Chris Schepp and Wreckless Eric at house concert in Rochester, New York
OK, so I sort of caught Eric by surprise but it’s a good picture of Chris Schepp, Rochester’s number one Wreckless fan, and the expression on Chris’s face perfectly captures the mood at last night’s house concert. As if we were living in our own dream this fifth Rochester appearance in the last few years was right across the street from our house.
When we were getting to know the hosts, Rick and Monica, we learned they were Amy Rigby fans but they had never heard of Wreckless Eric. We had never heard of Amy but we loved Wreckless Eric. When Eric and Amy first came through town as a duo we spotted our neighbors in the front row. I told Amy this story last night during their break and she said it often works that way. I also told her that her song about her daughter makes me cry. She liked that.
Last night we were in the front row in our neighbors house and I held my camera in my lap. I caught them doing a Tom Petty song and Amy’s beautiful “Don’t Ever Change.”
Todd East performing at the Inventors Club in Rochester, New York
Rob Storms called earlier in the week to invite us to a performance by Todd East, a local pianist who he described as the best musician in Rochester. I wouldn’t even mention that Todd East is blind if it wasn’t for the fact that he sounded exactly like Stevie Wonder and the only song that he did that I recognized was Ray Charles’s “Georgia.”
The performance was in the original Sound Source location on Norris Drive over near Cobbs Hill. We sat by the infamous “Spider” Casorla from Roller Coster Fireworks who was originally in town for the Jewish holidays but has stuck around until his father is well enough to make the trip back to their fireworks outlet in Nevada. A woman sat down next to us and asked if I was a Dodd.
It had been a long time since someone had asked me that. Maybe it was my new brush cut, a hair style that all five boys sported in the days when when my father would have us take our shirts off and stand in a line to get buzzed. She said she went to Holy Trinity with me but was in my sister’s class. Rob was calling this place a hacker space but it’s now called the “Inventors Club”. Conjures up all sorts of possibilities.
I love Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is.” If there is funeral service for me someday I hope someone will play it.
This graffiti in an artist’s installation at a museum in Sevilla, Spain caught my eye when we visited last year. The museum is in an old tile factory and the facility is as nice as the art. The graphics department at Earring Records used my photo for the cover of “Wall to Wall Carp,” one of the twelve songs on the new Margaret Explosion virtual, black vinyl, long playing release entitled “Untitled.” In keeping with the new economic band model the entire lp is available as a free download. Check it out.
Tom Harrell Quartet at Exodus To Jazz in Hochstein School of Music Hall in Rochester, New York
Tom Harrell was a highlight at both the 2006 and 2012 Rochester Jazz Fests. Beautiful melodies and fantastic players in his band each time. At Hochstein on Thursday night he played with a piano-less quartet, tenor sax with Tom’s trumpet along and Ugonna Okegwo on bass and Adam Cruzon drums. Peggi told me he may have been the best drummer she had ever heard but nobody can touch Ed Blackwell. This is a great venue for live jazz. The hall is relatively small and has a crisp, natural ambient sound. Really great players don’t overplay. They blow you away by coming up with the perfect parts and playing with the perfect touch and perfect feel. This was heavenly.
I took a movie of their last song and was going to throw it up on YouTube but it is out of focus. My camera (Nikon P7000) loses focus if I zoom while recording. I’m trying to learn not to do that. Damn thing sounds great though. Last time we were at Hochstein I took this movie of Kenny Garrett with my old camera, a Nikon 5100.
On Friday night we headed out to the Lovin’ Cup with our earplugs in my pocket. We walked in just as Rocket From The Tomb (early Pere Ubu) took the stage. This is a whole world away from jazz but it was a gas going back in time to somewhere between the late seventies and early eighties. I tried the movie thing again. Guitar player, Gary Siperko, is from Ithaca’s Mofos.
Saturday night was now. Somewhere between jazz and rock, Margaret Explosion played a benefit for our little buddy, Oscar, at RIT’s Lyndon Baines Johnson building. Go Oscar!
