I Witness

DR2D 2

2012-01-22T13:01:00.000-08:00

My choices for the best CDs of 2011... the first half was posted last week; see that post below.

REGGAE—If there was any real excitement in the Reggae scene last year, I missed it. New albums by Etana, Gyptian, various new young voices… ho hum. Tribute anthologies honoring vocal greats Beres Hammond and recently dead Gregory Isaacs, and Country Music (huh?). The “JamRock” single by one of Marley’s many sons… was that in 2011? Well, I did enjoy We Remember Gregory (VP Records VPCD 1927) with one CD devoted to remakes of Isaacs’ familiar hits--by Tarrus Riley, Duane Stephenson, Chris Boomer, Natel, Etana, Busy Signal, Jah Cure, and many others—and a second CD of old-style instrumental versions (not dubs) of the same tracks, driven by the reeds of old warhorse sax soloist-turned-producer Dean Fraser. (That second CD is pretty much superfluous, however, polite but lacking in pizzazz.)

Then reaching back into the past, back to 1980, I also picked up the grandly expanded 2010 reissue of UB40’s amazing debut, that dole-card package called

Signing Off—now a great set (2-CDs plus DVD) offering the original LP-plus-12” combination that introduced England’s racially mixed, politically rebellious, young Reggae adepts, with the second CD housing all their other 12” singles from that first powerhouse breakout year… But wait! there’s more: BBC radio sessions to round out CD #2, and then a lengthy DVD with five promo videos as well as primo performances from TV and live concert sources. In all, a terrific package from a great Reggaefied band that hit the ground running and rocking, reveling and rebelling, and that’s still going strong in 2012.

ROCK—I suppose the gradual re-emergence of Brian Wilson made this set inevitable… and hooray for that. Not Smiley Smile (truncated bastard stepchild LP), not Brian Wilson’s Smile (or whatever the remake from 2009 was called), but the real thing, the original Smile Sessions recorded by the Beach Boys as they were, a

two-CD box set (Capitol 509990 27664) with fancy extras--OMG, dig that crazy pinback!--offering all the master takes plus a great many alternates and rejects that survived Brian’s late-sessions mental breakdown and four decades of physical incapacitation. “Good Vibrations,” “Surf’s Up,” “Heroes and Villains,” “Cabin Essence,” “Wind Chimes,” “Vega-Tables,” even pieces of “You Are My Sunshine” and “Cool, Cool Water”—presented here in pristine shape, along with tapes of the works in progress. I hear the Grammys calling.

SOUL/R&B—For a couple of decades the Kent/Ace group of labels over in England has been compiling or reissuing great Southern Black Music of the Fifties to Eighties—James Carr, Percy Sledge, George Jackson, artists issued on small local labels and on Modern and Dootone out in L.A., all the best sessions of the Memphis to Muscle Shoals recording studio circuit. The set I’d name their crowning achievement came

out at the end of 2011, The Fame Studios Story: 1961-1973 (Kent/Ace KENTBOX12), the outer wrap with subtitle echoing Fame’s slogan, “Home of the Muscle Shoals Sound.”

Musician-turned-producer Rick Hall had “big ears” and some hard-earned luck, white Southern Soul and an indomitable will, and he turned a small studio in a small corner of Northern Alabama into an influential musical empire. Aspiring session musicians and songwriters flocked to cap-F Fame, where they gained sufficient small-f fame to move on to other studios and/or major careers in Memphis and Nashville. (Most prominent among those cool cats were the longtime main rhythm section of Barry Beckett, Jimmy Johnson, David Hood, and Roger Hawkins, songwriting session men Dan Penn and Spencer Oldham, and regular guitarists Joe South, Duane Allman, and Travis Wammack.)

In the meantime artists and producers eagerly made the trek to Muscle Shoals, anticipating that on-the-spot head arrangements, Hall’s canny luck, and the funky

Shoals sound would generate hits… And they did. This splendid set offers the solid proof, 75 hits and near misses on three CDs housed in 78s-styled mounted pockets, within a terrific 90-page mini-album book rich in color photos and equally colorful back-story text. So the hits kept on a-comin’—for Jimmy Hughes, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Clarence Carter, Candi Staton, Joe Tex, Irma Thomas, Spencer Wiggins, Arthur Conley, Lou Rawls, plus Pop stars Tommy Roe, the Osmonds, Little Richard (!), and Bobby Gentry. Big names and forgotten ones, they’re all here; and bookending the set are Arthur Alexander’s early country-boy hit, “You Better Move On” (from 1961), and Travis Wammack’s polished, Marvin Gaye-styled remake cut a dozen years later, with 73 more configurations from Rick’s “Hall of Fame,” a veritable Soul Music heaven, in between.

SOUNDTRACKS—Supposedly there are between three and five thousand crazed/dedicated/collector-serious film score fans scattered around the States and the globe (Golden or not), and a half-dozen or so specialty labels dedicated to issuing/

reissuing/expanding/recreating favorite or out-of-print or forgotten, even completely unknown, film scores--one- and two-CD sets that present every single bit of music recorded for the film (including alternate and unused cues), not just the composer’s selection of 30 to 40 minutes that become the so-called “Soundtrack album.” For 2011 my money’s on the elegant and truly symphonic, “Expanded Edition” 2-CD set reissuing then-young composer James Horner’s stirring music for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Retrograde/FilmScore 80128-2), released in 1984. Dynamic, exciting, dramatic, occasionally acerbic, this really is a Symphony for Some-Other-Where in Time and Space—hinting at Sibelius and Prokofiev, Bruckner and Mahler, Jerry Goldsmith and Alexander Courage (film composers who’d already left their marks on earlier iterations of Star Trek), and not forgetting James Horner and those daring to go into the Great Unknown. Bravo!

BEYOND CATEGORY—Which section gets the music of Kurt Weill? Classical or Show Tunes? Pop Music or Jazz? The album I’m recommending belongs in all four.

September Songs (Sony Classical SK 63046) was actually issued back in 1997, but it took till 2011 for me at long last to pay attention while blogging at length about Weill and Jazz. And what I finally heard were brilliant interpretations by Nick Cave and P.J. Harvey, Charlie Haden and Betty Carter, William S. Burroughs and--wait for it--Lou Reed. Lou’s slow-mo, guitars-go-ballistic version of “September Song” is topped only by Weill interpreter nonpareil Teresa Stratas defining for always the little-known, accordion-driven, tango-habanera called “Youkali.” Find this great album wherever you can. (But find it.)

WORLD—Many record stores and on-line sellers lump (white) Cajun and (Black Creole) Zydeco in with World Music. True, it was started by French Acadiens chased from the Canadian Maritimes, who settled eventually in South Central Louisiana; but it quickly absorbed elements of Country and Caribbean Music, New Orleans

Rhythm 'n' Blues and even English Folk. I immersed myself in Cajun/Zydeco for weeks on end in late Winter-early Spring 2011, getting acquainted with over a hundred CDs. Which means I have the ludicrous task of narrowing that full shelf down to one or two examples…

Well, forget it. Look for the Swallow and Maison du Soul, Valcour and La Louisianne labels for the sounds of Southwest prairies and swamps—plus Rounder Records for its amazing roster and classic albums. Dig into three generations of Ardoins (from Amade to Chris); the Balfa and Delafose families; anything with mad fiddler Michael Doucet or cranky accordion-maker Mark Savoy; friends and rivals (little) Boozoo Chavis and (huge) Beau Jocque; white guys Steve Riley and Bruce Daigrepont and black guys Nathan Williams and Buckwheat Zydeco; old-time Cajun accordionist Nathan Abshire and modern Zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier (who pretty much created it). And after you’ve absorbed

all of those, there's a historical hundred more to discover, from Jo-El Sonnier and Iry LeJeune to Joe Falcone, the Hackberry Ramblers, and Canray Fontenot.

But in the spirit of year’s best lists everywhere, I want to recommend the one excellent anthology I found that was actually issued in 2011--The Rough Guide to Cajun & Zydeco (World Music Network RGNET1265CD), a 15-track, hour-plus sampler of the hottest current or recent performers—which also comes with a no-number bonus CD: Bayou Road by Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band, presumably an earlier set from last year's Grammy-winning Carrier group. But the Rough Guide compilation takes the prize for its currency, quality, and variety. Exciting young bands Feufollet, Pine Leaf Boys, Lil Nathan and the Zydeco Big Timers, and Kyle Huval and the Dixie Club Ramblers vie for attention with solidly established acts like Cedric Watson and Bijou Creole, Geno Delafose and French Rockin' Boogie (that's

Geno on the booklet cover), Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and Jeffery Broussard, once powering Zydeco Force, now ramrodding the Creole Cowboys. Included too are a supergroup and a women’s group, bar bands and hip-hop influenced bands, even a Cajun New Ager!

“Rough Guide,” you say? Not really; it’s a lot sharper than that.

Desert Resort Discs, Part 1

2012-01-17T18:53:00.000-08:00

Herewith my choices for the best of the year just past, mostly CDs released in 2011, but adding some older things that I missed until last year. One or two might someday qualify as Desert Island Discs, but for now they are sound recommendations you can happily resort to whenever deserted and in need of music. Presented now for your listening pleasure, in no special order but with each representing a particular genre or category…

ALT.COUNTRY/AMERICANA—With a gilt-edged array of artists eager to participate in a special tribute, 30 songs by one of the best songwriters in the game, and many inspired and affectionate performances, you just can’t go wrong with This One’s for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark (2CD set Music Road MRRCD012). Carefully

crafted arrangements, Texas-twangy vocals, and a roster of names you could conjure with: Crowell, Lovett, Colvin, Cash, Nelson, Van Zandt, Elliott, Ely, Harris, Prine, Earle, Griffin, Kristofferson, Gill, Walker, and 15 more old friends and young admirers. And the songs? Mere classics like “That Old Time Feeling,” “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train,” “Homeless,” “Let Him Roll,” “Magdalene,” “Home Grown Tomatoes,” “The Guitar,” “Dublin Blues,” “Magnolia Wind,” “The Last Gunfighter Ballad,” “The Dark,” “Stuff That Works,” “Randall Knife,” “L.A. Freeway.” “The Cape,” “She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “Texas Cookin’,” “Baby Took a Limo to Memphis”… er, have I title-dropped enough?

Guy Clark is a wry, laconic, sometimes whimsical performer. It seems he’d rather repair guitars and write songs for other folks to sing--or like me, sing along with. (Take it, Ed!) “I wish I was in Austin, mm-hmm, In the Chili Parlor bar, Drinkin’ Mad-Dog Margaritas, And not carin’ where you are…”

BLUES—Lost in limbo for four decades, but finally issued a few months back, my vote for Blues release of the year goes to Son House in Seattle 1968 (Arcola A CD 1008), a nice 2-CD package with Son strong and live, sermonizing and sounding sober, his guitar and vocals powerful and exciting, his interview and between-song raps sweet and witty and wise. I witnessed all this; I was there. And I wrote at greater length about House and the concert some weeks back (find it a few posts down).

COUNTRY—I’ve chosen two discs/artists here, a standby fave and a new discovery (new to me, that is). Somehow I completely missed the excited buzz, the “out there, bad girl, say anything” antics, the amazing hits, the major awards, the big romance and wedding… in short, I missed everything that’s happened in the eight years since cute and nubbly blonde-bomb Miranda Lambert slammed into Country with sass

and serious attitude; drum-smashing, guitar-shredding arrangements; and her own wild-child songs rife with whiskey, cigarettes, fast cars, faster women, unfastened screen doors, firing guns and raging fires and raggedy runaways—sorta like a petite Natalie Maine on steroids! This li’l ol’ gal ‘ll break your heart and your staff and bury ‘em certain fathoms i’ the earth… Any of Lambert’s four albums will shake the dust off your boots and outta your ears, but let’s go with the original culprit, her debut release Kerosene (Epic/Sony EK 92026) from 2005. Nashville still hasn’t recovered.

Tough act to follow, but my man Vince Gill’s got the chops: master musician and brilliant songster, with one of the most pleasing voices around (tackling with aplomb Blues, Bluegrass, Cajun, Country, Cowboy songs, Folk, Gospel, and anything else you got), he succeeds too as husband, father, golfer, producer, practical joker, easygoing Christian volunteer, back-up vocalist happy to help as needed… His last album was an astonishing 4CD box set with Gill’s songs everywhere; it sold for the price of a

single disc, but was really just too much to absorb quickly. Now he has Guitar Slinger (MCA Nashville 50015510-02) richly demonstrating all his strengths and a handful of perfect songs: “Threaten Me with Heaven” (which might well be Country Music's Song of the Year), “Tell Me Fool,” “Bread and Water,” “If I Die,” and the long closing track, “Buttermilk John.” And this ol’ boy slings some serious git-tar on ‘most all the tracks too.

FOLK—At the Edinburgh Festival in 1983 or ’84 I listened in wonder—transfixed, mesmerized, reveling in each new old song—to a landmark, life-changing concert, vocal and guitar only… ah, but when the glorious voice box is June Tabor’s, and the

nimble plucks and picks stir the sounding board of Martin Simpson’s guitar… well, could there be a richer experience of “the doom and gloom” of Great Britain’s Folk Music? The duo’s careers both separate and, occasionally, together have proved long and distinguished, and both had excellent new Topic-label CDs in 2011. Martin’s Purpose + Grace (TSCD584) is an eclectic mix with guests Dick Gaughan, Richard Thompson and, singing on one track, Ms. Tabor; and though Martin often turns up for a track or two on June’s albums, not this time: her deep and mournful Ashore (TSCD577) is all songs of the sea, with the sessions built around piano and fiddle.

(For an examination of Tabor’s major albums and general career, go here.)

JAZZ—Well, it ain’t Sketches of Spain… but it ain’t chopped liver either. I’m talking about Miles Espanol: New Sketches of Spain (Entertainment One EOM-CD 2104). Who knew 2011 would become another year of Miles, what with those "New Sketches," a couple of official Sony “bootlegs” of Miles live in Europe, the Columbia Legacy CD called Bitches Brew Live (with performances taped at Newport 1969 and Isle of Wight ’70), a mid-Nineties Warner Bros. release called Live Around the World I’d never paid attention to till trumpeter/teacher/composer/conductor Bill Kirchner recommended a track from it. Heck, even Dave Holland’s album with flamenco guitarist Pepe Habichuela called up memories of the original Sketches.

Then, too, I spent a lot of time immersed in Gil Evans’ LPs with and without Davis (researching Gil’s interest in, and quiet championing of, Kurt Weill’s compositions).

But getting back to Miles Espanol, it’s two CDs offering new versions of the Sketches tunes, plus originals in homage to the classic set, and some Spanish-sounding or Latin Jazz numbers given a Milesian makeover, the whole shootin’ match of 16 tracks arranged and produced by Bob Beldin, directing a rotating group of major stars and lesser lights alike. (You'll need to listen well because booklet and labels confuse order and placement on the two CDs!) Great to hear oud and dumbek mixing it up with flute and harp and French horn, bongos and oboe reinforcing bass and bassoon; and that’s just the opener, “Concierto de Aranjuez,” with Rabih Abou Khalil, Brahim Fribgame, Lou Marini, Edmar Castaneda, John Clark, Alex Acuna, and others. At the opposite extreme is Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s piano solo “Fantasia for Miles y Gil,” along with various duets, trios, and quartets played bracingly and gracefully and with all the Latin sway you could ask for—yeah, and wait’ll you hear the juggernaut of “Saeta/Pan Piper,” as inexorable as

the Inquisition!—by Spanish-influenced masters Chick Corea, Jerry Gonzalez, both Eddie Gomez and Edsel Gomez, Sonny Fortune, Sammy Figueroa, Ron Carter, Chano Dominguez, Johns Benitez and Scofield, Jack deJohnette, and several more, but with a special spotlight shining on flamenco guitarist Nino Joseles.

The Sketches of Miles Espanol get better with every spin.

Part 2 coming soon.

Cover Story

2012-01-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

Well, it wasn’t a dog that ate my homework. It was this same doggone computer that now ate my latest blog post. There I was, typing merrily along when—at 4:35 PM computer time—I brushed some unnoticed key and poof! 300 words gone in a literal flash… and not to be retrieved, evidently, though I tried for hours. And no back-up alternative waited because I was smack in the middle of writing when the bits didn’t hit the plan. I felt like a Volkswagen flattened by a rhino…

I’m still too p.o.’ed and despondent to try and recreate the text just now, and so my brilliant exegesis on a hundred years of Jazz in Seattle will just have to wait for inspiration to strike once more. (As I close-in on age 69, I’m not making book.)

That means another hurry-up fill-in:

A couple of months back I edged into a multipart examination of Kurt Weill in Jazz by talking about the recent sale of my 11,000-piece record collection. As mentioned then, I also held onto a hundred-fifty or so favorite LPs—not valued collectibles but musical performances I’ll want to hear often till all the listening’s done.

But once a collector, always a pushover. I still keep my eyes peeled for bargain discs and unknown wonders, and I decided to post photos of a selection of the more interesting finds, 20-some LPs paired up according to whatever visual or sub-genre relationships I could detect.

The first two, for example, are great African-American singers with deep, resonant voices. But Paul Robeson stayed serious in all circumstances ("Why these burdens, Lord?"), while Clarence Carter sang Southern Soul with a lascivious laugh added.

Paganini alone scorched the strings of his violin like a man dueling 24 devils, while Bartok’s composition needed that many string players and sounded like they were losing the duel!

From the mid-Eighties and each release avant garde after a fashion: saxophonist Garbarek and his friends play pieces in homage to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, but Czukay and Sylvian make their own dark poems from spiraling winter ghosts, empty iron vessels, and a host of keyboards and synths.

Folk guitarist Rush rambled down an alley in Cambridge, on his way to fame; 20 years later it was an alley in Nashville picked for the Scene of a different “Newgrassy” Crime.

Two examples of Jazz albums with illustrated covers, one by the famous David Stone Martin, the other by the possibly obscure Pat Heine—both sessions featuring Texas Tenor-style saxmen (Cobb and Stanley Turrentine); both albums scarce and collectable.

Classic Americana composed by Thomson for documentary films (the John Steuart Curry cover art chosen accordingly), and a classic, on-the-way-to-America ballet composed by Weill in Paris, documenting a sort of split personality (manic cover art by one Jim Endicott).

I don’t know if this is a pair to draw to, but it’s definitely a pair of aces, one a quirky songwriter with a rural bent, the other a classy hoofer as urbane as Broadway backstage, but both of them peerless non-singers who could sing the sun up and star dust down.

Two less-familiar albums from two of the greatest violinists of the 20th century… hell, the 21st too! (The cellist was no slouch either.) All intensity and precision, Heifitz and Milstein just didn’t fiddle around.

The man for mumbling and clowning but some serious trumpet too is Clark Terry; at 80-plus now, he’s still b-a-d, slowed but not stopped. Matthews, in contrast, lasted the L.A. equivalent of a New York minute; was this his sole record?

Winsome and willowy, soulful and smart, tender and tough and blue… are some of the words that describe the final four LPs. Mimi shared the best-of album with her late husband Richard (and sister Joan Baez too); and master musician Jimmy Giuffre of "Four Brothers" fame arranged and conducted for Ms. Hunter.

Ubiquitous in 1998 (a hit track here with Pretender-guest Chrissie Hynde), UB40 still rules the waves of U.K. Reggae--occasionally--but Horslips peaked in the Seventies. (Their Celtic folk-rock mattered; this earnest rockumentary LP didn’t, though the slight visual echoes of Lurlean’s much earlier cover are of passing interest.)

And thus a new collection begins.

"To and Fro" Zen: Stevens in the Snow

2011-12-30T13:03:00.000-08:00

Odd how the language has evolved… here’s a pertinent example: You can be a lyric poet without ever writing lyrics. Moreover, there may be music in your poems even if you are not a musician and know nothing about music at all!

Forty years ago, when I was writing poems regularly--many of them accepted, and published, by some “little magazine”--I read other poets assiduously, and I soon realized my own verbal biases:

I valued wordplay, surprising imagery, simple rhythms, sometimes even old forms and rhyme schemes. I cherished Shakespeare, rejected Wordsworth; chose Donne and Marvell, avoided Byron and Shelley; loved Yeats, admired Frost, thought Wallace Stevens stiff and boringly intellectual.

But recently I took another look at Stevens and realized he was sometimes light and lyric, good fun when not grandly philosophical. Brevity is

occasionally the soul of his wit, with oblique, gnomic statements reminiscent of Zen Buddhist aphorisms, at least as articulated by West-Meets-East Oriented Beat poets like Gary Snyder.

As evidence, and in recognition of the season’s two Januses frozen in midwinter stasis, I offer two brief Stevens poems, the first complete, the other excerpted to make the point cogently…

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

* * * * *

from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

No false hope, but no despair--resignation, and a recognition of human alone-ness; so…

Have a good year. It’s yours to create… reclaim… occupy… take back.

C# or Yule B-flat

2011-12-22T12:01:00.000-08:00

Thousands of records and CDs purporting to celebrate Christmas have been issued over the 60 to 70 effective years of record albums. Seen from the vantage point of 2011, it’s evident that a certain miniscule number of them have attained the status of classics, still admired and eagerly listened to each holiday season… while the other 99.9 per cent (well, really a much smaller number from that percentage) have their few adherents yet for the most part merely appear, sell for a season or three, and then recede into the dim history of yule logs and mistletoe and forgotten Xmas records. Classical to “contemporary,” calypso to country, and with all the genre stops in between, I find Christmas music releases generally desperate in their claims of originality and rather depressing to contemplate,

much less listen to.

So I don’t. I resolutely play only non-seasonal stuff, ignoring the all-out radio stations and relinquishing the turntable/disc player controls only at two junctures, ones that even I will concede are way more important than my grumpy Grinchness; i.e., the hours devoted to tree decorating and then, at last, Christmas morning.

Then I too succumb… to Bing singing “White Christmas” or “Adeste Fidelis,” Nat Cole warming up “The Christmas Song” or those restive “Merry Gentlemen,” and a few modernist, rockin’ rites and rewrites courtesy of Phil Spector and the Beach Boys (differing Walls of Sound), Springsteen, Elvis and Charles Brown (dueling “Merry Christmas, Baby”s). Nor do I neglect a spin or two of the sainted Louis A. savoring “The Night Before…” while also asking, "'Zat You,

Santa Claus?” Follow that maybe with Run D.M.C. dis-cussin’ “Christmas in Hollis,” and then Steve Earle condemning the in-different poltroons politricking “Christmas in Washington”—his song sadly more pertinent with each passing year.

For a kinder and gentler definition of greed, there’s always “Santa Baby,” whether poseured by the Material Girl or purred by the immaterial Ms. Kitt. To clear the aural palate, I usually make room as well for a few skirtin’-the-edge-of-Bluegrass tunes by invincible Vince Gill, gritty Patty Loveless, and the ineffable Emmylou. (I picked up the expanded version of her pluperfect Light of the Stable album just the other day, in fact.)

And so it goes, my momentary madness soon admitting stocking stuffers by Sinatra, Ella (jinglin’ her bells) and, gritting my teeth a bit, Vince Guaraldi—but with that particular saccharin-high soon eased by John Fahey, or maybe Joan Baez. (You need a right vocalist to scale the heights of “O Holy Night.”) But contemplating guitarist Fahey’s flowing X-mastery reminds me of another matter…

Christmas at its best is a vocal celebration: hymns sung in some church and heartfelt caroling elsewhere, good wishes and good company in excelsis, excited kids and their grown-ups enjoying it all… Joy to the world, in effect and in fact. It’s practically sacrilege for a Jazz fan to admit, but I don’t find many gladsome tidings in instrumental versions of Xmas songs. Only rarely do clever arrangements and busy improvisation rise above vaguely creative Muzak to sound truly inspired. I probably own two dozen such Xmas CDs,

anthologies and single artist albums alike offering Jazz or Blues only, and I trot them out every year. Plenty of fine performances there, but no one really wants to hear them, not even me.

Still, I usually manage to slip in a tune or two from Jazz compilations issued years ago on Columbia and Blue Note, and older stuff brought back by Stash, but ultimately they just don’t beat Ray Charles singing anything from “Jingle Bells” to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” or, for that matter, the early Xmas album by Harry Belafonte, who “saw three ships come sailing in/On Christmas Day in the morning.”

No need to belabor this more. I know I’m being totally subjective, and that anyone reading this has his or her own favorites that I failed to recognize. Fine; let’s have

some feedback. Your nominations for best/favorite/classic/neglected Xmas albums are welcome and will be treated with respect. (Hanukah submissions too!) Please convince me how I’ve sold Jazzy Xmas short.

Hoping to hear back, I leave you with sincere wishes for a Very Merry... and one final thought. It’s common to sing overly familiar songs without thinking about their lyrics, which occasionally may be deserving of closer attention. By withholding mention of the Christ Child, this lyricist created what might well be a mysterious, beautifully poetic, secular experience happening at any time--or, indeed, out of time:

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie;
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

House of Mingus, Music of Mell

2011-12-15T17:30:00.000-08:00

Just back from Arizona, the Phoenix/Scottsdale area: a one-week getaway from clouds and rain to Southwest sunshine, which is what we had for the most part. Nice digs, good food, visits to several key sites but especially happy for the browse-time at two of the nation’s prime bookstores, used and antiquarian haven The Book Gallery, and then The Poisoned Pen for mysteries new and old.

