The Wolf Who Came To Dinner

I've been trying to cut back on posting partisan political content on this blog (have you noticed?).  I don't think it accomplishes anything much in the long run.  Sure, it makes me feel good for a minute or two and might make someone of the same political bent smile as well, but just for a few minutes until the anger starts to kick in.  And as for the other side, well, I've never heard of any of those posts, memes, cartoons and satire ever changing anyone's opinion.  I've never once heard someone say, "Well, I was a big fan of Donald Trump's, but after I saw that side-by-side picture of him and an orangutan, now I've got my doubts."  No, it just makes the right angrier and more ready to double-down on their resentment, just like racist pictures of President Obama did to the left during his term in office.

I've been trying to cut back on partisan political posts, but then Michelle Wolf comes along and dominates the news feed with her routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner.   From the outrage her remarks generated and the way it's been described in the media ("a foul-mouthed, obscene personal attack on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was sitting just a few feet away"), you'd think Wolf took the podium, said, "That Sarah's one @#!!&%! ugly little b----! Her $%!!# must look like @!?#%!" or something like that.  But no, it was a very typical comedic roast of parties on all sides of the political spectrum, from Rachel Maddow and Mika Brzezinski on the left to Kellyanne Conway and Meghan Kelly on the right, and even some male figures as well.  Her comments about Huckabee Sanders were mostly about the fact that she lies all the time, not her appearance, unless of course you totally miss the joke about burning facts to get the perfect shade of eye shadow.  

I'm not posting any more partisan political stuff, at least not here, but if you want to hear Wolf's full routine for yourself, yesterday (April 29) I posted the whole complete thing from the CSPAN feed over here.  It's actually pretty funny, and while occasionally ribald and, yes, she did drop an f-bomb or two, it's hardly a "foul-mouthed, obscene personal attack."

But here's the part that I love and the point of this post -  Michelle's career has skyrocketed after the Dinner performance.  There's no such thing as bad publicity and everyone's been talking about her for the last 48 hours.  She's booked about every late-night talk show.  Netflix has offered her her own comedy series.  She's breaking through as a star and it's about time - she was a stand-out guest on Larry Wilmore's Nightly Show (at least until Comedy Central axed it), and her HBO special last year had me laughing so hard I literally had tears in my eyes.  I've been a big fan and couldn't be happier to see her getting the attention she deserves.

Polyrhythm

The other day, I praised Joe Farrell's Follow Your Heart for its "very subtle use of polyrhythm."  The use of polyrhythms (different time signatures played at the same time) is common in African music, and even when not subtle, the lack of subtlety does not make it any less artistic.

Here's the late, great Fela Kuti giving a PhD dissertation on polyrhythms.  Listen to the introductory bass line - that's in 7/8 time, played as 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4.  After 12 bars, the guitar joins in, but playing in 3/4 (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3).  The beauty of Afro-beat music is that instead of conflicting, the two rhythms actually compliment each other and the other percussion behind these beats bounces around from one rhythm to the other, wedding the two together.  But the real brilliance of this music is that next the keyboards jump in and manage to walk the tightrope between the two sets of beats, not following any one rhythm, not ignoring the other.  They miraculously manifest the "harmony" of the rhythms, and then the horns and vocals are added and create space and rhythm not previously apparent.  Where this music enters the realm of the genius is that all this happens in just the first three minutes of the composition, before the tenor sax is even heard from and the call-and-response vocals begin, and the next 21 minutes is devoted to riffing off of this polyrhythmic miracle and simultaneously elevating the piece both to fine art and a searing political indictment of Nigerian politics.  And here you once thought Bob Dylan displayed genius with protest music.

Oh, by the way, all of this is a live recording from 1983, performed without the safety net of studio overdubs and manipulation, and that intro bass and guitar polyrhythm continue throughout the whole piece without ever once missing a beat.

This is an amazing example of polyrhythmic Afro-pop music, with Fela himself on soprano, piano, organ, and lead vocals.  And all this is made no less amazing by the fact that this performance is widely regarded as one of Fela's worst recordings.

Loma at The Earl, Atlanta, April 26, 2018

Texas-based art-rock band Loma played The Earl last Thursday night, but as is our custom, we'll manage our enthusiasm and discuss the opening act first.

We thought Jess Williamson was going to be a solo act, some sort of acoustic indie-folk singer-songwriter.  Of course, that was just an assumption, as we've never heard her or heard of her before. But she took the stage with a full band and launched right in with a slightly droning rock song reminiscent of Velvet Underground that was pleasantly louder than we were expecting.

After that, she covered a lot of ground in her set, ranging from some relatively straight-forward rock to some country-folk songs and even some heart-felt folk ballads.  It was a nice set and a good start to the evening.  Here's a taste of Jess' music, from her upcoming LP Cosmic Wink:

Loma is Jonathan Meiburg from the band Shearwater and Emily Cross and Dan Duszinsky who perform together as Cross Record.  Apparently, Cross Record toured last year in support of Shearwater and somewhere on the road they made a pact to start their own mutual band. We're big fans of Shearwater and would probably follow anything Meiburg does but this project, Loma, is truly something special and worthy, and Loma delivered the goods to a sparse audience at The Earl.
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The music was ethereal and hard to describe (a sample video is below).  "Art-rock" is about the only label we can come up with for their sound and it might be apt, as Emily Cross even sketched at an easel a little bit during the set.  I don't want to criticize the spontaneous product of her drawing - it's about the performance and not the product.  You try going on stage and lead a band through a full set, with your mom and Jonathan Meiburg's mom both in attendance (mothers of the band must have comprised about 10% of the audience that night), and try to do better. 

