Even during busy months, I try to absorb at least some new music. This May, I barely had time to keep up with obituaries, and will admit to getting all Righteous Brothers over the band possibilities in Rock and Roll Heaven. If they had ever played together, I’m convinced the combined talents of Doc Watson, Chuck Brown and Adam Yauch would have been…well, the most ill-conceived trio in the history of popular music, but don’t let that stop you from loving any of their music. Really, if any of you discover a deep bond among these three that doesn’t involve Doc Watson’s alleged involvement in the 1979 movie Disco Godfather, you’re trying too hard.

The first time I saw Doc Watson play live would have been pretty impressive for most guitarists, but I suspected something was missing. The second time I saw him, and sadly the last, was a solo show at a much smaller venue. I’d rank that one as the second or third-greatest showcase of guitar virtuosity I’ve ever witnessed (right after Andres Segovia, and in a virtual dead heat with Richard Thompson at the top of his game). Doc was meticulous as a flatpicker, storyteller, and singer. As a lifelong city guy, I got a great reminder that any sophistication and flair I could muster would likely seem backward in comparison to the pride of Deep Gap, North Carolina. Doc had a warmth and grace that made it easy to forget the skill it must have taken to pull off those dizzying runs on his guitar.

The range of material Doc liked to perform went well beyond the sort of old-timey traditional bluegrass that most probably associate with him. I think he cared much less about preserving “authenticity,” or defining his role in the musical world, than many of the folk music revivalists who helped bring his music to a worldwide audience. In an interesting biography of Doc Watson’s life and work, flatpicking scholar Dan Miller explains that in the early sixties, musicologist Ralph Rinzler had to persuade Doc to borrow an acoustic guitar for use in recording sessions, because Doc had been playing an electric model. Doc found inspiration in all kinds of places–old-timey or modern, black or white, city or country–using his fast fingers as a radar.

Doc’s only serious flatpicking competition may have come from his own son Merle, who broadened Doc’s range and deepened his love for the blues before his death in a 1985 tractor accident. Doc honored his son’s memory by starting the annual Merlefest. When he mentioned his son at the shows I saw, you could see the love and loss etched into the lines on his face.

Doc Watson, Blues Medley (“Deep River Blues,” “St.James Hospital,” “Nine Pound Hammer,” “Daniel Prayed,” “Mountain Dew”)

Doc Watson and Merle Watson, “Don’t Think Twice,” “Make Me a Pallet”

Crystal clear, warm night at the classic Paramount Theater in Oakland – a venue every bit as classy and surprising as Esperanza Spalding and the Chamber Music Society, who we were there to see during San Francisco Jazz Festival.

Instead of a standard review, decided to try and tell the story through Storify, capturing other people’s impressions and images (both from tonight’s performance and of Spalding in general) via social media, interwoven with some of my own commentary. Not sure this works – what do you think?
Continue reading Esperanza Spalding at the Paramount →

I spent part of my summer vacation in New York with two living branches of the Coltrane family tree. Ravi Coltrane is the respected, bespectacled sax-playing son of John and Alice, and the namesake of Ravi Shankar. Ravi’s cousin, Steven Ellison, whose grandmother wrote “Love Hangover” for Diana Ross, is the producer, laptop musician and cosmic voyager better known as Flying Lotus. So why was I thinking about an Irishman in a bar?

The Irishman used to show up at concerts I attended. He was fluent in a wide variety of musical styles. But he had precisely two musical opinions. After a show, he would down a pint or ten and proclaim the performers “bloody brilliant” or “bloody awful.” Asked to elaborate, he might add another “bloody” or two for emphasis. This could be frustrating, but I also admired his complete confidence in his beliefs.

