ANTHONY COLEMANFreakish(Tzadik)
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In his liner notes he refers to the Jorge Luis Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” about a fictional 20th-century author who immerses himself in Cervantes’s novel in an attempt to write it again, word for word. Borges calls Menard’s version “infinitely richer,” by dint of both the 400 years of history that separate it from the original and the effort required to write in the language of another time. Coleman quotes the story as a way to reflect on his own project: “more ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness.” Coleman does indeed add some ambiguity to the songs—slightly reharmonizing a melody here, gently funking up a left-hand pattern there—and these changes are hardly inadvertent. “I have steeped myself in ’20s jazz practice,” he writes, “but when an anachronistic sonority, line or groove emerges I subject it to intense questioning.” But this questioning appears to have eliminated most of the updates that it might’ve occurred to him to make, because by and large he plays Morton’s rigorous tunes straight, with a penetrating sobriety. (Freakish is dedicated to the memory of pianist Jaki Byard, who died in 1999; he was a mentor to Coleman, and few musicians have transported ideas from ragtime and stride into the postbop world as successfully as he did.)
MICHAEL HURLEY & IDAIda Con Snock(Gnomonsong)
VARIOUS ARTISTSFire in My Bones: Raw + Rare + Otherworldly African-American Gospel (1944-2007)(Tompkins Square)
Elsewhere on Fire in My Bones there’s fife-and-drum gospel from the Georgia Fife & Drum Band, a post-Rosetta Tharpe throwdown by Sister Mathews, vaguely psychedelic gospel rock from the Amazing Farmer Singers of Chicago, and the sacred steel guitar of Brother Willie Eason. Some of the music may strike listeners as novel, but the fierce conviction in the performances makes it impossible to experience it as mere novelty. This compilation is like a window into a lost world, forgotten to all but a few—and because so many of the artists represented were trying to please only God and their congregations, not the record-buying public, that world was richer and more varied than outsiders ever could have imagined.
