FTW, 10.26-27, 2022

 

Sometimes I go out. These days, the Grackle Art Gallery seems to have become my venue of choice, although there are certainly more rooms with music policies in my city than there were 20 years ago, and post-Covid -- it's not over, but the economic environment for live music has changed because of it -- there are a lot more touring bands coming through than in days gone by. But I can walk to the Grackle, and the shows are early, so I can be home in time to medicate my insulin dependent diabetic old man cat. Age-appropriate, then.

Thursday night had the vibe of a house show in Denton 20 years ago, and motivated me to dig out The Pyramid Scheme's The Long Con, Vol. 1 CD (a nice audio snapshot of Denton ca. 2004) the next day because I remembered having first seen Sarah Ruth Alexander with Warren Jackson Hearne's Merrie Murdre of Gloomadeers (I mistakenly thought it was John Wesley Coleman III, but she set me right) around that time. As much as I dig Sarah Ruth in band and improv contexts, my favorite work of hers is the kind of intimate, solo, weird-folk set she played on this night, where her quirky humor and roots as a West Texas farm kid come to the fore. She opened with a hymn, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," with which we were invited to sing along ("We'll be singing verses one and three"), reinforcing a sense of place (the Grackle's in an old pier and beam house with bare wood floors, not unlike a rural church) and the connection between performer and audience that your humble chronicler o' events found particularly comforting after years of virus-driven isolation. As always, the contrast between her classically trained voice and folkloric harmonium and dulcimer was striking, but in an ethereal and haunting way, not one that jarred the senses.

Chris Welch -- the Denton singer-songwriter, not the Brit music journo -- was a new name to me, although he's been around for years, fronting the likes of Pinebox Serenade and the Cicada Killers. He's a burly hulk of a fella, but looks can be deceiving; he suffered a stroke at the ass-end of 2019, and while the rest of the world was locking down, he was learning to play and sing (and walk) again. While his recovery might remain a work in progress, he strummed and sang with plenty of power, soul, and grit, singing songs inspired by family stories and social injustices. May his mighty roar remain undiminished.

The last time I saw Chris Plavidal, I carried his flaming amp out of Lola's after it caught fire onstage (something flooky about stage right power in the recently-vacated location; same side of the stage where my amp blew up the last couple of times I played there). Stumptone's Gravity Suddenly Released, his band's 2008 opus, remains one of my very favorite records of the Aughts. Since then, he's collaborated with UK shoegazers the Telescopes and local dub duo Wire Nest, among others, but Thursday's appearance was his first time on the boards in two years. For my two cents, no one does a better job of rendering the psychedelic experience acoustically, with electronic effects accenting his guitar's ringing harmonics like lysergic overlays on pristine reality. He makes my previous benchmark of "wooden" psych excellence, Roy Harper's Flashes from the Archives of Oblivion, sound hamfisted by comparison. Opening with the venerable "O Death" (the B-side of his latest Dreamy Life single under the rubric Storms At Sea), he played a selection of his own tunes plus covers of Syd and Roky (including my Gravity fave "Never Say Goodbye") that was deeply satisfying even when he re-started one song "because I really love this song but I fucked up the lyrics." No harm, no foul. Welcome back.

Friday night was something really special. On the occasion of an annual visit from a local boy now living in Colorado, the preternaturally fleet-fingered guitarist Bill Pohl (The Underground Railroad, Thinking Plague), Grackle Live music supremo Kavin Allenson booked a singular lineup: Bill playing improv in a trio with his Railroad bandmate, keyboardist extraordinaire Kurt Rongey (tickling the ivories in public for the first time in a decade) and Warr guitarist -- think "Chapman Stick on steroids" -- Mark Cook (99 Names of God, Herd of Instinct). All three are masters of their instruments, and good friends, but they'd never played together in a totally improvised context before. Watching them conjure complex architectonic structures on the fly, inhabit them just long enough, then blow them away like smoke and head off in a new direction, was riveting -- so much so that it doesn't appear anyone present captured the high spots on video, a rarity these days. But the music demanded one's full attention; you wanted to be listening to them as intently as they were listening to each other. 

