RAVINWIRE.COM

Booksigning and Reception for Legendary songwriter MIKE STOLLER of Leiber and Stoller

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:12:00 GMT

Joel Selvin invites you to a

Booksigning and Reception for

Legendary songwriter

MIKE STOLLER of Leiber and Stoller

5:30 TO 7 P.M. Saturday August 22

Tosca’s Café, 242 Columbus Ave.

Music by John “Piano Man” Allair

Books by

Please feel free to pass this invitation along. All welcome.

GUITARS NOT GUNS BENEFIT CONCERT - SUNDAY, July 12 in Oakland, CA

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:08:00 GMT

www.guitarsnotguns.org providing instruments and instruction for children in need

Alameda County Guitars not Guns

Is holding a Benefit concert

Sunday, July 12 from 3:00-8:00pm

The Everett and Jones BBQ Restaurant

126 Broadway

in downtown Oakland

Guitars not Guns is an allvolunteer organization that provides free guitar lessons and guitars tochildren ages 8-18 who are in need of positive self esteem buildingopportunities

A $20. Donation is requested

To reserve tickets please call

Bob Rhodes at 530-306-5393

For more information about Guitars not Guns

Go to our website at guitarsnotguns.org

WONDER TOWN: Thirty years of Sonic Youth by Sasha Frere-Jones/The New Yorker

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:03:00 GMT

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/06/22/090622crmu_music_frerejones?currentPage=all

WONDER TOWN

Thirty years of Sonic Youth.

by Sasha Frere-Jones/The New Yorker

PHOTO: Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, Kim Gordon, Mark Ibold, and Lee Ranaldo.

Photograph by Max Vadukul.

During the nineteen-eighties, there was a sort of competition among certain members of the American independent-rock scene to make the most hideous noise possible. Guitars were rebuilt to produce wild and staticky new sounds, then played painfully loudly; lyrics and stage antics were often gruesome and intimidating. Butthole Surfers, a psychedelic-punk band from Texas, projected graphic footage of penis-reconstruction surgery on a wall behind them while they performed, and a woman danced around the stage wearing only a loincloth. Steve Albini and Santiago Durango, members of the band Big Black, made their guitars screech at frequencies that seemed designed to give listeners tinnitus. Michael Gira, the lead singer of the almost comically misanthropic band Swans, sang about rape and ritual physical humiliation, and on more than one occasion leaped into the crowd to assault an audience member.

Though Sonic Youth have always been a sober, hardworking bunch, they began their career as an arty, hardcore-influenced band, as partial to abrasive racket as some of their noise-rock peers. Their music was often accompanied by lurid images: the video for their 1985 song “Death Valley ’69” reënacts the Manson murders, complete with fake blood and spilled intestines and the bassist, Kim Gordon, sporting dark hair and wielding a shotgun.

One summer night in 1986, I saw Sonic Youth play at CBGB. The club was oppressively hot. Thurston Moore, six feet six and sandy-haired, originally from Bethel, Connecticut, looked slightly distracted at first, like a surfer who’d wandered indoors. He opened the set by pressing a button on a large boom box; Madonna’s “Into the Groove” began to play while he fiddled, slowly, with his gear. I loved Madonna, and I was a little afraid that the band was making fun of her. But they let her song finish without comment, and then launched into “Tom Violence,” a dirgelike piece that drones and whines. If the bright, square notes of “Into the Groove” came from a world of easy round numbers, Sonic Youth’s music was made of intricate fractions. Each song was crammed with information. Moore swayed as if the stage were heaving, and he sang as though he were trying to calm himself down. Lee Ranaldo, a rugged kid from Long Island with a shaggy hair style, stood stage right, whipping his guitar through the air, now and then crouching to get a better purchase on it. Kim Gordon was center stage, bass in hand; she was the least seasoned musician onstage, and her playing was simple and relentless. Cool, blond, serene, she was like the lead in a movie who refuses to read from the script, more Marina Vlady than Brigitte Bardot.

I stood close to the stage, crushed in a group of people who had probably been pogoing or moshing to any number of bands that week. As loud and powerful as Sonic Youth were, the music was not straight punk, or even modified punk. I had no idea what kind of music it was. “White Kross”—which would soon make its way onto their 1987 album, “Sister”—was fast, straightforward rock, except that every guitar was strangely tuned, moaning and howling instead of crunching in satisfying consonance. The song that stood out that night was one of the quietest, “Shadow of a Doubt,” from the band’s fourth album, “Evol.” Moore and Ranaldo played a series of lightly fretted harmonics that, just as they were on the brink of becoming actual chords, dissolved in a series of electric pops. Gordon whispered the lyrics: “Met a stranger on a train,” and then, later, “Swear it wasn’t meant to be.” The guitars opened for a surge of ringing chords in the middle of the song, but it was determined to remain unresolved. The feeling was a little like being held hostage in a room with someone who refuses to turn on the lights.

