Album of the Week

Triptych Myth
The Beautiful (Aum Fidelity)

Cooper-Moore, once a fixture on New York's 1970s loft-jazz scene, is the current that drives the Triptych Myth trio: a crackling AC outlet for the self-made musician's pianistic urges. In other guises, he's a composer for stage productions, a folklorist, and an inventor of stringed and percussive instruments like the twanger and the ashimba.

But on The Beautiful, the bandleader brings his native extroversion to bear on the piano-trio tradition—and boy howdy, does he ever give it an overdue boot in the ass. Triptych Myth's self-explanatory opening "All Up in It" sets the pace: lots of dramatic tension ignited by C-M's colorful use of glissando, and kept grooving by the crisp collusion of bassist Tom Abbs and drummer Chad Taylor of the Chicago Underground Duo/Trio.

What's refreshing about the pianist's outside-in approach, however, is the way it embraces uncommon variety. "Pooch," an elegy for the late bassist Wilber Morris, is a gentle theme with gospel flourishes whose reflective tone is offset by Taylor's dazzling percussive display—imagine French composer Erik Satie sitting in with bebop master Max Roach. The title track ("Frida K. the Beautiful"), originally penned for the stage, likewise juxtaposes languid stretches of lyricism with sudden bursts of fireworks. Elsewhere, the avant-garde vigor the musician is known for is translated into boppish rural reveries ("Poppa's Gin in the Chicken Feed") and delicate chamber pieces ("Robina Pseudoacacia").

Throughout the disc, Triptych Myth thrives on its own group dynamic. The trio functions neither as an ad-hoc jam outfit nor as an overbaked concept act. Instead, The Beautiful heralds an increasingly rare and welcome thing in jazz: a great working band.

The Playlist

Song X, Ornette Coleman/Pat Metheny (Nonesuch; 20th Anniversary edition)

Yo!, Silvana DeLuigi (American Clave)

Pentagon, Mat Maneri (Thirsty Ear)

In the Reins, Calexico + Iron and Wine (Overcoat)

Alvin Lucier, Anthony Burr/Charles Curtis (Antiopic)

The Beautiful, Triptych Myth (Aum Fidelity)

50 Vol. II, Bar Kokbha Sextet (Tzadik)

Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple (Epic)

Chavez Ravine, Ry Cooder (Nonesuch)

Dimanche a Bamako, Amadou & Mariam (Nonesuch)

Forever Hasn't Happened Yet, John Doe (Yep Roc)

Twin Cinema, New Pornographers (Matador)

American Primitive Voi. II, Various (Revenant)

Drumming, So Percussion (Cantaloupe)

Arular, M.I.A. (XL/Beggar's Banquet)

Power to the People, Right On!

{... notes for the 2005 Table of the Elements release. Deja vu all over again ...}

An October afternoon in 1969. Midtown Manhattan. A rally in Bryant Park
against the Vietnam War. Down 42nd Street towards Times Square, Tony Conrad is adjusting microphones in his 5th floor loft, one directed at
the TV set - where it will pick up live local news coverage -- the
other pointing out the window, where the echo of speeches and crowd
noise mingles with the oceanic rush of crosstown traffic. As the event
is about to begin, he rolls tape. Thirty-four years later, we hear what
he heard. And the juncture, for so many reasons, could not be more
critical. As the Bush Administration pursues a risky military agenda in
the Middle East - one with unsettling long-term implications both at
home and abroad - we see a nation not divided, as in the Vietnam Era,
but strangely complacent. Our media-saturated reality functions like a
drug, instantly televised warfare a new entertainment, and organized
public dissent a novelty at home and a roaring chorus everywhere else.
Conrad's recording of the Oct. 15 Vietnam Moratorium Rally is an eerie
flashback that offers urgent new insights into our own lives and times,
post-9/11 and full on into a new millennium.

"This was one event that I didn't have to leave the house to attend,"
says Conrad, whose recording coincidentally chronicles not only the
rally - an archival moment - but doubles as a kind of sonic residue of
a New York City that doesn't quite exist anymore, a place as swept away
by the tilt of time and the circumstance of history as the twin towers.
The Times Square area, now a Disneyfied circus of commerce suitable for
morning show wallpaper, once was something far scarier and more
radically chaotic. And it was from this perch that Conrad spent the
afternoon. He remembers: "The street was awash with humanity, but no
one lived there. It was like being in a desert in some ways. The number
of voters were very small. There were people of every stripe and
pandering to every kind of base and debased desire. There was a huge
crossover, because millions of people came to work there every day, but
it was also skin deep. People lived at the edge of the gutter."

The perfect place to make your life as an artist, amid the democratic
bustle. That ruckus is key to this recording, which indulges the
composer's interest in issues of documentation, the nature of public
spectacles, and the deep biological impulses that govern the
individual's response in the face of a mass. "What quickens your pulse
in the wake of thousands and thousands of people?" he asks, while
holding up this construct to a dual one. "That phenomenon of somehow
the abstract voice of the media that comes down to us, can shape
individual reality."

With that in mind, listen to how the two channels of this tape define
the gap between media (the instantaneous leap of audio from a
microphone in the park, transformed into a signal, and broadcast
through his television's speaker) and reality (the delayed and muffled
arrival of the same information at his window). It was funny, Conrad
notes: "Because being there is later than TV. This brings up the
phenomenological notion of the present, whether we live in it or after
it. So you have this situation of TV vs. live, or TV vs. the street,
all these issues of presence. The tape invokes that time really
accurately and thoroughly. It's a big chunk, and that makes things so
much more different than a sound byte."

The rally, part of that date's full slate of public demonstrations
against the war, proves to be at once poignant and a bit comical.
Powerful oratory from the Rev. William Sloan Coffin (who cites the
gospel according to Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us.")
shares time with quips from Rod McEuen. A stageful of Broadway stars
enjoy cameos ("Dick Benjamin!"), while Dick Cavett and Woody Allen
chime in with quick comments. Leading anti-war politicos - such as
Eugene McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm - take the microphone. It's a
remarkable day in the life of a city.

"People really owe it to themselves to go to these things," Conrad
says. "Because these occasions are such important markers of the events
of our time. The moratorium rally put the media and the people
side-by-side, and presents a very important idea that comes into the
picture in today's protests as well. The media and reality: It's hard
to attend both."

Album of the Week (2)

Tom Verlaine
Warm and Cool (Thrill Jockey)

One of those guitar players that other guitar players drool over, Tom Verlaine has had a strangely bifurcated career. Two classic albums with his 1970s outfit Television escalated the wiry musician into the punk-era pantheon. His subsequent path as a solo artist has never drawn nearly as much attention. Warm and Cool, recorded in 1992, marks a further departure. The all-instrumental disc collected 14 chilled-out evocations of mid-1960s surf and twang styles, unveiling Verlaine’s inner Dick Dale while maintaining a deliberately nuanced posture. “Depot (1951)” epitomizes the minimalist approach, the guitar all noirish inflection and insinuation over the spare shhhh of brushed cymbals and a simple bass pulse. Fans used to contend that Verlaine was a CBGB’s version of Jerry Garcia, but it wasn’t always easy to hear Americana in Television’s swirling hypno-epics. Here, Verlaine sounds perfectly at home in a continuum that might include Ry Cooder or Bill Frisell. The lines Verlaine plays on the appropriately spacey “Saucer Crash” could almost pass for one of Garcia’s engagingly digressive solos, with its eloquent high notes, before the guitarist slips into his own version of a blues jam. If Warm and Cool was neglected by the faithful awaiting Television’s brief, early ‘90s reunion, this reissue argues for a second listen. Nine bonus tracks extend the original’s range, though Verlaine’s approach is so ethereal that the CD begs to be spun long afterhours. Tracks such as “Please Keep Going,” with its quivering tremelo and slowly picked, poignantly bent blue notes are a reminder of the soul imbedded in Verlaine’s virtuosity. They feel like silent prayers under a Moorish moon.

