Blogs Are Boring

 

Blogs are boring and egotistical.  Facebook and Instagram are phony and promote propaganda.  Reddit is a cesspool.

I'm too old and cranky for this world.  Just let me fade away in this pile of bricks on a hill.

The Hard Blues

In February 1972, then 34-year-old alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill went into Archway Studio in St. Louis and recorded four tracks with three like-minded other musicians.  They pressed three of the tracks onto vinyl on Hemphill's own Mbari label as Dogon A.D. and released only 500 copies.

The world is still catching up on what happened. Copies of that original release of 500 LPs now sell for $338 to $542, if you can find one at all.

The music can be classified as "free jazz" and rightly so.  The compositions, especially the title track, consist of extended improvisations framed by short composed sections.  But the playing lacks a lot of the dissonant, atonal cacophony associated with much free jazz.  Instead, Hemphill and his cello player (no bass) get locked into a groove and in the title track, they ride that groove for nearly 15 minutes, with trumpeter Baikaida Yaseen briefly jumping onboard.  Drummer Philip Wilson is admirably restrained, allowing a lot of empty space in the sound to give the piece a cool late-night feel.

Clive Davis' Arista Records re-released the album to wider distribution in 1977, and I first heard the track Dogon A.D. on Boston University's NPR station WBUR around that time on d.j. Steve Schwartz' late-night jazz show. Sometimes he'd play the track as the last selection of the evening before the station succumbed to overnight silence.  

A CD version of the album was finally released in 2011 and included The Hard Blues, the fourth track from that 1972 session.  Prior to the CD release, the 1972 version of The Hard Blues only appeared on Hemphill's 1975 album, Coon Bid'ness.  Although there are other albums by Hemphill that have different versions of The Hard Blues, none compare to his original version with cellist Abdul Wadud. The 2011 CD rightly and finally reunites all four tracks from the St. Louis session onto one album.

The album, especially the complete CD version, is one of my all-time favorites.  AllMusic gave the original album 5 out of 5 stars, and said "This important music is better to be heard than described."

However, that's easier said than done.  Both the vinyl and CD versions have long been out of print.  The album is not available on Spotify, Amazon Music, or other streaming site.  Fortunately, an upload of the track exists on YouTube with reasonable sound quality.  But that's been about it. I've searched online but I'm not about to shell out $500 for a vinyl copy.  I've lurked in share threads and even sniffed around the dark web and couldn't find anything.

But last week, by a miraculous stroke of luck, I found the CD available for free download, and as lossless FLAC files at that.  I'm ecstatic to finally have all four tracks in my personal collection once again.

Here's the funny thing, though.  There are two relatively short tracks sandwiched between Dogon A.D. and The Hard Blues on the album. They're not bad tracks by any means, but are somewhat forgettable compared to the protean masterpieces surrounding them.  But on listening to my new acquisition, I was surprised how well I knew those two tracks, how familiar they were to my ears.  I can only draw one conclusion - sometime in the late 70s, I must have owned a vinyl copy of the Arista LP version.

During the 70s, street vendors in front of Boston University buildings used to sell used LPs at quite reasonable costs, usually a dollar per album.  My guess is that I bought a copy back then (if I saw it on sale, how could I pass?) and played it several times, but then it got "lost" somewhere in my vinyl collection, or disappeared during one of my frequent moves from apartment to apartment, or got sold as I transitioned my collection from vinyl to CD.  I could have sworn I never owned a copy, but there's no denying my familiarity that those two "minor" tracks, a familiarity that couldn't have been based on radio play or other medium.

Anyway, last February marked the 50th anniversary of the recording of Dogon A.D., which to me still sounds as startlingly fresh as it did on WBUR radio in 1977.

Friday the 13th

So, um, I hate to ask, but with Evangelical Christians on the verge of realizing their decades-long goal of finally overturning Roe v. Wade, what does the Bible actually say about abortion?

Well, it turns out not very much.  It's a delicate and sensitive matter, and generally the Bible concerns itself with other things.  But in the Book of Numbers, abortion is not only allowed but required by law to be performed by a priest when a woman has been unfaithful to her husband. To quote Numbers 5:27:

If a woman has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink bitter water that brings a curse and causes suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse.

Chapter 5 has details of how to prepare bitter water and describes the ceremony to be performed in the administration of bitter water.  It's a trial by ordeal - if she hasn't been unfaithful, the bitter water won't affect her, but if she has, it will cause her to miscarry and abort the pregnancy.

How does this reconcile with the Commandment not to kill?  Well, according to the Bible, an abortion isn't killing because life had not yet started.  The Bible does not claim that life starts at conception or at a heartbeat.  According to the Bible, life begins at first breath.  As explained in Genesis 2:7:

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Man did not become a living being until he received the breath of life.  Likewise, a fetus is not a "living being" until it draws its first breath.

