Burning Ambulance Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Bob Stewart Jun 21, 2022

Show notes

The latest episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with tuba player Bob Stewart.

I have said all season long that we’re going to be exploring a single subject for ten episodes, and that subject is fusion. But as I hope has become clear over the course of the five previous episodes, during which I interviewed techno pioneer Jeff Mills, drummer Lenny White, trumpeter Randy Brecker, pianist Cameron Graves, and guitarist Brandon Ross, most of whom come from different musical generations and are not peers, when I say the word fusion, I’m talking about a state of mind, not a style or a genre. It’s not what you play, it’s how you approach music-making.

I understand that when most people hear the word fusion, they think of the big name bands from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. Those groups, and the Miles Davis bands from 1969 to 1975, and many other less immediately recognizable groups, all did a particular thing, playing extremely complex music that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz. We talked about those acts in the second and third episodes this season, with Lenny White and Randy Brecker, both of whom were around then and were actively participating in making some of that music.

If you think of fusion as a mindset, though, rather than a style, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. And that’s really how I prefer to think about it. Because the people who fall into the latter category are the ones who I find to be the most interesting, and the ones who are more likely to have careers where almost every record they play on is at least worth hearing, worth giving a chance. You may not like all of it. But they’re creative enough that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.

A perfect example of this is Bill Laswell, the bassist and producer. He doesn’t use the term fusion. He calls what he does “collision music,” bringing together players from wildly disparate areas — stylistic areas, and literal geographical ones, putting African players together with guys from Southeast Asia and New York rock artists and whoever else he thinks has something to say — and seeing what comes out when they all work together toward a common goal. And sometimes you get something glorious, that you never could have predicted or imagined beforehand. Like pairing Pharoah Sanders with a troupe of Gnawa musicians from North Africa. Or putting improvising guitarist Derek Bailey together with drummer Jack DeJohnette, DJ Disk from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and Laswell himself on bass. I heard a recording of that group just a few days ago, and you might not expect it to work, but it really, really did.

Bob Stewart is a fusion artist in that he takes an instrument that has had a relatively low profile in jazz for decades — the tuba — and created a variety of fascinating contexts for it. Not only on his own albums, but particularly in partnership with the late alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe. They began working together in the early 1970s, and Stewart’s playing on some of Blythe’s albums, most notably Bush Baby, where it’s just the two of them and a percussionist, and on Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illusions, where they had some incredible bands that included at different times James “Blood” Ulmer on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, James Newton on flute, and Abdul Wadud on cello. On the album Blythe Spirit, Blythe and Stewart record a version of the spiritual “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” with Amina Claudine Myers on organ, that’s absolutely amazing. We talk about that piece a little bit in this interview.

He’s worked with a lot of other artists over the course of his career, too, including Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Carla Bley, Gil Evans, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, Bill Frisell, the David Murray Big Band, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and on and on. The reason he’s able to do so many different things is that his approach to the tuba is really expansive, conceptually speaking. He treats it as much more than a substitute bass. He understands its full range, and the subtleties it’s capable of expressing, and he uses it in ways lots of other people would never even think of. On his own albums First Line, Then & Now, and Connections — Mind the Gap, he puts together really unorthodox collections of personnel. For example on Then & Now, which was originally released in 1996 but just recently popped up on Bandcamp, some of the tracks feature two trumpets, trombone, French horn, and drums, while another is a duo with pianist Dave Burrell, and others have trumpet, alto sax, guitar, and drums. And Connections — Mind the Gap, which is from 2014, features tuba, guitar and drums, with trumpet and trombone on two tracks, but then on five others it’s the core trio plus a string quartet. Now that’s very much a kind of fusion — jazz which is already in an avant-garde zone, combined with chamber music.

Bob Stewart is a fascinating guy, an endlessly creative spirit who has done a tremendous amount to change the image of his instrument in order to pave the way for guys like Theon Cross, who plays tuba with Sons of Kemet, or with Jose Davila, who plays with Henry Threadgill’s Zooid. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

Bob Stewart, “Bush Baby” (Connections – Mind The Gap)

Arthur Blythe, “Lenox Avenue Breakdown” (Lenox Avenue Breakdown)

Bob Stewart, “The Rambler” (from Then & Now)

Brandon Ross May 13, 2022

Show notes

As you know if you've been listening this season, we have a single subject we’re going to be exploring across ten episodes, and that subject is fusion.

