Bobby Bradford Reconvenes the Mo'tet [UPDATED]

Fresh off his 80th Birthday and a showcase concert at the Angel City Jazz Festival last week, composer/bandleader/educator Bobby Bradford will reassemble an extended octet version of his band The Mo'tet exactly one month from today, on Sunday, November 2, 2014 at the Mayme Clayton Library in Culver City. The lineup: BB (cornet), Chuck Manning (reeds), Michael-Pierre Vlatkovich (trombone), Don Preston (keyboards), Ken Rosser (guitar), Roberto Miguel Miranda (bass) and Christopher Garcia (percussion). As an added treat, saxophonist Vinny Golia will join the band for the second set, which will highlight compositions from Bradford's longtime collaborator, clarinetist John Carter.

The concert is from 2-5pm, preceded at 1pm by a brief interview with Mr. Bradford by the Beast's pal (and repository of bad jokes), music writer Jeffrey Winston. Admission is $20 and seating is limited. You can purchase tickets here.

Mr. Carter and Mr. Bradford, L.A., 4/22/78

[photo courtesy of Mark Weber]

JUST ANNOUNCED: Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq is back for one engagement before returning to Europe for an extended tour. On Sat., Oct. 11, He will be performing at Roscoe’s Seabird Jazz Lounge (730 E. Broadway, Long Beach, CA, 562-522-8488) with Acknowledgement, a group that was founded in the summer of 1975 by himself and 6 other members of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Of the original members who are still with us and will be performing on this night are Ishmael Hunter, who is the current organizer of this group as well as trumpeter Steven Smith and saxophonist Michael Sessions. It promises to be a very musical and enjoyable evening bringing back some of the original founding members of this musical coalition after being separated as an entity for almost 40 years. The event will be complemented with pianist Bobby Pierce on piano and bassist Jeff Littleton. First set starts at 9pm.

SON OF JUST ANNOUNCED: Ken Moore of Howling Monk is starting a series of six 4th Sunday afternoon concerts called "The Jazz State of Mind" at Fais Do Do. Reedman Bennie Maupin ("and Friends") will be the first featured show on Sunday, October 26 at 3pm. Doors Open at 2pm.

Oh yes, how could we forget? The Beast has published a few more lil' ditties over at Los Angeles Magazine. Check out the newest entries in our ongoing series The United Sounds of Los Angeles: #11 & #12, #13 and #14. There's also a new documentary on Arhoolie Records and its founder Chris Strachwitz that we reviewed here.

Jazz Standards from a Parallel Universe

The following "jazz-meets-literature" post was written in collaboration with The Beast's friend and colleague Anthony Miller, who also inspired a rather memorable post we did here last year. Mr. Miller is an Editor-at-Large for Black Clock and has also contributed to Bookforum, Los Angeles magazine, Poets & Writers and L.A. CityBeat. You can read his most current work at the site HiLobrow.

[image by James Jean]

References to jazz and jazz musicians abound in the writing of Thomas Pynchon. In his short story “Entropy,” Duke, the leader of the Duke di Angelis quartet, inspired by Gerry Mulligan’s jettisoning of root chords, explains to Meatball Mulligan how he had arrived at a “new conception” for how his ensemble should perform.

              A horrified awareness was dawning on Meatball. “And the next logical extension,” he said.
             “Is to think everything,” Duke announced with simple dignity. “Roots, line, everything.”

This results in a performance where musicians have to stop to sort out why they are “thinking” different entrances, time signatures, and keys. Duke concedes to Meatball, “there are a few bugs to work out.”

In this vein, the double bill of SASSAS's AD HOC series began Sunday night in an appropriately Pynchonian manner with L.A. avant-jazz sax titan Vinny Golia apologizing for one of his players having a flat tire and inadvertently turning his planned saxophone quartet into a trio. No problemo for a bunch of highly trained improvisers. "The point of all these textural combinations we're gonna do is to show the versatility of the saxophone," Golia rasped, "which by the way can also be used as a weapon, but if we keep our cool, nobody should get hurt."