Then Moore and Ranaldo first got together, they were playing what Ranaldo calls “a serious guitar and an O.K. one”—a Fender Telecaster Deluxe and a mid-sixties Harmony. Sonic Youth’s 1982 début EP was recorded and written in standard tuning, a first and a last for the band. After that, Moore and Ranaldo began restringing and retuning those guitars and a couple of “cheap Japanese no-names.” (At the beginning of shows, while the crowd waited, they would spend close to half an hour tinkering with the many guitars stacked on either side of the stage.) Because open tunings sometimes allow a guitarist to play parts without having to fret any notes at all, Sonic Youth’s music gained a resonance that’s simply not possible when you have to touch the strings with both hands. (“Death Valley ’69” is a good example: Ranaldo plays a guitar tuned—bottom to top—to two low F-sharps, two medium F-sharps, and an E and a B. Much of his playing involves no fretting at all.) Take these tunings, play them with nontraditional items like screwdrivers, run the signal through a variety of effects pedals, and you’ve got a pretty big palette. More like conductors than like typical players, these guitarists managed to turn their instruments into a kind of choir. The band’s latest release, “The Eternal,” is its sixteenth full-length effort, and my favorite Sonic Youth album in a long time, though I’ve liked plenty of them. The members of Sonic Youth are in their forties and fifties now, and their recording technique has changed very little since their first sessions. “We’re still playing old analog boxes and electric guitars with guitar amps, recording on tape, mixing on tape,” Ranaldo says. “We haven’t gotten any more professional, thank God.” Songs are communally written, and developed over long periods of improvising. Mark Ibold (who was once the bassist for Pavement) recorded and wrote with the band this time around, making it a five-piece again. (Steve Shelley, the drummer, has been with Sonic Youth since 1985. The multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke joined the band in the late nineties but left in 2005.)

On this record, they’ve focussed on crafting songs rather than open-ended compositions. Moore told me recently, “I remember being on tour in the nineties, when we started releasing more kind of lengthy, experimental stuff on our own label, and Malkmus”—the Pavement songwriter Stephen Malkmus—“was driving us somewhere. We were playing it in his rental car, and he said, ‘I hope you guys don’t leave the power of the song behind.’ He liked Sonic Youth as a songwriting band—he had a sort of charming concern about it.” One of “The Eternal” ’s dreamiest tracks, “Antenna,” begins with a simple guitar figure plucked over a brief wash of white noise and thumping tomtoms. Moore sings, in a gentle, conversational way, “My darling cruises the streets for pleasure, skyscrapers in the dead love dawn.” The lyric might be a rueful nod to the chorus of “The Wonder,” from the 1988 release “Daydream Nation”: “I’m just walking around, your city is a wonder town.”

Much of the pleasure here is in the sound. The producer and engineer John Agnello has captured all sides of the band’s multipurpose guitars. I worried that the album didn’t have one of those lengthy, broken-open garbage bags of noise, a song like “Expressway to Yr. Skull,” from 1986, in which all the dragons and feathers and firecrackers and water pistols get to run free. But “Calming the Snake,” though it’s only three and a half minutes long, comes amazingly close. It compresses the push-me-pull-you rhythm of soft lulls and big buildups into pop-song length without sacrificing any heat or unruly noise, and it features Gordon on vocals, doing the kind of punk yowling that the band hasn’t tried in a while. “Come on down, down to the river, come on down, I want to feel you shiver,” she hisses.

Gordon does the screaming on “The Eternal” while the boys do the nice singing. Several songs feature one or more of them singing in unison, an arrangement trick that Sonic Youth has so far largely avoided. Moore told me that the band was purposefully exploring more conventional vocal techniques, such as “getting Lee to harmonize with my non-singing.” Nonetheless, as has always been the group’s way, the vocals come only after the music for each piece is recorded. At that point, Moore, Gordon, and Ranaldo divvy up the songs, and each tries singing on a different one, sometimes trading after a week or so if someone is stuck, sometimes adding a track on top of someone else’s. The fact that the music is finished first is a point of pride, and is perhaps the best testament to the band’s career-long loyalty to the possibilities of sound. “For us, songs get born out of a guitar’s tonality as much as they get born out of chords and structures,” Ranaldo says. “We’re creating pieces of music as pieces of music. That’s all we’re thinking about. ‘Does this piece of music sound good?’ ”

By the early nineties, dozens of bands had picked up the Sonic Youth habit, developing their own proprietary tunings and making waves of noise. This year, Fender will issue the Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo signature Jazzmasters, each kitted out according to the players’ preferences for things like finish, pickup, headstock, and width of frets. The band that once specialized in manhandling pawnshop guitars has become an institution. ♦

Allen Toussaint: Down By The River

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:00:00 GMT

http://offbeat.com/artman/publish/article_3694.shtml

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Allen Toussaint: Down By The River

By Alex Rawls/OffBeat.com

Allen Toussaint finally looks comfortable. We’ve finished talking and during the conversation, he expressed concern that he wasn’t a good interview. He was gentlemanly as you’d expect, forthright, and though he wasn’t unhappy, it didn’t seem like he enjoyed the interview experience.

