A most peculiar paradox

Busy week.

At the top of my radar, of course, have been the various tasks that go along with readying the group for our last trip of 07: a two-day excursion to Ohio (specifically, Columbus and Cincinnati) that comes up at the end of September. Might as well reveal the personnel up front (note that we are picking up more and more NY players, and as such are becoming more and more of a truly "bi-coastal" group -- cool). The trumpets and the rhythm section will be exactly as they were for the Netherlands: Phil Rodriguez, Andre Canniere, Dan Rosenboom, Dan Schnelle, Oliver Newell, Jill Knapp, and yours truly. Other veterans (of the Netherlands tour and other recent trips) will be scattered throughout the group in key positions: Evan Francis on alto, Gavin Templeton on soprano sax, Josh Sinton on bari, Dan Pratt on tenor, and James Hirschfeld on bone. We'll also be picking up a few brand new people: Josh Rutner (an associate of Hirschfeld's, so he must be good) on soprano sax, and Brian Casey on bone (Brian is a composer, and one of the leaders of Honk, Wail, & Moan, the big band we'll be sharing a bill with in Columbus -- more about that in a moment). With any luck, we'll also have another Ohio sub (TBA) on the second tenor book.

Of course we'll be missing some of the old fogeys -- Zick, Tiner, Schenck, Wright, Walsh, etc. -- but that's the nature of this particular beast. I'm pretty confident that each new incarnation of the group has something special to offer -- for whatever reason, we've had good luck lately finding the "right people" for the job.

I'm not sure what to expect from this trip, however. The "pivot gig" is the Midpoint Music Festival in Cincinnati (September 27), which is pretty much a wild card at this point. I mean, I have a sense that it's a relatively large event, but I don't know how it stacks up next to some of the other, better-known indie music festivals (like SXSW or CMJ). One interesting factoid is that Midpoint has something of a "purist" vibe -- they generally eschew nationally-known, "signed" acts (boy, I would have loved to see some of those rejection letters). On the one hand, that's exciting. On the other (let's face it), that could really suck.

But we're going anyway. Chalk it up to my ongoing effort to straddle the chasm between two audiences. To review: on one side, we have the music wonks (also sometimes known as "jazz fans"), who have the finely-tuned ears, the historical knowledge, and the listening breadth to actually be able to make whatever "sense" can be made out of our music. On the other are the "just plain folks" (also sometimes known as the "popular music fans"), who I continually hope might listen to us for the same reasons they would listen to any of the other stuff with which they fill their iPods -- for entertainment, for some sort of emotional connection, for sonic wallpaper at a party, for the things about music that defy linguistic parsing (which, alas, might turn out to be pretty much everything).

In my more idealistic moments, I even hope to encourage these two groups (which I have vastly oversimplified in the preceding descriptions, by the way) to try out each others' listening habits. Just for fun, I guess.

Anyway, Midpoint will be the first time the current version of the group -- you know, the version that emerged once we "found our voice" or whatever -- will do its thing in the context of a large, essentially indie rock event. (Note that I am using the term "indie rock" in the broadest possible sense here. Also note that, as I have mentioned before, we did play SXSW back in 2002, but that seems like centuries ago now, because not only did we have an entirely different rhythm section, but we were a much smaller, much more obviously "jazz-like" band. The current group is a whole different animal. Or vegetable. Or whatever.)

A quick glance at the Midpoint lineup suggests that we are going to be very much in the minority in terms of our stylistic affiliations. Out of (approximately) 230 or so acts, we are among 3 that have been classified as "jazz." Not that we're really jazz, of course... well, I dunno, maybe we are. Anyway, that's some statistic, eh? A little more than 1% of the festival lineup. And, because I have no control over how these things are scheduled, it turns out that all three of the Midpoint "jazz acts" are booked into the same club on the same evening. Thank heavens (perhaps) that the "headliner" at the club that night is a jam band with a seemingly big following -- otherwise who knows if we'd even get a turnout.

The bottom line is that while Midpoint is a great opportunity and I'm glad we're doing it, things could either go really badly (if all the indie rock kids live up to the negative stereotype by refusing to even visit the jazz ghetto) or really well (if we draw attention and interest precisely because we are so very unlike everyone else on the schedule). So there is perhaps a little bit more of a gamble here than even I'm used to.

Ah well. Of course I've been doing the promo thing via the usual media channels (it's the same shit in every city). But I'm thinking that since the words "music festival" in this case are basically code for "indie rock festival," we'll have to do some serious guerilla marketing that afternoon when we hit town. Maybe we can walk through the city "in character" or something. Or perform a stripped-down version of our set on a local street corner. Or dispense hookers and blow.

(Uh, did I really just write that?).

* * * * *

Incidentally, our "warmup gig" (September 26) seems more and more promising -- a triple bill in Columbus with the aforementioned Honk, Wail & Moan and a southern-fried blues-inflected small-tet called The Free Beer 'n' Chicken Coalition (not to be confused with Tiner's former-group-with-a-similarly-hilarious-name, Big Red Peaches Coalition). And speaking of Tiner, the experience of putting this particular trip together sort of reminded me of a point he has been very good at making (with respect to underrated Bakersfield): the idea that lesser-known, under-the-radar towns can have solid scenes too, cuz (gasp) not all the good music in the world is happening in New York or LA. (A similar theme informs this piece on the music scene in Cincy.)

Big thanks to bassist Steve Perakis and keyboardist Linda Dachtyl (both members of HWM, and very busy players on the Columbus scene) for their enthusiasm and help in setting up the Columbus show.

* * * * *

Among the "various tasks" referred to above: I finally finished four new IJG tunes, which with any luck will provide the foundation for a whole new show that I hope to develop over the next year. These will be the first compositions I've introduced to the group in a while, actually -- the last batch ("Howl," "PDX LIX LAX," "Big Ass Truck," and a tune we have since dropped b/c it required an operatic soprano ("You're in Love with My Mother")) initially appeared during our west coast tour of August 2006.

Not that I have been willfully avoiding the question of new material. It's just that, with this band, changes to the show require logistical as well as aesthetic inspiration. In other words, while we benefit from a certain off-the-cuff approach, and while we make extensive use of improvisation (as a means to an end, anyway), at the core we are still a chart-based big band. So before I can introduce new tunes, I have to consider whether it is even practically possible to do so (in terms of necessary prep time, overall difficulty, etc.). Also important is the question of whether upcoming gigs will be occurring in new locations or contexts, and thus likely to draw new audiences, for whom material that we consider "old" is actually completely fresh. (It can sometimes feel unfair to retire a given tune before it has had enough of an "airing.")

On the other hand, if improvisation really is "composition without the benefit of an eraser," then composition is probably improvisation without the benefit of an audience. Which may be why I chomp at the bit to get my stuff out into the world, and why a year is an eternity for me in terms of this issue. In a way, the pieces don't really exist until they have come to life (or death) on a stage.

I dunno, maybe I write too much music. If so, it is not, I assure you, because I have an inflated sense of my own compositional worth. It's more a feeling of urgency that accompanies my daily existence, like somehow if I don't get some writing done before I turn in for the night, it's like I forgot to brush my teeth or something. (I know from years spent in the trenches teaching freshman comp that the problem of writer's block is where you place your anxiety. The writers who get blocked tend to worry about the value of a piece before it even exists. In my case, I try to save that anxiety until afterward, when it doesn't really matter anymore. So I don't get blocked much.)

Honestly, I seem to work best from a contradictory mindset. On the one hand, I have to believe that composition (at least the way I do it) is important enough to be worth a ridiculous amount of my time and energy. But I also have to tell myself that it's a completely frivolous (or at most purely entertaining) enterprise. Otherwise I would be focusing on something other than how the music actually feels and sounds (the notion of "importance," after all, derives from a social context -- and while social context is of course relevant, I wonder if that's where music-as-a-phenomenon really lives, at a deep level). Psyching myself into a sense of happy worthlessness also has the added benefit of encouraging me to take artistic risks, enabling me to casually shrug when something doesn't work, and (when that's the case) giving me the lack of sense to immediately move on to another compositional project with the same gusto.

