7/4

The sprinklers aren't working. Time for the large vats of boiling oil.

No sir, I don't think I'd like that. Not one bit.

One can never be too careful. So which one played with Allan Holdsworth?

hmmm....dated?

When they start ringing the door bell, I'll turn on the sprinklers.

Not to be confused with the yeast physiologist, Gary Novak.

October 31, 2007 Goulet Mangled Lyrics at Title Fight By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:31 p.m. ET LEWISTON, Maine (AP) -- Robert Goulet is being remembered in this former mill city for mangling the lyrics to the national anthem before the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston heavyweight championship fight more than 30 years ago. Goulet, 73, died Tuesday in Los Angeles while awaiting a lung transplant. Goulet's May 25, 1965, performance at the Central Maine Youth Center was described as being off-key and out of synch with the organ accompaniment. ''He finally managed to slur his way through it,'' fight spectator David Bernier, then a 15-year-old high school freshman, told the (Lewiston) Sun Journal. Newspaper stories at the time said he sang ''dawn's early night'' and ''gave proof through the fight.'' Interviewed years ago by online boxing writer Barry Lindenman, Goulet only admitted his mistake on the opening line. ''Even though I had never sung the national anthem, I said OK because I wanted to see the fight,'' Goulet said. ''So I went and had dinner with the governor (John Reed) that night. I left the table three times to go to the porch and practice.'' ''The fight lasted a minute and a half. They blamed me, and I walked out of town a bum,'' he lamented. Goulet's rendition of ''The Star-Spangled Banner'' wasn't the only aspect of the fight that came into question. Referee Jersey Joe Walcott mishandled the count when Liston hit the canvas, and skeptics complained that Ali toppled his challenger with a ''phantom punch.''

I wish you a Happy Birthday. So does Anthony Braxton.

Good thing I don't have to go to NYC until Thursday.

Who the fuck's gonna know that I'm dressed as Buckethead?? Or, rather, that Buckethead is a real person?? That reminds me -- is buckethead a real person?? I saw Laswell in a record store a few days ago and forgot to ask him. %$#...........unreal maybe...

Larry Coryell has two sons, Julian Coryell and Murali Coryell that play guitar. Karen Mantlers parents are Michael Mantler & Carla Bley. That's all I have for now. If I come up with any more, you'll be the first to know.

I need one. It's authentic.

Happy Birthday folks!

The thing that I like the most about it is that each article is a microcosm of each composer/musician's personality. Some can go on inteminably with whatever they choose to talk about but some are very precise analyses of a particular style of playing or compositional approach. I'm experiencing first hand John Zorn's rather "hands-off" approach because he's asked me to submit to Arcana 3, but is very flexible about content and size (within reason - there's quality, you know ) (I'm literally sitting here finishing the writing with graphics scanning to be completed after dinner). Arcana 2 should be out now or very soon, but I don't know who's included. If you need a listing for #1, I can tell you...and I've been given a temporary list for #3, but we'll see what the final list brings. The collection of artists really is a great collection of the artists of our time! #2 has been out for a while. I should pick them both up and check them out. I was at DMG early this afternoon and Zorn was there with Laswell looking for CDs. I see Zorn around all the time, but I've never seen Laswell off stage. Note: Laswell wasn't wearing a beret this time.

How is it? I never got around to reading those things.

So tell us about it.

