Andrew Wyeth

chistina's world
for Andrew Wyeth

brown hills of grass
where she slept

until the light
slides under
the surface of things,

she rises
hungry
as a fish
patrolling a lake's still surface,

there is someplace to be,

in a chair
at a table
with a place setting
of one plate, one fork,

one empty glass.

Patrick McGoohan

A note for the passing of actor Patrick McGoohan, known to American audiences as intelligence operative John Drake in the 60s television show Secret Agent (titled Danger Man in Britain, where it originated), and especially for the dada/surreal serial maze he created and starred in, The Prisoner.

A craggy countenance and a rumbling boom box of a voice, McGoohan had pacing, brooding presence on the screen, someone who could give you the impression that he was thinking of several different different things while he spoke to you directly about a particular item of dramatized controversy. It was a restless energy he could bring to a career of roles he succeeded in problematizing with a repertoire of ticks, manic hand gestures, tilts of the head, an abrupt change of posture; he seemed like he was about to go off at any moment. He was a smart enough artist to guide his persona into the right roles, and The Prisoner was the perfect fit; an uncontainable individualist quits an undisclosed intelligence agency, only to find himself kidnapped and held prisoner in an isolated village with other prisoners where the cryptic overseers demand information which he will not give.

The Prisoner, referred to as No.6 in the series, continually calculated his escape attempts, all of them failure, a task he would only start again because he would not be contained.
Odd, driving, quirky, The Prisoner fit neatly into a generation's reading and viewing habits where The System and The Man and The Establishment meant sterility, conformity, death on two feet, and it got the spirit of rebellion through the likes of No.6. One suspects that McGoohan's pacing rebel would do well with the counter culture that turned him into a hero: the prisoner didn't seem the sort of trade one sort of conformist rigidity for another. He wasn't a joiner.

RON ASHETON, RIP

It's a strange turn of the New Year when we first say adieu to arguably the greatest jazz trumpeter of the second half of the 20th century, Freddie Hubbard, and then this week discover that another musical pioneer with qualities opposite those of Hubbard's has died as well, guitarist Ron Asheton of The Stooges. Hubbard was a virtuoso force of nature, to engage in an abrupt use of cliche, a technical wizard who had, additionally, the great gift of melodic invention that put his untouchable skills in the service of riveting improvisation. In the company of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Hubbard coaxed an infinite number of dialogues and moods from his instrument, and he could place in the center of the emotional core of extemporized outings--the virtuosity made you feel alive , with emotions you forgot you had.It might sound too high hat, but metaphor aside, the Stooges were an alternative all the same to the pat bohemianism of the counter-culture;Rolling Stone and other hip capitalist media convinced America that there was a consensus among those of us in the "youth culture" and that all of us rock and roll fans were docile and enlightened, ergo harmless. The Stooges , along with the MC5 , showed everyone what was under the rock, a festering mess of violence, irrationality, youthful impatience. Sooner or later the lie had to be given to the hype about the Sixties and it was fitting that Ron Ashton's guitar work, a cranky machine of attitude, served as the battering ram against the edifice.

Ron Asheton, though, was of a different sort, a merely adequate electric guitarist who harnessed a narrower array of moods, attitudes, those being, I think, anger, diffidence, defiance, indifference to authority, characterized by a grainy, fuzzy, brashly fumbled yet heavily set of major and minor guitar chords. If Dave Davies of the Kinks invented the power chord with "You Really Got Me", Asheton reduced the formula to an even more primeval essence, his guitar work droning, groaning, distorting , aggravating and lumbering a set of teenage attitudes that crystallized the state of being inarticulate with a mind flooded with sensations and drives that had no experience nor wisdom to grant the spectre of coherence. He was the perfect foil for Iggy Pop, rock and roll's master of the throwaway lyric and the over driven ego; Asheton's primitivism had the gravity of a great boulder teetering precariously on a high cliff, finally sliding off with a crash, gaining momentum and mass as the huge rock approaches the bottom of the canyon; whatever was at the canyon floor was about to be smashed. Asheton made it clear on Stooges tune "No Fun", "1969" , "Search and Destroy", "Gimmee Danger" that whatever bad mood and impatient being lay at the center lay at the heart of Pop's lyrics wound up in the barbed wire snarl of his bleeding fuzztone and wah-wah pedal. Ron Asheton, an American rock and roll genius, one of the most influential fretsters of our time. Thank you, sir, and rock on.