Fusion means much more, I think, than just the music that most people think of when they hear the word. I’m not talking exclusively about the big-name bands from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. Those groups, and the Miles Davis bands from 1969 to 1975, and many other less immediately recognizable groups, all did the classic fusion thing, playing extremely complex music that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz. We talked about those acts in the second and third episodes this season, when I interviewed drummer Lenny White and trumpeter Randy Brecker, both of whom were around then and were actively participating in making that music.

If you think of fusion as a mindset, though, rather than a style of music, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. And that’s really how I prefer to think about it. It’s not just a specific narrow slice of music, it’s a way you approach any kind of music you make. KRS-One said rapping is something you do, hip-hop is something you live. And that’s kind of close to what I’m talking about here, conceptually speaking. Fusion can be a style of music, or it can be a way you approach the making of music. And the people who fall into the latter category are the ones who I find to be the most interesting, and the ones who are more likely to have careers where almost every record they play on is at least worth hearing, worth giving a chance. You may not like all of it. But they’re creative enough that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.

Brandon Ross is one of those guys. He’s been on a hell of an artistic journey over the course of the last forty-some years. His first recording was on an Archie Shepp album from 1975, There’s a Trumpet in My Soul. He worked with violinist Leroy Jenkins. He worked with saxophonists Marion Brown and Oliver Lake. He worked with Henry Threadgill for something like ten years, in multiple bands or one evolving band. He worked with Cassandra Wilson on her breakout album, Blue Light Til Dawn, and the follow-up, New Moon Daughter. He’s made albums under his own name. The reason a lot of people probably know his name right now is he’s the guitar player in Harriet Tubman, with bassist Melvin Gibbs, who’s been on this podcast before, and drummer JT Lewis.

And now here’s the really interesting part – Brandon Ross has an album coming out a little later this year on my label, Burning Ambulance Music. He’s got a new group, see, called Breath Of Air, which is a trio featuring violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow. Something I learned in this interview, by the way, is that Brandon has done the guitar-violin thing several times, with Leroy Jenkins and also with Terry Jenoure, a very interesting violin player who isn’t nearly as well known as she ought to be. When I was researching Brandon to come up with questions for this interview, I learned about her and now I’m gonna be diving into her catalog, and I suggest you do the same. Some of her music is on streaming services; she released a 3CD set called Portal last year that’s fantastic. Anyway, Breath Of Air has a self-titled debut, most of which was recorded live in February 2020, right before the pandemic started and live music went away, and like I said it’ll be out a little bit later this year.

In the meantime, enjoy this conversation between me and Brandon Ross. We talk about his work with Henry Threadgill, about his work with Cassandra Wilson, about Archie Shepp and Oliver Lake and Marion Brown, about Harriet Tubman, about the sort of No Wave punk-funk jazz scene of the late '70s and early '80s that included Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society and all the other guitarists that came out of that scene, including Michael Gregory Jackson and Kelvyn Bell and Jean-Paul Bourelly and James "Blood" Ulmer and Vernon Reid… we also talk about his particular approach to the guitar and to sound. There’s a lot to learn and a lot to think about in the hour or so of conversation you’re about to hear. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

Breath Of Air, “No One On Earth Can See You Anymore” (from Breath Of Air)

Henry Threadgill, “Little Pocket Size Demons” (from Too Much Sugar For A Dime)

Harriet Tubman, “Farther Unknown” (from The Terror End Of Beauty)

Cameron Graves Apr 12, 2022

Show notes

Episode 73 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with pianist Cameron Graves.

I have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting this season, and that subject is fusion. Fusion means much more, I think, than just the music that most people probably think of when they hear the word. Of course, it immediately brings to mind bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups that were formed by ex-members of Miles Davis’s band, playing extremely complex compositions that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz, while still leaving room for extended improvisation. But if you think of fusion as a process rather than a style, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. Because then you can pull in the music being made by Yes, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Santana, etc., all of which gets filed under just plain rock. And you can talk about the music Latin artists like Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All Stars were making at the same time. Or the really adventurous funk and R&B that was being made by Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament, Funkadelic, the Isley Brothers, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Ohio Players, Slave, which then leads you to jazz-funk names like George Duke, Billy Cobham, the Crusaders, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, Eddie Henderson, and of course Mwandishi and the Headhunters. This is how I prefer to think about fusion. It’s not just a specific, narrow slice of music, it’s the sound of walls being knocked down across the landscape.

