Recently I put a CD shelf together and got all of my music CD's unpacked. Well, most of them. Bootlegs remain in a box. Since then I have bought even more and now have to rejigger things to make room for them on the proper shelves.
The Louis Michot and Alash albums were bought at their shows here earlier this month while the one by Verità Baroque was purchased online after seeing one of their performances at the Madison Early Music Festival back in January. Tomeka Reid - come back to Madison, please!
I bought The Monks album just yesterday at B-Side. It was neat because I hadn't been there in ages and had never been to their new digs which, I suppose, aren't all that new anymore. The general layout is the same as the old space and the presence of Steve Manley behind the counter gave a familiar and welcoming feeling. But it was really odd to be able to browse without having to squeeze between shelves. All that space is so odd. Ha!
I was happy to see that the King Crimson selection remains strong there.
Jay Farrar continues channeling Woody Guthrie in a new song called "These Days Have No Shame". Also, Son Volt will be on tour later this year.
Trane!
I heard this on a soundtrack recently and it brought back memories of hearing it for the first time when I was heading home from Waunakee** on a lovely late summer evening.
Today I learned that Jethro Tull's 1969 otune "Singing All Day" (a Benefit outtake?) uses the melody from "Swingin' On Nothin'", a song by jazz maestro Sy Oliver. Oliver appears on a version by Tommy Dorsey. Now, whether Ian Anderson was familiar with this version or another, I dunno.
The legendary jazz drummer Roy Haynes passed away yesterday at age 99. 99! The guy played with seemingly everyone - Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk - the list goes on.
Here's his performance from the Madison Jazz Festival back in 2008 at the Union Theater when Haynes was a youthful 83.
A couple months ago I ran across a review of the Tomeka Reid Quartet's eponymous album at what I thought was a progressive rock review site I frequent but, having sought out the review, I find that it's nowhere to be seen there so I don't know where I found out about Tomeka Reid and her quartet. Nonetheless I am glad I did.
She is a jazz, a.k.a. - black classical music, cellist and composer out of Chicago. Since the review eludes me, I won't be able to say what caught my attention and compelled me to check out her music. I just recall there being a link to her Bandcamp page that I followed and found that I really enjoyed her 2015 album done with her quartet.
Since she is from Chicago, I thought there was a chance that she had played here in Madison at the Arts + Literature Laboratory which hosts jazz performances. Not only that, many of the shows there have been recorded by an anonymous taper and put into circulation. So I checked my stash and found that I indeed had a recording of the Tomeka Reid Quartet from the Arts + Literature Laboratory.
Jazz taxonomy is not my specialty so I am unsure into what subgenre she falls into. It's just jazz to me. But there is no brass. Instead guitar and Reid's cello do the melodic legwork.
Here's "Billy Bang’s Bounce" recorded here in Madison at the Arts + Literature Lab on Halloween night of 2019.
Thanks to Mad City Music for the new tunes. And thanks to Chicago's Tomeka Reid for making the great tunes. I hope you can visit our fair burg again soon and play "Old New" and "17 West".
Back around 1997 or thereabouts, I ran into an essay by a gentleman named Judson Caswell called "Minstrel in the Gallery: History in the Music of Jethro Tull" that I believe he wrote for a college class back in circa 1993. At least that's when he posted it to a Jethro Tull mailing list. In it he wrote:
Still, Ian owed much to the black blues and jazz traditions. His flute playing was a stylistic derivative of Roland Kirk, a famous jazz saxophonist. Perhaps he also derived aspects of his later stage persona from Kirk as well. Kirk is described by Lipsitz in his book Time Passages. Lipsitz speaks of Kirk's unusual stage attire and behavior as subversive and unconventional. He also makes note of Kirk's aggressive sense of humor, citing his satirical rendition of hymns and his "mischievous wordplay". Lipsitz calls attention to these characteristics to identify Kirk as a performer who is deriving his power from a sense of history. He explains that Roland Kirk presents an art that can be interpreted at many levels--an art that makes reference to the past through oblique and coded messages. These messages arise as eccentricities in Roland Kirk's music and stage presence.
