Bent Notes

Rusty Zinn’s great version of “You’re Just Too Good To be True.”

I interviewed Rusty for Indie-music.com a couple of years ago, when his Zinfidelity Vol. 1 album on the Bad Daddy label was current.  Great guy.  I was turned on to him by Mindy Giles, a high-school buddy of mine that I still see every few years.  She’s had an interesting career.  Worked for Alligator Records in Chicago for a few years.  While there, was involved in the production of some great records by Albert Collins, among others.  Then moved on to the now-defunct Black Top label.  Now she’s based in Sacramento and writes about music and promotes concerts.

Not the kind of economic / cultural harbinger you want to see going down:  a great Bloomington, IN wine bar, Tutto Bene, a place I’ve played a few times and where I presented, with Jazz From Bloomington, our combination booksigning / Melvin Rhyne performance / Sunday brunch fundraiser, Barbecue at the Sunset Terrace, a little over a year ago.

Just got an e-mail from this week’s featured performer, Dennis Riggins, who says that the Widen family, which owns Tuto Bene, is deeming November make-or-break for booking live jazz.  The door numbers just haven’t been sufficient to warrant it for a while.  Dennis was practically begging poeple to turn out.

If you live in the area adn can go see his group, which is first rate, Wednesday evening, please do.

I’d go, but I have my own gig at the Chateau de Pic tasting room in Clarksville that evening.

From Asheville, North Carolina, the Fred Whiskin Trio, featuring the incomparable Bob Belmont on guitar.  Bob’s a buddy of mine.  We met at the Aebersold workshop a couple of years ago and have stayed in touch since then.  We got together in Louiville for a jam last summer.  His strong, clean comping and solo lines are a delight to interact with.

One of those figures in rock and roll history that have come to be overlooked as the years have unfolded, but whose combination of kitsch in presentation and breadth in what he presented (Lovin’ Spoonful, Shangri-Las, Peter, Paul & Mary) spoke more about what 60s pop culture was really about than a lot of the stuff that gets examined nowadays.  Host of a Los Angeles-based syndicated dance show that was about three tiers down in production values down from Shindig, Hullabaloo and American Bandstand, he specialized in corny antics like this exercise-bike ride to the Georgie Fame record “Get Away.”

He went on to host game shows and has a daughter in country music.

Age 81.

Shari Pine, a NYC-based singer-songwriter whose early CD I reviewed for Indie-music.com some years back, and with whom I’ve stayed in touch, has a new CD out.  This is the video of the title track, “The Painter.”

I get a monthly newsletter in my e-mail called “Your Jazz Guitar Spin.”  It’s from an English guitarist named Chris Standring.

In the September edition, he addresses the issue of what makes a player have good days and bad days.  He raises a lot of noteworthy points, such as the fact that festival environments, with their tightly scheduled lineups, big stages with iffy sound systems and big crowds, are more of a strictly-business-type gig, as opposed to small clubs, where you can really lose yourself in the music.  He also talks about the phenomenon of observing yourself while you’re playing, and how it can make those moments when something didn’t work right not seem like such a big deal, and those ones when an idea comes to life a time to explore.

I know I’m getting better at that.  I come upon something during a solo - a sequence or repetition-type phrase, or an unexpected discovery about the harmonic possibilities of the underlying chord changes - and I can now recognize it in real time and take it somewhere.

It all comes from burning those fundamentals into your brain, though, I’m firmly convinced.  The older I get, the more I see that scale exercises and arpeggios are far from just doo-dah activity.  There’s a treasure trove of flavor in those notes!

These days I’m doing my standing Saturday-night gig on the patio at hotel Indigo solo.  Management wanted to cut the cost of the music program (one of life’s inevitabilities), and, while I miss playing with great associates like keyboardist Daryl Spurlock, bassist Robert Hay-Smith, and multi-instrumentalist Tim Tryon, it’s no skin off my nose financially.  They cut the fee in half, and I take it all home.

What it has done is spur me to re-incorporate vocals into my performing activities.  For many years, that was mainly what I did, and the guitar, if I played it at all, was secondary.  In fact, not having a PA but wanting to keep playing after the last band in which someone else had one was the impetus for honing my guitar chops some years back.  That story is well documented at my main site.  I went to the Aebersold workshop for four years in a row.  I woodshedded hours a day.  I came to see my activites as mainly centered around jazz guitar.

About a week and a half ago, I bought a PA, a Peavey Escort.  It’s a cute little unit.  The speakers, stands, cable, mike and mixer all go back into this compact arrangement resembling a slightly oversized suitcase. 

This is my big chance to define what I do more broadly.  I still have the jazz-guitar gigs, such as tomorrow night at Fork at 532 with violinist Carolyn Dutton, but what I shall play at solo shows becomes a delicious question to ponder.

