Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Two things about Thelonious Monk and inspired by Dr. Seuss.

Posted on by

(One night in the year 2000 I was listening to Theolonious Monk and reading Dr. Seuss….)

Misterioso

Smoke up and curled and
furled ‘round the piano man
chording, sorting, courting a melody.
By a bare bulbed light a sax man glistened,
listened,
blows low, something slow, out of flow.
I said so.
Man at the bar says “No no no—
Just listen!
He’s not missin’ the rhythm!
He’s with ‘em.  Always was, ‘cus
the music is there in the air…”

I disagreed.
Oh c’mon—there’s sound all around,
And noise…

“And notes and chords and music, man—
It’s like math or philosophy, doncha see?”

Oh man he’s swacked…
but I asked
you mean all abstract?

“No no jack!
The sounds are real,
a sound you can feel…”
Then he reeled and faded.
I waited.

Drank scotch.  Watched.

Piano man hummed loud as he played.  Weird cat.
I liked his hat.

We left it at that.

My friend came to.
“Bartender, another for me here and my brother”.
I asked for one for the piano playing cat.
“He likes his hat”
Bartender eyes:  wise guys.
“Thanks.”
We drank.

I walked up the drink.
Piano man nodded,
playing shards of melody from tunes long forgotten.
Some Tin Pan Alley, a nuclear blues.
The sax somehow came in on cue
Leaving me in the dark—
(or was it the booze?)
He looked up.
I said
I like your hat.
He said “Thank you”,
and that was that.

When suddenly the music fell into place,
filling out space,
a melody parsed is a melody whole
and it all became so misterioso….

Just like the drunk had said.

Blue Monk

Blue Monk
and I’m drunk–
What you gonna do?
Lissen to that piano,
man,
the guy in the hat,
he’ll dance,
he’s in a trance…
That’s blue blue blue
Monk to you.
And I’m drunk, too.
Blow man blow, blow that ax.
Bass man’s walking, talking
to the drummer
who chatters back
on the ride.
Hey Bartender! Another!
and something on the side.
Lissen to that piano man,
that arpeggio–
hey where’d you go?
I’m talking to you!
That’s Blue Monk up there!
And I’m drunk, too.

(12-12-00)

(That was the last time I mixed Thelonious Monk, Theodore Geisel and Thurlow Weed.)

I kinda miss being a lonely LA Kings fan in Los Angeles

Posted on by
Suddenly I keep having these surreal moments at work of people walking up to talk all about the LA Kings. I mean, this does not happen in Los Angeles. Hockey fandom was something weird and unseemly best kept to oneself. Nobody ever spoke of it. But now this. People walk up to my desk and start gushing about Jonathan Quick and Justin Brown and the other guys (they only know Quick and Brown’s name) and try to talk hockey talk and suddenly I know what it’s like to be Lakers fan. It’s very unsettling.
 
 
 

People talked of jazz

Posted on by

(from a  Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, 2011)

We thought Raymond crossed the freeway. It doesn’t. When CalTrans dug their huge ditch right through Pasadena and filled it with the 210, Raymond was one of the old thoroughfares that was sundered. Swinging the car around in front of a huge church we swore we heard a saxophone. We stopped. Sure enough. It was a tenor, sounding huge. So we parked in front of the place, this St. Andrews Catholic Church, with its enormous, medieval bell tower we’d seen from the freeway a thousand times, and when we opened the big giant wooden doors out poured “Trane’s Blues”. It was the Carl Randall gig we’d forgotten about. The place was enormous inside as well, vast even, and very very ancient looking. Old Rome must have looked like this to the first saints. It certainly didn’t sound like this, though, not this huge tenor saxophone that filled the place with this whole new holy spirit, this John Coltrane tone and those Coltrane chords, or that Dexter Gordon smooth with the edges on, or what before that, Coleman Hawkins? Is that where this sound comes from, the sound you hear all over town on a good night, that modern tenor saxophone sound? The drummer wailed too, the keyboard sounded like a pipe organ in all this space, the bass was huge, everything was huge. When Elliott Caine began blowing trumpet his notes stung, it was almost shockingly savage, so loud and brash and brass and just how radical a thing jazz trumpet was way back then became clear, when Louis Armstrong so shook up a western civilization so wracked and rent by war and plague and revolution. This was crazy stuff, this jazz. We forget that now. But it’s bad, crazy stuff.  It changed if not everything then a hell of a lot. If not the fundamentals of what we are—it echoed off these holy walls, and the saints weren’t fazed a bit—it certainly shook up the cultural innards forever. Cheryl Conley came out to close the gig. Nice, nice voice,  very lively and quite lovely. Afterward there was a party at the parish hall.  Wine flowed till the wee hours and people talked of jazz.

