Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Saxophonery

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[from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, c 2009]

We dig saxophone. Sometimes more than anything. Saxophones are sooo jazz. Almost iconic of the whole music. Trumpets were once, a long time ago, and clarinets had their sweet little run too. But Coleman Hawkins, big solid hard blowing Hawk, he put the sax up there in a spot no one has really been able to bounce it from for any serious stretch of time. Lester Young came in right after that, so spooky and perfect and lackadaisically gorgeous…if Coleman Hawkins put that boot down solid then Prez just kinda slid in like a man in his socks on a smoothly waxed floor. Then Bird just turned everything inside out with his bebop thing, stepping here and there and everywhere at once almost. You try to follow those footsteps. Just listen to a solo and try to follow it. Try. Was that work or what? Your eyes crossed, huh? And then Trane? Oh man. You put Trane’s thing on top of Bird’s thing on top of Hawk’s things and all around Prez’s thing I mean, man…..you got harmonics gone nuts, fingers going crazy, you got all that forced air rushing through that crazy saxophone (and it is crazy…look at one close up) and notes and chords flying free from that bell, making crazy patterns, and if you could see them, if the notes were different colors, they’d be filling rooms, filling whole night clubs, all squiggly flatted fifths and minor sevenths and whole bars of chords piling up everywhere. Piling up like fluff or soap bubbles, wonderful notes everywhere, just pouring out of a saxophone like some kind of crazy fountain. Think of that next time you’re sitting there in some jazz joint, the sax man blowing his ass off. Imagine all those notes. Not even the piano emits as many notes (and those would be neatly stacked or maybe scattered across the floor like shards of a glass enclosure.) Nope, it’s the sax that makes the most sound in jazz. There’s just more jazz to be heard coming out of it. Music theory this ain’t. It’s just that we dig the sax.

Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker

Coleman Hawkins blowing, Bird listening.

Saxophone Players

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[c. 2008, from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly]

There are a pair of saxophonists bookending the weekend at Charles O’s that absolutely slay us every time. On Friday we got Charles Owens, fresh from a big LACMA appearance. A masterful player (and orchestra leader…the Luckman has done brilliantly under his direction), Owens plays just about every reed and woodwind ever made (just dig him on English horn) and plays a mean dirty flute; but it’s on tenor that he is on fire. At the World Stage we’ve seen him go what looked like utterly out of his mind, all Dolphy and Roland Kirk and late period Trane or a way gone Sonny running down East Broadway, you know, crazy clusters and Fulani scales and notes flying so fast, damn…. And at Charlie O’s we’ve heard the most soulful A Love Supreme, the crowd utterly silent, not a whisper or a stir till it fades on that final bass thrum…then hot damn it’s Charlie getting down with Eddie Harris, music so funky people are actually dancing at Charlie O’s, and so greasy they’re getting drunk. That’s Charlie Owens, delivering. And that’s part one. Part two is Benn Clatworthy, same stage on Sunday. You’d never think a foul mouthed Michael Cain-as-Alfie-sounding Brit would play saxophone as good as any Yank, even better than most. He’s got a voice on that thing, steeped in mid period Trane, in Booker Ervin, in lots of Sonny Rollins when Sonny was the greatest of them all. But that’s just the sound. But the ideas, the vision, the places he goes, pushing, daring…god damn. Nobody in LA does this. Maybe nobody nowhere. It can be the most radical. It can be the most hard bopping. It can be so gorgeous you will not draw a breath till that horn has expended his. His is an intense, radical, beautiful jazz playing and still completely in the tradition. So there ya go, two of LA’s most exciting saxophonists, just waiting for your ears. Oh…and who’s got the floor on the Saturday between them? Tenor Don Menza is who, and he can kick anybody’s ass. Don’t let no one tell you this town ain’t got great saxophone players.

