Indictment for war crimes....

....is what they really fear--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice. Benjamin Ferenccz, a former chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, helped write the provision in the UN Charter that made "an unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign nation" a war crime. He believes that the invasion of Iraq was one such, and points out that most legal scholars, including those advising the first President Bush, agreed.

Deep in their hearts, that's what the Bushites fear--that somehow, somewhere, the worm will turn, they will no longer hold all the weapons, and they might actually be put on trial for their actions.

Historical parallel: in the last 2 years of the Third Reich (1944-45), almost all Hitler's generals knew that the war was lost, and were holding on only in order to destroy evidence. Most appallingly, that was a principle motive behind the Final Solution.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 022: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party: Shahen-Shah

This is some of the most transcendent music I have ever heard. I don’t recall where I first heard Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the leading light (before his untimely death in 1997) in Pakistani Qawwali (devotional) music, but it might have been on the soundtrack Peter Gabriel did for Scorsese’s passionate, courageous Last Temptation of Christ. Or it might have been the dsic called Passion Sources, upon which Gabriel—one of the most honorable gentlemen in pop music—provided a more expansive showcase for the indigenous musicians with whom he’d collaborated on the soundtrack. At any rate, I stumbled across Shahen-Shah at the gone-but-not-forgotten, much-missed Classical Film and Music in Bloomington, a fantastic store, and I was absolutely smitten from the opening track, Shamas-Ud-Doha, Badar Ud-Doja.

Qawwali is an improvisational and devotional music which arose from the music-making at the tombs of Chisti Sufi saints in Pakistan and North India. Its goal was to invoke religious trance in its listeners, using repetitious modal vamps, interlocking tabla and hand percussion, and mesmerizing call-and-response vocals. There’s a strong influence from North Indian classical music, from which Qawwali (particularly in Nusrat’s hands) took improvisational virtuosity and the use of the vocables called bols (you can hear Nusrat use them on this record). Qawwalis (the term is used to describe both the genre and the musicians) are expected to be both musical and spiritual experts, because they have an important spiritual charge: in the midst of the Qawwali ceremony, the singer, like the leader of a Sufi lodge, is expected to observe the spiritual “readiness” each participant, and to make the right repertoire and improvisation choices to send successive celebrants into trance. This still obtains in a non-sacred situation, and even in the West: we were at a concert on the Harvard campus one night when the Party came out, sat down cross-legged on the stage, Nusrat began to sing, and what looked like the entire Pakistani community of greater Boston mobbed the stage, dancing ecstatically and showering the musicians with money.

Years later, while in Bloomington, I became interested in Sufi music through various channels, but especially the writings of Brian Cullman in the old Musician: Player and Listener magazine and the a certain rock video by Kate Bush (a long story for another day). I wound up probably knowing more about Sufi, especially Chisti and Mevlevi, music than any other non-Muslim in town. I wrote about it, read about it, composed music based upon it, and years later I got a tattoo of a hoopoe, a bird sacred in Sufi symbolism, which was formed by a calligraphy of the illahi: the opening lines of the Holy Qu’ran. All this led me to Rumi, for which I am profoundly grateful.

Nusrat came from a long line of Qawwalis, but was not interested in being a musician himself: he wanted to study engineering in the West. He did this until he began to have recurrent dreams, in which various Sufi saints would visit him and insist that he was called to be a Qawwali. Finally, one night a white dove visited the dream and touched him on the throat. He claimed that he was a Qawwali and a virtuoso singer from the next morning.

The music is absolutely transcendent. People who know nothing about Pakistan, nothing about Qawwali, and nothing about Sufism still find themselves mesmerizing by the swirling ecstasy of the singing and playing. In that respect, Qawwali is like gospel: the spiritual intensity is so vivid, the religious commitment so fervid, and the palpable aura of love so great, that anyone who hears the music is entranced. I certainly was.

The Sufis have a saying: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

Nusrat was that teacher for me.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 021: Charlie Christian: Solo Flight

Charlie Christian was the first great electric guitar soloist in jazz. Born in Texas and growing in Oklahoma City, he cut his teeth listening to the great string bands and territory bands. He learned music through the medium of the black public schools, a crucial resource for upcoming musicians in the age of segregation.

It’s a little hard to know when or why he started playing the guitar in single note lines (probably using his thumb), because most of his teachers would have been fingerstyle players. My guess is that he listened—hard—to players like Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang, both of whom where playing harmonically-sophisticated single-note lines on blues and simple jazz changes. But no one else was playing the electric guitar in this fashion, using the new instruments expanded volume, sustain, and (especially) receptivity to slurring to play lines that were more reminiscent of the territory bands’ saxophonists than of earlier guitarists. Certainly OK City was a great place to be working on this approach, as it was a major center for the touring bands which were the laboratories for many of the innovations in swing and later in bebop.

Charlie was already a legend around OK City by his teens, and came to the attention of the omnivorous producer John Hammond, who before and after Charlie would be instrumental in the careers of everyone from Billie Holliday to Count Basie to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. In 1939 Hammond got Charlie out to LA for a hearing with Benny Goodman but Goodman, a notorious asshole who had nevertheless been one of the first (at Hammond’s insistence) to hire black musicians for his small group, blew off the audition. Hammond countered by sneaking Christian on-stage at the Victor Hugo restaurant. Goodman responded with a typical cutting-contest ploy, calling a tune (Rose Room) whose difficult changes he assumed would best Christian. Charlie listened to two choruses and came in for his solo—and played twenty choruses, effectively throwing the challenge back in Goodman’s face.

Christian became a national star with the Goodman sextet, and also helped to birth bebop in after-hours sessions in Harlem—there are actually private tapes of Christian jamming with Dizzy Gillespie (see # 011).

But Solo Flight--a collection of formal and informal (including some great live) recordings done with the Goodman big band and small-group, and in various informal swing-based jam sessions (check out the fantastic interplay with Lionel Hampton, also of the Goodman sextet)--is the first Christian I heard, a double LP set that Larry “Guitar” Baeder —formerly of the Jay McShann band and self-described as the “only Jewish guitar player from Kansas City”—insisted I buy. He had me transcribe Seven Come Eleven and Rose Room, but every track on this disc is phenomenal. Christian set a remarkably effective template for jazz guitar: he’s basically a blues player, with a blues player’s fantastic phrasing, vocal quality, tone, and sense of time, but with a jazz player’s sense of harmony and ability to fit his lines over chord changes. Taken by themselves out of context, many of his lines sound like straightahead blues, but he had a marvelous command of that vocabulary and, obviously, huge ears. Learning those solos was a fantastic lesson in fluidity, economy, and harmonic linearity—the ability to play beautiful, singable lines through complex chords.

