Drummer-at-Large

David Ornette Cherry on OPB Artbeat

2010-05-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

David Ornette Cherry's Expressions of Energy / One Drop To Victory

2010-05-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

This video contains various images set to audio from a 2007 performance at the Someday Lounge in Portland, OR. featuring David Ornette Cherry's Expressions of Energy group
(D.O.Cherry, Acoustic Piano
Michael York, Tenor Sax
Justin Durrie, Acoustic Bass
and Carlton Jackson, Drumset)

The tune "One Drop To Victory" was written by Cherry
and recorded by Jackson.

Art Resnick-Rob Thomas Collective / "Can You Do This??"

2010-05-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

a short-lived 1990's rehearsal band in Portland, OR
with pianist/composer Art Resnick and violinist Rob Thomas
joined by Dave Captein on basses
and Carlton Jackson on drumset.

Can You Do This
was composed and produced by Art Resnick
Recorded live to 2-track DAT.
engineered by Ron George
at Falcon Studios, Portland, OR.

Hip-Hop/Jazz pioneer Guru succumbs to cancer...

2010-04-20T11:48:00.001-07:00

Hip-Hop Luminary Guru Succumbs To Cancer
Posted Tue Apr 20, 2010 10:01am PDT by Billy Johnson, Jr. in the blog Hip-Hop Media Training

Hip-hop icon Keith "Guru" Elam died Monday as a result of cancer-related causes, MTV reports. He was 43 years old.

Guru was hospitalized in March, and while some outlets reported that he suffered a heart attack, it was never confirmed.

Guru's friend and partner Solaar released a statement following his passing.

"The world has lost one of the best MCs and hip-hop icons of all-time-my loyal best friend, partner, and brother, Guru," Solaar wrote, according to MTV. "Guru has been battling cancer for well over a year and has lost his battle! This is a matter that Guru wanted private until he could beat it, but tragically, this did not happen. The cancer took him. Now the world has lost a great man a true genius."

Solaar said Guru wrote a letter before his passing. "I, Guru, am writing this letter to my fans, friends and loved ones around the world," the letter said. "I have had a long battle with cancer and have succumbed to the disease. I have suffered with this illness for over a year. I have exhausted all medical options."

The letter also addressed Guru's concern for continuing his philanthropic efforts. "I have a non-profit organization called Each One Counts dedicated to carrying on my charitable work on behalf of abused and disadvantaged children from around the world and also to educate and research a cure for this terrible disease that took my life. I write this with tears in my eyes, not of sorrow but of joy for what a wonderful life I have enjoyed and how many great people I have had the pleasure of meeting."

In the message, Guru credited Solaar for his support.

"My loyal best friend, partner, and brother, Solaar, has been at my side through it all and has been made my health proxy by myself on all matters relating to myself. He has been with me by my side on my many hospital stays, operations, doctors visits and stayed with me at my home and cared for me when I could not care for myself.

Solaar and his family is my family and I love them dearly and I expect my family, friends and fans to respect that, regardless to anybody's feelings on the matter. It is my wish that counts. This being said I am survived by the love of my life, my sun KC, who I trust will be looked after by Solaar and his family as their own. Any awards or tributes should be accepted, organized approved by Solaar on behalf [of] myself and my son until he is of age to except on his own."

The note also makes controversial references to DJ Premiere. "I do not wish my ex-DJ to have anything to do with my name likeness, events, tributes etc. connected in anyway to my situation including any use of my name or circumstance for any reason and I have instructed my lawyers to enforce this," the letter said. "I had nothing to do with him in life for 7 years and want nothing to do with him in death. Solaar has my life story and is well informed on my family situation, as well as the real reason for separating from my ex-DJ.

"As the sole founder of Gang Starr, I am very proud of what Gang Starr has meant to the music world and fans. I equally am proud of my Jazzmatazz series and as the father of Hip-Hop/Jazz.
I am proud of my leadership and pioneering efforts on Jazzmatazz 4 for reinvigorating the Hip-hop/Jazz genre in a time when music quality has reached an all time low. Solaar and I have toured in places that I have never been before with Gang Starr or Jazzmatazz and we gained a reputation for being the best on the planet at Hip-Hop/Jazz, as well as the biggest and most influential Hip-Hop/Jazz record with Jazzmatazz 4 of the decade to now.

"The work I have done with Solaar represents a legacy far beyond its time. And we as a team were not afraid to push the envelope. To me this is what true artists do! As men of honor we stood tall in the face of small-mindedness, greed, and ignorance.

As we fought for music and integrity at the cost of not earning millions and for this I will always be happy and proud, and would like to thank the million fans who have seen us perform over the years from all over the world. The work I have done with Solaar represents a legacy far beyond its time and is my most creative and experimental to date. I hope that our music will receive the attention it deserves as it is some of the best work I have done and represents some of the best years of my life."

As the duo Gang Starr with DJ Premiere, the group released its most successful album in 1998, Moment Of Truth. They emerged in the ‘80s and were featured in Spike Lee's movie Mo Betta Blues. Gang Starr released its last album, The Ownerz, in 2003.

One of Black Cinema's true veterans is vital and very active on Broadway

2009-06-08T10:12:00.000-07:00

this interview was done before Roger Robinson recently garnered the Best Actor Tony award in 2009. He was always one of my favorite actors in the Blacksploitation era of Hollywood films in the 70's. I am happy that he is still vital and doing great work on the Great White Way...

---------------

Roger Robinson: Taking Another Tony Award-Nominated Turn
in August Wilson's 'Joe Turner'

By Bridget Bland on Jun 3rd 2009 4:04PM
Filed under: Interviews, Theater

Since the revival of August Wilson's 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone' racked up six 2009 Tony Award nominations, the critically acclaimed Broadway production is a must-see production.

Ask President Obama, who took his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, on a date last weekend to see the dramatic play, which also stars Chad L. Coleman, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Ernie Hudson, Andre Holland and Aunjaunue Ellis.

With just a few days before the annual Tony Awards on June 7, BV Newswire chatted with best featured actor nominee Roger Robinson, who plays griot and conjurer Bynum Walker in 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone.' The theater veteran explained why this story has touched the hearts of theater-goers and how Wilson's legacy will continue to live on for years to come.

No novice to Wilson's work, Robinson has appeared in six of the late playwright's 10 plays, which chronicle the black experience across a century. This marks the second time he has been nominated for a Tony, the first time was for the acclaimeAugust Wilsond 'Seven Guitars' in 1996.

"I had never done this particular show or role. I met with the director [Barlett Sher], and he used a word that drew me to it: collaboration," he explained. "And, it showed me he would be open to exploring this experience with me, and that he would be open to black culture even though he was a white man."

And explore the depths of the role Robinson does in the near three hour-long tour de force.

The Seattle native's portrayal of Bynum has left such an impression that he's also being honored by his colleagues.

On June 9, the 'Brother to Brother' star will become the first African American to receive the 2009 Richard Seff Award, presented by the Actors' Equity Foundation to an actor 50 or older in a supporting role in a Broadway or off-Broadway production.

Robinson's only lament is that the entire cast could not have been honored for their stellar performances.

"I wish the Tony Awards had an ensemble award like the Olivier's and Screen Actors Guild but [New York] theater needs to do that because this one would have been honored."

Robinson believes Wilson is a great American poet and his "use of language is second to none, except Eugene O'Neil and perhaps Tennessee Williams." In the age of Tyler Perry's popularity, the 69-year-old actor believes that there is still a place for these type of theatrical productions.

"August is literature. [Sure] Tyler is a marketing expert and a genius to make his empire, [but] August Wilson is probably one of the most produced American playwrights."

Currently, 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone' is playing at the Belasco Theatre. It's set to close its limited run June 14.

Given its buzz, an extension is a possibility, especially if the play scores a few of the Tony Awards it's nominated for.

local guitarist Kent Henry passes away

2009-04-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

I was sorry to hear that this wonderful musician finally passed. I had some contact/playing with Kent, through another guitar player in the early 2000's and finally heard what everyone was talking about with this guy. I did post the original email from Tony Conroy which came a day ago, and then my email response to Tony.

After the emails will be the official notice by Michael Russell at The Oregonian.

From: xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Local blues musician dies - OregonLive.com
Date: April 30, 2009 2:19:35 AM PDT
To: cjackson@teleport.com

Carlton,

Did you see this? I totally missed it.

I dealt with Kent many time when he worked as a repair tech at the Beaverton Guitar Center.

He was indeed a humble and unassuming guy. One time I brought him a story I found on the net from a guy who saw a concert Kent played with Steppenwolf at a college in Wisconsin. Kent's performance was so inspiring that it caused the guy to learn to play the guitar. Incredibly, Kent said he remembered the concert and was extremely touched to hear the story. Another time I was with him at Guitar Center waiting for him to complete my repair work, when the usual "Stairway to Heaven" came screaming from the amp section. I asked Kent if he ever got tired of hearing that tune here at the store. He said "No, I really don't mind hearing it..I just wish they'd learn to play it right".

What sad news.

Tony
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/03/local_blues_musician_dies.html

From: cjackson@teleport.com
Subject: kent henry story...
Date: April 30, 2009 7:54:49 AM PDT
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

yeah, I heard about it a few weeks ago when Kent was going down slow and I think that a benefit was mentioned, but didn't happen.

I never played with him actively, but knew of him and did one set of rehearsals and a one-off with Robert (Brown) Rude. That was the first time that I really heard Kent live, and he had some great instincts and cool tricks, within a strong framework of sound and grooves.

We played a great set at the giant gay bar (forget the name, but an infamous lesbian pick up place) up the street from Kung Fu Bakery on Division. Rude was trying to scare up some gigs, and that was the first time I had been in that place. There might have been a recording, and I will look.

A real loss in PDX music annals.

thanks for the heads-up and see you tonight (?) at the jam
cj

Local blues musician dies
by Michael Russell, The Oregonian
Thursday March 19, 2009, 6:17 AM

Kent Henry Plischke, a blues guitarist and singer who recorded with the bands Steppenwolf and Blues Image under the name Kent Henry, died Wednesday in Portland, his caregiver said. He was 60.

He was easy going, and he was a humble man, said Patty J. Hill, 56, who cared for Plischke at her Southeast Portland home. He once gave a gold record away because he didn't want to look like he was bragging.

Plischke was born on April 5, 1948 in Hollywood, Calif., Hill said. He joined his first band, The Lost Souls, when he was 14 years old.

In 1969 he played on the album Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends which featured guitarists Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, bass player Noel Redding and drummer John Bonham.

Plischke provided guitar solos on the Blues Image song Ride Captain Ride, a hit that peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Music Chart in June of 1970.

Plischke joined Steppenwolf in 1971, and toured with the band through 1972, playing lead guitar on hits such as Born to be Wild and Magic Carpet Ride. He also played on their 1971 studio album For Ladies Only.

Plischke moved to Southwest Portland in the early 1980s, Hill said. He replaced local blues musician Jim Mesi in the Paul deLay Blues Band and worked for 15 years as a technician at Apple Music at 225 S.W. First Ave., where he met and briefly dated Hill.

Hill took Plischke in for emergency surgery about 2 a.m. this morning. He was given a sedative but died before surgery could begin.

A public service is planned from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m on Thursday, March 26 at the Omega Funeral Home at 223 S.E. 122nd Avenue in Portland.

-- Michael Russell; michaelrussell@news.oregonian.com

The Shocking KMHD Story You've Never Heard Pt. 2

2009-04-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

Friends...here is a second post by Tom D'Antoni and his reasoning for not posting this unbelievable story sooner and blowing this all out of the water for KMHD...

Very informational.

cj
---------------

Sunday, April 12, 2009

A Few Thoughts on My Last Post on KMHD

First of all, thanks for all the emails and calls and comments about the last KMHD post.

I wanted to add that there are reasons why the KMHD DJs kept this in the family. Believe me, many times I've wanted to write the last post but I didn't for these reasons:

ONE:

I didn't want to jepardize the station fund raising. Around 75% of the operating funds for KMHD come from listeners. If I had blown the whistle on the scandal of how the music was not getting to us, I was afraid that listeners would stop pledging.

Since the DJs were taking care of business on our own (many of us deal directly with labels and distributors), any reduction in funds from our listeners could have seriously harmed the existence of the station.

Once OPB takes over operations, not only won't that be a concern, but I believe the good things that OPB brings to the station will actually help fund raising.

TWO:

At the Mt Hood Community College board meeting last Wednesday, several DJs spoke out about how badly the station was run, how the paid staff (with the exception of Calvin Walker) was incompetent, disrespectful to and and at odds with the DJs.

This seemed to shock those in the room who were unaware of the situation at the station. The college president and JoAnn Zahn knew and, although I can't confirm it, I'm pretty sure it's why they took the station in the direction of OPB.

So now that the DJs publicly opened the door to the issue, I proceeded with the story.

Even though one KMHD DJ, commenting on my last post, said that this wasn't news and that everybody already knew it, he is dead wrong. When I told several music industry insiders in Portland about it, people who know what's what, they were shocked.

Should we have raised these issues before. Maybe, maybe not. Since at least two of the staff jobs are union protected, and two former general managers were unable to oust Gomez, most likely nothing would have been done to fix the problem.

It was risky on my part to write that last post, but I think you expect that from me.
Posted by Words to Drive-By: at 8:56 PM 0 comments Links to this post

The Shocking KMHD Story You've Never Heard

2009-04-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

Below is a wonderful post from Tom D'Antoni's music blog (thanks Tom!!) concerning the ongoing story of OPB's takeover of KMHD in a few months.

This is a truly unbelievable account of what was up with Greg Gomez, music director at the station and his behaviour concerning....

well, I'll just let Tom get us up to date.

It really makes it hard to be an artist if no one gets to hear your output...

cj

---------------------------------

from Tom D'Antoni's Portland Music News Blog

Friday, April 10, 2009

The Shocking KMHD Story You've Never Heard

In the past few weeks I've hinted around about KMHD's "toxic assests." Now I will let you know why the vast majority of KMHD DJs are in favor of the move to OPB.

The number one toxic asset is Greg Gomez, KMHD's music director, often called "music preventor." His job is to have a good relationship with labels worldwide and musicians here in Oregon; to make sure he gets everything that's released in the jazz and blues world, listen to it and then make available to the DJ's the new albums he deems the station should play. After a suitable period in the "New Releases" shelves in the studio, his job is to add albums to the station studio library and the computer database so DJ’s can find them on the shelves.

These things he has not done.

Two of his biggest failures are keeping the station library stocked with music and not just having poor relationships with jazz labels, but having hostile ones.

The fact is that over two years went by without Gomez adding even ONE album to the station library.

I know that sounds unbelievable. Believe it. Below you will read his own admission of that fact.

When I started at KMHD in April of 2007 I assumed that when he removed albums from the "New Releases" shelves a percentage of them would be added to the library, at least the ones deserving. For instance, Portland trombonist Stan Bock had a wonderful new album in the new release shelf when I arrived at KMHD. After a month or so, it disappeared and never showed up in the main library. I kept wondering why.

Not long after I got there I was unable to find a lot of albums I knew had come out in the past year or so. I never understood why. I searched for the Grammy-nominated album by Portland's Nancy King and pianist Fred Hersch. It wasn't in the library…a year after its release. After talking with several DJs, I found out that there had been no new additions since 2006.

Yeah, it blew my mind.

A DJ told me, "Oh, I think he just keeps them in his office."

Just before last year's Mt. Hood Jazz Festival, I found Gomez had put some festival-related albums for airplay in a box in the studio. When I went through it , I found the Nancy King album, with the new release sticker still on the cover.

I began to inquire why it was in that box and not in the library and available for us to play

There is a KMHD email listerv, pretty much the only way KMHD DJs can communicate since, with the exception of Calvin Walker, Gomez and Mary Burlingame kept their distance, never communicating on any meaningful level. On August 6, 2008, I sent this:

Is there a good reason why the Nancy King/Fred Hersch album was not available to us for nearly two years and then suddenly showed up in the MHJF box? It was released in 2006, and according to your email, after three months was locked away in your office and unavailable for us to play.

I think we're interested in how your department works.

I don't have to go into detail about what a treasure Nancy King is, or how wonderful the album is. Is the fact that it has never been added an indication that you do not agree that it is worthy?

Many times, I've perused the library on a Saturday night wanting to play Nancy's album only to find it not there. I wondered if it had been stolen. I assumed it had been stolen because it's inconceivable to me that it wouldn't have been added to the library. When the original NR copy, with the playdate sticker on the front, turned up in the MHJF box I was astonished. I remain astonished.

Is Stan Bock's fine album also locked in your office? What will become of Thara Memory's? What others are also unavailable?

You have not addressed why this and many other albums are locked in your office, and why so few have been added to the library.

Is there a list of those albums released in the past couple of years which you placed in NR but which have or have not been added to the library?

On August 9, Gomez wrote this astounding reply:

We’ve all heard the term multi-tasking and I think it’s great that people can do this. At times I find myself even doing two or three things at once, but rarely, because I am more of a prioritizing kind of person. Please understand that in the entire seventeen plus years that I have been working here at KMHD there has never been a shortage of things to do in the area of music. To be a Music Director at a radio station and to be an employee of a radio station the size of KMHD (and please realize that some stations of similar size enjoy a much larger paid staff, thus the work gets spread out so that one person is not singly responsible for the flow of work) means that one will never be truly caught up with all the work. Also, to work in radio is to realize that priorities will change on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. There’s nothing like starting the day thinking you’re going to dive into this project or that project and then you receive an email or phone call asking for your immediate attention on something entirely new.

What this means is, about two years have passed since a new release has been added to the library. Clearly, adding CD’s to the permanent library has not been high on my priority list. (emphasis mine) Please understand this is not a slight to you or anyone else. I will be adding CD’s to the library. Please look for them in the coming weeks and months.

So Gomez admitted that his main job as music director, placing music in the hands of KMHD DJs to play, was not high priority.

And then he told us where all those albums were.

He wrote:

My usual time frame for keeping a CD in the new releases library is roughly 3 months. When a CD is removed from the new releases library it is stored in my office until I am able to process it for inclusion in the permanent MCR library.

Which was never.

He added this nearly-as-astounding coda to his email of 8/9/08. I can only assume he was being ironic, although it comes out of nowhere:

Will Nancy King be in this batch, I’m not sure…never heard of her. There are a million young sirens out there trying to break into this business. Before she gets too far into the music business, if you know her, tell her to ask the advice of a veteran artist who has been around the block. Someone that got her start singing with her late husband’s band or someone that’s been down heartbreak’s road a time or two and is only now getting her due public recognition for her artistry after years and years of being a “musicians musician.” Someone that is recognized for her scatting ability, her ability to wrap her voice around a lyric to the point that you feel as if she wrote and/or lived every single word she is singing….and probably has. Yeah, help this Nancy King kid out a little bit and tell her to keep her day job. However, if you say she’s good, then I guess so......

That paragraph looks more suspicious in light of something he posted on the listserv this week in one of his infrequent postings about new releases…something he never did before we started raising hell about his lack of competence.

Ben Darwish: Ode To Consumersim (sic)
Ben is a Portland based musician….I believe. Recorded live at Jimmy Mak’s, check out tracks 6, 7 & 8.

I believe? Is he being cute or does he not know?

Something else he wrote in his post of 8/9/09 brings up another problem. First what he said:

There have also been instances where a CD is available at retail but it hasn’t yet been serviced to a radio station. I don’t control when a label/promoter/artist decides to send a CD to KMHD. Another thing to keep in mind when you’re finding out about new releases, even though a label/artist/promoter has shipped the CD to radio and it’s in our grubby little hand’s, there are times when they will ask you to hold off on playing the CD on-air until a certain date has passed for their promotional campaign purposes.

Albums are never available for retail before they're serviced to stations. It just doesn't work that way.

In reality, many label reps have stopped servicing the station because of Gomez' incompetence. Recently, according to one KMHD insider, "Several reps from record companies have written Dr. Ski (President of MHCC) about Greg. Very powerful criticism too." Previously, they’d written and called Doug Sweet, while he was station GM, about the situation. The same source told me that other public radio stations who play jazz told have asked, "What's wrong with KMHD?"

The music director, among other things.

For instance, the 2009 Portland Jazz Festival was built around the 70th Anniversary of Blue Note Records. Here's another shocking example of Gomez incompetence from another KMHD DJ:

Back in February, I was the first on air host to interview Bill Royston, the creative director, for the PDX Jazz Festival, regarding the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records and the tie in to the festival. The station had arranged for several interviews with Mr. Royston to promote the event and for KMHD to derive some underwriting revenue made possible by the fabulous development director Calvin Walker.

I brought all the new and relevant Blue Note CD's from my personal library into the studio as a back for air play, in case Bill did not any or part of the collection with him. Bill was impressed, but I told him they were mine and the station did not have them available for the DJ's to play.

At that point Calvin Walker, the Development Director entered the studio and noticed what a good collection I had assembled for the interview. I said they were mine and KMHD did not have any in the studio. Calvin said that KMHD should be doing that and providing the Blue for all the DJ's, since the Blue Note 70th was so important to KMHD and for the station to out reach to the community. Blue Note chose Portland over ALL others to kickoff this national celebration!

We both shrugged our shoulders knowing the music director was not doing his job. It was reminiscent of communist Russia years ago when on vacation and hearing the same type of futile sighing remarks from the people about their dysfunctional government "not being able to food on the table."

Another example of what the volunteers face on a daily basis at KMHD.

A loyal KMHD On Air Volunteer

At one point, while Gomez was away during the festival and he had still not put out any extra Blue Note albums, two staff members took those much needed albums from Gomez' office and put them in the studio.

Upon his return, he took the box back into his office and locked the door.

One of the interesting things about the MHCC Board meeting on Wednesday was that when some of those concerns were aired, that news seemed to surprise many in attendance.

You might ask why the last two KMHD GMs have not been able to make Gomez do his job. The answer is that the paid KMHD staff does not answer to the GM, but rather have union protected jobs. Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong a union supporter as you'll find, but in this case, the inability of the GMs to either control or fire Gomez (and I know at least one dearly wanted dearly) has materially harmed the station.

JoAnn Zahn, Director, Fiscal Operations, Budget & Auxiliary Servies, who has been caretaker GM of the station since last summer, has done her best, but she is not a broadcast professional. At least she made an effort to interact with the DJs. She listened.

Gomez has been a cancer on the station for many years. After all the hell we raised about the music library, he has put a pitiful couple hundred albums in there over a seven month period. He has never added the Linda Hornbuckle/Janice Scroggins album which came out in July and which I had been playing since June. Terry Robb, the label owner and producer of the album had dropped off at least five copies to Gomez. I emailed Gomez about this repeatedly. Linda and Janice have helped the station many times over the years, number one. And number two it's a great album. Yet Gomez never added it. Who knows why?

When Mary Flower, who has played at KMHD sponsored events, released her latest album, I had to raise holy hell to get Gomez to add it. Eventually it found its way to the blues library shelves, but not without a fight.

Leaving Gomez at MHCC, where he is guaranteed employment, is perhaps at the top of the list in improving the station when it moves over to OPB.

Posted by Words to Drive-By: at 3:03 PM

3 comments:

Ben Darwish said...

wow. this is insane. thanks for the insight. just to clear up the confusion, i am based in portland and have been for the last 24 years.
- ben
April 10, 2009 7:26 PM
Les Hutchinson said...

Unbelievable! How do incompetents like Gomez stay around for so long? He's got to go!
April 10, 2009 7:39 PM
Skip Elliott Bowman said...

I am so shocked. Not at the behavior of Greg Gomez, which is legendary, but at his ignorance of the local jazz scene and contempt for local artists. His description of Nancy King is so laughable I had to wonder if he was pulling your leg.

I was a programmer at KMHD during the early 1990s, and would have enjoyed my job a lot more had it not been for the repeated intervention of Greg Gomez. I did all I could to support local artists, interviewing and promoting them on air and adding their new CDs to the library. Not only did Gomez tell me to knock that off (repeatedly; I refused to listen to him) but the CDs never made it to the stacks. I never saw them anyway, and during my 10pm-2am shift I had plenty of time to look.

I was wondering how he was able to keep his job all these years. Thanks for telling this story, Tom. I have a feeling there are a lot more. Keep fighting that good fight.
April 10, 2009 7:40 PM

R.I.P. Eddie Bo

2009-03-25T03:28:00.000-07:00

I am really sorry to hear this....I was just listening to "From This Day On", the source of many moments of hearing the opening horn fanfare sampled by today's rap artists. A real loss to the music world and the New Orleans grand tradition of music.

This post originally came from Tom DiAntoni's music blog/web site. Thanks Tom!!!

------------------

New Orleans piano legend Eddie Bo dies at 79
Posted by Keith Spera, Staff writer, The Times-Picayune
March 20, 2009 6:40PM
Categories: Breaking News, Obituary, Top News

RUSTY COSTANZA / T-P ARCHIVE
Singer-pianist Edwin Joseph Bocage, known simply as Eddie Bo, works the crowd at last year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans. He died Wednesday, March 18, at 79.
Eddie Bo, a potent, eclectic New Orleans pianist, singer, songwriter and producer who inspired a dance craze with his 1962 hit "Check Mr. Popeye" and later directed fans to "Check Your Bucket, " died Wednesday, March 18, of a heart attack. He was 79.

A prolific artist, Mr. Bo adroitly distilled an excitable synthesis of rock 'n roll, rhythm & blues, jazz and funk.

"He was one of the last great New Orleans piano professors, kind of a bridge between Professor Longhair and Allen Toussaint, " said New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival producer Quint Davis. "Everyone now has to remember to check their bucket on their own, without Eddie to tell us."

Born Edwin Joseph Bocage, Mr. Bo grew up in Algiers and the 9th Ward. He was heavily influenced by the piano style of Professor Longhair; he also gravitated to the jazz phrasing of George Shearing, Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum.

After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, he served in the Army. Upon his return to New Orleans, he studied arranging and composing at the Grunewald School of Music, a training ground for scores of professional musicians.

He fronted various bands and wrote and released singles for the Ace, Ric, Apollo and Chess labels. In addition to "Check Mr. Popeye, " which was inspired by the cartoon character, his hits included 1969's "Hook and Sling, " which reached No. 13 on Billboard's R&B chart.

Other artists fared well with his songs. Little Richard adapted Mr. Bo's "I'm Wise" as "Slippin' and Slidin." Etta James scored a 1959 hit with his "Dearest Darling." He is credited with writing Oliver Morgan's signature "Who Shot the La La."

In 1975, Mr. Bo semi-retired from music and left New Orleans after the failure of both his marriage and a North Rampart Street club, El Grande, in which he had invested heavily. He said he "couldn't make ends meet spiritually" as a carpenter.

Neither his retirement nor exile were permanent. By 1989 he was back in New Orleans following seven years in Miami, where he studied at the Yahweh Institute. The institute, he said, "teaches men that we should seek love and distribute love, and seek to be moral." It was around that time that Mr. Bo started wearing a turban-like diadem on his head.

By the early 1990s, he was touring Japan and Europe, appearing on albums with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and George Porter Jr., and holding down an evening solo piano gig at Margaritaville. A German label issued his funk album "Shoot From the Root" in 1996. In 1998, he released "Nine Yards of Funk" on his own label.

He also busied himself with non-musical pursuits. He briefly operated a club, the Check Your Bucket Cafe, and ran a health food store with his sisters.

In 1999, an electrical fire destroyed the Tulane Avenue building that housed the health food store. Mr. Bo also lived in the building. The fire claimed his two keyboards, along with master tapes of unreleased and previously released recordings, musical charts he had painstakingly written over the years, and a collection of his own classic 45s.

Scores of musicians -- contemporaries as well as younger musicians influenced by him -- volunteered to perform at a benefit concert in the wake of the fire. "It gives me a deep, deep feeling of not really knowing how people care, until you have to experience something like this, " he said. "Then you really know who your friends are."

His most pressing need, he said at the time, was to replace his keyboards. "I'll try everything I can to get another keyboard, " he said, "because I'm lost without something to play."

Funeral arrangements are pending.

A Contemplation on Music

2009-02-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

Friends,
There are many reasons and ideas why I play and continue to make music my living, and my life. I ask myself daily and continue the search for what makes it continue and satisfy me...

The thoughts contained within the posted speech below contains many of those reasons.

Ultimately, the artists in us all will eventually articulate the "inarticulate speech of the heart" for the rest of the world-at-large, through the eternal portal of musical understanding. That is where we will save the world, and grow.

please enjoy,
cj

thanks to Janice Scroggins for sharing, as she always does : )

---------------------------

A Contemplation on Music

This was the welcome address to parents of the incoming freshman class at Boston
Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the
music division at Boston Conservatory.

One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would
not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated.
I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and
math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an
engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician.
I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to
apply to music school-she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores." On
some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the
value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they
listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really
clear about its function.

So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society
that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the
newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage
in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in
fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit
about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the
ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said
that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy
was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent,
external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships
between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of
finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls
and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me
give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the
Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier
Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the
war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of
1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a
concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him
paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the
camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote
his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in
January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison
camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the
repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration
camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy
writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good
day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to
escape torture; why would anyone bother with music? And yet, from the
camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art. It wasn't
just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art.

Why?

Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the
bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be,
somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without
hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect,
but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part
of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is
one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has
meaning."

On September 12, 2001, I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I
reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the
world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as
was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking
about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music,
and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I
sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely
irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this
city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I
here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a
piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey
of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and
in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the
piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least
in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't
play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we
most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organize activity
that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang.
People sang around fire houses, people sang We Shall Overcome. Lots
of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public
event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at
Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized
public expression of grief, our first communal response to that
historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that
life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery
was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.*

From these experiences, I have come to understand that music is not
part of "arts and entertainment," as the newspaper section would have
us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from
leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass-
time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the
ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express
feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things
with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart-wrenchingly beautiful
piece, Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then
some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the
Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know
that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack
your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you
didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to
get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was
absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there
might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some
music. And something very predictable happens at weddings - people
get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some
musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone
sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame,
even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the
people who are going to cry at a wedding, cry a couple of moments
after the music starts.

Why?

The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces
of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we
feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching
Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no
music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right
moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at
exactly the same moment? I guarantee you, if you showed the movie
with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks:
Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible
internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important
concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than
a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I
thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed
playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St.
Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music
critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most
important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in
Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We
began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written
during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a
young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to
our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than
providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because
we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the
piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music
without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near
the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later
met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from hi
buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a
good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd
that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of
that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying
in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished thepiece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to
talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the
circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its
dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience
became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly
figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage
afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I
was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was
hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open,
but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine
gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute
from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean,
realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many
years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory
returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I
didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you
came out to explain that this piece of music was written to
commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle.

How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those
memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationship>
between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most
important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier
and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect
their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn
his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman
class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I
will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student
practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously
because you would imagine that some night at 2:00 AM someone is going
to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save
their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8:00 PM someone is going to
walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is
confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether
they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your
craft.

"You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell
yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a
musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies.
I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a
firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of
therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor,
physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they
get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with
ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

"Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master
music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of
wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of
mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it
will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no
longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which
together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If
there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an
understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit
together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what
we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the
artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal,
invisible lives."

Dig This!!! Nik Bärtsch's Ronin "Holon" (ECM Records)

2009-02-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

This is a review from a blog called "SOUND INSIGHTS" of an album that I am really digging these days, and wanted to share a well written description of what is up with Nik Bärtsch's Ronin.

Nik Bärtsch's Ronin "Holon"

Holon is the second ECM disc of "zen funk" from Nik Bärtsch's Ronin and the eighth in Bärtsch's series of "Ritual Groove Music" sets since 2001 (the first six are available only through the leader's web site). Composer and pianist Bärtsch (b. 1971, Zürich, Switzerland), together with Sha (b. 1983, Bern) on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, Björn Meyer (b. Stockholm) on bass, Kaspar Rast (b. 1972, Zürich) on drums and Andi Pupato (b. 1971, Zürich) on percussion, has forged yet another superb outing, laced with unfettered emotion, uncommon brilliance and uncompromising collaborative artistry.

The instrumentation is slightly altered from the group's previous and equally beautiful Stoa (2006), with the pianist foregoing his otherwise merely decorative Fender Rhodes and reed player Sha ditching his contrabass for alto sax on a very few occasions. But no one will notice the difference.

This July 2007 recording, issued in February 2008, like previous Ronin recordings, consists solely of Bärtsch compositions. The composer again gives his songs such erudite titles as "Modul 42," "Modul 41_17" (the first of the disc's notable moments and 15 minutes of ecstatic engagement), the filmic "Modul 39_8," "Modul 46," which has interesting echoes of Claudio Simonetti, the playful "Modul 45" and the alternately winsome and dramatic "Modul 44."

But the lack of emotion and artistry in the titles is not at all reflected in the passionate delivery of the music.

There is something here strongly reminiscent of such abstract expressionist painters as Barnett Newman, who also gave many of his beautiful paintings equally abstract and academic titles. Like a painter, Bärtsch and company are clearly more interested in providing the listener with a palette that he or she can interpret in his or her own way - without any juxtaposition of the artist's intentions of prosaic and self-meaning titles.

By way of a minor digression, I previously made a comment suggesting that Nik Bärtsch's Ronin eschews the seemingly predictable course ECM takes, from its prevailing European austerity to the cash-cow recordings of Keith Jarrett, who I unfairly named (or blamed) in particular, for the great expanse of work ECM issues in many different musical genres. This unnecessary insult to ECM and Keith Jarrett was intended to flatter Bärtsch and what his Ronin accomplishes. But it's just wrong and I apologize whole heartedly for it.

As I delve more deeply into the fascinating sphere of Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, I can connect some dots that I hadn't heard before. Most notably, it's easy to hear how ECM has laid the foundation for Ronin with its many piano-based recordings (from Paul Bley at one end to Tord Gustavsen at the other) and how Jarrett himself is much more fundamental and innovative in the ostinato jazz realm than he's ever been given credit for.

There is something especially European about Nik Bärtsch's music (the group is, after all, European and if they don't sound like it, then I can't think of much American music of late that's this inviting, inventive or involving), which is why Holon as well as the group's previous Stoa have found a particularly good home at ECM.

But it's hardly austere. It consistently hypnotizes (ritual), it swings (groove) and it has a surprisingly strong impact (music). And, like the best of Keith Jarrett's own compositions on ECM since the Trio recordings (particularly "Flying - Part Two" from Changes, "Dancing," "Lifeline" and the rest of Changeless, "The Cure" from The Cure and "The Out-of-Towners" from The Out-of-Towners) - these are patterns, or modules in Bärtsch's world, that work well on many levels; creating a basis of hypnotic music that prompts and provokes exciting intervention.

Bärtsch mixes something of the East - a tradition, but not exactly an Eastern tradition - with something of the West - a feistiness and a fury, but not exactly the Western recklessness or predictability that calls itself jazz lately - and ends up with something that is compelling and renews itself pleasingly with each listen.

Life and a Snare Drum

2009-02-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

I finally found this again and wanted to share. It's pretty cute and affecting...

Louie Bellson Dies at 84

2009-02-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

As one of the more influential drummers in my life and others, it was a blow to read that on Valentine's day, a great loss to the drumming community was felt when Louie Bellson passed from this world.

A great ambassador of the drumming art, a real gentleman of the jazz world, and just a big void will be felt from his leaving this world.

I am looking at my hand-signed promo picture that Louie sent me when he was a Pearl Drums artist in 70's. He signed nice words over the two bass drum heads in the picture and I have that image in my mind whenever I see his face and hear him play.

Along with Buddy Rich, Mel Lewis, Max Roach, Sonny Payne, and other drummers of that grand era of music (40's/50's) who are now gone, now I will most certainly will miss Louie...

------------------------------------

From the All About Jazz website:

We regret to announce the unexpected passing of Louie Bellson on February 14, 2009.

Tenative plans are for an L.A. area funeral, followed by funeral and burial in Moline, Illinois, his boyhood home. Details forthcoming.

About Louie Bellson

One of the world’s greatest drummers, Louie Bellson has been an exciting crowd pleaser for over 60 years. A well-respected educator and one of the nicest people in the music business, the still-active Louie Bellson is a class act.

Born Luigi Paolino Balassoni, Bellson won a nationwide Gene Krupa drum contest in 1940 and was heard by Tommy Dorsey, who was quite impressed. The drummer started at the top in 1941, playing with Benny Goodman; after serving in the military, he worked with the big bands of Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James. His trademark was using two bass drums in his set. From the start, Bellson was able to construct fascinating solos that could hold one’s interest for as long as 15 minutes, yet he also enjoyed playing quietly with combos.

Performing regularly with Duke Ellington during 1951-1953 made Bellson world-famous and he also gained good reviews for his writing, which included “Skin Deep” and “The Hawk Talks.” After marrying Pearl Bailey, he left Ellington to work as his wife’s musical director but he also performed in many different settings, including with Jazz At The Philharmonic, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, Count Basie, and special projects with Ellington. In addition Bellson led his own big band and small groups, recording regularly as a leader.

Since the 1960s, Bellson has been involved in educational work, teaching young musicians his dynamic drumming technique. In the 1970s and 1980s, he could frequently be found on recordings from impresario Norman Granz's Pablo label, as well as the Concord label. He has published many of his scores, including his jazz ballet The Marriage Vows. For more than thirty years he has led big bands internationally, and continued to tour, often with a quintet.

Bellson has performed on more than 200 albums with such greats as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Woody Herman, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Louie Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Mel Torme, Joe Williams, Wayne Newton and Bellson's late wife Pearl Bailey.

Composer and author, he has written more than 1,000 compositions and more than a dozen books on drums and percussion. He received the prestigious American Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. Also, he is a six-time Grammy nominee.

In 1998, Louie Bellson was hailed (along with Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and Max Roach) as one of four “Living Legends of Music" when he received the American Drummers Achievement Award from the Zildjian Company.

Bellson holds four honorary doctorates, the latest from DePaul University in 2001. In 2003, a historical land-marker was dedicated at his July 6, 1924 birth house in Rock Falls, Illinois, thus inaugurating their annual 4-day celebration in his honor.

The 2006 CD release of The Sacred Music of Louie Bellson and the Jazz Ballet amply showcased his mastery and breadth as both composer and performer. This “magnum opus" is well attested to by the highest accolades of colleagues Tony Bennett, Della Reese, Dave Brubeck, Lalo Schifrin, and others

In March 2007, Bellson and 35 other jazz greats received the Living Jazz Legends Award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

Condolences and cards to:
Mrs. Louie Bellson
c/o Remo, Inc.
28101 Industry Drive
Valencia, CA 91355

Soulbol's YouTube channel

2009-01-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

I have a channel at YouTube!!
It's full of PDX-oriented stuff
and other delights

Watch
Learn
Enjoy!!

and please visit www.youtube.com/soulbol
for more fun at YouTube

Ex-Bush aides say he never recovered from Katrina

2008-12-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

In recent months, I have talked to different people and heard on the progressive airwaves the concerns of our electorate, as to the current President's well-publicized comments / musings on how he hopes his legacy will be portrayed after his exit from office.

From what I remember of the tone of his comments, it seemed it was a continued disconnect from the reality of his surroundings.
This lavishly moneyed building would only serve to contain some doctored truths and distorted tributes, ultimately meant to paint a perfected picture of which was a truly jaundiced time in American history.

Today, the Associated Press has released a story of the speaking out of former Bush aids that should put some of these fears to rest. Their comments have been published in the current edition of Vanity Fair, and will be soon available to the buying public.

His record cannot be ran from, and the actions and the ensuing stories of Bush and his cronies, and their ritual hijacking of this country for a decade plus are coming home to roost, not unlike the chickens (and Malcolm X's historical paraphrase) in the old saying...

cj

AP/WASHINGTON – Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster.

"Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin."

Their comments are a part of an oral history of the Bush White House that Vanity Fair magazine compiled for its February issue, which hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, and nationally on Jan. 6. Vanity Fair published comments by current and former government officials, foreign ministers, campaign strategists and numerous others on topics that included Iraq, the anthrax attacks, the economy and immigration.

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs. When Bush first came into office, he was surrounded by experienced advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell, who Wilkerson said ended up playing damage control for the president.

"It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president — because, let's face it, that's what he was — was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," Wilkerson said, adding that he considered Cheney probably the "most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur" he'd ever met.

"He became vice president well before George Bush picked him," Wilkerson said of Cheney. "And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."

On other topics, David Kuo, who served as deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, disputed the idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of a religious right voting bloc.

"The reality in the White House is — if you look at the most senior staff — you're seeing people who aren't personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders," Kuo said.

"In the political affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at ... basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated."

A letter from a concerned American

2008-11-02T12:15:00.000-08:00

With all of the political stumping and posing going on, there has been plenty of verbiage from both sides, as to what needs to happen when they take possession of the White House...
A fellow musician here in town sent this well written (by him) tome to me, and lots of historical sense and plenty of crystalized, clear thoughts contained here in essay form.

Permit me to share with you and please just remember to VOTE!
thanks,
cj

-------------------------------------------

Carlton,

Some of my friends are undecided voters, so I wrote several essays--one in response to one of those lying forwards that someone sent around, one in response to a friend saying that he voted for Bush but now realizes that the promises that led him to vote were lies, but now he's undecided because he can't believe either side. I took the time this week to edit them all into one (hopefully) coherent statement.

Here's what I wrote:

Politics in America

When I decided to go back to school, I was told that “you really don’t know what you think about an issue until you write about it, and I really need to make some sense of the 2008 presidential campaign. I know that this time in the campaign is known as “The Silly Season,” but because of the size and nature of the problems our nation faces, I can’t do “Politics as Usual” this time. The following essay represents my best efforts at explaining why I think things are so bad in America today without blaming it on Republicans or Democrats but on the simultaneous rise of corporate power and fall of government power.

I am concerned with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the current financial crisis, the Iraq war, the US highway system, global warming, the US electrical grid, education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance. There are certainly many more challenges confronting our nation, but the eleven problems I just mentioned are either potentially threatening to the existence of the United States as a superpower, the value of our currency, or the basic health and safety of Americans.

The first thing I realize—and you should too—is that none of these problems can be solved by cutting taxes. Ask yourself the following questions and answer them before reading further.

If these problems are as big and ugly as they appear to me, why is such a large percentage of our campaign about which presidential candidate can cut our taxes better?

Do you want to be treated by a doctor who was selected because he cost the least?

Do you want to buy the cheapest car you can find without discussing whether or not it meets your needs?

Do you know the relationship between the quality of education and what it means that I met a student teacher who, when I asked her why she became a teacher, said, “I wanted to go to veterinary school, but I didn’t have the grades, so I had to go into education?

I’m sure that you want an expert to treat your illnesses and injuries, you want a car you can afford but that meets your needs, and you want the best education possible for your children. How would you feel if all the people who wanted to advance in your company campaigned for the job by arguing about who could cut your salaries better? (The fact is that corporate bonuses are often awarded for cutting employee costs, that’s why corporations are anti-union, and why jobs are moving overseas). Did you know that it is not always, or even usually, true that lowering taxes increases revenue?

Then there’s the problem with taking serious issues and turning them into jokes. Read this article and tell me how you would feel about this issue if it were your town with the infrastructure problem:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/165478?GT1=43001

I started with this issue because it is the one that the Republicans used on themselves rather than against Democrats. It was Republican Senator Ted Stevens, recently convicted of perjury, who tried to get this bridge built for his state. (For those of you reading the hard copy, this article explains why the “Bridge to Nowhere” is important to the town that was promised it years ago).

It’s too bad that duct tape and plastic kept around your house could spell the difference between life and death, because it’s been made into a joke—or maybe the joke will remind you to seal your house—I don’t know.

Enough frustration, let me explain something about why things are the way they are.

In the United States, there are five concentrated powers, the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive branches of government, the news media, and large corporations. Because the Republican Party has turned the conversation to how low your taxes can be, (lessening the power of the government to protect YOU) the news media are all owned and controlled by large corporations, and corporations have figured out how to make the lies contained in advertising believable, the government’s power has been severely atrophied. BTW, people who charge that corporations are trying to make you ignorant for some sinister reason are wrong—corporations are just trying to make money entertaining you.

This is not a political charge against George Bush but against Ronald Reagan. For twenty of the past twenty-eight years, we have had presidents committed to the ideal that if we give more money and power to the richest and most powerful, they will do more and more to grow the economy and the benefits will trickle down to us folks at the bottom. They have also been committed to the idea that since government is ineffective and corrupt, the best way to rid us of its influence is to starve it so that it cannot be effective and will go away. Tax cuts are just a side effect—and a strong selling point for their agenda.

For example, the Food and Drug Administration is underfunded, so the government created a program to allow drug companies pay to have their products tested and approved. Drug companies fund the majority of drug research, food companies fund food research, and then advertising convinces you that the food and drugs that you consume are good for you.

The US more and more resembles a third world country where rich elites control most of the wealth while most of the poor are working poor, and the middle class is reeling from the outsourcing of jobs, the cutting of medical insurance, and the outrageous cost of health care and its connection to employment that is no longer stable. We are living in a country where getting sick or having an accident can, and often does, bankrupt you, we created homelessness, then criminalized it, we talk about adequately funding public education in terms of throwing money at an insoluble problem, and our government has learned or invented several ways to privatize profit and socialize risk. This is because the reduction in government power is mirrored by the relative increase in the power of corporations. Since corporations also own the news media—well, you get the idea.

While most of this essay is nonpartisan, I can’t just be neutral because the way the world looks to me is that Republicans have empowered corporations to steal us blind and given poor Americans a steady diet of lies even as the safety and security that I was raised with have largely disappeared. I just don’t think they did it to ruin the country—that’s just the unintended consequence of limiting the power of government in a way that augments corporate power. Just so you know I'm not blindly anti-Republican, I have great respect for John McCain, Colin Powell, and many others whose names you might not know, and much of the legislation that has undermined our security had bipartisan support. I don't even think that the ideologues who got us into the current mess in Iraq and Afghanistan are thieves, assholes, or stupid. What I don't get is how anyone could believe that they did a good enough job so that you or anyone else would support them. Then, to think that after the Bush administration ran up two trillion dollars in national debt, a tax cut would be a good idea!

While I'm at it, don't you want to know about why we're many trillion more dollars in debt ten years after Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget?

What do you know about 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the current financial crisis, the Iraq war, the US highway system, global warming, the US electrical grid, education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance?

Did you know that back in 1988, Gary Hart was America's foremost expert on foreign terrorism? We might have avoided 9/11 if he hadn't gotten caught having an affair.

Do you know how much of the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Katrina was due to wetlands policy implemented by the Army corps of Engineers, how much was due to lack of preparedness on the part of New Orleans, (linked to budget woes as much as short-sightedness) how much was due to the Bush Administration’s decision to make the head of FEMA a political appointment, appointing someone with no experience in administering disaster relief. Do you know what sorts of policies are guiding the rebuilding efforts today?

Do you know anything about the relationship between the current financial crisis and those of 1819, 1837, 1873, or 1893? Do you know how much of the mortgage crisis is due to people borrowing more than they could afford to, how much is due to predatory lending, and how much is due to bankruptcies caused by medical bills?

Do you understand how the decision to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein was reached—what the intelligence actually showed, and what Americans were told the intelligence showed? Do you know where the trillions of dollars spent on the war went? Do you know what happened to create the prison in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base?

As a result of Guantanamo, our government's willingness to torture despite the fact that it doesn't work, our government’s deceit in leading the US to invade Iraq, and the refusal to talk to enemies, we have lost several important battles and lost the respect and admiration of people around the world. Most of the situations I'm talking about require long detailed explanations, so I hope the ones you know about are enough to convince you.

Are you aware of the current state of US highway bridges and how likely we are to see another collapse like the one in Minneapolis in 2007, or in Cos Cob Connecticut in 1983? Are you aware that a report on global climate change that was unaffected by American efforts to politicize the science was recently released to the delight of the global science community?

Do you know what happened when we deregulated the generation of electricity but didn't do anything to assign responsibility for the maintenance of the grid that used to be taken care of my regulated utilities?

Do you understand what kind of resources it takes to give everyone a good education and really leave no child behind?

Do you know or understand what assumptions are used in calculating the future failure of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements--and how realistic those assumptions are?

Do you know why America spends three times as much as any other industrial country on health care yet ranks at or near the bottom on most measures of care, service, and satisfaction? (Note: we do have the best trauma care system in the world, and that does play a role in increased expenditures. When we save lives, those people have lifetime health expenses that they wouldn't incur if they had died of their injuries). Do you wonder why Americans are so afraid of government bureaucrats deciding who gets health care that insurance company bureaucrats decide who gets health care?

Most Americans don't know that in the late 19th and early 20th century the US was rife with human rights abuses that resemble China's (poisonous additives to baby's milk and lead paint on children's toys are just two of the dozen crises facing China that I could mention without looking them up) but government created agencies—bureaucracies, to use the negative charge, to protect Americans from the abuses that had been perpetrated by corporations—knowingly AND unknowingly. Many Americans died to allow the unionization of American workers—balancing the power of large corporations. That was as ugly a war as any we have fought during my lifetime. The Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and many other organizations were created to limit the future potential for disaster and abuse like that which we had already suffered. Some of these agencies were so successful that some politicians thought—or still think—that they outlived their usefulness. In the same way, people who don’t remember what it was like to lose children to whooping cough, diphtheria, polio, and other childhood diseases are deciding not to vaccinate their children. So, our country has been recreating the plagues and ills that government eliminated or greatly reduced in the mid-twentieth century.

I believe in government regulation as the best way to keep us safe and free—at least this is true in a country where the People have the power to watch the government. I also believe that adequately funded government is the best defense against the complexity of the world and the number of other power centers--multinational corporations, drug and arms smugglers, and terrorist groups to name three. So what does this mean for you and me?

Here's the truth. Either Obama or McCain might make a good president. Either might be the victim of history or assassination, moral failing or simply be outmaneuvered by an adversary. I'm voting for Obama because his ability to inspire people who were apathetic about politics means that he will have a mandate to ask us what we really want for our future and what we're willing to do to receive it. I also trust Obama more than I trust McCain on foreign policy, and I have no faith in a President Palin—another Bush-like ideologue with no prior experience in, or understanding of, how global power is wielded.

As Chief Executive and Commander in Chief of the military, the place that a president can make the biggest difference is in foreign policy. In my opinion, the foreign policy choices of the Bush administration--Axis of Evil, Iraq War, Korea, Iran, etc., have been so bad that there is some chance that our nation will never recover and we'll become a former super power like France and Britain.

I believe that both McCain and Obama would make better choices, (not Palin) but we have a much better chance of finding out what really happened in the ultra secret Bush White House if the next president and congress are Democratic. My biggest worry, the erosion of American civil liberties, will likely be addressed by either Obama or McCain—especially if the public demands it, but I definitely want enough Democrats in office so that we can find out what happened in the Bush Administration that is illegal, immoral, and/or dangerous to America's place in the world.

Next most important of the presidential powers is that the president chooses Supreme Court justices. We recently had a ruling that is truly chilling for women--the court decided that since the Founding Fathers didn't think domestic abuse was serious, they shouldn't either. The Republicans have appointed judges whose agendas are scary. (No time to research the details for you, but you can look up the case). It is Republicans who have appointed judges that find in favor of big business against those who have been harmed, recently canceled punitive damages against Exxon for the Alaskan oil spill 20 years ago that the area still hasn't recovered from, and installed George Bush as president after he lost both the popular vote and would have lost Florida except for some dirty politics. (The Supreme Court stopped the recount, which would have showed that Gore won the state and thus the presidency).

McCain has already promised to appoint more like-minded judges.

I love my country, and I believe that when everyone notices that the stadium is on fire, the two teams (Democrats and Republicans, in this case) roll up their sleeves and demonstrate that the stadium really is more important than the game. Undoing the damage that we have done to our country will require personal sacrifice--the most important personal sacrifice is the realization that understanding the issues and having a opinion based on actual knowledge is so much more important than deciding which car to buy, which laundry detergent to use, and which medications will relieve our symptoms better.

Sometime in the last thirty years, candidates realized that if they never made any specific proposals, no one could criticize them. So, it's not possible to figure out what a candidate is actually going to do by listening to him or her speak. The only way to figure out what a candidate is likely to do is to look at his or her—and their party’s record. And it is unpatriotic to believe candidate ads, no matter which candidate you support!

In order to be an informed voter, one has to understand the issues and be able to predict how candidates will decide based on their track record, party platform, and public sentiment. For example, I was against the invasion of Iraq in 2001. I knew that (1) Bush senior had left Saddam Hussein in power in 1992 because he was a dictator who could keep the Kurds from wanting to take back historic Kurdistan from Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, and the Iraqi Shiites from wanting closer ties with Iran--either one of which could seriously destabilize the Middle East, (2) the evidence of WMD was iffy and being inflated to stir up support for a war that Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowicz, William Kristol and several other neocons had planned a decade before, (3) that it was likely that any war would be much more complicated, costly, and long than the American people would stand for, and we would probably wind up withdrawing in defeat like we did in Vietnam and Somalia, (and that McCain wants Iraq to end differently than Vietnam) (4) even in the best case, a war with Iraq would distract us from efforts to stop Al Kaida and other terrorist threats.

There is no way that I could have learned this in the few weeks that we had to tell our representatives how we wanted them to vote. Of course, I didn't foresee the attack on civil liberties, the torture and American disgrace abroad, the extent of mercenaries and their future effect on American freedom (watch what happens during the next disaster or terrorist attack) or the weakening of the separation of powers that eight years of George Bush would create. I now know what might happen if these abuses are not repudiated, rolled back, and apologized for. (Members of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes--and that is not a partisan statement). We now know that senior White House officials approved waterboarding, and waterboarding has been ruled to be torture. We don’t know what else has been done.

Republican presidents are not the only ones to blame for things that are horrible in this country, like (1) we spend much more money on health care than any other industrialized nation, but we are last in quality of care and citizen satisfaction, (2) the mentally ill who are a danger to themselves and others are often imprisoned rather than given long term care, (3) there is a crisis in education, and it's so big, I don't know where to start, (4) our national infrastructure--the electrical grid, railroads, air traffic control, levees, and others--are breaking and there is no plan to fix them, and (5) the government agencies that regulate the safety of food, drugs, banks, stocks, etc., are all underfunded, and the ability to sue for negligent or criminal wrongdoing is being eliminated. There are more, but these should give you the basic idea.

I don't know if Obama can solve all of these, but too many of them will continue the way they are without a different kind of leadership than the 8 years of Reagan, 4 years of HW Bush, and 8 years of W Bush we are still reeling from.

What we need is a series of presidents who can inspire Americans to understand that this course has magnified poverty to the point where most Americans in poverty are employed. They work so hard that they don't have the time and energy to raise their children properly but still often have no health care, no emergency benefits, and are victimized by higher costs for everything from banking, (check cashing places, payday lenders, and/or high fees for bounced checks) insurance (rates set by credit score) and purchases (the poorest pay the highest interest rates on everything from credit cards to auto loans). The new bankruptcy laws were written by the banking and credit card industry! The energy companies and auto manufacturers wrote new environmental laws, and the current administration has done everything it could to politicize both the justice system and science research so that findings favorable to conservatives are promoted and those favorable to consumers and environmentalists are hidden.

Please, whatever choice you make in the presidential election, make sure it is because you know what the problems are and whether or not the solutions proposed might work.

If you want to see a great presidential contest, watch Kennedy and Nixon debate. The more of the debates you watch, the more you will understand what a poor imitation we have today of a contest where two men vying for the presidency explain what it is that they would do about problems facing our nation. Every one of the topics they discuss is still relevant today, but most of you will have never heard most of the topics even mentioned—much less understand what import each choice has for the United States.

Today, people promise solutions without explaining how their solution works. They have learned that as soon as they say what they will do, their ideas are attacked.

So, to judge what your new president will do, look at the last ones. McCain will be much like Reagan, Nixon and the two Bushes. Obama will be more like Kennedy and Clinton. What makes sense to you? (Don't answer that until you read a little history that was NOT written by politicians trying to get your vote).

If we all just gave our favorite politicians $5 each, we'd be the special interests paying for access. There are 330 million of us, and money is power. Give to the politicians you support. Then pay attention and hold them accountable!

Whoever you support—VOTE!

Today is the day....

2008-10-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

that yours truly gets inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame in a ceremony tonight in downtown Portland.

When others would hear about the honor and offer their kudos, I would always say thanks (of course) and the only quip/retort that would come to my mind was that I hope the next 47 years would be as interesting as the last...
and maybe I would get it right this time!! (drummers are so self-effacing at times)....

Believe you me, I have thought long and hard about the ramifications of this honor and those who have fed into this vessel, who just happens to be a musician.

Those people are many, and there are still those who in present day who continue to shape and guide my sensitivities to the making of music.

One person that I should really name and get into the lexicon of things is my first real mentor, Bob Brewer, who really was the first guy who taught me the joy of being inside of the music, whatever it is, and to respect and go forward with the experience.
Bob would to travel to my house to pick me up for events that were "off the clock" for his time, but to expose me to different things was indeed a joy for him. His skills as a trombone/low brass player were of legend, and he left more friends than enemies, I would offer.
I still think of him as one of the leaders of the "Lewis & Clark College Music Mafia" during his school tenure there in the 50s.
Some great Portland musicians came from that group of players, and this also included my high school band teacher and later mentor Larry Morrell, who also continued my learning curve in this world of being a player, by interjecting me into the professional world by getting my view together of the music and what it required constantly. Another early champion of my cause was Chic Colburn, who I took a early drum lesson from, and who basically said that I needed to just go out into the world and "play"...

Another person I will take with me into the Hall Of Fame is Bruce Carter.
He honorably lives in the pages of this blog elsewhere.

This mighty drummer from NE Portland was another big influence on my young life (and others) as a highly accomplished and stylized player, and he did it with such groove and verve that we all were constantly floored whenever he took the chair with The Soulmasters, and then later, Pleasure.
One part Billy Cobham, another part Dennis Chambers (which he and Bruce were contemporaries) and all the rest pure groove.

Bruce knew where a quarter note began and stopped.

