I only heard of this band via The New Yorker, but they are on ATO and apparently have sold out The Independent for a show on April 22 which is also, for some people, Earth Day.
edit to add: the counter says that this is my 600th post. In the last 7 days, my posts have been viewed about 187 times, or about 25 times per day, but a total of 65 different posts where spied, like the long tail thingy, an avanyu, as in I vanyu to van’ me.
edit to add, 30 hours later: this actually goes with the “nashville post” but into it over it evan weiss to appear at BOTH in june with owls:
1. Abe Rosenthal has a book on the murder of Kitty Genovese, three letters to the editor, regarding something published March 10, 2014;
2. Alynda Lee Segarra, 27, Hurray for the Riff Raff, of New Orleans, part of the American Songbook at Lincoln Center, pictured with interesting tattoos on her extended right arm;
3. Africa Now music series at Apollo Theatre, produced by World Music Institute;
4. Tom Harrell’s Trip, a quartet, including Adam Cruz on kit, at Village Vanguard;
5. South African Hugh Masekela at Lincoln’s Rose Theatre — I had forgotten that he was married to Makeba.
6. At the Brooklyn Museum, “Witness: the art and Civil Rights of the Sixties”;
7. “The Library” by Scott Z. Burns and Steven Soderbergh, whose father was an Education professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge;
8. King Lear: includes a quote;
9. Rocky the Broadway adaptation or musical;
(that there were 23 things that caught my eye and I literally noted the other day reminded me of the defunct indie band from the Chapel Hill scene, Small or Small 23, that featured Chuck Garrison, who was the original drummer for Superchunk, i.e. before the very funny Jon Wurster (or maybe even before Jon was funny); the mis-addressed mail to him, to “Chunk”, is the genesis of Chunk as a band name, before they got super; I didn’t recall knowing that Eric Bachman played with them before forming AOL; on Alias Records, not Merge — I remember reading a fanzine or indie article in which Chuck said that one of their fans, at least for a night, was a guy who came out to see them out of curiosity, because he had decided to organize his life around the number 23).
(which actually reminds me that last night I watched only a minute or so of Russell Wilson, on Seth Myers recently, and all I heard was him saying “Be in the moment” and I froze the frame and ripped this shot, titled “Be in the moment” — no, it says “Wilson” but when I forwarded it to email/Yahoo I noted “Be in the moment” and also I noticed that it occurs, as you can clearly see, at 42 minutes of the 60 or 61 minute show; which reminds both of Douglas Adams and Jackie Robinson, and that watching the Giants-Dodgers epic 12-inning 3-2 game, I noted –how could you miss? — that all the players for both teams wore 42; I took as weird in that if you are retiring a jersey why do you reclaim it that way?)
Russell Wilson on Seth Myers, at minute 42, saying “Be in the moment” if you excuse the mixing of television and print
10. “Captain America” the movie features Robert Redford as “smooth bureaucratic fascist;”
11. “Finding Vivian Maier” about a trove of photographs unearthed;
12. “The Unknown Known” which for a small fee, our cable company will let us see quite conveniently in our tv room, about Errol Morris and Donald Rumsfeld;
he passed for an intellectual
whose ideas,
because ideologically useful,
went unexamined
until
in practice
they proved
disastrous (R.B. which means Rich Brody)
this is all from the 4/7/14 New Yorker
as of 4/15/14
(Lion on cover
eating a salad
— as I am in the instant case, at Coupa, with tuna, capers, egg, some magic French dust
— which is ironic in that in this electronic gadget age leafs are devoured by plasma or something even newer; they have taken leave, literally
and turning to the verso
of this handy Mead
COLLEGE RULED
1 SUBJECT
Spiral NOTEBOOK
$5.15 (about half what I paid for this nicoise)
Dayton, Ohio 45429 ,
which factors nicely
Trisha Brown is retiring (that’s lucky 13 if we are still counting)
14. J. Toobin on ACA Affordable Care Act, I try to avoid the sillier name for it;
15. Roseland Ballroom closing — I noted that Lady Gaga was actually on two different late night shows, both repeats; and a little drawing in The New Yorker; and I froze the frame while watching something else, across the street, to point out that the Roseland marquee with her name was visible; and that the Times had a timeline of the venue the other day;
16. “Old School: The d.j. Peter Rosenberg…” from Chevy Chase, Md. (from where one of my college roommates did hail, on Primrose, he they — did they know this Rosenberg, was he an “I Street Boy”?) by Andrew Marantz, like the brand of tv;
17. ‘Final Forms” about death certificates, including a brief Bernard Malamud aphorism, “broke what breaks” that is to say cause of death;
18. long memoir on writing by John McPhee which I would make time to try to eat in one sitting, before or after meditating with great minds like Kosinski, Shields, Yardley, Fagin, Foster Wallace and Vonnegut; “Elicitation: who is there to help you but the person who is answering your questions” I think that’s a question, although I deleted the punctuation symbol, #@&^!
