I was once in a crowd of Rush fans all wearing Rush tee shirts watching a Rush tribute band doing all Rush songs just before a Rush concert. The Rush fan couples all wore matching Rush tee shirts. I thought the Rush fans would be singing along but instead were studiously debating how much each Rush song sounded just like it did on the Rush album. Anyway we got bored and left after the song about Tom Sawyer and walked back through the fairgrounds, then turned and headed back. There was still a crowd of Rush fans all wearing Rush tee shirts watching a Rush tribute band also in Rush tee shirts doing all Rush songs just before the Rush concert. The Rush fan couples still all wore the matching Rush tee shirts. They weren’t the same Rush fans, though, I’d seen other Rush fans wearing Rush tee shirts walking through the fairgrounds. It was an interchangeable Rush audience. A modular crowd. You could remove a couple in matching Rush tee shirts and they’d be replaced by another couple in matching Rush tee shirts. They’d watch the Rush cover band a while, discuss how much the Rush tribute band version of the song sounded like the song on the real Rush album, and then leave for a bratwurst and a beer and be replaced by interchangeable Rush fans in Rush tee shirts. I thought by now with all the beer they’d be singing along but they were still studiously debating how much each song sounded just like the album, only debating a little louder. I’m actually not sure if the Rush tribute band playing when we returned was the one that had been playing before. There was a whole string of Rush cover bands playing outside the arena that afternoon. This one didn’t play the Tom Sawyer song though, or if they did I didn’t hear it. I would have recognized it, however, because it’s the only Rush song I know and could tell how much it sounded like the one on the album. Not that I have the album. I mean, I can’t stand Rush, personally, but it was an interesting experience, plus I could have had my computer repaired on the spot.
Bloomfest 2012
(Bloomfest in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, July 21, 2012)
Burrito wagons. That’s what was missing. Burrito wagons. Taco trucks. Back in the day that is what that stretch of Alameda Avenue was all about: artists, punks, winos and burrito wagons. Besides, their food was way better.
Spent the whole say at the Bloom Stage with all the geezers. We knew all of them. Beautiful time. Perfect. Saw some ex-Betty Blowtorch thing that shredded, Carnage Asada were loud and pounding and better than ever and ya gotta love frontman George. Saccharine Trust are one of the great bands of our time. I remember seeing them at Al’s three decades ago opening for the Misfits. (I remember seeing them for the very first time at the Cathay in 1981, but that’s another story). Mike Watt and the Missingmen doing double nickles on Hyphenated-Man. The Gears had a slam pit going for chrissakes with big huge inner tubes that people went crazy with and they bounced and bounded and knocked shit all over the place and watching some of the dads out there skanking was a trip…I hadn’t seen that in decades. Just no one gets hurt now. No bloody lips or black eyes or broken bones. Just good clean fun. Al’s Bar was a time warp. Surreal. It looked just like our Al’s Bar–it was our Al’s Bar, but it’s so clean now. So clean it was almost eerie. They sweep the floor now. They painted over the graffiti. The hole in the wall is covered up. The pool table is gone. The photo booth is gone. (Did that photo booth actually work? I just remember people fucking in it.) The wife and I had our 20th anniversary at Al’s Bar, I remember. That was forever ago. I had my 40th birthday party in there. That was forever-er ago. I smoked dope with Kurt Cobain there out on the back patio, and he’s been dead forever and ever. Continue reading
Charlie Haden
Saw Charlie Haden at REDCAT tonight….his last show ever, I’m told. What a solo to go out on, Blue in Green, all that emotion, that beauty, not a note wasted, not a note that didn’t grab us, it was nearly overwhelming. We let the last thrum fade into the air before bursting into applause. It was an oddly restrained applause, an overcome applause, exhausted applause. Goodbye class, he said, smiling, laughing–he’d laughed all night, laughing and joking and being funny as hell–and was nearly overcome once, remembering Scott LeFaro (they’d been discussing Blue in Green, Bill Evans had said it was his, LeFaro said it was so beautiful it didn’t matter) and he looked about to cry at the thought (after laughing that LeFaro wouldn’t let him date his kid sister)…then after that incredible take on Blue in Green he told the audience that Jim Hall was dead–they gasped–and he nearly fell apart. All this emotion, raw grief, bewilderment at how such talent could just up and disappear like that….we of course were all wondering the same thing. But he caught himself, made another joke, laughed, dismissed us with a whisper–that’s all the polio has left him with, a whisper–and then he smiled. Just smiled. Some smiles you remember, some in fact you’ll never forget. Not ever.
