Bye Bye Blues

A few weeks ago I had to play a funeral (it's part of my "day gig"), and was struck when one of the featured speakers described that event as a "cause for celebration." Then I realized: the deceased had made it into her 90s, and seemingly lived her life exactly as she pleased. What was there not to celebrate? We should all be so lucky.

Can you blame me for feeling the same way about the passing of the great Les Paul? Sweet mother of pearl -- what a life this dude lived.

When it comes to the "great man theory of history," I'm skeptical. I believe instead that developments in the world of art, or science, or other areas of culture are generally incremental, with many people contributing small things toward a pattern of overall progress. Every once in a while some talented-but-lucky schmuck comes along at just the right moment (more or less accidentally) to reap the rewards of all that less-than-thrilling behind-the-scenes preparatory work.

Here's evidence of Les Paul's impact -- it almost made me wonder if my skepticism was misplaced.

I do play guitar, but I'm not a guitarist (if you catch my drift), so I don't want to discuss all the wonderful things Paul did for that instrument (except to say that as a composer I benefit from them too). I also don't want to get into Paul's musicianship here, though I consider it to be above reproach. I remember hearing him perform at Fat Tuesday's in NYC, back in the 90s, just as I was beginning my own long, slow, downward spiral into jazz. My friends and I had a great time at that show, and I was thrilled that I got to shake the man's hand -- but I think I sensed even then that his music was not for all tastes, not even among guitar players. In the years since, I came across many other admirers of his, and noticed that more than a few of them faulted him for being capable of some pretty "corny" music. But for me, even Paul at his poppiest (e.g., the Mary Ford stuff, which I confess I love) always walked a delicious line between pablum-for-the-masses, on the one hand, and some kind of weird avant-garde mutant shit, on the other.

No, really. It seems commonplace now, but it's fundamentally bizarre (in a good way) to be able to play along with yourself on a recording, or to create an ensemble piece with musicians you have never actually met. So just as people were getting over the unease-with-the-uncanny that accompanied the first half-century or so of recorded sound, Paul comes along and gives them a reason to fret again. Cuz if music is all about being "in the moment," what happens when you split that moment over multiple tracks? When music becomes asynchronous? With one fell swoop, Paul (and the zeitgeist he rode) opened up a new avenue of musical art, one that was -- hallelujah! -- anything but "authentic." (To paraphrase Frank Zappa -- himself a pioneer of multitracking and other studio techniques -- with studio recording you could suddenly do things that had no analogue in nature.)

Ironically (to the extent that Paul is considered a jazz musician), jazz has always had a complicated relationship with recording technology, and specifically with the advances that Paul wrought. Though some jazz musicians were keenly aware of the possibilities, and sought to use that information to the most musical ends possible (Ellington was apparently a real stickler about recording), the infamous original resistance of a Freddie Keppard (say) seemed to inform the broader view: if you play jazz, record it only because you have to. And when you have to, aim for a good representation of the "live event," but don't ever think that that representation is going to compete with "the real thing." Making albums, in other words, is just a byproduct of the fact that we're in the music business -- not a viable practice unto itself. And so the experiments of a Bill Evans or a Bob Ostertag remained just that: experiments.

And yet we jazz musicians live in the present, too, and are affected by technological advances that we may not see fit to embrace explicitly. I have always wondered, for instance, about the extent to which a tune like Mingus's "Moanin'" (from Blues & Roots) would have been possible without the concept of multitrack recording hanging around in the cultural background. On the liner notes to that album, Mingus writes that he wanted "to use a larger group to play in a big band form I'd like to hear that has as many lines going as there are musicians." Here's a live version:



Is this really that dissimilar to the dense tier-ing that characterized some of Paul's recordings (or his demonstrations of same)? Set up the basic skeleton of a form -- whether it's a blues or something else -- and then just layer the shit out of it. You know, because you can. It seems like a model plucked right out of the multitrack world, where the temptations to think vertically can be pretty strong -- those of you who have ever owned or futzed around with a four-track, or a DAW, or a copy of Garageband, probably know the temptations I'm talking about.

I dunno, maybe that's a stretch. Or maybe I'm just realizing that this "multitrack mindset" has a lot to do with how I write the music for my own big band -- which, incidentally, now feels more indebted to Les Paul than ever.

Anyway, RIP.

Jazz of the Future

RIP George Russell.

RIP, also, to the days when jazz could be the subject of its own television show, in which viewers would be invited to understand its present and ponder its future. You know: the good old forward-thinking days.

(Now that the future is here, does that sort of old-time optimism seem quaint to you? I sure hope not. Even the future needs a future.)

We are the world, and we suck

I won't be breaking any news if I start off by saying what you know already: this week (and Thursday, in particular) the world lost two super-famous people, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Three, if you count Ed McMahon. (By pure coincidence, I spent much of yesterday practicing the music I need to play for a funeral today.)

