Denton, 10.30.2024

A diverse array of sounds at this month's Molten Plains, including two touring acts. There was another show in the main room, so things were shifted to the Rubber Room, which worked fine and accommodated a decent size crowd, plus a few latecomers from the other show. 

Opening set was by a trio of Kristina Smith, Rachel Weaver (Python Potions), and Stephen Lucas (who can usually be found recording audio of the performances). Smith and Weaver were seated at a table at the edge of the stage so as not to block the rear projection. This provided an opportunity to observe more closely than usual as they manipulated their electronic devices, vocalized through electronic treatments, and in Smith's case, operated a camera with a glitchy UV filter that provided visual accompaniment in real time. Lucas played synth and electronics and also contributed to the visuals. The net effect was something like what Paul Baker used to do with Sub Oslo: empiric reality cut up and distorted, giving way to moving, textured colors that flowed and reconfigured themselves as the music unfolded, deep bass undertones overlaid with static, distorted sounds of nature, and fragments of melody. A totally enveloping sensory environment.

Next up was Ojai, California polymath Rob Magill, who started his set by encouraging audience members to talk to him after his set, "because sometimes people don't want to after hearing me play." He started out playing a semihollow electric guitar, left-handed using fingerpicks, beginning with the most basic sounds, looping and adding effects as he went, creating layers upon layers of searing sound that evolved and changed as the set went on. Next he picked up a curious-looking instrument with rows of vertical pipes. Later he explained it was a sheng, a Chinese multi-reed instrument that's played like a harmonica. He finished up on tenor sax, on which he has a big, burnished, Ben Webster-via-Archie Shepp tone, at times using a microphone to amplify the sound of keys and wind without the reed, at others blowing percussive blats and using circular breathing to sustain keening notes. An ever-evolving set replete with variety. 

Closing set was by Australian expat Will Guthrie from Nantes, France, whom we'd seen duet with Gregg Prickett at The Wild Detectives the previous night. Will's a student of gamelan and an enthusiast of Ronald Shannon Jackson. He'd spent the day in Fort Worth, visiting Shannon's house on the Northside and I.M. Terrell High School, where Gilbert A. Baxter taught Shannon, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Julius Hemphill, among others who went on to make their mark in music. For his solo set, his compact kit was augmented with hanging gongs and he delivered a bravura performance, laying down propulsive polyrhythms and exploring all the timbral variations of his instruments, deftly moving between sticks, mallets, and beaters, employing a surprisingly light touch to cymbals, gongs, and singing bowls. A virtuoso whom I hope will return to this area again.

Molten Plains co-curators Ernesto Monteil and Sarah Ruth Alexander announced that November 20th will be another improv lotto, and December 14th this year's Molten Plains Fest, with a lineup of touring acts and locals that's still not final, but already enticing. It's been a great year for live music, and these folks are responsible for much of it. How fortunate are we.

Oak Cliff, 10.29.2024

It was a night of happy accidents at The Wild Detectives. Ernesto Monteil had originally booked it as an evening of experimental percussion, with touring artist Will Guthrie and local light Gerard Bendiks (Swirve, Magga Orchestra, Tidbits). But Guthrie asked if there was a guitarist available who'd played with Ronald Shannon Jackson -- an idol and influence on the Australian percussionist (currently based in France) -- and so Gregg Prickett, who'd played in Shannon's Decoding Society on the harmolodic icon's last-ever show at the Kessler Theater, back in 2012, was added to the bill. Coincidentally, Bendiks opted to perform with his Tidbits bandmate, guitarist Kenny Withrow (New Bohemians, Forgotten Space). And so the stage was set for two improvising drum-guitar duos, with rock dynamics.

Gregg Prickett's been playing out a lot this year, but usually in contexts without a drummer, so tonight we got to hear a side of him not heard since the days of Unconscious Collective (with Stefan Gonzalez on drums) -- using a more aggressive and percussive right hand attack than he's employed recently. Guthrie, who's studied gamelan music in Indonesia, demonstrated that he's learned his lessons from Shannon well, playing from the kick drum up in the manner of the master. One could hear echoes of the I.M. Terrell High School drum line and Jacksboro Highway roadhouses in his thunderous polylrhythms. 

