Tag: Music

Rockers of Ages

Seth Anderson0 comment

I can’t say the Rolling Thunder era is my most favorite of Dylan eras, but this is humorous nonetheless.

Rolling Thunder Logbook
“Rolling Thunder Logbook” (Sam Shepard)

Rocks of Ages – New York Times … No one living has a better appreciation for the sneaky and unnerving power of American myth than Bob Dylan. In the fall of 1975, the United States was gripped by what the playwright Sam Shepard, who had been hired to work on a film about the tour, called “Bicentennial madness.” With 1976 fast approaching, America was obsessed as never before with its origins, and as Mr. Dylan knew perfectly well, there was no better place to launch his tour than the mythic landing ground of the Pilgrims. Mr. Shepard did not end up contributing much to the film, but he did publish a log chronicling the tour’s first six weeks. Included in the book is a bizarre photo showing Mr. Dylan and several fellow musicians peering over the side of the Mayflower II, a reproduction of a 17th-century vessel berthed at Plimoth Plantation. A stiff breeze is blowing, and two of the party are desperately hanging on to the brims of their cowboy hats as the front man of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn, speaks on a huge, ’70s-style portable phone. But perhaps the weirdest and wackiest portion of Mr. Shepard’s log describes how Mr. Dylan and his pals recreated the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. As the poet Allen Ginsberg sat beside the iron fence that surrounds the rock, chanting and chiming his set of Tibetan bells, Mr. Dylan haphazardly piloted a dinghy to the Plymouth shore.

Nate Philbrick’s essay continues
The book is a fairly quick, amusing read about what a major tour with rock stars is like, if you are Sam Shepard.

Reading Around on September 1st through September 2nd

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected September 1st through September 2nd:

  • Will Chicago See a Hotel Strike? – Chicagoist – Chicago's hotel workers are clocking in today without a union contract, as negotiators from UNITE-HERE Local 1 and the Hotel Employers Labor Relations Association has yet to reach an agreement on a new pact. The previous contract expired at last night at midnight. “It’s been a fight to even just get to the table,” a spokeswoman for the hotel workers’ union told Crain's. “We’re not close, and I think we’re looking at the possibility of a major fight.”
  • Dithering: Jonny Greenwood: Sasha Frere-Jones : The New Yorker – "Q: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?

    JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me"
    I would add, they sound fine if they are recorded at a high enough sample rate.

  • Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch – And if it is indeed the case that the Washington Post is recycling the public views of ideologues, hacks, and torture-tourists like Marc Thiessen as inside scoops, then Finn, Warrick, and Tate granted anonymity to their sources because naming them would by itself discredit the story. There is a place for anonymous quotes in journalism, but this is not it.

Reading Around on August 25th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading August 25th from 10:32 to 16:21:

  • Emptywheel » Was John Yoo Free-Lancing When He Approved the “Legal Principles”? –

    “Earlier today, I showed that there is a CIA document on the “Legal Principles” on torture that included legal justifications that had not been in any of the August 1, 2002 OLC memos authorizing torture. I showed that the document changed over time, but that when CIA asked Jack Goldsmith to “re-affirm” the Legal Principles in March 2004, he stated that he did not consider the document to be a product of OLC.

    I have further inquired into the circumstances surrounding the creation of the bullet points in the spring of 2003. These inquiries have reconfirmed what I have conveyed to you before, namely, that the bullet points did not and do not represent an opinion or a statement of the views of this Office.

    It seems–reading Jack Goldsmith and John Ashcroft’s objections to the CIA IG Report–that John Yoo was free-lancing when he worked with CIA on them.”

    Why does John Yoo have a job at Berkley? and why does he *still* have it?

    VoodooFront.jpg

  • AP again advances falsehood that health reform “will mean cuts in Medicare benefits” | Media Matters for America – AP again advances falsehood that health reform “will mean cuts in Medicare benefits” In an August 24 article, the Associated Press uncritically reported that “[s]eniors worry that paying for the $1 trillion-plus, 10-year [health care] overhaul will mean cuts in Medicare benefits” without noting that, in the words of FactCheck.org, “[t]he claim that Obama and Congress are cutting seniors’ Medicare benefits to pay for the health care overhaul is outright false.” Additionally, AARP has also rebutted the notion that health reform will reduce Medicare benefits
  • cross dvd.png


  • “Fela: This Bitch of a Life” (Carlos Moore)

  • Music Monday: Fela Kuti’s Bitch of a Life – Carlos Moore’s Fela: This Bitch of a Life, the newly rereleased 1982 authorized biography of Africa’s greatest musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Well, sexism and police brutality. The book, translated from the French, is essentially a well-organized and very long interview of Fela at his peak. For die-hard fans of the original Black President this may be a enticing read

