Groovy times in Echo Parque this Sunday. I know the bum promoters cancelled it at the last second last year and there was nada and I mean nada happening down there but some sleepy ducks and sleepier fishermen, but this year it’s new promoters who seem to have their act together and it’s a go. With a killer line-up and drum circles and salsa dancing and cuban food and Jose Marti in bronze and smuggled-in rum and Silver Lake nuevo-hipster heuros in Che shirts and half-crazed old Bay of Pigs veteranos wanting to kill them and brutally strong expresso and white cake so light it floats above the plate and and cigars and gorgeous women with legs up to aqui smoking cigars and annoying little yuppie nerds in KCRW tees complaining about gorgeous women smoking cigars and getting laughed at and pochos in straw hats looking like a pocho in a straw hat and everything. Todo. And it’s free. Gratis. No deniero. Cheap. Easy. Havana good time.
Street parking or easier but paid lot parking scattered about the fringes. You know the drill.
Cow Bop at the Cafe 322 this past Wednesday were absolutely terrific. The fiddle player was outta town so they had a kid on tenor named David Wise fill in. He was perfect. I’d seen him do a quick sit in with them once before at the Cantina and loved his sound….very very old school, a lot of Prez, etc. He can play the newer stuff too, but also loves the oldtimers. He’s from Richmond VA I seem to remember and is laid back, a rather perfect fit for this town. He knew the Cow Bop form, too….used to sit in with a local band back him that was much along the same lines…a jazzified Texas Swing. Bob Wills and Asleep at the Wheel have left a whole tradition out there that the college kids and certainly not the boppers, post boppers and out cats are really aware of. Well Bruce Forman–from Texas–can play circles around a lot of jazz pickers in town and his bones are made of Texas country and roots…he’s all about bebop and country, deep down. He plays it like he was born playing it. He was hurling the bop lines at the kid on sax who took them easily….I don’t know nothing about playing the saxophone but watching a guy run through Bird on that bigger horn always seemed impressive. And of course the kid knew the whole Bob Wills thing, was laconic as hell and had the most beat up old wide brim this side of the Army of Northern Virginia It was a very loose night, Alex King and Jake Reed getting all smartassed on bass and drums, doing funny little bass player and drummer shit that was a ball to watch. Forman just seemed to encourage it. He ought to let them do Big Wind From Winnetka. That’ll show ’em. Pammy was unflappable, though the band does their best to flap her. She backs out when the instrumental bits get crazy intense, comes in just right when the vocal is called for and all eyes are on her when she’s singing. Where the hell does she score them big old cowgirl skirts, btw? Do they even make those anymore? They are beautiful things, from back in the days when the dudes were decked out up there in the Nudie suits and the house lights would set the spangles glittering and the lady singer would wear a big pleated cowgirl skirt and colorful cowgal boots and a little widebrimmed hat with the brim curled up just a bit. The only place you can see that in town since the Palomino closed is on a Cow Bop stage. When’s Bruce gonna get himself some spangled Nudie Cohn western wear to go with that big ol’ Texas chapeau?
Bruce Forman’s playing…wow. He was taking long intros and even extended breaks sometimes and getting into these intense, light figured things…the players would sit still or maybe sizzle the high hat a bit and Forman would be experimenting…at one point he strained his left hand into some crazy chords and ran it up the neck in intervals…you could see the concern in his eyes wondering if the idea would pan out or crash. He turned to the players and said I can;t believe that worked as the band lit in. They just smiled, used to it.
Bruce Forman has a new album called Formanism that like a fool I didn’t bring into work with me today to listen to right now as I’m talking about it. It’s him and Jake Reed and Gabe Noel on the bass. They don’t do anything the right way. I mean you listen to a hundred jazz guitar trio projects and this doesn’t follow the rules. He busts them wide open. Now it’s a guitar record and unless you’re a guitarist, a really good guitarist, or a really good jazz musician, most of it will fly right over your head. It sure does mine, whoosh, a whole universe of concepts I can’t hope to dig. But not all of it…it’s different enough so that even a neophyte like me notices. Like the structure all’s different….that comfortable head/solo/solo/solo/head thing ain’t there. There’s some chamber music stretches, but chamber music with a big old kick drum propelling it along in places. That’s wrong. And there’s some almost furious bebop things that might have tripped up the cats at Minton’s since the usual pattern ain’t there, not quite. I dunno. I did the liner notes for it, and what a bitch that was. The music was deeper than I could see but still I got glimpses of something happening, something heavy. The coolness. The newness. So I went through I dunno how many drafts. I tried being a smartass. I tried talking about women. I tried sounding like a real live jazz critic. Nothing worked. I sent him a couple thngs and he cobbled something together. But it was frustrating. But I only bring this up because I’ve listened to this album a couple times since then. And I dunno if you’ve ever done liner notes but I know that by the time I’m done with them I never want to hear that fucking record again. You listen to something over and over and over again to get it down in words. Get sick to death of it. It winds up in the stacks somewhere down near the bottom, between a couple cds by jazz singers that I’ve never done more than look at the cleavage of. They came by the dozens, those CDs. Everyday. Standards and some ill-advised pop cover or two. It was depressing. But I am digressing here. I just mean that a lot of awesome albums I’ve done liner notes for are now stuck in the stacks that I never get to. So why am I still listening to Formanism? Because I keep hearing things there I didn’t pick up before? Because listening to a great, great jazz guitarist is like learning a new language that has nothing to do with English at all? Some alien tongue full of inexplicable ergative and oblique and weird temporal cases? For me it is. So I listen again to figure out more. Listen and listen.
