KEEP YOUR GROOVE ON

Mac Gollehon and the Hispanic Mechanics
(True Groove Records)

Miles Davis has referred to trumpeter Mack Gollehon as “Mister Chops”, a fitting sobriquet for the versatile trumpeter who’s lent his skills to the work of David Bowie, Duran Duran and Blondie and a broad range of others, a man in command of his instrument, an agile, fleet improviser who finds the groove, expands it, makes it memorable.The ever searching Gollehon has commenced into the rich and rhythmically propulsive music of Latin EDM and House Music on is new release Mac Gollehon and the Hispanic Mechanics.

 Bright, blaring, buoyant, emotionally cathartic, ensemble establishes a stellar set of cross currents in what seems as astonishingly rapid conversations , calls and responses, points and counter points of percussion, piano, horns and a steadfast chorus of singers chiming through the dancing propulsive.Gollehon is a master of tone alternating between sounds reminiscent of the muted grace of Miles, the fat and scalar runs of Freddie Hubbard, to the twisting high notes of Maynard Ferguson, his riffs jabbing playfully at the intersecting grooves, short bursts of notes riding the swells and washes of drum and bass foundations and the kinetic activity of the trumpet and trombone (also played by Gollehon) to provide bursts, blasts, melodic outlines and searing ostinato pointillism. Gollehon alternates between staccato, where each sharp note is distinct from the other, and legato, a smoother, more flowing approach to the scales.

 The band, especially in the crazy activity of bassist Mike Griot and percussionists Miguel Valdez, Baba Don, Ronnie Roc establish a tight, pulsating weave of beats and vibes, accelerated and toned down as mood requires, a superb canvas of commotion for Gollehon to work his magic upon. My one complaint, if you could call it that, is the lack of any extended solos from the trumpeter. An artist who’s been widely praised for his skill to ad lib compelling solos that precisely fits the musical frame work he’s working in, a hot-footed sortie, an lyrical chorus or three of sublimely timed notes, riding the crest of these rich waves of sound, would have been the icing on the cake.Though jazzy in a large measure, this isn’t a jazz record but rather one intended to get the listener to arise and dance in the middle of whatever room they happened to be sitting, to sing along even though they might not speak Spanish, this is music meant to put the listener in the center of his or her being, in the present tense, past and future banished for the time being, so the syncopated joy can commence and rule the hour. This is Mac Gollehon and the Hispanic Mechanic’s gift to you.

Iggy and things French

Iggy Pop is the man to go against expectations, especially in the sense that he hasn't yet died. For decades he was on the list as The Next Rock Star to Die, in the wake of Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and the lesser known musicians who've died young. Iggy's tale is as horrendous as it got for pop musicians, all sorts of bad habits and tough breaks visited him like spirits to a hard knocks convention, the culmination of such things usually being fatal, as in dead, as dead as a beef jerky, if not as tasty. Pop pulled out of the tailspin, though, cleaned up and, thanks in large part to the recently belated David Bowie, became, even more, the artist than he was before. An icon and proof that one can survive from the Edge and have the severe experience lend authenticity to the angry three chord bashing you perform in front of. His legacy is such that he could just about sing anything he chooses and have critics slobber over with foamy superlatives. Apres, his album of covers of French songs, is that bridge collapsing.It's an album worth skipping. It is his version of The Great American Songbook fad, where fade rock belters like Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, and Cyndi Lauper attempted to become "real singers" but offering piecemeal versions of very old tunes. The results varied wildly artist to artist; there were not enough interesting interpretations of old ballads and standards for it to be anything more than a fad, like the notion that Rock and Roll is an art form on a par with, say, professional wrestling. Iggy tackling French tunes just seems pretentious; Mr. Pop has an expressive range midway between a car alarm and a beluga impaled on a bendy straw. It is a voice best saved for the personal bits of self-defining rage that continue to be his genius. Everything else he might try is baloney by definition.

