Bagatellen

Joe McPhee Po Music - Oleo

Hatology 579

Encounters with the electric guitar often conjure up my favorite comic book quotation. Aged Uncle Ben regaling post-spider bite Peter Parker with the adage: “with great power comes great responsibility.” Possibly Stan Lee’s most prescient pearl of wisdom. In this day and age of effects boxes, flanging pedals and Midi trickery any Average Joe can make his axe sound like an orchestra of instruments both known and arcane. The temptation to allow accoutrements to overshadow artistry is sometimes impossible for a plectrist to resist.

The first time I spun Oleo in its original cd incarnation, I arrived at the immediate (& it turns out presumptuous) conclusion that Raymond Boni had broken this cardinal rule. His general irreverence and flamboyant use of dive-bombing Doppler loops and flameout arpeggiations on the opening reading of Rollins’ sacred title track felt blasphemous to my orthodoxy-shackled ears. I barely finished the first cut before shelving the disc for the better part of a summer. The new Hatology edition of the album pokes copious holes in my initial Swiss cheese opinion. Far from a fret-foisting wanker, Boni is the blasting cap to the dynamite that is this group.

Andre Jaume on clarinet, bass clarinet and alto saxophone joins McPhee’s pocket cornet and tenor saxophone in the front line. Francois Mechali on beautifully miked double bass completes the ensemble on the first seven compositions, and compositions they are. Pieces like spine-tinglingly mellifluous “Pablo” and “Astral Spirits” encapsulate McPhee’s ecumenical marriage of jazz and European chamber music forms. His own liners describe the concept- in language I can’t help likening to Ornette’s explanations of harmelodics- of coming at musical structures from lateral vantages. Not obliterating axioms, but finding the crevices to inculcate new ideas within them. It’s in gorgeous evidence on the two versions of “Oleo” where Newk’s breakneck bebop theme still holds sway, but as springboard for expectation-bucking improvisations from all four men. It’s a coup McPhee and Mechali’s repeat on the brief but lushly realized study of Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford.”

Despite the theoretical basis behind the music’s construction there’s very little that feels academic or sterile about the end product. McPhee’s fabled emotive honesty is blooms with full force. Mechali’s arco solo on “Pablo” cross-hatched with flamenco filagrees from Boni’s hummingbird pick keeps any notions of egghead artifice at arms length. The leader’s Spanish tinged-tenor and Jaume’s bass clarinet drones continue to combat conceit. There’s even room for Milesian funk forwarded on the rubberball bass pops from Mechali that pepper “Future Retrospective.”

Wrapping it up, I was wrong and the music is right. This remains one of McPhee’s most eclectically adventurous outings and it sounds better than ever with a new Peter Pfister polish. Boni may never have heard of Uncle Ben, but he clearly learned the lesson originally imparted to young Parker long ago.

~ Derek Taylor

A Day In The Life With Hind’s Kidnap

I am posting this in conjunction with an essay I recently contributed to a festschrift in honor of novelist Joseph McElroy, available now from the electronic book review. The Hind's Kidnap referred to repeatedly in what follows is Mr. McElroy's second novel published in 1969. The best synopsis of the novel has been written by it's author, and can be found at his own website. When I first mapped it out, the essay was both much longer and less strictly "academic" in tone. The section from which this excerpt was taken -- which I have been re-working again, after roughly a year's lay-off -- was to have been situated in the very center of the work. Plans change, of course... Consider what follow a gloss on "Re-opening Hind's Kidnap. But also please consider that I make the following available here not simply because it deals with certain sonic phenomena. Specifically, the fatherly "voice" in all its moods, tenses and timbres: scolding, disappointed, advisory, exhausted, authoritarian, enveloping. And I post this here, finally, in tribute to Joseph McElroy, and, more than anyone, my own father, who introduced me to the wonders of music as soon as he could and I was able.

~ Joe Milazzo

I’m sitting in a classroom, its atmosphere mildly indolent with orange sunshine and the sleek brown tones of rubbed, oil-and-sweat-infused wood. Joseph McElroy, a guest, is telling a group of young writers about, as I, only slightly older student of writing, hear it, "big subjects".

Like the rest of us, Joe is touching the central table-top, his palms resting on it in full-view, as if to tell us he has nothing up his sleeve. The young woman next to me is leaning forward to establish eye contact with Joe, who entered the room in mid-speech and sat down without immediately removing his sunglasses; she has rested her chin on her fist, and her elbow on the table top. Other students tap their pens against papers laid out on the table or on the table itself, or drum their fingers, or keep a hand along its rim so they can use the table’s solidity to get what leverage they need to shift their weight in their seats. My legs are crossed and my right knee touches the table’s underside. We’re all bound by a common edge, for the edge to cover enough area to provide us all (9 or so individuals) a point of connection, it has to empty out or displace a sizable center. Earlier, as he was only beginning to speak to us, Joe, stopped himself mid-thought, craned back from the table, and, with one swivel of his head, made sure he caught the attention of those students sitting in a parallel arrangement to him. "I don’t want to obscure myself…" he said. Joe is not a man of unusual height or of great bulk. Once he was satisfied that he was not just a rogue voice cornered on one side of the classroom, he returned to his original posture. "Big things", that is what he has said. Not "big subjects". Verbatim (with some scrubbing):

Realizing also that stories affect readers partly by releasing forces that are in the reader. One way that you release them is by, in your stories, recognizing the archetypal, weird things that are there: a mother figure; a tree; a fish; falling. Big things. Really big things. But you can’t make a story just out of these big symbolic things. (04/07/03; 02:45:17 PM CST)

Big: capacious? inflated? looming? intimidating? major? important? weighty? generous? Or I, still an only slightly older student of writing, understand Joe’s comments, heard as I recollect it over a cold bottled beer as having for a background the noise of class-changing foot traffic, raised and saluting voices vivid as car horns criss-crossing the echoing space of downtown between skyscrapers, to be about the seductions of big subjects, subjects it is necessary to confront in "our" work precisely because their seductiveness, their being written all over already, is basically abhorrent. They exist outside time in a sphere of Lovecraftian cosmic conspiracy, and, as much as they are about us, they are somehow alien to us, these themes, pending, even conspiratorial, structural myths. We know that these are the kinds if subjects that will do as much to us as we do to them. Damn it, but resistance seems the wiser path. As Hind's Kidnap Sylvia says, a rancid smell of growth clings to them. It’s a fair assessment. But Joe and I and my own writing instructor from my days as an undergraduate who fell in love with wanting to write rather than the actual writing itself -- it came too easily back then, what did I know, I wrote in search of an overwhelming, self-abolishing avoidance, but also, as all writers do, to learn about what I was writing about -- we’re all trying to introduce these young people to Joe’s work. Joe cautions us, mention themes, huge binding structures that can contain entire novels or ranges of novels.

Like memory. Growth. Perception. Fathers and sons, more so than family, really. Definitely fathers and sons. There’s a corollary to that as well, one Joe has discussed with admirable elision (often), which is the matter of influence and derivativeness. Harold Bloom and the anxiety of influence. Shakespeare, who may be as much of a "name", historically speaking, as the names in Hind’s Kidnap, as the great father. And the inventor of the 20th Century, so runs the conventional wisdom. It’s a dangerous commonplace that tries, I guess, to be hopeful in fashioning modernity into some eternal verity. But for such a grand thesis, it won’t do as an explanation of all those 20th Century human endeavors that shame those of us who were there. The sins of the father, too, I suppose. Would there have been fascism without Richard III as Shakespeare made him, almost more Satanic than Milton’s more-than-human Satan? The implication that romantic love would not be the same without Montagues and Capulets, balconies, apothecary poisons… I try to imagine a Western world without these cognitive set-pieces, and I come to the conclusion that I’d rather spend my time rereading Shakespeare than by arguing with Bloom and co.’s (adherents and detractors alike) notions. The notions themselves are too prescriptive. Do improvising musicians think while they improvise in terms of quarter-rests and dotted-sixteenths and augmented 5th’s and such? I doubt that vocabulary has much to do with it. Why should writers be told that they are thinking about similar things as they plod around all the other obstacles writing throws in their way? Shakespeare is a great laboratory for the testing of one’s own writerly ideas anyway, if that’s what Bloom means in the context of the benefit of the doubt. Or does he mean something more along the lines of the readings we cannot avoid, texts so infused into the language, the one technology which we really have let loose on the world and have allowed to run amuck, that influence is ingested as helplessly as oxygen is inhaled? Mass we all have, but no weight without gravity. You can lose mass, actually convert it into energy you give to something else, say the track over which you run (friction) or the iron lozenges you set into push-pull, clean-jerk into groaning oscillation, the volleyball spiked up over the net. But you never lose weight first. "Weight" isn’t so much fat, flab; it is how we think, imprecise but somehow true. Weight coming and going like someone we don’t like recurring in our life, looking for a place to bed down or hitting us up for money. See what you put me through.

Sometimes you should try to go too far. (04/07/03; 02:27:48 PM CST)

Fathers and sons indeed. "Father hunger", it was first whispered of in a specific study of African-American community and has since grown into the form of rumor we call "archetype". I wait for the day that there’s a dangerous pill formulated to treat it. Deadbeat dads, the debate now over the deleterious effects of "gender affirmative action", how boys suffer educationally, are penalized for their simple "boy-ishness" in schools where assessment tests dictate literally everything, but especially funding. Robert Bly beating drums and swatting mosquitoes in the wild, defrosted Minnesota night. Maybe it’s a stupid theme, after all, too fraught with the possibility of recovering things that never were, their plausibility an embarrassment. What happened to the daughters? The mothers? But I can’t get around it: fathers and sons, it’s a relationship around which Joe’s fiction has been known to pivot. There are real fathers and sons in his books, I mean not that they are fictionalized real people, but that the relationships themselves are so believable they give life to the characters whom they encompass, perhaps even enclose. And I don’t want to conceive of these fathers and sons as representations, no matter how vibrant they are with theatrical and photographic detail.

We say a good deal else among ourselves that day in the classroom, but Joe’s straight-forward, "frank" advice, perhaps reflexive and easy to dispense if no less valid for that fact, stays with me. For I think too that so little criticism of his work acknowledges these themes. And they have been important to me long before Joe told me, in his own way (without knowing) not to end their importance to me, my readings, that day in that mildly sunny classroom. I regret not talking more to the students there that day, I wonder what they made of it all. Did they really understand the implications of Joe suggesting to them:

But once you get into a story there are so many possibilities that you have, and it is very hard to free yourself to recognize those possibilities. How many students have I heard say, "But this really happened." (04/07/03; 02:53:28 PM CST)

The corollary to this is that, in narrative, we have an opportunity to be more interesting, better persons, and a chance to put a finger to the lips that would utter a discouraging, "But this is how I really am."

I want this piece to be as brave as little stolen Hershey Laurel brandishing his bean bag, as in one of Hind’s visions. At first, the title seemed random, or, at best, something to hold the place of the title I had not yet devised. Or a way of hiding that what so moves me about this story of Joe’s is its ethical drive, the sense I can’t shake -- my pursuer -- that the story itself believes in the fact that art is useful, and can be used up, and, because it can and must be used up, must be applied to a proper end. That, to risk not a homology but a homiletic, that life is art, and art is life. Experience not understood is experience not fully had. And the experiences you lose can never be replaced. Though the chronological relationship of cause and effect, so dear to the detective story, the question of following and leading -- what’s first and what’s last? -- is also a question of "what lasts?" Now the title stuck there ("up" there) like a lit VACANCY sign reads like nothing less (or more) than a prediction. I will tell you of some matters not written about in Hind’s Kidnap, not even on the flyleaf or in the margins of my own copy of the novel. A copy now swelling with sallow yellow, neon burnt orange and hot pink and, naturally, kelly green post-it notes clinging to selected margins. I won’t write in a first edition. As if the volume itself, always in my possession sans d.j. (dust jacket) were in efflorescence, papers as buds, petals, invitations to hairy bee legs and randy winds.

Its contagious in my imagination... memory is like an artist. (04/07/03; 03:11:33 PM CST)

Isn’t the significance of allegory like… can it be compared to the voice of the guardian amniotically engulfing Hind, just out of college, like the caul of one of Hind’s childhood friends, since kept in a jar for luck by the boy’s widowed mother?

You wanted him, you wanted to listen to him talk and talk -- he didn’t quote poems the way he had used to -- you wanted his fluent voice to cover you like a skin, fill your eyes, take total control of the air. (466)

Allegory does diminish us, and though there’s nothing bland about the affections the guardian lavishes on Jack, he transforms the boy, then the man, into the silence Jack would otherwise fill with his own voice. The guardian’s intellect, which seems to be his true birthright (it is never so much a matter of education), is as relentless would like to be in deductive mode, but cannot be. And the guardian’s sometimes stern eloquence is scattered throughout the book, mostly in direct quotes that would seem set off from Hind’s own speech, to others and to himself. But the more we read of Hind, the more we hear of the guardian in his son’s diction, syntax, cadence, self-critical attitude, taste, and, very commonly, through Hind as a negative exemplar. Morton Feldman once wrote:

[W]hy do we fail to see that in art too, the facts and successes of history are allowed to crush all that is subtle, all that is personal, in our work? Yet the artist does not resist. He identifies with this force that can only destroy him. In fact, it has an irresistible attraction for him, in that it offers him known goals, the illusion of safety in his work, the tempting knowledge that nothing succeeds in art -- like someone else’s successes. In a word, because it relieves the anxiety of art. (21)

Feldman could just as well be talking about familial love here. Wait a second -- do I really mean "love"? Or am I talking here about desire more than love? For the guardian’s voice is just another voice, and it can be heard in one’s head -- Hind hears it all the time -- or in papers and letters, most problematically in letters one would not want to find it in -- the letter left to me. Why does Hind find such comfort in it all? I feel guilt at even posing the question, for the answer seems self-evident and would, in other circumstances, cause me to scratch out the words before as soon as they were impressed on paper (assuming I’m writing this longhand; the anecdote is rounded off with more romanticism this way than if I had described the gummed, springy resistance of delete keys and backlit projections of pixels…) I mean, I know what my own life with my father is like.

