debutante blues

I can't think of a better thing to come along right on time for this weekend's 50th anniversary bananapalooza:

http://blog.sfgate.com/thebigevent/2015/07/01/grateful-deb-when-the-dead-played-a-debutante-ball-in-1966/

Hey now!  I mean, really:

working undercover with a boar hog's eye?

I'm going to go ahead and presume that the punch went undosed that night.

a little bit more on Stockhausen

When I said "Stockhausen was a big influence on pretty much everybody," I was really thinking about the Beatles, and Light Into Ashes reminded me about Miles Davis as well.  Paul McCartney was one of Stockhausen's more famous fans, and his influence on the Beatles (starting with "Tomorrow Never Knows") was even acknowledged on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.  This fine piece by Alex Ross does a nice succinct job of mapping the influence more specifically.

I dug out the two books that I'd seen connecting the Dead with Stockhausen: Alex Ross' excellent The Rest is Noise and Mark Pendergast's The Ambient Century both make passing mention of Stockhausen's lectures at UCLA in 1966-67 that were attended by "members of" the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane (Ross 474, Pendergast 54).  While I'd bet that Phil Lesh was the Dead's chief representative (he had already been studying this stuff prior to joining the Dead anyway), that still seems like a thread worthy of investigation.  Stockhausen himself also apparently took in some concerts at the Fillmore.

LIA also pointed out that Garcia himself shows no sign of having listened to anything like this, whereas Lesh and Weir have mentioned classical influences in interviews.  At the risk of sounding like even more of a dilettante, I'll suggest that music like Stockhausen's Kontakte may not need a lot of repeat listenings to completely re-wire one's sensibilities, particularly if one is possibly under the influence of a psychotropic substance like LSD.  Unlike, say, John Coltrane, who's impact in live performance was certainly just as visceral and potentially life-changing (cf David Crosby's great story), figuring out exactly what his band was doing probably required you to sit down and listen repeatedly to the record -- which is apparently what various members of the Dead did, Garcia included.  Certainly there is far more to music like Stockhausen's than one will ever appreciate at first listen (not that I know what it is yet), but I don't know that much of the internal workings of something like Kontakte would have really impacted the Dead.  My guess is that, outside of Phil Lesh (who, again, was already well-studied in this kind of music), no one was sitting down with the scores for this stuff and incorporating those techniques into the Dead's own musical approach.  Outside of Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa, there really wasn't much experimentation with tape loops and electronics, was there?  And by 1968, that influence was probably more directly traceable to the Beatles than to Stockhausen himself.  I'm also putting aside Seastones and Phil & Ned for now; clearly Ned Lagin owed a great deal to Stockhausen.

I would think -- and I'm just guessing here -- that someone like Garcia could have spent a couple of evenings bugging out over a record like Kontakte and then never intentionally listened to it again.  But that could have been enough: it still could have had a profound impact on his still relatively fresh and still-expanding conception of music.  I can see how just a couple of listens could prompt the kind of thinking that led to the Feedback meltdowns of the 60's, the sparse interior jams in the 1969-1970 era Dark Stars, that sort of thing.

edit: I went back through David Malvinni's The Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation (2013), and he touches on Stockhausen a bit in one of his chapters on Dark Star, although not really in a way that answers any of my questions.  In short: 

• Tom Constanten actually studied with Stockhausen in 1967, prior to joining the Dead.  That experience rubbed off directly on Anthem of the Sun [although maybe more in theory than in practice; I always had the sense the Anthem sessions were pretty chaotic].
• Lesh was a devout admirer of Stockhausen, modeling his own early (pre-Dead) orchestral writing on Stockhausen's work.  Lesh also "ran the controls" for performances of Stockhausen's tape compositions.
• "'Kontakte' is spatial music with swirling electronic effects, based serially on the placement of speakers in a room for its full effect; it clearly is the sonic godfather of the Dead's concept of 'Space,' a rhymthically free region relying on electronic effects both within sections of pieces like 'Dark Star' and as the middle point of the second set after Drums." (Malvinni 107)
• There's another mention of members of the Dead attending Stockhausen's 1966-67 lectures (at UC Davis, according to this source, not UCLA), but no further details.
• Stockhausen redefined his music as "intuitive" and "beyond improvisation," embracing the belief that humans were on an evolutionary cusp of experiencing universal consciousness, telepathy, etc.  The Dead (and Lesh in particular) embraced similar ideas of group-consciousness (both with each other and with the audience), though that seems more like a parallel aesthetic and less like an influence.
• Stockhausen and his students may have attended the 4/24/72 Dusseldorf show… that's according to Rock Scully's book, though, so a grain of salt for that one.

