7/4

I want it. .

This is all way too @#$%&%! cute for me. I'm going to the park for a walk.... .

A jugalbandis is a duet. .

The irony is that I live right outside of NYC, I just don't have the time to hang there all the time like the old days. How close? Our pollution blows into NYC and makes theirs worse. .

I'm reading it now. I'm just frustrated with the locals around here, there just has to be more to life than TV, movies and sports - I wish these people knew it.

I didn't notice them, I'll look for them...I don't know those people. I'd rather discuss it here if anyone is up for it. .

You're not missing much. That would be why I barely check 'em out. Just the musicians forum at AAJ and the ECM folder at JC....

I was thinking that EXACT same thing. Can't say I'm real familiar with the other boards, I don't check 'em out too often.

New York Times, Jun 27, 2008

Kishori Amonkar and Hariprasad Charuasia - Great Jugalbandis I was listening to this recently...

Ton Van Bergeyk....there's someone I haven't heard about in years. I used to read about him in Guitar Player magazine in the '70s. .

A recent conversation with a local... them: So what are you listening to? me: Henry Cow. them: That's Jazz right? me: more like progressive rock... them: I don't like progrock. me: there's not much rock, it's not like Rush or Yes. The group is named after Henry Cowell. them: is he Jazz? me: no. He's a classical composer. them: I've never heard of him. ....and so on.

Clem...

