We Assure You: No One Dies in This Post

Hey ya. Last October, the Beast was interviewed by New York Times journalist Adam Shatz for a profile of the hottest thing in jazz right now: saxophonist Kamasi Washington. Unfortunately, none of our quotes were used but the piece is still enlightening and a good summation of Washington's Epic ascendancy. You can check it out here.

There's a new interview with guitarist Nels Cline over at Products of the Mind, "a podcast about the intersection of business and creativity."

Two New L.A.-centric music documentaries are coming down the pike: Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words, which premieres this week at the Sundance Film Festival; and East Los, an examination of East L.A.'s vital backyard-punks scene doe Vans' Living Off the Wall series.

Anyone who remembers jazz in the '80s remembers guitarist Stanley Jordan, whose intricate and intimate "touch tone" style of playing earning him much critical genuflecting. A rather timely article on Jordan appeared this week in Jazz Times in which he talks of his "androgynous" sexuality.
In the hour of The Danish Girl and Caitlin Jenner, notes writer David Adler, "Jordan’s story speaks to issues of gender and sexuality that go far back in the history of jazz yet often go unacknowledged."

Wow, THIS is exciting: Director Todd Haynes, recently snubbed by the Oscars for his lesbian period drama Carol, has announced he is showrunning a new series about L.A.'s own Source Family, the musical cult that ran the famous Source Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. The Beast once interviewed the filmmakers of a recent documentary about the crunchy (and kind creepy) crew.

EXCLUSIVE! New Free Jazz Documentary Produced by Thurston Moore & Nels Cline

[photo courtesy of Submarine Films]

Our pal Nels Cline -- currently gearing up for a 20th anniversary tour with newly minted civil rights heroes Wilco -- can now add the title of "movie producer" to his C/V. Cline, along with friend and fellow guitar shredder Thurston Moore, is co-producing a new feature-length documentary called FIRE MUSIC, which aims to "tell the definitive history of the Free Jazz revolution." According to press materials, "Fire Music reveals the little-known story behind the irrepressible, American-born art form that has inspired generations of fans the world over, and is experiencing a new renaissance today among music lovers." The film will feature interviews with 25 leading practitioners of Free Jazz, including Peter Brotzman, Gunter Hampel, Evan Parker, Ken Vandemark and Evan Parker.

The website (where you can view a 4-minute excerpt featuring Marshall Allen, pictured above) and Kickstarter campaign go live next week. Here's a little preview:

In the late 1950s, when the Abstract Expressionists took the art world by storm and the Beats forever changed the face of literature, a new radical form of Jazz erupted from New York’s Lower East Side. This new music was a far cry from the toe- tapping, post-Bebop sound of the Jazz mainstream popular at the time. This was an angry form of Jazz that mirrored the turbulent socio-political time. The young mavericks who pioneered this movement came to create some of the the most unconventional sounds ever heard. They eschewed every preconceived notion of what music was, abandoning melody, tonality, set time rhythms, the very concept of composition itself, creating new songs spontaneously.

This coming together of these like-minded artists, iconic figures such as Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Eric Dolphy and Pharoah Sanders, was one of those remarkable phenomena that rarely occur in the course of history. Like the Dadaists, the Lost Generation and the Italian Neo-Realists before them, the early progenitors of the Free Jazz scene were initially met with skepticism and outright disdain. They were accused of being anti-Jazz, and the music they played was dismissed as being pure noise. Undeterred by their critics, they soldiered on in relative obscurity and in the process created one of the most influential bodies of work of the contemporary age.

Turned away by nightclubs and ignored by the mainstream media, these cutting edge trailblazers were driven to create their own subculture. They self-released their own albums and found unconventional places in which to perform, like coffee houses and lofts, eventually forming their own communally-run venues.

The ’60s was a politically charged era, and no music reflected the tenor of the times better than Free Jazz. The resounding cries of atonal saxophones and the spastic pounding of drums reflected the growing indignation of a youth in revolt.

As the ’70s wound down, America embarked on a new era of conservatism. As Reagan assumed power, a new breed of musician lay claim to the Jazz idiom. These young Turks denigrated the great Free Jazz innovators who had preceded them, and sought instead to champion a revisionist brand of Jazz, what fabled soprano saxophonist Steve Lacey dubbed “Re-Bop.”

With the advent of popular Jazz becoming even more mainstream, an already marginalized form became even more pushed to the outer fringe. But Avant-Garde Jazz persevered. As the ’80s progressed, a new development started to occur. The Post-Punk enthusiasts who comprised the whole Alternative Rock Nation discovered kindred souls in the sonic blasters of the Free Jazz scene. The music actually enjoys a larger audience today than it ever has. This is the story of an irrepressible art form that has inspired generations of fans the world over. The originals that bucked convention in order to forge their radical sound must have their story told, for their fire will never be extinguished.

Fire Music's producing/directing team has a good pedigree for this subject. Writer/director Tom Surgal, (pictured above, with Ornette Coleman) a teenage protégé of Brian DePalma, has directed videos for Sonic Youth and Pavement and performs in the New York experimental duo White Out and has curated new music series at John Zorn's performance space The Stone. (He also claims one the world’s largest collections of Free Jazz recordings.) Dan Braun produced the out-music documentaries Kill Your Idols and Blank City and is also involved in Miles Davis in Paris, an upcoming project from Going Clear director Alex Gibney.

[Fun fact: Gibney also co-directed a 1980 short documentary called The New Music, which profiled L.A. avant-jazz stalwarts John Carter and Bobby Bradford. The guy who did the sound recording for the film was a young kid named...Nels Cline!]

So, the pedigree is there, folks. More to come!

