Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Lucky Thompson

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(Written in 2005.)

Lucky Thompson is no more.

Seattle.  He’d been there a while.  Stories were going around a few years back that he was down in nearby Tacoma, on and off the streets.  Brusque. Strange.  Working on an opera. I think he died in a home, though.  He was 81.  A good long life.  Well, part of it was good.  The last couple decades, since Lucky left the faculty at Harvard (was it? Or Colombia?)…well, they weren’t so lucky. Maybe just pre-ordained. By Lucky. Out there on the street, his head filled with arias. Alone.

Lucky Thompson is alone.

That’s how my favorite of his albums—Lucky Strikes—begins. Hank Jones lays down a beautiful little coda, then in comes Lucky on a soprano sax, blowing those seven ascending notes to open the seven-syllabled “In A Sentimental Mood”. Which is what he is really saying, of course.  “In A Sentimental Mood”, just the slightest delay before “Mood”, which he then hangs onto, exhaling it into nothingness. It’s music, though, and you can make it say whatever words you want. It could say ABCDEF…Geeeee. It could say I like ham and cheese on rye. Anything. When I read his obituary, and those Tacoma tales came back, the words I heard as the melody blew through my mind was “Lucky Thompson was alone.”  He was.

Hadn’t always been.  He was a big part of the Central Avenue Scene.  He shows up repeatedly in the autobiography of Mingus (who himself once wound up out on the street, arias in his head.) He was a major player.  Not a legend (though he might now become one; death opens up all kinds of possibilities); nor an institution.  Not even someone you hear many players cite as a prime influence.  But Lord could he play.  On tenor he was bop with a powerful swing undercurrent.  Never overly cerebral, always a hint in there that deep down this was a dance music. But on soprano…it just opened up. No one played like that.  No one plays like that. It was an old horn, hand crafted, so that on record you can almost feel the breath blowing through it. Hints of clarinet, of Barney Bigard.  Hints of Sydney Bechet, of a New Orleans funeral blues. A whiff of a jazzy primordial stew.  He doubles those notes when they come up again, tucking the added note just behind the original, lets the final note stretch to a glassy opaque, and the rest of the head ripples away, meandering up and down the scales of the horn. Hank Jones takes a gorgeous solo and brings it all back down to rich, loamy earth, then voices those ascending notes like a choir. Lucky takes the lead again, he and Jones flurry together like a couple butterflies and then Jones comps, his deep voicings bracing Lucky’s extra-ordinarily frail blowing of the head, those seven notes, all by themselves, lighter than air. Wisps. The last one hangs free, by itself. Alone.  Then piano and soprano saxophone link again, dancing around Duke Ellington’s melody to a delicate finish.

Lucky Thompson was all done.

Downbeat caption, July 1948: "Swing was born on Fifty-second Street. Devotees still go there for hot music. Here, at the Three Deuces, Hilda Taylor and a friend enjoy the Lucky Thompson orchestra. A former Miss North Carolina, she is now a professional singer." That's Al McKibbon on bass.

Downbeat caption, July 1948: “Swing was born on Fifty-second Street. Devotees still go there for hot music. Here, at the Three Deuces, Hilda Taylor and a friend enjoy the Lucky Thompson orchestra. A former Miss North Carolina, she is now a professional singer.” That’s Al McKibbon on bass, and the photographer was William P. Gottlieb.

Robert Omlit

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In 5th grade, Robert Omlit brained me with a copy of Little Women. Hardback. You don’t make fun of Little Women.

Robert Omlit was still Robert Logan at the time. Aside from Louisa May Alcott, I can’t remember what we talked about. Books, I’m sure. We were both constant readers. I’d plunder the library’s history section–Bruce Catton was a favorite–and dinosaurs. He read the classics. Each of us read a book a week, at least. We were unlikely best pals on the schoolyard, skinny funny-looking little Robert and me already five and a half feet tall at age ten. I suppose I kept him from getting beat up. I don’t think we hung out that much after school. Probably lived too far from each other. But I don’t know. He had a Stingray, I remember. I had a Schwinn.