June 29, 2008 Film Fear and Loathing on a Documentary Screen By DAVID CARR, NYT HUNTER S. THOMPSON, who has been lionized in two feature films, served as the model for a running character in “Doonesbury” and is the subject of enough doctoral dissertations to build a bonfire, now has a documentary devoted to him, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” by Alex Gibney. Thompson, who always seemed to keep one drug-crazed eye on posterity behind his ever-present shades, would surely be pleased but not surprised. But how to freshly document the life of a man who was his own Boswell, whose books and articles slavishly documented his own every tic, whoop and hallucination? A journalist who announced his arrival in American letters by riding with the Hells Angels and in the end choreographed a memorial from the grave that made the Burning Man bacchanal seem chaste? Few writers have commodified narcissism so completely — his participatory style of journalism became its own genre and gives the film its title — but still we are invited to sit in the dark of the theater and have a flashback about his flashbacks. When the film opens on July 4, why will people, as Thompson would say, buy the ticket, take the ride? The documentary by Mr. Gibney, who also made “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” does not attempt to work around Thompson’s endless self-consciousness but uses it as leverage instead. Produced by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and narrated by the actor Johnny Depp, “Gonzo” mirrors the subjectivity and immersion of the journalism Thompson and his trusty arsenal of psychoactive agents perpetrated in Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Mr. Gibney eschews narrative conventions and switches point of view on a dime, creating a prism of interviews and episodes that gradually assembles into a compelling portrait. In his long-running fever dream about America and its abundant pathologies, the bald man, with the tumbler of whiskey and head full of Schedule 1 narcotics, captured not only a mood — your government is not your friend — but many realities of civic life, most notably that if candidates were willing to do what it takes to get elected, they would probably arrive in office corrupted beyond hope. Thompson, whose defects of character could occupy a separate ZIP code, was not just an original, he was also a patriot and a romantic. Working from the far reaches of the culture and often lucidity, Thompson, who died in 2005 at 67, changed the way that much of America thought about itself, in part because his version of journalism threw a grenade at the bland convention of formal balance and straight reporting. “I would argue that Hunter and Tom Wolfe are the two most original voices to come out of journalism in the last century, and it’s no coincidence that they both worked for Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone,” Mr. Carter said. “No one else was willing to push it that way, to take those risks.” Mr. Gibney’s documentary plays appropriate tribute by restricting its gaze to the nascent Thompson of the ’60s and early ’70s. By the time most of America knew who Thompson was, he was pretty much washed up, having gradually been overtaken by his own legend, with steady assists from the bottle, the drugs and his coven of enablers. August men line up to pay their respects in the documentary — Patrick J. Buchanan, George McGovern, Jimmy Buffett, Gary Hart and Timothy Crouse, the author of the campaign memoir “The Boys on the Bus” — as do the women he loved. Both his first wife, Sandy, and second wife, Anita, testify to his courage and courtliness, in between pointing out that he could be mean as a snake and far less predictable. He broke through by covering a biker gang from the inside — he “rode with the Angels,” as Mr. Wolfe puts it in the film — and took a serious beat-down on the way out. Journalism, as practiced by Thompson, was not something for sissies. It’s clear in the documentary that what became a sort of pillar of the so-called New Journalism — nonfiction writing that borrowed from the techniques of fiction writing — began at the Kentucky Derby, when Mr. Thompson ignored the race he was there to cover. “We had come to see the real beasts perform,” those in the stands, Mr. Depp says, reading an article over Ralph Steadman’s illustrations. In 1971 Thompson went looking for the American dream while on assignment, and rather presciently he did what many tourists do today: He went to Las Vegas. “Gonzo” borrows a lot of footage from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” the 1998 film that stars Mr. Depp as Raoul Duke, the nom de persona of Thompson in the book of the same name. Mr. Depp developed a lasting affiliation with his subject, and narrates much of Mr. Gibney’s documentary — in one instance while holding a six-shooter at the ready — with a bit of the rumble that made Thompson’s speaking voice distinctive as well. (The film also uses some scenes from “Where the Buffalo Roam,” the biopic starring Bill Murray.) Stylistically the documentary combs the extensive archive of tapes, both audio and video, some made by Thompson familiars who spent time with him in his bunker at Woody Creek, Colo. The rest of the film uses standard talking heads and narration drawn mostly from Mr. Thompson’s two most celebrated books, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.” “I wanted to have some fun in the film, because nobody really appreciated me trying to put laughs in ‘Taxi,’ ” Mr. Gibney said over breakfast this month at the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “It was too dark.” Mr. Gibney said he thought of “Gonzo” as a bit of comic relief from “Taxi,” this year’s Oscar-winning documentary, which tells the story of an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American soldiers while in extrajudicial detention at Bagram Air Base. But Mr. Gibney and Thompson are both known for driving big dump trucks of truth toward power. “As a journalist Hunter never seemed to get trapped or hoodwinked into the phony balance,” said Mr. Gibney, who agreed to the documentary after being approached by Mr. Carter even though Mr. Gibney never met Thompson. As read by Mr. Depp in the film, Thompson suggests that objectivity was for suckers, a way to allow evil to triumph: “It was the built-in blind spots of the objective rule and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.” Sometimes that subjectivity could slip into something less benign. In 1972, when he took it upon himself to attempt to drive the presidential candidate Edmund S. Muskie slowly insane, he suggested that Muskie was hooked on Ibogaine, an obscure Brazilian drug. Thompson had made it up and seemed surprised when others took the bait. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of the McGovern presidential campaign, is seen in the film saying that that Mr. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing” book about the 1972 race, a collection of his articles for Rolling Stone, was “the least accurate and most truthful” account of the campaign. That campaign proved to be the high-water mark of his career. Although Mr. Gibney is quick to say that Thompson wrote as he did in spite of the drugs and alcohol, the substances — hallucinogens for the vision, amphetamines to get it on the page, booze to take the edge off both — didn’t just beckon the muse, they were stamped into everything that eventually popped out. Always far past deadline of course. “Hunter could manufacture a crisis out of almost anything,” said Mr. Wenner, his friend and longtime editor at Rolling Stone. “He did amazing, amazing work, but it got to the point where it was hard for Hunter to travel, because of all the stuff he would need to take with him.” There are extensive segments with Mr. Steadman, the long-suffering British illustrator and accomplice who could chronicle the internal and external demons Mr. Thompson spied everywhere. The poles of love and hate that characterize many great collaborations are clearly visible in the film. As the documentary demonstrates, the bottom for the pair came when Mr. Thompson was assigned to cover the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mr. Steadman explains in the film that in an act of enormous cocaine-assisted hubris (or perhaps fear that Mr. Ali, one of his heroes, was about to take a huge beating), Thompson gave away his tickets to the fight and went for a swim in the hotel pool. In doing so, he missed one of the greatest upsets in boxing history and, more important for a journalist, did not get the story. By the accounts of many Thompson never recovered from that episode, gradually morphing into the character of Uncle Duke that Garry Trudeau introduced in “Doonesbury,” a cartoon figure who fired automatic weapons from his sun deck at apparitions and enemies that only he could see. He became the sum of his trademarks — the sunglasses, cigarette holder and inchoate rage — and ended up imprisoned by them. “He was the master persona maker,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and friend of Thompson’s who serves as executor of the estate. “If Ernest Hemingway was going to go big-game hunting in Africa, Hunter wanted to use a submachine gun to hunt wild boar in Big Sur, Calif. He was dangerous, like handling nitroglycerin, and he liked to keep it that way.” In the end everyone wanted to be around Thompson except Thompson. And on a bright winter day in Woody Creek, with his son in the house — Juan Thompson sardonically terms it a “warm family moment” in the film — he called his own bluff and blew his brains out. He was infirm at the time, spending time in a wheelchair. Given his fundamental allergy to institutions like hospitals, his decision to set the terms of his exit is unsurprising. “Hunter was very much one to share the pain when things went wrong, but he would share the glory as well,” said Anita Thompson, who married him in 2003. “He was a generous person, but he ended up surrounded by leeches and hanger-on-ers. It is the curse of fame.” It is a curse that he embraced and held dear. The theatricality of his end, followed by a huge memorial in which his ashes were shot out of a cannon while people partied below, suggested that he understood his life as a kind of performance that required one final, deadly act. Throughout the film he speaks with such specificity about his legacy and its discontents that he seems to know he is speaking from the grave. “I’m really in the way as a person,” he said. “The myth has taken over. I find myself an appendage. I’m no longer necessary. I’m in the way. It would be much better if I died. Then people could take the myth and make films.”