My father, to whom I owe the simple fact of my existence; my father, to whom I owe whatever basic appreciation of the written word I have. My father, a writer and editor, known to me too in earliest memories through objects that belong to or were handled often by him: use-rippled sheets of wide-, not college-ruled notebook paper covered with handwriting narrow and not upright, listing to the right-hand margin, wavering every time (but in varying degrees) a letter requires its length to be drawn upward (old writing on the backside of the page "X"-ed out with two visibly slow-drawn strokes); books with typewritten review slips tipped into them, the ink of titles and authors on the very old slips slightly purpled and blurry; baseball cards, collated and uncollated, the hard sticks of bubblegum in a mound soon to be thrown away; an old margarine tub of cardboard poker chips rubbed free of their bicentennial colors along the rims; the hothouse of vacuum tubes, their smoky glass and glinting filaments though so solid (heaviest at the base) still somehow orchid-delicate, bulbing out of the slab of stereo equipment tabled out of little reaches in the corner of the living room. My father was struck down with polio as a young boy and has always been a slightly wizened figure, even when his face was at its most full in his mid-thirties. A man whose steps I have never heard across the hardwood floors on my childhood home: could he ever "walk away" from anything he wanted to say the hell with? Unlike Hind, my father could not live on his own, unencumbered or, rather, free to pick and choose his encumbrances, in an upstairs apartment. The isolation -- and fathers do need some of this -- he has needed from us has always been in his mind and in his heart. For all that, my father is fiercely independent, difficult, outspoken, and especially outspoken when he needs assistance, which is more and more often the case. A man too tough to die, so I’ve been told and so I have thought. I am young still, relatively so anyway, and close to these things, looking perhaps for a place to consign them, so I’ll hope you’ll pardon me. But Joseph McElroy -- Joe, my friend, who told me he was honored to know my father -- could never know how this passage would affect me:

Even twenty years ago [Hind’s] limbs had in a way blinded him; from an over-all length of twenty-seven inches at birth, he had by the age of fifteen reached seventy-three... he knew he could never stop his growth, knew he’d add more inches whether he smoked or did nonbreathing handstands or tried to give arms and torso and thighs and calves the compressed fullness of a weight-lifter’s neat body... As the winter solstice approached, indeed all through midwinter, Hind tried to blight his energies; but he grew and grew right down to his animal toes and their vegetable nails. (11-12)

Because Joe could not know that moreover how I would put this passage together with that earlier one about the Guardian's voice. He could not have known that when my father read to me as a five-, six-year old child, I could not sit in his lap, but stood behind him where his wheelchair was braked (literally) at our red dining room table. I could even then reach the floor-lamp in that room more easily than he could, and I would look at the pictures in the little white-bound volume (a crayon streaked across its textured front) of Bible stories from which I often requested he read to me from over his shoulder. My father’s voice did not descend from above like the massive vibrations unleashed from a cathedral organ. Instead, I felt that voice as a rumble, a burring, muffled baritone deep in his chest and the words (Joseph being sold by his brothers) rose and trailed a little behind to reach my ears. But it was never the sound of a voice heard as one walks away, or is walked away from. It was different by virtue of being tethered to the ground of his shoulders, the resonating bars and spokes and the damping leather and rubber of his wheelchair. I could always feel his voice, even its origins in his lungs, through the riveted back of his chair, a feeling like a warmth in motion. A simmering. I too would have blighted my energies, but, unlike Hind, not to be more like the childhood friends who must have treated him differently for his difference, but as a way of giving those energies to my father. To finish, as Hind keeps thinking, what he was never really allowed to begin. What does polio do to the muscles? It looks like atrophy, but really they just never develop. The barrel-chest, the long and sensitive fingers that my grandmother told me were so expert on the piano (my father, father of four, could never afford a piano as an adult), the spindly, pale hairy legs trailing down to the curled, inanimate but frighteningly sensitive toes, always very red just out of the bath. These could be the legs of a malnourished, refuge child as seen in a brochure from a charitable organization. What is it like to be estranged from one’s own body? Is this the meaning of the creatures that populate Hind’s reveries? They are hybrids seemingly most grotesque as they attempt to bridge the gaps that they combine in themselves, as well as cross the gulf of speciation that separates them from all the other mutations that exist in the world. My father sits in his wheelchair, the invisible cyborg. Or some Max Ernst nightmare, metal in crude compensatory design for the infinitely broken (they can never grow together, grow back) parts of the body, part of him only to be thought of as mechanical. No less so as he waits with a firm hand on the telephone, the one spot of light in his extinguished bedroom, waiting after 5 PM for the radiologist's office to call and offer some explanation about the spots -- 12 -- they've seen on his liver. (As of this writing, the information has not been passed to me.) Last year, on a March day that dumped 6 inches of ice across Dallas and Tarrant counties, he lost a leg from the knee down because of a melanoma that grew on the bottom of his foot. And it grew so large that he could no longer fit into his specially-constructed shoe (attached to a brace; post-Salk, few brace-makers in America). There are now "concerns" that a full year's worth of interferon treatments have still not been enough to destroy the cancer. My father, coughing, asks me to stand behind him and lift his shoulders so he can attain a seated position. He is so thin it is painful to look beneath his beard (always scraggly anyway), but he is still heavy in his chest and torso, unnaturally so, as if his bones have gained bulk. I can feel his spine like a petrified vine, knotted round and round by another parasitic, knotting vine, through his white t-shirt. In part -- how else?!? -- my father is a thing, a thing I was taught from an early age required maintenance and machine instructions. Forward, back, pivot; wheels where there should be thighs, knees, calves, ankles; turn, no bend, compress, yoga limbering, hopping, etc. I have a friend who is currently in the early stages of muscular dystrophy. The warning sign, number one warning sign, was numbness in her feet. She would be walking and would trip, even fall. She also experienced difficulty driving. Her body is in rebellion. In an allegory, that which is unclear is particularly monstrous and, if Hind’s Kidnap is a labyrinth, then Hind himself is the minotaur lurking around its corners (the name of the town in which the Laurels lived is Long Corners).

Hind was on his back. He closed his eyes again. He watched his pink, sun-blurred hand save a child’s face from acid that had been intended to clean the face of personal traces. And three drops sank into the back of Hind’s hand and turned it into a claw-wing expertly composed and fuselaged by a film team’s property man, a claw with raised green veins. (17)

I [wife Sylvia] ask, soaping [daughter] May’s golden arms ("Dial-A-Child") and salty hair so easy to bathe because she is charmed by your squatting presence at the tub edge, a hungry monster hesitating to reach into a nest—but one of your several forms and made by my mind, not May’s, who cannot understand your great height except as a grownup’s. (242)

To reach out into the world is to be affected by what one would desire to touch, command, alter outside of one’s self. Assuming there is anything outside one’s self. If there isn’t, allegories would sputter and stall and never achieve anything remotely approaching epic length. It was not until a year ago that my mother told me about the many surgeries my father endured as a boy of what?, 4 or 5 years of age, how his "material reality", his physiology was rearranged, organs shifted, ligaments removed and reinstalled elsewhere, other dark matters. Which meant that, contrary to what my long-time vision of my parent’s affection for one another is / was, they had, years before I had been born, discussed these things. And intimately. Were they whispered; said with eyes cast downward, tearfully, resentfully (after all these years…); over drinks, with cocktail piano and sloshing ice backdrop, on a front porch, in the car, driver and passenger staring utterly ahead, how? My curiosity spins on its axis, orbiting nothing. Does every child eventually grow into the sadness of realizing that their parents have stopped growing themselves? That those adults are grown, and that we missed it, learning that we missed it we are closer to them even as we can’t really recover all that we’ve missed (such is speculation), but at least can re-imagine and thus recover perhaps more than they ever can? That we really will finish what our parents began? I think so, and I feel it in my father’s case so acutely because I have evident before me everyday an outward sign that, yes, such growth stops and becomes something else. We will be the end of them. Recall how your parents, in moments of exasperation, would tell you that you would be the death of them… When parents lose the magic of that allegorical word, Parent, and become only people, flawed, vulnerable, maybe even wizened. So that, though the situation through which it narrates is much closer to m own, Richard Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma has never spoken to me as Hind’s Kidnap has. Something, not what I would call a force, tells me the Powers novel is what I should take my heart. But I don’t, and I know there is a story there that bears upon the stories of the novel I do choose. Joe himself would most likely tell me I should save all this for a novel, by which he would mean a novel of my own making, but I would respond that I have saved them for his novel, this novel, because it is a novel that requires just these operations of multiplication. I warned you the book was about intimacy, didn’t I? I hope I did. "Don’t end it", the last words uttered in Hind's Kidnap… End as surcease? No, as comforting as that would be, I do not think it is not a question of healing, but of being able to receive and to cope with the fear the comes with the knowledge that the boundaries of another person’s life can be so permeable to the imagination, and that the important thing isn’t gaining entry so much as it is not getting lost in the process of finding a way back to yourself.

Hind thinks about these things too:

Hind knew her [Sylvia] just as painfully as she was invisible to him. The dark insides of the body you lived in all your life—the heated, stemming parts; the esoteric heart valves or the pancreas—esoteric because they existed only in the hospital where you had them looked at. (34)

And you thought of the soft mass of Cassia’s [Cassia Meaning, a lame girl with whom Hind was infatuated as an adolescent] insides, unknown to her, and bubbling away, different from the outside skeleton of membranes, hair, crust, and polish, each with untamed intersections of message while behind and below were dark bubbling insides loved but almost never seen. (525)

What is the totality of another person? I’m laying odds, very Jungian odds, that the allegory resonates with us so much because it plays out in its most basic procedures our faith in our own human metaphysical being. The narrative of the allegory is the work’s body; the allegory’s ulterior meanings represent the soul. Yet if contemporary literary theory has taught us anything, it is that we cannot compartmentalize (another pop psychology term…) meaning as much as we may like. Hind's Kidnap: A Pastoral On Familiar Airs: that latter is not just a subtitle. It is also a clue. Like all things titular it is both suspended above and embedded within the actual narrative itself. Titles may not be abstracts or summarizes, especially when one is dealing with fiction, but so often criticism begins the minute an author settles upon a title for their work. So it is important that, as McElroy’s novel nears its conclusion, Hind is writing the story of his guardian’s life, but he has no title for the work. Finally, Hind does devise what could be called a thesis about his father:

This is a man who, possessed by a dream of freedom which he never, hence, possessed, thought himself a shepherd but found himself a tree. (533)

Whether you are in Elysium or not, trees are stationary and thrive despite human intervention. They are indifferent. Well, not really; the movement of trees is so gradual as to be imperceptible, and its movement that is multi-directional. It is mostly cellular movement the “hidden messages” Hind has to reconstruct in his imagination as he thinks about the women he loves. Trees, by virtue of their size and the expanses they penetrate, are never immobile. They vibrate with motion, some contrary, some sympathetic. Trees sway or droop in response to the weather; for those standing underneath them, they soak up rain and draw lightning. At some point, the bend of a tree becomes a snap. If my body were a tree’s body, or as long and broad and multi-limbed as a tree’s trunk, I would have to traverse it with my eyes, and this could take a very long time. When one grows to such proportions, one is much less self-contained, and perhaps it becomes easy to objectify portions of one’s self. And what of the largely unseen yet known symmetry and balance of forces that is a tree? A tree is a stalk with roots and branches raveling into huge fibrous balls at either end. The further down into the soil a tree delves in order to feed and to keep from toppling, the further upward and outward its canopy thrusts, the hardier its trunk, the greener and crisper its leaves, the rounder and heavier its fruit. Tress transform raw materials, they are makers. They drink, they excrete, they host millions of instances of generative division in their most minuscule tissues. Perhaps those roots, thriving in choking opacity where the branches invite in a network of wind and light, can be construed to be like the grander reality represented in the figures of the allegory. The tree’s branches offer us hints about the reality of the roots, hints in terms of resemblance. Roots and branches: two similar but distinct relationships on either end of a resilient and devious continuum. Trees like words, their healthy coloration a reflection of what is not there, chemically, the explanation of which is one of Hind's recurring memories. A tree's grasp of the ground, like a word's grasp of consciousness, is an odd tenacity. We think of a tree as occupying mainly two dimensions, as a vertical thing that occupies spaces high and low normally inhospitable to our occupation – just as we can’t live others lives for them or fully inhabit their experiences. And so that space we don’t take may feel like lost freedom. And trees always embrace us -- if not always tenderly -- when we enter the landscape in which they are situated. Roots below our feet, branches above our head: trees mediate. Breath, unformed words whose air we trade with the photosynthesizers of the earth, is a mutual use we make of one another. We are always climbing trees, really. As often as we are clambering over one another.