But when he sat down at the piano while the photographer snapped test shots, an ease and eloquence kicked in. He free associated a medley that started with a classical piece that flowed into “Tipitina and Me” then an Irish lullaby, a polka, “Tipitina” proper, “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and more. Many of the pieces were songs or styles we had just talked about, and it felt like he was speaking about them again, this time in the language he was most fluent. In this impromptu medley, each composition was recognizable but he also remade it in his own voice with his distinctive sense of rhythm, space and style. Everything was elegant and everything was profound. The musical history of the 20th Century was coded into his performance—not just in the choices of songs but in how his playing reflected an understanding of all those styles, regardless of what he was playing.

It was a similar moment that led producer Joe Henry to his most recent collaboration with Toussaint, The Bright Mississippi. In the album’s liner notes, Henry writes:

One day in a studio in Los Angeles, while grabbing a piano overdub on a song we’d recorded earlier that afternoon, he began amusing himself between takes by blowing freely and with great invention through a song by Fats Waller. I was stunned. It was a revelation to hear this music (“my parents’ music,” he later offered) interpreted through Allen’s very unique point of view. The song, inherently rhythmic as a composition, was transfigured by a left hand schooled in New Orleans, and by the melodic sensibility of a most particular kind of songwriter. “Have you ever considered making a record like that?” I quickly asked him over the talkback. “Never,” he said with a slight grin, and kept playing by way of assuring me that he most certainly had.

The Bright Mississippi is a red herring in a sense. The largely instrumental album with “St. James Infirmary” and jazz tunes by Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong invites listeners to hear it as a journey through Toussaint’s back pages, but as he told Henry, that’s not the case. “‘Dear Old Southland ‘I had never heard. ‘Egyptian Fantasy’—no none of these,” Toussaint says. “Because I’ve been New Orleans funkified quite a bit—and some pop and some Patti Labelle and some Joe Cocker. We don’t get off on that exit usually.” During an interview at JazzFest, he told writer Ben Sandmel that he was far more interested in the street music of his day.

That knowledge suggests a slightly different way to think of the young Toussaint who wrote and produced so many New Orleans R&B classics. Rather than being the apotheosis of the New Orleans piano tradition, he can now also be thought of as akin to a young Phil Spector, immersed in the music of his day and making hits for the young record-buying audience, largely teenagers.

The Bright Mississippi presents Toussaint not as a nostalgic lion in winter but as an artist as engaged in making modern music now just as he was when he recorded “Ride Your Pony” with Lee Dorsey in 1966, “Right Place, Wrong Time” with Dr. John in 1973, “Lady Marmalade” with Labelle in 1975 and The River in Reverse with Elvis Costello in 2005. The source material may have been written decades ago, but the performances and arrangements are contemporary. His primary foil on the album is Nicholas Payton, and his band includes guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Don Piltch, Don Byron on clarinet and Jay Bellerose on drums. The tracks were cut live without charts, with Toussaint and the band responding to the music not as history but as fresh musical compositions. As Henry writes in his liner notes, “He has fixed himself on an old and yellowing map, and by so doing has conjured it (again) to be a living, changing landscape.”

Toussaint’s renaissance has been a byproduct of his association with Joe Henry, the musician who himself is coming out with a new album, Blood from Stars, in August. He had approached Rhino Records and Starbucks with the idea for a series of soul albums made for the beginning of the 21st Century with classic soul artists. “There are people whose humanity is so visceral that this invariably soulful,” he says. “I don’t care anything about capital ‘S’ soul music in a record store. Ann Peebles’ very seminal record I Can’t Stand the Rain, as a whole album is a singer/songwriter’s record, [but it] delivered a beautiful soulful quality that many people respond to when they hear it. It’s not about big horn sections; the songs are very folky in their structure. Beautiful stories delivered by a voice that inclines you to want to believe in it.”

He set out to record artists who had that human quality, and he came up with I Believe to My Soul, Vol. 1 with Billy Preston, Mavis Staples, Irma Thomas and Toussaint in addition to Peebles. Unfortunately, most of New Orleans missed the release because on October 4, 2005, the city had other things to think about. Thomas’ version of Bill Withers’ “The Same Love that Made Me Laugh” is one of her finest moments from the last five years, and despite Toussaint’s self-deprecation of his talents as a vocalist, “Mi Amour” is convincingly sung by a sly, smooth-talking devil.

His inclusion in the project was partially a result of Henry’s search for a musician who could also make meaningful contributions as a member of the band. The idea appealed to Toussaint. “Me and Dr. John, we started as sidemen,” he says. “So I was back into a zone that I remember, and it had been a long time since I had the pleasure of just playing the piano and not having to consider the other factors.”

