Recommended:

Vern Gosdin's version of Donovan's "Catch the Wind". If lovin' it is wrong, I don't wanna be right. Great as his original recording was, Donovan sounds like a little boy compared to grown-ass man Vern Gosdin.

Gosdin's other big foray into mid-'60s pop territory, The Association's "Never My Love", doesn't work quite as well for me despite a strong vocal.

Recent (and Less Recent) Live Music, Part One

Although it's already been said better, I feel I should add one more voice to the chorus of enthusiasm for the meeting of contemporary titans that was The Bad Plus w/ Joshua Redman at the Blue Note. To say that Redman was able to find a place within TBP's often tightly arranged tunes would be a huge understatement. If I was to employ a deliberately terrible mixed metaphor, I would say that like master jewelers, the trio gave Redman a setting in which to shine and he knocked that s**t out of the park. For every mood and mode that The Bad Plus explored (and they get to lots of different places in a single set), Redman was right there with something profound (and often jaw-dropping) to add to the mix.

I do regret not planning ahead and getting stuck in the SRO bar area with a terrible sightline, but even at that remove it was impossible to miss the strong musical message that was being delivered - TBP's inimitable compositions taken to the next level live. "People Like You" and "Layin' a Strip for the Higher-Self State Line" are the first titles that come to mind as highlights, but there were many, many great moments spread through the set I saw (which also included, if memory serves, "Who's He?" and "Dirty Blonde" - I didn't make any notes).

I can't fault the Blue Note on its bookings - they bring in some of the best - but the decor does tend to give one the unsettling feeling (as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out) of having walked into the highest tier "gentleman's club" in a medium-to-large size Midwestern city, so that seeing someone with, for example, the elegance and stature of Ron Carter on stage there can seem almost distractingly incongruous. I suppose the defiantly unremodeled yet far-from-classic interior could serve as a sobering commentary on the economic viability of presenting jazz seven nights a week in the current economic and cultural climate. Mirrors and neon or not, they keep pulling me back in by booking musicians that are just undeniable, such as James Carter with 'Blood' Ulmer and Nicholas Payton (more about that in the forthcoming Part Two of this post).

I was at The Stone twice recently, finally seeing Dr. Eugene Chadbourne after listening to his music on and off for many years, and seeing the mighty Ken Vandermark in a duo with Joe Morris on guitar. Though he originally made his reputation as a downtown/avant guitar weirduoso, the Doc's recent solo set left no doubt that he's also a heckuva songwriter (highlights in that department included "God Made Country Music" and "Old Piano") and a great (though still plenty weird) banjo player. Come to think of it, I'd love to see a guitar-banjo duo with Morris and Chadbourne (looks like they have recorded together). If Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore hadn't already used the album title Blowin' In From Chicago, it would suit Ken Vandermark perfectly. His technique is highly advanced, but at the same time, he makes it very clear that playing the saxophone essentially involves blowing into a tube. There was no shortage of brains or guts in the Vandermark-Morris duo.

I saw the Mary Halvorson Quintet at Barbes for a second time (the first time, I think they were playing a mixture of material from the trio album Dragon's Head and some then-new compositions that would end up on Saturn Sings, but I may be combining it in my memory with an earlier trio gig). In any case, with the newer material firmly under their belts, the growth of the group sound and of Halvorson's compositions was very much in evidence. This group, already acclaimed well beyond the Brooklyn scene centered on venues like Barbes and Korzo, just keeps getting better.

For the March installment of Tower of Song, a monthly songwriter's-circle-type deal at Rock Shop, host/organizer Jennifer O'Connor outdid herself, assembling a very heavy lineup: Tim Bracy, formerly of Mendoza Line; the undisputed Queen of Country Music in Brooklyn and personal favorite of John Peel, Laura Cantrell; and a man who must be one of the most underappreciated songwriting talents of our time, 33-1/3 author and sometime John Darnielle collaborator Franklin Bruno. The performers made the most of being onstage together as a group, covering each others songs and contributing harmonies and extra guitar and keyboard parts. The highlight of the show may have been Bruno's song inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (Perfect Lovers). I don't know if he's recorded it, and I'm not even sure of the title, but I'd really like to hear it again.

I guess these YouTube clips (scroll down on the right-hand column) of the '80s-era public access jazz chat show The John Lewis Show (not the famous pianist or the civil rights leader and politician, but the less famous drummer) have been circulating for a while, but I just discovered them via A Blog Supreme and they are my new favorite thing. Ron Jefferson, the Ed McMahon to Lewis' Carson, must have been one of the hippest people alive at the time (not to mention "dynamic", "prolific", and "beautiful"). The show provides a valuable historical window into '80s jazz fashions, though I assume that Jefferson's bow tie in this segment was purely his own thing and not representative of any current trend. And fans of The Fighter might enjoy the interview Lewis and Jefferson conducted with boxer Saoul Mamby (who, at a critical turning point of that movie, pulls out of a fight with Micky Ward at the last minute). Lewis has DVDs of the full-length shows available here.

Next time in Part Two: Bill Frisell! Paul Motian! Neil Young! James Carter! and more?

And a final word from Schroeder:
More true than I'd like to admit.

bits/bytes/birds/bags

I don't know much about the electronic musics, but I'm enjoying this guy's crazy sounds (scroll down for player).

One of the most amazing things I've learned recently:
Many of the nests for bird's nest soup are "produced" in "factories".

One of the other most amazing things I've learned recently:
David Allan Coe cut a record with Dimebag Darrell?!?!?

Urban Buckaroo

I'd always heard that Buck Owens music - due to the way his records were recorded and mixed, and the often treble-heavy sound of the Buckaroos - was known for sounding good even, or maybe especially, in less-than-ideal, lo-fi situations, like through the crappy speaker of an old pickup truck's radio.  Whether this was a goal or a by-product of the recording process, the sounds were able to slice through any kind of tinniness or other sonic limitation to reach the listener.

Though I've listened to Buck on some cheap, factory car stereos, I don't think I'd ever listened to him on earbuds until about a week ago.  And as you might expect from what I've said above, he sounds great that way.  I've been trying to listen to some stuff featuring Charlie Haden on the iPod lately (might be a forthcoming post talking about some of that music), and it's very frustrating with my current setup.  The sounds of the city just wipe poor Charlie's bass right out of the musical picture.  I'm sure I'm missing some aspects of Buck's music, too, but the essentials come right through, even in the subway or on a busy street.  I enjoy the fact that the man who sang "I Wouldn't Live in New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Dang Town)" made music so well suited to subway listening.

What got me started on my recent Buck Owens kick was this great post over at The Hound Blog.  His tale of being picked up by Buck's stretch limo in pre-gentrified Alphabet City is priceless.

One more thing: excluding classical music and jazz, is there a more perfect, joyful piece of instrumental (i.e. non-vocal) music than "Buckaroo"?  Next time you listen to it, dig the cymbal beat (is that Mel King or Willie Cantu?).

Bland Country

I found a small (still sealed) gem yesterday at the Brooklyn Record Riot, Get On Down With Bobby Bland, from 1975.  Bland was already well-established as one of the great blues and soul singers, but a list of some of the songwriting credits on Get On Down will give you a better idea of what he was up to on this album than the title or cover photo could: Dan Penn, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Billy Sherrill.  Yes, that's right, we're in country-soul (not to be confused with country blues) territory.

It seems like a few years ago, there was a slight surge in interest in the country-soul crossovers of the late-'60s to mid-'70s - I vaguely recall some compilations and reissues appearing all around the same time. It's a particularly rich vein of music, spanning from Joe Tex and Joe Simon to Gram Parsons and Charlie Rich.  Ray Charles' Modern Sounds In Country Music records are usually cited as the inspiration/prototype for this mini-movement, but of course the process of cultural borrowing (or stealing) across racial lines is the engine that's driven American music from the beginning. 

Charles (for some reason, it seems weird referring to Ray Charles as "Charles") may have demonstrated the commercial viability of r'n'b artists recording country songs and proved that he could sing the hell out of a country song (or at least convincingly Ray-ify it), but his project was all about taking hillbilly music way uptown - Hank Williams songs with a (lightly) swingin' orchestra, etc.  The field was still open for artists who wanted to engage with country music on a closer-to-the-ground level, down in the pasture where they might get some shit on their shoes.  Bobby Bland didn't get all the way there - he definitely walked out of the Get On Down sessions with clean shoes - but if the arrangements seem a tad smooth today, they're a heckuva lot more understated and, to my ears, listenable than Ray's.  And they don't ever threaten to overshadow Bland's voice, which is smooth in an entirely different way (single malt whiskey smooth as opposed to baby food smooth).

With Bobby Bland's take on country, there's very little feeling of novelty.  The material is well-selected, or at least he makes it sound that way.  You don't hear Bland straining to fit himself into the song or distorting the song to fit his style - the tell-tale signs of an awkward crossover attempt (see Willie Nelson's Countryman). In his B+ review of the album (in which, typically, he makes the key points in minimum space), Robert Christgau hears awkwardness on one track (Conway Twitty's "You've Never Been This Far Before"), leading him to ask, "...he seems a little ill at ease reassuring a virgin with bom-bom-boms, but wouldn't you?"

One of the standout tracks for me is the last one, "You're Gonna Love Yourself (In The Morning)" by Alabama Music Hall of Famer Donnie Fritts (how's this for a resume?: Muscle Shoals session man, longtime Kristofferson sideman/sidekick, widely recorded songwriter, Peckinpah actor).  Bland seems entirely at ease with the Hag classic "Today I Started Loving You Again" and while "Someone To Give My Love To" doesn't surpass the benchmark Johnny Paycheck version, it's another highlight on an album with no real duds.

List Making #3 - Names From The Musical Past

The following is a list of bands, artists or musical groups (not all country) mentioned in Nick Tosches' Country (the book has had various subtitles in different editions, including "The Biggest Music in America", "The Twisted Roots of Rock'n'Roll" and "Living Legends and Dying Metaphors in America's Biggest Music").

Hunkie Smith (who recorded "Hunkie Tunkie Blues")
Moonshine Kate
Jules Verne Allen
Isom Dart
Bull Moose Jackson
Denver Darling
Snoozer Quinn
Henry Hornbuckle
Stick McGhee
Old Man Carol Williams
Scrapper Blackwell
Hardrock Gunter
Nat Love (aka Deadwood Dick)
Dick Justice

Prince Albert Hunt's Texas Ramblers
Ming's Pep Steppers
Clyde Leoppard's Snearly Ranch Boys
Dr. Smith's Champion Hoss Hair Pullers
Dr. Bates's Possum Hunters
Oscar Stone and His Possum Hunters
The Mississippi Possum Hunters
Curly Fox, Texas Ruby and the Fox Hunters
Paul Womack and His Gully Jumpers
Curly Williams and His Georgia Peach Pickers
Grandpappy Wilkerson and His Fruit Far Drinkers
Smoky Wood and His Wood Chips
Homer Clemons and His Texas Swingbillies
Charlie Ryan and His Timberline Riders
Kitty Gray and Her Wampus Cats
Peg Leg Howell and His Gang
Joe Almond and His Hillbilly Rockers
Luis Russel and His Ginger Snaps
Luis Russel and His Burning Eight
Russel's Hot Six
Luis Russel's Heebie Jeebie Stompers
Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers
Jimmy Heap and the Melody Masters

The Poe Sisters
The Cackle Sisters
The DeZurik Sisters

Mustard and Gravy
Tarheel Slim and Little Ann

The Tune Wranglers
The Modern Mountaineers
The Hi Neighbor Boys
The Ripley Cotton Choppers (the 1st country act on Sun Records)
The Shreveport Home Wreckers
The Maple City Four
The Hoosier Hot Shots
The Black Shirts
The Novelodeons
The Sod Busters

Two Duos - Grimes/Cyrille, Scheinman/Fulks

I saw two duos perform in NYC recently - Henry Grimes and Andrew Cyrille at the Bang on a Can Marathon in Battery Park City, and Jenny Scheinman and Robbie Fulks at Barbes in Park Slope. The only obvious links between the two were violin (Grimes and Scheinman both played one, Grimes doubling on his main instrument, bass) and Bill Frisell (Grimes and Cyrille followed him, Scheinman frequently plays with him). Otherwise, these were very different experiences - Grimes and Cyrille free-improvising in the glass-and-palm-tree canyon of the Winter Garden, Scheinman and Fulks harmonizing with guitar, fiddle, and a bunch of songs in the tiny back room of Barbes.

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It's a good thing that the Bang on a Can Marathon has a big, attractive venue to accomodate it's annual orgy of free music, but the long, tall open space of the Winter Garden tends to swallow up sound. When I saw a Johnny Cash tribute concert in the same space last year, I thought my problems with the sound might've been a result of sitting too far away from the stage. This time, though, I was much closer but still found that many of the details of the music got lost in the reverberations of the space. The new piece (noirish, soundtrack-y, a bit like Blues Dream) that Frisell performed with the Bang on a Can All-Stars sounded good, but I think I would've liked it better had it been louder (Frisell himself was conspicuously quiet, though this might've been partially a result of his wanting to keep the focus on the band and the composition) and longer.

As for Grimes and Cyrille, a tremendous amount of music was being produced by just two men, but I couldn't help thinking how much better it would've been in a small venue, where every nuance could be seen and heard. Grimes alternated between bass (olive green and covered with shiny star stickers) and violin. On bass alone, he was something of a one-man orchestra, bowing, strumming, double-stopping and producing a wide, deep stream of music. Cyrille's drums, skittering, restless, kept the music moving forward, though not in anything like a straight line.

The music was decidedly and proudly free, and clearly could've continued much longer (Grimes has a recent double-disc that documents a 2.5 hour continuous solo improv session!), had a PA not been given the extremely unenviable task of coming on stage to give the "wrap it up in five" signal. I know they had to keep the (extremely full) program moving, but can you imagine someone tapping Mingus on the shoulder and telling him to wrap it up? Maybe the musicians asked to be signalled so they'd know when to stop, but I still don't envy the person that had to do it.

I also saw a string quartet performance of Gavin Bryars' watery, "Amazing Grace"-haunted "Sinking of the Titanic" at Bang on a Can (after which the news was announced from the stage that the final survivor had died!), but I came away thinking that the title might've been more appropriately applied to Grimes and Cyrille's music. As opposed to an underwater quartet, playing calmly as the ship goes down, Grimes and Cyrille conjured the shreiks of the drowning, the groaning of the ship's hull. That's part of the beauty of this kind of music - not only is it "free" of harmonic and rhythmic constraints from the players' point of view, but the listener is also left entirely (and perhaps uncomfortably) free to interpret the music, including interpreting it as grating noise.

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Though she's clearly capable of playing just about any style of music, violinist Jenny Scheinman is probably best known for her jazz work. Talking genre in relation to Scheinman's work can be misleading, though. The music she's made with Bill Frisell, for example, incorporates significant classical and American folk elements. And if last night's show was typical, her recent live collaborations with singer-songwriter-guitarist Robbie Fulks have been showcasing her love and talent for country music. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that these two musicians were working together, as I was to hear that Fulks is now living in Brooklyn. He may now qualify as the borough's finest country musician, though that's a little like having the finest knishes in Nashville (sorry, country musicians of Brooklyn!).

This was my first time seeing Fulks live, and he lived up to his reputation for on-stage wit, even getting laughs with a between-song riff on Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. I'd always thought of Fulks primarily as a songwriter, but his guitar playing and singing (lead and harmony) impressed at close range, testimony to his experience and mastery of traditional styles. He played some great songs that I'd never heard, including some from his 50-song MP3 collection 50-Vc. Doberman. Fulks is the kind of songwriter that creates and inhabits characters - a fed-up barroom troubadour in "Goodbye, Virginia", a homicidal father in "Whitetail Woods Incident". His songs rarely seem to be sung from the point of view of "Robbie Fulks". He's also able to write new songs that sound old - he's obviously a serious student of country music, in all its forms.

Songwriters that have these characteristics are like "genre" film directors, in that they tend to be thought of as great "craftsmen" rather than great artists, often an unfair or incomplete judgment. It's no insult to point out that Fulks' craft as a writer is exceptionally strong, though. A close listen to the way he chooses words and fits them into the structure of his songs will tell you that much. Nothing is out of place and, at the same time, there are little sparks and surprises in the songs that take them beyond the workmanlike.

Having only heard Jenny Scheinman in jazz and instrumental contexts, I didn't know quite what to expect of her as a singer and folk-country songwriter. Maybe it's some kind of latent bias I have toward vocal music that makes me surprised to find out that someone I associate with instrumental music has a good voice - "if they can sing like that, why aren't they doing it all the time?" Actually, Scheinman seems to do a good job in her career of balancing and accomodating all the various types of music she's interested in (another Frisell associate, bassist Tony Scherr also sidelines as a rootsy singer-songwriter). There seems to be deep emotion behind Scheinman's songs, but they're not straightforward confessions. She incorporates dream logic and imagery and uses suggestive and allusive lyrics to set up and increase the impact of more plain, direct declarations.

Her fiddling is top notch, totally embracing the style of whatever tune she's playing. No showiness. No "jazzing things up" to show she's more sophisticated than the material. Besides trading original songs, Scheinman and Fulks also played two associated with the Carter Family, "Single Girl, Married Girl" and "John Hardy", plus a Jimmie Driftwood tune and an Alvin Crow instrumental, "The Broken Spoke Waltz", which a young Scheinman learned from a record her father brought home from a trip to Texas. This was the last of the Scheinman-Fulks shows at Barbes, but her ongoing Tuesday night residency continues. The next couple weeks look to be a return to jazz territory.


Bonus Henry Grimes Links

video of Grimes at Newport playing "Blue Monk" with Monk - a lot of this is shots of the crowd and sailboats, but Grimes appears at about 1:20 and again after the 4-minute mark

the entire Jazz on a Summer's Day documentary appears to be here - it's an absolute classic

Henry Grimes' mind-boggling discography - sessions with the biggest of big names in the late-'50s/early-'60s, then a 37-year gap