Since this was a negative review I never published it. And I dig Terrance Blanchard, btw. But it’s only a blog so up it goes.

(2005)

I mean thanks, Jeffrey…

There I was at California Plaza on Saturday night, esconced in my little roped off plastic chair up front with all these rich people who were slumming it in shorts and tees, rather disquieted by the fact that by the end of the second tune I wasn’t especially moved by anything. Particularly Terrance Blanchard.  He’s a nawlins horn man, and I always strain to hear the Louis in the tone and attack of nawlins horn men, but there was nary a red bean nor grain of rice to be heard. I mean, the compositions themselves were kind of interesting, and the Beninese (Beninoise?) guitar player did a long (maybe too long) solo that had a powerful kalimba-sound too it, almost a Thomas Mapfumo thing happening, and I dug that.  But still… .

Then Blanchard put down the horn and began a very funny rap.  He summed everything up by saying that yeah, they could of come out and played a bunch of standards but these kids in the band don’t wanna do that, they want to do something new…so I said, OK, maybe I’m just not getting it.  Maybe it’s me. So I sat back and appreciated–dug is not quite the word–the rest of that first set intellectually.  I continued taking notes (I wish I had them on me now) in case I wrote a review.  Like this. 

The set ended.  To be honest I can’t recall the tunes.  There was a funky jam that was an organic take on hip hop rhythms that was intriguing.  An Ivan Lins ballad (I never have been able to understand what jazzers see in Ivan Lins….).  The rest is a blur.  Lots of understated trumpet playing, kinda Miles-lite. The crowd seemed more enthused about some weirdo dancers than the band.  And it was cold, Frisco-in-August cold. People around me were shivering. Blanchard ended the set telling us all to go and have a few drinks (although I don’t think there was any to be had.) I got up, thinking about the music, analyzing it, being very KCRW [they sponsored the event]  about the whole thing. And on my way to grab a coffee I run into you, Jeffrey.

You scowled.  You thought it was boring.  You thought he was dull.  You said his playing had no fire to it.  You said the crowd response was lackluster.  That you had taken an informal poll and that three-to-one people thought it was dull.  (I never did find out your methodology.) And as you pounded away on the theme, I could feel this intellectual appreciation of mine weakening, cracking, just barely holding up.  I went back to my seat, coffee in hand.  I seemed even colder than it had been ten minutes before.  The rich people in their shorts and tees were fleeing. He began the second set, which seemed like a reprise of the first.  I sat there through another mellow trumpet solo. I was reminded of those Bobby Hackett with strings records. The guitar player did a long interesting kora-like solo.  Somewhere along I caught myself looking more at women and less at the band.  He began some flamenco flavored piece that could have been off a Gypsy Kings record. By then the notepad was tucked away in my pocket.  All the intellectual armor fallen away and I coudn’t get into it at all. I got up and decided to head out to Charlie O’s to catch Nolan Shaheed. (Although I actually wound up hanging in Chinatown with Elliott Caine, who I’d run into earlier.)

 So thanks, Jeffrey, for ruining what could have been a kind of pleasant evening.  And I’d be here telling people about this fascinating Terrance Blanchard show I saw.  Because with a couple days glowing hindsight, it would have taken on all sorts of deep meaning. Transformed from ponderous into heavy.  Underwhelming into subtly fascinating. And from a soundtrack sans a movie to genuine jazz. I mean I could have dealt with it, and written some pompous review to that effect.  That is, had I not run into you, a true believer, despiser of apostasy, loather of jazz that is jazz in name only.  You called it for what it was, and you were right. 

It was dull.

