Category Archives: Jazz

A picture of John Altman and Peter Green

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The two are definitely on the same wavelength here. I really like this photo. They had a band then, quite jazzy, Peter getting modal, Bitches Brew, out there, groovy, John on every reed and woodwind he could get his hands on. Hippie brilliance. He was so good, that Peter Green, and the horizon was limitless, such were the times. 1970. Jimi lived, the Beatles still were. Miles was a rock star and blues, rock, jazz and eastern sounds swirled together in a perfect ever changing mix. Musicians siphoned that mix into their own sound, their own bands. This was another of those bands, with Peter Green and John Altman and other outstanding London musicians. I wish I could find the names (although that is English bluesman Duster Bennett on harp, and vocalist Danny Da Costa left his story in the comments below), but there’s nowhere to look that I can find. It was an ephemeral moment, lost but for a photo and memories four decades old. There were so many of those throw together bands then. There’s stories, there’s legends. The ultimate, you’ll remember, was Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis together. That was the ultimate band, the dream band, the jazz rock band of all jazz rock bands. And that band never even existed. Miles sent the music over to Jimi. Jimi couldn’t read music. That ended that. Peter Green’s jazz rock band–the name, if they had one, escapes me–did play one storied gig at a packed London club. This might be a photo of that gig. If not, there’s another I’ve seen, Peter with a soloist’s concentration, John waiting his turn, two or three saxophones and a clarinet hung round his neck. That’s all I know, though, a couple photos, John Altman’s stories and an anecdote or two by audience members who commented on John’s Facebook page.  No audio, no video, just a couple photos and memories. And then Peter met some strange Germans, took a chemical trip to Valhalla, and that was that. 1970 was a rotten year for rock ‘n roll, full of dead and wounded and the missing in action. A rock star Viet Nam.

Look again at the photo. I have no idea who took it, but  it’s one of those perfect shots, so vivid, and with such great composition, that it goes beyond the visual and you can almost hear the music and follow the action and catch the vibe of the moment. That’s a rare thing, those shots. You can look through a mess of  Facebook galleries and a pile of photo albums and not see one. I don’t think a person gets more than a couple of shots like this in a life time. One that people can see generations later and think wow, that’s what it was like. But music fans look at a photo like this and they sigh. They wonder what might have been, and they sigh.

John Altman and Peter Green

Peter Green and John Altman in 1970. Duster Bennett in the background..

Grace Slick

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An old jazz piano playing buddy of mine was telling me yesterday how back in 1967 this hippie chick he was dating (ahem) took him to see Jefferson Airplane at the monthly love-in in Griffith Park. He really liked the Airplane–a lot of jazz cats did–but the hippie chick insisted on standing right in front of the stage. The PA was so huge and so ridiculously loud that he was deaf for two weeks. He was mad as hell at that hippie chick, but continued dating her. Ahem. But it turns out the real reason he did not leave the front of the stage was he could not take his eyes off of Grace Slick. She was so beautiful. He even remembered how short her mini-skirt was. Jazz piano players seem to remember those things, even fifty years later. One minute they’re talking about Ray Bryant, the next Grace Slick’s underwear.

Sunset Junction memories

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(email from I dunno when, but back aways)

My standout musical memory of the Sunset Junction Festival was Universal Congress Of…it was the year they held it in Echo Park along the lake and as usual back then the festival was great but the music bland and then UCO hit the stage and were intense. Play some more of that outside shit! somebody bellowed, and they did, Steve Moss screaming on the sax, Joe Baiza just gone on electric Ornette, and Jason Kahn’s self-taught drumming driving it all ahead. They got so funky the people danced. I also remember Pigmy Love Circus ending the event year after year…loud, fierce, drunken, funny as hell. Once Spaceland took over and pulled them ya knew it was the beginning of the end. All those poppy “Silverlake Sound” acts they’d book…. That wasn’t the Silverlake sound we remembered. Our’s was much harder and weirder, but Spaceland slowly squeezed that out of the Sunset Junction. But it was also fun to always see your friends play there, though usually in the lesser slots (11 a.m.!) I remember my brother Lex’s band last ever gig was there and they were awesome. My brother Jon played there I don’t know how many times. It was all punk and cholo and aging hippies and leather boys back then…and you couldn’t go twenty paces with running into someone you knew….glorious times. I used to love that fair. For years we lived on Edgecliffe three doors up from the little triangular park where Jack Zinder died….back then our pad was party central, three days non stop partying all Memorial Day Weekend year after freaking year. The best stage back then was right there at Edgecliffe & Sunset. One mellow afternoon I went down and caught Jesters of Destiny and Universal Congress Of back to back. I have that on tape (I had a blaster and recorded everything back then…I have hundreds  of hours of stuff from about ’85-’90). A lot of the other music over the years blends into each other now in my grey matter; nothing specific stands out. Once they began bringing in rock stars, though, they fucked it all up. And the booths got so expensive local vendors couldn’t afford them. No more Silverlake Militia selling tee shirts, no more local merchants. No more people you knew trying to sell their art or their music or whatever local people sell when a booth for the weekend only costs a couple hundred dollars. We moved over the swish alps to where we are now about 1991 and in the mid-nineties the Sunset Junction weekend partying switched to our pal Sketch’s pad off just off the Bates stage and early on they had great bands there and the cover was a voluntary $2 then $3 then $5 which we paid. Cool hangs at Sketch’s….best ever time there was maybe twenty years ago and getting there at noon and parking in front of his building (Fyl would cab it later in the day) and it was so hot we wound up hanging inside all day…DVH showed up early too and pulled out a jay and then another and another and I got soooo high when we finally went through the gate it was like Checkpoint Charlie and I was gripped by paranoia and all the colors shimmered and the sounds were like Charles Ives or “Section 43” or heavy heavy dub and it was like being at the Festival on acid….

