If you look at the sax reeds in this picture closely, you will note that each is cut or notched, altered in some fashion so as to render them difficult to play. Play them – or at least some of them – the James Fei Alto Saxophone Quartet did last Tuesday at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. This is roughly two & one-half blocks from Writers House & across the street (more or less) from the Slought Foundation art gallery. I say more or less because the Rotunda is set back from the street & you have to walk down a bit of an alley & enter through a most unpresupposing door. Once there, tho, you’re in one of the best spaces for music in Philadelphia. With Last Words Bookstore, one of the city’s best used book dealers, just around the corner on 40^th, the Institute for Contemporary Arts & International House all in the immediate vicinity, you’re in Philadelphia’s real avenue of the arts here, far more so than the institutional fare on Broad Street.

The Taiwanese-born Fei, who looks at least a decade younger than his 34 years, brought his quartet to town to recreate the extraordinary works gathered together on James Fei Alto Quartets, the most recent CD from Fei’s Organized Sound label. Altered quartets is the way my mind wants to rework that title. Fei, who spends as much time working with live electronics as he does on his various saxophones, approaches the sax much the same way that Jimi Hendrix once approached the electric guitar or Cecil Taylor approaches the piano, which is to say that any aspect of the instrument might be employed to make sound, from “crippled” reeds (Fei’s word choice) to moisture in the horn’s bell, to playing so very shrill that the audience doesn’t so much hear the music as it does feel it, literally standing those microscopic hairs of the inner ear on end – simply cup a hand over your ear & the sound disappears entirely. You can hear “Work for crippled reeds” as an MP3 here.

Fei may still be better known as a side man to Anthony Braxton than on his own (Braxton shows up as a side man to Fei on one track of the Quartets) and Fei’s work shares Braxton’s intensely cerebral approach to jazz tradition, albeit with more of the rigor of the minimalist. The quartet’s current lineup – Fei, Jeff Hudgins, Jackson Moore & Aaron Ali Shaikh -- have all worked with Braxton or John Zorn, making it perhaps the most post-avant sax quartet since ROVA.¹ Minimalist not in the sense of Steve Reich’s (or Phil Glass’ or Terry Riley’s) phased reiterations, but rather each piece broken into the exploration of a single aspect of what’s possible, what I think of as the Command Idea. In a work like “Study III (Saliva)” (MP3), the quartet sits – they’re always sitting – with each musician leaning back, the bell of their horns resting on the knee of a crossed leg², so that the bell captures all of the musician’s supplemental moisture. It sounds half as if they are playing under water (& in a way they are), then as if they were playing while drowning. Similarly, what you hear in the piece for “crippled” reeds are the reeds. As is true with any form of minimalism – think of Bob Grenier’s micropoetics – what occurs is the magnification of one element of the work, which at times appears to have been blown up to the proportions of a public sculpture in an urban plaza.

Talking with Fei after the performance, he talks about bringing forward the “inaudible” aspects of music, the elements a musician is trained to minimize and which the audience pretends it can’t hear, exactly like moisture in the bell. This is so similar to what a lot of the best contemporary poetry is doing that one hardly needs to translate media in order to discuss the aspects of it from one field to the next.

Fei will be performing solo at the Cue Foundation Gallery in New York next month, as part of a reading that Charles Alexander & I will be giving in celebration of Cynthia Miller’s show that I curated. The event will be on Friday, April 25^th, the day after the show’s opening, and you would be advised to bring both eyes and ears to this event. I’ll give out more details a little closer to the date.

 

¹ I say post-avant because I think it’s more or less impossible to be avant-garde with a straight face in the 21^st century, but it should be noted that jazz or post-jazz still carries with it some of the trappings of the Olde Avant world, musicians mimicking mad scientists – Moore’s own group calls itself the Laboratory Band and Braxton’s scores look like something Lt. Whorf would use to command the bridge of the Enterprise.

² See the image of Fei on the lower left here playing this piece.

Jorge Liderman

1957 – 2008

Stockhausen is fifth from the left, back row, just to the left of W.C. Fields


Karlheinz Stockhausen

1928 - 2007

Tracy Grammer & Dave Carter
(Photo by Jeff Bizzell)

I was talking with Craig Bickhardt during a break at our reading / event with Eileen Tabios last Tuesday night. Craig is a singer-songwriter who works the folk/country border of music – what alternative radio jocks these days call Americana – and has written number one hits for the Judds, Pam Tillis & Ty Herndon, had platinum hits sung by Martina McBride & Trish Yearwood, as well as having songs recorded by B.B. King, Ray Charles, Kathy Mattea & Alison Krauss – he did some of the music for Robert Duvall’s Tender Mercies awhile back. It’s a genre that I’ve been following, at least vaguely, for decades now since it evolved out of the folk festivals I attended in the 1960s.