Playing What You Want To Play

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(c. 2010, from an abandoned first draft of a Brick’s Picks column in the LA Weekly)

Was at one  of those media events a couple nights ago at an old flamenco joint in Silver Lake. All kinds of people, no idea who most of them were. But you sure could tell the musicians….they were the ones who looked so uncomfortable. Nervous, really, all these rock musicians vying for a must gig and scared to blow it. Life is rough for any  kind of musician anymore, there’s only a few venues left, and most of you out there don’t have any money to spend in  night clubs anyway. Hell, when 15% of the population has 90% of the cash in the country—that is real money, the kind you blow in a club—well, things get rough. Hard to fill joints like that. People can’t afford to see you play on a regular basis. No one has cash to record, no one has cash to back you, no one has cash to release your record. You spend your time kissing the asses of whatever impresarios, promoters and A&R people that survive, hoping for that chance at maybe making something of yourself. You soften your sound, commercialize it, make it nicer. You go pop. You go smooth. You go whatever works.

Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you just play what you want to play. You play loud, crazy rock music in dingy little dumps for freaks. Or, if you’re a jazz musician, you play your jazz straight ahead, and pour your heart out every solo. That’s what we love, those straight ahead guys. That’s why we can’t stop talking about them.

Chuck Manning and Sal Marquez

Though the party is over and the people gone, Sal Marquez is on flugelhorn and Chuck Manning on tenor, improvising on a melody for nobody but themselves. The photo (a perfect photo at that) is by the late Tony Gieske.

M

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I’ve never before seen this 1951 remake of M. It is one tough, disturbing flick, set downtown in my fair city. Most disturbing thing of all is David Wayne as a psychotic child killer. David Wayne. Right after Adam’s Rib and before The Tender Trap. That same David Wayne. He blows a weird breathy tune on the tin whistle and looks at a little girl.

david-wayne-in-jospeh-loseys-version-of-m-1951

Krzysztof Komeda

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Rosemary’s Baby has always creeped me out too much to enjoy, and of course the wife loves it. Nothing too creepy for her. I’d never watched more than bits and pieces of it, which means I missed the score in its entirety. Like just now Mia Farrow is trying to escape in the elevator and the music goes nuts with this incredible trumpet playing, crazy and dissonant and gorgeous. Wow. I had forgotten Krzysztof Komeda scored this, which I guess means that was his quartet, him on the piano and that was Tomasz Stańko blowing trumpet? Damn, I need this soundtrack.

Just a year or two later Krzysztof Komeda was in L.A. with a bunch of expatriate pals, just goofing around, drinking. Komeda tumbled and fell and hit his head. He never woke up. They finally sent him back to Poland, comatose, where he lingered and died and took all that creativity with him.

Now Mia, post partum, stricken, is screaming at the room full of old people. What have you done to my baby you maniacs? Komeda scored a drunken march here, and Stańko takes the melody where melodies are not supposed to go. God is dead, the old people chant, Hail Satan! The banality of evil. The story ends in a sweet sixties melody, a very continental pop thing of Komeda’s called Rosemary’s Lullaby, with Mia’s voice. It’s so melodic that the contrast with Stańko’s solo earlier in the scene is jolting, a melody rendered nearly dissonant by its own sudden sweetness. Rosemary, a good mother, reaches down to touch her gurgling baby, the music swells and fades, but a final note on the piano, dink dink dink dink dink dink, is left hanging, unresolved, just like this.

Krzysztof Komeda2

You see a photo of Krzysztof Komeda from 1968 and wonder what he was thinking. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.

Cannes

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There was a fascinating story in the L.A. Times today about the origins of the Cannes Film Festival (“What Cannes and the labor protests in Europe have in common”). It all began, apparently, as an anti-fascist response to the Venice Film Festival which had just given its highest award to Lili Riefenstahl for Olympia, her queasily beautiful paean to Hitler’s 1936 übermensch Olympics. The organizer of Cannes, Jean Zay, was a politician of the French left and former member of Leon Blum‘s democratic socialist government (or governments, Blum was prime minister three times as the nation went back and forth between left and right–French politics between the wars was insane, even by French standards). Zay saw the festival as the cinematic equivalent of the great French tradition of protest and revolution and streets full of workers and intellectuals and artists and red banners. He’d present films full of social realism and art and truth. He was later beaten to death for such insolence by Vichy thugs. But the festival survived him and evolved into a celebration of film and the filthy rich. Life does have its odd turns.

cannes_film_festival_0

Rich people massing on the red carpet at Cannes in metaphorical revolution.

