Hystericity

Music critic Chris May takes a bizarre tack in reviewing the latest CD from Vijay Iyer's trio, Historicity.

Writes May: "There is much that is immensely exciting about pianist Vijay Iyer and something else that is intensely irritating. The excitement lies in the music and the irritation in the miasma of cerebralization that surrounds it."

Can anyone guess to whom Iyer is inevitably, ineluctably compared a mere 1 paragraph later? Anyone? Starts with B. And it ain't Buxtehude. Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

I am as leery of miasmas of cerebralization as the next guy. My enjoyment of art is often utterly destroyed by gasbags who insist on articulating their insights, methods, musings and reflections, especially in big fancy words of more than say, 3 syllables. Think of how the accessible folk songs of Harry Partch were completely destroyed by his ridiculous "theory." Imagine how much more enjoyable Schoenberg or Webern would be without all that annoying "Serialist" pretense.

I prefer immediacy. I like my artists utterly aphasic, in fact. Too much thinking and self-reflection, especially when it reaches MIASMIC levels of CEREBRALIZATION, and I'm outta there. I don't know much about music, but I know what I like, and it isn't musicians who are more intelligent and articulate than I. Young, dumb and full of JASS, good time music, no philosophy.

Lo and behold, in a startling new trend that I wrote about last year sometime, Mr. Iyer himself weighs in on the comment thread to May's review. I suppose this isn't strictly new. I vaguely remember musicians writing letters to the editor at Downbeat, responding to 2 star record reviews or whatever. Generally, however, for centuries, critics have written about artists at a certain insulated distance.

Anyway, in the comment thread, Iyer posts the actual miasmically cerebralized liner notes to Historicity, to wit:

Historicity

"The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory."

- Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks


There are two main meanings for "historicity":

1) the quality of being historically accurate, as opposed to ficticious or legendary
2) a condition of being placed in the stream of history; also: a result of such placement

The second sense matters here: without a doubt, it's the past that's setting us in motion. With eons of recorded music ringing in our ears, and several years of intensive collaboration behind us, we take on pre-existing works by Andrew Hill, Julius Hemphill, Ronnie Foster, Stevie Wonder, Bernstein & Sondheim, and M.I.A..

Most of these works have a disruptive quality that we aim to reproduce with the trio. (The exception is "Somewhere," which simply gets retold on our terms.) You could see our covers as tributes, but we've also tried to augment each song with a fragment of ourselves. Each cover becomes a conversation between the original work and something else entirely; the best word for it is versioning.

I also borrow from my own past: earlier prototypes of "Trident" and "Sentiment" appeared on my first few albums, over a decade ago. And all of our music draws influence from the musical traditions of South Asia, Africa, and their diasporas (the Brown and Black Atlantic); perceptual illusions, mathematical equalities, and physical resonances; and everyday life in transcultural New York City.

The coda sections of "Historicity" and "Helix" both consider our experience of time as a continuous dimension instead of a series of events. For psychologist J.J. Gibson, events are perceivable, but time is not; he contends that time's continuum is something we imagine, as our way of connecting the dots.

Music, it seems, also connects -- carrying us smoothly across the tumult of experience, like water over rocks. That would make historicity the swirl of undercurrents, the reason we brace ourselves as we step into the river.

Thanks for listening.

vijay iyer"

OMFG!!!! IDK WTF Iyer is on about!!!! These liner notes? EPICALLY IRRITATING CEREBRALLY MIASMIC FAIL.

Not really, of course. Iyer's notes are interesting. I've been thinking a lot about the history of the music, how it relates to the repertory approach of Jazz at Lincoln Center, what the value of a retrospective "versioning" is, why people still get together all over the world and try to play Real Book tunes, how all of this history can be an inspiring force rather than a stultifying and intimidating Mt. Everest of genius, etc. One of my favorite blogs, It Is Not Mean If It Is True, was for a long time doing an "improvised music" reading of Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. (also some fascinating reflections on Adorno's Verse une musique informelle, but I digress....)

A closer examination of May's objection suggests he may have missed some of what Iyer is communicating. According to May, Iyer's musings boil down to nine words: "we are all part of the tide of history." I think not. Perhaps if one exposed a sullen yet mysteriously literate fencepost to Iyer's liner notes, said summary would result. Those of us with the patience for MIASMIC CEREBRALIZATION garner somewhat more. Each creative act is a gesture of incorporation of all the influences, in the mysterious aggregate, that come before. Each "new" statement is an homage as well as a rejection. Each moment of an artist's life is a "version" of the past yet entirely present. Influence can be literal, entombing the past in amber, fossilizing what was once vital, or it can be metaphorical, liberating and transcendent. I have long admired artists who baldly and reverently embrace influence (The Art Ensemble of Chicago, for example) but eschew imitation.

May continues: "As Iyer and his publicists frequently remind us, before becoming a full-time musician Iyer studied mathematics and physics at Yale and UC Berkeley. The guy has smarts; can we please move on now? For if he isn't careful, Iyer is going to match reed player Anthony Braxton's bone-dry academic posturing and in doing so set himself apart from the sizable audience his music could reach."

IRRITATING. Really a sort of trifecta of gasbaggery. 1). implying that Iyer and publicists (I imagine a vast team of marketing MBA's sitting around a shiny stainless steel conference table generated high-falutin' smartypants copy, a team of buzz-building former math majors, unheard of in JASS music until now....) somehow try to sell Iyer's music by making him look "smart," 2). implying that Iyer will somehow lose listeners as a result, 3). completely mischaracterizing the philosophical background and entire career of Anthony Braxton. ding ding ding! Insufferable gasbaggery for the win!

The irritating parts of May's review read like a Daily Mail article. May's appreciation for the music doesn't actually offer much insight into the methodolgy or aesthetics of the trio and there's a kind of inarticulate critical vocabulary at work. It's more plot summary than critical assessment. The sort of "review" that's fairly easy to pound out in 20 minutes, hungover, after giving the CD one listen. Maybe this is why a greater word count is actually dedicated to lamenting Iyer's intellectualism than to the music?

Anyway, file under "anti-intellectualism in jazz criticism," along with decades of other dismissive and condescending perspectives.

Ironic that the CD is available where smart people live (Europe) but won't be released here until October 13. In the meantime, in case you were wondering, here's a photo of the irritating and dangerously inscrutable CEREBRALLY MIASMIC Iyer. Be on the lookout.

If Q then not necessarily P

Americans have long had a technique fetish in their Calvinist, superficial attempts at appreciation for the arts.

Recently, Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success caused quite a stir. As soon as I heard Gladwell's glib "10,000 hours" formulation, I knew a couple things. I knew it would become a meme, a viral apothegm. I also knew it was a formulation of no ultimate consequence. This past summer, I was snooping around a friend's bookshelf, found a copy of Outliers and read it in about 45 minutes. How utterly disappointing, to see that the "best minds of my generation" are well-fed, superficial and have decided to reduce their intelligence to Reader's Digest levels of pablum-spewing lack of significance.

I'm sure there is a correlation between time spent engaged in a task/field of endeavor/area of expression and the quality of the results. I'm also sure that switching the "if...then" of the basic proposition reveals, in what should be an obvious way, the glib superficiality of the basic idea. "People who show extraordinary success at X have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice" simply doesn't translate to "People who put in 10,000 hours of practice at something will be extraordinarily successful at it." That this simple logical converse does not seem to shed light on the transparent uselessness of the original correlation for a lot of people speaks to how bereft the arts are (for example) in America.

The American sensibility seems to me often to reduce appreciation for an artist to the admiration one shows for a circus freak. Speed of execution, articulation, ability to manipulate the physical world and one's body, excellence at representing reality, extraordinary agility, flexibility, etc. These are the hallmarks of a "true artist" for the essentially materialistic American "consumer" of the arts. Even in the case of highly technically accomplished artists who also have a great depth and individuality of expression, what many Americans seem to value is merely the technical accomplishment.

Take, for example, the majority opinion on John Coltrane. Check out this bracing video of a transcription of Coltrane's solo on Giant Steps, the version originally released on Atlantic:



This metronome 240 (roughly) foray into linear and arpeggiated statements over functional harmony, an exaltation of both freedom and form, is a landmark performance. But the pathetic Jazz University that would soak such a form in formaldehyde entirely misses the point.

Coltrane's trajectory soon followed entirely new shapes, much to the dismay of many long time fans. The triumph of "be bop" was also its downfall. The form allowed for too much formalization, and very soon the genius practitioners of the form chafed against the "hamster wheel" experience of simply running the changes in 12 or 16 or 32-bar cycles again from the top. What could be said in such a fashion was exhaustively said, by artists of such expressive ability and insightful genius that there was no artistic urgency to revisit the endless chord wheel yet again.

