Friday, January 31, 2003

Rockin' the House Seattle's smartest art-punk band the A-Frames is finally getting some love from the city's alternative weekly newspaper. A positive profile by Michael Alan Goldberg leads this week's music section in The Stranger. A fixture on the scene since the mid-90s, the A-Frames (who began life as Bend Sinister) serve up terse slabs of sonic meat, their lean cuisine inspired by bands like the Fall, Gang of Four, Birthday Party and various Krautrock groups of the 70s. The band was disappointed when a gig supporting Australia's seminal garage-punks The Scientists fell through earlier this month. They'll have to settle for opening for Mudhoney next weekend at the Crocodile. If any of this sounds like your cup of noise, go henceforth to the site of Dragnet Records for the latest info and ordering information. 8:08:25 AM    Emphasize This! []

Monday, December 23, 2002

Death or Glory    From every dingy basement on every dingy street I hear every dragging handclap over every dragging beat That's just the beat of time-the beat that must go on If you been trying for years-then we already heard your song    – “Death or Glory,” Joe Strummer and Mick Jones     12 hours and a bottle of wine later, I’m finally able to write something about Joe Strummer. For someone who was the most important musician of his generation, his sudden death is getting remarkably little attention. He was only 50 for christsake.   Why is Joe Strummer important? Leave aside the dozens of amazing songs and immortal performances he gave us in his five years with the Clash. Joe Strummer was the last major popular artist to really stand for something and not be ridiculous. He didn’t compromise the music, he didn’t compromise his politics, he didn’t hold back a goddamned thing. He didn’t burden us all with his problems or his ego, he didn’t smother us with false humility. He was a real guy, saying his bit, and it was brilliant. I doubt we’ll see his like again, and that’s worth crying about.   Of the punks of ’77, Syd and Johnny got more attention, but it was Joe Strummer’s voice that set the tone. “They said we’d be artistically free if we sign a bit of paper,” he screamed on “Complete Control,” the Clash’s most ferocious single. He thought he was being ironic. But he really was good enough to make it stick.   Whenever I hear “Tommy Gun,” I’m transported to a flat in East Kensington, summer of 1988 (long after the Clash were dead and gone), where I’d turned up for no good reason the night before and was waiting for my then-girlfriend to get home from work. I was watching “Rude Boy” on the video with a bunch of Australian guys. They didn’t know me from Adam – all they knew is that I was some cocky Yank fucking their cute flatmate. But, and this sounds dopey to see it in print, the music brought us together. Anyone who liked the Clash was cool enough to hang out with. True in ’77, true in ’88, true today.   You ever see “Rude Boy”? It’s a terrible film – handmade and rambling, without any kind of plot. The Clash are basically background characters to the main story about this confused kid. It was shot in ’77 and ’78, when it was all happening. The scene of the Clash playing the Rock Against Racism show is historic. Joe sang “London's Burning” like a man possessed. Nothing in rock history – not Elvis in ’55 or the Beatles at Shea Stadium or Jimi Hendrix at Monterey – compares to the visceral power of that moment. The man and his time were one, and the camera caught it all forever. Those 140 seconds of film are worth every plodding moment that comes before and after.   Strummer was so hard for the media to peg because he wasn’t some kind of caricature. He wasn’t a self-destructive moron like Syd Vicious or a preening cartoon character like Billy Idol. Sure, he was punk through and through, but he was about the music, first, last and always. It’s all there on the records. Just put them on and listen. No bullshit, no rockstar pose. There was nothing to make fun of about the Clash, nothing to reduce to cliché. The songs were great, the performances completely convincing, the adventurous spirit and musical chops 100% authentic.   The Clash were the anti-media. They were about the real experience, not some mediated simulation. Their politics weren’t from some weird point of view or reducible to some comfortable pigeonhole, but they were utterly in confrontation with the dominant culture. Their best songs were well-argued tracts set to an irresistible rhythm. You couldn’t listen to the Clash without getting upset about something. As a result, they had no value in commercial culture even as a sideshow like the Sex Pistols. If people saw the Clash on the evening news, they might take them seriously, and we couldn’t have that. Except for the annoying problem of all those people who bought their records, the media’s only response to a band like the Clash was to completely ignore them.   Now Joe decides to drop dead. No warning, no spectacular drug flameout or assassination by crazed fan. Just a poor workingman’s death. Heart attack at 50. It’s not a tragedy for the music, because the man said his piece. The Clash hung it up for all intents and purposes in 1982, and when I saw Strummer play in 1998 with his new band, they were a nostalgia act. Their new stuff was OK, but when Joe sang “White Man” or “I Fought the Law,” it was 1977 all over again. He was the moment, the moment was him. Now the moment is passed and all we have to mourn is the man.   Sorry to see you go, Joe. You done good while you were here. 10:19:23 PM    Emphasize This! []

