Is This Really The Face of Islamo-Fascism?

Juan Cole posted a blog entry on 080806 responding to Bush’s statements that week about fighting Islamo-fascists in Lebanon. Cole wrote: “Relatively few Shiite Muslims of Lebanon are fascists of any sort. There are all kinds of Shiites. The father of the renowned entertainer Haifa Wahbi is Shiite.”

To make his point, Cole included this photo of the pop singer and a YouTube link to one of Wahbi’s music videos. As I watched the video, I thought of one of my recurring schticks on Mideast policy: we should be fighting Islamo-fascism with MTV; these folks really want Brittany Spears in spandex more than they want Osama in a cave.

Here’s a video clip from another Lebanese pop singer: Nancy Ajram.

Café Mouffe Presents: Henry Butler

After talking about Henry Butler’s photography at MIT, I’ve been hankering to hear some of his music. Here’s a YouTube clip of Henry Butler and Bruce Katz at the Clavia booth at the NAMM 2007 trade show. Henry plays a Nord Stage and Bruce jams on a Clavia C1 organ. This blues sounds like it could go on forever; too bad the clip cuts out so abruptly.

Want more? Another clip features Henry Butler at SxSW. He accompanies an unidentified gospel singer in a church illuminated by stained glass windows. The sound is quite good for a cell phone recording from the audience, and even though the performers are telescopically distant, I like the dark mysterioso effect.

While you’re YouTubing, check out this clip of the blind pianist driving a car.

Henry Butler, Musician/Photographer

Henry Butler: Musician/Photographer. March 5, 2005. By SeenyaRita on Flickr.

Café Mouffe Encore: Dancing in Your Head

After watching a lot of Ornette Coleman clips last night, I was mesmerized by the memory of this 1976 album. I don’t have it (yet) on CD, or I would have listened immediately. Ornette’s riffing on the Rome 1974 clip brought it all back. I yearned to hear "Midnight Sunrise" with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Morocco. My body ached for the hypnotic trance embedded in memory. I could tast the music like an acid flashback. I don’t mean acid reflux. As I wrote last night, those were the days.

Amazon.com’s editorial description, written by Stuart Broomer, evokes it well:

While Ornette Coleman still performed in the classic acoustic-quartet configuration during the mid-1970s, he also began working with younger musicians, usually bearing electric guitars. This Coleman group, recorded in Paris in 1976, is the first incarnation of the band that would become Prime Time, and the "Theme from a Symphony" is a perky Coleman tune previously called "School Work" (on Science Fiction) and "The Good Life" (in the symphonic Skies of America). Coleman plays constantly here, blowing alto atop the layered, pulsing, synchronous rhythms of the band. A special relationship forms between the leader and the brilliant electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, their phrases often mirroring one another, while guitarists Bern Nix and Charlie Ellerbee and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson create a field of complex, dancing polyphony. Static and dynamic elements are recast as the group creates a sense of constant movement without conventional musical development. There's an element of funk, certainly, but the music is characterized by a trancelike quality that has affinities with minimalism and some African music. The roots of Coleman's new conception are apparent in the two pieces called "Midnight Sunrise," taken from the extensive tapes he made in 1973 playing with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, the hypnotic Moroccan ensemble of winds, strings, and drums.

Café Mouffe Presents: Ornette Coleman

In tribute to Ornette’s Pulitzer Prize for Music, here is a YouTube clip called Rome 1974 Part 1. This is the music of his 1973-5 recordings for Dancing in Your Head , heard here on a smaller, slightly less intense scale. It looks and sounds like it was recorded in a garage, but hey, those were the days. Listen to Ornette’s gritty- funky-fluid lines. If that gets your heart beating, try two later performance clips, live 1979 and Ornette Coleman & Prime Time with Pat Metheney. The first includes Coleman’s son Denardo on drums. The second was recorded in 1988 at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Brace yourselves, it smokes.

I haven’t found Rome part 2 yet. Here’s the lineup: Ornette Coleman: saxo ; James Ulmer: guitarra ; Sirone: bajo; Billy Higgins: batería.

Congratulations, Ornette!

Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for Music yesterday for his 2006 live album, Sound Grammar. This award typically goes to a living American composer of “classical” music which few people have ever heard. Now it goes to a living legend whom few outside avante-garde jazz circles have heard or would give a chance. Remember that photo of Ornette with Jimmy Carter in 1977? I never thought he’d be invited to the White House. Hey, I never thought I’d be invited to the White House. At age 78, Ornette now is getting the national acclaim he deserves. Here’s a NYT feature story from September 2006, when Sound Grammar was released.

