I spent much of yesterday in the car (or, rather, cars -- more about that later) and listened to Michael Jackson's two great albums (Thriller and Off the Wall) several times each. I don't have any Jackson 5 on CD or on the iPod, but I've been playing those LPs this morning.

Jackson had descended so far into self-parody (and then all the way through it to a truly disturbing character, some sort of badly reanimated corpse that made you hope Sarah Michelle Gellar would show up with Mister Pointy) that it was easy to forget how damn great he was. He was a tremendous singer, he worked his ass off, he was smart enough to outwit Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono and get the Beatles catalog, and his great records are among the best pop music ever made.

Thriller is an almost-perfect album.* Nearly every song on it was a successful single, and even the non-megahits are great songs. It came out in 1982, which was the year I got my driver's license. My first car only had an AM radio and in those days, WABC and WNBC still played music, and half of what they were playing that fall probably came from that album. Along with the formerly whites-only MTV**, I was finally starting to escape the apartheid "rock" music I'd been brought up with, and that album was a revelation. Everyone liked it, regardless of color, regardless of whether they'd been hardcore "Disco Sucks" segregationists a few years earlier.

And sure, that album wouldn't have been what it was without master musicians like Greg Phillinganes and Rod Temperton and the towering genius of Quincy Jones. But it was unquestionably Jackson's album, and Jackson's genius that made it into the top-selling album in history. Jackson is much more entitled to his "King of Pop" title than Presley was to be called the "King of Rock and Roll."

It's all just sad. I feel like he is a great loss, but he's been a great loss for something like 20 years. I remember the long-awaited release of Bad in 1986, and how tremendously disappointing it was. Prince was at one of his heights, U2 and REM were doing great work, Public Enemy was getting started, and Bad was just ... bad. And he looked bad too. And then things went from Bad to worse and worse and then much worse.

He was an abused child, really, forced by a tyrannical father into an intense spotlight that distorted his whole life. His brothers certainly fared better, but he was the most sensitive of them all, and that's why he was so great, and why he fell so hard.

Driving home late last night, I was done with pop music and, scrolling through what happened to be on the iPod, played Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones, without even remembering the last song, "The Late Great Johnny Ace," which he wrote after John Lennon died.

Well, I really wasn't
Such a Johnny Ace fan
But I felt bad all the same
So I sent away for his photograph
And I wait until it came
It came all the way from Texas
With a sad and simple face
And they signed it on the bottom
From the Late Great Johnny Ace

*I say "nearly perfect" because of the insipid McCartney duet, "The Girl Is Mine," which sits in the middle of the first side like bird droppings on a barbecued steak. The two most glaring examples of wasted talent in pop music argue over "the girl" like New York State senators, engaging in dialog so painfully stilted it makes you want to hear the awful chorus again. And of course "the girl" has no name, nothing to say in the matter, and appears in a schoolboyish Jackson drawing on the LP's inner sleeve being tugged apart like a wishbone by the two superstars.

**Does anyone remember that for the first few years of its existence, MTV steadfastly refused to play videos by black artists? I remember David Bowie giving some bubblehead VJ a tongue-lashing during an interview about this, but it took Jackson's brilliant videos -- and threats from CBS -- to finally break the color barrier.

Tags: music

"It's all the same! Pathetically the same!"

Philip Glass was not criticizing someone else's music, but discussing his own. He was sitting at a piano in the St. Ann's Warehouse performance space in Dumbo, wearing a rumpled suit, his glasses in his hand, leaning around the piano to face his interviewer, radio host Ira Glass. It was "Glass on Glass," a fundraising event in which the award-winning creator of "This American Life" interviewed his cousin, probably the most famous living classical composer.

( A completely fascinating evening )

In conclusion, the two performed Allen Ginsberg's stunning poem, "Wichita Vortex Sutra." He had originally performed it with Ginsberg at an anti-war rally, and later with Patti Smith. Ira said that in rehearsal, Philip had asked him not to try to sound like Allen Ginsberg, and he didn't. He sounded like Ira Glass, reading Ginsberg's haunting words:

I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
          but not afraid
                    to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
                    because not only my lonesomeness
                                it's Ours, all over America

Tags: music

And a lot of special guests. Bob Jones and Boo Reiners, otherwise known as the Plunk Brothers, had a CD release party at Jalopy last night. Their first set consisted entirely of songs from their brand new CD, Two Guitarists and a Microphone, which is not available online yet but hopefully will be soon. It's 40 minutes of wonderful guitar duets and harmony singing. Their live shows are a joy to watch and that spirit comes through on the recording.

