The SST Records/ex-Black Flag mastermind gots a new album, We Are Amused, out November 8th. Should be back in the Fort with Cinema, Cinema around that time, too.
What is it with North Texas teens and surf music? First you've got the Fungi Girls out of Burleson, purveying a mix of garage-rock and surf sounds, and now Grapevine's own Spacebeach, fronted by one Torry Finley, a charismatic young mofo if ever I've seen one, weighs in with a five-song EP, produced by Britt Robisheaux of Theater Fire fame, and damned if it doesn't sound for all the world like Kurt Cobain fronting the Melvins...or maybe the Trashmen. Seems these brats have twigged that the distance between The Year Punk Broke and the golden age of Cali teen snot ain't that far when you've got a fuzzbox, an Echoplex, an ocean of reverb and a heart full of teen angst. Release party's set for October 30th at 1919 Hemphill with the aforementioned Jealousy Mountain Duo. Sounds like one not to miss.
Bluegrass with loops and samples? And a kalimba? Why, yes, if you're Austin's Ralph White (ex-Bad Livers). He's performing at formerly fonky Fred's next Wednesday, October 5th. You know what to do.
On two previous releases -- this year's FLIGHTPATTERNS and last year's Hollow Lake, both with the ensemble Open Graves -- Seattle-based percussionist/composer/instrument builder/sound artist Paul Kikuchi impressed me mightily with his ability to craft hypnotic, non-linear sound fields. This new recording, by a group featuring Kikuchi and his Open Graves collaborators Stuart Dempster and Jesse Olsen Bay alongside percussionist Alex Vittum and guitarist Bill Horist, adds some new elements to his world of sounds.
On "Faster/Still," the sounds of tuned percussion and conches evoke both Javanese gamelan and traditional Japanese music. Horist reveals himself as a guitarist who employs effects and extended techniques in the manner of Nels Cline, opening his episode with chiming harmonics, overlaying sparse treated notes, using a slide to generate microtonal melodies, gradually building in urgency and intensity, shadowed by background electronics and Kikuchi's trap set, which sounds at times like Elvin thundering away behind Trane on Ascension. Then Dempster's trombone enters, playing somber long tones that contrast with Horist's squalls and skronks.
The clattering percussion on "Improvisation" recalls Varese, and contrasts with the textures of percussively-played slide guitar, irregularly-metered traps, and trombone interjections. The tension the instrumental interplay creates is never fully resolved. "Prelude" opens with breath sounds (through Dempster's trombone) and ceremonial-sounding gongs. It's a return to the sacred space of Kikuchi's work with Open Graves. The space is soon filled by Dempster's conch (demonstrating how expressive a single note can be, properly played), Kikuchi's loosely-tuned drums, and more tuned percussion. "Tomorrow's Flowers" is an elegiac melody, alternately essayed by trombone and guitar.
With this release, Kikuchi proves once again that he's one of the most interesting composing drummers currently working. (Tyshawn Sorey is the other one.) His ensembles consistently create some of the most varied and satisfying improvised music one can hear today. Cop via Present Sounds Recordings.
No, it's not a bluegrass outfit like you might think, but rather, a German guitar-and-drums experimental unit. They're playing at 1919 Hemphill on October 30th with Spacebeach. Listen to what they sound like here. Like a two-man Magic Band, I'm a-thankin'.
Pssst! Hey, kid! Wanna watch an interview with Sonny Rollins?
The jazz saxophone colossus is a rare bird indeed: a master musician who's also a spiritually complete human being. His latest album, Road Shows Vol. 2, is largely drawn from performances at his 80th birthday celebration gig last year, including an encounter with Ornette Coleman on "Sonnymoon for Two." Far from throwing in the towel, Rollins at 81 is energized and aflame with creativity, tempered by a beautiful humility. See a 25-minute interview with NPR's Tavis Smiley here.
Pssst! Hey, kid! Wanna read an interview with Fever Tree's guitarist?
Once and future Nervebreaker Mike Haskins shared this in-depth interview with ex-Fever Tree guitarist Michael Knust (who apparently played an Epiphone Sheraton, jes' lahk your humble chronicler o' events). It's a must-read for fans of Texas psych.
Feeling a little guilty that the week Troy Davis, the woman who baked my middle daughter's wedding cakes, and a former coworker all checked out, my sweetie 'n' I had a nice li'l weekend. Also contemplating the fact that a week from Monday, said middle daughter moves across the country. While I'm confident she and her family will thrive there, it's the first time (since I got home from Korea the year my oldest was born) that any of my kids have been that far away, and I'll admit I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.
Thursday night, walked back up to Central Market after work to see Pablo & the Hemphill 7 play. Recently saw them again for the first time in about four years and dug the stripped-down lineup (guitar, bass, drums, and percussion, with Hembree and Sir Steffin both singing backup behind Joe). On this night, they were even more stripped down, since Jonathan Irwin had school, which just gave Damien Stewart more room to operate behind the traps. (Having an Andre Edmonson mix didn't hurt.)
I forget what a beautiful guitarist Sir Steffin is. He showed me his new amp, a custom job by a local guy, based on a Fender Deluxe with no reverb (my fave amp of all ti-i-ime) with a single 12-inch speaker, but much lighter. Besides having a great tone, nobody I know combines melodic playing and rock-solid riddim so well; while he's not out to wow you with his chops, he does things that are so subtle, yet so right, that they knock you out anyway. These days, he approaches "No Woman, No Cry" like Nels Cline, pushing down on the bridge to make the chords swell. Nice.
The real high point of the evening was watching Joe Vano's daughter Eva, who's six now, watching her dad play with the other kids in the playground. My sweetie told her mom that she looks like Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. At one point, we saw a little boy mouthing "That's your dad?!?!?" incredulously. Joe had promised not to "be a bad influence on the kids," but wound up playing "Little Man and Chiva Joe" by request for the latest generation of 20somethings dancing in front of Pablo's stage anyway. (Has it really been almost a decade now?)