Outside, hushed and still, the city of Pasadena curled up for the night. We drove home thinking of the past, the ancient past, and wondering about the future, the immediate future. That big church will be there forever. But this music?

Dead musicians

Posted on by

(email, 2009)

Of all the bands I was in, Renfield Brick was my favorite.  After that all the other bands seemed kinda safe.  Even the craziest most dangerous ones. I don’t know why, though, they weren’t lame at all. I loved them. But Renfield Brick was special….That’s such ancient history, completely gone. Chuck’s been dead years now, an OD. Ed is HIV positive. And I’m not even in rock’n’roll anymore. My second favorite band was my first, Keene White.  Chuck’s dead, and the singer died of Hep C he got from shooting up. Wasn’t even a junkie anymore…never had been really. Just chipping with the wrong needle. He died on the table..they were prepping him for a liver trasplant but the infection got him first. Close but no cigar. A few musicians from later bands and projects are dead…two from testicular cancers, a couple more ODs. There’s more, I’m sure, but I can’t recall the others right now, and I ain’t gonna try. Why? Just picking at those thick punk rock callouses, seeing if they bleed. They do, if ya don’t leave ’em alone. You pick and pick and pick and then late at night the blood flows and I find myself sighing and saying aloud Chuck, you dumbfuck…..

Dead

Posted on by

(unpublished essay, 2009)

Last nite we were at a bbq up in Lincoln Heights, way up on a hill, digging the panorama of a zillion backyard roman candles and rockets and pyrotechnics. The whole city looked wild, out of control, pyromanic. It was gorgeous. Crazy gorgeous. Then I get home to do some writing and check the email and find out a lady we know, a regular at all the summer bashes, was killed in our neighborhood when her house caught fire very early this morning, apparently from an errant firework.  Jesus…

She was at all the summer’s parties. Tall and mild, in black, hair a wild fauvist red, she’d hang with Gus, with Bob, with Josefina laughing and chatting never loud. She wore big ugly clunky shoes. It was her trademark, that red hair and those big clunky shoes. When I drove past her house today it was a charred ruin, all ashes and cinders. Pieces of furniture scattered on the lawn. There were heaps of clothes and a single clunky shoe. I wish I’d not scene that shoe. I wish I’d not driven down her street.

The dead. We party and laugh still, but think of them. We think of the dead when we see a few extra beers still in the cooler. We think of the dead when there’s a few extra pulls left on the joint. We live, thinking of the dead. We party, thinking of the dead. We laugh, and the thoughts dispel into the night air.

Feathers

Posted on by

( from a Bricks Picks in the  LA Weekly 2010)

Coming up is the extraordinary Malian band Tinariwen, about whom every desert cliché has been written by rock critics already. All we’ll say is we are absolute suckers for these guys, and highly recommend their albums if you like your Malian sounds cut through with earthy blues and a “Memo From Turner” kind of Stones groove, or if you’ve ever felt the eerie pull of gnawa. And while we do not encourage the use of illegal substances of any kind whatsoever, if you should somehow catch a whiff of hash in the air, breathe deep and listen.

 We don’t encourage the wearing of feathers either, or those manic hip shimmies that make a man’s eyes bounce around their sockets like pinballs. But hell, if it’s samba what can you do? And you’ll get samba in spades when Brazilian singer Diogo Nogueira is at the Roxy this Friday. He’s the star act at this year’s Brazilian Summer Festival, and the samba will be thoroughly authentic and played by Brazilian players that know how to do it. Lots of local percussionists and befeathered dancers, too, as always, and when the music is fired up and the bar good the crowd just loses it. We recall one of these bashes on a humid night at the Ford Amphitheatre some years ago. Bossa nova this wasn’t. The silver haired band was frantic, unstoppable, we’re talking Ramones tempos on acoustic instruments for what seemed like hours. The crowd sang every word, and in key. By the end of the night it was complete mayhem, the audience was an ecstatic mob, belting out the lyrics, jumping up and down, hugging strangers, grandmas running up and down the steps utterly out of their minds.  The stage was awash in dancers. Apparently this is normal. Maybe in the confines of the Roxy, the people will restrain themselves. Details at braziliannites.com.

