7/4

Are you shore?

Thursday, June 12, 2008 Kidd Stays in the Picture The MC at Wednesday’s Vision Festival Lifetime Achievement performance for Kidd Jordan introduced the guest of honor by means of analogy: “Basketball’s got MJ. But we’ve got KJ!” Judging from what followed, it’s fair to say that His Airness would be humbled by the comparison. If pro hoops were more like Mr. Jordan’s tone, I might actually give a shit about the NBA Finals. But let’s put a few things in perspective: Mr. Jordan, who is 73 and plays tenor like a baby trying to be born, headlined four of the evening’s five sets, screamed to heaven half-a-dozen times, at one point MacGyver-ed a sax valve out of a rubber band, and did it all in a t-shirt and jeans. “This guy looks like my grandfather,” my buddy said about twelve seconds before going whoa for the next two hours. Forgive the hyperbole. Every set was the best. First up, Kidd teamed with bari-saxophone guru Hamlet Blulett, keys-man Dave Burrell and some dude who exclusively tortured the strings on a prepared piano. Blulett mounted his ax on some sort of stand, and aimed the bell at the crowd like a machine gun. The improvisation veered from caterwauling reed walls to fractured, first line marches on hairline transitions, no percussion required. Burrell’s rhythmic shards nailed the piece to the floor while Jordan’s lines danced lightning-like overhead. When it was all over, I needed a beer to think in English again. After a break, Jordan returned with descriptively-dubbed violinist Billy Bang, a humongous bass player named William Parker, and Hamid Drake, a man whose drumming makes sex seem boring. Billy dueled the Kidd at center stage, trading, interrupting, hijacking each other’s melodies under the guiding push of the rhythm godhead. This time, I got a really hot bowl of lentil soup to reorient, which was delicious even though I managed to spill half of it onto my pants. Part three consisted of a Jordan-led quintet: trumpeter Clyde Kerr, Joel Futterman on piano, and percussionist Alvin Fielder in addition to a role-reprisal by Parker and Kidd. The visual dynamic was a riot. Kerr looks like latter-day Marlon Brando, Futterman like a maybe more unhinged Nick Nolte. The pianist kept peering out from under his soundboard and grimacing hellaciously. The music, surprise, surprise, was tremendous. Futterman runs the ivories like Schoenberg wind-sprints, and Fielder, although a more recalcitrant sticker than Drake, grooves so effortlessly as to almost magnetize the exchanges of the other players towards one another. If Kidd and Co. are the current, Fielder is the voltage. It’s always a shock to hear the completed circuit. It’s a bit unfair to call the next band, a New Orleans-based quintet led by Jordan’s two sons, Marlon and Kent on trumpet and flute respectively, an intermission act, but any 5-song gig of bop standards, no matter how well-played, would sound somewhat tame when bookended by the bouts of anarcho-genius improv that characterized the rest of the engagement. No doubt, the musicianship on display here was masterful: Marlon is a firebrand soloist and marathon drummer Fielder cooked hotter than the buffet crockpot. Still, it’s something of a comedown listening to music you feel you’ve heard before in an evening rife with sounds you’re likely never to hear again. To close out the performance, Kidd invited longtime associate and fellow tenor Fred Anderson to join him onstage alongside the marathon rhythm section of Drake and Parker. Anderson, six years older than Jordan, wears pants that seem to cover his entire torso and is about as tall as his instrument. He’s also one of the greatest saxophone players in the world, with a tone that sounds like a canyon being carved live in granite. Kidd and Anderson play like conjoined twins in an argument, throwing out a constant stream of sonic point-counterpoint, always anticipating the other’s ducking and weaving. The portrait of the pair is something to behold: Mr. Anderson bends his entire body at a right angle to the floor, beaming riffs directly into the crust. Mr. Jordan, conversely, uses his tenor to stare down the crowd, the cyclops eye of his bell refining the fossil fuel laid down by his partner out of the soil and spitting it back into the air as an electric mist. The collective age of the performers for this ultimate reunion probably approached the millennial, but their final set made everyone on hand feel as young as they ever wanted to be. Posted by Ben Lasman at 12:26 PM