I knew of Roland Kirk as Tull had done a version of his "Serenade to a Cuckoo" on their first album. Although I've since learned differently, I accepted that he was the model for Ian Anderson's style of flute playing. But I didn't really know much about Kirk himself and found myself intrigued.
And so I sought out Time Passages. Not hard to find. Lipsitz got his PhD. in history at my alma mater and was, at the time the book was published, a professor just to the west at the University of Minnesota.
Lipsitz opens the book with a discussion of Kirk.
The late jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk used to preface his performances with an unusual word of advice for the audience. A burly black man who often wore a stovepipe hat with a feather in it, and who frequently carried two saxophones (which he sometimes played simultaneously), Kirk would peer out at the crowd through dark sunglasses and growl, "This ain't no sideshow."
He proceeds to portray Kirk as Caswell described. His music, stage persona, and stage banter all "called attention to his role as a black musician in a society controlled by whites." Lipsitz claimed that Kirk "called attention to his identity as a historical subject, a descendant of slaves and a victim of white racism, a human being forced to disguise his pain and anger within the outward appearances of a sideshow."
Personally, I think Lipsitz is overly hyperbolic here and leaves little to no room for Kirk to dress or speak out of pure merriment or to play a song for the sheer joy of it. But I guess that's neither here nor there.
After reading the section on Kirk, I wanted to hear the man himself say those words: "This ain't no sideshow." I wanted to hear this little bit of musical history instead of it simply existing as words on a page.
Life got in the way back in the late 90s but my desire was rekindled during the Covid lockdown. Lipsitz doesn't list any notes for his comments on Kirk. John Kruth's biography, Bright Moments: The Life and Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, wasn't published until a decade after Time Passages so that wasn't a source. Wikipedia showed that some live material came out during Kirk's lifetime but 3 posthumous lives albums post-date Time Passages' publication thusly they were out. And so, as someone who collects bootlegs, I then sought out every Kirk show I could find.
Boots can be a good way to experience musical history. After all, Dylan aficionados actually heard that guy call him "Judas" long before the show was officially released in 1998.
I came away with Kirk shows from 1963, 1964, 1967, 1970, and 1972-76.
Where to start? Lipzig's phrasing gives one the impression that Kirk began all of his shows with the desired word of advice.
Some help came at the same time I was downloading the concert recordings when I stumbled upon a dissertation by a gentleman named Benjamin Tress called "The Jazz & People’s Movement: Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Struggle to Open the American Media to Black Classical Music". The paper's first section is a brief biography of Kirk and notes, "...Kirk also gradually changed his image, moving away from the conservative style of dress he had sported in the Fifties and early Sixties...In 1967, he was back on the cover of Down Beat, though this time with thicker sunglasses, a large knit hat, and facial hair that was reminiscent of a Black Bohemian style."
Furthermore, Tress says "Kirk’s recorded statements from the late Sixties and early Seventies also indicate a trend towards greater racial awareness."
My guess was that I'd find my prized word of advice in recordings from this time period.
Thinking that it would be fun to listen to a bunch of Roland Kirk and Rahsaan Roland Kirk music, I just started with the earliest show and made my way forward. Since it was quite possible that Kirk had said "This ain't no sideshow" at some point other than the outset of a show, I listened to each of the recordings in their entirety.
Here they are:
10/24/1963 Club Montmartre, Copenhagen, Denmark
9/26/1964 Philharmonie, Jazztage 1964, Berlin, East Germany
9/27/1964 Prälaten, Jazztage 1964, Berlin, East Germany
10/2/1964 Paris, France
10/6/1964 Messuhalli, Helsinki, Finland
10/10/1964 Teatro dell'Arte al Parco, Milano, Italy
10/14/1967 Sala Kongresowa, Warsaw, Poland
10/19/1967 Prague, Czechoslovakia
2/26/1970 Stuttgart, Germany
3/3/1972 Studio NDR, Hamburg, West Germany 34min(set 2)
4/2/1972 Village Vanguard, New York City, NY
9/22/1972 “SOUL!” TV show
10/29/1972 Jazz Workshop, Boston, MA
12/31/1973 Village Vanguard, New York, NY-
4/4/1974 Village Vanguard, New York City, NY (early show)
4/4/1974 Village Vanguard, New York City, NY (late show)
4/14/1974 Village Vanguard, New York City, NY
6/30/1974 Glen Island Casino, New Rochelle, NY
1/3/1975 Village Vanguard, New York City, NY
7/17/1975 Blue Bird Jazzclub, Aarhus, Sweden 58min
11/14/1976 Studio 104, Maison de la Radio, Paris, France
There is a country ton of absolutely mind-blowingly fantastic music here.