Gideon King &: City Blog: When fine musicians meet indifferent material

City Blog
Gideon King and City Blog

City Blog, the debut album from Gideon King and City Blog, is an admirable attempt to revive the fusion-jazz verve, funky-melodic improvisations and ethereal lyrics of the Steely Dan/Stanley Clarke/ Blow by Blow and Wired period, Jeff Beck. Great news for those listeners who lean toward instrumental chops guided by solidly arranged tunes, the kind of jamming that didn't forget the register jumping lessons of Coltrane of having each phase of a solo remain a fast but contiguous with the phrase before it and the one that would follow, and Ellington, you bet, who was the master of composing songs for select soloists (especially for his saxophonist Johnny Hodges) that highlighted a musician's instrumental personality. Effortless, layered, compositional nuance and transcendent and inspired ad lib from the soloists elaborating on the foundations. City Blog, though, is a mixed bag, a situation where technically and at times riveting demonstrations of technique gets snared by the tepid go of substandard songs. 

The problem isn't the skill of the musicians , who have a collective resumes that includes stints with Herbie Hancock, Steely Dan, John Scofield and many other notables. City Blog's pedigree is impressive and solo with seamless fury end to end, especially in the guitar work of Gideon King. What he offers here is work that seems to announce the next Guitar Hero; maintaining this acknowledged debt to Steely Dan as an influence, his tone is snaking and sleek, slow to build over the suspended chords with unexpected twists and inversions, consistently constructing solos from brief initial statements to middle sections that provide exhilarating crescendos, fast, precise, stinging, and skillfully tapering off artfully, returning to the main themes. Same for keyboardist Kevin Hays, a versatile member who cross-references funk, bebop, the angular logic of Monk and the sweetly insinuating  vibe of Stevie Wonder; he's adroit, imaginative, full of surprise, a musician who thinks fast on his feet, in a manner of speaking.

The material, though, isn't as impressive as it should be. Where the kind of fusion jazz this band seems to be trying to revive would, generally throw off the tasteful ballads and tone poems and kick an album or a live gig up a few notches and allow the soloists to rage at accelerated tempos over tricky changes, City Blog's material remains long in the middle area where pace is groovy and casual at first, but after several iterations becomes repetitive singsong. You get the feeling of being the last bit of cola being swished side to side in the can, at a mechanical , mind-numbing consistency.  Also , the material lacks graspable hooks, those musical figures that catch your ear and lure through a great song's melodic invention and the musician's contribution to the whole. This is a matter of having the band member skills framed , a context challenging already skilled players to do even better work. The music here too often becomes a meandering fog , with tones, textures, and hints of other styles failing to achieve cohesion. This is less a collection of original songs than it is a style sampler with the incidental benefit of skilled extemporizing. I appreciate the idea, as well, of bringing a day when it seemed that music could change the world for the better with a collective consensus that good vibes, peace, and love can be achieved through songs that carry a message of dreamy utopianism. This is for old hippies , though, and the music of Steely Dan, however seductive and serene in its exotic otherness, had a poetic cynicism , an Imagist take on the world that dealt with the dilemma of human expectations, whether material or spiritual, coming into conflict with a reality that always harshed any dreamer's billowing mellowness.  City Blog takes a different lyrical tact , which is understandable, but its unfortunate well-worn tropes were the alternative to Dan's crafted poetics.

For those looking for solid solos, chops, fleet and frantic improvisations that generate a good amount of heat, there is more than enough to satisfy here. For the rest, it's a drag, exceptional talent gets weighted by songs that don't leave a lasting impression. I am singing riffs from the instrumental bridges, not the hooks from the songs, and that is only half the pleasure I would have preferred received. 

The depressed genius of The Lost Poets

Insubordia Pt  ll
The Lost Poets

Depression is a art form, gloom is a high stakes gamble on a dour vision of the future, personal and collective, sadness and despair are the nerves of the human body on fire with every extreme expression of each otherwise contained emotion streaming like an electric current , from the base of the brain stem to the very most reaches of the gut. It is less a matter of being in a bad mood or being merely somewhat blue until the sun arises again in the morning; it is a statement of being in the odd, cold and emotionless real world that is as constant and proceeding ahead in its vaguely guided direction. It is that state of being when each of understands at last that our philosophies and certainty about the nature of Things are of no use when you're without friends or employment or a lover to make the world makes sense and that the existence we thought we could conquer with wit and good looks will not give us a reprieve to its ongoing purpose of just proceeding ahead and forcing circumstances on all of us.

