Saturday, March 16, 2024

Things we like: Danny Kamins, El Mantis

The pandemic lockdown brought a resurgence of solo recording surpassing even the '70s, when solo performance was a rite of passage for members of Chicago's influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In the enforced solitude Covid-19 brought, musicians were forced (or inspired) to explore the depths and dimensions of their personal musical languages. Retainer, just out on the UK cassette label Sound Holes, is one such recording from Danny Kamins. The Houston-based saxophonist runs the jazz program at Rice University and books experimental/avant-garde shows in H-Town, as well as performing solo and with various ensembles. 

The cassette medium is uniquely suited to capture the intimacy of an essentially private event. On Retainer, Kamins demonstrates his ability to keep a big column of air moving via circular breathing, embellishing his long tones and quicksilver runs with multiphonics, and covering the whole range of the baritone. His sopranino excursions sometimes recall Eric Dolphy's birdsong impressions on flute.

Back in January, Kamins was in Dallas as part of the Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band. The following night, he was in Denton with his trio El Mantis. That band teams him with Andrew Martinez on electric guitar, bass, and vocals, and Angel Garcia on drums, wooden flute, and vocals. Formed in 2021, the band's music blends psychedelic rock, free jazz, and impassioned balladry, infused with Afro-Cuban rhythm, with Garcia's operatic vocals adding dramatic flair. Houston-based CIA Records released their sophomore album, II, in February. 

Opener "El Espectaculo" is a good introduction to El Mantis's capabilities: a two-chord chant coupled with a freeblow exorcism. On "For Wendell," Kamins plays a plaintive lament on alto that his bandmates envelop in layers of swirling ambience. (In the studio, Martinez adds oud, sitar, trumpet, and sax to his array of instruments.) When bass and drums introduce a pulse, Kamins becomes more exploratory. "Pharaoh's Birds" sits astride the juncture of the vinyl sides. Starting with a Crimsonoid ostinato, it carries an air of hovering menace until it breaks down to a lysergic focus on microscopic detail. 

The trip continues on side 2, led by Martinez's F/X-laden guitar, with Kamins careening off into the stratosphere. The little march "La Muixeranga" evokes both the cinematic image of a village band and Chilean composer Sergio Ortego's "The People United Will Never Be Defeated." It sets the stage for the album's most danceable number, "Por La Noche," and its most prog-influenced, "Sin Alma."  El Mantis is a band of myriad strengths, whom I need to make sure to see next time they venture up this way.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Thoughts on the MC5's "High Time"

Talking about the MC5 with Paul Bamlett for a future broadcast of The Spark on Voodoo Radio a week after Wayne Kramer's passing got me thinking about this album, even though I haven't owned a copy in 20 years. (I have 5/8 of it on Rhino's "all the MC5 music you and your family will ever need" anthology The Big Bang, but that doesn't include three of my favorite songs -- which are so etched in my synapses that I was able to wake up the day after Wayne died and write out the lyrics to "Poison" from memory.)

After the cathartic chaos of live-recorded debut Kick Out the Jams and the tight-assed calculation of sophomore album Back in the USA, High Time was an attempt to establish the Five's stature as writers and players away from the influence of countercultural guru John Sinclair and wannabe industry player Jon Landau. They had a tough row to hoe. Their early radical political stance incurred the wrath of rock establishment figures like Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and promoter Bill Graham (not to mention the FBI and the collective law enforcement agencies of Michigan), and they'd alienated their core audience (the politicized hip community of Detroit-Ann Arbor) by breaking with Sinclair.

High Time was tremendously important to me when I was 14 (when I was also listening to the Rationals' Crewe LP and Mitch Ryder's Detroit album a lot). I filled my high school English class journal with Bangs-influenced drooling over the Five and Stooges (Creem magazine having just become available via the place where I used to buy comic books), which might have contributed to my getting to go see the school shrink that year. I miss all the funny shit from inside the High Time gatefold sleeve: the pics of the band in costume (Wayne as werewolf, Fred in his "Sonic" Smith superhero costume), Rob's cartoon of the cosmic egg hatching, the funny sayings ("Show me a man who's chasing dreams and I'll show you a man who's sleepwalking"). The album's street level political lyrics were age appropriate for me as I tried to make sense of the messed up place and time in which we lived. And I stole lots of guitar licks from Fred and Wayne, at a moment when I was trying to progress from copping solos off of Yardbirds records.

