JAZZ NEWS - RON MILES "QUIVER" w/ FRISELL & BLADE

Trumpet Luminary RON MILES Releases Quiver (Enja/Yellowbird), October 9 Live Recording Featuring Trio with BILL FRISELL and BRIAN BLADE Master trumpeter Ron Miles injects his radiant, lyrical tone directly into the lifeblood of American music on his latest release, Quiver. A compelling, inviting trio date with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade, Quiver combines the singing melodicism of American folk musics, the heightened communication of the most progressive jazz forms, and an entrancing, airy openness. The album finds three genre-defying musical masters at their creative best, lacing easy camaraderie with virtuosic interaction. “I conceived it so that there was a lot of space in the music,” Miles told writer and session annotator Chip Stern, “which just makes it a perfect vehicle for Brian and Bill, who are so purposeful in the way they think through a phrase with all of the silences intact and create all of this motion and energy without any wasted gestures or by playing a whole bunch of notes.” Miles is solidly grounded in the jazz tradition yet open to all manner of ethnic, popular and classical sources - let alone down-home American folk. Just try not to be intoxicated by the joyous hoedowns and hosannas of “Just Married,” in which country music and blues share a glorious two-step. Miles’ keen sense of those qualities which elevate the joy and drama of the very earliest jazz recordings enlivens the trio’s forays into roots elements of the music as well as its more modern iterations on Quiver. On “Guest Of Honor,” Miles infuses post-modern nods towards Scott Joplin with personal and political feeling. “Honor is my son’s name,” Miles explains. “I always wanted to do something syncopated in a ragtime manner, and it got me thinking about Scott Joplin and the opera which preceded ‘Treemonisha,’ which was ‘A Guest Of Honor.’ We don’t actually know what the music sounds like, because it was never sent to the copyright office. Apparently ‘A Guest Of Honor’ referenced the story of how Booker T. Washington was invited to the White House by Teddy Roosevelt, with all the controversy that subsequently ensued. And so while we tend to think of Joplin writing upbeat music such as “Maple Leaf Rag,” here he was writing political operas as far back as 1903.” On Miles’ more modernist conceptions, from the jagged hesitations and stutter steps of “Bruise” to the Ornettish exposition of “Rudy Go Round,” the composer’s love of extended forms, asymmetrical abstractions, and dramatic syncopated dances between dissonant and consonant elements rings just as true as his forays into the music’s earliest roots - as do the torchy tenderness and lyric splendor of his balladic interpretations, such as “Days Of Wine And Roses” and “Queen B.” The music on Quiver expands brilliantly on the technical and spiritual foundations this Denver-based, 49-year-old musical trailblazer has crafted for himself since graduating from the Manhattan School of Music in 1986. The album is a logical evolution of Heaven, his deceptively quiescent 2002 duet recital with Frisell. “If we were going to add a third person,” Miles says, “we both agreed it should be Brian more than anyone else because he is one of the most musical drummers on the scene.” In fact, it’s hard to imagine many other drummers approaching this music with both the pianistic elegance and intellectual discretion to lay back and allow the action to come to him - never truncating the conversation with some nervous compulsion to fill every inch of space with excitement. Witness how Blade sets the table for the old-timey jazz feeling of Miles’ brilliant re-working of that Roaring Twenties chestnut “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth The Salt of My Tears” with some of the most beautifully inflected mallet phrases this side of Big Sid Catlett and Elvin Jones, even as Frisell gets up on his Charlie Christian soap-box, while Miles seemingly channels the spirit of Lester Bowie in his solo passages. In short, on Quiver Miles brings the history of jazz up to date by neither disregarding its history or by remaining enslaved to it, instead giving an extremely personal account of the divergent branches of the music’s immeasurably rich family tree. “Listening to composers the likes of Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington on one hand, and improvisers such as Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry on the other, is both humbling and inspiring,” Miles concludes. “And as much as anything, after a lifetime’s study, what this music has given me is a sense of the enormity of spirituality; of being American, of being African-American; of how privileged I am to walk that path and how much work I still have to do. There are so many people who’ve inhabited this music: living it, writing it, playing it, listening to it. So you just find a way to be you in it, to find your way in it. That’s what we’re trying to do on Quiver.” Release Date: October 9, 2012 Ron Miles official site www.enjarecords.com Publicity Contact: Matt Merewitz - Fully Altered Media 347-384-2839 matt@fullyaltered.com fullyaltered.com twitter.com/fullyaltered

NEW DYLAN COMING

Now that may sound like a headline from the golden days of New Dylan sightings...Donovan, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, even Elliot Murphy all got the nod at one point or another. Then there was the band THE NEW DYLANS who had a brief run-in with critical acclaim in the mid-80s.

