I confess it's taken me longer to get this post together than it should have. I definitely have the holidays to blame, some family obligations, the usual work, the usual play. But honestly the main reason is that I have been thinking about what to write, and how best to articulate why I am such a huge fan of these three musicians individually, and then why getting them to play as a group on my show was such an enormous coup. And I think I figured it out.
C. Spencer Yeh (violin/voice) is probably best known as the founder of Burning Star Core, a noise band with a surprising elasticity in terms of sound, timbre, texture, form. He has played with probably every major "noise" artist you can think of and in weirder situations with people like Jandek. Chris Corsano (drums/percussion) has been moonlighting with Bjork of late, and has a longstanding free jazz duo with Paul Flaherty that peels paint. Again, he's collaborated with an enormous range of stylists and kingpins, from free jazz masters to heavy noise blasters, from pop stars to beardos. Nate Wooley (amplified trumpet) is a specialist-in-all-styles type player who digs Charlie Shavers and grew up playing in big bands, has spent time doing lowercase music, traditional-sounding free jazz, post-bop, electroacoustic improv and extreme/harsh noise. The three are primetime improvisors, it's the defining element that links all three. But what appeals to me about each of them is that they don't really "fit" anywhere. Noise, free jazz, post rock, bebop, punk, scuzz. If you are to play with them, you are to accommodate them, to get with the sound and discard the baggage, to open it up wide and be humble and just cruise.
They put in two long pieces. The first was a culmination of a handful of live performances of Nate Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain, a version of which was released on Important Records (with David Grubbs and Paul Lytton). The second is unadulturated free improvisation. Please enjoy. Many thanks to Mike Sin for engineering.
The live audio in this post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
Just...wow. I like all of their work individually, but together--- powerhouse. Just fantastic.
Posted by: c | January 10, 2010 at 04:17 AM