Bending Ears With Mary Halvorson

Originally published in the New York Sun in 2006.

Though she’s only half-way into her first beer of the night, it’s enough to loosen a confession from Mary Halvorson. The 26-year-old guitarist is becoming one of the most frequently spotted instrumentalists on the new music scene. She gigs in a variety of combos and formats at venues as upscale as The Iridium, where she’ll join the avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton for a week of shows in March, as part of his “Ghost Trance” ensemble. Yet, her more intrepid listeners may find her under the radar at spots like the Asterisk Art Project, a collective loft space in an old Bushwick warehouse. Though steeped in jazz, Ms. Halvorson belongs to a generation of young musicians who pay about as much attention to genre definitions as they do borough lines. She plays guitar in a way that fractures conventions, restlessly inventing her own paradigms.

So, while having the inevitable conversation about influences, Ms. Halvorson dutifully namechecks demigods from Jimi Hendrix, whose “Little Wing” she first tackled when she picked up a guitar at age 12, to Thelonious Monk, the pianist whose elliptical swerve may be a more profound resource for contemporary guitarists than most six-string legends. But, Ms. Halvorson admits, the first song she learned all the way through was also the most obvious: “Stairway to Heaven.”

“I think of myself as a guitar player,” she said, grinning only slightly sheepishly, as she perched on a barstool at the Parkside Lounge one recent evening. Ms. Halvorson was between sets nearby at The Stone, the Avenue C performance space whose February bookings she curated and where she will perform a few more times this month. “I’m not really concerned whether something is rock or jazz, I just want to play something that’s interesting to me.”

There’s a lot that interests her. You can hear Ms. Halvorson in so many different modes. She can shred, as she does with bassist Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant. She can play smooth and nearly stately compositions that evoke some of Steely Dan’s elegant studio jazziness, as she does with Ted Reichmann’s combo My Ears Are Bent. She’s a brisk thinker in improvisatory settings, unleashing a pointillistic spree of single notes as easily as she might concoct an unexpectedly beguiling melodic fragment, a knack she displayed recently in a duo with a former teacher, the innovative guitarist Joe Morris, at the Stone. And she sings, in a duo called People, with drummer Kevin Shea, and a separate pairing with her best friend, the viola player Jessica Pavone, whom she joins tonight for a set at the Stone.

“It’s definitely my most important project,” Ms. Halvorson said, recalling that, like many important things, the duo began as a kind of lark. One day while rehearsing, the women decided to each bring some lyrics to try out the next day. “We both ended up writing the same sort of thing. We can read each other’s minds. When we rehearse we’re usually checking out an episode of ‘The Sopranos,’ getting press stuff together for the next tour, and making dinner. It’s all the same thing. We’re very efficient.”

That spirit of playful nonchalance, along with the pair’s disarming alto voices, made the 2006 release “Prairies” (Lucky Kitchen) one of the year’s stealthier treats: the kind of CD fans would only buy from one of the women after a show, then play incessantly. It reveals talented musicians with a lot of ideas kicking around upstairs. The vibe shifts from bittersweet chamber reveries, paced by Ms. Pavone’s eloquent bowing and Ms. Halvorson’s heady scrambles, towards a particularly feminine humor. “Sometimes/ When you are talking to me/I don’t hear/A thing that you say,” they sing on “Sometimes,” each syllable enunciated as if part of an exercise, harmonies rising like arched eyebrows.

Trumpeter Peter Evans, part of a new wave of exceptional players churning up the city’s jazz and improv circuit, recalls Ms. Halvorson as forming her sound early on. They met as teenagers at a weekend jazz program at the New England Conservatory in Boston, not far from Brookline, where the guitarist grew up. “Mary sounded pretty much the same then as she does now,” Mr. Evans said, “which in a relatively straight ahead jazz context was a little jarring. She would play these very pretty voicings and melodies, but her solos were really twisted and angular with huge interval leaps and jagged rhythms.”

The guitarist also wins praise from Mr. Morris, whose contemporaries began staking out their turf in the late 1970s and early1980s. Decades
after the so-called “free improv” scene became codified, he views Ms. Halvorson as part of a welcome arrival to talent pool that has been male-dominated. “It’s about time a woman was given credit for making some new music on the guitar,” he said. “Mary has what it takes to be that woman.”

What’s refreshing is that gender is much less of an issue now. “When I was learning, no one would take me seriously because I was a girl,” Ms. Halvorson said. “If  we’re going to get rid of the whole sexism problem, we need not to draw attention to those differences. That’s how I try to approach it. It’s going in the right direction.”

Winter of Discontent, ‘Summer of the Whore’

Some artists hide behind the scrim of creative license, contending that even the bloodiest confessions are the mere fabric of fictional conceit. Names are changed to protect the guilty. Catastrophic experiences are shared by imaginary characters. And everything else is coincidental. Bob Dylan, in his 2004 memoir, implied that his 1974 classic Blood on the Tracks, widely assumed to be about his divorce, was in fact based on Chekhov.

It took less than half a pint of Belgian wheat beer to get the skinny from Shannon McArdle. By the time I sludge through the rain to our recent date at the Commonwealth bar in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the singer-songwriter already has a significant jump on me, happily tippling a Heffeweisen as she sat at the booth closest to the joint’s most excellent indie-rock jukebox. Introductions are made, the evening wet shaken off, and a Stoli-O-and-Tonic later, I joined McArdle at her post. Her wheaty refreshment nearly depleted, she was more than ready to spill. The Athens-gone-to-Brooklyn performer had no qualms when she admitted that the tortured tales on her debut solo album, Summer of the Whore (Bar/None), are explicitly inspired by the unexpected collapse of her marriage during the winter of 2007. One day her husband of two years, Tim Bracy, with whom she had performed since 2000 as a member of the indie-rock outfit the Mendoza Line, up and left. To add injury to insult, McArdle was tripped on her way into a subway one day, took a plunge down the stairs, and was rushed to an emergency room. “I had a lump on my back the size of a watermelon,” she said. Luckily, it was only two herniated discs, not a broken back. But what could more aptly symbolize the feeling of “hitting bottom” than actually hitting bottom?

Recording Summer of the Whore became a process of emotional exorcism and redemption. And, despite its provocative title, less an anthem to abandon than a rueful reminiscence. The idea came when Ms. McArdle, 31, and former Mendoza Line drummer Adam Gold, likewise newly single, began collaborating on tracks she had quickly written in the wake of the break-up. Afternoon meetings over margaritas would find “one if not both of us looking pretty rough,” McArdle said. “Adam came up with it first. He’d ask, ‘Were you a whore last night?’”

McArdle, a native of Albany, Georgia who fell in with the Mendoza Line while attending the University of Georgia in Athens in the late 1990s, had a definitively Southern lilt to her voice and sat with a certain poise that would befit, say, a schoolteacher. As it turned out, she works two jobs as an instructor of English as second language. But the racy album title isn’t entirely a joke. “It makes sense when you listen to it,” she said. “It’s not derogatory or in your face. I was doing everything out of desperation, trying to feel somewhat secure and somewhat confident, somewhat content and somewhat preoccupied. I think it’s quite appropriate.”

Stylistically, the album’s succinct song cycle rarely veers into nail-spitting Lucinda Williams territory, even though Ms. McArdle shares an affinity for country-rock textures and literary constructions. The melancholy undertow of the opening “Poison My Cup” could belong to an early ’70s MOR ballad. Meanwhile, the tasteful percussive accents, muted twang, and breathy upper-register choral notes of “Paint the Walls,” which is the album’s most direct song about suddenly living alone, could easily serve a jazz singer.

“The record is not supposed to be nasty or even insulting,” McArdle, talking while some vintage punk rock blared from the jukebox, said. “Although there are moments of that. I don’t want revenge. I just wanted to make a record and this was the only thing I could conjure up. It’s not meant to be a slap in the face. It makes me very nervous that I made this record and it’s getting all this press and I think, oh, now I’m going to hear from him. I didn’t want that. I just wanted to make a record that came out as something very personal. This record is just all me. I don’t need to hide behind it.” Nonetheless, like such kindred spirits as Neko Case, Kelly Hogan or the Handsome Family, McArdle reached back into the mountain ballad tradition to find a relevant parable to convey her personal experiences. “That Night in June,” beyond the shimmer of its slow waltz tempo and McArdle’s dreamy vocals, is laced with horror. “It’s about a woman who was drowned by her true love,” she explained. “This man drowns his bride and goes on this journey of self-loathing, but it turns out he has no conscience and he’s just a murderer. The woman dies, but there’s a rebirth of all these incarnations of the woman.”

If the process was meant to be therapeutic, it certainly worked. As she talks, McArdle gives the impression of someone who is unsinkable as a magic homemade fishing lure. Sure, it gets hauled down into the brackish deep, but eventually it bobs back to the surface, usually with a big catch in tow. So what if sometimes it’s just an old shoe. It’s the unsinkable part that counts. “For months, I didn’t know if I was going to write music again. Or not as a solo artist. I felt paralyzed. I wasn’t doing much. I had long work days and the bills were stacking up because I suddenly was faced with twice the expenses – which is what happens when your partner leaves you. So I was working these long hours, still am.” After months of moping, McArdle snapped into focus and wrote the entire album in about three weeks. “I knew there was something festering in me and it wouldn’t take long. The record just spewed out of me. I knew exactly when it was done. Glenn [Morrow, Bar/None head] asked me to add a few songs, and I said, ‘This is an album.’ It’s 30 minutes, but it’s a very hefty 30 minutes. I like short songs, short albums.”

If it’s too short, I suggested, you could play it twice.

Image“I feel completely satisfied with a 30-minute record,” she said. “Elvis Costello had it right with these under-two-minute songs. I felt the same way about this record. Probably for me, it’s that I don’t enjoy playing any instruments. I compose on guitar and I play guitar. But I don’t want to play guitar any longer than I have to. So when the song’s done it’s done.”

The pints came and went. The jukebox settled on some tracks from Television’s Marquee Moon. And our conversation detoured into neighborhood lore. McArdle wondered why we hadn’t talked about an adjacent dive called Timboo’s – one of the select beer-for-breakfast joints in a rapidly yuppiefying part of Brooklyn that once had been the preserve of Irish and Italian immigrants.

“I’ve never gone into Timboo’s, but one of these days,” McArdle said. I tell her about a friend of mine, a real alcoholic burnout, who often scored weak cocaine at the bar, before he ended up on nearly everyone’s shit list.

“It’s quite a crowd in there,” she agreed.

“I think there’s some old Irish gang world that still abides, like a ghost,” I said. “The ‘Boo’ thing is part of the old lingo.”

“My father’s from Ireland,” she said, “and he moved here in the late ’60s. All of his nicknames for us end in ‘Bo.’ My sister’s name is Karrie, so she’s KayKay-Bo, and when I was still with Tim he was Timbo Bimbo. That was not meant to be insulting. Everything ends in ‘Bo.’”

“I guess that carried over to this establishment,” I said. “I don’t think they’d be mean to you. There’s a whole bunch of great old man bars in this neighborhood. I don’t know how those old guys are still holding up.”

“People are living longer these days.”

“There was this poor guy. He lived above the bar called Jackie’s Fifth Amendment, which is like the most hardcore of all the old man bars. He needed help getting from his door to the bar, which was literally not even three feet away. He really needed a drink. I felt bad for him. But he was where he needed to be.”

“It worked out!”

As the vodka began to flow through my bloodstream, I became curious about something McArdle had told me.

“They call you ‘Snowflake’?”

“They called me ‘Snowflake’ and it was very sweet.”

“Little old Jamaican ladies?”

“No, African-American men. It didn’t bother me at all. I thought, I AM the only white person here. They’re just calling it as they see it, no problem.”

“I think it’s better that they call you ‘Snowflake’ than me.”

“It suits me better. I’m fine with it.”

McArdle, the artist sometimes known as ‘Snowflake’ to her neighbors in Prospect Heights, has clearly gotten her groove back.

Even her ESL students, many of whom are Mexican and African, have taken notice when the occasional interview appears. Although, as might be expected, some things are lost in translation. “They’ll come in, saying ‘Teacher you didn’t tell me!’” McArdle, grinning, said. “‘What is Summer of the Whore’”?

Jonathan Lethem Amps It Up

Inside every celebrated Brooklyn novelist is a songwriter struggling to break free. At least, it seems that way. Paul Auster has written songs with the band One Ring Zero, which has backed up his daughter Sophie’s performances of them. Rick Moody plays in the quirky art-folk outfit the Wingdale Community Singers. Now, Jonathan Lethem, author of “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” has a new musical side project.

“You Are All My People,” which comes out today on Bloodshot Records, is the first album by I’m Not Jim, a collaboration featuring the vocals and guitar of Walter Salas-Humara, more widely known as the front man of the Silos, a highly literate and slyly humorous rock act that also happens to be a favorite of Mr. Lethem. The writer penned most of the lyrics for the unusual assortment of songs and spoken-word interludes that appear on the new record, but he doesn’t actually sing or otherwise perform — unlike some of his peers.

“Rick [Moody] is a musician; he can play,” Mr. Lethem, sitting at a table in a coffee shop around the corner from his Boerum Hill home, said recently. “I’m at pains to make it clear that I’m not pretending to be that.”

It also took several years for Messrs. Salas-Humara and Lethem to get their heads together. They first met around 2004 or 2005 when the writer happened upon a Silos gig at a bar in New Orleans. A longtime fan of the band, Mr. Lethem decided to introduce himself and later mailed Mr. Salas-Humara copies of his books, by way of thanks. The guitarist became an instant enthusiast.

“‘Fortress of Solitude’ just blew me away,” Mr. Salas-Humara said, speaking by phone from Austin, Texas. “It was just such a cool combination of coming-of-age story and fantasy stuff. The prose is just so beautiful.”

The men, who will appear together Thursday for a free performance at Housing Works Bookstore and Café in SoHo, gradually began talking about working together.

“I thought I’d throw him a few lyrics and if he liked them enough he’d turn them into a Silos song,” Mr. Lethem said.

But his collaborator had something else in mind. “I wanted the whole thing stringed together with a single narrator, like a one-man show,” Mr. Salas-Humara said. “But Jonathan wasn’t into that. He thought it would be too easy to target.”

