June, Un-Gloomed (Or: Music for the Coming Z. Apocalypse)

What with all the talk of the ongoing cannibal zombie apocalypse that seems to be breaking out all over last week, we'd thought we'd outline what will make June a delightful diversion from prowling/shuffling/limping through the streets of L.A.consuming human flesh. (Last night alone would have sufficed for the whole month: Xiu Xiu in Eagle Rock; Walter Smith III & Ambrose Akinmusire in Little Tokyo, Dr. Vicki Ray in Pasadena, Alphonse Mouzone at LACMA, the Krautrock Tribute at the Ford and Cut Chemist at the Natural History Museum.)

Here's our picks:

June 2 Fancy Space People (w/ ex-Germ Don Bolles), Narwhal Party & Bella Novela @ The Home Room....Liam Mooney and Friends presents "music for brass chimes, assorted triangles, dry ice, plastic bottles, and electric fan" at The Wulf....Medeski, Martin & Wood's Billy Martin & Wil Blades duo at The Mint....June 3 Open Gate Theater presents Sunday Evening Concerts w/ the duos of Thollem McDonas/Alex Cline & Michael Vlatkovich/William Roper....June 5 OHM at the Baked Potato....June 8 Ernie Watts Quartet at LACMA....June 9 Alan Pasqua, Darek Oles & Peter Erskine @ Vitello’s....June 10 EX IM OT Series ("a free performance of EXperimental, IMprovised, and OTher music ") at the Home Room....June 12 Nite Jewel w/ Paradise & Nicholas Krgovich at The Echo....June 15 Los Angeles Jazz Quartet at LACMA....Morris Tepper at TAIX....June 16 DâM-FunK @ the Levitt Pavilion....Mike Watt & The Missing Men / Biblical Proof of UFO’s @ the Redwood Bar....Billy Childs Quartet at The Blue Whale....June 21 Chord Four at the Blue Whale....June 28 Kenny Burrell Quintet at Catalina’s

SPOTLIGHT
NINE WINDS 35th ANNIVERSARY

Now that summer is here and the weather is perfect for hunting for brains you can eat out of people's skulls with with a spoon, drag your useless left leg down to the four separate Wednesday concerts held to celebrate 35 years of Vinny Golia's still-kicking-beyond-anyone's expectations indie jazz label Nine Winds Records. Since so much has already been written about Golia in the local music press over the years, the elder statesman has cagily taken the spotlight off himself and declared the theme of the fest to be 'New Blood' of creative and improvised music now percolating in the Southland. And where else would he be doing this? Why the sunlight-averse environs of The Blue Whale of course, whose owner Joon Lee was just profiled in a recent issue of the L.A. Weekly?

The Schedule:
6.06 Slumgum / Music for Woodwinds, Percussion and Strings by Vinny Golia
6.13 Walsh Set Trio / Gavin Templeton Quartet
6.20 Daniel Rosenboom Septet / Vinny Golia Sextet
6.27 Vinny Golia Medium Ensemble

SPOTLIGHT
MICROFEST 2012

MicroFest, the annual L.A. celebration of microtonal music, concludes in slam-bang fashion (not a term usually used for this music, but still...) with two events. First, on June 14th, is actually a CD release party REDCAT-style: the first complete recording of the iconoclastic Cali composer Harry Partch's epic Bitter Music, a sort of abstract, found-object opera based on the seven months Partch spent as a wandering hobo who didn't wind up getting his face eaten off. The evening also includes a newly discovered 1969 interview with Partch and the first performance of the long-lost 1942 version of his classic Barstow. A week later, on June 23, the festival's assistant director Aron Kallay will oversee a trippy program at Beyond Baroque in Venice called Beyond Twelve: The Re-Imagined Piano, which the premiere the work of ten of American composers that was commissioned with two ground rules: 1) Re-tune the keyboard, from extended just intonation to 88 equal-divisions of the octave and everything in between. 2) Re-map the keyboard, left can be right, high can be low; pitches need not be linear. " Setting aside the debate over whether microtonal music calms Z's flesh-eating jones or actually drives it to become more intense, this should prove to be an ear-opening -- and not eye-eating -- experience. And for only $10!