There’s a straight-line progression from Charlie to Wes Montgomery (who went to school on Christian) to Pat Metheny (who went to school on Wes)—all of them Midwestern boys, interestingly.

He died of TB and pneumonia at age 25. At least we’ve got the recordings.

Jesus, what a different world jazz would be if he’d lived.

The pragmatics of noise pollution

After two weeks in the west of Ireland in the off-season, yes one really does notice the noise pollution upon returning to the States. Yes: cars, trucks, jets, jackhammers, and general blare are ubiquituous and surely deaden our senses.

But it's the consciousness-intrusive versions that really raise the blood pressure: that is, the types of noise pollution which not only cloud the background of your hearing, but force their way into your thinking as well.

Item: virtually any person having a non-professional conversation via cell-phone in a public place. Not every one of these people is an imbecile, but virtually every one of them sounds like one.

Item: radio and/or stereo playback selections in gyms and fitness centers. Why does management assume that every person trying to get a workout wants to hear/see/be invaded by "MTV-U"?

Item: virtually any spoken-word radio broadcast on a public sound-system. Broadcast "Talk-Radio" as a format has swept over music radio in a tidal wave in the past decade, including both commercial and public formats. The job/sound requirements to be a speaking personality on radio any more virtually mandate acting like a cretin. Some people just have the gift naturally (Paul Harvey on the air even as I blog) but others have to work at it.

Item: kids who assume that notions of appropriate personal space do not apply to the audio realm. I don't want to hear your back-yard party music at 4am, I don't want to hear the sub-sub-sub-woofers in the back of your jacked pickup, I don't want to hear your campus-wide "Spirit" yells as football season rolls around, I don't want to hear Bob Marley blared out of your fraternity's party-house windows (I love Bob, but goddamn sure not for the reasons you do).

Americans have spent 400 years fetishizing "personal freedom" so much that they are incapable of functioning as part of a cooperative community.

[Harry Dean Stanton in Repo Man]: "Lookit that! Lookit that! Ordinary fuckin' people...God I hate 'em!"

I gotta get out into the wilderness again.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 020: Taj Mahal: Taj Mahal and The Natch'l Blues

Born in Springfield Massachusetts to a Jamaican jazz musician father and a Soluth Carolinian gospel-singing mother, Taj Mahal (born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks: what a great name!) has always understood the interplay between roots music and the land, between one roots music and another, and between roots music and a sane and healthy life. He got a degree at UMass Amherst (Dharmonia's alma mater!) but he cut his teeth in the same Topanga Canyon/LA folk/roots scene that birthed Ry Cooder and David Lindley. All three of these have appeared on each other’s albums and played in each other’s early bands, and they share an ethos: a way of digging into roots music that’s grounded, funky as hell, and authoritative, but without the self-consciousness, persnicketyness, or fussiness of too many revivalists.

Taj and Ry did a band record with The Rising Sons in 1964, an early shout at the blues revival that gave us the Butterfield Blues Band and Canned Heat (the latter a terribly underrated band), but the band broke up before they could reap the benefits. Taj went on to make an eponymous solo disc which was released in 1968 and it’s absolutely fantastic, with a smokin’ band: both Ry and the late great Native American guitarist Jesse Ed Davis lay down fantastic slide licks, the sound is not Chicago-style but rather the “electrified boogie” of Memphis musicians like Sonny Boy Williamson, and the repertoire is both impeccable and enormously influential: Taj’s version of Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues went to the Allman Brothers, his version of Junior Wells’s Checkin’ Up on My Baby was stolen years later by the Blues Brothers, and his The Celebrated Walking Blues is the best version of Robert Johnson’s classic ever recorded by a revivalist.

Couple this disc as an amazon.com “two-fer” with the same year’s The Natch’l Blues and you’ve got the music which has been a cornerstone of Taj’s repertoire ever since. He continued to explore later on (he was the first American artist to cover Bob Marley, he did a whole reggae disc before anyone else, and he’s collaborated with Hawaiian, Malian, and East Indian musicians), but Natch’l Blues is still one of my favorites—and the tunes are obviously favorites of his: She Caught the Katy and Things are Gonna Work Out Fine show up regularly in concerts, Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue has been a vehicle for many extended live workouts, The Cuckoo pulls in the spooky Appalachian drones of Clarence “Tom” Ashley, and, in Corrina, Taj creates a piece of music as deep, said, and profound as anything Blind Willie Johnson ever recorded, leaving every other revivalist in the dust (this version of Corrina is also featured in a heartbreaking scene in Laurence Gonzales’s great ‘70s rock/Vietnam novel Jambeaux).

These records are mistakenly described simply as “electrified country blues,” but they are much deeper, broader, and more complex than that. Taj Mahal, like Ry Cooder (with his fantastic Into the Purple Valley and Boomer’s Story) and David Lindley (with his omni-genre band Kaleidoscope and, later and more successfully, with El Rayo-X), understood that roots music has values: that it serves purposes, builds community, rewards effort, and creates human value. For 40 years, these men have all been building bridges with music.

We owe them.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 019: The Mahavishnu Orchestra: The Inner Mounting Flame

Around 1971 the English guitarist John McLaughlin was just coming off eighteen months of incredibly high-intensity music-making. Having recorded a first, more-or-less straightahead jazz disc in England (the under-appreciated Extrapolation), he had come to the States in 1969 to play with Tony Williams and found himself, pretty much within moments, playing in the studio and (one night) on stage with Miles Davis’s late-60s band. Miles in this period was deep into an African/electric thing, having left most of the bebop/hard-bop/cool jazz fans and critics behind, and was investigating the intensity and the rhythmic grooves of rock and funk. He’d wanted to collaborate with Jimi Hendrix but Jimi was to die before a year was out; instead, Miles kept insisting to his later guitarists “Play like Jimi! Turn it up!”. Those early-70s LP’s by the big electric Miles bands are derogated too often as squalling noise, but they’re great music, and, along with McLaughlin’s first US album as a leader, were the foundation of the 70s jazz-rock/fusion style.

