Democracy now // Ari experienced

Wanted to comment on just a few items, as I prepare to head back to my ancestral homeland for the holiday.


















First, you've no doubt heard the racket over Chinese Democracy? Read my take here. Hint: I was more Fricke and Klosterman than Pareles.

I have found it fascinating to observe and participate in the superheated dialogue this thing has wrought. As you'll read above, no one is really lukewarm on the record at all. I've had like five or six people stop by my desk over the past couple days to express either disbelief at the opinion I chose to publish or a kind of somber solidarity, as though I had elected to undertake a suicide mission of some sort. My favorite bit on the album that I've read so far comes from the Klosterman piece (say what you will: the guy is an outstandingly entertaining writer):

"On the aforementioned 'Sorry,' Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line ('But I don't want to do it') in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the 'Sorry' vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, 'You know, I've weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human.'"

YES! And btw, he's not exaggerating at all--about the vampire talk. That's a brilliant song, one of many the album contains.

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Second, I was fortunate enough to catch the Ari Hoenig Trio (or try MySpace) live at Smalls the other night. Among other lessons I learned was that it is not in any way okay to assume an apathetic or been-there-done-that attitude toward what I often perceive to be "straight-ahead jazz."

I knew a little of Hoenig--a local jazz drummer who plays various downtown clubs so often he's dangerously easy to take for granted--before checking out this show. I had seen him play with Sam Yahel opening for Steely Dan a few months back. That gig piqued my interest and led to this review of his latest CD, Bert's Playground.

But that was written before I had caught Hoenig in his native setting. He plays Smalls pretty much every Monday night with one band or another and to hear the club's owner, Mitch Borden, tell it, Hoenig pretty much has the run of the place. Waiting with Laal in the entryway to the club on Monday night, I listened with Borden to a wicked drum solo that concluded the previous set. "Wait till you hear Ari Hoenig," Borden said, with two raised eyebrows. "Sometimes when he's playing a solo, the sticks are just a blur."

The club was as cozy as I remembered it. We scored second row seats and waited as the good-natured chatter swelled and subsided. Couldn't believe how packed the place was on rainy Monday night during the week of Thanksgiving, but again, that was just my underestimation talking.

How to describe Hoenig on the bandstand? I guess I would start with the word devilish. He announced the band--a lean trio with Gilad Hekselman on guitar and Orlando Le Fleming on bass--conferred with them for a sec, and then they hit it. Hoenig started off sparse. His face slowly curled into this odd sneer as he hit a stride. It's his trademark grimace, it turns out, and it signifies the demeanor of his drumming. His playing tends to work its way from pure poetic lightness to demonic density and bashing catharsis. And there's a definite wicked-gleam-in-the-eye glee about it. Hoenig loves playing for an audience, clearly, but more so, he seemed to be playing for his triomates. He kept staring them down with this crazed, superfocused smile, as if to say, "Beat that!"

And they smiled back, clearly high on his turbulent grace and kitchen-sink inventiveness (e.g., the way he meticulously renders melodies on the drums via ultraprecise muting; it verges on a vaudevillian cheese but ultimately comes off as dazzling, fearless high-wire entertainment). No tunes were announced while I was there, but I simply could not believe how tightly these three played together. No coasting at all. Very long forms, not like detectable choruses, but with everyone hugging the contours of the tunes at all times and hitting these unison accents out of nowhere. There was some minimal sight-reading and counting going on, but these players clearly knew this music.

Hekselman makes a great sparring partner for Hoenig. He was another preconception exploder. I'm not really a fan of jazz guitar per se, but there was no denying what he was doing. Burning, deeply bluesy, passionate, sick. He was just ablaze.

And Hoenig is just someone you have to see. The poetry and kineticism and, best of all, the strangeness. A marvelously eccentric player, and most refreshingly, there's nothing self-consciously avant-garde about what he's doing. But it always feels entirely fresh. He's the type of player that can sound utterly revolutionary while simply playing time. Again, no coasting. He could be criticized for being overly bombastic. He does not accompany in this band; he leads. It's often considered fashionable of late for a drummer who leads a jazz band not to command too much attention, but no, this is Hoenig's show.

And he will, I promise, screw with your mind. The suppleness verging on flashing, almost reckless outbursts. Just the strange tension of what he does. He doesn't make it look easy. He makes it look like white-water rafting or something. Always on guard, always looking for a way under, over, inside, outside the beat. His role is that of an agitator. It was--or, crucially, it at least appeared to be--a by-the-seat-of-the-pants performance, remarkable for a working jazz band. This was loud, commanding, turbulent music, but again, not in a free-jazz way. There was no pretension of mumbo-jumbo ecstasy or anything like that. It was emotional concentration, dancing poise. It was, I guess, all you'd want to hear from jazz.

