Concert Review: Stanley Clarke

Lots of good shows around Albuquerque/Santa Fe recently. Richard Thompson at the Kimo in Albuquerque was quite good, and he's probably one of the best guitarists living. Son Volt at Santa Fe Sol put on an excellent show (July 12); they sound more and more like a country band these days. But the really amazing show was Stanley Clarke, July 21st at the Lensic in Santa Fe.
Stanley is unquestionably a virtuoso, and may be the best bassist I've ever seen, though people like Buster Williams and Dave Holland make it difficult to compare. His walking-bass playing is surely the best I've seen. His solos are phenomenally inventive, and not just flashy but full of heart. He played acoustic for most of the night, only using the electric bass in the encore, with references to his classics School Days and Rock and Roll Jelly. He played some Return to Forever material, but most of the set list was new, and fantastic stuff. The kind of jazz that makes your hair stand on end. It had the standard jazz form of theme statement followed by a series of solos, recapping the theme at the end, but otherwise there was nothing much predictable about it.
On top of all that, it seems he's an excellent bandleader, the kind of guy who's a joy to work for. (I had the same impression of John McLaughlin a couple years ago.) His band consisted of three other virtuosos, and the excellent violinist Zach Brock was the least of them. He sounded a great deal like Jerry Goodman with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but didn't leave that neighborhood much. John Beasley on keyboards was consistently startling, just about as inventive as Stanley. The astonishing thing which made the show most memorable was the drummer - 18-year-old Mike Mitchell. This cat is a cross-dresser, or at least a really weird dresser, and has a perfectly ridiculous hairdo. Stanley's first words about him were, "Don't let the hairdo fool you." Well, it didn't fool anybody. He could wear a Mr. Potato suit and it wouldn't matter. In his first few minutes of playing, I was thinking it sounded like he had the Max Roach style down pretty well. Before long he had gone way beyond that. I've seen Buddy Miles, Billy Cobham, Carl Palmer, many other great drummers, but the only ones who outshone Mike Mitchell were Cindy Blackman and McCoy Tyner's drummer Aaron Scott. Give Mike 5 years or so, and who knows?
Stanley took a 10-minute bass solo towards the end of the show loosely based around 'Spanish Phases' from his early Stanley Clarke album (his 2nd I think). It was mesmerizing, but then he let his drummer outshine him with a 10-minute solo of his own which was as unpredictable as it was delightful. He even featured Mike more than himself in the encore. A very generous man.
All'n'all, a top-drawer show for sure, which pleased the audience and the band about equally. If Stanley comes to your town, don't think twice.

Democracy in Egypt

Today I have been very much inspired by the behavior of the people of Egypt (it isn't the first time), and I mentioned to a friend that my faith in human nature was given a boost. At the same time, I'm painfully aware of my fellow USAns' near-universal belief that democracy consists of being allowed to choose between two candidates for office, and almost nothing else; we're expected to "vote" with our money by choosing what products to buy, for example. Yet I can truthfully say that in my adult life I have not yet been asked, or allowed, to vote on anything important.

The Egyptians apparently clearly understand that in a democracy the will of the people is sacred. They know that an elected President must serve all parts of the population, that winning a vote is not a winner-take-all situation, but the assuming of the responsibility to build a concensus. And, it seems, they refuse to be ruled by those who do not understand these things any more.

USAns, on the other hand, seem generally to believe that if the Senate 'votes' to abolish candy, and condemn those who eat it as 'enemy masticants', we have to live with it, because after all we elected the psychos.

I like to go back to the basics; it's refreshing. Here's a few:
Secrecy in government is completely incompatible with democracy. This means that all public servants sacrifice their privacy when they serve. The rest of us keep ours.
Democracy and empire are incompatible. The Romans proved this a while back.
Capitalism is not incompatible with democracy, as long as every individual, every clan, community,  and polity, has the protected right to approve or ban actions by corporations that affect them. That is, charters of all corporations must be subject to review by all communities in which they operate. Corporations as tools of people can be very useful, and make many things possible that would not be otherwise. Corporations that make tools of people absolutely must be abolished, as they have abundantly proven their hostility to life.
Every government is a corporation. (By the way, did Marx really fail to realize this? Communists in general seem oblivious of it.) Any corporation out of the control of the people thinks only of its own perpetuation and growth. This applies to every undemocratic government, which includes most named democracies. 
The United States has never been fully a democracy, though we had a good chance at it in recent history (1972-1980, in my estimation). That chance is long lost. The ruling class rules but no longer has any class. They openly mock the will of the people, and brag of being rich as if it were the same as being wise. (Do you hear me, Joe Biden? BabyDoc Bush? Nancy Pelosi?) These sociopathic "leaders" (see Eugene Ionesco for the best definition of Leader) command by force and fraud the respect their behavior could never inspire, and by virtue of their meritless authority prevent any humans less inferior than themselves from aspiring to even the humblest reforms. It's been said a lot, but I'll say it too because it's true; brothers and sisters, we're screwed. But so what? People have been screwed throughout most of history. If it brings on despair, just think about how very not alone you really are.

