A Woman Is Not A Drum

Can you use the human body as a percussion instrument?  Sure - hit it and it will make a little sound.  The body is just a big sack of meat and fluid plus a couple air chambers for resonance.   Anyone (not just tenors as Anna Russell quipped) can have "resonance where their brains ought to be."

When it comes to slapping people it matters who you hit and how.  The act of hitting another person, especially if you're hitting a woman, can lead to unintended results. You could end up looking like a jerk.

---

Chapter One: Hitting Yourself

Our story starts with hambone.  That's where the performer slaps his own body, a musical style associated with black slaves in the Old South who, the story goes, were not allowed instruments lest they use them to secretly plan rebellion.  (Their masters must have feared talking drums).

Here's a video introduction to hambone:

Here's another hambone video, this one from the famous American cultural institution Hee Haw.  Here one-handed hambone is combined with an even more esoteric human-body percussion, rhythmic hand squeezing.  (The marvelous vocals are called eefin.)

---

Chapter Two: Hitting Other People

Now watch this video:

Three formally dressed, but shoeless, musical sadists slap a resonant masochist.   All in good fun, no doubt.

Although stylistically far removed from hambone, this video also shows the human body being used as a percussion instrument.  With obvious differences...

Most importantly, these three performers are not hitting themselves.  They are wailing on a fat man.  Let's call him Drum Man. We know this is not their first take because Drum Man's drum head (i.e. his skin) is already quite red.  And Drum Man starts the clip with a big sigh.

We can see his face the whole time.  This gives us clues to his personality.  Our hero seems to be taking his beat down with a sense of equanimity.  Or maybe it's just detachment.  "Okay," I imagine him saying "Let's get this over with."

Maybe he's got something to prove.  "Do your worst," he might say,  "I can take whatever you can give.  I'm a real man." It's like watching the losing fighter being pummeled in a boxing match.

Drum Man's eyes are fixed on the camera, on us viewers.  Maybe he's defying us.  Is he saying "Who you lookin' at?  You lookin' at me?"

Secondly, the players are getting a variety of musical sounds out of their "drum".  Hitting his belly, his arms, his back and later his (facial) cheeks create different tones.  There's enough timbral variety and humor to sustain interest for a quick minute.

I wonder if this video was made as a television commercial.  I can't find the term "Equipo Elite Mundial" online. A sporting goods company perhaps?

Try imagining variations to this video:

• Instead of three male percussionists, how about three sexy women hitting Drum Man?
• Imagine the three sexy female drummers hitting a large, nearly naked woman who, like Drum Man, was just standing there, taking the hits with a blank expression on her face.
• Imagine these three male percussionists hitting the large woman instead of Drum Man.
• Finally, what if these guys were hitting on an extremely sexy woman?  But only musically, of course.  This post IS about music.

---

Chapter Three: Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's A Drum Is A Woman is a large scale work from the late fifties - a suite of pieces that tell a story.  You could think of it as an oratorio or even a short opera.  It was used as a soundtrack for a television show and released as an album.

When I was in my twenties I first heard two songs from A Drum Is A Woman played as musical interludes in certain episodes of the BBC's Goon Show, originally broadcast in the fifties.  The singer was Ray Ellington, an English son of a Black American entertainer and a Russian Jew.  Ellington was his stage name.  He was not related to Duke.

These two songs, You Better Know It and What Else Can You Do With A Drum, stood out because they contain references to hitting women.  This struck me as strange content for a pop song.  At the time I had no idea who had written them or why.  (Another tune Ray Ellington sang, Bloodshot Eyes by Wynonie Harris, fell into the same category.)

Here are recordings of these tunes, clipped from Goon Show airchecks, plus some of the lyrics.

Ray Ellington sings You Better Know It from Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman

Zajj,  darling.  We're in love, it appears.
And I surely want to thank you.
But if you get ideas
I'll surely have to spank you.

Ray Ellington sings What Else Can You Do With A Drum from Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman.

There was a man who lived in Barbados
He saw a pretty woman one day
He took her home and when they got there
She turned into a drum.

It isn't civilized to beat women
No matter what they do or they say
But will somebody tell me
What else can you do with a drum?

Several tracks from Duke's original recordings of A Drum Is A Woman are available on YouTube:

• Part I: A Drum Is A Woman
• Caribee Joe/Congo Square
• Madame Zajj/Ballet of the Flying Saucers
• Part V - Caribee Joe - Part 2  

It was only within the last 10 years or so that I finally heard the entire A Drum Is A Woman.  To me it still seems like a strange metaphor on which to base an extended musical work, especially one which is essentially about the history of jazz.  I suppose the Fifties were different times.

Madame Zajj is the main character ("zajj" = "jazz", get it?).  She is created out of a drum.  She changes back into a drum.  She is the drum and the drum is her.  I guess, really, she is the rhythm itself, the rhythm which drives men wild.

Her love interest in this story is named Caribee Joe.

Once there was a boy named Caribee Joe.
Spoke with the animals in their jungle slang.
His heartbeat was like bongos
And he sang every song they sang.
One day he found an elaborately fabricated drum
And when he touched it, it actually spoke to him, saying,
"I am not a drum, I am a woman.
Know me as Madame Zajj, African chantress.
I can make you rich and famous.
Together we can travel
and make beautiful rhythm for the world."
But Joe was in love with the jungle, the virgin jungle,
God-made and untouched,
and with the jungle he had to stay.
The drum beat up a storm, screeching,
"I am the one and only Madame Zajj.
But there are many Joes,
and one Joe can make rhythm as well as another."
So she hopped a trade wind
And away she went to Barbados
in search of another Joe.

Zajj appears in scene after scene.   She dances seductively at Mardi Gras.  She's a snappy dresser.  She drives a big car (one with 88 cylinders that goes 440 miles per hour - but she gets a ticket for stopping at a green light).  Later she makes an entrance from inside one of those flying saucers.

Duke's narration is sly and well modulated.  His prose often turns flowery and surreal.

And we know it is about time now for the Mississippi River
To look like a puddle of pecan blue pudding,
Pistachio and indigo, and the sun and the neon-rose lollipop
Is being drawn up over the horizon into a fizzy bunch of grape colored clouds.

