All You Need...

I've heard nothing but great things about the Tony Palmer TV documentary "All You Need Is Love", a very comprehensive 17 part documentary on the history of popular music. Now I've seen the first few episodes and I'm a little beumsed. The shows I've seen do have some rare performance footage and impressive interviews with the likes of John Hammond and Eubie Blake, but some of the juxtapositions and conclusions reached had me scratching my head.

The four shows I saw were on the African roots of popular music, ragtime, jazz and blues. Understandably there was a lot in these subjects on how black musicians had to dilute their work to appeal to white audiences but two of the seeming examples of this were Louis Armstrong and James Brown!  Even odder, the first part of the Jazz program was narrated by someone named Al Roth who insisted that jazz did not come out of the  Storyville brothels of New Orleans (which writes Jelly Roll Morton out of history) or develop in Chicago speakeasies though he doesn't really give any alternative explanation for where it all came from.

The Jazz show is the oddest of the four. Obviously in an hour TV program it would be impossible to touch on all the essential figures in the genre, but Duke Ellington's only mention comes in passing when Hammond discusses the dishonesty of the music business and Count Basie's sole appearance is in contrast to footage of the Ku Klux Klan.  Later on they have musicians like Dave Brubeck, John Lewis and George Shearing talk about the importance of structure in jazz which would seem to be a rebuke to the 60's New Thing which is not even directly brought up. There's no mention of Ornette Cleman and John Coltrane is only shown in footage of his days with Miels Davis.  Interestingly the show does put some focus on what was then the current scene by showing Chick Corea fooling around on a syntthesizer and, since this was a British production, performance footage of British scenesters Mike Gibbs and Ian Carr.

Then there are other odd things like the Blues episode never mentioning Robert Johnson and ending with ten minutes on Billie Holiday who rarely sang blues. Then there is also the way that the same footage of modern day strippers is somehow shoehorned in to the ragtime, jazz and blues episodes. I'll get back to this series eventually and I'll be interested to see if some of these odd features continue in the future.

My Movies Of The Decade

Lately I've been hit over the head with the fact that it's the end of the decade. I've been seeing all sorts of lists about the best music, TV, news stories, athletes and whatever of the last ten years, so I thought it would be fun to do one myself.

My major love is music but I have no way of figuring out just what CDs I have that came out within the last decade so I'm instead doing my twelve favorite movies of the period. I don't have really mainstream tastes and I'm completely burned out on fantasy epics so you won't find "The Lord Of The Rings" or any comic book movies here (though "The Dark Knight" was under consideration) and as for comedy,  the likes of Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith do nothing for me. I tend to be drawn to darker or crazier films. Some of the ones I've listed were substantial hits. Others barely got a theatrical release. The only real commonality is that they all stayed with me long after I watched them. So here goes:

1. Let The Right One In  - This Swedish vampire film lived up to its hype. It was haunting, sad and a troubling meditation on love. A Video Watchdog article pointed out marked similarites between this and the mega-hit "Twilight" but I'll happily take this story about an eternally twelve-yeat-old vampire girl and her new protector over the teemybop version.

2. There Will Be Blood - An epic that could stand beside the silent work of Griffith or Von Stroheim. This story of a ruthless oilman in the early 20th Century was beautfully told and Daniel Day-Lewis well deserved his Oscar.

3.  Frozen River - A simple story about a single mother who turns to smuggling immgrants across the Canadian border to afford a new home for herself and her son. It was gritty and poignant and Melissa Leo at least got the recognition of an Oscar nomination for it.

4.  The Three Burials Of Mesquelaides Estrada - One that got away. Everybody gushed over "No Country For Old Men" but to me, this is a far superior Tommy Lee Jones movie and one which he also directed. Jones plays a Texas lawman who makes a trip to Mexico to give a dead friend a proper burial. As in that other picture, he beautifully plays a man who realizes he's out of his place and time and this movie at least has an ending.

5.  Bug - This is another brilliant film few people saw a supposed horror film that actually turns out to be an amazing study in psychological disentegration. Ashley Judd gave the performance of her career to date and it's a shame nobody knows about it.

6.  Lost In Translation - At least this movie found an audience. This story of two lonely people finding an unexpected connection in the alien world of Tokyo showed that Sofia Coppola definitely inherited her father's directing chops. As for Bill Murray, he has never been better.

7.  I (Heart) Huckabees - Finally a comedy. This story of self-help gurus, advertising and Shania Twain was so completely insane you just had to let its wacked out logic wash over you. It starred Naomi Watts, Dustin Hoffman, Mark Wahlberg, Jason Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin, Isabelle Huppert and Jude Law among others and not one of them was wasted.

8.  Control - Joy Division is my favorite rock band of all time so naturally I sought out this biography of the group's doomed singer, Ian Curtis. Anton Corbijn diirected with the same somber economy as his photography and the film did a great job of capturing the grim feel of the group's native Macnhester and the cathartic drama of their music.

