John Coltrane - September 23, 1926

John Coltrane at the Village Gate - Personal Reflections (a reissue of a previous blog-post).

17 August 1961. John Coltrane at the Village Gate. In the summer of 1961, recently out of high school, I was living on the second floor in an industrial loft at 326 Bowery with two artist friends, Mike M. and Joel. The three of us worked at the Stouffer Restaurant, The Top of The Sixes, located at 666 Fifth Avenue, near MOMA. At the time another friend, Jerry M. from Michigan was visiting. I had known Mike and Jerry in high school in Highland Park, a suburb of Detroit; Joel was the New Yorker. Our loft was located near the famous Five Spot.

   On the night of 17 August 1961, Jerry and I went to the Village Gate located at 158 Bleecker Street at Thompson in the Village to hear the John Coltrane sextet which featured Eric Dolphy (reeds), McCoy Tyner (piano), Art Davis and Reggie Workman (basses), Elvin Jones (drums), and special guest Roland Kirk (reeds).

Lewis Porter in his John Coltrane: His Life and Music, The University of Michigan Press (1999) reports on page 365 that ”According to Bob Rusch, Roland Kirk sat in with Coltrane on August 17 [1961].” Since I had never seen mention of the Coltrane-Kirk event, I called Lewis Porter and informed him of my presence in the Coltrane-Kirk event. Porter said that he would give me a footnote (someday) in the Coltrane encyclopedia he was putting together. Instead of waiting for the footnote, I’ll try and convey what the Coltrane-Dolphy-Kirk event was like nearly 50 years ago.

   I had met Roland Kirk at the Half Note in 1959. High School friends and I had spent that Christmas in NYC. Roland Kirk (later Rahsaan Roland Kirk) is one of three Columbus, Ohio music luminaries —Nancy Wilson (“Sweet Nancy” in Sid McCoy’s lexicon) and Harry “Sweets” Edison. I had the thrill of meeting ”Sweets” Edison in Detroit at Bakers’ Keyboard Lounge where he was performing with Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. “Sweets” Edison performed with Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Frank Sinatra. I never met “Sweet” Nancy; but I feel like I know her, since Sid McCoy, the famous Chicago jazz disc jockey always played something by Nancy Wilson. He opened his show with Jimmy Smith’s recording of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” — unfortunately a tune with a poignant message for us today.

   Sweet Memory, Fifty Years On. The Village Gate was located in the basement (or ground floor?) of a large building. The room itself was large with long tables at which one sat. I don’t recall having been served drinks, New York waiters had a keen awareness of the spenders verses ‘music lovers’, so our waiter or waitress most likely avoided us. The former Village Gate is now (Le) Poisson Rouge.

   Jerry M. and I were expectantly sitting at our table waiting for the music to begin. My expectation was the result of having heard John Coltrane in person once before at Ford Auditorium in Detroit, Michigan in the winter of 1959. He was a member of the famous Miles Davis sextet that featured “Cannonball” Adderly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. Ford Auditorium has/had a platform in front of the main stage that could be lowered and raised. Miles’s sextet rose up from a lower level blasting Thelonius Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser”—a thrilling moment for my date and me.

   I think the long tables were set out at angles to the bandstand. There were microphones all over the bandstand, each of the contra-basses was miked; Art Davis was on the left and Reggie Workman was on the right. Elvin Jones and his drum set were behind Workman. McCoy Tyner at the piano was behind Art Davis. John Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones was in the middle of these musicians. Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and flute walked past out table. He was charged with leading Roland Kirk to the bandstand. Mr Kirk was blind.

   To say that Roland Kirk was a multi-instrumentalist could be misleading. He performed on the tenor saxophone, flute, and these antique single-reed instruments manzello, stritch, and nose-flute. But Kirk was unique in that he had perfected a technique of playing the tenor, manzello, and stritch simultaneously.