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Return to the Paisly Underground I'm a sucker for clever '80s alt-pop: the dbs, Marshall Crenshaw, the Feelies, Robyn Hitchcock and Camper Van Beethoven are all among my faves. One band I thought never got enough attention for its well-crafted, literate and often-rocking work is Game Theory, whose best albums are now long out of print. Unfortunately, I hestitate to search too aggressively online for their classic double-album masterpiece for fear of ending up on the FBI's kiddie-porn hitlist. The unfortunate title of this great work? Lolita Nation. (ok, Google, bring on the pervs...) 8:44:42 AM    Emphasize This! []

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Blast from the Past    I thought I was getting too old to see a rock and roll show at a club on a Tuesday night until I got a load of the rest of the crowd that had gathered to see the Blasters reunion gig at the Crocodile Café in Seattle last night. I’d be surprised if there were a half-dozen of the three hundred in the house under 35, with more than half closer to 50. Lots of big guts, lots of gray ponytails, lots of patches of scalp where the ponytails used to be. Kind of like the band, actually.   The strange thing is, the Blasters really aren’t that old. They got started in LA around 1980 and were history before Reagan left office. Often associated with fellow bands like X and the Stray Cats, their connection with the LA punk scene of that era was more social than sonic. The Blasters, more than practically any other band since Creedence Clearwater Revival, played straight-up rock and roll. They probably drew an older crowd even back then.   Just for the record, there aren’t a whole lot of reunion tours I’d pay to see, but I was a big fan from way back and had seen Dave Alvin (the Blasters’ amazing lead guitarist) play with his own group, the Guilty Men, enough to know that he, at least, still had his chops. Dave is good enough on his own to make you feel like you’ve almost seen a Blasters show, but his gravelly bass is, in the end, no substitute for the rubber-voiced antics of his hyper-kinetic brother, Blasters’ frontman Phil Alvin. Intriguingly, it was apparently tension between the two brothers that broke the band up in the first place.   They took the stage a little bit after 10:00 pm and launched into a non-stop set that covered almost their entire catalog. The Blasters were always a crisp, professional musical unit with virtuoso Dave leading the charge on guitar, plus an outstanding Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano and rock-solid rhythm section. Even the crappy sound of the Croc’s PA system couldn’t disguise the fluidity and drive of five incredible musicians playing their hearts out and having a grand old time doing it. By the third or fourth song, there was enough dancing among the middle-aged crowd to make an Advil sales rep beam with delight.   Up on stage, Phil howled and grimaced and sweated his way through one Blasters classic after another. “Red Rose,” “No Other Girl,” “American Music,” “Long White Cadillac,” “Dark Night,” “Border Radio” and a dozen others sounded as great as the first time I’d heard them. Part of the reason the material has held up so well is that the songs sounded old – or perhaps timeless – even when they were new. Dave Alvin’s songwriting genius is what propelled the Blasters from to the front ranks of American bands. His songs didn’t just ape the structures of  folk, blues, swing, rockabilly and country-western styles, but went deep to explore the sensibility behind the music. Both of the Alvins know their American roots – historically, emotionally, politically, poetically. Their understanding of the complexity behind such basically simple forms is what gives their music a richness, sincerity and authenticity that separates it from the simple-minded revivalism of groups like the Stray Cats.   On stage, the tension between Dave’s musical professionalism and Phil’s crowd-pleasing clowning gave the performance some drama. At one point, the brothers looked like they might come to blows. Never fashion-plates even in their younger days, the band has ripened into an almost surreal physical ugliness that also made for compelling viewing. Gaunt, gap-toothed Dave was hunched over his guitar like a wounded coyote while Phil, sporting the balding remains of his trademark flat-top, flailed around like a wild boar with an aneurism. The rest of the band looked like they were rounded up from the local filling station and issued a pack of cigarettes and a six-pack of long-neck Buds along with their instruments.   By the time the band launched into the inevitable finale – “Marie Marie,” the best song Chuck Berry never wrote – the Croc had been transformed into a beer-soaked, smoke-filled roadhouse, with the portly, sweaty audience gasping in delight and exhaustion. An unknowing stranger who happened in off the street would have shrugged and wondered what the big deal was: just a veteran bar band on a good night. But hey – isn’t that rock and roll? 10:19:35 AM    Emphasize This! []

