I’d heard about Tom Waits’ music for years before I picked up a copy of his Asylum anthology on vinyl. I was about 18 years old in my first year at Michigan State University. I’d read the book Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters by Bill Flanagan. The interview with Tom is a highlight of that amazing read and I grabbed that record and took it home and played it as soon as I got back to my room at my Mom and Dad’s place where I was staying for the summer before sophomore year back at State.

Here’s the thing: I mostly hated the record. I put it back in its sleeve and didn’t listen again. I was taken by surprise by some of producer Bones’ Howe’s love for jazz instrumentation and even lush string sections. The arrangements on Tom’s early records were particularly challenging for me as it would be a few more years before I discovered Thelonius Monk and took my lifelong deep dive into jazz. I also have to admit that when I heard Tom’s voice for the very first time I thought it was a joke. It was so extremely rough and ragged that it seemed almost like a theatrical affectation — and it actually is to an extent. I hated anything that even flirted with artifice back then so I wrote the whole thing off.

As I remember it took a full year before I came across that album back in my room at my Mom and Dad’s place and thought I’d go ahead and give it another spin. That time was different. I loved the whole thing and didn’t stop playing it, and Tom is definitely on my songwriting Mount Rushmore next to Dylan as one of our best and most unique lyricists.

Here’s a great BBC doc, Tom Waits: Tales from a Cracked Jukebox. Here’s Aquarium Drunkard on the film:

Tom Waits is an inherently American artist. Over the past four decades, Waits’ eccentric boho brew of junkyard scat, jazz, gutter blues, tin-pan alley excursions and avant-garde cabaret have howled into the ether and reverberated back again…transfigured into something wholly his own. One day we will interview the man, dipping into all of the above – but until then, this; the BBC’s 2017 documentary on Waits by filmmaker James Maycock…

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As someone who spends a lot of time writing I can often be found at my desk at home or at the library or in a corner of a coffeehouse typing away with my headphones on. Here’s a little secret: I’m almost never listening to anything. If I’m reviewing a film or working on my blog I might be reviewing random scenes here or there or spending a minute browsing videos on YouTube, but mostly I don’t listen to anything else while I’m writing. Most writers can’t listen to words being spoken or sung while attempting to conjure phrases of their own, and unless I’m on an instrumental jazz jag music without lyrics mostly isn’t my thing. Lately when I’m driving I’ve been listening to Wilco and Donovan, and MMA podcasts, and the Hillbilly Elegy audiobook. I couldn’t indulge any of those and also crank out an insightful movie review or even the text for one of my photo essays. It’s this particular clash of music and writing that made this Open Culture post about Philip K. Dick catch my ear…

What did Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly author Philip K. Dick, that visionary of our not-too-distant dystopian future, listen to while he crafted his descriptions of grim, psychologically (and sometimes psychedelically) harrowing times ahead? Mozart. Beethoven. Mahler. Wagner.

Yes, while looking textually forward, he listened backward, soundtracking the constant workings of his imagination with classical music, as he had done since his teenage years. As Lejla Kucukalic writes in Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age:

After graduating from high school in 1947, Dick moved out of his mother’s house and continued working as a clerk at a Berkeley music store, Art Music. “Now,” wrote Dick, “my longtime love of music rose to the surface, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera” (“Self-Portrait” 13). Classical music, from Beethoven to Wagner, not only stayed Dick’s lifelong passion, but also found its way into many of his works: Wagner’s Goterdammerung in A Maze of Death, Parsifal in Valis, and Mozart’s Magic Flute in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

At his Forteana Blog, author Andrew May credits Dick with, given his pop-cultural status, “a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music.” He cites not just Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the introduction to A Maze of Death, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in Ubik, or the part of The Game-Players of Titan where “a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria,” but an entire early story which functions as “(in my opinion) a pure exercise in classical music criticism.” In 1953′s “The Preserving Machine,” as May retells it, an eccentric scientist, “worried that Western civilization is on the point of collapse, invents a machine to preserve musical works for future generations” by encoding it “in the form of living creatures. Unfortunately, as soon as the creatures are released into the environment, they start to adapt to it by evolving into different forms, and the music becomes distorted beyond recognition.”

