Category: Field Recordings of the Future

Cheryl Laurro, the former Godiva’s shop owner, restauranteur, singer and spiritual advisor, was in town. She held court over at Radio Social, the old Stromberg Carlson plant. It was the first time we had been in the place even though I grew up on the street, on the other side of Humboldt. We used to play in the parking lot. Bob Henrie and the Goners were playing there so it was a double draw. They sounded better than ever. Bobby is a dynamo with a wealth of songs he can call on. He keeps the band on their toes as they play two long sets with no setlist. I had the opportunity to video the same two dancers as caught eight years ago at another Goners’ show. They are still the best band in the city.

I don’t usually read the food section but I do look at it. I found myself pretty deep into an article about some guy, about our age, who really like the food at a particular restaurant but couldn’t stand the music that they played. He asked the owners if he could do a set list for them and they said yes. Turns out the guy, Ryuichi Sakamoto, was in Yellow Magic Orchestra, a group we followed in the late seventies.

I recreated his playlist in Apple Music and added one at the end, a Philip Glass piece that I stumbled on it while mistyping a song title. The playlist might not work for you but here is the link. I was unfamiliar with most of the music but instantly feel in love with this Bill Evans track called “Peace Piece.”

Soccer, like music, is a shared international marvel, a phenomenon. The World Cup puts all the nations though a big funnel. The first round, which ended yesterday, culled the top thirty two teams to sixteen. The mash-ups, Germany vs. Mexico, Senegal v. Colombia, Iceland vs. Croatia were monumental. I was thinking about how the the World Cup is constructed, and the possible permutations that will produce a winner from the last eight matches, as we sat down for Pilc Moutin Hoenig’s set.

Finally. We heard our favorite band of this jazz festival. The band was introduced, the bass player plucked a few notes and the drummer answered with a few strategically placed taps. Were they just checking their levels? No, they were starting a dialog, one that turned into a cat and mouse game before taking on the form of a fully developed piece. But just as we were digesting that development the piano player stood up and walked away. The bass and drums were revealed in a dramatic new light. He sat back down and piece evolved into something else.

Was their set all improvised? Surely they revisit favorite themes. The three were great players but their greatest strength was their arranging. They fearlessly deconstructed their music in the same way they constructed it. The trio was confident enough to explore smaller configurations. Just think of the possible combinations. Piano and bass, bass and drums, bass and piano. Just piano, just bass, just drums. And when it came down to just one instrument wasn’t so much a solo as it was music, played on one instrument. Pilc whistled a tune while accompanying himself with a one note piano repetition. It was brilliant.

They continually let things gracefully fall apart. One of them would duck out of the arrangement and the song immediately took on a new shape. They did this over and over again through the whole night. About thirty minutes into their set they found themselves all playing an ending and they went with it. There was applause. And they went back to work.

We started the night at Montage without knowing anything about the band. The room was packed, standing room only, and it was about thirty degrees warmer than outside. Their air conditioning was not up to the task so they had the back door open and a large fan whirling away. Christian Sands Trio, piano, bass and drums, was tearing it up with a big back beat and showman-like piano swells that had the crowd cheering. They brought it way down for “Deep Purple” and still had the room in the palm of their hands as they had us with the melody. Sands does two solo piano sets at Hatch Recital Hall tonight.

Sonidos Unidos, the popular local Latin music band, had twelve people on the small RG&E tent stage and I counted seven strings on the bass player’s instrument. They always sound good.

It wasn’t until the third song that I realized there was no bass player in the trio at the Lutheran Church. Kuala Trio held themselves together with the space around their perfectly placed parts. Mostly slow, even mournful at times, and always pretty in a sad sort of way. They mixed European folk with classical and jazz and played like a chamber ensemble, at times just sax or sax and drums or long stretches of piano and drums. They were each such great players they made their instruments sound like a million bucks.

We pushed our earplugs in and stepped into the big tent for a few songs by Moon Hooch. Two tenor sax players darting around the stage like professional wrestlers with a great dancehall drummer. They augmented this sound with some keyboard programming and got the party going on a Sunday night.

These two street musicians had switched instruments tonight and they sounded great.

The line for the Bad Plus went around the corner to Franklin Street but we weren’t worried, we’d been in this venue, now called Temple Theater, back in the eighties to see Yellowman, Grace Jones and The Replacements and we knew there was plenty of space. I was excited to see the Bad Plus with their new pianist, Orrin Evans. I found him just as melodic but more angular and impactful. The band has carved out their own space with a sound that is hard to pin down. One attribute is a constant. The group playing, one player’s part hanging on the other, creates the sound. I especially liked “Savages,” a hypnotic groove of a song from their new record.

