The Beast received gracious permission to repost a recent Facebook conversation between jazz/improvisational music artists/promoters about the scene in L.A. -- or lack thereof:
Gregg Bendian Conducts Some L.A. Friends at his 50th Birthday Bash at the Baked Potato (7/18/13 -- read Greg Burk's review of the show here)
[photo by Sander Roscoe Wolff]
GREG HOTCHKISS: Is it just me? or is the greater Los Angeles improvisational music scene practically non existent? Mr. T's Bowl, Cafe Metropol, Royal T's, Rocco's various venues,il Corral, DONE! Steuart Liebig, Kris Tiner, Jeff Kaiser, Dan Clucas, Wayne Peet, Anthony Shuduck, Jeff Gauthier, Alan Cook, John Fumo, Nels Cline, Nathan Hubbard, Jeremy Drake, G.E. Stinson, Noah Phillips, Joe Berradi, Tony Atherton, Vince Meghrouni, Bill Barrett...Those were just the names of the musicians I knew off the top of my head. There's dozens more who could be found playing through the city any given time of the month. I know Nels Cline, Ben Wendel and the other Kneebody members and Rocco Somazzi moving out of the area had a little to do with this, but I'm I missing something? Is it just me? Is there a website I'm missing?
As a person who was so deeply impacted by the music I've seen in L.A. over the last 13 years I feel bad that younger kids falling in love with Jazz will miss out on it. As a person who was so deeply impacted by the music I've seen in L.A. over the last 13 years I feel bad that younger kids falling in love with Jazz will miss out on it.
G.E. Stinson (L) with Nels Cline
[photo by Peak]
G.E. STINSON: I've been in L.A. since 1982. Never seen a worse time in terms of venues. It's easier for me to get gigs in Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento and other places up north than L.A. Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, The Blue Whale and a few other places are happening -- but scattered and few. Rocco is in Oakland running Duende. There are some other underground venues like The Handbag Factory and The Wulf -- slightly different music but still interesting. Also, Grand Star Jazz in Chinatown. Are you on the Angel City Jazz mailing list?
BEN WENDEL: Hey Greg - the L.A. creative music scene is always going up and down. The main issue is so few venues to play in - there are actually a lot of musicians from NYC coming through and/or moving to L.A. so I know there's potential. I'm working on building up a small, humble series at a new theater in Santa Monica called The Broad Stage -- they have thankfully allowed me to increase jazz programming there. Next season in there 120 seat black box theater, there will be folks like Gerald Clayton, Dan Tepfer, WildUp!, Julia Holter, etc. The honest answer is it takes individual like Rocco, etc. giving their time for the love of the music and creating a scene - you could be one of those people if you wanted but it's really just a labor of love.
Dan Tepfer (L) with Ben Wendel
GH: Thanks Ben. I was entertaining the idea of opening a venue/record store/creative empowerment center. Experience has shown me that Orange County isn't the place to do it and I don't have the desire to try it in L.A.
ADAM BENJAMIN: Orange County could really use a place like that. If you can find a relatively central location with low low overhead and institutional support, I believe it could succeed.
JOE BERARDI: Hey Greg, you're not wrong overall, but there are still a few things going on. Eagle Rock Center is still active every month. I am doing a trio with Steuart Liebig and Kira Vollman on Aug 4. Steuart and I just played at Battery Books + Music in South Pasadena (Rich West's store) and I just did a solo show at the Folly Bowl in Altadena on Saturday. These are just my recent experiences. Everybody else can fill you in on theirs. Point being, it's not quite done, but definitely less than it was. Things can still pick up, there are still players out there and new ones coming in all the time. Cheers!
NATHAN HUBBARD: Thanks for the shout Greg. I live in San Diego, was in AZ for about two years (2011-2012). I've played most of the venues you mentioned plus Line Space Line, Cryptonights at Club Tropical, Dangerous Curves, Chris Garcia's series at Harbor College and a few others. I've tried get up to L.A. to play as much as I can, both with groups from S.D. as well as playing with as many of the amazing people in L.A. as I can. That being said, it usually works out to once (or maybe twice) a year for the last 13 or so years. There has also been a lot of work (by myself and members of the Trummerflora Collective) to bring L.A. people down to perform in S.D.
Nathan Hubbard
NH: I agree w G.E. and Joe, things are slow with venues, but there are plenty of great things happening. Just look at G.E's soundcloud or Steuart's bandcamp, plenty of new music and all sorts of exciting collaborations. San Diego is going thru a similar situation on the venue front. It will swing back. As for other spots I don't think got mentioned yet, check Gatsby Books in LB (Scott Heustis is doing great things) and Rich West's Battery Books.
SCOTT HEUSTIS: Yes. The Book Shop circuit. Gatsby Books and Rich West's Battery Books. The Story of Open is unfortunately out of business. Even the Eagle Rock Center For The Arts used to be a library. I'm working on more venues. It's a DIY world buddy. All adventurous improvisors should cultivate at least one venue each. It's not hard to do. Instead of crying about the weakness of the LA scene, I'm creating one myself. And sharing it with everyone.
Gatsby Books
ROCCO SOMAZZI: Good conversation. For me the hard part is trying to develop an audience that will support a venue presenting this kind of music. It's easy to find a space to present music but if nobody comes to listen to it, it's very hard to make it last. I've been trying for 15 years to set-up a sustainable music presenting venue and the closest I ever got to it is my current venue in Oakland. LA has an amazing music scene but the audiences are notoriously fickle. Maybe there is too much other stuff going on all the time or maybe the venues are so spread apart it's hard to get to them.
After a loooooong hiatus, the Beast has finally gotten around to updating the first installment of The L.A. New Music Snerd's Dictionary of Terms. (All additions/changes are in red bold.) This in anticipation of Part 2, which is being readied to go up in the next week or so. Thanks again for your patience!