Next time you're bored on a Monday, go hear Ari Hoenig at Smalls. This is the kind of thing that I would feel completely comfortable dragging the proverbial Friend Who Doesn't Like Jazz to. Wild, visceral poetry is what it was.

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Appropriately, Hoenig's Bert's Playground figures into my 2008 Jazz Top Ten, posted via the Jazz Journalists Association.

Un-Cynic-al

My review of the new album from Cynic, complete with some streaming audio. Amazing artwork,no? I apologize for the dearth of posts recently. Don't count me out. Thanks for reading, as always.

Astral-agy: Van Morrison at the Hollywood Bowl - 11/7/08

Greetings. I promise I've not been as idle as it seems. Am ushering what is for me a semimajor and long-incubating journalistic project toward completion. I won't put too fine a point on it this minute, but if you've been reading this blog even a little bit over the past, say, six months, you can probably guess what I'm talking about. Anyway, more to come on that.

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Right this minute, let us discuss Van Morrison. The whole Don't Look Back concept--wherein an artist revisits a classic album in concert--is commonplace these days, some might even say it's completely run its course. But when I heard a few months back that Van the Man was re-creating Astral Weeks live at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A., which he did this past weekend, I knew this was something I wanted to check out.

Laal was onboard and we've both got relatives out West, so we decided to splurge and make the trip. One of the main draws for me was the tidbit of advance info that Richard Davis would be on the gig. I don't really even have to think twice about naming this man my favorite jazz bassist of all time; I've gushed about him on here before, but let's just briefly name Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, and Dolphy and Booker Little's Live at the Five Spot sessions, agree that these are some of the very finest jazz records ever made and reflect on the fact that they would not necessarily be so--or so utterly so--were it not for Davis's wizardly mastery. Let us add to this illustrious--and merely surface-scratching--list the fact that Davis not only performed on but straight-up fueled Astral Weeks, surely one of the most strange and visionary albums ever made, period, and we'll agree that the man is a giant. (And if we're still not convinced, we'll sit right down and watch this insane duo version of "Summertime" with Elvin Jones.)

But heartbreakingly, Davis was not on the gig. There were two sets at the show, the first one a sort of greatest-hits dealio with Van's regular band, and then Davis and Jay Berliner (who played classical guitar on Astral Weeks, not to mention Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady) were slated to come out for the Astral finale. 'Twas, for whatever reason, not to be: The same bassist from the first set, a Caucasian gentlemen whom I didn't recognize, emerged after the break and performed on all the Astral material.

I was reeling, believe me, but this was no waste of time. There is nothing lightweight or trite or over-the-hill or unriveting whatsoever about seeing Van Morrison live on a stage. To use a word from Astral Week's uberpoetic "Beside You," the man is a dynamo. We were seated in the middle of the amphitheater, and he was really just a little dot down there, but the Jumbotron was all fired up, so it was all good.

Watching the concert, the phrase that kept running through my head was "extended techniques." You see this term a lot in writing about experimental improv; basically what it means is using an instrument in a way it isn't traditionally supposed to be used, like, say what people like Axel Doerner or Greg Kelley on trumpet. In that world, a lot of these sorts of techniques ceased to be experimental years and years ago--my buds and I often refer to the excessive or gimmicky or ostentatious deployment of them as "thingin'"--but in Morrison's hands they seemed genuinely adventurous. I know that Morrison can be a ham as well as an experimenter and that some of his seemingly spontaneous tangents are merely routine cliches (during "Cyprus Avenue" at the Bowl, Van replicated the "my t-t-t-t-tongue gets tied" bit that he's been trotting out since at least the mid-'70s, to judge by the live album It's Too Late Too Stop Now). But I could swear that during a lot of this concert he was just throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick, in the vein of the iconically sore-thumb-ish "...really wrong, really wrong" groan-out in the middle of "Caravan" from "The Last Waltz," a performance which, criminally, has been removed from YouTube as part of a massive seemingly Morrison-sanctioned regulation of all his clips on the site.

