Category Archives: Jazz

Cow Bop: Too Hip For the Room

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2011: Bruce Forman asked me to write the liner notes for the new Cow Bop album. I don’t want the usual jazz liner notes, he said. Just write like your usual crazy self. Just start riffing. So I riffed a take. I like this, he said, got another? I riffed another, and another. Yeah, he said, I like these. Anymore? So I dashed off another. That it? I gave him one more. Five takes. That enough? Yeah, this is great. I’ll use one for the CD, he said, and another for the website, and he cut me a check. Cool. Can’t remember which of the five he used, though. But if only all liner note gigs were like this.

Cow Bop Take 1

Too Hick For the Room my big city ass. Sounds just right by me. This town, hell this world, needs a lot more Bob Wills. Western Swing is air you can breathe, smoky and boozy and dudes out in the parking lot fighting. Inside the honky tonk everyone’s grooving and swinging, hell there’d be dancing with the ladies if all them uppity jazz swells and slick hipsters would or could take a step or two. Man, can these cats play. Cow Bop ain’t no country radio band (not yet anyway), ain’t no jazz band either, but mama they sure swing, and yup that’s some pure Charlie Parker you’re hearing there in that mind blowing guitar solo. Bruce Forman that cat is, a barbed wiry, smirking smartass in a Stetson. The fiddler trading licks with him is Phil Salazar, and the hottie singing sweetly in the middle is Pinto Pam. Hands off, fellas, she sizzles. A dude I knew heard this album just once, jumped into his car and headed straight up the Grapevine where the mule deer and antelope play. Bakersfield is up that away, he said, next best thing to Amarillo. They got pickup trucks there, and cows and oil fields and chicken fried steak, and they got the Silver Palace and Merle and honky tonking Saturday nights. They got Cow Bop? No, he said, but they should. Best western swing in the land.

Cow Bop Take 2

Never expected to see something like CowBop in a jazz club. Saw ‘em take the stage in cowboy hats, pronghorns glued to the bass drum, singer in a long cowgirl dress. The regulars in the jazz joint stared over their cocktails, not getting any of this. The music was lightning fast, kinda swingy but awfully down home too. And man could those cats play. Solos zipped back and forth from fiddle to guitar and back again. Damn if that smartass guitar player wasn’t quoting Charlie Yardbird Parker. And ol’ crooked horn Dizzy too. And a lot of Bob Wills. The pretty girl sang about Texas, and dancing, and drinking, and men doing ladies wrong. By set’s end I was hooked, line and sinker. Y’all got any records? They said they had a couple. We got a new one we’re working on too. Yeah? Any good? Goddamn right it’s good. It’s gonna make us stars. And they packed up their gear and tossed it in the back of an old red Chevy pick up and took off in a cloud of dust. Well, that new one is this one here, Too Hick For the Room. Hot damn. What they call great driving music. That long stretch of highway between Tulsa and Bakersfield went by in a flash. Cow Bop.

CowBop Take 3 Continue reading →

Les McCann

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(2010, from a Brick’s Picks column in the LA Weekly)

This Friday at LACMA the L.A. Jazz Society presents their Los Angeles Jazz Treasure award to the great Les McCann.  Even if you don’t know the name you know his signature tune “Compared to What”. Talk about a soul jazz classic, it cooks hard and is funky as hell too. Not to mention one angry tune, angry at the War mostly, but at everything else too, all the bullshit that going down in 1969. “Compare to What” quickly morphed into a Civil Rights anthem in the bitter days after the Jackson State Massacre, when “People Get Ready” seemed too quaint and optimistic for the heavier times. Jazz-wise, Les McCann laid out the tune’s funked up piano and that wonderfully pissed off vocal, saxman Eddie Harris wailed on the thing, trumpeter Benny Bailey too. You’d hear “Compared to What” on the jazz stations and the R&B stations and on the free form hippie kid stations for years afterward, slipped between angry funk and Gil-Scott Heron. For sure he got sick to death of the thing soon enough, people yelling out for it all the time, no matter what he was playing, and he played an awful lot of great music over the years. But yell it out again here…they did at Playboy, where he also appeared with tenor Javon Jackson’s quintet, and he performed a pumped up and righteous rendition, too, ten thousand voices chanting god damn it, real compared to what? Having Jackson here at LACMA is a special treat, we’ve been digging his stuff for years, he’s a brilliant player; we just love his great sense of dynamics. His own grooving take on the soul jazz thing is alive and creative, never clichéd. Dig this one people, give it up for Mr. Les McCann and this smoking band. It’s free, too.