19. Jonathan Lethem in Berlin, who I first caught sniff of at The Gathering Cafe in Carroll Gardens, in winter 2001, wow that’s 13 years ago, when we were young; He’s working on a novel, “Pending Vegan”, at Sea World, on or off antidepressant Celexa, withdrawal; “Irving Renker” who “crawled out of his archetype like a lobster from his shell”;
20. an ode to “All in the Family” which survived a rough Cockney childhood “Till Death Do Us Part” — ook. I mean, in the U.K, although they might have said British.
on the home stretch, flipping TTM (the trusty Mead) to top of third page, just three more little alters, to some day at which to worship; then I draw a line across the page and continue, ignoring everything I learned about “rules” in “college”: Gu Wenda at Cantor Thurs 5/1 7 p.m. Aleta Hayes + Lava Thomas “Being Scene” Fall, 2013 cf Carrie Mae Weems; then another little line, almost at 45 degree angle, like Isoceles, NYT “rent” NYT Pulitzer, which is actually illegible, except I cheated and turned the page to reveal and remind to make a known known my notes on Fagin; back to, if anyone dear 7 billion hypothetical readers, is actually out there(from the Cantor newsletter, APMAJU2014:
21. George Packer, Home First Fires: How Soldiers Write Their Wars; “If I Die in a Combat Zone” Tim O’Brien, 1973, a Eugene McCarthyite Minnesotan;
22. David Denby on “Noah”: “craziest big movie in years”.
23. on C3, which is the “third cover” i.e. inside the back cover, there is an advertisement for a financial services company with headline
IRS or IRA?
and I read it as
IRS or IRAQ
outro and this took me 66 minutes plus or minus 23 bites of my salad 1 minute on still pretty stupid cell phone with my sweety Terry, plus “one hour” Tuesday:
edita: and this is ruining the purity of a post on 23 links to The New Yorker but is similar in form and in the way that it maps my mind, I grabbed from Palo Alto’s College Terrace library, because it was an arm’s length from Fagin, “This Indian Country” by Frederick E. Hoxie, but only got as far as glossing “pueblo indians” to learn that on page 270 before the New Deal there was an attempt to “deprive” the Pueblo people of their New Mexico land, and that David Starr Jordan, then President of Stanford, was at the meeting where that idea was either advanced or retreated. Hmm. (as Jody Naranjo, Santa Clara would say: I tend to think of Santa Fe area artists as merely artists and not activists or survivors of a type of purge
)
edita, five days later: library tells me they want the magazines back, mostly unread. I actually had but did not read the April 14 edition, Obama spoon-feeding something, and flashed to an article by Sasha Frere-Jones about Erika M. Anderson, from South Dakota, pka EMA, article entitled “Improv Everywhere: EMA flirts with chaos.
Kudos to Dan Fagin ’85, Pulitzer-Prize-winning former Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth. What I remember most about his directorate was them sitting around the lounge in Robinson Hall watching “The McLaughlin Group”and their banter and discussion would soon escalate to drown out the real pundits. Besides Reuters reporter Alison Frankel ’85, the group included eventual Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Jim Newton ’85. A cub reporter that year was another eventual New York Timesman, Jacques Steinberg ’88.
