Crow Quill Night Owls at the Oregon Country Fair

So the second time we saw Opal Creek was at the Oregon Country Fair, exactly a week after the first time we saw them. This time their bass player was a girl, in a cowboy hat. Nice. We saw them playing at the Shady Grove stage at the OCF, which was a much more intimate venue: a small natural amphitheater, with trees on one side and a dusty path on the other, with the creek on the other side of that. They put on another excellent show.

But the big serendipity of it all was that we showed up early to get a patch of ground for Opal Creek and ended up catching the second half of the Crow Quill Night Owls' set, and that was just as confoundingly awesome as you could possibly imagine.

Now, I'm on record on this here blog as having an abiding tolerance for hokum; the CQNOs are loving curators of hokum, wild-eyed bodiers-forth of it. Picture R. Crumb's Cheap Suit Serenaders if they were fronted by Captain Beefheart, imagine if Roxie Hart (in Renee Z's knobby-kneed version) had a jug band, conjure up the mental image if you will of Gentleman Jim dressed like a gas station attendant and thumping on a tub to accompany a troop of liberated Sasquatches who learned everything they know about music from reading the names of '20s orchestras from the labels of shattered 78s: the New Orleans Feetwarmers, the Red Onion Jazz Babies, the Mississippi Sheiks, the Washboard Ragamuffins, the Golden Pheasant Hoodlums.

All of which is to say that they were as visual as they were musical, a conceptual art schtick as much as a performing unit, and while that sort of thing should rub me the wrong way, they were absolutely perfect. I loved them.

Opal Creek

I think I've established that I don't go out for many concerts, and also that this prohibition mostly only applies to rock concerts. It's not that I don't like live music: it's just that it has to be under the right circumstances, and that includes sound quality.

The right circumstances came along a number of times this summer, and always with quasi-amateur local bands. Viz. Opal Creek, who we happened to see twice back in July.

The first time was on a 4th of July party in a park on the Willamette, called Art in the Vineyard. Basically a convocation of arts-n-crafts booths (one step up, in terms of highfalutinness, from the Saturday Market here in 'Gene, if that means anything to you) and wine-tasting tents (Oregon vineyards). But even more basically it was just an excuse to get a crowd together to sit in the sun by the river and listen to music all day, and then see fireworks over the river in the evening. An infinitely smaller version of the Esplanade thing we attended a number of times in Boston (but, curiously, a better fireworks-viewing experience, since most places you can stand on the Esplanade have badly obstructed views of the fireworks, and if you can see the fireworks you can't see the musicians and vice-versa: go figure).

There were a number of different bands playing at the festival, ranging from Scottish fiddle to Russian balalaika (only in Eugene would the finale group at a 4th of July festival be Russian - awesome) to rhythm'n'blooz. The best was Opal Creek.

They're an all-girl (except that the first time we saw them their bass player was a boy) bluegrass band. And they're good. Guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, bass, the standard bluegrass instrumentation, and four out of the five of them can sing, lead and harmony. Hell, one of them can even yodel.*

And what harmonies. The plaintive deadpan of the Carter Family, with just a touch, here and there, of the sweetness of Alison Krauss, and a good helping of the Stanley Brothers high lonesome sound. I mean, they're not world-class - a little wobbly on the rhythms now and then, a little warbly on the pitch occasionally - but they had that wrung-out heart that the best bluegrass has. They had the feeling.

A nice repertoire, too, including some familiar traditional numbers (they did a respectable "Orange Blossom Special," and a kick-ass "Going To Get My Baby Out Of Jail") and some originals that held their own. And I have to admit that the particular gender alignment of the band was part of their appeal. I don't just mean because they looked amazing standing up there in their Minnie Pearl dresses and Wayfarers; they had a definite female perspective that came through in their songs, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, that I found quite bracing.

I don't have a huge bluegrass collection - just a smattering of Bill Monroe, Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs, Alison Krauss, and a few other people among my old-timey CDs. But sometimes I get an itch deep down in my soul that only bluegrass can scratch. Opal Creek found it.

A perfect thing to listen to on a 4th of July afternoon, against the blue sky over the Willamette. That was the first time we saw them. The second time was the Oregon Country Fair...and that deserves a post of its own.

*The guitar player and yodeler left the band at the end of the summer, according to their Facebook page. Bonnie's going to nursing school. They're looking for a replacement. Any takers?