The piece they opened with was Shannon's "Mama Plays the Guitar," performed at the Kessler and revived here with the force of a tidal wave. The second piece was equally furious, with Prickett using his octave pedal and some echo effects, while Guthrie was all over the kit, using small instruments as well as sticks to strike the drums. They closed with a more meditative piece, with Prickett providing a pulsing drone (and using a mighty impressive two-octave stretch) while Guthrie used light beaters to dance over cymbals, gongs, and singing bowls. 

Earlier, Withrow and Bendiks showcased a musical telepathy honed over years of playing together, picking up their musical conversation from where it left off four years ago. Withrow demonstrated the proper use of sampling and delay pedals, creating loops of varied textures and tempos which Bendiks responded to deftly. Then the guitarist used his Gretsch and Gibson instruments to fill the sonic space with edgy lines, drenched with distortion, wah, and feedback. Bendiks reminded us that he's a groover as well as a free improviser. 

At one point I heard scratchy guitar while Withrow's hands weren't even touching his instrument and realized that Bendiks had recorded a noise guitar loop before they started and timed it to occur at a random point in the improvisation. At another moment, Withrow recorded a slide guitar loop without intending to, and when he realized what he'd done, he just laid back and let the ghost in the machine play. Before the set began, Bendiks had asked audience members to set their phone alarms for 35 minutes after start time, "and make it LOUD!" The musicians were winding down when the collective alarms sounded. When I asked Bendiks if he'd known what time it was, he attributed it to "a sixth sense." When I see things I don't comprehend but know that they're real, I call it magic.

Tomorrow night, Guthrie will be at Molten Plains at Rubber Gloves in Denton, on a bill with California-based saxophonist-composer Rob Magill and a trio of Dentonites Kristina Smith, Rachel Weaver, and Stephen Lucas. You owe it to yourself.

Fort Worth, 10.26.2024

As much as Fort Worth has grown, and as much arts activity as it sustains, it's still a finite universe when it comes to audiences, and sometimes worthy offerings get lost in the shuffle. Thus, on a Halloween weekend night when Panther City theatergoers had choices that included Stage West's What the Constitution Means to Me, Hip Pocket's Metamorphosis, and Scene Shop's Renfield, only a handful of us were on hand for the first weekend of Artes de la Rosa's Cuentos Fantasticos, Vol. 2.

Cuentos Fantasticos is the brainchild of Rob Bosquez, a prodigiously talented writer-actor-director-educator who's been leaving his mark on stages here for a couple of decades now. He freely admits that the seven stand-alone monologues that comprise the evening are influenced by Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Rod Serling, but because Rob's the kind of artist he is, the texts are shaped by the character driven, human scale side of those creators of fantastical and horrifying worlds. 

Rob opened the evening by asking audience members to share fantastic and spooky experiences they've had, after alluding to the Rose Marine Theater's illustrious history, which includes some supernatural encounters. A woman responded with a tale of her musician uncles, who were shamed one night by another relative who poured out their liquor, which formed the shape of a demon.

The staging was spare, with creative lighting design by Jonathan Gonzalez that placed the focus on the text and the performers. In Video Games, the opening vignette, Alex Mackenzie played a character who would surely resonate for any '80s Fort Worth kid -- a gamer who scores a triumph against a machine in the arcade at the miniature golf place off I-35. Moon Beach is a tale of a New Year's Eve at the beach that goes horribly wrong for a character played with understated intimacy by Fredy Quiroga. Tio Moon's Book of Fantastical Foods is an early highlight, with Christiann Rogers as the guardian of an ancestral secret. The wistful reminiscence Kiteflyer, with Lauren Moreau Riley as a child who grows up to receive a visitation from the past, was followed by a short intermission.

Slither Through the Green starts off as a mundane suburban vignette before Nicholas Zebrun's householder reveals some darker dimensions to his family's history. The madwoman's narrative Dogcatcher is a tour de force for the amazing Jozy Camp, a performer of riveting physicality and tremendous emotional range. Perhaps the most affecting of the monologues with the fitting closer: The Out There, the narrative of a biracial orphan (Liam Markland) torn between the different parts of his identity, on a quest to find family. It was a haunting (in more ways than one) conclusion to an evening of tales imbued with soul and spirit: a different kind of Halloween play.