9.   Dogville - Lars Von Trier is one of those directors who doesn't seem to always have all his oars in the water but he has directed two brilliant films, "Breaking The Waves" and this one. It's an audacious and simply staged fable about human cruelty that reveals itself by the end as a riff on the Brecht-Weill song, "Pirate Jenny". It's been called a criticism of America but with its international cast I really don't see that, the closing use of David Bowie's "Young Americans" not withstanding.

10.  Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World - Other people make comedies about fat schlumps trying to get laid and make millions. Albert Brooks makes a comedy about a comedian hired by the State Department to do the title task and nobody cares. Nevertheless this had Brooks playing the same narcisstic worry wart he did in "Lost In America" and "Modern Romance" and it was terrific. His comic voice is sadly missed these days.

11.  The Brown Bunny - I made this a Top 12 list because I had to get this in. Yes, Roger Ebert hated the rough cut of this and if people know it at all, it's for a miniscule oral sex scene but this is as powerful a study of the effects of guilt and loss as anybody has done recently. Whatever you say about Vincent Gallo he got it dead solid perfect with this one.

12. Million Dollar Baby - There may be the likes of "Bronco Billy" and "Pale Rider" in his past but ever since "Unforgiven" Clint Eastwood has been in his glory as a director.  This is my favorite of his films to date (but I've yet to see "Letters From Iwo Jima" or "Gran Torino"). Ostenibly a boxing story, this really goes back to one of his favorite themes, lonly and abandoned misfits forming a family unit which in this case, leads to a powerful and tragic climax. Hilary Swank's and Morgan Freeman's Oscars were well deserved.

Other movies considered: The President's Last Bang, Battle Royale, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, Birth, Melinda And Melinda, Baise-Moi.

CD Impressions

This is the first of occasional posts on music I have been listening to, not necessarily new stuff just what I pull out of my collection:

Lee Konitz, Satori (Milestone)



The great Mr. Konitz from 1974 doing his usual magical liquid improvising, mostly in the company of another iconoclast, pianist Martial Solal. The session is notable for trying to stay up with the times by using electric piano on two tracks, the free-falling title track and "Sometime Ago" where Solal adds burbling keyboards to Konitz's sweeping waltz time playing. Also notable here are the two young turks in the rhythm section, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.

John McLaughlin, Extrapolation (Polydor)



This is McLaughlin's celebrated first disc as a leader and on of the few that captures him still as a member of Britain's fine jazz scene. Listening to his brawling with John Surman's muscular baritone, you wonder how his career would have gone if he hadn't gone to America to work with Miles Davis and gone the Mahavishnu-Shakti route. This is tough, punchy music of exceptional quality.

John Zorn, "Alhambra Love Songs" (Tzadik)



John Zorn tries out the piano trio format on this disc, writing music supposedly in the style of West Coast musicians like Vince Guaraldi and Hampton Hawes. There is some good mellow jazz here in tunes like "Half Moon Bay", "Moraga" and "Alhambra Blues" but Zorn being Zorn, he can never stay in one genre for very long so there's also exotica, rock, serialism and noir faux-soundtracks. The players, Rob Burger, Greg Cohen and Ben Petrowsky, are very capable but to get the real feeling of the classic West Coast sound, stick with the original Mulligan or Guaraldi recordings.

Far From Reality

When historical films are made about long ago periods like the Civil War or the American Revolution, it's easy for the filmakers to get away with little inaccuracies about those times because there is no one from those times alive today to would know the difference. These days more and more films are made about the 1950's and beyond and those of us who were around then can tell immediately when a certain movie gets things really wrong.

This brings us to Todd Haynes' acclaimed 2002 film "Far From Heaven" which is set in the 50's and has a plot that sounds okay on paper but is grossly off in execution.
The film stars Julianne Moore as a picture book 50's suburban housewife who is stunned to one day discover that her husband is homosexual. She is so ashamed by this that she confides, not in any of her normal circle of friends but her handsome black gardener.

This isn't too implausible a storyline for a "Hidden Life of Suburbia" movie and the film does a credible job in delineating the shame-faced, underground world of 50's gay men. It's the other part of the plot that defies belief. Even in Connecticut, where the film is set, there is no way on God's earth a black worker would be as openly casual and friendly with his white female employer as the gardener, played by Dennis Haysbert, is here in 1957. Also while others react to their public conversations with glares and the occasional menacing remark, the overall responses from the other white characters are way too tame. In the South back then black men were getting lynched if anybody even thought they were looking at a white woman. We're supposed to believe that in Connecticut you could talk to and ride around with a white woman and just get a few dirty looks?

