Email this article | Printer friendly page Sleeping and Waking with JazzBy Alex Rawls |
February 21, 2008
When I hear jazz played as background music, I get the uneasy feeling that for many, it has replaced classical music as the highbrow muzak. This week I received further evidence of just how muzak-y it could become when Bedtime Beats: The Secret to Sleep (Rhino/Smash Arts) arrived on my desk. The two-disc set of music by artists including John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Joshua Redman and Milt Jackson is programmed to help put people to sleep, and the liner notes explain the science of beats-per-minute, how they aid in sleep, and other techniques that will help the jazz work its magic.
This is niche marketing at its finest, and addresses what I suspect is a bigger problem than we realize - the inability to sleep. As more and more people find their office hours lengthening, staffs shrinking and responsibilities growing, stopping work-related thinking and anxiety is hard to do. Still, there's something unsettling about having works of art duplicate the function of a white noise generator. A two-disc white noise generator at that.
Bob James appears on the album, and the same day it arrived, a bunch of ESP-Disc reissues including one by the Bob James Trio landed on my desk as well. There's nothing wallpaper-like about 1965's Explosions, which includes two tracks that are "electronic tape collages." The James reissue makes you wonder how someone's career could drift from improvised music to "The Theme from Taxi" and music to sleep by.
The ESP-Disc reissue series is one of the things that makes me happy these days because so many of these avant-garde documents were initially released in small quantities with indifferent distribution. Now, early works by Albert Ayler, Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd and Sun Ra are back on the market along with new works including Gold by Lindha Kallerdahl - a keyboard player/female vocalist whose extreme singing seems to be done in a language of her own devising.
The odd disc out in the bunch is 1965's Closer by the Paul Bley Trio. All the other reissues in this batch - Explosions, Steve Lacy's The Forest and the Zoo, and New York Art Quartet - are improvised, but most of this album was written by Carla Bley, with one track composed by Annette Peacock, one by Ornette Coleman, and "Figfoot" by Paul Bley. He treats the Carla Bley pieces with the delicacy and reserve they deserve, allowing their fragile beauty to carry the day.
I've said before only half in jest that if you missed 1976, 1977 and punk, the world must be a confusing place, and listening to these releases from New York City from 1964 and 1965, I have a similar sense that something happened. At the time, I was three and in Minnesota, so I can't speak from personal experience on this one. Still, poet Ted Berrigan wrote The Sonnets in 1964, and Andy Warhol was filming screen tests in the Factory at that time. What was happening, I'm not sure. My instinct is that Beat philosophy had finally sunk in to an extent that it was affecting art across the spectrum without it being obvious that the Beats were the source, but that's just semi-idle speculation, and I'm open to other theories.
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