The Music That Changed My Life

“Heroin”: Velvet Underground
     Come to think of it, Lou Reed has made his mark on my life several times. This was probably the first song that impacted me from the street smart smart ass. It was the build. Mo Tucker’s seductively slow crescendos which peaked higher and higher, so to speak, until that wonderfully wild John Cale viola wale from his previously only drony low hum with its clear slow rhythm of the bowing just blew away the song, sent it off into its end. “Heroin. It’s my wife and its my life cause when a mainline in my vein leads to the center in my head, then I’m better off then being dead” or something like that. I mean the lyrics had a lot to say despite the obvious cleverness and the easy model of the concept. The peaks and valleys of a drug addict. I was ready at an early age for a hooky (so to speak) tune to blow up in my ears with its wonderful and beautiful ugliness.

“Trouble Everyday” & “The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet”: The Mothers Of Invention
      And speaking of the beautiful in direct relationship and occupying the same sound waves as the ugly there’s Frank Zappa and his mad inventions. “Trouble Everyday” along with the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” were the first reports from the rebellious streets of LA. Sure I’d heard “Blowin’ In the Wind” and “Masters Of War” and even “The Times They Are A Changin’.” But these ruthless pop anthems had the dark roots of the life growing in the cracks and underneath the street. They groomed me for my own encounters with the rugged and deep cracks of city life. And after all that then there was “Suzy, Suzy Creamcheese? Uh, this is the voice of your conscience Baby. Suzy Creamcheese, Honey, what’s got into you?” and a full array of random nonsense of infinite possibilities on top of a tribal beat. The tribe was the tribe of the Freaks. Let it all hang out, freak out, all the shit, all heading in the wrong direction for the corporate ladders to have any form in it or any view of it. Incongruous. Rebellious. Iconoclastic. And Fun. I managed to see Frank one time, on his overnight sensation tour. What a great show. Frank played solos 3/4 of the time. He would sit back on a tall stool, place his omnipresent cigarette in the fret board and PLAY. And of course the songs were some of the best and most fun and direct that he ever wrote. I hoped to see him in New York. He played the Paladium every year for a couple years on Halloween. It was a four night stint. A friend worked crowd control up front, once getting me leaning on the stage for PIL. He was a true fan of Frank. But the night I was to see him Frank cancelled because of sickness. I used to feed him hamburgers and coffee when he needed nourishment for the shows two blocks away (a diet which may have assisted his demise). That was cool and he was ultimately cool, but designed to be seen in performance. I missed the show and I miss Frank.

Music For a Greek Tragedy: Iannis Xenakis
      My Parents had a collection of ten records, a survey of Classical Music I think put out by Angel, but I can’t remember. The Xenakis piece on the last side of the last record was the piece for me. Strings sliding around eachother, slipping through the air like threads of clouds pierced by a crazy gust setting those threads to slip and slide through the air, and within the silences of the strings voices intone Greek theater text. Despite its randomness, this was the most visceral piece of orchestral music I have heard. Unfortunately that record is long lost, so the details twenty-five years later are pretty much bound in the fog of the life that followed. Xenakis has a crystalline structure of mathematically measured brush strokes which is and always will be unique. I think of him as I think of Jackson MacLow, a disciple of John Cage. He too would engineer haphazard events through arbitrary selection (of word flow instead of tone) of a reifying device to define the text and create a structure. Jackson worked in chance operations á la Cage while Xenakis would use matrices. Though anyone could emulate these operations, those two have such a strong beauty in their projected heart or soul or left brain or spleen to create works of immense and startling quality.

“Take Five”: Dave Brubeck Quartet
      I used to try to accompany the track, doing my Paul Desmond on my cheap and badly breathed sax. It has a simplicity to it, it seems, though in a different time signature: 5/4 of course. I was no match for Desmond’s breathy perfection. What a tune! It brought me a ticket to the world of jazz I took hold of and am still riding with great delight.

