Bagatellen

Dedicatory Piece to the Geo-Physical Year 2004

Gil Melle died yesterday at the oversoon annum of 73. Not much to write right now other than I wish him well on the other side.

Din Sinister

The Devil’s holiday is nigh upon us & inspired by our own Cap’n Hate (a stalwart hero whose moniker has always struck me as antithetical to my own exchanges with him) I’m hoping we can create a freshly dug grave site for All Hallow’s Eve soundtracks. What sorts of spooky/creepy music do folks here reach for when the tittering Trick or Treaters come a’nockin’? I’m cueing up my own personal favorites to scare the pants off unsuspecting parents, but I’m positively dying (bwahahahaha) for more ideas.

Kahil El’Zabar & David Murray – We Is: Live at the Bop Shop

Delmark 557

A reciprocal loyalty exists between Delmark and its roster of artists. Crease back the pages in the label’s catalog a few years and the same names keep cropping up. Percussionist Kahil El’Zabar ranks as one of the most representative with a half dozen albums released and a backlog of several in the can. His strong associations with saxophonist David Murray go back a ways too. Each man approaches his art with a deep veneration for African American culture and expression. This live set from 2000 (evidence again of El’Zabar’s bottlenecked queue) marks their fourth commercially released recording together. If only the music was as uniformly direct and concise as the disc’s proclamatory title.

Part of the problem stems from a recycling of material. Two of the tunes are lifted from earlier albums. The other three work from motifs that never stray far from El’Zabar’s usual groove-centered rhythms. True these are live versions, rendered solely with reeds and drums, but a sense of déjà vu pervades just the same. Holding court in front of a captive audience at a small record store El’Zabar and Murray offer moments of copasetic brilliance interspersed with indulgent stretches of filler. At eighteen minutes the meandering “Blues Affirmation” feels long-winded, but El’Zabar’s luminous mbira patterns and the ruddy-textured blusterings of Murray’s tenor save it from ruin.

“One World Family” weaves a convincing crosshatch of percussive bass clarinet and palpitating hand drums, only to unravel in its second half when El’Zabar recites mawkish lyrics. The title cut reveals his shortcomings behind a standard kit as his wall of thrashing drums yields a surprisingly static backdrop for the yelps and growls of Murray’s hornet-stung horn. It’s energy music alright, but with the cork of control often completely blown off. As such the results come across more histrionic than dynamic in cast.

The set’s opening and closing cuts work better, but are still flawed. “Groove Allure” starts with Murray blowing a richly braided ribbon of cerulean riffs over the drummer’s percolating hand percussion patterns. Soon El’Zabar’s soulful chants boost the emotion quotient and push Murray to harden his articulation in a spate of honking skidding bleats. But the built inertia and focus sieves swiftly from the piece in its closing half as El’Zabar engages in a circumlatory solo. “Sweet Meat” falters under another frothing display by the drummer that douses the audience in a deluge of hopped-up cymbal splashes. More combative swagger from Murray around a simple riff theme and the pair take the show out on a raucous note. The Bop Shop crowd dutifully shows appreciation with a surge of whoops and claps.

It’s hard to fault El’Zabar his positioning as one of Delmark’s trusted and prolific hires. And there are strong sections to this album that are engagingly entertaining. I just wish he didn’t seem so complacent in coasting on an approach and style he’s already done to death.

~ Derek Taylor

Iberian Round-Up, Four Old, One New

Alfredo Costa Monteiro
Paper Music
Hazard
CD21

Alfredo Costa Monteiro
Rumeur
Creative Sources
010

Cremaster
Infra
Antifrost
2015

Ernesto Rodrigues/Alfredo Costa Monteiro/Guilherme Rodrigues/Margarida Garcia
Cesura
Creative Sources
008

Ruth Barberan
Capacidad de Perdida
Creative Sources
018

I recently received a small stack of discs from the Barcelona-based Alfredo Costa Monteiro, works from the last several years that partially filled out my meager collection of new Iberian improvisation. They certainly reinforce my opinion that the music being created in that neck of the woods deserves far more exposure. Some brief notes:

The disc containing Monteiro’s “Paper Music” comes tightly sealed in a crumpled paper sleeve, pressed into its container like a panini. I was almost reluctant to open it, rather liking the idea of an encased product that might forever remain beyond appreciation. But, of course, my acquisitiveness and curiosity won out. Reading the inscription, “all the sounds of this cd were made with paper. no effects”, I naturally expected to hear a variety of softish, swishing sounds. Hardly. The disc is almost entirely rambunctious, percussive and quite noisy, Monteiro generating an astonishing amount of sound variety by rubbing, hitting, blowing into, tearing, bowing and otherwise manipulating multiple varieties of paper. One track, the seventh of an untitled twelve, sounds remarkably like a Joe McPhee tenor solo! The next resembles a West African drum choir. Oddly enough, I doubt I may ever have thought paper was involved were it not for the disc’s title. It’s exciting, surprising and enthusiastic music, though.

His solo accordion disc, “Rumeur”, also confounds expectations somewhat. That is, expectations derived from years of listening to relatively quiet improv. The opening track is quite aggressive, an apian swarm that I daresay few would be able to source as having been generated via accordion. The second cut (all pieces are titled by a series of dots) is substantially more squeeze-boxish and, in fact, sounds like something you might hear from Guy Klucevsek, churning out percussive puffs from the bass register, chugging along in strict mechanical rhythm like a creaky, steam-generated engine. The third’s a rough and tumble, very enjoyable freefall through various bangs and wheezes of the instrument while the fourth enters an area of high, microtonal keening that’s quite abrasive. In a good way. Monteiro closes with a fine selection of accordional detritus, the squishy, crunching tableau summoned from somewhere within the instrument’s bowels. Fine, gritty stuff.

In Cremaster, Monteiro switches to “objects on electric guitar” and is joined by Ferran Fages on “feedback mixing board” and pick-ups, producing, on “Infra”, a wonderful welter of prickly electronics, spiky washes of noise that sandpaper the listener’s ears, leaving them shiny and stinging. One quality that goes a long way can be heard in the quieter sections: there’s always a sense of space around the noise—it never becomes two-dimensional. Often, it seems to be emanating from three or four different points. It’s a little hard to say why some of this music doesn’t come across simply as shrill, random sound—but it doesn’t. There’s a fine, almost breathing sense of naturalness at play that, form the first spray of static or crunch of plastic, convinces the listener of the unforced reality of what he’s hearing. Good work, hard to explain, but the pick of this particular litter for me.