Yet the phase of Coltrane's career most beloved by Americans, and especially most revered in "The Jazz University," is absolutely the phase of greatest traditional display of traditional technique. This is as it always has been here in the great US of A. Even 'Trane's later work with Miles Davis on the so-called "modal" Kind of Blue
pieces begins to attract resistance. "Too many notes," say some. (Possibly even Mr. Davis, who in his famous, possibly apocryphal, rejoinder to Coltrane offered a very simple suggestion for how to end a solo, namely, "Take the @%#$!* horn out of your *#@*&% mouth").

I have had many be-bop lovin' hepcat jazzbo white guys who are still running tired, fleet and technically accomplished solos over even more tired Real Book (tm) tunes say to me "I can't stand that later Coltrane stuff! He must have gone back on smack or something! Or that cat went crazy man! Ya Dig!!" (not really that last part, so much, but you get the idea).

So I'd offer Coltrane as one example (of a very, very many) of an American artist embraced as a master up until that regrettable leap off into madness, marked especially by what is perceived as an abandonment of technical facility. For contrast, and for a renewed sense of just how astonishing 5 years can be in the lifetime of an American innovator, check this transcendent 1965 performance of Naima :



And this is especially telling, as Naima is itself now considered a "jazz classic," and sometimes is subjected to the usual superficial, glib, utterly semantically depleted exsanguination as any other "tune" suffering the general misfortune of being adopted by the jazzbots. (At the same time, also tellingly, Coltrane's Sufi-like ecstacy in his solo is often dismissed as "just too much, " even now, 45 years after the fact).

So where does this version of Naima fit in the Gladwellian formulation? Clearly, Coltrane's utter mastery of the tenor saxophone, of the fundamentals of melody, harmony and rhythm, of the great sweeping arcs and jagged jumps of compositional drama in his solo, these aspects of Coltrane's art could (perhaps) be taught. Certainly, if not taught, at least analyzed, more deeply admired through analysis and perhaps employed in part or attempted whole by other artists, other students of the music. One could imagine easily spending 10,000 happy hours learning to play every nook and cranny of a handful of Coltrane recordings from roughly 1962-1967. Indeed, an entire school could be and in fact has been built on Coltrane's work, or Davis's, or Parker's, or what have you. Entire 10,000-hour schools could be built on single solos by these masters, or even some of the methodologies summarized in a few bars. This may sound hyperbolic, but listen to any so-called "JAZZ" recording claiming to be "mainstream" from the past 40 years or so and tune in to how each solo is an homage to an homage to an homage to some masterful statement, several decades old, a palimpsest featuring Sunday cartoon comics sketched over layers of what used to be culturally significant, the bottom-most layer an intricate, fundamentally unreproducible and urgent statement of vital truth.

What Coltrane (and so many others) plumbed (and continue to plumb) at the peak of their self-expression cannot be taught. Cannot be practiced. Only a mistranslation (at best) or a sorry-ass recapitulation is possible. Check the Naima clip from 2:49 to about 3:17, or the amazing interlude of telepathy with Elvin Jones from 4:26 to about 5:05 for but two examples (totaling just over a minute) from Coltrane's improvisation of what 10,000 hours, or 10,000 lifetimes of 10,000 hours each, could never teach.

Comfort Zones

Vijay Iyer, one of an inspiring young(ish) cadre of creative improvisers making inspiring music, posted a link on Facebook to this Wall Street Journal article giving Wynton Marsalis a generous, lotion-soaked tug job.

The article in turn inspired me to read up a little bit on Larry Blumenfeld. I knew I had seen his by line somewhere before, but I'm not (ahem) a regular reader of The Wall Street Journal. Turns out Blumenfeld is also "editor at large" for JazzIz magazine (not sure what editor-at-large means?) as well as a "regular contributor" to The Wall Street Journal. He's self-described as a "cultural journalist specializing in jazz," and as such I wonder how he could possibly have written the WSJ article with a straight face? The piece is thoroughly misguided. It unleashes some real howlers. Calling Ornette Coleman a "free-jazz avatar," (hyphen included), is absurd. Ornette Coleman is an American master, a stone cold American genius, a one-of-a-kind American iconoclast who has been making ridiculously beautiful music for decades. His composition for two improvising quartets called _Free Jazz_ was originally released nearly five decades ago (next year is the 50th anniversary) and has its own Wikipedia page. The term "free jazz" is thoroughly passe. To reduce Coleman to a cipher who still represents a movement that is 50 years old is really very bad music writing.

Blumenfeld also writes: "Mr. Coleman's engagement, which may nonetheless stretch some subscribers' comfort zones, is less aesthetic leap than show of strength." Precisely what sort of stretch for some subscribers' comfort zones will Mr. Coleman's engagement present? This is the sort of delicate writing that one used to (very occasionally) encounter in The New Yorker 35 freaking years ago. In my opinion, Wynton Marsalis is not fit to wash Mr. Coleman's underwear by hand. I realize reasonable people can disagree. It's just my opinion.

More importantly, Blumenfeld denies the importance of the still very much alive aesthetic, political and economic tensions in "jazz" since its entanglements in the culture wars of the late 1980s, yet uses broad distinctions that arose directly out of the exact same conflicts. Why call Ornette Coleman a "free-jazz avatar" and talk about comfort zones at all if "The so-called jazz wars of the 1990s, often focused on Mr. Marsalis's organization, now seem largely irrelevant"? Why use similarly superficial, glib and dismissive language referring to Cecil Taylor and John Zorn ("both avant-garde darlings")?

Quoting Blumenfeld at greater length:

"When saxophonist Ornette Coleman, a free-jazz avatar, opens Jazz at Lincoln Center's sixth season in its own space in the Time Warner Center on Sept. 26, some may interpret the booking as a widening of the mainstream-jazz credo long espoused by Mr. Marsalis ("Having the swing element and the blues at its center," he's often explained, "and heavy on improvisation"). But Mr. Marsalis presented a night of Mr. Coleman's compositions back in 2005, and inducted the saxophonist into the center's Hall of Fame last year. By now, Jazz at Lincoln Center, perhaps out of practicality as much as philosophy, has embraced a range of music that defies the conservative caricature..."

Again, I am left wondering in precisely what way Mr. Blumenfeld "specializes in jazz," if he can so thoroughly miss the very essential point of Ornette Coleman's music. For more than 50 years, Ornette Coleman's music has been entirely dedicated to the jazz credo espoused by Wynton Marsalis (never mind the execrable use of the term "mainstream," again reminding us that maybe the "so-called" jazz wars were actually significant somehow). Ornette Coleman has always made music "having the swing element and the blues at its center and heavy on improvisation." Perhaps this is precisely WHY Marsalis, ever-haughty and ever-condescending and ever-wrong-headed about the significance of jazz in American cultural history since 1959, "presented a night of Coleman's compositions back in 2005, and inducted the saxophonist (composer? innovator? revolutionary? aesthetic paradigm shifter???) into the center's Hall of Fame last year."

And I'd love to know more intimately what Dave Douglas was trying to say when he said:

""Has Jazz at Lincoln Center's promotion of jazz succeeded in assisting music and musicians? Without a doubt, yes," said trumpeter Dave Douglas, whose free-thinking approach has often been contrasted with Mr. Marsalis's in the jazz press, and who has performed at Rose Theater. "Has its strict genre boundaries and corporate image succeeded in silencing creative music and musicians? Without a doubt, no. On balance, the influence is overwhelmingly positive.""

This sounds like an abbreviated quotation to me. It also really buries some interesting critique just below the surface. Why hasn't Jazz at Lincoln Center's "strict genre boundaries and corporate image succeeded in silencing creative music and musicians"? Is it because the market for creative music and musicians in Europe and Japan remained very strong in spite of America's own abandonment of its own vital, progressive and ever-changing art form? Is it because a ton of dedicated people labored in the trenches at great personal sacrifice to keep the bodies and souls of creative musicians barely knit together? Is it because Jazz at Lincoln Center has been completely and totally irrelevant when the issue has been creative music and musicians? Or are there a host of other reasons that bear very close scrutiny and probably say a lot about the arts in America in general?

I could go on and on about Blumenfeld's fawning materialism (Marsalis in a "Lincoln Navigator," the JALC Orchestra "turning a profit three months a year," etc., etc.). Perhaps this fetishistic focus made the piece able to pass editorial muster at the WSJ, basically Fox News for the college educated?

If, like me, you need a soul-cleansing antidote to all of this, listen to the master himself. "free-jazz avatar" my ass. But watch out! Your comfort zone might get stretched! (check out the dudes in the audience at about 1:45 for some real comfort zone, haha).

Micro-Blogging

Is this thing on? I've spent so much of the past few months on Facebook that I'm afraid I've completely neglected the "long form." FB is tempting like fast food, like a cheap date. Instant micro-posting of various random thoughts, perspectives, reactions to the news, YouTube links, instant responses, no real dialogue.

Mileposts:

-8 months and three days smoke free.
-A return to full time high school math teaching with perhaps the heaviest class/student load I've ever had.
-A possible concert in Santa fe brewing, no definite plans.
-A renewed appreciation for Fishbone.