“Hair”
     The original cast recording was a time of snickering for my just born teen years, me and a friend snickering at the words that talked about the flesh, about the ass with suggestions of the flesh nearby, sung right there on record for the edification of my young flesh, the way of all young flesh, tender, curious and mostly unaware though becoming more aware every day. And some birthday celebration we went to NYC (flying in a helicopter onto the island of Manhattan) and my Mom bought tickets to Hair at some ticket shop across the street so I got to see the hippy musical during its original Broadway stint with the actors emerging from a huge sheet and standing nude and still as the lights faded before intermission. It took a few years later to figure out what the hell the play was hanging off of, I mean the plot, not the still nudes and the great tunes, when I got to see the opening of Hair the movie directed by Milos Forman sitting with my uncle a big exec at the William Morris talent agency and the story stood plain as the nudes on the boards before and it was something about the tribe encountering a future GI Joe and all the conflicts of free love and drugs and tribal hippiness for this kid from the sticks before off he goes into the terrible fight in Viet Nam where he probably goes and gets himself killed or something. But the coolest thing about the movie opening was the after party scene at this huge pier where when you enter you can't even see the disco with the disco ball hanging and spinning on the other side, and the many stars attending although the only stars I remember were Truman Capote and Andy Warhol sitting together at one of those huge round party tables.

"Masters Of War": Bob Dylan
     I always loved his song “Sad Eyed Ladies Of The Lowland.” I would even try singing along during many of the many times I played it. But what the hell is it about? Now “Masters Of War” I could understand. “I hope that you die. And your death will come soon. I’ll follow your casket. On a cold afternoon. I’ll watch as you’re lowered. Into your death bed. And I’ll stand over your grave until I’m sure that you are dead.” Now I could really get into singing along to that song. I’m lucky to not have been affected directly by a relative or friend being killed by the wars created by these masters. (There was one potential uncle who died in WWII, a war which kind of doesn't count) But my dad was gone for months early in our involvement in Vietnam. And I’ve met a few men who are permanently scarred by their Vietnam experiences. An uncle, an ex-Green Beret, a decade later died mysteriously while acting as liason between Army Intelligence and the CIA (leaving my aunt virtually destitute with the Army giving no suport to the widow). Witnessing the height of anger from all of us against the Vietnam Cambodia and Laos War as a teenager I had a sense of the pernicious sources of war.

“Ziggy Stardust": David Bowie
      The whole album caught me up in its decadence, from the high gloss platforms to the spiked flames of red hair. “5 Years” “Suffragette City” “Ziggy Stardust” “RocknRoll Suicide” When I was young I got into Bowie’s high drama. I was partial to the earlier LP “Space Oddity”. I loved “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” best, but I also loved the cheesy songs that followed with their coy Donovanisms. You can still hear the Anthony Newley affectations in the voice selling the silly message to my teen age ears. Supposedly earlier in the sixties Bowie or Jones or whoever affected a ch-ch-ch-change by being some sort of Musical Comedy crooner. Maybe that’s why I always loved the last song on Ziggy Stardust, its slow fade about fading, the fade out of the showy androgynous pop star, the bitterness of the saccharine tears Bowie invokes for the burning out or fizzle of his creation, his creature.

“A Love Supreme”: John Coltrane
      Okay so this is where I learned what jazz could be. Two sides of one tune that started out beautiful, Coltrane intoning a sunrise, and just sustained the four note melody through lovely chord changes and cool solos, Jimmy Garrison’s elegance, Elvin Jones remarkable simplicity and power, McCoy Tyner’s quiet thunder of fifths. It is a glorious corona, its inner stew simmering so the flavors mix impeccably. When many years later Tyner did “Enlightenment” over 4 sides with his fifths, the great power shattering me over the hundred or so minutes, I was exulted. Coltrane traced the flower/sun filling it with blinding beauty and then Tyner exploded the resonance surrounding it, the bright sky, a violent all encompassing vibration at the edges.

“The Great Concert or At the Five Spot”: Eric Dolphy
      The most visceral player ever. I just loved what he did on the bass clarinet, writhing and contorting to bring life to that giant instrument and powering it with all his guts to shape his very shape in one’s mind’s ear.