If you missed Cuentos Fantasticos, Vol. 2 this weekend, it runs again on November 1 and 2 at the historic Rose Marine Theater, a small gem on the Northside. You owe it to yourself.

Denton, 10.24.2024

Had planned to go hear Jonathan Richman at Rubber Gloves with my buddy Dan, but Jonathan got Covid and the date was postponed until next March. (This was billed as Jonathan's "Spring 2024" tour; perhaps that will be his "Fall 2024" tour? Wishing him a full and speedy recovery.) We got late notice of a Tatsuya Nakatani appearance at Gloves the following night, but when my buddy Mike hit me up and asked "Do you want to go?" I couldn't refuse.

It was hardly an optimal performance situation for Tatsuya, the Japanese master percussionist who hangs his hat in Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico. There was a loud dance party outside, and his music -- which is meditative as well as visceral -- works off the contrast between sound, silence, and the space between (the Japanese concept of ma). 

Nakatani, who plays about 150 shows a year, had been on tour since August and drove eight hours from his last stop to Denton. He announced up front he wasn't sure he'd be able to play because of the environmental factors. But he dug deep and managed to pull off a transcendent performance in spite of the obstacles.

While bowed percussion instruments are ubiquitous in the creative music world, few players possess the mastery of the technique Nakatani has achieved since adopting it in the mid-'90s. The massive overtones he was able to coax from his gongs, using handmade Kobo bows of his own manufacture, were symphonic in their resonance. The strength and dexterity it took to play two gongs simultaneously were audible in the sounds they produced. 

Nakatani kept up a fast pulse on a small kick drum while playing the smaller gong, and attacked the larger gong with beaters and singing bowls. When he turned his attention to his snare drum and collection of inverted cymbals and pot lids, the ritual and ceremonial echoes in the sounds produced belied the physicality of his assault. We, the listeners, stood transfixed before the stage, the sounds of partygoers passing through enroute to the bar momentarily forgotten. 

Earlier, Monte Espina's start was delayed by some technical issues, but once those were resolved, Ernesto Monteil and Miguel Espinel delivered their trademark electroacoustic webs of hypnotic sound. Together, they take the extreme close-up sounds of percussion, small instruments, and prepared guitar and run them through electronic treatments that send them floating off like phantoms in the air.

For me, the surprise of the evening was Nathan Siegel, a current UNT Percussion and Pedagogy student who lives in Fort Worth and teaches at Tarleton State. Siegel specializes in marimba but, probably for exigencies of the situation, brought a smaller vibraphone to Gloves. He used a variety of approaches -- bowing, sticks (which he'd sometimes use to strike the bars sideways, producing dissonant clusters), and mallets -- and exploited all of the instrument's percussive and harmonically resonant qualities in his 30-minute improvisation. Hope to hear more of him in the future.

Next Wednesday, this month's edition of Molten Plains will feature percussionist Will Guthrie, an Australian expat living in France; Californian composer-saxophonist Rob Magill, who has a record out with Tatsuya; and a first-time trio of local lights Kristina Smith, Rachel Weaver, and Stephen Lucas (whose band Vaults of Zin was recently namechecked in a Stereogum piece on the zeuhl influence in metal). The evening before, Guthrie will be at The Wild Detectives in a duo with guitarist Gregg Prickett (whom I've seen more this year than in the previous decade) on a bill with another percussion-guitar duo, this one featuring Tidbits bandmates Gerard Bendiks and Kenny Withrow. And Gloves bartender Randall Minick just played a solo show at the Green Goddess Lounge, a cannabis dispensary in North Denton. Live creative sounds abound in North Texas lately. May it always be so.

Oak Cliff/Dallas 10.19.2024

For the second weekend in a row, my wife and I were in Dallas -- this time, attending Daron Beck's life celebration at the Texas Theatre. I didn't know Daron until he started playing with Jon Teague after Yeti broke up, and a lot of what I know about Daron I learned while interviewing him for a piece I wrote for the Dallas Observer about Pinkish Black around the time their first record came out. But talking to friends and hearing/reading their testimonials since his passing, I've learned that he was beloved by many for helping them through tough times, and his partner Lisa Bush (DJ Wild In the Streets) did an exemplary job under trying circumstances of putting together a fitting memorial, including a website that will serve as a repository for his videos and music. She spoke with grace and aplomb at the end of the presentation about their life together and the plans they had. It seems to me that he had found his perfect life mate, and I had imagined him aging into a cool old man. Just ran out of time too soon. 

