Our first record, released in 1995, was the result of seven months of intensive study of the music of Bud Powell, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Though some compositions by Parker and Gillespie are in every jazz musician’s repertoire, they are often played incorrectly, and the more intricate pieces by these composers are ignored entirely. After poring over the original recordings with a magnifying glass, we opted not to re-create those performances, but instead to offer a commentary on them, refracting the spirit of those incendiary three-minute 78’s from the vantage point of our contemporary moment.
For our second record, we again wanted to have a unifying project that would tie the record together, rather than have it be simply a bunch of disparate songs. The present record is in some measure a commentary on American folk music, a very inadequate and vaguely offensive label for the many musical traditions that spring from rural Southern cultures. The raw material for our study was provided by the field recordings of Alan Lomax, the famous Folkways anthology of Harry Smith, and the vast archival project of the Austrian Document label. Artists such as Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Son House, and the Carter Family combined with Sacred Harp singing and work songs to provide a template for what song might mean. We set ourselves the challenge of writing music that could take its place among these recordings, songs that could almost have been passed along through oral tradition. We wanted to preserve the messy, knotted and tangled pictures the music presented us, and not prettify it or put quotation marks around it. We didn’t want to simplify or needlessly complexify.
Our model for the personal transformation of folk song was Bob Dylan, whose song Visions Of Johanna provides the title of our record. From the outset of his career Dylan had an uncanny feeling for the strange, off-balance world the old songs inhabit. He knew that the violence of the imagery, the Old Testament justice, and the naked expressions of desire present in the songs were all but underground in the conservative 50’s milieu from which he emerged. In our way we had attempted a similar re-claiming of the almost malevolent genius of bebop on our first record. Folk traditions have of course been used by jazz musicians before, memorably by Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. Moreover, jazz is itself a sort of folk music, mixing individual genius with an implicit history that is continually reworked.
The forgoing should not be understood to be a prescription for how to listen the record. The members of this group have a recording history, both individually and collectively, that this record updates and reflects in various ways. What can this record be, after all, other than merely the most recent record by Ben Goldberg, John Schott, Trevor Dunn, and Kenny Wollesen?]