We've seen this before  We've seen Joseph Arthur complete a painting on stage during his set at Eddie's Attic, and we've seen Nils Cline accompanied by an on-stage painter performing as a member of the band, so we're not surprised to see Cross turn her attention to the easel during the set.  And Emily not only sang and painted, she also danced during the instrumental passage of their song Relay Runner.

Anyway, it was a wonderfuls set of very original and ethereal music, and we strongly suggest that if you haven't checked Loma out yet, go do so at your earliest convenience.  Now, here's that promised sample, the stand-out single Black Willow with which Loma closed their set:

Dreaming of the Masters

As I mentioned last weekend when I found the old CD MP3s - Volume 1 in the time capsule, the song Follow Your Heart has a deep emotional resonance for me. The song is from The Joe Farrell Quartet LP, also released as Song of the Wind, the version that I once owned, although it's now more commonly known by the original name. Although it's from a Joe Farrell LP, Follow Your Heart is actually a John McLaughlin composition and I bought the Song of the Wind LP sometime in the early- to mid-70s because it had my jazz-fusion heroes McLaughlin and Chick Corea on it, as well as Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.  It's a great album with the excellent Creed Taylor production values typical of the CTI Records label, and is still eminently listenable after all these years.

Fun fact: The reason Follow Your Heart is on MP3s - Volume 1 is because back around Y2K, when I was first discovering this "new" music format called the MP3, among the very first songs in that new format that I found to download was Joe Farrell's Follow Your Heart.

Part of what makes the tune so compelling to listen to is the odd time signature.  McLaughlin's guitar starts in 3/8 time (1, 2, 3, rest, followed by four more resting beats), until Farrell joins in playing in 8/8 (two 4/4's - 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4), which in turn frees McLaughlin up to add more notes on the resting beats.  This is a very subtle use of polyrhythm and results in an overall 11/8 time (3/8 + 8/8).  So on one level, Follow Your Heart holds meaning for me as a fondly remembered cut from an interesting album I once owned back some 45 years back.

In 1976, a few years after buying the Joe Farrell record, I arrived at Boston U and found that radio station WBUR was using Follow Your Heart every night as the intro for Steve Schwartz' jazz show. As soon as you heard the distinctive 1, 2, 3 of McLaughlin's guitar following whatever song had been playing before, you knew that Schwartz' program was beginning and that you were in for an evening of discovery and musical adventure.  Every night, from 10:00 p.m. to 2 a.m., Schwartz provided the soundtrack to my collegiate studies as well as a welcome distraction from said studies when needed. He played everything from classic Count Basie and Duke Ellington to modern jazz, but concentrated on a lot of hard bop and modal jazz and wasn't afraid of free jazz or the avant garde, and on any given evening he'd take you from some soulful and swinging tunes to the extremes of free expression and sometimes the limits of your tolerance.  But it was always an interesting ride and I learned so much about modern jazz music from the man - not only was he a good d.j., but he was also a good and patient teacher, often providing details about the music or the recording or the artist, and often conducting insightful and informative interviews with the musicians themselves. So on top of just being a favorite cut from a cherished album, Follow Your Heart now also reminds me of listening to late-night radio and of my formative years of jazz education.

I should add that Schwartz was a hero to me and I pictured him as the epitome of bohemian cool, all black turtleneck and goatee.  But the one time I actually saw him in person, I experienced the kind of identity shock that off-camera media personalities probably trigger in a lot of people.  Schwartz was at the 1978 or 1979 annual Jazz All Night marathon at Emmanuel Church, and when I saw him there he looked to me like just a typical middle-aged caucasian with a slight paunch and thinning hair and wearing a Members' Only jacket. Nothing wrong with that, but his very suburban demeanour was enhanced by the fact that for some reason he was also carrying around a Hoover canister vacuum cleaner under his arm.  His appearance was so dissident to my impression of him that I actually found it humorous.  To me, he looked "funny" and it took me a while listening to him again after that before I could stop thinking of him as clownish.

Now let me make it clear that all this says way, way more about me and my mental formations (samskara) than it does about Steve Schwartz.  Schwartz' programming changed the way I heard music, and his nightly lessons on jazz are to me as much a part of my collegiate education as any other aspect of my college experience.  Sometime after I left BU and shortly later then Boston, Schwartz left WBUR for Boston NPR station WGBH, the gig with which he is most generally remembered.

Sadly, Schwartz passed away about a year ago, March 25, 2017, at the age of 74. Joe Farrell passed away in 1986 at the age of 48.  I didn't know any of that until I began relistening to MP3s - Volume I this week and to Follow Your Heart, and began Googling the names that came bubbling up from long-dormant memories.   

Now, the Joe Farrell song is more poignant for me than ever.

No time to post anything more - tonight, we're off to see this band at The Earl.

The hardest part of being a ruthless censor of the self is knowing when it's time to delete something no longer useful.

Phoning It In

Little known fact: I taught high school for one year a long, long time ago.  If I went out on a school night and showed up at work the next morning hung over, I'd surprise the class with a random movie from the AV room.  Looking back now on my own education, I have a whole new insight on all those weird First Period films I had to sit through (Those Amazing Snails!).

