Fri. May 18 -- Is Malian desert rhythm getting too hot? Find out from singer Khaira Arby and her cooking crew. With Peaking Lights, Moon Pearl. At the Satellite, 1717 Silverlake Blvd., Silver Lake 90026; 9pm; $12; (323) 662-7728.
Fri.- Sun. May 18-20 -- Mega-drummer Jack DeJohnette (Miles Davis, Charles Lloyd & all) doesn't turn 70 every year, and when he celebrates with iconic fusion pals Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke, well, y'know . . .. At Catalina Bar & Grill, 6725 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood 90028; two sets; $50-$75; (323) 466-2210; www.catalinajazzclub.com.
Sat. May 19 -- If you want to hear some great musicians dig way into the compositions of Charlie Parker, you can trust Charles Owens and The Luckman Jazz Orchestra to deliver beyond all expectations. At Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Fine Arts Complex, 5151 State University Drive, L.A. 90032; 8pm; $25-$35; (323) 343-6600; www.luckmanarts.org.
Wed. May 23 -- Swedish power-metal banner-wavers Sabaton wax nostalgic over how great war used to be when you had to get your enemies' blood all over your face. Swell, but for a more complex message, try the epic forms and textural adventures of SoCal's Ana Kefr. Plus Relicseed, Sirion, Solaria. At the Key Club, 9039 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood 90069; 7:30pm; $10; 18+; www.keyclub.com; (310) 274-5800.
Thurs. May 24 -- Audiences and fellow musicians alike sure are digging the somewhat retro elegance of pianist Vardan Ovsepian; intriguing format, too, with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on viola and Artyom Manukyan on cello. At the Blue Whale on the third level of Weller Court Plaza, south of East First Street between South Los Angeles Street and South San Pedro Street, Little Tokyo 90012; 9pm-midnight; $10; validated parking underneath off Second Street at the sign of the P in a circle; (213) 620-0908; www.bluewhalemusic.com.
Sun. May 27 -- Good eatz and drinx, good abstract soundz, good artistic company (Andrea Bowers, Alexandra Grant & Brian Kennon) in a gawkable hilltop home, and the knowledge that your donation hardly covers what you get from an organization that makes sound into evolution. That's a SASSAS Listening Party; 4-8pm; $125. Register at www.sassas.org.
Wed. May 30 -- Dub Club presents another "reggae meets Africa" night with Jamaican singer Bushman and Senegalese kora player Youssoupha Sidibe. Very righteous. At the EchoPlex, 1154 Glendale Blvd., Echo Park 90026; doors 9pm; $15 ($10 before 10pm); www.attheecho.com.
Kyle C. Kyle, drummer in my band Dred Scott as well as the Skulls, the Willys, Wild Stares, W.A.C.O., Listing Ship, Motels and many more, is ill and could use some help getting established in convalescence. Send a donation if you can.
Read Don Heckman’s jazz picks here and MoshKing's metal listings here. Read John Payne's plutonic Bluefat.com here.
Remember "Dogphotoman," the Greg Burk musical mystery novella you used to get on this site for free? You can now pay 99 cents for it as a Kindle eBook! Click here. Readable on any computer by downloading the free Kindle reader.
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Motoko Honda called her multimedia composition "Dreams of a Flower." One observer guessed the flower to be Motoko herself: raised in Japan as a classical pianist, rebelling against the strictures, moving to the USA, struggling toward an identity. And the musical-visual narrative traveled along a similar path.
Solo dancer Roxanne Steinberg was a great choice to play the rootless crocus. Slowly breaking soil into a hostile world, she used her big feet and Amazonian stature to dodge and oppose the storms, her movements as often muscular, deliberately nervous or unbalanced as they were graceful.
The instruments also acted the way humans do: realizing structures and improvisations alone or in twos; occasionally coming together for a groove, a mass improvisation or a concerted statement; relating to one another through shared values and intuition. (The overall philosophy reminded me of Wadada Leo Smith, one of Honda's mentors.)