Bits 'N' Bobs [UPDATED]

Stan Gilbert & Carl Burnett

Los Angeles, 2008

[photo by Warren Berman]

 

ITEM! With a career that has spanned from the Latin Jazz renaissance of the late 1950s to the Hip Hop renaissance of the late 1990s, drummer Carl Burnett (a.k.a. Karim Saleh) is an indelible part of Los Angeles music royalty. (In the late-1980s, Burnett opened the performance space ARTWORKS 4, which joined musicians from Leimert Park's jazz and hip-hop communities and was the inspiration for Billy Higgins and Kamau Daaood opening The World Stage.) Friday, Mr. Burnett will reunite with bassist Stan Gilbert, his partner in crime from the days of working the rhythm section with Cal Tjader and Gene Harris' The Three Sounds, for "Reviving An American Art Form," a monthlong residency at Leimert Park's Barbara Morrison Performing Arts Center. Together with their frequent collaborator, pianist Karen Hernandez, they will play three dates -- March 7, 14 & 28 -- as the Jazz West Trio. All shows are at 8:00 PM and opening night cover is $10. The emcee will be scholar/poet Dr. Derrick Gilbert (a.k.a., "D-Knowledge") and each show will feature vocalists from the World Stage Vocal Workshop, overseen by pianist Howlett Smith.

ITEM! On March 17 at 7:30pm, Mr. Burnett will also take part in a tribute to the late saxophonist George Harper, who recently passed away at age 71. Also at the Barbara Morrison PAC, the concert's all-star line-up will include Jacques Lesure, James Leary, Rickey Woodard, Nolan Shaheed, George Bohannon, John Beasley, Dwight Trible, Justo Almario, Karen Evans, Roy McCurdy, Theo Saunders, Phil Ranelin, Dee Dee McNeil, Cornel Fauler, Richard Grant, Charles Owens, Donald Dean and many more. The suggested donation is $20, which given the talent present is quite the bargain.

ITEM! Starting March 13, the L.A. Philharmonic is bringing back its mammoth Minimalist Jukebox festival, a citywide, multivenue effort that will last until early May. An oh, the goodies that will be available! Try the much-ballyhooed Kraftwerk 3D Concerts, the Philip Glass Ensemble performing Music in Twelve Parts, and Maximum Minimalism, with L.A. Phil Creative Chair John Adams conducting the Calder Quartet in selections from Steve Reich, Missy Mazzoli and Julius Eastman, among others.



ITEM! Two days before the Minimalist Jukebox, SXSW will premiere Adam Kahan's new documentary about Rahsaan Roland Kirk, entitled The Case of the Three-Sided Dream. Coming down the pike, according to the Beast's confidential sources, is The Sound of Redemption, a documentary about troubled L.A. postbop saxophonist Frank Morgan. Interviews are currently being filmed.

ITEM! On Saturday, March 8th, the jazz/improvised music scene in Long Beach will get its own mini-showcase. Titled Excursions: A Sight & Sound Festival, the daylong event is curated by guitarist Scott Heustis and trumpeter Dave Williams. The lineup includes some of the Beast's old Cryptogramophone pals, including The Mentones (led by contrabassist Steuart Liebig) and guitarist G.E. Stinson and keyboardist David Witham squaring off with live painter Norton Wisdom.

ITEM! On March 14, modern chamber ensemble The Kronos Quartet will celebrate is 40th Anniversary at UCLA's Royce Hall. The program will include two premieres: Philip Glass' Orion: China, with special guest, pipa virtuoso Wu Man; and Views from Here to the Heavens (for Scott Fraser), an original composition by our pal Nels Cline, who will be in attendance with his '59 Fender Jazzmaster.

ITEM! Oh yes! How could we forget? The Beast just wrote an article for the L.A. Weekly about plans to transport the art of 35 African-American artists from Southern California to the vaunted international stage of the 2015 Venice Biennalle. The multmedia program, curated by former California African American Museum head curator jill moniz, will including films, poetry and performances from three generations of L.A. jazz musicians that ranging from veterans of Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra to high schoolers currently under the tutoring wand of Leimert Park community organizer Fernando Pullum.

ITEM! We also have Part 2 of our series The United Sounds of L.A. over at Los Angeles magazine.

[photo by Nanette Gonzales]

Nels Waxes...

Two examples of why our friend Nels Cline is as good a writer as he is a guitar player. In addition to his moving tribute to recently deceased guitarist Jim Hall, we also found his brief essay about his beloved 1959 Fender Jazzmaster in a book called Instrument, which the Beast has reprinted below:

My guitar was purchased in the summer of 1995 from Mike Watt after the first tour of The Crew of the Flying Saucer. I had to use my old '66 Fender Jaguar on Watt's first solo record and really didn't know the difference between a Jaguar and a Jazzmaster other than the different pickups and switching configurations. I didn't know then that 1959 is one of the best years for Jazzmasters, and that this would end up being my favorite guitar. I first chose both Jazzmasters and Jaguars for their feel and because they have strings behind the bridge and single-coil pickups. I was copying Sonic Youth and Tom Verlaine, basically. But when I finally played the Jazzmaster, I was smitten with the whole feeling of the neck and body, the sound, and the inherent durability. Watt engraved his name on the base of the neck where it joins the body and on the base of the tremolo assembly.

This guitar has done more tours and records than I can count: all the Mike Watt tours, the Geraldine Fibbers tours and Butch album, later records with the Fibbers' Carla Bozulich and Scarnella, dozens of recordings by various improvised projects, including all my solo records since The Inkling, tours with Wilco, and all three records I made with them. This guitar mostly lives in Chicago in the Wilco loft now, and I have a different '59 at home in Los Angeles so that I don't always have to fly back and forth with it. I have been extremely hard on it, as you can see -- it was in perfect shape when I got it.