Monteiro’s back to accordion on ‘Cesura’, joined by Ernesto Rodrigues (viola), Guilherme Rodrigues (cello, pocket trumpet) and Margarida Garcia (electric double bass) for yet another grainy, somber set. Again rather difficult to describe except, maybe, as a cascade of textures, irregularly spaced, in fourfold depth, one after another (or four after four others), as varied and alike as people walking by on the street. As with much of the other music here, there’s such a convincing evocation of space surrounding the sounds, that one accepts the proceedings almost in a trompe l’oeil sense. Whatever sound emerges, sounds right. There’s dryness but not aridity, instruments whispering past each other, glancing off, rolling under. Have I mentioned how granular these guys are?

The only new release of this batch is Ruth Barberan’s contribution to the ever-growing mountain of solo trumpet releases, “Capacidad de Perdida”. Of necessity (though I wonder, with this release and others, why?), there’s nothing that would lead the innocent listener to suspect the presence of a trumpet, but true to what seems to me to be one of the guiding aesthetics in this neck of the woods, delicacy is thrown in the back seat and an aggressive, earthy approach is pursued. Granularity, again. Harsh burblings that almost cause you to grip your throat in sympathetic pain, severe knockings and intense, even emotional whistlings are the stuff of this session. If she doesn’t quite have the conceptual fullness of a Kelley or Doerner at their best, Barberan certainly has created her own niche and a very compelling one. Can’t wait to hear more from her.

Everything heard here reinforces my ongoing conviction that some of the finest, most distinctive new music around is being created between Barcelona and Lisbon. Check it out.

Unplanned Obsolescence

Surely most of those who post and read here already know that Jandek, the last truly underground musician, crawled out of his cave this month. He played an hour-long set at the Instal 04 festival in Glasgow and, in so doing, rendered two other cultural objects thoroughly superfluous: Will Oldham, and the documentary Jandek On Corwood.

The film, soon to be released on DVD, is an exploration of the version of Jandek that existed until October 17, 2004: a recluse making music for no one, or at best for himself, and sliding it out into the world through the crack of a door with the chain still on. Thirty-seven albums and counting; one interview (two if you count the Texas Monthly piece, which contains no quotes); and, at the time the film was assembled, no live performances. How do you explore a phenomenon like this? The filmmakers did their best.

In a way, Jandek On Corwood is a religious film. That's certainly how it's structured. You can’t interview the deity, the figure at the center of the cult – he’s not talking. So you interview those who’ve devoted some portion of their lives to interpreting the scrolls, and the one or two who’ve actually had person-to-person, one-on-one encounters with the Man Himself. From a viewer’s perspective, this is where the movie goes to hell.

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that a photograph of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. I assert with reasonable confidence that he said this without even having met any rock critics. There are men in this film (and there are only three women in the film, four if you count the disembodied voice on “Nancy Sings”) whose work I admire, like Byron Coley and Richie Unterberger. But they are not men who should ever be allowed in the same room as a functioning camera. Coley looks like a shaved chimp with a square goatee; Unterberger is almost literally indescribable. Suffice it to say that either man would make an ideal mold for a “Record Geek” Halloween mask.

The parts of Jandek On Corwood not taken up with talking heads are quite pretty. Lots of landscape shots and deserted houses, desolate hotel rooms, and other locales that either suggest Jandek’s music, or have something direct to do with it. (He has a song called “Point Judith”; the filmmakers go to Point Judith, Rhode Island, and film its lighthouse and crashing waves. Three of his recent albums featured cover photos taken in Ireland; an associate of the filmmakers goes to Ireland, and shoots some home video on the same street where Jandek may have once walked.) This stuff, mostly accompanied by Jandek music on the soundtrack, is quite evocative and nice to look at.

But, again, the dream is over. As Seth Tisue, proprietor of a Jandek website, put it:

‘Jandek’ is dead. Long live Jandek.

He’s stood on a stage now, played his (new) songs. Rumor has it there will soon be a live album (Jandek Comes Alive!) and possibly even a DVD. In this era of the new, living, breathing, interacting-with-a-rhythm-section Jandek, what purpose does a movie serve which takes as its central premise that Jandek is unfathomable, impenetrable, destined to remain forever a shadow figure at the furthest margin of music? Granted, he didn’t sell T-shirts, but only the most obtuse would fail to recognize this new development as more than a little deflationary.

I think he did it on purpose. He’s spent years resisting outside definition – why wouldn’t he resist being defined as the ultimate resister, too? Better to come out, just once, and prove, like Boo Radley, that he’s more than just a phantom. Then, his rumored self in tatters on the floor of a Glasgow hall, he can go on about his business in peace.

The Hum

John Peel, 1939 - 2004

The Fall have lost their biggest -- and most powerful -- fan.

BBC Obituary

Listener tributes to Peel

*** UPDATED ***

Peel's Texas roots

A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings (Rounder)

(Being an attempt at suasion in the form of a series of otherwise unrelated conditional statements.)

You'll love this album

• if you own a pea coat, second hand, just a little bald at the cuffs.
• if you gaze out the window in mid-continental flight only to look down at the brown of the mountains, the dapples of light and dark made by the individual peaks' overlapping rain shadows, how low their thrust spreads upon the ground.
• the dissonance of traditions aside, if you reel with your own understanding of the last scene of Fellini's Nights Of Cabiria.
• if you agree with Sly Stone's observation that "there's a rhythm / when you don't know what you're doing" ("In Time", Fresh).
• if you take a walk through the neighborhood at twilight just to see your known world through a veil of rust.
• if you smell something sweets as peaches in the acridity of smoldering autumn leaves.
• if you've learned it.
• if you think a "Panegyric" is a patent medicine.
• if there is a ghost haunting your coal chute.
• if you find that the State Fair seems to stay in town a few days fewer with each passing year.
• if you can dance with your collar buttoned tight on your Adam's apple; if you can dance with a bow pendant at the small of your back.
• if you see a dirt road and think of mud pies.
• if you know from which song the lyrics "the children look up / all they hear / is sky blue bells ringing" have been quoted.

If you know a private, pathless place deep in the woods, then this is the CD you'll leave behind when you go there to your secret.

If you are the village idiot, and the lovely, chestnut-haired lass who you dare not court is leaving soon, or at least with the coming of the first snow, for a long visit to a far-off place, then you can sheepishly toe the dirt and make of this CD a fine going-away gift.

If you prefer coffee to tea, and pie to cake, then you will want your short-order cook to have this playing over his hot plates.

If you are crying because you think you're all alone, and you can't make the tears stop even though you know you're wrong, you're mistaken, you're mistook, that you are never abandoned, then you've heard someone down the hall singing along with you and Texas Galdden... and Bozie Sturdivant... and Jess Morris... and Woody Guthrie.

If the only empire in which you believe exists in the hereafter, then you'll find its anthem here.