You Should Own Black Swan

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“The Black Swan” (Bert Jansch)

Listened to this Bert Jansch album over the weekend1

Scottish guitar hero and songwriter Bert Jansch (Pentangle) recording for Drag City, with a host of admirers in tow — Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart, Noah Georgeson (who performed and co-produced with Jansch), Helena Espvall, son Adam Jansch, and more. Black Swan is a collection of original and traditional tunes. Jansch turns in a performance that shows his typical restraint, and within it his wonder as a guitarist. His use of the blues, American, Celtic, and British Isles folk forms is also informed by music from Eastern Europe, and he ties them all together seamlessly. “High Days,” a solo track, uses all three, as he winds out an elegy for a friend. “When the Sun Comes Up” begins with Orton’s vocal and David Roback’s slide guitar and Otto Hauser’s drums, shuffling underneath. Jansch spills it modal and bluesy, Orton grabs onto his changes and effortlessly lets her voice wrap around his lyric lines. Her signing on the traditional number “Katie Cruel” has been brilliantly rearranged by Jansch. Banhart sings in a muted duet with Orton, but his vocal was unnecessary. It’s a spooky track that’s been prepared for by the preceding cuts. The slippery Piedmont blues style Jansch tucks into his British folk on “My Pocket’s Empty” is evocative of an earlier, simpler time, though as revealed by the tune, times were hard then, too. Jansch’s singing is at its most expressive here; he’s moaning in his reedy baritone. Orton makes one more appearance here on the gorgeous and-all-too-brief arrangement of the blues tune “Watch the Stars.” Hers and Jansch’s vocals take the tine out of the song’s Southern American birthplace and brings it into the world, one grainy line at a time. It’s a singalong blues that reveals the sheer expanse of the universe in the grain of their voices.

Ultimately, this disc is not so different from Jansch’s others, but it is wonderfully spirited and loose. It feels live, and backroomish. It’s as informal a date as one can find among superstars — and make no mistake, you may or may not know his name, but his large catalog proves it — Jansch is one. As for the rest, the hardscrabble dirty, slide guitar-drenched English folk of “A Woman Like You” rings as true as a Texas blues love song by Lightnin’ Hopkins. Traditional public domain nuggets such as “The Old Triangle” are almost radically reworked and ring spookily true for the current era. The blues-rock of the humorously political “Texas Cowboy Blues,” complete with keyboards and popping acoustic 12-strings, shimmies and even shakes in places. The last few cuts, a gorgeous instrumental called “Magdalina’s Dance,” and “Hey Pretty Girl” (performed solo), are drenched in historical tropes, but are thoroughly modern and soulful.

[Click to continue reading allmusic (The Black Swan > Overview)]

Really good stuff, highly recommended if you like acoustic guitar playing, and music graceful enough to have space between the notes. This ain’t Wall of Sound crap, this is gorgeous winter music.

from Grayson Currin’s Pitchfork review

It almost seems as though Jansch spent most of his four-decade career preparing for The Black Swan and its cast: His early solo work for voice and guitar staked out a clean, inventive style, focused on high fretting action in the left hand, an integrated system of hammers and drags that gave his instrument a thorough voice. With Pentangle, and later with Loren Auerbach in the 80s, he put that style into collaborative focus. His guitar playing– somehow constantly understated and completely unorthodox– has been the generous, enchanting source of it all.

It’s the wellspring here, too: Helena Espvall’s cello lines on opener “The Black Swan” dress Jansch’s guitar and voice in winter gloves, warming the chill of his melody– “Every day is quiet and calm/ Like a lull before the storm”– with perfectly paired playing. Otto Hauser’s cymbal and hand-drum percussion and Paul Wassif’s slide guitar on “Woman Like You” are likewise just shapely beds for Jansch’s playing. Orton, who handles vocals on three tracks, is flawless and selfless, her austerity informed by each song’s direction. She sounds like a weary survivor on “When the Sun Comes Up” and like a dejected soul on “Katie Cruel”, a traditional folk song about withered glory.

On an album all about meeting maturity with vibrancy, Banhart alone mars the effect when he mismatches Orton’s straightforward nerviness with an ultra-affected, reverb-buried vocal track on the gorgeously unsettling “Katie”. Even though Banhart is attempting to recall the voice of his idol Karen Dalton, who brought this song to proper attention, he sounds like the dilettante, roving unnecessarily for the freak side, still in search of guidance. Perhaps the rest of this beautiful, elegant Swan will help him find his way.

[Click to continue reading Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Bert Jansch: The Black Swan]

Footnotes:
  1. we wrote about it in 2006 prior to actually owning our own copy [↩]

Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix

Seth Anderson7 Comments

My mom bought me the Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions for my birthday a couple years ago.