Several friends paid musical tribute. Sarah Ruth Alexander, accompanied by Will Kapinos on guitar, sang a version of "I Put A Spell On You" that was more nuanced than the one that Daron famously sang during his American Idol audition and (accompanied by Will in a stomping rendition) at the Tommy Atkins memorial at the Kessler Theater before it reopened; a soaring "Over the Rainbow;" an electronically warped version of "In Heaven" from Eraserhead; and most fittingly, Eden Ahbez's "Nature Boy," with its closing line "The greatest thing you'll ever learn / Is just to love and be loved in return." A trio of Stefan Gonzalez on vibraphone, Aaron Gonzalez on bass, and Joshua Miller on tenor sax and drums played a medley of themes from Vanishing Light in the Tunnel of Dreams, the collaboration between the Gonzalezes and their late father Dennis (together aka Yells at Eels) and Pinkish Black. And Sean and Nan Kirkpatrick sang to a home-recorded backing track (featuring guitar solos by Daron's frequent collaborator Steve Moore of Zombi) on a version of Air Supply's "Sweet Dreams" that had more than a little of Pinkish Black in it.

Jon Teague was unable to make it back for the event from Albuquerque, where he's lived since 2020, but video from Pinkish Black's 2012 performance at NYC's St. Vitus (RIP) was a powerful reminder of their live impact. After dinner at Gonzalez Restaurant down the street from the theater, we stopped by the Kessler to say hey to Jeff Liles and pick up Kat's photos from a recent exhibit devoted to local venues. So we did have a JT sighting yesterday. 

After timely pause, we made our way to The Cedars, where Sawtooth Dolls were playing live soundtracks to silent films at Full City Rooster, which has become a favorite place to hear music in Big D. Paul Quigg unearthed some cinematic gems including silent films by Slavko Vorkapic (The Furies and The Life and Death of 9314: A Hollywood Extra), George Melies (The Infernal Cakewalk), and Germaine Dulac (The Seashell and the Clergyman), as well as declassified Defense Department films of 1957 nuclear tests in Nevada (where soldiers were exposed to the effects of nuclear radiation). Quigg and his collaborator Gregg Prickett improvised the scores -- Paul playing ever-shifting chords on guitar along with eBow and multiple effects, Gregg switching between standup bass, nylon-string and electric guitars, and wooden flute -- responding to both the action on screen and each other's sonic counterpoint. Gregg told me later, "We rehearsed with the films, but we had the lights on then, and once we started, I realized I couldn't see Paul." No matter; they were able to provide soundscapes that complimented the surreal images, restoring my shaky faith in the ability of the electric guitar to travel to unexplored territories. This is the last event of the year for Full City; looking forward to seeing what they have in store for 2025. And hoping Gregg will make it back to the Grackle in Fort Worth soon.

Oak Cliff, 10.11-12.2024

I hung up some flyers for Hay Festival Forum Dallas in Tarrant County, and for my trouble, Ernesto Monteil and Javier Garcia del Moral rewarded me with a weekend pass with a plus one. My wife and I don't get to go on many dates these days; she's not a huge experimental music fan, but fortunately she's indulgent enough not to mind when my buddy Mike and I want to head up to Denton or over to Dallas to partake of the offerings at Molten Plains or The Wild Detectives (both of which have Ernesto's fingerprints all over them), and more recently at Full City Rooster. But I digress. This was a welcome opportunity for us to absorb some extraordinary cultural experiences.

In preparation for the event, we re-watched the HBO series of Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, and I started to re-read the novel -- which I first read after viewing the series. It seemed to me then that the screenwriters had taken some liberties with Nguyen's text, some of which (particularly casting Robert Downey, Jr., as all of the Caucasian characters) were to my liking, others less so. 