This is a first for the Beast. We’ve reviewed books and interviewed authors but we’ve never reviewed a Ph.D. Thesis. But the subject of Charles M. Sharp’s 2008 dissertation, titled Improvisation,Identity and Tradition: Experimental Music Communities in Los Angeles, is something quite close to the Beast’s heart. And something we have been waiting to read for a long time.
It's a mammoth piece of work, clocking in at almost 500 pages. Sharp was kind enough to lend us a copy for informal perusal and we quickly found out why: despite the academic tone one expects in a Ph.D. disseration, it is the first text we've seen to weave together -- in a sort of crazy-quilt fashion -- the unruly and often confusing 40-year history of L.A.'s various experimental music scenes. There are chapters on Ornette Coleman, Horace Tapscott and UGMAA, Bobby Bradford, Nels and Alex Cline, Vinny Golia and Nine Winds Records. Perhaps the paper's centerpiece is a long and fascinating account of the late clarinetist John Carter's Roots and Folkore series, which Sharp rightly calls "one of the most important pieces of experimental jazz during the 1980s." There are individual case studies of working L.A. musicians like saxophonists Lynn Johnston and Michael Session and tubaist William Roper, and revelatory portraits of lesser-known figures like Lee Kaplan and Titus Levi, whose behind-the-scenes support for L.A.'s nascent improvised music scene proved invaluable in keeping it alive.
But Sharp has gone farther into areas that have either been neglected or passed over in any single history and connected them to a much wider and richer tapestry, particularly in the fascinating parallels between experimental jazz and punk rock in Los Angeles: The Masque, The Deadbeats, SST Records, The Minutemen, Al's Bar and The Weirdos (among many others) are all brought to the fore as spiritual inheritors of L.A.'s free jazz past. Sharp's vitae as both a musician and an educator (he teaches at Cal State-Fullerton) allows him to straight-facedly parallel the music of both Ornette Coleman and Black Flag and make it riveting rather than ridiculous.
If you have nothing better to do on a rainy Saturday (i.e. tomorrow), Sharp will moderate a panel titled The Cost of Free Jazz with guests Jeff Schwartz, Jeff Kaiser and Vinny Golia at the EMP Pop Conference at UCLA. (It's free BTW.) We recently sat down with the newly minted "Dr. Sharp" at the Royal/T Cafe for a brief chat about how he managed to pull all this off; rather than some salt and pepper-haired academic, we found a guy who, refreshingly, looks like this:
THE BEAST: I couldn’t bring the whole thesis today, sorry. SHARP: Well, it’s quite a monster.
How long did it take to complete?
Ten years from the time I started grad school to the time I finished. It was during the same period that Steve Isoardi was doing The Dark Tree, so we were almost chasing each other doing interviews…it was kind of weird. He was at the UCLA Oral History Department and I knew he had done Central Avenue Sounds and was starting to do the Beyond Central interview project with people like Bobby Bradford…I did one of my first interviews with Nels just a week before Steve did an interview with him.
How do you even begin to approach a project like this? How do you make sense of such diffuse material? Do you simply look for connections and go from there?
Well yeah, it’s a history and to go chronologically that makes it a lot easier.
But a lot of it hasn’t even been linked up together.
Well yeah, that’s true. That’s why it took such a long time. It was originally going to be going over some of the same stuff that was in The Dark Tree – I played with a lot of those people, I was very interested in that scene – but I was also playing with guys like Lynn [Johnston] and there was no historical connection between any of this. I didn’t see at first why that was, but then I realized, ‘Well, that’s what this is all really about.’ This music is about freedom but that freedom is defined very differently by different groups of people. So, for example, even though [SST Records founder]Greg Ginn listens to John Coltrane, his understanding of Coltrane is completely different from Michael Session’s understanding of Coltrane…I realized that they could talk to each other, they should talk to each other, and not just because I think it would be interesting. Those two guys have so little in common and yet so much in common, so how do I make those connections? How do I draw those threads out ? Once I figured that out, it was a matter of looking at all these different narratives and trying to weave them together at a different level.
Ornette Coleman
Were there any “eureka!” moments when you were doing your research?
Yes, almost everything was like that. [laughter] I started out with jazz and then it grew to the free-jazz guys and then the punk jazz and the free improvisers and the classical music players like Kraig Grady and David Ocker – that whole Independent Composers' Association thing was a real revelation, especially how similar it was to a social organization like COMA [California Outsider Music Association]. Both were happening at the same time but either they weren’t aware of each other or just weren’t able or interested in fusing those things. Then you had the top-down version of the L.A. Festival coming at the same time, so being able to lay those out brought the social issues to the fore, which is what really interested me…The music is diffuse and strange and capitalizes on the ability for anybody to interpret any way you want. This is music that doesn’t tell you what to think. It poses questions. This is true of all of it, whether its punk rock or improvised music…What amazes me is the degree of separation between Black Flag and John Coltrane and how can I listen to both of these...and I can appreciate all those things because I can find something that makes sense to me, that’s home to me, that I understand, that I can appropriate. Of course, ‘appropriate’ is a bit of a dangerous word when you’re talking about people doing stuff cross-culturally, but the very definition of the word is “making it your own”; if you understand something and you absorb it and it becomes part of your history or tradition.
Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra
That reminds me of what Tapscott used to say to his audiences: “Here’s another one that you wrote.”
Yeah, although he was speaking in terms of the wider community. I mean just on an individual level, you listen and interpret and make it your own, so Greg Ginn "owns" Coltrane, not in the monetary or copyright sense, but it’s his own music even though his relationship coming into it was entirely different than Michael Session, who was sitting in the park trying to practice. Both have every right to that. We’re not yet into issues of buying and selling and who does it. When Horace said ‘This is one you wrote’ or ‘This is your music’ or 'This is your band,’ he wasn’t just talking to people in his immediate neighborhood, otherwise he would’ve just played in his neighborhood, and he didn’t, and that’s really important.
I remember a few years ago there was that multi-part series on KCRW called ‘The United States of Los Angeles’ where each chapter was dedicated to a different neighborhood and treated them all separately. But you chose not to deal with L.A. as separate communities. What was behind that?
