How High The Moon

A good trip to the Salvation Army has inspired a revival here. First up, The Nearness of You, a compilation of Frank Sinatra tracks from his Capitol era on a mid-70s budget Pickwick release (the rule in thrift-shopping is you buy any Sinatra on Capitol but this is stretching the point a bit). The collection is quite listenable however - of note are Rodgers and Hart's "Lover", "You Brought A New Kind of Love to Me" (its earliest appearance may have been a 1930 film called The Big Pond with Maurice Chevalier), "It Could Happen To You" (done at a rather slow tempo - I prefer June Christy's brisker take on Something Cool, a desert-island disc of mine, as it happens) and the Mercer/Arlen "That Old Black Magic".

Next is the Jan Garbarek Group's Photo With Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows and a Red Roof (ECM, 1979). The principal incentive to get this was the presence of Bill Connors, who was the guitarist in the first electric version (superior to the Al Dimeola incarnation) of Chick Corea's Return To Forever, but his contribution doesn't quite solve the problem, the problem being that this mid-late 70s ECM stuff is the musical equivalent of Impressionist painting.

A Willie Nelson/Leon Russell double-LP called One For The Road (CBS, 1979) seemed best approached with no expectations and lo and behold, with that as the context, it is just fine. The choice of material ("I Saw The Light", "Heartbreak Hotel", "Don't Fence Me In") didn't cause anyone any sleepless nights but the combination of two of the most distinctive and appealing voices in American popular music of that era goes a long way toward mitigating a bit of laziness in the "R" half of the A&R equation. The 1979 date also means no crap-sounding digital recording techniques were employed.

Picked up a few more items, not all of which can be commented on without listening to them, but The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, of which I already own at least one copy, is on its way to some other lucky recipient's collection and Emmylou Harris's 1981 Evangeline fulfils another dollar-bin shopping rule, namely that there are no Emmylou Harris records that aren't good. This one seems to be no exception so far with impeccable song selection, including "Hot Burrito #2" (co-writer Chris Ethridge plays bass on the Nelson/Russell album in fact), two Rodney Crowell songs, Paul Siebel's "Spanish Johnny", the title track by Robbie Robertson and so on.

Formerly Harmony Burlesque

Picture if you will a vision of the future from 40 years ago, a Jetsons-styled robot in the process of exploding, with springs and sprockets flying out. Now imagine the robot is the Feelies fronted by Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna trying to imitate Joan LaBarbera and you’ve pretty much got the idea of Baltimore's Ponytail. (Or you could elaborate and liken them to Don Caballero imitating the Feelies [still exploding], a comparison I thought of while watching them, then dismissed, then found out they are going on tour with Battles, who are, I don't need to tell you, ex-Don Cab). About three of their songs fulfilled the promise implicit in all the above - I'd see them again!

The headliners were Japan's DMBQ. Based on the couple of records I'd heard, I thought they might deliver the straight-up early 70s stoner rock in a more uncut fashion - as it happens, their divagations into more noodle-y space jams were not unwelcome and they pulled it all together with a 5-minute closing wall of sound feedback blare from the guitars and bass while disassembling the drum kit and thrusting pieces of it into the crowd, finishing with most of its parts heaped up in almost vulnerable looking little monument.

The other main feature of the evening was the Pakistani Tea House on Church Street, courtesy of Tahir - you can read what these Yelpers have to say about it, but ignore the ones who are grumpy about the decor - it doesn't aim to be anything more than a fluorescently-lit steam table joint with exceptionally tasty food.

Far From the Madding Crowd

Headed to DUMBO for a show at an improbable venue, the Water Street Restaurant and Lounge, which is the sort of place for which the term "fern bar" was invented - unambitious cuisine served in a genteel decor whose pretensions to fine dining are somewhat at odds with the large television over the bar showing sports. The music was in their downstairs space which is large and generally a fine place to hang out - lots of oddly placed columns, though, which must serve some structural requirement as they don't serve any other and generally make the stage end a bit cut off.

In any event, some ambitious young promoters chose the spot to assemble an evening around Jarboe (now styling herself The Living Jarboe). Anyone who followed the evolution of the New York underground rock band the Swans through the 80s and 90s has a pretty good notion of who she is and what to expect at a show. Her voice is quite low-pitched and she has a strongly emotive-expressive style. On the continuum of singers comparable in one way or another, she falls somewhere between Nico and Diamanda Galas - more technically proficient than the former, not trying to be so dazzling as the latter. Her set was quite perfectly balanced - not much more than seven or so long-ish songs, totalling around 40 minutes, accompanied by adept but not flashy acoustic guitarists (with effects pedals) and Michael Evans (once of God Is My Co-Pilot) on a pared-down drum kit. Although her credit on the first Swans record on which she appeared was "scream", she is quite a conventionally beautiful singer when she wants to be.