Arriving at TWD for Nguyen's talk, I was struck by the number of Asian people in attendance -- probably the most I'd seen anywhere since the L.A. Cambodian rock band Dengue Fever played at Lola's in Fort Worth and a bunch of Khmer kids from Haltom City came down to check them out. I talked to a couple of women from Austin, who'd driven up because "he had an event in Austin that was $300, which the Vietnamese community can't afford, but he told me he had one in Dallas that was free."

Nguyen responded to smart questions from the TWD book club, then took questions from the audience. He alluded to the writer's life of "misery and suffering," and the fact that "no one cares" (which can be liberating as well as humbling for the aspiring creative). In reference to the changes the TV writers made to The Sympathizer, he pointed out that a visual medium provides the opportunity to depict elements and aspects of the story that wouldn't be possible in print, and also to make the story "more meta," particularly in its depiction of the "film-within-a-film" The Hamlet, making the novel's critique of US propaganda more cartoonish and burlesque-like. 

You could tell Nguyen teaches from the way he was able to craft a coherent response to any question he received. He also spoke about Asian-American identity being a product of racism, and the continuity between US military adventures in East Asia (the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia) and those in Southwest Asia since 2001, as well as the continuity between the American myth of the ever expanding Western frontier and Israeli colonization and genocide in Palestine. His words about "solidarity and kinship" between East and West Asian Americans hit home particularly hard. I'll be digesting this talk for awhile yet.

Afterward, Ernesto told me Nguyen stayed for quite awhile, signing books and interacting with audience members. I queued up to get his autograph on my copy of The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, then we headed over to Texas Theatre to hear The Historic Orchestra play a live soundtrack to the 1928 Expressionist film The Man Who Laughs. The orchestra comprised Jeremy Buller (Bosque Brown), Jesse Chandler (Pneumatic Tubes, Mercury Rev), Jason Reimer (History at Our Disposal), and Clay Stinnett (Ghostcar, Hoaries). While the silent film originally came with a synchronized musical score, the four musicians provided striking counterpoint, with rock dynamics, to the grotesqueries depicted on-screen. 

Saturday we missed the Sketches of Spain lunch because we had to feed and dose our old man cat (who isn't used to both of us being out of the house for extended periods), but we made it back to Texas Theatre in time to catch the screening of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Amores perros, surely one of the best-written films I've ever watched multiple times, and an interview with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who interweaves plotlines more skilfully than any other writer of whom I'm aware. Viewing the film again, I realized a decisive moment for one of the characters that I'd previously missed (no spoilers here).

Arriaga's interview was conducted in Spanish, with live translation provided using in-ear monitors. While the translator did their best, perhaps dealing with an unfamiliar dialect, and Arriaga occasionally switched to English, it might have been more effective to employ translation software like many opera companies use for superscript titles. 

Arriaga spoke about how there are two kinds of writers -- those who begin writing with a detailed plan in mind and those who follow the story -- and said that he is of the second kind. He revealed that some plot elements in Amores perros were inspired by events in his own life, and spoke of the differences between Mexicans and Americans, which perhaps explains why I find Amores perros the most impactful of the "death trilogy" he wrote for Innaritu (the other two films in the trilogy, 21 Grams and Babel, featured big-name American stars and had less of the earlier film's gritty, documentary-like feel).

The presentation of Valeria Luiselli, Leonardo Heilblum, and Ricardo Giraldo's Echoes from the Borderlands was a bit like seeing a play in workshop. For the past five years, the three have been recording sounds (including stories from people they meet along the way) and taking photographs along the US-Mexico border, starting in California and moving through Arizona and New Mexico. They've just started working in Texas, and author Luiselli says they'll probably continue their documentary work for "five to seven years." 

When complete, Echoes from the Borderlands will be a 24-hour immersive experience (because that's how long it would take to make the journey). What we saw was a one-hour abridgement of the 12 hours of material they currently have assembled. Composer Heilblum and Giraldo have been recording both binaurally (simulating the way humans actually hear) and quadrophonically at every location. The soundscape they've created includes sounds of nature as well as human activity, with the various sounds located in a realistic sound picture. Luiselli's text included discussions of forced sterilization of indigenous women, the influence of American eugenics on Nazi Germany, and the development of the intrauterine device.

