Monthly Archives: February 2017

Roy Haynes and Esperanza Spalding

Posted on by

(2010)

Here’s a review of a Roy Haynes/Esperanza Spalding press conference at the Playboy Jazz conference. I think this was 2010. Dig the contrast.

Must have been a hundred reporters. First up was Roy Haynes, though.  What is he now, 85? He looked twenty years younger. Played twenty years younger than that. He ran that room, baby, made suckers out of the reporters, we were all laughing our heads off and recording every line, each a gem. A classic performance. Then he split to applause and in came Esperanza. The salty, hard bitten atmosphere dissipated instantly and it was almost church. We whispered. Reporters were afraid to ask anything for fear they’d bruise her. She looked so sweet, her voice was so sweet, there was so much innocence there we all stopped swearing. We knew it wasn’t real, that she couldn’t actually be a jazz musician and be that innocent. But on that off, off chance that just maybe it was, we lobbed soft questions and she answered them all, eyes sparkling.

.

Roy Haynes

Posted on by

(2015)

Roy Haynes is ninety years old today, still drumming, still funny as hell, still jazz as jazz can be. I’m reposting this one from a few years back.

(an email from 2006)

Saw Roy Haynes last night (4/6/06) at Catalina’s. Absolutely first rate jazz. Jaleel Shaw is a killer alto, some Jackie McLean edge to his tone. He also did a long drawn-out blues on his soprano that seemed to have the spirits of both Lucky Thompson and a down in the dumps Pee Wee Russell floating over the stage. The piano player was great, though his name utterly escapes me now (some reporter I’d make…)…there was a phenomenal “Green Chimneys” and while Haynes, bassist Dan Sullivan and Shaw played the introductory figure straight, the kid on piano did it in some kind of counterpoint that made the Monk even more Monk. And Haynes…man, that cat is 80 years old and plays literally better than most half his age. I mean that, literally. He was perfect.  Drums can be godhead, and man, this reached it. He’s also funny as hell, strutting around out front playing his pair of sticks into the mic, a one man Rat Pack killing the room with wisecracks and heckling, demanding and getting a white Bacardi with a dash of soda, on ice, with a slice of lime. Looking maybe sixty, a really fit, lithe sixty at that. Good genes.

Dig this one. He’s there through Sunday. I am definitely gonna reprise this experience myself.

(and this is from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, 2007)

Last time  brought his quartet into the Catalina Bar and Grill, every set was a sensation. The jazz was intense, be bop and hard bop and post bop and assorted off the wall takes. Alto player Jaleel Shaw burned in the spotlight, looking and sounding a lot like the horn players Haynes played with back in the day.  And Haynes himself–his drums chops were so on, his patter so warm, his jokes and jibes and stories so damn entertaining you could not believe the man was 81 years old.  Anyone over fifty in the audience felt old in comparison. Haynes has played with towering figures of jazz history—Prez and Bird and Monk and Trane and Getz and Miles among them—but Haynes himself is not just history. Not yet. The guy still dominates a room from behind that kit, driving his young quartet to make killer jazz music. Between solos he takes a breather now and then, goofing with the crowd, but then he is 82 now. If you are a jazz fan you must see Roy Haynes once before you die, because apparently he never will.   (2007)

(And this too is excerpted from my LA Weekly column, 2009)

Roy Haynes is eighty three. Of course, that’s in Roy years…he’s about forty three in regular people years. How else can you explain this legendary octogenarian’s energy? This cat plays his ass off…but even more impressive, he makes the kids in his Fountain of Youth band play their asses off. If you’re looking for labels, the music they play is hard bop and post bop—which means that it’s equal parts hard grooving, wild soloing, and non-retro edgy—with plenty of space for the band to cook. Alto player Jaleel Shaw’s sound is NYC hard, so that even his gorgeous ballad passages have a diamond edge (think Jackie McLean). And Haynes demands and gets maximum dynamics out of pianist Martin Bejerano and just the right notes from bassist David Wong. And readers leery of paying big bucks for nostalgia, with dear old cats who ain’t what they used to be, should listen to Whereas, Roy’s live release from 2006. You’ll think you’re hearing tracks from the sixties but that was Roy Haynes, eighty one years young.

So it utterly mystifies all us here at the L.A. Weekly jazz bureau why the hell the house ain’t packed to the rafters when Roy Haynes is in town. As illustrated in his A Life In Time cd/dvd box set (on Dreyfus), Roy Haynes is a living, breathing, playing, still creative history of post-war jazz. Not only has he led some great sessions, but the man played with Monk (take Mysterioso) and subbing for Elvin Jones in Trane’s quintet (check out the bombs he’s dropping on “My Favorite Things” on Newport ‘63) and with Monk with Trane (At the Five Spot) and, oh man, Lester Young and Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and Fats Navarro and Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy (Out There) and Sarah Vaughan and everybody else (including last month with Phish; and see if you can find the clip of him with the Allman Brothers on “Afro Blue”). He’s all over the record collection of yours, tucked away in the credits and bashing and skittering and k-kicking, brushing and hinting, placing stunning rhythm intricacies here and perfect empty spaces there, driving and swinging and bloozing and dancing across that kit…. A pure be bop drummer. And live he spins stories and cracks wise and is a first rate showman. You really have to see Roy Haynes.