~ Joe Milazzo

John Butcher/Gino Robair - New Oakland Burr

John Butcher/Gino Robair
New Oakland Burr
Rastascan
BRD 051

John Butcher possibly spoiled me for life several years ago during a solo performance of his at Tonic. Three or four of the pieces were so perfectly realized, so precisely balanced between amazing extended technique on the one hand and substantial, song-like (though abstract) structure on the other, that I was floored. Not only has that concert stayed with me since then but, rather more unfortunately, I keep expecting each subsequent disc he releases to achieve that level of inspiration. A handful of the solo pieces, on discs like “Fixations (14)” have come close (and are certainly excellent work), but I’ve yet to relive that same thrill while listening to his recordings.

I can’t say that I expected to have these yearnings fulfilled on “New Oakland Burr”, a duo collaboration with SF-area percussionist (and other-stuff-ist) Gino Robair whose work, to the extent of my exposure to it, has generally struck me as, well, just OK. (I still regret that his Braxton project, “Jump or Die”, though not bad, wasn’t as wildly fantastic as it could’ve been). The sixteen studio-recorded tracks here are far more “simply” elaborations of technical approaches than they are considered explorations of sound. The sort of idea that I’ve heard undergirding the best of Butcher’s work isn’t to be regularly found. The pieces are also pretty short, ranging from less than a minute to under five, a time span that I don’t think suits him particularly well. At least it doesn’t suit the Butcher I want to hear. I find I prefer him in temporal mid-range, say the 6-10 minute area, where there’s both enough time for considered exploration of some arcane sonic facet and not enough of it so that the structure gets lost.

And, to these ears, the most successful tracks here are the longest, generally with Butcher on tenor, like the opening “Throat Rust” and the resonant “Fid”, each inhabiting its world fully, each implying that there’s a wealth of fascinating sounds left to be investigasted in the area and closing out with the listener wanting more. As with my time length preference, I find I generally enjoy Butcher more when he plumbs the lower depths of his big horn and I’ve especially enjoyed his use of feedback therein. When he gets into that territory here, the results are rewarding, all the more so when Robair’s contributions become difficult to distinguish from Butcher’s, i.e. when they’re not overtly percussive, which occurs pretty often. Still, those tracks account for perhaps a third of this disc and the rest is scattershot enough that, on the whole, I find “New Oakland Burr” somewhat disappointing (and, I should say, there are a couple of cuts where I glanced at the timings to see, even at a couple of minutes, how much more I had to endure, e.g. the amusingly titled “Whine Model”). Even so, there are few saxophonists I’d rather listen to these days and others may not share my prejudices and/or experiences in beautiful Butcherania. Myself, I’m just waiting for the discafied reappearance of those unrecaptureable moments.

Sons of Sabbath?

Metal’s been on my mind again of late as I’ve been sitting on the dimly-remembered details of a recent concert here in the Twin Cities for a couple weeks. Procrastination toward tapping fingers on keys after shows has been plaguing me all year. The malaise started with the ACME Fest back in April- another project that rots partially-finished in my leaky copy can. But back to the purpose of this post. Four bands, one gig, at the fabled Triple Rock Social Club on the Minneapolis’ West Bank: Countach, Aldabaren, Pelican and Zebulon Pike. Black Sabbath seems the spiritual and secular root of all four outfits, though each spun the venerated texts of embryonic riffage into different personalized fabric. The common thread of murky minor keys and seismic sternum-rattling slabs of guitar coupled to monolithic pulsing bass lines kept the bands in an elliptical orbit with the object of their inspiration.

In a shady turn of events that smelled strongly to me of payola and local nepotism Zebulon Pike headlined- a pole-position far more deserving of Pelican who occupied the runner-up slot. Countach, a four-piece comprised of two guitarists (one string bean and one bullet-headed with tats), bassist (axe slung low to the knees and equipped with long greasy black locks ideal for whipping into pinwheels on particularly sludgy cyclic riffs) and drummer (shirtless and largely obscured by his kit, prone to sledgehammer beats). I’m pretty sure they did an actual Sabbath cover toward the end of the set put I couldn’t quite place the tune. All three string players copped some great fuzz tones, trading in blues heavy power chords on most songs. A few even employed harmony vocals that reminded me of early Foghat or Deep Purple. Nearly all of the lyrics seemed to revolve around the universal testosterone themes of ladies and lust. Overall it was a great warm-up to what would follow.

Surprisingly the space between bands marked by nearly complete exchanges of equipment. Drum kits were completely disassembled and new amp stacks were trundled on stage. In all it was a very different protocol than what I’m used to with jazz gigs where different ensembles share, at the very least, the same trap set. A DJ cloistered at the back of the bar cued up a recurring medley of old and recent metal hits. The only ones I recognized were “Shout at the Devil” and “Ace of Spades.”

Aldabaren took the stage next. Just guitar, bass drums, but still packing a collective wallop between them these guys seemed more grindcore than stoner metal (by my admittedly stunted taxonomy). The bassist adopted a very theatrical approach with lots of splayed dramatic stances, leaning back into the dark groove erected by his coiled strings, sweat-soaked hair falling across his tortured face in sticky tendrils. The guitarist mixed fast arpeggiated leads with the menacing swollen riffs. His vocals were growls and screams, lyrics unintelligible. They had the look and attitude down, but the set seemed a little long and forced near its end.

Another short intermission and Pelican plugged in. They opened with “Nightenday,” the first track from their first (and only) full-length, Austrailasia. Starting slow the piece gradually evolved into an epic jam without the acoustic breaks. They were easily as loud as their predecessors, but mixed the volume with a strong melodic sense that quickly gave them the edge in my opinion. The flanging guitars and miasmic volume brought to mind heavier variants of My Bloody Valentine and Last Days of May. Trailing the last threads of dissipating distortion with brief band introductions, the bassist announced that the rest of the set would be material they were working on for their next album. Recurring problems with the drum monitor shorting out, but they soldiered on. The deluge of layered drones brought to mind My Bloody Valentine, especially in relation to the tentacles of striated distortion surging from the stacks.

I don’t know either by name, but the two guitarists struck a balance of Dionysian and Apollonian on the stage’s two sides. The former pogo-ed up in down in place, gesticulating with the neck of his axe at the air around him, his head snapping in time with the wave-like riffs. The other sunk his neck into his shoulders, buckled his knees and squeezed his eyes tight. The slightest smirk crossed his lips and he seemed entranced by the wall of fuzz flooding out of the amp behind him. The bassist stood center also looked engrossed in the pulsing cascades of tightly marshaled noise swirling around him, bearing the full brunt of the steady hammering pulse conjured by the drummer. As grainy and massive as the guitars were there was still an odd unifying purity to there sound, particularly when pressed into service in realizing the glorious fanfare-like themes that anchored most of the pieces. It was a quick set, just five songs occupying a little under an hour, but if any of the fresh music makes it to record the new disc should be a mighty follow-up.

