100 Greats in 100 Days #046: Toots and the Maytals: Funky Kingston/In the Dark

I live in a pretty fuckin’ conservative place.

Any political, social, gender, or musical sub-community is pretty much underground. In a way, living here is a little like living in small-town Massachusetts in the 1970s, in which towns you were quite conscious that you were part of a small minority of people interested in questioning the status quo. Around here, in the 21^st century, people still make small-talk with new arrivals by asking “Have you found a church home?”, and then ignoring any polite evasions. In the most extreme cases, if evasion proves impossible and you say you’re not a believer, the response is “Well, hon, I’ll pray for you”—which can sound a lot more venomous than it reads.

On the other hand, the local socio-/eco-system does make you appreciate the occasional wisp of a more progressive (hell, a more moderate) mindset. Dharmonia and I live in the only neighborhood that’s walking distance to a grocery store, our jobs, or a coffee-shop. Thank God that coffee-shop is the local hippie/alternative hangout (blogging from there right now, in fact). And thank God that the owners manifest that other quality that’s ubiquitous in this town, curiously enough: an impeccable taste for music (the only place I’ve been better treated, as a musician, than right here, is the west of Ireland).

So when you walk into the local coffee-shop and the great Toots Hibbert is singing Funky Kingston, it can really take you back…

In most of the music I care about, what makes a great singer is soul, or at least the appearance of it. In gospel, blues, r&b, rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, it’s about the singer being able to find the space where the spirit comes through. Because the music itself is a mechanism: a finely-designed, highly-evolved tool for creating spiritual ecstasy. So questions about whether the singer “means it” or “doesn’t really mean it” are, ultimately, beside the point. Because the singer can be a misogynist sociopath, or a raving cokehead, or a delusional Bible-thumper, or a satyriacal maniac, before the show starts. But when the lights come up, and the rhythm section hits the groove, and the background singers take up the call-and-response, the singer is supposed to be transported—out of the everyday, the ordinary, the prosaic, sinful and “worldly”—and is supposed to take the audience along.

That’s why some of the greatest, most soulful singers are at their strongest with the simplest, most straightforward, sometimes even banal material—because there is nothing in the song itself to get in the way, and the song itself is just a vehicle for transport. The greatest gospel and soul songwriters have been those who understood the song as a vehicle, as a recipe, as a simple mechanism for catalyzing the performance.

This is why the greatest, most soulful singers can still inhabit songs they sung hundreds, or thousands, of times before—which they usually wind up having to do to satisfy the audience’s hunger for the “classic hits.” This is why BB can still create a sense of great histrionic passion in Sweet Little Sixteen and Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops (still the greatest of all the Motown singers, subject of a future “100 Greats” post) can still pull off apocalyptic intensity of Reach Out I’ll Be There.

It’s also what the ragged kids in the Trench Town ghetto of Kingston Jamaica heard coming through the crackly broadcasts of the giant fifty- and hundred-thousand-watt stations of WDIA in Memphis (the “Mother Station of the Negroes”), XERA/XERF in Ciudad Acuna (a “border blaster” station across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, TX--where I spent a night in jail one time), and WSM in Nashville, home of the Opry. With FCC limitations on station wattage still a figment of the future’s imagination, these competing stations built bigger and bigger amplifiers, trying to blanket out each other’s frequencies—and not coincidentally cranking out signals that could be heard in Greenland, Vancouver, Havana…and Kingston.

They damned sure heard that music—the music aimed at working-class blacks and whites in the American South—in the hills of the Cockpit Country in north-western Jamaica. A stunningly-beautiful but virtually-unexploitable terrain of steep mountains, semi-tropical jungle, fast-running rivers, and astonishing fertility, the Cockpit Country had been the place to which, for 250 years, escaped slaves had fled. As was the case with blacks in the American South, Africans brought to Jamaica fled often; in contrast to the situation obtaining in most parts of the South, they were often successful. It was hard to hide in the Mississippi Delta or the Arkansas foothills, but upland Jamaica was a landscape into which escapees could easily vanish, sometimes before they had ever been transported to a plantation or sometimes even escaping from the slave ships themselves. And they went up into the hills, taking knowledge with them, and they settled in the steep valleys, and an entire culture grew up, taking in African, Native American, and European folkways and beliefs. You could grow almost anything there (fruit, vegetables, the fowl and pigs they knew from Africa, spices, sugar, and ganja) but you couldn’t hardly farm anything there: it was too hilly, too jungly, just too damned far away from “civilization.”

These were the Maroons, who, under different names but in similar situations in Jamaica, Cuba, Bahia, or the Georgia Sea Islands, retained the strongest ties to African culture and folkways—and much more strongly than in the far more repressive American South. Toussaint l’Ouverture, the heroic liberator of Haiti, was a Maroon; so (according to some people) are the Neville Brothers.

Bob Marley came out of the high hills. So did Bunny Wailer, and Peter Tosh, and hundreds of other would-be stars who left the hills and came to the capitol (really the only) city of Kingston, seeking to make their fortune. There’s a beautiful, evocative, and very sad portrait of this migration—of the semi-paradise they left behind, the reasons for their leaving, and the starkness of the life they faced in the Trench Town slums—in Michael Thelwell’s magnificent novel The Harder They Come, a “re-imagining” of the story upon which the film (see “100 Greats” #1) was based.

But Trench Town—like Harlem, and Cairo, and the 13^th Ward of New Orleans, and the South Side of Chicago—was a fantastically creative place, because here you had all these people, from all over the island and a range of family backgrounds, living cheek-by-jowl in shanties and listening to the fantastic wealth of popular music beamed from the US and pirated, copied, and imitated by Jamaican DJ’s and, especially, by singers.

Every kind of musician came out of Trench Town: the great guitarist Ernest Ranglin, the guitar and harmony teacher Joe Higgs, the self-taught horn players of the Studio 1 band (who single-handedly invented ska), the great rhythm section of Sly Dunbar/Robbie Shakespeare. But preeminently what Trench Town produced was singers—particularly in the classic gospel/doo-wop/soul trio of baritone/tenor/high tenor. You didn’t need instruments, you didn’t need technique, you didn’t need backing musicians—just as in New York doo-wop, it was something you could develop and perfect with two or three friends on the corner—or in “the Yard” in Trench Town (No Woman No Cry: “I remember, when we used to sit/In the government yard, in Trench Town”). That was the cradle of harmony groups like the Wailers (respectively Peter/Bob/Bunny), of the Gladiators, the Mighty Diamonds, the wonderful Pioneers, and of Toots Hibbert and the Maytals.

Bob’s story for another day. Here’s my story about Toots:

Reggae was big in Bloomington, more via the visits of touring bands than residents (pretty lily-white community), because the college crowd loved to go out to the venerable biker dive, smoke weed, and pretend to be Irie. They were of the same ilk as the fraternity pigs who loved to blast Bob out the windows of their $350,000-dollar chapter houses and out the bass bins of their $40,000-dollar Cherokees. Those boyos would have lasted about 20 minutes in Trench Town.

But there were also people in the community who had been long-term reggae heads—who had traveled to Sunsplash, who followed the bands every summer, and tried to lead an Irie lifestyle. One such was Norman Turner, who I met through the bass player in a legend-in-their- own-minds 80s power trio called “Rods and Cones.” I can’t remember the bass player’s name (Bob?), but Norman was a sweet and kind man, an Ital man, and a fine reggae drummer. I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, when Norman needed a guitar player for a pickup band he was putting together to open for Toots and the Maytals here (make no mistake about it: it was a dump—and the “.ws” domain on the website is a hilarious coincidence, considering the former owner’s proclivities). Anyway, it was a dump—but Toots’s intensity and joy in life could sanctify a worse dump than this.

There’s a beautiful clarity and sincerity that shines through in early reggae; that’s close to the roots in Trench Town and gospel, to the early spirit of the mountain communities and their Pocomania services. Even in the dank subterranean confines of the rock ‘n’ roll nightclub circuit to which Toots was consigned in the ‘90s, that came through.

Our part of the gig? Pretty straightforward. Toots’ part? Absolutely earth-shattering. I almost can’t talk about that show, because I was so spellbound by what happened when Toots, Raleigh Gordon and Jerry McCarthy, hit the stage. We played the music pretty good in opening the show, but I think only Norman understood what we were up against. The Maytals hadn’t been reunited that long, but they were singing from where they lived all the time. It was a fantastic experience—“like church”, Duane Allman would have said. I was lucky to be there, much less to open the show.

He’s another one of those singers who understands that, simply put, his stock-in-trade is transport: the saintly joy of gospel or the decidedly earthly joy of dancehall. As I said, he can sanctify the grungiest situations or the most trite songs—on this set, for example, he gives us Louie, Louie and Take Me Home Country Roads, both of which performances are absolutely staggering in their intensity, clarity, and sincerity. Like

This disc is an unbelievable value, collecting as it does the full contents of two of the best original Maytals records, and the Toots performances that dominated the Harder They Come soundtrack, the LP that introduced reggae on the world stage, Pressure Drop among them. He covers Bob (Redemption Song, cited above), Ike Turner (I Can’t Believe) and Little Willie John (Fever), giving all three a run for their money, and provides some fantastic originals of his own, including Pomp and Pride (there’s that gospel imprint rearing its influence again) and Time Tough.

Finally, there’s the Toots song that would go with me onto a desert island or into the grave, the jumping, heartbeat-rhythmed Funky Kingston, a virtual primer on how to play the “skank”, the chopping one-AND-two-AND-three-AND-four-AND guitar rhythm that defines reggae as opposed to its predecessors rock-steady and ska (and, did I mention that Toots invented the word “reggae”? See 1968’s Do the Reggay; talk about being there at the beginning!).