My own instincts for that music tend more toward what I think of as the Austin sound, that aspect of country-folk that emerged from the work of Willie Nelson & especially Townes Van Zandt, whom I’ve written about here before. The person who really introduced me to that sound was Nanci Griffith, whom Krishna & I first heard at a memorial concert for Kate Wolf in San Francisco nearly 20 years ago. We had wanted to have Kate sing at our wedding, but she was already too sick with the leukemia that would eventually cut her life short. We ended up going with the Good Ol’ Persons, Kathy Kallick’s bluegrass group that is still playing & recording two decades later, sounding as crisp as ever.

Where Van Zandt & Nelson were songwriters who’d attempted to break into the tight-knit scene in Nashville, only to find their hippy ways didn’t fit well with the neo-George Wallace types at the Grand Ole Opry, & thus returned to Austin to create a scene there more to their liking, Griffith grew up in Austin listening to their likes along with other local bands like Buddy Holly’s old outfit, the Crickets. Tho she’s a great singer & has long been a touring & recording success both here & in Ireland (where she spends several months each year these days), Griffith like Bickhardt often describes herself as a songwriter first & as a singer only of necessity. Like Wolf, Bickhardt & Van Zandt, the very first thing you note about her music is that it has a level of literacy about it that is a steep step above normal country or folk fare.

Another songwriter with Texas roots whose work I always point to as an example of what country-folk can be at its very best, and very most literate, is the late Dave Carter. Next to Townes Van Zandt & Bob Dylan – his two greatest influences – Carter was easily the best songwriter I’ve heard over the past half century. Carter, who grew up primarily in Oklahoma & Texas & whose partner, Tracy Grammer, still refers to him as ODC for Oklahoma Dave Carter, a nickname he still used when they first met in Portland.

Dave Carter released only five albums – four while he was alive, the fifth (this year’s Seven is the Number, presently the number one folk album in America) is largely a reworking of his rejected first effort, which had been released before Carter learned the nuances of record arrangement & production. The song “Crocodile Man” was a huge hit circa 1999 on the Americana charts – with Tracy singing the lyrics even tho they’re figured as a man’s words – and Carter found himself suddenly an “overnight success” after must have been decades of effort. He was 46 at the time & only would live to be 49 before a massive heart attack killed the rail-thin vegetarian after a morning run on the road in 2002.

Carter was raised in an evangelical family but whose own spiritual commitments broadened considerably & are best captured by the title of one of his albums, Drum Hat Buddha – the title’s juxtapositions, which sound exactly like NY School poetry, gen 17 (think of Drew Gardner’s Petroleum Hat, which came out four years after the Carter-Grammer album) – gives you some sense of what makes Carter so special as a writer. Here are the lyrics to “Ordinary Town” from that CD:

Common cool he was a proud young fool
In a kick-ass Wal-Mart tie
Rippin’ down the main drag
Trippin’ on the headlights rollin' by
In the early dawn when the cars were gone
Did he hear the master's call
In the five and dime did he wake and find
He was only dreamin’ after all, cause . . .

This is an ordinary town
And the prophet stands apart
This is an ordinary town
And we brook no wayward heart
And every highway leads you prodigal back home
To the ordinary sidewalks you were born to roam

Rock of ages, love contagious
Shine the serpent fire
So sang the sage of sixteen summers
In the upstairs choir
So sang the old dog down the street
Beside his wailing wall
"Go home, go home," the mayor cried
When Jesus came to city hall, cause . . .

This is an ordinary town
And the prophet stands alone
This is an ordinary town
And we crucify our own
And every highway leads you prodigal again
To the ordinary houses you were brought up in

Raised on hunches and junk food lunches
And punch-drunk ballroom steps
You get to believin’ you're even-steven
With the kids at Fast-Track Prep
So you dump your bucks on a velvet tux
And you run and join the dance
But your holy shows and the Romans know
You're just a child of circumstance, cause . . .

This is an ordinary town
And the prophet has no face
This is an ordinary town
And the seasons run in place
And every highway leads you prodigal and true
To the ordinary angels watchin’ over you

There is a lot of rhyme in these lines & some extraordinary word choices – ages / contagious / sage of is my favorite – here, as well as a remarkably pictorial eye. I can’t read these words without hearing Carter & Grammer’s arrangement – it feels completely inevitable to me, which is one test of the success of joining words to music.