   Now Eric Dolphy was leading Roland Kirk and all of his instruments to the bandstand! Around his neck were hung three saxophones and nose-flute. In his hand he held a regular flute. So after their trek to the bandstand, through an even more expectant and buzzing audience, there stood at the center of the elevated bandstand three giants of creative music: John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Roland Kirk. What I felt at that moment has stayed with me for nearly fifty years — I have had a vision outside myself of myself. That’s one of the ways that art — even the prospect of ART — can affect one; it takes one outside of one’s self, if one let’s the music take one. You have to give yourself to it. You have to be on “creative alert” in Geoff Dyer’s phrase. That evening at the Village Gate I was on creative alert.

   There are certain tunes that become an improving artist’s signature tune. “My Favorite Things” was John Coltrane’s signature tune in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with a “Hit Parade” competition or an “American Idol” shot. It’s more in the sense of an Anthem that I have in mind. It’s in the sense of an Anthem of Excellence or Striving for Artistic Perfection. I think of Charlie Parker’s “Koko” or Monk’s “Criss Cross”, nearly every tenor-man’s “Body and Soul” (after Coleman Hawkins, that is). John Coltrane didn’t take requests, but he most often played “My Favorite Things”. He first recorded it on 21 October 1960. It was released in March 1961. (I don’t know whether I heard this recording prior to the Village Gate performance.

The Music. Reggie Workman (bass) played pizzicato phrases while Art Davis (bass) employed an arco technique. The Village Gate introduction was in a way like that of Coltrane’s recording of “Dahomey’s Dance”. But it also was, or it had the feeling of, Jimmy Garrison’s solo introduction to the 57 minute Live in Japan 1966 recording of “My Favorite Things”, in which Jimmy Garrison uses both pizzicato and arco techniques. But the Village Gate arrangement followed the initial Atlantic recording except for the basses’ introduction and the additional instruments: a second bass, Eric Dolphy’s flute, and Roland Kirk’s three saxophones, nose whistle, and other stuff.

   Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk are on the bandstand. Reggie Workman (bass) and Art Davis (bass) have provided a lengthy introduction. McCoy Tyner (piano) plays an ostinato figure on the piano. John Coltrane plays the melody then solos. McCoy Tyner keeps the ostinato two-handed block chords coming. Roland Kirk is entranced, his movements were those of a prize fighter—a fighter with three saxophones hanging from his neck. Dolphy is looking up at the ceiling. Coltrane is back for another solo. Tyner keeps the block chords coming, pushing Coltrane’s soprano saxophone further out. Coltrane restates the theme after his intense solo. Next it’s Eric Dolphy’s solo on flute.

   The photographic image that I’ve had all of these years has been one that’s dark around its edges with a halo-like lighting in the center—the saxophone trinity of Coltrane, Dolphy, and Kirk in the center framed by the 6/8 rhythm machine con- sisting of the drummer Elvin Jones, the bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and the pianist McCoy Tyner. Ostinato all around; ostinato all the way down.

   Throughout the introductions of Workman, Davis, and Tyner, and throughout the solos of Tyner, Coltrane, and Dolphy; Roland Kirk is bobbing and weaving with his army of saxophones, whistle, and other stuff, ready to engage “My Favorite Things”. I’m sure that the Village Gate “My Favorite Things” was more than an hour in duration (the Live in Japan recorded performance is 57 minutes).

   After being "on creative alert" for forty minutes or so, the one man saxophone ensemble that was Roland Kirk was beyond ready to play. I certainly can't describe to the reader how he played; except to say that he played his three saxophones all at once and punctuated an incredible solo with a whistle from his nose flute — Kirk’s incredible solo followed the incredible solos of Messrs. Davis, Workman, Coltrane, Tyner, Coltrane and Dolphy. Incredible solos? Solos characterized by forceful tones, harmonics, doubling the 6/8 rhythmic pulse, creating a rhythmic pulse on top of Elvin Jones’ polyrhythmic pulses---indescribable; I tried!