The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Miles Davis)
“The Cellar Door Sessions 1970” (Miles Davis)

In reading the liner notes, I was struck by the thought that one of the greatest musical tragedies of the early 70s was that Jimi Hendrix never got to make an album with Miles Davis. They had talked about it at some length apparently, with Keith Jarrett, and maybe Michael Henderson and the rest of Miles Davis’ crack funk-jazz band of this era, but they never got around to actually recording/playing before Hendrix died, at least that I’m aware of.

Electric Ladyland
Electric Ladyland

Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland1 remains one of my favorite albums, especially in the moody, jazzed up sections. However, Hendrix received so many accolades for being a bad-ass guitar wizard that I think he allowed himself to get lazy in subsequent years, playing down to (or occasionally up to) the level of his jam buddies. If Hendrix and Miles Davis had recorded an album, there would have been no way that Miles, as serious a musician as has ever been born in the States, would have accepted anything other than stellar work, and Hendrix would have obliged.

The Cellar Door sessions

This music reveals a truly muscular Miles Davis at the top of his form as an improviser and as a bandleader with the most intense and nearly mystical sense of the right place-the right time-the right lineup. These shows, played in a club instead of a concert hall, provided a virtual laboratory for possibilities Davis was exploring. The money for the gig was nearly non-existent compared to what he was used to making playing halls, so he paid the band out of his own pocket.

..What happens as the band plays each night is that the sense of adventure grows, while the utter relaxation and confidence in each member is carried through to Davis who pushes the buttons and in strange, nearly wordless ways, communicates what he wants on-stage, and the other players give it to him. There are so few rough moments here where someone drops a line or doesn’t quite make it; when it does happen on that rare occasion, some other member picks it up and goes with it. And DeJohnette’s drumming, in his virtual mind-lock with Henderson, is some of the best playing of his career.

Hendrix would have fit right in. A real tragedy this collaboration never occurred.

Footnotes:
  1. aka Electric Dylan Lad [↩]

Reading Around on August 16th through August 17th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected August 16th through August 17th:

  • Woodstock: even the memories are muddy – The Globe and Mail – David Crosby judged his performance with Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Neil Young as “stoned and funny and fine.” Yet the recollections of one of his bandmates differ wildly from Crosby’s cozy account. “Woodstock was a bullshit gig, a piece of shit,” Young told biographer Jimmy McDonough. “We played fucking awful. No one was into the music.”
  • Death_of_Marat_by_David.jpg
  • Simpsons Did It: Laid-Off Workers Keep Up Appearances, Pretend To Be Employed – Earlier this week, the Washington Post shared the story of a man who tried hard to keep up appearances, and to carefully choreograph his routine so his friends and neighbors wouldn’t think of him differently. Finally, he tired of the charade, and outed himself. As an unemployed person.

    After he lost his job, Clinton Cole continued to wake up early, dress in a suit, and leave the house. Instead of going to the office, he spent the day in a park or public library. While his family knew about his situation, friends and neighbors didn’t, and he wanted to keep up appearances.

  • [removed link because it was apparently a scrapersite of content generated by The Consumerist. Strangely, the scraper-scum appeared in my Google alert before the original site did]

Bad Like Jesse James

swanksalot0 comment


“Live At The Cafe Au Go-Go (And Soledad Prison)” (John Lee Hooker)

There are certain songs that give you chills, no matter how many times you’ve heard them. John Lee Hooker singing, “I’m Bad Like Jesse James”, from the album, Live at Cafe Au Go Go is one such song for me.

It is one of those tracks you want to stomp your own foot to the relentless and insistent beat.

Simply one of the greatest live blues recordings ever. Hooker plays alone at Soledad, yet the real thrill is hearing him backed at Greenwich Village’s Café Au-Go-Go in 1966 by Muddy Waters and his band, including pianist Otis Spann, unsung harmonica giant George Smith, Francis Clay on drums, and guitarists Sammy Lawhorn and Luther Johnson. All are at the height of their abilities, but it’s Hooker who works like a hoodoo conjurer, making misery rain down in “Seven Days” and “When My First Wife Left Me.” This August night’s reading of I’m Bad Like Jesse James ranks among the most intimidating vocal performances ever taped. His guitar and baritone singing sink to rarely heard depths of the blues–that secret place in the music (known only to its absolute masters) where it becomes an elemental force.

the lyrics go something like this:

A little thing I’m going to do called
‘I’m Bad Like Jesse James’

I’m bad
I’m bad
Like Jesse James, uh-huh

I had a friend one time
Least I thought I did
He come to me
Said, ‘Johnny?’
[I ] Said, ‘What man?’
‘I’m outdoor’
I say, ‘Yeah?’

