StompBeast

THE 50 BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF 2017

2017-12-07T07:23:00.000-08:00

[Art by Al Margen]

✊
#RESIST

The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965–1975 by Mat Callahan

Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran by Nahid Siamdoust

Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913 by Daniel Wolff

📖
#LIT

Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination by Brent Hayes Edwards
"Do You Have a Band?": Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City by Daniel Kane
In Search of Soul: Hip-Hop, Literature, and Religion by Alejandro Nava

📕
#ESSAY

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays by Hanif Abdurraqib
Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z ed. by Jonathan Lethem & Kevin Dettmar

🆂
#SOUL

In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett by Tony Fletcher
Soul Survivor: A Biography of Al Green by Jimmy McDonough
Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music by Ann Powers

🎷
#JASS

The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums by Will Friedwald
Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine M. Hayes
Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs by Martin Torgoff
Finding Bix: The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend by Brendan Wolfe

💂
#Россия

Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina
Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M.T. Anderson
When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn's Cold War Triumph, and Its Aftermath by Stuart Isacoff

✏
#FICTION

Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
Late Arcade by Nathaniel Mackey
Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman

💋
#RS@50

When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock by Matt Brennan
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan

🎻
#CLASSICAL

Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting by John Mauceri
Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Toscanini: Musician of Conscience by Harvey Sachs

🍎
#NYC

Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011 by Lizzy Goodman
Punk Avenue: Inside the New York City Underground, 1972-1982 by Phil Marcade

👑
#UK

Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg
O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music by Andrew Gant
Folk Song in England by Steve Roud
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel

☃
#MINNESOTAH

Complicated Fun: The Birth of Minneapolis Punk and Indie Rock, 1974-1984-An Oral History
by Cyn Collins
Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince by Ben Greenman

🌆
#SUB-

Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture (reprint) by Beth Lesser w/ Stuart Baker
Ghostnotes: Music of the Unplayed by Brian Cross, Greg Tate & Dave Tompkins
The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles ed. by Josh Kun
The Raver Stories Project ed. by Michael Tullberg

👨

#HIS

Finding Joseph I: An Oral History of H.R. from Bad Brains by Howie Abrams & James Lathos
Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis
David Bowie: A Life by Dylan Jones
Everything Is Combustible: Television, CBGB's and Five Decades of Rock and Roll: The Memoirs of an Alchemical Guitarist by Robert Lloyd

🎧
#LISTENING

The Force of Listening by Lucia Farinati & Claudia Frith
Mozart's Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

👭
#HERS

Every Night Is Saturday Night: A Country Girl’s Journey to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by Wanda Jackson w/ Scott Boma
Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them ed. by Rhian Jones & Eli Davies
Hit So Hard: A Memoir by Patty Schemel
Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti

ᐃ b Ỹ է ∑ sNb Ø b s ᐁ [UPDATED]

2017-02-24T08:05:00.001-08:00

ART © BY KEN MOORE

As was revealed by former Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra chief-of-staff Jesse Sharps at a PAFF screening last week, Mekala Session, son of Ark saxophonist Michael, had now taken over as concertmaster the Ark. He will lead the band (including dad, Roberto Miranda, Jesse Sharps, Bobby West, Vinny Golia, Steve Smith, Kamau Daaood, Dwight Trible, Maia and Isaac Smith) in a recital to be held Wednesday, March 1 at 8pm at CalArt's Roy O. Disney Concert Hall.

This Saturday from 5-8pm, the Mayme Clayton Library in Culver City will debut the last of three events surrounding their current exhibition entitled Rappin' Black History. The special guest will be Anthony "Father Amde" Hamilton of the Watts Prophets. Doors open at 4pm.

Also coming up at the Clayton on March 26th will be the latest installment of the Double M Jazz Salon. Azar Lawrence and his Quartet (pianist Theo Saunders; bassist Henry Franklin, drummer Tony Austin). The concert starts at 2pm, but make sure you make it an hour earlier for a special live interview with Lawrence courtesy of our friend, jazz historian Jeffrey Winston. Tix are $20.

On Sunday, March 5, at 7:00 p.m., Alex Cline and Will Salmon's Open Gate Theatre celebrates 20 years of its eclectic Sunday evening concerts with the fundraiser IMPROVIGANZA, described as "a select but still ultimately massive array of volunteer musical notables who have both played and listened to much of the music that has been presented at the concert series over its two decades, all of whom will be heard in a variety of contexts and combinations in the course of the evening. Artists other than Alex (drums, percussion) and Will (flute, voice) are planning to contribute to an explosion of spontaneous music-making" are: brass: Dan Clucas, Bobby Bradford, Daniel Rosenboom, Bruce Friedman, William Roper; woodwinds: Vinny Golia, Phillip Greenlief, Alexander Vogel, Eric Barber, Charles Sharp, Emily Hay, Peter Kuhn, Richard Wood, Gavin Templeton; voices: Dwight Trible, Bonnie Barnett, Kaoru Mansour; strings (guitars, basses, pipa): G.E. Stinson, Ross Hammond, Jie Ma, Scott Heustis, Steuart Liebig, Jeff Schwartz, Devin Hoff, Darryl Tewes; keyboards: Wayne Peet; drums/percussion: Garth Powell, Breeze Smith, Brad Dutz, Christopher Garcia, Jonathan Saxon. And there are still some musicians who are attempting to appear but have not been able to commit yet—could be more!" The concert will take place at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, 2225 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock (one block west of Eagle Rock Blvd.). Admission is $10. Further information can be obtained by calling (626) 795-4989.

This Saturday at 2pm at the Far East Lounge (353 E 1st St, Little Tokyo) there will be a concert to remember late composer and community activist Glenn Horiuchi (1955-2000). The brass ensemble Purple Gums, made up of Los Angeles musicians Bobby Bradford (cornet) and William Roper (tuba), and San Francisco-based Francis Wong (saxophone), and other SF guests Lenora Lee (dance) and Melody Takata (dance and taiko), will perform. Admission is free/donation.

Found this sobering but well-written 1993 Washington Post account of The Lonesome Death of a Jazzman. If that doesn't depress you enough, try this recent Salon article on The new, jazzless New York Times.

Superb new article by our blog bud Woody Haut about an obscure writer named
David Goodis and his travails on L.A.'s Central Avenue.

For a more updated take on how L.A. inspires its artists,
read this new piece on trumpeter Terrace Martin's Los Angeles.

Pianist/vocalist/provocateur Diamanda Galas will mount a rare U.S. tour, which will include L.A.

on April 5.

Soul Amazing, an obscure but essential documentary about L.A.'s underground hip-hop scene has just resurfaced online.

Emergency Community Meeting @ the World Stage

2017-02-07T06:05:00.001-08:00

CATS IN THE BUSH

2017-02-06T08:33:00.001-08:00

Hi! Our brief preview of the new jazz documentary Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot (it premieres next weekend!) is now up over at the L.A. Weekly. Go here for the trailer. Go here for tickets and more info.

be not so fearful

2017-01-31T08:27:00.002-08:00

Do not despair -- they love it.

Do not be fearful -- they thrive on it.

Do not hate them -- it will make them stronger.

Do not let protest become violence -- it will make their case for them.

Conserve energy and outrage.

Pick battles carefully and with vetted info.

Collect evidence.

Remember the names. Say the names, over and over.

Pay witness.

Be cool and calm and focused and cautious.

Use ridicule and satire to cut them deep.

"And agitate. Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!"
Frederick Douglass

FROM SUSAN MILLER TWEEDY (FB post, 1/29/17):
Ok...so, Jeff and I went inside the airport and we were trying to go upstairs to the catwalks because I wanted to show him the view from above. We were walking by the area where people are waiting for the transport to leave the international terminal. There was a group of 3 kind of older white people we had to pass. One of the men said right in our faces "I wish I had my shotgun. I'd shoot every one of these people". (meaning the protesters of course) Then he says right to Jeff, "I'd definitely shoot you." Jeff said "Excuse me??? You don't even know me." Guy says "I don't want to know you. I'd shoot you anyway." A few other things were said back and forth that I can't even remember because of the insane adrenaline that was rushing through us. The woman was laughing insanely in my face after I said anything. Jeff decided to go and tell the police what was happening. Several police officers came over. They asked if anyone heard us get threatened and many people raised their hand and many people said "I heard it". And none of them were protesters. They were people of many different colors and nationalities, who had just gotten off an international flight and were willing to stand up to hatred. The volunteer lawyers saw something going on and stood by to see if they were needed. They were awesome and so were the cops. Jeff talked with the police for a long time and decided not to press charges. The police made the guy apologize. Sadly, I highly doubt if the experience will cause that group of people to think any differently at all. So depressing. All of it.

"collaboration is the path from protest to power"

2017-01-20T08:14:00.001-08:00

∞∞ B y T e S n b O b S ⚄ ⚄ [UPDATED]

2017-01-13T10:26:00.003-08:00

all images by ge stinson

the main stem, an original dramatic script focusing on a young jazz saxophonist

who escapes denton, tx for l.a.'s central avenue in the 1940s is now making its way past some pretty big eyes in the movie-making industry, including a prominent showrunner-writer for at least two influential cable dramas of the 00s.

also: there is also word of a new central avenue documentary that has just wrapped production; the soundtrack includes local musicians from horace tapscott's fold, including jesse sharps and bobby west.

bobby bradford, roberto miranda, vinny golia + william roper comprise the silverscreen sextet, who will be playing monday, 1/16 @ the vortex dome. info here

also: bradford + golia will be going to europe at the end of the month.

the beast is working on a preview for the la weekly about horace tapscott: musical griot, a new documentary by l.a. rebellion filmmaker barbara mccullough, who just moved back to socal after six years teaching in savannah, georgia. the film premieres next month 2/12 at the 25th annual pan african film festival. check out the trailer here.

this saturday at the central library's mark taper auditorium will be a screening of jane cantillion's the other side: a queer history's last call, a documentary about the gay history of los angeles from the 1940s and centered around a legendary silverlake piano bar.

aman kufuhamu was one of the most influential underground jazz djs of the 1960s, introducing hungry ears all over the l.a basin to the avant-garde of the radical-chic era. the beast spoke with him recently and he told us he's thinking of bringing back his classic kusc show greg's refresher course for the satellite-radio era. 😃

nels cline and yuka honda have a new new project called "cup"...and they already have a gig.

also: nels is a contributor to the new thurston moore oral discography out in march.

writer/dj michael davis, all-about-town gadfly of l.a.'s new music scene for the last 40

years, now has a website. check out his interviews with with nels cline and jim mcauley here.

jazz violinist michael white, who collaborated with john coltrane, rahsaan roland kirk, pharoah sanders and sun ra among many others, passed away last month. his widow, vocalist leisei chen, has written this moving tribute for the la weekly. there's also a tribute page if you'd like to add any memories or condolences.

kudos to bassist jeff schwartz, who just received new funding for soundwaves, his new music concert series at the santa monica library. the first show is this wednesday 1/18 with flautist emily hay and contrabassist steuart liebig.

also: schwartz also has a killer new cd with ellen burr and andreas centazzo

prolific nyc pianist matthew shipp has been on a roll lately with his facebook takedowns of the current political climate. he waxes further in a new aaj interview.

also: shipp has just announced his retirement from recording (!!!)

breakin' 'n' enterin' an obscure 1983 documentary about the burgeoning west coast hip hop scene (it wound up inspiring the breakin' films) has just resurfaced online.