(2004)

I’d say that the only local hook [for a Steve Coleman piece in the OC Weekly] would be that as the jazz scene expands in LA and OC, and as the younger jazz fans are looking at ways to mix in funk and groove and Latin and African elements into jazz (or looking for them in jazz), that Coleman is one of the figures on the edges of jazz who is doing just that.  His The Sign and the Seal: Transmissions of the Metaphysics of a Culture is not only one of the most pompously titled albums of the last ten years, but also perhaps the most striking attempt to get deep, deep into the rhythms of West Africa via Cuba (he even sings and narrates in Yoruban). The Latin jazz scene in So Cal is thriving and becoming one of the best in the country…indeed it might well become the best [nope...]  You can see that in the influx of former Bay Area residents here (Pete Escovedo, Francisco Aguabella) and Cubans who come here instead of to NYC (last time I saw Long John Oliva his band was composed almost entirely of Cubans right off the dock, and man could they play!)  To put it even more locally for Orange County, Steamers is one of the most important Latin Jazz spots in southern California.

In a way, his visit is like that of the first beboppers (Bird, Dizzy, Lucky Thompson) that began to hit LA in the late 40′s; bringing their intellectual energies to the west coast.  From that sprung Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper and Charles Mingus and Hampton Hawes and a score of others.  Who knows what will happen to the young, angry and radical jazz fans and musicians of LA and OC?  Only future weeknight gigs at Steamers and Charlie O’s and a dozen lesser nightspots will tell.  I notice that Coleman is avoiding the clubs this time and heading straight for Cal Arts.  That’s where the kids are. And that’s where the future of jazz probably is as well.  

[Just found this essay....I'm not sure how much I agree with now--certainly not all of it--but it's pretty interesting.]

(2004)

I swear, I think I have had a stroke or something.  My memory is completely trashed.  I couldn’t remember Johnny Hodge’s name either, which is absurd.  I can see why the boppers would choose him as their symbol of anti-bop.  His elegance, understatement, nuance and tone could be viewed in the fomenting revolutionary culture of the times as “tomming” maybe.  I wouldn’t agree, but I could see where he could be the unfortunate victim of the tides of change that way.  When you first brought up Ellington’s sax player, though, the first guy I thought of (without being able to remember his name) was Paul Gonsalves, who is one of my favorite tenor players.  That guy, to me, was a precursor to avante-gardistas to come.  (Email from Vince Meghrouni)

 What he [Med Flory] told me was “we didn’t care about Louis Armstrong or any of that old shit” and then he went on to explain how Bird had made all of that stuff obsolete and stupid.  Playing to the crowd.  Entertaining people.  He especially hated Johnny Hodges’ playing, because he played things for the ladies, played things to sound pretty.

 It was bop philosophy from a pure be bopper.  And I realized that Bird and Monk and Bud and the rest were the originators, yes, but they weren’t the true believers.  Originators create something new from the old, but they are very much of the old.  They are creating from it, out of it, reacting to it…but very much in it.  There’s a continuum.  But their immediate followers, the kids:  they are the ones who actually begin with the creations of the originators, and are themselves children of the new without any of the context of what made the new different from the old.  What made the new new.  These kids become the hardcore, the fanatics, the genuine revolutionaries.   They are the ones who reject everything prior to the movement (artistic, political, religious, whatever) that they have adopted.  Bird liked all kinds of music.  Bud was steeped in older pianists.  Monk refused to call himself a bopper.  But the kids that went and saw them in the late 40′s and early ’50s, with their instruments or wire recorders at the ready….that’s where you pick up the white hot fire of the be bop ethos.  Those of us who come along later, with our historical perspective, well of course we recognize how Johnny Hodges was so wonderful.  Certainly he was not as brilliant or revolutionary as Bird, but then I don’t think Bird could never play a couple notes as achingly beautiful as Hodges.  But try and get a Med Flory to admit that.  It’s impossible to him.  It makes no sense.  And he speaks of Bird in the same hallowed tones that Russians in the thirties and forties used speaking of Lenin, or conservatives now speak of Reagan, or hippies use when talking about Dylan.  Or rock fans our age use talking about the Pistols and Germs.  One of those you-had-to-be-there, you-had-to-breathe-it things

 Of course, he loves Stan Getz.  He loves Prez.  But then neither was blowing those gorgeous tones at the time of the bebop revolution.  Prez was earlier, and Stan perfected his sound later. It’s like that guy Rush at Wednesday’s party telling us about Exene sneering “hippie” at him.  Of course it was utterly absurd.  Exene would tell you that now, I’m sure.  But by the logic of the revolution at that moment, well….

