tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61120514479624172552024-03-13T06:41:37.994-07:00This is why I see live musicAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-4058384886782089762014-02-25T12:50:00.000-08:002014-02-25T12:55:17.084-08:00Speed mattersMusic is presence itself. Playing or listening, each note exists in its own bit of time, and until a note is appreciated and felt, it can't go on to the next note. But link the notes together, and presence may or may not survive the transitions.<br />
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I learned a little more about that from <a href="http://www.joelovano.com/" target="_blank">Joe Lovano</a>'s sheets of sound the other night at <a href="http://www.sfjazz.org/events/season2/spring-quartet" target="_blank">SFJazz</a>, where Lovano played tenor with <a href="http://www.jackdejohnette.com/" target="_blank">Jack DeJohnette's Spring Quartet</a>. "Sheets of sound" was journalist Ira Gitler's term for John Coltrane's cascading eruptions of hundreds of blistery notes. Coltrane's wails started as harmonic inventions -- overlaying three different chord progressions in a single, dense arpeggio flurry -- and were reinforced by his belief that speed would enhance his quest for God.<br />
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For many years I didn't get it. Coltrane sounded cold to me, analytic and cerebral. Where was the heart and soul? Virtuosity for the sake of human accomplishment? I dropped him down the same hole I dug for Pink Floyd. Engineered music. Music for me was an escape from super-rationality, the hell I lived in. Music was a place to feel overt emotion, right?<br />
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But I noticed something as Lovano reprised Coltrane's effects. I imagined for once that I was inside the soloist, playing fast and using the heavily rehearsed structures of chords, harmonics, scales, and arpeggios as vehicles for freedom. By playing so much so fast, I felt, Lovano was forced to surrender to the moment completely. He never had breathing space to take control himself. He had to trust that God would fill his horn with breath and move his fingers with music. Surrender.<br />
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I can't find any video of the Spring Quartet. Too bad, because the soul resonance that emerged from Lovano and DeJohnette was palpable all night. I'm sure DeJohnette was playing figures at times, but I didn't once notice them. It was as if he was in every note with curiosity and energetic creativity that seemed to float above his drum kit. The two kids in the group, Esperanza Spalding on bass and Leo Genovese on piano, comped and supported the older men as they soared. It was a kick to see Spalding in awe of the music; the one time I saw her fronting her own group it seemed like so much ego and not much else.<br />
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Here's Coltrane flying through A Love Supreme:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-17479818626489983772014-01-02T17:10:00.000-08:002014-01-02T17:10:32.074-08:00On the shoulders of giantsWhen genius arises, it seems to eclipse its own past. Beethoven lays down the mature musical structures of his time and superimposes a seemingly indeterminate stream of consciousness. Duke Ellington opens the locked-in unison of the swing band to soloists who are as personal and idiosyncratic as a coyote howl cutting through the winds sweeping the pines. The New Grass Revival lifts the tight-ass virtuosity of bluegrass into frantic hymns of psychedelic joy.<br />
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In his fourth year traveling the chitlin' circuit with R&B acts -- the Isleys, Little Richard, Curtis Knight -- Jimi Hendrix would not have been mistaken for a musical genius. Here's a serviceable blues of his from 1965.<br />
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A little more than a year later he turned rock and roll upside down with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, bending time, adding feedback and other noises unheard in prior notes, and like the geniuses before him stretching forms and boundaries. Here he is in 1970:</div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">One approach to genius says it requires honesty, character and courage. I heard this model from one of my kids, who was studying Wittgenstein. There's the tripartite soul: mind (honesty), body (character), and heart (courage). Or truth (honesty), joy (character), and love (courage).</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">I'm struck by how much we demand innovation. Genius seems to require standing on the shoulders of others, and adding something new. Picasso was an ordinary juvenile painter, the Beatles an everyday rave-up band in Germany, and Hendrix a typical journeyman r&b guy. Until. While they were all still in their 20s when they broke free, all had spent years intensively studying the traditions of their day. Freedom seems to come to the young more easily than the middle-aged. Mozart, Ornette Coleman, Monk, Dizzy and Bird -- all barely out of their teens when each of them first elaborated their new sound. But Coltrane was 30 before he found his sheets-of-sound way. </span></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">And why did they break free and others don't? They had honesty. Beatles vs. Stones? Easy. The Beatles were extraordinarily honest, and the Stones posed. John and Paul had a nose for bullshit, and George and Ringo were humble as the day is long. Character? Hendrix was a man's man, releasing a libidinous creativity from his body whenever he played. Courage? Picasso, the Beatles and Hendrix were inveterate explorers, in their prime refusing to retreat to what was easy for them. </span></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">Who will stand on the shoulders of past geniuses next? It's so hard to predict. In writing, arranging and playing, Mick Ronson was the equal of his two great partners, David Bowie and Ian Hunter. But when he was freed to play his own music, like with the New York Yaquis, the sound reduced to sentimentality. Similarly, the extraordinary fiddler Jason Crosby, who plays frequently with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh and others in the jamband scene, is locked in a less-revelatory sweetness when left to his own devices. Ronson was always worth seeing, and I catch Crosby frequently. But while they can break down what others have to say, they have more trouble finding a personal truth that transmits as genius. Here's Jason Crosby playing Bertha with Lesh and friends. What you can't tell from one song is how deeply Crosby tunes into the aesthetic and band he is playing with. He plays his solos from the inside of the song:</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">I have my hopes still for Derek Trucks. Burdened by the Allman Brothers legacy -- nephew of an original Allman and inheritor of the Duane Allman slide guitar seat -- most of his music is exceptionally well played Southern rock, jazz, r&b and blues. But he also has a more-contemplative (and to my way of thinking, more honest) sound that is unusual and inspiring. Listen to him blend his slide guitar with traditional Indian music:</span></div>
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So far, Trucks is weighed down by two traditional mentors -- the Allman Brothers and Ali Akbar Khan. He plays rock too close to the Allman Brothers for me, and eastern music too close to classical Indian for me. But one day, when he chooses to be himself, he may find a way to synthesize the two. Like how Carlos Santana blended Cuban, Mexican and psychedelic music. Or how Duane and Gregg mixed jazz, hard rock and blues to create Southern jamband music in the first place. </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-89720844117448533542013-12-21T10:59:00.000-08:002013-12-21T11:01:44.995-08:00To nature, not nationRock and roll blossomed in the 1960s at the same time that nationalism and imperialism were under relentless attack. The flag was burned, mom and apple pie were mocked, and students around the world demanded a new order. Who says Johnny should go to war? Who says the tradition of Jim Crow is OK? Who's protecting an individual conscience?<br />
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The counterculture helped spawn the great recording artists of the day, and vice versa. The message in the lyrics was not "I'm proud to be an American." Anything but. Hendrix deconstructed the violence in the <i>Star Spangled Banner</i>. World War II had exposed the connection between nationalism and genocide. Vietnam exposed the connection between nationalism and the similar bloodiness of legal, mechanized war.<br />
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But by 1984, record buyers embraced "Born in the USA" with delight and hardly a passing nod to its ironic message. Reagan was a pale enemy compared to Nixon. What gives? What gave?<br />
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This troubling swing of culture -- nationalism is bad when things are going bad, good when things are going good -- seems adept only at showing what is already obvious. The ambivalent voices that expose multiple views of the truth are drowned out as if they're pussyfooting.<br />
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For the last couple of years, the music of the long-defunct band The Band has enjoyed a subtle crescendo of popularity that inevitably will raise Robbie Robertson to the same reverence shown to Bill Monroe, or Woody Guthrie, or Louis Armstrong. They're game-changers in the identification of an American music. What are The Band's successors called? Americana. I recently spent a lovely night at Phil Lesh's place, <a href="http://terrapincrossroads.net/" target="_blank">Terrapin Crossroads</a>, listening to his sons and friends cover song after song by The Band. I love these songs. I love the fact that so many bands nowadays play <i>The Weight</i> as an encore. I tell my friends proudly that in my Woodstock, New York days I was an acquaintance of The Band's brilliant singer and bass player Rick Danko.<br />
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Here's a great cover of The Weight. Watch as they rehearse it how the energy and confidence builds. At first only Mavis Staples is fully comfortable (it's been a standard part of her set for years) but by the end they're all tuned into the song's joy.<br />
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But I'm worried a little about my own love for this nostalgic music. These are songs written by a Canadian that honor and embellish the rural frontier of America as a romantic and unique time. No doubt <i>The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down</i> has one of the great anti-war lyrics of all time: "You take what you need/ And you leave the rest/ But they should never/ Have taken the very best." At the same time, it's a song of nostalgia for a time of war. It reverently conjures Robert E. Lee, the great American symbol of honoring the enemy, despite the fact that this elegant Southerner sat atop a hierarchy designed to wage a despicably bloody defense of the horrorshow of slavery.<br />
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If you're nationalist, it's easy to be uplifted by <i>God Bless America</i>. If you're anti-nationalist, the counterweight is <i>This Land is Your Land</i>. Woody Guthrie wrote his anthem -- This land is <i>your</i> land/ This land is <i>my</i> land -- in anger at the message that Kate Smith was sending. (Guthrie's original lyrics twisted Irving Berlin's words to say "God blessed America <i>for me</i>." It's a hymn to nature, not nation.)<br />
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There's a direct lineage from Woody Guthrie through Bob Dylan to Robbie Robertson. But isn't there as much danger from nostalgia -- drawing more from the jaunty, white-only prosperity of Stephen Foster than the soulful weariness of spirituals -- as there is from flag-cloaked, fascistic modern country songs of nationalism?<br />
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One thing that isn't nationalistic about Robbie Robertson's music is his rhythmic and melodic invention. The Band releases my body in happiness with buoyant rhythms and touches my heart with poignant, intimate tunes. The music is personal. Robertson connects directly with individuals. It's music that fits into a ballroom. I like the Stones and Who as much as anybody. But they have a legacy to answer for. They introduced arena rock -- anthemic songs that support thousands of fist-pumping disaffected youth in a collective, shared energy -- a pattern of music that coopts the same species-trumps-individual message as the military spectacles organized by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7feldyduyg" target="_blank">Hitler </a> [selection from Triumph of the Will] or the self-congratulatory cheers of a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBdxtnkwV88" target="_blank">Mary Kay convention</a>. It's why I keep my distance from U2 and The Killers. They bond their live audience into a gran faloon, Kurt Vonnegut's term for a group that unites as if for common cause, but whose association is actually quite purposeless.<br />
