It is just before midnight and I am standing on the tacky floor of the Sunset Strip tourist trap known as the House of Blues, wondering about my purpose in life. Why am I in this oversize dive, I ask myself. The HOB has long been a clip joint where every surface has a layer of grime and every employee has the haunted look of a carnival grafter looking for ways to bilk the next mark, the next rube, the next chump.

At last, the background music fades out, the house lights dim, and the soiled curtains part to reveal a tuxedo-clad conglomeration of soul-bop funk ‘n’ rollers who have whipped themselves into a frenzy. Whether they are truly possessed by the spirit or are simply acting up a storm is something we will never know; either way, the effect on the audience is considerable.

The group is epic, starting with a ten-piece brass section that is punching and swinging at the same time. Their sound alternates between superb and something slightly better than that. There are also two keyboard players plus a rhythm guitarist, bassist, drummer, and five backing vocalists. They are wound up tighter than a skinflint’s purse strings and they conspire to lay down an irrefutable beat that shakes the entire square block of Sunset Boulevard.

I glanced at the crowd and saw people bobbing and weaving, often with awestruck expressions or big smiles on their faces. Many on the dance floor appear to have lost some control of their hips which are now undulating in a manner that is suggestive, to say the least.

High NPM (Notes Per Minute)

Insinuating its way over and under this churning, burning, and finger-poppin’ sonic stew is the electric guitar of Sam Mayfield, a musician who seems to defy the laws of physics when playing his axe. His approach to the instrument might be looked at in this manner: while strumming an eight chord progression is all well and fine, listeners might find it interesting if the player picked out each individual note in each of the chords, all in the same amount of time it would take a regular performer to simply strum. Mayfield is positively phenomenal. You know about high MPH (miles per hour), Mayfield has high NPM (notes per minute).

The Man

After three high-energy numbers from this powerhouse band, the time was ripe for the big guy, the main man, the true king, the prime shouter of the soul review, the legend, Doctor Solomon Burke. He emerged from the wings slowly, regally, all three hundred pounds of him. His royal badness entered wearing a floor-length ermine robe, seemingly floating through an aura of rarefied air.

His presence alone caused a visceral change in the crowd. Clad in a blinding gold suit, he made his way to the edge of the stage and created a near-riot when he began handing out roses which he gently kissed in between delivering lines of one of his slower (read “still pretty damn fast”) songs. I was nearly trampled once and several times knocked off balance by whooping or crying females who rushed forward to obtain one of those flowers.

Burke was in full voice and he had come forth to take no prisoners. He was an unstoppable force of nature and one of those acts of God for which there is no possible insurance policy. All the while, Burke’s very big band slammed out the chunka-chunka-ka-pow-pow beats and Mayfield worked his Fender six-string in an attempt to perform at a never-before-heard rate of speed. But it was the big guy who controlled everything. After all, Burke is larger than life in every possible way.

Throughout the concert, he thundered, he crooned, he coaxed, he demanded, he talked sweet, he talked funky, he made you dance, he made you sweat, he made girls cry, and he made us all dizzy. Let’s face it: Solomon Burke conquered.

Commercial Tie-In

The whole grand affair was part of the promotional launch for one of the greatest collections of bompin’ stompin’ rockin’ music ever recorded. I am speaking of the Rhino Records product, the superlative “Beg, Scream & Shout: The Big Ol’ Box of ’60s Soul.” I love mine (please note my dutiful helpful hype) and have enjoyed every one of the 144 (count ‘em!) tracks containing some of the thickest, nicest, and nastiest soul grooves you’ll hear anywhere.

Coda

Led by Burke, the entire ensemble performed with exuberance, ebullience, and exaltation. They played like this was the very last concert anybody was ever going to hear and it was absolutely magnificent. I left the venue on such a high that I almost didn’t notice my shoes sticking to the floor with each step.

Such was the state of our music temples in the nineteen nineties; I have returned to the HOB on several occasions in the last decade-and-a-half and the grime has always been apparent and annoying. Some things never change.

For more information: http://thekingsolomonburke.com/

Video of “Cry to Me”

Article is Copr. © John Scott G, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved. IMAGE CREDIT: ”Best of” album cover from Rhino Records.

From the band’s first few notes, it was clear that the packed house at Cozy’s blues club was in for a treat. We just didn’t know how big a treat.

The opening numbers featured nifty solos from Terry DuRouen on electric guitar and James Davis on electric keyboards, plus tight rhythm from Howard Deere on bass and Danny Pucillo on drums.

Deere, Davis, and DuRouen each took a vocal, and they were smoothly soulful. If these guys had kept going on their own, it would have been a fine night of entertainment because of their tasty chops and a background that is steeped in the blues. But there was Something Else on the way to totally take over the evening.

Heavenly Hell

DuRouen stepped to the mic and introduced a nitro-powered force-field called Guitar Shorty and all hell broke loose. At first, Shorty stood stock still while playing at the very back of the club. His axe plugged into a wireless system, he wailed, and the club seemed to start spinning.

His pyrotechnics were hypnotic as he leisurely made his way through the audience. Stretching out a snaky and delightfully evil blues, he regarded us with a smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eye. Every section of the club got to see a few moments of rockin’ blues performed in an up-close-and-personal manner. Shorty played for people at the bar, and for folks seated at their tables, and for those who were lined up against the wall.

Excitement kept building as more and more people spotted him moving through the club. When he climbed up on stage, the tension broke and he received the first of dozens of rounds of strong applause.

Sonic Stratosphere

For the next 90 minutes, the very concept of what can be done on an electric guitar was altered in the mind of every listener. It seemed as if no one else in the world plays like this. It may be safe to say no one else in the world has ever played like this.

Think of the most amazing blues-rock performance you can imagine. Think about Bluesbreakers-era Eric Clapton. Think about Albert Collins. Think about Albert King, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy. Hell, go ahead and think Hendrix. You probably won’t believe me until you experience it for yourself, but Guitar Shorty in person can be that powerful.

What’s more amazing, after a half-hour break, he climbed back on stage and cranked things up for another truly superlative 90-minute set. Let’s do the simple math: that’s three hours of stinging, soaring, vibrant blues-rock numbers that shook hips, turned heads, and drained the club’s beer kegs.

Historic

Guitar Shorty knows how to work a room, having started performing at age 14. In his career, he has toured or played with Ray Charles, Otis Rush, Sam Cooke, Guitar Slim, B.B. King, Little Milton, Johnny Copeland, Lowell Fulson, and the aforementioned T-Bone Walker. He traded licks with Jimi Hendrix, and historians have noted that some riffs on “Are You Experienced” were first developed by Guitar Shorty back when he was in Seattle dating and eventually marrying Jimi’s half-sister, Marcia.

Sounds

The tone Shorty gets from his equipment is phenomenal. The sound seems to start somewhere down inside his bone marrow. Coupled with this furious playing is a superior sense of dynamics. Some people can make a guitar speak. Guitar Shorty makes his axe shout, orate, pontificate, sing, and nibble on your ear.

Shorty’s original tunes are skillful, but what’s most impressive is his ability to explore so many lovely nuances of each song’s chords. His improvisational skills are such that you believe he could take any three-note progression and turn it into a superlative hell-bent-for-leather solo.

From where is he getting all these blistering licks? “I hear so much music coming in my ears,” he told me. “When my eyes are closed, I’m seeing music. And I’m seeing the frets on my guitar.” There are magnificent melodies inside this man, and it takes a live show for him to let them all out.

Guitar Shorty (born David William Kearney) should be a household name for his spotlight-grabbing stage presence alone. In concert, he takes the axe and strums it, flat-picks it, finger-picks it; he plays his guitar with two hands, one hand, a foot, his teeth, even his rump. He bends notes on both sides of the nut, and I swear he sometimes was bending entire chords without touching the whammy bar.

Whether strutting his stuff or just delivering a song with his big-throated blues wail of a voice, Guitar Shorty puts on the kind of show you never forget.

Addendum: The All Music site lists Guitar Shorty’s activity as being in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. However, his website and the Alligator Records site both feature listings of upcoming gigs, so I guess that “10s” should be added to that list. Okay, about the headline of this article . . . well look, we just couldn’t resist. Could you? For more information: www.guitarshorty.com

 
Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G – all commercial and reprint rights reserved. Originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com.