We returned to clouds and drizzle and too-many-hundred emails, but discovered therein some information pertinent to two recent posts:

1) Document Records, once based in Austria and run then by a fanatic completest Blues expert named Johnny Parham (something like that, anyway), now from its current British base, has issued a digital remastering of Son House’s 1941 and ’42 recordings for the Library of Congress--which have a critical reputation somewhat greater than I allowed them in the House post. But that’s what makes for horseraces (Son’s fleeter version of Charlie Patton’s

“Black Pony Blues,” for example).

Check out some old-school House-wrecking for yourself at www.documentrecords.co.uk . You’ll find Patton and Hurt, Skip James and several Johnsons, and a host of other Blues greats there too.

2) The “Mingus on Mingus” fundraising, to complete financing for the so-named documentary film that one of the great bassist’s sons is directing, continues at an accelerated pace now, with only a week to go in the allotted window of time; read about the project at http://www.orangethenblue.com .

Meanwhile, it seems that some controversy has arisen, due to a conspicuous absence of support (money and otherwise) from the actual Mingus Estate led

by strong-willed later wife, and then widow, Sue Mingus. Filmmaker Kevin defends himself and his approach to father Charles’ complex history at http://orangethenblue.com/open-letter ; and he claims to have the support of other Mingus children as well as his father’s musician friends.

Let’s hope family bickering doesn’t derail this long-awaited documentary.

* * * * * *
The key event of our Scottsdale stay concerned Music too, but in a bigger and overwhelming way... to whit: some hours spent wandering the opened-not-long-ago, not-yet-complete Musical Instrument Museum (MIM), housed in a sleek Desert Modern building complex, with many of its permanent mini-exhibits still being assembled. The MIM collection comprises thousands of

representative instruments arrayed in three hundred informative displays (so far) from over 200 countries--from all corners of the world in other words: santur, sarod and ‘ud; mbira, berimbau and Hardanger fiddle; talking drums, temple bells and didjeridoo; conch shell, shakere and shakuhachi flute; banjo, bandoneon and 15-foot-tall contrabass; the whole alphabet of instruments from Alpenhorn to French horn, Celtic bagpipes to Jewish klezmer, Chinese pipa to Dopyera National resonator, Hawaiian ukulele to Hungarian zither.

A publicity slogan claims it to be “The most extraordinary museum you’ll ever hear,” and who could come away doubting that claim? Seattle’s famed Experience Music Project in Frank Geary’s astonishing melted-guitar construct might win for the Rock

genre, but only because MIM is busy educating and tracking down audio/video samples and creating interactive displays for … oh, maybe, Brazilian capoeira and Balinese gamelan, Jamaica’s Maroon calaloo and Egypt’s Oum Kalthoum (still the queen of pan-Arabic vocalists) alongside major exhibits of Steinway piano-building, Martin guitar-making, and Fender-amping-it-up over the years.

MIM’s got it covered from Cuba to Quebec, Paraguay to Pakistan, Burkina Faso to Burma, Tonga to Tibet to Timbuktu. Whether hot Chilean or chilled Lapp, found along the Silk Road or somewhere in the Seven Seas, the museum embraces Old World, Third World, Brave New World, and Out of This World... Music.

So I offer another slogan, gratis: “I joined the MIM to hear the World… and did.” I also look forward to the next visit.

* * * * * *
There’s more to Arizona than highways and Hillerman, cowboys and canyons, First Americans and Mexican migrants, turquoise, Tucson, Tombstone, and trouble. The illustrations I’ve chosen reproduce a few of the hundreds of gorgeous paintings by contemporary Southwest artist Ed Mell; amazing how his Desert Deco subjects--earth-and-skyscapes, distant and vast; prickly blooms in giant close-up--can evoke such a wealth of experiences: elation, beauty, simplicity, anger, relief, implacability, serenity, silence.

Son Up

2011-12-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

Over the course of four decades the wider world in a sense met a different Son House each time the Delta Bluesman’s distinctive performances were captured on disc. House was first heard-from in several hair-raising, wailing-and-flailing, brute-force 78s he recorded up in Wisconsin for Paramount Records one fine day in May 1930--fiery two-parters
“Preachin’ the Blues,” “Dry Spell Blues,” and “My Black Mama,” a couple others maybe issued, maybe not, but never found--all of them instant classics, both plaintive and powerful. (Paramount did call him back for more recording, but Son chose to continue driving tractor instead.)

When Eddie James House Jr. (called “Son”) resurfaced in 1941-42 down in Mississippi as one among many rural musicians being “cut” onto the glass “masters” produced by Alan Lomax during the series of field recordings he conducted for the Library of Congress, this elusive genius of the Blues had toned down his

performances considerably, trading intensity for subtlety and a more contemplative approach. Many of the tunes were also performed by a stringband group comprised of Son, Willie Brown, and one or two others--pleasant enough but not really compelling. And that was it for another quarter century.

Then a loosely connected group of white Blues musicians, ethnomusicologists, and college dropouts (John Fahey, Dick Waterman, Al Wilson, Nick Perls, David Evans, others) in the early-to-mid Sixties became determined to find as many Blues elders as might still be alive; and whoa back, buck, not too long thereafter, Bukka White, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and, yes, Son House were limbering up their arthritic fingers and regaling younger, mostly white

audiences with terrific songs and stories. Son’s trail had stretched from Mississippi to upstate New York, where he’d moved in 1943; he had quit the music game, worked as a Pullman porter, regained religion and so, enjoying his retirement, was reluctant to pick up the guitar again.

But House relented, and soon was appearing at Newport Festivals and on stages from Washington, D.C., to WA's Seattle. And with Son among the several rediscovered Bluesmen who one by one came West on tour, that’s where I saw him in March of 1968, mesmerized by his singing and playing, his shy attempts

at humor and serious admonitions on life and the end of it. I was a true fan of the Blues, in the midst of researching and writing a screenplay on the story of Robert Johnson, and here right before me--me and maybe four dozen others in this small community hall--was one of Johnson’s own mentors and heroes. I'd still rate that concert and Son‘s presence as one of the greatest experiences of my life.

If you think that’s hyperbole, I invite you to listen--available to you and me now, suddenly, just 43 years after the fact--to the recently issued 2CD set on Arcola Records,

Son House in Seattle 1968. (Available through Amazon even.)

A few years into his comeback and still just in his middle 60s, Son was at or near his late-creative peak: playing his slidin’-Delta, National steel guitar with controlled ringing abandon; shout-singing several House specialties (“Death Letter Blues,” “Empire State Express,” “I Want to Live So God Can Use Me,” plus those named earlier); telling stories tall and short and laughing merrily (“Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face”); philosophizing and gently sermonizing—another side of preachin’ the Blues, you might say.

Where Bukka White, say, was big and bluff and jovial, and Skip James (admittedly battling cancer) seemed edgy and withdrawn, maybe suspicious of white attention,

House just calmly went with the flow, scorching the stage with his guitar and (sometimes) still powerful vocals, then speaking so softly and gently as to seem a spiritual guide set down in our midst. (Listen to him talk about the difference between burn-out “Fox Fire Love” and real “Natural Love.”) As years piled up, Son drank more and performed less surely, and his thoughts and words sometimes came mumbled and jumbled. He was way more cool and confident in 1968.

So put on CD 1 to hear his splendid concert and conversation, then switch to CD 2 for a good interview recorded during the Seattle stay by Bob West (in photo with Son), cleverly interspersed with representative 78s by other important Delta Bluesmen from Son’s circle (Charlie Patton, Willie Brown, Robert Johnson) plus both halves of Son’s own signature

piece “My Black Mama.” The two CDs give you a good taste of what was then living history, and the lengthy and truly excellent liner notes essay by Bob Groom, Brit expert on the Blues, is better than frosting.

Considering how close I was sitting to the mic Son was singing into that day, my clapping and cheering must be mixed in there somewhere… But I’m haunted by another matter. My family lived in upstate New York from 1946 until 1951, and we had close kin residing near Chicago, so we traveled to visit them a few times via the New York Central railroad, riding the real Empire State Express. House was a porter on that train during those same years, and I remember well one porter who seemed to love

kids; he entertained my little sister and me with stories like the tale of Hendryk Hudson bowling at nine pins (creating thunder), gave us crayons and pictures to color, and just generally looked after us… Could that kind black gentleman have been Son House?

Memory may be an unreliable witness but, impossible or no, Son’s is the face I remember—the smallish, slightly square-headed guy with a neat mustache that I see in dreams still.

Thoreauly Bearable

2011-11-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

If that punning headline bearly escapes being a self-defeating prophecy, I’m pretty sure some readers will consider it, not oxymoronic, but beary moronic indeed.

Undaunted, still I come, not to beary, but to praise author-illustrator D.B. Johnson who has created five incombearable works of wonder, a real handful, literally and figuratively, of picture books designed to please young readers, that are also wowing parents, librarians, kids’ book critics, and other adult readers—a nearly unbearalleled feat!

Who knew that Henry David Thoreau could be so much fun--aside from Johnson, that is. Intelligent and cranky? Yes. Confident to the point of arrogance? Sure. Full of Yankee ingenuity, yet uncannily attuned to the natural world? Goes without saying.

But a big, no-nonsense brown bear not so much roly-poly as brusque and solid, and still chockablock with dry wit, and folk wisdom, and expansive imagination? (Coulda fooled Emerson, I bet.) As the central conceit

for a series of children’s books, Thoreau the Bear works well, and Johnson has a great knack for ferretting out a few sentences or a single paragraph from Walden that he can expand visually, to present some aspect of the man’s social conscience or scientific method or Nature aesthetic—while also portraying Henry’s quiet, usually solitary discovery of beauty or connectivity or wonder.

Like many college students, there was a time when I was fascinated by Walden and its author, imagining that his hard-headed innocence—his native curiosity and cussed stubbornness--spoke to me directly. In fact, one year I worked as a gate guard, manning a lonely outpost on the University of Washington campus—specifically, the gatehouse and (then) dead-end

road leading to parking areas down behind the University Hospital and Health Sciences complex. Undisturbed for half-hours at a time, not only could I get classwork done, but I also scribbled a goofy journal of urban(e) observations--stealthily taking notes on the behavior of bearded doctors and chatty nurses, harried students and unhurried faculty, burly truck drivers and cadaverous cancer patients, and composing pithy philosophical dicta and witty remarks that such sightings inspired. Oh yes, I was convinced I was shaping a modern, city-wise Walden for bright, later 20th century minds… but of course after a few weeks my big plan faltered and fizzled and stopped.

(Right, I lost interest.)

Lethargy and self-doubt may have overwhelmed me, but clearly D.B. Johnson is made of sterner stuff. His books’ simple titles pretty much tell the story: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg; Henry Builds a Cabin; Henry Climbs a Mountain; Henry Works; and Henry’s Night.

Ah, but what visual magic animates those words, appearing on every page of the telling! The medium Johnson works in blends radiant color

pencils and richly colored paint; and the full-page illustrations offer a fractured perspective--sometimes the false geometry of all-sides-at-once Cubism, sometimes the irregular shards of a faulty kaleidoscope. But these uncommonly intriguing elements plus the simplified Walden text together make one smile happily as each story proceeds.

Thoreau for young kids (and wise adults)? Hey, works for me… and likely would for you too. Consider the plots of my two favorites:

Henry Builds a Cabin has the frugal bear buying lumber from a torn-down shed, assembling tools and plans, and then as he does the piecemeal construction having to explain to neighbors “Emerson,” “Alcott,” and others how his “too small” cabin grows considerably more spacious when the bean patch serves as his dining room, a sun-and-shade nook next to his cabin

becomes the library, stone steps leading down to the creek magically ‘morph into a ballroom for dancing, and the entire cabin is his umbrella when it rains. (And rain in Johnson’s rural New England landscapes is a particular visual wonder!)

Book 3, Henry Climbs a Mountain, gradually becomes a game of “Can You Top This?” as the principled bear—wearing only one boot and having refused to pay the taxman--is escorted to the local

hoosegow. (If the same famous incident, there is no visit by Emerson depicted, when he supposedly asked, “Henry, why are you in there?” and was answered, “Emerson, why are you out there?”)

Using crayons from his pocket, Henry first sketches his missing boot and then covers the walls and ceiling with drawings that carry him right out of the cell, over rocks and streams, and straight up a neighboring mountain where he views… a hawk gliding overhead, far-off terrain below, and a stranger walking toward him--who turns out to be an

escaped slave “riding” the Underground Railroad, following the “Drinking Gourd” and Northern Star on up to Canada. He is (of course) bear foot and still has a slave shackle around one ankle.

The two bears enjoy their world for a while, then Henry gives the escapee his boots and stumbles hurriedly back down the mountain, “arriving” in his cell just in time for breakfast and the news that someone has paid his taxes. He’s free once more; how does that feel? “Like being on top of a very tall mountain.” And so Henry departs—to buy a new pair of shoes!

The passage in Walden reads thus: “One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house.”

Using those words plus another quote, along with climbing experiences Thoreau wrote about, and a smidgin of magic realism, author-illustrator Johnson fashioned a

tale to remind us of that first Henry’s other important work, “Civil Disobedience,” the speech that gradually became a whole non-violent resistance doctrine, used so effectively by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and other proponents of peace and freedom around the world. The list now also includes this year’s citizen actions in the streets of Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, Athens, and… New York, Chicago, Oakland, Madison, Montreal, and more.

As the first Henry almost wrote,"The most of men lead lives of quiet occupation"--except for the millions who are underemployed and trying to live through the world recession and the sham of modern global capitalism. And all those folks must occupy themselves in other ways and other places, to reclaim their dignity and their rights… including the right to be there, anywhere, and their right to be here, period.

I doff my high-hat to both Henrys, with thanks, and to those who have bravely and angrily and desperately taken to the streets, I say:

Happy Trespass. Happy Transgression. Happy Thanksgiving.

Mingus Misprized, Duke Reprised

2011-11-12T12:15:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about Duke Ellington’s four-year loose affiliation with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise Records. Sinatra signed him on as an artist, presumably with a contract for X number of albums; then he did something more radical and innovative (or maybe risky): he also gave Duke a title and sometime job as A&R man for the label’s Jazz interests.

I should have bought the Mosaic set back a decade ago that revisited Ellington’s own albums for Reprise, not only because I quite like a few of them (especially his treatment of tunes from Disney’s Mary Poppins, plus the Afro Bossa and Symphonic Ellington LPs),

but also because I’d love to read and learn from Mosaic’s special essay/discography booklet—a highlight of every set; a treat and an education no matter who or what the subject.

For example, Duke was soon responsible for producing the debut albums, cut in Paris the same day in 1963, of pianist Dollar Brand (better known as Abdullah Ibrahim) and stylized beginner vocalist Bea Benjamin (soon to become Ibrahim’s wife, and add “Sathima” to her name). The Brand album merited some critical attention and praise, but Benjamin’s equally intriguing

session was shelved by Sinatra and only released in the Nineties. (More about Bea’s forgotten album below.)

Ignoring A&R Duke’s other hits and misses (from Bud Powell to Alice Babs), I have sometimes wondered… What if Charles Mingus had been without a contract at the time (rather than recording piecemeal for Atlantic and RCA and Impulse)? The bassist/bandleader greatly admired Ellington--openly competed with him too--and his big band compositions paid homage to Duke’s elastic but painstakingly crafted approach, building his compositions around the particular talents of each

Ellingtonian. It’s a major loss for Jazz that the two great leaders only ever got to record as “equals” on the prickly but remarkable, and occasionally brilliant, Money Jungle trio date with Max Roach. (Mingus threatened to quit midway through the session but Duke calmed him down--a bit ironic considering that Mingus was the only band member that Duke ever fired outright.)

But fiery Charles was definitely one who broke the mold, a volatile mix of sensitivity, creativity, and orneriness, of gospel soul, sophisticated vision, and impolitic pugnacity. Only the contra-bass was massive enough to match big, bullish, master musician Mingus; and that “contra-“ prefix suited him too since he measured himself against… well… not to put too fine a point on it, the world: white racists,

Ellington, record labels, other bassists, players he hired who didn’t “burn” with the same “orange, then blue” flame (those three words the title of one of his best-known compositions). Like Walt Whitman, Mingus embraced multitudes.

I assume that all these elements will—like the artist himself—loom large in the new documentary titled Mingus on Mingus, directed by his grandson Kevin Ellington Mingus (interesting name) and currently in the midst of filming. Except, to be strictly correct, the crew is on hold at the moment because, from November 7 to December 18, the core backers and creators are seeking to raise an additional $45,000. (You can read all about the project at www.orangethenblue.com, and also watch a brief trailer here. Then give whatever financial support you can muster!)

At any rate, any later creative interaction between Duke and Mingus was away from public view, if such occurred. In fact Ellington’s A&R work soon fizzled; he didn’t

submit (m)any more productions other than his own orchestra’s—and some of those, recorded between ‘63 and ’65, actually turned up on the Atlantic label. Was Duke miffed at the lukewarm reception several of his projects received? Did Sinatra have second thoughts, wanting material more pop/commercial in content? Or did the souring relations result from new parent company Warner Bros. getting involved?

Apparently given short shrift were the second half of some “Duke-revives-the-Big-Bands” sessions, and a fiddlers-three project recorded around the time of the (pending) Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin-Brand-Ibrahim’s day in the

studio--a Jazz violinists' summit of Ray Nance, Stephane Grappelli, and Svend Asmussen plus Duke and a couple of sidemen.

Asmussen, in fact, was a major addition to Bea Benjamin’s recording session, with all 12 songs cut, as the album title says, in the course of A Morning in Paris. Featured on the dozen were 1) some subtly Africa-tinged drum-work by Makaya Ntshoko; 2) a regal trio of pianists (Duke, Ibrahim, and Billy Strayhorn) taking turns at the keyboard; 3) then-still-Ms. Benjamin’s kittenish and slightly husky voice; and 4) the unplanned, unexpected addition of Svend—but plucking his violin’s strings singly or percussively rather than bowing them.

Curious and often compelling was the sound of those four features blended together—excellent takes on “Darn That Dream,” “I Should Care,” “Lover Man,” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” But there are some irritants too. For too many tracks—and this is hard to fathom--the three pianists are so subdued as to be basically phoning it in over a failing long-distance line. Instead, Asmussen’s pizzicato commentaries are allowed to take the lead. At first I thought his staggered plucks to be oddly akin to the “speaking voice” solos of reedsman Eric Dolphy (Mingus’s revered cohort around the same time), or even some sort of weak and thin version of a bass player’s freeform accompaniment. Then I came to my senses and realized it was all just a novelty, a

misguided momentary lapse by the ever-curious, willing-to-risk-it Duke.

If Ellington had intended a stripped-down, maybe simple bass-and-guitar backing, he surely could have made that happen. From Wellman Braud and Jimmy Blanton to Aaron Bell and Ray Brown, Duke usually relied on top bassists only, and if he’d had Jimmy Woode or John Lamb (or Mingus!), say, to provide the backing for Benjamin, rather than inadequate Johnny Gertze (yes, there was a bass just barely present) or bizarre Svendisms, her debut album might have appeared

on Reprise in ’63 or ’64 rather than vanishing into the vaults full of no-hopes and not-likelies.

Even though Bea went on to a vocal career still continuing in South Africa today, it was only in 1997 that A Morning in Paris ever “dawned,” when the original recording engineer was found to have kept his own copy of the tapes for 35 years! By then, her album seemed a quirky curiosity instead of a lost masterpiece.

Maybe if Ellington had put a little more thought and effort into prepping the fledgling singer and the pick-up session men, rather than relying on the moment’s happenstance (which he could do reliably with his Ellingtonians, and did for 45 years

or so), the Benjamin story might have taken a different course, and Duke might have had a more lasting A&R career, earning a solid reputation as producer of other major Jazz artists—which might also have helped Reprise’s anemic bottom line.

Ellington might even have persuaded Sinatra to give misprized Charles Mingus a chance.

Ill Wind

2011-11-01T19:04:00.000-07:00

Autumn has hit the U.S. with a vengeance: early snows, more flooding, storms hurling the fall-color leaves away to some other part of the world… and El Nino, or La Nina, or the Pinta and Santa Maria, or all four, threatening to wash America back to Vespucci and Isabella.

Nor are we alone in facing nature’s wrath. Whether you place your bet on Global Warming or climate change or warped statistics or Mayan prophecy, the arriving winter of 2011-2012 looks to be a doozy…

It’s 25 years now since Sandra and I and various children spent a chilly fall and icy winter skirting

the Mediterranean from Provence to Portugal’s Algarve in search of warmth. The “coldest European winter in decades” was foretold, even heralded, that year by a particularly fierce mistral wind sweeping down and across Provence.

(Perfectly apt: that raw and raucous wind from hell is also the surname of the great Nobel-prizewinning poet Frederic Mistral, champion of the Provencal language. My slight whisper of air to be read below would be quickly lost in the storm gales and summer zephyrs he unleashed.)

I seem to remember, from Lawrence Durrell’s South-of-France quintet of novels (less known and less important than his dazzling, and bedazzled, Alexandria Quartet), that a mistral sometimes blows hot air rather than cold.

But not in early November, 1986…

Le Mistral

Ice-hard and unyielding,

the autumn whirlwind bruises,
pummels crisp clouds askew,
and shreds the huddling trees
of their sharp, shriveled leaves.

Rapacious, falcon-fierce,
le mistral grips Provence;
chill talons rake the Rhone
from Arles back to Avignon,
beating the soul to its knees

with all fall’s cold at once.
Now the late grapes vein blue

like Papist folk new-shriven,
and the last vineyards lose
their golden cypress shielding.

Now the blood-earth grieves
a troubadour’s song of years,
dry hectares crying woe
for the region’s tans and creams,
burnt reds, bright blues, driven

in hiding, gone to cover
in halls of bauxite bone:
a blanched rotogravure
the dull, vainglorious end

of summer's sun-drenched dreams.

Le soleil’s ancient foe,
the bandit mistral wind
demands his droit du seigneur,
pillaging Aix to Vaucluse,
till stripped to dust and stone,

Provence arrests the reiver.

Flash Gordon and Rocket Fresh Rainier

2011-10-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

Rainier Beer celebrated its hundred-year anniversary in 1976... well, sort of "a hundred"; there was some discontinuity ignored, some no-beer years due to Prohibition and such.

My boss coined the word “Beercentennial” to mark the occasion verbally--America’s Bicentennial was still, er, Fresh in the minds of folks--and we dreamed up television ads that touched on the past, present, and (possible) future of the popular beer. (I was writer/producer for the firm that provided all creative work for the brewery.)

Rainier had a reputation for presenting strange and surprising, tongue-in-cheek and amusing, commercials back then--still a rarity back in those stolid Seventies. But the requisite seriousness of such a major benchmark for Rainier actually constrained our much-vaunted creativity. Blowing the frothy heads off a tray of poured beers was about as wild as we got... except for the "future" spot, which evolved gradually from a single sci-fi parody to a 30-second extravaganza that borrowed

from the “hot” films 2001 and Star Wars, joined by the outmoded glory of newspaper-strip and movie-serial hero Flash Gordon.

Our commercial ended up inside the bizarre Star Wars bar, where the camera discovers a big reunion in progress for the Flash Gordon characters—Dr. Zarkov, the lovely Dale, Ming the Merciless, and so on, plus (renamed for ad purposes) “Fresh” himself. But this reunion is occurring many years later, with the characters showing their post-retirement age.

Most of the parts were taken by local actors, but we actually hired the original movie Flash, Buster Crabbe (famous as a handsome, virile Tarzan too), still showing serious star power at age 72 (as I recall). Crabbe was serendipitously the main guest that year at a nicely timed Seattle science fiction convention, and we were happy to use his accessibility to our advantage.

In those days we also created several beer posters each year, usually related to the TV spots that were appearing. But the brewery balked at a "Fresh Gordon" poster; we couldn’t convince them of the sudden craze for science fiction that was sweeping the country. But I was so certain of its viability that I got permission from Rainier to print and market the poster myself.

So a comics shop owner and I did just that, printed 2000 or so, and over the next year-and-some sold all of them, to sci-fi fanatics and Rainier collectors and specialty poster shops. Now, skip ahead 35 years. Searching through stuff recently, before wife Sandra and I left on vacation, I found the copy of “our” poster that I’d kept as a sample/souvenir.

I decided to write a blog post around it, and that’s what you’ve been reading. (Used to caption the poster, that tiny print you can’t make out in the lower right-hand corner was meant to sound like pulp magazine copy.)

Retro rockets firing, Fresh Gordon jockeyed his MFR-80 spaceship down onto the arid, dusty surface of planet Bungo.

Then, aided by his thirsty companions of so many years, Fresh broke through the belligerent throng of alien vizki and d’jin, forging a path straight to the barren
world’s lone outpost of galactic civilization, the B’aarli Maltina. There the beerless company at last espied the liquid treasure for which they had quested so long--Mountain Fresh Rainier.

Even Bing the Brewless was overcome. “The Beer That Conquered the Galaxy” soon quenched five more parched throats.

Classy, huh? Oh yeah, I really thought I was hot stuff back in the day…

Roots, Right Hooks, and Hits

2011-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

Remember the Who’s hardnose heyday and Roger Daltry raging, “Hope I die before I get old”? Never imagined I’d ever have to admit such a sea-change, but the older I get, the farther I drift from Rock and the nearer I draw to Folk (or, in current terminology, Roots/Americana). Only the Guthrie/Dylan/Springsteen-styled Populist mergers keep me hangin' on and around the Rock scene at all. (Happy to admit I haven’t looked at a Rolling Stone issue in years!)