But, as always, the only new Dylan we need is whatever new-fangled Dylan, Bob himself gives us. There have been rumblings in Dylan's camp about a new record coming this fall and today there is some concrete news. His new album will be called TEMPEST and will be released on September 11.
Featuring Dylan's touring band as well as David Hidalgo from Los Lobos, this is Bob's 35th studio album and comes on the heels of four strong and critically acclaimed studio albums since 1997.


Bob talks about TEMPEST from the 8/16 issue of ROLLING STONE
 Here is the track listing of TEMPEST:

http://www.bobdylanisis.com/contents/en-uk/d19.html



1. Duquesne Whistle
2. Soon After Midnight
3. Narrow Way
4. Long and Wasted Years
5. Pay In Blood
6. Scarlet Town
7. Early Roman Kings
8. Tin Angel
9. Tempest
10. Roll On John

So the final song, "Roll On, John" is proported to be a new song by Bob about John Lennon and features lines from various Beatles songs according to a variety of sources in the various Dylan forums online. It is NOT the traditional song of the same name that Dylan performed on Cynthia Goodin's radio program in 1962 (hear it below) which has been widely bootlegged over the years. Below also is a version by the Greenbriar Boys from 1970 which just illustrates how much more authentic Dylan sounded then the average folk artists when he sprang on the folk music scene in NYC in the early 60s. The polish exhibited by so much of the music of the early 60s folk music revival was not Dylan's forte or his mode of expression. His individual style was based more on the organic folk process of taking your own stylistic idiosyncrasies and adapting existing folk material and references from a variety of sources that not only pay tribute to the original songs and performances but apply one's own intent and interpretation upon them to put forward a newer perspective on an older theme. He does this to this day with his "appropriations" of titles, grooves, imagery and melody. The Great Assimilator.

Here is the official press release from www.bobdylan.com:

July 17, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW BOB DYLAN ALBUM – TEMPEST - SET FOR SEPTEMBER RELEASE
COLLECTION OF TEN NEW BOB DYLAN SONGS
MARKS MUSICIAN’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY AS A RECORDING ARTIST

Columbia Records announced today that Bob Dylan’s new studio album, Tempest, will be released on September 11, 2012. Featuring ten new and original Bob Dylan songs, the release of Tempest coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the artist’s eponymous debut album, which was released by Columbia in 1962.

Tempest is available for pre-order now on iTunes and Amazon. The new album, produced by Jack Frost, is the 35thth studio set from Bob Dylan, and follows 2009’s worldwide best-seller, Together Through Life.

Bob Dylan’s four previous studio albums have been universally hailed as among the best of his storied career, achieving new levels of commercial success and critical acclaim for the artist. The Platinum-selling Time Out Of Mind from 1997 earned multiple Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year, while “Love and Theft” continued Dylan’s Platinum streak and earned several Grammy nominations and a statue for Best Contemporary Folk album.

Modern Times, released in 2006, became one of the artist’s most popular albums, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and earning Dylan two more Grammys. Together Through Life became the artist’s first album to debut at #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, as well as in five other countries, on its way to surpassing sales of one million copies.

Those four releases fell within a 12-year creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, “Things Have Changed,” from the film Wonder Boys, in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004, and a Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, No Direction Home, in 2005. Bob Dylan also released his first collection of holiday standards, Christmas In The Heart, in 2009, with all of the artist’s royalties from that album being donated to hunger charities around the world.

This year, Bob Dylan was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” He was also the recipient of the French Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1990, Sweden’s Polar Music Award in 2000 and several Doctorates including the University of St. Andrews and Princeton
University as well as numerous other honors.

Tempest is available for pre-order now on iTunes and Amazon.

##

Here's a segment of one of the new tunes as debuted in the trailer for the Cinemax show, Strike Back...courtesy of RollingStone.com:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/listen-bob-dylans-new-song-early-roman-kings-20120801