The First and Last Death of 2016

2016-12-31T07:48:00.000-08:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR, AMERICA AND THE WORLD. In a few hours, 2016 -- which, rightly or wrongly, people started cursing around the time of the death of a musical prodigy from North Minneapolis -- will be no more, and no one the Beast knows has come out unscathed. Yes, the TIME cover below is fake; we all know who's the real POTY as much as we cannot stomach it.

At least with past historical events such as Columbine or 9/11, the ornate grisliness was live and televised (followed by the endless Moebius-strip replays) and could not be avoided. But there was a sort of catharsis there -- there was no Matrix-like veil. We saw the worst we possibly could see and were awash in the direct and decisive complications. On 11/9, the profound sense of switcheroo was so violent that is nearly caused air bubbles in the blood -- if these indeed were the "bubbles" people kept talking about. Only this time, the slowly dawning horror was recorded not in scenes of collapsing buildings or bodies being pulled out of classroom windows but in a decidedly different kind of graphic imagery: cable-news chyrons, virtual-reality pie charts and wonky ballot tallies. It was a slow and stealthy choke for those of us who did not adequately prepare ourselves for the fact that their fellow countrymen could give the collective Republic such a decisive shotgun blast to the face. Not to resort to hyperbole or anything, but this it was cultural, moral and civic suicide on a Biblical level.

America in its immediate aftermath was like someone once described Eastern Europe before 1989: "One giant, dimly lit prison yard." The Beast lives in a Mediterranean climate and even the golden sun looked baleful and sickening. (Shouldn't the weather at least CHANGE to suit the mood?) Of course there was jubilation, but not not the pleasant kind. Quite the opposite, actually.

In the last two months, a deranged and violent kind of retribution has coalesced like an army massing beyond the trees: 1,094 reported incidents of hate crimes and counting. (And this doesn't even include post-holiday mall violence.) Sure, some of them might even be fake but so what? It's their meaning -- that they are even in the air and part of our sloppy under/overground discourse, like the rumors after the Twin Towers fell that all Jewish employees at the WTC had received phone calls warning them to "stay away" that day. It was bunk of course, but the rumor made it into a poem by Amiri Baraka. The poet was heavily condemned for this, but the Beast always felt that his point was this: Such hearsay was part of the paranoid ether of post-9/11, and its very presence -- even if on the fringes -- boded the question: Why is this still here? Why is it even being thought, much less said so flagrantly and cruelly? Of what acrid residue of our collective past was this and why does it keep bubbling to the surface?

And then came Election Day. Now, what was on the fringes has turned jarringly mainstream. Now, to paraphrase Gust Avrakotos in Charlie Wilson's War, "the crazies are rolling into D.C. like it's a fuckin' bathtub drain."

Not soon after the election, the Beast traveled to a family outpost in the middle of Doug Ducey's dog-dick Red State of Arizona -- Maricopa County to be exact, until recently Joe Arpaio's racial-profiling gulag. Our mood was quietly foul, emotions rolling around like ball bearings, wanting to be festive but guardedly so. One had the sense of having tripped on an edge of carpet and tumbled face-first through the looking glass. Five minutes after we crossed the border, we caught sight of a biker in the next lane with 'FUCK ISLAM' emblazoned (oddly, in the old-timey script of a saloon sign) on the back of his leather jacket. We stopped at a Waffle House for lunch and overheard adjacent bloviating from guys in trucker caps about California's new "plastic bag tax" as if that proved all their sneaking suspicions about their neighbor to the west. We rode up the US-101 outside of Phoenix which turns out is festooned with and endless parade of for-profit colleges, all lined up by the interstate like a main drag of used-car lots.

Not helpful. You cannot escape the zeitgeist, and its color is the smeared orange of a smog-choked L.A. sunset in the '70s and it will be on all screens for at least the next four years.

You prayed that there would be some sort of band-aid for all this free-floating bad juju, and there was. Actually, there was a lot of them, and they had been ripped off at once, and someone was not being gentle about it. It was ugly and it was everywhere and it was inescapable. Things were speeding up and slowing down simultaneously. Reality was hyper- and hypo- and post- and meta-. It couldn't get any worse than if the entire nation was a bunch of junkies watching each other nod out. The new regime wasn't in for another two months and the menace was already snuffling its dragon-breath on our doorstep. It was bad but it was going to get much, much worse. The exhaustion of the endless, cancerous campaign made us feel like we had already been through four years of Suck -- but those four years hadn't even started yet. Nope, it quite simply could not get any worse.

And then, like a methhead with an elephant gun, my sister made it worse.

image courtesy of Tsoku Maela

It started around the open kitchen island as the holiday meal was coming together, with me noting the small immigrant communities of Bulgarians and Romanians that had nestled themselves in the Southwest. The retirement community our family matriarch lives in is run and staffed almost entirely by those who fled the insanity of the Ceausescu regime. "They grew up under a Communist dictator and they know about the repression of the Left," Mom explained without elaborating on why they thought of the current president-elect would be any better.

As for the Bulgarians, I had met only one, at a Christmas party in Santa Fe several years ago. My sister introduced us to a friend of her nicknamed Tedi. She was a six-foot tall, vivacious, fiercely smart brunette with a bewitching Eastern European accent and rocking a shimmering long black cocktail dress and hefting a goblet of wine without an ounce of pretension. (Think Charlize Theron mixed with Marion Cotillard -- both in exuberant and unguarded moods.) The Beast doesn't remember how long our conversation lasted, because we walked away from it in a bewildered, head-spinning fog. "I think I have a crush on Tedi," I confessed to my sister, who laughed and touched my shoulder: "Everyone has a crush on Tedi."

More so when we learned about her: associate professor of internal medicine at the UNM School of Medicine; internist at both the UNM Health Sciences Center and the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center in Albuquerque. Tedi began her career at UNM in 2003 as one of the pioneering members of the New Mexico VA Hospitalist Group. According to a local newspaper profile, she "dedicated her professional life to the care and education of our veterans." She was kind and patient with them -- even when they were hostile to her. It must have worked. My sister told me that when Tedi was doing her rounds, they would line up eagerly to see her. Her very presence, just entering a room, was a temporary balm for some truly damaged souls.

But now, just after the ascendancy of a Gangster Capitalist and His Cabinet of 'Orribles, my sister sits at the marble kitchen island amid the smells of roasting turkey and tells me that Tedi did not even made it 48 hours into 2016.

It was early morning on a Saturday in downtown Albuquerque. Tedi was on her way to the medical center. Miles away at a local diner, a 29-year-old waitress showed up for her shift, argued with her manager and abruptly quit. She then proceeded to get into a red Ford Ranger pickup truck and sped off. Sometime after this, she picked up two men. Or maybe the men were already in the truck when she left the diner. Or maybe there was just one man. Nobody really knows. What is known is that minutes later, as Tedi was waiting at a stoplight, the red truck plowed into the back of her Mercedes Sedan at over 70 miles an hour, demolishing its rear-end into a gaping wound.

image courtesy of Jim Thompson

Tedi's neck was broken instantly. But she was not killed outright. In the OR they deployed the countermeasures of trauma. "They had to open up her skull," my sister cried.

Later that day, Tedi died. This literally happened January 2, 2016. She was 51 years old.

But there's more to the story -- disturbing tendrils that don't quite connect.

After the collision, the young waitress emerged alive from the wreckage. Dazed and hysterical, her shirt covered in blood, she ran a couple of blocks to a dialysis center, whose staff immediately called 911. Whomever else was in the truck with her also made it out alive. And ran. They have since fled the state. Witnesses to the crash have also vanished.

The driver's name was released earlier this month. It took almost a year for a grand jury to reach an indictment of vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident. During that time, Tedi's grieving friends were asking questions and not getting much from the local cops -- they wanted to know if the woman was texting, if she was on drugs or intoxicated. "How dare you call me this late?" seethed the press spokesman for the ABQ PD to a retired and respected veteran reporter (remember those?) who had phoned him at his house. Tedi's coworkers were dumbfounded when they were informed that the young woman had not been charged, that she had been released pending trial and -- inexplicably -- had been permitted to keep driving the streets for the next 10 months.

There was the whiff of conspiracy -- although the who/what/why of it all remained maddeningly murky. In the absence of any tangible or logical flow of information from official sources, the grieving inevitably turned to innuendo and rumor. One of Tedi's friends told me that "some sort of high level intervention" occurred in the case, although exactly what this meant they could not elaborate. The accused is from a family without means, but a high-profile defense attorney stepped in to take her case. Whisper, whisper. Tedi's case is being handled by a public prosecutor who has no prior experience in a courtroom. Whisper, whisper.

But the true cause may have been more prosaic. "The Bernalillo County District Attorney's office says missing evidence and court backlog are the reasons why it took nearly a year to indict a woman accused of killing a doctor," KQRE recently reported.

Absorbing all of this in less than ten minutes after we arrived, and already shaky because of the current national mood, the Beast never felt so frozen in the helplessness of fate and utterly indifferent violence. To quote the writer Denis Johnson: "It made God look like a senseless maniac."

It was now open season to be senseless maniacs for God and mortals alike. Usually it's one or the other, not both. Now it's both. The body politic does not fall apart piece by piece; it fails all at once after rotting in plain sight.

But what is the rot here? Someone on the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder wipes out an immigrant doctor beloved by veterans, many of them from the very same rung of that ladder. You know, the same mensches who volunteered as human shields for First American protesters in the brutal North Dakota cold; who have had to clean maggots out of their wounds in shabby VA hospitals; who have landed in homeless shelters as addicts. There is no irony or satire to wring from this. This is America eating itself.