Saturday, November 30, 2002

Bad Folk Rock, or, Bob Dylan, David Blue and Me   Much of my taste in popular music is founded on the cornerstone of Bob Dylan. An adolescent fixation on his mid-60s era work left me with an indelible appreciation for good lyrics and a boundless tolerance for rough-hewn but expressive vocals. Since I grew up 20 years downstream from Bob's prime, the tides of time had already washed away a lot of the residue of his influence from those years, including the slew of Dylan imitators and followers whose work was pervasive in the early 70s. Over the years, I've tried to hunt down specimens of this species and found them a very mixed bag. Strident protest singer Phil Ochs eventually matured into a genuinely tragic Romantic poet, and his last few albums are as great as any music made in the late 60s, whereas hacks like Tom Paxson started bad and only got worse. I thought John Prine's first album was Dylan when I first heard it - a mistake I'd never make about his departed colleague, the occasionally-inspired but often-insipid Steve Goodman. One name from that era that always intrigued me was David Blue (né Cohen), a hanger-on from Dylan's Greenwich Village period who recorded a few records in the late 60s and early 70s that were reputed to be the closest emulation of Dylan's style that anyone dared commit to vinyl even in those shameless times. However, Blue died sometime ago and his oevre is now entirely forgotten (save by current-day folk gangster John Wesley Harding, who memorialized him in a song called "Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Steve Goodman, David Blue and Me"), so I despaired of ever hearing it for myself. Enter Don, my ex-brother not-in-law (e.g., my girlfriend's sister's ex-husband), owner of the finest record collection in Appleton, if not the entire Fox River Valley, whose enthusiasm for this sort of music runs deeper than can possibly be imagined. He was good enough to provide me with David Blue's magnum opus, These 23 Days in September, which he had painstakingly transferred from his original vinyl to CD - along with "bonus tracks" of fellow forgotten folkies from that era such as Eric Anderson and Patrick Sky. 30,000 miles over Billings, Montana, I had my first listen. Does anyone here remember a track on an old Simon and Garfunkle album called "A Simple Desultory Philippic," in which Paul Simon does a merciless parody of the Dylan style over an organ-driven blues track? Imagine an entire album of this, meant to be taken seriously. Bad singing, flat melodies, pretentious lyrics that miss by a mile, dated production, the works – all cringe-inducing, but not quite terrible enough to be funny in spite of itself.  I guess when even Bob Dylan himself is a second-rate Bob Dylan imitator these days (at least when he performs material from his 1960s catalog), what did I really expect? Oh well – I guess some historical time-pieces are meant to stay buried. 10:30:09 AM    Emphasize This! []

Friday, November 15, 2002

Sex and Violins Joshua Bell is looking more and more like the next big thing in classical music. The 33 year-old Grammy Award-winning violinist was just here in Seattle on tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, where he was both guest director and featured soloist. He’s been touring madly for the past few years, showing his face in all the right places, including performing the Oscar-winning score to the respected art film The Red Violin a few years ago. Every generation, classical music produces one or two figures who attain wider recognition in the popular culture: Isaac Stern, Yitzhak Pearlman, Yo Yo Ma. Bell seems poised to be next. He has the upward career trajectory, the superstar look with his long brown hair and black silk shirts, and the $3 million Stradivarius. On Monday night, he made his case with lively performances of Bach and Haydn, followed by Mahler’s arrangement of Shubert’s Death and the Maiden. Bell’s virtuosity is impeccable, even to my untrained ear, and he holds the stage marvelously with his dynamic and demonstrative style. But I’ve seen him three times now and each time I am more and more convinced that there is a coldness, even an abrasive quality to his sound. It’s a very subjective opinion, but one that is further confirmed each time I’ve seen him.   Last night, by some quirk of the Symphony schedule, I found myself at my second performance of the week. Another violinist was featured, this time 27 year-old Nikolaj Znaider. Though not as seasoned or polished as Bell, Znaider offered a masterly rendition of Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G Minor, which benefited from the brisk, tight pace provided by guest conductor Yakov Kreizberg. And I couldn’t help noticing how much more pleasing Znaider’s warm, rounded tones were to my ears.   It’s too early to say whether Zniader will amount to anything. He also has performed and recorded widely, but he’s half a decade younger than Bell and has a ways to go in his career before recognition is available to him beyond the concert circuit. Most notably, however, he lacks the look – the star-power charisma that oozes from every pore of Joshua Bell. Even in the stately circles of classical music, branding is everything, and increasingly, Joshua Bell is looking like the choice of the next generation. 8:41:45 AM    Emphasize This! []