After Wayne died, I started studying some of the songs as playing forms, and thinking about the album in general.

Recorded in the UK, where the Five had gone to play the Phun City festival, album opener "Sister Anne" was the Five's "everything plus the kitchen sink" production. High Time marked the emergence of the band members as individual songwriters, with Fred penning four out of eight songs. The lyrics are naive and sometimes sexist, but heartfelt and of their time. Fred and Wayne overdubbed so many guitars that it might have contributed to the album's cloudy sound as much as the presence of producer Geoffrey Haslam, who'd let Doug Yule get away with the same excessive thing on the Velvet Underground's Loaded. The arrangement here is equally overloaded. Two verses and a bridge are followed by two choruses of dueling lead guitars, then two choruses of Rob Tyner and Fred's dueling blues harps before another bridge, a final verse, and an extended tag which ends with a Salvation Army band playing something that sounds similar to "The Pledge Song" from John Sinclair's Power Trip outtakes-and-rarities compilation. 

"Baby Won't Ya" is a rollicking rocker on which Fred used a signature Chuck Berry lick in a structure that's a far cry from a standard I-IV-V. Michael Davis plays a real Motown bass line, as if to underscore producer Jon Landau's folly in taking him off the instrument and having Wayne play bass on Back in the USA. The dissonance in the IV change comes from stacking a Gm7 (Wayne) on top of a Cm7 (Fred). Like "Sister Anne," this song is a treasure trove of overdubbed guitar licks that I plundered at will as a terrible teenage tyro. I still lean on those lessons: Fred's 16th-note facility, Wayne's double stop bends. Fred's bandmate from Sonic's Rendezvous Band, ex-Rationals front man Scott Morgan, recorded a faithful cover on the debut album by his '90s European band, the Hydromatics.

Slow ballads were never the Five's forte, but "Miss X" beats Rob's sincerity on the previous album's "Let Me Try" with Wayne's classic chord progression and salacious lyrics. This song really demands horns, a B3, and a soulful singer like Sharon Jones or Lisa Kekaula.

"Gotta Keep Moving," drummer Dennis Thompson's one solo contribution to the canon, is based on the same Bo Diddley riff as pre-Elektra B-side "I Just Don't Know," and is all relentless forward motion. The breaks -- six of them -- are two bars each, with two extra beats after the last one before going to the IV change. Fred takes the solo after the first bridge, while Wayne takes the one with the key change, after the second bridge, and plays the ascending line on the outro. This shit swings. Rob was wise to adopt the half-time delivery he uses on the released version, rather than trying to spit the words out a la Chuck Berry, the way he did on the alternate take included on ROIR's Babes in Arms and Sinclair's Human Being Lawnmower. There's a version of this on the one album by New Race, a 1981 one-off that teamed Thompson and once-and-future Stooge Ron Asheton with members of Australia's Radio Birdman, a band running on Detroit fuel and founded by Michigan expat Deniz Tek.

Rob Tyner's sci-fi rock masterpiece "Future Now" was the only MC5 song we played in Stoogeaphilia (we tried "Looking At You" but dropped it after a couple of shows; not enough song there). Like Dodge Main (Wayne's 1996 project with Deniz Tek and Scott Morgan) in their cover version, we dispensed with the slow "Oh Well, Part 2"-like section that contains my favorite Five lyrics after "Poison" (and also makes a great soundtrack for the opening shots of the wrecked Grande Ballroom in the still goddammit unreleased A True Testimonial documentary). We used to segue into "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" instead. For my two cents, the version of this on High Time is Dennis Thompson's finest recorded moment.

The aforementioned "Poison" was Wayne's first great song (later revived on The Hard Stuff in 1995), and as close as Michael Davis came to singing a lead vocal; dig the way he breaks down the line "But I ripped my pants / Doing some dance / That I learned in France / And they think there ain't nothing to know." The lyrics tell the story of the Five; the Rolling Stone reviewer scoffing at the line "Nature and peace are my shelter and companion" told you all you needed to know about the cynical state of the counterculture in 1971. Wayne also got in some great licks, including one of his signature descending single-string lines, over the recitative, and the Spanish tinge at the end is especially nice.