Saxophonist, Sigurdur Flosason, left Iceland to study with David Baker at Indiana University in Bloomington. Peggi Fournier also went to Indiana University but she studied saxophone with Rich Stim. His band was a perfect fit with the Lutheran Church where we sat in the pews contemplating the setting sun through the stained glass windows. He finished with with “Serenading the Moon,” a tribute to Hoagy Carmichael (a Bloomington native)/Johnny Mercer song, “Skylark.” We talked to Flosason after the performance and never mentioned Iceland’s 2-0 World Cup loss to Nigeria.

Django Bates’ Beloved Trio has a new record produced by Manfred Eicher at ECM. Funny how a record label, Impulse, Blue Note, ECM, informs the sound. To my ears ECM leaves the blues out of jazz. A huge generalization. Bates’s free flowing piano melodies hardly needed the adornment of the rest of the beloved trio.

Melissa Aldana, the Chilean tenor saxophonist at Kilbourn works in a moody, blue territory, steeped in the right parts of the tradition but the band seemed oddly disconnected from the songs. We only heard a few songs but I kept waiting for them to dig in. I might have missed that part. We went home to watch Germany score in the last minute of stoppage time.

it is a pretty safe bet we won’t see or hear a show at the Jazz Fest as good as David Murray and Kahil El’zabar were on Monday night at the Bop Shop. David Murray was a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet and he won a Grammy. Kahil has played with Pharoah Sanders, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder and Archie Shepp. He was knighted by the Council General of France. Together, as a duo, they cover a lot of ground, Murray on sax, bass clarinet and vocals, El’zabar on drums, percussion, thumb piano and vocals.

We have seen them many times because they are always fabulous but Monday was even better. Matt Guanere was recording them for a new cd, Aaron Winters was taking still photos and the performance was being videoed for the Bop Shop’s YouTube channel. The band was in tip top shape and their version of “Summertime” blew us away.

Bobby Moore cut Peggi’s hair a few times. This was back in the early eighties. He worked out of this building on South Clinton but it had another name, something with “More” in it maybe. I can’t remember. He used to come see the band. You would not forget him if you knew him.

He died of Aids back when it killed a bunch of our friends. Someone else took over the shop, another hairdresser, and they called it Personal FX, which was pretty close to the name of our band, “Personal Effects.” That sign stayed on the building for over twenty years even though the tenant had left.

Recently we spotted a new sign on the front of the place. The South Wedge is still coming up! This time they have the abbreviations for our current band. “ME”

Here’s Holiday, a recent song from Margaret Explosion

Pete LaBonne, shown above on bass guitar, named the band. Casey Walpert gave us a gig playing happy hour at the Bug Jar on Friday nights and we stayed there for a few years. We never rehearsed and still haven’t. We improvised. Jack Schaefer played guitar, Peggi Fournier played sax and I played drums.

The group changed over time. Pete moved back to the mountains after three months and Greg Slack, who was usually there on Friday nights, took over on bass. The group grew in size, became unmanageable and slimmed down again. Bob Martin moved back from DC and joined on guitar. Ken Frank joined shortly after Bob and that worked well for fifteen years. Bob moved to Chicago and Phil Marshall took his place on guitar. Pete sits in on piano whenever he is town, he’s on most of the records, and Jack plays bass clarinet when his schedule allows.

Margaret Explosion is a concept and it seems to work despite the line-up changes. I like to think it keeps getting stronger. On Wednesday Pete will be sitting at the grand piano, Jack will play a few tunes on bass clarinet and we’ll give away some merch. I am grateful to all the people we’ve played with in these twenty years and I’m really exited about tomorrow’s gig.

Here’s Tonic Party by Margaret Explosion

It wasn’t the best night last week. The band sort of floated around themes but never nailed anything until that one song in the second set. We trapped ourselves in a spell and stopped time. The room got really quiet and we all knew we were into something good. I remember thinking. “I don’t want to blow this,” and then the power went out on the recorder. I don’t know if kicked the cord or what happened but we lost the recording. If I hadn’t let the batteries run down they would have taken over but they were dead so, poof, the second set was gone. The really cool thing was that all four of us were bummed. We are all on the same page and knew we had touched magic.

Of course, if we did have the recording, the chances are it would never have sounded as good as we remember it. Mike Rea tapes a lot of shows. Maybe he has a recording.

This is Daydream by Margaret Explosion

We walked along the beach this morning with our back packs fully loaded. That would be just over and just under ten pounds each. We went up Oakridge Drive for a bit and then cut back into the park. We saw someone out on the golf course hitting balls. He was wearing headphones and he was surrounded by patches of snow. They looked like shiny white sand traps against the bright blue sky. Peggi found our first golf ball of the year, a brand new “Chaos” ball by Wilson. It seems like a strange brand name for such an orderly game.