Insert here the usual caveat about how there is more pressing stuff going on in the world. Still, all three departures were pretty fucking dramatic and sad. And Michael Jackson, as the lone musician in the group, is probably the one I should try to say something artistically insightful about.

Instead, I find myself wondering what really killed him.

I'm not talking about what the autopsy will reveal (thanks anyway, Dr. Gupta). I'm talking about the music business in particular, and the mass consumption of art in general. I'm talking about the media machine and its peculiar bloodlusts. And I'm talking about me and you: music fans who buy into and prop up stupid ideas like "the king of pop."

There's complicity enough to go around. Jackson himself made a number of really bad choices. But it's not enough to simply write him off as a crazy dude who is alone responsible for his fate. He was also a product of a system that we all (any of us who ever bought a record or watched MTV, anyway) participated in.

To you Jackson haters: can you, in your heart of hearts, guarantee that you would not eventually go off the deep end if one of your parental units brutally forced you into a professional entertainment career before you knew the first goddamn thing about the world? Can you guarantee your continued sanity if you turned out to be so famous that meaningful personal relationships became problematic, or even impossible? Are you that strong and imperturbable? Really?

To you Jackson fans: can you, in your heart of hearts, guarantee that you would love Jackson's music nearly as much if he had never sold millions, or billions, or however-the-fuck-many records? Did your love of his music (or him) depend on (or at least correlate with) his fame? No? Well, he evidently thought it did. Where did he get that idea?

I know it's important to focus on the music, but dig: the way the music was loved ultimately helped ensure that there wasn't more of it. So the fame problem became a musical problem.

There has been talk about how Jackson, in his bizarre later life, was the victim of enablers who infiltrated his inner circle. But we were all enablers. I mean, shit: even in death everyone wants a piece of this man. It was fascinating (and a little disturbing) to watch the explosion of furtive status updates across Facebook and Twitter as the news emerged yesterday: and the frenzy that obtained as people tried to confirm the initial TMZ report occasionally gave way to a sense of, well, petulant entitlement. Some people actually seemed pissed off that they were not immediately informed as soon as Jackson was gone. As if the news was really about them, or someone close to them.

So it's the culture, stupid. Andrew Sullivan has what seems to me to be the best obit so far, because he makes precisely this point:

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age - and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell. [...]

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

Yes, it chewed him up and spat him out. That's it exactly. Except that we're still chewing. Now I see people smiling, laughing, dancing outside the hospital. Now I see the smug broadcasters playing their part like predictable actors in some sick, tired play. Jackson was preparing for a "comeback tour," but in a way, this is the "greatest" comeback he could have devised, according to the rules of the game. In premature death, his fate is now sealed.

One of the hallmarks of the digital age has (supposedly) been the gradual erosion of the music industry star system. That was the world Jackson inhabited. Is it going to finally die with him? Cuz in the long run, it isn't doing anybody any good.

Anyway, RIP.

RIP Dom DeLuise

RIP Freddie Hubbard

For what it's worth (probably not much), "Daphne's Dream City" (the first song I wrote for the IJG, and also the first tune we recorded, and also the first track on our first album) was based (to a pretty shameless degree) on Hubbard's "Prophet Jennings."

The sad beauty of that Hubbard track still gets me. Seems fitting to play it again now.

The M word

It's raining, trying to snow.

My ankle is severely twisted, after I stupidly decided to go for a run last night and misjudged the circumference of a pothole (not surprising, since it was rainy and dark).

I can't stand or walk except by hopping on my left leg.

Apparently 40 brings you many things -- but not wisdom. And alas, the fool was right:

Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise.

Anyway, is it any wonder that this concatenation of circumstances has put me in mind of a certain well-loved film:



* * * * *

And speaking of well-loved, Amanda over at Pandagon has one of the best blog-obituaries of the late great Bettie Page, who died earlier this week (RIP):

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I don’t see the appeal, from the playful look in her eyes in most pictures, to her refreshing lack of shame, to the way she squares her shoulders, and of course her kitschy style that seamlessly adapted itself to punk rock reimagination decades later. She is very rock and roll, compared to Marilyn Monroe, who was very bachelor pad.

[...]

I have no doubts about why she’s popular at all. The image overload has diminished the power of her image, but for a lot of the kind of rock music loving weirdos who felt alienated from the standard cheesecake middle American version of sexuality---Playboy, Hooters, blond bimbos who all but say, “You want to put what where? *giggle*"---the Bettie Page pin-up pictures offered something genuinely fun. She’s not playing stupid in these pictures, and it’s genuinely hot. She’s naughty without seeming to have an ounce of guilt to her. They cater to the fantasies of men who want something more interesting than cheesecake. But it was women (well, women like me and a lot of women I know) who put her popularity over the top. I suspect a lot of women see her picture for the first time and think, shit, I can actually be sexy without getting breast implants, dyeing my hair blond, and adopting a cloying posture. For real. Not the consolation prize sexy, where you’re not the hot cheerleader but you’ll do. Genuinely sexy, sexy in a way that Hooters and sterile Playboy spreads doesn’t even come close to reaching.

