Archive for August, 2006

Some worthwhile stuff floating around the good old Interweb . . .

• Destination: Out: MP3s of classic free jazz cuts with some passionate commentary. It’s a good spot for newbies; recent offerings include Lester Bowie, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor.

• Greenleaf Music: The site for trumpeter Dave Douglas’ Greenleaf label also has an interesting blog. Douglas is not only an incredible musician, but a deep thinker, and of late he’s been discussing the need for a thorough, unbiased history of serious contemporary music: “The history that needs to be told includes all sorts of music from all sorts of traditions: contemporary classical, music from non-U.S. of A. parts of the world, electric music, pop, blues, country, pure improvisation and purely imaginary traditions.”

• Oral History of Scratch Acid: Joe Gross, a writer for the Austin American-Statesman, put together this piece on Scratch Acid, which is reuniting for the upcoming Touch and Go 25th Anniversary event.

• PostClassic: Contemporary-classical writer Kyle Gann offers some thoughts on the recent death of composer James Tenney.

Throughout its history Drag City Records has extended its reach beyond contemporary artists to reissue music from some of the most overlooked iconoclasts of the 60s, 70s and, 80s (Gary Higgins, Big Flame, Half Japanese), as well as put out new material by veterans still doing bold work (Mayo Thompson’s Red Krayola, Scott Walker). Recently the label has released albums by two more greats from the 70s. One's a cult hero, and the other's totally unknown.

Bill Fay was one of the most interesting and literate folk-rockers to emerge in England on the cusp of the 70s. He made two superb albums for the Decca subsidiary Deram—1970's Bill Fay and 1971's Time of the Last Persecution, both reissued last year by Eclectic Discs. He was backed by some of the country’s most progressive jazz musicians of the time, players who were conversant in myriad styles and shared a sophisticated improvisational and harmonic language. Bill Fay featured nearly 30 musicians, organized by arranger Mike Gibbs; among them were saxophonist John Surman, Soft Machine drummer John Marshall, and guitarist Ray Russell—a titanic talent who bridged the gap between free jazz and psychedelic rock like no one else. (A new Russell album, Goodbye Svengali, was released on Cuneiform earlier this year). The follow-up was much darker and stripped-down, with Russell’s searing leads emerging as a key lyric feature.

The record-buying public didn’t respond to the records, and Fay stopped recording under his name and took on day jobs. But in the mid-70s he did hook up with an aggressive jazz-rock trio called the Acme Quartet, made up of younger musicians who were fans of the Russell-era style, but capable of adapting to Fay's more relaxed vocal style. They recorded an album’s worth of material between 1978-1982, but it remained unreleased until Jnana--the label affiliated with Current 93’s David Tibet—put it out in late 2004 as Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It’s a gorgeous collection that sets Fay slightly wry but melodic singing amid elegant piano figures, stately rhythms, and the occasional guitar explosion, courtesy Gary Smith. While Fay is often compared with Nick Drake and Bob Dylan, his idiosyncratic, gentle singing doesn't really owe a debt to anyone; there are things about the album that remind me of the solo work by fellow Brit Robert Wyatt, but their voices sound nothing alike.

Drag City released Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow on vinyl in late July, and it's shown similar good taste in the case of fingerstyle guitarist Mark Fosson. A few years back, while asking her mother is she had any John Fahey records, singer Tiffany Anders (daughter of filmmaker Allison Anders) discovered that her cousin had once played with the legendary guitarist. In her charming liner notes to The Lost Takoma Sessions she explains that Fosson had sent an unsolicited demo to Fahey, who was thrilled with the music--a photo of the tape package features Fahey’s scrawled note reading, “best demo tape I’ve heard since Kottke”--and asked the Kentucky native come to LA and play some gigs with him. He left for LA in January of 1977 and recorded an album for Fahey’s Takoma imprint the following month. Unfortunately, by then the label was in deep financial trouble, and before Fosson’s record was ever released Fahey was forced to sell Takoma to Chrysalis Records. Fahey returned the master recordings to Fosson, who tried in vain to find another label to release the music. It was soon relegated to his garage until Anders’s curiosity led to him digging it out, which eventually led to Drag City getting hold of it and releasing it late last month.

