Once in a life time

How cool was Tony Williams? When he was 17, he was a prodigy behind the drums, propelling Miles Davis's legendary mid-'60s quintet, which was probably the best aggregation of talent Davis ever had. He was also a budding jazz composer in his own right, creating sophisticated pieces like this one here. (And he had the tastefulness to not even pick up his sticks for it!) His Life Time album is just as essential as any other '60s Blue Note classic. Which makes it unfortunate that Williams spent his adult career being a whole lot less cool with a bunch of dubious Fusion albums, and staining the luster of that record by using it as the band name for those dubious albums. Like the proverbial high school football star, Williams never bested his teenage self. So it goes. At least we can enjoy the high water mark now.

Tony Williams — Barb's Song To The Wizard

Robot afros

Herbie Hancock has amazed me several times in my life. He was cool Mr. "Rockit" in my early sentient years, only to reveal an exquisitely textural presence in the string of Miles Davis classics I discovered as a teenager, only to be occasionally very brilliant in his hit-or-miss '70s Fusion wanderings. Here's a gem that floored me anew just a few days ago. It sounds like a possible Kraftwerk future fantasy, but with a generous dose of non-Germanic warmth. The fabulous textures are there too. Far-out synths and jazz familiars finding beautiful common ground. 

Herbie Hancock — Rain Dance

If'n

It's the nature of music scenes to come and go. For improvising musicians, the last thing you'd expect is for them to linger too long in proven configurations. It's sad to see things dissipate, but that's what makes the moments meaningful. As long as the gigs keeps coming, I'm all for moving on to the next thing. Which made it fun to catch this trio a few weeks back, reunited after about a decade, picking up right in the groove where they left off. For an evening anyway.

Chris Speed Trio - Gina

Harmolodic happening

It's like Ornette Coleman said — if you've got a band of great improvisers, let 'em fly all at once. I'm paraphrasing. Bad-ass drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson clearly modeled his Decoding Society on Coleman's "harmolodic" approach and very un-snooty welcoming of electric instruments into the party. The band's records — sometimes dense, often super-energetic, always colorful — are absolutely worth checking out. 

Here are a couple tunes from the bizarrely-jacketed Barbecue Dog, which features not only a young Vernon Reid (on banjo?!), but also that sweet anomaly of a drummer-penned piece without a single drum to be heard.

Ronald Shannon Jackson and The Decoding Society - Yugo Boy

Ronald Shannon Jackson and The Decoding Society - Mystery At Dawn

Total modal

A bunch of famous people have been dying lately. One not-so famous person who passed recently is George Russell, and I think he deserves a note or ten thousand in tribute. Songblague will do its humble part.

Sadly under-praised, Russell was one of jazz's great innovators, working up an approach to improvisation based on scales, rather than chords, and getting all crazy with the Lydian mode, which I admittedly don't understand as well as I'd like to. Anyway, he made a bunch of awesome records in that great early-to-mid '60s period, when jazz was discovering all kinds of cool things about itself, before getting carried away by its excesses. This cut's got energy with brains to match.

The George Russell Septet - The Stratus Seekers

(Aww man, I just read that Rashied Ali and Les Paul kicked off as well. What is going on here?!)