-Mark Weiss ’86, a blogger at “Plastic Alto” on WordPress
(I posted this on disqus section of The Dartmouth, article by Treeman Baker)
see also:
a slightly greater dose of fagin/mclaughlinism:
this is the mcguffin:
There’s a rock band outside Philadelphia, and about 60 miles from Toms River, New Jersey, that Dan Fagin chronicles, whose song and song title references the Paracelsian notion of “dose-response relationships” that he describes regarding the cancer cluster near the pharmaceutical companies, I noted gleefully: Circa Survive, on Equal Visions Records:
And because Dan Fagin and I are both products of the 1980s, a more obvious association would be the Joe Jackson chestnut “everything gives you cancer/there’s no cure there’s no answer” which is probably not technically correct; Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello songs and lyrics were part of a reporter’s tool kit back at The Dartmouth; I remember Dan and I having a bit of a spat over whether it was too cheeky to lift a Joe Jackson song title for use on a “news brief” headline: he was right, I was wrong. I feel it. (If I didn’t say that to him at journalism alumni events in Hanover and New York in the late 1990s…).
Kudos, congrats and a hearty wah-hoo-wah to my former editor Dan Fagin for winning the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for his book “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation” (Bantam Books, New York, 2013), which deals with the relationship between industry and toxics, especially in a New Jersey community, home to Ciba-Geigy. I’m just working thru the book, thanks to Palo Alto libraries and it reminds me of: Rachel Carson, Erin Brockovitch, but also Bong’s “The Host” and various detective stories, like Peter Falk’s Columbo.
If I run for Palo Alto City Council in fall, 2014 I will likely either read above or at least read Jonathan Yardley’s review of such, and drop the name of the book during any public fora about development here. That plus, George Packer “The Unwinding”, which I already own, have read and try to paraphrase mention whenever I can, like here.
I mean “History of Future Cities Slash Palo Alto” despite my headline.
See / hear also: KQED Forum today on Steinbeck, “Grapes of Wrath” but also “In Dubious Battle”. Not to imply anything about this politics, but Jonathan Yardley and “Grapes of Wrath” were both born in 1939, so to speak.
If I can figure out a way to mention “You Know Me, Al” by Ring Lardner, I will, but it probably depends on whether the Giants make it to post-season.
edit to add: this is the fifteenth time I mention or describe “Yardley” here in “Plastic Alto” according to the search function although I may be creating a composite character comprising various parts of the four actual Yardley’s I claim to recall meeting/reading.
edita, later that day: the context within which I am skimming this book has to do with development in Palo Alto, and the fact that some people are for and actively promoting a “Manhattanization” of Palo Alto (population, 60,000 but with at least $25B in commercial real estate); I think of us skipping over Manhattan and proceeding to Dubai, although so far, the only connections I find is a law firm with offices in both places and several software firms based here with offices there. Here is esteemed Mr. Yardley on Brook’s book, and I’ll refrain from pilfering his Rudyard Kipling quote. We have a Kipling Street here in Palo Alto, where the once-mighty restaurant Zibbibo, at 430, is closing, to make room for more office space and would-be jet-setters, visiting Dubai, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Mumbai.
“Jazz has always been a music of fusion. ‘Nothing from New Orleans is ever pure’ — so goes an old throwaway phrase. But even by Crescent City standards, early jazz was an especially complex melange. The Southern mentality that obsessively measured infinitesimal gradations — delineating differences of quadroon from octoroon the way Aquinas demarked angels from cherubim and seraphim — quickly came to a cul-de-sac in tracing the lineage of this radical new music. Impure at its birth, jazz grew ever more so as it evolved. Its history is marked by a fondness for musical miscegenation, by its desire to couple with other styles and idioms, producing new, radically different progeny. In its earliest form, jazz showed an ability to assimilate the blues, the rag, the march and other idioms; as it evolved, it transformed a host of even more disparate sounds and styles. It showed no pretensions, mixing as easily with vernacular musics — the American popular song, the Cuban son, the Brazilian samba, the Argentinean tango — as with concert-hall fare. Jazz in its contemporary form bears traces of all these passages. It is the most glorious of mongrels.”