There's more.



But for now, I'll just post a link to a wonderful Elvin Jones performance with Dave Liebman, Courtney Pine and Palle Danielson. I love the way Elvin has his drums tuned. The floaters are roughly a half step apart, which creates some interesting tonal variations. His opening salvos in 5/8 are some wonderful stacked phrases. His language on the drums is instantly recognizable, of course. There's something about his actual stroke, the looseness and volume of it, the attack, that even with a few single hits it might be possible to say "That's Elvin!"

I like the way Lieb starts his soprano solo. It reminds me of some of the Miles Davis chromaticism from the mid-70s band. And definitely check out Lieb's pitch bending response to Pine at about 6:54. I do wish Courtney Pine would make more of a statement when he solos. His scalar/modal flurries are all right, but just don't seem to say much to me, other than "I have listened to a lot of Coltrane."

Anyway, hope you enjoy.

Bulbous, Also Tapered

There's no iconoclast like an American iconoclast, at least musically speaking. It's summer and I'm not teaching, so I don't really have to wheel out proof for my thesis statement. But as I scribble a few lame sentences here, Moonlight On Vermont kicks in at full volume from Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica.

As I mentioned in my last post, I finally picked up a CD of TMR, having had it on several different formats over the years. For many years it was an insignia on the general concept of "novelty." That is, my perception was that it was an entire album assiduously dedicated to the proposition that being self-consciously strange could be a diverting stand-in for Art. Connected to this: I have for a long time now kept certain recordings in my arsenal, specifically to wheel out for anyone within earshot (but even more specifically, uninitiated musician friends of mine) in order to produce the "what the fuck is this?" response. Some of these recordings I myself am not that close to. Patty Waters, for example. But I recognize the stretch and I like to lay the stretch on others, not so much out of a spirit of confrontational, in-your-face competition but out of a sincere love for sharing the experience of the new, the surprising, the shocking, the general WTF-ness of it.

(meat rose in hairs/meaty rose in hairs....which always made me think of disgraced baseball great, Pete Rose).

But there's some eye-opening aspects to having the CD and playing it on a pretty good stereo. I think Trout Mask suffered in the past from the extremely low-fi platforms I tried to play it on. The mix is very heavy on Beefheart's vocals, way up front, to the extent that the Magic Band sometimes sounds like it's in another room (which I think it was, at least for some tracks). In general, it's very difficult on poor equipment or with the interfering noise of a car (I used to play TMR on cassette tape on a boom box in my car) to focus on the absolutely outrageously intricate accompaniment. Lost in the haze of passing time and legend: who actually composed and arranged these instrumental parts. Apparently John French, aka Drumbo, had a lot to do with the final shape of each tune. Apparently also, the band lived in utter cult-like bizarre squalor and worked for many, many weeks on the pieces.

For a long time I figured a lot of the band parts were improvised. This is absolutely wrong, of course, and probably a side effect of my background before I heard TMR, which was from the so-called free jazz side of things. It's also because for a long time I never really knew how to listen to rock/blues electric rhythm/harmony guitar as an instrument (also an auditory blind spot resulting from a lot of jazz listening). I also bought into the myth that Beefheart successfully fabricated of absolutely untutored, raw primitivism. In fact, of course, the chromatic, contrapuntal polyphony that is yet surrealistically rooted in blues cliches and phrasing is highly sophisticated.

The relationship of the vocal parts to the band is almost constantly embattled. Some of the finest instrumental lines/harmonies are underneath the most vocally horrifying or potentially annoying pieces, such as Pena or The Blimp. The entire idea of what "lyrics" are is constantly shifting. The narrative lines are hilariously mercurial. The seemingly casual, tossed off, self-subverting lyrics sometimes contribute to the sense that the entire enterprise is a sick joke ("I'll set up with ya Big Joan/I'm too fat to go out in the daylight"). Beefheart's use of the soprano saxophone was very difficult for me to hear years ago, but much more a working part of his concept now. I hadn't yet accepted the "anti-technical" in music back in the '80s-'90s. Even Albert Ayler or Peter Brotzmann's approaches to saxophone were ones I could embrace, but not Beefheart's. It seemed an almost-inexcusable co-optation of "free jazz" methodology, yet another white raid on black music. This too is a whole other layer of Beefheart's approach, his "blues" influences, seemingly ever more remote and buried under layers of completely unexpected harmonic and melodic detours. Then there's the sometimes grotesque hippy/psychedelic angle, such as in Ant Man Bee. Then there's the hilarious faux hobo (fauxbo?) acapella "folk" flarf angle, such as in Orange Claw Hammer. And the Beat Poet/Dada/stream of consciousness poetry reading angle. And the bizarre references to various perspectives on "nature." And in spite of all of this, it's still possible to get that deeply skeptical, "you can't be serious" mistrustful feeling anywhere along the line. (or is it the "you've gone too far!" feeling? or the "this is just ridiculously pretentious bullshit!" feeling? Or the "damn, this is hideous!" feeling? etc.)

Are there PhD recipients or candidates out there writing about these themes? What about a larger picture where the "popular culture" could somehow support Beefheart even showing up on the radar, pun(s) intended? (I sometimes feel this way about certain recordings by Tom Waits, Primus, Helmet and a very few others). How does it happen that America comes to embrace, however briefly, partially or superficially, cultural items of extreme oddity? The musical landscape in the US is usually so unrelentingly and uniformly non-confrontational. A reasonable argument could be made that Trout Mask Replica is (so far anyway) the most aesthetically challenging "pop" recording ever released. That copies of the CD are available at, for example, Barnes and Noble, is nothing short of a miracle.

Which goes to show you what a moon can do?

China Pig

So I finally checked out one of the local chain music stores, haha, yes indeed, everything (almost) here in AZ is a "local chain." This place, called Guitar Center, is like a sort of upscale music store Target or maybe WalMart. Remarkably low prices. Hard to resist, really. The exact sort of Darth Vader of Retailing outlet that has put mom and pop independents out of business over the past few decades.

Here's the deal: the last time I spent a dime on my drums was maybe 15 years ago, no joke. Maybe even longer. Remo Weatherking Pinstrip drum heads last a looooong time. Somewhere in there I must have bought the Camco bass drum pedal and the used Tama hi hat stand. But I've had the exact same red sparkle Rogers Holiday bass drum and floating toms since 9th grade, the odd setup where both floaters were the same size at 12". The set originally came with the red sparkle standard Rogers snare and a floor tom. Over the years, I bought a Rogers Dynasonic snare, (how old am I? stuff I bought in person, brand new, is now considered "vintage"), inherited a very thin-shelled resonant Yamaha floor tom (somewhere in there I also had the very odd Yamaha pedal tuned tympani floor tom, damn I wish I still had that drum. It seems to be enough of a rarity/anomaly that I can't even find any photos or info about it in the web), replaced the old Rogers ball and socket bass drum tom mounts with Yamaha tom mounts and was given a 24 inch Zildjian Ping Ride by my mother for my birthday. The biggest investment came in 1989, when I used my first ever credit card to buy a Noble & Cooley single ply custom snare drum, only $700 at the time (new, they're roughly $1,400 now, retail). That's it.

This same setup has been through literally hundreds of punishing scenarios. The most punishing of these must have been the stint with the alt/funk/metal/thrash/math trio Purple Circle 7, all up and down the east coast, with Seth Herman's many inches of Gallien-Kreuger bass speakers to compete with, and a reliance on a few pairs of Vic Firth Tommy Lee drum sticks per gig. (the photo doesn't really do justice to the baseball bat nature of these huge sticks, at least one of which would break each time PC 7 played). Some indication of the fury that was PC7 can be heard at this myspace page, featuring PC7 guitarist Alex Bovone.

Many times these drums, never with any cases, were loaded into various vehicles, trucked all over the country, especially the southwest. Left in the car for weeks on end due to a lack of space in apartments.

So it was a red letter day indeed when I visited Guitar Center and bought all new drum heads, new snares, a new snare stand, a new cymbal stand and most exciting of all, a used custom K Zildjian China for $99 and a nice, used Zildjian Splash for $40.

I also took several hours to strip down the drums, lube everything, clean all the metal, clean the shells, etc. The smell of Brasso permeated the house, evocative of factory fumes from the Garden State Parkway in North Jersey. I haven't cleaned up the old cymbals yet, and haven't picked up the new ones. The new ones are on "police hold:" all used gear that comes into the local Guitar Center goes on police hold for a couple weeks, in case it really is too good to be true. Anyway, here's a couple of pics of the kit:





To top off the past couple of days of blissful aural-aesthetics-oriented consumerism, I stopped at a truly local, independent music store here called Hoodlums. I picked up a CD of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Safe as Milk, two BYG Sun Ra (The Solar Myth Approach, Vols. 1 and 2) and the classic 1957 (!!!!) Sun Ra Sound of Joy.