   There has been fixed in my memory and imaginings of that evening of stupendous music making and invention an image of the audience’s reaction to the sight of Eric Dolphy leading Roland Kirk, a blind man with his tangle of instruments, to the band stand. This image of mine, which has been constant, is one of me as a member of the audience witnessing the sight of Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk, witnessing this very reflexive seeing of a sight of . . . . This, hopefully non-vicious, visual regress appears to be in stereo—one mind’s eye on me qua audience member and one mind’s eye on the audience, including me. I also suppose that there could be a regress of mind’s eyes, too.

   My current explanatory hypothesis resides in the fact that I had met Roland Kirk a year before at the Half Note and I knew as a consequence of that meeting what to expect from him musically. The rest of Village Gate audience didn’t know what to expect from this blind man with his tangle of saxophones and other weird instruments, his assortment of found objects. Anyway that’s my thinking.

   After the music started I was totally transfixed. And my ‘memories’ of that fabulous night have been a fixed point for me over the past 50 years—me as a spectator amongst the other spectators, 17 August 1961. Memory and imagination hang together for me.

   As I noted above, for many years I couldn’t figure out exactly who the second bass player was; I knew that Art Davis was one of the bassists. I conjected that Reggie Workman might have been the other bassist, but I couldn’t be sure. A few years ago I asked Oliver Lake, who performs with Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille in the group Trio Three, if he would ask Workman if he was the other bassist that night in August, 1961. Reggie Workman thought that I might have been trying to peddle a bootleg recording of the music of that evening (I wish someone had a recording of that night!), and he refused to say whether he was on that gig or not. But some time later, Trio Three appeared at the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I asked Reggie Workman directly. He replied, ”Yes. It was magical wasn’t it.”

   It was indeed, magical.

Willard According to The Philosopher's Stone

Robert Paul Wolff, today in his blog The Philosopher's Stone, had this to say about Willard Romney's latest recorded blunders:

Some truths are so important that they bear repeating.  One such truth is that for as long as the Republic has existed, the key to an understanding of American politics has been race.  This truth was once again borne in upon me by the extraordinary video that has surfaced of Mitt Romney's impromptu talk to a closed meeting of fat cat Republican donors.  [A second, subordinate, truth of contemporary American public life is that everything, without exception, has been captured on a handheld device by somebody or other and can be counted on to surface when least convenient.]

Romney's surreptitiously recorded speech is widely viewed, on the right as well as on the left, as having put paid to any lingering dreams the Republicans might have had of winning the election.  As Tallyrand is reputed to have said about Napoleon's murder of the duc d'Enghien, it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.  What can Romney have been thinking when he casually dismissed 47% of Americans as free-loading moochers incapable of caring for themselves and slavishly beholden to Democrats throwing them slops?  Never mind that Romney had his facts completely wrong.  I think we have become accustomed to that.  But in the midst of an election that he is currently losing, what can have possessed him to speak condescendingly and contemptuously of a tad less than half of the American electorate?

The answer, as always, is race.  Let me repeat what I have written here before.  Both before and after the Civil War, poor whites in the South and also in the North, bemired in a socially and economically disadvantaged position in American society, consoled themselves with the thought that however poor they were, however much they were disrespected by their wealthier and socially more prominent betters, at least they were not Black!  In both the North and the South, here was a permanent underclass toward whom they could show disdain, whom they could discriminate against, and on occasion whom they could lynch with impunity.  That structural fact of American life was written into the Black Codes -- laws that reinstituted de facto servitude  after the end of formal, legal slavery; it was written into Jim Crow, into the exclusionary racial covenants that kept Black families trapped in ghettoes, into the racial quotas at Northern colleges, and into the devil's compact between employers and White labor unions that kept former slaves from any chance of securing good industrial jobs.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement in ending Jim Crow, in breaking down the barriers to employment, and in winning the vote for Black citizens deprived poor Whites of their only consolation for their disadvantaged condition, and they reacted with anger, bitterness, and a deep sense of betrayal.  It is the bitter residue of this ressentiment that explains the tenacity with which poor and lower middle class Whites vote against their economic interest by supporting Republican candidates whose policies sink them ever deeper into economic despair.