There's always someone to talk to. They might be in Egypt, though.

I haven't figured out how to post a song in here yet - I'm a tech-tortoise. But if you can find it, go listen to John Kruth's "Here When You're There", and wipe the frown off.

For now, till later, what then,
Justin

The Great Desideratum of Democracy

To justly forge a collective will with which we can honorably act in concert even as we disagree.

Launches Probe into Incident

That's from an actual headline. Need I comment?

AMA #1: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

I needed a way to notate music without using staves, flats and sharps, notes, pointy lines, arcing lines and wiggly lines. So this is what I came up with.

There are seven named 'notes', from A to G, and with flats and sharps that makes twelve. An octave is so called because the seven notes of a scale (some have different numbers, but most of what we hear uses seven) plus the first note repeated makes eight, therefore 'oct'ave. If the frequency of the first note is doubled, it produces the eighth, and remarkably, we hear it as the same note, only higher. In modern music (since Bach, that is) the octave is divided into twelve exactly equal intervals. They used to be unequal; if you hear the terms 'just tuning' or natural tuning' that's what that refers to. I'll describe that in another post when I tackle harmonics. But this post is about intervals.

In the following, A<E means A goes up to E (a 5^th), while A>E means it goes down (a 4^th). A small s or f stands for sharp or flat. () signifies a rest. It'll help if you have a keyboard handy. This way I can write a melody without using any of the beautiful, elegant symbols that have been devised for it. Music typewriters exist, but as far as I know there is no music ascii set. There should be.

AMA Introduction: Hertz So Good

 

As an intro to my Amateur Musical Analysis series, I think I'll run over some basic theory ideas, to help you cats at the NSA understand what I'm talking about, and to test my ability to explain things elegantly. I'm using what I remember of Carl Seashore's Psychology of Music as a jumping point, because it gives you what I call a flexible understanding – that is, an ability to think about a subject in more than one way.

Poetry Offering #1

I was unable to sleep one night recently until I got up and wrote down this poem. Thought I'd share it with you, whoever you are (I noticed somebody besides the NSA has been looking at my blog. At least one is a spammer called Fat Loss Factor. Others are probably my friends from escape-gaming. So for all, spooks, scamps and fellow scalawags, here goes) - this is a riff on an old song, 'I Come and Stand at Every Door, which refers to Death coming to take your young ones off to war.

PARENTS

I come and stand at every door

and then I go inside

What name do you have for me 

from whom you cannot hide?

Am I Jesus or the Devil

your conscience or a djinn

Am I working for the government

or all your fellow men?

You will not see me clearly

not the way that I see you

with your shame and pain and anger 

shaping everything you do

The pillow on your daughter's bed

so heavy with her tears

The wrinkles on your son's forehead

are deep beyond his years

The music you refuse to face

sings softly of your guilt

but loudly of your cowardice

and all you have not built

like trust, and love, and unity

and power to believe

in something uncorrupted

yet you will not grieve

For you think you do the right thing 

though it decimates your soul

And it's only what was done to you

before you had control

When they lied to you and beat you up

and said "It's good for you"

though your bodies tightened and twisted

and your hearts and minds did too.

A bully is a coward, 

driven by a lonesome fear,

by alienation powered,

lost to knowledge, love and cheer.

Such monsters were your parents

and like them you have become

I see it written everywhere

in your unhappy home.

Here is no puzzle to be solved,

no mystery to me

Your tight tired impatient faces

make the history plain to see

I come and stand and see it all

but nothing can I do

I am just a fellow human

wishing you were human too

What happens when you start writing a blog,

even if noone's reading it, is you start to get ideas about what you want to do with it, and where you want it to go. I think about a lot of things so I don't want to restrict myself to anything, but anyway here comes a series.

