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garystormsongs

Monthly Archives: March 2012

Roy Wood

31 Saturday Mar 2012

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frank zappa, Rock Composer, Roy Wood, The Move, Wizzo

Roy Wood’s Wizzo Band was never released in this Country.  My friend Louie the Mad Vinyl Junkie, gave it to me.  He and I are fanatical admirers of Roy Wood and his old group, The Move.  This is incredibly challenging music, big band rock with horns, keyboards, gigantic drums, a million guitars, and Roy Wood.  There is every kind of music hidden in here: that huge deep metal bass sound created by The Move, those licks from classical composers, jazz interludes on the horns, and even some country swing.  These are not songs, they are compositions.

It is tempting to call Roy Wood the British Frank Zappa when talking to people who never heard of him.  They are both unrestrained unsurpassed geniuses of rock composition.  But Roy lacks Zappa’s bitterness and is, of course, never nasty.  It may be that Roy long ago achieved that teenybop appeal that Zappa deliberately ridiculed and renounced.  Roy has been to the top of the AM Top 40 commercial world.  There is a story that during the middle sixties, The Move threatened to break up if their next single did not reach number one on the charts.  Such a stunt would be inconceivable in this country.  Roy Wood seems to say “I’ll do what I want to do, I know I’m a genius.”  Zappa seems to say “Fuck you, I know I’m a genius but if you want potty music I’ll give you genius potty music.”

The vocals on this song from Wizzo – “Waitin’ At This Door” – are as complex as anything dished out by the Swingle Singers, the improvisation is hot as Maynard Fergusson, the rhythms as varied as Debussy, the musicianship equal to any on the planet.  The production is odd, very thick and cluttered, but this is all the Roy Wood Sound, almost like they’re playing at one end of a long tunnel.  He says Dig this, I dare ya.

Roy Wood’s Wizzo Band, Super Active Wizzo, Warner Brothers Records, K56388 (1977).  Album Design – Smart Art; Cover Art – Dave Field; Photography – Martin Elliot, Annie Haslam, Mike Ottley.

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

25 Sunday Mar 2012

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Abdul and Cleopatra, Beserkley Chartbusters, Home of the Hits, Ice Cream Man, Jonathan Richman, Modern Lovers, Pablo Picasso

I have a large collection of rock’n’roll buttons.  My favorite says “Make Jonathan Richman an important part of your life.”  He is too.  How can I explain songs like “Abdul and Cleopatra” or “Ice Cream Man”?  He is absolutely silly and corny.  He will never be understood by those who forget that stadium concerts with flashpots and speaker towers and security guards all have their origins in garages and basements.  Those without a sense of humor will never see through his timid twanging of simple Chuck Berry riffs.  Moreover, he has written some of the greatest children’s songs of all time.

His strange sentimental gentle rock’n’roll show at Buff State around 1978 will never be forgotten by those lucky enough to attend.  He played in a small hall or large classroom and kept telling the sound guy to turn down the sound, finally telling him, sweetly, to just turn the whole PA off.  As I recall, the drummer played only a snare and a tiny peddle drum.

Jonathan Richman’s importance to the history of rock’n’roll cannot be minimized.  His incredible song “Roadrunner” on the Beserkley Chartbusters compilation album was one of the four harbingers of punk in 1976, along with the first album by the Ramones, the first Dictators album, and the great compilation, A Bunch of Stiff Records, from England, which gave us the first taste of new sounds by Elvis Costello, Wreckless Eric, Motorhead, Dave Edmunds, Graham Parker, and Nick Lowe.

At the moment, I am listening to Jonathan Richman performing “Pablo Picasso,” a song at once is sly, humorous, and, like so much of his music, childlike.

The Modern Lovers, The Modern Lovers, “Home of the Hits” Records, BZ 0050 (1976).  Album Design – Not credited.