Here’s an 11 hour playlist of Phil’s favorites for you to write your own visions by…

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My man Ezra flipped a sweet Dazed article about music and heroin into our {R}emnants mag on Flipboard yesterday, and sitting down to post it caught my eye. Here’s a bit from Dazed…

But heroin has consistently eluded this ebb and flow, from its prominence and influence in the jazz and blues era of the 30s, 40s and 50s (Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Chet Baker) to the rockers of the 60s, 70s, and 80s (Keith Richards, Sid Vicious, Nikki Sixx) and the heroin chic trend of the 90s, made popular by Calvin Klein’s ‘waif’ models and further pushed by the grunge movement (Kurt Cobain, Hole, Alice In Chains, and more).

In the 21st century – and specifically in the United States – the opioid epidemic is now at an all time-high, with The New York Times citing it as “a modern plague” with 59,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016 alone, the largest annual jump ever recorded in the US. With the country’s “drug-infested dens” (as President Trump so tactfully described earlier this year) becoming a national crisis, the topic of heroin addiction is coming out from under the bridge…

Follow the article link above to hear a playlist of heroin’s greatest hits. The list is jammed with rock and funk, but when I think of heroin and music I think of Miles and Coltrane and Bill Evans — I think of jazz. Here’s Bruce Weber’s poetic black and white study of Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost…

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I don’t remember how old I was when I learned that Detroit was the only place with a Devil’s Night. I’m posting this on Thursday evening, but I won’t share it with anyone until Friday morning, just in time for the night before Halloween — Devil’s Night.

The film Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages was released in 1922. The silent movie tells a history of witchcraft dating from ancient times until the early days of the 20th Century. The most famous version is the 1968 release which adds a great narrative performance by William Burroughs, and a killer, abstract jazz soundtrack from Daniel Humair.

This isn’t the first time I’ve posted this for Halloween. It won’t be the last. Have a wonderful terrible celebration…

Stay Awake!

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My first instrument was the saxophone. That instrument introduced me to performing music and if I hadn’t started playing my horn at the age of 11 I probably would have never started writing my own songs. I still love my saxophone. Even though my singer/songwriter output is balanced on my lyrics, playing the saxophone offers a respite from words in music — more than any other instrument the sax replicates the tonality and intricacy of the human voice, unencumbered by the ballast of language. Playing the saxophone is pure singing in a way that song-singing can never be.

Ornette Coleman died yesterday, but his legacy of pure musicality continues to affect me and any musician concerned with personal expression. Coleman’s radical improvisational experiments created a bridge that took Be Bop to its logical conclusion, and his pioneering music is the aural equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary canvases. Like Pollock, Coleman’s music has been hailed and reviled, lauded and laughed at, but his indelible influences at jazz’s most daring edges will forever define his legacy as one of the most important of American music-makers.

Here’s Coleman and his trio in 1966…

“Ornette Coleman Trio,” presents Ornette Coleman’s famous trio during their visit to Paris in 1966 in order to record the soundtrack of a very nutty-looking Belgium film called “Who’s Crazy?”.

Realized by Richard “Dick” Fontaine–who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of erotic gay cinema (with such famous titles as “The Days of Greek Gods”) and that years later realized the full length film “Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger”-. the film was made in three days and offers a portrait of the trio that becomes an “ironic essay in dignity in the face of insanity”. Ornette, who in this era was one of the leaders of the Jazz Avant-garde movement, faced the challenge with his two fellow musicians by responding with passionate improvisations to the stimuli that reached him from the screen where the images are projected. A priceless testimony to the innovations which revolutionized the world of jazz in the sixties.

Stay Awake!

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Google Maps has just released a street view that invites you to virtually explore The Great Pyramids of Giza and The Great Sphinx on digital foot among blurry-faced tourists who seem as curious about you (the Google eye) as they are about the presumably man-made wonders. Technology has elevated the experience of vicarious, imaginative tourism from illustrations to photographs to film, and now it’s possible to basically simulate astral projection among the pyramids of Egypt. We recommend listening to Sun Ra & His Arkestra Live in Egypt as you embark upon your journey to Planet Google Earth.

Street View Treks: Egypt by Google Maps

Stay Awake!

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45 years ago, in 1969, The Band released their classic sophmore album and changed rock ‘n’ roll forever. But, how did a group of nearly-all Canadians seem to absorb the entire history of American music from folk, to blues, to country to jazz and recreate it in their own inimitable way?

While the band received a thorough education in American rhythm and blues during their tenure backing Ronnie Hawkins as The Hawks, the poetic magic of their second album required a PhD in American roots music that might have seemed impossible given the youthful faces that appeared on the record’s iconic cover. The Band’s Music from Big Pink debut hinted at their greatness, but few expected this masterpiece from the group.