In the second set they invited a series of guest stars up to play with them, including singer Jen Larson who frequently shares a stage with them, and also Trip Henderson, Ben Fraker, Elena Skye, the Sheriff of Good Times, and me. It was great fun and a great honor to play with them and a wonderful night overall.

Boo is a well-known country guitarist who's played with Opry stars and won Grammies, and along with his partner Elena Skye runs the Demolition String Band, a great NYC roots outfit. Bob was a founding member of the Wretched Refuse String Band and an original member of the Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra, and repairs/restores guitars for most of the East Coast's bluegrass/old-time musicians.

They play fairly often in Brooklyn, so keep an eye out for them.

Tags: music, photos

I have been stalking lessons from mary_wroth, it would seem. Last night I went to the Good Coffeehouse in Brooklyn to see my second Del Rey show this week. Del is not nearly as famous as she should be. You could pile every living blues guitarist you've ever heard of on one side of a balance scale, and put her on the other, and they'd all have to be scraped off the ceiling.

She's a complete master of traditional fingerstyle guitar, but takes it to all sorts of places that the originators of that style -- Blind Blake, Gary Davis, etc -- never dreamed of. Last night, along with clarinetist Craig Flury, she played hot 20s jazz, two calypso numbers, several mind-bending original tunes, and old tunes for which she wrote new lyrics because she thought the original words were stupid.

She's a virtuoso player, playing sophisticated jazz fingerings with all sorts of counterrhythms and moving bass lines, all at lightning speed, relaxed and smiling the whole time, or raising an eyebrow at her guitar as if it had considered talking back to her. Her lead playing is mostly beyond my comprehension; if I could play rhythm backing the way she does I'd be happy. Very happy.

Here she is doing a classic blues, and here she is doing a duet with Steve James, a ragtime tribute to many great guitarists including her hero Memphis Minnie.

She doesn't come out east that often, but if you live in the Northwest, she lives in Seattle and plays around that area frequently. I guarantee you'd enjoy the evening.

Tags: music, photos

Bob Guida, the great blues guitarist and singer, a jovial and powerful presence in the Brooklyn music scene for decades, died last night. Shlomo Pestcoe posted the following announcement to the NY bluegrass and old-time list:

As some of you may have heard, Bob Guida passed away yesterday, Wednesday, March 11th. Bob had a heart attack as he was setting up his equipment to do a performance at a local library.

As per the Guida family's wishes, Bob's funeral and wake this weekend will be a small private familial function. Of course, there will be a larger memorial sometime in the near future. However, it's too early to discuss or organize such an event. Please understand that everyone is still very much in a state of shock and distraught over Bob's sudden passing.

Jim Garber and I are planning to set up a memorial site for Bob on Facebook asap. We'll let folks know when it's up.

All of our love and best wishes go out to Phylis Guida (Bob's widow) and the Guida family in their tragic loss.

Rest in peace, Bob. You are sorely missed by your many friends and loved ones.

"Bob loved performing and making people happy with his wonderful music and singing," Shlomo said in a Facebook posting. "It was Bob's fondest wish that when his time came, he would be able to take his leave of this world while on stage. And yesterday his wish was granted. He will be sorely missed."

Eli Smith interviewed Bob along with fellow Otis Brother Pat Conte last year. You can see video of the interview and follow a bunch of great links at the Down Home Radio site.

Tags: music

I'm listening to After the Heat this morning, the 1978 collaboration between Brian Eno and the German duo Cluster that I bought on CD yesterday. In some ways it is a transition between Eno's more rock-oriented work of the early 1970s and his increasing focus on instrumental and ambient music later in his career. It is a beautiful and unique album, combining Eno's quirkiness and humor with his abstract leanings, the instrumental talents of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and the environment of producer Conny Plank's famous studio. It's all analog -- digital synthesizers did not exist then, and many of the sounds are not produced by synthesizers at all, but by pianos and guitars and basses, treated and modified by Eno and Plank, sometimes "live," meaning that they didn't sit for hours adjusting effects units after the musicians had gone, but modified the music as the musicians were playing, using effects units as instruments.

This is an extension of the last post. I bought this LP at J&R Music, the same place I bought the CD reissue yesterday. I was a senior in high school, and discovered that yes, there was a store you could go to and find not only Brian Eno albums, but imported Brian Eno albums, with guys you'd never heard of, and liner notes in German you couldn't read, and that were utterly magical. There was no way to look up who these folks were, or to track down other recordings, other than by following the names in the liner notes and searching through bins of LPs for albums you'd never seen before.

