Good-Bye To All That

Another fun list from The Onion: “18 Kiss-Off Songs to Cities.”

Pavement’s “Box Elder” should be on there.

My Favorite Things

I really enjoyed Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. While he’s obviously an immense fan of the music itself, he avoids outright hagiography, almost to a fault. (Sure, we don’t need another chapter on the recording of A Love Supreme, but only a page and a half seems a bit austere). Overall though, the book is excellent and hits all of the right notes — heavy on exploring and explaining the music, light on the psychoanalysis.

My only criticism is fairly small. The modal evolution away from breakneck, hard bop, chord-change wizardry is explained pretty well (with no small amount of attention paid to Trane’s apprenticeship with Miles), but he seems to get a bit caught up in the phraseology of it all (Lydian, Ionian, Phrygian, Mixolydian, etc.) All well and good, but why not explain that, at its most basic, modal phrasing is about emphasizing unconventional notes within standard scales?

Ultimately though, it’s a great read. Ratliff’s grasp of the nuts-and-bolts of the music itself is refreshing, as is his understanding of Coltrane’s prominence as a cultural icon and his willingness to take a hard look at the many positive and some glaringly negative aspects of his legacy within the contemporary jazz community.

And I had no idea that Mike Watt of The Minutemen used to prep his audience with the entire 40 minutes of Ascension before going on stage. That’s as punk rock as it gets.

Friday Ska Fun

Meet The Rumble Strips from foggy Londontown.  Their cover of “The Boys are Back in Town” feels good on a rainy weekend eve.

“Like Notes from a Piano”

Contrary Theses (II)

One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,

He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.

He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again.
The negroes were playing football in the park.
The abstract that he saw, like the locust-leaves, plainly:

The premiss from which all things were conclusions,
The noble, Alexandrine verve. The flies
And the bees still sought the chrysanthemums’ odor.

–Wallace Stevens