7/4

nothing, really. ask Clem Strauss why he felt compelled to go there on this thread, not me. OK. Just wonderin'...I'll have to plunge in and check out your EAI scene sometime. David Beardsley aka 7/4

What does EAI have to do with SEM?

nice socks.

R U NUTS?!! I WOULD GO BUT I CANT CROS STATE LINES!?!?!? EVEN IF YOU FLY???

doesn't get any better than this....or does it?

WE'LL SEE...

THE MUSICAL BOX IS PLAYING IN NJ THIS FRIDAY AT THE STARLAND BALLROOM. I MIGHT GO, IT'S ONLY ABOUT 25 MIN FROM HERE.

...enjoy!

"Prize" doesn't necessarily mean money or financial gain. The prize can be as simple as folks enjoying ones work. Or at least an article or a review. When they're raving about ones work, that's good. Money or may be even lots of of it would be nice, but that ain't always happening. And back to some early posts, if folks think the so called avant-garde sucks, take a break. Listen to some other shit for a while and come back with a fresh new perspective.

What he said!

Jazz And Harmony From Bebop to Chants, Music Has Been in Alice Coltrane's Soul By Teresa Wiltz Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, October 21, 2006; C01 AGOURA, Calif. Aluxury station wagon rolls up to the temple here at the Sai Anantam Ashram and everyone stands at the ready, even the little ones, hands clasped in prayer. The door opens, and from it, Swamini Turiyasangitananda, nee Alice McLeod Coltrane -- yes, that Coltrane -- steps out. She is tall, mahogany of skin, swathed in a saffron sari, ebony hair pressed smooth, rippling past her shoulders, a long layer of dreadlocks snaking out from underneath. She smiles shyly. A devotee rushes to her side, drops to her knees, and, in the tradition of Vedantic followers everywhere, bows at the feet of her guru. Inside this temple, located about 35 miles west of Los Angeles, worshipers practice a sort of ecumenical Hinduism: The men sit on one side of the royal blue carpet, the women on the other; Alice presides from a fuchsia velvet armchair. During a Sunday service, she kisses a baby and christens him with a Sanskrit name. Someone announces there will be no services next week, thanks to a rare concert that Alice is giving "back East" -- a reference to her show tomorrow at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. She gives a short sermon, quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita: "You don't need any religion to get devoted to God," she tells them. Some of the 30-plus present wipe tears from their eyes. Then she sits at the electric organ. Places fingers to keys. Chants "Ommmmmm." And begins to play. Heads nod; bodies sway. They're singing in Sanskrit -- Bolo Bolo Asrita Bolo Om Namah Sivaya -- but something else is going on. The deep bass humming from the organ . . . the funk emanating from tambourines and hand drums . . . the soulful singing and fervent yeah yeahs . . . the sister crying out, hands raised, caught up in the rapture . . . Hindu gospel? Indeed, watching Alice on organ, beaming till her dimples pop, it's not hard to catch a glimpse of the child prodigy from Detroit playing in the Baptist church. To see the young bebop player, the one with whom John Coltrane fell in love, back at Birdland so many years ago. Another lifetime ago. * * * Hers is a life reinvented, in the classic American way of taking sorrow and spinning it into something that gleams brighter than gold. She's got a last name attached to one of jazz's all-time greats, and yet few know her for the highly gifted musician and composer she is: an artist admired for her righteously rumbling arpeggios, for the deep vibrancy of her tone, for her dynamism as an improviser. She joined John Coltrane's quintet in 1965, and together they explored the limits of avant-garde jazz, marinating in the mysticism of Eastern music, improvising their way into a deeply transcendent experience. Theirs was a brief but intense union -- just five years -- but one that brought three children and altered her life's trajectory. John Coltrane, 11 years older, introduced Alice to Eastern religion, meditation and philosophy. He pushed her to take up the harp, at the time a rare addition to the jazz canon. That instrument, along with her ecclesiastical explorations and noodling with North African and Indian instrumentation, formed the musical basis of her solo albums in the late '60s and early '70s: "Journey in Satchidananda," the staple of many a yoga class; "Ptah the El Daoud"; "World Galaxy"; and "Universal Consciousness." Her latest, critically acclaimed album, "Translinear Light," released in 2004 after a 26-year absence from the mainstream jazz scene, looks both backward and forward, traveling