Click photo above for a movie of Ab Baars Trio with Kern Vandermark at the Bop Shop Attrium in Rochester NY
The Ab Baars Trio with Ken Vandermark was a treat for the ears last night. They are about twenty dates into a US tour. They played New York last night and are clearly on a roll. There was physical space around their instruments, I swear. You could hear each instrument clearly and the dialog was fascinating. I turned the movie function of my camera on about halfway into this Ken Vandermark piece called “Losing Ground”. The band is taking the train to Buffalo for a gig tonight and then they play Ken’s hometown, Chicago, for a few nights and that’s it.
Jem Vinxi painting currently on view at the Little Theater Cafe
Remember when modern art looked and was contemporary? It doesn’t matter, it still looks good and JEM Vinxi who is currently showing at the Little Theater Cafe almost makes it look fresh. Not quite landscapes or representational but structural and decorative. They’re old fashioned modern art paintings and I like them.
Margaret Explosion got stuck in a few ruts last night and it wasn’t the paintings fault. Somehow we managed to shoot ourselves in the foot. There is still a fine line between modern art and junk or spontaneous composition and jamming.
Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company at the Syracuse War Memorial in 1968. Photo by Kevin Patrick
Janis Joplin at the Syracuse War Memorial in 1968. Photo by Kevin Patrick
Janis Joplin with Big Brother & The Holding Company at the Syracuse War Memorial in1968. Photo by Kevin Patrick. Click photo for another shot.
That quote is from the opening scene of “Love Janis” at the Downstairs Cabaret. All the lines in the play are from Janis Joplin’s own words, her letters and interviews, and it takes two actresses to deliver them, sometimes at the same time. This works well because just as you’re not buying one, the other takes over. The band members tour as Big Brother now so the show rocked. First play I’ve been to where they pass out ear plugs.
Coincidentally Kevin Patrick primed the pump for us with his recent entry with these sensational photos of Janis.
We put together a few cdrs of old Personal Effects records for Steve Lipincott and he sent us a short stack of things to listen to. It was a really tough call as to what to pop in first. We went with Miles Davis Nonet Boston ’72. Amazing three dimensional sound with Mtume Forman playing percussion in one channel, Badal Roy in the other and Pete Cosey’s wah wah guitar out there.
I’m looking at Miles Davis Quintet, Stockholm, playing “Bitches Brew” material or Captain Beefheart “Spotlight Kid Sessions” next.
Steve Lippincott who runs the EarCandy Archive in Portland is doing a profile of Rochester bands in the eighties so I spent some time this weekend putting together cd versions of a few of Personal Effect’s old albums for him. We did a compilation in November for the Scorgies reunion but that was just a smattering of songs from the various vinyl releases.
Bob Martin carved out the perfect bass boast eq curve for the songs from “90 Days in the Planetarium” lp and I wanted to use it on the whole cd but I couldn’t fine the settings in CuBase. I called Bob and he had me set up an AIM account so he could take control of my computer from his house. While we were on the phone I watched as he searched my computer for the old files and set me up through iChat.
Joe Sorriero emailed us and asked if we wanted to do gig with Nod at the Bug Jar. It sounded like fun so I replied without much thought and then mentioned the gig to Peggi. She read the email and pointed out that Joe was asking “Personal Effects” to play. I didn’t catch that. I thought he was asking “Margaret Explosion” to play with them since we had recently played together together at Abilene. I guess we could handle it.
I digitized all our cds and and I rely on the mp3 tags for liner notes but this song that Peggi and I have fallen in love with was only marked “nod4”. So I dug out all the cds and spot checked the songs trying to identify this thing. I finally determined it is from their most recent cd entitled, “Tree Stuff & Lightning”. I think Chris Schepp gave me a copy of it before it was released so never got the right tags. Peggi wants the lyrics to this so I thought I would post it here and see what happens.
“World Still Wants You” by Nod from “Tree Stuff & Lightning”.