David Letterman on The View, 9/7/10

Occasionally we watch The View, and this morning their guest was David Letterman. From the second he walked out, he owned the stage. And for the next forty-five minutes he put on a display of impeccable comic timing, improvisation, and craft. The guy has the best delivery in the business, and some of the quickest reactions. This was a master at work.

It reminded me of how much Letterman has meant to me through the years. From the '80s through the '90s I was aware of him, and watched him when I could - I'm 40, and it's fair to say I was part of the generation that grew up on Letterman's brand of humor. Between periods out of the country and periods when I just didn't own a TV, I never got to watch him regularly until 1999, when I came back from an extended stint in Japan. For the next six or seven years I watched almost every night...until finally it became apparent that he was just going through the motions.

I know a lot of people gave up on him long before that, but I thought he was incredibly strong in the early '00s. His running Campaign 2000 bit in that year was the best commentary (completely dada) on that crazy season in our national life, and of course he was the guy who got us through 9/11. But eventually I had to admit that his show was stale. I stopped watching him regularly a couple of years ago, and I haven't watched him at all in about a year.

Maybe I'll tune in tonight. Because this morning he reminded me of why during many of my years outside the US, Letterman was the piece of American pop culture I missed most: that dry, wiseass wit. I'm on the record as not liking snark, and he basically invented it, but Letterman's different; you can always sense an angry, passionate intelligence just beneath the surface. And even when he's not particularly engaged, he's still probably the best remaining practitioner of a particular, ancient and honorable, brand of professional comedy.

That's a lot of qualifiers, I guess. But anyway, maybe we still need Letterman.

Very early Santana

Santana is a band, not a man, or so goes the theory: in practice, most of Carlos Santana's solo work is pretty indistinguishable from his eponymous band's output, but it is true that his music is always more than just him and some sidemen. And if only because he doesn't sing, Carlos doesn't tend to dominate his bands the way, say, Clapton does his. Santana, when billed as such, is a band.

Of course for most of us there's only one Santana band, the first one. The one that gave us the only three Santana albums that matter*: Santana, Abraxas, and Santana III. The Santana that slew everybody at Woodstock.

But it turns out that this wasn't the first Santana band. It was the second. The first one consisted of Carlos on guitar, Gregg Rolie on keyboards and vocals, David Brown on bass, Marcus Malone on congas, and Bob "Doc" Livingston on drums. The first three, of course, were the instrumental core of the Woodstock-era band, but the two percussions were replaced for the first album.

Is this ur-Santana worth checking out? Surprisingly enough, it is. Where can you check it out? Three places.

First you'll want to track down the 1988 compilation Viva Santana! Hokey name, but worth getting if you're a Santana collector, because it has a ton of rarities. The one that concerns us here is "Ballin'," a demo recorded in late 1967 by this original lineup. A demo, it's called, but it was clearly professionally recorded, and it shows, in six and half minutes of instrumental fire, the musical conception of the classic Santana band already fully-formed. Hot crying guitar, cool caressing Hammond organ, seductive multi-percussionist rhythms. If this is the earliest Santana available, it's a magnificent overture for the man's career.

You'll also want to get the 2004 reissue of the eponymous debut album, the two-disc "Legacy Edition." This is a problematic release; it claimed to include, among its goodies, the complete Woodstock set, but in fact it's missing one song - which later came out on a two-disc set that includes the first album, the complete Woodstock set (for reals this time), but not the other bonus tracks from the Legacy Edition. Typical Sony/Columbia chain-jerking. Anyway, among those bonus tracks are six studio recordings from early 1969 that constitute the band's first attempt at recording their debut album. And although the liner notes to this edition very ungraciously fail to name-check Malone and Livingston, they are in fact the percussionists on these sessions.

Now, these tracks - early drafts of "Soul Sacrifice," "Persuasion," "Treat," "Shades Of Time," and "Jingo," plus a studio take of "Fried Neckbones And Some Home Fries" - are mostly disappointing, just like you'll read in any number of discussions of the classic album. They really are unfocused, slightly dead-sounding jams; particularly disappointing after the excitement of "Ballin'." I'm not sure I can even recommend checking them out, although "Shades Of Time" is interesting because it's not on the live album, so this is the only way to (legitly) check out the early stage in this song's evolution. ...It's worth noting that the liner notes to the live album (see below) mention that the first album was originally going to be called Freeway Jam, after a song by that name recorded during the sessions. But it's not here (although it shows up on the live disc). The notes to the Legacy Edition say this is the complete unreleased album, but is it? Or are we going to get yet another reissue someday with "Freeway" on it? This is Columbia/Sony: of course we are.

