Smashing the Idol of Trane

            I suppose I should begin with an apology, to those faithful who have been baptised in the waves of timbre St John blessed this Earth with some decades past. John Coltrane was probably the first jazz artist I came to dig, back in high school, and the first time I heard Coltrane, I mean really heard him, from my record player when I was fifteen years old, stoned and eating strawberries with the lights out in my room I saw such blue and green swarming in the dark; I have never quite had an experience like that before or since. I have in fact heard of almost identical experiences, from Carlos Santana, and in a song on Tribal Jazz, by John Densmore, original drummer of rock group The Doors.

            It was in fact The Doors who influenced me to dig Trane and Miles, specifically Ray Manczarek, in his autobiography “Light My Fire”. Many white rock groups of the 60’s and 70’s were highly influenced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, particularly their modal period. While this is all a good thing, I have since discovered how much public opinion of jazz had been shaped by the supposed authority of white people, critics and academics as well as performers and businessmen.

            Of course, it would be transcendentally ridiculous to claim that Coltrane’s music was in any sense ‘white’ – while he drew inspiration from all cultures and every source, John consciously sought to advance, and purify, the medium of Black American Music, and his stature is colossal (no offence, Sonny) upon black culture, as both an artist and a symbol of defiant freedom to the ongoing struggle for civil rights and human dignity.

            Still, much of the academic and critical focus on Coltrane has been dictated by an elitist white collegiate culture, which is far removed from the source of Black America, even if it has drawn a large influence from it. As a white man myself, with a bit of pomposity to boot, perhaps my own aesthetic prejudices are not worth pondering too deeply: on the whole, I am more drawn to his work on the soprano saxophone, and my favorite tenor moments of his are with Miles and right after leaving the 2^nd time, when he was still utilizing Davis’ incredible rhythm section, particularly the immortal Red Garland. He was also unbelievable with both Monk and Duke.

            So why the hell would anyone want to overthrow such a rich artistsic legacy? The fact is that once Coltrane had already taken both the soprano and tenor saxophones beyond the limits of Earthly perfection, he kept seeking, and while his seeking was by no means in vain, those who have attempted to follow in his Footsteps (Shorter excluded, for sure) have for the most part been stumbling blindly, and the plethora of formless forms engendered by imitators who lacked the grounding in bop, rhythm and blues, and the guiding signal of past tenor greats like Dex and Prez, and soprano Sidney Bechet, have contributed greatly to the disunity that characterized jazz music through the rest of the 20^th century.

            But just as the Catholic Church helped to preserve the wisdom of the ‘pagan’ Greek philosophers of Asia Minor and Sicily, Trane can serve to function not only as the beginning of post-modernism in jazz, but as a wonderful culmination and apotheosis of the history of this great music that travelled from New Orleans to New York over the course of a century, and in so doing transformed the world forever.

Smash that!

Kool Keith: Critic par Excellence

The question as to the value of art is of the greatest significance to our society. Great men over the millennia have known this, and sought to shape our view of truth and beauty according to their own agendas, which were often as misguided as their judgments were wrong and their writing style weak and lame. For wisdom, listen not to me but to the word of Kool Keith, Chief…you been out two weeks, while he has been following this discussion since before Black Man created Civilization itself, and, while prone to going off on fascinatingly bizarre tangents, he has nonetheless hit on the truth.

A brief summary of the aesthetic prejudices he has had to overthrow, before we turn to the monument of his achievement:

From the foggy origins of Western art criticism, amid the homoerotic decadence of Athenian empire, arise the proto-iconoclastic illusions of Plato and the stale faulty rationalism of Aristotle. These will get us nowhere. It took over a thousand years for European artists to melt asunder the shackles of Hellenistic dogma that Alexander unwittingly let loose on the ancient world. (And just briefly, if I may address those of you who have already written me off as some sort of priggish homophobe, the Renaissance returned a more pure, luminous homoerotic focus to European art that had flourished in archaic Greece but was abused by self-serving pederasts until Plato, perhaps a little sore from Socrates’ aggressive instruction, tried to wipe it out!)

But at that time Western artists were still dependent upon the Catholic Church and wealthy, aristocratic patrons for their livelihood, and basically the taste of these employers were what prevailed, without much academic devotion to the theory, rather than practice, of art (which was why their painting was so damn good.)