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My distrust of nationalism isn't exactly political. Voices like Bakunin and Kropotkin, Proudhon and Ron Paul seem whistlers in the wind. They recognize the repression of the individual that is an unwelcome byproduct of <i>any</i> institution. But they ignore the paradox that any effective response to institutional repression, from the inside or outside, requires the formation of a counter-institution and an identity as an anti-nationalist or anti-institutionalist.<br />
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Instead I find myself touched by the words of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tt6K2KHddI" target="_blank">J. Krishnamurti</a> [selection from U.N. speech], the Indian-born occultist who embodied the Jesus who angrily overturned the money-lenders' tables. Distrust all identification with institutions, all patriotism. Honor every capacity for personal freedom as a path to reuniting with the bigger consciousness that is available. And I translate that as finding music that allows me to be intimate with a personal joy, love and truth that might be universal but doesn't need anyone except myself in the room to be energized.<br />
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Can't resist including The Last Waltz version of <i>The Weight</i>. There's Mavis again igniting the heart, and Rick emoting his way through the "Crazy Chester" stanza. Rick was a goofy guy, and he might as well have been named Crazy Chester.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-34178641843184760862013-03-04T11:34:00.002-08:002013-03-04T11:34:42.965-08:00Bewitched, Bewildered and BotheredOnce in a blue moon a band appears to me as something so completely new that everything I heard before seems pale. The mid-career Beatles. The Tony Williams/Wayne Shorter Miles Davis sextet. As the world's body of music progresses through time, it synthesizes and either adds a new form or recombines old forms in newly revealing ways. If a brand new form shows up, it's a revelatory addition -- the halving of the eighth note's speed to form bebop, Miles Davis' modal form, or his fusion form, Buddy Holly's unadulterated rock beat, Cuban beat, the acceptance of chaos in free jazz. Those are exciting shifts, but they're additive and I feel no impulse to diminish what came before. They exist side by side with past forms: swing, blues, gospel, whatever.<br />
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So what is it when I hear something that sounds like it is not just adding, but reorganizing things so profoundly that for a moment at least other bands that I've appreciated suddenly seem pale?<br />
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Last night at <a href="http://sfjazz.org/" target="_blank">SFJazz</a> singer/pianist <a href="http://patriciabarber.com/" target="_blank">Patricia Barber</a> introduced me to the erotic as a fundamental source of creativity, like tantra, more completely than I would have thought possible. At times it was as if she was fucking the piano. Her relationship with her harem of young male accompanists was gobbling up eros and trapping it in an intensely physical music.<br />
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This was big eros, encompassing creativity as a singular delight, opening one unexpected universe after another. I'm used to loving small eros -- sexuality -- in music. It's no surprise that she had a Nat Adderley composition in her repertoire. Cannonball and Nat's group was a funky, sexual enterprise. Get up and swing your hips.<br />
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Here's Cannonball Adderley's quintet playing Sack O' Woe:<br />
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And Hendrix. In last night's encore, guitarist John Kregor was hearing the raw sexual explosion of Hendrix. Sex and music. So what could be pale about Cannonball Adderly or Jimi Hendrix? How did Barber impale them?<br />
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While powerful, I think there's a one-dimensionality in Cannonball's or Jimi's sexuality. Cannonball's <i>is</i> the sexuality of dancing, and he knows it, and he's intent on getting that response from the audience. Come on guys and gals! Let's dance. Jimi's <i>is</i> the sexuality of raw, meaty copulation, and he's showing off his manliness. (I get the feeling that Hendrix never said "Let's just cuddle tonight.")<br />
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What Barber was doing was far more complex and personal, and hardly needed an audience. S he wasn't showing sex. She was being eros. Big eros. Creativity and bursting universes. The original Greek Eros wasn't a cherubic cupid, but the formidable God who created order out of what had always been chaos. He created. Last night there was sexuality, no doubt. It was so strong that her harem couldn't return her constant, amazed gaze at them while they played. Each of them gave her what she wanted, in spades, but eyes downcast or sideways it was as if they were hanging on for dear life in fear of being overwhelmed. What she was advancing -- her mouth was wide open at times -- was too much for them to grok. She squawked and snorted, and lost herself in her intellect, and emerged in glee and surprise. It was like she was letting go into a stream of creative moments ordering a new universe one after another, uncontrolled by ego.<br />
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How did she do it? Her own talents weren't the point. Her voice and piano playing were well-tuned and certainly capable of virtuosity, but it was clear that she had let go of much sense of being in service to virtuosity. What she seemed to care about was using musical forms to embody all music, as a form of creativity, as a way to open her soul spontaneously, moment by moment.<br />
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I think it's a generational thing. From at least the Forties, leaders in the jazz idiom have been intently aware of music as a path to enlightenment. They mean to open space to bigger consciousness. But they were held down, I think, by the demands of virtuosity. Coltrane famously thought that virtuosity was the central key to unlock pure creativity. Being brilliant at an instrument required analytic, mind-based study. A jazz musician's first entry into professionalism typically came through virtuosity. They found heart and body only after they had first thoroughly explored mind. Ear training. Scales. Double-tonguing. There's an empty-soul feeling to an immature virtuoso, probably because he or she doesn't have much access yet to heart or body as a source for playing. Some virtuosos never get past the technical. But the point is that mind is overwhelmingly the entry point for virtuosic music.<br />
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Barber has a different memory of the beginnings of her fascination with music. Her father was a sax player for Glenn Miller. She remembers touching the horn as he practiced, to feel the vibration move through her. So body might have already been there. And she grew up in a generation when all women of a certain income practice yoga and Oprah promotes <a href="http://eckharttolle.com/" target="_blank">Eckhart Tolle</a>. The integration of body, heart and mind as a practice toward enlightenment is everyday, not esoteric.<br />
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Isn't that what Barber was engaged in last night?<br />
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Here with different accompanists she does a Beatle tune:<br />
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So what felt new was her personalization of the body, heart and mind in music. This is the opposite of new age music, which while steeped in the rhetoric of enlightenment often feels like it's holding a mistaken belief that the transcendent is a place that primarily soothes the soul. I like being soothed, but not so much by music. Her band took me to a place that felt her body, heart and mind impress my soul with creative energy, delight, glee, spontaneity, and individual, human consciousness. There was nothing nondual about it, nothing transcendent about it. It was like being with the root of the creative fire.<br />
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One kind of sad thing was that the audience last night wasn't the generation that most might welcome it. It was nearly all a bunch of greyhairs like me. But the experience was much closer to jamband music than post-Miles jazz. With a tweak here or there, this band would blow away all the other bands at High Sierra. This is music to dance to.<br />
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Here they do Black Magic Woman:<br />
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And let's not leave out Jimi humping his guitar:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-91406511468476830412013-02-11T11:48:00.004-08:002013-02-11T11:54:42.227-08:00Just a minuteIn fiction writing, a scene typically lasts a half page to a page and a half -- in reading time, 30 to 90 seconds. Even if the setting remains for longer than that, it's broken into sub-scenes -- each a complete figure of conflict, action, and resolution -- that fit the 30-to-90 boundary.<br />
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The bugaboo that arises if the scene extends too long most often is defined as the sagging middle. The action isn't active enough. It sags into redundancies or loiters aimlessly.<br />
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Music's the same. A pop song might have a verse, a bridge, a chorus, a verse, a middle eight, a verse and a chorus. Six or seven movements in two to four minutes. Each has to stand on its own, within the rise-and-fall arc of the overall song.<br />
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So how do jam bands or jazz combos pull off 12-minute excursions that prolong each verse, chorus, or bridge? Not well usually. Often, story-telling sags into vague noodling. But over the weekend, I saw two examples of tight groups adhering to the rules even while expanding well past the four-minute mark.<br />
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On Sunday night at <a href="http://sfjazz.org/" target="_blank">SFJazz</a>, bassist <a href="http://daveholland.com/" target="_blank">Dave Holland</a> led his Prism fusion quartet through six compositions that averaged 12 minutes. I don't know, but I would guess they followed typical 32-bar segmenting, or in some cases doubled 12-bar blues breaks. Think one second per bar, so the idea is to chop things into 32-second or 24-second segments, which fits the low end of the fiction-scene scheme. The first complication that arises in extended pieces is that a 32-bar verse might be repeated twice or three times in a row. Now you're at the high end of a fiction scene, where the sagging middle starts to be prevalent. And there's a further complication in the rules of fusion established forty-plus years ago by Miles Davis: chord changes don't push the story every one to four bars, but can be delayed for eight bars, or 16, or the chord can remain for all 32.<br />
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So how did these long, minimalist compositions hold my interest like a 3-minute pop song? They did. I think a key was guitarist <a href="http://kevineubanks.com/" target="_blank">Kevin Eubanks</a>' 15-year apprenticeship as the house band leader for the Tonight Show. From 1995 to 2010 Eubanks interrupted a jazz career that had established him as a master of serious jazz with lightning chops and deep composition credits. Twelve-minute songs. But for five nights a week, he zinged out four- or eight- or at most 16-bar flurries of recognizable melodies and flashy pyrotechnics. His improvisational work with Prism was the melodic centerpiece last night, and much of his storytelling urgency seemed to be supported by his capacity for finding rock-star riffs to punctuate his extended stories with mini-stories -- which part was the counterpoint? -- that boosted the tension and helped it rise and fall.<br />
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Prism's encore was a relatively brisk seven minutes, but to my mind it might have been two minutes, it felt so economical and simply resolved.<br />
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In the clip below, notice at the beginning how Eubanks duets with Holland as if his guitar is a bass, glissing and letting plucked strings extend. Then in the last third, Eubanks adds the world of Jimmy Page and riff blues. Prism was in a fiery, celebratory mood last night, and the piece sounded less abstract than this version. But maybe that was just the intensity of being there live.<br />