between John's compositions to the gospel hymns of her Christian childhood to the Hindu hymns of her own Vedantic-based beliefs. She's now at work on "Sacred Language of Ascension," scheduled for release early next year, an album that incorporates Hebrew devotional chants, Vedic culture, Coltrane jazz, along with orchestral and congregational church music. "She's got an incredible strength and direction," says bassist Charlie Haden, who played with John Coltrane, worked with Alice on "Journey in Satchidananda" and "Translinear Light," and will be performing with her tomorrow. "She's always exploring and discovering. . . . She's an incredible musician." When her one great love died in 1967 of liver cancer after years of alcohol and drug abuse -- Alice manages the jazz legend's estate -- she kept on playing, jamming on the piano, harp and Wurlitzer organ in studio sessions with the likes of Jimmy Garrison and Pharoah Sanders, with Rashied Ali and Archie Shepp, and collaborating with Carlos Santana, Laura Nyro, McCoy Tyner and Jack DeJohnette. Music swirled all around her until 1978, when Alice decided that she'd rather pursue all things spiritual. She spent weeks at a time in India, studying with spiritual masters such as her guru, Sri Swami Satchidananda, and the Indian sage Sri Satya Sai Baba, he of the beatific grin and the splendiferous 'fro. Ask her about this change in life direction, and she carefully measures her words, her voice a lyrical murmur punctuated by abrupt, staccato bursts: "This is what we did, [my children's] father and I, this is what we did when we were young," Alice, 69, says of her jazz career, sitting by a burbling stream at the ashram. "We concertized, we were busy and we played in various places and we recorded a lot. I felt that he completed his mission. And I felt that my time had passed on. "You see where I am today," she continues, gesturing at the Santa Monica Mountains, the lush trees. "I wanted to spend time in spiritual search." So she stopped making music for secular consumption and began recording spiritual music with members of the ashram's choir. But her second-eldest son, Ravi Coltrane, 41, a talented saxophonist, coaxed her out of retirement, bit by bit, for occasional concerts. Ravi produced and performs on "Translinear Light," five years in the making, and this year cajoled her to perform in four concerts across the country in the 80th year since John's birth. Tomorrow's concert will be her only East Coast appearance. "The performances for me are really commemorating that Alice wants to get onstage and play a little bit," Ravi says from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. "All my ideas -- 'C'mon, Ma, we should make a record, let's go in the studio' -- it was me begging her." * * * Growing up in Detroit in the aftermath of the Depression, the second-youngest of six children, money was always tight. Her father drove a delivery truck; her mother, a homemaker, didn't truck with childish nonsense. Alice learned about music from her older half brother, Ernie Farrow, a bassist. When Alice was 7, she went knocking on a neighbor's door. The neighbor had a piano; Alice didn't. "I decided one day that I was going to ask her to teach me," Alice says. She learned the rudiments and moved on to Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. Classical music grounded her in technique. She composed her first song at 10 and played in church choirs, and then music halls, weddings, funerals, didn't matter. "Music," Alice says, "was just in my heart, somehow." Farrow, who died in 1969, turned her on to the intricacies of bebop, to the genius of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. "He loved music," Alice says of Farrow, "and umph , he could play ." She fell in love with bebop's muscular braininess, with its off-kilter chord changes and speeded-up tempos. By high school, she was gigging all over town, chasing bebop's jagged rhythms. If Cannonball Adderley or Sonny Stitt landed in town without a pianist, she was on their shortlist to call. After graduating from Northeastern High School in the mid-'50s, Alice passed up a scholarship at the Detroit Institute of Technology and headed straight to New York, with a temporary detour in Paris to study with Powell, legendary even then. Jazz -- instrumental jazz -- was a macho world, and with the exception of a few, such as Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Hazel Scott and Marian McPartland, women weren't exactly welcome. Alice ignored the macho machinations. "There was no way I was going to be mannish and do the things men did," she says. She just played, mindful of her Baptist upbringing. She