Humanism in Italy appeared as antidote to this situation, although the corruption from Lutheran iconoclasm and Dutch morbidity cancelled out whatever gains may have been made at this time. Slightly later, the famed figures of the “Enlightenment” were to completely misunderstand the value of art, just what we should expect from such pompous, bourgeois plebians! Somebody get these eggheads a woman!

            Finally it was the Romantics who began to set things right again. Heinrich Heine, perhaps Germany’s finest poet, wrote competently on Delacroix, advocating the importance of meaning in art. The countervailing trend against romanticism manifested in many ways, for example the 19^th Century Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Social-Rationalist gibberish, in which he essentially utilizes criticism as theft of intellectual property, which remained largely the norm into the 1960’s.

            Fellow countryman and near-contemporary, Charles Baudelaire, in his ‘What is the Good of Criticism?’ put us back on a better track. (Notice the [probably accidental] similarity of the opening question, and title, of Baudelaire’s tract, with dGabe Evau’s 2018 pamphlet ‘Prejudices of Rock Critics’.) Baudelaire had a direct influence on the greatest art critic/aesthetician prior to the 20^th Century, Friedrich W. Nietzsche. Nietzsche may not have been the first thinker to take aesthetics seriously (see the intellectual poverty, in this matter at least, of Burke and Hegel.) He was, however, the first man since the days of the Reformation to recognize the religious significance of art, and in fact the first since those Athenian fools we mentioned earlier to relate it to the Olympian and mystery religions of Ancient Greece. Which brings us quite close to the subject of this article.

Then all the DaDa, DooDoo, overall degeneration of Art in the 20^th Century. There were still pockets of brilliancy, above all the contributions of African Americans to the highest Kultur attained thus far by humanity. Music, of course being the highest art, we move past the primal lament of the blues, the jubilation of early jass and the sensuality of swing (sometimes watered, or white-ered, down; always retaining the erotic buoyancy of the rhythm) and the cult of rock n’ roll to the most philosophical of all the arts: Hip-Hop.

Initial efforts were primitive, to say the least. In the words of the Master:

They use a simple back-and-forth, the same old rhythm

that a baby could pick up and join right with ‘em.

This from the debut recording by Keith’s original group Ultramagnetic MCs, appropriately entitled Critical Beatdown. In the 90s Keith went solo as Dr. Octagon, patenting a unique blend of off-color verbal humour, cartoonish horror-core and turn-of-the-millennium individualistic sexual liberty, all while sharpening his axe against the grindstone of homogenous rap-star clones dancing around on MTV and BET in shiny jumpsuits at this time, this last phenomena though a complete atrophy of hip-hop culture at the same time introducing much of the world to rap music, this author included. Some of us went further to learn the Four Pillars of Hip-Hop, but never refuse the head cornerstone, the Boogie Down Bronx, where a young Keith Matthew Thornton witnessed and participated in this final Testament of the Kreators.

Rap moves on to the year 3000…

           

            Under a variety of pseudonyms Keith has continued to attack the mainstream of rap poetry, offering cutting polemic as Dr. Dooom – 

Look in the mirror, kid: your shit is wack.

– satire of bloated white rockstardom as Black Elvis, a hilarious reversal of the white boy’s appropriation of the stylings of black innovators such as Little Richard and Bo Diddley – while still continuing to degrade the juvenile pretenders in the rap game:

I’ll be the man, watch your backpack,

pen and pencil, school today:

Grown man, I don’t play…

Of course, there were still a few other incredibly powerful artists with commercial success at this time in the late 90s, who were both creative and relevant, but to those who were truly listening Keith put them all to shame with the preternatural lyrical brilliance of his near-flawless record Matthew.

The (respected?!) music journal Rolling Stone, commonly used for wiping shit and jissom, once upon a time published a good piece, albeit an imbedded half-column at the bottom of the page, back in I believe it was 2003 or thereabouts, giving Kool Keith a chance to review three new albums, each with just two or three sentences. I no longer ‘live at home with my Mom’ where the article was taped to my bedroom wall, but I will try to remember those sharp, penetrating analyses, honed to perfect aphorisms.

            Of a release by The Used, Keith muses, “This group is called The Used? They sound used and over-abused. What are they so unhappy about?” What a sad truth about the emasculation of white rock since the early 90s – to go back and quote Dr. Octagon once again,

Kurt Cobain was here

but Doc Oc has Novocain.