My family moved to Virginia halfway through sixth grade and when we moved back to Orange County a year later it was to another school district. So I sort of lost track of Robert Logan. I remembering hearing from another friend that by junior high he’d gotten a bit hippie, wore an armband to school during the Vietnam Moratorium in 1969. Developed what they used to call a consciousness. Certainly smoked weed before I did, way before. But we both turned into rock’n’roll fanatics, though he was a ahead of me on that too. I was still listening to AM when he was already deep into FM. Continue reading →

Atomic Cafe

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Found this tucked away in the drafts folder, not sure how old it is. Someone told me the corner is now a hole with a subway in it. I remember the city was trying to sell the building for a dollar. All you had to do was move it. Maybe they were asking too much. 

That Senor Fish on the corner used to be the Atomic Cafe. Had dinner there with Darby Crash. We’d been next door at the Brave Dog. Probably summer of 1980. Darby had the wiener gotcha, a dude in a blue mohawk eating wiener gotcha. My wife got fried chicken. Banquet. I watched the cook open the box. The service was awful, food worse, it was wonderful. Wouldn’t last a week now. Hipsters want only the best food. Jonathan Gold made it impossible for any more Atomic Cafes. No more wiener gotcha. Now it’s overpriced ethno-hipster slop from food trucks. Oh well.

Atomic Cafe

Atomic Café in the daylight. 1980’s. The Brave Dog was this side of the Imports place.

The Kidneys

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(2014)

Saw a brilliant power trio last night at Cafe Nela that was so inexplicably original I tried for half their set to come up with a point of reference but the only one I could think of was Otto’s Chemical Lounge. Who? Yeah, big help. I talked to the band as they tore down. They’re called the Kidneys, from Cypress Park. The best new rock band I’ve seen in a long, long time. They’re all twenty years old or so. Goddam kids. Frantic, with crazy harmonies, crazier rhythms, crazy good playing. They’re so brilliant they probably have no future whatsoever. But if you want to see a new band that doesn’t sound like every other rock band these past thirty years, this is it. I’m just hoping there’s all kinds of bands like this out there, fresh out of high school, full of new ideas and trying not to be successful. Just playing crazy music and bugging all the boring people who wrecked everything.

The Kidneys in a blur.

The Kidneys in a blur.

Plastic Bertrand

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I had Plastic Bertrand going through my head all day yesterday, Someone said it was his birthday (I was never quite sure that there actually was a Plastic Bertrand…I thought it was Lou Deprijk) and shared a video which I watched nostalgically. Bad mistake. All day long I had Plastic Bertrand going through my head. Which is harmless enough–It could have been Bohemian Rhapsody or Free Bird or I Know What Boys Like–except  that I would find myself saying aloud (in a French monotone) Ca Plane Pour Moi moi moi moi moi, Ca Plane Pour Moi.  If I didn’t catch myself I’d do a couple choruses. This went on for hours. I ignored it. Last night I’d put on Joe Henderson’s Inner Urge. The title cut is one of my favorite jazz tunes ever. I can’t really express what it means to me, it’s beyond words. The lights were out and I sat in the dark and Joe was blowing and blowing and the tempo was crazy and McCoy Tyner’s left hand came down in crazy comps and Elvin Jones drop kicked and danced across the cymbals. Each soloed. Bob Cranshaw’s turn came and the bass was down, solid, grooving. Then expressive. Exploring. The music grew hushed. The room was silent. I closed my eyes and laid back awaiting Joe’s tenor return. It’s one of those jazz moments where space and silence means so much. It was just perfect. Everything silent except for the bass. And in that absolute quiet, that zen perfection, I heard another sound. It was a voice, my own voice. “Ca Plane Pour Moi” I sang, “Ca Plane Pour Moi moi moi moi moi….”

