Monthly Archives: July 2013

Miles Davis and that bilateral either/or thing

Posted on by

(2012)

The Ken Price tribute gig last night at LACMA was terrific. Got there towards the end of Brian Swartz’s Chet set. He did that stuff so beautifully. He had a helluva cold, turned out, which made for even more effective vocals…just the right touch of feeble. He used the rhythmic trio of the LA Jazz Quartet..Larry Koonse on guitar, Darek Oles on bass and filling in very ably once again for Mark Ferber was Kendall Kaye on the drums. Koonse has to be the piano player’s nightmare…I mean he does what he does so well you never notice that there’s no piano player. And he’s so much nicer than a piano player. Swartz, though, was the star….I’d never heard him play like that, like Chet Baker, that purer than pure tone, the elongated notes, the light swing like the airiest be bop you ever heard. Those LAJQ guys, man, they know how to lay it on without ever laying it on too much. Continue reading →

Jazz writer

Posted on by

There was that time at LACMA a couple years ago, one of their Friday jazz nights, and I’m chatting with some people. A guy just cuts right in and snarls Hey, is your name really Brick Wahl?   Uh, yeah, it is. Well, how the hell did you get a stupid name like that?

I politely explained. My name is Phil, my wife’s name is Phyll…so I got the nickname, etc etc. He didn’t understand what the hell was wrong with two people having the same goddam name. I said oh well. He said I’m a jazz writer, too. Can you get me a job?  I told him to contact the paper. He thanked me and split.

Footjob

Posted on by

Call me naive, but before spammed email I must confess I had no idea there was a thing called a footjob. True. It’s not that I was unfamiliar with the concept, just that I had no idea that such a thing is officially called a footjob. You look it up in one of your sleazier dictionaries and there’d it’d be: Footjob. Noun. Etc. Etc. I imagine the Oxford English Dictionary even has it as a verb. Look it up in Wikipedia. (I didn’t.) Also before spam I had no idea there were whole films of nothing but footjobs. Lots of them, a mini-industry’s worth. A couple out of work secretaries, a defrocked priest, some toe nail polish, and voila, a footjob movie. I didn’t even know that there were actresses and actors who specialized in films about footjobs. Or that one of those actors was named Brick Wahl. Who also directed them. Alas, I am unfamiliar with his work. I do know that sharing the same name has not yet led to any confusion. But someday, somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, it will. Some computer technician will ask are you THE Brick Wahl, the footjob guy? I’ll say no but, um, thank you.

And if it weren’t for spam, I would not be prepared for that at all.

Atheist

Posted on by

Someone posted on Facebook a vaguely creepy picture of Jon Stewart smirking manfully next to some quote about there being less choice in homosexuality than there is in religion. I can’t remember the whole quote but you’ve probably seen it by now, it’s everywhere. The thing kind of creeped me out….not the quote itself but the format itself…the big man looking vaguely Kennedy-esque but for that smirk utterly devoid of hubris, and next to it the quote in big strong letters–the thing looked more like one of those pictures of Stalin or Mao or Mussolini, Franco, or Petain that would be hung in public squares or on train station walls….just a creepy kind of nostalgia for more organized times. I wonder what the mindset is that finds solace in such displays? And how do they not notice? I must be the only one creeped out by this, but maybe I don’t trust anybody, or just think too much about the bad old days. Continue reading →

I just wrote that sentence in electrons

Posted on by

Half the stuff I have ever written in my life disappears in unsaved drafts or forgotten and long obliterated emails. All the long first drafts of Brick’s Picks columns I gushed out…I’d trim them to the exact word count and turn all that excess writing back into random electrons. And I have no idea how many emails are no more, thousands and thousands of emails. I used to do my best stuff in emails. Some were saved. The ones written at work, however, they too are now electrons. They could run on for hundreds of words, for paragraphs, crazy tales of something or other and then poof…..gone. Words become crazy spinning electrons. Probably a million words have gone that way. Hundreds of stories. Thousands of vignettes. I never even think about it till suddenly I want to retrieve one like the tale of the girl I nearly squirted with pickle juice. Sounds funny now, but to a little kid from California plunked down on an island off the coast of Maine it was no laughing matter. Lobster bait. It was my very first day in Great Island Elementary School, the fifth school I’d attended in second grade….beginning in San Diego, a stop in Tacoma, a couple other places, then the wilds of Maine……and my mother packed me a brownbag lunch of a liverwurst sandwich on rye with a pickle and when I bit into that pickle it squirted…but just then the little girl sitting next to me ducked down to pick up a pencil or something and the juice arced clear over her head and landed unseen in the floor. I could see it there, a tiny little puddle. Probably the most relieved I ever felt in my entire life. That was half a century ago but I can still remember it vividly. I wrote down the whole thing in a longish email that is gone now. Just electrons. And you know how electrons are. Meaningless. Brownian. infinitesimally small. Too small to give a damn about, really, except that I just wrote that sentence in electrons.