Did I mention, by the way, that the IJG may soon be picking up a burlesque show gig?

RIP Yma Sumac

Xtingu (aka the IJG's Jill Knapp) has a solid appreciation here.



As I get older, I find myself on a somewhat desperate search for more and more remarkable music. I like a lot of what's out there, but I count myself lucky if I discover, in any given year, a handful of artists whose music compels me to take advantage of my CD player's auto-repeat functionality. Sumac was one of that rarefied crowd (for me) in 2006. And I'm still in awe.

If you've never heard her, be warned that you will probably either love her (as I do) or think she's just awful. This is not the music of moderation.

RIP Isaac Hayes

Ugh. First Bernie Mac, and now this? What the fuck?



I'd be lying if I said I didn't suspect, with some chagrin, that Hayes will be remembered primarily for the latter phase of his career, and particularly as the epic soul artist who brought us the music from Shaft.

Not that I don't love that music -- even if it did set the template for a lot of cheesy porn soundtracks, and even if it did lay the groundwork for later generations of white comedians who could then counter-exploit the aesthetics of blaxploitation by using its definitive music to make fun of their own lack of cool (everyone from Will Ferrell to Conan O'Brien has toyed with this tiresome trope in some form or other). Obviously that stuff wasn't Hayes' fault.

But it does threaten to overshadow what for me is the mother lode of Hayes' output -- the series of gorgeous tunes he penned (mostly with David Porter, and many for Sam & Dave) for the Stax record label in the 60s. You know the hits, of course -- "Soul Man," "Hold On! I'm Comin'" (with its hilarious provenance -- perhaps one of the more entertaining examples of creative bricolage), "When Something is Wrong With My Baby," "I Thank You," "Wrap it Up" (actually, that last one was a B-side). But digging deeper into the catalog is also rewarding (see below).

Unlike a lot of the other music that ends up in constant rotation / Clear Channel / oldies purgatory, much of this stuff defies exhaustion. These recordings are like little perfectly-constructed perpetual motion machines: they don't wear out. They also demonstrate that just because a piece of music appears simple, logical, and apposite in retrospect -- the sort of thing that makes you exclaim "of course!" upon hearing it -- it does not follow that anybody could have written it. (In some ways, I've been trying to pen something as elegant, true, and basic as "Soul Man" for my entire career, and I haven't even come close.)

Two of my very favorite Hayes/Porter tunes were recorded by a short-lived girl group called the Charmels: "I'll Gladly Take You Back" and "As Long As I've Got You." Fittingly, the swagger of the Sam & Dave tracks is more or less missing from these sides -- and though I love dumb musical bravado as much as the next fan, I find the melancholy that replaces it here truly moving (no doubt the effect is heightened by wonderful vocal performances / horn arrangements).

And of course that melancholy is particularly fitting at this moment.

Hey, Bo Diddley

If Chuck Berry is rock and roll's storyteller/comic, and Little Richard its acrobat/ecstatic, then Bo Diddley was its eccentric folklorist. His music was like an anthopology class with a wicked backbeat: instantly recognizeable as something you have heard before, somewhere (on a playground, probably) -- but reconfigured and revitalized in a unique, addictive way.

It's common now to say that punk was invented to get back to the spirit of early rock and roll (after the combined "excesses" (not my term) of disco and, uh, Led Zeppelin). Maybe that's true, but in any case it's worth pointing out that, even in the context of early rock and roll, BD was "punk." For him, the guitar was a kind of drum (in fact, if you're feeling ambitious, perhaps you could argue that he presaged not only the punks but the modern-day percussive guitarists like Kaki King). The result was stripped-down, drone-based, fluid music that succeeded on the strength of its pulse -- though the occasional punctuation of weird effects didn't hurt any.

Okay, I'll just say it: in the end I always felt Bo Diddley was aesthetically closer to the master bluesman John Lee Hooker than he was to any of his fellow rockers. (Maybe that's why he fit in so well at the Long Beach Blues festival when I saw him there back in the 90s.)

And by the way, "Mr. Diddley" (as the NYT so politely calls him) also has the distinction of being the first rocker to hire female guitarists -- perhaps the best-known being Peggy Jones, aka "Lady Bo" (who worked with him primarily between 1956 and 1962, and appears on all of his classic recordings from this period, including "Hey, Bo Diddley", "Mona", "The Story of Bo Diddley", and "Road Runner") and Norma-Jean Wofford, aka "the Duchess" (who appears in the clip above, and was in the band until 1966). Given the "testicular fortitude" that is often associated with rock and roll, this openness to having a "chick in the band" (prominently) is a not insignificant detail of the man's biography.

