Denton/Dallas, 6.28.2025

Rolled out of the rack late after a good STC practice last night. Regrettably, the video on my phone was shot in slo-mo, so I couldn't upload it to YouTube, but I was able to view it at regular speed on my phone and have to say we played a pretty tight version of "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White." Cam improved us the way a good drummer always does a band. Not that we were planning on it, but this might actually be giggable by the fall, if there's anyplace that would have us. I always say the Stooge band was the most fun I ever had, but this is giving it a run for its money, plus I can remember every time we've played.

My buddy Mike came by and picked me up for the drive up to Denton and KUZU-FM's Revolution Record Convention, which included Spinning Bricks: Record Stores As Cultural Hubs, a lively and spirited panel discussion moderated by Sonido Tumbarrancho producer Ernesto Montiel, with record people Daniel Salas (of Fort Worth's Doc's), Mike West (of Denton's Recycled), Karla Grisham (of Chicago's Dusty Groove), and Kate Siamro (of Oak Cliff's Spinster). The passion for music and community these folks displayed reminded me why slinging platters was the only one of the numerous ways I've made a buck that I would go back to. Kudos to Ernesto for putting them together and asking the questions that sparked their discussion.

In the evening, my wife and I headed to Dallas' The Cedars neighborhood, home of Full City Rooster, recently featured on Good Morning America, and my favorite listening spot in Dallas along with The Wild Detectives (where Ernesto Montiel books the music). The occasion was the recording of a live album by the Monks of Saturnalia, guitarist-composer Gregg Prickett's long-lived Mingus and Ayler-influenced vehicle. 

I first heard Gregg in the last edition of Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society back in 2012, and I've since dug his work with Unconscious Collective and They Say the Wind Made Them Crazy, among others, but the Monks are his oldest aggregation -- a going concern for 25 years now. It takes a lot to maintain a band playing original creative music; a touring NYC muso recently remarked that the reason everyone in that city does improv is that no one can afford to rehearse without grant money, and the same is true here in Texas (with fewer foundation grants) as the cost of living spirals. As tenorman Steve Brown, the large-toned mainstay of the Monks' reed section, told me, "making art always requires a sacrifice."

Besides Steve, bassist Drew Phelps (perhaps Gregg's ideal collaborator), and drummer Alan Green (an understated but hard-swinging marvel who always serves the music well), the current Monks lineup includes newcomer Aden Sears on baritone sax, a SoCal native and recent UNT grad who was visibly delighted to be playing this music with these people, and, with Steve, summoned the spirits of Pepper Adams and Booker Ervin in the '50s Mingus band as they squared off for muscular section work and fiery glossolalia. The palpable joy in this section lifted the music, and watching the nonverbals between the two reedmen as they riffed behind other soloists or faced off for simultaneous expressive flights was a visual highlight.

The music itself was like a sixth presence on the stage, and it moved and danced like a living thing: the winds its breath, the rhythm section its pulse, and Prickett's guitar -- whether playing pianistic chords, splintering single note solos, or using tasteful distortion to add another textural element -- was its voice. It's going to be a gas to be able to enjoy recordings of longtime favorites like the Ayler-inspired "He Walked Into the River" (which I first heard at Shannon Jackson's last-ever concert at the Kessler), the Mingus homage "(Not Because I Have To, But Just for the Hell of It) I Pledge Allegiance," and "Hika," dedicated to Gregg's beloved pet wolf (one of three he raised, now all departed). And a new tune -- "So new it doesn't even have a chart," shades of Mingus at Town Hall in '63 -- sounded as bold and assured as the repertory tunes. But you really have to be in the room to appreciate this music as the players bring it to life. The third element is you.

FW/Denton/Arlington, 6.24-25, 2025

My birthday week. We like to stretch these things out and it just so happens there are a bunch of shows this week, along with KUZU.FM's Revolution Record Convention Saturday, where my friend Karla Grisham of Chicago's Dusty Groove will be appearing on a record store panel (moderated by Sonido Tumbarrancho host Ernesto Montiel) at 12:30pm.

Started the week out woodshedding with guitarist Greg Johnson of Savanna Sons, the house band at Tammy Gomez's Second Sunday Spoken Word, at which I'll be performing on July 13. (It's at Arts Fifth Avenue from 6-8pm.) I've known Greg for about 20 years now, but never got to hear him play until a couple of weeks ago, and we had a nice rehearsal with Sons bassist Walter Williams at the Grackle Art Gallery last week. Simpatico cats, I think this is going to be fun.

Wednesday was the latest Joan of Bark Presents, our favorite monthly experimental music series at Denton's Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios, so my buddy Mike and I headed up there, with a stop at Recycled Books and Records so he could trade some stuff and I could drop off Indivisible zines (two titles: updated Project 2025 and You and Deep in the Heart of TX, a "choose your own adventure" story about the abortion ban). 