The Vinny Golia Saxophone Trio Quartet in San Diego

[photo by Jeff Kaiser]

Golia, along with alto saxophonist Gavin Templeton and tenor saxophonist Jon Armstrong, played four songs in their 40-minute set -- "5" into "Old Man's Word" into "Un-Named" and capped with the memorably titled "Phil Shiffley Shaves His Eyebrows" -- but you'd never know it. Beginning with a growing series of atonal wheezes and blats like an old calliope firing up, the trio blended each song into a seamless suite by mixing in brief flights of improvisation. Golia was the conductor as well as the melodic anchor, switching from soprano sax to an enormous bass saxophone to a tiny, recently invented curiosity with a Middle Eastern sound called the piccolo saxophone. What was clear from the younger players was their command of jazz history and how they hid tinges of bebop and swing inside their angular freeplay: Templeton's tone could be as lush and breathy as Johnny Hodges', while Walsh's was unmistakably drawn from the Church of Charlie Parker. For his part, Golia looked pleased at what his pupils came up with.

After a brief intermission came a Chicago and Bay Area aggregate of musicians who performed one extended composition in three movements based on fictional songs from Pynchon’s novels V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. Led by multi-instrumentalist Kyle Bruckmann, the septet calling themselves WRACK (in honor, no doubt, of Pynchon’s affection for mysterious and ominous-sounding acronyms) offered a new way to “listen” to songs Bruckmann described as "jazz standards from a parallel universe." As he explained that he structured his compositions to see how these songs "would behave if they were standards," his very elucidation made him sound like one of the behavioral scientists from Gravity's Rainbow. Reflecting Pynchon's dense, cracked-mirror universe, the music quoted and spliced from a SuperCollider of free jazz, bebop and swing to carnival music, Le Jazz Hot (courtesy of Jen Clare Paulson's caressing viola) and even some down-and-dirty burlesque bump-and-grind. Like Pynchon’s writing, the music was imbued with a sly sense of humor underneath the cubistic postmodern lens.

Pynchon’s worlds are punctuated by songs, and his characters often launch into them as if they inhabited ‘40s movie musicals. Sometimes the music the band played embodied the books’ characters, other times it articulated their themes. As they sometimes stuttered in and out of sound -- the percussion simulating static or a set of electronic bleats -- as if warming up (or down), Pynchon’s specter of entropy suffused the room, surrounding and enveloping the listener. There were no lyrics to help the listener pinpoint exactly which song might be represented at any moment, although there were musical clues, repeated instruments, and motifs.

It might be useful here to give a name to each of these discrete movements in this phantasmagorical score. The first section of the movement from V. could have been called “Keep Cool but Care,” after an apothegm from McClintic Sphere, V.’s Ornette Coleman-inspired alto saxman who plays at the V-Spot, Pynchon’s version of the Five Spot. WRACK raised a spirited cacophony appropriate to the novel's Nueva York streets where a Whole Sick Crew of artists and bohemians wander while albino alligators (and their hunters) roam the sewers below. The second section, focused on the six songs in Lot 49, could have been entitled “Shall I Decipher A World?,” after the question posed by protagonist Oedipa Maas as she scrambles to make sense of a secret postal service and other conspiracies. The feeling of this section was more introspective and plaintive, incorporating an occasional Cuban jazz feel and other mid-60s sounds. Here Bruckmann’s oboe ratcheted up the paranoia with a kind of sinuous, snake charmer-like influence. Drummer Tim Daisy's arms were constant blurs as he kept up a skittery, double-time rhythm redolent of Gene Krupa with a (slightly) lighter touch. Trombonist Jeb Bishop soloed so furiously one could hear his momentous intakes of breath as his slide threatened to fly right off his horn into the audience.



By the time we reached the Gravity’s Rainbow section (undoubtedly it is the most difficult of Pynchon’s novels to get a handle on), there was no need for a title. (Maybe “Mindless Pleasures,” after one of the book’s provisional titles.) One touchstone for this movement was the infamous tenth section of the novel where Tyrone Slothrop hallucinates a trip down a toilet in a bathroom in Boston’s Roseland Ballroom in 1939 to the sounds of Charlie Parker's "Cherokee":

              The song playing is one more lie about white crimes. But more musicians have floundered
            in the channel to “Cherokee” than have got through from end to end. All those long, long 
            notes... what’re they up to, all that time to do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot?



WRACK incorporated parts of “Cherokee," along with the folk standard “Red River Valley,” which appears with a more parodic set of lyrics in Pynchon’s Roseland Ballroom sequence. (Bruckman also revealed that Alban Berg’s jarring 1921 opera Wozzeck, also cited in Gravity’s Rainbow, played a part in this final movement.) Darren Johnston’s trumpet provided some of the screaming across the sky, blaring calamitously like a siren or a klaxon, but also helping to underscore more contemplative passages.