I wanted to show how people were using music to break outside of those neighborhoods. So many of the communities in Los Angeles were the result of redlining and politics, and it was really hard for people battle out of that. This is why the community for Horace Tapscott stayed here and the community for Greg Ginn was there and they were like two miles apart but never met, which is amazing to me.
[The hideous shriek of an espresso machine drowns out most of what he says here]
Michael Session
…by listening to the Minutemen and Tapscott, you’re thinking in a little bit different way than someone who just listens to one of those things…You have some kind of fusion of those things together, so there’s some moments of overlap that creates this thought about aesthetics: ‘How does it pose questions to you that gives you an orientation to the world?’ That’s the link to all of them. The other link was that all this music was experimental and that’s never going to appeal to a huge audience…All of these people I interviewed had the intention of gravitating towards music whose meaning wasn’t always immediately clear to them right away, music that really tests and pushes the connection between the work and the world. Ethnomusicology is sort of premised on this idea that music can almost be understood as culture itself. It encodes how you think about the world in some way…One of the great beauties of music is that it’s always shrouded in some sort of mystery; experimental music capitalizes on that mystery and works those edges harder than anything else, questioning whether this is music at all…by thinking about that, you’re thinking about how people make that leap from the work of the imagination to the work of being in the world.
Older, Wiser?: Greg Ginn
Especially in Los Angeles, which is not shy about displaying its complete indifference to these types of music. Do you think this music functions better under threat?
On one end, no. Nothing works good under threat. We might want to have some romantic myth about that, but there would be more musicians playing it and more money for everybody if we just threw more money at it. If I had a million bucks I could say: ‘Let’s book a gig every night a week in this place right now! What’s it going to take? Ten thousand dollars a night? Fine, let’s do it!’ Is that going to make the scene better or worse? It’s going to make it infinitely better! Nothing gets helped by having no gigs, no record labels, no options for the music to get out there…
Black Flag
Still, in the late 70s and early 80s, you write about the similarities between the burgeoning L.A. punk scene and this burgeoning improvised music scene, especially since both groups were using the same D.I.Y. tactics: starting labels, fanzines, putting up their flyers of telephone poles, booking gigs in basements, fencing schools, wineries, churches…
Yeah, every single one of those instances is because of individuals who are going to lose money every single time, every single one of them. Now does being under pressure make people more cunning? I doubt it. If [Angel City Jazz Festival Organizers]Rocco Somazzi and Jeff Gauthier got a huge N.E.A. grant, do you think they’d squander it on Dom Perignon? Or would they book more shows?
Depends on what kind of a mood they’re in…
Granted you get more autonomy – if you can play in a fencing school you can play whatever you want as opposed to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion…If the Dorothy Chandler started booking Vinny Golia every week, do you think his music would suddenly blow up? No, not at all. If anything they would say to Vinny, ‘Can you tame it down a bit?’ I mean, they wouldn’t even invite him in to begin with, not because they don’t like the music but there those invisible perceptions over who should be doing what and why and what’s more valuable or worthwhile to the community…Then you’ve got the elite maintaining these really rigid mini-structures. I mean, how to we crack that open and reverse engineer that?
From Left: Lynn Johnston, Charles Sharp, Vinny Golia
You spoke earlier of the L.A. Festival. Your section on the one in 1990 curated by Peter Sellars is quite fascinating in regards to that “top-down” approach to multiculturalism you mentioned.
The first one Sellars curated was really diverse, even though it was really criticized by a lot postmodern cultural critics like Mike Davis…as being sort of a ‘bad’ example of multiculturalism...For the most part, they didn’t like the idea of any multiculturalism at all, that those things should remain separate. My point was: 'Who defines what makes these different in the first place?' From the bottom up, those difference are infinitely mutable. Like I went to a Gamelan concert and knew nothing about it at the time and it was awesome. It blew my mind. Now did I understand it the same way as the Balinese guy sitting next to me? Not at all. Will I ever? No. Does it mean I didn’t understand it? No. so if we go back to this idea that classical music is for the old white people, jazz is for the black people, this ‘free’ music is for the younger white hipsters – it destroys all the magic that the music does…Maybe there’s a few people who think, ‘I’m going to make music only for the immediate people around me' and you realize the people around you aren’t the people who are geographically stuck there but who are around you, who feel you, and that transcends geography, easy…I think that’s one of the trends in Ethnomusicology now in that it’s increasingly focused on ‘place.’ I kind of avoiding talking about a lot of that theory, especially geography, because it tends to ground everything back down to ‘regionalism’ and I’m trying to figure out, 'How do we break out if that?' In Los Angeles and anywhere you have to deal with the real civic urban rules, like the ridiculous zoning laws here that make it almost impossible to open up any kind of little performance space…That has a huge effect on the music.
Fishbone
Why do you think hardcore punk was so well aligned with improvised music? You’ve got Vinny Golia playing with Patti Smith at the Roxy, The Minutemen sharing a bill with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra at McCabe’s, Jonathan Gold leading an ensemble that played Terry Riley’s “In C” at the Anticlub – a lot of exciting cross-pollination!