One of the other two artists Keith reviewed was some young white female pop singer, I can’t recall which one or tell you if she has faded to oblivion or found new employment on some reality TV show, but I do remember Keith quipping, “in mock valley-girl voice” that he totally loved this music and could see himself taking out the trash to it.

Apologies if I have misquoted a lyric, my only reference source was, naturally, my memory.

Rubbish - 'The Doors' by Greil Marcus

            Rubbish.

            In a word, that’s Greil Marcus’s ‘The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years’, a terrible subtitle that yet betrays the incredible fascination the band have commanded from their prime recorded output which spanned in fact four years, but we can’t expect much higher mathematical knowledge from a professional writer and social critic who already displays such a poor training in language arts and social studies (perhaps he should have stuck to chemistry – in describing Ed Sullivan’s attempt to censor The Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’ for their performance on his CBS program, Marcus muses, “The network couldn’t have contrived a less musical solution if they’d suggested Jim Morrison sing the chemical formula for lithium.” Lithium is an element, functionally an ion, not a molecular compound.)

            Rubbish. Apparently, that’s what Marcus feels The Doors’ music amounts to – is this what he finds so inspiring in it? Surely the writer is not alone in his half-assed write-off of a critique, although at this point the group has pretty firmly been established as one of the greatest rock acts of all time – not that that untouchable list doesn’t contain a great deal of blunders. But that’s beside the point. Despite my own flagrant bias in favor of one of my favorite bands of all time, I can appreciate their shortcomings, although these may be precisely the opposite of what the modern liberal hack finds so depreciable. But if you are going to present what made these four musicians so great, and what continues to draw interest and excitement from young and old alike, as reason enough to trade those old well-worn records in at the shop for credit towards Taylor Swift’s latest epic, you are going to have to write a convincing argument, not a piece of junior-high homework your dog had the good taste not to eat. To convince me, that is; not to get it published, clearly.

            The Sunshine-Acid-orange the group’s photo is bleached into on the book’s cover is probably what made me pick it up in the first place, but I’m always ready to check out another perspective on The Doors; hopeful I might upturn some blue rock I missed in the desert that sweeps all footprints away and discover something I hadn’t noticed before, or at least a few tidbits of novel data to store away.

            One of the main arguments of the book seems to be that Jim got fat toward the end of his life, and therefore was no longer cool, and perhaps was never cool to begin with. You’d think this old bastard had lived long enough to give up talking about ‘cool’ in the first place, but the esthetic of the 60’s never dies for some, another running theme of the present work. In fact, Marcus equates maturity, coolness and vulgarity (like all today’s journalists do) even more so than Jim did; when discussing The Doors’ unsurpassed performance of ‘Gloria’, in reference to Jim’s line “It’s getting too darn fast” Marcus notes, “the darn sticking out, as if this is a little boy not ready for grown-up words.” Rather, darn is the more respectable, and therefore adult, way to express precisely what the poet wanted to say.

            Marcus’ metaphors are impotent, his arguments unfeasible and his analogies groundless. We watch with anticipation as he constructs the framework of what might be some grand philosophy or poignant social theory on the significance of culture and then it falls over, a house of cards and he hasn’t even got a full deck. We might be open to his critical belittling of some over-idolized alcoholic acidhead’s poetry if the writer himself didn’t make such a mockery of the English language, at all turns. Something kept me reading, through to the very end, with absorption: was it really just I couldn’t believe how bad the writing was?

            No, there was more. To be honest it makes me mad, not just to see my youthful heroes trashed so ineffectually (and yet with such authority) by some no-name hack…I could do that myself. Marcus will be dead some day, and despite his confused, mildly amusing bitterness at what he himself holds dear, his misplaced irony, we can see what the band meant to someone who actually went to see them and other great (and not-so) acts of the times, and who, as he says, has been listening to them for a lifetime. Even as he dismantles the sacred Gospel According to the Lizard King, he is grasping for words he doesn’t possess that might convey what the group was capable of in the 60’s, what they did to him and his young wife back then, what they do to listeners now. What is at stake is what Nietzsche called “the use and misuse of history for life” and I think Marcus’s intentions might be noble enough. He is attempting to cover with sand the idols whose hollow eyes he himself has stared into, once, long ago on some beach of the collective unconsciousness while skinny-dipping with Hare Krishnas…but enough corny symbolism. Marcus wants to sound out the idols for what they are, or what they could be, not what they have been, and so is perhaps the truest to Morrison’s own intentions of any critic I have read on the subject. Perhaps.

