Liberation Music Orchestra

[Gary]

I thought this may be of interest from todays Guardian

Anarchy on the trumpet

Can jazz stop Bush? John Fordham on the return of the Liberation Music Orchestra

Monday August 2, 2004

The Guardian

The anti-war brigade: the Liberation Music Orchestra

Charlie Haden was sitting in his car one night, listening to the news. Vietnam's neighbour Cambodia was being bombed by the US air force on the orders of President Richard Nixon. Haden felt powerless as an individual - but as a musician he was convinced he could register dissent, and maybe make a difference. He rang his friend and musical collaborator, composer Carla Bley, and said: "Let's do an album about the tragedy of what this administration is doing in the world."

The result was the Liberation Music Orchestra, which made one of the most powerful jazz-driven musical statements of the early 1970s with its self-titled album. The band was a volatile, expensive one, and many members were leaders in their own right, making it difficult to keep it on the road. But in the past 35 years, the LMO has returned whenever the rallying call was loud. It re-formed in 1982, when Ronald Reagan invaded El Salvador, to record the album Ballad of the Fallen. It came back in 1989, during George Bush Sr's time, for a rousing We Shall Overcome at the Montreal jazz festival, and to record the album Dreamkeeper.

And tonight the LMO performs at the Edinburgh festival - the first time Haden and Bley have shared a live performance in 20 years. Haden has long felt angry at what he sees as the Republicans' theft of the election four years ago, and the situation in Iraq has brought that anger to the boil.

Haden has said he always believed in "an America worthy of the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr, and the majesty of the Statue of Liberty". A bespectacled, mild-looking man in his 60s, with chronic bronchitis that worsens on tour, he exudes a firm sense of purpose, disagreeing with the suggestion that, in the end, music is just music: "I wouldn't have done this over all these years if I hadn't believed it made a difference. In recent years in America, it's become very difficult for people critical of the government to express their feelings. Providing some kind of focus for that to happen is power, in its way.

"People have often come up to us after Liberation Music Orchestra gigs and said this music has helped give them confidence to say what they really feel. The material we use draws on a long tradition of people doing that, all over the world."

By background and artistic disposition, Haden is no fan of Republican politics. His father had close friends in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought in the Spanish civil war; as a double-bassist, Haden participated in black Texan saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1950s revolutions in jazz form. These two influences came together when he heard of the Cambodian bombings. His father had a collection of socialist and anarchist songs of the Spanish civil war, music he and Bley had already considered adapting for a jazz project. The pair turned to this in 1969, examining the Spanish songs and creating arrangements for a full jazz band.

The resulting album featured a suite of 1930s anarchist songs vividly interpreted by the eloquent trumpet of Don Cherry and the hot winds of Argentinian Gato Barbieri's tenor sax. Haden also contributed the brooding Song for Che, a powerful double-bass anthem, plus Ornette Coleman's War Orphans. The sleeve showed the personnel lined up against a brick wall, staring uncompromisingly at the camera from under a banner. The album won the Grand Prix Charles Cros in France (a Grammy equivalent), Swing Journal's Gold Disc award in Japan, and critics' accolades everywhere.

The current line-up includes hot young sax prospect Miguel Zenon and Jazz Passengers trombonist Curtis Fowlkes. Haden, though, says he always hears the band as "timeless, in all its various incarnations". Its music has varied widely, too: politics may inform it, yet Haden is too much of a jazz improviser to settle for a repertoire of marching songs or fists-in-the-air music. On 1989's The Montreal Tapes, the orchestra plays We Shall Overcome for over half an hour: not as a cosy piece of linked-arms chanting but as an increasingly free blues in which a pedigree team of improvisers (including trumpeters Tom Harrell and Stanton Davis, saxophonists Ernie Watts and Joe Lovano, and trombonist Ray Anderson) independently jam themselves into ecstatic spontaneous union.

Earlier this year, when Bley was in London for the Barbican's tribute to film composer Nino Rota, she was still at work on the new LMO scores, and worried Haden would find them too oblique. She was absorbed by the sounds of her Looking for America album, in which she created sublimely sinister mirrors to imagery of John Wayne frontiersmen and roadside shacks bearing Day of Judgment warnings. That music has influenced the current repertoire. "I guess I've taken it more as my own project this time," Bley said then. "I hope Charlie doesn't think it's too ironic."

"She was just worrying," Haden says, now the tour is under way. "But there was nothing for her to worry about. I don't ever compare the current orchestra to the first one, because, although the music might be different, the reason for its existence is the same. Then it was Nixon, now it's George W. What they're doing is the same. So what we're doing is the same, too."

· The Liberation Music Orchestra plays Queens Hall, Edinburgh, tonight. Box office: 0131-668 3456.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/st...1274213,00.html

[king ubu]

Very nice article, Gary!