The live album. In 1997 Sony, who can do some things almost right, released a two-disc live document called Live At The Fillmore 1968, which features the original lineup. Drawn from shows at the Fillmore West on December 19, 20, 21, and 22, 1968, it was an odd move, coming at a time when the classic Woodstock lineup still hadn't been featured on a full-length live album. But never mind: we're glad we have it. And while we're never minding, let's try to forget about the fact that each disc in the set is under an hour long, while bootlegs from the era suggest that the band had more songs in their repertoire than are represented on this release. We're still glad we have it.

Because it's fantastic music. Carlos, Rolie, and the underappreciated Brown are just tearing it up on these nights, while Malone and Livingston hold their own: they're not Shrieve, Carabello, and Areas, but they hold their own.

The set includes four of the tunes that would eventually make up the first album. "Jingo" and "Soul Sacrifice" are pleasant, but definitely pale in comparison with what they'd become. "Persuasion" has yet to be tightened up into a by-gum-that's-a-pop-song; here it starts out with a shaggy fusion vamp before settling into the song portion. You can see why they stripped it down for the final version, but you can also tell that the earlier arrangement was more fun to play live, and maybe even to hear live. Lots of nuance and drama to this arrangement. But the prize of the familiar numbers is "Treat," stretched out to twice its album length here. Still follows the same basic pattern, but Rolie's piano work benefits from the room to stretch out. This is the Santana band as classic jazzers, a role they pull off with astonishing conviction. They had the goods.

The balance of the album consists of numbers that would never show up on an official album. The Willie Bobo number "Fried Neckbones," Chico Hamilton's "Conquistadore Rides Again," and Albert King's "As The Years Go Passing By," plus the originals "Chunk A Funk" and "Freeway."

Quite simply, these should have been the band's first album, and Santana the second. "Fried Neckbones" and "Conquistadore" are as funky and catchy as anything the classic band ever did, with that confident, at-home looseness that only the Fillmore could breed. "As The Years Go Passing By" is maybe the most assured blues performance to come out of San Francisco that year, and is a welcome representation of the straight-blues side of the band, a side that was fully assimilated into the Latin melange by the time the first album was recorded, but which in the beginning was raw enough that they called themselves the Santana Blues Band.

"Freeway," meanwhile, is...I'd love to hear a studio version of this someday. Live, it's a half hour long, and it almost justifies its length: it's their "Who Do You Love," their "Dark Star," their "Bear Melt": lots of solos all around. I don't mind this kind of thing, obviously; there are some who think this kind of thing was self-indulgent, but (a) what's the point of rock if you're not going to indulge, and (b) you have to understand that these jams were meant for dancing, and as a dancer as well as a musician, when you're in the groove, you don't want it to end, and the whole point of the SF scene was to ask, well, why should it have to end? "Freeway" has a great riffy first seven or eight minutes, before all the solos start, and that's why I'd love to hear a proper studio version: what did they consider the essential part of the song? Live, a lot of it is taken up by a percussion duet, and it's here that the inferiority of the Malone/Livingston battery to the Shrieve/Carabello/Areas team becomes glaringly apparent. But in the last six or so minutes the rest of the band comes back in, and all is forgiven.

An essential listen, made all the more so by the fact that it documents a band that is otherwise all but lost to history.

*For the record, I don't buy this line. I think Caravanserai is interesting, and Welcome and Borboletta are damn near essential albums. I haven't gone beyond them yet.

Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden (1994)

This was one of Polanski's great ones. I think I like him best when he's at his most political - that is, when he allows his normal psychosexual concerns take on sociopolitical overtones. Here it's sort of the reverse: he's taken a play that seems to have been mostly sociopolitical in its concerns and brought out its psychosexual overtones. This old review by Owen Gleiberman runs them down well: "Death and the Maiden is a true Polanski movie now, a sadomasochistic love story that locks torturer and victim together in a chillingly intimate spiritual embrace."

Where I differ from Gleiberman's take is in seeing the political dimensions of the story being given equal importance. Maybe this is easier for an American to see in 2010 than in 1995, at least an American who's had the scales fall from his eyes with regard to his fellow-citizens' willingness to torture and condone torture. The subject of the movie is torture, and how societies deal with it: that comes through loud and clear.