Café Mouffe Presents: Bill Evans

I’m mesmerized by the motion of expressive hands on the keyboard. I see hands talking in vivid sign language the same way, peripherally. I don’t see the detail of finger positions, but the rhythm and sweep catches what’s left of my eye. So watch Bill Evans’ hands on this YouTube clip of My Foolish Heart. Watch how he bows over the piano as if in prayer.

A friend of mine saw Bill Evans at Gilly’s in Dayton in 1980. Between sets he found Evans hunched sadly over a cup of coffee in the White Tower across the street. “Every one digs Bill Evans,” my friend said by way of salutation. “Yeah?” Evans said with a shrug that waved off further conversation. Several months later Evans was dead, burned out from a life of heroin and cocaine.

Café Mouffe Presents: Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Arkestra

You don’t have to go to New Orleans to second-line. As Sun Ra reveals, you can do it on Saturn. You can do it in Café Mouffe. In fact, we encourage it. At a predetermined point in this YouTube clip you’re going to want to get up from the computer and march around the room. Go ahead, it’s OK. Dance. Salute the universe.

David Sanborn introduces Sun Ra here. Sanborn almost trumps The Master when it comes to cosmic headgear -- and that’s his hair, circa 1990 when this version of Retrospect was recorded for the MTV show Night Music. He asks Sun Ra about his creative influences. Answer: “The planets.” Also featured here are solos by longtime Arkestra sidemen Marshall Allen (alto)), Michael Ray (trumpet), and John Gilmore (tenor). Allen leads the Arkestra now after The Master returned to Saturn in 1993. You get a glimpse of vocalist June Tyson but don’t hear her. This may be free jazz, but the parade finale takes me straight back to second-line dancing down Bourbon Street.

Sun Ra was “an intergalactic tone research scientist,” according to Michael Ray. That’s my kind of career aspiration. “Sun Ra said he would always hide his treasures in chaos… he told us to play the unrepeatable,” Ray adds. “If you can walk with Sun Ra on your shoulders, at least you’re walking in the right spot.”

Next week at Café Mouffe: Charles MIngus Jazz Workshop at Antibe

Sun Ra Encore: Space Is The Place

When George W. Bush announced his plans for spreading democracy and pre-emptive war to Mars back in 2003, I didn’t get nostalgic for John F. Kennedy and Captain Kirk. My yearning turned to Sun Ra. I suggested a theme song for the Bush Doctrine: Space Is The Place.

There are two YouTube clips that give you a taste of the Sun Ra classic, though neither reaches the musical scale of his original 1972 recording.

The first clip roars with a hypnotic baritone sax line. It appears to be bootlegged via cell phone camera from a live Arkestra performance. Not sure whether Sun Ra is present on the earthly plane for this one. The YouTube notes are in Japanese, courtesy of the Kyoto University Light Music Club. Light music? That’s the spirit!

The second clip is, well, metaphysical. You get snappy glimpses of Arkestra vocalist June Tyson and a sly feel for Sun Ra the Trickster.

Space Is the Place is a 1974 film documentary by director John Coney. YouTube offers snippet 1 and snippet 2, flashbacks with that 60s/70s trippy experimental movie feel. Remember Barbarella? Sun Ra invokes "music of the sun, music of the stars, music of yourself...vibrating...yes, you are music too, you are all instruments, everyone is supposed to be playing their part in this vast Arkestra of the cosmos"

Space Is The Place is also the title of John Szwed’s 1997 biography of Sun Ra. American Routes featured an interview with the author in 2003; check out the notes for the January 13 show for links to audio interviews with Szwed and Arkestra adepts Marshall Allen and Michael Ray.

Sun Ra has an impressive Wikipedia page. Another extensive source is Saturn Web. While The Master looks on from the astral plane, the Arkestra continues to gig here on earth.

Finally, a nod to poet Major Jackson, whose book Leaving Saturn launched my latest Sun Ra journey. I’ve written about one of Jackson’s poems in “A car, a girl, a community of believers” parts 1, 2, and 3. I need to write part 4 about the Sun Ra poems.

Lorraine Gordon at 84: Alive at the Village Vanguard

Lorraine Gordon, proprietress of theVillage Vanguard, just published a memoir at age 84. Alive at the Village Vanguard recounts a life in jazz stretching back to the 1930s. She married Alfred Lion and helped him run Blue Note Records in the 1940s. Then she married Max Gordon, owner of the Vanguard. Devoted to NYC leftie politics in the 1950s and 60s, she was a co-founder of Women’s Strike for Peace. When Max died in 1989 she took over day-to-day management of the Vanguard.

