On the shoulders of giants

When 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.

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.

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:

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).

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. 

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. 

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:

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:

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. 

Bewitched, Bewildered and Bothered

Once 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.

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?

Last night at SFJazz singer/pianist Patricia Barber 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.

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.

Here's Cannonball Adderley's quintet playing Sack O' Woe:

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?

While powerful, I think there's a one-dimensionality in Cannonball's or Jimi's sexuality. Cannonball's is 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 is 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.")

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.

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.

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.

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 Eckhart Tolle. The integration of body, heart and mind as a practice toward enlightenment is everyday, not esoteric.

Isn't that what Barber was engaged in last night?

Here with different accompanists she does a Beatle tune:

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.

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.

Here they do Black Magic Woman:

And let's not leave out Jimi humping his guitar:

What if Jerry Garcia had been a Beatle?

Stu Allen, who leads Mars Hotel, the best Grateful Dead cover band around, switched gears and with Deadophile David Gans 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.

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 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die. 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.

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.

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.

Here's the Beatles playing their last live concert (except the rooftop Let It Be performance), at Candlestick Park in 1966.

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?

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.

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.

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 Helter Skelter or Back in the U.S.S.R. or Revolution. 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.

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?

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.

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.

Hey Jude by Strawberry Field Trip live at Ashkenaz

Because the world is round

I'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.

I've always admired how tastefully the Beatles used a synthesizer on Abbey Road. 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 Because and elsewhere on Abbey Road, 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.

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 too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music." For a modernist, Pound was not just inconsistent, but awfully conservative.

Along comes Edmund Campion, 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.

Here's a selection from another piece by Campion; the one performed Sunday, The Last Internal Combustion Engine, isn't online:

Here's the Beatles using a Moog synthesizer:

And here's a lovely live version of Because I heard once:

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.

What would Husker Du?

Nostalgia's hard to figure. No matter the timeless beauty of Days, when Ray Davies 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.

The Fillmore 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.

Heading the other night to see Bob Mould, 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.

The other show I was thinking about on the way to the Fillmore was last year's Dinosaur Jr. 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.

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.