Breakfast Blend: Frank Zappa and Steve Allen

John Cage opens the door to this bit of silliness, which was also broadcast on a popular TV show on a network when there were only three channels. Lots of civilians watched.

Zappa is similarly affable, aware that he’s crossing the line and at the same time using that to expose people to a pretty radical idea. And Steve Allen is funny.

Night Music: John Cage, “Water Walk”

Screenshot 2014-07-19 23.31.03I was at a museum the other day that was showing the work of Amy Silliman. She makes abstract paintings with some figurative elements, or maybe it’s the other way around. She also has some fun with words.

I liked her earlier more figurative and allegorical paintings more than the later, more abstract and cagey paintings she’s been doing in recent years. Though one series, 70 some odd rooms–painted from memory–in which she remembered feeling shame, resonated conceptually.

As a sidebar, Amy Silliman and someone else curated their own show of things they thought should be in the museum. This is an interesting idea, and I think helped me get a handle on what Sillman was about. But what I really liked about it was a video of John Cage, the experimental composer, appearing on the ancient TV show, “I’ve Got A Secret.”

Fortunately, the clip is on YouTube, so I can share it. The key thing to note is that this was a TV show broadcast in 1960. Dwight Eisenhower was still the president. Jim Crow laws still ruled the south. The US only had a few hundred advisors in Vietnam. The Beatniks were kind of old hat at this point. And John Cage was still a young man, resembling maybe the young David Lynch, with the same knowing smile and the same ability to present the outlandish with all seriousness.

This clip is not rock. Cage is hardly a remnant. But there is so much going on here (Cage has to rewrite the piece because the stage craft unions are unable to figure out how he can turn on the five radios in the piece, as the score dictates.) that I have to share.

I’m not sure what I think about the work. I kind of agree with the Herald Tribune review that’s quoted in the piece to show that Cage is taken seriously by music critics. He is no joke. But I love that this exists, plus the cigarettes, and am glad Amy Sillman introduced me to it.

OBIT: Charlie Haden

I’ve seen Charlie Haden play many times in the last 20 years or so. In 2005 he reconvened the Liberation Music Orchestra to protest the War in Iraq, and I saw them in an explosive show in the Village.

A year or two later his family, musicians all, including his daughter Petra, who we’ve featured here a couple of times, put together a country band in honor of the Haden Family Band that toured the country when Charlie was a boy. I saw them at an outdoor festival near Lincoln Center. And some time earlier I saw an amazing show with Haden and Thad Jones at Iridium, when that club was in that fantastic space across the street from Lincoln Center.

In between I fell deeply in love with a gentle album of Latin American melodies and tunes performed with the great Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, though I never got the chance to see the two of them perform.

A few weeks ago I posted Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman here. Charlie Haden played bass on that classic, and much of the early Ornette stuff. His straightforward melodic bass lines were the spine that held together Ornette’s and Don Cherry’s raucous soloing in those free jazz days.

One of my favorite Haden stories in his obit in the Times today involved a show he was performing in Lisbon with Coleman in the early 70s, during which he dedicated Song for Che to the black resistance fighters in Mozambique and Angola, Portuguese colonies. He was promptly put in jail.

A detail I didn’t know about Haden’s life. He played only country music until he was 21, when he saw a Charlie Parker show in Omaha. He was inspired, started to play jazz and moved to LA, where he met and played with Hampton Hawes and Paul Bley and eventually hooked up with Coleman.

This tune is from a 1989 show with the great drummer Paul Motian and the pianist Rubalcaba. It combines the lyricism with the wildness the was a part of Haden’s whole package.

And here’s some Liberation Music Orchestra.

Night Music: Ornette Coleman, “Lonely Woman”

There was a concert honoring Ornette Coleman in the park near my house tonight. Ornette’s son, the drummer Denardo Coleman, was involved. Henry Threadgill was on the bill. I planned on going, but dinner ran late and rain was on the way. As we were clearing the table I checked Twitter and there was a picture of Ornette himself sitting in. Dang! Hadn’t expected that.