Nowadays, if the night gets away from me and I realize that I forgot to post something here before I go to bed, I can always post a random video from YouTube. This one is actually kind of interesting, though, and not irrelevant to our times.

Update: What people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way that other people see you.

Five Greatest Songs of All Time (David Bowie Edition)

"The truth, of course, is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time." - David Bowie (1947-2016)

R.I.P., David.

Time Capsule

Late last night, while I was looking for something else - I don't remember what now and it doesn't matter - I came across a box that I immediately recognized but hadn't considered for a while.  The box contained literally hundreds of handmade CDs (handmade as in I burned them myself, not that I manufacture my own compact discs).  Looking through them, I realized they were a veritable if inadvertent time capsule, documenting my changing tastes in music from 2000 up to 2014, but with a particular focus on the transitional years 2007 to 2010.

Short background - I've managed to download a lot of music over the years, and back in earlier times, computers didn't exactly have the one-, two- and more terabyte hard drives they have today.  Storage space was a precious commodity, so I had to burn music to CDs in order to clear space for new music.  But usually, as soon as something got burned, it was immediately forgotten, and eventually I just put the stacks of CDs away in a box, generally out of sight and out of mind until last night. 

Also, it's not that I don't buy and own hundreds of music CDs in addition to the hard-drive-clearing download project.  My CD collection (I'm guessing 800 to 1000 discs) dates back to the early 90s and fills an entire bookcase in a closet (see above), and this is after years of buying and then ultimately selling easily that many vinyl LPs from the 60s through the 80s, and then a not inconsiderable investment in cassette tape (easier for listening to in the car) during the transition years.

It took a while to sort through everything in the box and to recall the various projects and schemes I had employed back in the day.  There are at least four or five different series of CDs to the massive collection, and after I had gotten it all sorted out and chrono-numerically arranged (the anal-retentive archivist in me did an admirable job of documenting the discs, if I should say so myself), I was impressed by the diversity and breadth of the composite collections.     

The first series was designated by Roman numerals and stored in jewel cases.  Volume I was burned to a rewritable CD between February and April 2000, and is a pretty mixed-up affair.  It apparently contains whatever music I could find to download at the beginning of the millennium, and this includes some of the very first songs that I'd heard in the MP3 format.  But Volume I is all over the map and includes the funky Calypso Minor by Abdullah Ibraham, and Steely Dan's 2000 comeback album Two Against Nature (the very first album I ever downloaded in its entirety, and I remember that back in the days of 256-k dial-up modems it took me an entire weekend to download the entire thing).  It also has the Pink Floyd soundtrack to the film More (probably another weekend project), some blues, some reggae, some jazz, including Joe Farrell's Follow Your Heart, a song I had forgotten about but I now remember holds deep emotional resonance for me - another post for another day, I suppose.  Meanwhile, here's Ibraham's Calypso Minor with it's way laid-back bass line.

Volume I also contains Joni Mitchell's Coyote for some reason, as well as some bootleg live Frank Zappa, a single Brian Eno ambient composition, three Mongo Santamaria songs, and some random soundtracks beyond the Pink Floyd album, including some classic science fiction scores like Forbidden Planet and even some of that 70s wah-wah, porno-film soundtrack music.  Literally.  If you ever want to hear the love theme from Deep Throat, I've got it. To be honest, for all it's eclecticism, it's actually a pretty interesting CD, and I've already copied it onto my hard drive (from hard drive it came and from hard drive it shall return) for later listening.

There's ostensibly 162 volumes to the first series alone, from Volume I to Volume CLXII, which would be pretty heroic use of Roman numerology if I hadn't messed up in some places.  For example, I went from Volume XXII right to Volume XXXIII apparently without noticing the extra X in XXXIII, or else I'm missing Volumes XXIII through XXXII.  My guess is a typographical error on my part that just got carried forward to the next discs in the series, so there's most likely only 152 volumes to the series.  There are probably other errors in the series too, but who's got time to check 162 (or 152) Roman numerals? 

Randomly jumping somewhere into the middle of the series, Volume LXXVII (77) was apparently burned on July 25, 2002 (my 48th birthday).  Like most of the other CDs, it's more organized than the random songs of Volume 1 and consists of six jazz CDs.  It contains For Losers by Archie Shepp, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy by the Cannonball Adderley Quartet, I Hate to Sing by Carla Bley, Skateboard Park by Joe Ferrell, The Heart of Things by John McLaughlin, and a 41-song compilation of jazz-funk songs called Organic Grooves, featuring artists such as Les McCann, Sun Ra, Ray Barretto, Willie Bobo, Sly and the Family Stone, Randy Weston, and Kenny Burrell, and even Julie Driscoll's Season of the Witch.  Oh look - it's even got South Africa's Dudu Pukwana!  Cool!

There was one big change, though, after Volume LXXVII.  After that volume, instead of storing the burned CDs in those clunky jewel cases, I started storing them in the slimmer thin cases and printing adhesive labels that went directly onto the discs themselves instead of inserts that were slid into the jewel cases.  Over time, however, the labels developed little air pockets or frayed edges, and even the slightest imperfection to the label renders a disc unable to spin properly at the 500-plus rpms that CD-players use, and the music can't be accessed.  So I may never know what's on some of those CDs. 

What's more, in these days of streaming media, cloud storage, and thumb drives and portable hard drives (and reportedly the return of the vinyl format because why not?), not all computers even have CD players any more.  My time-capsule CD collection may become as antiquated and obsolete as my former cassette tape collection, which I frankly just simply threw away one day out of frustration that there was no longer anything available on which to play them.   