At Tedi's memorial, her shattered husband, also a doctor and professor, told the assembled that when he first spotted Tedi as one of his students, sitting in the lecture hall at the University of Medicine in Sofia, it was "like being hit by an asteroid."

"Every day, I have seen people's lives end, or changed by tragedy in one day," Tedi once told my sister. "That's why you have to make the most of every moment you are alive. You don't know when it will end."

Tedi wasn't supposed to be working at the hospital that day. She had a bag of fresh bagels on the passenger seat next to her. They were for her staff.

When you write for a living (or at least convince yourself that you do) you can't help but court pretension. You can't help but seeing the random occurrences in life as metaphors. It can be dangerous and counterproductive -- you feel battered by hidden meanings with no solutions, you feel oppressed by portents and symbols. But sometimes, even as you know it is just a coincidence, tiny things crystallize, and this sad tale really had it all: the triumphs and tragedies of our immigrant population; war trauma and veterans' rights; the grinding plight of the working poor; alcohol and drug abuse (alleged); institutional neglect and overwhelmed public servants; the dangers of technology and social media, even the whiff of "fake news" when there is no other option, or when governmental bodies build informational firewalls. And sudden violent death with no winners. It was the face of America 3.0, Year Zero.

Tedi's life ended on a street called Constitution.

THE 50 BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF 2016

2016-12-03T08:45:00.001-08:00

Q: "Will two-aught-sixteen -- already being referred to as either a Year in Disappointment or a Year We Got Everything Wrong that will haunt us for decades -- come to affect our judgment of its music books?"

A: "Are you kidding? What kind of stupid question is that? Who gives a %$*&? DRAIN THE SWAMP! BUILD THE WALL!! LOCK HER UP!!!"

But is it a stupid question really? In many cases the picks on this year's list can enhance one's understanding of this new upside-down-funhouse-mirror mortal coil in which we now find ourselves entwined.

Yes, out of the 200+ music books released in 2016, there are the pervasive trends from previous years: Splashy memoirs from music-industry insiders (Carole Bayer Sager, L.A. Reid), the recently departed (Maurice White) and unemployed MTV VJs (Matt Pinfield); the scruffy struggles of failed-but-ahead-of-their-time bands (The Hollywood Brats) and punk-rock survivors (Dave Dictor, Keith Morris); inspirational narratives from rappers you've either never heard of (Lecrae Moore?, Jensen Carp??) or who have been incarcerated (Lil Wayne); the packaging of underground D.I.Y. punk culture into glossy and expensive coffee-table art books; these persistent mixtape-and-Spotify inspired "Listicle Books" (spurred by that overripe "A History of [INSERT TOPIC] in [INSERT # OF EXAMPLES]" trend) that use the almighty playlist as a narrative device (or a replacement for lack thereof); continuing excavations of regional jazz scenes (Portland, Boston) and yes, more goddamn "Boomer Books" on Dylan, the Beatles, Grateful Dead, NYC in the '70s, the Doors and the Rolling Stones.

On the other hand, anyone concerned or at least academically interested in music as protest, satire or just plain defiance will find plenty to enjoy here. To whit: Woody Guthrie, nearly a half-century dead, had a very good year. (You think Dave Eggers invented the anti-Trump "30 Songs in 30 Days"? Think again.) You will find not one but two nominees from what possibly is the hippest and scrappiest little press out there: the Minnesota Historical Society. Despite the white riots going on in electoral campaigns in Europe and America, one might find the vitality of Afrofuturism and Post-millennial Feminism surprising and uplifting. Ditto to anyone interested in the tangled racial roots of America, or the global impact of the punk and rap on civil-rights movements. There's even a book here about HATING music -- if that indeed is your thing. Because after all, we really loved to hate in 2016, didn't we?

And of course, if none of this matters to you, a lot of these books are simply a hell of a lot of fun. Like the tour diary written entirely on the back of airplane vomit bags. The Christmas story written by a stoner country legend. The speculative novel about the many children of an obscure and bizarre voodoo-soul singer. The anthropological comparison of the tribes of Trump supporters to the fans of the Insane Clown Posse.

Yeah, right?

So let's get to the list:

WHO KNEW?
Topics Obscure Yet Fascinating
X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music 'On the Bone' by Stephen Coates
Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed Modern Music by John W. Troutman

FIRE MUSIK
Jazz in the '70s
Beyond Jazz: Plink, Plonk and Scratch: The Golden Age of Free Music in London 1966-72 by Trevor Barre
Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s by Michael C. Heller

GREY MATTERS
Stuff That, Like, Makes You Think

The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe by Stephon Alexander
Absolutely on Music: Conversations by Haruki Murakami & Seiji Osawa

The Hatred of Music by Pascal Quignard

LA-LA LAND

For a City That Can't Stop Reading About Itself
Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk by John Doe w/ Tom DeSavia
Slash: A History of the Legendary L.A. Punk Magazine: 1977-1980 ed. by J.C. Gabel & Brian Roettinger
Woody Guthrie L.A.: 1937 to 1941 by Darryl Holter & William F. Deverell
Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff

HELLO AGAIN

The Year's Best Reprints

King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era by Edward A. Berlin
Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe
Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero by Ed Ward

SON OF HELLO AGAIN
The Year's Best Collections
Music in the Air: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason ed. by Toby Gleason

Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues ed. by Paul Devlin
Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader by Greg Tate
Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings ed. by Tim Page
Jazz on My Mind: Liner Notes, Anecdotes and Conversations from the 1940s to the 2000s by Dr. Herb Wong & Paul Simeon Fingerote

"MIPPLES, MINN"

Books About the Minneapolis Music Scene of the '80s To Tide Us Over Until Someone Writes the Defintive Bio of His Purpleness
Heyday: 35 Years of Music in Minneapolis by Daniel Corrigan w/ Danny Sigelman
I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland by Michelle Leon
Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr

GROK U

The Continuing Excavation of the '60s
Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III by Robert Greenfield
Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock by Barney Hoskyns
1966: The Year the Decade Exploded by Jon Savage
Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day

by Joel Selvin

Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom Before 1970 by David Toop

IDENTIKIT

Music + Sex + Race
Sing for Your Life: A Story of Race, Music, and Family by Daniel Bergner
The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band by Michelle Cruz Gonzales
Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton
Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout by Laura Jane Grace w/ Dan Ozzi
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar by Franz Nicholay

ARCHITECTS

Best Books About Pioneers

Good Night and Good Riddance: How Thirty-Five Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Life by David Cavanaugh
Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield by Todd Mayfield & Travis Atria

Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by James McBride

A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

DISPOSABLE HEROES
Music 'n' Politics
7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering Of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane by Nathan Rabin & Danny Hellman
26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest by Greg Vandy & Daniel Person

FICTION + COMIX

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits by Mark Binelli
The Incantations of Daniel Johnston by Scott McClanahan & Ricardo Cavolo

OVERSIZED 'N' OVERPRICED
The Best Art Books For Conspicuous Display on Faux-Rustic Glass Coffee Table in Hipster Airbnb in Your Liberal Sanctuary State

The Empty Bottle Chicago: 21+ Years of Music / Friendly / Dancing by John E. Dugan
Jazz Festival: Jim Marshall ed. by Amelia Davis & Tony Nourmand
FER YOUz: The Los Angeles Hardcore Archive, 1981-1984 by Brian & Nikki Tucker
Motown: The Sound of Young America by Adam White & Barney Ales

OH DEAR ME
The Year's Best Memoirs
The Sick Bag Song by Nick Cave w/ Andrea Joyce
Porcelain: NYC, 1989-1999 by Moby

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

I Am Brian Wilson by Brian Wilson w/ Ben Greenman

ROLLING PAPERS
Best Christmas Books Written by Willie Nelson
Pretty Paper: A Christmas Tale by Willie Nelson w/ David Ritz

HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Great American Songbook by Sam Allingham
Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris by Rashida K. Braggs
The Banjo: America's African Instrument by Laurent Dubois

Beethoven for a Later Age: Living with the String Quartets by Edward Dusinberre

Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus by Krin Gabbard
How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia
Texas Jailhouse Music: A Prison Band History by Caroline Gnagy

Shit People at Gigs by Olivia Grbac

Angelic Music: The Story of Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Armonica by Corey Mead

Sticking It Out: From Juilliard to the Orchestra Pit, A Percussionist's Memoir by Patti Niemi

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century by Simon Reynolds
Testimony by Robbie Robertson

SOUNDPRINTS (Nov/Dec edition)

2016-11-03T04:59:00.004-07:00

NEW MUSIC BOOKS FOR NOVEMBER + DECEMBER

Nominally a jazz writer-blogger, Marc Myers collects some of his Wall Street Journal columns in Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop. (Read this interview with Myers about the Clash's "London Calling.") The sad departure of the Purple One this year coincides with a wave of nostalgia for the scruffy but hugely influential Minnesota music scene: photographer Daniel Corrigan collects his favorite images in Heyday: 35 Years of Music in Minneapolis (check out this Pitchfork profile) and veteran Twin Cities music scribe Jim Walsh collects his own Bar Yarns and Manic-Depressive Mixtapes. Pittsburgh U music prof Michael C. Heller delved into the personal collections of many of New York's finest jazz masters to tell the story of Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s. As they always do towards the end of the year, bios and memoirs are coming fast and furious: Tool/Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan's A Perfect Union of Contrary Things (watch the book trailer here); former enigmatic guitar whiz for the Smiths Johnny Marr's Set the Boy Free by Johnny Marr (go here for a recent interview); Testimony by Robbie Robertson (read an excerpt here); and Against Me! frontperson Laura Jane Grace's Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout (go here for an excerpt). But probably the most out-of-the-box choice for a music bio would be a famed LSD chemist, but in Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, Robert Greenfield makes the case for the man Steely Dan once dubbed "Kid Charlemagne." (Go here for Greenfield's Rolling Stone profile of Stanley.) The handsome oral-history volume No Half Steppin' also collects photographer Claude "Paradise" Gray's documenting of the pioneering hip hop scene at NYC's Latin Quarter club. Those who loved 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami know that music often plays subtle but pivotal roles in his novel; his new collection Absolutely on Music: Conversations should not disappoint. And for Ed Ward's first volume of The History of Rock & Roll, Volume I: 1920-1963, we pray that its fascinating epic scope (part 1 starts in 1920) will not render it as virtually unreadable as Ward's 1986 tome Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll. FINGERS CROSSED.

