The contest for bleakest film noir is one wrought with contention. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is often named as a favorite for the prize, but there are several lesser contenders also worthy of consideration. Shot on the streets of New York in 1959 and released roughly two years later, Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence sits well within that select number. Baron’s film centers on Frankie Bono, a mob hit man with a back-story as clichéd as they come: an orphan and sociopath who always works alone, Bono is good at his job precisely because of the hate he harbors for other human beings. Based in Cleveland with New York roots, he accepts a contract in the Big Apple to take out a middle tier boss named Troiano at Christmas time.
Baron stocks the film with numerous noir and existentialist tropes starting with a title sequence that likens a hurdling trip through a subway tunnel to the disorienting trauma of birth. Blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt (operating under a pseudonym) scripts a heavy-handed second-person voiceover as a further means of eroding ambiquity. Read in an alternatingly sarcastic and menacing tone, the narration intrudes to the point of distraction and it’s hard not to imagine a better film sans its portentous presence. Where Baron does strike gold is in the many location shoots around the city. Vintage storefronts and nightclubs abound, captured in a visceral and grainy monochrome that accentuates the starkness of their geometries. There’s even a vicarious visit to the Village Gate, though the conga-led jazz combo entertaining the clientele elicits winces rather than applause.
Baron’s decision to play the part of the brooding conflicted Bono is also questionable. Peter Falk was purportedly cast prior, but jumped ship to star in a more lucrative film production. Wooden, Ed Wood-worthy acting is the norm, but there are standouts amongst the cardboard. In particular there’s Larry Tucker who plays the part of Fat Ralphie a particularly odious blackmarketeer who Bono must rely on to obtain his murder weapon. Tucker’s role is ripe with winsome touches, from a flop house residence populated with pet rats, to a vaguely effeminate demeanor that directly recalls his controversial work in Advise and Consentseveral years later, though far more nuanced.
Bono’s odyssey is one of methodical purpose. Baron exerts great care in documenting his preparatory activities without clouding them in concessions to morality. There’s an extended sequence where Bono cleans and readies his gun, set to the strains of a solo jazz trumpet, which is particularly effective in this regard. Elsewhere, the vibraphone-dominant soundtrack, feels somewhat dated and intrusive. A Bohemian party where Bono attempts to connect with old friends is similarly time-locked, couples waltzing and carousing politely while in another corner of the room a hipster palms and awkward bongo beat. A comical peanut-pushing race serves as quixotic culmination.
The film’s violence, though sporadic, is surprisingly brutal and bloody. The film’s dénouement is predictable, telegraphed well in advance by the ham-fisted narration, but the minutes leading up to it are still tense and well-choreographed. Again, Baron earns considerable points for location authenticity and flavor; it’s in the recreation of realistic interaction and dialogue where the production falters. His professional background was in commercial art and comics with film craft largely self-taught. That chemistry catalyzes in his sharp camera angles and astute use of shadow, but fizzles when it comes to the human element. Two weeks tardy for Cannes consideration, but the French press did offer up mystifying conjecture as to whether Baron might be the next Orson Welles. It’s a stretch beyond measure, but his film still stands up as an interesting early Sixties experiment in pushing the boundaries of noir to grim extremes.
~ Derek Taylor
The missive from Mosaic that multitudes have been waiting for appeared in Inboxes across the globe the morning: The Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton now has an official ballpark street date of October. I’m not as jazzed as some by the news, but can still certainly appreciate its overall import. The diversity of material represented alone is impressive, ranging from cosmic quadruple orchestras to Mr. B by his unflappable lonesome. At eight discs it will require a chunk of change (if my math’s right, $128 plus S&H) to take one home, but given all the anticipatory hoopla that’s encircled the project since gestating rumors first dropped that’s probably only a pittance to most.
Been waiting for this one for awhile, ever since learning of Fat Possum’s acquistion of rights to the George Mitchell tape archives. Mitchell is probably familiar to most readers here, a guy who took the Lomaxes perigrinations as his loose template and traveled the South recording mainly rural musicians. Where he differed somewhat was in his penchant for spending significant time in the communities he visited, building rapport and often deferring to his subjects for direction. Save for a single disc compilation of bluesman Cecil Barfield, they opted to release the material as a series of 45 7” singles. The piecemeal nature of that format wasn’t to my liking, so I kept my wallet buttoned. Same held with with Emusic’s later presentation of portions of the holdings in mp3 form. Instead, I kept periodically pining away for a box set, hoping that one would appear sooner rather than later, subsisting on the scraps previously released on various Arhoolie cd compilations. Months passed and those unrequited desires eventually got buried in a cobwebbed corner of my memory.
A stop by Adam Lore’s indispensible 50 Miles of Elbow Room emporium this morning hipped me to the joyous discovery that my patience has finally paid off (thanks, Adam!). A box set respresenting all 45 volumes does exist and has been available since April. One is winging my way as I type this and I hope to have it hand next week prior to the start of the Deep Blues Festival (see below). I won’t bore readers with the details of the contents. That info is available within a few easy clicks. Suffice it to say that to the fan of country blues and gospel recorded in the field this set represents Rosetta and Grail rolled into one. More when I have the exalted object in my expectant hands….
Apologies for another meme post, but rest assured that its only purpose is to inform one & all that the Bags remodel is progressing apace. The Bags Hardhat Diving Brigade (pictured above in snapshot formation by deckhand Tintin Benoit) is continuing its endeavors under the expert command of the recently returned Al “Namor” Jones. Underwater acetylene torches are ablaze like a swarm of sunken fire flies, applying all manner of upgrades to the rusting barnacle-encrusted Bagatellen bulwark. I’ve been playing the part of desk jockey, trying to keep content current. As noted previously, feedback, suggestions & visions for the site are most welcome so please keep them coming. Toward that end, we’re curious how readers would feel about having a registration feature installed. This would likely mimic the apparatus of other sites in allowing for enhanced interactivity and also enabling a further retardant to interpersonal flammability. We’re shooting for a champagne bottle christening sometime around the first of August.
Friends. Long time, no post. Derek isn't aware I'm publishing this, but I'm sure he won't mind. *cough*
Being blessed with some free time -- I intend to revamp this place. Comparatively, I'm surprised that the community here has stayed more or less active for so long, in that the design and interfaces here at the site haven't changed much since the 2003 inception. Even 1.5x manpower makes management of bagatellen a huge responsibility, thus the less than static state many of you have seen throughout the years (license expirations, data loss, software transfers, blah blah). Derek has been at it solo with help from some contributors since early 2006.
My intentions are as follows, and I strongly desire input and suggestions from you guys and gals:
Additionally, I am considering either upgrading to the latest Movable Type rev, or shifting from the site's Movable Type interface to Wordpress. I am hesitant at this point because of the work that may be involved in the latter. Since our last technical nightmare, MT has become an open source interface and a new, better build is available that I intend to research. Any input on this end is appreciated.
The goal is to first make the site fresher, current, and user-friendly; and second, to relieve Derek and other authors and commenters of the frustrations frequently involved here.
Grad school starts back up for me soon, so time is tight to make these changes. Your input is appreciated.
Just heard word from erstwhile Baganaut Phil Freeman about his recent epic Q&A with Bill Dixon. The good folks at our sister publication The Wire (hopefully none on the masthead take offense at that presumptive ascription) have seen fit to stream the pair’s original phone session in toto. It’s also been boiled down into a 4500-word expose slated to pop in the July paper issue. I haven’t been able to check out any of the goodies yet as my antique work machine doesn’t have audio. But please do so & feel free to share thoughts/comments on the confab herein.
As revered for his brilliant Brechtian documentaries as he is notorious for his control freak tendencies, Fredrick Wiseman loosened the vice grip on his filmic catalog late last year. That surprise move has lead to a boon for followers of his work. No more waiting for blue moon screenings at museums or festivals. No more scouring closed stacks or holding out hope for rarefied inter-library loans in order to view slices of his sizeable cinematic corpus. Twenty-three titles are now available to the general public for purchase in dvd form. Sales so far appear to be robust and in celebration of the windfall the canny folks over at Not Coming to a Theater Near You have been devouring the catalog in earnest. Over a dozen reviews posted and more presumably on the way. The levels of comment and insight are high, particularly in Leo Goldsmith’s parsing of Primate. Do yourself a favor and spend some time perusing the primer and then cruise over to Zipporah Films central and empty the wallet.
Another one gone & this one’s big. Like certain other doyens, Bo Diddley peaked early, coasting through much the last four decades on the crowning acheivements of his Chess catalog. That kind of laurel-resting, while unfortunate, is more than warranted given his indispensible influence on music. Cigar box guitar and maracas made for a magical combination on dozens of Fifties and early Sixties sides that prove the Bo Diddley beat ain’t no joke. It’s a force of nature. One I fully intend to revisit once I get home tonight. Feel free to beat me to the punch by posting some remembrances and insights on the man here.
Heads up to all Mississippi Hill Country blues fans in the Midwestern United States (& beyond!): The second annual Deep Blues Fest is a go for the weekend of July 18th. I had last year’s event at the top of my docket, but a convergence of extenuating circumstances precluded my participation, something I still regret given the audio-visual evidence of what went down assembled on YouTube.
This year’s line-up looks every bit as appealing as last with a horde of delegates from the grittier and grimier side of the blues continuum converging on the Washington County Fairgrounds, a change in venue’s from last year’s storied Golf Course/Country Club hit. Looks like there’s a film festival component this time out too. Full schedule & specs viewable here. Among the headliners I’m itching to witness:
Elmo Williams & Hezekiah Early [caught these two in late ’98 opening for R.L. Burnside @ a Madison, WI tavern. They tore the roof off with a primal collision of amped-up boogie guitar and jackhammer cans]
T-Model Ford [see here]
Juke Joint Duo (feat. Cedric Burnside & Lightnin’ Malcolm) [don’t know Malcom, but Cedric’s lit rhythmic bonfires on a number of choice Fat Possum platters]
Dex Romweber Duo [unclear why Dex isn’t operating under his usual Flat Duo Jets sobriquet, but odds are his stage show will still be a gas]
Bob Log III [I last saw this helmet wearing one-man-band hedonist last in Tucson, summer of ’96, curious to hear how & if his cracked speaker stack sound has evolved]
Luther the Devil [never heard or heard of him, but hell, the name can’t help but give me hope]
Only downside is that Willie Nelson is playing a gig at a Hinckley, MN casino the same weekend and a date with the Red Headed Stranger is damn hard to break.
Jimmy Giuffre, and now Walt D. May is a cruel month is year. Rumors of Dickerson’s return to recording have been circulating for the past few years, spurred mainly by several “out-of-the-blue” interviews (links escape me at the moment) that revealed his activities over the past several decades. He was poised for a comeback on par with the one staged by Henry Grimes, but mortality has caught up and made it an impossibility. As consolation we still have the records, reflective of bursts of activity rather than a steady stream. I did a survey of his Prestige titles for One Final Note back in 2000 & while the prose is a little painful to revisit my sentiments remain the same. The platter pictured above is a bit harder to come by, but it’s worth the search as it’s a split of two sessions w. Rudy McDaniel (soon to be rechristened Jamaladeen Tacuma) and Edgar Bateman or Wilbur Ware and Andrew Cyrille as his running mates. The companion, Tell Us Only of Beautiful Things is even better by my lights, focusing on the Cyrille/Ware tandem over sidelong cuts. Both are rare, but the latter may still be available as a download here. Do check it out if you’re not yet familiar.