Last band of the night was Zebulon Pike. A local four-piece that includes the bassist from Happy Apple (which in turn had Dave King in the ranks before he hit the big time with The Bad Plus,) they looked like a strange amalgam of Faith No More and Anthrax. Somehow they managed to swipe the lead spot from Pelican (big fish in a little pond?), but nothing about their set suggested the coup was warranted. Most of the songs featured competent playing, but a continuous need for over-the-top tomfoolery deposited their shtick dangerously close to self-parody. Also hindering the balance were rickety interludes between the bridges for guitar solos that sometimes fizzled under needless wankery. One tune hit a righteous groove, but the others felt slapdashed and overly beholden to fireworks. The guitarist front man was especially contradictory in this regard, sporting a bald pate and bushy goatee akin to Scott Ian and aping grandiose rock postures, but only producing weak-kneed noodling during his solos. The band’s website lists Mountain, Rush and Bartok as guiding influences, but strangely no Sabbath. Points for trying to leap beyond what appear to be some fairly narrow parameters established for the idiom, but it often was a case of too many ingredients spoiling the goulash. I have to confess being glad when the death knell of their final song sounded. With four full sets of music exhausted I tipped back one more watered-down Bloody Mary and hit the bricks, ears ringing pleasantly and a nice spring in my step for the trot back to my car.

Talking with my friend later I learned she was fascinated by the gender dynamics at the show. Nearly all male and many seemingly single. I was caught off guard by the mellow, even docile behavior of the audience. There was sporadic metronomic head-banging, but virtually no outward aggression until Zebulon Pike’s performance when two ‘fights’ broke out. Coincidence? I dunno. Both were little more than minor pushing/shoving matches, one with an errant headlock answered by quick ejection by the bar security team. I’m curious if this sort of sedate, even polite demeanor is commonplace at metal shows these days? Also wondering what others think of these bands. I’m aware of Jason and Phil’s opinions of Pelican (ones I think I share), but are there other Bags readers who listen to this stuff?

Various - Italian String Virtuosi (Rounder)

Dave Grisman nearly ruined the mandolin for me. Guys like bluesmen Yank Rachell and Johnny Young along with the Italian gents on this Rounder compilation rescued it. Grisman’s self-styled dawg music, an amalgam of bluegrass, folk and jazz idioms, has its moments. But more often than not it carries too many of the conceits of his friend a colleague Jerry Garcia. The assemblage of vintage ensembles resuscitated by this survey are relics of a different age. Most carry their own conceits including a straight-laced propensity for toeing the melodic line and only occasionally venturing beyond genteel tweaking of the rondo structures. But there’s an umbrella of authenticity here that makes these conventions easy to forgive. The pieces range from lively mazurkas to moody tarantellas with occasional tangos and polkas tossed in. The bands cover an eclectic range of instrument combinations. Most revolve around a core of mandolin, banjo, violin and guitar in various ratios. Several incorporate castanet percussion and even saxophone and brass bass in a couple of instances. Performances like Giovanni Vicari’s “Visione,” a tango brought to sonic life through a string of parceled arpeggios, are perfect vehicles for the pinched pitches of the mandolin’s taut tunings. The Giovali String Trio gives Vicari a run for his lira with “Costumi Siciliani” as webs of scalar notes reel out from two mandolins, their respective melodic threads embelished by the loping counterpoint of a single guitar. Listening to society plectrists like Frank Fazio and Mario De Pietro strut their stuff it’s easy to imagine reclining on a vine-laced veranda in Sicily, sipping a goblet of aged Marsala and soaking in the Mediterranean sun. Programmed for variety and playability the twenty-five tracks serve as a generous and accessible time capsule. The bold nomenclature of the title may not fit every selection, but there’s plenty of impressive string-picking on display. Some that I’m certain would leave Mr. Grisman’s mouth agape.

Two from Tortuga

Old Man Gloom
Christmas
Tortuga
Tusk
Tortuga

These are the days of hybrid musics, when all that was once solid concerning genre musics has continued to melt into air. Anyone who grew up on hardcore and metal back in the day knew roughly where one genre ended and the other began. Despite all kinds of cross-cutting influence, nobody would ever mistake Iron Maiden for the Dead Kennedys. But over time, things have got nicely weird, first with the multiple genre blendings popularized in the late 1980s and continuing through regular cross-pollination of heavy music. Tortuga specializes in this kind of hybridity, and if people want to stick it with the moniker post-hardcore (whatever that means), you still can’t deny the range of expression found on it (and, for that matter, kindred spirit label Hydrahead).
Consider these two latest releases.

Old Man Gloom is a collective comprised of members of a lot of Boston-based groups and like-minded friends. For many years, they have released occasional documents (they take their time between releases, which are usually distilled from a year or two’s worth of recorded material) which are steeped in long, hypnotic, heavy trances that seem to have some kind of quasi-ritual significance. They don’t quite create the sonic headfuck of an old Earth recording, but they can approach that level of transformative listening. The lineup for Christmas is Nate Newton (not the old Cowboys lineman busted for mass quantities of dope, but the guitarist/vocalist from the mighty Converge), Caleb Scofield (bassist/vocalist from Cave In), Luke Scarola (electronics), Santos Montano (drums), and Aaron Turner (guitarist and vocalist best known from Isis).

Though they’ve always boasted an intriguing mix of inwardness and brash brawn, of swirling textures and chugging riffs, those elements are integrated better here than on previous releases (though I still have a fondness for the Zozobra EP, I confess). From the opening track “The Gift” – with its high lonesome acoustic strumming, dense electronic hums, and massive guitars – you get a sense of the combinative approach Old Man Gloom takes, the cinematic feel that they work so long to construct. There are also places where the explore a single feel, usually to great effect, with brief snippets of punishing thrash (“Skullstorm” or “Viking Song”) or long, vocal-less noise tracks (including the nearly 20-minute mind control closing track). Whether doomstruck dirges, vast apocalyptic riffery, or ominous glitchy miniatures, a sense of weight suffuses these tracks but shot through with an odd lyricism (which, unsurprisingly, recalls the primary bands of each of these players). The weight and power of the best of these tracks generates the feel of the ancient rock formations of the Southwestern deserts that so captivate this band; and the dissociative qualities of the electronics, the sweet release of the melody, pulls upward to the open expanse of sky.

Tusk is made up of ¾ of sludgemeisters Pelican and a grindcore-influenced vocalist: drummer Larry Herweg, bassist Laurent Lebec, and guitarist Trevor De Brauw (who also plays bowed mandolin, banjo, and keyboards here), team up with vocalist/instrumentalist Jody Minnoch. The brief, five-track EP – Tusk’s second release – apparently recounts the journey of a drifter stranded in a forbidding wilderness of some sort. Not your typical concept-metal record, these pieces are more like separate evocations of a sinister, disorienting terrain, thick with ominous portent that chokes you like the monster riffage of the band.