The next day at work, I saw a woman with a baby who'd been watching the show the previous night, and she said that "they sounded good, even though they didn't have all their members there (based on their name)" and said what a great singer "Pablo" was. I had to agree.
Saturday, we walked up to Fred's to see ex-Gideon Chuck Rose playing with the Chiefs, who just changed their name from Grass Valley after they lost their female singer. We like walking by Farrington Field during high school football season and hearing the marching bands and the crowds going wild for their (on this Saturday night, JV) kids' shot in the big stadium. Chuck playing country-rock seemed like a weird proposition, but then I remembered that he told me once he used to play bass for Fort Worth country institution Johnny Carroll, so it made more sense.
The last time I saw Chuck and Tom Battles play at Fred's was with the Howling Dervishes at Fredfest back in 2007. The Chiefs are a different proposition, playing jangly and reverb-drenched country rock in a Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers bag with some interesting song choices. As we walked in, Chuck was singing Hag's "Mama Tried," but the set (mostly sung by Tom) also included selections like Nilsson's "Everybody's Talking" and most bizarrely, a twanged-out the Who's "Baba O'Riley" (which perversely got more dancers on the floor than anything else, until the hoedown at the end).
For us, the best part of the night was seeing Carl Pack, who's managing Fred's front-of-house at night of late while Angel runs the kitchen, and hearing stories about his daughter Stormie's adventures in kindergarten at Lily B. Clayton. (Outlaw Chef Terry Chandler was in the house but not working; we ran into him and his wife showing some people around the Curmudgeon Zone on our way in.) All in all, a good night out. My sweetie posted some of her pics, including a beautiful Texas sunset, on her photo blog. Click on 'em to make 'em big and leave her a comment, why doncha?
Here's a 20-minute excursion by "electric string band" Strung Drawn & Quartered, a collaboration between Kavin Allenson (Breaking Light), Darrin Kobetich (Blackland River Devils, The Panic Basket), and Bill Pohl (The Underground Railroad), and one of the delights to be sampled at the Cavalcade of Unpopular Musics, hosted by HIO, which kicks off at 5pm on Friday, 10.7.2011, behind Doc's Records and Vintage (2111 Montgomery Street).
It's "The Old Lady from Brewster," a jumpin' slice of jazz-infused Nawlins R&B from his upcoming album In Velvet (currently skedded for release in 2012). Stream or download here. Mark returns to DFW in November: Pastime Tavern in Big D on 11.3, and formerly fonky Fred's in the Fort on 11.4. Sounds like a party to me.
Pssst! Hey, kid! Wanna hear some Captain Beefheart bootlegs?
This user has what appear to be entahr sets uploaded. Check 'em out before the powers that be make him/her take 'em down. The ultra-low fidelity and ambient noise remind me of cassette tapes we used to pass around back in the day. Here's Boston, January '71:
And New York, same year:
Finally, Portland, same year (the poster has lots of others, too):
The li'l Stoogeband's second go at the Basement Bar since Todd Osborne took it over wasn't as well attended as our previous visit. The absence of Facebook dealie-ohs, the fact that we were up against ACL down in Austin and a Dove Hunter/Quaker City Nighthawks bill at Lola's, and the Fort's first rainstorm in four months conspired against us. But it was Matt Hembree's birthday, and we were topping a bill that also featured our pals The Dangits and estimable Austin power trio Dixie Witch, so we knew we were going to have a good time. And sure enough, we did.
It'd been awhile since I saw The Dangits, but they're sounding better than ever, with new bassist Benjy Silver (Convoy & the Cattlemen, ex-Zombie Shark Attack) better integrated into the lineup (the haircut helped). Mike Noyes (the _real_ Irish kid; sorry, JoCo) still looks like he's going to eat the microphone when not trading off smokin' hot guitar lines with Branden Smith, who has the classic splay-legged guitar slinger's stance down cold. Is there anybody in the Metromess laying down a better, truer take on the Dee-troit via Stockholm/Sydney high energy Rawk ramalama than these motorbike ridin' boyos? I think not. Bonus: We got to hear the version of Deep Purple's "Highway Star" that they learned for the Fort Worth Rock Assembly gig, with Mike neck-tapping the Blackmore solo. Aces.
I hadn't seen Dixie Witch since before the late, lamented Wreck Room closed. (Do you detect a theme here?) Since then, founding guitarist Clayton Mills departed the fold and was replaced by J.T. Smith, a long, lanky, dreadlocked dude who has even more loose-limbed Rawk moves and rubber-mugged facial expressions than any ten other players -- a veritable walking Faces and Attitudes of Rock 'n' Roll, this guy is. The band's fulcrum remains Trinidad Leal (ex-Light Bright Highway), who kicks the double basses with aplomb (only a five-piece kit, he reminded me, when I asked if his set would fit on the Basement's stage), and sings the majority of the songs, giving the lie to the truism that singing drummers suck. Trinidad greeted Richard Hurley warmly, the two having toured Europe -- where folks still dig their rock 'n' roll more 'n we do here in the States -- together when Richard was still in Blood of the Sun. The Witch returns to the Old World in October, and their new rekkid Let It Roll emerges shortly. They blew the power out on one side of the stage a couple of times, but they kept it rollin' like we knew they would.
Soundguy Thomas didn't bother telling me to turn down like he did last time, and as a result, I didn't need to use the Big Muff Pi I'd borrowed from Ray. Branden also let me keep his SG onstage as a spare, which I wound up not needing, having changed the strings I hadn't broken at practice the morning of the show. (The next day, the high E I'd changed at practice on Monday was already showing signs of corrosion, so maybe I need to heed James Williamson's advice and change 'em before every show, as infrequently as we gig.) Without the substantial crowd to feed off of, we were a li'l more subdued than last time, but seemed to go over well. The "new" songs ("Ain't It Fun," "Looking At You," "Jet Boy") are working out fine, and we played an unplanned "TV Eye." The birthday boy had an enjoyable Matturday; mission accomplished. Next: The Wild Rooster on October 14th, and I need to see if I can book something in November or December in a place where we can get pizza delivered to the stage.