Kidd Jordan Makes the Vision Festival His Own By WILL FRIEDWALD June 13, 2008 http://www.nysun.com/arts/kidd-jordan-make...-his-own/79918/ In New Orleans, there's a venerated tradition of nicknaming younger, hot-shot musicians "kid" — sort of like Western gunslingers. The name often sticks, which is why it's no big deal to address an elder statesman as "Kid" in the Crescent City. Two of the best known of these were actually named Edward: the pioneering trombonist Kid Ory (1886-1973) and Kidd Jordan, who is being celebrated this week at the 13th annual Vision Festival at Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side. In the case of Mr. Jordan, who turned 73 last month, the appellation is somewhat appropriate, since his music continues to convey a childlike sense of wonder. Wednesday was the big night of the six-day Vision Festival XIII, in which the man of the hour played in four different combinations, and a fifth group performed a tribute to him. I arrived in time to hear the climax of Mr. Jordan's quartet with the equally sagacious violinist Billy Bang (plus the drummer Hamid Drake and bassist and festival co-founder William Parker). Of course, a free-jazz performance often consists entirely of climax. Messrs. Bang and Jordan are extreme free players, yet they know exactly how much of the traditional elements of jazz to retain. As a result, no matter how explosively chaotic their music gets, one can always hear something that sounds like a regular rhythm, something that sounds like a tempered note, something that sounds like a melody, something that approximates swing, and something that evokes the blues. Owing to Mr. Jordan's long history in R&B and pop, the tunes and traditions on which the quartet fell back were just as likely to be funk vamps. Mr. Bang is the latest in a long line of top-tier musicians with whom Mr. Jordan has achieved a remarkable synergy. It's one thing to achieve that on an agreed-upon pitch in the Western scale, but Messrs. Jordan and Bang coordinated their shrieks to the point that their instruments were yelping precisely the same microtone, as if the violin and the tenor saxophone had somehow been fused into a single mechanism operated by two men. The next group co-starred Mr. Jordan and the pianist Joel Futterman, and it was planned as an outgrowth of the trio that they have led with the drummer Alvin Fielder (which is represented on the "Southern Extreme" album, from 1997). Sadly, Mr. Fielder was too ill to attend, so the group became a quintet with the inclusion of the prolific drummer Gerald Cleaver, Mr. Parker again on bass, and the trumpeter Clyde Kerr. The highlight here was the interplay between Messrs. Jordan and Futterman; while the bass and drums supplied a foundation of time and a kind of harmony, Mr. Kerr's trumpet offered a discernible if abstract melody, and the tenor sax and piano departed for parts unknown. Mr. Futterman's playing has frequently been compared with that of Cecil Taylor, though it's hard to imagine how anyone could play free jazz on the piano without sounding like him. Mr. Futterman uses a similar technique of random-sounding pounding on the keyboard — a chaotic swirl of notes and pitches that, in a goofy way, sort of make sense. (Regrettably, Mr. Futterman didn't double on sopranino saxophone, as he sometimes does on the trio's recordings.) There were quieter, even lyrical moments, in which Mr. Parker played a skittering arco solo; normally, the use of the bow makes the double bass sound more classical, but Mr. Parker has developed a technique in which his arco playing is even further out than his customary pizzicato. In this music, one relishes every little phrase of conventional melody, much the same way the audience relished every little breeze that wafted through the unventilated theater on Wednesday. There was a lot of conventional melody in the band consisting of Mr. Jordan's students and progeny, led by his sons, the trumpeter Marlon Jordan and the floutist Kent Jordan. After years of regularly attending the Vision Festival, I never thought I'd hear a bop-centric set built around jazz standards ("Footprints," "Impressions") and the blues. Marlon is a representative member of the power-trumpet school of Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw, and Kent soloed eloquently, especially on piccolo, a woodwind rarely heard in improvised music. The quintet was well-propelled by the very versatile Mr. Cleaver on drums, who soloed as if he had been waiting his whole life — or at least the whole evening — to do so. The major disappointment of the set was that Kidd Jordan himself didn't sit in — he's never showed New Yorkers any of his facets other than his avant-garde technique, and I would love to hear what he sounds like playing chord-based bebop. Mr. Jordan has been a regular player at Vision almost since the festival's origins, but he should have felt right at home at Clemente Soto in another regard: The sweltering heat and heavy humidity in the theater (whatever cooling system they had was decidedly not up to code) must have reminded him of New Orleans. Mind you, this was Wednesday, when the temperature was only in the upper 80s. I can't even imagine what it must have been like the previous night, when it was 10 degrees hotter. A few hardy attendees (dudes, alas) responded by stripping to the waist. Yet at 73, Mr. Jordan was so robust that he flew from set to set without even pausing to change his sweat-stained T-shirt.