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The night before, I danced at <a href="http://brickandmortarmusic.com/" target="_blank">Brick and Mortar</a> to the rock jam band <a href="http://newmonsoon.com/" target="_blank">New Monsoon</a>. Like Eubanks, lead guitarist Jeff Miller can be pyrotechnical and dazzling. Like Eubanks, he keeps his ear to great riff rock that grounds and accentuates his storytelling. And like Eubanks, he finds himself telling a new story every 30 to 90 seconds.<br />
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New Monsoon surfaced 15 years ago as eclectics who added tablas, raga harmonics, a didgeridoo, timbales, and Cuban rhythms to the Grateful Dead ancestry that all jam bands descend from. Saturday night, they kept it stripped down to the rock and roll that they were steeped in growing up. They closed their first set with a nearly note-by-note reconstruction of Hendrix's <i>Fire</i>.<br />
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Hearing Eubanks hearken Led Zeppelin, it made me think that it was no accident that Hendrix exploded onto the scene in London. The simple, thudding, hormonal riffs in British Blues -- Yardbirds, Bluesbreakers, Stones, Who, Cream, and Hendrix, too -- were their own thing. Charlie Parker reached into his youth and curved himself around <i>I Got Rhythm</i>. When Dave Holland was a kid in England, British Blues was on the radio. No wonder it returns to ground his new music. And it wasn't hard to find the Neil Young and Led Zeppelin and Allman Brothers of their youth in New Monsoon's driving, riff-loving soliloquies.<br />
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Here's New Monsoon a few years back, when raga themes served the same grounding purpose.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-70881494679501438012013-01-19T19:10:00.002-08:002013-01-19T19:26:41.776-08:00What if Jerry Garcia had been a Beatle?Stu Allen, who leads <a href="http://www.jambase.com/Artists/91282/Stu-Allen-and-Mars-Hotel" target="_blank">Mars Hotel</a>, the best Grateful Dead cover band around, switched gears and with Deadophile <a href="http://www.trufun.com/" target="_blank">David Gans</a> played a night of Beatle songs. While it was a rank failure in terms of providing an adequate platform for Dead-style ecstatic dancing -- the only point I can see to a GD cover band -- it's never unsatisfying to spend time in new passages through the doors opened by the Beatles.<br />
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It so happens that I've resumed a project my kids and I faltered on a couple of years ago: moving CD by CD through a book titled <a href="http://www.1000recordings.com/" target="_blank"><i>1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die</i></a>. Its polymath author, Tom Moon, assists in the exploration of virtually all genres, from blues to classical to Afrobeat to folk to free jazz, gospel, bluegrass, and obscurities like Moorish Music From Mauritania and chants of Benedictine monks. (Abba to ZZ Top doesn't quite give a sense of that breadth.) I'm still early in the Bs, which seem to go on forever. Bach took a week: the Branderburg Concertos, Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, the Well-Tempered Clavier (at least it was only Book 1), and Mass in B Minor.<br />
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Serendipitously (or to GD types, synchronistically) I hit the Beatles the very day that Stu and Gans were to play. So I listened to A Hard Day's Night, Rubber Soul, Revolver and (even though it's not in the book) Magical Mystery Tour before heading to the dance. Sgt. Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road are still to come. And then the Beau Brummels, Sidney Bechet, and hours and hours of Beethoven. You get the picture.<br />
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The Beatles. Why was it so hard to expand their songbook into Grateful Dead jamming? For the very same reason that the Beatles quit playing live. By Revolver, the studio had become their primary instrument. It's oft-told that Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul and produced Pet Sounds and that the Beatles heard Pet Sounds and produced Sgt. Pepper. You can do that? Wow. It wasn't just that they were trying to top each other; they were instructing each other on the possibilities that a studio could bring to life. And they were similarly turned on by the huge catalog of voices and instruments and sounds -- traditional, electronic, found, distorted, clarified -- that could be brought in to perfect a moment of music. By Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles had stopped hearing and producing lines of music except in the voices that carried the melodies. The rest was a thought-out deconstruction of music into atoms of sound, assembled in collages that fooled the ear into thinking it was hearing movement and lines.<br />
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Here's the Beatles playing their last live concert (except the rooftop Let It Be performance), at Candlestick Park in 1966.<br />
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I'm astonished that Brian Wilson has made a second career of reproducing his studio-bound treasure boxes in live performances, first Pet Sounds and later the legendarily unfinished Smile. I suppose he craves the live experience, and wants to fit his greatest works into a concert hall setting. And I suppose there's something different about getting all those lovely sounds together inside the immediacy and risk of live music. But still, it seems weird. How could it possibly match the controlled brilliance of the originals?<br />
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Listening to Beatle albums is a lifelong project. They're the James Joyces of recorded music. My daughter and I once listened to Magical Mystery Tour three or four times through, just to hear and excitedly point out to each other all the changes that Ringo made within a single song. No chorus is played the same twice. He's adding and subtracting -- instruments, phrasings, volumes. And I've read that John and Paul told him exactly what to play. There was little improvisation going on at Abbey Road. Such minutiae. Such perfection.<br />
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The Dead were as opposite from that as you can imagine. They improvised all the time, and quit playing songs like St. Stephen that weren't open enough to jamming. They didn't have lovely voices that could carry the melody and free the instruments to do other things, like assemble pointillist symphonies. And they would always choose the groove over the leaping interval.<br />
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It's not that the Beatles aren't danceable. I can't remember a commons room dance in college that didn't kick into higher gear with <i>Helter Skelter</i> or <i>Back in the U.S.S.R.</i> or <i>Revolution</i>. The Beatles teethed on a punkish rave-up sound, and they could play with all the muscle in the world. And I'm sure you can jam to Beatle music; I've seen it done effectively for short periods of time. Even by them. They could play blues and they could play repetitively when they thought it was right.<br />
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But their ethos was a kind of perfectionism that is rarely tackled by anyone anywhere in any art form. The worldliness, and unflinching focus, attention and belief in themselves that they exhibited in Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's, and came back to briefly at the end for Abbey Road, is unmatched. I tend to think that it wasn't Yoko who broke up the Beatles. It was the sheer impossibility of sustaining that energy. They were exhausted at what, 28 years old?<br />
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Like I said, it's always worth it to hear Beatle songs, no matter the interpretation. At the worst they'll remind you that the originals are worth rehearing. At the best they'll remind you that the Beatles changed the world, all for the good, and they'll take you back to when it happened.<br />
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No video, but if you want to hear the GD/Beatle mashup of Stu and Gans et.al., go to the link below, find Hey Jude and starting at about 4:45 for a few moments you hear what Jerry might have sounded like if he had sat in with the Fabs.<br />
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<a href="http://archive.org/details/sft2013-01-17" target="_blank">Hey Jude by Strawberry Field Trip live at Ashkenaz</a><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-56319237314739394072013-01-12T10:49:00.000-08:002013-01-12T11:25:09.323-08:00Being in relationshipIn the opening bars of <i>La Mer</i> the other night at the <a href="http://sfsymphony.org/" target="_blank">San Francisco Symphony</a> my mind pushed the alarm button. Uh-oh, it said, someone lagged in an entrance. I heard a stutter where my mind sought a bang. My memory pulled up a recent disastrous performance by another orchestra that was marked by poorly shared entrances that stranded the sound in a murky swamp. But it turned out that the flaw at the beginning of the Debussy was a gift. The fear mechanism in my mind was now sharply attuned to the SFS's entrances and attacks. And I was rewarded with a visceral appreciation for conductor Michael Tilson Thomas's genius.<br />
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For me, it all goes back to rock and roll drumming. Most rock drummers lag the beat. It's a horrible thing. The stick or pedal hits the skin an instant too late. It's the plodding downfall of many bands. I wish it would stop. Having grown up mostly on rock and roll, my mind tunes to it. I was talking about it last night to a 100-year-old friend of mine who spent her working life as a concert cellist. She found it curious and even amusing that I focused so much on the precision of attack that it could quickly ruin a concert for me. It surely has reached the point of exaggerated importance to me, distorting my view as profoundly as the survival stories I invented as a kid continue to distort my relationships with people fifty years later.<br />
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But focusing on a distortion, letting it come to full consciousness and mind, can be a beautiful portal to things of truth, joy, bliss, consciousness and real presence. It's in knowing the suffering that we can come into contact with grace. And that's not just true in the ego conflicts of relationship. It can be true in watching live music.<br />
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Sitting above and behind the orchestra, looking down at the musicians as they went through the human motions of their job, watching Tilson Thomas emote and communicate with them, they became to me individuals in relationship to each other. Suddenly I heard myself marveling at how the percussionists pounded in absolute unison with the strings and brass and harps and woodwinds, and the beauty of that precision became a thing in itself. It was transformed into absolute beauty itself. There was nothing mechanical about the precision. These were individual human beings, with hearts and histories, and they weren't leaving those behind as they joined together. I divide the way of music sometimes into the Ellington band and the Basie band. The Ellington band is a bunch of individual geniuses who mainly solo and then meet up every once in a while to exuberantly expand on the solo. The Basie band is a swinging machine, the parts relatively unimportant to the overall groove, the feeling of unison. Tilson Thomas's orchestra was Ellington and Basie, joined.<br />
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<i>La Mer</i> is a standard for the SFS, and to a lesser orchestra could be called a warhorse. But the other night, the musicians' vast experience with the notes paid off. I couldn't find a video of the SFS playing it. The best I could find is a Berlin Philharmonic performance, which doesn't exhibit the precision I saw the other night. Still, you can get the picture of what it might be like for the musicians to reach the climax of the last movement and find themselves in a single loving embrace.<br />
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Why do drummers so often lag the beat? Strings don't. Woodwinds don't. Brass do sometimes, especially trumpets. I started to think it has to do with the kinetics of percussion and brass. It's worst in bombastic passages where for percussionists the attack doesn't start in the wrist but in the forearm. Pretend you're hitting a bass drum. The forearm tenses and releases before the wrist. The mind might feel it has finished the job with the release of tension in the forearm. Likewise with brass. Maybe the mind is finished when the tongue hits the palate, before the air carrying the note has made its way through the tubes and out the bell. I don't know. Just a guess.<br />