Behind the drums, Alex Cline used gongs, rattles and skins more to unite than to drive. Steuart Liebig's bass served as a defined male counter-voice and a vehicle for sparky electronic effects. Maggie Parkins' cello and Jeff Gauthier's violin intertwined in tight melodic dialogue. Daniel Rosenboom's trumpet made some of the broader statements with a declaratory challenge or a somber one-note series. Now and then, electro-clouds of varying textures would rise up and move across the stage without announcing their source, the kind of subtle coloration on which Honda always draws.
From her piano bench, a quietly intense Honda directed section changes in the sheet music or transitions of the dance with an outstretched right hand. Her own parts carried the themes of sadness, confusion and triumph with references to California jazz, urban blues, Elizabethan fugue, Moscovian stubbornness and finally an accelerated processional of Japanese pride. If that sounds schizoid, the even insistence and consistent melodiousness of her playing made it hang together.
With Steinberg's constant action and a beautiful backdrop of vibrating lines created live by projection artist Jesse Gilbert and cameraman Moses Hacmon, the visuals made nearly the same impact as the music. One special moment featured Steinberg, wrapped in white fabric and wearing a big white Easter hat, undulating in the foreground while her grainy black image shadowed her. She withered to near nothingness. The violent improv quieted. Steinberg's dark eyes gradually changed from shock to wonder. Her long hair came loose. Her arms spread wide again, and the transparent image on the screen looked like an angel in flight. Damn, that was good.
Some flowers don't need to be replanted every year; they just keep growing back.
Singer-songwriter Mia Doi Todd, eight months pregnant in a big blue dress, opened with a set of Brazilian-flavored acoustic tunes in duo with the spare congas and assorted percussion of Brasil '66 refugee Andres Renteria. Plucking and strumming an acoustic guitar with perfect rhythm, Todd set a scene of sunny beaches and mental ease that contrasted with the distant fragility of her presence. Although her new material was attractive, especially the Joni-like "Cosmic Ocean Ship," the main thing was her ice-coffee voice, which leaped from floor to ceiling with uncanny steadiness and no perceptible effort. An unusual talent, bubbling under for more than a decade.
Nate Morgan, the great jazz pianist from South Los Angeles, remains in the hospital ill, with no ambiguities about ill meaning good. The usual suspects gather to lend spiritual and earthly support.
It's a notable venue. You drive down a trashed strip of Western at 78th, and among the closed storefronts and semiclosed restaurants you grok a couple of 12-foot statues: black 19th-dynasty Pharaoh Rameses II and black Queen Tiye (stepping out on her 18th-dynasty old man, Amenhotep III), in full Egyptian garb and traditional pose. They guard the KRST (pronounced Ka-RAST) Unity Center, a cozy mini-complex jammed with scarabs, anks and Thoths. A dreadlocked gentleman in a white tunic tells me that people come here to connect with ancient culture and knowledge. Singer Dwight Trible mentions he's performed here a few times.
In the cooling overcast afternoon, the atmosphere is most relaxed and congenial, as always when jazz birds flock, and the Egypt thing accents the vibe along with lots of eye-boggling African and Jamaican robes -- one dude, telling everybody the Lakers came back to win from 22 down, wears gold-soled shoes with Obama painted on 'em. Ancient Rastas get sacramental on the avenue. Vets of Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra hug it up. There's Chet Hanley, the "Jazz in the Modern Era" TV host. There's DJ/promoter Carlos Niño, wide of smile but no longer wide of girth. Writers Steven Isoardi and Matt Duersten, never absent from this kind of thing, bump around the crowded crowd in the smallish patio/sidestreet area stocked with art vendors and donated Shabazz food stands frying high. All for Nate.
Talented Maia plucks the harp and tells us to visualize "genius giant." Trible wails as John Beasley grooves the Rhodes and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson terrorizes the viola. Kamau Da'aood chants something like "Joy split open, splashed against the night." Trombonist Phil Ranelin rolls out the Afro-Latin good times; Azar Lawrence, a man who saxified with Miles, stoops to hold sheet music on the stand so it doesn't blow away while tenor man Randall Fischer, about a third his age, tries to read it and succeeds. Azar is up next, hurricaning some Coltrane. Wish I could stay for Michael Session and Jesse Sharps and the gang, but sometimes a man must abandon heaven to avoid heck.