            The problem of freeing the youth from the great statues of the past is that we remove the ground out of which culture can grow.

@dGabeEvau

Megadeth at DCU Center 10 12 16

            Megadeth incinerated the DCU Center in Worcester like napalm fire Wednesday night, blasting through a non-stop set of fan favorites and newer songs alike. The single regret I have from the evening is that I didn’t get to bring my wife this time, as we have always seen them together. Still, I got to bang my head with one of the coolest guys in the world, meet like-minded metalheads and slam my body into dudes twice my size! The opening acts, the ones we caught at least, were truly amazing. Suicidal Tendencies played an intense set interspersed with messages of positivity and self-reliance fitting to both the youth and life’s veterans in attendance. Never really listened to them before; well, now I’m a fan…and in Metal, that shit’s for life.

Amon Amarth took the stage in true Viking splendour; green and purple lights illuminating the mist rising from the sea that encircles Earth as the mighty vessel Naglfar surfaced on stage; Thor himself seemed to be towering over us, hair gilded silver with the wisdom of Wotan’s one eye, as vocalist Johan Hegg raised Mjolnir towards Asgard. Throughout these two sets the mosh pit was in effect, metalheads young and old running around and slamming into one another, helping each other up when they fell only to collide again; it was hard to keep your footing with all the beer on the floor. After a bunch of us helped one guy up, I was helping steady him as he seemed quite drunk, dizzy or both. I said, “Maybe you should take a breather,” but before I could take another breath, he replied, “Fuck that!” and rammed himself into the nearest fan. Tired of moshing I moved forward into the standing crowd, remaining at the edge of the moshpit with a guy a foot taller than me to form a wall to protect those in front of us from the surge of the moshers.

By the time Megadeth came on I had been getting closer and closer to the front. Four people in hazmat suits came out to clear the stage of hazardous materials before the true fallout began as the band came out to wild applause. As far as I could tell nobody was running around dancing anymore: all eyes (and ears) were fixed on Dave Mustaine and his current lineup of ground fighters. Longtime bassist and co-founder David Ellefson was in full force. Latest guitar prodigy Kiko Loureiro, who plays on Deth’s latest album Dystopia, wowed the crowd with his pyrotechnics. Megadeth has always had some of the greatest lead guitarists in thrash metal – but I suppose they’ve got to, in order to even try and keep up with thrash’s all-time-greatest lead guitarist – and while everyone else was watching Kiko solo I had my eyes fixed on the man behind the music. How can Dave execute such flawless rhythm and unique texture with so little motion? And when he cuts into a solo himself – watch the fuck out! Current drummer Dirk Verbeuren kept the onslaught going, driving forward relentlessly without dropping a beat as the notes fell like shells from a magazine.

As always, Dave Mustaine & Co. make you think while they rock you; something reaches inside that head of yours even as you so mercilessly bang it. The video show on screen was cool and well-thought-out, although how anyone could take their eyes off Mustaine is inexplicable. It mainly served to reinforce the message that was driven home by the impeccable set-list. Songs like Peace Sells….But Who’s Buying? and Symphony of Destruction give the truth to the political lie we are confronted with every time we turn on the TV. To quote the latter:

You take a mortal man

and put him in control;

watch him become a god;

watch people’s heads a-roll.

But Dave has always been the only poet in modern rock making any significant social statement or observation of reality IMHO. Prior to playing Holy Wars…The Punishment Due Dave told the story, which I had heard years ago on VH1 but recently got this fuller account from reading his excellent autobiography, of when they were playing in Northern Ireland and Dave, quite uncharacteristically, I might add, spoke without thinking and had to be reminded the next day of how his incendiary flippance had lead to the band being promptly driven from the venue in a bulletproof bus. “Erin go Bragh!” I yelled, trying to get a rise out of Dave myself, as clearly the Metallica shirt I was wearing hadn’t worked. Like all the classics, the performance of Holy Wars that followed was spectacular. You can barely hear Mustaine’s trademark snarl above the sea of voices roaring along in unison, although you can tell the true fans when only a few of us continue chanting a particular verse, and I have to admit shamefully there were a few stanzas even I never learned. In fact, there were several songs from their post-’04 (the last time I saw them; The System Has Failed the last album of theirs I bought) output that I was completely unfamiliar with, but unlike most bands passing off new material to disappointed, diehard fans, those rocked not a mite less hard.