According to Henry, though, Toussaint later confessed that he surprised himself when he agreed to fly to Los Angeles for the project. “He told me later, much later, that up until that point he considered himself semi-retired; he had imagined he wouldn’t leave New Orleans again. He played Jazz Fest every year, but that was the extent of what he was doing, for the most part.”

Industry changes meant the I Believe to My Soul series never made it to Volume 2, but Henry didn’t lose interest in the artists he worked with. He was working on an album with Preston when he died in 2006, and he has expressed interest in producing Thomas again. He also stayed in touch with Toussaint, who found sessions very much to his liking. “I didn’t know Joe Henry before then, but as soon as I got out and started to go over things I realized this was a gentleman producer,” Toussaint says. “I respected him because of how he felt about the music and how he treated the musicians, and the atmosphere he set was so comfortable. And classy and smooth, he just setup a very creative atmosphere.” It was no surprise then that when Toussaint and Elvis Costello started to work on The River in Reverse, the two producers called Henry to man the board.

Because the city was under lockdown when The River in Reverse sessions started, recording began in Los Angeles then moved to New Orleans and Piety Street Recording 10 weeks after Katrina. It was Toussaint’s second journey back. “I came back to see my house a month later, as soon as I could, and everything was gray,” he says. “It was all light gray, a medium gray. It was very interesting. It looked like the work of an artist, to see everything gray. My Steinway, you couldn’t distinguish the black keys and the white keys. And there were no splits between the keys, just two unleveled bars of grayness. And everything else, the things on the wall, the stools and everything was grey. Very, very interesting. Everything I liked, Katrina liked it more. I resolved immediately that all was well, and whatever I had served me well until that day.

“I resolved Katrina, because I saw it as a baptism not a drowning,” he says, and if that sounds impossibly sanguine or like some sort of revisionism—rampant since Katrina—Henry confirms his account.

“He is sort of a Zen master in a way,” Henry says. “I was just devastated and felt I hadn’t prepared myself for what I was going to see, and he was elated to be there. It wasn’t that he was in denial about how catastrophic the scene was; it was more, to my estimation, that he could see through it to the next thing. He wasn’t trapped by the immediate moment. He could already see through to where it was going and where it might lead.”

In his case, it led to a lengthy tour in front of audiences, many of whom knew Toussaint as a figure from the past rather than a contemporary artist. His songs were celebrated nightly as he toured with Costello, and rather than seeming like an icon from history trotted out for a segment of the show, he integrated his distinctive piano into much of Costello’s music. He also recorded with other musicians including British R&B singer James Hunter and Theresa Andersson. She in turn celebrates him in her live show with a radically rearranged version of “On Your Way Down.”

“It’s quite an honor that they would call me,” Toussaint says. “It’s nice of them to feel that way about me.”

If The Bright Mississippi would have been about Toussaint’s past, it would have focused far more on Professor Longhair. He celebrated Fess with “Tipitina and Me” for Mark Bingham’s post-Katrina project, Our New Orleans, and “Ascension Day” on The River in Reverse” is strongly based on “Tipitina.” As a pet project, he has written symphonic arrangements for much of Longhair’s catalog. He has no plans to stage the music or record it, though. “Right now, where it is, we are very dear lovers.”

The close consideration of Longhair necessary for such a project just confirmed what Toussaint already knew. “He’s our Bach of rock,” he says. “I remember the first time I saw him. He was playing a spinet piano up on Valence Street. It was for a high school, and I thought how ironic because I thought of him as larger than life and there he was playing the smallest piano there is. But it was Professor Longhair and I stood near the piano in awe. Of course I didn’t speak to him because I didn’t have the right yet. Of course I watched his hands, but I was so busy with being in awe and in his presence I didn’t learn too much. But I knew his stuff. Ever since my earliest times, I’d copied everything, ever so humbly in the early days. I knew every song he had.”

Toussaint started playing before he was 7, and before he saw Longhair, he knew what he was doing with his life. Around the time he turned 12, he says, “I told my mother, ‘I’ll always do this.’” Still, he cautions against seeing too much Fess in him. “I came up in love with hillbilly music for a long time, and I dearly love bluegrass and all of the classics and polkas. I’m a polka fanatic, and of course all of the music I hear—the Irish lullabies and folk songs: ‘If They Knocked the ‘L’ Out of Kelly, It Would Still be Kelly to Me.’”

Henry selected the songs for The Bright Mississippi with “Tipitina and Me” in mind. “There was a certain kind of beauty,” he says. “It sounded old world, it sounded classical, deeply rhythmic like tango, with New Orleans rhythm but also had a deep blues tonality.” On a cross-country flight, he scoured his iPod for songs that might similarly showcase Toussaint’s rich musical voice, even though a jazz album seems counterintuitive as a follow-up to The River in Reverse, which celebrated his songwriting.