Zajj turns out to be too much woman - or too much rhythm - for Joe.  After travelling to New York, where he learns about be-bop in the jazz clubs, he seems happy to return to his jungle.  There he teaches other drums to tell this story.

Ahhh Hah!  Madame Zajj.
She's from way back, as far back as way back goes.
She's been way out, as far out as far out goes.
Enjoyed triumph on triumph, as the fanciest and the most famous.
Wealth and good looks.  She has everything but Joe.
She draws on all the resources of sorcery,
Trying to steal Joe from the jungle.
Joe too has had a fair amount of success giving drums lessons.
And in the evening he sits by the fire
With his fabulous collection of drums around him.
And Joe likes to tell them about his trip to New York
And Madame Zajj's dream.
When Joe gets sleepy he takes his favorite
New shiny drum on his knee and says
"Now you tell me a story."
And the new drum clears her throat and starts to recite
"Once there was a boy named Caribee Joe.
One day he found an elaborately fabricated drum.
And when he touched it, it actually spoke to him,
Saying 'I am not a drum.  I am a woman'."

A Drum Is A Woman is really a story in which love of musical rhythm is metaphorically compared to the love for a woman.   An allegory.  Madame Zajj represents the essential rhythmic feel of jazz.  

Duke makes his essential analogy at the top.  Here are the very first lines of A Drum Is A Woman:

A drum is a woman
Who won't stay out of your blood.
A drum is a woman
It's beat is like the quickening of a heart in love.

Metaphor or not, regardless of the quality of his music, we suspect that Ellington understood that he might be misunderstood - even back in the Fifties.  I suppose that's why he feels the need to tell us "it isn't civilized to beat women".

We should already have known that.

---

Chapter Four: Jorge Perez Gonzalez's Bottom Percussion

If Duke Ellington's A Drum Is A Woman is a delicate dance metaphorically combining love of music with love of women, then Jorge Perez Gonzalez's recent video Bottom Percussion PATAX shows just how low the art of metaphor has fallen.

Perez lines up four pairs of hairless naked be-thonged butt cheeks, arranges them so that's all we can see and then he spanks them with his hands, synching with a (prerecorded) instrumental track.  He occasionally hits a suspended cymbal.

He tells us that this is music.  I think he needs to be told that it isn't civilized to beat women.  Or anyone.  After all, it's not the Fifties any more.

Previously JPG's most watched video had about 30,000 hits in ten months.  Bottom Percussion got hit over seven million times in just two weeks.  Since Bottom Percussion is no more interesting musically than those other tracks (actually less interesting), it's not hard to figure that this popularity results from the particular "instrument" he uses and how he plays it.

People (meaning, in this case, mostly males, according to YouTube statistics) must want to see musicians hit women.  With such a large viewership, Perez has almost certainly opened up a new You Tube revenue stream for himself.  Sequels and copycats can't be far behind.

In an attempt to excuse himself from well-deserved accusations of musical misogyny, after two weeks Perez revealed that only two of the butts were female.  The others were not female, they just appeared to be.  He released another video showing these four people standing up afterwards with blurred faces.  I guess the Butt Cheek People don't want their identities known.  Maybe they are afraid that their mothers would find out.

At least Drum Man looked us straight in the eyes. And he only got hit above the waist.

When struck, the Butt Cheek People all make pretty much the same sound.  Perez seems to carefully choose which cheek he will hit.  But maybe he's just hitting randomly.  There seems little musical point for changing cheeks.   It's easy to imagine him thinking "I enjoy spanking one butt.  Four butts will be four times more fun."

If Perez had chosen a wide variety of body sizes to beat on presumably there would be aural distinctions between them.  A butt of a morbidly obese person might serve as the "bass butt".  A little girl or boy butt might serve as the "soprano butt" (that's a disgusting thought because Perez ought to know that it isn't civilized to hit children.  He could use a petite adult instead).

Maybe Perez only knows beautiful, hairless, tight-assed people with insufficient bodily resonance.  I think it's more likely that he just likes to hit on butts.

Because Perez has posed his instruments so the camera can only see one section of their bodies and because he chose to portray them as identical and interchangeable, he can be validly accused of sexual objectification.  Male or female, he has turned people into things.  Thank goodness he only used his hands to hit them.

Watching videos of spanking turns some people on sexually.  Some like to spank, others like being spanked.  As long as the relationship is consensual there's no problem.  Bottom Percussion really should be labelled as soft porn.  Keeping music and porn as two separate categories would be the civilized thing to do.

Seven million hits can't all be wrong, can they?  Everyone is free to draw the line between music and porn where they see fit.  There are more than ten likes for every dislike.

You might want to compare Bottom Percussion with this definitely NSFW video which shows a man "performing" on a young girl's behind.   Like Bottom Percussion you can't see the spankee's face.  Unlike Bottom Percussion there is no pretense of musicality.   It really is soft porn.

Others have called for Bottom Percussion to be removed from You Tube.   That's never gonna happen.

Instead, I hope that Jorge Perez Gonzalez does many more videos and lives an extra long life - long enough to someday understand what is so objectionable about this performance.   He has sunk to great depths without even knowing he's in a hole.  Getting out of his hole is going to require an awful lot of time and effort.

Who knows - this video might make his career, lead him to fame and fortune, the way Kim Kardashian's sex tape benefitted her.

To "honor" Jorge Perez Gonzalez's musical travesty and maybe give hs career a little extra boost I've decided to dust off the long dormant Mixed Meters awards program called The Dockers.  After all, this is awards season; the Oscars are this weekend.

The envelope please.

And the Docker For Setting A New All Time Artistic Low By Pretending That A Soft Porn Video Is Really Music goes to ... Jorge Perez Gonzalez for his video Bottom Percussion.  Take a bow, Jorge.

---

Chapter Five: Jayne Cortez's If The Drum Is A Woman

I was happy to discover other, more civilized opinions which employ the metaphor of women and drums.

