7.29.2017, Fort Worth

It was one of those wish fulfillment nights.

Big Mike Richardson and friends were performing Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow album in its entahrty, then the inimitable Bill Pohl, visiting home from Colorado, would play an Allan Holdsworth tribute set, accompanied by a couple of fiery youngsters. Big Mike's friends included my old bandmate Ron Geida in the leading role, and my old bandleader Lee Allen from two and a half years of Wednesday night jams at the Wreck Room. (Those nights were chronicled on this blog in a series called "the art of the jam," back when I was still affecting that annoying e.e. cummings "no caps" mannerism -- an infantile reaction, it seems in retrospect, to not digging being edited. Mea culpa.) On the day of the event, Big Mike informed me that there'd be a jam after Bill's set, and invited me to participate.

I got to Lola's Saloon, where the event would go down, a little after nine, and was as surprised as I'd been the night of the Transistor Tramps show a few weeks before at the number of cars outside, but I figured it was for the country show outside at the Trailer Park. Back when I was writing for the Fort Worth Weekly 15 years ago, I used to advocate for Bill's prog band the Underground Railroad, but getting people to their performances was like pulling teeth. Inside the venue were assembled the collective prog-fusion freaks and guitar heads within a 50 mile radius, including lots of young folks, which surprised me.

Promptly at 9:30, Big Mike and Co. kicked it off with "You Know What I Mean." On this occasion, Mike was playing second guitar and some keys. Besides Ron and Lee, his friends included Tyrel Choat on talkbox guitar, Steve Hammond on keys, and the phenomenal Christopher "Chill" Hill (about whom more later) on drums. Blow By Blow is the album that, when it was released back in '75, caused my teenage guitar mentor (RIP) and I to believe we needed to learn how to play good. (In my case, this was compounded by reading Robert Fripp's remarks in Guitar Player to the effect that Hendrix "had inefficient technique and misled many young players who tried to emulate him." Guilty.) We were wrong, of course, but anyway...

Blow By Blow was a revelation when it hit, although in retrospect it's more like a continuation (minus the vocals) of the jazz-inflected R&B direction Beck had undertaken with the Rough and Ready band; the secret ingredient was Max Middleton. (Beck has always relied on keyboard players to give him settings to make his unique melodic gifts shine.) I saw him live twice during his fusion period, once from the front row at the Palace Theater in Albany, NY (the sound was an undifferentiated roar, I was deaf for 24 hours afterwards, and Jan Hammer reminded me of Tim Conway), once from the first balcony at the Academy of Music in Manhattan (great view of the whole stage and beautiful, clear sound).

Big Mike and friends gave this challenging music a rougher edge than on Beck's George Martin-produced original, which I found preferable. There was blood on the stage, as there should be. Ron has great chops which have grown even more imposing since we briefly played in a band together 18 years ago, and he soloed with abandon and a brittle attack that put his own stamp on Beck's tunes (his solo on "Freeway Jam" was a particularly memorable scorcher). Lee's a consummate bandleader and interacted effectively with Chris Hill and Steve Hammond to hold things together when onstage monitors were unreliable. The rhythm section cooked on the funk grooves, and the whole band was blindingly amazing on "Scatterbrain" (taken at a furious tempo). It was nice to hear Ron on the unspeakably gorgeous "Diamond Dust," which I once heard him play (sans the head) with Bill Pohl at the Fairmount.

Then Bill got up with Chris Hill and bass virtuoso Canyon Kafer to pay homage to their inspiration, Holdsworth, who passed back in April. I'd heard Kafer's name before when he played with Bill and Eddie Dunlap on a previous visit of Bill's, and I'm sorry to say I missed a solo gig he played down the street from me at the Grackle Gallery. (I'll not repeat that mistake.) I believe he's also in Eddie's Rage-Out Arkestra. They opened with "Proto-Cosmos" from the New Tony Williams Lifetime album Believe It, the album which introduced Holdsworth to the US audience in the same year as Blow By Blow. I saw that band when that record was new, and I'm here to testify: Chris Hill's a polyrhythmic powerhouse, and his toms have the same thunder that Tony's did.

They tore into some material from Holdsworth's '83 Road Games EP, including the title track (sung by Big Mike). It was a jaw-dropper to observe the ferocity with which Cafer attacked his 6-string bass while reading chord charts. Bill showed that the move to Colorado -- where he leads a trio and plays in legendary prog band Thinking Plague -- has been beneficial to his playing. He picks lightning-fast runs with astonishing fluidity, with a smoothness of articulation that I've only ever heard from him, Holdsworth, and Eric Johnson. Watching him interact with these two young cats, it struck me how deeply all three of them had to be into the music, to be able to execute faster than most people can think.

