Seratones

Well, shit:

"Due to the loss of a family member this morning, we are headed back to Shreveport to be with our friends and family. 

Unfortunately, we have to reschedule the show in Atlanta GA, at The Earl, to Tuesday, June 30th, 2020. 

Thank you all for your support and love on this tour.”

I haven't been to a show since Big Thief at Variety Playhouse back on November 7 and was looking forward to seeing Seratones at The Earl tonight.  My deepest condolences to the band for their loss.

To be honest, it may just have been the big sound of singer AJ Haynes' voice, but I imagined Seratones as too big a band to be playing the little ol' Earl.  But everyone's got to start somewhere, I suppose, until they get their big breakthrough.  But as tragic as a death in the family is, it's also sad that Seratones will still be playing little clubs like The Earl in June of 2020.

James Chance & The Contortions

As long as we're revisiting 70s post-punk with our Gang of Four/Andy Gill tribute and 70s German experimentalism with our Canaxis  post, we might as well touch on New York's No Wave scene of the 70s with Dish It Out, a snappy little number from James Chance & The Contortions.  The song was the opening cut on the Brian Eno-produced No New York compilation.

A key figure in No Wave since the late 1970s, Chance was also a member of Teenage Jesus & the Jerks with Lydia Lunch.  At one point, he changed his name to James White, and on October 7, 1983, I got to see him perform as James White & the Blacks at Atlanta's former 688 club.  The Swinging Diamonds opened.  The show was epic but I know the exact date only because I found a list of 688 performances on the internet.  It's a pretty impressive list.

And We're Back

Hello, friend.  We might should post a "spoiler alert" warning for the meme above, but the words are the opening lines of the first episode of the first season of the show Mr. Robot.  You wouldn't think the very first lines of a series could be a spoiler, but that's the genius of the show - you don't realize it's a spoiler until the end of the last episode of the final season.  

Let's start again.  

Hello, friend. It's been a while since we spoke.  Two and two-thirds years.  And you're still here?  Were you just patiently sitting there waiting, like Haley Joel Osment at the end of A.I.?  Creepy . . . 

But whatever your motivations, it's been decided on this end that it's time to start posting here again. Lots of things have changed since we had decided to stop and now, among a great many other things, we have a lot more time on our hands.

But without any further ado, friend, let's just jump right into it.  Patti Smith: Words And Music was originally conceived as a three-night-only Off Broadway production.  The third and final performance was recorded by Audible, Amazon's audio-book division. 

The shows and the audio book were well received.  We don't know whether or not she's repeated the performance since then, but on March 26, 2020, she  will perform Words and Music in Knoxville, Tennessee as part of the annual Big Ears Festival.  Naturally, we have tickets.

Here are some other recent Patti Smith performances to hold us over until then.

Dave Brubeck

Innovative jazzman Dave Brubeck passed today at the age of 91, just one day short of what would have been his 92nd birthday.

During a period of the 1970s, between, say, the demise of "progressive rock" and the advent of punk, when  disco, mellow California pop, and Stevie Nicks ruled the airwaves, I very nearly stopped listening to rock music altogether and retreated into a world of jazz.  I was amazed at the richness and variety of this American art form that was largely ignored by the American public.  Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk became my new John, George, Paul, and Ringo, and as I went further down the rabbit hole of the avant garde, Shepp, Pharoah, Braxton, and Sun Ra became my new Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Speaking of Monk, though, there's a link to a great, nearly half-hour performance by Monk in all of his eccentric genius at the end of the Brubeck clip above.

Somewhere in the background of all this great music, though, there was always the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  They weren't my favorites, and I don't think I ever owned an album of theirs, although I had managed to accumulate a fairly prodigious collection of vinyl.  They were cool and cerebral, and my interests in jazz leaned more toward the visceral and the emotive.  No disrespect toward the departed today or the living back then, but it simply wasn't my thing.

I always did have an appreciation, though, for the playing of Brubeck's alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond.  In 1977, at the height of my jazz enthusiasm, Desmond died of lung cancer, the result of chronic chain smoking.  He was 52 when he passed, and I remember thinking that he was an old man then, even though I'm older than that now.

In any event, at some point around the rise of late 70s punk and the emergence of New Wave, rock music got interesting again.  At the same time, the number of musicians playing music that could legitimately be called jazz had already started to diminish due to sickness, old age, and death, as well as to the economics of the music industry.  I still appreciate jazz and my musical tastes today are informed and influenced by the freedom and creativity I encountered in jazz, but rather than listen and re-listen to the same old recordings over and over, I continue to explore the new and the different, just like Brubeck had during his lifetime.