“Live at the Bard Formal:” Richard Hell And The Voidoids
     The first encounter with punk rock was an evening at Manor Dormitory’s backyard with the Voidoids on stage. I was in a state of extreme twisted consciousness having had a tab of acid and it was hitting hard. I don’t remember much, but it had to be one of the great bands with Robert Quine and Mark Bell (to be Marky Ramone) and Ivan Julian. Richard has never been one of the great bass players in rock history, but his songs are lively and fun and unique both lyrically and musically. Robert Quine has always been a great guitar player creating a unique sound himself by his slashes of chords on the edge of chaos, barely holding to a rhythm making the rhythm more forceful like a brilliant singer sitting back on the beat. Beautiful and harsh and always interesting. But unlike a few years later, the songs were all new to me, I hadn’t absorbed them and couldn’t savor them as they were played. I might have thought they were too noisy or amateurish. It was a most peculiar day. Having my first experience with traces watching the omnipresent frisbee being tossed out on the lawn. Watching a sky-diver in a cloud seeming to be lifted up around the cloud’s convectionary current or whatever so he seemed to fall back into his parachute. And then walking away in a visceral tangle of confusion, walking along the main tree lined campus road and getting aural hallucinations such that if I walked faster, the distant thud of the drums seemed to speed up, and if I slowed down to a near stop, the thud would slow nearly to a stop, but pick up again with a gust of wind. Freaking out, I walked into the commons and to the men’s room to wash my face of it and stare at my huge black pupils. And in walked Clifford Forest, a perfect name for this big handsome black man as tall as me but much more impressive. He saw my wild-eyed condition and laughed. As I escaped back to my little dorm room, I encountered a sweet girl who told me to just enjoy it, so when I entered my cave I settled back on my bed and let the crazy high take hold. Waves of rushes rose from the base of my spine crashing through my throat and into my head. I heard angelic singing outside my window and looked out and saw angels flying with banners draped behind them proclaiming peace. Nestling back I threw on We’re Only In It For The Money enjoying the heck out of it. All this doesn’t have a lot to do with Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Or maybe it was the twisted songs sung at me and my school mates as we perched above the magnificence of the Hudson Valley at sunset that got me more twisted than any other trip. I hate to say it but I must: Hell of a night.

“Horses”: Patti Smith
      Another great crescendo of alternate feelings. The thick hot thudding of the build to the explosion of “Land Of A Thousand Dances” just hit me right. It was hard and direct to my guts and my spine. “He started crashing his head against the locker,” all off key and out of synch with the thudding beat exposed all the corrosive pain of the moment. But I guess the ultimate mind melter for me was her “Gloria” intro. The poetry of transgression. The punk mind fuck. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine," begins the song and, "but not mine,” ends the song. It had to be the first real song in which I experienced what was to be punk rock to me. (ironically the first time I saw Patti Smith was in full mushroom trip and it wasn't me but my friend who flipped (the second time was recently and though I saw her nearly sober it was also a great show), but I did have a wonderful vision wherein my white ice cream suit, the white spot directly behind me and her white outfit gave me a sense that Patti and I were connected)

“Anarchy In The UK”: The Sex Pistols
      It’s about revolution for dance floor. You’re not sitting still waiting to be lectured at, you're moving and enjoying and sweating and having fun and hearing “Anarchy in the UK, it’s coming sometime, it might be.” But mostly hearing “I am the Antichrist.” Now that’s some powerful shit to be spreading out to the eager and listening masses. Anti-politics and anti-religion all rolled into one big fat number that rates a 95 Dick Clark, cause you can hum it and you can dance to it.

“Leg End”: Henry Cow
      Talk about musical mind blowers. The most intricately wrought pop album ever. Clever and infinitely surprising and fun and brilliant, brilliantly played and brilliantly conceived. Memorize the shape shifting structure of the thing. You can sing along. You can dance to it too, but mostly in the head unless you spend some time to spread it out into “virtual movement” on a stage with professional modern movement. (Lindy was always my favorite dancer. I was infatuated with her. We had a brief affair which I, unfortunately for her, extended into an obsession. She was brilliantly (in the true sense of exuding light) beautiful and when she danced she brought an infectious and glorious emotional enthusiasm and expressiveness on her face as her head moved with her body through the space.) The musicians never paused for the riff, always moving forward, always inventing, never lazy. It is what art rock should be and never is except for the rest of the Henry Cow LPs. By far the best art rock LP ever. A mind expander.