Mike Noyes likes to bust my balls about being old, and in retrospect, it's clear that most of the dudes who played that night were _no spring chickens_. But I think we all brought it, and as Mike said afterward, "It keeps us all young." May it always be so.
Been re-reading Peter Niklas Wilson's Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music -- a more useful tome than John Litweiler's more encyclopedic Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life, and less chatty and self-referential than Howard Mandel's Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz (Christ, I hope my writing doesn't come across like that, although I suspect it does) -- and listening to OC again, hearing new things (or hearing old things differently) with the perspective of having played in HIO for two years. (I'll admit I find it a little embarrassing that we were nominated for a Dallas Observer music award in the "Jazz Act" category -- are there really not enough of those in Big D to fill out the ballot? -- but I'll go along with Dennis Gonzalez, who sez "HIO is jazz is improv is etc.")
While Herb Levy reminds me that OC's major contribution to jazz was changing the way the members of an ensemble interact, it's the blues cry of Ornette's solo voice -- the closest instrumental simulacrum I've heard to the sound of human lamentation -- that I find most compelling about his music, along with the playful and almost folkloric quality his melodies often have. Those qualities tend to get lost in the dense thicket of solo voices that are present in much harmolodic music (OC's term for an idiosyncratic approach to music that he's explained at length in fairly obfuscatory language in various interviews over the years), whether it's in the everyone-playing-all-the-time cacophony of the double quartet on his epochal 1960 recording Free Jazz, or the incessant guitar chatter of his '70s-and-later electric band Prime Time.
Listening with modern ears to the recordings of Ornette's music made under pianist Paul Bley's leadership at L.A.'s Hillcrest Club in 1958, or even the first couple of Atlantic albums featuring the "classic" Coleman-Cherry-Haden-Higgins quartet, it's hard to understand why this music was so controversial when it was new. (David Lee's 2006 book about the Coleman quartet's 1959 arrival in New York City was entitled The Battle of the Five Spot; audience members were so polarized by the music that they sometimes resorted to fisticuffs.) While Ornette's compositional and harmonic materials were undoubtedly different (no Tin Pan Alley chord changes for soloists to run), his ensemble's instrumentation, rhythmic thrust and procedures (opening and closing thematic statements bookending strings of solos) were basically those of a bebop band. I suppose the lesson is that to a player or listener who's committed enough to a certain set of conventions, anything that deviates even slightly from those conventions _doesn't register as music_, a perceptual anomaly that persists today in regard to anything new or different.
Wilson highlights one marked exception to structural orthodoxy from the Hillcrest Club recordings: the tune "Crossroads," in which a fast, notey theme punctuates unaccompanied solo statements from the horns and piano. The tune was re-recorded in 1959 (and released on 1970's The Art of the Improvisers) as "The Circle With the Hole in the Middle," with rhythm accompaniment behind the solos. By the time Coleman recorded again, eight months later, drummer Billy Higgins -- a hard drug user, like all the quartet's members save its leader -- had lost his NYC cabaret card and with it, the ability to work in nightclubs. Ed Blackwell, whom Ornette had met in L.A. in the '50s, came east to fill the drum chair with his lively and multidimensional blend of New Orleans parade drumming and masterful Max Roach-inspired swing.
"Beauty Is a Rare Thing," recorded in August 1960 and released on that year's This Is Our Music, represents a great formal leap forward for Coleman. Besides the introductory and closing thematic statements, the entire piece is a freely improvised dialogue, without steady reference to linear time. The openness of the sonic space they inhabit predicts the group dynamic of the trio Ornette would lead from 1962 to 1966, after Haden had left the group for a spell in Synanon while Cherry and Higgins went off to work with Sonny Rollins. (Cherry subsequently traveled around the world with a portable repertoire of compositions, performing with local musicians wherever he went, while Higgins became a house drummer of sorts for Blue Note Records.)
Ornette performed a single 1962 engagement at New York's Town Hall with bassist David Izenzon, a melodic player equally adept at arco and pizzicato attacks, and drummer Charles Moffett, an old ally from hometown Fort Worth. The trio toured Europe in 1965 and 1966 and a number of live recordings from those tours have been released. Their concerts juxtaposed trio sets with performances of Ornette's compositions in European art music forms, and (at Town Hall) Ornette's performances with an R&B group.
My favorite Coleman-Izenzon-Moffett performance is the 1965 one from Fairfield Hall in Croydon, a London suburb, which featured "Silence," another track highlighted by Wilson, in which episodes of alternately explosive and expository playing by the group are interrupted by intervals of negative sonic space (and in one instance, Ornette's response to a heckler's demand to hear the bebop standard "Cherokee"). During these years, Ornette also took up trumpet and violin, applying highly unorthodox techniques to each instrument. In the late '60s, he'd first employ his pre-teen son Denardo on drums, to the puzzlement of the jazz world at large.
The first Coleman music I encountered was made by the late-'60s quartet in which tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, another Fort Worth native, replaced Cherry in the front line and Haden and Blackwell returned to the rhythm section. When I was at SUNY at Albany in the fall of '75, my roommate and I used to go to the campus library and listen to the 1969 live album Crisis!, much to the chagrin of our fellow students, who couldn't believe that we were listening for our own pleasure, rather than for some class. I'd first become aware of Ornette in 1971-72, reading reviews of Twins (a compilation of '59-'61 outtakes like Art of the Improvisers) and Science Fiction (the then-current album that featured all of Ornette's '59-'60 collaborators along with Redman and trumpeter Bobby Bradford) in Creem.