But anyway, Volume CLXII (162), the last disc of the first series, was burned on May 11, 2005, and consists entirely of what's been called lounge or chill music, more specifically several compilations by French DJ Claude Challe of Buddha Bar fame.  While I know that the entire Buddha Bar series is somewhere in these disks, the Claude Challe albums on Volume CLXII are some of his other output, including the two-disc Flying Carpet collection, Out of Phase (subtitled N.E.W. Sound Experience), the two-disc Nirvana Lounge, the one-disc Near Eastern Lounge, and something called Claude Challe Presents Karmix - Kuon Ganjo (every Zen Buddhist should recognize the latter name as Master Dogan's Genjo Koan).  To be clear, this is chill/lounge music, not to be confused with New Age (although it's probably accessible to New Age fans).  The music doesn't play very well on my laptop because the adhesive label messes up the CD play, but as with Volume I, the files can be transferred to a hard drive and enjoyed from there. 

So that's the first series.  I can anticipate many, many hours spent exploring whatever it was that I burned onto those CDs. 

I apparently rebooted the numbering system for the second series, getting rid of the awkward Roman numerals and designating the dics MP3s0001 through MP3s0063.  Even without the Roman numerals, though, I still somehow managed to mess up the numerical sequence a couple of times. For example, there's two MP3s0018 and there's a five-CD gap for some reason between MP3s0046 and MP3s0052. 

MP3s0001 was burned on October 1, 2005 and apparently starts at the end of the alphabet, as it consists entirely of songs by the avant-garde dark-ambient/industrial band Zoviet France.  More specifically, it contains Popular Soviet Songs and Youth Music (1985), Misfits, Loony Tunes and Squall (1986), Gesture Signal Threat (1986), A Flock of Rotations (1987), Look Into Me (1999), and What Is Not True (1993).  Decades later, this music is still very cool although incredibly inaccessible, but my point is the new series was off to a good start.

MP3s0063, the last of the series, was burned on December 9, 2012 and contains music likely more familiar to readers of this blog.  More specifically, it contains Drawing Down the Moon by Azure Ray, Water Curses and Transverse Temporal Gyrus by Animal Collective,  People Who Can Eat People by the Andrew Jackson Jihad, Before Today by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Into Vision by The Art of Noise, and five separate LPs and EPs by Andrew Bird.  Obviously, I was clearing the albums off from my hard drive in alphabetical order, and this was the "A" list.

So that's a lot of music. On average, each CD holds between six and seven LPs, and between the two collections, there's something like 200 CDs (taking the numerical errors into consideration). That's, um, like 1,200 to 1,400 albums.  

But all that's only about two-thirds of what was in the time-capsule.  There were also about 66 or 67 CDs that each contain one album by the prolific German electronic musician Peter Namlook, including some very rare and hard-to-find albums.  ACtually, all his albums are rare and hard to find.  There's several complete box-set collections of John Coltrane, specifically the 17-CD (!) Complete Prestige Recordings, the seven-CD Complete Atlantic Recordings, and the eight-CD Complete Impulse Studio Recordings.  So if you're ever in the mood to hear practically everything John Coltrane ever recorded, you've got a friend.  I've got the discs if you bring the absinthe.

But it's the last part of the collection that most resembles a time capsule and not just a music library of staggering proportions.  During the time I was collecting all the music and burning all those CDs, I was also curating a private collection of chronologic "Best Of" collections.  The earliest ones are titled 2006-2007 Retrospective, Parts 1 and 2, which are pretty embarrassing to listen to now - it's all Top 40 pop and hip-hop, and includes lots of 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Brand New Heavies, Kanye, Ludacris, Mary J. Blige, Rihanna, Chili Peppers, Black Eyed Peas, Linkin Park, Maroon Five, and yes, there's even some Nickelback on there. To be sure, that's NOT what I was listening to at the time, but lost in my own world of jazz, industrial and electronic music, I was pretty out of touch with what was happening at the time in contemporary music.  But why, I wonder, do I insist on being so honest in this blog?  It would be so much more gratifying to either deny the existence of  2006-2007 Retrospective, Parts 1 and 2, or simply lie and say it contained all Pavement and Luna and early Animal Collective and Spoon recordings.  

A sister volume, Retrospective I and II:  2006-2007, is recorded in audio format (as opposed to MP3) for playing on the car stereo, but the 30 or so songs are all listed as "Track 1," "Track 2," etc., and I can't tell what they are without playing each one individually and then relying on memory and recognition to identify them (that, and SoundHound)  The few tracks I did play turned out to be Gorillaz' Feel Good Inc. and Diddy's Last Night (featuring Keyshia Cole), which are far from the worst songs on the larger retrospective, so my taste in selection is at least partially vindicated.

Anyway, this last group of 40-or-so CDs are a mix of audio and MP3 formats, with titles like New Music 2007 Volumes 1 through 7, 2007 Hip-Hop & Alt (I and II), Greatest Hits of 2007, and More Hits From 2007. There's eight CDs each titled New Music 2008, as well as New Music July 2008, New Music September 2008 (Discs 1 and 2), two CDs each labeled New Music 10-04-2008, and two CDs labeled New Music December 2008, and of course Best of 2008 - Volume I: A-K and Volume II: L-Z.