So that’s the kind of philosophical starting point for all the interviews I’m doing this season, and that’s what makes Cameron Graves such a perfect person to talk to. Because he’s a guy who crosses all sorts of musical boundaries. He’s had a lot of classical music training, as I learned during this conversation, he spent several years studying Indian music, and obviously he’s got a deep jazz background starting out as a member of the Young Jazz Giants with Kamasi Washington and the Bruner brothers, Stephen aka Thundercat on bass and his brother Ronald on drums, which evolved into the West Coast Get Down and all the albums that they’ve made over the last half dozen years or so. But Cameron’s also a lifelong metalhead — in fact, he played keyboards and guitar in Wicked Wisdom, the nu-metal band fronted by Jada Pinkett Smith in the early 2000s. So he’s not only toured the world with Kamasi Washington and with Stanley Clarke, because he’s a member of Clarke’s band, too — he also played Ozzfest.

And here’s an interesting connection: the drummer for Wicked Wisdom was Philip “Fish” Fisher, the drummer for Fishbone. And when you talk about fusion as the kind of big-tent/umbrella sort of conceptual thing that I’m talking about, you have to include them in there. They mixed funk and hard rock and punk and metal and ska and reggae and jazz into one big swirl, particularly on their most ambitious album, 1991’s The Reality of My Surroundings. There’s all kinds of music on there, from Bad Brains-style hardcore to Last Poets-style abstract jazz poetry. And of course they were the best live band on the planet from the mid ’80s to the early ’90s.

Fishbone were never as big as they deserved to be, but they were absolute heroes in L.A., and they were a huge inspiration to all kinds of open-minded musicians who came up in their wake. Last year, I interviewed Terrace Martin, who’s an alto saxophonist affiliated with the West Coast Get Down but is also a hip-hop producer who’s worked with Snoop Dogg for years — in fact, he put together a live band for Snoop in about 2010 that included Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Ryan Porter, who’s been on this podcast before, and other people from their circle as well. Anyway, when I talked to Martin, he expressed a lot of love for Fishbone. And he’s now a member of Herbie Hancock’s band, in addition to being part of R+R=NOW, a group that also includes Robert Glasper and Christian Scott. And Thundercat and his brother, Ronald Bruner Jr., were both members of Suicidal Tendencies, playing straight-up punk and thrash, for years. There are so many connections between jazz and funk and metal, when you look for them, and bands that combine them in various really fascinating ways. It’s all fusion, in the broad sense.

Another thing that’s really interesting, to me anyway, is that there are so many direct connections between the West Coast Get Down guys and the Seventies fusion artists. Like I said, Cameron Graves is in Stanley Clarke’s band. Terrace Martin is in Herbie Hancock’s band. Ronald Bruner Jr. played with George Duke before Duke died. Thundercat covered a George Duke song on one of his albums, and had Steve Arrington from Slave on his most recent record. It really is like they’re the next generation of fusion. And we talk about all this and a lot more in the interview you’re about to hear. This was a really fun conversation that went in some very interesting directions, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

Cameron Graves, “Planetary Prince” (from Planetary Prince)

Cameron Graves, “The Life Carriers” (from Seven)

Cameron Graves, “Red” (from Live From the Seven Spheres)

Randy Brecker Mar 13, 2022

Show notes

This season on the Burning Ambulance Podcast, we’re going to have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes, and that subject is fusion.

Fusion, of course, is a term that means different things to different people. When most people hear it, they probably think of bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups that were formed by ex members of Miles Davis’s band that played extremely complex compositions that were sometimes closer to progressive rock than to jazz, but which still left room for extended improvisation. What’s interesting about that positioning is that it’s very easy to draw lines between that stuff and the music being made by Yes, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Santana, all of which gets filed under just plain rock. And if you extend the boundaries out just a little bit further, you get to the music Latin artists like Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All-Stars were making at the same time. Or think about some of the really adventurous funk and R&B that was being made by Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament and Funkadelic, the Ohio Players, Slave, the Isley Brothers... This is what’s so interesting to me about fusion, is that at its best it’s about all kinds of musical boundaries being knocked down.

I recently spent some time listening to a whole bunch of albums by keyboardist George Duke, released on the MPS label between about 1971 and 1976. Duke was a really fascinating figure, because he traveled between worlds to really unprecedented degree. He had his own trio in the late 60s, and somehow or other hooked up with electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. They made an album together, and the gigs they played in L.A. brought them to the attention of Frank Zappa and Cannonball Adderley, two people who couldn’t have been doing more different things. But Zappa hired Ponty to play on Hot Rats, and then wrote and produced an entire album, King Kong, on which Ponty played Zappa’s compositions, and George Duke was the keyboardist on that record.