The response from the black characters in the film is just as bad. There is some grumbling from other diners when Haysbert drives Moore to a black roadhouse for lunch but no trace of the anger or fear such a thing would engender in the real world. Even Moore's black maid, played by Viola Davis, doesn't say a discouraging word about all this when in reality she would have been screaming at Haysbert from the rooftops. Rocks are thrown at Haysbert's house late in the film but ony by other blacks. In the real 50's Haysbert would have lucky if his house wasn't burned down, and it wouldn't have been black people doing it.

For all that this is a very well acted film. Moore, Haysbert and Dennis Quaid are all excellent but the story they have to act out makes you shake your head. All this movie shows is how clueless Todd Haynes is about the sad history of black-white race relations in this country. I seriously doubt he's read books like Native Son or Man-Child In The Promised Land. If he had he'd have a different view about how willing black men were to mix with white women in the 50's.

Amazing-Lee

It was said of Miles Davis in his electric period that, no matter what craziness was going on around him on the bandstand, he always played like Miles Davis. The same can be said for one of Miles' innumerable collaborators, the venerable Lee Konitz. No matter what setting he puts himself in, large groups, small groups, duos, solos, with strings, even free improv, he always sounds like himself with that distinctive, high-flying, behind-the-beat sound.

I saw that first hand last night watching him in a concert at the Kennedy Center. At the age of 82, he still has it. He played with a trio called Minsarah whose members looked young enough to be his grandkids. They went through a broad swath of styles and approaches from minimalism to the restless pulse of the Sixties Miles Davis Quintet but whatever the kids threw at him, Konitz was on top of it with unflappable cool. A calypso beat under "Cherokee"? No problem. Ghostly noir sounds on "Stella By Starlight"? Got it covered. A quick dash of Tristano-like unison melody. In his wheelhouse.

Konitz is known as a cerebral player. That is certainly true but he is also capable of great beauty. He proved this when a gorgeous solo alto improvisation led into a ravishing "Body And Soul" that sent lazily sighing notes spiralling out of his horn weith no seeming effort. It was a soft, sensual soundthat seemed to be channeling Lester Young. Through all this he was cracking jokes awith audience and seemed to be having a ball. When drummer Ziv Ravitz ended "Body And Soul" with small tinkling cymbals, Konitz responded with a few notes of "Jingle Bells". This was a fabulous show from a living legend.

A Musical Epiphany

I've been both an idiot and a snob.

When going out to see live music I normally go for people I've heard of, touring musicians I've read about or heard somewhere and ignore all the local talent that constantly plays in this area. I was emphatically reminded how dumb that is tonight by seeing some local musicians at Twins Jazz tonight, the Brad Linde Quartet.

They did include one out-of-town guest, pianist Dan Tepfer but the rest of the group lives here and they played a blazing set of Lennie Tristano-Warne Marsh-Lee Konitz derived "cool" jazz that had all the things I love about this music, intelligence, logic, imagination and musical telepathy. Tepfer was amazingly versatile going from Keith Jarrett rhapsodies to minimalist swing dead on the beat with accents reminiscent of Monk, Powell and others. His long florid introduction to "Stella By Starlight" was jaw-dropping. The two saxophonists, Linde on tenor and Sarah Hughes on alto, looked ridiculously young but they were both expert at explosive unison play and their solos had immaculate behind the beat phrasing that touched on all the "cool" shamans, Konitz, Marsh, Getz, Mulligan, all the way back to Lester Young.

I've been feeling a little jaded from going to local free improv shows which are often mostly people making squealing random noises on laptops. This show was a powerful reminder of the beauty of real instruments improvising on melody, chords and rhythm, a joy I've denied myself far too much lately. It's high time I checked out local jazz much more frequently.

Death Of A Pieman

I'm the age where I'm seeing a lot of my heroes pass away. Just over the last few months Hugh Hopper, Chris Connor, George Russell and Les Paul have all left us, and now Soupy Sales.

I don't remember seeing Soupy here in the Washington, DC area as much as he was in other parts of the country but I do remember a Saturday show on ABC and a show on Channel 20 when it first started in the late 60's. I fondly remember the shows though, all the goofy vaudeville jokes, his "dogs" White Fang and Black Tooth, the singing lion puppet Pookie, the hipo jazz and rock music and of course the pies. Watching a fedw clips on YouTube I see his goofy humor still holds up today and that many people have moved to write little tributes to him in the last few hours. He was someone that radiated a sense of fun and whenever I saw interviews with him in recent years he always seemed proud and happy of the work he did and all the people who loved him. Here are a few clips I pulled out from his glory days:

First a rendition of his hit single "Do The Mouse"...



Then Pookie doing Stevie Wonder...




And finally a few minutes with White Fang and "Daniel Boone" star Fess Parker and the classic Soupy finish.

The Overtone Quartet

Unfortunately I got sick the weekend after my last post so I couldn't make the Parker - Rothenberg show but I did get a couple of good ones in the last few weeks, including the Overtone Quaret at the Kennedy Center.