I teared up twice during their set. The first time was when I heard the intro to "Fred" from Believe It, a song I'd seen Holdsworth play with Williams all those years ago (and I'm now really regretting not seeing him when he played the Kessler in Oak Cliff a couple of years back; never take for granted there'll be another opportunity). The second time was when I turned around when they were done and realized: they'd kept the house. Yes, there's an audience for challenging music in Fort Worth -- although Bill played it off, saying "Mike can get people out for anything."

After that, I got up and jammed with Mike, Ron, Lee, Chris, Steve, Tyrel, and a cat from the audience who got up to play guitar. It was my first time to play with Lee in a decade, and I was hyper-aware of being out of practice, although people said kind things later. (There's nothing to compare with playing a half-ass solo, turning around, and seeing Bill Pohl playing rhythm. As Eliot said, "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.") I need a Stoogeaphilia show to restore my shaky self-esteem, and will get one, at Lola's, on September 16. Meanwhile, Big Mike will be back there on August 25, playing Led Zep III and Houses of the Holy (my favorite!) in their entahrty. I shall endeavor to be there.

Max Johnson's "In the West"

Part of a new generation of composing improvisers, Max Johnson is a young bassist who's made quite a splash since hitting the New York jazz scene not quite a decade ago, working with eminences from Abrams to Zorn and recording half a dozen albums as leader. His discography includes an album with the cooperative trio Big Eyed Rabbit, on which Johnson melds improvised music with his other great enthusiasm: bluegrass. (And this from a guy who grew up in New Jersey.) Beyond that, he has three discs (so far) at the helm of his regular trio with trumpeter Kirk Knufke and drummer Ziv Ravitz, and one (The Prisoner) with a quartet that includes saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, violist Mat Maneri, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara.

On In the West, released by the estimable Portuguese label Clean Feed, Johnson leads another quartet, this one including Susan Alcorn -- usually a solo performer, most recently heard on Mary Halvorson's octet date Away From You -- on pedal steel guitar, but it's hardly a Western swing session. Alcorn's molten-silver sound introduces atonal elements to the sonic stew, her swooping glisses recalling Harry Partch's just-intoned instruments.

The opening "Ten Hands" starts out with Johnson and drummer Mike Pride laying down a loping groove, reminiscent of Dave Holland and Jack Dejohnette's early ECM pairings, over which pianist Kris Davis can expound, expand, and elaborate freely, before careening into more impressionistic territory. "Greenwood" opens with a few scattered notes, surrounded by negative space, before Davis introduces the meandering theme. The other instruments join and gradually build to a masterful tension as Davis repeatedly hammers on a single key while Alcorn sprays clouds of notes around her and Pride raises a staccato clatter, the chordal instruments gradually building harmonic density before subsiding back into silence.

"Great Big Fat Person" is the most developed of Johnson's compositions here, wending its way through several contrasting moods. It starts out with a lengthy exposition by Davis, with comments from Alcorn that shimmer like reflections of light in running water. Some hammered chords from Davis send the flow in a different direction, with Alcorn playing sinuous ascending lines. As the piece decelerates, the leader does some of his most expressive playing. Johnson's spacious arrangement of Ennio Morricone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" is an extended and leisurely examination of the theme's melodic and harmonic contours, with plenty of room for the quartet's most spirited interactions. There's much to beguile the ear here, and Max Johnson's a talent to watch.

Obsolete artifacts, or "What's in my CD player"

Doctor Nerve - Every Screaming Ear: Imagine FZ's Waka Jawaka/Grand Wazoo or In NY bands, except there are no stupid "funny" songs to sit through, and all they play is charts that begin where "The Black Page" left off in complexity and mania, occasionally attaining Beefheartian levels of jagged contrapuntal angularity. Yum! Nice non-reverential cover of Don's "When It Blows Its Stacks," too. Doctor Nerve mastermind Nick Didkovsky is also a participant in...

BONE - Uses Wrist Grab: A long distance power trio, one of whose members didn't meet the other two until after this was completed. You wouldn't know it from the way they lock in on these complex and challenging compositions -- for contrary to the image "power trio" suggests, this is a composer's record. Here, Didkovsky covers bases from metallic skree to percussive thunk, while bassist Hugh Hopper reminds us why his era was Soft Machine's most compelling.