October 28, 2007 Slowhand By STEPHEN KING CLAPTON The Autobiography. By Eric Clapton. Illustrated. 343 pp. Broadway Books. $26. Most A.A. meetings begin with the chairman offering his qualifications at the head table next to the coffee maker. This qualification is more commonly known in the program as the drunkalogue. It’s a good word, with its suggestions of inebriated travel, and it certainly fits Eric Clapton’s account of his life. “Clapton” is nothing so literary as a memoir, but its dry, flat-stare honesty makes it a welcome antidote to the macho fantasies of recovery served up by James Frey in “A Million Little Pieces.” A drunkalogue consists of three parts: what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. Following a format that Clapton, now 20 years sober, could probably recite in his sleep, the world’s most famous rock-and-blues guitarist duly — and sometimes dutifully — covers the bases. He is rarely able to communicate clearly what his music means to him (“It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth,” he says at one point; “that’s why they’re songs”), but his writing is adequate to the main task, which is describing how he became the rock ’n’ roll version of Harry Potter: Clapton is, after all, the Boy Who Lived. And this drunkalogue has other things to recommend it; to my knowledge, no other addict-alcoholics can claim to have filched George Harrison’s wife or escaped — barely — dying in a helicopter crash with Stevie Ray Vaughan. Both Clapton’s and Vaughan’s choppers took off into heavy fog after a show in Wisconsin. Vaughan’s turned the wrong way and crashed into an artificial ski slope. I’ve heard it suggested at recovery meetings that the true alcoholic is almost always an overachiever with a bad self-image, and Clapton fits this profile as well as any. After millions of records sold, thousands of S.R.O. concert dates and decades of conspicuous consumerism (Visvim shoes, Patek Philippe watches, a yacht), he can still call himself “a toe-rag from Ripley.” That’s the small town in Surrey where Clapton grew up. He discovered, as a child of 6 or 7, that the couple he believed to be his parents were really his grandmother and step-grandfather. His mother was actually the daughter of Rose Clapp and her first husband, Rex Clapton. His father was a married Canadian airman named Edward Fryer: “The truth dawned on me, that when Uncle Adrian jokingly called me a little bastard, he was telling the truth.” Clapton’s first guitar (he seems to remember them all) was a Hoyer too big for him, and painful to play; his first addiction, Horlicks and Ovaltine tablets stolen from the local sweet shop; his first encounter with the sexual embarrassment that would haunt him for years came with a school caning (“six of the best”) after asking a schoolmate, with no idea what the query meant, if she might “fancy a shag.” He got drunk for the first time at 16 and woke alone in the woods, with fouled trousers, vomit on his shirt and no money. Then he adds the perfect drunkalogue kicker: “I couldn’t wait to do it all again.” He got his chance. His rise from the Yardbirds (1963-65) to sold-out stadium shows (Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos) was meteoric, but his sense of inadequacy and painful shyness never left him. Perhaps not surprisingly, his idol was the mythic bluesman Robert Johnson, so painfully shy himself that he once recorded songs while facing into the corner of the room. The drunkalogue’s “what happened” part is more familiarly known to ex-juicers as “hitting bottom.” Clapton hits his in 1981, about 15 years after seeing his first piece of “Clapton Is God” graffiti on a London wall. It was preceded by D.T.’s, bleeding ulcers and a grand mal seizure. He played through them all, often brilliantly (by other accounts; never by his own). Nor was he deterred by the