I taken the cat in
Get him a place to stay
And I found out
He goin’ ’round town
Tellin’ everybody that he
He got my wife

Then I gets mad
I goes to the cat
Like a good guy should
I said, ‘Look man
‘I’m gonna warn, you just one time’
Next time I warn you’
‘I’m gonna use my gun’

‘Cause I’m mad, I’m bad, like Jesse James

I’m so mad, I’m so mad.
I’m gonna ruin you this mornin’.
I’ve got three boys
Do my dirty work
Now, you don’t see me
I’m the big boss
I do the payin’ off
After they take care of you

In their own way
They may shoot you
They may cut you.
They may drown you
I just don’t know
I don’t care
Long as they take care of you
In their own way

I’m so mad, I’m bad this mornin’, like Jesse James.

They gon’ take you right down
By the riverside
Now four is goin’ down
Ain’t but three comin’ back
You read between the line
We’re gonna have a deal

‘Cause I’m mad, I’m bad, like Jesse James.

They gonna tie yo’ hands
They gonna tie yo’ feet
They gonna gag your throat
Where you can’t holler none

An cryin’ won’t help you none
Set you in the water
Yeah, the bubbles comin’ up.
Whoa
Rrrrrrr
Rrrrrrr

Oh yeah, I’m so mad!

So intense. When I saw John Lee Hooker perform at Antone’s1 he stomped his foot to keep time. Hard not to when playing songs like this. When I saw him perform, he was playing solo, but surprisingly, turned up his distortion and played a little proto-grunge on a couple of songs. I’d say circa 19882

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J3j74R9dbw
a 1986 solo version, not nearly as intense, but still, JLH!3

Footnotes:
  1. the famous blues club in Austin – I think it is closed down now – Clifford Antone had some problems with the law, sold drugs or something, and has since passed away [↩]
  2. I remember being too young to drink, went by myself, and tried to tip the waitress $5 for taking her table and only drinking a coke. Of course, I had my bong in my car, but that’s another story [↩]
  3. playing a guitar with BB King’s name on it for some reason. [↩]

Bloodshot Records to celebrate 15th at Hideout block party

Seth Anderson1 Comment

There’s a lot of good music on Bloodshot Records.

Violence Inherent in the System

Greg Kot reports:

The Hideout’s annual end-of-summer block party will be devoted to Chicago-based Bloodshot Records on its 15th anniversary, the label announced Monday.

The Sept. 12 festival will feature some of Bloodshot’s finest artists, past and present: Alejandro Escovedo, the Waco Brothers, Bobby Bare Jr., the Deadstring Brothers, Scott Biram, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, and reunions of the Blacks and Moonshine Willy.

A $10 donation to benefit charities is requested. Reservations can be made through bloodshotrecords.com.

[Click to continue reading Bloodshot Records to celebrate 15th at Hideout block party; Wilco adds second show | Turn It Up – A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap]

I’ll try to make it if I can, will you be there?

[1354 W. Wabansia, Chicago, IL ]

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (Bob Dylan)


“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Two-Disc Special Edition)” (Sam Peckinpah)

Finally got a chance to see this film a year or so ago. Watchable, not spectacular. The story behind the movie sounds more interesting. [Netflix / Wikipedia / IMDb

When Bob Dylan learned that Rudy Wurlitzer was penning a script focusing on the Bonney-Garrett legend, he tracked the writer down and requested a meeting.

“The script was already written when Bob came to see me in my apartment on the Lower East Side of New York,” Wurlitzer recalled earlier this month from his getaway home, a cabin in his beloved Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. “He said that he had always related to Billy the Kid as if he was some kind of reincarnation; it was clear that he was obsessed with the Billy the Kid myth,” a notion that was validated 34 years later in Todd Haynes’ multi-persona Dylan movie biography I’m Not There (2007). In the film Richard Gere assumes the Dylan shape-shifting persona of Billy, a bespectacled, enigmatic outlaw.

Initially, Wurlitzer suspected that the elusive singer wanted to contribute an original tune to the score of the film but Dylan had other plans – he wanted to be in the movie, despite having no acting experience whatsoever.

Wurlitzer continues: “I called the producer (Gordon Carroll) who was thrilled that Bob wanted to be in the movie and then I wrote the part for Bob off the cuff in New York. We flew down to Durango, Mexico, to see Peckinpah – who had no idea what was up – and we found him in his house, drunk and half-naked, shooting at an image of himself in the mirror. When I told him I had written a part for Bob Dylan and ‘here he is’, Peckinpah turned and after a long pause, said to Bob, ‘I’m a big Roger Miller fan myself’.”

