the Mothership is missing

John Luther Adams, The Far Country (lala)
Jónsi & Alex, Riceboy Sleeps
Jónsi, Go (lala)
Parliament, Live: P-Funk Earth Tour (lala)

Media announcements: Offbeat just launched its iPhone app containing its copious Jazz Fest Bible, including pieces by me (in the Fest Focuses section) on blues guitar singularity Robert "1-String" Gibson and old school soul crooner Brother Tyrone. I'm sure it all will be soon available in regular boring old website version and glossy print, but it is exciting to get published in app form.

In this week's installment of the 225 Record Crate blog, I get you primed for Earth Day, Baton Rouge Blues Week, Lost Bayou Ramblers, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and more fun than you can handle.

Also the Oxford American is throwing down this weekend in New Orleans in celebration of the 2010 Food Issue. Here's the intinerary for getting your foodie on with the my favorite magazine.

UFO announcement: The Mothership is missing! Though, if I had it in my back yard, I woudln't tell anyone either. I would just go out there in times of worry and sit in the captain's chair for a minute to recharge my interplanetary funksmanship. Thanks, @jgrossnas for the head's up.

And yep, that Jónsi record is as ecstatic and lovely as they've been saying. On the whole, 2010 has its musical shit together so far.

Boy Lilikoi - Jónsi

And sure, it might be as culturally productive as throwing plastic bags into the sea shopping there, but the Thai Basil Shrimp Noodle bowl at WFM coupled with a Jamacian-style ginger ale is suburban spring embodied in a grocery store dinner. Like the funk (make mine the P-funk, if you don't mind, yeah that one (pointing through deli counter glass) kthx), it can not only move but it can remove, dig?

P Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up...

"article mode"

Joe Bonomo, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost & Found (Amazon)
Mississippi Slim, You Can't Lose These Blues (lala)
John Lee Hooker, The Legendary Modern Recordings

Speaking of MTNs, above are the fabled Indian Mounds, sitting here on campus since before the time of the pyramids. I was looking for a picture online for the previous post and instead stumbled on this story, where archeologists speculate cremations may have gone down there. No better place to sit and read accounts on how the Killer resurrected himself after his sacrificial scandals and how his finest hours stand the tests of time.

See, can you tell I'm in "article mode?"

cool enough to have a pink suit

Mississippi Slim, from here

RIP Mississippi Slim. It's a sad thing in this informed world to be alerted to an interesting person's existence by the sudden swinging of the exit door. If I was anywhere cool enough to have a pink suit, I'd wear it in recognition.

Take Your Finger Out of It - M...

in the right valley BTW the MTNs of SHT

Holy Fuck, Latin (out 5/11)
Kathy Mattea, Coal (lala)
Bert Jansch, Santa Barbara Honeymoon (lala)
The National, various tracks from High Violet (out 5/10, obtained here and here and here)
LCD Soundsystem, This is Happening (streaming at their website)

I am just prudish enough to question the wisdom in putting "fuck" in your band name, plus I know how difficult it is to promote indie things in boorish old print (where it apparently still counts) and on the radio (dunno if that counts anymore) and your cheeky effrontery just doesn't help. Nonetheless, Holy Fuck's latest is great saunter-to-the-bus-stop music and "SHT MTN" (see, you don't have to put swears on everything for it to work) is the best song title of the year. I want to write "SHT MTN" on a lot of things now, in the taxonomizing sense. Perhaps I should have labels made up.

This by old Bert Jansch is a thing of dated, shimmering beauty heard high atop SHT MTN.

Lost And Gone - Bert Jansch

And damn if the National still aren't just the best band. If ever I reach SHT MTN's summit, I will tearfully plant their flag in its barren ground. I don't even know what this song is called and I love it already.



Get on that LCD Soundsystem. Smart as hell, I think, or even better, it feels smart as hell. It may actually be dumb as FCK and I may just be in the right valley BTW the MTNs of SHT to receive it.

The above is the small mountain of broccoli I am fixin' to eat for lunch with not enough hummus. Is there ever enough? Read what you will in SHT MTN associations.

I turn the wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons!

Philip Glass, Symphony No. 6 "Plutonian Ode" with Allen Ginsberg narrating. (lala)

Above is the composer Philip Glass watching his saxophone quartet being performed at a master class this morning. Below is the author apparently mesmerizing the composer before eating him. iPhone puts on like 20-30 pounds, right?



I have videos of the pieces performed but they need to be excerpted and permissed to be posted. The funniest thing he said was when coaching the saxophone quartet on tempo: "If you could get it up to 'incredible' that would be great." Thanks LSU, for putting this thing on.

I might be getting turned around on Allen Ginsberg. He was never one of my favorites; I always thought him a better catalyst than participant in the Art, but this stuff and Hydrogen Jukebox is cool.

Symphony No. 6 "Plutonian Ode"...

O heavy heavy Element awakened I vocalize your con-
sciousness to six worlds

I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah monster of Anger
birthed in fear O most

Ignorant matter ever created unnatural to Earth! Delusion
of metal empires!

Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous
Generals, Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!