 Cultural revolutions are fun.  People really don’t get hurt that much.  Oh, I mean some do—I remember laughing when I stumbled onto a fatter, balder (but certainly no smarter) Quiet Riot on a public access show, talking about their upcoming tour of Montana and complaining bitterly about all the new Seattle bands—but no one gets killed.  (Well, there were fistfights sat the debut of one of Richard Strauss’ works, but then those were Germans….)  But political revolutions…now those are scary.

 Ya know, next time my pal Dean throws one of those jazz bashes of his ya gotta come.  Med is one of my favorite people.  Bop runs white hot in his veins, in his playing.  It’s really something to see.  I like Wynton Marsalis a lot, I listen to his albums, but deep down he is a revivalist.  You can see it when you compare it with unbelievable clarity when Med Flory takes off on his ferocious alto solos.  Med’s the real article.  There are other old boppers out there—Jackie McLean, for instance—but Jackie continues to grow, to change with the times, the New Thang, the Trane stuff…he is part of living jazz.  Med Flory is unrepentantly Bird all the way.  This incorrigible bebop fanatic.  He explores the music within the boundaries set by Charlie Parker.  There’s plenty of room to explore there, of course.  It’s something to experience.  I’ve seen him play in Dean’s living room these pure, white hot and absolutely alive solos that could have been recorded in 1950.  Not in any sense retro.  Just uninfluenced by the changes afterward.  Trane means absolutely nothing to him.  Hell, Sonny Rollins means nothing to him.  And when he finally goes, then with him and with the few like him will go the last living links to that revolutionary time.

 When I was first learning about jazz back in the ’70′s I just knew that Stan Getz was some lame white square who couldn’t play.  That Trane absolutely blew him off the stage atNewport; that Stan stood terrified in the wings wondering how the hell he was gonna follow that act.  And how he bombed.

 Years later, I found out that Getz and Trane didn’t even play on the same night.  That Getz, of course, went down a storm.  That Trane thought Getz had the most beautiful tone you could have.  And to be honest, I listen to a lot more Stan Getz than I do John Coltrane nowadays.  But back in the ’70′s, the young Trane fanatics pretty much controlled the press that I had access to–Rolling Stone and all the white kid hippie mags.   And they were true believers.  And John Coltrane’s stuff was soooooo radical. I mean “A Love Supreme”?  It was revolutionary. A beautiful, even achingly beautiful, maelstrom.  And all the young kids went nuts with it; it had the power of the crazy crude and exhilarating rock records they were raised on, but was several levels beyond in depth and sophistication (and chops, obviously).  I remember bringing home a Sonny Rollins record to my college apt and my jazz fan roommate sneering at it.  He said “I really don’t care about any of that stuff”.  SONNY ROLLINS!   The 60′s New Thang/Free Jazz revolution was so ferocious that Sonny fucking Rollins was branded a reactionary!  He, the saxophone colossus himself!  Like how the Bolsheviks executed all the other leftists for being counter-revolutionaries.  It’s so weird—Sonny did all these crazy records in the ’60′s; for me they are brilliant records.  But the old guard dismissed them as they were not the astonishing intellectually precise stuff he did in the ’50′s (thanks, Jon, for pointing that out to me).  And the kids despised it because it was not Trane, and was adamantly free of any spiritual context (which is probably one of the reasons I dig them so.).  They remain pretty much unrecognized. I suppose jazz is sooo intellectual these kinds of things are inevitable.  And those beliefs, to the true believers, can last a lifetime.  Mike Watt was once raving about Trane in one of his long pronouncement emails.  I mentioned if he liked that stuff then he ought to check out “East Broadway Rundown”.  He answered back and I realized that my suggestion made no sense to him at all.  It was not part of the canon.   Trane’s got a church dedicated to him up in ‘Frisco.  It’s kind of hard to imagine attending mass at St. Newks Cathedral.   