SPOTLIGHT
GRANT LEE BUFFALO

The Beast just isn't about weird, obscurantist music that may/may not drive Z.s into a blood-frothy frenzy. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait til the end of the month to see what the outcome of the Z. apocalypse will bring to our ruined land, but for one night you can forget it all with the return on June 28th of L.A. sons Grant Lee Buffalo, the neo-psychedelic folk-pop trio who seemed poised on the edge of greatness with their 1994 album Mighty Joe Moon and its attendant single "Mockingbirds" (which took the falsetto back from Bread and Leo Sayer); hell, they were even featured in Rolling Stone's "The Future of Rock" issue! Then, that poised turned into perched as the band became one of the lynchpins of the Largo scene of the mid-1990s and got to watch compadres like Eels, Jon Brion, Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple achieve a success they much deserved. Didn't happen, but they remain influential cult miniaturists whose aping-of-Brian-Wilson-before-it-was-cool aesthetic in turn lit upon the ears of future L.A. pop outfits like Best Coast, Beach House and Lavender Diamond.

"M¡PUNK": A Nostalgic Stumble Through the Music of 1979-1981

PART THREE:
2 Sides To Your Mulleted Man

"Turn Me Loose” Loverboy
Label: Columbia. Single released: 1981. Songwriters: Paul Dean & Mike Reno. Producer: Bruce Fairbairn & Bob Rock. Highest Chart Position: #6. Album: Loverboy.

“Sweetheart” Franke and the Knockouts
Label: MCA/Millennium. Single released: 1981. Songwriters: Franke Previte & Billy Elworthy. Producer: Tony Camillo. Highest Chart Position: #1. Album: Franke and The Knockouts. 

Ladies of the Eighties, your hombre was a complex riddle. He had at least (if no more than) two sides to him: one the strutting selfish dickhead, the other an aw-shucks-girl romantic. He wore stone-washed jeans, leather vests with no shirt, embossed faux-snakeskin boots and those weird thin studded belts with the end tucked under and pointing downward like a withered dong-substitute. He feathered and treated and blow-dried his gossamer locks for about as long as you did. He fluffed and sunned his brushy 'stache until he looked like Joey Silvera. He kept an arsenal of Italian-style man panties that just broadcasted: Hey babe, I'm available. He loved parties with fondue, port-wine cheese and wall-to-wall shag. He kept an (unread) copy of Shogun on the coffee table. He had to do it his way -- or no way at all.

Summer 1981. The Beast and a friend with no driver's license were speeding through the Wisconsin cornfields on a muggy summer's night when Loverboy's "Turn Me Loose" came on the radio. We listened to the blaring cop-flick synth intro, the thumping bass line that kicks off a series of persistent demands: 'I was born to love, I was born to dream, the craziest boy you've ever seen...Makin' love to whoever I please, I gotta do it my way or no way at all...' We laughed at what a juiced-up asshole this guy sounded like.

Thing was: my friend was one of the biggest egomaniacs I have ever met in my life. He was the kind of guy who commandeered every stereo at every party he'd ever been to with a surly sense of entitlement; I actually watched him walk up to a host of a party he had no even been invited to and snapped, "Hey, whaddaya say we get those burgers on the grill now?" He was a disciple of Paul Mitchell hair care products and actually wore a pair of zippered parachute pants for a spell. He wore cowboy boots UNDER his tight jeans like Danny Bonaduce. He once wrapped a red bandanna around his neck before going out on a date and I had to intervene and tell him he looked like an idiot. He sort of reminded me of a cross between one of those cartoon roosters who wore tough-guy pompadours and Allen Covert's character Sammy in The Wedding Singer. He had a bit of the messiah in him, mixed in with an almost evangelical grandiosity that reminded me of the hair-metal ballads of the ‘80s. I could truly picture him shirtless in a flowing, windblown blonde mane and a leather vest, fist raised to the whipping fake rain, chained and painted women writhing at his feet: You can make it if you try!!!!! He wasn't so much addicted to sex as he was the sensation of the promise of sex – hence the constant mentions of the word oyster.

Suffice to say, he was aggressive and selfish in bed. He frequently hit on married women and then acted offended when their husbands protested. "Turn Me Loose" in many ways was his Neanderthal credo -- he should have had it printed on a plaque hanging in his mirrored-ceiling bedroom with the squishy, awkward waterbed and the lava lamp and the hanging terrarium.

But even the mulleted man of the Greed Decade had a trace of the incurable romantic nestled in his raven-black chest hairs. Aw shucks baby, I just, ya know, like, loved you an' thought you were a stone cold fox an' hot to trot an' you wouldn't wanna take a spin in my black Corvette with the gold eagle spreadin' its wings on the hood? I got some coke and some nitrous oxide... Enter Frank Stallone/Young Ron Jeremy doppelganger Franke Previte, who took a classic doo-wop piano riff (similar to Toto's "Hold the Line") and smeared it in Album-Oriented Rock Vaseline and got a #1 hit.