Her aesthetic ambience (and that of her audience) is quite noticeably "goth" - while her music is not stylistically so different from what you get at the average "freak folk" show, the far greater incidence of tattoos and black fingernail polish in the crowd and onstage stakes a certain claim (although the distribution of seasonally unsuitable headgear between indie rock and goth shows is comparable).

The promoters also livened up the between-band segments with the short films of Czech neo-surrealist Jan Švankmajer, who I also didn't realize was quite so gothic - more literally so than the black nail crowd as his work includes filmic realizations of several Edgar Allan Poe short stories and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the ur-text of the 18th and 19th century Gothic literary school. I'd recommend a newcomer to Švankmajer start with "Dimensions of Dialog" currently available on Youtube in two parts, although it seems like something that might not last long - while you're at it this excerpt from the film with music by astonishing French bassist Joëlle Léandre also merits a gander.

The show was well worth the trip and, stepping out just after midnight into the third consecutive perfect evening of early summer weather (a balmy 75°F), I ascended to the Brooklyn Bridge promenade, thanked God I wasn't at the beach or anything, and took in the immensity of the city night.

Yksi, Kaksi, Kolme

I stopped by Artists and Fleas on North 6th Street in Williamsburg and had a poke through someone's dollar bin which yielded a post-Mutantes solo Rita Lee (circa 1980) about which there isn't much to report - if the term BraPop doesn't exist, I hereby coin it. If the most interesting thing that can be said about a record is that it was allegedly popular with the British royal family...

A better score was Shalamar's second from 1979 called Three For Love - their records are always worth picking up because they usually contain a couple of keeper songs that wouldn't necessarily make it onto a greatest hits collection. The band itself (best known subsequently, if at all, for launching Jody watley's solo career) typifies what I consider the golden era of disco music which actually started circa 1979 when the Comiskey Park Disco Demolition Night was supposedly signaling its end. After all the Studio 54 mania, Time magazine stories, your aunt taking disco dancing lessons etc, the serious dancers and clubgoers (Blacks and Latinos, gay whites) whose music it had been to begin with, resumed dancing and never really stopped.

The early 80s brought the Paradise Garage and West End records, S.O.L.A.R. records in Los Angeles (Shalamar's label), and the first few Madonna singles (not to forget Taana Gardner, Fonda Rae, some of Sylvester's best work, Teena Marie, The Weather Girls etc) and was also the last time dance music recordings were made by live musicians (improvements in electronic instrument technology and the changing aesthetics which spawned house and techno left, by the mid-80s, Washington D.C.'s go-go music as the last genre exempt from the drum machine).

Anyway, Shalamar are pretty easy to return to periodically and I do, though Jody Watley's solo work never caught my attention to the same extent and while her exercise video was not her finest aesthetic hour, she's become sufficiently financially independent that she no longer deals with record companies and puts out her records herself, which I can only applaud. Slowly this is bringing me around to her 2006 release The Makeover which only has one really remarkable song but I've returned to it quite a few times as well, called "Bed of Roses", a collaboration with jazz-inflected electronica group 4 Hero that shows her and them to great advantage - which is really all I meant to say.

Internal Combustion

Listened twice today to Internal Combustion by percussionist Glen Velez - an excellent record! The CD is a 2003 reissue on the Schematic label of what was presumably a vinyl release in 1985. The record is almost entirely solo percussion pieces for various frame drums - North African and Central Asian variants of the humble tambourine, the Irish bodhran and so on.

The pieces are generally repetitive with a regular pulse and no extreme dynamic shifts - a gentle avantgarde-ism that should appeal to anyone who likes Steve Reich's early percussion work (on which Velez has played). The exquisitely precise timbres of the instruments and the fact that the recording captures all their nuance is where much of the beauty lies. Often in Western music, popular and in the concert hall, "exotic" percussion instruments are employed for a bit of passing color and are tucked off to the side of the stage or recorded listening field. In this case, they are in the foreground and miked with such detail that your head could be inside the drum (in a good way!). Every snare rattle and ping of finger on taut goatskin drumhead is delicately rendered.

I also very much like the fact that such quintessentially acoustic music keeps reminding me of experimental electronic "dance" music, particularly Thomas Brinkmann, a similarity that probably hasn't escaped the folks at the Schematic label, whose usual stock in trade is just such music.