In Remembrance of Zucchini Past

{... and the hits just keep on comin' ... for Stomp and Stammer.}

Way back in high school, during that ‘70s show called my adolescence, Led Zeppelin held such mythic sway that I actually believed they might be satanic. This was well before I’d ever heard of Aleister Crowley, the British mystic and original “magick” man who so fascinated guitarist Jimmy Page, and whose influence would often prompt dark innuendo regarding the fret wizard’s own Faustian bargains. (After all, if there was ever a rock musician who could be suspected of drinking the blood of virgins, it was Page, though evidence suggests he only deflowered them). No, my fears were based solely on two factors. One was the tape-distortion effects used on “Whole Lotta Love,” which, combined with Robert Plant’s harrowing wails of unimaginable torment and/or forbidden ecstasy, really did sound like a field recording from the Lake of Fire. The other was Roddy Jones. Roddy was, as perceived by some not in his clique, a “bad kid.” Or, if not outright bad, surely up to trouble. He was skinny and had long hair and probably hung out in the parking lot well after the first bell rang smoking cigarettes and cranking, well, Zep, on an 8-track player in some Chevy dashboard. I mean, I guess. It’s hard to remember. I do recall that pimply-faced 14-year-old girls, their tube-tops buoyant with glandular effervescence, were drawn to him as bees to honey, and that he had a band, one filled with guys who looked a lot like him, with the tight jeans and the boots and the shaggy feathered mullets and, most important of all: The Squint. The Squint always gave their peachfuzz moustaches an nth more definition, making them look less like straining wanna-bes who would most likely end up in the military if not pumping gas for a living, and more like – well, definitely NOT Jimmy Page, but not like clean-scrubbed college prep types, either. Actually, all these young dudes looked exactly like Kid Rock, avant la lettre, as the French say, and I figured, since they swaggered and talked back and could mysteriously ferret out the encoded meanings of Physical Graffiti as if it were the Kabbalah, whispering its secret knowledge between their ceaselessly masticated wads of chewing gum and nodding in conspiratorial unison – “Not even yet!” – and then cackling as if this ensured them nights full of Boones Farm and trailer-park lovin’ – I figured hey! how could this not be of the Devil? No music known to mid-70s youth came closer to reflecting the coarse hormonal surges that drove us all bonkers, except maybe the Rolling Stones, but they were nearly INTELLECTUALS compared to Led Zeppelin and, besides, had already “gone disco,” which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because we all listened to Wings, too, and how lame were they? But when Roddy’s band blew helter-skelter into “Whole Lotta Love,” or maybe “Black Dog,” at one or another illicit keg party at the house of some kid whose parents were away for the weekend (think a milder, gentler Larry Clark, with beer and pot and no AIDS yet), and the lights were dim and such ribald activities as “feeling up” and “making out” and “the Bump,” were going on, damn, perdition seemed pretty goddamned cool.

That’s what electric guitars are supposed to do! If Led Zep was scary, it wasn’t solely because they reveled in the sexual mastery we had yet to put a finger on, it was because they tapped so profoundly – and more profoundly than your standard middle-to-lower class white kids would be aware of – into blues, Celtic folk sources and Middle Eastern traditional music, plus dirty-ass funk that sounded even dirtier because the drummer wasn’t the exquisite and nimble Clyde Stubblefield, but the plodding and thundering Bonzo, aka John Bonham, whose Neanderthal tumult might as easily have been your own heartbeat, lurching from your chest cavity as you spun, dizzied by whiskey or the heat-seeking thrust of that new girl’s tongue down your very own throat. The song remained the same, but we never would.

You can experience it all, all over again, for the very first time on the minor avalanche of Zep artifacts released earlier this year by Atlantic Records. The 3-CD How the West Was Won, which compiles live recordings exhumed from some forgotten archive by Pagey himself, accompanies the 2-disc DVD, which is the same deal, pretty much, only different: An assortment of concert documents that span the band’s career. The shocking thing, now, is to see how danged INNOCENT the band looked, and marvel at their gradual evolution from farmboy punks to slicked-up rock icons. Clocking in at more than four hours (extras included), DVD atones for the paucity of Zep celluloid, and the laughable The Song Remains the Same concert film that, sadly, was all fans had to remember the band by following Bonham’s 1980 death. Though reunions of a sort have recurred, the surviving band members clung to an integrity their peers eschew, never pretending there could ever be a Led Zep again without the original Heavy Metal Drummer. It wasn’t as if the music had not pervaded everything since, permeating hip-hop’s juicy ribs like so much mojo sauce, making the Beastie Boys and Schooly D (who gave Puff Daddy the notion) possible, spawning Soundgarden and Jeff Buckley, and supplying the style template for “Almost Famous.” All of which are just a few of the thoughts that occur while watching this blissfully endless footage. All this time, I had only thought that Led Zep had given Johnny Rotten something to hate besides Pink Floyd. Lo and behold, they invented punk rock! I know, it sounds crazy. But there it is, 10 tracks into Disc 1. The Royal Albert Hall, 1970. Plant shoots Page a loving glance, whirls an arm up, and the guitarist starts plucking a high, buzzing, fuzzing rhythm, swinging his axe down low against his hip, while seeming to execute some sort of sideways crabwalk. A few repetitive measures in, and you realize it’s not the Ramones, ferchrissakes, it’s Eddie Cochran. “C’mon Everybody,” a flat-topped rockabilly anthem that challenges Page, for one fleeting instance, to be anti-virtuosic. (This, after all, was the guy they brought into to play the scorchy solo on The Kink’s “I Really Want You,” since he had the kind of mad chops none of the other art-school yobbos could muster, even if they did have a bustle in their hedgerow). I keep replaying those tight few seconds over and over, because it’s always such a shock. Nearly as much a reality check is how freaking good they were, already, in 1970. Beyond Page’s mercurial flash was a stunning grasp of traditions, his Celtic Delta dervish blues not merely a hypnotic display of musical finesse and bravado but beautiful, even breathlessly so. The band already had an immaculate sense of the dynamics that would make a fortune for Nirvana 20 years later, and also knew how to balance Page’s folkie affinities with sheer, ball-busting power chords. The opening downstrokes of “Whole Lotta Love” do constitute the Greatest Rock Riff Ever. And this proves it.

Likewise, Plant’s prowess as a front man can never be second-guessed. True, he was a human swizzle stick, a pretty boy, a Pre-Raphaelite heroine whose resplendent waterfall of curly blond locks played gender-bent mindgames with all the zucchini he was smuggling in his snug, frayed jeans. Cockzilla! Chris Robinson owes him style royalties. So does Michael Stipe. Or, well, he DID, back when he had those same curly locks, and knew how to muse them. All hail the Shark Whisperer.

As much fun as this is, and as fulfilling as is the footage from Zep in prime time (Madison Square Garden 1973 – and, in an acoustic set that gives the band it’s fully dimensional due -- Earl’s Court 1975), a lot of the magic has begun to rub off by the final concert sequence, staged at Knebworth in 1979. It’s all a bit valedictory (which, of course, it was), though thrilling to hear tracks from Presence (the last studio album that mattered) and Page at his magisterial best (“Kashmir”). Yet, it’s all a little too clean. Page has passed through his Cozmik Sorcerer phase, traded in his star-studded balloon pants for a pair of nice white slacks and a billowy blue shirt. Plant’s twirling in polka dots. Even Bonzo has tidied up. Urgency seems to have yielded to professionalism. It makes perfect sense though, this arc. The dark overlord didn’t own their souls, it was only Ahmet Ertegun.