So here are a half-dozen Folk/Roots (&Beyond) CD releases, both new and older,

that I’ve heard and enjoyed in recent weeks (and you can play spot-the-connections if you choose):

Purpose + Grace (Topic). Pride of place goes to our guest from across the Pond, Martin Simpson. Back in Old Blighty after several years’ residency in the U.S., Simpson plays a Blues-infused, Anglo-AND-American Folk now, his guitar work smooth and Root-solid, often surprising, occasionally sensational. His own vocals keep improving too, but for this eclectic set, he brought in some big guns: June Tabor, Dick Gaughan, Richard Thompson.

And the tunes are terrific, ranging from antique (“The Sheffield Apprentice” and “Barbry Allen”) to Americana (great expanded versions of “In the Pines” and “Little Liza Jane”), from updated (“Bad Girl’s Lament” and “Jamie Foyers”) to current (“Brothers Under the Bridge” and “Strange Affair”). Still, the disc’s apex is reached--and the album’s title secured--when Martin and “Geordie” Gaughan team up for Depression-anthem-come-‘round-again “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.” Anthemic and--think English slang now--brilliant.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (Nonesuch). Ry Cooder’s new album

channels Woody Guthrie to offer Ry’s trenchant musical response to the New Depression and never-ending political chicanery--played as only slide-master Cooder can so casually emulate—with angry laments against Wall Street, the wars abroad, old folks cheated, families splintered, returning veterans neglected, a modern Jesse James (Tex-Mex corrida style), and other on-going Populist complaints. It’s a wry Cooder keeper, blending Blues, Old Time Country, Gospel, Folk Ballads, and other Roots-in-Americana;

and his National steel guitar might rightly sport a sticker updating the well-known phrase on Guthrie’s: “This machine crushes banksters and warmongering profiteers.”

Note of Hope (429 Records). Opening salvo in the big build-up to the 2012 Guthrie centennial. Unfortunately there’s less meat and more aimless motion in this collection of unknown Woody texts nesting in new musical settings. The whole first half of the CD just limps along, but then Kurt Elling’s boogie and Ani DiFranco’s mechanized “Voice”

auger some better; Pete Seegar and Studs Terkel (the one prodded awake and the other resurrected via tape) rouse ‘n’ roll the bindle on down the line; and Chris Whitley (high and lonesome some weeks before he died) and Jackson Browne, rumblin’ and rattlin’ for a fanciful 14-minute “You Know the Night” (Woody busily courting his second wife)… well, de Gents and DiFrank Lady do just manage to take ‘er on home after all.

Wonder Wheel (Jewish Music Group). The Klezmatics had Guthrie Estate approval to adapt some of his Coney Island-era writings to klezmer music…

not a totally off-kilter stretch since the folk-poet’s second wife Marjorie (mother of Arlo and Nora plus two) was Jewish. But the result, while sung splendidly and played with an ear attuned to stately (rather than spirited) dance, seems to me a waste of Woody. The klezmer arrangements just overwhelm the Okie from Okemah, rendering his posthumous contributions surprisingly unraucous. Klezmatics fans should sample “Mermaid’s Avenue”

(the only Woody lyrics offering his usual evocative sense of place), “Gonna Get through This World,” “From Here On In,” and “Wheel of Life” (Rabbi Woody, would you believe?), while the goyisch Guthrie gang must settle for his less earthy, more spiritual writings: “Holy Ground,” “Orange Blossom Ring,” and “Heaven.”

World Musette (Paris Jazz Corner). Klezmer clarinets, saxes, and fiddles show up sometimes in the wonderful French music called musette—bluesy and triste (sad)

but somehow lightly so--which more commonly features accordion and guitar (and violin bien sur). The ever-changing ensemble known as Les Primitifs du Futur took a broader approach for this disc, incorporating xylophone, Hawaiian steel guitar, trumpet, oud, and whatever else might be needed to create a many-nations, World Music version of musette. Present too for many of the tracks, adding banjo, mandolin, and some vocals (plus artwork for the elaborate CD booklet, itself worth the price of the disc), is U.S. expatriate Robert Crumb,

better known as cartoonist R. Crumb, professional artist and amateur musician--as opposed to amateur artist and professional musician W. Guthrie, but both men shaped by the Depression (one way or another) and each eventually emblematic of his time. All that aside, this album is strangely effective, a potpourri of varied sounds and styles, China to America, that still links back to the Parisian clubs and Buenos Aires dives that musette evokes.

There’s More Pretty Girls Than One (Arhoolie). Both Crumb and fiddler Ian McCamy appeared on World Musette; now, a decade later, comes McCamy's

Melody Sheiks, a cheery quartet of expats residing in Provence and gleefully making Old Timey music together—tight and in tune, but no threat to the master pickers on either side of the Atlantic. And so what? With this repertoire, all the Sheiks need is a suit and a smile:
“Drunken Hiccups” and “Goodbye Booze,” “Ragtime Annie” and “Old Molly Hare,” both the “Dill Pickle” and “Pig Ankle” rags, the “Quebec Quickstep” and “Saint Jobe’s Waltz,”

“Take Me Back to Georgia” and “Home Sweet Home.” Hot times in the Old Country, thanks to Crumb’s great collection of Twenties 78s, and a hell of a ways from the "New Country" we know and leave, gladly, behind! So rise up, Billy, and walk along, John, and sail away, ladies, sail away...

Catch ya on the other side.

Re:Freshin' (and Rainier Beer)

2011-10-05T17:18:00.001-07:00

After limping through the Weill marathon, my clumsy stumblings in pursuit of his Jazz connections exacerbated by a recalcitrant new computer that keeps refusing to follow orders, well, I’m just bone tired. I feel like the Incredible Shrinking Man’s cousin. Add-in real height loss resulting from Parkinson’s as well as collapsing vertebrae… and it’s no wonder I’ve been having this irritating Mad Men/Pan Am Fifties dream...

My wife and I are out for a walk, and we bump into somebody she knows from business.

“Hey, Jim,” she says to him, “I want you to meet the ‘little man.’

Don’t know what I’d do without him… gets me out the door in the morning and keeps me going. Keeps me on my toes too.”

Not really. These days Sandie can wear flats and still get above my paltry 5’8”. I’ve lost nearly four inches in height, which has all slid down to my waistline. That’s one definition of an “Adult,” of course… someone who’s stopped growing at both ends and started growing in the middle. (I qualify.)

At any rate, no more big essays for a while (a Weill?). In fact, we’ll be gone east to Pennsylvania, New York, and Montreal for part of October, so blogging will be minimal for a… no, won’t say it… for some weeks.

These bleary thoughts have reminded me that back when I wrote and produced Rainier Beer ads (usually working off the buzzword phrase “Mountain Fresh,” clinging to the real tall mountain’s coat-tails), somebody among us on the creative team came up with a two-word bumper snicker that I liked well enough to stick a sample on my own car:

“GONE FRESHIN’.”

This time it’s RE-freshin’ I need, because… as we might have said in some other Rainier ad (but didn’t), with the unused two-word text positioned below photo of an empty sixpack-bottles carton…

Right now I’m “FRESH OUT.”

* * * * *

Note: One more post coming in a few days, so there’ll be something to think about while we're gone.

4B: "Svengali" a Weill Later

2011-09-26T17:26:00.000-07:00

Much more Kurt Weill still lay ahead as Lotte Lenya’s publicizing efforts (see part 4A below this closing section) made things happen--long-play records, more performances by more curious musicians, scholars mulling things over. Nonet trombonist J.J. Johnson and pianist Andre Previn teamed up for a Weill record, and then Gil Evans proceeded to create two multi-varied albums of great genius, perhaps the best of his long career (and no Miles for miles!), titled Out of the Cool and The Individualism of Gil Evans.

Each LP featured, and to some extent was keyed on, a single piece by Weill. Retrieved from his German theatre works were “Bilbao Song”—in Gil’s hands a mix of dissonant proclamation, odd percussion, and plucked bass and guitar, somehow all of a piece with the Cool album’s other tunes—and,

more prominently, “The Barbara Song,” a stunning, perfect arrangement that hovers and shimmers and haunts, on first listen or fiftieth, a wealth of melody and modulations, mastery and mystery alike.

Evans’ assistant for several years in the Eighties was Maria Schneider, who learned much from Gil and applies those lessons herself as a multi-Grammy award-winning Jazz orchestra leader. Invited by Jazz.com to pick and analyze a dozen favorite Evans tracks from his long career, well, Ms. Schneider chose Weill’s “My Ship” and “The Barbara Song” as two of the twelve. Regarding the latter she wrote, in part:

“I thought of it as a ‘Gil piece,’ not an arrangement of something. One day it occurred to me to check out Kurt Weill’s original version. And there it was, the whole long and developed melodic contour that I was familiar with. Gil had simply laid it out, but he did it in such a way that made it feel improvised and continually evolving…. Through the melody, Gil heard profound depth, and spun his own universe out of it…. Gil’s lines are just Weill’s original melody, but wrung out at a slow, searing tempo.”

Musician, conductor, and scholar Ryan Truesdell has located and studied and prepared for recording a number of unknown Evans arrangements, with an album to be released next year. He too has declared “The Barbara Song” to be one of Gil’s best and most important creations.

In fact, Gil’s quiet influence—his colors and dissonant voicings, his composer shadows (Debussy, Stravinsky, de Falla… and Weill?), his unlikely but perfect orchestrations and “notes between notes”—eventually pervaded or at least provoked the thinking of arrangers and musicians alike, whoever worked with him or studied his works, for the next 40 years: among arrangers, Bob Brookmeyer and Hal Mooney, Pete Rugulo and Teddy Charles, across the decades to Bob Belden and Gil Goldstein, Maria Schneider and Laurent Cugny; and among the scores of players, John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan and Miles… Steve Lacy, Cannonball Adderley and Johnny Coles… Eric Dolphy, Kenny Burrell and Elvin Jones…

Wayne Shorter, Herb Bushler and Tony Studd… Howard Johnson, Billy Harper and David Sanborn… Lew Soloff, Hiram Bullock and Arthur Blythe… Masabumi Kikuchi, Hannibal Marvin Peterson and Tom Malone… Pete Levin, George Adams and Airto... on and on and on.

Without Gil Evans and Kurt Weill would the Doors ever have swung wide open--first, Kurt’s “Alabama Song” and then Gil’s “Jambangle,” reworked a bit to become, with lyrics added, “Light My Fire”? And that era-defining hit probably led inexorably to Gil’s late projects with both Robbie Robertson and Sting—while edgy rockers like Lou Reed, Marianne Faithful, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits

built their careers in part on the jagged sound of Weill.

Without Evans, would composer Carla Bley’s twists and turns and quirky jibes so readily have found a place in Jazz? Without Kurt’s Berlin days, could bassman Charlie Haden’s peripatetic orchestra ever have become so political, so “Musically Liberated,” and so admired?

If Gil hadn’t taken off the arranger gloves and punched-up his freeform bands of the Seventies and Eighties, embracing electricity and synthesizers, would Miles Davis have gone so far (and farther out) into fusion and funk? He continued to consult Gil at every turn, and one can easily imagine the two of them holed up with some medicinal weed,

chortling merrily at the next step each planned to take. (In fact, if old guard Gil hadn’t grinned and accepted the mantle of avant garde “Svengali,” would fusion music ever have succeeded so?)

But we need to resume our walk on the Weill side. George Avakian became the manager and producer for a John Lewis-Gunther Schuller “Third Stream” venture called Orchestra U.S.A.; and one mid-Sixties project was an album titled Mack the Knife and Other Berlin Theatre Songs of Kurt Weill, by two Orchestra sextets that included ex-Nonet members Mike Zwerin and Lewis. Zwerin’s arrangements took a much simpler approach to Weill,

with a varying core of five musicians playing Kurt’s tunes fairly straight while the freed-up sixth man became the overlaid improvising soloist... basic stuff, really, very dependent on each soloist’s inspiration. But the results were astonishing, because the primary soloist on three of the seven tracks was Eric Dolphy going ballistic and berserk on his bass clarinet, especially on “Alabama Song,” registering his response to the Civil Rights violence there. (Had Dolphy not died soon after the first session no doubt he would have crushed the other four tunes too.)

Nearly three decades later, when Avakian wrote typically brilliant liner notes for the CD reissue of yet another Weill/Jazz album (John Bunch playing solo piano versions, mostly “up” and Fats Wallerish),

George was still marveling at Dolphy’s performances and he told this anecdote: Lenya had heard Dolphy play at a gallery opening in 1962 and had enjoyed his inventive style. In ’64 George gave her a copy of the Sextet album, warning that she might be shocked by the ferocity of Eric’s playing, particularly on “Alabama Song.” Avakian commented, “I am convinced that it will never be surpassed as the wildest bass clarinet solo of all time.”

Lenya listened and then responded with her own tale of Kurt hearing a Jazz version of one of his tunes and not recognizing it at first. When he did, he quoted a Threepenny lyric, “It’s possible my way—but this is possible too.”

Then she added, “Tell Eric I’m not sure what Kurt would have said about him, but I think it’s great and now I really understand why [he] wanted to play…” (that is, for the artist back in ’62).

Gil Evans was dead by the time Avakian wrote about woodwinds-and-sax genius Dolphy—who had contributed as well to the great Individualism album. In the mid-Eighties Gil evidently had begun to rethink the anything-goes, un-arranged bands he had “led” (just barely) for two erratic decades. Some bits of evidence:

Maria Schneider found him at the piano one day, practically tearing his white hair out; he desperately wanted to recreate his classic re-composing of Weill’s “My Ship,”

but couldn’t remember what he’d done or how—and he had thrown the arrangement away many years earlier.

At the time of his death in 1988, he was considering a proposed commission from producer Hal Willner, innovative driving force behind the excellent Weill tribute album Lost in the Stars (released in 1985) and the varied and amazing September Songs CD sequel that would shake up the Jazz/Pop world in 1997. Willner wanted Gil to do a new version of Mahagonny! (The mind boggles at what might have been… the whole opera given the old Evans musical magic? The Songspiel only? Or even just the right song or two…)

Maybe Gil had finally heard the rumblings among fans and Jazz critics,

who were tiring of too many live albums by spur-of-the-moment, hit-or-miss, "Monday at Sweet Basil" bands. Columnist Francis Davis ended one essay, for example, with this suggestion:

“Evans belongs back in the studio, where greater focus is a prerequisite, and where arrangers are in their element… He deserves an opportunity to pick the soloists for an entire album of Mingus or Ellington or Billy Strayhorn or Kurt Weill, for whom he has long shown a special affinity…”

But none of that occurred. Instead Gil cut a disc of duets with Steve Lacy and a pair of fine, old-style-Evans orchestral CDs with Laurent Cugny’s Big Band Lumiere. Then he died.

Weill’s fans around the world celebrated his centennial in 2000, and lots of new albums appeared, and then the world just resumed turning. These days the Weill Foundation works with scholars doing related research, and it keeps tabs on Kurt’s music, Berlin to Broadway and beyond.

Gil’s assistants and musicians and fans continue to ponder his musical choices and mysterious innovations. The piano trio known as Tethered Moon issued a terrific CD of Weill songs in 1995; all three musicians (Masabumi Kikuchi, Gary Peacock and Paul Motian) in some manner had played or recorded with Gil.

In 1997 Charlie Haden produced an interesting “duet” on “Speak Low,” his deep-as-a-well double bass thudding alone over pianist Fred Hersch and then segueing into… Kurt Weill himself singing the familiar lyrics!

And in late August, a few weeks ago, Ryan Truesdell and his hand-picked orchestra of New York musicians cut a dozen previously unrecorded and/or unknown Evans arrangements ranging from the Forties up to the Sixties. The resulting album will be issued in 2012, Gil’s own centennial year.

Among the tunes recorded was a recently discovered alternate arrangement of “The Barbara Song,” this unknown version

for a larger and differently configured orchestra than Gil used back in 1964.

The Kurt Weill conduit continues.

* * * * *
My thanks to all who actually read all five parts in this diffuse saga. I tried to make it vaguely amusing, even surprising in a few spots, with a changing perspective on the people and music. Maybe I got in over my head, but the float vest worked... and here we are, finally ready to move on.

Gil Evans: Here 4A Weill

2011-09-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

(Lengthy Part 4 is now divided for readability, with second half in a day or two.)

There was something in the air. Or maybe it was the water. But from the Twenties to the late Sixties there was this spectrum--invisible, imaginary, whatever--of oddball anarchist music (well, quirky anyway) being created and released on record and film. Aural symptoms might include sound effects, irregular rhythms, changing tempos, tuneless tunes, uncommon instruments, eccentric, possibly amateurish playing, an alien musical conception withal.

Each artist would exhibit only certain of these traits. At one end of the spectrum you’d find, chronologically, the barnyard sounds and seemingly uneducated playing of the Original Dixieland Jass Band; the wild and woolly, wacky-woo-woo, musical bits and pieces strung together with split-second timing by composer Carl Stallings for Warner Bros.’ “Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies” cartoons; and the bizarre combinations of music and dialogue and sound effects good-humoredly smushed together on the records of Spike Jones. (The near-musical, carefully timed, rapid-fire routines of comics like the Marx Brothers and Abbott & Costello fit in there somewhere too.)

The opposite end of the spectrum is much more musical, though still strange-sounding when first sprung on a casual, unsuspecting listener. I hope there’s no need to belabor the point (racially or otherwise), but I’m thinking of the choppy, hammering, stride-piano playing and eccentric, brilliant-corners compositions of Thelonious Monk; the slightly west-of-caterwauling, hues-of-blues originals issuing from Ornette Coleman’s plastic sax (love the “ugly beauty”; still not ready for Prime Time); John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” reflecting his unshakeable, inner-space determination to blow every possible note and combination of notes arrayed in the infinite field of any piece of music (and do so all at once!); and the antic hijinx--the combs, brooms, costumes, dreams and drums--the delirious music unleashed on a suspicious world by the world-is-our-playground-and-oyster, con-kniving knaves known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

One end “light”… one end “serious.” And most groups and Jazz bands somewhere along the line between. You can supply your own candidates and placement, or you can dismiss the whole fanciful thing as Hog-warts, but I ask that you just amble with me a ways further.

Edging toward the bizarre would be the Boyd Raeburn Orchestra mixing BeBop and Stravinsky, while the working groups and session bands organized by Gil Evans would be drawn more to the blues’n’boogie, Hard Bop portion of my diagram. And the odd balance of Jazz, opera, and Broadway pop would deposit Kurt Weill (his friend Gershwin not far off) right on the invisible midpoint, flanked by tubas and tangos!

Kurt died in 1950, with only his American show-tune hits of the Forties still having any currency. But two stubborn fans (maybe three) versed in his forgotten European works were having none of that. I wrote a bit last time about Lenya’s revived career and tireless publicizing of Kurt. Time now to introduce George Avakian: writer, producer, scholar, proselytizer, bon vivant, and great good friend of Jazz. The fact that he knew and loved Weill’s early masterworks was the cake under all that frosting.

Avakian and Lenya teamed up to create most of the famous Columbia Records LPs starring her and resurrecting Kurt’s songs and German theatrical works with and without Brecht—excellent if not quite perfectly definitive productions of Mahagonny, Threepenny, his German and American theater songs, Seven Deadly Sins… all but Happy End, which was a later addition after George had moved on from Columbia. (Avakian shows up time and again in this fable.)

Parallel to this were developments in the career of arranger/re-composer/conductor Gil Evans. Claude Thornhill’s bands of the early and later Forties, with beaucoup arrangements by Evans, occupy a special “Beautiful Music” spot on that spectrum chart. Gil fashioned a strange but lovely sound by blending high woodwinds, low brass, and Thornhill’s soft-as-snow-falling piano… which oddly worked on BeBop adaptations as well as ballads and semi-Classical numbers.

When the band was off the road, Evans stayed on in New York City, and his door’s-always-open bachelor pad became the philosophic bull-session center (circa 1948-1951) for a select group of musicians and fledgling arrangers: Evans, John Parisi, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, John Lewis, and several others including Gil’s new pal, Miles Davis. Fresh from his high-profile time with Charlie Parker, Miles soon became the frontman/leader, and Gil the central force behind the scenes, as the group gradually experimented with a stripped-down version of Thornhill, all the rich chords and strange harmonies vested in nine players only (including tuba and French horn)—just the sort of musical challenge Weill once thrived on.

So there they were, the Evans crew gradually rehearsing, road-testing audience response via a two-week gig at the Royal Roost, and slowly edging into the recording sessions that became known years later as “The Birth of the Cool”—and Kurt doing much the same: writing, orchestrating, rehearsing, moving on from Street Scene to shape new shows Love Life and Lost in the Stars. I’d love to believe that Gil and Kurt each had a chance to catch the other’s work; it’s just barely possible. Certainly Weill’s music became a source for Evans’ magpie curiosity and skillful re-composing a few years later, but Gil’s interest might have started in the Forties.

Here’s that chronology told simply:

Miles' (and Gil’s) Nonet recorded very slowly, with sessions in 1949-50. Among the changing roster of players, Konitz, Mulligan, Miles, and tuba whiz Bill Barber made all dates, joined variously (as available) by J.J. Johnson, Max Roach, John Lewis, Junior Collins, Al McKibbon, Gunther Schuller, and (in place of Johnson during the Roost gig) trombonist and writer Mike Zwerin.

Evans’ conception and maybe even his handiwork seem evident in several arrangements though he claimed only “Moon Dreams” (often cited as the perfect Nonet cut) and “Boplicity.” Some selections were released on 78s with minimal publicity and minimal response, but reissued c. 1954 and then 1957 on LPs with the “Cool” claim—light textures, subtle rhythms, disciplined arrangements; some of them including “Moon Dreams” aren’t too far from what Weill was composing and imaginatively orchestrating at (and on) all stages. (Tangos seemed one of Kurt’s special fortes. Intriguing then that Evans’ own best-loved original was “Las Vegas Tango.”)

Kurt died in 1950, the Nonet soon after. Players dispersed to become leaders elsewhere. Miles and Gil stayed in touch. Then in 1956 Columbia’s producer and a&r great George Avakian not only began issuing the Lenya-Weill albums, but also signed Miles to a major label contract. Gil came aboard to help with arrangements for the Davis Quintet’s ‘Round Midnight debut, which turned out so well that Avakian decided to put Gil and Miles together for an orchestral Jazz LP.

Which became the brilliant and famous album titled Miles Ahead, though not without a struggle: several three-hour recording sessions and countless hours of cut-and-splice tape editing by Avakian and overseer Gil. But the result… ah, the bountiful, beautiful result… “Springsville.” “New Rhumba.” “The Duke.” “The Maids of Cadiz.” “Blues for Pablo.” The title cut. And leading into that track, because the LP really is one big suite of linked, disparate tunes and themes, Kurt Weill’s song superb, fleet of foresail and fancy, “My Ship”… the track routinely discussed as one of Evans’ masterworks of melody and motion. (Yes, Kurt and Gil, together again for the first time, documented.)

And so onward, to Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain and more, as Davis and Evans went deep into the dark center of Catfish Row and the deepest song of flamenco--wailing Jazz soloist against richly textured orchestra, slipping closer to a kind of opera. And the reawakened Sephardic soul of Kurt lingered a Weill, smiling

Owed to Autumn

2011-09-11T13:57:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the gorgeous aerial shots of autumn foliage that bridge scenes in the new TV series Necessary Roughness, and by Doug Ramsey’s photos detailing the changing seasons as seen from his roving bicycle (posted at his Rifftides blog), yet equally dis-inspired by this dadblamed new computer still dissing me, and by my resulting failure to write "Kurt Weill Part 4," well… what can a poor boy do but to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band, ‘cause in sleepy Vashon town there’s just no place that’s happening, so I’ve booked-in Little Johnny Keats as my stand-up replacement. Yes, he’s another short guy like Weill, but he’s tall on entertainment and believe thee me, folks, he knows how to turn a phrase!

Here are some excerpts from his ode to the busy female “Autumn”—but rather than New York or Vermont, this lovely gal’s a favorite in Sussex and Cumbria instead…

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core…

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers…

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue…
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

* * * * *
That was Johnny… a pretty decent poet, and the clever lad predicted social networking too.

Part 3: A Short Weill

2011-09-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

He was not a tall man, this proud new American, this solid citizen immigrant. Diminutive, compact, bespectacled, he was a shy man, quietly confident--perhaps arrogant, but silently so--regarding his musical skills and his business (show business) acumen. And this is what he said, this is what Kurt Weill said:

I write for today. I don’t give a damn about writing for posterity…. I have never acknowledged the difference between “serious” music and “light” music. There is only good music and bad music.

Sound familiar? One Ducal/orchestral leader offered a similar opinion:

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

Asked about the Jazz elements in his opera-related, vox populi music, Weill responded:

American Jazz has influenced modern music undoubtedly. Rhythmic and harmonic freedom, simplicity of melodic material, directness—saying things as they are—these are the contributions of Jazz… I do not mean the Jazz of today, but the Jazz of the time of the “St. Louis Blues” and other pieces of that period. Today it is much more complicated and it has been influenced in turn by Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and so on… [M]odern composers did not go to Jazz to borrow its idiom. It was not the actual taking of material. It was an influence you did not feel.