Nick Didkovsky - Binky Boy: On which the composer explores -- on his overdubbed lonesome, in tandem with Mark Stewart, and (on the gorgeous Crimsonoid chamber music of "Black Iris") with the other members of the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet -- the myriad musical possibilities of the electric guitar. Comparisons being odious, I'll listen to this as often as I do to Nels Cline's similarly conceived Coward (a lot). Didkovsky's also on...

Henry Kaiser/Robert Musso - Echoes for Sonny: On which the Bay Area avant-gardist and NYC muso-producer render tribute to the letter and spirit of the estimable six-string saxophonist's law, via covers of his tunes from Ask the Ages and Guitar (both of which are essential), as well as collective improvs with Didkovsky, bassist Jesse Krakow, and drummer Weasel Walter. A brisk, bracing free-jazz skronkaroll melee.

Thinking Plague - Hoping Against Hope: Leader-guitarist Mike Johnson comes across more like a modern composer using rock instruments than your typical '70s-reverential progster. One reason is his tonal palette, in which the acoustic sounds of woodwinds and piano carry much thematic weight, although here, Bill Pohl's fleet-fingered guitar replaces the piano. Also, the lyrics Elaine Di Falco sings are attuned to the troubled times in which we live, and the closing "A Dirge for the Unwitting" is simply a masterful achievement.

Soft Machine - Live at the Paradiso: As they shed founding members, their focus shifted from psychedelic whimsy towards jazz. Their second LP represented the best balance of their "song" and "jam" impulses; Robert Wyatt's biographer got my attention by highlighting this good-sounding boot as a more aggressive rendition of many of those songs. It ain't Third, but I didn't miss the horns, either. Jazz-rock improv powerful enough to rival Cream, the Hendrix Experience, and '73-'74 King Crimson. Speaking of which...

King Crimson - Epitaph, The Night Watch, and The Collectable King Crimson Volume One: Got my tickets! While I'm waiting for the show, these comps of live recordings are my favorite way to hear 'em. Epitaph demonstrates that the '69 lineup left more blood on the stage than you could hear in the grooves of In the Court... (they encored with "Mars" from Holst's "The Planets" to show they weren't fooling), while portions of The Night Watch and The Collectable...Volume One wound up on Starless and Bible Black and USA.

Things we like: King Crimson, Bill Pohl

All I ever need is something to look forward to. Now, it looks as though I've got a couple: King Crimson will play a rare Dallas date on October 21 (tickets go on sale July 24 at 10am CDT here, and prog-igal (see what I did there?) son Bill Pohl will be visiting Fort Worth from Colorado at the end of July, and has a couple of shows booked.

The publication of David Weigel's The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Progressive Rock started a lot of teapot tempests, if Facebook comment threads I've read are an indication. Prog's been taking it on the chin since the advent of punk, but its adherents are as fervid as metal's, and equally insular. Myself, I haven't read Weigel yet, and probably won't until my public library gets a copy; I can't see shelling out for a tome that has ELP and Rush among its subjects. But don't take me for a hater. This month, I'm rolling with Crimson and Thinking Plague (the band Bill joined after moving to the Rocky Mountain State, whose new album I finally bought after Bill told me they aren't touring this year) in the car, and spinning Doctor Nerve, Henry Cow, Soft Machine, and Robert Wyatt at la casa.

Back in the day, I might have found ELP's air-spinning drumkit and Rick Wakeman's wizard's cloak over-the-top, but I thought the same thing about Mott the Hoople's marionettes (when I saw them on Broadway). As one who grew up listening to German opera at pain-threshold volume every weekend courtesy of my old man, I was less taken with conservatory cats who brought classical repertory into the rock arena packaged as spectacle (not that there's anything wrong with that) than I was with the sturm und drang of the Who, Hendrix, and the like. That said, I owned all the prog recs that were typical of a rock-obsessed teen of my place and time (Long Island, '70s): The Yes Album and Close To the Edge (which made better architecture inside my "experienced" brain than the Allmans at Fillmore East, even); Thick As A Brick; In the Court of the Crimson King and Red.