The album's centerpiece is "Over and Over," with Fred's bemused Everyman contemplating life in the USA at the cleavage of the decades. Dodge Main omitted the intro from their cover; they were wise to omit the last chorus (after verse 3), which makes the song drag on too long without adding anything to it. On the High Time version, Fred's ascending solo before the reprised intro and verse 3 is perfection. 

Fred's "Skunk (Sonicly Speaking)" is another kitchen sink production, opening with a percussion jam featuring seemingly everyone in Detroit (notably Bob Seger and some Rationals) and closing with a jazz coda featuring Dr. Charles Moore, with whom Wayne would make a jazz album in the 21st century. I dig Fred's feedback chords at the very end. In between, it's all forward motion which I understand could be quite compelling live. I think "Over and Over" would have made a better album closer. No matter. For my two cents, High Time is the best MC5 album. If you dig the rock and haven't heard it, you owe it to yourself.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet's "Four Guitars Live"

Always late to the party, I've been aware of San Francisco guitar sage Bill Orcutt for over a decade, but I didn't take time to investigate his work until viewing the Tiny Desk Concert of his Guitar Quartet with Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parrish last spring -- which means I missed his solo stand at Rubber Gloves back in the summer of 2022 (my biggest missed concert regret of the current decade). My earliest exposure came in the form of acoustic versions of songs like "White Christmas," "Over the Rainbow," and "The Star Spangled Banner," played on a battered 4-string acoustic (in standard tuning, but missing the A and D strings, the low E string sometimes tuned up to G). This caused me to inaccurately peg Orcutt as a rustic eccentric in the mold of John Fahey, which he isn't -- not exactly. I also noted that he releases a lot of music on his Palilalia Records label, in small pressings which tend to sell out quickly and become difficult to obtain. (These days, I'm prone to buy any Bill Orcutt record I see.)

The music the Orcutt Guitar Quartet played for NPR was from his 2022 release Music for Four Guitars, on which Orcutt overdubs himself playing 14 short pieces on a 4-string Telecaster through a Fender amp. The music is rhythmically insistent and replete with spiky counterpoint, repurposing the syntax of blues-based rock guitar -- the drone-based modality, the hammer-ons and pull-offs -- into something entirely other, an engaging sound that, in its hypnotic repetition and metallic clangor, can be quite magnificent. Parish -- a folk-based player who also performs in the prog-punk band Ahleuchatistas -- transcribed the music from the album. Once he, Eisenberg, and Mendoza had familiarized themselves with the score (which required emulating Orcutt's guitar setup, and the occasional use of a capo), the four took it on the road last year, and Four Guitars Live was recorded on tour in Europe last November (a couple of weeks before I saw Eisenberg at Molten Plains Fest in Denton!). 

It's great to hear the interlocking parts going down in real time, and as Orcutt points out in one of his brief onstage raps, the concert is an hour, where the album was half that length, and they make up the difference by improvising. There are solo spots for all the players and a duet for Mendoza and Parish, the better to appreciate Orcutt's burbling bursts of melody, Eisenberg's classical fluidity and percussive right hand, Mendoza's blues grit and whammy bar fluency, and Parish's Celtic roots and penchant for atonality. The energy exchange with the audience is palpable in the music, and by the time they tear into "Barely driving" (an arrangement of "Barely Visible" and "Glimpsed While Driving" from Four Guitars) at the top of side D, you can feel them entering a rarefied realm of group interaction. Then Orcutt pulls out all the stops for the solo encore -- recorded at a different concert than the rest of the program, because you know he wanted us to have the best. 