The Overtone Quartet is one of those "band of bandleaders" deals, a group comprising three musicians well known as leaders, bassist Dave Holland, pianist Jason Moran and saxophonist Chris Potter along with celebrated drummer (as well as ordained minister and model) Eric Harland.

They were at the Kennedy Center on October 10 and played with fire and virtuosity for over an hour. Holland lived up to his fearsome reputation in his features. Moran played tricky bop to gospel to ragtime in one spot and dreamily funky electric piano for an ambiance that recalled the Miles Davis electric bands that Holland played in. Harland, who I knew the least about, was a wonder working in African and hip hop flavors on one long solo turn with extreme shifts in dynamics.

The audience was properly appreciative though I got the impression this was all pretty new to them. From the little talk I overheard as I left, I had a feeling there were a lot of moonlighting classical fans there, which isn't that much of a shock considering the venue. The same place will have McCoy Tyner and Lee Konitz playing there separately next month. Hopefully I can make it to one of those shows.

Sonic Circuits 1

It's long been one of my quirks that I will get excited about concerts with national artists in other cities but give short shrift to what is happening here in my home town, Washington, DC. When I went to Baltimore's High Zero Festival last year, I was a bit nonplussed to find out that several of the artists there who I had never seen before were from this area.

Well, I'm trying to make up for that now. I've finally gotten to a couple of shows in DC's own experimental music festival, Sonic Circuits, one pre-show concert last Friday and one tonight.

The Friday show at Silver Spring's Pyramid Atlantic was a little much in some ways. I'm cool with hearing one or two electronic acts in a night but this show had five straight performances of solo and duo musicians hunched over laptops and effects boxes. It was a relief when the last two acts of the night brought real instruments into the fray. Nine Strings was a duo of four and five string basses and the 21st Century Chamber Ensemble was a lively blend of saxophone, guitar, bass and cello with scratchy electronic effects.

Tonight there was a show at the Kennedy Center's free Millennium Stage that featured the latter two groups again. Nine Strings was joined this time by a percussionist who bills himself as Pilesar and the Ensemble did an alternately melodic and noisy set in honor of John Coltrane's birthday. They were joined by another electronic group, Mind Over Matter Music Over Mind who played just long enough to get their point across. I plan on going to Friday's show as well, though that one will feature two international legends, Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg.

Double Cassandra Wilson

Since I haven't posted in a while here are two clips by the rgeat singer Cassandra Wilson, the first being Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" with Brandon Ross on guitar and the second is Robert Johnson's "32-20 Blues" done with her entire band.

Ginger Baker and two guys with glasses

A musician like Ginger Baker has earned the right to play whatever the hell he wants to and he has been doing more and more jazz in recent years. Here he is in the company of Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden.

Dizzy In Finland

Dizzy Gillespie with Arturo Sandoval and Finland's UMO big band doing "Manteca". American, Cuband and Finnish musicians together. Think jazz isn't universal?

Bass Desires

Here's some more Bill Frisell, this time from 1986 in the group Bass Desires with Marc Johnson on bass, Peter Erkskine on drums and John Scofield dueling on guitar. The only bad thing about this clip is that it cuts off mid-performance.

Bill Frisell solo and together

The great guitarist Bill Frisell works in so many formats I had to put a couple of his clips up.

First some of his hypnotic solo Appalachian folk-jazz picking...



Then a brilliant group jam with a band including Greg Leisz on dobro and Jenny Scheinman on violin.

Lee Konitz

Since I haven't posted in a while, here's an extra for today: some beautiful playing by the ageless master Lee Konitz.

Surprise Package

I'm gaining a lot of respect for the multidisc DVD collection of old public doman work that Mill Creek puts out. I bought a 12-disc set called Dark Crimes and that has turned out to have in it not only a few classics like The Naked Kiss, and D.O.A. but rare Oscar Micheaux and James Whale films and five episodes of the legendary 50's TV series, Studio One.

The other day I ran across a collection of old cartoons by the company called "Super300 Cartoon Colection". I studied the cover for a minute and around familiar faces like Popeye, Clutch Cargo and Felix The Cat, I saw some surprising figures. In one corner was Hoppity Hooper, the one Jay Ward cartoon star the world seems to have forgotten about. An even bigger shock was the presence of Calvin And The Colonel, stars of a one season ABC prime time cartoon show from the Sixties where the creators of Amos 'n' Andy, Freeman Godsen and Charles Correll, tried reviving their famous characters as animated animals.

This was all a shock as I had given up hope of ever seeing either of these obscure series on DVD. Needless to say I knew I had to have this set either if there was only one episode each of the shows. I bought it and though I haven't watched any of it yet, I'm very happy to see there are eight Calvin and The Colonel episodes and ten of the four-episode Hoppity Hooper adventures. There's also a bunch of various other series like Gumby, Clutch Cargo, Van Bueren Studio's Aesop's Fables, some Disney Alice cartoons and stuff by characters I've never heard of like Fraidy Cat and Wacky And Packy. It will be fun going through all this I hope.