The album does have narration, delivered in a suspenseful, after-hours radio voice by Mr. Salas-Humara. Likewise, the individual songs are held together by some running themes.

“There’s something on [the album's] mind, something to do with cars that won’t start and women who run away in airplanes,” Mr. Lethem said. For his part, the novelist wasn’t interested in crafting a more explicit structure. “I get to do that in my regular work,” he said. “I wanted to find a way to work in a more termite-like sense. We just let ourselves fool around with our notions and sensibilities until something amused us.”

The songs came together over two days spent at Mr. Lethem’s house in Maine. Mr. Salas-Humara was knocked out by how quickly his partner typed up lyrics.

“He’s a genius. I’ve never seen anything like it,” the guitarist, who composed music on the spot and recorded vocals into his laptop, said. The demos were later worked over by the remix team the Elegant Two, who gave the pieces a deliberately lo-fi electronic feel that makes the music sound like a nocturnal transmission over an abandoned boom box.

“We tried to come up with this deadpan, existential, Steven Wright sort of person,” Mr. Salas-Humara said. “I don’t know if that’s really how it feels.”

Songs like “Towtruck” advance a gin-soaked philosophical view of the world with an edge of damaged romantic heroism. “And if you get the car stuck / You can call my tow truck,” Mr. Salas-Humara sings. It could be a declaration of love, although it also strangely evokes Bob Dylan’s “From a Buick 6,” in which the singer needs a dump truck to unload his head and a steam shovel to keep away the dead. The automotive theme continues on “Meter Running in a Crashed Cab,” a litany of feckless occasions set to a syncopated funk strut redolent of the Meters. “Drink ‘Till I’m Sober” is mostly self-explanatory, as Mr. Salas-Humara promises to commit all kinds of felonies and misdemeanors — “I’m gonna torch the family farm / I’m gonna chew on my right arm” — over the grungy psychedelia of squalling and squelching guitars.

“It was by far the most productive writing experience I ever had,” Mr. Salas-Humara said. “We’d write three or four songs in a couple of hours, then go for a long walk. Have lunch. Come back and write three or four more songs. At night, we’d just watch the Mets.”

Jon Langford Saves the Wales

Onstage recently in the back room of Schuba’s Tavern in his adoptive hometown of Chicago, the singer Jon Langford introduced a song he called the Welsh National Anthem. His band, one of many fronted by the multifaceted guitarist and songwriter, was called Skull Orchard, and played an often rollicking repertoire of songs about Wales. That’s where Mr. Langford grew up, and it’s where he returns — in spirit, at least — when he convenes the group.

In Mr. Langford’s imagination, Wales has been waiting for its true and destined king to return and take his rightful place in history. That man is Tom Jones. After Mr. Langford finished his exclamatory spiel, the band punched into a loud, woozy waltz. Yes, it was “Delilah,” which Mr. Jones made a hit in 1968. As the crowd joined in on every lurching “why, why, why” refrain, a devilish grin swept across the singer’s face. Sometimes you can go home again.

This week, Mr. Langford won’t be the only wandering Welshman with a gig in New York. Tomorrow he headlines at the Knitting Factory with Skull Orchard and the 52 voices of the Toronto-based Burlington Welsh Male Chorus. The group is led by Julian Murray, an old college friend and one of the dozens of musicians who were briefly part of the Mekons, the quasi-legendary punk-era band Mr. Langford co-founded in 1976 while attending university in Leeds. The pair became reacquainted a few years ago when Mr. Langford was in Toronto producing a record, and a one-off summit at a Chicago Celtic music festival led to occasional collaborations.

“I’m cheating,” Mr. Langford said. “It looks like I’m flying people around the country. They’re actually in New York performing with [the Welsh opera singer] Bryn Terfel and they had a day off.” Ah, another Welshman. “I do have an auntie who stalks him. She leaves notes for him at all the great opera houses.”

Mr. Langford’s collection of songs, some of which are inspired by traditional ballads and hymns, began coming together about 10 years ago when he recorded his first solo album, “Skull Orchard.” One day it occurred to him that everything he wrote at the time seemed to be about life in South Wales.

“It was a bit like when you see a frog in a frying pan,” he said. “You don’t really recognize it until it starts heating up.”

Some of the material is dryly comic in tone. In one song, Mr. Langford describes a seaside village where nothing interesting has happened since 1954, when John Huston came to film “Moby Dick.”

“Huston heard there was good fox hunting there,” he said.

The movie, which cast the local populace as extras, now serves as an unintentional documentary. “When you look at the film, the faces of those people are just fantastic. We went through there once with the Mekons and nothing seemed to have happened.”

Newport, where Mr. Langford was born and raised in the mid-1950s, was cosmopolitan by comparison. The shipping industry dictated a local culture that was strongly alcohol-themed, with the kind of thriving nightlife that appeals to men of the sea. But it also made Newport into an international crossroads.

“There were people from Asia, India, people from Mauritius, Seychelles. Big Soviet tankers coming in. Reggae culture,” Mr. Langford said. “There wasn’t racism. The black kids were like the cool kids.”

The idyllic recollection contrasts sharply with other stories Mr. Langford has explored. He also sings about the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster, which killed 144 people when a giant pile of rock extracted from the mine slid down a mountain and obliterated a school, leaving only a few survivors.

“I went to school 20 miles away,” Mr. Langford said. As a child, he went with a friend to visit the memorial site. “It was amazing. The earth was black with coal. We looked at all those graves, hoping that there wouldn’t be one with our actual birthdates. But the dates were pretty close. I was 8 or 9, and it was just unthinkable. It wasn’t like it was somewhere remote and far away — all those little crosses on the hill.”

The gravity of such a tale becomes even more powerful with a chorus, which also gives Mr. Langford occasion to expand his musical range beyond the honky-tonk variations of his rowdy working band, the Waco Brothers.

“We’ll get to do a lot of hymns and patriotic songs,” he said. “There’s one called ‘We Are Still Here.’ You can’t understand a word of it, but it’s very powerful. It’s about how pissed off the Welsh are about the Romans. Still. It’s like they’re saying, ‘We are still here, but where are you?’ The Welsh really know how to harbor a grudge.”

Berne, Baby, Berne

New York jazz in the 1990s spawned some monstrously good working bands, outfits so keenly focused that they could trigger the transcendental glimmer of highly skilled players in burning improvisatory flux. Depending on your taste, those bands could have been Joshua Redman’s quartet with pianist Brad Mehldau, John Zorn’s all-star Masada, the David S. Ware Quartet, or Bloodcount – formed by alto saxophonist Tim Berne in 1992.

RED BLOODED: Alto saxophonist Tim Berne has revived Bloodcount.

Bloodcount, which featured Jim Black, drums, Michael Formanek, bass, and Chris Speed on tenor, was a percolating laboratory for Mr. Berne’s complex and detailed compositions. It wasn’t unusual for a Bloodcount piece to last a half-hour. If the notion implied high-minded severity, that was never the case in practice. Even at its gnarliest, the music conveyed a sense of adventure and risk, rewarding the attentive with intriguing structures, surprising depths of soulfulness, and spirited interactions between the players, whose roles might revolve like a Calder mobile. Besides, there were Mr. Berne’s titles, which brimmed with his peculiar wit: “Sense and Sinsemilla,” “Yes, Dear,” “Scrap Metal.”

“I always find that people like my bands a lot more after I stop doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “But if something becomes successful, I move on and see if I can work something else out. Once it gets to the point that no one is complaining, I get nervous.” That explains why he broke up Bloodcount in 1999. After what he cautiously estimated as a “billion” gigs, Mr. Berne said he could no longer compose for the band’s instrumentaton. Now, almost a decade later, he began hearing some different music for the same group. Bloodcount marked its return to the stage this year with an ongoing series of clubdates, during which
the six-foot-four Mr. Berne likes to play in his stockinged feet, avant-casual. “You can reinvent an old band by writing new stuff and starting fresh,” he explained. “I didn’t want to do it as a retrospective.”

For that, fans can check out “Seconds.” The new CD/DVD release, on Mr. Berne’s Screwgun label, features two discs of vintage Bloodcount live recordings and a 1994 concert video from Paris, shot by Susanna Schonberg, that reflects the energies of the performance in a restless montage of extreme close-ups and offstage passages. But the music Bloodcount has now begun to play sounds much different than that, Mr. Berne promised, chatting recently from his home in Park Slope, where he has lived since the 1980s. (“The downtown scene?” he said, as if cocking an eyebrow.
“I’m a Brooklyn guy.”) “My writing changed a lot when I started writing for keyboards,” he said, referring to an ongoing affiliation with the pianist and electronic composer Craig Taborn, who plays in Mr. Berne’s trio Hard Cell and alongside him in a quartet with guitarist David Torn. “There’s certain rhythmic stuff, certain harmonies. I guess rhythmically more than anything, and the counterpoint is stranger.”

Mr. Berne was a late-bloomer musically. He didn’t pick up a horn until he was 19 or 20, excited by the countless gigs he attended
at bustling mid-1970s haunts like Studio Rivbea and Slug’s. One day he sprained his ankle, and purchased a $200 alto saxophone to help him kill time. His astute taste in mentors proved exceptionally fortunate. Mr. Berne’s favorite musician was Julius Hemphill, the visionary saxophonist and composer (“Dogon, A.D.,” “Long Tongues”) who proved open to taking on a completely green student. “I started making music because I saw him doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “I was pretty naïve for quite a long time. I started as a bandleader by default. It’s a good thing I learned how to do it early on, and I learned how to put out records. I just had to learn music.”

Now 53, the saxophonist honed his chops and had a contract with Columbia Records in 1986, even though he was working a much different line than the label’s loudly touted jazz star, Wynton Marsalis. The deal only lasted for two albums, but Mr. Berne became fast friends with its graphic designer, Steven Byram, and began a long artistic partnership. (Mr. Byram creates all of the amusingly abstract design for the saxophonist’s CDs, which upend the dry and amateurish norm for avant-garde jazz packaging).

“I just want to own the stuff, I don’t know if it makes any difference,” Mr. Berne said. He’s been marketing his own discs since 1996, with 19 titles available on his website – www.screwgunrecords.com. During a short spell a few years ago, he became ambitious about running an indie label, but burned out on the effort involved. Lately, he’s tried to take advantage of MP3 technology. “Today I sold six downloads!” he said, with an air of mock pride. More common, he lamented, was learning how easily his performances could be acquired elsewhere. “It’s hard to sell stuff because everyone gets it for free. I was talking to a friend in Europe after we did some shows in Barcelona and Budapest and he had already listened to the gig, 24 hours after we played it.”

As for the recharged Bloodcount, Mr. Berne advised to expect the unexpected. His recent European tour with Mr. Torn, whose music is dense and boiling, yielded precisely the response that he thrives on. “About 20 percent of the audience was shocked,” he said. “We weren’t preaching to the choir. Some like you, and some don’t, and you get a kind of tension. That first year or two with a band is really different than the rest of the time. Nobody knows the music – including me.”

Perhaps the only thing for certain is that Mr. Berne’s new pieces will stretch out at their leisure. There’s a good reason he prefers extended compositions, he said.

“I never liked to talk.”

R.E.M.: Semi-Automatic for the People

Every year, striving rock acts and feisty independent record labels, indefatigable fans and drink-cadging critics, converge on this Texas college town for the South by Southwest music festival. The event has mushroomed into a showcase for a gazillion variations on the next big thing, becoming such a media magnet that your average semi-obscure bar band may clock five or six gigs – on any given day.

So it was in Austin, of course, that Dark Meat – a 17-piece Mardi Gras party of a stomping, free-rock ensemble – celebrated its recent singing to Vice Records, with a chaotic blow-out. The outfit shared a bill with a half-dozen other groups from Athens, Georgia, all representative of that other Southern college burg’s unique place in rock history: The original “scene” town, which 30 years ago spawned a funky little dance combo called the B-52s, and shortly thereafter a flurry of quirky, DIY-minded bands with names like Love Tractor, Pylon, Oh-OK, and R.E.M, was as vital as ever. The scene, as such, has shifted from buzz city to buzz city. Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, Omaha, and, right now, Brooklyn, among others, have enjoyed their seasons as focal points for the  zeitgeist. But the contemporary concept of geography as a kind of indie-rock destiny began in Athens.

SXSW was as strong a reminder of this. Even as Dark Meat (enthusiastic, a bit gimmicky) was winding down its set, the members of R.E.M. were getting ready for a gig a few block away. As an opening act, they had tabbed another young band from Athens, the excellent Dead Confederate, which mysteriously melds Pink Floyd dreaminess with Lynyrd Skynyrd blooziness.

It’s unlikely R.E.M. would call it a comeback, but someone obviously felt a need to reassert their willingness to rock, and to do so in the same amiably scruffy, beer-sodden environs that first launched them to critical and, eventually, commercial prominence in the 1980s. Much as their old neighbors the B-52s, R.E.M. has a new album to promote, and Austin proved an ideal platform to signal the band’s return to foursquare, guitar-based rock. “Accelerate,” which is released April 1, finds R.E.M. sounding like R.E.M. again. Or, at least, sounding like the R.E.M. of its late-1980s breakout period, when albums like “Life’s Rich Pageant” and “Green” took the quartet out of the college bars and into the arenas.

The band’s show at Stubb’s Barbecue, as heard on a streaming feed from the National Public Radio website (npr.org), conveys a certain wisdom that groups of R.E.M.’s vintage can bank on. There’s no need to reinvent a trademark sound. Just stick with what always worked. “Accelerate” is the first studio album from vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills since 2004’s dismal “Around the Sun.” And it’s the first R.E.M. album since original drummer Bill Berry left the group in 1997 that isn’t tricked out with keyboards, electronic noodling, and artificially sweetened popcraft that seemed to abdicate the beat that Mr. Berry took with him.

Not surprisingly, the band’s record sales have been in a tailspin since its heady days of early ‘90s glory – when songs like “Losing My Religion” and “Man on the Moon” secured global mass-market affection, yet refined the band’s idiosyncrasies into compassionate art. Watching R.E.M. meander towards nostalgia-dom the past few years called to mind something recently said by Thurston Moore, guitarist for Sonic Youth, the New York art-rock act whose more pointedly outré career has paralleled the Georgia group’s. Mr. Moore suggested that his band broken up years ago, and then reunited, they might ensure a bigger payday and be more popular than ever. In retrospect, it’s easy to imagine R.E.M. calling it quits on New Year’s Eve 1999, which once was rumored to happen, deciding that without Mr. Berry, they really were “a three-legged dog,” as Mr. Stipe has quipped, and should seek new horizons.