drug-related deaths of peers like Brian Jones, Keith Moon and Jimi Hendrix (for whom Clapton had bought a guitar on the day Hendrix died). At Christmas in 1981, while dressed only in bright green thermal underwear (and “looking like Kermit the Frog”), he was locked in his bedroom by his wife at the time, Pattie Boyd, so he wouldn’t spoil Christmas for the gathered friends and family. Shortly thereafter, Clapton finally called his manager for help and checked into Hazelden, which “looked grim and resembled Fort Knox. ... It didn’t surprise me to learn that when they tried to get Elvis to go there, he apparently took one look at it and refused to get out of his limo.” It took him two tries — and I love the image of him setting the dining room table for his fellow patients at mealtime — but he finally “got it,” as A.A.’s say. It took him about six years, a not unusual length of time. Some never get it. The most harrowing and touching episode in Clapton’s early recovery deals with the death of his 4-year-old son, Conor, who fell out a window while playing hide-and-seek with his nanny and dropped 49 stories. The job of identifying the body fell to Clapton. I cannot comprehend how one stays sober under such circumstances, especially one in the early years of recovery, but somehow Clapton did. Later, after telling his story at an A.A. meeting, he was accosted by a woman who said he had taken away her last excuse to drink. “I’ve always had this little corner of my mind which held the excuse that, if anything were to happen to my kids, then I’d be justified in getting drunk. You’ve shown me that’s not true.” In drunkalogues, the final part of the tale — what it’s like now — is usually the most rewarding to live and the least interesting to listen to; veteran drunks have heard it all before, and the newbies, shaking and pale, rarely believe it (I myself believed that anyone claiming more than four months of continuous sobriety had to be flat lying). Clapton’s tale is no different. The founding of Crossroads, the now famous recovery center that he built in Antigua, is the best part. Otherwise, the final chapters are only intermittently interesting: Clapton raises a family, Clapton buys cool clothes, Clapton offers a curmudgeonly overview of pop music (“95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure”). Most of all, Clapton plays gigs, gigs, gigs. It’s like reading a letter from a cheerful uncle who is now getting on in years. Clapton is honest — sometimes, as in the account of his son’s death, even searing — and often witty, with a hard-won survivor’s humor. There’s plenty of uplift as well. What Clapton’s drunkalogue lacks is any real insight into the music he’s spent his life playing. We know it gives him joy — he continues to live on what he once called “blues power” — but he’s only rarely able to communicate that joy, or convey what it was like to be a part of the mad hot ballroom that was the British pop music scene between 1963 and 1970. It’s not lack of will or effort; Clapton does the best he can with what he has, and the result is an honorable badge of a book. He may not have the skill of a Mary Karr or Frank McCourt, but I’m sure he writes better than most memoirists play guitar. And sometimes the workmanlike flashes into the wonderful, as when he describes himself in his early days as “a green young scholar listening my way forward.” Then there’s the story of one of the most notorious rock acts ever to play the storied Albert Hall in London — the Mothers of Invention. Clapton writes, “Frank Zappa’s keyboard player, Don Preston, known as ‘Mother Don,’ broke into the hall’s organ keyboard, which was locked behind two glass doors, and played a raucous version of ‘Louie Louie’ that brought the house down.” I could have used a little more of that. It’s not memoir or drunkalogue. That’s rock ’n’ roll.