To be sure, I don't recognize the Bible as having any divine or other authority and it does not guide any aspect of my moral or spiritual life.  But Evangelical Christians sure put a lot of stock in it, and yet it seems to contradict their hardline position on abortion - that life begins at conception and abortion should be forbidden in all cases, even incest, rape, and to save the life of the mother.  

This position is not only not found in the Bible, it is flat out contradicted by their holy scripture.  The life-begins-at-conception argument is just a fiction created by anti-abortion zealots taking a no-holds-barred, extreme position to support their goal.  It is the position of those church ladies with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces and of hypocrites, bigots, and bastards.

Unpacking Big Ears, Part 3: Fennesz and Low

Okay, I'm not going to do a separate post on each individual artist I saw at Big Ears this year.  Let's wrap up the opening Thursday night with a recap of the two remaining acts we saw that evening. 

On the opening Thursday night, after catching 75 Dollar Bill at The Standard and then Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble at the Tennessee Amphitheater on the old World's Fairgrounds, I hoofed it over to St. John's Cathedral to see Austrian electronic musician Fennesz.

The walk from the Amphitheater to the Cathedral was long and confusing, and I'm sure I didn't take the shortest, most logical route between the two points.  I also had to walk up a lot of staircases, and I mean a LOT of staircases.  But no worries - not only did I get to St. John's in time to hear Fennesz, I was the first one in the VIP line to get in.

Fennesz is known for his intricate musical worlds and for his electric guitar compositions.  Since the late '90s, he has been creating melodies and atmospheres that fuse classical and orchestral concepts with conceptual music and complex digital structures, resulting in dense multilayered sheets of sound somewhere between concrete, classical, and ambient music.  

At Saint John's, the first half of his set consisted on ambient soundscapes generated from his laptop computer and a keyboard. As the set progressed, he routed a guitar through effects pedals and into his laptop, where the sound was further altered with samplers and other effects. He played solo, all alone, seated behind a small table set up in front of the church's big pedal organ.  

Originally, I was planning to leave his set early in order to get to my next set, but as I started to lose myself in his sonic structures, I decided that I wasn't going to spend my festival rushing from one set to another.  Instead, I'll just relax and take each minute as it comes.  So I stayed - and enjoyed - Fennesz' entire set.  

After the set was over, and after I had time to chat with a few of my fellow festival-goers, I made the long walk from St. John's Cathedral over to The Mill & Mine.  Those two venues are probably the furthest apart of any two places hosting the festival and represent the longest walk between shows.  I walked at a brisk pace and by the time I got to The Mill & Mine, the band playing there, Minnesota's Low, was already on stage.  But as I walked into the club, they began playing the first notes of the first song of their set, White Horses, also the first song of their most recent album.  Turns out, I had managed to stay and enjoy all of Fennesz's set and then to take the long walk between the two venues, and still didn't miss a single note of Low's set.  

Low are a much-beloved indie-folk band whose songs feature haunting melodies and intricate harmonies between husband-and-wife members Alan Sparhawk (guitar) and Mimi Parker (drums).  Although they've been around since the mid-90s, to nearly  everyone's surprised they radically changed their sound in 2018, adding big slabs of noise and static over their songs, although somehow it was still all clearly recognizable as Low.  Their new album, Hey What, the one that starts with White Horses, continues the experimentation.  

I've seen Low a couple of times already, but not since they changed their sound.  I was curious to hear how it sounded live, and how much of the noise and static were studio effects and how much was live instrumentation.  

As it turns out, it's almost all their own instrumentation, and if anything, they sound even more unruly and distorted live than they do on record. To be clear, I like the new sound and appreciate a band expanding their sonic palette,  but part of me also missed the cuddly old Low of earlier, when the term "fuzzy" was used to describe fans' warm emotional response to the music, not the static enveloping the songs.  Still, it was an interesting set, and it's rare for a band that's been around for over 25 years to suddenly have something new to say.

Low played through their new album in its entirety and in the order of the tracks, and then performed several of their older songs.  When the show was finally over well past midnight, I took the long walk back to my hotel (although the distance was only about half the length between St. John's and The Mill & Mine). According to the odometer app on my phone, I walked a total of 4.1 miles that day, and climbed the equivalent of 9 floors.  I unwound with a couple of IPA drafts at Clancy's, a bar next door to my hotel, before calling it a night.

So on the first day of Big Ears, I managed to catch four acts, ranging from free, world-music-inspired improvisation (75 Dollar Bill) to gospel-influenced jazz (Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble) to ambient electronica (Fennesz) to freaked-out indie folk-rock (Low), and I still had three more full days to go.

18-Year Anniversary