After the show, we split up to speak to the musicians. When asked how he was able to keep track of where one song ended and another began, Bruckmann smiled. "It's all part of the game," he said. When asked if he caught Sharknado on TV, Golia grinned, "Of course! I loved it!"

We felt Mr. P. would have approved of both conversations.









THE L.A. RELAY: Spirit-Jazz in Encino → Improvised Orgy in Eagle Rock

We haven’t done an L.A. Relay in quite awhile. Why? Because it’s exhausting and stressful for the Beast. But occasionally there are two things happening at far ends of the L.A. basin on the same day and we feel compelled to make them both.

First off, was a prototype set from the chamber ensemble calling themselves Masters of the Ark playing in the Encino living room of author and jazz enthusiast Mimi Melnick. (Check out one of our past reviews of a Mimi salon here.) Led by multi-instrumentalist and bassoon-voiced cat Jesse Sharps, it was a sort of an informal, get-the-kinks-out performance designed to raise funds for an upcoming music, dance and poetry retrospective of Horace "Papa" Tapscott and his Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra. Introductions were made by Tapscott's son-in-law Michael Dett-Wilcots and granddaughter Raisha, current heads of the project and one of the curators of the voluminous archives left behind by the late pianist's arts collective UGMAA (The Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension). Wilcots explained that Tapscott tasked him with preserving the history of this influential underground jazz movement. “I’ve always been down there at the bottom of the pyramid, layin’ the bricks of the foundation," he smiled. "I wasn’t upfront, like Papa, or Jesse, so I’m shakin’in my shoes right now. But we’re here to try to raise enough money to get the party goin'.”

[photo by Mrs. Beast]

Assembled in the living room was a gold-label ensemble and the place was standing room only. (Thank God for a warm day and an outdoor patio.) There was Roberto Miguel Miranda on bass, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Sharps on various woodwinds and Cornell Fauler (replacing Don Littleton) on drums. In the piano seat of Bobby West sat his last-minute replacement, Grammy Award-winner Billy Childs (!!), an apt choice to tackle not just the complex classically-inflected music of Tapscott, but the various players’ own tributes to the late pianist and bandleader. Among the highlights was Miranda’s “Horacio” (written when the bassist was just 19), a Latin-tinged blast of California breeze and vista let loose in its intricate melodies. Atwood-Ferguson continued to prove himself a mercurial new talent on the L.A. scene by bringing a muscular vitality to his solos, bending his knees as he soloed like an Olympic swimmer launching off a diving board. (He really pushes his instrument like an Olympic coach to be sure.) Sharps and Miranda brought the wood (excuse the expression): Miranda plucking deep oaken notes from the bass while Sharp imitated drunken wood sprites with his wooden mini-flute.

Jesse Sharps and the back of Jeannette Lindsay's head

[photo by Mrs. Beast]

During the first song, if you could tilt your head just so, you could hear guest vocalist (and fellow Tapscott grad) Dwight Trible doing vocal warm-ups in the bedroom. Trible joined the ensemble for “I've Known Rivers” off his new album Cosmic. Childs unfurled a glistening wave of glissando while Atwood-Ferguson kept a single impossibly high note quavering in the air like a lightbeam, pushing Childs to take a surprisingly spare solo, more Bill Evans than Oscar Peterson. After a ballad sung by Trible, Sharps announced that this small group would tackled a complex, multi-part suite “Dem Folks," which: (a) was meant to be performed by a big orchestra; (b) hadn’t been performed since 1995; and (c) had three pages missing from the score. Okay then. "Folks" proved a ball-busting, time-changing Golem of a piece that contained at least five different streams simultaneously, including a slo-blues drag, an Army band march, European modernism and a bit of West African polyrhythm. (Sharps later told the Beast that it took the band two 6-hour sessions to master it all.) Sharps took a thundering soprano sax solo, running up and down the scales like a mouse trying to find an opening, and Childs followed with a hammering solo that matched Sharps’ in intensity. When it was all done 9and done successfully), Sharps reflected: “Classical and jazz is the same kind of music to me.”

We bowed out of the second set to grab a bite and make it over to the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts for the Open Gate Theater’s 15th Anniversary celebration, hosted by OGT artistic director Will Salmon and drummer Alex Cline. Originally started on Saturday nights in 2000 at the Pasadena American Legion Hall (first show: guitarist G.E. Stinson’s A Thousand Other Names), the monthly concert and performance series of mostly European and avant garde-influenced improvised music has been through at least four different locations before finding a comfortable (and supportive) nest in Eagle Rock. In his brief opening remarks, Cline addressed the issue of the constant tug to bail out on this monumental pain in the ass (he has to schlep his gear up from Culver City) by simply stating, “We are basically stuck in our ways.” He also reached out to anyone in the crowd for the status of trombonist Bruce Fowler, who apparently suffered either a heart attack or a stroke the week past—a comment on the scattered world of L.A. musicians if there ever was one.