I'll have more to say about these CDs soon. But for now, I leave you with a link to the amazing early Magic Band, a live performance of When Big Joan Sets Up/Woe Is A-Me Bop/Bellerin' Pain. Check out the awesome amplifier noise just before Big Joan officially uses her small hands to destroy all preconceptions of what music could be.

Hermit Hears Duets

Hanging at home all day today, just me, the dog and the cat, as the significant other is away. Don't know what Freud would say, but all the records ended up being duets. Marion Brown and Leo Smith, Marion Brown and Elliott Schwartz, Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden (Soapsuds,Soapsuds), the entire two disc Cecil Taylor/Max Roach duets from 1979. Joseph Jarman and Don Moye, Egwu Anwu (Sun Song) from 1978. So yes, with the exception of the Ornette, each set of duets a double album as well, oddly.

I don't have much to articulate about these recordings, really, except to say there's something uniquely intimate about improvised duets. Having done 24 of them last year I know it firsthand, but it really came home today. The connections between Roach and Taylor are awe inspiring. Haden and Coleman, such purity. I might have listened to Hampton Hawes and Haden too, but it was altogether too mellow by contrast so I saved it.

Don Moye and Jarman call forth Art Ensemble levels of sound manifestation, despite being 2/5 of the band. Heavy with the Africanisms, but still kick-ass. It works somehow, unexpectedly, the layering of sincerity on top of the pretense of African-ness. Why it works: the two of them are absolutely killer musicians. Oh yeah.

Maybe it's time to start blogging again.

Self-Obsessed Drivel

The interwebs are an odd country. The few posts here "about" quitting smoking have mostly generated constructive comments, interesting suggestions, cheerleading, etc. Someone sadly too chickenshit to identify him or herself (which is precisely what I get for allowing anonymous comments) wrote: "What self-obsessed drivel! So you were dumb enough to smoke for many years. Why should the rest of us, who were smart enough not to pick up a fag, be tortured with your detox story?"

And this is an excellent question! Indeed, why should the rest of you, indeed why should any of you, be TORTURED with my detox story?

I have no ready answer for this most incisive query. Except for the hearty rejoinder that has become universal internet currency: if you find my detox story torturous, don't fekkin' read it, ya wanker.

Or some several variations thereof.

And yet. The comment did serve a salutary purpose. For one thing, it had me reflecting, yet again, on how true it is. All blogging is actually really just self-obsessed drivel. I mean, isn't that what blogging is? So on a meta-level, yes indeedy. What self-obsessed drivel! Obviously.

And on a particular level, it's also true. Stories about addiction and the struggle to recover from same are oh-so-tediously boring and ridiculous. They are perhaps the new archetype of the worst kinds of sensationalist, self-absorbed, exceptionalist story.

Smoking specifically is such an idiotic cultural arena. People who pick up fags and then insist on tarring their lungs and destroying their hearts and tasting/smelling like ass for years truly are total and complete morons, at least in this particular regard. So it is difficult to have sympathy for those who finally snap to how idiotic they have been and then whine on and on about how dreadfully difficult it is to stop doing this unquestionably moronic behavior.

Then there's the Confessional Society thing. The Oprah Winfrey-ization of all of our personal and private struggles. The Who Gives a Royal Rat's Ass response is not only appropriate, but refreshing. As my friend Willy Blake transcribed from Hell: "Damn braces, bless relaxes."

So today, as March draws to a close, as I celebrate 10 weeks without cancer sticks, as I reflect on $500 saved and 2,000 cigarettes not smoked, as I gloat over my continuing liberation from the likes of RJ Reynolds and their Thank You For Smoking duplicitous PR bullshit, I solemnly swear that I'll not blog more about what it's been like to quit. Well, not much more. Maybe a bit. Could be, for the next several months. Sorry.

For example, it continues to floor me how powerful the grip of the cravings is. Weeks ago, supposedly, the nicotine molecules were purged, the receptors died off, the physiology of it all was restored to normal. Yet, my repeated desire for a smoke is awe inspiring and humbling, as if a terrible black-winged nicotine demon has me in his heart-clutching grasp several times a day, sometimes for minutes on end. I am emerging from the regularity and ferocity of these cravings slowly, but their force is truly a wonder to behold. I'm told that this will be the case for at least the entire first year, in all likelihood. If nothing else, these tidal cravings illustrate, once again, the angry-Poseidon-ish nature of the mind. "You're not physically addicted anymore!" one of my students said and I thought "that's the least of it." What a mystery. You'd think I'd be able to mind my own mind. Cheeky bastard has a mind of its own.

My irritability, tendency to isolate and curmudgeonly growl have all definitely come to the fore. I don't think I've been very good company, particularly. Which is too fucking bad (he said not to those within earshot but to himself). As I'd rather be addiction free and unpleasant than on my way to an accelerated, horrifying respiratory death and Mr. Sparkles. Not that those are the only two choices, except that they are, a lot of the time. Exactly how it was that cigarettes aided me in being available to people and in being more extroverted, I have no idea. Not in the same way that alcohol did. But some other way.

Which reminds me: aren't you glad this isn't an AA/Recovery/sobriety blog? Because oh how it could be. Oh what fun it would be to be. And how how I reserve the right to make it so. Especially considering how I have yet to find a recovery community here in good old Scarizona. How much fun would it be if I were to blog relentlessly, torurously, narcissistically about *both* recovery from alcoholism and years of smoking? Ah what great fun, what great originality!

Yet, there's more to life than becoming less mentally ill. I said to myself just this morning, looking at my spring-turgid and budding cacti, "hey, there's more to life than becoming less mentally ill, you know."

For example, music.

Yesterday at school, a very talented multi-instrumentalist and vocalist student of mine asked the seemingly innocent question: "So what sort of 20th Century innovative composers would you recommend?" I always ultimately feel sorry for students who ask me questions like this, as I always end up shoveling cultural references at them ton after ton, until they look like they want to say (yet politely don't) "enough already, man, get a life, holy cow, enough enough!" We promptly headed to YouTube, whereon we discovered excerpts from or versions of Ionisation by Varese (this version conducted by Pierre Boulez; there are a few versions up), Metastasis by Iannis Xenakis (with agraphical score, the audio is low, so pump up the volume), the famous Requiem by Gyorgi Ligeti (with funny still photos from 2001: A Space Odyssey), Penderecki's Threnody on the Victims of Hiroshima with suitably plain black video (conducted by Penderecki himself), Stockhausen's "Helicopter" String Quartet, and last but not least, George Crumb's Black Angels.

By the time we finished watching these, either entire or in snippets, my student was deeply enthused. "Why doesn't anyone teach us about this music?" was one of the plaintive questions. To which I had no answer.

It's F@*$+*G Distracting...

The title of this post one of the outbursts from Christian Bale's awesome, expletive-laden rant, captured in its sparkly essence by Revolucian's remix.

It's probably a sign of a certain spiritual, emotional and mental imbalance that I persist in finding the above so delightfully entertaining. Lately, in particular, I have a renewed appreciation for the way Bale pronounces the letter F. Like a fricative lisp. Sort of.

Te interwebs (mostly youtube) continue to provide an endless cavalcade of amusement. Piano playing cats, sneezing panda bears, John Berryman's dream songs, Art Ensemble and Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry...it's all jumbled in my media-fevered and indiscriminate mind.

Today marks week 6 without a cigarette. 42 days. Probably about 850 cigs not smoked. About $200 saved. I continue to be surprised by how strong the cravings are from time to time, and as of last weekend anyway, all weekend long. There's actually no noticeable easing up yet. Not entirely sure why not. It makes no difference, really, but it's astonishing. I figured a few weeks tops would be the most harrowing part. Sometimes the only thing I've got is "well, the discomfort, as bad as it might be, won't kill ya."

I'm ready to kiss February goodbye. Is it astrological, biorhythmic, acculturated, otherwise metaphysical, this tendency for February to crush my spirit like a bug? The nadir of the year, fairly reliably.

100 non-cigarettes later

It's almost as if things are sort of coming back online. The withdrawals are still wicked, as are the cravings. But two days of teaching 130 high school math students didn't drive me back to lighting up. So that's something, eh?

One thing is, it's getting boring. You know I think I started smoking because I'm frikkin' hyper. I pace around a lot. I'm wired, man! Cigs were like an accessory for being essentially a human squirrel. So now I've already been up against that bored feeling. Like now what?

On the other hand, this is of course the evil whispering devil on my shoulder. Surely just because you're bored that means it's an excellent idea to GET CANCER.

Nobody ever said addiction was rational.

To bed, 120 hours with nothing but air and Phoenix AZ crud in my lungs....

On Being a Non-Smoker

So 60 hours ago I had my last cigarette. There's a trusty and (as far
as I can tell) almost completely ineffectual (but maybe that "almost"
is pretty important) 21 mg. patch slapped on my arm. One reason why
the measly 21 mg. delivered over 24 hours might still be leaving me
with skin crawling, excruciating nerve clanging withdrawals.