The project appealed to Toussaint, who had by that time developed a deep trust in Henry. “I feel like an instrumentalist, first second and third,” Toussaint says. “When he first mentioned he wanted to produce me, I had no idea what genre he had in mind. I was glad it would be an instrumental, whatever genre it would be. And to find out it was going to be this really easy going jazz project—that was quite comforting too, once I got involved. It was something that’s mellow, it’s smooth. It’s not taxing at all.”

Toussaint knew Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues,” but though he knew Django Reinhardt, he hadn’t heard “Blue Drag.” He hadn’t performed any of the songs before including “St. James Infirmary,” despite the song’s status as a standard in New Orleans. “I hadn’t paid much attention to it, but it’s an easy song to remember,” Toussaint says. “I didn’t give it much thought, but for some reason the intro came to me like that. It was something I had done before on the piano, but never used.” In that intro, he teases the melody with a little trilled, morse code-like figure before playing the melody as a series of single notes played only with the right hand. With each pass through the verse, he adds levels of complexity. “As far as my part is concerned, that’s the most unique thing about the song by this pianist—the intro and the interlude. That song is a good song on its own and is easy to remember. You just try not to ruin it.”

When the album was in the planning stages, Henry asked, “When you were the man in New Orleans in the ’60s and ’70s making such iconic records as songwriter and producer, what did you think of Louis Armstrong?’ He said, ‘I thought of Louis Armstrong not at all. That was my parents’ music. At that point, he was sort of a nice old man on TV. I didn’t realize until much later that he was a revolutionary.” For Henry, that admission confirmed the rightness of the project. “Here was Allen at this point in his life understanding the significance in a completely fresh way. It wasn’t about recreating anything to him; it wasn’t in Allen’s mind to be recreating. He was seeing a new light shining out from his beloved city in a way he hadn’t before.”

Toussaint is now 71 and he’s back in New Orleans. He still maintains the place in Manhattan he lived in after Katrina, but he has a house on the lakefront. He’s not sure that it’s home yet, but it’s a place to work—a place where he gets a cup of tea, turns on synthesizers and starts making music. “It’s either completing plots I’ve started before, or finishing some plans I might have thought up before,” he says. “There’s always something on the back burner, so there’s always something to do musically. Everyday is something about music.” Unfortunately, this spring has also meant saying goodbye to contemporaries—Snooks Eaglin at 71 and Eddie Bo at 79. It’s a fact of advancing age that friends pass away, and it only underscores the remarkable nature of Toussaint’s career that he is enjoying a career renaissance now. It’s not surprising that Toussaint doesn’t reflect on their deaths in that light.

“They left something good that is forever,” he says. “These two gentlemen that you mentioned, and others like Earl King and King Floyd, they left something that is very dear and they’re still here. All of the people that love their music—many of them never got to know the person, so the part they knew is still here. I think of that as quite a blessing. The age we live in, lives can be immortalized, as opposed to during the days of Bach where it must be reproduced by someone. You can hear the original guy.” That sort of peace and insight has made his relationship with Allen Toussaint particularly special for Henry. “My wife said to me on more than one occasion, when I come back from some experience with Allen—because I’ve had quite a few of them now, and I’d come back and in retrospect I’m just in awe of something that happened or communicated or performed—she’ll say you’ll never have another friendship in your life like that one, and that’s true. I don’t know anyone else in the world like him.

Published June 2009, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 22, No. 6.

OBIT: Jack Nimitz, 79; Jazz Baritone Sax Player

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:51:00 GMT

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jack-nimitz16-2009jun16,0,3226318.story

Jack Nimitz, 79; Jazz Baritone Sax Player

Nimitz played with Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and Herbie Mann and had a busy career as a studio musician in Hollywood.

Obituary from The Los Angeles Times

Jack Nimitz, a jazz baritone saxophonist who played in the Woody Herman and Stan Kenton big bands and in the group "Supersax," died Wednesday of complications from emphysema at his home in Studio City. He was 79.

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1930, Nimitz began playing clarinet at an early age and alto saxophone at 14. He was still a teenager when he began playing professional gigs at Howard Theatre in Washington.

He soon fell in love with the baritone saxophone. "It sounded so warm and nice and dark and rich," he told The Times some years ago. "The bottom notes are the best notes in the whole orchestra, because if you don't have a good bottom, nothing really works."

He bought his first baritone saxophone at the age of 20 and three years later was playing baritone in Herman's band. Through the 1950s, he played with Herman, Kenton and, later, Herbie Mann.

On the advice of colleagues in Kenton's band, he came to Los Angeles in the early 1960s and established himself as a first-rank studio musician for scores of film soundtracks and recording sessions. He worked frequently for songwriter Johnny Mandel. He also played with such jazz luminaries as Benny Carter, Gerald Wilson and the Lighthouse All-Stars

In the early 1970s, he added his baritone to the Charlie Parker tribute band "Supersax."