Dickerson was a colossus on his instrument and a continuing influence on many who came after. Matt Moran and Jason Andasiewicz are just two descendants that spring to mind. This hastily written appreciation does him little justice, but he certainly sits highly within my personal pantheon. Here’s hoping he’s sharing spirited mallet exchanges with Hampton and Jackson in the great beyond.
Debashish Bhattacharya represents a long tradition of adapting “Western” instruments to “Eastern” modes of expression, in this case a modified Hofner hollow-body guitar, to Indian Classical applications. I think it was the esteemed Professor Bivins who first hipped me to his work, but I can’t recall exactly. However my means of ingress, I’m unequivocally hooked and have been for some time. Bhattacharya’s Indian Archives albums are marvelous and allow for full length excursions through several popular raga forms. The best is probably “Raga Bhimpalasi”, a piece popularized by Ravi Shankar and recorded by the master at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival for World Pacific. Bhattacharya spends much of the first fifty minutes, building and retreating in waves through the alap, jor and jhala sections, his calm detailed picking rippling across a bed of braiding tanpuras. It’s the final thirty or so where his transcendental technique really takes off, partially cued by the entry of Samir Chatterjee’s tablas. “Jaw-dropping” doesn’t even begin to describe the improvisational ingenuity on display as patterns glide by at in a blur without losing anything the way of detail or accuracy. The effect of the whole is literally like an aural cleansing. Listening again on a jog along the Mississippi River this weekend, I was completely swept up, the myriad stressors of the last week washed summarily away.
In the copious notes to these releases, Bhattacharya gently, though repeatedly, laments the “lonely” course of his career development. The relationship of guru and pupil is historically central to Indian Classical music and Bhattacharya’s choice of expression complicated his search for such an arrangement. He eventually studied with a series of teachers, among them Indian slide guitarist-pioneer Brij Bushan Kabra and sarodist Ali Akbar Khan. Kabra’s teaching ran contrary to the customary course as he encouraged Bhattacharya to find his own voice, a directive that initially had a detrimental effect on the student whose desire was to copy his mentor. In reflecting on the experience, Bhattacharya almost seems almost sad that he’s had to devise a language of his own given the ‘foreign’ nature of his instrument. It’s an attitude in stark contrast to that of the typical Western improviser who commonly views individual innovation as paramount over deference to tradition. Time proved Kabra’s decision a savvy one as the mandate for self-reliance led Bhattacharya to seek out a myriad of collaborators, among them John McLaughlin and the Hawaiian steel virtuoso Bob Brozman, which have amplified awareness of his music to a global audience. I have yet to hear those encounters, but the music on his India Archives releases as well as Calcutta Slide Guitar, his debut for the Riverboat label, is an aural body I return to often to renew my sense of wonder.
Jimmy Giuffre has passed, a bittersweet blessing considering the trajectory his life took in the last half decade thanks to Parkinson’s. I have much I could/should write, but sadly not the time to write it right now. Suffice it to say he was a giant and one of my most cherished musical spirits. “The Green Country” is probably my favorite Giuffre tune; a 3-minute reverie of preternatural beauty that I hope will play at my wedding and funeral. Rest in peace, Jimmy.
The Street with No Name straddles the clash-prone genres of noir and FBI procedural better than most films of its ilk. Even so, the docu-drama segments play like unintentional near-parody. In the opening story-establishing scenes, the Hoover-run apparatus springs capably into action. Murder bullets are couriered to the Bureau’s DC crime lab and matched through a “data base” that consists of a filing cabinet with labeled drawers. A suspect is identified and apprehended within hours. One neat, if slightly far-fetched trick involves matching dried paint on the suspect’s coat to a building girder to corroborate an alibi.
Later, at a cinematic precursor to Quantico, an agent is picked out of a litter of recruits like an eager puppy from the pound. His qualifications for undercover work appear to consist solely of being a crack shot and possessing the ability to differentiate friend from foe. Mark Stevens gives a fair turn as the undercover agent Gene Cordell, investing the rather thankless blank slate character with some much needed personality. Cordell takes to his assignment with enthusiasm and resourcefulness, but isn’t infallible as a third reel gaffe on his part leads to potentially dire consequences. His means of infiltrating the criminal gang are at once simple and novel and provide panoramic ingress into the chaotic bustle of a vintage boxing gym as well as some welcome levity.
Director William Keighley deftly negotiates the studio mandate of a spotless and efficient Bureau with grittier doses of reality and bad guy who isn’t a fish in a barrel. Richard Widmark’s Alec Stiles has his own bag of tricks including a clever method of screening new members for his gang that involves carefully orchestrated frame jobs and subsequent access to police records. Stiles is the slow boil sort, cool on the exterior with an explosive temper simmering underneath. Widmark also gives him the slightly unsightly and unsettling habit of sniffing nose drops. His signature menace is present, but bridled much of time, making the periodic explosions of violence all the more effective, as when he guns down a woman in the back in the film’s first few minutes. Camaraderie with his gang comes out of necessity and his ruthlessness remains governed by a calculating intelligence. Stiles personifies a new sort of atomic age gangster, one “building an organization along scientific lines”.
Joe MacDonald’s cinematography is gorgeously gritty, particularly so in the location night scenes. Even with some print wear in evidence, his compositions of shadow and light and sharply contrastive angles give the film a look that easily qualifies it as noir despite the more staid procedural leanings of the plot. The Skid Row of the fictional Center City comes alive through the camera and the cast is similarly stocked with vibrant character actor talent including: Ed Begley, John McIntire and Howard Smith. McIntire in particular distinguishes himself as Cy Gordon, Cordell’s perpetually grave handler. In radio communications with headquarters he even goes so far as to dampen his voice to a somber whisper even though there’s no one else within ear shot to hear him. The script is saturated with period vernacular, but not overblown. One line stands out amongst the hardboiled banter: “The nose, hit him in the nose, it’ll splatter all over his kisser.” It’s a humorously savage sentiment manifested more explicitly in a surprisingly bullet-riddled finale.
Placeholder for discussion on any or all of the following: Oliver Reed, Charles Bukowski, Tallulah Bankhead, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Jackie Gleason, Brendan Behan, The Pogues’ Shane McGowan, Ozzy Osbourne, Winston Churchill, Kingsley Amis, Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard, Red Sox pitcher David Wells, Modern Drunkard Publisher Frank Kelly Rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Known collectively under the mantle “Fifteen Famous Drunks” coined by artist Danny Hellman.
Commercial sheet music courtesy the Djll family library.
“At the very bottom of the process of musical development are the howls of the savage; shrill, piercing, and with indefinite pitch. ... Like all folk music, neither boogie woogie nor the blues was created by any one individual. Seemingly, both styles developed from the tribal music of the African savage.”– Sharon Pease, “Boogie Woogie Piano Styles,” 1940. Forster Music Publisher, Inc. (Chicago)
Of the many charming and half-forgotten love-children of the musical genre mixing that emerged during the fertile era of the 1930’s, when jazz music and American popular culture briefly shared the same bed, none had the eventual impact of boogie woogie. Christened with a name that fairly reeked of the world of chippies, cribs, honky-tonks and sporting houses, the boogie woogie style nevertheless enjoyed a brief rage in the early 1940s, faded from national attention and then was reborn, lusty and screaming, in the stomping ivories and honking saxophones under the command of Fats Domino, Little Richard and countless other rock ‘n’ rollers who followed them. It was still showing up decades later, although slowly losing its genetic thread among fuzzbox mutations by the 1970s. Then, during the 1990s, boogie woogie was reanimated and stitched onto that pop music Frankenstein known as “swing and jive,” unwittingly caricatured by pudgy sheiks in goatees and zoot suits, who didn’t seem to know the difference between a Sing, Sing, Sing and a Rocket 88. There’s a special place in Hell on MySpace for them now. But I digress.
The three-disc set Mosaic presents here collects a representative garland of boogie-woogie pianists and small bands recorded between 1935 and 1941, on labels associated with Victor and Columbia. The producers make plain their wish to avoid inclusion of the million-selling big band hits that capitalized on the boogie-woogie craze, such as Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie Woogie and that crushing collision of flag-waving and white hipsteria, The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. An impressive selection of important records in the eight-to-the-bar style is included, although completists must search elsewhere for some key omissions. Notable Decca recordings such as Meade Lux Lewis’ Yancey Special fall outside of the producer’s boundaries. And although Lewis laid down the pioneering boogie wax with Honky Tonk Train Blues in 1927, it is the re-recorded 1936 version that’s here; other progenitors such as Pinetop Smith, Champion Jack Dupree, and Wesley Wallace are unrepresented.
The eccentric style of a pianist like Wallace would be valuable in rounding out a collection like this. Not much is known about him, but his 1929 Chicago recording, No. 29 (included in the Riverside History of Classic Jazz) is a fascinating 6/8 train piece with humorously evocative narration and erratically-timed modulations between just tonic and subdominant keys. It’s unlike any other boogie or blues piano piece I’ve ever heard, and hints at the murky origins of the style as reportedly practiced by long-forgotten itinerant musicians who predated the recording age. Like Wallace, the origins of boogie woogie are obscure, probably stretching back into the ragtime era or possibly earlier. In Blesh & Janis’ They All Played Ragtime, Eubie Blake describes a 300-lb character from Baltimore named William Turk who “had a left hand like God…He could play the ragtime stride bass, but it bothered him because his stomach got in the way of his arm, so he used a walking bass instead. I can remember when I was thirteen – this was 1896 – how Turk would play one note with his right hand and at the same time four with his left. We called it ‘sixteen’ – they call it boogie woogie now.” Blake is probably speaking of a steady 8th-note bass in his description of Turk’s style. Turk, who reportedly played in all keys and sometimes in multiple keys (“and the chords still jelled,” recalled Blake), died in 1911. Blake also told of a Boston pianist from the same generation, One-Leg Willie Joseph, who grabbed a national ragtime prize for his rendition of The Stars and Stripes Forever in march, rag, and ‘sixteen’-time. Blake no doubt carried some of this musical DNA into his own work, evidenced by a 1922 recording of Charleston Rag (not the famous Charleston, by James P. Johnson), which sports tricky reverse-boogie walking bass-anchored themes sandwiched between hard-striding ragtime syncopations. I call it “reverse” because Blake shifts the pattern by an 8th note, and all the accents go with it, making the pattern sound backwards.