So still not much in the way of specifics, beyond Kontakte begetting all the weird stuff in Dark Star, Space, etc.  I wonder if there are transcriptions or notes of Stockhausen's lectures?

a little light listening: Stockhausen, Herbie Hancock

A friend came by last night for a little listening session with a handful of German electronic records, including Stockhausen's seminal work Kontakte (the 1968 Candide lp, if it makes a difference).  I think I'd heard it before, probably in a cursory "isn't that interesting" way during some college music survey class, but oh man, my mind was good and thoroughly blown by it last night.  One of my summer projects is to read and listen up on Stockhausen.  I know he's a big deal, but my firsthand exposure to why he's a big deal is pretty scant.  Time to do some homework! 

I also then remembered that Phil Lesh recommended Kontakte, in the same breath as Ives' 4th Symphony and Coltrane's Africa/Brass, when asked for some pieces of music that deadheads should be checking out.  Stockhausen was a big influence on Lesh and the Dead, but just saying that is kind of a truism: Stockhausen was a big influence on pretty much everybody.  The Stockhausen/Dead connection is worth some deeper excavating, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole right now.  Later, maybe.

After my friend left, I was in a electronic state of mind, so I had a nightcap with the atmospherically weird and wonderful "Water Torture" from Herbie Hancock's Crossings, the second album by his groundbreaking band Mwandishi.  Then I also remembered another off-hand link between the Dead and Stockhausen, via Hancock himself.  A few months ago I'd read his new-ish autobiography, Possibilities, and there's this bit when he's talking about the first time he heard Stockhausen:

"When I first heard those sounds [Stockhausen's earlier piece Geseng der Junglinge], I felt drawn to them, though I didn't really investigate how he'd created them, since I wasn't interested in making electronic music myself.  Stockhausen's work was often categorized as classical, but it fell on a continuum of avant-garde music that intrigued me, a continuum that stretched from Stravinsky and Bartok all the way to Jerry Garcia." (Hancock, 104-105)

OK then!  It's not often you see ol' Jer casually mentioned in the same company as Stockhausen, Stravinksy, and Bartok.  It's even more surprising because Hancock mentions throughout his book that he very rarely kept up with what was happening in rock & roll at all (although nowadays he's no stranger to crossover collaborations with all kinds of rock/pop stars).  The connections between Hancock and the Dead are actually pretty thin: I'm sure some of the band were aware of Hancock's music, and the Garcia/Saunders band shared a bill with Hancock at least once, but I think that's about it in terms of actual links.  A couple of other amusing things jumped out at me while reading Hancock's book, though:

• Besides being a serious gadget-head, Hancock was also a taper: he taped a lot of Miles Davis Quintet gigs on his own (and tells a funny story about how Miles would scowl at him as he crawled under the piano to set up his mics as the gig was starting).  Hancock says that his soundman recorded most performances by the astounding Mwandishi band (circa 1970) and that the band would relisten to them obsessively, but all those tapes were stolen out of their van one night in NYC.  I guess that explains why all of the circulating recordings of the group are from 1971 and later. 
• The Mwandishi group lugged around a $10,000 state-of-the-art portable quadrophonic sound system (circa 1971) so as to not be stuck with whatever old PA the club happened to have.  I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing this was still relatively rare for most touring musicians and unheard of for a jazz group in 1971.  Another book on Hancock's Mwandishi period (Bob Gluck's You'll Know When You Get There) also talks about the extremely high quality of Hancock's PA system.  Sound familiar, anyone?
• Carlos Santana was invited to play on the Crossings album, but he couldn't hang with the music.

Stockhausen, the Grateful Dead, Herbie Hancock.  Where was I going with this?  Great minds think alike, I guess.