“The Modern Dance”: Pere Ubu
      Further expansions of the mind. An art rock punk rock LP. For some reason I never dedicated myself to rote memorization of the album. But I remember when I first heard it I was mesmerized and deeply excited about its noise. The crazy crashing rocknroll with the high and whiny voice of Dave Thomas on top just seemed so cool to me. It was great. The song of theirs I did manage to memorize by hundreds of listens was an early single not on the album but coincidental with it: “Final Solution” “My Mom won’t let me out till I get some pants that fit” “It isn’t a drug it’s a final solution” and the apocalyptic noise of the song hung me out to dry every time I heard it. I always liked the smart stuff and Pere Ubu managed to stuff all the smart stuff into the genius chaos of punk. They guided me into the irreverent nonsense that was punk rock by being so extreme and arty and expressive and being danceable in a heady way rather then the gutsy way of the Sex Pistols or the pelvic swiveling way of the Ramones. Though there was a profound silliness to Pere Ubu, it was the opposite of the campiness of the Ramones. They were singing truth, the kind which stems from observation and painful experience of day to day life rather than the placard expressions of the Sex Pistols or archetypal inverted heroism of the stupid adolescent in the early Ramones.

“Metal Machine Music”: Lou Reed
      I think this changed me by being so aggressively weird or unusual, a four sided chunk of noise. I’d heard a few slabs of noise in my teens, Xenakis for instance, and I enjoyed non-melodic textures. They actually moved me. I didn’t need a melody key to let me inside the music. But most people do. Lou Reed, now a pop star of some popularity, what with the ultimately catchy tune “Walk On The Wild Side” with his cool rapping guiding us through the world of the Warhol underground and the hook of “And the colored girls go dootdeedootdeedootdeedootdeedoot…”, had concocted what was probably for most who wanted to catch the latest from this fun, mad pop singer, an utterly unlistenable two record set. Still, to have this tunesmith create a wonderful album, at least I think it’s wonderful, a work of avant-garde electronic noise that I could get lost inside, somehow validated my musical peculiarities, stretching my tastes out for the consumption of the masses. I have to admit I am proud of my elitist tastes, and am surprised (less and less over the years) when someone else knows the obscure music I know, but that solipsistic bubble probably was given its first pin prick by Reed’s RCA LP, the least commercial LP ever released by a major label.

Live: Bonnie Raitt and Willie And The Bees
      The first regular bar band I ever saw was Willie and the Bees at the Union Bar. What a sleazy place that was, and now it’s a fucking Christian bar. It had to move for that to happen. The ghost of sleazy rocknroll would be far to persuasive to one’s head and gut. There they had this great long stage to spread out that boogie band. It was mid-seventies Twin Cities funk—bluesy and horny and keeping the hard and tight beat that gets you swinging when the blues is on. It was a big band for a rocknroll bar band. I can’t remember exactly how many, six or eight or something. And who you danced with was the choice of hard drinking dames all loose and shaking. It was a hardcore bar for sure. Willie was dueting at a show I saw with my brother with Spider John Koerner. This was at the beautiful Guthrie Theater. My brother wanted to see these guys after digging their mad romp on “Running Jumping Standing Still” which is a great record on Elektra back when it was getting hot with the Doors. He was disappointed in the show, however because it was just the two of them, no backing band. From what I recall it was a cool show, sort of a jazzy, folky, bluesy show. For some reason what I remember is Willie on an upright bass. He plays the bass and a fantastic boogie woogie on piano, so I’m sure he did both, but I remember the bass. But when I saw Willie he was rocking at the Union Bar. Wailing on bass and vocals. Maurice was there comping on the baritone sax, smiling and making the ladies tingle wetly. He’d sing a cool smooth voice for those soft sweet and sexy occasions. The ballads. And then there was the time when Willie (and maybe Maurice) joined Bonnie Raitt on stage at the Cabooze, an excellent place to check out the blues. Her voice filled the club. It was spectacular. It’s amazing to see her in the big halls and watch her presence dissipate in their openness. Her voice enveloped you completely and it rocked you and moved you. It was cool to see Willie up there with her. They are old friends. She recorded her first LP upstate at Dave Ray’s studio, a hippie enclave in the middle of nowhere, and had the Bees backing her. I have seen Willie many times at several bars and outdoors and he always plays incredible piano, his instrument of choice. He sure knows how to boogie your woogie.