Crimson I loved best of all. Even at its most stately and majestic ("In the Court...," "Starless," "Exiles"), their music carried a sense of dread and menace via Robert Fripp's distorto guitar and the spectral sound of the mellotron -- a keyboard-operated tape replay device that the Crims had the audacity to carry on the road in spite of its temperamental character. Fripp himself, a classically-trained former dance orchestra muso who looked for all the world like a small town schoolmaster, was the most thoughtful and philosophical of music-makers, plus a good writer to boot, as anyone who read his '80s scrawl in Musician magazine can attest.

The original '69 Crimson lineup, which exploded out of nowhere and lasted less than a year, was probably the most alchemical; the '73-74 lineup, anchored by the "flying brick wall" (Fripp's words) riddim section of John Wetton and Bill Bruford, was probably the most adept at improvising. Even in the '80s, with Adrian Belew up front "ruining things" (Jon Teague's words), they were capable of something like "Requiem" from 1982's Beat, on which Fripp and Belew came as close as any guitarists have to replicating the sound John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders made together.

In recent days, I've become quite enamored of 2003's The Power To Believe, featuring a better integrated Fripp and Belew, along with a new "flying brick wall" (Trey Gunn and Pat Mastolotto). The current touring octet includes Mastolotto as one of three, count 'em, three drummers along with returning veterans Tony Levin (bass) and Mel Collins (sax). Setlists I've seen span the band's entire trajectory, including some surprises. This is probably my last chance to see them (which I haven't yet). Now all I need is a ticket.

Closer to home, Bill Pohl has an improv gig (billed as "The Art Five Live at Art 5") booked at Arts Fifth Avenue on Friday, July 28. He'll be joined there by Eddie Dunlap on drums and Joe Rogers on keys -- making this a de facto embedded Master Cylinder reunion -- plus Chris White on brass and flute, and estimable youngster Canyon Cafer on 7-string bass. Then on Saturday, July 29, Bill will play an Allan Holdsworth set at Lola's with Cafer and Christopher "Chill" Hill. Headlining that night will be Big Mike Richardson, who'll perform Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow in its entahrty, accompanied by usual suspects like Ron Geida, Lee Allen, Tyrel Choat, Steve Hammond, and the aforementioned C. Hill. (If I make the latter date, as I intend to, it will be my first time hearing Big Mike -- whose name I first heard from Bill and Kurt Rongey, some 15 years ago -- play electric. Shame on me.)

7.15.2017, Fort Worth

It was a night of singers.

Transistor Tramps played their first show in five years at Lola's Saloon last night, on a bill with Panic Volcanic and Dead Vinyl. Three bands I want to see playing five minutes from mi casa is sufficient cause for me to venture out, so I headed over there a little after nine and was surprised (again, I don't get out much) at the number of cars parked on the street so early. Some of 'em were probably from Lola's Trailer Park (where a big TV screen had the sports on all night, rather than in the saloon -- good move, Brian Forella!), but both of the support bands are big draws, I gather. However it came about, a good house to start out with.

I'd seen Ansley-The Destroyer Doughtery for the first time a few weeks earlier, singing covers with Frank y los Frijoles in the Trailer Park while I was trying to sell records with Carl Pack at the Rock and Roll Rummage Sale. With Panic Volcanic, she was Something Entahrly Other: comparisons being odious, imagine Janis Joplin (minus the rasp, but with lots of power, projection, and presence) fronting the Grand Funk Railroad riddim section. (Offstage, I was surprised to note that she's quite diminutive, rather than the amazon I was expecting.) Behind her, drummer Chris Cole and bassist Zach Tucker (about whom more later) flailed 1970-length hair while kicking up a ruckus like Don and Mel at the Cincinnati Pop Festival. Stirring stuff. They release their second album at Main at South Side on August 4.

Dead Vinyl's trip is also replete with '70s referents, and they get bonus points for opening with Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody" and closing with Elvis' "You're So Square (Baby I Don't Care)." Before he opens his mouth, frontman Hayden Miller comes across like a slacker Everykid, but put him on the mic and he campaign shouts like a Southern diplomat, with showmanship to spare. His band plays sweaty boogie rock with sass and swagger, like a less inhibited Free or post-Smokin' Humble Pie. Guitarist Tyler Vela channels Page and Kossoff with a brittle tone reminiscent of the Red 100s' Raul Mercado, while bearing an uncanny resemblance to Jeremy Diaz of Dead Sexy fame. In the engine room, the aforementioned Zach Tucker is joined by Parker Anderson, with whom he also plays in Animal Spirit and whom I first saw playing with Eddie Dunlap's Mondo Drummers a few seasons back. They're all stupendous.