We only caught a handful of events, but the festival also included conversations with authors Douglas Stewart and Bruna Dantas Lobato, Mircea Cartarescu, and Mariana Enriquez, a performance/interview with guitarist Phil Manzanera, and discussions of race and justice in America, the global fentanyl crisis, the power of indigenous language and culture, and Texas wildfires. All in all, it amounted to a veritable SXSW of ideas, with many free events as well as ticketed ones with prices ranging from $5 to $15. We'll be paying attention the next time Hay Festival comes to Dallas, and The Wild Detectives continues bringing cultural conversation (and left-of-center music) to the area on the regular.

We finished our the night with takeout from Benito's, which wound up providing us with breakfast as well as late dinner and a reminder why I always used to stop off there on the way home from the airport upon returning from out of town.

Dallas, 10.10.2024

Firelight Trio is the rubric for Austin saxophonist Joshua Thomson (Atlas Maior) performing with Oak Cliff siblings Aaron Gonzalez (bass) and Stefan Gonzalez (drums). Tonight they were at Full City Rooster in Dallas; Saturday night, Joshua and Stefan will be in Fort Worth at the Grackle Art Gallery with Drew Phelps on bass. [ADDENDUM: I goofed. Firelife Trio is the Gonzalez sibs' band with Houston multi-reedist Danny Kamins. The first-time trio with Joshua Thomson remains unnamed. Mea culpa.]

It was the first time I'd heard the Gonzalez sibs in a small group that had worked together previously since the days when they performed with their late father Dennis in Yells At Eels, and it was immediately noticeable how much more open the forms they played were than in that earlier unit. When I mentioned this to Aaron, he said, "If [Joshua] had brought a tune, we'd have played that," but it seemed to me that with Firelight, it's the interplay between the musicians that is the focus. 

All three players have fertile musical imaginations, and it was fascinating to observe how they spontaneously communicated as the set unfolded, each one taking the lead at different times, all of them listening and responding to each other's ideas, conducting a three-way conversation that ebbed and flowed, with dynamics that shifted from whisper level to explosive intensity. The Gonzalezes have been playing together since childhood, and their communication on the stand is as telepathic as one might expect from such a lengthy relationship. Watching Aaron and Joshua, you could see them taking time to listen and find their way into each other's ideas. Stefan has always played like a force of nature, but more and more lately I'm seeing him adopt a lighter touch and leave more space. 

The three made use of every tool at their disposal: Aaron switching between arco, pizzicato, playing with the bow's stick, tapping on the body of the bass; Stefan using sticks, brushes, and beaters, a series of inverted metal objects on his floor tom, rubbing sticks together, damping and releasing a cymbal after striking it to hear different resonances, occasionally unleashing his fast right foot (evoking memories of numberless versions of Yells At Eels theme "Document for Toshinori Kondo"); Joshua switching between mouthpieces to lend his alto either a brighter or darker tone, playing a wooden flute, whistles, and a Chinese multi-reed instrument called a hulusi. At one point, the confluence of Aaron's pentatonics and Joshua's skirling Near Eastern melodies conjured a kind of desert blues. The Gonzalezes' wordless vocalizations lent the music a primal, earthy quality.

I regret I'll miss the Grackle show because I scored weekend passes for my wife and myself to the Hay Festival Forum Dallas, but I'll be back at Full City Rooster on October 19, when Sawtooth Dolls (Paul Quigg and Gregg Prickett) perform live soundtracks to silent films.

Darius Jones' "Legend of e'Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye)"

It's Darius Jones' time.

His 2023 album fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred) was a critical favorite, making several end of year best-of lists and landing him on the cover of The Wire. Recently appointed to the board of directors at NYC's Roulette Intermedium, he begins teaching at Wesleyan University -- where Tyshawn Sorey and Anthony Braxton have also instructed -- this fall. More to the point, Aum Fidelity just released Legend of e'Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye), the seventh in Jones' nine-album Man'ish Boy cycle, the eponymous first chapter of which the label released in 2009.

I played the album on the computer this morning while I was making breakfast and was struck by the cry of Jones' alto on "Another Kind of Forever" -- a sound as close to human lamentation as I'd heard since Ornette in his '60s trio days. Jones is as singularly focused a musician as one can imagine; you can hear the intelligence and intention that inform his note choices: no rote glossolalia here, even when he unleashes torrents of notes and keening multiphonics. His collaborators in this venture -- bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Gerald Cleaver -- back him to the hilt, always supportive, not obtrusive. 