Toots called us back out on stage for the last tune of the set. I got to play guitar with the Maytals (quite an education) on that last tune—and it was Funky Kingston.

I have no words to describe what a privilege that was. All I can say is that, as ever, and over and over down the decades, the music opened doors of experience to me that would otherwise have been closed.

I thank the music, and Toots Hibbert, and JAH-Rastafari, for that.

Gerson on Chimpie's speechimacatin'

This one was too good to pass up:

Absent a script, Bush couldn’t get from a subject to a verb without breaking his ankle.

Chimpie has always achieved every "success", since freshman year, by doin' what the smart boys/upperclassmen/COO's/Vice-Prez have told him to do. He has never worried about whether he was making his own decisions. It would never occur to him that he's spent his life like a ventriloquist's dummy with Cheney's hand up his ass.

He's like Charlie McCarthy in a Brooks Brothers suit.

US gov forced UK discloser of plot for *political gain*

NBC: Hair-gel terrorists posed no risk last week

An anonymous "senior British senior British official knowledgeable about the [hair-gel bombers]" told NBC that there was no threat to airplanes last week, that the terrorists had been under surveillance for over a year, and that UK government didn't plan on arresting these guys until they'd surveilled them a while longer, but moved when they did because of US pressure.

The day after Lamont stomped Holy Joe Lieberman. There is simply no denying that to the Bush/Cheney White House, there is no greater priority than political gain.

These are "high crimes and misdemeanors." If the Repubs lose the House and/or Senate in November, there will be indictments.

100 Greats in 100 Days #045: The Who: The Kids Are Alright

I had some astonishing musical, artistic, and personal experiences at the old Brattle Street Theatre in Cambridge, Mass (old New Englanders pronounce it “Mass”; we don’t need no stinkin’ USPO abbreviations!). I saw Hendrix for the first time, in the fantastic Jimi Hendrix film (see “100 Greats” #31), saw most of my favorite (though not my first) Zatoichi films, saw My Dinner with Andre with a dear old friend. It was a tiny (250-seat), dank place, with, as Kevin Murphy described it, seats only marginally more comfortable than fire hydrants. But their programming policy was (and is) absolutely fantastic: if you think that “underground” art functions best on a shoestring (not fuelled by cheddar and Chablis and Yuppies), then it might be the best art-house theatre in the country.

It’s also where we saw The Kids are Alright, Jeff Stein’s earthshaking biopic of the Who, in its original theatrical release. I’d been a Who fan for years (Live at Leeds was another one in the small-but-good collection I took to West Texas—the first time), and Dharmonia had been ever since My Generation (and saw the last Moon tour), but I’d never seen ‘em live.

I don’t think, even as a pretty-knowledgeable person by 1980, even as well as I already knew their music, even though I’d seen their fantastic sequence in the Woodstock film (about which more in a future “100 Greats” post)—I don’t think I was prepared for these guys. I knew the music was good (I fuckin’ loved Townsend’s writing), but I didn’t get just how overwhelming they were in concert. And not just in volume: Blue Cheer was louder, the Velvet Underground was much sludgier, Zeppelin was way more ice-pick trebly.

No, the Who were more like the aural equivalent of the immaculately dressed street-fightin’ Mods immortalized in Pete’s later Quadrophenia (and in their theme song, the amphetamine-stuttering I Can’t Explain): they were absolutely sharp, absolutely together, impeccably well-thought-out, and absolutely merciless. Whether it was an interview with teenybopping newspaper writers, where Roger would pick his nose; Pete would sneer (like Ian Anderson, Pete terrified writers because he was smarter than they were; unlike Anderson, he was also just as lacking in self-confidence as they were, which leveled the playing field); Entwhistle would sit stoic (or giggle at the others’ antics); and Moon would either clown, as manic as Spike Milligan, or take off his clothes.

But make no mistake about it: they were unmistakeably nuts (and cranked on meth, or grass, or acid, or brandy-and-soda, or, eventually, horse), but they were also the scariest fuckin’ band in rock ‘n’ roll—I can’t imagine how noodlers like the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane must have felt to have to follow a band as tight, as fierce, as virtuosic as the Who, and playing the absolutely sublime (the word is chosen advisedly) songs of Pete Townsend.

It was the intensity of four working-class yobbos (Roger was looking at a job as a sheet-metal worker)—or, OK, three working-class yobbos and an art-school student (Pete)—for whom this band, this music, these fans were the spark and the lifeline: the spark to a life bigger than Shepherd’s Bush, and a lifeline to a greater world.

I don’t think one could argue that Townsend is one of the greatest minds in rock ‘n’ roll—OK, also one of the biggest mouths in rock ‘n’ roll—on the sheer weight of the music. Pete’s daddy had been a big-band/swing-band leader during the war years (Pete was boarded with relatives during WWII, and there’s a dark story there, I think—the wicked child-molesting uncles that recur throughout the Townsend oeuvre are pretty deeply felt), and like every British schoolboy of any class he’d learned to sing harmony and counterpoint in the Anglican choirs, and he like the whole band went to school on the incomparable songwriting of what they called “Tamla/Motown” (Smokey, Barrett Strong, and the magnificent Lamont-Dozier-Holland), so he know how music could be put together, but he also had both the hubris and the astonishing conceptual breadth to think in larger forms. By comparison, the Stones wrote riffs (great ones—but riffs), the Beatles wrote pop songs (great ones—but pop songs—Sergeant Pepper is marvelously evocative, but it’s not a complete concept).

Townsend wrote operas. In fact, he wrote at least two (Tommy and Quadrophenia), and you could argue that might have written three (Lifehouse, whose songs formed the backbone of Who’s Next, was never released in complete conceptual form). Or two-and-a-half: A Quick One, though it’s only eleven minutes long, is a complete entity—a lovely little cantata: it even ends with a chorale (the aforementioned You Are Forgiven).

20 years before the mosh pit, Pete Townsend understood that what the rock ‘n’ roll audience was seeking was what he (who called himself “the ultimate fan”) himself was seeking: a sense of community, the kind of community he’d experienced dancing with the Mods at the Marquee in Shepherd’s Bush, before they ever made an LP; a sense of intensity and commitment (the film captures Pete’s magnificent response to an interview question regarding whether he thought he’d remain an angry young man: “naow, no’ a angry young man…more lahk a angry ol’ FAHRT, really…but not BOR-ing!”); even, we could argue, a sense of spiritual purpose: Pete grasped that rock ‘n’ roll could be a spiritual path. This set him up for all kinds of pompous (and angry) pronunciamentos—Townsend certainly cornered the market on the grand, failed gesture—but it also allowed him to actually find that path, in song after song; album after album; concert after concert; leap after leap.

Maybe that helps explain what held these four disparate and battling personalities together: their esprit de corps was about more even than their share of transcendent moments—partly because they sought them: Moon through excess, the Ox through acquisition, Roger through rage, Pete through religion. The astonishing thing is that, screaming arguments and fistfights, battles public and private, digression and internal mockery, they got there together.

It’s there in performance after performance in this film: no matter what arguments, fisticuffs, or dueling interviews preceded the gig, once they hit the stage it was the four of them together against the world: in the “See Me, Feel Me” sequence fro Tommy they were playing as the sun rose over the ragged tent city at Woodstock (as Pete said, “that was a gift, that was; I didn’t really feel we deserved that”); the magnificent instinctive-Tudor counterpoint “You are forgiven” at the climax of A Quick One on The Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus (a film worth acquiring only for the Who’s sequence, not for the Stones’ druggy posturing, and if only to see Pete use his massive schnoz to adjust a sagging microphone mid-performance); the thunderous version of Mose Allison’s Young Man Blues from the Live at Leeds era.

Most particularly and most unexpectedly: the climactic moment in The Kids Are Alright, when—old, worn, cynical beyond belief, chivvied back onto the sound stage for another run at a “definitive encore” by director Stein, they crash into Pete’s greatest song and their greatest record ever: Won’t Get Fooled Again, Pete’s anthem to corruption, transcendent music gives the lie to the wounded cynicism of the text. They lash through the opening, the ageless Daltrey running down all his classic spinning-the-microphone tricks (though R Plant took the shirtless-with-blond-ringlets look much further, and was a good six inches taller, there was no question that Rog took have taken Rob with one punch); the aging, paunchy, sweaty Moon, headphones strapped to his head in a vice-like harness, hammering out the 6-tom fills that he invented (and that Zappa later dubbed “Quaalude Thunder”);

and the lights go down and the lasers go up, fading to the synth tracks which Townsend had recorded in ’71 for Who’s Next and which are still the greatest synthesizer parts in the history of rock...

and Moon’s thunderous fills build to the climax...

and the Daltrey screams the ultimate Daltrey scream, and the lights come up,

and Townsend is in the air soaring across the stage, landing, knees oblivious, and skidding like the most balls-out figure-skater into the wings.

He staggers to his feet, the inimitable Townsend sneer in place, and it’s like the music—his own music, the music he made only with those three comrades—has done what it set out to do, one more time, to its most dedicated, and most disillusioned believer: he’s swept away, one last time, into the music and the dancing and the sense of pure rock ‘n’ roll community, which he, with those three comrades, had found in the nameless gigs at the Marquee and, more clearly, consistently, and courageously than any other ‘60s rocker (even Ray Davies, another courageous—but far more introspective—‘60s songwriter), had fought to bring to the stages of the world. That the promise of the '60s was sold out by the late '70s: we were “lied to” (to quote Johnny Rotten—about whom Townsend wrote another brilliant, rueful song, Who Are You?) wasn’t Pete’s fault—he always told the truth, as much as it was in him to do it.