Bill's been playing in a cover band that gigs regularly, doing stuff like Meters and Miles Davis, and you could tell from the simplicity of his rig (Marshall head with 1x12 cab) and some of the new tricks in his trick bag -- lots of propulsive rhythm things, some grittier tones than I can recall ever hearing from him, the way he casually plucks false harmonics out of a pre-bend and release, as well as executing his trademark rapid-fire, wide-interval runs. (Also noteworthy is his generosity of spirit, passing his custom instruments around so the guitarists in the audience could try 'em out before the set.) Mark plays enough music for three people all by himself on that aircraft carrier-looking axe, sometimes playing simultaneous lead and bass lines, sometimes using his array of effects to orchestrate colors and textures. The real surprises came from Kurt, though, applying his impressive classical chops, composer's intelligence, and old school prog sensibility to serve as the music's fulcrum. At one point he pointed out that he and Mark were wearing the same shoes, proving that virtuosic progsters can be funsters, too. If you weren't there, you missed it. Hopefully they'll do it again next time Bill's in town.

Now back to pre-election anxiety. Go out and vote for democracy, kids.

Jussi Reijonen's "Three Seconds / Kolme Toista"

On the anniversary of Don Cherry's passing, I had my coat pulled to another well-traveled musical explorer: the Finnish guitarist-oudist-composer Jussi Reijonen, whose new album Three Seconds / Kolme Toista just dropped digitally, with CDs due on November 4. Since releasing his acclaimed debut un in 2013, Reijonen had undergone a creative block centering on issues of identity and belonging, rooted in a life that carried him from the Arctic Circle to the Middle East, East Africa, and the United States. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for reflection and regeneration, the result of which is this five-part suite, performed by a multi-national nonet (besides Reijonen, there are three Americans, two Turks, a Jordanian/Iraqi, a Palestinian, and a Japanese), that draws on the musical traditions of all the cultures in which the composer has lived. 

The basic unit here teams a standard jazz-rock rhythm section -- guitar, piano, bass, drums, and percussion -- with two brass (trumpet/flugelhorn and trombone) and two strings (violin and cello), so Reijonen has a wide tonal palette at his disposal. He uses it to good effect on opening track "The Veil" -- imagine an Arabic-flavored version of Herbie Hancock's "Speak Like A Child." Pianist Utar Artun really shines here. On "Transient," my favorite track at the moment, the confluence of Layth Sidiq's violin, Reijonen's oud, Keita Ogawa's percussion, and Vincil Cooper's trap set creates a sense of unsettled roaming that evokes the sounds of Balkan Romani people as well as Arabic roots. 

For many listeners, the best point of entry to Three Seconds / Kolme Toista might be via "The Weaver, Every So Often Shifting the Sands Beneath Her," a somber, '90s rock-style lament that benefits from the ensemble's rich orchestral textures. The pizzicato strings and the blend of Jason Palmer's flugelhorn and Bulut Gulen's trombone particularly stand out, as does the way Cooper plays against the ensemble after the false ending. "Verso" (Finnish for "to sprout" or "to grow") brings a sense of cathartic release, with the rhythm section building to a percolating groove and ample space for trumpet, violin, and piano to cut loose. "Median" performs the same function as a plagal cadence at the end of a hymn, or "Psalm" at the end of A Love Supreme. It's the satisfying conclusion to one musician's struggle to untangle the strands of his own being in search of transcendence and growth.

Patricia Brennan's "More Touch"

Back in February -- eight months and a lifetime ago -- producer extraordinaire David Breskin pulled my coat to the vibraphonist-marimbist-composer-bandleader Patricia Brennan, whose album More Touch (due out November 18 on estimable indie Pyroclastic) he was about to start work on. "You haven't heard of her," he said, "but you will." Sure enough, Brennan was part of the band on guitarist-composer Mary Halvorson's May 2022 release Amaryllis. (Back in 2021, Brennan released a double album document of her solo project, Maquishti. Besides working with leaders including bassist-composer Michael Formanek -- see The Distance on ECM -- she performs in the duo MOCH with percussionist-drummer-turntablist Noel Brennan.)

More Touch is Something Entahrly Other: a percussion-heavy quartet that blends the methods of jazz and contemporary classical music with rhythms from the Afro-Cuban tradition and the Son Jarocho style of Brennan's native Veracruz, Mexico. Cuban-born hand drummer and percussionist Mauricio Herrera has lived in Mexico and is well versed in both musical cultures; he and trap drummer Marcus Gilmore blend their patterns expertly. Bassist Kim Cass can think like a drummer as well as performing his instrument's traditional harmonic role. The sound these musicians weave together is densely rhythmic but dances with light like a rainforest canopy. Breskin's longtime associate Ron Saint Germain captured it all beautifully.