That McLaughlin debut was 1971’s The Inner Mounting Flame, credited to the Mahavishnu Orchestra (named after the name given McLaughlin by his guru Sri Chinmoy), but unquestionably John’s band. Mahavishnu went through several incarnations, but the first quintet was by far the best: violinist Jerry Goodman, keyboardist Jan Hammer, bass guitarist Rick Laird, and the explosive drummer Billy Cobham. The template was to exploit the rhythmic grooves, instrumentation, and intensity of rock, the improvisational virtuosity of jazz, and the shifting meters and (occasionally) the modal scales of Indian music, in a program of all-original tunes.

This is a tremendously raw, forceful, but at the same very beautiful record, featuring McLaughlin’s twin-necked “Double Rainbow” electric guitar virtuosity (he was an astonishingly gifted technician), matched every step of the way by Billy’s volcanic drumming. Their dynamic interaction, the core of the band, is shown to best advantage on the frighteningly perfect stop-time unisons of The Noonward Race and the remorseless ostinati of The Dance of Maya.

Later, entirely too many people—even including McLaughlin himself—presumed that the template of screaming volume, lightning tempi, and portentious solemnity was the “way forward” for jazz in the 1970s, which led to an awful lot of self-indulgent crap from musicians who should have (and eventually did) know better. With hindsight, we know that they should also have been looking at loft jazz (Sam Rivers, Milford Graves, and their ilk, beautifully captured in Val Wilmer’s book As Serious as Your Life), the ECM school (Keith Jarrett, the first Pat Metheny trio record, and Oregon), and the collectives, especially Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Colored Musicians (AACM) and Philly’s Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

But that first Mahavishnu record, especially if you were a guitar-player, was exhilarating beyond belief. Still an amazing disc, 35 years later.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 018: The Clash: The Essential Clash

(in lieu of hypothetical special compilation excerpting The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, and London Calling)

My favorite punk band. They weren’t as chaotic as the Pistols, they lacked the thunderous brevity of the Ramones, they didn’t have the guitaristic virtuosity of Television or the linguistic virtuosity of Patti Smith, but here’s what they did have: the great guitar parts of Mick Jones, the matinee-idol good looks of Paul Simonon and fantastic, rock-solid drumming of Topper Headon, and the political ferocity of the much-missed Joe Strummer. The Pistols went on TV and said “fuck”—the Clash went on stage and called for revolution. Coming up in Brixton, they had linked up with the ska and reggae musicians of the immigrant Jamaican community, and they saw the damage being done by the Tory Horror. They wrote absolutely fantastic songs, they understood—far better than the Pistols, who were basically interested in pissing off their aunties, or the Ramones, whose cretinous interviews reflected nothing but a reflection of Joey’s un-examined political imbecility—how to dance along the knife-edge between access and sell-out, they recognized the political power of being rock stars. They were more involved with anarchist and leftist political groups than any other punk band, and the song titles tell the story:

White Riot, London’s Burning, Police & Thieves, (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais, Stay Free, London Calling, The Guns of Brixton, Jimmy Jazz, Train in Vain, This is Radio Clash, Should I Stay or Should I Go

These are all absolutely fantastic songs, most of which make the connections between class, cash, and power explicit. White Riot, the first single in 1976, set the political template—but not the musical template, which would continue to evolve and grow, which was to cost them credibility later, because a pillar of the earliest punk (and then the later hardcore) ethos was that virtuosity was a sell-out.

The first record, The Clash, I heard in Chicago from Americans who were coming back from England; the second Give ‘Em Enough Rope (1977) I bought myself. Here was where they made their connections with rockabilly and reggae explicit: there’s a brutal version of I Fought the Law and the titanic original White Man in Hammersmith Palais (a metaphor for their own experience as Anglo punks in a Jamaican immigrant community). Mick said “You should write about what you know about,” and so they did—but what they knew about got bigger and bigger, and more and more sophisticated. There’s fantastic punk, reggae, and rockabilly on this second record, and the political content is as strong as ever, but for me the high point is the same tune that the punk audience hated: Mick’s Stay Free, an anthem to friends on the scene who had already died. Now I hear it as a tribute from Mick for Joe, who died of an unexpected heart attack in 1992—a tragic loss.

years have passed and things have changed
and i move anyway i wanna go
i'll never forget the feeling i got
when i heard that you'd got home
an' i'll never forget the smile on my face
'cos i knew where you would be
an' if you're in the crown tonight
have a drink on me

but go easy...step lightly...stay free

The third disc, London Calling, a double-LP, is conventionally described as the band's masterpiece, and it's a great record, with an absolutely iconic cover:

By the time it came out, I had moved on, geographically and musically, so it wasn't 'til years later that I got to know the record.

But they were great, courageous men: this is a band that played Rock Against Racism and the Concerts for Kampuchea and Reggae, insisted that their double- and triple-LP albums should be released at the same price as a single-disc, and categorically refused to reform or to sell out. The best part: they played their first gig on July 4 1776--the American Bicentennial. Absolutely appropriate: they epitomized the sophisticated rabble-rousing of Sam Adams better than anyone else in punk history.

The Clash had the balls and the brains to go up against the cowardice, greed, class-hatred, racism, and fascist repression of Tory Britain. They were Margaret Thatcher’s worst nightmare. And God knows she, and Ronnie and Nancy, and the PMRC, all deserved it.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 017: Juluka: Musa Ukungilandela

Johnny Clegg, a London-born Jewish boy raised by a single mother, met Zulu guitarist Sipho Mchunu on the street in South Africa in 1969, when he was 16 and Sipho was 18. Sipho had come to Johannesburg from his tribal homelands to find work, and John was casting around for a path toward manhood. John was already aware of the fantastic Zulu syncretic music and dance styles pioneered by street musicians, including the magnificent guitar styles called variously ukupika and izihlabo (the guitar, tin whistle, and concertina had all come to play an important role in South African music after having been introduced by Christian missionaries in the colonial era). Zulu culture across ethnic groups was marked by powerful roles for music, story and dance, usually divided into different idioms along strict gender lines. Various forms of men’s dance and stick-fighting were learned and performed as rites of passage, and they were profoundly attractive to a fish-out-of-water lonely kid.