Basically, I try to treat the whole business as if it is simultaneously the most and the least important thing I could be doing. (Which is not to say that it is actually either.)

We'll see how it goes this time around.

Bloodsucking fiends

I couldn't stand the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series when it was on the air. I have a high tolerance for snark, yet Buffy's superabundance of too-cool-for-school dialogue wore thin for me awfully quick. Or mayhap the problem was in the production values. I tend to like my horror and sci-fi old-school, all George Pal and shit.

My wife, of course, remains a big fan, and I'm sure this is yet another area in which she will ultimately be revealed to have much better taste than me.

Until then, I will at least validate her current interest in the comic series spawned by the success of the TV show. It's actually kinda good.

While supplies last

Bulk fossils, baby.

Uninterested in bones? How about books? (By the foot, that is.)

Too easy

Avenue Q? I dunno, I dunno.

Sure, I'll admit, I'm curious.

I think the concept caught my attention. But browsing through the YouTube stacks has so far yielded very little of value.

Maybe it's the music -- like the lesser songs of Tom Lehrer, some seemingly funny set-ups and lyrics are drained of their oomph by warmed-over Broadway-with-a-vengeance melodies.

Or maybe it's a feeling of under-development. Like too many Saturday Night Live sketches, the thing never seems to get beyond its premise. (So the premise is all you really need to know, and the actual performance becomes kind of irrelevant.)

Is anyone ever going to write an interesting musical again? Should they?

An old influence...

...that still rings true in many ways.

(After all, I too am "from deepest New Jersey.")

Alas, I tend to err on the dorky side of things. Even when it comes to pop.

One at a time (part 2)

An Oregon woman is suing the RIAA:

A disabled single mother from Beaverton has filed a federal lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of America, claiming that she is the victim of abusive legal tactics, threats and illegal spying as part of an overzealous campaign to crack down on music pirating.

The recording industry sued Tanya J. Andersen, 44, in 2005, accusing her of violating copyright laws by illegally downloading music onto her computer. Andersen claims in a suit she filed last week in U.S. District Court in Oregon that the recording industry refused to drop its case after its own expert supported her claims of innocence.

This is exactly the sort of case that those in the "copyright consensus" -- the portfolio of corporate interests who since the advent of the "digital age" have been busily pushing for more and more egregious copyright laws -- assume they will never have to face.

And with good reason. What kind of personal threshold must one have crossed (or have been pushed over) in order to be willing to take on one of these behemoths? One only has to notice that when things flow in the other direction -- e.g., when an individual or a small company (such as an indie label, or a community orchestra) is sued by a multinational corporation like Disney -- it almost doesn’t matter whether the “little guy” has a good legal case. In fact, it almost doesn’t matter what the law actually says. The only “known” in such a situation is the guarantee of exorbitant legal fees. The actual outcome is up for grabs, thanks to an erratic judiciary and the new, untested quality of the laws (some of which, it should be noted, are fairly ambiguously worded).

The worst case scenario involves financial ruin (legal fees plus tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines) and the possibility of jail time. No wonder nobody wants to be the guinea pig.

Until now, anyway. What can I say? The lady has a lot of guts, and I wish her the best.

Early Jay Ward

I stumbled on this by working backwards from a set of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, which I recently picked up in DVD form.

As a kid, I never liked the goofy moose (if you must know). As an adult I'm finding him completely hilarious, and kind of fascinating. (My wife, in her wisdom, has always been a fan. Thandie seems to be following suit.)

The things you discover when you have a kid. It's incredible, really.

One at a time

Yes! Score one for the public domain.

For a sense of what is at stake here, I quote from the opinion:

Each plaintiff in this case relies on artistic works in the public domain for his or her livelihood. Lawrence Golan, for example, performs and teaches works by foreign composers including Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky. Before the CTEA [Sonny Bono's law extending the term of copyright, sometimes also referred to as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"], plaintiffs anticipated that certain works would soon outlive copyright protection and enter the public domain. The CTEA delayed this moment by 20 years. Prior to the URAA [the Uraguay Round Agreements Act, another egregious update to copyright law -- which in this case was being used to pull works out of the public domain], each plaintiff utilized or performed works by foreign artists in the public domain, such as Sergei Prokofiev’s renowned “Peter and the Wolf.” Since the passage of the URAA, plaintiffs must pay higher performance fees and sheet music rentals as well as other royalties. In many cases, these costs are prohibitive.

The primary gain here (at least for those who are interested in copyright sanity) was to set up a potential challenge to the URAA. As far as I can tell the CTEA comes out pretty much unscathed, but the URAA must now pass First Amendment scrutiny upon review.

I know there are bigger political issues out there, of course -- I doubt any of the presidential candidates are going to be making stump speeches about copyright any time soon. But I happen to think it's a big fucking deal that there are people trying to stop media conglomerates from executing what James Boyle calls a "second enclosure movement" -- an enclosure, that is, of the "intangible commons of the mind."

Other reasons you should give a shit:

The love of our little Johann Sebastian for music was uncommonly great even at this tender age. In a short time he had fully mastered all the pieces his brother [Joseph Cristoph] had voluntarily given him to learn. But his brother possessed a book of clavier pieces by the most famous masters of the day—Froberger, Kerl, Pachelbel—and this, despite all his pleading and for who knows what reason, was denied him. His zeal to improve himself thereupon gave him the idea of practicing the following innocent deceit. This book was kept in a cabinet whose doors consisted only of grillwork. Now, with his little hands he could reach through the grillwork and roll the book up (for it had only a paper cover); accordingly, he would fetch the book out at night, when everyone had gone to bed and, since he was not even possessed of a light, copy it by moonlight. In six months’ time he had these musical spoils in his own hands. Secretly and with extraordinary eagerness he was trying to put it to use, when his brother, to his great dismay, found out about it, and without mercy took away from him the copy he had made with such pains. We may gain a good idea of our little Sebastian’s sorrow over this loss by imagining a miser whose ship, sailing for Peru, has foundered with its cargo of a hundred thousand thaler. He did not recover the book until after the death of his brother.

As you may have surmised, the subject of that anecdote is one JS Bach (from an obituary, as quoted in Christoph Wolff's bio). Sounds to me like he was engaging in a primitive version of what we would now call P2P. (And Joseph Christoph sounds an awful lot like the RIAA.) Heavens to Mergatroy!

And how 'bout this recollection by Mr. Zappa (the media is different, but the gist is the same):

By the time I was really into high school [… m]y real social life revolved around records and the band I played with. There wasn’t much work for us then. We’d get a job maybe, every two months at a teen hop, but most of the time, I was back in my room listening to records. It was the records, not TV, which I didn’t watch, that brainwashed me. I’d listen to them over and over again. The ones I couldn’t buy, I’d steal, and the ones I couldn’t steal I’d borrow, but I’d get them somehow. I had about six hundred records—45s—at one time, and I swear I knew the title, group and label of every one. We all used to quiz each other.

That's right, folks. Frank Zappa was a filesharer! (Cue the Dragnet theme.)

Of course we artists have to make a living. But if you fence in the commons of the mind, where are tomorrow's artists (or at least the ones who, say, can't afford a CD habit at $15 a pop) going to go to find out what has come before them?

Well, YouTube, of course!

(That bitchen photo of Lessig c/o Ian White, by the way.)

Carla-isms

In the course of my recent Carla Bley obsession, I came across this old interview in New Music Box. Worth checking out in its entirety, but here are some highlights:

I don't consider myself a jazz musician at all. I'm not spontaneous. I take a lot of time thinking about everything and when I finally get an idea during a solo, the piece is over. So, I'm really slow. I'm not a jazz musician; I wish I were. I'm just writing for them [...]