As always, Mel Brown and Ronnie Steen were constants in my life, and continued to be so in present-day. Their friendship and musical compass-pointing continue to keep me spirited in the best of ways. Generous to a fault, and always encouraging to me over the years, I could have never asked for a better couple of guys to give me perspective on things in the professional musician world.
Let's put it this way, in regards to these two people...

Carlton Jackson really doesn't exist without the two of these men, doing what they do best...
enabling and emboldening others with the true spirit of what good music making is.

Moreover, I am more than happy and fully honored to be inducted with the likes of the great (now local!!) Jazz piano player and lyricist Dave Frishberg, composer, conductor Norman Leyden (34 years conducting the Oregon Symphony Orchestra Pops, and whom I have worked with a few years into now present day), Terry Currier of Music Millennium Records (whom I shared lots of time in their aisles buying music over the years), David Leiken (who managed the aforementioned band Pleasure in their heyday). Curtis Salgado who still is the killer-diller, with regards to blues vocalists...

The beautiful,freaky Holy Modal Rounders (with whom I know Roger North, a great local drummer and light who invented the infamous North Drums) and also the local funk band Shock (vocalist Malcolm Noble is a good friend, along with drummer Billy Bradford)

Also Thara Memory, Uber-educator, mentor and good friend.

Gary Ogan,who I always thought that music literally poured from this man. Gary is always a person who I look at to see what he is up to and still enjoy listening to his output.

I will post more of my thoughts later, as they come to me.

thanks for reading,
cj

Everything (Basic) You Wanted To Know About Reggae Drums*

2008-10-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

*but were too afraid to ask.....

How To Play Reggae Drums:
An Introduction

Learning how to play reggae drums involves thinking differently regarding the primary pulse of the beat. In reggae the emphasis is on the third beat in the measure as opposed to the 2 and 4 in popular music. The grooves can be played straight or with a triplet swing feel.

The bass drum played with the snare on beat three enforces this backbeat. The kick and snare can be placed anywhere you desire within the pattern. Just make sure the emphasis is on the third beat. These are just general guidelines to base your patterns on.

One Drop - Rockers - Steppers

When learning how to play reggae drums there are three main drum beat styles to master: One Drop, Rockers and Steppers. The One Drop beat, places the emphasis on the third beat of the bar with the snare and bass drum played together. Beat one is not played which is the opposite of most popular music. Carlton Barrett drummer of The Wailers is credited with inventing this style.

Check out "One Drop", by Bob Marley and the Wailers to hear him play this beat. Barrett often used an unusual triplet figures on the hi-hat, as heard on the song "Running Away" from Marley's "Kaya" album.

The Rockers beat, has the emphasis on beat one and beat three as heard on "Night Nurse" by Gregory Isaacs. The Rockers beat can also include syncopated counter rhythms such as the Black Uhuru song "Sponji Reggae".

In the Steppers beat, the bass drum plays four solid quarter notes giving the beat a strong driving pulse. "Exodus" by Bob Marley is a good example. Stewart Copeland of Police fame mixed syncopated rock and reggae rhythms to create a distinctive style that influenced many drummers.

In the Steppers beat, the bass drum plays four solid quarter notes giving the beat a strong driving pulse. "Exodus" by Bob Marley is a good example. Stewart Copeland of Police fame mixed syncopated rock and reggae rhythms to create a distinctive style that influenced many drummers.

The triplet or swing feel gives reggae drumming a jazzy feel. Playing straight tends more toward rock or a heavier sound. Reggae drummers often play drum fills that do not end with a cymbal crash.

A standard drum set is commonly used with high a pitched snare sound. A timbale or second snare with the snares off adds tonal variety to the beats. >Rim shots and side stick techniques on the snare are common in reggae. Toms are often used within the beat pattern itself, not just for fills.

A variety of other percussion instrumentation is used in reggae. Bongos, congas, claves, cowbells and shakers are often used to add counter-rhythmic flavor to the grooves.

Always remember that drum styles and beats are always evolving. Rules are made to be broken when it comes to music of any kind. Try to take these basic principles and create your own hybrid reggae beats.

Reggae originated in Jamaica and Bob Marley is recognized as the artist that made it popular around the world. If you want an education in Reggae drumming add a Bob Marley compilation CD to your collection and learn the drum beats.

Learning how to play reggae drums is really fun and adds another great style to any drummer's library.

(http://www.drummuffler.com/how-to-play-reggae-drums)

Sweet Georgia Brown Tractorkomp

2008-10-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

When drummers fail....
when the drum machine blows up....

there is.... this.

Oh my....

dig the 4 bar breaks by the new guy :)

The YouTube Boneyard of CJ Fun

2008-09-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, the beauty of YouTube and the stir it has caused amongst the humans these days...

I have fallen to it's spell, and am going thru the VHS/DVD/Kinoscope archives to upload and share some moments with you the public. I try to center around Portland music events and some funny moments in the real world, by way of my favorite moments in Blaxploitation movies and such.

It's a heady mix, but someone's got to do it.

So, to give you a taste of what is up there on the channel, I have created here at the blog, the YouTube Boneyard of CJ Fun, for your enjoyment.

Or better yet...
when you are at YouTube, find my video universe under the name of Channel Soulbol PDX.

Here is a listing of the blog videos....

To see more, go up on the channel at:

http://www.youtube.com/soulbol

--------------------------------
1.Tom Grant Band/Mt. Hood Festival Of Jazz '83
2.Tom Grant Band/Mt. Hood Festival Of Jazz '87
3.Carlton Jackson/Dave Mills Big Band Waterfront Blues Festival 2002
4.Jack Quinby Orchestra live at George Fox College
5.Portland Trailblazers Big Band Video opening montage
6.Jeff Uusitalo trombone solo w/Jack Quinby Orchestra
7.Piano Throwers live at Horning's Hideout Anniversary 2008

Click away on these, and have a good time with some of my favorite musical moments, at least in this life.

More to come as I digitize them : )

Later....
cj

Backbeat King and Legendary R&B drummer Earl Palmer passes away

2008-09-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

This is one of the originators of the "backbeat" in modern Rock and R&B...let's have a moment of silence for one of the greats.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Leading R&B drummer Earl Palmer, best known for his New Orleans recording sessions with the likes of Fats Domino and Little Richard, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles at age 84, his family said.

Palmer, who died after a lengthy illness, played on hundreds of hits during a career that ran from the 1940s through the 1970s and earned him an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

His drumming on such hits as Fats Domino's "The Fat Man," Richard's "Tutti Frutti and Smiley Lewis's "I Hear You Knockin'" featured the strong back beat that was his signature and helped transform the lope of rhythm and blues into the full-tilt thrust of rock 'n' roll.

"That song required a strong after-beat throughout the whole piece," Palmer wrote of his work on "The Fat Man" in his 1999 autobiography, "Backbeat -- The Earl Palmer Story."

"With Dixieland you had a strong after-beat only after you got to the shout last chorus," he said. "It was sort of a new approach to rhythm music."

Palmer also played drums on Domino's "I'm Walkin,'" the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin,'" Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High," and Sam Cooke's "Twistin' the Night Away."

His handiwork behind the drums was featured as well on a number of popular television themes, including "The Odd Couple," "77 Sunset Strip" and "The Brady Bunch."

In addition to his collaboration with R&B and blues artists in New Orleans, Palmer was a highly sought-after session player for recording stars ranging from Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan to Elvis Costello, Ray Charles, Dizzie Gillespie and Count Basie.

“Kick Drums” an interesting study of the grind of drumming

2008-07-23T03:03:00.000-07:00

On the BBC News website today came a report about current research by British exercise physiologists involving the physical demands of rock drumming. The findings of Marcus Smith and Steve Draper’s eight-year research project on Blondie drummer Clem Burke is that rock drummers require the stamina of an English Premier League footballer (that’s soccer player for you stateside readers) during a league match.

Smith and Draper hooked up Burke to equipment to measure his heart rate, oxygen intake, and lactic acid levels in his blood. They found that his heart rate would reach 140 to 150 beats per minute, sometimes as high as 190, similar to top athletes. They also found that Burke would burn between 400 and 600 calories per hour - just about enough to burn one Royale with Cheese in a single gig.

Here’s the…kicker: Smith notes that Premier League footballers generally expect to play about once or twice a week. But touring rock drummers can play almost every night for weeks at a time. Burke himself played about 100 concerts in one 12-month span, with 90-minute sets. Add the rigors of touring and it’s an amazing conclusion, especially for a man 52 years of age. What would you expect from the man and the band that brought us “Atomic“?

Smith and Draper are parlaying these findings into developing a “drumming laboratory” at the University of Gloucestershire to further study the effects of drumming, with the hopes of studying more drummers. (Maybe they can study Josh Garza from the Secret Machines or Ben Shapiro from La Laque - those guys can bash!) Even better, in the works is a collaboration under the Clem Burke Drumming Project, the University of Gloucestershire, and the Department of Health, Sport, and Social Care in Britain to develop community outreach programs targeting overweight and disengaged youngsters.
BBC.co.uk)

Clem Burke (Image: BBC.co.uk)
0 Responses to

The END OF THE UNIVERSE ??? Lewis Black will touch on this...

2008-06-24T12:49:00.000-07:00

I hope that you all are hip to the one-man unbelievable sense-maker of a tsunami named Lewis Black... His Comedy Central appearances are totally funny, and I would like to share a routine that I found on YouTube...well, the rest will speak for itself. : )

Great job and thanks to Nathan 1097 for his wonderful, original post.

enjoy,
cj

George Carlin, R.I.P. by Bob Leftsetz

2008-06-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

Hi there friends...

This is the first piece in all of the tributes for the late George Carlin that has caused me to pause and nod my head in agreement with what was said.
Not that the tributes I seen have been inadequate, but this one has some spunk to it and with the kind permission of the author, Bob Leftsetz (who has a bio at the bottom of the page....please read it...) I will attempt to enlighten your mind and lighten your burden for a few seconds with a wonderful tribute to GC.

George Carlin

The last time I saw George Carlin was at the Universal Amphitheatre. As I watched him stride the stage with his mic, I thought what a great job this was. You get an agent to book the gig, you drive to the venue from your house, you do your show and you take ALL THE MONEY!

I’m sure George loved that. After all, he invented the format. Oh, the Borscht Belt comedians preceded him, but George wasn’t a member of that club, hell, he wasn’t even Jewish. He didn’t depend on favors from singers, and he had a gold-selling record career. George Carlin didn’t tell jokes, he specialized in the TRUTH! And one thing the baby boomers recognized was the truth. They flocked to George. Once he gave up trying to please their parents and just said what he felt on the inside.

I can’t remember whether it was ‘67 or ‘68, but around seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, with school still in session, my parents dropped me off at Sacred Heart University for a concert. One of those five act extravaganzas like the one featuring the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, the Soul Survivors and…that I went to at Fairfield University the fall before. The headliner was Vanilla Fudge. Actually, I saw Carmine Appice a couple of weeks back at the Kenny Chesney show. Playing second was Connecticut’s biggest local act, NAIF, the North Atlantic Invasion Force, but in the middle, on around nine, was the performance I truly remember. George Carlin took the stage. Did the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. He was funny. I kept my eye on him. When he exploded in the seventies it wasn’t news, but the preordained success of someone who worked hard, bucking the system to ultimately be successful in another system, that of youth culture.

Sure, he was about ten or fifteen years older than his new audience, but he was seen as one of them. A God. Quoted ad infinitum from his Little David records.

Seinfeld’s observational comedy? That’s all derived from Carlin. I don’t want to hassle Jerry here, he admits it. Carlin was the first to look at our screwed up world and question it. The only comedian doing this today is Chris Rock. Cable TV killed live comedy and while everybody with a modicum of talent looked to star in, or write for, a sitcom, today’s generation was subjected to the inanities of Dane Cook. A harmless gentleman, but that’s just the point… Dane’s about jokes. Carlin was much more than jokes, he actually inspired people to think, to question.

Save the planet? SAVE YOURSELF!

I think of Carlin’s routine every time I hear people pontificate about the environment. George said the planet’s been around for millions of years, it will survive. Isn’t that an interesting thought? An Earth without people? Instead of thinking about whether your kids will get cancer, think of human beings going the way of dinosaurs.

And, of course, the difference between football and baseball… Sudden death and extra innings. The gridiron as opposed to the field. Baseball is a pastoral game…

And what about the routine about STUFF? Buying stuff, hoarding stuff, moving stuff. As someone addicted to my stuff, I think of George’s words whenever I debate throwing something away. Do I really need it? Is my identity really rolled up in my possessions?

And then there was the Friday night executions. Maybe it was Monday night. But you remember that HBO routine. God, that would generate ratings! Begging the question, would executives put ANYTHING on television if it delivered ratings? In the years since, Carlin seems a seer. Hell, it’s almost not a joking matter. They have vigils, TV reports, whenever they execute another inmate.

From a distance, it looked like George couldn’t break through into TV or movies. The obituaries are saying it was his choice. I’d like to agree with this, if you’re sui generis, if you’re making a difference, can you play any role but yourself?

I looked forward to those HBO specials.

I must say, in the recent one, George was a bit off his game. Maybe his health was affecting his talent. Then again, we don’t reevaluate Sinatra based on his final tours. Frank’s legend was cemented over and over again, from the forties to the sixties. And George Carlin’s legend was cemented from the seventies to the nineties. He wasn’t the voice of a generation, he’d hate that description, rather he was the trusted observer, removed, sitting on high, taking the pulse of a nation.

You might say he was secondary to Richard Pryor. I love Richard, but their acts were different. Richard was a storyteller nonpareil. Carlin’s talent lay in his insight, in questioning what the f**k was going on through humor.

If you look at Carlin’s track record, it’s akin to the Beatles’. He was more consistent than the Stones, even though he worked just as long. And even though we loved his greatest hits, we always wanted to hear his new stuff. Carlin wasn’t calcified, he was positively alive.

Sure, he took drugs to cope. But, he also had a wife and a child and a level of normalcy that left him out of the "Behind The Music"/"E! True Hollywood Story" exposes. With Carlin, it wasn’t about the drugs, but the talent. We marveled at the talent.

Carlin's infamous arrest sheet...

It’s funny when a guy like Carlin dies. Because he still lives. Not only all those HBO specials and records, but the routines in our minds. He’s changed our lives. You see, Carlin’s comedy never got dated. Because being human never really changes.

But now Carlin is gone. Kinda weird, because he was an inspiration, a beacon for all us wannabe truth tellers. If Carlin could do it, maybe we could too. Now, the path is only illuminated by his legacy, there will be no more new words, no more new routines. No more appearances on late night TV where he questions the conventional wisdom, where he states he doesn’t vote because it doesn’t make a difference. I’m a big believer in casting my ballot, but I can see that George is right. The fat cats win no matter what. The little guy is squeezed out. George was not a star who wanted to live above the fray, he never forgot his roots, he was interested in the little guy, and the little guy loved him for it.

Everybody I know who interacted with Carlin said they had a conversation. His stardom did not eviscerate his humanity. But his poor heart stopped him cold.

Seventy one is too young to die. Seems old, but when you get there, or see that a man running for President is that age, you realize that as a septuagenarian, you’ve still got a lot of living to do. Hopefully.

George’s candle has been snuffed out, but his memory will live on. If I think of my pantheon of inspirations, I put him right up there with Tom Wolfe and Frank Zappa. Wolfe the observer and Zappa the questioner. That’s what George Carlin was. An observer who was not afraid to question the status quo. I will be continued to be inspired by him.

Hopefully, you will too.

----------

Who is Bob Lefsetz

Bob Lefsetz is the author of "The Lefsetz Letter." Famous for being beholden to no one and speaking the truth, Lefsetz addresses the issues that are at the core of the music business: downloading, copy protection, pricing and the music itself.

His intense brilliance captivates readers from Steven Tyler to Rick Nielsen to Bryan Adams to Quincy Jones to EVERYBODY who’s in the music business.

Never boring, always entertaining, Bob’s insights are fueled by his stint as an entertainment business attorney, majordomo of Sanctuary Music’s American division and consultancies to major labels.

"The Lefsetz Letter" has been publishing for the past 20 years. First as hard copy, most recently as an email newsletter and now, for the first time, in blog form.

Birthday Greetings from Joe Cocker!!

2008-06-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

hey gang!!,

This is one of the funniest things I've run across in a long time.

Let's dedicate this one to Bobby Torres, longtime Portland resident, conguero primo and former percussionist in Joe's backup group, The Grease Band (which means that our beloved Bobby was playing during this video of Joe singing at WOODSTOCK!!)

Bobby, this was the birthday present that I didn't get you....

ENJOY!!!

Jaco and Toots: Three Views Of A Secret

2008-06-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

This video was posted on YouTube by francky85, and sent to me by sometimes co-conspiritor and bassist Tony Conroy (thanks, man...)
and it is a lovely rendition of one of my all-time favorite tunes...
Jaco Pastorius' "Three Views Of A Secret".

Jaco plays piano, does wonderfully...
My point being that you don't see this often, because usually Joe Zawinul (R.I.P.) was on-stage with him in Weather Report, taking care of that role.

Yes, as multi-talented as Jaco was, he could also hold his own on the piano. The comments on YouTube concerning the video echo the sentiments that to this day, Jaco's passing was still untimely, and not fair to him and his many, many fans and followers.

A sad thing to behold, present-day.

The added treat of being joined on-stage by his friend, mentor, father figure Jean "Toots" Thielemans is a sight to behold.
Toots (on chromatic harmonica, of course) played on the original version of this song on "Word Of Mouth", one of Jaco's great solo albums.

This video is a wonderful portrayal of the vibe and love that this great bassist/musician put into his playing.
Just the fact that he is playing piano so vibrantly and giving is a further testament to the aura of his being.

Know YOUR History....

2008-05-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

this is one of those posts that will either chap someone's hide, or enlighten them in a good way, so here goes...

a few days ago, I was reading through one of our major paper publications in town, and checking their version of "the 10 best new bands of the year" or something like this.

I took my time and read through the list of winners and their attributes, in regards to what they are trying to bring to the music/what they want to say.

I think the biggest thing that stood out from this group of people is that I have not come across ANY of these people in my music musings, and I do get around in this business. There seems to be a sub-culture of bands that inhabit the workings of the musical muse, but for the like of me, I have never run across any of them in my chase of the music business race.

As I said, I am sure that they have their place in the everyday workings of PDX music,and that some of them are probably very talented, but they are most certainly NOT the center of the universe. Deserving of a front cover of a major magazine while many vital people still play other musics/genres (Freak Mountain Ramblers, Rex Wilson (Rex & The Rockets), Billy Kennedy, Turtle Vandemarr, Steve Bradley, Jon Koonce, Janice Scroggins, Jim Mesi, Linda Hornbuckle, Darol Anger, Lloyd Jones, Tom Grant, Robert Brown, Fernando Viciconte... and do them well enough to merit continued recognition for such.

Those same vital veterans are the same people that, I guess, are not waiting around for an addition to a 10 best list of bands, because life and survival/performance is something that occupies their time... by the same token, they are not chopped liver.

They ARE the still the circle of some importance, and have been for a long time.

Still the listings of this particular magazine I was reading was FILLED to the brim with the unknowns, while the vital people are slowly,systematically being ignored more and more each year.

Maybe this is endemic of the way that our society treats the older people, in general. The children grow up in each generation, knowing just that much more than their elders...

Or so they think this is true.

As I continued to read the list of bands and what they are about, I then came to the thought that the portrayal to the public is that these are the people/bands that are supposed to save music and continue some sort of forward motion, in this big wide world.

This particular publication, week after week, fills their music pages with these people that are puzzling to me, because chances are that in my circadian rhythms of seeing music live/out and about,I probably will not see, or search them out.

I also know that I am not the center of the universe for everything music, but just seeing these bands trotted out as what I should be concerned with, and history being ignored, with the passing of some important people, is something that just seems not fair and just.
A performance atmosphere that make it possible for these modern bands to freely trot out their designations, for an audience that needs these descriptors to help them decide what is good.Some of the classiications of genre are a bit puzzling....emo-core, shoe-core, acoustic-core, fraternacide-core...you get my drift.

It used to be that you could say...Rock and Roll, Soul, Classical, etc. and you would know where things are going with the music being presented.

These are the bands that warrant a front cover of a major publication in PDX, while others toil away and gain their laurels by plying their trade, day after day, year after year, and for some....decade after....???

Let's get back to the history end of things.

When we live in a time where the true OLD SCHOOL music people like rocker Earl Benson (Sleezy Pieces), creative artist Gary Ewing (light-show hero and Grateful Dead staffer), Vince Hozier and local Jazzers such as Art Cheney, my mentor Bob Brewer, Julian Dreyer, Eddie Wied, Herbie Hall, Marianne Mayfield, Ralph Black, Herman Jobelmann, Benny Wilson and Cleve Williams, and recently bluesman Paul DeLay pass from our earthly plain to another. These aforementioned people have done more music in one day that the said youngsters will attempt to lay their hands on in a half-year.
Plus these same scribes that have all the time in the world to write about bands I don't know, don't care about, and will probably outlive these band's shelf life, well please get on the stick and promote the history for the young to learn and get in order their place on the musical food chain.

With no recognition of their passing/and or their place in the big food chain of popular music in Portland, no less than in other circles, in other locales...
well that is just very poor, in my estimation.

Young people...
Get to know your history, before you're doomed to repeat something bad...
such as obsolescence.

cj

GOODBYE, ROCK:

Earl Benson , frontman of influential Portland band the Sleezy Pieces , died on Nov. 26 of last year at age 68.

One of the marquee rock outfits of Portland’s ’70s bar scene (when the OLCC loosened regulations on music and bars), the Sleezy Pieces played a mix of folk rock and electric material.

Longtime Portland music critic SP Clarke writes: “[Benson’s] delivery was something to behold—a bearded boyscout in Bermuda shorts and a wrinkled sportscoat singing in a rich falsetto, while quoting St. Paul, fronting one of the best bands the city has ever seen.

In the annals of Portland weirdness, Earl Benson stood apart... Way apart. ”

The Pieces rocked Portland for more than a decade.

Friends and fans gathered at 7 pm on Monday, Feb. 18 at Duff’s Garage for a memorial. Surviving members of the Sleezy Pieces—Steve Bradley, Bill Wyatt, Jon Koonce and Bill Piland took the stage later in the evening and played again in honor of Benson.

-----------------------
The poster promoting a benefit to help Gary Ewing pay his medical bills in 2006.

Portland rock art icon Gary Ewing dead at 65
Posted by Joseph Rose, The Oregonian April 30, 2008 15:31PM

Gary Ewing, the psychedelic Portland light-show and poster artist who worked with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and a slew of other rock bands in the 1960's, was found dead today at his Southeast Portland home. He was 65.

Ewing's wife, Karen, called Portland police shortly after 5 a.m. today to report that she woke up and found that her husband had collapsed during the night.

The Multnomah County medical examiner's office listed Gary Ewing's death as "natural causes."

"He was big man with a big heart," Karen Ewing said. "He touched a lot of people with his art and what he did for the Portland music scene."

Of course, she said, that big heart had some serious problems in recent years. Gary Ewing had several heart attacks and eventually underwent quadruple by-pass surgery. He also suffered life-threatening health problems last year, she said.

Terry Currier, owner of Music Millennium in Portland and president of the Oregon Music Hall of Fame, said Gary Ewing was "one of the legends" of the Portland music scene.

"To a lot of people, he was a living piece of history," Currier said. "He was the master of a dying art -- the concert light show. But for the people who experienced those shows back in the sixties and seventies, his art left a lasting impression."

Ewing was born and raised in Portland. After graduating from Cleveland High School, he headed to New York City to attend The School of Visual Arts before returning to Oregon to pursue an art career.

His artwork included window displays at the Meier & Frank department store, billboards, art prints, fabric prints, and glass and metal pieces. At one point in the 1960's, he packed up and moved to San Francisco to work in that city's booming music scene.

At classic concert venues such as The Avalon and The Fillmore, he saw his first light shows. "He said, 'That's the medium for me,'" said Karen Ewing.
"The size. The beauty. The impact on the crowd."

After returning to Portland, he became known for his gig posters and legendary light shows at local venues such as Beaver Hall andthe Crystal Ballroom.

Later, he lit the Mayor's Ball and sat on the board of the Portland Music Association.

Even as opportunities to create concert light shows faded, Currier said he tried to find venues and music festivals where Ewing could still work his magic, including last year's Fuzz Fest Northwest.

Like many musicians and artists, Ewing didn't have health insurance. A benefit ball at the Crystal Ballroom in 2006 helped raise money to defray Ewing's medical bills. But last year, new medical problems almost claimed his life and brought in more bills, Karen Ewing said.

But Gary had gone months without problems and she said they were making plans for summer. "He was probably living on borrowed time," she said. "He stayed up later than me" on Tuesday night. "It looks like he died as he made his way to bed."

Ewing is survived by Karen, his wife of 21 years; his son, Aaron; and his daughter, Crystal.

A memorial concert with the reunited sixties band Portland Zoo Electric Band is scheduled June 8 at the Crystal Ballroom. Currier said some of the digital light shows created by Ewing in recent years - "the stuff done on computers" -- likely will shine through the concert hall during the event.

But don't count on an old-school psychedelic light show, created with liquid gel and a projector, Currier said. No one, he said, could do that like Ewing.

garyewing.com

-- Joseph Rose; josephrose@news.oregonian.com

Hammer time at L.A. Philharmonic !!!

2008-03-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Philharmonic percussionist Perry Dreiman offers a demonstration.

A 25-pound mallet helps make the perfect thud in Mahler's Sixth Symphony.
By David Mermelstein
February 7, 2008

Rarely does chopping wood or smashing rocks count as orchestra practice. But when the piece in question is Gustav Mahler's mighty Symphony No. 6, pretty much anything goes, at least for percussionists.

The symphony, first performed in 1906, is not Mahler's longest -- the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth all surpass it -- but it may require the most stamina for the percussionist delivering its defining hammer blows.

That's right: hammer blows, like the kind that ring bells on high strikers at carnivals.

Midway through the final movement, an enormous hammer delivers two thwacks -- Alma Mahler said her husband described them as blows of fate. Enhanced by timpani and bass drum, they are among the most dramatic moments in all symphonic music.

"I should probably go work out at the gym," Los Angeles Philharmonic percussionist Perry Dreiman said the other day. That's because he's the designated hitter, so to speak, for the orchestra's performances this weekend of the Sixth, to be conducted by Christoph Eschenbach, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Dreiman, a strapping 6 feet 5, also wielded the hammer when the Philharmonic last performed the work -- in December 2003, soon after Walt Disney Concert Hall opened, with Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium. In fact, Dreiman has struck the blows every time the orchestra has played the symphony since he joined it in 1985.

Yet what may at first seem like the ultimate kick in classical music turns out to be a complicated affair. First, there's the issue of the right smack.

"Mahler writes that it should sound like the blow of an ax, not like a hammer on a piece of iron," Eschenbach said by phone from Paris last week. "It should sound damp but loud, without any resonance, like a very loud thud."

And securing an object to produce that sound? That has forced orchestras around the world to act creatively. In the case of the Philharmonic, Dreiman arrived with his own hammer -- something he crafted during his days as a student at the Aspen Music Festival.

"It was constructed from an ax handle topped by a block of pine measuring 5 by 7 inches," he said, displaying it, Paul Bunyan-like, in Disney Hall's backstage percussion room.

At his first chance to use the hammer in his new job, however, in April 1987, Dreiman was thwarted -- by no less than Simon Rattle, now chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Actually, all concerned decided that Dreiman's modified ax just wasn't loud enough.

Finding a solution fell to Michael Nutt, a now-retired Philharmonic violinist with a knack for invention. "He liked to dabble making things for the percussion section," Dreiman recalled. "He made whips and bell plates for us. And he was instrumental in creating the second-generation hammer, which resembled a pile driver."

That fearsome instrument, more than 4 1/2 feet long, consisted of a 3-by-7 beam with a horizontal dowel serving as its handle. Alas, it worked a little too well. "It was so powerful it shattered the podium it struck," Dreiman said.

But it sure pleased Rattle, who inscribed its black surface in silver ink with these words: "I suppose I still owe you one more stroke per night. . . . Many thanks and much love in Mahleria."

The remark isn't quite as strange as it sounds. It refers to Mahler's decision when he published the score to reduce the number of hammer blows to two from three -- a choice that retains an air of mystery given the composer's preoccupation with premonitions and death.

"He cut the third blow when he was writing the Eighth Symphony," Eschenbach said, "because he didn't believe any more in that final blow. Unfortunately, he didn't write about why. But scholars think that in writing the positive messages contained in the Eighth Symphony, he no longer wanted a final, fateful blow."

As to creating the blows, the Philharmonic's current solution came during Tilson Thomas' 2003 visit.

"Michael came with his own vision," said Dreiman. "He didn't go for the pile driver." Having recorded the symphony with his own orchestra in San Francisco two years before, the conductor had strong feelings about the matter and suggested that the Philharmonic examine his solution, an enormous mallet once used to secure the stakes of circus tents.

Tom Hemphill, a longtime percussionist with the San Francisco Symphony, had found the hammer at a salvage shop in Northern California. For performances, he'd slam it on a large plywood box, with a hole cut out to amplify the sound and prevent the box from exploding.

Plans were faxed from San Francisco, and the Philharmonic's carpenters copied the box and the hammer.