Love That Zeena

{Liner notes, more or less, for the reissue of Nightmare Alley. We had a swell little chat over tea in her tiny tenement walkup above Max Fish, the notoriously model-swarmed Ludlow Street bar, which now looks a bit like the first cantina to stake out the Gold Rush. Zeena's pad has some of the same feel: an artist's cocoon, used for pitstops between tours, redolent of a time when the Lower East Side was neither trendy nor particularly safe afterhours -- maybe a dozen years or so ago, back about the time I first saw her rock the electric harp in Atlanta.}

She goes the whole wide world, Zeena Parkins does. The sonic spectrum she annexes via her inventively modified electric harps, beautiful instruments of handcrafted rigor and industrial elegance, streaks across the tangled terrains of genre and history. Her purposeful distortions, stark noise-bursts, mysterious elisions and hypnotic reveries expand not only the language of the instrument – indeed, she is nothing less than its Jimi Hendrix – but have been her passport to a colorfully varied career. It’s one that has taken Parkins from the grungier precincts of Lower Manhattan’s performance scene to the glittering spectacle of the global arena. She has, in the course of being singularly distinguished at what she does, stepped free of predestined musical niches. Parkins has managed the micro and the macro: She was an integral member of such important improvising ensembles as Skeleton Key (with Fred Frith and Tom Cora) as well as a key player in ongoing creative scenarios with John Zorn, David Shea, Butch Morris and Elliot Sharp, among others. At the same time, she’s rocked out with the boisterous likes of Courtney Love and Hole, and tours a good part of the year with the Icelandic avant-pop diva Bjork. Almost furtively, Parkins has succeeded in connecting with the large, worldwide audiences that would seem out of reach to most of her downtown NYC peers -- save for the occasional Sonic Youth or Marc Ribot. Recorded in 1992, Nightmare Alley resonates from a moment when notions of popular music and “the avant-garde” were on a collision course. Punk rock was about to bust mainstream (in the guise of Nirvana), a decade-plus of arty/improvy/jazzy/noisy New York sounds began to consolidate around a club called the Knitting Factory, and, out in San Francisco, a record label called Table of the Elements was in its embryonic stage: Parkins would become its first recorded artist, and this CD its first release.

But long before Parkins became the preeminent improvising electric harpist of her day – indeed, the one improvising electric harpist whose name comes most immediately to mind when the question is popped on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? – she worked in the circus. The traveling troupe billed itself as the Janus Circus, and because its number was small, each member performed a variety of tasks and, natch, amazing feats. Parkins designed costumes. But she also played the accordion, while dressed up as a dancing bear, the kind of bear that might also make a fearless dash and leap through the terrifying “heart of fire.” On an afternoon in downtown Manhattan, many years later, Parkins took in a matinee at Film Forum. The feature? Nothing less than the 1947 film noir sideshow Nightmare Alley. A grim and despairing look at the making of a low-rent carnival huckster (Tyrone Power), who ultimately comes to get his geek on, the film is downbeat morality tale laced with deliciously lurid details of carnival life. Parkins was sketching ideas for this album, and became totally inspired by what she saw on the screen. “I completely fell in love with the film,” Parkins says. “At that time it had particular resonance for me. And I knew instantly that I would shape the album around the film in a loose kind of way. It just fit into a cozy spot for me. And of course there happens to be a main character whose name is Zeena – a clairvoyant – so how could I possibly resist?”

Parkins choice of the harp was somewhat more incidental. Originally a piano player, she was assigned the instrument while in a Detroit high school and participated in what she describes as “a boot camp harp training situation.” The instructor was firm. “She inspected our fingernails to make sure they were tidy and clean and we were instructed to wear special shoes while playing harp and a proper pastel gown while performing concerts,” Parkins recalls. “It was a bit ridiculous. I resented that sort of superficial regiment but loved the instrument.” The next three years provided her only formal training. Instead of developing a classical technique, Parkins taught herself, creating a performance style that is more purely idiosyncratic. In that, she is consonant with many improvising musicians of her generation, who have taken instruments associated with certain types of music and, in effect, retrained them to suit new purposes. Whether it was what John Cage and David Tudor did with their “prepared” pianos, Derek Bailey with notions of guitar tradition, John Zorn with his duck calls and compositional cut-ups, Eugene Chadbourne and his plugged-in rake, Zeena Parkins cast a similar gaze upon the harp. “I decided to have a rhythmic approach – more like a rhythm guitar player or a drummer than a flute player or a violinist. I see the instrument as a luxurious sound machine more than a sweet angelic stringed creature floating around on a cloud.”

Nightmare Alley, the album, is at once psychic and luxurious, though not in ways you might easily assume. The release, as the flagship title for Table of the Elements, marked not only a beginning, but a sign of things to come. During its 10-year history, the label has consistently championed various forms of exceptional string music, made by artists looking for ways not only to extend the potential of their instruments but also to more richly explicate the fundamental impulses that animate their vibrations. These include sonic magi such as Arnold Dreyblatt, Tony Conrad, Paul Panhuysen, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, and Rhys Chatham. In a very real sense, the album helped to forecast a growth market in so-called “unheard music,” and an expansion of possibilities for art musics that had previously been fostered only by universities, galleries and the international warehouse bohemia. And while many of the 15 tracks on Nightmare Alley connote a sense of hall-of-mirrors distortion, unreeling as if a long, shimmering dream sequence, deeper listening reveals a genuine, if not always comforting, lushness: Here, tucked away behind the gawkers and hawkers of the sideshow, is a consuming bed of sound.

“I had a kind of map for the pieces, instructions that I followed in the studio,” Parkins recalls, “and also pieces that developed from an improvisatory beginning but were layered and edited in the studio. I also had ideas for various studio techniques that I wanted to try — these were pre-Pro Tools days. The record was recorded on 2-inch tape, so there was turning of tape inside-out, changing the speed of the tape, wobbling the reel, and so on—as well as experimenting with different amp setups as well. Many of the pieces developed in this way, taking full advantage of some of the things I had access to in the studio: fancy effects processors, and beautiful vintage amps, a Leslie tone cabinet, overdubbing, things that were not possible at a gig or in my rehearsal space.”

Pieces such as “Freak” overlay loping note patterns, mocking psych-out effects that suggest Zippy the Pinhead channeling Jimi Hendrix, and a percussive attack on the strings that would not be misplaced on a Sonic Youth record. “Peephole” generates a flurry of dueling harmonics that eventually opens into a fusillade of musical effects: from nimbly articulated rhythmic dialogues to deranged heart of midnight clangor. “Hairless,” which begins with the gentle, contemplative bending of strings, gradually takes on sinister, unsettling airs. Again and again, the music lures the listener into a parallel world of sensations, one that is disorienting and surreal, strangely pleasurable and more than a little dangerous. Nightmare Alley proved to be the living end for Tyrone Power’s corrupt carny, broken like a butterfly on the karmic wheel of fortune. But for Parkins, it’s an occasion for some truly amazing feats, no less than a leap through the heart of fire and animated by the same spirit of derring-do. You won’t believe your ears.

Album of the Week

Gangbé Brass Band
Whendo (World Village)



If John Philip Sousa was Fela Kuti, he would feel right at home in the
Gangbé Brass Band. Its bold and joyful horns take the European brass tradition on a high-stepping tour of West African voodoo rhythms, incantatory Yoruban soul and infectious percussive shakedowns. The group hails from Benin, a once-flourishing empire that was colonized by the French in the late 1800s. Its music, which incorporates choral call-and-response and lyrics that switch between several local languages, could simply exist as an evocation of various African styles: This happy-foot sound would segue seamlessly between King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

But on Whendo, its sophomore release, the outfit is as much new world as old. There are mighty mambo beats and trombones that recall James Brown's killer horn sections, as well as up-tempo affinities with the marching brass bands of New Orleans (i.e., the bottom-end bustle of a sousaphone, lots of punchy riffage and metallic percussion that features one musician who totes a giant bell on his head).

