School's Out - Student Studies With Cecil Taylor

The closest I’ve ever been to attending a university: Cecil Taylor’s ‘Student Studies’ album on Affinity (vinyl, double, in perfect nick, still).
   Whilst at secondary school I studied girls, music, clothes, football, and nothing much else.
   What course would my life have taken if I’d passed my 11-plus and gone to the Latin school next door (the irony - placing The Achievers next to The Losers!)? A career is one thing, but what about culture?
   Class and culture were bound up back then. Today, less so, I suspect. As a kiddo from a council house I had to love soul, reggae and even rock. The posh kids were on another track, long ones, consisting of tales of topographic oceans and King Arthur to the sounds of intricate fretwork and Wagnerian synthesizers, probably. How do I know? Well, what are the chances they were moon stomping to Toots & The Maytals or shuffling their loafers to Motown tunes?
   If I’d been with the posh kids, would I have dropped Kool & The Gang for King Crimson? We weren’t into Prog, or educational progress.
   I may have smoked dope instead of downing pints of snakebite, and lived in flared jeans rather than adopting the shifting styles of the street.
   ‘Cecil Taylor is very educational!’ declare the Jazz Elite, who like to think they’ve studied a subject that is profound, and beyond most people. Perhaps they’re right; I may have said as much myself in the past. If CT is a ‘subject’, he’s akin to Latin, or double Dutch, to most ears. ‘Jazz Is The Teacher, Funk Is The Preacher’, sang James Blood Ulmer in 1980. Right there he summed up the extent of both my learning, and my religious experience.
   What does Jazz teach anyone? You tell me.
   What can we learn from ‘Student Studies’? That CT was a musical maverick, unique visionary, genre of one, sonic explorer of the eighty-eights – yes.
   ‘What goes into an improvisation is what goes into one’s preparation,’ he once said, ‘then allowing the prepared senses to execute at the highest level devoid of psychological or logical interference.’ Devoid of those, we listeners may also benefit when it comes to listening to CT. Free your mind and pleasure will follow.
   From Slade in the 70s to CT a decade later, I took a long, strange musical journey. If the earlier phase was logical, what came later also had its logic (from Funk to Jazz-Funk then Jazz). Then I learnt to abandon preconceived notions of what music ‘should’ be by listening to the likes of CT, Archie Shepp, Pharaoh Sanders, Ornette Coleman and the rest.
   Most music comes pre-packaged with a logical mindset relating dancing, dreaming, crying, whatever; this music does too, if you heed the scare stories about ‘Free Jazz’ (labels can be shackles, can’t they?). But whilst wall of noise wailing by the tenor titans frightens off most people, CT’s piano-playing may be more approachable, dare I say, as long as you forget notions of logic, harmony, etc.
   Yet there is a kind of logic to this music, the illogical kind, or the kind that CT creates as he constructs and executes the music. Listening again, I now adopt a Zen-like approach, I let go, and let it go. Here are four men (CT, Jimmy Lyons on alto sax, Alan Silva on bass, and Andrew Cyrille on drums), making music, making sounds. That’s it. I keep the volume down and let them get on with it.
   The record as time capsule delivers them to me all the way from Paris in 1966. It strikes me as a fantastic thing that this is possible. Equally fantastic is the fact that nothing they do sounds that old, and neither is it contemporary. It’s beyond time.
   CT’s debut album in ’56 was called ‘Jazz Advance’, and he did advance Jazz, beyond recognition. It was a warning, but no-one could know at the time. He would continue to advance through many lean periods, but finally reach the point where, today, he’s regarded as a kind of institution, a member of the Intellectual Musical Appreciation Society’s hall of fame.
   You don’t need to be ‘educated’ to listen to Cecil Taylor. I’ve learnt that much.

A Night Out With The Futurists

Exploration Of The Moon - Arthur C. Clarke & R.A.Smith 1954

Ah, yes, an age of optimism, even though the space race had not begun in earnest. Here Arthur C ponders the possibilities. 'No barriers remain that can keep us from the planets,' he declares in the introduction. 'If we have the will and the ambition to go there.' Indeed. He forsees the day when 'the Moon is only a suburb of the Earth' (filled with identical houses and people pouring into overcrowded space ships for the commute to the city?). Note the ladder being used to cross a ravine, and the 'Lunar Gymnasium' (because everyone on the Moon will be fitness fanatics).  The 'Hydrophonic Tube' shows a nice crop of what look like beans being harvested. 'Many astronomers are convinced, from their observations of colour changes on various parts of the Moon, that there is a certain amount of lunar vegitation,' writes Arthur. Section 45 just contains the words: 'The price...' (junk-filled crater illustration) - ending on an eco-warning, there. The cover scan, by the way, is culled from the 'net since mine, sadly, lacks one. Hope you enjoy these illustrations from a scarce book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pain, Pleasure, Black & White Vomit With Wolf Eyes