* * * * *

Here are a few (a very few) of the other rock/pop tunes that use the so-called "Bo Diddley Beat," the rhythm of which is helpfully transcribed in DJA's tribute.

Need more evidence of the man's influence? Here are the Strangeloves doing "I Want Candy" in 1965 (with a surprise appearance from Sammy Davis Jr. at the end):



(That's an insipid imitation, I know.)

Of course, at some point it can be hard to follow the trajectories of artistic influence / overlap. Here, the inimitable Dr. John demonstrates a contemporaneous instance of the "BD beat" (i.e., Sugar Boy Crawford's "Jock-a-Mo" -- aka "IKO IKO" -- originally released in 1954):



Sometimes stuff is just in the air, ya know?

Anyway: rest in peace (and thank you), Ellas McDaniel.

RIP Harvey Korman

My earliest distinct televisual memories are not of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers or even Warner Brothers cartoons, but the Carol Burnett Show. Yes, I am old enough to have seen the last few seasons when they originally aired. And some thirty years later, I have to say that most of that stuff just doesn't get old.

Given my proclivity for colorful language, and my concern for maintaining a certain level of "cool" cred on this blog, perhaps the foregoing assertion comes as a bit of a surprise to you. After all, Carol Burnett and the troupe did "family entertainment" (yuck!) -- and thus, compared to, say, Lenny Bruce (another hero of mine), they were in fairly tame territory. Certainly they didn't get too far into the "satire as a weapon of social critique" thing that I love so much.

But the way I see it, Burnett was "family entertainment" in a vaudevillian sense. Hers was, essentially, a comedy show for grownups that also happened to appeal to kids. Most "family entertainment" today takes the opposite approach: it is, essentially, kids' entertainment that throws an occasional (usually pathetic) bone to grown-ups. (Dreamworks, I'm looking at you.) Burnett could count on drawing the kids because she never really got into anything terribly controversial (or topical) -- instead, sketch after sketch was about social interaction in a more abstracted and (dare I say it?) "timeless" sense. Sort of like the Marx Brothers. Or Shakespeare.

Harvey Korman was, of course, an essential ingredient in Burnett's comic stew. He was the show's John Cleese -- no one in the cast was better at lampooning bombastic authority. Actually, perhaps the best evidence of Korman's talent in this regard came via a different context, when he played the sputtering bureaucrat Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles (another one of my many favorite films).

But there were other things about Korman's role in TCBS that would make a big impression on me. My favorite (inevitable) moment on any given episode was when the actors or the material would become so silly that the dramatic illusion (they're actors: they're on stage and they can't laugh at what they're doing) could not withstand the pressure. Korman was usually the first to crack (by cracking up), and while perhaps most acting coaches would frown upon such a thing as "unprofessional," to me that was always the high point (and maybe the point) of the show. It meant that the humor had become so important that Korman could no longer control himself -- and what could be funnier and more honest than that? (Needless to say, I would later be drawn to the sort of music that allowed for precisely the same possibility that things could bubble over at any moment.)

Anyway, what you have in the clip above is classic Korman -- physical comedy par excellence, an exquisite portrayal of pomposity (somehow simultaneously suggesting the humility of the actor himself), a hint of Korman's talent for ensemble work, and, toward the end, a brilliant example of the man's skill as an improviser: taking a "mistake" and turning it into an unanticipated moment of hilarity.

Friday Muxtape, no. 2

Before I get into the music: a moment of silence for Eddy Arnold -- the kick-off artist on last week's muxtape (which you can still get here -- I'll be switching off on my two muxtape sites every other week). Arnold was one of (if not the) best-selling country artist of all time, and he passed away yesterday, just shy of 90 years old. RIP.

Anyway, here's some of what's been tickling my ears this week:

1. Prokofiev: "Romeo and Juliet."

2. Roger Daltrey & the LSO: "I'm Free." (This one is for Alex, by the way. Back when I was in school, "I'm Free" was the tune I always sang to myself the minute I had finished with my last final of the semester.)

3. The Challengers: "Lanky Bones." (Did I ever tell you that I love surf rock? No?! Well, let me tell you now: I love surf rock.)

4. Willie Brown: "Future Blues."

5. Charles Wright and the 103rd Watts Street Rhythm Band: "65 Bars and a Taste of Soul."

6. Industrial Jazz Group: "Skeeter Goes Legit." (The obligatory shameless self-promo track. This one is from our first album, Hardcore.)

7. Charming Hostess: "Two Boys."

8. Manhattan Brothers: "Marie."

9. LEMUR GuitarBot: "Emergencybot." (That's right. It's a guitar-playing robot -- from the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, of course.)

