Some Came Running

Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #2: Roy Haynes/Phineas Newborn/Paul Chambers, "We Three" (Release date, likely early 1959, date of acquisition, some time in 1990)

I have no problem admitting I'm a Phineas Newborn dilettante. Even Stanley Booth, the author of the thorough, admiring, and extremely painful appreciation of Newborn that was my first exposure to the great pianist, wrote in that account that shortly before he met the man in the early '70s he "knew almost nothing about Phineas Newborn except that he was a jazz pianist whose records I'd seen reviewed in Down Beat in the '50s." 

Booth's piece, entitled "Fascinating Changes," first appeared shortly after Newborn's death in the spring of 1989, in a quarterly musical supplement that was then being published in the Village Voice, in the days when someone of Stanley Booth's caliber would permit his work to be printed in the Village Voice. It is reprinted in Booth's 1991 collection Rythm Oil, an absolutely essential book for anyone with even just a passing interest in music, the United States of America, and good writing. In the book Booth prefaces the piece thus: "This piece was written before Phineas Newborn, Jr., died, but it ran in the Village Voice as one more obituary. I don't like it, as a poet once said, but I guess things happen that way."

Booth's account was of an extremely troubled, perhaps mentally ill individual, more or less at sea, who plays piano like an angel. It is an angry piece that weaves in threads of family history, Memphis history, observations on the various natures of the music business of the time, the vicissitudes of jazz critics (which Booth has very little patience for; after quoting a review of a Newborn set by one John Mehegan which takes it to task for a lack of "real jazz feeling," Booth writes "The absurdity of a white piano teacher from New York telling Phineas Newborn about real jazz feeling is delicious." 

In any event, after reading Booth's article, I was kind of haunted by the oddity of the character that Booth had made out of Newborn. Booth's perspective was not that of a clinician but as a kind of privileged observer, and the mysteries in his story and Phineas' story are kept mysteries, and among the most troubling of the mysteries surrounds a beating that Newborn suffers at unknown hands for unknown reason not long after Booth first meets and hears the pianist. Booth also conjures the sense of a world that most of us will not,  can not, ever know, and does this with some wry pique, as in this digression from a reasonably suspenseful and worrying narrative in the piece:

Leaving the Dickensons downstairs with Fred, who was saying, 'I have seen the time I could call six and have it come up, tell the dice what to do,' Susan and I went up to my office, sat on the couch and passed the time until we heard footsteps on the carpeted stairs. I looked around the door-jamb to see who was coming up and spied Fred on the landing. 'Where Junior?'

Insufferable Yankee editors have explained to me how offensive it is to quote Southerners speaking as we speak. Fred said Where Junior not because he didn't know it's correct to say Where Is Junior but because he knew I knew there wasn't time to say Where the fuck is Junior?

And of course I needed to hear some Phineas Newborn music. A little easier said than done. I was living in Manhattan at the time, in Murray Hill, and as far as I knew, the record store with the best-stocked jazz department at the time was J&R Music World downtown, then an altogether dustier and more cramped environment than it is today. Oh, yeah, and almost entirely vinyl. And even there, Phineas Newborn records were thin on the ground. So thin on the ground there were no "proper" Phineas Newborn records, that is, no solo piano recordings or accounts of him leading a group. No, there was only one record I could find featuring Newborn, this trio set on which drummer Roy Haynes is the first player listed and hence often credited as the leader, although it's not a "Roy Haynes Trio" record; We Three, originally released on Riverside's "New Jazz" imprint, as far as I can tell. 