Artist receiving award at Public Market “artist’s Row” show
Don’t know if it was the rain or wind that disrupted our antennae reception of PBS last night since we don’t watch enough tv to know whether our reception is reliable in the best of circumstances but we tried to tune in to the Ric Burns Civil War meditation on death. The carnage was unbelievable but I expected at least some discussion of what it must have been like to commit yourself to standing in a wall formation before the armed forces of your fellow countrymen. Two hours later, still in a couch sitting stupor, “Frontline” jolted us with an hour special on the civil war in Syria. Their embedded journalist’s reporting and interviews with the committed rebels made it perfectly clear why citizens would get out in the street with machines guns blazing.
“Jesus and Mary Magdalene siting in tree. K I S S I N G”. History is not dead!
Rochester’s Fringe Fest starts tomorrow and Margaret Explosion plans to perform a special Fringe set of music tonight at the Little Theater to kick it all off.
The row of spinach that we planted a few weeks ago got swallowed up by the cilantro that went to seed a month ago and is now something like a ground cover so we put in two more rows of spinach. This will probably be our last batch for the season. Spinach is the one thing we can keep up with at the dinner table. I ate cilantro leaves while we planted the spinach. I don’t worry about a little grit in there after reading the article about the health advantage of exposure to local bacteria in a locavore diet. We have eggplant coming out our ears and more tomatoes that we can can. We had zucchini for dinner and picked more of that this evening. The whole trick is grabbing that stuff before it gets too big and seedy.
The huge leaves on our acorn squash are finally dying back enough so we can see the fruit and there is a lot of it. That usually keeps pretty well on top of our refrigerator until Christmas or so. Our neighbor gave us two parsley plants and they have been getting bigger and bigger all summer. I came back with a bunch of that. I picked a few more jalapeños. Can only handle so many of those in a day. I left the red peppers on the vine because we still have a bag from Wegmans. Maybe I’ll roast them tomorrow. There’s a roasted eggplant/red pepper/anchovy tapa in our Spanish cookbook. I might make that. Who needs the Public Market? Actually we plan to get over there tomorrow for the art fair.
I’m happy to be back in town for the Margaret Explosion gig tonight at the Little Theater Café. And especially happy to have no idea what it will sound like.
My Darling Clementine at Lovin’ Cup in Rochester, New York
In 1973 when three guys knocked on the door of the small house Peggi and I were renting in Bloomington Indiana and told me they wanted me to play drums in their band I was freaked out. These guys were old, mid thirties at least, and hard core country. “Butch Miller and the Midnight Echoes,” a working band with two gigs the next weekend, they were desperate and as hard as I tried i could not talk my way out of their offer. A few days later I was out in the country in the living room of trailer with a black velvet Kennedy painting on the wall rehearsing Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and George Jones songs. I fell in love with the stuff and played with the band for two years before leaving the job to Dave Mahoney.
My Darling Clementine, from England, does a damn good job of aping the George & Tammy, Nancy & Lee Hazelwood country duo thing. Last night at the Lovin’Cup they did a great job with “A Good Year For The Roses” and the encore, “Jackson,” but as George sang, “There’s nothing better once you’ve had the best.”
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at the Armory in Rochester, New York
A thunderstorm forecast forced the move of Thursday’s “Party in the Parking Lot” into Rochester’s Armory, easily the worst sounding room in the city. My parents used to go to the circus here and it might still be an ideal spot for that. If only last night’s show was anywhere near as interesting as a circus. We walked in while an announcer was introducing “Chuck Prophet & the Mission Express” and you could not understand a word he was saying. The wild reverberation here swallows even a loud speaking voice. I have no idea what Chuck Prophet was singing about but the two guitar, keyboard, bass and drums was some of the most ordinary rock music I’ve heard. I am probably too old to voice my opinion but it was as if the whole punk thing never happened and rock music continued to get straighter and straighter for the last thirty years.