That didn’t happen, though for many fans and critics it might as well have. Sitting by while peers like Bono saves the world and Radiohead reinvents the wheel can’t feel too good. So
the urgency of “Accelerate,” and of R.E.M.’s strident and jangle-happy Austin showcase, feels genuine. It’s just too bad the songs aren’t better. Mr. Stipe, who once kept listeners scratching their heads to decipher lyrics that felt like surrealist poetry, has long since adopted a declamatory style that too often underscores how banal his lines are. New tracks like “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” and “Horse To Water” suggest the singer has never met a cliché he didn’t purloin, even if the beautifully aggressive mesh of Mr. Buck’s guitar with the rhythm section captures the youthful buoyancy of prime R.E.M. “Supernatural Superserious,” the album’s first single, is even more regrettable, as Mr. Stipe sings about “the humiliation of the teenage nation.” Huh? Save it for Hannah Montana.

The bumper-sticker sentiments aren’t new to R.E.M., and in some cases, the band’s impassioned punch combines with Mr. Stipe’s fiery testimony in ways that you don’t want to resist, especially when Mr. Mills lends his choirboy’s counter-tenor to echo the main vocal lines. As R.E.M. efforts go, “Accelerate” is the band’s best work this decade, but once you peel back the layers of guitar, it’s not nearly as emotionally affecting as the disquieting murmurs of 1999’s underrated “Up,” whose ambient pop tinkering dressed up heartfelt ambiguities in the wake of Mr. Berry’s departure. At his best, Mr. Stipe negotiates uneasy truces between the particular and the universal (“That’s me in the corner/That’s me in the spotlight”), and narrates what it feels like to be caught between them. “Accelerate” tries so eagerly to deliver on its promise that it zooms right past what makes R.E.M. really great.

Visions of Joanna

Material originally published in vastly different contexts in Time Out Chicago and Stomp & Stammer.

I don’t know freak-folk from a funky chicken, but I can tell you that Joanna Newsom is an original: a one-of-a-kind wondermint whose far-strung stringed jingling is epic and arty in a way that skirts the usual idea of “epic” and “arty.” Which is to say, how do you fabricate a mini-opus like Ys (Drag City), her new album, fill it with allegorical star-swept illuminations, furry creatures whose hearts thump as big as the moon, and some of the most nakedly rapturous and soulfully turbulent singing since, seriously, Astral Weeks, and not come off a tad… overdone? I’m not going to mention, just now, that Newsom plays harp – the ornate, whopping Celtic kind, so evocative of angels in 1930s Hollywood musicals and new age frim-frammery -  or that she hired the justifiably legendary Van Dyke Parks, the greatest living quirky genius arranger, to help score her songs, with their umpteen verses, and their marvelous turns of tongue, and their nearly archaic embrace of language as a forgotten kingdom. As such, Ys (Eeees!) seems to have less to do with contemporary pop as it does with, say, Chaucer, or the Farmer’s Almanac. Or just, you know, the brimming viaducts of your own pellucid dreams. All done up with a 30-piece orchestra.

I caught Joanna waiting in line at a Northern California supermarket, and when I checked back a few minutes later, as she motored home, she gave a pretty generous illustration of how she could seemingly indulge some crazily ambitious creative urges without becoming self-indulgent – which is why the rich and arousing beauty of Ys, as sweeping and demanding as it is, makes me think of Van Morrison at first blush and not, oh, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

And so we began…

Joanna Newsom: I’m throwing a big surprise birthday party for my parents tomorrow, and got it into my mind I needed certain things, but for some reason it was ten times busier than usual at the grocery store. I was standing in that line, looking at my cell phone. Damn it, damn it!

Ha ha. So… do you still live in Nevada City?

Yeah.

What’s it like there? You’re close to Reno?

It’s not terribly close. It’s still like an hour from the border. It’s near the California side of Lake Tahoe, right up in the foothills before the mountains. We live near all the ski resorts in Northern California, right at the base of all that. Just a really small town. For some reason it’s a real creative haven.

Like a California hippie town?

I think what happened is there was an exodus from the Bay Area. Some people went to Marin County, in the mid-’70s, when a lot of the artistic community got disillusioned with what was happening in San Francisco. It got dark. A lot of things got dark there. And a lot of the people who were creative started going all sorts of places. This is one kind of outpost. A lot of writers, and composers and poets came here, and bought a bunch of property. You could buy property really cheaply back then. So there’s a lot of people with 100-acre, 200- acre plots of land.

Your parents were part of that?

They came later. They came in ’80s. They were both physicians. In some ways they are super-close connected with that stuff, especially my mom. She’s very radical, a very political person, very into protesting and organizing and having a lot of causes. But, in other ways, they were removed from all that. They joked that they missed the ’60s, because they were in medical school the whole time. So they only got to do the not-so-fun things… [Joanna trills!]: Oh Hiiii! [Then back] I just got home and my aunt and uncle are here. It’s complete madness. We have 90 relatives coming in and it’s at my house.

I thought it was interesting to see that the fabled minimalist composer Terry Riley was one of your neighbors.

He’s a neighbor in the sense that everyone is a neighbor here because the town is so small. We didn’t live next door to each other. I don’t live up there. I grew up across the river.

Years later, you ended up at Mills College in Berkeley. Which is the kind of place Terry Riley would teach, if he hasn’t taught there.

Going to Mills was definitely a decision influenced by Terry Riley. A lot of what I did musically for awhile took place within a framework that was partially defined by what I saw him doing. I wanted to write music and make music, because that was what I loved doing most of all. But just about the only person I knew of who did that as their job was Terry Riley. The fact that he had connections to Mills was one of the motivating factors for me to go there.

Have you ever had his hot sauce?

[Exuberant] No. [Laughs]

He makes a killer hot sauce. It’s just great stuff.

[Laughs]. That’s pretty awesome. No, I’ve never had it.

Well, if you get a chance … So, you kind of grew up and gravitated to Mills. Is that where you got most of your training?

It’s where I got a lot of one particular kind of training. That was the first time I approached writing music from a formal perspective. I’d been writing music my whole life, but I thought of what I was doing as composing. Because of the simple distinction that I wasn’t signing, so they couldn’t be songs. I really formalized it in my own mind when I went to Mills and attempted to be more experimental. Experimental for me is so much less experimental than anybody else at that school. Oh, my lightbulb just went out! My last remaining lightbulb in my kitchen just burned out.

That’s very rock star.

Yeah! Ha ha! I just feel bad, because this is ostensibly the center of the action for tomorrow’s party. But I’m a complete wreck. I’ve been traveling non-stop since I bought my house. Some rooms are empty and some rooms are cluttered beyond like, beyond neatening, and all my bulbs are burned out, and cheery aunts and uncles are just rolling in, and being like, “Where can I store this ham?” and “Here’s some harvest-themed centerpieces for your table!” I’m like, what tables? It will be very interesting. I’m going to need lightbulbs that work in the house by tomorrow.

You need candles.

That was one of the things I was getting at the store was candles. I thought, “You must have candles.” Candles alone do not a party make. My house must have light in it. It’s an outdoor party. We bought tiki torches and we rented big propane heaters and tables. It’s a full-on event, and I know people are going to be interested in coming in and seeing my house. It’s going to be the ultimate embarrassment in front of my whole family if I don’t even have a lightbulb that works [laughs].

You have a lot of friends there?

I know everybody. A lot of my really good friends did something similar to me. They went away to go to school or to travel, and have elected to come back. It’s really exciting.

Did you gravitate to harp at college?

I’ve played harp for 16 years! Certainly, when I was at Mills, it came to my attention that I was one of the only people remaining in the school who wrote music on their instrument. Very few people even played instruments anymore. Most people wrote on laptops. Very few people even wrote music involving pitches that the human ear can recognize. Most of it was beyond dissonant. Just noise music. That was the conversation that was going on.
Your record is amazing, but it’s definitely not something you can absorb in even a few listens. It’s a huge piece of work. How did it all come together?

It was the product of a series of instinctive and natural and at the time not very huge-feeling decisions on my part. The first and most simple and probably most formative decision in the whole project was what I wanted to write the songs about. As soon as I knew what I wanted to tackle in the story of the record, I also recognized the requirement that the songs be long. The story would need to be paced in a certain manner. It’s sort of the difference between how certain topics are best-suited for a 100-word blurb, and other topics are best-suited for a 2,000-word essay, and the pacing of your idea will be fundamentally different because of the form you use to discuss it within. I felt it would be vulgar to make them short, and it would be a great disservice to the work I was trying to do. It was an easy decision. It wasn’t intimidating. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I was finished with two of the songs, and part-way finished with the other three, at that point I realized it was also going to be required of this record that I involve an orchestra – for all kinds of reasons.

What kind of feeling is that when you realize, oh, darn, I’m gonna need an orchestra now? That must have been a fun phone call to make to the record company.

Yeah, it was sort of like that. I was definitely laughing sheepishly. Dan Koretsky, who runs Drag City, was really, really excited from the get-go. It was still really conceptual. We didn’t know how it was going to work. A few months after that, I got a copy of Van Dyke’s record Song Cycle and, upon hearing it, realized that it was the closest thing I had heard up to that point that approximated the mood and gestures that I wanted the orchestra to be armed with. For the first time, I was encountering somebody’s arrangements that resonated with me on this record, and how I wanted it to sound. I had no idea what a big deal Van Dyke Parks is. I’m talking to the record label [does gee-whiz kid's voice]: “Hey! OK! So I wanna ask Van Dyke Parks to do it.” “Ohhhhhhh, OK. Well, we’ll give it a try.” They said they’d ask him but that it would be maybe difficult for him to do it, and prohibitively expensive. But they were willing to try.

Had you heard him before?

No.

Great.

Only Song Cycle. And basically nothing before that.

None of the Beach Boys stuff?

I didn’t know that he had been involved in that. I guess I had heard him before, without knowing it was him. I didn’t know about Smile. I had never heard of that. I remember seeing that name everywhere, but I didn’t realize what had gone into that record. Yeah, so we … It all took place in the course of one roadtrip. At the beginning of that roadtrip my boyfriend gave me a copy of that record and told me, “You need to listen to this.” And I heard it, and fell in love with it, and called Drag City. And by the time the roadtrip ended up in LA, Van Dyke and his wife came to a hotel room that I had, and I rented a harp, and they came and sweetly introduced themselves, and perched on the edge of the bed, and listened to me play my songs. Van Dyke, he was so immediately receptive and expressed such immediate interest, that I immediately felt like it wasn’t going to happen. I was sure nothing would come of it. But true to his word, he was involved from there on out. It was a really long process …

The vocals, which you recorded separately with Steve Albini, are really intense. The emotions.

The whole thing was really, really emotional for me. There’s one song I can’t even listen to my own performance of, I can hear certain places where I was starting to cry and it makes me feel so weird. I still think it’s valuable in terms of honesty and authenticity to have that preserved, even though there’s the hugely formal, lush, bombastic orchestral presence. So it was good to have that division. And when I was finished, I could set it aside. That was months before the album was done, and I went into a different part of my brain, a very critical one. I’m very difficult to work with!

How was Van Dyke to work with?

He was amazing. He was very graceful about recognizing how specific my vision for the record was. And he humored me in that doggedness, despite the fact that I was seldom able to articulate myself in a technical way. So not only was I really stuck on the album sounding a certain way and feeling a certain way, but I didn’t even have the vocabulary to give him any sort of shorthand. It really is a bunch of trial and error. I gave him a pile of notes on the lyrics to help him generate his first draft. Occasionally, I might have said something semi-technical, but usually it was kind of out there. Like, I want this line to evoke this image musically, or I want the trumpets to do this sort of movement, low strings or high strings. I also gave him a 30-page manifesto! I thank him eternally for putting up with all of my shit. Just sort of saying, I want the record to feel this way. I want these certain things to not be sacrificed no matter what. Here’s what I want this album to end up sounding like. I would burn CD-Rs of certain things I liked the arrangements of, which he promptly disregarded. He listened to them and he appreciated them, but he also thought it would not be helpful for us to work in that way. And then he started Draft No. 1. He would send things to me usually in the recorded form of a cheesy old synthesizer. Some music program on his computer that hadn’t been updated in 15 years. That was beautiful. He’d send his drafts to me, and I would tear them apart. And they were exquisite! The struggle revolved around making his arrangements do exactly what I needed them to do for these particular songs…and resonate for him and for me as the product of our ideas. I’m really, really bad at giving up any kind of musical control. And he was hugely graceful and patient and full of so many ideas. He was a joy to work with. He didn’t always give in. He would interpret my criticisms in his particular way. We’d get into arguments about certain choices, and he would sometimes win, and in every case that he won the argument I had always been glad that he did. Like, I didn’t want electric guitar or bass on this record and he had Lee Sklar and…

Yeah, I’m looking at some of these names and it’s like the LA session posse. It’s your Steely Dan record.

Hee hee hee hee. My Yacht Rock record! They’re all such incredibly sensitive players and they gave us a lot to work with. When I sat down with Jim O’Rourke (to mix the record), we cut a lot of that stuff out, as they had expected we would. Their goal was to give us raw material to use where we needed it. In the sections we used those instruments, it contributed so much to the record. The arrangements are so complicated sometimes, that I think the record really benefited from the grounding force of bass and guitar substantiating the chord changes. In a weird way it made it sound like a folk record, because it backed up the idea of chord changes.

If someone hadn’t heard the record, how would you describe the story?

It’s hugely autobiographical but, then, it’s a fictional narrative. It was an effort on my part to organize and score and make some sense of and articulate my reaction to a year of my life that was a very hard year. I mean, obviously, there are overt enough references to mortality on the record, it’s clear that’s a huge thing. There was a lot of death that was rough for me, but also other kinds of death. And some really, really good things that happened, too. And all those things in the process of poeticizing them. Ahhh, in the process of organizing them lyrically and musically, these things started to spookily assert this kind of synchronicity and a real shape. Almost like there was a causal relationship between all these things that happened. Each thing that happened created the environment in which the next thing happened. In my mind there was five steps to the story. One thing that was really important to me, and I really made sure this was the case, every lyrical line means something really, really specific to me. There’s no arbitrariness. No saying something because it sounds good. Every single line is an effort to be completely truthful and to say something in a certain way. At the same time, it’s not hugely important to me that anyone else “get” the story.