We arrived during a break. The rain was close, but Weather Underground put it on the other side of the park. Other than a few drops it was humid and not too hot. A guy in a magenta suit, or maybe even pink–if you want to be unkind–came out and thanked us for our patience, and then introduced Hal Willner, who is a famed producer of lots of different music and shows. Willner puts together a tribute show each June in Prospect Park, lassoing all sorts of talent for a single night of unusual pairings and fantastic connections.

Willner started talking about how much Lou Reed loved Ornette, and how he and Lou, for the last four years of Lou’s life, had had a radio show together. It sounds like they made 80 or so shows over the years, (I assume on SiriusXM because I didn’t know about it) and the first song played on every one, Hal said, was Ornette’s Lonely Woman. He then introduced a recording from one of the shows, with Lou explaining why this is a great song, but it doesn’t need that at all. Just listen.

Willner then introduced the next band to perform: Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Bill Laswell and the guy who invented the boxes that helped the guitars make the sounds they made on Metal Machine Music. But their performance, and what came after, is a story for another day.

Afternoon Snack: “Sukiyaki,” Kyu Sakamoto

All the Japanese pop some forced this song into my head, and, to quote Lucinda Williams, I Can’t Let Go.

Not that I wish I could.

Kyu Sakamoto was sort of the Masanori Marukami of pop: Sakamoto the only Asian to log a #1 hit in Billboard history, and well, this is it. And, though he was a one-hit wonder here, though “Mashi” (the Giants nickname for Marukami, the first Japanese born in the Major Leagues) was kind of like that too, they at least both paved the way.

I guess it is pleasant enough, and when the song came out in 1963 it was indeed a huge hit (sold 13 million units overall). But, this song is certainly not pop as I think of it, and it is as far removed from rock and roll as Percy Faith and Mitch Miller and even Pat Boone’s obnoxious cover of Tutti Fruiti.

Not sure why it was such a big hit, though? Sort of muzak with words none of us knows, and as I thought about it, I thought about compiling a Steveslist of the six songs not sung in English to hit #1 on the Billboard chart.

But, as I looked at them, they were all really so awful–and I get they may evoke fond memories in some–that I just couldn’t do it.

However, they are:

  1. Nel Blu Dipinto di Bleu: Domenico Modguno, 1958 (My mother loved this song: Bobby Rydell did the American thing with Volare.)
  2. Sukiyai: Kyu Sakamoto, 1963
  3. Dominique: The Singing Nun, 1963 (See how badly we needed the Beatles? Two of these dogs in one year.)
  4. Rock me Amadeus: Falco, 1896 (Proud that I have no conscious clue what this song is.)
  5. La Bamba: Los Lobos (I love the Lobos, and this song, in fact this is the best tune on the list, but why not Richie Valens?)
  6. Macarena: Los Dell Rio, 1996 (Never understood and I guess the only reason I know this song is they played it at the ball park.)

I just don’t get any of these songs, save La Bamba, which is really a treatment of a Mexican folk song, being hits at all. Not that I am trying to be xenophobic, but in general the music is cheesy and most really cannot understand the words. Meaning if we were on Bandstand, and doing “Rate a Record,” we couldn’t say, “I give it a 73, Dick. It had a nice beat and I liked the lyrics.”

OTOH, I don’t get I’ve Never Been to Me or Abba songs (maybe tuneful, but so what?) or even Snoopy Versus the Red Baron (which I hated at the time as much as I hated Incense and Peppermints and In the Year 2525.)

BTW, this video of Sukiyaki is the official publicity one Sakamoto released. And, sadly, in another shot at fame, Sakamoto was killed as one of the fatalities resulting from the JAL air crash August 12, 1985 the worst air disaster in history.

So, on that sobering note, enjoy if you can. If you dare.

 

Happy 100th Birthday, Sun Ra!

sunra-headThe bandleader Sun Ra would have been 100 years old yesterday. His Arkestra was a touring powerhouse and Sun Ra a huge composer and personality in the world of modern jazz. Of course, Sun Ra was his own person and had his own way of looking at things, so the idea of this or that may have had no currency to him. He did things his way, with a devotion and concentration and no thought of compromise.  Which is what makes him a legend to this day.

His attitude, his belief that he came from a place beyond Earth, and that the music he made had no limits, made him a favorite of progressive rock fans back in his day, as well as jazz fans, and the Arkestra’s live shows around the world were historic and popular beyond jazz’s usual audiences. These were musical shows, but also spiritual, celebrating the passing from the leaden quotidian to the exultant and rapturous.

