DeKalb County today released the official autopsy results of Stop Cop City protester Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, who went by the name “Tortuguita.” According to ABC News, although police claim that  Tortuguita fired the first shot at officers, there was no gunpowder residue on their hands.  However, there were at least 57 police-fired gunshots on their body, and an independent autopsy performed at the request of their family suggests that Tortuguita had their hands raised when shot.

This is a homicide - the murder of an environmental activist  by the Georgia State Patrol. Cop City should not be built, not just for the many good reasons identified by the protesters, but out of respect and memory of Tortuguita.

Statistically speaking, it's delusional for people to live in fear of crime when crime is as low as it's ever been. The chances of a stranger attacking you are incredibly low. Not only is overall crime down but most violent crime that does occur is between people who know each other, not some random stranger. Getting attacked or shot or trafficked by a stranger is so rare compared to dying in a car crash or of an illness.

Yet many people still worry about strangers attacking them and freak out about mythical riot and unpoliced zones in "urban" areas, when in reality all of this stuff is way overblown. People spend years living in unnecessary fear and they'd be better off health-wise not stressing about it. 

Arguably, we are living in the most peaceful and cooperative time in all US history, and possibly all the world. But people who realize they're safe don't purchase lots of firearms to protect themselves. People who realize they're safe don't have a desire to put a lot of "scary" minorities into private prisons. People who realize they're safe don't want to build idiotic walls on the border. 

But people who are told to be afraid want all these things, and there's one party to serve those people, to cater to their ridiculously inflated fears.

Sometimes Concert Pics Come Out Better Than Expected

 The Decembrists at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse, April 10, 2013

 

Unpacking Big Ears: Tennessee

 

The Big Ears Festival is held every year (covid allowing) in the City of Knoxville, Tennessee. The recent expulsion of two Black legislators from the Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives reminds us of both the racism still present in that state, the birthplace of the KKK, as well as the growing embrace of fascism and partisanship by the Republican party. 

Knoxville, though, is a college town (University of Tennessee). It's the site of the 1982 World's Fair. It's not Nashville - it doesn't self-identify itself with country music and the Grand Ol' Opry. And Big Ears is an international festival celebrating, among other genres, jazz - the home-grown invention of African American musicians. 

Yet I still had an uneasy, squeamish feeling throughout this year's festival. The performers were all so white! The first act I saw on the opening Thursday night, Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, consisted of two white performers, and then I saw the (white) electronic music pioneer Phill Niblock and later the (white) prog-rock band Rich Ruth.  

The festival closed with an all-star performance of John Zorn's game piece COBRA.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to put together a 14-person, all-star jazz band without a single musician of color? Somehow, Zorn accomplished just that. I'm not suggesting Zorn, who embraces his Jewish heritage with his klezmer-based band Masada, is racist, but his extended family of musicians and collaborators sure is awfully white.  To be fair, the ensemble he put together to close out Big Ears included three women (21% female) and one performer of Asian descent, but other than that it was exclusively white males.

This wouldn't have raised my eyebrows if this set were an anomaly. But Brian Marsella's Gatos do Sul included several Latinx musicians and a Filipino-American saxophonist, but no African Americans.  The other acts I saw that Friday (Mary Halvorson's Amarylis, Ava Mendoza, Pino Palladino & Blake Mills, and Lesley Flanagan) were often female-fronted and/or included Hispanic and Asian artists, but no Black musicians.  Only (white) guitarist Marc Ribot's trio, the Jazz Bins, included not one but two musicians of color.      

I don't want to name-drop the entire festival and, frankly, it feels kind of creepy to go through every band and try to pick out the ethnicity of each performer, but if I did, the results would not be that different for Saturday and Sunday than for Thursday and Friday. 

Now, the fault here lies as much with me as with Big Ears, or with Knoxville or the State of Tennessee for that matter. I picked out the acts I wanted to see from a mind-boggling menu of options and choices, and I overlooked many all-Black or Black-led bands with more inclusive lineups.  I didn't consciously do this (and suddenly I feel a need to defend my choices). I concentrated my selections on the extensive slate of performances by John Zorn and his collaborators, who incidentally tend to skew white, on the English post-rock band caroline, and on legendary icons of the electronic-music avant-grade like Niblock and Morton Subotnick.  But through four days of listening and I-don't know-how-many sets, I saw so few African-American musicians that if I counted them on my fingers, I'd have enough left over to give a double bird to the Tennessee legislature. 