Well, “hydrocephalitic listlessness” has a different meaning to every person.

But it’s also an image. It’s supposed to be immediately accessible. It’s supposed to mean having a head that’s full of an excess of water. That’s a flower. It’s also an image of decadence and excessiveness and fertility and fecundity and laziness and all these things that have direct parallels to the story, the actual story, but also have a certain value as images.

Do you feel you absorb a lot of things and it just comes out? People are always analyzing Bob Dylan and finding things. Are you inspired by something else, or do you try to write without worrying about other existing ways of writing?

Probably the most honest answer to that is that I obsess over structure but I don’t think about it in the context of anyone else’s work, especially with this project. I don’t even know what to compare it to. The only thing I was influenced by on some level, in storytelling I guess, was <I>The Sound and the Fury<$>, by Faulkner. Only in that there’s one story that book aspires to tell, and the different angles from which the story is told are so incredibly different, and each character except for the final passage, the first three sections involve people doggedly running in circles around particular obsessions. There are psychological hiccups they can’t free themselves from, but the loops and the circles sort of take on this particular shape, and all of these characters together, their different obsessive running – the shape that those things form in relief is sort of the story, you know?

The NY Sun Files: Plastic People of the Universe

Regimes and revolutions come and go, but the Plastic People of the Universe are forever.

Nearly 40 years after its members first switched on their amplifiers in the chilly aftermath of the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring of 1968, the band is back on the road: grizzled, defiant, and rudely effusive with its lurching rhythms, untempered skronk, and philosophical jokes that seem partially lost in translation.

Vratislav Brabenec, the group’s 63-year-old saxophonist, was introducing one of the opening numbers in Czech before a crowded audience of about 150 fans at the Cutting Room in Chelsea on Saturday night — a rare New York appearance by the Plastic People, who will also perform tonight at the Knitting Factory.

Many in attendance were there in conjunction with a symposium at Columbia University, where former Czechoslovakian and Czech Republic president Václav Havel recently began a seven-week residency. So perhaps a translation of Mr. Brabenec’s comments was not entirely necessary. But Eva Turnova, the young, red-haired bass player who joined the group a few years ago, offered hers anyway: “What it means is, we kill a pig and then we eat it in one day.”

Turn that barnyard analogy to any purpose you please, but it does speak to a certain unvarnished folk wisdom. The Plastic People epitomize a whole-hog aesthetic that regards any element as useful, without much concern for tidy trimmings. Their songs have a tilted, out-of-focus feel, thanks to those old village dance rhythms and what can only be described as a curiously lustful melancholia — given the odd collusion of Jifií Kabe’s bittersweet violin and Mr. Brabenec’s frequently squealing saxophone.

The band, which took its name from a Frank Zappa tune, stuck to its classic material for most of the 90-minute show, evoking the American subculture hero’s fuzz-haired eclecticism in songs that, as Ms. Turnova offered later, were not so much explicitly political as merely oddball and artinflected. The Plastic People became revolutionary martyrs in the 1970s because the mere notion of American-influenced rock musicians creating a public spectacle was an inherent threat to Soviet dominance. Or, as the Talking Heads would put it back when these rowdy Czech hippies were still consigned to a kind of public exile: “Electric guitar is a crime against the state.”

At the Cutting Room, the band was mostly absent that weapon. The lead guitarist was sick, and only appeared for a song or two. And because they often sang lyrics as a chorus, the musicians sounded less like subversive rock legends than a wandering gypsy freejazz punk outfit that had missed its bus at the Port Authority and was gigging for free beer and cigarettes. And gloriously so.

There has never been anything trendy or even terribly commercial about the band’s choices. Czech communist rule forced the musicians off the public stage in 1970, and a notorious, aborted 1974 performance in the village of Budovice that attracted thousands of fans ended in police violence and arrests. During the late 1970s, when English punk-rock acts like the Clash preached revolutionary rhetoric that became a gesture of style, two of the Plastic People were living with the consequences of physically rejecting political oppression of free speech. They were in jail, serving out eightmonth terms for a 1976 conviction of public disturbance. That is, they were arrested for rocking.

Despite the arrest and the subsequent governmental ban on performances, the band thrived underground, inspiring the Charter 77 movement that anticipated the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which swept their friend and supporter Mr. Havel into power as the Soviet Union crumbled.

All these years later, the group’s current tour makes it seem as if it has popped out of a time capsule. Indeed, given their crazy-quilt history, the older musicians might feel as though they are now reaping the rewards of their struggle. Tom Stoppard’s new play “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” now at the Royal Court Theatre in London, celebrates the band’s insurgent saga (as did a 2001 documentary about the band). And while the death in 2001 of its founder, Milan Hlavsa, left the outfit with only three original members, its current multi-generational lineup appears fully invigorated.

Astonishingly, on Saturday the music shifted between comic a capella and fluid improvisational jamming in the space of a single song, implying that the band might be equally at home playing the neo-hippie Bonnaroo Festival as it would be at the late, lamented CBGB.

As Mr. Brabenec noted from the stage, the group has been traveling a lot, recently headlining a concert in St. Petersburg. “They were very nice,” he said later, puffing on a Chesterfield outside the venue, where fans young and old hovered for bits of conversation and autographs. “Russian people are very nice people.” Then he added, with a touch of commentary: “Russians and Americans are almost the same people. They know anything about everything.”

Mr. Brabanec looks quite a bit like one of the Fugs — the irreverent leftie rabble-rousers Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders — who were one of the big influences on the Plastic People, and who have joined the group onstage during previous New York appearances. He was happy to be back in town, in part through the agency of Mr. Havel, for whom he offered affection but also criticism. The Velvet Revolution was, maybe, “too much velvet,” he said, suggesting that the hardliners of the old regime got treated too softly when they should have been kicked out of their apartments. But he had little else to complain about.

“I’m still playing,” he told someone in Czech as he finished his cigarette. “Still drinking. Still fucking.”

99 Albums Reviewed!

Bradford Cox channels Young Thurston Moore?

Eventually. Otherwise known as: The Ego Roll.  More or less everything I have reviewed for Time Outs Chicago and New York, Playboy online, and possibly some other venues beginning now and going back a year. Click on the links for the reviews.

Deerhunter Microcastles

Boston Spaceships Brown Submarine

Monareta Picotero

Mogwai The Hawk Is Howling

Calexico Carried To Dust

CSS Donkey

Dirtbombs We Have You Surrounded

Beach House Devotion

Evangelista Hello, Voyager

The Walkmen You & Me

Dennis Wilson Pacific Ocean Blue

Laura Marling Alas I Cannot Swim

Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1

American Music Club The Golden Age

Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics

Chairlift Does You Inspire You?

R.E.M. Accelerate

The Melvins Nude With Boots

The Fleet Foxes

Brian Wilson That Lucky Old Son

Stereolab Chemical Chords

Matthew Sweet Sunshine Lies

Andre Williams and the Hellhounds Can You Deal With It?

Witchcraft The Alchemist

Caribou Andorra

Wolf Parade At Mount Zoomer

Mission of Burma Matador Records Reissues

Shelby Lynne Just a Little Lovin’

The Hold Steady Stay Positive

Conor Oberst

Mercury Rev Snowflake Midnight

The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton

Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro Sounds and Nigerian Blues, 1970-76

Coldplay Viva la Vida

My Morning Jacket Evil Urges

Ryan Adams and the Cardinals Cardinology

Scott Weiland “Happy” in Galoshes

Mavis Staples Live Hope at the Hideout

The NY Sun Files: Gary Panter

Published Sept. 15, 2006.

Gary Panter is explicating a painting that hangs in the attic studio of his Brooklyn home.”There’s a villain from a Japanese TV show,” the artist says, gesturing toward one menacing visage, which floats in a cosmic soup of images. “And that’s, like, a 1950s robot. And that’s a made-up tentacle brain monster.” The canvas, which radiates a sickly green, is also populated with a bikiniclad beach babe, an exaggerated cartoon puppy with its tongue sticking out, and a disembodied skull — among many other symbols, resonant with subconscious anxiety and desire.

“They’re about primal issues,” Mr. Panter admits quite cheerfully. “And the stupid way the sexes see each other. All those horrible clichés. It’s about people standing right next to their wishes and fears.”

Mr. Panter’s vivid obsessions make him one of the stars of “Masters of American Comics,”a two-part exhibition that opens today.The show, which features 14 artists and spans the history of the medium, is so large that it takes two museums to accommodate it.The comic strips of seminal figures from Windsor McKay (“Little Nemo in Slumberland”) and George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”) to Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”) are mounted in the Newark Museum. Meanwhile, the emergence of comic books in the 1950s and, later, underground “comix” and the graphic novel, is represented at the Jewish Museum, where Mr. Panter is joined by contemporaries (Chris Ware, R. Crumb) and artists who preceded him (Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner).

“It’s like being knighted,” says Mr. Panter, 55, who may still be best-known for his Emmy Award-winning design for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” the subversive 1980s kids show that has found new life on the Cartoon Network and on DVD. “There’s stuff in the show I have idolized since childhood, so just being in the room with it …” his voice trails off. “Is humbling the right word? I’m exhilarated.”

Mr. Panter’s presence in such an exhibit is a sign of the times.It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when underground comics acquired mainstream legitimacy. Perhaps it was in 1992, when Art Spiegelman, who championed Mr. Panter’s work as the editor of RAW magazine in the early 1980s, won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel “Maus.” (Spiegelman, whose work was part of the “Masters” exhibit first organized by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, pulled it from the New York show, citing personal reasons). Or maybe the arrival of “The Simpsons,” a few years earlier, had something to do with it.That show’s creator, Matt Groening, came out of the same alternative media as his friend Mr. Panter (and joins him October 10 for a conversation at the 92nd Street Y).

Mr. Panter, a Brownsville, Texas, native, proudly dubbed “the king of the ratty line,” didn’t begin to draw seriously until after he’d already been painting for some time.

“What’s behind a lot of cartooning is a frustrated, shy person who wants to make something that shouts for them in the world. In the old days, people cartooned because they needed a job, and they started out at 12. I started after college. I remember, I went to see Jack Kirby, and he said [in doubtful voice], ‘Okay, but why are you starting so late?’”

He was lucky, though, to launch his career in Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. The city’s erupting punk rock scene meshed seamlessly with Mr. Panter’s artistic ambitions. His self-described “jaggedy” style made for some memorable Frank Zappa album covers (remember “Studio Tan”?), and found purchase in a local punk ‘zine called Slash, which invited the artist to contribute a comic strip.Thus,”Jimbo” was born: a post-apocalyptic Everyman who wanders the landscape of an imaginary city called Dal Tokyo.

Original panels from Mr. Panter’s magnum opus, “Jimbo in Purgatory,” fill a wall in the Jewish Museum, their shaggy mayhem and chiaroscuro tones offering a strong contrast to the precise, geometric figures and interior wit of Mr. Ware’s work, which shares the room.

“In my mind, I see him as a young Kevin Bacon,” Mr. Panter says of Jimbo, who strides through the densely allusive panels of “Purgatory” amid dialogue lifted from Dante, Boccacio, the Book of Isaiah, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Two Virgins.”Yul Brynner’s cowboy robot from “Westworld”makes a guest appearance, as does Zappa and a host of other free-associative references — all duly footnoted.

Another room contains a trove of Mr. Crumb’s grumpy, profane, and sexually effusive underground comics, which minted counter-cultural folk heroes like Mr. Natural (“Keep on Truckin’”) and Fritz the Cat. Mr. Crumb’s cracked sense of humor jostles easily with that of Harvey Kurtzman, inventor of “Mad” magazine, whose elbow-in-the-ribs style also had a strong social counterpoint. Panels from his Korean War comic book, “Two Fisted Tales,” relate combat stories with compassion, blunt humor, and even a kind of poetry.

More traditionally, there’s Mr. Kirby, whose cinematic style for the “Fantastic Four” (created with Stan Lee) revolutionized the superhero business and gave Roy Lichtenstein a key source for his paintings. Mr. Eisner, whose “The Spirit” arrived in 1940, a year before Mr. Kirby’s “Captain America,”is also celebrated for introducing adult themes and urban realism to a newspaper comic and anticipating the graphic novels to come.

The exhibit’s deep focus revealingly ties all the artists together, despite their widely divergent styles. But the days of conventional superheroes may now be something more for Hollywood to mine. “There’s a revolution in comics right now,” Mr. Panter said while reflecting on his experiences teaching at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. “It’s not just Dungeons and Dragons anymore. There’s all kinds of genres now.More than half of my class is interested in doing their own stories.They want to go struggle.”

As for his own inspiration, though he cites the dystopian science fiction of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and the discordant sound collages he plays on a motley stack of old boomboxes, Mr. Panter only has to flash back to his Texas childhood — and the looming menace of his own imagination.

“I got scared by some kids in monster masks when I was 4,” he says, with a soft chuckle. “My mother said I never got over it.”

The NY Sun Files: Zeena Parkins

Globalism is nothing new for Zeena Parkins. She routinely zigzags between New York, where she has lived since 1985, and various concert dates in Europe and behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. Years before Mikhail Gorbachev was implored to tear down the Berlin Wall, American avantgardists were burrowing underneath it. Two decades on, Ms. Parkins — a one-of-a-kind musician who composes and improvises on electric harp — may play an electronic music festival in Moscow one night, come back home, then fly back for a gig in Lithuania.

“I have my bag of toys that literally expands or contracts depending on how far I’m going,” Ms. Parkins, who also employs various keyboards, samplers, acoustic harps, and a Foley setup in her performances, said. Getting through JFK airport can sometimes be a challenge, but nothing in her travels prepared her for her biggest and most recent move: across the East River from downtown Manhattan to Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“I got kicked out,” she said recently, sitting at a 1950s modern dining table in a nook of her new apartment, with a sunny view of a garden and the waterfront a few blocks away. A Brooklynite for all of two days when we spoke, Ms. Parkins was catching her breath before another long trip. “I don’t even know where the coffee shop is where I’m supposed to meet someone later.”