It is difficult to imagine a more succinct description of jazz’s evolution and central character. Cross-fertilization is its dominant characteristic, which is why the balkanization to which its performers, composers and listeners are too often prone — dividing as they do along lines of style, of tradition and of, alas, race — is so unrelated to the true reality of the music. Jazz is a mix, as Gioia conclusively demonstrates, not merely of musical styles but of other influences, some of which are not immediately detectable: the phonograph recording and the radio, the ceaseless combat between art and commerce, a seductive, pervasive “mythology . . . that romanticized the jazz life,” the pull between tradition and the “forward-looking” impulse of modernism. The point about jazz is not that everything within it seems so different but that everything connects.
The History of Jazz is not absolutely perfect. Gioia deals with the questions of race that are so central to every aspect of it but tends to dance around them; an extended discussion of the conflicting and mutually reinforcing strains of Jim Crow and its obverse, Crow Jim, is missing, and is a major omission. Every reader’s personal inclinations will at times run aground on Gioia’s judgment; I happen to think he overrates Stan Kenton and, in emphasizing the “chamber-music style” of the Modern Jazz Quartet, underemphasizes its persistent, if at times subtle, swing. Though he provides a useful, highly selective list of recommended recordings, it is a pity that his publisher did not include a compact disc of illustrative selections, as Yale University Press did a couple of years ago for Barry Kernfeld’s What to Listen for in Jazz.
Never mind. If you are looking for an introduction to jazz, this is it. If you know and love jazz well, this is your vade mecum. Me, I expect to be reading around in it for the rest of my life. (boldness, mine; mbw)
Ok, so that’s a 500-word pilfer of Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, from 1997, praising Ted Gioia’s “The History of Jazz.” In penance, I will trot over to Palo Alto Mitchell Park library, also known as Cubberley Multipurpose Room (where I once booked Broun Fellinis to jam, past their curfew; and somebody else once booked, at a Japanese fair, Shing02 and The Terracota Troops), and check out (literally and figuratively) Gioia’s book on the master works, as soon as I finish this short riff and chug the rest of my Peet’s. I started at said library but got there 45 minutes before it’s opening. I started this bit of digging — perhaps not unlike Frida the cocker spaniel pawing away at the sands of Half Moon Bay, in her youth — with the electronic version of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s New York Times magazine telling of the Geechie Wiley and Elvie Something tale — rare blues sides, by rarer PKA’s, on Paramount, but in Wisconsin (huh!?). I don’t recall if the article mentions Ted Gioia but the wiki does. He wrote a book on the Delta Blues and covered some of the same ground as yesterday’s Times, but got there well before. I did digress into Jack White in Nashville but not the Ugandan guy he produced recently that I only just learned of on KZSU, when I called to ask the dj to use “Tweed Funk” “Real Mother for Ya” as a chaser for Grand Funk “We’re an American Band” — I was going to suggest to a member of Tweed Funk they do a mash-up called “We’re a Wisconsin Funk Band!” — and will certainly forward back towards those lake areas the “news” about Elvie.
I’m also carrying around Stella Brooks’ Q4 2013 royalty statement from Smithsonian Folkways and debating the ethics of describing it: she, ten years past passing, raked in another $4.37 — about what I spent on my cappucino — for 2 sales of a compact disc she splits mit Greta Keller, some album downloads, some track downloads and some digital streaming. Depending on your frame of reference you either want to toast to Moe Asch and Folkways>Smithsonian (going under the name Cecille Chen at POB 37012 MRC 520, Washington, DC 20013) or Alabama shake your fist at them, like the fictional version of Dave Von Ronk, played by Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis, asking for the winter coat of Mel TK (played by TK) but based apparently on Asch. (I was managing the music estate of Stella Brooks for an 18-month term a few years back, or at least her niece told me to believe I was if the actual Executor never did — if there is a distinction — so I am indirectly comparing Stella Brooks myth and legend with aforesaid Elvie and Goochie, before digressing or evolving into Yardley and Gioia).