And after that, both Zappa and Cannonball Adderley – who, don’t forget, had Joe Zawinul in his band before that, who composed “In A Silent Way” and played with Miles Davis, and formed Weather Report with Wayne Shorter – both Adderley and Zappa wanted George Duke in their bands. He wound up taking both gigs, doing two years with Zappa, then two years with Adderley, then going back to Zappa’s band for three or four more years. He had left the group by 1975, though, so he was not part of the concerts recorded for the album Zappa In New York. But Randy Brecker was.

Brecker and his brother, saxophonist Michael Brecker, who died in 2007, worked together in dozens if not hundreds of contexts from the late Sixties to the Nineties. They were both part of that Zappa concert, which was related to their being part of the Saturday Night Live band at the time; they played on a million recording sessions for everyone from Aerosmith to Bette Midler to Aretha Franklin to Lou Reed to Dire Straits to Donald Fagen. They were part of drummer Billy Cobham’s band in the early to mid ’70s, playing on Crosswinds and Total Eclipse and Shabazz and A Funky Thide Of Sings. And right around that same time, they formed the Brecker Brothers band and made a string of albums for Arista that were extremely successful.

Now, what matters for the purposes of this introduction is that the side of fusion the Brecker Brothers represented was very different from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Weather Report side. That was, for lack of a better term, white fusion. It was marketed to white rock audiences. Those bands toured with rock bands. They played arena concerts. Lenny White talked about it in the previous episode of this podcast — the members of Return to Forever hung out with members of Yes.

On the other side of the coin, there was black and Latin fusion. Like I said above, there was some incredibly challenging music being made under the headings of salsa and Latin jazz in the 70s – you should check out the episode of this podcast where I interviewed Eddie Palmieri to hear more about that, as well as the episode with Billy Cobham, where he talks about performing with the Fania All-Stars. There are funk records that are every bit as complex as prog rock. Jazz artists like Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard, George Duke and even Joe Henderson were all making records that can really only be described as fusion in the early 70s, and that’s without even getting into what Miles Davis was doing, particularly with his live band from 1973 to 1975. But except for George Duke, who actually had Frank Zappa cut a couple of guitar solos on his 1974 album Feel, they were drawing more from funk than from rock, and they were marketed more to black audiences than white. And as Randy Brecker explains in this interview, that was where the Brecker Brothers fell. They had more success on black radio and on the R&B chart than in the rock world.

Now, eventually, that more funk-oriented, R&B-oriented side of fusion slid in an explicitly commercial, radio-friendly direction, and a lot of it ended up as smooth jazz. Which is to some degree why the term is vilified in some quarters today. But that doesn’t take anything away from the good stuff, and Randy Brecker has been involved with some very good records over the years.

This was a really fun conversation that went in some very interesting directions. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

The Brecker Brothers, “Some Skunk Funk” (Heavy Metal Be-Bop)

Billy Cobham, “Taurian Matador” (Shabazz)

The Brecker Brothers, “Sneakin’ Up Behind You” (The Brecker Brothers)

Lenny White Feb 12, 2022

Show notes

This is the sixth year of the Burning Ambulance Podcast. This is episode 71, and I decided at the beginning of this year that it was time to change things up a little. So for all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting this season, we’re going to have a single subject, and that subject is fusion.

Lenny White played on one of the most important albums in the history of fusion, Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. In the clip that you’re gonna hear when I finish talking, right before the interview begins, he’s on the left hand side, with Jack DeJohnette on the right. And you want to hear something insane? That was his first ever recording session! He was recommended to Miles Davis by alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. White was in McLean’s band at the time.

Within a year, he had also played on Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy, and Joe Henderson’s At The Lighthouse. In just the first half of the Seventies, he was on Eddie Henderson’s Realization, on two albums by a Latin jazz-rock band called Azteca, and For Those Who Chant by trumpeter Luis Gasca, a record that also had Henderson, and Carlos Santana, and a bunch of other people from across the jazz and rock spectrum.

In about 1972, he joined Chick Corea’s band Return To Forever and made four albums with them – Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy, Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery and Romantic Warrior. He also played on solo albums by Stanley Clarke and Al Di Meola, and made records under his own name that were like a perfect storm of jazz and rock players working together. His 1977 album Big City has Herbie Hancock, Neal Schon of Journey, and Verdine White of Earth, Wind and Fire on it. But despite being at the heart of the fusion movement at the time that it happened, he doesn’t actually like the term. He prefers to call what he does jazz-rock, and when you listen to what he was actually playing, that distinction is very clear and makes perfect sense.