Teenage angst, Nordic despair, existential crisis , call it what you will, but underbelly of the soul, that part of the self where it's always a sleepless 3AM, is an alluring quality, particularly in rock and  roll. Whether the speed freak  zen of the Velvet Underground, the post-apocalyptic ejaculations of Doors visionary Jim Morrison, or the more recent moody, mumbled and lumbering guitar gloom of Tool, it's a powerful stance for musicians and poetry -included lyricists. Distorted guitars, drumming and bass playing underpinning a bellowed and lower registers that struggles to climb to the top of the noise and , metaphorically, rise above the dark  for rays of an unobscured sun, this is the sound of the struggle to realize the pointlessness of trying to dream the world into perfection with abstraction and to change, to aspire for a life that is real, creative, authentic and vital to the attempt to change personal despair into passion. It is not a pretty picture, but when the self-pitying falls to the way side and the sound and words have impact as real, not mannered, it can be a beautifully thing . Damaged, loud, dented, demented, slightly insane, slightly broken,but real , human, beautiful all the same.

Damaged, grinding and tense are what the Lost Poets are, an anonymous duo from Sweden who bring us the mega-grunge behemoth Insubordia ll , an album of hard-scrabble guitar bashing, stalwart drums and tranced bass lines filtered and seasoned with ground glass. Not quite as anonymous as the legend they put forth, , the pair haven;t allowed their faces to be shown in publicity shots and names seem to be absent from the packaging, But atmospherics this grandly downbeat cannot go unacknowled, and we'll reveal the names as David Rosengren: (vocals, guitar),Petter Ossian Strömberg( drums, bass), production by Alex Holmberg, whose sound mix seems the audio equivalent of a Zack Snyder film, inspiring images on a massive steel-grey scale, nearly black and white.The interest in remaining unknown is intriguing and effective,as it enhances the grueling evocation of anomie  which is, to quote the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, "...  personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals." The album escalates the resonating chambers of rage and despair and conveys the soul wrestling with its demons night after sleepless night. 

"Danny Electro" is the lumbering example of someone thrashing during a bad case of night terrors, beginning with a down-tuned acoustic guitar and pushed, nudged and badgered forward by unadorned drumwork, exploding suddenly with a visceral, invigorating crash of low slung electric guitar, a primal, metallic , blues-tinged caterwaul . This is similar to the abject despair of Cobain and Nirvana's anthem "Smells Like Teen Spirit", as the persistently coarse vocal harmonies and constant  strum and drone of acoustic guitars is what music has evolved at this point in the 21st century, rock, not roll, the rock suggesting weight, not mobility. The only motion this sound suggests is being pushed into the earth,the crush of empty history. 

The effect is liberating despite the shoe-gazing and bedroom isolation atmospherics Insubordia ll offers up. I've listened to several times quite despite the gut feeling that music this depressed is contrived more a product of marketing decisions instead of the need to rid oneself of demons. This music is slow and deliberate, full of muted build up, choruses that are re-mindful of an off key church chorus intoning aprocraphyl Latin liturgies, lead singing alternately mumbled, as if emerging from self-medicated slumber and raging, howling, exposing the moment when the pain reaches its full expression and forces mind and nervous to demand relief from the grind. The wash of of distorted guitars, the sharp transitions between soft  to loud, was convincing, a corrosive evocation of the human condition where isolation seems the unchanging norm and the spiral descent seems an endless endurance.


This is the sound track of an industrial age when the machinery falls apart. This is the world where the unheeded youth of The Who's "My Generation"  realize that they need to rage harder, longer, bash the drum harder and grind the guitar sharper against the darkness that surrounds them. Insubordia ll isn't uplifting in the sense that it offers the greeting card salutations of hope and serenity, but it is compelling and exhilarating in an odd way as The Lost Poets wail, bray and scream against the  background of primal percussion and washes of marching chords and tell the audience that , yes,we hurt and we must make noise and get others to make noise as well and that perhaps if the sound is loud and mighty enough, the rock will roll over away from the caves we've sealed ourselves in and sunshine and fresher air and the noise of the world getting out of bed can greet us again. Not for the faint of personality, to be sure, but definitely for those who feel deeply and long, Insubordia ll is recommended.

"

Superman And The Damage Done | Birth.Movies.Death.