It was their greatest, most hard-won, and most selfless moment of transcendence.

And it was their last: Moon died less than two months later—and the band that’s played since then, while a great band, isn’t the Who.

And that’s OK—they gave us enough. We should be grateful. Walking out of the Brattle in late 1979, I knew that, and I still believe it.

100 Greats in 100 Days #044: Spider John Koerner: Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Been

Pace Bob Zimmerman, the two greatest folkies I ever met out of Minnesota were Spider John Koerner and Dean Magraw—both guitarists, both virtuosi, both fantastically original roots stylists, and both of them more-or-less madmen—John sardonic and Dean manic. I got to know Dean’s playing (an absolutely superhuman amalgam of Norman Blake, McCoy Tyner, and Charlie Parker) at the old Guitar Workshop on Boylston Street, where he was part of a legendary faculty that also included Dharmonia, Larry “Guitar,” Mike Bierylo, Little Mikey Bevan, and Scott Samenfeld, and at the Idler just out of Harvard Square, a fantastic basement club whose back room preserved the hippest, funkiest, and least precious remnants of the Cambridge Folk Scare: low ceilings, skullbuster beams, sexy-but-indifferent waitresses, cheap beer, and a booking policy that would bring in only the hippest people and let them do whatever they wanted (more about the Idler here and in an upcoming “Music Houses” post).

But I got to know John’s playing at Bob Franke’s Saturday Night in Marblehead, another ‘60s remnant that he had founded around 1974 in a church parish hall in my own home town. I already knew the coffeehouse scene, because the Me and Thee Coffeehouse, also in my home town (and still running strong after 1000 performances) was a place I come to frequent. I didn’t like all the performers—even at the age of 13 I could tell there was some sanctimony in that community—but it was a place where a disaffected junior-high-schooler could hang out and wash dishes on a Friday night.

Bob’s SNM was similar, but different. It was attached to another Episcopal community, but of the “we’re middle-class liberals who supported Dr King” variety rather than the “we’re Anglophiles who’ll employ as many smells-and-bells as we can get away with” variety. So there was a stronger social-justice/building community element to SNM. And Franke, whatever else you say, as a musician himself had impeccable musical taste, so the roster of artists was overwhelmingly great (FE: at least a half-dozen of the artists on the “100 Greats” list are people I first heard there): Geoff Bartley, Stan Rogers, Martin Grosswendt, Greg Brown, Paul Geremia, Cormac McCarthy, Sally Rogers, Claudia Schmidt, they all played there, and a lot of them were brilliant—and inspirational. That might have been the first location in which I ever was able to ask myself if maybe a life as a musician was a real possibility.

My favorites at SNM were always the bluesmen, though: Geoff (upcoming “100 Greats”), Martin (upcoming), Geremia, and Spider John Koerner. John had come out of the U. Minn folk scene that began pretty much concurrently with the Harvard/Radcliffe/BU scene in New England, but that was, in some ways, more tight-knit, less intellectual, and, overall, tougher than the Boston/Cambridge scene (maybe it’s the cold, or the absence of trust funds and boarding schools in the Minnesotans’ backgrounds). There’s a fantastic recollection of John in Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney’s magisterial Baby Let Me Follow You Down, with Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music maybe the greatest non-academic book ever written about a local music community, and eminently worth the tracking-down. He showed up with Dave “Snaker” Ray (another guitarist) and Tony “Little Sun” Glover (a great Sonny Terry-style harp player) and they were bad motherfuckers. Dave looked like a blond surfer, Tony like a 90-pound greaser, and John looked like a basketball player. The cover of their debut LP, Blues Rags and Hollers captures both their look and their repertoire: they were more like a pre- than post-WWII blues band (the post-WWII Chicago sound would only hit the Bost/Camb folk scene with Butterfield’s Band at Newport ’65). It was astonishingly funky and mature music for three Minnesotans in their early 20s.

I never saw that trio play live: Tony and Dave went back to Minnesota, but John stayed around, and was still a presence on the Bost/Cambr scene by the mid-‘70s when Franke got SNM going. I was fortunate enough to see Koerner and his frequent partner in crime John “Mr Bones” Burrill at SNM, and then later, multiple times in the Idler’s backroom. John played a home-adapted 9-string guitar (almost-but-not-quite-a-12-string), the same one he’s played for at least 30 years, and got a huge sound out of his guitar, his stomping right foot, and Burrill’s bones. You could understand why they came to call John “Spider”—he’s a good 6’3”, skinny as a rail (especially since an emergency triple-bypass in ’98), and when he’s playing, his limbs kind of go every which way. There’s a good sample of John in the great 4-part documentary, written by another SNM alumnus, Elijah Wald, called Mississippi: River of Sound. They’re filmed in John’s local bar, and that holds true with how I remember him: you always got the sense with John that he was more comfortable in bars than in coffeehouses—and with the full range of behaviors that went down there (I always imagined he could have handled himself if somebody ever swung a punch, for example). Similarly with John’s involvement with the Minneapolis-based A Prairie Home Companion, which almost always played on radio during the SNM setup on Saturdays, and about which one of the regulars named above, arriving to play a solo gig, spat out “Yes, it’s such a precious little show with its precious little themes and its precious little skits and its precious little characters,” thereby capturing what I had intuitively disliked about the show (and still do). John was way too funky for Prairie Home, as he was probably too funky for SNM—but at least he had more fun with us: we didn’t mind his cussing, or the occasional swig of something in the rector’s office that served as the green room, and we laughed at his jokes (John’s the first place I heard the “what’s time to a pig?” joke that eventually showed up in Ciarán Carson’s great Irish-trad memoir Last Night’s Fun).

It was raunchier and more raucous at the Idler, though: John stomping out the rhythm and flailing at the 9-string (he’s got about the weirdest right-hand technique of any fingerpicker I’ve ever met) and Mr Bones, stooped with arthritis and fused cartilage, the two of them laying out a loose-jointed, behind-the-beat, splayed and irresistible groove.

One of the great things about John’s approach is that, over the 70s and 80s, he expanded his repertoire to include all kinds of old, non-blues folk tunes—as he himself said: “there’s a lot to those old songs; there’s a reason people still sing ‘em”—and it all came out sounding like him. That’s why I select this disc: because a sea chantey like Shenandoah, a cowboy song like Old Chisholm Trail, a pre-Civil War song like Cotton-Eyed Joe, or a New Orleans dirge like St. James Infirmary all come out with that same loopy, unmistakable, juke-joint groove.

Especially since his complete recovery from the bypass, he’s continued mining this wonderful vein: sometimes in more soloistic settings or with his Twin Cities homies (as on this disc), or with New Orleans players on Raised by Humans, or even extending to Stardust or ballads like The Golden Vanity on Stargeezer (another of his great strengths has been a succession of fantastic album titles).

This might be my favorite though—and Sail Away Ladies (from Nobody Knows…) might be my favorite piece of music ever recorded by a Minnesota folkie, unless it's Dean Magraw's version of Blind Willie McTell's Statesboro Blues, which buried Taj Mahal's and the Allman Brother's both.

Zimmerman's got my sympathy, though. Just as when Hendrix covered "All Along the Watchtower," there's attitude and then there's ATTITUDE. On Nobody Knows..., it's the real Big Dogs laying it down.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 043: Count Basie Orchestra: 1937-1943

Jim Crow was a twisted shadowy backwater. Whites (North and South) pretended they were gentle and Christian, blacks (North and South) pretended there was nothing but good humor and comfort in their dealings with whites. Neither Ellington nor his band ever appeared in public in anything other than smiles and the height of uptown fashion; Louis Armstrong grinned and let Joe Glaser take half his royalties (saying, famously and notoriously “Always keep a white man behind you that'll put his hand on you and say 'That's my nigger'"), and Basie was the most understated and urbanely-charming bandleader imaginable, beaming at the piano as he laid down the subtlest, most minimalist arabesque possible.

It would take another jazz generation before the beboppers of the mid-‘40s and the hard-boppers of the ‘50s would break that mold—would issue a musical proclamation that was openly defiant of Jim Crow (Monk said “we’re gonna make a music that’s so hard they can’t steal it”)—but in the ‘30s the grins stayed in place. The ‘30s jazzman’s defiance was epitomized in Lester Young’s elliptical, gnomic words, and the elaborate handles he bestowed on peers (he famously gave Billie Holliday the moniker “Lady Day”) and his absolute refusal to kowtow to the era’s expectations for a tenor sax player—a big, booting, hyper-masculine sound exemplified by his alter ego in the Basie band, Herschel Evans. But Prez (from “The President,” Lady’s nickname for him) refused: he played smooth, eccentric phrases across the bar-line; he built a whole harmonic language out of the possibilities of chord substitutions; he played with a light, focused, straight tone. And, of course, he would turn out to be the most influential tenor player of them all, because Prez is where Bird learned to play (double-time Prez’s lines, play them in the mid-range of the alto instead of the upper range of the tenor, play upper-structures as well as chord subs, and you’ve got Bird).

But there was ferocity behind those grins. The Basie band was built out of the nucleus of two great ‘20s territory bands: Walter Page’s Blue Devils, who Basie, a Jersey native, had joined in ’28, just before they disbanded to go out with Bennie Moten, who had a bigger budget and better gigs.

The territory bands were the most important live music phenomenon in the ‘20s, barnstorming across the West and Southwest in converted school-buses, playing strings of one-nighters (pull into town, set up the music stands, put on the uniform, play four hours for the jitter-buggers, break down, sleep on the bus, drive to the next gig) that were the incubator for swing, and for the virtuosity of the beboppers who cut their teeth there. And they were fierce: no PA (or a minimal one), huge halls full of expert dancers who’d brook no bullshit, and they did this 300 nights a year. A good territory band wasn’t afraid of anybody—they knew how bad they were, grins or not.