What I learned about Nate Morgan: That as kid he used to do homework at Eric Dolphy's grave. That he learned some licks from Hampton Hawes. That he has passed on knowledge to many here. That he is loved.
It musta felt good to be home, because Charles Lloyd radiated energy -- spieling a hipster rap the way he used to, dancing like a bear on a roof, practically shaking the seeds out of his maracas, all the while puffing forth his nonpareil woodwind whirl. The local "family" setting helped, but charging his batteries a week before in his other hometown, Memphis, must have kicked him up another notch.
Over the last couple of years, Lloyd has also been refreshed by the wellsprings of his collaboration with Greek singer Maria Farantouri. We observed what he likes about the partnership: the spiritual exchange with a comparable voice, and an opportunity to swing beyond his usual jazz-blues-Latin orbit. When the two performed Greek folk songs and hymns together, he clearly relished taking on the foreign scales and rhythms -- approaching them at his own angle, not trying to duplicate the forms from (as he said) the missionary position.
Farantouri and Lloyd built bridges toward each other. Farantouri's bridge was Socratis Sinopoulos, a shy, curly-haired feller who hunched over his lyra (three-stringed upright violin), drawing out precise, elegant complements to Farantouri's soulful vocals. Lloyd's bridge was his New Quartet, which has fermented to an exquisite balance in its six-year existence. Drummer Eric Harland particularly got off on a format that encouraged him to explore new relationships between fingers and skins.
Until a defiant wedding dance late in the evening, Farantouri's segments retained the somber atmospheres she must have experienced in her exile during the circa-1970 dominance of the Greek military junta. Pianist Jason Moran mostly restrained his harmonic embellishments to meld with the Mediterranean drone -- except in one special moment, when he piled every note of a song into one geysering chord. On flute, tenor and oaky tarogato, Lloyd created an Athenian blues, amplifying European folk with Mississippi-mudbank grace notes.
The Eastern intrigue inflected the music even during Farantouri's break, when the Lloyd Quartet lashed the saxist's lilting classic "Dream Weaver" into a frenzy of schizoid torment behind Moran's chordal smashes and bassist Reuben Rogers' wild yet sensual plucking -- a mourning cry, maybe, for the hippie dream. And the California wistfulness of the Beach Boys' gorgeous "Caroline, No" took unscheduled detours into despair and giddy nausea. Joy and transcendence, exemplified in Lloyd's lightning tenor ascensions, nevertheless emerged triumphant as he and Farantouri swayed together at encore's end.
In African cap and beige suit, Lloyd conducted the performance like a gospel revival -- a deeply rooted influence he doesn't always show. That's no knock: Despite modern cynics' impression of perspiring Southern preachers as hysterical frauds, quite a few such parsons really, truly believe.
Morton Subotnick must be gratified to know he can still drive listeners away. Throughout the electrosquiggle pioneer's performance with California EAR Unit, pairs and singles were stumbling across other patrons' knees and fleeing up the stairs.
Including my wife. "Irritating bugs on a sunburn," she scribbled in my notebook, describing the blippy synthesizers and whirling effects. "Self-immolation soundtrack." "Is it ALL going to be like this?" Okay, I'm keeping the pen. See ya after, sugar pie.
Because, of course, I was loving it. Why? Just because I salivate over the autocratic onanism of a kindred white-haired f*ck? Conceptually, this differed little from an Yngwie axfest: Subotnick twiddled his Buchla analong synth and laptop (no keyboards!), guiding the entire process; most of the EAR Unit's sounds reached us indirectly, being channeled, processed and redistributed by the leader through his mixing board. And since EAR pianist Vicki Ray and drummer Amy Knoles are women, the old bull got to subjugate them, while violinist Eric Clark deferred.