Works Cited

Feldman, Morton. Give My Regards To Eighth Street: Collected Writings. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.

McElroy, Joseph. Hind's Kidnap: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

Dorothy Ashby - Hip Harp (Prestige)

The gimmick epithet was regular obstacle for Dorothy Ashby, a consequence of her choosing an instrument outside the usual jazz ordinance. She wasn’t the first Aeolian improvisor but based on a body of work that stretched into the Eighties I’d hand her the crown (the contemporaneous Corky Hale, and Alice Coltrane being strong runner-ups). Her first Prestige album follows closely on the heels her Regent Records debut, employing the same then-exotic quartet instrumentation. The session favors lighter fare with an emphasis on balladic standards. Some like the overly demulcent “Moonlight in Vermont” mire in sticky sentimental sap. But elsewhere Ashby swings with conviction. “Pawky” feels like vintage Mancini refitted with a moody hardbop shuffle beat. “There’s a Small Hotel” is an ear-popping marvel of digital dexterity as she sculpts an aural cat’s cradle out of the opening melody. Her harp often sounds like a medusa-stringed guitar with the shimmer-switch toggled to “11”, transfixingly hypnotic and hauntingly alien in equal measure. Gilded notes float and extinguish in glittering swathes like swarms of fireflies flittering above a sylvan glade. Herman Wright isn’t the most nimble-fingered bloke on bass but he handles the extra pressure saddled to his shoulders in the absence of piano with aplomb. Ashby’s iridescent chords pick up additional slack, filling in cracks and adding further harmonic helium to the mixture. Basie-alum Frank Wess leaves his tenor horn at home and focuses solely on flute, his gossamer melodic flights dancing pirouettes through the chamber-flavored tunes. Ashby also holds aces in her two drummers, Art Taylor and Roy Haynes. Brushes are the order of the hour and each man wields his whisks with Picasso-worthy precision. Herr Van Gelder captures it all with clarity and warmth from behind his Hackensack console.

[Sidenote: Three out of sixty-nine. That’s the number of picks in the ROW featuring women as leaders/co-leaders since the section’s inception. Kind of a piss poor ratio IMHO. So I’m throwing down the gauntlet to myself, Joe and whomever else wants to step up. Just for fun let’s make the selections over the next four or so weeks female-centric & see what we come up with. This site is Y chromosome-saturated enough as is.]

Joel Stern / Matt Davis - small industry

l'innomable

About midway through thinking over this piece, I realized that what I wanted most of all from myself under the circumstances -- receiving a review copy of this disc only days before I had to leave for St. Louis on a business trip in late April; multiple other deadlines for other publications assuming a higher priority throughout the early summer; the arrival of the new crop of Erstwhile releases; my inability to track down my copy of the June 2003 Wire (see below)... What I wanted most of all was to locate within myself some reserve of invention that would equip me with what I needed to write 2, or maybe 3, different reviews of this disc, "published" serially here at Bagatellen. (formerly, bagatellen) over the course of the summer, each review a graceful step in the evolution of the same linguistic material and opinions, not a series of drafts, a progression of refinements, a series of finished works, each a newly revamped model of a product line "classic" (think of the Ford Mustang, or even the humble Mr. Coffee). In one review, I would have told you that I disliked small industry, in the next review I would have been helpless but to reveal, underneath my sarcasm and pseudo-anarchic "give the people what they want" attitude that I was beginning to acclimate myself to the recording, and in the final installment, I was to have risen to head-clearing objectivity and been able to share with you substantial and positive opinions about not only the release in particular but also and its fit within "eai" literature in general. Clunky right angles and dragging metallic exoskeletons were to be supplanted by space-age polymers molded into the curves and humps of "European styling" -- a phrase that works just as well in describing the quite distinct shells of moussed coiffure and Whirlpool washing machines. These redesigns are all intended, in part, to give your senses less to linger over. Your eye is invited to glide from sleekness to sleekness, and you are not to notice that key features of what you have grown accustomed to using / enjoying may have been renamed but not enhanced exactly. Moreover, those features may have been removed entirely -- dropped or "no longer supported", the standard language in the skewed universe of information technology, I believe -- entirely in order to make allow for the implementation of new functionality. Often the designer's pet, the utility of such devices may appear questionable to the lay-person, but this is a misapprehension, as these appendages exist primarily to prove to you that, well, something of the sort can be done, even if not well, after all. Wait until next year. "Proof of concept" has to be one of the most hilarious instances of double-speak that human beings have ever devised. Each review, then, as a "re-introduction", a new launch, a campaign. Bright with distortion.

But it was not to be. What's to blame? Silly question when we're talking about a systemic failure, eh? A slight downturn -- can you see the arrow head bending double like a wilting tulip? -- in my fortunes. Some investments that went bad. Some fees that went unpaid. Walk-outs and other work stoppages. A breach of the corporate HQ's firewall. Having to fend off investigators and auditors. Several executive retreats; if I never see another assessment test that discusses my personality in terms of colors, conflict resolution skills, or creativity / technical expertise pie chart wedges, I'll die a happy man. Inflation. Recession. Changes to the Fair Labor Standards act. Loss of a key contract to a competitor. A disastrous overseas advertising campaign; we failed to assess issues of cultural sensitivity before settling on a slogan. Embargoes levied on those regions that export all the rare substances (virtue is not one of them) necessary to the complex manufacturing process by which record reviews are made. All I have left, then, are project plans, a few prototypes in which some individual parts do move but do not move productively, briefings for the share-holders -- pep talk kind of stuff -- earnings projections, and mocked-up advertising slogans that have gone as flat as warm Coca-Cola (Marca Registrada).

What I can do, though, is open my briefcase to you and let pour over the office salvage overflowing from its many pockets, folding files, and tabbed sub-dividers. Its no archive, I warn you, transition being the first thing that collapses under stress. Any cobbling together is going to have be done on your own time and your own dime, on your own terms, using your own facilities. (Of course, some of the material here has already been reconstituted several times over. This very paragraph is made from 100% recycled content / 50% post-consumer syntax.) Maybe you can glean a lesson from all this dog-eared and red-inked evidence. I truly hope you can turn a profit out of these mad emendations. It's funny. Had you asked me about the status of my entrepreneurial scheme only a month ago, I would have lied or browbeaten you. I worked with one arm pressing my laptop screen as far down as it could go while still not preventing me from typing, even if blindly. I saw evidence of espionage everywhere, and all eyes were prying. I was sure references to rival reviews of small industry had been placed strategically all around my physical as well as virtual presence by underground marketers, that competitors were trying to trick me into "cat out of the bag" if not "spilled milk" despair, and thus into the premature revelation of my intentions. But now I know how absurd this paranoia was. There's no market for this content at all. Anywhere. Only the specific accounts relating to my failure possess any net worth, and you can bet your... you can rest assured that I'm hoarding that failure until I'm faced with the choice of liquidation or death.

~ Joe Milazzo

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What Took So Long?

Eddie Hazel's only solo album, Dames, Games & Guitar Thangs, has finally been issued on CD, thanks to the fine folks at Rhino Handmade.

I've already ordered my copy; I recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that you do the same. If you haven't heard this incredible record before (somebody slipped me a CD-R of it a few years ago), you are in for an overdose of funk-metal brilliance. The soloing on "California Dreamin'" is on the same exalted plane of Out as that on "Maggot Brain." No kidding: I'm as excited about this as I am about the Ayler box.

On the Road with Ellery Eskelin...

One of my favorite facets of the Hat Hut website is the section allocated for Ellery Eskelin. Its scrollable virtual pages contain a plentitude of performer’s insights on par with those available from that other master of econo jamming Mike Watt. Eskelin’s expanded on the material over at his own URL, but my fond opinion of the original home was jogged pleasantly by the advent of this new DVD, entitled simply and appropriately On the Road With Ellery Eskelin w/ Andrea Parkins & Jim Black.

Eskelin packed along a camcorder on the band’s 2003 European Tour. On a whim he taped segments of the itinerary, amassing twenty-five hours of film during the cross-continent journey. In the months following the band’s stateside return he whittled the footage down to an hour-long distillation. Sound and lighting quality varies depending upon the scene under scrutiny. Born out of necessity, the single camera approach lends to the feeling of being an invisible observer, an eavesdropping insect. In the opening scene the POV stays stationary and affords only a narrow field of vision. Ellery sits at a table conversing with a French presenter about the structure of an impending concert. The details of their dialogue end up strangely mirroring the layout of the DVD as a whole. Another short segment later in the program seamlessly intercuts snippets of the same tune from performances at several different venues to create a clever teleportation effect.

Solo performances from a gig in Nancy, France intersperse with a handful of ensemble episodes and plenty of downtime interludes. Eskelin’s solo segment pans in mid-sprint. Sans signature porkpie hat a sheen of sweat beads across his brow under the hot stage lights. His phrasing is feathery and nimble, but the overall impact feels somewhat compromised by the tampered context. He appears visibly fatigued by its end. Parkins’ plays both her sampler/keyboard/lap-top set-up and accordion, even a bit of piano. At one point the camcorder zooms in on close-up shots of her squeezebox, its sparkle-coated keys glinting in the bright club lighting. Elsewhere Black has a brief opportunity to demonstrate his collection of disassembled music box innards before his band mates interrupt his show-and-tell. The band’s humor is a plus too. Black waxes dryly philosophic on the simultaneous constancy and mutability of reality on tour. Later he and Parkins engage in a bout of mathematical theorizing on the expanding dimensions of her posterior.

The reception toward guest vocalist Jessica Constable (who recently completed work on the trio’s upcoming Hatology release) shares uncomfortable similarities to that accorded Irene Iebi in Steve Lacy’s numerous ensembles. Intimations of this skepticism crop up at various points in the program. Constable confronts them head on. I particularly got a kick out of the scene where, upon seeing a playbill for the trio with her name omitted, she requisitions a magic marker and inks herself into a position of prominence above Eskelin. But based on the actual performance samples I wasn’t won over by her style, which blends ululating wails with husky crooning and liberally employs electronic effects.

Touring is especially important in creative improvised music for numerous reasons. The widely held belief that it’s a form of expression is best experienced in person, at the occasion of creation is probably foremost among them. Other reasons involve the severe paucity of funding for promotion and the music’s already marginalized status when stacked against the so-called mainstream. Eskelin seems cannily aware of these realities and continually takes them in stride. The tour preserved by his prescient camcorder is clearly a grass roots affair. Local presenters beat the bushes for the funding and amenities for the trio through grant writing, fundraising and whatever means necessary. The venues are all small clubs, probably familiar to those of Eskelin’s peers fortunate enough to fly across the pond for gigs. No frills, but that’s a big part o the charm. This DVD set succeeds as both entertainment package and archival document mostly because of the idiosyncratic elements of Eskelin’s editing which manage to encapsulate so much of the touring experience.

~ Derek Taylor

On the Road With Ellery Eskelin w/ Andrea Parkins & Jim Black

Prime Source 3010

One of my favorite facets of the Hat Hut website is the section allocated for Ellery Eskelin. Its scrollable virtual pages contain a plentitude of performer’s insights on par with those available from that other master of econo jamming Mike Watt. Eskelin’s expanded on the material over at his own URL, but my fond opinion of the original home was jogged pleasantly by the advent of this new DVD, entitled simply and appropriately On the Road With Ellery Eskelin w/ Andrea Parkins & Jim Black.

Eskelin packed along a camcorder on the band’s 2003 European Tour. On a whim he taped segments of the itinerary, amassing twenty-five hours of film during the cross-continent journey. In the months following the band’s stateside return he whittled the footage down to an hour-long distillation. Sound and lighting quality varies depending upon the scene under scrutiny. Born out of necessity, the single camera approach lends to the feeling of being an invisible observer, an eavesdropping insect. In the opening scene the POV stays stationary and affords only a narrow field of vision. Ellery sits at a table conversing with a French presenter about the structure of an impending concert. The details of their dialogue end up strangely mirroring the layout of the DVD as a whole. Another short segment later in the program seamlessly intercuts snippets of the same tune from performances at several different venues to create a clever teleportation effect.

Solo performances from a gig in Nancy, France intersperse with a handful of ensemble episodes and plenty of downtime interludes. Eskelin’s solo segment pans in mid-sprint. Sans signature porkpie hat a sheen of sweat beads across his brow under the hot stage lights. His phrasing is feathery and nimble, but the overall impact feels somewhat compromised by the tampered context. He appears visibly fatigued by its end. Parkins’ plays both her sampler/keyboard/lap-top set-up and accordion, even a bit of piano. At one point the camcorder zooms in on close-up shots of her squeezebox, its sparkle-coated keys glinting in the bright club lighting. Elsewhere Black has a brief opportunity to demonstrate his collection of disassembled music box innards before his band mates interrupt his show-and-tell. The band’s humor is a plus too. Black waxes dryly philosophic on the simultaneous constancy and mutability of reality on tour. Later he and Parkins engage in a bout of mathematical theorizing on the expanding dimensions of her posterior.