His first album as a leader was the 1995 session on Fresh Sound records called "Confirmation," which focused heavily on bebop tunes.

"Bebop is the most sophisticated form of jazz," he told The Times. "It's very challenging but also rewarding because it feels so good when it happens."

A memorial service will be held Saturday at 3 p.m. at Chapel of the Hills, Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills.

FROM AllAboutJazz.com

Sometimes fate does not distribute her gifts based on merit. Jack Nimitz never achieved the recognition, popularity or record sales of Gerry Mulligan, Pepper Adams or Serge Chaloff. Nonetheless, he was fully their peer as a baritone saxophonist of the post-bop era. Nimitz died last week in Los Angeles at the age of 79. From the early 1950s in Washington, DC, with The Orchestra, through the bands of Bob Astor, Johnny Bothwell, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, Nimitz was a sturdy anchor of reed sections and a soloist of power and creativity.

After he moved to Los Angeles in the early sixties, Nimitz was a first-call baritone player in studios and on a dozen or more big bands, including those of Benny Carter, Gerald Wilson, Terry Gibbs, Oliver Nelson and Frank Capp. He was a charter member of Super Sax, the saxophone band that specialized in orchestrated Charlie Parker solos. Nimitz is on scores of other peoples' albums, but did not release a CD as a leader until 1995 with Confirmation. That recording is out of print or, as the record company's web site optimistically announces, “temporarily out of stock."

Fortunately, his second CD, Yesterday and Today, is available. It teamed Nimitz with another neglected master, the trombonist Bill Harris and, five decades later, with a rising young player of Nimitz's own instrument. From a 2008 Rifftides review:

Jack Nimitz, Yesterday And Today (Fresh Sound). “Yesterday" was 1957, when the distinctive baritone saxophonist recorded a long-playing album for ABC-Paramount. The LP sat unissued for half a century. “Today" was early last year, when Nimitz went into the studio to record new music to add to the 1957 material and round out a compact disc. Nimitz's tone has more heft and his soloing more aggressiveness than fifty years ago. In both instances, his playing is superb.

CD REVIEW: Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy "Spirit Moves"

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:37:00 GMT

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/21/PK521830H6.DTL

CD REVIEW

Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy

Spirit Moves

Green Leaf Music

Review by Davi Wiegand/San Francisco Chronicle

Perhaps the only thing that isn't surprising about "Spirit Moves," the new album from Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy, is that it's full of tasty surprises. You'll know that right off from the first cut, an inspired arrangement of Rufus Wainwright's "This Love Affair" that immediately evokes the sounds of a New Orleans jazz funeral. The album's highlights are the three compositions honoring trumpeters Lester Bowie, Enrico Rava and Fats Navarro, each piece honoring the style of the other trumpet greats while demonstrating Douglas' singular creativity. Otis Redding's "Mister Pitiful" is a joyful mashup of '60s soul, '70s funk and anything else Douglas and company feel like tossing in. This is very much an ensemble success, with superb contributions by Vincent Chancey on French horn, Luis Bonilla on trombone, Marcus Rojas on tuba and Nasheet Waits on drums.

OBIT: John Houghtaling, 92, Inventor of Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:43:00 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/business/20houghtaling.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

John Houghtaling, 92, Inventor of Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed

By MARGALIT FOX/The New York Times

John Houghtaling, an inventor whose best-known product shook postwar America, or at least those Americans who stayed overnight in midprice motels, died on Wednesday at his home in Fort Pierce, Fla. Mr. Houghtaling, the inventor of the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed, was 92.

The cause was complications of a recent fall, his son Paul said.

Developed in 1958 in Mr. Houghtaling’s basement, Magic Fingers was a ubiquitous presence in the roadside America of the 1960s and ’70s. Installed on millions of beds in hotels and motels across the country, it featured a mechanical vibrator attached to the box spring, and a coin meter attached to the vibrator. Activated, “Magic Fingers quickly carries you into the land of tingling relaxation and ease,” as a label on the device proclaimed.

Operation was simple. The weary traveler dropped a quarter into the meter, and the mattress surged to life. Fifteen minutes later, when the shaking stopped, the user could either drop off to sleep or pay for another tremulous round.

“While the vibrators offer a pleasing sensation similar to weightlessness, no special medical or therapeutic value is claimed,” The New York Times reported in 1963. “It is said, though, that they are of aid in getting to sleep.”

Combining the thrill of a carnival ride with the pleasure of what could be accomplished, sleeping or waking, on a motel bed, Magic Fingers has insinuated itself into the consciousness of a great many Americans over 40. It has cropped up in a spate of movies, television shows and popular songs, including “This Hotel Room,” by Steve Goodman, in which Jimmy Buffett sang: “Put in a quarter / Turn out the light / Magic Fingers makes you feel all right.”