A lot of people think the use of electric instruments, particularly synths and other keyboards, is a key dividing line between fusion and the jazz that came before. But for me, it’s about the beat, it’s about the drummers. Lenny White is one of maybe five drummers who really shaped an entire genre in their image — the others are Billy Cobham, who’s been on this podcast before, and Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, and Alphonse Mouzon. These guys played with Miles, they played with Weather Report, they played with Herbie Hancock, they led their own groups, they were the guys who established the sound of fusion by finding a way to combine the aggressiveness and drive of rock with the subtlety and suppleness of swing, and in Lenny White’s case in particular, he brings a tremendous Latin feel to the music as well.

The Latin element is really important, because Latin musicians were stretching out just as much as their jazz and rock peers in the crucial years between 1969 and 1975. Listen to the Fania All-Stars’ Latin-Soul-Rock album, which featured guest appearances from Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer, less than a month before they would leave the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Listen to what Eddie Palmieri — who's also been on this podcast — was doing on albums like Superimposition, Vamonos Pa'l Monte, and Live At Sing Sing. Listen to Santana’s run of albums from Caravanserai through Borboletta. A lot of this stuff is hardcore jazz fusion set to a Latin beat, and in terms of complexity and intensity you can put it right next to King Crimson, Yes, and all the other prog-rock acts of the time. And funk was going through a radical evolution, too — listen to how complex the songwriting and arranging is on albums by Parliament, Earth, Wind and Fire, Slave, and the Isley Brothers — and these guys all knew it. They all knew each other, they all knew what they were doing, individually and collectively. There were no borders. There were no limits. Lenny White has a hilarious story in this interview about hanging out with some of the guys from Yes.

I really enjoyed getting the chance to talk to Lenny White. He’s had an incredible career, and he was there at the beginning of a musical revolution. I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation.

Music in this episode:

Miles Davis, “Bitches Brew” (Bitches Brew)

Luis Gasca, “Street Dude” (For Those Who Chant)

Lenny White, “Rapid Transit” (Big City)

Return To Forever, “Sofistifunk” (No Mystery)

Jeff Mills Jan 13, 2022

Show notes

This is the Burning Ambulance podcast's sixth year, and our seventieth episode, so I decided it was time to change things up a little. This season, we’re going to have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting, and that theme is fusion.

Fusion is a very charged term. When most people hear it, in reference to music, anyway, they probably think of bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups formed by ex-members of Miles Davis’s band that combined a certain freedom to improvise with extremely complex compositions that were closer to progressive rock than to jazz. I mean, when you listen to the first two Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, side by side with King Crimson’s Larks' Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black, they really fit together quite well. I mean, they’re even using the same instrumental palette: guitar, violin, keyboards, bass, drums. The only real difference is that King Crimson had a singer.

What interests me about fusion, the term and the concept, is that it lives up to something saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one of the co-founders of Weather Report, has said many times — that to him, the word jazz means “I dare you”. I dare you to play as loud as the rock bands. I dare you to embrace funk and multi-part suites and the most advanced studio production techniques available. I dare you to go big, to be ambitious. Because that’s what the best fusion of the 1970s was, and what modern-day fusion is. It’s ambitious. It doesn’t recognize externally imposed limitations, people saying “you can’t do that”. Why not? Why can’t you? It refuses to stay within the boundaries of genre. It’s not jazz, it’s not rock, because there’s no such thing as jazz and no such thing as rock.

One of the things I discovered, or became more certain of, while writing my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century, which is out this month from Zero Books in the UK, is that jazz is ultimately about artistic intention. There’s no one instrument or rhythm or harmonic relationship that defines it, but there are two crucial values: innovation and improvisation. There must be an attempt to do something new, or to put a new spin on something old, and there must be an element of uncertainty and a real-time exchange of ideas, or in the case of solo performances, there must be an element of real-time thinking and spontaneous creation. Because it’s absolutely possible to play something that startles or surprises yourself, and then respond to it.