Jayne Cortez, who passed away recently, was a poet.  She performed her work with a band called The Firespitters.  Beyond her own successful career, she came of a high jazz pedigree as the mother of Denardo Coleman.  She was once married to Ornette.

Her poem If the Drum Is A Woman speaks to the issue of domestic violence against women.  The poem uses Duke's woman/drum metaphor.  This seems like an appropriate way to conclude this post.

Here's a video of Jayne Cortez reciting If the Drum Is A Woman with accompaniment by The Firespitters.  Appropriately they play a lot of drums in the background.  Read the whole poem here.  I include a short excerpt below.

If the drum is a woman
then understand your drum
your drum is not docile
your drum is not invisible
your drum is not inferior to you
your drum is a woman
so don't reject your drum
don't try to dominate your drum

---

It has been almost three years since I awarded the last Docker.  This is a link to all the awards.

Mixed Meters has never discussed spanking before.  But the subject of penises has come up a few times.  Some of those posts even have musical connections.

Want more eefin?  Check out this eefin post from WFMU.

Butt Tags: Duke Ellington. . . Ray Ellington. . . hambone. . . body percussion. . . spanking video

The Peter Schmid Quartet Plays Waiting For The Trickle Down

Peter, Lori, Cornel and Luis manage to play every crazy thing I throw at them.  I don't know how they do it.

In this track, Waiting for the Trickle Down, the guitar and bass are both electric and the drums are hand drums.  Since, like Godot, the Trickle Down never comes, this is kind of a sad and mournful piece.  Leslie says this is not my best work - and she makes a good point.

Click here to hear Waiting for the Trickle Down - by David Ocker © 2012 - 501 seconds

The quartet is:
Peter Schmid, piano
Lori Terhune, electric guitar
Cornel Reasoner, electric bass
Luis 'Pulpo' Jolla, hand drums

Recorded at Aphrodita Japonica Studios, Pasadena, California.  You can hear all the tracks by the Peter Schmid Trio and Quartet on the Peter Schmid Quartet Page.

"The Trickle Down" of course refers to the widely believed but even more widely discredited economic theory first implemented during the term of "Saint" Ronald Reagan.  It is currently being preached by Willard "Mitt" Rmoney and Paul "Ayn" Ryan.

Their idea was that giving more money to rich people would benefit everyone because the rich would use that money to hire the poor.  Since it was the rich people who created this crazy plan, the only poor people who have been helped are the ones with jobs selling yachts and fancy sports cars.

Here's a chart showing income distribution in the United States since 1947.  The income of the top 1% - indicated by the red triangle - has experienced cancerous growth since the start of the Trickle Down era, indicated by the arrow.

This chart came from the blog PrairePopulistsandProgressives.net

Trickle Down Tags: Peter Schmid. . . jazz quartet. . . trickle down theory

The Peter Schmid Quartet Plays Maximum Wage

Last year I posted two tracks of my music as performed by the pianist Peter Schmid and his buddies.  They're as close to an all-psychic musical ensemble as you could hope for. The tunes were called Work for Food and Too Poor To Be A Whore.

We just finished another one.  It's called Maximum Wage.

The title was inspired by this picture of a protester, possibly from the Occupy movement, holding a sign which reads "Why is there no maximum wage?".  The concept of setting a limit on income for people who make too much money was discussed in this recent Mixed Meters post:  Why Is There No Maximum Wage?

Click here to hear The Peter Schmid Quartet Plays Maximum Wage - by David Ocker © 2012 - 301 seconds

Recorded at Aphrodita Japonica Studios, Pasadena, California

The quartet is:
Peter Schmid, piano
Lori Terhune, guitar
Cornel Reasoner, bass
Luis 'Pulpo' Jolla, drums

---

Quartet Tags: Peter Schmid. . . jazz quartet. . . maximum wage

Stanley Zappa, Matthew Shipp and the Fazioli

I don't remember what my first contact with Stanley Jason Zappa was, but I'm pretty sure it happened because we both write blogs.  Stanley's blog is called It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack, Attack, Attack).  I don't have the slightest idea exactly what that title means although when Mixed Meters had a blogroll it was listed there.  He lives in the cold part of Canada.   He must be a smart guy because he can write about Theodore Adorno.

And yes, S.J. Zappa shares some DNA with the much more famous F. V. Zappa.  I'm pretty sure they were never close.

Stanley Zappa is into jazz, free jazz in particular.  He plays saxophone and clarinet and maybe other things. 

Here is a video of Stanley playing a very free tenor solo (and doing it very well) along with a Finnish Zappa tribute band.  They introduce him by playing the one thing you always hear before out-there free tenor saxophone solos, the very famous, very un-free Finnish tango Satumaa. (Stanley's solo starts about 2'24".)

Stanley Zappa also writes quite articulately about jazz.  And he promotes jazz things he likes.

That's why he recently sent me a link to a Kickstarter project promoting a proposed film project with filmmaker Barbara Januszkiewicz and pianist Matthew Shipp.  Stanley asked me to pass it along to you.  You can click the link and pledge money to the film.  There's only a few days left and they have a lot of money left to raise.  I think it's kind of like a down-to-the-wire NPR fundraiser.

The film will be called The Composer.  In this case the composer is the pianist.  The pianist is Matthew Shipp.  But the important question is ... what kind of piano is it?

Stanley Zappa's essay promoting this project - entitled Fifty Note Cluster - finds particular significance in the specific brand of piano to be used.  It's a Fazioli, a high-quality Italian job.  He writes:

A contemporary piano like the Fazioli, designed and built in the late 20th century, deserves, nay, demands the music of our time.  One has to wonder if Bach or Chopin would have written the same music if they had a Fazioli with which to work out their musical ideas.

With Shipp, unbound by century old harmonic conventions, the totality of the Fazioli's tonal are fair use.  A piano as capable and "creative" as the Fazioli deserves a pianist capable of creative exploiting the unique qualities of the Fazioli as Shipp.

Faziolis are expensive. Watch this news clip to learn about one that was for sale for a half mil.

Mixed Meters has written about expensive pianos before.  Read the MM post The Price of a (Lousy) Piano about the instrument in the film Casablanca.  In 2006 it was valued at five times more than the top Fazioli is today and certainly sounded much, much, much worse.