Glad I was there.
Warne Marsh
A buddy of mine was smoking a jay with Warne Marsh outside Donte’s after the last set. Warne said hey man, you think you could spot me a joint for tomorrow’s gig? Sure man, love to. Turned him onto to a very nice bomber. Next night Warne died on stage, sax in hand, just like that. Warne was stoned, he was playing, he was gone. Poof. It was sad, but it was jazz. My pal explained it to me…ya see, I turned him onto his last high. Yeah man, I said, wow. My friend said well sure, you get it, but a lotta straights might think that’s fucked up, Warne Marsh being dead and everything…but I think it’s kinda cool. I mean he died with his boots on. He died stoned. He died blowing beautiful stoney solos. Damn man, what else could you want? I said I did think it was kinda cool. Yeah, my friend said, that’s what Warne’s compadres were saying. They said dying flying blowing has gotta be the way to do it. Warne was no dummy. Wasn’t nobody’s fool. Makes sense to me, I said. My friend nodded, concentrating on the joint he was rolling. You have any Warne Marsh records? I pulled out one of the sessions with Lee Konitz, and Warne is weaving around Lee’s airy lines, and my pal takes a deep drag off that freshly rolled joint and closes his eyes and I think he’s back at Donte’s. He hands me the joint. I declined. I gotta drive, I said. So I remained in the now listening to a record, while he slipped into a Warne Marsh space. He held up the joint. This is some good shit man, tightly rolled, slow and steady burning. He sounded like an old Lucky Strike commercial, though I didn’t know if he meant the weed or Warne. Or both. I took a deep breath and got a second hand taste. Wow. I closed my eyes and there was Warne. Just like that. Magic. A marijuana time machine. The vinyl spun and the analog music was right there, like real. Those grooves grooved, man. Warne takes off. I could almost see the golden bell of his horn. My friend’s pot smoke weaved around my head. I leaned back and listened.
It’s years later now and I’m digging Apogee as I type this, and if I had a jay right now I’d be at this session too, watching and listening. I don’t. But Pete Christlieb and Warne Marsh are dancing around each other on Magna-Tism, the student giving the teacher a run for his money. Damn.
Lee Konitz blowing, Warne Marsh waiting, Al Levitt on traps. Somewhere in Holland c. 1976.
Coleman Hawkins playing “Picasso”.
One of my favorite jazz pieces, it seems forgotten today. Not sure why. He recorded it in 1948, well before people really thought of doing anything like this. It’s an art piece, really, and within twenty years there’d be hundreds of solo tenor sax recordings. But in 1948 this was about it. I suppose with the bebop explosion going on something as spooky and contemplative as this would be passed over. It’s not as exciting as “KoKo”, certainly, or “Salt Peanuts”. But it’s deep, and it’s beautiful, and it’ll hang with you for quite a while. Those were jukebox nights then, and for a nickel you could sit at the bar and smoke and drink and listen to the notes of an unseen saxophonist. It ends with the melody hanging in the air, unresolved, just like this.
.