Previte actually had a decent voice -- shrill but soulful enough for Foreigner to ask him to replace their shrill lead singer Lou Gramm -- but he later cashed in his frontman chips, took an old Franke & the Knockouts demo called "Hungry Eyes," wrote a new song called "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" and made a Brinks' truck full of loot when both were included the gazillion selling Dirty Dancing soundtrack. It earned the former one-hit wonder an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy nomination. You can hear the influence of Franke P. and his Knockouts -- if it can be called such -- can be heard in the melanin-challenged R&B-lite of Maroon 5 and the gayest band of the '80s, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Believe it or else, the Knockouts' original album is going for $75.20 on Amazon.

On the Loverboy side of things, "Turn Me Loose" would have an equally unusual second act somewhere along the lines of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" and "Venus in Furs." From Songfacts:

The S&M/leather community has noted the sadomasochistic overtones of the lyrics, what with being tied down, being on your knees, and so on. And "flying" is scene slang for the high experienced while buzzing on endorphins (natural chemicals released in the brain as a response to painful or confining stimulus), so "I wanna fly" loosely qualifies. And finally, bondage fans also claim that the only time they feel "free" is when they're tied up - hence it's like being "turned loose." Make no mistake, Loverboy very clearly did not intend the song this way, but for reasons of alternative interpretations, this song is usually part of the music playlist in your typical "dungeon" - at least at the kind of Southern California "play party" where couples swish those tacky velvet floggers around with way more dignity attached to the affair than one might expect.

Uh-huh. So basically, Ladies of the Eighties, your man was, in the words of a great philosopher, "gayer than nine guys fucking ten guys."

Two Sides of the Story

1466 E. 54th St. - 5.17.2012

[photo courtesy of jhvu]

This last Thursday, May 17, the Beast and a writer colleague Anthony Miller took a self-styled "tour" in a sort of ad hoc memoriam for the tragic shootout that occurred in Los Angeles 38 years before between the LAPD and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The actual address of the gunfight is one of the most infamous "unofficial" tourist sites in the city -- alongside the intersection of Florence and Normandie, the La Bianca house in Los Feliz and the spot in the West Adams district where The Black Dahlia's body was found. Like those locations, there is no plaque to commemorate the five people burned alive in the 5 1/2 hour gun battle that was broadcast live across the nation.

1466 E. 54th St. - 5.17.1974

What we found, however, amounted to an almost accidental memorial. The block the house is located in is on the western edge of the city of Vernon and on the northern side of Compton; surprisingly, the sleepy block was shaded by many overhanging trees and not exposed to the sun. The house, of course, no longer exists, but the top photo shows what stands there now: A verdant copse of tropical plants and trees hiding a stucco duplex that could have been on the Westside. The lot was conspicuously lusher than the rest of the block. As we stood across the street, there was a broken wooden chair and a scraped and abraded desk placed out on the curb amongst a scattering of rags and broken glass. Rap music pounded faintly from an open window somewhere. An ancient Hispanic woman tottered by carrying a sack of groceries. A parking enforcement officer stopped and asked us if we've moved our cars for street-cleaning.

At our feet in the dirt was a weathered and stained poster of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in a busted picture frame. We removed it to look at it closer and my friend mentioned that newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, whom the SLA had kidnapped and brainwashed nearly four months before the shootout, had adopted the revolutionary name "Tania" in honor of Guevara's martyred female comrade Tamara Bider.

"Remember when I told you not to think of everything in life as a metaphor?" I told my friend. "Well, forget what I said." We had to snap a pic of it:

After standing on the curb looking at the piece of real estate for what felt like an appropriately solemn amount of time, we made it north to the Garvanza area of Highland Park for the recently opened SLA exhibit at the Los Angeles Police Museum. It was quite impressive, using three rooms and a panorama of different You-Are-There visual aids (timeline, video, audio, 3-D displays); it sort of reminded us of the floating, living imagery of the Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture. There was a lot of incidental oddness to it all: between text describing the heroic actions of the SWAT teams who razed the house to the ground were large totems of the SLA's heyday, including a faux-scrawled SLA slogan 'Death to the Fascist Insect That Prays on the Life of the People' under the bright orange SLA banner. There was a wall text describing Patty Hearst's 56-day captivity in a closet. . .on an actual closet that one could open and peer into.

