Rollins band

Philip Larkin said that in jazz, "the unconscious describes itself almost in its own terms."

Even when he's not using a tenor saxophone, Sonny Rollins can describe jazz as well as anyone. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sonny in 1999. That was probably the peak moment of my now-neglected music journalism "career." It was perhaps a forty-five-minute-long phoner, nothing earth-shattering. But I knew I was crossing paths with someone to whom we'll still be listening in a hundred years.

How do you know music journalism isn't going to be your livelihood? In my case, it happened when I found myself sitting in the upper deck of a football stadium waiting to see the British band Bush start their set during a festival. They were due to play in about three hours, and I had to think of something reasonably serious to say about them. And I sat there thinking, "You know, I took this job because I thought it was cool...."


FMFM: Sonny's "St. Thomas," one of the simple pleasures I suspect I'll always enjoy: the rolling Caribbean rhythm from Max Roach, the heard-it-your-whole-life theme, the sweetness of the improv, and the talky communication among the players.

In the disco

Fred Armisen gets his due in the NYT. I was lucky enough to see him perform as the opener for Jeff Tweedy at the Great American Music Hall a few years ago -- it's the show documented in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. We weren't expecting a comic as an opener, but oh wow, did we enjoy Fericito.

I see that he's a fan of Les Savy Fav, who you'd probably remember if you ever saw them play. They had -- have? -- a highly confrontational frontman who jumps around like a lunatic, messes with people in the crowd, and plays with the lighting cans in the club, the microphone stands, or whatever else is available. I was never terribly into their music -- a cousin of math-rock or prog-rock that didn't have much emotional range, as I recall -- but as singer schtick goes, well, I guess you could do worse. High-energy stuff.

One time I saw Les Savy Fav at Fletcher's in Baltimore, opening for someone I actually cared about. I was leaning -- really squatting -- against a post fairly near the stage in the mostly empty club. The singer jumped over the monitors and started getting in people's faces, and eventually decided to play like he was going to choke me against the post with the mic cord. As soon as it got close to my neck, I just grabbed it and held on. He had about four feet of mic cord to play with, and was forced to stand in place and sing for once. I remember him looking back at me as if to say, "Oh man, how long are you going to make me do this? Okay, you got me." I made the poor bastard suffer for a minute or two, and he never got in my face again that night.

[Heads-up: I know you're all itching to comment on this stuff, so I thought I'd let you know that I added a word verification step to the commenting function. I've been getting a lot of random spam comments lately, and I'm just trying to keep that stuff away from here. Sorry for the inconvenience.]


FMFM: Merle Haggard's A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player In The World

Ten years after

Ladies and gentlemen, the Spin Doctors have reunited.

It's hard to imagine that they were actually once a jam band that prompted hardcore fans to drive around the country and tape all their shows. They blew their shot at maintaining a Phish-ish or Widespread Panic-like audience by having big radio hits that were popular on lite-rock, "at-work" stations. My amigo Eric calls it "failure by success": the shark-jumping career pattern when everyone loses interest in you because you're overexposed, and you lose both your original fan base and your newly acquired fans.

Cracker failed by succeeding too, and they're still together -- touring incognito from time to time, no less. I suspect that most rock bands find it easier to quit (i.e. break up and/or move on to other projects) than to keep making music when 90% of their fans have stopped listening -- even if they still have something to say musically.


FMFM: The tense, exploratory Filles de Kilimanjaro

"We can all pitch in"

Now I've seen everything. A couple of days ago I noted that environmentalists in California were fighting to shut down a windmill farm. And now George W. Bush has urged Americans to stop driving so much. This from the same President who believes -- or believed -- that unfettered consumption is "an American way of life" due to the "bounty of resources in this country."

As I've noted before in this space, I'm happy that conservation is becoming more an American imperative than a lefty cause. If it's for geopolitical reasons more than environmentalist reasons, I'll still take it.

Meanwhile, these people are still out there. I see that Jonah Goldberg is applauding. Barf.


FMFM: The bizarre musical dialogue between Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk on take two of "The Man I Love," from Miles Davis And The Modern Jazz Giants. You can hear them thinking.

Last train running between the water and the power lines

More tales of Allen Toussaint and his evacuation from New Orleans. [UPDATE: The Times gave him a shout-out too.]


FMFM: Toussaint's performance at JazzFest 2005

Easily amused

This had me cracking up for quite awhile. I spent plenty of time with Topps baseball cards as a kid (surprise!), and I remember a lot of these.