The problem mainly has to do with the band’s inclination to attempt to integrate quasi-blues elements into their compositions, which detracts from their consistency and vitality and ends up inundating them with unessential, irrelevant and distracting elements. I know that towards the end of his career Jim Morrison reported a desire to become more of an old grizzled blues player than an incandescent pop star, however this was a deplorable ideation on his part and a large contributor to the overall decline in the quality of the band’s recorded oeuvre.

There is nothing per se wrong with blues bands, other than their proclivity to be rather boring. It was completely wrongful, though, for the Doors to conceptualize themselves in this dimension, because that wasn’t what they were about, it wasn’t for what they stood for, it was inconsistent with who they were as an integral performing unit, it detracted from the sufficiency and vitality of the band’s premise, and it interfered with its ability to model a new way of looking at issues from the mundane to the profound and wildly extravagant, such as what is the purpose of life and the meaning of being.

To begin with, though, it’s hard to overestimate the impact the Doors had on the little clique I was a member of in high school. They exploded onto the scene like some kind of weird neutron bomb, genetically altering everything within its path. All of a sudden those Simon & Garfunkel records we’d been listening to just weren’t the same anymore. The girls we knew debated endlessly about who they’d rather have sex with: Jim Morrison or Mick Jagger. This was mildly puzzling as there were any number of perfectly serviceable guys hanging around with whom they could have sex if in fact they wanted to, but this seemed to fall outside the scope of discourse (and didn’t really start happening until all of us transported ourselves off to matriculate at Berkeley).

The Doors were qualitatively different than the other influential bands then comprising the soundtrack of our lives, such as the Jefferson Airplane, Love, the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield. Yes, there was the theatrical presence of the aforementioned Mr. Morrison, the disconcerting and other-worldly effect of Ray Manzarek’s spooky organ, John Densmore’s crisp drum riffs (particularly notable are the off-beat toms) and Robby Krieger’s experimentalist guitar playing. But there is something more to it than that; a phenomenological texture that sharply differentiated them from their immediate counterparts.

If one were making a list of influential bands of the time, the Doors would have to be in a separate column. Thanks to brilliant production by Paul Rothchild, their records had a sound all of their own, which amalgamated and congealed the different instruments into a supernatural whole. While it was possible to hear each instrument clearly in separation, there was an overall sheen to them that one didn’t find with records by any of the other aforementioned bands. Please understand I’m not casting aspersions on the production of records by these other bands, which was wonderful and is highly deserving of acclaim in its own right. All I’m trying to point out is that the Doors records sounded completely different. And, the band’s creaky but visionary existentialist ethos of love-sex-death-nihilism-hallucination-delusion, both explicit and implied, put them into a different category altogether.

I saw the band on a half dozen occasions throughout its duration and evolution, performing shows of varying quality. Why they used those gigantic Acoustic amplifiers remains a mystery. While they made for an inspiring pile of speaker cabinets, they were transistorized (not tubes), and they sounded terrible – harsh and brittle. I always hoped Krieger had a small Fender twin by the side of the stage, which is what he really used, and the Acoustics simply were props (this commonly is done today with, say, Marshall stacks). In the band’s defense, PA technology in the late ‘60s – early ‘70s was primitive, particularly with monitoring. So, much of a band’s amplification power had to come from on stage. I also saw the band circa 2002 sans Densmore at the Universal Amphitheater, with Ian Astbury doing a creditable Jim Morrison impression (though Val Kilmer’s in Oliver Stone’s movie about the band might have been better overall; a legitimate subject for debate).

I listened to all of their records from start to finish during the space of a recent afternoon. Essentially there are six Doors records: their eponymously entitled debut; “Strange Days;” “Waiting for the Sun;” “Soft Parade;” “Morrison Hotel” and “L.A. Woman.” Yes they did release “Absolutely Live” while the band still was together, but I would situate that more in the category of concert performances. “American Prayer” isn’t bad but it was released years later; as a concept record of spoken poetry with music overdubs it doesn’t really count. There were a couple of eminently forgettable albums by the band after Morrison’s demise. And, the past several years have seen a plethora of releases of live shows. I was following these for a while but then got tired of listening to them as they are pallid examples of the band’s work, particularly when compared to the paradigmatic cases of their studio albums. King Crimson has a similar problem with releases of its live shows. I know there are completists among us who enjoy these types of initiatives, but they really are best forgotten; just because they exist doesn’t mean they should be allowed to escape from confinement.

The first three records may be considered as a group. The individual songs, and even the order in which they appear, have become crystallized over time. In retrospect, though, some clearly are better than others. Perhaps a vestige of their early performing days, the first record contained several anomalous quasi-blues songs like “Soul Kitchen,” “Alabama Song” and “Backdoor Man.” These are markedly inferior to songs such as “The Crystal Ship” and “Take It as It Comes,” which more felicitously iterate the band’s essential characteristics. [On the topic of “The Crystal Ship,” there is an astonishing cover version, readily locatable on the www, by the band The Joyride; if you haven’t heard it you must stop everything you’re doing and listen to it immediately.]

“Strange Days” is much more consistent. Compositionally, “I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind” is reminiscent of “End of the Night;” “My Eyes Have Seen You” could be an extension of “I Looked at You;” and “Horse Latitudes” is entirely dispensable. If there was one song I would omit it would be “Moonlight Drive,” which again veers off-point; and then of course there are the lengthy expositions of “When the Music’s Over” versus “The End.” Its then scandalous Oedipal references notwithstanding, “When the Music’s Over” actually is a superior song to “The End” in most respects; the poetry is better and the music’s far more engaging.

“Waiting for the Sun” is the pinnacle of this trio. There really isn’t a bad song on it. “Hello, I Love You” is one of the great pop songs of all time; the only one I can compare it to is “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones. “Love Street” echoes the themes of “People Are Strange;” “Summer’s Almost Gone” and “Wintertime Love” are ingenious counterparts; and “Yes, the River Knows” is a beautiful, mystical, bittersweet paean to lost romance. If there was one song I would omit it would be “My Wild Love,” which is more in the nature of “Horse Latitudes” and generally out-of-place when juxtaposed against the others.

The controversies really started to occur with the band’s fourth album, “The Soft Parade.” By and large I would like to come to the album’s defense. Mainly listeners were turned off by the addition of orchestral elements. Personally I do not view this as problematic; it actually enhances those songs on which it is deployed. The record sounds different; there is more separation and not as much midrange, it sounds crisper. Maybe this was due to the evolution of recording technology, which then was occurring at a rapid pace. The real problem is that the quality of songwriting has become much more inconsistent. “Touch Me,” “Wild Child,” “Shaman’s Blues” and particularly “Wishful Sinful” are amazing. However “Tell All the People,” “Do It,” “Easy Ride” and “Runnin’ Blue” are horrible; much worse than even the worst songs on the album’s three predecessors. I still am of two minds about the song “The Soft Parade.” I can remember one evening up at Berkeley hooking up a huge PA system and repeatedly broadcasting the song’s introductory declamation (“When I was back there in seminary school …”) over Berkeley’s entire northside. This was particularly amusing given that there in fact were (and are) several seminary schools there.

“Morrison Hotel” continued to evidence the band’s slide. Most of the songs are terrible, such as “Roadhouse Blues,” “You Make Me Real” and “The Spy.” “Maggie McGill” is nothing more than a drunken rant. “Waiting for the Sun” is all right, however, it sounds more like it should have been on the earlier record of the same name. Three songs have intriguing breaks about mid-way through: “Peace Frog,” “Ship of Fools” and “Land Ho!” If one was to edit these breaks and put them together, changing keys and tempi as appropriate, then simply erase the rest of the songs, the result might be halfway interesting. “Blue Sunday” and “Indian Summer” are beautiful love songs, though derivative of “Yes, the River Knows.”

Then we get to “L.A. Woman,” which is an awful record all around no matter how you look at it. The production is uninspired, the songs are mediocre, and the band is a pallid shadow of its former self. The only half-acceptable one is “Riders on the Storm,” and even it isn’t that good. The entire album could be safely extirpated from the Doors’ canon without loss, and in fact most likely an enhancement to its durability. Why they released this record will remain a mystery.

Article is Copr. © 2012 by David Kronemyer, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

Two musicians walk into a bar. One doesn’t order a drink. Hey, it could happen.