The room is considered by many to be the most venerable venue in jazz. More than 100 recordings have “Live at the Village Vanguard” in their titles. "The room really responds to some artists more than others," Gordon says. "The walls start to shake a little when there's no business and the room says forget it, the vibes aren't right. I listen to the room. The room tells me a lot."

NPR did a fine audio tribute to her. The web page features interview outtakes; MP3 downloads of jazz classics recorded at the Vanguard; a gallery of photos from the memoir, including this snapshot of Lorraine and Louis Armstrong taken in 1946; and a memoir excerpt describing the first time Lorraine heard Thelonious Monk:

Monk's room was right off the kitchen. It was a room out of Vincent Van Gogh somehow - you know, ascetic - a bed, a cot, really, against the wall, a window and an upright piano. That was it.

We all sat down on Monk's narrow bed — our legs straight out in front of us, like children. I looked up for a moment and saw a picture of Billie Holiday taped to the ceiling. The door closed. And Monk, his back to us, began to play.

He had enormous hands. Those hands almost stammered, it seemed to me, right above the keys. 'Where are they going to come down?' I kept wondering. It was just riveting to watch.

There were a lot of modern musicians I didn't understand — they were fast and terrific but not comprehensible to me, necessarily. Thelonious Monk I understood. Always. Monk was a revelation. From our very first encounter he was right in my groove.

He was always working on something new. That day we heard him composing what would turn out to be "Ruby, My Dear," one of Monk's most admired signature compositions. He didn't even have a title for it yet. I just loved the melody, so much so that I can remember thinking: 'Boy, I wish he'd name it after me - call it "Sweet Lorraine" or something.' Eventually, in the course of a later visit, Thelonious did tell me that he had titled this piece "Ruby, My Dear," and I said to him, "Oh, who's Ruby?" "No-one," Thelonious answered. "I just like the name."

Another Steve Lacy Encore

Oh, man! I’ll never get any work done today. Reflections is the Steve Lacy source in my jazz collection. It blows me away to think I was 3 years old when it was recorded in 1958. It was the first album of Thelonious Monk tunes recorded by someone other than Monk. Lacy, not Sidney Bechet, inspired John Coltrane’s experiments with soprano sax. The Monk connection points to that genealogy of influence, plus the connections of sidemen heard with both Lacy Sand Trane, pianist Mal Waldron and drummer Elvin Jones. Lacy discography

Café Mouffe: Steve Lacy Encore

Listened to Bye-Ya last night. The minimalist structure and feel of Lacy’s music has always appealed to me. This time I was impressed by his tones: loose, fluid, endlessly inventive in small, shifting steps. I heard tones that make me think of Ornette Coleman: no matter how avante garde, never far from some gritty blues.

Here are more Lacy clips on YouTube:

Lacy muses about the soprano sax’s tempermental sound. “The soprano is like the difficult child of the family.”

Recessional for Steve Lacy is a tribute to the saxophonist/composer by film maker Paul Adams featuring Paul Adams on vibes and Herb Bayley cornet. Haunting.

Guitarist Greg Malcolm plays Lacy’s Life on Its Way. Hypnotic.

Lacy joined the lineup for this Miles Davis & Gil Evans Big Band cut of Wait Till You See Her. In this clip it’s the soundtrack to a bucolic video montage of mountains and shore.

Introducing Café Mouffe: Steve Lacy in Paris

Sunrise hasn’t happened yet in Yellow Springs, but it’s already Friday afternoon somewhere. Somewhere like Rue Mouffetard in Paris. Friday afternoon means jazz. When I get home from work on Friday, what I want most is to walk down the street to a funky little jazz club with a piano trio, bistro cooking, a coterie of lounge lizards, and some amiable conversation. A place like the Village Vanguard in New York or Snug Harbor in New Orleans. My village doesn’t have that kind of club, so I have to imagine it. I’d call it Cafe Mouffe. I know I’m blending places here – a village in Ohio, Greenwich Village maybe, Faubourg Marigny, the ancient village of Lutecia on the Left Bank. But hey, it’s my imagination, isn’t it? I need all these places to conjure the ambiance I want.