When I started smoking again after nearly 9 months without a
cigarette, in July of 2004 (ironically, on Independence Day), I chose
Natural American Spirit cigarettes. Health smokes, don't you know. It
turns out these are stronger than Marlboro Reds, the smokes I had been
smoking. I also gravitated toward the second strongest cigarette American
Spirit makes: their pimped out super minty menthols. 2.17 mg. nicotine
per cancer stick. And promptly hit a pack a day. In other words, 43.4
mg. of glorious nicotine delivered over roughly 16 hours, usually in
great clumping gobs of heart stopping, lung crackling joy.

My legions of receptors are laughing maniacally at the puny patch.

The "simple spiritual tools" of AA have been helping me immeasurably
the past 2.5 days. Okay, maybe just uncommon sense: right now, I am a
non-smoker. I'm not in charge of quitting; all I have to do is show up
without smoke in my lungs. I can't figure out why or how I'm quitting
or even if I'm able to do it. In other words, I am powerless over
nicotine and my life has become unmanageable. My short form of the
Serenity Prayer: "Help me!" Just a great yelp to the universe.

Antheil's Ballet Mechanique or Varese's Ionisation or far, far worse, something like Neil Diamond's I Am...I Said playing at full volume in bad headphones pretty much 18 hours a day without interruption. Tiny little insectile devils jabbing happy tasers into my back and forearms, dancing and laughing like Daffy Duck. Pornographic images in my mind of the great allure of the crackle of the baccy as the flame from the lighter hits it. Fantasies of the utter repose and peace provided by just one cigarette. A James Brownian restlessness. Flashes of Olympian rage not triggered by anything in particular. A strange feeling that my soul is plunging feet first into a bottomless pit, surrounded by a howling maelstrom. Combined exhaustion and hypervigilance.

And now, for the second day in a row, I head into the desert to walk up hills.

Holiday Shopping

Happy Black Friday! I've been thinking about how bizarre it is we actually have a consumer-oriented day with a name to represent retail consumption. How strange too that so many special, one-of-a-kind gifts will be purchased at Big Box stores off the rack holding a few dozen exact replicas of same. How strange that the gloom and doom economy collapse prophets seem to think it's a bad thing that endless huge anonymous yet aggressively branded caverns full of utter crap might go out of business. I'm such a contrarian bastard. Every time I see Linens 'N' Things or Joanne or Starbucks going under I get a frisson of glee up my spine.

You know what else is pissing me off lately? The new spell check databases for Gmail, Facebook, certain fora I'm on, and Blogger. I keep typing in completely legitimate words and they keep getting underlined in red. For example, in this post alone, "contrarian" and "fora." Recently, "vampyric," (here too!), "grotesqueries" (here as well) and my preferred spelling of "dialogue," which seems to have been abandoned for the odd-looking "dialog."

Anyway, these words being tagged as unrecognizable is a very bad sign. Part of the general retardifying (take that, spell check!) of culture.

But I digressify. The holidays are upon us. For the past two nights, J and I engaged in enjoyable sessions of culture browsing on You Tube. Eva Cassidy, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Don Cherry with James Blood Ulmer and Rashied Ali (and an audience full of stunned and nauseated looking Swedes), The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Country Joe McDonald, Miles Davis on the Steve Allen Show with the second quintet doing All Blues at lightning speed (featuring a brief precious moment where good old happy go lucky Steve Allen asks Davis what he's going to play, can't hear the response and asks someone else to tell him, saying "Miles has laryngitis"), The Kingston Trio, Tom Lehrer (a great bunch of footage of him that I didn't know existed; also didn't know he's still on the planet and 80 years old), Eddie Cochran doing Summertime Blues followed by The Who doing the same at Woodstock 10 years later, Patty Waters (sadly, no actual footage, just some examples of the strange yet oddly touching You Tube practice of posting music with still photographs), Leo Kottke, Michael Hedges, Kate Nash, Kate Bush, an almost unwatchable episode of Disco Teen with special guests The Boxtops, Danny Gatton and his beer bottle slide and towel routine, two absolutely horrifying Michael Jackson videos (Scream and In The Closet), "lame American folkie" Dan Wilcox, an excerpt from the Cecil Taylor documentary All the Notes, a duet between Milford Graves and David Murray from a documentary homage to Albert Ayler, a solo performance of the Mahavishnu Orchestra's Miles Beyond by Dave "Fuze" Fiuczynski , Tori Amos kicking people out of her show ("Get the fuck out of my show! It's a privilege to sit in the front row"), Tom Waits in 1977 doing Tom Traubert's Blues, a very brief snippet of Rod Stewart doing same about 5 octaves higher. There's more, but you get the idea.

So here's a thought. Don't buy a single new thing from now to January 2020. Just take the time to get to know even a little bit about what's already been made. Shop for Xmas gifts at thrift stores and yard sales. Or make your own gifts. Or reconfigure the whole idea of what a gift is in the first place. Gift or curse? For example, well-meaning people have given me a lot of utter crap over the years. I always feel obliged to hold onto it. "I can't throw that away! Someone put a lot of thought into buying that!" Thing is, it's all going to go. I'm paring down. I'm offloading big time. The real precious irreplaceable things, like recordings, books, cacti, that stuff will stay, even though I eye it askance since I can't take it with me and every single time I move (9 times in the past 7 years) I have to lug all of it around, a Laputan comedy. (and go screw yourself, Blogger spell check for not recognizing "Laputan." What a world!)

A few afterthoughts in this Special Director's Cut of the Stochasticactus Release of the post titled Holiday Shopping:

I started thinking about what the best gift one person can give to another is, short of maybe a kidney or dying to save someone else's life. I realized that perhaps the single most dreaded phone call from a friend goes like this: "yeah, so, I'm moving into a new place...think you can come over and help me move?" So perhaps the finest gift of all would be to visit every single friend you have and just start boxing up and removing their worthless crap. *Ahead* of the "hey can you help me move?" phone call. Drug them up if you have to, hypnotize them, whatever it takes. Then just gut their space. Box after box of old sand-filled hand weights, signed baseballs, Roy Orbison records, moldy-boxed board games, bread machines, yard umbrellas, whatever.

And here's a novel way to deal with "gift guilt," that feeling when you get a gift that, darn it all, now you *have* to reciprocate. Just send back the original gift with a little note: "Thank you! I enjoyed this ___________ (sweater, pen, Sigmund Freud action figure, pair of socks, etc.) for a short while and have decided to return it to you. We're all going to die anyway and nothing's permanent! Happy Holidays!"

Where Do We Live, Again?

I'd like to suggest that citizens are all members of their national
community and nations are in turn citizens of one global community.
The amassing of great personal wealth allows for insulation from one's
community that I don't think ultimately makes for a strong, secure,
functional nation. Along these lines, my own borderline lower middle
class finances make it possible for me to insulate myself from, say,
those starving and dying in the shantytowns outside Nogales, a mere
120 miles south. So American attitudes about wealth have also by
extension isolated and insulated the US from being a more participant
global citizen. We were perhaps shocked awake by 9/11, but in my
opinion immediately put back to sleep again by promises of war and
security.

It seems to me we aren't as a people given to any regular and
sustained awareness of events and realities around the world. Small
pockets of starry eyed citizens occasionally band together to fight
hunger, human rights violations, injustice and oppression in "other"
places. But generally, if it isn't at our doorstep, it's not our
problem.

This applies within the island nations inside the US as well. Behind
security kiosks and gates, in countless enclaves of wealth for which
no account must be given and which, as a culture, we idolize, any
sense of connection is lost. The wealthy have their own rules, their
own justice system, their own ideas of scale, their own ideas of
fairness and citizenship that are fundamentally, culturally different
from the rest of the population. The more I traveled around the US and
lived in different places, the more exposure I had to this insular
reality. Because my employment has been as a teacher of the wealthy,
I've only been able to afford to live in neighborhoods that were
liminal, on the border between wealth and poverty, yet had a lot of
experience of the values and culture of the rich, "liberal" and
"conservative" alike. It seems to me there is a point at which
quantitative differences become qualitative, at which one no longer
lives in the US at all.

The other island nations are within our borders too, "red-lined"
bombed out urban war zones, rural poverty and scarcity we don't often
shine a light on or even think about. Cities like LA, Philadelphia,
NY, Boston and even towns like Santa Fe offer jarring contrasts
sometimes in a matter of a few blocks. Poverty, hunger and suffering
of our own citizens used to be a popular theme, used to provide a
rallying cry of some kind for those who saw injustice and wanted
equity. In my opinion, it seems that these realities are now just not
very good television, just too dreary and boring to sell newspapers.
You'd think we won the "war on poverty" if you hadn't seen poverty
yourself on a daily basis. It's like the War in Iraq: we can't handle
pictures of coffins, even if they are draped in flags.