Early Leo Kottke is certainly a good point of reference for Fosson’s playing, a technically dazzling mix of gorgeous melody and deft counterpoint. Compared with the complex, blues-derived constructions of Fahey, which drew upon elaborate structures of Indian classical music, Fosson sounds straight-ahead, but his original tunes are filled with shape-shifting episodes sewn together with invisible threads—the music rolls forward with the fluid motion of the finest bluegrass picker, but its studded with fanciful harmonic thickets, counter-melodies, and pinpoint rhythmic clarity.

It’s actually not Fosson's first album. After the Takoma deal went sour he remained in LA and started pitching songs to MCA Records. He didn't have much luck, but he did get involved with the city’s underground country and singer-songwriter scenes, and even had some tunes included on A Town South Of Bakersfield Vol 2, a 1988 collection put together by Dwight Yoakam producer and guitarist Pete Anderson that also included tunes by Jim Lauderdale and Lucinda Williams. But it wasn’t until last year that Fosson finally released a collection of own music, Jesus on a Greyhound. It's a solid collection of rootsy country-rock, but the music on The Lost Takoma Sessions is something really special.

If that’s not enough, in October Drag City is releasing The Black Swan, a terrific new album by Bert Jansch, a long-time guitarist in the excellent 70s folk-rock band the Pentangle. The new record was coproduced by Jansch and Noah Georgeson, who worked on Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender, and features some guest spots from Beth Orton, David Roback, and king of the cameo whores Devendra Banhart.

Reedist Ken Vandermark presented the latest installment of his long-running Territory Band last night at Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion. It was an impressive concert, revealing the international ensemble as one of Vandermark's most rewarding and exciting vehicles; his episodic writing and meticulous arranging does a masterful job of sparking a variety of improvisational situations.

Things like instrumental combinations, rhythm, and color can’t be isolated from the composition in which they’re embedded, but the performance allowed discrete elements to emerge. A passage that featured only bassist Kent Kessler and Swedish tuba player Per-Ake Holmlander put the focus on low-end sounds, as the bass bounced and the horn blubbered in some gloriously gut-rumbling statements. Each section of the set-length piece flowed nicely into one another—an area where Vandermark is improving—but the real satisfaction was in getting absorbed by each one of them.

Fred Anderson was the featured soloist, and it's to Vandermark’s credit that he challenged one of his biggest heroes by putting him in unfamiliar settings: it’s a sure bet that the veteran tenor saxophonist had never dueted with the kind abstract electronics that Norway’s Lasse Marhaug produced. Anderson has an unflappably patient, deep-toned style, ruminating over the subtlest intricracies of a given phrase, and Vandermark presented some frenetic sections that created a nice tension while set against Anderson's playing. The concert was recorded for future release on Okka Disk Records, the former Chicago imprint that’s issued all of the Territory Band recordings, including the brand new 3-CD effort by Territory Band-5, A New Horse for the White House.

Few jazz artists have ever had the sort of spectacular aura created by Sun Ra, the legendary big-band leader who claimed he was from Saturn, outfitted his Arkestra in silky, astral-themed finery, and gave performances that mixed vanguard technique with show biz spectacle. Although he was in New York during the heyday of the New Thing—the free-jazz movement propelled by folks like Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman--Ra resided in his own universe, though he shared the New Thing's bold sense of exploration.

The seeds for Ra’s one-man revolution were sown in Chicago, where he moved from Alabama in the early 50s. A fascinating document of his Chicago years has just surfaced in a slim volume called The Wisdom of Sun-Ra, published by the local art press WhiteWalls. The book collects typewritten broadsheet screeds that Ra wrote and distributed on city street corners in the mid-50s. Until the appearance of this book, edited by occasional Reader contributor John Corbett and WhiteWalls editor Anthony Elms, only one of the broadsheets was known to exist: a leaflet Ra had given to Coltrane in 1956. These dense missives combine early Black Nationalism, biblical allusion, and elaborate—if fantastical and absurd—etymological theories (“Negroes belong to the race of Mu. Another way to spell Mu is moo. Moo means low. That’s the cow’s word. Negroes are Mr. Moo.”).