I was prepared to hear that music by Zappa's conductions of the Mothers of Invention on Weasels Ripped My Flesh and Captain Beefheart's anarchic sax solos. By the time Science Fiction was waxed, the "energy music" inspired by John Coltrane's late-period work had opened up possibilities for improvisers (Redman's vocalizing through his horn, for example) that made some of the classic Coleman quartet's recordings sound almost quaint in comparison. Haden perhaps unintentionally evokes Hendrix with his wah-wah bass on "Rock the Clock." When the musos are in full flight, they sound more like a teeming cityscape than the rustic lope of Free Jazz. (The title to the last track on Science Fiction sums it up: "The Jungle is a Skyscraper.")
Released in 1976, Dancing In Your Head (the first OC record I bought when it was new) upped the ante and widened the frame. Inspired by Ornette's 1973 encounter with the Master Musicians of Joujouka in Morocco, "Theme From a Symphony" (aka "The Good Life," a sprightly theme from Ornette's symphony Skies of America) found its creator immersed in a kind of R&B-based trance music. Bern Nix and Charlie Ellerbee's guitars, Rudy McDaniel's bass, and Ronald Shannon Jackson's drums created a dense, hyperactive clangor that evoked the spirit, if not the letter, of both Free Jazz and Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. Body Meta, recorded at the same sessions, presented shorter and more dynamically varied tunes. Later, Ornette would expand the group to include a second bassist and drummer (Denardo, post-college graduation) -- sort of a "double quartet" minus the second horn.
Ornette recorded prolifically through the early '80s, playing on original (and unrecorded) Prime Time guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer's debut album as leader; a series of duets with Charlie Haden (a player who's worked in a variety of contexts, always with a deep sound of great lyrical beauty); the most coherent and unified Prime Time statement, Of Human Feelings, a series of digitally-recorded first takes; and a surprisingly successful collaboration with rustic pastel guitarist/OC fan Pat Metheny, whose contributions to the project were uncharacteristically robust. Ornette became a fixture at Fort Worth venue Caravan of Dreams, releasing records on their label, including the superlative In All Languages, featuring the classic quartet and Prime Time -- both their sounds now familiar as heartbeat -- playing the same tunes across two LPs, and the video of Shirley Clarke's 20-years-in-the-making documentary Ornette: Made In America.
I never made it to Caravan when Ornette performed there in its heyday; I was busy Guarding Freedom's Frontier (stationed at Carswell) and starting a new family, and I lost the thread after 1988's Virgin Beauty. Although I remained a fan of Ornette and his alumni Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Blood Ulmer, and Shannon Jackson, I missed out on Tone Dialing, Sound Museum, Sound Grammar, and Ornette's MacArthur genius grant, Pulitzer Prize, and Bonnaroo performance. I still think of him as the greatest musician of my lifetime, though, one whose achievement combines constant reinvention with a consistency of sound and inspiration that runs through his entire body of work.
Because redundancy is good, here are the two videos from our session with Michael Briggs. (Typically for HIO, the third piece, which happens to be my favorite, wasn't captured on video. Feh.)
A classic 1973 recording with the Jazz Composers' Orchestra, and an important influence on my part, at least, of HIO. Wish I still had the vinyl. Thanks to Bruno Tocanne for the link.
Back in April, HIO went up to Denton to record three lengthy extemporizations in the home studio of Gutterth Productions honcho Michael Briggs, who makes a mean cup of coffee and has a very nice cat and birds, the latter of whom make a guest appearance on one of the tracks. (Look at the titles and guess which one.)
Afterward, we adjourned to Hooligans Pub on the courthouse square for drinkie-talkie, and encountered Big Rig Dance Collective for the first time. All in all, an auspicious day for HIO -- maybe the most since we recorded for Jeff Liles in the Green Room at the Kessler.
You can view partial vid of two of the pieces and stream or download audio of all three, complete, from the Violitionist Sessions site here.
Dixie Witch, The Dangits, and Stoogeaphilia pics @ meezlady.blogspot.com
My sweetie posted some of her pics of Dixie Witch, The Dangits, and Stoogeaphilia from last night's extravaganza at the Basement Bar on her photo blog. Click on 'em to make 'em big and leave her a comment, why doncha?
My buddy Darrin Kobetich recorded this beautiful, meditative solo guitar piece during Fort Worth's big rainstorm -- first in four months -- last night. It seems his artistry, always stunning, is growing ever more expressive after a decade of solo acoustic playing.
He'll perform solo acoustic, electric with Darryl Wood in The Panic Basket, and who-knows-what with Bill Pohl and Kavin Allenson in Strung Drawn & Quartered at Doc's Records on October 7th. It's the Cavalcade of Unpopular Musics, hosted by HIO, headlined by The Underground Railroad. Yeah!
The Welsh ex-VU guy's Extra Playful, comprising five brand new tracks, picks up where his '70s Island stuff left off, with a new LP due next year. Yeah!
Listening to my vinyl Rykodisc Hendrix Live At Winterland and reading about Experience Hendrix's recent four CD/eight LP reish of those shows, as well as the expanded In the West that's out at the same time.
Turns out that they've substituted different performances for the February '69 Royal Albert Hall versions of "Little Wing" and "Voodoo Chile" that were my favorite things on the 'riginal In the West -- perhaps indicative (if only on a wishful-thinking level) that the Estate is getting closer to regaining the rights to the film of the Albert Hall show, paving the way for a DVD release that'd suit me fine.
For the time being, I'm just glad to have those two songs (my introduction to them, two decades before battalions of SRV clones would render 'em almost unlistenable to these feedback-scorched ears) on the semi-legit More Experience LP. Editing F/X render the 'riginal Albert Hall film clips of "Little Wing" on Youtube unwatchable, but you can at least hear the audio track here, and hope that whatever Experience Hendrix winds up releasing will be easier on the eye.
The Fungi Girls are young, and I am old -- old enough to be their biological father, in fact (although still obsessed enough with the noise that was turning me on when I was younger than they to be writing this review).