At one point Carter attended the California Institute of Integral Studies where I was the director of development & outreach, although we didn’t meet until later & I’m not 100 percent certain that our time at the ‘Tute overlapped.¹ Krishna & I once heard him & Tracy perform at an outdoor concert that was driven indoors by a thunderous downpour to the King of Prussia township council chambers – as inauspicious a venue for sound as you can imagine – where they played sans benefit of any amplification. They made it sound as intimate & welcoming as a house concert. And if it wasn’t the biggest venue we ever saw them in – that would have been the Philadelphia Folk Festival – nor the space with the best sound (that would have been The Point, the late lamented folk club in Bryn Mawr, the last place we saw Dave before his death) – it’s probably the place I’ll remember longest & best, simply because their strengths as people as well as singers shined so brightly that evening.

I’ve been listening this past week a lot to Seven is the Number. When Carter died, he and Grammer had planned at some point to rework his early Snake Handlin’ Man album into what Carter – who obviously was a perfectionist – would have considered an acceptable arrangement. Grammer, who started out as his accompanist on violin & voice & has emerged herself as one of the best folksingers alive, has done a terrific job with this. Every one of Carter’s albums is well worth owning – indeed, they make great presents too – and both of Tracy’s post-Carter solo albums have lots of his songs on them as well. Lucy Kaplansky, Chris Smither & the Kennedys have all recorded some of his songs & Joan Baez has included “The Mountain” in a number of her concerts (she once sang it for the Dali Lama). If you have even a remote interest in folk or in the singer-songwriter genre, you owe it to yourself to own all of Dave Carter’s music.

 

¹ Carter’s Wikipedia article refers to the influence of Joseph Campbell on the singer after a visit to his school. That was, in fact, one of my projects at CIIS. Campbell died in 1987, a year after I’d left to edit the Socialist Review.

Listening to Modern Times, the new album by Bob Dylan, two different & competing thoughts pop into my mind. The first is that the sound is very much of a piece with his last two studio albums, 1997’s Time Out of Mind & Love and Theft, released on, of all dates, September 11, 2001. At ten years, this is the longest that the 65-year-old folk/rock chameleon has retained anything like the same aural presence. When one thinks of the multiple personalities Dylan inhabited during the 1960s – folk troubadour (Bob Dylan, most of Freewheelin’), protest singer (The Times They Are A-Changin’), surreal balladeer (Another Side of Bob Dylan), inventor of folk-rock (Highway 61 Revisited), reclusive collaborator (John Wesley Harding, The Basement Tapes), & country crooner (Nashville Skyline), the sheer continuity of Dylan’s current renaissance is worth noting. You can hear (and see) a snatch of the music on, of all things, this iPod commercial.

The second is that this album contains Dylan’s very best band since … not The Band, but in fact the Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band, which accompanied Dylan first on the infamous electric betrayal at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, playing “Maggie’s Farm.” You can hear them on the soundtrack for the Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home, where they sound tremendous. The late Michael Bloomfield, the great rich white kid blues guitarist of the ‘60s, lead guitarist for the Butterfield group, proved essential to the sound of Highway 61 Revisited, the one album more than any other that sealed Dylan’s reputation as the most creative rock musician in the genre’s most creative period.

Modern Times uses only one musician, bassist Tony Garnier, who shows up on either of the two previous studio albums & it’s true that Garnier’s work is as central to defining Dylan’s current sound as Bloomfield was then. The Butterfield band, the loudest group I’ve ever heard in person (a concert at UC Berkeley in 1965 or '66), wasn’t the first of the successful white blues acts of the 1960s – Koerner, Glover & Ray were the big musical act in the Twin Cities back with Robert Zimmerman first dropped out of the U. of Minnesota, “borrowed” a bunch of Glover’s LPs and began to refashion himself into Bob Dylan. And, in point of fact, the Butterfield band wasn’t all white either, including during its best years two veterans of Howlin’ Wolf’s band, Jerome Arnold & Sam Lay, as well as harmonica master & singer Butterfield, organist Mark Naftalin & bassist Elvin Bishop.

Where Koerner, Glover & Ray were masters of miming the sound of acoustic delta blues, the Butterfield band hued much closer to their own Chicago roots & the electrified urban blues pioneered there by Muddy Waters (whose earlier Alan Lomax recording back in the delta is well worth listening to, just to get a sense of where he was coming from), Wolf, Otis Spann & Buddy Miles. If the very first rock-n-roll tune ever recorded was Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Cross Road Blues,” the Butterfield band 30 years later represents the first clear moment when rock & blues clearly are no longer two separate genres. From Eric Clapton to the North Mississippi All-Stars, the influence of the Butterfield band has continued much further than the band itself. After two hit albums, the first simply entitled The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the second East-West, the band’s make-up changed &, with it, the sound that had proven so effective both for Dylan & the band itself.