Lately, Joan of Bark's been getting more eclectic, and this month's edition started off with the mother and daughter duo of Donna and Grae Gonzalez, who offered a charming line in song and story, encompassing goofy humor, high lonesome harmony, girl group pop, and sultry jazz. The electronic duo Gentle Doom and IMCAT (Aaron Brent and Will Frenkel) made some staticky connections, then the Chelsey Danielle fronted quartet The Side Chicks improvised Denton-centric stream-of-consciousness rock songcraft, highlighted by Lauren Upshaw (The Hope Trust)'s deft guitar lines. Next Joan of Bark is July 16, the night before the Good Trouble Lives On day of action.

Thursday, Mike and I made our way to downtown Arlington so I could deliver more zines and we could catch my favorite band of the moment, Trio Glossia, at Growl Records. Alex Atchley booked the show, and played direct support with his trio Mirage Music Club -- which evolved from his solo project Naxat, in which form he first pinned my ears back at the Tommy Atkins benefit at the Kessler Theatre before it reopened. His guitarist Scotty Warren lit up the strings with metalloid fusion chops, while drummer Brandon Young propelled things nicely from behind his tiny kit.

Alex's pal Jack O'Hara opened the show with his new duo Threshold of Devotion, in which Jack plays an extremely physical guitar to backing tracks of bass and fake drums that sounded incredibly full and powerful, and Denton-based composer and electronic musician Louise Fristensky plays seductive chanteuse. The Nick Cave-y vibe made me imagine that I was in a Wim Wenders film about Arlington. Then I went outside to talk politics with folks and catch up with Michael Chamy (Zanzibar Snails), who filled me in on his latest endeavors in renewable energy and providing affordable housing in rural areas. Always a forward looking cat.

Trio Glossia was returning from a brief hiatus, during which Joshua Canate toured with a rock band and Stefan Gonzalez and Matthew Frerck traveled to Austin to perform with Chicago saxophone eminence Ken Vandermark twice -- in a quintet with guitarist Jonathan F. Horne and ex-Sons of Hercules drummer Kory Cook, and in a trio playing works by Chicagoan Fred Anderson and Stefan's dad, the late Dennis Gonzalez. Vandermark was suitably impressed. "When I met with the other musicians it was clear that they had all worked on the material ahead of time," he wrote in his blog. "In addition, the skill they all possessed was more than technical, it was interpretive -- they didn’t just play the music properly, they brought it to life." Stefan says the unit will perform again.

Since their last Trio Glossia show, both Canate and Frerck have been composing furiously, and their set comprised all new material with the exception of Frerck's "To Walk the Night," which has coalesced into a really strong feature for his guitar and the interplay of Gonzalez's vibraphone and Canate's drums. Opening tune, Canate's "Gnats from Past Meats," featured its composer roaring on tenor over a fusionistic tempest of sound from Frerck on a short-scale acoustic guitar-styled bass and Gonzalez kicking the traps like I remember hearing Alphonse Mouzon with Larry Coryell's Eleventh House. The net effect was kind of like hearing Sam Rivers sitting in with Lifetime. Another new Frerck original, "Vanishing World," was lyrical and orchestral. The three musicians have grown as an improvising unit, in each other's pockets even while extemporizing like demons. They'll next appear in September at Austin's Sonic Transmissions Festival.

After I finish typing this, I'll go wash the dishes and attempt to practice singing before heading out to Haltom City to rehearse with my STC pals Tony Medio (Dragworms, Bull Nettle Jacket) and Cameron Long (Merkin, L. Ron Hummer), the electric analog to my Stashdauber/Folknik acoustic solo covers project. Then tomorrow evening, after RevCon, my wife and I will head to Full City Rooster in Dallas to hear my other favorite band, Monks of Saturnalia, record a live album. It's a great life if you don't weaken.

Autohype

Three Layer Cake's "Sounds the Color of Grounds"

Not writing many record reviews these days, but coming on the heels of Mike Watt's appearance at The Wild Detectives with MSSV a couple of months back, this stunner of a side deserves a little virtual ink. Even 40 years after his Minutemen shipmate's untimely demise, Watt remains "d. boon's bassplayer," and that heritage is writ large in this collection of remotely recorded tracks that Watt and guitarist-banjoist Brandon Seabrook laid down in response to Mike Pride's drum tracks for the second outing by their pandemic-era project Three Layer Cake. It's out June 27 on Stephen Buono's Otherly Love label.

For Sounds the Color of Grounds, Watt laid down his parts on d. boon's birthday (April 1), and composed lyrics in rough sonnet form (ten syllables, 14 lines, three quatrains and a couplet) for his friend, iconic visual artist Raymond Pettibon. The spoken word approach suits Watt's ragged-but-right vocal style, and the flow of his verse recalls his collaboration with poet Dan McGuire in Unknown Instructors. His yeoman bass work shows why he's the model for the plethora of punk-jazz-funksters currently treading the boards. 