Music for Four Guitars is an essential masterpiece, but I'm going to keep Four Guitars Live on the shelf with all my favorite electric guitar noises: Trout Mask Replica, Marquee Moon, my favorite live Richard Thompson and Funkadelic rides. Buy it for your pleasure, miss it at your peril.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Dan Weiss's "Even Odds"

A lot of records I dig these days are primarily documents of a live event (whether said event took place in a studio or in front of an audience), but when I stumble on a record that involves an innovative compositional or conceptual approach, or a unique presentation, I often see producer David Breskin's name in the credits -- most recently on albums by Ches Smith, Brandon Seabrook, and Patricia Brennan. Breskin co-produced 2022's Dedication, the fourth album by drummer-composer Dan Weiss's trio with bassist Thomas Morgan and pianist Jacob Sacks. On Weiss's latest album, Even Odds, out on Cygnus (the label run by Weiss and guitarist Miles Okazaki) on March 29, the format is similar, albeit with different players, but the compositional stakes are higher.

Weiss brought a half dozen fully composed pieces to the sessions. The opening "It Is What It Is" gallops and skitters with a tension that belies its apathetic title (a mantra for many during the pandemic years); it's followed by a somber memorial for "The Children of Uvalde." "Ititrefen" pays homage to Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti," while "Max Roach" is based on the bebop pioneer's masterwork on Charlie Parker's "Klactoveesedstene." "Fathers and Daughters" is a tender evocation of love for Weiss's daughter Vivienne (for whom his publishing company is named). Equally versed in bebop and classical Indian tabla, Weiss pays homage to other forebears in the improvised "Bu" (inspired by an idea of Art Blakey's) and "Nusrat" (based on a Qawwali rhythm and dedicated to Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan).

Other pieces were based on drum patterns which Weiss recorded solo, then gave to his trio mates -- Grammy nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow Miguel Zenon on saxophone and versatile pianist Matt Mitchell -- to improvise over. The results are presented in juxtaposed fashion, with three of the drum sketches preceding their trio realizations, while the delicate sax-piano interplay of "Horizontal Lifestyle" is heard before the full trio "Vertical Lifestyle" from which it came. The solo "Recover the Mindset" features Weiss at his most Tony Williams-esque, which Zenon and Mitchell transform into the tumbling, turbulent "M and M." The Elvin Jones swagger of "Too Many Outs" sparked the impressionistic "Runner-Runner," while the repetitive groove "Bribes and Ultimatums" inspired the minimalist "Royal Beatings." The track "Conversing with Stillness" begins with the full trio, muting Weiss's drums midway to end with a spacious meditation. Weiss's trust in his collaborators' creative impulses is amply rewarded by the depth of expression in their responses.

Add Dan Weiss to the short list of outstanding composing drummers, alongside the young Tony Williams, DeJohnette, Motian, and Sorey, in addition to his musical ancestors here acknowledged. And one can't help wonder what a Weiss-Breskin co-production on Weiss's large ensemble would sound like.

Saturday, March 02, 2024

FTW, 3.1.2024

Winding up a great week of live music at my favorite hometown spot, just up the street from mi casa. Jonathan Horne and Joshua Thomson were performing music from their new cassette release Clandestine Flower -- recorded in an industrial tank in Lockhart -- in public for the first time. They couldn't have picked a better venue than the Grackle Art Gallery, a 1920s house with a pier and beam foundation and hardwood floors that make it very acoustically live.

While the previous night at Oak Cliff's The Wild Detectives with Stefan Gonzalez on drums had been a free jazz exorcism, this was a more contemplative occasion, although still relying on improvisation and achieving peaks of intensity. On alto, Detroit native Thomson brought a broad expressive palate and eclectic influences to the city of Ornette and Julius Hemphill. The themes underlying the music on Clandestine Flower have to do with connections between people, compassion, and the ongoing alienation many feel as a result of the pandemic. In his introduction to "Bombarded," Thomson said the piece had been composed on the day Israel invaded Gaza -- in 2021, a reminder that today's catastrophes have recent precursors.

Horne demonstrated that an electric guitarist can project powerfully without relying on excessive loudness; the volume of his Fender Princeton was well modulated to the needs of the room, and provided great clarity and definition, even when using multiple effects and extended techniques. Horne was able to dig in more on his new Fender Bass VI than he had the previous night, and the concluding piece had him playing a mutant bluegrass breakdown on his signature Mosrite. He'll be back in the area on March 27, augmenting Stefan Gonzalez's new band Trio Glossia at Rubber Gloves.