I play hard. There is actually a very deep and ever-deepening gouge above where the strings stretch from the bridge to the tailpiece, where I play a lot and, apparently, with considerable vigor! Admittedly, the finish was delicate. It is easy to scratch the paint, revealing a purplish hue, much like eggplant. I used to wear my keys on my ant loop, and after hopping up and down on stage with Watt, I created an interesting and rather sizable stippling on the back of the guitar. In the Geraldine Fibbers, I would sometimes throw the guitar to our drummer Kevin Fitzgerald and play my effects pedals while he savaged it with drumsticks, sometimes ripping out the strings, which is difficult to do on a Fender guitar, and bleeding on it. I have bled on it plenty. The Geraldine Fibbers' "Dusted" caused some wounds, and these days Wilco's song "A Shot in the Arm" might be another danger, though I am much smarter now about things like fret wear. The body. . .well, I think it looks great. It's a work in progress, just like me.

The Cline Brothers -- In Color!

Gearing up for next month's Angel City Jazz Festival 2012: Artists & Legends concerts, the folks at Angel City Arts are at it with the Kickstarter campaign again. This time it's to raise funds to film the upcoming performances that KCET decided (at the last possible moment) not to broadcast this year on its Live at the Ford series. Check out a personal message from drummer Alex Cline (who just played with NY saxophonist David Binney at the Blue Whale Tuesday night) on the aims and goals of the project, which is currently at $3150 with 0 hours left.

Meanwhile, Alex's intrepid guitarist brother Nels Cline just gave a radio interview with KUNM's Afternoon Freeform show. (He's got a new trio called Eye Bone with pianist Teddy Klausner and drummer Jim Black -- where does the guy find the time?) Check it out here.

Nels Celebrates Record Store Day

I worked at Rhino Records in West L.A. from around 1976 to 1985. This was the time when little record stores such as (in the Los Angeles area) Rhino, Aron's, Poo Bah, Rene's, et al thrived by selling used records, cutouts, and BOOTLEGS. Other record stores like Jem Records specialized in imports, and we would make pilgrimages to The Valley to buy the latest ECM records, weird prog rock records, and cutting edge/obscuro improv on Incus and FMP, etc.

Like free-form radio programming, my heart always "zings" a bit when I experience a barely socialized underground record store somewhere. I recognize the atmosphere of wariness, the alienation mixed with inspiration, the passion for sound and culture, the desire to permeate one's life wholly with the certain singular stench of whatever one is obsessed with that week. Whether it's Rhino (long gone), Poo Bah (still sort of there in a different location), Atomic, or late lamented stores elsewhere like Hoboken's Rather Ripped, or newer (monster) stores like Amoeba, Waterloo (in Austin), Twist & Shout (Denver), or the numerous little hole-in-the-wall stores I stroll into across the globe whose names I have forgotten, I salute you all.
from Nels Cline.com

Can You Name This Record Store?

CD REVIEW: Nels Cline’s DIRTY BABY (UPDATED*)

A few weeks ago I had a brief if pleasant conversation with the novelist Steve Erickson where we marveled at the recent spate of superlative film soundtracks: Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood, Daft Punk’s for Tron Legacy, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ for The Social Network, The Roots' for Night Catches Us. I found myself throwing Nels Cline’s score for David Breskin and Ed Ruscha’s DIRTY BABY project into the mix even though the music does not accompany moving images but static ones. And with poetry to boot! Yet growing up in the shadow of Hollywood must have somehow seeped into Cline’s radar: this is perhaps his most cinematic piece of music and indicative of a sweeping and vision he’s only been hinting at. But now it’s official: Nels Cline wants to be a great American composer.

Even in his liner notes to the beautifully packaged objet d’art 2-CD box set, Cline makes references to modern musical cranks like Morton Feldman, Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives. Yet he declares in his lengthy liner notes that "a project like this unavoidably approaches (and yet naturally enough avoids) the very idea of SOUNDTRACK” – partly because some of the music has been improvised (yet so seamlessly incorporated into the composed bits that I defy you to notice where one ends and the other begins) and partly because of Cline’s embracing of the pastiche techniques used by John Zorn (Naked City) and Frank Zappa (Uncle Meat). Where the majority of songs on Cline’s albums with his regular group the Nels Cline Singers (bassist Devin Hoff and Scott Amendola form the spine of the 15-member DB orchestra) jump from one single genre to the other – something that Cline himself has admitted in interviews has become somewhat predictable – Cline does a more successful “mash up” of myriad influences. Punk, avant-garde jazz, film noir, doom metal, Middle Eastern drone, country-western, electronica, groove – all are mixed together more organically. Similar to other soundtrack composers like Michael Danna (The Sweet Hereafter) and Brian Keane (The Way West), Cline draws parallels between conflicting forms and comes up – despite the America-centric settings of Ruscha’s images and Breskin’s poetry – with a result that evokes a sort of borderless global iPOD.

The Cool School: Ed Ruscha, David Breskin, Nels Cline

It’s no wonder the guy grew up in Los Angeles. Cline, along with Ruscha, evokes the city’s uneasy codependency between the high and the low forms of artistic expression. In a 1999 interview, Cline stated that growing up in the city during the ‘60s explosion of psychedelic music and irreverent Pop Art led him to develop into “the king of aesthetic dichotomies until I was fully an adult. Everything for me has been an internal war between high and low art, between rock and jazz…I could never merge them until I was almost forty years old.” Where his twin brother Alex became a gifted visual artist and mercurial jazz drummer, Cline has since worked to incorporate live improvised music with improvised art, such as his longtime live collaborations with L.A. painter Norton Wisdom, both in the duo Stained Radiance and the punk-groove-jazz collective Banyan.