If you smiled, this book (“You’ve Got a Deal: The Biggest Lies of the Music Business”) is for you. Actually, even if you didn’t find it funny, you can learn a lot about musicians and the music business by reading this volume of jokes, tales, stories, puns, one-liners, and sarcastic observations.

No doubt some people will read these pages and shriek with the kind of laughter that comes from recognition. Others will enjoy plenty of LOL moments but think that “the biz” can’t possibly be as horrific as presented here. But in a brief conversation with the author, Weber told me that the music industry is “actually much worse than what is in the book. Every one of my colleagues who has read it has told me at least one story that goes even further than what I’ve written.”

As Weber notes at the start of the work:

If you think that many of the lies you are about to read are the great truths of our business, then like me, you have been in the business way too long. If you think that some of the stuff you are about to read is especially cruel, harsh or too brutal, then you haven’t been in the business long enough.

Naturally, Weber includes the most famous comment on the topic, the one by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

While you might be tempted to say Jeffrey Weber’s paperback opus is “cynical,” I think that “realistic” is closer to the truth. In any case, it’s damn funny.

Inside Information

Weber writes from a position of knowledge based on his extensive experience and a wealth of inside information. “Probably too much inside information,” he says with a rueful grin.

With a three-decade career in music, he has produced tracks or full albums for an incredible array of artists: From Ronnie Dio to Pat Boone. From MC Lyte to David Crosby. From Jackson Browne to the Count Basie Orchestra. From Nancy Wilson to Ritchie Blackmore. From Etta James to the Utah Symphony.

His wide-ranging credits, which you can find on the StudioExpresso website, also include such artists as Steve Lukather, Marcus Miller, Michael McDonald, Chick Corea, Stanley Clark, Linda Hopkins, Kenny Burrell, McCoy Tyner, Buddy Miles, Billy Preston, Kenny Rankin, Diane Reeves, Rita Coolidge, and Luther Vandross.

Helpful

In addition to provoking guffaws, chuckles, giggles, and hoots of laughter, Weber feels that the book can help up-and-coming musicians prepare for some of the problems, challenges, difficulties, roadblocks, and speed-bumps they are likely to encounter along the way. In reality, You’ve Got a Deal! is an instruction manual disguised as a joke book.

The opening section on “Biggest Record Company Lies” is somewhat balanced with the section on “Biggest Musician and Singer Lies.” Well, perhaps “balanced” is not the proper word because the record company lies will keep you poor while the musician and singer lies can be countered by insisting they hit the right notes and refrain from the substance abuse.

Observations

Weber points out that many entries in the book are verbatim reports of actual conversations or business correspondence. As with this record company executive’s reply to an attorney’s request for fairness in a recording contract: “I’ll be Goddamned before I’ll commit to being equitable!”

There are some jokes requiring at least some knowledge of the situations, personalities, and job descriptions within the business. Such as when the record label A&R guy is asked his opinion of a new song and he says “I don’t know — I’m the only one who’s heard it.” Or this observation: “There is a very fine line between ‘arranging’ and ‘mental illness’.”

The rewrite of the 23rd Psalm from the perspective of the rhythm section is blasphemous but delightful: “The Lord is my drummer, I shall not rush. . . .”

Some of the jokes are miniature album reviews or critical analyses of people’s careers: “What do a cup of coffee and Eric Clapton have in common? The both suck without Cream.”

Some anecdotes are helpful for fathers of daughters who date musicians: “What do you say to a drummer in a three-piece suit? Will the defendant please rise.”

There is also an amorous short story that is hysterically entertaining because the profanity and anatomical references have been replaced by the names of jazz musicians: “It was a balmy night out and I was feeling thelonious. I hadn’t had any tatum in so long. . . .”

Types of Humor

Light bulb jokes, tone-deaf jokes, and musicians playing out-of-tempo jokes abound. Some are funnier than others, but the book seemed free of any real groaners. And sometimes Weber got me to choke on my coffee as a laugh line crept up on me. One such example was his special feature on imagined Jewish Country-Western song titles, which contains this gem:

“Mamas Don’t Let Your Ungrateful Sons Grow Up to Be Cowboys (When They Could Very Easily Have Just Taken Over the Family Hardware Business that My Own Grandfather Broke His Back to Start and My Father Built Up Over Years of Effort Which Apparently Doesn’t Mean Anything Now That You’re Turning Your Back on Such a Gift!)”

Definitions

Because one of my current jobs is editing the “DictionaryTomorrow” project, I was especially interested in his Glossary of Terms at the end of the book. Here are a few of the ones that made me smile:

Agent: A character who resents performers getting 90% of his salary.

Augmented Fifth: A 36-ounce bottle.

Modulation: “Nothing is bad in modulation.”

Movie composer: Someone who can write like anyone except himself.

Plague: A collective noun, as in “a plague of conductors.”

Transsectional: An alto who moves to the soprano section.

Vibrato: Used by singers to hide the fact that they are on the wrong pitch.

Giving Back

Weber is donating a portion of the proceeds from book sales to two organizations. The first is Reader to Reader (www.readertoreader.org), a non-profit group which distributes books to school and public libraries in the poorest communities. The second is MusiCares (www.grammy.org/musicares) which provides financial assistance to those in need within the music community.

Calls to Action

Musicians, producers, songwriters, and others in the industry are invited to participate in further editions of the book. Weber and his publisher “are looking for more great lies, stories, song titles, jokes, definitions” and more. Don’t know how long Weber will maintain this incredible accessibility, but he prints his e-mail in the book: it’s WeberWorks@earthlink.net but please just contact him with serious comments, okay? In other words, don’t you be a joke.

Finally, I’d like to quote one of his most intriguing observations:

There apparently exists, somewhere in Los Angeles, a computer that generates music for television dramas. When TV composers need a new dramatic cue, they turn on this computer; after sorting through millions of possible musical themes, it spits out “ONE LONG LOW SCARY NOTE ON A SYNTHESIZER,” and this becomes the cue. The next time they need a cue, the computer spits out “TWO LONG SCARY NOTES ON A SYNTHESIZER.” And so on, ad infinitum. We need to locate this computer and destroy it with hammers — along with TV producers and entertainment lawyers.

For that item alone: Jeffrey Weber, a grateful nation salutes you.

Book Summary

You’ve Got a Deal: The Biggest Lies of the Music Business by Jeffrey Weber, illustrated by Bob Wynne

Headline Books, Softcover, 176 pages; ISBN: 9780938467328; $14.95

www.headlinebooks.com

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

Jocelyn Pook does not hear sound the way most people do. Whereas someone else might hear a droning piece of machinery, she hears the foundation of a song in which mere sonic noise is fashioned into auditory excitement. Where one person might hear a simple chord, she hears the potential for a mellifluous combination of aria and electronica. Where the average person might notice a few birds chirping in the distance, she hears the idea for the creation of an etude or tone poem.

Of course, that’s just the way I see it. And so is this: Jocelyn Pook creates music of such majestic beauty that it serves to suggest the grace of the gods.

Talent

Let’s back up a moment and consider the talent it would take to compose music for, and perform along with, Peter Gabriel, PJ Harvey, Laurie Anderson, This Mortal Coil, Massive Attack, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nick Cave, Lyle Lovett, and the Communards. While that is daunting enough, now ponder what would be needed to be able to handle commissions and assignments from Stanley Kubrick, Derek Jarman, the BBC, The King’s Singers, and the Royal Opera. Pretty nifty, but every one of those achievements is just part of the resume of Jocelyn Pook.

Her curriculum vitae begins with her studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama but immediately afterwards she hit the road with the Communards and very quickly began collaborating with musicians, artists, choreographers, and filmmakers who operate at a high level of critical and popular recognition.

Scores

In addition to recording, touring, and leading her own projects (Electra Strings and the Jocelyn Pook Ensemble), she has created or contributed to the soundtracks and scores for such motion pictures as: The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford; L’Emploi du Temps, directed by Laurent Cantet; Brick Lane, directed by Sarah Gavron; and Gangs of New York, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Also among her motion picture credits are Caravaggio, the Derek Jarman film; Room in Rome, directed by Julio Medem; The People v. Leo Frank, directed by Ben Loeterman; The Government Inspector, directed by Peter Kosminsky; Storm Over Everest, directed by David Breashers; and Death On The Staircase, directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade; as well as Edward II, Mad About Music, and Blight for British television.