Like a lot of the more interesting heavy bands around these days, Tusk combines an appetite for punishment and destruction with a convincing sense of pacing, space, and texture. That’s not easy to pull off, for sure. There’s stoner sludge here, alongside grind sensibilities, and epic post-Neurosis sound constructions. Swirling atmospherics are almost always prelude to a speaker-shredding chugfest or a wicked grindcore blast (particularly on “Starvation Dementia”). Yet there are occasionally bizarre touches such as the glitchy guitar frenzies that are quasi-Dillinger or the long psychedelic sprawl of “Ursus Arctus – Walk the Valley.” Ultimately I don’t find this stuff quite as satisfying as Pelican’s music, both because the trio is slightly less convincing with the speedy stuff than they are with sludge, and because Minnoch’s vocals don’t seem top-notch to me (at times he sounds too much like he’s emulating Converge’s Jacob Bannon). But it’s certainly something that fans of this music should check out. The disc also comes packed with multimedia, and if you’re of a mind to do so, you can follow the claustrophobic path of the protagonist through some creepy video accompaniment.

Fujii And Tamura On Libra

Natsuki Tamura
Exit
Libra 104-010

Satoko Fujii
Illusion Suite
Libra 203-009

Pianist Satoko Fujii continues a frantic release schedule -- some twenty-three albums in eight years -- with these two new discs on her self-owned Libra label. Exit finds her again in collaboration with her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura. His new quartet venture is an excursion into communal "free" fusion where everyone, apparently even the drummer (from time to time) is electrified. Unfortunately, this listener was not. There is no lack of communication—all members are clearly comfortable, exhibiting incredible chops and taste in an environment free of conventional solos and choruses. There are wonderful moments of meditative silence -- such as those at the beginning of "Eliminate" – as well as many long stretches of high-volume intensity.

Timbre is the problem. Whether intended or not, the group's sound palette is small, and the individual players' choices monotonous. Tamura is a first-rate player, but the Bitches Brew trumpet, delayed and often distorted, wears thin half way through the album. And Fujii, a wonderful pianist, seems less than comfortable with a pitch wheel, the most subtle and "humanizing" element in a synthesist's musical vocabulary. Yet even her synth patches are fairly pedestrian, and only the title track finds the quartet exploring more interesting timbral options -- squeaky toys and Phil Minton-like squawks -- to amusing effect. That said, Supersilent, to name only one example, presents much more of a model of what is possible when sonic innovation and more conventional forms of improv merge successfully.

Infinitely more satisfying is the newest disc from Satoko Fujii's New York trio with Mark Dresser (bass) and Jim Black (drums), Illusion Suite. Absolutely refreshing from the opening moments of its thirty-four minute title track, Fujii's classical background is immediately apparent in what I'd swear is a conscious allusion to Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time! Impressionistic piano chords in the upper register, bass imitating cello, tinklingly oriental percussion … but it's all part of an illusion which fades as Mingus' melodic lines and Corea's harmonic sensibility merge to become part of an unusually original compositional voice.

Fujii's constant juxtaposition of tonal and atonal ideas is as breathtaking as is her spatial awareness, doubtless a result of her many big band experiences. She is never quite as explosive as are her trio partners, Black bursting into flames more than once during the album, but she anchors the proceedings with everything from Debussian planing chords to free outbursts that invoke Cecil Taylor. "An Irregular Course" and "An Insane Scheme" are sonically daring and lots of fun, the latter finding the group sounding like they're trying to play and scream their way out of a soup can and then breaking into a slow grotesque waltz, only to forsake that for more ambiguous territory. It is the perfect closer to one of the most inventive and exciting trio discs I've heard in quite some time.

~ Marc Medwin

A Thoroughly Modern Primitive

Hot off the presses of Fantagraphics Books comes Irwin Chusid's lovingly assembled catalogue raisonné The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.

By the 1950's, the decade of draftsman / designer Jim Flora's greatest activity, bebop had become only one idiom within "modern jazz". Kenton blare, the cocktail hour gavottes of the more prosperous cool combos, and the innovations of musicians such as Thelonious Monk were all proof to listeners then that jazz had ceased to be happy, or happy-go-lucky, and had instead gotten, well, complicated. Of all the talented artists of the era (Paul Bacon, Reid Miles, Tom Hannan, William Claxton, Burt Goldblatt, the artists of Guidi / Tri-Arts), Flora and David Stone Martin bore the best witness to these changes and to have given us enduring images of them at work. And yet these two designers could not have been more different. Flora worked primarily for the major labels Columbia and RCA Victor, designing covers for classical releases and records by largely Caucasian "West Coast" -- i.e., more pop-oriented -- jazz ensembles. Martin made his reputation working with Norman Granz and his various impresario ventures, from JATP to Verve Records and its incredible roster of jazz talent: Bird, Bud, Diz, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Art Tatum, and on and on. Flora was a brilliant cartoonist given to the kind of overstatement than can be mistaken for grotesquerie or even surrealism, while Martin was an illustrator with a rare gift for portraiture. Flora favored bold lines and amiably garish colors. Martin's drawings are spider-web delicate and often tinted in a sympathetic pastel (especially his Billie Holiday covers). Although both men drew inspiration from the same 20th Century sources, such as Picasso, Klee and Miró, Flora had an obvious affection for Leger and early Gottlieb, giving us Frankenstein-ian big band leaders (Sauter and Finegan) whose bones and squishy internal organs have been replaced by trumpets and saxophones. Meanwhile, Martin's subtle, fluid deformations of the human figure owe a great deal to Ben Shahn's "modern populist" approach to his subjects. Abstraction serves as a backdrop in Martin's designs, whereas in Flora's points, arcs and hash-marked squiggles reminiscent of Kandinsky's painterly notations of Schoenberg et. al. penetrate or circle his imps like anthropomorphized lines of force. If Martin was, as his design for the Charlie Parker Jam Session indicates, the master of the frieze, his eye trained upon the interval separating one happening from the next, Flora was more akin to a cave painter, his compositions jangling with the asymmetry of any static depiction of many independent elements in hypnotic motion. (In fact, the figures in the cover for Short Rogers' Courts The Count could almost be petroglyphs.)