Brennan herself is an exciting new voice on tuned percussion -- as virtuosic as Ruth Underwood, Midori Takata, or Evelyn Glennie, but with an added dimension of sonic experiment. The pitch-bending effect she employs on her amplified vibraphone (Breskin says Nels Cline coached her on Kaoss Pad) gives the instrument a fluid sound that recalls both her friend Halvorson and the early electric piano explorations of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. Most importantly, her compositional intent is the driving force behind the quartet's free-flowing explorations.

Breskin also applauds her spirit: "I've never known a musician to laugh as much as her, even mid-session." That joyous energy is audible throughout More Touch, from the soca jam "Unquiet Respect" that opens the proceedings to the shifting moods and timbres of the tour de force "Space for Hour" to "El Nahuali (The Shadow Soul)," which manages to be both spacey and visceral. On "Square Bimagic," the composition's mathematical structure contrasts with the earthiness of the percussion array, while the two-part composition "Robbin" lets us hear Brennan's electronically altered vibraphone to its best advantage here. Patricia Brennan's just getting started. I look forward to following her creative odyssey wherever it takes her...and us.

Charles Edward Buxton, 1949-2022

Charles Buxton, the man who brought me here, died on October 10, surrounded by his loving family. He ran a record store at 6393 Camp Bowie Blvd (with a brief detour to Berry Street) for 25 years, under four different corporations (Peaches, Sound Warehouse, Blockbuster Music, Wherehouse Music). He had people who worked for him for decades. Some of them even followed him from the record store to Petco when the last record chain folded in 2002. As a manager, he had a way of seeing the folks who worked for him as we were, accepting us, and drawing the best out of us by example and expectation. When I say I want to be kinder and gentler, I really mean I want to be more like him. 

Between 1978 and 1995, I worked for him four different times, always for short intervals, before going off to have various misadventures, after which I'd always return and beg for my job back. For some reason, he kept hiring me back. He was always present for me at times in my life when I needed understanding and wise counsel, and I have the sense he fulfilled that role for a lot of people. His "last detail," for Half Price Books, was processing a big buy of Folkways records. He still had the love and enthusiasm for music that he had when I met him in '78 and thought he was ancient because he was 29 (I was 21). I was there when he met his wife Barbara. They were married when they knew each other for just a few months, and she and their children were the center of his world for 43 years. They lived simply and frugally, and taught their children the same.

Charles was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and moved with his family to Richardson. By the time I met him, he'd seen the Velvet Underground and 13th Floor Elevators at the End of Cole -- up the street from the store where he and I first worked together -- and been out to San Francisco, playing bass in a rockaroll band, before his father passed and he came home to take care of the family business. I was proud of the way, after his retirement, he marched and worked for a fair, just, and democratic society. His passing reminds me that as we age, every person we love whom we lose means that there's one less person left who knows the stories. Charles knew a lot of the stories. Peace and comfort to his family, and to all who loved him as I did.

Trevor Dunn's "Seances"

"Humans love to forget and to repeat. We fall subject to confirmation bias, sway to suggestion, take the easy way out and allow ourselves to be governed while adamantly broadcasting our independence." 

That isn't a quote from a sociological treatise but rather, from bassist-composer Trevor Dunn's extensive and thought provoking liner notes to Seances, the full artist appellation for which is Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant avec Folie a Quatre (which seemed like a lot for a blog post title but is descriptive and accurate). Trio-Convulsant is a unit that Dunn convened after the collapse of avant-rock outfit Mr. Bungle, which he co-founded while in high school. The lineup on the trio's second album, 2004's Sister Phantom Owl Fish, included guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Ches Smith, both of whom went on to become important bandleaders and composers in their own right. I enjoyed Dunn's work on pianist/Pyroclastic Records boss Kris Davis' Diatom Ribbons and two albums by Dan Weiss' Starebaby. He's also collaborated with a diverse array of artists including John Zorn, Fantomas (with Bungle bandmate Mike Patton), the Melvins, and Wendy Eisenberg (my current obsession of the moment). 

Dunn's inspiration for Seances came from two disparate sources: Paul Desmond's 1962 album Desmond Blue, which teamed the ex-Brubeck saxophonist with guitarist Jim Hall and an orchestra, and Dunn's reading about an obscure French religious sect, the Convulsionnaires of Saint-Medard, whose "mass hysteria and group belief" (Dunn's words) have resonance in our own time. After an abortive 2015 attempt to write music for the trio plus a string quartet, and a release of his chamber music for Zorn's Tzadik label (2019's Nocturnes), Dunn composed the Seances material for the trio plus a mixed quartet of strings and winds. For this project, the trio with Halvorson and Smith is augmented by violinist/violist Carla Kihlstedt (Tin Hat Trio, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, last heard from here in 2015 on Ben Goldberg's excellent Orphic Machine), bass clarinetist Oscar Noriega (Tim Berne's Snakeoil), cellist Mariel Roberts (Wet Ink Ensemble), and flutist Anna Webber (Webber/Morris Big Band).