Kyle C. Kyle

Posted on by

(2015)

Damn, Kyle C. Kyle. Cool dude, amazing stories, a fine drummer who sounded like nobody else, playing in a band–the Wild Stares–that would have driven most of his drumming brethren mad. What a bad ass shuffle he laid down, I remember. Utterly unique.

Ah well….

Can’t remember who we’d all gone to see, but I had my last long conversation with him at Café Nela maybe a year ago. He was ageless, unchanging, a laconic presence that could have fooled a lot of people into thinking he had nothing to say. Not true. In fact, it was back a zillion years ago when I did a long story on the Wild Stares, and Kyle C. Kyle’s were some of the more incisive comments from a band full of brilliant minds.

Here’s that ancient story. Sorry about the writing. But you can still hear him in it, I think, his voice, his thinking. Somewhere I have tapes I made prepping that story. One a long interview. The other, especially priceless, a Wild Stares rehearsal. Kyle nails it. One of my favorite ever drummers.

Oh well….it happens.

The Wild Stares in the early 90's, Kyle C. Kyle on the left.

The Wild Stares in the early 90’s, Kyle C. Kyle on the left.

Steam

Posted on by

Here’s today’s viral earworm. You can thank me later. No worries, it’s safe for work. Family friendly. Infectious. Infectious as the Spanish Flu, in fact, so if you are at work make sure to turn it up so you can hear as it spreads throughout the whole office. They’ll be singing it standing over the xerox machine, or waiting for the elevator, or in the restroom when they think no one else is in there. They’ll bring it up on YouTube and post it. It’ll pop up in emails, texts, ringtones. And there’s no antidote for it, either. No anti-virus fix. No other song that can quash it. You know that commercial that says if you had chickenpox you have the shingles virus? This is like shingles. That’s the beauty and power of ear worms. And this is the greatest ear worm of all time. If an ear worm could destroy civilization this would be it. All you evil types take note. You marketing types, too. Though the damn thing is driving me nuts now and I gotta turn it off. It’s been playing on YouTube who knows how many times the whole time I’ve been writing this. Sheesh, infected myself. I can still hear it. Over and over and over. That double bass drum. The glockenspiel. The infinite na na na na’s and interminable hey hey’s….. oh death where is thy steam?

steam

All it takes is one listen.

Joni Mitchell

Posted on by

The angriest hate mail I ever got while writing my jazz column for the LA Weekly was from an old hippie from the canyon who thought I’d slighted Joni Mitchell. Well I had, actually, a little, but that was too much for him. He raged, he fulminated, he would have kicked my punk rock ass. He gave me a long lesson in Joni Mitchelldom. Unfortunately I didn’t save any of the emails, which came to probably a thousand words, beautiful things really, so goddamn angry, but I do remember he called me a young whippersnapper. I didn’t dare tell him I was more of a late middle aged whippersnapper. No, I was nice, said I felt shame, and promised to listen to Court and Spark.

I lied, of course. Once a whippersnapper, always a whippersnapper.

Cass, Joni, Judy, Joan and young whippersnapper.

Cass, Joni, Judy, Joan and young whippersnapper.

The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act

Posted on by

(2012)

I keep falling asleep on the couch during the midnight movies . . . last nite it was On the Waterfront, my fave flick ever. I couldn’t figure out why . . . after all, one of my seizure meds discourages sleep even. Then I read Greg Burk’s latest MetalJazz and he’s going on about the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act. CALM for short. Clever.  He’s crazy about it. No longer can commercials be louder than the programs they’re interrupting. You can imagine Burk before its passage, in his EZ chair, lunging for the remote and cursing the Toyotathon.  No more, though…all is mono-volume, smooth and unsurprising as the Kansas plain. The law went into effect on December 13, about the time I began dozing off before Marlon Brando had a chance to tell Rod Steiger he coulda been a contender.  I am lulled into deep sleep curled up on the couch, surrounded by the new fluffy couch pillows (which don’t help things either). Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger and Ashley Madison and the Mattress King flowing seamlessly together.  Nothing interrupts. No more being jolted awake by those ads for the Trojan Twister and their haunting undertone that men aren’t really necessary at all. But the thing is, I always did my best writing in the wee hours, invariably after being awoken by that delicious babe describing hideous malpractices that can be sued for. She rattles them off, all kinds of scary things,  diseases and deformities and even death. She talks so fast, this chick, and never blinks. Disturbing. And I don’t even know what a vaginal mesh is.  So I’d turn off the TV and turn on the computer and out would come prose. All kinds of prose. A blog’s worth of prose. No more. Now I just sleep, wake up, straighten up the house (I always straighten up the house), read a while and go to bed, the real bed, and sleep again. No prose at all.