If a typically proto-psychedelic, Halloween-hued, bratty Jim Flora album jacket looks as if it should adorn a box of very sugary breakfast cereal (complete with "marshmallow treats"), an urbane David Stone Martin design is more what one pictures on the front of books carried under the arms of those strolling along the Left Bank. This is another way of saying that Martin's sobriety is quite overt and follows from neo-Classical principles honoring both the inherent drama of the pose and the candor of repose. Meticulously set down in all its veins and sinews, the meaning of an individual "Martin" is always apparent. This is not to say that there is any belabored obviousness here. But you know what it is? There's just too much immortality, too much of the encomium and of the moment made eternal, in Martin's depiction of his fellow artists.

Flora's works, by contrast, are so hung over with excitement that they are incapable of taking themselves that seriously. Nor do they ever stop slithering and wobbling around long enough to become "art objects", not even when reproduced in a book. It is worth noting that Flora liked to juggle his cartoon musicians through various states of suspension and / or flight. Exaggerated. Animated. High as kites. So that, for me anyway, Flora's designs possess the same extremism with which the best bebop pulsates. As John Litweiler has written (in his The Freedom Principle), "a deadly fall to earth is ever possible" (14) in such instances. Martin acknowledges the precariousness, but Flora flaunts it, expanding the edge along which others dance into a field in which he can play.

In our Age of Nausea – your saliva thickens, exhaustion greases your eyeballs, and either you're unwell because the world looks the way it does, or the world looks the way it does because you're sick, sick, sick -- the publication of The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora is more than a little overdue. Its appearance is sure to delight anyone with an interest in vintage graphics, record collecting, the current state of the graphic novel, or Pop Art's ability to sublimate the obscene and have it return to the collective consciousness as the neurotic.

~ Joe Milazzo

Brett Larner/Toshimaru Nakamura - after school activity

Brett Larner/Toshimaru Nakamura
after school activity
Impermanent
ire005

Three tracks recorded on consecutive days in late January 2003. Though the initial cut, “your naïf”, took place in a studio, the very first sound you hear is a slight room hum, an element that sets the stage for subsequent activity. On this piece, Larner uses his koto for single, bell-like notes, hovering in the air between Nakamura’s staticky buzzes and ultrahigh-pitched tones. As in the remainder of the disc, I found Larner’s contributions, while not unpleasant, to be rather beside the point and I far preferred to concentrate on what magic Nakamura was creating, even if the mere juxtapositioning of the koto with the mixing board provides a nice, inherent "feel" to the music. About midway through, Toshi switches over to less pristine, woollier sounds that are also quite attractive on their own.

After a brief second track that’s in roughly the same area as the first, the scene shifts to the Artship in Oakland, a public venue as one soon discovers. Larner makes wide use of extended techniques here, including rubbing and ruffling the koto strings, largely choosing to blend in with Nakamura’s sounds (and those of the environment, such as a passing plane) rather than position himself alongside, although early on he also avails himself of a lovely pattern that approximates a melody. Nakamura’s wonderful here, introducing wavering lines that shimmer against the ambient noise like a heat mirage. Little by little, the music cedes way to the ambiance as snatches of schoolkids’ laughing and yelling begin to be heard. This quickly turns into a virtual takeover of the space as the kids (sounding like a gaggle of 13-year-old boys) tumble into the space, apparently oblivious of the music. Our duo plunges on regardless, their plucks and sizzles melding, if not seamlessly at least obligingly, with the teenage bluster. It’s a lovely little object lesson as the hermeticism of art music is infiltrated by the banality of day-today existence and proves itself, in this case, entirely accommodating. As I implied above, on a strictly musical basis, I would have been happy with only Nakamura’s presence but, as the disc progresses, that aspects matters less and less and when it succumbs to the environment, it ends up making little difference at all. A good recording, well worth hearing.

Toshiya Tsunoda - Scenery of Decalcomania

Toshiya Tsunoda

Scenery of Decalcomania
Naturestrip
NS3003

My sole complaint about this recording is that there are seven tracks, ranging from about five to seventeen minutes instead of its being a seven-disc set, with each of the pieces allowed an hour or so to breathe. Though comprised of, more or less, naturally occurring aural phenomena, these aren’t pure field recordings in a technical sense, as Tsunoda tends to use specific and unusual set-ups to capture his sounds. So, he’ll place small microphones inside a length of U-shaped pipe, in a tiny cavity at the base of a metal cylinder or between thin sheets of copper foil, transmuting the sound vibrations that find their way into these spaces.

Given that so much of the actual input is pre-existent sound, channeled through specific “funnels” but otherwise untampered with, making qualitative evaluations of the final work, as far as Tsunoda’s contribution, perhaps devolves into a simple appreciation for the choices made, both as to the means of recording and which samples (from, one would assume, an enormous library) to issue. In this regard, I think Tsunoda has curated wonderfully. There’s a wide-ranging variety of timbres, high, whistling tones to wooly, low ones, variations in spatial imagery from compressed to expansive, etc. Most of the pieces are relatively steady-state, focused on a particular phenomenon, such as wind passing from a small aperture in a metal handrail, the loose exterior billowing contrasting with but clearly relating to the tightly enclosed keening heard within the tube. Similarly, the piece involving the cylinder cavity contrasts the deep, almost liquid-sounding rushes of air through that tiny space with the chirps and tweets of area birds, unconstrained in an entirely different sonic space. The final work, “Cut Diagonally”, uses voltage gates to cut off sounds beneath certain frequency levels, leaving only the irregular “peaks” and resulting in a fascinating, difficult-to-translate welter of sonic debris that’s strongly reminiscent of some of Xenakis’ electronic explorations.

The exception to this general rule, and the standout track on the disc, is “Ferry Passing”, recorded on a bridge in Kisarazu Bay, Japan, apparently with little in the way of enhancement. It unfurls like a freeform short story, narrative with no preconceived plot, leaving the listener in an anticipatory dither waiting for the next event. The harbor noises, PA announcements, scattered snatches of conversation, chimes, motors, wind and water all provide an extraordinarily rich sound field only heightened by the natural, everyday drama of small events. It’s one of the most rewarding pieces I’ve heard this year and “Scenery of Decalcomania” has been one of my most played discs in recent months, a superb recording.

Check it out at: www.naturestrip.com

~ Brian Olewnick

Person to Peer to Peer to Person

What does Sony Music Entertainment's decision to suspend the manufacture of copy-protected compact discs really mean?

This story has been reported in a number of major media outlets -- the Los Angeles Times, the BBC -- only in such a way as to lead one to believe that the repercussions of this shift in policy might be felt outside of the Japanese market. As the original AP story above and as this nice little write-up from The Register plainly disclose, the newly merged, international Sony BMG Music Entertainment will not be swayed.