As for his bandmates, Pride plays a lot of tuned percussion as well as drums, giving the trio a broad palette of textures and colors. Seabrook's "heavy metal banjo" chops lead the charge out of the gate on the explosive rustic swing of "Deliverdance." "The Hasta Cloth" is harmolodic space rock, while the mutant bebop of "Occluded, Ostracized, and Onanistic" features Pride's mallets to good advantage. "Tchotchkes" abounds with Eastern European echoes, while "Lickspittle Spatter" highlights Seabrook's bowed banjo. Seabrook's last two outings as leader had him helming an octet (2023's Brutalovechamp) and overdubbing solo (last year's Object of Unknown Function). This latest from Three Layer Cake demonstrates the efficacy of the trio as improvising unit.

Dallas, 6.6.2025

No live shots this time. I put a password on my phone and now I'm locked out. Apparently this kind of Android won't let you power it down without entering the password, so now the young person at the phone store says I need to let it run out of power, then come back with my Google password and they can make it lose its mind. Ah, these machines that are smarter than I. 

So I had a very 20th century experience driving to New Media Contemporary in Dallas' Exposition Park to take in a triptych of women working in various forms of experimental music, in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros. Got lost, but was able to improvise my way (heh) to the venue before start time. (Street team and zine distribution action has helped me familiarize myself a little better with Big D's daunting highways and byways.)

Sarah Ruth Alexander's solo music combines pure vocal tone, operatic training, multi-instrumental flexibility, goofy humor, a literary bent (Didion and McMurtry are favorites) and a feminist perspective with an aesthetic rooted in a place (the Panhandle farm where she grew up) to create something resonant and expressive. She opened with an audience vocal exercise, in which we were invited to scream (men first, then women, then the whole audience), then hum together. A way for us to bond and ground ourselves. 

After verbally riffing on Bartok and bar talk, she played a new piece, "Bird Talk," in which she imitated bird sounds on slide whistle and recorder. Another new composition, accompanied on harmonium, expressed sadness at the conversion of beloved elders in her home town to Trump supporters ("although they're not racists" -- ironic?). She apologized for "getting political," but as my friend Tammy Melody Gomez says, all art is political, including watercolors of bluebonnets and barns.

Sarah's most striking new piece was "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," inspired by hearing high school girls singing the National Anthem at the rodeo. Over a bed of roiling, dissonant electronics, Sarah sang the Anthem (using a screenshot of lyrics "because I'm not that big of a fan") in the manner of a variety of "belty" models, including (briefly) Whitney Houston, then extemporized. She played a new work in progress on New Media Contemporary's baby grand piano, drone-y and modal but with some dissonance, and finished with a nice surprise: "Dust Bowl" from her 2015 Words on the Wind cassette (a fave at mi casa and still Bandcamp-available). I enjoy her work in a lot of contexts, but always dig her solo music the most.

Hexpartner is the performing rubric for Grace Sydney Pham, a virtuoso on violin, voice, and electronics who's incorporated harp into her instrumental array the past two years. She uses samples of her voice, keyed to what she plays on her electronically enhanced instrument, to create layers of swirling, through-composed harmonic wonderment and dark beauty. Her projected video complemented her soundscapes, but I think it was paused at a certain point in her performance and never resumed.

Brooklyn-based polymath (musician, visual artist, architect) Sandy Ewen has advanced the language of prepared guitar farther than anyone else. Although best known among Texas rockaroll types for her work with the group Weird Weeds, she's led a long-lived, Houston-based, all-female large improvising ensemble, and collaborated with improv heavyweights like Damon Smith, Weasel Walter, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Kaiser, Jaap Blonk, and Lisa Cameron. She's currently in the middle of a 23-date solo tour that also included multiple dates in Houston, Austin, and Denton. I was unable to attend her show at Rubber Gloves the previous night, so I was happy to be able to catch this one.

Sandy's now running her seasoned Ibanez semi-hollow (strung with a plain D string, the better to withstand her abrasive attack) through a Milkman stereo amp with two 15-inch speakers -- good for capturing the full sonic range of what she's doing -- and her trusty Ernie Ball pan pedal (contrary to ign'ant journos, the only electronic effect she uses). She employs an array of objects -- metal rods, plates, and the railroad spike that provided the name for her record with Roscoe Mitchell (2021's A Railroad Spike Forms the Voice), bells, a stainless steel scrubbing pad, a selection of electroluminescent wires, sidewalk chalk -- and works like a sculptor to create densely textured soundscapes. 

It's fascinating to watch her in action from up close (easily done in New Media Contemporary's intimate, live-sounding room) and hear the sounds of freight trains, shifting tectonic plates, temple bells, and radio static emerge from her highly tactile process. (She says she might do a video shot from above to allow interested listeners to see how it's done.) While Sandy has a number of good solo recordings available (my pick is the vinyl You Win from 2020), you need to be in the room to get the full depth and dimension of her sound, and experience the head-spinning sensation her stereo panning creates, in tandem with her back-projected visuals. An authentic innovator and a true original. Kudos to Sarah Ruth and New Media Contemporary impresario James Talambas for facilitating an enjoyable and edifying evening.