So fusion is about taking ideas from seemingly disparate genres and combining them. And taking the philosophies that govern those seemingly disparate genres and figuring out what they have in common. That’s what the Seventies artists did, and that’s what modern-day fusion acts are doing. I would include people like Thundercat, Cameron Graves, Christian Scott and even Kassa Overall, who’s been on this podcast before, in that category. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about all year long on this podcast, through interviews with prominent fusion artists of the past and present.

Many people may not think of Jeff Mills as a fusion artist. He’s normally thought of as one of the most important musicians in techno history. I’m not gonna run down his discography here, that’s what Wikipedia’s for, but suffice it to say that his influence in the 1990s was massive, but what makes him interesting to me is that he’s taken the creative space his fame has brought him and used it to really expand his own sonic parameters. He’s made an album with a full orchestra. He’s created new scores for silent films. He’s made albums inspired by astronomy, science fiction, and his interest in the supernatural. And he’s collaborated with musicians who are geniuses in their own fields. In 2018, he made an album called Tomorrow Comes the Harvest with legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen. And that project led to the first of the three albums he put out in 2021. It’s called Counter Active, and it’s a collaboration with keyboardist Jean-Philippe Dary under the name The Paradox.

The second album he released this year was called The Clairvoyant, and it’s about two hours long — if you buy it on vinyl, it’s three LPs, and he says that the best way to experience it is to lie back in the dark and listen to the whole thing from beginning to end. It arises out of his interest in spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th century and his perception of the similarities and connections between that era and now. That’s one of the topics we discuss in the interview you’re about to hear, in fact. And I have to admit I was surprised by how willing, even eager, he was to discuss social issues. A lot of electronic music is deliberately anonymous, deliberately emotionally blank — it’s a canvas on which you can paint your own feelings. But it also reflects broader social conditions, as any art produced by human beings inevitably must. Detroit techno represented the frustration and anger, as well as the hopes and dreams, of the citizens of that city, and Underground Resistance, a collective Mills formed with Mike Banks and Robert Hood, was explicitly political, taking on social conditions in their city and the overall politics of the music industry.

The third album Jeff Mills put out in 2021 was The Override Switch, a collaboration with Rafael Leafar, who plays a number of instruments on the record, including tenor, alto, soprano and baritone saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, flute, cornet, and a wide range of keyboards. The music they make together is fusion in the purest and most genuine sense: the rhythmic steadiness of electronic music combined with the melodic and harmonic adventurousness of jazz. The individual pieces, and the album as a whole, take the listener on a real journey. And frankly, on a purely sonic level, I find it easy to draw lines between this and the music that people like Stanley Clarke and George Duke were making in the 1970s.

Anyway, I feel extremely lucky to have gotten the chance to talk to Jeff Mills for an hour. He’s an incredibly busy guy, so tracking him down was a challenge, and the day we were initially scheduled to talk, he had to run from Paris to London, so we moved it, and then when I did catch him, I thought he was still in Paris but it turned out he had returned to London, which meant I was calling him an hour later than expected. Still, it was a fascinating conversation that went in some really unexpected directions. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music featured in this episode:

The Paradox, "Super Solid" (Counter Active)

Jeff Mills, "Someone Who Feels Things" (The Clairvoyant)

Jeff Mills & Rafael Leafar, "The Sun King" (The Override Switch)

Billy Harper Sep 16, 2021

Show notes

Billy Harper has had a pretty incredible career. He was a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1968. He played with Max Roach. He was part of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band and the Gil Evans big band, and because of those connections he got to play on a Louis Armstrong album. He was on Lee Morgan’s final studio album, recorded in 1971. And he’s had a solo career since the early Seventies, making legendary albums like Capra Black for the Strata-East label and Black Saint for…well, for Black Saint. It was their first release, and they named the label after it!

Since about 2008, Harper has been a member of the Cookers, a group led by trumpeter David Weiss that also features Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Donald Harrison or Craig Handy on alto sax, George Cables — who’s been on this podcast — on piano, Cecil McBee on bass, and Billy Hart on drums. All of those guys have long careers as leaders, but when they come together, playing music from their back catalogs and new material, they’re really amazing. I’ve seen them live twice and it’s just astonishing to watch absolute masters get up there and deliver the way they do.

I really had a good time talking to Billy Harper. In this interview, we talk about the Texas tenor sax tradition, we talk about his time with Lee Morgan, we talk about the Cookers, about his solo work, about how to teach improvisation, and a bunch of other things. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Billy Harper, “Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart” (Black Saint)
The Cookers, “Destiny is Yours” (Look Out!)