Monitor Street

The corner of Monitor Street and Greenpoint Avenue is the location of Uncle Paulie's, a modest truckers' coffee-shop/pizzeria by day and recently the scene of live underground rock shows put together by the redoutable Todd P. Its location is right across the street from the Newtown Creek-Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant, the daytime aspect of which is suitably post-apocalyptic (you can check this Flickr set for more views) but at night, when the tops of its towers are illuminated in some kind of ultraviolet light and the neighboring buildings are all scrap metal yards with guard dog signs and concrete structures with their gates left open because they really contain nothing but the most unsalvageable refuse, you can feel that you've just arrived outside Mordor.

Fortunately a quick right turn (as you dodge the sweeping eye of Sauron) places you amidst friendly faces and interesting rock bands - most recently, on April 7th, Double Dagger drove up from Baltimore (I'll let you find their MySpace page yourself - hints for Googling: they are called Double Dagger and they are from Baltimore - you may not however, immediately find singer Nolen Strals' collaborative art blog 99 Drawings In 99 Days, well worth a look), Metalux drove in from elsewhere in Brooklyn and Green Milk From The Planet Orange flew in from Japan.

As the sole band about which I had no notion, Double Dagger proved to be the unexpected surprise which every evening out should have. A vigorous drummer and bassplayer, as the sole instrumentation, provided a necessarily minimalist but tensile backdrop to Nolen Strals' vocal and physical method acting - on record, his singing seems a little more conventionally emo, but live it's all pretty much transformed by his interaction with the audience. At first his persistent caroming around, singing right into people's faces and bumping into them seems like predictably confrontational tactics, but it becomes clear that he's too gentle about it for that analysis. Ultimately the effect he creates is more like one of the more manageable forms of autism, as if he is operating by a different set of rules about how to interact with people. It's still a bit disconcerting but any number of factors (from his between song remarks to the implicit social contract of the young artist circles in which the band travels where the weirdness tends to be rather contained) combine to make it feel more collaborative than threatening. Of the various approaches to challenging the performer-audience relationship, from G.G. Allin's ordure-flinging to Robert Fripp perching unceremoniously on a high stool, this one seems worth a return visit.

Also worth a return visit (now that I've completely run out of steam for writing about the evening) are Metalux, an electronics duo you should also have no trouble locating on the Web (add the term "carbon" to your search) - part of why they are great is they are not "electronica" - they play electronic music without an Apple logo in sight or an audible rhythmic pattern that could function on anyone's dance floor anywhere. Jenny Graf plays some guitar and has this amazing looking homemade synthesizer with alligator clip connections and a pre-digital era touch-pad controller, while M.V. Carbon combines keyboard and reel-to-reel tape loops made on the fly, which she then modifies by manipulating the metal reels as if they were turntables.

Green Milk From The Planet Orange are yet another Japanese power trio, of which there are currently quite a number - not as alien as Fushitsusha, as inventive as Minimokoto or as needles-in-the-red as High Rise, the three nonetheless purvey a high energy brand of drone/hard-rock psychedelia that was thoroughly convincing while it was happening. They sit down to play as well, which in a packed venue with no stage was a bit of limitation, although occasionally at the start of a song, they stood up on their amps, made the devil horns hand sign to the audience, swung their hair around - generally conveyed "we come to rock" - and then sat down again to resume their intricate finger motions.

Back On The Horse

Sorry for the gap - too much to write about rather than too little!

Just finished George Gissing's New Grub Street, a late Victorian novel focused on the struggle between art and commerce, with the latter, justifiably or no, the clear winner. No character in the book who does not have money ends up anything other than dead or obscure and the characters who become well-to-do by luck, initiative or both, continue to prosper as we wish harder and harder that the novel's deeply cynical point of view were not so vindicated.

It is also, in a sense, a meta-novel, as the characters themselves, all striving in the literary world of their time, continuously debate the relative merits of M. Zola's naturalism versus Dickens' use of farce and melodrama to make his novels tick. Gissing himself, considered a naturalist who evolved into a realist (someday I'll really understand that distinction) is not above a bit of farce and melodrama himself when it serves to keep the plot moving, ennoble an otherwise doomed character with a dignified death and so on.

Although it is not an accepted literary school, Gissing might best be called a pessimist. He is not dispassionate enough in his presentation of grim realities to hide the fact that his sympathies lie with the losers, yet the two main characters who come out on top at the finish (and who he has constructed skillfully enough that we can't actually despise them, at least I don't think we are supposed to), end the book with this bit of dialog:

"Ha! isn't the world a glorious place?"
"For rich people."
"Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils!"