Looking back on my childhood, I am struck by how trippy children's programming was. It certainly was eye catching. The first example I want to show is from a preachy, moralizing cartoon I remember seeing every saturday morning. I think they used it as filler between regular programming. It was called "Jot" and it mainly gave these moral lessons. The format was simple--Jot (a dot with a face and feet)would commit some moral transgression, things get all trippy, Jot repents, Jot feels better.
Enjoy:
It's enough to make a kid swear off cupcakes forever.
In this next one, Jot is tempted by some sort of Noisy Windmill toy. Perhaps it was part of some Man of La Mancha action figure set. That is not really made clear. He steals the aformentioned toy and with it he levitates to his lair in a treehouse. It is at this point that his enjoyment of his stolen goods is complicated by the fact that he begins hallucinating that the toy is speaking to him, whispering the 8th Commandment over and over. The toy seems broken and unattractive.
He repents and returns the toy, at which point the toy seems desireable again.
It is hard not to covet when the world works this way. Thief's remorse I suppose.
Next up is a clip from a children's special called "The Point". It's a sort of allegorical bildungsroman with music by Harry Nilson and narrated by Ringo. Main character Oblio lives in a land where everyone has a pointed head. His is decidedly round. He dons a pointed hat and goes in search of "a point". In this clip, he is given life lessons by a hipster.
Kinda get the munchies just watching that don't you?
In the early to mid seventies, Saturday morning children's programming was dominated by two main forces: Hanna Barbera, and Sid and Marty Krofft. They seemed to be competing to determine who could develop the most acid-inspired programming. Consider the following from Hanna Barbera.And now from the competition. Can this be anything other than a pot song?We were also tantalized by the Beatles and Peter Max from time to time--but this usually took the form of a prime time special. Here are the Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine:
But perhaps the classic mind blower of all for kids my age was this piece of magic:Combine all of this with the toy we all grew up with--the toy that made disorientation fun--that associated dizziness and playtime--that equates an inability to walk with pure, unadulterated joy. What could it be, you ask?
You know, sometimes being the man just trumps everything. As an intro here is one of my old man's favorite stories. The sales manager comes to the boss and says "Johnson has been showing up late and his expense report is through the roof!" The boss replies, "Did you mention it to him?"
"Yes, and he said you could eat your hat and that I should go &^%$ myself."
The boss replies, "What do his sales look like?"
"Twice as good as anyone else, but what are we going to do about his attitude?"
And the boss says, "Well I am going to get a new hat, and you have a personal problem."
The old man would always use this little joke as a way of reminding me that there are perks that come with excellence. Many of my father's life lessons took this form. He was just a bottom line kind of guy.
Now let me tell you another story, A story of a gypsy man. His name was Jean Baptiste Reinhardt, but he became known as Django to the world. To many, he was the finest guitarist who ever lived. He was born in 1910 and lived most of his life in France among the manouche gypsy population. In 1928, at age 18 he was living in a gypsy caravan vardo like one of these:
He was already an accomplished guitarist and jazz banjo player. His wife made celluloid flowers. One night the vardo catches fire and the celluloid stuff just turns the whole thing into an inferno. Django was caught inside. He had serious burns all over his body, but one of the most damaged areas was his fretting hand--the breadwinner of all his body parts. His ring finger and little finger were horribly burned and were rendered all but useless. Here is a picture of his hand:
This does not stop the guy. In fact, he was just getting started. He starts using chord shapes and styles that are suitable for his damaged hand. Before long he meets virtuoso violinist Stephane Grappelli and they form a band that plays jazz but all on string instruments. Many of the various side men are also gypsies including Django's brother Joseph. They record some of the most beautiful and most swinging music ever recorded. Django's playing is just amazing. Almost every jazz guitarist since claims him as an influence. And he is doing all this with two working fingers and a stump of a third. Just as things are really starting to get kicking and the band is becoming known world wide, the Germans occupy France. Stephane Grappelli (who was gay) decides to leave and wait out the war in England, but