There’s a bit of the Irishman in me when it comes to John Coltrane, because his music often leaves me muttering “bloody brilliant.” The only passable thing I’ve ever been able to write about him was to transcribe to limericks all the tracks on Coltrane’s Live at Birdland album. Coltrane’s horn cuts dangerously close to my sense of what it feels like to be human. Ask me about love, and I cue A Love Supreme. Ask me about justice, and I hear the stirring “Alabama.” Ask me about my work ethic, and I conjure the chord changes in “Giant Steps.” Ask me about God, and I squawk my way through the otherworldly clamor of Ascension and Meditations. Ask me if I remember laughter and…okay, I think of Tiny Tim and Brave Combo’s swing-tempo version of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” But Coltrane had just about every other human emotion covered, and we can’t all be comedians.

Playing live in New York (at Birdland, no less) and on albums such as In Flux, Ravi finds inspiration in both John and Alice, and plays some top-shelf post-bop and ballads. But Ravi also deserves credit for finding his own path. While he can breathe new fire into papa’s “Giant Steps,” he’s just as likely to cover Ornette Coleman’s “Tribes of New York.” He also draws liberally from his years of cross-cultural improvisation as a member of Steve Coleman‘s M-Base Collective.

Ravi’s range serves him well when collaborating with his cousin on the lush soundscapes of Flying Lotus, whose special guests also include fellow travelers Thom Yorke of Radiohead and harpist Rebekah Raff. Much of what passes for “innovative” electronica these days leaves me stone cold bored, and I’m not yet ready to proclaim Flying Lotus the Coltrane of the laptop. Still, the most adventurous parts of 2010’s Cosmogramma suggest Ellison has the vision and nerve to bring uncharted parts of interstellar space to the next generation. And if that isn’t bloody brilliant, it’s getting pretty close.

[Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder site has posted a soulful summer mix.]

Ravi Coltrane, “Tribes of New York”

Flying Lotus, “German Haircut” (featuring Ravi Coltrane)

Flying Lotus, “And the World Laughs With You” (featuring Thom Yorke)

In one of my recurring dreams, I’m handed an enormous map of an unfamiliar city and discover that it’s written entirely in musical notation. Because I’m a mediocre sight-reader, I find myself hopelessly lost after a few turns. Bossa Nova Boulevard moves along nicely enough until it unexpectedly dead-ends at the Fusion Freeway, leaving me scrambling for the nearest exit. Eventually, I abandon the map and submit to the found sounds of the streets and alleys, not sure if bebop or bhangra or blues will lurk around the next corner, perhaps followed by country-tinged hip hop, harmolodic polka or ukulele death metal.

While New York City didn’t quite become the city of my dreams when I visited last week, the annual Make Music New York festival helped it come close. On solstice day, more than 1000 musical performances in a staggering variety of sounds enveloped the boroughs. Dozens of pianos lined the streets, meaning that if you were in Queens, you might hear someone like teenage conservatory student Lisa Occhino, performing a medley that meshes Lil’ Wayne, Lady Gaga and the Beatles. The Bronx hosted an inspired griot summit of New York-based musicians from Burkina Faso, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. Governors Island became Punk Island for the day.

Manhattan had Mexican ballads and a tabla symphony uptown, while downtown, you could find a concerto for bicycles and Wall Street businessmen rocking out on their lunch breaks. Greenwich Village had perhaps the best variety, including traditional shakuhachi players, Gypsy strings and vocals (Barmaljova), Afro-Colombian funk (M.A.K.U. Sound system), singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham with rock classicist Jim Boggia, and the audio gumbo of the Underground Horns. In Washington Square Park, dozens of guitarists remade Outkast’s biggest hit into an urban campfire song.

Some of the most ambitious concerts were projects of Super Critical Mass, an Australian collective that arranges for large numbers of musicians to play the same or similar instruments in public settings, drawing from simple, agreed-upon “algorithms” of sound. Close to sunset in Central Park, the MATA Festival presented one of these, an evocative piece called Swelter in which dozens of brass players collaborated lakeside, calling and responding with swirls of sound enveloping an audience of boaters and onlookers. It wasn’t home, but it was a great place to get lost.