Personally, I have less interest in what instrument a soloist is using or how it sounds than I have in the notes that are actually being played.  That's why I think the real story here is not free sax solos in the middle of famous Finnish tangos nor fancy Italian fortepianos in underfunded Kickstarter movies.  I think maybe Matthew Shipp is a man to watch.  I mean a man to listen to.

Free jazz on the piano has a problem of wrong notes.  When there are a lot of non-standard harmonies it is all too easy to criticize every dissonance as accidental.  But Matthew Shipp plays cleanly and playing cleanly impresses me.  In this (very underwatched) video he's obviously hitting the notes that he intends to hit (even if he is doing it on a Steinway).  That means we're hearing the music he intends to make.  That, my friends, is a great and all too rare art. 

There's a lot more of Matthew Shipp on YouTube and Spotify.  Probably other places as well.

 
Clean Tags: Stanley Zappa. . . Matthew Shipp. . . free jazz. . . expensive pianos

The Peter Schmid Trio

Here are two recordings made this summer by my buddies The Peter Schmid Trio.

The trio is:
Peter Schmid, piano
Cornel Reasoner, bass
Luis 'Pulpo' Jolla, drums

The Peter Schmid Trio Plays Work For Food  (339 seconds)

The Peter Schmid Trio Plays Too Poor To Be A Whore  (579 seconds)

Recorded at Aphrodita Japonica Studios, Pasadena, California
Produced by David Ocker
Copyright © 2011 - All Rights Reserved

Let us know what you think.


Trio Tags: jazz trio . . . Peter Schmid

Kenton Wagner

This is the first of two posts about how composer Richard Wagner has inspired popular music.   Jump to the other one.

A few posts back I wrote about composer Ramon Sender and his conceptual reduction of Wagner's Ring down to four quick clicks. You can read that post, Listen To Wagner's Entire Ring Cycle In One Second.   It includes my audio realization of his idea and more.

In the early sixties, about the same time that Sender was working in San Francisco, a certain Southern California composer (and famous big band leader) was working on his own personal spin to Wagner's music.

That would be Stan Kenton (1911-1973), who recorded an album entitled Kenton Wagner (sometimes called "Kenton Plays Wagner"). The subtitle is "From the Creative World of Stan Kenton Come Innovations on Great Wagnerian Themes". There are eight Kenton arrangements of famous Wagnerian moments.

According to this site by Terry Vosbein, the album was recorded during four evening sessions in September 1964, plus a solo piano session in October.  The ensemble was 5 saxes (alto, 2 tenors, bari and bass - someone doubles on piccolo), 5 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, piano, bass, drums, percussion - plus 5 French Horns. (How could you do Wagner without horns?)  The album itself does not credit any players, producers, engineers, copyists - no one except the guy who wrote the program notes, Noel Wedder.

Musically, I've always regarded Stan Kenton as part of the problem not part of the solution.   His arrangement style for big band, lush and brash in equal measure, came across as mostly just thick and loud in my ears.  A place where sax vibrato and screech trumpets run riot.  Apparently the Kenton style continues to be very influential in the world of big bands and higher education.

Kenton, like so many other successful popular musicians, apparently thought of himself as a serious composer.  I found this description of him here:

[Kenton] could rhapsodize, in his halting speech pattern, about musical creativity and innovation in a very erudite manner. He always referred to the band as the "orchestra" and to a song as a "composition" or a "theme," never a "tune."

The liner notes to Kenton Wagner describe a formative chance encounter with Maurice Ravel in a Chicago jazz club about 1930.  Then the period after Kenton's early success with the Artistry in Rhythm band is discussed.

Over the next ten years Stan and chief arranger Pete Rugolo became convinced that the only way to make their modern music survive was to experiment with the complex ideas of the classical school and to fuse them along new thematic and harmonic lines.

To that end Kenton created the Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra.  A boring name indeed but it did include 16 string players so the term orchestra was accurate.  His most modern offering was the 1951 album City of Glass, Stan Kenton Plays Bob Graettinger.  Graettinger composed for the Kenton band using the twelve-tone technique. That's a pretty out-there idea for 1951. The album is fascinating and curious.  And WAY ahead of its time.  Graettinger died a few years later, still in his thirties.

While my opinion of Kenton did improve somewhat when I discovered City of Glass, nothing is going to improve my opinion of the album Kenton Wagner.  It's like listening to an automobile accident - you can't stop listening and you just know nothing good is going to happen.

As expected there's a lot of bluster in the brass with occasional piano solos as contrast.  The players show almost no swing feel and get no improvised solos.  Unlike City of Glass, the musical textures are remarkably unvaried throughout.   It's as though Kenton was afraid to really mess with Wagner beyond occasionally adding a latin rhythm or updating a few harmonies.

One cut, the Wedding March, starts out with a kind of funereal drumbeat and distant muted trumpets - some musical marriages are like that, I guess.  I don't see how this album could appeal either to opera fans or jazz fans.

Of course, I'm telling you about Kenton Wagner now because Los Angeles has a mild case of Richard Wagner disease at the moment.   The L.A. Opera is holding a low-budget county-wide Wagner festival to coincide with their performances of the complete Ring.   Shamefully, it was endorsed by the County Supervisors.  This is another of my raspberry contributions to the festival.

Kenton Wagner is not in print.  LP copies seem to be selling for about $65 to $70.   (You could make me an offer for mine.)   I've made it a rule to only post my own music on Mixed Meters, but I'm making an exception of one cut from this album so you can formulate your own opinion.   (Eventually I'll delete the file.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner as arranged by Stan Kenton.   Listen to it here.   Enjoy.  In my mind this arrangement and performance can only be described as - bloodless.  Also loud.


Wagner himself would most certainly hate it.   If there is a Hell (which I personally doubt) Richard Wagner is there being forced to hear this album over and over for all eternity.   Or at least he must listen as long as the Ring of the Nibelungs lasts - whichever is longer.   It's a punishment well matched to his crimes.