Music for the stage is another area of specialization for Pook and her work has been a part of My Body, Your Body, the DV8 Physical Theatre production; Deluge for O Vertigo; the National Theatre’s production of St Joan; Phantasmaton for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company; and Darshan Singh Bhuller’s Requiem for the Phoenix Dance Company.

The ROH2, which is the contemporary arm of the Royal Opera House, commissioned and produced her opera, Ingerland. BBC Radio 3 commissioned her Portraits in Absentia, which intertwines music, resonances, and voices from her recorded phone messages. Pook has also composed music for such theatre productions as: Peter Brook’s Insomniac; Bobby Baker’s Box Story and How to Live; and The Royal Shakespeare Company’s King John.

Ears Wide Open

There is no doubt that Pook’s most widely-known work resulted from her being asked to compose the original music for Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. People tend to fall into one of two positions in discussing that score. “I love it!” say some folks. “I hate it!” say some others.

When questioned, the haters almost always refer to the soundtrack’s solo piano piece, “Musica Ricercata, II,” which was composed by Gyorgy Ligeti. While I am a huge fan of that piece, as well as everything I’ve ever heard by Ligeti, I recognize that his oeuvre may be an acquired taste. The point is that Pook’s exquisite compositions in the Kubrick film are often unfairly maligned by people who haven’t bothered to look into them.

There are also some strange comments about what are called “those backwards vocals” on the track used in “Masked Ball,” the erotic coupling sequence of the film. It is unlike almost anything else utilized in motion pictures. My own reaction is one of awe at how organic this piece sounds while at the same time possessing an almost mathematically precise progression of voice-and-instruments.

While nothing on the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack attained the popular acceptance of that portion of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” used in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I find her compositions to be at an equally high level. For me, her achievements are as compelling as that Strauss work. In both cases, I first heard them while watching the films. And in both cases, I have subsequently played the works in their entirety many times.

Whole New Worlds

Jocelyn Pook creates musical works that combine the new and the traditional. Her approach melds the energy of youth with the experience of maturity. In piece after piece, she combines disparate styles, genres, textures, or source material. Or all four. The result is the conjuring of new aural worlds. They may be unnerving but they are also ethereal. They may be haunting one moment and peaceful the next. She can achieve massive alterations of mood often with nothing more than the modulation of one instrument.

She has already created a body of work that is representative of a magnificent transcendence. These are songs and suites that some might term moody-groovy. Her works sparkle for their inventiveness and dexterous blending of wide-ranging influences. The Pook style is certainly mysterious, and sometimes even quite unusual, but every one of her creations is consistently satisfying to the soul. Put on some Pook and you have the opportunity to be transported to a different plane of existence and to enjoy a celestial piece of legerdemain.

Listening Room

Recently, I took a couple of Pook’s albums, Flood and the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack, to Anisound, the mixing and mastering studio run by Matt Forger (Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Patrick O’Hearn). The goal was to subject the recordings to intense audio scrutiny. Forger put them up on a couple of his speaker systems and I am now more impressed than ever. While I enjoyed and respected her work when playing them on my home, auto, and computer systems, after hearing them in a near-perfect listening room, I absolutely love them.

In other words, like all valuable and vibrant music, Pook’s work just gets better the more you dive into it.

As I said a few paragraphs ago, Jocelyn Pook does not hear sound the way most people do. After listening to her work, neither will you.

For more information, visit: www.jocelynpook.com .
 

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.

VIDEO:

For music majors, this book is a must-read. For the rest of us, there are passages that will be a bit technical. At least Schiff mixes a scholarly approach with a delightful human touch, as in this sentence from the preface: “One day, after I had mapped out a chronological outline of the century with some flashy chapter headings, an alternative approach suddenly came to mind. . . Instead of doing battle with history I would write a nonhistory.”

Schiff states that his concentration in the book will be on the century’s music in terms of color, rhythm, melody, harmony, love, history, and God, always referencing Ellington’s music even when long passages explore the work of classical, jazz, and pop music composers.

Quite frankly, this approach just should not work, yet the result puts twentieth century music into perspectives I had never considered. Better still, his writing has encouraged me to widen my exposure to many more works and artists.

Listen

References to musical works abound throughout the book and I kept wishing that a CD or flash drive accompanied the volume. Thankfully, there is much available on YouTube. If, for example, you want to check out selections from Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta,” or Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or Schoenberg’s string quartets, you can do so. And while not all of Ellington’s approximately 1,000 compositions are available, there are quite a few postings of his work.

Quotes

Each chapter opens with carefully selected quotations. I found that reading them before and after each chapter was instructive. And these, too, prompted me to expand my reading. Some are famous, like: “Ellington plays the piano but his real instrument is his band,” from his frequent collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Schiff expands on that by stating “Ellington hired players with idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable playing styles, and composed parts for specific players rather than instruments.”

A quote from Claude Debussy, “The century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its own,” made me look up Roger McGuinn’s comment about musical sounds in history: “The sound of the airplane in the forties was a rrrrrrroooooaaaahhhhh sound …. Now [1965] we’ve got the krrrriiisssshhhhh jet sounds…. It’s the mechanical sounds of the era: the sounds are different and so the music is different.” That quote is not in the book but it certainly could be.

Capturing Sound

Ellington did more than consider his performers when composing, he also frequently wrote with recording technology in mind, including the role of the microphone.

Early on Ellington saw that the new mechanisms for amplification and recording could enhance coloristic explorations. Long before the advent of recording “production,” let alone of electronic music, Ellington revealed his genius for technologically enabled sound synthesis in “Mood Indigo,” first recorded on October 17, 1930, but written especially for the “microphonic transmission” of a radio broadcast.

For the most part, Schiff wants to go beyond the sonics, to deal with “the intersection of high art and popular entertainment: African, American, and European traditions, improvised performance, and rigorous composition.”

To do so, Schiff delves deeply into twentieth-century pop and classical music, often in witty observations such as “…the 1950s, for instance, were the decade of both Boulez and Buddy Holly” and “With the appearance of Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘song book’ albums. . . the much-maligned output of Tin Pan Alley became the much-acclaimed Great American Songbook.”

Going Beyond

In dissecting Ellington’s works, Schiff is both analytical and appreciative. But if, like me, you do not have music theory skills, you may have to just allow yourself to be carried along by his prose until full meaning returns. Here is an example of his discussion of “Prelude to a Kiss” –

Harmonies heat up the melody’s seductive moves. Ellington set the initial pitch, B, atop a D dominant-ninth chord to form the interval of a thirteenth above the bass, the highest possible upper addition to a triad. The thirteenth is a double dissonance, one seventh (upward from C to B) stacked on another (from D to C). Music theory terms these combinations of tones dissonances, but they sound sensuous, not harsh.

Digging Deep

The book delves into the why and how of Ellington’s works from many angles. While his viewpoints are consistently interesting, Schiff doesn’t stop with his own estimations; he includes comments by colleagues and critics across a spectrum of the music world. A quote by Andre Previn really is a killer: “Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, ‘O yes, that’s done like this.’ But Duke merely lifts a finger, three horns make a sound, and I don’t know what it is.”

Schiff continually defines or even redefines music from the inside out. And he is quite egalitarian, digging into Alban Berg and George Gershwin equally. Genres are also explored, and he delivers one of the most interesting descriptions of the blues I have ever seen:

As much a poetic as a musical genre, it has its own verse form, syntax, vocabulary, imagery and subject matter. . .

Form: a thought stated, repeated, completed (surprisingly)

Syntax: lines broken midway by a caesura, and at the end by a comma; these breaks usually filled with a guitar response

Imagery: Love, tears, the railway

Subject: Suffering and escape from suffering

More than musical categories are deliberated. In a discussion of Ellington’s various “Blue Light” compositions comes this observation: “Like Monet’s series of haystack paintings, these works bathe identical subjects in changing light; heard back-to-back, they might be termed ‘blues-as-process’.” You will find references to painting, poetry, ballet, and literature throughout the volume.

High-fallutin’

There is a sense of bias in that classical composers are introduced by last name (as in this sentence: “Euro-jazz by Milhaud, Ravel, Hindemith, Krenek, and Weill dominated the new music scene of the 1920s”) while jazz and pop composers, and most jazz performers, are presented with both given and surnames. I admit that “Davis” or “Goodman” may not mean as much at first glance as “Miles Davis” or “Benny Goodman,” but who other than those deeply into music know that it’s Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill? (And how many people know that it’s Ernst Krenek?)