Ossia, the Eastman School of Music’s student run, new music ensemble had their last event of the season on Friday night at Kilbourn Hall. You can’t beat this free admission ticket to wide open, experimental soundscapes. The pieces by five different composers on last night’s bill were as varied as you can imagine and hold out boundless promise for new music performed by classically trained musicians.
The second half of the program was devoted to the third, second and first place winners of Ossia’s International Composition Prize. I liked the third place, “die nacht war kalt” by Daniel Tacke the best. The piece with soprano voice, clarinet, cello and piano reached new heights of sparse and used the air in the arrangement to sculpt an environment where our heartbeats slowed and our minds opened wide.
One of the earlier pieces on the program by Luigi Nono called for a piano player to accompany a prerecorded piano track which was played on a laptop through speakers set up behind the piano. I found it tedious but it demonstrated the wide gulf between live sound in a good hall, and the acoustics Kilbourn are as good as it gets, and a state of the art recording.
Dave Liebman Trio at the Bop Shop in Rochester, NY
Dave Liebman played sax on Miles Davis’s “On the Corner”, “Big Fun”, “Dark Magus”, and “Get Up With It”, my favorite Miles stuff. The guy is amazing. He’s been here twice at the Jazz Fest. We saw both shows at Montage last year and we bought his DVD. Last night he played at the Bop Shop in what was billed as a “classic organ trio setting”. Paul Smoker, Bill Dobbins and all the local jazz celebrities were out.
Phil Haynes, who we have heard a few times with Paul Smoker, played drums and Steve Adams played a Hammond B3. They played all standards and opened with “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes”. Dave was playing a wooden flute, The organ player held on extremely long fuzzy note and the drums sounded beautiful. Phil Haynes plays with his bare hands, he scratches the top surface of his cymbals with the butt end of his sticks and looks like he is conducting the music with his facial expressions and whole body. He plays “Ayotte” drums with wooden rims and they are the best sounding drums I have ever heard. They sounded especially nice in this bass player less setting.
Dave played one song that Doris Day had popularized and when someone snickered as he introduced it Dave said, “Don’t undercut Doris. She was right there with Sly back in the day.” we weren’t sure if we heard him right so after the show Peggi and I asked him after the show if said’ “Sly”. He said, Oh yeah. She was right there, hanging with Sly, doing LSD, the whole trip.
“Science Fiction” by Ornette Coleman is one of my favorite album and I was thinking about this record last week when Bob Martin posted his top 25 lps on his Facebook page. We named our cat Ornette after seeing Coleman in NYC in 1998. I read in Jeff Spevak’s D&C blog that local trumpet star Paul Smoker and some of his Nazareth College students would perform interpretations of Ornette’s avant-garde classic album, Science Fiction on Sunday afternoon.
I got the lp out this morning so I could look at the liner notes and then I played a few of the tracks from our iTunes library. In Robert (Bob at the time) Palmer’s liner notes he says “Ornette’s music grabs you inside before you understand it intellectually.” That’s certainly how it got me and I still don’t understand it intellectually. He also says “To play this music, you have to step out of the mold your teachers taught you.” But this teacher is Paul Smoker!
So I made arrangements for Peggi to drop me off at the Atrium on the way out to her mom’s place. I sat down next to Greg Bell from “Jazz Rochester” as Paul Smoker introduced the lineup. There was only one Ornette piece in there, “Happy House”, and Paul told the crowd that they would be doing all Ornette later in the month at Nazareth. I had heard that there was a lot of inaccuracies and untruths in the blogospere but didn’t believe it until now. The band sounded great but I gave up some prime painting time to be here and Ornette is one of the few people I would do that for.
There was a discussion panel after the set and Paul Smoker said they would talk about, “Why we do what we do. Why do we keep beating our heads against the wall despite cultural indifference?” I had to leave to meet Peggi out front.