SOUNDPRINTS (Oct. edition)

2016-10-06T07:08:00.001-07:00

NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN OCTOBER:

First Third Books unveils the photo album Big Star: Isolated in the Light while, to the immense consternation of its control-freak subject, writer Nick Hasted unveils Citizen Jack: How Jack White Built an Empire From the Blues. Amend these volumes with Michael Buffalo Smith's Capricorn Rising: Conversations in Southern Rock. The life of the great soul auteur Curtis Mayfield is remembered by his son Todd in Traveling Soul while roots-Americana auteur T-Bone Burnett is given the same treatment in Lloyd Sach's A Life in Pursuit. Emily Lordi adds to Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series with Donny Hathaway Live. A month after Beach Boys blowhard Mike Love's bitter autobiography comes bandmate Brian Wilson's long-awaited (and thrillingly titled) memoir I Am Brian Wilson. Coinciding with Jim Jarmusch's eagerly awaited documentary Gimme Danger comes the Jon Savage/Jeff Gold-edited Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges. Historian Toby Mott curates Oh So Pretty! Punk in Print, 1976-1980. With the rise of interest in Afrofuturism, Paul Youngquist illuminates one of its architects -- the mercurial "Space Jazz" bandleader Sun Ra -- in A Pure Solar World. Another kind of futurism rears its mascaraed eyes in Simon Reynolds' Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century. David Hadju gives his own "personal and idiosyncratic" memoir of pop music in Love for Sale. The bowler hat-wearing Rice Miller was actually the second blues harpist known as "Sonny Boy" Williamson; author
Mitsutoshi Inaba searches for the life of the first in John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson: The Blues Harmonica of Chicago's Bronzeville. Now that it's October and the weather's getting shittier, why not load up on the pleth of books about Great Britain -- Rizzoli's deluxe $160 doorstop God Save Sex Pistols, Lol Tolhurst's Cured: A Tale of Two Imaginary Boys, Jenn Pelly's The Raincoats, and synth wizard Thomas Dolby's memoir The Speed of Sound -- and New York -- Steven Blush's New York Rock, Lil Wayne's Riker's Island memoir Gone 'Til November and Peter Ames Carlin's Paul Simon bio Homeward Bound. And just the title of dark Americana prince Nick Cave's new tour memoir seals the deal: The Sick Bag Song -- essentially, a diary written entirely on airplane vomit bags. Awesome.

SOUNDPRINTS (Sept. Edition)

2016-09-06T07:40:00.004-07:00

ON DECK FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN SEPTEMBER:

The reprint of Ed Ward's Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero apparently has so much new material it should be considered a brand-new book. (Watch the book promo here.) Chuck Eddy's Terminated for Reasons of Taste: Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music makes a case for an "appreciation of the lost, ignored, and maligned." (Read a review here.) For over a decade, Guido Harari was singer Kate Bush's official photographer; The Kate Inside, 1982-1993 is a limited edition collection of his most indelible images of the British siren. (See a smattering of them here.) Jim Marshall, another veteran photog, trains his camera eye on the Jazz Festival. (Read a profile of Marshall here.) Barry Miles reveals the little-known history of The Beatles' short-loved experimental record label in The Zapple Diaries. Barry Miles adds to a recent spate of superb studies of race and American music in Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. Thames + Hudson rolls out a pricey 400-page coffee table celebration of Motown: The Sound of Young America. This couldn't have been more well (or sadly) timed: The recently departed Maurice White's posthumous memoir My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire.

Rush drummer Neil Peart continues his road diaries with the new volume Far and Wide: Bring That Horizon to Me! Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series continues unabated with The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy. (Read a Q&A with author Paula Meija here.) L.A. Weekly scribe Ben Westhoff tells a LoCal tale in Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap. Daniel Bergner went from trailer park with an abusive mother to juvenile solitary confinement to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York; read about how he got there in Sing for Your Life: A Story of Race, Music, and Family. Tim Lawrence focuses on a vibrant and gritty account of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 while the hangovers of AIDS and Reagan were beginning to kick in. Nathan Rabin follows up his 2013 study of musical subcultures with an intriguing side-by-side comparisons of music and politics in the ebook 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering Of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane. Martin Hawkins excavates the life of Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge. With the death this year of the colorful Texas troubadour Guy Clark, Tamara Saviano's bio Without Getting Killed or Caught couldn't have come at a more poignant time. Clark, along with Townes Van Zandt and Kris Kristofferson, is part of an academic collection of articles in Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas.

Oh, and this guitarist from New Jersey has his first memoir coming out:

SOUNDPRINTS (Summer 2016 edition)

2016-06-07T07:21:00.002-07:00

ON DECK FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS THIS SUMMER:

Following recent "pivotal year" books on 1965 and 1966, David Hepworth declares 1971 "the year that rock exploded" in Never a Dull Moment. (Read a review here.) The great tenor saxophonist Benny Golson recalls his tutelage under John Coltrane (and many other memories) in Whisper Not. (Read a review here.) George Plasketes plumbs the life and career of L.A.'s answer to Elvis Costello in Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles. (Read about Zevon's wild life here.) Brendan Mullen, Jello Biafra, Mike Watt, Lorna Doom, Ian Mackaye and Malcolm McLaren all contribute to The Fucked Up Reader. Martin Power offers No Quarter in his new biography on the life -- well, three, actually -- of Led Zeppelin guitarist James Patrick Page. Newly reminted Hold Steady keyboardist Franz Nicholay tours the global punk underground in The Humorless Ladies of Border Control. (Read an excerpt here.) It's been delayed for at least a couple months, but let's hope Hat & Beard's 500-page Slash: A History of the Legendary LA Punk Magazine: 1977-1980 lives up to all the hype. If not, Circle Jerks head honcho Keith Morris' My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor should prove to be a lively companion. One of the founding members of NYC's Black Rock Coalition, Greg Tate, releases his second essay collection Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader, while Ed Piskor adds a fourth volume to his gorgeous graphic novel series The Hip Hop Family Tree. The Library of America celebrates the life and career of an influential American composer with the collection Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings. For better or worse, dance music is finally getting the rigorous academic treatment with Grafton Tanner Babbling Corpses and the essay collection RAVE. Not exactly beach reads, these.

Ricardo Cavolo's hallucinatory folk art is the highlight of Scott McClanahan's graphic novel The Incantations of Daniel Johnston. (Read an interview with McClanahan here.) The concert festival that allegedly killed the 1960s finally gets its own book in Joel Selvin's Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day. Yacht rock's gruesome twosome of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen get their laundry aired in a new expanded reissue of Brian Sweet's Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years. When the Brooklyn alt-rock venue Death by Audio shut its doors in 2014, they held an epic 75-day goodbye party that was documented by photog Ebru Yildiz in We've Come So Far. (Look at some of her amazing images here.) If you enjoyed the recent documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono's epic citizenship battle, Leon Wildes, the lawyer who took their case, tells the inside story of John Lennon vs. The U.S.A. Meanwhile, back in the UK: Punk London. 1977: The Roxy, The Vortex, King's Road and Beyond as photographed by Derek Ridgers. Indie-rock godheads like he Sea and Cake, Interpol, Low, Vandermark Five, The Arcade Fire and The Flaming Lips all played Chicago's Empty Bottle bar; now the plucky lil' dive gets an extravagant art-book treatment in John Dugan's The Empty Bottle Chicago: 21+ Years of Music / Friendly / Dancing.

John Powell endeavors to explain Why You Love Music while Olivia Grbac attempts the same for Shit People at Gigs. Paul Morley looks back on The Age of Bowie. Almost by accident, Jace Clayton becomes a DJ and winds up traveling the world; he tells what he found in Uproot: Travels in21st Century Music and Digital Culture. Andrew Matheson's memoir Sick on You: The Disastrous Story of The Hollywood Brats satisfies our taste for glorious unsung failures, while our fascination with "playlist lit" (a.k.a., "listicle lit") continues with Michael Rubens' YA novel The Bad Decisions Playlist and ex-MTV VJ Dave Holmes' Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs. And, barely six months after the death of David Bowie, Your Band Is Killing Me author Rob Sheffield offers perhaps the first significant piece of posthumous appreciation in On Bowie. (Check out Sheffield's Spotify playlist here.)

75 HOT LINKS (w/ Dirty Rice & Sausage Gravy)

2016-05-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

Mmmff, this should keep us all full for awhile...

THE MUSIC FOODIES: How Jazz Became an Artisan's Movement (SALON)

How NYC's Loft Jazz Scene Inspired A New Underground Restaurant (NPR)

SON OF DETROIT: The Oral History of J. Dilla (WAX POETICS)

Which Rock Star Will Future Historians Remember? (NY TIMES MAGAZINE)

Listening to West Sumatra's Musical Megaliths (AURAL ARCHIPELAGO)

Bill Bratton's Strange, Old-School Linkage of "Thugs" with Rap

(THE ATLANTIC)

CROWD-SOURCED: The AACM Revisited (POINT OF DEPARTURE)

SIGN THE PETITION: Save The Smell, L.A.'s Flagship DIY Music Venue (iPETITION)

HEAR YOU BREATHING: Jazz's Funniest Musicians (JAZZ TIMES)

The 10 Weirdest Indie Rock-TV Crossovers of the Nineties (STEREOGUM)

HOOK LINE SINK: Revisiting John Lurie's Strange and Wonderful Fishing Show (STEREOGUM)

MUCH ADO ABOUT MUCHNESS: The Man Who Introduced China to Rock 'n' Roll (LARB)

Meet the Composer Who Made the Eiffel Tower Sing (NPR CLASSICAL)

The Dark Art of Mastering Music (PITCHFORK MEDIA)

Edward Snowden: Unlikely Techno Star (VICE MUSIC)

RANT: A Great Black Actor Makes Miles Davis Look Like A Fool (THE STRANGER)

The Rediscovered Jazz Artistry of Forrest Westbrook (OFF RAMP)

"PUSHERS OF PIRACY": An Open Letter to YouTube (MUSIC-TECH-POLICY)

This Is Congress' Chance to Be Fair to Musicians (THE NEW YORKER)

EXCERPT: Nels Cline Interviews Sean Lennon and Les Claypool (MAGNET)

Aquarius Records Release Fanzine of 50 Favorite Records Since 1996 (THE WIRE)

Armenian DJs Are Bringing Traditional Sounds into Underground Dance Music (LA WEEKLY)

QUIZ: Are You A Big Jazz Boy or a Little Jazz Boy? (CLICKHOLE)

How Living Colour, Bad Brains and Fishbone Fought Gentrification (AFROPUNK)

REBELS WITH BOWS: Why Cellists Are the Crankiest Musicians (SLATE)

The Trombone Comes Home (NY TIMES)

The Current Face of the Bass (MOSTLY MUSIC)