The year that Jonathan Yardley won the Pulitzer his son Jim Yardley (and Bill) was my classmate and running-buddy at Gunn High; their mom (the critic’s ex-wife) was a Knight Fellow at Stanford for the year, 1980-1981. Henceforth the name Yardley has struck more than a few diddley-bo chords all these front porch and Piedmont blues seasons. As y’all can ascertain on your own part by punching that name into the Plastic Alto / wordpress search function — not quite an obsession but a little hyper-caffeinated.
Gioia plays the tiniest cameo role in my “The History of Palo Alto / Jazz”, which is either the ultimate utterance on the entire history of Western Civ and this subject or just a rough draft and query about a proposed event via PAHA that would, more rightly feature Mr. Gioia and a few select others (i.e. “WOGS” or “the WOGS”, although it could, now that I am tracking Jana Herzen, see below, be amended to “the WHOGS”, however you say that: Ar-whoooglie, like a Fields medal Kyoto Prize holler.
If you’ve continued on in good faith for another 600 words here, might as well go all in, taking the hint from the algorithm higher power at wordpress and read the three related “Plastic Alto” posts:
1. “Jazztime travels or jazz scribe contrafacts” which is also known as “The History of Jazz / Palo Alto” which is about a 20,000 word tome, be forewarned, wear sunscreen; it’s officially at 24,385 which does not include a deleted pre-amble about Vijay Iyer, and I recommend some of the comments, especially by New Ager Steven Halpern and the guy who wrote a book on Vince Guaraldi; if you are starting here, please know that I claim sometimes that it is recursive as a matter of style; pingback but it also “sticks” to the mast head (dude tossing bowling ball), if you enter “Plastic Alto” via the front door rather than from the search-injuns.
2. Don Cherry at Dartmouth which is actually a draft of something that was eventually ripped to shreds and printed in abstract in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine; 1,899 words, I think I could go to 5K quite easily. The later draft, on some long-abandoned word processing machine or a hard paper copy filed who knows where, but probably not, with my luck, the three inch think file, used a “pied piper” motif for the lead, beyond “this specific silence” which is a little passive and passé.
3. Something about Sam Rivers at Dartmouth, based on noticing a poster in the lobby of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth. About 1,609 words, written five days after his death, but like this relies too much on lifting from other works, and jumps around too much. I’m amiss in my miscegenation of topics.
edita: an hour overtime, since this is a sort of crate-digging exercise from the gecko, why not outro with The Mindbenders version of (something associated with Stella Brooks), “She’s a Little Piece of Leather”? (if interobang is a question and a exclamation, what is a question and a colon? And 4) I was originally 90 minutes ago, clutching now wrinkled version of yesterday’s fish paper to be, Aidin Vizari on closing of Cafe DuNord and Red Devil Lounge, and what it all means):
edita edita:
Jim Yardley (son of Jon) is now Rome Bureau chief of NYT and his bio somehow fails to mention all our mutually formative one-on-one contests at Escondido Village basketball courts in the spring of 1981. Meanwhile Jonathan Yardley, who I’ve never met, is about 75, writes sporadically for the Post, and recommends from the crop of 2013 Daniel Brook (sic, no relation to Stella) “A History of Future Cities” which rings a faint bell with me, if not a Faith Bell, and, at least to this hyper-Peet’sied bundle of synapses fits the format of my jazzscribe/contrafact thingy.
edit to add, finding 90 minutes at the end of the day: to luxuriate in the act of revising or editing or proofing, even, the 1600 above, and/or skimming or noting or plugging my bounty, the three bound volumes / titles with which I did abscond from the public libraries (plural; two stops) today: 1) Brook, “…Future Cities” (2013); 2) Gioia, “Jazz Standards” (2012); and, because this title is the only thing in our system by him, Yardley, “Second Reading” 2011 — and it lists 6 other possible titles; with Gioia, we have two other titles but they are “in storage” as we feed the Gods of Pork — And Capital Investment — our libraries are under construction, two out of five, that is, which is great in baseball but pretty crappy for a library system).