What is truly noteworthy about this tsunami in a teapot is not so much the idea (expressed by corporate spokesperson Yasushi Ide) that Sony's message about the harm done to both artists and the economy by illegally reproducing and distributing branded content has somehow contributed to making human beings a little less predatory, but rather the very feudal fact that, finally, the only thing that can trump one property law is another older, bigger, uglier, and more entrenched one. To wit:

Indeed, Sony appeared concerned that a copy-protected CD isn't a Compact Disc in the true, standards-based definition of the term, which its own parent company was jointly responsible for setting. In short, there is consumer resistance -- and possible a legal challenge -- for something that looks like a CD but either plays nothing or lower quality audio when used in a CD drive.

At the same time, the strict enforcement of "bad patents" is being closely monitored by public interest groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF]. And yet I would wager that Sony and Phillips will never get into it. Corporations have become extremely wary when it comes to picking their battles. It is much easier -- i.e., less expensive -- to take down and co-opt the Mountain Dew-guzzling Shawn Fannings of the world. No CEO in his / her right mind wants "listeners" or "an audience". They even understand that "fans" will only ever represent a small is devoted percentage of the market they wish to dominate. They want to own those who, in turn, want to own. Not as Southern plantation owners held slaves, of course. But what is up for grabs are the reasons we have to want what we do, as well as the mechanisms by which we can exercise those wants. It may be that there can be no arguments about tastes, but perhaps the day is not far off when tastes can be truly expropriated, traded, and controlled by remote means. If they are not already. Desire upon desire upon desire… it's enough to make me want to be a Buddhist for real.

So, is this abandonment of ill-conceived technology on the part of one of the world great electronics firms truly a victory for consumers everywhere? If so, I'd like to know when did my quasi-legal status as "consumer", traducing borders in the new global economy, supplant by citizenship, my existential bond to the circumstances of my specific time and place? It prompts me to think about the chicken-and-egg question that I do not think I've ever seen phrased as such… which came first, the P2P networks, or the social and economic forces those networks circumvent? That is, is the "oppositional" character of something such as Kazaa accidental, or knowingly, diabolically in-built?

There's no doubt about it in my mind: the public domain has become increasingly becoming private, a sphere in which it pays to be surreptitious. As much as the power wielded by those conglomerated "persons" we call corporations does, the popularity of P2P networks communicates to me that the equality of individuals can no longer be protected, much less guaranteed. In place of equality, then, we have anonymity. But, qua Sony, what lessons does the "free trade" experience teach us about human nature?

Trudy Pitts - Legends of Acid Jazz (Prestige)

A recurring choice for when lights are dim at the Taylor cabana, this disc is much like that matchbook with the kitsch-cool cover you keep finding in the breast pocket of your smoking jacket and can’t bear to toss out. Pitts had an encomium-worthy career that sadly didn’t transfer to fecundity on vinyl. She’s the only organist, to my knowledge, to have gigged with Coltrane in their native Philadelphia (where are the tapes!?!) and one of handful of female purveyors on the B-3 who could easily hold court with her male peers. She’s since been shrouded under the shadow of her counterpart in the sisterhood, Shirley Scott; a fate shared by fellow unsungs Gloria Coleman and Rhoda Scott. This two-fer, combining Pitts’ first and second platters for Prestige, is totally of its era. On the first nine numbers the soda pop conga of Abdu Johnson joins the core trio of plectrist Pat Martino, playing a fair bit of acoustic along with his customary hollow-body electric, and drummer Bill Carney (also Pitts’ spouse and manager). All nineteen cuts are draped in the pungent, instantly appealing aura of an intimate lounge date despite their origins in Rudy Van G’s Englewood Cliffs studio bunker. The set is so ripe with atmosphere that you can almost smell the wafting aromatic blend of cheroot smoke, mohair fibers, freshly poured Johnny Walker, and Naugahyde upholstery lingering in the patron booths. Pitts proves herself a pro at building and sustaining ambiance, rotating favorite pop songs of the day (“It Was a Very Good Year,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale”) with bop-tailored tunes from Carney’s songbook. Her command of the organ’s available nuances and willingness to incorporate a wide range of settings from reed-like twitters to thick vespertine fills and narcotic swells ensures that the bromidic nature of some of the material is undercut by an adventurous uncertainty. The summit for me is a rendering of “Eleanor Rigby” where Pitts’ captures song’s sentiments of urban alienation completely without sacrificing a sliver of groove, rubber-stamping her swirling indigo-hued solo with an emphatically hip “Yow!” Don’t let the garish Kool-Aid™ acid test cover art faze you. This is music that targets both the hips and head and sets the tumblers in each to locking on a deeply pleasing groove.

Some Notes Prompted By Moanin' At Midnight

(Installment number 1 in a series of...)

Moanin' At Midnight: The Life And Times Of Howlin' Wolf, by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman. Pantheon. 397 p. $26.95.

I was asked to review this biography for The Dallas Morning News. In the process of assembling my final copy, I filled several pages with observations, reactions and speculations I knew would never even make a draft, not even as material to be ultimately discarded. Said review was written for a very specific audience, i.e., one unblemished by much familiarity with sharecropping, West Memphis, the Chess brothers, or the man-mountain Chester Burnett himself. These unnumbered notes will never be written into a real piece, but, even in their formlessness -- more like that of lava than of pudding, I hope -- I feel they say more about my experience with the book, and with Wolf's art, than the 450 polished words I have submitted elsewhere. (In fact, the review may not even make it to print, what with layoffs looming at the Belo Death Star.)

---

Wolf's beginnings are, of course, obscure. Who cared about another black boy in 1910 in rural Mississippi, beyond what he represented in terms of toting, hauling, hoeing, and picking capacity? His mother Gertrude cared only as long as the rewards of motherhood appealed to her.

"Maybe, as Chester told a friend [actually, Hubert Sumlin, who Wolf named in his last will and testament as kin, as his son, with no distinction drawn between ties of blood and the bond of legality, i.e., adoption], his mother became enraged because he would not work in the fields for 15 cents a day. Maybe, as he told his last wife, his mother rejected him because he refused to sing spirituals with her because he already had his sights set on another calling -- singing the blues. [Switch mother for father, make the protagonist Jewish instead of black, and isn't this basically the plot of The Jazz Singer?] (6)

His uncle Will Young didn't care for young Wolf, but he tended or minded him like he would a mule. One has something of a hard time picturing a giant such as Howlin' Wolf as Cinderella. But if we are to believe Segrest and Hoffman -- and I can hardly argue with them -- the rough-and-tumble was all-too conscious of his scarring boyhood. The authors describe the wastrel Burnett thrown to the vagaries of winter, shoeless, following the railroad tracks to wherever he might be taken in. Its an image they then reveal lurks behind the lyrics to "Smokestack Lightnin'": "Well, who been here, baby, since I been gone? / Little bitty boy, derby on..."