So it is that I roll my eyes and think GMAFB when those that got talk
about how unfair it is to be asked to give. "I'm the best steward of
my own wealth, thank you" is really just an excuse for continued
unaccountability, irresponsibility, disconnectedness, insularity.
"Government can't be trusted to solve problems" is an absurd
statement, given the emergence of essentially socialist democracy
since the Great Depression. Real social problems, actually solved by
that old much-hated gummint. Imagine an American historical landscape
over the past 75 years if pure free market capitalism had been adhered
to, no New Deal. My vision of that is wars, uprisings, violence,
destruction, anguish, revolution. "You just want to throw money at
_____________" is a childish dodge. For example, regarding education.
I'd sometimes hear folks spending $27,000 a year on their child's 7th
and 8th grade years dismiss "throwing money" at public education. 9
times the average per student expenditure, in that case. Seems to work
for you and your kid, I'd want to say, but wouldn't. When do we hear
someone say "You just want to throw money at terrorism, you can't
solve the problem that way." Never.

Anyway, we live in the world. If we don't take responsibility for the
gestalt, it will come around and kick us in the ass.

Political Vortex

I've gotten swept up into electoral politics the past month or so. I'm not entirely sure why, as my own personal political history has been saturated in non-representation since roughly 1972 or so. I was an 11 year old progressive commie pinko socialist then, and now I'm an older one. So my entire political experience of American public life has been as an outsider. One of the finest Republican presidents we've had during that time, Bill Clinton, offered some tiny, slight hope for a few meager ideas to the Left of Center, but to no avail, ultimately.

I went to Political Compass yesterday and tried to answer their fascinating quiz the way I imagined Obama would, the way I imagined McCain might. Then a friend of mine pointed me to the site's own analysis. I scored both candidates as less conservative than the site does, with Obama actually a couple points to the left of center economically and socially. The site has him the other way on both axes.

I'd guess more Americans have beliefs and values in the 2nd (top left)
and 3rd (bottom left) quadrants than we'd imagine, given the Center/
Right domination of national politics. I wonder if the new documentary
about Lee Atwater, _Boogie Man_, sheds some light on the recent
history of Center/Right rhetoric and tactics. The new robocalls going
out from the McCain camp (created by the same firm that smeared McCain
in 2000) fall into the usual Atwater/Rove strategic category. I'm not
saying that Democrats don't also use appalling tactics to attain and
retain power. I am saying that, in my opinion, the bullying of public
discourse to the Right is a result of Republicans being better at
it.

And what a spectacle it is, McCain picking up on Wurzelbacher and his
"socialistic" line regarding Obama's tax plan, in the midst of the
socialization of capital to the tune of $1 trillion and probably more
advocated by "conservative," "free market" W. But McCain has finally
found a (dishonest) way to talk about the economy yet not talk about
it, hitting his stride. He'll come back in the polls and the election
will be much closer than polls and maps show now, possibly even a
repeat of 2000. Says this Chicken Little Breslin Socialist. (Of
course, Obama is lying on a daily basis as well, as there's no way,
given the current economic picture, that he can implement what he's
promising).

It's a success for both Obama and McCain, oddly, that probably most
Americans (including me, apparently, given my guesses on the political
compass test) think of Obama as a "Liberal." McCain finally gets to
harp on ye olde Tax and Spend riff, and Obama gets to blithely deceive
a huge segment of the Democratic Party that is yet again duped into
not being represented on the national stage. Democrats have long
manipulated their own Left constituencies by urging them not to "waste
their votes" on Third Party candidates who much better represent their
views. The whining over Nader and Florida, etc., is appalling. I hope
to see a re-emergence of Left ideas into public view, and a shift to
the Left in the Democratic Party. But this is the last election where
I'll cast a fear vote. I honestly do think Sarah Palin is a "cancer on
the Republican Party," like David Brooks, and have finally found
common ground with Chris Buckley, Peg Noonan, Kathleen Parker et al.
I've been coming to terms with the simple fact that I'm voting against
Palin. Sad but true. Another statistic, another casualty of the
culture wars.

I think it's revealing too that a recent email invited me to a phone
calling party in Scottsdale hosted by MoveOn, the angle for which is
"Help Defeat Sarah Palin." The party features bar-b-q chicken
(probably organic, free range?) and Saturday Night Live Tina Fey
videos. The thought of attending this event makes me want to eat my
own face, but it's fascinating rhetoric. Obama is not "energizing" the
Left base nearly as much as Palin is. The address for the anti-Palin
Party, by the way, is a barren, windswept McMansion quadrant on the
golf course riddled edges of well-watered Phoenix. These are folks
just dying to pay more tax. Or perhaps they are secure in the
knowledge that their expensive tax accountants will buffer them from
Obama's "socialistic" schemes.

The Panchromaticon

Recently, I launched a teaching unit in all of my math classes (Algebra 2, Pre-Calculus/Trig and Calculus) analyzing the ratios or factors used to develop various musical tuning systems. Generally, my students "hate fractions," and they're even more suspicious of irrational numbers. So I figured it might be interesting for them to listen to fractions and to hear the effects of multiplying by irrationals.

An introduction to the harmonic series and the construction of the 12-tone chromatic scale based on whole number ratios of the upper partials compared to a fundamental, folded within the space of an octave, came first. Then the concept of logarithmic constants used to exactly double a frequency through 12 multiplications was covered, looking at the use of the 12th root of 2 to construct a 12 tone equal tempered tonal palette. Some historical background was thrown in to try to give the students some sense of how seriously people used to take this stuff, particularly regarding religion, philosophy, psychology and spirituality. Finally, an introduction to the 43-tone 11-limit just tuned Harry Partch octave extended the topic, including a showing of _The Dreamer That Remains_, the 1972 documentary directed by Stephen Pouliot.

In researching to prepare the unit, one of the endlessly distracting toys I found was the midicode online synthesizer. There's a tuning drop-down menu that includes 12-tone equal temperament as well as a great many other tunings (Zarlino, Pythagorean, Ptolemaic, a variety of microtonal tunings, even "Wendy Carlos Super Just," which I have yet to analyze), including, lo and behold, Partch's 43-tone octave.

The whole experience has me thinking about the tonal musical palette in general. Experimental studies show that some highly percipient listeners can hear frequency differences on the order of a mere 5 cents. (The cent is a logarithmic measure of change in frequency, where 100 cents is equal to multiplying by the 12th root of 2, in other words, an equal tempered half step is 100 cents). For those who can hear 5 cents at a time, there's a universe of 20 distinct tones between, for example, A440 and A#. This of course would lead to a 240-tone octave.

I'm defining any octave that includes 240 tones as "panchromatic."

Out of this panchromatic scale (whether equal tempered or just tuned...I have to look into exactly how the ratios would look in whole numbers to get 240 tones into an octave....) one could construct all possible perceivable music. Tonally, anyway.

This panchromatic idea has me also thinking about whether a fairly simple General Theory of Harmony could be proposed. Removing all considerations of "good" and "bad" from the terms consonance and dissonance, perhaps these two fundamental principles (which, after all, turn out to be rooted in how we perceive frequency ratios) could be used as a foundation for such a General Theory. Composers would then be entirely liberated to write panchromatic music, drawing on all of the perceivable tones in the 240 note octave. Of course, composers would still be free to use only 12, or 7, or 5, or 43, or whatever number.

Perhaps problems in performance could at least be partly ameliorated with the aid of technology. But such an idea would shift music education from its current obsession with mechanical technique and facility, toward a highly refined tonal sensibility.

I have nothing against the 12-tone equal tempered scale. But the vast universe of perceivable tones available for our auditory perception has barely been explored, at least for the past 400 years or so.

Inside Out, Over but not Out

For the past two years, I've been producing a weekly radio show called Inside Out for KSFR, Santa Fe NM's local, community supported public radio station. I was brought on as a volunteer producer after the station made the switch from an afternoon "classical music" format to "jazz," a bold move to be certain. Not only that, but the station manager at the time, Tim Pemberton, did his damnedest to bring in local "jazz" musicians as producers, a truly remarkable effort. The switch resulted in KSFR featuring nearly 24 hours of "jazz" programming every week, most of it in prime morning and afternoon slots, in a national market of commercial radio featuring zero of same (largely, let's ignore execrable "smooth jazz" shall we? at least until the coffee wears off) and public radio featuring largely endless talking heads, news, political commentary and interview shows. Another remarkable aspect of the programming switch: Santa Fe isn't a "jazz" town. Or at least, wasn't, so much, when the switch was made. I hear that the recent New Mexico Jazz Festival had a mostly sold out run (never mind my acidulous take on this year's bookings, save it either entirely or for another post)-- perhaps KSFR could be credited with slowly building a real breathing audience for "jazz" in a town better known for opera, chamber music and alt country.

(yet with a growing reputation for creative music and emerging artists as well, thanks to High Mayhem Emerging Arts, but that too is another post).

Last year, I moved to Tempe, AZ. I've been recording the show at home and ftp-ing it to KSFR's server pretty much every week. The station decided this week to pull me from Thursday afternoons and get some warm bodies in the studio, an excellent idea for an outlet so connected to Santa Fe's local scene, events, people and culture. Who among the loyal listeners to KSFR would prefer a guy in a can? Not even me.