It's not a record with any kind of agenda; it feels as casual, maybe even "tossed off," as any record featuring three instrumentalists as accomplished and distinctive as Haynes, Newborn and bassist Chambers could be. Its opening cut is "Reflection," a tune by Ray Bryant, another underappreciated pianistic master of the Memphis baroque, but the first voice you hear isn't this session's keyboardist; no, the tune begins with the sweet thunder of Haynes' floor tom, I believe, rumbling with the clarity and crispness that has ever been the defining feature of his style; then the piano comes in, a bouncy, Latinish right-handed melodic theme with some unexpected forward somersaults,  backed by a tricky hi-hat pattern (Haynes takes his own sweet time here before giving the snare one of his inimitable smacks) and some sneaky scale-climbing from Chambers. Then it's off to the races for Phineas, whose runs have an incredible fluidity and playfulness but also what I myself always took for not just real "jazz feeling" but real blues feeling. There's masterful technique here but also a bedrock love of the forms and conventions of what they're playing; call it authenticity, or organic-ness, or what you will; this is "down home" music in a very deep sense. It's also music that's mind-blowingly virtuosic in ways that you'd never necessarily process unless you were sitting down trying to process it, and the music always feels so good that you're hardly ever inclined to devote your listening time to parsing in that way. The album's centerpiece is a ten-minute-plus tour-de-force workout of Avery Parrish's  "After Hours," which Newborn opens with  a simultaneously knotty and very lowdown iteration of the theme, runs off a bit like it weren't no thing, twinkling the high notes multiple bars before breaking off with an exclamation point or a wink. Then he'll slow down and breathe in and out a couple of cool chords. The bassist and the drummer provide what appears to be mere comfortable, confident support, pick up the tempo to take things for a stroll, and on it ambles; it isn't until you really start picking the thing about that you notice in sections of the jam each player is in a different time signature; it's all so in the pocket you'd never suspect a contrivance of that sort.

It's all just pure pleasure as it fills the room, and I guess that's why this apparently not particularly historic session has grown through the years into one of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite, records. I don't entertain the whole "desert island disc" question all that often, but when I do, We Three is always a very strong candidate. I've never been in a situation or mood, good or bad, where putting the thing on didn't do something to improve things. I've listened to a good deal more of Phineas Newborn's music since then, and of course Haynes' Out of the Afternoon, an actual historic session featuring Roland Kirk on reeds, Tommy Flanagan on piano, and Henry Grimes for heaven's sake on bass, is and ever shall be an all-time fave too, and I don't suppose I need to start on Paul Chambers' other work (played bass on Kind of Blue, you know...three years prior to this)...but still, We Three has a big hold on me. It's a remarkably joyous record without being particularly sappily demonstrative about it; and of course it only represents a particular moment of creation, an afternoon in Hackensack, N.J., at pioneering jazz recordist Rudy Van Gelder. Chambers was all of 23 years old at the time; in 1969, after struggles with alcohol and heroin, he would die of tuberculosis. Newborn was 26, and just a couple of years away from his first stay in a mental institution. Haynes was the eldest of "we three," 33; he turned, if I can believe my eyes, 86 this year, and is still playing; he made an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman in June of this year. 

Modes of representation

Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau, 1921

Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927

The Thing From Another World, Christian Nyby, 1951

Team America: World Police, Trey Parker, 2004

The swinging '60s

From top: Jacqueline Bissett; Pattie Boyd; Jane Birkin (with Ray Brooks); Charlotte Rampling (with Michael Crawford); The Knack...And How To Get It, Richard Lester, 1965.

Coffin Joe redux

José Mojica Marins and Rui Rezende in Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil), directed by Marins, 2008

I've quoted this passage from Caetano Veloso's memoir, Tropical Truth, before: 

In 1967, people were talking about a Brazilian B movie that Glauber Rocha had liked, A meia-noite levarei tua alma (I'll Take Your Soul At Midnight), directed by the Paulista José Mojica Marins. In him Glauber sensed a primitive Nietzsche, although the production was a horror movie made on the sort of precarious budget typical of a small-town Brazilian circus. The director went around wearing the same black cape and long nails of the character he had created in the film (and in others afterwards). Marins was—in every sense—popular. In the film, he both exposed our poverty and attacked the religious conventions that were inimical to a bold individual will. The Catholic imagination appeared mixed with the pornography of terror, laughable visual effects, and dialogues on the edge of street language. Torquato [Neto, Brazilian journalist and poet] insisted that it was pure charm on Glauber's (and my) part to show aesthetic interest in such a pile of trash. He did not believe that I could see in the film a radical version of what Glauber had tried to do in Land of Anguish. But it was truly difficult, at that time, to admit to a critical posture that, soon after, would become commonplace. (It would be inspired again by the old black-and-white version [sic] of The Fly, Freaks, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, all of which delighted me at the Electric Cinema when I arrived in London in 1969; and Torquato himself to this day is remembered for his participation in Nosferatu no Brasil [Nosferatu in Brazil], a film made in the seventies by Ivan Cordoso, which gave rise to a cult of Mojica Marins and kindred figures[...])