Academy of Music, March 1972

Charlie Miller has just released his transfer of 3/25/72, the Bo Diddley/GD show, which finally means that every note from the 1972 Academy of Music run is now circulating for our listening pleasure.  Until pretty recently, these shows represented a big hole in what is arguably the greatest year of the band's career.  There were always poor aud recordings of most of these shows, but none of it circulated on sbd at all until a few years ago, and it's only been in the past few months that about half of these sources entered the general public circulation.  Yee haw!  Thanks, Charlie!  I believe most (all?) of these derive from that mysterious third batch of Bettyboards, the ones that are still being held by a guy who bought Betty Cantor's equipment cases at auction and discovered the moldy reels, which were eventually cleaned up by Rob Eaton (correction: not Rob Bertrando).  I think?  There seems to be a lot to that story that remains untold.

Anyway, eat it up, music lovers:

https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-21.sbd.miller.92395.sbeok.flac16
https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-22.132726.sbd.miller.flac16
https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-23.sbd.miller.100000.sbeok.flac16
https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-25.133593.sbd.miller.flac1648
https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-26.133303.sbd.miller.flac16 (also Dave's Picks 14)
https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-27.132366.sbd.miller.flac16
https://archive.org/details/gd1972-03-28.132729.sbd.miller.flac16 (also Dick's Picks 30)

No reviews for now.  If you've forgotten about it, go listen to the very unusual and very beautiful Caution > jam > Uncle John's Band from 3/22.

And, for your reading pleasure, here's a fun contemporary article on the whole crazy week:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2014/09/march-21-28-1972-academy-of-music-nyc.html

9/11/74 - as natural as breath or speech or thought

I'll be done with my Ornette musings for now, but I did find one more little nugget that segues nicely into something else.  This excellent appreciation by trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum reminds us that Ornette's greatness was in positing "that the infinite improvisational possibilities of a melody could thrive outside of a predetermined structure, that musical ideas could flow and expand in the moment as naturally as breath or speech or thought."

That struck me more than once last night as I listened to a truly amazing yet strangely under-recognized performance from one of the Dead's most heralded years and felt the need to trumpet its greatness.  I'm talking about the last night of the Dead's London run in Sept 1974, released in small part on Dick's Picks which ignored the towering highlight.  This short European tour seems pretty universally dismissed as a poorer run of shows, with one glowing exception (9/18/74), and in my own unscientific observation it seems like the three London shows are overlooked because of their official release status.

www.postertrip.com

Confession: 1974 is seen by many as a high watermark for the Dead, and I agree in theory, but in practice I find a good deal of 74 to be a little too, well, I dunno, too coked out.  It's still one of their best years and has some of their very best moments, but it also has a fair bit of spiky, edgy jamming that makes my gums throb and my cheekbones ache.  Coupled with the flatter feel of many of those 1974 sbd recordings, I find myself gravitating more towards 1972-73 or 1976 these days (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of writing this on the anniversary of 6/18/74, one of the finest shows of the year).  There's extramusical stuff that colors how I hear this year, too: the amazing but cripplingly extravagant Wall of Sound itself, the band's dissatisfaction with playing larger and more impersonal venues, the increasing intensity/insularity of the behind-the-scenes scene, the growing dependence on cocaine to keep the whole train moving.  It all sounds like one hell of a pressure cooker, and I do think the music reflects that to a significant extent, as brilliant as it often was.

I bring this up because, according to various sources, most of these things came to head on this last night of their London stand.  Someone's book (Rock Scully's?) tells a tantalizing and hopefully not too good to be true tale of the organization's collective coke problem getting so out of hand that one of the roadies finally called for everyone to empty all of their stashes onstage that afternoon and sacrificially light the whole pile ablaze.  Ned Lagin picks up the story and relates how the band huddled up and agreed to reset the levels and engage in a little lysergic purification (he explicitly says so in the interview in Gans' book and hints at it here).

So inevitably that may color your listening to this, too.  It certainly colors mine.  There are a number of shows where folklore has it that the band were all tripping -- we seem to festishize some (8/27/72 and 5/11/78 come to mind) and don't make much of others, for whatever reason (I feel like this is rarely brought up about any of the Oct 74 Winterland shows).  9/11/74 seems to fall into the latter category.  You go down a slippery slope once you start trying to identify indicators of pscyhotropic drugs that are evident in music.  I don't know that the Dead sound different when they're suitably dosed vs. relatively sober (or on something else), but I dunno, there's just a different kind of a vibe.  It may be pure conjecture, but this night feels like it has that vibe all over it.