From that moment on, the author remembers, “Dylan followed Sam around like he was one of the last real outlaws, which, who knows, he probably was, at least in my partial experience.”

[Click to continue reading Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto < Columns | PopMatters]

Making the film was a long, drawn out process:

In a 1982 feature for Rocky Mountain Magazine titled Last of the Desperadoes: Dueling with Sam Peckinpah, journalist and Elle magazine advice columnist (Ask E. Jean) E. Jean Carroll summed up the experience in a colorful and breathless single adrenaline-rushed paragraph that reads like a passage from a later Peckinpah film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia:
Peckinpah wants to shoot in New Mexico for authenticity. Metro wants Mexico to cut costs. He loses. Peckinpah wants a Panavision repairman in Durango, Mexico, to fix the cameras. The studio says nothing doing. The first footage is sent to L.A. to be processed. The lab calls Peckinpah. Says the film’s out of focus. Panic in Durango.

Downtime. The camera is fixed and the paranoia sets in. The actors get sick. The crew gets sick. Peckinpah is puking every day. They fall behind schedule. James Aubrey, president of MGM, wants to save time and forbids Peckinpah to shoot a raft scene. Peckinpah shoots it. The scenarist, Rudy Wurlitzer, starts complaining. Says Peckinpah is rewriting the picture with the help of his old TV scripts. Jerry Fielding, Peckinpah’s music composer can’t work with Bob Dylan and quits.

Dylan’s unhappy. Kris Kristofferson (the Kid) says Rudy’s dialogue is corny. Rita Coolidge (Maria, the Kid’s lover) says all that remains of her role thanks to MGM is that of “a groupie.” James Coburn (Garrett) says Peckinpah is a creative paranoid who generates tension to give everyone the same experience to feed on during the film. A fight breaks out one Saturday night.

Two guys. One is on the phone ordering a couple of gunmen to Durango. Wants the other guy killed for threatening Peckinpah’s life. Whitey Hughes, Peckinpah’s stunt man, says they always have a good time, but on this film they aren’t having a good time. The hit is canceled at Peckinpah’s insistence. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is brought in 20 days over schedule and $1.5 million over budget.

MGM’s building a hotel in Vegas and needs cash. The studio moves the release date up and gives Peckinpah only two and a half months to edit. On the sly MGM duplicates the work print and employs another cutter. Peckinpah’s version runs between 122 and 126 minutes. The studio’s runs 106. The producer, Gordon Carroll, negotiates day and night. Gets nothing restored. The picture’s released. Peckinpah sues for $1.5 million. Orders all the cuts put back or his name taken off. Nada. Nada. Nada.

[Click to continue reading Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto < Columns | PopMatters]

And of course, the Bob Dylan song, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door becomes a big hit, and is oft covered by others, including Dylan1. Now that I think about it, I saw the original studio version of Pat Garrett, not the so-called Special Edition. Maybe I’ll watch it again, sometime.

The soundtrack was also haphazardly recorded:

As Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid neared completion, Dylan held a recording session on January 20 at Columbia’s recording studio in Mexico City. Filming had been so difficult, both of the film’s stars and Wurlitzer accompanied Dylan out of Durango. Wurlitzer said at the time, “Sam knows he’s losing to Dylan…but I don’t care, man. I’ve got to get away.”

Backed by local Mexican musicians and members of Kris Kristofferson’s band, Dylan had difficulty recording a satisfactory take of “Billy.” Eventually, he began paring down the arrangement, and by the last take, he was backed only by bassist Terry Paul. This final take was used for the film and later included on the soundtrack album as “Billy 4.” A brief instrumental, “Billy Surrenders,” would also be featured in the film. The session would continue until 4 a.m., but it would not produce anything else that would be considered usable.

Meanwhile, Peckinpah hired Jerry Fielding to advise Dylan on his work. Fielding was experienced in film scoring, but he held very conservative views regarding popular music. Dylan was fully aware of Fielding’s opinions regarding his work (“a lot of nonsense which is strictly for teenyboppers”), but he did not resist Fielding’s recommendations on how to score the film.

On Fielding’s advice, Dylan sang “a relevant verse” of the “Billy” ballad “as it fit the story at [four] separate points throughout the picture.” Fielding had also heard Dylan’s new composition, “Goodbye Holly,” which was written for an important scene involving the character, Holly. Fielding recommended dropping this song and writing a new one for a scene involving the death of Sheriff Baker.