Decameron

25 Sunday Mar 2012

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Boccaccio, Celtic, Decameron, Folk Music

Listen to this is a prancing song in 5/4 time called “Saturday” by a British group named Decameron.

When they close up the market
and all the stalls come down
and the young men in their pickups
come in from all the country round
and they wind down the windows
and shout things at the girls
just because it’s Saturday.

This is a magic song in the middle of a forgotten album buried in the budget bins of the import section of a store that was going out of business.  Anyone who reads Giovanni Boccaccio (who lived from 1313 to 1375 and who wrote the 100 little tales compiled as The Decameron) can’t be anything but great.

Dik Cadbury and Dave Bell, “Saturday,” Scorpio Music (1975).  From: Decameron, Third Light, Transatlantic Records, TRA 304 (1975).  Art Direction – Philip Warr; Design – Pat Elliott Shircore; Photography – Keith Morris and Tony Evans.

Fela Kuti

18 Sunday Mar 2012

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afropop, breakbeat, Fela Kuti, house, trance, World Music

Listening to Fela Kuti, a.k.a. Fela Ransome Kuti, a.k.a. Fela Anikulapo Kuti.  My mind wanders through the record store.  I don’t see why we don’t file this in the dance bins with the breakbeat, house, and trance records, but you will never find it anywhere but the whirled music bins.

Fela wants you to dance.  And he offers endlessly repeated syncopated patterns and vamps, taken right out of those thumpy funky bumpy beats that Fela heard when he visited America in 1969 and over which he honks and serenades with his sax, and the reverbed trumpet humms and stumbles, and the electronic piano bobbles and bubbles, and Fela sings and growls and cries and if you understood the pidgin of his words you would know that he is dancing blowing strumming beating and singing truth against power.  “Let’s start what we have come into the room to do!”

Fela Ransome Kuti.  Vol. 1 & 2.  M.I. L. Multi Media LLC/Esperanto, Esp 8502 (1995, 1996).  Album Design – Not Credited.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

18 Sunday Mar 2012

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Allen Ginsberg, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Hip Hop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, old school, Rap

“The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five – the most wrathful grieving song ever.  The refrain is an anthem that people will chant as long as they sing “The Star Spangled Banner”:

Don’t
push
me
‘cuz
I’m close
to
the edge
I’m
Try-
ing
not
to lose
my head
Uh huh ha ha ha
It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under

This is poetry whose imagery and argument rival Allen Ginsberg or Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  In the words, amped up by the backbeat of the rhythm loop and Grandmaster’s scratching, you FEEL the feelings of the dangerous streetlife and downtrodden hope and smoldering rage.

Broken glass everywhere
People pissin’ on the stairs, you know they just don’t care
I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice

In this song you are dragged through horrific scenes of squalid dwellings, broken human beings, bill collectors, bag ladies, fragile health, the human trash bin of prison, petty murder, and that powerless heartbreak of the parent who cannot find a way to protect their child from the rottenness of the world.  And, even more bitter, the poet contemplates how each child “is born with no state of mind, Blind to the ways of mankind,” only to be smacked down by this second rate life.  And the rapping is all kinda slow, so you don’t miss a single detail.

The song ends with an ironic humorous little skit in which Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, jamming on a street corner, are busted by the cops.  And what is The Message?  The rapper seems to be a sensitive and gentle guy.  And yet every person, every hope, every need in the song is crushed.  There is no redemption, there is no escape, there is no reprieve.

If you had to look for hope, and you’d have to be a liar to do so, you would take the words, “It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under,” as a sign that the narrator has not yet “gone under.”  But so what?  He is a poet.  He perfectly understands and expresses his own desperation amidst the devastation in which he lives.  This is the same futile lucidity that was awakened in those lonely beaten souls just before they were herded into the gas chambers.

E. Fletcher, M. Glover, S. Robinson, & J. Chase, “The Message,” Sugar Hill Music Publ. Ltd. (BMI) (1982).  From: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Message, Sugar Hill Records, SH 268 (1982).  Album Design – AQ Graphics, Inc.; Photography – Hemu Aggarwal.

