Playlist Friday 4/28/06

While I’m waiting for the Leon Russell revival to begin, I’m listening to:

1. “Urban Blues, Blues Uptown Vol. 1” Imperial Legendary Masters Series LP

I found this at a little shop in St. Johns, Oregon called “Vinyl Resting Place.”

The liner notes (by Pete Welding) say this collection is from 1968 and gives credits to Bob Hite and Henry Vestine of Canned Heat for “Inspiration” and “Final Selection Approval” and to Hite “for the loan of his priceless originals.”

Almost none of these tunes were hits, but that just don’t matter none, nohow. Tunes by Fats Domino from1953 and “c.1951-53,” from Smiley Lewis, Roosevelt Sykes, T-Bone Walker and someone named Mercy Dee (Walton) who, it turns out, wrote “One Room Country Shack” while living in Fresno.

The gems are a tune by Big Joe Turner recorded with Dave Bartholomew’s band in 1950, a previously unissued (remember this was 1968) Joe Turner/Wynonie Harris duet, and the most sublime version ever recorded of “Mother Fuyer.” It’s by Nelson Wilborn who recorded it under the name “Dirty Red.”

2. Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk “Live at Jazzfest 2005”. CD

Aaron’s son has taken over as the number one funkiest Neville of them all. He was a big part of all that new energy on the last Neville Brothers’ recording and leads this band which, along with Papa Grows Funk just may keep the funk alive till New Orleans gets itself together again and the musicians come back from Austin, or Memphis or wherever they’ve gone (and where they’re making more dough playing than they ever did in New Orleans).

Ivan’s got two bass players on this gig (which I saw from the audience) on the Accura Stage last year. Also sitting in is bonist Mark Mullins from Bonerama.

Ivan has matured. He isn’t the kid anymore. He’s the man.

Listening to it now, it seems like things were so much more innocent at last year’s Fest. Nobody knew what was coming. It was the final year of Jazzfest and New Orleans as we knew them.

3. Various Artists “The Now Sound of Brazil 2” Ziriguiboom CD

Ziriguiboom is a label. Don’t let anybody tell you Brazilian music isn’t just as happening now as it ever was. This collection came out last year and it’s got everything you’d ever want out of Brazilian music: rhythm, beauty and the sexiest signing (literally) in the world. Nobody ever had to learn Portuguese to appreciate this stuff.

Bebel Gilberto is the best known singer on this, but it’s been a lot of fun to discover the others on here: Cibelle, Celo Fonesca, Zuco 103, Bosscucanova, and Apollo Nove. See? Even their names are sexy.

Somebody took a lot of trouble to sequence the tunes. I can’t get enough of this.

4. Paul Motian Trio “At The Village Vanguard” CD

From 1995, with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell. Frisell’s the chameleon, Lovano the Lion and Motian the intellectual. It’s easy to get swept up in who they are rather than what they’re playing, but wrapping yourself up in the vibe here is good for ya. It might make you smarter. It always makes me think. It’s one of those recordings that provides a jumping off point for your own brain.

You put it on, get into it, and let whatever brain cells are still functioning take over.

5. Don Cherry “Multikulti Live” DVD

Thank God there’s a visual record of Don Cherry’s last band. This is from a concert in Germany in 1991. Nobody ever said he was the greatest trumpet player who ever lived, or the greatest composer. He projected something more than talent (although he had it in freight car-sized amounts). He had, oh I dunno…a goodness, a vibe of peace.

I didn’t know him, although I interviewed him for an hour at the time he was recording the first Multikulti album. I mean, he could have been a rotten sonuvabitch and mean as shit, but I doubt it.

I can’t imagine anybody asking him why he had people of all colors in his band. I wish every American who travels abroad could bring what he brought to this concert.

Why can’t this DVD be an hour longer? Don Cherry has only grown in stature since his death.

Wonder what’s up with Nenah?


6. Nathaniel Mayer “I Just Want To Be Loved” CD

When I was a 14, I heard a song on the radio called “Village of Love” by somebody named Nathanial Mayer. It was wild. I bought the single and used to play it over and over and over, etc.

In 2004, forty-four years later Fat Possum released this album of newly-recorded songs. Nathaniel had stopped recording decades before and was currently, and had been by all accounts, getting over as best he could, if you know what I mean.

This is just as wild as “Village of Love.” Wilder. Out of control in an end-of-a-fucked-up-life way that we’ve never much heard before…the result of living the bad life in Detroit.

There are great liner notes which include a conversation with Mayer. He was calling for money. He wanted a car, he wanted clothes. Finally he said, “Fuck everything. Just give me 20 dollars so I can get my dick sucked.”

