v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Newly Discovered Mingus Tapes from the 70"s

 

Just heard about music tapes from concerts that Mingus held in Detroit back in 1973. It's great news as this is the Mingus I heard when I was young. It was his quintets and sextets of this era that I heard with Dannie Richmond, Don Pullen, George Adams, Hammiet Bluit, and Jack Walrath at the Smithsonian and also in Baltimore at the Left Bank Jazz Society. It was a group that Mingus allowed to explore and further the limits of jazz. But the music that will be released only has Pullen, and features Detroit natives percussionist Roy Brooks and trumpeter Joe Gardner. Also on tenor the very versatile John Subblefield. It's a unique group and what I've heard of the tapes is high quality both in the sound and the improvisation. It's great that we have this as it was really an interesting time and group for Mingus.

Here's a recent article in Billboard on the upcoming release:

When Amir Abdullah first learned of a Charles Mingus Quintet performance at the tiny Strata Concert Gallery in Detroit during 1973, he never dreamed he'd be spearheading a release of the set. But it surfaces on Nov. 2 as Mingus -- Jazz in Detroit/Strata Concert Gallery/46 Selden -- including the track "Peggy's Blue Skylight," premiering exclusively below.

DJ and musicologist Abdullah saw a poster for Mingus' week-long residency at Strata during a visit to Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, where he was gathering materials for a Strata Records exhibition he was curating. Then, during the summer of 2017, Abdullah received an email from Strata owner Barbara Cox telling him that drummer Roy Brooks' widow Hermine had a recording of the Mingus concert, which had been broadcast on the local public radio station WDET. "Of course I said yes," Abdullah tells Billboard. He was living in Berlin at the time so sent producer/DJ friend John Morales to check out the reel-to-reel tapes. "We were all blown away at how stunning the recording sounded," Abdullah says. "You really feel like you're in the small but intimate Strata Concert Gallery, sitting in front (and) grooving to Mingus and the band." He subsequently brought the tapes to Mingus' widow, Sue, who gave her approval for the release.

The set stands out for a variety of reasons, according to Abdullah. "You get to hear Mingus in this intimate setting where he and the band are free to explore whatever musical territory that suits them," he explains. The recording also features Mingus working with a tenor saxophonist (John Stubblefield) for the first time. "Although he didn't last that long with Mingus this recording really highlights why Mingus invited him to be in the band," Abdullah says. The album also features the earliest known recording of "Noddin' Ya Head Blues," with Brooks playing musical saw, and the first official release of "Dizzy Profile," which Mingus never recorded in a studio.

"This recording adds more than just the chance to hear Mingus in a rare intimate setting but it also allows the listener to hear his process of arranging and improvisation combined with his ability to tell a story with his music," Abdullah says. "It also shows how Mingus was not above playing smaller venues and supporting local black-owned businesses. Strata was an artist-run and owned collective that spoke to the people of Detroit. You have to remember that 1973 was still a turbulent time in America, particularly after the riots of 1967 and 1968 in Detroit. Motown had already moved to L.A., and that left a huge vacuum in Detroit.

"So having someone like Mingus come to your neighborhood to do a week-long residence would have been mind-blowing for many in Detroit."

The Mingus set will be released as five-CD and five-LP packages and is available for pre-order. And the good news is that there are more treasures to come from the Strata Records and Strata Gallery archives.

"In fact," Abdullah says, "Herbie Hancock was the next artist to do a week long residence at the gallery followed eventually by Ornette Coleman, Elvin Jones, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and Weather Report. I am working hard to secure these masters as they would even add more to historical legacy of jazz."

High Zero Festival

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- At the Theater Project (April Camlin, Rose Hammer Burt, Andrew Bernstein)

A welcome interruption into the political chaos that seems to afflict this country every day of the year. The High Zero festival has been going on for 20 years and though I didn't have the opportunity of attending these sonically disruptive concerts o na regular basis while I worked for a living, when I do go they are a great ear cleanser among other things. This year I attended only the first night but I was happy to learn that they also held the festival in Chicago and New York. It was well coordinated and the music was sufficiently varied to increase my interest and anticipation for next year's festival. Great job by the local organizers.