Sipho taught Johnny guitar and dancing and they began performing together, at a time and place (apartheid-era South Africa) in which there were severe potential penalties if the two races simply listened to, much less played, music together. Along with other apartheid-era musicians like Mzwake Mbule and Dudu Pukwana, Johnny and Sipho (first as a duo and later as a band, Juluka) specialized in hit-and-run concerts, playing for small mixed audiences and vanishing before the security forces could intervene. Throughout the 80s Juluka toured the world, and it’s a tragic irony that, in the post-apartheid era, various intolerant, ill-informed, and cowardly musicians tried to argue that Clegg and Mchunu must have “sold out”, simply because they had had the temerity to perform under apartheid (an old friend from Bloomington, a classical flutist who also speaks and performs in two different Zulu traditions, couldn’t get an orchestra gig in South Africa for the same reasons). But Johnny and Sipho have all the beatings, arrests, and persecution on their resume to permit them to ignore these amnesiac, classless assholes. Eventually, Sipho’s father died and he went back to the tribal homelands to inherit, while Johnny continued with a new band, Savuka—though he and Sipho occasionally still re-unite for concerts.

And the music is just fantastic. Zulu choral singing features deep-voiced male choirs singing modal parts in 4ths and 5ths—a raw, beautiful approach that sounds like Western plainchant sung over African grooves (Nans ‘Impi), beautiful call-and-response vocals over izhilabo guitar (Zodwa), and the fantastic tuneful bass lines adapted from mbaqanga (Izinhlobo Nezinhlobo Zabantu). And this doesn’t even address the staggering power of the singing, playing and dancing in the group’s live shows. Though this disc is something of a swan song for Juluka (1984), before Sipho’s departure and John’s foundation (with the same players) of the more pop/rock-oriented Savuka, it’s a beautiful, thoughtful, and mature record.

We used to play some of these tunes in the horn band in Bloomington. And I had the great good fortune to be playing them, live on stage, on the night that Nelson Mandela walked out of prison. What a privilege that was.

Bonus tracks: from 1999’s Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World with Savuka: the lovely, heartfelt and tuneful love song Dela, and the titanic Warsaw 1943, based on the poetry and essays of Warsaw-Uprising poet Czeslaw Milosz: a song which finds its way, with great insight, simplicity, and compassion into the heart of a frightened revolutionary who has informed on his friends:

Chorus:
I never betrayed you, and I never betrayed the revolution
I just didn't want to die alone, I needed you to see me home
And if I could save you, and if I could find a solution
I would die a thousand times, to get you out of here

Sharing the same cold cell
Betrayer and betrayed
An island with two frightened castaways
Not a word is spoken,
How can he explain?
Through swollen eyes they watch the dawn's first rays
It's all over now
They stand backs to the wall
Waiting for the fascist's sword to fall
In the desperation of a young life about to end
He turns before the bullet
And forgives a friend

That is the same forgiveness that let Nelson Mandela walk out of solitary confinement after 27 years and find a way to “peace and reconciliation” for his damaged country. Few American musicians, NO American politician I can think of, has ever displayed as much moral courage.

[Unsurprising sordid trivia: as a US Congressman, Dick Cheney voted against a congressional resolution calling for Mandela's release. The Dick has been true to the most contemptible, selfish priorities for his entirely-too-long public career. What a sorry excuse for an inadequate human being.]

100 Greats in 100 Days # 016: Fela Anikulapo Kuti: Zombie

Fela Kuti, born to an upper-class Christian preacher father and a Maoist mother in Abeokuta Nigeria in 1938, might possibly be the most dangerous musician ever to come out of Africa. A composer, singer, saxophonist, keyboardist, and legendary bandleader, he was also a notorious foe of the corruption, brutality, Euro-centrism, and stupidity of a series of Nigerian military dictatorships. After taking a degree in jazz from the London Conservatory of Music, he came back to Lagos, bought land in the middle of the Sirulere Ghetto, and put together a band.

In 1968-69 he and the band spent six months visa-less, starving in Los Angeles, during which Fela was exposed to the late-60s experiments of Miles Davis and James Brown (both of whom in this period were “re-Africanizing” their music, expanding their bands, and sinking deeper and deeper into a world of polyrhythmic grooves) and to the rhetoric and politics of the Black Panthers. He adopted all three, married them to an African concept of polygamy, tribal community, and the musician’s power to criticize, and released the first in a series of LP-length recordings which would make him notorious throughout Africa.

By the mid-70s, his Sirulere compound had expanded to include a nightclub (“The Shrine”), recording studio, pressing plant, newspaper printing press, radio station, and an extended family of multiple wives, children, and runaway street children, enclosed by an electrified fence. Fela named it the Kalakuta Republic, and declared it an independent state not subject to the laws of the military. It was just down the street from Alagbon Close military barracks. Throughout this period Fela released records which married hellacious grooves, jazz-inspired brass and reeds improvisation, James Brown’s use of cuing and call-and-response, and Panther-esque political diatribes, delivered in the “pidgin” which was the lingua franca of West Africa. Discs like Roforofo Fight (1972), Alagbon Close (1974), and Confusion (1975) used the traditional musician’s position of prominence, but unlike a traditional musician, Fela pointed fingers, named names, and damned those he deemed guilty in scabrously funny language.

These albums were wildly popular across West Africa, even though Fela himself was thought of as a “crazy person”—a notoriety upon which he of course traded. Album covers, painted in the style of Nigerian market novels, offered brutal caricatures of the political figures named within (1989’s Beasts of No Nation depicted Thatcher, Botha, and Reagan with demonic horns and fangs dripping blood, and 1975’s Expensive Shit depicted Fela and his many bare-breasted wives grinning and giving the Black-Power salute behind barbed wire), but the military was caught on the horns of the classic dilemma which political musicians from Zappa to Victor Jara to Ventadorn have exploited: ignore the critique and your regime seems inneffectual; repress it and you legitimize it as a real threat (hear that, Chimpie?). 1976’s Zombie pictured Nigerian soldiers, and the title song and its accompanying stage business made the mockery explicit: “Zombie na go go unless you tell ‘im to go—Zombie na go stop unless you tell ‘im to stop—Zombie na go t’ink unless you tell ‘im to t’ink—Zombie na go kill unless you tell ‘im to kill—GO AND KILL!”, while Fela would drape his saxophone over his shoulder as if sloping arms, and goose-step around the stage.

