Month: October 2013

This week’s Updoc, Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday (East Coasting Time), returns to the music of the mighty Ronald Shannon Jackson in the aftermath of his recent departure at the age of 73, with samples from his band the Decoding Society, solo pieces combining drums and the vernacular poetry of Sterling A. Brown, and episodes from Shannon’s tenure with Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. After so much airborne electricity atop the unstoppable drive of Jackson’s chthonic tembloring it seemed sensible, later in the show, to take refuge in the autumnal shade of Johannes Brahms’ late-period music for a trio of clarinet, cello and piano. Brahms had retired from composing at the age of fifty-seven when that black woodwind set him alight for a few last outings with his muse; after which I couldn’t let Hallowe’en fade away without hearing Philly Joe Jones do the Lugosi on his Blues for Dracula. They are the children of the night. What beautiful music they made.

Howling agrees with capital punishment for crimes against music  as well as theorising on time (again), likens himself to a scientist  and  welcomes lots of old friends to the porch who should have already been there. Amazingly, he does all this in an hour and still finds time to play some of the finest roots and blues on the net.

Bert Jansch – “Whaddaya mean I look like a Monkee??

This week Howling claims to be cutting edge, gets excited about a pair of lungs, amused by transatlantic accents and reveals the meaning of time! All this and an hour of the finest blues and roots you can hear on the net for free!

Sister Marie Knight – Pure Class 

Look at that, I zazzed up a John Zorn cover shot. This is gonna be one edgy, pushy, po-mo show. Twenty five minutes of Zorn’s Spillane and what else? Well, how about Brahms’ first Piano Concerto as played by that hound of all downtowns, Artur Rubinstein? Actually, first off I put the show together—Updoc, Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, Carnegie Hall Lobby Time—with Clifford Curzon’s classic performance before deciding that Rubinstein, despite or because of his exaggerated rubato, was warmer and more Brahmsian; but mainly I marvelled at what kind of genius it might take to write music of such expressive might when still in your early twenties. We tend to think that Brahms was born middle-aged with a prenatal beard, but the young man in love with Robert Schumann’s wife, whose maelstrom of a opening theme probably depicts her husband’s suicidal dive into the Rhine, was one of the most tumultuous of all romantics. He was trying to write it as a symphony and didn’t feel up to it, though Beethoven’s ghost may have envied him that towering opener. After that the screams and splatters of Zorn’s Spillane are light entertainment, though Zorn’s torn alto blues over minor-key strings toward the end of the piece will surely zap your heart. Is there other stuff on the show? Sure, it takes two hours and includes the first Gulf War and Pee Wee Russell’s college concert. Sometimes it takes a pickled man to look like a pickle and play such sozzled clarinet. Bring a jar.

The playlist for this week’s Updoc—8PM Friday and noon next Tuesday, Brooklyn Quiztime—does not particularly compute. Okay, two long cuts from the new Carla Bley record of Trios with Steve Swallow and Andy Sheppard, and two more from the old Bill Evans all-star quintet record Interplay: no problem, they’re good. So is Steve Kuhn, and he gets two tunes in, while Pee Wee Russell gets four. Two orchestral pieces by Aaron Jay Kernis, one soft and one loud, plus a violin concerto by Magnus Lindberg. All good music but I don’t get the point. Consult your decoder rings and send your possible solutions to me at my Zonguldak address. You might have to listen to the show first.