Enter David Breskin, a renaissance mensch whom Cline knew for his music journalism and production credits with ex-Cecil Taylor sideman Ronald Shannon Jackson, gutarist Bill Frisell and the aforementioned Mr. Zorn. In 2002, Breskin had produced RICHTER88, an art/poetry/musical hybrid featuring the abstract art of Gerhard Richter and the music of Mr. Frisell. This caught the eye of Mr. Ruscha, who invited Breskin to tackle some of his lesser-known paintings from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Breskin selected 33 prints each from two different series – The Silhouettes (murky chiaroscuro images of Western expansion: tilted merchant ships, baying wolves, road signs, spiny cacti) and Cityscapes (abstract bars and strips). Although Ruscha is mainly known for his word-based paintings of American roadside signage, Breskin chose to go nonverbal: both sets of paintings are referred to as the “dumb blocks” (Ruscha’s term) or “censor strips” (everyone else’s). Breskin also chose to include his own poetry in the concise and airtight form of Arabic ghazals. Breskin then approached L.A. super-producer and multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion (Paul Thomas Anderson’s go-to soundtrack guy for Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love) but Brion begged off after pleading unfamiliarity with Ruscha’s work. Cline seemed the next natural leap: he and Brion had been collaborating for years, including charmingly esoteric jam sessions at L.A.’s Largo club. “David did give me clues to what he wanted for the music,” Cline admits in his liner notes, “but no specific direction save for the initial Side A brief: create one long piece of music, not a collection of discrete songs.”

SIDE A, "NELSAANISQATSI": Breskin’s task was a little more specific: he wanted Cline to score no less than “a sort of shaggy-dog time-lapse history” of Western expansion: “The primordial New Land is “discovered” by European interlopers and settlers; they push westward; land and slaves are purchased, fences go up; cities are created, the land is altered in extreme; proximity and increased ease of communication beget, ironically, isolation.” Quite a chunk to bite off – that’s about 6,000 years, folks! – yet its remarkable how Cline calls on his music-nerd encyclopedia of a brain and yet makes music that sounds so eerily original. Side A begins with deceptive simplicity: back and forth acoustic strumming by Cline and acolyte Jeremy Drake, soon joined by Bill Barrett’s shape-shifting chromatic harmonica and Devin Hoff’s searching bass, calling up images of bubbling tidepools and oozing magma. Barrett’s harmonica mixes with Glenn Taylor’s understated pedal steel guitar before Wayne Peet’s atmospheric Hammond organ flickers over a plodding horse-hoof pulse. (The same BPM is maintained throughout the 42 minute cut). It’s an epic yet modern cowboy opera—music both familiar and otherworldly.

Cline’s adherence to his improvised-music roots yields some fascinating direction for his musicians: at one point, Cline cues them to improvise using only the chord-structure used by Nashville session players.* By the fourth mini-suite, guest Jon Brion (whom Cline managed to get to sit in) weighs in with a vintage EMI Synth, creating circular squiggles on which one can almost see the time lapse growth of the digital city like a metastasizing computer chip, eating up the desert as it expands. Despite Cline’s claim in his liner notes that “I pretty much messed up any literal timeline,” this could be the story of Los Angeles, our progression to “the end of the line.” Any doubt of this is smershed by the closing track: A terrifying primeval march/dirge, where Hoff’s bass growls and stomps like some slag-created monster oozing out of a cadmium-polluted urban nightscape – all doom, all the time. It’s a scary experience on headphones, summoning up dinosaurs and Maseratis alike drowning in the La Brea Tar Pits, both making distress calls in their own language. This is some of Cline’s most upsetting music – that is, until a banjo and a mini-guitar begin to rise in the background, stilling the ugliness and making it go to sleep with a choker hold.
*From Nels: "In Nashville songs are easily played/learned/recorded/arranged by just naming the chords as they appear in the diatonic scale - I - vii. So in C I is C, IV is F, vi is A minor, etc. Sometimes onstage playing little-known material a musical director will use numbers of fingers, sometimes charts are just these numbers."

SIDE B, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHIFIED": Breskin’s idea for DB's second half was, as he told an interviewer, “a kind of shooting gallery in which to set the Iraq conflict — back to the 'cradle' of that civilization, the nearly-destroyed nursery.” His direction for Cline was a bit more constrictive: 33 pieces, each no longer than a minute-plus. Cline came up with, in his words, “more than a string of amuse-bouche”: a sound-byte rendering of America’s wars in the Middle East. And it’s amazing how many far-reaching sounds and influences Cline throws into the mix and mashes together with great care. Track 6 (“DO AS TOLD OR SUFFER”) could be a race-car engine, or someone imitating a race-car engine by spitting though tightened lips, or even one long cartoonish flatulence. On Track 9 (“HEY YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH THE FISHES?”), a bebop bass line is supported by a woozy, art-damaged surf guitar reverb. Some tracks punch you in the face before signing off abruptly. The Cagean Track 10 (“A COLUMBIA NECKLACE FOR YOU”) is more silence than sound. Track 11 (“NOTE WE HAVE ALREADY GOT RID OF SEVERAL LIKE YOU”) is of a lyrical piece with the Gil Evans/Miles Davis collaborations of the late ‘50s. Track 15 (“I’M GOING TO LEAVE MORE NOTES AND I’M GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS”) is chugging metal mixed with a free-jazz horn freakout. Even in these small pieces, Cline approaches the anthemic spheres of great FILM composers like Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone. Even he is forced to conclude in his liner notes: “Maybe it IS a soundtrack after all…” Ah Nels. Long may you waiver!