[photo by Mrs. Beast]

But there were 25 other very talented people who had graced the OGT stage over the years assembled in a sort of in-the-round fashion -- the “round” being the audience, as one could turn one's head in any direction and see someone standing before a musical stand holding some sort of musical vessel. Often, the musicians were in the audience and would only reveal themselves by sliding out of a chair and taking their designated station when de facto conductor Cline would point. (Mrs. Beast mused: “Every time he walks through the audience, I'm afraid he’s going to point at me and I'll gave to go up and play something.”) The key phrase of this eve, in Cline's words, was "a whole lot of whatever happens.”

“Whatever” began with a twosome of Cline on varying percussion and Salmon on flute amd occasional Native American-informed chanting, followed by Salmon reading a poem by Rainer Maria-Rilke with Cline making a rare step from behind the drums to play autoharp and the delicate timbre of a Chinese pipa played by Bay Area transplant Jie Ma. Cline then summoned Japanese vocal sculpturist Kaoru, six-string bassist Steuart Liebig, percussionists Brad Dutz and Joe Berardi, keyboardist Wayne Peet and live electronicist Tim Perkis to the fore, and simple and unrelated sounds began mutating like the Stuxnet virus. Here one could watch the music grow from a paramecium to a full-bore animal, able to focus only on part of the grand tableau as it unfolded: Vinny Golia announcing his presence with a squealing sax skronk; Dan Clucas standing behind a white pillar and blasting one of his citrus-sour solos; William Roper in a suit and tie shoving a water bottle down the bell of his tuba (and later launching into an insane rant about pirates); Cline and Alan Cook looking like happy drum circlers as they pounded their eclectic traps; young 'uns like Tom McNalley bending notes like Carlos Santana and Charles Sharp answering with an ornery sax break. It was akin to, well, a 1970s key party sans wall-to-wall shag and wood panelling: four bassists in a thunderous circle, two saxes going at it while an accordion and a flute watched, a tuba and an accordion doing it doggy style...ahem, yes, well. It was good.*

After this cornucopia of Wacky, a chair was placed at the center of the hall for poetess Dorothea Grossman, a frequent collaborator with many of the musicians assembled. They responded to her  Jewish Emily Dickinson-in-L.A short poems (“25,000 Clams – that’s what I got a Pismo Beach”; “Sky-colored ocean, ocean colored sky -- I’ll have more beach, please”; “[Allen Ginsberg] looks nervous, like any good holy man who knows its almost over”) with blatting and raucous responses. The finale was truly grand: Salmon directing the entire ragged-but-right ensemble (with cards marked '1A,' '2E,' '7B') while reciting a "seafaring epic poem based on the life of Captain Kidd.” Like we said, wacky. Here’s to another 15 years!

*Go here for our pal Greg Burk's similarly porn-themed account of the Open Gate show.

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: …For The Love of Don Preston: A Tribute Concert (South Pasadena Music Conservatory, Los Angeles, 9/11/2010)

Can’t think of a better date to have a BIRTHday celebration on what’s become the American Day of the Dead. Don Preston’s real birthday isn’t until 9/21, but Walter Zooi of the South Pasadena Music Center decided to have this tip o’ the hat to one of the few remaining original members of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. (They’re becoming like WWI survivors.) Mr. Preston, of course, is so much more than just his affiliation with that gang of monster cross-dressing players: a perpetual self-educator who, as friend/colleague Alex Cline noted in a moving verbal tribute Saturday night, “always manages to stay up on his game in current music and technology.” This reminded us of a time last February when we saw Mr. P preside over an impossibly abstract concerto of electronic squiggles from various laptops while percussionist Andrea Centazzo closed in for the mind-meld.