What I’ve been doing so far (this is my fifth week doing the solo gig; I rented a PA the first three times) is trotting out some chestnuts from some of my favorite blues composers.  I’m doing several songs by Percy Mayfield.  He was one of the Texas people, like T-Bone Walker, Amos Milburn, Big Mama Thornton and Illinois Jacquet, who came to Los Angeles in the middle of the last century to establish themselves in the venues along Central Avenue and record for labels such as Specialty, Modern and Imperial.  For the first two years of his recording career, he was marketed as a dreamboat for black housewives.  He focused more on songwriting after being disfigured in a 1952 car wreck.  Several of his compositions have become staples of the blues repertoire.  Probably his best-known work is “Hit The Road Jack.”  I don’t do that, but I perform “Please Send me Someone To Love,” “What A Fool I Was,” and “Never No More.”  I also do numbers by the great 1930s Indianapolis pianist Leroy Carr, as well as, of course, the Chicago bassist Willie Dixon.

It’s been ages since I wrote a good old song.  I wonder if I didn’t get so immersed in the esoteric fine points of learning jazz guitar - bebop scales, walking bass, chord-melody voice leading, modal explorations - that I lost touch, to some degree, with the overall context in which that stuff developed.

This is something I address in a fictional way in my novel, High C at the Sunset Terrace.  Neither R&B nor modern jazz developed in a vacuum. Quite the contrary: A look at the week-by-week schedule of acts booked into the Sunset Terrace Ballroom, for instance, from the late 1940s through the 50s indicates a rich mix: Charlie Parker, T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Lloyd Price, The Clovers, Dexter Gordon. 

It’s this overall strain of unmistakably American music that I’ve always really been about.

I guess all this thinking in public is just my way of lighting a fire under my tail end.  I’ve been concentrating on craft for years now.  It’s time to do some creating.

Aged 91.

If ever there were a symbol of the richness and depth of mid-twentieth-century American music, it was Jerry Wexler.  Born to Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Washington Heights, the neighborhood above Harlem at the northern tip of Manhattan.  Nose-to-the-grindstone window-washer father who tried like hell to get Jerry to see the value of taking up the trade.  Mother with high-culture aspirations who made sure he was exposed to art galleries, foreign films and literature.  A youth spent in pool halls and record stores - and sneaking into the Savoy Ballroom to hear the best big bands of the era.  Service in WW II.  A stint as a reporter for Billboard, where he made the rounds of Broadway publishing and song-plugging offices - and where he coined the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949.

But it was his two decades as partner and vice-president at Atlantic where he left his mark.  When you hear “Shake Rattle and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Night Time Is The Right Time” by Ray Charles, “Cry To Me” by Solomon Burke, “In the Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett, “Respect’ by Aretha Franklin, to just scratch the surface, you’re hearing Jerry Wexler’s contribution to American culture.  (To name a few more, the list also includes Clyde McPhatter, Ben E. King, Booker T. & the MGs, Otis Redding, Duane Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, King Curtis.  And I’ve still just scratched the surface.)

As is noted in this obituary and the many to which it links, he came from that seat-of-the-pants school of entrepreneurship and artistic creation that is so quintessentially American.

I don’t know what kind of greatness could possiby replace the kind he embodied.

Two great posts at Powerline today:  A report on the unraveling of the climate-change “consensus,” and a 69th birthday greeting to Dion DiMucci.

My review of Brian Butler’s Axuality is up at Indie-music.com.  Sweet, gentle, quirky guitar explorations.  A link to his website.  He got in touch with me after he saw the review, and it’s clear from his correspondence that he’s a genuine good guy.  Check him out.

Dennis Prager on Rene Marie singing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” atthe Denver mayor’s State ofthe City address.

Age 93 and still holding down a standing Monday night gig at 51st and Broadway.  He played the heads to most tunes and took a few solos.  Great trio behind him.

So much of what American music came from and developed into in the middle of the twentieth century can be found in the notes, chords and measures of the sides the Mississippi-born Elias McDaniel cut for Chess at that time.  The shorthand for what I’m saying is that he was a key figure in laying down the foundation of rock & roll.  His music was brutally thunderous, with an inescapable rhythm that spoke to the second charkras of males and females alike.  His stage name comes from the term “diddley bow,” which was the instrument most blues legends first learned on, fashioned from bailing wire, nails, and a couple of barn planks.  There is that country / fish-fry / barn-dance strain that comes through in his classic performances, but also the grit and clang of the south side of what was then America’s second largest city, a world of steel mills, packing plants, tenements in which tens of thousands of human beings crammed themselves together seeking some kind of way forward, gin joints and storefront churches.

His music was steely and snaky.  Often his songs were just one-chord vamps.  But in a genre - rock - in which the term “sexuality” is all too often applied to musical examples lacking in even rudimentary levels of real libido, what Bo Diddey gave the world was straight from the most unapologetically real parts of the human animal.  There’s only one answer to the question “Who do you love?”

He made warm, human, unmistakably American music and he was a classy gentleman, which is to say he represented a vanishing breed.  Preceeded in passing by his wife of 66 years by two months, which I always take as an indication of inseparable soulmates.

