Thursday, June 26, 2008

Review: Willie and Wynton and the boys

The gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt made only one tour of the United States. He spent three weeks in November 1946 on the road with Duke Ellington's band, performing for the first time in Cleveland before making stops in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh before returning to New York for two shows at Carnegie Hall (or almost two - the famously erratic Reinhardt ran into an acquaintance on his way to the concert hall and instead spent two hours at a cafe instead).

The tour was at best a moderate success. (Check out Paul Vernon Chester's account in which he reports that Reinhardt was shocked to discover that Ellington and the members of his band wore underpants of a floral design - although he made sure to picked some up for himself before returning to Europe). Only one obscure recording of the show in Chicago documents their performance chemistry. Still, the event remains on the short list of shows that most jazz fans would have given their right arms to have seen.

I thought of Duke and Django's American adventure last year when I happened on a review of a concert featuring Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Jazz purists will rattle their dentures at the comparison, but the echoes are there: Nelson, while no gyspy virtuoso, shares Reinhardt's instinctual approach to music and love of swing and the standards that populate much of the jazz songbook. Marsalis, for his part, has made no secret of his desire to inherit Duke the mantle of as both a composer (and snazzy dresser). And I'd have given my right arm to have seen this show.

When the shaggy country star joined the elegantly tailored jazz czar on stage in New York in January 2007, they came together on a program of music from the genre where both styles meet: the blues. The evening apparently got off to a rough start, but five songs in Marsalis's band (drummer Ali Jackson, bassist Carlos Enriquez, pianist Dan Nimmer and saxman Walter Blanding) and Nelson finally found their groove.

That groove is what's on display in the new Blue Note release "Two Men with the Blues," which drops officially on July 8. Nelson is clearly the visiting team here (he gets moral support from his longtime harmonica player, the awesome Mickey Raphael) but he's almost like Jackie Chan's character in the Drunken Master movies in that it's precisely his idiosyncratic (and at times just plain off-kilter) approach that becomes his strength. Marsalis and his men are clearly enjoying the challenge of adapting to the bearded outlaw's at times Zen-like disregard for the beat. On "Stardust" in particular, he's at times so far and so comfortably off the beat that you can feel the rest of the band trying to adjust. The result is kind of a group moonwalk with Willie in the lead.

All this disorder leads to some really fresh and engaging solo work form Marsalis, who I often find a little too calculating in his approach. His vocals on "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" and "Ain't Nobody's Business" are also a treat. The setting also allows the jazz roots of Nelson's guitar solo technique, always laying there latent, to come to the fore. (As a footnote, the recording also makes clear how integral Mickey Raphael's harmonica is to the Willie Nelson sound. His presence on the band stand is as understated as ever but just as tightly wound into the larger context.)

The essential pleasure of "Two Men with the Blues" is listening to this meeting of city and country styles as the players work it out. It's actually less of a concert than an especially productive jam session. I'll dare to hope that they both Wynton and Willie carve some time out of their rampant touring schedules to see what else they might be able to come up with. And if not, we'll always have this one night in New York to remember.

Free download
Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis - Bright Lights, Big City (mp3)

Linkage
www.willieandwynton.com

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Seen from the El

One of the many advantages of our recent move from Oak Park to the Edgewater neighborhood in Chicago proper has been the accompanying switch from the Blue Line to the Red Line for the bulk of my public transportation. The Blue Line runs along the Eisenhower Expressway before going underground as you hit downtown and the Loop. The result is you have a view of cars racing (or often inching) along on the surrounding lanes. It's like riding in a ditch.

Much of the Red Line is truly elevated, allowing for some treetop views and world-class eavesdropping on lives near the tracks. But near the Fullerton stop, as you're passing through DePaul University's Lincoln Park campus, you might get the feeling that someone is looking back at you...



That's Frances X McCabe Hall which (literally) overlooks DePaul's Wish Field and Cacciatore Stadium, and nosy subway riders.

www.transitchicago.com/

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The Good Wordle

Here's a cool time waster: Wordle. I used it to create this here word cloud for Oddment of Sandwiches.


And now back to your regularly scheduled life, already in progress.

(Tip from Good Evening)

Monday, June 16, 2008

What Though The Way May Be Long



This delightfully odd little film, set to the song "What Though The Way May Be Long" by Sweden's Esbjorn Svensson Trio, shows how much can be done with very little, on a number of levels. Today it takes on an additional melancholy layer of meaning with the news that pianist Esbjorn Svensson died over the weekend.

More over at The New Low Down.

RIP Esbjorn Svensson


Video: A Picture Of Doris Traveling With Boris

---

Sad news for a Monday: A bright light in the musical firmament has gone out, and much too soon. Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson died over the weekend in a scuba diving accident near Stockholm. He was 44.

When I first heard the Esbjorn Svensson Trio (a.k.a. est), it felt as though the music was arriving from the future and the past simultaneously. Although generally labeled as "jazz," their music drew from classical and Baroque influences even as it reached out the hip hop generation, touring with Bjork and other "rock" groups. I'm proud to have his statement above serve as the motto for this here blog. To say he'll be missed is a severe understatement. est's 12th album, Leukocyte, is scheduled for release in September.

