So long, Med Flory

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(March, 2014)

The thing about Supersax is that the stuff sounds so great really really loud that you can blast it at a crazy party full of rock’n’rollers and they notice, move, swing without even knowing they’re swinging, and finally ask what the hell that is. It’s Charlie Parker. That’s Charlie Parker? Well, it’s a mess of horns all doing Charlie Parker. They spark one up and listen, get lost in it. Just like that the song ends. Let it play through they say. So you leave the album on. Jazz fans are made one at a time.

Rest in peace Med Flory, from me and Phyllis. We had a helluva lot of fun at your gigs–oh those demented nights at Jax–giving you lifts, dropping by your pad. You and that dog of yours. Your stories. Your jokes. Your be bop. You old viper you.

I don’t see the point in writing about jazz, you once told me, it’s like dancing about architecture…but you do it somehow. Keep it up. I just nodded, said thanks, made a joke. Always with the jokes. Two great big guys making jokes.

The problem with old be bop guys is they gotta go one of these days. All the smartassery and fire and craziness and fanaticism and melodic invention disappears with the light. Poof. They’ll come a day when there will be none of them left at all. A whole revolution–Charlie Parker’s revolution–reduced to academia and anecdotes. No mistakes. Just perfection. And you know what death perfection is.

Ah well. The world’s a smaller place when a big lug dies.

This isn’t very good, I know. I meant to say more, say less. Talk about your shows. All these memories piling up. Not sure what goes where. So I winged it. I can hear his laugh.

So long, Med Flory.

[And here is a pick in the LA Weekly for a Charlie O’s gig from 2005.]

On 52nd Street alto saxophonist Med Flory once gave Charlie Parker his last five dollars. Bird paid Flory back bigtime, though, when Med arranged his solos into Supersax. Bird…Med’s eyes light up. The wisecracks cease. He’s one of the kids who heard “KoKo” and flipped. Parker revealed whole new dimensions, musical universes. So what if bop drove the folks away? The hell with popular shit. On this night John Heard will anchor the rhythm section, guests will sit in, Carl Saunders will play miraculous trumpet. The sets will be bop, blues, maybe a casual vocal. Med’ll sit on his beat-up sax case, take a deep breath and blow like a crazy mother, eyes wild, lost in progressions. Then, remembering it’s his 78th birthday, he’ll come up for air, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “I just love to play, man” he’ll say, as the pianist unravels the melody..

(Here’s Supersax roaring through Bird’s KoKo. Play it loud.)

Supersax...Med Flory looming in the middle.

Supersax…Med Flory looming in the middle.

Cisco Pike

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Cisco Pike on TCM. The last time I saw this I was in a crowd full of hippies at the Wilshire Theatre in Fullerton, California. Weed smoke was in the air and Jerry Ford was in the White House. Kris Kristofferson is Cisco Pike. I believe Doug Sahm comes up somewhere, high as a kite. But then who wasn’t? He’s a poet, he’s a picker, Kris sings about Cisco, he’s a prophet and he’s a something, though what I can’t remember. That refrain has been going though my head since 1975, though that last something disappeared somewhere in the punk rock eighties. Three quarters of two couplets, hanging unresolved. Odd that it never bothered me enough to seek out that last he’s a. But it didn’t. As Kris sang it again on Turner Classic Movies I heard that final he’s a and thought a ha! Now I got it. But I didn’t. Within days it was he’s a something again. The three fourths quatrain has etched itself into my brain permanently. Let’s leave it. Kris has stopped singing now, instead is trying to sell a whole mess of marijuana. He’s not doing so well. He’s doing better that Harry Dean Stanton in the bath tub, though, who’s not looking so hot. And there’s Karen Black, Cisco’s old lady, who was in everything back then. Gene Hackman–it’s Gene Hackman Day on TCM, with this stuck between The Conversation and French Connection–is a cop gone bad, and he’s creepy and inexplicable and irritating all movie long.  Gene probably doesn’t watch this one a lot. There is a plot, one of those early seventies sort of plots full of hippies and rock’n’roll and jaded stoner wisdom, but far be it from me to give away the twists and turns. A cult picture, they call this. The hippies in the Wilshire Theatre snickered even then. I remember being thoroughly confused by the story. Let’s see if I still am.

Yup, I was.

Seinfeld

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I remember when Seinfeld went off the air and I told someone at work I had never seen it and soon there was a stream of people coming by my desk to ask if it was really true that I had never seen Seinfeld. Apparently I had done something really wrong.

The Saints Are Coming

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Watching a hockey game on ESPN–a rare thing, hockey on ESPN–and an ad for an upcoming New Orleans Saints game is on and I immediately recognize the vamp to the old Skids song The Saints Are Coming. Wow. I loved that song, but it’s ancient history. It’s quickly obvious that it’s not the Skids, though. Google said it might be U2 and Green Day doing a limp rock star rendition some years ago. Well, Google didn’t say limp, I said limp. But it was. Or maybe it is some ESPN only version. I have no idea. I just thought it was bizarre hearing a Skids tune that was utterly unknown in the US back in the day in an NFL ad. Now somebody will tell me they play it every time the New Orleans Saints play and that everybody knows that except me. Life is so bewildering when you never watch football. Drop the puck already.