“For Everyman”: Jackson Browne
      I lost a lot of faith in Jackson Browne over the years. I remember seeing him at the State Theater and being less than enthusiastic. I think that guy from Kaleidoscope was still with him, and so you had an impeccable performance, but Browne is not the consummate performer. Low key. He was definitely low key. It was boring. Reminds me of my sophomoric concept of selling the words and not the song. Presenting my poems unadorned by any emotional inflections. Maybe its me. Maybe I’m the bore. But I loved “For Everyman”. Its an epic song of a quiet soul searching man. Browne’s songs were mundane and powerful, a specific blues about a day’s event and not the universal significance of a classic and universal blues lyric. But somehow, like he said, it was for Everyman. Like the figure in Medieval Morality plays he was just this guy. And the guy has some stuff happen to him. Browne is just letting us know what that stuff happened to be. And yet you got Jackson having affairs with Nico, or at least getting her into the songs and having her sing them on her first solo record. The guy’s got too many women chasing him “Two that want to own me, two that want to stone me, one says she’s a friend of mine,” to be anyone like me. When I was nineteen I viewed three women as being interested in me, and I in them, and perhaps there were others who for some reason or other hadn’t gained my focus. So maybe at that age I could relate. Maybe it was Browne who most spoke to the white suburban kid in me, which was most of me.

“London Boys”: Johnny Thunders
      “You need an escort to take a piss. He holds your hand and shakes your dick.” Now on the other side of lyricism there’s Johnny Thunders. No delicacy. “I love you. No matter what I do. There’s no one else like you. Honey I love you.” Johnny played the blues with the wisdom of a whining child. His solo on “So Alone” was a pure blues, bullshit simple and yet expressive as hell. “London Boys” was the simplest riff in the world and very Sex Pistols. (the Pistol's drummer and guitarist played on the recording, so you got to figure…) And it fucking rocks. Johnny just seers his solo with unadulterated stupid simplicity and whine, telling off all those busy guitar wankers (of course Johnny would pull his hand from the end of the fret board up to the beginning of the neck for his “effects”, more wankerish then about any guitarist I can think of). The story goes the Sex Pistols did a rip on the New York Dolls, making fun of the Dolls buggering glam presence. So Johnny struck back with his take on them and there little world. Then another great guitar rocking band, Motorhead, with Lemmy's throaty yell and thumping bass, replied with the highly amped and thoroughly rocking “No Class”. Because of the pure unadulterated greatness of these punk tunes, the extra layer added of being a series of arguments made them special and important to my sense of that punk culture which I emersed myself in. They were cultural points of attachment in the interconnective web of rocknroll culture as I know it, and I enjoyed their luscious stickiness.

"Attitude": The Misfits
        Along with Motorhead's No Class, this was the song I could listen to over and over again on the jukebox at Max's. It has a joyous rocknroll quality, but, as the song says, with "some fucking attitude". I haven't listened to much else by the famous punk band whose leader ended up being some megalith of metal with his self named band Danzig. It has the same quality as New Rose by the Damned to rouse in me a desire to sing along like one might do in a rowdy pub after a few brews. Instead I would internalize the choruses and that would drive me on with a hard assed smile tight on my face. I guess the lesson learned might be you can make the infectiousness of melody out of even the most disorderly of hardcore noise. Husker Du may have learned from it, what with I Apologize and New Day Rising and Real World and Dianne and, you get the picture.