Transistor Tramps returned to the stage after a lengthy hiatus while frontwoman Elle Hurley battled hepatitis-C (read all about it in Steve Watkins' piece here). The band -- Elle's husband Richard Hurley on guitar, keyboardist David Sebrind, and drummer Jason Sweatt, plus new backup singers Angie Ntavyo and Morgan A'lyse Gardner -- reconvened five months ago at the request of Elle and Richard's daughter Chloe for her 18th birthday. Their streamlined sound, a blend of '80s synth pop and late '70s rock without an ounce of excess to be found, serves as a vehicle for Elle's tough chick persona, and she really inhabits the songs she sings, with the backup vocalists giving the proceedings more of a celebratory air. When Chloe joined Elle to sing "Jackie Boy" at the end of the set, it was clear that she inherited her mother's pipes. I'm going to have to dig out my copy of the EP they released before the hiatus. They should be recording again soon.

A visit to Stoogelandia (via the valley of the Dead) with Maria Damon

Maria Damon is a poetry scholar and Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at NYC's Pratt Institute. She's also, like your humble chronicler o' events, a fan of both the Stooges and the Grateful Dead. Her review of Jeff Gold's Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges As Told By Iggy Pop is in the current print edition of Rain Taxi. We recently chewed the fat online about our shared enthusiasms. I'm leaning; she's standing tall.

K: I am simultaneously amused and mortified that the sole Dead show I attended (Dallas '78) was so lousy that people don't even trade tapes of it. 

M: Yeah, they are the first to admit that they bombed here and there. It's amusing to me that people have such strong feelings about the Dead, both pro and con. I saw them once at the the Greek Theatre at Berkeley, an ideal venue. And I saw the Jerry Garcia Band at the Keystone in Palo Alto, both in 1981, my first year in grad school. Both occasions were excellent.

K: It is interesting the depth of feeling they inspire. Probably only prog rock comes close. I'm an idjit for missing Watkins Glen because my best bud from middle school and I were at some kid's house getting high and jamming endless versions of "Savoy Brown Boogie" and "Smoke On the Water" instead. I read the interview with Steve Silberman where he talks about how transcendent their soundcheck was. 

M: I spent the summer of Woodstock learning to weave, and listening to the festival on the radio. I had been so envious of the whole thing beforehand, but when reports of the torrential rain and the problems it caused came across the "transom" (as it were), I felt relief.

K: I watched news reports of Woodstock with my grandmother in Hawaii, on the same TV where we'd watched the Apollo moon landings a couple of weeks earlier. We didn't share enough language to communicate, but always got along. How bizarre that all must have seemed to her (b. in Japan at the end of the 19th century). Anyway, you're still weaving!

M: Yup, my preferred zone-out activity. The amount of time I devote to emptying my mind ... it takes up most of my day and night, really, but yeah, not through getting high.

K: I always think of the last semester before I dropped out of college as a waste (and a very dissolute time in my life), but that's actually when I learned about musical structure via my roommate forcing me to learn songs off records and play them over and over. If I'd been smart I'd have majored in journalism or English, but I was too chickenshit to commit myself to something where I feared failure...which I'd go on to experience in life anyway.

M: I  also feel very close to the experience of failure even though from the outside one could say I have it easy. I think that's why I love the Stooges and Iggy so much. Their failures were so spectacular and also an integral part of their identity and their strength. I like that zone where failure and achievement are so intertwined that they're hard to tell apart.

K: Something the Dead and the Stooges have in common! Walking that tightrope...

M: Ah yes! Never thought about that, but of course.

K: It's interesting to me that there was a direct linkage between the Beats and early psychedelic culture, including the Dead. And seeing how that translated to the midwest a couple of years later. (Ann Arbor as an extension of Berkeley, MC5 manager/Trans-Love Energies/White Panther honcho John Sinclair as a sort of latter day Beat-Leary amalgam).

M: A psycho-geographic mapping of psychedelic culture. Thinking too about the darkness hovering right around the edges of Jerry Garcia's easy-going funster persona.

K: The terrible tragedy is that the Dead's success destroyed him. He said he wanted to have fun, but carried the weight of all those people's economic need. They became too big for him to quit. In my mind's eye, I see them folding the tent after '74 and him going on to play little bluegrass and jazz gigs around the Bay Area. It's a nice fantasy.