 I was listening to one of my brother Jon’s favorite Rollin’s records this morning, “Sonny Meets Hawk”.  Coleman Hawkins—who must have been an infinitely patient man—plays his wonderful style around which Sonny Rollins goes absolutely nuts.  He’s playing these crazy, and just plain weird, fractions of notes I guess (I’m a musical illiterate so forgive me here) in which the melody becomes clear only when you step back and listen to it without focusing on each individual tonguing [I have no idea what that means now].  Kinda pointillistic, I guess.  I’m sure you know the record by heart, Vince.  But as I blasted it along the 134 freeway today I was just stunned at how goddamn avant garde it was.  Would be even today.  And yet he was already by acclaimation—this is 1963—a has-been by that point.  Go figure. (As a sidenote, it’s odd that the composer of “Picasso” would be considered conservative….)

 So hey, I should wind this up.  I am not denying revolutionaries anything (well, as long as they don’t kill and imprison folks or generally fuck things up….) When I was a kid I was caught up in the whole punk rock revolution.  And though this will not make any sense to any of the pure jazzers out there–it was one of the most exhilarating intellectual periods of my life.  It was a wildly pure and uncompromising time.  Anyone who went through it will tell you the same thing.  We rejected everything.  Primitivism was a sign of purity, of the real, and chops were automatically suspect.  It was ideas over skills. Concept over composition. Funny over serious. An amazing time.  Nowadays—indeed any other time—such notions would be absurd. But hell, they were pure oxygen at the time.  That’s the nature of a revolution, I guess.  It sure seems stupid later.  But at the time, it is the only logical course of action—hell, the only conceivable course of action.  I got rid of almost my entire record collection in 1978 and 1979.  Hundreds of albums.  Dumped them and started anew.  And Med Flory could dismiss a truly exquisite player like Johnny Hodges as a musical whore who sells out the music to make the girls swoon.  In so many words, anyway.  (And Satchmo was treated like a hack in the ’60′s–and he invented the goddamn music.) Sid Caesar as the great bebopper Progress Hornsby had a guy in his band on radar, to warn them “in case we come anywhere near the melody.”  Hell, it made sense at the time.

 Wow.  Thanks for setting this off, Vince.  It’s good to clear out the cerebral cobwebs every once in a while.

 See ya….

 Brick

 ps:  Freddie Hubbard was on Chet Hanley’s show once for an amazing three hours.   All these wonderful stories about just about everyone you could name.  He talked about Lee Morgan and all the great times he had playing with him.  Chet mentioned something about “Sidewinder” or something, or maybe Freddie’s “Red Clay”—you know, one of the classic tunes.  Freddie was dismissive.  They didn’t want to play any of that stuff, he said.  None of the popular stuff.  They played the bebop.  The real music.  He wasn’t been pompous or a jerk at all.  It’s just that among the great cats the only thing that really matters is the serious bop.  It was like asking a physicist about statistics or a Shakespearian actor about television.  We may love popular culture, but to them, it’s basically a waste of time.  Something to pay the bills.  BeBop, I suppose, is the ultimate intellectual art form. It has to be accepted entirely on its own terms.  Med was arguing with my brother and a drummer once at Dean’s place about jazz and popular music.  The very hip jazz drummer was arguing that you sometimes have to give in a bit to popular tastes so that people can understand what is being done.  He wasn’t talking Kenny G., he was talking “Sidewinder”.  Otherwise, they said, you’ll never be able to expand the audience.  If you want to get people, the young people to listen to jazz, you have to make it a little easier for them to listen to, otherwise they’ll be scared off.  There won’t be an audience.  “Then the hell with ‘em,” Med replied, “Fuck ‘em.”