Practically all jazz and blues pianists of that era were acquainted with boogie woogie, even if they themselves didn’t play it. When the craze took off, many bands and pianists featured at least one boogie woogie number to please the patrons. Jelly Roll Morton, of all people, though such blues styles were too low down to be taken seriously; Earl Hines scored big with Boogie Woogie On St. Louis Blues but otherwise never touched the stuff; Fats Waller reportedly refused requests to play it altogether (although one listen to his 1942 Up Jumped You With Love proves he did play the style at least once). All this discursion is meant to illustrate that genres, then as now, are fluid melting-pot things, at least in the hands of American musicians. And it provides an introduction to the earliest recordings on the Mosaic boogie woogie set, by Cripple Clarence Lofton, made in 1935 (but presented last in the anthology). Lofton, like Cow Cow Davenport and doubtless others forever lost to time, wasn’t too particular about keeping the rag out of his boogie, and vice versa. He had an interesting half-time bass, heard on Strut That Thing, consisting of one bass quarter note on the root of the chord followed by a quarter note on the remainder of the triad, walking this pattern up and down. The result is as much oompah as boogie. Lofton’s five pieces are all vocal blues numbers, tastefully embellished by Big Bill Broonzy’s guitar. Brown Skin Gal features some charming whistling as well. Lofton’s are really proto-boogie pieces, more in the standard blues idiom of the day.
An acknowledged father of boogie woogie is Jimmy Yancey, whose story illustrates the all too common difficulties faced by many African-American musicians. For much of his life he didn’t own a piano, practicing only occasionally at his sister’s house. He lived in Chicago all his life; after early success traveling in vaudeville as a singer and dancer, he went home to a near-invisible musical existence ground out in rent-parties and seedy bar gigs. Yancey’s day job was groundskeeper at Comiskey Park. But with the help of Meade Lux, who recorded Yancey Special (which was then picked up by the Bob Crosby band and made a hit), in 1939 Moe Asch and Victor both tracked down Yancey and brought him into their studios. All the Victors are included in the Mosaic set, along with four sides for Vocalion for a total of seventeen. It’s great to finally have them all in one place and mastered well for CD, for they are stone classics of American music of any era or genre. It’s hard to know where to start digging – every piece is varied in rhythm, key, and mood, offering multitudes of pianistic pleasures. Yancey’s style was pure 12-bar blues with a strong beat, spare and no-nonsense. He didn’t announce his pieces with flashy introductions – on the contrary, many of his records start off seemingly in mid-sentence, catching the listener off-guard. State Street Special is a supreme example of his art. It starts out light and breezy but quickly gets down and funky. Yancey’s bass keeps shifting between about six different figurations, with a fluidity that would be astonishing if it weren’t so fully integrated with the right-hand syncopations, and therefore not attention-calling. For the last couple of choruses Yancey slyly segues into a steady boogie beat, using plenty of space and keeping the dynamics down for the initial chorus before hammering out strident blue-note octaves on top in the second (a variation of an earlier chorus) – suddenly ending with his standard tag-line stop. It’s one perfect performance. Yancey Stomp is a fast rocker with a couple of dazzling breaks in the middle. Five O’Clock Blues delivers a deeply felt meditation (although it doesn’t reach the level of enlightenment of Yancey’s 1951 Atlantic re-recording of the same set of variations under the name Mournful Blues. Like many great musicians, Yancey recycled material as he pleased – 35th And Dearborn and Cryin’ In My Sleep also contain variations of the same choruses.). A couple of times Yancey stumbles momentarily, generating some creative tension, as on Yancey’s Bugle Call, with its skin-of-my-teeth breaks (especially the unissued take). The Vocalions and three of the Victor sides feature Yancey’s vocals, which on the Vocalions are rather oddly formal. Yancey’s enunciation sounds professionally coached, defying our expectations of what low-down blues is “supposed to sound like.” The Victor Cryin’ In My Sleep and Death Letter Blues offer Yancey vocals that sound more “authentic.” (Which brings up a perplexing question: which was indeed the authentic sound of Jimmy Yancey’s voice? Was it the producer at Vocalion who specified a “more legitimate” (i.e., white) vocal sound, or someone at Victor who urged the artist to “black it up?” One could imagine either scenario as a scheme to boost sales, albeit to differently-pigmented audiences. Or, less conspiratorially, is the stilted singing on the Vocalion date – Yancey’s debut on records – the result of opening-night jitters, or a flashback to his vaudeville days?) (Another aside: Yancey had a brother Alonzo, also a pianist, who recorded a few sides in the 1940s. They show him to be solidly in the ragtime school, with scant blues touches.)
Yancey remained clear of the limelight practically all his life. On the other hand, at the crest of the boogie craze, three other black pianists brought authentic boogie woogie to concert halls and high-class clubs in New York. One should not be surprised to see the name John Hammond come into the discussion at this point, for it was he who first presented Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson in New York, opening the 1938 Spirituals To Swing concert at Carnegie Hall (Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the jolly liner notes for the Mosaic package, calls Hammond the “deus ex machina of boogie woogie.” He might well have said “of American popular music in the 20th century.) All three of these “discoveries” of Hammond’s were much more schooled and comprehensive piano players than itinerant bluesmen like Yancey and Lofton. But that didn’t guarantee steady gigs for them – Hammond found Lewis working at a car wash in Chicago, and Ammons and Johnson had been cab-drivers on and off to bring in the bread. After their debut at Carnegie, though, that changed – for a while, anyway. Soon Ammons and Johnson had a duo going at the very democratic Café Society (integrated bandstand and audience) and recordings on big-time labels. Albert Ammons (father of saxophonist Gene) was the earthier and more rhythmically solid of the two – he’s another guy with “a left hand like God.” Ammons has just one solo recording in the set, Shout For Joy (in two takes), which is a peerless example of the boogie woogie style. After a Big Ben chiming intro, the God-hand digs into a timeless boogie figure – anyone acquainted with Dizzy Miss Lizzy will recognize it. Like Lewis and to a lesser extent Pete Johnson, Ammons gives over the last eight bars of each chorus to a standardized cadence that doesn’t vary much on repeats. It’s a common blues form. Contrast this with the “primitive” Yancey, who was less prone to this habit.
Lewis, Johnson and Ammons are all on hand for the two-part Boogie Woogie Prayer, presumably a reprise of the music they had created together just days before at Hammond’s Carnegie Hall concert. It’s a thick, roiling stew of blue pianistics, not terribly varied in texture, locked into three-chord harmony and 12-bar cycling, but one can imagine the impact this relentlessly rhythmic music must have had on your average white audient in 1938. Certainly record producers felt a new kind of freedom, the kind that would soon tool up the dreadful assembly line of Bumble Boogies and Bugle Boys and the rest of that sour ilk. And the public was there to lap it up, along with the fables about African savages and so forth. Whites could enjoy the thrill of being “hip to the jive” while their received notions of Afro-primitivism remained intact.
Eight performances from 1941 by the Ammons-Johnson duo (with discreet drumming) finish out disc one, and they offer seamless, mildly commercialized boogie for the downtown trade. Worth singling out is Cuttin’ the Boogie, an easy-going ramble that showcases the kind of contrapuntal extravaganza the duo could produce. It’s not possible to fully disentangle the two pianists for a who-did-what, but it’s a good bet Ammons is doing most of the bass work. Johnson, a more versatile jazz pianist, handles at least some of the fancy high-register filigrees. In the middle, a thicket of riffs spills from the keys. The duo would gig with dual pianos, but in practice just used one, thus enabling them to work on keeping out of each other’s way. On the records, we get intertwining lines, which, like relay runners, pass the melodic lead off to each other as they cross. It can all get pretty frenetic, as on a fast-tempo number like Boogie Woogie Man. Towards the climax, the groove doubles up as the walking basses run up and down the lower keyboard registers and the riffs pile up like a ten-layer double chocolate cake, thick, rich and bewitching.
Johnson and Ammons get to show a jazzier side on a few sides with swing trumpeter Harry James. On the boogie numbers, James sounds fenced in by the eight-to-the-bar rhythm – his ideas are less adventurous than usual and at times the excitement sounds forced. Things lighten up considerably for the non-boogie pieces; Home James has Johnson fingering in the Teddy Wilson mode in his solos and exchanges with trumpet. The previously unreleased Jesse has Ammons striding forcefully in a minor thing reminiscent of Dark Eyes (as Morgenstern points out; but his pianist attributions for this session don’t agree with the discography. My ears say the latter is correct.).
Pete Johnson’s work with the monumental blues shouter Joe Turner is more representative, and these are essential sides in both their catalogs. Turner worked as a singing bartender in Kansas City, where he and Johnson often performed together in the 1930s. The duo has two pieces on disc one: Goin’ Away Blues has Pete serving up a stride bounce and virtuosic tremolos. Roll ‘Em Pete was their showpiece, and Turner was still belting out “You’re so beautiful baby, but you’ve got to die someday” in 1977 in Chicago (although by that time you could hardly understand the words – as he aged, Big Joe gradually excised consonants from his delivery). Disc two of the Mosaic set opens with Pete Johnson And His Boogie Woogie Boys, a sextet offering sublime slices of Kaycee swinging the blues. Hot Lips Page and Buster Smith (Charlie Parker’s elusive mentor on one of his rare recording dates) make the front line backing Big Joe on four numbers. Cherry Red is a relaxed blues with a delicious ensemble opening and clear, forthright choruses from the singer, while Baby, Look At You again limns the “you’re so beautiful” refrain, at a jumping tempo. Smith breaks out with smooth alto and Page – one of the all-time hot blues instrumentalists – boils away behind a tight mute. Then Johnson takes over and demonstrates bear-like tenacity in his solo, carrying the whole band in the out-choruses. On Jump For Joy, at a similar brisk tempo, Pete gets three stride choruses and demonstrates he could hold his own against any piano player of the day (the magisterial Tatum excepted). Lips sounds especially nasty in the opening to Lovin’ Mama Blues, while Smith backs Turner’s vocal with a natty obbligato. Despite the band’s name, the session doesn’t offer a lot of boogie, but it’s wonderful small-group jazz nonetheless. From the same date comes a curiosity, Café Society Rag (Morgenstern calls it “not a rag, not a blues, but a boogie-flavored romp on jazz changes”). Johnson, Ammons and Lewis are back as a piano trio while Turner calls out the switch-hitters (“Donald Duck swing…better known as Lux!”).
Turner gets in more soulful vocalizing on a couple of pick-up dates from 1940, led by Joe Sullivan and Benny Carter. On Low Down Dirty Shame with the Sullivan group, he’s ably answered by Benny Morton’s trombone and Edmond Hall’s clarinet. Also in the frontline was trumpeter Ed Anderson; little-known now, he gets well-met exposure on two takes of I Can’t Give You Anything But Love. The leader was not known as a boogie pianist but as an effective stride player of the vanilla persuasion; in the event, Sullivan doesn’t shame himself on Low Down Dirty. Carter’s group sounds lush, not surprising given the leader’s silky demeanor as well as the presence of two more horns. Morton is back on trombone, along with Bill Coleman, that most insinuating trumpeter (he deserves more recognition, if anyone does), Georgie Auld on tenor, sounding as always like Ben Webster with a lung removed, and Benny Carter himself on clarinet. Other members of the group were drawn from Carter’s working big band, making it a comfortable, well-balanced session. Mosaic gives us two takes of two tunes each. As Morgenstern notes, Turner doesn’t sound all too comfortable on Beale Street Blues, experimenting on both takes with mic proximity and timbre, clipping off his phrases in an un-swinging way, and getting words scrambled. But then the high-flying Coleman takes wing and all is well again for the nonce.