If Ms. Parkins feels a bit symbolic — part of an artistic diaspora that has accompanied the real estate boom in lower Manhattan — at least she is accustomed to thinking fast on her feet. It’s a major part of her process. She has become to the harp, an instrument that suffers from an antiquated image, what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar: She plays it in ways no one has ever thought to, and extracts sounds — often manipulated in mid-strum — that have never been imagined.

Whether her soundscapes evoke pyrotechnic frenzies or cast lyrically hypnogogic spells, Ms. Parkins compels attention with the swirling ease of her hands at play. She often collaborates with choreographers; presently, she’s working on a piece with John Jasperse that will make its premiere this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival. It’s a natural fit: She can make the most immobile of orchestral instruments seem as kinetic as a rocket ship.

Ms. Parkins’s approach, which tends to de-emphasize the harp’s “harpiness,” put her in immediate demand when she first arrived in New York from San Francisco 22 years ago. She began gigging immediately, hooking up with the protean guitarist Fred Frith (with whom she will perform tonight at the Stone) and the late cello player Tom Cora in the trio Skeleton Crew. Over the years, she’s been a versatile collaborator, playing alongside such pop acts as Sonic Youth and Björk, on whose 2001 album “Vespertine” she proved essential.

“I lucked out,” Ms. Parkins said, eager to note that the harp was forced on her while she took music classes at her Detroit high school. “I came to New York and started playing in John Zorn’s game pieces — like ‘Cobra’ and ‘Darts’ — and met Fred and Tom.” She also began working with the percussionist Ikue Mori. A few years ago, the pair formed the band Phantom Orchard, which will perform Friday at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

“With any improvisation, it’s all about being profoundly in the moment and out of the moment,” Ms. Parkins said. “It’s really a moment of inhabiting opposite states. It’s a unique position to be in, and I think it’s taken me a long time to be able to articulate that. You can say: ‘I don’t know what happens.’ But it’s much more than that.”

Her work with Ms. Mori actually comes closer to the song form — or what the duo calls songs. The partnership has evolved such that Ms. Parkins handles the hardware — an array of keyboards, her harps, and various baubles — and Ms. Mori peddles the software, conjuring homemade percussive samples on her laptop and projecting short films she has made.

The duo’s performance this week will take advantage of a 16-channel speaker array installed at the Issue Project Room, a former oil silo adjacent to the Gowanus Canal. The venue will move at the end of June, according to its director, Suzanne Fiol, due partly to landlord issues but also because a pending shutdown of the canal will turn the area into “a rat-infested garbage bath.” The show will be one of the last at what has been one of the city’s most distinctive performance spaces, although Ms. Fiol intends to continue at a new Brooklyn address in July.

“We’ve never played there,” Ms. Parkins said. “So it will be a first and a last. It’s not often that Ikue and I are here at the same time, so it’s nice to play for our friends in New York.”

Speaking of final shows, the recent closing of the Lower East Side experimental music club Tonic has sent a chill through Ms. Parkins and many of her peers. It’s the first time in more than a decade that Manhattan has lacked a sizable venue catering to the amorphous avant-garde scene, which is most visibly championed by Mr. Zorn’s tiny nonprofit club, the Stone.

“It’s kind of inexcusable that the city can’t support it,” she said. “Hopefully, this is some kind of strange transitory moment. It’s an economic problem and it has to do with greed and all those tall buildings going up downtown.”

Ms. Parkins, who still manages to keep a rehearsal studio in Manhattan, is nonetheless happy to embrace Brooklyn. She’s carved such a singular niche for herself, that the relative inconvenience of the G train will not impede her career. “If you want that thing I do, you know where to go,” she said with a laugh. “You thought it was in Manhattan, but check that new address.”

The NY Sun Files: Nico Muhly

Originally published Aug. 22, 2008.

Nico Muhly may not get the kind of attention that is lavished upon some of his collaborators, such as Björk or Rufus Wainwright, but the New York-based composer may be the most buzzed-about musician in the city right now.

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Michael Schmelling

TONGUE-TIED The composer Nico Muhly.

The prolific Mr. Muhly, who turns 27 on Tuesday, has had his pieces performed uptown (at Carnegie Hall) and downtown (at the Kitchen), created music that was adapted from sources as unlikely as “The Elements of Style,” and worked closely for a spell with the almost painfully ethereal vocalist Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. As obsessed with choral music a millennium gone as he is with next-generation electronics — he pays the rent working as a keyboardist and conductor for Philip Glass — Mr. Muhly has no problem constructing pieces through instant messaging while digging back into the primal sources that make music at once visceral, ecstatic, and cerebral.

“He is not afraid,” Mr. Hegarty said of his colleague. “He hears things vividly.”

Mr. Muhly also speaks vividly. Grabbing a happy-hour cocktail at Good World, an Orchard Street bar not far from his Chinatown loft, the composer, who is nearly always described as boyish, was indeed … boyish. But if he looks a good bit younger than his years, the Vermont native displays a thriving intellect that connects seemingly random topics as swiftly as a Google search — whether he’s talking about Thomas Tallis or “Top Chef.”

“There’s something so manic about the chefs,” Mr. Muhly, who graduated from Columbia and Juilliard with dual degrees in English and music composition, said. “The knives and the heat. And Padma. She’s so out of control. Have you read her cookbook? It’s ridiculous. Like this fake Nigella Lawson supermodel vibe.” He mimed Padma Lakshmi, host of the hit Bravo reality series “Top Chef”: “‘I love to go and pamper myself silly and eat so much Korean barbecue. Because I’m wild!’”

Mr. Muhly laughed so hard he was about to fall off his chair.

“It’s great.”

Maybe one day Mr. Muhly will write an opera based on “Top Chef.” If you spend a little time with him, the idea begins to seem awfully normal. Or, spend some time listening to his new album “Mothertongue” (Bedroom Community/Brassland). His fusion of folk music and electronics provides a backdrop for Saturday’s performance at (Le) Poissin Rouge in Greenwich Village. The show, which Mr. Muhly described as a “bistro version” of the recording, also features his key collaborators Sam Amidon, Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman), and the violist Nadia Sirota.

Though he cheerfully concedes the pervasive influence of new-music kingpins such as Mr. Glass and John Adams on his own writing, Mr. Muhly took on “Mothertongue” as an occasion to reimagine much earlier incursions into his aesthetic consciousness. His original influences were his parents, whom he described as being “older than hippies” yet devoted enthusiasts of the folk-music revival of the early 1960s, as symbolized by such singers as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.

Check out Mr. Muhly’s seemingly radical adaptation of a lyric called “The Two Sisters.” Titled “The Only Tune,” it features Mr. Amidon’s singing and string-plucking, a lot of electronic manipulation, and three separate variations on the song that veer from sonic chaos to a transcendently soulful viola solo by Ms. Sirota that ties everything — the lyric’s tragic theme and Mr. Muhly’s extremely creative interpretations of it — together, juxtaposing the analytical and the passionate. The composer’s reaction against one tradition is actually a re-embrace of an older one.

“I hate seeing people singing folk songs and smiling,” he said. “When you listen to the Child Ballads, it’s some crazy old man in Scotland and you know he’s not smiling. Because the songs are all so horrible. They’re so vicious and pagan. Even the ones that aren’t pagan. I’m way more interested in these heavily stylized things. Like [English countertenor] Alfred Deller singing Elizabethan minstrel songs. It’s like Butoh, but way more text-appropriate.”

As a child, Mr. Muhly remembered, his parents sang him the song about the two sisters. The older one pushes the younger one into a stream. Later, the body is fished out of a mill pond and gets refashioned into a violin, an instrument whose only sound is of cold wind and rain.

“I’m like, ‘I can’t believe you’re singing this like it’s nothing. This is infanticide.’ There’s this texture of chilled-out-ness in folk music. So I was trying to do a piece to insist on how nasty it is. I want to own the murder. Jerry Garcia made a recording of it. It’s so dopey. It plods along. I mean, they push her in and make a fiddle.”

Mr. Muhly, whose speech can carom a bit like a pinball going “ding-ding-ding-ding,” has a way of making a strongly felt point through a tone of sheer dumbstruck wonder rather than, say, assuming the role of a didactic snoot.

“Someone took a girl’s body and made a violin. Like, that’s amazing. It requires some focus. We’re going to have bone. We’re going to have flesh. We’re going to have hair. Making that cut was the most fun thing ever. It was crazy to do and it felt so delicious.”

Recorded in Iceland at the studio run by the producer and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurðsson, “Mothertongue” is the product of a highly inclusive process.

“When you think about classical composers, you think about the composer being isolated,” Mr. Amidon said in a separate interview. “But with Nico, there’s a social element that’s really important.” The guitarist also noted Mr. Muhly’s reluctance to prefabricate anything. “We started with drawings on a piece of paper,” he said. “There was no score until the piece was done. And it’s very harmonically complex. I would mess something up, and he clearly was so open to the moment that he would keep my accident-laden version.”

Cracks in the veneer are valuable to Mr. Muhly, who actively resists the incessant pigeonholing that American popular culture imposes on its artists. It’s one reason he enjoys working in Iceland, where, he said, someone is either “indie” or is not.

“You can get away with a breadth of influence there,” he said.

As a cozily somnambulant ballad by Cat Power drifted into the early-evening bustle of the street corner outside, Mr. Muhly mimicked those who don’t quite get that there’s nothing to get. It’s all there. Always. All the time.

“People here, there is no end to asking, ‘How do you reconcile this plus this?’ It’s really boring. People asking, ‘How do you bridge the two different worlds?’ What worlds are you talking about?”

The composer mentioned a well-known music critic whose approach drives him crazy. “It’s unbearable. It’s always in the first person, and it’s always, ‘It sounds like this plus this.’ It does not. This is your dumb hermeneutical exercise. What is that narrative? If people ask me what my music sounds like and I’m feeling charitable, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, it’s like John Adams plus 16th-century choral music.’ And then I feel stupid for six weeks after. Dirty. I have to loofah.”

The NY Sun Files: Sunn O)))

Heavy metal is a joke. Right? Its eldritch trappings, thudding chords, and gothic pomp make it an easy target for sympathetic parody, from Spinal Tap to Tenacious D. Yet the really funny thing is that “the metal,” as Jack Black calls it, has stealthily morphed into a new kind of art music.

“I’m really inspired by the aesthetic and spirit of jazz, like Miles Davis in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” said the guitarist Greg Anderson, who forms Sunn O))), the leading exponent of underground metal, along with fellow guitarist Stephen O’Malley. “I love the freedom of that music, the concept of pushing boundaries.”

Mr. Anderson, whose shoulder-length black hair and beard would certainly fit the period, also runs a record label, Southern Lord, which has released 70 albums since 1998. To expand on the jazz connection, the Los Angeles-based label seems to represent for the most creative factions of metal what the fabled Blue Note label did for jazz in the 1960s. Unlike Blue Note, however, which recorded both avant-garde landmarks and hard-bop standards, Southern Lord’s most popular releases tend to be its most far out. They fall into a loose category that fans call “stoner doom.”

Doom’s glacial tempos take their cues from Black Sabbath, often simulating the blurry consciousness experienced by marijuana smokers. But then it begins to free-associate, veering toward psychedelia, hypnotic drones, and a feedback-laden wash of impure sound that roots in the ambient experiments of Brian Eno and the minimalist throb of 1960s innovators like Tony Conrad and La Monte Young.

“We’re at a very cool place right now,” Mr. Anderson said. “There’s not too much analysis of what we’re doing, and that’s part of the magic.” Bands like Sunn O))) — pronounced “sun” and named after a brand of amplifier — and Boris, a Japanese trio inspired by the Melvins and fronted by a skinny female guitarist named Wata, are redefining the genre’s frontiers by essentially ignoring them. How far they’ve pushed became obvious when Sunn O))) toured as the opening act for the more conventional Swiss black metal act Celtic Frost.

Mr. O’Malley, who is now based in New York, recalled the first show, at the Fillmore in San Francisco. “I looked out at their crowd and realized we do not have a metal crowd by any means compared to this,” he said. “Imagine if it was 10,000 years ago and you had your tribe and you thought you were a metal tribe, and then the real metal tribe came over. You’d lose your territory pretty fast.”

In truth, though, the performers all come from the same place as that audience: a profoundly obsessive fanhood. Mr. Anderson makes a joke about how he first hooked up with Mr. O’Malley when both lived in grunge-era Seattle and idolized a Sub-Pop act called Earth — whose founder, Dylan Carlson, is now signed to Southern Lord. “It was all about getting really stoned and getting as many amps together as we could,” he said. After forming bands with the more conventionally metallic names Goatsnake and Burning Witch, the pair came up with Sunn O))), and Mr. Anderson launched the Southern Lord label to put out their records.

The band’s live shows often act as endurance tests for the audience, with sound waves generated as much for tactile sensation as audible comprehension, and the ever-impending threat of the so-called brown note — an extreme subharmonic rumble reputed to challenge the intestinal fortitude of more sensitive fans. Meanwhile, fog machines whir and the musicians vanish beneath the hoods of their dark monk robes.

Last year, such ritual intensity won Mr. Anderson and Mr. O’Malley a cover story in the countercultural monthly “Arthur,” which more often champions freak-folk heroes such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. “Blacker Sabbath” was the headline, and while the musicians enjoy some of the drama inherent in metal, they also are having a bit of a laugh. The name Southern Lord indulges some of Mr. Anderson’s affection for religious imagery, but he’s the first to acknowledge its actual source. “We were drinking a lot of Southern Comfort, and listening to a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he said. “We thought it was a cool-sounding name.”

The label is even more Dixie-fied than that. The Hidden Hand, a Maryland-based band that performs tonight at Club Midway in the East Village, is one of the standard-bearing acts on Southern Lord — although front-man Scott “Wino” Weinrich has an epic reputation as a member of such defunct bands as Saint Vitus and the Obsessed. While tracks on the new album, “The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote,” deploy that exaggerated bass drone that Black Sabbath minted on “Iron Man” and evoke the seismic dread of a leviathan trawling through sludge — with a high-hat marking time — much of the record flat-out boogies. The springy rhythms and choogling guitars of “Lightning Hill” are pure Southern rock, as is the wailing harmonica that keeps up the locomotive pace. And with its song cycle about a mythic “first American” — a renegade heir to African slaves and native tribes — the album reaches for consonance with a literary landscape mapped by Constance Rourke in her classic study “American Humor.”