Sorry, that wasn't why. No, I locked in on the intellectual energy, the constantly moving surround-sound carousel, the roller-coaster dynamics, the speed-freak machine rhythms, the crashing noise intrusions, the sheer volume. More than once I flashed on Throbbing Gristle's 1981 Culver City farewell-tour event, the loudest show I've ever heard, where I sneaked into the wings to watch Cosey Fanni Tutti stomping her FX box into a metal pancake as tsunamis of feedback shivered the walls and vintage porn movies twitched behind the stage. It couldn't have happened without Subotnick, whose "Silver Apples of the Moon" became the first sorta popular electronic-music album in 1967.
Not that the REDCAT show attempted Gristle levels of loudness or perversity. Mainly, it highlighted the extreme evolution of the form. Although it was advertised as being based on Subotnick's "Apples" and "A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur," those acted only as signposts in a fluid improvisational field. Electronic instrumentation has gotten sophisticated enough to make the original "Apples" sound primitive/cute, and the composer's own knowledge (he's 78) has grown too. So the expanded timbral palette, the density of the rhythmic experience and the mobility of the soundscape opened up dimensions neither Subotnick nor Gristle could have tapped decades ago.
Some of the zooming tones and marimba-like clonks had antique resonance, but the acoustic/electric mesh sounded fresh -- Ray flossing the piano wires with what appeared to be actual dental floss, Clark stroking rich sustains, Knoles tinkling a triangle, all electromorphed into, yes, some kind of giant insects maybe, but intense dragonflies or cicadas rather than annoying mosquitoes. To funny effect, Knoles, behind a big drum kit, knocked out a thumping solo straight out of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," an artifact from the "Apples" era. I'd like to think she did it with a wink.
Those who stayed were mesmerized. A modern pagan ritual, that's what it was.
Eteri Andjaparidze was the right choice for the job of interpreting Alexander Scriabin's quietly revolutionary circa-1900 music. She entered and performed in near darkness, so the sound spoke for itself; we had to wait until her closing bows to meet the pianist we might have imagined anyway: a wiry 55-year-old with a thicket of black curls and a proudly intense face.
Scriabin wrote music that resonated with his birdlike bones. As much as I dig Vladimir Horowitz's vigorous 1950s takes, the composer can't have envisioned Vlad's brand of impalement. But the soulful touch of a Russian woman was just the medium to conjure ghostly harmonies that would have puzzled peasants when written, and that would still scrape modern earholes if less delicate fingers got all over them.
The soft stuff dominated the program: a "caresse dancée," a "reverie," a "fragilité," a "poem languide," some "nuances." Andjaparidze began with the somber torment of "Vers la flamme," and ended by bouncing on her bench to pound out the passionate climax from Sonata No. 4. Although she had that kind of oomph in her arsenal, she showed special skill in bringing out the subtle wanderings of Scriabin's inspired mind, and using the sustain pedal to blend tone sequences you wouldn't find in any scale book. She showed drama, too, raking fingers through her hair and suspending her hands at the conclusion of segments. Even her layered black dress came with some theater; only when the lighting shifted at the end did we discover that it was diaphanous from mid-thigh to floor, and that she had damn good legs.
The hook of "Spectral Scriabin" was Jennifer Tipton's lighting, which nodded to the composer's famous theories of color and sound without getting too specific. A circle or a group of overlapping circles were projected behind the pianist, fading slowly in and out in shades of cream, red or violet, supporting the pensive/longing/hallucinatory moods and never distracting. If anyone expected a light show in the Grateful Dead mode, it didn't materialize, but no sweat. Maybe the concept put a few extra butts in the seats for an hour of great music that doesn't get played much. And it was played very, very well.
Wait -- for the first time, I saw Ben Goldberg smile. More than once. He was standing holding his clarinet in the middle of his all-star Orphic Machine, and he just couldn't help himself. Hard to blame him; it was one of those times when somebody has put a lot of sweat into composing, arranging and assembling just the right musicians for a project he particularly cares about, and it SOUNDS GOOD. Everyone in the full room agreed; you could tell by the way they nodded. And then clapped, of course.
It seemed as if Goldberg actually cared whether a range of humans might connect with his sounds. He hasn't always cared much: Even when the long-running Berkeley explorer has approached a familiar form such as klezmer or bebop, there's been something confrontational about it. Although the quintet on his 2006 Cryptogramophone record, "The Door, the Hat, the Chair, the Fact," served as the basic personnel for tonight's nonet, that record twitched with a far more abstract quality.