The profile that resulted from my phone interview of Buddy Guy is here at Indie-music.com.:

http://www.indie-music.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7337

The kickoff to Fork at 532’s music program was an unqualified success.  (That’s the new wine bar in the downtown of the city where I live, Columbus, Indiana.)  The sound violinist Carolyn Dutton and I have fashioned works well there.  I think the plan is for us to appear there every other Friday.

Then, starting this next Saturday, I’ll be at the new Hotel Indigo, also in the downtown of my ciity.  For the first outing there, I’ll be with keyboardist Daryl Spurlock.  He’s an old bud (as in back to the tenth grade, during the Nixon era).  When he moved back to Indiana from Seattle four years ago, we hooked back up.  He’s playing keys on several of the sound clips over at my main site.  We’ve done jazz gigs, but the Indigo manager wants us to do blues and soul, a la “It Could Be That Way,” ironically, the only tune on my sound clips page on which somebody else is playing keys.  Very doable.  Daryl has been playing lots of blues up in Indy lately, with Governor Davis and the like.

With gas prices in the statospheric range, it sure is nice to have some steady work within blocks of home.  Major thanks to the Great I AM.

The International Association of Jazz Education has filed for bankruptcy and Louisville’s world-class club The Jazz Factory has closed.

Much has been written about the changing - okay, shrinking - demographic for what had once been America’s music.  It’s not really a new phenomenon.  Players, promoters, record people and broadcasters back in the 1950s bemoaned the dwindling opportunities for those who were set on devoting their musical energies to this mode of expression.

Does the blame lie with the fact that, after WW II, jazz was no longer primarily dance music?  I think there’s something to look at there.

I’m reluctant to say that race is any kind of a major factor.  Both black and white players have been making seriously swinging jazz since the days of Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Venuti, King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton.  Yes, African-Americans pioneered the form, but it quickly became, as I say, America’s music.

And I don’t want to make too much of this postwar lack of danceability.  Bebop wound up making its way into the broader conventions of the development of American music.  You heard little bop flourishes in a lot of mainstream pop by the mid-50s. 

I gave my final lecture for the semester in my rock-history class last night.  I said, “I’ve really tried to keep my opinions out of this class, but here’s an opinion for you: I think there should be at least three prerequisites for taking rock history: history of American popular song, blues history, and jazz history.”  I asked the class to name three George Gershwin tunes and three Cole Porter tunes.  Alas, the assemblage came up short.

I think the overwhelming of American culture with the rock ethos - loud, fast, simple, and focused on the exaltation of youth - is the primary factor in where we find ourselves today.  Any conveyance of the subtleties of human experience - in our music, and also our visual arts, our literature, and, indeed, in our personal interactions - gets harder and harder to accomplish.  Such is the legacy of Alan Freed and George Goldner.

I still cling to some faint hope that jazz hasn’t calcified into some kind of museum piece, some kind of rarified specialty like opera.  Those who pioneered it in the funky clubs, cafes, theaters and ballrooms of early 20th-century America certainly didn’t envision such an end for what they were fashioning.

Had dinner with some friends at Farm-Bloomington last night and got a look at the Root Cellar, the downstairs music venue where violinist Carolyn Dutton and I will be playing Thursday, April 24.  Cozy place.  The stage area has a grotto feel to it, hemmed in as it is by these massive ancient walls.  Hope everyone in the area will come out as fill the place.  It will be the premier public outing for my new Gretsch arch-top.

Fans and those who have attended my gigs know that I have played a 1976 Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty Custom for years.  I got it in 1981, to be exact.  I have played it and played it, in fact.  Had it refretted six years ago, and it really could use it again now.  Has some character-imparting nicks in the finish and it weighs 12 and a half pounds, but it’s been a part of me. 

There’s a music store in my city that I patronize frequently, for strings, picks, music stands, etc.  From time to time, one of the guys there has had me play various guitars and on a few occasions I’ve been so impressed that I’ve floated the idea of a trade-in.  He’s always said, “I’m not even going to go there, man.  Your Les Paul is you.  You’d regret it.” 

Well, Saturday morning, he put this absolutely gorgeous maple-with-sunburst-finish Gretcsh archtop in my arms, a G 5120 SB, with dual-coil pickups and that classic Brigsby whammy bar.  I stummed it a few times.  He said, “Dude, I’ve never seen that look on your face before!”  I played it for about twenty minutes and left to run some errands.  About an hour later I came back, Les Paul in hand, and said, “Don’t try to talk me out of this, man.”

It’s a stunningly excellent instrument.  Not the first microinch of play in the tuning pegs, no odd sounds.  It sounds like an object crafted from wood - so rich and resonant.  It’s a gas to just sit there and stum a simple A major bar chord and listen to it ring out.

Practice has become inspiring again.  Such a friendly fretboard.  Scales and exercises practically play themselves.

I’m not even going to tell any of my musical associates.  I’ll just let them be surprised when I take it out of the bag the next time I gig or jam with each of them.

John Abercrombie and Andy LaVerne.  The organization on whose board I serve, Jazz From Bloomington, is bringing them to Jazz at the Station, on north Walnut, on April 17.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MhR19VaR6o