Django remains behind and continues to gig. Now think about this--we are not talking about some low profile working class guy trying not to be noticed, this is a gigging musician band leader who is out front every time he goes to work attracting attention to himself, and he is a handicapped gypsy in a gypsy band playing music written by blacks right in the middle of Paris when the place is crawling with Nazis. Sweet Jesus, they came for the gypsies before they came for the jews! I guess my pop is right. If you are the man, if you are creating something that no one else can, well sometimes a fellow like that gets a pass. There is only one known piece of footage of Django playing where the sound is synced up with the visual image. This is from when he was still playing with Stephane Grappelli. Here it is:Now listen to what a man of an "inferior" race can do with two fingers:
It's 1953. Bebop is in full. . . well. . . bebop. Diz and Bird are kicking it hard. A group of Jazz fans in Toronto decide to sponsor a concert at Massey Hall that ended up being Jazz legend. According to the story (as I heard it--and there are many versions) Charlie Parker was a pretty notorious, unreliable junkie at the time. Habit had got the best of him. Started to get a rep for showing up all junked up to the gig. So to make sure he didn't show up incapacitated, the band takes his money and just gives him a ticket for travel. This seems Urban Legendish--but I am just relating the story as I have heard it a million times. The idea was that if they leave him with no dough, he can't fix. No cash, no stash. As the legend goes, Bird shows up in Toronto as planned, only it is clear that he has fixed. And then the horrible realization hits home that Parker has in fact hocked his horn to fix before leaving NY.
Everyone is in scramble mode looking for a horn. It's after hours and one of the guys sponsoring the show has a music store and is a rep for these new saxophones made of plastic. Parker ends up playing what many refer to as the greatest jazz concert of all time on a plastic saxophone. In 1994, Christie's held an auction where they sold the actual legendary plastic saxophone that Bird played on that night(it eventually sold for over $144,000.00). They hired another legendary player to demonstrate its sound. Here is Pete King playing the Grafton Plastic Sax. He actually plays one of the tunes that Parker and his cohorts played that night, "Wee".
The lineup for the Massey Hall Concert was as follows:
Parker--Plastic alto Dizzy--Trumpet Bud Powell--Piano Charles Mingus--Bass Max Roach--Drums
Now that is a lineup. The event was recorded and released under Roach and Mingus's co-owned Debut label. Since Parker was contractually obligated to another label at the time, he had to be listed under a pseudonym. They chose "Charlie Chan" possibly because of Louis Armstrong's famous critique of Bebop where he said it sounded to him like Chinese music.
Now to Bud Powell. What a tragic story there! In 1945, the cops just beat the living crap out of him, and from that point on, his mental state was questionable. In '47, he went to the mental institution and stayed for more than a year. The doctors repeatedly zapped his brain with electroconvulsive shock which lead to severe memory loss. Here's Bud:
From then he was erratic (Hell, who wouldn't be?). He was an alcoholic, and according to many of his colleagues, it just took a little bit of the sauce to make him very aggressive. I often wonder how much of his trouble was a mental disorder, and how much was just a rational response of a genius level artist to the indignities of Jim Crow. In '51, he was busted on a Marijuana charge which lead to another prolonged stay in the mental hospital--almost two years. So at the Time of Massey Hall, he was fresh out of the mental hospital but had been released to the owner of the Birdland club and was being basically held prisoner in an apartment! It was not until a few months later that his playing started to really suffer from the effects of taking the drug Largactil for his supposed schizophrenia. Massey Hall was a good show for Bud; he is sharp and nimble and perhaps full of energy from having just been released (sort of). Beginning around '54 he started to really slip. The composing was still good--the performing, not so good.
Two years later in '55 there was a partial reunion of this legendary lineup at a New York club. Only Diz was absent. Bud at one point could not play and became totally incoherent having to be lead from the stage. Parker gets in the mic and starts saying Bud Powell...Bud Powell...over and over like he is paging the incapacitated pianist. He takes it WAY too far and just keeps repeating it. Mingus is so pissed, he gets in another mic and says "Do not associate me with this; this is not jazz."
Charlie Parker was dead from drug abuse within a week.