Kirk was a master of circular breathing and there are times when he holds a note for a full minute, maybe more. As noted above, he played multiple saxes at once. Sometime they play in harmony, giving a rich, full melody; at others he's busting out different parts on each sax.
On one of the earlier shows, he threw in a bit of "Let It Snow", which took me by surprise. Kirk and his bands perform originals and a wide variety of covers that range from New Orleans jazz, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, and more. He definitely celebrates all manner of black American music and implores the audience to do the same. In later shows, they even do a bit of "Hey Jude".
The February 1970 show has a song with some parts that brought "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" by Traffic to mind. Similarly, there were a few piano solos that brought some Keith Emerson parts to mind. These moments drove home the fact that progressive rock leaned on jazz heavily at times and not always by people in the Canterbury scene.
"Fingers in the Wind" from 3 March 1972 is simply gorgeous.
At the Boston '72 show he gripes about Jethro Tull's version of "Serenade to a Cuckoo" getting a lot of radio airplay while his original does not.
Racial awareness came to fore at the September '72 show. He bemoans the paucity of black classical (i.e. - jazz) musicians on TV - Kirk helped found the Jazz & People’s Movement to address just this issue. He also says "plantation Earth" instead of "planet Earth".
"Fly Town Nose Blues" is a great song. On the 4 May 1974 shows he's got a guy named Kenny Rogers on baritone sax and he plays this wonderful struttin' melody as Kirk wails on flute. Just fantastic.
The late show from that date features the proto-rap "Clickety Clack". Influenced by The Last Poets? Gil Scott-Heron? Kirk says The Beatles came to American and took all the money while a black man went to a Rolling Stones concert and got killed. He proceeds to diss Lawrence Welk and say that Redd Foxx got screwed over.
That last show from 1976 was performed after Kirk's first stroke which left one side of his body paralyzed. That he continued playing was miraculous. Here, though, the band sounds smoother, the rough edges have been polished and the simultaneous saxes are missing. Everything seems more conventional, less eccentric, less Kirk.
So, which shows featured Kirk saying "This ain't no sideshow."?
None.
Not a single one.
I grant you, not all of these recordings are complete so it's entirely possible that he made that comments at some or all of these shows and the recorder in the audience, the radio station, or the TV station either didn't record it or left it out of the recording that has made it out into the world of bootlegs.
Having listened to all of my boots, I went to Youtube and listened to:
Again, no sideshow comment.
As stated above, Lipsitz provides no notes or the slightest clue where he got the notion that Kirk said "This ain't no sideshow" even once, much less at every show, as he implies. I don't think that my little round of listening to Kirk shows is iron clad, rock solid, definitive proof that Lipsitz is wrong, but I find it very suspicious.
I didn't expect to hear Kirk utter those words until shows from the late 60s so I wasn't surprised that I came up empty on the earlier ones. But I was surprised that I never heard them at all. I was also more than a little bewildered to find no mention of Kirk's sideshow comment beyond Lipsitz when I did general internet searches. Maybe I need to search the Down Beat archives or some such thing. Perhaps it was mentioned in an article and Lipsitz simply forgot to give credit.
While "This ain't no sideshow" certainly sounds like something Kirk would say and I don't doubt that Kirk said that at some point, I just don't believe Lipsitz that it was a very common, much less ubiquitous, occurrence. Either he got something wrong or pursued Herzog's ecstatic truth for his text.
Whatever the case, it was pure joy listening to all of that music by Kirk and I recommend you check him out if you haven't already done so.
After seeing that mural, I discovered that legendary jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard is from Indianapolis.
(early-August 2023)
(Take a look at the prelude.)