The rest of disc two is taken up with a grab-bag of small group recordings generated by the boogie woogie craze, mostly performed by superior jazz groups led by Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Henry “Red” Allen. Wilson seems an unlikely acolyte to the cause, and A Touch Of Boogie gives a hint as to how much boogie the buyer will get. But after several exemplary swing solos, a full-band flourish announces the plunge into that low-down groove. Lionel Hampton doesn’t waste any time in Munson Street Breakdown (October 1939), a boogie blues with a diminished release à la Air Mail Special. Hampton plays piano and vibes in turn, opening with driving walking-bass on the ivories. Central Avenue Breakdown takes off similarly, but this time Hamp shares the keyboard with Nat “King” Cole, flitting around in the (mostly out of tune) upper register using his patented two-finger technique. This gambit may have represented little more than a vaudevillian trick, but it didn’t sound like anybody else’s piano playing, either, and Hampton managed in similar showpieces to prefigure some bop clichés by several years. (Another Hampton small-group recording from 1939, Sweethearts On Parade, is more profoundly prophetic: In it, Hamp and his men manage to conjure up the kind of perfect in-the-pocket shuffle that practically defined the early rhythm & blues era, complete with booting tenor saxophone (courtesy of Chu Berry).) The third and last Hampton entry, Bouncing At The Beacon, features Hamp’s working LA combo featuring Marshall Royal on alto and Lester Young’s brother Lee on drums. Sir Charles Thompson is given the bass-piano duties while once more the leader tinkles all over the top of the keyboard (with his two fingers, mind you); Royal contributes a not-ready-for-prime-time solo, bristling with odd notes. The two takes of K.K. Boogie from “Red” Allen shows the direction his band was taking in ‘41, from a kind of advanced Dixieland towards a jump band like that of Louis Jordan’s. Kenny Kersey is the pianist here (Yep! – same guy as on Cootie Williams’ 1942 recording of Thelonious Monk’s Epistrophy), jumping in on a galloping bass; when he solos, he drops the boogie in favor of fleet Wilsonian figures.
Finally, Mosaic offers several cuts from the Will Bradley-Freddie Slack-Ray McKinley nexus, and they’re the most blandly commercial sides in the set. Bradley and McKinley waxed a boogie woogie hit early in the craze, Beat Me Daddy (Eight To The Bar) that led to these sides. To be fair, they are very well played, and perhaps it’s unfair to dis them for commercialism, since the music’s equally as far from the kind of sonic oatmeal cooked up by the Kay Kysers and Sammy Kayes of the day as it is from “real” boogie woogie. It’s just that this listener finds nothing so cringe-worthy as white folks doing blackface, or in this instance, blackvoice. Ray McKinley’s singing is especially unfortunate in this regard. The man seemed to have no inhibitions; but then, they tell me he hailed from Texas (and no doubt was raised in Tennessee, as the song goes). He not only does the blackvoice but in falsetto on the first take of Southpaw Serenade. Thankfully, Columbia released the other take. (Right after the war, Ray McKinley hired Eddie Sauter as arranger for his big band and recorded a suite of Sauter’s forward-looking compositions, so I guess I forgive him. Will Bradley, for his part, later became a “serious” composer in thrall to the works of Alban Berg. Who’da thunk it?) Trombonist Bradley takes the interlocutor role to McKinley’s Mista Bones (well, not quite literally) on the novelty Down The Road A-Piece, and the two old boys blithely traffic their “Man, Ise a-goin’s” and “I sho would lak dat’s” while Slack keeps up the rhythm in acceptable fashion. During the bass solo, Slack splashes a few notes on a celesta, followed by McKinley’s whistling (and all that while he plays the drums! Heavens to Betsy!). The listener is treated to three takes of this three-ring circus. I’m not well acquainted with Freddie Slack’s work, but Mosaic’s producers hold him in some regard, having already released a Mosaic Select three-disker of his band from the early 1940s. The guest list looks pretty decent.
There’s one remaining pianist in Mosaic’s anthology I want to mention as a kind of icing on this rich, chocolaty cake, and that is Mary Lou Williams. She arranged a piece for Andy Kirk’s band called Little Joe From Chicago, and subsequently recorded another, entirely different, solo piano piece by the same name, which opens disc three. It’s an enchanting walking-bass boogie all the way, conceived as only Mary Lou Williams could, i.e., far out. For one thing, her walking bass covers more pianistic ground than most, venturing into the middle of the keyboard by the end of chorus three, with descending chromatic thirds on top emphasizing a diminished scale, producing a momentary bitonal crunch. She uses and extends blues changes but ignores any set form – she’s improvising like a jazz player, not a blues player. Then she switches to minor blues changes and confines the bass to a narrower, deeper range, giving the music an evil face. All the way through, her touch, dynamics and figurations are tightly controlled yet swinging and propulsive. The music stays at the same level of rhythmic intensity throughout, never getting too hot or showy. Mary Lou was always cool – and comfortably ahead of the times. Even more than Hampton, she was playing bop-like music when bop was yet to be. Kudos to Mosaic for including this overlooked orphan in this musical family reunion. And let the good times roll.
~ Tom Djll
Apologies to anyone who’s felt aggravation as a side effect of visiting the site over the past few days (if it’s any consolation, I’m among that number). The posting problems were finally localized to a faulty Pearl script module that got compromised in a recent behind the scenes mandatory host upgrade (largely Greek speak to me). A friendly server tech helped me with the fix and (knock on cast iron ship’s hull) it should be relatively smooth sailing from here on out. Such assurances have a nasty habit of falling short of certainty though, so please keep me appraised of any further headaches or hitches. Enough “meta”, back to the music (& film?)… Couple new reviews to peruse including a Hamid Drake record I really wanted to dig more than I do.
This slice of surreal Eighties cinema seems custom made to invoke conflicting feelings in regard to relative quality. The clunky script is peppered with curious non sequiturs and leaps in logic. Dated doesn’t even begin to describe the look and mood. But the sizeable list of faults folds up curiously into a viewing experience that is hard to shake. In an odd way, Miracle Mile is a West Coast counterpart to Martin Scorcese’s After Hours. The plot plays out in much the same fashion: boy meets girl, boy chases girl, and boy loses girl, all within a fish-out-of-water urban milieu. The difference comes with the central conceit, one that amplifies the story arc to apocalyptic proportions.
Anthony Edwards plays Harry Washello, a twenty something trad jazz trombonist, with typically bemused befuddlement. Visiting Los Angeles for a gig, he spends his off hours at a natural history museum located near the La Brea Tar Pits. There he encounters Mare Winngham’s Julie, a vaguely punk rock/New Wave waif who looks the spitting image of Ziggy Stardust’s sister. It’s a case of fledgling love at first sight. The pair shares a few magical hours together, but their courtship is cut short by the start of Julie’s waitress shift a Johnnie’s Diner (a local landmark). Harry suggests that they reconvene when she gets off and reluctantly returns to his hotel for a nap. Fate has other designs as a discarded cigarette leads circuitously to a short circuited alarm clock. Arriving back at the diner several hours late and discovering Julie long gone, Harry despairs. Picking up a chance call on the pay phone outside, his entire life (as well as those of the other diner patrons) changes irrevocably.
The film’s catalyst is a good one: a wrong number from a missile silo forewarning that a little over an hour remains before the West Coast is consumed in nuclear conflagration. Harry initially considers it a crank, but events converge that begin to dispel his doubts. What follows transpires with dream-like logic as the minutes on the clock tick inexorably by. Harry’s quest to reunite with Julie and secure safety for them both is beset by a darkly comic string of setbacks. Quirky humor is colored with strikingly dissonant explosions of violence. The Tangerine Dream soundtrack also aids immeasurably in this regard, relying on layered synth tones that mirror the early morning alieness of the city and a multiplying sense of dread.
Director Steve De Jarnatt deals strangely with the elements of time and perspective. An opening montage optimistically recounts the evolution of humankind from sea-dwelling amoeba to bipedal mammal, only to be revealed as a stock museum short. Eras and styles converge and conflict. The kitsch interiors of Johnny’s Diner contrast with the steel and concrete of adjacent skyscrapers. Harry’s vocation and an intimated fondness for vintage RKO films stands starkly against the ennui and impersonality of modern L.A. The fossil preserving tar pits serve as starting point and terminus. Weird stereotypes also abound, perhaps most egregiously in a segment set in an early hours gym constructed of neon and glass, the hairsprayed Spandex-sheathed occupants looking like hellish extras from an Olivia Newton John video. The final reel delivers on the tension and unease depicted in these fomenting incongruities. It does so with an uncompromising denouement that brings the underlying truth contained in that stage setting museum short harrowingly home. This is definitely a filmic example of the whole surpassing the sum of the parts, an artifact of an earlier era that still resonates potently regardless of the passage of time.
One of the peripheral reason for my move to Minneapolis six years ago was the regularity with which Bob Mould makes tour stops to the municipality. His Twin Cities roots run deep and the ties remain intact. I’ve written about Mould several times in these pages, the entries reflecting the ups and downs in my affinity for his music. Detours into dance club electronica and a propensity for angsty lyrics no matter how earnest haven’t always been rewarding moves. His new record, District Line, still hasn’t quite reconciled the stylistic incongruities, but as with past efforts the gold content still largely outweighs the pyrite.
Mould played First Avenue last night to a respectable, but hardly packed crowd, the first gig in a 20 city tour. It’s hard to approximate the number of times he’s played that particular stage since the early Hüsker years, but it has to number in the triple digits. I hit the venue early enough to catch the opening act, Halou, a five-piece from San Francisco mired in its self-conscious mix of indie rock influences. Two guitarists, one doubling on keyboards, crafted a melismatic sea of feedback around a female singer. The drummer and bassist were largely anonymous. Their short set left little of a lasting impression and felt more like a distraction.
Mould and crew set up quickly with a line-up nearly the same as the last time they rolled through save for the absence of Brendan Canty on drums, replaced by new recruit whose name escaped me. A soundcheck of the signature cerulean Strat elicited a few cheers from the audience. The set opened strangely with a string of vintage Sugar songs starting with “The Act We Act” and “A Good Idea”. Mould and bassist Jason Narducci lept and sprinted all over the stage, hammering on their instruments and building fast, finger-abrading versions of the tunes. Drinking in the clumsy histrionics, I couldn’t help reflecting on Mould’s reasoning behind retiring from touring in the late-Nineties, essentially that he didn’t want to end up a parody of himself. While the music was definitely rocking, the visuals seemed bear out, at least partially, the wisdom of this tack. Narducci’s explosive and exaggerated string plucks were particularly amusing in this regard, his beanpole frame stalking the stage and wobbling wildly at the knees. From my balcony perch, keyboardist Richard Morel (also a collaborator on Mould’s DC-based DJ project Blowoff) was obscured behind a row of garbage receptacles, but his contributions sounded modest by comparison, designed more for color than prominence. The exception: a late set rendition of “Circles” where Morel’s sparse accompaniment of Mould’s vocals beautifully presaged the coming ferocity of the amplified strings.