That said, Gangbé wears its cultural heritage on its sleeve. Its name translates as "the sound of metal," a reference to the raw material of its horns, and the musicians take the stage in a riot of colorful traditional garb. The members aren't too shy about revealing their sources, either: Late Nigerian bandleader Kuti gets name-checked in a tune that deploys one of his stock arrangements as an homage. And, yes, they will take you for a ride on the "Night Train." But whether it stops in New Orleans, Havana or Lagos, nobody knows.

Shake 'Em On Down

{I felt like I almost died making this trip, and got spooked the fuck out when we breached the *real* crossroads -- out by "old" Highway 61 -- where, at dusk, even the dust is bedeviled. Or maybe I'm a sucker for lore, and someone was just pulling my Legba. Originally published in 1992 (?), and unearthed now in remembrance of R.L. Burnside and Paul "Wine" Jones. I'll revisit this with some footnotes that will make for a much more interesting tale. Editorial compromises, writerly sloppiness, hangovers, cliches. But, for now ...}


Near Holly Springs, Miss. - Junior Kimbrough's sad eyes spark with mischief as he hoists a pint bottle of clear liquid and takes a warming swig.

"We ain't drinkin' no corn liquor," the longtime blues singer announces, sly as a fox, as the sweet intoxicant begins to tickle his belly.

Across the dusty floor of the barn-sized juke joint known only as "Junior's place," an antic Sunday-night crowd laughs, offering shouts of affirmation between sips of beer and the irregular clack of pool balls.

It could be a scene right out of "Deep Blues," a lively documentary survey of Mississippi's contemporary blues scene that features vital performers such as Mr. Kimbrough, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Jack "The Oil Man" Johnson and Lonnie Pitchford. It runs through Wednesday at Cinefest on the Georgia State University campus (651-2463).

Each musician is an inheritor of the traditional blues legacy, keeping the mu sic alive as entertainment, a soundtrack for social dancing and as an up-to-the-minute oral history.

Narrated by former New York Times critic Robert Palmer, who wrote a DON'T YOU AVANT ME, BABY?
definitive 1981 musical history also called "Deep Blues," the film rambles through the juke joints and tin-roofed shacks where the music has been nurtured for decades. It travels south from Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., now, sadly, a Disneylike mall for tourists, to the hard-rocking Playboy Club on Greenville, S.C.'s, crack-infested Nelson Street, where most tourists fear to tread but the music is some of the Delta's hottest.


Nothing on celluloid, however, compares to the real-life scenery of a long night spent jukin' at unreconstructed, rustic blues haunts such as Junior's. Only six hours by car from Atlanta, this hot spot in Mississippi's northern hill country might as well be on another planet, one where the rough-hewn music and festive social rituals seem virtually unchanged since the days when seminal bluesman Robert Johnson roamed the crossroads.

Midway between the regional cultural meccas of Oxford, Miss., and Memphis, Junior's is directly on Robert Avant's Anheuser-Busch beer route. Only on this recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Avant, in his mid-30s, is hauling firewood with half a dozen companions. The logs are a gift for Mr. Kimbrough, whose juke is a multipurpose facility that serves as a community gathering place, party central and a magnet for anyone willing to sit in or drums or guitar.

"We've got some of the goodest guys around here as you get anywhere," Mr. Avant says, ready to work in bluejeans, a flannel shirt and an old baseball cap. "They can play anything you want 'em to play."

A former musician who gave up guitar when on the verge of regional fame, he laments the onset of professionalism. "Back then [1960s], people would go out and play for something to drink or to party or for food," he says. "Now they're more organized."

They're even using cordless electric guitars - "You couldn't buy that stuff when we were playing," Mr. Avant says - but rarely at Junior's.

Yet in rural towns like Holly Springs, no less than at corner jukes in Clarksdale or Memphis, playing blues is not so much a way to make a living as an essential tool for communication - something to let off steam after a long day working in the factory or field.

"There are more musicians in Holly Springs than you'd ever know," says Norris Hibbler, who, like his friend Mr. Avant, has patiently waited at least an hour for Mr. Kimbrough to arrive and open his club. "They'll be playing so much music, people don't want to leave."

That's a home truth, whether the venue is Green's Lounge in South Memphis - where the house band the Fieldstones wraps its last set around 3:30 a.m. - or Margaret's Blue Diamond Lounge in downtown Clarksdale, whose busy concrete dance floor is lighted only by two bare bulbs, one red, one blue. At Green's, the crowd may be dressed to the nines - 82-year-old regular Willie Williams even sports a ruffled tuxedo shirt as he squires dancing partners one-fourth his age - while the regulars at Margaret's wear overalls straight from the job site.

But a juke joint is always a juke joint, distinguished by a visual language that is part folk art, part functional and part found object.

Decorated by twinkling Christmas lights, malt liquor posters and hand-drawn signs that warn "No dope smoking" and "No outside beer" -often with creative spellings - the clubs are havens from workaday reality. For decades both incubator and preserve of blues heritage, juke joints are perhaps the only place to hear the music with all its vibrancy and quirks.

"People who have never set foot in a real moonshine-swilling, gun-toting juke joint have been declaring the down-home blues dead, or dying, or anyway, not what it used to be," Mr. Palmer contends, writing in the liner notes to the "Deep Blues" soundtrack album, financed, like the movie, by former Eurhythmics guitarist and blues fan Dave Stewart. "But the blues is enjoying an unprecedented resurgence in the areas that originally nurtured it."

That's the argument "Deep Blues" persuasively makes. Yet the jukes always have been jukin', even when the outside world failed to take notice.

"In the African-American community, especially, people like to be with each other and hear blues music," says Judy Peiser, director of the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis and a regular at Green's Lounge -where your $4 cover charge includes a frisk by a friendly rent-a-cop, an almost genteel nod toward patron security. "So they have these . . . bastions of cultural survival. Living, breathing, wonderful places where men and women can listen to live music on weekends."

An outgrowth of segregation, when blacks were compelled to run their own nightclubs and house parties, juke joints continue to offer a loose, open space for musical performance. "At first, the reason there was such incredible musical creativity [on Beale Street] is because there was a segregated society," Ms. Peiser says. "The musicians might perform at country clubs, but after hours . . . that's where the real jam sessions took place."

Holly Springs guitarist R.L. Burnside, 64, who lives next door to Junior's an d performs his "Burnside style" blues in the documentary, says he always plays best in juke joints - though he's made several tours of Europe.

"You get a better feelin' about it," says the performer, who has eight of his 12 children playing music. "It makes you think about the old, way-back blues and the house parties. In those days, you could really enjoy it. Wasn't as many young people out there as there is now, buggin' people. Heh, heh, heh."

Esau Shaw, 48, a local gospel choir leader and drummer, confirms that there's more to the scene than just music. "The atmosphere's a bitch!" he volunteers, drinking a Budweiser outside Junior's as night falls. "It's loose. No tension. Everybody learns to leave the tension home. Nobody wears no tie. Everybody knows everybody."

When at last Mr. Kimbrough arrives, handshakes are exchanged all around and a wood-burning stove begins to smoke in the rear of his club, its walls lined with an extravagantly colorful series of folk art like portraits of young black women in a variety of high-fashion poses.