In 1977, during a pan-African festival which Nigeria was hosting as a means of burnishing the regime’s image, Fela ran a counter-festival at The Shrine, widely attended by the politicians and musicians visiting from the West, during which he continued his brutal attacks on the government. Just after FESTAC’s closing, soldiers came to Kalakuta to arrest one of the extended family. Fela refused them entrance and electrified the fence, at which the soldiers broke in, beat Fela within an inch of his life and broke his hands, destroyed the recording studio, instruments, printing press, and master tapes, raped his wives, and threw Fela’s aged mother from a second story window. He fled to Ghana, and from his hospital bed, released an LP commemorating the incident: Sorrow, Tears and Blood. Upon his mother’s death from her injuries, Fela led a parade of the poor from Kalakuta through Sirulere to the gates of Alagbon Close, where he deposited his mother’s remains, an event depicted in the next LP, Coffin for Head of State.

I saw Fela play in 1988 in Vancouver: I had been traveling, by plane, bus, and cab for 18 hours, but Dharmonia had got tickets and we went, and I’m glad we did. The band was immense (percussionists, two bassists, dancers, singers, horns, multiple guitars, etc) and Fela spent much of the concert storming back-and-forth across the stage, ranting at the audience about the shame that “you Americans” were about to incur by electing George HW Bush. The Vancouverites’ feeble “but we’re Canadian, eh!” were lost on him. I had the good fortune to write about him in the dissertation and to publish that essay; the least I could do for one of my great heros.

Fela understood like few others ever had just how much power a musician in African culture can have, and how much more power he can accrue by dancing along the edge of the semiotic precipice.

Certainly one of the bravest musicians there ever was. The rest of us could learn some courage from him.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 015: The Sex Pistols: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

I loved the Sex Pistols; I mean, I really loved the Sex Pistols. I had already seen Television and the Patti Smith Group at CBGB in lower Manhattan in Winter ’76, but I didn’t encounter this record until moving to Chicago in Fall ’77. At that time, the undergraduate College at UC was pretty nightmarish—UC administration either (a) neglected the College in favor of the much-vaunted Graduate School, or (b) enacted absurdly demanding requirements and standards to try to compete with the Ivy Schools, about which they had a terrible inferiority complex. Most of the UC undergrads living in the Shoreland Hotel were into disco, which I hated—yet another musical trend I figured out too late. So pretty quickly I stopped going to classes and started hanging out in blues clubs on the South Side (Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge still one of my favorite music clubs in the world). But I also met some dear friends (shout-out to Ed Derse and Fred Duca) and my first great love. Other than that, I read books in the library and visited Maxwell Street Market, where I met Arvella Gray (and God, I wish I’d known about Chi what I know now; I would have found a lot more musicians).

And that was the context in which Lin and Mary introduced me to Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Lin was a poet from New Orleans and Mary had been living in England and brought the disc back. They used to love to put this LP on at disco parties where the spandex-and-double-knit crew were dancing to Bee Gees. I loved the power of the music, the sense of a deeply-felt “Fuck You” to ‘70s music culture; at least, that’s the way I heard it. Years later I heard the stories about Malcolm McClaren creating the Pistols out of a punch of yobbos and an Irish lunatic who hated each other, but at the time I just knew I loved the pissed-off-ness of the songs. The ones I remember the best were Holidays in the Sun (“I-don’-wan-no-hol-i-days-inna-SUN / I-wanna-go-ta-the-new-Bel-SEN”), God Save the Queen ("God save-the-Queen.....the Fascist-re-GIME"), Anarchy in the U.K., and Pretty Vacant ("We're so prit-ty--O so prit-ty...VA-cant---and we don't CARE!").

It was even more years later that I came to realize just how brilliant the Pistols’ whole punk parody actually was. Sid was a worthless loser, but Steve was a pretty good guitar player, and John…Ah, John…

John Lydon/Rotten is one of the most brilliant put-on artists to come out of 20^th-century pop culture. I’d put him on par with Dali, Antonin Artaud, Frank Zappa, and John Cage. He tapped into the classic anti-Brit Irish Calibanian archetype: for 150 years, the English illustrated papers had been depicting the Irish as simian sub-humans, as ready to drink or fight as work. John understood the power of that archetype, the power of the despised. His attitude was “you want a rock ‘n’ roll caveman? I’ll give you a rock ‘n’ roll caveman out of your worst nightmares.”

Lydon never gave in to the media machine. The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, a documentary on the Pistols only-and-last US tour, ends with Rotten alone onstage at their last show, a sardonic chuckle in his voice, asking the audience,

“Ever get the feeling…you’ve been cheated?!?"

Rock 'n' roll should, in part, be about saying "fuck YOU!" to the power structure. John always remembered that.

Let’s hope rock ‘n’ roll never forgets.

"Old weird America" blogging

Greil Marcus is a pompous self-mythologizing bozo (whose Lipstick Traces seems to me to be overblown and self-indulgent speculation w/out much original insight) but he did come up with a wonderful phrase for the re-titling of his Invisible Republic: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes: he called it Old, Weird America. Nick Tosches and various other American-studies people have worked this same vein, to emphasize the degree to which, prior to radio/movies/TV, American culture was far more localized, far more diverse, far more isolated, and far more "weird" than since then. It's the world that the early cylinders, 78s, and Vita-phone films just hint at--artists whose performances and performance rhythm were aimed at the medicine show and the vaudeville stage, with the audience and performer in the same room, not the objectification of electronic media.

Well, here are a few shots from the "Old, weird America" as represented by the 4th of July celebrations in my home town. Dig:














Porta-Sans and kiddie-carts









Trying to fill the sippie-cup








and...








Church O' the Rock Corn Dogs (sold out by noon, in case the Rapture hits later on)

Great stuff in bad films

July 4 they're showing all the Americana and patriotic bullshit they can on the tube, including Field of Dreams (which is both Americana, patriotic, and bullshit), but there's a line in that film that would go through most American men like a knife.