Anyway, but unless his band members were faking it, they were on their toes during this entire show. Morrison performed a lot of familiar tunes during the first set--"Saint Dominic's Preview," "Moondance" (Van took an awesome, brief and somewhat Lee Konitz-sounding alto-sax solo on this one) and "Brown Eyed Girl" (in a very elegant, folky arrangement)--but he also stretched out on some pieces I didn't know well: one called "Troubadour" and some others I'm forgetting. I don't remember the songs so much as isolated moments of weird, inspired spontaneity. "I want to tell you a story," he blurted out in the ;middle of one tune. "It doesn't have any words." This set off a lengthy scat section, wherein Morrison worked himself into a tongue-speech lather and eventually began emitting rapid-fire grunts in a seeming imitation of a machine-gun. In another tune he looped the line "Way down in the backstreet," then paused and shouted, "That's where I come from, man!" There was a sense of real channeling during the best of these outbursts. Morrison stays planted when he sings, punching his right arm horizontally at the air, as though he's warding off, or maybe inciting, a spirit. He's got no autopilot, or at least he could've fooled me; he really grapples up there.

Some of the most inspired moments of the show didn't involve his voice at all. "Slim Slow Slider," the brief, elegiac wisp of a song that closes out Astral Weeks, got stretched way, way out live (perhaps in honor of the fact that the recorded version was apparently edited big time, as related in various accounts). Van didn't play too much guitar during the show--a fair amount of rhythm strumming and some nice, twangy, pickless self-obbligato playing here and there--but as "Slider" kept on churning, something seized Van and he grabbed the acoustic guitar and started to hammer at it, working up to a harsh, blurry, brutal sort of strumming. It was dissonant, it was anti-technique; it was like some sort of hamfisted heavy-metal mariachi playing. The first thing I thought of was Sonny Sharrock's meaty, vigorous dicing of the instrument on Black Woman.

Speaking of the avant-garde jazz vibe, I felt that heavily in Van's harmonica work. If I remember correctly, he did do some conventional soloing on the harp, but what I recall more were these moments when he seemed to become obsessed w/ the instrument's pure-sound potential and blew messily into it while humming at the same time, producing a weird, airy, slobbery multiphonic din, like something you might hear George Lewis attempt on trombone.

And then there were the patented Morrison mantras--long stretches of trancelike repetition--from the familiar ("the love that loves to love the love that loves the love to love," etc. in "Madame George") to the thoroughly weird and unexpected (he kept injecting the phrase "Get on up," seemingly a la "Sex Machine," throughout the show; at one point he broke without warning into the first verse of Ronnie Hawkins's "Who Do You Love?"; and at the end of "Madame George" he went into an odd riff centered around the phrase "This is a train," before strolling offstage, mike still in hand.

I remember these isolated moments much more than the songs themselves, though I generally found the non-Astral Weeks set to be looser and more enjoyable. Some of the AW stuff felt straitjacketed, e.g. "The Way That Young Lovers Do," which was a spitting image of the original. Most uninspired was "Beside You," a poem of ecstasy on record that had the life sucked out of it onstage. Richard Davis and the other players at the original sessions understood how to let these compositions breathe, but Van's current band seemed to want to normalize the material; the drummer, for one, kept slipping into a backbeat where none were needed, and it felt like a crutch.

But Morrison is well worth catching live, no matter what the setting. He didn't talk much to the crowd, but after "Moondance," when the audience went wild, he said, "Ah, now I get it," alluding to our hunger for the familiar. Morrison's known as horribly cantankerous, but he seemed warm onstage and most of all, inspired. As described above, there's a real sense of grappling, of searching. He's got to be one of the most restless-seeming rock singers I've ever heard live; he's just got this itch to probe and prod his songs, to wring all the weird tics out of them that he can. It's this quality that makes him not just a great singer but a great improviser. He often writes of mystic quests and spiritual journeys, and even though his current band comes off as slick--and even sleepy sometimes--you get the sense that Morrison goes down those metaphysical paths every time he gives a concert.

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*I leave you with a song from Van's latest, Keep It Simple. This disc didn't grab me much when I first checked it out, but appropriately, a few isolated tics stuck with me. I love the stubborn repetition of the title line on this tune, the way van just swings with and against the background rhythm. It's a virtuoso tightrope moment disguised as a senile zone-out:

Van Morrison - That's Entrainment
(Wikipedia sez: "Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, usually produced by other organisms with whom they interact socially. Examples include firefly flashing, mosquito wing clapping as well as human music and dance.")

*Also check out this very cordial and forthcoming Van email Q&A from the L.A. Times. Dig how fond the man is of ":)"--gotta love it.

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In other matters, hail Traced in Air! (I don't think I really realized how eagerly I was anticipating this until I got my hands on it.) More on that soon.

Yes.

Hell yeah.

There's nothing political whatsoever about The Elephant Riders by Clutch, but it's one of the most rousing, celebratory songs I know, so why not? Crank it.

(By the way, I'm sure many will say so, but I thought McCain's speech was way dignified.)

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P.S. Destination Out recently concluded its tribute to another great African-American, Anthony Braxton. My voice is a small part of the chorus.