carried herself like a lady, just like her mother taught her, and that, she says, is exactly how she was treated. "She was a sweetheart, a lady lady , that's how I would put it," says vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, with whom Alice played Jewish melodies as part of her New York experimentation. "A good-hearted person." And what made her a good musician? "What makes anybody good? They're good. She played all the right notes, all the right chord changes. Her timing was perfect. What makes Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, good? That cliche 'good for a girl' was not true." * * * Gibbs likes to take credit for playing matchmaker to Alice and John. Mention this to Alice and a little righteous Detroit indignation creeps into her mellifluous voice, which often brings to mind India more than Motor City. "Only Terry and I know the real story," she says, turning to look at her sister, Marilyn, and raising her eyebrows. She won't elaborate except to say that it was while gigging with Gibbs at the legendary Birdland in Manhattan in 1962 that she got to know John. She was 25; he was 36. By then, John had battled and beaten his much-publicized addictions to booze and heroin, and was deep into exploring yoga and religions, from Islam to Buddhism to Hinduism. Backstage, the two (Gibbs calls them "introverts") opened up and started chatting about religion, architecture, languages, the world. Depending on whom you talk to or what you read, they both may have been married at the time -- she to jazz vocalist Kenny "Pancho" Hagood, with whom she had a young daughter, Michelle; he to Naima Coltrane -- but Alice and John were soon inseparable. "I don't think he cared about her physically," Gibbs, the erstwhile matchmaker, says. "I think he just saw a great human being." Alice joined John's group, and they toured the world. But home was Dix Hills on Long Island, far from nightclubs and chaos. Their family grew: John Jr. was born in 1964; Ravi, named after Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar, followed in '65, the year that the couple wed in Mexico. Oran, the youngest, was born in 1967, a few months before John died. Alice knew he was in a lot of pain, they just didn't know what was wrong. By the time she persuaded him to go to a doctor, the cancer had progressed. She saw the end one day, sitting in meditation. She says he came to her in a vision. "I'm going onward," he told her. So she was prepared. Even though it broke her heart. He was 40 when he died. She wasn't yet 30, suddenly single with four young kids to raise. "It was not a very happy time," Alice says. And yes, she misses him still. "Absolutely." * * * Just outside the ashram, a white sign spells out the rules: Women should dress modestly. This is a vegetarian retreat; no meat is allowed on the premises. Neither is alcohol, cigarettes or drugs. Shoes are prohibited inside the buildings, where shrines to Sri Satya Sai Baba abound. Alice moved west because she says that is what God told her to do. First, to San Francisco in the mid-'70s, establishing a Vedantic center there, and then settling in Southern California in Woodland Hills. Growing up with Alice as a mother didn't make for a traditional childhood. Her eldest, Michelle, remembers the vegetarian dinners, her mother dressing in the orange clothes of the renunciate who'd taken a vow of celibacy (right after her husband's death), the singing and chanting in their living room. "So we weren't popular with the other kids when they came over," laughs Michelle, now 46 and married with children of her own. "Because we were young, it didn't seem strange really, just another part of life." In 1983, Alice bought the ashram property, paying a reported $1.3 million for 50 acres of land, a year after her eldest son, John Jr., died in a car accident, at 17. She got through it through her spiritual practice -- "that's the only way" -- and focusing on keeping John Sr.'s legacy alive, playing the savvy businesswoman, managing his estate through Jowcol Music, which includes a publishing and licensing business and an educational foundation. Proceeds from the estate help keep the ashram afloat. Today, she lives in a modestly furnished house in Woodland Hills. Michelle and her family live next door; Oran and his family live on the other side. Far from Detroit, perhaps, but then again, not so far. "You never forget your foundation," Alice says. "I'm just as devoted to Christ and Christianity as I was back then. But because you've expanded your views and you've expanded and your options for experience . . . " Staff researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.