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - At Theater Project ( Jeff Carey, Allison Clendaniel, Stewart Mostofsky)

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- At Theater Project (Shelly Blake-Plock, Stephanie Barber)

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - At Theater Project (John Berndt, Wendel Patrick, Neil Feather)

An End to an Experiment?

From The Globe and Mail, Sarah Kendzior writes :

On Sept. 18, California Representative Devin Nunes, a Donald Trump loyalist best known for his attempt to obstruct federal investigations into Russia, bemoaned the activists of his own state. “It’s such a pain now to go to these political events,” he told a private meeting of screened supporters. “It makes it very different to even move around the valley or anywhere else, because everywhere you go, you have this resistance movement.”

From the moment Mr. Trump took office in January, 2017, immediately prompting the largest protest in U.S. history, the resistance has been an object of derision, with the term co-opted by politicians and propagandists soon after it emerged as a popular hashtag. In the past few months, Mr. Trump has slammed the resistance as a creation of Senate Democrats, an anonymous alleged White House official claimed in a New York Times op-ed to be a member of an internal resistance carrying out its own autocratic coup and so-called alt-right imposters have claimed the resistance mantle along with countless bots.

This cynical portrayal of the resistance is unrecognizable to the Americans organizing for change on the ground. Most people are too busy protecting their fellow Americans to engage with smarmy pontification on what the resistance is. This dichotomy between media caricature and lived reality often reflects the gulf between the U.S. pundits (mostly white, wealthy conservative men based on the coasts) and Americans who disapprove of Mr. Trump, which currently comprises 60 per cent of the population and whose broadly dispersed activism is dominated by women.

There is not, and has never been, a unified, hierarchical resistance in the United States – nor should there be. There are simply millions of Americans who know they deserve better. It is less a resistance than an insistence that privileged impunity will no longer stand. If there is a unifying theme, it is against corruption – a rallying cry for white-collar crime to finally be punished, a repudiation of policies that steal from the poor to line the pockets of predators. There are those who rage at senators who wish to promote a man repeatedly accused of sexual assault to the highest court in the country. That is not normal, and the resistance – regular people who ask for simple checks and balances on power – won’t stop fighting against it.

In the Trump era, fundamental American values – a government of, by and for the people; a republic with liberty and justice for all – have been redefined as radical demands. As I wrote in this newspaper in March, 2017, “What is now called resisting is often Americans simply helping others: a concept so alien to the Trump administration that it is labelled as subversive.” Little has changed since then except the scope of the problems. Questions that would have once seemed hyperbolic or absurd – is America becoming an autocracy, a theocracy, a Russian proxy state? – are now reasonable.

But the cavalcade of crises and lack of unilateral leadership has led some to label the resistance – and by extension, the Democrats – as disorganized or failing. This characterization is odd given the scale of political participation since Mr. Trump took power. Both 2017 and 2018 were marked by massive nationwide demonstrations: women’s rights in January, gun control in March, immigrant and refugee rights in June. Protesters numbered in the millions, more than during the Vietnam War, yet their efforts often did not make the front pages of American papers. The year 2018 was also marked by special elections and primaries with record-high turnout, with some districts Mr. Trump won now voting Democrat.

There is a sense that the midterms mark the end of something – maybe Mr. Trump’s unchecked domination over American political life; maybe the American experiment itself. The fact that we don’t know which imbues every day with as much heaviness as hope.

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Las Dos Hermanas en Mexico

Rafael Miranda 1957 (?) - En Mexico

Irene Schweizer's Sound

 

From the now defunct Village Voice, a good overview of the marvelous Irene Schweizer, pianist of our future:

Her dozens of recordings — most of them on Zurich’s phenomenal Intakt label, on whose board she resided until last year — make clear just how much she venerates the jazz tradition. In the midst of wide-ranging improvisations, you’ll catch flashes of the past, expertly deployed. Sometimes short flourishes will display the grounded rhythms of pre-war stylings like ragtime, boogie-woogie, or swing, but she’s just as likely to pound out block chords in the manner of McCoy Tyner or the delicate melodic flourishes of a Satie miniature.