Granted, another contributing factor may be the recording.  I listened to this fine new matrix blending the meh sbd with an impressive audience recording.  Let's hope these good people are able to put one together for the night before as well!
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-09-11.132458.mtx.GEMS-BCE.flac16

There are folks who don't get much out of 73-74 era first sets, and I get that, but this one seems to me like it shimmers a little more than usual.  The matrix helps to really highlight some of the dyanmics that are usually missing many 1974 sbds, so that's certainly a contributing factor -- Sugaree is an example of a tune from this period that rarely jumps out at me, but the dynamic contrasts that are highlighed by the roomy ambiance here really bring it to life.  Little details kept jumping out at me throughout: Donna's little patch of scatting (as opposed to oooh'ing glossolalia) in the crackling Scarlet jam, Jerry's daredevil little fills under Bob's vocals in Jack Straw, Phil's divebombing runs in Big River... all this stuff gives a very well-played set a little extra sparkle.  Only Bobby McGee seems to wobble and struggle to stay upright.  The closing Playing in the Band seems to deviate slightly but significantly from many other Playin's that characterize the year for me: the first half seems content to revel in its own environment rather than charge forward, but it never feels stagnant or dull to me.  The second half builds a little more purposefully, but without the single-minded, teeth-clenched determination of many Playin' jams of this vintage.  They push and pull at it, never too forcefully, gradually building a delicious kind of tension, which Jerry finally resolves with a little mini-Tiger rush at the end, although here it feels less like a harried, hard-won peak and more like finally letting steam out of a valve.  Phew!  Some ride.

The second set, though, is what puts this in the upper tier of 1974 jams, and, if pressed, I would probably say, of 1971-74 jams in my book.  It could have been included on the Dick's Picks release (the sbd is under 74 minutes), but I guess I can see why it wasn't.  I suspect most heads would prefer to pass on Phil & Ned's sets, and even if you're one of them, don't automatically pass on this one: many of them could be ear-splittingly jagged (like the next one on 9/14/74), but some could be softer, developing more organically and gently, and I would put this one with that bunch.  The first few minutes seem like Ned alone, patiently sending synth waves spiraling and twisting slowly out into the void, almost curiously probing.  It's not all smooth sailing, of course, but it never gets abrasive.  Billy appears, then Jerry, then eventually Bob, and Ned seems to mostly abandon the synthesizers and moves to his Rhodes piano.  This is pure Brain Moss Music, difficult to describe, palpably psychedelic, and deeply, deeply in a groove of its own.  They never played like this after 1976.  Eventually Eyes of the World appears on the horizon, and I love how it takes them seven more minutes to fully their get space together and begin it for real -- you don't often hear them find their way into a new song, cue it up, then back away so completely.  In one of the rare instances that his contributions to a full-band jam is audible, Ned adds some acrobatic keyboard lines as Keith comps behind him, and while this Eyes doesn't quite take flight and soar like others from the year, it doesn't have to.  They're already deep under the sea, so why bother to surface?  Eyes works through its changes brilliantly, finds its way to another nameless jam for another full ten minutes, and winding down with Wharf Rat.  Monstrous, leviathan, beautifully strange music, flowing and expanding in the moment as naturally as breath or speech or thought, up there with some of the best that the Dead created.  And from the looks of it, it was a beautiful old brokedown palace in which to have this experience:

the Alexandra Palace in 1974 (at an international darts championship!)

Phil announces a break to break down Ned's equipment and adds a spacey little comment, "Everybody turn around, look at your neighbor, and smile or something, like naaaah..."  Like whaaa?  It definitely sounds like everyone could use a little break.  The boys return for a perfunctory final mini-set, another half hour or so of reentry music to get everyone back on their feet and back in their minds.  The first few tunes are actually pretty hot and energetic, but by the time they get to Sugar Magnolia, it's clear that they're absolutely spent.  Phil takes the mic again, "Thanks a lot folks.  We couldn't have done it without you."

the gospel of unlimited possibilities

Worth a read:

"Ornette Coleman's Time," Rolling Stone 547, Mar 9, 1989.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/ornette-colemans-time-19890309

