Articles by Gordon Marshall
Mind
by Gordon Marshall
For Yoko MiwaShe knocked me out for a yeartook me to the tombsof Egypt, where she embalmedthe brains of the first tribeof jazz... with kindest careshe put them in their jarslabeled calligraphicallywith multi-colored lettersindicating Duke and 'Tranein a quicksand of sadness they reign,under her sash of silkin all her sweet milk,nursing it all in ...
read moreLou Cohen: Opening the Door
by Gordon Marshall
In his cushy, classy, elegant two-story home just outside of Central Square in Cambridge, MA, Lou Cohen introduces his Symphony 5: from a laptop, jammed together fragments of elegant new music unfold, spaced out so that breath can enter in the interstices... Then the sound of roiling, rolling violins getting impacted: all is mellow and peaceful again, the silence between gets stifling, but segues into eerie jubilation. Pathos enters darkness, and wind-almost the tornado ripping up Dorothy into Oz. Back ...
read moreThe Business of 'Trane
by Gordon Marshall
Carlos Santana turned me on to himin an article in Guitar Player magazineI read at the Hingham library,at 14: spiritual centerof his Baja brain,and mine now,for 35 years,in Boston, in the rainafter a storm...the storm--it lasted years,years when I couldn't listen to the fellow,so powerful his song,so powerful the memories of lossand pain, in ...
read moreJazz and Poetry: Impacted Gems
by Gordon Marshall
The poetry of the Beats, the New York school and the Black Mountain school, as well as the jazz poets, all share a particularly heavy rhythmic feel and an earthy, gritty imagery that creates a kind of syncopation within itself. The scenes dance and bump up against each other, cutting and rubbing up against the beat. Three of these poets, Kenneth Patchen (1911-1992), Paul Haines (1933-2003), and Robert Creeley (1926-2005), receive jazz treatments on a recent release, a re-release, and ...
read moreConcepts of Pain: The Stuff of the Sixties
by Gordon Marshall
This chapter is an excerpt from Naked Mind: On Music and Power, a work in progress by All About Jazz contributor Gordon Marshall. It is said that the '60s ended in 1974, with Richard Nixon's resignation. On the one hand, there was nothing left to believe in. On the other, there was nothing left to protest. Early in the decade, Timothy Leary preached acid politics, thinking that Mao and John F. Kennedy should be sitting in ...
read moreThe Rotten Apples: Beach Party at the Orchard
by Gordon Marshall
The Rotten Apples, “the tightest out-of-tune band in the world," had an antecedent in guitarist Keith Waters' Belmont High School band (Belmont is a town just north of Boston). Even that early evolutionary ancestor of the current band blew effortless attitude in the face of the powers that be. Waters remembers playing a party at the Romney estate in town. “We didn't like the party and we didn't like Romney's kids, so we left early and got back in our ...
read moreNovember (for Yoko Miwa)
by Gordon Marshall
On the ebony off-keys, your hands,your head in a veil of black mist, tonicto your turquoise evening gown. Poised as a turtle dove on an eave,you press an index finger on the ivory,liberating a passel of scales zooming down like falcons in a swarm,your colony and command,to a Japanese baseball diamond playing field for a perfect game,blossoming cherries shaking
read moreYoko Miwa: New Star in an Old Sky
by Gordon Marshall
Self-effacing but with healthy ambition--and genuinely glamorous--pianist Yoko Miwa is a shimmering study in contrasts. Her music is loyal to sources and roots, yet it is fresh and sexy. Everything is in balance in her work. On a most elemental level she is like a graceful hostess at a grand party, catering to the desires of all; on a deeper level she is an architect. Imagine, far from her native Kobe, Japan, a dilapidated ballroom, say, in Detroit. Say it ...
read moreBlack Sage (for Henry Grimes)
by Gordon Marshall
I have seen the stage lights playthe sly sagacity of Henry's smile:the lightning on his lips, decadesdark with spattered starlight coming back to his eyes.To win words from that smilethat opens like a jackknifedrawing blood from parchment spurting the sanguine melodythe black sage spun like spiderin fury wrapping Ayler's axe--it is a dream, unless the song ...
read moreGutbucket: Cascades and Collisions
by Gordon Marshall
Over its 12-year career, Gutbucket has resituated its various musical parts like the pieces of a Rubik's cube. The elements of that cube, the sonic strains, have remained similar--an amalgam of fuzz rock, jumpy jazz, post-serial classicism--but its panoply of shifting color has been redeployed in unique ways on each of the Brooklyn-based quartet's five CDs, starting with an emphasis on improvisation but gradually incorporating greater degrees of composing. It is not that it never arrives at ...
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