He sings like a thief and a pimp. Not the commercial 50 Cent kind, but in the most transparently calculated way. He’s the kind of Black Man who White Folks never understand. And he wants to keep it that way.

This was recorded with a very rough, funky Detroit band.

I like to drive around oh-so-polite Portland, Oregon and play this real loud with the windows down. Nathaniel would like that.

7. Wayne Horvitz The Four Plus One Ensemble “Sweeter Than The Day”

Not the funky Wayne of Zony Mash, not the outside Wayne of Pigpen, but the sweet, acoustic Wayne. Julian Priester is on here, Reggie Watts, Tucker Martine, Eyvind Kang on viola and violin, and the underrated Skerik, from New Orleans on bari sax.

He wrote these tunes in the middle of a night when he couldn’t sleep. He was living in a little town in Central Italy for a few months.

This album brings ya round. It’s narcotic in the good way. It hugs you. It’s a slow dissolve in a jump-cut world.

Horvitz and I have the best hats in the NW.

8. Louis Prima Keely Smith with Sam Butera and The Witnesses “Las Vegas Prima Style” LP

On the front cover it says, “Recorded Live at the Sahara Hotel” (underline theirs). On the back cover it says, “At 12:30 (a.m.)…Louis Prima issues the call that summons the faithful. From now until six in the morning, Las Vegas belongs to Louis Prima.”

I know he became a Lounge icon to the hipsters of the late 1990s but I’ve always loved Louie (underline mine). He’s all over the place with volume and coolness and excitement.

Imagine Tiger Rag, White Cliffs of Dover, Should I, Holiday For Strings and O Sole Mio all done al la Louie.
The thing about Louie and Sam and the band is that, besides being “The Wildest” (which they were), they could PLAY.

9. George Harrison and friends “The Concert For Bangladesh” DVD

I rented this to see how I would react to it, 34 years after the fact, and to see Dylan. Here’s what I found:

a. What the fuck was all that Indian religious shit about, anyway?
b. I like the Beatles only slightly better. I still nevah liked them. So shoot me.
c. Was Eric Clapton on junk? He didn’t play one good lick.
d. Did Eric Clapton have the worst haircut ever placed on the head of man?
e. Thank God for Billy Preston, who took the concert out of the muck of pandering to Eastern religion. Oh wait, he did a gospel tune. I’m busted.
f. Leon Russell was so heavy that Harrison introduced him without using Russell’s last NAME.
g. Everybody on stage was smoking!
h. Dylan was king. No competition.
i. Leon Russell singing harmony with Dylan was absolutely brilliant. Oh yeah, George sang on that song, too.
j. Yes, I listened to part of the Ravi Shankar set and skipped the rest.
k. The naivety was positively charming.
l. Leon Russell’s medley killed.
m. Did I keep pulling my hair away from my eyes every ten seconds when my hair was a long as George’s?

This also appears on CounterPunch.com

Click! I Quit!

More. Faster. Louder. More. More. Faster. Louder. More.

We have become contracted in our way of life. We are a jump cut society. Our discourse is truncated yet louder. Our visual stimulation must be more rapid or we tire and change the source. Thoughts come and go.

Five of the seven words you can’t say on TV have been said on network TV. The most violent thoughts, the most criminal behavior are a part of our children’s daily entertainment.

Having grown up playing video games, or not, is the defining factor of existence.

More violence. More greed. Sold to us, packaged and sold by those who believe in its reality, in its necessity. And each one who comes after believes that the way to success is to be more than what came before. To be faster. To be louder than what came before.

The number of boxes on a screen we are able to watch at any one time, indeed, the number of screen themselves, grows in inverse proportion to the number of paragraphs we can absorb at any one sitting. Watch your TV. Look at your magazines.

The internet has taught us that we no longer have to read anything more than 800 words. It has exposed our failure to have taught people to read, while at the same time has caused more people to type than ever before. Typing is not writing. You’re is different from your.

The President shouts at us, while three-word slogans repeat on the wall behind him, over and over, the simple message he cannot put into words. No one ever finishes a sentence on interview shows. Smugness reigns, and I sit on the bus, watching it pick up speed with no one at the wheel.

More. Faster. Louder. More. More. Faster. Louder. More.

Does anyone who is responsible for these things ever use these things? I mean, ulitimately responsible. The poor fools do. Not the buyers, but the fools making the things that go faster, louder, more profane, more violent, and which ignore basic human values. And more fools line up every day, confident in their belief that if they just made more of what already exists faster, and louder, that they can have more of what somebody else just made faster and louder and more.