Odd guy, Bruce Forman. Stretching jazz concepts way out when he does a trio, and sticking close to the bone when it’s Cow Bop time. Both work.
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Nawal is from the Comoros, an island nation nestled between Africa’s eastern shore and Madagascar, awash in the cultural influences of the Indian Ocean. On Aman, her new tour de force, the nearby African rhythms—that kalimba, and the drumming and call and response—mix with Malagasy melodicism and tunings and the complexities of Arabic and Indian musical traditions. Nawal’s years in France too have left their impact in some Django-tinged guitar playing, and her trio is backboned by a strong contrabassist which gives most of the tunes a jazzy thrum down the middle. The variety of songwriting and styles, that mix of sweet melody and energetic rhythms remind one a bit of much of Brazil’s best—the variety of Caetano Veloso, of Gilberto Gil at his rootsy finest (and her voice often sounds remarkably like Tom Ze). The long tendrils of Islam are never far off, and Sufism suffuses the entire project, lyrically (“God is in your mind/God is in all things”) and in long Sufi trance passages that must be remarkable in person. And dig Idris Mlanao’s jazzy basslines—it’s what jazz fan can grab onto as we listen, soaking in all the exoticism of the rest. Her live shows reportedly are even better than the album, and if you are looking for something a little different this week, Nawal is highly recommended.
I don’t know where the hell I was back in 1990 but I never heard this before. Too bad, man, I woulda flipped. Woulda been something else to bug the fuck outta the neighbors at 3 a.m. Saturday nights. We were the worst neighbors ever. Threw great parties though…nearly every weekend….The things you can get away with when you’re six and a half feet tall and wear cruel looking military boots besides. I’m 55 now, though, and quite sweet and wear regular shoes. Anyway, this is the only version of TV Eye that I’ve heard that does the original justice. It’s freaking awesome. Turn the volume all the way up, however.
When we first heard Amir ElSaffar’s Two Rivers, we freaked. This was a couple years ago and tucked away in the culturally conservative Los Angeles jazz scene—which as a rule never mixes nothing with nothing if it ain’t been mixed before—well, the crazy mesh of jazz with Arabic music was a revelation. This wasn’t like playing Miles Davis music with horns and sitars, this was the maqam of Iraq—the land of the two rivers, where ElSaffir’s father was a musician—as learned by a jazz trumpeter, improvising the melody (ruhiyya) of each piece on his horn, accompanied by oud and dumbek, buzuq and frame drums, and the Persian born, Bay Area residing saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, who can blow through quarter toned runs here and the blues there like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Which it is, really. Just listen to ElSaffir’s gorgeous tone, to the long drawn out blues lines, and his flights up and down and around those crazy near eastern scales. And how it all winds up in an absolutely swinging, Ornettish “Blues in Half E-Flat”. Rarely have two supposedly inimical civilizations melded together so beautifully. Bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Alex Cline fill out the four piece more than ably. They’re playing Monday, one night only, at the Jazz Bakery.