See, that's what differences in taste are all about. I consider myself a bit of a jazz guitar nut, but talking about 50s/60s jazz guitarists, I never felt much urge to revisit the (pre-60s) Kenny Burrell leader LP's that I have. I can't really put my finger on it but reading what Chauncey had to say here somehow struck me just a wee bit as if the gist of what (s)he said might be the reason why his records somehow (literally) did not strike a chord with me anywhere near the way Tal Farlow (THE MAN!!), Barney Kessel, Jimmy Raney, Billy Bauer, early Wes Montgomery (and even Hank Garland, Jimmy Wyble, Joe Puma and obscurity Dempsey Wright - thank you, Fresh Sound) do. So this thread has made me curious enough to pull out KB's records again and of course I will listen to them under impact of this debate. But is that a bad thing? I reserve the right of having an opinion of my own anyway - one way or another! I know Kenny Burrell is no Jim Rainey, I'm OK with Kenny Burrell being Kenny Burrell. Apples and Oranges folks...of course, I'd really rather listen to Jim Rainey.

Life goes on...

I feel like I could be culturally trapped in the sticks, but I'm only 10 miles from NYC.

June 29, 2008 Making a Case for the ‘Cult’ of Jazz By TAMMY LA GORCE SOUTH ORANGE He may have won 17 Grammys and dozens of other musical accolades, but that doesn’t make him a popular guy. At least that’s what the guitarist Pat Metheny had to say to about 100 sweat-drenched New Jersey high school jazz musicians here earlier this month. “In 2008 the culture is openly hostile to jazz,” Mr. Metheny said at the South Orange Performing Arts Center during a 90-minute question-and-answer session — a “high school master class” — organized by Jazz House Kids, a Montclair group devoted to jazz education. “The fact that we’re sitting here having this conversation on a 100-degree day, it’s almost like a cult thing.” “In your 14 or 15 years on earth you’ve gravitated toward .001 percent of people — people who are hip,” he said. “But you’re rubbing up against the extremes of culture,” he warned. This did not discourage the clusters of students who boarded buses from Mountain Lakes High School, Millburn High School, Columbia High School in Maplewood, Randolph High School and Arts High School in Newark. “It was awesome the way he explained how he started out and his experiences as a jazz player,” said Michele Arenas, a 16-year-old pianist and member of Randolph High’s jazz band. “It made you want to work hard.” Ms. Arenas was one of just a handful of girls in the audience. “Somehow, jazz appeals to them more,” she said, meaning boys. Tim Egan, 18, a saxophone player at West Orange High, said, “What I took from it is that music is hard, and that I need to have a lot of confidence and keep at it.” He drove himself to the arts center even though his school had canceled the trip, and the school day, because of triple-digit temperatures. For the nonprofit Jazz House Kids, formed in 2002 by the vocalist Melissa Walker, 43, getting Mr. Metheny to speak was a big deal, if not a surprising one. Ms. Walker’s husband, the bassist Christian McBride, is a member of the Pat Metheny Trio. In addition to organizing events like the one with Mr. Metheny, Jazz House Kids conducts programs for students from second through eighth grades at schools throughout New Jersey. Its “Let’s Build a Jazz House” workshop series introduces up to 100 students at a time to jazz culture and history and lets children explore individual instruments. A performance by professional musicians is part of the package. Jazz House Kids also offers retreats for teachers interested in incorporating jazz into class work. Though only seven schools of about 40 that Ms. Walker had invited participated (St. Benedict’s in Newark joined West Orange High in canceling because of the heat), she said she was pleased with the turnout. “Some schools have already ended their school year, and others had conflicts,” she said. Whether they had conflicts or not, those that passed up the event missed a rare opportunity. “This was pretty special,” said Mr. Metheny, 54, a Missouri native who lives in Manhattan and played a five-minute song for the group in addition to answering questions. “I’m usually doing 29 concerts every 30 days. I guess I get to do something like this maybe three or four times a year.” If the tone of his question-and-answer session lacked both scholarly formality and sugar coating, it’s because that’s the nature of the music, Mr. Metheny said, and he is a believer in following its bylaws. “The institutionalization of jazz is something that rarely works,” he said. “As soon as you start to go there, it turns into this murky-brown mall-like thing. But what Melissa is doing with Jazz House Kids actively resists that. “This presentation was alive,” he said. That may have had something to do with where it took place. “New Jersey has always been something different,” Mr. Metheny said. “There’s a level of passion mixed with a lack of jadedness here — an unbridled enthusiasm. We’ve been a lot of places, but people never give it up like they do in Jersey. “It’s really cool.”

From what I understand, no matter WHAT quitting regimen is used, a certain percentage eventually go back to smoking. It's a powerful drug, and the addiction is both physical and psychological. That's right. Addictions are cunning, baffling and powerful. One minute you're clean and out of nowhere you're doing it again. One fellow I know always tells how he left his lawn mower running to get a drink, spent the day in the bar and totally forgot about cutting the grass. Out of the blue it confuses you...

Now that's funny. .

I've been looking at Bachs Violin Sonatas and Partitas recently, particularly the Gm presto. Gets the fingers moving, I tell ya and plus, it's Bach, sounds way cool. .

+ a Trane tune I've never seen recorded by anyone else but Trane. I have a bunch of those Quest boots.......er, private recordings. .

Actually, I know I need to hear more... .

Same here. I mean...hey, he's OK. Just never really knocked me out. Maybe I need to hear more...