The next half dozen songs zoomed by in a blur with Mould touching on “See a Little Light”, “Egøveride”, “I Am Vision I Am Sound” and others from his solo canon. Banter was minimal, until he paused and wryly mused “oh yeah, the new album”. I counted three from that source, “The Silence Between Us”, “Again and Again” and “Miniature Parade”, and all translated well to the live quartet, shorn of most of their production accoutrements and boiled down to rock-receptive cores. Still, I couldn’t shake the rushed feeling of their delivery as if the band were intent on reaching the finish line in record time. Part of the problem was the distracting presence of a drunk fan on the balcony stairs in front of me. His stumbling impressions of Richard Nixon and repeated near tumbles down the stairs continued despite interventions by myself and others and he swiftly became an abject lesson in the ineptitude of the First Avenue event staff. To put it another way, it’s apparently easier to be impeached as a president than it is to get 86’d from the Ave.
A one-two punch of Hüsker standards, “I Apologize” and the immortal “Celebrated Summer” primed the audience for an unexpected finale choice. Mould seemed re-energized by the shift in repertoire, particularly on the second, his hallmark song. It’s a number he’s played countless times, but remains a near perfect piece of melodic song craft, equally effective in the service of a full electric band or a lone acoustic guitar. A slight pause and Mould signed off a selection that surpassed my most fanciful expectations: the old Hüsker chestnut “Divide and Conquer”, my favorite entry in the band’s somewhat-mouldy (sorry) songbook. Apparently I wasn’t alone in my affection as the crowd erupted at the strains of the familiar racing loop riff and Mould’s shout-sung lyrics:
“Well they divided up all the land
And we've got states and cities
Cities have their neighborhoods
And more subdivisions
There's countries divided by walls
Oceans and latitudes
And longitude, longing to find out
Just what they're missing
They're lots of area codes
And nine-digit zip codes
Secret decoder ring codes
Arteries, shopping nodes
We'll invent some new computers
Link up the global village
And get AP, UPI, and Reuters
To tell everybody the news
[ Lyrics accessible from http://www.rare-lyrics.com ]
We'll be one happy neighborhood
Spread out across the world
But who's going to stop that burglar
From breaking in to my house
If he lives that far away
We'll be just like old friends
No means to your ends
The police state is to busy
And the neighborhood's getting out of hand
It's not about my politics
Something happened way too quick
A bunch of men who played it sick
They divide, conquer
It's all here before your eyes
Safety is a big disguise
That hides among the other lies
They divide, conquer
Well I expect I won't be heard
Because my silence is assured
Never a discouraging word
They divide and conquer
They divide and conquer”
I suppose the choice makes perfect sense given the long-standing cultural and political climate around these parts, but it was still an unmitigated thrill to hear the old man run down the song with such sound and fury. And Narducci’s bodily exaggerations had finally found a vessel apposite of the energy expenditure. An encore was forthcoming, but I felt compelled to split since nothing could have topped the closer.
With results certain to be tabulated and circulated in serious academic circles, please take part in this impromptu scientific poll:
What is your favorite Black Sabbath song AND why (100 words or less)?
Long before he became the befuddled NRA rube caught in Michael Moore’s dubious documentarian/contrarian crosshairs, Charlton Heston had a respectable Hollywood career. He built it on chiseled-jaw turns in biblical epics The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, later dystopian sci-fi operas like Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green, and a slew of other genre productions that demanded an action-oriented lead. Westerns were another dramatic outlet and Will Penny sits squarely as Heston’s defining turn in such role. Directed and scripted by Tom Gries, the film tracks the circuitous path of the titular character, an aging, itinerant and illiterate cowboy who gradually finds himself confronted by a crisis of self. It’s revisionist in its attention to realism and self-reflection, but Gries balances the psychology with a fair share of traditional Western action and melodrama. His visual sense owes much to John Ford and Budd Boetticher with regular wide shots of Eastern Sierra locations and detailed attention paid to recreating the harsh and filthy conditions of frontier life.
A protracted prologue sketches a character study of Penny and his cohort as they escort a herd from trail to sale. Heston plays him close to the chest and the film is all the better for it. He’s a man of few words guided by pragmatism forged through a life lived mainly alone. His friendships are few and fleeting and it’s difficult to draw a bead on his personality in the beginning. With thick moustache, facial scruff and a five gallon hat clamped down over his pate, he bears uncanny resemblance to Warren Oates at a distance.
Gries fleshes the cowboy contingent out with a near-perfect cast of character actors including Slim Pickens, Clifton James, Robert Luster, Anthony Costello, and later Ben Johnson. A youthful Lee Majors plays Blue, the closest thing Penny has to a confidant, with an easy aw-shucks manner and Anthony Zerbe completes the trio as Dutchy, a largely ineffectual immigrant cowpoke with a faulty accent. The three soon run afoul of Preacher Quint and his familial band of outlaws. Donald Pleasance’s Quint is typical of the actor’s more over-the-top performances, comically devout and prone to violently psychotic outbursts. Bruce Dern and George Rutherford play his loutish and lascivious sons to the hilt. While certainly entertaining, Quint and his crew are caricatures and personify one of the film’s flaws.
Repeated run-ins with the Quint family frame Penny’s peregrinations as do encounters with a widow and child played by Joan Hackett and the director’s son Jon. The latter relationship gradually leads to Penny’s personal crisis as the closed-off manner in which he’s lived his life comes under assault with the realization of other alternatives. Heston handles the transition in outlook beautifully, conveying the awkwardness of a man used to solitude awakening to the pleasures and perils of emotional company. Hackett does a decent job on the other side of the equation as well, capturing the fish-out-of-water elements of her character coupled with a budding fondness for an individual far removed from her realm of experience or comfort.
These earnest and occasionally over-drawn human moments don’t detract from the quotient of western-calibrated violence. The film features unexpectedly gory altercations, even flirting with rape and child murder. One scene dips into the disturbingly surreal, depicting a deranged hoedown by the Quints where Pleasance lets his freak flag fly maniacally to the wild accompaniment of Jew’s harp and harmonica. Gries script has some great darkly comic touches too as when Penny and Blue stop off for a whiskey binge, leaving a gut-shot Dutchy bleeding out in the wagon. Shots poured, this exchange follows:
“How’s it taste?”
“Dunno, but it definitely burns a dollar’s worth.”
Aside from the purple acting of Pleasance, the film also has several other faults. The story’s time frame is difficult to ascertain, but the presence of plastic rain slickers seems totally incongruous with the otherwise carefully constructed 19th century milieu. The closing credits deliver another debilitating minus as the hackneyed strains of crooner Don Cherry’s “The Lonely Rider” demolish much of the depth of the decidedly downbeat denouement, though the misstep is not enough to diminish it completely. Heston is but a shell of his former self these days and an easy target. This film harkens back to happier times when he could readily hold his own and is one of the finest in his cinematic folio.
Few, if any, bands surpass the Dead in terms of tape archive magnitude. Despite best attempts by legions of fans, an exact inventory of every concert, session and rehearsal committed to tape is probably impossible. The same goes double for Sun Ra whose discography resembles a scintillating mosaic of asteroids in an orbital belt, constantly shifting and extremely difficult to quantify. One thing’s for sure though, there’s an awful lot of it sift through. From piles of hand-pressed and painted vinyl to stacks of barely and often-mislabeled cassettes and reel-to-reels, the Ra archive is one of celebratory chaos. Order was a condition meant for the music’s creation, not its dissemination.
The tiny Transparency label has been making in-roads into organizing some of the more obscure entries, first with a string of DVD releases and soon after with an adjoining series of CDs. The newest projects are a pair of limited edition CDR box sets. Announced a few months ago and available via mail order in the interim they’re now making the rounds of retailers like Downtown Music Gallery and Jazz Loft at middleman-boosted prices. The scope of each is something to marvel at and somewhat akin to a Fatman and Little Boy relationship, if you’ll forgive the atomic analogy.
The Complete Detroit Jazz Center Residency: December 26, 1980 – January 1, 1981 packages an entire 11-concert New Year’s eve stand by the band onto 28 discs and clocks at over 26 hours(!) The 14-piece incarnation of the Arkestra holds court on over a hundred compositions and group improvisations. Audio is surprisingly decent, the product of soundboard sources. Two poster-sized pages give a rundown of both set lists and band members. The smaller Live at the Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, Canada 1978 culls eight hours of material from three different dates onto ten discs. The Arkestra on hand for these shows is slightly smaller, but basically the same in membership and again, fidelity, while a bit boxy, is more than listenable.
I’ve been living with both sets for about the past two weeks and predictably haven’t been able to carve out much time to spend with them thus far. A warts-and-all philosophy pervades, but it’s also to be privy to the music without the potential distractions of major interruptions or edits. The Horseshoe set is a bit problematic in that individual tunes do not appear to be indexed into tracks and accompanying set lists are not included, but Michael @ Transparency assures me that the information is forthcoming. The entire production operation consists only of himself and a recently hired employee. Given the time and effort necessary to construct each box, they’re both keeping very busy trying to keep up with the steady stream of orders. More boxes are planned for the near future, but honestly, I’m wondering when, if ever, I’ll be able to digest the entirety of these initial ones. Still, the promise of further installments is enough to cause the collector gene in my DNA helix to vibrate expectantly. As I’m so fond of quoting, “addiction ain’t fiction”.
A couple of weeks back the Naval War College in Newport, RI hosted a guest speaker, Dr. Hank Brightman, to discuss the evolution of the insurgency in Iraq and the mathematical model that may assist in tackling problems steeped in chaos.
Brightman's an expert in Game Theory and uses the concept of Nash Equilibrium -- yes, that Nash -- to explore the destabilization of groups (large tactical units, or small insurgent nests) and vulnerabilities over time. Better, that 2 or more opposing "players", given the most optimal choices and moves in a game, will approach an equilibrium as long as all sides are making the most informed tactical decisions in their playing of the game. As long as this happens, the payoff hovers only to reduce in value, such that the end of the game itself slowly becomes as attractive as the payoff. The longer two sides hold one another near payoff, the less value they are willing to accept at its end.
Brightman's article applied to Jund al-Samaa clashes in Najaf requires more than a cursory read, but the content and theories he posits are worth strong consideration, not just through the lens of conflict, but in other areas that require strategic thinking. Maybe someone would be willing to tackle the concept of "strange attractor" and its applicability in music.