What this album recalls for me, especially playing it in the morning, is the RJE room at Brooklyn College. RJE stands for "Remote Job Entry." It's the room where first-year computer science students, who were required to submit their programs on punch cards (you didn't get to use terminals until your second year) handed in their decks of cards and waited, sometimes more than an hour, to find out if their programs had run correctly.




I spent a lot of time in that room in the winter of 1983-84, me and my Sony TCS350 cassette Walkman. It surprises me that I can't remember what album was on the flip side of the cassette After the Heat was on; it was probably the first Cluster&Eno album but I'm not sure I got them at the same time. (I bought LPs, but transferred them to cassette for listening in the car and on the Walkman; cassettes were interesting in that the pairing of albums was largely a function of what you had bought that day. The set of albums I bought yesterday would probably have resulted in a permanent mental pairing of the new U2 and Springsteen albums.)

That winter was the tail end of my fascination with electronic and experimental music; Talking Heads were in remission, Bowie was doing pop music, Eno was deep into ambience, synthesizers were suddenly all over pop radio, and I was in the process of rediscovering the harmonica, and within a few years would be completely immersed in blues, reggae and political hip-hop.

After the Heat is a real moment in time for me. I listened to it obsessively for a few years, and then it went largely unplayed for decades. But when I hear the gentle piano melody of "Lüftschloß," or the strange phased percussion of "Broken Head," or the brief snatch of lyrics in "The Belldog," I am transported back to college, punchcards, and the smell of the computer room.

We were at the machinery
In the dark sheds
That the seasons ignore.
I held the levers
That guided the signals to the radio
But the words I received,
Random code, broken fragments from before.
--"The Belldog"

Tags: music

I went to J&R Music today to buy some actual albums (new ones by old acts: U2, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen, as well as an old Brian Eno collaboration that's hard to find in its original form at a reasonable price.

This is an increasingly rare experience, even for me. I buy a lot of music online nowadays. I like the instant gratification, and I like being able to find what I'm looking for without having to go to half a dozen stores.

Of course, you can't go to half a dozen stores anymore to look for albums. Tower is gone, both Virgin Megastores are closing, the HMV store disappeared years ago, lots of smaller outlets are gone, and for the most part to buy CDs nowadays you have to go to places like Circuit City or Barnes and Noble or Borders which have terrible selections and outrageous prices. But J&R was there first, and they're still there, and they still have an impressive selection and people who know about music, not that they're particularly nice. They also have great prices -- I used to tell people in the Borders at the World Trade Center that they could save a dollar per block per album by walking over to J&R. The U2 album was $6.99; I think the last time I paid that for a new album I was buying the new Cars album at Record Baron on Staten Island.

Or I could have been buying albums by any of the people I bought albums by today. Honestly, these albums all sound like what they are: mediocre releases by aging (or aged) artists. I doubt I would have even bought them if not for my completist instincts. They're not bad but not very exciting. I am glad to see U2 and Eno and Daniel (now billed as Danny????) Lanois and Steve Lillywhite all working together again, but this is nowhere near as interesting as The Unforgettable Fire or War were. The Springsteen is perfectly serviceable but pales in comparison even to non-canonical Springsteen classics like Tunnel Of Love or The River. The Van Morrison album is quite frankly sad, a live re-creation of one of his greatest albums, Astral Weeks. It's an attempt to recapture spontaneous magic that happened 40 years ago between a unknown and somewhat paranoid young songwriter and brilliant older jazz musicians who were required to record in a separate room. It's not reproducible by a cantankerous old superstar with a band of hired guns attuned to his every querulous move.

I have owned the beautiful After the Heat, recorded in 1978 by Brian Eno with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, for many years, but I wanted a digital copy of it and gentle electronic landscapes are not well-suited to digitization from LPs, no matter how well taken care of they were.

So despite the nostalgic feeling of going to the store and buying new albums, taking them home and unwrapping them, I'm less excited by the music I bought today than the edgier and more interesting music, by younger people, that I buy at shows or download. I don't feel that the death of the record labels or traditional music retail outlets store is bad for music. In some ways it's an improvement; before the advent of emusic or Amazon or iTunes or CD Baby it was harder to find music, especially unpopular music, and when you did find it, it was expensive. And that extra money didn't go to the musicians.

Tags: music

Piedmont blues guitarist John Cephas died yesterday. He was a gentle man, a wonderful musician, and a born educator. I saw him play many times and took a guitar class with him at the Augusta Heritage Festival in 2003.