As you can probably guess, these are followed by New Music volumes for February, March, May (2 CDs), September, and November 2009, as well as New Music 12-19-09 and 12-24-09.  After New Music March 2010, the titles changed format a little and we have Retired Tunes - Favorite Singles & Downloads 2010-2011, and Parts I and II of KEXP Songs of the Day - October 2008 through January 2012.  We have New Music 2013, three volumes of New Music 2014, and 2014 Singles A-l and M-Z.  After that, there's a few compilation CDs of specific albums selected for listening to while driving. 

Taken as a whole, these CDs document my growing awareness of the indie rock renaissance of the mid- to late-aughts and a transition away from the hip-hop and Top 40 of the earlier part of the decade to my current, if still eclectic, taste for folk-, punk- and post-rock. Unfortunately, it also documents a transition away from a lot of African-American artists to almost exclusively white musicians, but the unbearable whiteness of indie is a topic for another post on another day. 

And that, my friends, is a boatload of music.  It's overwhelming and there's no way I can listen to it all or even to one select subset of the CDs (the Coltrane box sets alone would probably take a month to listen to completely).  On top of all that, there's still my actual CD collection (pictured at the top of this post), live music, streaming music, and every other format under god. At this point, I'm actually somewhat grateful that radio's no longer a viable medium for new music - one less format to have to consider.

Sorry that this post is so long, but as they say, I didn't have time to write a shorter version.

I Feel Strongly About Violence

Dreaming of the Masters

Three weeks ago, we posted Turiya and Ramakrishna by Alice Coltrane, and then the next week, following the passing of the legendary Cecil Taylor, we posted his Spring of Two Blue J's.  Last week, we posted Piano Solo 11 by Ahmad Jamal, as it had played that week in the soundtrack of Episode 6 of Danny Glover's television comedy-drama, Atlanta.  The emerging theme here obviously is jazz piano.

Well, last night was Episode 8 of Atlanta, and what do you think Glover chose to include in the background music?  Why, Turiya and Ramakrishna, our post from two weeks ago.  Either great minds are thinking alike, or good taste is synchronous, or Danny Glover is following this blog after we name-dropped him and his show and he enjoyed the Alice Coltrane cut.  Hey, don't laugh, it could happen.

Why, then, you ask, didn't he include some Cecil Taylor in Episode 7?  Hey, nobody could fit one of Taylor's protean, epic-length compositions into a 30- to 40-minute show, not even Childish Gambino, and even with editing, Taylor's music is still too intense for prime-time TV.  But thanks for asking.  

To test our theory, here's a very soundtrack-friendly piano cut, Banyana, from Abdullah Ibraham's The Children of Africa.  If we hear Banyana in an upcoming episode of Atlanta, I rest my case.  I can easily imagine it playing in an opening sequence, or behind the titles.  If we don't hear it, well, it's still a great track, and I love the elastic approach Ibraham takes to time and tempo in this composition. We had a vinyl copy of The Children of Africa back in the 70s, and it's a great album from start to finish.  Banyana is the opening track, and the album just gets deeper and richer with each cut.       

By the way, if you haven't been watching Atlanta recently, the last three episodes, 6, 7 and 8 of Season 2, have been among the greatest moments of television.  No exaggeration.  I would put them up against any episodes of The Sopranos or Game of Thrones or any of the other sacred cows of quality TV.  And the beauty is you don't even have to follow the series to enjoy these episodes - each one stands alone as an individual vignette of one individual character per episode, and the emotional depth, the skillful story-telling, and the acute social commentary of each episode transcends the sit-com genre, or any other genre for that matter.  Go and watch these episodes if you haven't already, and when you're done, listen to some more Abdullah Ibraham.

You can thank us later.

Sung Tongs

I spent all day today in a ballroom at the headquarters of the electrical utility Georgia Power Company for the fourth annual conference of the Georgia Brownfields Association.

That was nice, but I really don't have much to say about it.  That's not the reason for this post.  

The reason I bring it up is that around 10:30 a.m, while at the conference, I received an email announcing that the Baltimore band Animal Collective were bringing their Sung Tongs tour to Atlanta's Symphony Hall (Sung Tongs is a 2004 AC LP that the band has recently been performing live in its entirety).  This was exciting news to me - Sung Tongs is one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite bands.  Alert readers of WDW, even those not familiar with the Sung Tongs album, might recognize the first track, Leaf House, as I posted it here almost a year ago and then again earlier this year.  Until 10:30 this morning, it appeared that the AC ST tour was going to miss Atlanta entirely.

Pre-sale tickets, according to the email, went on sale at 10:00 a.m. this morning.

WHAT?  Usually a presale is announced a day or two in advanced, and usually I wouldn't much care whether or not I was among the first to buy a ticket as most rock shows are General Admission and from where you observe the show is usually dependant on what time you arrive at the venue, not when you buy your ticket.  But Symphony Hall is a seated venue and to get a good ticket, you need to buy early, and I had already missed the first half-hour of the sale.

But no worries. The speaker at the podium was droning on and on about some such matter or another, so I discreetly used my iPhone to access the box office's web site, entered the secret pre-sale password ("Baltimore"), and selected a choice pair of tickets in the bullpit right in front of the stage.  Score!

Then the troubles began.  The wireless connection in the ballroom was not the greatest, and in the time it took to validate my credit card number, my connection timed out and the box office told me I had to try again.

