Month: November 2014

This week Howling’s blues hounds are hiding behind pseudonyms, rejoicing in the death of white supremacists and getting into the vibe. If that wasn’t enough, Dick’s warning us to prepare for a pedant on the porch. All this, and you still get an hour of  some of the finest blues ‘n roots on the net.

Lonesome Sundown – “Of course thats my real name!!”

Last week’s Updoc opened with a set featuring jazz newcomers who put out notable records in 2014. This week’s show—Friday at 8 and noon next Tuesday, Spanish Harlem time—expands the age bracket to accommodate new work by Brian Blade, Miguel Zenón, Pat Metheny, Oliver Lake, Tigran Hamasyan and the rebooted Preservation Hall Band. After that it’s Milton Babbitt’s perky and abstruse piece for jazzlike ensemble, All Set, originally premiered by Bill Evans and some hirelings in 1957, here performed to a fare-thee-well by Gil Rose’s formidable Boston Modern Orchetra Project with Lucy Shelton on piano, subsequently chased to Far Wells, Mill Valley by Charles Mingus. Branford Marsalis’ long evening with the Grateful Dead in 1990 has been around on bootlegs for years, but now it has gone legit on a Dead box set, and Updoc has selected the long jam on Dark Star as an example of how it went. The mix does not favor Marsalis, but if you squint your ears you should be able to make him out hardening his tone and asking John Coltrane for the loan of some alternate scales. He gets them. Once again we have induced Mr. Mozart to bat cleanup with one of his famous piano concertos, this one No. 25 as pitched by the nonpareil team of Argerich and Abbado. That’s all for this week, while I study up for the oncoming 50th anniversary of a Love Supreme, remembering what it was like to see and hear the universe broken wide open by four guys onstage at Birdland. I’m gradually coming around to the conclusion that music is a good thing to have around. Watch this space for further news.

This week Howlings getting corrected by the usual suspects, playing guessing games and eulogising over bacon sandwiches. What’s all this got to do with the blues? Only way is to listen – you know you’ll hear an hour of the first blues ‘n roots on the net.

There isn’t a single focus or overall theme on this week’s Updoc—Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, East Broadway Rundown time—but I think the music’s good enough to stop by for: first a set of jazz newcomers who recorded notable albums this year—Alfredo Rodriguez, Oran Etkin, Melissa Aldana et al—and then a kind of mournful song-set built around a performance of Jeff Buckley’s Grace—live on TV, four-piece band, no tricks and yes he could really sing like a soaring angel contemplating his oncoming death unbothered. The brackets are two of the stunningest melodies I know, Purcell’s Dido’s Lament and Buxtehude’s Klag-lied, and after a dazzle of D-minor Bach, Jacob Druckman and an orchestra wish Nor Spell Nor Charm trouble his friend Jan DeGaetani’s lully-lullay, and please annul her early death. Maybe the show does have a theme: Herbie Nichols is up next, and his successor Andrew Hill, then along comes maybe the most famous early death of all. I’ve been featuring Mozart piano concertos to close recent shows but this time I got distracted by the extraordinary brilliance of his String Quintet in D, the fifth of the six he composed, less famous than the G-minor but I think the stunner of the set: for most of its length it sounds like Beethoven’s Late Quartets decades before the fact. The canonical recording is by Grumiaux & Co. but I found even more to love in a recording by the Zukerman Chamber Players. I can’t say enough about the glories of this music, so I’ll let words fail and just hope you lend an ear.

This week Howling’s knee deep in Pee Wees as he ponders a blues mans wealth and  finds out that everyones got the blues! As usual, Dicks talking absolute nonsense but in between does play an hour of some of the best blues ‘n roots music you’ll find on the net.

Jerry Lee Lewis ” The career in public relations was never going to work out!”

Sometime in the mid-1980s, when I was working on a profile of Jack DeJohnette, I got to watch Herbie Hancock in action at a recording session at the Power Station. It was an all-star Michael Brecker date, and Brecker, Jack, Charlie Haden, and Mike Stern or was it Pat Metheny did a lot of waiting around while Herbie showed up late, greeted everyone with his customary grace and politesse, dropped a Buddhist book on the control room table, then had to make a couple of long phone calls to the Coast. Pianist Don Grolnick was the producer, so he was able to take the band through the chart of the first tune, but then there was some more waiting around while Herbie disappeared to who-knows-where. Finally he ambled into the studio proper, took a first polite peek at the score on the Steinway’s music rack, and then the band hit the uptempo labyrinth of the tune. Herbie had the first solo and entered with a quick handful of notes, peeked at the score again, played a longer variation of his opening phrase and then sailed his thematic material into the heart of the music like a Cunard liner impersonating a cigarette boat. The whole band sprang to life and there were gasps in the control room. No one could quite believe the sudden wealth of inventiveness pullulating from the keybaord, and no I can’t play it for you on this week’s Updoc—Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, Power Station time—because Grolnick, expecting a mere runthrough, didn’t turn the tape recorder on, thereby missing maybe 20 minutes of unrepeatable amazement. HH is much in evidence lately, with Harvard lectures and a new memoir and all, so the show presents a scattering of his music—he’s done so much it’s impossible to do more than that in two hours—with breaks for his worthy constituents Johann Sebastian Bach and Duke Ellington; and for a couple of funny Herbie Hancock stories I lacked the nerve to tell in full detail, but I trust you to get the pernt.