Piedmont blues is a distinct genre very different from the Delta blues of Robert Johnson, Son House and other Mississippi musicians, and their many descendants and imitators. Piedmont blues is more melodic, usually fingerpicked, and often sounds like ragtime. If you've heard Elizabeth Cotton's "Freight Train" (also performed by Taj Mahal), or the music of people like Blind Blake, the Rev. Gary Davis, John Jackson, Blind Boy Fuller, or Brownie McGhee or modern day players like Ernie Hawkins, that's Piedmont blues.

Cephas and his musical partner, Phil Wiggins, probably the best living blues harmonica player, started playing together sometime in the late 1970s. I first heard them at a cigarette company-sponsored free show at the IBM building in midtown in 1990, the same weekend I met Willie Dixon. I own all of their albums, have seen them in concert better than a dozen times, most recently at an outdoor show in Madison Square Park, from which the above photo comes. (And I would not have known about that show if not for redstapler pointing out the sign after lunch one day with rosefox and others, so thanks to both of them, because Cephas and Wiggins didn't come to NYC often enough.)

Their shows were not only spectacular musically. Cephas took every opportunity to talk about the culture and the history of the blues; he would often explain the difference between Piedmont and Delta blues as he tuned his guitar down to play a haunting tune by Skip James, in my opinion the greatest Delta blues musician. Cephas and Wiggins carried the lonely torch of honest acoustic blues for decades, and with Cephas being close to 30 years older than Wiggins, they crossed generations with each other as well as with their audiences.

Their easy camaraderie, snappy clothes and perfectly set straw hats, and virtuoso musicianship made every show a joy. I dragged many people to see them, most of whom had no idea who they were and knew little about the music. I don't recall anyone being anything less than wildly enthusiastic.

All of their albums are in print and well worth buying. And there are a few musicians still playing this music well and honestly, particular Corey Harris and Guy Davis. You can hear a lot of the Piedmont in Keb Mo's playing sometimes, in Taj Mahal's. You hear them when anyone fingerpicks blues. But you'll never hear them quite like John played them, and I will miss that, and his laugh, and the way he would shake his head when people tried to get too analytic or strict about playing music.

I guess I'm like so many other folks
I can't stop now
I guess I am a hopeless case
I can't put this guitar down
I was determined I was gonna play those blues

--"I Was Determined," John Cephas, 2004

Tags: music

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.

William Zantzinger, immortalized by Bob Dylan as a racist murderer in "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll", died this week. In 1963, drunk and rowdy at a Baltimore hotel, he ordered a drink from Hattie Carroll, a 51-year-old black woman who worked at the hotel. She wasn't quick enough, and he repeatedly struck her with his cane. She fled into the kitchen, told her co-workers she felt sick, and died of a stroke the next day.

He was charged with murder, but the charges were reduced to manslaughter based on testimony that his actions did not lead directly to her death. He was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $625.

His obituary in The New York Times today took Dylan to task for taking "some liberties with the truth," and quotes writer Clinton Heylin, who said Dylan's portrayal of Zantzinger "borders on the libelous." But the Times only mentions one error of fact in Dylan's song, the fact that Hattie Carroll had eleven children, not ten, which as the Times pointed out would not have fit the meter of the line as written.

Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen.
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table

I think those lines are probably worth the rewrite. He also misspelled Zantzinger's name, leaving out the "T."

Heylin, in his book, says Dylan's song "verges on the libelous, depicting [Zantzinger] as a privileged son who killed a black maid, Hattie Caroll, by striking her with his cane at a Baltimore "society gathering," escaping with a nominal sentence because of his political connections." Rather, Heylin says, Zantzinger "got drunk at a party and began tapping people with a wooden carnival cane," including Carroll, whom he describes as "a 51-year-old barmaid with an enlarged heart and severe hypertension." He also says that Zantzinger didn't have much in the way of political connections, although he and the Times disagree on what they were.

Dylan's song does leave you with the impression that Zantzinger beat her to death with his cane, which was not the case. But Zantzinger did commit a crime. He assaulted and verbally abused an older woman because she didn't bring him his drink quickly enough. The commission of that crime contributed to her death. It's not that different from a store owner having a heart attack when a robber points a gun at him and demands money. That robber would be charged with felony murder, and while it might be reduced the way the charges against Zantzinger were, the responsibility remains the same. Heylin's description is an outrageous understatement of Zantzinger's behavior, and the six-month sentence was unjustly light. Dylan's song is not only a brilliant piece of songwriting, it is as factual as one can expect a song to be, verging on journalism.

Zantzinger was a piece of work. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to collecting rent from black families who lived in shanties he didn't own, shanties without running water or toilets. He did this for years, over the protests of community groups, even taking some of the tenants to court. It took an investigation by The Washington Post to stop it.