The reception toward guest vocalist Jessica Constable (who recently completed work on the trio’s upcoming Hatology release) shares uncomfortable similarities to that accorded Irene Iebi in Steve Lacy’s numerous ensembles. Intimations of this skepticism crop up at various points in the program. Constable confronts them head on. I particularly got a kick out of the scene where, upon seeing a playbill for the trio with her name omitted, she requisitions a magic marker and inks herself into a position of prominence above Eskelin. But based on the actual performance samples I wasn’t won over by her style, which blends ululating wails with husky crooning and liberally employs electronic effects.

Touring is especially important in creative improvised music for numerous reasons. The widely held belief that it’s a form of expression is best experienced in person, at the occasion of creation is probably foremost among them. Other reasons involve the severe paucity of funding for promotion and the music’s already marginalized status when stacked against the so-called mainstream. Eskelin seems cannily aware of these realities and continually takes them in stride. The tour preserved by his prescient camcorder is clearly a grass roots affair. Local presenters beat the bushes for the funding and amenities for the trio through grant writing, fundraising and whatever means necessary. The venues are all small clubs, probably familiar to those of Eskelin’s peers fortunate enough to fly across the pond for gigs. No frills, but that’s a big part o the charm. This DVD set succeeds as both entertainment package and archival document mostly because of the idiosyncratic elements of Eskelin’s editing which manage to encapsulate so much of the touring experience.

~ Derek Taylor

Under Siege

Think Masada. Think The Alamo. Then think again ‘cause we ain’t goin’ out like that. The last couple weeks have seen a surge in Spam on-site. I just zapped plugs for ejaculation cream and blackjack & there are sure to be more to follow. The latest ones have been cloaked in the flimsy guise of congratulatory praise (kinda like the easy to spot rubber-skinned terminators). Anyone have a quick & simple solution so we can kick these jackasses in their respective scroats? Moné? Dear readers? For all I know there’s just the right ammunition already built into the Bags chassis to skeet shoot these motherfuckers into oblivion.

John Russell/Ute Völker/Mathieu Werchowski - Three Planets

Russell/Völker/Werchowski
Three Planets
Emanem 4106

Beetlegeuse! Beetlegeuse! Beetlegeuse! Collective improvisation as refreshing as Weihenstephaner in the stifling September heat, the prolific Martin Davidson offers this bundling of guitarist John Russell, accordionist Ute Völker and violinist Mathieu Werchowski recorded in November of 2003 at the home of the Emanem producer. Breaking my maiden with the latter two musicians, I must concede that a soft spot exists for the guitarist, who uncharacteristically flourishes machete at his instrument through much of the performance, rarely hinging things upon trademark chordal brooming and/or more conventional right-handed attack.

Eerie tonal compliances witnessed best in 'Little Litotes Blues' and the moving, quite melodic 'Zum Dreispiel' glue together a hearty volume of just under eighty minutes. At the initial minute mark of said “blues,” one can even discern that archetypal Vicksburg vamp. What of Russell that attracts me is his select proclivity toward a zone wherein I automatically superimpose some Western folk pattern, cicadas behind Robt. Pete Williams and Richie Havens' plectrum.

The French violinist's long, singular lines change the color of things while he often remains concurrently atop the trio--the sun trying to sneak past the rooster, Völker billowing and sinking to the floor, toying with the listener’s notions of fore and aft. Werchowski’s is a very different approach aligned with current stringéd kin, more furtive and compacted. At instances he locks up with the lungs of the accordion in deference to Russell; black leather clad deviants breathing heavily in a big room with maroon walls.

To this music’s credit, the accordion is often courted and played around. Ute’s quavers recall the nether register of Dolphy’s bass clarinet beneath the introduction to ‘Spritual’ at the Vanguard and by turns some old, haunting church organ. Doubtless inspired by the time of year/listening conditions, Three Planets indicates climactic anomaly, a portent of autumn's dryness and thick sweatshirts. Each are aware of their destination and each cognizant of the rocky path ahead. Exactly how these three maintain such an even weight throughout is puzzling and attractive in itself. . . like a Shriners motorcade or a well balanced midfield, continually having to weave around the other, swinging back with intense patience until the time to charge is certain. I am reminded of the burgeoning queue to Tonic’s bar in a panic after Rowe and Fennesz performed respectively, minutes prior to their collaboration: befuddled, astonished people asking one another “How can this work?” “How will they possibly be able to pull back from one another?”

This is ribald parlour music, woodcut allegorical. . .worthy of your time and grip. The cover art is excruciating and the titles Flecktone kitsch (‘Pachyderm’s Canon’?) but I am glad to have met this violin and accordion and hope this trio continues to record.

~Michael Schaumann

Fahrenheit 9/11

I don't really need Michael Moore to point propaganda out to me. I am confident that I know propaganda when I see it. The trouble is, while the tone of Fahrenheit 9/11 is propagandistic, once you mute Moore's voiceover, tune out his smirking use of licensed music (Joey Scarbury's theme song for The Greatest American Hero -- "Who could it be? / Believe it or not, it's just me" -- and R.E.M.'s otherwise irredeemable "Shiny Happy People", here playing behind a montage of the Bush Jr. and Sr. glad-handing with King Fahd, Prince Bandar and other prominent Saudis), blow away the hot air pumped out by his talking heads, and cleansed your palate of stock footage, you are left with images whose veracity -- I hesitate to use the term truth-value -- could never be obscured, much less played up, by means of cropping or editing. These are the kinds of images that would be undeniably persuasive -- or chilling, or enraging, or heart-breaking, or... -- regardless of what factors into their presentation. They are the kind of images that do not tell me anything I did not already know about the current President of the United States -- for a Texan, and, worse, a Dallasite such as myself, a homegrown horror -- or, for that matter, human nature. But they do remind me of many things I wish I could forget.

Case in point: Moore dedicates a significant portion of Fahrenheit 9/11 to telling his audience a little more about the composition of the U.S. Armed Forces who have been sent to war in Iraq. It is a brave move, and one that issues a challenge to any self-styled patriot who mouths off about "supporting our troops" as if good wishes and distant sympathy wrapped in yellow ribbons could substitute for a working knowledge of a soldier as an individual. So we see the wounded and maimed working towards recovery, and we see snapshots of those who have been killed in action and hear their survivors read the letters they sent home. We see Marine recruiters working a lower middle-class mall, employing dirty tricks -- "Just let me confirm your personal information so I can mark you off my list as someone I've spoken to..." -- in order to fill quotas. Moore goes one to replay Army recruiting video in which perfectly fit (polygonal) CGI service men and women "withstand", "achieve", and "earn money for college". By the close of the clip, these figures are no longer dodging flak in helicopters but have risen to a mountaintop, where, with the algorithmic sun brilliant behind them, they morph in and out of uniforms and civilian clothes. As if the transformations under consideration were that smooth and seamless and possible with a few key-strokes. We are presented with paid actors in Halliburton advertisements portraying soldiers who benefit from that corporation's unalloyed altruism: hot meals, warm blankets, telephone service back home ("It's a girl!"). But mostly we see very young men and women, most of them barely out of their teens, pimply, gawky, in need of braces, their heads swallowed up by heavy helmets, talking about their fear, their confusion, their disgust with the carnage around them, and the adrenaline rush they feel when they enter combat.

Moore never quotes any statistics to the effect that those who have enlisted for military service in the past, say, 6 or 7 years share specific or a specific set of demographic characteristics -- namely, that, as he claims, many of these "good kids" come from America's disenfranchised classes. Either the absence of such figures is a misstep on Moore's part, or such numbers do not exist. Given the Pentagon's mania for information, "intelligence" about its own forces, I find it hard to believe that this information has not been collected. Whether it is a matter of public record is something else altogether. What is a matter of public record, however, what is included in Fahrenheit 9/11 because, I have to surmise, it does not constitute any threat to national security, are the comments of one soldier about the music he and the rest of his armored vehicle battalion listen to during their engagements with the "enemy". He tells us that they jacked into the Bradley's communications system with their CD player and fired their shells into the heart of Baghdad to the accompaniment of The Bloodhound Gang's "Fire Water Burn".

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Hello my name is Jimmy Pop and I'm a dumb white guy
I'm not old or new but middle school fifth grade like junior high
So I don't know mofo if y'all peeps be buggin' give props to my ho cause she all fly
But I can take the heat cause I'm the other white meat known as "Kid Funky Fried"
Yea I'm hung like planet Pluto hard to see with the naked eye
But if I crashed into Uranus I would stick it where the sun don't shine
Cause I'm kind of like Han Solo always stroking my own wookie
I'm the root of all that's evil yea but you can call me cookie

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Yo yo this hard-core ghetto gangster image takes a lot of practice
I'm not black like Barry White no I am white like Frank Black is
So if man is five and the devil is six than that must make me seven
This honkey's gone to heaven
But if I go to hell then I hope I burn well
I'll spend my days with J.F.K., Marvin Gaye, Martha Raye, and Lawrence Welk
And Kurt Cobain, Kojak, Mark Twain and Jimi Hendrix's poltergeist
And Webster yea Emmanuel Lewis cause he's the anti-Christ

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Everybody here we go
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Throw your hands in the air
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Wave 'em like you don't care
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Everbody say ho
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Everybody here we go

The "burn motherfucker burn" refrain is what kept them motivated. Football players do much the same thing before their clashes, using angry sounds to psych themselves up. Yet, the rest of this song seems superfluous, especially as you can visualize -- its easy, really -- Baghdad itself engulfed in an incantatory rhythm of yellow and white flames and oily, dogshit-brown smoke. Apparently, catharsis is no advantage on the field of battle, unless it is something you induce in your opponent. Then you know for certain they are overthrown. Gives one a new sense of the sounds to be heard over the Al-Jazeera network, what those wails and cries of "Allahu Akbar!" reverberating around every bombed civilian target in Iraq mean, doesn't it? And how would you feel if you discovered your favorite style of music were being used in this manner? If Diamanda Galas, Cosmos, Gogoroth, Henri Pousseur, Hair Police, The White Stripes, Big Mama Thornton, Beth Orton, Elmer Bernstein, Pete Seeger, Skinny Puppy or Joe Maneri were used in the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay? Would you find fault with the music itself? How might you explain away the efficacy of such sounds when put inhumane ends? Is there a good measure for the perversity with which these acts are undertaken?

What is it that Kim Greist's character (Jill Layton) says in Terry Gilliam's Brazil to paranoid fantasist Sam Lowrey (Jonathan Pryce)? "How many terrorists have you actually met, Sam?" And he answer he never gives but should have: "You mean other than myself?".

Martial music is part of any war, of course. In recent times, music as brutal noise has also been part of many psy/ops actions. Few music nuts I know were immune to the irony of the U.S. military aiming high decibels of hard rock at Manuel Noriega in an attempt to drive out of his compound, given how vital cocaine had more than likely been to the creation of the music itself. But the current hostilities in Iraq make more a war unlike any other in this country's history. I myself cannot read these "rap-metal" lyrics without thinking about, rather than being an anomaly, they are just another expression of the same, often envious, racial fantasies that have always been important in American pop music. Al Jolson. Johnny Otis. Cool vs. hard; East Coast vs. West Coast. Elvis Presley. The Twist. Motown. The Rolling Stones. Soldiers in Vietnam turning their tanks into giant boomboxes blasting Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" as they decimated one village after another (according to Hammer Of The Gods author Stephen Davis). Disco. Michael Jackson. Ice-T's Home Invasion. Kid Rock. And so forth. I'm not bothered by the fact that this Bloodhound Gang song "advocates" violence. I think, stupid and unenlightened by irony as those lyrics are, they still employ metaphors of destruction that, in true American fashion, sprawl over a number of associations and experiences -- sexual conquest chief among them. What does bother me is that, in this one small incident in a gigantic horror, what is otherwise the empty boasting of an African-American stereotype, a symbol of social dysfunction in America, has become the agent of American might, American right, and American vengeance. Don't they know that "motherfucker" need not be an insult, a challenging thump in the chest, a dehumanizing taunt thrown down at a vanquished foe; "motherfucker" can be a term of respect, and an honor earned? Are they so ignorant of their own culture? It is all especially disconcerting to me when I think too about those who are defending valor in Iraq, under circumstances in which valor is surely hard to find.

We can all argue endlessly about the nature of this war, whether it is being waged over oil and profit margins, whether it was a purely political stratagem intended to convince a rattled electorate that indeed what is needed is a "war president", whether it is a contest between good and evil, where the terrorists were, whether Saddam Hussein was a threat or not. Sure, we can and will, while the muddle of aggression in the Middle East boils hotter and hotter. What I do think is inarguable, however, is that, in many ways, this war being fought on other continent is a domestic conflict that its combatants have chosen to fight on foreign soil. In that respect, I guess Operation Iraqi Freedom is not all that different from the First World War. When small men are cursed with huge fortunes... Osama bin Laden re-made the World Trade Center and the lives and deaths of those inside the towers into a staging area for his own hatred of the ruling Saudi regime -- which includes his own family. The Coalition of the Willing is killing men, women and children who we are assured are "evil" in order to preserve an unsustainable way of life that has outgrown the ideals in which it originated.