"Batman v Superman" is, for the moment, the most controversial movie ever made, with the internet seeming to bulge beyond its digital boundaries as critics and fans alternately debate, praise, degrade, defend and assault the film and the film maker, Zack Snyder. For the record, I enjoyed the movie immensely, seeing it consistent with the versions of Superman that have come before in the comic book source material. That is an article yet to be written by me. Another day, another year, perhaps.This book post , though, is an example of fans getting too attached to their child hood obsessions; this is somewhat like a Norman Rockwell toned reminisces of a perfect America that never existed. There is a yearning that the world they think they remember should not have changed and that matters have only gotten worse since they gained adult bodies and adult experience.

 Nostalgia is the ultimate buzz kill.  My take away from the blog article is that is still mourning for the Superman of his youth, which is pathetic on the face of it. Mark Hughes in the Forbes piece has the good sense to understand what Snyder is doing with the character and the wits to understand that this "updated" Superman is consistent with how the Man of Steel has been rendered in the comics over the decades. Interpretations of characters have to evolve, especially great and iconic characters , whether Superman, Hamlet or Otello; playing the Shakespeare card here seems a little cheesy, sure thing, but it's to make a point that what makes characters great over several decades or over several centuries is that they are adaptable to current temperaments.

 Plot elements and basic characteristics remain stable, but how characters like Superman, James Bond or Hamlet deal with their circumstances as extraordinary people among ordinary populations in crisis is the element that keeps them fresh. Superman is consistent in BvS with is comic book counter parts, but what Snyder depicts is the struggle with how to go about being a Super Hero; to quote Mick Jagger and pursue the Kal as Christ trope, Superman has his moments of doubt and pain, a man with great power whose first instinct is to help and do good facing grave unintended results and a backlash against his presence . It's an idea borrowed from XMen,of course (but then again, XMen were borrowed from Doom Patrol) , but it's an applicable approach to conveying Superman as an active agent in a world . This is not the world of Curt Swan, a hero consigned to rescuing cats from trees and suffering exposures to promiscuous varieties of Kryptonite, this is a Big Blue with the classic existential crisis, a man emerging from self doubt and ambiguity taking action against a threats and menace. this'

Zack Snyder: choosing brilliance over coherence

Well, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is getting slammed by the majority of film critics so far, although the complaints about the Zack Snyder directed film--choppy, slow, a mangled storyline, grandiosity, too grim and dark--are not really things that would keep away from the film. Admittedly I've been a Snyder fan since seeing  300, his sword-and-sandals hit, and I've even been a defender of his much maligned riot grrll slug fest Sucker Punch. Plainly, ZS is one of those directors who has a visual style so commanding and brilliantly mounted , film to film, that style literally trumps substance in a very big way. In the case of Sucker Punch , which has a plot line that is easily explained-- an orphan teen girl is consigned to an orphanage where evil management markets them as nubile prostitutes to flabby white men with money and big cigars, and who's protagonist is able to enter another realm altogether by performing provocative dances --but is impossibly muddled in the movie's presentation, Snyder's bravura visuals, honed in comic book action panels, keep the film from being a waste. 

There is evidence of genius in how this man puts together his set pieces, scenes so amazingly executed, CGI and all, that we may have to reconsider what it is we mean when we use the term "masterpiece". Toward that consideration, let me say that I've seen Sucker Punch in it's entirety four additional times since seeing it in the theaters, and have watched large chunks of it on the premium cable channels while staying up beyond my bed time. Yes,the movie is incoherent, but I've seen it several times and I've more than one spirited (and surprisingly lucid) defenses of the film against those determined to make an audience think that Snyder is incompetent. My revisionist take on the auteur theory would advise that Zack Snyder is the Fellini of the Digital Age, a master of crushing spectacle more intrigued a a vivid since of the world, a world beset by seers, odd gods, super heroes and villains, guns, swords, collapsing skyscrapers and splendid evocations of steam punk contrasted against futuristic gleam; his vision over takes all, and his narrative style, at times, fails the visuals under way. It's like trying to find the exact words to describe the best or worst dream you've ever had. In any event, I suspect I 'll find BvS:DoJ entertaining, maybe even evidence of more divisive genius. Or maybe this will the Snyder where I find his maneuvers predictable and tattered in the over use. I will report what I find soon enough.

