Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

Everybody saw the sun shine, but I saw a dragon fly, while Gretchen said “butter fly” and Eva shook her tuckas, rising towards heaven — posted, May 22, added June 22

Latin what plus it pleases I got to indirectly from McNally p.537 then Dodds online at UCSC – I actuallex sussrd “cowboy Neal at the wheel” and kept pecking.

Tag as words; I was also backlog ing “public saxophone”saxophobe which is a jimi refn

1. McNally, on the Grateful Dead, p.537 about the “Other Ones”
2. Beatles, “I’ve Got a Feeling”

The single most notable feature here is the alternation and eventual superimposition of two separate songs. It’s more than just a medley; the fancy college board musicology term for it is a “quodlibet”. Aside from the many learned Baroque specimens of this technique, you can find two very well known examples from the Broadway show repertoire of the late fifties: “West Side Story”s dueling versions of “Tonight” (one by the rival gangs, and one by Maria), and “Music Man”‘s alternation of “Goodnight My Someone” with “Seventy Six Trombones” (Alan Pollack 1999; I hear “I’ve Got A Feeling” on one hand and “Everybody had a good year” on the other; Pollack suggests>
3. Broadway (Maria sung by two different groups in “West Side Story” or 76 Trombones in “Music Man”) And I’m very influenced by this Pollack, who was otherwise unknown to me, and about 2:30 of this 3:30 clip of the movie version, when Maria and Tony are singing more operatic versions to the Jets more chanted utterances it does take on this effect; probably more obvious in the actual staging. That by then, and with the Beatles example, there is enough repetition of the competing themes that you can hear them and appreciate them side by side or simultaneous or quodlibet.

I also call this effect or something similar “Fast cheap and out of control”.
4. Eigsti/Parlato at Filoli

It was really Tay’s show, with Kendrick Scott drums, Zach Ostroff bass for one set, and then Gretchen joining and really leading the second set, after a long 30 minute break on a beautiful almost perfect or almost infinitely perfect day, but we got a call or retrieved a call during that break, while strolling those grounds, that Eva Zirker, 93, dancer and radical had flown to heaven or was in transit so it shook us, but something about having Gretchen there for the next 50 minutes really helped us deal, and indeed I was staring at a dragon fly while the singer mouthed “butterfly” and I imagined Eva shaking her tuckas and rising above; I had met Gretchen in Philadelphia in 2004 or 2005, at Chris’ I think it was. She had just won the Monk Award and I chatted up she and her band before the show, from adjacent tables. But for a litany of reasons, this show was supreme. And I bought above disc, although did not get a chance to get it signed, or re-greet her, in that I ran into six Ostroffs and Terry and I started simultaneous conversations: Greg, Hannah, Luke eventually ZMO himself caught up to us and we were introduced proper. Terry and I, arriving late, happened to be seated at the very first table, stage left, a little too near the speakers but at a table with two of Zach’s guests, Fidel his Stanford roommate, and Addison, — all three are class of 2017 but transferring in (for instance, Fidel from nearby Canada College, Addison from Wesleyan and Zach from Columbia). I actually said “Are you sitting here, sir?” like in a musical chairs game and then did indeed ask myself about having addressed someone half my age as “sir”. But he was wearing a jacket. I couldn’t help overhearing him say “two 50 minute sets” and eventually guessed and then asked, between him leaving and the actual set, “Is your friend in the band?” — I had heard Tay say on the radio he was using a local musician in his band. Tay actually said “I like to add a younger musician, to my band, here is Zach Ostroff on bass” which is funny because Taylor Eigsti himself is a former prodigy and debuted or even last played at Filoli in 2000 when he was literally 16. The Gretchen set features Taylor and was nominated for a Grammy, for ObliqSound.
5. Palo Alto Jazz Quintet on Uni Ave
at 5:51, after lingering a wee bit too long and actually being 86’d from Filoli, the 1:30 show with two 50s that ended at 3:50, I caught the last couple verses of the last song of Palo Alto Jazz Quintet,then greeted Dan Adams, then his wife and two younger boys, Felix and Leo, and wife the Starr, then zipped over to catch the last swordfight, Ronald Coleman as cousin Roland and TK as Rupert of Henzau, with my paterfamilias before furthering on to Sir Loin of Deadcaus (not to be confused with Deadmau5 of Al Green Toronto). Anyhow I got young Zach’s card, Zach who I claim to be the most signfificant jazz transfer to the farm since Larry Grenadier in 1985; I think he actually is playing tonight at Stanford Jazz Workshop, before zipping on to Los Angeles, Europe and more. If my talk, or panel moderation of jazz history here was called “The Palo Alto / Jazz Quintessence” partly as a tip of hat to PAJQ the term Palo Alto Jazz Quodlibet also comes to mind and I am hereby — and will edit the actual piece, which is called something like “Palo Alto Jazz contrafacts; time space travels, from fregulia to full faith and credit and back” or something — to reflectd such, but in addition to being namechecked, gratuitously and not to disrect Dan Adams, David Denau, Terrigal Burn, their Bass Guy — and indeed I think Zach Ostroff would be well-advised to check out Dan Adams if they don’t already know each other, maybe they could even play together, but Dan is a great role model as a polymath, although jazz’s loss here is Tesla’s gain, and he also said there is a new Oxbow set coming out, his rock band — and it does pop into my head something about Robben Ford telling Miles Davis stories on the bus with Front Porch Blues tour, and that digressing into a discussion of Carlos Santana and someone suggesting perhaps as a hate-hate-hate that Carlos takes long solos but forgets where he left and therefore should re-enter the form — and we are or they play “as it pleases” there are certainly rules — as in, will I remember where I left the story here? — Zack Ostroff is now Palo Alto Jazz meme number 281 towards my predicted 500. I guess he’s the youngest in that list.
One of the thoughts that had me wanting to link Zach Ostroff to PAJQ besides Dan Adams as a role-model or comparison – and Dan was faculty in the early days of SJW while in high school — was that Mr. Ostroff, Greg, the father described visiting Windhover, the Nathan Oliver tribute and chill space on campus and that launched me into trying to decribe, first for Greg then for Zach the Nathan Oliveira jazz riff — PAJQ when I got there the sax player was in a solo and he looked a little like Joey Oliveira:

6. Sammie Sosa redux
Well this goes from a litany to a hodge-podge perhaps but I noticed an ad for a Roland Rahsaan Kirk festival at Cafe Stritch in San Jose and then I saw a separate add for a Ernest Ranglin show in Santa Cruz by Pulse Productions the next day or adjancent or conveniently handy and I wondered if Ernest Ranglin could somehow on guitar sit it with some of the Rahsaan-athon — I almost wrote Kirk-sters, but they call the thing Rahsaan fest — and I wondered about something called Rahsaan-tafari, like Ras-tari, that would combine the music of Roland Rashaan Kirk and reggae; see also, Charlie Hunter doing Natty Dread, Charlie Hunter with Earl Chinna Smith and Ernest Ranglin, Jose Roseman doing ska and more; and sussing that out led me to Ernest Ranglin on his 80th birthday playing with Geoff Vaughn’s Vinyl, which made me search for the source photo for my Vinyl at Cubberley poster, which was 1998 the year that Sammie Sosa and Mark McGuire both broke Roger Maris’s homer record, or crushed it, and got fairly close:


7. Matt Nathanson, at Shoreline and Denver (does not belong here except that Access TV has a live concert from 2013 of Matt and band in a theatre near Denver or Fort Collins and his band includes Chris Lovejoy who also played with Charlie Hunter, and that Matt likes to shake his half-Jewish tuckus. (TK: photo of Matt from Shoreline, 2015)
8. Jimi Hendrix at Berkeley: public saxophone, something I was researching if that’s the word when I started this post, last month, but does not really fit; accept or maybe that it provoked a conversation at least about wanting to hear someone mix klezmer and Hendrix, Sussman Can’t Sleep, what others call “the goy’s teeth.”
9. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road. You could also broadcast over a tape mechanism so that you said something, then heard your own voice a second later in variable lag and could rap off of that if you wanted to. Or you could put on earphones and rap simultaneously off sounds from outside, coming in one ear, and sounds from inside, your own sounds, coming in the other ear. There was going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn’t tune in on and rap off of. (Wolfe, Chapter 6)
10. David Womack will back me up on this, David Womack who was my stage manager and A&R consultant for many years, David Womack of World For Ranson and its predecessor, David Womack of Grateful Dead book sourced by McNally fame: when Charlie Hunter and T. J. Kirk performed at Cubberley, a co-bill with Charlie Hunter Trio — and the only instance of such — there was a moment where Charlie ran thru about a half dozen famous rock guitar riffs; to a lesser extent, this calls to mind when Green Day played the Tinder Block 10-year party and took the stage unannounced and Billie Joe Armstrong was maybe checking his guitar, he played 7 notes of “Smoke on the Water” then about 20 double-speed notes “as it pleases” before he Tre and Bass Guy ripped into about a half dozen of their own songs. Mike Dirnt.
11. Glenn Hartman told me that one of the primary memes of NOKAS was Willie Green and the bassist doing rhythm parts of “Hey Pocky Way” while he and the fiddler did some Jewish melody line; also there is the jazzsinger Jacqui Naylor playing (or her pianist Art Khu) one song while she does the melody to another, like Led Zep or something. Or Rene Marie “Lift Every Voice” to melody of “Star Spangled Baner”. Litany or lists, quodlibet and medleys; hodge-podge, mishmash, potpourri and mash-ups. It’a sll goood. It’s all good.
a 1 and a 2. it’s 2:22 and now I’m at Cafe Zoe in Menlo Park, after stops at Peets –whose wireless was weak, and Prolific Oven where I wrote the bulk of this, and about 4 hours in I realize there’s also the pun, the “other one” is about the beat, the drummers, Kreutzmann and Hart, the polyrhythms and complex rythms and the two drummers working in sync and the song title references that fact; as was explained in McNally, and I want to suss further here with David Dodd; and I also was just listening to a 23 minutes “the other ones>eyes of the world>the other ones from San Diego 1973 and then Zen Tricksters with Tom Constantem when it hit me.