I shouldn’t have eaten that Magnum (it was mint-flavoured, by the way, not through choice, but because that was the only kind they had in the shop – and I thought we were living in the Wonderful Free West, where choice was everything and capitalism meant we could get what we wanted, when we wanted – dammit! I haven’t worked my whole life (true, I haven’t), which has involved stacking bricks, getting burnt by cooking oil, scared out of my wits at 50ft on a cherry picker cleaning windows at Chelsea Wharf, cracking thousands of eggs in the catering factory etc and paid my taxes to find that the only Magnum I can buy is the Mint one! Now the fucker’s given me toothache, as well as adding more of whatever goes towards the evolution of a gut, a middle-aged gut, the kind of which I thought I’d never get (oh how I laughed at the middle-agers down the pub in my lithe teenage years! Look at the state of them!). OK, anyone who knows me, has seen me, will laugh if I say I’m putting on excess flab ‘round the gut, but they haven’t seen me naked, and don’t know. They don’t know a lot about me, but that’s the nature of friendship, I find, because unlike the myth perpetuated by sitcom and silver screen writers (yes, those conspiratorial bastards) I don’t have a load of Friends with whom I ‘buddy up’ (is that an expression?) every other night for a bout of soul-baring, pain-sharing, shoulder-crying friendship. I don’t. No-one does. It’s all a lie, especially today, when we all spend our whole time hunched in front of a screen ‘talking’ to Facebook friends instead. Or is it just me...
   Pain. Toothache. Antidote: Wolf Eyes, specifically, ‘Hell Made Man American’ - ouch – I’m fighting fire with fire, pain with pain, and it seems to be working because the sonic commotion made by Wolf Eyes outdoes the worst my nerves in conjunction with cold ice cream can muster – that and the strong coffee’s helping – and the sight of the sunlit golden leaves on the tree outside the window – and the two books I bought this morning in a charity shop, one of which is worth a good price if I can find the right buyer. That’s the thing, finding the buyer. What’s anything worth if there’s no buyer? Nothing. Here endeth the economics lesson.
   What’s this Wolf Eyes noise worth? I haven’t looked on the market, but no doubt someone somewhere is offering it for $59, or £47.99, because it’s a CDR and only ten were made, probably. I do admire that kind of production, don’t you? A mass-produced slice of Pop is fine because that’s how the genius of Motown and Blue Note became rightfully part of ‘the fabric of sound’ that we, er, wear – you wear, they wear, the whole world wears Motown, but not so Blue Note, although it is known worldwide, of course.
   Here I pause to wonder what it must be like to be 15, inquisitive about music, and hear ‘Song For My father’ for the first time, and fall in love. Ah, age will not wither me, and shall not diminish my love for Horace Silver, I hope - although, as you know, age does put paid to the feeling, the absolute passion felt for discovering classics in our salad days (replaced, in some cases, by cabbage ears, but that’s another subject – a subject involving what the aging process does to some ears, whereby time erodes their capacity to absorb fresh sound, to want to explore. Not that ears act independently, of course; they’re governed by the brain/mind – and here endeth the socio-psycho-musical lesson).
   Sunshine and rain being like joy and pain, as David Bowie once said (no, he didn’t, actually, he sang ‘he laughed insane and quipped Kahlil Gibran’, but you get the connection, I’m sure), so we must experience the pain of Snow Patrol to appreciate the absolute Pleasure in the pain of Wolf Eyes who, at their sublime best on ‘Hell’, deliver Otherness, Mechanical Spirituality, almost, to match anything made by anyone in terms of indispensable sound. They reach greatness not when wrenching maximum agony from the machines, but in quieter phases, in the howling, the song of the biomechanoidal beast somewhere out there in the forest of evil – ha!
   ‘No threats detected’, my computer tells me – yet there clearly is a threat posed by Wolf Eyes, or so I like to think – a threat in the form of their music (music?) in missile-form, primed and ready to be fired at...well, just about anyone who I define as The Enemy. A pre-emptive strike is the best policy, so, load the coordinates and push the button – Downing Street, Washington, the Middle East (is that too indiscriminate?), all television centres, wherever the Daily Mail, Sun, Sport and the rest of the scumbag press is written...hold on...the toilet at The Camden Head, ‘cause that is a shit hole in both senses...I’ve run out of targets., and besides, Wolf Eyes can’t demolish building (although they could probably have brought down the walls of Jericho), the aim is to accomplish sonic destruction (Wolf Eyes piped into the toilets at The Camden Head?). So, to rethink, programme sonic missiles to infiltrate all media outlets, all radio and TV programmes – not blanket ‘bombing’, but stealth interruptions of ‘Question Time’, for instance - cue Dimbleby: ‘Our next question comes from Katy Clueless’ – ‘What are the government going to do about making the economy not broke and, like, tuition fees and racism?’ Before the MP can answer, viewers and studio audience alike are assaulted by Wolf Eyes at ear-bleeding volume; they scream, vomit, squirm, soil their underwear, faint and develop the same reaction, Pavlovian-fashion, to all politicians on TV, and ‘Hollyoaks’, and the rest.
   Talking of vomit. Anthony Braxton appeared on stage with Wolf Eyes at the FIMAV festival in 2005. The beautiful music they made together can be heard on the album, ‘Black Vomit’.