Music Marathon man

CMJ '08 is a wrap. I heard music every night of the fest, which is a personal first. Read my thoughts on Yo! Majesty, Dungen, So Percussion, Deerhoof, Ponytail and more--as well as posts by my colleagues Jay Ruttenberg and Colin St. John that on the whole are way wittier and more entertaining than mine--over at the Time Out NY blog. Otherwise, I'll speak to you real soon...

Sporting life // Paradise city // Exquisite corpse // The good kind of Shudder

I've had a bit of an inertia problem w/ DFSBP recently, but that is really nothing new. The thing to do is just to start writing, get to business, etc. It's not an easy thing to do. Or it couldn't be easier, I'm not sure which. Anyway, this week I'll be blogging on CMJ happenings over at the Time Out New York site. Tonight, I'll be blogging on Gary Smith and the Paradise Lost films right here...












Gary Smith is a writer for Sports Illustrated, and I am reading a recent collection of his pieces for that magazine, Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories, and I love it. It's a strange thing, discussing one's enjoyment of a medium that's widely considered lowbrow. There's all this backpedaling, disclaiming involved. I have to admit I feel a little self-conscious carrying the book around on the train, emblazoned as it is with the famous SI logo.

Ben Yagoda, writing on Smith in Slate recently, said, "Gary Smith is not only the best sportswriter in America, he's the best magazine writer in America." That's intended, it seems to me, as a contrarian statement, at least in some sense. It's like writing in "The New Yorker" that the Foo Fighters are the best rock band in America. Maybe that's not a good analogy, but gushing over a sportswriter in a publication like Slate is inherently going to come off as slumming.

Which is a shame, because reading Gary Smith, I don't know that I could come up with a strong counterargument to Yagoda's declaration. A lot of my favorite writers cover topics other than the topic I cover--two that come to mind are the Village Voice food critic Robert Sietsema and John Feinstein, a sportswriter even more populist in his appeal than Smith, not to mention the great Pauline Kael. I actually tend to feel like I'm learning more about writing when I'm *not* reading about music, even though I read a ton about music always. Really what I'm interested in reading is great human drama, great storytelling, and on that count Going Deep is an outstanding book. It's overheated at times, and a bit blustery and self-important, but Smith's writing has an immense confidence, a relentless narrative thrust.

In a way, what he does is write novelizations of true events. As Yagoda points out, he uses firsthand interview material, but he's just as likely to narrate a story from within the subject's head as from inside his own, observing the individual. He basically takes everything he knows of his subject's back story--whether that's Andre Agassi, disgraced former Notre Dame football coach George O'Leary, flash-in-the-pain MLB pitcher Mark Fidrych or Mexican-American high-school runner Javier Medina--and just tells the story as he sees it. He doesn't stretch facts so much as sell them: He's an unabashed dramatist and he has a way of making every story into something epic and universal.

And what would this commentary be without the ultimate cliche? "These stories are not really about sports." That's my statement, not Yagoda's. Okay, well you know what? They're really not. About sports, I mean. They are, but Smith's stories are really about striving, and psychology, and the desire to win, and race, and competition, and love, and fear. But his real gift, strangely, is for describing shame. I've never read more poignant stories of human lives just tanking.

One of his main fascinations with the world of sports seems to be *its* fascination with scandal. Many of these stories are about disgrace of one form or another: George O'Leary lying on his resume, high-school basketball star Richie Parker committing sexual assault, NC State coach Jim Valvano flaunting NCAA regulations. And Smith is never better than when he's documenting the swift, puritanical self-righteousness with which the media condemns these actions. "America seemed more shocked by lying from a football coach than from a politician or a businessman," he writes of the O'Leary mess. "The country still attached honor to sports."

And so much of this book is about the ludicrousness of that principle, about how silly it is that people care so much about sports. But also about the paradox that there's nothing silly about sports, that in many cases (such as for the 1957 TCU football team), college or high school sports is the pinnacle of people's lives. The athletes are gods during that time, and then they graduate and have to become regular people, but a part of them always stays in that moment where the spotlight was on them. Smith knows that somehow sports are worth paying attention to, that they're inextricably tied up with the way this country views itself and that despite the fact that it's all just a game, people care. A lot. So these are basically stories of lives on the line.

The tales intersect with crucial historical moments, such as the Little Rock high school integration, so they're not myopic by any means. You don't have to care about sports passionately to believe in them. But you do have to appreciate their mythology, the notion that they matter very, very much to those who invest their lives in them. In a way, sports and music are America's two great hopes: Those who love music revere it and those who practice it as holy, and the same goes for sports. But usually they're viewed as antithetical. When you read Gary Smith, you realize that it's really just the same struggle for meaning and self-betterment. I don't know if he's the best magazine writer in America--I only read a few magazines each month. But I can say that I'm enjoying this book immensely and that I'm trying to learn from it how to be a better storyteller.