Mounted on short legs, the Philharmonic's box, made of white ash, stands 5 feet 2 and is 3 feet deep and 7 feet across. The sound hole has an 18-inch diameter. Because of the box's size, the percussionist must mount three steps to strike it properly.

The new hammer, which Dreiman says weighs about 25 pounds, consists of an ax handle topped by a cylindrical head, its pieces laminated and secured by metal bands. "You don't want it breaking apart and flying into the audience," Dreiman said.

Indeed, before a performance, he makes a point of addressing audience members sitting close: "I tell them, 'Don't be alarmed, but I'm going to get up and whale on this thing a couple times.' "

OUCH!!!!

2008-03-18T03:03:00.000-07:00

can you say "sub-prime interest loans" ??????

ABBA drummer found dead in his garden

2008-03-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

I know that it's been a little morbid around here with some of the passing of individuals, and the documentation of them.
These are people that have influenced me and my playing, so there should be something said to at least honor them, in some way.
That being said, how many of us have considered ABBA to be a "guilty pleasure" of sorts.
The truth is this band was one of the biggest selling groups in music history.
They don't have to apologize for success, as George Lucas once said about creating Star Wars, and the fallout after.

Ola Brunkert was one of those inspirations along the way, for me. He always seemed to play the right thing for the song. One of my favorites was "The Name Of The Game" with it's slinky 2-beat funk groove. Can someone say "Dancing Queen"...another groove that was just right for the moment.

By CIARAN GILES, Associated Press Writer
Mon Mar 17
9:13 AM ET

MADRID, Spain - A former drummer for the Swedish pop band ABBA was found dead with cuts to his neck in the garden of his house on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Police said Monday an autopsy showed it was an accident.

A neighbor found the body of 62-year-old Ola Brunkert on Sunday evening at his house in a coastal area outside the eastern town of Arta, a Civil Guard spokesman told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

He said an autopsy was carried out and confirmed initial investigations. "It was an accident," he said.

The spokesman said Brunkert hit his head against a glass door in his dining room, shattering the glass and cutting himself in the neck. He managed to wrap a towel around his neck and left the house to seek help, but collapsed in the garden.

Brunkert lived in the coastal apartment complex of Betlem in the municipality of Arta, in the eastern part of Mallorca.

Brunkert had lived in Arta for around 20 years. His wife, Inger. died less than a year ago, an Arta municipal official told the AP. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the case.

ABBA band member Benny Anderson told Swedish daily Expressen he was sad to hear of the drummer's death. "It is tragic," he said.

Band member Bjorn Ulvaeus added that Brunkert had been "one of the best."

"I remember him as a good friend when we worked together in the mid-1970s. He was a very creative musician who contributed a lot when we toured together and worked in the studio," Ulvaeus told Expressen.

According to ABBA's official Web site, Brunkert and bass player Rutger Gunnarsson were the only musicians to appear on all ABBA albums.

Brunkert first played with ABBA on the group's first single, "People Need Love," and toured with the band in 1977, 1979 and 1980.

He had been a jazz drummer and a member of the blues band Slim's Blues Gang, before joining pop group Science Poption in the mid-1960s.

ABBA, with the four regular members Agnetha Faltskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Ulvaeus and Andersson, was one of the world's most successful bands, with album sales of more than 370 million. The group has not performed together since 1982, but continues to sell nearly 3 million records a year.

___

On the Net:

ABBA:

http://www.abbasite.com

Buddy Miles, flamboyant rock drummer with Jimi Hendrix in his Band of Gypsys, passes away

2008-03-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

As a kid, I do remember hearing Jimi Hendrix, and recognizing that after Mitch Mitchell did his firmament stint with JH, Buddy Miles was the next to make his mark and to point the compass of all who aspired to drum and to express themselves, as the rhythm told them to. Buddy was the musician that sailed lots of those seas of rhythm, and this inspired legions of drummers to perhaps, match some of his soulful fury...

In my varied musician travels, I do remember being on the road with the Jazz keyboardist Tom Grant, and as we are clocking the many miles down the freeway, just trying to get the motor home back to Portland after a long tour, I do remember hearing "Band Of Gypsies" about 5 times in total, as we went through the state of Nebraska, doing what we would do to pass the many miles to traverse this country. Buddy's rock-solid groove passed through all the tunes we heard, and completed the necessary ostanato of groove that would sustain our ferverent interest.

Buddy also spent some time, living here in PDX and interacting with the locals, and being just a genial and wonderful spirit. I did get the chance to talk to him a few years later, and he did remember fondly the about 8 months he was here, living in town.

I also remember freely hijacking my brother Muntasir's copy of Buddy's hit solo effort "Them Changes", and checking it out many times... that is, only after hearing it come from his bedroom many a day/night... (he would put a speaker outside his bedroom and I would hear the right channel of the album...it's funny to remember that aspect of the story )
and in the course of that... letting it surround my ears,
and influence me musically in the '70's,

As a drummer, I have never been
the same...

ever.

R.I.P. Buddy Miles. : )

and big thanks to the mighty Tony Coleman for giving, and pointing my compass on what Buddy meant to all of us...

Buddy Miles, the American rock drummer who died on February 26, was a member of Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys from 1969 until Hendrix's death in 1970.

During his career Miles played on more than 70 albums, and appeared with musicians such as Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, Barry White, Prince and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Part of Miles's appeal as a rock musician was his physical appearance. From his command post behind his drum kit he held audiences spellbound with his Stars-and-Stripes shirts, high-brushed Afro hairstyle, massive frame and engaging smile.

Born George Allen Miles on September 5 1947 at Omaha, Nebraska, Buddy took his nickname from the drummer Buddy Rich and was considered something of a child prodigy, playing drums in his father's jazz band, the Bebops. George Sr had played upright bass with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon.

As a teenager Buddy Miles played in a variety of bands, including Ruby and the Romantics, the Ink Spots and the Delfonics. In 1967 he formed Electric Flag with Mike Bloomfield, guitarist with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. When Electric Flag broke up after their second album, Miles formed the Buddy Miles Express.

This was the era in which the demarcation between black and white artists in rock music began to be broken down (Jimi Hendrix himself was the first black musician to become a "white" rock star), and Miles was part of this process.

He had met Hendrix in Canada when both were acting as sidemen for other artists in the early 1960s. As Hendrix started to include guest artists on his recordings, he invited Miles to participate, and Miles played with him on two tracks on the influential Electric Ladyland album (1968). Later their friendship led to various collaborations, Hendrix producing the Buddy Miles Express release, Electric Church, in 1969. Soon afterwards Miles joined Hendrix in the short-lived group, Band of Gypsys. A notable feature of its line-up was that all the players were black. This was a first for Hendrix and was seen as a move towards reconnecting with his soul roots. Perhaps the group's best known album was Live at the Fillmore East, which featured Billy Cox on bass guitar; it was recorded on New Year's Eve 1969, the last night of the 1960s.

But a month later, when Hendrix appeared to suffer a (probably drug-related) breakdown on stage (there were suspicions that someone had spiked his drink), Miles was fired by Hendrix's manager, Michael Jeffery. Although the Band of Gypsys was wound up, Miles continued to work with Hendrix until his death in September 1970.

Miles went on to produce other records under his own name.
Soon after Hendrix's death he re-recorded "Them Changes"

a song he had written and recorded with the Band of Gypsys. It became his signature song, and later featured on a live record he made with Carlos Santana.

Signed to the Casablanca record label, Miles released the album Bicentennial Gathering Of The Tribes, an echo of his friendship and collaboration with Hendrix, who had Native American blood.

In the late 1970s Miles was sent to prison after being convicted of theft, serving his sentence at the California Institution for Men at Chino and at San Quentin - at both institutions he formed his own bands. He was released in 1985, and the following year found work singing in the highly popular California Raisins Claymation advertising campaign (the California Raisins were a fictional R&B group); he was also lead vocalist on two California Raisins albums of 1960s R&B covers. He rejoined Carlos Santana as a vocalist on Santana's album Freedom.

In 1999 Miles appeared on Bruce Cameron's album, Midnight Daydream, featuring the former Hendrix musicians Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell, as well as Jack Bruce and others.

In 2006 Miles released a final live album, The Band Of Gypsys Return, the result of a reunion with Billy Cox to re-record songs from the original live album of 1970.

Buddy Miles is survived by his partner, Sherrilae Chambers.

Dennis Irwin...the passing of a great bassist and spirit

2008-03-13T04:11:00.000-07:00

I got an email the other day from a professional bassist in town here, who informed me that the great Dennis Irwin had passed away on the 10th of this month...

As some of you may or may not know, I am a great fan of the late, great drummer Mel Lewis and his playing of the drumset.

Dennis Irwin spent many hours in the service of Mel and his big band/sextet, and always was a fine support with all the varied, stellar musicians he played with.

He was the grand example of cool and hipness, with a willing nature to empart upon those around him a beautiful aura of the essence of what Jazz was, is and will be for those to come to it's creative firmament.

I have posted a You Tube video that is a fine primer on the essence of what Dennis Irwin was about.
Check the Lord Buckley 'hipster' lingo and the joyful delivery Dennis unleashes.

Thanks to ace writer/critic Bret Primack for a wonderful tribute to a great man who just happened to play bass for a living.

Thanks Brian for sending this to me and increasing my awareness.

Please enjoy,
c

God Bless You, Robert Plant !!!!

2008-03-05T23:26:00.000-08:00

Hey there friends (and as Redd Foxx once said)...
and you OTHERS!! : )

For me, here was an evening spent toiling in the trenches and doing just what we all would be doing, and it finally wound down with the result being going mindless in front of the late evening news.

Through the majority of the dreck that would ensue with regularity, I heard a story about Robert Plant nixing any hopes of a Led Zeppelin reunion tour, mainly because he just wasn't interested in it, and had other plans to go and tour some dates with his recent liason/super great project with Allison Krause.

To that I say....GOD BLESS YOU, ROBERT PLANT!!!

Now don't get me wrong....I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but in the real of things, there is a good point to RP just saying that he is not into doing this reunion thing. Here are some points to consider, coming from yours truly and my opinion, which has had many years to gestiate and formulate.

1) There will never again be a REAL, bonified reunion of the Zep....
remember, John Bohnam is DEAD, and even though his kid, Jason has stepped up to the plate honorably during the recent Ahmet Ertegun tribute concert (hey kids, did you get your ticket...was your lottery number called???) and put some real chops down in the best of honour of the dead Dad unit, but ladies and gents, that ship HAS sailed long ago.

In the words of The Beatles....Let it Be

2) Personally, I am pretty satisfied with the output/legend of what Zeppelin was about....I guess I just didn't need the grand reprise of all things Zep that bad...especially after seeing Plant/Page and their set at the 50th Anniversary Atlantic Records Show, which worked for me that night.
(Anybody remember an out of breath Plant at Live Aid, back in the 80's????)

3) Have you even heard Robert Plant and Allison Krauss' not-so-new, but truly a gem of an album that won big at the Grammys this past year???

If you were making an attempt at distancing yourself from a past that really can't be replicated (RP's voice isn't that high, anymore, friends...age does this to you) unloading this album on the public was a gem that didn't need polishing, and was a wonderfully realized pairing of two great voices...
Moreover, RP's voice has not slacked on the other end of things where he wasn't screaming. It is a very mature and expressive statement that deserves to be inhaled in like a fine wine.
Just a wonderful talent getting older gracefully and shouldn't all artists be allowed to grow and change?

4)Maybe you have forgotten.... RP HAS had a steady solo career away from the Zep.

My fave album of his solo output is a toss between "Pictures At Eleven", "Shaken n' Stirred" or "Now And Zen"...(FYI...great drummer performances on each of these albums....Cozy Powell (the late), Phil Collins, and even Richie Haywood (doing some rockin' and slamming of his drums, gleefully away from his usual deep Little Feat fare).

Anybody remember "Little By Little","Big Log" or the stomping Zepp-ified "Burning Down One Side"
I can't forget one of my big faves... "Pink And Black" from the "Shaken" album ??? Just too cool!!!

5) Nostalgia....In my humble opinion, there comes a time when we all need to just........let..... go.
(See exhibit 1 above...)

News flash!!! The Beatles are coming back.........................................NOT!!! : )

Now the kids that are rediscovering music, and not being totally tied to the iPod teat, I would not dissuade them from seeing all the live that they can get, but there are many things to see on video and get the point...
Zep being one of them...
and Hendrix being a bigger One of them.

Spend some of that non-existent, deposible income on the DVD of your choice and then you own it...or better yet...
go out and support some live music, wherever and whenever you can. Lots of worthy artists that play night after night in your backyard. Work on that live music viewing acumen that is sorely missed these days

With all of the digital distractions out there, the iPod generation has some work to do.

thanks for listening,
c

here is "Burning Down One Side" from the album Pictures At Eleven

here is "Kashmir" from the Atlantic Records' 50th Anniversary Concert

Johnny Vidacovich: The Foundation of a Musician

2008-03-02T14:42:00.000-08:00

Johnny Vidacovich: The Foundation of a Musician

Hey there friends, this post contains a great article about the wonderful NOLA drummer, Johnny Vidacovich
This post resides on Jambands.com and I appreciate their generousity here
Johnny V Is a legend in New Orleans and an true creative icon in modern American Drumming.
But like so many of the great New Orleans musicians, he continues to function in obscurity.
He has a new album called We Came To Play and it features Johnny, June Yamagishi (Papa Grows Funk), and George Porter Jr. (The Meters). Recently, he has been dealing (as are many people down there) with the remains of his house and health, after Katrina.
A very interesting read...
please enjoy,
c

Johnny Vidacovich: The Foundation of a Musician
Randy Ray
2008-02-24

Johnny Vidacovich has spent time playing with a wide variety of musicians from various genres—Charlie Hunter, Professor Longhair, Stanton Moore, Willy DeVille, Mose Allison, George Porter, Jr, to name a few—but the common denominator is New Orleans. He has been a popular fixture in the Big Easy for over three decades as one of the scene’s best drummers and teachers of the craft. Indeed, as this interview will attest, the experience he brings to his kit and the Tipitina’s Sunday Workshops Series where he holds court with Moore and other visiting musicians like guitarist Luther Dickinson, carries forward into lessons about collaboration and the art of improvisation.
The legacy of Hurricane Katrina’s impact in New Orleans did not escape Vidacovich. Although his home wasn’t destroyed like so many other residences, it did suffer foundation damage and, as the renowned musician will detail, he found other problems with the house as he began repairs. On top of that bit of hard luck, last July, Vidacovich discovered that he had arthritis in his right thumb casting serious doubt on his future. To the rescue came his one-time student and esteemed colleague Stanton Moore as the Galactic leader organized a Benefit Vidacovich gig at Tipitina’s in New Orleans on January 16 which helped him begin his home repairs and get additional medical help. The gig played like a “mini-fest,” according to the drummer with a lineup which included Galactic, Robert Walter, Papa Grows Funk, the Soul Rebels and Garage A Trois.
The one-time Longhair drummer, Moore guru, Hunter co-conspirator and Porter, Jr, trio mate sits down with Jambands.com to discuss his current plight, fellow musicians, generous old friends and the nature of the music we call “collective improvisation.” Vidacovich is a compassionate, humorous and honest man who has lived through his music for a very long time and thoroughly enjoys telling his tale as long as one is willing to listen (and he has a few things to say about that subject, too).
RR: How did the Benefit Vidacovich gig at Tipitina’s on January 16 turn out?
JV: I was amazed and awed. It was a very humbling experience. It surprised me that it turned out to become what it became. Stanton Moore came over to my house as he always does and he sat at the table and says, “Let’s figure out something to help you out with your hand because of your arthritis and your house is all messed up”—the insurance companies all fell under. “Let’s try to get together some musicians and have a benefit.”
That’s the way he sat at the kitchen table and explained it to me so in my mind, I pictured getting a bunch of my friends playing and that would be that. As it turned out, Stanton Moore being the kind of guy that he is, it looked like it must have been six hours of musicians non-stop. I don’t know. I couldn’t count the musicians that played. It turned out to be a Stanton Moore mini-set with different kinds of bands and musicians—a brass band, the Soul Rebels, Garage A Trois, Robert Walter, Papa Grows Funk, the Midnight Disturbers, Galactic. It was tremendous, man. I was freaked out.
Most of the time in my life, I was part of a charity and a benefit. This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever been on the other end of it. I have to say it was quite shocking and successful. It started the repairs for my house to begin and things are coming around, slowly. Things still have to be done. It also enabled me to seek a little bit more therapeutic and things to deal with my arthritis and the problems that came up this last summer with my right hand. Now, I can take some therapeutic measures and not feel so pressed to play every single gig in order to keep the groceries on the table and try to fix the house. Now, I can fix the house with my own money. Stanton’s benefit helped out tremendous. Tip’s also helped out a tremendous amount to get the ball rolling.
To put it all…you know…(pauses)…there’s only word you can say and that is “thanks.” There is no way to describe how you feel when that many people give up something. To me, I would just go play benefits and it would be like a party, seeing friends and everybody would be happy because it’s all going to a good cause or a good person. Now, I see the whole circle. I remember being a little kid and playing once a week at charity hospitals, playing Dixieland music for sick people, once a month playing at the tuberculosis ward and once a month playing at the home for the incurables. I remember going to all of these things and playing benefits here and benefits there. Now, I’m on the receiving end and I’ve never felt that before. The only polite thing I was ever taught to say and reminded by Johnny Allen and what his mother told him: “Son, just say ‘thank you’.” There’s no words to be said. My grandmother also told me that. When someone does something nice for you, you say, “Thanks.”
I also learned about this word ‘humility’, to be humbled. I found out that this was a word that you’ve got to keep with you all of your life. It’s more like a verb. It’s something that’s taken on a whole new meaning now, the way that kind of thing feels. It’s a very beautiful, thankful and humble experience. I was quite surprised. For the first two hours, I was speechless at how many musicians and people around town came and just gave it up.
RR: What specifically happened to your house? It didn’t get destroyed by Hurricane Katrina but the flooding took a toll and a tree fell on the house, right?
JV: Yeah. It messed up the foundation with the weight of the tree. Also, the wind blew the foundation funny and sitting in water for so long contributed to the integrity of the foundation. Then, as we started to fix what I thought would just be replacing some boards, recaulking and repainting, we pulled off a couple of boards and two of the main support beams of the house were eaten away by termites and have to be replaced. Problems quickly escalated from a paint job (laughs) to an incredible amount of stuff that was underneath, including the entire insulation had all turned black and had fallen down to the bottom, in between the outer wall and inner wall. I was living with this black funk in the walls and I didn’t even know it. (laughs) So…it took years.
RR: At the same time, your thumb started to give you problems.
JV: On July 5th [2007], my thumb and the joints got arthritis and I have to deal with that. That caused tendon problems which deal with your thumb, palm, wrist and forearm. The musician’s clinic set me up with a Chinese acupuncturist and a chiropractor is seeing me on Saturday mornings. He’s donated his Saturday mornings to come in and help. I’m just trying to do all of the therapy that I can to continue to play. I need to play. I can’t just not play. I teach and I play and that’s what I do, man. I don’t want this to hold me back. Since I’ve been going to therapy for a couple of months, I’ve had some improvement. I still have some pain around the second set. I sit down at the end of the evening and I’m taking these proper fish oils and glucosamine and Omega-3 oils and different kinds of healthful things to deal with joints—old man stuff. (laughs)
RR: Let’s talk about some of these musicians that you’ve played with over the years, beginning with Stanton Moore. That relationship goes way back.
JV: Sure. I first met him when he was about 16 or 17. He started coming around my house. Tipitina’s Workshop, back in the old days, had a National Endowment for the Arts and I was part of a rhythm section on Sunday mornings and he came to that. He was very young. When he started college, I took he and Kevin O’Day and a bunch of others—Brian Blade came a little later—but he studied with me for at least four or five years. A lot. He started coming around the house and we started to become friends. In those years, he was very much like a sponge, constantly learning and he would take any information that he learned and he would figure out ways to vary it and be creative and develop. And that’s how he has developed his way. His way is based on so much good foundation that he’s learned how to take the simplest thing in the world and make it very colorful. He’s a beautiful painter and he’s a good listener. He’s a very emphatic player and a very emphatic human being. He helps everybody. [Author’s Note: this may even include so-called trivial matters. This writer was five rows back at a Galactic gig on the West Coast three years ago and gave Moore a thumbs up at show’s end as he was exiting the stage. The drummer stopped in his tracks, went back to his kit, came out front and gave this stranger a drum stick as a handy souvenir.]
When Stanton Moore gets a cymbal, stick or drum endorsement, he turns fifteen drummers on to it. He’ll tell the companies, “You’ve got to get this guy on your drums,” or “You’ve got to get this guy on your cymbals.” He’s very much into sharing and it’s a whole other side of Stanton that people don’t know. It’s all natural. It’s the way he was raised—all heart and soul. He’s beyond average.
RR: With Stanton, you helped found a Sunday Workshop Series at Tipitina’s which is free for aspiring musicians. How did that originate?
JV: Stanton Moore and my wife, Deborah collaborated on that one. They had the idea and he started, as he usually does, moving blocks. It’s my wife’s baby, now. She hires all of the guys to teach the kids on Sunday mornings and she takes all of the kids, inspires them to get up there and learn and she knows all of them by name and they all ask her for information. She’s the program director. What is very cool about her is that she doesn’t make it one thing—all rockers every Sunday or all jazzers. She exposes the kids to all kinds of music.
One of the most inspiring Sunday mornings was a workshop with Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars. He just sat and we played and we played with some of the kids and then, I asked all of the kids to sit on the stage. I said, “Luther—just tell us how you feel about music.” He said some great, great mature things about playing in a band—how much you give as opposed to take. He told the kids the dangers of indulging yourself in music and indulging yourself as a musician. The music should be what comes first, not you. This is something I knew all my life but he put it in such great terms, coming from a Mississippi, soulful, modern but strongly, firmly rooted player. He’s firmly in his roots yet ultra modern. Luther’s an extension of an old man. He doesn’t play like an old man. He’s not an old man. He doesn’t talk, act, sing, play but there’s so much foundation.
That morning when he spoke I realized how deep his foundation is and it reminds me of a lot of guys here in New Orleans because the music here in New Orleans is based upon the roots of our music. In the music around here—even in the new rock or the new funk or the new brass band music, whatever you want to call it—you will hear the indigenous elements of our region. Some people call them street beats or Zydeco, the way the funk is played more with a looser groove than it is in California or New York. (laughs) The funk here is definitely a lot more liquid, a lot more fluid—in my terms. Not taking away, I’m not saying it is better, but it is indigenous of this area. It’s folk music and cat’s here are very strongly rooted in that—at least most of the guys that many people around here think are great players; they have good roots.
[The Sunday Music Workshop Series at Tip’s] exposes the young people to more different kinds of roots other than our own which we always do because we have some local guys happening. Last week, I just went to observe and they had the drummer from Ministry, Martin Atkins and he gave a lecture on the business of music and it was brilliant. It was truthful, honest and so logical. What Deborah is doing, I thought, was going to be against the grain and it would be unfocused and scattered. But all of that chaos is actually logical. When I step back, it’s been going every Sunday since August 2006 and now, I’m looking at it and thinking, “WOW—I thought this would be chaotic crap.” I can see I’ve learned a whole lot. I’m not the drummer every week—that’s for sure. Once in a while, I’m the drummer but there’s drummers from all over the States and the world and different people passing through town. Now the guys want rappers and it’s amazing to see because some of these guys have never dealt with kids before. It’s amazing to watch them. The whole thing is a circle, man. It’s a circle, again.
RR: You touched upon something that is really interesting to me in what Luther Dickinson had said. I wanted to ask you from your own point of view how important is collaboration, collective improvisation and listening to the other musicians?
JV: How important it is to them?
RR: Not so much other musicians but you, personally, from your own background.
JV: Wow—I never thought the word ‘important’ would be one of the descriptive feelings. Huh, but I guess it is important. To me, it is, was and will be always a natural thing—the collective improvisation—because that’s the way I was taught to play. I was taught to play in a kid band by an old man and he taught us old traditional Dixieland songs that involved improvisation, collectively. And you had to hit a lot of wrong notes before you hit the right ones as a kid. I think that collective improvisation—now that you mentioned it and I want to incorporate the word ‘important’—is important because it involves, from what seems from an observer’s point of view sometimes improvisation seems very selfish, like he’s just doing virtuosity and showing off improvising but there is a part of improvisation that is even more of a percentage of importance than virtuosity. That element is the listening of what you hear—your ability to hear what everybody is doing and to either play or not play to enhance the music, to learn to let the music tell you what to do as opposed to you forcing yourself onto the music. “I’m gonna show off my shit. I’m gonna show how good I am because I can improvise here and play anything I want.” Well…that’s a very small percentage of it, my friend.
When you have more than one guy on the band stand, all of a sudden, the percent of what you want to play should be less than 50%. You should be devoting more percentage of your musical energy towards what those other people on the stage are playing. Whatever you do or don’t do—which is very important—can make the entire picture, the entire music, a beautiful painting, a beautiful song. Improvised music is important because it’s not so much about playing but it’s a very large percent about learning how to listen to multiple people at one time and fitting in. It’s a very unselfish thing even though it appears to be a very indulgent, selfish thing. It appears that improvised music allows one to do what one wants but truly, the depth—to see beyond that surface—the depth for a group of guys to collectively improvise, involves the art of listening. Of course we have to learn to play our instruments. Of course we have to strive towards virtuosity. Of course we have to learn how to play great solos and stick out but what’s more important to play in a group is that you have to be able to listen to different people. It might be the same song but you’re playing with different people. You’ll have to listen to what they are playing and the way they play it and fit. That doesn’t mean that I played “High-Heeled Sneakers” with Joe last night that I’m going to play “High-Heeled Sneakers” with Bill, tonight. Joe plays it one way and I’ve got to see how Bill does it. I can’t say, “This is how “High-Heeled Sneakers” goes. I don’t care about Joe or Bill.” You can’t do that. That’s indulgence. That’s selfish. That’s bullshit. MeMeMeMeMe and it ain’t about fucking me. Music comes first. Music comes first. It’s not about you. Too many people think they are making the music. Too many people think they’re composers and that’s all good and fine and dandy but, all in all, the music is in the air and we’re receptacles and it’s up to us to open ourselves up to let it all flow through.
That incorporates what is going on, to what the people you’re playing with feel and, of course, the audience. You want to bring them with you. They have to be part of the music. It’s not just the musicians that make the music. The musicians plus the audience makes the music. Algebra 101. x+y=music. Musicians+Audience=Music. I can sit here and play drums in my living room all I want. It’s music but it’s not really music until you come over and I can connect with you and I can feel that you’re sending back what I am saying—even though it sounds like right now, I’m doing all the talking. That’s because you asked me the question. I’m getting philosophical but it is mostly a feeling is what I am talking about. My feeling about the importance of improvisation and jam improvisation-style whether it be funk or jazz or classical jam or Indian raga jam or rather it be Bach. You can improvise on Bach; he was a great improviser.
These people were improvisers and it’s just very important to do this in order to learn how to not only express your virtuosity but what you feel in your heart and soul—and when I say virtuosity, I don’t mean just a phenomenal technician, a great technical player. I mean a musician who has the virtue to be true to the music, who knows how to play with the music, for the music, who lets the music become him, who gives himself up, who surrenders himself to the music. At the same time, while surrendering, he can play something very pretty—whether it be complicated or simple, Delta Blues or Stravinsky—and connect with the audience in order to get that circle that I just spoke about. You can play music in your living room until you’re blue in the face but you want to connect.
RR: I’m going to ask you about other musicians you’ve played with over the years. How about George Porter, Jr.?
JV: 1966, Bourbon Street. I was 17; he was 18 or 19. We worked at different clubs and we became sidemen backing up some go go dancers with guys in the band we didn’t know. We made very little money and we worked those types of gigs. We played everything from his mama’s church gigs to traveling around with John Mooney and all kind of guys playing blues gigs all over the South. We shared the same hotel room on many occasions back in the old days when times were tough, going back to the early 80s when we were younger and struggling a little harder to grow up.
RR: And you have also played in The Trio with George at the Maple Leaf Bar.
JV: Oh, yeah. My wife put all that together. She started that. She called George. (laughter) I said, “I can’t call George and say, “Do you want to come play in a little bar on the West Bank on a Wednesday night (for I don’t know exactly how much money we were going to make)?” My wife pulled that together and that turned out to be what we’ve been doing for seven years.
RR: Here’s another one—Charlie Hunter?
JV: Charlie Hunter! (laughs) He’s crazy. I love him, man. He’s funny, man. Great musician. Great musician. Totally ambidextrous. You should hear him on the drums. He can play the drums and in the middle of the beat, switch from being left-handed to right-handed and not change the beat. He can switch from left-footed to right-footed while being left-handed. He’s four way; he’s an incredible guy. As far as being on the road with him, traveling and doing gigs with him, he’s fun. He has a great, loose, relaxed attitude. His music is challenging but not scary to the point that you’re not going to have fun. It’s challenging up to having a smile on your face and having fun. He’s always smiling—at least the times I was on the road with him. We were always laughing and having fun. I learned a lot of new stuff from him. I felt like the old man in the van traveling around with those guys for a couple of months. Everybody’s way younger than me. I still see him from time to time and I’m sure we’re going to play some gigs together here and there.
RR: Here’s a great singer—Willy DeVille.
JV: Willy DeVille—wow, man, we’ve been on weird projects together. I think I did one of his records back in my foggy days. One of the first records I did with Willy DeVille, he was living at Europe at the time and he came to New Orleans to do a record at Allen Toussaint’s. Somehow or other, I got on a project and I don’t know how many tracks I was on—as a matter of fact, I don’t have the record. I might have lent it to someone. Then there was another record that was a big production and it was somebody’s songs and it was all kinds of different artist where everybody would do a different track. Another time, we were sidemen on somebody else’s record. He was a sideman vocalist and I was a sideman drummer on two tracks. That was some years back. Me and Willy was mostly all about work. We’d walk in a studio and immediately start to go to work. We talked, we shook hands, we smiled, we hugged and all of that and laughed and told short jokes but immediately, jumped back into work. He was a quicker worker and I could work with him. I can see where a lot of people might say he is too eccentric but that doesn’t bother me.
RR: And another cat that people might think is eccentric—Professor Longhair.
JV: Wow…man…man…wow…I’ve been listening to his music since I could talk. I remember dancing to his music when I was five years old. Then, I started playing with him, occasionally, in the early 70s. He would get hung up for a drummer or a drummer didn’t show and they would call. It actually wasn’t a steady gig back then but then he got a manager named Allison Minor. It was fun. We went on long tours and before his last record which was Crawfish Fiesta, that particular band was running around and Allison had him working fairly steady. We were traveling and playing around town. The money was very, very mediocre but at least Fess was back on the scene. He wasn’t stuck in his house, walking around with a cane and everybody forgot about Professor Longhair. All of a sudden, he was back on the scene. We liked each other.
Around 1976, 1977, I started playing with him on a more regular basis because the drummer he had with him at the time was a Canadian and he had to go back to Canada. They said, “Johnny, come play,” and I said, “Sure,” but I didn’t want to take the gig at first because I knew it was kind of iffy, it was an iffy kind of situation. I took the gig for many reasons—I loved the bass player and I even loved the second bass player. I loved all the guys in the band and, of course, I loved Professor Longhair and grew up with all of his music so I took the gig.
Traveled a lot. In those days, we traveled in a funky Dodge camper. One of my first steady trips as the regular drummer we started out from New Orleans, all the way up to Baltimore, up into Canada to Ontario and Toronto and some other cities in Canada and came down to the East Coast and at that time, we hit one of the first punk clubs I ever heard of or seen in my life in New York City. It was called the Mudd Club and this was in 1977 or 1978. [Author’s Note: Bringing it all back home—Tipitina’s in New Orleans opened in 1977 and was named after the famous song written by Professor Longhair.]
So during these trips, we had long travels. Fess was a tap dancer so that meant he was a good drummer. We’d be sitting in the van driving for long hours and he’d say, “How do you like this one, Jorowsky?” He used to call me ‘Jorowsky’. He never called me Vidacovich or Johnny; he just called me Jorowsky. He just made that up. He was always making up words. Even in a newspaper review, he called me Johnny Jorowsky. (laughter) I loved it. We just went with it, too. We corrected him once and he turned right around and re-read the article and when he came to the part of the article with “Johnny Vidacovich, the drummer,” he said, “Johnny Jorowsky,” again instead of Vidacovich. He read the article perfectly out loud but every time he came to my name, it was Jorowsky.
Here’s the hip thing. We were sitting in this funky Dodge—stinky camper with eight stinky guys overpacked with equipment for six weeks, traveling all the way up the East Coast and he’d tap on my leg and say, “How do you like this rhythm?” [Vidacovich raps out a vocal rhythm of the drum passage.] He’d tap this stuff out on my legs and say, “How do you like that? Huh? Huh? ” I said, “That’s cool,” and I’d tap something out, too. We had a lot of fun.
RR: Johnny, you sound like you have an amazingly positive attitude about your current situation. You’re just going to keep on playing. You have a great crew and support system and you are just going to see what happens. Is that fair to say?
JV: Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve been very sad for a long time…until…especially when the arthritis hit on July the 5th. I freaked out, man. I said, “Oh, man, this is the end of it. God damn, I wanted to play another ten years.” And so, I sound as if I have a good attitude…and yeah, I do have a good attitude. I have a lot of great people around me. You are right on both accounts.
I can’t believe how many beautiful people that I forgot about, especially students that I taught 30 years ago that write me letters and ask how can they help and send me checks for $25—everything from $25 to $200 to $1,000. “Wow—I remember teaching this guy 25 years ago—what’s he doing living in Cleveland, Ohio? This guy Mike—I remember teaching him 20 years ago. He’s been doing big Broadway shows for 15 years now.” I do feel very positive regardless of my physical situation and the condition of the house. I see improvement everywhere. I didn’t really realize…I thought it was only a cliché that people were beautiful and generous but they are. People are beautiful and generous.
RR: Well, we all want you around and playing for another twenty years.
JV: Man, I would be so happy with ten. Twenty would be a dream. Twenty years would be heaven. If I could play for another ten years, I’d be the happiest guy in the world. Another twenty years would be a miracle and if you were to call me on the telephone, bro—you think I sound positive and optimistic, now? Shit, bro—we’d be eatin’ cake. If I could possibly live and play for another twenty years that would be beautiful and way more than I ever expected.
RR: Thanks, Johnny. Tell your wife thank you for me, too. I really appreciate her wonderful support during this feature project.
JV: Deborah, he said, “Thank you for being such a lovely, supportive wife.” She said, “You’re very welcome.” Oh, man, I appreciate you calling me and talking to me. I appreciate everything you’re doing and I appreciate the fact that you’re interested in this kind of music. This is chancy music, you know what I mean? This is not popular music—the whole jamband situation—but I think it’s important. I think it is part of everybody’s culture and I don’t just mean America. I don’t mean New Orleans. I don’t mean young people. I mean I think it’s important for everybody’s culture—the importance of collective improvisation because that is what is happening to me, right now. People have collectively improvised how to help me. Everybody’s improvising—starting with Stanton Moore. He got some guys to throw a benefit and look at what it turned out to be. It turned out to be a fucking mini-fest. Let my wife tell you. It’s very important.
Deborah Vidacovich: Hi, Randy. I just wanted to tell you this. The last seven years—everything I’ve done for John, it all came from Stanton. Every single person, all the Charlie Hunters, everybody—Stanton gave me all their phone numbers. Everything I’ve done for John—all of it originates from Stanton. He’s a great guy and people don’t realize how great but he really is and you know, I definitely claim him.
RR: Fantastic. Thank you for your patience in working around my weird schedule.
DV: (laughs) I thought, “Oh, God, it’s going to be an act of Congress.”
- Randy Ray stores his work at www.rmrcompany.blogspot.com.