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My favorite drummers, many of them in jazz, seem to anticipate the beat all the time, and yet the band doesn't speed up. Jazz soloists notoriously listen to the bass to keep time rather than the drums. Maybe that's how they get around the fact that the drummer is playing just a little ahead of them. Here's a clip of four terrific jazz drummers accompanying a tap solo. Notice how they're always a little ahead of her, and yet she keeps perfect time. She knows drumming. They're playing <i>Cute</i> by Neal Hefti, which was one of my mom's favorite songs.<br />
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And here's my favorite drum piece of all time. At the end of the Bangladesh concert in 1971, everyone got on stage for the encore. Usually an all-star encore is a musical wasteland, muddy, meandering, and devoid of authentic energy and meaning. But Jim Keltner singlehandedly drives a momentous groove that stays ahead of the band and forces the music into ecstasy. Ringo's helping out. The video doesn't do it justice. On the soundtrack it's a juggernaut.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-3745447339712129372012-11-01T15:25:00.000-07:002012-11-01T15:25:44.176-07:00Knockin' on Heaven's DoorWhen I imagine Grateful Dead music I see its core being drafted by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. At heart it seems to be rooted in their biased search -- for sublime joy, informed by open curiosity. Joy and curiosity are essential aspects of the soul, and they have their own colors and fragrances, and it's hard to imagine anyone better than Garcia and Hunter at tapping and expressing them.<br />
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I imagine Bob Dylan's music coming from a different essential aspect -- strength -- and not just drawing on creative energy to come into being, but actually manifesting as creativity itself. Raw strength seems to tumble from Dylan's songs with a relentless ferocity. Think of the songs Hurricane, Desolation Row, and Ballad of a Thin Man.<br />
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Most Wednesday nights I can be found at <a href="http://www.ashkenaz.com/" target="_blank">Ashkenaz</a> in Berkeley for <i><a href="http://www.jambase.com/Artists/49452/Stu-Allen" target="_blank">Stu Allen and Mars Hotel</a></i>, a Dead/Jerry cover band with a rotating cast. Mostly I'm there for dancing, and mostly I get moved by joy and curiosity. That's to be expected. Most of the songs are Grateful Dead songs. The dancing around me is loopy, or crescendoing, or trippy.<br />
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Stu's in another band called <i><a href="https://www.facebook.com/GhostsofElectricitySF" target="_blank">Ghosts of Electricity</a></i>. It's not really another band. Most of its musicians take turns in <i>Mars Hotel</i>. But it might as well be another band. Instead of playing Grateful Dead music, they only play Bob Dylan songs. The arrangements may be similar. The approach may be similar. But there's no denying the ferocity of Dylan. In anybody's hands, a Dylan song returns the band and audience to the very source of creativity. Last night at <a href="http://www.sweetwatermusichall.com/" target="_blank">Sweetwater Music Hall</a>, the dancing around me was energetic, relentless, and powerful.<br />
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I make sure to see Dylan himself live every couple of years. Usually his voice is impossible for me to decipher, and he reworks his lyrics into new melodic settings, so the songs themselves can be unrecognizable. But I go anyway. I'm in Stratford-on-Avon at the Globe Theatre watching Shakespeare onstage, or in Greece listening to Homer recite, or in Vienna with Mozart holding the baton. Like those others, Dylan has direct access to the fierce, red creative pulse -- the eros side of love, the leap into the unknowing -- and his songs remind me that courage and strength have a deep source and are available.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-20038000171056931572012-10-20T14:04:00.000-07:002012-10-20T14:04:10.859-07:00Giving creditWhat is it that gives extra credit to artists who make it seem easy? Maria Callas didn't just have an unusually clear voice, or better timbre, or enough range. She had all those. But the ineffable distinction between her brilliance and another's not-quite-there seems to my ear to be associated with ease. The technical difficulty of opera singing amplifies the importance of seeming at ease or in the flow, doesn't it? Ease isn't the same as fluidity or the sense of being well-practiced or comfortable with the material. It looks like it incorporates those things, but it expresses a feeling of being at one or in direct contact with the muse, the feeling that the artist is being moved rather than that the artist is actively moving air.<br />
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I'm not a musician, and I'm especially not a singer. My 10,000 hours of practice are with writing. The Malcolm Gladwell-distributed theory is that fluidity in any vocation starts appearing at around 10,000 hours. When I started to write without thinking about it, I became ashamed of my writing. Sounds perverse, right? I could find nothing to take pride in. Before, while I was learning the tools and ridding myself of the first round of cliches, I took great pride in my writing, especially as it seemed to improve. But one day, I was done. Writing just happened. I started to think of it as a parlor trick. It always worked, and seldom was far from me. When a dear friend expressed admiration for something I had written, and I responded that it was my parlor trick, she became alarmed. To her, "parlor trick" meant insincerity. I think she was wise to be alarmed, and now I think I was wrong to have used the term. At the time, I truly didn't believe I had done anything, or written anything particularly eloquent. I didn't feel I had done anything much at all. Taking credit for it seemed crazy. Insincere even.<br />
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With work and discipline, anyone meets his or her capacity to leap onto the back of the winged muse and take off. I imagine it feels the same for just about everyone who experiences it. No? A venture capitalist feels it when she starts the dance. An opera singer when she hears the overture. An athlete when the gun goes off. A plumber when he reaches for a wrench.<br />
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Last night watching Bellini's <i><a href="http://sfopera.com/" target="_blank">The Capulets and the Montagues</a></i>, I couldn't help think about Maria Callas singing Norma. Her seemingly effortless "Casta diva," the aria she opens with, floats into the divine while staying painfully human and worldly. She is meeting the muse on both its terms and hers. There were moments last night like that. And that was enough. It didn't need to be sustained to be welcomed and to last and last. Here's another performance by the mezzo-soprano I enjoyed last night, Joyce DiDonato, playing Romeo, and a different Juliet:<br />
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So what is it to meet the muse and stop taking credit for mastery, and at the same time feel the sincerity of something flowing through me that is not necessarily just me? It's as if by calling it a parlor trick I wasn't giving credit to the mix of history, discipline, and conscious acceptance of the divine that allows the flow to emerge as a timeless aria, or just a note to a friend.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-82315168875205359172012-10-19T11:35:00.001-07:002012-10-19T11:48:10.521-07:00Heaven is withinMy mind is good at sensing fault, honing in on the cause, labeling it, and gleefully passing judgment. We're miraculous self-improvement machines, every one of our 100 trillion cells checking its own health all the time, and passing along any warning signs so repair cells can scurry in and get things fixed.<br />
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Last night during live music I noticed myself withdrawing into judgment two big times. The first was during Moby-Dick, a modern work performed by the <a href="http://sfopera.com/" target="_blank">San Francisco Opera</a>. As I sensed fault -- uh, where are the melodies, and why does everything feel like a transition, and it's pretty warm up here in the balcony, and these lyrics are pushing me too fast -- I battled to stay in touch with what was actually going on on stage. I lost the battle and left. I'll probably never listen to Moby-Dick again, and so I'll go to my death ignorant about whether it was me -- the Flipper burger I had, the two drinks at Absinthe, the heat, my own restlessness -- or the choice of singers, or the hall, or the composition itself. I say I didn't like it, but in truth I didn't give it a chance. I just reacted negatively and got myself out of there. That's how my ego works on me. It's as if culture is analogous to my cellular structure, and needs fear and caution to motivate repair and strength.<br />
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Because the second time I noticed my withdrawal into judgment was more compartmentalized and definable, I was able to overcome it and stay with the music. After I walked out on the opera, I headed to Phil Lesh's joint in San Rafael, <a href="http://terrapincrossroads.net/" target="_blank">Terrapin Crossroads</a>. He was playing a bluegrass set with his sons and other friends. Just the idea of that touches me. Bluegrass players start as living room musicians, and so there's a family tradition: the Carter Family, its spinoff Cashes, the Whites, Osbornes, the other Whites called the Kentucky Colonels, the Stanley Brothers, the Monroe brothers, the Scruggs family, Red Allen and his sons Neal and Harley, the Dillards, and on and on, and in Marin, the Leshes.<br />
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What I walked into couldn't have felt more surprising and lovely. The lovely part was the song being played well, <i>Early Morning Rain</i>. I remember talking up <a href="http://gordonlightfoot.com/" target="_blank">Gordon Lightfoot</a> to my friends in the early Seventies, and getting reluctance. Isn't he too sappy? Too Old Folk? Too commercial? Folk, bluegrass, country and rock were crossing over each other, and sometimes it was jarring in unexpected ways. The mind likes what it likes, and doesn't want to let in the new without being sure. I've seen a lot of bluegrass bands do <i>Early Morning Rain</i>, and Lightfoot himself, and the Leshes' version was pure commitment to a place and a feel and a harmony. The surprise was Phil's own contribution. His bass tone was characteristically subtle, staying low, resonant and cleared of bright spots so that it could unobtrusively take care of the bottom. But my mind was telling me to watch out. It sensed something different going on, and it went to work to label it either danger or delight. What I then heard was that Phil was playing the melody, the absolute lead line of the song, without changing his instrument's posture as a humble contrapuntal contributor. He was alone out there, and the band was following his melody. I wondered how often I had heard a bass sing an aria like a soprano, and it's probably not often. Sure, in a solo. But this was the very structure of the song itself being led by the bass. It was as if he took the song's introspection and amplified it by moving it into an instrument that by nature is largely introspective.<br />
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Here's a clip from another Lesh and sons show:<br />
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So what did I get judgmental about? It didn't happen during <i>Early Morning Rain</i>. It was later, when guitarist Ross James started playing the hell out of his Telecaster. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong, or at least seemed wrong to my ego threat machine. It wasn't that he was overplaying or had picked the wrong genre to fit, or anything about his technique, which seemed flawless enough and inspired enough. It was the licks themselves, which sounded like straight country licks adjusted to allow a knowing wink that this was only barely updated stuff that every Nashville sideman has to learn. It was when I heard "barely updated" cross my mind that I could label what seemed to be in need of repair. He wasn't playing these licks to learn them and challenge them. He was playing them to show that he knew them. It was like he was mugging. That's OK at times, but not right then. The rest of the band seemed to be deep into the difficulty of exploration in the tightass speed and complex harmonic requirements of bluegrass. He seemed outside that context, as if he was playing to the audience -- the one that I was part of, and the one that was on stage with him -- while the others were playing for themselves and each other and the constant search for divine sound.<br />