Mr. Weinrich, much like his peers, doesn’t analyze things too much. He credits the lyrical themes to bassist Bruce Falkinburg. “You’ll find him reading ‘The Iliad,’” he said. But the performer does enjoy telling a good story. “We still like to sing,” he said, calling from an Arby’s drive-through lane somewhere in the heartland, where his band was on tour. “Singing isn’t popular anymore.” Instead, metal vocalists are still in love with the Cookie Monster, the slang phrase for the slow, guttural “Narrrrrghhh” sound that approximates speech on many death metal recordings. Like a blues singer, Mr. Weinrich would rather belt it out, enunciating his syllables with passion and verve.

Even if its signature acts spiral off into interstellar orbits, Southern Lord remains grounded in those essential qualities. “It’s really important to have a strong voice in the underground,” Mr. Weinrich said. “Greg’s tenacity is crucial, man.”

Even Jack Black can bow to that.

The NY Sun Files: Kidd Jordan

Even people who aren’t sure they’ve heard of Kidd Jordan have probably heard him. Now 73, the tenor saxophonist has been playing since the early 1950s. And since Mr. Jordan’s spirited adolescence coincided with the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll and the explosion of new sounds coming out of New Orleans’s fertile rhythm-and-blues scene, the Crescent City native was at the right place at the right time.

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Luciano Rossetti

ON THE HORN The saxophonist Kidd Jordan.

Mr. Jordan was barely out of his teens when he began gigging with the Hawkettes, a band featuring future New Orleans musical royalty Art and Aaron Neville, whose 1954 hit “Mardi Gras Mambo” became a parade anthem. In the half-century since, the avuncular multi-reedist has backed up everyone from Ray Charles to Martha and the Vandellas to Stevie Wonder, worked alongside Professor Longhair and Little Richard, and recorded with Elvis Costello and R.E.M. But for all his session and stage credits, Mr. Jordan has always pursued a parallel path as a jazz avant-gardist of the purest intent. It’s in that role that the saxophonist visits New York this week, headlining a Wednesday night tribute to his career at the 13th annual Vision Festival, the world’s leading free-jazz summit. This year’s edition will present more than 50 events, including music and dance performances, poetry readings, film and visual art projections, and panel discussions.

“It’s like a love-in,” Mr. Jordan said of the festival, where he has performed nearly every year since it was launched in 1996 by the dancer-choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker and her husband, the bassist and bandleader William Parker. “All the cats that I love are playing. It’s a family thing. You just get up and assert yourself. You play and you do what you do.” Talking by phone from his daughter’s house in New Orleans, Mr. Jordan often displayed an amused regard for the world and for himself. “You know, other than in Chicago, New York, and Europe, people always look at me strange.”

Mr. Jordan is no stranger to the Vision Festival, where his fierce and lyrical style can erupt in whatever impromptu pattern he chooses, without puncturing decorum.

The weeklong lollapalooza first emerged as an alternative to the city’s big-ticket corporate jazz festivals of the mid-1990s, namely the mainstream JVC festival and the long-defunct Bell Atlantic and Verizon festivals organized by former Knitting Factory owner Michael Dorf. Though the Vision Festival has an amorphous relationship to genre — it has hosted artists as non-jazz as Cat Power, and has long fostered an appeal to indie-rock fans — it revels in old-school free improvisation and next-wave jazz exploration. There’s a particular focus on the long tail of influence extending from the revolutionary sounds of such 1960s icons as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. It’s a continuum into which Mr. Jordan slips seamlessly, as he will demonstrate when he plays four sets in a variety of combos featuring such favored associates as Mr. Parker, the drummer Hamid Drake, and Chicago tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, another unsung hero who was previously honored by the festival.

“We’re used to playing together,” Mr. Jordan said of Messrs. Parker and Drake, who are to this kind of music what, say, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare were to reggae in the 1970s, and who have collaborated with the saxophonist in various settings during the past decade. Thanks to such a high degree of almost telepathic chemistry, the musicians can move together like a breeze gathering force, capable of radical and unexpected shifts. In the quartet with Mr. Anderson, the rhythm section may become the front line, musically speaking, while the saxophonists create a modulating background of rushing, roiling tones. “They’ll throw different things at you; that’s what I like about improvised music. You don’t get stuck in ruts. You can’t look for nothing!”

A fifth ensemble, formed around two of his musician sons — trumpeter Marlon and flautist Kent — as well as alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, will pay a New Orleans-themed tribute to Mr. Jordan.

It’s appropriate, given that the musician chose to stay in his hometown rather than join a generation of his peers who left for Los Angeles and studio work in the 1960s, or spent most of their time on tour. Instead, Mr. Jordan became an educator, teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge, running summer music camps for kids, and raising seven children of his own, four of whom are now professional musicians.

“I figured if I always had a job teaching, I could play what I wanted to play,” he said. The only thing that pushed Mr. Jordan out of the city was Hurricane Katrina, which forced him to relocate to Baton Rouge until his home is finally repaired. (“Nobody’s getting nothing done,” he said. “But you got to put up with it. You can’t do nothing about it.”)

While Mr. Jordan became a valued resource in New Orleans, his work as a soulful improviser with a surplus of old-school R&B shout in his heart has filtered out to free-jazz fans through a network of independent labels in America and Europe. As a young man, Mr. Jordan said, he was another horn player copying Charlie Parker’s licks. Then one day, someone played him “Something Else!!!!” a new album by a then little-known musician named Ornette Coleman. “And I said, ‘This is it! I know I’m in the right direction now,’” he said. “Oh, man. When I heard that … Hallelujah!”

As far as lifetime recognition goes, though, Mr. Jordan has no worries. The characteristically self-effacing performer may appear modest, but beneath his New Orleans charm he’s just as tough and singular as Mr. Coleman — and as purely individualistic as any of his now-legendary bandmates from the 1950s and ’60s. As we spoke, he cracked a joke about the time someone was trying to track him down.

“I said, ‘Man! If you want to hear me play then come by my house. As long as I can practice, I don’t care if I play nowhere.’”

Miles Davis: Back “On the Corner”

When it hit the streets in 1972, On the Corner was, to paraphrase James Brown, the new, new, super-heavy funk. One step beyond the already mindblowing electrification project that was Bitches Brew, this was Miles Davis’ boldest, blackest recording yet. And it still is. Underrated even by critics who defended the trumpeter’s transformation from the modal genius of the mid-1960s to the switched-on starchild of the ’70s, On the Corner was a festering soup of sonic experimentation that was all about collective jamming and deep amorphous polyrhythms. Open-ended sessions, shot through with a potent, R&B-influenced pulse, psychedelic vibes, grinding organ and dancing tables, were radically edited into form by producer Teo Macero – extrapolating the improvisatory impulse of jazz into the computer-lab world of electronic music.

The Sly-Stone-Meets-Stockhausen mash-up was several galaxies far removed from the music Davis made indelible in the late 1950s – beginning with Kind of Blue, through several Gil Evans collaborations, and onto his latter-day supergroup with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams, who all followed their leader into the brave new world of jazz-rock fusion. Critics argue that the movement was a dead-end for jazz, and it’s hard to argue away the fact that, aside from a few amazing albums, a lot of what came in the wake of Davis’ new sound was stridently commercial schlock. But what’s heard here isn’t a cul-de-sac, it’s a visionary path to the future of popular music. Like some protean fungi sprouting from a stump in the Rain Forest, the music has seeped into the post-1970s consciousness that shaped disco and dub, ambient and trip-hop, and the outré chic mixes of avant-ribshack producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. At least, that’s what it sounds like now. What it sounded like then (or close, I think I first heard On the Corner in 1978, which may or may not have been more impressively dense and wild under the frequent influence of hallucinogens) was something like a thick syrup crawling with bees, or sweat dripping off of a provocatively naked thigh, or a lucid dream in a cybernetic jungle.

These six CDs are a map through a hypnotic thicket, offering a chronological survey of the sessions that yielded Corner and subsequent studio albums (Big Fun, Get Up With It) leading up to Davis’ retirement in late 1975. Though Davis would return in 1981, these are his last records that matter. Tracks like “Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X” and “Black Satin” are at once bad-ass and immaculate, cosmic and streetwise: these stoned-out grooves suspend time. Fret-freaks will grab this to hear legendary guitarist Pete Cosey’s contributions, while connoisseurs of spectral funk will dig into the half-hour dirge “He Loved Him Madly,” a meditation on the death of Duke Ellington that might as easily be a eulogy for jazz itself. Columbia’s vaults may have given up the last of its Milesian ghosts with this extravagantly packaged metal box (with tactile facsimiles of the ghetto cartoon characters Davis inked for the original album cover). The eighth and final set sends out the archival series with a big bang.

Cat Power: “Jukebox”

I’m not sure what the moment was when Cat Power “broke.” Was it her singing “Sea of Love” on some Connecticut Life insurance commercial, or doing that Cat Stevens song on the diamond commercial, or having her gawky/glamour/gamine form projected sky-high into the exterior of the Museum of Modern Art as part of video artist Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers, or was it that shot of her taken by Richard Avedon, not long before he died, that ran in The New Yorker: atypically slathered in heavy eye makeup, wearing a Bob Dylan T-shirt and a pair of jeans provocatively untucked enough to reveal a thatch of pubic hair? Oooooh, eat that, Britney!

Our not-quite-pop anti-diva is more likely to frame the desire of Italian fashion photographers and neurotic teen girls on LiveJournal (is that still going?) than the paparazzi. She’s always crept under the radar of Big Media, which is the genius of culty-cult status: You can be famous, but you can also get left alone. It’s allowed Chan Marshall, the erstwhile Atlantan – Fellini’s Pizza, holla! – who records as Cat Power, to steadily, even sneakily, build up an impressive career while seeming to be in the process of dismantling the notion of “career.” I swear, without her sotto voce, somnambulatory alto, and its earthy Southern elements, there might never have been a Norah Jones, or a generation of Starbuck’s-approved, post-Lilith Fair, singer-songwriters. Leslie Feist may be the best of them, but Leslie Feist never kept me awake at night, listening, and Leslie Feist probably has the eccentric edges of her personality tucked away somewhere for later. The thing about Marshall is she always wears it on her sleeve. She’s not quite professional, which makes it oddly gratifying when she really, really tries to be.

The new Jukebox capitalizes on the breakthrough of Marshall’s radiant The Greatest (2006), which saw the singer step up to the challenge of working with a “real” band – an all-star assortment of old-school Memphis studio masters, such as guitarist Mabon “Teeny” Hodges, who co-wrote many of Al Green’s hits, and drummer Steve Potts from Booker T. & the MGs. The project reflected Marshall’s personal obsessions with the iconic aura of Memphis as a key site in the Civil Rights-era South, and gave her the chance to mesh her formerly bare-boned songs with those lush, simmering Stax/Volt grooves. As many YouTube clips attest, it worked transformative wonders in concert, as a performer who formerly verged on the autistic flowered into something like professional maturity. Last summer, as she headlined at Chicago’s Pitchfork Media Music Festival, Marshall still had her mojo intact. Her group was killer, an offshoot called the Dirty Delta Blues Band that featured the tastefully nuanced Mr. White on drums and Judah Bauer, the eruptive guitarist from Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion. The outfit’s rewired versions of Dusty Springfield and Otis Redding felt at once classic and contemporary, Marshall’s self-conscious mannerisms undoing memories of the pop standards even as she remade them.

Jukebox works entirely in that vein. Amid songs by Joni Mitchell, Hank Williams, and Janis Joplin, there’s stuff here that just sounds odd (“New York, New York”), because it thoroughly discards the original melody and becomes a caprice. And there’s stuff here that sounds perfect, like the version of Bob Dylan’s hymn “I Believe in You,” with Marshall emoting over rough drums and raw guitar that could be an outtake from Exile on Main St. The Rolling Stones are frequently evoked (and not only on the cover image of the singer copping a Mick Jagger strut). George Jackson’s “Aretha, Sing One for Me” is a joyous evocation of the late-1960s gospel-grunge that the band claimed during its own infatuation with Southern roots music. A retake of James Brown’s “Lost Someone” strips away even that veneer. Delivering the lyrics with a spartan ardor, the singer is accompanied only by some echoing guitar and brushed drums.

As much as Jukebox is about hero worship, Marshall achieves her own pinnacle when she pens the lyrics, about hero worship, in “Song to Bobby.” It’s a catalogue of moments in which her life might have intersected with that of Bob Dylan. The music, with subtle piano notes and a contemplative medium tempo, is gently imagined as a backing track from some circa-1965 Dylan studio session, Marshall singing at her wispiest, here and there inflecting with a bit of Bob in her larynx (as she does on a resplendent version of “Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)” from the I’m Not There soundtrack). It’s moving, because it’s so personal, and because her voice gives way when she pushes for meaning. There are no mannerisms, and no professional poise, either. In her desire to embrace her own spiritual heroes, Marshall may not become their equal, but perversely enough she’s never sounded more original.

Double Fantasy: The Watson Twins

Now more than ever, America needs the Watson Twins.

The sisters from Louisville, Ky., were the secret, double-barreled weapon on singer Jenny Lewis’s 2006 album Rabbit Fur Coat, on which they helped the former child star break out as a countrified solo artist after years of indie-rock success with the Los Angeles quartet Rilo Kiley. And they did so often subliminally, like the fine details in the fancy embroidery on a Western-style shirt. The more deeply one listens to that record, the more one hears the Watsons, whose gospel-inspired harmonies gave Lewis’s confessions both unanticipated emotional depth and a celestial glow.

As might be expected, Fire Songs (Vanguard), the Watsons’ full-length debut, is more than a little bit country. When you’re talking about vocalizing siblings from bluegrass territory, all you need is a banjo or a pedal steel, a slower beat, and some studio echo to make it all sound like it’s about Jesus. Even if the ladies did a version of “Hot for Teacher” it would still make a rank heathen want to drop to his worthless sinful knees and beseech the heavens for absolution of his wickedness. That spooky devotional quality, unearthly enough to qualify for the next David Lynch film, is a major part of the vibe the Watsons brought to Rabbit Fur Coat — a calling card. It’s everything that country and western devotees in the rock business — Jack White, Jeff Tweedy, Billy Bragg, et al. — aspire to, with their ancient tube amplifiers and Hank Williams envy. But the Watsons have it in their blood.