June 13, 2008 Music Review | Kidd Jordan A Sax Man of Distinction and That Vision Thing By NATE CHINEN To the extent that the tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan is known in the general jazz world, he’s known as a New Orleans patriarch and educator. Dig deeper and you might also hear about his long, eclectic career as a sideman and his role in inspiring the formation of both the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the World Saxophone Quartet. But Mr. Jordan, 73, has never made much of a dent as a solo artist, and he still doesn’t have an entry in “The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz” (Oxford). None of which should be seen as a reflection of Mr. Jordan’s prowess, or his prominence among a certain adventurous subspecies of jazz fan. At the Vision Festival, held annually on the Lower East Side, he commands a sort of veneration. On Wednesday at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center, the festival devoted a full evening of programming to Mr. Jordan, bestowing what it calls a lifetime recognition honor. And he earned that distinction, playing hard in four ensembles and presiding over a fifth, in a room that might charitably be described as ventilation challenged. The group that didn’t include Mr. Jordan was a sextet featuring two of his accomplished sons: Marlon, a trumpeter, and Kent, a flutist. Their set, atypical for the festival, involved post-bop standards by John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. In terms of content and execution, it would have suited a Midtown jazz club. Every ensemble featuring Mr. Jordan, by contrast, knocked about in the realm of free improvisation. He’s a master of that tradition, one of a handful of saxophonists of his generation to absorb the breakthroughs of his contemporaries Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, not just as a shock but also as a spur. His technique has the capacity to astonish, especially in the altissimo range. But he works to ensure that the technical takes a backseat to the soulful. That much was clear in the first of his two sets with William Parker on bass and Hamid Drake on drums, the same partners as on “Palm of Soul” (AUM Fidelity), one of Mr. Jordan’s few available albums. During one heated stretch, he engaged in a strident back-and-forth with the violinist Billy Bang; during another, he took the horn out of his mouth and called out exhortations. He seemed just as committed to a quintet with Mr. Parker, the trumpeter Clyde Kerr, the pianist Joel Futterman and the drummer Gerald Cleaver. His rapport with Mr. Futterman in particular — they have recorded together — was striking. Earlier he had struggled to find the right chemistry with another strong pianist, Dave Burrell. But the set with Mr. Burrell had also presented Mr. Jordan with an intuitive foil, the baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett. Their dual improvisation kept returning to the substance of a spiritual, with rewarding results. A similar thing happened in the evening’s exquisite finale: Mr. Jordan locked horns with Fred Anderson, a fellow tenor and former Vision Festival honoree. As on the album “2 Days in April” (Eremite), recorded in 1999, they dug in deeply with Mr. Parker and Mr. Drake. But first there was a conversational prelude, in which the two saxophonists tossed phrases back and forth, rejoicing and rejoindering with a mischievous secret wisdom.

Better take a week off and recuperate! It's the stress of life on the road. Too much time away from the net wondering how that EmmyLou thread is doing.

It could be like one of those all star jams where they play Smoke on the Water. .

Yeah man, I'll bet it's nice. I love my Teles, although I'm not really playing them now. I really like the neck pup clean and they seem to have more treble and bass than a Strat. .

I'm looking forward to that eight guitar version of Bight Size Life we were talking 'bout. .