Inside Out emerged as an attempt to illustrate musically a very basic premise: "jazz" (which I usually call "creative improvised and composed music" on the program) is a complete, living, breathing continuum. It's damned sure not "dead" and it's for certain not neatly divisible into camps, schools, movements. Thus the title. Listen even a bit more closely to the best of the "inside" and you hear the perpetual innovation at the heart of great creativity. Listen with open mind, heart, ears to the finest of the "outside" and you hear with clarity the deep roots or flat out overt incorporation of the history of the music.

Most of my programming decisions were made in an attempt to reinforce this theory, repeatedly, sometimes pointedly but most often without comment from me. Spineless, gutless, predictable, formulaic, derivative, insincere, imitative, boring, blandly palliative, overly produced, insipid and insincere music was always (I'd like to think) checked at the door.

A handful of the "inside" artists with solid gold "mainstream" cred who provided endless examples of in your face (overt or subtle; yes, music can be quite subtly in your face) links/precursors/engagements with the "outside":

Duke, Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Booker Little, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Herbie Nichols, Mal Waldron, Pepper Adams, Randy Weston, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Dorham, John Coltrane, etc.

A handful of artists marginalized (to varying degrees) to the "outside" whose roots and branches are so obviously continuous (usually seamlessly) with the "inside" that it's amazing the boundary lines were ever drawn:

Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Julius Hemphill, The World Saxophone Quartet, Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, Bill Dixon, Jimmy Lyons, Leroy Jenkins, Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Lacy, David S Ware, Matthew Shipp, Tim Berne, etc.

If you're not nodding your head, you're not listening. You've bought hook line and sinker some line of BS about the "great death" of "jazz" in 1959, or 1969, or 1979 or whatever. You've read too many Wynton Marsalis/Stanley Crouch/Albert Murray interviews and curricula, or maybe admired the Ken Burns/PBS patina without digging, or maybe you've been to "jazz school" in the great cookie cutter Jamey Aebersold music factories. Or you've too ardently embraced Be Bop as the be all and end all of "jazz."
(Without examining very closely that Be Bop itself was construed for a good long while as the End of Jazz). Or, I suppose, you just don't care. In which case, if we ever have a conversation, I'll ask (maybe sporting a shark-like smile) "why not?" This music is the backbone of American musical art. Never mind that the category "jazz" (and God only knows what's actually included in that category) currently enjoys a mere 2% of the record industry market share in the US. Never mind that "jazz" is perceived by many as "old people music." Never mind that the attitude expressed by an actual "jazz" music presenter in America's midwest, that "jazz" is "irrelevant," actually came as no surprise to me. Never mind all that.

What's more, the above lists are merely handfuls. The examples are in reality much more vast. I've only scratched the surface of musical illustrations of my theory in nearly 100 hours of programming over two years. One of the great weaknesses of my program was a paucity of new releases, due largely to budgetary constraints. If I had been in residence at KSFR, I would have had access to many more current examples, such as The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, etc.

The theory and my programming, by the way, was never intended to exalt either "inside" or "outside." Nor was it intended to "make the world safe for the avant garde." Fundamentally, it was intended to reveal the utter beauty at the core of a bunch of great music, period.

I'm grateful to KSFR for the opportunity to engage in such risky, perhaps one of a kind programming during an afternoon weekday slot. I was given complete leeway in programming decisions, even after a bumpy start. In either my first or second show, I went from Andrew Hill/Dolphy to Jimmy Lyons/Sunny Murray (Riffs #5) to Ornette (The Artist in America), at the top of the hour, leading into Democracy Now, one of the station's most popular programs. Yikes! Tim Pemberton and Sean Conlon unreservedly went to bat for my "dial changers," and that's amazing these days. I'm also grateful for the opportunity to interview Jane Ira Bloom, Roscoe Mitchell, Sonny Rollins and Oliver Lake. Sad that Rashied Ali didn't pick up the phone for a scheduled interview last year and that Pharaoh Sanders declined, but you can't win 'em all. I'm also grateful for the many regular listeners who called or emailed with complaints, suggestions, information, requests, etc. Gratitude as well to my friends at Destination Out for providing a ton of music for the program through their remarkable MP-free blog.

I'm intending to continue producing Inside Out on a weekly basis, moving into the 21st Century by making it a podcast. Stay tuned while I figure out this whole new-fangled podcast thing.

The penultimate show tomorrow:

1-2 pm
Randy Weston- Blue Moses, from Zep Tepi, 2006 (Weston will be 83 years
old next April)
The Art Ensemble of Chicago- Uncle/Peter and Judith, from Urban
Bushmen, 1982 (extended bass sax solo from Roscoe Mitchell)
Sonny Rollins- Sonny, Please!, from the eponymous CD, 2006
Horace Tapscott (with John Carter, Cecil McBee, Andrew Cyrille)- The
Dark Tree, 1989

2-3 pm
Horace Tapscott, conclusion
Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop- MDM, 1960 (w/Dannie Richmond, Lonnie
Hilyer, Ted Curson, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Booker Ervin, Jimmy
Knepper, Britt Woodman)
Ornette Coleman- What Reason Could I give/Civilization Day/Street
Woman, from Science Fiction, 1971
Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach- Money Jungle/Fleurette
Africaine, from Money Jungle, 1962

Not sure yet what the last KSFR show will be, but you can listen in (or out).

Git Offa Mah Yard! part x

My girlfriend thinks I should start a blog called Get Off of My Yard! that features rants the likes of which might be delivered by an angry old man, shaking his fist at the neighborhood children, worrying his two remaining teeth with his yellowed old tongue. Apparently, I sometimes embody this character as I fulminate regarding pop culture, advertising, politics, music, education, the driving habits of Arizonans, etc.

So perhaps instead of launching a whole new blog, I'll just occasionally rant right here, in a charming series called, of course, Git Offa My etc.

Enough with the BS already! But where to begin?

How 'bout with an inspiring little card inserted between plastic wrapper and kale-green cigarette pack brought to us by the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Natural American Spirit cigarettes. I smoke roughly a pack a day of their admittedly high quality menthols. The menthol flavoring, by the way, comes from mentholated crystals embedded in the filter, maintaining the virginal purity of their tobacco. These are fine, tasty, high-powered smokes, my friends. I felt not a twinge of guilt as Cecil Taylor bummed them off of me, one after the other, during a post concert party in his hotel room in Albuquerque. My pals, who are non-smokers generally, cadge a smoke or two off me without remorse, savoring the "100% Additive-Free Natural Tobacco." A friend who writes screenplays and directs movies calls them "Pimp Daddy Smokes," combining the somewhat shady sleaze of menthol with a kick of nicotine and carbon monoxide mule-like in its oxygen denying ferocity.

But the company's greenwashing is ridiculous.

Text of inspiring inserted card, front:

Bold heading: DIFFERENT Company

"It's refreshing to know a company that produces a product we use actively supports human rights, the environment, and other charitable works."-Scott W.

Never mind the Oxford comma.

Further inspiration on inserted card, back:

"Our people...We believe that the way we do business is as important as the way we grow our tobacco. That's why being earth-friendly is a part of our everyday lives. Whether it's using wind power to run our offices, or contracting directly with organic farmers who grow tobacco using earth-friendly practices, we're dedicated to reducing our footprint on the earth." (followed by the company's logo, featuring an altered zia...symbolism is heavy all around, including an Indian in a full head dress holding up a peace pipe and a handy little gold Thunderbird printed on every fag).

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for reducing footprints on the earth.

But it's the epitome of balls for a tobacco company to jump so hard on the green bandwagon, really. Hey, I have an idea-- maybe my respirator someday can be wind powered? Or perhaps half my lower jaw can be removed using entirely *earth-friendly* recycled bone saws? Or perhaps the radioactive elements used in my lung therapy can be obtained from direct contracts with organic, *earth-friendly* mining companies?

Some small print on the side of the pack seems perhaps too little, too late. Or maybe just so utterly obvious as to be unintentionally hilarious: "No additives in our tobacco does NOT mean a safer cigarette."

The stub Wiki article is highly revealing:

"The Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company is a tobacco manufacturer, best known for its production of the Natural American Spirit cigarette brand. However, "Natural American Spirit" brand cigarettes are currently owned by (since 2002) the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, Inc. There is controversy surrounding this brand, both for its use of a 'native American' logo (citation needed), and for its claims to be natural, which many consumers misconstrue as meaning that the product is healthier for you."

I'm fully prepared, obviously, to admit that the only SAFE cigarette is an unlit cigarette. I'm also sheepishly ashamed to have such deep brand loyalty to a company that has obviously gone completely off the deep end of boomer, yuppie PC marketing nonsense.

And so, with gravelly voice and at a nicotine-ratcheted fever pitch, I crow to the marketing department at RJ Reynolds/Santa Fe Natural Tobacco: Git Offah Mah Yard!