*UPDATE (11/24/10): Listen to NPR reporter Andrea Raymond's profile of the DIRTY BABY project.

ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2010: Demokratic Vistas

After a two-day break, the Angel City Jazz Festival returned for its second leg on Thursday night with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration—mainly between music and the visual arts. A bit of this was hinted at the Royal/T Café last week with the dinner/music/dance/video combo of the memorable “Cookin’ It Up” show, but both Thursday and Friday nights really drove home the interaction between  images and how artists respond to them. At the helm of the musical side of things were two L.A. composers whom I have been thinking about in the same breath a lot lately for their similarities: the festival’s keynote guitarist Nels Cline and the festival’s unofficial first lady, pianist Motoko Honda. Both conjure whole orchestras out of their respective instruments; both are musically omnivorous; both don’t hide behind their gadgets but utilize them improvisational devices in the bigger mix; both aggregate punk-rock energy with studious avant-garde discipline; and both have no limits to their talent.

Thursday night was the second buzz-worthy event since Henry Grimes on opening night: The LACMA-sanctioned premiere of DIRTY BABY, the picture/poetry/music “triologue” between L.A. badass painter Ed Ruscha, San Francisco-based producer/poet David Breskin and Mr. Cline. (A bethumbed review copy of the $125 coffee-sized tome with attendant “DIRTY NELS” CD sat like a giant doorstop in the museum bookstore.) Before beginning his readings, Mr. Breskin, a suitably intense and prickly gentleman with a lethal-looking shaved head who took very loud and elongated pulls on his bottled water, commented about how the boxes of fresh copies of the DIRTY BABY book were seized at U.S. Customs after being shipped in from its Italian printers; apparently, the book’s title scrawled all over the boxes convinced authorities they had hit the motherlode of confiscated child pornography. Oh Ed, still throwing people for a loop after 50 years!

David Breskin makes cellphone owners fear for their lives

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

The show was split into two parts, the first of which was a less successful melding of the involved art forms than the second. Mr. Breskin began – after acknowledging the evening as being the 55th anniversary of the reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl – with nearly a half hour hour of continuous short readings of his tart, ironic ghazals (sort of like Arabic haiku with refrain). In the book they are combined with 66 prints of Ruscha’s little-seen “dumb block” paintings from the 1980s and 1990s: dreamy, murky silhouettes with those punk-rocky black-censorship bars over where text would normally be.

The DIRTY band, first set (from left): Wayne Peet, Jeremy Drake, Danny Frankel, Glenn Taylor, Scott Amendola, Todd Sickafoose, Nels Cline, Bill Barrett

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Cline followed with no less than, in Breskin’s words, “a time-lapse history of 6,000 years of Western Civilization.” His dream nonet of Left Coast players (whom Breskin dubbed "The People of the West") rose to the challenge with the stunningly epic and ambitious 42-minute title cut, which split itself into at least five different mini-suites that ranged from white squalls of noise to sweeping lyrical expanses that recalled composers like Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copeland. (It was Cline’s own personal There Will Be Blood soundtrack—the title of which is even repeated in one of Breskin’s ghazals.) The standout instrument of the first set was the prairie-ghost whisper of Bill Barnett’s chromatic harmonica. This, taken with Glenn Taylor's delicate pedal-steel shadings, framed the suite as some sort of strange and fragmented Western opera.

Maestro!

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

In the second set, Breskin’s terse readings turned bragging and hostile (“You Will Eat Hot Lead,” “I Thought I Told You That We Won’t Stop” “You Talk You Get Killed”) as he tackled the cracked mirror of America’s wars in the Middle East. These were interwoven more organically with Cline’s short bursts of bliss and vinegar. Besides electric guitar, Cline used what appeared to be a series of smaller and smaller acoustic guitars, including one that looked and sounded like a Cuban armónico, that lent the score a waft of Middle Eastern incense.

Lady about to attack her piano: Motoko Honda

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Friday night’s marriage of imagery and music was no less epic, despite the fact that there was only one musician onstage instead of fourteen. Pianist and sound sculptress Motoko Honda preluded the premiere of Steven Elkins’ frequently poetic documentary The Reach of Resonance (think Fast, Cheap and Out of Control with musical mavericks) by stating her confusion at being asked to compose a piece inspired by the film. “I am mostly an improviser,” she said almost apologetically before sitting down for a furious and anarchic 20-minute tour de force in which she practically crawled inside the instrument. Mixing lyrical, almost George Winston-like etudes with a prepared technique I can only describe as “flossing" -- slipping a fishing line around the piano strings and moving them back and forth rapidly to create a sound not unlike a methed-out bee swarm  -- she beautifully refracted the film’s mind-bending investigations into the outer reaches of musical inspiration, or what composer Jon Rose, one of the film’s four subjects, tellingly labels “sonic terrorism." Mmm, not a bad buzzword for the ACJ festival as a whole.

THE REACH OF RESONANCE SNEAK PEEK:

Our apologies to Mr. John Abercrombie, who closed out the festival Saturday night with his Quartet. The Beast took ill and couldn't swing it, but here are some lovely and candid shots of the master at work:

From left: John Abercrombie, Joey Baron, Thomas Morgan, Mark Feldman

(all photos courtesy of Myles Regan)

ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2010: The First Leg

Ahh opening night. The electric-shaver buzz in the air! The expectant crowds milling about! The familiar faces! The parking fees! Welcome to the Angel City Jazz Festival Year Three. And for some reason – maybe momentum, maybe a perverse urge towards a Viking-style funeral – this year's bill was the most radical one yet. After getting a toehold with the first two years, what the hell were festival organizers Jeff Gauthier and Rocco Somazzi thinking?