FRANK J. OTERI: You took the earliest Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth records.

CARLA BLEY: Yup, and Philip Glass. We were his first distributor. We did Laurie Anderson, Gil Scott Heron. Whenever someone had a hit we'd just fire ‘em. We'd say you don't need us anymore. Come on, give the other guys a break.

FRANK J. OTERI: It's kind of like Moe Asch's philosophy of Folkways. Once he had a hit record he'd say, some other label take it off of me please, I'm not interested!

I used to go around to Teo Macero at Columbia, or Nesuhi Ertegun at Atlantic, or Frances Wolf at Blue Note -- I had my presentation together and my tapes together. And they said, look, there's no market for this, we can't do it, very sorry. Finally we had to start it ourselves. We started the Jazz Composers Orchestra and Escalator Over the Hill. We fundraised ourselves: made every penny, put ourselves deep into hock, and made rich people give us money. That's how we did it. After that point I got interested in that and I didn't want to leave the outcome of my life up to anyone else. I though I'd rather be my own director.

The process has been, until this last album, to do a tour and record sometime during the tour. Two thirds of the way through is usually best because it would cost a fortune to go into a New York studio and hire guys—like I just did. So I always did these things either live, or at a studio when we had just a couple days off. There was not much that I could control with planning that. I had the band together so I didn't have to worry about someone not being able to make it, or having to go home early or something. I had those guys. They were in my band. They were in my bus and in my hotel. I got to do whatever I wanted with them for the duration of the tour, so that how I made all my albums.

I listen to NPR a lot. When there is a music show I have to go do something else for a half an hour. I'm really not crazy about listening to music because my head had music in it already. I might listen to a talk show or something, but I don't know if I would want to listen to music on the radio. So I don't blame them for not playing [my stuff].

And, on the subject of her website:

Yeah, we tried to make it hard for everybody because we were so tired of the sales game. Why sell something all the time? Why not give people something they can't have and refuse to sell it to them. Maybe we backed off of that a bit now with all that music for sale in the library. Otherwise, all the lead sheets can be downloaded for free. We didn't want to make money off of it. Strange.

And finally, on composition:

But, if you're stuck and take a long, hot bath, then it just might come to you. And then there's that thing when you're in bed and all of a sudden you can't sleep and you're going over and over that certain thing and you think, "Ah, that might work." The next day it usually doesn't, but in the garden you can keep singing something over and over again and maybe you'll come up with something. The bathtub is good for not only music; the bathtub is good for all sorts of life situations. Like, what should I put on the cover? Or, when should I visit the lawyer? The bathtub is good for everything. I'm a firm believer in not thinking too hard.

Why can't we all get along

I think I first discovered JKSS back in the old MP3.com days -- nice to see he's still at it (and thriving, in fact).

NMKY

Now that's enthusiasm.

Inspiring.

[Via Kill Ugly Radio, who also brings us news of (what may be) the world's first anti-social networking site.]

Meister brau

I'm drinking less these days, but I'm still enjoying fine beers. Imagine my delight when I came across these items recently in the specialty brews section of our local market:



The Monk-themed Belgian ale was otherwordly. ("Monk." "Abbey." Get it?)



The Zappa beer wasn't quite so good. And how quirky to name a brew after a dude who shunned alcohol. Apparently, it was a labor of love. And apparently, there is to be a whole series of these. Both of which are good reasons to give the brewer a big thumbs up.

* * * * *

UPDATE: Apparently, there is an IJG-related brew out there as well. Yup. It's a pity they mis-spelled the cyber-handle of our lead singer, but considering that we didn't even ask them for this free publicity, I'm not going to complain:

The Reverend is Homeless

I'm not a religious man, but... ah, shit. This guy has been cyber-mining the musical motherlode for some time now. I hope Satan cuts him some slack.

I forgot to remember to write this post

It has been a while since Mr. Roach (justly) trumped Mr. Presley as a subject for this blog -- but, in addition to all of the other shit I've had going on lately, I've actually been listening to their music in pretty much equal measure in the days since. That, plus the fact that Kris Tiner managed to churn out two stellar posts on both of these fellas almost simultaneously, has inspired me to return to the idea of writing something short 'n snappy about Elvis, who (in my opinion) is a rather misunderstood figure in modern American music. So here we go (it's snappy, but, alas, it's not short):

As a kid, I never liked Elvis much. My brother and his pals were big fans, but I suspect their affection went as much to the "fat-Elvis-with-leis" period as anything else. I could appreciate the ridiculousness of that stuff, but could find little else to engage with.

It wasn't until college, when I started reading William Faulkner -- and, more broadly and erratically, other so-called "Southern Gothic" writers -- that I began to understand. (Yeah, I know, that doesn't really compete with KT's being hipped to Elvis through Wadada Leo Smith.) I refer you in particular to Faulkner's amazing series of novels about Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional place that I always saw as a metaphor for a dying southern culture -- about which one is tempted to say "good riddance," though in the Southern Gothic take it was a riddance without much possibility of redemption, and therefore, on balance, more sad and pathetic than vengeful. This stuff helped me understand that despite all the screaming girls (or, later, middle-aged ladies), there was something melancholy about Elvis's music. Or at least there was more to it than the be-happy-or-else aesthetic that would be imposed on rock-n-roll by Dick Clark and others. Whatever his intentions as an artist, Elvis' mid-fifties recordings for Sun (which I personally see as the high point of his career) seemed to hint at what Tenessee Williams had referred to as "an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience."

Indeed, while there are at least three or four other early rockers who I think were far more deserving of the "King" title (KT mentions Bo Diddley -- my own top choice for that label would be Little Richard, though my personal favorite rocker is probably Chuck Berry), I would go so far as to say that nobody could compete with Elvis when it came to rock-n-roll as a vehicle for pathos. Not that Elvis was particularly introspective. But his music invited introspection, in part because he himself became such a potent symbol of what may be a peculiarly American kind of success (poor kid gets famous by providing one example of the wonderful possibilities of cultural intermixing) and failure (poor kid succumbs to a life of excess, and -- intentionally or not -- highlights the bum deal most of his black peers faced).

There is melancholy in the biography, of course. It is hard for anyone willing to look beyond the absurdity that marked Elvis' latter period to not suspect that there was always great unhappiness under the surface (as also seems to be the case with Elvis' cultural progeny, about whom I personally think we should all really just shut the fuck up already). By most accounts Elvis was a dirty, poor, awkward, painfully shy kid, from a demographic that in a pre-PC era would have been referred to as "white trash." Of course many (all?) of the first rock and rollers came from humble backgrounds, but Elvis was never quite able to obscure his origins (whether via a flamboyant persona or some other means); even standing in the oval office with Nixon he came across as a benighted "aw shucks" country kid who happened to be able to "sing good."

And then there is the music itself. Elvis didn't really know what he was looking for when he first walked into Sam Phillips' reception room; he just knew he was looking. (It is thus kind of poetic that he was driving trucks for a living at the time. And damn if the music that he and Phillips and the Scotty Moore / Bill Black rhythm section would end up producing wasn't perfectly suited for "the road" -- maybe even more so than that favored musical fare of the highway-loving beats.) One of the most salient features of the early sides was the famous Sun slapback reverb. Nowadays recording studios are built with an ear toward a clean, dry sound, but before one could add effects processing artificially, studios were prized for their built-in acoustic personality. Sun was one of the most characteristic of these -- through a combination of the building materials used in the room, its shape, and contemporary recording technology and techniques, some kind of alchemy was achieved. (Elvis was not the only beneficiary of this, as is obvious if you listen to the numerous other recordings that came out of Sun before it became museum -- including sides by Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Johnny Cash, and a host of other not-too-shabbys. But with Presley the effect was to ramp up by a thousand percent the basic mournfulness of his vocal style, making him sound like some kind of hip wraith.)