Determinedly, I did.  But this time, there were no more pit seats left, and the closest I could get to the stage was Row E in the Orchestra, which are still great seats, only five rows back from the pit, but still seemed like the lesser of two goods in comparison to the seats I could have gotten if my original purchase hadn't timed out.  But no worries, I went to purchase the tickets anyway, but this time, instead of timing out, the box office said that my credit card had "insufficient funds" to purchase $66 worth of tickets.

That was ridiculous.  I knew that my card was valid and paid up, and that I had a credit line of several thousands of dollars, so I tried again a third time.  I was still being discreet with the phone, holding it low near my lap beneath the surface of the table and careful to not appear rude to the conference's speaker, as I was sitting at the front table closest of the podium.  But this time there were no more Row E seats left, and the best I could do was Row M, which is now quite a bit further back than where I had started, and all because of the awkward timing of the announcement and the poor reception in the ballroom in which I was stuck.

I got the same "insufficient funds" message for Row M as well, and on the fourth attempt I brought the phone up off my lap and above the table where anyone and everyone could see because I thought that maybe the table might have been interfering with the signal.  But no, this time the box office just said that my credit card had been refused, and then the next time after that, the transaction just timed out like earlier.  As it did again the time after that.

I finally realized my actual problem - Chase Bank recently sent me a new card to replace the old one with a 5/18 expiration date, but the old expiration date was still on my Ticketmaster account.  So I updated the account info and selected the best tickets left, but it was now after 11:00 a.m. and we were over an hour into the pre-sale and the "best tickets" were now all the way back in Row U. However, I was finally able to complete the purchase without an error message or the transaction timing out, even though I was now 21 full rows back from where I had started, and although the acoustics and the sight lines at Symphony Hall are great, and even though Animal Collective aren't necessarily the most visually compelling of musicians to watch perform, I still felt like I had somehow been cheated out of my rightful due because of circumstances beyond my control (slow connection and misleading error messages).  If the box office told me the first time that the expiration date was incorrect and not that I had "insufficient funds," I'd have been in Row E.  If the first attempt hadn't timed out and I had gotten the right error message, I would have been all the way up in the bullpit.

The good news - Animal Collective will be performing Sung Tongs live in Atlanta and I've got tickets!  The bad news - the tickets aren't as close as they might have been (not that it really matters) if not for a series of unfortunate circumstances.

Why is it that the mind fixates on the half-empty part of the glass of water, and can't appreciate the half cup of cold, refreshing water?        

Yo La Tengo at Terminal West, Atlanta, April 1, 2018

The New Jersey Invasion continues - the night after Garden State band Titus Andronicus rocked The Masquerade, Hoboken's indie-rock royalty Yo La Tengo played at Terminal West.

No opening act, just two sets by Yo La Tengo, the first consisting mostly of quieter and gentler songs from their latest album, There's A Riot Going On, and the second considerably louder (mostly) and more energetic, featuring various songs from previous albums.

Photos from the quieter, more introspective first set, as is apparent from Georgia's acoustic guitar.

Yo La Tengo aren't anything if not eclectic though, and even the quieter set included experimentation and improvisation.  They didn't really break between songs but instead each song collapsed or dissolved into some spontaneous soundscapes before the next song emerged out of the soup.  Here's a short clip from one of those interludes.

The second, harder-rocking set climaxed with one of Ira Kaplan's signature feedback-guitar freakouts in The Story of Yo La Tengo (from 2006's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass).  

Yo La Tengo's encores are famous for their cover songs, and that night they covered What'cha Gonna Do About It by Small Faces and closed the evening with Sun Ra's doo-wop oddity Somebody's In Love (which they recorded in 2015 on Stuff Like That There).  Between those two covers, they played a quieter version of Sugarcube off of 1997's I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One (they played a louder version as the penultimate song of their second set).

Our fourth or fifth time seeing Yo La Tengo.  As always, a good show.  

Titus Andronicus at The Masquerade, Atlanta, April 11, 2018

It may not be recorded and celebrated in the history books, schoolteachers may not force their students to memorize the date, but April 11, 2018 was the day that pop diva Mariah Carey came out of the mental-health closet and publicly announced that she suffered from bipolar disorder.  It was also the day that New Jersey art-punk band Titus Andronicus played at The Masquerade in Atlanta, and the confluence of these two events is that Titus Andronicus' frontman, singer, and guitarist Patrick Sickles has been quite open and honest for years about his struggles with bipolar disorder, even writing a rock opera about his struggle on the 2015 album The Most Lamentable Tragedy.

But before we get to that, the show opened with a most enjoyable set by Rick Maguire of the indie Boston band Pile.  Maguire performed most of his set solo, although he was accompanied by pianist Alex Molini on a few songs toward the middle of his set before taking over the piano himself and finishing his set solo once again.

Molini was the only other musician on stage with Patrick Stickles during Titus Andronicus' set as well.  Stickles called this the "Titus Andronicus acoustic tour," even though he played electric guitar throughout and Molini was on electric piano.  Still, it was a stripped-down version of the band playing stripped down versions of their songs, mostly from their latest album A Productive Cough.

 It mostly worked, especially on the new songs, although I did miss hearing the "shoop sha la la's" during Above the Bodega.

The first half of the show was pretty much what one would expect from a stripped-down Titus Andronicus set.  During his banter, Stickles noted how it was appropriate that he was performing on the Hell stage of The Masquerade (the venue has three stages, named, for some reason, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory).  "I've felt like I've been in hell most of my life," he noted, before going on to talk about Mariah Carey's announcement that day and how good it made him feel to hear someone else, anyone else, come out and publicly admit to the same struggle he's fought with for all his life.  