While it will almost certainly piss off Sky Salinas, the Girls' drummer and leader, to read this, at an age when I was still mainly into having spitting and farting contests with my asshole crew in front of the deli in my town and wondering why the Really Neat Girls wouldn't have anything to do with us, when "being in a band" was mainly an excuse I used to get out of my parent's house to party, Sky and his buddies and bandmates Jacob Bruce (guitar/voxxx) and Deryck Barrera (bass) were undertaking their second coast-to-coast tour of these United States and releasing their second full-length elpee, Some Easy Magic. Now they're back in Burleson, sweating out their last year of high school.
All of which would be a whole lot less impressive if Some Easy Magic were just another pro forma slab of emo or pop-punk spew: suburban kids aping their contemporaries, age-appropriate but nothing more. But what makes it more than that -- what, in fact, makes Sky one of the three most interesting local musos o' the moment in your humble chronicler o' events' opinion (the other two being Drift Era's Jonathan O'Connor and Spacebeach's Torry Finley) -- is the tasty sonic stew these Burleson brats have cooked up here.
For Fungi Girls' sound is redolent of a mythic West Coast that existed a half-century before its creators picked up their instruments. It's a hybrid reimagination, though, rather than sheer stylistic mimicry. You can almost hear the crash of the surf in the Girls' oceans of reverb and Sky's wash of cymbals, at the same time as you can feel the acid creeping up on you in some of their mysterioso minor-key melodies, or when Jacob kicks on the fuzz in "Velvet Days." It's as if the fellas were riding the waves in the morning, then hopping in their woody and heading into town to riot on Sunset Strip in the evening. Comparisons being odious, here's one for you that'll simplify this explanation a bit: Imagine Dick Dale sitting in with the Syndicate of Sound. It's evocative of a past its creators couldn't possibly remember in a way that still manages to sound fresh and immediate, not at all campy.
Download via Bandcamp or cop on CD or sweet, sweet vinyl from Hozac Records (or Doc's, if you're fortunate enough to live in Fort Worth). You'll be glad you did.
You can stream a coupla tracks from the newie by Torry Finley and his pals from Grapevine on Bandcamp now. It's produced by Theater Fire guy Britt Robisheaux and officially drops 10.30.2011. Soundin' good, too.
Head Fungi Girl Skylar Salinas pulled my coat to The Painted Ship, a '60s garage outfit from Vancouver, British Columbia, of all places. Frontguy Bill "The Captain" Hay was a veritable '60s chameleon, eliciting Jim Morrison comparisons from one scribe, looking more than a little like Roky Erickson in a photo, and sounding a helluva lot like J. Osterberg on the Ship's finest moment, the B-side "And She Said Yes."
Last night I made my sweetie a mixtape (well, it's in iTunes now, but that sounds so much less romantic) that included a couple of songs from Largo, the long-deleted 1998 concept album about, well, America, inspahrd by Dvorak's "New World Symphony" and masterminded by a couple of, um, ex-Hooters, that nobody but my buddy Geoff from Philly (who finally got his review of it pubbed on the All Music Guide) liked.
Actually, that's not strictly true: according to Geoff, Pete Townshend liked it enough to buy copies of it for everyone he knew, including Roger Daltrey, who now performs a couple of the songs in his live shows. "Gimme a Stone," which I included on her mixtape, is sung on the album by the Band's Levon Helm, and it's an anthem for every little guy that takes on the big guys, which makes it perfect for her.
I can't understand why this thing wasn't a hit when it was released. (Then again, I'd be the world's shittiest A&R man.) They even made it onto Letterman, with Taj Mahal (singing and barking!), Joan Osborne (another fave of Geoff's 'n' mine), Levon's ex-bandmate and Mercury Rev familiar Garth Hudson, and a hurdy gurdy.
Also on board: the Chieftains, Cindy Lauper, Carole King, and Willie Nile (whose '79 performance at Reunion Arena was the most memorable thing about the Who show I saw him open there). It's not the lineup that's important, though; it's the toons. But don't take my word for it; it's available again digitally via iTunes or Amazon.
Pssst! Hey, kid! Wanna see an hour-long Pink Floyd TV show from 1970?
Can't believe this entahr thing is on Youtube. I remember seeing it on public TV when I was 13. Not as stellar as Pompeii, but definitely has its moments.
T. Horn pulled my coat to this cat. Don't know much about him. He was in the Florida band Harry Pussy, whom I've never heard. To these feedback-scorched ears, he sounds like a blues-drenched Derek Bailey who's trying to pull the strings off his guitar with a very strong and active right hand. (Note that he plays a guitar with only four strings -- the low E and the top three -- and observe the condition of that guitar's face.) Beautiful, visceral stuff that for some reason reminds me of the Japanese freak-folksinger Kan Mikami, although it sounds nothing like him. Must investigate further.
Hembree just posted his recording of the li'l Stoogeband at the Basement Bar a coupla weeks ago on his Stoogeaphilia archive. It's a corker. Listen, learn, read on. A preview of Friday's festivities (although we promise that this week's setlist will be at least 60% different).
I was at work on the 14th floor of Tandy Tower One, drinking coffee, when somebody from the quality control lab said that a plane had just hit the Trade Center. We went on yakking, thinking it must have been a Cessna, when somebody said that the whole tower was on fire. We were watching on a TV in the lab when the second plane hit the other tower.
I spent the next couple of hours (in between intermittent attempts at doing work) trying to call my buddy Jay, who lived at One University Place, in the shadow of the towers. When I finally got hold of him, he said, "My wife and I just watched the second tower collapse from the roof of our building. We're going to donate blood."
That it happened was no surprise, only the where/when. After the first attempt to blow up the towers in '93, when I was a recent military separatee, I told another ex-Air Force guy I worked with, "This isn't over. This is just the beginning." Still, on that day, I remember thinking, "This is the one thing I didn't want to see in my lifetime. Now this country will be at war for the rest of my children's lives."
"Why do they hate us?" wasn't really a question, either. As a service member overseas, I'd observed the exportation of American culture to lands and people to whom it was foreign, and the lack of respect most of my fellow GIs held for those people and their customs and traditions. I was recently reminded of this watching Kurosawa's High and Low, where the industrialist's luxurious house on the hill inspires the hatred of the poor medical student living in squalor in its shadow.