October 28, 2007 The Music Issue Century’s Playlist By GEOFF DYER, NY Times THE REST IS NOISE Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross. Illustrated. 624 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30. Does the very thing that qualifies someone to write a review — the fact that he is the kind of reader to whom the book is “especially” addressed — disqualify him from doing so? I ask not as one “well versed in classical music” but as a representative of “those who feel passing curiosity about this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture.” Those better versed may be able to pounce on Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, if he gets things wrong — if he mistakenly claims the music goes from a D major to a D minor or whatever — but my ignorance of musical technicalities means that I pose a special and more profound test of Ross’s skills. When he’s treating an invalid (pronounce the word however seems appropriate) like me, he will have to proceed like a therapist faced with a physical inadequacy that can’t, of itself, be fixed. His prose is going to have to work on the surrounding muscle to compensate for a more deep-seated weakness. If he does this — if he succeeds in articulating what my ears have been ignorantly hearing — then he will have produced a thoroughly invigorating program of rehabilitation. “The Rest Is Noise” is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music. We start with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, “the titans of Austro-German music” in Graz, on May 16, 1906. Strauss is there to conduct a performance of his opera “Salome.” It turns into an extraordinary night — not because of the shrieks, discords and howls of the music but because, to Mahler’s astonishment, the audience loves it. This may have been “just one event in a busy season, but, like a flash of lightning, it illuminated a musical world on the verge of traumatic change. Past and future were colliding; centuries were passing in the night.” Vividly actualized, extensively and astutely analyzed, the episode also serves as a model for the book as a whole. Time and again Ross finds an event that expresses a larger movement — a person or a scene in which tendencies and meaning converge. In Paris, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie stand for a “stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy” avant-garde, while in Vienna Arnold Schoenberg and his 12-tone progeny, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, illuminate “the terrible depths with their holy torches.” From Stravinsky to Sibelius to Schoenberg (who “learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata”), the emerging heavyweights of the new music are sketched with a brevity and confidence that are the products, surely, of deep immersion and study. Steeped though Ross is in Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann, his own style is mercifully free of the “implacable imperative of density” commended by the critic-devil in Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” (a novel that provides a framing parable for the book’s early sections). Nevertheless, with so much ground to cover, after 150 pages one fears that “The Rest” may subside into a linked series of adroitly composed New Yorkerish profiles. Fortunately, just as things begin to sag, totalitarianism comes to the rescue. As Ross examines the compromised fate of composers under Stalin and Hitler, the book again rises to embrace its darker purpose. Inevitably Dmitri Shostakovich is the emblematically contorted figure, moving from derisory laughter at the very idea of having to explain “the socioeconomic dimensions of the music of Chopin and Liszt” to an uncomfortable accommodation with the state that both facilitates and threatens his work. In post-Wagnerian Germany, meanwhile, could something ominous be heard looming in all those “humongous Teutonic symphonies”? Conceding from the outset that “no composer more painfully exhibited the moral collapse of German art than Richard Strauss,” Ross probes the composer’s complex, often contradictory relation to the Nazi regime with considerable dexterity. This is where the debate at the conceptual heart of Ross’s undertaking is thrown into sharpest focus: is the history of music self-contained or can a larger, extramusical history be distilled from it? Actually, as Ross makes clear, the alternatives are mutually implicated and imbricated: “precisely because of its inarticulate nature,” music is “all too easily imprinted with ideologies and deployed to political ends.” With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, “The Rest Is Noise” is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement. So much so that at times history itself seems bent on playing into Ross’s hands. Who could have imagined that, as a “surreal” consequence of the rise of fascism, many of the giants of European classical music — Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and Otto Klemperer (to say nothing of Mann and Adorno) — would end up living on each others’ doorsteps in Los Angeles? In such proximity, events of world-historical importance offered an irresistible incentive to pettiness. When NBC broadcast Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony in 1942, most of the émigré composers “experienced a mass attack of envy and resentment.” Schoenberg and Stravinsky both did their best to squeeze huge fees from sympathetic Hollywood studios. Thereafter, scoring music for films became one of the principal ways in which new orchestral music maintained a viable position in the cultural marketplace. And while America produced both homegrown composers of “straight music” (to use the jazzer’s preferred term) and composers of popular music deserving classic status — Ellington, Gershwin, Bernstein — many of the most challenging ideas of the avant-garde were disseminated through jazz (often regarded as “black classical music”). This means that, in the postwar years, Ross’s catchment area has to be extended still further. Inevitably, as we draw closer to the present, the quantity and range of material make it difficult for the book to sustain the concentration achieved mid-century. The fragmentation of the musical center means that the story becomes dispersed, and we are urged, irresistibly, toward the cultural edges. With its obligation to touch on everyone — Terry Riley, Alfred Schnittke, Thomas Adès — the book begins to resemble a reference work in narrative guise. I don’t see how it could have been done differently, but the centrifugal force generated by the obligation to be comprehensive also causes a distortion of emphasis. Perhaps the problem rests on the necessary if unsustainable distinction between improvisation and composition. John Coltrane is mentioned, but relatively speaking, his importance here seems to derive from the way Steve Reich saw him play a bunch of times. Keith Jarrett does not get a look in, even though his improvised solo piano concerts in some ways represent the culmination of virtuoso classical performance stretching back to Liszt. It would be unfair, though, to dwell on omissions when so much has been included. “The Rest Is Noise” is a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand “more seeingly” in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.