Dunn's compositions are complex and evocative, propelled by Smith's inventive rendering of their shifting time signatures. "Secours Meurtriers" opens with an aura of dark foreboding and gradually builds to something approximating a chamber music Mahavishnu Orchestra over a driving 13/4 ostinato. Dunn hears "Saint Medard" as a country blues tune, but if so, it's the most abstract one since Henry Cow somehow managed to wrestle "Bittern Storm Over Ulm" out of the Yardbirds' "Got To Hurry." Halvorson has become such a familiar compositional voice that it's refreshing to hear her percussive, dissonant improvisation as a color in someone else's tonal palette. "Restore All Things" retains some ideas from the aborted 2015 string quartet collaboration. Dunn cites the moment when Webber solos microtonally over a bass drone and string glissandi as his favorite on the record. 

The taut, tense, metallic theme of "1733" gives way to a freeblow meltdown, followed by a series of more spacious instrumental conversations before the theme returns. "The Asylum's Guilt" is probably my favorite piece here, a web of somber melody with solo statements from cello and bass clarinet. "Eschatology" is the most jazz-like item here. It's impossible not to think of Out To Lunch Eric Dolphy while listening to Noriega navigate the broken field of rhythm behind him, then Halvorson makes her statement over a bed of strings. Dunn concludes this intense program with the blessed relief of the simple melody  "Thaumaturge." See if you can spot the "collective metric accident" he chose not to fix. Seances is a strong testimony to his compositional acumen, and maybe the best record I've heard this year.

Things we like: Circlons, Zoh Amba, Texas Butt Biters

These days it seems as though a lot of bands will release albums a song at a time, only letting the final product drop after all the individual components have been internet available for awhile. When Only the Music Is Pretty, an EP by Circlons that arrived in my mailbox the other day, seems like Something Entahrly Other -- what could be a taste of four distinctly different albums. The project is the brainchild of guitarist-songwriter Kjehl Johanson (Urinals, Trotsky Icepick, Narrow Adventure), with three collaborators whose bloodlines include Trotsky Icepick, the Last, and the Leaving Trains, fronted by a rotating cast of singers. On "I Wanna Be On Your Radio (Not In Your Arms)," with lyrics that could have been written by the Wonders' careerist frontman from cinema's That Thing You Do, and enough chords to be a Radio Birdman song, John Talley-Jones does the vocal honors. Title track, sung by Adam Marsland, has a string arrangement that lifts it into Love Forever Changes territory -- appropriate for a song about the machinations of the L.A. music business. "Blue Cheer" isn't a proto-metal homage like you might expect from its title, but rather an R&B flavored tale of domestic violence, forcefully sung by Bellrays' force of nature Lisa Kekaula. "Moon Over Babaluma" is a credible Krautrock homage, as its title tips you off, with spoken word by Barbara Manning that recalls what Dan McGuire was doing with Unknown Instructors a few years ago, or Anne Sexton was with Her Kind decades before that. A mixed bag then, and a welcome surprise. 

Since her arrival in New York last year, 22-year-old tenor sax wunderkind Zoh Amba has had a slew of releases and played with an impressive array of the city's heaviest talents. I first got wind of her via Ra Kalam Bob Moses, who'd played a festival in her native Tennessee with her, and then heard her trio with William Parker and Francisco Mela, released on 577 Records as O Life, O Light Vol. 1. (A duo album with Mela, Causa y Efecto Vol. 1, just dropped on the same label this week.) Myself, I liked O, Sun on John Zorn's Tzadik label -- featuring pianist Micah Thomas and bassist Thomas Morgan from the band Zoh is taking to Europe -- even better. But Bhakti, just released on Mahakala Music, might just be her most substantial statement yet. What you hear on the disc is what went down in the studio, for Zoh values spontaneity. The spiritual longing in her music is buoyed here by the supportive contributions of Thomas, Morgan, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (replaced for the tour by ex-Cecil Taylor/David S. Ware sideman Marc Edwards). The musicians are clearly listening closely to each other, and the music wends its way through numerous dynamic shifts, but always remains powerful and expressive. On the closing "Awaiting Thee," guitarist Matt Hollenberg sprinkles shards of splintered notes over the roiling maelstrom. Listening to Bhakti takes me back to the first time I spun Trane's Ascension (with Amiri Baraka's liner notes suggesting that one could use the record to heat up the apartment on cold winter nights), or the night in '78 when Charles Moffett brought his three sons to sit in at the Recovery Room on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas and they raised the roof with '60s style energy music. That spirit still lives in music, and it will as long as players like Zoh come along to channel it.