Elvis' melancholy was also infused with (you knew I was going here, right?) understated humor -- a facet frequently overlooked, but brilliantly captured by Jim Jarmusch in the film Mystery Train (featuring lengthy, hilarious performances by Screamin Jay Hawkins and Joe Strummer). In fact, what really hooked me in to the Elvis story was when I learned how "That's All Right" -- the first single -- was created. Elvis had been moping around Sun -- whose recording services were available to anybody for a modest fee -- for months. His original goal had been to record some maudlin ballads for his mother. A lot of trial and (even more) error ensued as he attempted to make his next steps; although Sam Phillips and receptionist Marion Keisker (who I have always suspected was an under-recognized player in the Sun story) were both confident that Elvis had talent, none of the initial recordings really clicked. Then, during a break in one particularly frustrating session, something happened, according to guitarist Scotty Moore:

...we were taking a break, I don't know, we were having Cokes and coffee, and all of a sudden Elvis started singing a song, jumping around and just acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass and he started acting the fool, too, and, you know, I started playing with 'em. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open -- I don't know, he was either editing some tape or doing something -- and he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'

This, incidentally, is one of the best examples I know of creativity set loose by a willingness to stop trying... so... damned... hard. If I ever have to teach a class on composition (not that I think that would be a terribly good idea), day one would be spent impressing upon students the somewhat counterintuitive idea that sometimes the mind just needs to drift, daydream, wallow in aimlessness before it can actually get anything done. In this case, after hours of comparatively regimented work, a sudden descent into goofery produced something amazing, almost by accident (it is worth pointing out that, at least according to Moore's story, the musicians were hardly aware of the beauty of what they were creating -- such awareness was Sam Phillips' special talent).

Like a lot of other good music, the Elvis Sun recordings -- in addition to the aforementioned "That's Alright," my favorites are "Good Rockin' Tonight," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "Mystery Train," and "Blue Moon"... but of course there are numerous others -- sound more complex than they are. I can remember, for instance, initially wondering what the hell the drummer was doing to make everything groove so nicely -- and of course, there was no drummer. (The percussive effect seems to be coming from the bass and / or Elvis' acoustic guitar -- though as far as I know Elvis never strung a dollar bill through the strings of his instrument, which is purportedly how Johnny Cash got his guitar to sound like a drum.)

Pity that it was mostly downhill from here.

* * * * *

Twelve years ago (right about this time of the year, actually) I had a chance to visit Memphis and Sun for the first time as part of the cross-country car trip that finally landed me in LA. Something about moving west has made me, on the whole, a bit less of a romantic -- but there was one very hot night during which I was actually able to sit on the hood of my car in front of the momentarily-empty, barely-refurbished Sam Phillips studio, with its little neon sign. I spent a good forty minutes there, just staring at the sky while absorbing the energy of that place. It was a good feeling, but rather bitter too.

Errata and neologisms, together again

Apropos of nothing, of course:

Einstein's Mistakes.

Other people's mistakes.

New kinds of language.

Other new kinds of language.

I hope it really is a satire

Apparently there is a musical based on an American Idol theme; you can get a synopsis here.

I think there's great potential in this material, but if they really want to drive the point home (if indeed there is a point), they should pull out all the stops. I mean, just go over the top. You know, tease out all of the subtextual associations that go along with the word "idol": virgin sacrifice, Indiana Jones, badly chanting Hollywood "natives," cannibalism, whatever. Throw Clay Aiken (or whoever) in the middle of that and see what you get.

(Jeff, any scoop on what this actually is, or whether it's any good?)

Not the best way to reignite the flames of passion

Woman sets fire to ex-husband's penis.

No pic for this post, thank you very much.

Via Reuters.

Maybe that's where I left my keys

Astronomists find enormous hole in the universe.

Via the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

I love a parade

Well, once in a while, anyway.

Last weekend we ingested a dose of neighborhood culture with "Multnomah Days", a celebration of local businesses, artists, and services based in our little corner of Portland (the corner also known as Multnomah Village). The high point (for anyone with kids, anyway), was the rather lengthy morning parade, whose participants ranged from the very predictable (local churches... yawn) to the very eccentric (you shoulda seen our hairy, hippy clowns). In other words, typical, charming Portland.

I spent much of the time either dodging candy or watching with great interest to see who was going to accidentally step in the horse-shit that was deposited early in the parade by a cop-carrying thoroughbred. But there was a moment when my interest was truly piqued: by a freaking marching band, for chrissakes.

I guess what grabbed me was that said ensemble was staffed by a panoply of, uh, mature gentlemen and women.

I know it has become hip as all get-out to revisit the marching band format, but what probably sold me on these folks was that they weren't hip -- and they dug in and rocked the crowd anyway. It was completely without artifice. The notion of having a marching band wasn't a gimmick, or a unique way to express post-modern angst, or whatever. Rather, it was simply a bunch of older folks who wanted to get together on a Saturday morning to play a surprisingly rousing version of "Wooly Bully."

As a former prisoner of a high school marching band (it was very hard to circumvent that particular ensemble if you wanted to participate in most of the other music programs at my high school) I had to smile. I never really enjoyed having to don the spats and other ludicrous hand-me-down regalia, but every once in a while I'm reminded that maybe my time on the field wasn't totally wasted. Practically speaking, marching band gave me some of my first experiences arranging horn harmonies on the fly (mostly as a way to goof off during band camp, while some other section of the band was being taught their choreography). And of course there's this: jazz has a significant tangle of roots in the New Orleans street culture that included marching-band-like entities.

On the other hand, given that most high school marching bands are obligated to include at least one "contemporary hit" in their repertoire, I cringe to think of some of the performances that will unfold on football fields across the country starting in September...

Like shooting fish in a barrel

Well, sort of.

As a kid, I used to fish a bit, but I never caught much of anything. For me, and for most of my comrades, the "sport" was more about hanging out near (and sometimes swimming in) a lake, eating forbidden junk foods, telling tasteless jokes, skipping stones, and finding stuff to burn in the campfire (I guess I was a pretty typical boy, at least until junior high).

And even though my brother once had a mishap with someone else's hook that accidentally got caught in his earlobe, I must admit I don't see the benefits of a fishing pole that looks like a bazooka. If you click on this site, you'll be body-slammed by a very loud commercial that makes fishing sound like pro wrestling. With dead fish.

I dunno. It seems like the sort of thing Dick Cheney might get off on. (That is, if Dick Cheney still had enough of a soul to actually get off on anything.)

A Little Max

Oh, shit.

I originally intended to use this post to write up something snappy on the 30-year-anniversary of Elvis Presley's over-the-toilet slump. (Elvis was a hero to some. Not to me -- though I do love all of those early Sun records, including his.)

However, given that Max Roach died yesterday, the idea of following through on that particular goal now seems somewhat sacriligious -- even for me. (Max was famously broad-minded in his musical interests, but I suspect he might have drawn the line at Elvis. If so, I would have understood completely.)

As in the past, there isn't much I can add to the existing eulogies, given the scope and the depth of the reactions by the rest of the jazz blogosphere (spearheaded by the usual suspect). Which is not to say that there isn't more to be understood about what exactly Max accomplished.

This morning I tried to pay some respect by tuning in to WKCR's memorial broadcast (which runs through next Wednesday, I believe). Here, perhaps, is a measure of the man's greatness: I got an error message telling me that "the streaming server cannot accept any more connections at this time." Yikes -- I have never had that happen before, and I listen to a lot of internet radio. (If you get similarly rejected, keep trying, cuz the marathon is well worth it.)

Of course, there is the lingering question, which resurfaces every time one of the big ones leaves us, of whether or not jazz really is "literally dying before our very eyes." And the related question of whether it is more appropriate to wring one's hands in grief, or to celebrate a life lived at the highest artistic level.

