...all things groove.

wlcm2thejngl

Pt. II

...and all that jazz

preachin' the blues

so much blues

blues on the westside

introspection

diggin deeper

a blue dream

....still dreamin'

The Gospel of Contemporary Funk

Today, when I think of funk , I think groove, vibe, vamp and i think MMW : Medeski, Martin and Wood, one of the hottest young electric-jazz-funk combos in the world. And when they team-up with the prodigious John Scofield, one of the most tasteful jazz guitarists to ever grace this nasty planet, A Go Go is born. A heavily vamp-laden and groove heavy , trance-inducing, highly improvised blues session.

It is very evident that Scofield had a blast in conceptualizing and recording these pieces, that seem to be almost resting on R & B heavy, hip-hop shuffles that tend to dance to the really laidback pump from Billy Martin's all acoustic caboodle.

From the mucho infectious title tune 'A Go Go ' to the classic James Brown style vamp on 'Chank', from the, soulful & airy, acoustic-strummed fusion of ' Jeep On 35 ' , to the low down dirty southern-fried blues on ' Hottentot' , this album is right on ! That doesn't mean one cannot hear Scofield's favorite chromatic flights into the " way-out corners " of his usually athletic & angular progressions. Sco shows the world that music can be immensely relaxed and acutely serious at the same time. His perennial, angular-blues lines are very much here, and they're more ephemeral than usual — Sco has long known that long solos rarely improve the groove, and groove is all this rhythm section does.

When the groove escalates, this deliberately funky ministry progressively overheats into a almost bawdy & inebriating funk, with Sco narrowing down on some outrageously chunky rhythmic chords and tasteful phrases throughout , on his very own 'richer-than-molassess' toned hollow-body, while Medeski, Martin and Wood charge along like a funked-up monster on steroids.

All in all Sco & MMW have delivered , what we funkers call the gospel of contemporary funk. A Go Go.

Fare You Well

my favorite thingie

a few of my favorites . i shall review these shows later.

Jimi Hendrix & Friends : The Dirty Funk and Blues At Midnight

This live set documents Hendrix at the genesis of his powers. While not a rock musician per se yet, Hendrix has already introduced a revolutionary approach to the blues sound and melody. For Hendrix, the guitar was an extension of the human voice.

These tunes are brilliantly melodic and exploratory, with a refreshing angular vocabulary. The band occasionally strains at the seams here, with the all-star septet bursting with clamorous tribal energy. It's evident here that Jimi is a noisy guitarist who employs volume as a tool for tension and release.

All in all this boot is a smattering of the dirty funk and blues, that Hendrix would dig into for the rest of his short but tempestuous life.

Best Kept Secret

Being described as the Jimi Hendrix and the Charlie Parker of acoustic music must mean something to JD.

This show surely proves all of that and more. Always true to his roots his band offers far more than just "another version" of the covers included here. Where someone like Ricky Skaggs would use country's old weapons of choice -sentimentality and religion - to sweeten the often labyrinthine complexities of Appalachian music, JD knows how to utilise folk and jazz timing to take the trip to another level.

They don't just call him " the dobro's matchless contemporary master."

Impressions

The audience filed out, stunned and bludgeoned. The comfortable had been disturbed. The merely hip had been driven back to protests of cacophony, anarchy, disorder.

Some people believe that even at its best, the music of John Coltrane never achieved the free flow of Ornette (the comings together and conversation of Free Jazz), or the arranged blossoms of sound-clusters of Sun Ra, but us Trane'd folks believe differently. His music does have excitement and immense raw power – an experience in itself. 'Trane could beat himself bloody, pounding at the farthest reaches of experience and come back with only his effort as an answer.

Perhaps that alone is his answer.

kozmic blues

When you listen to Miles Davis, how much of what you hear is music, and how much is context?

Here's a very interesting article i found online, while looking for write-ups on Miles Davis. This is the sort of thing I always wondered about. And it's not about Miles alone .