a poem by Arthur Rimbaud for today (or any day)

2008-01-30T11:18:00.000-08:00

This poem by Arthur Rimbaud was found in a book of poems and thoughts collected by Fred Nemo called
"Shock and Awe...a Gentle Balm"

Fred was the resident dancer/undeniable force of nature /local stage color for the long defunct band Hazel from Portland, OR. and fortunately for all of us, he's always thinking...He would also show at my gigs in the 90's with LeBon and dance his butt off.

You know the masthead on those big sailing ships with some Nordic figure, standing against the wind with his pitchfork?
that would be Fred Nemo.

thanks for the thoughts....
c

------------

Democracy

Our flag goes off to the unclean landscape, and our dialect drowns out the drum.

In the cities we'll feed the most cynical prostitution. We'll massacre the logical revolts.

On to the lands of rain and spices! - in the service of the most hideous exploitation, industrial or military.

Goodbye here, hello anywhere. Draftees of good will, our philosophy will ge ferocious; stupid in science, debauched in comfort; let the world go to hell. The real war. Forward, march!

Under False Pretenses... The Iraq War: An Orchestrated Deception

2008-01-26T15:38:00.000-08:00

The Center For Public Integrity has excellent information in this Media-starved age we live in, as to the posting of the truth.
This excellent posting about selling the War Card is on the Public Integrity.org site, and sums up a ugly time in our Country's life. There is more info than this post can contain (the 935 false statements, for example) so if you would, please take the time, visit them to complete the picture on this post, in detail...and stay informed.

False Pretenses

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

President Bush, for example, made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction was, 'Where is he getting this stuff from?' "
In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year." A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it.
In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear."
On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team's final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.
On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."
On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources." As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named "Curveball," whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government]."
The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

It was during those critical weeks in early 2003 that the president delivered his State of the Union address and Powell delivered his memorable U.N. presentation. For all 935 false statements, including when and where they occurred, go to the search page for this project; the methodology used for this analysis is explained here.

In addition to their patently false pronouncements, Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda. Other administration higher-ups, joined by Pentagon officials and Republican leaders in Congress, also routinely sounded false war alarms in the Washington echo chamber.

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, "independent" validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq.

The "ground truth" of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: "It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual "ground truth" regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who's Who of domestic agencies.

On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials, have publicly — and in some cases vociferously — accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence. In the end, these critics say, it was the calculated drumbeat of false information and public pronouncements that ultimately misled the American people and this nation's allies on their way to war.

Bush and the top officials of his administration have so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. There has been no congressional investigation, for example, into what exactly was going on inside the Bush White House in that period. Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government's pre-war intelligence — not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials. And, of course, only four of the officials — Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — have testified before Congress about Iraq.

Short of such review, this project provides a heretofore unavailable framework for examining how the U.S. war in Iraq came to pass. Clearly, it calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were the unwitting victims of bad intelligence.

Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?

These are some of my Favorites (complete list from blog profile)

2008-01-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

This current post strives to provide a complete list of the people and groups that I wanted to place in my profile page, but the 2000 character limit is a buzzkill to contend with.
Here is an unadulterated list here for all to see and to hopefully make suggestions, as to some new artists to contend with, grow with, and enjoy forever.

c

in no particular order:

Miles Davis, James Brown, Chick Corea, Vince Mendoza, Vikter DuPlaix, Count Basie, Dave Holland, Pat Metheny Group, Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland, Eddie Harris, Keith Jarrett, Horace Silver, Pleasure, Yellowjackets, Oliver Nelson, Marcos Valle, Butch Miles, Joe Chambers, Les McCann, Capp/Pierce Juggernaut, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Buddy Rich, Warren "Baby" Dodds, Billy Cobham, Bruce Carter (R.I.P, Donald Bailey, Tony Williams, Billy Kilson, Ray Marchica, Nick Ceroli, Billy Higgins, Carlos Vega, Steve Gadd, Terry Bozzio, Chad Wackerman, Gary Hobbs, Donny Osborne, Keith Carlock, Terry Silverlight, Steve Smith, Joey Heredia, Jeff Porcaro, Eric Gravatt, Simon Phillips, Keith Moon, John Bohnam, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, Mel Brown, Irv Cottler, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Payne, Clyde Stubblefield, Jabo Starks, Clayton Fillyaw, Ed Shaughnessy, Alvin Stoller, Neil Peart, Bobby Previte, John Perett, Joe LaBarbera, Dafenis Prieto, Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez, Ndugu Chancler, Antonio Sanchez, Radiohead, Jack De Johnette, John "JR" Robinson, Nesbert "Stix" Hooper, Eddie Marshall, Shelly Manne, David "Panama" Francis, Gerryck King, Bobby Rosengarden, Land Richards, Tod Carver, Tom Grant, The Piano Throwers, Darol Anger, Darin Clendenin/Jake Kot, Led Zeppelin, Gerard Presencer, Jeremy Stacey, Thara Memory, Obo Addy, Derek Sims, Little Beaver (Willie Hale), Caetano Veloso, John Scofield, The Police, David Sylvain, Wayne Kramer (and MC5), Marcus Gilmore, Marcus Baylor, Gene Lake, JoJo Mayer, Dennis Chambers, Chris Parker, Adam Deitch, Sauter-Finnegan Orchestra (Eddie Sauter, Bill Finnegan), W.S.Holland, Jerry Allison, Cozy Powell, Phil Collins, Frank Katz, Frank Briggs, Grady Tate, Terry Clarke, Allan Ganley, Paulo Braga, Floyd Sneed, Jim Keltner, Baron John Von Ohlen, Gary Chester, Raymond Pounds, Akira Jimbo, Harvey Mason, Mike Clark, Narada Michael Walden, Steve Ferrone, Ron Davis, Les De Merle,
Zach Danziger, Daniel Sadownick, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, David Ornette Cherry, Thelonius Monk, Elmo Hope, Donny Hathaway, Scott Law, DK Stewart and the DK4,
Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Michael Jackson, Joe Williams, Howard Hewett, Tomasz Stanko Ensemble, Leroy "The Walker" Vinnegar, Jeff Sipe(APT Q258),Kazumi Watanabe, Jon Cleary and The Absolute Monster Gentlemen, Ivan Neville, Nancy King & Steve Christofferson, Paul Bley, Sandin Wilson, Gordon Lee's GLEEFUL Big Band, Joe Roccissano, Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds Of Joy, Woody Herman's Thundering Herd, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton, Terrence Blanchard, The Metropole Orchestra, David Diamond, Leonard Bernstein, Angie Stone, Michael Bard, Mint Condition, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Joe Henry, Dan Siegel, Edgar Winter's White Trash, the MIGHTY Chris Whitley (R.I.P), Billy Ward (great drummer/educator from NYC), Wilco, Bobby Torres, Wayne Krantz, Dave Mattacks, Gino Vannelli, Lee Ritenour, Michel Columbier, Prince, Bob Florence Big Band, Lloyd Jones Struggle, Matthew Herbert, Marcus Shelby Trio, Clare Fischer, George Duke, MR.Frank Zappa, Kenny Wheeler, Peter Erskine, Max Roach, Weather Report (or any Joe Zawinul/Wayne Shorter related output), Scott Henderson & Tribal Tech, Allan Holdsworth, Janice Scroggins, Me'shell Nedege'ocello, The Crusaders, Mos Def, Roy Ayers, James Poyser, Photek, Squarepusher, Dan Balmer, Nik Bartsch'RONIN, Tord Gunderson,

A Few Thoughts About Vintage And Custom Drums

2007-12-29T09:58:00.000-08:00

About the author: Ken Sanders owns a selection of Vintage Drums and various Custom Drums, from Fork’s Drum Closet.
Ken is also an active member at Drum Solo Artist where he is answering drum related questions, and helping drummers with tips and advice.

Vintage Drums Versus Custom Drums

As a general rule a vintage drums should range from 1920 's to 1970 's and drum sets usually include three, or four pieces. Some of the Manufacturers that are popular between the "vintage drum seekers" are: Gretsch, Ludwig, and Slingerland, and one of the most important aspects when choosing a vintage drum is its particular model. - That of course if you are buying the vintage drum as a collectable item, and not because you just want to add that "vintage sound" to your drum set.

I do my all of drum equipment business at Fork’s Drum Closet in Nashville. One of the cool things about shopping at Fork 's is that you never know who is going to come into the store. Customers, both professional and amateur, often have those drummer-to-drummer discussions that are worth just hanging out at the shop to hear. One cool thing about us drummers is that we love to share our drum information with one another.

One segment of Gary Forkum’s (the owner of Fork’s) business is the ever-increasing vintage drum market. Fork’s has a steady flow of very interesting vintage drums and drum kits coming into the store. It is not unusual for the customers that are present when some really cool items come in, to ooooh and aaaah the newly arrived treasures, often with the reverence others might associate with viewing a sacred relic. I’ve certainly slobbered over lots of them, and see no foreseeable change in my tendency to do so.

Some folks love to collect vintage drums because they find them unique pieces of musical history. Others have been looking for a drum that they want to create a certain “authentic” sound for recording work... basically a tool of their trade, but a very special one. Still others, especially “Jazz Guys” are looking for a vintage kit that has the feel and look and sound that just “does it” for them. Everyone seems to have at least one “Holy Grail” drum item they are searching for. For a lot of us drummers... well... we really have all the stuff we will ever need. It’s just that we still just want more cool stuff.

Well, I went through all of that to get to the heart of the discussion we had at the drum shop last week. The topic was... ”Do the old drums just sound better than the new ones?” Aaaaah, you can imagine the depth of that discussion... way too much to cover here, but it does warrant a few points I will make.

First, everything about what "sounds" good, bad, great, or, terrible, etc. is, of course, very subjective. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then likewise we can accept that fantastic sounds are up to the ears of the one proclaiming them as fantastic sounds.

Now, although some others may disagree with me, there is no doubt in my mind that the top line drums made today, are better crafted than the drums made thirty and more years ago. But the sound? Obviously subjective!

Today’s top line drums are made from specifically selected woods and other materials to purposely generate certain sonic qualities. Walnut shells, birch shells, ash shells, maple shells, and beech shells, etc. or combinations thereof... all generate different sound characteristics. Additionally the glues, bending and seaming technology, and other craftsmanship involved in making top line drums today is far superior to those of the good old days. Now that 's the craftsmanship, not the particular sound that just might absolutely rock your world.

So maybe we can agree that it still comes down to the unique sound you like, doesn’t it? For example, I was surprised to learn that the eight lug Ludwig Acrolite snare drum of the 1960’s was preferred over other most of the more expensive drums for many years by recording engineers. It was the unique sound that the drum’s thin aluminum shell and the eight lugs produced! Now the Acrolites were considered inexpensive student line drums back then. But with all of those treasured old Radio Kings and Supraphonics that were also out there during that period. "who wood think" the Acrolites were the “go-to” snare drum?

Another example that I hear over and over is that someone in the drum shop will eventually say “I’ve been looking for a snare drum with that classic roundabout (remember the Yes recording with drummer Bill Bruford) sound, and I still haven’t found it”.

I confess that I’ve had a lot of fun with this one. I’ve told those drummers searching for that genuine roundabout sounding snare drum to select ANY 5 to 6 ½ depth, 14” diameter drum in the shop and then I would show them the drum they were looking for.

After they brought me a drum I would say... "My God... that 's it!" Next I tuned the drum heads top and bottom and then de-tuned the top head. Then aha! there was the roundabout snare sound. The point is that it is not always the drum. It is often the way you set the drum up.

So our drum shop discussion last week ended this way just about any drummer can name a vintage drum (or drums) that would just be their ultimate find. If they find it, they will treasure it, and it will be a source of personal drum pleasure for them to have.

However, back to the original question posed; an old drum does not automatically qualify for being a great sounding drum. Even after being properly repaired/restored an old drum MAY NOT sound like the mythical sonic treasure you had stored away in your mind for years. I have discovered that many times myself, although, it doesn’t stop me from still wanting that ELUSIVE vintage drum that is STILL my particular Holy Grail drum. It must just be something that gets into the blood system of us drummers!

Our drumming performances, in my opinion, are a combined product of our minds, our ears, our limbs and lastly, our equipment. No matter though because many of us drummers are still gear heads anyway. Hope you enjoyed these thoughts and I hope you find your Holy Grail Drum!

Yakov Kasman... Superman of the Piano!!!

2007-12-19T09:35:00.000-08:00

Yakov Kasman, has become a folk hero in Portland classical music circles after seizing the day with his daring 2004 rescue of the Oregon Symphony by playing one of the legendarily tough Rachmaninoff piano concertos.
I remember reading this story the first time around when the gifted pianist came to PDX and did the difficult, pinch hitting for the orchestra with the Rach 3, and it has resonated with me, whenever I think of what he did to perform as he did that evening...and he came back two years later, and did it again with the Rach 1 !!

Enjoy this story, and thanks to the Oregonian and their ace classical reviewer David Stabler for allowing this copywritten piece live again on this blog.

The Oregonian - Monday, March 13, 2006
Pianist flirts with the devil

Yakov Kasman returned to Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Saturday for another triumphant performance of a Rachmaninoff piano concerto - proving his 2004 feat was no fluke.
Eighteen months after rescuing the Rach 3, Yakov Kasman returns to tackle No.1

By David Stabler
The Oregonian

The pianist Yakov Kasman moseyed across the stage of Schnitzer Hall with a hangdog look Saturday night. He bowed obediently without smiling and sat down.
The audience's welcome couldn't have been warmer - they remembered Kasman's daring, triumphant, improbable rescue of the symphony's Rachmaninoff's Concerto No.3 just 18 months ago.
Still, Kasman knew the demands that lay ahead of him, and his body looked as though it didn't want to cooperate.
But the moment he touched the piano, a great shuddering and exploding erupted. His hands shot across the keys, a blur of speed and almost predatory urgency. In the next 25 minutes, Kasman gave one of the more mesmerizing performances of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No.1 that I have ever heard.
Kasman's brilliant performance combined sheer aggression with swooning romanticism, confirming that he is a remarkable pianist- powerful, measured, deeply serious, but also a little dangerous. He flirts with the devil.
Now we know that his previous success in Portland was no fluke. Not that we thought it was, but we had to hear for ourselves. Kasman triumphed again in Schnitzer Hall and after hearing him twice, I'll never worry about this diminutive Russian pianist again. He can play anything, and we can let matters take their rapid course.
All through the Rachmaninoff Concerto No.1, brash and youthful compared with the magnificence of No.3, it was impossible not to link the figure at the piano with the earlier visit.
Then, Kasman flew across the country to Portland to substitute for injured pianist Louis Lortie. He went on without rehearsal, and after the performance, he slumped on a sofa in his dressing room, having played what he acknowledges was the concert of his life. When I shook his hand after the concert, it was limp like a jellyfish. His face was flushed. His watch pointed to midnight, Alabama time.
The day had begun with a phone call from the Oregon Symphony to his home in Birmingham. Could he fly to Portland and play Rach 3 that night?
Kasman had never been to Portland, had never met conductor Carlos Kalmar and hadn't touched the fiendishly difficult music for seven months. One seat remained on the plane to Portland, and it would leave in 90 minutes.
Kasman was on it.
His plane touched down in Portland at 7 p.m., an hour to spare. He was so focused, he didn't speak or even look at anyone. All he wanted was to touch the piano and huddle with Kalmar about tempos.

Details still fresh

He still remembers many details of the story.
"I felt dread and excitement. I had a kind of feeling - they don't know that I know it. I know that I know it even though the truth is, the last time I played it was many, many months ago. But that piece was always in my fingers"
Kasman doesn't remember the conductor nudging him through the stage door, but he heard the applause. "They know I just arrived in those circumstances. I know they don't expect too much, so I just relaxed."
But he also knew there was a tricky passage in the first movement that could derail him. If he and the orchestra got through it cleanly, he was home free.
They sailed through it.
The rest of the performance, give or take a couple of chords, defied reality. Kasman, whose child-size hands belie his power, played with a booming tone, matching the orchestra note for note.
Audience members leaned forward, shaking their heads. They couldn't believe what they were hearing. The final, thundering chords lifted Kasman straight up off the bench. People rocketed out of their seats, too, shouting with joy.
Kasman recalls the day after the concert. "I remember the sunny morning. When I left the hotel, I said, "OK, I did something very, very good last night." That was a great feeling."
And then it happened again.
Six month after his Portland triumph, Kasman's manager called. "What are your plans for this weekend?"
No plans.
"Would you like to play tonight in Charleston, West Virginia?"
"OK. What?"
" Rach 3"
"OK"
Charleston is only 3½ hours from Birmingham, so Kasman actually had time to practice before boarding the plane. He arrived two hours before the concert. Again he sailed through the piece..
"I should keep my suitcase ready," he jokes.

Unfamiliar music

After his first Portland success, Charles Calmer, the orchestra's artistic administrator, asked him leading questions about his repertoire, which leans heavily toward Russian music: Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich.
Kasman, who won the silver medal in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1997, sensed an impending invitation.
Sure enough, it came a couple of weeks later. Kasman opened a letter from the Oregon Symphony asking him to play the first Rachmaninoff concerto: He didn't know the piece, but again, he didn't hesitate to accept.
Saturday's performance revealed no first time jitters. He and the guest conductor, Sweden's Stefan Solyom, synchronized phrases between piano and orchestra as if they'd played it together a dozen times, building a sympathetic partnership. After the brilliant embroidery of the first movement, the slow second movement sang a mournful song, both sober and ceremonial. Russian music loves Kasman as much as he loves Russian music.
In all, we heard power and temperament expressing themselves, a feeling for life that is both grand and painful. Kasman knows both. He suffered greatly in music boarding school and in the Russian army, where he spent two years mopping floors and peeling potatoes.
But he doesn't doubt himself, he says. The night he saved the symphony, he felt "anticipation of something extremely unusual, absolutely impossible. It will be a highlight of my whole life, that's for certain. Not only my concert life, but my whole life."

Blizzard of Lies...The Government, Part 200

2007-12-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

Remember Alberto Gonzalez??? The US Attorney firings??? How soon we want to forget, but with every passing day, more heinous things are being uncovered with regulararity. The arrogance of these current officials with their jaundiced actions stymies the very thing that makes government " for the PEOPLE".

In the interest of disclosure,here is the story of a bad person who is still entrenched in the government, and the detailed account of a former attorney in the same Department of Justice that is now speaking out, in spades.

Thanks to the Washington Monthly, December 2007. This article is copywritten and much appreciated.

Brian Roehrkasse, Please Leave the Building...Why the DOJ's spokesperson dishonors the department
By Bud Cummins

With rare exceptions, the Department of Justice has a distinguished history of nonpartisan pursuit of the laws of the United States. It conducts its business across the nation through ninety-three U.S. attorneys' offices, each led by a presidentially appointed U.S. attorney who is the chief federal law enforcement official in the federal district. One of the many responsibilities of the U.S. attorney is to speak, at times, on behalf of the DOJ.

From 2001 to 2006, I was one of those ninety-three attorneys, appointed to the Eastern District of Arkansas. Much of the work I did couldn't be discussed publicly, for legal or ethical reasons. When I did speak to the media, however, I always made sure to be precise and accurate. Credibility is the currency of a federal prosecutor who represents the government. Former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey often reminded my colleagues and me that U.S. attorneys are immediately assumed to be credible—not because of who they are but because of whom they represent, the United States of America. Credibility is a formidable weapon, and those granted it have a solemn responsibility to preserve it. That means telling the truth.

In 2006, the Department of Justice asked for the resignations of nine U.S. attorneys who had been appointed by President George W. Bush. I was among them. No president had ever fired his own appointees in such a manner, and a scandal was born when Congress started asking questions and getting fishy answers from the DOJ. Many months of lies ensued. Some of the dubious statements, such as those of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, were made during congressional testimony. Others came in the form of public statements made on behalf of the department. Today, most of those involved in the deception have resigned.

Most, but not all. One player who remains is a DOJ Office of Public Affairs spokesperson named Brian Roehrkasse, a Bush campaign worker in 2000 who went on to be a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation and for the Department of Homeland Security before moving over to the DOJ in 2005. Roehrkasse did more than perhaps any other DOJ official to disseminate the avalanche of untruths. A number of reporters have complained to me in private about having been deceived by him. But he never resigned. In fact, he was promoted by Gonzales in August to be the director of the DOJ's Office of Public Affairs.

I believe deeply in the Department of Justice. Serving in the DOJ was the pinnacle of my professional career, and I will be forever indebted to those who helped put me there, including President Bush. But the department's reputation can't be restored if its chief spokesperson isn't credible. Out of dozens of examples, I've chosen five, ordered chronologically, that I hope will illustrate the problem. You'll find no bombshell (and some are complex, so bear with me), but what should become clear from them is that they are statements fundamentally intended to mislead.

1. The Maternity Dodge. I am perhaps unique among the fired U.S. attorneys in knowing the truth about why I was fired. It was to make room for an aide to Karl Rove named Tim Griffin. (I know this because then Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty made it clear in congressional testimony, and subsequent e-mail disclosures confirmed it.) Tim Griffin took over from me in December 2006, and his arrival attracted scrutiny for two reasons. The first was that he had been appointed under a new and virtually unknown legislative provision in which a U.S. attorney could skip Senate confirmation. The second was that his appointment went against a norm of having the first assistant U.S. attorney of an office serve as interim U.S. attorney until a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed replacement can report for service. So why hadn't Jane Duke, the first assistant in my office, taken over from me until Griffin could be confirmed? That was the question journalists put to Brian Roehrkasse at the DOJ. His answer: "The first assistant is on maternity leave."

Many folks in Arkansas were incredulous at this explanation, particularly those close to Duke or the office. We'd known for more than six months that Griffin was going to take over for me, and the original due date of Duke's pregnancy fell well after the date of my ultimate resignation. In other words, if the DOJ had ever had any intention of installing Duke as an interim attorney, it could have made plans to do so. It was true that Duke was on maternity leave at the time, but this was only because she'd gone in for an emergency delivery a few days earlier, two months prematurely. Roehrkasse knew that only my colleagues and I would understand why his statement was so misleading. Apparently he was counting on our "loyal" silence.

2. The "Good Faith" Effort. Once it became clear that several U.S. attorneys had been fired, members of Congress became concerned that the White House was trying to circumvent the confirmation process. Tim Griffin, after all, had been appointed in a manner that bypassed congressional advice and consent. In response to Senate accusations of bad faith, it was Brian Roehrkasse who came out with an official statement meant to allay such worries. "In every case, it is a goal of this administration to have a U.S. attorney that is confirmed by the Senate," he said. "It is wrong for a member of Congress to believe that this is in any way an attempt to circumvent the confirmation process."

