The CD Parades and Saints, by The Real Cool Killers, featuring John Doheny on sax, Geoff Clapp on drums and Rob Kohler on bass, is available for sale as of today! You can order it online from Louisiana Music Factory.
Maybe there's someone on your gift list who would enjoy some original jazz as a holiday gift? Parades and Saints would make a great gift. The recently released The Professors of Pleasure, Volume Two is another possibility. Volume One and Volume Two are both available from Louisiana Music Factory.
Here are the liner notes from Parades and Saints:
The Real Cool Killers (the name is taken from a novel by African-American crime novelist Chester Himes) had originally intended to record some compositions by bassist Rob Kohler and tenor saxophonist John Doheny and in fact had actually rehearsed them. But when Kohler, Doheny and drummer Geoff Clapp convened at the recital hall at Tulane University on the night of November 8th, 2009, the original plan was scrapped and the band agreed to "play free" for this initial session. Nothing was discussed; saxophonist Doheny set up the six-four groove of "Parades and Saints" and the trio played uninterrupted for 20 minutes. After a short break, they did it again, in fact the only preconceived music on the CD is the final track, Theolonius Monk's "Rhythm-a-ning." Everything else was in the grand tradition of New Orleans collective improvisation. And while on first listening the music may appear to be "free jazz," further perusal reveals a more holistic approach to the music, one containing hidden re-compositions of funk tunes (the Meters "Cissy Strut," James Brown's "I Feel Good"), standards ("Stella By Starlight"), the harmonic and sonic approaches of 20th century composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Darius Milhaud, and allusions to mid 20th century tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin. The titles of the individual tracks were actually dreamed up by Doheny at a later listening, and the tracks themselves were created in the mixing process by producer-engineer Kohler. The music itself stands on its own, a whole and complete thing, born of the special circumstances of a special night in New Orleans in 2009.
-- Herbert "Buckshot" Lefonk, New Orleans, Sept. 2010
- Parades and Saints Has Been Released!
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johndohenyfans- November 30th, 2010
2010-11-30 05:09 pm (UTC)
It's also priced extremely low, at $9.99. In part that's because it was comparatively cheap to produced; we had no studio costs (it was recorded 'live' direct to digital in the Tulane Recital Hall) so I thought it's pricing should reflect that.
However, at the risk of sounding like I'm whining at you to buy my records (which, of course, I am lol) I'd like to mention here that the changes in the music business in just the last 5 years or so are making it increasingly difficult to document creative, non-pop-oriented music of any kind. The vast majority of my students at Tulane, for instance (who, ten years ago, would have been an obvious, easily reachable market for my stuff) do not own a single CD, and rarely even bestir themselves to pay for i-tunes downloads, unless it's a classic track I've assigned in a class. And even then they sometimes bitch about having to shell out the 90 cents. What things like file-sharing have done is create an entire generation of people who have literally no conception of music as a commodity. It's just 'there,' like tap water.
I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, as an educator, having near instantaneous access to virtually the entire recorded ouvre of jazz music is a powerful. powerful tool to have at one's disposal, and free downloadables like the Amazing Slowdowner offer students methods of transcribing solos that players of my generation (who ruined countless vinyl copies of "Kind of Blue" playing them over and over again to 'bite' Coltrane's solos off them) could only dream of. On the other hand, the unibiquity of music today, in my opinion, tends to devalue it. Music used to be a sweet treat, now it's everywhere, being pumped into your head via i-pod. And reducing great works of art like Cotrane's "A Love Supreme," a work I played every single day of my life for a number of years, to 'information' that can be 'downloaded' at will...to me it's a bit like putting Rodin's "The Thinker" in a can, you know?
But I digress. What "Parades and Saints" lacks in recording quality it more than makes up for in vibe. That night in the recital hall was truly a spontaneous, magical moment, and it's captured there for you to relive. We had no idea that performance would be a CD, we thought we were just recording for analysis and preparation for the 'real' record later, but Rob called me the next day and said, "you know man, I think this is it. This is the record." And when I heard it, I knew he was right.
There's a lot of 'imperfections' on it that would be excised in a studio recording, particularly the spontaneous shouts, groans and exhortations emmanating from the players. But that was the moment, that's what happened.
Music may indeed be 'free' (and the music on "Parades and Saints" is very free indeed) but my landlord still demands coin of the realm the first of every month. Recording studios and pressing plants also demand their due. If people don't buy my (and others) recorded products, we'll be left without the means to make more. We're not looking to get rich, but we'd like our music to be heard.