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I don't want to be on Ross James' case. It's one sample. Maybe he was just in his cups last night, enjoying his extroversion. Maybe he was clowning around because it was the right time for him to clown around. That, too is a problem with the whole judgment apparatus. It sure likes to universalize and make things absolute and sealed shut. If I had been in a clowning mood, Ross James might have delighted my self-centered ego.<br />
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Here's a funny thing I noticed one day about Phil Lesh. In the Skull and Roses version of <i>Bertha</i>, through the whole song Phil is mostly playing the riff from the song <i>Judy in Disguise</i>. He shows how a simple riff can be worked and reworked and explored in the context of a single song, and still humbly support a band and create a feel. It's introspective work, even if the riff is danceably extro.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-49474164239234767942012-10-17T12:43:00.001-07:002012-10-17T12:52:36.771-07:00Three centers, one beingI've been wondering what it means to say that the three components of music -- rhythm, harmony, melody -- conform to the three centers of self -- body, heart, mind. Do we enter into a relationship with a piece of music that is an analogue to a relationship with another person?<br />
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Everyone gets it that tribal rhythms attach to sexuality, and move the body before they move the mind or heart. Exuberance -- the body's tension and release captured and known -- is the drill, and ecstasy the desire. The other night I saw a wonderfully exuberant Afrobeat band, <a href="http://lagosroots.com/" target="_blank">Lagos Roots</a>. Here's a video:<br />
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I'm clumsy these days, and while I like to move my body to the rhythms of live music -- always have -- I don't relate it to the dance of two people, the call and response of dancing <i>with</i> someone. In fact, when that is asked of me, I'm clumsier than usual. Confused. I was talking to a stranger at the Lagos Roots show at the <a href="http://www.thenewparish.com/" target="_blank">New Parish</a> and because we were naturally moving to the beat it suddenly became a dance. I was embarrassed and didn't know what to do when she became even more embarrassed. Now the physicality, the exuberance, was being transposed into a call and response, and it stopped being simple, selfless and contained. Drama appeared. How peculiar. But no question: there's a link between the body, musical rhythms, and the sexual component of relationships.<br />
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Melody for me is heard almost totally by the mind. I start with Paul McCartney and those big, leaping intervals that are sweet, friendly and stripped of ambivalence. These are unfiltered thoughts being transmitted directly from one mind to another. While Paul is pretty good at attaching labels to the thoughts -- Michelle is a person, Yesterday a time -- the melody exists as its own idea, created by a mind for other minds. There's something absolutely brilliant about a beautiful melody. When we sing along, it's out of memory and head and a kind of truth that the mind wishes it had all the time, undistorted and unified.<br />
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Whatever a melody is, it is unmistakable. In college I was a Charlie Chaplin fan, and owned several versions of the song <i>Smile</i> that he wrote for his movie Modern Times. I ran the school Film Society, and that meant I was the projectionist, so I got to preview the movie and show it twice and then show it to myself or friends again later. That melody became part of me for a while. Nat King Cole's version is the gold standard. Imagine my surprise a couple of years later in grad school in New York, going to the Met for Puccini and hearing the melody of <i>Smile</i> -- all of it except the last down note -- tucked into the middle of an opera. I'm pretty sure it was Madama Butterfly, but it could have been La Boheme. We remember melody well, because it can be more easily stored in mind than rhythm or harmony. It's from there, after all.<br />
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The melody is the bright parts of a relationship, or the low points. It carries the drama with it, and the stories and memories and ideas that accompany friendship or love.<br />
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Which leaves us with harmony, the heart. Oh dear. Here are textures of grief and joy, cold spells and the warmth of vulnerability and exposure. A few years ago I saw the quietest concert, an hour and a half of spellbinding harmony by Joao Gilberto. Here's another performance of his:<br />
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This, to me, is all heart. Something happens between the guitar and his voice that has little to do with musical notation and melody, that is beyond the chords. Maybe it's in the achievement of a blended bunch of sounds and projected feelings. It tells me that his heart is tender and unguarded, but reluctant to join the shiny, loud world.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-82581031741705293632012-10-12T11:48:00.001-07:002012-10-12T12:08:34.133-07:00For the beauty of the earthThe divine can express itself by implication. Not reacting, not being triggered into judgment: these are ways to be present, too. They're oddly noticed in retrospect; they don't shout out "presence" while they're happening. When listening to music, this is the feeling I get when everything is played seamlessly and at the same time with little need for emotion. The notes themselves are enough, like when the sun on my face and sand in my toes are good enough, or a ham on rye, or walking past my neighbors' houses.<br />
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<a href="http://www.sfsymphony.org/Buy-Tickets/2012-13/Andras-Schiff-conducts-Bach-and-Mendelssohn.aspx" target="_blank">Andras Schiff</a> has the attitude to find the divine in the everyday and ordinary. As a conductor he is courtly and pulls seamlessness out of the orchestra. As a pianist he is inside the geometry and plain sense of Bach. I didn't lose myself in emotion last night at <a href="http://www.sfsymphony.org/Buy-Tickets/2012-13/Andras-Schiff-conducts-Bach-and-Mendelssohn.aspx" target="_blank">the San Francisco Symphony</a>. I lost myself in an appreciation of the orderliness of life.<br />
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Sometimes I think that since <i>Blood on the Tracks</i>, Dylan's love songs have been dissecting a single past love over and over, more delicately and narrowly as he descends deeper into it. Bach is like that for me. It's as if he found a single leaf, and started looking at the perfect geometry in its structure and near-infinite variability in that geometry as it fractaled under a microscope, and he transcribed the ways of the leaf in one composition after another.<br />
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Here's part of one of the pieces Schiff played last night, in a recording with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra:<br />
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Music is my primary companion now. I'm uneasy about that, but getting used to it. Orchestral music allows me to feel the humanity of dozens of players finding agreement on what is true, what is now, what is present. Sitting in the cheap seats overlooking the orchestra from behind, I have a beautiful window into the players' intense work. The Rolling Stones wrote a simple tune of gratitude called <i>We Love You</i>. I feel that love from the orchestra. I saw Furthur play it once; here's a recording of another time they played it:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-85219758248340255572012-10-11T11:22:00.000-07:002012-10-11T11:26:38.715-07:00Do it againWhen a soloist steps forward, the threat machine in my head starts up. I may have a sense of anticipatory thrill, but it shares space in my body with my ever-present platform of dread. More than anything, I dread the repeater -- the solo that settles into what isn't a groove or an exploration, but a repetition of the one thing the soloist is thinking about. Three out of four blues solos get stuck in a repetition. It has something to do with the acceptance of showboating in the blues; when you're playing for the audience, I think, your mind is at work, not your soul.<br />
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There is a place for repetition. Jobim's one-note samba, Neil Young's one-note guitar wails, rising choruses in songs like Steven Stills' <i>Love the One You're With</i>. But mostly, repetition indicates a failure of imagination, which means a failure to let go and let something or someone else take charge of the instrument. Whether the performer calls it a muse, or God, or a fugue state, or inspiration, it's a release of thought and it's an ability to perform without effort.<br />
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Last night the aged bebop pianist Barry Harris told how his friend and roommate Thelonious Monk taught him his tune <i>My Ideal</i> by playing it all the way through, then having Harris play it all the way through, then Monk, then Harris. "I wish I had recorded it," Harris told the Herbst Theater audience. "We must have played it fifty times." He paused, in the presence of the divine. "It's too bad there's no recording of that day."<br />
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What to say about Monk? By stripping chords to their smallest necessary elements and then collapsing those elements into narrow intervals, Monk found a way to trap the silence of God within the gratitude of music. And once he had done that, it became playtime for him. He was a highly repetitive pianist, making tiny subtle changes, and sometimes big abrupt ones, while over and over finding the core, the place where nothingness could emerge, again and again. That's an important kind of repetition, one that rarely involves an audience.<br />
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Last night the young Cuban pianist <a href="http://alfredomusic.com/" target="_blank">Alfredo Rodriguez</a> showed the same kind of appreciation of silence and repetition. He had been asked to intentionally honor Monk in a three-generation piano show that <a href="http://sfjazz.org/" target="_blank">SFJazz</a> put on for its annual celebration of <a href="http://www.sfjazz.org/events/f12/monks-birthday" target="_blank">Monk's birthday</a>. (Jacky Terrasson was the middle generation.) For his centerpiece improvisation, Rodriguez played a simple, tight and dissonant, figure in the middle of the keyboard, hinted at a stride bassline like Monk would, and then explored the central figure over and over. It was intense, sweet, and strong and sent shivers through me. Here's Rodriguez playing a Monk-inspired tune of his own called Cu-bop. It doesn't have the simple repetitive strain, but it's a powerful evocation of Monk:<br />
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When I was 15 I saw Monk. He was the warm-up act for Blood, Sweat and Tears at the old D.C. Coliseum, pretty much an airplane hangar. It's hard to know what I actually remember of Monk. I was there for BS&T; I played in a BS&T cover band at school, and presumably I carried a sense of privilege and tribute more than a desire to open my ears to something new. But I have an inkling, a tiny sense of memory, that Monk seemed a marvel, and that his pling-pling attack -- unlike anyone else's (except Chico Marx) in its childlike acceptance of the brightness of hammer on string -- got into me.<br />
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In 1978 living in New York City for the first time, I sat on my bed thumbing through the giant telephone book, and something stopped me on a page. I looked, and then I looked twice. There, listed in the phone book, was Thelonious Sphere Monk. He had two telephone numbers and a Harlem address. I guess he was actually living in Jersey at the time, but still, it was so cool to think that Monk had a listed number and that I could just pick up the phone and talk to him.<br />
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Here's a video of Monk with Dizzy the same year I saw him at the Coliseum:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-34005044469066782632012-10-10T16:07:00.000-07:002012-10-10T16:07:23.264-07:00Because the world is roundI'm not sure why my ear is particularly out of tune with the combination of contemporary classical and electronics. I once sat right behind Milton Babbitt in a recital hall, and shook his hand when a mutual friend introduced us, and I had to lie through my teeth saying I enjoyed his piece.<br />
