iPod for the summer house

 

My summer house was built by three young architects in 1969. It is a so-called "A-house" (named after its simple shape), which is "floating" on concrete pillars. The acoustics in this house has always been amazing. These days, the music is transmitted via iTunes of course, and recently via the iPod Hi-Fi, which looks like it was designed specifically for the house! It has been standing on the floor - I take it outside sometimes - but today, during vacuuming, I wanted to get rid of it. Enter two bicycle elastic cords. Heureka! The shit is flying. Oh, you want to know what the hanging iShuffle is playing? The album "Ming" by David Murray Octet.

That tenor saxophonist David Murray's Ming was recorded in the 1980s is no small feat, as that era was the dawn of the neoconservative movement. All who returned to jazz-band setups then seemed tracked for high dry-cleaning bills on their suits and a modicum of attention from the likes of Time and Newsweek, writing on the rebirth of jazz. But Ming was coming from an altogether different direction. Murray was a 25-year-old prodigy heavily schooled in the avant-garde fests he snagged in the World Saxophone Quartet and elsewhere. And so he took 1960s mainstream styles like hard bop and shot them through a kaleidoscope of complex group arrangements, spicing them severely with his inestimable chops, his awesome command of the tenor sax and bass clarinet, from their lowest depths to their most skating, tonal heights. In hindsight, his band on Ming looks like a jazz summit: pianist Anthony Davis sparring with alto saxist Henry Threadgill; trumpeter Olu Dara wrapping brass lines around cornetist Butch Morris's cryptic, limber bends and curves; George Lewis holding the low brass on trombone with drummer Steve McCall; and bassist Wilbur Morris pushing fast and hard, then dipping into a soul-laced bag while Murray indulges his best ballad chops. Ming is a classic that deserves its status.