Mixed Meters' three regular readers know full well that I don't like Wagner's music.  And now they also know that I don't much like Kenton's.  If I must make a choice between Wagner's original and Kenton's unoriginal I really would rather listen to Wagner.  The Kenton is that bad.

---

Here's a wonderful Ride of the Valkyries video.

This video is

• NSFW (Not Safe for Work),
• NSFCIUS (Not Safe For Children in the United States),
• NSFPRWRMR (Not Safe For Prudish Right Wing Religious Moralist Prigs) and
• NSFPWOTTOOW (Not Safe For People Who Object To The Objectification Of Women).

For the rest of you, prepare to watch a battalion of sexy topless female skydivers selling washing machines to Europeans to the accompaniment of Richard Wagner.  Enjoy.

Musically, I really like the cut to the jazz muzak at the very end.  It puts the Wagner bombast into proper context.

---

A large Stan Kenton Collection exists at the University of North Texas - but only a list of holdings appears to be online.  They also have a Bob Graettinger archive. UNT offered the first ever degree in jazz studies.  Can you guess when that was? (1947)

Kenton used a Mellophonium section in some of his bands.   A what?  Read about it here.

Here's a more positive review of the Kenton Wagner album which doesn't have many good things to say about it either.

Thanks to the pseudonymous John Marcher of the blog A Beast In The Jungle for alerting me to this Fleggaard video.

Read the Mixed Meters post Wagner Inspires Pop Music

Jazz Study Tags: Stan Kenton. . . Richard Wagner. . . Ride of the Valkyries. . . Ring Festival LA

Classical Music Isn't Dead, It Just Needs a Rest

A Los Angeles Sunday Times "Arts and Culture" article gave me pause. It's called Alexy Steele, Classical Underground Impresario by Scott Timberg. In the print edition it's entitled "Mad for Classical".

Here's the story ...

An artist, Alexy Steele, a person who creates new art to earn his living, holds classical music concerts in his loft. He calls the series "Classical Underground". People flock to them. And these events are held up as a way to save classical music.

We are told ...

The Classical Underground series was inspired by Steele repeatedly being told that classical music was dead. "Whenever I get to this point," he exclaims, wheeling back on his chair as he pours more beer, "my ears would pop!"

What bothers me, of course, is that the music presented to these gatherings of creative people is all from the classical canon. Nothing mentioned in the article seems very current or adventurous. The article did refer to one piece by Prokofiev (d.1953) plus some improvisations on Bach.

I'm reminded that one principal reason people love classical music is that it helps them relax. And maybe they need to network at loft parties. All that is easier with familiar, comfortable classics; music which barely changes from one performance to the next. I conclude that in such situations the music is not meant to offer a contemporary perspective. They have other forms of art for that. I fear this music is more like a spa treatment for ones ears.

I remember a story told by Dorrance Stalvey, for many years director of the Monday Evening Concerts back when they were sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of (what else?) Art.

Dorrance programmed a concert of music which living artists played while they worked. He asked them "What do you listen to while you work?" and they told him. He was dismayed how the result was mostly from the baroque and classical periods.

Apparently these contemporary artists - some of them cutting edge - had no clue about contemporary music. I guess that they didn't find any inspiration in modern music. More charitably, maybe listening to something of actual relevance would distract their creative process. It's easier to ignore familiar things when you need to concentrate.

The fact that visually creative people, who I would have thought ought to have an interest in other forms of contemporary creativity, instead prefer a solidly unchanging body of old music, fills me with wonderment. How would they react to musicians who only cared to view paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries?

Thankfully, the world of creative music persists even without visual artists. Another article in the Times, just one day before, outlines local activities of creative music here in the LA area - all of it improvised. Read Finding Jazz in a Cool Place. (The title is "Jazz at a cool spot" in print.)

Alas, nothing in that article speaks about creative classical music either. The words "creative" and "classical" are ideas which aren't mutually supportive. Competing against the classical favorites is not easy.

Maybe we could have a moratorium on the classical warhorses - just stop playing them for ten or fifteen years. There are plenty of other classical-style pieces for people to listen to. Audiences need a chance to catch up.

Meanwhile the words "jazz" and "creative" certainly support one another these days. I wonder if there are visual artists who would like listening to cutting-edge improvisations in their lofts. There are plenty of creative musicians looking for places to perform.

=-=-=-=-

Alexy Steele's Website: High Art Forever

Other Mixed Meters attacks on artists:
Our Culture Overvalues the Wrong Things
What's on David Hockney's iPod?

Other Mixed Meters attacks on the classics:
Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably)
One Goldberg Equals Twelve Abbas
A Fine Line Between Classical and Parody
Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa
Combining Four Letter Words: Oboe + Blog

Underground Tags: Alexy Steele. . . loft concerts. . . underground music

Vinny Introduces Anne

Before you watch this video you might want to review Volume One of the trilogy as told in The Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio. In that post you can watch another video called Vinny Introduces Me (available directly here) and read about and listen to the Golia LaBerge Ocker trio, one of those eighties groups. There are pictures and historical artifacts.

Been there? Done that? Good. Now read on.

Anne LaBerge, composer, flutist extrordinaire and resident of a non-mountainous part of Europe, is currently touring the U.S. Last Friday she visited the same "Career Design" course at CalArts that I had also visited. I attended her presentation, sitting inconspicuously in the back. Just as I had done the first time, I recorded Vinny's introduction.



Anne will be performing as part of the 8th Annual New Music Festival at Cal State Fullerton from March 18 through 21. (Read about it here as well) She does amazing things with flutes and computers.

On Saturday, as part of that Festival, as I understand, Charles Sharp (who has been featured in Mixed Meters in the post A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles) will be presenting a scholarly paper about the Golia LaBerge Ocker trio. I'd really like to know what he says but it's scheduled way too early in the morning for me - 9 A.M.


This picture of Anne and me was taken last Saturday. We were happy to have finished a meal of Mexican food at Dona Rosa's in Pasadena.