I always loved those long psychedelic jams, the real ones, back when the minds of players and fans were psychedelicized, to quote the Chambers Brothers. We were just on our way up Pacific Coast Highway a bit ago when the hippie station on Sirius (“Deep Tracks”) played “Liberation” by the Chicago Transit Authority. They were a pretty good band then, when they had the long name, doing an updated Electric Flag thing, I guess, less blues and more charts. Certainly sold a of records, too. I was 12 and listening to AM radio then and I remember them well. Switched over to FM a bit later and there was more of them, lots more. That’s where I would have heard “Liberation”. I had no idea that a fifteen minute song back then meant the deejay was out back getting stoned, or maybe in the john, or getting laid. All I knew was long tracks were cool. Heavy. Art. Significant. We were all impressed by long tunes, or suites, or movements, whatever, back then. It gave rock music that classical music cachet. Though let’s be honest, what no doubt happened was the Chicago Transit Authority had recorded enough usable tracks for three sides of a double LP. They needed another 15 minutes of music. Today you’d sit down and write another three or four tunes. But in 1969 every intelligent rock musician spent a lot of time out of his mind high listening to some totally gone John Coltrane. Trane doing a whole LP side of “My Favorite Things”. Trane and Pharoah Sanders doing that utterly mad 12 minutes of “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” that open Meditations. Trane just blowing free form, idea after idea after idea. His quartet doing the same. A lot of raucous soloing. Elvin Jones, baby. Elvin Jones. You’d get way high, you’d listen, maybe ohm a little. Ohm. Trane screaming, Pharoah screeching, Elvin pounding, you om aum ohming. Made sense at the time. So if the producer said we need 15 more minutes for that fourth side you just looked at the band, say yeah baby, fire up a jay and make free form rock’n’roll. Everybody was doing it. The Sons of Champlain, the San Francisco scene’s own horn band at the time, called their fifteen minute fourth side “Freedom”. Freedom, Liberation, what’s the difference? (The difference was that Chicago Transit Authority sold a million copies and the Sons’ Loosen Up Naturally sold a couple thousand). Both tunes are one of those demented aimless freak out jams that work only if the band never stops to think about it. They could do that back then, not think about something. You could get really really into something but not worry about it.. Just let it flow, man. Music–hell, creativity itself–was just a thing that happened. Not like accidentally happened, but just happened. That whole Jackson Pollack thing. Get the right mind vibe going down and let yourself go and man, look what happens. Free love happens. Free music. Free concerts. Free drugs. Freedom from barbers. Freedom from baths. From reality. That was 1969. The year opened up with Liberation and Freedom. Something in the air. Summer was Woodstock. By December bikers are beating up hippies at Altamont. Oh fuck. It all goes to hell eventually, of course. They should have known that. Pollack led to an army of wanna be pollacks, throwing paint around, making a mess. Free form played by amateurs usually completely fails. Free drugs leads to heroin. Free love to the clap. Free verse to words in heaps. But for that magic window when it does work, it’s beautiful. And even though it’s that rarely listened to fourth side of a double album, “Liberation” sure sounded beautiful that sunny wind-blown day driving up PCH. Terry Kath does this insane guitar solo for I dunno how long, forever, it’s hysterical but hey it was 1969, they were some real musicians in that band, used to playing to midwestern dance halls full of kids absolutely out of their minds on some psychedelic or another and what the fuck, go for it Terry, just go for it. It’s not loaded, baby.
Pianist Oscar Hernandez played the Blue Whale last nite…the joint’s first ever Latin anything show. This one was pure Latin jazz with a helluva band, including a righteously fired up Justo Almario on tenor and bassist Carlitos Del Puerto, who has the coolest hair this side of Esperanza Spalding. Good crowd, loud and drinking and taking up every seat, a few danced in the back, and the response was ecstatic. Not a lot of Latin jazz in LA between summers. People were jonesin’ for some. Hernandez poured it on. amazing virtuosity, I mean the cat can play a mean piano, aggressive runs and crazy fingered dances all across the keyboard…piano both melodic and powerfully percussive…the drummer and conguero got caught up in it and wailed, laying out crazy latin polyrhythms that Hernandez would plunge through. That is when he wasn’t all grace, Justo and he doing the danzon thing, very old style Cuba, all ballrooms and ladies in white chiffon dresses. Then back into a rumba, the drums laying out that montuno rhythm from way back in the forest there where the slave drivers can’t reach, that ancient african sound at the heart of Cuban music. That’s a wild sound, an alien sound, we have nothing like it here in the States, something so unadulteratedly African. But when the congas begin you can feel the whole room tense up in anticipation, waiting for Hernandez to unleash it on piano, that driving, staccato piano line that means were in for several minutes of serious business. It was too…descargas, Cachao style, heavy Cuban jam sessions, players taking turns with burning solos, and Carlitos right there in the middle, laying down one helluva mean bass line. Me and the whole room were digging every second of it, every note, and it’s a shame it had to end but it was a Thursday and Friday morning beckoned early, sleepy mornings at work hearing Oscar Hernandez’s piano still in our heads. Latin jazz done right is soooo good, that mix of virtuosity and jazz skills that doesn’t lose the fundamentally Cuban and Puerto Rican rhythm and vibe that pumps it forward. Oscar Hernandez could write a book on that. Maybe he has.