As he is compelled to do, Moore repeatedly brings his film's focus back down to the town of his birth, Flint, Michigan. He speaks to a group of African-American high schoolers, not a one of them naive about the deplorable economic prospects waiting for them on the other side of graduation, about the rewards of military service. They tell Moore that the recruiters are very active on their campuses, and, when asked who among them is related to someone or is friendly with someone who is in the Armed Forces, they all raise their hands. Of course, it could be a cherry-picked group of individuals, carefully screened and artfully coached (wardrobe here seems suspiciously coordinated). When one of the young men mentions how he has been watching the news lately and looking at reports on the devastation in Iraq, only to reflect on how the bombed-out buildings on television resemble the downtown Flint he has always known, one could be excused for momentarily wondering if the young man is reading from a script. He is so "on message", as Karl Rove's Team Bush likes to say of their candidate, that one might hear rhetoric. But listen again, because his articulation is somewhat unsure, and he sounds nervous about making the connection he has made. Is his voice tremulous less with incredulous laughter ("can-you-believe-it-its-happening-all-over-again?") than with disenchantment? I hear it differently, in fact; he is singing a lament, and not just for himself.

~ Joe Milazzo

Shelly Manne / Jack Marshall - Sounds! (Capitol)

Stereo.

Enough has already been written in the last decade about the hi-fi culture of prosperous mid-century America to make this a rather short entry, but it is worth remarking that the duet setting is a rather intimate one on which to base a "sound spectacular". For that is what you get with this LP, the sound of two highly professional musicians enjoying each other's backstage conversation. The recording itself -- by Hugh Davies -- is both up-close and spacious: a classic example of the kind of analog sound that audiophiles still pine after.

Jack Marshall plays guitar "Classical Gas"-style throughout; fun enough. But it is Shelly Manne, one of the most unfailingly musical drummers in the jazz idiom -- cf. his Impulse! 2, 3, 4, recorded about the same time as this session -- who raises this LP to the level of the extraordinary. Manne seems to have lugged every exotic percussion instrument in his private collection into the studio with him, and he uses each maraca, steel drum, wood block, Philippino loo-jon, tambourine, boo-bam, suitcase and piece of discarded cardboard to restore some color to faded popular fare such as the theme from Lawrence Of Arabia, "Am I Blue?" and "Yesterdays". Outsider euphony by the likes of Orientalists Harry Partch, John Cage and Colin McPhee, as well as neo-Viking Moondog, plays in the background of many of these pieces, though the arrangements on Sounds! circumnavigate the Southern hemisphere. There is also the sense that Manne's work here anticipates that of Roscoe Mitchell's groups in that leader's fascination with "little instruments". Or at least anticipates it as much as Capitol was trying to cash in on the phenomenal success of Enoch Light's Persuasive Percussion recordings. Yet, if we have learned nothing in the post-hip-hop age, it is that you take your avant-garde wherever you can get it. Traditions are just waiting to happen.

Not bad for a record by a couple of "squares" (as seen from this end of the telescope), jacketed in a fairly tame -- I won't go so far as to say "classy" -- cheesecake cover, no doubt sold simply as accessory to a bachelor pad evening of grilled steaks, dry martinis, "low-tar" cigarettes, and necking with the secretary on the bearskin rug.

~ Joe Milazzo

Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll

I don't really need Michael Moore to point propaganda out to me. I am confident that I know propaganda when I see it. The trouble is, while the tone of Fahrenheit 9/11 is propagandistic, once you mute Moore's voiceover, tune out his smirking use of licensed music (Joey Scarbury's theme song for The Greatest American Hero -- "Who could it be? / Believe it or not, it's just me" -- and R.E.M.'s otherwise irredeemable "Shiny Happy People", here playing behind a montage of the Bush Jr. and Sr. glad-handing with King Fahd, Prince Bandar and other prominent Saudis), blow away the hot air pumped out by his talking heads, and cleansed your palate of stock footage, you are left with images whose veracity -- I hesitate to use the term truth-value -- could never be obscured, much less played up, by means of cropping or editing. These are the kinds of images that would be undeniably persuasive -- or chilling, or enraging, or heart-breaking, or... -- regardless of what factors into their presentation. They are the kind of images that do not tell me anything I did not already know about the current President of the United States -- for a Texan, and, worse, a Dallasite such as myself, a homegrown horror -- or, for that matter, human nature. But they do remind me of many things I wish I could forget.

Case in point: Moore dedicates a significant portion of Fahrenheit 9/11 to telling his audience a little more about the composition of the U.S. Armed Forces who have been sent to war in Iraq. It is a brave move, and one that issues a challenge to any self-styled patriot who mouths off about "supporting our troops" as if good wishes and distant sympathy wrapped in yellow ribbons could substitute for a working knowledge of a soldier as an individual. So we see the wounded and maimed working towards recovery, and we see snapshots of those who have been killed in action and hear their survivors read the letters they sent home. We see Marine recruiters working a lower middle-class mall, employing dirty tricks -- "Just let me confirm your personal information so I can mark you off my list as someone I've spoken to..." -- in order to fill quotas. Moore goes one to replay Army recruiting video in which perfectly fit (polygonal) CGI service men and women "withstand", "achieve", and "earn money for college". By the close of the clip, these figures are no longer dodging flak in helicopters but have risen to a mountaintop, where, with the algorithmic sun brilliant behind them, they morph in and out of uniforms and civilian clothes. As if the transformations under consideration were that smooth and seamless and possible with a few key-strokes. We are presented with paid actors in Halliburton advertisements portraying soldiers who benefit from that corporation's unalloyed altruism: hot meals, warm blankets, telephone service back home ("It's a girl!"). But mostly we see very young men and women, most of them barely out of their teens, pimply, gawky, in need of braces, their heads swallowed up by heavy helmets, talking about their fear, their confusion, their disgust with the carnage around them, and the adrenaline rush they feel when they enter combat.

Moore never quotes any statistics to the effect that those who have enlisted for military service in the past, say, 6 or 7 years share specific or a specific set of demographic characteristics -- namely, that, as he claims, many of these "good kids" come from America's disenfranchised classes. Either the absence of such figures is a misstep on Moore's part, or such numbers do not exist. Given the Pentagon's mania for information, "intelligence" about its own forces, I find it hard to believe that this information has not been collected. Whether it is a matter of public record is something else altogether. What is a matter of public record, however, what is included in Fahrenheit 9/11 because, I have to surmise, it does not constitute any threat to national security, are the comments of one soldier about the music he and the rest of his armored vehicle battalion listen to during their engagements with the "enemy". He tells us that they jacked into the Bradley's communications system with their CD player and fired their shells into the heart of Baghdad to the accompaniment of The Bloodhound Gang's "Fire Water Burn".

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Hello my name is Jimmy Pop and I'm a dumb white guy
I'm not old or new but middle school fifth grade like junior high
So I don't know mofo if y'all peeps be buggin' give props to my ho cause she all fly
But I can take the heat cause I'm the other white meat known as "Kid Funky Fried"
Yea I'm hung like planet Pluto hard to see with the naked eye
But if I crashed into Uranus I would stick it where the sun don't shine
Cause I'm kind of like Han Solo always stroking my own wookie
I'm the root of all that's evil yea but you can call me cookie

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Yo yo this hard-core ghetto gangster image takes a lot of practice
I'm not black like Barry White no I am white like Frank Black is
So if man is five and the devil is six than that must make me seven
This honkey's gone to heaven
But if I go to hell then I hope I burn well
I'll spend my days with J.F.K., Marvin Gaye, Martha Raye, and Lawrence Welk
And Kurt Cobain, Kojak, Mark Twain and Jimi Hendrix's poltergeist
And Webster yea Emmanuel Lewis cause he's the anti-Christ

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Everybody here we go
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Throw your hands in the air
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Wave 'em like you don't care
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Everbody say ho
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Everybody here we go

The "burn motherfucker burn" refrain is what kept them motivated. Football players do much the same thing before their clashes, using angry sounds to psych themselves up. Yet, the rest of this song seems superfluous, especially as you can visualize -- its easy, really -- Baghdad itself engulfed in an incantatory rhythm of yellow and white flames and oily, dogshit-brown smoke. Apparently, catharsis is no advantage on the field of battle, unless it is something you induce in your opponent. Then you know for certain they are overthrown. Gives one a new sense of the sounds to be heard over the Al-Jazeera network, what those wails and cries of "Allahu Akbar!" reverberating around every bombed civilian target in Iraq mean, doesn't it? And how would you feel if you discovered your favorite style of music were being used in this manner? If Diamanda Galas, Cosmos, Gogoroth, Henri Pousseur, Hair Police, The White Stripes, Big Mama Thornton, Beth Orton, Elmer Bernstein, Pete Seeger, Skinny Puppy or Joe Maneri were used in the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay? Would you find fault with the music itself? How might you explain away the efficacy of such sounds when put inhumane ends? Is there a good measure for the perversity with which these acts are undertaken?

What is it that Kim Greist's character (Jill Layton) says in Terry Gilliam's Brazil to paranoid fantasist Sam Lowrey (Jonathan Pryce)? "How many terrorists have you actually met, Sam?" And he answer he never gives but should have: "You mean other than myself?".

Martial music is part of any war, of course. In recent times, music as brutal noise has also been part of many psy/ops actions. Few music nuts I know were immune to the irony of the U.S. military aiming high decibels of hard rock at Manuel Noriega in an attempt to drive out of his compound, given how vital cocaine had more than likely been to the creation of the music itself. But the current hostilities in Iraq make more a war unlike any other in this country's history. I myself cannot read these "rap-metal" lyrics without thinking about, rather than being an anomaly, they are just another expression of the same, often envious, racial fantasies that have always been important in American pop music. Al Jolson. Johnny Otis. Cool vs. hard; East Coast vs. West Coast. Elvis Presley. The Twist. Motown. The Rolling Stones. Soldiers in Vietnam turning their tanks into giant boomboxes blasting Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" as they decimated one village after another (according to Hammer Of The Gods author Stephen Davis). Disco. Michael Jackson. Ice-T's Home Invasion. Kid Rock. And so forth. I'm not bothered by the fact that this Bloodhound Gang song "advocates" violence. I think, stupid and unenlightened by irony as those lyrics are, they still employ metaphors of destruction that, in true American fashion, sprawl over a number of associations and experiences -- sexual conquest chief among them. What does bother me is that, in this one small incident in a gigantic horror, what is otherwise the empty boasting of an African-American stereotype, a symbol of social dysfunction in America, has become the agent of American might, American right, and American vengeance. Don't they know that "motherfucker" need not be an insult, a challenging thump in the chest, a dehumanizing taunt thrown down at a vanquished foe; "motherfucker" can be a term of respect, and an honor earned? Are they so ignorant of their own culture? It is all especially disconcerting to me when I think too about those who are defending valor in Iraq, under circumstances in which valor is surely hard to find.

We can all argue endlessly about the nature of this war, whether it is being waged over oil and profit margins, whether it was a purely political stratagem intended to convince a rattled electorate that indeed what is needed is a "war president", whether it is a contest between good and evil, where the terrorists were, whether Saddam Hussein was a threat or not. Sure, we can and will, while the muddle of aggression in the Middle East boils hotter and hotter. What I do think is inarguable, however, is that, in many ways, this war being fought on other continent is a domestic conflict that its combatants have chosen to fight on foreign soil. In that respect, I guess Operation Iraqi Freedom is not all that different from the First World War. When small men are cursed with huge fortunes... Osama bin Laden re-made the World Trade Center and the lives and deaths of those inside the towers into a staging area for his own hatred of the ruling Saudi regime -- which includes his own family. The Coalition of the Willing is killing men, women and children who we are assured are "evil" in order to preserve an unsustainable way of life that has outgrown the ideals in which it originated.

As he is compelled to do, Moore repeatedly brings his film's focus back down to the town of his birth, Flint, Michigan. He speaks to a group of African-American high schoolers, not a one of them naive about the deplorable economic prospects waiting for them on the other side of graduation, about the rewards of military service. They tell Moore that the recruiters are very active on their campuses, and, when asked who among them is related to someone or is friendly with someone who is in the Armed Forces, they all raise their hands. Of course, it could be a cherry-picked group of individuals, carefully screened and artfully coached (wardrobe here seems suspiciously coordinated). When one of the young men mentions how he has been watching the news lately and looking at reports on the devastation in Iraq, only to reflect on how the bombed-out buildings on television resemble the downtown Flint he has always known, one could be excused for momentarily wondering if the young man is reading from a script. He is so "on message", as Karl Rove's Team Bush likes to say of their candidate, that one might hear rhetoric. But listen again, because his articulation is somewhat unsure, and he sounds nervous about making the connection he has made. Is his voice tremulous less with incredulous laughter ("can-you-believe-it-its-happening-all-over-again?") than with disenchantment? I hear it differently, in fact; he is singing a lament, and not just for himself.

Billy Taylor Trio - Warming Up!

Milestone 47103-3

In the 1953 Seussian cinematic fantasia The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T the titular villain absconds with an army of prepubescent pianists and forces them to practice in perpetuity. The real Dr. T (recipient of doctorate from U-Mass) never hatched a plan so nefarious. But in light of his library of achievements as composer, educator and all-purpose jazz ambassador over the years it’s easy to imagine him having numerous pairs of hands at his command. Taylor remains a national treasure, a professor par excellence in pianistic pedigrees from stride through postbop.