Opening set featured Grackle favorite Darrin Kobetich along with his RageOut Arkestra bandmate Eddie Dunlap and his Yucca Men co-conspirator Mark Hyde, digging deep into their Near Eastern bag. After starting the set on cumbus, Kobetich had to step out briefly to address some tuning issues with his oud, leaving Hyde to carry the melodic load on his homemade electric baglama. The volume differential between the baglama and oud (the latter played through a cardiod mic) made it hard to hear Kobetich for much of the set. Dunlap is the most subtle and tasteful of percussionists on hand drums, and he applied some of those techniques to his trap set. I would love to hear this ensemble completely unplugged, with Eddie on hand drums. The musicians involved are all smart, sharp players who aren't reliant on electronics for their impact, and the Grackle's room acoustics would support it.

Friday, March 01, 2024

Oak Cliff, 2.29.2024

Leap Night at The Wild Detectives. After last night at Rubber Gloves, I wasn't sure I'd be up for another night out, but how often do I get a chance to hear Jonathan Horne play guitar two nights in a row? The realization that there's more "weird music" I dig on the boards in North Texas than at any time since Caravan of Dreams (whose heyday I missed due to military service and having small kids) folded the tent is not something I take for granted. And as my wife says, "It's okay to come to the surface."

On this night, Jonathan was performing as part of the recently recorded trio Atlas Maior: Palindrome with saxophonist Joshua Thomson and drummer Stefan Gonzalez. Thomson's work with Atlas Maior -- an expandable ensemble built around himself and oudist Josh Peters -- draws heavily on Arabic, African, and Brazilian influences. Gonzalez (Trio Glossia) has played with Horne in the transcontinental jazz/rock/hip-hop juggernaut the Young Mothers, as well as less formal aggregations like the Texas Butt Biters. Their set at TWD was a free jazz exorcism the likes of which I haven't seen since Charles Moffett's sons walked into the Recovery Room on Lemmon Avenue during the band's break on a hot summer night in 1978 and blew the roof off the place with a blast of '60s style energy music.

Speaking of energy, Horne -- clad in characteristically colorful mismatched prints -- played with restless animation, stomping on pedals with both feet, switching between his new Fender Bass VI and his trusty Mosrite, attacking his strings with vigor and churning up a whirlwind of sound. His obvious exemplar is Sonny Sharrock, but Horne's advanced ideas and use of extended techniques -- bowing the guitar, hammering on strings with his pick hand, playing a kalimba against the strings -- coupled with his arsenal of effects, takes him into a realm that's entirely other. He played ostinatos of rapid fire runs and when Thomson cued him to play unaccompanied, Horne careened off into Albert Ayler territory. When Thomson responded with his baritone sax (rather than his usual alto), Horne grabbed the Bass VI.

Thomson had a biting tone on alto, and when he bent his knees and leaned into the horn, he conjured the spirit of the testifying saxophonists from Holiness churches. When he picked up an Andean flute, clad as he was in a poncho, he reminded me of the trio of similarly attired flutists I once heard playing in NYC's Times Square. Gonzalez kept up a steady commentary, backhanding the edges of his cymbals, responding to phrases the tonal instruments played, alternately steering and following the conversation.

Tonight, Horne and Thomson will be at the Grackle Art Gallery in Fort Worth, performing music from their recently released Clandestine Flower cassette.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Denton, 2.28.2024

A night out at the "Latex Mittens," as Sarah Ruth Alexander dubbed Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. This month's edition (number XX, for whom who keeps a record) of the Molten Plains concert series opened with Venezuelan expat electroacoustic duo Monte Espina -- that's Miguel Espinel on percussion, small instruments, and electronics, and Sarah's Molten Plains co-curator Ernesto Montiel on guitar -- in the Rubber Room. The duo was releasing their new cassette, alquimia criolla, and the room was full by the time they started. Listening to the way Espinel's instruments (which on this occasion included the Rubber Room's upright piano along with his usual compliment of percussion implements, violin bow, recorder, and harmonica) responded to his electronic treatments, the phrase that popped into my mind was "tintinnabulation under the volcano" -- shimmering and tinkling over an undertow of dark ambience. When a passing freight train interjected its sounds, they fit right in with what the musicians were doing.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the Houston-based duo of Aisen Caro Chacin and Adam Zaretsky. She's an academic; leads the UT medical prototyping lab and teaches pathology in the medical school. He's a "Wet Lab Art Practitioner." When we walked into the main room, they were seated at a table in front of the stage. He had a laptop, she had a number of implements including what looked like a coffee pot, and some mysterious liquid boiling in a pan on a hotplate. There was back projected video, and Zaretsky was mixing music on his laptop. 

