I see people debating Frank Zappa on social media a lot, but of course they are, he's an annoying genius. Inevitably, someone asks what album or albums they should check out, which is raw meat to the classicrocksplainers, who immediately show up in droves for the feeding frenzy that quickly devolves into the 'just list every Zappa album we can think of because we'd rather parade our knowledge than give a useful answer' approach. Well, I've got a useful answer of my own: do it yourself. But if you want, do check out this guest radio spot he and Captain Beefheart did in 1975 to promote the Bongo Fury album and tour, for which Beefheart briefly joined Zappa's Mothers and they laid down an underrated avant/R&B/contemporary classical stew (much better than any Zappa material with Flo & Eddie on it, take that classicrocksplainers). This radio show is revelatory, featuring some Bongo Fury cuts (I really like "Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy"), but mostly made up of early Zappa recordings, experiments, live jams, etc. that took place before the Mothers of Invention were named as such, and man this stuff is raw and punky avant-madness, predating the LAFMS almost in full (not as much synth/electronic input, but it's creeping in the corners).
POSTSCRIPT: After listening to the whole 67 minute upload on YouTube, with a different tab up, the next video started immediately, Muddy Waters live at the Checkerboard Lounge in 1981 (the time when the Rolling Stones happened to drop in), and as Muddy's band went into the intro vamp and played it for several seconds, before any vocals came along, I didn't even bat an eye thinking it was still more early Mothers and/or Beefheart music. These Mojave Desert weirdos were a straight-up top-notch greasy raw rhythm & blues band! Respect due!
(This Long Hots tape review has been lying around not-quite-finished for months, but I'll finally post it now in advance of their just-announced upcoming 7" on Third Man Records and summer tour with David Nance Group:) An honest-to-goodness primitive power trio laying down extendo trance rock and roll music, heavily instrumental, but not without a brat/boogie group vocal approach that really puts the roll into the rock. Eva Killinger is on drums, and she was in the ultimate Philly underground trance gunk rock and roll band Spacin', so you know that's a good start. The guitarist and other vocalist is Rosali Middleman, who just released a singer/songwriter album under her first name Rosali called Trouble Anyway, but Long Hots ain't singer/songwriter, it ain't even really songwriting at all, this is ur-rock, and Ms. Middleman's primordial grinding/keening/singing rhythm/lead guitar kills throughout, not surprisingly heard to great effect on the 9-minute "Boogie Trance." (See, it's not just me using the word "trance.") Kathryn Lipman plays bass guitar that is also very ur-, locking in with Killinger and laying down the train tracks for Middleman to flow over. And to be honest, it's a pretty rough practice-room recording, any/all mistakes left in, and as much as I like it, it still feels like they're just getting started.
Shoutout to the @GreatestMusicOfManAndWomankind IG feed, which recently turned me on to the work of Charles Amirkhanian. From 1969 to 1992, he was the music director of KPFA (Berkeley, CA), the flagship station of the Pacifica Radio Network, where he hosted countless programs featuring guests from the world of experimental contemporary classical avant-garde music (or, in the parlance of the times: "new music"). Said IG feed pointed out a 2-hour 1980 episode of Morning Concert that was hanging out on archive.org, in which Amirkhanian's guest was Eliane Radigue, and from there I found a 1979 episode of the same program with guests Joan La Barbara and Morton Subotnick. I wondered if Joan and Morton appeared in two different segments, but it turns out they were a married couple then (how did I not know that?) and still are (he's almost 86 and she'll be 72 in June). They both sound so cool and intelligent and nicely humored, and wow, the music on the show: a super-great excerpt from a Subotnick piece called "A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur," and my god, the holy of the holies, Joan's "Twelvesong." About 20 years ago (around the same time I bought my own cheapo second-hand copy of Silver Apples of the Moon), I was lucky enough to first hear her extended vocal pieces, thanks to an #oldhead (music-hound college professor, in this case). They've always haunted me, but "Twelvesong" is the hauntiest of them all, her unreal non-electronic vocal soundscape (the title refers not only to the 12:12 running time but to "twelve tracks of voice, layered") getting way into oft-forgotten subconscious nooks. (Not to mention crannies.)
Released in 1978, an older, wearier, wiser Anita O'Day, post-heroin, enjoying a second career in Japan. A fine document of her easy chemistry with long-time drummer John Poole (they also co-owned the record label, Emily Records). Picked this LP up in a free stack at the local oldhead used bookstore which, against all Amazon-hellworld odds, is still open noon to 8pm every day. And speaking of the neighborhood, Anita O'Day is my all-time favorite former attendee of Nicholas Senn High School, a mere 15 blocks away from Blastitude HQ (and she's got a real rogue's gallery of competitors for that honor, including William Friedkin, Harvey Korman, Harold Ramis, and Shecky Greene himself). She might be your favorite Senn alum too if you've seen her smashing outfit and stoned improvisational regality onstage at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, as indelibly captured in the film Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960, d. Bert Stern, Aram Avakian).