In a similar vein, Texas Butt Biters is a collaboration between the peripatetic American saxophonist John Dikeman and three members of the transcontinental free jazz/hip-hop/metal supergroup The Young Mothers: drummer Stefan Gonzalez, bassist Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, and guitarist Jonathan F. Horne. Recorded late one night in Amsterdam, the three tracks are a surging tour de force of controlled violence and insane abandon. It's the sound of systems in overload -- bold and bracing, but not for the faint of heart. Young Mothers will be touring Norway later this month, so one hopes there'll be new music from them soon.

FW, 10.1.2022

The passing, within a few days of each other, of Pharaoh Sanders, Mark Hitt, and Sumter Bruton reminds us that a generation of musical titans is moving on.

Pharaoh was, of course, the free jazz firebrand whose tenor upped the intensity ante on late Coltrane sides like Ascension and Meditation. Signed to Impulse, Pharaoh then undertook a series of recordings (notably Karma, Tauhid, and Summun, Bukmun, Umyun) on which that unremitting energy took on a spiritual cast. He went on to work with collaborators as disparate as John's widow Alice Coltrane and pop R&B vocalist Phyllis Hyman. His 1977 album Pharaoh, with the guitarist Tisziji Munoz, is the most sought-after item from the India Navigation catalog. His 2021 release Promises with the composer Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points) and the London Symphony Orchestra received wide critical acclaim. A distinctive voice is stilled.

Mark was an influential and revered guitarist who made his name on the highly competitive '70s New York area cover band circuit with the band Rat Race Choir, an outfit that filled bars all over Long Island and upstate New York that were also frequented by the likes of Twisted Sister, Harlequin, and the Good Rats. (The 2014 doco We Are Fucking Twisted Sister! is worth viewing to get a flavor of that scene.) I saw his RRC drummer Steve Luongo with John Entwistle at Caravan of Dreams in 1999; I understand Mark toured with an earlier lineup of that band. Like a lot of players who made a living playing other people's music, Hitt was not recorded extensively, but there are numerous examples of his mastery on YouTube, and he had a track on the 2013 compilation The $100 Guitar Project.

Sumter was a scholar of blues, swing, and bebop, and the pre-eminent exponent of T-Bone Walker guitar style. Back in 1978-1981, the Juke Jumpers -- the band he formed with Ohio-via-Woodstock expat Jim Colegrove -- was the band I saw most often after the Nervebreakers. Sumter was a handful of rockaroll kids, including Freddie Cisneros, Jackie Newhouse, and Mike Buck, who started playing with Fort Worth blues eminence Robert Ealey at Black clubs around town in the early '70s, famously documented on the T-Bone Burnett-recorded Live at the New Blue Bird Nite Club (reissued a couple of years ago on the Record Town label). The Bluebird was as close to Nirvana as your humble chronicler o' events will experience in this life, a place where Como neighborhood folks, gassed-back hair/soul-patch sporting white blues guys, hipis, and punks rubbed shoulders with TCU frat/sorority kids and their parents who used to go see Howlin' Wolf and Bobby Bland at the Skyliner Ballroom in the early '60s. Stirring times were had by all.

Sumter's dad, a big band drummer from New Jersey, got stranded in Fort Worth and opened Record Town on University Drive in 1957 (year of my genesis). When I came here to open Peaches at 6393 Camp Bowie Blvd in 1978, he still had a second location at 6333 Camp Bowie, where I used to go on my work lunches to hear the cantankerous old Yank bag on my employer. Big Sumter told me his eldest son (Sumter III's younger brother Stephen grew up to play with Kris Kristofferson, among others) used to sneak downstairs when he was a tyke to spin his favorite sides, which he recognized by the colors of their labels. 

I was fortunate to be the recipient of numerous free guitar lessons, which Sumter dispensed from behind the counter at Record Town, and when I became aware, in the early Aughts, that college kids were buying records again because they were cheap, I bought a turntable from Sumter and started back collecting vinyl. I didn't see what was coming. (I also got his old copy of Bobby Bland's Two Steps from the Blues. Evidence below.) If you're from Fort Worth and dig music, chances are you have a story or two involving Sumter. If you don't know what the fuss was about Fort Worth blues but want to find out, go see Ray Reed or James Hinkle at the next opportunity. Don't take tomorrow for granted.