This YouTube clip of Steve Lacy’s sextet in Paris does the same kind of blending and conjuring for me. Lacy is joined by his wife Irene Aebi on violin and vocals, Steve Potts on alto, Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass, Oliver Johnson on drums, and Bobby Few on piano. The composition is called “Prospectus.” We know all the details thanks to the dedicated lounge lizards who commented on the clip. That’s a virtual jazz club for you. That’s Café Mouffe.

Like a lot of American jazz musicians in the 1960s, Steve Lacy left New York for the expatriate jazz scene in Paris. I dreamed of going there to hear him. Never thought he’d come here. Eventually he started coming back to the States every year to gig around. To my unending astonishment, he came to Yellow Springs in 1997, performing in Kelly Hall with the trio featured on Bye-Ya. It wasn’t Friday afternoon but a wintry Tuesday night. My friend Bob Grubbs dragged me out, insisting it was something that could only happen once in a lifetime. He was right. Hearing Steve Lacy in my laid-back little village remains the most incredible musical experience I ever had.

Coming next Friday to Café Mouffe: Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Arkestra

Another Cool Cat Turns 50

What a week for cake and candles! Longfellow turned 200. Elizabeth Taylor turned 75 – whatever happened to National Velvet, anyway? And today the Cat in the Hat turns 50. If you’re a child of a certain age (and who isn’t?), you will hear one of the Cat’s catchy rhymes, then long-forgotten neural pathways will be firing all day long. The same warning goes for the Cat’s animated musical birthday card. I was thrilled to find it, then I couldn’t turn it off.

As you’d expect for any 50-something cultural icon these days, the Cat in the Hat has his own Wikipedia page. But who knew the book has a scholarly edition, The Annotated Cat? According to the publisher’s blurb, “The Cat in the Hat and its sequel operate on many levels. The books teach reading, but they also teach about poetry, politics, ethics, comics, history… even conartistry.”

NPR celebrated this morning in its comprehensive audio-historical way. The NPR web page is loaded with additional content and links to other sources. Here’s the skinny:

John Hersey of Hiroshima fame had a hand in the book’s inspiration. He prompted publisher William Spalding to bring out an engaging children’s book that would solve the urgent question of the day, “Why can’t Johnny read?” That was the 1950s version of a pedagogical crisis as old as Socrates. The publisher asked Dr. Seuss to produce a reading primer with a 200-word vocabulary that was entertaining enough to replace Dick and Jane. Dr. Seuss chaffed at the word restrictions. The book took a year and a half to write, and in the end it deployed a 236-word vocabulary. It made Dr. Seuss a rock star among children’s authors, but it was too “subversive” to gain acceptance as a school primer. Like the Cat himself, Dr. Seuss knew how to break the rules and get away with it.

“Into each life some rain must fall…”

Today is the 200^th birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, scion of poets everywhere with three-part names. In the 19^th century you couldn’t get a union card in the Literary Lions Guild without a name scanned in iambic pentameter. Think Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Sarah Orne Jewett. The most perfectly metered, onomatopoeic name actually had four parts: Edna St. Vincent Millay. How’s that for burning the candle on both ends?

To celebrate, the HWL bicentennial committee sent snippets of weather-drenched verse to 1,800 meteorologists around the country. The Longfellow Poetry Forecast includes old chestnuts like “Into each life some rain must fall/Some days must be dark and dreary.” And there are more obscure couplets like “She heard the birds sing, she saw the sun shine,/The air of summer was sweeter than wine.” Beware callow youth who try to couple with that line.

See Mud? It’s Eric Dolphy Day!

Do they still celebrate Eric Dolphy in Syracuse, New York? Back in the 70s friends of mine at LeMoyne College cut classes and partied on the first winter day when enough snow melted so they could see mud again. They proclaimed this earliest harbinger of spring to be Eric Dolphy Day.

Listen to this YouTube clip of Eric’s solo performance of God Bless the Child and you’ll understand why. That bass clarinet sounds chthonic. Makes me want to wallow with the toads in some primordial ooze. Maybe by my back door. Get down, batrachians!

It isn’t exactly mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful yet, as e e cummings put it. But there’s enough moist, bare earth under foot to summon Eric’s spirit.

This is the debut of a weekly series of jazz clips that I’ll call Café Mouffe. Why the name? Tune in next Friday and I’ll explain.

Mardi Gras: Smokin’ with Some Barbecue!

I’ll miss the Zulu and Rex parades. I won’t hassle with the drunken mob on Bourbon Street. But I can listen to Kermit Ruffins! I have some beads, a fine Cuban cigar, and spicy andouile sausage from Farmer Dale. I excavated a snow pit for my grill. So, bluntly speaking, I’ll be smokin’ with some barbecue tonight. Happy Mardi Gras, y’all.