This new Milestone two-fer folds back the calendar pages to the spring of 60’ and winter of 61’ respectively, combining two chestnuts from Taylor’s early catalog. The first album was commissioned by a radio-transcription firm (one of the several side gigs the pianist worked during the nascency of his career). Only three of the dozen cuts crack the three-minute mark and in each case just barely. What’s surprising is the amount of room given Grimes to solo, especially considering the original objective of the record and the terse track lengths. He works against the swiftly ticking clock on pieces like “That’s Where It Is” sculpting adroit improvisations that exploit the springy elasticity of his strings.

The second album in the compilation comes from a Moodsville concept date for Prestige recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs enclave and simply titled Interlude. Taylor took as his inspiration the emotions that accompany a love affair from first flirtations to final resignations. Watkins holds down the bass chair this time out and drummer Ray Mosca returns on the traps. The nine tunes, all originals, allow for slightly longer expository space, and Taylor once again shares the floor liberally with his sidemen. It’s a real treat to compare the styles of Grimes and Watkins so closely, both men favoring fingerings that emphasize the warm, bottom registers of their instruments and natural gut strings. Mosca does another competent job varying the rhythms and keeping steady time.

Highlights of the relaxed second set include the bright blushing chords of “You Tempt Me” and the contrastingly heavy-hearted “All Alone,” which when rendered in Taylor’s optimistic elegance still can’t help but affect an undercurrent of amiability. In typical Moodsville fashion the studio demeanor is one of cozy calm. It’s an ambience perfectly captured in the snapshot that adorns the back traycard. Taylor, lying on the floor of his living room, arms crossed behind his head, cheeks puffed in a satisfied smile, listening to an LP on his hi-fi.

~ Derek Taylor

A Veritable Dorwardcopia

Some may already be hip to our man Nate Dorward’s new web-based repository of works past & present, but just in case there some not yet in the know, here’s a heartfelt plug. Nate’s been a regular here at Bags & other haunts on the net for quite awhile, mixing things up with his polished (sometimes pointed) prose and adding to the flavor & color that makes this site what it is. Things are still under construction at ndorward.com, but there’s already a healthy supply of music reviews in the easily accessible queue (poetry section soon to follow). Hardhats & safety goggles available upon entry. So a hearty doff of the cap to Nate’s new enterprise. As Bob Rusch is known to say: “check it out and please do tell a friend.”

Jaco Pastorius - Trio: Live In New York City, Volume 2 (Big World)

I’m a resident of the Stanley Clarke camp when it comes to electric jazz bass. Clarke’s contributions to Return to Forever were that band’s primary saving grace in my book. Plus he gave Sam Rivers some serious competition for the mantle of coolest coifed afro in the Seventies. I’ve only had dalliances with the discography of Jaco. A completely solo disc culled from Italian gigs nabbed in 92’ served as a faulty indoctrination and I quickly lost interest. Over the years though the curiosity kept creeping back and eyeing this disc in a used bin recently I handed over half a sawbuck to take it home. It’s part of a seven volume set and a bit unusual in that Jaco opts for a fretted axe. The tune choices are fairly telling of the date’s age and the trio’s decision to open with the antiquated “Wipe Out” doesn’t help the case for a cutting edge designation. Art Pepper’s “Straight Life,” rendered surprisingly straight, leads into more pop cover fare like “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Dear Prudence.” On the latter Hiram Bullock squashes his notes with a wah-wah pedal, squirting them out like squiggles of ochre acrylic squeezed from tumescent paint tube. The guitarist even accesses his inner arena rock child for the groove staple “Ode to Billie Joe” coaxing out hard crunching power chords at the conclusion while drummer Kenwood Dennard lays down a fair share of healthy funk. “Continuum” becomes a bit lost in sparkly echo-etched riffing and turgid noodling. “Three Views of a Secret” proves a snoozer too as both Jaco and Bullock switch to corny organ-style keyboards. But the Meters’ “Cissy Strut” is another matter, the prime conduit for his percolating fingerings as he plays Porter Jr. to Bullock’s Nocentelli. The cover photo is a kepper too, picturing Pastorius with aquamarine Rasta cap and tye dye tunic, sporting his usual look of smug constipation. Creative blockage gets piped through his contorted countenance leaving his cerebrum and fingers free to conspire in crafting those furiously fibrillating runs. Sure it’s sloppy and overly bombastic in spots, but I’m betting that’s just how Jaco was the majority of the time in person. This after all was a man whose insufferable ego could easily occupy its own zip code.

The Vandermark Challenge

It's safe to bet that following a reading of Ken Vandermark's "Defining Terms, Pt. 1," in the All About Jazz forums, many writers are going to react with, "Wow, Ken sure hates journalists."

When I heard this morning about KV's "column," I was very interested to learn what he had to say. He's an enigma, really, only in the most non-mysterious way. I'm at odds with the majority of his music, but so am I with Black Sabbath. As a player, Vandermark has been called a number of things. Wayward. Inconsistent. Genius. Copycat. Pacemaker. The Glue. My personal opinion varies from one record to the next, and the same with each of his compositions, but not so much with his live performances, which can be very entertaining. Should that opinion be considered "serious" because I'm a writer with my own webspace and my own forum to spout about whatever, whenever I want? Not necessarily. My opinion is only as "serious" as Joe Reader takes it.

This week I have for the second time come to the associative defense of Bagatellen for what some may consider to be irresponsible writing. In that defense, I was prompted to point out that, in many instances, a review or editorial tends to say more about the person doing the writing than the subject being addressed. It is precisely this dynamic that feeds Milazzo's interest in Whitney Balliett. But not only does Balliett himself come off as interesting in his writing, he leaves little doubt that he knows his subject. He can be trusted, right?

While it may be a lot to ask when you consider the growing pool of amateur and professional writers at work on the various digital and paper music journals in the world, according to Vandermark, we should all strive to be someone like Balliett, or Ekkehard Jost. And I don't blame him in the least. KV accuses writers of using terms like "Free Jazz," "Experimental Music," "European Free Improv," and "Avant Garde" interchangeably, and he is correct. He challenges people interested in improvisational music to more clearly define the genres, techniques, and customs that serve as headers to many of the topics addressed in music writing. I agree. Since my initial interest, I've been at odds with not just the label for "electro-acoustic" music, but also with that music's implications, its hierarchy of talent, and even its general history, this last an area that isn't even close to agreed upon among the many enthusiasts who comment here at this site.

KV says more, and I fundamentally agree with his concerns, at least in "Part 1". A responsible reader, I'll get to "Part 2" when I have more time to digest it. In the interest of continuity, I have pasted Vandermark's first offering from the public AAJ site below. Or, go here to follow the whole discussion and other KV entries.

Holy Moley!

Last night I scored a junkie’s taste. Eremite honcho Michael Ehlers was in town visiting his friend Emel who, incidentally, hosts The International Jazz Conspiracy on KFAI, the most adventurous radio show on the Twin Cities airwaves IMO. In joining them for a delicious repast at Emel’s Afghani restaurant Khyber Pass I was privy to some excellent chewing of the fat on topics ranging from wisdom gleaned touring with Brötzmann to the perennial debate over Spirit Room acoustics. Racing over to the radio station & arriving just under the wire of Emel’s studio start time, we hung out while Traffic, Bodega and Christian Marclay beamed out to an unknown number of listeners. Then Michael pulled IT from a cardboard box he’d unassumingly been carrying under his arm.

My own handful of discs, grabbed on the fly from glove compartment of my car (Eddie Davis w/ Shirley Scott Roulette two-fer, Prince Lasha’s Inside Story, Wild Bill Davison’s Commodore Master Takes and Christopher Cauley’s FINland), immediately seemed superfluous. I spot-checked the address label on the box, typed out to one Byron Coley, then returned my expectant gaze to the black carved faux onyx box Michael cradled in his mitts. HOLY GHOST.

Figuring out how to open the lid was a bit like sussing out the hidden release mechanism behind a Chinese mystery box. Once exposed the contents continued to flabbergast. The folks at Revenant have outdone themselves with this thing. The hardcover book- all 208 pages worth- is a compendium of absolute beauty. Chock-full of impossibly rare photos (in color & b&w) along with essays and insanely detailed annotations [Ben Young is a glorious madman when it comes to minutiae]. A reproduction of a vintage issue of Cricket magazine, a poetry book by Paul Haines, a postcard of young Albert… the damn thing even has dried leaves from a Dogwood tree sequestered in a tiny mylar sleeve.

As fascinating as these trappings are the music is the sweetest draw & we quickly set about trying to pick a track for airplay. Zigzagging fingers scrolled down the printed session details- names like Cecil Taylor, Frank Wright and Sam Rivers leaping out- finally settling upon the medley of “Venus/Upper and Lower Egypt” taped at the Renaissance Club, NYC 68’. The band: Pharoah, Albert, Dave Burrell, Sirone & Roger Blank along with an unknown alto and trumpet players. The piece opened with a crisply recorded solo from Blank who steadily built up a head of gasket-blowing of steam. Pharoah came next, starting deceptively low-key before twisting off the cork and loosing geysers of squealing multiphonics. It’s here where Emel cranked the volume and the studio was suddenly awash in the torrent of sounds. Grins suffused our faces as we kept drinking it in. Michael turned to Emel, “Man, how can you possibly follow that up?” Emel’s resigned reply: “yes, the show might as well be over now.”

On Perpetual Buzzing

Inspired by Joe’s recent post, allow me a few on screen inches in the telling of my own tale of sonic perturbation.

I have tinnitus. It is a fate that I imagine to be somewhere between the having of hemorrhoids and mild eczema. Generally, I place my acquisition of this disorder somewhere in the fall of 2002, after seeing a (pretty exceptional) Black Dice concert, and not being able to hear quite properly afterwards. It escapes me whether or not I had this irritation beforehand, likely it’s in part a product of living in New York City, listening to too much music on headphones, and seeing altogether too many noise shows in reverberant basements. Occasionally I like to dream that it is the product of my wisdom teeth coming in, or my having some exotic jaw disorder, but the likelihood of either of these being the cause is low. Fuck.

For a quick reference, think about what would it be like if Sachiko M was perpetually playing a solo concert in one’s skull. Take the changes in timbre and stretch them out across days, and add as her collaborators the 7 train grinding away above 65th st, low traffic moans and emergency sirens. Every day is a study in contrasts; the noise of the city plays against the high pitched whirring and subsides, leaving the sine pulse space for a long solo while I’m working in the library.

Yes, it is massively annoying. For whatever reason, it is more difficult to tune out than other constant sounds that my body makes - respirating, heart thumping, etc, and seems to pop to attention in my aural field very regularly. It’s odd to think of a sound that’s produced by the hearing mechanism itself. Maybe ignorance of those common body sounds is hardwired, but we’re still programmed to respond to alien frequencies such as these with suspicion? It feels always foreign, maybe I’ll get used to it sometime down the road, but as for now, this seems not likely.

But in all of this chagrining, an interesting thing has happened. The process of constantly paying attention to my hearing, partially to prevent further hearing damage, has given me closer understanding of the subtleties of my aural experience of the world. I’m paying better attention to what sounds are making it in through the ears, and which ones come from vibration through other parts of my body (considering that I spend about 1 ½ hours everyday on subways and platforms, there’s more of this variety of experience than you’d think.) I didn’t realize how many there are, leaning your head onto the metal poles, windows and walls turns your head into a big contact microphone, you get the feeling that you’re hearing every imperfection of the metal of the tracks, all of the quirks of the brakes, the way the window sits in its molding, etc. And in trying to filter out the actual sound of the tinnitus from both the hum of the computer and from the music on (in this case Coelacanth’s “Mud Walls”, a fine piece of music) is worthwhile as well. I get a sense of the space that the music is taking up in the room - since in this case my head is higher than my speakers, the “high” sounds are from in-ear, and the “low” ones are from the record.

So, rather than push me away from listening, tinnitus has made me a better listener. This probably is due to the poverty of my faculty of discerning listening, but whatever works, I guess.

"From Treetop To Treetop"

Early one morning last week, I was startled awake by the sound of what I originally took to be fingers or perhaps needle-nose pliers seeking larcenous entry through the bay window on the east wall of my bedroom. Pulling myself out of one of my typically twisted postures of slumber, I sat and, rather than reaching for the Louisville Slugger I keep underneath the bed, listened in the stillness of my own anticipation. And as my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, I noticed the shadow of something vaguely bullet-shaped on the slats of the mini-blinds. It crept very gingerly towards an unknown target. Pulling back the blinds as if they were drapes -- I did not think to raise them -- I saw that what had raised the alarm was just a cicada that had wriggled its way in between the window and the window screen. What I had taken for the initial crepitations of breaking and entering were, in fact, just the nervous, perhaps even distressed, unfurlings of large, delicately-veined (and nearly useless) wings rattling against glass and tin. I fell heavily back to my pillow, and eventually drifted back off to sleep, comforting myself with thoughts about how, at the height of summer, these damn bugs never give me any rest.