Head out to the hinterlands for the weekend & there’s no telling what disaster may strike in one’s absence. It seems Bagatellen’s domain registration expired sometime on Friday summarily sinking the works and leaving more than a few readers scratching their heads. Petty Officer Pinnell sprang into action, firing up the Sikorski rotors and setting out on a split-second rescue mission across white-capped seas…
On the reality side of my tall tale, copious thanks to Richard for taking charge in such a timely fashion & covering the cost of a registration re-up. He’s graciously refused remuneration, which makes the gesture all the more generous. Apologies to anyone who attempted a visit earlier in the weekend and found only evidence of a possible site demise.
A rhetorical question to be sure, but the musical coordinates can be found in the catalog of Lu Watters. Not a name that sparks much recognition in the minds of current jazz intelligentsia, Watters played an important niche part in keeping the traditional jazz repertory spirit alive from the Forties forward. Fortunately, the bulk of his catalog is still available via a box set put out by the good folks at Fantasy, The Complete Good Time Jazz Recordings. Watters had a cherubic visage, kind of a Chet Baker with baby fat intact, and a commercial-friendly Caucasian pedigree. The band name* borrowed from that of a Bay Area record shop and musician hangout. But seeing as Watters’ took Satchmo as his most immediate musical sourcebook, I prefer to think of it as an under the table reference the herbaceous ‘tea’ leaves that were Armstrong’s tonic of choice. Curiously, the set makes no mention of the possible corollary even though it seems an obvious one.
Watters deviated from the Armstrong model several important ways, chief among them the addition of a second cornet to his frontline (a la King Oliver). Bob Scobey proved an inspired choice for the slot. Trombonist Turk Murphy and clarinetists Ellis Horne or Bob Helm completed the horn section. One session, recorded during Watters’ wartime absence with trumpeter Bob Strickler pinch-hitting even featured the licorice sticks in tandem. The earliest sides plugged in tuba for string bass and also relied on the dueling banjos of Clancy Hayes and Russ Bennett for extra rhythmic potency. Watters’ experimented little with the instrumentation once established, preferring to concentrate instead on building a working band and reliable repertoire in line with classic Crescent City convention. Spanning the band’s recording debut in December of 1941 through its initial swan song in August 1947, the music is gloriously and unapologetically anachronistic.
Most of the sessions come from live air shots and while the fidelity is frequently far from ideal, the raucous atmosphere of venues like the Avalon and Dawn Club bleed persuasively into the acetates. Set lists tap tunes from the usual suspects: Bunk Johnson (who split an LP w/ Yerba Buena), Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Oliver, Scott Joplin and original muse Satchmo are all represented in the band songbook of rags, stomps and blues. Individual tracks all tie off in the two to three-minute range, but Watters’ arrangements are tight and terse enough not to require further elaboration. The repertory feel remains resolute and any liberties taken are relatively minor. Why then even give these sides the time of day when superior versions of many of the songs are available from earlier more renowned sources? It’s a good question and one I’d answer by arguing that what Watters’ adds to soup isn’t innovation, but personalized veneration. There’s brio and jubilance in these performances that cuts to the quick of what the band’s more celebrated sources were also aiming for. Preservationist though their efforts might have been, Watters and his crew didn’t treat the music as staid stone tablets secluded behind museum glass. In true populist fashion, they held them heartily aloft and paraded them around the town square.
Echoing that which it explicates, the booklet is very nearly a work of art, comprehensive in its inclusion of annotations and ephemera that encompass original liner notes to all of the Good Time albums as well as color facsimiles of the album art. The latter feature deserves special mention as the San Francisco city shots by photographer Fred Lyon give the records distinctive local flavor. Essays and anecdotes are plentiful, documenting Watters’ various musical triumphs as well as the commensurate hard-drinking and womanizing that often went along with them. A concluding portrait by two non-musician friends delves into his colorful eccentricities and activities post-Yerba Buena as an activist, ornithologist, botanist and fisherman. Watters’ ascendancy was comparatively brief and his name now is little more than a footnote. Exposure to these sounds doesn’t necessarily call foul such a curtailed career arc, but it certainly opens the door for reappraisals. In the meantime, that map to fabled Yerba Buena remains readily within reach.
[*“Yerba buena” also refers to various strains of aromatic medicinal mint]
Cliché as the saying may be, the right picture really is worth a thousand words. Peter Gannushkin’s Downtownmusic.net has been mentioned before in these pages and a convenient link has nestled in the cluttered Bags Points of Interest section for years. Still, given the scope and longevity of his enterprise (no sign of lapsing or lagging in nearly seven years) another shout out is hardly out of order. The man appears a tireless shutterbug, snapping any and all improvisers who touch down and hold court in the Five Boroughs area. Thanks to his lens I’ve been able to put face to name on dozens of musicians from old guard heroes like Charles Burnham and Joe Daley to younger talent like Tyshawn Sorey and Daniel Levin. To put it in another frame of reference: Gannushkin’s camera captured the visual contents of several hundred gigs last year alone. That impressive figure telescopes to a couple thousand over the site’s run thus far. His preference is for close-ups, presumably for easier indexing of shots by subject’s name, but many of the full ensemble compositions could easily qualify as album cover material. Some no doubt have. There’s also an admirable balance between color and black & white. Long sell short: it’s a library of images that consumes hours if your not careful.
Downside, though it’s a perfectly understandable one and a savvy move on the part of Gannushkin: None of the images lend themselves to capture via web browser. Interested parties must go through the proper channels and presumably pay the proper fees for usage. Makes sense to me. And before anyone gets bent over the many imbedded links to Downtown Music Gallery (there’s another one!), let me be the first to say I salute the move. Gannushkin’s been quietly doing the creative music community an immeasurable service, much like earlier photo-documentarians answering to surnames like Wolff, Wilderman and Willoughby, the last of whom is responsible for that everlasting Big Jay McNeely spectacle above.
Thomas Wolfe’s prescient line “you can’t go home again” is clichéd beyond measure, but it still constitutes the quiet crux of Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 indie effort Old Joy. Running at a lean 76 minutes the flick is more an EP than an album, but still packs plenty of food for thought into its relative brevity. The plot centers on the reunion of two thirtysomething ‘slackers’ and the sobering realities that come to light with their renewed acquaintance.
Mark lives with his pregnant wife Tanya in Portland, Oregon. A quick succession of scenes suggests a marriage strained by impending responsibilities and Mark jumps at the phoned invitation to join his college friend Kurt on a camping trip in the Cascades. Clumsily negotiating permission from Tanya, he packs his gear and heads out to pick up his friend. Air America drones over the car radio, a loop of progressive opining that’s more background noise than engaging fodder for Mark’s mind.
Kurt’s situation seems suspect from the start as he meets Mark curbside outside a mutual friend’s house, a Red Flyer wagon with a TV in it inexplicably tow. Deftly deferring to Mark to drive, he also convinces him to make a pit stop to procure pot, even going so far as to hit him up for money to complete the transaction. Once on the road, Kurt regales Mark with tales of his counterculture adventures crisscrossing the country at drum circles and nature preserves, pausing in his monologues only to blaze up repeatedly.
Mark’s responding duplicity is subtle on the surface, but speaks volumes. He presents an engaged and supportive face to Kurt, but the edges of the façade peel back periodically, as when he vents passive frustration to his wife during several cell phone conversations out of earshot of his friend. These are two men that may have shared something in the past, but are now leagues apart. Each attempt by either to reconnect fails, frequently punctuating with a pregnant silence as when Mark recounts the miraculous recovery of his father from a brain ailment. Kurt focuses instead on earlier relayed information of parental infidelity, suggesting “it’s sort of like when an old Eskimo goes out on the ice to die” and missing the point of Mark’s story completely. The disparities in viewpoint are subtle, but indelible.
Things deteriorate as Kurt forgets the directions to the campsite and the two get lost. Pulling into a clearing at dusk they find an impromptu fire pit and pitch a tent. The night’s conversation, broken by target shooting at emptied beer cans, follows a similar script of dislocation and interpersonal distance. Kurt exhibits a rare moment of candidness, lamenting what he perceives is a disintegration of the friendship. Alarmed, Mark attempts to smooth things over with empty platitudes. Later, in a variation on the earlier car scene, Mark relates his efforts at building a community garden in his neighborhood. Kurt is complimentary, but Mark is quick to qualify his achievement so as to not offend or diminish his friend. Another uncomfortable silence follows.
The cinematography and languid pacing echo these themes of disassociation. Long tracking road shots scored with Yo La Tengo’s minimalist Ry Cooder-reminiscent music create a beautiful sense of ennui. Overcast Oregon skies accentuate the feeling. Once the men reach the wilderness the palette changes, with blue skies, white clouds and the deep mossy greens of the rainforest replacing early grays. The shift hints at some hope for the pair and a moment of offered connection and accompanying acquiescence, while fleeting, brings out the humanity in both men.
The film clicks with me because I’ve lived it, both the scenery and the situation, at least in part. Many have. Time and geography have a habit of eroding and calcifying relationships. Decorum is not a means of repair. Reichardt and her actors relate these themes in such an understated way that it’s easy to dismiss the film as slow and pretentious. To the receptive viewer though, the potential faults resonate as memorable strengths.
Ferreted far back in the stacks tonight and found Parliament’s First Thangs, one of the more laudable Fantasy reissue choices of ’98 and a nearly exemplary time capsule of an epochal band at its genesis. Out of a sweet sixteen, the tune that keeps pinging the replay synapse in my cranium is “Come in Out of the Rain”. It’s the perfect early Seventies jukebox joint mixing pointed political commentary with a groove that just won’t quit. George Clinton leads the vocal charge, running down a soulful rap that simultaneously indicts as it inspires. Handclaps and an pocket-locked backbeat by “Tiki” Fulwood braid with “Billy Bass” Nelson’s bottom-dwelling bass to mobilize an edifice of monster funk, but it’s Herr Eddie Hazel’s fret fortitude that dominates the studio stage, all Hendrixian wah-wah and flexing Afrocentric sex. Bernie Worrell brings the church counterpoint with a shimmering, understated organ backdrop and the ensemble builds to suitably florid release. This is a track I can play on continual repeat whether washing the dishes or cruising with the windows down in the car. Hyperbole? Maybe, but it’s still a “2:55” that never fails to convey an explicit urban consciousness upon whomever cues it up, right along with a rump-shaking thump.
Curious to learn the identities of other folks perfect “2:55”’s, “3:23”’s, etc.
The Bags homepage is built a bit like a 18th century Parisian squatters’ row: Some sections bustle with activity while others exhibit heavy shrouds of cobwebs and mold. The Interviews area is indicative of the second category, a wing where the overhead bulbs burned out several years ago and rodents now reign supreme.
Over the years, a number of readers have remarked on the unsightliness inherent in this vacancy of new content. I’ve been thinking about a remedy for awhile, even going so far as to mull over the idea of a new site feature focusing on newly-minted interviews. A few serendipitous events appear to have brought this closer to fruition, among them the strong possibility of an existing contributor filling the gap. Time will tell if it’s got a future, but in the meantime I thought I’d put a preliminary confab in the cannon barrel.