I would be the wrong person to ask that question. My urge towards the fringier fringes of Out There music is not a good indicator of my judgment of a festival roster’s bankability. The esteemed music critic Greg Burk (who also reviewed the festival) asked me Monday night over dinner what I thought of this year’s lineup of artists and I froze with mouthful of cured tuna hearts. “I think it’s great!” was all I could muster. Burk was coming at me from the Long View of things: in order for this music and for the only annual festival to celebrate it to survive, it needs to embrace both the Out and the In. (To whit: last year’s sandwiching of the relatively straight-ahead B3 organisms of Larry Goldings between guitar freek-a-leek Nels Cline and the prepared piano of Motoko Honda.) I was coming at it from the blissfully oblivious punk-rock stance of, “the more extreme the better!” Which is why I don’t run a record label. I like Viking funerals.

This year, the extreme was exhibited in the majority of acts over the first few days having absolutely no set list. There were exceptions -- Kneebody and Ravi Coltrane on Sunday and the Trible/Beasley duo on Saturday – but the main feature was inventing a journey for the ears that wasn’t always “fun” in the classic sense. Like a good novel the music contained all emotions, from anxiety to abandon, from confusion to rapture. Hell, there was boredom in there a few times too, and the task of both performers and audience alike to wrest free of it.

Saturday was the much-ballyhooed return to L.A. of Mr. Henry Grimes, the bassist who has become as celebrated for the Hollywood-worthy tale of his rediscovery and rehabilitation as his pioneering work with the godheads of free jazz (Ayler, Taylor, Shepp, Sanders, Coltrane, Coleman). In fact, Grimes’ “story” has been told twice and Social Network-style in two opposing accounts in the last two months: first by scholar Steven Isoardi (“The Return of Henry Grimes: A Memoir” -- emphasis on that last word) and then a month later in the new literary quarterly Slake by journalist Hank Cherry (“The Resurrection of Henry Grimes”). It's a story, underscored by Mr. Gauthier’s opening remarks, that encompasses “hope, creativity and not giving up in the face of dire circumstances” and “very much an L.A. story.” We won’t get into all that here – in fact, we shudder at the thought of Grimes' story making to the big screen and becoming another The Soloist, complete with Kanye West or Sean Combs bobbing for Oscar cred by playing the troubled bassist. Suffice to say, all the crackling anticipation in the REDCAT theatre precluded that Mr. Grimes would be received rapturously if he simply stood onstage and did nothing but scratch his ear. He did stand onstage, but nothing the man did was simple.

Mr. Grimes’ set was preceded by the duo of vocalist Dwight Trible and pianist John Beasley, who took their own sweet time setting a subtle, churchified mood for their short set. They began with an improvised duet and moving into more structured material like “Autumn Leaves” and a bracing medley of “The Spirit of Love” with the more dire standard “Strange Fruit,” with Trible creating cubistic psalms over Beasley’s soft tide pools and mathematical chimes. They even paid tribute to current economic woes (which, as indie jazz musicians, they must feel quite acutely) with the closer, “Backlash Blues.” Four bars in, someone yelled from the audience: “I like it already!!”

Henry Grimes, with Olive Oil

The auditorium was dead quiet when Grimey & Co. shuffled out of the wings like gunfighting pilgrims. Grimes, dressed in baggy black pants, rumpled Hawaiian shirt and canary-yellow headband (his rotating headgear is like the jazz world’s version of the Bears' Jim McMahon), bent over the green-painted bass named “Olive Oil” (a gift from N.Y. loft vet William Parker) and started his knotty boxer’s hands dancing over the strings. This was the first of at least three improvisations that ranged from hellacious cacophony to near-silent meditation. The drama was heightened by the musicians (with minimal rehearsal and minimal direction) struggling across the tightrope together. It was 15 minutes before any kind of noticeable rhythm started and in that time Grimes switched from arco to pizzicato and then over to violin, while pianist Ben Rosenboom switched from the keyboard to the inner strings of the piano, Vinny Golia switched from baritone sax to clarinet to bass clarinet, Alex Cline switched from wire brushes to mallets to whatever else he had up his sleeve, and poor Dwight Trible (a last minute addition) switched from standing up to sitting down, as it appeared he was having difficulty fitting his vocals into the cracks of the ensemble’s intensity. But for intensity, one needed to look no further than the MVP of the evening Alex Cline, who towards the end of the set shattered the almost-quaint egalitarianism of the band by launching into a chest-rumbling and heavily caffeinated tribal beat that drew the rest of the players – even the maestro himself, who appeared not to once notice he had any bandmates – into its let’s-go-out-on-a-high-note sway.

Nels tears the Ford a new one

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

If Saturday night was the feather tickling, Sunday evening at the Ford Amphitheatre was the motherlode of weirdness, the anti-Hollywood Bowl. The bicoastal quintet Kneebody played like a bunch of young punks who just came from a show at The Smell. Vinny Golia returned for some funkified cold fusion with a youthful ensemble culled from his CalArts students. (Did we actually catch Golia dancing a little onstage?!). Nels Cline practically stomped a hole in the stage floor as he and saxist Tim Berne and three-armed drummer Jim Black went for the apocalyptic orgasm in an entirely improvised set that included Berne’s siren-like wails that he muted by sticking an empty Arrowhead water bottle into the bell of his horn.