We usually cut our own hair but occasionally we go to someone or they come here. We had arranged to have our friends’ daughter trim our hair tonight, before we leave for the Camino, and at the last minute she told us she wasn’t going to able to because her son had a bad cold. That was fine with us because we didn’t have to miss yoga.

Jeffery puts a lot of work into his classes. There is a natural flow to the class and the two hours fly by. He tells stories, in pieces between the durations of the poses and he effortlessly leaves the story to have us reposition before continuing. A woman in our class lived next door to Louise Slaughter and she and Jeffery went to Louise’s memorial service at the Eastman. The Clintons were there along with Nancy Pelosi and John Lewis. Jeffery was really moved by the service and eulogies. Apparently it was a real celebration of a life lived to the fullest.

Margaret Explosion plays one more Wednesday in March at the Little Theatre Café, 7-9pm. Here’s “Jack In The Box,” the first song from last week’s show, with Pete LaBonne on piano.

Joe Daley introduced his trio last night and then revealed their game plan. “What we do is we converse with one another for about an hour or so and you get to listen in.” The set began with an extended vibes intro by Warren Smith. He played vibes on Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” and hundreds of other records. Joe Daley joined on keyboard and Scott Robinson joined the conversation in with a deep, soulful baritone sax part. Warren Smith moved to Timpani. He is on the road with two kettledrums and they sounded so good. He is in his eighties now and he told me he fell in love with the instrument in school and he used to sneak into the band room to play them. I told him I loved the way they sounded in Sun Ra’s band and he told me he played with Sun Ra for a few dates in New York.

The prettiest piece they played featured Joe Daley on drone flute, an wooden instrument with three shafts, the outside two just playing one note each while the melody (in A minor) is played on the middle one. Scott Robinson played another wooden flute and Warren Smith played the drum kit with his hands. Joe said they always finish with a memorial piece and the one he played last night was dedicated to his late wife, Naomi. They were married for forty five years and she passed away just as they retired two years ago. It was mournful, sad and beautiful.

Leon “Ndugu” Chancler recently died. He played drums with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Weather Report and Hugh Masekela but also did some serious session work. That’s him playing the drums on the intro to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” I really like this quote from his NYT obituary. “The player has to do much more listening than the listener coming to enjoy the music and if that player is doing that listening, he will become a great player.”

We heard Johnny O’Neil over the weekend up in the old corporate boardroom of Security Trust Bank. The eleventh floor space is surrounded by glass and you get a great view of downtown Rochester. It sounds good in there as well. Johnny O’Neil made a name for himself in New York in the early 1980s, drawing comparisons to classic jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. We had heard him before in an Exodus to Jazz series at Hochstein.

He plays piano in a trio setting. The bass player and drummer stay out of the way while Johnny works the room. He’s at home with the blues and sings about every other song. “She puts whiskey in her coffee, whiskey in her tea. Whiskey in her whiskey, too much whiskey for me.”

From “Leave the Driving” on the lp, “Greendale”
“The moral of this story
Is try not to get too old
The more time you spend on earth
The more you see unfold”

Maybe you already knew this but I just found out. Neil Young is giving away the store for a few months. Everything in his archives is available for streaming in a high quality format. You can really tell the difference. Pick your favorite song or album and give it a spin.

We started with “On The Beach” and then “Greendale.” Both sounded better than ever. We ran into a little hitch with “Landing on Water.” The timeline he provides is really cool as well. You can see how he would often record songs and then use them at a later date. He is a non-linear guy.

We walked down to the lake, across the seasonal bridge on to Lake Road and then up Bay Road where we cut back into the new homes off Dewitt Road that hover over the bay on the Webster side. It was a little over eleven miles by the time we got back. A few more pokes into Webster and we will be ready to keep going around the bay and back.

Our snow has disappeared so we walked in the woods today. Odd how clunky the trail feels on the bottom of your feet after only a week of gliding through it on our skis. This trail, on the east side of Durand Lake, is a popular one for good reason. These heavily tattooed beech trees attest to that.

I must be running in the wrong circles because I can’t remember the last time I heard a really exciting local band, somebody doing something I haven’t heard before, something from left field. I keep running across bands that are all too eager to provide comfort food, pale imitations of what was once the good stuff. I know they’re out there. Like I said, “I’m running in the wrong circles.”

Black Thought from the Roots is wondering the same thing.
“We back again
For a couple things we lost in the fire
The drive, the desire to perform on a higher plateau
I’m at that show lost in the mire
Wondering how we got so far from inspired”

Thinking about checking Sirsy out tomorrow night at Three Heads.