SLIDESHOW: Sun Ra Arkestra, Pharaoh Sanders + Kamasi Washington in A Night of Spiritual Jazz (POPMATTERS)

Recently Discovered! The Only Known Video of Louis Armstrong in a Recording Studio (LAMAG)

THE INFILTRATION OF BLACK RAP: The Untold Story of Hip Hop's Early Entrepreneurs (CUEPOINT)

JAZZ FOR THE THRILL OF IT: Chris Becker Interviews Grace Kelly (LARB)

The Greatest Electronic Albums of the '50s and '60s (THE VINYL FACTORY)

PHOTOLOG: Amazing Images from the San Francisco Punk Scene, 1977-82

(DANGEROUS MINDS)

An Open Letter to 17-Year-Old Boys Who Just Discovered the Doors (MCSWEENEY'S)

Read the Very First Issue of Billboard, Dated 11/1/1894 (BROWBEAT)

Why Jazz Will Always Be Relevant (THE FADER)

HOME THEATER: Warne Marsh: An Improvised Life (SEED & SPARK)

BLOOD AND ECHOES: The Story Behind Steve Reich's Civil Rights Era Masterpiece (PITCHFORK MEDIA)

ARCHIVES: Watch An Entire Black Flag Concert from 1982 (YOUTUBE)

HOW WE MADE IT: Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" (THE GUARDIAN)

Carla Bley: First Lady of the Avant-Garde (KEYBOARD)

How Jazz Saved Hip-Hop (Again) (PLAYBOY)

The One-Man Band That Almost Made Punk Uncool (Again) (NOISEY)

?uestlove on Why Prince is Hip-Hop (WAX POETICS)

KIND OF PURPLE: Jazz Musicians on Prince (ALL ABOUT JAZZ)

SCANDAL, SLEAZE + PUNK ROCK: Inside the Tropicana Motel (ANOTHERMAG)

The Ramones & Rap: A Shared History? (PRIMEMIND)

INFOGRAPHIC: The Miles Davis Universe. Visualized (THE JAZZ CHILL CORNER)

WATCH: A 2000 Documentary on David S. Ware (BLOG THE HUM)

A Guide to the Work of Diamanda Galás (RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY)

T-Bone Burnett's Stirring Speech About Music and the American Story (MEDIUM)

Kamasi Washington on the Pressures of Being Called "Jazz's Savior" (ESQUIRE)

WATCH: Wendy Carlos, Vangelis & Giorgio Moroder Do Battle as "The Lords of Synth" (ADULT SWIM)

16 Pieces of Protest Jazz for 2016 (REVIVE MUSIC)

Man Actually Tries to Find Jazz at a Jazz Fest (NEUTRAL GROUND NEWS)

ATOMIC CAFE: The Long Lost Little Punk Haven of L.A.'s Little Tokyo (OFF RAMP)

ASK A SCIENTIST: How to Pick Music for People on LSD (MOTHERBOARD)

Q&A: Ethan Iverson Interviews Wayne Shorter (DO THE MATH)

FROM THE TIME-LOCK VAULT: The Infamous "Dangers of Punk Rock" Episode of Quincy

(THE A.V. CLUB)

DOCUMENT UNDER GLASS: John Coltrane's Handwritten Outline for A Love Supreme

(OPEN CULTURE)

Meet the Innovative Jazz Drummer Praised By Stravinsky (and Ignored by Everyone Else)
(THE STRANGER)

A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON: Les Blank's Unreleased Film About Leon Russell

(UNDER THE RADAR)

A SPACE FOR MUSIC: An Interview with Rocco Somazzi (WENDTWRITINGS)

YOU DIG?: A Dive Into Jazz Slang (A BLOG SUPREME)

Communal Experimentalism in the Sixties: The Pulsa Group (NEWMUSICBOX)

THIRTEEN PRAYERS: Kamasi Washington's Favorite Albums (THE QUIETUS)

CHECKING IN: George Clinton on Sun Ra, Kendrick Lamar, Prince, Jimi Hendrix & more (NUVO)

Disappointing Prince Vaults Found to Contain 37000 Hours of Billy Joel Covers (THE ONION)

"IS THE WATER WARM ENOUGH?": Cartoonist Depicts Wendy + Lisa's Contribution to Prince's Legacy (THE WIRE)

Inside Miles Davis' Prince Obsession (THE PITCH)

JAZZ HOME THEATER: Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case of the Three-Sided Dream (VIMEO)

Breaking Down the Orchestration of Radiohead's "Burn the Witch" (FLYPAPER)

ARCHITECTURE + EXPLOSION: Cecil Taylor, The Composer (DARK FORCES SWING BLIND PUNCHES)

NYC IS KILLING ME: Albert Ayler's Life and Death in the Jazz Capital (PITCHFORK JAZZ ISSUE)

FROGTOWN: Anthony Wilson Tackles Love, Loss and Lyrics (KPCC)

SOUNDPRINCE (May Edition)

2016-04-27T08:00:00.001-07:00

ON DECK FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN MAY: Bruno Ceriotti's exhaustive e-book My Little Red Book: Love Day-By-Day 1945-1971 charts the L.A. cult band's tumultuous rise and fall. Premier punk press PM publishes the second edition of George Hurchalla's Going Underground: American Punk 1979–1989. He's not dead, so you can still read Philip Norman's Paul McCartney: The Life without crying to a Spotify playlist. Rolling Stone editor Mark Binelli reanimates a gonzo R&B singer in his 'What If?' novel Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits. Caroline Gnagy follows in the footsteps of John and Alan Lomax in Texas Jailhouse Music, a fascinating history of prison bands. David Toop has written some of the most sublime books on the holistic effects of sound and music; now he just may top himself in Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom Before 1970. In Beethoven for a Later Age, classical violinist Edward Dusinberre interweaves the history and challenges of Beethoven's 16 string quartet compositions (written between 1798 and 1826) with the history of his own Colorado-based Takács Quartet.

Honestly, we're getting kind of tired on books about the "World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band," but Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones examines the group through the contradictory lens of journalistic fandom. (Be forewarned: Cohen, along with Mick Jagger, is one of the co-creators of HBO's execrable Vinyl, so bring along a couple grains of salt.) John Troutman excavates an underrated and misunderstood instrument in Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed Modern Music. Ex-Grantland scribe Steven Hyden brings a kind of Monday Night Football blow-by-blow commentary to classic musician rivalries (Biggie vs. Tupac, Stones vs. Beatles) in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life. (Read an interview with Hyden here.) Since the turn of the millennium he's been a tireless booster for the West Coast, but in his memoir Porcelain: NYC, 1989-1999 technopop auteur Richard "Moby" Hall looks back on his early DJ career in Urinetown. Yale University Press's twin volumes Conversations In Jazz and Music in the Air aim for reappraisal of the pioneering jazz writer Ralph J. Gleason. (Read The New Yorker's take on Gleason here.) Happily, the prolific Ted Gioia, who wrote the introduction to Conversations in Jazz, also has a new book, the accessible primer How to Listen to Jazz. (The Washington Post reviews it here.) Minnesota University Press collects the rare and unpublished essays of jazz and blues critic Albert Murray in Murray Talks Music. (The LA Review of Books reviews it here.) And rounding out the month for you Geminis are two very different titles from Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series: Jovana Babovic's Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out and Rolf Potts' The Geto Boys. Trevor Barre plumbs the early days of the London free-jazz movement in Beyond Jazz: Plink,Plonk and Scratch. Originally published in 1994, Edward Berlin's King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era gets a reprint from Oxford University Press. In his novel Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett novel seamlessly mixes mental illness and music-as-therapy for a memorable coming-of-age tale. (Read an interview with Haslett here.)

2016-04-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

There is a woman who sits

All alone by the pier

Her husband was naughty

And caused his wife so many tears

He died without knowing forgiveness

And now she is sad, so sad

Maybe she'll come 2 the park

And forgive him

And life won't be so bad

In Paisley Park

Eddie Becton Schools A Young 'Un

2016-04-18T07:24:00.001-07:00

Eddie Becton (L) with Chet Hanley and Leroy Downs

I was kicking back having a glass of wine and listening to some classic Duke Ellington and reflecting on a discussion with a young cat in my jazz history class years back:

Young 'Un: Eddie B! Hey man, I know you dig jazz, but doesn't it get boring? A lot of it doesn't have lyrics, so it doesn't really tell you anything. Are you STUCK on jazz?

Eddie B: (resisting the urge to plunder the young lad, YET conjuring the spirits/sentiments of Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, among others) I tell you what. Listen to these cuts. Start out with Ellington's cut, "Gong." Listen to what Duke says throughout, but especially to what he does in the background as much as the foreground. Peep his lines from 2:47 to 3:07. Tell me what you hear.

YU: Damn! They're chillin', but it sounds like they're having a conversation, even though there were no vocals! It's like Duke was responding to whatever they played.

EB: Okay, cool. Now, listen to this cut, "All Blues," by Miles Davis. What do you hear?

YU: It's a different vibe, but it also sounds like they're having a conversation. The band seems to be feeding off each other. I dig how mellow and cool this cut is!

EB: Okay, I dig you. Now,watch this clip from by Funkadelic, "Cosmic Slop" live. What do you see/hear/feel?

YU: Damn! They're killin' it! You see how many people were on stage? Parts of it sound like rock, but it has that funky vibe to it. Everybody is having a conversation and feeding off each other. You could even feel like the people in the audience were probably going off!

EB: (laughing my head off!) Man... okay, okay. Now, listen to this cut by Dr. Yusef Lateef, "Juba Juba." Was there ANY connection between all the cuts?

YU: WOW! That cut is POWERFUL! I heard the literal voices and musical voices. It's like the cut encompassed, in some ways, the history of black music in America. All the cuts sounded good, for different reasons, but I dug them all. If there was anything across all, I guess it was they all seemed to be having a musical conversation, but the Lateef cut was like a summary of them all, if that makes sense.

EB: Exactly! When you understand the culture and the music, you FEEL it, and can relate to the band's conversations amongst itself AND the audience! While each cut you listened to might have had a different vibe, they were ALL talking to you, just using different words. ALL of it felt/sounded good, and for different reasons. It's like spirituals, work songs, blues, jazz, etc., they all speak to you, it's just that they may, in some cases, use different words to tell the same story!

YU: Ahhhhh, I didn't really think about that.

EB: Man, don't you EVER tell me that music with no verbal lyrics is incapable of telling a story! The voice is an instrument as much as a sax, but that doesn't mean they both can't talk and/or tell a story. The history of black music IS the story, man, LISTEN, and if you listened to the music at any period in history, you'll get a sense of what was happenin' at that time!