Gerald Wilson, coming from a different time
(2013, after a show at Catalina Bar and Grill, Hollywood)
Staring at sound. I saw Gerald Wilson do just that a couple nights ago, staring right into the bell of a screaming tenor sax. Kamasi Washington was blowing like a freaking hurricane, just roaring, and Gerald stood maybe two feet in front of him, letting that crazy dangerous torrent of notes wash right over him. He watched and counted time almost invisibly, nodding ever so slightly for another chorus, and another, and another. Kamasi was loud, a big huge room filling sound, and Gerald, 95 years old, never flinched. I was sitting a few feet away, with a profile view of the scene and wishing so bad just then that I was a photographer and not a writer because I could see the picture, still can, and if I had taken that picture I’d stick it right here and cut out a thousand words. But all I have is that image burned into my brain, as perfect a jazz image as I’ve ever seen. And one I’m not likely to see again, not so close, not so perfectly framed. Gerald comes from a different time.
Gerald Wilson in the throes of creation…. (photo by Tony Gieske from the International Review of Music)
Vinyl
Records are so hot now. Burning hot. Paycheck blowing hot. Obsessively hot. Get a life hot. Stacks of platters. Analog, baby. People lining up on record store day and they don’t even know why. U2 just downloaded their vinyl only album onto an old Big Country LP I didn’t even know I had. Weird.
I liked it better when CDs were king and no one bought vinyl. CDs were everything. Digital baby. It’s the future. Box sets. Booklets with really long dull essays. You could play CDs in the car and not have to listen to Jim Ladd at all. Records were sad. They scratched. Surface noise. You had to get up off the couch to flip them over. A drag. Analog. Unhip as unhip could be. Unhipper even than cassettes. And that is unhip.
I’d stopped buying albums, too. I was getting rid of them. Giving them away. Dumping them at the thrift store. No one was buying. I was into cds. Digital. The future. Then one day Rockaway Records here in Silver Lake was having one of their huge sales. I wandered into the room in the back. It was full of records. Out front the CD bins were a desperate struggle and here was nobody. Literally nobody. Not one customer. It was hushed. Untouched. Archaic. A window into a ridiculous past full of styluses and RPM’s. I wandered along looking at one of the dozens of shelves. I realized I was looking at hundreds and hundreds of jazz LPs. And this was the $3 and under room, and everything was 75% off…..which meant the most I could pay was 75 cents. I pulled out a Sonny Rollins LP priced at twenty nine cents. At seventy five percent off that would come to, umm, seven cents.
I’d found a new hobby.
I’d find incredible stuff, walk out of Rockaway with fifty or sixty records for twenty or thirty dollars. The sales went all weekend so I’d do that on Saturday and Sunday. Get me a hundred records. A month later there’d be another sale. The record room would be full of more albums than before, and was just as empty. I’d be there for hours, leaving with another fifty records. I’d be the only one in line buying vinyl. People eyed me suspiciously. The clerks rolled their eyes. Maybe they’ll be valuable someday, I said. Yeah right. Meanwhile people are fighting over the CDs.
Since even record collectors hated jazz back then the pickings were mine. All mine. And there was world music, all kinds, platters from everywhere. And impossible as it is to imagine now there were amounts of soul and sixties stuff that people were buying on CD only. They wouldn’t touch these. You had to get up and turn then over. Talk about a buzz kill. No one had to get up and flip a CD over. So all this sealed, or mint, or as close to mint as near mint vinyl could be went ignored. Except by me. For maybe five years it was heaven. I ran out of room. Too many records. Some I’d never played. Some I didn’t even remember buying. I was beginning to worry.
Then suddenly vinyl was hip. I was saved. Damn.
The good thing, though, was that I resold most of the records at more than I paid. All that fire sale vinyl paid the rent a few times. People pay ridiculous money now for vinyl. Some guy will show me a record he paid thirty dollars for. He’s thrilled to death. Maybe I picked up the same record a decade ago for a buck, say, or six bits, or even a quarter. Seven cents. I never tell them that, though. It’d be mean. Though no one would believe me anyway. So I just say cool….
You know, you can get amazing CDs for fifty cents now. Find them everywhere. Thrift stores are overwhelmed with them. No one buys them. I have way too many. It’s embarrassing. I can’t even read the tiny print in the booklets anymore. They’re a drag, compact discs. Digital. Unhip as unhip can be. Unhipper even than cassettes. And that is unhip. I should know. I have too many cassettes, too.
Where the rent money went.