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That went a little long. I went deep, as it were. Anyway, I wanted to mention the Paradise Lost documentaries (there are two of them), which Laal and I watched in quick succession over the weekend. I don't know quite what these have to do with Gary Smith other than that they tell a true story in a fascinating way, but they're immensely intriguing.

These films were made by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the dudes responsible for the mighty Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster, which I love to death. They tell the story of three teenagers from West Memphis, Arkansas, who were convicted in the early '90s for the gruesome murders of three second graders. The accused were misfit kids, into heavy metal and the occult, and during the trial, these superficial facets of their personalities were pretty much the only hard evidence that was used against them. They were branded as satanists and freaks, and thus the trial basically took on the cast of a modern-day witch hunt. There were other compelling leads, but they were never pursued; the town and the jury just seemed to make up its mind and that was that.

All of the above is documented in the first film. The second film, subtitled Revelations, is sort of a postscript to the first, and it's odd b/c it documents the process wherein the making of the first film came to influence the actual events being documented. The first film brought notoriety to the case and many activist groups sprung up to try to prove the innocence of the three teens. Those efforts have snowballed and at this point the West Memphis Three are the fashionable cause celebre among folks like Eddie Vedder and other ostentatiously political pop-cultural icons.

It's to the filmmakers' credit that though they seem to generally support the notion that the men were wrongly convicted, they never come out and beat you over the head with that opinion. They make sure that you understand a) the heinousness of the crimes (I've never seen such graphic crime-scene footage in a doc before), b) the devastating effect they had on the families, and c) that there are a select few compelling pieces of evidence in the prosecution's testimony, namely the fact that one of the teens, albeit one who has been labeled "borderline retarded," actually confessed to witnessing and partaking in the crimes, though this was after 12 hours of brutal and coercive interrogation.

Much of the second film deals with Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the boys who went on to become a prime suspect. A tall, fiery and thoroughly creepy man, he puts on these odd pageants of hate for the filmmakers, creating mock graves for the three teens and setting them ablaze and screaming vengeful damnations into the camera. He's a really disturbed man and it's very easy to believe that he--an admittedly abusive father--could have been driven to commit these crimes. But again, you're never sure.

I admire what the West Memphis 3 advocacy groups have done on these men's behalf, though I find the bandwagon-ish approach of that whole campaign to be a little distasteful. There doesn't seem to be enough evidence to determine their guilt, but nor do you (or at least I didn't) ever feel totally comfortable proclaiming them as straightforward victims of chance in the whole matter.

Regardless, these films are absolutely fascinating documents of the way violent crime can destroy entire communities, and not just the lives that are directly affected by them. Like Gary Smith, Berlinger and Sinofsky know how to tell a great story.

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Speaking of documentaries, I highly recommend the Cannibal Corpse DVD set Centuries of Torment (great cover, no?), out recently on Metal Blade. I first heard of this one from Ben Ratliff's charming and utterly unexpected review in the Times a few weeks back, and I agree wholeheartedly with his assessment that it's as much a history of death metal as it is of the Corpse. There's great info on Morrisound Studios, the pre-internet metal underground, the Tampa scene, Metal Blade records and many other aspects of the music's early history that have never been comprehensively explored on film. It's way detailed and nonfans might get a little restless, but the Cannibal guys are--contrary to what you might think--very good natured and pleasant. They love what they do and it's a joy to watch them retrace their humble beginnings.

I listened to my fair share of Cannibal back in the day, though I always felt that they were sort of second rate, paling in comparison to the likes of Morbid Angel. But seeing this documentary makes me reconsider: Sure they're workmanlike in a way, but they've also stuck to their guns in a way that few others have. They haven't really messed with the formula too much at all, and their latest record, Kill, is probably their heaviest and most uncompromising yet. I've also revisited "The Bleeding" recently and am realizing that it's a remarkable and especially memorable disc, with some of the greatest riffs ever to appear on a death metal record. Check out an MP3 my favorite track, Return to Flesh, which would make Tony Iommi way proud.