About the audio of the video. There are two problems. One is the background music - from my iPod which was accidentally playing. It seems much louder on the recording than in real life. The second is that the little microphone on my pocket point-'n-shoot picks up some voices better than others (Anne's is good except when she's quoting Mel Powell; Vinny's not so good). And certain noises - like chairs being moved or laughter - are viciously loud. So I extracted the audio, normalized the levels as best I could and then re-attached it to the picture. Alas, I couldn't get it back in perfect sync. Please pretend like you don't notice.

A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles

No musician admits it out loud and a few probably don't even admit it to themselves, but every musician wants to get into the history books. I've seen composers open a new book from the back just to look for their name in the index. I do that myself sometimes.

I'm very proud that I got mentioned even once in Frank Zappa's autobiography. (On page 175 in case you run across a copy because Frank didn't believe in indices.)

Recently I was contacted by Charles Sharp (also known as C. Sharp). He wanted to interview me for his doctoral dissertation. Here's how he described it:

[It is] ostensibly about avant-garde jazz in Los Angeles but it has become increasingly about the intersection of various different genres of experimental music in Los Angeles.

One of those intersections involved the ICA, the Independent Composers Association, a group in which I was active in the early 1980s. You can read several Mixed Meters articles about ICA. (MM is the only place on the Internet you can read anything about ICA, alas.)

I answered Charles' questions as best my memory would allow. A year passed. Charles finished his dissertation, charmingly entitled "Improvisation, identity, and tradition: Experimental music communities in Los Angeles". He has since defended it against all comers and earned some letters after his name which entitle him to a chance of being hired for menial college teaching positions.

The dissertation is 500 pages long! I immediately searched it for my name and found a gratifying number of mentions. Thankfully the quotes Charles picked didn't make me look like a complete idiot. It's not online at the moment but if you want to read it you should contact him. Charles created a blog to accept comments here which might be a good place to leave him a message.

The story Charles tells is important. It's about creative music right here in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, in experimental music, what happens in L.A. stays in L.A. This telling should help delineate a historical tradition few people know much about. Even those of us who witnessed parts of it don't know the whole story. People from elsewhere will be surprised.

After an academical introductory chapter (in which the word hermeneutics confused me repeatedly) it's a pretty easy read. Charles starts off with Ornette Coleman, not often thought of as an L.A. musician. He left here for New York in 1959 after recording The Shape of Jazz to Come. Three Los Angeles jazz musicians, pianist Horace Tapscott, cornetist Bobby Bradford and clarinetist John Carter are the backbone of the story.

I was acquainted with John Carter, heard him play a bunch of times and even got to play with him once, if only in private. He was a nice and genuine person. His cycle of 5 albums, Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, is the centerpiece of Charles' story. I could have learned a lot from John - had I thought to pay more attention.

Sharp discusses the music of Tapscott, Bradford and Carter :

...these musicians had preunderstandings, which were informed by bebop and also the developing music of free jazz. Their music suggested different realities and possibilities. If racism, which was a systemic part of urban planning, policing, and public policy, was a reminder that black people were not fully valued as individuals, the music was a reminder of the importance of individuals and the power of community. ... Their music was supposed to sound unique, different every time, and challenge the listeners; aspects that seldom result in broad mass appeal. ... As their music was understood, it expanded the horizons of the listeners and new communities would emerge. (p.126-7)

Charles writes a lot about communities - little groups of like-minded people within which music could take on some meaning. Telling how these groups arose and interacted with each other and eventually disappeared makes the story interesting.

For example, I found the early histories, starting in high school, of drummer Alex Cline, guitarist Nels Cline and synthesist Lee Kaplan (who ran an important concert series at a little dump pretentiously called the Century City Playhouse) fascinating. My buddy Vinny Golia gets a lot of space. (You can hear ancient recordings by an improv trio of myself, Vinny & flutist Anne LaBerge in this MM article.) Others (like Bill Roper, James Grigsby, Titus Levi, Kraig Grady, Lynn Johnston, Will Salmon) who I know or worked with get space as well.

Charles puts a lot of different things into his narrative. A chapter about punk rock. A chapter about the various Los Angeles city-wide arts festivals (which I alluded to in my recent post about opera.) Dr. Sharp takes the story right up to the present - long after I dropped out.

Having lived in Los Angeles for nearly 35 years, first as an active participant in the local experimental music scene and then an observer of same, I think this dissertation deserves to be widely read. Creative musicians, non-creative musicians, music fans of all kinds and even music critics will find it interesting. And they might just realize that Los Angeles is not quite the creative wasteland we pretend to be.


To accompany this post I've gone through the chaos of my archives and selected some flyers, newspaper clippings and concert programs which relate one way or another to Charles' subject matter. All of them mention my name somewhere - why else would I have kept them? But most are more interesting because of the others involved.

The material is in two formats. One is a 16 meg. PDF of scans of each item - get it here. The other is the same material only converted to searchable text. Read that one here.

Here's a list of the items included:

• Promotional Articles - Ornette Coleman and Golia/LaBerge/Ocker (LA Herald Examiner September 1984)
• Postcard Ocker/Golia/LaBerge TRIO and Peet/Fumo DUO (Galeria Ocaso August 1985)
• Flyer - An ORT FESTIVAL (Oranges & Sardines, March 1985)
• Promotional Article - Lee Kaplan with Golia/Ocker (LA Weekly, no date)
• Program ....INTO MUSIC (LACE May 1985)
• Flyer - SEVEN NIGHTS FOR LOCAL COMPOSERS (Nov/Dec 1984)
• Postcard - L.A. Festival: Jazz & the New Thing and Golia/Ocker (Sept 1990)
• Review - Carter Compositions Featured (Los Angeles Times Sept. 6 1990)
• Review - Clarinet concert like fine conversation (Daily News, Sept. 17, 1990)
• Program - The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble (Harbor College, Oct. 1991)

Willie and Wynton

There's something new happening at Mixed Meters: I'm getting offers of free things, review copies, freebies, swag - if I write about them.

First there was a comp ticket to Bloggers Night at the Ojai Music Festival. I didn't go but I did write about it. You can listen to what I wrote here.

I accepted a copy of Kenneth D. Ackerman's excellent book YOUNG J. EDGAR: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. I am reading that now and will write about it.