Sharon Jones at least sounds good with simple things like syncopation between drums and bass, rhythm guitar, not just strummed chords, and great backup singers. The Dap Kings have studiously copped the vintage R&B thing and look and sound like a studio band on stage. Nowhere near the heft and funk of the godfather but enough to pull off a good version of Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” It was good to see the crowd come alive, smell pot in the air and be in the right spot for some serious break dancing. I guess I was spoiled by some extraordinary music at this year’s Jazz Fest like Mederic Collignon, Hakon Kornstad, Terje Rypdal and Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
Kid’s room at Lutheran Church, one of the venues for the Rochester International Jazz Fest
Funny how no two people hear the same thing. We are so lucky this is the case. After Terje Rypdal’s performance last night we were talking to a friend who was disappointed he didn’t hear more Terje Rypdal solos (he only takes two in his score for “Crime Scene”) and then a comment to yesterday’s post about the abundance of solos. The beautiful bass solo at the end was one of our favorite parts in the score.
We checked out the lineup for last night before leaving the house and Peggi said, “When the choice is between music that transports you and music that doesn’t, there really is no choice.” So like a broken record, there we were in the front row for performance number three by Terje Rypdal and the Bergen Big Band. It sort of amazing to watch them virtually clear a house. No more than fifth of the people in attendance make it to the end.
A true crime buff, Peggi had scripted all the parts of this masterpiece in her head. She knew when the crime happened, when the getaway occurred, when the crowd was just standing around gawking and then of course when the crime was eventually solved. The Jazz Festival pulled out all the stops in booking this incredible band.
We were talking to the band leader after the forth show and he told us how they had played with Joe Henderson and Maria Schnieder and so many others but they absolutely loved touring Europe playing the non-traditional arrangements Terje had written. There were no sax solos, only parts with plenty of room for movement, and then sections that heaved and dug deep into Terje melancholia. This gets our vote for best movie we never saw.
Terje Rypdal with Palle Mickkelborg at the Rochester International Jazz Festival
We primed ourselves for Terje Rypdal’s Rochester appearance by listening to his 1975 album, Odyssey, the one with him smiling, sitting in the back of an open van with his guitar and equipment. We grabbed front row seats in the Xerox Auditorium, right in front of a an orange-red, Fender Strat with a whammy bar on a stand between stereo Vox amps. Terje performed most of his 2010 recording, “Crime Scene,” with Bergen Big Band (a thirteen piece horn section with two bass clarinets plus drums) set up stage left and his core band (Hammond B3, electric piano, addition guitar, bass, drums and Palle Mikkelborg on trumpet bathed in reverb) stage right.
The 20 piece band came out first and then Terje, 38 years after Odyssey, with the support of a cane. Terje’s trademark sound has a distinct mood that has not changed since the seventies and his score for big band has only made it darker and richer. We felt like we had entered a dream state and I kept finding that my mouth was hanging open. This wild music is strangley comforting. We caught both performances and plan on hearing again tonight at the church.
I’m keeping track of this year’s Jazz Fest over here.
Pedrito Martinez Group on break outside the big tent at the Rochester International Jazz Festival
We stopped by the back of the big tent to listen to a bit of Pedrito Martinez Group. We were sort of afraid to go in the front door because the group had been so loud at their Montage show that they chased people out the doors. The next thing we knew, three of the members came out the back of the tent while Pedrito was doing his percussion solo. I was amazed how quickly they pulled out their smart phones. The cowbell player (in the blue), a key player in Afro Cuban music, invited us back in so we took in the rest of their show from the side of the stage. They sounded fantastic.
Street band in front of apartment building near Abilene in Rochester, New York
We were the first ones in line outside the Rochester Club for Luca Ciarla Quartet while the line for the Cuban band at Kilbourn, a show that started at the same time, had already wrapped around the corner and was confusing itself with the line we started. The “Mediterranean Gypsy Jazz” moniker works well for these guys. Laid back, warm and friendly, their personalties carry over to their sound. The crowd went nuts when violin, accordion, double bass and hand drums got into overdrive but they kept the volume in check and always followed it up with something sweet. From Monk to Nino Roto like tunes they reached beyond the gypsy songbook. The accordion player was outstanding.
The line we found in front of Harro East (remember when this place was the Triangle Theater and Wease worked the door and they had all those great reggae acts?) was gone so we stopped in for few songs. I like Catherine Russell’s great voice when she’s not belting it out.