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I've always admired how tastefully the Beatles used a synthesizer on <i>Abbey Road</i>. The Beatles knew as much about sound as a thing as anyone ever has. When they got famous, they used their money and access well. Paul became close friends with John Cage. George started circling the globe with Philip Glass, looking for music on other continents. Yoko had been Cage's assistant. These were people interested in the truth of sound and music.When you hear a Moog synthesizer on <i>Because</i> and elsewhere on <i>Abbey Road</i>, it blends with the familiar instruments that we think of as more human somehow, or is played intentionally to stay close to what is known to charm and move us. I can't think of anything that makes traditional instruments intrinsically more natural. But we think of them that way, probably because we're so familiar with them.<br />
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Maybe it's because electronic music comes without built-in structures and history that it seems to encourage experimentation at the fringe of comfort. I'm not talking about dance music -- electronica and its descendants -- which retain a highly familiar structure. What did Ezra Pound say? "Music rots when it gets <i>too far</i> from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music." For a modernist, Pound was not just inconsistent, but awfully conservative.<br />
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Along comes <a href="http://edmundcampion.com/" target="_blank">Edmund Campion</a>, who professes to build hybrid compositions -- electronics mixed with familiar instruments -- that find a way to blend the two. By being frugal with the electronics, the Beatles succeeded in doing that. I'm not sure Campion does. While the Kronos Quartet and Santa Rosa Symphony sounded heartfelt, energetic and kept my interest, the more electronics in the piece Sunday night in Sonoma, the less my ears heard. I think that's my fault, though. I do like much of Campion's work. But I think I don't know how to listen to modern electronics well. Ambient music, sure. Electronica, sure. But without that rooting in 4/4 dance and a pentatonic scale, I find the electronics start going random.<br />
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Here's a selection from another piece by Campion; the one performed Sunday, <i>The Last Internal Combustion Engine</i>, isn't online:<br />
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Here's the Beatles using a Moog synthesizer:<br />
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And here's a lovely live version of Because I heard once:<br />
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Some of the most moving music has come to me through choirs. There's something about the human voice -- its resonance with my own body, I think is a lot of the movement -- that can bring rapture faster than other instruments, even the most traditional ones.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-13171353941134925472012-10-09T18:20:00.001-07:002012-10-09T18:20:29.707-07:00Oldest/youngest in the audienceMy younger daughter, Marina, complained a few years ago about how hard it was to keep up with all the music. All the hip music, I think she meant. As far as I can tell, she's pretty good at it. Just about every new band I get excited about, and mention to her, she's already bored with.<br />
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It's hard not to be nostalgic about the late '60s and early '70s, when rock and roll was expanding at the speed of sound. One other thing to be nostalgic about was that just about everything worthwhile could be discovered in one chronicle: Rolling Stone. It wasn't just an arbiter of taste. It was the source for everything new. A handful of labels controlled the rock and roll market. Every rock critic tried to listen to everything new coming out, and to an extent unfathomable today, they could. I would read Rolling Stone cover to cover, supplement it with Crawdaddy, and I knew as much as anyone about what was happening. And everything was happening. Another thing hard to believe: We all listened to the same music. My friends listened to the Dead, the Beatles, Hendrix, Who, everyone who played at Woodstock, everyone who played at Monterey, the Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Dylan, Emmylou, Earl and Doc, Little Feat, Zappa ... Get it? This was the music on every progressive radio station in America. Sound hadn't splintered into personal taste; it was all explosively new and still expanding, and shared by everyone.<br />
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Now you're into electronica, or dub, or rap, or American Idol belting, or whatever, and even if there's some crossover, it's clear from the dress and behavior of an audience that each of the styles has its own full-fledged identity. Hippies were their own tribe, to a certain extent. Now there are many, smaller, quicker-changing tribes.<br />
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But it's all music. It's not necessarily all good music, but in each genre and subgenre there's stuff worth hearing. So far I've found that.<br />
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As Marina says, "The more music you hear, the more you hear music."<br />
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One evening she and I were in Yoshi's on Fillmore seeing Madeleine Peyroux, the jazz singer.<br />
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We had seen Peyroux a few months earlier, and after the first set I had an idea. We left Yoshi's, walked three blocks and bought tickets to see Yo La Tengo at the Fillmore. We made it into the hallowed hall five minutes before the band took the stage. She had been the youngest person at the Peyroux concert. I was the oldest at the Yo La Tengo concert. The last time I had seen Yo La Tengo I was in my 30s, when the guitarist Ira Kaplan was the sound guy at Maxwell's in Hoboken, and his wife Georgia Hubler hadn't yet learned to play the drums well. Now she's one of the best.<br />
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On the Madeleine Peyroux clip, the second song she sings is from Randy Newman in 1966. Marina learned it from a Dusty Springfield album. Here's Marina's version: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/timeforneal/music/IThinkIt%27sGonnaRain.mp3?attredirects=0&d=1" target="_blank">Marina sings I Think It's Gonna Rain Today</a><br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-68422912036359137722012-10-08T13:28:00.001-07:002012-10-09T08:30:10.570-07:00I was so much older then ...When I was 16, bluegrass was storming through D.C. If you were a hippie, it was the local music. Zeitgeist. Like being a punk in New York in the late '70s, or a folkie in Boston in the mid-'60s. You didn't really have a choice if you wanted to be hip to what was going on. This was 1972, and right on the heels of the most explosively inventive period for one popular genre -- rock and roll -- bluegrass was opening up to its own new worlds of sound.<br />
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As I remember it, a single pivot encouraged, validated and through the force of his impeccable cred allowed the full breadth of this merging of rock, jazz, folk and blues into bluegrass. Earl Scruggs. The crucible of the civil rights movement brought Scruggs in close touch with people like Dylan, the Byrds and Mahalia Jackson. It opened his ears, too. Scruggs got a lot of flack as the first outspoken champion of civil rights in a bluegrass world deeply embedded in redneck tradition. It stands to reason that the mutual respect that arises under that kind of pressure would spread from politics and morals to the music itself, and that a spirit of inclusion would, too.<br />
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By 1972, bluegrass festivals were wild and rangy things, with Sam Bush and the New Grass Revival going atonal, David Grisman and John Herald going Eastern European, John Hartford going nutty, and Earl Scruggs and the Dillards going fully electric. I remember the afternoon when Doc Watson persuaded a shy Vassar Clements to duet with him on hardcore mountain blues songs. Vassar shook his head no for a good two minutes of cajoling before Doc got his way. As he crossed the stage to join Doc, Vassar bent down and whispered something to him. Doc burst out laughing, and related to the audience: "Vassar says he's never played pure blues before." When it was over, you'd have thought Vassar was a sideman for Muddy Waters.<br />
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The Scruggs version of <i>You Ain't Goin' Nowhere</i> was our anthem. Here's a video that includes Scruggs playing it with the Byrds, from whom he learned it. This was the version of the Byrds that included Clarence White, who had established his virtuosic legend first as a guitarist with the bluegrass Kentucky Colonels:<br />
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It was weird when I returned to bluegrass ten years later to learn that the young upstart Ricky Skaggs and other traditionalists had virtually done away with the blending of genres and forms. Thirty years younger than Scruggs, twenty years younger than Dylan, Skaggs should have known better. But he got his way. Bluegrass festivals in the '80s were whitewashed of Dylan and blues, and barely supported the visions of Grisman and Bush and Hartford. Under the Skaggs rule there was a trust in pure virtuosity -- perfect harmonies and speedy instrumental work -- which in any music limits the range of expression. Some things of beauty have everything to do with what is not played. Monk and Miles Davis and the Band were particularly fine at expressing silence and depth without showing off their chops.<br />
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I missed the free-for-all of early '70s bluegrass. In high school, we spent Friday nights at the Childe Harold club in D.C. with the raveup blues of Liz Meyer. That was bluegrass. And returning the next night, Saturdays were when Emmylou Harris stilled us with dreary, soulful Hank Williams songs, one after another after another. That was bluegrass, too.<br />
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Warren Hellman's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival has always had that '70s feel. When Patti Smith and Dry Branch Fire Squad can share the same festival, magic can happen. For the traditionalists, here's some Dry Branch:<br />
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A couple of years ago, Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs were onstage at Hardly Strictly with Ricky Skaggs. Earl's son Gary emceed. He said something like this: "I want to introduce my father Earl, who's 85, and Doc Watson, who's 86, and Ricky Skaggs, the oldest one of the bunch."Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-58652656554825360022012-10-06T11:07:00.002-07:002012-10-06T11:11:36.413-07:00That's what makes us strongIn the Republic, Socrates reasons that popular culture is subversive to the state's interests and might be banned except when designed to marshal patriotism. Taken literally, that's a pretty awful statement. Letting go of something as personal as musical taste is puzzling to the fashionable projections of freedom.<br />
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Now take the Republic as a spiritual work, in which the state is a metaphor for the soul. What if Socrates is arguing that the popular, ordinary songs are stuck in the shadows of human emotion, and that it's worthwhile to reject them in favor of songs that encourage the soul to reach a place of light?<br />
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So much of popular song roots into "woe is me" and "somebody done me wrong" and "I wish things were different." Most lyrics in most songs are doggerel that validate everyday emotional experiences. But the spiritual masters -- Socrates, Buddha, Jesus -- seem to agree that everyday emotional experiences are illusion, and that the trick is to work through their distortions to find the truth underneath, or beside, or above.<br />
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I'm not convinced that it's time to throw out most of the songbook, but I am pleased that increasingly there are songwriters who convey a spiritual path in the midst of popular music. Yesterday, two of them hit home live. At <a href="http://www.strictlybluegrass.com/" target="_blank">Hardly Strictly Bluegrass</a>, <a href="http://www.conoroberst.com/" target="_blank">Conor Oberst</a> and the Mystic Valley Band opened with <i>We Are Nowhere and It's Now</i> from his most overtly spiritual album, <i>I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning</i>.<br />