Judas Priest

10 Saturday Mar 2012

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Glenn Tipton, heavy metal, Judas Priest, K.K. Downing, Rob Halford, Rock Hard Ride Free

Judas Priest is on a mission to conquer, to engage in unfettered revelry, to never suffer defeat, to destroy the enemy, to defend the faith, to guard against evil, to march forth with a mighty army, to murder the challengers, to behead the power mad freaks, and, at every opportunity, to ride scorchingly fast vehicles, have raging sex, and inflict the kind of hurt that feels really good.

I have no idea what Judas Priest is fighting against, who the enemy is, what they are advocating, or what happens if they win.  But their music is incredibly exciting and the musicianship is fantastic.  The lead guitar duo of Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing grab you by the hair, Rob Halford’s operatic singing hits you in the head, and you have to be dead not to punch the sky and charge out wanting to conquer something – even if you’re not sure what – just because you know you can do it – after hearing their music.

Take this great anthem, “Rock Hard Ride Free.”  After a long guitar duo introduction, the song leaps into a fierce call for defiance.  We are being exhorted to exert ourselves without compromise:  “Gotta get a reaction / Push for all that you’re worth.”  And someone is trying to stop us, but we will triumph:

No denying
We’re going against the grain
So defiant
But they’ll never put us down

And to the jubilant thundering chorus – “Rock hard, ride free / All day, all night” – punctuated by screeching that must have blown out Halford’s eyeballs – “Rock hard, ride free / All your life” – we roar forth on molten wheels, invincible, undaunted.  It doesn’t matter that we don’t have a clue who “they” are who were trying to put us down.  They can’t escape us!

The band’s name is of noble origin, being borrowed from Bob Dylan’s song “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”  Independent of the Dylan aspect, the band’s name has a clearly Christian connotation, but, unlike a lot of earlier metal bands, I find nothing religious about any of their songs.

Glenn Tipton, Rob Halford, K.K. Downing.  “Rock Hard Ride Free.”  April Music Inc., Crewglen Ltd., Ebonytree Ltd., Geargate Ltd. (ASCAP), 1984.  From Judas Priest.  Defenders of the Faith.  CBS Records, FC 39219.  1984.  Cover design:  Doug Johnson.

Lapiro de Mbanga

10 Saturday Mar 2012

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afropop, Cameroon, Lapiro de Mbanga, Paul Biya, World Music

Lapiro de Mbanga from Cameroon.  Frantic desperate as if he is trying to get every note out before it’s too late.  Guitar arpeggios spilling forth like marbles on a drum skin, and drum skins slapped like the snap of a string.  He sings like there is no other choice, if he didn’t sing he would explode.

And do you know why?  He had to!  He had to be as quick to scold as he was to sing.  Because he sang truth to power.  Cardinals, imams, and especially Grand Pablo, his name for Paul Biya, president of Cameroon since 1982 – no enemy of democracy escaped Lapiro’s lashings.   And for his truth, Grand Pablo and a kangaroo court buried him in prison for three years.  Listen!  Dance!  Rare is the courage that drives a musician to pay such a price for his art!

Lapiro de Mbanga.  Ndinga Man Contre-Attaque: Na Wou Go Pay?  Label Bleu/Indigo, LBLC 2506 (1992).  Artistic Direction – Frank Tenaille; Graphic Design – Jacques LeClercq-K.

Patrik Fitzgerald

04 Sunday Mar 2012

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1970s, Patrik Fitzgerald, Punk, Punk Folk, Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart

Acoustic guitar, no drums, no bass, no electricity, no amps, no chords, no broken eardrums.  Pure punk.  In my experience, Patrik Fitzgerald, was the first punk folk singer.  And this is surely one of the first punk ballads:

I don’t love you for your tattered tie
I don’t love you, and I don’t know why
I just love you for that
Beat – beat – beat – beat – beating
I’ve got a safety pin stuck in my heart
For you, for you.