At a certain point, Chacin started dropping cylindrical objects into the "coffee pot," which turned out to be a blender. It being Wednesday night, it occurred to me that maybe she was going to pick the lotto numbers. She pressed a button and grinding noises emanated from the blender, then shards of ice came flying out the top -- ice cubes! (She was wearing eye protection.) Then Zaretsky stood, stretched, and walked over to the blender. He started pouring liquids and powders in and covered the top. Chacin pressed a button and blended the mixture. This process was repeated, then Zaretsky poured the mixture through a strainer into a canister. It began to separate into layers. When I asked him later, he said the mixture included coca leaves, whiskey, and baking soda -- "Kind of like the things you'd mix up when you were a kid." (I did; didn't you?) It was a total Dada event. Afterwards, Monte Espina's Espinel was heard to exclaim, "That was real experimental music!" And Chacin's post mortem take? "It finally worked!" A set full of surprises, and big fun to watch.

Bill Nace is a guitarist from Philadelphia who's collaborated with the likes of Kim Gordon, Susan Alcorn, and Chris Corsano, among others. On this occasion, he played a taishogoto -- a "mutant two-string instrument" he found in a curio shop in L.A.'s Japantown. Manipulated with a keyboard, the instrument was remarkably resonant...and LOUD. Over an underlying drone, Nace played melodic arpeggios that created a hypnotic atmosphere -- like a one man Acid Mothers Temple. When he paused mid-set to lift the instrument and briefly hold it in front of the amplifier, it was notable that the sustaining harmonic feedback never oscillated. Then he returned to the keyboard to bring the set to a satisfying conclusion. Later, Nace said he also has a similar five-stringed instrument but it lacks the taishogato's resonance. While he said that lately his improvs have been getting into melodic areas that are "outside my comfort zone," he finds that having taken a break from guitar for awhile, he's ready to return to his primary instrument. A performance of riveting intensity. 

Last set was a trio of vocalists -- Sarah Jay, Michael Briggs, and Aaron Gonzalez. Briggs, who currently runs Civil Audio and performs with Lorelei K, is a figure who's been central to the Denton music underground for a couple of decades through his involvement in Gutterth Production, Violitionist Sessions, and other entities. One of my first experiences of free improv in North Texas was seeing him perform in Vexed U.K. with Sarah Ruth. In this setting, he electronically manipulated his voice using his laptop while Jay used an array of pedals and Gonzalez extemporized straight through a microphone with no added effects. It was kind of a quintessential Denton set, and a fitting close to a night of intriguing music. Sound tech extraordinaire Aubrey Seaton made sure everyone sounded good.

Molten Plains continues March 10 with a special Sunday evening with peripatetic improvisers Blue Lake (Texas via Copenhagen), Hal Lambert and Mitchell Mobley (Baton Rouge), and Kelby Clark (NOLA), plus a cello duo of Dentonites Kourtney Newton and Brianne Sargent. Then on March 27, Molten Plains XXI will feature Copenhagen-based international quartet Tactical Maybe, Chicagoan Daniel Wyche, Stefan Gonzalez's new band Trio Glossia (joined by guest guitarist Jonathan Horne), and Bitches Set Traps, the feminist improv trio of Sarah Ruth Alexander, Elizabeth McNutt, and Kourtney Newton. All at Latex Mittens, of course.

ADDENDUM: I stand corrected twice. Somehow I had Adam Zaretsky's name as "Duretsky." And Miguel Espinel is responsible for the electronic treatments in Monte Espina. Mea culpa.