The representatives expelled from the Tennessee House will likely be re-elected and returned to Nashville, although it is presently unclear whether the bigoted legislature will swear them back into office. I can easily imagine all kinds of condescending "I think they've learned their lesson" press statements if they are allowed back.  

But Tennessee should be sanctioned somehow and punished for their misdeeds.  If I were producing a film to be shot in Tennessee, I'd give serious consideration to another site.  If I were organizing a professional conference, I'd likely choose some other state. I know this will never happen, but if the legislators aren't readmitted, the state should be hit where it would really hurt and Tennessee should be expelled from the SEC. Vanderbilt, too. 

Should Big Ears move out of state?  I don't think that would necessarily hurt the feelings of the good-old-boys over in Nashville, but it would negatively impact the economy of Knoxville, including its minorities and citizens of color. And it would reduce the number of otherwise close-minded locals who might attend a performance or two and have their eyes opened a bit. 

And where would it move to?  Show me on the map where there's no racism, partisanship, or political shenanigans. It's probably so far away that I wouldn't be able to afford to travel there.

 

 

Unpacking Big Ears: Sam Gendel

The first performance I saw at Big Ears 2023 - to be honest, the first live performance I saw since Big Ears 2022 - was a Thursday night show by Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes.

In 2018, the two Sams released the LP Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar, followed in 2021 by Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs. Both were unhurried, almost somnambulant, collections of tender improvisations and relaxed but unwavering grooves. The rhythm tracks on some cuts could be as little as the muffled pulse of a kick drum or syncopated finger snaps, and between tracks you can hear the musicians discussing the arrangement of the next tune. As Kelefa Sanneh noted in a 2021 profile in the New Yorker, “Probably one of the things that people—especially non-jazz people—like about Gendel and Wilkes is that the music they make together sounds slightly unfinished, and rather unobtrusive. If you weren’t paying attention, you could walk right past it.” Their recordings suggest two old friends hanging out while some of their favorite people listen and chat, but surprisingly, this was the duo’s first North American performance.

“Sam Gendel plays like a student at the altar of spiritual jazz," according to Pitchfork. "His songs are just a little too psychedelic to sit in the contemporary jazz section, but his music is as studied and controlled as his counterparts in post-bop." Gendel feeds his sax (and occasional harmonica) through various electronic treatments that muddy and slur his sound. As Pitchfork wrote, Gendel's playing reveals alien qualities inside the songs he plays. Gendel’s closest predecessors might be Jon Hassell and Ben Neill, but he also nods to the slurred aesthetic of West Coast and Southern rap.”

The performance was held at The Point, a modern, non-denominational church.  It was a new venue for Big Ears and by far the northernmost stage in the festival - I took the free festival trolley to get up there and didn't return again for the rest of the festival. It took the two Sams to get me to haul my fat ass that far from my hotel. 

I saw Sam Gendel again the next night (Friday) at the fabulous Tennessee Theater, which conveniently was literally right across the street from my hotel. That night Gendel was playing with bassist Pino Palladino, guitarist Blake Mills, and drummer Abe Rounds.  

Palladino and Mills released an album, Notes With Attachments, in 2021, which featured Sam Gendel's laid-back playing on nearly every track. Palladino is a session musician who has toured with The Who (replacing John Entwistle) and worked with Erykah Badu, Mos Def, and Kendrick Lamar, among others. Mills is half Palladino’s age but he’s also a coveted session musician and producer working with the likes of Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, John Legend, and Perfume Genius.  Public performances by Palladino and Mills are rare events, although later that weekend they took their show to Atlanta for a set at Terminal West on Sunday night. 