What should be remembered, in my opinion, besides the lives of the innocent people that were lost and the heroic sacrifice of the first responders and those who labored for years afterward, at their own peril, to repair the damage, is the way we as a people seemed, if not more united, at least temporarily inclined, for a few weeks after the traumatic shock, to treat each other with kindness and decency.
Even though I'm a 20th century guy at heart, it has been my good fortune to be alive in a time when digital downloads and the resurgence of vinyl have finally made it possible for me to easily access my most-coveted Velvet Underground bootlegs. The VU canon is one I only revisit once a decade or so, but since I last lost the thread (following the release of The Quine Tapes a decade ago), a lot of stuff I was interested to hear but not geeked enough on record collecting to seek out has become more generally available, due to the aforementioned dual phenomena.
In my excavations, I've been more interested in finding stuff that never made it onto the four "real" albums than in hearing every single version extant of those songs, and to do that, you've gotta go to the boots, because until The Quine Tapes, the legit live recordings on offer were all pretty flawed.
The Brigid Polk cassette-recorded Live at Max's Kansas City, while an interesting audio verite document of the Max's demimonde, suffered from ultra-low fidelity and documented an enervated band on its last legs (Uncle Lou's very last night with the band, as it turned out). 1969 Live, which for many years was the gold standard of live VU, doesn't capture any of their vaunted onstage extemporization, with the slight exception of a pretty hot drone 'n' chug versh of "What Goes On." The Quine Tapes, and in particular, its three versions of "Sister Ray," finally let you hear the full force of the Velvets in flight, but for my money, none of 'em are a patch on the "Sister Ray" from the 3.15.1969 Boston Tea Party "guitar amp tape."
If It's Too Loud For You, Move Back! documents a November '66 Exploding Plastic Inevitable show in Columbus, Ohio, and is particularly noteworthy for the first and last songs performed, "Melody Laughter" and "The Nothing Song." Different excerpts from the former appeared on the What Goes On and Peel Slowly and See box sets, but the full 30-minute sprawl is a wonder to behear, starting with random feedback blasts until Mo's tribal thump enters, then moving through episodes led by Cale's sawing viola and gamelan-sounding piano, soaring wordless Nico vocalismo, an episode of "ostrich" guitar giving way to plagal cadence chords that predict the jam in the middle of the recorded "There She Goes Again," culminating in a Reed-Cale "yeah-yeah" vocal episode.
"The Nothing Song," in spite of its title, is even more impressive in its sustained ritual splendor. A Columbus record store owner and early Velvet aficionado, Bernd Baierschmidt, released those two tracks on a vinyl boot in '81 and probably would have released the rest of the set had he not been killed in a motorcycle accident shortly afterwards, leaving that task to others. There are times when HIO is hittin' on all cylinders (as we were in the Kessler green room for Liles' video camera in March 2010) that I fancy we sound like these guys, although our methods are quite different. Terry and Hickey would probably disagree.
In 2010, the VU's oft-booted set from the 8.2.1969 Hilltop Pop Festival in New Hampshire got reished on sweet, sweet vinyl. While its packaging includes some laughable elements (cover art credited to "The Warhol Organization 1969," label listing "The Velvet Underground & Nico"), it's a concise summation of the '69 VU's strengths, perfect for resource-constrained vinyl junkies that can't swing with the C-note Rhino wants for its six-LP Quine Tapes box set.
Besides the ten-minute-plus versions of "Run, Run, Run" (with plenty of fuzzed-out guitar from Lou) and "What Goes On" (with Doug Yule earning his pay on organ), there are good takes on "Waiting for the Man" (closer to the wired studio 'riginal than the leisurely Max's and 1969 recordings), "Pale Blue Eyes" and "Heroin" that show the band's stylistic reach. The VU headlined the Hilltop Festival over pre-Moodance Van Morrison, Jaime Brockett (of "The Legend of the U.S.S. Titanic" fame), and a bunch of local New England acts. Their only recorded outdoor performance sounds like it took place in front of a crowd of about six people -- lucky folks that they were.
Perhaps best of all is A Workout at the Gymnasium (subsequently reished this year as Psychedelic Sounds from the Gymnasium), which surfaced in 2008 on "Velvet Records" (nice play on the Verve Records label design) in such good fidelity that some fans speculated that it was actually the work of a modern day VU tribute band. But it only takes one listen to squash such speculation; there's only one person on Earth who sings 'n' plays the way that Uncle Lou did in 1967, when he was still actually singing, rather than talking, and staking out his turf in the distortion-and-feedback guitar stakes.
Gymnasium might just be the best-sounding live VU extant, and part of the reason's in the pic on the cover: the Vox Super Beatle. In Bockris and Malanga's essential Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story, Boston Uberfan and future Modern Lover Jonathan Richman (whose own band's best song recycled "Sister Ray") recalls, "Lou used to use the built-in mid-range boost peculiar to Vox amplifiers a lot. Their sound changed when the group switched to Acoustic brand amps in '69 and then again when they switched to Sunn brand in '70. The Voxes had a darker sound with more mid-range tone. Much more. And it was easier to get feedback out of 'em." And it doesn't hurt that Lou's vocals here are much more present and up-front than on other live VU recordings.
The otherwise-unavailable "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore" works off a repetitive riff reminiscent of the one that powered Them's "Little Girl" (speaking of Van the Man). "Guess I'm Falling In Love" (same version that was on the Peel Slowly box) rocks out in more of a chugging Chuck Berry manner than one might expect from the VU. "Waiting for the Man" and "Run, Run, Run" are even more intense than the Hilltop versions; this is, after all, the lineup that recorded White Light, White Heat, and you can actually appreciate their power more from these (soundboard?) recordings than you can from that album's "all-needles-on-red" registration (which squashed the music's dynamic range).