( 1991 Washington Post article )

Unrepentant to the end, Zantzinger told writer Howard Sounes said the song "had no effect upon my life" and called Dylan "a no-account son of a bitch. He's just like a scum of a bag [sic] of the earth....I should've sued him and put him in jail." But as Sounes points out, he never did, never tried to enjoin Dylan from performing the song, never dared to put his claim that the song was false to a legal test.

Tags: music, politics

I was very excited last year when the news came that David Byrne and Brian Eno would be releasing their first collaboration since 1981's My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts. The album was a bit of a letdown -- Ghosts was a groundbreaking record that still sounds ahead of its time a quarter-decade later, one that neither could have done on their own.

On the other hand, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is a small album of pretty songs that aren't genuine collaborations. Rather, Byrne wrote lyrics for melodies that Eno, who "hates writing words," had already written.* Byrne sings all the vocals, and Eno plays most of the instruments and probably produced the album (it's credited to both, but the production and the sounds are classic Eno).

So it was a bit of a letdown at first, but it has slowly grown on me. The songs are beautiful, much better than most of Byrne's recent look-at-how-many-world-musicians-will-come-to-play-with-me excursions. Byrne says of the music Eno sent him,

The foundation of some of the tracks are much like those of traditional folk, country, or gospel songs before these styles became harmonically sophisticated. Brian's chord structures were unlike anything I would have chosen myself, so I was pushed in a new direction, asked to face the unfamiliar ... The challenge was more emotional than technical: to write simple, heartfelt tunes without drawing on cliché. The results, in many cases, were uplifting, hopeful, and positive, even though some lyrics describe cars exploding, war, and similarly dark scenarios.

In his "I Believe In Singing" essay, Eno describes his love of songs "based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music." The instrumentation and arrangements aren't always straightforward. "Poor Boy" uses a disturbing rhythm track that might have come directly from Ghost's "Help Me Somebody," while "Never Today," one of the bonus tracks, uses the distinctive analog synthesizer sound from Another Green World's "In Dark Trees." But the latter is a beautiful song with the kind of simple, sparkling hook that Eno is so good at, and uncharacteristically simple (for Byrne) lyrics:

I never thought I would fall asleep tonight
I never thought that my arms could reach so high
But now and then we find
We're walking and we're talking for the very first time
And what I am is what I want to be.

And the packaging of the deluxe version is a joy in and of itself. Enough so that I did a whole Facebook photo essay of it.

*It's worth noting that Byrne and Eno each wrote essays for the CD booklet discussing the origins of the album, and each tells a different story about this encounter. Byrne places it at Eno's studio in London while Eno recalls it as a lunch in New York. I'm sure they noticed this too.

Tags: music

Brian Eno wrote an essay for the NPR series "This I Believe," which was broadcast this morning. Eno is probably the world's most famous electronic musician (meaning a player of electronic music, not a silicon-based musician). The majority of his work is instrumental music, often ambient. Many of his fans (including me) lament the lack of vocals in much of his work. And he wrote an essay beginning, "I believe in singing." Plain a capella singing.

And it makes perfect sense, really. His essay says nothing about the value of listening to singing, on CDs by other people. It's all about the value of singing. Not only is it beneficial physically ("You use your lungs in a way that you probably don't for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly") and psychologically ("Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness"), he also discusses its "civilizational benefits."

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

He's absolutely right. I have been immersed in the bluegrass / traditional country music / old-time world for years now, and have almost entirely stopped going to the blues jams that a harmonica player more typically would be found at. Some of that has to do with my love of melody, but a lot of it has to do with the opportunities to sing. At first I was reluctant to sing, believing I wasn't "good enough," as so many people sadly do, but the more I did it the better it felt and the more I realized that the joy of it was not in being "good" but in being together.

He includes a recommended list of songs, many of which you could hear at any of our jams -- "Keep On the Sunny Side," "Sixteen Tons," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" -- and others that would fit right in, like "Can't Help Falling In Love" or "Down By the Riverside." They're simple songs, based, as he says, "around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music." They are not only word-rich, with beautiful lyrics, but also rich in words with long vowels, where the harmonies really shine. "When you get a lot of people singing harmony on a long note like that, it's beautiful." These songs are indeed good to sing together, and not only that, they really aren't very hard. There are no complex scales or unintuitive harmonies. The choruses are usually brief and easy to remember. Generations of people have been able to sing and enjoy them, and that's why they're traditional American tunes.

I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

Thanks to my "new life" I have been able to spend a lot of time this year singing for days on end. One of my most transcendent experiences of the year was an unaccompanied gospel sing at Ashokan -- I am an avowed atheist but I'm also a believer -- in the spirituality of singing together, in community, in "the great social virtue" that Eno describes.