What’s more authentically redemptive about Chandra and Leigh Watson, however, is not that they are the reincarnation of some Carter Family-era hillbilly hoodoo. The overall effect of Fire Songs is closer to the current Los Angeles neo-hippie folk-pop demimonde. The gals have lived for nearly a decade in hipster Silver Lake, sort of the 21st-century Laurel Canyon, and reside on the earthier side of a scene fostered by venues such as Spaceland and culture ’zines such as Arthur. They aren’t freak-folk, and they aren’t psychedelic. But when the guitar twangs and shimmers over a stately rhythm at the beginning of “Sky Open Up,” for instance, evoking Neil Young and Fairport Convention, it could be 1972 all over again.

Smoky, mid-tempo balladry is a favored mode for the twins, who indulge in the high lonesomes on such tracks as “Dig a Little Deeper” and “Old Ways,” bittersweet and tangy romantic reveries that work well enough without making anyone forget about Lucinda Williams. But the album is a lot more fun when the singers embrace retro confections like “How Am I To Be,” a throwback to early-1960s girl-group pop with toy xylophone chimes and “wooo-ooh-ooh” choruses that works its charms in a succinct three minutes. “Fall,” probably the best-realized performance on the album, dispenses with all but some acoustic guitars, eventual strings, and a haunted, echoing bit of piano for a coda, as one of the Watsons (it can be difficult discerning which) sings against a spare backdrop. It’s all about romantic madness and dissolution, but the delivery is so straightforward, the song becomes a meditative balm.

The sisters up the ante into goose-bump territory with the album’s not-unexpected cover song. What is unexpected is that it’s not a Wednesday night prayer-meeting ditty. Instead, the twins take up the 1987 Cure hit “Just Like Heaven,” slowed down a notch so the melody glimmers off the guitar strings like little droplets of rain, a harmonica wheezing with just the right amount of “sad.” The beauty of this kind of remake, with the verses rendered in close-miked harmony, is that the listener not only gets to hear the lyrics — stripped, as they are, away from their original new-wave trappings — but also to feel them. When the Watsons hit the line, “Found myself alone, alone, alone above a raging sea / Stole the only girl I loved and drowned her deep inside of me,” their voices delicate and dreamy in their evocation of loss, it approaches the suspended animation of a Wong Kar-Wai scene.

Drawn like the prodigal wayfarer, I followed those harmonies down to the Mercury Lounge in Manhattan one recent afternoon where I found Chandra and Leigh fussing over their T-shirt concession display. I grabbed a beer and flicked on the tape recorder as the sisters each took a barstool, and we started talking.
So how did you guys wind up in Los Angeles?

Chandra: It was a twist of fate. We had been traveling around the country visiting friends and when we got home to Kentucky, it just so happens that a friend called us from L.A. and said his roommates were moving out and he had a couple of extra rooms. We had promised each other that when the time came and the door opened we would just go. And that was the door. We packed up our truck and drove to L.A.

What kind of truck?

Chandra: We still have it. Ford Ranger. Proudly.

Did you play around Kentucky a lot?

Chandra: Leigh and I had been in Indiana going to school, and we were doing a little bit of playing there. Just bars and coffeeshops.

Leigh: We had started writing our own music. We had a band back then for a little bit, but it wasn’t anything serious. We were wasting time more than anything else. Right before we left school we started getting a little more serious about it. L.A. is a good music city, and we got really lucky to be part of a neighborhood where everyone was into music. We landed in the right spot.

This was ten years ago. What was the scene like then?

Chandra: Strangely enough it’s the people from that neighborhood now. Rilo Kiley, Silversun Pickups, Earlimart, Sea Wolf …

Leigh: Dengue Fever, Radar Brothers.

Chandra: They’ve all been happening for years, but only become recognizable in the last few years.

Leigh: Elliot Smith was living there and Beck and people doing it on a much more professional level than all of us. It turned into something that was really special. I feel lucky to have been a part of that fetal state. And now feeling like wow, seeing all my friends doing well and getting recognized for their music.

Chandra: It’s just a matter of time. You plug away long enough and you get better and you meet more people. If your head is in the right place it evolves into something bigger.

Is it pure natural for you two to sing together?

Chandra: We sing along to the radio and harmonize. I was telling someone the other day that it’s harder to… I mean, I can sing the melody but my head automatically goes to the harmony.

Leigh: It’s pretty instinctual. We challenge ourselves by thinking outside what our natural instinct is and try to do something different.

What’s the cheesiest song you’d sing along to?

Chandra: We sing along to everything.

Leigh: We were like rocking out to Wham! on the way out here from LA.

Chandra: Whatever comes on the radio.

Leigh: Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, lay it on us.

After the Jenny Lewis record, what was it like to be on the radar?

Leigh: We were singing backup vocals in bands for so long, it was a comfortable place for us to operate in. We were excited that “Oh this record is getting so much attention,” but we really had no idea what we were about to embark on. It just kind of rolled out. There wasn’t too much fuss about it. Ultimately, it set the stage for now. We talk with Jenny and that whole project was such timing. All these people came to a quiet spot and a beautiful thing sprung out of it.
Is it weird if people come up to you and say they think your music is spooky? Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m in a David Lynch movie…

[They laugh]

Leigh: I think there’s that visual element, too.

It reminds me of Roy Orbison, too. There’s a timeless, ethereal quality. Maybe it’s what happens…

Chandra: When three ladies come together?

Leigh: The spiritual essence. It’s weird. Someone asked me, “Well what do you think about people calling you ‘white soul’?” And everybody is allowed to have their own opinion. It’s not a negative opinion in any way. If people are tapping into that it’s a-OK with me.

Chandra: There were a lot of different interpretations of the music. Some people found it eerie. Some people are like, hey it’s really country, or old soul, or old folk. It touched on a lot of genres that we all enjoy.

When you were growing up, what was important? TV, church, indie rock?

Leigh: A little bit of everything. We started out in church but then we got very involved in the hardcore and punk-rock scene in Lousiville, and that scene turned into indie-rock. It’s a weird thing.

Squirrel Bait?

Leigh: They were a little bit older than us. But bands like Slint and Crane and Palace, weird bands that no one really knew how to clarify.

Chandra: You went to every show.

Leigh: There was nothing else to do. When someone gives you a venue that you can play and sing in, and feel some sort of spiritual lift and connection from that then yeah, you want to experience it again. It’s the same high you get from performing the raddest gospel song you ever heard in your life. That really elevates consciousness in some weird way, that singing and harmonizing with people.

What’s the raddest gospel song ever?

Leigh: If you asked my great-grandmother she’d say “Old Rugged Cross,” but that’s not necessarily a rejoicing song.

What’s the soundtrack for your roadtrip?

Leigh: Beirut, the new Elbow, our friends Stars from Canada, some Feist, the new Cat Power – I guess it’s not that new anymore – it kinda floats everywhere. Of course, there’s some Dylan on there.

Chandra: Good roadtrip music.

Leigh: Good roadtrip music. We just listened to the Grateful Dead the other day. American Beauty. We’re Grateful Dead fans.

Well, alright! What’s your favorite Dead album?

Leigh: The pretty mainstream stuff. [Chandra chimes in at the same time] “St. Stephen.” It’s a great song. I just like the changes in it and the harmonies are amazing and musically it’s a journey and I appreciate that.

I don’t really think it was the same after Pigpen died. It’s a different band.

Chandra: You’re old school.

Bukkake of Sound: Smile, it’s Boris!

Dry ice billowed across the main stage at the Knitting Factory back one night in March, bathing the audience in a pale, sepulchral mist. Stacks of amplifiers groaned like lungs caked in black fuzz. Short, choppy guitar shards spat furiously, while thick bass chords oozed beneath the seismic shudder of the drums. Few bands alive make the walls sweat like Boris.

The Japanese trio, which has been gigging in one form or another since 1992, has become more prevalent on the American rock club circuit since the breakthrough success of its 2005 album Pink (Southern Lord). The recording sold about 15,000 copies to the kinds of fans who would not likely be seen at Ozzfest, the annual tour that serves as a summit for everything heavy metal. Indeed, the crowd that jammed into the Knitting Factory this week qualified as more nerdy than diabolical, despite its excess of facial hair. And though there was a semblance of a mosh pit, there also was a sizable young female element to the demographic, savvy and amused, perhaps, to have strayed so far from the L train – the automated artery that pumps hipster blood through the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, America’s capital of the next groovy thing.

But, as is obvious to anyone who has indulged their ears in Pink, or for that matter in last year’s collaboration with the guitarist Michio Kurihara of Ghost, Rainbow, Boris really isn’t a heavy metal band. It’s more accurate to label them “heavy meta.” The outfit’s fluid chemistry and ease with extreme dynamic swerves allow it to deploy stop-on-a-dime transitions that can carry a set list across the universe, from skull-cracking rhythmic assaults to beatific nature reveries laced with sun-dappled psychedelia.

One song off Boris’ brand new album, Smile, illustrates this perfectly: “Buzz In” begins with a 4-year-old child singing a jingle, all giggles and innocence, before lead guitarist Wata cranks in with the über-riffage and the drums start to wallop. Yet, every song Boris performs achieves the same effect. “Flower Sun Rain” bodes some kind of lyrical impressionism, but to get to bassist-vocalist Takeshi’s wistful refrain, you have to submit to extensive feedback, drone and hum, manipulated like the sonic equivalent of a hall of mirrors. The effect is at once ghostly and sincere, ephemeral and emphatic, and in the end it feels as if the singer has invited you to drizzle away with him into a soulful, introspective guitar solo that might have been inspired by the late Funkadelic fret wizard Eddie Hazel.

In the world in general, we’re always moving between beautiful and ugly,” Atsuo, the band’s drummer and driving creative force, said recently. It was the afternoon after the show, and the musician and artist was sitting in the lobby of a hotel on West 94th Street with his young American translator. Thankfully, this skinny white dude was more artful at articulating Japanese idioms and parlance than 98 percent of the interviews I’ve done with musicians who don’t speak romance languages. No need to make every time Suntory time, thank Saint Ozu. Instead, what Atsuo often spoke came across as poetic, occasionally a tad mystifying, and generally edged with the crafty intentions of the unreconstructed Dadaist, dishing up the epigrams. “People say about every album, that it’s a pendulum, swinging between opposites. That’s the reality of life.”

Atsuo, like his bandmates, uses only his first name professionally. Now in his late 30s, he seems to approach Boris as part of a more general ongoing art project, one that extends to visual art and literature, as well as more marketable facets such as the band’s often extravagant collectible record and CD packages and its endless collaborations with peers in Japan (guitarist Keiji Haino, Merzbow) and America (label-mates Sunn O)))). His intensity was calm but deep, as an introductory comment turned into a discussion about the meaning of “ambivalence” in Japanese culture, and how Boris’ pursuit of extremes is a method for questioning a kind of national complacency.

Maybe that’s why the group is so eager to embrace an American audience. “When there is a conversation between two people who have their own unique perspective, what comes out is a synthesis of love,” Atsuo said. As he sat in a deep leather armchair, his fingers fluttered over upturned palms like a spider flexing. His long, jet-black hair was offset by a white suit and white loafers, worn with pinstriped black socks. He scarcely needed the dark sunglasses to complete the effect. “The point of the conversation between Boris and music is to destroy the music,” he continued. “The point of the conversation between Boris and the audience is to destroy the audience’s expectation for what Boris sounds like as they listen to it.”

As a child, Atsuo said, his earliest cultural memories were of musical themes used in cartoons. His favorite was a robot show that usually climaxed with a huge battle. “Every week, there was a fight song,” he said. “And it always had a sense of courageousness, of putting your shoulders up and going forward.” The bandleader also nodded to the 1970s theatrical artist Shuji Terayama, whose shows typically subverted reality. “One of his performances was a performance that you couldn’t see,” Atsuo said. “He made everyone who was coming drink a sedative to fall asleep. He was doing quite dangerous things.”

On the flip side, Atsuo lamented that he hasn’t made much of an impact back home. “Japan doesn’t really understand me,” he said. “Yet.” But pudgy, hairy-faced American guys and their hipster chicklet counterparts? They do. They’ll lick the sweat off those walls.

The NY Sun Files: Jonathan Kane

Originally published in the NY Sun, Aug. 26, 2008. Not revised, as yet.

As a drummer, Jonathan Kane has worked for such demanding bandleaders as the minimalist godfather LaMonte Young, and Michael Gira of post-punk brutalists Swans. But before all that, Mr. Kane was a teenage blues addict with a fake ID who toured up and down the East Coast with his harmonica-wielding older brother Anthony, in the Kane Brothers Blues Band. It was the 1970s.

Click Image to Enlarge

Sheri Hausey

KANE IS ABLE Jonathan Kane (on drums) and his band February.

The combo lasted only a few years, breaking up about the time Mr. Kane reached legal drinking age. One day, on one of his frequent pilgrimages to the heavily black South Side of Chicago, the white Mr. Kane found himself performing in Theresa’s Lounge, a club in which white patrons were best advised to sprint from the taxicab to the door. As he played a favorite beat, he heard a gruff voice call out.

“Where’d you learn how to do the whorehouse shuffle like that?”

It was Junior Wells, the legendary Chicago singer and harmonica player. Mr. Kane had never heard the rhythm called that before, but the comment was high praise. The “whorehouse shuffle” has since become a signature for Mr. Kane.

“It’s characterized by a little grace note just before the backbeat,” he said. “It makes the backbeat swing a little harder. Most bluesers know it as the ‘double shuffle.’”

It’s a major component in the music Mr. Kane performs with his band February, a five-piece rock outfit that headlines the Saturday finale of P.S.1’s Summer Warm-Up, a series of free outdoor concerts at the Long Island City art museum. The band, which will release its second album, “Ear Jet Party” (Radium), early next year, boasts three guitarists. The front line generates the same textured harmonic effects that Mr. Kane has loved so much about his 20-year collaboration with the composer Rhys Chatham, in whose armies of 100 or more guitarists the drummer served as the sole percussive source.