Anyway, Team USA was beaten by the Kazakhstani Paralympic team and have now gone home to earn millions and millions of dollars.

Safe European Home

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I wore this record out back in ’78, played it incessantly, and this opening tune even more incessantly and as loud as possible from that first snare blast till even my roommates came to love this song. I’d loved everything the Clash had done before then–Complete Control especially (wore out two copies), and White Man in Hammersmith Palais–and I didn’t like much of anything they did after this LP–they turned instantly way too commercial for me, way too pop–but this album cranked hard and massive and when I saw ’em on their first US tour at the Santa Monica Civic, it was one of the most thrilling concerts of my life. There weren’t even a thousand people in the joint, but it seemed like a million.

Listening to Bob and Ray

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Listening to old Bob and Ray radio shows for a couple hours in isolation is pretty mind bending. I have a whole library of Bob and Ray, maybe a hundred very weird 15 minutes, and you can get lost in them, doing whatever it is you need to do, and when you finally turn them off, the world seems some discombobulated and unBob and Ray and wrong. Maybe it’s those McBeebee Twins, a bit that is actually somehow disturbing, like how did Bob and Ray think up that bit, and why, and was anyone damaged in the process, like people in early LSD experiments, or dogs sent into space, or saxophonists who blew free jazz so hard that melodies terrified them and they hid under their beds hiding from syncopation and the landlord.

Meat

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Watching a David Attenborough documentary–Planet Earth–with a Sioux Indian is mildly disconcerting. Attenborough is intoning about the bison. That’s a magnificent animal I say. That’s a lot of meat, she says. We used to hunt them with arrows, she says. You could kill them with arrows? Nah, but if you could immobilize it you could hack at it. I blanch even whiter. That’s a lot of meat she says again.

Real estate values

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There was a fatal stabbing on the east side of Hoover street. Domestic squabble. Sad. The east side of the street is Silver Lake now, since the LA Times set the borders hard. West side of Hoover is East Hollywood. It used to be that apartments for rent on the east side of Hoover were Silver Lake adjacent, but stabbings were in East Hollywood. Or Virgil Village, actually. Virgil Village disappeared somewhere on the maps and now East Hollywood goes all the way to Beverly, where there is nothing even vaguely Hollywood. Silver Lake tumbles down from tony breezy heights to come to a hard stop on Hoover Street. If only the tiff could have been taken across the street. It’s narrow enough, two lanes, tight parking, a moving trucker’s nightmare. They could have run over there easily enough. But no, it happened on the Silver Lake side, and now the crime reports scream murder in Silver Lake, a knife flashing through very expensive air, and try explaining that to the lawyer you’re selling that insanely overpriced bungalow to.

Theo Saunders and George Herms tonite, Friday September 16, at LACMA–6-8 pm FREE.

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Theo Saunders and George Herms tonite at LACMA–6-8 pm FREE.

Sitting here listening to Theo Saunders Jassemblage for the umpteenth time, digging how each tune is different tunes pieced together crazy logically illogically into new things, like Nuttiness that is half a dozen Monk tunes in one, or I Steal Good Moments that somehow slides Oliver Nelson’s Stolen Moments inside James Brown’s I Feel Good (or is that vice versa?), or the gorgeous Naimanox or Caramanteca or or more Monk in Rubistrophy–Theo Saunders digs his Monk. Great band on board this CD too–Chuck Manning and Louis Van Taylor on saxes, George Bohannon on the trombone. Love this album. Love it even more as the great George Herms designed the sleeve. Meanwhile, as I listen I’m flipping for the umpteenth time through the gorgeous double volume The River Book, which just gushes with George Herms crazy brilliant art. Madness, this stuff, things he finds and turns into other, cooler things. It incluides a DVD of a show he did at the REDCAT a few years ago that I still have difficulty describing. But why should I? After all, tonite, Friday, September 16 from 6-8 pm George Herms and Theo Saunders and band–including Phil Ranelin and Chuck Manning–will share the stage at LACMA and its free. Free free free. Be there. This has to be one of the jazz and art events of the summer. The year, even. Certainly the now. What a spectacularly groovy and weird and swinging and out way to begin the weekend. Believe you me, this will be something pretty special. And believe you me, be there or be unassembled.

Great Society

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Here’s an obscure psychedelic classic by San Francisco’s Great Society. You used to hear this spooky take on Sally Go Round the Roses on the free form FM stations on occasion in the ancient daze when a DJ was hip to the band. Recorded in 1966, released in ’68 after the Airplane became superstars (Grace Slick began in this band), check out Darby Slick‘s guitar extended solo….way ahead of the curve, he soon went off it entirely, when he went to India to really get deep into the roots. (Check him out on Facebook). Also, dig Peter Van Gelder‘s soprano sax in the long vamp that leads into White Rabbit. If any other rock band was getting that far out (as they used to say) with the Trane inspired reed work in 1966 I’ve never heard ’em, and notice how naturally it folds into Darby Slick’s raga inspired solo that follows. Grace Slick’s vocals blended in perfectly. Brilliant and vastly underrated stuff by a band that even more than most at the time, didn’t seem especially concerned about being rock stars, let alone making top forty singles. I had an early vinyl version of these recordings–think it was a double LP–way back when, have no idea where it went. Somewhere stoned, no doubt. Feed your head.