But the most amazing (and least appropriate) offer was for "Willie Nelson Wynton Marsalis; Two Men With The Blues". which goes on sale July 8. Under normal circumstances I would have absolutely no intention of listening to this album. Read this Mixed Meters post to find out how Willie Nelson drove me to buy my iPod so I would NOT have to listen to him at Starbucks.


My first mistake was telling Leslie about the offer. "I want it," she said jumping up and down like a pogo stick, "Please get it." I said no, but I made a counter offer. "I'll get the album if you write the review."

Leslie demurred to this generous proposition, saying that her training as a marine invertebrate taxonomist didn't qualify her to pen music reviews. So I made my second mistake - I sweetened the deal.

"If I get it, and you listen to it," I offered, "then I'll record your reactions in a conversation and fashion those into a blog post." She agreed.

I wrote back to John Lavallo (of Takeout Marketing in New York) and after a while a review copy of WNWMTMWTB arrived. I listened to it and Leslie listened to it. Then one day I recorded our discussion about the album.

Please note: I listened to it first but I tried not to color Leslie's opinions by telling her what I thought. Once she did tell me what she thought she asked for my reactions which were recorded also. I transcribed my words as well.

What follows is a heavily edited transcript. No names have been changed to protect anyone. Leslie's words are in purple and mine in brown.

LH: It was pleasant and entertaining. It's good. I liked it but I was disappointed. I expected it to be great. Instead it sounds like a bunch of friends sitting around and jamming on a bunch of favorite tunes. It's not what I'd hoped it would be.

I would expect a live concert to be better than a studio recording because you would catch the interplay between all the musicians. On this album you can hear them laughing - they clearly enjoy playing together - but it's not better.

Willie Nelson is one my absolute favorites. Across the Borderline - I just listen to that over and over and over. Same for some of Wynton's stuff. The two of them both have music for moods when I want quiet, moods when I want energy, for dancing, for being happy or just layin' back. Even the cool jazz, intellectual - when I'm sitting and thinking.

DO: I can hear Wynton having a cool jazz, intellectual side. You'd have to show me Willie Nelson's cool intellecutal side.

LH. Willie Nelson has written and performed some standards of American pop music that can stand up with anything, with whoever you consider a master, people like Cole Porter. He started off as a guy in a suit - he wrote top songs for Patsy Cline.

It's a fun album. Willie's singing is ... casual. Just sittin' back. It's like he was sitting on his front porch with these guys, relaxed and easy - not caring if there are a couple wrong notes. Just playing. Just having fun.

The solos of everybody combined ... it's all easy stuff for them. There's no stretching here. Licks that you've heard over and over again. And they're combined in familiar ways. This album is a conversation with a dear friend, one you enjoy very much, but it's not one that's going to stay in your memory.

DO: So you thought Wynton and Willie were on the same wavelength when they were playing.

LH: They blended pretty well for the most part. Kind of a honky-tonk slash New Orleans slash whatever feel to it.

DO: It's billed as Two Men With The Blues.

LH. Sounds awfully cheery for the blues.

DO: It's a really bright shade of blue?

LH: Kind of a teal or an aquamarine.

Leslie asks my opinion.

DO: It was a fine album but completely undistinguished - except for the fact that Willie's singing, his delivery of the songs, drags the whole thing completely into the mud. As long as he wasn't singing it was pleasant to listen to.

But whenever he was singing I was cringing physically. He seemed to be missing the notes, forgetting the words and not using the same tempo as everybody else. Maybe he's just old at this point, maybe he was tired that night, maybe he thinks that's the way the blues ought to be sung, maybe I just don't get it. But I couldn't deal with his vocal delivery. I would never listen again because of that.

LH: I think his delivery has always been laconic - in a good way. He does a lot with a little. Maybe this isn't the right backing to bring that out as it does in some of his other songs.

DO: If the phrasing that I heard on this album was the phrasing of his idiom, then it was not appropriate to this group of sidemen. In that sense, his singing and the instrumentalists weren't really speaking to each other.

When Willie played the occasional guitar solo I thought he was fine. If he had just shut up and played his guitar I would have been a whole lot happier.

That's what I thought -- if this had been the album they were playing in heavy rotation at Starbucks I probably wouldn't have had quite as negative a reaction.

Anything more to say before I turn the tape off?

LH: Thank you for getting it for me, honey. I like it.

This album has its own website, willieandwynton.com
Willie Nelson has his own website: willienelson.com
Wynton Marsalis has his own website: wyntonmarsalis.com

Click this sentence to find blog reactions that are more positive.
I particularly like this review in Time - less than 75 words; not exactly a pan, but not a compliment either.

Two Men Tags: Willie Nelson. . . Wynton+Marsalis

Art Tatum Performs Live - June 2008

Imagine my surprise to see an announcement that Art Tatum (1909-1956) would be performing live in a few days. This was in a consumer electronics company advertisement in the New York Times West Coast Edition.

Here (in purple) is the exact text of the ad for J and R Music World; New York Times, Tuesday, June 17, 2008, page D8.

Art Tatum will be performing at Harlem's World Famous Apollo Theater on June 19th, 20th and 22nd.

Receive a FREE pair of tickets for the Friday show (6/20th) with purchase of his new CD, "Piano Starts Here: Live At the Shrine"

Price ($12.99) effective thru 6/21/08
Free ticket offer while supplies last.

Click on the picture to read it for yourself.

Returned from the dead to play in public once again!! Wow. I'd like to be there too.

In reality it's a promotion for this recently released album on Sony Classical who apparently forgot to tell the J&R people that poor Art left this mortal coil 52 years ago. The album is a "RE-PERFORMANCE" of 1949 recordings done by this company. Their website has a sample of the process. Seems very cool. I'd like to hear it.

This story is another part of the explanation.

ADDENDUM - added about 5 hours after the above:


I had to buy pet food this afternoon. The pet food store is near a Best Buy. I went there to look for a new DVD writer for my computer. They didn't have any. I wandered through the CD section. They had a lot of Sony Classical discs. They actually had "Art Tatum Piano Starts Here Live at The Shrine" for $14.99. I got the last copy. It's $2 cheaper at Amazon.