And the Basie band were the baddest of them all. Honed in the ‘20s in the Blue Devils and Moten’s Orchestra, hanging tough together in the new cooperative they started under Bill Basie’s name, they backed the greatest vocalists in American music: Billie, Jimmy Rushing (“Mr Five-by-Five”—five feet wide and five feet tall), Big Joe Turner (the granddaddy of rock ‘n’ roll), and Joe Williams. They had the scariest gunslinging horn players: Prez, Herschel, and the great trumpeter Buck Clayton. And they had the baddest motherfuckin’ rhythm section there was before bebop: Basie, Big Walter Page on bass, the great guitarist Freddie Green (“4-to-the-bar” chords that nobody outside the band could hear—and nobody within the bandcould do without) and the master, Papa Jo Jones, the drummer who made bebop possible.

The first hint anybody east of the Mississippi had of the territory bands were the charts Benny Goodman purchased from Fletcher Henderson—Fletcher was a genius musician/arranger but a terrible businessman (sort of the opposite of Goodman, in fact) and it was Goodman who became the “King of Swing” on Henderson’s charts. And Goodman had John Hammond behind him, and Hammond had impeccable taste, and insisted that Goodman take on Teddy Wilson (piano), Lionel Hampton (vibes), and eventually Charlie Christian (guitar)—all black—for his sextet, which made Goodman’s music infinitely better.

But almost nobody, east of the Mississippi, had ever heard the actual bands. And—as ever—nobody on either coast could imagine the way these guys could play. 300 nights a year, playing with section-mates you’d sat next to for 10 or 12 or 15 years, 4 hours a night for the greatest dancers American music had ever produced, putting together “head” arrangements on the fly, and you knew you and your band were badder than anybody’s.

Basie finally got the money together to bring the band east in 1936, first for a long residency in Chicago, and eventually for an even longer residency in ’38 at the Famous Door, a 52^nd Street club so small that Basie’s piano sat off the bandstand on the dance-floor.

It didn’t matter—they were better than anybody else, they knew it, and nobody had ever heard anything like. The band was a powerhouse, with not one but two killin’ tenor soloists, Prez and Herschel, who could not have been more different but who between them covered virtually the entire spectrum of what was then thought possible on the instrument (the other unclaimed tenor territory belonged to huge-toned Ben Webster, who at the same period was about to begin a legendary, if brief, tenure with the Ellington Orchestra). They had the absolutely astounding rhythm section, who played with an authoritative ease and relaxed virtuosity that buried any East Coast band. They had a succession of great singers, and they had just about every jazz musician not on a gig in the house listening. More than anything else, they had that telepathic swing: they had 10 or 12 or 15 years of playing together, night after night after night, and they could read each other’s minds. One O’Clock Jump, which became their theme song, had come out of one such “head” arrangement:

Buster Smith remembered: “We were fooling around at the club and Basie was playing along in F. That was his favorite key. He hollered that he was going to switch to D-flat and for me to set something from [another tune called ‘Six or Seven Times’] on alto. Lips Page jumped in with the trumpet part without any trouble and Dan Minor thought up the trombone part. That was it–a ‘head.’ ”

The tunes on this compilation of Basie’s greatest years feature the vocals and instrumentals, blues and “Rhythm” changes, head charts and beautiful arrangements, the full band and various small groups, the horn players and the rhythm section. Some of them, like Jump and Jumpin’ at the Woodside, epitomize the head arrangements; others became incredibly influential on small group players (notably the Prez vehicles Tickle Toe and Lester Leaps In); some allow Basie to unleash his own formidable but typically under-employed boogie-woogie skills (Red Bank Boogie); some—really all—are features for the springy levitation of the rhythm section; some just rock harder than anything before Louis Jordan (Yeah Man). They all, even in the low-fidelity and brief duration of the 78, provide a little taste of what those nights at the Famous Door in ’38 must have felt like.

The Second War killed the big bands: white players were encouraged to enlist en masse (and usually whiled away their tours playing for the troops), black players were usually unable to get work, while the rationing of rubber (for tires) and gasoline (for buses) destroyed the touring circuits. An awful lot of people wound up working overtime or the swing-shift in the defense industry, while the government levied a nightclub tax that made dancing a costly proposition for club owners—who put in more tables and encouraged listening music instead. Bebop would be the result.

But that was in the future. Basie himself was reduced, in the early ‘50s, to touring with a small group, but he boogied just as hard and just as charmingly. Eventually, when he was able to revive the big band in the Eisenhower ‘50s, it became a very different—but still great—band, now relying not on swing and head arrangements, but on the seminal charts of great arrangers like Frank Foster and Sammy Nestico. I played a lot of those charts for Dominic Spera in Bloomington, and I played head charts for Dave Baker—but before that, I knew Basie’s music.

I knew it because, though a conflagration of circumstances I can barely remember, Dharmonia and I scored some tickets to see the Basie band at Harvard around ’81. He was old, and sick, by then, and the band was full of young turks, the masters having long since retired or passed on, but the grin, the captain’s cap, and the style were still there. And when we walked into that little banquet room in Harvard, paneled just the way you’d think the Ivy League would be, the aura of that band’s history was palpable even to us who didn’t know much about them. And when they hit, in that paneled Cantabridgian room full of Harvard students and a few stray hipsters like us, it was absolutely overwhelmingly: smooth, powerful, confident, understated, and like a 16-cylinder engine. It was absolutely incredible. By then, they'd been playing together sixty years, some of them--and the ferocity was still there. They weren't taking shit from anybody.

Years after that, we went to school on Basie at Indiana. Years after that, the guys who played on my Master’s recital went to work on the Basie band. Years after that, I wound up teaching that music as history.

But I was lucky enough to know it as experience first.

Crashing the gates

Oh, yeah: we are in fact the "wild-eyed progressives" the Beltway insiders warned their children about. This is the same old, old, alliance between and including all the have-nots. Matt Stoller's got it:

The informal alliance between African-American progressives, white progressive organizers and bloggers, and disaffected union members can beat any Democrat in any primary anywhere in the country. If you can attach an effective general election strategy to that alliance, we have a progressive America.

This is precisely the alliance (ethnic minorities, progressives, writers/authors/artists, and workers) that the Populists and Sockless Jerry Simpson and the Farmers and Workers Union tried to put together in the 1890s, and that the Wobblies tried to put together in the 'Oughts, and that Gene Debs fought and went to jail for. Hell, they called it "Progressivism" even then.

This is the real "Rebel Alliance"--it has fuck-all to do with ethnicity, or inter-trade warfare, or "conservativism" versus "liberalism." It has to do with the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

For centuries in this country, the oligarchs in power have used ethnicity, competition, or red-herring social/ethical disputes to divide and distract those below them on the economic ladder. If you could keep "True Blue Americans" fighting with recent Irish immigrants, or poor Southern whites fighting with poor Southern blacks, or farmers fighting with industrial workers, then you as the "owner-class" (e.g., the small economic minority who derive income, trust funds, possessions, and their children's inheritances from owning things rather than working for things) had a chance of maintaining your hold.

But if those have-nots ever figured out that all those other issues were red herrings, used to divide them and to distract them from the economically-exploitative world the oligarchy intentionally set up to keep their own snouts in the trough (keep them dumb with lousy public education, keep them distracted with mindless mass media, keep them divided by choosing the "wedge issues" of personal ethical convication which no politician actually wants to legislate but which every politician will use to divide)--if they ever figured out, I say, who the real enemy is, then watch out, Jack--because then it'll be your gates that the barbarians will be crashing, and your power, money, and privilege that will fall.

Class warfare? Betcher ass.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 042: Stravinsky/Monteux/Columbia SO: Petroushka

Before I ever found Larry “Guitar” Baeder, or Dean Magraw, or Mike Bierylo, or Tom Binkley, or Dave Baker, or any of my other great teachers, LP’s were my first teachers. And—like my teachers—records seemed to find me when I needed them.

One of the greatest moments in 20^th century music, and certainly the greatest moment in the greatest ballet ever written, and certainly the greatest musical moment in my life before the conservatory: First Tableau (“The Shrovetide Fair”) in Stravinsky’s 1911 Petroushka, when the polytonal hustle and bustle of the Russian peasant crowd suddenly coalesces into the magnificent pedal-point polymeter of the circus troupe that includes the Old Wizard, the Ballerina, the Moor, and the title character, the mournful, happy/sad post-commedia dell arte clown called Petroushka.

This was the role that Nijinsky was born to dance. He had scandalized Parisians with the eroticism of his Faun in Debussy’s Prelude and changed the language for the prima danseur in Debussy’s Jeux, but nothing in his past career had prepared anyone for the intensity of his Petroushka—as nothing would prepare anyone for the revolution he, with Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Roerich, would concoct with Le Sacre du Printemps. Certainly the “Rite,” of the three Russian ballets, is conventionally regarded as the real watershed—but Petroushka is the harbinger, and here’s why: the Rite was consciously intended as a confrontation; as a subversion of everything that went before; of a direct assault upon the 19^th century’s fixation on chromatic harmony, complex formal structure, and toxic self-absorption—and it succeeded. But that also led to a “shock for shock’s sake” aspect to the Rite.