Friday. Just after dawn. The sunlight squeaked in through the hotel room curtain. There was just enough for me to navigate my way to the bathroom without tripping over a suitcase and ignominiously faceplanting on a grocery bag full of potato chips and trail mix. My plan for the day was to have a mellow morning. I’d grab a cup of coffee from the hotel lobby (Starbucks - not good but decent), go get some postcards, mail them, and then head down to the convention. My wanderings yesterday took me away from the con and its hordes of gamers for most of the day so I figured, since I had no games planned, I’d buy some generic tickets that could be used to gain entrance to any event. You just show up at one that you want to attend but hadn’t registered for and, if a registered player doesn’t make it – usually because they are hungover – then you’re in.
Well, that was the plan.
My first destination was the Indiana State Library as their website indicated they carried postcards in their gift shop and I just couldn't recall where I'd bought them the previous time. It was a nice older building that kept up with the neoclassical motif I had seen on the courthouse yesterday.
What a contrast to our Capitol here in Madison which is surrounded by grass and trees on all sides, inviting any and everyone to come visit the building to admire the architecture or hang out on the lawn with some fine local cheese for a snack. Indiana seems to treat their Capitol as just another office building, to some extent, anyway. It's just odd to see acres of blacktop like this in the downtown of a large city. Why not build a ramp and more buildings and use that no doubt value real estate better?
As I continued north, I found this mural of various local jazz musicians called “46 for XLVI” on the side of the Musicans’ Repair & Sales building. I did not recognize any of the faces of the players but this is not surprising. Other than Kurt Vonnegut, I don't know of any other famous folks from Indy, jazz musicians or otherwise. Regardless, it's good see locals honored whether they made it big on the national scene or not.
I turned east thinking I’d check out the war memorials that I’ve seen from a distance before but never up close and soon found myself before a Masonic temple. Immediately that episode of The Simpsons featuring that fine parody of the Masons, The Stonecutters.
Another really neat building in the neoclassical style. I think so, anyway. It does have columns. I wondered if the Masons had an outsized influence in Indianapolis. Regardless, the city has retained some very nice, old buildings.
Across the street the from the temple is the Scottish Rite Cathedral.
Scottish Rite is something to do with Freemasonry but I’m not sure exactly what. I have a friend who is a Free and Accepted Mason and has talked about other Masons that follow the Scottish Rite but has never explained what it all means, presumably because it’s a big secret and he’d have to kill me if he ever went into detail.
The cathedral was dotted with friezes or whatever you call them of bats and owls.
The stretch I was on had displays off on the side of the path dedicated to various historical figures and I investigated the ones for Thomas Edison and Susan B. Anthony.
Perhaps one of these trips I’ll rent a bicycle and investigate the Trail further.
I headed northeast to another neoclassical (columns!) building which turned out to be Indy’s central library.
On the west side of it was a piece of art that I call the Headless Slender Man statue. I give Indy credit for featuring a piece of public art that is a bit odd and uncanny if not genuinely disturbing.
It turns out that the library was at the north end of a several blocks long stretch of memorials, fountains, parks, and whatnot. The library faced the American Legion Mall lined with even more neoclassical buildings including the American Legion National Headquarters.
The memorial in the center here is for Hoosiers who served in “the World War”, i.e. – World War I. There were more memorials along both sides of the mall but I stuck to the west side and encountered the one for those who served in the Vietnam War.
Stepping into the space created by its semi-circular shape, one is confronted by a list of all the Hoosiers who died in that conflict. Walking around it, I saw that excerpts from letters home by those who never returned alive were etched into the concrete.
The mall was a lovely, peaceful spot. A great greenspace in the northern part of downtown.
There were Canada geese ambling around on the grass in the middle of mall as well as hanging out in the shade on the tree-lined sides. Oddly enough, I didn’t see one pile of goose shit.
Continuing south, I crossed the street and was at Obelisk Square which is home to a very large black obelisk with a fountain at its base.
It didn’t appear to be a war memorial and instead had these rather large bas reliefs at the bottom which illustrated…I don’t know…general virtues, maybe. The virtues that make a nation strong, perhaps. One with a cross must have represented religion. Another was of a woman reading to a child while holding a torch. Wisdom and knowledge? And there was one with a guy relaxing near a globe with a surveying telescope behind him and a familiar looking bird ahead of him.
An owl! The Masons are everywhere in this town!