The disc has 13 songs on it but 26 tracks. Each track is provided both in Surround Sound and Binaural Sound. I listened to the binaural ones on my iPod. It's supposed to sound like you're actually sitting at the piano - high notes on the right, low notes on the left. There's audience applause (very fake and annoying) farther off to the right.

The big selling point of this new disc is that they've recreated the exact performance recorded years ago on a living modern mechanical piano using computer magic. Previously they've done the same thing to Glenn Gould. I wonder how they reproduced Glenn's "singing".

I'm sure the sound of this Tatum album is just a sweet wet dream for technoids. But who cares. I'd completely forgotten about all that crap half way through the first track because Art Tatum plays rings around the piano.

He shoots arrows into the strings and transforms them into a great angelic harp. He tugs at the tunes distorting the melodies like funhouse mirrors. He left jabs and right hooks the harmonies until they cry uncle. He tells musical jokes and times the punch lines perfectly. This is absolutely wonderful music.

Granted, I don't know the original Un-Re-Performed recordings. I'm confident I'd react to those recordings just the same way I reacted to this gee-whiz-bang computerized modern value-added re-performed audio technical marvel. I say "Who cares how it sounds. That guy can really play."

I hope he plays a few gigs in L.A. after he finishes his run at the Apollo.

ADDENDUM TOO (added the next day) - Zenph Bloggers

Turns out that one of the people who worked on this Art Tatum album and also Art's live performance at the Apollo has a blog. Who woulda thunk it?

Here's a link to Eric Hirsch posts in the category Zenph. Check it out.

Re-performed Tags: Art Tatum. . . ressurection. . . Sony Classical. . . J and R. . . Zenph. . . Reperformance

A New Rhapsody in Blue

I turned on the car radio last month to the strains of Rhapsody in Blue. Ah, I thought "I must be listening to KUSC, LA's (one remaining) classical music station." Rhapsody in Blue, for all its jazzness, is part of the classical repertoire. It seems to be played by every symphony orchestra and every piano soloist over and over, each performance pretty much identical to all the others. Audiences appalaud dutifully.

After a few seconds I realized this was no ordinary Rhapsody in Blue. Along with the "classical" bits it contained actual improvisation. And I was not listening to the classical radio station. This was being broadcast on the (one remaining) jazz station - which normally never plays Rhapsody in Blue (because they don't play classical music.)


This rhapsody had soloists soloing (yep, multiple soloists along with the pianist including a big part for the lowly banjo). The soloists were making things up, they were being creative and individual. The familiar segues were different. There were new fascinating harmonies in the piano part; chord substitution is not a classical music talent (any more). This pianist, whoever it was, was a master of twisting the familiar into the fabulous.

In between all this was a regular orchestra playing the familiar bits which sounded, well, familiar.

It was still going strong when I reached our driveway. I sat and listened, enthralled, until it was over. Turned out to be a Jazz from Lincoln Center broadcast. The announcer (some guy named Winston or Wilton) said the pianist was Marcus Roberts. I marched inside and immediately ordered the album, Portraits in Blue by Marcus Roberts.. Here's more info.


When the album arrived I was surprised to learn that there were two sets of musicians; the improvising musicians and the classical musicians were not the same. The performance was credited to "Members of the Orchestra of St. Lukes and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra". I had naively assumed that there are plenty of musicians who could play both halves of this piece, the classical and improvisation. I guess not.


The music is a mix of jazz styles - the liner notes mention Errol Gardner and Thelonius Monk. There's a Mingus-like section. The final cadenza ends with a vamp right out of Leslie Gore. I guffawed when I heard that. Now, dozens of listens later and knowing full well that it's about to happen, I still laugh.


This arrangement of the Rhapsody gets various live performances.
Here's an excerpt from a recent review by Harvey Steiman in Aspen Times (about the Aspen Music Festival's survey of the relationship between jazz and classical music):

I­n a 1­998 p­erformance o­f “R­hapsody i­n B­lue” h­ere i­n A­spen, t­he j­azz p­ianist M­arcus R­oberts p­layed G­ershwin’s m­usic a­s i­f i­t w­ere r­eal j­azz a­nd e­xtended t­he c­adenzas i­nto full­s­cale j­azz s­olos. T­hat w­as i­mpressive. A­nd r­are.

And Marcus Roberts performed the Rhapsody in Blue last week at the Proms. Here are some notes. And here are some reviews.

In a BBC interview before the broadcast Roberts said:

It's been wonderful pretty much every time we've done it ... because people know the piece, so when you improvise on it they can follow what you're doing, even if it's fairly abstract, even if it's fairly spontaneous.

The live performance was less interesting to me than the recording since many of the solos reverted back to the orchestra players who played them really "straight". Well, it was a run-out concert. And of course the recording represents the best of several takes. I'd like to hear the Lincoln Center recording again - that seemed pretty wild.

It occurred to me that if many (or even a few) performances of classical music had this level of creativity in them - of even a small fraction of the creativity in this performance - I would not think of it as such a dead art form.

Other music in my current listening rotation (meaning on my iPod) have similar creativity within a classical framework:

• the Diabelli Variations by Uri Caine (Mixed Meters on Uri Caine's Goldberg Variations)
• the Art of Fuguing, Bach arranged by William Malloch
• Mozart in Egypt (Egyptian composers re-compose W.A.)
• Some Combinations of Fingers and Passion - piano improvisations by Sergei Kuryohkin who displays an abundant classical technique

What these have in common is that someone has taken classical music, or some aspect of the classical music style, and treated it creatively with new ideas and new elements. This is not re-creative work, as so much classical performance is these days. It is also not recreational entertainment product. It will not need to be rerecorded and reinterpreted.

However, this is stuff you'll need to think about while you listen. Afterwards too. And of course a grounding in the classics will help but it's not enough. Not nearly enough. If you already have fixed thoughts about the great works of music, then you'll need to think new thoughts in order to listen to these pieces. That, it seems to me, is what makes a living art form.


Clazzical Jassical Tags: George Gershwin. . . Rhapsody in Blue. . . Marcus Roberts. . . classical music. . . jazz. . . Proms