From time to time, things get a little high-fallutin’ for my taste, as in his use of “vers libre” instead of just saying “free verse” or when he writes of George Perle’s discussion of Alban Berg’s hand-annotated score to his “Lyric Suite” that “The annotated score may be less an urtext than a billet-doux.” Really, it doesn’t seem that it would have been so hard to just say “less an original musical manuscript than a love letter.” But maybe that’s just me. However, Schiff’s next sentence is: “Perle’s revelation of the secret program marked a turning point in the hermeneutics of twentieth-century music from modernist formalism to postmodernist semiotics.” Hello.

Black and White

The subject of race appears from time to time. “Until rhythm and blues crossed over to become rock and roll, the blues scale functioned as a racial marker in pop tunes,” he writes, going on to note:

The blues scale indicated that a song, like “Stormy Weather,” was intended for black performers because it portrayed emotions that “they” had but “we” could not express, or it portrayed a “mongrel” condition, like that portrayed by mixed-race Julie in Show Boat when she sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine.” The blues scale in particular became a fixture of torch songs, from “The Man I Love” to “The Man That Got Away,” sung by women who had “gone south” and paid the price.

My first reaction was WTF but since so much else in the book seems either right on or revelatory I’ll go revisit those songs and see if I get the same context as he does.

Observations

There is much to admire in this book. In no particular order, let me mention his noting the now-forgotten practice of classical improvisations: “Opera singers in the baroque and bel canto eras added ornaments and embellishments to arias; concerto soloists were similarly expected to improvise cadenzas.” And this:

To a greater or lesser extent, jazz improvisers are not just doing what comes naturally. Most jazz players live up to the old title “professor” that once designated the resident pianist at a bordello. They know more about music theory than anyone else in the business, and they practice as systematically as the most competitive concert violinists.

Also terrific is his shout out to jazz composers: “There is much evidence to suggest that certain practices of European modern harmony, including added notes, polymodality, and polytonality, began as responses to jazz (or its predecessor, ragtime) rather than the other way around.”

Or consider this description of one of Arnold Schoenberg’s works: “Op. 23 no.2 sounds like a man wrestling with an angel. Its harmonies are at once visionary and tactile…” Schiff makes me want to listen to this work immediately.

In his rumination on Ellington’s “Warm Valley,” Schiff injects poetry into his prose:

…instead of observing love from the outside, it turns listeners into lovers. Long before Nietzsche termed this phenomenon “Dionysian,” musicians recognized the erotic power of their art in the genres of the serenade and nocturne. Much of Ellington’s oeuvre (like Mozart’s or Chopin’s) is music of the night, enveloping the listener in the sensuality of sound. When Johnny Hodges keened a melody with vibrato and rubato, hesitations, swells, and slides, his tone was like an intimate touch.

Schiff himself points out that “Americans, and Europeans as well, conflated jazz and sex, and imagined jazz as a black Dionysus….” Schiff then includes a quote from Ellington about the relationship of sonics and eroticism, including a reference to “an aria of the sex symphony.” I won’t include the whole passage, but like his musical compositions, it is beautifully crafted and quite delicious.

Modern Music

Schiff touches on music by Steve Reich, Charlie Parker, Cole Porter, Erik Satie, and many more. He also explores some of the hullabaloo over free jazz, which is often performed with no regard for harmonic progression and which raises atonality to new heights. He states that “Ellington anticipated this controversy by more than a decade” in his 1947 Carnegie Hall concert where he “let loose the most outside piano solo he or anyone else had imagined up to that time.”

In moments like these, Schiff makes you yearn to be a part of the ongoing flow of all music, not just jazz, or classical, or pop, or anything else. And that is one of the highest compliments I can pay the book.

Book Summary:
The Ellington Century by David Schiff
University of California Press, Hardcover, 336 pages;
ISBN: 9780520245877; $34.95, £24.95
www.ucpress.edu
www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520245877 .

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Video – Mood Indigo by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra.

VIDEO:

http://youtu.be/GohBkHaHap8

My initial impression on unpacking was that the cosmetics look great, no inconsistencies in panel coloration (ours is white) or stenciling, the wood sides were firmly applied, nothing rattling around loose inside (you’d be surprised at how often this disconcerting problem occurs). Power is an external in-line transformer, which works for me, I have made a specialty of trying to isolate power supplies from sensitive internal electronic components, it makes no sense to try and jumble two essentially incompatible functions inside of one box.

On power-up the LED displays were nice and bright, with a pleasing dark-grey on bluish-grey color scheme; the “main screen” in the center has a slightly different backdrop. Essentially a computer, the Solaris boots up quickly; much faster than the Hartmann Neuron, which always leaves me with the disquieting impression it will fail when turned on. No discernible fan noises, hums or other irregular sonic fluctuations emanated from the machine. Some of this might be due to our complex but extremely effective grounding/transformer-wiring scheme, but the noise floor was quite low even bypassing it, an outcome confirmed by using test equipment. The knobs and switches felt firm and determinate, a pleasing tactile sensation; hard as it is to believe, the controls of many synths actually wobble (unintentionally) between one’s fingers.

One of the most interesting features of the Solaris is that all of the sounds are stored on a compact flash card. The same one that you can stuff into a reader to communicate with your computer. Thus, in principle, sounds can be archived on disc. Or, if you feel like dropping by your friend’s house with some cool new ones, just take the compact flash card with you (assuming said friend has a Solaris, of course). The compact flash card supplied comes preloaded with 62 sounds in bank 0 labeled JB (which I assume stands for John Bowen); 127 in bank 1 labeled MP; 90 in bank 2 labeled CL; and 90 in bank 3 labeled SH (I apologize for not knowing the respective attributions behind these initials). These sound pretty good; I particularly was impressed with some of the Moog lead emulations in bank 0. The logical architecture of compact flash cards makes it possible to “glitch” the sounds, once loaded, between various notes. By this I mean that with fast technique one can force the synth to transition between notes at a speed exceeding its capacity to respond, which results in fragments of notes, partial notes and stuttery transitions between notes. When coupled with pressure-sensitivity (the Solaris has this feature), one can devise some extremely interesting sonic outcomes, which never could be created on the original instrument(s).

The Solaris’ real potential lies, though, in two additional domains. First, its versatility. Five separate smaller screens supply complete control and assignability over every imaginable parameter of oscillator, LFO, mixer/FX, filter/VCA and EG. The layout of these functions from left to right is particularly intuitive. I make a practice of never consulting a manual unless I have a specific question, and then much later after we have had the synth for a while, the better to discern whether its operation is instinctive or awkward. It was easy to figure out what to do and how to modify a sound and either save it to the compact flash card, or simply manipulate it in real time (such as with a filter or modulation source).

Second, the compact flash card beckons intriguingly. Speaking strictly for our organization, we have hundreds of sampling discs left over from the days of the Akai S1100, the EMU 4XT Ultra, the Kurzweil K2000RS/K2500RS/K2600RS, the Roland S-760, etc. From companies like Hollywood Edge, Sound Ideas, Voice Spectral, Best Service, East*West, Time+Space, ILIO, Zero-G, Pros?nus, MasterBits and Sonic Implants, reading off the spines of some CDs. Not forgetting the proprietary formats and libraries associated with each of the above-mentioned samplers, and TEAC’s bold but failed GigaSampler format. I still enjoy palpitating hardware samplers, because (among other reasons) they sound good and I’m reasonably facile at doing so (this due solely to rote practice since their release, not to any special abilities). Of course these samplers now are available on EB for a fraction of their initial price, but that’s progress for you. It takes a variety of disc drives, zip drives and hard drives to get sounds into these obsolete beasts. Now, though, what we have done is loaded a lot of the samples we like and use frequently into Logic (which, through EXS24, also can translate proprietary formats), whereupon one can slice and dice them to one’s heart’s content.

The point of this excursus is that it would be swell to be able to load some of these samples onto a compact flash card and then be able to play them on the Solaris. The Solaris itself is not a sampler. It is, however, able (in principle) to read files one has sampled and then loaded onto compact flash. When I talked with John about this, he said this was completely feasible. All that’s needed is a utility program to parse out the sample file into a mysterious hierarchal format that I don’t understand. I know a lot about how to use these devices, interconnect them, make music with them, and I’m reasonably good with a soldering iron. But I encounter nothing but a vast field of low-lying brain fog when I start to hear about hierarchal memory structures.