Eye doctor

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(2010, from a Brick’s Picks column in the LA Weekly)

Listen, man, Dr. Elliot Caine is up front explaining  astigmatism to a Highland Park hipster mom when Cannonball just starts burning on alto for a zillion choruses, then Hank Mobley comes in, takes it back to the head and in comes Miles again. A little while later it’s a funky Lou Donaldson session, then an even funkier Lonnie Smith with a groovin’ George Benson before he got so damn rich. And look around….half these cats are up on the walls, no waterfalls and floral scenes in Dr. Caine’s office, just classic jazz photography. As we’re about to step back out onto York Boulevard we hear the opening strains of Search For the New Land. Dr. Caine looks up from the scrip he’s writing, says ya gotta have some Lee Morgan, man, then goes back to optometry. It’s pretty damn hip office for an eye doctor. He’s got a pretty hip band, too, at Alva’s this Friday. Tenor Carl Randall, bassist Bill Markus and drummer Kenny Elliott are solid players and veterans of the jazz grind, earning and learning the craft the hard way in the joints and bars along Central Avenue or on Chicago’s South Side or in just whatever dive was booking for a while before turning into a disco.  The experience shows, when they do a blues it’s down and dirty, when they launch into one of Caine’s exciting post bop things it smacks of the street and a zillion worn out Blue Note LP’s, not of art school. Caine’s trumpet reflects decades of long nites doing casuals or blowing high notes in funk and Latin and ska bands while learning every Lee Morgan and Miles solo just to see just what made them tick. Sitting in again is astonishing young pianist Mahesh Balasooriya, who in a town awash in ridiculous keyboard skills stands out for the visceral power of his playing, a virtuosity stripped of frill and niceties, just stunning jazz power. And brilliant Nick Mancini returns for this live session too, bursting with ideas that no matter how arcane or out or gorgeous he never lacks the vibes chops to pull off. (Nick also writes a great gig announcement—get on his list.) It’s an evening well worth your ten bucks, especially when you can bring your own drinks and eats and there ain’t a bad seat in the house. Plus LeRoy Downs in emceeing, and he don’t do no bogus gigs.

Miles Davis

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(from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, 2010)

Miles Davis. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Colombia Records is just making sure.  They’ve repackaged everything He did for them, then repackaged the repackages, finally they stuck all the repackages into a trumpet case and are selling it for a jillion dollars. One of those way limited editions that millionaire jazz fans just have to have. Not even critics get that thing. They’d probably just sell it to Amoeba anyway. Critics do get invited to the fancy release parties though. Free food, free booze, free respect. Colombia and the Miles Davis Estate do these things up good. The Bitches Brew one was atop a fancy Beverly Hills hotel. Rooftop, baby. Look at all those rich people way down there. They had live Miles projected on the side of a building and he was like a dozen feet tall. A giant, huge Miles. A young hippie-ish Chick Corea was mad on the keys, and Wayne Shorter was so rad. If you stood just right the light reflected on the glass wall surrounding the roof and a gigantic mega-Wayne Shorter loomed over the Hollywood Hills, blowing crazy saxophone. A sky god. Unstoned, it looked cool. It might have been terrifying stoned. The thing is, though, that Wayne does not loom vast over the city. Not even Miles does.  That’s why they were throwing this big bash. So we’d tell you about this new Bitches Brew reissue that we’ve had in the changer here now for weeks. It’s a good one, people. Real real good. But we wish this stuff did loom over American culture like that giant Wayne Shorter. And that music meant as much to people nowadays as it did a generation ago. Oh well. Those were different times. The poets, they studied rules of verse, and the ladies, they rolled their eyes.

[Yes, the last couple lines there were copped from Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane”….]