“I set up two dubbing sessions,” recalls Fielding. “Dylan had this song [‘Billy’] he’d written for which he had a limitless number of verses that he would sing in random order…So I had to tape Dylan’s song, because he had nothing written down, and have it transcribed…At the same time I asked that he write at least one other piece of music because you cannot possibly hope to deal with an entire picture on the basis of that one ballad. So finally he brought to the dubbing session another piece of music – ‘Knock-Knock-Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’ Everybody loved it. It was shit. That was the end for me.”

Dylan recorded the final version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” at a session in February, this time on Warner Bros. Records’ soundstage in Burbank, California. “It was very early in the morning,” recalls drummer Jim Keltner. “I think the session was 10 a.m. and again it all fell into place…There weren’t any overdubs on that, the singers were singing live, little pump organ, Roger McGuinn I think played [guitar]. This was for a particular scene in the movie when Slim Pickens is dying and that’s the first time I ever cried while I played. It was the combination of the words, Bob’s voice, the actual music itself, the changes, and seeing the screen…In those days you were on a big soundstage, and you had this massive screen that you can see on the wall, [with] the scene…running when you’re playing. I cried through that whole take.”

The sessions at Burbank lasted several days. Though they were much more relaxed and amiable than the Mexico City session, the process was still irritating to Dylan. At one point, he told producer Gordon Carroll that “this is the last time I work for anyone in a movie on the music. I’ll stick to acting.” Though Dylan would produce his own films and later contribute songs to other soundtracks, he would never take sole responsibility for an entire soundtrack again.[Click to continue reading Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (album) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Though of course, Dylan won an Oscar decades later for Things Have Changed. [YouTube of his acceptance speech]

Footnotes:
  1. when Dylan sings out of his vast songbook, he usually “covers” himself, i.e., makes new interpretations of the original song. Sometimes similar, more often radically different [↩]

Desert Blues

Seth Anderson1 Comment


Aman Iman: Water is Life1

Pitchfork reviewer Joel Tangari has a nice historical overview of the music from the Sahara, including one of my favorite African based bands, Tinariwen.

The roots of today’s Kel Tamashek guitar revolution lie in varied soil. From a purely musical standpoint, it descends from traditional chant music played on distant relatives of the guitar, which in turn draws from sources north and south. The music of Al Andalus to the north– a family of sounds extending from flamenco in Spain through Arabesque and Berber orchestras in North Africa and Lebanese string music– is one source of input, while the myriad musics of the Sahel, a semi-arid band of land that spans Africa to the south of the Sahara, are also close relatives.

The pentatonic scales echo those heard along the curve of the Niger River, and it’s easy to draw a line through the music of Senegal, Guinea, southern Mali, and other parts of West Africa straight to American blues. This YouTube video isn’t much to look at, but it’s soundtracked by a Tamashek chant recorded in the 1930s that offers a good glimpse of the connection between traditional Kel Tamashek music and the modern, electrified version (I believe the stringed instrument is a tehardent, a three-stringed lute related to the ngoni and ultimately the guitar):

[Check it out Pitchfork Feature: Rebel Blues in the Sahara: A Desert Guitar Primer]

There is a certain ineffable quality to music of the desert, a rough-hewn beauty. Perhaps due to the dual desert heritage of my name (ancient Hebrew, ancient Egypt), perhaps for deeper DNA related reasons, but the music of the Sahara, and nearby, resonates in my soul.

Footnotes:
  1. repost from my old blog [↩]

The definition of Cool

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Kind of Blue (Legacy Edition)” (Miles Davis)

Speaking of police arresting iconic black dudes, Miles Davis had his own dustup with the police, as Bernard Chazelle reminds us:

Why didn’t Professor Gates keep his cool? Not sure. Let’s ask the man who gave birth to the cool. In the words of Leonard Feather,

After escorting a young white girl out of the club to a taxi [outside Birdland in NYC] he was standing on the sidewalk when a patrolman came by and asked him to move on. When Miles said, “I’m not going nowhere — I’m just getting a breath of fresh air,” the patrolman threatened to arrest him. Miles said, “Go ahead, lock me up.” When the patrolman seized his arm, a scuffle ensued during which a painclothes cop passing by began hitting Miles with a blackjack. With blood dripping all over his clothes, he was taken to the police station where, with his distraught wife, Frances, at his side he was booked on charges of disorderly conduct and assault. At a hospital, 10 stitches were taken in his scalp.

Feather doesn’t tell us if President Eisenhower had the cops over for a beer.

[Click to continue reading A Tiny Revolution: “So What”]

[Miles Davis after resisting arrest]

From Miles Davis’ autobiography:

I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. At the time I was doing a lot of boxing, so I thought to myself, I ought to hit this motherfucker because I knew what he was doing. But instead I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.

He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.”