Of Vinegaroons, Bootheels and Frontiers

A strange couple of weeks, these past two, especially odd coming after two weeks of 115 degree air conditioned down time, during which my obsession with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II re-emerged. (I had discovered a whole new way to play this already ancient game, involving various delay tactics intended to get all of my opponents arrested...this approach led to hours of time delightfully squandered. There's something about a well designed video game and my own impulse to twist the parameters of the software that's definitely a compulsive combination, a focus that sets in after the goals and purposes of the game intended by the designers have long been mastered).

Two Saturdays ago I set out for Roswell, NM to be an artist in residence for the Roswell Opera Camp, under the auspices of The Santa Fe Opera. 6 nights at the Days Inn of Roswell, nearly 30 kids age 6.5-13, endless hours of horrifying cable television during off time (when I ought to have been sleeping). The kids were great; they came up with a story involving 7 tomboy princesses who journey to the Amazon in search of the Godzilla Beetle and encounter an evil 4-headed unicorn named Fluffy. Very Wagnerian somehow. The camp took place at the First Presbyterian Church of Roswell, a Gothic Revival structure built in 1937 and highly evocative of my childhood church in Bethlehem, PA.



Late Thursday night, I took a smoke break from fleshing out some of the music the kids had written and stepped outside the sanctuary side door. The first thing I noticed was dozens of huge cockroaches zanting about, actually larger than the ones we've encountered here in Tempe, which is astonishing. Then, on the tiled porch, in my peripheral vision, I caught sight of an enormous...thing. My mind clamored "that's alive!" and "no, it's a dead leaf blowing in the breeze...can't be alive" pretty much at the same time. Lo, 'twas indeed a living creature. A Giant Vinegaroon, to be exact.

My teaching partner, Charles Gamble, and I printed out a photo of a vinegaroon from the web to show the kids the next day. "We see those all the time," they said, bored. It's true, the Roswell and Artesia area is the population center of these beasts. Crazy.

I got one morning of cactus hunting while in Roswell and found some great plants, including a flowering Echinocactus horizonthalonius:



On the way back from Roswell, I took a very roundabout route through Carlsbad. I would have had tons of daylight to check out Guadalupe National Park in Texas but for New Mexico's Finest, who stopped me at a DUI checkpoint and happened to notice my expired tags. I did catch some beautiful Echinocereus dasyacanthus near Carlsbad just before sunset:



I ended up driving all the way to Las Cruces, staying in a motel room straight out of Barton Fink. The next day I poked around a bit in New Mexico's bootheel, an area I've always been curious about. "Off the beaten track" doesn't come close to describing this land that time forgot.



Shortly after arriving home, I set out on a 2 day trip in a big circle from Phoenix to Seligman to Peach Springs to Kingman and up to Meadview, with an overnight in tiny Truxton, AZ.



Truxton is a motel, cafe and gas station on Route 66. As I checked into the Frontier Motel, a young German man was also checking in. He asked the woman who runs the motel, a very friendly 75 year old, "Why is Route 66 so famous?" The woman seemed to not understand him. "It was built in 1927," she said. "It's an old road." The German guy seemed confused.

Peach Springs featured Agave utahensis v. nevadensis:



The next day, I roasted half to death in my un-air conditioned car up to Meadview. The reason to go up there: I wanted to see Echinocactus polycephalus v. xeranthemoides in habitat. I found several, including this monster, about 7 feet across and 4 feet high, with nearly 40 heads:



Many more habitat pics...I might post them in a separate post. It's wild territory up there by Meadview. The kind of place you could have a vision of the heavenly host descending or all the demons of hell let out to play.



Is it any wonder most Arizonans are crazier than shithouse rats?

Eternal Qwest

Okay, bad customer service from huge utility companies is one thing. It's not a good thing, but we generally learn to live with it, if not actually expect it.

However, nearly 3 hours on the phone, 2 technician visits after both of which we were told our DSL problems were "fixed," and a replacement modem all spell essentially the same thing: continued frequent outages of our internet connection and speculative searching for a new provider. When are these outages, you ask? When it gets hot out, roughly from noon to 9 pm or so. As in wicked hawt. As in 115F or so. Why? The cables and insulation at our hub were installed in the 1950s. Haven't been upgraded since. Like everything else around here, no one actually seems to have engineered for the heat...a regularly repeated climatological phenomenon about which there is a full century and a half of accurately recorded data.

How do I know we need a bucket truck and some telephone pole attention? The first technician who visited, bless his heart, said as much. "Yeah, your neighbor kept calling with the same problem. I think they finally had to redo the insulation or something. I don't know. Maybe he has cable internet now."

Funny, funny good good times: being walked through the ridiculous modem power reset/phone wire/phone filter drill by every single customer service rep we've contacted. The last time the rep tried to get me to do the pointless dance again I started yelling at him and he hung up on me. The next rep tried it too, but (significantly more calm) I simply said, "No, I'm not going to do any of that." She paused and said "I'm sorry sir?" and I said "Sorry, we've done that several times now...I'm not going to do it again." "Ah, I can hear the disappointment in your voice sir." "Yes, I suppose you can." After which she offered to send a replacement modem. Which of course has not solved jack shit.

Finishing up here as it warms up outside. Much more interesting posts to come, I promise. But first, I'm off to Roswell New Mexico until Monday, July 21, to do a Santa Fe Opera project with my buddy Charles Gamble and a gaggle of Roswell's talented kinder.

Ice Ice Baby

The best thing about these here newfangled interwebs is how much bone-crushingly depressing news one can keep up with on a daily basis.

For example, this handy little map from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO., which provides a daily update of the rapidly receding polar sea ice at the North Pole.

National Geographic provides an interesting article.

I only discovered this foreboding news way, way down at the bottom of Google News under the Science and Technology link. The bulk of those news stories involved product release puff pieces for PS3 and Diablo III. Shall we amuse ourselves to death on the leading edge of the end of time? Why not?

Just remember: when there's no potable water left and temperatures soar, you can check back here and buy cacti from me.

Here's some more happy time stats from the BBC. You know, the news organization over there across the Atlantic somewhere, where folks have been taking climate change seriously for at least the past decade.

Then there's this site. As Will Rogers said, "It don't take all kinds, we just got all kinds."

Recently heard music for the End Times: Kevin Frenette 4: Connections (with Andy McWain, piano, Todd Keating, bass; Tatsuya Nakatani, percussion and Frenette on guitar) and Visions by Leonard/Skrowaczewski/Zappa (Mark Leonard, bass; Nick Scrowaczewski, percussion; Stanley Jason Zappa, tenor sax and Bb clarinet). Buy them now and listen to them on your portable CD player while rafting over what used to be Manhattan.

Obama Music

Wired responds to Barack Obama's iPod playlist being outed in Rolling Stone magazine

The thought of a President who publicly acknowledges a fondness for Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane is sweet indeed. Certainly Bill Clinton made vague gestures toward being hip, and he did reinstate Jazz on the Whitehouse Lawn (anyone have a transcription of his All Blues solo?)but can Bill ever be forgiven for Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow? More apropos, it turns out, for Clinton's tenure would have been Cecil Taylor's One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye, but that's another story.

The true Presidential hero of the music was of course Jimmy Carter. Imagine Cecil Taylor anywhere near the Whitehouse, let alone being hosted as an honored guest and performer. Imagine John McCain's iPod playlist, or GW Bush's for that matter. Lee Greenwood is easy to make fun of, I know, but how sad is it that most of the old white guys to whom we repeatedly see fit to hand the reins of power are absolutely ignorant of one of the greatest cultural contributions the US has ever made to the world?

An open plea to Mr. Obama, should he get elected: please immediately remove this man and revamp this curriculum, with much less Marsalis sauce. Thanks!

local color

Things remain cactoid in the neighborhood. I'm proud of my radio show, every Thursday from 1-3 Mountain Time, (you can stream it from KSFR) and I'm proud that I taught a bunch of art school students Algebra 1 for an entire year and didn't kill anyone (including myself). I'm proud of a lot of things, like any good American.

I'm proud I might be interviewing Pharaoh Sanders in advance of his NM Jazz Fest appearance. I'm proud to know amazing, creative, risk-taking, innovative musicians, artists and performers, and to have had the opportunity to work with some of them.

But mostly, like the crazy MF I am, I'm proud of my cacti. Go figure.

Echinocereus berlandieri (tagged as "blanckii," but that's a long and twisted story for another time):







Leuchtenbergia principis, crazy long tubercles and a big Ferocactus flower:





Mammillaria guelzowiana (used to be Krainzia or the even better Phellosperma guelzowiana):





Night-flowering Discocactus (yeah, disco, like Stayin' Alive) buenekeri:



Obregonia denegrii, nice flower, plant like a mutant artichoke:





Thelocactus bicolor ssp. bolaensis



Onward into high summer here, including very exciting 90 degree nighttime lows. We'll see whether or not everything just melts.