And wouldn't you know it? Mill Creek has put a Calvin & The Colonel excerpt on YouTube to plug this collection. I've always thought some of the Jay Ward staff must have worked on this but I've never seen any confirmation of that.

The Swinging 60's As Seen On Television

I'm interrupting the usual flow of jazz videos to share two clips I found that show how downright bizarre rock songs were often staged on 60's and 60's TV shows.

The first clip is Kenny Rogers And The First Edition doing their initial hit, "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)" on the Smothers Brothers show in what I guess is supposed to be an approximation of the song's wigged out lyrics although Kenny looks about as psychedelic as an insurance salesman. The drummer is Mickey Jones was doing Bob Dylan's legendary electric tours with The Band whenever Levon Helm wasn't around.



Next is The Mamas and the Papas doing "California Dreamin'" on NBC's Hullabaloo show. You might wonder why they were doing the song on a set full of plumbing and bathtubs. Then halfway through the song, you find out and the answer makes even less sense. From the few clips I've seen of Hullabaloo in recent years, it's obvious the show was out to make as much use of its dancers as possible no matter how goofy that made things.

Jim Hall

Here is a taste of the quicksilver beauty of the great guitarist Jim Hall.

C. T.

I read a few days that Cecil Taylor had to pull out of a festival appearance in Australia due to an unspecified health problem. He did play a well-reviewed birthday concert in New York two months ago but he is 80 now so when you hear "health problems" you start to worry. I hope he returns to full health soon but anyway here's a little bit of Cecil solo from the 1981 film "Imagine The Sound" with particular attention paid to the blur that is Mr. Taylor's hands.

Kenny Wheeler at the BBC

Here's another jazz TV program, this one from the BBC on British trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler. Norma Winstone and Henry Lowther are two of the other people in the group.

Stan Tracey and "Starless"

In 1965 British pianist Stan Tracey released an album called "Under Milk Wood" based on the Dylan Thomas play. It contained a piece that went on to become the most famous example of British jazz. Here forty years after the fact are Tracey and the saxophonist on the original, Bobby Wellins, playing that piece again, "Starless And Bible Black".

Cool Part 2

Here is the second part of the "Cool" episode of "The Subject Is Jazz" featuring Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh duetting on "Subconcious-Lee".

Drum Orgy

I ran across this video by accident and I'm just amazed this happened, three of the baddest men who ever picked up a pair of drumsticks, Sunny Murray, Elvin Jones and Art Blakey playing together!

The Subject Is Cool Jazz

An intelligent and hip program about jazz on a major American television network? It sounds like the stuff of fantasy today but back in the 1950s, it was possible. Case in point: "The Subject Is Jazz", a 13 week show that ran on Sundays on NBC back in 1958. JazzVideoGuy has posted parts of the show on YouTube and they are great fun, critic Gilbert Seldes discussing various subgenres in the music which are then demonstrated by a band that includes Billy Taylor, show's musical director, on piano, Mundell Lowe on guitar, Ed Safranski on bass and Ed Thigpen. This excerpt is the fisrt half od a show on cool jazz with added musical guests Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh and Don Elliott. Even PBS would never do a show like this today. Heck they probably would never rerun this one.

Barron and Mehldau

A romp through "All Blues" by two gifted pianists, Kenny Barron and Brad Mehldau.

Take Five

I don't remember what the first jazz record I ever heard was but Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" had to be one of them. I still love everything about the piece, the circular rhythm, Joe Morello's authoritative break, Paul Desmond's amazing fluting alto and Dave Brubeck's nagging riffs. This is a particular delightful version of the song by the classic Brubeck quartet done in Berlin in 1966 with Brubeck and Desmond in particularly magical form.

Joe Henderson

Some elegant bossa nova from the great Joe Henderson.

Sofia Koutsovitis

I hadn't heard of this singer before I ran across this clip but I really like the way she rocks a Brazilian groove. This also features African guitarist Lionel Loueke, a Herbie Hancock discovery.

Magma

Magma is one of those bands that creates its own category, a French group around since the 1970's that does a supercharged proggy jazz-rock revolving around a science fiction mythology created by the band's founder, drummer Christian Vander, that even involves the group's vocalists singing in a made-up language, Kobaian. The closest comparison I know would be Sun Ra and his Arkestra. I don't know if the two bands ever played on the same bill but if they had, a large chunk of the planet might have flown off into space.

There are a surprising number of clips of the group on You Tube. This one is the climax to a 2006 concert with old hands like Vander, bassist Jannick Top and vocalist Stella Vander (Christian's wife) still going strong alongside younger musicians.

Wadada Leo Smith

Okay, finally back to some music. Here is a bracing bit of wotk from the current version of Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet with Vijay Iyer on keyboards, John Lindberg on bass and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums.