I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest!” He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. Now, boxers had told me that if a guy’s going to hit you, if you walk toward him you can see what’s happening. I saw by the way he was handling himself that the policeman was an ex-fighter. So I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head He stumbled, and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk, and I thought to myself, Oh, shit, they’re going to think that I fucked with him or something. I’m waiting for him to put the handcuffs, on, because all his stuff is on the ground and shit. Then I move closer so he won’t be able to fuck me up. A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on. Then I remember Dorothy Kilgallen coming outside with this horrible look on her face–I had known Dorothy for years and I used to date her good friend Jean Bock–and saying, “Miles, what happened?” I couldn’t say nothing. Illinois Jacquet was there, too.

It was almost a race riot, so the police got scared and hurried up and got my ass out of there and took me to the 54th Precinct, where they took pictures of me bleeding and shit. So, I’m sitting there, madder than a motherfucker, right? And they’re saying to me in the station, “So you’re the wiseguy, huh?” Then they’d bump up against me, you know, try to get me mad so they could probably knock me

[Click to continue reading Hot House: Race Relations, 50 Years Later]

Miles Davis after being arrested for standing next to a white girl, helping her catch a taxi

Back to Mr. Chazelle who subsequently enters into another kind of discussion, the kind I can read all day without really understanding the details. Just the feeling is enough. D-minor is a favorite chord of mine, albeit on guitar. I have never had a piano of my own that I could noodle/learn on, so haven’t ever figured out what chords are what without laboriously putting them together. I mean, I can create melodies on a piano, but don’t have enough formal musical training to sustain an entire 10 minute jam, much less explain what the hell Dorian modal scales are.

OK, What about the music? “Kind of Blue” is the most extraordinary jam session ever, featuring a dream team of jazz musicians (Miles, Evans, Coltrane, Adderley, Cobb, Chambers). It’s one of the most influential albums in jazz. It broke from bebop in a big way by going modal. But that’s not why I can listen to it a million times without ever getting tired. The reason for that is the dream team. All the modality does is give them space to breathe and explore melodic ideas that are ruled out in chord-heavy bebop (unless you’re Bird and you can play a full-fledged melody in two-and-a-half seconds).

“So What” is harmonically straightforward: you go Dorian for the first 16 bars, then move up half a step for 8 bars and then back to the original key for the last 8. Sounds so simple. Until, of course, it’s your turn to solo right after Coltrane. Good luck! It’s often said that jazz introduced modes to modern music. Nothing could be further from the truth. Satie, Debussy, Ravel and all those guys used modes heavily a good 50 years before Miles, using far more complex arrangements. But who cares? This video alone gives you a good sense of why jazz is the music of the 20th century par excellence.

Click to continue reading A Tiny Revolution: “So What”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TbrgIdm0E

Miles Davis and John Coltrane play one of the best renditions of SO WHAT ever captured on film-Live in 1958. Edit : in fact, was in New York, april 2, 1959. Recorded by CBS producer Robert Herridge. Cannonball Adderley had a migrane and was absent from the session. Wynton Kelly played piano–he was the regular band member at this time–but Bill Evans had played on the original recording of “So What” on March 2, 1959. The other musicians seen in the film were part of the Gil Evans Orchestra, who performed selections from “Miles Ahead”. Jimmy Cobb on drums.

Freedom Rock Man

swanksalot0 comment

Keep Off Rock
posting this photo led to a Flickr pal leaving a YouTube link for the infamous Freedom Rock late-night television commercial (ran in the late 80s, has been a punch line for hipster jokes since then)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eGWW8KOQio

I assume there is a bittorrent for these songs; at the least, they are floating around in MP3 form. Kind of a funny list actually, Deep Purple and Jethro Tull don’t really mix well with Seals & Crofts or Dion, at least when I am manning the DJ controls. Also somewhat surprisingly, there is no Wikipedia entry for Freedom Rock, at least that I could find.

Because I’m waiting for a file to download and have some time to waste, I marked an asterisk next to the songs that currently exist in my iTunes library. I really need to burnish up my Freedom Rock credentials, don’t I?

Disc One:
*The Byrds – Turn, Turn, Turn
Ten Years After – I’d Love To Change The World
*Jethro Tull – Locomotive Breath
Joan Baez – The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Edwin Starr – War
*Santana – Black Magic Woman
Harry Nilsson -Jump Into The Fire
*Deep Purple – Smoke On The Water
Brotherhood of Man – United We Stand
Coven – One Tin Soldier (The Legend Of Billy Jack )
*Jefferson Airplane – Somebody To Love
*Canned Heat – Going Up The Country
Friend and Lover – Reach Out Of The Darkness
*America – A Horse With No Name
*Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird
Allman Brothers Band – Ramblin’ Man
The Guess Who – Share The Land
Elton John – Friends
Ocean – Put Your Hand In The Hand
Three Dog Night – Black & White