We were kind of looking forward to the Monophonics, the “psychedelic soul” band from the Bay Area. I liked the single we listened to in the iTunes store, a real digital single, two songs for $1.98 and packaged with a big hole 45 and off white sleeve graphic. But, damn, there was nothing psychedelic about them. They were as loud as hell. The guy in front of us had his hands over his ears until he left. The tent was packed with glum looking people in plastic chairs. The gruff vocalist behind the B3 managed to get seven or eight kids up dancing to “Slippin’ Into Darkness” as we slipped out the back.
We were talking earlier to a fellow Jazz Fest passenger, a stranger, who said he has a problem with the Xerox venue because he always falls asleep. The auditorium’s warm sound is perfect for some acts and Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey is one of them. Man, did they sound great! Like the Flaming Lips, a fellow Tulsa band but on the rock side, they are adventurous. Aptly named, the Odyssey wander all over the musical map, with songs arranged but open like a free-range playground. We’ve seen these guys at two earlier festivals and they keep getting better and crazier.
Kid trumpeter in the alley behind the Eastman Theater in Rochester, New York
The couple in front of us in the line for Tom Harrell were like a bad trip. The woman was dying to talk, to anyone, and there we were. I tried to give detached answers to her questions but when she asked me if I needed help threading the cloth lanyard through my jazz pass I just said, “No,” in a scolding tone.
Behind us a mom was helping her son set up a busking station. She even chummed the waters or primed the pump by putting a dollar bill in the open trumpet case. She probably dressed him too because he looked like he had stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. As he warmed up his lip the guy in front of us said, “Maybe he’ll use the money for lessons.” The kid played the theme to an Ellington song and I clapped. The guy said, “Don’t encourage him.”
Pink and blue chairs at Jazz Fest in Rochester, New York
We made an extra effort to get out early on the first night of Jazz Fest 11 and we were in good shape for down front seats at Kilbourn Hall for the bass player Christian McBride but word spread that he was stuck in Newark airport due to wind. You’d think McBride could have made an extra effort to leave a few hours before the show or just driven up here.
Hatch Recital Hall, the newest addition to the Jazz Fest venue list is easily the best sounding room in the line-up. It’s not a room, it’s a performance space and it only holds about two hundred people. It’s like sitting in front of a big speaker but in this case the tweeter is a Steinway Grand and the woofer is a gorgeous sounding stand up bass in the capable hands of Canadians Don Thompson and Neil Swainson. They have played together for thirty years and know over two thousand songs so they were melodic and lyrical as twenty first century musicians can be.
We had seen “Get The Blessing” before at an earlier Jazz Fest and we gave their straight ahead trip hop a second try. Elements of jazz, the two horns, with plenty of effects on top of a clubby rhythm section in the cavernous Christ Church seems like it could work. The drummer and bass player had success with Portishead but here their instruments had a wide dull rumble sound like a rock band down the street rehearsing.
Goran Kafjes Subtropic Arkestra at the Lutheran Church borrowed the the name of Sun Ra’s band. They built their songs around somewhat repetitive keyboard progressions and with seven players they managed to sound like a big band but they didn’t swing like Ra or visit the astral planes. Jonas Kullhammer was in the band which was sort of odd. He was such a dynamo with his own quartet in years past. But still I liked this band quite a bit. It was trumpet player, Goran Kafjes’, birthday and their music was fun like a Bollywood soundtrack.
Ingmar Bergman comes from the Faroe Islands and there is something of that austere quality in Yggdrasil’s delicate sensitive music. Like the early, hippie, new age ensembles Paul Winter Consort or Oregon, they look for inspiration close to the earth. Yggdrasil performed a beautiful nine part piece devoted to the Inuit and Native American tribes of North and South America. With chanting, piano, bass, flutes, violin, drums and an electric guitar player in a Pink Floyd shirt they were quite extraordinary.
Eric DuFaure and Dwight Glodell in PCI Studios in Rochester, New York mixing Personal Effects’ “So Hard”
I love this Polaroid because it perfectly captures the vibe between Eric DuFaure, who signed Personal Effects to Cachalot Records and Dwight Glodell who produced our first ep. We had dinner with Eric and his wife last night, the first time we had seen him them in thirty years. They have been living in Paris and we had a lot of catching up to do.