            Almost thirty-six hours later, if I saw Dave and could use my voice or bend my neck, I would bow and say,

Thank you, Dave. This was more than a night of music. Your records were always more than a flat surface to break up pot on. You have touched me in ways no other artist ever has, the way an honest politician or a wise philosopher ought to, in fact. No mere entertainer, nonetheless you put on quite a show and give the folks what they want; even more, what we all need. Truth. Mindfulness. The courage to look reality dead-on. The will to speak up. I hope you continue thrashing for years to come; but it is already time the world needs to generate someone to carry on what you have done, lest the human race fall into docility, mediocrity and spiritual servitude irredeemably.

No words can express what you mean to us, Dave: but I had to try anyway.

@dGabeEvau 

Equinox/New Moon

            What a Winter we just witnessed! Up here in the Boston Area, anyway, it has been one for the record-books. But even before the snow came, I could feel something stirring in the atmosphere. You can always feel the Winter Solstice coming on; the magnetic momentum of our world seems to pick up energy like a spiraling pendulum driven to its nadir by gravity, and then abducting that same downward force of attraction and using it to push off and outward, towards the Sun, into the light. And we just came into it; recently, on Friday March 20^th the Spring Equinox and the New Moon coincided, thus reconciling the start of the Solar and Lunar calendars as only happens periodically. This made that day, Day One, of what in my own private calendrics was already shaping up to be the Year One, the New Beginning just two years late of the Mayan prediction, the purported Age of Aquarius although the transition time of the Rapture could be indeterminate; seven years was only an example, based upon the common numerical superstition that has held since the Chaldeans.

            In any case, whether we go by the Solar year cornered by the Cross of the Seasons and call this the Month of Aries or adhere to the Sidereal system (which is cosmologically more accurate as regards the actual constellations) as RawGoddess’s astro-blog based on the more ancient 13-signs and proclaim that we are still swimming through Pisces, Fire and Water are both transformative elements and as aspects of the essence of Pitta either element can be used to demonstrate the significance of this time in our collective destiny.

            Of course, if this were truly the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, then the New Moon would have occurred when both the Sun and Moon were, from an observer on Earth, superimposed upon the constellations of Aquarius, the last Decanate, 29 degrees. Aquarius is the sign of New Ways, infinite horizons in Space, our Mother, Nuit. Most cultures had a male Sky God who impregnated the Earth, but the Egyptians had Nuit, the Goddess of the Sky/Universe, married to Ra the Sun-God but secretly in love with the male Earth-God, Geb. While it was forbidden for Nuit to sleep with Geb on any of the 360 days of the solar year, Thoth (the God of Wisdom, Science and Learning) tricked the Moon (male in the Egyptian system) into playing dice and won 5 days of the Moon’s light to add the calendar year, 5 days which were outside the Solar year and thus exempt from Ra’s decree, enabling Geb to sleep with Nuit and impregnate Her with the next generation of Gods and Goddesses. Among other things this myth helps to explain the difficulties early civilizations had in reconciling the count of the solar year with the lunar cycle. Chinese, Jewish and Islamic calendars are all lunar-based and at times will be either more or less ‘in-sync’ with our Western, Sun-based calendar. This recent new moon/equinox has been a perfect example of the two orbits syncing up, which generally coincides with major energy flowing relatively smoothly in our lives.

            This past Saturday saw the apex of that first moon cycle of the new solar year, a full moon Saturday night going into Easter Sunday. Now we have as well the synchronicity of an established religious ceremony, held on the same day of the seven week days named after the seven planets (including sun and moon) visible and known to the Chaldean astronomers, in this case Sunday the day of the Sun, every year, and this year lining up with the Full Moon quite nicely as well. I am already feeling quite a lot of energy as this first moon of the year dissipates its energy slowly; sometimes the full moon is too direct and powerful, a lot of people have been sick or tired lately and we may need to just ride this one out and wait ‘til the next moon cycle, when things have warmed up a bit more and our souls have thawed out. But I see great things to come in the year ahead.

@dGabeEvau