The strangest addition were the beaded, tie-dyed hippie curtains that separated the rooms -- like it was a meticulously reconstructed Sunset Strip head shop from Elvis Meets Nixon. It might have been a cop's nightmare over what doors would be if the hippie pinko freaks won. (Missing: a giant cartoon hippie named "Groovy Gravy" whom one could beat with a real cop baton.) Although we were much impressed by the detail and professionalism of the exhibit, we couldn't help but see these things as the spoils of war, the victors' display of the booty acquired from the vanquished. Any doubt about this was further stoked by the adjoining exhibit on the 1997 North Hollywood Bank of America Shootout, which displayed full-sized mannequins dressed with the exact clothing and body armor that were worn by the gunmen that day. The sponsor for the exhibit? Bank of America.

[NOTE: For a riveting read on the whole SLA affair, my friend Anthony recommends tracking down a rare copy of The Voices of Guns by journalists Vin McLennan & Paul Avery. Mr. Miller would also like to point out that Robert Downey, Jr. played Paul Avery in the film Zodiac. Always a repository of good info!]

REST IN VERSE: Dorothea Grossman

In the old days,

I spread fires and floods and pestilence

on my toast.

Nowadays, I’m more selective,

I only read my horoscope

by the quiet glow of the marmalade.
Dorothea Grossman, "I Allow Myself"

Dottie Grossman (1937-2012)

(Mark Weber, Jazz For Mostly, 5/07/2012)

In It For The Kicks: An Interview with Dorothea Grossman

(Travis Nichols, Poetry Foundation, March 2010)

Grossman parked herself in her wheelchair up front to do her call-and-response thing: She would knock out a few lines of her poetry, and the musicians would reflect the blooming flowers, the fading helicopters, the Henny Youngman apotheoses, whatever. These made for some of the evening's best moments -- because the format provided an instant group focus; because if one minute didn't congeal, another inspiration was coming right up; because of the musicians' longtime love for Grossman, an ever-present avant attendee for decades; and because, as she noted, a lot of these people wouldn't know free improv from free lunch if not for her late husband, pianist Richard Grossman.
Greg Burk (3/07/2012)

[Read Mr. Burk's eulogy for Dottie here.]

The flinty lady with frequent collaborator

Michael-Pierre Vlatkovich

Salmon-colored stripes

crossing four shades of blue.

Anybody who tries to

write about this

is barking up the wrong tree.

"Sunset Attempt,"

Dottie Grossman's last sent poem

for musician Bonnie Barnett's birthday

I Oughta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Blogroll

Check His Head: An Interview with Adam Yauch

(Shambhala Sun, 1/1995)

Afterword: Adam Yauch

(Pitchfork Media, 5/04/12)

Adam Yauch Writes a Snarky Response to a Music Critic

(The New York Times, 6/20/2004)

Was Paul's Boutique Illegal?

(Slate, 5/07/2012)

Los Lobos' Louie Perez Goes Broadway....Kinda

(KPCC.org, 5/03/2012)

Cecil Taylor's Keyboard Legacy

(The New York Times, 5/03/2012)

Preview of Summer 2012 Music Releases

(Consequence of Sound, 5/01/2012)

Review: The First 100 Records of John Peel's Record Collection

(The Quietus, 5/03/2012)

Review: Vinny Golia Quartet's Take Your Time

(Music and More, 5/05/2012)

Jazz Gets Final Death Blow on L.A. AM radio

(Los Angeles Times, 5/02/2012)

Watch: Alec Baldwin Makes a Stand for Classical Music

(The Rest Is Noise, 5/04/2012)

Live Review: Kronos Quartet, Tony Kushner & Marjane Satrapi's Exit Strategies

(Sound of the City, 5/04/2012)

Live Review: Jack White's Blues Clinic at the Mayan

(Buzzbands L.A., 5/04/2012)

How Chicago House Got Its Groove Back

(Chicago Reader, 5/05/2012)

20 Great MCA Moments

(Stereogum, 5/05/2012)

Anatomy of a Power Ballad

(L.A. Record, 5/01/2012)

Origins of Battle Rap: Louis Armstrong vs. Dizzy Gillespie

(AvantUrb, 2/13/2012)

Um, Eww: Smegma (the band) Live in the '90s

(WFMU's Beware of the Blog, 5/04/2012)

A Treasure Trove of Unreleased George Harrison

(Chicago Tribune, 4/20/2012)