And speaking of fathers (Jim’s), my own called to say that David Wiegand had a story in the Chronicle about a new tv series and he wanted to know if my friends Steve and Eric Cohen (sons of Paul, the math whiz) were involved. No, Dad, that’s Joel and Ethan and “no H”. But picking up the tear sheet from him, and dropping off some matzo ball soup, I was psyched to see Edward Guthman on prince of posters David Lance Goines.
And so far about half way thru this exercise I have made about 22 small fixes, not that the thing is now strung with pearls, as my Editor Ed Burns used to say.
Revision strawberry letter small 23: this is too many threads even for this tangled web but: Mel TK above is Mel Novikoff, played by Jerry Grayson, who passed away post-filming but pre-release, his dates being 1935-March, 2013; the reviewer for the East Bay Express suggesting that the naming of the Moses Mo Asch character is a tip of hat to legendary Bay Area film exhibitor Mel Novikoff, in whose name SF Film Society gives an award, this year, next month, going to the near-Yardleyan (and Dartmouthian) David Thomson, even though, as Dave Von Ronk’s widow and many others suggest, the depiction of Asch or the asch-archetype is not very flattering.
And running out of steam I will refrain from dovetailing the Yardley article about Cannery Row to the Steinbeck mention above (i.e. that I wrote and posted after this). For the Gioia book, I opened to a page at random, p. 429-430 and noted a song I don’t actually recognize by name, but has versions from Hamiet Bluiett (and I will fact-check that spelling, even if Gioia presumably did) and Monk, in 1996 and 1952, “these foolish things”.
Ok, I lied. I’m still here. Let’s end with a link to Greil Marcus interviewing David Thomson for the LA Reader of Books, because Marcus says, first off that he has read Thomson(who appears May 4, at screening of “The Lady Even” with Barabara Stanwyck)’s new book “The Big Screen” but admits to being a “slow reader” – I was toying with asking Yardley to consent to an email interview and asking him just how fast does he read?
I saw some amazing student art from Gunn, Paly and Jordan students today at Palo Alto Art Center, part of the third Youth Speaks Out event. The pieces, drawings, painting, photography, graphics and ceramics, were from five PAUSD teachers’ and posted anonymously, along with unsigned “artist statements” about the work.
I know personally the woman who organized the show, a local mom/activist, but I will refrain from mentioning her by name, in keeping with the vibe of the show — although I was glad for her name being on the poster and enjoyed and was inspired by our chat today.
The work pictured above, a detail from a piece that depicted a Mexican tricolor flag morphing into Old Glory, with little vignettes, reminded me of Enrique Chagoya and the Orozco murals.
About a year ago I clipped an article from the Paly paper in which a student said something like “My Dad says I should study computer programming and we think ‘coding’ should be mandatory at Palo Alto High so that we can all get good jobs someday and hopefully become billionaires” which made me rather sad, but the work I saw today was like a field of poppies blooming, each one a wonder. I called Terry and got her to meet me back at the Center because the show is closing.
I am tempted to contact the teacher, Deanna Messinger, and try to put the student in touch with Enrique, who I saw from across the room last night at Paula Kirkeby’s 80th birthday party, at Santa Clara University’s De Saisset Museum — I did greet Kara Mara, Ms. Chagoya, from about 20 pesos I mean paces.
unsigned student art from Youth Speaks Out in Palo Alto
This caught my eye because I had seen Penn and Teller’s movie about Vermeer and his technique — this student does the opposite and uses free-hand to balance the technology, as she explains in her statement.I think both of these students work with Deanna Messinger at Gunn.
There were also some incredible ceramics in the show; I think they work with Jordan King a new teacher here who studied at San Jose State.
Terry noticed and shot this beautiful flowering tree in the courtyard of the art center
Carolyn Digovich did a miraculous job producing Youth Speaks Out; every piece in the show is a potential life-changer. “Kudos” does not say enough in this case. (It’s a Greek word and was probably pronounced, as the British still do, “Cue-doss”).
Lynne Arriale and several other jazz musicians played a tribute concert at Dinkelspiel Auditorium on the Stanford campus in February, 2014 in honor of the famous scientist Leonard Herzenberg, of the Herzenberg Lab, who died last fall.