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

Andrew Cyrille Aug 19, 2021

Show notes

Andrew Cyrille is the last man standing from the first wave of free jazz drummers. He and Milford Graves, Sunny Murray, and Rashied Ali really revolutionized jazz rhythm in their playing with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and other musicians in the early to mid ’60s. Their influence was huge, and each of them brought a different perspective and instantly identifiable style to the music. What I hear when I listen to Andrew Cyrille, whether he’s playing with Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton or in any other situation, is an incredible precision and consideration. He really seems to be thinking about every single strike and placing it with unbelievable care, even when he’s playing ridiculously fast.

In the last few years, Cyrille has been making some really interesting records as a leader for ECM. He started in 2016 with The Declaration of Musical Independence, which featured Bill Frisell on guitar, Richard Teitelbaum on synth, and Ben Street on bass, then he made Lebroba with Frisell and Wadada Leo Smith, and now he’s got a new album out, The News, which features Frisell and Street again but has David Virelles on piano instead of Teitelbaum. And right before that string of records, in 2015, he was on guitarist Ben Monder’s album Amorphae. And I also want to mention a record he did in 2017, Dione, a trio record with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp. He’s had an incredible career as a sideman, too, working with David Murray, Leroy Jenkins, Muhal Richard Abrams, Marion Brown, Horace Tapscott, Peter Brötzmann, and of course he’s also one of the members of Trio 3 with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman — they played at the 2021 Vision Festival, where he also presented a solo tribute to Milford Graves.

We talk about Graves a lot in this interview, as well as Cyrille’s approach to rhythm and to music generally, and a lot of other things. It’s funny, the conversation has kind of a false ending, because I had been told by his publicist that he only wanted to talk for a half hour, and I negotiated us up to 45 minutes, and then at the 45 minute mark I started saying goodbye and thanking him for his time, and he showed no interest in stopping, so we kept going and probably could have talked for another half hour.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Andrew Cyrille/Wadada Leo Smith/Bill Frisell, “Worried Woman” (Lebroba)
Andrew Cyrille, “Go Happy Lucky” (The News)

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

Don Byron Jul 15, 2021

Show notes

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

Don Byron is originally from the Bronx, and he was kind of a fixture on the Downtown music scene in the late '80s and early '90s. His first album as a leader, Tuskegee Experiments, came out almost 30 years ago, in 1992; it featured a variety of musicians, including guitarist Bill Frisell, two different bassists, Reggie Workman and Lonnie Plaxico, and two different drummers, Pheeroan AkLaff and Ralph Peterson. A year after that, he released Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz, an album of klezmer music that shaped his public image maybe more strongly than he might have liked, as you’ll understand when you listen to this conversation.

The thing with Byron is, every one of his records is completely different from the others — he seems to always be deeply invested in exploring a concept, and once he’s done that on record, he moves on. He’s not one of those musicians who establishes a working band and takes them into the studio every year or two. When he makes a record, it’s because he’s got something very particular to say at that moment, and when he’s done, he’s said all he has to say on that subject. And as a result, his albums require you to really be willing to put the time in and think about what he’s saying and why. That’s not to suggest that the music isn’t enjoyable on a purely sensory level. It is. He’s a great clarinet player, and a really fascinating composer. But he wants you to think about why someone might make the kind of music they make, instead of just taking it — or taking anything — for granted.

I should warn you that about halfway through our talk, Don Byron drops an N-bomb with a hard R while making a point about what is and what isn’t jazz, what is and what isn’t black music, et cetera. That’s basically the subject we spend this entire hour circling around, because his primary instrument, the clarinet, the composers whose work he explores, and all of that are in kind of blurry territory where, as he says, it’s not considered "real" jazz sometimes. Which is on the one hand bullshit, because jazz is whatever a jazz musician plays, but on the other hand, genre distinctions are meaningless anyhow, right? That’s why we end up talking about Biz Markie and Kirk Franklin and Fishbone and all the other stuff that we talk about in this interview. I had a blast talking to him; I hope you'll enjoy listening to our conversation.