"C'mon, Junior!" somebody yells, as a vocal, mostly male audience begins to gather not long after dusk. When Mr. Kimbrough smiles in response, the lean angles of his face suggest an African-American Lenny Bruce.

Nodding to the grandson and son of Mr. Burnside - 14-year-old drummer Cedric Burnside and his uncle Dwayne, 24, who doubles on bass and guitar - the musician grabs the guitar in his lap and conjures a flowing, hypnotic vamp. The song is called "All Night Long" and for one obvious reason: Mr. Kimbrough loves the tune so much he can't stop playing it.

For nearly half an hour, primal rhythms shake the room. Dwayne Burnside, a driving force in his father, R.L.'s, Sound Machine, pumps the bass with cocky ease while Cedric attacks the drum kit with the joyous aggression most kids save for shooting hoops. But it's Mr. Kimbrough's chilling, spectral moans that carry the song, making him seem a force of nature - no less than the breeze that sweeps through the piney woods of the north Mississippi hill country.

Mr. Kimbrough, nearly recovered from a stroke that has left him with a limp but "didn't take away my hands," doesn't play as a matter of profession. What's evident as he sings - sometimes with a predatory groan, sometimes in a high, mournful wail - is that he does this because he has to. And because he does, he functions as a kind of backwoods oracle, an admired figure who receives tokens of cigarettes and beer while he performs in the creche-like band area.

"Sometimes you play, you get the feelin' that it is the blues," Mr. Kimbrough says, taking a seat and firing up a menthol cigarette before he begins the first, open-ended set of the night. "Just like you out working in the field or something like that, and it's close to quittin' time and your blues hits you and you start to sing. Heh. Gettin' close to quittin' time so you know, work all day in the field, and then stay up all night."

He doesn't jest. But Mr. Kimbrough's stamina is almost a running gag in Holly Springs.

"We joke about that all the time," says Mr. Burnside, who first met Mr. Kimbrough 35 years ago in the same juke joint. "Tell 'im, `We have to pull the plug to get you to stop, here.' He gets to drinking, you know, and the women get to dancing."

Is Brooklyn the New Downtown?

{Written for Newsday during the strangely lively dog days of August ...}

Downtown isn't what it used to be. It's not even where it used to be. Ever the roost for New York's creative bohemians, neighborhoods like the East Village and the Lower East Side have fostered grassroots arts scenes for decades. But the era of affordable rents and accommodating venues, which made all this possible, has faded fast.

As real estate values soar and landmark music clubs such as the Bottom Line and CBGB have been shuttered or threatened with eviction, artists and entrepreneurs have taken flight. Once, the so-called downtown scene celebrated free-ranging sensibilities in which genre boundaries, particularly musical ones, were gleefully blurred.

Now, geographic lines are blurring. More and more, it's Brooklyn -- and its neighborhoods in immediate reach of Manhattan - that looks like the new "downtown."

"Musicians were living there but there wasn't a scene before," said Anthony Coleman, a pianist and composer who lives in the East Village but often finds himself riding the F train to Brooklyn for gigs. "It's not like the scene is dead here, but Brooklyn is where it's gone."

Coleman is symbolic of the shift. One of the core members in a closely knit circle of musicians who defined the downtown jazz scene in the 1980s and '90s, he celebrates his 50th birthday this week with a pair of concerts. They won't be in striking distance of his tenement apartment, near the former residences of Allen Ginsberg and Charlie Parker. Instead, two Brooklyn venues will host: Barbes, in Park Slope, and the Issue Project Room, a non-profit space on the Gowanus Canal, where events are staged in a renovated concrete silo.

"It was amazing when Barbes started," said Coleman, who once was a regular at the Knitting Factory, a sprawling TriBeCa club that made its name with avant-garde jazz but now rarely books it. "The fact that it built so quickly into a scene made a lot of sense. I never thought of Park Slope as a happening place, but Barbes gave it focus."

The shoebox-shaped bar was opened in 2001 by a pair of expatriate Parisians, Olivier Conan and Vincent Douglas. They began booking a lot of improvisatory jazz and traditional string music, and now give whole evenings over to Balkan and Brazilian-themed dance bands. Partly, this was because they liked an eclectic vibe. Also, noise-control regulations mandated that they keep the volume down. Even though its back room barely holds 40 people, the venue draws some unexpected luminaries to its intimate confines. Neighborhood literary icon Paul Auster likes to drop in. On occasion, mellow pop divas Norah Jones or Madeleine Peyroux might slip up to the stage to sing with their pal, violinist Jenny Scheinman, one of several players with weekly residences there.

"This neighborhood has a sense of community that's slowly disappearing from the East Village," said Conan, a musician himself, who wanted a space to showcase the abundance of local talent. "Most of the people who play here live within a 10-block radius."

Club regular Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist who performs every Sunday with a workshop ensemble, has embraced Brooklyn as a cultural refugee. He sold his East Village apartment and moved back to his native Flatbush after his co-op board refused to let him practice his horn in the building. "They wouldn't even let me soundproof," said Nathanson, whose band the Jazz Passengers has featured vocalists Debbie Harry (of Blondie fame) and Elvis Costello. "This has been the new downtown for a long time, but it's more spread out."

Brooklyn hasn't lacked for cultural institutions. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has, during the past 20 years, become a blue-chip arts hub in Fort Greene. Choreographer Mark Morris opened his Dance Center down the block in 2001. St. Ann's Warehouse, an expanded facility for the non-profit presenter Arts and St. Ann's, opened the same year in DUMBO, in a renovated spice warehouse. What's different now is that everyday venues have begun to pop up. And not only in Williamsburg, which has long functioned as an adjunct to the East Village, with scores of art galleries, and a promising alternative theater scene.

The Issue Project Room is one such arrival. The non-profit's director, Suzanne Foil, lost her space in the East Village earlier this year but quickly latched onto a new site. The building, a former storage silo, is circular, which allows for unusual staging. "It's outrageous," said Fiol, whose programs feature experimental jazz and chamber music, electronic sounds, poetry readings, film screenings and even theme dinners. "People tell me it's their favorite building in the whole city."

The obscure location, adjacent to the Carroll Street bridge at the Gowanus Canal, hasn't deterred audiences. It's only a 10-minute walk from Smith Street, Brooklyn's popular "restaurant row." And artists have been responsive. Fiol has already forged ongoing partnerships with composer Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Institute, and will host a 2006 residency with the Ne(x)tworks Ensemble, which features the avant-garde soprano Joan La Barbara. Coming events include an evening devoted to short story readings, with the author Grace Paley, and a 36-hour concert to inaugurate the space's 16-channel speaker installation. "If I was going to have to go anywhere," said Fiol, a photographer and former gallery manager who lucked onto the commercial rental, "this is where I would want to go."

Coleman, who performs there Tuesday in the first of his two birthday events, will be coming full circle. He grew up a few blocks away in Cobble Hill. As a teenager, he took lessons from jazz piano great Jaki Byard, and spent all his spare time hanging out at jazz clubs. "Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Earl Hines and Duke, that would be a good week," he says, name-checking a shortlist of piano heroes. "That was a normal week." Along with such peers as guitarist Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, and saxophonists John Zorn and Tim Berne, among many others, Coleman became a central figure in a thriving new music scene in the mid-1980s.

A man given to affably encyclopedic discourses, the composer works out of thoughtful conceptual backdrops that display a sharp wit. His piano trio Sephardic Tinge explores Jewish themes as a galloping collision between Jelly Roll Morton and the Borscht Belt by way of Spanish Harlem. It takes a cue from Morton's dictum that jazz must evoke "the Spanish tinge."