YU: Thanks, Eddie B!

EB: No problem, and remember this: Life can be much more fuller and wonderful when your ears are bigger than your mouth. Listen, son, listen!

[Eddie Becton is a professor of African-American Studies at Loyola Marymount University and hosts Eddie B's Jazz Journey on KXLU 88.9-FM. The above FB post was reprinted with his permission.]

Our Cruelest Month (of Links)

2016-04-06T09:21:00.001-07:00

8 Things All Band Geeks Know to be True

(CLICKHOLE)

BEYOND OBJECTS, BEYOND SCORES: Aditi Sriram Interviews Vijay Iyer

(GUERNICA)

A Guide to 1980s Miles Davis

(PITCHFORK MEDIA)

Hear the Very First Drum Machine from 1931

(OPEN CULTURE)

25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music is Going
(NYT INTERACTIVE)

NO MAG: Entire Print Run of Seminal L.A. Art Punk 'Zine Now Online

(DANGEROUS MINDS)

How to Listen to Music

(THE ATLANTIC)

ELECTION 2016: The Complete Guide to the Candidates' Favorite Music

(ROLLING STONE)

AUTHORITARIAN HOLD MUSIC: How Donald Trump's Banal (and Dangerous) Playlist

(WASHINGTON POST)

Jazz Musician Inspired by Campaign Rhetoric on New EP

(SCPR)

Q&A: George Clinton Interviews Kendrick Lamar

(PIGEONS & PLANES)

How A Historic Black Queer Disco Became the Epicenter of L.A.'s Industrial Scene

(THUMP)

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Nina Simone's Face

(THE ATLANTIC)

Why Nina Simone's Skin is as Important as Her Voice

(THE PITCH)

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks
(OPEN CULTURE)

FUNK, FUZZ & FELA: Fela and the Birth of Afro Rock

(CUEPOINT)

(Re)discovering the Culture and Nostalgia of L.A.'s Record Stores

(LA WEEKLY)

How To Turn Your Cremated Remains Into a Vinyl Record

(MNN)

RITES OF SPRING REDUX: Watch "Noisy Dissent" Disrupt A Harpsichord Recital
(SLIPPED DISC)

Larry Young's Self-Questioning Jazz

(THE NEW YORKER)

Tom Marcello Photographs NYC's Loft Jazz Scene

(BLOG THE HUM)

KONSPIRACY KORNER: Does A Supertramp Album Cover Predict 9/11?

(DANGEROUS MINDS)

Esperanza Spaulding: Insubordinate by Nature

(PITCHFORK INTERVIEWS)

WATCH: Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" Played on a Gayageum

(YOUTUBE)

Fishbone Bassist Norwood Fisher on Being L.A.'s Only Funk-Punk-Ska Band
(KCET)

How Ahmad Jamal's The Awakening Became A Sampling Goldmine

(THE VINYL FACTORY)

Sonny Sharrock on Improvisation

(PREPARED GUITAR)

MYSTIC NIGHTS: The Making of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde

(THE OXFORD-AMERICAN)

A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters

(KCRW)

ARCHIVE SUPERCUT: Every Single Tom Waits TV Appearance

(YOUTUBE)

10 Things Never Say to a DJ

(CLICKHOLE)

SOUNDPRINTS (April Edition)

2016-03-31T07:39:00.002-07:00

ON DECK FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN APRIL:

Michelle Cruz Gonzales details the '90s moshpit in The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. (Read an interview with the author here.) James McBride follows his bestselling memoir The Color of Water with Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. (Read Rick Moody's NYT review here.) NPR's Bob Boilen interviews the likes of Regina Carter, Jimmy Page, Hozier, Smokey Robinson, Carrie Brownstein and St. Vincent on their musical inspirations in Your Song Changed My Life. (Read an interview with the author here.) In 1750, poet Thomas Gray stood in a cemetery on the English countryside and wrote a famous elegy for all of the unknown and unfulfilled talent buried there ("Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest"). 266 years later, Ray Robertson does something about it in Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Rock & Roll. (Read an interview with the author here.) There's a reason classical musicians call it "the Pit"; now, in Sticking It Out, percussionist Patti Niemi reveals the cutthroat world of big-city symphonies. Adding to a recent spate of "music as nostalgia" memoirs, Erik Spitznagel resolutely declared Old Records Never Die! (Check out the "book trailer" featuring Wilco's Jeff Tweedy here.) He used to be named John Ravenscroft and his radio show on SoCal's own KMEN influenced the Anglophilia of the '60s Sunset Strip rock scene. Later he moved to England and became John Peel. In Good Night and Good Riddance: How Thirty-Five Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Life, David Cavanaugh pays tribute to the bearded, laconic tastemaker. (Read The Guardian's review here.)

England's Dreaming author Jon Savage commemorates the 50th anniversary of the cultural-shift year of 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. (Check out the book's accompanying playlist here and
another cool list of the year's top rock albums here.) Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series continues with Buzz Poole's The Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead. (Read a Q&A with the author here.) They just finished what may have been their last tour, now the proggy Canucks called Rush have their own volume of fan fiction with 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush. We've been waiting for his reminisces between film roles, X bassist John Doe has finally obliged with Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk. (Read an interview with Doe here.) Albert Einstein = Albert Ayler? Stephon Alexander thinks there might be something there in The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe. In Dr. Herb Wong's essay collection Jazz on My Mind honors late KJAZ DJ's lifelong devotion to America's classical music. (Listen to an interview with the book's editor here.) Greg Vandy and Daniel Person document particularly fertile creative month for an American folk icon in 26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest.

Now that we know the new Twin Peaks reboot will be more music-related than we could have ever imagined, editors J.C. Gabel and Jessica Hundley provide contest in Beyond the Beyond: Music from the Films of David Lynch. Having just announced an upcoming biography of The Stooges, Third Man Books also has published photographer David James Swenson's Pictures From Unknown States as part of its Vault Package #28. The book documents Jack White's recent acoustic mini-tour.

Why Los Angeles Needs A Jazz Film Festival

2016-03-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

"Happiness is a nice wet Rico reed."

"I've never done a gig in a hash bar," notes the guitarist, an older Englishman named Jon Dalton. "I spent my teenage years on the festival circuit in tents and vans. I cooked curry in a hubcap one night."

Welcome to a marijuana dispensary with the James Ellroyish name of L.A. Confidential Caregivers.
Located on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, the space played host to a group of jazz artists who met for a couple of years there for informal Sunday-night jam sessions. It's something that used to happen in into the wee hours of the night, every night, all over the L.A. basin. Hungry young players would run it like a circuit. Then the clubs started dying on the vine and the sessions became limited to Sundays. And during the day to boot.

Hal Masonberg's sensual, understated documentary Jazz Nights: A Confidential Journey (2016) makes a case for jazz returning to the night. And not just the literal night but the night of alternative spaces and word-of-mouth, of music free from club and record label skulduggery and allowed to breath again. In the Uber and App-driven world, this could be a new trend in urban America: "Weed Dispensary Jazz." It's a strangely apropos setting, hearkening back to jazz's semi-legal origins. As the spirited saxophonist Geoff "Double G" Gallegos, who looks like he should be playing bass for Metallica, offers: "To be a criminal you have to improvise, and there's no better training for crime than jazz."

But herb is beside the point -- not all the cats in this racially and generationally mixed octet even like to get high. Between intimate musical interludes of the group easing into standards like Freddie Hubbard's "Little Sunflower," Toots Theilmanns' "Bluesette" and Harry Warren's "There Will Never Be Another You," they banter about how the dispensary gig freed them from the Sisyphus-like existence of jazz players in LA-LA Land. Before he wandered in the front door, guitarist Emil Porée drove a bus and cab in Pasadena to avoid the traditional studio-session work that his father was famous for. "I wanted to experience the music the way I wanted to: No veil between me and actual art."

(FYI: If you wish to see Jazz Nights in its entirety, its world premiere will be April 23, 2016 at the Newport Beach Film Festival.)

Over the last few months, the Beast had had the privilege of being contacted by a few filmmakers about their various jazz-related projects. Beside Jazz Nights, another one that stood out was Turn the Mics On, a 2011 film by L.A. guitarist Matthew Ritvo about the making of his 2009 album with local luminaries Michael Session, Roberto Miguel Miranda, Bobby English, Rahmlee Michael Davis and the late, great Woodrow "Sonship" Theus.

Add to this are three (!!) recent biopics about jazz: Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead, Howard Budreau's Born to Be Blue and Cynthia Mort's Nina. Each has been subject to its own set of criticisms, but honestly the Beast cannot remember a time when filmmakers could even dream of making any jazz-related project that wasn't a documentary (The Case of the Three-Sided Dream), a delivery-system for junkie porn (Low Down) or just plain lazy (Whiplash). This dates back to the mid- to late-1980s, where the documentary form seemed to outpace the fictional. There was the majestic Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser and the bizarre glitterscummy Chet Baker: Let's Get Lost (both released in 1988), and the dutiful but seemingly incomplete The World According to John Coltrane (1990). For the fictional field, things started off hopefully with Bertrand Tavernier's elegiac 'Round Midnight (1986) -- which garnered its star, L.A.'s own Dexter Gordon, an Oscar nomination -- and ended with a resolute thud by Clint Eastwood's Bird (1988), a noble failure that managed to make jazz more boring than Ken Burns' Jazz.

But thanks to IndieGoGo and Kickstarter -- not to mention these go-go days of online D.I.Y. mini-documentaries -- jazz on film is coming back hard. (Cheadle partially used an Indie GoGo campaign to fund Miles Ahead, as did the filmmakers of Fire Music, Jaco and I Love John Coltrane.) In fact, the Beast did a tally of L.A.-related jazz films and came up with about 30. This doesn't include films currently in production: L.A. rebellion filmmaker Barbara McCullough's film on Horace Tapscott; Mitchell Kezin's film on pianist/vocalist Bob Dorough, Tom Paige's The Gathering (which features decade-old footage of this young kid named Kamasi), Paul Sabu Rogers' Jazz in the Rainforest as well as docs on Shelly's Manne-hole and saxophonist Warne Marsh.

In short, we realized: There's enough material here for a L.A.-centric jazz film festival. Don't believe us? Here's a rundown of what could be. (Of course, if there's anything we've missed, please add to our knowledge.) Yes, much of this can be see online or on YouTube, but let's not lose the chance of seeing these images on a BIG screen surrounded by actual breathing human beings.

FEATURES

'Round Midnight

(1986; 2 hrs., 13 min.)