(2004)

Freddie Hubbard was on Chet Hanley’s show once for an amazing three hours.   All these wonderful stories about just about everyone you could name.  He talked about Lee Morgan and all the great times he had playing with him.  Chet mentioned something about “Sidewinder” or something, or maybe Freddie’s “Red Clay”—you know, one of the classic tunes.  Freddie was dismissive.  They didn’t want to play any of that stuff, he said.  None of the popular stuff.  They played the bebop.  The real music.  He wasn’t been pompous or a jerk at all.  It’s just that among the great cats the only thing that really matters is the serious bop.  It was like asking a physicist about statistics or a Shakespearian actor about television.  We may love popular culture, but to them, it’s basically a waste of time.  Something to pay the bills.  BeBop, I suppose, is the ultimate intellectual art form. It has to be accepted entirely on its own terms.  Med Fory was arguing with my brother and a drummer once at Dean’s place about jazz and popular music.  The very hip jazz drummer was arguing that you sometimes have to give in a bit to popular tastes so that people can understand what is being done.  He wasn’t talking Kenny G., he was talking “Sidewinder”.  Otherwise, they said, you’ll never be able to expand the audience.  If you want to get people, the young people to listen to jazz, you have to make it a little easier for them to listen to, otherwise they’ll be scared off.  There won’t be an audience.  “Then the hell with ‘em,” Med replied, “Fuck ‘em.”

(2010)

Now, you might need a bit of an outish edge to dig The Industrial Jazz Group … then again, underlying the IJG’s 15-piece in-your-face attack are Andrew Durkin’s solid, Mingus-soaked arrangements. The group’s Industrial Jazz A-Go Go is just terrific, all swinging craziness, like Stan Kenton smoking all his band’s dope and cleaving Mingus’ ax with an ax. We love it. And the upcoming LEEF is from a live gig at home in Portland … funny swinging stuff with clumps of European music and Zappoid art rock and cabaret tossed in, missing only Joel Grey. They’re at the Temple Bar on Tuesday, at 11 p.m. on the dot. One set only, alas.

(Actually it wasn’t recorded in Portland, but I can’t  remember where. And there were 16 players. Durkin pointed this out on his site. And are they still playing? A helluva good band, I said other things about them too, including “Jazz on a Monday Vibe presents the Industrial Jazz Group, whose leader Andrew Durkin’s arrangements are weirdo cool, like hanging out stoned at Sam Rivers’ loft arguing about Mingus vs Threadgill, Duke vs Raymond Scott. ” Hey, it made sense at the time.)

(LA Weekly, 2005)

Yowza!  Her CD covers outdo Eliane Elias for come-hither cheese; this is Julie London for the college kids of today.  And Jane actually sings better than Julie.  On her early stuff she even matched Julie’s spare instrumental backing, getting that noiry feel.  Sure, like Sassy and all the others, they have bogged her down in lush, orchestral arrangements lately, cashing in. Sentimentality sells.  Live, though, she’s backed by a good jazz combo.  Singing and swinging?  Yes, yes.  And she’ll look drop dead gorgeous?  Ohhhh yes.  And will she date you, a college kid?  Not likely—that’s her husband on the drums.   ROYCE HALL

(Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly, c. 2009)

Bennie Maupin brings his group to the World Stage on Friday and Saturday. It’s $20, they don’t serve drinks, the place is a store front with folding chairs, and the neighborhood needs a serious infusion of stimulus money that doubtless is being held up by the various political shenanigans, infighting, greedy landlords and bureaucratic incompetence that have plagued the Village in Leimert Park for years, denying this splendid, historic, culturally significant, low crime and charming as hell artistic center it’s proper place in our city. Oh well. But just because the political establishment doesn’t give a damn doesn’t mean that some of the best jazz you will ever see doesn’t still go down at the World Stage. Bennie Maupin is brilliant, original, fired up, daring, passionate and an amazing player with a hell of a band and well worth the drive out (or into) here. Here he is in his creative element. You remember him way back on Bitches  Brew or with Herbie Hancock. Great stuff…but he’s way beyond even that now. Jazz musicians never stop learning new things. And fans shouldn’t either. Check it out.