We all mourn in our own way, of course; what's "appropriate" is what feels right. As for me, I choose the celebratory mode, both in pondering Max's life and the "state of jazz." For one thing, Max's contribution to music (indeed, to art) was not limited to something finite, like the elements of a style (he swung in such and such a way, he pioneered the use of this piece of the kit, etc.). Those things are of course important, but like Ellington, Zappa, Mingus, Monk, and umpteen other heroes of mine, Max left behind what Joseph Conrad called a "how to be": in this case, a philosophy of artistic survival, vitality, and growth (one of the elements of which was a sense that art is socially important -- imagine that!).

So rather than being one of the last remaining guys to have the "jazz gene," how about this: Max Roach, simply by the example of his life, ensured that "jazz" would continue (even if, in the future, jazz doesn't always sound like the music he created, and even if it stops being officially called "jazz" at some point (now wouldn't that be nice?)). He put so many good ideas into so many people's heads that we'll be hearing from him for many years to come.

The first Max record I reached for today, incidentally, was Money Jungle (and what an apt title to describe the peculiar situation of the jazz musician -- or of any artist in a capitalist society, really). Friends I have tried to turn on to this thing over the years have tended to respond extremely: they either love it or they hate it. I suspect much of this has to do with a sense that the music, without being "aggressive" in the obvious ways (atonal, loud, or overly fast) does sound a bit like a protracted struggle. Several of the performances seem to come within a hair's breadth of total collapse.

And that may be the crux right there. On this recording, as on so many other great jazz recordings, the possibility of failure is tangible, and the participants don't seem interested in concealing it: the result is not artful, it is art. The willingness of certain talented people to risk everything, not as a platitude, but as a real choice with real consequences, good or bad: I can't think of a better definition of greatness.

Ah, the WKCR stream is back -- gotta go listen.

Find it, find it now

One of Web 2.0's better moments? Not likely.

I don't get it. Is this meant to be a sleuthing device, to help you pinpoint the original version of some hard-to-place melody stuck in your head? In that sense, I suppose the thing has potential.

Or is it really (yet another) social networking site, masquerading as a music service? What's with the sharing? The ratings? The comments?

Worse yet, is this the American Idol philosophy run amok? Social networking as a massive talent show? Why else would one want to take the time to listen to an insipid a capella rendering of "Amazing Grace" (or whatever)?

Aside: in a former life, I worked as a librarian in the music and arts department of a NJ library. A few times a week I got to helm the music reference desk, where I was sometimes asked to help someone hunt down the name of some elusive ditty or other. It was in this way that I first came to learn the names of some of my favorite cartoon melodies, like "Entrance of the Gladiators" and the "Volga Boat Song" (both of which have been quoted in recent IJG tunes). Good times.

Riffing

Perhaps, as Mwanji humorously suggests, music really isn't a healing force in the universe. But if, like TIG, we want (again humorously) to get into the issue of having / not having rhythm, something tells me we’d all be a lot better off if this recently-retired, morally-deficient, and tragically-coiffed fellow (not to mention the folks “dancing” around him, including at least one journalist who should have known better) had even the barest hint of “groove” or “soul.”

Actually, I'm not sure this is funny (though it was featured as a bit on Letterman a while back) -- at least not in this "raw feed" form. I mean, the clip is silly enough, and it's hard not to laugh, but given the fact that Rove seems to be laughing too, in the end this comes off as just another diversionary tactic. See? He can't be the spawn of Satan -- he's too goofy!

It was in some ways more jarring (and more effective as dada) to see this clip (for the first time, in my case) as background during a story on Rove's retirement last night on Countdown. It was run entirely uncontextualized (I had to YouTube it before I knew where it came from) during Olbermann's interview with James Moore (I think). Presented matter-of-factly as representative Rove footage, the effect was more comic in a cut-to-the-quick kind of way, and ultimately a little disorienting too. Oh yeah. This is how bad it has gotten. It was like watching Hitler kiss a baby: awkward and malevolent all at once.

Of course, "Virginia" and her fellow (self-described) "Rovehos" might not agree.

Important news

You have to know about stuff like this when you have a kid.

Apparently, there is a blog devoted to archiving as many versions of "the diarrhea song" as possible.

Most of these seem rather, uh, strained (sorry). For instance: "When you’re rummaging in the attic / and your ass goes automatic." Still, it's good to know there are connoisseurs out there devoted to finding the "finest variations" of this little ditty.

(Horror of horrors: the version I learned as a kid -- "some people think it's funny / but it's really wet and runny" -- isn't there yet.)

When I was a kid myself, I used to be fascinated by the idea of a "kids' culture" -- which was pretty viable despite the fact that most kids didn't have direct access to mass media. Turns out other people find that fascinating too.

I sing the body, whatever

(Aside: I suppose the above image gives a new vibrancy to the "navel-gazing" tag...)

So I know I'm guilty of occasionally using this blog to less-than-surreptitiously complain about a certain back condition (ankylosing spondylitis) that has been a part of my life for the last ten years or so. I'm going to start out this post by being a lot less surreptitious.

Apparently, according to my rheumatologist, there are some new developments. What the most recent X-Rays suggest, anyway, is that my vertebrae are now actively fusing together. That's right: my spine is slowly calcifying into a single bone! Neat-o, eh?

So yeah, I've entered a more aggressive phase of this fucking disease. The usual trajectory from here is to fuse and fuse until you "cain't fuse no more." It takes a while, yes, but that's the narrative.

No point in getting melodramatic about this, of course. There's no way I'm going to end up like the guy pictured above (even though he had the same illness). Besides, there are a few new "wonder drugs" on the market that purport to be able to stop the thing in its tracks. (Alas, like most wonder drugs, these oddly-named concoctions have the potential to create a whole different set of problems. But what the hell -- it's not like the "booze therapy" I had until recently prescribed for myself was without its own side-effects.)

* * * * *

Why on earth am I boring you with the tedious details of this situation? Well, like everything in my life, it always seems to come back to music. In this case, I've been thinking a bit about composition and its relationship to both the body and the physical act of playing an instrument. I wonder: is composition a habit you develop when your fingers aren't skilled enough to articulate the sounds your mind is imagining? (By "you," I mean "me," of course.)

My own history as a player has been a hodgepodge at best. The piano was the first instrument I can remember wanting to play, and though I started early enough (2nd grade), I never came close to being what you might call "accomplished." I was certainly never the kid who played exceptionally well at the recital. I could find my way around a keyboard alright (still can), but I hated reading music (still do), and more than once was caught by my teachers(s) filling in the gaps of what my eyes couldn't follow with what my ear was hearing.

Sure, the piano was always my main axe, but I was never really in love with it the way I was in love with the process of "making up songs" (even way back then). I suspect on some subconscious level that I felt obligated to find an instrument at which I could truly excel -- this, I believed for a while, was the essence of being a musician -- so at some point in my youth I spent quality time with the drums, the guitar, the trumpet, the clarinet, the bass clarinet, and the tenor sax. Alas, nothing clicked, though of course I got a lot of practical knowledge about how these instruments worked. But I always came back to the piano, and that was where I did the bulk of my writing.

In high school I found myself constantly at war with the notion of instrumental virtuosity. On the one hand, many of the extra-curricular musical circles I moved in were oriented toward the heavy metal / prog rock vibe, which of course is all about technical mastery. I was one of a handful of keyboardists in my class willing to take the time to learn some silly Yes or Rush song or other, mostly for the "benefit" of the opposite sex.

But truth be told, I hated the whole chop-heavy ethic of that environment. Partly because I suspected that I couldn't hang with it consistently. (It's one thing to play a little flashy piano for some big-haired girls in a choir room, but something else altogether to do that sort of thing regularly with an actual band.) More importantly, it all felt a little misdirected to me. I probably knew even then that the time it would have taken to get my technique up to speed -- if such a thing were even possible -- was time that would have been better spent actually writing music.