But then the show became unhinged (although in a good way).  It started when the "band," such as it was, performed a punk cover of Where Everybody Knows Your Name (the theme from Cheers), with Stickles singing accompanied only by Molini's piano, and then he wandered out into the audience, microphone in hand, and ordering a drink as he performed several more songs, including a cover of Tom Waits' Better Off Without A Wife, while sitting on the bar.  It might have seemed very spontaneous and off-script, but as you can see in the video below, he did about the exact same thing several nights before in Fort Worth, Texas (and I'm sure at other stops on the current tour as well).

He had to have performed at least a half-dozen songs from the floor, both from his perch on the bar and then later at the barricade by the stage, including one song right smack in front of your humble narrator.  It was intimate and personal as Stickles talked frankly about his disease and sang songs about his struggle.  The audience empathized with him throughout, and the guy standing next to me (the audience was almost all guys for some reason), was literally weeping - head down, palm to face, tears streaming down his cheeks.  Not many other bands can achieve that painful a level of no-holds-barred rapport with their audience.

So you'd think that was it, but no, Stickles was just getting started.  Well, actually, that was about the half-way point.  Having covered most of the new album, the second half of the set, after Stickles finally got back on stage and strapped his guitar back on, was devoted to their other albums, but mostly The Most Lamentable Tragedy.  All in all, the set lasted over two hours and although, with only two bands in the lineup and 7:00 p.m. doors, we thought we'd be home by 11:00, we didn't actually get home until after midnight.

But with a big smile on our face.

Five Greatest Songs of All Time (Kick-Ass Edition)

Sometimes, we're just through with being nice.  We're done being all kind and polite.  Sometimes, we just want to kick some ass, while other times, we just want our asses kicked.

Here are the five GOAT songs that kick ass.  We suggest that you play them as loudly as you can, and with the windows wide open.  Don't worry about what others may think - the sheer brutality of these five songs will protect you from any harm.

You've been warned.

For those wanting a little explanation of what's inside these cuts, Preview is from the vastly underappreciated 1968 eponymous LP by The Jazz Composer's Orchestra, featuring the late great Cecil Taylor (RIP) and a young Gato Barbieri, and the cut below features one of the most intense and ferocious tenor saxophone solos ever recorded - quite possibly, the most intense and ferocious tenor solo even possible. If you think all jazz has to sound like Kenny G, you HAVE to listen to this, and all the way through.   

Blank Frank is from Brian Eno's 1974 Here Come the Warm Jets and the song not only anticipates and predates both punk rock and post-punk, but both New Wave and No Wave as well. According to MTV, the track "represents the most sacrilegious deconstruction ever of the basic Bo Diddley beat, including a guitar break seemingly intending (and undeniably succeeding at) an imitation of a machine-gun volley."  

Mr. Bungle's My Ass Is On Fire (1989) is here for obvious reasons, and most especially for its "redundant" closing.  We had hard metal before, and we had heard punk before, and we had heard ska before, and we had heard prog before, but until Mr. Bungle, we had never heard them all played in the same song, often at the same time.  This John Zorn-produced LP blew out minds nearly 30 years ago and still does now.

The Dream was selected from the much larger number of candidate songs from Thee Oh Sees discography that could rightfully qualify for this list because of the way this 2011 track so successfully shows how garage rock can capture the sensation of riding down an urban highway in a ridiculously unsafe car with no seat belts or brakes. 

Finally, the list couldn't be considered complete without something from Swans, and while you could easily compile a Top Five list of kick-ass songs by just Swans alone, even that list wouldn't be complete without Michael Gira screaming "Your name is Fuck!" while the chorus chants "Allelujah!" That's at the 10:45 mark, but please do check out the entire piece for all-important context and to understand how She Loves Us (2014) is actually about surrendering one's soul to a female deity, or something like that. 

Infinite Jest

In David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, a character devices a videotape that is so endless fascinating, that anyone who watches even a few seconds of it literally cannot stop watching, and will sit there transfixed, staring at the screen hour after hour (it plays on a loop), until death arrives by dehydration, starvation, or worse. 

Some time Saturday afternoon, I found myself with some free time on my hands (always a dangerous situation).  For some reason, I started a little project where I took a bunch of screensaver photographs I've accumulated and set them to music. I wanted to make it hypnotic by repeating some pictures in a recurring fashion, while keeping it interesting by introducing new themes and motifs in accordance with the music.  Somewhat facetiously, I titled the project Infinite Jest in honor of DFW.

DFW had the last laugh.  I started the project sometime around 8:00 p.m., and while still not finished, I didn't stop work on it until 3:45 a.m.   This morning, I met Britney for brunch, but as soon as I got home, I resumed work on the project and the next thing I knew it was already Sunday evening.  I missed the Celtics' game on t.v. (they won), I didn't get any chores completed, and I'm still nowhere near complete on the video project.  But like the titular Infinite Jest, it caught me (but not the viewer) in it's web, but fortunately I was able to break the spell before it was too late.

The video above is not the Infinite Jest project, but a video along the same lines that I produced several years ago, posted to give you an idea of what kind of project I had in mind before I almost lost my mind. 

What to do when it's Sunday morning and you realize you forgot to post something on Saturday? Why, just post some random pictures, backdate it to the previous night, and hope no one notices.