We all need more singing in our life.

Tags: music

We're about halfway through Southern Week at Ashokan, and while it's been raining an awful lot we're still having a great time. I've spent the last few weeks playing a lot of fiddle tunes, some with very amusing names. The below is one round of "Shove That Pig's Foot a Little Further In the Fire." I'm taking the video, so I'm not in it, but thanks to the harmonica rack you can hear me playing. Brooklynites will recognize a few other pickers in the crowd. Photos are accumulating on Flickr.

Tags: music

I went down last night to Jalopy, a fairly new performance space (I believe it opened last year) on the edge of Red Hook. It's a vintage instrument store in the front, and a wonderful performance space in the back, with church pews, a full stage, and an excellent sound system. The location is a tad remote (unless you're driving; when you step out the front door you're looking at the Battery Tunnel). But they book a fantastic mix of roots music, including some big names. Ann Rabson of Saffire has played there and King Wilkie was there last weekend.

I was there to see an acoustic blues band. The show was fantastic, a wide range of songs (old blues, pop tunes, Hank Williams, Brenda Lee, Gillian Welch) driven by Bob Guida's outstanding voice and the wonderfully understated playing of Peter Kohmann on guitar, Steve Uhrik on fiddle and Mike Saccolitti on bass. And I got some great photos.

But at one point Geoff and Lynette, the owners of Jalopy, started dancing in the back, and that was perhaps the best moment of the night. They love this music, that's why they own the place, that's why we're all able to go down and listen or play at a room that sounds so wonderful and where the bands and musicians feel so well-loved. Dance on, both of you, and thank you for bringing your love of music to all of us.

Tags: music, photos

And no I'm not talking about something I might have brought back from Hershey, PA, but about an amplifier I bought today. It's a Fender Champ 600, circa 1955 or so. It's small -- about five watts of power, and maybe 18" across (a standard diatonic harmonica would just about fit under the handle) and sounds ... amazing.

Tube amps sound best when you drive them hard, but even mid-size amps are just too loud to play at top volume. This little guy, though, can be opened up to 8 or 9 without blowing anyone out of the room, and sounds hot, with just that level of tube-distortion crunch that makes for that blues harp sound.

I rarely play amplified, but this will make its stage debut early next month at the Greenwich Village Bistro, with Saboteur Tiger. I'll be playing harp for two sets with them on April 3, and before that I'll be playing the Barrington Coffeehouse in Barrington, NJ, on March 29. More details to come on both shows.

( More photos )

Tags: gigs, music, photos

He was both a legendary musician and a legendary monster. Maybe it's true that he never got to tell his side of the story, but really, what could he have said? The spectacle of Phil Spector denigrating Tina and calling Ike "misunderstood" was the stuff of parody; one unbalanced violent nutcase defending another.

But Ike Turner has been treated unfairly by history. He was a violent abuser, let's make no bones about that. But that's not why he's so loathed in the public eye. The list of men in the music world who are idolized despite their violent behavior towards women (up to and including murder) is endlessly long. But Ike abused a woman who was as intensely talented as he was, who would be listened to when she spoke out. That's the difference. This doesn't excuse what he did, but it should make us all think twice about why we scorn him so much more than we do Jerry Lee Lewis or Miles Davis or the many many others who did as bad as Ike if not worse without paying anywhere near the consequences.

In the end, you have to judge a musician by his or her music. And Ike's was simply magnificent. He would have been a legend if he'd never met Tina, if only for "Rocket 88," commonly considered the first rock&roll song. Was it really? Who knows. It's a classic record, with Ike's piano driving a monster beat, all the elements that would become rock&roll coming together on a single brilliant record. At Sun Records before Sam Phillips discovered the white boy he'd been looking for, Ike was instrumental in the early careers of people like B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf. He was a brilliant bandleader, a masterful piano and guitar player, and a damned good singer. I mean, this guy sang with with Tina Turner and more than held his own!

The music Ike and Tina made together was amazing. It was probably Ike's best work, and was certainly Tina's. Her deservedly successful solo career was built on her great voice but those cheesy eighties productions are fizzy wine coolers next to the straight-no-chaser whiskey of Ike and Tina Turner. The only time she ever had a band worthy of her, Ike was leading it. There are individual Ike & Tina records -- "Let's Get It On" to name just one -- that blow every single solo record she ever made through the wall, leaving holes shaped like Simmons electronic drums.