[bertrand]

'We Shall Overcome' is not actually 30+ minutes long on the Montreal CD - it's a typo on the back of the CD. They still stretch it out too long, though.

Bertrand.

[Clunky]

I'm catching the LO 2004 tonight, last night Malaby, Fowkes and Matt Wilson put on a great show of Malaby's tunes.

[JohnS]

Adrian, please post a review of the LMO. Shame they are not playing in the south this time around.

[bertrand]

Please let us know if Dewey Redman is in the band.

Thanks,

Bertrand.

[Clunky]

Please let us know if Dewey Redman is in the band.

Thanks,

Bertrand.

No Dewey for sure, tenor saxes include Tony Malaby and Chris Cheek, both excellent players IMO

[Spontooneous]

After some digging, found a personnel for the current LMO on the Web. According to Miguel Zenon's Web page, it's Carla Bley, Matt Wilson, Steve Cardenas, Joe Daley, Ahnee Sharon Freeman, Curtis Fowlkes, Miguel Zenon, Tony Malaby, Chris Cheek, Mike Rodriguez and Seneca Black.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Kind of a drag - too much new blood. I always liked the fact that the band had some real history in its earlier incarnations - people like Motian and Dewey who had been there forever and were on all the studio records (if not all the gigs). Don Cherry and Mike Mantler were there for the first two records. I have been less impressed with things like the video from Montreal 1992 which has Robin Eubanks, Javon Jackson, James Williams, Bill Stewart, Tim Hagans, Ryan Kisor. Too many notes, not enough feeling, not enough personality for me. But with folks like Cherry, Jim Pepper, Ken McIntyre gone - I guess there have to be changes. (Can Curtis Fowlkes do the Roswell/Valente/Ray-bone blasting? Robin Eubanks certainly couldn't or wouldn't - or just didn't. And I think that sound is really a part of the ensemble's palette.)

Sharon Freeman has been there since the second record (1982) and Joe Daley has been there since the third record (1990). But they aren't really significant soloists. Carla, of course, is the one who gives the band its identity, no matter who the players. In the end, I'd like to hear this group.

Mike

[bertrand]

I will definitely see this band as well if the opportunity arises; it's just that Dewey made Ballad Of The Fallen really special for me. As he once said himself in an interview, he was at his peak in the early 80s.

I saw the LMO twice. Once was 1985 in Vitrolles, France. The concert was delayed quite a bit because apparently Haden was ill, but the show did take place. The Carla Bley Orchestra half of Ballad Of The Fallen was not there, but Pepper, Redman and McIntyre were. They really played only a few ensemble passages, but most of the night was one long solo after another. Dewey took an absolutely amazing 20-minute solo that was the highlight of the show.

I saw them again at the Duke Ellington school in D.C. in the early 90s. This was a better show - the arrangements were much tighter. Dewey was not there, however.

Bertrand.

Edited August 3, 2004 by bertrand

[Clunky]

According to Miguel Zenon's Web page, it's Carla Bley, Matt Wilson, Steve Cardenas, Joe Daley, Ahnee Sharon Freeman, Curtis Fowlkes, Miguel Zenon, Tony Malaby, Chris Cheek, Mike Rodriguez and Seneca Black.

Correct, solo honours evenly divided between Malaby, Cheek and Curtis Fowlkes. Miguel Zenon himself was no slouch either, the two trumpet players had few opportunities really but Mike Rodriguez had a nice brief solo on "Amazing Grace". Malaby's gruff intensity played off against Cheeks warm and fluffy style. Both utterly different but equally compelling soloist. Oh and Fowlkes can really blast it. He was the tops.

Haden announced the music as a message to send Bush and Chaney to the North Pole. What the North Pole had done to deserve this wasn't actually made clear , Anyway pieces followed on in one 90 min. set with Haden's "Not in our name", Metheny, Bley, America the beautiful, Amazing Grace, an unknown, and finally Samuel Barber's "Adagio".

Bleys characteristic kaleidoscope of musical influences was fully on show with Mexican marching band jostling with gospel cadences and even a hint of reggae juxtaposed in her surreal manner. Either you like it or hate it. I favour the former.

Haden and Bley had little solo space and neither didn't do much on their own instruments to excite. Ensemble work was tight and punchy. The theme of America being a place capable of transcending the current political problems was etched out to the rapturous audience which lapped it up and appauled every bit of anti-Bush sentiment. Haden seemed happy and gave the impression that he thought it was, on balance, worth his while coming to Edinburgh. 8 out of 10.

Edited August 3, 2004 by Clunky

[JohnS]

Thanks for that Adrian, glad you had a good evening.