Yeah there was. I was surprised I didn’t find more connections between the No Wave scene in New York and the L.A. punk scene. There was some eye opening moments talking to some of the people in the punk scene who were really into jazz back then, like Scott Guerin. His dad was a jazz musician, he grew up listening to jazz – actually very similar to my own story. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he was making this really tweaked-out punk music that actually would have been way more in place in the No Wave scene. No question if he had moved to New York he would’ve been on that Eno No Wave compilation; instead, he’s in L.A. and he has no fans and he plays gigs for no one and there’s like five people on the scene who even likes jazz. [laughter] Some of them were really important people, like Brendan Mullen, but it’s this tiny subculture within a subculture. The early Masque scene was way more diverse than I ever expected…with bands like The Weirdos and The Screamers – that stuff is totally weird. They would’ve easily fit into No Wave, and they were before No Wave. The preceded it by far! That’s amazing to me. They were playing the Masque with all off these dirt teen metal bands who can’t even play and then you have this freaky-arty other component…If nothing else, the only thing that’s bringing them together is their opposition to the mainstream-trapped-in-a-box-commercial- made-for-mass-appeal. Anything that didn’t appeal to the masses was going to fit there – that doesn’t surprise me at all. What surprises me is how it got quickly reversed into a million hardcore imitators of Black Flag. All that diversity disappears and becomes associated with the exact opposite of diversity. I mean, what a flip flop! That original scene actually wanted diversity. They sought it out! It’s not surprising that a lot of that original scene was into hip hop, because hip hop was emerging at the time, and Brendan Mullen and some of those guys were into early rap. One of the first guys on the Masque scene – I can’t remember his name – started one of L.A.’s first hip hop clubs. There’s also connections between the electroclash and funk scenes, the mobile DJs, bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Untouchables and Fishbone were getting gigs at some of the first hip hop clubs in town and they’d switch off between punk rock to the early N.W.A. stuff.
Nice young boys!: The Minutemen
You have a lot of the usual suspects in this paper, but also so many fascinating characters who don’t get as much ink and are sort of in the shadows. Like Lee Kaplan, who started the Sunday concert series at the Century City Playhouse and seems to be some sort of weird fulcrum for the entire improvised music scene.
Oh yeah, he’s such an interesting guy. He was invaluable to this scene by being brave and maybe foolish or unaware that that sort of thing should work [laughter], which is great. And Lee never made a dime off any of those shows. He was willing to take risks and lose money, and in a sense making money was his goal, consciously or not. When I was interviewing him, he’d be talking about the series in business-model terms – 'We wanted to guarantee this many people'; then he’d pause and say, ‘But then again, it was the Art Ensemble playing – just for me!’ and that right away negates everything about losing money. [laughter] He was ready and willing to just lose it all!
Nels and Alex Cline
The question is that would have he been able to do that if he didn’t know guys like Nels or Alex from high school and I would guess no. But would Nels and Alex and Vinny have been able to do what they did without him? I don’t think so. How did he get contacts with all of those different musicians? From working at Rhino Records…That music was barely his taste to begin with when he started booking the series, which was just a monumental connection to every other improvised scene in the United States and between all those different scenes in L.A. Some of John Zorn’s first shows were at the Century City Playhouse, when he was playing with Eugene Chadborne. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zorn, when he came out to L.A., heard some of those early punk bands, because it’s after he plays here that he goes back to New York that’s when all of his cut-and-mix stuff starts happening…I think there’s some influence between New York and L.A. that’s gone unnoticed, from somebody coming out play at the CCP, seeing a punk show that’s totally wild and weird and bringing that mix back to New York, but nobody in New York realizes the connection is here in L.A. – that’s my conspiracy theory anyway.
Another fascinating “facilitator” – and I many ways my favorite character in your whole narrative – was Titus Levi, who started the California Outside Music Association (COMA) and was involved in the early days of Option magazine.
He’s a great guy. I’ve known him forever. I met him when I worked at Kinko’s and he came in with a flyer for a show: “50 copies in solar yellow!” I noticed the show: “Some guy playing microtuned accordion? Hmmm.” He invited me to the show and introduced me to Lynn Johnston. He’s definitely a unique guy. He has a Ph.D. in Economics and teaches at a school in China right now. He was another who was willing to risk it all. What was really great about him was that when he founded COMA, he was already heavily involved in curating the L.A. Festival and public-sector arts programming. I find it hard to believe he started COMA in his twenties! I questioned him a lot about what he thought are the boundaries between what’s “outside” and what’s “inside” and it wasn’t always easy for him to express.
Titus Levi (red shirt) confers with Charles Sharp et al
"I know it when I hear it"?
Yeah, and he was brilliant at it, too. He always curated interesting shows. He was like Lee Kaplan in that he rarely booked himself and his own bands; he played cello but I think he never felt satisfied with his own music to pursue it more. Titus really worked hard to encourage this kind of circulation between all these micro-scenes in L.A. Another good comparison is someone like Nels, who did play every night when he did the New Music Mondays. Nels I’m sure was really influenced by COMA and played in some of those shows.
On the musician side of things, there’s someone like William Roper, who seems to be in a universe by himself: an African-American tuba player who improvises as well as plays in punk bands.
Yeah. Bill played in a jazz band in high school because he said he didn’t want to get jumped by thugs on his way home. [laughter] His training is in classical music. He never considered himself a jazz player; he didn’t start improvising until he got involved in this weird performance-art scene…He was a chef at Gorky’s downtown. Gorky’s had a stage, and all those artists were living down there before the rezoning forced all of them out, and Bill’s at home practicing Bach on his tuba, and he sees someone at Gorky’s playing the vacuum cleaner: “Hey, wanna join my chamber ensemble?” “Sure!” [laughter]…Bill is inclined to experimentation. He has no interest in being average and ordinary. He’s willing not to fit in. And he enjoys that, I think.
William Roper
What outsider artist doesn’t love his or her outsider status to a certain extent?
Yeah, but the interesting thing about Roper is that he felt like an outsider even when he was playing with Horace Tapscott’s band, not to mention the really straight-ahead jazz bands he plays with. There’s not that many African-Americans in classical music and there’s not that many tuba players in classical music to begin with, so he’s got the “outsider” thing going on every level.
Maybe that means less competition, the further out you go.
Could be. That’s another part of what I was thinking about when I was writing this: All these scenes are on the outside, and on the outside everything is closer together in its relation to the inside. Not everything out there is going to be equally related. The fringes are closer together than they are to the center.
That makes my head hurt.
UPDATE (2/27/11): Improvisation,Identity and Tradition has found a publisher in Duke University Press! You may now kiss the bride.