Special 30th Anniversary Screening!

Passing Through

(1977; 1 hr., 45 min.)

Larry Clark's docudrama student film from UCLA, featuring
Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra.
Read the Beast's take on the film here.

CONCERTS

Central Avenue Live!

(1997; 58 min)

An account of the 1996 Central Avenue jazz festival, directed by S. Pearl Sharp.

Charlie Haden + The Liberation Music Orchestra: Live in Montreal

(2002; 60 min.)

The Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra: Live at Moers
(1995; 1 hr., 7 min.)
Titanic, earth-shattering set from Horace Tapscott's guerrilla jazz orchestra.
Arguably their finest filmed performance.

The Silence Is Broken

(2010; 1 hr., 49 min.)

AIDS/HIV docu-concert film from pianist Patrick Gandy.

Soul To Soul
(1971; 1 hr., 36 min.)
World Pacific Jazz record honcho Dick Bock's documents a landmark 1971 concert in
Accra, Ghana featuring Les McCann, the Staples Singers, Ike & Tina Turner, Santana
and the Voices of East Harlem.

A Tribute to Charles Mingus: Past, Present and Future
(2009; 60 min)
Film from Paul Sabu Rogers that includes interviews and performance excerpts
from heavies like Ndugu Chancler, Buddy Collette, Patrice Rushen and Nedra Wheeler.

The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble: 20th Anniversary Concert
(2002; 100 min)

DOCUMENTARIES
Approximately…Nels Cline
(2012; 30 min.)
Steven Okazaki portrays the intrepid avant-guitar star from West L.A.

Art Pepper: Straight Life
(2007; 180 min.)
Laurie Pepper's three, hour-long troika of surrealist sketches of her late husband,
the postbop saxophonist Art Pepper. Go here for an NPR profile of the project.

Barry Manilow: The Making of 2am Paradise Cafe
(1984; 60 min.)
DON'T LAUGH. Follow the link above and you'll understand.

Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog
(1998; 1 hr., 18 min.)
Directed by Don McGlynn. Produced by McGlynn and Mingus' widow Sue.

Charlie Haden: Rambling Boy
(2009; 1 hr., 25 min.)
Reto Caduff examines the free jazz bassist's Americana roots.

Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant
(1989; 5 min.)
L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis's brief portrait of a SoCal treasure --
the only woman to jam with Charlie Parker.

Dexter Gordon: More Than You Know
(1996; 52 min.)
Don McGlynn portrays the bop saxophonist-turned-Hollywood-actor.

Electric Heart: The Don Ellis Story
(2007; 1 hr., 13 min.)
John Vizzusi makes a case for the underrated
"psychedelic big band" leader and pioneer of World Jazz.

Eric Dolphy: The Last Date
(1991; 1 hr., 32 min.)
French documentary from Hans Hylkema and Dolphy biographer Thierry Bruneau.

Ernie Andrews: Blues for Central Avenue
(1986; 60 min.)
Lois Shelton's film on the underappreciated vocalist is credited for sparking
the reappraisal of L.A.'s African-American jazz history.

The Good Ear
(2009; 67 min)
Steve Rudolf's film follows club owner/promoter Rocco Somazzi
and L.A.'s creative jazz/improvised music scene.

I Stand Corrected
(2012; 60 min.)
Andrea Meyerson's timely document of left-handed jazz bassist John Leitham's
gender transition to Jennifer Leitham.

Jazz on the West Coast: The Lighthouse

(2006; 78 minutes)

Kenneth Koening on the groundbreaking Hermosa Beach jazz club.

Joe Albany: A Jazz Life

(1980; 60 min.)

Carole Langer's gritty portrayal of the tormented bebop pianist who recorded with Charlie Parker.

John Carter and Bobby Bradford: The New Music

(1986; 30 min.)

Short film about the avant-garde duo by Peter Bull and a
pre-Going Clear Alex Gibney, then a film student at UCLA.

Keep on Keepin' On: The Clark Terry Story

(2014; 1 hr., 24 min.)

Alan Hicks' masterful biography of the late trumpeter.

The Legend of Teddy Edwards
(2001; 1 hr., 25 min)
Don McGlynn's film of the bebop saxophonist.

Leimert Park: The Story of a Village in South Central
(2006; 1 hr., 28 min.)
Jeannette Lindsay documents the 1990s cultural renaissance in this SoLA 'hood.
Read the Beast's take on the film here.

Life Is A Saxophone
(1985; 58 minutes)
S. Pearl Sharp's short film on "jazz poet" Kamau Daaood was recently
given a 28th anniversary reissue with 14 minutes of extra footage.

The Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story
(2014: 1 hr., 24 min.)
N.C. Heikin's portrait of the tumultuous career of the saxophonist and Jefferson High alumnus.

This Is the Life

(2008; 97 min.)

Ava Duvernay's film on the melding of hip hop and jazz at the seminal Good Life Cafe in Exposition Park.

Trying to Get Good: The Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon

(2008; 90 min.)

Doug McIntyre & Penny Peyser portray the trumpeter and vocalist with the most recognizable voice.

The Wrecking Crew

(2008; 1 hr., 41 min)

Denny Tedesco, son of famed session guitarist Tommy Tedesco, filmed this love letter to the jazz musicians who supplied American youth with its necking-and-petting soundtrack.

KEYNOTE SHOWCASE: CHARLES LLOYD

The iconoclastic saxophonist from Memphis is more associated with Big Sur and Santa Barbara,

but he got his start in L.A. in the late '50s and was part of the local scene until he moved north
for his "wilderness years."

Lloyd was also a vital link between the jazz and rock worlds of the '60s. Amazingly, he's had no fewer than SIX films made about him, almost all by his wife Dorothy Darr. (Our blog bud Greg Burk previews a few of them here.) And oh man, if we could get them to show up for a live Q&A with our pal Dr. Jeffrey Winston? Sheeeiiiit...

Charles Lloyd: Journey Within

(1969; 60 min.)

Eric Sherman's rarely screened doc was filmed during a pertinent time in Lloyd's career when he was at the height of his '60s popularity and about to go into self-imposed seclusion in Big Sur. Features the sublime quartet of Lloyd, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette and Ron McClure.

Charles Lloyd: Memphis Is in Egypt

(1995; 60 min.)

Charles Lloyd + Billy Higgins: Home
(2004; 72 minutes)

Ben Ingram vs. The State of Mississippi
(2009; 1 hr., 50 min.)
Film about Charles Lloyd’s father.

The Monk and the Mermaid: The Song of Charles Lloyd
(2009; 60 min.)
Italian documentary from Fara C. & Guiseppi de Vecchi.

Charles Lloyd: Arrows Into Infinity
(2012; 1 hr. 53 min)

Jazz On RSD

2016-03-14T10:56:00.002-07:00

Next month, Record Store Day 2016 will again be upon us, and although the genre of jazz is woefully underrepresented, we still unearthed some prime finds:

John Coltrane - The Roulette Sides [Rhino/Parlophone]

Originally released April 23, 1976. Transferred from the original tapes. Limited to 4500 copies.

Miles Davis/Robert Glasper/Bilal - Ghetto Walkin' [Columbia/Legacy]

Grammy winner Glasper and singer-songwriter Bilal re-interpret the classic Miles Davis song 'The Ghetto Walk' with the new track 'Ghetto Walkin'' from Glasper's upcoming Miles Ahead-inspired project.

Bill Evans - Some Other Time: The Lost Session From The Black Forest [Resonance]

A newly discovered Bill Evans studio album recorded by the legendary MPS Records producer and label owner, Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, at his studio in Villingen, Germany (aka "the Black Forest"). Recorded literally five days after Evan's legendary Grammy-winning live performance at the 1968 Montreux Jazz Festival, Liner notes to include new historical essays from jazz journalist Marc Myers and German jazz historian Friedhelm Schulz; interviews from participants Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette; plus rare and previously unpublished photos.

Dizzy Gillespie - The Champ [Savoy]

Reissue of Dizzy Gillespie's ground breaking bebop album of small group recordings from 1951-52 with guests Milt Jackson & Percy Heath (who went on to later form the Modern Jazz Quartet), Stuff Smith, Bill Graham and some of the earliest sessions by John Coltrane."

Modern Jazz Quartet - The Quartet [Savoy]

These seminal recordings, originally issued under 'The Milt Jackson Quartet’ launched what soon became the elegant chamber jazz of the MJQ.

Thelonious Monk - The London Sessions Vol. 3 [ORG]

The third and last installment of Thelonious Monk's final recording session as a leader features Monk on six solo performances as well as five numbers with bassist Al McKibbon and drummer Art Blakey.

Oscar Peterson with Herb Ellis & Ray Brown - Tenderly [Justin Time]

Recorded in the summer of 1958 at the Orpheum Theater in Vancouver,

Sun Ra - Spaceways [ORG]

Receiving its first ever vinyl release for RSD16, Spaceways features live performances by Sun Ra and his Arkestra in New York City in 1966 and 1968.

Lester Young - Blue Lester [Savoy]

Lester "Prez" Young classic features the tenor master at his peak and includes what would become his lifelong theme song "Blue Lester."

Various Artists - Jazz Dispensary: Cosmic Stash [Fantasy]

Features some of the most iconic and hard-to-find drum breaks, legendary samples, and a who’s who of players and producers including: Bernard Purdie, Isaac Hayes, David Axelrod, the Lafayette Afro Rock Band, the Blackbyrds, Pharoah Sanders, and more.

Open the Door, Sam!

2016-03-08T08:24:00.001-08:00

Samuel Rodney Browne

Jefferson High School (1926)

Thanks to Drew Tewksbury over at KCET's Artbound, the Beast has just published another excerpt from our book-in-progress Midnight Pacific Airwaves. This section comes from a chapter on L.A.'s influential music teachers. Enjoy!