I've been thinking of Mojica Marins and Ze de Caijao (Coffin Joe), about whom I first wrote for this blog here, because I just got the Synapse Films Blu-ray of 2008's Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil) Marins' rather improbable-seeming comeback film for the character. Or at least I figured it was improbable, in large part due to the fact that Mojica Marins, 14 years after that 1994 Chiller theatre Expo appearance, was rather likely to cut an even less-imposing figure than the not-very-formidable one he did then.

But I underestimated Mojica Marins' intelligence, not to mention inspiration. At the beginning of Embodiment, just as Coffin Joe is about to be released from prison after a 40-year term (and this indeed syncs up nicely with the conclusion of the last "proper" Coffin Joe film, '67s Esta Noite Encarnerai no Teu Cadaver [This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse]—if I'm not mistaken, while Mojica Marins appeared as Coffin Joe in many subsequent films, those pictures were about the character's impact as a pop culture figure rather than installments in his saga, so to speak), one of the many officials who's balking at his proposed release rationalizes things by insisting that the guy is just "a crazy old man." And indeed, except for those weird-ass long fingernails, there's nothing particularly fearsome about the guy; the top hat, cape and medallion all produce a vaguely comic effect. Waiting for him at the prison gate is his wide-eyed Loyal Henchman, who is actually called, pace Woody Tobias Jr., "Bruno," and played with disquieting conviction by Rui Rezende. Quite the anachronistically ridiculous  pair the two make, prowling the streets of Sao Paolo by night. But in the shot from which the above screen capture is taken, the two characters are about to stop and behold a couple of street urchins, each no more than ten years old each, sitting in a doorway huffing glue from paper bags. "He exposed our poverty," Veloso recalled. "Ain't a damn thing changed, " Method Man said. Such is the atmosphere in which Mojica Marins' deranged character, obsessed with propagating, as it were, the "purity" of his "bloodline," thrives. And when he's returned to his longtime lair, he finds that Bruno's got a small cadre of pierced and tattooed young people ready to earn the fruits of Coffin Joe's weltanschauung, such as they are and such as it is. 

"Nothing can affect a mind that believes nothing," a wise and beautiful young gypsy woman advises Joe during the ensuing orgy of blasphemous hallucinations and appalling tortures. You'd think after Fear Factor that scenes in which young lovelies have their heads dunked into large bowls full of squirming live insects might lose some of their punch. But as it happens the film has a lot of the crude power that the older picture has, and Mojica Marins takes full advantage of what he can get away with. Which is to say, don't be fooled by the crazy old man bit—this is "authentic sadistic cinema" to the bone, not "funsy" stuff. You have been warned. But for those with the stomach for it, there's something in Embodiment of Evil that is genuinely radical in a way that the creators of such meretricious gunk as the Hostel and Saw films can't even conceive of. What's that thing that Lynne Gorman's character says in Videodrome? "It has a philosophy. And that's what makes it dangerous."

The disc is released on March 29; on Monday, March 21, the ReRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn will be hosting a free preview screening of the Blu-ray, tickets for which can be acquired here. 