Hello and welcome to what I hope will be an ongoing and inconsistently posted project of mine: an irreverent (irrelevant?) guide to the underground music as I’ve experienced and collected it of Los Angeles -- specifically, the frequent and surprising intersections of creative jazz, art punk, avant-garde, alt-hip hop and world music. It was inspired and dedicated to my friend Robert Mendoza, a loyal reader of my previous blog Downbeast despite by his own admission, “not understanding half of the terms and people mentioned.”
"Yeth thir, that new TheeDee by Flying Lotuth ith awethome!"
So let’s start with the obvious: “Snerd.” UrbanDictionary.com has several definitions, mostly along the lines of “sexy nerd.” (Another is, naturally, a reference to a revolting -- if not impossible -- sexual practice.) Though I am loathe to argue with that definition, “snerd” is for the purposes of this colossal waste of time-slash-labor of love my amalgam of “snob” and “nerd.” Now, there is a difference between a snob and a snerd: a snob with blow air through his lips derisively if you admit you’ve never heard of No Age or Dwight Trible and make you feel like an idiot; a snerd, hearing the same confession, while grab you by the arm excitedly and say, “Dude! You gotta hear this!” and immediately give up a ton of information – much of it too fast to absorb in one sitting – and will immediately want to be FB friends so s/he can deluge you with a shitload of links and downloads. In other words, a snob will hold onto information like it’s a Victorian money belt; a snerd will willingly and happily invite you in to share. And share. And share…
As for style and form, it’s pretty straightforward. All cross-referenced terms are in all caps. We’ll add more entries as we come up with them and add to the new entries as new info makes itself apparent to us (or subtract if something is inaccurate). If there are any you see missing, feel free to add an entry in our ‘Comments’ section – provided you aren’t some kind of spammy asshat or boner-pill pitchman – and I will add it to the list.
Here are the A’s.
A
Aceyalone. Fedora-hatted polymath and cofounder of the mighty FREESTYLE FELLOWSHIP, the once-named Edward Hayes is the purveyor of a particular brand of hyper-literate, jazz-inflected, semi-humorous Left Coast underground soul-hop that was birthed at the now-mythic “No Cussin’” open mike nights at THE GOOD LIFE CAFÉ. (Sample lyric: "I bet you think I'm silly, huh, Annallillia?") Unfortunately, it rose to cultlike prominence right around the same time that another West Coast rap strain with absolutely no sense of humor called “gangsta” blew up down in Long Beach and Compton, blew up the charts and obscured the FF’s more literary accomplishments. “Acey” released two guaranteed classics – 1995’s All Balls Don’t Bounce (later re-released as a deluxe edition in 2004) and 2000’s Accepted Eclectic.
Afrobeat. Danceable and politically prickly snerd-obsession that reached its apex with the re-release by KNITTING FACTORY Records of the complete catalogue of its mercurial founding father/monumental pussy hound Fela (Anikulapo) Kuti. (The Jay-Z-backed Broadway musical Fela! didn't hurt either.) Not usually known by budding snerds is that Afrobeat may/may not have its roots in Los Angeles, where Fela landed with his band Nigeria 70 in 1969 and even played a residency at Citadel de Haiti on Sunset Boulevard. (He also found the time to bed Black Panther Sandra Smith at a local NAACP gig.) Critics have noted that Fela’s music was merely an amalgam of afro and anglo jazz when he arrived in L.A., and yet when he left it had mutated into a potent brew of funk, afro-jazz, wacky stagecraft and hilarious album titles – a transition documented on The ’69 L.A. Sessions. Contrarian snerds argue that L.A. had nothing to do with Fela’s transition and that drummer Tony Allen had everything to do with it.
Albach, Tom. Gruff, six-foot tall, blue-eyed German-American indie record producer, label owner and SoCal jazz club attendee since the 1950s -- saxophonist VINNY GOLIA once described him as “a sea captain with a cigar” – known for starting record label Nimbus (later NIMBUS WEST) in the late 1970s specifically to document the music of pianist HORACE TAPSCOTT. He did this in part for refuge from, in his own words, “the growing miasma of crap that I could see happening in L.A.” Albach, who lived in Santa Barbara, had virtually no experience with the recording industry (he funded Nimbus with his Vegas winnings), evident in his maverick practice of giving Tapscott complete artistic freedom over his own recordings because, as he opined later, “When you start telling a creative person what to do, it’s going to have a deleterious effect on the end result, any way you shape it.” Notably gonzo print ad campaign underscored Albach's no-B.S. mein: a Tapscott quote ("Music Needs No Scene") with no other info.
Alligator Lounge. Former club located at 3221 West Pico Boulevard right under the lip of the I-10 freeway in West L.A. (and, perversely, near the offices of NARAS, the Grammy committee) that for five years in the mid-Nineties hosted NEW MUSIC MONDAYS, a seminal showcase for unclassifiable artists from L.A. and elsewhere curated by guitarist NELS CLINE. Also famous in older snerd circles for having been a venue previously booked by double bassist Ray Brown before it turned into an identity-confused refuge for Cajun dancers, Viggo Mortensen’s poetry and the old Palomino Club rockabilly crowd. Cline was hired by the club’s owner, an “old, alcoholic-looking” muscle-car enthusiast named Milt Wilson, who nevertheless saw the value of the scene erupting around the intrepid guitarist, which he intriguing dubbed “the New Subterraneans.” Fondly remembered by snerds for its rabid-red interior (before all L.A. clubs adopted it), relaxed no-security/no-cover vibe, and plenty of dark places out on the street to get baked. Remembered fondly by musicians for rare luxuries like a green room with a real working toilet, a sound system “with a sound guy who actually knew how to use it” and an actual stage. After Wilson died of colon cancer, the Alligator closed down in 1997 for various health code violations – including giant palm rats scampering through the kitchen – and replaced by a supper club specializing in Bananas Foster.