I especially enjoyed the "white Oscar Gamble" reference.

The answer is blowin' in the wind

Environmentalists in favor of shutting down a windmill farm. Wow.

When rival environmentalist factions are pitted against each other, they can look silly. Do we save the birds, or do we reduce dependence on fossil fuels? Some people don't care about either. It does seem like the best response, as as always, is to reduce demand by encouraging good habits. Californians cut their energy consumption by ten to fifteen percent almost immediately during the 2001 power crisis. I wonder whether those habits really stuck with people, though.

It can be frustrating to try to live gently among people who won't do the same. I had a houseguest this week who knew how to turn on the lights wherever he went, but didn't seem to know how to turn them off. My housemate loves to open all of our shore-facing windows, but he tends to leave the heat on when he does it. Some of my best friends set their thermostat at 74 degrees in the winter, and then open the front door for some fresh air. One of my old roommates subscribed to Earth Island Journal, but used a space heater to warm his room to 85 degrees so he could do hot yoga every night during the power crisis.

While many eyes are fixed on gasoline prices, the other gas -- natural gas -- is likely to be in short supply this winter, which will lead to high heating bills. I suspect most people won't really understand until the shortage hits them in the pocketbook.

Could I do better with my consumption habits? Sure. I could drive less. (My new vehicle uses about 35% less gasoline than the old one, and I take the bus significantly more often than I used to.) I could set the thermostat even lower and make my roommate put on a sweater, but it's hard to convince him to change his habits, and I'd be a lousy roommate if I harped on it. I realize that Americans' standards of comfort are higher than the rest of the world's, and that no matter what I do, I'll probably be a relatively hoggish consumer of resources. But it's no reason not to try to develop better habits.

[Tangentially related: I don't mean to make light of people fleeing imminent tragedy, but this picture does make you wonder how many economy-size cars there are in Houston.]


FMFM: Charles Mingus' frantic and passionate Let My Children Hear Music. How about those song titles?

Death from 1979

First there were the Dead Kennedys, and now this.

I saw a bit of the Dead Hensons last weekend too. I can't say I'm a fan of my generation's obsession with its own youth, but I did find them pretty entertaining for a little while.


FMFM: The John Abercrombie side of McCoy Tyner's 4x4

True stories

An old friend makes it to safety, and tells his story. It's really terrifying to think that there are hundreds of thousands of people in very similar situations... and with another storm bearing down, there could be many more by this weekend.


FMFM: Cannonball Adderley, Milt Jackson, Wyn Kelly, Percy Heath and Art Blakey grooving hard on Things Are Getting Better, a very well-recorded and fun date from 1958. The interplay is loose, and the tone is relentlessly upbeat. A pleasure to spin, especially with the Angels down by three runs.

Not a drop to drink

More good reporting on California's levees, and Bay Area disaster preparedness (part one and two).

Can't believe people are still disregarding all the warnings, and pretending it's not going to happen. Obviously there are risks to living here, but to be completely unprepared for inevitable scenarios is ridiculous. Check out those poll results: 11% profess a lack of awareness of earthquake risks, and 41% are "not very well" prepared. It sounds like I'd better have twice as much canned food and bottled water for my neighbors' sake.


FMFM: Three versions of the Boss's fabulous "I'm Goin' Down" -- the album cut, an unedited version of the same take, and a live one

The end of summer Camp

I see this morning that onetime Braves righthander and present-day scumbag Rick Camp has been sentenced to prison for conspiring to steal money from a mental health institution.

Camp had a decent enough career in the big leagues, and was an excellent closer for a mediocre team for a couple of years. But his greatest moment is missing from that article, and everyone who saw it surely remembers it. Camp, you see, hit an 18th inning homer off Tom Gordon on the 4th of July 1985 -- by then, it was well into the 5th of July -- to tie an ultramarathon contest at 11-11. I was all of twelve years old, but I stayed up late to watch that freaky game, all the way to its conclusion at 3:55am.

Camp, a career .060 hitter at the time, was batting only because the Braves were out of players. According to at least one account from someone who's reviewed the film, Camp took two embarrassing swings to fall behind 0-2 with two outs before connecting for a solo shot into the left field seats. I've seen the clip in recent years, but it really doesn't convey the shock that I felt watching at home at the time. Camp promptly gave up five runs in the top of the 19th to lose the game, although the Braves made it interesting by countering with two in the bottom half of the inning. (The final was 16-13.) Atlanta residents reportedly believed the city was under attack when the Braves finally shot off their fireworks above the stadium as dawn broke over the city.