Sonny Stitt , a wonderful jazz saxophonist

 In the seventies, while a young man appropriately bored with the slamming two-dimensional dynamics of late-period jazz-rock (which had morphed into a stylized arena of tick-rock riffing termed "fusion" that was monotony incarnate), I ventured forth into older jazz forms, bop, swing, big and, Ellington, Davis, Mingus, people who swung over unpredictable tempos and fantastic chords. It was a love affair that hasn't stopped yet. Curiously, though, I formed jazzbo attitudes about artists I hadn't heard, a phenomenon not uncommon among some of us desperate for a hip reputation. You followed the herd-thinking. What I heard was that alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt was nothing but a low down Charlie Parker imitator, technically adept and adroit in extemporizing over a 6/8 time breakdown of a popular tune, but he was a technician only, without a soul. I went with that for years and dug into my Miles Davis phase, binging over a the late eighties and nineties on as Much MD as I could afford, everything from what he'd done as a sideman with Bird and through his various labels as band leader, from the hard bop session he'd done, through the modal experiments and into the blistering jazz-rock he created., noting, as well, the history of his saxophone players, a fine fettle of reed geniuses: George Coleman, Cannonball Adderley, Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Dave Leibman. Nothing but the best for Miles. I was one of those who scoured the used CD bins, looking for my preferred artists and one day, lo! I came across a record titled "Walkin': A Jazz Hour With Miles Davis" on released on the now-defunct economy label Laserlight.

 Featuring a previously unavailable live performance in Stockholm in 1952, this was not the classic earlier studio album "Walkin'" (one of MD's many masterpieces), but so what, it was Davis live and on sale. Reading the personal, all seemed worth the purchase despite the misdirection of the title, as it highlighted, worthies like pianist Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers on drums, Jimmy Cobb on drums, on saxophone...Sonny Stitt?? The plagiarist, the rip off artist, the Parker wannabe? The man I relegated to the minor leagues without endeavoring to hear what he played like? With Miles? This wasn't so earth-shaking a revelation as I might want to make it sound and, of course, I didn't ask myself that sequence of disbelieving questions presented in incomplete sentences. I was curious and bought the record. I was more than pleasantly pleased with the hard bop brilliance of the band--Miles Davis of this period is essentially flawless as he applies to his muted, modulated, middle register approach to the hard-charging changes this fine band challenges him with--and came to the conclusion that Sonny Stiff had been given the short shrift as a musician. 

The resemblance to Parker is there, undeniable, and it's understandable how jazz snobs of the time, wanting to consecrate jazz as America's art music in opposition to the tradition of European classicism and establish both canon and criteria for our best gift to the world, would deride particular players, diminish them in stature without fair estimation in an effort to create standards for an emerging aesthetics. Understandable and unfair, because what I discovered was a musician of envious fluidity and lyric invention within his scope as an improviser who could negotiate steeple-chase tempos and obstacle course chord progressions with precision and yet never, or at least rarely lose a song's melodic nuance ; for all the high-velocity bravura bop-related jazz musicians are known for, Stitt had a ribbon-like, sweetly undulating method of teasing notes and shading their sounded presence with variations within the pitch, a legacy from the blues that maintains a vocal quality, a sharp note of surprise as the solo unfolds. 

 Stitt, in any regard, was not a soulless technician. Whatever debt he owed to Charlie Parker is nearly besides the point; the style is something Stitt took possession and made it his means to express something that, in itself, was beyond race, economics and the general ugliness mere existence weights us with; it is simply beautiful and exciting music made by a musician who deserves to be reexamined for his best recorded moments. Life itself does not get rosy, as a unified condition of creation that maintains a just and serene equilibrium merely because a black musician could make beautiful music with a saxophone. Whatever his whole story, Sonny Stitt remained black and a male and, above all, only human when it came to the combined forces of human stupidity, judgment and physical gravity pitted against his too-too vulnerable flesh. He made his music, found some solace for those moments during and after the notes played, and then returned to the eternal struggle of being in the world, dragging our burdens, sometimes easily, sometimes slowly, dirthfully, always toward the grave. But the magic a person can make with imagination, skill, a mind that wants something better than the weight of weather and wealth grinding them into the ground, well, I believe, that much makes life worth living and worth going back. We have the capacity to make this life of ours a better one, if only by the smallest increments, a little at a time, and , let us not forget, we can make the lives of each other better, even if only slightly.