(What a difference twenty five years makes. The Sunset Junction Fair is dead, killed by greed. And if I smoked three joints now my brain would melt.)

Bruce Forman

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(March 30, 2012)

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.

Bruce Forman

John Zorn doing TV Eye

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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.

Amir ElSaffar

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(2009–Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly)

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.

Oscar Hernandez

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(March, 2012)

 

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.

Jazz album covers

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Just saw a photo of a bunch of jazz musicians–some of the very best in fact–making silly faces. I was taken aback. I mean is the serious jazz picture phase is over? Did someone kill it? I don’t have a jazz column anymore and don’t keep up with these things. I can never keep track. There have been so many phases. I have records from the fifties with these old time musicians grinning like happy drunks. Which they probably were, bombed. A little reefer. Meanwhile the bop guys are all serious, way serious. Suits too. Matching. A little too big but matching. None of them ever cracked a smile. Too many changes. Wild tempos. Pawned horns. Suits were out by the angry album cover era. Dashikis, even on white guys. With their dashikis, long hair, and horn rimmed glasses, the white guys always looked like engineers on acid. The black guys looked angry. Man, were they angry. Scary angry. I once looked at a Pharaoh Sanders album and hid under the bed for three days. I was never comfortable with the 80’s happy jazz picture phase. Sonny Rollins happy was weird. Chick Corea disturbing. I’d listen to the albums but try not to look at the covers. My favorite period was the jazz musicians in bell bottoms and sideburns and leisure suit era. You’d see them on their album covers trying to look like hippies but always looking like heroin dealers. Then there was the everyone dressing like Sly Stone period. Huge hair. Huger flairs. Heels so high they created their own weather patterns. And bling baby, bling that made Isaac Hayes blanche. Sometimes, though, the players looked less like Sly Stone and more like Elton John crossed with an electric chicken. Which wasn’t actually the intended effect. But I digress.

A lot of those albums sure were great, though.

Herbie Mann saving money on clothes.

Herbie Mann saving money on clothes.

Artie Shaw again

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Found an old flick on some station, Second Chorus, Fred Astaire and Burgess Meredith cracking wise, Paulette Goddard her usual little knock out self, and I’m not paying attention till I hear a clarinet and it’s Artie Shaw and band, doing Everything is Jumpin’. Such a sound he had, that Artie Shaw. Great stuff. Johnny Guarnieri on piano I recognized, and Nick Fatool on drums. Great Billy Butterfield trumpet solo. It was 1940. Europe going all to hell, Artie at his peak. Selling tens of millions of records, playing big halls, broadcasts, movie appearances, raking in the cash. Married to Lana Turner even. He’d be ducking Japanese bombs in a couple years, and then the Big Band scene imploded after the war. A slew of other wives. But 1940 was the pinnacle, and Artie was already bored. You couldn’t hear it in his playing, though. And he never stopped making great music until he packed it all in for good in 1954 and lived forever, almost.

Artie Shaw with Nick Fatool in Second Chorus. Not much of a movie but everything is jumping in this scene.

Artie Shaw with Nick Fatool in Second Chorus. Not much of a movie, really, but everything was jumping in this scene.

 

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Creativity happens only once

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A couple decades ago my pal John Altman was doing a session with jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli. The producer in the booth asked Grappelli to play like he did with Django Reinhardt back in 1936. There must have been an uncomfortable few seconds, perhaps a sigh. “I wouldn’t know how” Grappelli said.

People sometimes ask me to recite passages from something I wrote as if I had it all memorized. This doesn’t happen as much now but when I was writing my jazz column it was a regular occurrence, sometimes two or three times a night. What was that you said about this gig? I almost never had a clue what I’d said about the gig. No idea. Why would I? I’d already written it. It was gone. Tucked into some corner of the memory, probably, filed away, and in all likelihood never to be seen again. I can’t even recognize my own writing lots of times. People have quoted me to me without me knowing it. I ask who wrote that and they stare at me. You did. I apologize. They’d give me a look, like I must be some kind of jazz critic idiot savant. Once I laughed aloud and said what fool wrote that? It was me. I don’t ask that now. But I still find it weird that people assume I can just recite anything I wrote. Because that’s not how it works. You’re writing in the moment. And once done, you put that writing away and think about what you’ll write next. There’s nothing in the creative process that enables you to go back and recite by rote anything you’ve written. Indeed, of the million or so words I’ve written in the last twenty or so years, I can recite but one line: “Broken back mountains, a lizard, a snake, and the meaningless rippling of sand”. And I remember that only because it pops into my head every time we drive that desiccated little stretch of Highway 111 on the way into Palm Springs. That is it, the only line I’ve ever written that I can repeat from memory.

I can’t see how improvising a jazz solo would be any different. It’s purely of the moment. You’ll never create the same solo again. You might re-create it, if you listen to a recording and figure out exactly what it was you did, but next time you’re playing that piece and its your turn, that same solo will not emerge from the bell of your horn. It’s the same with words. The second draft is always a new creation. Jazz soloing is pure creativity. Not painting by the numbers. When the band leader points at you you’re on your own. And when you’re staring at an empty screen, fingers poised, that opening sentence comes to you and you roll with it. You have to. It’ll never come to you again. Not like that. Creativity happens only once.

Stephane Grappelli and Django mid-creation, 1935

Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt mid-creation, 1935.

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