Camp was released, along with veterans Pascual Perez, Len Barker and Terry Forster, the following spring. Maybe that's when the trouble began for Camp. The Braves' housecleaning might have seemed geared toward a youth movement, although they signed Omar Moreno the same day. Guess not. Anyway it would be a few years before they fielded a really good team -- they lost 106 games in 1988, and still weren't very good in 1990 before going all the way to that fabulous Game Seven against Jack Morris in 1991.

Oh, to have that kind of energy again -- staying up all night for a mid-season ballgame. And if only pro athletes didn't so frequently turn out to be swindlers, crooks, wife-beaters and otherwise unsavory individuals once they get off the field. Bah on you, Rick Camp.


FMFM: One Never Knows, John Lewis's 1958 soundtrack for No Sun In Venice. It's a bit of an adventure sometimes for the MJQ, but generally it's spacious and mellow listening -- often kind of like a Satie gymnopedie. It's apparently a 1959 pressing (with "experimental" label), found in the $1 bin at Amoeba.

Who's ready?

"If Hurricane Katrina didn't prove it to you, I don't know what will," Mayor Gavin Newsom said recently at a news conference unveiling a citywide public awareness campaign aimed at getting people ready for a major disaster. "I'm not waiting, in the event of an emergency, for Air Force One."

Septembering

Apparently I was the luckiest man in the Fillmore last night. People were asking $100 a ticket to see the Decemberists, but somehow I scored a face-value ticket just moments after I arrived at the venue. I sort of felt bad watching people leave in frustration. It's not like I'm a huge Decemberists fan -- a dear friend recently sent me a copy of Picaresque, and I thought I'd follow up by checking out their show. My amigo and his amiga were there, and I ran into two more friends inside. Good company, fine music.

We hung out in the poster room during the first act, but emerged just in time to see Petra Haden's ten-piece female choir -- the Sellouts -- commence their nearly-full-album cover version of The Who Sell Out, an album I pretty much know like the back of my hand. Familiarity with the record apparently helped -- most of my companions thought it wore thin rather quickly, although the big hit "I Can See For Miles" seemed to get a big response. Haden's group eliminated four songs from Side Two, jumping from "Miles" straight through to "Sunrise" and "Rael", but otherwise did everything -- the fake ads and station identifications included. They vocalized the drum parts when necessary, made backward guitar noises on "Armenia City In The Sky", and nailed the "Love-love-love-long" bit in "Our Love Was, Is". An incredible performance in many ways, although I'm not sure I'd ever want to stand through it again.

Anyway, the Decemberists. I wasn't totally sold on Colin Meloy as a frontman on record. I liked his historical fiction, but wasn't sure about his nasal, Neutral Milk Hotel-esque vocal tics. I really warmed up to him at the show, however. He emerged as a sympathetic character rather than what I feared -- a vain, self-absorbed love-me type -- and approached the mic with wit and charisma. I found the occasional circus/carnival instrumentation engaging too. At some point in the tortuous, 18-minute first song, I felt like I was watching a band that could do anything it wanted to. And while the goofy theatrical stunts could have been corny -- making everyone sit down and be quiet, performing a brief re-creation of a light-saber battle from Star Wars, and bringing out a giant whale, possibly made of cardboard, for the grand finale -- I thought they were funny rather than distracting. I had the impression it was somewhat like a Jethro Tull show in the 1970s.

Oh, and while I was down there, I got myself some tickets for the double bill of Calexico and Iron & Wine. Based on the description on the Web site, it seems like a can't-miss proposition. New record out today. I'm on it. Will discuss soon.


FMFM: Speaking of two terrific artists getting together, Stan Getz's 1963 date with Laurindo Almeida is kicking my butt. Recorded just two days after the Getz/Gilberto classic? Wow. It's actually a little closer to Jazz Samba -- which is to say, not necessarily a step down.

Pictures from life's other side

Thanks to Jordan for passing this along. Every photo is worth your time.


FMFM: The Yankees and Sox, along with intermittent forays into Tusk

"Economically optional"

"When, after Katrina passed, the levees broke and the pumps failed, another essential part of at least this New Orleanian's mind was activated: the part devoted to doubt about our competence to operate the purely human aspects of our society. New Orleans is, and for a long time has been, the opposite of a city that works.