The Clarisa Room is no more but the old Shep’s Paradise is open as “Clarissa’s” and it is still a great sounding room for jazz. We were there last night for the open jam hosted by 1968 RL Thomas graduate, Mike Allen, aka “A King Of Soul”. These three horn players, probably Eastman School of Music students, were waiting to play “Love For Sale”. This is one comfortable bar and it was midnight before we knew it.
We were talking about Gap Mangione last night because the bass player from his big band was sitting in. Conversation turned to the Buffalo plane crash and the Chuck Mangione players that died there. We hadn’t heard from Gap in a while but he called today to request some changes to his web site. We did another quote today for a web site. We have a few out there. We could be busy again if all goes well
The Ethnic Heritage ensemble showed up about 9:30 for an 8pm gig tonight at the Bop Shop Atrium. They were coming from Toronto and they got hung up at the border but the crowd stuck around. The band sauntered in like they weren’t even late and opened with a trance/chant tune on thumb piano with the lyrics, “Pharoah Sanders”. When we last saw these guys at the Jazz Fest in 2005, they did a similar piece called “Ornette Coleman”. All three played beautiul percussion at various times. Corey Wilkes, who also plays trumpet with the Art Ensemble, is an amazing player. Tom Kohn should have a great recording of this show.
Like most people in my painting class my father works on a number of paintings at the same time. We work paintings up to the point where we could use some feedback from the maestro and then set them aside before continuing. This one of Margaret Explosion is not done but it is getting close. My father based the painting on a photo he took off the tv when WXXI broadcast the Margaret Explosion episode of “On Stage.”
I stopped by to see Bob Martin yesterday in his second floor suite at Bob Martin Associates. He was working on one computer and uploading the Margaret Explosion WXXI video tracks to YouTube on another. I previewed them on our iTouch this morning when I got up. Some of the songs had zero plays when I checked in.
Sound of Tomorrow hosts Heather and Ross at the Mez in Rochester, NY
We joined the staff at WXXI for a last minute pizza party celebrating the airing of the final show of the second season of “Sound Stage”, their locally produced, Elliot Spitzer’s payola refund funded series of local band performances. The Chesterfield Kings were barely audible on the wall mounted flat panels but they looked great in front of their Marshall stacks even when they were playing acoustic guitars. This was a preview of Sunday’s seven o’clock airing, a glimpse of tomorrow with a band that sounds like yesterday.
While we were there we managed to talk Jan Marshall, Scott Reagan and Sue into following us over to the Mez for a live Valentine’s Day podcast from SOT. The Sound of Tomorrow’s theme song sounds suspiciously and appropriately close to the Mystery Science Theater theme song. Scott Bradley, the guy with the trumpet, played keyboards and anchor, Chris Zajkowski of the Squires of the Subterrain played drums. The two of these guys sound like a whole orchestra. They were joined by a surprisingly funny Miché Fambro on a few songs. Miché came into town in the eighties and left town in the nineties. In between he lived in Ithaca, the Berkeley of the East, “long enough to want slap an NRA sticker on my car”.
Hosts Ross Johnson and Heather Zajkowski, the Babe with the Power, sat in chairs on stage reading from notes but mostly creating and going with the flow. Del Rivers and his buddy did some stand up comedy and Heather belly danced with her posse. Phil Marshall, who wrote some of the music on the brand new, Who Sell Out styled, “Squires of the Subterrain – Adventures in Radio Land, TV Land and the Blogospere” cd, was no show due to illness but the evening was perfectly delightful like an old fashioned radio broadcast.
I visited the SOT site and got sucked in to a hilarious review of David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour. The show we heard last night must still be in production because it is not up on their site yet. That’s probably why they call it “The Sound of Tomorrow”.
James, the owner of the alcohol free club with the best sounding room in the city, gave up trying to sell the Mez on Craigslist and has decided to stick out.