Wadada

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Wadada Leo Smith, who also backed Mr. Grimes on Saturday and who likes to stand at the edge of his bands like a character in the margins of an old MAD magazine, led his Golden Quartet in a groove-tinged set with some powerful players, including hot keyboardist Vijay Iyer (whose own current Solos CD is getting rapturous buzz) and the bewitching John Lindberg, who ran his bass through a pedal and created an otherworldly and elongated sound I can only regrettably call “bowelly.” (This made the L.A. Times jazz critic Chris Barton laugh -- although thank god he didn't mention it in his review of the show.) With their serpentine interplay and clean, well-lighted songs, the quintet led by saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (second son of John and Alice) and trumpeter Ralph Alessi tucked us into bed and kissed us on the cheek.

Ravi Coltrane/Ralph Alessi Quartet

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

The next night at Culver City's Royal/T Cafe was more of a cozy, family affair that mixed musical improvisation with multimedia flash and culinary wizardry courtesy of visiting chefs Paul Canales and Kelsey Bergstrom. (Indeed, Carol Kim's live video feeds of musicians and kitchen staff heightened the similarities between food and music—and further proved to me that chefs are the new DJs.) There was a metal tub packed with ice and stacked with bottles of Rahsaan Roland Kirk Dark Lager. There were silver multi-storied dishes of farmer’s market green beans and grissini dip. There were tablecloths, for god’s sake. All accompanied by the strangest dinner music we’ve ever heard, a true ebbing-and-flowing blast of West Coast airs anchored by the leadership of bassist Mark Dresser and pianist Myra Melford, who played a white mini-grand besmirched with subway graffiti, and brought to the brink by the butoh dance master Oguri, who squeezed himself between the banquet tables like that Tooms guy from The X Files. The Brothers Cline took a brief duo interlude during Dresser's "Rasa" that made one marvel at the talented womb they both were sprung from—and how ageless both seem when they are playing together. (Nels' recent collaborator and bride-to-be Yuka Honda was almost invisible behind Melford's piano, hunched over a tiny keyboard-sized piece of electronics called a Tenori-on.) The second set veered almost shockingly into verboten blues territory, with violinist Jeff Gauthier and Mark Dresser chasing each other in mad-stringed brotherhood. (I’m not sure of this, but some loud female voice kept yelling out “Mark Dresser! Yeah! Play it! Wooo!” during his solo, and I swear to God it might have been Ms. Melford, whom I’ve heard utter few words in person.) At the end of this wonderful evening, both Rocco and Jeff were spent but smiling. What do they know that we don’t?

Drawing by Deborah Drooz on my notebook

while I was in the Men's Room at the Royal/T



Check out the Ford performances on YouTube's Angel City Jazz TV page.

LIVE REVIEW: We Are Plastic Ono Band (Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, 10/01/2010)

I think I’ve accidentally seen Yoko Ono’s vagina more than I have accidentally seen my own mother’s. (She is only 5 years younger than my mom, by the way.) Truly, it is a strange experience to see a 77-year-old woman performing onstage while a giant film of her prodigious bush (with flies crawling all over it) plays directly behind her. But then again, the fact that you are actually sitting in a theatre seat and see a legendary survivor of the 60s and perhaps the most famous assassination in music history standing RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU pretty much outstrips anything else this show would have to throw at you.

So hence was the challenge: actually trying to set aside the twinkly stargazing and listen to the Widow Ono’s music for itself. (Overheard in audience: “I heard that Julian and Sean recently reconciled!”) This too was made more difficult by the lineup of hipster faces who popped up all throughout this quasi-Hal Willner evening: Mike Watt, Iggy Pop, Nels Cline, Perry Farrell, the RZA, Yuka Honda and Yoko's only son Sean Ono Lennon, who quadrupled-duty on guitar, bass, piano, creator, musical director and de facto master of ceremonies. Lennon even adopted a Garrison Keillor persona and spun some tales about his enviable childhood, including a memorable dinner party given by his mother where Phil Spector and Iggy Pop almost came to blows.

The Coolest Mom in the World and son

But, of course, the evening was all about feting Mom. (Let’s face it, she’s reached “first name only” recognition: we can just say ‘Yoko’ and everybody on the planet – save for a few caves in Waziristan and a few hollers in Arkansas – knows who we mean.) The night began with a mélange of images culled from her many experimental films, including the infamous Bottoms (1966), Cut Piece (1965) and the aforementioned Fly (1970) and testimonials from the likes of music critic Robert Palmer and actress Ann Magnuson. In the mix, of course, was the Great Man himself, lounging on a patio chair, steering a rowboat for his bride, picking up and twirling his son. The period at the end of that sentence, of course, was the single shot of John Lennon’s bloody and cracked glasses from the cover of Ono’s Season’s of Glass (1981). This is when the widow made her appearance before the black curtains, bathed in a single spotlight like Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and sang “It Happened” a cappella, the meaning and weight of which no one in earshot could possibly question.

All night, Yoko was like a tiny, demented and very fashionable goblin. Dressed all in black in what looked to be a velour running suit under a small coat, a jaunty cap tilted on her head and black ovoid sunglasses dipped on her nose, she pranced like a herky-jerky Celine back and forth across the stage before the first house band to carry the moniker “Plastic Ono Band” since 1973. It was an ever-changing ensemble made up of a music snob’s wet dream: besides young Sean (in a circus-barker’s top hat) on bass, L.A. prodiguitarist Nels Cline played a stolid and quirky G.E. Smith to keyboardist Yuka Honda’s Paul Shaffer; San Pedro punk godfather Mike Watt hobbled out on crutches with a brace on his left leg and literally sat in on bass and was occasionally replaced by a glowering Haruomi “Harry” Hosono (oddly, playing a Paul McCartney-style Hofner bass) of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. The core P.O.B. was made up of the touring lineup for Japanese cut-and-splice popsters Cornelius, and one couldn’t help noting what a perfect fit these energetic young freakazoids were to the task, particularly the eerie sonar squonks produced by guitarists Hirotaka “Shimmy” Shimizu and Keigo “Cornelius” Oyamada (who did double duty on keyboards). Then there was the amazing moppet-haired drummer Yuko “Mi-gu” Araki. Her muscular, thunderous timekeeping was like a barnacle-encrusted anchor for a demanding and eclectic set of songs.