Read also:
See also:

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Who's Watching


Here's an update on activity in my other blogs.

The New Low Down
An Oddment of Sandwiches
This purposely un-bloggy thing has turned into a story collector, of all things, thanks to a writing exercise I came up with back in November. I take the Word of the Day from two word-of-the-day services and try to sketch out a scene that makes use of both words, for example "garboil" and "lacuna". One time what came out was a poem. I try to keep this to a single page in a 7x5 notebook, so most of them come out pretty short. Initially, I tried to use both words in the story which was fine at first, but quickly began to feel forced.

It's been a profitable exercise, artistically speaking, although being in control of all these characters can be a burden. Bumping off a talking penguin is one thing, but with one poor sap I needed two edits to make sure he was dead.

So we'll see where this goes. Most of the pieces I've sketched are still in the notebook, where they will remain. No use crying over spilled ink. But there are several characters who keep turning up asking me for fresh scenes. I get the feeling that two of them are going bound to meet sometime.

Condi: Behind the Music

The things that catch a person's eye.

Not long ago I was on the phone, idly perusing the webdoggle while my father informed me about the weather in South Dakota, when this surreal snippet derailed my rapt filial attention:

Condoleezza Rice meets rock band Kiss

The link led to an Associated Press report on the chance meeting of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and the members of "legendary glam rock quartet" KISS. Seems they were all staying in the same hotel in Stockholm and when Gene Simmons and his cohort found out, they invited the secretary to stop by and say hello.

Sadly, no reporters were present at the actual meeting (which sounds like the setting for either a Don DeLillo novel or a Bullseye Rooster post) but the AP's Matthew Lee, dutifully passes on the official gloss: Rice said it was "fun" to meet the undead novelty act and noted that Kiss "seemed well informed about current events." State Department spokespersons told Lee that the band signed autographs and handed out backstage passes to Rice's staff. The story doesn't indicate whether the Secretary herself accepted a backstage pass.

And then, as so often happens, the interesting details are consigned to the bottom of the piece:
Rice, a classically trained pianist, said she has eclectic musical tastes ranging from Beethoven to Bruce Springsteen [nice alliteration, Mr. Lee]. Hard stadium rockers like Kiss are included in the mix and Rice said her favorite tune of theirs is "Rock and Roll All Nite."

But, she conceded she had never seen the group in concert.

In fact, although she frequently attends classical music performances, Rice claims to have been to only four rock concerts in her life [hopefully the AP has a summer intern verifying this "claim"]. The first was in the early 1960s when she went as a 10-year-old to see Paul Revere and the Raiders in her home state of Alabama.

After her family moved to Colorado, Rice went at the age of 16 went on her first date with an Air Force cadet to see Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. She later saw Earth, Wind and Fire in Denver and her last rock and roll show was a U2 concert in Washington, she said.
Suddenly the painfully stiff, prickly-defensive, seemingly constipated public figure we've become familiar with over the last 7 years makes a lot more sense, at least to me. I look at the face in the State Department photo above and I can picture a young Condi, alone in her room, dorky-dancing with her headphones on, hoping no one catches her.

None of this will make listening to her woman-on-the-verge-of-a-hissy-fit style of speaking any easier to take. It also doesn't absolve her of complicity in prodding us into and stubbornly defending an unnecessary war. But barring a vice-presidential nod, the end is at hand. Rice has given every indication of wanting out of the spotlight once an ignoble dusk settles on the Bush era.

I've never subscribed to the whole "music will set you free" school of thought. But I have to wonder what might have happened if Ms Rice had gotten out to a few more rock and roll shows as a youngster. Given the line up above, you could argue she hasn't been to a "rock and roll show" yet. Big ups to Smokey and EWF, but I'm just saying...

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Preposition trouble

A little something for the Word Dorks from this morning's Chicago Tribune Daywatch:
So many questions: Is the governor's desk on wheels now? Can he raise and lower it like a bus? Are free rides the only way to get the disabled off his desk? What are they doing up there to begin with?

(And yes, the title of this post is a reference to this classic cartoon. Money line at ~3:06)

Monday, June 2, 2008

A Day with Harvey and Bo



I spent much of the morning following a string Harvey Korman videos on YouTube (starting here), which led to a string of Carol Burnett show clips and outtakes. Then this afternoon email brings word that the great Bo Diddley has passed. So it's back to YouTube where a retrospective of this sui generis pioneer is there for the searching.

All in all, a pretty good way to spend a day.

The clip above features the now foundational Bo Diddley riff stripped down to its essence. Why bother with lyrics about buying diamond rings? The riff is the man, as the man is the riff, world without end, amen. (To see just how wound that riff is into rock's DNA see this.)

Requiem in eternas, Bo. And Harvey. You made this world a happier place.

---
Korman clip tip from XO and TT (who are unlikely to ever share a sentence again).