Pegasus Early Music performance with Julianne Baird in Rochester, NY
Our neighbors, Rick and Monica, had their second house concert last night. This one featured an alt country-like band from Austin with a lead singer named Lisa. Rick asked me to record the show so I set up some mics. The drummer recognized me from a long time ago. He played with a band called the Stripminers and we shared a couple of bills when I was playing with Personal Effects.
It was nice crowd and intermission was fun. The kitchen became the epicenter. Walter Ketcham was holding court and there was all sorts of interesting food to sample. Karen Miltner made some toasted almonds with Chinese Five Spice and they tasted just like the ones Peggi makes at Christmas. That’s because Karen is the food critic for the local paper and Peggi got the recipe from one of her columns.
Karen was talking about the restaurant in the old Fabrics and Findings building and someone said they served tapas there. I piped in that they were probably big portions and not like the tapas you get in Spain. I said, “Someone should just do regular sized tapas here”, and Karen said, “Small portions won’t work in this town”. So that was the end of that conversation.
Jeff and Mary Kaye are in Mexico for a few weeks so they gave us their tickets to the Pegasus Early Music Series. Today’s concert took place at the Rochester Academy of Medicine on East Avenue. It was sold out so the “Music Room” in this old mansion was full. Julianne Baird, a soprano who the New York Times calls a “national artistic treasure” was the featured artist. Our favorite piece was one called “O Golgatha (Passio Marcum)”. It was dark, mournful, Passion of Christ thing written by Richard Keiser around 1700 and it almost sounded like a Spanish saeta.
They had much more interesting names for their songs back then. We heard songs with titles like “Bid The Virtures, Come Ye Sons of Art”, “Music for a While”, and “Seek not to Know”.
Jaffe sitting in with Margaret Explosion at he Little Theater in Rochester, NY
I brought my tripod to the Little Theater last to take a few shots of my painting show before it closes. I found a note tucked up under one of then that read, “Sorry, but this is some of the most unappealing “artwork” I have ever seen”. I was happy to see they were able to get under someone’s skin.
Jaffe sat in with Margaret Explosion for the fourth week in a row. He emailed us this morning to say that he thought “we got to a special place last night”. We found another note in the tip jar at he end of the night. It read, “I.O.U. We accidentally came out without any cash tonight. We saw you on WXXI’s On Stage and really enjoyed your sound. We’ll pick up a cd at your next gig.”
Robin Jon promo photo on the wall at Sound Source in Rochester NY
There are a lot of options in town for buying new band equipment but when you want to keep your vintage equipment going there is no better spot than Sound Source (“We Make Hearing Loss Affordable”).
One of the best things about a trip to Sound Source is that it is another opportunity to look at old promo shots for local bands like Wilmer Alexander and The Dukes and The Quirks and the the lounge duo, Robin Jon. Rob and Jon just happen to be the owners of this place so you take updated photos of these guys in the flesh if you can get the two of them together. They keep Rob in the back with his head lamp and soldering gun. Rob is likely to to offer you a fudgsicle or show you one of his new squishy toys. Jon manages the front end and takes care of the money.
Rob fixed Peggi’s sax pickup while we waited all the while triggering crying baby noises with something on his desk. He started talking about the Sound Source web site, which is in a sorry state, and wondered if he could learn how to post stuff to it on his own. We told him we would help with this effort. Rob’s father worked at Kodak and he took 3-D photos of Rob’s band during his his high school days. Rob has shown us these on a few occaisions and they are mind blowing. I’m wondering if there is any java script for displaying these on their new web site.
Our friend and neighbor, Rick Simpson, let us borrow “Stax/Volt Revue – Live in Norway” dvd. We watched it on the coldest night of the year (so far) and we couldn’t sit still. This is one amazing performance from openers, Booker T and the MGs, to Otis Redding. We loved Booker T on organ and Al Jackson on drums and Duck Dunn was a locomotive on bass. The same band backed all six artists on this tour. This show started hot and got hotter until it was almost out of control. Only the great Sam and Dave could take it down a few notches with “If Something Is Wrong With My Baby” and reach the high point of the show.