10. John Vanderslice: "White Dove." (Here's where the mix starts getting all rocky and poppy and stuff. Sorry.)

11. CPeX: "Vindegij Mijn Gat." (CPeX: not the "Center for Planning Excellence," but "The Clement Peerens Explosition.") According to Sven at And the Ass Saw the Angel, "The Clement Peerens Explosition started as a joke by the men who made a hilarious radio comedy show, Het leugenpaleis, on Studio Brussel." Sounds like my kind of project.)

12. Badfinger: "Baby Blue." (These days I seem to enjoy the bands that ripped off the Beatles more than I enjoy the Beatles themselves. How's that for irony?)

And there you go.

Crazy She Calls Me

Censorship by definition -- You can't do that, it isn't Jazz -- has been the bane of innovative musicians from James P. Johnson to Anthony Braxton. But few can have suffered from its effects quite so comprehensively as Jimmy Giuffre.

Graham Lock, qtd. by Ted Gioia in West Coast Jazz



Rest in peace to a man who helped set the template for the modern composer / improviser / musician who unapologetically, beautifully, and with utmost integrity does his or her own thing.

Thanks, Jimmy.

RIP Bebe Barron

Making good "electronic music" is a bit like writing good iambic pentamenter: it seems like it would be the easiest thing in the world... until you actually try it. (I speak from experience.)

Bebe Barron only made it look easy. The shining example of this, of course: with her husband Louis Barron, she was the co-composer (in itself quite an accomplishment -- I mean, a functional marriage is hard enough to come by, let alone a functional husband-and-wife creative team) of the soundtrack (er, "electronic tonalities") of one of my absolute favorite films of all time: Forbidden Planet.



I'm no expert on "electronic music," but it's pretty obvious that the process of making it back in the forties and fifties was light years away from what it is today. Back then, folks like the Barrons were, first, creating new textures from scratch (in the Barrons' case, they built their own circuits). Not to belabor this point, but that meant that they could not simply go down to the local Guitar Center and buy the appropriate synth module for the scene they were scoring. (A world without Guitar Center? Hard to believe, I know.)

Once the sounds were created and recorded on tape, they had to be organized compositionally, a painstaking process that involved comparatively rudimentary cut-and-splice techniques (apparently, this was Bebe's job). Again, the difficulty here is something that has to be experienced directly (or at least seen on YouTube) to be appreciated:



Clearly, with the advent of digital cut-and-paste technologies in recent years, this sort of thing has become much, much easier (the single edit in the preceding video, which took around four minutes, can now be done in a few seconds). But one wonders if the digital methods of cut-and-paste would have evolved so efficiently had it not been for the pioneers who spent most of their lives doing it the hard way in order to demonstrate what the possibilities were.

Wikipedia:

The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener from MIT played an important role in the development of the Barrons' composition. The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior apply to both animals and more complex electronic machines.

By following the equations presented in the book, Louis was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated with a circuit called a ring modulator. The sounds and patterns that came out of the circuits were unique and unpredictable because they were actually overloading the circuits until they burned out to create the sounds. The Barrons could never recreate the same sounds again, though they later tried very hard to recreate their 'ID' sound from Forbidden Planet. Because of the unforeseen life span of the circuitry, the Barrons made a habit of recording everything.

Barry Schrader:

The music for Forbidden Planet is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music. This was the first commercial film to use only electronic music, and the score for the movie displays an attitude towards film scoring that was different from anything that had happened before. In Forbidden Planet, while there are themes for characters and events in the film, as was traditional in the scoring of that day, the themes are composed and perceived as gestalts, rather than as melodies in traditional movie music. Even more important is the fact that the scoring of Forbidden Planet breaks down the traditional line between music and sound effects since the Barrons' electronic material is used for both. This not only creates a new type of unity in the film sound world, but also allows for a continuum between these two areas that the Barrons exploit in various ways. At some points it's actually impossible to say whether or not what you're hearing is music, sound effect, or both. In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.

RIP Dan Morris

For some time before I snapped up an (unwitting) Mr. Schnelle as our "official drummer" -- and let's face it, the honor has been all mine -- we had something of a "drummer problem," in that we couldn't get any of our tubs-men to actually stay in the band. From 2000 to 2005 we went through, by my count, six "main" drummers, and maybe a few more who subbed with us from time to time. That's changing drummers more than once a year -- no way to build a solid rhythm section, especially when you're dealing with complex, written, original music. It was maddening.

Not that it was anybody's fault. Sometimes economic reality intervenes. Sometimes schedules just don't mesh. And sometimes, even in the case of players who can handle all of the aesthetic / economic / logistical challenges you want to throw at them, the chemistry of a given lineup might be slightly askew. (As a bandleader, sometimes you've just got to suck it up and recognize that the greatest musician in the world might not be the best fit for your project, if he or she isn't "vibing" with everyone else.)