Be An Asset To Your Commander - Basic Battle Skills Manual

What makes secondhand book hunting so different, so appealing? Finds like this, issued in 1986 by 'Director Of Army Training'. Note the advice regarding a nuclear explosion - hiding behind a rock should definitely help. I know this will have very limited appeal, but I find such publications fascinating...and this is my blog. I like the diagrams drawn on the back by the previous owner.

 

Earworm, Basic Battle Skills etc

Current earworm:




Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it. - Tallulah Bankhead

Coming soon on Include Me Out

(you lucky people), everything you'll need to know, come The Revolution...

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity. - Raoul Vaneigem
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Dione: Part-Time Beatnik

Circa 1960 every magazine had to have a beatnik feature; it was part of the editorial policy. I imagine editors bawling out their staff: 'Where's the goddam beatnik stuff?!'. Nugget, April 1960, was no exception. There is another page featuring part-time 'bitnique', Dione, but it's just her in the nude. It's pure coincidence that I posted a photo of myself playing chess a few days ago, then found Nugget and the week-end beat girl, doing the same thing. At the time, I probably fancied myself as a beatnik too...only at week-ends, of course.

Electrotones Compilation

A compilation of electronic music old and new for your listening pleasure.

57MB 60mins Get it here.

Featured...

Later With Jools Holland - A Rocky Horror Show

Snow Patrol - why?

The death of REM and the birth of a new series of ‘Later with Jools Holland’ is no coincidence; it’s an act by the Gods of the Electric Cosmos (wasn’t that a Hawkwind album?) – yes, they’re telling the world something, they’re saying Stop The Rock! Michael Stipe got the message, but Jools hasn’t.
   If REM represented Stadium Rock Intelligence (I said ‘if’), they must be God-like to the ‘Later’ audience. Their demise is another nail in The Coffin of Rock, but sadly, there aren’t enough to prevent the corpses within prising off the lid and roaming the land. Look at the Rocky Horror Show (or ‘Later’, as it’s known) – see the cadavers twitching, screaming and wailing their way through the blues, soul, indie, folk variations to an audience of well-trained seals clapping every time they’re thrown another fish (Marillion, anyone?).
   Yes, I did look at the first in the series. When I confessed online, someone asked me why. I even asked ‘Why?’ aloud as I watched, to which LJ replied ‘I know’, and that seemed to say it all. I was wondering why anyone would want to see or hear this lot. To me it’s car crash TV. In the 60s all men drove with seven pints of Watney’s Red Ale coursing through their veins, without airbags, or seatbelts on - yes, it was a crazy time. Consequently, on coach trips, we’d often come across sculptures of mangled metal and flesh on motorways. ‘Don’t look!’ Mum would say, but I did anyway, along with everyone else. ‘Later’ holds a similar fascination. I also watch it as I did Top Of The Pops in its dying years, hoping against hope that something will surprise me by being good. Unlike TOTP, though, ‘Later’ should, I feel (yes, I’m deluded), throw up something interesting, instead of making me feel sick. Does Jools Holland pick all the bands? If anyone else has a say, perhaps they could prod his portly girth with a suggestion of something more radical than those who simply rehash ancient forms.
   But I forget the purpose of ‘Later’, which is to act as an aural comfort blanket in which the audience can snuggle up against the bitter cold of anything remotely cutting edge, ie fresh or interesting, such as using those newfangled instruments called synthesizers, or laptops. But who wants to watch someone twiddling knobs or pushing buttons? Me, in this context. The sounds they make should speak volumes, loud enough to give the audience tinnitus, hopefully.
   But The Rocky Horror Show is only partly about music, and has a lot to do with the stance of Rock, the hand-me-down Punk posturing, or plaintive strum of acoustic guitar whilst warbling heartfelt lyrics. If synthesizers appear, they do so as lite additions to already lite music, played with a couple of fingers at best. Look at Jools, he’s really ‘with it’, he’s into 80s Synth Pop revival bands!
   Has Sun Araw been on yet? Do tell me if he has. Stallones must surely be Acceptable Modern Music for Mojo readers. He’ll play guitar and reference Hendrix or Funkadelic, albeit amid a sonic sludge with big bass as a bonus, but I’m sure he’d be good for the show.

Requirements for artists to get on ‘Later’:

Do not act as if Rock History doesn’t exist.
If you’re not talented in the trad sense, be fashionable.
Play acoustic guitar.
Look like Arkansas woodsmen.
Look like crusty tree-huggers and include a fiddle-player.
Look like any Punk band from 1978.
Play like any Punk band from 1978.
Play the blues.
Sound like a Q-Tips tribute band.
Be old, with a load of records under your belt.
Have a Rock tart singing, preferably a pale imitation of Debbie Harry or Patti Smith, wearing a short skirt,
Play Rockabilly.
Be a woman with a 50s hairstyle.

Can’t wait for the next show.

Nova Magazine Fashion 1967

As London Fashion Week ends...

(Cropping is due to large original format)