These writings were aimed directly at African-Americans, and many of the pieces embrace a unabashedly provocative tilt that sought to excoriate complacency and lack of self-knowledge. But there are passages that have a broader, more timeless significance. In the opening broadsheet, “What America Should Consider,” he sounds eerily prescient regarding America’s arrogance: “The kingdoms of the past fell because they grew too proud and self-satisfied. There is no room for self-satisfaction in a living world because there is too much to learn and do.” The Wisdom of Sun-Ra includes beautiful reproductions of the dog-eared broadsheets, with full transcriptions in the second half of book. As interesting as the writings are in their own right, they're also offer powerful insights into the personality and philosophy that was central to Ra's later work.

This collection kicks off a series of projects that shed light on Sun Ra’s early days. On October 1 the Hyde Park Art Center will host an exhibition, Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-61, that collects invented instruments, album covers, original copies of the broadsides, and drawings from the bandleader’s Chicago days. (The opening reception is on October 15.) Two weeks later a complementary exhibit called Interstellar Low Ways opens in the same space, collecting work by artists related to or inspired by Ra. On November 11 and 12 the museum hosts an academic conference on Ra’s legacy that will include roundtable discussions, performances, readings, and presentations. Confirmed to attend thus far are John Szwed (author of the definitive Ra biography Space is the Place), Robert Campbell (Ra’s assiduous discographer), Graham Lock (the British jazz scholar), and a number of art historians. There will also be concerts happening around this time with a Ra theme; Ken Vandermark and Thurston Moore are among the scheduled performers.

Eric Claridge, best known in these parts as the bassist in the Sea and Cake, has previously gained a small but devoted following for an indescribable series of paintings of chilled-out smoking monkeys. He's back this weekend with a new show, again dominated by animals. It goes up at the Rainbo Club this Saturday; there'll be a reception with the artist at 6 PM.

Tower Records has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which means that the cash-strapped chain is desperately looking for a buyer. Its also means there's a good chance the buyer will be a competitor who'll liquidate Tower's stock and shut it down. Read more here.

The Belgian label Sub Rosa has released a series of albums that showcase some of the rawest, most passionate examples of Morocco’s greatest traditional music; the latest installment is by the Master Musicians of Joujouka, the famed group of trance musicians from a small village in the Rif Mountains. In the past their music has made converts of Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Ornette Coleman, Brian Jones, William S. Burroughs, and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. Now our beloved Billy Corgan has joined the list of admirers. Corgan traveled to Joujouka this past March to watch the group perform in its native environment. His analysis: "This is the closest any other music comes to rock . . . . in its intensity.” Sorry Joujoukans, close but no cigar--a few months listening to Adore may do the trick.

Boujeloud—named after a Moroccan analog to the Greek god Pan, the spurned half-man, half-goat who taught the shepherd Daphnis to play the flute—was recorded during several visits to the village between 1994-1996, and features ritual music performed during the annual Boujeloud festival. As on other recordings of the group, the music throbs with a primal focus, all stuttering frame drum beats, trilling reed flutes, and piercing clusters of rhaitas--the distinctive double reed instrument whose sound could perform trepanation better than any drill--alternating between massed riffing and wild flutters.

Elsewhere: As a complement to Touch and Go Records’ big 25th anniversary celebration at the Hideout Block Party, the label is also presenting an exhibit of visual art made by a dozen artists on the label’s roster, including Jon Langford (Mekons), Tim Kerr (Big Boys), Mick Turner (Dirty Three), and Bianca Casady (CocoRosie). The show runs from Monday, September 4, through Friday, September 8, at Open End Gallery, daily from 9 AM to 6 PM.

In a piece for Time Out Chicago this week, longtime Roctober editor and Chic-a-Go-Go producer Jake Austen wrote about the Monks documentary showing at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. As the piece explains, Monks frontman Gary Burger is coming to town for the film screening Saturday--and then sticking around to play a set of Monks tunes on Sunday night at the Empty Bottle with masked garage heroes the Goblins as his backing band. What the piece fails to mention is that the Goblins is Austen's band.

Forgive the lecture, but one of the basic rules of journalism is that you don't write about stuff that you have a direct stake in--like your own band's show. I'm a longtime fan of Austen, whose boundless enthusiasm for his obsessions (one of which is the Monks) is one of the most appealing things about most of his endeavors. I have no doubt that the same enthusiasm that led to his involvement with the show motivated the article. But it creates the appearance of an ethical problem, which in journalism basically is an ethical problem.   