I remember my pal Ron E’s birthday party, a long time ago. I was playing drums behind my brother Jon (on sax) and a bassist. I remember Sky storming the stage and singing along to some tune we were doing. Later I was playing in a trio with Ron E. (on his big giant loud fast guitar). Sky, stoned, beyond stoned even and out of his mind high, suddenly rushing out from backstage and storming the stage again. He kinda shouted-screamed bellowed-wailed. Which means I actually had the (mis)fortune of playing with Sky Saxon in two different bands on the same night.
When he wasn’t sucking on pipes and joints, he was trying to talk chicks into getting it on with him. Young chicks and big chicks mostly. He liked ’em young and/or big around. Rock stars, ya know. Old hippies. Lost visionaries. Fruitarians. God spelled backward is dog. Really.
Part of me is slightly envious. I mean I was never really a fan, never got the whole Sky cult thing, but what a lifestyle. No one keeps you from getting on somebody else’s stage. No one keeps you from rolling somebody else’s weed. No one stops you from hitting on somebody else’s wife.
I have a few more Sky Saxon stories, know of many more…who knows how many there are? I’ve had the hippest jazz critic I know regale me with Sky Saxon stories. I told him mine. He nodded, impressed. What to me was just a weird night was to him a bit of history.
Well, Sky’s dead now. Writers gushed in all the magazines, on the websites, even in the newspapers. Not because of “Pushin’ Too Hard”. But because he was Sky. Or is Sky, the myth. Musicians shake their heads and wonder. Dope dealers hide their stashes. Ladies tingle and blush.
I didn’t mention that I hung backstage with him that night between the stage stormings, smoking out with Sky, experiencing Sky, wondering how the fuck Sky ever got there. He’d smoke, talk batshit crazy, then leap up and chase down some poor chick. She’d say no and turn red, not sure if it was a compliment or not. Most of them said no. Most of them. He was Sky after all.
(I can’t recall what this bio was written for…but I found a draft of it in my files)
Of all the zillions of musicians and singers and artists and songwriters and entertainers I ran into through my LA Weekly columnist gig, Katia is one of my favorites. In fact, I’d say she’s one of my top two very favorites but it might start a catfight. So we’ll just leave it as one of my very very favorites. She’s a helluva singer, an incredible live performer, and even her lyrics in that heavily accented English are wonderful. She is brilliant and intensely intellectual and way smarter than me and I hate saying that. And when a couple years ago she decided for the sheer hell of it to start writing short stories it was infuriating because she was instantaneously so goddamn good at it. In English no less, a language she has yet to master verbally, to say the least. And don’t get me started on her enthusiasm and sincerity. There isn’t a jaded cell in that body of hers.
Not long ago she asked me to help polish up a press release. Her copy was a lugubrious mess, as often happens to people who write fiction when they try to write something as dull as a press release. I whipped it into shape quickly. Not quick enough, though, as she was on my case in a panic the moment she emailed it to me. I said call me if you have any questions. Ring ring, she’s on the phone arguing. Ten minutes later she calls again and fights me on another sentence. Then another call, another sentence. I had planned on going out and here I was spending a Friday night at home trying to teach English to an angry carioca. She argued and argued and argued. I was right on every point, of course–I mean, the English language is what I do–but I had to fight line by line anyway. Not that I wanted to argue. She did. And she gets her way. When at last she was satisfied I swore I’d never do that again. No more writing for Katia. Of course, I had said that before. And will say again next time. She’s a writer, a helluva short story writer. I have a soft spot for writers, especially the crazy ones.
That press release was for her tribute to Elis Regina. Katia is soooo Elis. Her voice. Her vitality. Her vivaciousness and charisma. Her mastery of the gamut of Brazilian music. The high voltage sexuality. Guys swoon. They melt. They have terrific crushes on her and can’t believe I am blessed to know her. They ask me if it would be OK if they emailed her. I laugh. She’s in show biz, man, she loves that kind of attention. Email her. And they do and then tell me that Katia answered, and are thrilled to death.
Ya know…. I probably blurbed her dozens of times in the Weekly. Ran out of adjectives. She’s that good. You don’t run out of adjectives unless they’re good.