Music shares space with museum's art Jesse Hamlin Sunday, June 8, 2008 SFGate A few weeks ago, Terry Riley, the great minimalist composer with the flowing white beard, strolled into the dynamic Yud space at the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, where the angled walls ascend 65 feet and come alive with the ever-shifting play of shadow and light pouring through 36 diamond-shaped windows. The master clapped his hands, sang a few notes and smiled. The acoustics seemed ideal. "The room really hits you - the beauty of the design, the way the light comes down. When you walk in, your spirits are lifted," says Riley, one of several major artists whose work will inaugurate the soaring space intended for music and contemplation. He was tapped for the museum's Aleph-Bet Sound Project by John Zorn, the avant-garde New York composer and saxophonist who rounded up an intriguing cast of musicians and storytellers to create music and sound installations that will play in the Yud during the next six months. (Yud is one of the two symbolic letters in the Hebrew word l'chaim, "to life," on which architect Daniel Libeskind based the new forms thrusting from the museum's historic brick shell.) Zorn also commissioned works from such noted collaborators as rocker Lou Reed, performance artist Laurie Anderson and jazz cellist and composer Erik Friedlander - all of whose work will be heard during the opening program - as well as composer Alvin Curran, conceptual artist David Greenberg and a half dozen other artists, Jewish and non-Jewish. Each piece is inspired by a letter in the Hebrew alphabet, or aleph bet. Riley, who will perform his piece live later in the year, chose aleph, the first. He researched the letter's symbolism and associations - "there are layers and layers when you start reading about it," he says - and was inspired to explore it musically. "The main thing is that it has this connection between heaven and earth," says Riley, on the phone from the East Bay. He hasn't cooked up his piece yet, but he's been thinking about "man's eternal striving to develop a connection with the heavenly realm and the divine." He plans to improvise much of it live on a MIDI grand piano. He envisions using the instrument's contrasting voices - the computer-and-synthesizer-made sounds and the acoustic piano - to create a dialogue between the earthly and celestial. Riley, who isn't Jewish, appreciates the museum's broad vision. "If you look at this country's production of art, so much has come from a Jewish perspective," he says. "Something in that culture has a great love of beauty." Friedlander, who has performed with Zorn on the gritty downtown Manhattan music scene and shares his forward-looking notion of radical Jewish culture, says some of the music in his "The 50 Gates of Understanding" uses the harmonic minor scale of Eastern European Jewish music - "that exotic, mournful, cantorial quality" - but has many other flavors and moods as well. Based on the 14th Hebrew letter, nun, his composition - which takes its title from the character qualities the ancient Israelites sought to achieve while wandering the Sinai desert - is divided into seven sections with seven short pieces each, with a final tune that stands alone. Each section builds on a 14-note theme that's reiterated seven ways. "Every piece has a different way of looking at these 14 notes," says Friedlander, who performs the piece on cello in an improvising quintet featuring violin, piano, bass and drums. "Some are very dissonant, some are very melodic, and you recognize a sort of jazz tradition. And some are totally atmospheric and almost abstract expression." Some of these miniatures are 12 seconds long, others a minute. "I hope there's a little alchemy going on as these 50 gates open and close," says Friedlander, who was blown away by the museum's Yud space when he visited last month from New York (he was in town to perform at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition of photographs by his father, Lee Friedlander). "I thought it was incredibly beautiful. It's like a temple in there." David Greenberger will fill the space with the sound of his own voice, telling vignettes he collected from elderly people about their earliest memories. Greenberger, who lives in Greenwich in upstate New York, based his piece, "Tell Me That Before," on the seventh Hebrew letter, zayin, the first letter in the Hebrew word for memory. Each story, which revels in the "strange poetry" of fragmentary conversation and memory, is underscored by music written by Chicago composer Mark Greenberg. "I'm trying to honor this odd form of portraiture," Greenberger says. "I'm not creating a souvenir of that person's life. The world's already filled with those kind of things. I'm trying to create a doorway to think about our own lives."