Don Preston (left) f*cks sh*t up with Andrea Centazzo (Feb. 2010)

Whether it be classical, jazz, electronic music, new music, rock music, the man’s talent is simply, as pianist Ben Rosenbloom put it, “protean – able to take on different forms.” The point was punctuated by the art hanging just across the street at the funky new SPACE gallery…by Don Preston! Or the booklets of stories and poems sitting by the SPMC’s entrance…whoa and behold, by Don Preston! Or the jagged, experimental film playing onstage before the concert…

The Ugliest Band in the World: Don Preston (top, second to left) with the original Mothers

The 3 hour concert featured just as many verbal memories as musical odes, mainly from letters read from friends who couldn’t be here (like Preston's Project/Object bandmate Robbie “Sea Hag” Mangano) and MP3’ed shout-outs (like a hilarious greeting from Preston’s fellow Mother Roy Estrada, who sounded happily stoned). Zooi started the evening off with a story who’s gist basically described Don Preston’s slow, creeping takeover of the South Pasadena Music Center, first offering to teach, then offering to curate an adventurous music series that has become a new haven for L.A’s perpetually-struggling new music scene, and lastly, physically putting up curtains behind the stage so the polished brick-and-exposed-duct space wouldn’t look so much like a cavernous barn. The 78-year-old Preston, clad in his usual flowing silken robe and tunic, introduced himself by getting purposefully caught in the curtains before playing three separate piano pieces from three successive generations of the Preston family: an autumnal parlour reel written by his grandmother; a florid orchestral tune by his father, Don Sr.; and a piece that incorporated both those styles with jarring blops of abstract-impressionist paints all over the keyboard from Don, Jr. It was a remarkable lesson in musical genes. One could almost hear a “Preston Family Style” emerging, sounding like music to accompany nonexistent silent films, with abrupt but seamless shifts in mood and narrative underscored by doses of lyricism.

(Grand)mothers Bunk Gardner & Don Preston smell their instruments

Zooi stepped aside to let percussionist Christopher Garcia become the de facto Master of Ceremonies, who peppered the evening with many “Don Stories” that testified to the man’s restless musical spirit as much as his terrible memory. “I didn’t know this was gonna be a roast!” Preston called out from his pimp-seat in the front row (next to his ex-wife Tina). Vinny Golia answered from the stage, “Seventy-seven years old and the guy is still naïve!” before bringing up elder paterfamilias Bobby Bradford for a testy anti-duet the two dubbed “Sergeant Preston.” Before they played, Bradford told a short-but-suite Don Story from the days when they used to play avant-garde jazz together in SoCal penitentiaries: “In Chino prison, they guys in there, all they wanted to do was get out. Well, Don is the only guy I ever knew who they wouldn’t let in.”

Pianist Ben Dowling took the stage with bassist Putter Smith and drummer Alex Cline for an old school bebop tune “Stella by Starlight” featuring the ghostly wrists of Mr. Cline, whose wire brush strokes sounded like breathing, and the hard Irish knuckles of Mr. Smith, whose solo turned his head beet red and shifted the song into different time signatures at least twice. If that wasn’t enough, a beaming, obviously pleased-to-be-here Smith stepped up to the mike with memories of playing Chavez Ravine and an old L.A. dump called Via Frescate with Preston and Paul and Carla Bley, making a bold statement by deeming his old friend “the most talented person I have ever known.”

Even though Preston is primarily a pianist, the night seemed dominated by percussionists (at least three separate drum kits were set up onstage). Next up was a trio of Brad Dutz (drums), Tom Rizzo (guitar) and Bevan Manson (piano), who performed a percussive improv. Then came violinist Harry Scorzo with Ken Rosser (guitar), Putter Smith, Alex Cline and a just-added Michael Pierre Vlatkovich, whose unmiked trombone runs threatened to blast the other musicians out of earshot. Then Mr. Preston returned to demonstrate three different magic tricks which he used to do onstage with the Mothers, before inviting fellow Mother Bunk Gardner onstage for a few duets. Pianist Ben Rosenboom offered a rambling homage before sitting down to perform a Prestonian song he called “Thelonious Monk Meets P.T. Barnum and They Go Have a Hot Dog Together.” Alex Cline recalled the glorious debacle that was a 1970 show pitting the Mothers of Invention versus the L.A. Philharmonic and the experience of going to the Whisky to see Preston’s group Ogomoto open for George Clinton’s Funkadelic. Cline offered an Eastern-flavored solo percussion piece before bringing up Chris Garcia for an amazing “singalong” drum duet on Zappa's “Uncle Meat” and “Mother People.” Harry Scorzo returned with Mike Vlatkovich for a run through Preston’s metrically and emotionally difficult “Dead Children,” which prompted Scorzo to just hang his head and ask its composer from the stage: “Don, seriously why did you name it that?” Preston jogged back to the mike to explain that the song was written after a rash of local children were killed in drive-by shootings and was meant to "express my anger about it. I mean, get angry, people!”