Pete Christlieb

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(2013)

Pete Christlieb was so goddam good at the Desert Rose tonite. The applause after every solo and every tune was loud and prolonged, impassioned even. I know I was transfixed…Christlieb has this huge sound, strong and muscular, and a tone you never really hear anymore. We caught the last set, and he owned that room, filled it with sound, danced around the melody like a boxer always on his toes, jabbing, pulling, throwing the sudden punch, or the slow motion sidewinder that lifts the tune right off its feet. And sometimes he was that fighter on a leisurely run down the beach, throwing jabs and dancing, one two, one two, one two three and pow. The band was so hot, Jon Mayer especially, playing like only he does, these brilliant solos like shards of blues and jazz strung out in  perfect, crazy, beautiful forms. No sweeping arpeggios for Jon Mayer, rather he breaks them up and reassembles them, like you know jazz pianists did before they were all university trained. Chris Conner was in heaven on his 180 year old bass just out of the shop–repairing that thing took two years, and when he pulled out the bow and followed Christlieb’s fiery solo you can hear just why it takes two years to revive a 180 year old bass….the thing resonated like you can’t believe. This ancient, beautiful sound quality, so rich, a perfect match to Christlieb’s own rich tone. And drummer Mark Z Stevens–this is his trio, and his  weekly gig–was so freaking tight, tighter than I’d ever heard him here, that in the pocket doesn’t do him justice. What a quartet this was.  But it was really all about Pete Christlieb, that sound, that style, that presence. Maybe a dozen or so bars in I was thinking Dexter Gordon and suddenly he’s doing Dexter doing Good Bait and I nearly fell out of my chair…a bit further on he’s quoting Sonny Rollins. And why not? He’s in their class. That’s how good Pete Christlieb is, he’s one of the greats. One of the true greats. A hundred years from now they’ll be lining up all these tenor players like gods, and Pete Christlieb will be in that pantheon. Yet  not even jazz fans in this town realize that, most of them. If they knew–if they’d seen what I just saw tonight, heard what I heard–they would know that, know what a lifetime of saxophone dominance the man has coming out of that horn, and they’d beg for the chance to sit four feet from the bell of his saxophone, eyes closed, sipping whiskey and wondering how it was that they happened to be in such a right place at such a right time. But that’s jazz, man, that’s the nature of improvisation. It just happens, and you have to be there. And I was. For that last set, I happened to be right there, in a perfect seat, with a perfect drink, in perfect company, hearing perfect jazz saxophone. Pure jazz it was, people, the purest, and it was beautiful.

The Mark Z. Stevens Trio (sometimes plus a horn, as tonight) is there every Saturday night from 7-11 p.m. at the Desert Rose, corner of Prospect and Hillhurst in Los Feliz, right across from the new Cap’n’Cork. In fact it stands on the grounds of the old Cap’n’Cork, where Ernie Kovacs bought whiskey and cigars and dreamed up his next crazy show on ABC, all proto-psychedelic and surreal and hysterically funny. I think about that every time I’m there eating one of their hamburgers or just drinking a whiskey (Irish, Kovacs preferred sour mash) and watching and listening. The food is good, the bar is full, the waitresses gorgeous, and the jazz is just fine.

(And in 2016 the Trio is still at the Desert Rose every Saturday night.)

Dwight Trible

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Had my mind blown by an open air Dwight Trible set yesterday afternoon (on Saturday, April 30) in Leimert Park. Trevor Ware on bass. Theo Saunders on piano. Yow. Apparently there will be another open air Dwight Trible set next weekend also in Leimert Park (and also absolutely free, money wise). Will keep you posted. Every time I see him perform I think that Dwight Trible is maybe the greatest thing in jazz at this moment, and has been for many moments so far, and yet so few seem to realize it. Next week add in Justo Almario on tenor, and there will be a point where your mind will sizzle past the point of no return.

Leimert Park is gorgeous, and cool and amiably funky, a hipness as yet unhipsterized, where people wear Eric Dolphy tee shirts because they actually knew Eric Dolphy, and kids in dreads do the Big Apple. Dwight soars above it, meanders through it, grooves inside it. I could hear him two blocks away as I drove up. I walked in, said hey to a pal and was nearly run down by Barbara Morrison in her souped up motorized wheel chair. I love the place. Seen so much incredible jazz down there over the years. Ordinarily jazz in LA comes in tiny confined spaces, like Charlie O’s or the Blue Whale or the World Stage or the four tables in front of the stage at JAX, rest in peace. But in Leimert Park it can cover entire city blocks, audible blocks away. It’s in the air, in the streets, in the bones.

So next week, Dwight Trible in Leimert Park. Details anon. Be there.

Dwight Trible

Dwight Trible (I believe from a London gig, unknown photographer.)