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Lastly, I feel bad for not mentioning last month's Shudder to Think reunion show at Webster Hall. Had a blast at this one. It was unabashedly a Big Rock show, with dazzling light displays and the like, but that was very appropriate in that it celebrated the '90s watershed when art and commerce were comfortably intertwined for a few blissful years. I'm certainly not the first one to point this out, but Shudder to Think will forever be a leading candidate for Weirdest Band Ever to Appear on MTV. Anyway, they were great live. Craig Wedren is a powerhouse of vocal dynamism and general exuberance and positive vibes and Nathan Larson has old-school rock-star swagger down cold. It's amazing how many strong songs they had and how weird they still sound and how insanely catchy they still are. Pony Express Record is essential and is their obvious magnum opus, though a few tracks from Get Your Goat and 50,000 B.C. are must-hears as well, including set opener Red House (video on YouTube) from the latter and Shake Your Halo Down (MP3) from the former. (Shout-out and congrats too to bassist Jesse Krakow for getting the gig and nailing all the songs. It was the enthusiasm of him and his former Time of Orchids bandmates and buds that got me into Shudder in the first place, so I know how much this experience meant to him. Bravo!)

The final word (I hope)

Colin Powell was the picture of dignity, no? I felt as inspired watching this as I have during the entire campaign--Powell was so evenhanded and above-the-belt. Psyched!

Drublic display

Having spent the past several weeks preparing CMJ coverage for Time Out New York, I was ready for a little change of pace, and I got just that last night. It's always refreshing to attend an event that would never in a million years be deemed cool by the Pitchfork crowd, and to see so many people enjoying themselves in such a completely infectious and unabashed way.

I'm talking about the NOFX concert at Irving Plaza (now know as the Fillmore New York, oddly). NOFX is a band that I only actively listened to briefly, back in high school. I was very avid enthusiast of pop-punk for a few years as a teenager, and though I don't keep up w/ the genre, I never wavered in my belief that NOFX's Punk in Drublic was one of the most enjoyable, not to mention extremely poignant records I'd ever heard.

Apparently the band thinks highly of that one as well, because they played a bunch of songs from it last night, including "The Quass/Dying Degree," "Reeko," "Perfect Government," "Don't Call Me White" and probably my favorite, "Linoleum." The latter is this awesome defiant anthem about taking pride in poverty. It seems worth throwing the lyrics up here:

"Possesions never meant anything to me
I'm not crazy
Well that's not true, I've got a bed, and a guitar
And a dog named Bob who pisses on my floor
That's right, I've got a floor
So what, so what, so what?
I've got pockets full of kleenex and lint and holes
Where everything important to me
Just seems to fall right down my leg
And on to the floor
My closest friend linoleum
Linoleum
Supports my head, gives me something to believe
That's me on the beachside combing the sand
Metal meter in my hand
Sporting a pocket full of change
That's me on the street with a violin under my chin
Playing with a grin, singing gibberish"

Frontman Fat Mike is a brilliantly unapologetic snotnose a lot of the time, but his writing also has this really tender philosophical quality. I love those last two lines--"That's me on the street with a violin under my chin /Playing with a grin, singing gibberish." He loves to portray himself as this sort of bumbling fuckup who can't get anything right. It was the same way at the show: After every song, he kept apologizing for all the mistakes he'd made and proudly proclaiming himself an alcoholic. At one point, he looked down at the drink caddy on his mike stand and noted that his vodka had been taken away, which led him to complaining that it had been confiscated by his roadies. He got it back after a few songs, though, and even if he was a little sloppy and hoarse, he put on a great show. That guy sings with absolute passion and for all his funny standoffishness ("Stop yelling stuff. I can't hear what you're saying anyway, so shut the fuck up."), he seemed genuinely touched by the huge turnout, and his thank-you at the end of the set was a very sincere one. Speaking of sincere, I loved his Obama plug. "Vote for the black man," he said at one point, simply and directly.

Guitarist El Jefe also deserves a special mention. He's sort of known as the silly guy in NOFX, and deservedly so. At the end of Punk in Drublic, there's this hilarious hidden track where he's imitating various cartoon characters like Yosemite Sam and Scooby-Doo, all saying the line, "This guy's more punk than me." Sounds dumb, but I got a lot of mileage out of that as a teen. Anyway, he's a hell of musician. Hefe played some really badass trumpet last night, and his supporting vocals (such as the incredible gravelly voiced intro to "Perfect Government") were intensely soulful.

Another thing about El Hefe that needs to be mentioned is that he truly shreds on guitar, which leads me to an interesting facet of NOFX: They're complete instrumental virtuosos. Hefe takes very extravagant solos constantly, and though the live show doesn't spotlight drummer Erik Sandin in that way, he's still an absolute machine. He favors this incredibly speedy version of the classic hardcore beat that incorporates a double-stroke hiccup on every other bass-drum hit, and it makes the beat really seem to hurtle along. And when the band plays their downtempo reggae stuff, which they did a little too much of last night, you can see what a great bassist Fat Mike is. What I'm getting at is that though they're occasionally sloppy, NOFX shreds. Over the course of their career, they've completely defied the idea that a punk band shouldn't be able to play. In fact, they're tight as shit and have been for years.