So at some point in my early college years I resigned myself to being a merely competent instrumentalist (piano mostly, but a little guitar too), and concentrated on writing the best music I could in spite of my technical flaws.

Of course, just as I was becoming comfortable with this role, I accidentally started studying jazz more seriously. It began with a ragtime phase (in 1995, shortly after moving to LA to go to grad school) and that quickly led to an immersion in classic jazz piano styles, like boogie-woogie and stride. I was so hardcore about this stuff for a while that I actually found myself playing fairly regularly with a sad little "dixieland band" (their term, not mine), which was, incidentally, where I met some of the original members of the IJG (including some, like Evan Francis and Cory Wright, who are still in the group).

Because of the level of tactical precision required to execute any of the stride-oriented styles in particular, I found myself spending long tedious hours trying to work up something resembling a technique. I never really achieved that, but I got to the point where I could fake it well enough to play publicly. From there, I got bored, of course, and also got so sick of the dixielanders that for a short time even Louis Armstrong was ruined for me. I then spent about three years burning through an ad hoc "modern jazz piano course" (of my own devising) during which I aspired to play mostly like either Bill Evans or Monk, depending on the day of the week.

Once again, at the end of this period, a certain basic competence was attained, but once again, it wasn't enough to satisfy my own personal criteria-for-doing-it, which was, roughly: if I am going to put in the effort as a pianist, I want greatness to at least be an option. Merely being good at the piano wasn't enough of a justification for going through the mind-numbing hell of daily rudiments. So my self-imposed routines started to drift, and I inevitably found myself using the piano to write instead of practice.

Thus for a second time I abandoned my aspirations toward total instrumental proficiency. And thus for a second time I confirmed my identity as "one of those composers who can't play so good." And all of this, I realize now, was at least partly spurred on by a new reality in my life: suddenly, sitting with the "appropriate piano posture" on the typical backless piano bench for more than fifteen minutes at a time could lead to excruciating pain. Suddenly, too, I was unable to sleep through the night for the same reason. (Ankylosing spondylitis is at its most onerous during periods of inactivity.)

I have always been a night owl, but the fact that I could no longer sit still for the amount of time it usually took me to get into a good compositional work rhythm (for me, writing at the piano always involved a warming up period of basic noodling) meant that I had to develop new work habits.

The first of these was pacing. It's amazing how many compositional problems can be solved by walking back and forth, humming to yourself. I've always been interested in the relationship between sound and movement -- but suddenly this relationship was much more immediate and compositionally relevant for me. The fact that I took up writing-while-walking may help explain why so many of my IJG-era tunes are more groove-oriented than the stuff I was writing during, say, the Evelyn days.

The second new habit was writing music on a computer. I know, it sounds kind of scary. But the computer has come to feel very much like a neutral device to me -- it doesn't seem to guide or limit the direction of a particular piece in the way that writing on a piano did. Thanks the invention of notational software, which could be loaded on a laptop, which could be placed on a counter so I could work while standing, I could score an entire piece without touching the piano at all. (And actually, with my temperament, I can't imagine keeping a group like the IJG stocked with tunes if I were computer-less. With the original quintet version of the group, I used to do stuff the old-fashioned way (i.e., by hand) and found it tedious as hell. But I suppose that's a topic for another post.)

I guess the irony in all this was that, though I was suffering physically much of the time (both from the disease, which was finally diagnosed in 2002, and from the fatigue that came with the accumulated lack of sleep), I was suddenly writing better music than I thought I was capable of. I suppose there was something delightful about being "freed by necessity" from the limitations of an "actual instrument" -- no longer did I need to cultivate my tunes by physically playing them. This (for me) fresh perspective on the process of writing music was like rediscovering the rush of completing my first compositions: I felt like I was seventeen again, and writing for all the right reasons.

Anyway, we'll see if the new drugs make any difference in all of this. First, I guess, I should get over my aversion to having to stab myself in the thigh once a week.

We just bought a dorky red upright piano for the basement -- just for fiddling around, I told myself, though I hope it will also tempt the kid into learning to play. I do daydream from time to time about starting some kind of free jazz duo or trio -- as a periodic diversion from the stresses of running a fifteen-piece group. But the piano portion of that hypothetical project would inevitably be more of an energy-over-ability thing. You know: "punk piano." Certainly if I ever start taking myself serious enough as a pianist to act like this, you should feel free to tell me to fuck off.

Over 250,000 hours of practicing, and more than 15,000 lessons...

And all I got was this big headache.

Watch out! There goes a flying finger! (Or was it a toe?)

Musician, heal thyself!

Uh, "tear down the internet"? Really?!

Yeowza, is this dude a nutcase. Here's the tabloidy link, which I'm sure you've already seen.

Let's keep in mind that Sir Elton's own music started sucking long before the rise of the blogs and iPods and cell phones and all the rest.

Actually, let's strike that "sir" business, shall we? I think that's part of the backstory here: what Reggie is really expressing is a modern version of the traditional aristocratic contempt for the riff-raff (people like you and me, dontcha know) -- in this case, those who have dared take advantage of music biz cleavage that has opened up as a result of the technological developments of the last ten years.

Oy.

Can the next musician to become wildly famous and popular please make an effort to stay sane?!

Not everyone likes a minstrel

This wikiHow entry on how to be a minstrel reads a bit like a hastily-dashed off high school homework assignment, and requires some serious editing (well, maybe "serious" is not the right word). But bits of it are very amusing.

I dunno, maybe I'm punchy with a mix-heavy morning. You tell me:

"Be constantly cheering people up. Use your skill with the instrument to sing impromptu songs about people on the street. Sing about their demeanor or clothing and always try and poke fun when possible."

"Not everyone likes a minstrel. You may be asked to leave by a police officer or a member of the community who obviously opposes fun of any manner."

"Always dance."

There's a bland insistence and naivete to this stuff; it's almost charming.

Alright, back to work...

More conceptual art?

The site tells me they're selling this software, but the packaging sure looks like they're selling a sex doll (yes, that link is "work safe," and worth checking out).

Not that I know much about what typical sex doll packaging looks like. (Ahem.)

One of my many questions: is she singing in front of a wall of fire?

And who the hell came up with the name "Vocaloid"? I guess they couldn't have known that it would remind me of a certain Devo song.

UPDATE: This just in: "Sweet Ann" has her own MySpace page. Sounds to me like they forgot to program her to take the cotton out of her mouth before she started singing.

No fuss, no muss

So an insert for these came in yesterday's mail, and my day was basically ruined.

I mean, what the fuck? Like, are real human babies not already helpless enough? Do we hafta make 'em small enough to fit in the palm of your freakin' hand? If that's not an instance of de-evolution, I don't know what is.

Or maybe it's a way to feel superior and in-control, subtly disguised as an obsession with "cute things." As my wife said, satirically in character as one of these obsessives (I'm paraphrasing): "Oh, look at me! I'm a giant! Look at my itty bitty baby! Haw haw haw!"

Of course, Jeeeezus has to be involved somewhere under all this. If you're bored enough to click over to the website of the lady who insists on unleashing these upon the world, you will be greeted with some churchy doggerel equating sculpture with divine creation. Hoo-boy.

But if there really is a god, I seriously doubt he/she would intentionally make something like this:



And here's a gruesome twosome for ya:



This guy looks a little like Edward G. Robinson. And he's made out of silicone:



Anyway, the insert had a little disclaimer that read "This doll is not a toy; she is a fine collectible to be enjoyed by adult collectors."

Oh really? "Fine" in what sense exactly? "Enjoyed" in what sense exactly?

I mean, we're not talking about wine here, right?

I guess what really creeps me out is that I can't help but wonder if the existence of these things, much like the existence of the child pageant phenomenon, is actually evidence of a deep disgust for real, living, breathing children. A product of these sad, sick times.