Except that, in this instance, the Democrats in Congress had it right. After internal DOJ e-mails were subpoenaed, we learned that Gonzalez's chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, had authored an e-mail about precisely how to execute an end run around senators in the case of Tim Griffin. Sampson wrote to White House and DOJ colleagues:

I think we should gum this to death. Ask the senators to give Tim a chance, meet with him, give him some time in office to see how he performs, etc. If they ultimately say, "no, never" (and the longer we can forestall that, the better), then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All this should be done in "good faith," of course.
It's possible that Roehrkasse didn't know about Sampson's game plan at the time he made his statement, but he never subsequently corrected the record.

3. The Disappearing Denial. Several weeks after I resigned and just after I had been quoted expressing concern about the allegations against my colleagues, I received an unpleasant phone call from Michael Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. During our conversation, Elston warned that if I—or other fired colleagues—continued to respond to media inquiries about the firings, the DOJ might have to roll out more damaging allegations in the press. In March, McClatchy Newspapers learned about Elston's call to me and ran a piece about it in which they spoke to two of the other fired attorneys anonymously. Brian Roehrkasse criticized McClatchy for running the piece, saying, "It is unfortunate that the press would choose to run an allegation from an anonymous source from a conversation that never took place."

The problem is that it did take place. In spite of Roehrkasse's condemnation of McClatchy, the story was exactly accurate, and we proved it. In fact, at least three of us had received similar threatening calls, and Elston himself didn't even bother to deny having spoken to us, saying instead that he was "shocked and baffled" over what he said had been a misunderstanding. Roehrkasse, undaunted, then found a new spin on the story. "A private and collegial conversation between Mike Elston and Bud Cummins is now somehow being twisted into a perceived threat by former disgruntled employees grandstanding before Congress," he told journalists. This was an impressive mix of untruth and affront. First, the public was evidently supposed to forget that the conversation "never took place." Then it was supposed to believe it did take place but was entirely collegial. Finally, the public was to suspect the fired attorneys of "grandstanding before Congress," even though each of the U.S. attorneys had turned down numerous previous invitations to testify. As Roehrkasse well knew, we were talking to Congress reluctantly, and only because we'd been subpoenaed.

4. Spinning the Post. In March 2007, the Washington Post ran a story that pleased senior officials in the Justice Department. It began as follows:

The White House approved the firings of seven U.S. attorneys late last year after senior Justice Department officials identified the prosecutors they believed were not doing enough to carry out President Bush's policies on immigration, firearms and other issues, White House and Justice Department officials said yesterday. The list of prosecutors was assembled last fall, based largely on complaints from members of Congress, law enforcement officials and career Justice Department lawyers, administration officials said.
This was the story that the DOJ wanted to sell, but the story soon unraveled. For one thing, subsequent DOJ disclosures revealed that the list had been initiated long before "last fall," with names being added or subtracted right up to the last minute. For another, while it was supposedly senior Justice Department officials who had identified prosecutors they believed were underperforming, not one of the officials under oath would admit to placing any of the names on the firing list. Finally, not a single person within the DOJ who was consulted about the list would have been in a position to evaluate the performance of the U.S. attorneys who were fired. The seemingly reasonable explanation reported in the Post story was, bluntly put, a load of bull.

So who within the DOJ had caused such deceptive claims to become the basis for the Post story? Let the answer come from an e-mail that Kyle Sampson (chief of staff to the attorney general) sent to Brian Roehrkasse at the time: "Great work Brian. Kudos to you and the DAG [Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty]."

5. The "Oops" Denial. Last April, Alberto Gonzales told the Senate that Seattle U.S. Attorney John McKay had been fired because of recent disputes over an information-sharing system. A few weeks later, however, it emerged that McKay had been recommended for removal as early as March 2005. Why had the DOJ neglected to release a document showing Gonzales's claims to have been false? Because of an "inadvertent mistake," explained Brian Roehrkasse. A suspiciously lucky inadvertent mistake, he might have added.

hese are just a few examples. As I said, there are many others. None of them is individually earth shattering, but the pattern of deception employed by this young man is deeply unsettling to me. It is symptomatic of a creeping mendacity in public life, a deceptiveness that has found its way into bedrock institutions that once were immune from Hollywood-style spin. Political campaigns and movie stars traffic in it, certainly, but some institutions, like the DOJ, have always been viewed as sacred. It's one thing when a flack for Lindsay Lohan falsely assures us that Lindsay is sober. It's another when a spokesperson for the DOJ starts telling fibs about a department that is entrusted with the neutral and nonpartisan execution of our nation's laws. The decisions made by the DOJ affect life and liberty. The entire mission depends on the integrity and credibility of the department.

Now, I don't have any way of knowing how Brian Roehrkasse came to make so many dubious or misleading statements. I've never met the man or communicated with him directly. For all I know, his superiors were writing them, and he was simply reading them. But once you realize you are being repeatedly marched out to say untrue things, integrity dictates that you push back or resign before you do it again. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me over a dozen times, I'm a willing liar.

When I became a U.S. attorney and the government issued me DOJ credentials, I used my institutional credibility to my advantage frequently. If I made a factual representation to a judge, he usually accepted it. If I told reporters I had to keep quiet about a case for ethical reasons and public safety, they respected my silence. I was sensitive never to abuse this power. Trust should never be taken for granted—by anybody.

Here's another thing: We are at war. There are a great number of relevant and legitimate legal debates about executive power generally—about topics like the terrorist surveillance program, torture, and the legal status of enemy combatants. Unlike a typical Washington Monthly reader, I happen to agree with President Bush on most of these issues. The executive branch, from the president down to the investigating agent on the street, should have as many constitutional tools to protect the security of the nation as possible. And it isn't smart to debate all of the issues that face us out in the open in front of our enemies. Some issues need to be analyzed more privately. In sum, our government needs a formidable range of powers in order to investigate and combat terrorism properly.

The public, however, will never grant it such powers if the government and its agencies lack credibility. Congress has to believe the Justice Department when it makes representations about legalities. There can't be doubts.

Unfortunately, doubts are all that someone like Brian Roehrkasse can offer. The Department of Justice has gotten a fresh start with a new attorney general and new senior officials. But how can the public trust any agency with a spokesperson who thinks distorting and deceiving in order to satisfy his bosses is part of the job? If Attorney General Michael Mukasey wants to repair his agency, at the top of his list should be finding the DOJ a trustworthy spokesperson. That means telling Brian Roehrkasse to find a position more suited to his abilities. Hollywood, I suspect, awaits him.

Bud Cummins served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas from 2001 to 2006

Just please tell me: "what does a drummer do" ?

2007-12-05T11:11:00.000-08:00

This is a post from rec.musicmakers.percussion from a gent named drummerrob who captured my eye with his post on just what a drummer really does with his abilities....please read and soak this in.

--------------------------
"drummerrob" wrote in message

I've written a book called "Whole Music Drumming". My premise is that
drummers need to know all the parts of a song they don't play, so that
they know what to play. If you'd like to know more, go to
http://wholemusiclearning.com/wholetext.htm.

Meanwhile here's my essay from the book on the role of drummers, as I view it.

WHAT A DRUMMER DOES

The drummer provides the rhythmic environment for the entire band.

Often the role of the drummer is thought to be the time keeper of the
band, but the drummer's role is far broader. While the drummer's
playing is the closest actually stating time, everyone keeps time -
otherwise the song would fall apart.

The drummer most often - and appropriately - plays grooves (drum set
beats) and fills. Simultaneously, musical drummers make choices based
on many pieces of information - meter (duple, triple, unusual,
combined, etc.), the style and corresponding feel of the music, the
melody, harmony and bass lines, the song form and phrasing, the
arrangement form (how the song is to be performed), and any number of
additional elements particular to the song being played. That sounds
like a lot, but while making the journey from drummer to musician,
these things must be learned in order to bring to the playing
experience the knowledge necessary to render a musical performance.
When the knowledge and playing abilities are all there, the result is
sensitive, vibrant and artistic playing which fits into the song
perfectly and makes everyone sound great. The best drummers
consciously and intuitively understand this stuff. The rest of us
should be on the road to acquiring it.

Philosophically, I like to think of the drummer-musician as the play
caller or traffic director. In sports the equivalent might be the
point guard in basketball or the catcher in baseball. The drummer
accompanies and guides the group through one section into another,
helping set the feel, implying (though not often actually playing) the
beat. The drummer has to push, pull, energize, and hold back, in a
sense providing a large part of the band's rhythmic environment.

Drummers are musicians of the very most important level...
if trained and taught to think that way.
Too often the joke about the band consisting of four musicians and a drummer is true.
Too often the drummer is trained to become drummer and not a musician.
If musicianship is emphasized he becomes both.
If only drumming is emphasized he becomes a musician largely
as a result of aptitude and luck.

Rob

Sean Cruz: Why I am running for Oregon Senate District 23, part 2

2007-12-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

Sean Cruz is one of the administrators of the Jim Pepper Rememberence Band (documented in the archive pages of this blog), and he currently is running for the Senate in Oregon.

A nice person with one of those stories that just tugs at your being.

Sometimes you just don't know how close peril in someone's life lives next to your own situation.

Here is a story to read and digest when you think about change and voting those current bastards out of our lives and our government.

--------------------------

Why I am running for Oregon Senate District 23, part 2
By Sean Cruz

Four years ago, on Thanksgiving Day 2003, I watched my son Aaron, all 21-years-old of him, pack for deployment to Iraq.

He was gone the next day, driving to Utah to join my other son, Tyler, 19 years old, both members of the same Army National Guard unit.

As we held our last embrace, standing together in my driveway, Aaron in his full dress uniform, I could feel in my heart, bursting with dread and pain, that I would never see him again.

I promised him that his room would be as he left it when he returned, forcing the words out of my mouth, my stomach knotted in grief.

I had spent every day of the previous three months desperately trying to connect Aaron with medical care. We had no health insurance.

I had been among the hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who lost access to health care when the Oregon Health Plan was gutted in 2002.

Senate District 23 was hit harder in sheer numbers than any other senate district in the state.

I understand the access to health care issue on a deeply personal level. This is the core of my commitment to Oregonians as a candidate for the Oregon Senate.

Aaron had a host of medical problems, some life-threatening. He had suffered medical neglect for years while living in Utah, the victim of a 1996 kidnapping from Oregon.

I had recovered Aaron from that kidnapping just three months before, in August of 2003.

He had called me and said, “Dad. I’m ready to come home. Come and get me.”

I had left my job, taken the seats out of my van, and was gone for him the next day.

The joy of recovery was gone as soon as I saw him there in his friend’s living room in Payson, Utah.

He was suffering psychosis, sleep-deprived for so long that his eyes would roll back in his head while he was speaking.

I saw that he had become a chain smoker, and I watched him nod off that morning with a burning cigarette in his hand.

I woke him and told him about the cigarette, and he replied that he did that all the time, showing me the burn scars on his finger joints.

Cigarette burn scars on my beautiful son!!!

Every person I met during the several days it took to get Aaron packed was oblivious to his medical condition, shrugged it off, actually.

It was apparent that others accepted Aaron’s crisis as “normal” behavior.

Aaron had no health insurance, no access to competent care, no one to help him get seen by a doctor, and that had been his situation for the years that had passed since he had disappeared from my home during the major storm that had besieged the Northwest in February 1996.

For days, repeatedly, we would get the van partly loaded, and then Aaron would take everything back out and spread it on his friend’s lawn, over and over, obsessing over this and that.

He would fall asleep in every kind of position and situation, for time measured in seconds, then wake up as if all was well. For Aaron and those in his Utah life, this was considered normal behavior.

When I finally got him home here in Portland, I began the desperate search for medical care, with no health insurance and no financial resources to speak of.

My friend Baruti Arthuree helped me, arranged for Aaron to be seen by a Providence doctor.

The one contact with “medical” care that Aaron had in Utah was his participation in a methadone program there, and we continued that here.

Every weekday morning, from that first day in Portland, I drove my son to the methadone clinic to start the day.

He was too ill to drive himself, too ill even to sit upright in the car. He would lie on the floor of my van both ways, every day, eyes closed, might get four or five minutes of sleep in the process.

Methadone clinics are closed on weekends, so every Friday Aaron would bring home the two weekend doses.

His Providence Hospital doctor really took on his case, really tried to help him, tried to total up the damage from all those years of emotional abuse and medical neglect and figure out a way to keep him alive long enough to give him a chance to improve the quality of his life.

Among the medical issues we were learning about, Aaron had developed a seizure disorder that threatened to take his life. His doctor warned him that there was a strong likelihood that he could suffer a seizure and lapse into a coma from which he would not recover.

I have that warning in writing.

The Bush Administration, however, had other plans for my son, needed Aaron to help them out in Iraq, ordered him to report to his unit by this date, dead or alive.

When he left our home, Aaron lost what little access to health care he had, lost contact with the one person in his life who understood his need, who was committed to filling it.

The Army held Aaron in Utah under medical review, which one would think would include actual medical care, but that is not the case.

National Guard soldiers in this hold status draw no pay and receive no benefits. They are entirely on their own resources. Aaron had no resources in Utah.

During the medical review process, Aaron was required to remain in Utah, where he had no health coverage, was too ill to hold a job, and had no place to call home.

His condition deteriorated until March 2005, when—as predicted—he suffered a seizure, lapsed into a coma and died several days later.

I spent the last five of those days at his side.

As it turned out, Aaron was sick enough to actually qualify for the remaining remnants of the Oregon Health Plan, although that coverage didn’t arrive before his deployment orders.

I spent all of my financial resources during that 2003-2005 period on supporting my son, on paying his bills, on a cell phone for him that was our sole means of communication. I have not come close to recovering financially.

I could hear his worsening illness in his voice, in countless conversations during that period, begging him to come home no matter what the Army had to say about it.

He was focused, however, on finding a way to join his unit and his brother, wouldn’t give up, loved his Guard unit and his brother more than he loved his own life, wanted to be with them more than anything else in the world.

Aaron wouldn’t—or couldn’t—come to grips with his own medical reality. He was ready to sacrifice his life for his country, for his unit, for his brother.

The sacrifice would have ended his own pain, and he welcomed that.

Aaron would have been the first to step into noble glory on foreign soil. All he had left was courage.

I personally had no medical coverage until January 2005

Now it is four years later, and another 3500 Oregonians and their families recently received the news that they will continue to shoulder the burdens of war virtually all on their own.

The fact is that we Oregonians are knowingly sending many of these soldiers off to get their lives ruined, and that we are doing so knowing that we are not doing enough to help either the troops or their families that have gone before them.

The 3,500 soldiers we are about to send off to the war realize this fact, and they have little reason to expect that we Oregonians will value their sacrifice enough to cover their backs.

The focus for the month of December will be on what it always is--holiday shopping and holiday travel.

Much of the holiday shopping involves the purchase of goods made or grown in foreign nations. This does nothing to strengthen the nation in either time of war or peace.

For some of those 3500 soldiers and their families, the gifts could be the last, the holiday spirit a sacrifice already made on our behalf.

Most of the holiday travel involves the purchase of fuel that directly fills the coffers of the nation's enemies.

I can tell you that I personally do no holiday traveling.

The nation struggles with the cost of gasoline at the pump, is locked into a war to keep the price under $ 3.00 a gallon. Nothing gets people more upset than seeing a nickle bump in the cost of fueling their private motor vehicle.

Meanwhile, it costs the US taxpayer one hundred dollars a gallon to get diesel into Afghanistan. That's right, $100 a gallon, but who cares?

These Oregon soldiers and their families know that they are going into the meatgrinder, making sacrifices for people who will begrudge every nickle spent on services for veterans and their families on down the line, for people who will make absolutely no personal sacrifice in return.

Who among us will these courageous people look to? Who will be there for them?

These are important questions, and one that we must settle among ourselves here in Oregon.

Ending these wars is completely out of our control.

As a consequence of its relatively small population, its distance from the national Capitol and the factor of time zones, Oregon rarely has a meaningful role either in the selection of presidential candidates or in the election of the President of the United States, much less a role in the nation’s foreign policy.

We also lack both the clout and the sensibility that comes from the presence of large military bases or defense contractors.

The one thing regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that is entirely in our Oregon hands is how we will address the needs of the troops and their families, how we will address the needs of those that have already served, those who are serving and those who will serve.

This is our mutual responsibility, and we are failing the troops and their families.

We are failing them both individually and collectively.

I am committed to changing that.

Access to health care is the key issue for the constituents of Senate District 23, and the voters will have the opportunity to make that statement clearly by supporting Sean Cruz in the May Democratic primary.

I am asking you to send me to Salem, to represent you on those vital Senate Committees on health and human services issues, to fight for access to quality health care for all Oregonians.

I need you to invest in me, and I need your support now!

Mail contributions to:

Friends of Sean Cruz
P.O. Box 30093
Portland, OR 97230

Let me know how else you can help. Here’s one really important way: Please forward this message to your friends and associates. That will help.

You can't keep a good program down... Beats And Pieces Returns to the airwaves !!!!

2007-10-23T02:52:00.000-07:00

I have stolen this from Rob V's blog, "The Sound O Mat", but it perfectly sums up the good feeling of what needs to be, with regards to radio in PDX.
Enjoy the news, and please support SC and his efforts at KMHD with a show of funds to the annual Pledge drive.

Go to KMHD.fm for more details.

------------------
October 10, 2007

Great News!
Steven Cantor's "Beats & Pieces" Returns

For almost 13 years, in sometimes changing time periods and some times two days, most times three, the world's best free-form DJ, Portland's own Mr. Steven Cantor, is returning to the airwaves! His new version of "Beats & Pieces" is only one night a week, Sunday nights 9PM to midnight on community college radio station KMHD (89.1 FM). This is a bit of an odd fit, and Mr. Cantor will undoubtedly be trying to focus his show on the station's normal format, which is jazz, with blues show on Friday afternoons and evenings.

Still, this is fantastic news, and KMHD is extremely well-respected as one of the few radio stations still dedicated solely to jazz & blues (the most famous jazz record label is called "Blue Note", after all) and with its growing listenership and contributions, they have expanded their transmission power over the years to its current... well, the history section on their Web site is somewhat lacking, and doesn't have a short writeup on how they've grown over the last 23 years.

You can also listen to them on the Internet although I still have problems, after several years, with their use of Abacast, but they offer the following channels:

48K MP3 Stream from Abacast and 20K Stream from Abacast (will launch a new window). The 48K stream is stereo and you can copy the link and use Winamp to play it, which I highly recommend over the 20K stream in a new window (unless you have Firefox, where you can force new windows to open in the existing one, like I do.)

(ed. note: the post did not mention that the higher speed stream is also on iTunes and doesn't require Abacast.)

Their history reads:

"Playing jazz for more than 22 years as a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to providing quality jazz, blues, and traditional American music 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Since 1984, we have been playing the music and promoting the great sounds of jazz. Recently we added national radio programs from NPR and independent producers. We have locally produced specialty shows such as Trad Jazz, Juke Box Saturday Night, and Latin Jazz on Monday nights. Stay tuned for the fun!"
So for those who've had to sit and listen to me rant on about how amazing Mr. Cantor is as a free-form DJ, and how he makes it the art-form it is, and takes it to levels I've never heard before, not even on the famous WFMU in NJ. So start listening in Sunday nights at 9PM on KMHD 89.1 FM or one of the Web streams above - it's a great way to end your week and start the new one on a good note (pun intended.)

Posted by Rob V. at 08:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Another View of the Norman Leyden Birthday Concert

2007-10-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

a living legend reaches 90
October 17, 2007
Posted by Charles Noble

Wow. I am stunned - and I’m ashamed that I’m stunned. I went to the Norman Leyden 90th birthday concert at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall this evening (which was presented by the Oregon Symphony). I don’t know what I was expecting, but I got a master class in what it is to be a consummate professional who still shows joy in music making after a sesquicentennial in the business.

The high points? Hearing maestro Leyden sing for the first time in my 12 years with the orchestra - and he can! He’s no Sinatra, but he hit the notes, the phrasing, and did so with elán. His clarinet playing is a bit grainier in texture than a few years ago, but he still effortlessly turns a phrase like those giants he played and arranged for in the 40’s and 50’s.

The big band he assembled was also in great form, very tight and some great solo turns, especially from trumpeter Mark Gaulke and saxophonist Dick Saunders.

Vocalist Reneé Cleland was superb, having shown much growth from her days as a member of the Leyden Singers, and a sparkling presence on stage. Rod Lucich was steady and reliable, but his voice didn’t sparkle, and he was slightly under pitch for many of the songs.

Norman always found time to promote local young artists who were worthy of notice and who shared his love for the music of the big band era. Reed player Hailey Niswanger is a sax and clarinet player to watch - she has got the goods: great sound, pure intonation, and a sure hand around a turn of phrase. And she’s only a senior at West Linn High School. Back for her second performance with Leyden was Aubrey Cleland, daughter of Reneé, who made her pops debut at the age of 10. Now 14 she’s on her way to being a seasoned performer. She has a young voice, but time will take care of that, and she has the presence and quality (and beauty) of her mother, so look out world!

Dance West of Beaverton provided several large-scale dance set pieces - the up tempo numbers were the most effective, but the choreography proved a bit repetetive and didn’t always match up to the mood of the music.

In retrospect, I feel I owe Norman an apology. I didn’t take him seriously enough - I respected him and liked him very much as a person, but I didn’t or couldn’t see what was before me: a master and legend.

I stand corrected.

this next post is courtesy of the blog "Pencilmarks" by Tony Maxymillian, Portland, Oregon

An evening with Norman Leyden

The Oregon symphony hasn't been noted of late for groundbreaking or original performances. Their uninspiring programs have lost the luster of years past with stiff performances seeming more like high school music class. Despite the plummet toward irrelevance, however, they can still, on occasion, offer an evening of fine entertainment. Norman Leyden's performance, on occasion of his 90th birthday, at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall last night was the best offering the Oregon Symphony has had since, well, Norman's retirement performance several years ago, and the sold out crowd seemed to agree, clapping wildly throughout and even spontaneously bursting into a verse of "Happy Birthday" late in the show.

Hearing Norman's big band is always a treat. I've heard him conduct the Oregon Symphony Pops, and perform with Pink Martini, but he always seems at his best in front of a big band. It's also one of the few occasions on which you can hear the classics of the big band era performed as they were intended. Leyden's history as an arranger, and his 300 plus arrangements make him an authority on the big band sound, and he is always true to the style of a time when stockings had seems, men wore hats, and movie stars smoked on screen. Most interesting is how the old arrangements lack the clutter heard in even the best of their modern counterparts. It's not to say the traditional is better, just different...and disappearing.

Norman Leyden is 90 years old. Honestly, and with the deepest respect, we may not have a chance to hear him that many more times. Where he once occupied a regular place in the Symphony's season, his appearances are now rare and special. This obviously wasn't lost on the audience, many of whom appeared to be Norman's contemporaries. Outside prior to the show, while waiting for my party to arrive, I was struck by how intent many were to be there. Many in attendance had obvious difficulty getting around, requiring walkers and assistants, and moving with great effort, but they weren't going to be left out. In spite of the struggle, once inside, the music brought out inspiring youth in everyone. At the end of the show, balloons were dropped from the ceiling as a birthday cake was brought onstage, and before long, the crowd was throwing the balloons around like a beach ball at a Van Halen concert. The energy was both unexpected and exhilarating, and Leyden and the band responded in kind.

The band stand was decorated white, and the band all wore white for a very clean presentation. From the opening note of Tommy Dorsey's Hawaiian War Chant they hit the ground running to a welcoming standing ovation. The expected classics were all included. Pennsylvania 6-5000 and American Patrol, 2 Glenn Miller classics, featured dancing by Dance West from Beaverton. Leyden himself lifted the microphone to sing Chattanooga Choo Choo and the highlight of the evening came with a jumping performance of In the Mood featuring scorching solos by Dick Saunders and Paul Mazzio. The band tore through the song with enthusiasm to a point where they sounded on the verge of chaos, but never out of control, as Saunders and Mazzio traded licks on sax and trumpet.

Some intimate moments of the night came in the voice of Renee Cleland and songs such as September in the Rain, and Music Maestro, Please. Cleland's daughter Aubrey took the stage for what I thought was a less well known song, 6 Lessons from Madame LaZonga, but the cheers and snickers in the audience told me otherwise. Young Cleland performed with a maturity beyond her 14 years, returning later to perform an uplifting version of A-Tisket A Tasket. Other vocals were provided by Leyden regular Rod Lucich, and Hailey Niswanger joined the band on saxophone for several numbers.

By the time it was over the audience was well satisfied and the band well played. For all the musical excitement, though, Leyden himself seemed to almost revel in the evening, especially when bantering with the audience. Hopefully, the Oregon Symphony will take notice. This was the kind of evening Portland audiences expect, whether comprised of casual popular music such as performed by the Leyden band, or a thoughtful interpretation of an interesting classical program. It also doesn't go unnoticed that this was the first time in a long while I saw the Schnitz sold out for a Symphony sponsored event. In case your listening, Symphony, give us more quality like we saw last night, and bring Norman Leyden back for at least one performance each season. Maybe then you won't seem so irrelevant.

Posted by tony on October 18, 2007 12:19 PM

More for the songs, and ultimately.....the celebration of music....

2007-10-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

Norman Leyden's Big Band Birthday
by Lynn Darroch
Posted by bajohnso October 18, 2007 14:16PM
Categories: Top Stories

After the standing ovations, the balloons and the cake, after "Happy Birthday" was sung twice, there was still only one thing Norman Leyden wanted to focus on: the music he loves. So when the curtain began to close on the last strains of "Moonlight Serenade," Leyden stepped forward, thanked the full house, played a brief cadenza on clarinet, and then turned back to his band.

Because in the end, as it was at the beginning of Norman's Big Band Birthday concert, it was all about music for the Oregon Symphony's Laureate Associate Conductor, who celebrated his 90th birthday Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
"I hope you came here for the songs more than to see an old geezer," he said.

Those songs - 30 period classics performed by the Norman Leyden Big Band with vocalists Renee Cleland and Rod Lucich as well as some younger guests - have been part of Leyden's professional life since World War II, when they were on the Hit Parade and he served as arranger with Glenn Miller's Air Force Band. Later, he arranged for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan.

An expert on the Swing Era big band, Leyden's 17-piece group recreated that sound with excellent musicianship and solid swing. The ensemble supported Cleland with colorful instrumental work on a ballad medley that included "That Old Feeling," and demonstrated beautiful balance on an unusual arrangement of "Rhapsody in Blue." Spare, melodic solos - highlighted by trumpet/drum duets by Paul Mazzio and Carlton Jackson - contributed to the period feel.

Leyden's accomplishments also include the nurturing of young musicians, and on Wednesday he brought out Cleland's daughter, Aubrey, 14, who sang several tunes with the band. He also introduced woodwind phenom Hailey Niswanger, 17, whose duet on clarinet with Aubrey Cleland on "'S Wonderful" delighted the crowd. And he featured the teenaged members of Dance West.

Though he turned the spotlight on others, Leyden took several turns on clarinet and even sang a few verses himself.

"It doesn't get any better than this," he said. "Here I am at age 90 and still doing the things I love to do." But he kept his focus on the moment, not the past.

"I won't say much," he concluded, "because we've got so much music for you."

-- Lynn Darroch is a Portland writer; lynndarroch@yahoo.com

It's Twine Time!!!!

2007-09-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

Browneyedhandsome Man is the name of Rob Whatman's blog, and he has some great history on R&B artists, past and present. This post is from his site on Blogger.com and it was respectfully borrowed from it with all of it's copywrite implications. Please enjoy and visit his site if you get the chance.

With one of the bands I play with, The DK4 with Dave Stewart, we do this song and the floor starts jumping each time we do it.
I first heard it when my sister bought the 45 RPM record, many years ago. She wore this song out from repeated playings!!

It's Twine Time!: Alvin Cash And The Registers

"The Twine, which is the title of this album, is a dance started in one of Chicago's High Schools. It is the consensus of opinion that Dunbar High School students started the dance.

Herb 'The Cool Gent' Kent, WVON deejay, popular with teenagers, picked up the name at one of his regular record hops and started talking about the WOODBINE TWINE (the title of our newest release by the Five Du-Tones). Bill Cody, who has taught choreography and dancing in and around Chicago for many years to most of the singing groups, saw the dance and brought it to the attention of Mar-V-Lus' A&R man, Andre Williams. Andre saw the dance and felt the beat - grabbed Alvin Cash and the Registers, and bingo, the rest is history. Alvin Cash, the leader of the Crawlers dance group has been on the entertainment scene as a dancer and entertainer for thirteen years. Alvin was born in St. Louis, Missouri, is now 23 years old. At the age of 10, Alvin became a close associate of his Uncle Bill Robinson Jr., who was a well known dancer in the St. Louis area; and soon after, became a part of his uncle's act. Later, when Alvin's brothers, Robert (now 16) and George (now 15), were 7 and 8 respectively, they joined him as part of his act. Robert 'B Q', a radio personality at KATZ in St. Louis, named the act (because of their ages) THE CRAWLERS. Alvin, unmarried, lives in Chicago. George and Robert, who are still attending Sumner High School, St. Louis, Missouri, commute to Chicago every weekend to work in various clubs, returning to St. Louis on Sunday for classes on Monday."