John Joseph Houghtaling was born on Nov. 14, 1916, in Kansas City, Mo. (The family name is pronounced HUFF-tay-ling.) After high school, he held a series of jobs, among them hotel bellman, cookware salesman and a salesman of a remote-control lawnmower.

The earliest vibrating beds predated the Industrial Revolution and were powered by household servants. Then came steam power, and after that, electricity. Mr. Houghtaling’s great innovation was to separate the motor from the bed.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Houghtaling was working as a salesman for a vibrating-bed company. Its product, which combined motor and mattress in one integrated unit, was expensive and unwieldy. What was more, as he said in interviews afterward, it broke down frequently.

Tinkering in the basement of his home in Glen Rock, N.J., Mr. Houghtaling tested 300 motors before hitting on one that was light, unobtrusive and made the bed tingle at just the right frequency. At the company’s height in the mid- to late 1970s, Paul Houghtaling said, more than a million Magic Fingers devices were in use in hotels, motels and private homes in the United States and Europe.

Mr. Houghtaling’s first marriage, to Ruth Donovan, ended in divorce; his second wife, Rita Breier, died before him. He is survived by four sons, John, Mark, Paul and Chris, and a daughter, Alison Lincoln, all from his first marriage; and four grandchildren. Most of Mr. Houghtaling’s children have Magic Fingers in their homes, Paul Houghtaling said in an interview on Friday.

By the early 1980s, Magic Fingers had begun to fall out of favor with hotel owners. By the standards of late-20th-century in-room entertainment, the device seemed quaint. There was also the matter of guests breaking into the coin meters and stealing the quarters, something they did often.

Mr. Houghtaling retired in the 1980s, after selling the rights to the Magic Fingers name. Today, the device is marketed by its current owners for home use.

The Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed can still be found in a handful of steadfast motels, mostly in the American West. There, the faithful check in and take to their beds, rolls of quarters in hand.

Olivia Harrison Still Loves To Hear George's Voice

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:19:00 GMT

www.spinner.com Article: Olivia Harrison On Life Without George

Olivia Harrison Still Loves To Hear George's Voice

By Melinda Newman/Spinner.com

On June 16, George Harrison's first greatest-hits collection in more than 30 years was released. The set, 'Let It Roll: Songs by George Harrison,' is the only compilation that spans his entire solo career. Its release is one of a series of current activities celebrating Harrison's legacy, starting in April when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In September come both the Beatles' highly anticipated version of Rock Band and their rereleased, remastered catalog.

Spinner talked with Harrison's widow, Olivia, about 'Let It Roll,' plans for other Harrison reissues and her late husband's obsession with taping everything.

How involved were you in picking the music for 'Let it Roll'?

More than I cared to be, to be honest, because it was nearly impossible. Everyone was fighting and pushing and pulling. [Harrison's son] Dhani had a list, of course, and he was, "No, you can't have this; you gotta have this." Then the record company has ideas ... I had a two-CD set; we really honed it down [to one] ... We tried to pick something from every era.

What's the most gratifying part for you that there's seemingly no end in the interest in George's music, whether it's solo, with the Traveling Wilburys or with the Beatles?

I guess just hearing his voice. I love that voice ... But you know, [people] would say, "What would you like to be remembered for?" and [George] would say, "I don't really care if I'm remembered" ... He wasn't trying to make himself into something that had to be remembered. If somebody takes something away, which I think they have and obviously his music has endured, [that's fine], but if not, that's fine, too.

Do you listen to your husband's music a lot?

I listen to a lot of really rough recordings, cassettes and demos. George seemed to have a tape recording going ...The other night I listened to New Year's Eve, it must have been '87. There was Joe Brown, a great musician; and Dave Edmunds; Alvin Lee, who was a neighbor; Jon Lord from Deep Purple. We're all just hanging out. And then we're sitting around the piano, someone has a guitar. You can hear all the wives talking, the guys are playing and we're all singing along ...I'm like, 'Wow, who had this tape going,' you know? And George would always end up putting it in his pocket, throwing it in a drawer, so I listen to things like that.

Any thought of releasing them?

No, not really, but you just sit and listen and it's sort of like you're there again.

Why is there no previously unreleased material on the set?

George had a "best of" that ended in 1976 -- that was the only "best of" collection out there. That album always bothered me ... I just thought that is really not fair and I think we have to put something in that place, and that's really what this is.

What do you want someone to learn about George from this collection?

I think the basic thread that runs through it is his guitar playing and his sentiment, which veers towards a person questioning their existence and also somebody with a sense of humor ... And also, there's a longing, especially, like in the song 'Isn't It a Pity.' He really meant that. He used to feel so bad when bad things would happen. I think the ultimate was a couple of months before he died was 9/11. He was so disappointed and so heartbroken, like everyone else.

