[Jesse]

[
You mention the song structures. How do you see the song structures? I'm not even sure what asking, other than to get your insight on the way the music was written, and how someone listening percieves them.

Re: Milo Fine:
I last heard his music with a guy named Gnitka about 20 years ago, when hat Hut first released his early stuff, but I have not heard him since. His approach to music led me to start thinking really seriously about trying to get my music documented by a larger record company than my small daagnimRecords label. Tell me what he's doing now.


Dennis:
I will take another run at it, having lost 2 posts in 2 days, intended for you.
My original post was intended to share some reflections on Stefan, Namesake, and something of the process that returned me to a new listening.
On the way to retrieving Bannar(your work was gradually floating up from the mists) from my ill-inventoried collection, I found Catechism, and 10 minutes into it, all bets were off for returning to the other Silkheart sessions, for now.
It's interesting, really, the role time plays in this matter of listening to improvised musics caught for posterity.For example,when I first heard these dates, I was 33, w/a 4 year old son (now 21,and another who is 14), standing damaged from an impressive 19 year career of chemical abuse, avid, argumentative and excessively attached to the new music. I burned out on challenging music around '91 and literally could not listen w/fresh ears for another 9 years or so.This followed an 18 year romance w/listening, discussing and befriending some of the local improvisers here. Neither listener nor artist can step into the same river twice. It's amazing to me how many people fulfill a self-limiting, passive/consumer role where art is concerned. What better signifies the interdependent nature of everything really real, then the artist and the fully engaged listener?
O.K., digression done, point resumed:with all respect, Dennis, I think something happened in London w/the Catechism cats that is on another level. You asked my thoughts on your song structures, and I can break them down into elements,though I am no kind of writer. There is the entwining of languages that are improbably harmonious: Moholo's African vibe, the explicit Southern gospel and Latin flavor in some of your choruses and horn playing, the mantra-like piano figures of Tippett:the settings for free-improv soloing in extended/suite-like pieces: the lower case catholocism I hear in all of your work: the Hymn motif that calls forth some flavor of the musician cited: the orchestral voicings marching up to the entrance of the 2 trumpets solos that literally sound larger than the 6-7 cats involved. I can reference these elements in your work and in the finest work of others working in similar fields (John Carter, among others). But the heart of the matter for me, Dennis,what really struck me here, IS the HEART of the matter. Whatever your story has been, walking the earth lo these many years, you bring indestructible heart to Catechism, and your compatriots respond with the same. (As a digeression to underscore this, I have never appreciated Dean's stuff much in other contexts, and here he is amazing). So you take the aforementioned technical qualities and integrate big heart into the mix, and this is the shit!
Anyway, I can damn by faint praise with the best of them, and have quibbles and distractions w/elements of Stefan(I love the Cherry hymn), and Bannar,
but today I wanted to focus on what happened hearing Catechism again after lo these many years. I hear suffering and some resolution and reverence and hilarity and a guerilla spirit. I hear a little of your story and a little of mine.I wanted to grab someone (gently), and insist,"Listen to this!This is the sound of the human heart!". That's how it was before the burnout, and for that, as they say, I am grateful.
I will get a little more contemporary (!) w/your stuff when funds allow.I can also send another post, if you are interested, on the enigma of Milo Fine (alive and well).
May your music flourish,
Jesse