Whole Foods

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When Gelson’s had their grand re-opening (they had been a Mayfair) in Silver Lake a decade or so ago, they had all kinds of free stuff…I remember we stopped in on our way out to eat and wound up eating so many free samples we just went back home to digest. Yesterday the Whole Foods (née Ralphs née Hughes née Market Basket) had their parking lot fair to announce their brand new Silver Lake store and they one upped Gelson’s with food trucks. Yup, food trucks. Why provide free eats when suckers will flock to your event and buy their own? OK, they were giving away potato chips, different colored potato chips even, and you could spin the wheel to see if you could win a whole bag of different colored potato chips. My wife said there was a very long line to spin that wheel. They used to have soup lines in this country. Now it’s spin the wheel.

Andromeda Strain

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Saw The Andromeda Strain again last night. One of my favorite science fiction flicks. Not only is it a helluva story with a hard science plot, but best of all one of the heroes is an epileptic. Probably the only time I have ever seen epilepsy genuine portrayed on the silver screen, or any screen:

Leavitt had a seizure.
What?  Why in the hell didn’t she tell us about it?
No top lab would have her if they knew. Insurance, prejudice, all that crap.
Sheesh….from the Middle Ages.

Those four lines nail it.

I remember seeing The Andromeda Strain in a movie theater when it came out. I was maybe thirteen and watched the lady scientist have a seizure and it was intense. Wow. There are people like that out there?

Little did I realize….

Anyway last night when Kate Reid, as Dr. Levitt, had her first spell–an absence seizure–I was asked what was happening to her. I don’t actually have absence seizures (and I am immune to flashing lights), hence I can drive. Absence seizures are called complex partial seizures. Simple partial seizures–most epileptics have simple partial seizures–are epilepsy without loss of consciousness. You’re still messed up in your own unique little way, strange symptoms and behaviors, you’re just wide awake messed up. I’ve had lots of those, nice and awake and aware. But with complex partial seizures you zone out of consciousness for a moment (or several moments). Or perhaps you are conscious, awake, but unaware of anything around you. No idea where you are. Lost. But in this first seizure scene, Levitt has obviously lost consciousness. She’s frozen, she’s out of it. She doesn’t fall down or anything, she just zones out and when she snaps back, she is momentarily disoriented. Kate Reid did a good job portraying a complex partial seizure, aka an absence seizure. Obviously Dr. Levitt didn’t drive.

An hour later into the plot, as all hell breaks loose, the flashing red alarm lights send Dr. Leavitt into a full seizure. I had several of those, at night, while sleeping, quite unsettling for somebody sleeping with me. Thankfully meds ended all that as they had seriously trashed my long term memory. Somebody asked me if Kate Reid’s was a realistic portrayal. I said I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there to watch me. I was never conscious at the time. The brain is zapped all to hell during a tonic clonic seizure, which you probably know as grand mal (“big bad”) seizures. There’s no consciousness during a big bad seizure. The brain is having one hell of an electric storm. I was watching Forbidden Planet today for the zillionth time and when Robbie the Robot tried to take on the Monster of the Id his electronic brain goes white hot with electricity and shuts him down cold. Robbie had the robot equivalent of a big bad seizure. But if you’re flesh and blood (and brain), you only know you’ve had one because everyone around you is freaked out afterward. You wake up with no memory that anything happened at all, feeling quite blissful in fact, while everyone is staring at you like you’re Linda Blair in The Exorcist. And though it’s been years since my last big seizure, I’m so medicated, I still remember their expressions. So traumatized, so concerned, and I hadn’t a clue why. You had a huge seizure they’ll say. I look surprised. Invariably they’ll ask if I remember. Unepileptic people can ask the dumbest questions.