It’s interesting, sad even, that Dylan never made a record with the Butterfield band during its short-lived heyday in the mid-1960s. The Band, originally the Hawks, Ronnie Hawkins’ backup band, didn’t really gel on their own until Big Pink, their debut album. While they were the touring band behind Dylan during the Blonde on Blonde period, they aren’t the band he recorded with until 1974’s Before the Flood, not Dylan’s finest work. The Basement Tapes of course emerged a year later, after nearly a decade as one of the most widely distributed bootlegs ever made, but it’s clear there that these are musicians jamming. The unfinished sound of so many songs on that collection, tho, is an essential part of its charm.

Dylan’s approach to his bands often feels as tenuous as that of Chuck Berry, who is notorious for playing gigs around the country & simply presuming that whatever band the promoter hires will know his work & be able to follow along. Dylan at least has had a tendency to hold onto his bassists & keyboard players for longer periods (Charlie McCoy & Al Kooper being two examples from the early years), as tho these were the keys to his sound.

But it feels strange to think of Dylan’s 44^th album as finally being the one in which he gets the backup band right. It lends his current sound, which is at once both cynical & nostalgic, retro &, for a balladeer, still restlessly innovative, all at once, a depth his work hasn’t held before. How very curious.

The Envelope, Please by Swifty Lazarus, a collaboration between Canadian expatriate poet Todd Swift and composer Tom Walsh, is the latest attempt to wed the impulses of poetry to sound recording in some format beyond the traditional reading. The major influences – & they’re right out front & center – include Laurie Anderson; the Bill Burroughs of Towers Open Fire; the Brian Eno-David Byrne project, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; touches of Brecht & Weill; Godard’s sound tracks; and just maybe the backwards-talking dwarf from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

There is some good writing here, but mostly you have to read the liner notes to get to it. The problem is, I think, inherent in the medium. To carry over as anything other than pure reading, the text as literary signifier must choose to do one of three things:

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>focus solely on itself as signifier, becoming sound poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>enter into a collaboration with other media and genre expectations, or

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>subordinate itself to another form altogether

Ultimately, those aren’t such attractive alternatives.

Collaborations between media are less common than those within one. The major challenge for any collaboration, regardless of the genre involved, is the surrender of control between players and between the conjoined forms. But whereas, within any single medium, two participants or players must arrive at a position that enables each to function, often enough something no one individual involved could have conceived of on his or her part alone, between media the gap can yawn so large that ultimately their interaction may not matter all that much.* It does matter in The Envelope, Please as a gathering of diverse poems (all by Swift, save for one by Adeena Karasick that is buried deep in the found-language layers of a 12 minute track) are transformed into the sonic shadows of recordings we already know, avant-garde as nostalgia. Several of the texts appear to have been written for Lazarus: there are generalizations so bald that they could not have been intended for consumption by a reader – “If History is dead, why do things still happen? / If there is no Truth, why do I bother lying?” But the title piece is a quiet surreal lyric that gets lost as a sort of preface in its 30-second format.

Texts that are subordinated within another form often work best when they immerse themselves without looking back. The poets who have had the most success with careers in popular music – Anderson, Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen – produce words for music that share relatively little with their best known writing. Similarly, the finest musical texts in recent years – the work, say, of Dave Carter or Townes Van Zandt – don’t stand up well on the printed page, precisely because they were never conceived as doing so.

Containing sound, reference, syntax, and context, language is déjà toujours intermedia. The instant it combines with any form of instrumentation, the entire history of song is invoked and the result, regardless of how well intended, can never be innocent. Consider from the perspective of poetry the comic inappropriateness of Steve Reich’s filigreed setting for the work of William Carlos Williams as art song in The Desert Music compared with the far more powerful use of found language a much younger Reich demonstrated in tape loops such as Come Out.**  In projects that recruit poetry into other media, the ultimate question of context cannot be begged: where is the language most itself? Collaborators who forget or ignore that question do so at their own risk.

*The most successful intermedia collaborations in recent years – between poets & painters and between poets & dancers – have been in forms where the text functions alongside the other medium, rather than within it.

** A participant in a riot explains on tape what he needed to do to convince the police to get him medical attention:

I had to, like,

open the bruise up

and let some of the bruise blood

come out to show them.

The tape adds, then phases out of synch, multiple tracks of this last line until it gradually evolves into a roar.