Red House Painters Live at the Alligator Lounge, 1995
All About Jazz. National publication founded by designer-framed jazz snerd/New Media impresario Michael Ricci (not the ice hockey player) in Philly in 1995 with regional offshoots a la New Times or Starbucks. Print version boasts famously tiny, unreadable print and ability to show up mysteriously in wire bins all over L.A. Cavernous and unwieldy with over 100,000 web pages, its online version is as easy to get lost in as the hedge-maze in The Shining. Notable for its cheerfully aggressive subscription-pitchers at various local jazz events despite the fact that the paper is free. Great reading while you’re waiting for a table/bus/bottle service/elevator/presale tickets/date/happy ending. I have a pile of them in the corner that I’ve never read.
Al’s Bar. Much-missed, oft-misunderstood, impossible-to-find (at least for virgins) odiferous graffiti-strewn dive in downtown L.A.’s arts district located in basement of 100-year-old American Hotel building at 305 S. Hewitt Street. Opened on site of former truckers’ bar by mustachioed, widow-peaked artist Mark Kreisel on Easter Sunday 1979 as a way to fund his nearby art gallery (ahead of the city’s 1981 “artist-in-residence” ordinance) and went on to feature DNA, The Fall, The Residents, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, Nirvana, Hüsker Dü, Beck, L7 and Arthur Lee & Love. Also featured adventurous local music of all stripes care of booker Lizzie Balogh (and later, Toast and Jim Miller), who scheduled arty and experimental groups you'd never hear on the Sunset Strip: Paper Tulips, W.A.C.O., the Ray-O-Vacs, Christian Death, REDD KROSS, Betty Blowtorch, The Gun Club, Lutefisk, Popdefect, TVTV$, the Dagons, Tex & the Horseheads, the Dickies, Texas Terri, the Humpers, The 400 Blows, Tadpole, Blues Experiment, Ballgagger, the Caltransvestites and the Imperial Butt Wizards. Thought to be the west-coast equivalent of CBGB’s (acolytes of Anaheim’s Linda’s Doll Hut, Costa Mesa’s Cuckoo’s Nest and SF’s 924 Gilman St., we hear your whining), bar was famous for its numerous easy-to-remember t-shirt epigrams like “Tip or Die” or “Art & Life" and anarchic live shows where pogoing (yawn) and stage-diving (zzzzzz) were considered not creative enough – try wading pools filled with oatmeal, avocado juggling acts and exploding toy animals. CRUEL FREDERICK and Universal Congress Of, the two free jazz groups on SST RECORDS, both formed and performed regularly here. Post-fusion keyboardist WAYNE PEET recorded his 2003 album Live at Al’s Bar here. Predictably, fecklessly disgusting bathroom, decaying booths pilfered from old school Hollywood schmooze spot Nicodell’s on Melrose. Famous for its “No Talent Nite” and take-no-shit-but-lovable bouncer Cliff. Free-range mood was enhanced when patrons enjoyed 32-ounce beers for $5 and enthusiastically disregarded indoor smoking laws. Subject of snerd objet d’art 1996 comp Al’s Bar: What A Dive (featuring a CD encased in a giant yellow matchbook) and an entertaining liner notes the eponymous Jack Daniels and Jamaica Jay-loving “Al,” whose remains were reportedly buried under the pool table.
Al's Bar flyer circa 1981
Alt-jazz. Somewhat useless blanket term for any kind of jazz-inflected music made approximately between John Coltrane’s mid-60s work and the advent of the Cult of John Zorn in the 1980s. For awhile, this type of music didn’t even have a name—now it has about 25, from the sublime to the insulting: “Post-Jazz,” “Edge Jazz,” “Nu Jazz,” "Anti-Jazz," "Post-Miles," “Jazzcore,” “Creative Jazz.” Some would say it shouldn’t even be called “jazz” anymore—now, it’s “Creative Music,” “New Music” or simply “That Weird Sh*t.” (Reedman VINNY GOLIA prefers the mouthful of “Contemporary Improvisational;” the CLINE Brothers call it “Squeeky-Bonk.”) Whatever it was, the music succeeded in bridging a gap from the 60s avant-garde to the punk and indie rock generations, who saw something kindred in its musical freedoms and do-it-yourself ethic.
Amendola, Scott. Curly-haired, wire-spectacled, insanely prolific drummer with a well-known (and oft-envied) careerist streak. A longtime mainstay on the Bay Area nu-jazz scene through his associations with guitarist Charlie Hunter and Saxophonist Phil Greenlief and an honorary Angeleno for enduring six-hour car rides to play for unappreciative or nonexistent audiences in various collaborative groups like L. Stinkbug, Crater and most famously THE NELS CLINE SINGERS. Originally from Tenafly, New Jersey, Amendola’s musical pedigree extended back to his grandfather, Bronx-born guitarist Tony Gottuso, who played with everybody from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn to Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. (Gottuso played on the original "Hello Dolly" with Louis Armstrong.) Subject of a famous print quote by San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Derk Richardson echoing Jon Landau’s famous pronouncement about Bruce Springsteen: “If Scott Amendola didn’t exist, the San Francisco music scene would have to invent him.” The Nels Cline Singers’ 2007 song “Evening at Pops’” is dedicated to him.
Angel City Jazz Festival. Wildly diffuse NEW MUSIC soiree with misleading name—it’s less like the Playboy Jazz Festival and more like the ALT-JAZZ version of the FUCK YEAH FEST (which it shares the same weekend). Started in 2008 by local club promoter ROCCO SOMAZZI (who was later joined by musician/label owner JEFF GAUTHIER) and despite all predictions has lasted for three subsequent years and counting. It’s purported “lack of focus” actually a testament to how eclectic and borderless the LA creative music community is and a chance for people to finally appreciate that fact. The festival has evolved from a single weekend/venue to multiple days/venues, which in LA may be a sign of success or may not. Also a place where like-minded snerds reconnect with each other in a non-Zuckerberg kind of way, only to vanish into the city again until the next big event.