Proof of that pudding is the 18-minute "Sister Ray" that takes up all of side two -- allegedly the first time the song was played live. You can hear Lou still working out his phrasing, and including some lyrics that wouldn't get recorded until "The Murder Mystery." Cale's on bass here, rather than organ, and there are welters of sparring guitars and feedback over Mo's relentless pulse. Like Mingus' "Meditations," I could listen to innumerable iterations of this song, so infinite was the VU's improvisational variety. Stumbling on stuff like this makes it fun to be a fan again.
Jeff Liles posted some scrawl I did on Roky in anticipation of his upcoming (September 30th) Kessler Theater appearance here. (You might need to be a FB victim or Jeff's friend; if so, lemme know and I'll post the text on this blog.) If you're in DFW and don't have tickets yet, go here to rectify the oversight.
I asked for a show, and for my sins they gave me a few
Stoogeaphilia:
9.16 at Basement Bar w/The Dangits, Dixie Witch (Matturday!)
10.14 at The Wild Rooster w/TBD (Jamie and Linda's birthday)
Trying to book one more in November or December w/Fungi Girls, the Mike Haskins Experience
HIO:
10.7 at Doc's Records and Vintage w/The Underground Railroad, Strung Drawn & Quartered, The Panic Basket, Darrin Kobetich (Cavalcade of Unpopular Musics)
12.8 at 418 Texas St. in Denton w/Home Made Dance Project
12.16 at Black Box Performance Space in Denton w/Home Made Dance Project
12.17 at Black Box Performance Space in Denton w/Home Made Dance Project
TBD (Dec-Jan) Invitational house show with trombonist Patrick Crossland
TBD (Dec-Jan) Doc's Records and Vintage w/Drift Era, Spacebeach, Fungi Girls, The Year of the Bear (Cavalcade of Unpopular Musics 2)
European jazz seems to be on a roll, with veteran players like Peter Brotzmann and Han Bennink counted among the music's most revered figures, and Lisbon-based label Clean Feed emerging as this decade's Blue Note. Musos like Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado and Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser even run their own labels. Now you can add French drummer Bruno Tocanne to the list.
Tocanne's a jazzman with one foot in rock; one of his projects is the I. Overdrive Trio, a Syd Barrett tribute outfit. He's served as artistic director of the imuZZic collective for over a decade, and launched the Instant Music Records label in 2010. On 4 New Dreams!, he leads a quartet where Blaser intertwines contrapuntal lines and swaps solos with trumpeter Remi Gaudillat. The leader never rushes the proceedings, always ensuring that there's plenty of space for the groove to breathe and the listener to cogitate. The music's mood is somber and reflective, and the performances are beautifully recorded, so that every intimate detail and nuance is clearly audible.
Libre(s)ensemble is a whole 'nother kettle of fish: a big band that covers a whole spectrum of moods and influences with two trumpets (including Gaudillat), two guitars, and one or two woodwinds atop bass, Tocanne's drums, and percussion. The opening "La Foley" juxtaposes a pulsing guitar chord against an abstract melody before the horns break out in collectively improvised polyphony. "Bruno Rubato" commences with a slice of sprung rhythm freeblow, with hints of surf and Jim Hall in the guitars, before settling into a winding, horn-led dirge that's reminiscent to these feedback-scorched ears of Bill Frisell's reimagining of Burt Bacharach's work with Elvis Costello. Then Elodie Pasquier takes a woody bass clarinet solo over more sprung rhythm and the melody returns, this time with Damien Sabatier soloing on alto.
"Suite for Libre Ensemble" winds its way through four different movements, which are alternately Spanish-tinged, Henry Cow-like, freewheeling, and folkloric-but-_out_. "Le chant des marais" starts out with a jangling rhythm guitar like something out of Lighthouse or one of those other early '70s "jazz rock" bands. Elsewhere, there are echoes of Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society (back when he still had the scream trumpet), Jack DeJohnette's Directions, and even the ethereal, spacey side of Ornette's Prime Time. Overall, though, Libre(s)ensemble is most evocative of Carla Bley's work with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra and her own bands. It's not just the eclecticism, it's the way the horns are voiced. The soloists are uniformly strong, but it's the compositions and the way the constituent parts interact as a whole that are the focus here. Together, these two discs form an auspicious debut release for Instant Musics.
Pssst! Hey, kid! Wanna see some live Soft Machine from '68?
Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, and Mike Ratledge rippin' it up for 24 minutes on French TV. This is even better than the laserdisc-to-VHS booted footage that disappeared into the recesses of Ray Liberio's house five years ago. Soulful, improvisatory, experimental. Wow.
Go here and click the link on the page to download the New Fumes Panthers from Your Mind EP, which my sweetie got on cassette last night. If you dig noisy psych, this one's right up your alley.
Dim Locator, New Fumes, and The Ugly Beats pics @ meezlady.blogspot.com
My sweetie posted some of her pics of Dim Locator, New Fumes, and The Ugly Beats from last night's extravaganza at Lola's on her photo blog. Click on 'em to make 'em big and leave her a comment, why doncha?
Both my sweetie 'n' I had demanding weeks at work, so we decided to celebrate the dignity of labor with "date night" at Lola's, where Justin Robertson had curated an eclectic bill topped by Austin garage rock veterans the Ugly Beats, with two "one-man-shows" of musos we dig in front: Daniel Huffman's New Fumes and Will Kapinos' Dim Locator.
Justin's a Fort Worth Uberfan and familiar of drummer/visual artist extraordinaire Clay Stinnett and Waxahachie gallery owner Bruce Webb. His evening was up against the second night of the Fort Worth Rock Assembly (local bands play classic rock toons) across town at the Wherehouse, but he still managed to pull a select roomful of cognoscenti. I dig his style and taste.
Dim Locator led off with a set of digital-age electrified country blues. Will plays a battered hollowbody electric and a set of drum pads programmed for kick drum and hi-hat sounds through a bank of F/X through a PA speaker and good ol' reliable Fender Twin. (When I walked in and saw four, count 'em, four vintage Fender amps onstage, I thought I might have died and gone to gear geek heaven. And Will's drum rig is a work of art in itself, a more industrial-looking version of the jumble sales used by the drummers in Restaurant and Bastardos de Sancho.)