Mitt Romney knew what he was saying when he described 47% of Americans as takers, moochers, free-loaders.  He was talking about Black and Brown Americans, and he was talking to White America.  The numbers do not matter, nor do the facts.  What mattered was a desperate attempt to tap into that deep well of bitterness and try to transform it into a winning coalition of White voters. 

Happily, he will fail.  But he is not a fool, and what he did was not in fact a blunder.  It was one last resurrection of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy.

Now a couple of weeks ago I attempted to persuade a friend of mine that:

Anyone who voted for Willard Romney was either stupid, a racist, or both.

It has appeared for some time now that Gov. Willard Romney is both stupid and a racist. I trust that he'll know which lever to pull on election day, and vote for himself. This election will also show the world something. Should Willard Romney be voted into office in November, his acceptance address will in fact be a resignation speech; showing a Republican party resigned to greed, obstructionism, bigotry - a party bereft of ideas.

One image remains with me and causes me to smile: Willard Romney acting a fool (in Langston Hughes' sense of 'acting a fool') in front of his his White Billionaires behind closed doors on candid camera, as it were. Ain't that somethin'!  

http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/

Susto - Cosmopolis & Bad Timing - DeLillo & Roeg

“Sing a song of sad young men....”

Don DeLillo's novel, Cosmopolis, was published in 2003. Nicolas Roeg's film Bad Timing was completed in 1980, but (barely) released twelve years later. Cosmopolis has been made into a movie by David Cronenberg, and subjected to very limited release (in Columbus, Ohio in any case).

  Cosmopolis, because of DeLillo's poetical writing, reminded me of Mike Leigh’s film Naked. Cosmopolis and Naked, each in its own way, invokes poetical language to give us the bad news, to let us in on what it’s like to lose one’s soul - death of the soul or susto. 

  Rorg’s Bad Timing brings to mind the Vienna of Schnitzler, Freud, and Klimt. Indeed, the film’s male lead, played by Art Garfunkel, is a professor of psychoanalysis. And Gustav Klimt’s paintings are a prominent part of the film’s decor. But it is also the Vienna of John Le Carre and Len Deighton - a city full of spies and voyeurs. 

  Love Crime (Crime d‘ Amour) by the late Alain Corneau is also a recent film about post-modern love. Let’s say Bad Timing is about modern, obsessive, over the top love, while Cosmopolis is about post-modern auto-erotic love, the thrill of money, speculation, and power (among other similar things).

Music. 

  Vienna has been a music town, at least since papa Haydn. Paris, France (where Love Crime is set) is a music city, also. I listened to bits of Cronenberg’s sound track for his film of Cosmopolis. The music was composed by Howard Shore and performed by Metric and K’Naan. It might be microtonal, minimalist, indie.

  The music for Bad Timing consisted of recorded music by Tom Waits, The Who, Billie Holiday,  Keith Jarrett, and Harry Partch - Partch’s music could certainly be viewed as having influenced both techno and indie composers and sound-specialists.

  I was totally enthralled by Love Crime (Crime d’Amour); I viewed it four times. It is a murder-suspense commentary on capitalism and its multinational corporate manifestations. It has these similarities with the other three films also - it might not be on the surface of Leigh’s Naked, but it’s viciously displayed in the character of the landlord. Music in Naked often consists of duets between a contrabass and harp. Love Crime has no music until the very end. The music is by Pharoah Sanders and consists of a duet between koto and Sander’s tenor saxophone. Contrasts of high and low instruments in both cases.

  In a large way each of these films is about love, manipulation, and power. Love as treated in Bad Timing has been called, among other things, by reviewers ‘erotic’, ‘obsessive’, ‘sordid’, ‘perverse’. “Love is sometimes sad, sometimes sad; but beautiful”, as the song goes. Billie Holiday in an interview said the same things about the blues.
  Based on the limited distribution in the United States of America that the films mentioned herein have received, it seems that bad news doesn't play well in its movie houses. Creativity in film also seems to be an undesirable attribute of film, too. One can read about these films and Don Delillo's novel in the usual internet places.
  Susto is explored lyrically and seriously in these films and novel by Messrs. Leigh, Roeg, Cronenberg, and DeLillo. Stop, Look, and Listen.