If there is any sound that I associate with summer, it is cicadas. I'm not talking so much about the 17-year variety here -- periodical cicadas (Magicicada septendecim; Magicicada Cassini; Magicicada septendecula); a soil-aerating plague -- but the so-called "dog day" variety. They aren't locusts, as they are absent horns; still, their mud-brown molted shells, left crouched on any number of vertical structures, look like locusts. (As if Nature were telling you a parable about evolution as the sloughing off of lesser character.) The ones you hear then, I suppose, on July and August days when the noon sky is as white as a felled sycamore tree, and the temperature seems to ascend with each little amplification of the insects' synchronized "oooo-wheeeeoo-oooowheeeeoo-oooo-wheeeeoo". When the cicadas hit a certain pitch -- and they invariably do, over and over again -- it is almost as if your immediate surroundings, the very environment that both sustains and threatens you, is a giant tamboura. Each protracted chirp is an immeasurably tiny length of taut string, the air itself is a resonating chamber… music by colony. Amazing to think that it is all due to a membrane, a loose lid vibrating on a deep barrel. Dead, cicadas fold up and become oddly weightless, despite their girth. It is as if their song -- not the ability to sing, but the actual tones themselves -- accounted for the great percentage of their mass as well.

Does one hear in these cyclical melodies naught but Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw", the story of creatures that have endured, if not peacefully then through sheer, impassive procreative virtuosity, the extinction of generation upon generation of predators and pests? When I was a child, I used to humor myself with the thought that the cicadas' whirring, whining refrain jumped from tree to tree, that there was some relay or even responsorial at work. Over their very long life span, cicadas climb from (silently feeding?) grub state to the most outspread of branches, and so, from treetop to treetop, the frequencies would double, then quadruple, and the sound would overlap itself. Distances as they were measured back then -- back in the yard, down the block, to the school playground, past the stop sign, over the chain link fence -- would become confused. Now I know that this call is exclusively male, and a mating song. A competition. Cicada song, then, even if studied by hobbyists in the field of bioacoustics, is not music for leisure. It is sound as pheromone, and, like the raining honey-dew that is the cicadas' urine, this discharge is mediated sap.

Serious matters of survival are tied up in this languid buzz that hurtles towards a scream around sundown (Have different broods joined in? Or are the identical bugs now using different parts of themselves -- hindlegs or forelegs, thoraxes, wings -- to make and modify this familiar sound?). There's nothing really lazy about it, not even with the smells of weed-wacker gasoline, Good Humor popsicles, and pool chlorine wafting on the breezeless air. What must this song, so repetitive, sound like to the cicada? I don't mean "sound" here so much cognitively. I mean physically. I think, too, that I mean in terms of a substance in which you are plunged, or which radiates through you even as you are only an apportionment of its forces, by virtue of your anatomy. Is this sound visited upon your arthropod consciousness like a divine madness, or Greatness? Does your blood slosh about in sympathetic vibrations? Does the song seize your nerves through your senses; does it make you engage in helpless behaviors? As you sing, do you have to beat time, or is your rhythm entirely natural, a compulsion that displaces your individuality (as much as you, hiving and dispensable, can be said to possess one)? And, most of all, this noise, what does it set to tingling -- and where, and how?

Led Zeppelin - Presence (Swan Song)

The Song Remains the Same didn't suddenly make Led Zeppelin ludicrous; the film just confirmed for many of the band's critics how much of a caricature they had always been. Zeppelin had the loudest drummer, the busiest bassist, the sloppiest, most indulgent of guitar heroes, the lead singer with the biggest hair and the tightest trousers. They also had the phoniest anti-establishment stance (no interviews, no TV, no identfying marks on album covers, no singles in the UK), the roughest-necked of managers, the most exagerrated stage gimmicks -- "The Bow! The Bow!" -- and the most insensitive and avaracious "understanding" of African-American popular music ever (cf., "The Crunge", "Hats Off To Ray Harper", "The Lemon Song", and this album's "Royal Orleans").

Of course, this is all just another way of saying what a great rock and roll band Zeppelin was -- at least a far as rock and roll is an expression of the male libido. In many ways, Presence -- the only Zep album I still own -- is their purest record. Recorded on the cheap (for them) and on the fly (on tax exile) in Munich following Plant's infamous North African smash-up, the album is definitely a downer. But the band is so unbelievably tight here, and not just on the tunes -- "Achilles Last Stand", "Nobody's Fault But Mine" -- we all know from classic rock radio. Relatively minor works like the staggeringly sleazy "For Your Life" and the jumpy (but cynical) "Hots On For Nowhere" are as muggy with the same regret... or foreboding?... associated with many post-coital experiences, from speechlessly picking clothes up off the floor to being sprawled out in your own drying up, wondering when it will be safe to leave your partner to go stand under the shower.

Factor in some of Jimmy Page's finest work, including what may be his best solo on record on the slow blues "Tea For One", and you may have the best -- i.e., most true to life -- hot weather / hot places of the earth album ever made. By 1976, the year Presence was relased, the flame of Me Generation romance had not died; rather, romance had burned itself, as the cliche goes, to a crisp. And, as an icon of the following decade, Raymond Carver, liked to point out, we not only make our homes within cliches, we travel through them as well, collecting mementos and dispatching missives as we go. All Presence is missing is a postmark.

~ Joe Milazzo

two from hibari

Jean-Luc Guionnet
Tirets
Hibari
05

Alfredo Costa Monteiro/Ruth Barberan/Ferran Fages/Masahiko Okura/Masafumi Ezaki/Taku Unami
Atami
Hibari
03

Two discs with virtually nothing in common save for their label.

Hmmm…first Tilbury plays a bit of pipe organ in duo with Keith Rowe and now this. Although, in fairness, the five pipe organ improvisations on Guionnet’s disc were recorded between 2000 and 2001 in a Parisian church. You can immediately understand the potential attraction of the instrument, from its drone capabilities to the various permutations it might be subjected to via pedal weights, unusual stop-voicings, etc. One of the things you might feel compelled to avoid, however, is any overt reference to classical organ literature, especially given the hoary resonance it’s likely to have for the contemporary listener. Face it; we’ve all seen too many bad horror movies not to leap to conclusions when certain areas are entered. The opening piece, “block-werk & mutations”, begins with what sounds like forearm-length chords over a dark and troubled drone. The drone is fine, the chords…bombastic. There’s a melodramatically stygian feel to the track and if Guionnet is imparting a sly wink it’s hard to discern through a morass from which one half expects to glimpse a leering Beelzebub. An ungodly amount of time passes before the final smidgens of gas are passed. The second piece, “soufflets”, tones things down volume-wise but remains in a similar Phantom of the Opera dramatic vein although, in the process, managing to generate some intriguing Chromolodeon-style microtonal wheezing. “abrege” begins in annoying fashion, noodling about amongst whistling tones like a kid with his first Moog but, several minutes in, settles into a fairly complex, medium to high pitched drone that would have sustained more than enough interest on its own were it not repeatedly interrupted by arbitrary jabs and pedals. Guionnet does rein himself in (a little bit) for the final two improvisations, easily the most successful of the set. “cromorne & fonds” has a mysteriously brooding quality that’s not only quite attractive but worthy of the considered and lengthy investigation it receives. No vapid flailing or expostulating here! When sharper voices appear, they evoke a troubled conversation that fits in rather well with what has previously transpired (even as their timbre reminds me of the wild organ improvisations on Sun Ra’s “Black Myth” from the live performance at Donaueschingen in 1970). Finally, “gravures” conjures up an elvish industrial park full of tiny steam whistles, miniature rotating cogs and wee, whirring conveyor belts. It’s charming, if ultimately somewhat slight. The most beautiful pieces on the recent Tilbury/Prevost disc were, in my opinion, the ones where the former’s organ playing was beautifully reticent, just tingeing the proceedings. Guionnet could derive a lesson or three from them.

“atami” finds the nifty Iberian trio responsible for the wonderful recording recently issued by Rossbin, “Atolon”, merging with three Japanese musicians who have been frequent contributors to the Hibari label. The mix of instruments is itself enticing: two trumpets, an alto sax (doubling “bass tube”), an accordion, a feedback mixing board and a lapsteel (doubling laptop). Additionally, you have the tendency of the Europeans to play, by eai standards, fairly loudly set against the quiet nature of Okura, Ezaki and Unami. A very happy medium, intensity-wise, is quickly reached and held throughout the disc’s seven tracks. More impressively, there’s a great deal of perceived space between the instrumentalists, a neat trick when you’re dealing with a sextet. Had I listened to this without any other information, I may well have thought I was hearing a trio or quartet. Other than that, I have little to say except that I found the disc consistently absorbing, the choices made by the musicians invariably both solid and imaginative. Perhaps the less said the better; there are no larger ideas broached, simply a beguiling six-way conversation. It’s a lovely little recording that will modestly but attractively stand out from most other discs you’re likely to hear this year.

~ Brian Olewnick

Joy Of A Toy

…the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
   unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
                A. R. Ammons, "Gravelly Run"

What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of
   
being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us…
          W. H. Auden, "Archaeology"

I won't abjure it anymore. It is even a theme I wish to take up with more serious intent (that is, with the goal of achieving more permanent argumentative results) elsewhere. For my recent experience has only reinforced to me a sense I've long harbored that there is something touching about abandoned technology, albeit inexplicably so. Many of the substances from which we fashion implements -- iron, steel, brass, wood (in block and in pulp), ivory, lacquer -- age as much as we do, and a pathetic response to such things' deterioration is not far-fetched, even when they are examples of mass production. But there is no real warmth to plastic. Its ubiquity in the contemporary world means our eyes slide ride off plastic's surfaces much as our touch does, the latter a comet whose head is a fingerprint and whose tail is just a smear of sebaceous cling and unwanted salts.

I was 14 years old in 1986, a freshman at the Catholic, co-ed Bishop Lynch High School (our mascot: The Fighting Friars) in East Dallas. My prized possessions were cassettes of The Cult's Love, The Cure's Pornography, a dub of the 2-LP Ralph Records "best of" I had received in exchange for 2 USD and, IIRC, some stamps, P.I.L.'s Second Edition and Pete Townsend's Scoop, the last of which I had purchased as a case-punched $2.99 "cut-out" at the Sound Warehouse on Fitzhugh and Cole Avenues. The Cult album only confirmed my faith in psychedelic music. A gringo in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, the off-kilter Latin orchestrations on Forever Changes and Buffalo Springfield Again really spoke to the 6th grader in me. If I had its tunes quietly singing in a medley of memorization in my head as I took bicycle tours down Lower Greenville Avenue, the Love LP in particular made the squat buildings around me -- The Goody-Goody liquor store, a gutted church, pawn shops, an organic grocer's, and highly competitive auto detailing garages -- team with insane, slow-motion life. Meanwhile, in pubescent winter, The Cure were as therapeutic as a palmful of mentholated Vaseline rubbed on a phlegm-rattling chest. And the Ralph stuff fanned the flame my inner weirdness, not the least for including The Residents' brilliant vinyl de/re-construction "Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life". But it was the Townsend record, ultimately, that inspired me insofar as it pricked up the ears of my discontent with remaining a mere listener. Suddenly, rock-star fantasies and soft-pedaled observings would no longer do. Yep; Pete Townsend led me to believe that I could learn to make music just by dicking around. In the liner notes to Scoop, Pete talks abut developing "synthesizer-itis", and while it is true that I loved tracks like "Melancholia", "For Barney Kessell", and "Mary" (A Lifehouse reject) the most, I would listen to "Initial Machine Experiments", suddenly, very badly, want to suffer from the same syndrome. My case was not helped at all by the fact that I had just read a history of electronic music and was simultaneously hunting high and low for examples of musique concrète, as well as records by Stockhausen, Silver Apples, Morton Subotnick, and Suicide.

So when I first saw advertisements for the Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard in the fall of 1986, I decided that I would raid the savings account my parents, grandparents and various aunts and uncles had tended for me -- 5 bucks for a birthday here, 10 for Christmas there; the stray denomination that, once given, demarcated the end of an unscheduled visit as bills were passed from a breast pocket dusted with twigs and curls of tobacco and transferred to the inner folds of a pair of blue jeans where the harmonica and a couple of pink chunks of bubblegum rode close to the thigh -- to buy one. Remember, this was a time when the proto-crunk sounds of Licensed To Ill were brand new, and Ferris Bueller's keyboard-enhanced gross-out pranks (he wanted a car, not a computer) defined the triumph of youth culture cool over parental cluelessness. Reagan's children all, we thought the technology belonged to us, you understand, when it had simply been handed over to us, and not without strings attached. But I knew as well as any kid who had grown up marveling at the guy who held down the high score on Defender -- which is Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" turned into a video game -- about sprites and hand-eye coordination, about machines as opponents to beat ("turn over"). And so I thought it was as if the musical skills I needed were soldered into the keyboard's motherboard, and that if I could work the keys in the proper sequences, feed the CPU the right input, I could make the of talent's pattern surrender themselves in a stream of illuminated, coded bytes. I could, I thought, find the oversight or flaw in human engineering that I could exploit for outrageous results every time I manipulated the SK-1. You see how little I comprehended about the mysteries of sound, much less those of systems. (It bears noting at this point that the SK-1 is a veritable Holy Grail in the circuit bending community and it is a "community" for real. The SK-1 and trivialities like it may not have the capacity to heal the world, but they are bringing a diverse group of individuals together in new and intriguing ways that have little to do, finally, with global capitalism.)