Also, there was something comforting watching the kids go apeshit over the band. I can't remember the last time I was at a show that had such avid singalongs. The entire place screamed every word to "Linoleum," for one. And most of the floor erupted into a giant mosh as soon as the show started. It was kind of annoying to fend off the jostling, but it was also inspiring to see people even wanting to move around that much. Add to that some good-natured loudmouths (one guy in the bathroom line was like--and I'm dead serious--"What's taking so long? You all got vaginas or something?") and you've got a rowdy, silly good time. Was this a totally obnoxious crowd? Yeah, but NOFX is sort of predicated on obnoxiousness. Overall, the show was a really wonderful respite from the oppressive hipsterdom that has reigned at so many of the other concerts I've attended over the past few years.

A plug, if I may...

This Friday, STATS performs in Brooklyn. Just wanted you to know. More here as soon as I am able. Thank you for your patience...

Dumb and dumber // Recently: Hill/Hamilton + Joni Mitchell + The Bad Plus + The Ultimate Warrior

Another week goes by, and I'm playing catch-up on here as usual. Let's see how we can move through all this. In a way, it's starting to seem sillier and sillier to me--or maybe it's just that I'm feeling more and more self-conscious about it--not to comment on current events on this site. Maybe I'll dip my toe in here or there, but I just don't feel qualified. I can't imagine it comes as much of a surprise to anyone that I'll be voting for Obama, and I'm certainly not going to offer any insight you won't get in a more informed and coherent tone elsewhere.

I can't help, though, watching a lot of the campaign coverage with a devil's advocate eye. For example, when I see Katie Couric grilling Sarah Palin (here and elsewhere)--and the latter did admittedly look ridiculous--I wonder if she's not playing right into the hands of those who favor the "smartypants liberal media" stereotype. I can't remember where it was that I read this, but a recent column discussed the frustratingly foolproof nature of the "They're not dumb; they're just like us" argument re: "folksy" or "unsophisticated" Republican politicians, wherein appearing unworldly will always be better than appearing pretentious.

For example, in one of the Couric interviews (viewable here), she asks Palin the by-now infamous question about why she didn't have a passport until recently. And Palin gives what I feel is a pretty politically brilliant answer: that she's not one of those (I'm paraphrasing) "rich people whose parents sent her to Europe with a backpack after college; I've had to work my whole life." How better to deflect that scrutiny than by--again--appealing to this notion that worldliness is at odds with the honorable provinciality she wants to project. I always try to keep in mind that to those people who are inclined to support Palin and politicians like her, she appears noble for precisely the reasons that she appears stupid to left-wingers.

I guess all this is my way of reflecting on my experience of digesting this campaign. I worry mainly about what's constructive, about what's actually going to sway undecided voters. Is practicing--to use Palin and McCain's phrase--"gotcha journalism" really going to convince anyone who's already inclined to support Palin that she's unqualified? It may only make them root for her more. Now I'm not advocating that she shouldn't be asked tough questions, but maybe that she shouldn't be asked them in such a strident and even nasty way. Couric is practically gritting her teeth--and I'm sure most of us wouldn't do much better if faced with Palin--and that seems like it will only play right into the hands of the enemy.

Same goes for the recent New Yorker profile of Cindy McCain, a smear job if I've ever seen one and one that's likely to leave you nauseated no matter what side you're on. And again, who are we trying to convince here? Do New Yorker readers really need another reason to think ill of the McCains? It can all just seem so petty and smug and even if it's all true, how is this going to help Obama win? How is the media going to reach across party lines and actually sway people who already have their mind made up? And more importantly, who in god's name *doesn't* already have their mind made up? That's my real question. It's hard for me to stay interested on a day-to-day basis, because *nothing* I hear is going to change the fact that I'm voting for Obama. And I'm sure that goes for nearly everyone who happens to be reading this post. Really, tell me this, do any of you know a single undecided voter? (Or even a single Republican voter?) I truthfully want to know who these people are. Living in New York and moving in arty-ish circles, they can be hard to find. I'd love to talk to one and have a constructive dialogue. Maybe all this preaching to the choir is getting us somewhere, but I don't see how. Is anyone's mind *really* being changed or even swayed by any of this? How could it be with issues as polarizing as the Iraq war and abortion rights? We're all waiting for Palin to make an ass of herself on Thursday, but it's worth remembering that to some, she'll look the most endearing when she's at her dumbest. Unfortunately there's no antidote for that; it's a frustratingly insoluble argument. It just can seem futile to tirelessly pick over nuances when you know the other side will constantly receive the exact opposite message from the exact same set of data.