[For those who tuned in late -- myself included -- the albums in the Man'ish Boy cycle are a varied lot. The first two are trios: with Cooper-Moore and Ra Kalam Bob Moses on Man'ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing), Adam Lane and Jason Nazary on Big Gurl (Smell My Dream). Book of Mae'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise) features a quartet with NYC standbys Matt Mitchell, Trevor Dunn, and Ches Smith, while The Oversoul Manual uses no instruments at all; it's performed by the acapella Elizabeth-Caroline Unit. Le bebe de Brigitte (Lost in Translation) brings back Mitchell and Smith along with the dual basses of Sean Conly and Pascal Niggenkemper, and vocalist-pianist Emilie Lesbros. Raw Demon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) is, as its title implies, a solo venture.]

The compositions that make up Legend of e'Boi are concerned with Black mental health and healing from trauma, via therapy, community, and creative expression. Indeed, the project began with a prompt from Jones' therapist to "make a song for yourself." On album opener "Affirmation Needed," Jones states the sedately swinging theme, then subdivides time in a multiplicity of ways in his circuitous solo statement. "No More My Lord" is based on a 1948 Alan Lomax field recording of a prison song of transition ("I'll never turn back no more"), the rhythm section creating a static backing -- Lightcap's arco drone and Cleaver's drum clatter -- over which Jones testifies, then achieves transcendence. 

Jones employs a lot of negative space in "We Outside" as a way of depicting shattered humanity. Later in the piece, he hits on a note and worries it to death with staccato repetition before ascending to stratospheric heights. "We Inside Now" provides a gentle, lyrical respite. The album closes with "Motherfuckin Roosevelt," a pensive theme dedicated to the uncle who gave Jones his first saxophone. Here the rhythm section gets featured, with Cleaver backing a long Lightcap pizzicato solo, before Jones' meditative solo. This is powerful, emotionally resonant music that invites deep and repeated listening.

On My Father's Centennial, 10.4.2024

Too often when we write
About someone close to us,
We wind up writing about ourselves:
What they meant to us, 
How they affected us.

No shame there:
We all live in our own dreams,
No one else's.

But I want to try and think myself
Into his head, maybe more than in the past.

We must have seemed willful to him,
And ungrateful for the opportunities we had.
He was filial to his father,
Even though there were bad memories there.
(In his decline, when he couldn't
Reliably remember who I was,
The memory of his father's creditors
Beating down the door
Was one that recurred often for him.)

What did it feel like
To be 17 years old
When your country was attacked
By the land your parents came from?
(You could see the battleships burning 
From your front porch.)

What did it feel like
To be a 20 year old first lieutenant
Interviewing survivors of a firebombing
And an atomic bombing
On behalf of the government 
That sent the bombers?
(You could speak the survivors' language
Because you grew up speaking it.)

He must have had a deep inner life
When he was a young man.
The books he had in his library
(Dostoevsky, Eliot, Thomas Mann, Camus)
Pointed to that.
(I took some of them with me
When I left home for good.)

He was musical too, in his youth:
Played violin in orchestras.
At college, he was able to 
Discuss scores with music majors.

By the time I knew him, he
Seemed inarticulate and 
Socially awkward away from
The work that defined him.

As men of his generation did,
He got on the treadmill
Of making a living
And spent his years
Responding to circumstances
He didn't create
And couldn't have foreseen.

He was comfortable there.
He knew the rules
And how to play the game.
Home was harder.

I've lived some of that now
And think I understand him better
But still, when I took my wife
(This one, not the first one)
To meet him, he told me
As we were leaving,
"You don't have to come back here
When I die."

I guess there was some guilt he carried.
I have some of that, too.
In dreams, I'm always a failed college student
Who can't find the way home.

Perhaps I regret disappointing him
In ways I never realized
(Although I'm content now
With the life I've had).

But here's the thing:
No matter what we went through
Years ago, when we were grappling
With how to relate to each other,
He's still in my head every day,
In a positive way, I think.