“Play with some fire on it,” Sun Ra would tell his musicians. “If you’re not mad at the world, you don’t have what it takes.”

 

 

 

 

Night Music: The Cox Family, with Allison Krauss, “Remind Me, Dear Lord”

I won’t say this one has much to do with fucking on the floor, but it is darn near perfect even if you have no faith in anything. Except maybe fucking on the floor.

On a broader note, the Cox Family is a bluegrass gospel group who plays music that is clear and principled and has musical virtue apart from their beliefs. Their records are ace and should not be missed.

Allison Krauss, as we know, is super talented and even turned Robert Plant into a hitmaker again. She’s also a fantastic fiddle player with a very smooth and excellent voice.

I love the Cox Family on their own, but Krauss raises their game. Dig deep into their catalog. My friends will say they don’t rock, but they scratch a serious itch.

 

Breakfast Blend: Peter Callandar is Dead.

When I think of the worst song of all time I think of two songs that played incessantly in the storm window factory I worked in the summer after I graduated from high school. That would be Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” and Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods’ “Billy Don’t Be A Hero.” Both had lyrics written by the Englishman Peter Callander, may he rest in peace. The music for these two 1974 No. 1 hits can be credited to Mitch Murray. It should be noted that Paper Lace did a version of Billy Don’t Be a Hero that is not as good as the Heywoods’ version.

Night Music Goes to the Movies: Gene Krupa & Barbara Stanwyck, “Boogie”

This month my favorite TV network, TCM, is having their annual “31 Days of Oscar” leading up to the actual awards ceremony (to which I am fairly indifferent). During that span every film TCM shows has at least been nominated for an Oscar, and most have won at least one.

TCM is a treasure trove of cinematic brilliance, with the bulk of their offerings focusing on the heyday of the studio system in the 30’s and 40’s.

One of the standards in those movies was to toss in a song. Which is why in the middle of a dark and brilliant Noir film, like The Big Sleep, we see Lauren Bacall singing at a speakeasy operated by gangster Eddie Mars (he is to this film, sort of what Jackie Treehorn was to Lebowski).

So, this morning I was working with TCM on in the background when Howard Hawks’ (who also made The Big Sleep, and my favorite Screwball Comedy, Bringing Up Baby) Ball of Fire came on.

Written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, the film is a great Screwball Comedy that deconstructs Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, placing the setting in Manhattan in the early 40’s, with Stanwyck playing the moll Sugarpuss O’Shea to Gary Cooper’s English professor Bertram Potts (Cooper is one of eight sheltered eggheads working on an encyclopedia).

A few other things:

  • Every great character actor and cartoon voice from that time are among the professors, so if you watch, you will suddenly hear Fractured Fairy Tales etc. in the back of your head.
  • This is the last script that Wilder and Brackett wrote before Wilder went on to his fantastic career as a director (Stalag 17, Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and Double Indemnity are just a few).
  • One thing that stuns me about Wilder is that English was his second language, yet his writing in our language is so sharp. And, if you watch Ball of Fire you will get an idea of just that. This movie is as funny and witty as anything ever put on the big screen.
  • One other thing I love about Wilder is the apocryphal tale of when he premiered Sunset Boulevard for a cluster of Hollywood moguls, after the film Samuel Goldwyn got up and chastised Wilder for making such a dark portrayal of the industry that made him rich and famous. What was Wilder’s response to the most powerful man in his industry, in front of their peers? “Fuck you.”

Back to the movie, as part of the set-up, Cooper/Potts takes to the streets fearing his grasp of slang is already outdated, and happens upon O’Shea at a night club (he also goes to a ball game and gets some good slang there).

O’Shea is the singer at the club, and though her singing and the song are marginal, Gene Krupa and his big band are just deadly. So is the piano player and the guy who does the sax solo. Funny too, cos playing guitar was just a minor rhythm instrument, as you can see in most films of this ilk.

Anyway, Canned Heat et al all owe their boogie chops to this great scene.

And, just for fun, after the big number, Krupa and Stanwyck reprise the song with Krupa playing matchsticks instead of drumsticks.