I mean, Goldberg started the set with a blues -- the rolling river "Immortality," employing violinist Carla Kihlstedt, a gorgeous elf with a wispy voice, to sing lyrics about "the autonomy of the will." Goldberg held on to words as the main remnant of his customary conceptual rigor, an appropriate choice since the suite he was playing (also called "Orphic Machine") wouldn't have existed without inspiration and quotations from poet Allen Grossman's book "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics." Did Grossman's aphoristic brain twisters really penetrate our media-thickened crania? Maybe not, although it was worth pondering titles such as "How To Do Things With Tears" and notions such as "If we see William Blake in a vision but Blake does not see us, that's a fiction."
After the blues, a sensual bossa and a softly tangy waltz proved equally absorbable. Goldberg set up groove after easy groove to support a series of repeating riffs loosely stated by his ultraskillful band: along with Kihlstedt, drummer Ches Smith (recently reviewed here in Tim Berne's Snakeoil), keyboardist Myra Melford (recently reviewed here in Trio M), bassist Greg Cohen, vibesman Kenny Wollesen, trumpeter Ron Miles, saxist Rob Suddoth and Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker. While they made a wonderful collective impression (in only their second gig!), the solos I can still hear in my mind's ear include the carving violin lines of Kihlstedt, the bluesy economy of Miles, the dense melodica chordings of Melford, the physical flyswats of Wollesen, the clean adventures of Parker and the New Orleans celebration of Goldberg on the big vertical contra-alto clarinet.
Chamber Music America and the Jewish Music Festival commissioned the writing of "Orphic Machine." They ought to be slapping backs all around.
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It was a quadraphonic experience. Alex Cline, 15-year co-director of the monthly Sunday Evening Concerts series, had his drum mess piled up in the "stage" area of this old library, at the end under the big window that showcased the neon insurance sign across the street. More drums, music stands, amps, keyboards & such were jammed up there by him. Along each side of the room, behind rows of columnar archways, lurked four standup bassists as well as woodwind players, brass players, guitarists, percussionists, singers. More than two dozen musicians, all previous participants in the series, were here to blow. Joe Berardi, Tom McNalley, Rich West, Vinny Golia, Jie Ma, Steuart Liebig, William Roper, Carey Fosse, Charles Sharp, Wayne Peet, Will Salmon, Andrew Pask, Kaoru, Emily Hay, Alan Cook, Anthony Shadduck, Brad Dutz, Dorothea Grossman -- those were just the ones I could name on sight.
You might hear Salmon's flutes from behind, Hay's vocal wails and Kaoru's electronic loops from one corner, Peet's organ from another, Golia's sax and Roper's tuba from one side, West's whirling whip device behind your left ear. Music is the place where everyone can talk at once and still get understood.
Sure, free improvisation reigned -- that's what these people do. Mostly they didn't jam all at once; Cline would beckon for this one or that to trot up and solo, or for groups of five or nine to enter colloquy. It went in and out of phase, the way freedom will, hitting a special groove when Cline laid down a torrent with his mallets and McNalley (who's formed a seasoned alliance with Cline) skipped rapidly over the stream on guitar.
Grossman parked herself in her wheelchair up front to do her call-and-response thing: She would knock out a few lines of her poetry, and the musicians would reflect the blooming flowers, the fading helicopters, the Henny Youngman apotheoses, whatever. These made for some of the evening's best moments -- because the format provided an instant group focus; because if one minute didn't congeal, another inspiration was coming right up; because of the musicians' longtime love for Grossman, an ever-present avant attendee for decades; and because, as she noted, a lot of these people wouldn't know free improv from free lunch if not for her late husband, pianist Richard Grossman.
Series co-director Salmon let his supple vocal cords fly on a Rilke poem early on, and closed the evening by conducting a beautiful old shape-tone hymn adapted to embrace both peace and piracy. The large ensemble lent it the right level of solemnity, spirituality and occasional absurdity.
