Just a minute

In 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.

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.

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.

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.

On Sunday night at SFJazz, bassist Dave Holland 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.

So how did these long, minimalist compositions hold my interest like a 3-minute pop song? They did. I think a key was guitarist Kevin Eubanks' 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.

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.

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.

The night before, I danced at Brick and Mortar to the rock jam band New Monsoon. 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.

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 Fire.

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 Got Rhythm. 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.

Here's New Monsoon a few years back, when raga themes served the same grounding purpose.

Heaven is within

My 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.

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 San Francisco Opera. 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.

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, Terrapin Crossroads. 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.

What I walked into couldn't have felt more surprising and lovely. The lovely part was the song being played well, Early Morning Rain. I remember talking up Gordon Lightfoot 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 Early Morning Rain, 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.

Here's a clip from another Lesh and sons show:

So what did I get judgmental about? It didn't happen during Early Morning Rain. 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.

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.

Here's a funny thing I noticed one day about Phil Lesh. In the Skull and Roses version of Bertha, through the whole song Phil is mostly playing the riff from the song Judy in Disguise. 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.

Nearly Dead

It's Wednesday, so I'll probably head to Ashkenaz 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."

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?

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 Triumph of the Will 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.

What did one Deadhead say to the other when they ran out of weed? "What's this shit we've been listening to?"

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?

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."

The least creepy cover band I've seen is The Minks. 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.

Let there be songs to fill the air

Good 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 American Beauty Project, 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 Fiona McBride brought me into the land of God. I found a nearly full recording from the show I heard it at. This is the transcendent:

The chorus is a haiku, I think. And that's David Mansfield 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 good, 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 Ollabelle, who make up much of the American Beauty Project.

Stacey 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 Hot Tuna at the Sweetwater in Mill Valley, his cover of When I Paint My Masterpiece 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.

A few weeks later, again in Mill Valley but this time 142 Throckmorton, something similar happened. After a lot of rollicking soul-blues from the Blues Broads, it was Tracy Nelson'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.

The jazz singers know about this. Why do we expect less from rock and rollers?