Plastic Bertrand

Plastic Bertrand

Mars

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Oh yeah, here’s Mars doing “Puerto Rican Ghost” off of No New York. Brian Eno produced. You probably won’t like it. You probably really really won’t like it, even. There’s only two kinds of music, Duke Ellington said. I’m not sure where this fits in. I know it can clear a room, except for a few weirdos. My kind of people, those weirdos.

And here’s “Tunnel”,  also from No New York. I think this used to be my favorite cut on the record back in the day. Who knows how many people I tormented with it at maximum volume. I recall playing it one Halloween and some tiny trick or treaters wouldn’t come to the door. I turned it off. Three and a half decades later it’s still a crazily imaginative piece of music (or “music”), the aural sensation of a hurtling subway is pretty incredible. That had to be Brian Eno creating that sound, knowing what buttons to press and levers to push to get that feel, like George Martin assembling “Tomorrow Never Knows” or Teo Macero editing Bitches Brew from an unholy mess of jam sessions. Back in the late ’70’s and even into the ’80’s “Tunnel” sounded stunningly alien, even scary, but I guess all the crazed electro creations of the past couple decades have sunk in and now this thoroughly analog thing sounds a little more conventional. A little more. As it spins it forms itself into a groove in my head. I can imagine people dancing to it. Weird people, yeah, but weird people dancing. Which is the title of an essay if I ever heard one. Not this one, though, but one full of weird people dancing. What a sight they make.

Mars

Spiral Scratch

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I remember picking up the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP back in 1979. The first self released punk record ever. You remember: Boredom/boredom/boredom. That one. It was a reissue and cost $4.99. That is $17 in today’s bread. $17 on a 7 inch record. That seems stupid to me now, but then made all the sense in the world.  I spent all my money on records then. I lived on top ramen and had an incredible punk rock record collection. It was all brand new, this crazy music, and buying the latest out of England was like buying be bop in the forties, obscure, expensive, essential and there went the rent money. I wore that Spiral Scratch out. Played it every day. Boredom, boredom, boredom. If you know it you’re hearing it now in your own skull. At some point in the early eighties, stoned, I lent my copy to my bass player. Sometime in the mid 80’s it wound up in his record collection in the trunk of his car when he was arrested at the Grand Canyon with no registration, several unpaid traffic tickets and a pocket full of blotter they never found. He said it was beautiful, the Grand Canyon, all the colors, the space, the presence, the being and unbeing, and he tripped his entire two week stay in a Clark County jail as well. He never went back for his car or belongings, and they were eventually auctioned off to someone who became the proud owner of an obscure Buzzcocks 7″. Not to mention a Some Chicken single. Some years later we can imagine a record geek, tired of the casinos and buffets and normal people, fleeing the casinos to haunt the thrift stores far from the Strip. Amidst the dreams and detritus he comes across my Spiral Scratch for a dollar, and something called Some Chicken. Oh boy. He shows them off to other record geeks. They’re green with envy. The years go by and he matures, takes a gig as a web developer, and bores of punk rock records and tattoos. Tattoo removal is expensive, so he puts the records up on Ebay and makes hundreds of dollars. Now he looks like a Republican and buys yacht rock and is screwing his secretary. He probably doesn’t even exist, but still, I hate the little fuck. And while the Some Chicken doesn’t bother me, I haven’t heard Spiral Scratch in thirty years.
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Never lend anything to a bass player.
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Spiral Scratch.