There was a third performance by Gendel at Big Ears this year, a Saturday afternoon set by his "Concert Group," which includes Gabe Noel and Phil Melanson.  I didn't go, not due to any artistic criticism of the Concert Group but because the set was the same time as John Zorn's Suite for Piano with Brian Marsella, Jorge Roeder, and Ches Smith. Big Ears is all about making hard choices and strategic decisions, and if I could somehow go through the entire festival again, I could see all different sets and still have a great time.  

To give you an idea of how full the Big Ears schedule was, Gendel's set also conflicted with sets by indie rockers Kevin Morby and The Weather Station, singer Josephine Foster, the JACK chamber music quartet performing Catherine Lamb's divisio spiralis, noise improvisation by guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano,  This is How You Will Disappear by Stephen O'Malley of the avant-metal band Sunn O)))), and screenings of the films 32 Sounds and David Byrne's American Utopia.

 

Unpacking: Brian Marsella Wins Big Ears 2023

"It's not a competition," but this year at Big Ears I saw more sets by or featuring keyboardist Brian Marsella than any other performer.

It all started early Friday afternoon, Day Two of Big Ears, with a 12:30 set by Marsella's Gatos do Sul ensemble, one of my highlights of the festival.  In addition to Marsella on piano, the ensemble included Marsella's mentor, the percussionist Cyro Baptista, as well as drummer Tim Keiper, bass player Jorge Roeder, accordionist Felipe Hostins, nylon-string guitarist John Lee, flautist Itai Kriss, and saxophonist Jon Irabagon. Their music is a playful fusion of jazz, improv, and Brazilian forms like choro, samba, and bossa nova.  The Big Ears program notes advised that the performance was going to be a "stripped-down" version of the octet featuring only Marsella, Baptista, Irabagon, and violinist Mark Feldman, but the full band actually played on Friday.

Fun fact/extra bonus points - Marsella and company were staying at the same hotel in Knoxville as me, and I ran into them in the lobby immediately after their set. I respected their privacy but couldn't resist quickly thanking them for a great performance. I saw them again at the breakfast buffet the next morning.

On Saturday, I saw a performance of John Zorn's Suite for Piano performed by Marsella, Roeder, and drummer Ches Smith. And on Sunday, I saw the Brian Marsella Trio, including Trevor Dunn on bass and Kenny Wollesen on the drums, perform Volume 6 of Zorn's Bagatelles (this year's festival, in part, was a celebration of Zorn's 70th birthday).

Finally, the Sunday night grand finale for the festival was a performance of Zorn's game piece, COBRA, which featured an insanely large and insanely talented roster including Marsella on piano, John Medeski on organ, Mary Halvorson, Wendy Eisenberg, and Will Greene on guitar, Mike Nicolas on cello, Trevor Dunn on acoustic bass, Simon Hanes on electric bass, Sae Hashimoto on percussion and vibes, and Ches Smith, Aaron Edgcomb, and Kenny Wollesen on the drums. COBRA is a composition whose performance is based on rules of a game among the players, with John Zorn acting as the conductor. Whatever the rules of the game are, they were lost on this observer but seemed to involve the musicians volunteering to lead an improvisation and pick their collaborators, with Zorn occasionally holding up signs giving the players instructions which he didn't show to the audience. He also conducted using his usual hand signals and gestures, and the game seemed to also involve Zorn periodically putting on and taking off a baseball cap and the musicians occasionally donning a headband for whatever reason.  It was all quite opaque, but I think the point wasn't understanding the game but appreciating the haphazard, chaotic composition that it generated.

Anyway, in response to some game situation and cue from Zorn, at one point Marsella got up from his piano and ran around behind the rest of the band clucking like a chicken and flapping imaginary wings. As I said, I don't understand the COBRA rules and don't believe they're written down anywhere. Whatever it was, it was all madcap fun and the musicians seemed to be having fun, laughing frequently and enthusiastically waving their hands in the air to be picked to lead the next improvisation.

So in total that was four sets over three days featuring Brian Marsella, and I now have a new respect for his playing, his composing, and his artistry.  And he can dance a mean Funky Chicken. You can stream the Brian Marsella Trio's Intersection of Dissections on Spotify and purchase his Zorn performances on the Tzadik Records website.