         

Guelph Jazz Festival 2012

I returned to Columbus, Ohio late Sunday evening from the five-day Guelph, Ontario, Canada Jazz Festival. My friend and I attended our fourth Guelph Jazz Festival. Rather than attempt a performance-by-performance account of what we heard and witnessed, I'll treat the wonderful 2012 Festival in a general way. It was the Festival's nineteenth year - quite an accomplishment. We remember Ann Arbor's Once Festival; so-named because as reckoned by Robert Ashley and others it was believed that they could only get away with advanced, serious music Once at most. Professor Ajay Heble, Guelph's Artistic Director and the Guelph Festival stalwarts have gotten away with presenting great music and great musicians for nineteen years! The co-operative effort on behalf of The Government of Canada, The Province of Ontario, The City of Guelph, and others over such a protracted period is something that Canadians can be extremely proud of. And something of which Americans  should be envious.

  It may have been the great musician, critic, educator, and human being Sir Donald Francis Tovey who remarked that in order to criticize something one must understand why people like what you criticize - I'm talking about "criticize" in the senses of I'm not sure that X is worthy of my consideration or the short-form version, I don't like or understand X. I learned something of value at this year's Guelph Festival. There were numerous performances that incorporated electronics in significant ways - laptops, drone-machines, re-recorded sounds &c. Most of these performances were to my ears, mind, and aesthetic sensibilities rather over-done, and in certain instances hokey - remnants of Karlheinz Stockhausen via Miles Davis or the other way round.  

  After Fred Frith's solo electric-guitar performance, which was not to my liking, I was asked by a woman how I liked Frith's music. I replied that I didn't like it. My reasons were as follows: (i) I didn't like the guitar very much (Freddie Green was enough guitar for me), (ii) I didn't care for all of Frith's Cage-like assaults on his guitar (messing with the guitar by using foreign objects, etc.), (iii) the result of all of Frith's assaults were to my ears without rhythmic or harmonic flow. 

  I asked my inquisitor why she liked Frith's music. Her reply was very revealing. It made me understand something that I didn't understand before. She replied that she liked Frith's music because she liked his creativity. I asked her what she meant by creativity. She replied that she liked seeing him doing all that stuff with his guitar (what I call assaulting his guitar). I replied that when I listen to music, I prefer to listen with the lights off - in the dark. All of Frith's Cage-like moves detracts from my enjoyment of the music. For my interlocutor all of Frith's physical moves plus the resultant sounds were the music. I then realized that visual items were an important part of music enjoyment and understanding for people who prefer their music lit-up, not in the dark. I then understood why music like Fred Frith's was admired. I finally got it. Flamenco music without the visuals, without the dance is not exactly appealing; it isn't as good in the dark. Of course, everyone knew this already.

  For me, one of the highlights of the Guelph Jazz Festival was the ROVA saxophone quartet's Coltrane Re-imagined - The Electric Ascension. This was performed by ROVA plus eight with the subtle use of computer electronics. The fabulous Chicago percussionist, Hamid Drake took care of the time and rhythm. 

  The other highlight was Peter Brötzmann (saxophones and clarinets) and Jason Adasievicz (vibes). They performed at least four pieces, one for each of Brötzmann's wind instruments. These un-amplified performances were spellbinding. There exists one recording of this fabulous duo. Sunday morning's 1AM performance was recorded. I noticed after I got home that Brötzmann and Adasievicz were performing that Sunday evening at Ohio Wesleyan University. Had I known about this, I would have certainly stopped to hear these great musicians on my way home.
  I'm looking forward to the EdgeFest in Ann Arbor, Michigan in October.  http://www.kerrytownconcerthouse.com/index.php/events/edgefest/