Monday, November 11, 2002

Electric Masada Acid Test: John Zorn’s Separate but Equal Jazz   The best jazz has always been about the blues. Over the course of the 20th century, this sprawling, multi-layered complex of musical expression has been based on a foundation of traditional African-American (and African) harmonics, rhythms and feelings. African-American musicians who work in the idiom of jazz are therefore playing on their cultural home field. Others can and have made contributions, and while the music that results is not always inferior per se, it must always be judged in relationship to the core African-American tradition rather than as part of it.   Various efforts to reconcile jazz techniques with European art music over the course of the 20th century were often unsatisfying. Whether instigated by African-American or white musicians, there was a certain uneasiness between the informal, conversational style of jazz and the self-consciousness of whatever it was being “fused” with. The only really successful hybridizations of jazz have been with other folk styles: Latin, Gypsy folk music (such as the work of the great guitarist Django Reinhardt) and, in an oblique way, Appalachian music (as in Western swing). Of these, only Latin Jazz has produced an important independent tradition, and the success here might be because of the shared African roots.   Enter John Zorn. Early in his career, the Jewish saxophonist was clearly uneasy with his outsider’s relationship to the African-American blues-jazz tradition. His first efforts were spectacular if sterile excursions into the avant-garde, often turning on cleverly-conceived innovations in musical theory. He promoted a new approach to improvisation through an elaborate game called Cobra, and sought to root his music in various non-blues forms such as film music. The results were often more “interesting” than satisfying, but in the course of his explorations, he developed an incredible virtuosity both as a player and as a band leader.   Sometime in the early 90s, Zorn hit upon the vehicle that allowed him to express his most complex and imaginative musical ambitions within a framework that was as comfortable to him as the blues tradition is to African-American players: the traditional folk music of European Jewry. The power of this breakthrough was staggering. His new combo, Masada (named for the stronghold of a band of die-hard Israelite nationalists fighting Rome in the 1st century), produced a music that was exciting, adventurous, historically-resonant, and capable of supporting the complex musical superstructure of jazz technique as readily as the blues. Zorn and his (mostly Jewish) colleagues were finally able to infuse their theories with the hot blood of an authentic cultural experience in which they were fully immersed, creating a music as electrifying in its own way as the early bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie or the mid-60s free jazz of John Coltrane and (Zorn influence) Ornette Coleman.   In lesser hands, the core idea behind Masada could quickly degenerate into a novelty or cliché. But Zorn is possessed of an almost superhuman commitment to his music and a rare burning genius for invention and innovation. Masada relentlessly explored the avenues made available by this new approach in an ongoing series of recordings released according to the sequence of the Hebrew alphabet. While it took 40 years for African-American jazz to get from Louis Armstrong to Cecil Taylor (or James Brown, if you prefer), Zorn collapsed the evolution of his new genre into less than a decade.   Last night in Seattle, he performed with his new Electric Masada septet featuring Kenny Wolleson (drums), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Trevor Dunn (electric bass), John Medeski and Jamie Saft (keys), and Marc Ribot (guitar). Performing with amplified instruments is of course nothing new to Zorn, but the makeup of this particular combo with the two keyboards, percussion and electric guitars allows the new Masada to create the same kinds of musical textures that Miles Davis achieved with his late-60s, early-70s group that produced the landmark album Bitches Brew, in marked contrast to the more traditional acoustic approach that Masada had employed in the past.   The critical mass of talent under Zorn’s iron-fisted leadership exploded in a fireball of musical fury. Zorn’s compositions, frequently rooted in the minor key harmonics of his traditional source material, provided a wide-ranging palette of melodies, tempos, dynamics as well as a solid foundation for the most far-reaching improvisations. Zorn appeared to incorporate a few of his Cobra techniques to direct the soloists and shape the performances like a magician conjuring with powerful mystical forces. He allowed each of his virtuousos plenty of room to embroider, featuring his own formidable skills on the alto sax only occasionally and to staggering effect. The interplay of the group onstage was utterly spontaneous and produced a string of exciting moments. Every passage seemed to be a tour-de-force. At times, the group thundered along as if trying to lift themselves and everyone in the audience into space by achieving some kind of musical escape velocity. It was beyond belief.   If last night’s performance is any indication, Electric Masada seems ready to write a new chapter in musical history. The quixotic, cerebral, often intentionally difficult Zorn has found the alchemical formula for marrying his undeniable musical genius to a rich tradition of which he is fundamentally, organically a part. By ambition, talent and sheer will, Zorn has created a place for an authentic, non-blues-based music in the hallowed pantheon of American jazz. Mazel tov! 10:13:24 AM    Emphasize This! []

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