Ric & Dusty

If I have a guilty pleasure it's pro wrestling, not so much the neutered silliness that the WWE and its weak imitator, TNA spews out today. For me the great stuff was the NWA shows broadcast out of Georgia in the 1980s' and not the in ring stuff but the promos, the segments where the wrestlers would come out promoting their upcoming shows in a line of trash talking that was compelling, realistic and as badass as it gets. Some guys couldn't talk that well but the best like Jim Cornette, Tully Blanchard, and Road Warrior Hawk were amazing, fast talking politicans, preachers and used card salesmen all at once, only they were selling themslves.

I've just discovered that You Tube has a bunch of classic promos in its coffers and here is a sample of two of the best. First, probably the greatest talker in all of wrestling, the Nature Boy Ric Flair just being THE MAN!



Ric had a lot of opponents but the greatest one had to be Dusty Rhodes. Dusty was never the world's greatest or best looking wrestler but that fat man oozed charisma and when he got in front of a microphone, he was 24 karat gold. This promo "Hard Times" is supposed to be one of his classics. I definitely believe it.

Mary Halvorson

One of the more prominent young improvising musicians around these days is guitarist Mary Halvorson. I heard an NPR interview with her where the interviewer couldn't get off the "Wow, dude, you're a girl!" sort of thing but she's proving she has scary chops in a number of settings. Here she is going the power trio route with Trevor Dunn's Trio Convulsant.

Eric Dolphy

The blues by way of the very singular Eric Dolphy. This is taken from a German TV broadcast.

Soupy and Pookie

I now realize that one of the cool things abourt watching kids' TV in the Sixties was all the music you got exposed to, especially jazz. I remember seeing Dizzy Gillespie, Willie The Lion Smith and Billy Taylor on Captain Kangaroo and Soupy Sales snuck some jazz records into his routines as well. Here's a bit from Soupy's show featuring Pookie the Lion doing Clark Terry's "Mumbles". He then finishes up with a bit of the Animals.

David Murray

Here is one of the great modern tenor players, David Murray, doing his composition "Morning Song" at the Village Vanguard in 1986. He is playing with John Hicks on piano, Fred Hopkins on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. The sobering thing about this clip is that only 23 years later, Murray is the only one of the four still alive.

Recent Movies

I haven't written anything about movies in Lord knows how long. I haven't seen anything current for a while for various reasons, but I have been watching a few films thanks to Netflix. Here are some recent impressions:

The Career Of Nyklos Dyzma - This is a bawdy Polish satire about a graveyard worker who crashes an exclusive party, insults a high ranking goverment official and soon finds himself rising swiftly in the Polish government. The jokes about obtuse and crooked politicians are easily recognizable even if you know nothing about Poland and the film is further graced by gorgeous nude actresses throughout.

Gumshoe - A 1970's British film in which Albert Finney plays a would be comedian who pretends to be an old fashioned private eye and gets involved in a real mystery involving South Afircan politics. With thirty years' hindsight Finney's character comes off mannered and irresponsible with his constant Bogart fetish. The story does become engrossing though as it goes along.

The Lives Of Others - This German film won the Best Foreign Film Oscar last year and deservedly so. It's about a member of the East German secret police who bugs the apartment of a prominent playwright on government orders and finds himself drawn into his world a lot more than he intended. There is a slight feel of the neat, well made Hollywood story to it but the overall tale is so compelling and well played out that doesn't hurt it.

Spider Forest - A Korean horror film that manages to use both of the most common twist endings in recent films, the one used in The Sixth Sense and Carnival Of Souls and the one used in Fight Club and The Machinist. It's a circular but touching story that gets more confusing the more you think about it and seems to violate one of the understood rules of supernatural fantasy. It shows a ghost aging from child to adult...maybe.

Ornette and Prime Time

I posted something from Ornette Coleman's early quartet before. Here is his electric band, Prime Time from 1978. This edition featured Bern Nix and James Blood Ulmer on guitars and Ronald Shannon Jackson and Ornette's son, Denardo, on the drums. The video quality isn't that great but the music is amazing.

Dave Holland

Something from the great Dave Holland and the NDR Big Band, featuring Robin Eubanks and Billy Kitson going for it.

Ella

Sometimes when you constantly hear an artist called great, you take that idea for granted and forget how brilliant their work really is. Here is a short reminder of the genius of Miss Ella Fitzgerald.

The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble

I had a chance to see Chicago's daunting Ethnic Heritage Ensemble last night, a band that has been going strong for 36 years but not with this exact lineup. Percussionist Kahil El'Zabar, the leader, has been there from the beginning but saxophonist Ernest Kabeer Dawkins and trumpeter Corey Wilkes haven't. Here is a 2008 taste of them from a Syracuse TV(!) show. Notice Wilkes and Dawkins both going the Rahsaan Roland Kirk route with two horns at once.

Wayne Shorter

A bonadife Living Legend, Mr. Wayne Shorter with his quartet doing "Joy Rider".