Jocko Homo

So here's the "Jocko Homo" video I mentioned in the last post, for those of you who haven't seen it.

Mothersbaugh: "Jocko Homo was one of the first songs I wrote for the band. The whole song was meant to be a theme song for the theory of de-evolution and for Devo, what we were about. It was meant to lay out the story right there. It was a collection of discussions we had where we sat around in Kent after students had been shot, and decided that what we were seeing happening on the planet, when we looked at the news and read the paper, was not evolution but was more appropriately described as de-evolution."

Casale: "We were kind of poetically explaining what it meant to be Devo, and what de-evolution was. We didn't see any evidence that man was the result of some never ending linear progress and everything was getting better. When we were growing up, the magazines would show the world in 1999, and it'd be this beautiful, futuristic, domed city with everybody going around in jets and space-cars. Everybody was fed and everybody was groomed and everybody seemed to have tons of money. It's such a joke, what really happened was: the planet got more and more overrun by population, greater gaps between the rich and the poor, more new diseases, decimation of the environment. It seemed like even though people were getting more 'free' information from television and newspapers, they were actually less informed, less thoughtful, and acting dumber. So we saw de-evolution. The fact that a bad actor could be elected president was more proof to us. Things have just gone downhill from there. We didn't really want it to all be true, instead it looks like de-evolution was clearly real. In retrospect, compared to what's going on today, Reagan looks like a serious guy."

More commentary here.

It's Pavlovian, baby

I must be an absolute basket case for even considering mounting another IJG tour for 07 -- such a thing would be like, what, the third? fourth? fifth trip we've taken this year?

I mean, I've got a semi-idyllic existence going up here -- hanging out with my beautiful family, enjoying the greenery of Portland, writing new music, getting all mixy with the new album -- do I really want to subject myself to the madness and exasperation that inevitably accompany the tour-booking process?

In a very real sense, the answer to this question is a big fat "no." But, alas, like any addict, I remain enthralled by the potential highs that can accompany the all-too-brief 4 or 5 hours we might actually spend on a stage during a week or so of touring. In any case, I keep telling myself to hang on, Sloopy; the next batch of gigs will surely push us into a position where this whole process actually gets a little easier. And if not the next batch, the batch after that for sure. And if not the batch after that for sure...

Ahem. Anyway, this time -- if, as the magic eight ball suggests, all signs really do point to yes -- we'll be exploring new territory in the fabled "rust belt" of Ohio, western PA, Kentucky, and (possibly) West Virginia. (A region about which, I presume, Zappa's delightful "Sun Village" lyric ("It take the paint off your car / And wreck your windshield too / I don't know how the people stand it / But I guess they do") could just as easily have been written.)

Got any venues to recommend, dear reader? If so, let us know!

"Why the rust belt," you ask? Answer: we got invited to do a showcase at (Cincinnati's own) Midpoint Music Festival, which on the surface looks like exactly the sort of indie rock festival some of us upstart jazzers think we need to play if we want to make our art economically (and perhaps culturally) viable.

I usually commit to these things based on a combination of instinct, research, and band voting. This time, however, in addition to all of those things, there was a weird convergence of geography and listening interests. It turns out that July 2007 was the month that I finally got around to checking out the band Devo; a band that, coincidentally enough, emerged (as probably everyone but me already knew) from the Akron, Ohio scene in the seventies.

Let me put this in context -- I have never really considered myself a true fan of the so-called "new wave" -- at least not in the way that someone who came of age during the new wave period ought to have been. Alas, while that particular phenomenon was happening, I more or less ignored it, turning instead to the fifties and sixties for my popular music.

As I got older, and as the new wave receded into history, I allowed myself to make occasional forays into its poppy, punky goodness. And so I have gone through an Elvis Costello period, a Talking Heads period, a Blondie period, and so on. But Devo was always one of those bands that managed to slip through the cracks. This even though I was quite sure that they were worth investigating further -- an opinion based soley on what I thought was the startling originality of the ubiquitous "Whip It" (as good an example of a weird song "crossing over" as I can think of).

Several years ago I tried to address my Devo-less-ness by purchasing Are We Not Men?... and was a little disappointed. I don't know why it didn't click, but it didn't, at least not right away. But I didn't give up, and recently, while hunting for interesting music for Thandie, I hit upon the somewhat misguided notion of getting her a Devo DVD compilation with an intriguinging title: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution. I dunno, I think I was probably expecting something a little more, well, "cute." Turns out Devo videos are anything but cute, and are not exactly the sort of fare you want to run by a three-year-old. I mean, they're funny, but man, are they bleeeaaaak.

Funny and bleak -- one of my favorite combinations! So the DVD that was intended for my daughter ended up as my nightly viewing for about a week. And now it can be told -- maybe I'm being premature, or whatever, but at this moment, I have to say that Devo is one of the most interesting bands I've come across recently.

Here, in no particular order, is a series of observations related to that last point:

1. Turns out Devo was not only from Akron, but they went to Kent State. Turns out they were there when the national guard gunned down several of their fellow students. Turns out (at least according to one report) that they actually knew some of the students who were killed. If any of this is true, I can only imagine that it was a key formative experience for the band -- much like Zappa's getting framed for making a pseudo-pornographic recording, and then getting sent to jail for it. Zappa and Devo -- now those are two artists you won't hear mentioned together very often. But I submit that they have more in common than you might initially think.

2. Exhibit B in that argument: also like Zappa, and unlike many of their other contemporaries, Devo seem to have understood dada's potential as a response to a world that gets more absurd with each passing year. So much of what emerged in popular music in the seventies seemed either to be about pure rage and alienation (metal and punk), or authenticity and narrative (singer-songwriters), or escapism and masturbation -- er, virtuosity (prog-rock), or celebration and the body (disco). Holy cow, I know I'm getting into deep doo-doo making these gross generalizations, but I do think the basic point -- that very few artists turned to dadaist aesthetics, at a time when such aesthetics seemed particularly apt -- is right on. Devo has always had a reputation for being a silly, weird-for-weirdness' sake kind of band (see number 6 below), but their intent, so I am learning, was actually quite subversive.

3. It may be obvious, based on what I have said, that my sudden appreciation of Devo has something to do with seeing them as well as hearing them (note that it was a DVD that hooked me, not a CD). Mothersbaugh's turn as a bouncy, demented professor in the video to "Jocko Homo" (for instance) made that song come alive for me in a way that my initial listening didn't. But I also want to be clear that though the visuals are indeed quite important to the Devo aesthetic, the audio is not insignficant by any stretch. In other words, I think it would be a mistake to overlook Devo's music, however simple and repetitive it might be. This is true on a number of different levels: melodically, texturally, rhythmically...

4. Unpacking the DVD and getting a little backstory on the band really helped, as these things often do, to put my own work and artistic struggles in perspective. Briefly: it took a long time for Devo to hone its act / philosophy / aesthetic, and once they did "get it together," their success was fleeting at best. If their commentary is to believed, they were (like most bands coming up in the age before artists were savvy about such things) fucked every which way by a pretty unsavory cast of characters, including (surprisingly) one Mr. David Bowie. And they continue to be fucked by bands like Korn.

5. Gerald Casale: "Devo's irony and absurdity were always aimed at making people think, and making people realize the random possibilities in a world of chaos. Thereby strengthening the validity of us as a species rather than our self-serving egotistical view of ourselves being at the center and masters of all. It makes you a much more humane person to realize that one degree in temperature in an atmosphere or .2 percent of some chemical over another creates a whole new life form. That's what we were always pointing out, that humans have to stop and realize they don't know what they're talking about."