M:  Yes, but I think there's something more. I don't think it was just benevolence and a sense of responsibility that kept him playing instead of resting. I think there was an enormous reservoir of grief that he didn't want to deal with, so he "kept busy," as it were, and then had to medicate to keep up the pace.

K: I think the jump to stadiums changed the essential nature of what they did. The direct communication that was the basis of their gestalt was no longer possible.

M: Yes, the Long Strange Trip documentary touches on that. Jerry always wanted the lights up a little so he could see the people's faces even in the stadia. I mean their individual faces.

K: And the loss of his father and his mother's absence created a big void, no doubt.

M: Yes, on top of the grief of being human.

K: Absolutely. One reason American Beauty resonates for so many is it really is an album about grief and loss. I didn't know why "Box of Rain" and "Brokedown Palace" evoked the emotions they did, but now I have a better idea.

M: Springteen has said that rock and roll is just one long cry: "Daaaaaaad-dyyyyy!"

K: Pretty much. But it changes as we grow older. As art does. But back to Stooges-Dead, I think what electric music offered Jerry was the opportunity to be expressive without the strictures of bluegrass. What he wanted to preserve was the "conversation." He intuited that with acid, they could learn to play together in a way that hadn't been done before. And for awhile, they did.

M: Yeah, I guess acid really worked for them. I was always afraid to find out if I was one of those "mentally unstable" people who really shouldn't do acid, so I played it safe. but I get some of the vibe anyway.

K: By the time psychedelic culture had filtered down to my backwater burgh on Long Island, it had become more of an insular, less of a communal thing. And it fucked up a lot of people I knew, including myself.

M: Yeah, now I'm kinda relieved that I never took the plunge, though I also feel like I missed out.

K: Nothing exceeds like excess. I knew lots of acid casualties. Couldn't listen to Hendrix for a decade after college because of all the ones who fried themselves in the name of being "like" him. Not something to toy with. But...we were children.

M: Yeah. I'm kinda glad I ... well, I'm ambivalent, like I said. But it's too late now. I'm not gonna go out and do it now.

K: Drugs were such a part of my growing up that it's hard to believe that now I wonder, "How many of the changes were from the things you were using, and how many were just...growing up?" I'll never know.

M: You don't need to know I guess... growing up is hard enough...

K: True.

M: I watched part of the Sunshine Daydream film [the document of a '72 Dead concert in Oregon], and it kind of grossed me out. All these blond white kids dancing naked and exposing themselves to melanoma, getting super sunburned, was all I could think. it didn't look ecstatic to me, it just looked stupid and misguided. But the music! For me, it stands on its own. Every year I get into a Jerry groove for a few days, and then something happens to pop me out of it, I think the underlying sadness gets to be too much. It's funny because though the Stooges are said to be "nihilistic," their music is far more life-affirming, ultimately. And of course Iggy is the ultimate survivor, while Jerry succumbed.

K: And that is totally luck of the draw. Ig had his addiction scene when he was young and strong. Jerry, when he was middle aged and pretty sedentary. Plus there's genetics. I find the Stooges pretty life-affirming myself. And a great story of historical validation late in life. The MC5 made a better movie, but the Stooges always win.

M: Yes, so glad Scott and Ron Asheton went out on a high note.

K: The victory lap was probably the last thing the Asheton brothers saw coming. The Stooges were Everykid. Any bunch of corner-loitering hoodlums in America could have done what the Stooges did. But they did it.

M: I think Iggy's ambition and his ability to corral the others into the band had a lot to do with their getting it done...I mean executing the vision, and they really had something pretty unique even if any group of kids could have done it. I really trust Iggy's revelation by the banks of the Chicago River ... it changed rock and roll.

K: Three things to remember: 1) He had some organizational ability (class president). 2) He was a better musician than any of them (drummer in a blues band). 3) He was like their sociologist from Mars -- observed their rituals, wrote songs about 'em.

M: Vice-president. Yes, that was the thing I focused on... the auto-ethnography. What rankled in that book I reviewed: Iggy takes credit for everything.

K: As last one standing, he now owns the story. He was alienated, but they were super alienated.

M: He was their link to the functional world. He used their alienation to fuel his art.

K:  Precisely. He created the frame to present them. Also interesting that they couldn't get a good take without him dancing in the studio. It really was a synergy (as overused as that word is).

M: Yes, it was synergy.