Ron Carter: 75 Years of Superb Bass

(NPR's A Blog Supreme, 5/03/2012)

The 10 Best Songs by The Band 

(PopMatters, 4/30/2012)

Wadada Leo Smith: Decoding Ankhrasmation

(NewMusicBox, 5/01/2012)

50 Jazz Albums Unlikely To Make Other Lists

of 50 Jazz Albums You Have Read On International Jazz Day 2012

(Burning Ambulance, 4/30/2012)

Bloom (UPDATED**)

[Photo coutesy of Wil Cohen]

While The Beast is still catching our breath from the departure of alt-jazz promoter Rocco Somazzi to the Bay Area to oversee his new restaurant Duende, now we have to say goodbye all over again to his staggeringly talented betrothed/muse, pianist/sound sculptress Motoko Honda. Sigh.

{**UPDATE #1: Luckily, Motoko will still be playing shows in Los Angeles. ("Both Rocco and I will continue to involve with L.A. music scene," Motoko told the Beast. "I mean, how can we leave all the great musicians here ??") } Tomorrow night (Thursday, May 3) as a part of the L.A. Bloom Festival at the Aratani/Japan Theatre (244 S. San Pedro St., Little Tokyo 90012). Honda will be on the bill with the equally adventuresome laptop-folkie Mia Doi Todd, who will play the first set with percussionist Andres Renteria. (Mo goes on at 10pm if you are concened about traffic.) She will be premiering her newest....uhhh, jazz composition? multi-disciplinary exploration? holistic auditory wackiness?...called "Dreams of a Flower," part of Honda's massive Sound E/Scape Project. Following "a mysterious story" of a single flower (shades of another pianist's The Secret Life of Plants), the piece features an expansive world of acoustic sounds colored with electronics, visual projections featuring a Spectral GL (a visual instrument that employs an interactive software system to generate real-time 3D animation in response to live or recorded sound) invented by visual artist Jesse Gilbert and live dancing by Roxanne Steinberg.

Of particular interest to music alt-jazz fans is the stellar combo Motoko Honda has assembled for the evening: multi-percussionist Alex Cline,  trumpeter Daniel Rosenboom, violinist Jeff Gauthier and his wife cellist Maggie Parkins and electric bassist Steuart Liebig. Honda has collaborated with all of these players in the past, so the psychic connections should be flying fast and free. Don't miss it, ffolkes!

{**UPDATE #2: Go here to read a review of Thursday night's show. }

"Jazz in the Modern Era" Turning 10

We take a lot for granted in Southern California.

We take the weather for granted. We take the ocean for granted.

And we take it for granted that in our midst we have a group

of legendary musicians and artists that play a music called jazz.

Chet Hanley

For the past decade, professor and historian Chet Hanley has been literally putting these words to music. He had hosted over 250 episodes (many of them 3 hours long) of Jazz in the Modern Era, (now archived on YouTube), a college curriculum course and jazz music television show broadcast from the campus of Cal-State Dominguez Hills (Locally, it airs Tuesdays, 9:00 - 10:30PM on Time-Warner Cable Channel 36, and online). And Chet's in good company: cornetist Bobby Bradford once taught at the Dominguez-Hills campus in the late-60's-early 70's. JITME viewers are encouraged to call in to speak with in-studio guests and discuss their favorite selections or artists.

Chet Hanley (L) with the great bassist John Heard

[photo courtesy of The Jazzcat]

Chet has featured jazz musicians, club owners, photographers, promoters, writers, historians and collectors from all over the country. But what makes his show so special is its documenting of the Southern California jazz scene: the show's archives amount to a massive treasure trove of local jazz history from Central Avenue to Leimert Park. Here's a recent show with the brilliant bassist Roberto Miguel Miranda:

Many of the writers, collectors and historians who stop by bring along rare performances of jazz greats, which makes it a terrific window into the tributaries of the SoCal jazz underground, who trade their wares they way Dave Matthews fans trade live bootlegs. And then there's Chet, an urbane and genial host with an encyclopedic knowledge of not just jazz history but poetry, boxing, photography and art. And, true to jazz, the show often goes in unexpected directions, like the time funk great Rick James made a call in to the live broadcast to argue a small point...or Big Jay McNeely phoning in to confirm that he wasn't dead.

Chet with childhood friend Jeffrey Winston on the JITME set.

Together, they have hosted the Leimert Park Jazz Festival

and 72 live oral-history interviews at The World Stage

[photo courtesy of The Jazzcat]