Rocco Somazzi (right) and Jeff Gauthier
at the Angel City Jazz Festival 2010
[Photo by Aaron Griffith]
Ankhrasmation. Surrealist term coined in 1977 by trumpeter WADADA LEO SMITH to refer to his personal style of musical notation that in part resembled the bizarre, multicolored Sesame Street-scores of ANTHONY BRAXTON. Word is a mash-up of Ankh (Egyptian for “Life Force”), Ras (Amharic for “Father”) and Ma (“Mother”) and like Braxton uses a system of colors, shapes and symbols to indicate to players which direction to take the song (i.e., a symbol to “play orange” means you play the fruit, the color and the mood) Smith attempted to explain: “Ankhrasmation music uses no pictures of notes, no designs of notes; it’s a symbolic interpretation of what’s there. It is a way of making music that has a little bit of both improvisation and composition inside it.” It is advised to sound this word out in front of a mirror several times before using in company of knowledgeable snerds.
An example of "Ankhrasmation"
Anticlub. Originally located at 4658 Melrose Avenue in East Hollywood in a former gay-bar space once called (ahem) Snoopy’s Long Shot, the 200-capacity Anti-club opened the same year as AL’s BAR with a show by a GREG GINN-led Black Flag and similarly caught the late 60s/early80s post-punk zeitgeist of unclassifiable music thanks to leasers Russell Jessum and Jack Marquette and booker Jim Van Tyne (not to mention sound man Jac Zinder, who had a policy of not miking the amps and lived nearby with his parents). Tyne once quixotically stated that the all-ages venue was “about music that‘s a challenge” and proceeded to make good on that statement by booking family friendly bands like Flipper, Savage Republic, The Cult, Agnes Angst (a.k.a., Lily Tomlin), The Nymphs, Tomata Du Plenty, The Descendants, The Urinals, St. Vitus, Swans, Lawndale, The Meat Puppets, The Lazy Cowgirls, The MINUTEMEN, fIREHOSE, and SACCHARINE TRUST as well as spoken word and performance art. DAVID OCKER, head of the INDEPENDENT COMPOSER’S ASSOCIATION, played there with his improvising trio that included saxophonist VINNY GOLIA and flautist ANNE LEBARGE. A large group assembled by saxophonist JONATHAN GOLD, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning L.A. Weekly food critic, led a large ensemble that performed MINIMALIST composer Terry Riley's In C. Officially called The Anti-club at Helen’s Place, as owner Helen Gutman was noted for her dislike of the more bizarre acts, embodied by her frequent refrain: "What's the matter with you? Get off the stage, you crazy nut!" The club, which moved several times during its history – including a burrito stand, a Mission Furniture outlet and the parking lot of Apparel News – but had frequent zoning and fire code problems leading (among many other things) to its frequent relocations and eventual closure. FAST & FUCKED UP – a punk band with tuba player WILLIAM ROPER – played here, as did Sonic Youth during their first US tour. Front of original club featured in the 1986 PUNKSPLOITATION flick Lovedolls Superstar.
Anticlub flyer, July 1985
Arco. Knowledgeable musical term for bowed bass playing, i.e., “MARK DRESSER is the greatest living Arco player on the West OR East Coast.” When mentioned, you can nod thoughtfully and say, “Word.”
Ark. Biblically derived, blanket term adopted by at least two major avant-garde bandleaders of the 1960s – a sort of hipster term replacing the more Anglo-Saxon “commune.” Sun Ra and HORACE TAPSCOTT both used the term “Arkestra” in their very different but equally surreal big bands, which often contained more than one person on an instrument and acted as teaching ensembles for future generations of free-thinking alchemists. Typical snerd: “Yeah, man, I checked out ‘The Ark’ last week at the Levitt Pavillion!” Also see: PAN AFRIKAN PEOPLE’S ARKESTRA, THE GATHERING.
Arthur. Archeological indie snerd music mag founded in 2002 by ex-Sound Collector editor Laris Krelsins and ex-New Times scribe Jay Babcock. The heir apparent to the original OPTION magazine and a growing media empire that seemed to be poised to compete with the more inscrutable VICE magazine, Arthur trumpeted weird and forgotten music of all stripes, most notably NOISE MUSIC, psychedelia, and the avant-garde and backed up its cred and almost assured its eventual self-immolation by being free and bi-monthly. Cute snerdy titles for the names on its masthead: “universal mutant,” “psychedelic healing visions correspondent.” Columnists included Snerd Hall fo Famers Byron Coley, Thurston Moore, Daniel Pinchbeck, Douglas Rushkoff and T-Model Ford. After Arthur shut down temporarily, Babcock got wise and moved Arthur Vol II to New York, where it now exists strictly online. Sigh.
Arthur J and the Gold Cups. Depending on who you talk to this was a pioneering "punk rock big band" who was 20 years ahead of its time or a “godawful” absurdist joke. Name came from an amalgam of infamous local haunts for male hustlers: Arthur J.’s was a “big chicken hawk hangout” on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica Boulevard; The Gold Cup was “a sleazy coffee shop” located on Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas near the punk club THE MASQUE and its attendant squatter’s tenement THE CANTERBURY and was the subject of the scum-punk song “Trouble at the Cup” by DANGERHOUSE RECORDS chairman Black Randy. Considered by some to be the house band for The Masque, as it first emerged out of jam sessions at the club. The club’s owner BRENDAN MULLEN played drums. Quasi-Gold Digger backup singers wearing cowboy hats and toy pistol holsters dubbed The Cupcakes. Aptly named frontman Spazz Attack (a.k.a., "Craig Allen Rothwell") was known for successfully executing 360 degree flips in the middle of a song. He playing Devo’s famed Booji Boy mascot (“a bizarre adult infant freak with pre-adolescent sexuality and Yoda-like wisdom”) in the band’s videos for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Peek-a-boo” and later was a dancer on David Bowie’s 1987 Glass Spider tour. (Rumor was he was coached by dance guru Toni “Mickey” Basil.) Lead guitarist Geza X known for his art-damaged surf guitar and trumpeter Hal Negro known for being a trumpeter in a punk band. Famed for its Cuisinarty mixing of influences: name-checking ORNETTE COLEMAN (whose song “Themes from a Symphony” they covered), Sun Ra, George Clinton and James Brown along with the New York Dolls, T.Rex and The Sex Pistols. Also may have pioneered the hipster practice of the Ironic Cover Song: from the Green Acres theme to the "Cal" Worthington used car commericals. Evolved into the pioneering LOUNGECORE band Hal Negro and the Satin Tones, with the Cupcakes evolving into the Playboy Martinet-aping Punk Bunnies.