So, I hope somebody writes a simple, easily useable utility program to do this. One designed for ordinary stupid musicians, not computer whizzes. John told me that Bernard Wong and Ken Elhardt – both design geniuses as far as I am concerned (as is John, of course) – are busy working on this. Ken also is working on, or has completed, additional sounds for bank 4. Assuming this project comes to fruition, then my chimerical but strangely compelling vision of using Logic-edited samples of anything under the sun, loaded into Solaris via compact flash, takes a step towards practical, operationalized implementation.

Kind of like a more easily usable Mellotron, n’est-ce pas? Of course the new Memotron rack (a kind of Mellotron-in-a-box) from Manikin Electronic, which also uses compact flash, looks pretty darn good, too. And, a new Eurorack module made by ADDAC Systems uses control voltage to trigger .wav files stored on compact flash, which presents a host of mind-expanding possibilities.

It is with reluctance we have been deaccessioning some of our larger keyboard synths, or even smaller ones that duplicate functions found in rack-mountable ROMpler modules, simply due to lack of space. Recently we lost our lease on the large studio building where we had been tenants for many years; the owner said he was going to turn it into “lofts.” What is a loft, you might ask? Fact of the matter is that it’s a kind of yuppie condo without walls. That way the owner can sell them for just as much as a condo with walls, but save the expense of actually having any.

We will miss the old space, which we had maximized for ultimate creativity. We also will miss its collection of tools to realize sonic outcomes never before heard except possibly elsewhere in the multiverse space-time continuum of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Being in a smaller space, though, introduces a kind of aesthetic discipline, because it forces one to make choices. Like The Clash sang, “should I stay or should I go?” (in this case, applied to synths). We made the decision to offload almost all keyboard synths; about half of our supply of ROMplers; but retain and expand most of our modulars, mainly because they still intrigue and also because of the new population of Eurorack modules, which quickly are becoming the de facto standard. Many new ways to manipulate control voltage, many new filters and modulation sources – always a good thing.

From present vantage point, it looks like the only keyboards we’re retaining will be an Alesis Andromeda A6; a Hartmann Neuron; a Moog Voyager; and the Solaris. Plus of course keyboard-only controllers for our Moog system, the ARP 2500 and 2600, an Analogue Systems French Connection for the Euros, and a few others that presently escape my mind. Plus a variety of miniature or limited-function keyboards for the intriguing and powerful new generation of mini-synth modules such as the Dave Smith Evolver/Tetra/Mopho, the AdrenaLinn I/II/III, the Waldorf Blofeld, the new Moog Minotaur, and others. Plus some sequencers and such. Truthfully I can’t remember what’s here and what isn’t, but my point is that as far as large keyboards with sounds living inside of them are concerned, the Solaris is one I can see us using for many years to come.

I earnestly and sincerely congratulate John for sticking with this project, seeing it through to fruition (despite delays and daunting economics), and making a great and innovative instrument.

To learn more about the Solaris, please visit: http://johnbowen.com/ .

Article is Copr. © 2012 by David Kronemyer and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial rights reserved. Images by and © David Kronemyer, used by permission.

Photography books are a special breed, with special requirements. You want large-scale presentations of fascinating subjects. You want them well-printed on thick paper, and in a sturdy binding so you can return to the book time and time again to put yourself into the splendid images, perhaps often sharing these moments with others.

All of that, I am happy to say, is delivered with Baron Wolman’s “The Rolling Stone Years.” Here are beautiful prints of musicians in poses that reflect their personalities, their desires, and their dreams. And what a terrific list of people:

Jimi. Janis. Miles. Mick. And a whole bunch of amazingly photogenic (at least in front of Wolman’s lens) artists who are as just significant as those who can be identified using only a single name.

I would be willing to bet that there have rarely been such perfectly timed portraits of James Brown, The Who, Mike Bloomfield, Tom Morello, Jeff Beck, Little Richard, Joni Mitchell, Taj Mahal, Johnny Winter, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bootsy Collins, Duane Allman, Gregg Allman, Steve Winwod, Kris Kristofferson, Joan Baez, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dolly Parton, Keith Richards, Rod Stewart, and on and on. And these are not “publicity shots.” These are mystical frozen instants of time when the person, the place, the emotion, and the spirit of the epoch have all merged. It is something that is rare enough in life, and rarer still in front of a photographer’s lens.

Oooh and Ahhh

Every time I open the book, there are pictures that make me catch my breath. It is difficult to be objective when confronted by what has been caught on film by Wolman and presented in this big (10-1/4 x 12-1/4″) and impressive volume. The “oooh and ahhh” factor is very high with this book.

Not only is the list of subjects quite long, it goes beyond the “names you’ll recognize.” There are also stunning sections on Woodstock (the original one) as well as a six-page section devoted to Groupies.

(Got your attention now, I’ll bet.)

Insight in Sight

In the Prologue written by art director Tony Lane, he notes that Wolman is diametrically opposite from those photographers whose images display “fear discernible in the eye of the hapless subject.” He goes on to say:

In Baron’s photos there is acceptance and often delight showing in the twinkle of an eye, a gentle smirk or an enchanting smile, and never the fear often generated by certain uncomfortable demands of contemporary publicity and branding….Whether it is in a studio portrait, a backstage document or an on-stage performance shot, Baron’s subjects always seem to embody the essence of themselves.

Writer Jerry Hopkins, in a four-page essay that serves as the book’s Introduction, talks about some of the experiences he shared with Wolman, including “…being welcomed into the groupie world; and touring with The Rolling Stones the year Tina Turner, who had just dumped Ike, and B.B. King were the opening acts. It was, as it’s said, a crappy job, but someone had to do it.”

The Method

“When I picked up my first camera and looked at the world through its viewfinder, I discovered form within chaos,” Wolman states. While his prose is entertaining and often contains observational gems like that one, it doesn’t read like it was composed but has the feeling of being dictated, which he reveals is the case on page 175.

Still, there are many excellent points in the text, as when he explains that he “was photographing the music, not really hearing it.” He notes that “you try to shoot the process of the musician making the music, try to isolate a peak moment of the music being made, try to communicate the ecstasy of somebody playing, singing, performing.” He achieves this in shot after shot and it is a delight to behold.

You’ll have your own personal favorites, but I like returning to the visages of Frank Zappa peeking out of a cave (page 167) and riding a bulldozer (pages 42-43), Bob Dylan lost in the power of an electric guitar chord (page 166), Pete Townshend seeming to levitate (page 163), Johnny Cash looking like he’s daring the world to intrude (page 63), Grace Slick staring straight at you with a look that can be interpreted in oh-so-many-different ways, from cosmic to carnal (page 146).

Wolman shot in both black-and-white and color. Everything in the book is superb, but I have a fondness for the b/w frames. Perhaps Wolman does, too, as he states “Light is the key element to black and white photography, much more so than with color — the light and the shadows, the degrees of gray and black.”

His method for putting a subject at ease is logical and time-tested, and he freely divulges it. He also explains his technique for replying to a probing inquiry about one of the rock stars in such a way that the questioner thinks there was an answer when in reality nothing was revealed.

Modest and self-deprecating, Wolman admits he’s a “good, competent photographer” but claims that the fame of his subjects makes him seem better. But on page 154 is his portrait of Lotti Golden, an artist who is unknown to me but who appears interesting, intriguing, and important because of Wolman’s great photograph.

Gone Are the Days

Like many people, Wolman sees the advent of MTV as the tipping point for quite a lot in the music industry, including how the talent gets photographed. Musicians would see music videos and think “‘Oooh, we want to look like this and we want to look like that.’ MTV changed everything. . . now there is very little honest portraiture of the musicians themselves, everything is stylized.”

Or perhaps there was another turning point:

After Woodstock the music industry came to understand the economic possibilities of the mega concert. When they saw all those people gathered to hear music the corporados started drooling dollar signs.