Feathers.

Rita Hayworth

Posted on by
Watched Lady From Shanghai again yesterday. Damn that’s a great flick. And Rita Hayworth in that short blonde hair, good lord she was hot. Gorgeous. Gorgeously hot. A goddess, but one of those South Indian goddesses carved into the rock walls of a temple in the Deccan traps full of Vishnu and war and elephants and preening gods with tremendous manhoods and goddesses who lie about naked in the sun, condemning whole cities to oblivion. One of those kinds of goddesses. The gnarly ones.
 

Tinariwen

Posted on by

(2005)

I know it’s pain getting there from anywhere east of Beverly Hills, but Tinariwen are playing the Santa Monica Pier this Thursday.  They are from Mali, but are actually Taureg  and share that cool kind bluesy Malian sound that’s been stirring up the music scene in a lot of places (if not the American rock scene…) You can hear an example of them on that incredible “Festival in the Desert” album, which is a live recording from the same named event held in the sands a day’s drive from Timbuktu. That album is the most exciting live concert recording I have heard in many years, and I can’t see how some of it’s amazing, bluesy, funky, windy Afro-Saharan vibe won’t be emanating from the stage this Thursday at the Pier. Funny thing about this desert sound is it’s eerie similarity to American blues…there’s a real John Lee Hooker loping groove and grit to it. Like the best roots reggae in a way. Well worth your checking out, even if you are not as addicted to African sounds as some of us are.

Besides, it’s free.
(2010–Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly)

And there’s a couple great events from other continents on Saturday.  We’ve been digging Mali’s Tinariwen quite a while, with their mix of Sahel feeling and melodies set to a very gritty instrumentation. It’s very bluesy, like so much Malian music, and it strikes a deep chord with many of us, but the rhythms are often wonderfully alien, loping chunkachunk swaying stuff, and it’s absolutely irresistible.  It’s rock’n’roll hard too, so that 2007’s Iman Aman was almost a Saharan Exile on Main Street.  Their latest Imidiwan is a touch lighter and less gritty but just as good. The men in this band did a brief stint long ago as Taureg guerillas, a romantic story that pop journalists still mooning over Che Guevara just love. But military service is just an interruption in many a young musician’s career, and Tinariwen are and always have been musicians first and foremost, turning ancient music traditions into a formidable new style that certainly blows our mind.

Ya gotta wonder about the art on the guitar, in that eye, that eagle, maybe a setting sun? A rising moon?  Ancient stuff. Christianity purged most of the ancient signs from western culture, protestantism left nothing but the true cross.  A whole universe of magic symbols reduced to one. Rationalism dispensed with that one and left us with nothing magical at all. For everything there is a logical explanation. Everything. For me there’s no longer any magic, no miracles. I see a guitar like this covered in ancient magic and I feel envy for a second or two.  That’s all,  just a second or two.  I listen to Tinariwen and hear one of greatest bands in the world and all makes perfect musicological sense.

 

Dish it out

Posted on by

And while I’m at it, here’s another great 3 am party tune….picked up No New York in the Village in ’77 or ’78. Still got it…and it still sounds great at a party at 3 a.m.

Too many rich people and intellectuals

Posted on by

(2010–Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly)

On Monday the Theo Saunders Quartet is at Charlie O’s on Monday. We imagine they’re doing Monk again but to be honest club gigs are where jazz really happens, and always has, and always will.  Three or four sets, a loose vibe, good booze, good food, and a parking lot or alley to smoke funny cigarettes, that’s the way it ought to be. That’s the way it always has been.  Forget the whole America’s classical music thing.  That implies something beautiful and way old that’s been preserved a long time. That’s a concert hall thing, which is OK but not us, not at all. Galleries and museums and “performance spaces” are nice, but smack a bit of salons…too many rich people and intellectuals and  like that. The jazz thing is something we need to hear and watch and feel for real. We dig the jazz bars. Minton’s was a bar. That’s all you need to know. Google “Minton’s” and dig.