Now, certainly Kurt Weill could articulate the stance of those composers who absorbed detectable aspects of Jazz, but it is also ironic that his own staying power and his place in music history owe debts of gratitude to Jazz arrangers influenced by that very impressionism, the “re-composers” who discovered useful irony and melodic invention, suspended harmonies (“notes between notes”) and tuneful changeability in Kurt’s compositions. And his indebtedness certainly extends to a certain other “St. Louis” too.

(Look out, old Satch is back!)

Throughout the War and after its end, Weill kept quietly storming the barricades… and Broadway responded, noting misses as well as hits. The Firebrand of Florence flopped like a gasping flounder, yet that failure came hard on the heels of his biggest hits, Lady in the Dark, an astonishing musical about psychoanalysis, with Gertrude Lawrence, young Danny Kaye, and Kurt’s co-writers Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, followed by One Touch of Venus, starring Mary Martin as the earth-visiting goddess, with fine and funny lyrics by Ogden Nash. The two also featured a pair of moody ballads—one each show--that became Kurt’s second and third all-time showtune standards, “My Ship” and “Speak Low.”

The latter was taken up first, by Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, then Sonny Clark with John Coltrane, Tony Bennett, Grant Green, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Hank Jones, Boz Scaggs, and umpteen more, right up to a deep thudding bass performance by Charlie Haden—accompanying a tape of Kurt himself “Speaking Low”! Similarly, “My Ship” sailed from Sassy Sarah to Kenny Barron and Gary Bartz, with stops en route at the ports of Jeri Southern and Ella.

Other shows, other hits: “It Never Was You” (Bobby Short, Judy Garland ), “Lost in the Stars” (beautiful version by Tony Bennett with Count Basie, also Ken Peplowski, Helen Merrill, Anita O’Day), “Lonely House” (wistful June Christy, eerie and powerful Betty Carter), and more. (Both the Haden and Carter reimaginings are on producer Hal Willner's interpretive masterpiece, September Songs, from 1997; also splendid tracks by Lenya, P.J. Harvey, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, et al, and a pair from Teresa Stratas that simply exceed perfection, "Surabaya Johnny" and the unknown and impossibly lovely "Youkali.")

By the time Weill died in 1950, pretty much from overworking himself, he had begun to gain a small dual following among Jazz folk; vocalists loved his melodies and his co-writers’ poetic yet straightforward lyrics, players admired his chords (“great possibilities for reharmonization,” commented one) and the rhythmic changes. But the admirers knew only the music of his “American” years—and even the performances I’ve mentioned mostly date from the mid-Fifties on. Before the Weill deluge could begin, a couple of other planets had to align…

The still-youngish Widow Weill decided to devote her life to keeping Kurt’s music--especially his neglected or unknown European works—in the public consciousness. First she performed a concert version of The Threepenny Opera in 1952, which set the theatrical world a-buzz about both Weills, then she played the part of Jenny (stopping the show every performance with her angry, world-weary version of “Pirate Jenny”), cunningly commanding the 1954 Americanized, revised staging of the complete Threepenny… which took off like a stealth jet, eventually and inexorably holding court off-Broadway for seven years.

That on-going success coupled with healthy sales of the MGM original cast album persuaded Lenya and Columbia Records to resurrect the others, adapted slightly so sultry, low-voiced Lotte could take some major role in each: Mahagonny, Happy End, The Seven Deadly Sins, and truly brilliant collections of his best (or best-suited to Lenya’s limited but oh-so-expressive range) German and American theatre songs—dozens of classic Weill and Brecht-Weill songs to be discovered, performed, and recorded by new generations of listeners and performers.

And in the midst of all that activity, capstone of the arch as it were, there arose the spectre of murderous Mackie Messer, aka “Mack the Knife,” with sainted Jazz trumpeter and master of the second-line march Louis Armstrong leading the way, just ahead of the “Mack Pack”: Turk Murphy (his version shelved for decades to leave the door open for Satch),then Ella Fitzgerald (live in Berlin as I recall), Bobby Darin, Bing Crosby with Bob Scobey, Eartha Kitt, Kenny Dorham, even Sonny Rollins blowing a tenor sax version under its instrumental/theme title, “Moritat”).

You could say that Kurt made Mack, and then Mack made Kurt, posthumously.

Suddenly both English-speaking audiences and revived German concertgoers were thinking, “Hmmm… Kurt Weill… Interesting… Wonder what else he’s written…” Whole albums devoted to Jazz versions of Weill began to appear, the first one an Australian Jazz Quartet LP of Threepenny songs with fairly boring arrangements by Teddy Charles. In France the Jacques Loussier Trio issued an album of brief, light, miscellaneous Weill. The Andre Previn Trio backed trombonist J.J. Johnson in his bid. And in the half century since J.J.’s LP there have been a couple dozen more devoted to Weill just in the categories of Jazz and Pop—over a hundred if one adds in the historical reissues and purely Classical releases too.

Weill was unique. I can’t think of any other composer who lived and created and succeeded so convincingly in the two musical realms he named with disdain in that quotation back at the beginning: “serious” and “light.” Indeed, at his best, whether sarcastic or sentimental, caustic or comedic, from The Threepenny Opera to Street Scene, from “Surabaya Johnny” to “Speak Low,” from Der Lindburghflug to Down in the Valley, from “Berlin im Licht” to “Youkali Tango-Habanera”…whether sung by Dave van Ronk or Dagmar Krause, Teresa Stratas or Elvis Costello, Andy Williams or Nina Simone, James Brown or DeeDee Bridgewater, Lotte Lenya or Lou Reed… or played by Miles Davis or the Doors, Cal Tjader or Django Reinhardt, Eric Dolphy or David Bowie, Nat Cole or Nick Cave, The Great Jazz Trio or the equally great trio Tethered Moon…

Whatever the Berlin shocker or Broadway blast, cabaret hit or concert hall miss, rock star adventure or Firebrand failure, you could be sighing a “September Song” or savoring “Green-Up Time,” and I might be sailing “My Ship” alone or feeling “Lost out here in the stars”… through it all, “It Never Was You,” or me. It always was Kurt.

(One last part of this convoluted story still lies ahead, a fantastic triple play to wrap-up the game. You might score it as “Thornhill to Evans to Kikuchi.”)

Part 2: A Long, Long Weill

2011-08-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

Duke Ellington was born in 1899, Louis Armstrong in 1901 though he claimed 1900--but across the Atlantic in Dessau, Germany, and actually born in 1900, was composer Kurt Weill, a true child of the century of Jazz. Son of a Jewish cantor but never particularly religious, Kurt was a musical prodigy; and by age 17, after a couple of preparatory years, he was composing, conducting various groups, and off to Berlin for academic training, where he quickly became the prize student of composer Ferruccio Busoni, caught up in the avant garde, atonal music scene soon to be associated with the heyday of Weimar Republic Germany in general and rowdy, anything-goes Berlin in particular.

But Kurt was a restless young man, always in search of something new or different; and though he had many commissions for his "serious" music, somewhere along the line, around 1925, he began to hear recordings of this exciting new music from America...

Wait. Stop. That's the way his story is usually told, the official line: Weill was knocked for a loop by Jazz, and his own music changed. That's true... in part. He did abandon concertos and symphonies in order to compose strange operas and fractious, fractured musicals. But there's more to his conversion than meets the eye in Weill biographies. (It meets the ear, in fact.) The music that Kurt heard was not the Jazz we think of--neither New Orleans two-beat, overlapping and interwoven, nor the more contemporary mixture of solo musician insouciance and syncopated swing. Moreover, he was less influenced by Jazz of any era than he actually became an influence on Jazz, especially after he moved to the United States in 1935.

By 1925 Kurt was hearing Europe's idea of American Jazz, ahead of its ballyhooed, pre-sold arrival in 1926-27 in the persons of professional, slightly Jazzier, U.S. bands (but still dance bands) led by...uh ... Whiteman (Paul) and Black man Sam Wooding--and he was observing the Continental dance bands Americanize their names and play a chopped-up, used-condiments, mixed curry of marching drums, bierstube brass bands, ragtime syncopation, hurdy-gurdy streetsingers, quick-step 4/4 fox trots, tangos called back from exotic places, cabaret with a sexy Berliner snarl, cornpone humor and critter sounds (inspired maybe by Original Dixieland Jass Band 78s), Jewish klezmer clarinets threatened with violins, and Adolphe Sax's early C-melody saxophones, and all of those ingredients subjected to a piecemeal, pick-and-choose, go-for-broke approach.

These disparate, desperate measures of music met Weill's boredom and incipient rebellion head on, just when he was reading and cultivating the iconoclast poet and budding Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, cocky, half-cocked, brazen and brilliant. Kurt had lately decided to thumb his nose at a "serious music" fest in Baden-Baden that expected him to submit another atonal opera-in-progress. Suddenly he had the words--five Brecht poems including what became the famous "Alabama Song"--plus the eccentric model of this wild, new, no-style ur-Jazz (make that Eur-Jazz), and with cowboys yet! (Talk about your Brechtian alien-nation on the hoof.)

Weill thought, "I can do that better"... and he did, creating the heady blast of Weimar freethinking called Mahagonny Songspiel. When it premiered at the '27 festival, there in the set's boxing ring stood gussied-up Lotte Lenya, proudly holding up a hand-lettered sign and shout-singing right along with the other actress and actors. Kurt had met the brash and angular brunette (later famous for her fiery orange-red hair), an ex-dancer yearning to act, nearly three years earlier. Very quickly they became the couple widely known as "Kurt and Lenya," and soon were married; but this was her debut in a Weill piece. Inspired by the quizzical but excited response to the Songspiel, the troika (Lenya, Kurt and Bert) plus Brecht's assistant Elisabeth Hauptmann soon exploded the old new Germany and compass points outward by unleashing a trio of audacious, opera-nudging stage adventures: Die Dreigroschenoper; Happy End; Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. (Threepenny immediately sported big dollar signs, Happy End didn't, and Mahagonny rose and fell with Hitler's maneuvering.)

The Brecht-Weill team composed scores of angular, angst-denying, angrily sarcastic songs, of which at least a dozen (a few of them thanks to Lenya's unique delivery) quickly became classics of the new modern theatre, from "Alabama-," "Barbara-" and "Bilbao-" songs, to "Pirate Jenny," "Surabaya Johnny" and "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" Kurt's music was quirky, unpredictable, and instrumentally inventive, employing stops-and-starts, tempo and key changes, even "blue" notes, and he often chose to compose against the words rather than reinforce them. Since he always did his own orchestrations too, he could cheerfully call for such unexpected additions as banjo, hurdy-gurdy, trap drums, barrel organ, concertina, bandoneon, tenor viola, ricky-tick piano, and kitchen sink… and did. (A nice Weill story says he even required Hawaiian slack key guitar for one tune, but I'm dubious--Hawaiian guitar, yes, but slack-key tuning began decades later.)

On the verge of rich and famous, the three were much in demand, busily pursuing separate opportunities in opera, film, literature, theatre, and more, but by 1933 were all fleeing Hitler's Germany as designated enemies of the state (Bert the Communist, Kurt the Jew, and Lenya the pain in Adolf's skinny rump, guilty by association!), forced to abandon houses, lovers, money, and sheet music to the winds of no-chance. The Weills had already been through separation and divorce, but they kept regaling each other with wonderful letters; and so they decided to reunite in Paris for one last Euro project with Brecht ("The Seven Deadly Sins" ballet), realized they were meant to be together after all, and steamshipped on to America in 1935—where few knew of or gave a falling fig for their German fame and European successes.

Kurt had turned his back on Germany for good. He sought work in musical theater, on and off Broadway, and soon got it. He also pursued U.S. citizenship with his usual fixated shy seriousness. That took a little longer, but Kurt was determined to become more American than the Americans themselves. Hit shows and hit tunes soon guaranteed it...

Which brings us to the American viewpoint. Kurt and Lenya were unknown quantities. No matter what had occurred over there, the word had not traveled well. A few New York theater people had heard of The Threepenny Opera, but it closed almost immediately when presented in 1933, long before the couple ever considered immigrating. Nor were the great Brecht/Weill songs yet known. (As Bert might have said, "Work first, then food.")

Kurt cultivated an acquaintance with playwright Maxwell Anderson, and soon he and Lenya were edging into the musical theater's upper echelon...slight notice for minor antiwar musical Johnny Johnson... better reviews for an odd but entertaining, American history piece titled Knickerbocker Holiday, with knockout tune "September Song" performed in the play, and eventually twice on hit recordings, by aging actor Walter Huston.

Suddenly the days weren't dwindling down, they were stretching out, on a red carpet. More than the politically awkward play, "September Song" alone served as Weill's entree to the inner circle of musical theater creators; it showed his unique talent for coolly emotive music--sad but not overly sentimental, strange without sounding strained, immediately familiar even when tailored to one singer. And the song was taken up by dozens of vocalists, from Ella, Bing and Nat, to Jimmy Durante (a great performance) and Frank Sinatra (two versions waxed decades apart), to Tony Bennett, Willie Nelson, and Lenya herself (after Kurt's death). Sarah Vaughan recorded it on three separate occasions--with Teddy Wilson in 1946, Hal Mooney’s orchestra a decade later, and finally a December-of-her-years performance with Wynton Marsalis.

Jazz musicians heard its beauty too, among them orchestra leaders Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington, pianists Art Tatum and George Shearing, Jacques Loussier and John Bunch, and frontline soloists ranging from Chet Baker and J.J. Johnson to Al Hirt and Illinois Jacquet (with Ben Webster). Eventually even cabaret-ish rocker Lou Reed fell under its spell long enough to shred it quietly via his pick-and-slide, electric guitar version--not quite “Metal Music” unlistenable, but a challenge to Weill’s fans nonetheless.

Kurt would live long enough to become the still-youngish master of a new kind of Broadway musical, and to write the gracefully odd tunes for other hit songs lamenting the fragility of life and the evanescence of love. When he died suddenly in 1950, Jazz musicians were just beginning to take serious notice.

(Part 3 will pursue his influence on Jazz.)

Now Under Construction

2011-08-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

When it rains, it pours... unless you live in Seattle where it showers, drizzles, and mists. (Vashon Island is close enough to catch the dripout.) Here we sit, basking in the second week of summer and with September looming, Weilling away the hours, waiting for the techspert to mouse/key my new harddrive into submission.

Call me Alibi Ike (a Damon Runyon character I think), but Fate has delayed my take on "Kurt and all that Jazz" for a few more days. Part 2 is actually ready to post, and will be, just as soon as that dang-blasted computer cries "Uncle."

Eire Language

2011-08-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get to chewing on stuff I might maybe shouldn't have bitten off. Right now I'm square in the middle of an attempt to document Kurt Weill's influence on American Jazz--a daunting task if, like me, you lack a music education or any playing experience. All I know or suspect comes from reading and listening; serious, reasoned analysis takes me oh... so... long...

Rather than skip a week, I decided to post one of the better poems I've written over the years, a sort of "small tale" for a front-porch summer evening. As a lifelong admirer of Irish poetry, I consider William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney to be the two greatest poets of the 20th century--those writing in English anyway--each of them wonderfully "musical" in his own unique way, with Heaney still going strong. One day I read a quotation from Flaubert that bounced around in my brain until I wrote a response, a monologue poem perhaps prodded a bit by Heaney as he might have sounded in his younger days; more about that below.

* * * * *
Bear Language

“Language is like a cracked kettle on which we
beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all
the time we long to move the stars to pity.”
--Gustave Flaubert

I beat the cracked kettle
with a single stick of hazel
and listen as the thick syllables
run together. The chain pulls
this way and that, rattles
its own countermeasure, and hauls
me up tall, tipsy-toed to reel
Old Blarney in, drool and all.
Oh, he’s a handful,
he is: brown fur matted wet, male
razzle slapping his time, the usual
twinkle of trouble
in his one good eye... Bears

‘ll dance for you, and stand still,
shuffle and stall and sometimes scuffle
a bit; but Old Blarney’s a regular dazzle.
He rears back, high as Maeve Hill,
and sets his bear backyonders to heel-
an’-tow, and wriggle sure and all.
With his great paws flapping uncle,
his gap-tooth smile,
and his raggle-taggle tinker’s airs,
why, honey wouldn’t melt in his muzzle.

And thereby hangs a tale…
Or did. Just the last April
it was, at Derry Fair, and him on a publican’s table,
stepping out something fierce and typical.
Till he backstepped his backside full
in the barman’s electric fan, and fell
all over himself and nine pints with the froth of the pull
still on them—pell-mell and holywell
water, prancing and roaring and clanking, hide-hairs
a whirlwind behind him, parts of Old Blarney mill-
ing amongst us like the pieces of a puzzle
we couldn’t reassemble,
though we patched up his pride by wetting his whistle
with enough of the stout to befuddle
Cuchulain. He passed out in a puddle
of Guinness, still licking his chops, wishful
like... And now he just grins and bares it all.

Me? Oh, I’m just the bit of a shill.
Whilst Old Blarney struts his wonderful,
I blather and beat on this kettle
and watch his tin cup fill
till the stars come out all unawares.

* * * * *
Once I'd written the poem I began wondering what had prompted the garrulous Irishness and the bear-handler's tale-telling misdirection culminating at the end. What might "bear witness" to this example of poetic inspiration? After all, I'd merely opened up Flaubert's words to make room for a story that hoped to amuse the reader. Certainly my immersion in 20th century literature must have contributed, maybe starting with a kind of Yeatsian desire for elegance masked--in this instance--by bearish behavior:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Theodore Roethke may be in there somewhere too, the big bearish poet shuffling around the University of Washington's Padelford Hall and mentoring a whole next generation of poets:

I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears...

Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

And Heaney, who looked a bit bearish too in his younger days, and whose Northern Ireland accent and poems so syllable-precise with Irish diction might have somehow persuaded me to go for broke. His power is accumulative, but here's a poem in just four lines that hints at his style:

For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat,
Its long grains gathering to the gouged split;

A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather,
Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather.

Other possible sources could range from my teaching Faulkner's great classic, "The Bear," centerpiece of Go Down, Moses, to Randy Newman singing about a dancing bear on his first album... Clearly it becomes a mug's game, a muddle of influences, all of them or even none of them directly involved.

Maybe I just got inspired. Or maybe the poem is as lame as a battered bear-pit creature, not worth the time it's taken to tell all this.

(Wonderful color illustrations from Henry Climbs a Mountain by D.B. Johnson. Note the shackle on this nameless bear who's "riding" the underground railroad North.)

Duke in Black, Brown & Beige

2011-08-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

Jazz is improvisation. ("Oh... really?")

Sounds created by musical instruments manipulated, and players perhaps composing, on the fly, so to speak--aural ephemera released into the air, roiling the molecules, disturbing the stillness, then allowed to dissipate into... airy nothing, or urban legend, or Jazz history. The same tune played by the same set of musicians on separate occasions, or in one take after another in a recording session, might be magical one time and leaden all the others. The variety and number of possible readings and/or performances are infinite--or so we assume--even if recording equipment and human judgment seem to fasten on one among them all and declare it "definitive"... though it may be only of that moment.

Small group Jazz played by a few or by several is already expanding the performance options logarithmically with each new player added. So imagine the number of variables possible when a full orchestra plays, whether one as disciplined as the Jimmy Lunceford or Tommy Dorsey bands--or as spontaneous and freeflowing and subject to whims as the Ellington players and, certainly, the Duke himself. Perform an established number a thousand times--"Caravan," say, or "Cottontail," "Take the A-Train" or "Happy-Go-Lucky Local"--you still can screw-up. (You might also enter the mansions of glory by suddenly unleashing a solo the likes of which has never been heard before.)

But what if the composition itself is unfinished, its shape not firmly fixed, left in pieces that are available to be jigsaw-puzzled together at will (or whim)--Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applied to already frangible, intangible Jazz? When Duke's mother died in 1938, his grief produced "Reminiscing in Tempo," a lovely work lengthy enough to fill the four sides of two 12" 78s. By January of 1943, he had set his sights higher, aiming for a three-part symphonic work, but still in Jazz, to celebrate 300 years of the Negro in the New World, which the Ellington Orchestra would premier at Carnegie Hall on the 23rd.

What happened? Was he rushed, overburdened with other projects, not quite up to the task he'd accepted? Whatever the Duke had prepared, however complete the structure or incomplete the detailed parts--dress-rehearsed the night before at a high school, officially premiered one night later with copyists' pages still being distributed to the players, rough patches in the performance shielded by wonderful passages of music--many attendees and the majority of critics felt disappointed. This "tone parallel" called Black, Brown & Beige was sprawling, amorphous, the structure, if any, not easily grasped.

The Duke retreated; he reconsidered and revised, all the while maintaining his charming, unflappable, stolidly positive public persona. When the second Carnegie night came 10 or 11 months later, Black, Brown & Beige had been shelved until, said the Maestro, the world was ready for it (or vice versa). A couple of years later, a much-shortened version, revised excerpts really, graced another Carnegie evening; and something approximating that cluster of pieces was actually recorded by RCA and issued--speaking of parallels--on two more 12" 78s, the four sides casually identified as "Work Song," "The Blues," "Come Sunday," and "Three Dances" and packed in a double-fold, color-pictorial paper sleeve.

I found a fairly nice copy years ago which I kept as a piece of collectable Ellingtonia. Revisiting it recently occasioned this brief blog notice (gave me a perfect excuse to offer photos of the rarely-seen packaging). As for the music, here Johnny Hodges' alto languidly lifts "Come Sunday," Joya Sherill explains "The Blues," and Harry Carney, Tricky Sam Nanton, Ray Nance, and other Ellington stalwarts take fine solos in the remaining two sections. But this trimmed version wasn't the last...

Label affiliations came and went. By 1958 Duke was firmly ensconced at Columbia Records once more and prepared to let the world hear the latest Black, Brown & Beige, revised yet again, this construction longer than RCA's but with the number of themes reduced. No more Blues, no more Dances; Johnny Hodges gone off and Mahalia Jackson drafted in, her voice in place of his sensuous sax. In fact, the orientation of this version is considerably more religious, the backstory now reduced to slaves' work and Sunday rest. The cover photo is wonderful, the orchestra clearly up for the sessions, Mahalia in fine voice... and still the overall impact is minor, the album a lesser item in Ellington collections--too polite, too sedate; too much repetition and not enough passion.

I miss Hodges, I want Nance to cut loose on his fiddle, I yearn for Mahalia's gospel fervor, not the 23rd Psalm. The despair of slavery, the joy of Emancipation, the strengths of Black culture... all blithely shunted aside. Why?

I don't know if Duke and his men ever tackled portions of the unfinished work casually, at some club date or college dance or more formal concert. But he had one more go-'round with "Come Sunday," recycling it yet again as he assembled the parts for his First Sacred Concert--the music and the event admired by many for various reasons, but I'm not a fan. "Waste not, want not," some might claim, praising Duke's stubborn refusal to give up on his long-lamented tone-parallel dream.

But I lament his retreat in the face of a hostile reception, his tacit acceptance of the bully critics' disparagement, and his decision thereafter to write only briefer works with more easily managed structures, suites rather than Jazz concertos or a Third Stream symphony. I'd say that the bemused, half-hearted acceptance by some, and the outright rejection by others, struck a major blow to Duke's evident self-esteem, a nagging disappointment he never could quite walk away from. It rankled.

He shrugged at the loss of the Pulitzer and moved on when Jump for Joy never really got off the ground. But confronted by the maddening partial failure--or call it the continuing limited success--of Black, Brown & Beige, Duke blinked and then kept on blinking.

He always was a contender. He routinely battled and won in the Middleweight division where, in or out of the ring, points are awarded for percipience and inspiration, sophistication and wit. ("Boxing as a metaphor for the cultured, elegant Ellington? Ridiculous." "Oh yeah?" says I. "Put up yer Dukes.")

I believe Ellington, that man of infinite variety, whom we all loved madly, should have been--could have been--the Heavyweight Champ.

Lenya, Kurt, and Bert

2011-08-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

I sold my record collection a few days ago.

I began buying 7" singles way back in 1953, but soon switched to Long Play albums, which means I was a record "hound" for nearly 60 years. Not many of those early buys are still around; Fats Domino, Elvis, Rosemary Clooney, the Five Satins, Belafonte, Chuck Berry maybe, were some of the earliest artists I bought. As the many years passed, between collecting, reviewing records for a decade, buying and selling 12" discs as a dealer, searching out "platters" of special interest--sometimes whole collections--I've probably had 25,000 LPs pass through my hands, but after 15 years or more of selling via a now-defunct store and then online (at least I was until recently), I saw a bit less than 10,000 records vacate the premises today in boxes of a hundred or so each. I did decide to keep some favorites, nostalgic reminders or whatever, but they aren't valuable LPs. I left those for the buyer, a successful mail order dealer and a decent enough guy, based out of Portland.

Imagine having 10,000 Long Play records suddenly at your fingertips for a week and a half only, with the challenge to figure out a hundred-plus to keep. I actually had a high old time scanning the shelves and playing sample after sample, hour upon hour, trying to reconnect with whatever magic once was in those grooves. Aside from a few classic LPs, I pulled and kept representative items in general, but much more from the categories of Folk and Reggae, Classical (especially with a Spanish tinge) and Jazz. Rock and Country, World Music and post-Seventies Pop, all got short shrift. (Dig the sacrilege: Tom Rush and the O'Kanes and John Hammond, yes; Beatles, Stones, and Robert Johnson, no. Piano by Alicia de Larocha, si; keys courtesy of Sviatislav Richter, nyet... But wait! Simmer down, kids--the truth is I have a ton of CDs around here, easily replenishing any offloaded LP greats.)