"Salsa was more an ethnic music for me than Jewish music ever was," he said. Another combo, Selfhaters, is a joke on the idea of the self-hating assimilated Jew. As Coleman explained, he was trying to separate himself from the '90s klezmer revival. "I wanted to send things reeling a little bit," he said, "in a trickster, joker, gadfly way."

The Tuesday night concert, with a cast of sidekicks that includes bassist Greg Cohen and saxophonist Michael Attias, deals with Coleman as a composer. Its centerpiece is an ambitious revival of the 1998 chamber quintet piece "The Abysmal Richness of the Infinite Proximity of the Same." The music "sits there," he said, "and it evolves, and it degenerates, and it evolves again, and then it loses it. And I really like that." The following night, Coleman will lead two different improvising trios at Barbes. Those shows, he said, will offer some relief. "When you start rehearsing this stuff, you realize why you don't do it very often."

Despite his frequent appearances in the borough, Coleman doesn't expect to join the downtown diaspora, even as it continues to grow. "How many musicians from the downtown scene live in Brooklyn? Most of them," he said. Who's left? "Only those of us who have apartments that we'd be crazy to give up."

Fear Not The Pig Sauce

Another Midwestern tourist falls prey to the lurking evil.

An Interview With My Favorite Photographer

{Atlanta, 1997 ...}

Even on a gloomy afternoon, light pours through the picture windows in Harry Callahan's condominium. It floods the living room where the celebrated photographer sits, several floors up in a Colony Square high- rise, gracing a splendid view of a stately oak tree in adjacent Ansley Park, and beyond it, of cars and people moving along Peachtree Street.

Most of us, blessed with such a perspective, would venture a glance and say, yeah: a tree. Trunk, limbs, branches, leaves. Great tree. Atlanta's got a lot of 'em. Harry Callahan would no doubt agree, but he would see so much more. He would see a universe of possibilities. He would take a camera, and he would begin to explore all the different ways that a tree could be looked at.


He might photograph it using such extreme contrast that the tree no longer resembled a tree at all, bleaching the image into pure abstract form; he might shoot multiple exposures of the tree, so that it blurred vertiginously against a blank sky; he might aim his lens directly up from the base of the tree, so that its limbs and branches and leaves came to resemble an aerial photograph of some anonymous marsh; he might conjure mystery in the shadow of the tree; or he might impose upon the tre e the image of his patient and gracious wife, Eleanor, her face, perhaps, or her classically nude torso.

Harry Callahan might snip off twigs from the tree and make something of that. You get the picture. It's just a tree, but there are so many ways to see it. This is what Callahan, who is 84, has done for most of his adult life. Look at trees, and city streets, at brick walls and natural expanses, at Eleanor and their daughter Barbara, at scraps of paper and complete, unknowing strangers, at light and at dark, in color and in black and white. Look, and reveal what others missed.


"The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image," Callahan has said, "is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively ---intuitively ---the camera can write poetry."


There's a lifetime of that in "Harry Callahan," a career-spanning exhibit of 116 photographs opening Tuesday at the High Museum of Art. The show, curated by Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art, reflects every aspect of Callahan's work, which has been marked by its rich, inquiring variety. There is not one style that belongs to Callahan ---who came to photography as an amateur enthusiast, embraced it as a fervent faith and would become one of its most influential teachers ---but rather several.


"If the show does nothing else, it absolutely cements his reputation as one of the greats of 20th century photography," says Ellen Fleurov, the High's curator of photography. "He's been a restless experimenter all through his career."

But Callahan, who continued to steadily produce new work until impaired by a 1995 stroke, makes no grand claims for himself. He is, and has always been, a solid, workaday Midwesterner wholly invested in the process of his art, which, alongside Eleanor, his wife of 60 years, has been a singular and consuming passion.


"I've always been nuts about photography," he says, enunciating each syllable with effort and care as he sits beneath a wall covered with framed images ---an abstraction of dense foliage; a Chicago street scene alive with striking angles ---which make his home a kind of one-man museum. "That's the only thing I could do. And when I ran out of gas with something, I tried something and later came back again. I think I photographed almost everything in the first two years. But I went away an d came back, and it had changed. My treatment, that's really what it is. The person changes."

Yet Callahan, who moved to Atlanta 13 years ago to be near his daughter and her family, has been remarkably consistent throughout his career. "His work is absolutely about the potential of the medium," says Keith Davis, fine art programs director for Hallmark Cards, whose extensive collections include some 300 Callahan photographs. "It's about how a visual genius sees the world. They're about the process, about the world, about living."


Despite the work's historical significance, it hasn't made Callahan a household name. "His work is not `controversial,' it's not `provocative,' " Davis says. "It's simply great."


That work began in earnest after a life-changing encounter with Ansel Adams in 1941, when the epic landscape photographer gave a workshop at the Detroit Photo Guild.

"Ansel came and all the lights lit up, " recalls Callahan, who had been struggling to find a direction for his photography while employed as a clerk for Chrysler. It wasn't Adams' "spectacular stuff" that grabbed his attention, but rather close-ups of seemingly more prosaic gravel pits, of grasses and ferns. "I was living in Michigan and there were no big mountains," Callahan says, laughing. "I was anxious to go West before, but I didn't like what I got. I like what I got in Michigan."


Tellingly, a 1942 trip to Colorado yielded one print: a snapshot-like portrait of the Callahans posed face to face in the foreground with the grandiose sweep of the Rockies as backdrop. Even here, the photographer sought a sense of intimacy. Back home, he began an intensive phase of exploration, applying what he learned from Adams. The master photographer stressed not only the necessity of tactile clarity in an image, but the inherent spiritual nature of photography itself. These lessons hav e stayed with Callahan, who was satisfied photographing immediate, everyday scenery that most urban dwellers took for granted or ignored: ripples on Lake Michigan, a weathered concrete wall in Chicago, a utility pole, studded with hundreds of staples, on Peachtree Street. "I like the walls," he says simply. "I like signs. I like surfaces."


Adams was not his only inspiration. He was greatly influenced by Alfred Stieglitz, whom he met on a 1942 pilgrimage to New York. And a pivotal 1946 appointment to the Institute of Design in Chicago ---where he taught until 1961, when he left to develop the new photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design ---brought Callahan into a heady new orbit. He absorbed lessons from the school's founder, Bauhaus artist Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, the architect Mies van der Rohe and a host of others associated with the modernist hothouse.


Importantly, he began a second career in teaching, one that would support his photography until retirement in 1977. "I don't think I am very bright," Callahan says, a disarming statement from someone whose work fused the key qualities of both European and American modernist styles, whose technical savvy is matched by an enthusiasm that makes his late work feel as fresh and engaged as his earliest exposures. But this is modesty of the self-made, all-American kind. "I had a good IQ, but I didn't ever go to college." Instead, he learned on the job. "This is how I got an education ---teaching. I liked it because I could say what I believed. Many times I thought I would quit, but when I saw the students' work at the end of the semester I was happy again." ("Harry Callahan and His Students: New Acquisitions," a parallel exhibit at the High, will showcase works by Callahan and some of his more notable students, who include a diverse group of photographers such as Emmet Gowin, Linda Connor, Bil l Burke, Ray Metzger and Atlanta residents John McWilliams and


Constant through all of Callahan's endeavors, however, has been Eleanor. Now a youthful 80, she represents an essential core of her husband's work, appearing in classic nude abstractions and posing in the couple's Chicago ballroom studio of the 1950s, standing on street corners and up to her neck in Lake Michigan.


"This was just an everyday occurrence," Eleanor Callahan says. "Whatever was on his mind at the time was what we shot. . . . It's his life, and he does it every day. He's never let up a minute, even now, after the stroke. He's loved every minute of it."