Here's the thing though: writers get paid to write, but editors get paid to know better. I know the Goblins wear masks and use pseudonyms to keep their real identities "secret," but I'm willing to lay odds that the music staff at Time Out were in on this particular not-so-secret secret. This is bad news for journalism standards, but great news for Chicago musicians, who are sick and tired of having to go through the whole rigmarole of persuading some middleman to write about their shows.

The Chicago Underground Film Festival kicks off tonight with Usama Alshaibi's Nice Bombs, a personal documentary about a trip to his Iraqi homeland following the U.S. invasion. But things really get started Friday, and there's a lot of musical content among the offerings--a superb Monks documentary as well as works on techno, Sympathy for the Record Industry honcho Long Gone John, and the Danielson Famile. (Check out the Reader's complete guide to the fest.) On Sunday there's a screening of Weird Paul: A Lo-Fidelity Documentary about the nerdy Pittsburgh indie rocker; he's coming to town for the event and then playing a show later than night at the Empty Bottle with M.O.T.O. and Gary Burger of the Monks, who'll be backed by the Goblins. 

Saturday's program, called "From the Mountains to the Prairies," includes a music video by Magnolia Electric Co., while Monday's "Odd Balls" program will feature the world premiere of Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players: Off & On Broadway--a doc about the goofy family troupe that writes fantastical songs about slides they find in thrift stores. Saturday's program, "We Are Not Laughing With You, We're Laughing At You," includes a short video made by Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc, Make Believe) called A Lover's Discourse.

As its fourth installment of Estrojam nears--it runs from September 27-30--the creators of the local showcase for female-oriented arts and culture have decided it could use a name change. Duh! I'm a man, but I think both genders can agree that Estrojam has to be among the worst names ever given to any event or organization. (Any takers out there to trademark Testosterofest?) Anyway, I suppose better late than never: go here to submit your suggestion for a new name. The winner gets a VIP pass to Estrojam 2007, whatever they're calling it then.

I wrote a story about Estrojam the year it debuted. Back then head organizer Tammy Cresswell claimed her event was more diverse than its inspiration, Ladyfest, but this year's event is limited to indie rock and pop stuff more than ever--the lineup includes a hotly anticipated Team Dresch reunion, as well as performances by Fannypack, Nina Hagen, and Paradise Island (the solo project of Erase Errata's Jenny Hoyston). Aside from the fact that the event totally ignores women working in experimental and jazz music, does that mean that women who play country, blues, and international music just aren't edgy enough?

Earlier this year England’s superb Soul Jazz label released the second volume in its Soul Gospel series. The disc has loads of gritty, hard-hitting testifying from artists who are both well-known (Clara Ward, the Staple Singers, Marion Williams) and more obscure (Sensational Cymbals, Lovers of God, and Rev. T.L. Barrett), though in truth none of the artists on the collection ever flew too far under the gospel radar. The name of the series isn’t very well-chosen; black gospel is one of the two roots of soul music, and it’s pretty much all soulful. But the compilation does focus on more contemporary (i.e. late 60s-early 70s) iterations of the form, which have a strong dose of funk rhythms.

Leave it to Chicago’s Numero Group label to go the extra mile with similar material. Its forthcoming collection, Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal (due out on August 29, but you can order it now here), not only has a better title, but its makers left no stone unturned in locating 18 killer tracks that almost no one who isn't a hard-core record collector will be familiar with. With typically informative and colorful liner notes, the CD ties together a rather far-flung and rarely practiced sound that was such a stylistic blip that it’s never really been tagged as a genre unto itself. The music is drawn from super-hard-to-find singles, and it speaks to the efforts of the label that the acknowledgments include funk experts Dante Carfagna (article available in the Reader's paid archives), Josh Davis (aka DJ Shadow), and local gospel sage Bob Marovich.

There are numerous Chicago-based selections, from the the tight, badass bass romp of “Bad Situation” by the 5 Spiritual Tones—which recalls early-70s Stevie Wonder—to the the timeless quartet harmonies of the Gospel Comforters on “Jesus Will Help Me,” which features a roiling groove that seems informed by Syl Johnson’s classic “Is It Because I’m Black.” Even though some of the tunes here are from the early 80s, the lo-fi production, as on the searing “God Been Good To Me” by Detroit’s Mighty Walker Brothers, deflects contemporary studio polish. Almost worth the price of admission by itself is “O Yes My Lord” by Detroit’s Voices of Conquest, in which a 20-strong chorus engages in battle with the furious drumming of one Benjamin Wilson. Obscurity for the sake of obscurity is boring; this stuff was just a victim of circumstance.