The 76-year-old Schweizer, who in person projects warmth and self-effacement, even shyness, entered the jazz world in the early 1960s with three or four strikes against her: She veered, thanks to the influence first of Paul Bley and then of Cecil Taylor, into free jazz (polarizing at best, reviled at worst); she was a woman in one of the most male-dominated artistic arenas; she was a lesbian, something she was always open about; and she was from Switzerland (her last name literally means “Swiss”), a tough sell considering that the country, especially at the time, didn’t exactly strike up images of cool hard-boppers. Originally from Schaffhausen, north of Zurich, along the Rhine in the relative flatland near the German border, she took a steep, untraveled road, and just remained on it for more than fifty years. “It’s true,” says Schweizer of her journey. “I didn’t realize that: I’m a woman, and the only one.”

Schweizer’s single-minded artistic vision is apparent on her brand-new album, Live!, an improvised duo performance with New York–based drummer Joey Baron recorded two years ago at Rote Fabrik, Zurich’s alternative art space born out of the early-1980s student riots. Featuring a dynamic attack that can be ferocious and distinctly percussive (she plays drums herself, though not publicly anymore), then nimble and searching, it’s a testament to the subtle traditionalism that’s always lurked on the margins of her playing.

“I think the influence of real jazz tradition is very strong in Irene,” says Patrik Landolt, the founder and head of Intakt, in the label’s office across town in an industrial quarter. “She had an era of free playing, of emancipation, and today she’s so free she can combine both.”

Landolt started Intakt in 1986, in part to give Schweizer a platform since, he says, “Irene was completely underdocumented.” The label’s first record was Irène Schweizer Live at Taktlos, a Swiss festival she helped organize. The date included George Lewis, Paul Lovens, Günter Sommer, Maggie Nichols, and Joëlle Léandre, the latter two part of her semi-regular, all-female Dada-esqe trio, Les Diaboliques, which started back in the 1970s. When Landolt proudly pulls the original vinyl version from a shelf, he notes how the opening is on the wrong side. “We didn’t know how to do a record,” he says, laughing.

For this recording, she adds to her ongoing partnerships with drummers. (She’s previously recorded with Günter Sommer, Pierre Favre, Han Bennink, Andrew Cyrille, and Louis Moholo, who she first met in 1963 when he and other South African musicians, Abdullah Ibrahim included, lived in exile in Zurich.) This time she chose to collaborate with Baron, the longtime associate of John Zorn. They knew each other loosely through the free-jazz scene over the years, but she hadn’t seen him play live solo until early in 2015, at a small festival for improvised music in Biel, Switzerland. “He played 45 minutes,” says Schweizer from behind royal-blue-rimmed eyeglasses, “and I never heard such a nice concert. It was so great, and there were some people in the audience who knew me and they said, ‘Irène, this is the drummer you have to play with and do a CD with.’ I said, ‘Of course, I feel that.’ ”

When she approached him, Baron says by phone from Berlin, “It was a big yes. Irène is a legend, and she is a very important figure and I absolutely respect her, a lot. Who wouldn’t be flattered.… And she’s a very, very kind, wonderful human being, and that’s very important to me. And that’s not always the case.”

Given the often lonely path she’s traveled as a rare woman in jazz, it’s impossible to ignore the challenges she’s faced, which continue to this day. “The audiences love her, but not the business,” says Landolt of Schweizer’s limited recognition in New York. “The club owners don’t invite her. She never played the Blue Note, never the Vanguard, never the Jazz Standard.”

When asked if she felt shut out in any way, Schweizer pauses. “Not really,” she says. “I didn’t get this feeling. Sometimes yes, of course. There were machos everywhere at that time, it was normal, but it never bothered me. I was very lucky — all the musicians I played with always had a certain respect for what I did.” Though she does add: “I would be much better known if I was a guy.”

A warped mind

John Lee Anderson on Trump and Puerto Rico from the New Yorker:

It is much the same with Trump and Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico a year ago next week. Evidently immune to the idea that he might be held to the same standards of judgment as his predecessors, Trump behaved with negligent condescension toward the disaster from the beginning. He had made two visits to Texas in the days after Hurricane Harvey hit that state, gushing fulsomely over the handling of catastrophe and “great turnout” for his visits. But he waited two weeks after Maria struck to visit Puerto Rico, and then spent a mere four hours there, during which time he was driven around a middle-class suburb of San Juan that was not badly affected, and appeared at a church where he cavalierly tossed rolls of paper towels to local residents. In a press conference, he appeared to issue a scolding for the cost of the assistance, saying, “Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” and he minimized the island’s tragedy by drawing comparisons between its reportedly low death toll and the “hundreds” of people who had died in Katrina. (The official toll in Puerto Rico eventually rose to sixty-four.)