Jon Mayer again

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Went to the Desert Rose tonite to see saxophonist John Altman with the Mark Z Stevens Trio (Mark on drums, Chris Conner on bass and  Jon Mayer  on piano.) Alto Kim Richmond sat in for a stretch, always a joy, and the superb Mike Lang sat in for a pair of tunes on piano at the beginning of the second set, playing beautifully as always. While Lang played, Jon paced the room like a mountain lion smelling blood. He wanted to be back up there. After his second tune Mike Lang returned to the bar as the crowd applauded warmly. Jon sat down at the bench, an evil gleam in his eye, like it’s the 1930’s and it’s a cutting contest and it’s his turn now. Altman counts down and Jon went instantly mad on the piano, crazy comping, big fat angry chords with all kinds of Monkish space in between, and when it was his turn to solo he did so with a vengeance, grabbing the melody with both hands and whirling it into submission…building and building, each run more intense and impressive than the one before, beautiful figures and shards of melody and turning the old chestnut–damn I can’t remember the tune right now, but you’ve heard it before–turning it into something stunning, muscular, and intensely creative, just absolutely fearless improvisation. When he resolved it and dropped back into the head the crowd burst into loud, sustained applause, the kid behind me whooping like it was a rock concert. What an absolute treasure this cat is. Learned his art in NYC in the crucible of the fifties, brilliance and self destruction going hand in hand. He dropped out for a couple decades, wound up in L.A. No one here plays like Jon Mayer, and yet somehow he remains in the shadows. No one said jazz was fair.

Then Sonny Rollins speaks, talking through his horn

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This is from an unpublished piece I wrote back in 2005.

….So the extraordinary facility of his early years, the 15 notes per second on Saxophone Colossus that Greg Burk cited in the LA Weekly last week…well, that was what young brains can come up with.  Young brains, young fingers, young lungs…. And the later stuff, the intricacies of The Bridge…well, that was the result of thousands of hours of contemplative, strenuous wood shedding, blowing into the wind, over the blasts of steamships and the cacophony of New York traffic. And even later, as the sixties wore on and Sonny’s tone became more voice like, the Bach complexities replaced by runs that sounded like him talking, as if three little words that emanated from the bell of his horn were even truer than the words that came with his speech…well, that is the result of a lot of struggle, a lot of searching, of endlessly questioning everything as you do it…. I think that finally, perhaps, he got to some point where he felt his seeking was over.  All that Eastern religion, the stumping around India after wisdom, late nights thinking, blowing, thinking some more….it had all come to a result. A place. I wonder if you can hear it on East Broadway Rundown. That’s a ferocious twenty minute title track…beginning with a wild head of almost Tijuana Brass simplicity but at a hurricane tempo, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, fresh off the Trane, work up a savage rhythm, the bass pulsing, throbbing, Elvin locked in a monster polyrhythmic groove, and Freddie Hubbard and Sonny blat, howl and finally, shriek, and then push it on even further to these unearthly staccato squeals that swirl around Elvin and Garrison like the seagulls that used to scream and kite around Sonny out there on the Williamsburg Bridge. At last their cries fade and we are left with a moment of silence.

Then Sonny speaks, talking through his horn.  I don’t know what he is saying.  Perhaps he is talking with the gods, or Buddha, or some inner self, or to the Muse itself.  But it is there, a sentence or two of words that come out of his horn.  It is as if he has reached some stage, some state, a place that Trane never got to through all of his screaming.  That Ornette never even tried to get to because he didn’t believe in it.  That Bird never even knew existed.  If it did.  Or does.  But it did for Sonny.  Or so it seems to me.  There, in that studio, just shy of the twenty minute mark, Sonny reached Nirvana. Or Olympus.

Then again maybe not.  The mind can run riot when the music blares in the dark….

 

Sonny Rollins reaching.

Sonny Rollins, reaching.