Here’s the Wiki…

The album includes many of The Band’s best-known and critically acclaimed songs, including “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, which Rolling Stone named the 245th greatest song of all time (in the updated version,[7] it was the 249th greatest song of all time). In 2003, the album was ranked number 45 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1998 Q magazine readers voted The Band the 76th greatest album of all time. TIME magazine included it in their unranked 2006 list of the 100 greatest albums. Robert Christgau, having been disappointed with their debut, had expected to dislike the record and even planned a column for The Village Voice to castigate their followup. Upon hearing the record, however, he declared it better than Abbey Road, which had been released four days following, writing that The Band’s LP is an “A-plus record if I’ve ever rated one.”[2] He ranked it as the fourth best album of the year in his ballot for Jazz & Pop magazine’s annual critics poll.[8]

By the time of their second record, The Band had toured the world with Bob Dylan and created a collection of music with him in Woodstock, New York that would later be released as The Basement Tapes. The lessons they learned during their time in their rustic retreat, sharing songs with Dylan finally came to fruition on the classic 1969 release.

Here’s a documentary that tells the story of that time, and helps to illuminate The Band’s evolution into one of the most important groups in the history of rock…

Stay Awake!

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This year we celebrate the 100th birthday of the cosmic reign of the avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra whose official birthday is celebrated on May 22. For those who know the man’s music, there is no need for an introduction here. For neophytes, here is a sampling of the story from the Sun Ra Arkestra’s official website:

Eclectic, outrageous, sometimes mystifying but always imbued with a powerful jazz consciousness, the music of Sun Ra has withstood its skeptics and detractors for nearly three generations. And well it should, since Sun Ra has been both apart of and ahead of the jazz tradition during that time. Like Duke Ellington and swing-era pioneer Fletcher Henderson, Sun Ra learned early on to write music in an arranged form that showcased the specific talents of his individual Arkestra members, and he has retained the services of some of these musicians to this day: John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, and Julian Priester for example since they first joined in the 1950′s. On the other hand, Sun Ra was the first jazz musician to perform on electronic keyboards (56), the first to pursue full-scale collective improvisation in a big band setting, and his preoccupation with space travel as a compositional subject predated bands like Weather Report by about 15 years.All this from someone who refuses to even cite the earth as his home planet and prefers to have arrived from Saturn. As Sun Ra once explained it, “I never wanted to be a part of planet Earth, but I am compelled to be here, so anything I do for this planet is because the Master-Creator of the Universe is making me do it. I am of another dimension. I am on this planet because people need me”.

There is no one quite like Sun Ra, and no band quite like the Arkestra — part jazz ensemble, part communal living experiment, part cosmic musical cult, Sun Ra and his Arkestra were a living theater that put their music at the service of human consciousness and enlightenment. It’s hard to imagine artists with more integrity — the Arkestra still spreads the message to this day. And it’s difficult to imagine any American more deserving of this centenary remembrance.

In honor of his 100th birthday, here is the Sun Ra documentary A Joyful Noise…

Stay Awake!

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Van Morrison joined the British Invasion with Them until he left the band to meet Dylan and the folk rock revolution head-on with his first great masterpiece, Astral Weeks.

Here’s what Rolling Stone has to say about this epic, emotive music:

Van Morrison never sounded more warm and ecstatic, more sensual and vulnerable, than on his enigmatically beautiful solo debut. Fresh off the success of “Brown Eyed Girl” and newly signed to artist-friendly Warner Bros., he explored the physical and dramatic range of his voice during extended poetic-scat singing, and set hallucinatory reveries on his native Belfast to wandering Celtic-R&B melodies. The crowning touch was the superior jazz quintet convened by producer Lewis Merenstein to color the mists and shadows. Bassist Richard Davis later said that Morrison never told the musicians what he wanted from them or what the lyrics meant. Maybe he didn’t know how to. He was going deep inside himself, without a net or fear.

This is big-heart music for the thinking person — a masterpiece of lyrical inspiration and musical improvisation. Van’s use of his own repetitive voicing as a percussion instrument speaks to the poetic underpinnings of his songwriting in the Celtic, spiritual traditions where he has continued to root his mature music. This is deep, dark sound. It’s also ecstatic, mystical music — Morrison reveals himself to be a rock shaman par excellence within the tracks of this album’s lustrous, longing message.

Here is the album in its entirety:

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