6. Mark Mothersbaugh: "We were constantly misunderstood by the record company, critics, and everyone around us. Our sense of humor was ironic humor; we were so far out and had such a vocabulary already put together by the time we became public, because we worked for so many years in Akron, just coming up with our own choreography, music, philosophies, politics, wardrobe, the films, everything... our own slang terms. [...] People kept trying to put us in categories and we didn't really fit in with the punks and we didn't fit in with new wave. We didn't party with all the rock and roll people. We didn't take drugs. We didn't do anything that would have really made it easy to figure out what we were about, and the irony in our humor often threw people off from what the message was. They thought, 'oh, they're just kidding,' or, 'they don't take what they're doing seriously.' The record companies thought of us as just clowns and quirky, and they'd put out press releases that would say 'that quirky, zany band.'"

7. I knew that Mothersbaugh had a post-Devo career that involved making music "for the man" -- but I wasn't prepared for the little anecdote he tells in TCTADE: that (once upon a time?) he put subliminal messages in his commercial scores, with the intention of undercutting the very product he was hired to help sell (e.g: a subliminal message of "eat less sugar, kids," in an ad for soda). Outstanding!

With an emphasis on the "e"

This is either really cool or really scary.

Maybe I'm Crazy...

...but this seems like an awful lot of work for very little payoff.

I dunno, I could be mistaken.

Also: how I have missed the word "execrable"! Thank you, David Ocker, for reminding me of its stealthy power.

Live Dirge

I'm all for the cause, of course, but if you really wanted to save the planet, couldn't you at least sign up some halfway decent acts?

(Look, folks, they're doing that "band against a wall" pose. Need I say more?)

What I did on my summer vacation

So summer is here and the time is right to finish the next IJG record (in production for over a year now). I know I've been dropping all sorts of ludicrous hints as to its concept, character, title, and so on. Here is the latest update:

Shortly after I moved to Portland last September, my friend and longtime recording partner Michael Kramer (responsible for the recording, editing, and mixing of three of our four "official" albums -- Hardcore, City of Angles, and Industrial Jazz a Go Go!) seemed to sense the impracticality of my 6-month plan to commute to LA every few weeks in order to complete the new record (at that point each tune in the current show was on hard drive in some form, but there was a lot of overdubbing -- not to mention editing, mixing, and mastering -- left to be done). Realist that he is, Kramer talked me into getting set up with my own home recording rig. This turned out to be easier than I expected, and after laying out a few hundred bucks I had converted my basement office into a humble-but-functional studio, with the requisite ProTools software, a set of decent monitors, and a few spare hard drives.

And so Ugly Rug Records was reborn.

Backstory: though I have never been a studio obsessive by temperament (among other things, I've always been just a little leery of the way technology can interfere in the creative process), I did catch the home recording bug for the first time back in the late nineties, initially as an expedient to help with a number of film scoring projects I had picked up at the time. "Ugly Rug Records" (named for a brown-orange shag carpet that lined one of the many apartments Daphne and I shared when living in LA) started with a very basic four-track-and-DAT-machine setup -- and in some ways I still miss its simplicity, as well as the kinesthetic rush it inevitably provided (actual knobs and buttons and tapeheads and faders, oh boy!). This was the main contraption used in the creation of the only Jay's Booming Hat album (a lo-fi-ish mess called Gruel -- you can, if you must, hear excerpts (including the original versions of "The Job Song" and "Big Ass Truck") here, though I will probably unleash the entire thing upon the Internet Archive someday).

When I finally did take the full-on digital plunge, it was by way of Steinberg's Cubase program. I got a number of good demos out of that fucker, and concocted a few of the more "experimental" tracks on the first few IJG albums (e.g., "Los Feelies," "Fantasy on Eine," etc.) using it. But once I recognized that Cubase was not going to be the industry standard, and once I started down the time-intensive road of expanding my compositional ambitions from the quintet to bigger configurations, I lost interest in cultivating whatever modest engineering skills I had developed.

So for the last three IJG albums I have mostly contented myself with shaping each recording "from afar," so to speak -- that is, I never got in and actually did any of the engineering moves myself. I have been very lucky to be working with Kramer throughout most of this period -- because we've been recording together for awhile now, and because we have a basic musical simpatico, we developed a shorthand (and sometimes a telepathy) for the recording / editing / mixing process. This shorthand has been immensely valuable, because there are certain things, when dealing with the creation of a musical recording, that are just very difficult (and tedious) to have to explain to another person. And when you're paying for studio time by the hour, you sure as hell don't want to have to rely on a spell-it-all-out-in-detail mode of communication. You want someone at the helm who just gets it.

Of course, even with a good producer/engineer relationship, there are edits or mixing moves that (given a basic familiarity with the technology) are easier for a producer to do him or herself. And hence the brilliance of Kramer's suggestion that I just bite the fucking bullet and get my own rig. I'll admit that, initially, I was a little put off by the learning curve -- I thought it would take forever to get up to speed on a whole new system. But lo and behold: it turns out that several years of watching someone else use ProTools can actually help you learn how to use ProTools! And so much of this has proved to be more intuitive than I anticipated.

Not so intuitive that I feel ready to finish the project entirely solo, of course. I'm having a lot of fun geeking out, but I know my limits, and I'll still be leaving the final mix in Kramer's hands. With any luck, that will be happening in LA sometime in August (at which time I also hope to have a reading session for some of the new IJG charts). But between now and then (so goes the plan), I'll be holed up in my basement here in Portland, madly editing, assembling in-the-ballpark rough mixes, taking care of the few remaining overdubs, and coming up with the "eureka" album sequence and whatever transition pieces are necessary.

It's gonna be a long, hot summer (did I also mention I'm writing a whole new set of material and trying to plan out the band's touring itinerary for the next year or so?)

* * * * *

So what will the new album be like?

First, I should clarify by saying that I'm actually working on a pair of albums -- it's just high time to get all this material (fifteen or sixteen tunes, I think) finished and out into the world, already. (For a brief moment I actually considered releasing a single double album, but who buys those anymore? No, these will be two separate releases, but meant to be understand as a set.)

Before May, there were basically two main sessions I was working from. The first was meticulously tracked (old school rock style) at Kramer's Wolftone Studios. That was a process that began more than a year ago, and as of today is still not completed (there is at least one instrument left to track on most of the tunes). The second was more of a live session done at CalArts with a skeleton crew version of the group, just before I moved to Portland (this session was engineered by the very talented Owen Vallis). The CalArts session too is in need of some overdubbing. In any case, I had been poking at these sessions half-heartedly throughout 07, not exactly sure how they would end up. But I had been assuming the album(s) would be a purely studio effort, with all the clarity and precision that that implies.

Then came the European trip. In the weeks before we left, I did some research and discovered that (for a somewhat pricey fee) I could get our Bimhuis show recorded. I had been wanting to get a good multitrack live recording of the group for some time, and I gambled on the possibility that the excitement of the trip, plus the fact that we had a critical mass of very experienced IJG-ers (and some amazing subs), plus the possibility of a truly receptive audience would all conspire to produce a good performance. You can read the post on that show to get the details on how things actually went, but in short, the group played a mostly fantastic set, much of which, it turns out, is album-worthy. Of course, "IJG live at the Bimhuis!" would have to be a very different release than "IJG Multitracked in the Studio!," the album I had initially been imagining.

So I found myself faced with a bit of a conundrum, now that there were two extant versions of almost all of the tunes. Do I 1. make the studio album, which has the benefit of clarity and precision, or 2. make the live album, which has the benefit of that elusive and magical "live vibe" that jazz fans so crave?

The answer should have been obvious from the start, given my aesthetic interests (and the circumstances of my life in general): hybrid vigor, baby! Stay tuned for the specifics...

It remains a pertinent parody.

Happy freakin' Fourth of July, everyone.

Hummingbird, hummingbird...

So my wife (who I will now start calling "Quick Fingers") snapped this bitchen shot of an elusive hummingbird in our yard yesterday. (Click it for the full effect.)

Look at that little dude / dudette! This was probably the only restful moment in his / her entire day.