How cool are Brooklyn’s soulful, cerebral art-alt-funk combo TV On the Radio? Never mind their years of critical accolades. Never mind that second vocalist and guitarist Kyp Malone reached the prestigious final round of Stuck Between Stations’ battle of the beards. The real sign they’ve reached the pinnacle is that the Brickshelf Gallery has put them alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Sleater-Kinney and Johnny Cash in their hall of LEGO rock star action figures.

TVOTR’s latest album, Nine Types of Light, may come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who still expects the band to be the ragtag upstarts who released OK Calculator a decade ago by hiding it in sofa cushions in New York coffee shops. For the most part, it’s more relaxed than the band’s earlier work, less frenetic than 2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain and less groove-heavy than 2008’s Dear Science.

The shape-shifting opener “Second Song” comes across as a bit of TV On the Radiohead, at least until the charismatic lead vocalist Tunde Adebimpe lets loose with his falsetto. “Killer Crane,” a gorgeous three-lighter ballad with avian imagery and gratuitous banjo, might have a few old-school fans wondering if they’ve accidentally picked up a Decemberists album. The self-explanatory “Caffeinated Consciousness” comes closest to capturing the Pixies-perfect manic energy from earlier albums. A few other songs seem to get their consciousness from herbal tea and a hot bath. These include the soul stirrer “Will Do,” a love song you could imagine Stevie Wonder singing into a telephone sometime in the eighties.

None of this should suggest that the guys now just sit around watching Oprah and making valentines. TVOTR never were art-punk purists to begin with (nor do they need to be, since that’s why the Lord made Mission of Burma), and they continue to play what the late D. Boon would have called scientist rock. The band’s riveting hour-long “visual reimagining” of Nine Types of Light shows TVOTR fusing lovers’ rock and revolution rock into the same mind-meld. A lot of this could come off as hopelessly pretentious, but the band usually finds the right moment to kick out the jams or segue to a funky new form of future shock. I especially like the video segments that accompany the Parliament-tinged “New Cannonball Blues,” and the Talking Heads-worthy “Repetition,” where survivors of urban anxiety become fish out of water, pushing their way through life during wartime. The songs are bittersweet in light of the sad news that TVOTR’s outstanding bassist Gerard Smith passed away from cancer in April, just after release of the new album.

Someone had better whack me with Peter Gabriel’s sledgehammer before I keep rambling about death-defying high-concept videos and songs with big beats. Adebimpe’s vocals tend to strongly resemble those from PG’s work in the albums following his Genesis exodus. But that’s a very old story, and Adebimpe had the last word on it seven years ago: “At least nobody is comparing anyone in the band to Meat Loaf.” For now, I still love TV On the Radio just the way they are, and have no worries that they will mutate into Mr. Loaf. But if the next album is called Bat Out of Brooklyn, I might start to worry.

TV on the Radio, “New Cannonball Blues”

TV on the Radio, “Repetition”

The black paper between the mirror breaks my heart that I can’t go.
Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow.

The good Cap’n has passed (through mirror paper?), evidence that the sun ain’t stable? If he wasn’t already, Don van Vliet is now having the neon meate dream of a octafish. Forever. Finally lost his battle with muscular sclerosis at age 69. His Trout Mask Replica was Number 58 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In a 1969 review, Lester Bangs called Beefheart “the only true dadaist in rock” and Trout Mask “a total success, a brilliant, stunning enlargement and clarification of his art.” Tom Waits spent a lot of time on the phone with Beefheart in his post-music years:

“He was like the scout on a wagon train,” Waits wrote in an e-mail Friday. “He was the one who goes ahead and shows the way. He was a demanding bandleader, a transcendental composer (with emphasis on the dental), up there with Ornette [Coleman], Sun Ra and Miles [Davis]. He drew in the air with a burnt stick. He described the indescribable. He’s an underground stream and a big yellow blimp.

Sure ’nuff ‘n yes I do

Continue reading Practice in Front of a Bush: Stuck on Beefheart →