The key to the evening was groove. Whether it be blues or spacey funk or testy electronic pop, Ono’s songs in both sets were made quite irresistible by their distinctive, even danceable, pulses. The most famous example is her 1981 single “Walking on Thin Ice”* (the last song she and Lennon recorded before his murder), which in its original form carried a pop-friendly disco beat that translates well to our modern Lady-Gagaed ears. (Was it any wonder that Miss Gaga herself was a guest for the show’s second night?) Over it all, natch, was Ono’s famous arsenal of tribal wails, chants, yelps and mewls that she splatted like thrown paints over the hard-charging aggressions of the band. (She even has one -- the immortal “aaawhoooaaaha!” – that is recognizable enough to be a ringtone.) True this: nobody but Ono could get away with this Japanese version of scat-singing. Also true: There is a method and a science to it, exhibited perfectly by a duet between Ono and Mr. Cline on “Mulberry” (a song derived from Ono’s memories of Japan during WWII) who threw sounds at each other across the stage like they were John Henry and the steam engine.
*NerdNote: I once saw a 1986 performance of this song from Yoko’s Terminator-goggled Starpeace tour with a crack band that included guitarists Mark Rivera and Jimmy Rip, keyboardist Phil Ashley, bassist Leigh Fox and drummer Bennie Gramm – after which she happily told the crowd: “Okayyyy, you can take out your earplugs now!”

The second set ranged from the unforgettable to the incoherent – a nice mix! There was: Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s bizarre supper-club performance, complete with tux and tails and two dancing goils with paper angel wings; The Tune-yards (featuring the extraordinary vocals of Merrill Garbus) lighting into an Africanized deconstruction of “We’re All Water”; Carrie Fisher’s surprisingly strong Music Hall go-round on "What A Bastard the World Is", with her vocals sounding not unlike Marianne Faithful; Sean Lennon and “my friend from The Dakota” (and Paul Simon’s son) Harper Simon dueting on a sighing “Oh Yoko!”; Ono and The RZA facing each other in a silent-frieze chess match before the latter took the mic for a dark and turgid "See The Joy"; Vincent Gallo, in white fringe jacket and big Pee-Wee Herman boots, sitting down to lend a Chet Baker croon to “I’m Going Away Smiling”; Perry Farrell’s indecipherable disco-fried take on “The Sun Is Down.” And then there was Sir Iggy.

"A surprise party for me? I'll kill ya! Whose idea was this?"

Iggy and the Stooges released their sludgy, primal debut in 1969, the same year the original P.O.B. released their primal, sludgy Live Peace in Toronto. The fact that Ono and The Igster have never shared a stage before seemed absurd. They embraced onstage like the two old friends they were, only to break into their own spastic dances as Iggy took the lead vocals for the uptown punk smersh of “Waiting for the D Train.” It took Iggy about 20 seconds to shed his black dinner jacket and go shirtless-caveman all over the stage while Ono circled around him like a deranged Tinkerbell. It was also Iggy the Politician who made one of the funniest additions to the closer of the evening “Give Peace A Chance,” rapping about the Meg Whitman housekeeper scandal and asking “Is Jerry Brown a good guy? I don’t know!” Ms. Ono directed the audience to raise the tiny ‘Onochord’ flashlights handed out before the show. Then she did something unexpected: she apologized. “If I have hurt you, I am sorry. I didn’t mean it,” she told the audience. “I love you all.” What the hell could we say?

Nels on the March

He may be decamping soon for Neuva York, but wonk-wizard extraordinaire Nels Cline continues to conquer as many stages and studios as he can before senility starts in. Fresh from his memorable stint at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival last month in the sweltering heat of BAHston, where his personal ‘Stompbox Station’ installation and irradiating set with his punky little instrumental trio The Nels Cline Singers were obvious highlights, Sir Nels will be dropping back in these here hills early next month on a number of errands for the ear.


Professor Cline demonstrates his Magick Stompbox Musicquarium at the Solid Sound Festival


The Nels Cline Singers with special guest Yuka Honda perform "Thurston County" at the SSF (8/15/10)

First, he will fulfill some sort of music geek’s fantasy by guest playing with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band along with Iggy Pop and Mike Watt (Oct. 1). Then he’ll mosey over to the 2010 Angel City Jazz Festival (Oct. 2-9) where he will play in no fewer than three different configurations: a trio with old buds Tim Berne and Jim Black (whose insane drumming and giant brandy snifter were highlights of last year); a group improv session with pianist Myra Melford, bassist Mark Dresser and butoh dancer Oguri; and finally, the crowning glory, the premiere of DIRTY BABY, a long-awaited art/music/poetry hybrid project with producer David Breskin and artist Ed Ruscha. The three wize men were interviewed recently about DB by ArtInfo and Flavorpill already posted a thoughtful review. Yesterday, Mr. Cline brought The Singers (joined by Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda on keyboards) into the NPR studios to perform for the network’s Tiny Desk Concert Series.