Sex, music, politics, TV, movies. More. Faster. Louder. More. Can you top this? Can you take it further? If I just sat down and thought of the worst thing in the world, people would buy it. If I just made it a little bit more gross, a little bit more violent, a little faster, a little more. Just a little more.

How far over the top can you go before you fall off the edge? How edgy can you be before the edge becomes so thin, it disappears? How self-referential can you be before all of existence becomes a weblog and you spend your whole life documenting each and every moment as it happens?

I am infected with it. I can’t even finish writing this. I am bored by my own thoughts.

This also appears on huffingtonpost.com

U.S. & Iran---Friends Seperated by Religious Fanatics at the Top

Two countries, whose people have often liked each other, are now in the hands of reckless religious fanatics. The United States is ruled by a lawless Christian fundamentalist who has rained destruction and death on a Middle Eastern country which had not attacked it, and which he sees as a bed of infidels.

Iran is ruled by a similar head of state, a Muslim fundamentalist who wishes to have the means destroy a Middle Eastern country which has not attacked it and which he also sees as a bed of infidels.

This leaves us, in both America and Iran, the more informed and less fanatical of us wondering what how we got in this mess. Both leaders were selected in dubious, dishonest elections. Both are messianic in their beliefs...that they have the one sole truth, and that god smiles upon them.

I feel like if I had the phone number of a guy like me in Tehran, I’d call him up and we’d both be tearing our hair out about this situation. Neither of us wants to destroy the other, invade each other’s countries, or any others we can think of. We’d probably like to sit down and have a beer and shoot the shit, because the shit is the same all over.

He’d like me to put on some American music. I’d like him to put on some of what Americans call “World Music,” (that which comes from someplace other than our own back yards).

But no, we have to sit in our own houses without contact, wondering if these nutcases who think they have a pipeline to divinity are going to start a war over…over what? Has anybody figured that out?

These leaders appeal to the worst in humanity. They must be stopped. A small minority wants either side to start killing.

Hey, guy in Tehran. I want to tell you that there are lots of people trying to remove our lunatic from office. I’m hoping there are like-minded folks in your neighborhood. Maybe we’ll be glad to see each other again.

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Tom DeLay Meets Jesus

Shortly after Tom DeLay was struck and killed by a runaway golf cart as he played the 18th hole at The Congressional, and as his immortal soul floated toward the light, it stopped at a crossroads where he was met by Jesus.

“Hello, Tom,” Jesus said.

“Who the hell are you?” muttered the Hammer.

“I am Jesus, the Son of God, Tom,” was the reply.

“No shit,” he said, extending the glad hand with the same smile he had in his mug shot. “Gladta meetya.”

“It is time to take stock of your actions in life, Tom,” Jesus said.

“I did pretty damn good, didn’t I? Except for those wimp-assed bastards who messed with me at the end,” Delay said proudly.

“Did you lie, Tom?” asked Jesus.

“Well, it takes a lot of guts to be a man in my position,” came the reply.

“So that’s a yes,” Jesus said, marking it down.

“And did you tell people that you were working on behalf of God, and in His name?”

“Yes, of course. I always spoke highly of you and told the people that you’d do the same as me, if you were me,” said DeLay

“Do you think I would make children work in sweatshops in Saipan like you did when you blocked reform there?” asked Jesus.

“Uh, well I had to take care of my friends, you know.”

“I will ask you again, do you think I would make children work in sweatshops in Saipan like you did when you blocked reform there, and force them to have abortions as you did?”

“Where’d you hear that, from Huffington or some other Godless Communist place?” said the Hammer getting angry.

“Tom, are you getting angry with me? Do you know me?” said Jesus. “Do you know what this crossroads is that you’ve come to?”

“No, I don’t,” the Hammer said, bristling.

“Well, Tom you’ve done a bad job representing me on Earth. I think the only thing left to do is to teach you a lesson.”

“Whad’ya mean?”

“Here’s a surprise for you, Tom. I have been talking this over with several friends of mine, including Buddha, Moses and Mohammed and we’ve come up with this. We’re going to send you back to earth, to Texas.”

“Well, thankya, Jesus!”

“Not so fast, Tom,” Jesus replied. “We’re sending you back as a roach, to Sugarland, and we’ve arranged for your extermination company to be scheduled to visit the kitchen you’re going to infest.”

“Just a damn minute,” said the Hammer.

“You will escape a couple of times, running in sheer terror as your company tries to spray you out of existence, but finally your time will come. When that happens, I’ll be here waiting and we can have another conversation, Tom,” said Jesus.

“Wait, wait, holdonhere,” cried Delay.

And with that he was gone, back to earth and his next destiny.


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