That’s not the case with Petroushka. In that work, Stravinsky gets as close to Bartok—and Bartok’s unself-conscious assimilation of traditional music’s rhythmic and modal implications. It’s the most folkloric of Stravinsky’s ballets and, actually, far more influential in the long term than the Rite. Throughout the 20^th century, composers from Bartok to Janacek to de Falla to Ives would explore the possibilities of developing a personal—but cool—modern compositional language out of the implications of folk music. Dvorak had told us to do it (“you have in the melodies of the Negroes all the resources you need for a great national music”); Vaughan Williams had shown that it was possible (in numerous pieces based upon the modal and melodic implications of English folk music); even Debussy and Ravel had found a way around the Viennese hegemony of Brahms and Mahler by going to other sources: popular music, old French music, and “exotica” from around the world. Stravinsky, who was notoriously resistant to any attributions of influence—he had way too big an ego—nevertheless succeeded, as he always did, in drawing on the new ideas most pregnant with possibilities.

And it’s so beautiful. There is so much love in this music—for the Russia he left behind, for the folk musics he learned as a child (hilarious anecdote he told in his autobiography about hearing a moujik on the family estate playing fart-noises in his armpit), for the people that he left behind. At different stages in his career, Stravinsky made entirely contradictory statements about the presence or absence of Russian elements in the Rite, depending upon whether he was pissed at the Soviets for taking away the ancestral estates or sucking up to them when they treated him like a returning hero.

It’s a dark, sad, story, picking up on the Expressionist fascination with clowns that played out in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and their close cousin, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. In Stravinsky’s version, Petroushka is a sad, sawdust-stuffed clown, ensorcelled by the Wizard, but pining perpetually for the Ballerina, who has eyes only for the Moor.

The score is full of the hyper-diatonicism Stravinsky had derived from his Russian forebears—chiefly Rimsky—and which had provided a way to both retain the flavor of folk music and up the dissonance ante. In 19^th century German music, the solution had been to stuff more and more chromatic alterations into the functional harmonic language. What the Russians, the Eastern Europeans (especially Bartok and Janacek), and Ives had figured out was that you could retain the shape and character of modal folk tunes, but create a powerfully dissonant language, by juxtaposing instruments or groups playing in different key areas simultaneously. That meant that one section would play, more-or-less diatonically, in one key, and another in another key, and the relationship between the keys (close or distant) would determine the level of harmonic “crunch.”

It’s potent in Petroushka (and overpowering in Le Sacre), because Stravinsky builds it into the very fabric of the characters’ themes: the “Petroushka chord” combines two triads, harmonically distant from one another (a C major triad and an F# major triad), either of which could work in a perfectly vanilla way—but juxtapose them, play them simultaneously, overlap them, trade them off with one another, and you have an astonishingly flexible range of dissonant options.

It has different meanings in different places, because the dissonance can be dark or light, crashing or fluid. And it does throughout this piece: the hustling hurly-burly of the crowds at the Shrovetide Fair in the First Tableau; the brutality with which the Wizard exiles Petroushka to his cell and the lonely sadness with which he responds in the Second; the stomping brutality of the Moor in the Third; and the return to the hustle of the Fair in the Fourth and final Tableau.

The story ends, actually, with horror: Petroushka interrupts the Moor’s seduction of the Ballerina, and the Moor chases him into the market-square and hacks him to pieces with an axe; but the Wizard demonstrates that he is nothing but sawdust and straw. At the very last moment, after the Wizard’s departure, and the apparent defeat of all Petroushka’s hopes—and shockingly—the ghost of the puppet appears on the roof of the market-building, uttering one last fortissimo, spiky, bitonal chord: one last curse for the Wizard, a and for the complacency of an audience that would let it happen.

But it doesn’t matter; the music is so beautiful. There were a half-dozen or so LP’s that I owned as a child, things I found either in our family collection (a weird amalgam of mostly unpredictable and not-very-good stuff) or, peculiarly enough, at yard sales. I was kind of fascinated by the idea that you could find interesting music that other people liked—and I was already well-programmed to be obsessive about saving money. So used records were perfect for me (I would only have had to be a little bit more neurotic to wind up as much of a record- and comic-collecting weirdo as Harvey Pekar or Robert Crumb).

But the universe looked out for me, I guess: one summer, around the age of around 11, at a yard sale in my home town, I found LPs of Petroushka and of Beethoven’s #3 (Eroica). The Stravinsky was a Columbia “Living Stereo” release of the 1947 version. Here’s the miracle: the disc cost me a quarter, and it was conducted by Monteux, who conducted the premieres of both Petroushka and the Rite. Other conductors have led more impressive or more impeccable or more astringent performances (certainly Nagano and Boulez have both done commanding versions), but Monteux conducted the premiere. How much more immediate and visceral an understanding of the work’s original intent could you have?

I played that record—and the Beethoven—on a virtually daily basis for a good eight years. And I imprinted on it, the way you will, the way I did on Live at Fillmore East, and Born to Run, and a few others. Even now, 35 years later, I can teach these pieces with total passion, totally from memory, and as if I’m discovering them for the first time. I can still sing the opening passage and nail Monteux's opening tempi for all Four Tableaux. I still remember the Gauguin painting on the cover, and the clicks and pops at crucial moments, and the ways those records (and a few others, and a few books) helped make sense of my world.

And “The Shrovetide Fair” still makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 041: Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt: A Meeting by the River

There’s a depth to modal music—and that depth can connect modal musics of wild diversity. Certainly the musical texture of a melody moving against a drone, with harmonic chords either absent or an afterthought, is a texture shared across very different music cultures, from South Asia to West Africa to the Near East to the South Seas. It connects ancient and modern music cultures: both medieval European chant and East Asian vocal genres share the drone-plus-melody texture. And, of course, the melody + drone texture, with its radical emphasis upon tension and resolution, upon the light-and-dark artistic possibilities of dissonance and consonance, of the expressive possibilities of all the micro-tones “between the notes” and the world of bends, slides, slurs, and glissandi that can connect them, connects to the most ancient instrument of all, the human voice.

Couple that with an instrument capable of reproducing all that microtonal expressive information (preeminently the voice, but also bowed strings, winds, and a competent blues guitar player or harpist), and you have both a wealth of diverse implicated idioms and, potentially, a shared technical language.

So it’s no wonder that two modal musicians specializing in playing plucked strings with a slide might find common ground. In the Hindustani tradition of the vichitravina, a sitar-like lute, sitting on gourd resonators with a lengthy wire-strung neck parallel to the ground, is played with fingerpicks called mizrab and “fretted” (really, “has its strings stopped”) with a small polished stone held in the left-hand. The instrument thus borrows from the grand-daddy Hindi plucked lute, the vina, which is often depicted as the favored instrument of Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, music, arts and speech, and the patronees of truth and forgiving. She is a river-goddess first. But the chitravina also borrows from the slippery intonation of the sarod, the short-necked lute with a polished metal fingerboard, which comes into Hindi music from Islam (Arabic: sir-‘ud, meaning “the grand oud”). The chitravina may have borne a Hindi music influence into Polynesia, and thus may be one of the unacknowledged ancestors of the Hawaiian slide guitar.

There’s a direct connection between Hawaii and the Mississippi Delta blues guitar as well. Though there are ancient and multiple traditions of bowed and plucked lutes in West Africa, the one perhaps most closely shaping slide guitar traditions is the musical bow, which comes into the New World as the Afro-Brazilian berimbau and the American South’s diddley-bow—both single-string instruments with pitch shifted by manipulation of a smooth stone.

Playing the guitar with a slide in the South seems to have been an innovation by African-American musicians who heard Hawaiian lap-slide players on 78s released as demonstrations by catalog companies selling Victrolas. W.C.Handy claimed to have heard slide players in the Delta in Oughts (around 1906), but certainly by the ‘30s, the Delta had seen at least three generations of great slide players—most significantly for the present essay, the great sanctified singer from Texas Blind Willie Johnson, whose instrumental Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground was preserved on a gold-plated LP (along with Bach and Beethoven) that went “out there” with the Voyager space shot.

Miracles and horrors can result when two worlds collide. Thankfully—in both music and global relations—when there is sympathy, humility, and most crucially a willingness to listen, to find ways to coexist in one another’s worlds of experience, the result is more often miraculous.

So with this CD, the record of the very first encounter between the Hindi chitravina player Vishwa Mohan Bhatt (who plays a wonderfully personalized, modernized version of the instrument, adapted from an arch-top jazz guitar with added sympathetic and drone strings) and slide guitarist Ry Cooder, whose touchstones on the instrument have been Blind Willie and the great Robert Johnson. Cooder was drafted to recreate Robert’s style for Hollywood film Crossroads, which had the misfortune to feature Ralph Macchio and an abysmal screenplay but also some chillingly-evocative moments (the encounter with a modern-day “Mr Scratch” at the crossroads, driving a jet-black late-model Camaro; the climactic cutting contest between Macchio—who, appallingly, wins by playing Bach—and the Devil’s guitarist, Steve Vai), none more so than the opening few seconds, which recreate the mythological moment in a Dallas hotel room in 1936 when Robert Johnson laid down the original of Crossroads Blues for Ralph Peer.

Water Lily Acoustic’s audiophile engineer/owner put them together in a small Catholic mission in Northern California. They were introduced, had dinner, sat down with their usual accompanists (Ry’s son Joachim, Bhatt’s tabla-player Sukhvinder Singh Namdhari), and this record was the result. There were no second takes—no additional sessions. It captures a moment of holy listening, when sympathy, humility, and compassion come together in the hearts and hands of two master musicians and the world is saved by the sounds that result. They play Hawaiian tunes (Isa Lei), a very logical point of connection between Hindi and American stylists; original blues (Ganges Delta Blues), and two free-improvised pieces. It’s probably fair to say that, brilliant as Cooder is, on display here is mostly his impeccable musical taste: knowing when not to play, when to lay back and allow Bhatt to take the lead (a lesson Ry might have remembered a little better on the Buena Vista Social Club project, where he’s not quite so tactful). This takes guts: the courage to keep one’s paint out of the picture. At the same time, he’s ballsy when he needs to be: there’s an incredible moment in Longing, in the midst of a long (brilliant) solo by Bhatt, when, after 8 minutes on the tonic drone, Cooder shoulders his way into the sound-mix, playing an unmistakable and bluesy six-string glissando that takes the tonal center up to the IV chord—something that is never done in Indian music. I asked Cooder about that, and he laughed and said “You noticed that? Yeah, I thought, ‘Fuck it! I’m gonna take him to the four chord!’”: an amazingly confident and courageous improvisational decision.

