Category Archives: All kinds of music (except jazz and punk)

Random kinds of music.

John Turturro

Posted on by

Brick with John Turturro

 

John Turturro and I at the opening of Passione in Beverly Hills. I’m the tall one. It’s a brilliant documentary about the Naples, Italy music scene…I was hoping to do an article on it for the LA Weekly, which would have gotten the thing the attention it warranted in this town. New editor wasn’t interested. A shame, it could have put the thing over in L.A., and gotten the soundtrack attention too. One of those rare times a music journalist can have an impact on another medium. And the film, and the Neapolitan music scene it so lovingly portrayed, deserved a helluva lot better than they got from the local press.

There was a great party at the Italian Consulate afterward. Pretty heady haps for a jazz journo, I gotta say. This was on a Saturday night. I quit the Weekly that Tuesday. Told the editor I quit. He sent me a lecture on punctuation. I told him to fuck off.

But I did take the kernel of that unwritten article and made it the coda of my very last Brick’s Picks:

Just saw John Turturro’s Passione, and talk about a revelation. We barely knew anything about Neapolitan music…Dean Martin, Lou Canova, pizza parlor juke boxes … that was about it. Who knew that back in ancient, messed-up, photogenic Naples could be found the real thing. Not even the hippest radio stations played the stuff. That bothered Turturro. He loves this music. So he did one of those things that must drive Hollywood agents utterly mad: He took a film crew over there and shot 23 songs by 23 different acts in 23 different locations in 21 days and, man, you gotta see the results. There isn’t a performance that isn’t stellar, and the passion and intensity is so stirring you’d have to be a hardened cynic not to be moved. The tunes run the artistic gamut from street singers to classic love songs to art songs to operatic numbers to very Neapolitan rap, rock and even reggae. Turturro limits his screen time to a couple street interviews (and one freaky dance); mostly he just narrates, sparingly. He doesn’t edit the tunes all to hell and no storyline bogs the thing down. It’s just music and locations and people — no heavy analysis, no dreadful critics, and unlike Buena Vista Social Club, no American players sitting in and tainting everything. Nope. This is the best music flick we have seen since Calle 54, and to be honest, we liked this even more. Go see it. Buy the soundtrack. You’ll be making pasta and singing “O Sole Mio” to your dog, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Still bums me I didn’t get to write that piece. I remember telling my wife on the way home that this was gonna be the big time. It would have been, too. Only problem was I didn’t want the big time. I just wanted my life back.

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

Ray Manzarek

Posted on by
I was never been much of a Doors fan, though suddenly I think they are the greatest thing ever. Funny how that works. Just trying to get into the Jimbo spirit here. Stark and dark and evil, Ray dropping Trane–McCoy Tyner really–into the Top 40. Lighting fires. Ray was hip. Jazz hip. Jazz was dark. Jazz was beat. Jim was beat. Words breaking on through to the other side, full of madness and patricide and Oedipus. Ray laying down jazz licks hidden inside that rock’n’roll. There was nothing pretty about any of this. Nothing soft. The music grooved as bad things happened. Life was hard and weird and sympathy wasn’t part of their vibe. Let’s get real here. You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.

John Altman

Posted on by

John Altman plays with the Mark Z Stevens Trio tonite, Saturday Feb 2, at the Desert Rose in Los Feliz, corner of Prospect and Hillhurst. Music is 7 to 11. There’s no cover. That’s the bare facts. Everything below is just my usual charmingly humorous diatribe, but hell, if I were you I’d read it. Besides, Mark asked if I could spread the word about the gig. I said sure, Mark, anything for you babe.  Because that’s the way we talk in show biz, and that’s the way we roll. Continue reading →

Rick Stevens

Posted on by
Terrific singer, horrific crime, I never thought I’d see this. He’s appearing with Tower of Power…the band is up for it. I’d love to see that, he was my fave of their vocalists. His ability to shift from conversation to singing and back on “You’re Still A Young Man” is just extraordinary, I remember being amazed at that even as a kid. It was so street, man, so real. Too real, I guess, him spinning out on speedballs and whatever, a junkie tweeked out of his skull. His crime was bad, man, real bad. No thinking at all, just bad paranoia with a gun. Yow. Hard time for a zillion years, for life, for life doubled even, did the crime and doing his time twice over, forever. Then a miracle, he’s out, and he sure ain’t a young man no more. But I bet he can still sing, sing like nobody’s business, and in a world where people can’t even sing for real for the President and Martin Luther King, I doubt you’ll hear a note or a word out of this man that ain’t as real as real can get. I’m looking forward to his day on stage.
Anyway, here’s the story.

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.

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.

 

Joe Bataan

Posted on by

Man, I love Joe Bataan. I finally got to see him several years ago (circa 2004, I guess) at the Filipino Cultural Festival in San Pedro. All around those huge old trees with their screaming parrots was a sea of Filipinos. They were chattering like mad, averaged about four feet, and craned their necks and stared waaaaaay up at me, giggling. We got some pansit or something and watched the inevitable beauty contest. There was some important pinoy dude emceeing the thing, and some politicians, and somebody from the consulate. And there were two beauty queens, former Miss Philippine Cultural Festival or something. One was a perfect pinay virgin, prim, sinless, polite, with a sweet smile. The other was some saucy knockout, an LA girl, this smartass, hysterically funny gorgeous chick who made a risque joke and I fell immediately in love with her, of course. She had some kind of connection with the LA Raiders, had been a girlfriend or something. A wantonly sexy woman. I remember the good beauty queen was obviously offended by her.

Anyway, there was some bad singing group that opened and went on forever. Then out came Joe Bataan. Really thick NYC accent and attitude. He called himself Joe Bataan (as in ran), and not Bataan (as in on) or Joe Bata’an (as in ah-on), which is how he was introduced. What an amazing set. Great soul and funk, all the classics. A total showman, he owned that stage. I stood in line afterward to have him sign the CD I bought there….something I never did before or after. I felt like a complete geek. But he was soooooooooooooooo cool, that Joe Bataan….

(2003 or so)

Breathe deep and listen

Posted on by

(Brick’s Picks, LAWeekly)

Wednesday at the Troubadour 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.

Nice white people wriggling

Posted on by

[from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly]

It might just be easier to head over to Vitello’s where we are surprised as hell to see Katia Moraes & Sambaguru playing Friday. In fact, if you love Brazilian music this is a must. The band smokes no matter what style, so tight, so limber. And she is a world class Brazilian vocalist who’ll remind you eerily at times of Elis Regina. She’s has more stage presence, charisma and enthusiasm than maybe anybody in town. We have to wonder how the nice white people in their little chairs at Vitello’s are going to handle just sitting there once she and her band get moving. They’ll be wriggling over their pasta and then realize it and stop. And then start wriggling again. Make reservations now.