by Timothy Casey, Instructor, DFLL The few jazz CDs scattered among the abundant classical and ethnic collections in the AV Library are a feeble representation of America’s greatest original contribution to world music. Anyone curious about traditional jazz would learn more by browsing through the jazz racks of Kungkuan music stores, hanging out at the Blue Note Coffee House on Shih Ta Road, or listening to Bill Thissen’s jazz program Flavors on ICRT (Sunday, 9:00pm) The library offers a few of the great classical jazz musicians - Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, each on one rather ordinary CD, but it completely neglects such other leading figures as Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Instead, its jazz collection is dominated by contemporary European jazz, a style that many purists consider closer to new age music than to jazz. The library’s neglect of the American source and mainstream of all jazz music in favor of derivative European jazz is comparable to an art museum’s neglecting the Chinese mainstream of Asian art in its Oriental collection and stocking only Japanese paintings instead.
Nevertheless, European jazz has become a popular and distinctive form in recent years. Both branches of Tower Records in Taipei have sizable racks devoted exclusively to the leading European jazz label, ECM. Since an ECM CD costs about NT$400, those interested in this music might try sampling the AV library’s offerings before spending their own money. Fortunately, the library’s selection of musicians who record for ECM is a well chosen sampling. All of the albums mentioned below are available in its collection. Probably the best introduction to this music is Ralph Towner’s Solstice. Not only is the album itself excellent, but it also features three other musicians who appear elsewhere in the library’s collection: Jan Garbarek (saxophones), Eberhard Weber (bass), and Jon Christensen (drums). Towner, who plays both guitar and piano, may also be heard alone on his Solo Concert and accompanying Garbarek on the slow and melancholy Dis. Besides Solstice and Dis, Garbarek is also featured with Charlie Haden (bass) and Egberto Gismonti (guitar) on the excellent Folk Songs, a bright and lively album that contrasts sharply with Dis. The other two musicians on Solstice, Weber and Christensen, perform on Weber’s Yellow Fields. Christensen may also be heard drumming on Masqualero’s Re-enter and Miraslav Vitous’ Journey’s End. Two other ECM albums worth a listen are Barre Phillip’s insistently rhythmic Three Day Moon and the Indian-influenced Cloud Dance of Collin Walcott, who plays sitar and tablas. Along with such artists as the Arab Rabih Abou-Khalil, the South African Abdullah Ibrahim, and a number of fine Japanese artists, Walcott was a leading figure in the further internationalization of the once purely American idiom of jazz music. a
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May 2024
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