At the end of the flick, when Ray Kinsella has managed to resist his banker brother-in-law's blandishments to sell the farm he's plowed under to make a diamond for a ghost baseball team, and the JD Salinger character has walked off into the corn with Shoeless Joe Jackson, only the catcher is left on the field. Kinsella turns and sees him, the player turns toward him, and Kinsella says "Oh, my God. It's my father."

I lost my father too young--twice. That line does it for me.

Independence Day edition: 100 Greats in 100 Days # 014: Springsteen/van Zandt compilation: The E Street Patriots

"What a fantastic monument to the better instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers." --Hunter S. Thompson

In my America, This Land is Your Land is the national anthem. Jimmy Carter is emeritus Secretary of State. Al Gore is President (not because I want him, but because he actually won in 2000). Bruce Springsteen is roving Ambassador. And these are the songs that we play at the 4^th of July Parade:

• Born in the USA: a searing indictment of the rich men who send poor boys out to die; Ronald Reagan’s campaign bootlegged it for the ’82 race, which made it obvious that Republicans can’t listen past any song’s first chorus);
• Sun City: Little Steven’s brilliant attack on South Africa’s minority government and Reagan’s “constructive engagement (read: enablement); features, among many others, Bruce and Miles Davis;
• I am a Patriot: Better known in Jackson Browne’s version than Steven’s own, but reclaims the title of “patriot” for those who deserve it, rather than the yammering cowards who screech about it
• Youngstown: a Bruce folk-song: the people who worked the foundries that “helped the Union win the war” and received no reward
• Bring ‘Em Home: brilliant live version of Seegar’s Vietnam-era anthem, from the Conan O Brien show; find it on youtube.com
• 4^th of July Asbury Park (Sandy): Bruce’s happiest patriotic song: “Sandy the aurora's rising behind us, the pier lights our carnival life forever/Oh love me tonight and I promise I'll love you forever”
• American Skin (41 Shots): Bruce understands and acts on the realization that “my country right or wrong” should mean “my country: fight for it when it’s right; fix it when it’s wrong.” Commemorates the shooting death by NYC cops of Amadou Diallo during the Giuliani era. He was unarmed, shot 41 times, but a changed-venue jury unanimously acquitted on all charges. Any question about actual culpability were resolved by a $3million out-of-court settlement to his survivors. A terribly sad song.
• My Hometown: the song John Mellencamp (who I had the misfortune to play with in Bloomington) has been trying to write his whole life.
• Los Desaparecidos: Little Steven’s Woody Guthrie-esque tribute to those disappeared during the right-wing activities of South America’s Operation Condor, sponsored by the USA.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 013: Fairport Convention: Liege and Lief

This might be the worst-sounding masterpiece I’ve ever heard--but it's still a masterpiece. Producer Joe Boyd, who certainly enters the Hall of Fame for his impeccable musical taste as a producer and A&R man (Incredible String Band, Fairport, Chris MacGregor, John Martin, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Toots & the Maytals), listened a little too hard to the musicians' fears of “sounding like a rock ‘n’ roll band” and produced a record that sounds as if they’re playing under several layers of quilts—though the remastered and expanded version is a little better.

Fairport, founded by Ashley Hutchings and Richard Thompson as a British version of San Francisco folk-rock, had recently sustained a catastrophic van crash which had killed drummer Martin Lamble and shattered the old version of the band. On Liege and Lief, they added fiddler Dave Swarbrick, who had just come off a string of fantastic duo records with the great guitarist Martin Carthy, and this record is the moment when they transition from a reasonably competent psychedelic/folk band to something deeper, darker, and more ancient. Swarbrick helped Sandy reach deeper into her own folk roots and goaded Thompson to explore writing new songs in the traditional forms.

The result, track by track, is absolutely earth-shattering: the jubilation of Sandy’s Come All Ye (introducing the band’s personnel and writing them into myth at the same time), the spooky fanged terror of Reynardine (based on AL Lloyd’s re-write of a traditional song, about which Swarbrick said “it wasn’t us—it was Sandy’s ability to tell a story, and us rambling around in the background”), the raging fiddle medley The Lark in the Morning (in which Thompson’s skirling electric and Simon Nicol’s thumping acoustic guitars kick Swarbrick into the highest gear). Most intense moment of all is probably Tam Lin, an ancient (14^th century) Scottish border ballad of demonic kidnapping and rescue, and the ancient bloody balladry of Matty powered by the Mattacks/Hutchings rhythm section, who had the good taste to rip off the fantastic descending pentatonic riff from Martin Carthy’s version of The Famous Flower of Serving Men (itself possibly the greatest folk-song performance I’ve ever heard).

Secret weapon: the titanic drummer Dave Mattacks, who, in his mild-mannered bespectacled Eric-Idle-as-librarian way, lit a fire under Thompson’s ass and pushed Swarbrick’s fiddle tunes to dizzying heights. Mattacks went on to play in numerous future versions of Fairport, as well sa with the greatest versions of the Richard and Linda Thompson Band, and with pickup bands for the folkie Bob Franke, where I had the privilege of playing with him too--and it wasn't like anything else.

For sure.

[h/t to Dharmonia for putting the right riff with the right ballad.]

100 Greats in 100 Days # 012: Richard & Linda Thompson: Shoot Out the Lights

In 1982 Dharmonia and I were living in Cambridge, Mass, trying to survive as free-lance musicians and teachers. The guitar studio we both worked out had already gone belly-up and we were only scratching along because we lived in a $238/month rent-controlled apartment with big chunks falling out of the ceilings.

We were already well-aware of the Anglo-Celtic folk revivalists, were already playing that music with Reynardine (a great band conceptually, but we were too late for the 60s-70s folk scare and too early for the ‘80s Celtic revival), and already knew Thompson’s music, mostly through his fantastic writing and guitar-playing with Fairport Convention. We also had a rare double-LP set of live stuff and outtakes called Live (more or less), which had some fantastic extended guitar solos and a beautiful version, by Richard and wife Linda, of Dan Penn’s Dark End of the Street. Linda had sung lead or backup vocals on some of Richard’s most intense and personal stuff, including the magnificent Pour Down Like Silver (topic of a future “100 Greats” post), and we were eagerly awaiting the new R&L duo disc.