But back to Massey Hall. And to Mingus. Mingus was always a tough looking dude to me:
Mingus had a strange early career that left him with a sizeable chip on his shoulder. There was a tradition in Jazz where many of the top cats adopted titles of nobility. King Creole, King Louis, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, etc. Early on and still visible on some labels you can see Mingus referred to as Baron Mingus. Anyway, Mingus was of mixed race. He had some serious run ins with racism early in his career that left him bitter. He had played with Louis in the 40's and then with Hampton. He even got some of his own compositions played. And in certain lineups, Hamp's band was interracial. Mingus also had worked in Ellington's band which was also interracial. He was involved in a famous incident in that band involving racial conflict. According to other members of the band, Mingus had a conflict with Juan Tizol, Duke's valve trombonist. Tizol was the composer of Caravan and Perdido--two of Duke's biggest hits. Anyway the story goes like this. Tizol shows Mingus a piece of written music and asks him play it. Mingus plays it but not exactly as written--he spins it or whatever. So Tizol announces to some of his white bandmates, "See, I told you these niggers can't read."
Here is Juan Tizol:
Mingus becomes so angry that he shoves Juan Tizol from the wings, and Juan Tizol goes sprawling all the way across the stage into the other wings! Duke fired Mingus. Supposedly he is the only musician that Duke ever sacked (although some say Soprano sax player, Sidney Bechet was also canned once).
Then in the very early part of the 50's, Mingus hooks up with legendary vibraphonist Red Norvo and guitar viruoso Tal Farlow to form the Red Norvo Trio. They are brilliant and inventive and critically acclaimed. The have trouble gigging because Mingus is black. Incidentally, Red Norvo was really something to see. Watch him go crazy with Benny on "The World Waiting for the Sunrise" only a decade or so after his period with Mingus.So here we are in 1953 and Mingus is playing with the biggest names in Bebop and the concert of the century. When he goes back and listens to the recording, his bass part is barely audible. He ended up overdubbing his bass part for the recording that ended up on the record.
So in 1953, a legendary lineup takes the stage. Many of them battling their personal demons, whether they be race, mental illness, or junk. And they channel all of it into jazz magic.
Here is a recording from that historic night in 1953. It is Dizzy's classic composition "A Night in Tunisia".
Here is another Bebop classic from that same night, "Salt Peanuts":Dig.
Imagine yourself at the top of the musical ladder. For whatever your instrument at the time you are playing, you are the man. You've got the chops that no one else has. You do the things that no one else does, and you make it work. Your technique is just dead solid. You have reached that level of virtuosity where what you play is only a matter of choice. What you think is what you play. You are not hampered by your hands or your lack of understanding or your clumsiness or your stamina or a lack of nimbleness. You are only limited by your imagination. Got that? Great--just being able to wrap your head around that concept and what it means in terms of human expression is quite a feat in itself. I am still struggling with what that would even mean--let alone actually being able to achieve anything close to it.
Ok now imagine that you are not like Whitney Houston, or Mariah Carey (who are certainly virtuosos) in that you have taste. I mean you not only CAN play anything that occurs to you; but also you happen to choose things to play that are classy and knowing and cerebral without being elite or unapproachable. You are most of all Musical.
Now add to that the fact that you are experimental. You are developing new ways to approach your instrument. You are composing in new ways. Your imagination is inventive. It's inventive to the point that not only are you reinventing the approach to your instrument, you are playing with the definition of what a song is. And on top of it all you are playful.
Now imagine that at the peak of all this, you have a brain aneurism. The doctors give you little hope. You are going to die. You have intense brain surgery and you actually make it. You wake up from the anesthetic and you are not sure who you are. You don't recognize your parents. You remember nothing about your musical career. You don't know how to play anymore. Nothing. Just nothing.
This is what happened to Pat Martino.
For the guitar world he was like a Coltrane, a Parker, a Tatum, a Peterson, a Dizzy. And then not. Clean slate.
So he relearned it all. He started relistening to everything he ever recorded. He started relearning the instrument from scratch. He relearned how to read music. He learned to read his own compositions. And using all that, he clawed his way back. He still has missing information--missing parts of his childhood. But hell--Who doesn't. Most of college is blank for me!
Before the surgery one of his experiments that I found especially cool was the album Baiyina: The Clear Evidence.