St. Louis Blues
Play this one loud. Hooch helps. So does mezz and the warm night air. About 6:54 Trummy Young destroys the world, though Louis puts it back together again about 7:42. Repeat.
St. Louis Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPEVmBOfiC8
Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (1954)
Elvin Jones
Incredibly great photo of Elvin Jones. The photographer had quite an eye, and would have crouched low on the stage looking up and waiting for the exact moment when Elvin’s face appeared between tom and cymbal. This is instantly one of my favorite jazz photographs ever (is it off an LP jacket, have I seen it before?), and thanks to drummer Fritz Wise for passing it along.
I’ve always thought the best jazz shots–hell, the bet shots of any music–came when the photographer got in groove with the players, and for a moment it’s like the photographer is one with the band, snapping pictures in perfect time.
The great Elvin Jones, though that flat monosyllabic great doesn’t quite do the man justice. You need polysyllables in polyrhythmic meter to describe Elvin Jones, but that’s poetry, and this is a caption. No idea who took the shot, if anyone knows please pass it along so I can credit.
Lester Young
My pal Vince Meghrouni–a fine saxman himself–posted this picture of Lester Young. Vince loves Lester Young. Loves Dexter Gordon more, probably, but he loves Lester Young. It’s a haunting photograph, he’s so thin, so gaunt, really, playing for nobody but the photographer in a bare room. Just the bed, a phone, a clarinet, and a saxophonist. I asked Vince if he knew the when and where of the thing. He said sorry, he didn’t. Just one of the things plucked from Google. He just dug that it was Prez. Others liked that it was Prez too. Prez! they said. The President! Imagine that….you’ve been dead for more than half a century and people see your picture and say, simply, Prez! A nickname of a nickname transcending generations.
But it’s such a sad, haunting shot: Beautiful and sad. It looked to me to be near the end.
I dug around the web for a while, looking for answers. Turns out the photo is by Dennis Stock from a single volume collection entitled Jazz Street. You can find it but it’ll cost you, it’s a rare one. Stock was one of those post-war photographers, that New York City feel, film noir, far too early in the morning. It seemed a harder time then, at least in the cities, far from the suburbs, and photography bore that out, black and whites of blacks and whites wreathed in smoke, thinking, listening, worrying, angry. Mr. Stock shot all these jazz pics in the late 50’s, from 1957 onward. Prez died in ’59, and looked decidedly less frail in the Sound of Jazz in 1957 (playing that perfect solo for Billie Holiday) than he does here, so this is probably closer to the end, maybe 1959. He was suffering from cirrhosis (as you can plainly tell here). I heard that he lived in a flat across from one of the jazz clubs (the Vanguard?) and rarely emerged, essentially drinking himself to death. His last few official recordings from this time sound a little frail, but they still swing. I’ve got a couple live things, board recordings I think, that sound sloppy drunk, though I like them anyway. He did a couple gigs here and there those last couple years, but wasn’t getting out of his room much. Drink, illness, maybe mental illness, maybe all three. He made a last stand in Paris for a couple weeks in late ’59, nearly drinking himself to death in the process and probably breaking a lot of jazz lover’s hearts with that sound still coming out of that body. Dexter Gordon seems to nail that as Dale Turner in Round Midnight. Lester Young returned to NYC and did finally drink himself to death a couple days later. He was forty nine years old. They buried him somewhere in Brooklyn. It must have been one helluva funeral. Everybody would have been there, telling stories, remembering better times. Mingus wrote “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” soon afterward. A ridiculous hat, a beautiful tune. You can’t see the hat in this picture. You can’t hear the saxophone, either, but you can imagine it. You look, and if you know Lester Young’s music, your mind fills in the sound for you. It fills that whole room, a thin little man, a bed, bare walls and all that saxophone. A black and white photo and the lightest, most gorgeous tone you’ve ever heard. Perfection.
“Fine and Mellow” from The Sound of Jazz, 1957.
(Lester Young takes his solo about two minutes in. Within two years, both he and Billie Holiday were gone.)
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