Art punk. Poorly defined term centering on punk rock bands with artistic pretensions and can encompass the early recordings of the L.A. FREE MUSIC SOCIETY as well as the visual incontinence of bands like THE SCREAMERS and THE WEIRDOS and the stripped down minimalism of THE SMELL's house band NO AGE.
Ascension. Epoch-defining recording from saxophonist John Coltrane is considered the rosetta stone for the free jazz movement of the late-60s and beyond. (Reedman Dave Liebman once called it “the torch that lit free jazz.”) Recorded 6/28/65 at a studio on Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, during Year Zero of the Sixties counterculture, America’s involvement in Vietnam, and urban uprisings, it was Coltrane’s break with bebop and MODAL playing and and embracing of more distressing sounds and a relentless spiritual searching through a bigger band. Basically a single 40-minute group improv with a refreshingly egalitarian feel (Coltrane is listed among the horn section instead of as leader and doesn’t take any more solo time than the others), the album has had wide-ranging influence on future generations of noisemakers who wanted to challenge their audiences and annoy their neighbors. Besides Iggy and the Stooges, it’s rumored that THE GERMS listened to Ascension on a contant loop in their Hollywood punk squat. Wrote critic Douglas Wolk: "Over 35 years later, it still blows the roof off."
As Serious As Your Life. Bible of avant-garde jazz written by British photographer/Afrophile Valerie Wilmer. First published in 1977, book is considered one of the first salt-worthy overviews of the emergence of what she calls "The New Music" in the 1960s and 1970s—with incisive and fascinating profiles of ORNETTE COLEMAN, Sun Ra, ALBERT AYLER, CECIL TAYLOR among many others—and one of the ONLY books of the time to even mention the role of Los Angeles musicians like BOBBY BRADFORD and JOHN CARTER in more than just one sentence or a small-font footnote. The title is from a quote attributed to drummer McCoy Tyner.
Atwood-Ferguson, Miguel. Tall, curly-haired studio musician/bandleader and purveyor of a particularly aggressive style of punk-inflected jazz violin that hearkens back to the old Frank Zappa sidemen like Jean Luc-Ponty and Don “Sugarcane” Harris and joins him with Gen X/Y string recontextualizers like LILI HADYN and PETRA HADEN. Notably a journeyman between many different local musical métiers, particularly jazz and hip hop, Ferguson worked with the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, MADLIB, BILLY HIGGINS, Dr. Dre, and the PAN AFRIKAN PEOPLES ARKESTRA offshoots THE GATHERING and BUILD AN ARK with producer/DJ CARLOS NINO. In 2009, orchestrated the music of late Detroit hip hop producer J. DILLA's for the memorable three-part Timeless: A Suite For Ma Dukes concert at the Luckman Auditorium. Cemented reputation as a shapeshifter by appearing on indie rapper FLYING LOTUS’ 2010 breakthrough album Cosmogramma.
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (right) with Carlos Nino
Ayler, Albert. Ahead of his time (in the tragic as well as innovative sense) saxophonist from Cleveland often cited by music snerds when they want to let you know how “out” their eardrums can travel. Beloved by modern punks and avant-gardists alike because, as critic John Litweiler once wrote, "never before or since has there been such naked aggression in jazz.” Ayler mixed Salvation Army brass band messiness with R&B, blues (he backed harmonica legend Little Walter in the early 1950s) and gospel hymns and came up with a powerful multiphonic sound that was so radical and overwhelming it never found its sea legs in America but was better received in Europe. Known for his custom-tailored sharkskin suits, thatch of white hair in his black beard, and mysterious suicide-tinged death at age 34 in New York’s East River in 1970. Subject of superb if seemingly incomplete 2005 Swedish documentary My Name Is Albert Ayler and exhaustive 10-CD restropective Holy Ghost released in 2004 by Revenant Records. Spent at least three years in Los Angeles post-Army discharge, where he was summarily ignored a la one of his influences, ORNETTE COLEMAN.
Albert Ayler wails for John Coltrane, NYC, July 1967
Azz Izz. Druggy performance space located at the Venice Place complex at 1031 West Washington Boulevard (now the yuppified Abbot Kinney Boulevard) in Venice Beach from 1970 to 1978. Run by St. Louis-born ranconteur/musician Billie Harris, space was famous for closing before most music snerds even knew it existed. Official name was the Azz Izz Jazz Cultural Center and Teahouse. Acted as the Westside base for the PAN AFRIKAN PEOLE’S ARKESTRA and its attendant arts umbrella UGMAA. Harris scavenged old carpets, rolled in giant wooden cable spools to use as tables, soundproofed the place with egg boxes, pulled leaves off eucalyptus trees to make tea and fishing off the Venice Pier to make fillet sandwiches. Thought of as the progenitor to RICHARD FULTON’s FIFTH STREET DICK'S coffeehouse. Rotating house band consisted of Andre Burbage, RUFUS OLIVIER, Bobby West, ROBERTO MIGUEL MIRANDA, BILY CHILDS, George Cables, BILLY HIGGINS, Frank Morgan, ONAJE MURRAY, VINNY GOLIA, Walter Savage and JESSE SHARPS -- many of whom lived for a time at the club. Place shut down for a variety of reasons, including infiltration by the Venice chapter of the Crips, whom the musicans fought physically one night until Harris fired a shot from his gun into the ceiling. The fact that it was located across from the Westmister Elementary School might have played a role as well.