 

Dreaming of the Masters

Those of you who watched Episode 6 (Teddy Perkins) of the second season of Danny Glover's outstanding television show Atlanta may have wondered what the music in the background was during one of the key scenes, where Darius follows the sound of a piano up into the second floor of a creepy Buckhead mansion.  Well, wonder no more, it's Piano Solo 11 by Ahmad Jamal from his 1987 album Crystal.

No time to post anything more - tonight, we're off to see this band at Terminal West.

No time to post anything more - tonight, we're off to see this band at The Masquerade.

The King of America

As Socrates would have it, a just polis (city, or city-state) is one in which there is harmony, cooperation, and a division of labor between all the inhabitants.  Farmers farm, merchants buy and sell, the police police, and the rulers rule.  The polis works like machinery, with all the factions contributing to the common good, and all lamenting when misfortune happens to any one of them.

But in an unjust polis, one group's gain is another group's loss, faction schemes against faction, the powerful exploit the weak, and the polis is divided against itself.  

Pop quiz: at this point in time, which polis does America more resemble?  What are you doing about it?

As Socrates would have it, a just polis must be ruled by a philosopher-king, because only a philosopher would have the wisdom to determine what was best for the common good rather than just best for him, a rather self-serving conclusion for a philosopher such as Socrates I might add. But in any event, if the American polis is not a just state, does that imply that the king is not a true philosopher but is only looking out for his own, or his own faction's, self interest?

Five Greatest Songs of All Time (The Women Edition)

If I've learned anything over the years, it's 1) that only five songs are ludicrously insufficient to capture an entire gender's contributions to music and 2) that it's not my place to try and mansplain the five songs that I did select.

There is a famous hypothetical "problem" that ethicists and philosophers use to test people's ideas and assumptions about morality.  It asks you to imagine that there's a runaway train, and it's charging down the tracks enroute to hit and kill five people standing on the tracks, unaware that the train is coming at them.  You can stop the train and save the five people by pushing someone off a bridge in front of the train, which would slow the train down enough for the other five people to escape and survive.  You'd effectively be murdering one person, but you'd also be saving five others.  Is it the correct thing, is it the moral thing, to not kill and allow the other five people to die, or is the right thing to do to push the one person off the bridge, sacrificing one life to save five?

Most of us recoil at the thought of willfully participating in the death on an innocent person, even if it results in saving the lives of five others.  However, some people's ethics can reconcile the act on the basis of the greater good (better one dies than five) while other people feel that murder under any circumstance is wrong, or that it's immoral to impose one's own decision as to what the best thing to do is onto the innocent bystander on the bridge, who hadn't themself decided to sacrifice their life for the greater good of the other five.  The latter is a free-will argument maintaining that it's better five people die solely due to their own free-will choice to be on those particular tracks at that particular time than it is for one person to die based on a choice made by someone else.

If you argue that it's an act of murder to push the one person off the bridge to save the others, isn't not pushing the one person off the bridge effectively murdering the other five people that you could have otherwise saved?  Or at least manslaughter?  How is participating in the death of one worse than allowing the death of five?

I think there's a problem with the "problem," or at least the way that I've heard it and presented it above.  The problem is that there must be at least two people on the bridge, the person who can be pushed off to stop the train and the person doing the pushing, and the person who can push the other off the bridge is also capable of simply jumping off the bridge themselves, sacrificing their own life to save the other five as well as the one person on the bridge. While suicide may be considered immoral by some, it's a matter of which is worse - suicide or murder? Also, the suicide prevents imposing one's own choice onto someone else's free will. As they say in Game of Thrones, "He who passes the sentence should swing the sword," so if I were asked if I would push the person off the bridge to save the other five or allow the five to die by not pushing, I would answer, "Neither.  I'd jump off the bridge myself and save them all" (the bodhisattva response).

To break all this down mathematically, if you jump off the bridge yourself to save the five people on the tracks and to spare the life of the other person on the bridge, then the ratio of killed to saved is 6 saved (the five on the tacks and the one on the bridge) to 1 killed, or 6:1.  If you push the other off the bridge, the ratio is still 6:1, but you yourself are one of the six and someone else died at your hand, so to my thinking, in this case 6:1 ≠ 6:1, but actually 6:1 > 6:1, where the greater, more moral 6:1 is the one where you jump and spare the other person on the bridge.  If you don't push and you don't jump - you don't do anything - the two of you on the bridge are spared but five other people die and the ratio of saved to killed is 2:5.  Therefore and in summary, the moral equation boils down to 6:1 > 6:1 >  2:5.

But we're not all logicians and we don't experience real life mathematically.  One of the universally regarded highest acts of valor is when a soldier sees a hand grenade tossed into his troop's foxhole, and he reflexively dives on top of it, shielding his fellow soldiers from the blast by using his own body. He doesn't take the time to think through the mathematics or devise moral equations, and he doesn't meditate on the relative morality of one option or the other. If he paused for even a nanosecond they'd all be dead, so he immediately and instinctively goes with his training and reflexes and jumps on top of the grenade.  If the soldier looked around and threw someone else on top of the grenade, he'd be court martialed and reviled as a coward and a traitor (if he wasn't first shot by his own troops on the spot).  Unless, that is, the body thrown on the grenade just so happened to be an enemy combatant, in which case the soldier would be rewarded for his cunning.   

But I can see I'm already getting to another theoretical problem, so I'll just leave you to decide what you would do on that bridge - jump, push, or do nothing?