The messages of his songs are melancholy, bitter, and true.  He seems to sing glaring from the corner of a bare room.  My copy of his first record is autographed with the strange inscription, “There was a man from Okinawa . . . . .”

Patrik Fitzgerald, “Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart,” No publisher (1977).  From Patrik Fitzgerald, Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart, 45 rpm E.P., Small Wonder Records, Small Four (1977).  Art – Final Solution.

Michael Hurley

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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cartoon, Eyes, Folk Music, HiFi Snock Uptown, Michael Hurley

Well he does sing.  Like it’s amazing singing.  Even using a falsetto.  But there is something about his singing that is more like talking.   And then there are these people and animals, and animals that represent people, he sings about.  And then the stuff that is so ordinary that it’s hard to understand why it’s worth singing about at all, like taking a wiz, and finishing a beer, and picking out bones from a fish.

I’ve heard he really lives like a hobo, traveling to gigs in a clunky jalopy, sleeping in his car or on couches and wherever.  You can hear Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and maybe even Joseph Spence, and who knows what bunch-of-others sending their inspiration into his sound.  For a time he played and wrote songs with Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber, the core members of the crowd of loonies known as the Holy Modal Rounders (which you must not forget is a spawn of the empire crushing Fuggs phenomenon).

And don’t forget his cartoons.  As inscrutable and captivating and perhaps weirder than those of R. Crumb and Bill Griffith and even Art Spiegelman.  How do those wolves walk and live in a human world and why are they the only ones playing music, and why do wolves seem to be the only objects of desire for those zaftig human women prancing naked in the street?

And then these crazy things that happen in his songs, involving werewolves and ghosts, not to mention his celebration of robbing banks and cutting off his lover’s ear.  And what the hell is a protein monster?

Protein monster
Ate a sack o’ poison sugar
Crawlin’ out of the barn
to the weeds to die
Rollin’ his Eyes – Eyes – Eye
s

It may be enough to say he is one of the greatest folk stylists ever in the history of the United States of America.  He is that, but he communicates about a social niche or way of life or state of mind that few, if any, would ever otherwise experience.  He is In The Life, he is an outsider.  The star of this album is named Hi Fi Snock but we know it is really Michael Hurley, even if we don’t know why.

And then there is just the loneliness, the blues, the strife, the missing you, the longing for peace:

She calls me a bum
Sleeping through the  day
There is nothing I wanted to say
I closed my Eyes – Eyes – Eyes

How could anyone sound at once so drunk and sad and funny and profound?

Michael Hurley. “Eyes, Eyes,” Dogfish Music (ASCAP) (1972).  From HiFi Snock Uptown, Racoon/Warner Bros. Records, BS 2625 (1972).  Cover art – Michael Hurley; Cover Design – not credited.

Ry Cooder

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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Chicken Skin Music, folk rock, He’ll Have to Go, Joseph Spence, Ry Cooder, WZIR

One of my all time number one favorite recording artists. What perfection. These old sounds, corny words, rootsy beats, wistful harmonies, simple chord changes, blues and folk and funk and rock and jazz and Latin and African and the Whole Wide World, all that popular culture and he makes such delight out of it all. He is a musician’s musician. And he revives that funny out of tune tuning of Joseph Spence, and he uses those Cajun and Hawaiian and Mariachi sounds so rarely encountered in the rock world.

Listen to this version of Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go.” Elvis Presley recorded a cover of this tune, and they say it was the last song he ever recorded. Here Ry is playing with his usual crowd of unbelievable musicians including Jim This-Guy’s-Played-Drums-On-Every-Record-Ever-Made Keltner and the great Tex-Mex accordion player Flaco Jimenez in loose dialogue with Pat Rizzo on sax. Ry Cooder’s music is about the joy of music. He puts happiness out there. He just does.