Ike never recovered from Tina leaving. Between his own problems, and the ignominy of being mainly known as the guy who used to beat up Tina Turner, he never got his career back on track. I saw him at Tramps in the mid-1990s, when he was touring behind his comeback album Here and Now, and while he could still put a band together, he didn't have it anymore. The album isn't bad, but live, he was clearly trying to recapture what he no longer really had.

If many of his peers managed to avoid having to lay in the beds they made, while Ike languished in his, that doesn't let Ike off. But he was a great and talented musician, and I think it's unfortunate that his personal problems have obscured his gifts and left too many people unaware of some truly great music.

Tags: music

The New York Times published a disgraceful and very short-sighted article in Friday's paper, describing how to see live music in the city without paying for it. The writer visited great NYC music spots, clubs that I've seen both good friends and great stars in -- the Rodeo Bar, the old-time jam at Freddy's Bar and Backroom here in Brooklyn, Hill Country -- and proudly says that he spent only $30 for 27 sets of music at 22 clubs. "Waitresses and tip jars can be avoided, if you can bear the guilt," he says.

Read that again. This miserable little tightwad is proud of the fact that he sat down in a club whose owners are probably working their asses off trying to keep their heads above water, and are booking live bands out of the love of it, because they could make a lot more money hiring a DJ or installing a karaoke system. And he's proud of the fact that he makes their lives a little harder, and makes it a little more possible they'll give up and close down and we'll lose another live music venue.

And he talks up all these great local bands, great local musicians who are playing for the love of it and hoping that the tip bucket covers a cab ride home so they don't have to haul two guitars and an amplifier on the subway, and he's proud that he didn't put any money in. I wonder how all those musicians felt reading that article in Friday's paper?

If enough people follow his advice, there will be no music to see in the city. As it is, I've lost count of the great live music venues that have closed down. I wonder if he got paid for his article, or if the Times has figured out how to stiff writers out of their checks?

Tags: media, music, stupidity

We were back at the Baggott Inn last night for another edition of the Sheriff Sessions, featuring a band from Austin, Shotgun Party, that includes fiddler Katy Rose Cox who was a highlight of the Brooklyn pickin' scene before moving to Texas a few years ago.

Their music lives in an area somewhere between honky-tonk or the classic blues of folks like Memphis Minnie, and modern alternative music. The instrumentation is completely traditional -- fiddle, bass and a gorgeous old archtop acoustic -- but the songs (all originals) go places you don't expect. Katy plays wicked fiddle, sometimes like horn lines, sometimes like keyboards, sometimes very dissonant, and Christopher Crepps on bass was right there with all the weird changes and unexpected turns, playing masterfully in the classic style. And Jenny Parrott is one of the quirkiest and most engaging singers I've seen in a bluegrass setting in some time, and a great songwriter. Her voice ranges from little-girlish to gutbucket blues, sometimes in a single line, and a stage presence that's hard to describe and harder to capture on camera in very low lighting. (I was using a 50mm/1.4 without autofocus, not that I'd use it anyway since the focusing light is very distracting, and with the lens opened all the way up so the depth-of-field was very narrow; as a result I have many great out-of-focus shots.) Check the link above; they're playing several more times in the area over the next few weeks and are well worth catching.

Also on the bill was Copper Kettle, which combines the talents of two excellent songwriters in the Brooklyn scene: Andrew Hunt and Fred Skellenger, and also the Sheriff's own Cheatin' Hearts, a good-time band if ever there was one.

Tags: music, photos

Robert Fripp is one of the very few guitarists who are recognizable almost as soon as they play a note. Most of the others in this category -- Jimi Hendrix, Richard Thompson, Muddy Waters, Mark Knopfler -- are emotional players who rip loose on their instruments and grab you by the throat. Fripp is exactly the opposite, an intellectual player who seemingly never plays anything he hasn't thought out in advance, and for whom a raised eyebrow is an outpouring of emotion. Nonetheless he is a compelling and passionate player; it's that contradiction that draws me to him.

Along with his League Of Crafty Guitarists, he played a formal and precise show tonight at the Ethical Culture Society. Fripp, whose careful interlocking guitar parts were at the center of every incarnation of King Crimson, and whose howling guitar drove songs ranging from Bowie's "Scary Monsters" to Blondie's "Fade Away and Radiate," is in his sixties now, and in some ways white hair suits him better. After his formal bows left, right and center, he kissed his guitar, took a seat on a stool, and began to layer guitar loops one over the other, hardly moving or looking up.