But that's the bigger picture. On the immediate piece-by-piece front, I realized I'd be saying goodbye to whole smaller collections, 20 to 50 items in each--Aaron Copland LPs, versions of Porgy and Bess, Elvis bootlegs, albums with Bill Stout cover art, a massive array of Ellington releases, Bruce Springsteen bootlegs, 60 years of Dave Brubeck with and without Paul Desmond, Dylan LPs legal and otherwise, Fairport Convention and all its spinoffs, Martin Denny albums with various beautiful women on the covers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. (Hmmm, Yul Brynner musicals? Naaah.)

Actually, the single biggest subset was probably albums celebrating Jazz-influenced composer Kurt Weill, his sometime creative partner, radical playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the always amazing Lotte Lenya, actress/vocalist extraordinaire and Weill's helpmate/wife. I had maybe 80 LPs (kept 10 faves) and still have another 20 CDs detailing the music and lives and lasting works of that explosive threesome. They showed a united front (more or less) for Weimar Republic masterworks The Threepenny Opera, Happy End, and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (plus the earlier bombshell, Mahagonny-Songspiel); after fleeing Nazi Germany managed to regroup in France for The Seven Deadly Sins; and then pretty much split for good, with Kurt and Lenya off to America and the wholly different Broadway musical stage, while Brecht took refuge in Denmark and then briefly in Hollywood before eventually heading up Communist East Berlin's state-run theater for decades.

The Lenya-Weills took some time to get acclimated. Both of them devoted much time and creative energy to the ill-fated project that had drawn them to the U.S., the massive theatrical pageant and financial disaster known as The Eternal Road. Johnny Johnson, Kurt's first American musical, was a small success that, like the later Down in the Valley "citizen cantata," showed how eager he was to embrace all things "American." That small success also promised bigger things--which came quickly as Kurt was invited to collaborate with Moss Hart, Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, and other Broadway insiders.

Between 1937 and 1950 when Kurt died suddenly and unexpectedly, in addition to many partial but unrealized projects, he wrote complete scores for Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, The Firebrand of Florence, Street Scene, Love Life, and Lost in the Stars, offering adventurous, inventive music and a few lovely tunes that were soon revered musical standards, even as their source playbooks receded into Broadway history--"Speak Low," "My Ship," "September Song," "Lost in the Stars," "It Never Was You," "Lonely House," maybe "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," all joining Kurt's German precedent-setters from "Alabama Song" and "Bilbao" to "Pirate Jenny" and "Surabaya Johnny."

Lenya had left the stage for several years. Now she became the fierce proponent and defender of Weill's long list of serious Classical and lighter-hearted American compositions. She starred in the 1954 reconfiguration of Threepenny (steamlined a bit for modern tastes by Marc Blitzstein). She oversaw--with amusement, one assumes--the astonishing popular success of "Mack the Knife." She teamed with Columbia Records to record definitive versions of the earthshaking Weimar successes as well as the American highlights. She became "Rosa Klebs," a murderous East German villainess, in the second James Bond film, From Russia with Love. She came out of retirement for a star turn in Cabaret. She enlisted Teresa Stratas to carry on the dissemination of Kurt's songs. She established a major Weill Foundation in New York City. And then, some years ago now, she died peacefully--respected, honored, unique, sometimes unruly, yet routinely rated the greatest "no voice" singer of the 20th century.

I no longer recall what led me to Lenya, Kurt, and Bert, perhaps something as uncomplicated as Bobby Darin piping, "Look out, old Mackie's back!" Or Tony Bennett (on the live album with Count Basie) so hauntingly "Lost out here in the stars..." Doesn't matter. By the Seventies I was hooked, and a decade later hip-deep in books and records as I worked to shape a musical play about the collaboration between Brecht und Weill (Lenya figuring importantly), at its peak with Threepenny's astonishing Berlin--then European--popular and critical success and collapsing by the time of Mahagonny's Nazi-threatened opening night.

Anyway, seeing those pieces of my life boxed and handtrucked away was... a bit sad... in anticipation of which I snapped photos of the more interesting items (many shown below), and I still intend to examine the subject of Kurt and Jazz in a second blog piece, coming soon I hope. As his "September Song" insists,

When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,
One hasn't got time for the waiting game.
Oh, the days dwindle down
To a precious few
September
November...

Rick's Place

2011-07-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

I first heard the resonant, staccato name "Rick von Schmidt" (more frequently "Eric") on Bob Dylan's debut album back in 1962, when "the Zimmer Man" intro'ed one song, "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down," thus: "I first heard this from Rick von Schmidt... He lives in Cambridge... Rick's a Blues guitar player... I met him one day in the, uh, green pastures of Harvard University!" (And thus did the fledgling folkie not only publicize von Schmidt, but also craftily announce the Chaplin-clown-wiseass persona of an unknown kid calling himself "Bob Dylan.")

Somehow Rick's name took on a mysterious incantatory power... and I'll bet I wasn't the only listener to wonder "Who's this Cambridge guy? Dylan's weird enough; is von Schmidt his mentor or something? Could he be that strange too?" Gradually, as Dylan and Joan Baez and Judy Collins and others replaced the various Trios and Belafontes of folk music, word got out about Eric too--a somewhat eccentric bearded painter/illustrator who also wrote folksongs and sang, part of the amazing coterie that included Richard Farina, Dave Van Ronk, Rolf Cahn, Tom Rush--and Jack Elliott whenever he rambled through. Eric's father Harold was a wellknown and respected cover artist for The Saturday Evening Post (like his pal Norman Rockwell), and the son wandered off on his own illustrative path, which included stays in Europe and England and the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, as well as his Boston-area home turf.

By the time Dylan mentioned him, von Schmidt already had one album out in the States and another soon to be recorded in England, and in 1963 there would be a Blues LP on Prestige Records' folk line. Also recording for the label about then was another new face, Tom Rush--who always knew a good song when he heard it. Within a couple of years, Tom and other singers from DeShannon, Jackie, to Dylan, Bob, were mining Eric Sings von Schmidt, his Prestige follow-up, for Eric's originals... and that's continued for 40 years, with many covers of "Cold Grey Dawn," "Light Rain," "Rattlesnake Preacher," "My Love Come Rolling Down," even the sarcastic mock-doowop "Acne," but especially his island-rhythm, Caribbean hard-times tale--a true classic--"Joshua Gone Barbados," about an out-for-himself union boss, who rouses his followers to action, then flees the violence that follows:

Yeah, Joshua gone Barbados
Stayin' in a big hotel
People on St. Vincent
Got many sad tales to tell...

But Joshua gone Barbados
Just like he don't know
The people on the island
Got no place to go.

(Another beautiful number worthy of new versions is "Blues for Kennedy," written in the wake of the assassination. Support musicians Geoff Muldaur and the infamous Mel Lyman are major assets on this track and elsewhere.)

Comic, cryptic, rhyming liner notes by Richard Farina, and von Schmidt's self-portrait, line-drawing cover complete a great album package. Look close to see that Eric holds a small piece of paper which quietly states, "All my own work." An artist indeed. And gradually his impetus switched from performing to painting as he became the artist of choice for many in the folk world. His impish portraits adorned albums celebrating Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Cisco Houston, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, Dave Van Ronk, the Reverend Gary Davis, Paul Geremia, and many others, and for the one-and-only album by country-rockers the Blue Velvet Band, he designed a complete board game citing anecdotes true and otherwise from the lives of real country/bluegrass musicians.

One of the Blue Velvets was Jim Rooney, producer, musician, and Bill Monroe expert. In the late Seventies Cambridge scenesters Jim and Eric teamed up to compile the definitive history, photo-rich, of the Cambridge folk era; they called it Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (yes, same title as the von Schmidt song that Dylan made famous). An oral history comprised of thorough interviews with some 60 folks who were there and had many a fine tale to tell, tied together by the wry and hip commentary of the author-editors. But the small print run meant a quick out-of-print status--such that when an ex-Boston recording engineer borrowed my copy, he decided not to bother to return it! But demand for the elusive book eventually led to a revised second edition issued in 1994. (Yes, I own a copy and, no, I'm not loaning it out.)

So writer-artist Eric began writing and illustrating children's books too. And he recorded several more solo-with-friends albums over the years, but without ever snagging the gold ring or, really, recapturing the magic. While his arts/painting career went ticking merrily along, von Schmidt's reputation in folk music sputtered to an undeserved halt. His last two albums were (1) a mid-Nineties, newly recorded attempt at a career greatest-hits overview and (2) the 30-years-late release of an unissued album--a good one too--recorded back in 1972 or so.

But the earth's orbit did not alter, and Eric died suddenly, less than a year later, on February 2, 2003--Ground Hog's Day (my birthday too) become an unwelcome part of history yet again. His unexpected death may have marked an ignominious end to a solid folk career, but we'd do well to remember there was a time when a younger, questing world was ready, baby, to follow Eric von Schmidt downtown, up the country, and all around--from Cambridge to St. Vincent and points east, but west to Minneapolis and on out to Oregon too.

And wasn't that a mighty time? There was magic in that name, and that man.

Make Ice, Not War

2011-07-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

Across the U.S. this year, July has been a grim torment. But Washington State goes blithely on, troubled not by hellish heat but by persistent grey clouds and rain. For us it's been uncommonly cold or unusually muggy, but tiny irritations, of course, compared to the weirdness of weather and brainless political posturing going on in the other Washington and various states.

In July of 1986, a quarter century ago now, I was zipping around Europe thanks to a Eurail pass, sleeping on trains or in youth hostels--six months into what would become a 20-month, around-the-world adventure. Back then, most terrorism was still centered in the Middle East; but there was that plane at Lockerbie... and as a result Reagan had been bombing Libya (and 25 years on, plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose!) and I had been quizzed and harangued about "our cowboy President" everywhere I went, Fiji to Frankfurt, Auckland to Austria, Koh Samui to Copenhagen, Bali to Burma to Basel.

One hot day, I sought to escape all the polite disapproval of American policies and policing by holing up in an air-conditioned McDonald's. I was thirsty anyway, and Mickey D's always had ice, even in Switzerland. Sitting there, I started writing a quirky little poem about frozen water--any cold warfare reference was purely coinci-dental--and like glacial melt it just grew:

Chewing Ice

From the press and rush, the crowd of quick and lucrid,
I have come to these familiar golden arches,
misplaced on a platz in Basel’s merchant core.
I’m thousands of miles from the nearest Boeing plant
yet less than a hundred from warheads and bombers,
weary of Pax Americana and accusations.
But this is not that poem.
Instead of fear or shame, just now I feel
relief. Drinking-in the culture of Coca-Cola,

I’m “Yankee Going Home,” for the moment.
Among these neutral burghers I can sit
simply breaking the ice, my mouth making small talk
and chipped bits smaller still--all the while remembering:
“Chewing ice will ruin your teeth.”
Dentists have threatened that for 40 years at least,
but I have always reckoned on the inevitable
less-than-perfect dentures in a glass...
Ice is my connection.

To lemonade I sold in summers long ago,
each penny cup with its separate cube melting,
in some postwar, G.I. loan development in upstate New York,
or the shadetree road near Arlington’s dragon’s-teeth graves…
To the domed, grey metal crusher in some kitchen of the past,
its scimitar blades chewing over and over,
shredding and shaving each cube to crystalline gravel…
To the thousand brain-spearing pains I cursed,
shooting them up through the roof of my mouth and away.

I think of ice in the South:
of pre-Cold War trucks and horsedrawn wagons
hauling the great, cloudy blocks, the massive sweating men,
their claw tongs delivering burlapped relief, icebox salvation,
from that ramshackle icehouse down by the river,
whose strangeness of brine and shade
was a magnet drawing local boys like iron filings.
We’d drift in arcs of electromagnetic force
from one clanking hulk of machinery

to another: ammonia-dazed coils, brute forms chopping and grinding,
unnatural devices transforming water to mystery--
cold technology shaping all our futures,
taunting us with the promise of mastery over the earth.
I went seeking ice and silence;
I brought back the chilly, controlling ways
it seems now I may never lose…
Or was it earlier still, in the belly of my mother,
whose craving all that scorching summer and fall

on the San Antonio airbase was pieces of ice?
Chunks she held to her swollen sides,
cubes that cooled her cheeks and soothed her forehead,
chipped ice she chewed for company while my father
taught his fledgling fliers how to get aloft
and stay there, how to fight on the wind and air
and target their tons of fire,
how to never ever lose
a combat pilot’s cool and leather-jacketed smile.

Part 3B: Perk Up!

2011-07-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

(Delayed yet again, but here at last! A smaller selection of pics this time, with many others still viewable below in the gallery of last week's Part 3A...)

Tenor sax great Bill Perkins was one of those many-hats guys, a genial man of many parts who "played" most of them: leader, co-leader, sideman, band section man and featured soloist with those same bands, from Herman and Kenton to Maynard Ferguson and Terry Gibbs' Dream Band, to later Bill Holman groups and Doc Severinsen's Tonight Show Orchestra, as well as Jazz/Classical orchestras in Germany and the Netherlands. He was a cool West Coaster and a Hardbop-influenced, sometimes abrasive blower (later on). He mastered and routinely recorded on all four saxes plus flute, alto flute, oboe, clarinet, even bass clarinet--not just "doubling," but quadrupling. He earned college degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Music (after WWII service), so he was already 27 when Woody Herman hired him suddenly in 1951 and his real professional career began. He became a first-call player for Hollywood soundtracks and commercial sessions as well as Jazz; yet he also worked on the other side of the glass during the Sixties and early Seventies as a highly regarded studio engineer. He invented and held the patents on a pair of MIDI electronic instruments used by trumpeter Miles Davis and saxman Ernie Andrews, among others. In fact it wouldn't surprise me to learn that this towhead California native son was a surfer dude and an avocado farmer too!

But above all else William Reese Perkins most certainly was a thoughtful, hardworking, quietly polite, shyly diffident, all-around nice guy--who managed to work his musical magic on ballads and up tunes too for over fifty years and... what? maybe 75?... never less than first-rate albums.

Several months ago, trying to get started, I wrote these paragraphs:

I've been slow to post this third portion of the Richie Kamuca-Bill Perkins saga partly because I kept (and keep) discovering other CDs I'd neither heard nor known about, featuring Perk in some way--a few with him and Richie too--that I wanted to absorb before writing more. For example, other tapes from the November 1956, Macumba Club performances (mentioned in Part 2) by the so-called "Bill Holman band," meaning the swing-defined, short-lived version of Kenton's mid-Fifties Orchestra, with great Holman charts bustin' out all over--a pleasure to play yet attuned for those dancers too. That disc, Sounds of Yester Year DSOY814, Swinging in San Francisco 1956, has Richie and Perk side by side and revelling in the groove. And a slightly different ensemble, recorded months earlier on Ground Hog's Day (my 13th birthday, so I had to hear Tantara TCD-1123, Kenton: Cool, Hot & Swingin', too), has features for Perkins certainly worth a listen; see below for one of them.

The major solos that he played in the early Fifties for Herman's "Third Herd" and then for the mid-Fifties Kenton Orchestra made the Jazz world aware that this unassuming fellow might be a tenor to reckon with. His first major assignment for Herman was to replace "Four Brothers" mainstay Stan Getz, and to produce some approximation of Stan's famed "Early Autumn" solo. No problem, Perkins nailed it, night after night. (Composer Ralph Burns then supplied a follow-up, also assigned to Perk, a nice tune called "Misty Morning" that went nowhere.)

He joined Kenton in 1955, and at the July sessions in Chicago, built around new Holman arrangements--Contemporary Concepts was the album name--Perkins pulled out another plum. With no rehearsal, seeing the chart basically for the first time, Bill cut a magnificant, spur-of-the-moment version of "Yesterdays"... which he always grumbled about thereafter, but which left his bandmates gaping. More than one of them, as had happened with "Early Autumn" too, spoke wonderingly in interviews of Perkins' ability to play that tune nightly without ever "coasting," coming up with a new gem of a solo every time.

I'd also like to suggest a third band classic, Perk's solo version of "Out of Nowhere," which appears on Magic DAWE50, another of the "Live at the Macumba" CDs issued by Kenton collectors, this performance dating from November 17. (A February runthrough is included on the Cool, Hot & Swingin' CD.) As was usual, Perkins takes the last solo on Bill Holman's great arrangement for "Stomping at the Savoy," then as the tape continues to roll, we hear Perk himself announce the follow-up/encore... But this particular "Out of Nowhere" comes from the "Somewhere" of inspired improvisation, as Perkins uncorks a magisterial four-minute solo that moves from stomping to romping and back again, and then to a tromp-'em-on-down, all-by-himself cadenza finish. Sadly, only Kenton Band aficionados have ever heard it!

Even at my age, one can still learn by listening and reading. And I have lately learned why I was confused regarding certain solos by Perk and Kamuca. The liner notes to one of the Macumba CDs makes this point: Perkins acknowledged some years later that playing in that for-the-tour temporary sax section with Pepper Adams on baritone, listening to his Hardbop solos and authoritative blowing in general, worked its way into Perk's approach to the tenor. Which means that both of the Lester-light Youngsters were transitioning away from Pres by the end of '56. Kamuca may have started earlier, since he was always fond of the lower register on his horn, but Perk wasn't far behind, working his way downward and blowing more powerfully too. (Eventually he'd become an on-call choice not only for tenor, but down to the bass-ment for baritone sax and baritone clarinet. He modestly compared his playing of that last to "the sound of the Queen Elizabeth coming through the fog," while on flute "I'm known as the barnyard Shank"!)

Meanwhile, Perkins had signed with Pacific Jazz/World Pacific earlier that year, and owner-producer Richard Bock quickly found several ways to present him, starting with the famous date known as Grand Encounter: 2 Degrees East/3 Degrees West, with Left Coast Bill the sole horn amongst Easterners John Lewis and Percy Heath, and the West's Jim Hall and Chico Hamilton--a gently supportive, four-man wrecking crew of Jazz stars who let Perk be the one who shone.

* * * * *
That's where I stalled and stopped, wanting to hear more, understand more, explain more... but tacitly admitting, yes, that the task was beyond my comprehension and comfort zone at the time. I know more now, these several months later, but the real change is I've come to accept my own shortcomings and to recognize the futility of trying to analyze, even summarize, scores of albums and 50 years of creative, evolving musicianship in a few hundred words. So instead this will be one fan's reactions/comments/thoughts, a verbal and visual miscellany rather than an essay.

If any performance of Bill's Getz-smart "Early Autumn" solos has been issued in some manner, I've not found it. My personal Perkins stash begins with Capitol T560, emphatically titled The Woody Herman Band!, which features the tenorist 7/11 (so to speak) and has an intriguing, darkroom-manipulated cover photo (this in 1954). I fancifully read it as Woody grandly singing the praises of his star saxman, bespectacled "Brother" Bill, seated in the lower left corner!

His years with Kenton were grander still, and that burgeoning reputation persuaded Richard Bock to issue several Perkins-centric albums. The fine Degrees sessions produced a quiet, nobody-in-a-hurry set, which many Jazz fans cherish and a few just yawn at. But there is general consensus about Bill's brilliant star-turn on the ballad "Easy Living," possibly the last of his solo features to attain "classic" status for many years. (The quasi-live, in-a-theater, Perk-arranged octet set was another winner, but overshadowed by all the other bob-and-weave, a la mode releases by Mulligan-Baker-Pepper-Niehaus Inc.)

The mid-Fifties were a lavish smorgasbord for players West and East, the following decades more of a soup kitchen. Perkins appeared with umpteen bands, some of them surprisingly well-documented like the half-dozen Gibbs Dream Band albums, and he also cut well-regarded LPs with folks as varied as Bud Shank and Benny Carter, Doc Severinsen and Shorty Rogers, Victor Feldman and James Clay, Akiyoshi-Tabackin and the Lighthouse All-Stars, Niehaus Octets and Pepper Elevenses and Kenton Neophonic extravaganzas. Yet for 20-some years to make a decent living he had to rely on steadier gigs: studio engineer at United Recorders, man-about-multiple-instruments for commercials, and tenor ace on the Tonight Show.

Over all that stretch of time, he kept listening and storing up, so that when he resumed a career away from the studios around 1980, that beautiful "Lestorian" languidness had been Pepper-tempered (both Adams and Art) and Trane-hardened. As Bill told friends and interviewers (one who has written about Bill many times is Doug Ramsey of the much-honored Rifftides blog), he could still reach out for the early romanticism--what Bird called "playing clean and looking for the pretty notes." But he was listening differently, hearing the changes change, absorbing the drums of rock and the heat of global atmospherics--and a gruffer tone and steely timbre were often the result.

Looking over LPs and CDs both, I realized that, mirroring his back-burner career, I neither own nor have heard anything Perk recorded between 1960 and the early Eighties. But from then on, until his death from cancer in 2003, Bill worked in Jazz steadily and the albums reflect his maturity and ability to tune in. First came the date Perk and Shank co-led, Serious Swingers (Contemporary C-14031), announcing with bravura and saxy brass the maverick session-men's classy comeback--highlights: "Don't Explain," a dark beauty requiring no explanation, and an "Out of This World" which is.

Many quartet and quintet releases followed, usually with Frank Strazzeri or Alan Broadbent at the piano. Revisiting the venerated Mullligan-Baker model, Bill cut some no-piano albums too; an example would be V.S.O.P. #80 CD, Two Brothers, by trombonist Herbie Harper and Perkins (who also produced). My verdict... Two brothers? Half the excitement of four; fun for West Coast fans, but a bit flat; competent but a little too cool.

But that album does include a quintet version of another tune that would soon become a Perkins classic. Less than a year later, the tenorman captured Irving Berlin's ballad "Remember" with a tenderly rendered solo floating on the Metropole Orchestra of the Netherlands. That album, I Wished on the Moon (Candid CCD97524), let Perk drift and soar like the Getz-plus-strings of Focus ("The Summer Knows" and conductor Rob Pronk's great original "No More"); swing and sway the Jazz Latin way ("Besame Mucho"); and pursue an exotic "Caravan" out to the Silk Road and beyond. (I also wrote a year ago about Brilliant Corners, Bill Holman's amazing 1997 tribute to the music of Thelonious Monk--the other orchestral band masterwork that featured Perkins around this time.)

Perk's solo career in Jazz more or less began with sessions involving alto great Bud Shank, and the two friends rose to prominence occasionally in tandem thereafter, so it suits the arc of the Perkins Story that Bud figured at the finish too. In the early Nineties Perk played tenor, soprano and more on several nostalgic, keep-'em-flying releases by the "Lighthouse All-Stars" and "West Coast All Stars"; and Shank was there for a couple of them. More bracing and challenging was the less-known 1995 release titled The Bud Shank Sextet Plays Harold Arlen (JIMCO JCD 9502-2), featuring Bud, Bill, Jack Nimitz, and Conte Candoli up front, plus rhyth'men John Clayton, Jr. and Slammin' Sherman Ferguson.

You don't have to be a wizard to know that tunes like "Come Rain or Come Shine," "Blues in the Night," "My Shining Hour," "Out of This World," even "Over the Rainbow," arranged by Bill Holman, Marty Paich, et al, will indeed shine when played by the right musicians. And the Shank six, older pros with scuffed soles--scoured souls too--don't need a yellow brick road to know which way a cyclone blows, not to mention the horns, when shaping a rough-cut gem. Unruly rhythm ballads, bees not asleep but a-buzzin', positive accentuations only when the sun comes out... Shank is elemental and Perk in his post-modest element. (So watch out for stray sparks and still-burning embers!)

The Arlen one-off became the template for Perk, Shank, and Conte, together again and touring, at the turning of the millenium, around the album--and sometimes as the group--named Silver Storm. (Look for Raw Records 067384302010.) The pros are even older but the rogues of rhythm even hotter (Joe LaBarbera drums, Bob Magnusson bass, and Bill Mays, yes, at the piano). The chimneys are snowy but the furnaces still fired up and the tunes meant for blowing the ashes out--"Idol Gossip" to "Yardbird Suite," a raucous reprise of "My Shining Hour" and four of Bud's best originals. But only one need detain us: "Perkolator."

Doug Ramsey's liner notes might have posted a notice here: "CAUTION--Storm Warning. Big Fun a Head. Proceed at Your Own Asterisk!" But Doug's virtuoso sentence is its own reward: "This wild new version summons up a vision of Witold Lutoslawski, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Charlie Parker meeting in a Manhattan free-jazz loft." (What? No martini time with Martinu? gibes for Giacometti? mingling with Brancusi's braintrust? Surely they're just as impertinent.) Joshing aside, "Perkolator" sounds like Abbott and Costello Meet Boyd Raeburn, as Clayton bows, Mays meanders, and LaBarbera cuts up. As for the horns, think rehearsal room hijinx plus some split-second-timed blasts commingling BeBop and the Big Bopper... some fun, kids, and not strictly for the Boyds.

