Disquiet

Composer and cornet player Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris has what is essentially a fifth name as well, a jazz neologism with which he is synonymous: “conduction.” That’s his word for the subtle art of using hand gestures to weave a single technique out of both conducting and improvising. An hour-long trio performance, recorded live at the Kitchen in Manhattan in 1987, has been uploaded to the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org), featuring Morris, usually with his mute on in full electric-era Miles Davis mode, plus two electronically enabled colleagues: trombonist J.A. Deanne and keyboardist Wayne Horvitz (he’s credited as “Wayne Horowitz” on the set’s archive.org entry). The music ranges from gauzy electric jazz to deeply echoed dub. The latter distinctly foresees the shape of illbient a decade or so yet to come. The set is bookended by an interview with Morris in December 1988 (he also employs the alternate word “conprovisation”), conducted by Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian. The track is available in various formats, the most compact of which is a 64 kbps MP3 file (MP3). More details at archive.org.

By Marc Weidenbaum