Herzenberg’s daughter is Jana Herzen, an artist and label owner, who grew up on campus and is now based in New York City. I believe the label name “motema” means “heart” in a Congolese dialect. The performers all record for her label.
I don’t know the family, nor did I attend the concert, although I would have liked to. Someone mentioned to me earlier today, however, that her friend Jana, the founder of Motema, was from Palo Alto. (The closest my jazz world overlaps with Motema is that Jacques Schwarz-Bart, a saxophonist who leads a recent session on the label, once played the Cubberley Sessions as a sideman for Blue Note recording artist James Hurt. And that Babatunde Lea, who recorded for that label, also participated in 2003 in Say It Thru Song, a workshop in the Vallejo school district that was organized by my friend Tracey Hartwell. And also last night even, at Paula Kirkeby’s 80th birthday party, the bandleader was Akira Tana, who has or had a duo project with Motema artist Rufus Reid, a bassist. I’m going to amend my “Jazz History of Palo Alto” article to include Jana Herzen’s history here).
I heard something funky on KZSU, on Don Farrell’s show, and then found this other performance by the same artist, Willis “Gator” Jackson, from the 1950s.
Forrest Bryant, the KZSU jazz deejay and author, reviewed Anton Schwartz’ recent release “Flash Mob”, the tenor’s fifth, all on his own diy label. I had heard a track — and was digging it — a few days ago on Clifford Brown’s show at KCSM, a show called “American Jazz Countdown” and he had it number one with a github (I admit I don’t know what a “github” is, but I understand it is very disruptive of the bullet industry, but not as disruptive of the guy who barged into Tom Parkinson’s office fifty years ago and stole his face, literally, and killed the Berkeley English professor’s assistant — sorry to be so macabre, on a lovely spring afternoon, on my way to a nice lady’s birthday party, a a museum).
I like to think of Anton as “Antwon” like the fat piano player from New Orleans, so I was glad to see that Fo thinks track number 8, a Monk cover, is also kinda 504. (“five oh fo'” > “fi’ oh Fo'” — I smell chicory either way).
I will check this out Fo sho.
(And when I drop sounds and syllables I still do the Keeney Jones test and make sure I do not sound like a founder of the Dartmouth Review — not to digress again, any more than is typical in or on Plastic Alto — but I read a good couple pages in a book on censorship in the schools and boned up on the defense of “Adventures of Huck Finn” which is sometimes challenged for its language, even at a Mark Twain Middle School in Virginia – and maybe I mention Keeney Jones or whatever his name is cuz I just mentioned William F. Buckley in a previous post: I wish I was channeling Lord Buckley instead).
KZSU is 90.1 on your radio dial for those of you who remember terrestrial radio.
STRAIGHTAHEAD JAZZ – The 5th release from this Bay Area tenor saxophonist (who abandoned a Stanford Ph.D. in artificial intelligence to follow his muse) is easy to like, full of catchy, satisfying original material. The band includes Menlo Park native Taylor Eigsti on piano, and trumpeter Dominick Farinacci is a really good fit too.
Fo’s Picks: 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9
1. 6:09 – upbeat churning groove; bright piano & sax solos 2. 5:09 – slinky melody, dragging swamp feel, nice trumpet, hopping sax 3. 7:48 – drum intro; tight horns & rolling turbulence; piano takes sudden flight 4. 6:49 – cute little melody with a celtic drone, gets perky in middle 5. 6:33 – lazy, bluesy, so nice: trumpet/bass duo break, soulful sax 6. 7:52 – upbeat odd-meter tune, light driving groove becomes forceful 7. 7:19 – lovely Kenny Dorham ballad, muted trumpet leads, eloquent solos 8. 4:28 – perky Thelonious Monk riff theme gets a New Orleans feel 9. 6:07 – relaxed, meandering tune, flowing toward mystery 10. 4:14 – upbeat swing with a bit of swagger, sax lays it out 11. 4:29 – slow romantic ballad, just sax & piano
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 