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Then later in the evening, <a href="http://jessewinchester.com/" target="_blank">Jesse Winchester</a> was supposed to play at Great American Music Hall, but was sick. So instead Guy Clark sang a couple of his songs and then Elvis Costello, with Buddy Miller and a beautifully restrained and resonant Jerry Douglas, moved the audience through four more. Here's Winchester himself in a song that is its own dialogue on the point that Socrates was making:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-70219673636545187392012-10-04T17:34:00.000-07:002012-10-04T17:34:15.529-07:00Slow-cooked soul foodIf time is a human invention, which I think (and feel) is true, then why does slower or faster matter in terms of feeling the divine? Sure, some musicians like Coltrane felt faster and faster might get them there. But sacred music tends to be slower and simpler. Think hymns.<br />
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Witnessing Bartok's 3rd Piano Concerto today, I fell into an expansive series of moments at the outset of the second movement, which is not-coincidentally tempo-marked <i>adagio religioso</i>. In the clip below it starts around the eighth minute. The part I'm talking about starts there and lasts two minutes or so. It seemed like much more during the concert.<br />
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No matter where you are in music, if you're truly in it, as a player or listener, you are nowhere other than that moment. In hymns like this, the moment is allowed to persist long enough to be explored. And there's no concern about the dissonance or consonance of the next moment. That's the oddest part. Yes, slow movements have melodies that are built like song melodies. But at times, like in the Bartok selection, I have the experience of total surprise with each change. I've settled in, explored, maybe discovered something, maybe joined with something, and then it changes and the feeling starts all over again, only different.<br />
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Slow can approximate timelessness, I guess, in a way that fast doesn't. I can be transported by fast, and I can be swallowed by it, and I can feel joy and divinity. With slow, in addition I have no purpose or direction.<br />
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The performance was by the <a href="http://sfsymphony.org/" target="_blank">San Francisco Symphony</a> under guest director Vasily Petrenko. The first piece, also deeply spiritual, didn't work so well, and I think that's because Petrenko is too human and driven to grok Arvo Part. He conducted <i>Fratres</i>, a famously simple composition, with a lot of fierce emotion, as if its subtle tensions were a personal manifesto. I just don't think that's what's going on in the piece. It's about an orchestra holding moments and moods, and that was what I didn't hear. I heard it in the Bartok in spades, so much so that the virtuosity of the fast, technically demanding last movement was completely lost on me. I was still stuck in the slow moments of the second movement.<br />
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Boy I love live music. The second half of the show was Respighi's <i>Fountains of Rome</i> and <i>Pines of Rome</i>. Not the deepest stuff, but exuberant and beautifully delivered by Petrenko and the symphony. Petrenko's a young guy, and that means he can be in full command of breathless, fast, brassy, complex charts. All he has to do is project himself! And then, in the midst of this Disney stuff, principal clarinet Carey Bell delivered repeated egoless, sensitive, textured and exquisite solos, one after another. It was like I had never heard a clarinet before.<br />
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I can't find any video of Carey Bell, so here's a nice recording of <i>Fratres</i>:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-22304947805388250602012-09-30T23:46:00.003-07:002012-09-30T23:48:26.351-07:00Getting onI was a freshman in college in Santa Fe in 1972. On a lark we rumbled up to Albuquerque to catch Sha Na Na. An astonishing opening act called Steely Dan limped off the stage, scorned alike by the greasers and ironic hippies. My new college friend Anji grabbed my hand and pulled me under the stage risers. In a minute we were backstage in a circle sharing a bottle of -- catch this -- Jose Cuervo with the glum Fagen and Becker et.al. Skunk Baxter, I think, too. Pretty cool. Until I spoke up and said to Fagen, "Man, you guys are great. You must listen to Traffic." He looked at me like I had just vomited on his foot, or like I was a Sha Na Na fan. We gathered it had been a pretty dispiriting tour. "Traffic?" he sneered. "You kidding? We listen to Sonny Rollins."<br />
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I bought Saxophone Colossus. Oh my.<br />
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By 1978, Sonny Rollins was my favorite jazz guy. I was then a grad student living in New York City. One night I went to the Beacon Theater to see something called the Milestone Jazzstars, one of those odd things record labels used to do -- putting together a group of their signed musicians who normally didn't play together. It was Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter and Al Foster. Oh my. At the close of <i>In A Sentimental Mood</i>, I felt something wet on my face. I was coated in tears that I hadn't even known I was shedding.<br />
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There's a recording of the same program I saw, taped I think at the last concert on the tour, that goes in and out of print. Here's a link: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/In-Concert-Milestone-Jazz-Stars/dp/B000000XWN" target="_blank">Milestone Jazzstars</a>. It's a masterpiece.<br />
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So now it's forty years since Donald Fagen turned Sonny Rollins on to me, and thirty-four since I first saw him live. At 82, he still produces some of the deepest explorations of the soul. I've read that he calls it a search for perfection that never gets there, like a frustrating itch, except one that lasts a lifetime.<br />
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Three of the more revelatory concerts I've experienced in the last few years were by octogenarians: Sonny Rollins (I try to see him whenever he's in town, like <a href="http://www.sfjazz.org/events/f12/sonny-rollins" target="_blank">tonight</a>; it's always worth it), Ornette Coleman (likewise), and Ravi Shankar (likewise). Four if you include Joao Gilberto, who is now 81, but was in his late 70s when I saw him. Quietest concert ever. His voice was a whisper, his guitar a breath. A very ornate breath. They all had the air that performing is something spiritual, and fun, and not a pursuit of more glory. They have plenty of that. Shankar was 89. I swear that his hands and mind moved at the peak of his powers. Usually there's something different, slightly diminished as musicians near the end. By the first time I saw Dizzy he was in his 60s and his timbre was less bright. (Ha! About as important as a few specks of dust on a Leonardo.) But I have no doubt that had I seen Shankar in his 40s, it would have been no more or less spectacular than what I heard from him at 89.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-6759421795716938102012-09-30T13:54:00.001-07:002012-09-30T14:07:23.651-07:00Dizzying brewI wonder whether we would have had Miles Davis' genius if it weren't for Dizzy Gillespie? I don't mean in terms of influence. Exactly the opposite. Sometimes I imagine that it was Dizzy's extraordinary chops -- speed, intonation, sense of time, exuberance -- that forced Miles down a different path. Why compete with the virtuoso on his own terms?<br />
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Randy Brecker got me started on this with his <a href="http://www.randybrecker.com/" target="_blank">Brecker Brothers Reunion Band</a> on Friday night. The marks of Dizzy were all over him, from the exuberant joy that spilled out of brassy runs to the self-mocking elegance of his comments between songs. I had seen Brecker last year as a sideman for the great pianist <a href="http://kennywerner.com/" target="_blank">Kenny Werner</a>, and was beyond disappointed by him. He just didn't seem to be there. Always give a master musician a second chance!<br />
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Great band, especially ex-Miles Davis sideman Mike Stern on guitar, and control king Dave Weckl on drums. Stern plays with John McLaughlin's speed, but sentimentally. Weckl seems to channel tiny amounts of energy into huge, crashing elaborations, like it just takes concentration and not muscle. And because Sonny Rollins was in town, Brecker got his conga player Sammy Figueroa on stage, which gave the band a Dizzy-like Afro-Cuban edge.<br />
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Enough of the review. Great band, beautiful funk-drenched jazz, everyone cooking and the hall filling with joy.<br />
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I hope that with its new building, <a href="http://www.sfjazz.org/" target="_blank">SFJazz</a> won't have much need for Herbst Theatre anymore. It and 142 Throckmorton are the Bay Area's two high-school-gym echo chambers that masquerade as music venues.<br />
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The next night, a band that couldn't have been more similar and more different came on stage. This was a reunion band of Miles Davis sidemen from the '80s and '90s, called <a href="http://www.sfjazz.org/events/f12/miles-smiles" target="_blank">Miles Smiles</a>. Same lineup -- trumpet, sax, keyboard, guitar, bass, drums -- and same era and genre -- fast, funk-based fusion.<br />
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And there the similarities ended. Where the Brecker band's sound is built on soloists, Miles Smiles is built on the mysteries of collective improvisation. Isn't that what's different about what Miles brought to music? That he discovered a path to the transcendent that was based on the musicians having just enough structure, and not so much that it would close the door on finding their way, together, to truth. Miles' music is head music, as if it was cerebral, but it moves right past thought and emotion, leaving them behind to find something more primal. Truth is complex and paradoxical. This kind of band is willing to look at everything that's there at once. Wallace Roney can be glissing along as if his truth on the trumpet is slick with honey, and at the same time, deeply appreciating what Roney is seeing, there's Ford comping with a squawk or some other rude utterance, while Omar Hakim joyfully fills the room with Usain Bolt's heartbeat, all of it at once and all of it part of something big.<br />
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Robben Ford isn't a McLaughlin type, and his blues-based soloing took getting used to. Where did it fit into the dissonant mystery that was being explored? It made me wonder whether Davis brought McLaughlin in as a memory of the fast trumpet voice of Dizzy. Mike Stern blended his guitar the night before with Randy Brecker's trumpet as if they both were playing the same lines on the same instrument at different times.<br />
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Joey DeFrancesco on B-3 with Miles Smiles was a trip. He's such a purist, so used to bifurcating his mind so that his left hand plays the bassline that, in a band with a bass player, he let his left hand go limp and produced his lush, complex, rising-gospel breakouts with just his right hand.<br />
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Two nights, two magnificent post-Tony Williams drummers. Why is rock and roll filled with such lame drumming? It wasn't always the case. Ringo, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon ... and then? Most of them seem to learn only so much, and then stop and play that little bit over and over and over. Why? More can be learned, and mixing up time and rhythm is part of the reality we live in, so why do we let in drummers who have stopped exploring and drag down most of the bands worth listening to?<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-16282203339263126492012-09-26T13:36:00.001-07:002012-09-26T14:31:15.027-07:00Nearly DeadIt's Wednesday, so I'll probably head to <a href="http://www.ashkenaz.com/" target="_blank">Ashkenaz</a> in Berkeley for Stu Allen and Mars Hotel. They retread old Grateful Dead shows. Most cover bands are about verisimilitude; the closer to the original notes, the better received. Grateful Dead cover bands are about the spirit and dancing related to a band that encouraged sweet, open expression -- even giddiness -- as worthy of release. A Dead cover band just has to be good enough, and swing enough, to take the audience through the emotional and hormonal changes that the original band inflected. And people have to go, "Wow. He really gets Jerry."<br />