Judgement of judgements, Divine Wind over vengeful
nations, Molester of Presidents, Death-Scandal of
Capital politics! Ah civilizations stupidly indus-
trious!

Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate! Manu-
factured Spectre of human reason! O solidified
imago of practicioner in Black Arts

I dare your reality, I challenge your very being! I
publish your cause and effect!

I turn the wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons!
Your name enters mankind's ear! I embody your
ultimate powers!

from "Plutonian Ode," via American Poems, pls forgive the botched formatting

rock it Somali today

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Philip Glass & Allen Ginsberg, Hydrogen Jukebox (lala)
Waaberi - New Dawn (lala)

According to @OlafurArnalds and subsequently this AP story, music has been banned from Somali airwaves, which is a shame. I don't know a thing about Somali music and if things like this persist, nor will anyone else, so for little more than my own feeble edification, among ecstatic Philip Glass appearance runoff, I will rock it Somali today. And no, I didn't exactly know where Somalia was either until I looked it up.

According to the oracle:

As Somalia's foremost musical group, Waaberi spawned many popular artists who would go on to enjoy successful individual careers and shape the face of Somali music for years to come.

so that seems a good place to start. I dig the way Waaberi makes a joyous racket "with instruments that range from household items like tea cups and water bottles to bongo drums and the oud" according to their AMG description for New Dawn. Why ban your music when your music sounds as good as this?

Heei Yaa Alahobalin Hoobalowa ...

Eerily, the piece from Hydrogen Jukebox I was listening to when I saw that news was "Jahweh and Allah Battle"

PART ONE Song #2 Jahweh and Al...

in which Old Father Death Ginsberg offers a litany of voices commanding him to "be here": Sadat, Arafat, Messiah, God, my mother, the Sphinx, etc, so in the face of the world, the least we can do is be here.

The Five Stages of Philip Glass

Philip Glass lecture and piano recital, LSU, Baton Rouge, 4/12/2010

1. Philip lectures. He spoke mostly about collaboration and the role of the composer in theatre vs. dance vs. opera vs. film and the amount of control one has in each. "Dance...it's better [for the composer] than film, but worse than theatre." He was also frank and congenial about his commercial work, saying it is about 10-15% of his time and pays for the rest of it.
2. Philip sells out. Way to go, Baton Rouge! Better than the half-empty room in which I saw Kronos Quartet a number of years back and the anemic showing for Bang on a Can All-Stars in 2008.
3. Nobei Udon at Koi. Philip regrettably did not join me for this. If he had, his stomach might have provided a similar rumbling bass accompaniment as mine did throughout the show.
   
4. Philip explains. Each piece gets his self-effacing intro, like when he introduced parts 2,3, and 4 of Four Metamorphoses, he admitted "Don't feel short-changed; parts 1 and 4really are pretty much the same."
5. Philip plays. The Metamorphoses struck me with its wistful, almost living-room-piano softness, to be the same family gathered under different circumstances, say a wedding, a tense holiday meal, and a funeral. Glass' music is a demonstration in texture and in touch, for without it, many of his pieces would simply dissolve into variations of That Philip Glass Thing. He spoke of the Etudes similarly as "a family of people that didn't really look alike" and that came across in these exercises gone romantic.
   
   He veered off program to play "Night on the Balcony" from Music from the Screens, his collaboration with African musician Foday Musa Suso, before going into the slowly undulating Mad Rush, joking that when commissioned for an appearance by the Dalai Lama at St. John the Divine in NYC, the organizers said they weren't sure when His Holiness was going to arrive, and could he write something of indeterminate length. "Not a problem."
   
   I was a little put off that Knee Play 4 from Einstein on the Beach (I really love the Knee Plays) didn't get played as stated in the program, but instead we got the "Wichita Vortex Sutra" from Hydrogen Jukebox, the chamber opera written with Allen Ginsberg. Mr. Glass played with a tape of the poet reciting his declaration of the end of war from the center of the United States. I've never been able to get into this piece on record; I think the recitation against the music is jarring, and it seemed to go the same way live until they both lit on the word "love" near the middle. The vortex blossomed as two friends across the greatest of divides found their rhythm. Ginsberg lost that distracting dated sappiness that (for me) hampers his readings and got actually funny, detailing how his declaration of peace migrated through his body the way a bill does Congress, and Mr. Glass' playing became softer, more sympathetic, comically elegiac. It was synthesis of the things he talked about in his lecture, the three parts of music (melody, harmony, and rhythm) as well as the four parts of opera (text, music, and...I forget) , everything cycling into that ebullient vortex. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, all hinging on "love." He closed with an encore reading of "Closing" from Glassworks, natch.

I am not a musician so I don't know how difficult his music is to play, but with all that repetition and counting and place-keeping, I'm thinking Philip Glass could inventory a grocery store with a cursory glance. I tried my bootlegger best to capture a video but the alignment of people's heads would have required a degree of obnoxiousness which even I will not venture, so imagine a night of a sweet old man (that looks and plays pretty good for 70) on a beat up piano in a gorgeously refurbished Shaver theatre, offering up slight turns of the prism that makes an artist; each pivot bending the light ever just so.