On October 7 the Stooges--joined by bassist Mike Watt--will begin recording a new studio album in Chicago with Steve Albini behind the boards.

Jim DeRogatis offers some reflections on last week's Lollapalooza here and here, examining its organizational and technical shortcomings. Despite a number of appealing performers I didn't attend the festival: I had household chores, and a 20-minute walk between stages is 18 minutes too much. For a particularly incisive meditation on the experience look here.

The lineup for Touch and Go Records' 25th anniversary celebration at the Hideout on September 8-10 has finally been nailed down. 

Although it’s ostensibly aimed toward crate-digging hip-hop and soul record collectors, I can’t think of a better music magazine published in the U.S. than Wax Poetics, which recently increased its publication schedule to six issues annually. Each issue contains well-researched, well-edited stories--with beautiful photos and graphics--by people who not only know their subjects, but know how to write as well. Even when I’m not particularly interested in a specific subject—the mag likes to write about once-reviled fusion purveyors like David Axelrod, Joe Zawinul, and the Mizell Brothers—the quality of storytelling and detail makes any article worthwhile.

The latest issue is largely devoted to Parliament/Funkadelic and includes interviews with mothership captain George Clinton as well as loads of the franchise’s most important players, including Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, and Billy “Bass” Nelson. There’s also a good interview with Pedro Bell, the Chicago artist responsible for some of Clinton’s most memorable and striking album covers. (More chats with him here and here.) Bell developed a distinctly black take on the comic- and muscle-car-derived art of Robert Williams that was all his own--once you've seen it you won't soon forget it. (Think of the gap-toothed freak mama that graces Cosmic Slop.) I'll never know why locals don't celebrate such a local treasure.

For most of the last decade Jazz Festival weekend has meant one thing at Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge: the annual appearance of New Orleans saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Hurricane Katrina changed that last year, though--Jordan was one of thousands left homeless due to the tragedy. But he returns to Chicago on Friday and Saturday, a few weeks before the Jazz Festival, to spar with his old chum Anderson for the grand opening of the new Velvet Lounge. They’ll be joined by bassist Harrison Bankhead and Jordan’s Crescent City drummer of choice, Alvin Fielder.

Jordan has enjoyed a long and varied career in New Orleans, initially working as a hired gun—he’s played with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder to Ray Charles—but he’s always been a jazzman at heart. Unfortunately, the fact that he's rarely recorded under his own name means he has a low profile for a musician of his stature and skill. Thankfully, the situation has been slowly rectified over the last decade--he's put out albums on Silkheart, Eremite, and Boxholder.

Just three weeks after Katrina hit, Jordan doggedly kept his commitment to a trio session for Aum Fidelity in New York, and the fruit of that labor has just been released. Palm of Soul (the site for the album includes sound samples) was recorded with bassist William Parker and Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, and it’s one of Jordan’s strongest outings. Although he’s an explosive blower, tapping into deep reserves of energy and upper register huzzah, the album is surprisingly gentle—aside from the minute-long postbop opener, the collection is dominated by ballads and turbulent meditations that feel appropriate considering the devastation Jordan had just witnessed. Parker only plays bass on two pieces, opting instead for ringing Asian percussion—gongs and metal bowls—and the Moroccan guimbri, a bass-like instrument, while Drake restricts his kit drumming in favor of tabla and frame drums.

Jordan’s tenor is distinguished by a weeping vibrato that navigates the space provided by his cohorts; he alternates between meticulous, fat-toned embroidery of bluesy licks and expressionistic, gorgeously striated cries. On “Unity Call” he delivers a stripped-down, slowed-down twist on Gnawan music, with Drake intoning Arabic vocals in a deeply soulful, chantlike style, and with Jordan answering and elaborating on each recited phrase. I’m sure Jordan will be in a more demonstrative, aggressive mode when he’s joined by Anderson in what promises to be some joyful gigs on August 11 and 12.

Note: EV Productions announced Wednesday evening that this show has been canceled.