Can’t remember where we bought it, or even if maybe we ordered it through one of the Cambridge shops, but I clearly remember driving down Storrow Drive with her reading the lyrics—some of the darkest he ever wrote. At the time, we were most aware of the scary and pessimistic elements (Don’t Renege on Our Love, Shoot Out the Lights, and Did She Jump or Was She Pushed) and we made those connections when we saw them on tour that year and realized that they hated each other (divorce pending, after Richard showed up at the airport to meet a pregnant Linda and told her was leaving her for someone else) and realized that the cover was designed in such a way that they hadn’t even had to be at the photo session together.

The shows on that tour were titanic but not enjoyable—more like watching a rock ‘n’ roll version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--though I did have a remarkable close-encounter with Linda (a story for another day). It’s only with years of hindsight that we’ve learned to recognize the other, less stark beauties of this record: the sighing heartbreak of Walking on a Wire, the raging transcendence of the guitar solos on Shoot Out the Lights, and the fierce, hell-or-breakfast, Tilt-a-Whirling, Dervishtic jubilation of Wall of Death (“Let me ride on the Wall of Death/One more time/You can waste your time on the other lines/This is the nearest to being alive/O Let me take my chances on the Wall of Death”).

This is a great, very angry, very brave record.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 011: Dizzy Gillespie Big Band: Manteca b/w Things to Come

This is an imaginary two-fer 78: Manteca (co-authored by Dizzy and Chano Pozo) and Things to Come. They weren’t released together, but if they had been, you could take the resulting record to the proverbial desert island and have a pretty good grasp of some of the major developments in jazz. After having played with Cab Calloway, schooled Miles Davis, and (with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk) created the art music called bebop, Dizzy, a consummate showman, put together his own big band in 1945. Having played in Cab’s band and in the prototypical big band of Earl Hines (which also included Sarah Vaughan, Bird, and Billie Eckstine), Dizzy knew what he wanted in a big band, but he was also looking forward. One of the great musicologists and teachers in the history of jazz, he had become interested in the Afro-Cuban music he and other jazzmen heard on after-hours gigs in Spanish Harlem, the bands of the great Desi Arnaz and Arsenio Rodriguez. Dizzy could hear the connections between the cross-accents and “dropped bombs” being worked out by Jo Jones, Kenny Clarke, and Max Roach and the poly-rhythms which form the basis of Afro-Cuban music—and he was enough of a nationalist and an historian to trace both to Africa. When he put together the Big Band, it was with the express purpose of bringing his vision of bebop to a wider audience on tour, and of making a show out of it. He never quite succeeded, losing money on the band’s only tour of the South, presumably because the lindy-hoppers couldn’t figure out how to dance to the band’s powerhouse bebop charts (Dizzy disagreed, saying “I could dance to it; I could dance the fuck out of it”).

What becomes apparent in hindsight is that the Big Band’s great contribution was to point forward, past a time when bebop had to find a market with dancers, to when it, and its language, could make its way into the academy. Every high-school and college big band owes a debt to Dizzy’s, because he found a way to translate bebop’s intensity, dynamic interaction, and virtuosity out of the hanging-by-its-fingernails chamber setting of the quintet, to the size, volume, and power of the 16-piece band. Things to Come is still a standard chart at North Texas and at Indiana, where the real hot-shot college bands can be found.

Dizzy is also, of any 20^th-century musician, probably the single individual most responsible for the melding of styles which yielded Latin jazz. In order to further his own education in this area, Dizzy brought the great Cuban drummer Chano Pozo to New York. Chano, a singer and conguero, was a respected priest in the sect of Santeria, the syncretic religion combining elements of African and Catholic belief. Music, and more specifically drum rhythms, are an essential part of Santeria’s possession ceremonies, and Chano was admired for his compositional ability. When he and Dizzy met, neither spoke more than a few words of the other’s language, but as Dizzy said “we communicated through music.” Manteca (Spanish slang for lard) was one of their first co-compositions. Built on a foundation of Chano’s drumming and singing, the track layers brass, reeds, and percussion one after another in interlocking rhythms, in the fashion of a Santeria ensemble. Dizzy contributes the contrapuntal brass themes and the swing bridge and the band burns throughout.

These two tracks might be my own desert-island big-band tracks; it’s fantastic music, especially considering it was recorded in 1948.

Absolutely astonishingly prescient stuff.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 010: Youssou N'Dour: The Lion and Set

I was lucky enough to be introduced to African music by people from Africa. I had played various styles from around the Continent for years (North African/Islamic ‘ud music, South African township jazz/kwela/Zulu styles, etc) but around 1990 I met various people from whom I had the good fortune to learn the music directly.

Most especially from my darlin’ collaborator Heather Maxwell Adou, who after growing up in Michigan spent high-school time in West Africa, then as a Peace Corps volunteer, then stayed on as a working musician. I learned a lot about music of Ghana, Mali, and Cote d’Ivoire from her; she taught me to play kamelengoni and balafon, I wrote a bunch of accompaniments for her traditional and original songs, and we did a series of gigs at which she sang and danced, I played and sang, and Rob Mulligan played percussion. Still some of my favorite music to play—but, as with a number of other genres, something I’ll only play anymore as a sideman—I need an expert leading the way.

I also had the chance to see Youssou N’Dour’s band around 1990 in Lexington, KY. I was playing in an eight-piece horn band (“Jif and the Choosy Mothers”) and we did a lot of reggae, South African, and Afro-Caribbean music. Way too hip for the rooms/college students we played for, but the players were excellent and we had a good time. I was later fired from that band for being insufficiently collegiate material (and I still owe Danny K a beating for that and worse sins—payback’s a mother, Danny, and I’ll find you some day).

Anyway, I’d seen Youssou on various videos, and had watched him blow Peter Gabriel off the stage singing guest vocals on In Your Eyes (with Gabriel’s happy assistance). We went down to see Youssou in KY, and this was the first time I’d ever seen a real African band: 10-12 players on stage, costumes swirling, fantastic virtuosity as the players casually switched from one instrument to another tune-by-tune, and the phenomenon of the animateur: the virtuoso dancer whose whole job is to dance, thereby “animating” the crowd to dash the band by showering them with money. It was an incredible show, largely featuring the material on The Lion.