*****

And re: what I (ahem) actually intended to post about, here are a few things I've been enjoying of late:











1) The new duo record by Andrew Hill and Chico Hamilton. Yes, you read that right. This release--a heretofore unreleased session from 1993--seems to be totally slipping under the radar, but it's easily one of the best records I've heard this year. Here's how I argued that very point in Time Out New York (you can sample a track at that link there as well).
















2) Joni Mitchell's 1975 full-length The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which I picked up on LP this past weekend. I'd long been fascinated with the *idea* of this one--not to mention its mindblowing title--and upon a first--admittedly superficial--listen, I'm not disappointed in the least. It appears to be one of her most sophisticated statements--a meditation on sociosexual relationships, privilege, posturing, authenticity, commerce, crime, etc.--though not at all overly intellectualized despite being explicitly literary throughout. It's just another reminder of how much incredibly intense and thoughtful artmaking was going on in plain sight in the '70s. Check out this fascinating track called "The Jungle Line"--the link takes you to one of those static-image YouTube videos--in which Mitchell sings over a field recording of African drummming (if you're anything like me, you'll hear foreshadowings of Paul Simon's "The Obvious Child"). (An interesting tidbit about this record is that in a 1985 Rolling Stone interview, Prince dubbed it "the last album I loved all the way through.")













3) Last Thursday's late set by the Bad Plus at the Village Vanguard. Joe and I were seated in the upper tier, right next to drummer Dave King and it was pretty phenomenal to watch him work. But what I was most impressed with is the unabashed dedication to groove and melody that this band has. The audience really connected with the set--they were whooping and cheering throughout--and I think it was because the music was very straightforwardly enjoyable. And though some pieces had an ostentatiously clever slant, for the most part it was a deeply emotive set. I loved the slow, steady and lovely cover of "Heart of Gold," for example, which featured a nice a capella vocal section to which all the members contributed. Along similar lines, a Reid Anderson ballad that I think was titled "People Like You" floored me with its poignancy. The more brainy and kinetic pieces provided nice variety and energy, but it was the slower, prettier stuff that hit me hardest. As far as the covers went--they did "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in addition to the Young tune--it's true what the anti-backlashers say: They were only a very small part of the set. That practice of covering recent (or simply non- or post-American Songbook) pop hits has obviously been a double-edged sword for the band--it earned them a ton of press but also the label of "gimmick"--but after hearing them live, I'd have to say that these pieces really didn't have that much bearing on the set overall. It was a jazz group--albeit a very fresh and contemporary one, for whom traditional or even progressive types of "swing" are only a very small part of their rhythmic vocabulary, most of which is dominated by backbeat-oriented grooves--that chose to season its original tunes with pieces more likely to be familiar to the audience. In other words, "standards" in the truest sense, popular tunes that functioned as palate cleansers and that created a bridge with the listeners. Along that line, what I admired most about this band was their ability to entertain in a very classy way; as Joe pointed out, hearing them was not unlike hearing a thoughtful and stimulating rock band or singer-songwriter. There's no sense of taxing experimentalism, just sophisticated--and remarkably passionate--entertainment. It was a lot of fun to hear something that enjoyable and enriching at a jazz club, and without a hint that you were experiencing a bygone mode of performance. With or without the covers, the Bad Plus are the best kind of modern pop group. Not that they're not a proper jazz group, but seeing them in the company of an enthusiastic crowd at the Vanguard really helped me tap into the sensation of what it was to hear jazz live at a club in the days when it *was* actually popular and not a rarefied art music. (I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but the band's pianist, Ethan Iverson--a subtly dreamy and extremely thoughtful melodicist--maintains an excellent blog here.)


















4) This video of--and attendant blog post on--the Ultimate Warrior's astoundingly seething and hypernonsensical prematch hype proclamations. Dig the part at the end where he's vowing to literally bring down Hulk Hogan's airplane as he flies to Wrestlemania, and lines like "The family that I live for only breathes the air that smells of combat," and "All the fuses in the exit signs are burnt out." Eternal thanks to John A. for the tip on this one. (I haven't yet explored this blog further, but am very intrigued by post headings such as "Paul Bearer a.k.a. Faulknerization of the WWF" and "The Huck Finn-ing of Hacksaw Jim Duggan." It's just this kind of pseudointellectual flippancy--not to mention thematic consistency--that makes some blogs take off and others (uh, like the one you're reading) remain an acquired taste at best.)