From the Los Angeles Times MUSIC REVIEW Terry Riley at Walt Disney Concert Hall The organist rides 'Hurricane Mama' into cosmic depths. By Mark Swed Times Music Critic May 27, 2008 AT 4:53 p.m. Sunday, NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars, and two hours later pictures from the dusty red planet arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to prove it. But sound doesn't travel as fast as light, so it took a half-hour longer before we had an indication of extraterrestrial life stirring. That is when Hurricane Mama awakened and began to make miraculous music a few miles from JPL at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Terry Riley -- a Space Age Prospero dressed in black, wearing a black skull cap and in striped stocking feet, his long gray beard flowing -- walked to the organ consol. The hall was darkened. The wooden pipes were illuminated deep purple. No longer "French fries," a nickname Riley told the audience he felt inelegant, the pipes were newly dubbed "radiant columns of Orfeo." Hurricane Mama is his name for the Disney organ. For the next two hours, Hurricane Mama howled and roared. Orfeo's columns traced the shapes of swirling galaxies and accompanied accelerating quanta as they collided releasing astonishing quantities of energy. They strung out strings of space-time and hymned drones of mystical oneness with the universe. All of that came before lift-off, which occurred in a long-held ground-shaking, gravity-defying final chord. Riley and the organ are a match made on the other side of Mars, namely heaven. As the composer who launched Minimalism in 1964 with "In C," he was an obviously crucial figure in the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Minimalist Jukebox" festival two years ago. At that time, the orchestra invited Riley to create a new work for the organ. "Universal Bridge," which began with an Anthem for Disney Hall and concluded with nature unleashed in "Hurricane Mama Blues," was the result. "Minimalist" is a strange tag for Riley. It suits him in that he has never lost his love for interlocking repetitive figures imbued with the strength to send the brain into psychedelic reverie. But Riley is really a musical accumulator. Years of study in India have made him a master of raga, played on the keyboard and sung. A virtuosic pianist and inspired improviser, he began as a jazz player and, at 72, remains a brilliant jazz player. Hardly remaining in or anywhere near C, he roams through modes and microtones continually enriching his harmonic palate. Melodically and rhythmically he flows naturally between East and West, ancient times, recent music history and the present. Although he has performed before on the pipe organ, Riley's main instruments are piano, electric organ and synthesizer. To prepare for Sunday's concert, he made several trips from his home in Northern California to spend nights familiarizing himself with the Disney organ, typically practicing from midnight to 6 a.m., a period when he could play in the dark uninterrupted with only the night watchman looking on. His original idea was to give an all-night concert, from around 11 to dawn, but he had to scrap that when the Philharmonic put him on its regular organ series. For the first half of his program, Riley revised two classic pieces, first updating "Persian Surgery Dervishes," a study in whirling repetitions for electric keyboard and tape delay. (A famous performance of that was given and recorded in Los Angeles in 1971). Sunday's new "A Persian Surgery Dervish in the Nursery" made his performance on the old electronic technology seem downright primitive. On Disney's instrument, Riley achieved a sense of awe-inspiring vastness with thick church-like diapason textures. For an arrangement of a few themes from his epic 1985 string quartet, "Salome Dances for Peace," Riley began with spellbinding rumbling of low notes and then traced trilling fanciful melodies, at one point adding raga-like vocalization. The "Universal Bridge" premiere was after intermission. Its opening Anthem for Disney Hall proved an embracing celebration of succulent chords in grand progression. The second movement, "The Bull," began with Middle Eastern melodic figuration over an arpeggiated ostinato base that had a faintly tango feel and slowly evolved into Bachian exuberance. In the next movement, "The Shape of Flames," calm, soft-grained Mexican-like figures radiated into musical styles from near and far, with occasional long dissonant blasts, as it built into the rapturous, overpowering, indescribable "Hurricane Mama Blues." On a personal note, I am not a disinterested observer of Riley's music. I have been attending his concerts since the '60s. I lined up with other students waiting for a Berkeley record store to open to buy "In C" the day the first recording of it was released. I attended Mills College in Oakland when Riley taught there in the '70s (although I didn't study with him). I got goose bumps watching him receive an honorary doctorate at CalArts this month. My expectations for Sunday's concert were impossibly high. They were exceeded.

I saw a bit of this late, late last night and it's just not for me. Paced too fast and too much drama for me. At least I tried.

Happy birthday and many more!

Single-horned 'Unicorn' deer found in Italy By MARTA FALCONI, Associated Press Writer Wed Jun 11, 3:06 PM ET A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday. "This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. "The unicorn has always been a mythological animal." The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed "Unicorn" — was born in captivity in the research center's park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said. He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns. Calling it the first time he has seen such a case, Tozzi said such anomalies among deer may have inspired the myth of the unicorn. The unicorn, a horse-like creature with magical healing powers, has appeared in legends and stories throughout history, from ancient and medieval texts to the adventures of Harry Potter. "This shows that even in past times, there could have been animals with this anomaly," he said by telephone. "It's not like they dreamed it up." Single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of — but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn, experts said. "Generally, the horn is on one side (of the head) rather than being at the center. This looks like a complex case," said Fulvio Fraticelli, scientific director of Rome's zoo. He said the position of the horn could also be the result of a trauma early in the animal's life. Other mammals are believed to contribute to the myth of the unicorn, including the narwhal, a whale with a long, spiraling tusk.

That's a really cool cover Jim. .