Except for images of Eleanor, and Barbara as a child, Callahan shuns traditional portraiture. He preferred, after Walker Evans, to catch subjects "when their guard is down," and so stealthily snapped close-ups of Chicago pedestrians edged in urban anxiety. Yet he could focus prolifically on his wife, whom he met on a blind date and who would become a kind of all-purpose muse, distinguished by a profound calm and unwavering dignity.


"Yes," Callahan explains, "because I know her. She was wonderful. She did it. She was agreeable to everything I asked her. I think I have always been moved by what I thought was beautiful. She was beautiful . . . not Hollywood's type."


The photographer, whose lively spirit persists despite age and health ailments, who, in fact, is still taking pictures, turns a lens on himself for a moment. "I think I have always been affected by looks, " he says, and laughs again. "I thought grass was beautiful. I thought trees were beautiful."

I'm Lazy, So I'll Torture You With Unpublished Liner Notes -- Hah!

{For a pending release on Table of the Elements. These have been lingering for a few years, all 3,000 words. Just to get us kick-started ...}



Few experiences in life are as emphatic and direct as the hour spent in a dark room when Tony Conrad is on stage. Instinctively, you want to reach for some epigram to qualify what happens, because what happens demands a rationale – an explication, a tidy summing-up. But that’s elusive, much as Conrad’s own history of recording and performance. Say this though: Tony Conrad has been kicking the violin’s ass for longer than most of his contemporary audience has been alive.

Curiously, though, it may have been necessary for Conrad to wait until now to find an audience as keen to appreciate the particular brand of whammy he lays on it. There is a quality that is thrilling and absolute in the way that it thoroughly reasserts the primal nature of sound. It smacks you in the gut, as all such encounters should, but never ever lets up, never lets you catch your breath. Instead, that immediate physiological response to the massively amplified bowing of Conrad , and the dream cathedral of overtones this generates, becomes profoundly psychological as well. Consciousness-altering, even. You think that it's just washing over you, but those oceanic tremors might as well be a map of your own nervous system. To pull a concept out of Thomas Pynchon, that tight knot gathering in the belly is the beginning of a knotting into:a logical reaction to the quickening jolt of the infinite that announces Conrad's arrival. The best strategy for riding the storm out is to ride the storm in. All that mile-high oscillating resonance, all that extremism in the pursuit of liberty, erupts into hearty metaphor. This is the belly of the beast, in a lost time, under a full moon. And the beast is roaring.

Here's the catch, though. It's easy enough to make romantic claims for an artist like Conrad. He's one of those guys. Ur-Sixties. Quintessential cult figure. Resident outsider. Rebel angel . He's got the kind of immaculate credibility that can't be bought and can't be sold.[And how else, otherwise, could he have persevered?] Rumbling under the cultural radar since the Kennedy Era, Conrad is at once first cause and last laugh, a covert operative who can stand as a primary influence over succeeding generations, while pretty much conducting most of his business in obscurity. That is, until about 10 years ago, when he began re-materializing as a live performer and started recording a series of releases for the Table of the Elements label. Because he'd kept such a low profile, when Conrad did pop up, the impression made was a good deal more spectacular by sheer dint of surprise. Who, exactly, was this guy? It was an unusual weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, when people began to ask -- again. Conrad was having one of his first "coming out" parties, and despite some of the odd circumstances, it could not have been staged more memorably. The Manganese Festival, which doubled as a kind of avant-garde debutante ball for, Table of the Elements, went down April 23 and 24, 1994, at the exact same time as Freaknik, the "spring break" for students from the circuit of predominantly black colleges. Atlanta became an urban version of Daytona Beach for about three days, with traffic grid locked, boom boxes shouting, and provocatively ample derriere-shaking for mile after mile along Peachtree Street -- the main stem that runs into the heart of "The City Too Busy To Hate." The festival was sequestered in a complex of art galleries off an industrial side street intersecting Peachtree (and thus, cut off in such a way that anyone who managed to drive in could not possibly hope to drive back out until the traffic jam subsided many, many hours later). This was ideal, for anyone hoping to maximize the singular nature of the experience. You could check out any time you liked, but you could never leave. Perfect for a first encounter with Tony Conrad. He cut a curious figure, Tony did, in his bowler hat and his shorts, prowling the premises with a video camera, documenting the goings-on as if at some family reunion. In a sense, it was: The gathering tribes included Thurston Moore, Lee Randaldo and Steve Shelleyfrom Sonic Youth, harpist Zeena Parkins, avenging Japanese guitar hero Keiji Haino, the anarchic artistes of Faust -- Conrad's long-ago collaborators on "Outside the Dream Syndicate" -- and Jim O'Rourke, wonder boy. From Europe, the trioAMM, godfathers of free improv, was in the house, as was New Zealand’s rare-to-such-shores Gate. This was an unusual assortment of performers, a Lollapalooza for fringe-dwellers, and a model for further electrical storms – such as the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival – that would light up the skies into the new millennium. By the time Conrad finally came to perform, sandwiched between the jet-engine decibel bath of Haino and the ritualized freak-out of Faust, even those not in the know were primed for a paradigm shift. The city was in a gridlock, as surely as if suffering a collective panic attack or celebrating a coup d’etat. What better moment to pump up the volume, and tune in to those strange frequencies?




Ten years on, and some four decades since he began making trouble from a fourth-floor walkup loft on Ludlow Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Conrad is back in New York. He visits fairly often, to work on collaborative art projects, or take a gig at Tonic, a renovated former kosher winery on Norfolk Street that has become a kind of trans-genre performance salon: an engine room for 21st century musical imagineering. Conrad is 62, and he’s enormously fun to watch, even now, even when he’s not onstage, teaching that violin what’s what. He’s circled around nicely, from pre-this to post-that, at once the guy who anticipated (with former roommate John Cale) the whip-song feedback drone rock of the Velvet Underground – which then anticipated everything else, polluting young minds who formed generations of rock’n’roll bands to follow – and someone it is enjoyable to think of as the Jerry Lee Lewis to La Monte Young’s would-be Elvis of All Things Minimal. ‘Course, Conrad did not show up drunk afterhours at the Church Street entrance to Young’s drone-sweet-home, the DreamHouse, waving a pistol and cajoling his former colleague, though Jerry Lee once pulled that stunt at Graceland. But the debate over authorship of certain musical ideas and properties shared with Young and other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music has sparked much of Conrad’s intensive activities during the past decade. And in marshalling his minority report, he’s had much better aim than the so-called Killer.

Conrad’s been both the frying pan and the fire. He’s a reminder of what early Sun Records phenom and cottonpatch bad-ass Charlie Feathers said once – about rockabilly, of course – constituting “the beginning and the end of music.” And, in both his sonic fundamentalism (which is to say, an insistence on hewing close to a nearly indivisible root) and insurgent idiosyncrasies, Conrad’s in league with a whole pantheon of American visionaries – figures variously perceived as cranks, weirdos and aliens before their names graced boxed sets and they were feted on the White House lawn. Think of Johnny Cash, or Harry Partch, or Cecil Taylor, or Don Van Vliet. Conrad has those essential qualities we prize in our iconolasts. He’s ornery, , but he’s crafty, too, like that slippery cartoon wabbit who always finds a way to turn his antagonists’ weapons back on themselves.