The next day, though, it feels like I pulled every muscle in my body. You never realize how many muscles you have until the day after a tonic clonic seizure. A lot of muscles. Muscles in ridiculous places, muscles that you can’t imagine have any purpose whatsoever but suddenly hurt like hell. But that’s the impression epileptics have of their own seizures. What my big bad fits actually look like I have no idea. So I asked my wife if Kate Reid’s portrayal looked like a tonic clonic seizure. She said yeah, that is what it looked like. Six and a half feet of me stiff as a board, shaking, making unearthly sounds. Then it ends.

Great movie, The Andromeda Strain. But sadly it remains the only film I know of that shows epilepsy exactly like it is.

A complex partial seizure.

A complex partial seizure.

The Trip

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The Trip poster 2

Sat down to watch The Trip again last night, the Roger Corman/Jack Nicholson flick with Peter Fonda, and about ten minutes in it dawned on me that I had never seen The Trip. How I do not know. Great psychedelic freakout turned free form jazz score with the Electric Flag, though the occasional bass line kept making me think it was Country Joe and the Fish. A living, breathing, uncharred Gram Parsons in the club. Bruce Dern with a frightening beard. Dennis Hopper being quintessentially Dennis Hopper. Plus women in strictly supporting roles, this being the sixties. Lots of psychedelicized screwing. Grooviness and paranoia. What’s with all the horses? I didn’t know LSD came in gel caps. Peter anxious. You’re always nervous your first time Bruce Dern says. Bruce Dern knows. He knows. The score gets hazy, eastern, psychedelicized. Peter coming on. Dig those crazy colors. Peter holds an orange. That’s the sun in my hands, man! Jack Nicholson wrote, Oh, it gives off an orange cloud of light that just flows right out over the sea! Bruce Dern smiles knowingly beneath that mammoth beard. The camera follows Peter. Peter one with the universe. Peter naked and freaking. Peter home invading in a creepy scene. Peter weirding out the lady in the laundromat, who steals the scene. Peter freaking big time. You’re stoned out of your mind, aren’t you, said the blonde waitress. Peter staring, child like. Peter must have gotten laid like crazy with that look. Now Peter smelling bacon, ditching the pigs. Peter lost in acid terror, finds himself back at Dennis Hopper’s pad. Dennis senses his trauma. I wish there was some hip way of telling you this, baby, he tells Peter, but, ah… you’re one with and part of an ever-expanding, loving, joyful, glorious, and harmonious universe. I think the police are after me, Peter says. Bummer. I got a house full of pot, Dennis says, you better split. Peter back on Sunset Boulevard. Chicks everywhere, groovy blonde chicks, Susan Strasberg even, dancing, giggling, balling. Free love, baby, when in doubt, fuck. Peter is in doubt. Peter is one with everything, yet not one with anything. Crazy sax blowing turns to flute exploration. Peter is down at the sea shore to let the waves wash his mind. In the gray dawn perfectly good breakers go unsurfed. This is so beyond Frankie and Annette now. Beyond Dick Dale even. The naked lady dresses as Mike Bloomfield plays some crazy blues figure on the guitar. She asks Peter about the trip. Did he find what he was seeking? Yeah, I’m hip about time, but I just gotta go, Peter says, in the wrong movie. In comes the Electric Flag, grooving over the credits. That’s it, baby. Self-actualization, rock’n’roll and screwing on the Sunset Strip.

The Trip--waitress

You’re stoned out of your mind, aren’t you?

Suggested for me by Google

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The 5 Star Jazz Band with Elvis impersonator Ben Johnson will be playing Coleman Hawkins Park in St. Joseph, Missouri this July 31. Coleman Hawkins, who I confess to idolizing somewhat, was born in St. Joseph a very long time ago. Someday I will visit the town just to go the park. But not this year. However, if you are in St Joseph this July 31, please let me know if the Elvis impersonator is actually performing with the jazz band, as the announcement on the Google News page was unclear.

Incidentally, this was the one of the four news items Google nicely suggested for me. Hillary Clinton discussing terrorism, Ann Coulter disparaging Jews, ISIS destroying Libya and an Elvis impersonator in Coleman Hawkins Park.

This didn’t happen before the internet.

 

But this happened before the internet–Coleman Hawkins with Sonny Rollins. Paul Bley on piano too.