When I was at WZIR, I interviewed him. He was humorless and arrogant. I guess he thought he was talking to a meat headed rock jock. I said, You use that weird out of tune tuning and he started in the schpiel about Joseph Spence this guitarist from the Bahamas and I said Yeah I know I play him all the time on my show – but he didn’t hear me. He was totally patronizing. Then I said, Bop Till You Drop, what a great album! He said, I despise that album. I hate every note on it.

Ry Cooder, Chicken Skin Music, Reprise Records, MS2254 (1976).  Album Design – Kenny Price; Album Artwork – Kenny Price.

Maryam Mursal

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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afropop, Maryam Mursal, Somalia, World Music

Courageous refugee from the torments of Somalia.  This album recounts the journey from the baleful world from which she escaped with her five children.  Canorous layers of luminous sound from a large ensemble of rock instruments, traditional percussion, string orchestra, many vocalists supporting the ancient quartertone inflections of her amazing voice.

Maryam Mursal, The Journey, Real Word Records/Caroline Records, CAR 2370-2 (1998).  Graphic Design – Tristan Manco; Art Direction – Michael Coulson; Photography – Marcelo Benfield, Soren Kjaer Jensen.

Bert Jansch

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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Bert Jansch, Celtic, Folk Music, Nottamun town, Pentangle, riddle song, World Music

Anyone who had anything to do with Pentangle is a member of the Divine Host.  This is a traditional tune, “Nottamun Town,” rendered otherworldly with Bert Jansch’s mystical guitar work.  Bert uses a drop D tuning and his intricate finger picking bites out notes from his steel strings like a shower of sparks.

I cannot say exactly what happens in this song.  The liner notes speculate that this song has “a high sexual content.”  Well, I can construe that.  But this is also a riddle song, like “Scarborough Fair” or “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” that sets up a series of impossibilities and contradictions.  I wonder if the medieval minstrel who devised this rhyme was presciently expressing existential ennui centuries before Jean Paul Sartre wrote “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

The protagonist begins “[i]n fair Nottamun town,” seeking someone who will show him the “the way to fair Nottamun town.”  He is where he wants to be and doesn’t know it.  His horse stands still and throws him to the dirt.  He caused his own fall, the horse could not have done it.

But the song seems to turn into a ghost story, as he encounters a King and Queen and their company, and a stark naked drummer “with his heels in his bosom.”  “Heel” can be the last or lowermost part of any object; can these be a description of the desolation of the drummer’s heart?  They laugh and yet not one looks gay, they talk and not a word is said.  They prefigure the worldly emptiness of “Sounds of Silence.”

In the end he is left sitting totally alone on “hot cold frozen stone,” with ten thousand people around him, “Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.”  Indeed, a pointless life is little different than one never born.

In any case, Bert Jansch’s vibratoless dry voice is a perfect vehicle for this song’s mystery.

Traditional, arranged by Bert Jansch, “Nottamun Town,” Heathside Music (no date).  From Bert Jansch, The Bert Jansch Sampler, Transatlantic Records Ltd., Transam 10 (1969).  Sleeve design – Rainbow; Photography – Peter Smith.

Ray Lema

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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afropop, Ray Lema, World Music

Ray Lema - NangadeefIs this jazz, funk, fusion, rock, afropop, trance, folk?  Western instruments applied to rhythms at once spacious and intricate.  Strange and surprising textures, pizzicato violin, furious guitar, grand piano.  Vocals harmonizing punctuating and surfing above it all – are the lyrics Swahili, Kikongo, Lingala?  I do not need to know.

Ray Lema, Nangadeef, Mango Records, CCD 9829 (1989).  Sleeve Design – Island Art; Photography – Richard Haughton.