Contact Mic isn’t as apposite now that Brian’s on sabbatical, but I still like the name. So as an initial entry in what might become a series, here’s the results of an email exchange I had with Ted Gioia, editor of Jazz.com. The questions were pulled from the text of the recent discussion below, scrubbed of any lingering vitriol and answered in kind by Ted. I plugged in a few more based on his initial responses and he fired off a second round of answers. The only area that he declined to elaborate on was funding, but I respect his desire to keep that information personal and private.
Some may find the conversation bland or softshoe, but I enjoyed engaging in it and came away with at least a better understanding of the site’s motives and goals. Best of all, as (almost) always, the Bags comments flue is wide open, so start shoveling coal or kindling down the chimney if so inclined. I won’t be at the bottom to strike a match, but maybe someone else will and we can watch the damn thing burn like the first go round. Either way, I’ve positioned a fire extinguisher a short sprinting distance away.
Thanks again to Ted for the collaboration and to you for reading.
How did Jazz.com come about?
I am not sure of the entire history of the www.jazz.com domain. I imagine that it has changed hands a few times, but I am not aware that it has ever played much of a role in the jazz world. But I was intrigued when the current ownership of the domain name asked for my help in building it into something special.
This is an unusual project for me. As you probably know, I have rarely written jazz journalism or reviews. I have focused instead on books and historical research. I like big projects that allow me to tackle large subjects. I spent more than a decade researching my recent Work Songs book, and my big book Delta Blues, another huge undertaking, will come out later this year. Web writing is usually the exact opposite – a place where people toss off random thoughts, often poorly thought out and rarely backed by research.
I decided to try to bring my “big project” approach to the jazz.com site. I wondered if I could gather a team of top notch writers, reviewers, photographers, artists, and other talented people, and succeed in providing a multi-layered and comprehensive approach to the jazz idiom.
Probably the most ambitious idea was to review individual tracks – not entire CDs – and try to cover the whole history of the music. By my estimate, I will eventually need more than 10,000 reviews to do a good job of this. We have around 1,400 completed right now.
That is impressive, but your indictment of “web writing” gives me pause, particularly since the brevity of many of the reviews on Jazz.com could potentially invite a similar conclusions. In this regard, they read like soundbites rather than fully cooked meals of criticism. I suppose this fits with the focus on tracks over albums. But readers familiar with the music may find them lacking, as I have. Do you see this as a viable conclusion to reach or am I looking at them in the wrong light?
This is an important issue. I too am concerned about any approach that reduces music criticism to sound bites. In fact, I have changed some of our guidelines on reviews in recent weeks. When we first started writing track reviews, I suggested that our critics write reviews that were between 50 and 100 words per track. I am now encouraging the writers to stretch out, and contribute longer and more detailed reviews when they feel it is appropriate.
I remember my disappointment at many of the reviews in the All Music Guide, which attempted to sum up an entire CD in one or two sentences. I don't want to go down that path. In some instances, I am now publishing reviews of individual tracks that are longer than reviews for individual CDs in other periodicals.
Of course, the quality of the review is more important than absolute length. But I want to give our critics the flexibility to go shorter or longer depending on what they want to say in the review.
What is the rationale behind reviewing individual tracks rather than albums?
I have always been unhappy with the traditional CD review. Back when I wrote my book The History of Jazz, I was asked by the publisher to add a list of recommended CDs. I refused. Instead, I compiled a list of recommended tracks. This was long before the rise of downloading and the iPod. But even back then, I preferred focusing on the individual track for a variety of reasons.
As we know, CDs are often a mixed bag, with some strong material mixed in among weaker performances. Also, the most important historical tracks often show up on various reissues, some of which go out of print very quickly. So you can recommend a CD only to find that it has been discontinued by the label, while the song is now available on some other compilation. A track-oriented focus avoids these problems.
But perhaps the most important advantage of recommending tracks is that it encourages closer listening of the music. When people listen to an hour-long CD, they often treat it as background music while they do some other task. If I can get people to listen to a track, in contrast, there is a greater chance that they will focus their attention on the music. For these reasons, I am firmly convinced that a track orientation is a much better approach for both the reviewer and the fan.
Of course, with the rise of downloading, the track review is the way of the future for purely technological reasons. I think you will soon see other people jumping on this format for reviews.
The death of the album as default music format does seem imminent. But what about recordings that are conceived of as albums by the artists (ie. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, A Love Supreme, etc.)? Doesn’t parsing them apart do the overall whole a disservice?
You're quite right. I've learned that I need to make exceptions in certain instances. For example, we sometimes need to discuss works that encompass multiple tracks -- such as an extended composition -- in a single review. I recently did this in a review of Wynton Marsalis's Blood on the Fields. I considered reviewing individual tracks from this extended composition, but finally felt that I needed to treat it as a single entity. We did the same with Ellington's Black, Brown & Beige. So we are willing to break our own rules, when they don't seem to work.
How did you recruit the staff and who handles what in terms of operations? What qualifications do you have for contributors?
I am responsible for recruiting reviewers, and I have been working hard at this for more than a year. I want critics who know the music and write well. The quality of the writing is especially important to me, since so much web journalism falters in this regard.
I have written some short guidelines for our reviewer. Let me quote from them. “We look for intelligent, stylish reviews. We don’t ‘dumb down’ our writing. We encourage you to develop your own tone and attitude, and not try to match some perceived generic style of writing.” Etc. This gives you a sense of our philosophy. I want to encourage individual reviewers to develop their own voice and approach to the music. I am not imposing any ideology on them. In fact, I strive for the opposite. I think ideology has done a lot of harm in the world of jazz criticism.
Our web technology is also a big help. Our software architecture allows me to publish multiple reviews of the same track – and each with comments from site visitors. This encourages different perspectives and attitudes, and is a major advantage the web has over the print media.
Bagatellen operates in a similar fashion, but on a much smaller scale. One of the unfortunate by-products of an open comments policy is anonymous invective, usually followed by conflict. What steps are you taking to curtail this sort of behavior on Jazz.com?
We have a policy that allows us to remove comments that are abusive or otherwise inappropriate. But so far I have only censored one comment from a site visitor-- and that was from a woman who invited people to visit her salacious web site for purposes that seemed to have nothing to do with jazz music.
In perusing the site, I came across several examples where the reviewer did not appear to possess a grasp of the artist under review. What sort of quality control measures do you have in place to ensure that an artist receives fair and accurate appraisal?
I am working to recruit the best critics I can find for our track reviews. I am quite proud of the team that I have compiled – currently 26 reviewers and growing. I enjoy reading Rob Bamberger writing about Jelly Roll Morton, or David Sager discussing King Oliver, Jeff Sultanof on big band music or Eric Olsen on hard bop, and the like. I bring in the critics that have the most interesting things to say, and give them a platform to say it.
I see that some of the posters at Bagatellen have questioned Alan Kurtz’s familiarity with free jazz. Honestly, Alan was hanging out with Eric Dolphy back in the day, exchanging views with Dolphy after both of them had been listening to a John Cage concert. He brings a lifetime of intense jazz listening to his reviews. Alan – and our other reviewers – teach me new things all the time. And he is a great prose stylist, which is very important to me. The fact that he doesn’t like a particular Sun Ra recording is not grounds for disputing his knowledge of the music.
That said, we encourage intelligent rebuttals from site visitors. And we also can publish multiple reviews of a single track. So this isn’t like the old days at Down Beat when there was no way to criticize the critics. We like frank and spirited exchanges.
In the case of Kurtz, the issues centered on his apparent unfamiliarity with Sun Ra’s music and the conspicuously provocative nature of his prose. His pieces contained very little in the way of specifics about the music, trading instead in cagey quips and erroneous generalizations. To me, that’s not good criticism, nor is it especially good writing. There’s no problem with not liking something, but in the case of a critic, such dislike should be substantiated with an informed perspective. From my vantage, such a standard didn’t seem in place with Kurtz’s pieces.
I imagine Alan could have added another paragraph or two elaborating on his views. But I don't think that would have softened the blow for Sun Ra fan's who disagree with his sentiments. Alan didn't like the recording, and he made his points using humor. That's a valid way of expressing an intelligent opinion.
I thought his views were provocative and amusing. I still do. Of course, I also knew that they would generate controversy. When he first showed me the review, I sent him an email suggesting that it would get people 'hot and bothered' -- those were my exact words. But I also laughed out loud at his wit. So I never considered not publishing his review.. But that doesn't mean that there aren't other perspectives on this track. We would publish an alternative review from another critic without hesitation.
By the way, even the most devoted Sun Ra fans need to realize that there are different opinions about this body of work. Sun Ra's music -- in fact, his entire career -- was designed to evoke strong reactions. When you set yourself up as an Egyptian sun deity you have to expect some flack.
In light of the rapid growth of content (1400+ reviews in several months) what concerns, if any, do you have about maintaining depth of coverage and caliber of writing? If the history of All About Jazz is any indication, the danger would seem to be quantity trumping quality.
We have been writing these reviews for more than a year – so it isn’t like we cooked up all this material overnight. We didn’t open the site until we had a solid library of content ready. There has been no rush to pad the site with hastily written reviews.
Of course, we all know about other places on the web that publish lots of poor quality reviews. Or publish good reviews mixed in haphazardly with bad ones. These outfits operate like fanzines. They serve a function, but this is different from our vision for jazz.com.
First, we pay our writers, and that gives me an advantage over the amateur outfits. Site visitors can submit reviews too – so we can publish the work of fans as well as experienced critics. But I haven’t started doing that yet. And I won’t if the submissions aren’t good enough.
I am convinced that anyone who takes the time to read a couple hundred of our reviews will be impressed by the high caliber of what we are doing. Will they agree with everything our critics say? Of course not. But that is always true of good criticism. It is supposed to engage people with provocative viewpoints, not just dish out bland comments that never offend.
I am having a little trouble with your claims of across-the-board quality. Not to pick on poor Kurtz again, but his reviews of Charles Mingus’ “Stormy Weather” (97/100 rating) and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” (100/100)-to name just two examples- leave me in serious want of more in the way writing and criticism. Both read like off-the-cuff blog or fanzine entries and neither delves deeply into the music’s mysteries or mechanics, despite awarding near-perfect and perfect ratings respectively. Are you concerned about the magnitude of your content masking reviews that do not measure up to your intended standards? It appears to have done so in some cases already and to put it in direct terms some of the content does feel suspiciously fanzine-like.
Alan Kurtz is probably the best prose stylist on our reviewing staff. I work hard on the style and flow of my sentences, but I often find him delivering metaphors and turns of phrases that I wish I had come up with myself. I would hire ten more like him if I could find them. Honestly, compare his work with what passes for reviewing in the major magazines, and it compares quite favorably.
And there is an art to writing a scathing review. Check out Kurtz's take on Kenny G's "Songbird" which belongs in the Hall of Fame for musical invective. But he is also generous with his praise when he finds music he admires.
How is Jazz.com funded? I noticed direct purchase links to Amazon.com on the review pages. What rebuttal would you offer critics who see this arrangement as a conflict of interest?
We are just like other small jazz outfits – such as independent record labels, nightclubs, magazines and the like. We rely on funding from individuals who love the music and want to do something for it. The only difference is that we have a philanthropic approach, and intend to donate any money we make back into jazz-oriented charitable causes.
