This week my contributions to the pile of music reviews got a little bit off the road with William Parker then Bill Frisell. Since we're already off the pavement, I might as well head straight into the culvert with a panegyrist over a Tom Cora performance.
Tom Cora, you ask? Ah, yes, the late, lamented patron saint of whack jazz cello. In case you haven't noticed, the cello has been a common theme in this space of late; Paul Buckmaster contributed a little electric cello to Miles Davis' On The Corner sessions. Tony Levin put down his Stick for a bowed bass in last week's OTM, "Cracking The Midnight Glass." But none of those guys could hold a candle to Cora.
Tom Cora attacked the cello much like John Zorn attacks his saxophone, coaxing some of the most disharmonious noises ever to come out of the instrument. Having arrived on the New York experimental music scene about the same time as Zorn, it was only natural that he would appear on Zorn recordings (Archery, from 1981), as well as records by Fred Frith and Eugene Chadbourne.
But unlike these like-minded artists, Cora left behind a scant discography under his own name when he died of melanoma in 1998 at only forty-four years of age. What is available are mostly hard-to-find live recordings.
One of the rarer ones also contains one of his best taped performances: a stunning 1987 gig called Live At The Western Front. A solo concert armed with an amped-up cello, Cora brought an anarchist punk attitude to the traditionally staid orchestral instrument. It's a definitive statement of his prowess and he slays all pretenders to the throne of experimental bowed bass, as if anyone was daring enough to try.
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