Still, I like to think that I have learned something important from everyone who has played in this group, no matter how briefly. And I know that's the case with Dan Morris, who took a turn in the IJG drum chair for maybe four or five months in 2003. Dan and I lost touch shortly after his tenure as our drummer -- until recently, when he came back to my attention in the worst possible way. There are so many dimensions to this tragedy, but the one I keep coming back to is the untimeliness of it all -- at 37, he was, simply and horribly, way too young.

Dan's good friend Alex Shapiro has a moving tribute (as well as some context) here (thanks to KT for the link).

* * * * *

I met Dan at a James Carney trio concert (at the aforementioned club Rocco) sometime in 2002 (Dan Lutz was on bass, I believe). For me, it was a moment of great growth -- the IJG (such as it was) was fully into its septet phase, and was in the process of becoming a distinct presence on the LA "avant jazz" scene (such as it was). I was at the Carney concert both to hear the trio live for the first time (I had been a fan of their recorded work for a while) and to check out the club, which I had never been to. It was a mellow evening, audience-wise, and at the break Carney and Morris both came over to my table and we had a long chat about music and LA. They confessed their admiration for our City of Angles album (which had just come out), and we talked about that for a little while. I was a little naive, and a little overwhelmed, frankly -- as an interloper on the scene, I couldn't believe I was getting totally unsolicited and genuine respect from the very guys I was trying to show unsolicited and genuine respect for. It was a nice connection.

I noted right away that Dan had a big, fun, outgoing manner; as a result, the conversation seemed to fly right by. At the end of the night, I filed that interaction somewhere in the back of my mind -- with a note that said "If you ever need a drummer, be sure to give this guy a call."

* * * * *



Dan was on board for our very first San Francisco performance (which, coincidentally, took place on the day after the Iraq war started, and was thus a fairly emotional event for me -- I can still vividly remember the street protests that almost prevented me from actually making it to the venue). If you squint, you can see him in the above pic, between Garrett Smith (bone) and Cory Wright (soprano).

But Dan's first performance with us was a Rocco show (by this time the club had moved into the theater next to the performance space depicted in the "AMC" video), on February 22, 2003. It was only our second performance as a nonet; in addition to Dan and myself, the personnel was Aaron Kohen (bass), Cory Wright (tenor), Beth Schenck (soprano), Evan Francis (alto), Kris Tiner (trumpet), Justin Ray (trumpet), and Garrett Smith (bone). Dan helped us debut a number of tunes which would eventually be released on The Star Chamber.

To my ear, he lent a unique beefiness to the overall sound of the group. Check out his take on the opening section of this (shitty live recording of) "Anger Management Classes" (I know I've been going on about this one lately -- sorry):



Whatever my insecurities about this tune, I have long drooled at the prospect of doing an orchestra + drumkit arrangement of it -- and what Dan plays here pretty much nails what I would be looking for from a drummer in that scenario: a driving beat punctuated by "sporadic raining hellfire" fills. Or something like that.

Although he was comfortable slopping around in the bog of progginess exemplified by "AMC," I personally think that where Dan really shone was in the freer, more improvisatory stuff. In this excerpt from a performance of "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboy-Presidents" (recorded at the same Rocco show), notice how he expertly displaces the big "drum downbeat" that you so desperately want to hear at the end of the first four-note horn sequence (to put it another way: there's a roll that begins at around :21 and feels like it could end in a crash at :26, but hangs on for another two seconds). That, plus the sudden shifts in feel/texture that follow, give this section an apposite frenetic tone (which ended up evolving in a different direction by the time we got around to recording the tune "for real"):



Of course, Dan could lay down a plain old comical backbeat groove (the sort of thing that we would start doing more of in 2004, after he left the group). This is from a later section of the same recording of "Mamas":



And so on.

* * * * *

I certainly don't want to suggest that Dan's participation in the IJG was the high point of his career, however much I personally appreciated it. To really hear him at his best, I recommend checking out any of the recordings he made with James Carney. There are three of them, and they are all stellar -- here's a sample from one of my very favorite of Jim's tunes (that's Peter Epstein on soprano -- good golly!). There is also the work he did with Alex Shapiro, which I am less familiar with, but which sounds great to me in the excerpt that can be found at her own post. And yes, there's more stuff listed at this bio.

The bigger issue, however, is that whatever recorded legacy he left behind, Dan was a significant force on the LA new music scene in the early years of this century -- and perhaps in ways that are frustratingly harder to measure than through the evidence of a simple discography. He was one of those dedicated, unsung people who was always out hearing music as well as making it. He was curious, he was an advocate, and he helped to keep the scene alive. He was there in a way that mattered -- a quintessential soldier in one of the best "good fights" a person could embrace: the fight for culture.

For that, and for everything else, this ex-Angeleno would humbly and solemnly like to say: thank you, Dan. You will be greatly missed.