That's why for me, the husband is the most interesting character. Sigourney Weaver's Paulina is a marvel, "stalk(ing) through the rubble like a battered Amazon queen exacting her revenge," in Charles Taylor's phrase (the other review I linked to above). And Ben Kingsley as the suspect Dr. Miranda is amazing, his final confession being one of the most five minutes of speaking you'll ever see, sketching for us how an ordinary man, with the ordinary load of ingrained lusts and anger, can, in the right circumstances, act like a monster, and how he can explain it himself afterward, and to what degree he can forgive himself.

But the figure of Paulina's husband is the real fulcrum of the drama, as we see him struggle to understand the situation. He's supposed to be a dedicated democrat, a crusader for truth and justice for the victims of the old regime, not to mention that he's Paulina's loving husband. But when her actions, her accusation of the doctor, put him on the spot, we suddenly see how as a man, with a normal load of reflexive misogyny; as a husband, with a normal load of grievance; as a lawyer, with a normal distrust of uncorroborated testimony; as a political figure, with a normal sympathy for authority; as a citizen, with a normal unwillingness to see his kind neighbor as a villain; as a peaceful man, with a normal hesitation to use violence; as all these things and more, he's utterly unequipped to give Paulina's story the credence it deserves, and respond with the action it demands. He hesitates at every key moment. And if he hesitates now, how can we expect the truth and reconciliation commission to work?

Quincy Jones: Talkin' Verve (2001)

Growing up in the '80s you couldn't help but be aware of Quincy Jones. Between Michael Jackson and USA for Africa, you'd definitely heard of him; but chances are you never had much idea of why. Okay, sure, he was a producer - but why was he getting interviewed when other producers weren't? And why was he credited for "Just Once" and "One Hundred Ways" when it was James Ingram singing? Later, of course, I learned more and started to understand what it meant to be a producer, and came to appreciate the value of professionalism in the music industry, and to see that what I'd been aware of as "Quincy Jones" growing up in the '80s was only the tail end of a much longer career in American music, one that (and this is something that's impossible to appreciate when you're young) transcended momentary fads in pop.

This album helps get that across - a little bit. I think Jones's kind of accomplishment is the thing that doesn't really translate well to records, because it's more a matter of organization. Even this disc, which draws from a bunch of records he did under his own name, mostly conducting and arranging himself, includes work that he evidently didn't have much to do with besides sponsoring. And as nice as some of this music is, I think it would be forgotten today if "Soul Bossa Nova" hadn't been used in the Austin Powers movies - and there it was used, like everything else, as a goof.

This collection tries to make the case for Jones as an important bandleader and arranger in the same way as the Lalo Schifrin disc in the same series. I don't think it works as well. I don't think it's because Schifrin's roots in jazz were any deeper than Jones's - they both, interestingly, passed through Dizzy Gillespie's band. But the records Schifrin did under his own name (if the disc I have is representative - and it may not be) do seem to aspire to jazz seriousness in a way that Jones's didn't (again, if this disc is a fair sample).

That's a convoluted way of arriving at the conclusion that these tracks sound gimmicky, like big-band novelty tunes. Some of them are pretty enjoyable even so: "Comin' Home Baby" is a fine walk down the dirty side of jazz pop, with great work from Jim Hall on guitar and Roland Kirk on flute. The two movie themes, "Funny Farm" and "Rack 'Em Up," are priceless slivers of multifaceted film jazz, combining ultra-atmospheric touches (ominous noirish background murmurs on the first, "ch-ch-ch-ch-cha" noises on the second) with funky keyboards. As with Schifrin, bits and pieces of some of these numbers were sampled by club jazzers in the '90s.

But the 2001 release date on this disc probably contributes to what drags it down, which is the focus on easy-listening style covers of improbably chosen contemporary pop songs - "Hard Day's Night," "Hang On, Sloopy," "Okie From Muskogee." Here the groovy ornamentation is utterly misapplied; I think the only way to appreciate these records now is as camp, which is how the lounge boomlet heard them, and that's who the Verve suits were aiming at by 2001.

Which means, I guess, that I'm pretty particular about my jazz-revival overtones. Japanese and European-style acid-jazz skinny-tie-and-horn-rims vinyl-rummaging rare-groove obsessing Blue Note Records-worshiping serious irony: yes. American-style lounge Vegassy martini-swizzling tiki-bar send-up irony, as unfocused as a Mike Meyers movie: not so much.