Another way of saying that is, 'What would you be hearing if you didn't know you were listening to Miles Davis?' I think of context as everything that isn't physically contained in the grooves of the record, and in his case that seems quite a lot. It includes your knowledge, first of all, that everyone else says he's great: that must modify the way you hear him. But it also includes a host of other strands: that he was a handsome and imposing man, a member of a romantic minority, that he played with Charlie Parker, that he spans generations, that he underwent various addictions, that he married Cicely Tyson, that he dressed well, that Jean-Luc Godard liked him, that he wore shades and was very cool, that he himself said little about his work, and so on. Surely all that affects how you hear him: I mean, could it possibly have felt the same if he'd been an overweight heating engineer from Oslo? When you listen to music, Aren't you also 'listening' to all the stuff around it, too? How important is that to the experience you' re having, and is it differently important with different musics, different artists?
Miles was an intelligent man, by all accounts, and must have become increasingly aware of the power of his personal charisma, especially in the later years as he watched his reputation grow over his declining trumpeting skills. Perhaps he said to himself: 'These people are hearing a lot more context than music, so perhaps I accept that I am now primarily a context maker. My art is not just what comes out of the end of my trumpet or appears on a record, but a larger experience which is intimately connected to who I appear to be, to my life and charisma, to the Miles Davis story." In that scenario, the 'music', the sonic bit, could end up being quite a small part of the whole experience. Developing the context- the package, the delivery system, the buzz, the spin, the story - might itself become the art. Like perfume...
Professional critics in particular find such suggestions objectionable. They have invested heavily in the idea that music itself offers intrinsic, objective, self contained criteria that allow you to make judgments of worthiness. In the pursuit of True Value and other things with capital letters, they reject as immoral the idea that an artist could be 'manipulative' in this way. It seems to them cynical: they want to believe: to be certain that this was The Truth, a pure expression of spirit wrought in sound. They want it to 'out there', 'real', but now they're getting the message that what its worth is sort of connected with how much they're prepared to take part in the fabrication of a story about it. Awful! To discover that you're actually a co-conspirator in the creation of value, caught in the act of make-believe. 'How can it be worth anything if I did it myself?'
I remember seeing a thing on TV years ago. An Indonesian shaman was treating sick people by apparently reaching into their bodies and pulling out bloody rags which he claimed were the cause of their disease. It all took place in dim light, in smoky huts, after intense incantations. A Western team filmed him with infrared cameras and, of course, were able to show that he was performing a conjuring trick. He wasn't taking anything out of their bodies after all. So he was a fake, no? Well, maybe-- but his patients kept getting better. He was healing by context-- making a psychological space where people somehow got themselves well. The rag was just a prop. Was Miles, with a trumpet as a prop, making a place where we, in our collective imaginations, could somehow have great musical experiences? I think so. Thanks, Miles, and thanks everyone else who tookpart, too.

-BRIAN ENO

Thanks Miles. You were one of the greatest. Always will be.

March Madness Pt 1

ABB always meant a lot to me. blues, rock, jazz, jam, slide, jam, gregg, duane, oakley, jam, dickey, butch, jam, jam, jaimoe, jam. warren & derek just add so much more to all that. Phew!

dtb2006-01-25

thank you jim. for taping such a beautiful concert. And for letting us have it. for free. here's an artwork i did for the show.

and thank you derek. you're the best. you are.

peace

the garcia discs

Thanks to Ed Maier for this compilation & all the people at etree who make this whole thing so beautiful & hence meaningful.

peace

Why does it got to feel so bad?

there is a very strong reason why i'm writing this here.

'ridin' with the king' has been playing for a while now. i can't seem to digest the fact that the guy who cut this album, with one of his gurus, has been putting out stuff that defies all sense of proportion or musical sensiblities.

why in the world would anyone who has cut ' beano', ' disreali gears' , 'blind faith' , and ' layla ' a few other pretty decent albums, end up putting on wax something that doesn't even qualify as an amateur effort. infact how can he?!!

i've been feeling ripped off for a while now. ' from the cradle ' was a very good effort to do what he's really good at and he did a very good job. but his last few releases are really disgustingly bad. can any human being become like this?

he was someone who was hailed as god. and even appealed to atheists like me. but now, no way. no. no way. it's wrong. it's cheating. it's blasphemous.

this guy is capable of more. lot more. lot lot lot. we all know that. i guess someone needs to tell him.

the other ones

music means a lot to me.

i guess i now know what warren meant when he said that musicians are the biggest fans . there's something about it that makes you go weak in the knees .

some get it.

Symphony in C Major

To see far is one thing, being there is something else.

I'm an Artworking man, doin' a lot of things I can.

so here's how it goes.

sip sip. " hey that's not right. "

puff boom .

and then something like this. been happenin' for a while now.

so what we see here is a result of all that. over many years. many.

" man this schitt rocks! "

" you bet it does! schitt eh!! heh heh "

then we went on for a while, and i kept thinking of the show i heard last night. it was 'live' alright!! the band was on fire . and maybe some good stuff too. who knows? but they had everything in place. right in place. it was so cosmic. light yet strong. flowing. like the water is right now. down my parched throat.

"Phew!! Man that is unbelievable."

"Errr..you mean this is unbelievable! "

"very"

"very"