Mr. Kane’s propulsive verve imports the infectious, hip-shake rhythms of Chicago blues, while the guitars mass and drone behind a simple, slippery theme of a few choice notes. There’s a lot of moonshine in it, and a lot of old-school New York art-rock spirit. Only there’s no pretension — it’s party music.

“We played our own style of very high-octane Chicago-style blues,” Mr. Kane, speaking by phone recently, said as he recalled his days gigging with his brother. “Very, very aggressive super-charged blues. And I just never escaped it.”

Even the drummer’s tenure with the Swans, whose stark and abrasive aesthetic he helped create with Mr. Gira, came to an end when the band’s style began to shift.

“The whole rhythmic subdivision thing was fun,” he said. “But then the band lost a sense of swing and became more of a Teutonic grind. I liked it when it had a little bit of a lilt.”

Mr. Kane also suffered hearing damage in his right ear, for which he blames a faulty monitor at the Mudd Club, a downtown hot spot circa 1982.

Saturday’s concert harks back to those days, which were recently celebrated in a book, “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980″ (Abrams Image), by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the rock critic Byron Coley. Sharing the bill is another figure who made his name in the early-1980s “no wave” era of New York rock, the saxophonist, soul shouter, and occasional pugilist James Chance.

“We’re both acts that have taken the black American musical experience — whether it’s blues, jazz, or funk — and pulled it into a direction of our own,” Mr. Kane said. “Both bands have credibility with people who don’t like that kind of music.”

Mr. Kane is sanguine on the topic of reunions, which have been popular with rock bands of early-’80s vintage.

“I mean, Mission of Burma sounds better than ever,” he said. “But I’m just trying to have a reunion with myself!” Several years ago, the musician took a full-time job as a photographic editor for Time Life. He also oversees the archives of his father, the photographer Art Kane, who is best known for his 1958 Esquire magazine photo of 57 jazz giants, “A Great Day in Harlem.” Art Kane, whose wide variety of work included portraits and album covers for the likes of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Janis Joplin, and Lester Young, gave his son an early introduction to the music world. But Mr. Kane found that it was difficult to sustain a financially sensible career from it.

“The [photography] job had the opposite effect, though,” he said. “Since I was less stressed financially, I became 10 times more productive.” An invitation to record a one-off vinyl single for the independent art-music label Table of the Elements, which had released a box set of Mr. Chatham’s older recordings, led to an ongoing series of albums and festival performances for February.

The band features young musicians from the Brooklyn bands Bear in Heaven and Clara Venus, as well as longtime friends and guests, such as the singer-songwriters Peg Simone and Lisa B. Burns. Ultimately, the group testifies to Mr. Kane’s almost glandular connection to a peculiar rhythmic concept: the whorehouse shuffle.

“I don’t know anybody in New York who can play a double shuffle who’s a straight blueser,” he said. “They can’t swing, unless they’re jazzers.”

But the jazzers just don’t have the thump.

“I need to play it with the power of a rock drummer and the freedom of an improviser,” Mr. Kane continued, paying heed to the imperative to keep some figurative grease on top of the beat. It’s allowed the drummer to come full circle, though he still laughs pretty hard about the glory days.

“What was fun was people’s reactions,” he said, remembering those assaultive performances with the Swans. “These dyed-in-the-wool, seen-it-all New York crowds were shocked. But I didn’t like people coming up and saying, ‘My stomach hurts.’ I like to see people dance. When we’re having a great time, people really seem to lose themselves, and when people seem to lose themselves, so do I.”

The NY Sun Files: Eri Yamamoto

Originally published in the NY Sun, Sept. 26, 2008. Not revised.

Manhattan’s landscape can change in a flash, yet even near the busiest thoroughfares, a half-forgotten pocket exists where time stands still and only the escalating beer prices alert a patron to the approximate decade. Straddle a barstool inside the musty, West Village cocoon that is Arthur’s Tavern and marvel. Balloons dangle from the ceiling, slowly deflating, their candy-shop hues faded with the years. The tobacco-brown wall paneling is dotted with ratty decorations that celebrate every occasion: Cupid silhouettes for Valentine’s Day, fake cobwebs for Halloween. If there’s a ghost of Greenwich Village past, it probably abides here, harmonizing with the creaking furniture.

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Eri Yamamoto

Pianist Eri Yamamoto’s new album, ‘Redwoods,’ is out now on AUM Fidelity Records.

Dump that it is, Arthur’s makes a great bet for jazz fans. Almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday for the past nine years, the pianist Eri Yamamoto has led her trio through a couple of early evening sets at the Grove Street bar. It’s the sort of open-ended residency that seems rare these days, a holdover from the era when Charlie Parker would drop by and jam. Ms. Yamamoto’s focused, sensitive touch and the easy flow of her rhythm section sometimes mark a brave stand against the chatter that fills the bar.

There’s no cover charge, so people wander in and out. A ring of chairs in the back of the room, where the pianist plays on an enclosed stage, offers an over-the-shoulder vantage point.

“It’s a challenge,” Ms. Yamamoto said recently. “Sometimes it’s very noisy, but sometimes it’s fantastic.”

The pianist, who is in her early 30s, was sitting in her Hell’s Kitchen apartment on a recent Saturday morning. She was still excited about the evening before, when a full house of European tourists had sat in rapt attention during the performance. And she had other reasons to feel cheerful. The week before was spent in Milan, where Ms. Yamamoto appeared as part of a soulful sextet led by the indefatigable bassist William Parker. And there was her new album, “Redwoods,” a sparkling trio session that complements a release from earlier this summer, “Duologue.” Both were released on the Brooklyn-based label AUM Fidelity.

Where “Redwoods” presents a cycle of nature-inspired compositions that emphasize the melodic mesh of a working band (with bassist Ikuo Takeuchi and drummer David Ambrosio), “Duologue” is a departure, a collection of improvisatory duets among Mr. Yamamoto and Mr. Parker, the drummers Hamid Drake and Federico Ughi, and the saxophonist Daniel Carter.

“I had a dream,” Ms. Yamamoto said. “It was a very clear dream. I was recording a duo album with these musicians. I woke up and thought, ‘That’s perfect.’” She had dreamt up specific melodies for each musician and wrote them down immediately. With the songs in tow, Ms. Yamamoto contacted the producer Steven Joerg, whose AUM Fidelity label released numerous albums by Mr. Parker’s group, including the 2008 “Corn Meal Dance” with Ms. Yamamoto on piano.

“To me, William’s music is very natural,” she said of the kaleidoscopic composer, with whom she has toured the past two years. “I didn’t feel any difference between that and what I’ve been doing. I don’t feel like I’m writing music ‘for jazz.’ It’s been the same since I was little.”

Trained in classical music, Ms. Yamamoto decided while in college to become a teacher. The native of Osaka, Japan, might still be doing that if not for an invitation, 13 years ago, to visit her sister in Manhattan.

“I had no idea about jazz,” she said. Picking a show at random from the Village Voice, the sisters went to Tavern on the Green to see the pianist Tommy Flanagan. Ms. Yamamoto was disturbed to see that the great pianist, who died in 2001, needed assistance to reach to the bandstand.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I paid $40 to see that old guy?’ But once he started playing, it was very strong. That moment, I knew I wanted to be like him.”

Flanagan told Ms. Yamamoto that if she intended to play jazz she had to move to New York. A few months later she did. After meeting the bassist Reggie Workman, Ms. Yamamoto enrolled for the next three years at the New School, where he taught. She immersed herself in the study of Bud Powell and other canonical figures, but it took a while for the student to gain enough self-confidence to begin playing her own music in public.

That changed in 1996 when she saw Paul Bley lead a trio, with the drummer Paul Motian and bassist Gary Peacock, at the Knitting Factory. She heard in the group’s language, with its sources in the freer forms that began emerging in the late 1950s, a way to unlock her own voice.

“I was very relieved,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be a musician like Bud Powell. His life was so different from how I’d grown up. But when I heard this trio, the music reminded me of my own roots. I didn’t have to be the next Bud Powell fake. I could play what I wanted.”

Ms. Yamamoto’s jazz career began in earnest in 1997, when she picked up a regular gig at the Avenue B Social Club. The short-lived East Village bar was a favorite after-hours hangout for several generations of Lower East Side avant-garde musicians, literary types, artists, deadbeats, couples who would slip downstairs to make out, and drug addicts too stoned to snap out of their spells: an ideal audience for a novice.

“I saw her many times get a bar full of yuppies to get quiet and actually listen,” the pianist Matthew Shipp said. Mr. Shipp, whose often aggressive and deconstructive style might seem the opposite of Ms. Yamamoto’s, first heard her at Avenue B and became an ardent booster, eventually bringing her to the attention of his record label, Thirsty Ear.

“What struck me about her playing was that it had heart and soul and actually moved me, which is so unusual for a ‘jazz student.’ They’re usually caught up in chords and scales. But somehow she had already gotten to the artist part of this.”

Mr. Shipp also offered advice to the aspiring pianist.

“He told me, ‘Move your finger a half-step and you might find a different world,’” Ms. Yamamoto said.

There was no looking back. She has since developed a style that is laced with subtle colors that can rise as she blends notes in unexpected ways. The style rewards close attention. And as a seasoned bar player, Ms. Yamamoto knows how to plant flowers in the dustbin.

“My voicing is not traditional at all,” she said. “If I can hear a melody, I feel good.”

“All you need is a girl and a gun.”

Quick break from the slackering spree of SXSW Film coverage to drop a hot link to my brief feature on Olivier Assayas’s Boarding Gate, which ran in today’s New York Sun. “We were like caged animals …” sez Asia Argento, of a 25(!)-minute scene with co-star Michael Madsen that’s as visceral and knotted as you’d hope from such a pair of bad-asses. Love will tear us apart, again? No it won’t. Love will blow your brains out. Q&As with Assasyas and Madsen en route.  And listen out for a loop from Fripp/Eno’s No Pussyfooting. Opens in NYC on Friday.

SXSW: Day Two

 

SXSW: Day One

Belated dispatches from the banks of the Red River. Just got back from SXSW, the first time I’ve been to the film component, now in its15th year. It was either 1992 or 1993 when I paid my first visit to Austin, home of the Charles Whitman Tower – that wacky college town immortalized in local hero Richard Linklater’s indie classics Slacker and Dazed and Confused –and the city that gave us Madonna’s pap smear, the Butthole Surfers and Daniel Johnston. Upon that inaugural trip, I was still a rock critic for a major daily newspaper, Beck was just launching his career, and Johnny Cash was making a comeback. My super-genius cultural prescience wasn’t exactly Nostradamus-like: When I met rock legend Kim Fowley, he introduced me to a wraith-like spindle of raw bones, black stringy hair and eyes as blank as the checks he would soon be able to cash. The next big thing, Kim gloated. I didn’t foresee Rock Future. I saw Gothic Loser. Good thing I’m not in showbiz. But I did shake hands with Marilyn Manson.

The Divine Mr. M is banging teen starlets these days. Yet, I had nothing to complain about. This week, my hostess was the mostest. And the festival was as good as promised. Just not the weather. Arriving a day early, we had naively assumed the Texas skies would brim with toasty goodness. Instead it was cold and nasty. A trip to Guero’s and the fab Yard Dog gallery was dampened by horizontal sheets of black freezing rain that turned a pair of mean-ass New Yorkers into soggy raindogs, scampering for a cab and whimpering in dismay. Went back to the sucky Marriott Courtyard and watched an AVI download of Irina Palm, a downbeat Cinderella story-of-sorts about a dowdy widower (Marianne Faithfull, more amazing through the years) who discovers a midlife aptitude at giving handjobs for hire. The scenario falls somewhere between Joe Orton and Mike Leigh, though lacking either’s acidic pep to punch through the dour, council-flat veneer the film insists on. Worth it for Marianne-with-the-not-so-shaky-hands, redeeming menopausal doldrums (and saving the life of her gravely ill grandson – movie-of-the-week style) via the glory hole, though I can see why it never got a US release. Perhaps someday on IFC or Sundance.

Montreal

Bedeviled by BB … or SS she-devils?

Went to Film Forum today to see a tasty new 35mm print of Godard’s Contempt (Le mepris for you Gauloises smokers), set adrift on memory bliss at the sight of BB’s splendid derierre –

– and Fritz Lang’s mighty monocle. (More to come, but for now enjoy the trailer above).
But something distracted me on the way in. There was a huge poster of two Nazi She Wolves torturing a square-jawed American POW. The artwork is featured in new documentary called Stalags, which exposes the once-popular genre of Israeli-made smut with concentration camp themes! Here’s the spin from www.stalags.com:

Stalags were pocket books whose stories revealed lusty female SS officers sexually abusing camp prisoners. During the 1960s, parallel to the Eichmann trial, sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel as hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at kiosks.

The popularity of the Stalags only declined after a much-reported trial, in which their authors were accused of distributing anti-Semitic pornography. The film examines this notorious phenomenon, exposing the creators of this literary genre for the first time. Moreover it posits that pornographic aspects appears in canonic Holocaust literature and continue to be spreaded as part of the representation of the Holocaust in Israel, in schools, books and trips to Auschwitz.

More at: www.filmforum.org/films/stalags

Hello my friends

Is everybody happy? La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la … Hey look me over, lend me an ear. This is the new thing. The in sound from way in. This is not a public service announcement. If you have small children cover their ears. For the sake of all that is holy cover their ears! Or not. Maybe it’s time “they knew.”

Alrighty now! Just warming the seat up. Return for further emissions regarding, in no particular order or consequence: Belgian beer, mass media, NYC street culture, the fiery pleasures of dining in Elmhurst, Chinese girls singing about meeting Jesus in Heaven, really goddam noisy fucking jazz, Japanese metal, minimalism, the aesthetics of porn, the porn of aesthetics, modern furniture, the impossibility of a happy life without hot peppers, strong coffee and obscure Korean cinema, all things Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago, Panhandle Florida, redneck mothers, watermelons, weirdos, underground comix, Coney Island, the end of the world as we know it, Iggy, visionary fuck-ups of every stripe, and what Nick Tosches once called “the sevenfold path of the unfiltered Kool.” And so on …