Eric had just visited Hal Willner in New York and he showed us some photos of Hal and his puppet collection. Howdy Doudy was in there. Eric told us he and Mitt Romney were in the same Harvard MBA class so he has been fielding a lot of inquiries lately from the press looking for salient Mitt stories.
When we first met Eric he was living in a loft on Mercer Street, we recorded tracks at nearby Sorcerer Sound and Cachalot’s office was at 611 Broadway at Houston, a building with lots of characters. Kieth Haring was downstairs, Ed Steinberg, Bob Singerman Management and Peter Leak. Neil Cooper, who founded the cassette only company called Reach Out Records (ROIR) was right next door to Eric.
We picked up right where we left off, so much so we wound up looking at old PE videos and Eric fell in love with “Bring Out The Jazz“, a song he never heard because we recorded it in our basement a few months after we parted ways. On the way out the door he suggested hiring some young kids to lip sync to the song and make a hit.
Logo on door of old police station in Penn Yan, New York
A call on our home line from “FOB NY” got us out of bed this morning. Even though that line is on the “National Do Not Call Registry the cops get an exception for their extortion-tinged cold calls.
We borrowed my fathers car because ours is in the shop. He keeps his radio tuned 90.1, the jazz station, so we left it there and heard Pharaoh Sanders’ “Astral Traveling” on the way home. First song I heard back home was Sun Ra’s “We Travel the Spaceways.” I doubt that “Support the Police” sticker they would have given me if I had donated would do me any good in these worlds.
NEXUS Percussion Ensemble at Parkleigh Pharmacy with the Eastman School of Music’s John Beck sitting in (on far left)
The Percussion Rochester festival has popped up in Parkleigh Pharmacy. We used to buy the New York Times here on Sunday mornings when we lived in the Park Avenue area. It is no longer a pharmacy and has morphed into a high end trinket shop. My sister works here and I was hoping to see her but she had finished her shift and was out waking the dog by the time the NEXUS Percussion Ensemble started playing in the Mckenzie Childs section of the store. That’s Steve Gadd’s (Kate Bush, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Joe Cocker, Chick Corea, Eric Clapton, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Jon Bon Jovi, Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, The Bee Gees) drum teacher, John Beck, the longtime Eastman School of Music faculty member and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra percussionist on the far right. Peter Erskine performs music from Weather Report tonight.
Side of yellow wooden building on Goodman Street in Rochester, New York
Vinyl does sound better even when it’s an mp3 file made from a 45 from 1967 and especially when the song is by The Creation.
In my reading the newest release from MX-80’s Bruce Anderson and Rich Stim, the heroic “Bar Stool Walker” nods a few times to Rochester’s Margaret Explosion. The music is lyric free, there are songs called “Happy Hour“, a video shot on the Golden Gate Bridge and “Tall Boy” and they have a clumsy drummer.
Bar Stool Walker is a multilayered project and I can’t say for sure that this is the case but we haven’t found any sax in there yet. Rich Stim taught Peggi to play sax. Her first song was “Hava Nagila.”
Rich Stim wrote a popular Personal Effects song, “So Hard.”
Many of the songs on Bar Stool Walker are already fully realized videos but it looks like we will have to wait a bit for the luscious Beach Boy cover “The Warmth of the Sun.” Happy Hour Calcutta Cutaway Smoky The Unsuspected Major Pipe The Bridge Paper Hat Hodaddy Humanoid Tall Boy The Warmth of the Sun Bar Stool Walker
Twenty years ago Chris Schepp organized the first Infest, an all day concert with ten bands in the Olmstead designed Genesee Valley Park. Pete LaBonne put a band together for the affair and called it “Pete’s Rock Band.” Buffalo’s Bruce Eaton played bass and I played drums. I can’t remember who the other bands were but SLT must have been one of them because Matt Sabo, Pat Lowery and Marathon Mark can all be seen in the video footage we have. I used to have an “Infest” t-shirt and an “Infest” cassette but they’ve slipped away. We came across this vhs tape and Peggi edited a clip for YouTube.
Pete joins Margaret Explosion on piano Wednesday night at the Little Theater Café.