In the year since, Trump has mentioned Puerto Rico mostly to compliment himself for his performance, as he did again on Tuesday, describing his government’s response to Maria as “an incredible, unsung success.” His rosy rendition stands in direct contradiction to the opinion of most Puerto Ricans, eighty per cent of whom view his response unfavorably, according to a recent Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Over all, the government response, at both the federal and the local levels, is viewed as having been sluggish and inefficient, with inexplicably long delays in reactivating the island’s devastated power grid and in repairing damaged roads and homes. The crisis has also deepened the unemployment problem and accelerated an exodus of people from the island.

Meanwhile, the Milken Institute School of Public Health, at George Washington University, published a report that found that nearly three thousand people ultimately died as a result of Hurricane Maria. Trump’s reaction—against the backdrop of a new hurricane season, and with Hurricane Florence approaching the coast of the Carolinas—was to decry the report as an attempt by Democrats to besmirch his reputation. “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” he tweeted on Thursday. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. . . . Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3,000. . . . This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.”

Those comments elicited an unusually bipartisan condemnation. In Florida, where a large influx of Democratic-leaning Puerto Ricans have become a highly courted political constituency, Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, tweeted, “I disagree with @POTUS. . . . I’ve been to Puerto Rico 7 times & saw devastation firsthand.” Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Cuban-American Republican who represents the Miami area, said that Trump’s remarks were “heartless,” and that only “a warped mind” would “turn this statistic into fake news.” In Puerto Rico, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, who has verbally sparred with Trump since last year, tweeted, “YOUR LACK OF RESPECT IS APPALLING,” and “Simply put: delusional, paranoid, and unhinged from any sense of reality. Trump is so vain he thinks this is about him. NO IT IS NOT.”

Trump’s self-centeredness and his lack of empathy are not a point of contention for most Americans; what is more egregious, in Puerto Rico’s case, is the obviousness of the double-standard that he has applied to the island—an unincorporated U.S. territory—and the suspicion that it is racist in nature. Trump’s sign-off on his tweet denying the death toll was, “I love Puerto Rico!” That felt about as convincing as his proclamations of “I love Hispanics!” during the 2016 Presidential campaign. Indeed, the blatancy of Trump’s condescension led Ricardo Rosselló, the pro-statehood governor of Puerto Rico, to say at a press conference on Thursday, “After the storm, it is evident that the treatment that was given, say, Florida or Texas, was very different than the treatment given in Puerto Rico. We are second-class U.S. citizens. We live in a colonial territory. It is time to eliminate that, and I implore all the elected officials, particularly now in midterm elections, to have a firm stance. You’re either for colonial territories or against them. You’re either for giving equal rights to the U.S. citizens that live in Puerto Rico, or you’re against it.”

At Siem Reap

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Craft at Siem Reap 2009

Let's Drink to That

From Balkanization, a legal blog, Mike Graber writes:

Too many young men drink to excess.  When they drink to excess, they often become boisterous.  They engage in disorderly conduct.  They utter and scream racial, ethnic, gender, and other epithets.  They vandalize and destroy property.  They drive drunk.  They pick fights with each other and perfect strangers.  They assault women.  They damage, ruin or destroy their lives and the lives of their victims.

 

Most of these young men mature.  They learn how to moderate their drinking or how to moderate their behavior when drinking.  They become solid citizens, valuable employees, respected professionals and community leaders.  They are faithful spouses and loving parents to their sons and daughters.  The drunken escapades of their past become little more than foggy romanticized memories. Until this week, the central question raised by this pattern of behavior for many persons was how they should regard apparently distinguished and decent persons they remember as drunken frat boys (for the record, I am a lifelong oblivious teetotaler, who spent most weekend evenings in high school and college playing chess or bridge).  For Americans today, this pattern of behavior is crucial to determining whether Brett Kavanaugh should sit on the Supreme Court.