Over the years, I misplaced a series of conflicting stories I told my mother about how I "lost" the SK-1 that had cost me almost 70 dollars. But, by the end of my sophomore year at BL, the Casio was certainly gone. And, by the time my junior year began, my extra-curricular interests had experienced continental drift, and, as that autumn wore I on, I found myself stranded on a land bridge as sea level rose all around me. I had new trauma to store in the old memory banks, you know? No room for childish things. Yet I recognized the sliders and the convex oblongs of the keyboard's buttons (yellow, blue, and a few shades of gray) the moment I saw the SK-1 this June amid the cast-off, odd-sized shirts, dirty ultramarine ice-cube trays, one-armed action figures, and Reader's Digest Condensed Books laid out on a neighborhood church rummage sale table.

As the cliché goes, it all came back to me. I had lent my old SK-1 to a classmate named Dale. I'm somewhat surprised now to think that I would have let any of my classmates know I owned an SK-1. Had I actually been consumed by status in those years? Dale certainly had. He always wore his school tie loosened by one button, and he had a broken-nosed charm and a mole-punctuated smirk that drove the girls who lifted cigarettes from the 7-11 down the street and made posters and buttons for their friends who were running for student council go crazy. Dale had sat in front of me in Algebra I, seventh period, freshman year -- the year school ran until 3:30 every afternoon -- but we hade no classes together after that. But he had enrolled in a different section of the same Theater Arts course that I took as an elective sophomore year. Dale asked to borrow my keyboard the winter of 1987 so he could score a short film he and his project group were required to complete for credit. I even remember seeing the final cut of the thing, and recognizing the droning, atmospheric loops of which the SK-1 was capable as they crept underneath footage of a mysterious, chubby-cheeked, safety-goggled figure descending the concrete and red brick stairwell that led from the back door of the school library down to the hallway behind the cafeteria and its echoey expanse of tables and huge, wheel-able trash-cans. Dale never returned the SK-1 to me, despite the fact that my mother nagged me about it almost every late April, early May morning and afternoon that she had to drive me to school. As well, despite the fact that, with the passive-aggressive force that only smart-ass teenagers can muster, I tried to co-opt and then transform this nagging into an original, hard-ass persona whenever I saw Dale socializing as far away as possible from my negative charisma. The congestion of topsiders, polyester pants and plaid skirts waned, willy-nilly, during the passing period between classes, and I never got any closer to my classmate and erstwhile bud than a cold, accusatory stare. Maybe this was due less to my fear than to my being embarrassed, chumped. Perhaps it was that I heard how someone else had mastered my toy, and I had given up on it; subconsciously, I understood the SK-1, as if it were some unique entity and not something I could in theory replace off-the-shelf, were no longer mine. I had heard specific electronic sounds in my head, and I could even draw some classic wave-forms (they cropped up in the little doodling I did at that time, but I never had a desire to turn them into tattoos), but I could never tease them out of that keyboard.

Except that, with the help of my on-again / off-again (she put up the cash), the Casio SK-1 is mine once more. I knew without pulling the price tag -- "$2.50", written in fat pencil -- back from where it covered the model number that what I found at the garage sale was an SK-1, and, in fact, it was THE VERY SAME ONE I had been so lax with more than a decade ago. Yes, I could tell standing there in the electric bath of Saturday morning sunshine that the keyboard had been accorded favorable treatment for over the years, that all the working parts were in order. At the same time, I could care less about its private odyssey. Sure, sure, factor in the likelihood that Dale lived in this lake-adjacent neighborhood to which I've moved, close as it is to my alma mater. Maybe his parents had given the SK-1 away when they disposed of Dale's many other personal effects after he left for college, or was sent to jail, or was just booted out on his craven ass. Which would have served the thieving little punk right... One can have an attachment to old belongings that is not sentimental. Right?

Sans its contingent of 5 AA batteries, there is something so familiar in the imbalance -- left-hand speaker like an iron lung, right-hand side microphone as light as a single contact lens -- of the SK-1's heft. Yes, I think remember too how that faint arc of black ball-point ink making a stick-man smile from the middle A to the high G key came to be there, a mark that anyone other than its former owner would mistake for a scratch. Could it be... the same machine that, at various times, captured, held and transformed 1.4 seconds of my grandmother's saying, querulously but with affection, "Hello Joseph"... a note from the Norma guitar, the one Frances and I re-strung two years later when she came back from the Madeira School with her composition books full of poetry and her big gushing collages of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young records, the guitar my mother had been given by her "baby cousin" when Patty and her husband split, the ne'er-do-well who lost an eye in a bar fight, and Patty made her way back to Colorado Springs (and not before we also somewhere lost a Siamese / tabby mix she had entrusted to us)... stray radio static, bristling now who knows where in the solar system... various tappings and scrapings of the built-in microphone, a silvery little grill (9.38 kHz)... an October afternoon exhalation through a red plastic nose-flute when I should be doing my Latin declensions (3rd)... Vince Ely's drum lick from the opening of The Psychedelic Furs' "Wedding Song"... the clatter of runcible spoon and butter knife... a thump on an emptied margarine tub, the pluck of a soda pop can tab... cigarette-pack cellophane being crumpled...

Sitting with the thing at home, snapping my fingers over it, hearing again that "brass ensemble" synth voice that I feel even to this day resembles, and in a cool, not eerie, way, the keyboard sound on Led Zeppelin's "Carouselambra" -- can I find those two notes again? -- I realize that what makes the SK-1 so special, I almost want to say "dear" is also what makes it so loathsome. I mean, what sounds could I coax from this thing other than those I heard back when I first bargained on it, at 14? This machine is an engine that converts mimesis into allusion. Yes, the SK-1 is lucky enough to lose all its memory -- samples and sequences -- once its power supply is cut. I should not have mentioned all those old sounds, because, sensuous detail aside, there's no hooking savor there. It is the process, the processing, that remains. Math never mortifies. The basic principles around which the SK-1's recondite circuits close are constant. Not so the noisome emanations of relatives and bodily functions and long-discarded kitchen finds, then; rather the hissing (a modest roar, really) of air streaming into the SK-1's microphone, carrying the instrument's unique acoustics within its flow. To change the pitch of a sampled tone, the SK-1 simply repeats the captured information at a different speed. Loop the sound, even of one's fingers snapping, and hit three keys at once: non-tempered sounds are not magically transformed into chords, but drones do emerge from the paralleling of each repeated harmonic's internal rhythms. And these battering dislocations expand the longer, that is, the more obnoxiously, you hold the keys down. The transition from a higher note to the next lowest note in always introduced by the sound of something grinding the wheels of its own cessation, giving up the ghost, or being whisked away by the forces of cosmic entropy. Because, in sampling, and no matter how noisy the sample, tiny, embedded switches, more minuscule even than transistors but switches nevertheless, are being thrown, generating a flip-flop buzz so faint it feels like mere ambiance. Multiply this by SK-1 speaker distortion, and you end up with phantom, whistling, truly tempered overtones clinging to each sample. All samples are the property of the machine. Wait a moment. Does consciousness actually move faster than artificial intelligence can? What's really inside this SK-1? Not a grab-bag of wires and capacitors and LED's and touch-sensitive rubber. Rather, there is a whole set of adolescent habits relating to my positioning myself proximate to random events; more specifically, my tendency to inject randomness into events which, in fact, unfold with a deadly purpose. At 14, I did not hear my parents bicker as often as I had as a pre-schooler but I had found an old audio tape my mother made while she was still pregnant with me, a recording of daily minutiae to be sent to her parents in lieu of a letter. And, like so many Residents fans who never really dug The Big Bubble, I am already dismissive of MIDI, eyes closed as the telephone samples of Kraftwerk's Electric Cafe click through near-infinite cycles on my old Walkman, the moon is up, I can smell the smoke from the fireplace fires burning in the restaurants a few blocks away, I'm sitting on a felled tree rotting in the backyard, it will be years before it returns to the soil completely, The Young Ones comes on before 120 Minutes, Frances' mildly dyslexic letters arrive on Senator Paul Simon's Senate stationary, and I've only just discovered The Crying Of Lot 49 from a reference in the instruction manual to a strategy game based on the concept of the Illuminati (Steve Jackson Games, makers of GURPS). Even if it while be a long time before I comprehend the formula, its sum is already present, if not ever-present: a matter of recognition, not creation. There's a junk drawer open in a bureau against a wall in my new home. I bend to blow over the SK-1's microphone. But I cannot. Involuntarily, I hold my breath until I it is impossible to hold it anymore. The SK-1 beeps cheerily to know that it has completed its task. Apply the tremolo I envelope -- no, wait the "long release with sustain, slow decay when key[s] released". , not . Set the loop. Turn on the sequencer. Might as well listen. I'm still a big believer in the virtues of trial and error. Clumsy, whooshing dragon-breath, and not exactly tape loops flaking into desiccation 's oblivion while the World Trade Center implodes (Basinski's Disintegration Loops), but, hey, what do you expect... And yet, in the unvarying over and over again of the SK-1's roar, I still feel something receding, but only so it can build up a new head of steam, gather the momentum it needs to crash its snaking amplitude right through me. Hell take control; it's always outdoing itself. It's always wiping me out.

~ Joe Milazzo

Charming Billy

Full culpability shouldered for shirking the *unspoken* post no bills policy in the Blog. But the following month-long ‘residency’ seems to warrant an exception. Mostly I’m just hoping readers/writers in NY (Ted? Brian? Others?) will make one or more of the gigs & grace this space with reportage. Lord knows if geography weren’t a hindrance, I’d be a fixture for the four nights:

The Billy Bang Quartet will be performing every Thursday in August at a new Williamsburg hang called Zebulon.

Billy Bang Quartet: Billy Bang – violin; Andrew Bemkey – piano; Todd Nicholson – bass; Newman Taylor-Baker – drums

10 pm to 12 am NO COVER @ Zebulon, 258 Wythe Avenue between Metropolitan and North 3rd Street. Take L train to Bedford. Contact: 718-218-6934

(thanks to Todd Nicholson for circulating word on this hip happening)

Snap, Crackle And Pop

If you had yourself a piezoelectric transducer contact microphone and an unlimited supply of the recording medium of your choice, to what use would you put it? What would you most want to eavesdrop upon with its help?

Sport, dilly-dallying, and / or outright knavery is acceptable. So, too, are your own personal pensées...

I was continuing to shrink, to become...what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. T hat existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I STILL EXIST! (Richard Matheson, The Incredible Shrinking Man)

Kaptain Knievel

Anybody catch Robbie Knievel’s jump on Saturday? Did a quick Google this morning, but so far have come up zilch on the outcome. He was set to pilot his 80 horsepower rocket cycle over five vintage jet planes on the flight deck of U.S.S. Intrepid, a retired aircraft carrier moored in New York harbor.

According to his website in the past year he’s leaped over: 15 Pepsi trucks in Lincoln City, Oregon, 10,180 dish plates in Irwindale, CA and 23 police cars at a dealership in East Hanover, NJ. Other triumphs: jumping the span between two buildings in Vegas and a head-on launch over a speeding locomotive. But a fair share of near-debacles checker his record too including the Grand Canyon stunt of 1999 where he miraculous walked away from a crash with minor injuries.

I’ve followed his exploits off an on over the years, mostly through blind luck of stumbling across them on TV. He strikes me as a more grounded (no pun intended) facsimile of his father, Evel. The same daredevil death wish but minus most of the ego and flair for self-promotion & aggrandizement. Evel may have had the edge in terms of personality & machismo, but Robbie’s already broken all of his pop’s records except one (Evel’s broken more bones). And while we’re on the subject of Evel, the man definitely belongs in the top echelon of 70s pop culture icons. Other cycle jumpers who followed in his immediate wake (I’m thinking The Human Fly here, recipient of a cool, if exceedingly goofy comic book spin-off) couldn’t hold a candle to his level of temeritude.

Anyway, back to Robbie’s latest gamble against The Reaper. In his own words: “I’m definitely gonna crash, I can promise everyone that.” I guess the question is how hard. Assuming the jump went without a hitch & he survived relatively unscathed he’s planning to jump 150 feet worth of slot machines at a casino in Washington State later this month.

I hope he made it.

Bernie Krause - Citadels of Mystery

Takoma 7074

Based on the theory that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all, I’m happy to report the following about this release of a recording originally made in 1975:

1. It’s produced and engineered very nicely.

2. It’s based on the book by L. Sprague de Camp.

3. It uses some African percussion, Andean music, Zen bells, and Caribbean calypso, and has sections not only in 12/8 but in 13/8.

4. Andy Narell was and is a very good percussionist, especially on steel drums, but everybody on the recording, synthesist Krause, Narell, Chris Michie, Mel Martin, Peter Maunu, George Marsh, et al. can play pretty well.

5. It probably wouldn’t have sounded nearly so dated if it were being used for an old "Hawaii Five-0" episode or some 1970’s movie involving seagulls, horses, and Katherine Ross.

6. The arrangements are more than competent, ultra-professional even.

7. The notes credit Krause with involvement in the music for Apocalypse Now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Rosemary’s Baby (as well as one that’s much easier to believe: Love Story).

7. There’s some stuff that sounds like it was lifted from Shaft.

8. It won’t sell too many copies, unless it can make it onto some smooth jazz radio stations in which case it might just...take off!

9. There’s some African vocals on one tune that must have sounded very forward-thinking and cool back in 1975, before Paul Simon started scrounging around for exotic material.

10. Most music is "of its time."

Walter Horn