 

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Infinite groove

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(from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, c. 2007)

The table was so close it abutted the stage, and when Azar blew that soprano of his you could look straight up into its innards and almost see the frantic rush of notes coming out all harmonized. It was that close. So close that you could feel the rhythm section, Lorca Hart’s pounding toms and John Heard’s thrumming bass and Nate Morgan’s jagged chords vibrating through the stage and through the table and into our bones. They had a groove going, a monster jazz groove, and it was unstoppable…even Azar gave into it and left the stage to let the groove whirl itself senseless, turning and turning, ever widening. Morgan’s fingers were completely mad, pounding and pirouetting insanely intricate melodies out of Monk and McCoy and the blues and Chopin. Lorca, laughing, was all motion and whirring sticks. Yet things did not fall apart, for holding down that center was Heard, just his second night back at Charlie O’s after a long, scary illness. He leaned into his instrument and laid out a perfect lattice of bass notes that held everything together as it propelled it all forward. No mere anarchy this. This was an infinite groove. This was a happening. This was jazz in all its overwhelming power, deep black music played white hot. Nothing else mattered. Not the whole crass music business, not the manufactured pop and rock and hip hop that passes for American culture anymore, not a music press that pompously elevates mass-produced trash into art. None of that mattered, not an iota. This was a Sufi moment, all the horrors of the world dispelled by the twirling monster groove. No one slouching nowhere. When at last it came to a stop, the audience, spent, exploded with applause and rushed the stage to congratulate the players like they’d won the Stanley Cup.

But then if you dig jazz you’ve been there. Moments like that don’t happen every time, but if you see enough jazz you’ll experience them. It’s one of the very last things in America, this battered America, that can take a sick and tired you and make you feel like you touched the sun. It still does what the American music industry has destroyed in almost every other music. It remains real, unpackaged, spontaneous. It’s immune to marketing campaigns and image consultants. They may have killed rock and pop and the rest, sucked them dry, but they haven’t touched jazz. Certainly not that night at Charlie O’s…for if there had been any A&R people in the audience that night, as Lee Ving once said, they certainly went and died.

Azar Lawrence

Azar Lawrence

Jon Mayer

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Saw Jon Mayer last nite out in Beverly Hills. A trio gig, with rock solid down the middle Chris Conner on bass, always good, and Roy McCurdy on drums. They don’t make drummers like Roy anymore. All that power. Not Elvin Jones power, but metrical power, swinging like he swung everybody, Cannonball Adderley and everybody. Jon was playing a huge piano that was last tuned in 1967 or thereabouts but he didn’t seem to have much trouble with it. I was at Charlie O’s one nite–might have been this very same trio–and I was sitting with John Heard back at the bar. Heard was digging Mayer’s playing, totally digging it, and said Mayer was the real thing. “That’s the way they used to play” he told me, “trying stuff on the fly, taking big risks like that. Just pure creativity. They don’t do that anymore.” He said something like that, anyway, back at the bar downing a brandy, me a whiskey. We listened to Mayer working through whatever it was he was aiming at, and I got it. Heard what John Heard was hearing. Saw in Jon Mayer’s face that creative process Heard was marvelling at. Sometimes an idea wouldn’t pan out and Jon would curse to himself and strained a second to rebuild it into something that would work. Fearless improvisation, falling back on nothing but the centrifugal force of pure jazz improvisation to carry it along. It’s like Mayer doesn’t see a beautiful lattice of possible patterns, nothing he learned in school, nothing somebody else did before. That doesn’t even seem to exist to him. He’s not making art, like pianists tend to do anymore, he’s making jazz. Pure jazz. Jazz the way it was played in NYC in the 1950’s, when he was first gigging. You can imagine the heavy cats he had to play with, play for–hell, there was a session with Trane, even–back when jazz was at its absolute apogee. Those were then days that all jazz musicians look back at now as Olympian, as something jazz players now would give anything to be part of, and Jon Mayer was there, really was. You can hear it in those crazy clustered chords of his, these sensitive yet almost dissonant things he drops in where almost everyone would lay out a straight melodic line. I mean he’s not dropping any huge Monk clomps, not even dropping one handed bombs like McCoy Tyner, but instead turning the melody into pieces, oddly shaped pieces he lays out with spaces between them that distill into single notes that plash on the keys like drops of rain water. He does this even in the most gorgeous tunes, a magnificent Green Dolphin Street or something by Tadd Dameron, or something he’s drawn up himself.

I dunno, I find writing about jazz piano impossible, absolutely impossible, and I flail around looking for ways to explain something that I don’t even understand. I wrote about jazz in the LA Weekly for seven years and never did learn how to write about jazz piano. I failed again with this. But Jon Mayer’s piano playing affects me like no other, I just listen in disbelief wondering how his musical thought process works. And I wonder if anyone else in town realizes what a treasure this jazz player is, and why they aren’t lining up to see him. He’s that good.