Is that what they named the club after?

What they said.

I just got in and totally missed this.

October 23, 2006 Music Review | Marilyn Crispell A Quartet Announces Itself With a Visit to the Borderline By BEN RATLIFF Starting in the late 1970’s, the pianist Marilyn Crispell played free jazz — the real thing, hot, gestural, abstract. But in the last 10 years she has become more and more valuable as a borderline player, a bridge between free jazz and its more structured original sources; she has broadened and settled her music, and it is giving her many more options. Saturday night at Miller Theater, she showed how widely her circle has been redrawn, giving her first performance with a quartet that included the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, the bassist Mark Helias and the drummer Paul Motian. Ms. Crispell has worked in a trio with Mr. Helias and Mr. Motian before — they made a beautiful record two years ago called “Storyteller” — but it was her first time playing with Mr. Lovano. It’s a powerful group of musicians, and during the evening every member was represented as a composer as well. After two hours, they had made a strong case for themselves; it seems almost necessary that they persist as a band. They demonstrated some of the great potential of inside-outside jazz — music that sometimes doesn’t have a clearly stated pulse, that jumps between dissonance and holding firm to key centers, that can expand and contract as it needs. At root, borderline is nothing new; it’s been an unnameable underground river in jazz since the early 60’s. Yet it forms a tradition and a valuable one, especially when played at this high level, with such a feeling for pulse and melody. A lot of Ms. Crispell’s early Cecil Taylor influence has burned off, and what’s much more audible now is McCoy Tyner. Listening to her was at times like hearing a much younger Mr. Tyner, as he sounded toward the end of his time in John Coltrane’s quartet: strong, resonant left-hand chords guiding the tonality in a mode, and powerfully rhythmic phrases in the right hand — but with a more flexible sense of time than he prefers now (or, in fact, did then). The tacit connection to Tyner and Coltrane reached its peak in the last piece of the concert, Coltrane’s ballad “Dear Lord.” It’s a song that Ms. Crispell has played a lot over the years, and the band got into its marrow. Mr. Lovano’s tone and projection stayed moderate as he blew billowy, note-stuffed phrases across the chords. And Mr. Motian, almost eerily, seemed to fuse the styles of Coltrane’s two great drummers; he played some deep Elvin Jones swing, then some Rashied Ali-like wave-spreading patterns, phrases that didn’t conform to regular time. He did it with his usual economy of motion, keeping to limited sections of the kit. As a closer, it was fantastic, a state of grace, and the gig, in two sets, moved gradually uphill toward it. The first piece, Ms. Crispell’s new “Lines for Joe,” sounded aggressive, unresolved, a little caustic. The concert proceeded through music by Mr. Lovano (“Topsy Turvy” and “Boss Town”) and Mr. Helias (“Limbo” and a poignant, elegant ballad called “The Harmonic Line”), as well as a half-dozen pithy songs by Mr. Motian, all of them using nubby melodies to configure the rhythm. Some of Ms. Crispell’s own pieces opened up the concert. One of them, a mellifluous 20-bar ballad called “One December,” could almost have passed as a Hollywood theme from the 40’s. Then the set turned hard into another springy Motian song, powered by short, springy lines. Taken as a whole, the concert compounded some of the widely varied promises of the last 50 years of jazz — formal elegance and hardboiled abstraction, swing rhythm and free rhythm — and it made sense together.

I think it's great and a milestone.

Many interesting facts about wild turkeys can be found here. And here too.

Ah...you're gonna want to keep that away from those Republicans.

If that's a Turkey, I wouldn't be too surprised. Are you saying that it wandered over from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? You're right and I screwed it up. I should have just written: "Republican?", but I wasn't sure what kind of bird it was.

If that's a Turkey, I wouldn't be too surprised.

Another very good one!

An excellent idea. What are we drinking to go with? BYB. I probably won't drink more than one beer, I'll be doin' the vodka shots.

Polkaing with Pharoah? Maybe Laswell would be interested in producing it.

In Japan with a gatefold sleeve. I think Karma is my favorite of the Impulse disks. More thoughts after a Pharoah Sanders Octoberfest marathon.