Youssou was a child star in his native Senegal, and a prodigious money-maker with his band Super-Etoile du Dakar. Unlike many such, he went on to grow and mature as an adult musician, maintaining the fantastic groove-a-bility of the great African dance bands, but also developing a voice about national and international issues affecting his people. Like Fela Kuti, subject of a future posting, he understood the powerful voice a musician has in Africa—unlike Fela, he wasn’t so much a sociopath that governments felt they had to arrest, beat, or persecute him. The Lion and Set capture this new maturity. Youssou calls in a favor from Gabriel, who co-wrote and sings on the feminist anthem Shakin’ the Tree and Youssou pulls in New York session ace David Sancious to add keyboards. Set continues and deepens this trend, with beautiful cautionary and proverb-laden texts, power-house grooves (especially on Set and the reggae-flavored Miyoko), and fantastic global critique (Toxiques, which begins “rich countries make toxical waste..why should they send it to me?”).

Youssou has continued this full range of activities, building a state-of-the-art studio in Bamako and continuing to produce hit singles, which fuels everything else.

One of the great West African musicians.

The legendary Jacques Cousteau

Originating in a comment to a post over at DeanDad about first childhood exposure to science:

Two words, one name, a legendary inspiration: Jacques Cousteau. I watched every National Geographic Cousteau special there was, my parents bought me every one of the books he published, I read his autobiography and even wrote to him. Here was the guy who *invented* the aqualung in occupied WWII France, who bought an old minesweeper and refitted it for oceanographic exploration, who was talking about presentation and the global ecosystem in the 1950s, who traveled the world with a small cadre of guys with cool accents and dove on Mycenean wrecks and South Pacific atolls.

I was the first volunteer (at the age of 11) at our regional giant-tank aquarium--even before they opened the doors to the public. I didn't wind up an oceanographer, but I think Cousteau might have been the first person who interested me in recovering, understanding, and telling the stories of the past. Which definitely *is* my profession.

I still get choked up when I hear the brass fanfare that was the old "National Geographic" TV theme.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 009: Jethro Tull: Songs from the Wood

I don’t really understand why the rock critics hate(d) Jethro Tull. I mean, if you wanted to accuse them of pomposity, surely E.L.P. was more pompous? If you wanted to accuse them of empty flash, surely Yes was more show-offy? If you wanted to accuse them of scungy cynicism, surely Alice Cooper was a better target?

I think the rock critics hated Tull and frontman Ian Anderson for some of the same reasons that the same critics hated Frank Zappa—because it was obvious from both artists’ interviews as well as records that said artists were smarter than said critics. And there’s nothing that a critic hates worse than having his mental/creative limitations exposed: just ask David Horowitz.

Tull was one of the few rock bands I actually knew about as a child because they were one of the few rock bands that my elder brother was interested in. I remember Blood, Sweat and Tears records, Bill Cosby and Firesign Theater records, one or two FZ discs, and Tull records. My beloved and admired elder brother can sort of carry a tune in a bucket but he knew these records inside and out, and so Living in the Past, Aqualung, and Stand Up were records I also knew very well.

When I went off to school here I took only a few records with me and I didn’t know much about popular music, as I mentioned in “100 Greats” entry # 003. But I did know Jethro Tull, and I did know enough to look for new releases. Just before the release of this LP, I found a limited-edition promotional EP (7” rotating at 33 1/3 RPM) in a Greenwich Village record shop, which included Ring out Solstice Bells on one side, so I was primed for Songs from the Wood when it came out. I basically instantly liked everything about this record, from the beautiful hand-colored photo of Ian at his campfire on the cover, to the stunning vocal and instrumental virtuosity of the title track, to the Green Man, pagan, and Gaia references in Jack-in-the-Green (“I saw some grass growing through the pavement today”), to the stunning love song Fire at Midnight. I didn’t really understand, at age 17, what went into this music, but I knew…

I mean I KNEW…

that the Greil Marcuses and Robert Christgaus of the world (Lester Bangs gets a pass for getting this one wrong, because he got so much else right) were jealous and intimidated, and that’s why they didn’t like the record. A lovely synthesis of Brit-blues, poetry, odd-meters, and the influence of Renaissance broken-consort and (especially) Tudor music.

I thought it was beautiful, still do. No "guilt" about this pleasure.

Vaughan Williams would have loved and approved of this record.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 008: Talip Ozkan: The Dark Fire

Music plays a fantastic, intensely-emotional, deeply-personal, and culturally very central role in Turkish culture. Because of the country’s location at the Bosphorus, literally straddling the land bridge connecting Asia and Europe, and because it has been a cosmopolitan, multi-cultural place for at least 1500 years, Turkish music has both influenced and been influenced by many other idioms. Couple that with a mystical religious tradition (Mevlevi Sufism) in which music and dance play a sacred role, and the Azeri/Central Asian/nomad reverence for the spoken word and for poetry, and you have a recipe for an incredible music culture. In Turkey, musical instruments are capable of giving religious sermons (the saz), wandering minstrels fight improvised poetic duels in coffeehouses, and the national Robin Hood character, Koroglu, not only robs from the rich and gives to the poor, but composes, sings, and accompanies his own ballads describing these exploits.

Talip Ozkan is a fine saz player and very expressive singer who has recorded for several different overseas labels, but who hadn’t really caught on in the US until he lucked into a recording contract with the American producer Bill Laswell, who released this disc on his late lamented Axiom label. On it, Ozkan plays a mixed bag of dance tunes, Sufi melodies, and songs from the asik tradition: the tradition of the wandering minstrel-poets whose badge of office was the saz, who were revered throughout Anatolian, Azeri, and Central Asian culture, and whose most famous exemplar was Koroglu, who is also the topic of the titanic opening track, an excerpt from the enormous, loose cycle of songs associated with him.

[A weeny wanna-be American ‘ud player who wanted to brag about playing with Latif Bolaf has dissed this record, but I feel reasonably confident in saying he’s full of crap. I know this music too, and the power, focus, and spiritual intensity of this record is exemplary. The legendary scholar and collector Ilhan Basgoz recommended this discs to me. And yes, I’ve done gigs with Latif also.]