Here come da judge

Posted on by

Facebook has ruined writing. You can write all you want on Facebook and there’s no need whatsoever to do so with any grace or talent or even basic writing chops. You’re not supposed to show any chops, actually. It was designed as a purely egalitarian medium. Nothing pretty. Very little even signficant. I know a lot of fine writers and their Facebook posts are just as dull and artless as any twelve year old’s. It is wholly functional.  Two dimensional. If people talked as dull as they post you would find them so annoying you’d duck out of the way when you saw them coming. Facebook reduces everyone to the dullest person you know. It is artless, faceless, characterless and not very funny. Emotions are worn on sleeves. Facebook is like instant messaging that everyone at work can read. Safe, dull, and designed not to hurt anyone’s feelings. No juicy gossip, no hidden secrets, no sex.   Continue reading →

Maybe a couple too many tom toms

Posted on by

They say Big Sid Catlett could swing an entire big band with a pair of brushes and a phone book.

a couple too many tom toms

Fan mail

Posted on by

An artifact from 2007 I just found tucked away in my email…..

Brick- How’s it going?  I read one of your jazz picks while taking a dump this morning….good stuff….

At least he read it before using it.

Movie star

Posted on by

Rough morning at work, everything going wrong, so I split for Don Cucos right around the corner for huevos rancheros and a Tecate. I took the seat at the far end of the bar. There’s three music industry guys next to me, the ones who design and make boxes and pedals and amps for guitar players. They were chatting up a storm over beers. I ate in silence, paid my bill and  got up to leave. One says Hey, aren’t you a movie star? I said no. They said yes you are, you’re a movie star. I said no, I’m nobody. The guy says no, you’re that dude. I recognize you. That dude. I said no. Yeah you are. That dude. I oughta ask for your autograph. I said no, no autographs. He said well, let me shake your hand? We shook hands. As I walked off he was trying to remember just what movie I had starred in. I had just made that guy’s day.

You have no  idea how many times this happens to me. Several times a year.  And those are just the ones with the nerve to ask. Most just stare and wonder what movie they saw me in.

Ya know, it’s really weird when people think you are Somebody because they never belive it when you say you’re a Nobody. I tried something different today. They asked Are you a movie star? I said no, I’m just some asshole. Which meant for sure I was Somebody. No Nobody would ever call himself an asshole. So there goes that idea. Back to square one.

I get asked for autographs. If I don’t agree to an autograph they get mad. Or hurt, you can see it in their faces and just feel awful about it. Problem is since they never know who I am I have no idea what to sign. I signed Brick once. Just Brick. That made them happy. Tourists, ya know.

Once a security guard at the Hollywood Von’s caught me in the aisle and asked if I was a movie star. None of the other employees the nerve. They told him to ask me. I said I wasn’t. He said I was. I said no, really, I’m not a movie star. He said come on, man, I’ve seen you in movies! I said OK, I was. He said I knew it!

I never told him who I was, though. But he knew it. I saw him talking to the others, and they stared, trying to remember who I was. I was polite, but secretive. You know how movie stars are.

The funny thing is that I have no idea why people think I am a movie star. I have no idea what it is I do that gives people that idea. If I could figure it out, I’d stop. But this goes back nearly 30 years. Thirty years of movie stardom and what do I have to show for it?

Grammy Museum

Posted on by

One night I finally gave in and went to one of these events at the Grammy Museum they were always after me about. It was dull, dull, dull. There was the inevitable private reception afterward with an open bar with expensive wine. The bored waiters slipped about with trays of bite sized things I couldn’t identify, but generally tasted odd. The crowd was all music industry types and hangers on and ass kissers and aging star fuckers and their rich kid freeloaders and not my scene at all. Not one bit. I slipped away for a minute and looked at some photo display in the gallery. Big shiny photos perfectly positioned and mounted and framed and very artily significant. Most of them were of rock stars, this being the Grammy Museum. Boz Scaggs and Rod Stewart and Bonnie Raitt, some Debbie Harry and David Byrne and Sting, like that.  For some ungodly reason, right there in the middle of them, was a shot of crazy, hardcore, anarchist, music business-hating Black Flag, with Henry Rollins all serious and fierce and young and not quite so buff. I recognized the beat up van they were sitting in and laughed….I remembered smoking dope in that very same van. Getting very high. That was, what, some thirty years ago? A couple party attendees came up, maybe wondering what I found so funny.  I got high in that van I said, aloud. Maybe too loud. They backed off. I laughed again. Nice people did that when we laughed back then too, thirty years ago. We would laugh, they’d retreat, we’d laugh again. Funny how laughter can be dangerous. Everyone took themselves very seriously in the seventies. So we’d laugh at them. It worked. This and the rest of my life three decades ago passed before my eyes. I was dying in there, surrounded by these photographs,  these people, this place. 

Suddenly I wondered just how the fuck I wound up hanging around a bunch of music industry hacks at the Grammy Museum. I hate the Grammys. I hate the music industry.  At that moment I knew I would never make it in this business. Me, who’d shared a bill with Black Flag in some hole of a club long ago. And me now, who only wants to sit in a small bar somewhere and listen to intense jazz improvisation. I just want the music, the pure stuff, all creativity and inspiration and intensity. Not this shit. Not this ultra hip industry crap. Not their fine suits and  fine cars and arm candy. I was hating myself for even being there. I had promised I never would, but there I was. Just another jazz journalist on the make. I had to get out of there, so I gulped down my two hundred buck chuck and split. The valet brought my car around. I got in and cranked up the radio. A saxophone screamed. I pulled into the city traffic and went looking for some jazz, feeling clean.