After a few pieces (not songs, surely), he gave a nod offstage, and the ten Crafty Guitarists filed out in a line to their stools, set in a semicircle, with Fripp at one end, and the never-introduced leader* of the group on the other. At another nod from Fripp, the leader played a single note, then moved his guitar and his body towards the woman next to him, who in turn played the next note, and "threw" the piece to the man to her right, and the song began, each guitarist playing a single note in turn, a complex melody created by precise timing enforced by physical motion. Soon all ten were playing interlocking parts in strange time signatures as Fripp sat back, expressionless, listening to ten acoustic guitars build a wall of music, something like a Philip Glass piece, until he shattered it with a close-to-feedback howl from his guitar, the only electric on the stage.

This was pretty much the entire evening. The group's timing was incredibly precise, and the playing passionate enough to save it from being mind-numbing minimalist masturbation. They even managed to elicit a few "Yeah!"s from the audience, when particularly complex and powerful pieces stopped perfectly on a dime.

The songs ranged from their own compositions to King Crimson songs ("Vroom") to the only instrumental the Beatles ever recorded ("Flying" -- "Revolution #9" doesn't count as a song) and a television theme song I couldn't identify. (I have a very hard time identifying instrumental music; I've played fiddle tunes at jams from start to finish, played them well at high speed, and at the end turned to the person next to me and said, "What's that one called again?")

The LCG is the performance ensemble of Fripp's Guitar Craft workshops, which focus on developing "relationships" with the guitar, with music, and with oneself, and which depend on what Fripp calls the "New Standard Tuning," (CGDAEG). This is about as far from the music I play as it's possible to get and still be enjoyable, so it was an interesting evening but not one that made me come home and want to play.

I first saw Fripp play more than 20 years ago, back when they had concerts on Pier 84 next to where the Intrepid is nowadays (or will be when it gets out of drydock). It was the summer of 1984 and he was playing with the best incarnation of King Crimson, when the band was himself, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford. He sat on one side of the stage, on a stool, surrounded by his samplers and synthesizers, seemingly unmoved and unaffected by the antics of Belew and Levin and Bruford with his 360-degree drumkit. The beauty of that band was the perfect interplay between the studious Fripp and the outrageous Belew, their guitars interlocking and contrasting perfectly. Fripp hasn't moved from that stool nor changed his black clothing in all the intervening years. His hair is white now, and he wears contacts, and while I missed the contrasts and energies of the King Crimson days, it was a joy to sit and watch him create his sound live, and hear extremely intellectual music that can still reach me emotionally.

*I assumed this was Curt Golden, since he usually leads this group in North America, and the guy looked like Golden's photo. I'm told by a couple of anonymous posters (one polite, one childishly rude) that it's not him; this is an unfortunate side-effect of Fripp not uttering a single word during the show (and in fact, any time I've seen him play). I'm told this was indeed Hernan Nuñez but the LCG site has no further info. Fripp's performance philosophy is vastly different from my own; I was disappointed to listen to ten very talented musicians without ever knowing who they were or what else they'd done, but this is in line with Fripp's overall focus on the music to the exclusion of anything he'd consider extraneous.

Tags: music

It felt weird today to say, for the first time since the summer of 2001, that I was going to see a concert at the World Trade Center. In fact, I was going to see a concert in front of the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center, which is not quite the same thing; even the original was part of the WTC in name only.

Nick Lowe closed his main set with "What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding." He sang it slowly, wistfully, with the cursed Deutsche Bank building looming in the background (those diagonal lines of lights behind him in the photo are the lighting on the staircases in that hulk).

As I walk on through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
Where are the strong? And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?

And every time I feel it slipping away
It just makes me want to cry
What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

Also on the bill were The Holmes Brothers, a great NYC gospel group, and Olabelle, a rock band that plays lots of traditional country tunes.

A Holmes Brothers anecdote: Many years ago mikeskliar and I were playing a bar in Hell's Kitchen, and in between set the bartender pulled me aside and said, "Popsy Dixon from the Holmes Brothers is here and wants to sing a song." So we called him up and thankfully Mike knew the chords to "Georgia On My Mind" and I got to play harmonica in answer to that spectacular voice. It was quite a moment.

Tags: music, photos

The morning was rainy, but the skies cleared in time for a perfect fall day, and the yard and beautiful old building of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture filled with pickers. Veterans of the scene who've been playing for decades, kids with adorable miniature fiddles, folks from out of town and folks we play with several times a week. A great concert, opening with Rafe Stefanini, a brilliant old-time fiddler and banjo player from Italy, and his wife and daughter, and continuing with local and national stars. So crowded that you couldn't find seats; I went back out into the yard to play some more and people were saying they could hardly get through the auditorium to leave. I should have taken more photos but I was too busy playing.

( At the Jamboree )

Tags: music, photos