"[It's music for] people who can dig that there is more than one possibility. That's what Ornette always represented to me. No matter what direction you go in, there's always going to be other possibilities."  -Jerry Garcia

"I started going to church and taking the horn.  Have you ever gone to church and heard somebody who don't know how to sing at all?  Yet it sounds so beautiful.  The church was singing, and sometimes they would be singing in the key of Z!  Meanwhile, I'm playing with them.  And I thought, 'If I'm able to do this now, why can't I play like this outside?'"  -Ornette Coleman

RIP Ornette Coleman

Many jazz and music writers will write about Ornette Coleman more knowledgeably and eloquently than I can, so I will just share a few thoughts.  Coleman belonged to the "first name is enough" echelon of jazz giants, so I will refer to him as countless others have: Ornette.

Ornette was a true maverick genius of American music, and I'm fully conscious of the overuse of the word genius.  If a genius is someone who does something genuinely innovative yet wholly obvious and necessary in hindsight, then Ornette fits the bill.  From the start he had a clear vision: make music that sounds sounds beautiful and honest, regardless of whatever convention or pattern you may break in the process.  It's not exactly rocket science, yet at the time the idea was absolutely radical and divisive -- it still is.  Unlike other pioneers of "free jazz" (Cecil Taylor comes to mind), Ornette's music was also wholly inclusive: maybe it wasn't always approachable to those who preferred the conventional way, but Ornette's jazz never felt completely out of reach, never exclusive or closed off to non-believers.  It felt too real.  It wasn't confrontational and it wasn't explicitly reactionary: it was "folk art" in the most sophisticated sense.  Miles Davis was a contemporary who also warrants the "maverick genius" tag, but Miles' thing was always to push relentlessly, unapologetically forward, refusing to look back at what he left in his wake.  Ornette's music grew and changed over the course of his 50+ years, but it never felt like he was trying to leave anything behind.  It defied that narrative of "progress" and "development" that jazz critics love to map onto long careers like his, but it also never felt like he was being nostalgic or locked in the past either.  And it's no exaggeration to say that he completely changed the course of jazz in a way that almost no one else did: he rearranged the priorities, and folks like Miles, Coltrane, and Mingus on down changed what they were doing after Ornette's music hit.  Yet, for all of his maverick and revolutionary spirit, he was no isolationist: his music has always been about communication and community, always an ensemble music where the ensemble always remains just as much in focus as any soloist (I even chose the pic above with this in mind).

I didn't get it at first.  My father had the landmark Shape of Jazz to Come record and I listened to it as a kid and wondered what was going on.  So like much other "challenging" music, it wasn't until I got to see Ornette in person that it suddenly made sense.  This must have been around 1997 or so, and it was a reunion of Ornette with his original bandmates Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins at Lincoln Center in New York -- sadly, all have left us now.  I'm not being hyperbolic: it really was life-changing in a musical sense.  All of a sudden, "free" improvisation made sense.  It just seemed perfectly natural: three cats playing the music as it changes, grows, and moves around before us.  I had never heard anyone outside of the Dead play music in that way before.

The influence of Ornette shouldn't come as a surprise, though it wasn't talked about as often as influences like Coltrane or Charles Ives.   Weir said that the Dead were listening hard to Ornette in the 60's, and Miles Davis himself even reported that Garcia liked Ornette.  But just listen: every Dead jam that took it outside of the normal bounds owes a little something to Ornette's conception of music.

Blair Jackson's got the story of how Garcia hooked up with Ornette for 1988's Virgin Beauty album, with some extensive quotes by Garcia.  Some more pertinent background info is at deaddiscs as well.

And, of course, Ornette actually performed with them, too.  Twice!
https://archive.org/details/gd1993-02-23.116152.NeumannKMF4.daweez.d5scott.flac16
(this one has one track from Ornette's opening set with Garcia sitting in)
https://archive.org/details/gd1993-12-09.sbd.miller.91958.sbeok.flac16

But tonight, I'm breaking out the Atlantic box set, the Golden Circle trios, the amazing Science Fiction album, Dancing In Your Head and Of Human Feelings by the Prime Time band, all the way up to his final "official" album Sound Grammar that coincided with his Pulitzer Prize.  Long live Ornette!