The departed

It's not complete by any means (are they ever?), but Locust Street has posted a list of a few of 2007's notable departures -- with accompanying music clips (if you've never heard that Kenton version of "Everything Happens To Me" (a Bob Graettinger arrangement) do yourself a favor and check it out now).

There is never enough time to blog about everything you want to blog about -- but I sure would have appreciated a few extra hours this year to write up a post on Lee Hazlewood. Ah, well.

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.

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.

Going forward to get back

I know, I know; not only am I behind on my blogging (and so many other things), but the sequence-of-events component of this thing is starting to read like the fractured chronology of a Faulkner novel. (And speaking of novelists, holy cow am I (still) bummed that Vonnegut is gone. I know he was an old guy and everything, and I know he's probably a lot happier wherever he is now. But he was one of the good guys -- and, by the way, a not-insignificant influence on my own worldview and philosophy. And so on.)

Let me explain: I still have to provide some sort of after-the-fact recap of the recent "return to SoCal" tour. That post is long overdue, and only coming together slowly. So what'll I do in the meantime? Well, why not look ahead and spill the beans on the next batch of stuff in store for the group?

Sure, that makes sense. Let's see. How 'bout starting thisaway:

May 2007, with a little luck, could be a high point in what has already been the best year the group has ever had.

For one thing, we'll be performing in a pretty sweet slot at the Bakersfield Jazz Festival on May 12 (we're the third-from-last act, followed by Matt Wilson (yee-haw!) and Lee "too smooth for school" Ritenour). That will be a milestone in itself -- not because it will be our first festival (a "distinction" which belongs to the Brewery Arts Center Festival in Carson City, NV), but because I'll actually be able to guarantee everyone in the group more than a hundred dollars for a gig (don't worry, I'm not going to delve too far here into the boring woe-is-me behind-the-scenes economics of a postmodern big band). A low three bills probably sounds like a pittance for anyone who deals in trios, quartets, and quintets, but believe me, when it comes to a group this large (playing left-of-center music, no less) it's a real coup. Credit must go to Kris Tiner (who thankfully will be rejoining the group for this gig), at whose gentle insistence Doug Davis -- the very sweet guy who heads up the festival and the jazz department at Cal State Bakersfield) finally got to check us out, first at our Bakersfield gig last August, and a second time at IAJE. I guess we made some sort of impression.

The other upcoming event-of-note is our May trip to the Netherlands. We'll be performing (twice) at the Hague Jazz Festival (May 16 and 18), and also squeezing in a show at the world-famous BimHuis in Amsterdam (May 17). I've been keeping this one on the down-low, partly because I didn't want to jinx it, and partly because I believed for a while that it was all some sort of cruel hoax. The booking originated in our IAJE performance this past January -- that's where I met Ruud Wijkniet, who liked our show well enough that he immediately invited us to play the festival, all-expenses paid. Again, I was more or less very suspicious, but it turns out that Ruud was for real (and, like Doug, very pleasant to work with -- where have these folks been hiding for the last seven years?). Now that our travel arrangements have beeen finalized, I feel it's safe to act as if the trip is really going to happen. Needless to say, I'm (cautiously) psyched.

For those of you who are interested, the bands for these gigs will be as follows. For both, we'll have Dan Schnelle (drums), Oliver Newell (bass), Jill Knapp (vocals), Dan Rosenboom (trumpet), Evan Francis (alto), Cory Wright (soprano), and Brian Walsh (tenor). In Bakersfield, add Stephanie Richards and (of course) Kris Tiner, trumpets; Ian Carroll and Ron Christian (bones); Gavin Templeton, Ben Wendel, and Damon Zick (saxophones). In the Netherlands, the substitutions will be Andre Canniere and Phil Rodriguez (trumpets), Beth Schenck, Katharina Thomsen, and Josh Sinton (saxes), and Wolter Wierbos and James Hirschfeld (bones). That's right, for the Netherlands gigs I'll be borrowing key players (Canniere, Sinton, and Hirschfeld) from my favorite east coast big band, DJA's Secret Society. I'll also be bringing in two heavy hitters from the Dutch scene: one lesser-known (Thomsen), and one pretty goddamm well-known (Wolter Wierbos).

The only problem with all this goodness is: where do we go next? (Ah, well, I'll figure it out when we get there.)

Given that this is an important moment in the life of the band (even if we never get any further), I have been allowing myself an unusual amount of self-analysis as I consider what we've accomplished with the last two incarnations (specifically, the Go-Go era tentet group and the Mix-Tape-era big band). Of course, just because I've been allowing myself to indulge in this sort of intro-speckshun doesn't mean that I don't know in my heart of hearts that any conclusions I draw may be more or less total bullshit. I have always found that I compose best when I don't overthink what I'm doing (not that that's an appropriate strategy for all composers). So what follows will be a very loosey-goosey sketch of what I consider to be the elements of the mature IJG "sound." It's all off the top of my head, without actually going back to listen or think through the repertoire in question. Contradict me if you must!