Audrey Hitchcock

How To Steal A Million, William Wyler, 1966

Hairless, toothless

Julius Tannen, after a long fame on the stage, came on hard times in Hollywood. For a number of years he was unable to get a job acting. Tannen’s friends were unable to help him. Something always slipped up, and the witty Julius found himself finally in a desperate way. His friends persisted, and after much intrigue a part was secured for Tannen. He was to play an editor in a newspaper drama. All that remained was for the producer to see him and pass on him.

Tannen dressed himself carefully that morning. He was completely bald and wore a toupee which he stuck on his head each morning with a special mucilage.

After studying him for ten minutes and listening to his nimble speech, the producer shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Tannen. But I don’t think you’ll do for the part.”

Julius inquired quietly in what way he was deficient. Was he too tall, too thin, too old, too young?

“No,” said the producer. “You could act it very well. But I have always visualized a bald-headed man for the part.” 

Julius smiled and slowly pulled the toupee off his head.

“I think I can satisfy you on that score,” he beamed. “I happen to be completely bald.”

The producer sat studying the polished Tannen skull and then shook his head again and pronounced, “I’m sorry, Mr. Tannen. I simply can’t visualize you as a baldheaded man.”

—Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century, 1954 

Last year, we asked Harry [Bugin] to play Aloysius, the malevolent door-scraper, in our movie The Hudsucker Proxy. Harry understood immediately that an evil door-scraper would, in the nature of things, have a shaved head, and was amenable to shaving his: “Sure fellas. It grows back.” […]

But any actor can shave his head. As shooting drew near we were still groping for a means of ending the climactic fist-fight in the Hudsucker Building’s clock room. The script called for our great clock to be stopped twice, once by a broom shoved into the gears, which was well and good, and a second time by something else—not just anything, clearly, but a capper that would keep the audience from resenting our repeating the gag of the stopped clock. The nature of this was a puzzle of daunting specificity. The object had to be of just the right size to be stuffed into our great clock gear, and had to be of such consistency as to offer temporary—but only temporary—resistance before being ground away. Mere days before the scene was scheduled to be shot, co-producer Graham Place had a leaping insight: Harry’s character might have his dentures knocked out in the course of the fist-fight. This would leave an ideal gear-stopper at hand, and would incidentally let us punctuate the fist-fight with the classic Chattering Teeth Gag. Dentures were clearly the one perfect—the only perfect—the only conceivable—solution. There remained only one question, and on it rode all our hopes for satisfactorily resolving the very climax of our movie: Did Harry Bugin wear dentures?

“Sure fellas. Full uppers and lowers.”

And that’s why Harry Bugin is our favourite actor.

—Joel and Ethan Coen, "Our Favourite Actor," in "The Positif Collection," Projections 4 1/2, 1995

Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #1: Pere Ubu, "The Modern Dance" (Release date, January 1978, date of acquisition, some time around January 1978)

For Chris Wells.

Many were the times during my childhood and adolescence when, due to my consumption and enjoyment of certain particular pieces of popular or, I should more accurately say, in some cases, semi-popular music, my parents were forced to conclude that I had gone completely off the rails, and/or was gay. Listening to the Beatles' "Within You, Without You" on some kinda outdoor hi-fi setup over in a corner of the backyard one summer night in '67, I overheard one of the adults hanging out with my folks at the patio proper exclaim, "Sounds like Chinese funeral music," and saw my mom kind of shrug and roll her eyes and make this "what are we gonna do?" gesture. One afternoon a few years later, I brought home a copy of David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, which my mom politely requested to take a gander at; and when she opened the gatefold sleeve (see right) and got a load of the air-brushing at Bowie's crotch cleavage, she had her very first stroke.

But it was when I first played Pere Ubu's debut LP, The Modern Dance, on the Radio Shack stereo system of my family's home in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, some time in the winter of early 1978, that the determination was made by certain of my kin that I had finally and definitively lost my mind for good.

It was an album whose prospect I found highly intriguing, despite being rather suspect of the album's front cover artwork, which didn't look particularly punk rock or even post punk rock to me, as in, what's with the dude in the ballet slippers. I had not heard the Cleveland, Ohio-based bands independently released singles but I knew their work was rated highly by Robert Christgau, whose Consumer Guide I had been avidly obeying via the pages of Creem from 1974 on, at least until I found a Jersey drugstore that sold The Village Voice. There was also the matter of the band's name, which to me was redolent of Surrealism and French cinema, two of my major enthusiasms at the time. So having found this sort-of major label debut (the record was on Blank, a "New Wave" offshoot of Mercury contrived by Cliff Burnstein, later a cofounder of the very heavy management firm Q Prime) in the racks of a Sam Goody's either in the Rockaway Townsquare Mall or Garden State Plaza, I don't remember which, I was extremely eager to get an earful of its sound, which the aforementioned album artwork and minimal sleeve notes (band members' names in alphabetical order, no listing of instruments played or by whom) gave very little clue about. Pretty much no sooner did the needle lock into the groove than I was greeted with a high-pitched electronic shriek, implacable in its insistence, not coming up right into your face per se but calmly, inasmuch as it could be calm, asserting itself as a fact, the same way your dentist's drill does. Alongside the shriek was a semi-mechanical sounding tapping or clicking. And for several seconds it's just that—the shriek and the tapping. And it seems, the first time you hear it, like an eternity. 

In fact it is only about three seconds before the electric bass guitar comes in, plucking bent doubled notes that just hang there before the electric guitar comes in with a kind of mutant Chuck Berry chording and then the whole band kicks in and chugs away—the shriek having dropped out—on the monumental riff of what is "Non-alignment Pact." All right then—rock and roll! Only then the singer starts in, with the shriek returning to buttress his fat-toned near-hysterical whinging about heads of state and whatnot. Even ignorant of any visual reference for Ubu lead singer David Thomas, he sounds like you'd imagine the grown-up Norman, a.k.a. "Chubsy Ubsy," of Hal Roach's Our Gang shorts, would have had he grown up, done a few substances, nursed a particular emotional petulance, and founded a band. By the end of this particular number, Thomas works himself up into such a frenzy over, one eventually learns from parsing the lyrics, his alienation form the fairer sex, that he actually sounds as if he's barking his frustration. The other people in the house weren't the only ones shuddering at this; I have to admit I did, too. The remainder of side one proved similarly...odd. The title track boasted another killer riff, this one propelled by that least punk-rockish of instruments, an electric piano; but the bizarre radio wave and conversational-snippets noise below its surface, the percussive hammer hitting a railway tie, and finally, the bizarre middle-eight (such as it was) with a noisy push-me/pull-you slide guitar solo by Tom Herman whose halts and returns were so abrupt that I had to inspect the vinyl several times to make sure it wasn't actually skipping; what was that all about? Then the bizarre horn work of the next track blending in with the atonal-seeming "scatting" of the singer; the horn in question, I later learned, was called a "musette" and was played by either...or maybe by both...Thomas or Allen Ravenstine, whose rudimentary, patch-cord operated EML synthesizers were responsible for the shrieks and hiccups and patches of white, white noise that never left the songs alone. It all came to a climax of sorts on the album's second-to-last cut, which seemed to be an extremely well-recorded chronicle of the singer breaking a bunch of glass ashtrays in the studio while drunkenly mouth-farting while the guitarist tried to piece together a lick and the other band members (Tony Maimone and Scott Krauss were the bassist and drummer, respectively) did...stuff. This "song" was entitled "Sentimental Journey." That thing that everybody's parents once said at some point about the rock and roll, e.g., "This isn't music, it's noise?" That pronouncement literally comes true with this particular piece.

Or at least it seemed to at the time. Even given the ostensible extremes of the stuff I'd been scarfing down in the summer and fall of '77—Ramones, Clash, Iggy and the Stooges (Raw Power but not Fun House, which might have given me a clue re Ubu and noise),Richard Hell and the Voidoids—and even given all that Velvet Underground stuff I had gotten into a few years prior to that, there was nothing that could have prepared me for this. As it happens, my memory of my particular circumstances of first hearing this record are a little blurry; I always associate it with my high school years, but the album's release date puts me in what I sometimes laughingly refer to as my second semester of college. I was attending William Paterson College as an English lit major; I had tried to get into SVU, on account of my best friend was gonna go there, but my parents balked at the cost and the fact that I would have to live in the city. They were going through a rather protracted breakup at the time, one that wouldn't become definitive until several years later, speaking of push-me/pull-you, and one of the end results of this that had the most impact on me (aside from the financial insecurity that eventually dictated that I go to a state school within commuting distance) was the fact that I was never entirely sure which "adult" authority figure was going to be living at our house at what time. So I don't precisely recall whether The Modern Dance gave my mother her third or fourth stroke, or if it caused my dad to give me that look that said "What are the genetic circumstances that led to my fathering an extraterrestrial being?" I do know that after the first audit, I tended to play it only when there was nobody else in the house. For in spite of the fact that it actually even weirded me out a little bit, I was kind of obsessed with it. 

I played it for some of my buddies, most of whom were high school pals. We had formed a band in the late spring/early summer of '77, a very suburban quasi-"punk" outfit we called The Bad Taste Delegation. We covered half of side two of The Ramones' Leave Home on the one hand, and Loudon Wainwright III's "Dead Skunk" on the other. Most of its members were talented multi-instrumentalists largely known to the remainder of the student population as "band fags," and they were largely into "real" music, which largely meant Chicago. Our bass player was such a maven that he once won a block of tickets to a Madison Square Garden show by that band by correctly guessing, from the opening chord, the title track of Chicago singer/songwriter Robert Lamm's three-copy-selling solo album Skinny Boy on some FM radio contest. The guys were, how do you say, mildly intrigued by my musical tastes. "This Costello guy's got some pretty good songs," one of their number would allow. And then wonder, "How can this John Cale come up with something as great as 'Mr Wilson,' and then do this other...shit?" And so on. In any event, The Modern Dance in general and "Sentimental Journey" in particular took the cake for these fellows. "You're not going to believe the thing that Kenny's cooked up now..." And hardly anybody really could credit it.

Even today, the record doesn't exactly sound...cozy. "Non-alignment Pact" turns up in the background of a record-store-set scene in the last third of Olivier Assayas' 1986 Disorder, and it's welcome and bracing to hear and it sort of "fits in" with the rest of the New Wave music on the soundtrack (and given the film's storyline, it also evokes the ghost of Peter Laughner, the songwriter/guitarist who was an Ubu founder and who died of alcoholism/acute pancreatitis in 1977 at the age of 24), but it still sounds distinctive, its irritation factor is still there, there's little that's quaint about it. As much as the music cohered for me over months and then years of listening (and to be quite frank, seven times out of ten when I'm revisiting the record at this stage of my life, I will skip "Sentimental Journey"), there is still something a little scary about The Modern Dance. It would be less than a year before Ubu would release its second LP, the even more monumental Dub Housing, as a U.K.-only Chrysalis issue, Blank Records seemingly having imploded in the wake of Modern Dance's release. By that time I had moved out of my family house and into a place in about the poorest part of Paterson, gotten something like a proper girlfriend, purchased and enjoyed Art Bears' Hopes and Fears and Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, among other seminal works, and taken several further steps leading me from childhood into the fierce order of virility. In March of 1979 I would see Ubu live for the first time, on a bill with The Feelies at Hurrah's. That show was where I first would lay eyes on Robert Christgau, who had written of The Modern Dance, "Ubu's music is nowhere near as willful as it sounds at first. Riffs emerge from the cacophony, David Thomas's shrieking suits the heterodox passion of the lyrics, and the synthesizer noise begins to cohere after a while." My buddy Ron and I couldn't believe that my girlfriend Nicole had actually fallen asleep, her head resting on a speaker cabinet, during Ubu's set—but shows went on very late back in that day. By this time the music was making nothing but sense to me. I was beginning to feel as if I had found a place. I was somewhat mistaken, but not entirely.