Music Monday: Cecil Taylor, Joe McPhee, and New Music

This last week didn’t involve as much music as I would have liked, but I somehow survived, and I think that we can all acknowledge that the past couple of years didn’t produce as much new music as usual. The challenges of the COVID pandemic impacted not only live performances, but the intimacy of studio recordings as well. 

My buddy Kostis Kourelis sent along a recent article by Ted Gioia who noted that the last two years tracks older than 18 months have absorbed a larger percentage of the US music market. The massive payouts for Bruce Springsteen’s, Bob Dylan’s, and Neil Young’s back catalogue, for example, seems to confirm that existing catalogue has significant earnings potential. More than that, it seems likely that the investment in back catalogues will encourage further efforts to generate revenue from this outlay. In other words, if music companies are investing in these catalogues, they have a plan to ensure that they make good on their investment. 

Without digging deeper into Gioia’s data, I’m disinclined to hand wring too much, but it is hard to avoid the constant onslaught of re-released music, back catalogue excavations, and lost gems that pours forth from both major record labels and smaller independent record labels alike.

<p That said, some the recent re-releases or newly released older recordings are pretty spectacular.  Hasaan Ibn Ali’s (blogged about here), Lee Morgan’s Complete Live at the Lighthouse (blogged about here), and efforts to re-release hard to find recordings from Detroit’s Strata and Tribe labels (blogged about here) bring lost, obscure, unreleased and out of print classics back to public attention.

This past week saw the release of Cecil Taylor’s complete Return Concert from 1973. For fans of improvised and free jazz this is a legendary landmark recording that reminded the world of Cecil Taylor’s capacity to produce challenging, dynamic, and, above all, powerful music. The album consists of three tracks with the first track running for nearly 90 minutes. This is deep and heavy stuff. Taylor’s piano playing alternates between percussive and delicate and Lyons, whose rapport with Taylor was forged over a decade of collaboration, unleashes blues soaked solos that I found startling. This is not casual music that you can put on in the background and dip into from time to time. It’s front and center.  

As a break, I found myself enjoying some of Joe McPhee’s recent releases especially an album by the Blue Reality Quartet! where McPhee is joined by fellow reed player Michael Marcus and two drummers: Jay Rosen and Warren Smith, who adds vibes to the recording. Recorded amid the COVID pandemic, the album contains plenty of examples of McPhee and Marcus showing their free jazz chops, but perhaps in keeping with the spirit of the age, the album is bluesy, subtle, and not quite as fierce as McPhee and Marcus are known to be elsewhere. 

McPhee has been spectacularly active lately. In fact, the good folks over at the Free Jazz Collective have recently produce a series of combined reviews of McPhee’s 2021 releases in three parts (notable among these is a series of Corbett vs. Dempsey re-releases from the 1960s): I, II, and III. There’s a lot of good music there and a reminder that despite the pandemic and the challenge of getting new music heard amid the heavy investment in back catalogues.