Hamlet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The other thing we saw at OSF was Hamlet, and this was splendid, more than enough to wash away the bad taste of Throne of Blood. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for you, O Reader), I don't know if I have anything much to say about it. Certainly not as much as I had to say about Throne of Blood. I mean, this Hamlet was awesome. Just amazing. But I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to Hamlet. I saw it on Boston Common a few years ago, and I've seen Kenneth Branagh's film (twice!), and of course I've read the play a number of times...but I wouldn't dream of saying I know anything about it.

This series of posts on Bardolatry talks about some of the distinctive aspects of this production: I particularly want to second what Murphy says about the decision to make Hamlet's father deaf, even at the expense of some of the Bard's verbiage:

...having Hamlet and the Ghost communicating in sign language—one might describe it almost as their “private” language—also served to produce the (in my experience, unique) effect of putting the father-and-son pair in a sort of psycho-spiritual bubble, contra mundum; a bubble that excluded all others and highlighted Hamlet’s isolation. The relationship between father and son portrayed in most productions comes across as distant, severe and (on Hamlet’s part) rather worshipful, even awestruck. In this production the father/son relationship is portrayed as having been loving and paternally intimate, which makes Hamlet’s reaction to his father’s tale of murder all the more harrowing.

(snip)

Finally, in the OSF production’s captivating use of sign language—for me it put the icing on the cake, as it were—there were several very nice bits of stage business when we see, in a couple of key scenes, Gertrude and even Claudius breaking briefly into sign language when speaking of the late King Hamlet. These fleeting moments from the ancien regime seemed to signal, as it were, breakings-in of conscience and former ties of familial love into the toxic little Gertrude/Claudius bubble—that “rotten” thing poisoning Denmark.

This really captures something excellent about this production: it got the feeling of the relationships between the characters absolutely right. The brother-sister feeling between Laertes and Ophelia, the father-children feeling between both of them and Polonius, and of course Hamlet and his father and mother, and even uncle. I think what Murphy's suggesting - and I saw this - is that when Gertrude and Hamlet and Claudius break into sign language when speaking of the late King, it's force of habit: these are people who are used to speaking simultaneously in sign and by voice, for the benefit of the King as well as each other, and it's entirely natural that they'd slip back into that old habit at moments of high nostalgia and/or emotion. Natural, and more important for the play, affecting: touching.

This was a very emotional Hamlet. (It's here that I think the best aspects of OSF come through: I called Throne of Blood pandering; the flip side of that is the emotional intensity and accessibility of this Hamlet, populism of the best kind.) The philosophical aspects of the play are there for all to appreciate - you can't escape them, and this production does its best to highlight them too (I like the idea of having the rest of the action onstage stop like a freeze-frame when Hamlet steps out to do a soliloquy). But mostly what we get is a production in which everybody's emotions and the actions that spring from them make visceral sense. We feel Hamlet's turmoil, his grief, his frustration, his anger. His despair.

The wordless play-before-the-play that they've added is important here. (If you go, get there when the doors open so you can see the whole thing.) I'd love to somehow return to a state of innocence where I knew nothing about the play, so that I could learn about Hamlet's character the way the first viewers presumably did - so that I could let Shakespeare introduce him to me cold, and see what effect that would have on me. That's impossible, of course, for almost anybody coming to the play today: by the time Hamlet is first mention, much less appears onstage, we all know what's eating him. The play-before-the-play acknowledges that, and makes our first entry into the play through Hamlet, rather than through the watchmen: for a full half hour we see Hamlet utterly motionless in front of his father's coffin after the funeral, while the mortuary personnel mill around putting away chairs and jawboning in the back of the chapel. We learn everything about Hamlet here: not only that he's young and handsome in his mod suit and sunglasses, but that he's both much more upset by his father's death than anybody else (he's the last one in the chapel) and that he's capable of incredibly concentration (he sits motionless, lost in thought, for thirty minutes). In short we see the ingredients of his obsession, his madness, right here. We can identify (and it helps that Hamlet is dressed and played as a recognizable neurotic hipster, so that the ironic pirouettes of the soliloquys feel like the manic word-riffage of someone raised on rap); we can feel him. It's not strictly Shakespeare, but it quite effectively works with Shakespeare to lead us into the play.