Best practices

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Best overdose I ever saw at a rock show was in San Francisco at some inner city commune called The Farm. It was staffed by old hippies and full of hardcore punk kids. This was the mid eighties and I remember the punk band MDC was on going on about capitalism and dead cops while off message right in front of the stage about half a dozen skinheads were slapping the shit out of one of their brethren who’d apparently done a little too much junk. One would grab him by the collar of his leather jacket and give him a full bodied crack across the face. Another would give him a crack across the face the other way. Each took their turn slapping him and finally after a maybe a dozen blows he came to. Best practices, I guess. They yanked him up and walked him around on rubbery legs, dropping him once or twice. Eventually he was sort of standing on his own, while they were trying to slam dance and falling down. By then there was some band from Seattle on with a gorgeous singer and one of the skins tried to yank her into the pit by her ankles and she brained him with the mike stand. He went down hard, bleeding profusely, but I don’t think he noticed, he was up again, laughing and wobbling and giving her shit and fell down again, blood everywhere. His friends dragged him out by his collar and tried to staunch the bleeding with a band shirt they stole off the merchandise table. About that time I said let’s get out of here and on the way out a kid in an MDC shirt cajoled a buck out of me for a Revolutionary Worker. Make sure to read what Chairman Avakian says about the fascist war on drugs, he said. I said I would. All drugs should be legal, he said. Sure, I said, why not.

A little jazz history

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Emcee George Reeves at the first Playboy Jazz Festival, 1955.

Emcee George Reeves at the first Playboy Jazz Festival, 1955.

James Moody

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(2010)

There’s gotta be something that makes it a blue Christmas. Sometimes it something big, like a war, or a disaster, and sometimes it just a passing friend. James Moody had a lot of friends. He was just that kind of guy. And that makes for a lot of blue Christmases.

You can’t say it was really tragic, though, for Moody was one of those rare jazz icons whose music and life wasn’t streaked with bitterness, anger, regret. He was the guy that made you laugh. Made you feel good.  He was the funny guy that played that gorgeous saxophone. Of course, we forget a lot. Moody, after all, “scarred by racism”, as he put it, split for Europe in the late forties for Europe. He’d had quite a young career—a long stint with Dizzy Gillespie, especially—and packed it up for overseas, where the ptomaine of the slave era racism didn’t poison almost everything it touched generations after Civil War and even a bright New Jersey kid like Moody felt suppressed by its dead hand. If you can’t beat ‘em, split, and he did.  Abroad, in more ancient lands, he blossomed. He did great stuff there (look for the killer couple sessions with Frank Foster), but Moody’s Mood For Love was the most famous result. You all know it. You may not even know you do until you hear it. It’s so deeply built into jazz by now, worked its way into the jazz DNA. It’s more than a standard. Like Take Five or Kind of Blue, it’s the kind of thing you could tuck into a space capsule and shoot into space for some alien race to find a zillion years from now and listen to and get an idea of who we are. Or were.  That tune was James Moody. And he was just beginning.

He wasn’t in Europe long, just long enough for him to shake out a lot of bad vibes and get tired of people not speaking English, and after a few years home and Prestige Records beckoned. This was New York City in the fifties and baby the jazz was happening in a big way, bigger than ever before or ever since. It was the music’s glory years, full of life and death and genius and fabulous, unbelievable jazz. Moody, a star now—“Mood For Love” had been big, radio big—did a whole string of classic sessions. If you know a jazz fan, they got some of these.   We just pulled out a small stack of vinyl, putting something on at random. “Flute ‘N the Blues”—when was the last time you heard anyone play the flute so warm and so down to earth?  And dig his “I Cover the Waterfront”, Eddie Jefferson on vocals. Oh Lord. There’s nothing like this anymore either.  Not like that “Body and Soul” either. Sure, it’s two generations old, and things and jazz change with the years. But people don’t. And James Moody was that same kind of people his whole career. Listen to that horn. It’s a big huge warm alto sound. Nobody else has that. Nobody had Moody’s sense of humor, or just his way of talking to people, especially an audience. You paid good money to see James Moody, and he wanted to let you he knew that. He never turned his back to his fans. Not even now when he’s gone. Folks that knew him, remember him, the rest of us remember the music. That absolutely personal sound of his. How on alto he made jittery bebop warm and less scary. Or could blow some big bluesy tenor that wasn’t sad and doomed and drunk. How he played earthy breathy living flute, transforming a delicate European thing into something loamy and American. And we remember his voice most of all, a voice that could melt hearts when it wanted to, melt ‘em laughing. That sweet guy, James Moody.