I'm a professional amateur - actually a dropout, if you want to get technical. Didn't finish Eagle Scout, high school or college. Got what I wanted out of all of them, but no official declaration that I'm competent to do anything. I scoff at most people's credentials, and dream of a world where authority is granted by the rightness of a person's actions, rather than fancy papers. I've been an antiquarian bookseller for years, and that's an impressive title for someone who can't officially understand or do anything (8 syllables, yo! Mo' money!), but like anything else, it's all about learning the jargon, then deciding whether to be honest or not.

I'm amused that the word 'amateur' means Lover, while the word 'professional' means Pretender. That arrangement suits me fine. Soon I'll be writing a post about the monkey in the lab suit, and the chicken in the thunderbird costume.

But for now I just want to announce that I'm doing a series on Amateur Musical Analysis: cause I'm pretty good at it if I do say so myself. AMA #1 will be a study of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, with some Al Green and Joni Mitchell thrown in.  Down the road we'll get into a study of musical tempests, from Vivaldi to Yes, and somewhere along the line a comparison of Died Pretty's A State of Graceful Mourning with Gustav Holst's Venus.

Seeya soon's I get sumpn writ
Yr Huckleberry Friend

Some Amateur Linguistics

I studied Ancient Greek in college, and we had a lesson once on how the meaning of words is enriched and expanded over time; an instance given was the word psuxe (from which comes 'psycho' and everything associated with it). To the later philosophers, it means 'mind' or 'soul', the invisible animate force. In pre-Homeric Greece, it is said to have meant merely, 'breath'.

I listened to my father snoring one night, long gurgling rasps followed by violent expulsions of wind; he'd broken his nose twice and had some windpipe troubles, so his snoring was extra dramatic. Suddenly I heard that word. Psu - in the exhale, then che - drawing in again. Suddenly I 'knew' where the word came from, and understood that all its meanings had been in it from the start. It is the difference between a sleeping person and a dead person.

just1

New Words for People

I just ran across someone using the word 'migrants' to describe some humans who were killed by some other humans near some border for some reason. Not immigrants or emigrants, they're just migrants now. The word militants has long been in use for those-whom-it's-all-right-to-kill, and I've seen the word miscreants an alarming number of times.

My god! How long can it be before they start massacring musicians?

Towers of Psychobabel

Getting started might seem to be a problem, but I guess it really isn't; you just start wherever you please. I'll start with the Tower of Babel cause that story's bugged me since I was a kid. I think now I know why. It's because of music.

They always say music is the universal language, and I believe it, but it doesn't do everything we expect a language to do, like plead in court or ask directions. I can imagine constructing such a language entirely of notes, timbres and dynamics, it wouldn't be hard, and probably as easy to learn as Esperanto and more fun to speak. This has never been done, I think because when we pretend we're important, or try to impress people with our gravity and competence, we always pretend to be unmusical. We stiffen ourselves; we level our voices, suppress rhyme and rhythm. And since lawyers and priests and senators and the like can't imagine themselves singing and dancing at their jobs,  we won't be seeing it I guess.

But certainly it's possible. And this was one of the few times in the Old Testament when Jehovah was actually cool, but the people blew it anyway. Remember that this group of worthies had started on this project because they were pissed off that heaven was above them, in Yertle the Turtle fashion; or maybe they really just wanted better access, who knows? But this really should have pissed off Jehovah, who was known for intolerant behavior (I think he's an impostor, i.e. not the Creator, but more on that down the line.) Recall that after basically entrapping his own children in a classic setup, he not only refused to forgive them but kicked them out on the street and placed armed guards at the door to make sure they could never come home. Then he set them to being unequal and murdering each other by showing favoritism. A guy like that, you need to be careful around.

But in this story, he gave them an out. He didn't blow their little tower away with brimstone. He just made them all suddenly realize how different they were.

Now my question is, why didn't they also realize, right on the heels of that, how much alike they were too? Maybe there were too many lawyers, priests and senators among them. Too many self-exalted middlemen with all their personal power invested in making others work for them. I don't know; the Bible isn't clear on this and many other points.

Anyway, we already do have a universal language in music, useful for more than we usually use it for, and I'll be writing more about that I think.

For Now
just1