Freddie Hubbard, RIP

I had the good fortune of seeing the recently passed away jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard several times when he played San Diego, most memorably in the Seventies when he played at the Catamaran Hotel. At the time Hubbard had made a switch from the straight ahead style on which his considerable reputation was made to a more commercial, funk and fusion approach, heavy on back beats, simple melodies, with a minimum of improvisation, and this was the material he concentrated on for the first hour of his show. Technically impressive, I remembered thinking , and I leaned over to my date and said that I thought it was a shame he was performing the recent radio-friendly hits that had brought Hubbard's name to a broader,non-jazz audience. It was as though Hubbard had heard me, for as yet another anemic ballad finished, he turned to the rhythm section and began an uptempo count and BAM! the group snapped into a head-twisting bop.
Hubbard, who was an imposing figure on stage and had a build that reminded me of a fast, hungry boxer, blew the finest trumpet solo I'd ever heard, a brilliant, fast, blinding succession of lines that skittered, danced and pirouetted in configurations that seemed alive, serpentine. For the rest of the night Hubbard was in command of his trumpet, the strong , bell like clarity of his tone and the sense of fast-witted sass and unexpected delicacy on the slower numbers continually surprising a crowd that, perhaps attracted to the gig by commercial records geared for popular acceptance, quite possibly had no idea that they were coming to see the best jazz trumpet player of his generation.

Hubbard, like many great musicians, made some dubious style choices, and was, at times, a pain in the ass, as I learned when he had a week long engagement in the eighties at the Summer House Inn's jazz club Elario's, where I worked as a reservationist. Hubbard stayed in the hotel during his gig, and was, shall we say, difficult in temperament. I answered the in house phone at the front desk one afternoon and it was Hubbard calling from his room, asking the bellman to bring up a pack of Marlboros; I decided to bring him the smokes myself, seeing a chance to actually meet a musician I admired. I knocked on the door of his room, which opened with a jolt, and saw Hubbard standing there, in his underwear and t-shirt.He tilted his head and looked at me through squinting eyes.

"Marlboros" I said, and handed the pack over to him.He took the pack and shuffled around a bit, an awkward moment. "If you need anything else, just give us a call at the Front Desk" is what I said. Hubbard said something and closed the door. The following morning I spent most of the afternoon answering phone calls from customers who'd come to see Hubbard perform at the restaurant; it seems he got into an argument with the pianist on the band stand between tunes and fired him on the spot, adding a gratuitous remark about the size of his personal business.

Let's say here that Freddie Hubbard was the greatest trumpet player of my lifetime and that what I concentrate on are those records where there seems to be no disputing the fact, Red Clay, Outposts, Body and Soul, Hub Tones. The composer of the classic "Red Clay" had clay feet it seems, but when all is said and done it is the work great artists that lives on, not the foibles and contradictions. Freddie Hubbard,thank you. Thank you very much.

Buddy Miles, RIP

I was sorry to see that drummer Buddy Miles, best known for his work with Mike Bloomfield's Electric Flag and for Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies from the faraway 60s, has passed away due to apparent heart disease. The odd thing was that even with playing with the likes of John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck, Wilson Pickett as well as Hendrix and Bloomfield, Miles got little respect as a musician, often being derided as a monotonous timekeeper who's straightforward, rock solid drumming were a drag on the greater musicians who opted to play with him. It was a bad rap and Miles deserved better. He certainly did better on disc than his detractors claimed. His drum work on John McLaughlin's landmark Devotion album, a seminal session of pulverizing jazz-rock riffing and fret scraping, is sharp, hard and bracing in sound, uncompromising as a project that was bringing jazz-fusion, as a form, into a viable mode of hard-luck ad-libbing, an application of an eight- to- the-bar tempo with chitlin circuit rim shots anchoring the explorations of others who were catering the shotgun wedding of jazz and rock. It's a great, sharply textured album, wonderfully refreshing and alive with the spunk soloing, quite distinct from the muzaky malarkey the music later turned into. It's been said that the initial release of the live Band of Gypsies contains some of the most inspired, impressionistic and brilliantly fluid guitar work Jimi Hendrix ever recorded, to which I would agree, and to which I'd add further that Buddy Miles steady, consistent , hard charging drum work deserves much of the credit. The generally favored Hendrix drummer, Mitch Mitchell, had jazz chops, sure, but the truth is that what he, Hendrix and bassist Noel Redding did on stage was flail about, out of key and erratic in tempo and transitions; the task of waiting for those moments when Hendrix "took off" and gave us one of those pockets of genius amid the miscues, the bad notes and feedback often was more work than it was worth. The Band of Gypsies was a steadier thing, a firmer base for Hendrix to improvise over; as Hendrix died young, we'll never know if he'd improve his technique and advance on to playing with drummers like Tony Williams or Elvin Jones, but for the moment all the graces Hendrix had--original sound, emotion, a mastery of volume--fell into place when he had Buddy Miles as his backbone. Buddy Miles did good Thanks, friend.

Oscar Peterson

Oscar Peterson, possibly the chief jazz piano virtuoso , has died. No one I've ever heard surpassed either his speed or his technical mastery of the ivories, and he was one of the handful of thuderclap virtuosos who's solos were continuous streams of melodic invention. His was an immense talent in service to musicality; his improvisations were so well developed that one might say that Peterson composed music each time he performed. One of my favorite jazz reissues is a disc called Face to Face which features Peterson with an group of improvising elite, including Freddie Hubbard and Joe Pass. It's a furious and magical blow out, with a long and faniful lacings and ribbon like sorties managing to leave me breathless each time I play it. Peterson, to be sure, led the way through the mad accelerations and fevered playing, the sparkle of his dancing cascades evoking jubilation.Thank you, Oscar.