There goes my writing career.

The People vs. Norman Flint

Posted on by

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”    Friedrich Nietzsche

Damn, that’s a beautiful line. A little romantic maybe, but beautiful. Very much the Europe of la Belle Epoque. Vast wars are still in the future, ancient empires intact, and even weirdos were harmlessly dancing. Sweet. Nostalgic. Flowers in the rain.

Of course, Nietzsche wound up completely insane. Utterly mad. Which led me to wonder about his quote. It didn’t sound like Nietzsche. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Now that was Nietzsche. And it didn’t sound like German, either.  “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” That sounded German, with the verb sitting there solidly at the end. “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” lilted. It’s musical. In rolls off the tongue in English and English has rolled off the tongue like that since the Normans dressed up our west Germanic language in layers of French finery. English and German deep underneath are quite the same. But we’ve moved a few things around, softened a lot of consonants and dipthonged every vowel we could get our hands on, and eventually our language developed a bit of a lilt–not a swish, certainly, but definitely a lilt–that pries it free from the German so far that you have to hit bedrock before you realize it’s a Germanic tongue you are speaking. But I’m digressing from my point that “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” just didn’t ring German to me.

So I googled it. I found the same quote and same Nietzsche attribution everywhere, on site after site. Dozens and dozens, all the same. It’s one of those things that makes romantics swoon. Then, several Google pages in, I stumbled onto a site called Quote Investigator, whose quote investigator wrote a long and magnificent account of his elaborate investigation that established that it was definitely not Nietzsche, nor any of the myriad other people to whom it was attributed, including Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, John Stewart (not Jon Stewart), a science fiction fan, Angela Monet, the great Sufi philosopher Rumi, some more science fiction fans, George Carlin, or Megan Fox, who had it tattooed on her back which would give her away instantly should she be the victim of a celebrity sex tape. My favorite choice was a mysterious someone named Norman Flint. I love that name–Norman Flint. No lilt there.

The thing has been attributed to everyone, even just an unknown (“anon.”) . In fact now someone will attribute it to me if they are high enough and only look at the first two sentences of anything they see online, which is what stoned people do. Then they babble knowingly to their friends and urban myths are born.

Anyway, it turns out that back in 2005 a newspaper in Florida said it was Nietzsche. They probably found that on the internet which has since collectively settled on Nietzsche, so it must be true. Alas, it ain’t, and our dogged quote detective finally throws up his hands and admits he has no idea who said it. He even added a mess of footnotes to show how he tried. Several commenters chimed in with their theories of their own (none, alas, Norman Flint.) Then came this:

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” is a translation from one of the lines in a French play called The Madwoman of Chaillot. It’s a fabulous play about living a life free from the pollution of money and all the dark, needless things that cause life to become dreary.

That rather nails it. The Madwoman of Chaillot (La Folle de Chaillot) written by French playwright Jean Giraudoux in 1943, first performed after the Liberation in Paris in 1945, though Giradoux himself died (no word on how) in 1944. Apparently it’s a satire, so I’m not sure if those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music was as overtly romantic as it appears to be all over the Internet. I suspect a subtlety or layered meaning but I can’t tell without reading the original (or the English translation, anyway). Alas, after some dogged googling myself it seems the play does not seem to be online, nor a script of the movie (starring Katharine Hepburn, Paul Henreid, Oskar Homolka, Richard Chamberlain, Donald Pleasance, Danny Kaye and Charles Boyer) that came out in 1969. That’s a powerhouse cast–and besides Boyer there’s dozens more French cast members as well–for a film that no one seems to have heard of anymore. Weird how that happens. But maybe Turner Classic Movies will show it. Or maybe they already have. So is the line in the movie’s script? I found a site that contained an online version of the screenplay…but it was gone. Poof. Funny how sites disappear like that, and right at critical moments. Makes you wonder about conspiracies, or bad luck, or meaningless chance. Something. Or maybe someone, who wants us not to know. There’s a danger in being a man who knows too much. Que sera sera. But Doris Day is not in The Mad Woman of Chaillot. You can look that up for yourself on the International Movie Database. IMDB don’t lie, baby. You can set your watches by that. Plus IMDB lets you look for crazy credits, those wacky, zany things. There are no crazy credits for The Mad Woman of Chaillot. The  French are very serious about these things. A lady probably takes her top off, though. You can’t make a French movie without a lady taking her top off. It’s the law.