The practice of underage male drinking in the United States supports both Christine Blasey Ford's and Mark Judge’s account of what happened at a drunken teenage bash in North Bethesda thirty-five years ago.  As numerous accounts by women who attended all-girls schools in Montgomery county attest, male sexual assaults on women during underage drinking parties were and are unfortunately common.  What Ms. Ford claims happened to her happened to many women of her generation.  Mark Judge’s claim that he has no recollection of the events is also plausible.  Underage drinkers often cannot remember what they did the morning after events take place much less thirty-five years later.

Brett Kavanaugh’s denials are far less believable.  In previous speeches, he has acknowledged and romanticized his past excessive drinking habits.  Substantial evidence exists that Kavanaugh was blind drunk at various points during his youth.   If he can say with confidence that he never assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, he may be the only adult male in the United States who can remember with perfect clarity everything he did during repeated bouts of drunkenness in the past.  This is hardly air-tight proof that the attempted rape occurred.  The claim is only that Kavanaugh cannot possible remember whether, during his apparently repeated bouts of drunkenness, he ever threw up in a car, broke a window, ran naked in the living room or assaulted a woman.  That Kavanaugh has demonstrated, at the very least, a willingness to make very misleading self-serving statements under oath casts further doubt on his veracity.

The Kavanaugh nomination should go down because he has consistently put the needs of the Republican Party before the Constitution and the country.  The Kavanaugh nomination should go down because Republicans have steadily refused to provide the country with the documents needed to evaluate Kavanaugh’s past service in the Bush administration.  The Kavanaugh nomination should go down because even on the basis of the limited record Republicans have provided, Kavanaugh lacks the integrity demanded of a Supreme Court justice.  The Kavanaugh nomination should go down because his claim to remember what happened when blind drunk is not credible.

The Kavanaugh nomination should go down even if Kavanaugh was honest enough to admit he has no memory of everything he did when blind drunk.  For thirty-five years, Brett Kavanaugh has romanticized his underage drinking, inspiring other ambitious young men to drink to excess, confident that their behaviors will have little bearing on their professional lives once as adults they moderate their drinking or moderate their drinking behavior.  If Kavanuagh goes down, somewhere in North Bethesda or elsewhere, an ambitious young man might decide not to attend an underage drinking party or to moderate his drinking behavior at such affairs.  One less neighbor may be be woken up at three in the morning.  One less racial epithet may be uttered.  One less window may be broken.  One less drunk driving accident may occur.  One less woman may be sexually assaulted.  One less drinker and one less victim may have their lives not damaged, ruined or destroyed.

Urban Urban

Vallejo Nocturno 2018- Condado Wall 2007

Dada Arp

Dada wanted to destroy men's pretences at reason and rediscover the natural, unreasonable order of things. Dada wanted to replace the logical nonsense of men today by illogical meaninglessness. This was why we beat the great Dada drum and trumpeted long and loud the praisesof unreason. Dada gave a clyster to the Venus de Milo and allowed Laocoon and his sons to relax after fighting a several-thousand-year battle with that fat sausage-snake. Philosophers mean less to Dada than an old toothbrush long since thrown away and so Dada leaves them to the great world leaders. Dada denounces the devilish tricks of the official vocabulary of wisdom. Dada is for meaninglessness, which is not the same as nonsense. Dada is as meaningless as nature. Dada is for nature and against art. Dada is as direct as nature. Dada is for infinite meaning and definite means.

Dada objects are made from things that have been found or manufactured, plain or complicated. The Chinese a few thousand years ago, Duchamp, Picabia in the United States, Schwitters and myself during the 1914 war were the first to invent and spread abroad these toys of wisdom and perspicacity which were to cure human beings of the wild madness of genius and bring them gently back to their place in the proper order of things. The natural beauty of these objects is a basic part of them, like that of a bunch of flowers gathered by children. Thousands of years ago, an Emperor of China sent his artists to the furthest of his lands to find the rare and unusually-shaped stones he loved to collect and he set them on pedestals alongside his vases and his gods. This pleasant pastime would never suit our thinkers, modern Jacks-in-office who lie in wait for the connoisseur like hotel porters stalking customers at a station.

Catalogue for the Arp retrospective exhibition
Paris, Musée national d'art moderne,
February-April 1962