Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday February 20th, 2013 with Bernard Stepien
Guitarist Michael Gregory Jackson – Clarity 1976

Avant-garde music seemed always to come in two phases over the century of Jazz history. The first phase would be considered as the wild phase while the second phase is much quieter and immensely more structured. Be Bop was followed by Cool Jazz, and the wild Free Jazz of the ‘60s was followed by an almost classical wave of cooler Free Jazz called Post-Free and even going way back Ragtime is now considered as a classical music after starting in minstrels shows and many other unstructured and infamous contexts. Guitarist Michael Gregory Jackson falls into this category with a combination of vocal and instrumental works, some even reminiscent of Chet Baker. His association with both wild and immensely structured musicians like Anthony Braxton, Sam Rivers or Chico Freeman not to mention landing a job as a professor at the New England Conservatory provides ample illustration of this phenomenon. Tonight we will survey an ESP-DISK CD, Clarity from 1976 that should widely illustrate this fact.