Grossman said it felt like a family. Many families are this strange, not many this connected.
New York saxist Tim Berne is catching up with L.A. pals at the bar, smiling, casual as can be in rumpled white shirt and stretched-out cords. Oh yeah, he remembers he's gotta play, so he strolls up, shaking hands here and there along the way, and edges his 6'/190 behind his music stand, setting an unfinished glass of amber liquid on a stool where he can reach it. Berne picks up his alto, the lacquer of which has worn down to a dull pewter (metal mouthpiece almost the same shade), and his quartet spins into some nuclear physics with an ease born of two years' woodshedding.
To his right, homburg on back of head, short/round Oscar Noriega plays B-flat clarinet like an extension of his lips, and bass clarinet like an amplification of his body. I can't see Matt Mitchell very well; his piano sounds more decorative and less comprehensive than I remember, but no less brilliant. I'm right next to blank-faced skinny farm boy Ches Smith, so I can scrutinize the three gongs (like corroded iron hoplite shields the size of skillets) from which he extracts rude tones; his trapsman technique involves resting hands and other objects on the skins and sliding them around so his sticks can knock out an ever-changing range of bangs and clacks.
You will rarely see an old-young audience so intent, leaning forward on their vinyl cube seats and honoring the house's no-blab rule as they try to absorb what's coming at them. Got to try, because the music fights every expectation: the nonstandard intervals of the riff notes, the oblong lurch of the rhythms, the blindfold development of the compositions. The lines of Berne and Noriega make you feel as if you're observing the same dance from two angles a half-second apart, with Mitchell providing intuitive auras and Smith cutting out frames and freezing them to break up the long flow of the forms.
The experience can exhilarate and exhaust. One set's worth of ingenious involution satisfies me -- word is that the second ran twice as long.
Besides, claustrophobia is setting in: Again counter to expectations for such superabstract expressions, the place is packed all night.
Anyway, I've babbled enough about this group lately -- here, for instance, and here. Zip it, me.
As I was telling Berne's old friend Bill, I have been tracking this sax sojourner's obscurity for 30 years. It's funny to see the captain of the chess team finally gaining favor in the land of power lunches.
Fri. Feb. 24 -- Twangin' country poets I See Hawks in L.A. preview their new acoustic album, "New Kind of Lonely," which comes out March 6, but I bet you can score a copy here tonight. I just checked out Rob Waller's lyrics on the band's web site, and they are sad & true to the bone. Ole pals Old Californio open. At McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica 90405; 8pm; $15; (310) 828-4497; www.mccabes.com.
Fri. Feb. 24 -- Megadeth are pushing "Thirteen," their hottest shredfest in about 20 years; a recent Lemmy documentary is keeping Motorhead at a pinnacle of visibility; Denmark's Volbeat bellow the punky melodiousness like a cross between the Clash and Billy Bragg; and Italy's Lacuna Coil offer a blast & an eyeful, so it's no wonder that this edition of Gigantour is sold out. At Gibson Amphitheater, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City 91608; 6:30pm; www.livenation.com.
Fri. Feb. 24 -- Maybe Volto are kind of an old-fashioned jam band, but Tool drummer Danny Carey doesn't shy away from old-fashioned insanity. At the Baked Potato, 3787 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Studio City 91604; 9:30 & 11:30pm; $25; (818) 980-1615; www.thebakedpotato.com.
Fri. Feb. 24 -- One of those guys who personify today's brainy but unpretentious melodic jazz: New York saxist Dave Binney. At the Blue Whale on the third floor of Weller Court Plaza, south of East First Street between South Los Angeles Street and South San Pedro Street, Little Tokyo 90012; 9pm-midnight; $10; validated parking underneath off Second Street at the sign of the P in a circle; (213) 620-0908; www.bluewhalemusic.com.
Fri.-Sat. Feb. 24-25 -- For sheer flash, nobody can match fusion giant Stanley Clarke on the bass, here leading a quartet. At Catalina Bar & Grill, 6725 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood 90028; 8:30 & 10:30pm; $30-$40; (323) 466-2210; www.catalinajazzclub.com.