The greatest playing is probably on the title track, which also opens the disc, and was the first tune they played together. At a certain level of development and in certain contexts, master musicians are no longer really playing instruments, no longer really thinking about music. They’re freer than that, able to use the decades of technique not only to escape physical limitations, but to escape the emotional, egotistical, and cultural blinders that trap us all inside our too-small individual worlds. A Meeting by the River captures that.

There’s a quote from my beloved Rumi on the liner notes, from the Mathnawi, about “letting the beauty we love be what we do.” No question that is the ethos here. But I think another Rumi parable captures this music even better (paraphrased here from the great Sufi Coleman Barks, a Georgia boy whose lifelong encounter with Rumi’s work has been one of the most extraordinary journeys in American poetry—equaled only by those of Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg):

An ocean frog visited with a frog who lived in a small pond. The pond frog dove to the depths of his home—a distance of two feet—came back to the surface, and said “Look at the depth of my world.” He swam across the pond—a distance of five feet—came back to the shore, and said “Look at the breadth of my world.” Finally, having exhibited the full expanse of his pond, he said “Isn’t that amazing? What is it like where you live?”

The ocean frog replied, “I can’t describe it to you. But I’ll take you there someday.”

In A Meeting by the River, by listening and if only for a short while, we can go there too.

Rick Steves in Ireland: Make it stop! Make it stop!

Rick Steves in Ireland: I can't stand it! Now he's in Temple Bar! Now he's in Kilmainham Jail waffling about the 1916 Martyrs! Now he's elbowed his way in to the front of the queue for the burial tomb of Newgrange on the winter solstice! Now he's in the bar above the Guinness Museum talking about how "that thick black pint is no longer your only option!" God, he just used the transliteration "BOW-dran"!

Make it stop! Make it stop!

ps: what's worse: he has a conscience. I just wish he didn't look/act so much like Steve Martin playing a consummate nerd.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 040: Albert King: Live at Montreux

Albert King was larger than life: in his person (6’4”, over 300 pounds), in his singing voice and his laugh (a huge, gravelly bellow), in his former profession (he looked like the bulldozer driver he’d been), in his guitars and tuning (he played a Gibson Flying V upside down and backwards, tuned down to a low C), in his technique (he played with his thumb, a spatulate digit about the size of a ballpeen hammer), in his tone (a huge, grainy, tactile stab), and in his influence (most especially, upon Jimi and upon Stevie Ray). He came up after BB and he borrowed BB’s surname, but there could not have been a greater difference between them. B (still with us, thank God) is one of the great blues shouters, with the strongest possible influence from gospel and a fluid, singing tone derived from T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Johnson, and, indirectly, from Django Reinhardt; Albert, in contrast, brought the funk, recording with the Stax/Volt musicians and covering everything from Sleepy John Estes to Herbie Hancock.

I was living in West Texas—the first time—working as a blowout-preventer mechanic for an oil-drilling company, trying to pay off my first round of college debt. I’d been renting a spare room from a very proper Texas lady in her 60s whose husband had left her for a second, trophy wife, but we just didn’t get on, and I moved out, sharing a house with an ex-biker-turned-truckdriver named Bob and his young wife, whose blue-collar family actually thought they could change him (OK, I haven’t always made realistic housing choices). Very weird days: most of the guys I worked with smoked weed and bred fighting dogs (Mexican dirt weed was 10 dollars a lid in W Texas in the late ‘70s, and the drilling-yard workers were mostly either ex-bikers down on their luck or Mexican guys working illegally), but I spent my time reading virtually every interesting book in the town’s small library (the library ladies got to know me very well), and starting to grapple with the idea of being a professional musician. I had only a few records, but I’d finally reached a stage where I knew a good record from a bad one, so it was a good collection: Live at Fillmore East, Born to Run, and Albert’s great Live at Montreux double-LP set. The previous year, at Chicago, I’d figured out on my own how improvisation worked: you had to know the scale the song was in, and then, if you knew the fingerings for the scale, you could play pretty much anything in the scale you could hear. My friend Fred Duca and I spent some 8-hour nights sitting in the stairwells in the Shoreland Hotel working out the implications of that—and 30 years later, I’m still playing modal music. I had an old Ephiphone semi-hollowbody ES-335 knockoff I’d bought at a yard sale (wish I still had that one—it went missing somewhere in the years that followed) and I’d crank Albert up on the stereo and pace the empty house, playing along, while Bob and his wife were out at the honky-tonks trying to “patch up the relationship.”

Albert was great for schooling: gutsy, great phrases, huge tone, fantastic interplay b/w his singing and his guitar soloing, and impeccable choice in tunes: he plays Lemon Jefferson (Matchbox) and Charlie Patton (Killing Floor), T-Bone Walker (Stormy Monday) and Herbie Hancock (Watermelon Man). That latter tune gets as another of his strengths: his receptivity to newer black styles (most notably funk—Albert recorded for years with the Stax/Volt rhythm section) and his willingness to recruit bands who could play it: most notably, on this record, the young rhythm guitarist Donald Kinsey, who went on to play with Bob Marley and his own, funk-tinged Kinsey Report.

To go with his larger-than-life presence, Albert had a larger-than-life sound, as well: when he sings in that big, gravelly voice (less fluid but ten times as macho as BB’s), when he squeezes out major-3^rd bends in that low-C tuning (what Albert called “the woman tone”, and when he chuckles between lines at his own double-entendre jokes), he owns the festival, be it the huge roster of bigger sellers than he at Wattstax, or the long list of jazz heavyweights at Montreux Jazz. And, true to that larger-than-life presence, Albert always managed to pull the groupies. He played on a triple bill with Hendrix and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (incubator of a whole series of blues-rock guitar luminaries) to open the Fillmore West in San Fran in February 1968, and people who were there say Albert blew the other two off the stage.

Stevie Ray Vaughan, who—though derivative—was always good about acknowledging his influences, did a series of gigs with Albert, which was a nice gesture—particularly since most of what Stevie didn’t get from Hendrix he got from Albert. Listen to Stevie play any slow blues, and you’ll know what I mean.

I always laughed to hear Cream’s version of Born Under a Bad Sign: they were great players, certainly with lots of chops, and I still think Ginger Baker is one of the great unsung geniuses of the ’60s rock era (and so did Bill Laswell, who coaxed him out of retirement as an Italian olive farmer to record for Axiom), but there’s simply no denying that, for all Clapton’s notes, for all Jack Bruce’s histrionic melodrama, there was simply no way those three white boys could hang with Albert’s original.

There’s a story about Hendrix working with a rock rhythm section (might’ve been Billy and Buddy—see future “100 Greats” post on Band of Gypsies) in rehearsal at the Fillmore East, working on a version of Crosscut Saw, “playing the tune, then shaking his head, going back to the side of the stage, lifting the needle, and playing the record again. It never sounded the same.” When I hear that story—when I realize that even Hendrix, maybe the greatest electric guitarist ever (see “100 Greats” #31), was still going to school on Albert, even after Monterey Pop and taking England and America by storm, then I feel connected to something much, much bigger, and those isolated days, pacing through a deserted, ramshackle little house on the poor side of a windblown West Texas oil town, with Live at Montreux blaring out of the stereo and me playing along, don’t seem so pointless.

Not so pointless at all.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 039 Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah-Um

I studied jazz with David Baker. That’s roughly like saying “I studied violin with Joseph Gingold” (actually, I didn’t—but I bought him Fritos), or “I studied Indian music with Hariprasad Chaurasia” (I did—but only for a year), or “I studied medieval music with Tom Binkley” (I did—but fortunately never had to accept a grade from him). I have been blessed with a few poor and mostly fantastic, superhuman, brilliant, genius teachers: the above is only a short list. So there’s some braggadocio involved. But, really, my place in that roster is not due to my own merit, but rather to the generosity and the wealth of positive energy those teachers put out in the world, for thousands of students over many decades. I was just the latest and least in a long line—but I am honored and proud to be part of those lineages.

The first time I heard David Baker play was on cello in his 21^st Century Bebop Band: terrible band name, but typically a fantastic roster of rotating players drawn from his most senior students. Dave had started playing cello after his jaw was broken in a car wreck (and, neglected by the racist subhuman pigs staffing the KKK-dominated hospitals of Martinsville, Indiana, his embouchure never recovered). When his cello chops were up, David was a fantastic improviser—and he was always a magnificent composer and teacher. I’d encountered him, though, several years before that, through the series of teaching methods he authored and put out on his own small press. And, of course, through the playing, teaching, and materials of the people who played and studied with him, a list that began with Wes Montgomery, continued through Eric Dolphy and Michael Brecker (RIP), and included my contemporaries Ralph Bowen (Rutgers), Derrick Gardner (Basie), Brent Wallarab (librarian for the Smithsonian Jazz Orchestra), and Tom Walsh (best of the contemporary classical saxophonists). I am honored to have been included among them.