How to Love Jazz – Robert Creeley

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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Allan Eager, Art Blakey, Bob Brookmeyer, Charles Olson, Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Fats Navarro, James Wright, Jazz, John Logan, John Neves, McCoy Tyner, poet, Poetry, Robert Creeley, Stan Getz, Steve Davis, Steve Kuhn

HOW TO LOVE JAZZ; ROBERT CREELEY

Those nights flying with poets.  Buffalo has for many years been a poet’s town.  All the great poets of America habitually pass through and many like inscrutable Charles Olson, melodious John Logan, prissy Carl Dennis, and morose James Wright have lived and taught here.  When I first arrived in Buffalo I was not a drinker, but the poets, the poets would consume vast unbelievable quantities of booze, laughing all night from bar to bar, smashing glasses, speeding down Main Street like death was on the taillight, sitting nodding in the kitchen, neon light over the sink, dope and Coltrane interweaving the talk. I  was uncomfortable, intimidated, afraid to let go, to undress my soul in any way, lonely and these ramblings with poets made me feel lonelier.  Taverns to readings to bars with the great poets of Buffalo.  It was a time like no other.  If a group of lions is called a pride of lions, and a group of larks is called an exultation of larks, then I would call a group of poets a wandering.  A wandering of poets.  These memories I have are so humiliating and hard and I realize they were meant for poems, waiting for poems to tear at the guts.

Sometime that first year in Buffalo, I met Robert Creeley.  Creeley is one of the most prominent of America’s living poets.  Half of the year he is a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  He spends much of the rest of the year near Albuquerque in my home state.  I met him after I had been doing Oil of Dog for quite a while and I was surprised he had heard me.  It was then that we discussed the possibility of his appearing on my show and I said Oh that would be great anything that you want to do it will be your show.

Some poets are fat.  Some are thin.  I don’t think there are many in between.  Creeley is lanky and tall, squinting a missing eye, beaming the other, greying goatee.  Many of his admirers can be seen wearing his characteristic garb: an army-green fisherman-type hat, an army jacket, faded jeans, hiking boots, and a satchel over one shoulder.  He is a one-man mode of cool.  It is no wonder that people so admire him.  Because he is so raging and so kind, his voice is soft and thoughtful, breaking off in midsentence, trailing into a mumble (I am reluctant to say “What?  I didn’t hear you.”), beginning midsentence because he seems to have a million things in his mind at once, thoughts that seem to need several simultaneous sentences.  Historically, he is associated with the beat poets of the fifties and his words are often those of the hipster and his manner that of the space cadet.  But he seems so fascinated with what is going on now, broadly accepting of life, interested in all people, even moms and dads and squeaky college kids, even fruit pickers and stu-bums and floozies.  I am a great admirer of Robert Creeley.  Not because of his poems. His poems are important because he can infuse the page with his marvelous personality.

That night when we pre-recorded the four hour show.  Ah!  A blizzard buried the state and I was having trouble with my girl friend and I listened to Creeley warm that night with his love of jazz.  He spoke of musicians and particular songs and legendary solos with great affection:

Art Blakey – “One of the most extraordinary, certainly the loudest, drummer in the business.”

The song, “Nice Work if You Can Get It” with Stan Getz, sax; Bob Brookmeyer, trombone; Steve Kuhn, piano; Roy Haynes, drums; John Neves, bass – “A kind of funky, late forties, almost like a Beach Boys sound of that time and place.”

John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis, Elvin Jones doing “Body and Soul” – “This is where it’s at, friends and neighbors, if you can get these two together, you’ve got it made.”

I did not grow up listening to jazz, I did not know how to experience it.  I had no idea what to listen for in a solo.  But after these few hours with Creeley I began to understand.  If there is any way to keep jazz musicians from needing to play disco and jazzak – to reach those who do not understand jazz – it is to have people like Robert Creeley talk about music, make fond presentations like those heard that night on Oil of Dog.