- liner notes to Mar-V-Lus LP 1827, "Twine Time" released in 1965.

The weather is still fine, and summer has not left us behind, it's time to dance but one thing is on my mind: How do you do The Twine?

I don't know about you, but not having lived through the Sixties, and living far from the talcum powdered dancefloors of northern soul, I have immense difficulties in strutting my stuff. I hear a record, my body wants to move, but I am reduced to one of three options: propping up the bar for another pint; gyrating wildly in a freestyle form of funky James Brown dance which results in injuries for other dancers; or the intense, solo dance, comprising lots of shuffling and spinning, that for some reason third-generation mods like me seem to think should accompany Green Onions.

What I really would like to be able to do is to dance The Bop, The Watusi, The Cool Jerk, The Boston Monkey, The Birdland, The Sissy Strut, The Popeye, The Funky Penguin, or just Shake A Tailfeather. The trouble is, I have never actually come across anybody who knew how any of these dances go. I suppose there is the Twist, and the Mashed Potato, but surely things used to be more exciting than that? Where did all the dancers go? Nowadays, there seem to be more people interested in learning the foxtrot than in knowing what to do when somebody yells, "It's Twine Time!". When Land Of A Thousand Dances comes on, you'll find me propping up the bar again, watching other people go, "Well, I know how to , um, and do the .. well, ..."

I am still no nearer to finding out just exactly how to dance the Twine. Maybe Sis Detroit can enlighten us?:

"I was once in a boogaloo contest in a backyard party (twenty-five cents to enter the gate.) But I was a young teen-ager. When the jerk came out, I was an older teen, and I had slowed down a bit, but tried to hang in there. The twine was quite easy, but the older I got, the less I danced, and the more I just listened and observed."

This sounds slightly reassuring, as I am now at the tender age of 34, and need to consider slipped discs, hernias etc. Meanwhile, Joe Nawrozki, a writer for the Baltimore Sun, attests to the powers of The Twine when far from home:

"I would see this again years later, stinky and scared young guys dancing to candlelight in a sandbagged Vietnam bunker, serenaded by a tropically-warped Temptations album. That
dancing was integrated [unlike in clubs in Baltimore] and I learned how to do the boomerang, shing-a-ling, the skate and the twine time. Dance was a brief connection with home for us, time out from the insanity of war."

So what is the story behind The Twine?

Alvin Cash (real name Alvin Welch) was I believe the eldest of eight children. Alvin, Arthur, George, and Robert formed a song and dance act and called themselves The Four Steps or the The Step Brothers. Alvin wanted to try to get into music, and encouraged his brothers to visit him in Chicago for dance gigs and competitions. As a dance group they were very successful. They renamed themselves The Crawlers, while Alvin formed a band of his own called the Nightlighters. It was while the Crawlers were dancing at the Budland Dance Club in Chicago that Andre Williams spotted them, and decided to try Alvin out at Mar-V-Lus back in Chicago.

The other brothers in the Crawlers were not featured on the record that came out of this, Twine Time, written by Andre Williams and Verlie Rice, following on from the tune Woodbine Twine by The Five Du-Tones. All being much younger than Alvin, nobody could quite see how they would fit together as an r&b group performing for adults. That is all bar one. While Andre was taken by Alvin's singing skills, flambouyancy and sharp, colourful dress sense, it is another brother, George, to whom much of the credit should go for crafting the dance we know as The Twine. Don on the Soulful Detroit forums recalls:

"George was the person who originated the dance moves named The Twine that Alvin adapted ... Since George was a dancer he would make up the dance routines, or would make better routines out of any regions dance moves. If anyone ever saw Alvin Cash do a concert you know what I mean."

George was so talented he is alleged to have shown Major Lance and others how to improve their moves. Not only that, but despite his young age at the time, George was know locally as a remarkable drummer, playing with local group The Vows. He could even dance at the same time, and once, opening a concert for Frank Sinatra with the Four Steps, he was invited back on to play some drums by Frank himself, while tapping! According to Don, George's drumming was so good that "[it]... even made Sammy Davis, Jr said wow!" So it is George you can hear keeping the beat on The Twine Time and many other Alvin Cash recordings. Only trouble was, due to his age, George would have to be snuck into clubs and snuck back out again as soon as the set was over:

"Since George being young, he couldn't stand around or mingle in the area because he was underage, and would have to stay in the back before the shows began and during intermissions and after."

While George was too young to latch onto the fame that went with Alvin Cash and The Registers, he went on to play drums with a number of groups, including Mothers' Finest, and continued playing with The Vows. He is married to Berniece Willis of The Kittens.

Ladies and gentlemen, you don't need to check your watches, I'll tell you what time it is!

Alvin Cash & The Registers - Twine Time (Mar-V-Lus 6002)

Alvin Cash & The Registers - Twine Awhile (from Mar-V-Lus MLP 1827)

Information from liner notes, and from the informative posts of Mel(andthensome), Sis Detroit, Randy Russi, and most especially Don on the Soulful Detroit forums
Posted by Rob Whatman at 1:49 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Labels: Alvin Cash And The Registers, Andre Williams, Dance, George Cash, Major Lance, Mar-V-Lus Records, The Kittens

Drums stop...then Bass solo starts....I know, bad joke : )

2007-09-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

Drummer Denies He Intentionally Spooked Horse That Died
By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

Published: September 16, 2007

In an unquiet city like New York, Fifth Avenue and 59th Street is especially known for its uproar. Double-decker buses rumble past. Taxicabs honk. Tourists mill. Workers refurbish the Plaza Hotel.

All the while, up to 20 horses quietly stand by, waiting to take passengers on carriage rides in Central Park.

On Friday, one of them bolted after it was apparently startled by a loud noise. The horse, a 13-year-old mare named Smoothie, ran nearly a block, and when her carriage became caught on a tree, she collapsed and died.

Witnesses told reporters that somebody walking past and beating a small drum may have been the source of the noise.

James Williams, the drummer who had been playing near Smoothie’s carriage, said yesterday, “We did not do anything malicious, like walk up and hit a drum in a horse’s ear.”

Yesterday Mr. Williams, who plays for tips, found himself facing the kind of attention he did not want. Reporters asked him where he had been playing and how loudly. Horse owners complained about him and the break-dancing group, Two Steps Away, that he accompanied on Friday.

The Horse and Carriage Association of New York said it planned to hold a news conference this afternoon at 59th and Fifth to call on the city to ban street musicians and “overly loud” music in the area. The group said it also would ask the city to provide secure hitching posts for the horses, which are often tethered to trash cans and street lamps.

Mr. Williams, whose stage name is Ayan, plays a full set of six drums and four cymbals. He said he did not know until yesterday morning that a horse had collapsed on Friday, and he was upset by the implication that he had scared it.

“Spooking a horse right here could mean a baby carriage getting run over, or a person hurt,” he said.

Noel Kelly, 49, a carriage driver who said he was positioned behind the carriage drawn by Smoothie, said he had seen the break dancers before, but not accompanied by drums.

“It was like a rock concert,” Mr. Kelly said yesterday. “I commented to another driver that these drums are very, very loud.” But Mr. Kelly’s horse, Chester, who is 7 years old, did not bolt.

Cornelius Byrne, owner of Smoothie and four other carriages and their horses, said yesterday, “It’s a deep human error on their part to make that music around these horses.”

Yesterday, to avoid a repeat, Parks Department officers asked Mr. Williams and the break dancers to move to another area.

In Memoriam: Josef Zawinul in a silent way now.....

2007-09-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

This one came out of left field for me....it's like that "not so funny all the time" line about someone dying, and the response would be "I didn't know he was sick..."

This situation would be that for me. Just the way that Joe Zawinul would stand at his keys and have that boxing stance that came from a full knowledge of the sport and how it weaved in with what he did with his music, and his life. He seemed so pugilistic and invincible, that somehow in the back of my mind, he would be around forever, like his musical output. Sadly, I was mistaken somewhere...
Zawinul, who stood as tall as Miles Davis, in pointing the way with what music would sound like in the future with his direction and composition of such items, kept vital even to the end of his life, forcefully swinging and putting out how things would sound in a world dominated by truly world sounds, and how Jazz music was truly World music, and vice versa

From email, this next wonderful thought came from my fellow broadcaster on KBOO 90.7 FM, and generally smart guy, Dan Flessas, who's name has graced this blog before....

....mercy, mercy, mercy....another big part of my youth moves on--how i listened to music, what i listened for, what i heard, i got directly from these radical adventurers--Zawinul, Max Roach, Miles, Bird. But for a kid of the 60s and 70s bred on Hendrix and The Mothers...

Weather Report literally changed my life. Each new record seemed like a visit from the future. Zawinul and Shorter turned me on to 3 of my favorite bassists--Miroslav Vitous, Alphonso Johnson, and Jaco Pastorius (Victor Bailey was no slouch, either..), but it was always Zawinul's sound that never ceased to surprise me. Hypnotic, mystical and intensely funky, he could transport you along in concert like nobody--i often found myself taking off my clothes in the frenzy Weather Report created (well, i was younger, heh)...

He didn't just play, he told stories without words.

long live Josef Zawinul!

~d

Jazz great Joe Zawinul dead at 75
By VERONIKA OLEKSYN

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul, who soared to fame as one of the creators of jazz-rock fusion with the band Weather Report, has died, a hospital official said. He was 75.

Zawinul died early Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Vienna's Wilhelmina Clinic said, without giving details. He had been hospitalized since last month.

Zawinul suffered from a rare form of skin cancer, said his manager Risa Zincke, according to the Austria Press Agency.

Zawinul, who turned 75 on July 7, won acclaim for his keyboard work on chart-topping Miles Davis albums such as "In A Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew," and was a leading force behind the so-called "Electric Jazz" movement.

In 1970, Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter founded Weather Report and produced a series of albums including "Heavy Weather," "Black Market," "I Sing the Body Electric," and the Grammy-winning live recording "8:30."

He is credited with bringing the electric piano and synthesizer into the jazz mainstream but was frustrated by the lack of respect for electric keyboards and new technology among jazz purists.

"There is no difference between a Stradivarius or a beautiful synthesizer sound . . . ," Zawinul said in a 2007 interview for Jazziz magazine. "People make a big mistake in putting down electronic music. Yes, it's been misused and abused, but that's true of every music. . .

"There is nothing wrong with electronic music as long as you're putting some soul behind the technology."

Earlier this year, Zawinul released the CD "Brown Street," a live recording made at his Vienna jazz club, Birdland, pairing his small combo and Germany's WDR Big Band, on which he revisited such vintage Weather Report tunes as "Black Market," "Boogie Woogie Waltz," and "Night Passage."

This spring, he toured Europe to mark the 20th anniversary of his world music group, the Zawinul Syndicate. He sought medical attention when the tour ended, the Viennese Hospital Association said in a statement last month.

Austrian president Heinz Fischer said Zawinul's death meant the loss of a "music ambassador" who was known and cherished around the world.

Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer praised Zawinul's "unpretentious way of dealing with listeners" and said he wasn't "blinded by superficialities."

Zawinul's son, Erich, said his father would not be forgotten.

"He lives on," Erich Zawinul was quoted as saying by APA.

Born in 1932, Zawinul grew up in a working-class family during the Second World War in the Austrian capital. He played accordion on the streets to make money and received classical piano training as a child prodigy at the Vienna Conservatory.

In the postwar years, he grew interested in American jazz, playing in a dance band that included the future Austrian president Thomas Klestil and making a name for himself on the local jazz scene in bands led by saxophonist Hans Koller and others.

"One thing about Viennese musicians, they can really groove, more than even the German bands can," Zawinul said in a 2007 Downbeat magazine interview. "It's something in our nature, perhaps. We're cosmopolitan and interracial - Czech, Slavic, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish a little bit."

In 1959, Zawinul emigrated to the United States on a scholarship to study at the Berklee School of Music in Boston but left to join Maynard Fergusion's big band. He next landed a gig with Dinah Washington. His funky piano can be heard on her 1959 hit "What a Diff'rence a Day Made."

Zawinul rose to international fame after joining alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's band in 1961. During his nine-year stint with the band, he composed such tunes as "Walk Tall," "Country Preacher," and most notably the gospel-influenced, soul-jazz anthem "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," his first important recording on electric piano, which climbed the pop charts.

Zawinul's pioneering work on the new Fender Rhodes electric piano caught the ear of Miles Davis, who was impressed that Adderley's band was being booked into rock venues like San Francisco's Fillmore West.

"Miles came to all of our gigs and he told me, "That's the way music is supposed to be played - open it up," Zawinul said in the Jazziz interview.

In the late '60s, Zawinul recorded with Davis' studio band, His tune "In a Silent Way" served as the title track for the trumpeter's first foray into the electric arena.

Zawinul's composition "Pharoah's Dance" was featured on Davis' groundbreaking 1970 jazz-rock fusion album "Bitches Brew."

After releasing his debut solo album in 1970, Zawinul teamed with Shorter, who had just left Miles' band, to form Weather Report, which became the preeminent jazz-rock fusion band of the 1970s.

The band became known for its collective improvisations, innovative compositions, high-energy rock grooves, world music beats and use of cutting-edge electronics to create an orchestral sound.

At the core of the group was the interplay between the introverted Shorter and the extroverted Zawinul.

"I have no idea how we did it. It was just one of those things," Zawinul recalled later.

"It's funny how we work together. . . I have perfect pitch and Wayne is close to it. . . . He is a great poet. I don't even call him a saxophone player and I don't call myself a keyboard player. I'm a musician who tells stories and we could tell stories together."

Weather Report enjoyed its biggest commercial success with the 1977 album "Heavy Weather" which featured Zawinul's catchy tune "Birdland," which became one of the most recognizable jazz hits of the '70s after it was also recorded by Maynard Ferguson and the vocal group Manhattan Transfer.

After Weather Report broke up in 1986, Zawinul went on to form The Zawinul Syndicate, which brought together a global village of musicians who recorded such albums at the Grammy-nominated "My People" (1996) and "World Tour" (1998).

Zawinul's wife, Maxine, died earlier this year. Plans for Zawinul's funeral were unclear but Vienna Mayor Michael Haeupl told reporters Tuesday morning he would be given an honorary grave in the capital.

http://jam.canoe.ca

Albums I am playing on.....

2007-09-05T23:16:00.000-07:00

I was searching the Google alerts, which I have a couple come to me regular-like on the email front, and I saw a blog that devoted itself to long out-of-print Jazz Fusion albums (yes kids, there was vinyl before all of the 1s and 0s...)
There was a post that contained a couple of albums I played on, so I got to thinking that I could start a farm of sorts, with the images of albums that are still available, some that aren't, and generally just things that contain my drumming/singing output.

Well, here goes something.... :)

In the early 80's, I played with a guy out of Eugene, OR, keyboardist/composer Dan Siegel, who was on the ground floor of what is now the radio format called Smooth Jazz. He still is going and is playing great music and enhancing other musicians and their endeavours with his expertise.

My output with him consisted of the following albums.....

this is an album that Dan Siegel produced and it contained many great fusion stars of the time, and I got in on a cut of the puzzle!!

I spent 13 years with Jazz keyboardist Tom Grant, over two tours of duty, along with being on 6 of his albums....

TG also is one of the first players in the genre of what is called Smooth Jazz.
He did his share of Mainstream, Fusion, Rock and Roll, amongst other styles.

My output with Tom included these albums...

Out of the Tom Grant connection came my association with his guitarist at that time, Dan Balmer, whom I subsequently
recorded 6 albums with and continue to play music with him to this day.

A recording session in the best spirit of how they used to do it....
One or two takes of a song, then move on.
Jan Celt's Flying Heart label cranked out this session in a two day period, featuring some great Portland musicians (the house band included myself, Randy Monroe, Janice Scroggins, Albert Reda) and performers (Lily Wilde, Mel Soloman, Chris Newman, Rich Halley, Johnnie Ward and others), all concerned doing it "live and off the floor" with little, or no rehearsal.

A very exciting experience, and one I hope you will search out to enjoy.

Eddie Parente's "Touraco" is one of those albums where we caught "lightning in a jar", so to speak. All of the players, arrangers, engineers were on the same page to produce one of the most listenable volumes of jazz in a long while. All being helmed by one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to play ponticello for you : )

Composer, pianist, and lover of counterpoint, Gordon Lee continues to make challenging music for all to consume. I have made a big band album, and a trio album for him, and continue to search the fruits of this association to this day.

Local singer-songwriter Jack McMahon had me in on his session for the "Better Late" album, back in the 80's
This album also featured local stalwarts Denny Bixby, Tod Carver, Tom Grant, Glen Holstrom and others. The news from Jack is this album being re-released in Japan, due to some persistence from some fans over there. I still haven't gotten my copy of the new release, but I do have vinyl.

I have an album in my head, and already have the cover for it....here goes something!!!!

Another of the ones I watched while growing up as a young musician, passes away.

2007-09-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

it is a tough thing to see those who were great /influential to us for a long time, finally leave us for another plain... so it is important that some document exist for all to see, and why I present it here.

The general top shelf musicianship and generous humor of Tommy Newsom always was a pleasure to see on my TV, late into the evening...

He joined "The Tonight Show" in 1962 and rose from band member to assistant music director.

Johnny Carson gave Newsom the nickname "Mr. Excitement" to make light of his low-key personality and drab brown and blue suits - a sharp contrast to the flashy style of bandleader Doc Severinsen.
and will be remembered for his own output of wit and deadpan humor.

He retired, along with Carson, from The Tonight Show in 1992

a more formal piece from the Washington Post by Adam Bernstein is respectfully offered here.

-----------------------------

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Jazz Saxophonist Tommy Newsom; Played on 'Tonight Show'

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tommy Newsom, 78, a jazz saxophonist and arranger who gained national visibility as a key member of Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" band for three decades, and whom Carson nicknamed "Mr. Excitement" for his stone-faced demeanor and somber outfits, died April 28 at his home in Portsmouth, Va. He had bladder and liver cancer.

As a personality, Mr. Newsom pretended to have none. Carson gently taunted him for his deadpan expression and bland tastes -- his suits ran the gamut from brown to navy.
Band member Tommy Newsom, shown in 1982 on the "Tonight Show," was often the target of host Johnny Carson's jokes about his conservative attire and stiff deportment.

"As a child one time, Tommy got lost, and his parents couldn't describe him to the police," Carson once said. On another occasion, Carson said Mr. Newsom "wants to come back as a plant, so somebody will talk to him."

Periodically, Mr. Newsom topped Carson's one-liners.

When Carson asked why Mr. Newsom kept his jacket buttoned, the saxophonist replied that his rear end would otherwise fall off. This prompted executive producer Fred De Cordova to remind Mr. Newsom that the host was supposed to get the bigger laughs.

Despite the gags, Mr. Newsom was a graceful musician and veteran of bands led by guitarist Charlie Byrd, clarinetist Benny Goodman and society bandleader Vincent Lopez. Mr. Newsom became an NBC studio musician, worked for Merv Griffin and soon after was assigned to the "Tonight" program in early 1962, several months before Carson took over.

Mr. Newsom spent the next 30 years on the show, most of the time directly under the bandleader and trumpeter Doc Severinsen, who was known for his loud outfits. Mr. Newsom became assistant music director in the late 1960s and took over the baton in Severinsen's absence.

"I think the first night I took over for Doc, Carson recoiled," Mr. Newsom told the Los Angeles Times. "He was so used to having foils on either side, Ed [McMahon] over here and Doc over there, and he needed somebody to bounce something off of, so the gags began.

"I guess my cardboard-cutout style makes a good contrast to Doc's flamboyant image," he said. "Carson has really laid some heavy ones on me. One night, he said I was the only person who was going to reach puberty and senility at the same time."

Thomas Penn Newsom was born Feb. 25, 1929, in Portsmouth, where his father was a pharmacist and his mother taught kindergarten. As a child, he was exposed to opera and big band music over the radio. His mother played piano and sang.

His parents bought him a saxophone when he was 8, and he immediately launched into a Hungarian rhapsody by Brahms, albeit with unorthodox fingering. He later received formal training and, as he told an interviewer, began playing in a school band -- "two girls playing a piano, several violins, a trumpet, a clarinet or two and I had a C-melody sax."

By 13, he was playing professional engagements in the Norfolk area at school dances and for returning World War II service members.

"My parents kept a very loose rein on me," he later told a Norfolk reporter. "They were grand, but they were very lenient. They had faith in me."

By 1952, he had graduated from the Norfolk division of the College of William and Mary and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore -- taking music jobs in strip clubs to supplement his income. He spent four years in the Airmen of Note, the Air Force's big band, and received a master's degree in music education from Columbia University.

Meanwhile, he began an active freelance career based in New York. He recorded with fellow Tidewater jazzmen such as Byrd and clarinetist and vibraphonist Tommy Gwaltney. His most prestigious early job came in 1961 and 1962, when he toured the Soviet Union and South America with Goodman's big band.

While with Goodman, he wrote a well-received composition, "Titter Pipes," that became a showcase number for two other saxophonists on the Soviet tour, Phil Woods and Zoot Sims.

Mr. Newsom continued to cultivate his reputation as a solid composer-arranger. Over his long career, he arranged for Byrd (including 1964's "Brazilian Byrd" album), jazz trumpeter Buck Clayton (for whom he wrote "Kansas City Ballad") and the all-female jazz orchestra Diva. He also arranged for opera singer Beverly Sills, country singer Kenny Rogers and the Cincinnati Pops orchestra.

Mr. Newsom also did musical arranging for such TV broadcasts as "Night of 100 Stars" (1982) and the "40th Annual Tony Awards" (1986), and he shared Emmy Awards for both productions.

Long settled in Los Angeles, he was persuaded to relocate to Portsmouth by California's Northridge Earthquake in 1994. He recorded several CDs, including three for the Arbors label, and played at music festivals nationwide.

With the self-deprecation that made him a household name, he once told a festival audience: "And now we're going to render George Gershwin for a while. Probably into a bar of soap."

A son, Mark Newsom, died in 2003.

Survivors include his wife of 49 years, Pat Hernansky Newsom of Portsmouth; and a daughter, Candace Liebmann of Teaneck, N.J.

Finally....an unwelcomed houseguest leaves...

2007-08-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Embattled Attorney General Resigns

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 27, 2007

WACO, Tex., Aug. 27 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, announced his resignation in Washington today, declaring that he had “lived the American dream” by being able to lead the Justice Department.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation for months, submitted it to President Bush by telephone on Friday, a senior administration official said. There had been rumblings over the weekend that Mr. Gonzales’s departure was imminent, although the White House sought to quell the rumors.

Mr. Gonzales appeared cheerful and composed when he announced that he was stepping down effective Sept. 17. His very worst days on the job were “better than my father’s best days,” he said, alluding to his family’s hardscrabble past.

“Thank you, and God bless America,” Mr. Gonzales said, exiting without responding to questions.

In Waco, President Bush said he had accepted the resignation reluctantly. He praised his old friend as “a man of integrity, decency and principle” and complained of the “months of unfair treatment” that preceded the resignation.

“It’s sad,” Mr. Bush said, asserting that Mr. Gonzales’s name had been “dragged through the mud for political reasons.”

The president said the solicitor general, Paul D. Clement, would serve as acting attorney general until a permanent replacement was chosen.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the senior administration official said early this morning. Among those being mentioned as a possible successor were Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security who is a former federal prosecutor, assistant attorney general and federal judge; Christopher Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general who is now senior vice president and general counsel of PepsiCo Inc.

Mr. Bush repeatedly stood by Mr. Gonzales, an old friend and colleague from Texas, even as Mr. Gonzales faced increasing scrutiny for his leadership of the Justice Department over issues including his role in the dismissals of nine United States attorneys late last year and whether he testified truthfully about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

Earlier this month, at a news conference, Mr. Bush dismissed accusations that Mr. Gonzales had stonewalled or misled a Congressional inquiry. “We’re watching a political exercise,” Mr. Bush said. “I mean, this is a man who has testified, he’s sent thousands of papers up there. There’s no proof of wrong.”

But Democrats cheered Mr. Gonzales’s departure. “Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say ‘no’ to Karl Rove.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation for months, said this morning: “It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new leadership.”

Senator Schumer said that “Democrats will not obstruct or impede a nominee who we are confident will put the rule of law above political considerations.”

Another Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who has been highly critical of Mr. Gonzales, Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, said the next attorney general must be a person whose first loyalty is “to the law, not the president.”

But a Republican senator who has known Mr. Gonzales for years, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, paid tribute to the Harvard-educated Mr. Gonzales, the first attorney general of Hispanic heritage. “He has served in difficult times and I believe is a good, honest man who has worked hard in public service all his life,” the senator said in a statement.

Mr. Gonzales’s resignation is the latest in a series of high-level departures that has reshaped the end of Mr. Bush’s second term. Mr. Rove, the political adviser who is another of Mr. Bush’s close circle of aides from Texas, stepped down two weeks ago.

The official who disclosed the resignation in advance today said that the turmoil over Mr. Gonzales had made it difficult for him to continue as attorney general. “The unfair treatment that he’s been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department,” the official said.

A senior administration official said today that Mr. Gonzales, who was in Washington, had called the president in Crawford, Tex., on Friday to offer his resignation. The president rebuffed the offer, but said the two should talk face to face on Sunday.

Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to Texas, and over lunch on Sunday the president accepted the resignation with regret, the official said.

On Saturday night Mr. Gonzales was contacted by his press spokesman to ask how the department should respond to inquiries from reporters about rumors of his resignation, and he told the spokesman to deny the reports.

White House spokesmen also insisted on Sunday that they did not believe that Mr. Gonzales was planning to resign. Aides to senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said over the weekend that they had received no suggestion from the administration that Mr. Gonzales intended to resign.

As late as Sunday afternoon, Mr. Gonzales himself was denying through his spokesman that he was quitting. The spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said Sunday that he telephoned the attorney general about the reports of his imminent resignation “and he said it wasn’t true — so I don’t know what more I can say.”

Steven Lee Myers reported from Waco, Texas, and Philip Shenon reported from Washington.

Losing a true pioneering spirit of the Be-Bop Era

2007-08-17T13:36:00.001-07:00

Aug 17, 4:47 AM EDT
Master Jazz Drummer Max Roach Dead at 83
By LARRY McSHANE
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Max Roach got his first musical break at age 16, filling in when Duke Ellington's drummer fell ill in 1940. Those three nights spawned a career that would make the self-taught Roach the first jazz musician ever honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, or "genius grant."
His rhythmic innovations and improvisations defined bebop jazz. His peers deemed him the greatest jazz drummer ever by the time he was 30. And after helping reinvent the genre, he became one of its loudest voices for civil rights.
The master percussionist died late Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital after a long illness. He was 83.
No additional details were available, said Cem Kurosman, spokesman for Blue Note Records, where Roach played on seminal recordings with Ellington, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis. Roach was elected to the Downbeat magazine Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Grammy Hall of Fame 15 years later. He won a $372,000 MacArthur grant in 1988.
"Max was one of the founders and original members of the A-Team of bebop," said fellow music legend Quincy Jones. "Outside of losing a giant and an innovator, I've lost a great, great friend. Thank God he left a piece of his soul on his recordings so that we'll always have a part of him with us."
Roach challenged his listeners and himself by making music that connected the jazz of the pre-World War II era with the beats of the hip-hop generation. His place in the pantheon of jazz greats long since secured, Roach collaborated with drummers from around the world, with a string quartet that featured his daughter Maxine, with rapper Fab Five Freddy.
"I try to show my students the correlation between hip-hop and Louis Armstrong," he once said. "That's how well-rooted hip-hop is, coming out of an environment where people were denied any kind of cultural enrichment."
The New Land, N.C., native was born on Jan. 10, 1924, and moved to Brooklyn with his family four years later. A player piano left by the previous tenants gave Roach his introduction to music.
But he was looking for another instrument while singing with the children's choir at the Concord Baptist Church. Roach found a snare drum and was quickly hooked. His father gave the eighth-grader his first set of drums, and Roach was drumming professionally while still in high school.
He would take often the nickel train ride from Brooklyn to Harlem, listening to the music spilling out of the Apollo Theater or the Savoy Ballroom. He befriended saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzie Gillespie as the burgeoning bop movement took flight. By 1942, he was playing behind Parker in an after-hours club; two years later, Roach joined Gillespie and Coleman Hawkins in one of the first bebop recording sessions.
What distinguished Roach from other drummers were his fast hands and ability to maintain several rhythms simultaneously. By layering different beats and varying the meter, Roach pushed jazz beyond the boundaries of standard 4/4 time. His dislocated beats helped define bebop.

