AllenLowe

WANNA COME TO MY HOUSE AND WATCH ME SUPERSIZE?

HEY LAURIE WOULDYA HOLD MY PICKLE?

I have to admit to having not listened to much Laurie Anderson - especially after reading a few years back how she decided she needed to get in touch with the working class and so went to work for MacDonald's for a time (sound of puking and dry heaving) -

funny thing is I was listening on My Space and thought, "hey, David sounds real good on this" but it turns out I was listening to Wiley - excellent player -

I think she was talking about Irving Hitler - he was a phone installer for Verizon -

there are always exceptions - but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence - ironically from liberal/left types who complain about working with the young 'ens - I trust my wife's judgement as well as my own, I am far from one who pines for the good old days - the latest comment from one of my wife's co-workers, who is in her 50s, was to the effect that the gold-star daycare system had really created a sense of constant entitlement, an addiction to the kind of psychobabble that, like an episode of Sesame Street in Hell, just keeps saying "I AM SPECIAL I AM SPECIAL I AM SPECIAL." The really funny thing is that this is one in which we probably need to concede some things to the more conservative Americans among us (read: Republicans) who warned us of a spolied generation - well, now we have it - Berigan, you out there? and I have been playing music since I was in my twenties with other musicians who were also in their twenties - I never saw such a lack of communication and professionalism - now I am sure there are many exceptions, including readers of this site - congratulations, I say. but also, don't forget - they warned us that if we took LSD we would breed a generation of mutants -

in the right setting, Moody is one of the hippest players around - about 15 years ago I booked him for the New Haven Jazz Festival; not long before this he had done a blindfold test, probably for DownBeat, in which he put down everybody who wasn't playing bebop from the "right" perspective, from the Young Lions to Ornette (or maybe Dolphy); so here he is (one of the nicest musicians I ever met, btw) playing the most convincing inside/outside tenor I ever heard - tons of chromatic chord substitutions, strange but logical arpeggios - always perfectly resolved and beautifully executed - I remember talking to John Szwed, who was at the same concert, about it - he too had read the Blindfold test and was shaking his head at how Moody, who put down all the "outside" players, had, from a technical standpoint, accepted so many of the musical principles they espoused -

she was a beautiful lady and a good singer - in the 1970s Neal Hefti was living in Brookline, Massachusetts; I called him up and went over and met him - he introduced me to Francis Wayne, to whom he was married, and told me that she had finally convinced him, after all the years, to leave Hollywood, as she hated the whole area - sadly, next I read, she was being treated for cancer and died soon afterwards - moral of the story: money isn't everything -

THIS IS THE STRAIGHT TALK LOCAL -

sorry - I GOTTA BE ME WHAT ELSE CAN I BE?

found a bass player - he's only 8 years old, but his mom allows him to stay up late -

but seriously it may be related to a generation that has grown up so removed from deprivation memories of WWII and the depression, who knows - but my wife, who is 60, works in an office with a fair amount of under-35s and remarks at how high maintenance they are, requiring so much positive re-enforcement, to the point of exhaustion - my experience in Portland, trying to work with much younger musicians, bears this out to some extent, though I do find a few who are reliable - but I don't know if it's age or this city; all I know is that I need a bass player now, which, after feeling things were on-track musically, is discouraging -

anybody hear of Sonny Williams?

he also took a lot of important photos, as I recall -

Don lives up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx - I worked for him in the middle 1970s and have great respect for him, but he kinda let the music business pass him by through what I would call a misguided sense of principle - what is significant is that he set up Xanadu in an equitable way, in which the full costs of the recordings did NOT have to be re-couped before the musicians saw sales royalties. he has a sense of "if I can't sell it I'll sit on it" in terms of the masters he owns and did tell me about 10 years ago that the French CD deal went bad. Unfortunately he views the jazz world as having gone irretrievably bad and he is in some danger of becoming the Howard Hughes of jazz-

somewhere there's a late 1930s session with James and basie-ites including Hershal Evans, maybe Jo Jones - and don't forget James's 1950s band with perhaps the GREATEST bebop trombonist I have ever heard - Carl Elmer, as great a bebopper as Knepper IMHO, as a matter of fact I think I have an excerpt somewhere in one of my devil tune box sets -

"I had no idea you were so old! " come to Portland (Maine) where the arts scene is run by 25 year olds and where I haven't had a gig in about 8 years - and where I've just been stood up for rehearsal by a 22 year old bass player whom I just fired - as I told him in a long and annoyed phone message, I've scheduled rehearsals and recordings in the past with world-class and BUSY musicians from Julius Hemphill to Roswell Rudd to Matt Shipp who never ever stood me up or failed to return a call - my wife thinks that young people today suffer from a surplus of self-esteem, a new version of the me generation in which years of psychobabble have created a sense of personal privilege beyond the usual need to just like one's self - sort of a Dr. Phil generation of self-centered weenies - now where did I leave that package of Depends?

at the risk of unleashing the wrath of Clementine (and everybody else here), I gotta say that I find Beefheart a one-time-listen. Once you hear what he has/had to say, everything else appears to be a re-hash. He seems to me the epitome of what I have complained about ad-nauseum, something which I have called, in the past, formalism, but which is really an obsession with process that characterized a lot of "new" music - as though once you have solved the problem of form and basic technique, the rest is random - and not that Beefheart is random, but that he has a limited idea of what to do with his own innovations - and by the way he's a terrible graphic artist -

anybody who pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs can't be all bad -

can you suggest one? preferably cheap and easy -

anybody out there?

anybody remember Sonny Williams?

he's back - and before I'm outed, I stole the 5&10 routine from the Marx Brothers -

always had trouble with Joe Smith, Bessie Smith, Johnny Smith, and Jimmy Smith -

anybody ever hear of dumpy mama?