K: Was talking to a friend [Nick Didkovsky] who studied with Pauline Oliveros. He said they did an exercise where all the people in the class held hands and when you felt a squeeze, you squeezed the hand of the person next to you and made a vocal sound. She said there were two ways to do it: to think about it, and to feel it in your guts. It's a neural/spiritual connection -- musical performance as communication without words. Which you can relate to both the Stooges and the Dead. Her whole concept is "deep listening," which requires more than just attention. She relates it to meditative states, and the Stooges were definitely trance musicians. As were the "Dark Star" Dead.

M: Thich Nhat Hanh also uses that phrase but somewhat differently.

K: I re-read your piece, and it got me thinking of an int that Ig did with Detroit DJs Deminski and Doyle the day after Ron died. He sounded as though he was in shock, and mainly wanted to talk about old days. He called Ron "my best friend." After that, he got his game face back on, I guess, before he talked to Jarmusch and the book interviewer.

M: I remember that interview! Very moving and genuine. I think he goes through phases.

K:  As do we all. It was...surprising to hear his vulnerability in that moment. Although it shouldn't have been.

M: Also there was one with Terry Gross where he was very reflective about death, and remarked about Ron, "He knew me." Suggesting that there were fewer and fewer people of whom that could be said. That too was honest and vulnerable.

K:  Yes. I think Bowie taught him to hide behind the persona. Before, he just kind of ate the acid/did the show, and what you saw was what you got. Bowie's lesson enabled him to survive, but came at a cost.

M: Hmm, that's interesting. Do you mean Bowie explicitly "taught" him that, or that Bowie modeled that and it looked good to him?

K: I don't know what conversations they might have had, but he's spoken in interviews of how his time in Berlin with Bowie taught him that lesson. I suspect the modeling was a big part.

M: Oh, that's interesting. I've heard/read interviews in which he talks about Bowie's work ethic, but not that particular element of performance.

K: I think it's all part of a package. Iggy might have been the most "together" guy in the Stooges, but I think being a solo artist requires a different set of skills -- being a personality, rather than a member of a gang.

Things we like: Nick Didkovsky

I was crate-digging at Recycled Books in Denton the other day when I stumbled on a copy of Doctor Nerve's Out To Bomb Fresh Kings LP -- the original US indie release, not the German reissue! -- stuck in the jazz bin. (The estimable Denton muso-broadcaster J. Paul Slavens reminds us that uninitiates often mistake progressive rock for jazz. The very presence of saxophones is enough to trigger this response; add some dissonance, and it's a foregone conclusion.) Doctor Nerve is the band that Nick Didkovsky -- the NYC-based guitarist-composer already known to me as the brains behind the $100 Guitar Project and the Pretties For You NYC band -- has led since 1983. The record's an explosion of high-energy hi-jinks and rock-fueled, funkafied freeblow, activating my Zappa/Beefheart and Soft Machine pleasure centers in the same way as Tin Huey, and inspahring me to hit Didkovsky up for a German CD reish of Doctor Nerve's live '97 career summa Every Screaming Ear. (He's also got reissue CD copies of their weighty '95 opus Skin for them what wants 'em.)

That very night, I was able to catch Didkovsky on a radio show, playing and talking about music from some of his many projects. Didkovsky was a composing member of the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet (two CDs on the Canadian label Ambiances Magnetiques, plus all the quartet members guest on his solo-with-overdubs album Binky Boy), and played in a power trio, BONE, with ex-Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper (two CDs on Cuneiform). His compositional strategies include conducted improvisation and algorithmically-generated composition, using software he developed. Didkovsky studied composition under Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Gerald Shapiro, but he's also a dyed-in-the-wool rockarolla who's mastered the emblematic '70s styles of Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi and Alice Cooper's Glen Buxton; he plays metal with Hassliche Luftmasken and grindcore with Vomit Fist. There's also Petromyzontiformes, a series of electric chamber pieces. Quite an extensive and varied body of work, of which I need to hear more.

Roscoe Mitchell's "Bells For the South Side"

The school of composing improvisers who first came to prominence via their association with Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in the '60s and made their mark on the '70s Lower Manhattan "loft jazz" scene before settling into academia in the succeeding decades are now claiming their place among the serious American composers of the 21st century. (One could argue that Ornette did it first, as he did with many things, but it's taken critics a few decades to wrap their heads around the idea that improvisation is just on-the-spot composition.) Anthony Braxton -- whose compositions always unashamedly displayed European influences -- had his McArthur "genius" grant as early as '94. His former trumpet foil, Wadada Leo Smith, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013, before Henry Threadgill, who led a succession of colorful ensembles beginning with Air in the '70s, won the 2016 music Pulitzer.