NORMAN MAILER IS DEAD

The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.
--Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself

The irony of it all, I guess, is that Mailer can be said to tread on the Noble Savage sentiment, but what he asserts in both "White Negro" and "The Faith of Graffiti" is there is a need, nay, a requirement for self-definition among those who are denied the means to do so for reasons of race, gender, economics, and that the form these taggers have taken is a way of making something that resonates. What he argues , essentially, is that the impulse, inspiration and discipline of committing yourself to unsullied artistic expression is the same , whether it happens to be in European salons, Soho Art Galleries, Museum Walls, or on the side of a Brooklin water tower; he rejects art as the domain of the white culture the final aim of which is a fat commission and corporate sponsorship and college courses and brings it again to something that is human in it's dimension. As it regards black American culture, the likes of Amiri Baraka, Cornel West and Eric Michael Dyson would find quite a bit to agree with about Mailer's treatise. Urban culture is now the stuff of dissertations , has been codified as an aesthetic with it's own critical parlance, and is now a legitimate part of the larger cultural landscape of America, and Graffiti, like it or not, is an essential element of this mid 20th century development. Mailer was the first one to write seriously , on his own terms , about this. One can argue with Mailer's tone, his arch style and his interest in neo-prmitivism, but I think his interest in the young men he interviewed and spent weeks with as a writer was honest and his ideas about their work were sincere. In a forward to the book, he reveals that the title was given to him by an artist who was seriously injured from a steep fall that happened when he was tagging a structure from on high. He was talking about having faith in something, an ideal, that motivated you beyond your limits. I can only paraphrase, but it came down to him telling Mailer that the name of the book that would come out of this would be The Faith of Grafitti". Mailer recognized something amazing.

Arthur Lee

Arthur Lee, lead singer, guitarist, and principle songwriter for the seminal Sixties Los Angeles rock band Love, has passed away at the age of 61, succumbing to acute myeloid leukemia. It's impossible to understate the importance of Lee's work with Love during that critical time; in a time when it was the norm for white bands to adapt black American musical traditions, Lee, an African American, took on the guise of a “black hippie” and embraced English British rock in the guise of the Stones and the Beatles, and he wasn't above blending it with a surreal smattering of Middle of the Road vocal styling. As a vocalist, he was a unique and brilliantly transparent, alternating between a Mick Jagger glottal, semi-Delta moan and grunt, and the honey-toned tenor of Johnny Mathis. It was genius, intended or otherwise, that he would assimilate the influence of a British singer who made a career emulating black American soul singers, and a popular black singer who crooned without a trace of racial signifiers apart from the “good music” expectations desired by a broad, mostly white audience. This, combined with a sensibility that effortlessly fused hard rock, folk, classical and jazz, and sweetly odd and dreamy psychedelic lyrics, and we have a genius that though short-lived inspired a generation or two beyond. Forever Changes, Love's third album, is considered by many to being the best American response to the Beatles' bar-raising disc Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. As is too often the case, Lee's is a case where the great creative period was short-lived; drugs, jail, eccentricity and erratic behavior prevented him from regaining the heights he reached with Forever Changes. There are very, very few rockers, though, who have the bragging rights to being the creator of such a masterpiece. Rock on, Arthur.

Syd Barrett: shine on

Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd and probable acid casualty, died this past week, age 60. Although his tenure with the band was brief, very brief, it's a legacy that cannot be dismissed,nor one that we can afford to forget. Syd Barrett did one thing very brilliantly in his musical career, which was co-founding Pink Floyd and being the central creative for their debut album, The Piper at the Gate of Dawn. Usually someone who starts off bright star and budding genius who flames out early is consigned to the ain't-it-a-shame file and only recalled in diminishing rounds of generational recollection, but Barrett's name has remained constant in discussions of Pink Floyd's career in the years since his deterioration and departure from the band. Although Roger Waters, Gilmour et al found their own voice and peculiar sense of combining experimentation with mainstream expectation, Barrett's influence on the unit was never transcended, forgotten or obscured; it's more like the ground breaking work Barrett did in the short time at the band's start was rather refined, expanded, nuanced and tweaked in subtle, often sublimely achieved ways. Although it doubtlessly gores Roger Waters' ego to confront this, but the Barrett imprint on Pink Floyd was never erased. Water's claim to greatness is that he had taken Barrett's diffuse template and personalized it into a cryptic, caustic world view, just as the band maintained the blurred eclecticism and make music that was individually achieved yet contiguous with Barrett's briefly realized genius. Barrett may have been a one short wonder, but the bullet he fired went far and pierced many layers of armored conservative sensibility with regards to music. His achievement for such a short productive time casts a longer shadow than a few dozen others who've had decades to make music.