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Maybe the wit in Jerry Garcia's playing lay in his conflict aversion. Where another good guitarist would play his way into the inevitable, Jerry seemed to sidestep the expected. He and Bach had a lot in common. They both loved the geometry of music -- Jerry's arpeggios and chromatics in general -- and Bach like Jerry relished avoiding resolution. Much of the beauty of the Brandenburg Concertos is his refusal to express the next obvious chord, instead diverting us over and over again. Isn't that what Jerry did, too?<br />
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Lots of rock and roll bands are popular because they help us release id movements that are fierce and urgent. Fascist-rock bands like U2 and AC/DC, or the Killers or Ramones, get that release through metronomic hopping and robotic fist-pumping and an orgiastic collective blast of testosterone or some other raw, sexual energy. It's got its place, although there's a <i>Triumph of the Will</i> chill to it, too. With the Dead and its cover progeny, it's more like I'm humming along with my id, amused to have it, happy to let it dance its way into the universe. I'm not necessarily mad at anything, although that's OK too as part of the bigger picture, and the world feels pretty seamless during a Dead break.<br />
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What did one Deadhead say to the other when they ran out of weed? "What's this shit we've been listening to?"<br />
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I'm sure Stu Allen is quite talented. But it's difficult for me to think about a musician who has narrowed his public persona to a single influence. I remember being hopping mad when Tom Petty showed up. He's just doing Roger McGuinn! Then I bought a Roger McGuinn album that had him singing a Tom Petty song, and I threw my hands up. What did I know?<br />
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One night a David Bowie cover band's entourage was a table over from me, and I noticed that the wives had the same behaviors and airs of a real band's wives. I mentioned it to a friend, and she coined the term "Cover Wives."<br />
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The least creepy cover band I've seen is <a href="http://www.myspace.com/theminks" target="_blank">The Minks</a>. It's a Bay Area all-girl Kinks cover band. They stick to the early rave-up material, and funnel it through a New Wave sensibility. They remind us that the Beatles and Kinks, in their first orientation, were a hairsbreadth removed from punk. The Minks don't perform very often, but they have their own energy, their own aesthetic, and they feel original.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-82334536477438919092012-09-26T11:32:00.000-07:002012-09-26T14:32:07.508-07:00HopelessI have a rule: There's always something worthwhile happening on stage. If I'm stuck seeing the meretricious Eagles, I can find joy in Joe Walsh's self-deconstruction. Even Michael McDonald on solo piano got me going with his upper range. (Those were both corporate events that I felt compelled to attend.) There's always something worth listening to on stage. There is nothing logical or right about the expression "the exception that proves the rule," but if there were, it would be Esperanza Spalding.<br />
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No question she is a brilliantly trained musician, and her voice can do lots of things. She can hire great backing musicians, and she has ambitious tastes. She is charming, too. And yet it was peculiarly difficult to find a heart to her show the other night. I think part of it is the Berklee background; what once was a secret school for eccentrics who wanted to live in jazz instead of rock now is a factory that produces technically brilliant, commercially available studio musicians. She puts on a formulaic show that leaves little opening for mistake, which also means little opening for risk, which also means little opening for the serendipity, the stream of consciousness, the leap of faith that can reach the divine.<br />
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The other problem with jazz like hers -- the updated Maynard Ferguson school -- is that funk drumming restricts emotional expression. It has its place, but when a band is rooted in funk it is not rooted in demanding improvisation. And what's jazz without demanding improvisation? Not pyrotechnically demanding, but emotionally demanding. Touching souls. The problem with the rock or funk beat is that it is relentless and quite orderly, and the emotions of the heart are not so much. One of the virtues of the swing beat is its ability to teach musicians how to stretch time. That isn't a dotted eighth and sixteenth note. It's two eighth notes, only one is a little longer and the other a little shorter. How much stretch is up to the band, and can vary within a single song. For Brazilian musicians, the samba works much the same way. Once musicians get used to that flexibility, they learn to stretch not just notes in the meter, but the very meter itself. Syncopation and hesitation work hand in hand. And what is hesitation but doubt -- doubt about what has just been said, about what comes next, about whether to linger or go on? The rock beat doesn't doubt. It drives.<br />
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Yes, she can sing like Flora Purim. Technically. But when Flora Purim sings to me and stretches time and hesitates and doubts, universes open.<br />
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<a href="http://www.sfjazz.org/" target="_blank">www.sfjazz.org</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-9125924161287527242012-09-25T21:44:00.002-07:002012-09-26T18:27:28.861-07:00Let there be songs to fill the airGood live music requires musicians open to risk. Great live music requires musicians steeped in accepting what comes next. Transcendent live music requires musicians who can become vessels of God. Every year or two, the transcendent shows up in my life. Recently it was a cover of Ripple by a band called the <a href="http://americanbeautyproject.com/wordpress/" target="_blank">American Beauty Project</a>, a group of musicians determined to remind people about the folk-inspired joys that ring through the Dead albums American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. Robert Hunter wrote lyrical, thoughtful words to many of those songs, and the words to Ripple are as poetic and beautiful as any American song -- in the stratosphere with Dylan and Chuck Berry. Jerry's voice is fine on the album, but hearing Ripple anew through the blessed voice of <a href="http://www.ollabelle.net/" target="_blank">Fiona McBride</a> brought me into the land of God. I found a nearly full recording from the show I heard it at. This is the transcendent:<br />
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The chorus is a haiku, I think. And that's <a href="http://www.david-mansfield.com/bio.html" target="_blank">David Mansfield</a> on mandolin in the foreground. I had last seen him 35 years earlier, when T-Bone Burnett was guiding the Alpha Band through rehearsals in a Tesuque, NM bar before going into the studio in LA to record their great first album. You don't remember the Alpha Band? They were a footnote to the Rolling Thunder Revue who deserved to be noticed more than they were. My summer friends Andy and Oriana and Catherine and I -- some of us worked at the Bull Ring restaurant in Santa Fe -- caught the show night after night, calling out "You're so <i>good</i>, bass player" regularly once we found out that David Jackson was a hired hand and not a full band member. Embarrassed, he asked us to tone it down, which we agreed to do as long as he drank with us nightly. Dylan, of course, was supposed to show up but didn't. Fiona McBride normally sings with <a href="http://www.ollabelle.net/" target="_blank">Ollabelle</a>, who make up much of the American Beauty Project.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-32407757115145212562012-09-25T17:48:00.001-07:002012-09-26T18:36:20.144-07:00What would Husker Du? Nostalgia's hard to figure. No matter the timeless beauty of Days, when <a href="http://www.raydavies.info/www/main.php?content=news" target="_blank">Ray Davies</a> leans into the microphone to sing it, I'm Marcel Proust flashing back to college, my now dead friends William and Aleta in the car laughing and singing, loving the sincerity in the midst of irony. It's creepy, too. The past creates such static, especially when it's idealized. Being transported back to an illusion of an illusion. Yikes.<br />
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The <a href="http://www.livenation.com/The-Fillmore-tickets-San-Francisco/venue/229424" target="_blank">Fillmore</a> has a habit of producing this nostalgia/artistry tension for me. Ray Davies slipped into the nostalgia side, I think because he is intentionally nostalgic, and idealizes past rapture, and so believes that it's OK to appear in his own context. His discomfort with his own living in the past adds emotion to his show. At least he doesn't go so far as Jonathan Richman, who won't let on which side of the joke he's telling -- the gloppy sincere one or the cruel ironic one.<br />
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Heading the other night to see <a href="http://bobmould.com/" target="_blank">Bob Mould</a>, I was thinking about two prior concerts, one from 25 years ago, the other last year. When I saw Husker Du at what turned out to be a famous concert at Irving Plaza or the Ritz, they were on the verge of breaking up. I didn't know that. But I did know that I had seen the second coming of Lennon and McCartney. I could not figure out how Bob Mould could keep so many lines going at once on a single guitar, and for that matter I couldn't figure out how he was making any music with such motionless, clumsy looking fingers. That show shot to second place on my all-time concert list, which had been held for 15 years by the Jefferson Airplane the night that Jorma handed me a joint and Gracie stared at me through the entire concert. I was 16 and very impressionable.<br />
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The other show I was thinking about on the way to the Fillmore was last year's <a href="http://www.dinosaurjr.com/home/" target="_blank">Dinosaur Jr.</a> show there. I had braced for the possibility of post-punk nostalgia, and was amazed at the currency of D. Macsis' raging, impossibly loud and intricate guitar work. Now he had set the standard. Those two, Macsis and Mould, broke through the ban on musicality in punk, and set the stage for the watered-down grunge bands. Thrash, and specifically Dinosaur and Husker Du, reopened music from its most treacherous drift into fashion.<br />
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What I got with Bob Mould was a different kind of nostalgia. As the concert progressed, I hoped for the sublimity that I remembered from 25 years ago, and when that came in the last half, I felt both rewarded and confused by my own demands of an artist who clearly wants to change on his own terms, not mine. It was funny that he was featuring, in the first half, an early Sugar album that toned down his guitar work, while the brand-new album he featured in the second half met the rave-up thrash expectations of a diehard Husker Du fan like me.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6112051447962417255.post-17922645589396096212012-09-25T16:54:00.000-07:002012-09-26T14:45:26.769-07:00Stacey Belson anyone?Twice in the last month I was blown away by a singer because the singer never let go of a single note. The big surprise was Bob Weir, usually a big offender in the game of fade-away notes, huff-huffing to hit his target only to let the note die as he gears up for the next one. Oh, it's not so bad, I guess. Sure beats belting. But in comparison, when Weir was sitting in with <a href="http://hottuna.com/" target="_blank">Hot Tuna</a> at the <a href="http://www.sweetwatermusichall.com/" target="_blank">Sweetwater</a> in Mill Valley, his cover of <i>When I Paint My Masterpiece</i> elaborated an intensity that drove my heart into my throat. Why? Because he held every note, hard and vibrating, until the precise instant that the next note appeared.<br />
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A few weeks later, again in Mill Valley but this time <a href="http://www.142throckmortontheatre.com/" target="_blank">142 Throckmorton</a>, something similar happened. After a lot of rollicking soul-blues from the <a href="http://thebluesbroads.com/" target="_blank">Blues Broads</a>, it was <a href="http://www.tracynelson.com/" target="_blank">Tracy Nelson</a>'s turn to solo. The hall shifted into another gear, leaning forward and gasping. Why? Because she didn't let go of a single note before its time.<br />
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The jazz singers know about this. Why do we expect less from rock and rollers?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11173104879616416903noreply@blogger.com0