Even if that performance somehow doesn't do the trick, I know you'll love her early 1940s tenure with the Gene Krupa band, especially the super-fun (and for the time daringly integrated) million-selling 1942 duet with trumpeter/vocalist Roy Eldridge, "Let Me Off Uptown."
I wondered if the song was meant to be about Chicago's legendary northside entertainment district, just a couple miles south of where I type, though figured they were probably talking about the more nationally known "uptown" of Harlem, New York. Then again, c'mon... Anita grew up and learned how to be a jazz singer in Chicago's Uptown, and Krupa was from Chicago too. As luck would have it, she wrote a great memoir in the 1980s called High Times Hard Times, and it answers the question with this crucial passage featuring the song's lyricist Redd Evans (as well as good ole Senn High):
Senn Junior High had my body between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM, but my mind was wandering the taverns of the Uptown district. In 1936, Chicago was still a toddlin' town. In addition to the big clubs and theaters in the Loop that used stars, there were a lot of funky Uptown hangouts such as the Barrel of Fun, Liberty Inn, Warm Friends, and, of course, the 5100 Club where eventually Danny Thomas was to make his name. At school, the only time I felt I was living was during Friday afternoon entertainments. I was obsessed with music and Fridays I'd let it all out. The rest was zilch. The way I looked at it was I had to serve my sentence. On December 18, which I thought was my sixteenth birthday, I split again. That night I sneaked out the window of our apartment, as I'd been doing since the truant officer got me, went over to the 5100 Club where a lot of kids hung out on the street, listening to Fletcher Henderson's brother Horace blow. Horace had a terrific band. On this particular night, I fell into conversation with the cat named Redd Evans, who played the sweetpotato (ocarina) with Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. He and I got to singing and I really felt alive, as if I was where the action was at last. "I like riffs, don't you?" Redd asked. "Riffs? What are they?" He sang one, then explained that it was a repeated musical phrase. I really dug that. Riffs became the center of my world. I went around working out riffs all the time. So Redd had an influence on me from the first time we met.
Hey Anita, guess what? I like riffs too. There's no doubt that Anita knows and feels and gets music, with passages to that effect throughout, like this nice one about Charlie Parker:
I idolized Charlie Parker because I would say he was one of the great jazz geniuses of all time. He changed the whole face of the music. What I mean is that when Louis Armstrong became popular, all trumpet players had to change their styles. Not the rest of the band. But when Charlie Parker became popular with his be-bop tunes, everybody had to change his style -- the drummer, the piano player, the singer, whoever.
There's also this excellent episode of the NPR program Jazz Profiles that spans her entire career, with lots of great interviews and musical selections. I love it when John Poole emphatically points out that she wrote a song called "Rock and Roll Blues," and the year she wrote it was 1947, long before Elvis Presley showed up. (Maybe he's so emphatic about the year because a recording of the song didn't seem to come out until 1952.) Could it be that the swing era is the actual birth of rock'n'roll? I did once say on twitter that Gene Krupa was the first rock star....
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PHOTO: Dolman. LOCATION: Raising Cane's #352, 6568 N. Sheridan Rd., Chicago IL
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Finally wrapping up this Anita O'Day piece, to the point where I'm even filing the LP, and I thought it was notable that it was right next to The Visitor by Jim O'Rourke. He didn't go to Senn, but he is also from Chicago, and not all that far away. "I grew up on the northwest side of Chicago, near the airport, near the beginning of the suburbs," is what he told Popwatch magazine (issue #8, Winter-Spring 1997), and I swear I remember him saying, in a different interview I can't find, something about going to the Goldblatt's store in Anita's old haunt Uptown to buy records when he was a kid. It's an impressive historic building, built in 1915. Anita would've also known it as Goldblatt's, as they were in the building for a very long time, from 1931 until they finally closed down in 1998, possibly an early victim of the internet. It became a Border's Book Store in 2004, which is how I knew the building as a Chicagoan. That store never felt quite right, and was definitely a victim of the internet when it closed in 2012. The building has been shuttered since, and even with the forces of hypergentrification that have swept into so much of Chicago, Uptown remains a relatively funky multicultural big-city music neighborhood, with shows almost every night at the Aragon, the Riviera, and the Green Mill.