In the process of challenging the very history he helped to create, Conrad has the good fortune to revel in its aftermath. He’s looped. When he mounts his bicycle, as he does for a tour of old Lower East Side haunts on the DVD included in this package, he conjures a flashback to a 1965 Look magazine spread that identified the artist as an archetypal happener. Behold! The young urban explorer whose bohemian enthusiasms defined a certain way of life – an aesthetic code that was also an ethical position – which New York City, in its fathomless churning, its insatiable hunger for fresh meat, at once compelled and fostered. It’s a different New York now, in many sad and irreversible ways, but Conrad can still feel that thrumming at its core, can still feed on its boundless appetite. He fits right in. When he rides up the street, the gunmetal gray bicycle chain he drapes around his neck registers as an unconscious hip-hop gesture. (And Pythagoras becomes another sucker MC, getting the beatdown from Tony C.) The sounds on the street are a midday downtown babelogue: salsa rhythms blaring out of modest taquerias; Hasidics murmuring over their knishes as they slouch towards Williamsburg; the blunt thud of car-trunk subwoofers rattling windows with the new Nelly single; kids screaming; garbage trucks loading their haul, grinding and clanging without end; somewhere, a bird. You don’t have to spend very much time with Conrad to see how he enjoys this ruckus. It’s his candy shop. And business is better than ever.



“It amazed me that in the 1990s, for the first time, you would go to a club and find an audience that was just ready for anything,” says Conrad, sitting across the table in a Mexican restaurant on Rivington Street on a late summer afternoon. He’s sincere, clearly buzzed about the idea that his own assault on the Western canon, on received notions about -- well, have you got some time? Pull up a chair. Conrad is insistently inclined towards cultural investigation, and not someone who takes much for granted. Rather, he digs for the back-story in any given scenario. Even, in this case, his own prominence on the latter-day performance circuit, which might include anything from an art gallery to a rock club. He’s caught on, and if, so far, “official” histories of the 1960s minimalist movement relegate him to a footnote, that same outsider status is a big part of what makes him matter to listeners who aren’t likely to be shelling out the Jeffersons to catch the new Philip Glass opera. Thus, with “Slapping Pythagoras,” Conrad took advantage of a pool of kindred spirits from Chicago’s indie music scene – including stalwarts like O’Rourke, guitarist Kevin Drumm, and engineer Steve Albini – to bridge a generational divide. It gave him currency. The kids are alright, right? But, um, why? “That still has to be thought through,” he continues. “Like, what happened? Was the young audience simply untrained and gaga? Are they completely so overexposed to everything they're just jaded to death? Are they so saturated with the pop-market that they’re ready to hear anything else that just doesn't sound like the shit on the radio? Or is it a combination of the above? No one has really diced this out that I know of, but the result is that there's a whole sea of people who really are hungry to be exposed to sound in a different way.

“Once at the Kilowatt in San Francisco, my performance was preceded by a wind octet playing contemporary sounding wind octet music, composed by academics. The audience comes in and sits in the thrash pit and listens patiently to the octet. Ten years before people would be fleeing. Or screaming for relief. So, were they there because they didn’t give a shit what they heard? Or because they had absorbed the lessons of John Cage, and found they could adapt their senses to anything that came along? Or were they so grateful to hear something very strange and focused?”

Conrad’s not merely dishing rhetoric. He’s puzzling over the paradigm. What are the political implications of performance? What happens when art music becomes fuck-art music? What happens when it’s not dry but humid? What happens when it’s raw and dirty? What happens if you kill off the myth of the composer and roll dem bones?


“When the music got very loud it meant that it took on this identity of its own that required a kind of handshaking,” Conrad says. “You could think of that engagement with the sound in a couple of different ways. You could think of yourself as submitting to the sound, and that evokes a whole discourse of sadomasochistic analysis. Another way of thinking about it is that you flow with the sound, you go into it and inhabit it and interweave your space with it. That’s a completely different power dynamic. That’s very fascinating because there's this paradox between those two things. I was always inclined to prefer the second approach. I guess in the way that I enjoyed Cage, and the challenge of being confronted with a situation and assimilating it and controlling my responses to it. There's a contest of some sort. You rise to the occasion, so to speak, and I always thought that was bracing and challenging. Like you test yourself in a sporting event. You see how much weight you can lift or how fast your can pedal on your bicycle. There's just this great rush of energy that comes with the omnipresence of the sound: The sound being all around. For me, this was a way of dealing with the problem of the composer.”

Punk rock, with its volume and intensity, and its anti-virtuosic, DIY credo, brings up similar issues. But Conrad makes an important distinction. “What’s different, say, between this music and punk rock? In punk rock there's a gestural element of ‘I'm jazzing my guitar so it will spit cum all over you.’ The feeling you get is very, very masculine fucking power trip that's supposed to really damage you. That's quite different. It's interesting. But it’s not the same. This has a more neutral power flow, but it does go into a space that is recognizable from that. That’s one reason why there could have been such a powerful crossover to New York rock in the '70s. The New York punk movement was a little less – originally, at least -- focused on that kind of football mentality. There was plenty of blue-collar feeling in New York, too, displaced into alienation. Think of Lydia Lunch for example. That was alienation turned into articulateness. So there’s a shriek there but it’s not supposed to destroy you. It’s supposed to get your attention and deliver a blow in a meaningful way. It’s ancient music now. I’m 62, and when I started doing music I was 22. That was 40 years ago. When I first came here I remember finding out through Jack Smith -- he was into a kind of nostalgia trip -- I began to find out about the pop music of the ‘30s and ‘40s, old 78s and stuff like that. It struck me as so alien, and so bizarre and weird and distant and remote from my life that it was thrilling, and intriguing, but also just coming through the pipe from some other universe! And that was, let's say, the sounds from 1942, and that was 20 years earlier [in 1962] and now looking back 20 years I'm finding myself looking at 1982! For today's younger person things that were going on in 1980 must seem completely weird and irrelevant and strange and alien.”



Yet, in a funny way, what Conrad is doing now is utterly timely. It has to be, and in a more specific way than merely the ease with which it provides a youthful audience an opportunity for reinvestigation of performance tactics and philosophies they were not alive to experience the first time around. His refreshing populism makes me wish we could elect him to public office, because Conrad grasps the essence of democratic thought in a way that is heartening. He sees through the Big Daddy posturing that’s gotten us ass-deep in the jaundiced miasma of contemporary times, and argues persuasively that’s there is another way. But history is sometimes the dream we DON’T want to wake up from. Because history is familiar, makes us feel secure even if its nipple succors only with spoiled milk. The body of Conrad’s work, much of which has come to light through a series of releases initiated by Table of the Elements, not only makes an immediate demand on the listener – strap yourself in kids, we’re going for a ride! – who must negotiate his own terms with the music, but has stealth implications as well. These are something like, for lack of a more appropriate or immediate comparison, the parallel worlds of “The Matrix.” Do you want the red pill or the blue pill? Do you want the crime or do you want the punishment? Must ignorance always be bliss? Or can’t bliss signify its own self-evident truths?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, but the very axis our lives spin around. And they’re part of the paradigm whose shifting is Conrad’s enterprise. It’s there in the drone, the switched-on throb of alpha and omega, earth and ether, that fills the room when the strings are stroked. Conrad’s predilection for playing behind a billowy white curtain, while his shadow is projected – and magnified – against it, lends many of his performances an air of some arcane mystery theatre. Time unhinges. The mind wanders. You begin to think about Bill Monroe, hollering high and lonesome, or a frayed traveler moaning in the Delta night of 1931. You being to think about a thousand choirs massed in a Biblical prophet’s hallucination, or a ritual staged by some lost tribe in a forgotten part of the world, whose secrets no tongue will ever again speak. You begin to feel strangely connected to a world of experiences you can never possibly know. Which is funny, because Conrad doesn’t come off as a mystic, and he’s no shill for anyone’s hogwash. If anything, he’s a born debunker. But in liberating this music from orthodoxy, he also unleashes it for democratic free association. Not much, these days, can do that. Tony rocks. And, maybe, that’s epigram enough.

Testing, testing

Well, here we are.
How exciting.
Welcome.