Keith Jarrett

He's demanding and tempermental but he's also a brilliant musician. Keith Jarrett was also once the mainstream poster boy for Jazz and in retrospect he was a darn sight better one than Wynton Marsalis. Here he is with his Standards Trio.

Pat Metheny

Here is Pat Metheny jamming out on Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island" in the august company of Steve Swallow and Bob Moses. Notice at one point that the Bravo logo appears in the corner. That's right. The network that now makes its money with reality shows about chefs, real estate agents, fashion designers and chunky rich housewives once used to show music like this. Sad.

Annie Whitehead Live

This is more of trombonist Annie Whitehead, this time with one of her own groups live at London's Vortex club in July 2007. I don't recognize any of the musicians except the tenor player who I think is Larry Stabbins but Whitehead herself takes the best solo anyway. This piece demonstrates how much African rhythms have seeped into the soul of British players by this point in time.

Robert Wyatt - Sea Song

There are a bunch of very iconoclastic British gentlemen among my musical heroes. They include Vano Morrison, John Martyn (R.I.P.), Ian Dury (R.I.P.) and one guy who is thankfully still with us, the brilliant Robert Wyatt. The quizzical, earnest music he's made sounds like no one else's. Here, from a BBC documentary, is one of his most beautiful pieces, "Sea Song". The trombonist beside him is Annie Whitehead.

Rava & Fresu

"Round Midnight" as performed by two great Italian trumpet players, Enrico Rava and Paolo Fresu.

Patricia Barber

Continuing with female vocalists, here is the sultry voiced Patricia Barber with "Winter".

The Amazing Sheila Jordan

Someone wrote me telling me they shared my fondness for the great jazz singer Sheila Jordan and so I looked around and sure enough, there were a bunch of live clips around of her performing. This one is of her doing "Confirmation" at her 80th birthday concert last November 18th with a band including Steve Kuhn, Mark Feldman and Bill Drummond.

That's right. I said her 80th birthday.

Lovano & Jones

Back to normal finally. Here is the duet, "Kids", from two amazing old soldiers, Joe Lovano and Hank Jones. I know the tune is really "Body And Soul" but I guess they can call it whatever they want.

The Music Of John Martyn

Comcast finally got my connection back up to speed so I can at last post some clips of John Martyn.

First from 1978 the exquisite "Small Hours":




Then a 1995 duet with Kathy Mattea on "May You Never":



"Johhny Too Bad" with a full band in 2004:



And finally his masterpiece "Solid Air" with Danny Thompson:



R.I.P. Big John.

Gone To See The Man Upstairs

I don't usually post anything when someone I admired dies. I even ignored Patrick McGoohan's passing. That's because I usually run across scores of tribute to that person. Today is different because one of my favorite musicians just died and he's someone I'm not going to see a lot of tributes to right away.

Singer-songwriter John Martyn passed this morning at the age of 60. Martyn came up in the British music scene as one of the many folksingers of the mid-60's but his muse took him in his own direction with a viscous, fluid music that encompassed folk, jazz, funk and blues covered over by a husky, burring voice that seemed to emerge out of a fog. I first heard him in the early 70's with the song "Solid Air", a serpentine, half-submerged groove of dark, ambient jazz and I followed his work through albums like One World, Sunday's Child and Grace And Danger. I followed him as he cut his own individual path through folk songs, electric noise, reggae and dub with amazing songs like "Man In The Station", "Bless The Weather", "May You Never", "Discover The Lover", "Our Love" and "Big Muff".

Martyn's music turned a little too mellow in the 80's and eventually it became very hard to find his albums in the U.S. when he actually released something. Most of his recent CDs seem to be releases of old concert tapes. I have run across some quality later material though. One is The Church With One Bell, a sweetly funky covers set that touches on Ben Harper, Elmore James, and Billie Holiday with snaky readings of Randy Newman's "God's Song" and Portishead's "Glory Box" and a spine-tingling "Death Don't Have No Mercy". The other is, barring some posthumous release, his final release, On The Cobbles memorable if for no other reason than a gritty duet with Mavis Staples on "Goodnight Irene". Martyn was one of those singers who could chill your blood and haunt your nightmares. I wanted to post some clips of him but YouTube seems to running really slow today. I'll try to get some up tomorrow.

Barbara Thompson

Barbara Thompson is a leading saxophonist and composer on the British jazz scene and here is a clip of her from the 80's with her band Paraphenalia doing some spacey jazz-rock. The drummer is her husband, the renowned Jon Hiseman, and the MC is a Brit jazz legend, Ronnie Scott.

THE Ornette Coleman Quartet

One of the great groups in modern jazz, the classic Ornette Coleman Quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins. This was from a concert in Spain on their last tour together in 1987.

Toshinori Kondo & IMA

Toskinori Kondo is a trumpeter from Japan known for working with progressive types like Bill Laswell and Peter Brotzmann. Like a lot of other jazz musicians in the 80's and 90's he also at one time tried the electric rock-fusion scene with a band called IMA. Here he is with a video from that group called "China Demonstration". It reminds me a little of "Rockit"-era Herbie Hancock.