Will there be a Volume Two of the greatest hits? There are omissions here like 'Dark Horse' or 'Crackerbox Palace.'

With 'Dark Horse,' I will remaster that, but there's a lot of peripheral material to that and I don't want to just do the album and put it out without everything ... There's photographs, there's artwork, there are a lot of things that could go into that to make it a really nice package. But to actually put the music out because they fans want it ... if they wait, I can make it better.

In April, George received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. What would he think about that?

I think by this point he would have been OK. But there was a point, sort of in the '90s, he was enjoying himself so much not doing anything in the public eye, he might not have done it. But you know, we want to give him a star and so that's too bad, George, you're going to have it [Iaughs]. He would always say, no matter what it was, "Oh that's nice." Sometimes people would make up an award and send it because they like him and he'd go, "Oh, that's nice." And he'd kind of put it on the table and it would just be there. Probably people don't realize that he did appreciate it whether it was the biggest award in the world or the smallest little award or a flower left in the gate ... He might have some hokey little thing beside an Oscar on the shelf and it was all the same to him.

The Beatles: Rock Band game comes out in September. How involved were you?

Oh, we [Olivia, Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr] were all very involved. The technical things you leave to Harmonix and EA because that's what they do, but little things like, you know, the shape of the face and certain things, the nose: "His chin wasn't like that" ... There was a point where I had to say, "Hang on a minute, it's a game. They're not trying to re-create him here." But you wanted it to be nice and you wanted it to reflect a look. They're very cute.

Dhani gave an interview where he said there may be some unreleased Beatles songs in the game. True?

I don't think that was an accurate quote, actually.

So the answer is no, then?

I think what is it is there's a lot of [unreleased] dialog that was given from the [recording] sessions and that has been used ... They had hours and hours of studio talk, so they were able to incorporate that.

OBIT: Barry Beckett, 66, Muscle Shoals Keyboardist/Producer

bsarles@aol.com (bsarles) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:35:00 GMT

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/06/15/barry-beckett-muscle-shoals-keyboardistproducer-dead-at-66/

Barry Beckett, 66, Muscle Shoals Keyboardist/Producer

By Daniel Kreps/RollingStone.com

Barry Beckett, a Muscle Shoals producer and keyboardist who worked with artists including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Phish, passed away on June 10th following complications from a stroke in Hendersonville, Tennessee, Billboard reports. He was 66. As a member of the famed Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, or the Swampers as they were called, Beckett was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995.

Beckett performed on songs like Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome,” Willie Nelson’s “Bloody Mary Morning” and several tracks on Bob Seger’s Night Moves album. Beckett was also part of Traffic’s live band in 1973, appearing on the live album On the Road. In addition to his session and live work, Beckett had a long career as a producer, helming Bob Dylan’s 1979 album Slow Train Coming and 1980’s Saved, Phish’s 1993 LP Rift, Dire Straits’ Communique and a song on Elton John’s Duets.

The first hit Beckett produced was the Sanford Townsend Band’s “Smoke From a Distant Fire,” and Beckett’s first Number One was Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers.” Later in his career, Beckett segued into country, producing Kenny Chesney’s first two albums and Hank Williams Jr.’s Born to Boogie, which won the 1988 CMA Album of the Year award.

“He was the best boss I ever had and one of the greatest friends I ever had,” friend and coworker Dick Cooper told Alabama’s Times Daily. “He and [producer] Jerry Wexler taught me everything I know about the music industry.” Swampers guitarist Jimmy Johnson added “Barry was one of the greatest keyboard players I ever worked with. Definitely, in our field, he was in the top five in the world. He’s going to be missed.”

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/06/june-10-at-age-66.html

FROM PASTE MAGAZINE:

Musician and producer Barry Beckett died in his Tennessee home on June 10 due to complications related to a stroke. He was 66 years old. Beckett is survived by his sons Matthew and Mark and his wife Diane.

In the mid-'60s, nestled between music powerhouses Memphis and Nashville, the small southern city of Muscle Shoals, Ala. didn't have much to boast save for a narrow leg of the Tennessee River and a sliver of America's metals industry. Soon, though, something grew up around Fame Studios and a band called the Swampers that would give the city over to rock 'n' roll history as the namesake of the "Muscle Shoals sound."

Beckett was the keyboardist of the Swampers, formally called the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. The quartet got its start as an ensemble of contract musicians at Fame, the first studio in the Shoals. In 1969, the Swampers broke from Fame and created their own studio, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, where Beckett began producing as well as contributing keys to the countless acts that would record there.

As a pioneer in the city's music scene, Beckett's legacy reaches as far back as Etta James' 1967 album Tell Mama, and as far forward as

Band Of Horses

, who recorded their third album in the Shoals last fall. The complete list of Beckett's beneficiaries includes Aretha Franklin,Otis Redding, Paul Simon, Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, John Prine and Kenny Chesney, among countless others.