1. Hearty portions of the basic building blocks of popular music (mostly American popular music, but not exclusively), often tweaked and permutated beyond recognition. What do I mean by the "basic building blocks" (BBBs, I guess) of popular music? Specific riffs, phrases, rhythms, harmonic progressions (and so on) that get used repeatedly in that canon. I'm not talking about broad genre characteristics (like the blues scale, for instance), but rather more specific (though still recurring) things. (See, for instance, the bassline at the beginning of "Doo Wha?", or the repeated rhythm at the beginning of "Bongo Non Troppo" -- these BBBs can be found all over the place in American popular music (in various permutations, of course).)

2. Displacement. As a way of building tension, I like to take intact figures (a portion of a melody, for instance) and set them off, complete, against their originals. This may occur horizontally (in time), usually at some counterintuitive spot (like one beat away), or vertically (creating a parallel harmony). The crucial thing for me is that the listener be able to recognize the displacement -- so I don't try to hide it (thus parallels stay parallel most times).

3. Simple canons, rounds, etc. Canons / rounds are displacement built up in a comparatively fancy way. That's probably how I got here -- though I should also acknowledge the influence of twentieth-century round-master, Moondog.

4. Strong melodies. I started seriously writing music in high school -- a time when I was strongly influence by the Beatles. Is it any wonder that I still give a shit about a beautiful melody when I can squeeze it in? Sometimes this interest yields what I would call "pseudo-folk" melodies like the one that appears in "Bandoleero, part one." Honestly, I don't think my melodies are all that great by classical music standards (they don't usually rise and fall in the traditional way), but I can write catchy music when I put my mind to it. I used to flee from this ("it can't be weird and tuneful at the same time!" I told myself), but now I just throw caution to the winds let the notes fall where they may.

5. Taking simple ideas to their extremes. Why subdivide by eighth notes when you can subdivide by sixteenths? Why change the tempo once when you can change it twice, or three times? And so on.

6. Layering / reverse layering. This is a Mingus-ism (see "Moanin'" on Blues and Roots for perhaps the best example, though my favorite Mingus tune ("Hora Decubitus") does something similar). Start with one instrument, add another, add another, and so on until you have the densest thing you can still hear individual voices in.

7. Long compositions with mutiple disconnected “movements.” I have always been interested in form, but with the current version of the group I seem to be going for sequential, episodic structures as opposed to organic, narrative ones. I'm not trying to tell you a story when I write. Instead, I want to make you aware of how the book is made.

8. Juxtaposition of unlike things. Beautiful melodies cohabitate with noise; genres collide incongruously; endless, seemingly-static vamps cohabitate with rapid change and forward motion (more of a Go Go era thing for me, that last one is a technique borrowed from Zappa); and so on.

9. Naturalistic use of odd time signatures. See the story in this post about people clapping along to the 3/2 section at the end of "Fuck the Muck."

10. Timbral substitution. Take a figure heavily identified with one instrument (such as a boogie woogie piano bassline) and put it in a horn (for instance).

11. Comedy. Been thinking about what I mean by this, and I know I'll have to return to it. I guess I feel most comfortable using the word "comedy" to describe a category of resistance to authority (with the assumption that authority is always corrupt / arbitrary / unkind). More specifically, for me, it's the idea of resistance-from-within (and thus is somewhat incompatible with (and suspicious of) the notion of a pure revolution "from outside"). Oh, and it also has to be funny.

I told you it was loosey-goosey.

* * * * *

Addendum: Just got the sad news. RIP Andrew Hill.

Passings

Several of my jazz blogosphere compatriots have been eloquently keeping on top of all the recent losses in the music world -- and what a depressing year it has been so far, what with the departure of everyone from Leroy Jenkins to Alice Coltrane to Michael Brecker. I have been moved by reading these tributes, but in general I have felt that my comrades did their blog-eulogies so well that additional commentary from the likes of me was more or less completely unnecessary.

Still, I don't think any of the usual suspects have yet noted the strange sad passing of Boston vocalist Brad Delp. Which is probably just as well, because Boston's contributions to the advancement of jazz are probably negligible. But good music is good music, right? If you're looking for some sort of standard for male hard-rock vocals (and I know you are), Delp was surpassed only by the godlike Freddie Mercury.

In practice, I was never a huge Boston fan. But I respected them, because they did what they did extremely well, and with a hell of a lot more integrity and focus than some of their contemporaries. They were one of those groups whose records earned the dubious distinction of ad nauseum airplay, which nearly ruined them for kids like me. But for better or worse, all of that was forgiven during one hot Fourth of July weekend in high school, when "More Than a Feeling" was revealed as the perfect soundtrack for a moment of teenage lust. What can I say? For that I will always be grateful.