"He Stopped Loving Her Today": George Jones
          It's all about Country & Western music. I used to hate Country except of course Hank Williams. When I heard the bending notes in this song I realized what great blues music Country could be, and what a great blues singer is George Jones. He's definitely up there with Muddy and the Wolf. It's a heartbreaking song, sung with all the passion of its emotional meaning. But the blues of Hank or George, though fully emersed in archetypes as is classic Chicago blues, gets specific at times or clever or both. In black music, you need to look to soul to find an equivalent. Of course there's Ray Charles, but also the amazing twists of phrase of Smokey Robinson. I'd love to hear George tackle some of Smokey's songs. And then of course there's:

"I've Been Loving You Too Long To Stop Now": Otis Redding
         The theme song to my wedding. What a great walloping version of his song he blew away the budding hippie crowd at Monterrey with. Popular music never dug so deep into the belly and the heart before exploding all get out and shaking you to the toes with the stops he puts in the bridge. Bang, Bang, Bang. And again. Bang, Bang, Bang. and etc... Sweetest of soul music, melodic and soaring and true and then Bang. Fucking great.

Live at Young America: Muddy Waters
          One of the great moments of my life as a lover of music was standing in the presence of Muddy Waters in a small gathering area at the Minnesota State Fair. The area was a youth oriented spot, Young America I think it was called, with a small bandstand at the end. There was a crowd, but only really a couple hundred. And here was a master. Like some spiritual guide/magician/shaman/showman he'd stir up everybody with just his cherubic smile and love of belting the blues out there for us white bread Minnesotans. Truly awesome. I wish I could retain every song played, every moment he sang and the band played, to replay at any moment in my life, but it is a distance of 25 years which brings only scattered glimpses of the event. Not so much music but images like snapshots. The area has turned into Heritage Square, a half-assed attempt to conjure an earlier, simpler time. I was probably at the right age to really enjoy the previous occupant, being a young American. I remember shopping at a record shop/booth and picking up USA/Union by John Mayall. It was an early moment of attraction to my future career, record store manager. And the funny thing is, it wasn't all that great an album, but it did lead me to enjoy the music of the Mark/Almond band and the fun funky mouth music of Room To Move by John Mayall.

"Third": Soft Machine
     I love the first three Soft Machine albums. Their changing textures from song to song and, especially with Third, within a song, were really cool to listen to and obviously influenced Henry Cow's Legend. Except for maybe some of Mingus's long pieces with their sudden tempo changes or some of Sun Ra's more eclectic tunes, very little in music is quite like it. I guess John Zorn plays with changes alot, maybe even too much. I like Third the most because the side long suites, four of them, one per side, really work. My favorites of those are Out-Bloody-Rageous composed by Mike Ratledge the keyboard player and Moon In June, composed and sung incredibly by Robert Wyatt. It is Wyatt's presence on the first three albums that made them great. His vocals are extraordinary, a high tenor with a unique tone and a crisp delivery which could be at times conversational and at times flowing and quavering. The development of Soft Machine was towards more serious and complex music, a mingling of jazz and rock, fusion but with a love of the progressive change. From the first album's silly and weird rocknroll, by Wyatt's exit from the band, they had moved to tight but flowing compositions with no verbiage. The seriousness was what eventually relieved Wyatt of his drumming and especially his singing duties in the band. The last album he was on, 4, he didn't even sing. Now Ratledge's tune was a transitional piece, containing some humor in its different moments. But it has an incredible drive and uses the arangement of musical voices (none human, but instrumental) like a hard driving big band, punching each change with hard hitting and tightly arranged blasts. It kicks butt, okay? And Wyatt's side is purely expressive of his wonderful offbeat and offhanded humor. His words are fun, telling a tale of a tour through New York. And the music twists through tight group changes into weird tape manipulations, slowing and speeding up the tape. He even performs a drum solo which at once, like his voice, shimmers gently with the cymbals and then bangs melodicly on the skins. Check it out.