Rick Simpson came to our door to tell us that a big tree had fallen across our our path in the woods behind his house. We had to run right down there to check it out. You can only get a sense of how big this tree is by clicking the photo and spotting Peggi in the lower right hand corner. We had sixty mile an hour winds yesterday and there must have been some sort of micro burst in this one spot because four trees came down in a row.
We got a panicked call from Kevin Patrick on Christmas day about the audio player misbehaving on his blog. I had recommended the One Pixel Out player but it wasn’t set up right so he gave us access and we duked it out. I’m so glad we were able to help because I love this site and I love “Zabadak” by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. We didn’t hear this tree fall in the woods but I’m quite sure it went “Zabadak”.
Watkins and the Rapiers at he Flipside on Main Street in Rochester, NY
You can tell it’s near Christmas by the amount of red that bands are wearing. Another clue is that almost every tune we heard last night was a Christmas thing. I finally got the picture and got in the spirit. Down on Main Street, at the Flipside, Watkins and the Rapiers were thoroughly entertaining. They have a Christmas cd under their belts and add new chestnuts every year. Their Christmas tunes sound like classics. The place was packed but there should have been a line out the door. These guys have rescued Christmas.
Bob Henrie and the Goners at Abilene
Over at Abilene the joint was rockin’. We had just walked in, our glasses were still steamed and people were trying to get us to dance. Bob Henrie and the Goners are real treasures. They are better at early rock n’ roll than anybody. Their covers sound better than the originals. Some bands sound too loud in this room and others just get lost unless you are right on top of the band but these guys sounded like a live record. They have been playing together for twenty five years or so and they are real pros but that is no reason to go see them. Go see them ’cause they are a blast.
Indo-Pak Coalition at the Village Gate Atrium last night in Rochester, NY
Last night we stopped in the at the Village Gate Atrium to see Indo-Pak Coalition with Rudresh Mahanthappa on sax . The sax, tabla, guitar lineup had all sorts of potential but it didn’t really work for me. Seemed kind of academic or something and I was never any good with that.
Rochester Contemporary has their Members Show opening tonight. I always like this show. I put this recent crime face in there. We saw Barbara Fox recently and she was complaining about how her work gets lost in it and that is certainly a drawback of an uncurated free for all but I like the chaos of it all. And it is full of surprises. We want to be over at the Eastman House by eight to see the Patti Smith movie, Dream of Life.
Margaret Explosion playing upstairs at Abilene in Rochester, NY
I dragged my feet getting to this report on Black Friday’s gig at Abilene. I wanted to post a sound file with the entry and I hadn’t found time to listen to the tracks. I was almost afraid to because Ken and I had such heavy colds. We were both doing legal drugs to take the edge off. Ken took some Sudafed and I went with the Advil.
Danny has a magical little room upstairs. And just like magic Dale and Myna showed up for our set. I hallucinated seeing Dale tuning a guitar at stage left while we were playing our set at the Scorgies thing but they couldn’t make that one. Dale and I played together for a couple years in early New Math and we did a gig with Myna’s band, Human Switchboard, and the rest is history. It is always good to see him.
Jack played guitar and bass clarinet with us, Bob was celebrating Liz’s birthday at ONE, and Ken played his electric bass instead of the stand up. The lineup switch, the room, the drugs and the Nod people shaped the sound of the evening. It felt out of our control. Peggi, though, was in full control and sounded better than ever.
The room could be both perfect and magical. Danny has to get a liquor license for the upstairs bar. NYS makes you get a separate license for each floor. Some one has to move the furniture out of the alcove where the low rise stage is. No furniture in that performance space. The Get Out The Vote posters should be history, as graphically interesting and successful as they are/were. The rest of the place is so timeless. And Danny needs to serve Guinness on tap. These demands will be in our rider the next time we play there.
Nod rocked the house downstairs. It was almost a perfect evening.