Roscoe Mitchell might have less name recommendation than some of his peers, since his individuality was subsumed for years in what my friend Charles Young calls the "communal ethos" of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a cooperative group with several composers that was known for its Afrocentric costuming and ritualistic, theatrical performances. But the Art Ensemble started out as Mitchell's band, as documented on records like 1966's Sound and 1968's Congliptious. On 1977's Nonaah, he could be heard transforming a confrontational solo improvisation into an intricate ensemble piece, and with the following year's L-R-G/The Maze/S II Examples, he was blurring the lines between composed and improvised musics. Where Threadgill's Pulitzer-winning album, In For A Penny, In For A Pound, was a chamber music variant of his often carnivalesque earlier sound, and Smith's also-ran, the mammoth Ten Freedom Summers, shifted seamlessly between jazz group and chamber ensemble, Mitchell's Bells For the South Side merges and juxtaposes four trios in ways that showcase every facet of his oeuvre to date.

Mitchell's sidemen come from all over. The first trio teams him with colleagues from the Mills College faculty: percussionist William Winant, who's worked with composers Lou Harrison and John Zorn as well as the rock bands Mr. Bungle and Sonic Youth, and Taiwanese reedman James Fei, an alumnus of Braxton's Diamond Curtain Wall Quartet. Trumpeter Hugh Ragin, a mainstay of saxophonist David Murray's large groups, was in Mitchell's Sound Ensemble and appeared as "special guest" on Mitchell's album of duets with trombonist-pianist-drummer Tyshawn Sorey, an estimable composer who seems poised to pick up the torch from leading AACM lights like Braxton, Threadgill, and Mitchell. Keyboardist Craig Taborn, a busy leader and sideman in his own right, has been a Mitchell collaborator since the '90s, including two recent trio albums with the British jazz/noise/hardcore/improv drummer Kikanju Baku. Detroiters Jaribu Shahid (bass) and Tanni Tabal (drums) have worked with Mitchell since the '70s in his Sound Ensemble and Note Factory bands.

Bells For the South Side was commissioned for, and recorded during, a 2015 art exhibition commemorating the AACM's 50th anniversary. Each trio performs one piece alone (two, in the case of the Winant-Fei unit) and the musicians are recombined in various permutations for the remaining seven. Mitchell's own multi-instrumental mastery -- to include multiphonics, microtones, and circular breathing -- is matched by his musicians' flexibility, placing a broad tonal and textural palette at the composer's disposal. Besides a multiplicity of reeds, there are high and low brass, keyboards (including two pianos) and electronics, acoustic and electric bass, and the Art Ensemble's percussion array, which rivals Harry Partch's instruments for corporeal beauty and was on display as part of the exhibit.

Among the trio features, "Prelude to a Rose" starts as a doleful lament for wind trio, with Sorey on trombone. Around the three-minute mark, the players' interaction takes on an impressionistic cast, alternately raucous and playful, before returning to the pensive theme. "Dancing in the Canyon" (on which Mitchell shares composition credit with Taborn and Baku -- the only piece here on which he does so) opens with sparse percussion clatter and electronic squiggles which give way to tone clusters and fragments of melody, gradually building to a volcanic intensity that peaks, then abruptly recedes. "Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand" opens with an episode of reflective beauty from Mitchell and Shahid (on arco standup) before Tabbal takes off on an exploration of the timbres of the trap set, then Mitchell unleashes a torrent of tumbling notes, and Shahid and Tabal jump in for a race to the finish. On "Six Gongs and Two Woodblocks" and "R590 Twenty B," Mitchell and Fei trade contrapuntal lines while Winant provides punctuation.

The other pieces are equally variegated, with the sound of surprise often present. "EP 7849," with its long tones and distorted electronic textures, treads on turf staked out in the '70s by progressive rockers King Crimson. The title track is Mitchell at his most minimalist, with Ragin's trumpet crying out plaintively. "The Last Chord" probably packs the most auditory events into the shortest duration (12 minutes, although it's not the shortest piece here), while "Red Moon in the Sky" is an extended soundscape with the gravitas of the Art Ensemble's People In Sorrow. A version of the Art Ensemble anthem "Odwalla" closes out the proceedings, allowing Mitchell to pay tribute to the past while keeping his eyes fixed on the future. Entering his world for the couple of hours and change it'll take you to listen to Bells For the South Side is a trip worth taking.