Still, I prefer to give the last word to Perkins himself--that is, to a quintet disc with Bill as producer and sax/flute lead, 1999's splendid release, the unintentional yet suitably valedictory album titled Swing Spring (Candid CCD 79752), featuring Clay Jenkins' trumpet and the rhythm threesome of Perk's longtime piano pal Frank Strazzeri, Tom (the bubbly bustling bass) Warrington, and fiery drummer Bill Berg (his sketch of Perk serves as the CD booklet's cover). First off, portions of the album play like a classic Blue Note set circa 1960--melodic, not quite so soulful but just as straightahead-catchy as early Hank Mobley or Horace Silver.

Yet there's more, a bitchin' brew of '60s Soul, '70s Funk, '80s explorations, '90s neo-Swing--breezes blowing, exotic processions, simmering nights and salt sea spray, Barbadian beaches and love walking... somewhere. The tracks of his years are here, Lester to Richie, Pepper to Coltrane, Art to Bud--and not forgetting some Shorter twists and angles--but they all come a-Perkin' now. Jenkins plays the perfect foil, and Strazzeri is brilliant from main-stem to "Lotus Blossom"--the moody, mercurial tenor statements on the latter ascending to that select list of Bill's best. (And his tenor on the final track, "BeBop Love Song," manages to evoke the great tune by that other Jenkins, and so hint at "Goodbye.")

Tenors, baritones, sopranos, clarinets, flutes; blown tenderly, tenaciously, tempestuously. He didn't go gentle, but he did finally say, Good-night...

I have this afterthought. Maybe the Jazz world should consider bestowing a "Brownie" Award--but only occasionally, when some nominee over a lengthy career in music displays the inherent skills, intermittent genius, quiet wise restraint, and general nice-guyness of the award's namesake, Clifford Brown. Ignoring other deserving candidates, I think it's safe to say that genial, generous, multi-talented, blow-for-broke Perk would be a shoo-in.

A Perky Fanfare:

2011-07-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

A Disarming Occasional Piece, for alto flute, tenor sax, and baritone clarinet;
Composed and Performed (with Overdubbing) by William Reese Perkins.

...No such beast, so far as I know. But contemplating the world this morning, with wars and non-wars, nationalist skirmishes and political folderol raging everywhere... well, it just seemed like a decent idea, a needed brief musical interlude that might be played during lulls in the fighting.

Today I'm posting the visual gallery half (call it Part 3A) of my long-overdue light examination of tenor sax great Bill Perkins. The text will appear later in the week. Assembled as one, I believe the length to be formidable and possibly forbidding; accordingly, I have split the thing in two. So here are a couple of dozen CD and record covers--roughly oldest to newest once past the Herman pair--the albums I've been listening to in order to write about Bill. I see them as Perks of the job.

Always Beat 2

2011-06-26T10:52:00.000-07:00

Writing a blog is hazardous to my health... oh, not in the sense of physical trauma; rather, my financial health, the pain in my wallet from enticements I don't resist, acquisitions that come fraught with financial finagling and expenses overspent.

In one-syllable words: I spend too much. I pick a subject, do some newer research to bolster my "old" knowledge, et voila! Money mailed out to pick up (cheaply but adding up fast) too many items that I don't already own, but that now seem essential to a greater understanding. The cost of getting totally hooked on Cajun and Zydeco, for example? Oy. Don't ask.

Revisiting my Beat youth is/was much less expensive. I had bought a copy of Howl right at City Lights Books in San Francisco in the summer of 1959, and then the signed limited edition of Kerouac's Visions of Cody a year or so later. I reveled, briefly, in the local Washington State aspects of Desolation Angels, and I fantasized becoming a fire lookout during the back-from-college summers, but found jobs in ROTC Camp kitchens and grocery produce sections instead. My fledgling-Beatnik fascination tailed off after the emotional pain of Big Sur and the rise of S.F. as the epicenter of hippiedom and the new Rock music. But I did keep apprised of Gary Snyder because he was a strange and fascinating source of rugged poetry combined with some sort of wiser, gentler Buddhist/Gaiaist/Native American thinking.

Only when the bookstore I ran in the Nineties also coincided with the release of new Kerouac texts, in a carefully orchestrated campaign by Jack's Estate and Viking/Penguin, did I reconnect with the haunts and the haunting residue of Beatdom--Pomes All Sizes, Book of Blues, the forbidding giant that should have been titled All of the Dharma and Then Some, Good Blonde & Others (excellent collection from a different publisher), two volumes of Selected Letters, the journal extracts published as Windblown World, even the holy grail of Kerouac texts: the much-vaunted and not-quite-mythic, railroad-dispatch-paper, taped-continuous-roll, typed-'round-the-clock, gleeful-and-genially-mad, overloaded-sentences, mid-revisions draft of On the Road simply known as "The Scroll." (C'mon, baby, let's do the Scroll!)

Thinking and writing about the Beat Scene again earlier this month made me realize I'd mostly stopped paying attention a decade ago, so I checked some Internet sites and discovered I absolutely "had" to acquire copies of the Kerouac CDs I mentioned last post, plus a fancy-package, 1997 reissue of Jack's '59 Readings album (I'd had an original version in the Rhino box set but sold that to an eager collector). I reached out too for the Jack Elliott album, Kerouac's Last Dream; a used copy of the supposedly straightforward bio, Kerouac: His Life and Work; and by Jack himself, the recent Penguin publication called Book of Sketches. (None of the four had arrived when I wrote the Good Beat piece, but they have since been trickling in.)

Man, talk about "Beat"... I bought used copies of the two CDs and definitely got what I paid for, fine-enough discs but Beat-up (Beat-down?) outer containers. Ramblin' Jack's set of folk tunes and Dylan covers--recorded in Germany in 1980, but never issued here till 1997--is easily one of his best-ever albums (even minus the original plastic jewel case). Elliott was at the top of his game 30 years ago, his guitar-picking sweet and solid, the twang of his voice just about perfect, and the familiar songs not yet become rotely or remotely "automatic Jack." Moreover, any album with a 10-minute performance of Elliott's "912 Greens," his great Talking Blues classic, belongs in every household in America. And seven or eight minutes in, by the way, comes the album's sole Kerouac reference, to a Mexican chair he sat in, transported now to New Orleans where the other Jack could plop down on it... Even so, the album's title doesn't really relate.

Also slightly trashed is the cardboard package housing cool Fifties-style postcards, a Ginsberg tribute to Kerouac, and a slightly worn CD of his excellent 1959 album, Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. But all's right with the world, nonetheless, because Jack is in fine fettle--alcohol-sober but loose and funny, occasionally dramatic, boppin' his cheery spontaneous prosepomes till the streetlights come up and the Beat cowboys come home. Jack's favorite subjects get plenty of mention--old bums, good-looking women, weird sounds, strong tea (as in pot, smoked rather than steeped), and Jazz circa 1949 (Diz and Pres, Monk and Bird)--short lyrics and longer set-pieces both, Bluesy San Francisco pomes, a slice of The Subterraneans, and the perennial Kerouac-style favorites known as "History of Bop" and "Neal and the Three Stooges."

Off the Road, busy taking notes, watching the world pass... Happy Jack, Kerouac at his peak... before the long, resentful, sorry slide into soul-Beaten drunkenness and stars-gone-out death. Best to remember Wild Jack criss-crossing America, with and without Dean/Neal; read that fun and funky Scroll. Poet Jack jotting his impressions, writing, always writing, fashioning hundreds of skinny Sketches; see the brilliant Book so named, its short-line prosepome shapes dictated by the tiny notebooks Kerouac carried everywhere. And Soul-full Jack, confused, sentimental, loving, unable to escape his mother and dead brother, sexually struggling and maybe less masculine than he looked--and no way bold and bearish enough to assume the "King of the Beat Generation" spokesman role American society thrust on him. (Drawing on newly available journals and letters, Paul Mayer's Kerouac bio is solid on the day-to-day chronology of his life, less interested in psychoanalysis and speculation.)

That was Kerouac, many things but finally just one thing: all ways Beat.

Sound Off

2011-06-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

Ornette Coleman was the subject of a JazzWax piece several days ago. Ornette's debut album, Something Else!!!, was reissued recently, and Marc Myers noted in passing that Cannonball Adderley's LP of approximately the same title (Somethin' Else, with Miles Davis guesting) had appeared at approximately the same time in 1958.

A whole scene popped immediately into my head, but when I tried to pass it on as a comment, Marc's recalcitrant server chewed it up and spit it out into space, or some sort of cloud of dissed-information. (Even the a.i.'s are critics these days!) I started to write it again, then realized--waste not, want not--that I should post it right here instead.

The encounter is imaginary and never happened... unless it did, of course. Some might think it should have.

* * * * *
Cannonball and Miles were playing a one-night gig in St. Louis, rehearsing some tunes for Adderley's upcoming album. Late in the evening, a slight, dark-skinned young man shuffled up to the bandstand carrying a small plastic saxophone and asked if he could sit in.

Cannon looked him up and down, saw new threads on a country boy, wrinkled like he'd just stepped down off the bus. The big man smiled. "That accent says Texas. And Blues maybe. Why, sure," checking Miles. "Ease on up here."

The trumpeter was remembering his first trip to the Apple, searching for Bird for days, finally sitting in... Miles just shrugged, called for "Autumn Leaves" in a slightly ascerbic key and, a few bars in, pointed at the newcomer: "Go."

Swirling leaves vanished, the song consumed by bleating goats, snakecharmers' pipes, staggering leaps and fits, plastic gold and deep African blues. Cannon listened to the kid's caterwauling for a few minutes, then stopped the tune. "Coal Man," he said, "you are somethin'."

"Somethin' else," rasped Miles. The two looked at each other. Adderley said, "Sounds like an album title to me."

Miles frowned at the plastic sax held in the young man's long fingers. "You got a lonely future right now. Get a real sax. Learn the changes." He half-turned, paused, laughing in that croaky way, "Better yet, find some Texas woman take you in."

Cannonball laughed then, too, and the dual leaders walked away.

The young saxophonist looked down at his odd sax and his scuffed shoes. He smiled just a bit and said nothing, keeping his own counsel as usual. He was already feeling the solitude... the aloneness... in his chest, and hearing some ornate harmolodic wails in his head.

He walked out of the club, straight to a nearby corner. Under a flickering streetlamp he began to blow. Cries and whispers...

He could almost see the sad lady, could almost see her face.

Good Beat

2011-06-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

It's useful to remember that Jack Kerouac's "Beat Generation" phrase in the beginning meant "street people Beat down to the bricks"; only later did he redefine those words as "Beatific and free-spirited." Despite all his whooping exuberance and popular acclaim, Kerouac was a sad cat--a brooding, miserable drunk living with his Memere, haunted by his dead brother Gerard, too busy observing and taking notes and writing in his mind to enjoy fully and freely all the wild and crazy experiences he went on and on about. (On the Road was nearly a decade in the making and remaking.)

Jack penned his literary hopes on hustling, hitchhiking, and having a ball, then tried exZentrick Buddhist tantras when the close focus on his car-thief, country-hound buddy Cassady didn't seem to be sellable--when that All-Americana Road kept going nowhere...

Yet he kept writing. Usually revved up on coffee or blasted on demon weed, Jack occasionally needed Bennies to help him pound out his Jazz poetry and "spontaneous Bop prose," and then rivers of booze to help him escape the clamoring sycophants, unwanted daughter, ex-friends, and excess fame he fled from when they all finally came knocking. His spirit and his liver gave out in 1969, long before the astonishing breadth of his worldwide success became apparent.

Much as the Kerouac Estate (administered by the Sampas family via Jack's last wife Stella) has overseen the gradual publication, since Jack packed it in, of two dozen previously unknown texts (some of them edited from larger works), with more and more academic studies of Kerouac's sprawling Duluoz saga appearing as well, so too is there a growing industry in recordings by, or in tribute to, Ti-Jean/Jack. Setting aside the audiobook versions of On the Road (two of the best are read by rock musician Graham Parker and actor Matt Dillon), there must be eight or ten widely varied releases worth acknowledging.

First, of course, are the three LP records issued in the late Fifties with Jack reading his own works. Poetry for the Beat Generation came first, a rare album initially issued by Dot, then quickly withdrawn and transferred to obscure Hanover Records, which most fans had no way of hearing until 1990 when Rhino Records issued a terrific box set housing Kerouac's official three (Poetry, plus Blues and Haikus and Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation) as well as a fourth LP of other uncollected readings. This set can still be found in some formats, but the major three also exist individually on CD now--the first with improvisational piano background courtesy of multi-tasker Steve Allen (who featured Jack on his television show), B&H graced with the waxing-and-wailing, counterpoint saxes of Zoot Sims and Al Cohn (some folks claim the duo ignored or, alternatively, sneered at the sad poet), and Readings, which presents Jack's solo voice only. That last is actually my favorite, mostly due to the variety of texts he drolly recites, chants, or reads.

Over the next 40 or 50 years, the albums that namechecked Kerouac were mostly minor acknowledgments of the influence of Jack's "spontaneous Bop prose" and presumed Beatific attitude on songwriters and performers ranging from Dylan and Tom Waits (A Beat cat if ever there was one!), to Patti Smith and Nick Cage, to Johnny Depp and Joe Strummer. Some examples of Jack's influence would be Patti Smith's poetic LP Horses; the casually titled album Beat by King Crimson; Tom Waits' Nighthawks at the Diner (to name just one among many); and Ramblin' Jack Elliott's 1980 return to the recording studio, Kerouac's Last Dream... all of them dating from the Seventies and Eighties.

More recent examples include several Estate-backed CDs. Two are featured later in this post, so I'll just quickly mention two others--the truly bizarre Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake, a 2CD dramatization of Kerouac's unproduced screenplay, here more like an episode of radio-show thriller The Shadow, with music by John Medeski and the cheerful participation of poets Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jim Carroll, Rock maverick Graham Parker, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, and others. (A thick, cartoon-illustrated book of the screenplay completes the package; issued in 2003, the set quickly became a rare collectible.) And in 2009 appeared the compelling film One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur (discussed here), which documents the 1960 events that led to Jack's end-of-his-tether novel of the same name--the set containing one DVD and a separate CD of the excellent Jay Farrar/Benjamin Gibbard song-score.

Jazz musicians have occasionally remembered Kerouac too, from the early Fifties Esoteric LPs issuing Jerry Newman's Forties' club recordings of Monk, Gillespie, Charlie Christian, and others--some tunes given names referencing jam-session fan Jack--to last year's 2CD set devoted to the Fifties BeBop records of tenor sax man Brew Moore, titled The Kerouac Connection merely because Jack wrote about him in On the Road.

But the most lasting Jazz tribute came from an unlikely source; in 1981, ever-hip vocalist Mark Murphy put out his homage LP, Bop for Kerouac, offering Mark's inimitable versions of standards named in Kerouac's novels--arranged by fine pianist Bill Mays and with wildman Richie Cole adding alto sax--together with wonderful readings of excerpts from Jack's restless prose. "Mellow... mournful... magical" are some of the words I'd use to describe Mark's singing and reciting; highlights include the sung "Be Bop Lives (Boplicity)" and "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," leading to the talked and sung "Parker's Mood" "(with an excerpt from The Subterraneans) and the final, perfect "Ballad of the Sad Young Men," which segues from the well-regarded sunset-on-the-Hudson ending of On the Road into Murphy's definitive reading of the song.

The album's LP and then CD sales and general critical acclaim led to an '86 sequel called Kerouac, Then and Now. I suppose that less-compelling title suggests the less-astonishing, me-too problem facing sequels in general. But Murphy and arranger Mays work overtime to dispel any doubts. Mark soothes through "If You Could See Me Now" and "Ask Me Now" both, shows his scat chops on Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" and a so-slow bit chipped from Billy's late gem, the chilling tune "Blood Count," but then falters some in the recitations--less-involving, too-brief passages from Big Sur and On the Road, plus a not-so-funny take on hipster comedian Lord Buckley.

Still, Murphy's pair of aces went unchallenged until the late Nineties, when the Sampas folks stepped forward to unveil some "new" Kerouac to revitalize his rep among Rockers and Jazz cats. Following tribute events in NYC and Lowell, Mass., Jim Sampas and Rykodisc Records invited a host of young and older performers to contribute their versions of Kerouac "pomes" or prose passages. The resulting album, Kerouac--kicks joy darkness, is bracing and boring, wacky and wasted and wonderful in about equal measure. Joe Strummer of the Clash plays guitar and more behind a tape of Jack reciting excerpts from "MacDougal Street Blues," and Allen Ginsburg works easily through nine-tenths of "The Brooklyn Bridge Blues," with the final tenth supplied later by folkie Eric Anderson actually standing on the bridge with traffic noise for accompaniment. Hunter S. Thompson goofs around, and William Burroughs goes cowboy-straight for "Old Western Movies." (Backing duo "tomandandy" don't.) Soon-to-be-dead singer Warren Zevon tackles Death head-on in Jack's excellent "Running Through--Chinese Poem Song," and the group Morphine provides a great original called "Kerouac" that outdoes the Beatman.

Patti Smith, Eddie Vedder, Michael Stipe, Johnny Depp, John Cale, Matt Dillon... they're all here; some making new-Jack swing, others just phoning it in. There are 25 tracks in all and only a handful that flop. But oddly enough, it's the longer prose chunks and excerpts from Visions of Cody that seem less interesting than Jack's odds-'n'-ends pomes-with-music-attached.

A separate venture, and a wonderful one, came two years later: Jack Kerouac reads On the Road. This one was and is a major addition to the Kerouac biblio(disco)graphy--late Fifties tapes of Jack reading, reciting, even singing, or goofing on a few Jazz songs anyway; some cuts with music present on the original, some with music added (courtesy of keyboards whiz John Medeski and Jack's friend, composer and player David Amram), and one left blessedly unimproved, allowing Jack to sink or swim alone. And, man, does he--freestyle, at a 29-minute pace!

The songs are Kerouacker Jack croonerisms, surprisingly funny and fine ("Come Rain or Come Shine," "Ain't We Got Fun," a pair of bluesier tunes), and a terrific two minutes of On the Road made musical by Jack and Medeski. Amram's accompaniments to the 9-minute "Orizaba 210 Blues" and double-that "Washington D.C. Blues" (previously unpublished) are rich and strange, lightly packed with ever-changing flute, conga, ocarina, piano, oboe, viola, French horn, shanai, dumbek, and the rest of the World Music kitchen sink. Between Jack's focused performances and David's madcap mellifluities, a grand time can be had by all.

There are two other excerpts from On the Road included here. (And the fold-out liner notes are laid out sideways, using very small print, designed to resemble the infamous typed Road scroll.) The concluding track is a potent, patently percussive, Waitsian-wasted warble that ends the album not so much on a high note as on a blasted baritone croak. Yes, it's Tom of the Beaten voice, for whom neither Time nor tide has Waited. And for a taste... well, a whole meal... of the real thing we turn to the album's centerpiece, Jack's half-hour reading of the well-loved portion of On the Road, separately printed, early on, as "Jazz of the Beat Generation"--a sterling-silver (Beaten-gold?) sample of spontaneus Bop prose in motion: the Beat set but changeable, Beaten down but unBeaten, Beatific and comic too, Beatitudinous and yet with attitude. Much of the best of Jack captured on a tape that almost no one knew existed, a performance full of piss, vinegar, "Dean Moriarty," saxmen Lester Young and Charlie Parker, good drinks, better women, and the best of Jazz morphed by spontaneous Bop prosody into a new variety of literature. (One that's got a good Beat you can even dance to!)

Release into the moment, Jack (blue) noted elsewhere, and "so he said it and sang it and blew it through to the stars and on out."

Ozzie Bailey Too

2011-06-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Six months ago I posted a brief piece titled "Ozzie Strays," an introduction of sorts to Ozzie Bailey, a littleknown vocalist who sang with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra around 1957-58. Ozzie performed on Duke's 1957 television special A Drum Is a Woman as well as the accompanying long-play record. He toured with the band around then, appearing overseas and at Newport with Duke in 1958 (his feature was a French/English version of "Autumn Leaves" arranged by Billy Strayhorn), and slightly later Ozzie also recorded some songs, demos maybe, for a Strayhorn project.

Then he seems to have vanished from the Jazz scene. My post asked the basic questions--who was this guy? what became of him?--and I asked for additional information from anyone who happened to read the piece and could help. Time went by and then two weeks ago, a man named "Art Serating" submitted the comment I am about to reproduce. I've sent a couple of emails to Mr. Serating's odd return address, but no further communiques have been forthcoming. So I offer his emailed comment now without having verified any of it...

I met Ozzie in New York in 1971. He and I worked together as sales clerks in the record department in the Doubleday Bookshop on Fifth Avenue & 53rd Street. He was extremely shy and spoke very little about his experiences with Duke Ellington but other employees already knew of his incredible talent. We played music in the store all day and he frequently sang along to everyone's delight. His favorite lunch was a Smithfield Burger from the hamburger shop down the block.

I never saw him lose his cool. He was a real gentleman. Ozzie had a great musical memory and he would always help customers find what they were looking for. Famous New York entertainers frequently visited Ozzie at the store and we were all impressed with his circle of friends. Ozzie passed on some years ago but his beautiful voice goes on forever.

From band vocalist to bookstore clerk just a decade later. In the unanswered emails I asked Serating if any of Ozzie's Ellington reminiscences could be shared... what celebrity friends visited him at the store... when precisely he had died... and so on. But no response.

So the world may know more about Ozzie Bailey now--or not--but the mystery surrounding his curious life continues...

So Rare

2011-05-31T11:40:00.000-07:00

Following on foot the well-worn bicycle-tire tracks of Doug Ramsey, time-and-tidesman of that most excellent blog Rifftides, I offer a sort of current weather report. (Absent Jaco, Joe, and elusive Wayne, I'm filling in.) "Everyone talks about the weather," said Mark Twain, or more likely someone else, "but no one does" (read: can do) "anything about it."

It has been a hellacious Spring all across the Midwest, where tornados of a size and wind-strength not suffered in dozens, maybe hundreds of years, have wreaked total havoc, eradicating whole towns and scything off horrific numbers of lives. Drought, storms, floods, earthquakes... disasters are in fact sweeping the world, though "scouring" might be a more accurate verb. If this isn't climate change or global warming at work, well, we must be experiencing the Wrath of an Angry God, and one can only fear for the Fall ahead.

But here comes June, glorious, sweet-scented June... in times past thought of as a most peaceful month, a time for green growth, lovers and weddings, the warmth of the sun, an easy transition into Summer. And--we vaguely recall--what is so rare as a day in June? (Then, if ever, come perfect days.)

Who wrote that anyway? One of the elder poet Lowells? Nature-besotted Thoreau? Old Will himself? (If you picked the first and added "James Russell," you are correct and--in your identification of the author--possibly "so rare," these days, as a dry 24 hours.)

Yes, June is bustin' out all over, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. (That would be a turtle dove and not the silent twerp who won't come out of his shell.) However, if you are a resident of the Pacific Northwest, specifically the region west of the Cascade Mountains, you have long since come to realize that the voice heard and the green seen are illusions, prevarications, because gray clouds and rain will continue, intermittently but too frequently, for another five to six weeks. Summer around here really begins sometime after the 8th or 10th of July; then, usually, the rains stop.

But the interminable grayness of our skies, lasting for two-thirds of the year and more, causes much complaining--all that talk and no action--not to mention lack-of-light clinical depression and too many suicides. Sad people wait out the Winter and the sodden Spring, only to find a wet June and no hope remaining in them. Mark Twain (in his Samuel Clemens, Western reporter days) supposedly also said something like... "The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer on Puget Sound." However, San Francisco too claims to be the locale he insulted so. Young Sam did get around, but faulty attribution is no surer than a Seattle June.

Idly curious, I looked up James Russell Lowell, forgotten poet and cornstalk philospher, in a funky quotations book I got somewhere; turns out that while he was no Emerson or Samuel Johnson (much less Shakespeare) for number of quotable remarks, his 16 selections do put him on a par with Ambrose Bierce and Albert Camus, and ahead of Keats, Thomas Hardy, and hundreds of other quoteworthy persons. And, remarkably (so to speak), Lowell did have more pithy words on seasonal weather. Here are three pertinent examples (impert- maybe):

Take a winter as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him: and tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac
A ghastly parody of real Spring
Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.

There is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

Weather or not, drenched or dried out, a Western Washington June just doesn't provide any answers or much relief. What is "so rare" around here? June bug beetles? A Juneteenth celebration? A Seattle sports team becoming national champion, in June or any other month? A song performed by Jimmy Dorsey, with insipid lyrics about old champagne, blossoms fair, heaven on earth, and love so rare? (Sorry; nothing there.) And Lowell's poem is no better. It becomes a laundry list, way too lengthy, of the changes June brings to Nature and Man; the lines are mostly forgettable and, indeed, have been forgotten.

But one brief passage--words taken at the flood, you might say--did catch my eye and ear, its current circling back to the opening sentence of this blog post:

Now is the high-tide of the year,
And whatever of life hath ebbed away
Comes flooding back...

Paul Oliver's Blues

2011-05-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

A friend in Los Angeles named Bruce Lofgren is a working Jazz musician--hard-working, yet still "scuffling," I think--who plays guitar, composes, produces occasionally, leads a big band, and also teaches for a living. Bruce sends out a "Gig Alert!" (a private email blast to fans and friends) whenever he's hired for a night or weekend, usually booked as a duo or trio.