And so it occurs to me that, more than any other outwardly on-the-go-on-the-make Americans, Black Americans are fated, or perhaps cursed, with discovering their roots over and over again. The truth of this people's origins seems continually repressed, like the McCaslin genealogies in Faulkner's "The Bear". I suppose it is because they have been so denied their history, first by capture, then by enslavement, segregation, consignment to the underclass, eventually even by pride -- the always problematic phenomenon of (Pan-)Africanism -- and by political correctness.

Corollary to the question, then, of how Chester Burnett became Howlin' Wolf is that of how Howlin' Wolf saw himself. Or: how did Howlin' Wolf understand his transformation? Did he conceive of himself as a kind of brujo, or a denizen (sort of) Dr. Moreau's isle? Man-made, or self-made man? The authors cannot possible answer these questions, and neither can I, unless I resort to the medium of fiction.

---

"By the light / of the silvery moon…"

How might the Wolf have held his tonk hand? When he gambled, was he reckless or was he so parsimonious his opponents could never read him?

How would Howlin' Wolf down himself a bottle of beer?

---

Wolf is not so much remembered here as is his span, his bulk, his appetites, the way women were drawn to his violent charisma (women so thick around him they blotted out even his eminence), the iron in his discipline, his wariness, his illiteracy… What can musical theorizing make of all this?

Hubert Sumlin, who, I shit you not, was listed in Chester Burnett's funeral program as his son:

"We got to be so close, like father and son… Hubert was Wolf, Wolf was Hubert. That's the way we had it, that's the way it was…" (184)

Wolf's biological son, Floyd Burnett, describing what he felt when he learned of his father's death:

"[H]e thought he heard a voice in his kitchen asking him for water. 'I said, "That's my daddy's voice! Wait a minute! Somethin' ain't right."' He called Lillie [Floyd's step-mother] and asked, 'My daddy is dead, ain't he?' She said, 'How do you know?' He said, 'He just called me from the grave to bring him some water. And from the Bible speaking, that's hell-bound.'" (318)

So much for sacraments. But what does it mean to sacrifice one's manhood for the sake of becoming mythology incarnate?

---

Wolf the "tail dragger" (also the title of one of the songs written for him by Willie Dixon, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship; Wolf considered Dixon's tunes not much more than what we might call "novelties"). On stage, he would tuck a handkerchief or between his belt and his trousers and shake his hips. At first -- according to Willie Lee Johnson -- the handkerchief was a towel, and the sweat-drenched Wolf needed it handy to wipe down in the roadhouses through which he passed, leaving his tracks, not really wiping them out, as he liked to euphemize the lasciviousness of his performances.

Necessities become affectations, I suppose. Elvis's pelvis could never compare to the convulsive reality of all six feet, three inches, and 300 pounds of Howlin' Wolf in accusatory breakdown. Wolf's (in)famous appearance on the teenybopper ABC program Shindig from 1965 (made at the bequest of The Rolling Stones) makes this all too clear. It is almost frightening to see a man that big apparently lose control of his body, or have his sense of self taken utterly away by the music. Stared at by pasty, acne-d white faces, kids in beach-wear clapping politely, Wolf is a tornado in gabardine. Astounding.

Then, too, there is an image in my mind that is absent from the portrait Segrest and Hoffman paint of the sharecropping life Wolf would have known so intimately. It is an image, moving, of black men and women making their way through the cotton fields at harvest time, nipping the buds, trailing behind them huge sacks of white burlap, often patched together crudely from many disparate swatches of cloth. (And think of the KKK costumes in Griffith's Birth Of A Nation.) Sacks more like tunnels to be filled with the cash crop, growing steadily heavier even as the cessation of beast of burden's efforts looms at the far end of the row. And hungry ghosts are riding on their backs.

"When the mighty Wolf come along draggin' his tail, he done stole somebody's daughter."

---

"'I never knowed him [Wolf] to do a thing but pat his foots [size 16] and sing those songs,' said [cousin Dorothy] Spencer. 'Now he was sure lazy -- I'll tell you the truth!' Wolf would have called it wisdom -- choosing a better life." (25)

The vagabond existence of the bluesman as an escape from the deathly tedium of rural life, that life's crushing cyclical nature. The blues offer a succession of temporary highs -- drink, women, celebrity -- that can nonetheless be strung by its most inventive and conscience-free practitioners so that it builds to a long, sustained crescendo. The blues singer and the community he / she (rarely, but there were some) "serves" are like wheels in some mechanism turning against one another.

The blues as the sound of autumn, Robbie Robertson's "King Harvest". For the bluesman, the disposable income earned by the reapers just rolls in. For his audience, his songs are as hard as moonshine, as sweet and numbing as patent medicine taken not by the drop -- or spoonful -- but by the gulp. Yes, the bluesman only stays in one place long enough to get paid. He gets out before his vagrancy can be detected and he can be pressed into labor. Your wits, your timing are key. Keep to the shadows. Like the Wolf, your movements must always be furtive, your whereabouts should never be fully known.

And so Segrest's and Hoffman's narrative often becomes not much more than a number of paragraphs beginning with "And then…" All these witnesses who saw Wolf hitchhike or, late, drive through in his Pontiac station wagon. "I heard him once, here, there, then." Chronology defines his life, although his art is timeless.

Isn't it?

---

Juke joints. The floors of such places, rough joints of unsanded, unvarnished planks, Splinters in waiting. Boards stained with tiger-piss brown liquor, spilt blood, the flaky powder of cigarette ashes mixed with sweat and other lubricants into a light gray paste, snuff juice. Wolf's huge foot (one nickname, Foots, is kept alive by old associates, his guise for them, striding, wandering) keeping time so loud on this floor. Does it rest on the dirt, or is there a resonating crawl space between the foundation and dancing surface? Wolf sits on a cane-bottomed chair with his huge legs spread wide. He performs seated, his ass almost twice the size of the chair's seat, but he becomes animated, and the chair is scooted about the room as if by a mischievous or more dire and restless spirit summoned in a séance. And the lanterns shake, squashed paper cups litter the floor, and outside the thin and leaning walls is a world of swamps and hoots and gloomily swaying trees. A magic forest, a green and ochre darkness. Wolf, a creature himself who is barely able to make his wildness (as well as his wiles) heel, unites the inside and outside. Yet the bluesman himself fears nothing in nature except the ferocity of other people.

So Wolf's greatest performances, such as "Smokestack Lightnin'", "Back Door Man" and "I Ain't Superstitious", reveal that his art is primarily one of paranoia. And if paranoia is fear emboldened by rage, well, perhaps this is why Wolf's blues are more macabre and exhibitionistic than they are lonesome and sorrowful. Still, a man fighting with everything his has to rescue his humanity from racist ideas about his reputed evil is hardly an unreasonable man -- nor is he a man governed by bad faith.

~ Joe Milazzo