...Over the years, New Orleans has moved from being a top-ranked port toward becoming an economically optional city. Traditionally, it has had the kind of developing economy that runs on plantation agriculture, mineral extraction, and an intentionally impoverished, unempowered, and uneducated populace; its transformation into a tourist mecca was a form of going to ground, and it means that the city will be especially difficult to re-start."


FMFM: J.J. Johnson's swinging First Place, which features an excellent backing band -- Max Roach, Paul Chambers, and Tommy Flanagan -- as well as a terrific cover shot

Burning and looting

"I haven't even run out of weed yet."


FMFM: John Lewis's Improvised Meditations & Excursions, which never gets old, and Cannonball Adderley & Bill Evans' Know What I Mean?, which is all new to me.

When the lights go down on the ci-tayy

The SFChron finally comes through with a story about San Francisco's disaster preparedness. Interesting that the mayor's new campaign is all about surviving the first 72 hours, given that relief took up to six days to arrive in New Orleans.


FMFM: Doc Watson's Southbound

"You drove a Hyundai to get here tonight...."

Three college students tell an unbelievable story -- or an all-too-believable one.

[UPDATE: That link appears to be dead, so I'm replacing it with this version of the tale.]


FMFM: Bill Evans and Shelly Manne's playful dialogues on Empathy

High water everywhere

I realize the View From Fort Miley has been quiet lately. Seems I returned from my week on the Cape with a little cough, which turned into a mysterious exhaustion, which then produced a fever, which was diagnosed as pneumonia when I finally made it to the hospital. I suppose I'd been burning it at both ends, or maybe just spending a little too much time on airplanes.

The illness coincided with one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. I spent a lot of couch time watching the sad footage roll in from New Orleans. I feel lucky that I saw this magnificent city, if only for a few days, before this tragedy unfolded. The destruction, loss of life and misery are mindblowing and heartbreaking. Yes, the disaster response was slow, and yes, projects that could have mitigated the disaster went without funding. I have heard noted scientist Rush Limbaugh claim that "nothing happened" in New Orleans (as of Monday morning), and that "doom-and-gloom sayers" were wringing their hands inappropriately by saying floods were possible, and that warm water in the Atlantic would actually produce fewer hurricanes rather than more, and that since Hurricane Camille (1969) was bigger than Katrina that must mean global warming isn't happening. I don't much want to discuss that today, however. At the risk of sounding self-centered, I'd like to address this as a resident of a city that also lies in harm's way.

The disaster occurred about two weeks after I finished reading Marc Reisner's A Dangerous Place, a fairly slim volume that I consumed in about two days. A Dangerous Place deals with California's natural and human history, and centers on earthquake risks and preparedness. Reisner's Cadillac Desert is quite simply one of the best books I've ever read; it changed the way I live, and changed the way I see the American West. This newer book -- published in 2003, three years after Reisner's death -- is eerily prescient, down to envisioning the current (2005) state of repairs on the Bay Bridge.

Reisner's primary disaster scenario -- a hypothetical 7.3 quake on the Hayward Fault, in February 2005 -- includes fires, collapsed buildings, a bridge failure, car wrecks, and emergency management resources stretched thinly. It culminates in simultaneous failure of several levees in the Sacramento Delta region. Those below-sea-level islands fill with fresh water, producing a vacuum that sucks salt water back into the Delta region, filling the state's aqueducts with sea water. Agriculture in the Central Valley is ruined. Half of Los Angeles's water is ruined. The Bay Area's water supply is ruined when it's most needed. Ugly.

I haven't seen a single SFChron story about local disaster preparedness since this all went down. I get blank looks from a lot of people when I bring it up. A little investigation reveals the city government's emergency operations plan, but I have no way of knowing whether it's adequate. (Something tells me San Francisco is better prepared for an earthquake than New Orleans was for a flood.)

About those blank looks: One person told me he was "so over earthquakes," having grown up here and survived the '89 quake. That person has no canned food on hand, no bottled water sitting around, no flashlight, no batteries. When I brought up the levee-failure scenario, that person said, "You mean the tap water wouldn't even be good if you boil it?" I don't think he gets it.

I mentioned Reisner's book to another person, who simply said, "That's a fun thing to think about." So there you have it: mind over matter. If you don't think about it, it won't happen. I wonder about people sometimes.

Net result: I'm planning to undergo NERT training once I'm well. Seems like the right thing to do.


FMFM: The great Allen Toussaint, who is reportedly safe. [Separately: The Charley Patton song is here.]

Won't you lend your lungs to me? Mine are collapsing

That's me on Sunday afternoon. Pneumonia sucks.

I'll be back in a few days.