Ok see if this makes sense. Imagine a scale of notes. For the sake of argument, just imagine the major scale--Do Re Mi etc.
Now imagine that you line up those notes over and over like this:
Do re mi fa sol la ti do re mi fa sol la ti do re mi fa sol la ti do re mi
Ok? Now suppose that you pair each note with a letter of the alphabet like this:
Do re mi fa sol la ti do re mi fa sol la ti do re mi fa sol la ti do re mi A__B_C__D_E__F_G_H_I_J__K__L_M_N_O_P_Q__R_S.........
(If those don't match up on your computer, use your imagination!)
Now you have a code. You can spell anything with notes. The weird, chaotic heads of a lot of the tunes on this album are an experiment with translating text into notes in this fashion. If I am not mistaken "Israfel", the third cut on the album is a note-translation of a Poe poem of the same title or some phrase of it. On the album cover, where it says that it is a psychedelic excursion into the magical mysteries of the Koran--I think phrases from the Koran (and Poe's poem referencing the Koran) are played with in this way.
And you can put any repeating scale against the alphabet this way. Modals like mixolidian or Dorian or Aeolian. This will of course completely change the feel of the phrase. Go to that amazon link and listen to a few samples. Crazy.
And he lost it all around 1980.
Here is what All About Jazz had to say about it:
One of the greatest guitarists in jazz. Martino had suffered a severe brain aneurysm and underwent surgery after being told that his condition could be terminal. After his operations he could remember almost nothing. He barely recognized his parents. and had no memory of his guitar or his career. He remembers feeling as if he had been “dropped cold, empty, neutral, cleansed... naked.”
In the following months. Martino made a remarkable recovery. Through intensive study of his own historic recordings, and with the help of computer technology, Pat managed to reverse his memory loss and return to form on his instrument. His past recordings eventually became “an old friend, a spiritual experience which remained beautiful and honest.” This recovery fits in perfectly with Pat's illustrious personal history. Since playing his first notes while still in his pre-teenage years, Martino has been recognized as one of the most exciting and virtuosic guitarists in jazz. With a distinctive, fat sound and gut-wrenching performances, he represents the best not just in jazz, but in music. He embodies thoughtful energy and soul.
Here is Pat Martino in a recent clip playing "Oleo". I think you'll see he's doing ok.
Here is a short little rambling interview with Pat about his experience:
For us guitarists, Pat is like our Lance Armstrong.
I am rereading what may have been my first great read. It was around 1979 or 1980. I was in an English class, and it was taught by a woman who may well have been the first true love of my life. She was young, gorgeous, and just passionate about reading and ideas. She taught me to read. She was unaware of it at the time, but that is exactly what she did.
She would come in on a Monday and talk about whatever she read over the weekend in this cool, hipster way. I wanted that world--that mindset. I would go out and find whatever she mentioned and try to read it, AND I would try to read it with the goal of having something to say. She opened my head wide. Now true, it was all mixed up with my adolescent sexuality, but that wonderful woman largely affected the way I feel about the two most important things in this world, women and books. To this day I have never been attracted to a woman since that was not brilliant.
One book she lent me was a book by James Dickey. I had seen Deliverance and had read a few poems, but I had no idea what was in store. She lent me Sorties. It is a collection of his Journal entries. It touched on everything--art, books, ideas, guitar, poetry. I was most attracted to the guitar sections. He had such a great way of describing guitar playing.
Anyway, I just picked up another copy of it, and started reading and ran across this passage where Dickey describes the death of his father. Having just gone through that myself, it struck me.
Check this out:
Long deathwatch with my father. Nothing in his wasted and loveable life has ever become him so much as when he moved close to death. It is astonishing to understand that one's father is a brave man: very brave. The only thing he worried about was me seeing him in that condition. he cannot ever understand, whether he lives or whether he dies, how much better he looked with his arms full of tubes, with one of those plastic hospital things in his nose, and the rest of it, than at any time I have ever seen him before. He was a man up against an absolute limit, and he was giving as well as he got and he was not afraid of nothing in this world or out of it. God bless that man. No matter how I came from him, I hope that it was in joy. For the end is courage.