I wanted to give proper credit to that email-notice idea... because I have a big-time Gig Alert! to announce and help publicize. Paul Oliver, the premier Blues expert of the U.K.--a serious scholar, multiple books author, field recorder, album compiler, liner notes writer, records/CDs reviewer, and much more, universally acknowledged as one of the top Blues experts in the world, and a much-honored architect in his "real life"--will be appearing in the East Bay Area on June 4 and 5. He'll be speaking and participating in organized discussions both days at Down Home Music in Richmond/El Cerrito, in a belated but important postscript to this year's 50th Anniversary of Arhoolie Records and its remarkable founder Chris Strachwitz. The main celebrations occurred several weeks ago, but octogenarian Oliver had health problems and could not make it to the States at that time as planned.

The delay might well prove a blessing in disguise, because now the attention of fans, critics, and collectors can be focused completely on Oliver and Strachwitz, who have been good friends and fellow Blues enthusiasts for well over 50 years. How the Polish immigrant turned 78s collector and the English architect first connected I don't know, but Oliver's Blues research began in the early Fifties and by 1960 he had already published a brief biography of Bessie Smith plus Blues Fell This Morning, his inspired study of Blues lyrics--broad themes and individual "pet" subjects, poetic images, hidden subtexts, and personal demons--the book also including an Introduction by Black author Richard Wright.

By the late Fifties Chris's excursions throughout central California searching for 78s had convinced him he needed to get to the Southern source. So in '59 he traveled to Houston and there managed to meet both eccentric collector-scholar Mack McCormick and brilliant, then-littleknown Blues musician Lightnin' Hopkins. As a result Strachwitz decided he'd head back South the following summer to try recording Blues folk he met while scouting those old 78s. Several thousand miles away, Oliver by then had won an assignment from the BBC to create aural documentaries on Southern music and social history; and after initial stops in Detroit, Chicago and Memphis, he and co-researcher wife Valerie joined forces with Chris and his big automobile to follow leads further South, to locate and record interesting characters who might or might not be working musicians too.

And that's what any attendee at the June sessions will be hearing... their adventures on the road and in the field (so to speak); and how Oliver and Strachwitz eagerly, but inadvertantly, kickstarted the Blues Revival. Oh, they won't make such exaggerated claims themselves, but I will on their behalf. The guys will just talk about traveling through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, connecting with known and unknown musicians, sharing the work and the results of the field recordings, each of them eventually going home with material he could work with.

Chris launched Arhoolie Records on the strength of his "back porch" recordings of newly discovered elder songster Mance Lipscomb, and followed up with LPs from other casual field sessions by Black Ace, Alex Moore, Lil' Son Jackson, Sam Chatmon, Butch Cage and Willie Thomas, and several others. (A fine trip sampler is Arhoolie CD 432, I Have to Paint My Face.) The slow, steady sales of these releases allowed him over the next three years to record Big Joe Williams, master slide guitarist Fred McDowell, more of Mance, Lightnin' Hopkins (at last!), and then Lightnin's "cousin," Zydeco man Clifton Chenier, and many more. The Arhoolie label soon came to mean Roots Music from most corners of America, as forever-whimsical-collector Strachwitz expanded his interests: Tex-Mex border music (norteno, corrido, conjunto and more); Cajun yelps and Zydeco steps; Bay Area folk in both Folk and Jazz; even Polkas alongside more Blues.

Meanwhile Oliver had produced the expected BBC radio-documentaries--and then, using transcriptions of the hundred or so interviews he'd taped during the trip, created a portrait of the Black South circa 1960, his carefully edited compilation titled Conversation with the Blues (published in 1965), one of the greatest of all such books, rigorously organized yet with language left a bit raw, a racially troubling stunner supposedly issued in the U.K. and U.S. both, though I've never come across an American copy. I was a crazed Blues fan in the mid-Sixties and when I read about the book in the English magazine Blues Unlimited, I promptly ordered one straight from England. (A few years later I also found a copy of the same-name, long-play documentary record issued only in the U.K. Both are among my prized collectibles.)

I actually owe Oliver a debt of gratitude. I pored over his book, mesmerized by the localized dialects and colorful slang and the much-prized "poetry of the Blues" that he had captured on tape. Those remarkable interview excerpts showed me the way forward, and when I wrote my Robert Johnson screenplay, Hellhound on My Trail, in 1968-69, I know full well I incorporated some rhythms and diction and a few particular images I'd found in Conversation. The book definitely helped this grateful white boy's dialogue sound more believable, more convincingly Black.

Around 1969 Oliver published another gem, his photo-rich history titled The Story of the Blues--which many, including me, still consider the best single historical text on the subject. And when I worked as a freeform, hippie-FM disc jockey for a year, I used to read portions of his chapters on the air and play the pertinent or related music samples to match whatever subject or period Oliver was describing. (Helped me fill an eight-hour on-air shift too!) The listeners who phoned in ran about four-to-one in favor of my mini-docs on "The Blues According to Paul Oliver," but even better were the complainers who'd say, "Enough already with that boring old stuff. Play some Hendrix... or Led Zeppelin." Right, the irony was perfect.

Here's the final prescient paragraph of Oliver's Introduction written for the earlier work (with English punctuation and spelling), which summarizes nicely the intent of both books; it also shows him as both elegant poet and straightforward scholar:

In retrospect the recorded conversations from which the following transcriptions have been made seem to have been registered at a significant point in the history of the blues. A long musical tradition led to the threshold of the 'sixties; the rapid changes brought about by popularization and imitation were still to come. Far from the close-carpeted artistes' rooms backstage at the concert hall, the coffee lounge or the college auditorium the recordings were made in shot-gun shack and brownstone house, Mississippi barber shop and Memphis pool-room, in Negro juke and coloured hotel, on street corners and front porches, in club and bar-room, basement and tenement, record shop and garage from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Barrelhouse pianists and juke-joint guitarists, street singers and travelling show entertainers, jazz musicians and jug band players, sharecroppers and mill-workers, vagrants and migrants, mechanics and labourers--these were amongst the speakers. Some had secure jobs, some had none; some were on relief and some in retirement; some played for themselves, some played for others, some had once ridden high and others were going down slow, some were famous, some unknown, some were young and others venerable: all had played their part in shaping the pattern of the blues. It was a pattern that emerged slowly, logically, dictating its own order from the many hundreds of thousands of words transcribed from the results of weeks of recording: a pattern that was not the history of the blues in detailed terms of every personality and style and region, but which was, nonetheless, from the lips of those who made it, the story of the blues.

Oliver and Strachwitz will have many fine tales to tell, no doubt; fifty years of collecting, serious research, various other books, and hundreds of new albums and historical reissues give them plenty to talk about. I can't attend--no money for another trip right now, not even just to San Francisco and its environs--but I'll be there in spirit. For now, like the old days at KOL-FM, I'm "Broadcasting the Blues" once more.

A Sellecked Group

2011-05-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

What is it that keeps some actors trapped on the small screen only--stars of the medium, series television favorites for decades, skilled performers commanding respect from many and adulation from still more, yet blithely ignored by Hollywood?

Some varied examples... Clint Eastwood started in TV with not much future, but went to Europe to play a silent gunslinger and returned a triple-threat star (actor, director, composer of film music). Clint and the spaghetti Westerns were a perfect match, but most other "oater" actors rode no further than your living room; even wry and steady James Garner is remembered more for his series roles and TV movies than as a comic "Support" actor. Hugely popular sitcom stars like the Friends and Seinfeld casts basically just disappeared once their shows ground to a halt; only ginger-and-spicy Jennifer Anniston and wee, weaselly Jason Whosit could convince big-bucks film cameras to love them. And the daytime soaps' perennial lean and hungry villainess, Susan Lucci... ready for prime time and beyond, like, say, Joan "Conniving B." Collins? Nope... no chance.

Plum roles, or stereotyping that ignores skills; unexpected audience affection, or inexplicable rejection, or sudden smash-hit fame--these can make or break an actor regardless of talent. What, then, might be held to account for the major stardom and Hollywood credits denied sturdy, steadfast actor Tom Selleck--who just may have been television's top, quietly macho leading man for four decades, bigger and tougher than, say, fave male lead Harrison Ford, but denied the great plots and parts Lucas and Spielberg dreamed up for "IndyHana." Selleck arose from early defeats on The Dating Game, to his Hawaii/Ferrari/bachelor heyday as Magnum, P.I., and a subsequent recurring role in the Friends supporting cast. But he is probably best-known now for his latter-day triumphs in made-for-TV adaptations of Louis L'Amour's laconic Westerns and Robert B. Parker's bleak Jesse Stone "Easterns," and his current anchoring role as the conscientious NYC Police Commissioner, head of the multi-cop, multi-generation Reagan family, in the first-year hit series called Blue Bloods.

After a dozen big-screen, but mostly forgettable films in the Eighties and early Nineties, Selleck retreated to the screen size that seemed to favor his solidity and seriousness. Well, is this then a case for culture cop Marshall McLuhan of the C.S.I. (Canadian Superfluous Interpretations) to unravel? Something like this: our hero, a man of few words but always of his word, functions best in the cool medium where we viewers must do most of the work, fitting video picture itself together, as well as character bits, sketchy simplified sound, plot stories interrupted by commercials and children and telephones ringing, into a "unified" television picture and comprehendable image. No, it seems too doctrinaire an answer.

But there are odd bits to acknowledge here. Selleck actually scored a major movie hit in '87 with Three Men and a Baby, and used his subsequent "juice" (Tom's word) to get the green-light for his (also successful) Aussie Western called Quigley Down Under. And even before those... anomalies, maybe?... he supposedly was first choice to play Indiana Jones but, bound by his Magnum contract, had to turn it down. (If that's accurate, how did he then get to film, still during the Magnum run, Three Men plus The Shadow Riders and Lassiter and one or two other losers?)

Selleck back then was close to 6' 4' and in athletic trim, had played college basketball and then national-level volleyball, was handsome and tough, a tireless tower of strength (literally) who could also smolder in anger, becoming more dangerous the quieter he got. So why didn't moviegoers embrace his films? (Even his fun, mock-Indy movie, High Road to China, just barely got off the ground.) Poor project choices? Inadequate scripts? Too four-square a character and jaw?

The success of Quigley suggested a way forward--continue making Westerns, even if they were to premiere only on television--projects suited to his size and demeanor, his signature retro mustache and Second Amendment, gun-owner attitude. If dumbed-down, no-attention-span moviegoers had no use for all that Old School stuff, then, fine, he'd stick with the becouched and bemesmered older folks at home. And so, with Selleck starring and also serving as Executive Producer, there appeared at irregular intervals Ruby Jean and Joe, a fine modern-times story of rodeo and race (1996); Last Stand at Saber River, a tough tale dating from Elmore Leonard's early Western novels period (1997); Crossfire Trail, the third or fourth Louis L'Amour book that Tom took on (2001); and finally in 2003 his classy and superior remake of Monte Walsh, the classic aging-cowboy novel written by Jack Schaefer. Four excellent Westerns in eight years and each one better than the ones before. The man definitely could sit a horse...

During that same period Selleck also tried his hand at Broadway (a new production of A Thousand Clowns, lost in the post-9/11 malaise); took a close-to-villain part in the courtroom drama Reversible Errors; and portrayed a sexy politician in the romantic comedy Running Mates, with Tom the hens-pecked candidate surrounded by ex-lovers with personal and political agendas! Then Selleck shaved head and mustache both to become a credible General Dwight D. Eisenhower for the compact mini-series Ike: Countdown to D-Day.

As some of those roles suggest, the inescapable aging had begun. Tom was some thicker and some weighted down by time and circumstance. It was time to get down off the horses... and just then came the right circumstance too. CBS proposed that Selleck do a TV film or two based on the on-going Jesse Stone novels by Robert B. Parker, best known as author of the wiseass private eye series about Spenser and Susan and Hawk. His new character Stone was an older, tireder, hard-drinking ex-cop transplanted from Southern California to coastal Massachusetts--to a small town misnamed Paradise.

As the wry and cranky, too-often-silent police chief, Selleck was--not to put too fine a point on it--perfect. Still handsome but starting to go to seed, cagily mentoring his quirky deputies, surviving the prying town council and the dogs that adopt him and the lovely women who drift through and, oh yeah, solving the crimes and mysteries that show up even in Paradise. Jesse/Tom is clearly a flawed but decent man making the best he can of his private sorrows and his unkempt life.

The first film, Stone Cold, proved a welcome success, so the network ordered a second, then a third, and so on; the Stone series has continued right up to the present, one film per year more or less, with Selleck also Executive Producing (lately co-scripting too) and the audience growing exponentially. The seventh film, an original script titled Innocents Lost, will be broadcast on May 22, and I'll be tuned in as always...

Just as I was every Friday night these past several months, savoring Selleck as Police Commissioner Frank Reagan, overseeing the massive New York City Police in the new high-ranking series Blue Bloods. The man at age 60 or so exudes decency, dignity, gravitas, ethical strength, perhaps greatness, and the actor portrays as well Frank's expansive love for, and careful attention to, the extended Reagan family, four generations of policemen, lawyers, spouses, grandchildren and others, that come to his house for dinner every Sunday--a Norman Rockwell scene that may be comical or argumentative or saddened by events. Meanwhile, back on the job, pater familias Tom is by turns witty, sometimes cagey, briskly all-business, cautious about political matters--but when his family or his men or his city are threatened or harmed, he may suddenly become steely angry, but still holding himself back from shouting out orders. A complex guy, our Frank.

Commissioner Reagan is a hell of a part, and the repeating role of Stone a career-maker. Good thing they've been entrusted to quietly extraordinary Tom Selleck... who maybe should stick with television roles after all.

Goin' Up the Country

2011-05-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Cajun or Zydeco? Zydeco or Cajun? Which of the Southwest Louisiana-centered Francophone cultures--Black and mixed-blood Zydeco, or White Cajun--is the more vibrant, even perhaps becoming dominant in this second decade of the 21st century?

And, anyway, shouldn't we be talking "Creole" (a social/historical term) rather than Zydeco (a type of music, with some attendant activities)--that is, concerning the folks of Spanish-French-Caribbean derivation, but mixing in gens libres de couleur and migrant Blacks bearing their ex-slave heritage, all of whom moved up-country from New Orleans--when attempting to comprehend such a thriving culture?

The two days we spent zipping around the diamond-shaped area defined by Ville Platte at the top, the Eunice-to-Opelousas horizontal axis, and on down through historic Grand Coteau to Breaux Bridge, gave us only a brief taste of either. We enjoyed Louisiana hospitality everywhere; saw rice farms and running horses and flat expanses to the horizon, as well as beat-down Zydeco dance clubs and abandoned shacks and modern homes up on blocks (for flooding, which the government is about to allow!); sampled Gulf cooking (blackened fish! shrimp gumbo! ubiquitous bright-red crawfish in too many dishes!), savoring all at first but quickly reaching overload; and, forced to travel midweek, heard not nearly enough local music, live or on the radio.

We bought CDs, both Cajun and Zydeco, at Floyd's Record Shop, the six-decades center from which Floyd Soileau issued Swallow and Maison du Soul singles and albums grand and galore. We found the best of Cajun music and quiet, cheerful camraderie at Marc Savoy's spare but packed factory-cum-weekend jam headquarters, where he and main assistant Tina Pilione and an occasional Savoy son build handmade Acadian accordions selling for hundreds and thousands of dollars. And we did manage to catch a couple of terrific sets offered by three of the key players from the young band Feufollet--the basic, traditional Cajun, trio line-up of squeezebox and support fiddle (Chris Stafford), lead fiddle (Chris Segura), and rhythm guitar and vocals (Anna Laura Edmiston)--which really only whetted the appetite... But, sadly, there's not much music happening midweek now.

So we missed out on hearing Zydeco and seeing the dressed-to-the-pommel, boots-to-Stetson-garbed dancers go at it for hours on a Saturday night. And "missed" is the right word, because just two days after our brief visit to Breaux Bridge, the annual Crawfish Festival began, and its music stages were packed with all of the name Zydeco bands, new or established, of the prairies: Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas, sassy Rosie Ledet, Keith Frank, Zydeco Force, Terrance Simien, the Carrier clan in some configuration, and umpteen others, but most significantly early Black accordionist/composer Amede Ardoin's third generation descendent, the young accordion genius Chris Ardoin (prime mover in the adaptation of modern Black Music into Zydeco), performing hours on end for three amazing days... or so I assume, not having been able to stick around to experience the festival's music. (Conspicuously missing from the previous list are Boozoo Chavis and Beau Jocque, the recently deceased leaders of two driving-riffs, mainstay groups.)

So we came that close to encountering both Black Creole and White Cajun in a much-compressed timeframe. Few would say that racial divides don't still exist in Cajun country. The two musics have their separate clubs and adherents and occasional incidents. But there's much crossing of lines back and forth by the musicians themselves. Master fiddler Michael Doucet and younger accordionist Steve Riley play Zydeco as well as Cajun and appear on Black artists' CDs. Older figures like Buckwheat Zydeco and Rockin' Dopsie have played with Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and other rockers. Generational bandleaders Nathan Williams and Geno Delafose routinely welcome White contributors to their hot Zydeco releases, and both men are quite willing to draw on Cajun classics as well as old Creole tunes for their inspiration. Cajun rocker Wayne Toups mixes the two musics and calls his group the ZydeCajuns. Even original Zydeco king Clifton Chenier, who certainly experienced decades of segregation's offenses, cut one album with Elvin Bishop guesting and later welcomed slide-guitar great Sonny Landreth into his Red Hot Louisiana Band.

Zydeco has become hugely popular around the world, and Cajun music struggles to keep up, still somewhat tied to the old ways and smaller venues, the front-parlor fais do-do dancing and front-porch musicmaking on weekends. Groups dedicated to preserving, and carefully updating, Cajun tradition include Mike Doucet's BeauSoleil, the Savoy Family Band, and the terrific trio merger known as the Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band. I recently learned that Doucet and the Savoys are all coming to Port Townsend, Washington's Fiddle Fest this July. (Fifty-some miles away? You can bet I'll be attending a concert/dance/casual jam or three!)

And at the soon-to-come Seattle Center's 2011 Children's Festival, Geno Delafose and his French Rockin' Boogie band will be performing over several days. The Delafose family has been a mainstay of Zydeco for nearly five decades, and I recommend Geno's geniality, exciting accordion work, and solid mix of Zydeco, soul and r&b, old Cajun and older Black Creole, all-spiced with a smidgin of Hip-Hop, and cheerfully blended to make you get up and dance. As he sings, "Everybody dancin' all night long, Somebody dancin' to my song."

Southwest Louisianans? You can steam them and boil them and drench them in oil, but--merci le Bon Dieu--you can't wash them away. And you can't keep them up-country isolate, cher, no more neither.

I Didn't Know Beans

2011-05-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

The first time I was in Cajun country was 1954 or '55. I rode in a panel truck with my maternal grandfather; with no one left to work it, Grandaddy had sold the hundred-acre family farm in Georgia and followed his several sons to their new home in Shreveport, Louisiana. The four Spivey brothers had opened a barbecue place, pretty much a take-out stand in the beginning, which had become an instant rage because folks loved the smoky-hot Spivey barbecue sauce. So the brothers bottled it and sold the sauce locally, then regionally, and eventually all across the South. But that was later. With me as nervous helper, Grandaddy was briefly filling in for a sick driver, delivering barbecue sauce and the new Spivey hot sauce down to the Cajun prairies, to grocery stores located from Natchitoches on eastward.

I don't actually remember much about the day, too restive to pay much attention to the farmlands we rode through, but caught up in the unspoken pleasure of grandfather and grandson traveling together. I was eleven.

The trip Sandra and I are on now comes over a half-century later. All the many elder Spiveys are dead, and the sauce company was bought out and the sauces killed by deep-pockets rival Kraft Foods. We're flying to Shreveport for the wedding of our son Mike, a major in the Air Force, stationed at Barksdale. (The years do go by.) I still have cousins in the area, but we're not close and I don't plan to visit any this time. Instead Sandra and I are driving on south to Opelousas and Breaux Bridge, Mamou and Eunice and Ville Platte, for a quick, two-stepping, two-day sweep and scamper (prior to the wedding duties). We'll be dining on crawfish and boudin and shrimp gumbo and listening to Cajun music--a young band named Feufollet in a restaurant concert, Marc Savoy (I hope!) testing his latest hand-made accordions at his famous music shop near Eunice, checking out CDs and older LPs at Floyd Soileau's Record Shop (a 50-year Cajun country landmark).

My recent crash course in this special dance-oriented music and French-derived, unique sheltered culture opened another door too. The Black and mixed-blood French-speaking Creoles of Southwest Louisiana have their own versions that borrow some from White Cajun traditions, but are much more derived from African and Caribbean, Native American and slave-heritage experiences. The Creole variation on Cajun music's accordion-and-fiddle basics adds blues and r&b and bigger driving rhythms to create what's called Zydeco music. That odd word is an organized modern spelling of some garbled French words once found in several variations probably going back to a folk saying for poverty and hard times, "Les haricots sont pas sale," which translates as "Green beans without salt"--the understood reason being "no salt meat to flavor them."

Clifton Chenier (pronounced shen-YAY) was the great Black Creole musician who codified Zydeco and became its recognized "King," from about 1960 until his death from diabetes problems in the late Eighties; and I have a small connection to Chenier's rise to prominence. In the mid-Sixties producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records met Clifton via his cousin, Blues great Lightnin' Hopkins, and immediately began producing/issuing Zydeco albums demonstrating Chenier's astonishing piano-key accordion work and killer vocals, his creative songwriting, range of expression, great variety, and knowledge of older-style Creole musics but combined with a fully modern, r&b-friendly allegiance to funk and soul. Chenier was a bundle of dynamite with the fuse lit, about to explode, and as a crazed Blues fan I happened to buy his first LP, Louisiana Blues & Zydeco, in '66, just out of curiosity.

I loved it. I mean, I really loved it. Played the thing, especially the first side, so much that I wore out that copy and immediately bought another. Played it for dinner guests and made a mental note never to invite back anyone who didn't flip for it too. Also bought his next two Arhoolie albums right when each was released. (They were fine too if not as startling and unique.) The third came out in 1969 about the time that I was trying to persuade Rolling Stone to let me review records, and Chenier's was just obscure enough for me to get the assignment. Editor Greil Marcus liked the brief piece I wrote enough to run it in the August 23 issue, which launched my career as a reviewer. (I lasted a half-dozen years writing for a variety of publications.)

But I like to think my review helped spread the word about Chenier too. Strachwitz enjoyed the slight notice enough to make reprints of it to mail out, and then he included it in a roots-music promotion magazine he created to publicize Arhoolie albums. I don't know if any of it had much effect on Clifton's career in the long run, but I sure hope so.

Can't say if we'll luck into any Zydeco on this hurried visit, but I offer here that 42-year-old review in honor of all things creative in South Louisiana--from New Orleans across to Lake Charles and beyond; Black, White, or indeterminate color--including the long-established but now expanding phenomenon of Creole trail rides complete with Zydeco both live and recorded, recently examined at length in The New York Times. Someone reading the old review now may be new to Chenier and Zydeco, and wisely want to investigate further. NOTE: Album issued originally as Arhoolie LP 1034; half the cuts can be found now on CD-329 along with the whole of Louisiana Blues & Zydeco. And the strange decisions on capitalizing were the magazine's:

Black Snake Blues

Clifton Chenier's name is not exactly a household word--though it should be. But maybe that's all about to change. It can't be every day that "The King of the South" (as Chenier is known along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast) gets two separate plugs in a single issue of Billboard, as happened in the July 12th edition. Chenier, you see, a blues singer and accordionist-extraordinaire, is the foremost practitioner of that black Louisiana-cajun R&B called zydeco or, sometimes, zodico; and--in my house at least--the release of any new Chenier album is cause for rejoicing.

In the 18th century, the French Acadians of Nova Scotia (remember Longfellow's long poem Evangeline?) fled persecution from the British Canadian government and settled in Southwest Louisiana, where their French influences quickly became dominant. Cajun Louisiana has stayed that way right up to the present. Cajun music--a guitar-accordion-and-fiddle combination of French and C&W--survives today, as does its black variant, zydeco, which adds a heavy R&B overlay of drums and washboard. Waltzes, two-steps, slow blues, rock and roll tunes--they're all a part of zydeco, and they're all in Chenier's fantastic repertory.

Black Snake marks his third album for Arhoolie (though he's been recording regional Southern hits since the early Fifties)--and it's just more of the same great music: plaintive blues like the title tune, Frenchified versions of Fats Domino's "Walkin' to New Orleans" and Ivory Joe Hunter's "When I Lost My Baby," and wild up-tempo rockers like "Johnny Can't Dance," all filled with pumping, jumping accordion and raspy churchkey-scratched steel rubboard.

Zydeco, I admit, is probably an acquired taste--and maybe I'm lucky to have kinfolk living in Shreveport, La. But, brother, you got to get it on. And the album that'll do it best is Chenier's first, Louisiana Blues and Zydeco (Arhoolie 1024). Buy Black Snake if you're already into zydeco; but if you're new to French "La La" music played black Gumbo style, then start with LB&Z. I promise you it'll rock all your cares away.