FOR THE FEED (which doesn’t carry the enclosure at the top of the post): Check out the YouTube clip of Kermit singing Smokin’ with Some Barbecue.

“Je T’Aime” Encore

After I found the YouTube clip of Je T’Aime, I realized the video featured Jane Birkin, not Bardot. Perusing the song’s Wikipedia page, I learned that BB judged her version to be too scandalous to release in the 60s. Go figure. So Jane is heard panting along with Serge Gainsbourg in the YouTube clip. Their 1969 version was a #1 hit across Europe, perhaps because the Vatican and BBC banned it. Nonetheless, the best account of the song’s history is a BBC H2g2 Guide. Sample insight: “The sound of the first few bars, surely the Wurlitzer organ's most erotic moment, made their mark on the musical landscape and will long be associated with the free sexuality of the sixties and seventies.” Yeah. Go, Wurlitzer. Je T’aime!

Remembering Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life

MEDIA NOTES: “Lush Life” - A Self-Portrait in Song, NPR 020607

Music journalist Ashley Kahn remembers Billy Strayhorn on NPR this morning. Here’s the NPR intro: “Best known as the songwriting genius who created many of Duke Ellington's masterpieces, Billy Strayhorn is the subject of a new documentary premiering Tuesday night on public television, as well as a fine companion CD. Both are titled Lush Life, after Strayhorn's most enduring composition, which commentator Ashley Kahn sees as the composer's autobiography in music form.”

The radio piece is supported by an enriched web page offering five different versions of “Lush Life” (by Andy Bey, Nat King Cole, Joe Henderson, Nancy Wilson, and the composer himself) plus an essay by Kahn.

“A car, a girl, a community of believers” – Part 1

POEM: “Some Kind of Crazy” by Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002)

I am enchanted by this line of poetry. It wormed its way into my memory, and now and then it floats to the top of inner speech when I should be using my words to transact one or another dreary task. It’s the final line of a poem by Major Jackson. I heard him read it on an excellent edition of Open Source with Christopher Lydon on January 23.

“Some Kind of Crazy” tells a story about a street person from the Philadelphia neighborhood where Jackson grew up. As he walked around the neighborhood he pretended he was a car. “He was definitely someone who gave texture to my neighborhood,” the poet explains before reading the poem. “Everyone knew who he was. A number of the girls would ask for a ride, and he would pretend like he was parking the car and get out and act as if he was opening the passenger door for them.”

“It doesn’t matter if you can’t see/Steve’s 1985 Corvette,” the poem begins

Like a Baptist
Preacher stroking the dark underside
Of God’s wet tongue, he can make you

Believe.

The poem ends:

We, the faithful, never call
Him crazy, crackbrained, just a little
Touched. It’s all he ever wants:
A car, a girl, a community of believers.

Amen.

“That’s all any of us want, maybe. That’ll do,” Chris Lydon says in that awkward moment after a poem is recited and the silence waits for a response. “A ‘community of believers’ is interesting. That’s what a poet wants, right?”

“A community of readers,” Jackson answers, “– and believers.”

All of this – the conversational setup, the poem itself, the response – happens between 35:20 and 38:00 on the podcast. It works perfectly, poem and context. Every poem, when recited aloud, exists in an aural context. At poetry readings the nervous patter preceding a poem can be longer than the poem itself, and after the last line is uttered… few poets are brave enough to let the silence linger. And few listeners loosen their character armor enough to allow an audible response.

It’s paradoxical: more poets are writing and publishing poems today than ever before, but few poems really find an audience, a community of believers. We need to work on creating more contexts where poetry can be experienced. That’s a creative project as necessary as the work of writing poems. This edition of Open Source does the job well.

I have more to say about “Some Kind of Crazy” which I’ll pursue in subsequent posts. For now, I am grateful that hearing one poem and remembering just one of its lines has returned me like a prose-prodigal son to the visionary linguistic space of poetry.

This is just the first of many paeans to Open Source with Christopher Lydon. To my mind, it is the most intelligent conversation anywhere on radio. I get it as a podcast, the only one I listen to on a daily basis. It’s where I expect to find depth, nuance, perspective on issues like Iraq and global warming. Interspersed among the current affairs topics are gems like this show with Major Jackson which remind you that there is more to life than the daily news. Need a break? A little inspiration? Listen to Chris Lydon with Philip Roth, Daniel Barenboim, and Emerson biographer Robert D. Richardson.