SOUNDPRINTS (March Edition)

2016-03-04T08:45:00.004-08:00

ON THE DOCKET FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN MARCH: Bob Mehr's already-released

Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements delves deep into the lovable losers of '80s punk. (Read an excerpt here.) L.A. writer Jan Tumlir takes Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as a starting point for an examination of the interaction of rock concept albums and pop art in The Magic Circle: The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records. Today, Duke University Press releases the collection Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, which includes articles on "listening" by Pauline Oliveros and compositions by flautist Nicole Mitchell (who teaches at UC-Irvine) based on the science fiction by Octavia Butler. Dylanologist Barney Hoskyns (who must be drooling over that recent cache of rare Dylania) catalogues the "wild years" of the upstate New York arts and music colony of Woodstock in Small Town Talk. Steven Blush, who gave us the monumental American Hardcore book/film, is one of the authors of the self-explanatory companion to the recent doc Lost Rockers: Broken Dreams and Crashed Careers. (Watch the film teaser here.) Originally released in Europe, Nick Hayes' ghostly monochromatic images of the Great Depression buoys the graphic novel Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads. Frank R. Hyde details the life of a infamously cranky bebop drum legend in Stan Levey: Jazz Heavyweight. The tribal agitchicks of Minneapolis's late-'80s punk scene get the historical treatment by band member Michelle Leon in
I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland. Recently, a researcher found references to the word "jazz" in 1917 Chile; in kind, Chicago University Press's essay collection Jazz Worlds/World Jazz shines a light on the global impact of America's classical music. Coming of age during the '60s, UCLA Bruins legend Bill Walton was an entirely different kind of basketball star -- namely a vegetarian Grateful Dead fanatic -- and details how his Deadhead lifestyle informed his on-court glory in his new memoir Back from the Dead: Searching for the Sounds, Shining the Light and Throwing It Down. John Corbett offers a travelogue for your Taylor Swift-saturated ears in the pocket-sized A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation. XTC's publicity-shy frontman Andy Partridge explains the origins of the British psychedelic punks in Complicated Game. Jooyoung Lee journeys down to L.A.'s Leimert Park to find out how young rappers are made in Blowin' Up: Rap Dreams in South Central. And hey, not all books about have to music have to be about how great it is; French essayist Pascal Quignard takes the road less traveled with The Hatred of Music. Now that researchers are finally able to map LSD's effects on the human brain, Jesse Jarnow drops a tab of groovy cultural change in Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Rizzoli turns its sumptuous, coffee-table eye to Duke Ellington: An American Composer and Icon. And speaking of icons? Two very different ones round out the month: Blondie's Parallel Lines, Kembrew McLeod's entry in to Bloomsbury's venerable 33 1/3 Series; and Rich Kienzie's The Grand Tour about the iconic (and troubled) country singer George Jones.

March in the Omniverse

2016-03-01T10:58:00.000-08:00

DON'T MISS 3/2 Roscoe Mitchell Sextet (w/ Nicole Mitchell, Mark Dresser, Anthony Davis, Stephanie Richards & Mike Reed) @ UCSD Prebys Music Center (La Jolla)....3/3 Benn Clatworthy Quartet @ Vibrato (Bel-Air)....3/4 Dublab presents Music for Train Stations @ Union Station (Downtown)....3/4 Tizer Quartet featuring Karen Briggs @ Squashed Grapes (Ventura)....DON'T MISS 3/4 Lucinda Williams & Bill Frisell @ UCLA Royce Hall (Westwood)....3/4 Mike Watt & The Missingmen @ DiPiazza's (Long Beach)....DON'T MISS 3/5 Kaki King @ LACMA (Miracle Mile)....3/5 Donald Dean Quartet @ Bar Fedora (Downtown)....3/6 Benefit For Bernie Sanders w/ No Age, So Many Wizards, others @ The Smell (Downtown)....DON'T MISS 3/6 Dwight Trible, Philip Greenlief & Alex Cline @ Center for the Arts (Eagle Rock)....3/8 OHM @ The Baked Potato (Studio City)....3/10 Eve Egoyan @ REDCAT (Downtown)....3/10 PLOTZ! @ Squashed Grapes....3/11 Burning Ghosts (Daniel Rosenboom, Jake Vossler, Tim Lefebvre, Tina Raymond) @ curve line space....3/12 Don Randi & Quest @ The Baked Potato....3/12 Carla Bozulich & Devin Sarno @ The Market (Highland Park)....3/12 Matt Ritvo's Klaymation w/ Michael Session @ Harold's Place (San Pedro)....3/12 Jonathan Rowden Group @ Meng Concert Hall (Cal State-Fullerton)....DON'T MISS 3/13 Carl Stone, Ulrich Krieger & Chas Smith @ the blue whale....3/14 Kim Richmond Jazz Orchestra @ Typhoon (Santa Monica)....3/15 Miguel Atwood-Ferguson presents Les Jardins Mystiques @ Del Monte Speakeasy (Venice)....DON'T MISS 3/15 Esperanza Spaulding @ Belasco Theater (Downtown)....3/16 Soundwaves presents Urlich Krieger @ Santa Monica Public Library....3/17 & 18 Mark de Clive-Lowe presents CHURCH @ the blue whale....3/18 Archie Carey, Booker Stadium + Andrew Bernstein @ the wülf (Downtown)....3/18 Pete Christlieb/Linda Small Quintet @ Vibrato....3/18 Herbie Hancock (w/ Thundercat, James Genus, Terrace Martin, Lalah Hathaway & Vinnie Colaiuta) @ Disney Hall (Downtown)....3/19 Joel Ector, Azar Lawrence, Alfredo Rivera, Onaje Murray & Derf Reklaw @ Corazón Performing Arts (Topanga)....3/19 Alphonse Mouzon's All-Star Band @ The Seabird (Long Beach)....3/20 Mike Watt & The Secondmen @ Cafe NELA (Cypress Park)....DON'T MISS3/20 Peter Erskine's DR. UM CD Release Concert @ Moss Theater....3/21 The Necks @ the blue whale....DON'T MISS 3/21 The Jazz Bakery presents Bill Laurance Group w/ Michael League & Robert Searight @ The Moss Theater (Santa Monica)....3/22 Piano Spheres presents Mark Robson @ REDCAT....3/22 Busdriver w/ The Underground Railroad Band (accompanying screening of Robert Townshend's Hollywood Shuffle) @ Cinefamily (Fairfax District)....3/23 Faust @ Union (Mid-City)....DON'T MISS 3/24 Yuck @ The Echoplex (Echo Park)....3/24 Brian Auger & The Oblivion Express @ The Baked Potato....3/24 Vardan Ovsepian Chamber Ensemble @ the blue whale....3/25 Jamael Dean Quartet @ Del Monte Speakeasy....3/25 The Jazz Bakery presents Cory Henry Trio @ The Moss Theater....3/25 Dale Fielder Quartet @ H.O.M.E. (Beverly Hills)....DON'T MISS 3/26 Don Preston & Dr. Vicki Ray @ Alva's Showroom (San Pedro)....3/26 The Changing Same (w/ Charles Sharp, Gabriel Nobles & Breeze Smith) @ Studio 1444 (Hollywood)....3/26 Azar Lawrence Quintet @ The Seabird....3/28 L.A. Jazz Collective @ the blue whale....3/28 Bill Cunliffe Big Band @ Typhoon

PREMIERING TONIGHT! "The Jazz Creative" w/ Leroy Downs

2016-02-26T08:07:00.001-08:00

Two generations of sharp-dressed L.A. jazz broadcasters:

Chet Hanley (L) and Leroy Downs

The Beast gives mad respect to The Jazzcat! Since the late-1990s, radio DJ/promoter Leroy Downs has acted almost as a one-man Energizer Bunny of L.A. jazz. Best known as the master of ceremonies for the Monterey Jazz Festival, Downs now can add "TV host" to his mind-boggling resume. From the press release: "The premiere episode of The Jazz Creative celebrates African American History Month, the Grammys and the Academy Awards as we peek inside the creative process of composing Music for Film with trumpeter Terence Blanchard (Chi-raq) and pianist Jason Moran (Selma), a visit with Philadelphia-born bassist Christian McBride, who talks Gamble & Huff, the Sound Of Philadelphia, Grover Washington Jr. and the 76er’s and two sets of great new music from The Planetary Prince, pianist Cameron Graves and the Afrophysicist, trumpeter Theo Croker."

For more info on the show, check out this new interview with Downs about over at Urban Music Scene. For a clip of Downs chatting with Kamasi Washington, go here. There are also a number of cool interviews on the All Music Television YT channel. Go here to find the Aspire Channel on your TV.

Not surprisingly, Downs is also a Jazz Curator of the Steven James Buchanan Jazz Collection at the Mayme A. Clayton Jazz Library and Museum in Culver City, where two new events have just been announced:

On Sunday, 3/6/16, 2pm, a closing reception for Touch Bass, a unique exhibit by photographer Sammy Davis that focuses on portraiture of several of SoCal's world-class bassists, including Henry Franklin, James Leary, Jennifer Leitham, Roberto Miguel Miranda, Richard Simon, Trevor Ware, Nedra Wheeler, John B. Williams, Mike Alvidrez, Luther Hughes and John Heard. Admission is free.

A month after that on Sunday, 4/3/16, another of the late Mimi Melnick's Double M Jazz Salons will feature the Phil Ranelin Jazz Ensemble, with trombonist/leader Ranelin, reedsmen Pablo Calogero and Keith Fiddmont, trumpeter Curtis Taylor, pianist Aaron Provisor, bassist Ian Martin and drummer Don Littleton. April 3rd, also marks the one-time Horace Tapscott Young Musician’s Heritage Award. A deserving recipient, who has already made early contributions to the art form and continues to display great promise, will be honored during a brief ceremony. (Doors open at 12:30 p.m. At 1:00 p.m., Phil will briefly reflect on his life and career, in an informal discussion with jazz historian Jeffrey Winston. The first of two stellar sets with a 40-minute intermission begins at 2pm.)

StompBeast

THE 50 BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF 2017

ᐃ b Ỹ է ∑ s__N__b Ø b s ᐁ [UPDATED]

Emergency Community Meeting @ the World Stage

CATS IN THE BUSH

be not so fearful

"collaboration is the path from protest to power"

∞∞ B y T e S *n* b O b S ⚄ ⚄ [UPDATED]

The First and Last Death of 2016

THE 50 BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF 2016

SOUNDPRINTS (Nov/Dec edition)

SOUNDPRINTS (Oct. edition)

SOUNDPRINTS (Sept. Edition)

SOUNDPRINTS (Summer 2016 edition)

75 HOT LINKS (w/ Dirty Rice & Sausage Gravy)

SOUNDPRINCE (May Edition)

Eddie Becton Schools A Young 'Un

Our Cruelest Month (of Links)

SOUNDPRINTS (April Edition)

Why Los Angeles Needs A Jazz Film Festival

Jazz On RSD

Open the Door, Sam!

SOUNDPRINTS (March Edition)

March in the Omniverse

PREMIERING TONIGHT! "The Jazz Creative" w/ Leroy Downs

ᐃ b Ỹ է ∑ sNb Ø b s ᐁ [UPDATED]

∞∞ B y T e S n b O b S ⚄ ⚄ [UPDATED]