Disc 2:
*Derek & The Dominos – Layla
Moody Blues – The Story In Your Eyes
Five Man Electrical Band – Signs
Jonathan Edwards – Sunshine
The O’Jays – Love Train
*Cream – White Room
*Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
Judy Collins – Both Sides Now
Seals & Crofts – We May Never Pass This Way Again
Zager & Evans – In The Year 2525
*Alice Cooper – Eighteen
*Deep Purple – Hush
The Youngbloods – Get Together
Sonny & Cher – The Beat Goes On
Dion – Abraham, Martin & John
Melanie – Lay Down
*Spirit – I Got A Line On You
*James Taylor – Fire And Rain
Lobo – Me And You And A Dog Named Boo
*Otis Redding – (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay

and of these, probably the only song I wouldn’t skip past would be Locomotive Breath, and maybe The Byrds doing Bob Dylan’s, Turn Turn Turn. The rest are either horribly over-played, or just exist to be played in ironic context, i.e., not often.

Soul Power Sounds Spectacular

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I can’t wait to see this film, sounds spectacular.

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, the director of the new documentary “Soul Power,” was a film editor in 1995 for “When We Were Kings,” the Oscar-winning documentary directed by Leon Gast about the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight world championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (now Congo).


“When We Were Kings” (Leon Gast)

That fight had a huge sideshow: Zaire ’74, a three-day music festival of American soul alongside African music, headlined by James Brown and filmed by the same crew that was in Zaire for the fight. “Soul Power” presents that festival from its precarious beginnings to the finale of a shirtless, sweating James Brown singing to an African audience, “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

The festival was a striking sociocultural moment. African-American and Latin musicians were being introduced to Africa and African musicians amid Mr. Ali’s black-power politics and a hodgepodge of visiting music, sports and literary figures. “There was a lot of deeper meaning about why people went there and what it evoked for them,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said.

Brown and other headliners, including B. B. King, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, the Spinners and Bill Withers, performed at their peak, flaunting bright-colored, sharp-collared, bell-bottomed 1970s outfits that are a fashion show themselves. Americans shared the lineup with African musicians, like the South African singer Miriam Makeba and the top Zairean groups T.P.O.K. Jazz (featuring the guitarist Franco) and Tabu Ley Rochereau.

[From ‘Soul Power,’ Documentary on the Zaire ’74 Music Festival – NYTimes.com]

but who knows when the film will ever be released:

His plan was to put out concert DVDs of the festival’s performances, a fairly straightforward process. Then “I committed the original sin of filmmaking,” he said. “I fell in love with the material instead of following this rational business path.

It cost about half a million dollars, including licensing the music, to make “Soul Power.” So far there’s no deal for a soundtrack album. The DVDs will be assembled “as soon as humanly possible,” Mr. Levy-Hinte said, though that may well be next year.

“The vast majority of the material has still not been used,” he added. “There may be a whole other movie in there.”


“20th Anniversaire, Vol. 2” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)


“1972/1973/1974” (Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz)

Jackson Was a Wealthy Pedophile

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Michael Jackson may have sold a lot of records, but he was still able to commit on of the most heinous of all crimes, pedophilia, repeatedly (allegedly, but come on, even he knew he was doing wrong), and escape from jail because of his wealth and fame.

Bob Herbert has a theory:

In many ways we descended as a society into a fantasyland, trying to leave the limits and consequences and obligations of the real world behind. Politicians stopped talking about the poor. We built up staggering amounts of debt and called it an economic boom. We shipped jobs overseas by the millions without ever thinking seriously about how to replace them. We let New Orleans drown.

Jackson was the perfect star for the era, the embodiment of fantasy gone wild. He tried to carve himself up into another person, but, of course, there was the same Michael Jackson underneath — talented but psychologically disabled to the point where he was a danger to himself and others.
Reality is unforgiving. There is no escape. Behind the Jackson facade was the horror of child abuse. Court records and reams of well-documented media accounts contain a stream of serious allegations of child sex abuse and other inappropriate behavior with very young boys. Jackson, a multimillionaire megastar, was excused as an eccentric. Small children were delivered into his company, to spend the night in his bed, often by their parents.

One case of alleged pedophilia against Jackson, the details of which would make your hair stand on end, was settled for a reported $25 million. He beat another case in court.

The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death — not just an appreciation of his music, but a giddy celebration of his life — is yet another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life.

As with so many other things, we don’t want to know.

[Click to read more of Bob Herbert – Behind the Facade – NYTimes.com]

I don’t want to know because his crimes sickens me, so I opt to ignore all hagiography of Jackson.