* * * * * *
In the beginning, it was just Clifton on the huge piano accordion and his brother Cleveland supplying rubboard (frottoir) rhythm. By the time both Cheniers were gone, a hundred Zydeco bands had formed to follow in Clifton's footsteps. Most of the newer leaders--then and still today--do their whipping and wailing on smaller single-, double-, and sometimes triple-row squeezeboxes better suited to the simpler, stripped-down, riff-repeating groove and hip-hop rhythms favored now. But there's another reason: none of them, not even Clifton's successful bandleading son C.J., can match the complex, sophisticated, powerhouse playing of the late and still-lamented King.

May One Speak Out?

2011-04-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

The first day of May takes on added significance this year, the year of Republican governors and their state-house stooges, not to mention the damfool Repugnants of the House of Reprehensibles, all of them intent on rescinding worker rights, New Deal programs, long-established benefits and pension plans, and anything else the bastards can dream up, even Social Security--which the liars claim draws on government coffers when in fact we citizens pay into it directly, shares of our hard-earned wages, and it's funded till 2040 or some such, and could be secure for good--the public good--just by raising the cut-off level for paying in.

Or, jeez, here's a radical thought... WE COULD TAX THE RICH! We could end the three wars we're (quag)mired in. Instead of giving rebates and tax breaks, we could actually collect corporate... call them dues because they're way overdue... from the fracking transnational global round-the-world pay-no-taxes close-the-factories move-the-jobs-overseas MEGA CORRUPTIONS!

But no. Instead the Repugnants rob the poor and middle classes to pay the rich--blatant payback for campaign contributions, and "pay ahead" for the future lobbyist jobs awaiting ex-Congress folk. (Folkers, I'd call them.) So teachers, firemen, the police, farmers, workers in general get screwed again. And so this May Day means more.

I'll end the rant on a calmer note, with this careful rewrite of a favored "tea party" slogan, my revision closer to the reality we live now:
"Representation without Taxation is Tyranny by the Rich." (Think about it.)

And herewith my attempt to create a less-overwrought, less overtly political piece; think of it as "Politics makes strange bedfellows" meets "All's fair in love and war." In other words, it's a love poem...

Mayday

This is the cry for help.
This is the weapons parade.
This is the mad dance--
poles and checks in balance,
bodies swirling, engulfed,
this chilly come-what-May
Day, in ribbons and rue.
Abandon inhibitions. Dance.
Abandon hope, all ye, and dance.
Abandon ship, come all ye true...
Mayday, mayday. See the flares
fire, guns fire, fires flare up,
the dancers leap and turn,
fire in their limbs. Skirts
flare, nostrils flare, a melee
yet may be. Oh baby, burn!
Hearts on fire, cities afire,
the flames roaring higher,
isolate unions, dancers
come sole to the dance.
This May Day of no knowing,
fires rain down and weapons reign,
while marching armies arrayed
for the military's sights
show us their might and main.
Still bound by night, by fires
on the darkened plain, desolate
dancers bound, their hearts re-
bound, to sway and be swayed
again. Return us union now,
that all may know us free,
till the bounding main engulfs
the flames, the ship of state
founders, the dancers bank
each other's fires, the last
lover goes down with her heart.

B&w photos: workers, spouses, children observing May Day circa 1920--One Big Union in solidarity.

Blackened Fish... and Beaches, and Birds

2011-04-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

Louisiana, you're on my mind... Jesse Winchester might well have sung that when instead he sang "Mississippi."

Consider this confluence of circumstance and events:

(1) The first anniversary of the B.P. oil spill disaster, started April 20 a year ago: nearly 5 million barrels released, and clean-up of the damaged Gulf Coast environment still a long way from finished.

(2) Good friends Susan and Kim just back from a long weekend in New Orleans, enjoying the popular, but less madhouse, French Quarter Festival. (She gets to the Crescent City occasionally on foundation business, while he's spent some time there helping with the Habitat for Humanity rebuilding effort, not to mention staunchly attending NOLA's post-Katrina music fests.)
3) Our son Mike getting married early in May, the ceremony to occur up in the northwestern corner of Louisiana, in Shreveport. We're flying-in a few days early and so will have time to drive south to the prairies and bayous, the small towns and lively music spots, of Cajun country--my first time back since the early Fifties.

(4) That trip plan prodded me into a spending spree buying every used or new CD of Cajun and Zydeco music I could track down, to learn as much as I could in a short period of time. (And thus the extra credit-card debt that persuaded me to sell the Elvis Sun 78 mentioned in two recent posts; I got a few hundred for Elvis but thousands of dollars worth of enjoyment--with more ahead--from the CDs, whether white French Acadien or Zydeco by Creole gens de couleur.)

(5) And if I hadn't done all the listening and learning, by means of discs from the Twenties right on into the twenty-first century, I wouldn't have heard the surprising and distinct albums (dating from 2008, 2010, and 2009, respectively) by Michael Doucet, Steve Riley, and Zachary Richard--veteran Cajun Music superstars all three. Nor would I have been thinking again of a certain later-Fifties, not-really-Easy Listening album--more a light Jazz suite, in fact--that haunts me now and then...

But let's save that till later, while we galop across the Mamou prairie, our horses headed for Eunice, or drift down some Atchafalaya tributary in a 'gator-proof pirogue. (Sometimes even in the Louisiana backcountry life is good.) But the terrible experience of Katrina and the big oil spill, and the horrific aftermath of both, seem to have set the tone and subject matter of two and maybe all three of the recent CDs, all of them beautifully introspective and less upbeat than usual. So: music less for lively dancing than for pondering and dreaming and looking back, finding a hard-earned equilibrium rather than the fais do-do and joie de vie (approximate Cajun French spelling).

Doucet and Richard are cousins and got their start in music back in the late Sixties, Michael taking his fiddle straight into Rock (a short-lived but seminal band called Coteau), influenced by It's a Beautiful Day and the Grateful Dead, while Zachary gravitated to the traditional, learning accordeon Acadien. But in the early Seventies things changed radically. Doucet went to France for six months, was swamped (so to speak) by fans of Cajun music, and returned ready to devote his playing, indeed his life, to the sounds of early fiddle-driven Cajun; he apprenticed with famous players like Dewey Balfa, Lionel LeLieux, and Dennis McGee, plus the Creole fiddler Canray Fontenot. By the Mid-Eighties he was leading the hugely influential modern Cajun group called BeauSoleil, with hints of Jazz, Classical, Blues, Zydeco, and much more tossed into that "sunny" gumbo.

Meanwhile, Richard moved to Quebec and built a very successful international career--in France and French Canada as well as Cajun Louisiana, with several albums released on A&M in the States--Richard offering Cajun-spiced, French-speaking rock 'n' roll, the lyric content sometimes quite political, but playing less and less of his Acadian squeezebox. In fact his 2009 album, Last Kiss, is a moody ballads set with nary an accordion within hearing! The opening track is a lovely mid-tempo number called "Danse," with sweet nostalgia and moonlight on the bayou, but it sounds like something arranged for the Dixie Chicks--and that's not meant as a slur, just a musical definition. Lots of guitars and mandolins and some strings strings too, if you catch my drift, but no sawblade fiddle. Still, this is a gorgeous set with Zachary delivering his dozen originals like a Jackson Browne with a gruffer, more soulful voice, even convincing gospel power on Richard's own "The Levee Broke," worthy of standing beside Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927."

But enough with the comparative name-dropping; Richard is a major force because he writes, sings, plays, and commands respect. Among other gems here are "Give My Heart," which also evokes watery doom, but is an interracial love song; the sad hopelessness of "Sweet Daniel," which seems to be about a gay draftee escaping in his mind by sniffing cocaine (wow!); the chiming power ballad "Come to Me"; and the final number... I ignored the change earlier; the twelfth song is actually Robbie Robertson's grand histoire titled "Acadian Driftwood," nicely reworked here, Richard joined by--are you ready for it?--Celine Dion for a fine "gypsy tail wind" of character instead of a titanic duet. The song--the album--ends with Richard and Dion shouting across each other, echoing and calling out, again and again, "J'arrive, Acadie./ J'ai le mal du pays."

Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys aren't experiencing mal du pays (sort of "homesickness"); they're another kind of sick--sad and p.o.'ed--and the Grand Isle cover image gets right to it. Whatever that blackened bird, outsiders have befouled--coated in oil and destroyed--whole portions of the Pelican State. The opener ("Dancing without Understanding") begins as a dirge then turns to snarly rock 'n' roll, heading straight into the punk anger of "Chatterbox" (both Eunice club and shallow girl). Things settle down for the chant chorus number "This Is the Time for Change," Riley's anger now understated and direct, followed by a ballad ("It's Lonely") and then... wait for it... Edith Piaf's signature number "Non, je ne regrette rien" in a strings-and-squeezebox arrangement. Next comes "Pierre," a rhythmic Creole number more Mamou-metal-band than Mamou Playboys.

And then a return to the real Cajun music sound for the lovely "Valse de chagrin" and the country-rockin' title track--but with lyrics alluding to the terrible destruction of that once-idyllic island--plus actual Cajun triangle and serious squeezebox driving Riley's happier-times original "Lyon's Point" (a classic in the making, I'd say). Steve and the 'Boys finally unleash the full arsenal (hmm, strange expression) for "C'est trop/Too Much," Cajun players rocking harder and harder, Cajun spice burning blacker and blacker...

And that's the climax of Grand Isle. The last two leftover numbers actually leave the album sounding worn down and unsettled. One's final impression is this: Louisiana may be hardhit, knocked to the canvas, but is getting up again, back on its feet and looking for another fight... or a fais do-do.

Michael Doucet is one of the supreme Cajun musicians far and away (and also close to home, lazing in Lafayette). His mastery of the fiddle, likely the violin too, is definite and irrefutable, playing like that Johnny (and the Devil himself maybe) from Charlie Daniel's famous song. Doucet seems not just to master whatever sort of music he chooses, whether from the U.S. or around the world, but to imbue all with excitement and his adventurous spirit, often creating structural innovations on the fly. To hear accordionist Marc Savoy calling out, urging "Mike" on and on when the Savoy-Doucet Band gets to steamrolling, is to experience tenfold the heated, high-stepping, happy soul of Cajun country and culture. However... Michael might should leave the vocalizing to others. He has the high-pitched Cajun yelp down pretty good, but otherwise... let him focus on that fiddle.

As some Soul singer put it, "First cut is the deepest"--and the opener on Doucet's album makes a philosophical statement, I guess ("Ev'ry thang gone be fonk-y, from now on"), maybe subtly acknowedging some of his state's problems, but Michael attempting to channel Allen Toussaint is excruciating. Is he paying hommage to Toussaint, or mocking him? Is he stating a strange blueprint for the future (album title: From Now On), or dredging up the minstrel show past?

Doucet is too proud a player and too decent and learned a man to be truly stuck in the muck, but a listener is much relieved when the rest of the album gets musically serious and splendidly varied, reeling and unreeling like a career resume--recalling the past, releasing the present, revealing the likely future of Cajun stylings in music. Traditional numbers ("Le Two-Step de Basile," "Contredanse de Mamou"), Jazz standards ("Saint Louis Blues," "New Orleans"), Gospel/Blues cuts ("A Closer Walk with Thee," "You Gotta Move"), Doucet originals ("L'Amour ou la Folie," "Brasse la Gombo Vite," and, yes, "Fonky Bayou"), they're all saw-fiddlated and finely Douceted. (And to discover Mike really getting funky, just track down the sessions where he provides smokin' fiddle for Zydeco great Nathan Williams.)

So... now for the lagniappe. Among the so-called Mood albums recorded by composer/conductor Paul Weston and his Hollywood orchestra, one misfit standout from 1957 or so was Columbia CL 977, titled Crescent City: The Moods of New Orleans, but really a 35-minute suite for Jazz players, percussion, and strings-boosted full orchestra. Weston (husband to singer Jo Stafford) wrote three-quarters of the suite's individual pieces and arranged traditional numbers to complete his portrait of the old New Orleans... which just barely exists now, a half century later. "Vieux Carre," "Riverside Blues," "Storyville,"
"Bayou St. Jean," and "Esplanade at Sunset" are some of his individual impressions, and he adapted "High Society," "Creole Songs and Dances," and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." (And drifting through many of the pieces, his yearning "Crescent City" theme.)

French-sounding tunes, Blues and Gospel, Louis Armstrong-styled traditional Jazz, Creole dances, Mardi Gras marching, haunting melodies that play more like embedded memories, history and the social mores of NOLA, they're all a part of Weston's lively and lovely, spirited and spiritual Crescent City, and the suite as a whole is certainly worthy of a documentary or feature film utilizing it. In fact, Weston and his orchestra gave a live concert or two around New Orleans performing the whole composition; and I imagine some of his regular Jazz guys (including Eddie Miller, Ted Nash, Matty Matlock, Dick Cathcart, Barney Kessel, and Paul Smith) were involved.

About the only local music neglected (so near yet so far) was of course the odd sounds of the Acadiens--loud and exciting, mixing Western Swing, country, and a hint of Blues, French folk fiddle and German-polka accordion. In the mid-Fifties that region was both isolated and ignored, the French language banned, Cajun "culture" a source of jokes, the people treated like second-class citizens (sound familiar?).

It took another decade and more for other parts of the nation to learn about and come to appreciate Cajun music and spices and spirit. But that change made it possible for young men like Doucet and Richard and Riley to hold their heads high, to wonder about their heritage and then become musicians preserving and advancing it.

Meanwhile Weston's career continued. The New Orleans album eventually went out of print and did not make it to CD until Paul or Jo or the estate reclaimed the copyright and issued it with a slightly changed name and a boring cover shot of a cathedral. That was a mistake. The original cover shot seemed as mysterious and perhaps dangerous as the city. It displayed a distant aerial view of inner New Orleans ostensibly at sunset, showing the sweeping curves of the river and a major bridge in the early stages of construction.

The only problem was, the picture was so dark, with an eerie orange glow layered between the roiling gray-black clouds above and the unlit wards and districts below, that you might also see a deadly storm building, a hurricane or tornedo about to strike, the Wrath of God about to descend on the Crescent City.

Weston's album--tribute, memorial, cautionary tale--was just 50 years too soon.

Rock It, Willy!

2011-04-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Last week's post on aging (yes, that's what it was, sort of) ended with a photo of the Sun 78 r.p.m. record that announced Elvis Presley and the birth of rock 'n' roll--especially the Southern subgenre called Rockabilly. That 78 disc is now up for auction on eBay. It's not that I've abandoned my part-Southern roots and heritage, just that I've some bills to pay. But back in 1955-56, I was 12 and then 13, living in Virginia and Alabama, and totally swept up in the new rocking music on local radio stations, from the r&b connections of Little Richard and Fats Domino to the wildass white boys with redneck names like Elvis or Charlie Feathers or Jerry Lee (pronounced Jer uh Lee) Lewis.

Rockabilly ruled! And sometimes it still does...

In the last few weeks I found some cat-clothes-cool CDs and a terrific book too--Chrome Dreams CDCD5047, bravely titled The Rarest Rockabilly Album in the World Ever! and offering "50 of the most obscure songs from the Golden Age" which would be approximately 1954-1958; plus the 325-page, nicely illustrated trade paperback tome titled A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster's Guide to Rockabilly Music, by writer-collector Max Decharne, and the similarly named Ace CDCHD 1268, billed as "the soundtrack” to the book, packed with 28 "slices of the wildest 1950s rockabilly mayhem. A rocket-fueled mixture of hepcat classics and rockin' rarities." With just three numbers duplicated, that means a total of 75 timeless, slapbassed, jukin’ joints of hillbilly r&b.

Those primitive, do-it-yourself, pickin'-and-scufflin' screams and chants marked the Fifties explosion of teen rebellion, however shortlived. Thousands of poor-white Southern boys and a dozen or so rowdy young women found a studio or a side parlor or a gritty bathroom (good for that Rockabilly echo!) and cut disc after disc after disc, 120-second come-and-gone paeans to hot wheels, cool threads, and unbridled lust--vocalist grunts and shouts, guitarists holding their axes at an out-front angle, slapbass guys actually climbing up their instruments, Elvis's swivelling hips and Jerry Lee's pumping piano. Eager kids and aging no-hit cynics alike mimicked the lead cats' songs and style, searching for some unfilled tiny niche, shrieking and flailing at their guitars and thumping their chests, not ape-like, really, but as insignicant humans shouting, "Sir! I exist!" (Garage bands, then Punk, then Grunge in some measure, were all later Rock music expressions of that disgust and rebellion, braggadocio and self-sufficiency, anarchy and creativity in equal measure.)

Then everything went to hell. Elvis answered Uncle Sam's call, Carl Perkins nearly died in a car crash, Lewis married too young a cousin, Buddy Holly and others did die, Chuck Berry went to jail, and so on. The boppers, big and small, bailed. And sidling in came small-talent white guys from Philadelphia, and Motown's unexpected clean-streets danceability, and disaffected suburban kids strumming folk guitars. By the time Private Presley (he'd made Corporal by then) came home, he had a smoother baritone and bigger dreams--and Rockabilly was history. Gone.

... Except in England there were these stubborn "Teddy Boys," and in France various wise guys typically named Johnny, and in Germany fraulein-less herren fixated on motorsickles or something; and they all loved the hiccups and howls, the standup bass and the falldown folderol of Rockabilly. So the movement, the craze, the record-collector madness, crossed the wide ocean and settled in the U.K. and Europe. The history of Sun Records became as carefully studied as the Hundred Years' War. The whereabouts Stateside of one-hit and never-hit wonders became as important as finding more Dead Sea Scrolls.

By the early Seventies, specific-subject anthologies (Rockabilly obscurities released on Decca, say) and broader collections of rare singles (for example, tracks produced in some Memphis studio other than Sun) were being compiled and annotated and issued, and were selling more copies than the singles ever did! And so it has continued for four decades now, right up to the present, cheerfully fueled by record companies wholly dedicated to keeping America's past musics alive. For Rockabilly that's mostly meant "the ABC's"--Ace in England, Bear Family in Germany (compilers of big, definitive box sets), and Charly in England and France, for Sun Records in particular.

Decharne touches on all the odd history in his excellent book, rich in anecdote and esoteric information, but he wisely focuses most on introducing to the reader--and describing wittily and pithily--as many old Rockabilly 45s (and the performers) as can be named and organized and squeezed intelligibly into his three-hundred-page text. I recommend it heartily whether you dig Rockabilly the most or couldn't care less; you'll be amused and amazed regardless.

The CDs are well worth the investment too. Rocket is absolutely brilliant, the best single-CD, across-the-labels anthology of Rockabilly I've ever seen or listened to--literally the only one you'd ever need to stand in for that small slice of Rock history, but alternatively, and more likely, also the sampler that whets your appetite for more! The Rarest, on the other hand, has a different principle operating; you'll find many excellent examples but a whole lotta shaky cuts goin' on too. (Hey, nobody claimed these as the best, only the rarest.)

For every three you might shrug at, there's one jaw-dropper that sets your toes to tappin' and your juices flappin'. I'm particularly partial to "Rock All Night" by Glen Honeycutt, Jimmy Patton's piano-driven "Yah I'm Movin'" and later "Oakies in the Pokie," Don Woody frantic from "Barking Up the Wrong Tree" (great guitar too), "So Tired" by the unknown Chavis Brothers, and tracks by Jimmy Lloyd, Kenny Owens, and Joey Castle--that last, "That Ain't Nothin' But Right," offering cool echo-effect guitar and a catchy chorus. Should have been a hit, as others here; for instance, Don Willis's "Boppin' High School Baby" and Glenn Bond's "When My Baby Passes By," the last two tracks on CD 1 channeling Elvis very obviously but also quite effectively.

CD 2 has similar non-hits and deserving misses, but I like it for two other reasons--novelty numbers with names like "Old Moss Back," "Rock n Roll Saddles," "Pink Elephants," and "Jello Sal"; proof positive that in Rockabilly anything goes, or went anyway, back in the heyday. And this CD is quite blatant with another message too; seven of the titles tell the tale: "Hot Rod Baby... You're the One... Please Give Me Something... I Need It... Convertible Car... Swing It Little Katy... Teenage Ball." I can't decide whether Nat Couty's "Woodpecker Rock" belongs with the first group or the second!

Loads of fun among the frantic 50--and classic cuts galore in the great 28, from the chooglin' slash-guitar opener (a la the Johnny Burnette Trio), "How Can You Be Mean to Me" by Dale Vaughan; through the real JB 3, with early guitar hero Paul Burlison taking charge and tearing through "The Train Kept a-Rollin'"; to the final cut, the title track, with barrelhouse piano and more real Rock-it-Willy guitar, not to mention Jimmy Lloyd wailin' on lyrics that are lubricious at least. And speaking of guitar greats, you have Scotty Moore with Elvis, riding that "Mystery Train," Carl Perkins singlehandedly ripping up "Put Your Cat Clothes On," and little-known Hal Harris adding urgency to Bob Doss's warning, "Don't Be Gone Long." And a few cuts further on, Harris encores considerably and convincingly with his own never-released string-reinforcer called "Jitterbop Baby."

On rolls the Rocket CD: novelties like "Rockin' in the Graveyard" by Jackie Morningstar, Gene Maltais's weird, what-next number "The Raging Sea," and the equally goofy "Wash Machine Boogie" by the Echo Valley Boys. Great stuff by Charlie Feathers ("Get with It"), Ray Harris ("Come On Little Mama"), and Don Cole ("Snake Eyed Mama"), and no cut less than excellent. Even the three duplicate tracks--raucous "Jello Sal," "Boppin' High School Baby," and Ric Cartey's reverb-riot called "Scratchin' on My Screen"--sound better in this all-star crowd, as though cut hotter or mastered from cleaner original sources.

So don't be like Jimmy & Johnny (slapbass and slapstick working overtime) missing out on a swinging party inside because, as they sadly sing together, "I can't find the door knob, I can't get in." In other words, cats and kittens, get with it. Every guy and gal needs a hot rocket to ride.

The fuse is lit.

On the Record

2011-04-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

Last time out the message was driven by anger and sadness and doubt. This time around I promise to stay lighter of heart. And next post I'll get back to the reviews and mini-essays, batteries all recharged. Oh, there'll still be some progressive commentary occasionally, given the world we live in and the sad record of human cupidity, but I'll cool it some too.

Meanwhile, for all us staunch fans of vinyl--those long-play "records," as I quaintly call them--some thoughts on production and distribution...

(Yes, it's another poem-like object, but this one just might leave you smiling.)

R.P.M.

Someone changed speeds.
16 going
at 33
through the hits years,
then 45
spinning faster...
and suddenly
78
circles close, my

revolutions
near run-off. What
was mastered on
virgin vinyl
got too much play--
gone scratched and worn
now, all highs and
lows diminished.
A melody

lingers faintly,
yet the lyric
no longer cuts
through. But listen:
I had impressed
upon me long
ago, "Playback
is all. Either
it's in the grooves,

or nothing. Take
your given turn
on the table
and then get off;
don't wait to be
rejected." Sound
advice. And so
as I spiral
faster and fast-

er to the spin-
dle hole silence,
I track one small
consolation:
while all these discs
grow more compact,
I have become
a collector's
item at last.

A Troubled Way

2011-03-27T10:59:00.000-07:00

No illustrations this time. Please absorb the words and supply your own mental images. Lord knows the news has shown us enough.

When I traveled around the world in 1986-87, I missed visiting Japan. The hellacious events there now, the terrible destruction, lives lost, radiation clouds drifting unchecked, are a dreadful reminder (and, yes, I am full of dread) of our place in the Pacific Rim's "Ring of Fire." Violent earthquakes in Chile, New Zealand, and Indonesia, the horrific, beyond-imagining pictures from Japan, even the minor aftershock in Alaska, warn those of us living on the West Coast to prepare now for the worst.

But the trip years ago did allow me to wander the two main islands of New Zealand, with a few days spent in South Island's then-lovely city of Christchurch--whose venerable Cathedral was destroyed, portions razed to the ground, in the 2011 quake just weeks ago. With Easter approaching now, and in remembrance of the earthquake and tsunami dead, in Japan and elsewhere, I offer this slight, reluctantly religious poem started in New Zealand long ago, intending to express a small bit of the angst and doubt--and irrational hope--most humans experience along the troubled way... where the worst natural disasters are still outnumbered by human ones.

Easter in Christchurch

The man on the dark tree
died into mystery;
his gaunt corpse disappeared
and all of history veered...
Like every other youth,
I hungered after truth
but slipped away, as most
of the agnostic host
that sees the world its way.
But this is Easter Day,
and I am in Christchurch--
another man in search
of something, Jaysus wept,
some message to accept.

The Cathedral stands fair,
a monument to prayer
and song--a Schubert mass
this day as I walk past.
The voices rise to heaven;
their lives have been forgiven,
their errors purified.
I listen from outside.
Easter is autumn here,
the down-turn of the year:
leaves withering on trees,
systems in entropy's
grip... In this dying season
how can a soul be risen?

I pace out in the rain
and ponder the world's pain,
the blood shed in hatred,
anguish of quick and dead,
absence of brotherhood.
Christsake, where is the good?
If race survives, still man
does worse than he began.
If this be God's behest,
I will remain a guest.
From all that's sanctified,
stone of ages, I would hide.

Yet the cold rain compels
me in, where belief dwells...
I come in doubt, but stay
to listen and half-pray.
Nothing waits me out there,
and I must be somewhere
this day of Resurrection.
I brood on his rejection.
At cock-crow, in first light,
I still could rise. I might.