Fortunately, Wolman was on the scene when it counted and we now have his photography as testimony to his artistry. It was a proud pursuit and a ton of work, although he obviously had a great time along the way. In bold type under a charming photo of a tee-shirt-clad Pete Townshend at the piano, it reads “Rock music, fashion, lovely young women, and gritty street photojournalism. It’s a wonderful life…”

You will have a great time, too, not just with the eye-candy photos but also with the stories about Jim Morrison’s “package,” Carlos Santana’s drug trip, Jerry Garcia’s missing digit, Bill Cosby stealing Wolman’s girlfriend, and Janis Joplin coming to his home for what he called a “Performance for One.”

There are also a number of lovely quotes from the stars he photographed, including Miles Davis telling him, “Listen carefully to my music; I play like I box. You can ‘hear’ the jabs, the feints, the crosscuts, the uppercuts. You can imagine that I’m boxing when I’m playing.” That’s a quote so good that it appears twice, on pages 108 and 131. (There are a number of repeats in the book.)

Visuals Beyond Visuals

You know what? I now have new favorites, such as the ethereal and cinematic image of a couple of flower children/adults on page 152 and a stunning tableau on page 141 featuring saxophonist Sonny Rollins and his own perfectly-cast shadow. Or perhaps I’m now drawn to B.B. King on page 90, as he plays Lucille in what appears to be a trance-like state. Since there are nearly two dozen shots of Janis, a dozen of Jimi, and multiples of many others, you’ll have plenty of choices of your own.

Find a comfortable seat near a good light. Open this book to any of the large photos. Immerse yourself in another time, another place, and another aspect of the creative rendering of history.

Book Summary:
“The Rolling Stone Years” by Baron Wolman
Vision On (Omnibus Press), Hardcover, 176 pages, ISBN: 9781847727404, $37.95, £24.95.
www.omnibuspress.com
www.baronrocks.com

Article is Copr. © 2011 by John Scott G, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all rights reserved. Disclosure: neither the author or this site or its publisher have been compensated in any way for mention of this book.

Bob Dylan has created so many masterful poem-songs that it is sometimes difficult to keep track of them all. You can put on the vinyl, slide in the CDs, and scroll through the databank, and you will pleasingly, delightfully, assuredly swim through the decades of Dylan classics. But unless you start making your own list of annotations, it might be best to turn to a good biographer for some perspective.

Wilentz provides more than some perspective; he takes you on a veritable walking tour of Dylanania, bringing the best moments into sharp focus with a powerful jolt and with details so varied and intense that you almost feel embarrassed to have been caught eavesdropping on people’s conversations. Actually, it often gets to the point where you feel like you are inside some people’s thoughts.

Given extraordinary access to archival information, Wilentz grabs the data in both fists and turns it into a series of excursions into more than Dylan’s saga, but also the history of folk music, blues music, poetry, performing styles, touring, recording sessions, and even history itself.

You Are There

The chapter on the making of “Blonde on Blonde” is twenty-six pages of You Are There In The Studio and it is fascinating; very nearly worth the price of the book. Of course, it helps if you own, or at least have heard, that album; but either way, the images, the struggles, the fits and starts, the sounds, and the magic are captured and presented in ways both terrific and taut.

Since I think “Blonde” is a great and awesome rock record, that amount of attention seems justified. Wilentz obviously is impressed with the recording as well, and makes a number of pointed observations, including that the songs have a quality that goes beyond excellence to achieve a state of delicious delirium. He also notes that Dylan was “working in a 1960s mode of what T.S. Eliot had called, regretfully, the dissociation of sensibility — cutting off discursive thought or wit from poetic value, substituting emotion for coherence.”

Good Questioner

As an interviewer, Wilentz is terrific. There are many wonderful comments from people throughout Dylan’s personal and professional life. Returning to the “Blonde” section as an example, Wilentz shares quite a few conversations from people who were on those sessions or in the studio at the time, including Al Kooper, Charlie McCoy, producer Bob Johnston, and even Kris Kristofferson, who at that point was working as a janitor at the studio. Wilentz delves deeply into all aspects of the recording dates, even going so far as to note that Rick Danko, Bobby Gregg, and Paul Griffin played on the album but were never listed on the credits for either the vinyl or CD releases.

Refraction

Wilentz comes at his subject from all sides, presenting Dylan now, then, before, after, and in the perspective of antiquity. It’s an ambitious goal and I think he pulls it off. What could so easily have turned into a crazy quilt patch-work has emerged as a multi-faceted jewel of a book.

His method comes with consequences, as this approach might not hold the full attention of the average fan. In the interest of placing some of Dylan’s creative choices in social context, Wilentz devotes sections of the book to events and people one might not have expected, including Aaron Copland, Blind Willie McTell, and Marc Blitzstein. The more anticipated names such as Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, Joan Baez, Allen Ginzberg, Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and so on, are well-represented, but Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby figure in the story a whole lot more than you might have predicted. A discussion of the Beats vs. the Folkies is one thing, but Old Blue Eyes and Der Bingle? Yup, and all of Wilentz’ observations hold up upon reflection.

Influences on Dylan include the early days of broadcast television as well as a host of literary and music figures, including William Blake, Ovid, Robert Johnson, Lotte Lenya, Gene Autry, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Leonard Bernstein, Ezra Pound, William S. Burroughs, and Charlie Chaplin. To name a few.

Perspective

There are lots of great stories here. Example: Dylan’s first concert in New York was deemed disappointing as “only fifty-three ticket buyers showed up.” Up-and-coming acts in Los Angeles today would probably kill to draw half that. Later on, when he was booked to perform on the highly rated Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on the CBS network Sunday evenings, Dylan made “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” his song choice. As you might expect, the CBS executives had some sort of minor stroke and ordered him to sing something else. Rather than be censored, Dylan left without appearing on the program.

Sense of Time and Place

Performing at Philharmonic Hall in 1964, Dylan debuted “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and Wilentz takes us there. . .

During these performances, the audience was utterly silent, trying at first to catch all the words, but finally bowled over the by intensity of both the lyrics and Dylan’s playing, even when he muffed a line. We would not get the chance to figure the songs out for another five months, when they appeared on

Bringing it All Back Home — and even then it would take repeated listening for any of it make sense. At the time, it just sounded like demanding poetry, at times epic narrative, proving once again that Bob Dylan was leading us into new places, the exact destination unknown but still deeply tempting.

Rolling Thunder

There is a forty-page section dealing with the Rolling Thunder Revue and the story of “Hurricane” (both the song and the relevant details of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, the boxer who was falsely convicted of murder), with side-trips into traveling circuses and Les enfants du paradis (“Children of Paradise”) the 1945 film by Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert. Does the book waver in its forward flow because of all this? Nope. You’ll be swept right along, possibly the way Dylan was when he encountered these events in real life.

Beg or Borrow

Thanks to Wilentz persistence, it feels like we finally get the whole story involving the discussions and arguments regarding Dylan’s borrowing, fair use, plagiarism, or “Love and Theft,” which is both a Dylan album and a chapter in the book. In discussing Dylan’s song “Cross the Green Mountain” from the film “Gods and Generals,” Wilentz writes:

… the song lifted a line from the poem “Charleston” by the almost completely forgotten Confederate poet Henry Timrod. But Dylan’s borrowings were actually much more extensive. “Cross the Green Mountain” included lines and images from sources that ranged from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Henry Lynden Flash’s “Death of Stonewall Jackson,” and Nathaniel Graham Shepherd’s “Roll-Call,” to Frank Perkins and Mitchell Parish’s jazz standard from 1934, “Stars Fell on Alabama.” In the next-to-last verse, Dylan condensed an entire Walt Whitman poem, “Come Up from the Fields, Father,” about the news of a young man’s falling in combat reaching home, in a single, compact eight-line stanza, and he took a phrase from Whitman’s original to boot.

The situation is dealt with in scholarly and gentlemanly fashion, as one might expect from the historian-in-residence for Dylan’s official website. Quite apart from the fact that most of the sources are in the public domain, there is the transformative value of the newly-created work.

For more than half a century, Bob Dylan had been absorbing, transmuting, and renewing and improving American art forms long thought to be trapped in formal conventions. He not only “put folk into bed with rock,” as Al Santos still announces before each concert; he took traditional folk music, the blues, rock and roll, country and western, black gospel, Tin Pan Alley, Tex-Mex borderlands music, Irish outlaw ballads, and more and bent them to his own poetic muse.