James Blood

Here is the mighty James Blood Ulmer doing a solo version of his old classic "Are You Glad To Be In America?". Today I think a lot of people would answer that differently than they might have a year ago.

Hiromi & Chick

Hiromi Uehara is a young Japanese pianist who's gotten a lot of attention recently. She reminds me of a certain famous other pianist who happens to be playing with her here. They are doing "Concerto de Aranjuez" followed by, appropriately enough, "Spain".

Brotzmann in 1974

Here is an amazing little rarity. I posted a clip of German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann playing with Last Exit in 1986 the other day. Here is an even earlier piece of Brotzmann in 1974 playing in Warsaw with other key members of the first wave of European free jazz, Alexander Von Schlippenbach on piano, the late Peter Kowald on bass and Paul Lovens on drums. This shows more of their humorous side than the full out assault they were capable of and it's amazing to see them all looking so young.

Last Exit To...

This is Last Exit, a short lived free jazz "supergroup" of the Eighties, that consisted of four of the ferocious musicians of the day, saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, one of the founders of the European free jazz scene, legendary guitarist Sonny Sharrock, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson who had played with Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman and bassist and constant musical experimenter Bill Laswell. These four men played ruthless, take no prisoners noise that had the rough shape of rock but the barrelling force of unfettered jazz. They didn't stay together for that long, just a few years before other projects took them in different directions and Sharrock's death in 1994 ruled out any chance of a reunion but as you can hear from this 1986 live clip from a Frankfurt concert they were something to behold.

Linus The Lionhearted

This is a piece from a cartoon show that will probably never see the light of day on DVD or any other home video format, Linus The Lionhearted. The show ran on CBS on Saturday morning in the 1960's and starred several characters who all started out as trademark symbols for various Post cereals. There was Linus, a lion who ruled a jungle (the star for Crispy Critters cereal), Lovable Truly, a mailman (Alpha-Bits), Sugar Bear (Sugar Crisps) and So Hi, a little Chinese boy (Rice Krinkles). It's certainly not unusual for cereals to have cartoon spokesmen in commercials like the Trix rabbit, Captain Crunch and Quake and Quisp but this is the only time I know of where those characters were put into full length cartoons.

The cartoons weren't bad and deserve to be remembered as more than just extended commercials. The animation was good, the stories, like this Linus example, tended to have an adult level of humor as well as the kiddie stuff and the voice talent included some well known actors who were associated with some of the prime time CBS shows Post sponsored like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "The Andy Griffith Show". Sheldon Leonard and Carl Reiner are doing the voices here and I remember Howard Morris and Jonathan Winters doing voices in some of the other cartoons.

Obviously the commercial ties of these cartoons make them verboten for release today even though I don't think Post even makes most of those cereals any more so this is a real rarity. Here is Linus The Lionhearted in "Travel Is Broadening".

A Narrowing Of Focus

I haven't posted for a while because I've been rethinking what I want to do with this blog. I do like the idea of posting music clips but I've really been random with them and it was really starting to look like an oldies party around here with the last few posts. Instead I want to concentrate on all the jazz works I've been finding especially rare clips by modern musicians especially those who don't get much recognition these days. There is still some rare stuff in other areas out there I want to post and I will not neglect some of my other favorite niche genres like female British folk singers but I want to concentrate for a while on giving some love to jazz and other improvising musicians like the following...

NBC doesn't seem to have a problem with clips of the Johnny Carson era Tonight Show on YouTube because Carson of course had an excellent big band on his show and loved having visiting musicians come in and play with them, including here someone not known for straight ahead work, the great guitarist John McLaughlin. He does himself proud here, just nonchalantly sitting down with an acoustic and jamming the hell out of "Cherokee".

Shaw Sings Nilsson

I mentioned Sandie Shaw yesterday and here she is. I meant to post "Girl Don't Come" but then I found this clip of her doing a medley of Harry Nilsson's "One" and "Without Her".

Gene Pitney

I'm not much for nostalgia but I have to admit a fondness for some of the big voiced pop singers that were around when I was a small kid, singers like Chuck Jackson, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Dell Shannon, Sandie Shaw and most especially Gene Pitney who got to use his magnificent voice on some of the most sophisticated and stylish pop of his day. Here is a vintage clip of him doing "Town Without Pity".

Lee Hazlewood & Friend

I was looking through some old Lee Hazlewood clips on YouTube. There are a lot of duets with Nancy Sinatra there of course, but I was looking to see if I could find one particular song he did with Ann-Margaret called "Sleep In The Grass". That does not seem to be there but I did find a clip of Hazlewood doing that song with a singer named Siw Malmkvist from one of his Swedish TV specials. Honestly I'm now not sure which version is better.