Category: Music

Listening tonight to the alternatingly sweet / heavy, intense / broadway, pastoral / political voice of Nina Simone, who passed on yesterday at age 70. Saddened not just at her death as I am always to see the great masters peeling away, one by one. Great music still rises up to take its place, it’s true, and I don’t want to come off like I romance only the past, blind to the present, but I always want to ask, who will be this generation’s Nina Simone / Sun Ra / Django Reinhardt? History is one-way and I don’t hear world-changing music anywhere around me.

Yahoo! has more.

Since when did I get too busy to buy CDs? This sucks. When this next deadline comes and goes (final stretch now!) I’m going to buy some music:

Lou Reed : The Raven
White Stripes : Elephant
Conor : Bright Eyes

Forget what else it was that I wanted, but I know I want it. Sheesh. At an Oscar party last week realized I hadn’t seen a single one of the movies up for an award, and now realize I haven’t purchased an album in months. Life inside out. But somehow have no regrets – coming home to Miles every day is a joy I can’t describe, leaving him in the a.m. gets harder every day (as he grows steadily less infant and more toddler).

“Raven” includes collaborations with Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, and Ornette Coleman. He calls it the culmination of everything that’s come before in his career. Should be a trip. Is it true that Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were married once?

Went to see Damo Suzuki (once upon a time of Can) last night with Josh and Minette at the Hemlock club – packed into shoebox against mirrored walls, six musicians onstage. Damo was not at his best, I didn’t think – seemed to lack some spark or was not singing at full range or something. He does this improv thing with his voice that sounds so much like human language but is not. Crunching pulsing space rock, band was very good but not as good as bands we’ve seen him with before. One guy with Elton John star glasses played hammered dulcimer and a theremin signed by Robert Moog. It’s a very hard instrument to maintain pitch with, so there was an undertone of things being a bit off throughout — not totally unfitting the music. A great night, if not the best Damo night ever.

Here is a picture of Damo sleeping with a houseplant.

Had a big debate (argument?) on the way home about whether it makes sense to give panhandlers money. A topic for another day.

A piece I wrote years ago for a book of Pagan Kennedy’s, The Cosmology of P-Funk, just had an unanticipated spillover effect — a fellow name of Brian Benson apparently used it as a springboard for a master’s thesis on how Parliament-Funkadelic connects to the Transcendentalist movement. He sent me the finished piece, Transcefunkadentalism, with an invitation to post it on (old school) birdhouse alongside my earlier piece. It’s very good. His appendix contained a bunch of complete P-Funk lyrics, so I removed his appendix :-) to avoid possible copyright issues.

Brian adds, “My prof and I are trying to get this published in the “English Journal,” a mag for English teachers. This makes me laugh.” He’s interested in feedback, so drop him a note if you dig it.

To Elbo Room w/Chris, Nada, Mike to see Banyan — Mike Watt (bass) and Nels Cline (guitar), Stephen Perkins (drums), and a small horn section. Each of these guys has a long and mixed history, but as Watt said to an interviewer, “working in our “song” bands is like sitting alone writing, while Banyan is like conversation.” An outrageously fluid stomping improvisatory conversation. Watt as always solid and rooted and inventive without being quirky and yet abstract but not flighty or airy or particularly difficult. The real deal. Wearing exactly the same plaid shirts, jeans, Converse high tops he wore when I watched him in the Minutemen 20 years ago.

Painter Norton Wisdom improvised paintings behind the band in real time – amazing what he could do with sponges and fingers and some basic red, black, blue ink washes so quickly. Perfect complement. Why are music and painting not more often married? Almost everything tonight mostly improvised, but right in the middle of it all they launch into The Stooges’ “TV Eye.” I can die contented.

While the RIAA kvetches and whines about how the continuing rise of CD-R technology is supposedly hurting record sales, Smithsonian-Folkways — purveyors of all those crusty old albums by Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie (not to mention mid-century field recordings of Mongolian throat singers) — has seen its sales rise 33% in the past year. How? By using on-demand CD-R burning to keep their massive back-catalog alive. Rather than let important but slow-to-sell music go quietly out of print, they burn CDs whenever customers order from the back catalog: one copy for the current order and four more for future orders. No inventory sitting around, no music forgotten to history, no customers turned away. This makes me smile.

Thanks bIPlog.

Watched The Miles Davis Story with Amy yesterday, after the march, just because. He’s a complex cat. Really a bad man – so mean to so many, especially to women. Reminded me of Mingus in that respect. Tortured genius poet transformer locked in misogynistic mindset. Lots of conversation with wives and children and people close to him (unfortunately no interview with Betty Davis). But some of the musical footage, from the 50s through the 70s, so amazing and beautiful, especially the early 70s sessions — Bitches Brew, Agartha, On the Corner. Conversations with Dave Holland, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Ron Carter… and on and on. Reminded that Carter had recorded on more than 1,000 records by the late 70s already. “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”