You can watch the flick online. If you watch it you might hear the line in question. Katharine Hepburn would say and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. Unless it was Richard Chamberlain, who would say it in a perfect monotone that sounded so grave and sexy that all the ladies would want to make mad love to him right there on the spot. That’s what I think. Someone check with Robert Osborne. Though maybe if you had the right English translation of the play itself it’d be there, just like the commenter said.That would nail the answer in a heartbeat. That’s what I think.

But this is not quite good enough for our dogged Quote Investigator. He wasn’t so sure. Do you know the specific part of the play that you believe contains the statement? he asks. Do you know which character makes the statement, or what phrase was used in the original French? A good quote investigator is always suspicious. False flags and prevarications lay across the internet like mine fields.

Of course, he could have found out for himself by going to the library, or even calling a library information desk. My friend Linda works at the library. You could call her, she’d research around, and if they have the book she’s hold it aside for you. You wouldn’t even have to check it out but sit there quietly and read till you found the quote and shout Voila! Then Linda would bop you on the head. No shouting in the library. But you would have found your answer and set civilization at ease. Which is a good thing. That’s what I would have done. Called the library and then gone down there and found the quote. I wouldn’t shout Voila! though. Linda would bop me twice as hard and then tell everybody we know. Imagine my shame

But our dogged quote investigator would probably not even bother. No one goes to libraries anymore, he seems to hint. No one reads books, let along plays. What’s the point? If it’s not on the internet, it can’t be true.

Which is why I still think it’s by Norman Flint.

Testosterone

Posted on by

(2015)

So on late night television I keep seeing this icy gorgeous blonde warning me about testosterone supplements. They can cause stroke, pulmonary embolism, blood clots, heart attack and even death she says. She really punctuates that death. There’s no empathy in her voice, it’s almost robotic. She stares you down without even a hint of pity. She wasn’t hired to make you feel all warm and fuzzy. You can tell it’s bad. It’s not like an honest death. You died because you needed more testosterone, and the gorgeous blonde knows it. That’s the kind of death they whisper about at funerals. And yet you took that supplement because of blondes like her. One of late night TV’s little ironies. But I’ve never taken a testosterone supplement so I will never die and the blonde can stop worrying.

Then just now I get a call. A lady will give me $150 dollars if I took a testosterone supplement and answer a few questions. It’s nothing kinky, alas, just a survey. I thought about lying and saying yes, lady, I’ve taken testosterone supplements. But then I remembered that pitiless stare of the gorgeous blonde. So I said in my lowest voice possible, no lady, I don’t take no testosterone supplements. She said thank you and hung up.

So now some wimpy guy is gonna make $150.

Those testosterone supplement commercials were pretty cool, though. You’d see them late at night too. Some middle aged guy looks tired. Doctor says you’re tired because you are a weak excuse for a man. Gives him some medicine with a terrifying warning about what will happen if your wife comes in contact with it. (Basically her voice will drop and she will beat you up.)  Then, next scene, the middle aged guy is getting bedroom eyes from a gorgeous blonde. Little does he know that same gorgeous blonde will be warning him about stroke, pulmonary embolism, blood clots, heart attack and even death as he watches late night TV, too wired and horny to sleep. He’ll watch her and want her and next day get a hundred fifty bucks for his trouble, the pipsqueak.

Hot babe says you will die.

Hot babe says you will die.

.

Communication breakdown

Posted on by

What exactly is the breakdown in communication described in the lyrics of Communication Breakdown? Plant seems to be expressing himself with no problem. Does his girlfriend not speak English?

My friend Bob brings up an excellent and timely point. Though personally I’ve always wondered if Led Zeppelin’s English fans understood the Aw Shucks just before the guitar solo, or if that was on the American release only. They don’t say Aw Shucks in England or in any of the dominions or even Ireland, not now and not in 1969. Indeed, on the much rarer English version single, Robert Plant says We Will Nevah Surrender while in a dress, on the even rarer Irish 78 he screams Faith and Begorrah as Bonham does a clog dance on the drums, and on the strictly imaginary Australian 8-track Plant and a herd of freshly sheared sheep bleat Tie Me Kangaroo Down as Jimmy Page plays a classical part on the 12 string. They had to, as Aw Shucks was completely indecipherable to them.

OK, maybe I haven’t always wondered that.

Jazz moved fast in those days

Posted on by

Driving today and flipped on KKJZ and Koko exploded out of the radio, Max Roach Quartet. Crazy drumming, nobody plays like that. Kenny Dorham blowing Bird on the trumpet in long frenetic buttery lines, just gorgeous, then in comes I think George Coleman (yes, I just looked it up) on tenor, hard and fierce and beautiful, what a ridiculously overlooked player. What a fantastic cut. Why don’t I have this album? Recorded in late April 1958, I had just turned one year old and Bird had turned three years dead. Jazz moved fast in those days, in revolution time.