After listening to a tune by Fats Navarro – “dear old trumpet” says Creeley – featuring Allan Eager on tenor sax:

Robert Creeley:       Yeah, I’d like to find out whatever happened to him.  I was in New York once, this was like twenty years ago.  And very sad, as usual.  And, uh, the two great clubs were The Open Door and The Five Spot.  They used to have, like, classic Sunday evenings, or Sunday afternoons and evenings, and you’d go around and sit around for very little money and hear some extraordinary jazz.  This particular night nothing at all had happened, so I was leaving in ultimate loneliness and walking down the street and I see these – yeah – five people getting into a car.  And I just, ah, on impulse got in line with them and hahaha got into the car.

Gary Storm:       Hahahahaha.

C:       And, ah, I remember sitting down and they said, y’know, “Who the he-Who are you?” and I said haha well, you know, “What are you guys doing?” and they said “Well, ah . . . .”  Then they st-I guess they broke up and started laughing ‘cause it was so weird.  And then they introduced themselves and one of these guys said, ah, y’know, “I’m Allan Eager.”

G:       Oh.

C:       I said, “You’re Allan Eager??”  And then all the other guys say “What’s the interest . . . . . . ?” ah, y’know, “Who’s Allan Eager?” And I said, “Well, he’s one of the great, y’know, tenor players ever, man!”  Haha, but no one in the group knew he was that!  It was sort of, this was, yeah, ‘56.  That, yeah . . . .

G:       Is he still alive?

C:       Hopefully.  He was a very bright and articulate man, he got sort of sadly involved with other things for a time, but, ah . . . .  What’s interesting to remember, the extraordinary, ah, tenor players just at that point, um yeah, black and white, extraordinary.

From Oil of Dog – the story of my life as an all-night progressive disc jockey.

Ernest Bloch

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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classical, Concerto Grosso, Corelli, Ernest Bloch, Handel, string instrument, Vivaldi

Ernest Bloch - Concerto GrossiThis is “Concerto Grosso for Strings with Piano Obligato” by Ernest Bloch. The strident unison themes of the prelude, the warm and sad resolution of the dirge, weeping gypsy violins, those shimmering violins, melodies that remind me of falling in love, dancing – they are called “rustic dances” – stately dances as if for a wedding, the fugue, the wonderful inevitable fugue, the declamatory strumping finale.

There is something about the concerto grosso – as a form – that has inspired a great deal of music that I in turn find most inspiring. A daring artist will constrict himself, bind himself to a form – the sonneteer’s 14 line iambic pentameter Italian rhyme – and from this constriction will be distilled intangible feeling, a perfectly articulated passion. Our feelings are so elusive and amorphous they must be conveyed in the context of a highly disciplined backdrop or frame in order to be comprehensible to others.

I could not define a concerto grosso, I do not know the rules for the form. And yet I know when I hear one. Some of the most inspiring compositions by the baroque Italian “-ellies” – Corelli, Locatelli, Torelli – and by Handel and Vivaldi – are of this form. The one I am playing at this moment is, however, from 1924. But it still has that special grossoesque quality.

Concerto grossi are usually for string orchestras and the fact that I am a string player must have something to do with my affinity for the form. The solos for violins, viola, and cello are always so tuneful and intricate; the movements from few to many are so lush and textured. These pieces are almost archetypal to me. I carry the melodies of specific works – Corelli’s “Christmas Concerto,” Vivaldi’s “Spring,” Handel’s “Concerto Grosso No. 3, in E Minor” – with me everywhere. It is as if the form explains – leads to other truths. It is as a musician too that I love these works, they are always so playable. I have performed many of these in orchestras including this masterpiece by Bloch.

Ernest Bloch, Concerto Grosso No. 1 for String Orchestra with Piano Obbligato, No publisher (1925).  From Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra, Howard Hanson conductor, Ernest Bloch, Concerto Grosso No 1/Concerto Grosso No. 2, Mercury Records, SRI 75017 (No date).  Album design – Not credited.

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