(Liner notes from the various artists compilation album Gimme The Keys, the band is Lexington (aka Lexington Devils), the tune “Wisconsin Death Trip”, 1987)
I can remember the first time I heard “Wisconsin Death Trip”. The band was playing in a biker\bar in an industrial stretch of Anaheim—you know, all parking lots and dumpsters and broken glass. The club was an immense pool hall, really, row after row of billiards tables surrounded by bikers and their women, punks trying to look like junkies and junkies like punks, old hippies with beads and bellies, barmaids with them perfect asses. Typical rock’n’roll environment. Lexington was playing to an indifferent crowd, the crowd being those who stuck around the stage long enough for them to do a song. They had a bunch of loyal, even fanatical fans who squealed and yelled to everything they did, especially the tight little Replacements-like numbers: verse, chorus, verse, lead, chorus, Thank you, “Singapore Sling”, “Mama Wants Her Baby Back”—good songs, don’t get me wrong, damn good songs. But the band looked so weird. I dunno. Not so much the way they were dressed—Frank in that James Dean / Monterey Pop Jimi outfit and that trashed little Les Paul in his giant Mexican hands; Derek like Keith Moon might have looked like if he had played for Gene Vincent, with those giant sticks he launch off his ride, actually hitting and hurting people; Eric, beautiful, serene, stoned, even if he weren’t, fingers snaking across the frets bloozin’, jazzin’, rockin’ it—and Lex, that crazed rasping voice belied by the almost pretty face El Greco’d in the shitty bar lighting, body twisting, rolling, writhing, staggering—drunk off his ass, pounding his head on the mike stand, laughing laughing laughing, the pretty pink scarf draped besodden round his neck billowing in the breeze blown by Derek’s giant floor fan. Frank is in the middle of some bloozy rock shuffle (“Lord of the Highway”) and it is an audience favorite, they’re digging it at the pool tables, shaking their cues to the beat, when he starts strangling his guitar, I mean choking it, trying to kill it, you can hear its feedback screams over everything, and he doesn’t stop and it just screams and screams and Eric just digs it and nods to Derek who brings it down, way down, all closed high hat and rim shot, and Lex struggles to his feet, kicks one of the toms laying around across the stage, and just stares at Frank, watching, studying, waiting, catching a breath. Frank’s playing with the guitar now, moving it around in front of the amp, making funny feedback noises. Eric stops, Derek taps out a quiet blooz on his shut high hat, its jagged shattered edges sticking out in all directions. It goes on like that for a while, seconds, minutes, this electric squeal and garbage can tapping. The audience doesn’t get it, a few applaud, some hoot, a big drunk biker yells something unintelligible. The band stands there. The breeze from the fan blows Lex’s scarf. It quivers a little, barely alive. Frank pulls his fingers off the guitar’s neck. The feedback expires. The stick taps arhythmically, slowly, even more slowly. The bar is hushed. Billiard balls clack. That biker mumbles. A lady with beautiful legs is walking round by the bar, looking antsy. People hit furtively from the joint being passed around. What a weird way to end a set.
I remember the next few seconds in slow motion. Frank bolts upright and turns on us, some freaked out “Foxy Lady” triplet riff distorted beyond belief explodes out of his amp and then the whole band follows, punctuated by Derek’s tom tom blasts and it’s a freakin’ Motorhead/Hendrix/Zeppelin hurricane, Lex is screaming and it goes on like that for a minute or two, the audience rockin” out or just staring frozen wondering what the fuck has just happened when it stops just–like–that except for Derek’s out of time descending roll skin-crackingly loud and it hangs there, just for a minute, then BOOMP BOOMP BOOMP BAM and what’s this? Weird guitar, soaring, building on an incredible bass line that just goes on higher with an almost intolerable suspense, drums one two three four five six one two three four five six and Lex on the floor writhing and hurting, first almost in a whisper “Saw your face in the paper…” oblivious to us, to everything but the band, “You know you looked so fine” the vocal melody alien, fragile as a child’s noodling on the piano, or a fragment of a birdsong, recorded and slowed down a hundred times. Frank is chording now, big guitar chunks smashed together, following the bass line, then leading it, then staggering away crazily into feedback then back into he melody again, Derek’s drums grow louder, Lex is walking across the stage, bumping into Frank, away from Eric, tripping on chords, kicking aside pieces of drums and empty cans, yelling into the microphone, yelling at someone in the song, , then screaming this curdling blues howl into the cacophony of drums, guitar and bass blasting this twisted “Dazed and Confused” riff till the remains lay scattered about the stage and the band asks for a beer for Lex. “He looks thirsty. Come on.” The crowd stood silent for a moment, and then screamed.
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