Crossing another street to the south I arrived at the Indiana War Memorial & Museum. It’s a building I’ve seen from a couple blocks away previously but now I would actually see it up close.
Again, neoclassical (I think) with colonnades. The cornerstone indicated that it was laid by old Black Jack Pershing himself on 4 July 1925. It’s a rather imposing structure – like a fortress. The bronze(?) doors were rather neat.
They looked like they'd be right at home in Lord of the Rings and I could envision some king entering his fortress through these doors after a hard day of killing orcs and being greeted by an entourage bearing fresh clothes, some water to wash the blood off, and a big flagon of mead.
Out front was a statue entitled “For the Fatherland”.
When it doesn’t look like a fortress, it has the feel of a mausoleum. There wasn’t a welcoming entrance inviting me in and I felt like I was being asked to contemplate the sayings etched into the exterior walls instead. Checking out the museum would have to wait for another visit.
Continuing south was another wonderful bit of greenspace. Not only were there trees and flowers and grass, but also this beautiful fountain.
Men and women joyously dance as fish swim at their feet. At the top a woman plays a cymbal. Something joyous and a bit of revelry made for a nice contrast to the more serious and solemn things I'd seen on my way here.
On the east side of the fountain area was a statue of a woman holding a flower that looked like a water lily.
And on the opposite side of her was one of Pan playing his pipes, which means that figure above is surely a nymph. Pan is no doubt trying to convince her with a song to rusticate out in the country with him where he would plow her field, so to speak.
This reminded me of a statue that I had seen on my wanderings the day before which featured the Roman god Mercury. It was neat to see neoclassical architecture and Greek/Roman statuary dotting the cityscape. Man, Indy sure does love a war memorial! I wonder if anything commemorates the fallen from our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq over on the east side of the mall that I didn't investigate.
During my perambulations I seemed to encounter very little auto traffic. There was some, of course, but it felt like I didn't have to go very far from the convention center to escape a constant stream of cars. Do a lot of the businesses there let folks work from home? Or do locals just try to avoid downtown to keep their distance from the unwashed masses of gamer dorks? I couldn't blame them if they do.
While there were cars parked everywhere, I saw relatively few people. The mall was populated mostly with the homeless, as I walked through. A gentleman came out to his car from the Scottish Rite church as I was admiring it and he chatted with me briefly. Indy is a very friendly city. Hell, even the geese don't shit in public, it seems.
And so I completely failed to spend more time at the convention this morning. But it was a fun and intriguing hike around the downtown.
********
Bonus photo. Cats! Here’s one from many years ago with Grabby grooming a very young Piper out on the porch of our apartment.
Bassist, UW-Madison professor emeritus, and social justice activist Richard Davis passed away a couple days ago.
While jazz was his home base, the Chicago native’s genius jumped genres. Moving from Chicago to New York, he played with everyone from Sarah Vaughan to Van Morrison, from Leonard Bernstein to Bruce Springsteen. Critic Greil Marcus called his work on Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” album “the greatest bass ever heard on a rock album.”
Much like funk drummer Clyde Stubblefield did when he moved to Madison, Davis embraced the city, playing at local clubs and educating and inspiring generations of students as a UW-Madison music professor.
Davis was also an influential community activist on racial issues in Madison, and made it a personal mission to increase diversity and inclusion at UW-Madison, founding the Madison chapter of the Institutes for the Healing of Racism.
Here's the Richard Davis Quintet performing "St. Louis Blues" at the Craig Auditorium down in Janesville, WI on 27 April 1996.
A trio of previously uncirculated shows from the legendary Madison music venue, Merlyn's, have been posted at Dime.
Air 1981-02-10
Art Ensemble of Chicago 1980-10-29
Ronald Shannon Jackson 1982-11-27
The taper noted: "A friend of mine was a student at U-W Madison in the early 1980s. He noticed someone recording various jazz shows at Merlyn’s and requested copies of a few shows. He recently asked me to transfer these 1st gen cassette copies to CDR. This transfer is the basis for these audio files.
Unfortunately my friend did not keep in touch with (the taper) nor does he remember much about the recordist, who likely still has a stash of shows recorded in Madison in the late 1970s and early 1980s."
I have recordings of Brand X and Pat Metheny performing here in Madison at Bunky's in 1978. Same taper?
