I’ve noticed in looking back over them that my band of the day
picks have leaned heavily towards rock, which might lead one to
believe this is all I care about. Not true! I love jazz, my favorite
being that period of 60’s and 70’s postbop, when Coltrane, Sonny
Rollins, Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Miles Davis and many others were doing
such groundbreaking and special work. I really don’t know much about
the scholarship of this kind of music or why I like it so much. I just
know from empirical trial-and-error, when I play a wide variety of
jazz available in the stacks, this is what gets me going. I mentioned
a few days ago that I consider Love Supreme to be the
single most perfect and uplifting work I have ever heard. Back when I
was doing the Friday
jazz shift I one day played, more or less at random, Don Cherry’s
“Actions” from the New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra
album. Wow! It really knocked me out, and some guy called up the
station and we had a 15 minute conversation about it.
Today’s band of the day is a musician whose work I’m familiar with
from WREK – professor, composer and saxophonist Steve Coleman. He
has an amazing amount of his MP3s available on his download page. There are
samples from his in print albums, and his out of print albums and the
unavailable in the US ones are up in their entirety. He says on the
page that soon he’ll be posting an essay answering the question “As a
working musician, why would you make your work available for
download?” I’ll be very interested in what he has to say.