Roach's innovative use of cymbals for melodic lines, and tom-toms and bass drums for accents, helped elevate the percussionist from mere timekeeper to featured performer - on a par with the trumpeter and saxophonist.
Through the jazz upheaval of the 1940s and '50s, Roach played bebop with the Charlie Parker Quintet and cool bop with the Miles Davis Capitol Orchestra. He joined trumpeter Clifford Brown in playing hard bop, a jazz form that maintained bebop's rhythmic drive while incorporating the blues and gospel.
In 1952, Roach and bassist-composer Charles Mingus founded Debut Records. Among the short-lived label's releases was a famed 1953 Toronto performance in Massey Hall, featuring Roach, Mingus, Parker, Gillespie and pianist Bud Powell.
Around this time, a panel of 100 jazz musicians voted Roach the greatest jazz drummer ever.
But bad times were lurking. Roach watched several friends - including Parker - die from heroin addiction. He was further devastated when Brown and Powell died in a 1956 car accident, slipping into his own battle with drugs and alcohol.
Roach rebounded with the help of his first wife and frequent collaborator, singer Abbey Lincoln. The couple, married in 1962, split after eight years.
Roach re-emerged in the free jazz era with a new political consciousness. Albums like "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite," released in 1960 to celebrate the upcoming centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, reflected his support of black activism.
Roach eventually expanded his repertoire and explored new challenges. He taught at the University of Massachusetts, traveled to Ghana in search of new music and performed with groups from Japan and Cuba.
He also formed an all-percussion ensemble known as M'Boom, a quartet and a double quartet that included his daughter Maxine on viola.
He was survived by five children: sons Daryl and Raoul, and daughters Maxine, Ayo and Dara.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

-------------------------

ZNet
The Beat Has Stopped
Good-bye Mr. Roach
by Alexander Billet

August 19, 2007

Ask who the absolute greats of jazz are, you’ll get a few short words: "Bird," "Trane," "Miles," "Dizz" ... "Roach."

Few did more for jazz as an art-form than Max Roach, who died August 16th at age 83. Normally the drummer is the nameless guy in the back, the one who just keeps the beat while the "real musicians" do the actual work. But Roach showed everyone what a sham that is. A virtuoso in his own right, a composer, an innovator and revolutionary, Roach was the last survivor of a string of jazz greats from an era that changed the face of American music.

Born in North Carolina in 1924, his family moved to Brooklyn when he was four. Before too long he was already proving himself something of a prodigy, and at age ten was playing drums in the church choir. By the time his teenage years were over he had played briefly with Duke Ellington's orchestra and participated in jam sessions with Charlie Parker that many say helped invent the genre known as bebop.

Roach was "one of the first American musicians to understand the complex polyrhythms of Africa" said longtime friend and collaborator Quincy Jones. In every group and orchestra he played in, he brought that complexity with him. His drumming frequently engaged in a "conversation" as one writer put it, with the other instruments. Previous jazz drummers had used the bass drum to provide the rhythm. Roach, along with Kenny Clarke, moved it to the ride cymbal. It was a move that allowed greater freedom and improvisation for the whole group, and would define bebop and its successors.

Bebop's sound was, at the time, controversial. It relied not on elaborate orchestrations but on the musical instincts of small groups of four or five. Count Basie once called bebop "Chinese music" for its seemingly atonal and erratic qualities. But bebop was also the re-affirmation of jazz as art. Most bebop musicians consciously viewed themselves proudly as artists. In an America dominated by Jim Crow, lynch mobs, and urban poverty, a pride like this among blacks was dangerous--even revolutionary.

So it comes as no surprise that many bebop innovators, including Roach, identified with the radical left in the 30s and 40s. Roach played several benefits for the Communist Party USA, which had made an effort to reach out to black jazz musicians.

The late forties and early fifties, while disastrous for much of that same Communist Party, was also a turning point for jazz with the advent of hard-bop and cool jazz. Roach, in typical fashion, was there at ground zero when he played on Miles Davis' iconic "Birth of the Cool" sessions.

As an innovator, Roach demanded an amount of creative control that was--and is--rare in the recording industry. For that reason he and fellow jazz-great Charles Mingus founded the Debut imprint in 1952 as the first musician-run jazz label.

It wasn't merely a business move. To him, jazz artists' control over their output was an integral part of the struggle for civil rights in Black America. Two things he did in 1960 reflected both sides of this. He and Mingus organized a festival rivaling the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island protesting its treatment of black artists, and together with lyricist Oscar Brown and vocalist Abbey Lincoln he composed and recorded "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite."

Largely considered one of the best jazz protest records ever, its cover was a picture of black men sitting at Greenboro, North Carolina lunch counters. Roach's drumming, along with Lincoln's voice, seems to capture the defiant strength of their struggle. In few albums like this one can the "freedom" of free jazz be so directly paralleled to the freedom sought by the civil rights movement in the US, South Africa, and all over the world.

"I will never again play anything that does not have social significance," Roach said to Down Beat magazine after the album's release. "We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we are master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we've been through."

Roach kept true to his word with "Percussion Bitter Sweet" and "Speak, Brother, Speak!" as well as the rest of his catalog of over fifty recordings with countless groups and ensembles. Always pushing the boundaries of what was possible in both his genre and his instrument, he formed a group in 1979 called M'Boom, made up of eight percussionists, showing how flexible--and melodic--percussion could be.

Perhaps one of the best modern testaments to his far-reaching influence, Roach performed in the early 80s with rapper Fab Five Freddy and the New York Break Dancers. "I try to show... the correlation between hip-hop and Louis Armstrong," said Roach. "That's how well-rooted hip-hop is..."

From bebop to hip-hop, the world looks very different now from when Max Roach hit his first snare. There is no doubt that he played a role in shaping that world. And if his music is taken to heart, so do we.

****

Alexander Billet is a music journalist and activist living in Washington DC. He is a regular contributor to Znet and Dissident Voice. His blog, Rebel Frequencies, can be viewed at http://rebelfrequencies.blogspot.com, and he can be reached at alexbillet@hotmail.com

Wooo Hooo for David Wu !!! .... Someone on Capitol Hill gets it.... in spades!!!!

2007-07-31T07:08:00.000-07:00

This message was sent to me by a good friend and fellow broadcaster Dan Flessas ( KBOO 90.7 FM on Friday nights with "The Outside World"... a great eclectic local radio program.)

Check him out if you can, and often!!!

The message is another cry from that majority of people that Bush and his imperialist cronies can't see (and won't acknowledge) through that giant blind spot in their collective vision.

Take a bite out of what goodness Oregon Rep. David Wu. is serving....

Mmmmmmmm.....the smell of people coming together in knowledge, and not ignorance!!!

c

-------------------

------ Forwarded Message
From: daniel flessas
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:35:18 -0700 (PDT)
To: my self
Subject: Oregon Rep. David Wu sez:

i was pretty impressed by this, coming from David Wu. It's people like this in Washington who need us behind them, showing them they are on the right track (and not a moment too soon--hopefully not too late either!), so thought i'd share this. i may even read it on the air tonight...

~d

###########

I am deeply disturbed by the Bush Administration's blatant disregard for
the constitutional limits of presidential authority. Our nation's founders
wisely constructed a system of governing institutions that divides power
among co-equal branches of government. Yet time and again we have
witnessed President Bush ignore and purposefully disregard the
constitutional limits of his power in efforts to advance his own
self-serving agenda.

Throughout our history, nations around the world have looked to the United
States as a model of liberty; and we have done our best to set a high
standard. Recently, however, we have witnessed the Bush Administration
ignore the freedoms established in the Constitution on countless occasions
for what they have claimed is in the national interest.

The Bush Administration orchestrated the U.S. invasion and occupation of
Iraq, a policy I opposed from the beginning and continue to oppose today.
I voted against giving the president the authority to go to war and
continue to support bringing our troops home at the earliest practicable
date.

Of more concern, documents such as the leaked Downing Street Memo suggest
that the Administration manipulated intelligence to so that it would
appear as though the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass
destruction. Similarly, White House attempts to discredit Ambassador
Joseph Wilson's refutation of the Niger yellowcake story, and the
subsequent exposure of his wife Valerie Plame as a covert C.I.A. agent,
show the depths to which the Administration is willing to stoop. The
perjury and obstruction of justice trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the
Vice President's former Chief of Staff and a close advisor to the
president, has revealed that the vice president was likely deeply involved
in the White House effort to discredit Ambassador Wilson.

This serves as a poignant example of this Administration's willingness to
engage in ruthless politics of personal destruction when confronted with
critics who speak the truth. I believe Congress can -- and should --
scrutinize the vice president's actions and policies.

We must not sit idly by while the president and his advisors run roughshod
over our constitutional freedoms. I cosponsored H. Res. 635 in the
previous Congress. This resolution would have established a Select
Committee of the House of Representatives to investigate the Bush
Administration's intent to go to war; its manipulation of pre-war
intelligence; its retaliation of its critics; and its condoning of
torture. The resolution also directed the committee to make
recommendations regarding the grounds for possible impeachment. H. Res.
635 was referred to the House Rules Committee, but was not brought up for
a vote prior to the adjournment of the 109th Congress. A similar
resolution has not yet been introduced in this Congress, but if Judiciary
Committee Chairman John Conyers (MI) does introduce such a measure, I will
give it serious consideration again.

Congress is currently considering H.Res. 333, a resolution introduced by
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (OH) to begin impeachment proceedings against
Vice President Cheney for purposely manipulating the intelligence process
to deceive the citizens and the Congress of the United States by
fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and an alleged
relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to justify the use of
American military forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging
to our national security interests. H.Res. 333 has been referred to the
House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
where it awaits further consideration.

Unfortunately, President Bush's failings are not limited to his political
judgment.

Recently, our country bore witness once again to President Bush abusing
his authority for the personal gain of one of his loyal supporters. On
July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison
sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice for his involvement in
leaking Valerie Plame Wilson's name as a covert C.I.A. officer. Libby was
convicted in March 2007 of lying to F.B.I. agents and a grand jury and was
sentenced to 30 months in prison. While Libby was required to pay a
$250,000 fine and will remain on probation for two years, he no longer
faces the prospect of serving time in prison.

Although the Constitution gives the president the power to grant clemency
in cases when he deems it to be warranted, I strongly disagree with
President Bush's judgment in this matter. I am deeply disturbed by
President Bush's disregard for accountability and the rule of law.
Commuting Mr. Libby's sentence undermines our judiciary and is blatantly
irresponsible given the severity of Mr. Libby's offenses and the high
level of trust his position in the Administration required. Congress has a
responsibility to protect the American people from unchecked executive
power; and I believe President Bush has overstepped his constitutional
authority in commuting Mr. Libby's sentence.

With this in mind, I became an original cosponsor of a resolution
introduced by Congressman Robert Wexler (FL) to censure President Bush for
commuting Mr. Libby's prison sentence. The resolution expresses the sense
of Congress that President Bush failed to comply with his obligations
under Executive Order 12958 concerning the protection of classified
national security information by revealing to members of the media the
covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson as a C.I.A. operative. Knowingly
leaking the identity of a covert agent is a criminal violation of the
Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The resolution further expresses
the sense of Congress that in commuting Mr. Libby's prison sentence,
President Bush has finally and unalterably breached any remaining shred of
trust he had left with the American people and rewarded political loyalty
by flouting the rule of law. I strongly oppose President Bush's decision
to commute Mr. Libby's sentence. As my colleagues and I work to pass this
important resolution, I will continue to keep your thoughts in mind. I
respect your belief that the best way to move forward is to impeach the
vice president. This is a matter of extremely serious concern and if the
Judiciary Committee takes the resolution up, I will give a vote of this
magnitude my full and thorough consideration. Thank you again for sharing
your views on this issue. If you have further questions or concerns please
contact me at 503-326-2901 or 800-422-4003. /signed David Wu

What a short, but interesting trip it has been lately...

2007-07-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

Hello all good people who love good music!!!

Here I am back in town after a good stretch of time,playing some interesting gigs out and about.

I managed to miss the Blues Festival this year in Portland, but I did get to make some great music with wonderful people, out of town this time around.

The group I was with this year, the aptly named Strings For Industry

(including Darol Anger, Tye North, Scott Law, Tony Furtado) played in front of some wonderful people at both the High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy, California, and also the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, OR. (the remains of what used to be called Renaissance Fair, or Ren Fair to the oldtimers around and before 1980)

I was an initiate in both of these gatherings, and historically, I always had local people talking to me about going to the OCF and checking it out. I just never got the time to variate from what the bill of fare was at that time, work-wise for me. This was an eye-opener to me, and lots of fun to get some music out to a new crowd of people this time around.

In both places, lots of people, all in emotive, festival mode. Lots of earthy vibes, bright colors and churning rhythms.
All the festival smells and sights were wonderous to behold. The band had a good, engaging set, and it seems we are finally on our way with the usual dealings of such an undertaking.

In particular, our friend and liaison Jen (an artist coordinator at High Sierra) went out of her way to make it wonderful for SFI to do our thing during our stay.
(Hey Jen...I will not forget to send you that folder of pictures I promised.... really soon ! :)

As the events unfolded, the other guys in the band were rekindling old friendships and fan connects all during the three days we were there. Lots of after hours jamming by guys in the group...usually until sunrise is a good bet on this stuff. I think that I was getting up, as Tye and Scott were getting in to the B&B from just that sort of action the night before.
All of the crews on stage and elsewhere at High Sierra were warm and helpful, and just a joy to be around. Some of the support was from right here in the Portland area. It was good to see some of the brotherhood there and functioning in important waters of commerce.

You didn't have to want for anything, and since it was 105 degrees there that weekend, lots of water and iced towels were to be had in general, and this was in evidence at the stage where SFI spent some time...
People were taking care of business for the artists, so to speak.

Plenty of kids and others running around, and other festival events, in and around the music were available for consumption.
On one of the evenings, there was a night parade at HS, with many fest goers in splendid dresswith neon appendages, and lots of stick walkers and costumes and drummers, pipers and other various glorious noise,
and there was a contingent of Portland people staying in a tent community of sorts, together in harmony, and welcoming all that passed by their spot.

The vibe was "no worries" by the fest goers...no drama, and I saw only one person go out in an ambulance, probably from heat exhaustion, it looked like to me... but at least they were smiling from the open end of the vehicle.

In the town of Quincy proper, where we stayed off-site as a band, the ladies at the Sporting Inn Bed & Breakfast were just that...truly sporting and helpful with all they did. It was a comfortable place to stay, and the communal breakfast with all the kids running around in the halls made it for a great, warm atmosphere. That nut bread for breakfast (the kind that you wait in line for at the bakery, the ladies said) was just sterling.

I also saw some wonderful music in both places...
In particular, High Sierra had great performances by Bobby Previte's Coalition of the Willing (whom I talked to at the Bed & Breakfast for a bit....he was wonderful to hear)

Leftover Salmon (with the great Jeff Sipe, aka Apt.Q258 powering the band along on drums)
Soulive, Ivan Neville's Dumpstaphunk, Drive-By Truckers, Page Mc Connell, Brian Auger's Oblivion Express, The Del Mc Coury Band, The Hot 8 Brass Band (with their wonderful turn on the brass band tradition with more "street" leanings in their music), and many others.

As to my engagements, I did double drumming duty with SFI, and also playing Tony Furtado's band set (including his regulars Alan Toribio on guitar/vocals and Damian Erskine on Electric Bass), since his drummer had commitments back home and couldn't make this particular booking.

Here's an interesting aside...
I remember having a conversation/debriefing with Tony sometime after his show, and making the comment that it's always interesting to have to learn/chart out 12-15 high level tunes from someone's catalog, play the show, and then discard them from your ROM memory, only to have something else take it's place in the machinations of learning music in a musician's world.

I hope I get to essay Tony's work again. It's very engaging, and he is truly a string virtuoso, as are the other men in SFI.

As to the Oregon Country Fair and it's vibe...
Same good people digging the sounds and such.
Lots of organization and people doing their job.
Cops out in numbers in the town proper of Veneta, getting those coffers full for the city by expressing more tickets out to the unlucky fair goers.

My guest and I got to the front gate and got credentialed, and a Gator truck was sent to get us and the gear loaded up to the Main Stage.
As we rode open-air in the vehicle, we appeared to be swallowed up by the forest... I did lose my sense of direction that day, and it reminded me of some sort of Lord Of The Rings scenario/ scene from the Ewok Village from Star Wars with all of the trees reaching out to envelop us from the rustic, twisty gravel roads.
People were camped at every turn, and signs to warn people of various patches of Poison Oak (!!!) were placed at different intervals.

We finally reached our destination inside of the fairgrounds, and were greeted very much in a kind way with our arrival by stage personnel.
All around us, there were lots of people in various states of dress and undress, and generally having a good time.

The SFI guys have played this affair before, so once again, I am the newbie to all of this particular event. All are kind and helpful with direction for me.

A trance kind of band from Colorado played before us, and after, a gent named Scott Huckabay played solo guitar with lots of bells and hoofs on his ankles and a looping system on stage to create layers of sound in his performance. He held the crowd's attention for a long time and was good at what he did.

It was just a wonderful few days to behold, and as my mind digests more, I will post here.

Let us not forget our wonderful friend Doug Balk, who lugged gear for us in both places (CA. and OR.)
and was a generally great vibe around and for the band.

Cheers, Doug!!

take care, c

Slow Train A' Comin......

2007-06-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

As the months pass, and the Democrats plan their moves with regard to the festering sore that is the Bush Administration, this new turn of events will be a interesting showdown in legal and American history, involving the White House and the Congress

...If there is nothing to hide, then why not comply???

-----------------------

WHITE HOUSE, Cheney's Office subpoenaed
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush's controversial eavesdropping program that operated warrant-free for five years.

Also named in subpoenas signed by committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were the Justice Department and the National Security Council. The four parties have until July 18 to comply, according to a statement by Leahy's office.

The committee wants documents that might shed light on internal disputes within the administration over the legality of the program, which Bush put under court review earlier this year.

"Our attempts to obtain information through testimony of administration witnesses have been met with a consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection," Leahy said in his cover letters for the subpoenas. "There is no legitimate argument for withholding the requested materials from this committee."

Echoing its response to previous congressional subpoenas to former administration officials Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, the White House gave no indication that it would comply.

"We're aware of the committee's action and will respond appropriately," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. "It's unfortunate that congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation."

In fact, the Judiciary Committee's three most senior Republicans — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, former chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa — sided with Democrats on the 13-3 vote last week to give Leahy the power to issue the subpoenas.

The showdown between the White House and Congress could land in federal court.

Leahy's committee and its counterpart in the House have issued the subpoenas as part of a sweeping look at how much influence the White House exerts over the Justice Department and its chief, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The probe, in its sixth month, began with an investigation into whether administration officials ordered the firings of eight federal prosecutors, for political reasons. The House and Senate Judiciary committees previously had subpoenaed Miers, one-time legal counsel, and Taylor, a former political director, in that probe.

But with senators of both parties already concerned about the constitutionality of the administration's efforts to root out terrorism suspects in the United States, the committee shifted to the broader question of Gonzales' stewardship of Justice and his willingness to go along with the wiretapping program.

The Bush administration secretly launched the spy program, run by the National Security Agency, in 2001 to monitor international phone calls and e-mails to or from the United States involving people the government suspected of having terrorist links. The program, which did not require investigators to seek warrants before conducting surveillance, was revealed in December 2005.

After the program was challenged in court, Bush put it under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established in 1978. The president still claims the power to order warantless spying.

Debate continues over whether the program violates people's civil liberties, and the administration has gone to great lengths to keep it running with extensive presidential discretion.

Piquing the committee's interest was vivid testimony last month by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey about the extent of the White House's effort to override the Justice Department's objections to the program in 2004.

Comey told the Judiciary Committee that Gonzales, then-White House counsel, tried to get Attorney General John Ashcroft to reverse course and recertify the program. At the time, Ashcroft lay in intensive care, recovering form gall bladder surgery.

Ashcroft refused, as did Comey, to whom Ashcroft had temporarily shifted the power of his office during his illness.

The White House recertified the program unilaterally. Ashcroft, Comey, FBI Director Robert Mueller and their staffs prepared to resign. Bush ultimately relented and made changes to the classified program that the Justice officials had demanded, and the agency eventually recertified it.

The fight was one of the most bitter disputes of the Bush presidency and questions remain over whether the program tramples people's civil liberties. The administration says the program is crucial to preventing more terrorist attacks.

Fratto defended the surveillance program as "lawful" and "limited."

"It's specifically designed to be effective without infringing Americans' civil liberties," Fratto said. "The program is classified for a reason — its purpose is to track down and stop terrorist planning. We remain steadfast in our commitment to keeping Americans safe from an enemy determined to use any means possible — including the latest in technology — to attack us."

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the subpoena to Gonzales is under review and that the department recognizes Congress' oversight role.

"We must also give appropriate weight to the confidentiality of internal executive branch deliberations," he said.

Majority Democrats and some Republicans are skeptical and have sought to find out more details about the program and how it has been administered.

Leahy's panel is required to serve the subpoenas to specific people within the offices named. One is addressed to Gonzales, while the others are addressed to: David S. Addington, Cheney's chief of staff; White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, V. Phillip Lago, executive secretary of the National Security Council - or "other custodian of records" in their offices.

The subpoenas themselves seek a wide array of documents on the program from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to the present. Among them are any documents that include analysis or opinions from Justice, the National Security Agency — which administers the program — the Defense Department, the White House, or "any entity within the Executive Branch" on the legality of the electronic surveillance program

Learning From The Drum Solo

2007-06-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

rohit bhargava's blog on marketing and strategies had a post about drumming that had an interesting perspective on how people perceive "the drum solo"
thought that I would share it and learn from it myself.....

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Monday, June 18, 2007

Learning From The Drum Solo

Last night I saw a drum solo as part of the A.R. Rahman concert here in DC.

For those who don't know, A.R. Rahman is as close as any modern day man can get to being a god in India. He is the music composer (and sometimes voice) behind many of the most popular Bollywood films. The concert presented an evening of his music from many films and was hugely popular here in DC - with people lining up outside and dancing in the aisles throughout the show. The drum solo was much like any drum solo you have likely seen at a music concert. It lasted for more than ten minutes and the drummer flew effortlessly between large drums, small drums, indian drums and a wall of cymbals. Being a drummer myself, this was one of my favourite parts of the show - because I had a frame of reference to understand and follow the drummer's beat. Unfortunately, as I looked around at the audience, most people had no such background to draw on and seemed lost.

A drum solo is a tricky thing. There are no other instruments, and typically no melody ... only rhythm. You have to bring the audience into the rhythm and engage them in the beat. The problem with most drum solos is that they are overly complicated and indulgent - with the drummer focusing more on demonstrating the speed and skill with which he (or she) can play rather than offering a beat that audiences can connect with. There are moments in most drum solos where the drummer gets a beat, people start clapping along, and it's a nice moment. We all know what happens next. The drummer switches the beat, you stop clapping because you lose the connection, and now you are just watching a performance again. Marketing is exactly the same as the drum solo. If you focus too much on your own story - you will end up only appealing to the drummers in your audience who understand you and listen between the lines. Your audience is mostly non-drummers. A successful drum solo offers a simple beat that an audience can connect with - just like successful marketing has a simple uncluttered message that resonates with a target audience. The need to demonstrate everything you can do for a customer at once is tempting. It's like the drummer wanting you to marvel at the speed with which he can play. Everyone loves a good drum solo ... the important thing is to make it one that people can relate to.
Posted at 09:02 AM in Random Thoughts | Permalink

(photo by courtney erskine)

Music review / Nancy King Marks A Milestone....

2007-06-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

- A fete at Portland's Bijou Cafe honors a world-class jazz singer whose talent is finally getting its due
Monday, June 18, 2007
LYNN DARROCH/THE OREGONIAN

"Of the wonderful things -- that you get out of life -- there are four," Nancy King sang.

She phrased the complex lyrics so they snapped to the quirky beat of the classic bebop tune, "Four," each syllable quick-stepping to the melody.

"And baby -- so to truth, honor and happiness -- add one thing more. Meaning only wonderful, wonderful love -- that'll make it four."

It's become one of her signature tunes, and her masterful performance made it stand out in an evening of musical highlights at King's 67th birthday party and concert at the Bijou Cafe on Friday. In fact, it sounded as if the Portland-based jazz singer had every one of those wonderful things she was singing about within her grasp.

The love was clearly evident, at any rate, in the warmth and affection that the standing room only crowd and fellow musicians showed the singer, who received a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal last year

And she did look happy, digging the work of the seven instrumentalists from her seat on a stool in their midst. Hair pulled back in characteristic ponytail, King rocked forward, shouting encouragement, nodded her head in affirmation, smiled and, between tunes, told funny stories.

And when she sang, well, you'd need to paraphrase the voice-over to "Superman" to do it justice, because she appeared to leap tall buildings in a single breath, scat faster than a speeding bullet, and build momentum like a freight train. All with perfect intonation.

She is one of the best jazz singers in the world, after all.

Though she has performed on major stages, recorded with the renowned Metropole Orchestra of the Netherlands and released a number of highly-regarded albums, King has not received recognition and financial rewards commensurate with her abilities. Perhaps her dedication to truth and honor, both personally and professionally, has at times slowed the process. But she has always had the satisfaction of making music in her own uncompromising way. And given her increased opportunities in the past few years, it looks like that was the right path.

"I still believe in justice," she said a decade ago, before all the recent recognition. "I'm confident that the universe is taking care of me because I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing."

Singing jazz.

On "Groovin' High," written by Dizzy Gillespie, one of King's heroes, she dug deep into her alto range, then suddenly jumped an octave, attenuating that note to a thin stream before plummeting again to fat, round tones in the lower register.

On nearly every tune she sang, the instrumentalists seemed to elevate their performance in response to her example. Warren Rand's alto saxophone slithered around the melody, his big tone swelling with emotion, while Cheryl Alex's cool alto flute offered a well-paced foil. Saxophonist Toby Stone recalled the warmth of bebop-era tenor players, her tone like an homage; Robert Moore sang several duets with King as well as a heartfelt version of "I Can't Get Started"; and young pianist Dan Gaynor's solos flashed in concert with the rhythm section of drummer Carlton Jackson and bassist Scott Steed.

King urged them on, and every solo was greeted by shouts and applause as the crowd felt the collaborative spirit among the musicians.

And that's what makes King such a sterling jazz vocalist: She situates herself as an equal partner among the instrumentalists. Unlike the pop tradition, where the singer stands alone and the others are mere accompanists, King uses her voice as simply another instrument in the ensemble.

But on her 67th birthday, she was clearly first among equals.

Lynn Darroch writes about jazz frequently for The Oregonian. Reach him at: lynndarroch@yahoo.com

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Warmth...Don Rickles / This hockey puck is a real LEGEND!!!

2007-06-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

This image is the one that resides as my current business card, and I sometimes get the comment that "hey, your card is great, but who is that old guy in the front of it ??"

It always gives me a silent cringe when I think of who that person is walking in front of the band, conducting us through the last rousing, swinging tune of the evening to cap off his rousing, 75 minute set....

Well in the interest of clearing things up, that old guy is great comedian and current flavor of the year, Don Rickles, and that shot is from a two day run in Lincoln City some months ago, where I played in the show's 14 piece orchestra.

Here is a picture of some of the 14...
These guys are the best at playing music for a living!!!

I just need to say that if there were a more genial legend to meet and hang with for two days, please show him or her to me... well now that I have said that, let us not forget the one and only Leroy "The Walker" Vinnegar who I knew for most of his 15 years here in Portland, and was fortunate enough to share a stage or two, in his gracious employ...

but I digress...

Right now, Mr Rickles is enjoying a round of well-deserved attention with his new biography out and selling like gangbusters (check out his interview on "Fresh Air", podcast-wise), but let it be said that, contrary to all that you would believe from his act and how he does it, there was not a kinder, gentle, inviting soul to his orchestra, and to the audience around him...
that is, of course, after getting lit into frequently, by his brand of humor.

He was generous with the orchestra, and included us in the show with a few of the routines. We did not "live behind a scrim curtain", as is the case with some of the bigger shows. We were right up front with him on the stage, and interacted accordingly.

As I said, he referred to us many times during the evening, introduced us each by name near the conclusion of the evening, and of course, insulted us accordingly....

For my portion of the public flogging, it went something like this....

"This is Carlton Jackson, our drummer for the evening...
Hey Drummer!!!!...Sonny Payne wants his act back!!!!"

Then without missing a beat, he went on to tell a wonderful story to me, while we were there on-stage(and conversely so, lightly educating the audience) about his meeting and hanging with the great drummer from Count Basie's big band many years ago (I think it was the late 40's/early 50's he was talking about).
He also tried each night to "hook me up" with some unsuspecting African-American lady that happened to be in the audience. Just the way that he portrayed the piece of meat that was me to these ladies was indeed funny and side-splitting each night...at least my lady friend thought so (thank goodness...).

If that weren't enough, as we were packing up on the second night, Mr. Rickles sent his valet to tell the orchestra that if we could wait a few minutes, he wanted to meet us all and to tell some stories, allow us to take some pictures for memories, and to just generally be a wonderful man to us all.

He let us know that he appreciated the way we played his charts, and that our attention to detail that weekend was to his liking.

For my end of things, I got to hang with another legend that weekend.
For that, I am humbled to no end.

Long live "Mr. Warmth" (Johnny Carson's words, not mine) : )

(photos, again by auntie p.)

9/08 postscript....

One of Dark Horse Comics main drivers is Mike Richardson, who co-produced with John Landis a wonderful special look at Don Rickles called "Mr. Warmth"
The DVD has won an Emmy or two and is a funny and touching look at this legend.

Here is a story about Don hanging with his friend, Anthony Quinn that is up on YouTube.