"Rock Bottom": Robert Wyatt
     Wyatt had a terrible accident several years after Moon In June. He became a paraplegic. The album which immediately followed was a creation out of the depths. Instead of the light hearted and sometimes light headed verbiage he sang and spoke with Soft Machine and the later Matching Mole, here were words of a mythic, symbolic nature which intoned loss. His voice became the tragic and beautiful tenor fully singing almost all the time that it is today. Rock Bottom is one of the greatest albums ever recorded. It has long soaring or flowing songs seemingly emersed in a thudding sea depth which is never murky but is relentlessly dark and beautiful. The songs rise out of the depth with comparably heavenly highs (though its just at or near the surface) before descending back home. Yes its dark stuff, but wonderful and important and transforming. I love Robert Wyatt. I am a true fanatic. And though his later work has hit me deeply and hard, especially Yesterday Man and At Last I Am Free and Biko, this album was his peak moment.

"Fanfare For the Warrior": Art Ensemble Of Chicago
     I had a chance to see the Art Ensemble, and I can't remember where, soon after this album was released. It was a fantastic show. I love them, but I have to admit they tend to wander at times. The second time I saw them, I couldn't help but feel ennervated by the experience, not relaxed or intoxicated by the music and/or the show. I saw them recently for the third time, though it was only three fifths of the group, Joseph Jarman having left music altogether and Malachi Favors being sick in the hospital, and the show was extremely short. But it was a cool show. The percussion based improvisational interactions were often sublime. But the first show was heaven. Very song oriented and structured but with the integral quality of group improvisation which has always been their arch from which all their music hangs. There was an atmosphere, a tribal atmosphere, creating the spirit of a clearing in the jungle to perform the sacred dance to the fire, earth, stream and stars. Solemn in terms of the quality of performance and happy in terms of the fun of the creation occuring in front of me on stage. The album is a masterpiece, alongside People In Sorrow, the Art Ensemble's peak performance. Both share tangible space created for the time of the music played. They hold onto a context which in and of itself holds you spellbound as the brilliant players, Roscoe Mitchell, Don Moye, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors and Lester Bowie and, for Fanfare, the equally brilliant Richard Abrams on piano, weave their tapestry of noise within the frame. Why aren't wonderful albums like these and Sam Rivers' Sizzle always available? But the cool thing is, almost all of the breathtaking albums I mention above are available.

At The Keystone Korner: McCoy Tyner
     I have been lucky enough to see McCoy Tyner several times. Though every time I saw him was different and extraordinary, the most amazing moment was in San Francisco. I had been familiar with his music, especially the above mentioned A Love Supreme and Enlightenment. It was easy to notice his growing obsession with fifths, running up and down pounding out fifths. It created analogs to the avant garde runs associated with Cecil Taylor or Don Pullen, but with a certain restriction, a conventionality which seemed to either hold back or guide his creations, his improvisations. But when I saw McCoy at the Keynote I discovered, with an epiphanic awe resulting, the insistent pounding could create a reverberation within the case of the piano that McCoy could move and sway with his pounding to give the crashing chords and runs a simultaneously created reverberating, pulsating, thick tonal bed. It was if the cosmos had been finally broken into after relentless passionate and beautiful attempts at its walls, which would give, suggesting the methods were having their success. What I'm trying to say was it was a spirtual moment for me, a communion with all that had gone before exploding blissfully into an overpowering moment of musical brilliance.

"The Music Improvisation Company": Derek Bailey
     Like being slammed against a brick wall, but in a pleasant way. Where's the melody? It's filled with clangs and clongs which follow eachother along with the arbitrary movement of pure reaction. The music is electric, crashing through the air with clashing friction sparking and flaming. Derek is a genius of the truest kind, creating a movement with the weight of his improvisational style. An intelligence which has transformed the way we can listen to music. Along with Jamie Muir playing the most obscure rythm in percussion, Hugh Davies, the master of the buttons, Evan Parker, the most empathic of sax players, plays Bailey's masterful guitar strokes plicked plocked and plooked and scratched. His Incus albums were my pride and joy in college, bought at a now sadly defunct record store on 8th East of 6th Ave. in Greenwich Village. Their music, his music was some of the most beautiful I knew at Bard in the mid-seventies. When I sold my collection of records for some foolish reason like survival, I charged a substantial amount more for my Incus, which my rich Manhattan friend was offended by. They were worth the money he paid and much more. Probably priceless or worthless. The records did not exist except in the small numbers cherished by their owners a rare group with great distances between them and me. And then Incus was reborn onto CD and now I finally have the pleasure to revisit these great fucking sounds.

"Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh": Magma
     Christian Vander is a god of music, a muse I suppose. His crazy pulsing operatic sound bestows upon our world the world of Magma. Inventing a language, a sort of Germanic root language of this crazy French man’s imagination, he relates to us in a beautiful and yet pounding form pounded out by a rock group of piano bass drums and guitar the myth/ history of this other world. There is nothing like the music. The concept of another world has been used by the wonderful Daevid Allen’s wonderful Gong trilogy of Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg and You. It too travels through the tales of another world with a rock and roll base but with a progressive jazz fusion rather than in Vander’s case a symphonic model emerging out of the mutating mantras of Reich and Glass and, most originally and most beautifully, Riley, whose In C was another life changing platter of vinyl. Yes, there are hints of other worlds and similar musical concepts, but Magma stands alone. You have to hear it to know its incredible and wonderful uniqueness. It reverberates and in the shadows of the reverberations are, for me two or even three (Glass’s Music In Fifths) other music that changed my life.

"Radio Gnome Trilogy" Gong
Since my college days in the mid-seventies where my rich and/or eccentric New York mates turned me on to the music of Virgin Records, Richard Branson's brain trust and route to millions of dollars which had started with Tubular Bells whose composer/performer, Mike Oldfield, encouraged the idea of putting the arty rock of home town Canterbury England on the label over a period of three or four years which resulted in the masterful and mostly ignored works of Henry Cow, Hatfield And The North, Egg, and Gong, I have loved these eccentric groups. The mastermind of Gong was the crazy original hippy anarchist from Australia via Cambridge and Wilde Flowers and the original Soft Machine to the situationist/anarchist/student revolution in Paris 1968 where his involvement got him exiled but through which he created his rock unit Gong, Daevid Allen. It was '71 I believe when the first Lp arrived from them, Camembert Electrique. A world was created full form out of the head of Daevid and onto the cover, with his wonderful cartoon visions of pot head pixies, including the band, in a mandala form, as well as the text and conceptual gesture of the music inside. Nearly thirty years later I acquired a t-shirt with the front cover art emblazened on it. The occasion was a live concert at First Avenue Sept. 20, 2000. I didn't need to turn around and look behind me to see all that past covered. I just needed to look on stage and see the old wizard, beyond sixty, still weaving his spells within the funky quick stop form of his songs and then their long beautiful musical raptures of sax or flute and synthetic keyboards and bowed electric guitar, the man still delighting me and the unfortunately way too few who were lucky enough to be in his and the band's presence. The band was outstanding. They played the old trilogy songs with a brutal exactness, but could sell them as if it would always be fresh. The trilogy followed Camembert up through 1975 and contained wonderful funny yet profound lyrics amix with unique yet catchy, even hooky tunes. He managed to cover all my favorite moments from the three Lps. It was like being a kid again mouthing off the words hitting with air drums the beat of those convoluted little tunes: Oily Way, Radio Gnome, You. But I also found it easy to bop to the beats of the new compositions the band laid out for us (equally funky/danceable as the old tunes). And at least as important in the wonderment of the evening's entertainment was the presence of Gilli Smyth, Daevid's wife who possibly changed singing forever with her ethereal high soundings within the pungent and cogent muck which surrounded her voice. My wife suggested such future performers as Kate Bush and Bjork may have never found their sound without the whispery witchy pixy voice of Gilli. Oh and the moment when Have A Cup Of Tea was pronounced, the crowd engagement moment of the concert wherein Daevid asked us if we would like a cup of psilocybin tea, was the first time after all these years I was told what he had been prescribing/advising/realizing/imbibing in. Have a cup of tea, Daevid. Have another.