I have listened to Jazz for something like 30 years now. For the longest time, I would hear people go on and on about Armstrong. Of course the images it called up for me involved Louis being very gentlemanly--all suited up maybe doing a duet with some white woman singer. It would usually be saturated with strings or soft horns. You know what I am talking about. And I just never got what made him great. It was all sentimental, and frankly kind of, well, tommish. Nice and all--sweet, classy, soulful--sure, but worth the hype? I saw Louis like this:It wasn't until years later that I got hip to the early Satch and its boldness. I guess I had heard some of it, but to my then untrained ear, it just sounded like dixieland. It wan't until I saw the raw power of the visual image of King Louis that it began to make sense to me. Seeing him young and in his prime, at times struggling to control his power--strutting all over the stage unashamed--the beast unleashed that it was like a kick in the face. Watch Louis play with "Dinah" here. Kicking the rhythm all around like a four legged ninja. Look at the raw attitude. And remember this is in 1933.
Yeah. Now if you want to see Louis get full on hip hop and totally non PC and with even more crazy frenetic energy, check out Rhapsody in Black and Blue from a year earlier. The actual song is "I'm Glad You Dead You Rascal You". Then he ramps it up even more with "Shine". This is the energy and power that I had missed. Later on it was all about class and style. Early on it was pure unadulterated power in the face of Jim Crow.Starting to make sense to you?
My one time drummer, David Burks, once turned me onto one of my all time favorite jazz acts, The Raymond Scott Quintet. His main connection to popular culture is through cartoon music. I think Warner must have had a deal with the guy because much of his music was later incorporated into Warner cartoons. But then come to think of it I seem to remember a few early MGM cartoons who used it as well. It was used again in the Ren and Stimpy cartoons from Nickelodeon--particularly in the Wrestling episode. The casual listener will be most familiar with "Powerhouse" which is full of chromaticism. Scott was a product of a very industrial society and it shows in his composition and his general approach to sound. Nowhere is this more evident than in "Powerhouse." It is used most often in cartoons to back mechanical, machinelike behavior. Here is "Powerhouse"Now as good and as strange as that clip is, my favorite Scott footage is "Wardance of the Wooden Indians" because it centers on my favorite musician in the band, Drummer Johnny Williams. Bit of trivia here--he is the father of composer John Williams. I think Johhny Williams is among the most underrated jazz drummers of all time. Love those mounted Indian Tom Toms! Also notice Scott is moving towards using instruments as effects and blocks of sounds to create tension--I am specifically referring to the trumpet part that centers on one prolonged vibrato note. And check the insane clarinet part. When Burks first introduced me to this stuff, he described it as the speed metal of 40's Jazz. Not bad. And after listening to this stuff, think how the Star Wars bar band sounds. Homage to Dad? Here is the Wooden Indians Clip with apologies to any Native Americans who interpret this to be mocking their culture. (Incidentally, I have never understood why the term Native American is preferable to Indian. I mean sure the term comes from Columbus's mistake thinking that he had discovered the sea passage to the East Indies--hence the term Indian. But if that is not PC, why do we still insist on referring to them as "Americans" which is a reference to the obscure Italian 15th Century mapmaker, Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus's mentor? Is that really less insulting? Just sayin') Enough blather, here is the wardance:
Is that not awesome?
Raymond Scott later became a pioneer in Electronic music developing early oscillators and other instruments that ultimately evolved into the synthesizer. Once he even created a set of albums in the fifties that were entirely electronic and marketed to young space-age parents as electronic lullabies for babies.
Here is the cover of Volume one. I think it got more complex for older babies.
He actually later collaborated with Robert Moog to create some of the very earliest synthesizers. Also carved out a niche for himself in the advertizing world adding electronic sounds to early radio and TV advertising
Here are a few pics of Raymond Scott and amazing early synthesizers he personally created.
All those machines create music like this:
Crazy.
update: I have some new Raymond Scott to share!! Here is a nice lengthy trailer for a documentary about Ray.
And here is another great Raymond Scott clip (again check out Johnny Williams on the drums):
And here is a later clip of electronic music created by Raymond Scott for Nescafe:And Finally another supremely surreal commercial by Ray:
