OF LINES
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Thursday, September 12, 2024
JOHN MAYALL WAS A BIGGER DEAL THAN I FIRST THOUGHT
While scrolling through the headlines one morning, alternating between laughter and grunts at the day's news, I abruptly stopped. A story caught my eye, prominently displaying a flattering photo of the veteran British bluesman, John Mayall. The prominence of Mayall's photo on the news site sent a chill down my spine, prompting me to read on. The article announced the death of John Mayall, the iconic British blues figure, at the age of 90. A giant no longer walks among us.
Born on November 29, 1933, in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, John Mayall's pioneering work in the early days of the British Blues movement during the sixties marked a historic milestone in England's pop music history. He, along with other pioneers, sparked a revolution, empowering a generation of musicians to experiment with forms and adapt musical styles such as folk, jazz, blues, and classical, integrating them into the Big Beat. Mayall established the influential band John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, which became the launching pad for a host of dynamic guitar legends like Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Harvey Mandel, and Coco Montoya.
A steadfast figure in concerts throughout the 60s and 70s, he released around 50 albums with a constantly rotating and evolving group of musicians. These players adapted to Mayall's vision, creating a blues expression that was both traditional and innovative, direct yet introspective, soothing and invigorating. Mayall may not have reached the heights of success as those who came after him, but it's widely believed that British rock would be markedly different without his early influence. Indeed, Mayall is often considered one of the most significant musical figures of that era.
Mayall's influence was profound during my youth. He, along with Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, inspired me to pick up the blues harmonica. Sixty years and innumerable harps later, my passion remains strong. Meeting him and other white blues revivalists from America and Britain changed the course of my life. John Mayall and his Blues Breakers were instrumental in the British blues scene, igniting the guitar hero phenomenon that continues today. Mayall shone a light on Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor. Although he was a competent yet unremarkable harmonica, guitar, and keyboard player, his true genius was in his leadership. Occasionally, his bands reached a level of synergy that seemed truly groundbreaking. Mayall's ensembles broke the mold and exuded energy.
This is evident in the early Blues Breakers records, and later albums that showcased Mayall’s evolving interpretations of blues music, such as The Turning Point and USA Union. His vocal style was remarkable, reminiscent of Mose Allison and J.B. Lenoir—relaxed, high-pitched, and not merely imitating his idols. While he wasn't a virtuoso like Butterfield or Musselwhite, his harmonica playing was charmingly airy, warmly rustic, with rich chords and exquisite slurs and bends that mirrored the emotion in his voice. What he lacked in flamboyance, he compensated with texture, rhythm, brief sequences, and a powerful use of silence between phrases that captivated listeners. No modern blues harmonica player exists who hasn't been influenced by this man's technique.
Mayall was an able and earnest musician, a chilling and eerie vocalist, a punchy songwriter given to pungent social commentary, but his most demonstrable superpower was a genius as a band leader. His penchant for selecting tasty and distinct blues guitarists and other instrumentalists and allowing those players the full expression of their musical personalities kept the blues grooves fresh and crackling. As with jazz maestros he admired, such as Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers or the ever-morphing Miles Davis, the musicians in his various groups through the decades provided Mayall with new frameworks to continually retool his unique style of presenting his music. I give Mayall full credit for putting together crackerjack bands that have, at times, made it possible for him to release first-rate albums. The albums I listen to especially are USA Union, featuring the sadly underrated Harvey Mandel on guitar, Larry Taylor on bass, and Sugarcane Harris on violin, and, of course, Turning Point, with the splendid, Paul Desmond like sax work of Johnny Almond and Jon Mark on acoustic guitar.
Unlike Paul Butterfield, who expanded the expressive capabilities of blues harmonica with his fluid and rapid explorations, John Mayall's approach was distinct. He favored chords over single-note runs, crafting a signature "chugga-chugga" rhythm, notably in his track "Room to Move." Influenced by a vibrant Latin beat akin to the classic "Tequila," the song vibrates with energy as Mayall locks into the groove. The song's simplicity belies the difficulty of mastering its elements, a challenge I've faced for years in attempting to perfect the harmonica parts, yet the quintessential Mayall sound remains elusive to me.
Among his works, there are several I revisit for a surge of inspiration, especially "Television Eye," which features Harvey Mandel's guitar work on the 1971 album "Back to the Roots." In this shuffling tune, Mayall sets the tone with hauntingly high notes on the harmonica, hinting at a polished texture, while Mandel's guitar provides a pulsating, well-phased accompaniment. Mayall's lyrics reflect a man's realization of his addiction to the television, unable to look away from the images in darkened rooms. Mandel's ensuing solo maximizes the space given by Mayall, showcasing why I consider him among the finest blues rock guitarists of his era.
It wasn’t always his harmonica solos or the blustery verve of his guitarists that made the man’s performances memorable. “Broken Wings”, from Mayall’s 1967 album The Blues Alone . It’s a slow and churning song in a minor key, Mayall filling the spaces with the rounded swells of what sounds like a B3 organ, applying thick, resonating chords over his resigned choked-up vocal. It’s a lament for a lost lover who now must deal with the consequences of the decision they’ve made. The keyboard fills the space with a harrowing sound as the progression descends and the volume lowers, fading into a silence as one would imagine a downcast man would lapse into after the last words have been said. I heard it originally in 1967 and its been one of doleful melodies that come to mind when old heartaches come back for a visit in the lone , late hours.
It's somewhat tragic that we often only appreciate the full scope of an artist's work—a musician, writer, or artist with a long and evolving career—after they pass away. This is when we truly grasp the depth and breadth of their life's work. I must admit, I hadn't given much thought to Mayall in the last decade and had even been unfairly critical of him at times. However, an unexpected obituary has a way of sharpening one's memory and perspective on history. John Mayall was indeed a necessary figure, an artist who grappled with the stark realities of the blues. He was a straight-talker about the human condition who also strived to keep his music relevant to the era and culture he lived in. He embodied a paradox: a traditionalist but not a formalist, an innovator but not an avant-garde artist. With just a guitar, a harmonica, and a voice of pure sincerity, he sang the blues, delivered the news, and inspired both audiences and fellow musicians to create their own music.
I purchased his albums, acquired a harmonica, and managed to play it quite well, finding a voice that conveys my meaning when words fail me. Thus, I extend my gratitude to John Mayall for this gift, and wish him Godspeed.
(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
THE BOYS OF SUMMER
The Eagles: a band I loathe—a troupe of musicians with obvious talents as songwriters, instrumentalists, and vocalists—who try too hard to secure a significant place in rock and roll history. Despite their apparent charms and conspicuous skills at being tuneful, you can't shake the burdensome feeling that they're calculated in nearly everything they attempt. Their rock and roll feels sluggish, their ballads dragged out, more a burden than an expression of pathos. And those strained vocals, reaching for that perfect moment when the voice cracks and then swells dramatically—it’s all a bit much. As for the lyrics, especially the weak variations on the gloom and doom of Nathaniel West's downcast novel Day of the Locust found in “Hotel California,” they appear weepy, whiny, and oddly proud of their own low self-esteem.
They were a defining band of the 70s , the last hurrah for the country-infused rock that dominated SoCal music, but even a period where narcissistic self-regard left an odious trace in too many lyric sheets, The Eagles capacity to feel sorry for themselves was so pronounced and heavy-handed that it became toxic; it made you feel bad not in an exhilarating way that an artist Elvis Costello could achieve (due, perhaps, to Costello's wisdom in making his rhyming ruing of missed chances more compact, not turning them into speeches), but instead in a way that made one want to take a mallet to the stereo that was broadcasting their songs. Not a good thing, yes?
However, there’s an exception: “Boys of Summer.” This solo effort by Don Henley—a singer I never quite warmed to due to his Rod Stewart/Bob Seger/Willie Nelson affectations—stands out. The song is genuinely good, boasting a well-crafted arrangement of guitar textures and an insistent beat. Henley’s singing here seems to draw from a deeper well of inspiration, beyond the usual manager’s playbook. The lyrics are clipped, terse, and vividly convey the sense of a man haunted by memories of lost love—an Eden he cast himself out of. And then there’s the video: one of the most effective I’ve ever seen in capturing the song’s mood. Black-and-white photography, suitably faded to evoke memories slipping away, blends with home videos superimposed over the stark reality of the present. That scene—the man brooding over his glass-top desk while a Super 8 home film flickers on the wall behind him—is nothing short of brilliant. It encapsulates the stream of regret a man feels when he reflects on the imagined perfection of a past life with the woman of his dreams.
Friday, August 23, 2024
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRAP
"Sewage Has It's Say", a poem by Steven Cramer, stinks to the highest reaches of irony, and it's a fine thing too.A monologue in essence, the essence of which is the voice of what we consume processed and reduced to its fouler essences in turn. This is the food we eat and the drinks we imbibe with all the cosmetics of preparation removed, after all the benefits (nutrition, energy) and debits ( obesity, high blood pressure) have been had. Insulted, railed against, invariably used as a pejorative, equated with the foulest intents and deeds a race is capable of, sewage finds it's voice, it talks back to the world that is other wise obliged to consume and make crap and crud an unavoidable consequence; there is hypocrisy here, the fetid mess proclaims, everything winds up in this repulsive stew:
Give me roots prying into the jointsof your main waste line, Charminthickening her web first to a nest,then to a dam, and I'll sluice in reverse,top the basement tub and spillinto a poem! Damn! I've sunkento new heights! Will you takea hint and stomach your disgust?What does The Thinker look likehe's doing? How come Luther heardGod's thunderclap of justice via faithwhilst sitting on the privy?
You know...where love's pitched his mansion, sodon't shower so much. Squeaky clean'sfor mice. No soap's got enough tallowto wash out the mouth mouthing off.What made you so ... nice? Polite'skind of like death, isn't it? Okay, notquite. But consider this, my sweet kinin excretion: to flies we taste like candy.
Monday, August 19, 2024
My Life and My Music
By Jorma Kaukonen
Thursday, July 11, 2024
MAN OF WEALTH AND TASTE
It was heavily rumored that the Stones, stricken by unusual levels of concern and moral determination, had dropped 'Sympathy" from their set list after the 1969 fiasco at Altamont where the Hells Angels murdered Meredith Hunter. It became part of the general mythology of the band, a musical force that wrote a song so cursed with malevolent spirit that they simply had to leave it alone. This was a wide spread belief, but it turns out after all this time to not true, an urban legend, maybe a rumor turned lose by the Stones themselves to distance themselves from the evil the song might have inspired. Mick Jagger did say, to paraphrase, that something to the effect that weird things happen when they play the song. But they never dropped the song from their live performances because, I suppose, commerce is king. After initially loving the song when it first came out, I quickly tired of it. A song created for shock value and maximum impact loses power and relevance with repeated listening. I think it's one of their weakest songs from their richest period. Even when I loved the song back when, I thought the "who killed the Kennedy's " line and the answer "After all , it was you and me" was nothing short of a cop out, another example of Jagger ducking behind theatrical ambivalence .
Laying the blame on "you and me" for the Kennedy assassinations was a chief device . Mailer in Rolling Stone didn't buy the resolution either and called the song , essentially, a case of all build up with no pay off. Jagger evidently tried to sell the audience on the idea that he might be a Satanist but wanted some plausible deniability. On the matter of songwriters dealing with the assassinations of saints and political heroes, nothing has surpassed Phil Och's masterpiece "The Crucifixion
Friday, June 28, 2024
A QUICK TAKE ON EVE BABITZ AND A NOTE ON POETRY HATRED
SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY:The World, The Flesh and L.A.
by Eve Babitz
Active as a writer in the 70s and 80s, Babitz was a feature writer for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Vogue and Esquire, with a good portion of her journalism and essay writing covering Los Angeles in its most chaotic , boundary pushing years. Slow Days, Fast Company is a collection of magazine pieces, reissued a few years ago by NYRB Books , the terrain being California, the place where it seemed everyone had come from everyone else to make a last stand to be something bigger than normal before resigning themselves to their fate.
These are wonderful pieces , with Batitz maintaining a beautifully modulated tone in her first person narration of non fiction events: she is skeptical while being sympathetic, bracingly honest but hardly heartless, full of wit but seldom cruel. What comes across through the scattered subjects here is how well she presents her lack of experience or her presumptions about locations and relationships she's about to enter and credibly reveal how much she'd learn. Her piece on the city Bakersfield is a revelation of serene sympathy for a people and the community they live in, and a stand-out article is a recollection of the heroine death epidemic that seemed to be everywhere in the bad old days; Babitz recollects on her relationship with Janis Joplin , who, Babitz writes, seemed to have everything after much struggle as a woman and an artist, but resorting to heroin to fill a void her material success couldn't heal. More moving is the memory of an actress friend named Terry , a delicate creature who flitted about the edges of acting success in Hollywood, who couldn't refrain from a drug that was killing her by the noticeable inch. I recommend this to anyone who yearns for more brilliant writing about the middle part of the 20th century. With Didion, Wolf, Mailer, Babitz, I think, is essential reading for the curious.
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THE HATRED OF POETRY by Ben Lerner
A lucid and at times even lyric essay, poet Ben Lerner addresses the love/hate relationship everyone else besides poets themselves have with what's been gratingly called "the highest art". Taking his cue from Plato, who distrusted poetry because it presented worlds that are false and meant to seduce impressionable minds that need a hard understanding of how reality operates, Lerner quickly sketches that distrust of what poets have to say as things that are meaningless, garbled, wishy-washy, utterly unmasculine and prone to "feminine" emotionalism and yet....he also conveys the idea that great portions of a distrustful readership cannot leave the form alone, who keep returning to it to for solace , assurance, spiritual connection of a sort that they can't achieve from the worship of money, sex, and success. Lerner doesn't have any answers I detect, and his examples are at times wholly anecdotal. This essay, in fact comes off in the end as a bit of a wallow, an attempt at ironic distance against a despairing that poets can do nothing except deem to confirm the worst sentiments of a perpetually discontented audience. But in all, an enjoyable examination of the problem , if ultimately fatalistic.
Friday, May 31, 2024
POETS WHO DON'T DISCOVER THE WORLD BEYOND THEMSELVES
Interesting things afoot in discussions about the precious craft of writing poetry, an endeavor fraught with personal assessments of what-poetry-must-be . It’s an intense crossfire of what seems like irreconcilable views for some and suffice to say that nearly any side you might take on an issue of trying to “express the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable”, your bound to offend someone, be called a fool, dismissed as a philistine, labeled a reactionary kook. It’s a minefield. But lately it’s been intriguing that partisans of different schools of thought about the Highest Art have agreed on one thing in particular, a general feeling of being fed up with poets drowning their poems with first person pronouns. “I, me, mine, my”, an excess of author presence, the feeling of someone talking at you , not with you. No names of offenders or the critics involved, but in a general way I’d like to offer my perhaps fence sitting take on this general complaint.
It's a matter of "having an ear", a musical ear.
I prefer the ‘I’ of
the poem to be a narrator engaged with a world fully outside their senses. It’s
composing, no less than composing music. I accept the first-person pronouns as
legitimate starting points or anchors, but what satisfies is if the poet
concentrates on the perception of things in the world around them and does not
use those perceptions for trivial finger exercises in autobiography.. The
biggest sin against the art of poetry is the rise of ‘Poetry-About-Poetry’ and,
worse, ‘Poems About Being a Poet.’ This is a symptom of someone who has nothing
interesting to say.
I would agree in principle that a contemporary poet is most effective when the language is pared down to the right words for the right image. Prose is the big picture and poetry x-ray, some would have it. But to have poems be hard, solid things, literally objects on par with paintings or sculpture, which was the over all mission of the Imagists movement, is at best a fool's errand. Poetry seems to me the most subjective of the writing arts, one that has inspired unlimited numbers of "schools", manifestos, rules, and regulations and demands that have tried to remake the idea of all poetic expression . Poets are individuals , though, and given a hyper awareness of themselves in the world with minds that work too hard to make connections of people, places, things, ideas, philosophies , morality that wouldn't normally be connected, the need for a writer to access their feelings, their sense of how the world appears and the qualities particular things seem to have --comparing one thing to another and the result being an unexpected third meaning, a new perception--seems to me inevitable.
Both Steve
Kowit and Paul Dresman, my two mentors in my early attempts to write honest
poems, insisted that what makes for an effective and resilient poem is craft
and having an ear for the right phrase and the right number of words for that
phrase, an "ear" as Paul called it. And Steve in particular insisted
that half the art of writing poems is in the rewriting. Even if one didn't like
Steve Kowit's work, he worked on each poem relentlessly until there wasn't a
false note in the piece he was about to publish and / or read.
Friday, May 10, 2024
"Younger than Yesterday" by the Byrds .
THE LAST OF THE MC5 IS GONE
Grande Ballroom photo by Charlie Auringer |
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Sublime Joe Henderson Tribute from the Lori Bell Quartet
Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson -- Lori Bell Quartet
It’s more a case of slipping into a comfy, loose-fitting garment than it is studying Lori Bell’s latest release, Recorda Me: Rememb ering Joe Henderson. Kicking off with the late jazz saxophone great’s composition ‘Isotope,’” Bell nimbly states the spry signature theme, and one finds oneself unexpectedly wholly immersed in a delightful exchange between the flutist and pianist Josh Nelson. She and the keyboardist weave a delicate and swinging set of variations on it. Nelson’s touch on the keys is light, deft, and swinging, surely over the subdued but percolating tempo provided by bassist David Robaire and drummer Dan Schnelle. Bell is, as she has always been in her distinguished effort, a flutist with unlimited resources who brings her nuanced lines to the fabric that the others have created for her on the opening track. Her playing soars, bringing a different assortment of tonal color to her speedy bop-informed lines and the lyrical blues coloration she often provides in her slower passages.
The album continues in this pleasurable vein, a sagacious offering of deceptively easy grooves and meters. The Lori Bell Quartet has an odd combination in that the allure in this album’s worth of interpretation of Joe Henderson’s compositions lies in the kind of classical precision, yet full of the intricate twists and shifting chord voices that elevate the improvisational acumen of all the players. It’s apparent halfway through the disc that this does not come across as a routine “tribute” to a departed jazz giant as well as projects that—in spite of good intentions—too often seem lifeless or at least absent the grace and luxuriant finesse of whomever the tribute is geared toward.
Bell avoids stifling perfectionism that mars such efforts and lets Joe Henderson’s compositions breathe in a way; the ensemble allows itself to be playful with the music in front of them, undulating with a steady yet continually evolving succession of rhythmic invention. Henderson’s saxophone playing was rich and expressive, versatile and harmonically complex. He had at his disposal an armada of voices that would be brackish and groove, smooth and lyrical, excitingly precise as his compositions required. Deeply rooted in the blues, Henderson’s songwriting used Latin and Afro references, elements creating an insistent and flexible rhythmic basis that made his inventive use of unexpected chord progressions more provocative. His music was one of dynamic but unassuming brilliance.
Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson is stellar work, with the collective readings of Henderson’s “Inner Urge,” “A Shade of Jade,” and the tour de force workout on the title track, with its ascending and descending themes and shifting melody contrasts. It is a wondrous effort toward a breathtaking whole: Bell negotiates Henderson’s galloping changes with quicksilver improvisations over Nelson’s sympathetic chordings and counter melodies. His solo outing here in turn is a keen master class in uncluttered elegance. A shout out as well for the very fine work by drummer Schnelle and bassist Robaire, a rhythm section pursuing a dialogue of their own as meters swerve and sway and swing. Recorda Me does exactly what Bell and her superlative quartet intended, reintroducing listeners to a resourceful and exciting musician and composer. This music moves fast on the uptake, is light on its feet, and is memorable and compelling, rendered with a fervent wholeheartedness by a superlative ensemble.
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