Kapinos sings in a style that's part young Johnny Cash, part crazed hillbilly, and all Texas kid; no affected African-Americanismo or over-the-top vocal F/X a la Jon Spencer or Bob Log III for this boy, to his great credit. He can fingerpick the fire out of that big box, or flatpick it for an effect not unlike a less-flashy, early Johnny Winter. (For proof, hear the cover of R.L. Burnside's "Mattie" on his TXMF 7-inch, with spooky/swampy Clay Stinnett cover art.)
I first saw Dim Locator at the Tommy Atkins benefit at the Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff last year, when Will invited Daron Beck to sit in on "I Put A Spell On You." Since then, the music's become less John Lee Hooker-derivative and a more organic representation of its creator, even including a song from his old band Jetscreamer, whom I vaguely remember seeing at some long-gone venue in Deep Ellum a decade or so ago. He's up for a "Best Blues Act" award in the Dallas Observer, which I think he deserves if only to piss off the purists. I was happy to hear that he'll be opening for Roky Erickson at the Kessler on September 30th, since I've already got my tickets for thatun.
New Fumes, up next, was an entahrly different kettle of fish. Daniel Huffman, familiar of both the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne (who provides a testimonial on a sticker affixed to the outside of New Fumes' estimable debut vinyl statement Bump and Assassination) and the Polyphonic Spree's Tim DeLaughter, has been making interesting music for longer than the decade of which I'm personally aware, and is just now, with this project, beginning to realize his considerable potential.
It's instructive to remember that Ghostcar was originally Daniel's band, before the more assertive Karl Poetschke and Clay Stinnett hijacked it. Back in those days, Daniel always used to play sitting down, facing away from the audience, often with a cat mask on the back of his head. More recently, I was surprised to see him playing stand-up guitar in Day of the Double Agent with Regina Chellew. I last saw him three years ago, when he sat in with PFFFFT! at the Fairmount.
While one-man-bands are certainly not the novelty they once were (saw Greg Ginn at the Wild Rooster a couple of weeks back; Nathan Brown was in the crowd early last night), New Fumes is more ambitious than most. Bump and Assassination is a full-on, multimedia presentation, with integrated video for each song -- a head-spinning orgy for eyes a la Sub Oslo, but more programmatically linked with the musical goings on, so you can see video Daniel, wearing a cathead and purple lipstick, singing along with his onstage self.
The music's orchestral in scope; fella sure can get a lot of sounds out of a guitar, a laptop, and a pedalboard. The obvious sonic comparison is with the Lips, of course, but there are dance music components at work here as well and the overall effect is positive in the manner of the Spree without ever making you feel like you drank the purple Kool-Aid. This is homemade psychedelia at its best: an evocative, ultimately uplifting sensory overload. I particularly liked the video clips of Billy the owl, whom Daniel found injured in his driveway, nursed back to health, and eventually released.
(Dig New Fumes' cover of the Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow toon "Trust" via Soundcloud.)
Batting cleanup were the Ugly Beats, who gots a new album Moor! out on Get Hip and are about to embark on a tour of Spain, where their retro sound goes over big. Guitarist Dan Wilcox also plays in the Strange Attractors (whose bassist Jen Tran made it up to Fort Worth to see the Ugly Beats play but sadly was unable to when her own band was playing here last week). The UBs' stage trip works off the dynamic between diminutive frontguy Joe Emery and organ chick Jeanine Attaway, whose presence reminds me of Joe Nick Patoski's squeeze Kris Cummings back when she was in Joe King Carrasco's Crowns (who've recently regrouped for a few shows).
Except for Wilcox, who looked as though Thurston Moore had been transported back in time to 1962, the UBs mainly looked like extras from That Thing You Do, which caused one wag to remark, "I wonder whatever happened to the Oneders?" They played a cover of Roky's Erickson's "Starry Eyes," dedicated to Justin, that served as a reminder that Buddy Holly, Bobby Fuller, and Roky were all Texans.
It'd been a long day, so after my sweetie took some shots of the UBs (some of which she'll post, along with a few of her New Fumes/Dim Locator pics, on her photo blog in just a little bit), we headed out to grab some grub at Taco Heads (not bad, but pricier and not better than Melis Taqueria in our own 'hood) and head home to the cats. Kudos to Justin R. and Lola's for hosting a great night of music. If there were more shows like this, I might have to venture out of mi casa more often.
That's right, kids: The new single from Hickey's solo project Joe and the Sonic Dirt from Madagascar is streamable and downloadable via Bandcamp here. Get on it!
Another day of Velvet madness: In between running, compost, laundry, waiting for an alarm guy, reading Stephen Prince's The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, and, um, napping, I've been listening to yet another VU bootleg I downloaded today from back in the Cale-and-Nico era (1966 in Columbus, Ohio, to be exact), that includes "Melody Laughter" and "The Nothing Song," two more 30-minute thump-and-drone fests, but even more tribal and minimalist than the '68-'69 jams I've been digging. Bliss! How'd I ever live without this stuff?
Dining tonight at Tokyo Cafe with HIO and the creators of Home Made Dance Project, Amanda Jackson and Whitney Boomer, who also dance with Big Rig Dance Collective. They've invited us to perform with them in Denton on December 8th, so we'll be hammering out the brass tacks.
Speaking of HIO and the future, even though the first Cavalcade of Unpopular Musics show is still weeks away (October 7th), Jenkins from Doc's Records has agreed to a second one at a date TBD with HIO, Drift Era, Spacebeach, Fungi Girls, and new psych band (with ex-Lift To Experience muso) Year of the Bear. Hoooray!
That's right, the Led Zep guitarist gots a new website, with interesting content updates that only stay available for 24 hours. That's one way to get your hit count up. My big sis finds the best stuff.