Music featured in this episode:
Don Byron/Aruán Ortiz, “Black and Tan Fantasy” (Random Dances and [A]tonalities)
Don Byron, “Powerhouse” (Bug Music)

Anthony Braxton Jun 24, 2021

Show notes

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

This is an episode I have been hoping to present since this podcast began. I’ve been requesting interviews with Braxton for years, but never gotten the okay until this month. And you know what? In retrospect, I’m glad it took as long as it did. You know the saying “When the student is ready, the master appears”? Bill Dixon said that to me when I interviewed him for The Wire, and I feel like it’s absolutely true in the case of the conversation you’re about to listen to. I was not ready to interview Anthony Braxton when I first started asking. As it is, we probably could have talked for at least another hour, and maybe longer; we got along very, very well. Which was frankly not guaranteed going in. This interview didn’t just take years to set up, it also fell through the first time we tried to do it, and I’m not 100 percent sure why but I have some suspicions. I do know that when I was working on re-scheduling it, I sent over my list of proposed questions in advance, which Braxton mentions right at the beginning, when he starts talking about the late Bob Koester from Delmark Records.

I first started listening to Braxton’s music about 20 years ago, and I feel like I’ve had a few major breakthroughs with it in that time, where it kind of made a little more sense to me afterward than it had before. Because it really is a learning process. You hear other things differently after you’ve grappled with his work for a while.

The first big breakthrough for me was the album Quintet (Basel) 1977, which wasn’t released until 2000; it’s a live album that features George Lewis on trombone and Muhal Richard Abrams on piano. It was maybe the second or third thing I’d ever heard by him, so I mostly knew him by reputation still, as someone who made extremely advanced "weird" jazz that didn’t really swing, but it wasn’t free, either. Well, what I heard was not any of those things. It was a nonstop flow of energy, extremely creative but also swinging hard as hell, and the compositions were absolutely recognizable as such. It made perfect sense to me as jazz.

The second breakthrough was when Mosaic Records put out a box set of his Arista albums, which I reviewed for Jazziz. Some of that music was difficult and alienating to my ear, but a lot of it was even more immediately accessible than I had expected it to be. If you’ve never listened to Braxton at all, you could do a whole lot worse than to start with New York, Fall 1974 or Five Pieces 1975, which were two of his first Arista releases and really do seem like his attempts to make music that would catch people’s ear right away.

The third and final breakthrough moment wasn’t an album, it was a book – Forces In Motion, by Graham Lock. Lock went on tour with Braxton’s quartet in England in the mid-80s, watching all the gigs, and interviewing all the group members repeatedly, and he gives you a 360 degree portrait of all of them as musicians and as human beings. It’s one of the best books about music and musicians I’ve ever read, I recommend it unequivocally.

When I was writing this intro, I looked on the hard drive where I keep most of my music, and I was surprised to find that I only actually own about 40 Anthony Braxton releases, including the individual albums that are contained in the Mosaic box and another box of his Black Saint albums from the 1980s. I honestly thought I had more. But among the others are a 3CD set of large ensemble pieces, a 12CD set of pieces for an a cappella ensemble, a 4CD set of improvisations for quartet, and a 4CD opera, all of which feature one long track per CD. I also have a 7CD set of the music of Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh and other related musicians, an 11CD set of Charlie Parker tunes, a 13CD set of live recordings of standards, and an audio Blu-Ray containing 12 pieces ranging in length from 40 to 70 minutes. All told, I probably have around 80 hours’ worth of Anthony Braxton’s music in my house. If I wanted to, I could spend a long weekend listening to nothing but his work. And that’s probably about ten percent of his total recorded output, maybe less. The man’s catalog could fill a room.

He’s put out two mega releases just this month. The first is that audio Blu-Ray, which is called 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017 and features several different ensembles of between six and nine musicians including harp, cello, accordion, and horns, playing as I said long single pieces composed and then improvised upon using a highly specific and codified musical language of Braxton’s own devising.

The second is Quartet (Standards) 2020, the 13CD collection of live recordings from January 2020, when he played nine concerts in three cities: Warsaw, Poland, London, England, and Wels Austria, with a conventionally structured quartet: saxophone, piano, bass, drums. As its title suggests, they played standards. There are 67 songs on the box, with no repeats. There are tunes by Thelonious Monk, by Sonny Rollins, by Wayne Shorter, by Andrew Hill, but there are also several songs by Paul Simon, including the really excellent version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that you hear at the beginning of this episode, which if I’m being honest reminds me of Aretha Franklin’s version.

In this interview, we talk about both of those releases, as well as the larger issues they reflect. We talk about his compositional languages, the demands he places on the musicians he works with, his relationship to the jazz tradition, Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Dixon, Max Roach, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, and much, much more. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done, and I’m thrilled to share it with you.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Anthony Braxton, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (Quartet (Standards) 2020)
Anthony Braxton, “Opus 23B” (New York, Fall 1974)

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected