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Calendar - Performance

Calendar - Performance image
Parent Issue
Day
3
Month
December
Year
1975
OCR Text

Performance

McCoy Tyner
at Baker’s, Nov. 4 – 9

Although McCoy Tyner was at Baker’s Keyboard lounge, something vital was missing. Call it excitement or nostalgic memories of Elvin Jones sitting behind the skins, it just wasn’t there.

McCoy himself is a complex and serious player and always interesting to hear. It is the focus of the music that changed. His conception has shifted in the last few years from a compositional and arranged music to a rhythmic thing. From texture and line to energy and strength. Nothing wrong with this approach inherently if everybody’s always there and capable of sustaining it through songs that are as long as half an hour.

Though no old man, to be sure, McCoy’s group is comprised of virtual youngsters and the edges are still a little rough. Junie Booth seemed asleep at the bass and the drummer, E.W. Wainwright, was probably awake though a trifle diffuse with the rhythm. Now, when your rhythm section’s gone, you’re in trouble, especially when you’ve got a percussionist the steaming likes of Iami Franco, who accompanied McCoy energetically.

The highpoint of the evening was the group’s version of Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear.” McCoy combined the right hand sonorities that are Monk’s with his own distinctive left hand in a beautiful and learned rendition of this standard. Azar Lawrence took a solo that showed him a very capable linear player, an aspect of his music that sometimes loses definition. And god damn if I didn’t hear the depth and expressiveness of John Coltrane from this young man’s tenor and here. We’re going to hear from Azar.

McCoy Tyner is still a giant and will never be denied. Let his group grow and fuse for a few years and we’ll really hear something.

- David Weiss

Louisiana Red
at Raven Gallery, Oct. 23

Turn where you will, synthesizers are the thing in music nowadays. Fiddles, guitars and crying squirrels can be conjured up while sitting at a keyboard. But I don’t care if Einstein and Ike Newton come back with their tool-kits from the grave, ain’t nobody ever gonna synthesize the blues.

Why wait, anyways? There are still artists like Louisiana Red gracing our midst. Red was in town a few weeks ago at the Raven Gallery in Southfield, beloved bastion of the real thing. His music was as relaxed as the atmosphere at the Raven, where a faithful clientele shows up regularly for an eclectic menu of folk, blues and whatever moves.

“You might notice I don’t like talkin’ ‘bout myself,” Red said with a grin. He doesn’t have to. His songs are mostly his own and retell his experiences with warmth and wisdom. He accompanies himself on an amplified acoustic guitar with a style he says he learned from his grandfather. A current source of joy to Red is his harp player and good friend, Sugar Blue. His playing is clean and soulful and very much his own. Together They are hand in glove, without a wrinkle.

His own material runs the gamut from a cookin’ boogie called “All Night Long” with the fiery harp of Sugar Blue, to the contemplative and woeful “Dead Stray Dog.” Red also did a great version of Slim Harpo’s “King Bee,” a song that can be found on his new album, “Sweet Blood Call,” on Blue Labor Records. It would be worth your while to find this record and to come to the Raven when Red returns in February.

- David Weiss

Art Ensemble Of Chicago
at Wonders Kiva, East Lansing, Nov. 15

As the jazz-rock fusion continues to lure more and more creative musicians into the commercial-success sweepstakes, the need for innovative, rhythmically diverse, truly improvisatory music grows ever greater – and the always exciting Art Ensemble of Chicago (Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and Don Moye) continues to work in the absolute forefront of the free-music vanguard, creating space for complex thought and feeling to take form in the beings of the musicians and the audience alike.

These musical space cadets remain some of the most open composers and players “out there” – the only “formula” they follow from performance to performance, or even from piece to piece, is to let the music move as fast or slow, and in as many directions, as the musicians’ minds and feelings actually move, so that the listener/participant has as much to do, and finds as much pleasure, in digging the music as the players do, making it.

Now I would be the last person to suggest a war, or even a real-life contradiction, between free multi-rhythmic improvisational music and structured, repetitive, pounding over-and-over again music – my point is simply that both are necessary to keep us moving these days, and if we need the popular music of the straight-out surge to carry us through the industrial grind, we sure enough need some sounds of pure human space to take us out beyond the limits and show us, yes, just where in creation we’re headed.

The Art Ensemble does this, dear friends, and what’s more, they do it a different way, every time they play! Now at the very top of their exquisite form, and equipped with as many reed, brass, and percussion instruments as it takes to flesh out their musico-dramatic visions, the fearsome fivesome from the Windy City did it again in East Lansing the middle of November at the latest presentation in the Creative Music Collective’s fall concert series at MSU, where Roscoe Mitchell remains a driving musical and organizational force-in-residence. Two nights, four coherent units of music, and a few hundred eager students of the art of wide-open creation were left with a treasury of thrilling memories for when there’s nothing on the scene but music that sounds like machines, grinding away at the nodes of feeling.

If the Art Ensemble of Chicago were five white boys from, say, Germany or points west, and if their record company put as much bread behind their cuts as they do for, say, Roxy Music and all the rest, then you might have a better idea of what I’m trying to say. But they aren’t, and it won’t, and it will be five or ten years before the music industry catches up with their stuff, which situation is just about as boring as it’s always been. You don’t have to wait that long, though – you can buy any of their many excellent sides, and you can watch V for them every time they stop by. We’ll let you know when they show, and when you hear it – don’t blow! Go!

- John Sinclair

Frank Zappa/Larry Coryell
at Crisler Arena, Nov. 18

Frank “King Leer” Zappa and the latest incarnation of his Mothers of Invention brought their advanced music and adolescent sexual fantasies to Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor and gave the students both what they want (“smut”) and what Frank thinks they need (involved instrumental improvisation). He was joined on this occasion by guitarist Larry Coryell and the 11th House who opened what was, all things considered, an imaginative, progressive booking from the UAC Concert Cooperative at UM.

Coryell and the jazz-rock hooligans who joined him have recently released an album on Arista Records, which usually means that they’re within striking distance of pop stardom. Unfortunately, I missed their half of the show but reliable sources report that they turned the place out with an hour of furious fusion music, after which time they were unreservedly called back for an encore.

Now Frank Zappa is a popster whose original commercial genius was to combine eclectic (popular and avant-garde) musical sources with lyrics that were funny, satirical, and most importantly, proposed (and endorsed) an alternative “freak” lifestyle to white middleclass teenagers suffocating in the bosom of plastic America. That first Mothers’ album, “Freak Out,” released in 1966, remains an inspired, living, psychedelic artifact.

Then, as now, Frank attracted superior musicians, and this evening’s line-up performed in that stellar tradition. Roy Estrada, a contributor to the “Freak Out” sessions, was back playing bass and singing deadpan falsetto vocals. Recent addition, singer/saxophonist Napoleon Brock, exuded charm and fire. There was a very young-looking androgynous demon, whose name I didn’t catch, smashing the drums with a fury and inventiveness that recalled Elvin Jones. Detroit’s own Norma Bell, on loan from the Lyman Woodard Organization, played roughneck alto sax, sang, screamed and danced, while the Maestro himself, ever on guard against spurious rock-star histrionics, led the band through their paces in his usual impassive manner and played some good guitar after he warmed up as well.

The songs themselves began with two or three choruses of vocals which, when dispensed with, left everyone ample time to solo. The Mothers went back and dusted off, among other gems, “Lonely Little Girl”; “What’s The Ugliest Part Of Your Body,” during which Brock played tenor as if on fire; and “Camarillo Brillo,” which featured a breathtakingly energetic drum solo. Still, these far-out, strictly instrumental segments of the show left many people behind. Most seemed to be there to laugh at the abuse Frank dishes out to them in liberal quantities.

Indeed, Zappa’s (longstanding) contempt for his audience left me pretty cold. And although his smug sexual vignettes, “Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy” and ‘The Illinois Enema Bandit” might have been considered taboo-smashing six years ago, they seem at best juvenile, at worst unnecessarily offensive, today. What is the instructional or satirical value, in “Illinois Enema Bandit,” of the lines, “Should we let the bandit free/It must be just what they [his woman victims] all need”? That’s the same, tired shit Frank’s been peddling for too long, and even if he’s not, I’m certainly ready to move on.

Still, the folks at Crisler ate it up and Frank, back for an encore and serious for the first time that evening, called Crisler “A very intimate kind of large hall” by way of appreciating his audience. The band then tore up “San Ber’dino” and said good night.

- Bill Adler

Jimmy Cliff
at the Michigan Theatre, Nov. 7

Jimmy Cliff, the man most responsible for bringing his country’s best-loved export, reggae music, to Americans, auspiciously inaugurated, on November 7, the first in a continuing series of midnight concerts sponsored by The SUN and presented at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor.

The slim Jamaican has captured himself a cult following in enlightened areas of the U.S., mostly via “The Harder They Come,” the brilliant film documentary of the rise and fall of a reggae singer in corrupt Kingston, written by and starring Cliff himself. Over 1800 hungry Ann Arbor freaks jumped at the rare opportunity to dig Johnny Too Bad cutting up in the flesh.

But first Ann Arbor’s bad enough Mojo Boogie Band opened the show in their customary raucous fashion. The Mojos have been honing their hard bar blues as a unit for several years now and rock along with the precision, power and good humor of mentors the like of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Slim Harpo, and Jimmy Reed. The antic performance of pianist/vocalist Donnie Backus was a particular treat that night, and on such originals as “Sweet Susie B.” and “Gone, Gone, Gone” his gravelly shouting recalled Mitch Ryder. Other highlights included Jim Tate’s harp solo on “Listen to Me,” J.C. Crawford’s brutal drumming throughout, and the entire band’s lovely rendition of “Rainin’ In My Heart.”

Jimmy’s part of the show was organized in a semi-revue fashion. His crack 7-man band preceded him onstage and commenced to lay down a rhythmic instrumental groove dense as a Jungle. Fellow reggae star Joe Higgs sang the Melodians’ “Rivers Of Babylon” and The Slickers’ “Johnny Too Bad.” Folks were primed from before the beginning and ready to move when Jimmy jumped out and began his potent demonstration of “Fundamental Reggae.” He kept things up with “I’m Going to Live, I’m Going To Love,” and his signature tune “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”

Still, Cliff is not a wildly energetic performer, and the weight of the tunes themselves plus the memory of the movie significantly helped to pull his stuff across. In fact, there’s little question but that Joe Higgs, the mystery man who sang “Rivers Of Babylon” and who wrote “Dear Mother,” was more exciting than the star of the show. Especially affecting was his “Freedom” which asks, “Look at the riches in America, and the poorness in Africa. Why is so much money spent on space, instead of on the human race?”

Cliff came back and did an intensely soulful job on the gospel-ish “Many Rivers To Cross” before indulging his sanctimonious side with “Remake The World.” People were up and dancing from the opening strains of “The Harder They Come” and came flooding into the front of the theater to move to and help sing The Wailers’ “No Woman, No Cry.” Jimmy’s first hit “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” was the gracious encore and most of us walked on to the Ann Arbor, 4 a.m. streets feeling sanctified.

- Bill Adler