I studied with Dave for three years, everything from bebop styles to jazz history to pedagogy to arranging to, most notably, composition. In pretty much all situations he was indefatigable, regularly carrying a quadruple teaching load and never allowed to retire, as IU repeatedly offered him more money to keep him on. As I write, he’s 75 and still going strong. I don’t play jazz anymore (one of the things Dave taught us was to play the music brilliantly, or not to play it at all), but David Baker’s part of every lesson I teach—I still use his pedagogical methods in teaching blues and Irish trad.

Dave also introduced me to Mingus’s music. Oh, I had heard it, but I first had the chance to play Mingus’s tunes in Dave’s big band, a fantastic opportunity to learn not only the mainstream repertoire of the swing era but also Dave’s great expanded compositions, blending bebop and advanced 20^th-century serial techniques—they were a blast to play. Dave had us play some tunes as head arrangements, the way the Basie band put them together, he had us experiment with free improvisation, and he also had us play Mingus. This disc captures some of my favorite Mingus repertoire.

There are a lot of things I love about Mingus’s music: the way he managed to reconcile the virtuosic pickiness of bebop with the balls and joy of blues and gospel grooves; his insistence (like Ellington) that music could be “street” and “art” at the same time; his political outspokenness and his brilliant ability to use music to make political statements; his prototypical sense that jazz music could become a powerful tool of black identity; his skills (and temper) as a bandleader, providing some of the best and most challenging improvisational settings that soloists like Pepper Adams, Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Jackie McLean, and Jimmy Knepper (who lost some teeth to a Mingus punch) ever experienced—and I’d give a month of my life, maybe more, to have heard Rahsaan Roland Kirk with the Jazz Workshop; his interest in extended compositions, freer forms, and collective improvisation, all of which prefigure both the free jazz of the 1960s and the jazz collectives of the 1970s; his titanic bass playing (as Dave said “the worst thing that ever happened to jazz bass was the invention of the pickup”—Mingus played on telephone cables and his acoustic sound could fill a room), which had driven the astonishing Bird/Diz playing on 1953’s Live at Massey Hall; and, most overwhelmingly, the sheer heart and beauty of his compositions.

There are a bunch of great and a few not-so-great Mingus albums (I’m particularly partial to Mingus Mingus Mingus etc, because it features one of the first and still one of my favorite charts to play—the volcanic II B.S.), but Mingus Ah-Um is a great place to start, as it collects some of the best-known compositions and some of his most characteristic writing.

There’s Ducally-rich color (Self-Portrait in Three Colors and Open Letter to Duke); a tribute to Parker (Bird Calls), Jelly Roll Morton (Jelly Roll), and Lester Young (the masterpiece Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, one of the greatest blues ever written—and it’s not a blues); fantastic and brutally-effective political satire (the open-form Fables of Faubus, whose lyrics, mocking anti-integrationist Arkansas governor Orville Faubus, were scrubbed from the record before the initial release), and a personal favorite: Better Git It In Your Soul, an intentional and very effective evocation of jazz’s gospel roots, complete with shouting preacher (Mingus’s bass as superhuman lead voice), call-and-response choral vocals, and the rhythmic grooves that have driven black music in this country since the 17^th century.

Mingus had a very rocky personal life—feuding with critics, fighting (sometimes physically) with his sidemen, battling depression and substance abuse, at one point in the ‘60s being physically evicted from his apartment for indigency, but the music, when he could tear it out of himself, was always personal, emotional, and beautiful. Mingus couldn’t quite do what Ellington did—that is, preserve the hard-won veneer of sophistication in the most demeaning of circumstances. On the contrary: when Mingus was suffering, he let the world know it, but his music is all the more powerful for that.

I look at what the Italian-suited Young Lions of Jazz (now pretty old in the tooth) have wrought, turning the ultimate street music into an academic discipline, and while I celebrate the music’s survival, I weep for what we’ve lost—what Mingus never forget: that it was people’s music first. This music is as rich as Duke Ellington’s—and it has the courage to reach beyond Ellington, while never neglecting the earliest pre-jazz roots of the music, and to point toward the music of the future.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 038: Kate Bush: The Sensual World

You wouldn’t think I was a great candidate for induction as a Kate Bush fan. I mean, here’s this airy-fairy sylph-like child prodigy in a leopard-skin leotard, singing in a voice that sounds a little like Marilyn Monroe on helium. About cats and Charlotte Bronte. I mean, she was first signed by David Gilmour, for God’s sake! The prog-rock train left the station, without me, a long time ago.

But you never know where the music will lead you, and when you open up to one kind of experience, you never know what other kinds you’ll find yourself opening to…

We were living in Indiana, trying to finish grad school, and I was playing in an 8-piece horn band (great band, too hip for most of our audiences, eventually riven by internal disputes and an infantile—but virtuosic—rhythmic section who wanted to play INXS instead of the Neville Bros). We played all over the Midwest, typically bar gigs from 10pm-2am, and then another hour-and-a-half of loadout while the sound company broke down the PA and the Good Doc (Dr Jolt, keyboards) loaded, unloaded, and reloaded his pickup “for best road stability.” I’d stand around waiting, the horn players having taken off with the nearest waitress within moments of the last tune, and wait ‘til the Doc was satisfied with the load. Then we’d clamber in, I’d say “are you OK to drive?” and he, wired after the last set would say “I’m OK!!!”, and I’d conk out.

We’d roll into Bloomington at 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning, and, if I didn’t have to go directly to the public radio station for the Sunday sign-on Morning Edition shift (Scott Simon had nothin’ on me), the Doc would drop me at home. Usually I’d try to crash out straight away, so as to have at least a couple of hours sleep before class. Sometimes I’d be too wired, and would mindlessly surf the TV while trying to come down. That’s how I discovered the much-missed, live music program Night Music (hosted, awkwardly enough, by David Sanbourn, missed by Michelob, and booked by Hal Wilner), about which I’ll post in future, but it also meant that occasionally I’d see something on MTV, which I didn’t watch any other time. And that is how, one late night/early morning in 1989, I saw the video for the first single off Kate Bush’s disc entitled The Sensual World, for a song called “Love and Anger.” The first 90 seconds of that video made me a die-hard fan, at least of that record.

Of course, she was a good dancer and easy on the eye, so the sight of her in clingy black leotards under a rain of gold dust was not unpleasant. But, what’s that?!?...Mevlevi Dervish dancers spinning as in the sema? Some guy playing the Malagasay valiha? I was riveted by the visuals of the thing before the music and lyrics even registered. And that was the first aspect of Love and Anger that leaped out of the confines of the MTV-environment: that it was a little short film, saturated with images of transport and transcendence, and remarkably free of the pandering that MTV specialized in.

Then I heard the Trio Bulgarka singing the background vocals, and the beautiful groove being laid down by slapping bass and drums, and then I heard the chorus, which reminded me of nothing so much as Rumi: “Take away the love and the anger/And the little bit of rope holding us together/Looking for a moment that’ll never pass/Livin’ in the gap between past and future”, and as I watched the video, I felt myself virtually going into a trance myself. By the time she was carried, in an apparent swoon, to a stage where Gilmour was ripping out a solo, and began dancing ecstatically, I knew I had to get the record.

And what a record it is: bursting with what Bush herself later called “female energy”, it’s heavily dependent upon the collaboration of the Trio Bulgarka, who she said “just cuddled me and sang with me”; the various global instruments of her brother Paddy (yes, there’s a Mick in the woodpile—the Bush’s are Irish, going back), including kabosy and valiha (I was discovering Malagasay music at the same time), a lovely sample of her father’s Oxbridge voice, at the beginning of The Fog, saying “Just put your feet down, child…Because you’re all grown up, now”; and a succession of spooky, sensual, remarkably naked songs.

And it’s almost all written from the female's point of view, not of an teenage nymphomaniac as imagined by a coke-snorting blow-dried LA-songwriter-asshole, but of a grownup woman who understands that the gap between men and women, between the sensual and the technological, between the instinctive and the rational, might possibly only be bridgeable with love. And, in song after song, love—in all its most Apollonian, Dionysian, light and/or dark manifestations—is the topic: the opener and title track, which quite intentionally evokes Molly Bloom’s orgasmic, holy “Yes” at the end of Ulysses; the chilling noir of a woman who discovers her own yearning toward the sexiness of dark evil when she wakes up from a dream to discover she’s been dancing with Adolf Hitler (Heads We’re Dancing); the loneliness that comes to all when a loving parent is gone (The Fog); the stark loss of love in Never Be Mine; and also deeper, more complex, and more transcendent loves: a lonely soul who unexpectedly discovers love in the form of a computer program’s empathy, voiced in Deeper Understanding by the boops and beeps of her Fairlight and the voices of the Trio Bulgarka (as Kate said, “I tried to imagine what would be the most loving, unearthly sound I could, and that was the Trio”); the acceptance of the loss that love “Between a Man and a Woman” will almost surely entail and of the particular pains that each gender faces alone (This Woman’s Work, used to accompany a scene of miscarriage in the film She’s Having a Baby), and the absolutely astonishing, holy ecstasy of Love and Anger.

After staying up til all hours on multiple nights to see the video again, eventually I purchased the VHS (I had never done that with MTV shit before) and watched it many more times. I was so blown away by what I thought I saw in it—both visual and textual references to Sufism, mystical Christianity, pagan and Goddess religion, the ecstasy of religion and of rock music, the inarticulable but nevertheless real ways in which men and women experience the world differently, and the way that art can unite these halves and produce ecstasy—that I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on it, arguing that the video itself was a holy document, like a sand painting or a mandala or the decorations inside a mosque: that watching this video with the right intentions, surrendering to the absolute tidal wave of archetypal spiritual imagery she had carefully and “using women’s ways of knowing” had built into the document, could itself trigger a spiritual experience.