Two of the most exciting artists on the excellent Los Angeles hip-hop label Stones Throw perform tomorrow night, August 10, at Morseland on a bill organized by Evanston imprint EV Productions. Oh No (aka Michael Jackson--no, not that one) is the sibling of Otis (dba Madlib), and while he’s still working in his brother’s shadow, his superb new album Exodus Into Unheard Rhythms proves he's coming into his own. The samples on the new album come exclusively from the work of Galt MacDermot, the Canadian-born arranger and pianist who composed the music for Hair--as well as for numerous sound tracks to Blaxploitation films like Cotton Comes to Harlem. Oh No makes room for a wide array of mostly west coast MCs and singers--Cali Agents, Aloe Blacc, Vast Aire, Murs, MED, and Dudley Perkins among them--to drop rhymes and melodies over the funky, intricate tracks.

Rapper Roc "C" (who first turned heads with the J Dilla-produced single “Move”) is another contributor to the Oh No album, and he’s got his own recent full-length, All Questions Answered. He’s got a gruffer delivery than most of his Stones Throw brethren, and there’s more than touch of gangster ‘tude on display; his tough talk on a track like “Fuck You” (“Fuck you / I don’t give a fuck / Why would I say I don’t give a fuck / If I really do give a fuck”) works much better in the ears than it does on the page. In short, he’s got more charisma, flow, and smarts than your garden-variety thug. Aloe Blacc, Perkins, and Chino XL are among the guests on the disc, and production chores were handled by Oh No, DJ Romes, and Kan Kick. Locals Earmint and Eulorhythmics also perform, in addition to resident DJs Tone B Nimble, Copperpot, and Teebot.

Moacir Santos, one of the greatest arrangers in the history of Brazilian music, died Sunday, August 6, in Los Angeles, where he had lived since 1967. He was 80.

Working behind the scenes during the international heyday of Brazilian music--from the mid-50s to the mid-60s--Santos never achieved popular recognition. But the handful of recordings he released under his own name were excellent instrumental affairs; his 1965 masterpiece, Coisas, is a dazzling display of extended harmony, cool jazz-influenced arrangements, spare improvisation, and sophisticated Brazilian rhythms. Among the many artists he worked with in Brazil were Vinicius de Moraes, Sylvia Telles, and Sergio Mendes. He later moved to LA to teach and work on film sound tracks, although he continued to record sporadically, making four albums for Blue Note. (One of them, 1974's Saudade, was recently reissued in Japan.)

Santos earned some acclaim late in his career thanks to the American label Adventure Music, which put out a pair of new recordings. In 2004 it released Ouro Negro, a 2-CD package originally released in Brazil, is a wonderful career overview, with vintage tracks and new recordings with the likes of Milton Nascimento, Ed Motta, Joyce, and Joao Donato; last year's Choros & Alegria featured all new material and a few guest cameos by Wynton Marsalis. 

The new print of Black Orpheus, currently showing at the Music Box, is nothing short of mind-blowing. Vibrant colors leap off the screen, but the relentless sound track is even more impressive. The 1959 Cannes Palme d’Or winner, directed by Marcel Camus and set in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, helped turn bossa nova into an international phenomenon (though none of the music is bossa nova, per se). But experiencing the film in a theater, volume cranked, makes it plain that the film's fantastic sound design involved more than some tunes that would later be transformed into bossa nova classics. Rhythms assault you from start to finish; Brazil is a country where music is as essential as oxygen, and the sound track throbs like a heartbeat.  

The beautifully edited dance sequences are driven by primal, complex samba beats; the ecstatic expressions of actual Carnival participants--and their rapidly moving feet--are meticulously cut in sync with the fierce polyrhythms. And the city's manic intensity is captured from the very first scene, when country girl Eurydice gets off a boat in Rio. An adaptation of the Greek tragedy, Black Orpheus (Orfeu da Conceiçao) was originally conceived in 1956 as a stage musical written by poet Vinicius de Moraes, and it marked the start of his fruitful and highly influential partnership with the then-unknown Antonio Carlos Jobim. (Architect Oscar Niemeyer, who helped create numerous Brazilian landmarks, as well at the UN headquarters in New York, designed the show’s set.) The film version included all-new songs written by Jobim, as well as a few by guitarist Luiz Bonfa. Since Marpessa Dawn (who played Eurydice) was an American, her vocal parts were dubbed by the great singer Elizeth Cardoso--who recorded some of the first bossa nova songs ever. The title character, played by Breno Mello (a handsome soccer star, not an actor), got his singing voice from Agostinho dos Santos.