Unexpected Discography

Instead of Dylan’s discography, which is widely available online, Wilentz gives us six full pages of songs that influenced Dylan, from Roy Acuff’s “Wait for the Light to Shine” to Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Your Funeral and My Trial.” Like Dylan the alchemist (for that, ultimately, is what Wilentz proclaims him), the list is fascinating.

Portrait

The prose that Wilentz employs is witty, deft, expressive, and as you can see here in his overview of “Love and Theft” (the album not the concept), often lyrical:

And with his expert timing, better than ever, Dylan shuffles space and time like a man dealing stud poker. One moment it’s 1935, high atop some Manhattan hotel, then it’s 1966 in Paris or 2000 in West Lafayette, Indiana, or this coming November in Terre Haute, then it’s 1927, and we’re in Mississippi and the water’s deeper as it comes, then we’re thrown back into biblical time, entire epochs melting away, except that we’re rolling across the flats in a Cadillac, or maybe it’s a Ford Mustang, and that girl tosses off her underwear, high water everywhere.

Wilentz paints a portrait of Dylan in nouns, verbs, and adjectives revealing him as a product of black-and-white TV, Beat poets, rebels, street artists, hustlers, outcasts, social protesters, folkies, hot rodders, carny performers, singers of all genres, and the stacks of the New York Public Library. Considering the varied ‘n’ sundry topics Wilentz covers in this work, an alternate title might have been “America in Bob Dylan.” Either way, a terrific read.

Book Summary
“Bob Dylan in America” by Sean Wilentz;
Doubleday, Hardcover, 400 pages, 100 photographs, ISBN: 978-0-385-52988-4, $28.95; Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-7679-3179-3, $16.95;
* http://www.randomhouse.com/author/81426/sean-wilentz?sort=best_13wk_3month
* http://www.boblinks.com
* http://www.expectingrain.com

VIDEO: “Positively 4th Street”

Article Copr. © 2011 by John Scott G, originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all rights reserved. Disclosure: No fee or other consideration was provided to the author of this article, this site or its publisher by the book author, publisher or any agency.

The opening line of Clark Terry’s book tells you a few things about the man: “I made my first trumpet with scraps from the junkyard.” This brilliantly sets the stage for a story of a man with an indomitable will and an intense dedication to music. It also shows a guy who is just the right amount of crazy.

“Clark” (written with his wife, Gwen Terry) is a book that is chock full of sights, sounds, smells and situations involving big characters and big emotions, all played out against nine decades of history. There are pimps, whores, con artists, racists, and a full complement of good people and bad.

Jazz giants like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie are a part of his tale and we get to eavesdrop on some of the conversations. His meet-ups with Miles Davis, scattered through his life, are interesting or acerbic, or both. Through it all, his lifelong friendships are touching and his dedication to jazz (and the teaching of it) is inspirational.

NSFW

Okay, you were warned about what’s coming up. There are exciting interactions with the fringes of society and some of the power brokers with whom he had to deal, including the Purple Gang, one of whom would stroll through the club in a “sharp suit, escorted by his bodyguards.” This man’s “signature style was a white cap and a real pigeon roosting on his shoulder.” And there are passages like this:

…one of the acts was a short little piano player named Peanuts. He rolled the piano from table to table while a sexy girl named Mary Calendar sang and did risque dancing. It was customary for her to do little private dances at a particular table. After her dance, she’d pick up any coins given to her with her “other set of lips.”

What happens next is even more outrageous but I’ll let you discover all the wild scenes for yourself.

Style

Terry may not be a great writer in the classic sense of the term, but he is a great storyteller in any sense of the term. And his life is one big, bountiful, beautiful story. While his style gets to the nitty-gritty in scene after scene, it also has some of the positives and negatives of verbal history. Like the turnaround. Here is the conclusion of a section dealing with his having to pass a swimming test while he served in the Navy during World War II:

I got out and walked away hoping that they had accepted what I’d done. When the instructor blew the whistle, I glanced back and saw the next guy jump in. No one called me back, so I walked away calmly, while my insides were jumping for joy.

            A few weeks later I got an unwelcome letter from home.

That type of thing happens a lot and it rather charmingly propels you forward.

On His Own at 12

Kicked out of the house before his thirteenth birthday, Terry learned how to make his way through life the hard way. There was scrapin’ and scrappin’ galore as he struggled to survive while always returning to music, whether playing with others or spending hours and hours practicing. Until there were sores. Until there was blood.

To enter this world is to be swept away with him, as in his first trip into New York:

            Billy met me at Grand Central Station. I was overwhelmed by all the people. All colors, foreign accents, moving, pushing, talking. Billy was grinning like crazy, telling me all about the things he had planned for us. I didn’t hear much of what he was saying while we were walking to the subway, ’cause I was totally wowed! Tall buildings, a sea of yellow taxi cabs, restaurants, stores, and honking horns.

            Billy said, “Don’t look up. They’ll know you’re a mark.”

Colors

While the book is a story of a man’s journey through life, love, and music, it is also about racism. The tales of indignities and violence are numerous and incendiary. Some of them resulted in flight; some in calls for first aid; some were deadly.

On the other hand, the colors of people are noted frequently by Terry, almost always in a descriptive and friendly manner. This guy or that gal might be the “color of nutmeg,” “Dark-skinned,” “Medium-brown skinned,” “Olive complexion,” “caramel-skinned,” “light complexion,” “color of bittersweet chocolate,” and so on.

At one point, he talks about joining the colored musicians’ union: “The whites had theirs and we had ours, but we all read the same black notes on white manuscript.” It’s hard to top a sentence like that.

While his love for playing knew no boundaries, there were some performing situations that had a bit more tension than others:

All the cats from St. Louis carried a shank — in common language, a knife. So did I. When I’d come to work, before I took my music out of the book, I’d push the switchblade button. Bling! The sharp metal would flash in the lights. Then I’d throw the knife so that the point of the blade would stick in the fiberglass music stand. Boing! …”Good evening, everybody.”

Quotes

I have nearly a page of notes leading to cool quotes in the book. Like when Terry mentions that “Jazz saved my sanity. Which made me love it even more.” Or when he is talking about a trumpet player who was waiting tables “because it paid more money than gigging.” Some things never change.

Throughout the book, the teaching of jazz becomes an all-powerful force after working with his first student, “a skinny young kid” trumpet player of about twelve years old named Quincy Jones. For Terry, passing along the insights and traditions of jazz became almost an obsession:

It was the greatest feeling in the world to think that I had something to do with the careers of my students. The greatest feeling. I loved the awards that came from here and there, but the thing I loved most was to see those young people grow. Watch their dreams come true.

Sounds

Jazz is a constant throughout the journey, but so are pretty ladies, all kinds of food, good deeds, wrong turns, and more food. Every type of meat and vegetable seems to be simmering in the background somewhere. Because of the segregation the bands endured on the road, they often had to cook for themselves. “We cooked beans in a pot on a hotplate or on the back of an iron.”

Time and again, Terry provides delicious descriptions of great, hot jazz. He refers to train rhythms, horse hooves on the street, the tap dancing of a childhood friend who affixed PET Milk can bottoms on the soles of his shoes, “raindrops on the coal shed in the old chicken yard,” and much more. As a writer, I love these sections, especially here where he gets inside the genius of Count Basie:

During his easygoing renditions, there was a soul-stirring feeling. His four-four rhythm swayed a head-nodding and ear-bending groove, an easy foot-tapping bounce. Then during his up-tempo renditions he created a finger-popping force that made you move.

Recording History

In the back of the book is a nineteen-page discography compiled by Tom Lord, editor of the Jazz Discography Online. It lists 371 releases. After reading Terry’s stories, I now want to hear every single one of them.

VIDEO:

BLOG: http://keepswinging.blogspot.com/2008/01/clark-terry-bob-brookmeyer-quintet.html

Book Summary
“Clark: The Autobiography of Clark Terry”
by Clark Terry with Gwen Terry
Preface by Quincy Jones
Forward by Bill Cosby
Introduction by David Demsey
University of California Press, Hardbound, 344 pages, ISBN: 9780520268463, $34.95; Adobe PDF E-Book, ISBN: 9780520949782, $34.95; ePUB Format, ISBN: 9780520949782, $34.95
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520268463

Article is Copr. © 2011 by John Scott G, and originally published on MusicIndustryNewswire.com – all commercial rights reserved. Disclosure: no fee or other consideration was provided to JSG, this site or its publisher, by the book author, publisher or agent(s).