My revered dissertation advisor once said to me “you should never write a musicology paper unless you think that by doing it you can change the world.” And that was certainly the goal behind my paper on Love and Anger. The bibliography name-checked Sufi commentators like Idries Shah and John Lewin, feminist scholars like Jean Shindoda Bolen and Mary Field Belenky, pagan authors like Starhawk, poets like Omar Khayyam and, especially, my beloved Rumi. When I gave the paper (for a group of ethnomusicologists specializing in visual sources) I must have seemed a little bit like a fakir (a “God-intoxicated man”) myself: I was so convinced of the brilliance of this piece of art, so persuaded that this represented an extraordinary realization of the tools for ecstatic reunion still available in the technological West, that I gave the whole paper, verbatim, including all still and video excerpts, with virtually no reference to the printed text—and then couldn’t remember the experience afterward.

This piece of art found me when I was just about to slide into a deep valley of confusion, alienation, and crisis in my personal life: most particularly, in my relationships--both contemporary and very, very old--with women. Studying Love and Anger, grappling with it, trying to find the words to speak of the baraka (the spark of transcendence) which it created, I now see, also helped me begin to climb out of that valley again.

I honor Kate Bush for the human empathy, spiritual courage and pure stick-to-it-ivity it took to create Love and Anger—and I’m grateful it found me when it did.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 037: Magic Sam: Live at Ann Arbor and Chicago

In the winter of 1978 I was living on the South Side of Chicago, marooned with a bunch of other U Chicago undergraduates in a largely-condemned 1920s-era hotel on the shores of the Lake, which the University was renting from the city to house its overflow undergrads. The hotel itself was a spooky place, with, as I’ve said, multiple floors which were condemned and thus off-limits to the students living there. Of course, that didn’t stop us, late at night, from sneaking up elevator shafts and down fire escapes to check out the deserted spaces, especially the roof and the ballrooms—which were very spooky, with tattered curtains still blowing in the drafts of the 40-foot windows. Every morning we’d schlep onto City-of-Chicago busses for the run east, into and across Hyde Park, to the UC campus.

I hated the place: I was coming off a freshman-year here, which had been one of the most amazing intellectual experiences of my 17 years, and UC by comparison was big, pretentious, oblivious, and had a visible inferiority complex toward the Ivy League. The snow lay piled four and five feet high on the sidewalks (Blizzard of ’78 in Chicago was a brutal time) I also experienced my first grand passion and the pain that usually accompanies same (word of advice: if at all possible, don't fall in love with a poet--especially if she's a good one), and my first encounters with the Sex Pistols. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have coped very differently and a lot more happily (but, with hindsight, don’t we all say that?). As it was, I just fell into a pretty classic spell of depression, and spent all my time sleeping, reading in the UC library (great library), and discovering the blues clubs on the South Side.

See, UC and its Hyde Park community were a white enclave in the midst of the black ghetto. During orientation, UC staff had issued us dire warnings about how paranoid we needed to be, and about how we should not under any circumstances ride the El or otherwise mingle with the “locals.” I blew that off—I had been living in Manhattan for a year, in Alphabet City, and walking everywhere on the island, including volunteering and listening to proto-hip-hoppers in the Parks the Bronx and Spanish Harlem. So I rode the busses and the El and I went out to the funky little blues clubs that dotted the South Side, in the old days before the blues in Chicago literally went “uptown” into neighborhoods the white Yuppies would venture into. Teresa’s and Pepper’s were the most famous but my favorite was the Checkerboard Lounge, owned by guitar great Buddy Guy, who’d recorded with Muddy and, by the time I lived there, was a regularly jamming party of English blues guys like Clapton and Beck (in fact, I heard a great story in the Checkerboard about a night when Clapton had dropped in to jam, and Buddy got word that a raid was going down, and slipped out, leaving Slowhand to take the bust; it was probably the greatest night of Clapton’s life).

The Checkerboard was in Bronzeville on 43^rd street, and most nights, especially when Buddy was out of town, the gig was held down by his rhythm-guitar-playing brother Phil, from who I heard my first P-Funk and Johnny “Guitar” Watson tunes. There was a great ribs joint next door that stayed open ‘til the bar itself closed. There was a chain across the open door to the Checkerboard and a large gentleman would check ID’s and collect the admission charge (usually $2 for people from outside the neighborhood). Inside, the bar was along the right hand wall, separated by a row of cheap lally columns from the tables and vinyl-upholstered chairs of the club section. The stage was just inside and to the left of the door and was maybe 6 inches off the floor. We went there a lot of nights. I was pretty comfortable there, and would bring UC friends down: the neighborhood was used to young white boys coming in to check out the blues, because it had been going on ever since the late ‘50s when the YWB were Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield.

But there was a whole ‘nother blues scene, beyond the South Side, in the 1970s, and neither I—nor, I’d guess, most other denizens black or white of the Checkerboard—was much aware of it. That was over on the West Side, in even tinier clubs like Rosa’s, where the bandstand was so small that you couldn’t fit a second guitar player, so the guitarists over there learned to hold down both parts themselves. King of that scene had been Mississippi-born Magic Sam Maghett, already a noted recording artist for Cobra (Otis Rush’s label), who had gone on to lead bands and record for Bob Koester’s great blues-revivalist label Delmark: his West Side Soul was a great record, capturing the interaction of Sam’s Memphis-flavored Strat and a band of heavy-hitters out of Muddy’s band, but (in my opinion) it didn’t really capture what Sam himself was capable of. He was a great singer and fantastic and funky guitar player, schooled by playing for gospel quartets and in six-fingered Homesick James’s hard-rocking band, but he was at his greatest with the minimal backup of bass and drums.

In August ’69 White Panther John Sinclair had put together a blues & jazz festival for Ann Arbor, running it virtually head-to-head against the upcoming Woodstock fest. And, with his contacts around Detroit and Chicago, he’d been able to put a stellar lineup, that really reminds us of what the waning days of the blues revival were like for blues heads: it included BB and Freddy, T-Bone, Muddy, Wolf, Otis, Buddy and Junior, but also Arthur Crudup, Clifton Chenier, Roosevelt Sykes, Sleepy John Estes, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Big Joe Williams. It’ll never again be possible to get such a constellation of legendary bluesmen, representing the entire history of the music its ‘20s roots in the Delta (Son) and Memphis (John and Big Joe), its reincarnation as jump blues in the hands of T-Bone and later BB, its detours to Texas and Louisiana (Lightnin’ and Clifton), and its modern Chicago manifestations (Muddy and Otis) and next generations (Buddy and Junior). My friend Bob Franke, a student at UM-Ann Arbor, was volunteering, and he remembers it costing 2 bucks to get in.

Sam was supposed to go on at 3pm on Sunday, but, in typically relaxed West-Side fashion,arrived late with his regular bass player and no drummer. He recruited Sam Lay out of Muddy’s band 2 minutes before they hit the stage, some anonymous hippie volunteering as sound man turned on a tape machine patched out of the board, and this is the record that resulted.

It’s an absolute tour-de-force in the blues power trio. Nowadays, with every corner bar holding a Stevie Ray clone and a rock rhythm section, we forget that nobody played the electric blues in a power trio format. Buddy had yet to take on the Hendrix fixation that he in turn passed on to Stevie, and the presumption was that every blues band needed a rhythm guitar player, and probably a piano-player, just to lay down the groove that would get the dancers out on the floor.

But Sam’s revved-up Memphis-style thumb-and-finger playing was an entire orchestra in itself, the way that Robert Johnson’s had been (and there are stories that just prior to his death in ’38, Robert had been gigging around the Delta with an electric rhythm section)—so the minimalist bass-and-drums rhythm section doesn’t drag, but rather fills out the sound. He plays Jimmy Reed (Tore Down) and Freddie King (the instrumental San-Ho-Zay), even throwing in a turbo-charged version of Robert’s Sweet Home Chicago, and the set is like a primer in how to play modern blues guitar: you can actually hear the rhythm section picking up on what Sam’s doing, growing more and more confident and assertive with each new tune in the set. I certainly learned to play the blues guitar from this two-LP set.

The electric blues should be like jazz—it should allow for wildly idiosyncratic individual choices (viz Lightnin’s “Lightnin change [the chord] when Lightnin’ want to change), but it should also be a shared musical language. It’s exhilarating to hear this prove out: bassist Bruce Barlow (another young white boy learning the blues, who would go on to play with Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen) knows the tunes and the changes, but drummer Sam Lay is having to pick up on Magic Sam’s moves moment to moment. The amazing thing is that it works, and there’s a visceral excitement about the recording, horrific technical quality though it is, simply because you’re hearing it develop moment by moment. By the time they played Sam’s closing signature song, the funk-tinged Looking Good, the crowd was screaming so much that the producers brought the band back on—whereupon they played an encore of Looking Good, once again.

The blues reacts: if somebody jumps up on the sticky red-and-white linoleum tile of the Checkerboard and wants to sing on, if someone else in the club is celebrating a birthday, if a police raid is going down and the bar-owner has slipped out the door to avoid it, if the guitar-player shows up at the festival with no drummer—the music is supposed to be able to adapt and react.

It’s a great treasure to have such a fantastic example of this adaptivity, at such a crucial moment in the revival’s final twilight. Within a year or two some of these players would be gone: Freddy in ’76, Sleepy John in ’77, Son and Lightnin’ in the 80s. It was a last flowering of the music’s full recorded history—and of Sam’s: on Dec 1 1969, less than four months after this performance, he keeled over and died from an unexpected heart attack. There have been other recordings and reissues, some with better sound or more extensively-rehearsed bands. But, thanks to that anonymous hippie at the soundboard, Live at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival captures the West Side blues the way I remember it, warts and all, from that cold, sad, life-altering, mind-expanding winter 30 years ago.