If, God forbid, something like Hurricane Katrina happens again, we want to be able to offer help to the members of the jazz community who are impacted. And, of course, there are many pressing areas for jazz philanthropy that arise all the time. If we can get Jazz.com on a stable financial basis we will use the cash we generate in these areas.
I see that some people have suggested that Amazon.com is funding us. Wouldn’t it be great if Amazon was actually channeling money into jazz web sites? But that is not the case. We have no corporate funding.
We put in the Amazon links as a service to our site visitors. I am trying to create the kind of site I would enjoy visiting myself. I like listening to new music every day, and when I read an interesting review I want to be able to find the music quickly. The links to Amazon allow that. We could just as easily be linking to iTunes or eMusic or other sites. But Amazon has the widest selection, and they do a great job of offering even obscure and out-of-print releases.
Who handles the editing of content and what is the process? How is content determined? To what degree is it left to the discretion of the reviewers?
Until recently, I was the only editor, but that’s changing. I recently brought on Tim Wilkins to take over some of the work of editing our on-line encyclopedia. We have ambitious goals for our encyclopedia, much as we do for our track reviews. Soon I will probably need some help editing reviews as well. In the last 24 hours, my reviewers have sent me around twenty submissions to edit -- so this keeps me pretty busy, maybe too busy. And I want to have time to write more myself.
My editing style is fairly low key. I ask the reviewers to suggest which tracks they want to review, and I almost always let them focus on the music they like to cover. Many of them have different opinions on the music than I do – but that is fine. In fact, it’s desirable. I encourage them to take a stance on the music, and express their views clearly Sometimes I have sent back a review for more work because it didn’t take a firm position. And I am a stickler for good writing. I will be quite insistent on that. You can have controversial views on the music, and I will publish them. But if you write poorly, there is no place for you at jazz.com.
Please explain the rating scale for reviews. A spectrum of 1 to 100 points seems quite broad, not to mention a potential breeding ground for ambiguity and inconsistency.
I never liked the one-to-five-star rating system that you find, for example, in Down Beat. In practice, reviewers almost never use the top end or low end of any scale – so most reviews are crammed together in the three star or four star range. It’s hard to see what use that is to anyone. I wanted a range with room for more nuance and subtle gradations. I find that the one hundred point scale works well.
Good points, but such a scale also leads to potential anomalies. A Bagatellen reader noted the Harmon trumpet feature where Chris Botti in the company Sting trumps Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Art Farmer, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan AND Dizzy Gillespie in terms of rating points. Regardless of where one falls in regards to Botti, the average jazz fan would probably find such an appraisal suspect, if not plain crazy.
Could you maybe take me through the process by which you personally assign scores? Let’s take your “12 Essential Brad Mehldau Performances” piece: the scores for the 12 selected tracks range between 88 and 98, a ten-point spread at the top end of the overall scale. What makes “All the Things you Are” a “98” and “Martha My Dear” a “95”? Also, are those scores in relation to jazz writ-large? Or just Brad’s own catalog?
You can compare review scores, and wonder why I gave a higher score to one Brad Mehldau track rather than another. But, honestly, I couldn't say anything here that would be any more astute than what I have already communicated in my reviews. I don't give out scores of 98 cavalierly, and any time I have done so in a review, I will try to communicate as clearly as I can why I did so.
Will everyone agree with my score? Of course, not. It wouldn't be much fun if everyone agreed. But I absolutely stand by my Mehldau reviews. Just as I am sure that Alan stands by his reviews.
A stop by the homepage today (1/12/08) revealed links to articles and reviews on Clark Terry, Ron Carter, Brad Mehldau, Cyrus Chestnut, Lee Morgan and Frank Zappa. Save Zappa, such a sampling seems pretty centrist or “mainstream”. What sort of plans do you have to more prominently feature other styles/eras of jazz (free, third stream, Dixieland, etc.)?
We want to cover the full range of jazz music. I am painfully aware of where we have gaps in our coverage, and I am working to fill them.
For example, during the last few weeks, I have been working to recruit reviewers and photographers from outside the United States. In just the last few days, I have added three more European reviewers and two European photographers, and I have some leads in other parts of the world. This will help alleviate the US-centered bias that is so pervasive today in jazz journalism.
But there are many other gaps that I need to address. Our last three features, as you point out, were devoted to Clark Terry, Frank Zappa and Maria Schneider – I think that is a reasonably diverse trio. And in the last ten days we have published reviews of Willem Breuker, Cheick-Tidiane Seck, Stan Kenton, Dan Grolnick, Marian McPartland, Etta James, Woody Shaw, Deborah Harry, Philip Catherine, Kerry Politzer, Paolo Fresu, Pat Metheny, Nancy King, Art Pepper, Frank Zappa, Martial Solal and Ed Palermo, among others. I don’t think anyone can look at that list and say that we have a narrow definition of jazz.
Heard word about the launch of the impressive new addition to the internet jazzosphere earlier today, Jazz.com. Looks to be quite a resource and a serious contender at giving the heavyweight champion (in terms of scope & size) AAJ a run for the title. The monthly review totals alone are staggering, though I have to admit to not having much time yet to conduct a litmus test in terms of depth and quality of the coverage. The strategy of reviewing tracks in lieu of albums also seems a little irksome, a necessary concession to the mp3 culture we’re living in, I suppose. Layout and navigation appear intuitive and aggravation-free, so there’s another plus.
Props to Ted Gioia for spearheading the project and the thirty-odd scribes he’s conscripted thus far to assist in the endeavor. Judging by the contributions under his own by-line, it looks like his listening diet stresses diversity far wider than his seminal West Coast Jazz survey would suggest: Shipp, Bley and Zappa all fall into his widely cast net. I just hope potential writers aren’t won over by the gloss and shine before giving Bags corroded bulwark consideration as a possible place to proffer their services. I can dream, can’t I?
Brian’s impending shore leave leaves an obvious black hole in Bags coverage. I’m wishing him the best while holding out hope that his Rowe tome reaches completion in a matter of mere months and he opts for a return to active duty shortly thereafter. But quality takes time and with that in mind I’m readying myself for a long night of shadowboxing.
We’ve had open casting calls before, but this time the results may prove particularly pivotal. A large chunk of the site readership revolves around eai and related improv, a zone where I have both minimal expertise and interest. So, if there are any brave souls out there in the stands willing to put on the gloves in “K.O.” Olewnick’s stead please give a holler. Those with interests more closely aligned with mine are certainly welcome as well.
Bags might be a perpetually rusting, listing hulk of a ship, but she’s still got fire left in her cast iron boiler and we need the person-power to keep it properly stoked.
Back from a holiday hiatus to Tucson and the rejuvenating environs of Rancho de Taylor. The desert sun and air did me good, but it also made the transition back to the double digit minus temps of Minneapolis all the more galling. Another disheartening development arose through my attempts at organizing a successful CD safari in the Old Pueblo. Tucson is now a veritable wasteland when it comes to brick and mortar music establishments. Hear’s, the high-end jazz, blues and world music boutique, is now a vacant storefront. A large shop that launched shortly prior to my last annual visit and looked a promising newcomer was at some point in the interim also erased. PDQ, once a vinyl juggernaut also riddled with all manner of obscure CD finds, is under new management and a mere shell of its former self. Zia’s, a scrappy Southwestern chain, is now over-priced and denuded, its retail focus redirected to DVDs and head shop sundries. I made the rounds and was routinely greeted with dissolution and decay, returning to the Twin Cities with not a single music purchase. What a sobering difference a year can make.
Minneapolis still has a number of healthy shops and I made beelines to a number of them upon my return, reassured by rows of racks and a handful of gratifying finds. The snapshot above is of B-Side in Madison, WI, another “mom & pop” holdout that seems to be weathering the desertification. Still, the desiccation out West makes me wonder, how long before the Midwest (stereotypically 3-4 years behind the coastal cultural curves) ends up in the same sorry situation?
I wanted to announce my intention to take a more or less complete break from reviewing new music during 2008 for the purpose of allowing myself more time to concentrate on the Rowe biography. I figured I'd post it prominently here in lieu of trying to think of all the musicians and/or labels likely to send things my way; I'll also post it on the blog.
It's a tough decision on several levels. I love doing the write-ups, I love hearing the music. I'm in the minority camp that thinks more is good, so I really do enjoy hearing new things, even if I ultimately don't care for them. I'm also concerned that this gap, small though it may be, won't be filled which would be extremely unfortunate. I seriously hope that one or more individuals steps up and covers for Bags many of the same areas I've tended to.
But the time constraints have become tougher and tougher. Working a "regular" job, having a wife, dog and household duties, I have only so much I can devote to writing activities. In the evenings, doing reviews has often been "easier" than working on the biography simply because they can be done in bite-sized chunks. But the book, delayed enough as is, has suffered and I'd very much like to get it completed in a semi-reasonable amount of time.
I said "more or less" above. I don't doubt that there will be one or a handful of releases I'll feel compelled to write about and may do so. Plus, I committed to do some work for Squid's Ear where I can pick and choose from a list, keeping things manageable. But for all those musicians and labels who have graciously sent their wares my way over the last several years, I can no longer promise to write about them. At least for 2008. We'll see what happens after that. Anyone with whom I've had prior communication on stuff I've agreed to receive will, of course, get the write-up, so there are still a few things in the pipeline. But after this, no promises!
I will, of course, continue hanging around here and other boards, freely commenting.
Thanks for everything, to the musicians, to Derek for keeping this place going.
What’s that they say about the Reaper reaping in threes? Frank Morgan left us this morning here in Minneapolis. He would’ve turned 74 on the 23rd of this month. I caught a disappointing gig of his at the Minneapolis Jazz Festival last summer. Lukewarm playing and a set list that sadly included bromidic pap like “Suicide is Painless”. On record it’s another matter. From his 1985 Contemporary comeback, made after decades of incarceration, insolvency and obscurity, through a prolific string on High Note he dovetailed his Bird-bred alto in a multitude of settings. My favorites include the three volume Live at the Jazz Standard Series with a dream rhythm section of George Cables, Curtis Lundy and Billy Hart in tow, and his 1986 album of duets with Cables, Double Image. My biggest regret is not having made more of an effort to hear his various concert gigs here, most often at the Saint Paul basement bastion of jazz, The Artists' Quarter. Here’s to you Mr. Morgan, many thanks for the music.
I’ve got my longstanding beef with Ike Turner, namely the way he treated Tina for lo those many years, but there’s no denying the import of the man’s music, from his early sides for labels like Sun, Cobra and Crown to last year’s out-of-left-field album for Zoho, which earned him his first solo Grammy. Even more important to me recently, his role as talent scout and Virgil to Joe Bihari’s Dante on field recording trips throughout South, the results of which can be heard on the four-volume Modern Down-Home Blues Collection on Ace. The first volume was a ROW four plus years ago and the other three are pretty much on par. So here’s a tumbler raised to Mr. Turner prefaced by a summary figurative kick to the shin.