The storytelling is heavy-handed, the obvious symbolism can be cringe-inducing, and the acting is frequently wooden. But the film still provides a spectacular peek into black Rio--all the more remarkable since it arrived at a time when such earthy, sexual movement was anathema to the average American filmgoer. Its narrative virtues may be suspect, but as a visual and sonic feast it remains unparalleled.

Two of the most idiosyncratic African-American musicians to ever play have died in the last few days. On Wednesday, August 2 Rufus Harley, a Philadelphia legend who started out as a saxophonist but soon found a way to play the bagpipes in a jazz context, died from prostate cancer at the age of 70. He made a number of peculiar jazz recordings for Atlantic, he also worked briefly as a sideman for hard-boppers like Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins, and he appeared on a pair of late Albert Ayler recordings, New Grass and Music is the Healing Force of the Universe [editor's note: see Comments for a correction]. Despite the freakish quality of his work, Harley managed to transcend its oddness much of the time. He’s perhaps best-known for some of his cameos—he played on “Sweaters” on Laurie Anderson’s classic Big Science, and on the title track of the Roots album Do You Want More?!!!??!

Yesterday Arthur Lee, the visionary behind the great psychedelic pop band Love,  passed away at the age of 61; he had been suffering from leukemia. During the late 60s his band delivered a natural-sounding mix of sweet, gorgeously orchestrated pop gems and nasty garage rockers. The band’s 1967 album Forever Changes was their masterpiece, but all of the group’s four albums for Elektra were strong. He broke the band up in 1968 and never came close to matching its artistic heights. For most of the 70s and 80s he struggled to regain his form and popularity without much luck and spent time in jail during the 90s for firearm possession. After his release in 2001 he cobbled together numerous line-ups to play the classic Love material.

Last night Ken Vandermark ’s Powerhouse Sound gave their second performance, bringing down the house at the Hideout. Usually the leader’s brawny tenor saxophone muscles its way to the top of the mix, but in the company of electric bassist Nate McBride, drummer John Herndon, and guitarist Jeff Parker it had to fight for its place. The group plays a stunning amalgam of electric music—I heard bits of Funkadelic, the early 70s work of Miles Davis, and spacey dub reggae—but it can’t be reduced to a simple composite of those sources.     

I’ve heard Parker play in loads of different contexts, where his preternatural mastery of funk and rock is hinted at, but this was the first time I can recall him ever visiting those styles with such purity; the spirit of Eddie Hazel loomed large, but Parker’s gooey, lacerating tone and his unpredictable melodic shapes were all his own. Herndon was a revelation, too. He provided a deep funk, but he consistently varied his rhythms with spontaneous accents and discrete improvised sections that provoked his bandmates without disturbing the music’s surprisingly graceful flow. Too often in such hard-hitting funk projects the bass player finds it necessary to strut his stuff, but McBride was a model of economy--no Jaco noodling here--laying down thick, muscular lines that bypassed the typical slaphappy simplicity of most funk for something more ethereal yet forceful. Instead of seeing how many notes he could cram into each bar, McBride frequently laid out to provide meaningful space. Vandermark, who wrote and arranged the music with both authority and a light touch, pushed as hard as he could, playing nicely angular lines that criss-crossed with the patterns of Parker and McBride, a mix of barwalk honk and free jazz abstraction. For all of the music’s rigor, it was incredibly fun. Here’s hoping that they become a more regular presence.

Towards the end of this article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker writes, “Refusing to be the fodder for someone else’s lifestyle-making machine because you are building your own strikes me as a hollow victory. But maybe I’m just too old to get it.”

That’s certainly the way I feel. The story examines the phenomenon of underground T-shirt makers, who forge an idea and create products—mostly clothing and other items that transmit a brand name—around it. The “ideas” are sketchy; there are various takes on subverting consumer culture, although none of the explanations about what's subversive here made much sense to me. I saw a bunch of examples of this sort of designer T-shirt at the Pitchfork Music Festival. In the struggle to express one’s individuality, or at least membership in an elite, non-mainstream community, nearly everyone looked like they were on the same team. It’s one thing to buy a white T-shirt and customize it as an extension of your own personality, and quite another to buy a manufactured model to try and accomplish the same task. Would the Baffler please stand up and explain all of this to me?