June 12, 2008 Music Review Harmonious Tension and Dueling Flaxen Locks By NATE CHINEN, NYT Alison Krauss and Robert Plant performing at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden. On “Raising Sand” (Rounder), the spooky, beautiful album they released last year, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss tilt toward each other from starkly different vantage points: heat-blistered arena rock (his) and coolly plaintive bluegrass (hers). Their material, scouted out by the producer T Bone Burnett, mines a deep, dark region of Americana somewhat familiar to them both. But their chemistry springs partly from contrast; even the most harmonious moments convey a subtle, fruitful tension. Mr. Plant and Ms. Krauss approached common ground more literally at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday, the first of two concerts there. Taking the stage from opposite wings, each assumed a stalking gait, like cartoon predators. Their pace had a parallel in “Rich Woman,” the R&B throwback that also opens the album. There was casual symmetry in their height and black attire, and in their flaxen manes. Things loosened, and quickened. The next song up was “Leave My Woman Alone,” a spunky admonition by Ray Charles; Ms. Krauss grabbed her fiddle, and Mr. Plant sang bracingly over a two-step groove. Then came “Black Dog,” a classic by Led Zeppelin, Mr. Plant’s old band. Arranged in a minor key for banjo, acoustic bass and guitar, it felt muted but menacing, especially as both singers arced their voices upward with a harmonized “ah,” just before an instrumental squall. “Welcome to the Raising Sand Revue,” Mr. Plant said after that song, summing up a basic truth about this tour. While plainly inspired by the album, it takes welcome liberties with repertory and tone. Mr. Burnett, leading a band of aces, including the drummer Jay Bellerose and the guitarist Buddy Miller, keeps the momentum crisp. The set list doesn’t appear to change much from night to night, which doesn’t suggest a lack of imagination so much as a sturdy formula. It’s working mightily, judging by Tuesday’s results. As a revue the tour also favors the strengths of its headliners, in a way that “Raising Sand” doesn’t. So there were two more Led Zeppelin tunes, each a powerhouse. “Black Country Woman” had the band exploding at each emotional spur in the lyrics, and then subsiding until the next furious wave. “The Battle of Evermore” was quieter but stronger, owing to its Celtic drone (a sound not far removed from Appalachia) and its female vocal part (which Ms. Krauss sang grippingly). And even on some songs from the “Raising Sand” album, Mr. Plant was rewardingly forceful: “Nothin,’ ” a Townes Van Zandt lament, found him caterwauling like his younger self. Ms. Krauss had her own showcase, beginning with the traditional hymn “Green Pastures,” on which she received sparse support from Dennis Crouch on bass and Stuart Duncan on guitar. Then she pared down further, singing a serenely penetrating version of “Down to the River to Pray,” initially with no accompaniment at all. (Halfway through, Mr. Plant mock-tiptoed onstage to contribute to an a cappella gospel harmony.) If this collaboration encourages Mr. Plant to be a bit more ethereal, it has certainly made Ms. Krauss seem earthier. Her characteristically sweet, high singing was balanced against more strident and cathartic belting. On “It’s Goodbye and So Long to You,” which doesn’t appear on “Raising Sand,” and “Trampled Rose,” which does, she proved she can wail as hard as anybody, even you know who. Elsewhere there was better proof of a cohesive blend, as in the back-to-back closers: “Please Read the Letter,” a ballad by Mr. Plant, and “Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On),” a classic by the Everly Brothers. Then there was the final encore: “Your Long Journey,” by Doc and Rosa Lee Watson. Ms. Krauss and Mr. Plant sang it exquisitely, with a somber intensity that they couldn’t possibly have summoned before they hit the road.

June 11, 2008 Krauss, Plant lead Americana Awards finalists By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 11:34 p.m. ET NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Alison Krauss and Robert Plant were nominated Wednesday night for top album, No. 1 song and best duo in the seventh annual Americana Honors and Awards. They received the nominations based on their million-selling ''Raising Sand'' album.

Maybe a hermaphrodite druid...tree worship, something for everyone. However there might be problems with this approach. Despite neo-druidic believers, it is unknown whether or not women were historically allowed to serve as druids. Summer Solstice comin' up, reason to party...it's Heliocentric baby. .

I thought each post was going to have the same content! You need a higher post count Allen.

Uh oh...I'm out of Cholula.

I missed the rerun last night, but it looks like the new season starts tonight. I'll at least try to check it out. .

Congratulations! .

some questions from the Ice Road Truckers web page. Did You Know? Does the ice road have a speed limit? Why are some Inuvik homes painted very bright colors? .

My copy is misfiled, so I can't find it, but I think there's an explanation in the liner notes.

I think it was 3.79 when I filled up a few days ago. Rod...you're a consumer in the news!

what the fuck... .