October 28, 2007 Music Sidewalk Hero, on the Horns of a Revival By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH, NYTimes Plenty of chamber music festivals have featured works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Or Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner. But a festival that includes music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ives, Carter and Kirchner, all playing second fiddle to the classical works of Moondog? “Moondog Rising,” which takes place on Friday and Saturday at Advent Lutheran Church in Manhattan, is surely the first. The Viking of Sixth Avenue, as he was known, would be proud. From the late 1940s to the early ’70s Moondog was as recognizable in the New York City landscape as the Empire State Building, and nearly as striking. A tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog’s Corner. Dispensing his poetry, politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors), he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and “Today” to Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese. “Everybody who was anybody met Moondog,” Robert Scotto, author of “Moondog,” a biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. “And everybody had his own Moondog.” Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character, though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth Ansell observed in the mid-’90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie Parker admired Moondog’s idiosyncratic forays into their world, “the classical orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him.” Robin Boomer, a cellist and the organizer of Moondog Rising, said: “Most of the people I know from the classical music world don’t know Moondog at all. He hasn’t made it into the canon.” Part of the problem is that Moondog was so prolific and eclectic. Working in Braille, often composing under his cloak on the sidewalk, he wrote in an impressively wide range of styles: percussion-driven exotica (he made his own triangular drum-and-cymbal instrument, the trimba), avant-garde jazz, folkish madrigals, Bach-like neo-Baroque rounds and canons for chamber orchestra, symphonies for full orchestra, and a layered minimalism that influenced his young collaborators Steve Reich and Philip Glass. (They can be heard playing with Moondog in the 1960s on a sampler CD included in Mr. Scotto’s book, for which Mr. Glass wrote the preface.) He released more than a dozen recordings, and his music was used in films and television commercials. His songs were sung by Janis Joplin (on “Big Brother & the Holding Company”) and Julie Andrews (a children’s album); he once shared a bill in a Greenwich Village club with Tiny Tim and Lenny Bruce, and much later performed on a festival stage in London at the invitation of Elvis Costello. Still, acceptance as a modern classical composer has eluded him. The atavistic streak symbolized by the Viking helmet can be heard in the work, which was melodic and tuneful at a time when atonality and dissonance often ruled. Mostly it sounds more like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart than Ives, Carter or Kirchner. Ms. Boomer said that was why music by those composers would be played along with Moondog’s at the two-night festival, so audiences can compare and contrast. Born Louis Hardin Jr., in Kansas, the son of an Episcopal minister, Moondog was raised in various Plains states. At 16, he was blinded while tinkering with a blasting cap. He became a voracious autodidact of music, literature, history and philosophy. He renamed himself Moondog for a howling bulldog he had loved as a boy, and developed a worldview that embraced Norse mythology and Viking culture as the pinnacles of European civilization. He was 27 when he came to New York in 1943 and quickly established his eccentric status. Although often mistaken for homeless, he always had a room somewhere (he lived for a year in the ’60s with Mr. Glass and JoAnne Akalaitis), and was married for a period and raised a daughter. His many hours on the street were his way of connecting with the sounds, voices and rhythms of the city. That’s where Mr. Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, first met him as a college student in the mid-’60s. “He was the avant-garde figure par excellence, the ultimate hippie,” Mr. Scotto recalled. “He was a pilgrimage that all college students made.” Mr. Scotto sought out Moondog again in Europe in the mid-1980s. Moondog’s German friends had convinced him by then to set aside the Viking helmet and cloak, which they scoffingly referred to as his “amateur Odin” costume, referring to the figure from Norse mythology. Ms. Boomer first heard of Moondog in the ’80s from a jazz musician who “was aghast that I didn’t know him.” Pursuing a master’s degree in arts administration at Columbia University last year, she began to research Moondog’s life and works. What she originally planned as a small lecture and performance grew into “what I refer to as the Exploding Moondog Festival,” she said. “It just got bigger and bigger,” with her own 20-piece Eupraxia Players joined by musicians from around the country and Europe. In his preface to “Moondog” Mr. Glass writes that he and Mr. Reich “took his work very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Julliard.” Ms. Boomer said she hoped to spread that appreciation.

Same here Brownie. Happy Birthday!

Oh, come on; that sheep was asking for it... I find they just don't complain.

I thought that might be a possibility.

I don't know, acoustic instruments seemed to have served classical music very well for hundreds of years. Then, the next thing you know, they started splicing mag tape. Come out to show them...

Happy happy joy joy Birthday!