Miz Mockingbird

Voodoo Festival is finished for another year, thank goodness.  It’s always a wonderful thing to hang out with musicians, to hang out with all the WWOZ kids I don’t get to see very often these days (they’re largely diurnal to my decidedly nocturnal), and to spend a few days ankle-deep in sucking mud.  Seriously.  Once you decide to jump on in, the mud’s a lotta fun.

This weekend I got to cross three bands off my colossal People To See Before I (or They) Expire list:  Ween, Gogol Bordello, and George Clinton with Parliament Funkadelic.

As many shows as I’ve attended over the years, I finally – finally! – got my rockshow cherry popped and exploded during Ween’s set, brief as it was.  Thanks to the torrential rain we received, the poor sound techs had an amazing 30-45 minutes just trying to get the mics working.  Add to that the previous band’s unwillingness to leave the stage, and Ween ended up playing for a measly 45 minutes or so.  …But, oh those 45 minutes were amazing.  Between their excessive stage-fog, over-the-top lighting, and the lusty wind kickin its heels through City Park, I stood gape-mouthed at the altar of Rock and Roll.  It’s the only rock show I’ve attended where I did not yawn once.

Gogol Bordello played every bit as vehemently as I’d hoped they would, although I think perhaps their energy is better suited to enclosed venues.  So much seemed to get carried away on the wind.  Otherwise, I was surrounded by some truly talented stilt-walkers and their friends, dancin in the mud, twirled and enmeshed by their strands upon strands of spiderwebs.  Immediately following Gogol Bordello’s set, the March Fourth Marching Band popped up outta nowhere, just to my left.  Ain’t nothin better than being suddenly on the business end of a buncha horns afflicted with the Funky Beat.  Lordy.

I only caught about half an hour of George Clinton/P-Funk’s set, which meant I listened to exactly 2 songs in their entirety.  David Kunian said something on his show last week about George Clinton being to rock and roll what Sun Ra was to jazz.  After finally – finally! – seeing Clinton and P-Funk play live, I now see exactly what Kunian means.  And he’s riiiight.  I had a previous engagement, it being Halloween and all, so had to leave Voodoo right as P-Funk launched into Maggot Brain.  More’s the pity.  But, I tell you what, exiting City Park beneath the underlit live oaks in their Spanish Moss finery, in the glow of a nearly full moon, listening to the wafting, fading strains of “Maggot Brain?”…

‘Magical’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Awright, kittens, I’ve gotta finish pulling this show together for tonight.  If you’re up and about, come on out in the backyard with me around midnight.  I’ll have a little picnic and catnip for us, spread out on a blanket under the full moon and the evening’s birdsong.

Until then I’m

Waving and grinning and lovin you with all my ridiculous heart,

~mockingbird~

I love having an excuse to tell people how I really feel about supporting the Arts, and that absolutely includes radio…or it should.  Well, I mean, I can’t even mention “art with a little a” in respect to commercial radio; that’s like using deity to sell control.  But I can, and I do, use ‘art’ (and sometimes ‘Art’) to discuss community radio.

Jamie Dell’Apa made a great point the other night concerning television vs. radio.  He reminded us that, while the teevee feeds us imagery, radio feeds our imagination.  This is what Art should do.  …No, really.  Art nourishes and encourages imagination; it opens creative doors for us and shines sunlight on Potential and Possibility.

…Anything else is just plain old Propaganda.  Done and done.

Wake up and smell the brainwashing, brothers and sisters.  Begin and continue the Good Fight to throw off the oppressive culture of affluenza.  Remember, as you have seen after every major and minor disaster in this country, that We Are All In This Together.  We are not here to buy things together; we are here to Create Lives together.  We are here to intentionally create the communities we want to live in, to look out for each others’ welfare, to foster the Beauty we want to experience, to encourage fulfillment on every front.  How beautiful and amazing is that?  Y’know?  How grand and golden is this opportunity we hold in our hands, this opportunity to turn our backs on what we’re fed and to create what we want, instead?

To me, a large part of creating intentional community involves shoring up a truly solid basis for Food, Beauty, and Sustainability.  I believe it is imperative we teach each other how to Love:  personally, in our neighborhoods and communities, and in the wonderful world at large.  It is important that we take whatever steps we are personally able to help good things grow, and to help others help good things grow, whether libraries or gardens or second-lines on Sundays.  How better to teach than by example?  Y’know?  How better to show, for example, that New Orleans’ musical heritage is truly important than actively working to support our living musicians?  By spreading their music as far afield as humanly possible?  Gettin the word out for the good work, y’all!

If monetary support makes the most sense to you, by all means join the WWOZ roster in that fashion.  Please.  But, y’know, if you’re like me, strugglin to pay the rent?  Baby, volunteer to help in less immediately tangible ways.  If you cook, offer to feed people during the membership drives.  Offer to help out at any of the dozens of music festivals WWOZ assists throughout the year.  And if you’re too far physically removed to volunteer with WWOZ, find something in your own community that speaks to your heart.  Y’know?

As Scott Borne is so fond of saying, “Get in where y’fit in,” and understand that that applies to a freakywide range of opportunities.  It might take a little while to find just where you fit, where you feel most effective, so until then, try everything.  Try your hands at giving a hand to everything that strikes a heartchord with you.  Whatever it is you have to give, it is of value to someone.  This isn’t some squooshy self-help bullshit, either.  This is the Real Thing, the Real Experience.  We are all, down to a molecular level, connected in some fashion, so it stands to reason that our needs and our gifts and our desires and our skills are all connected somehow, too.

Personally, I need music.  Need, need, need, need, NEEEED.  …Need music.  Especially living in the city, where it’s a lot harder to hear the music of the planet, I really require melodic expression of emotion to keep me grounded.  My somewhat esoteric set of skills and idiosyncrasies have been poking around the edges of music communities since I was 15 or so, and I have just now, in the year or so I’ve been volunteering with WWOZ, really started to find Where I’m Supposed To Be, and How I Can Be Most Effective.  I can’t even begin to tell you how gratifying this is.  And, y’know, this new opportunity, this fit with ‘OZ has suddenly clarified all the years I’ve spent poking around, trying to find out where I fit.  Because I dabbled here and there, because I tried to give what I could to a buncha different endeavours within the music/food/art communities, I now have an opportunity to give in proportions I never previously imagined.

Y’gotta start somewhere, baby.  If WWOZ gives you even an infinitesimal portion of what it has given me and a gajillion others planet-wide, start there.  Or start wherever makes sense for you, in your community.  Start teaching local kids how to do something you know well:  gardening to swimming to making rhythms to painting to building to on and on and on.  Take a few minutes to sweep the leaves outta your neighbors’ sidewalk.  Offer to pick up extra groceries for the Matriarch of your block.  Carve out an extra place at the dinner table for a teacher or an artist or a musician, or hell, just somebody who’s hongry.  Build a bicycle for a kid (or a grownup) who maybe couldn’t afford one otherwise.  Y’know?  Only you know where your superhero skills really lie, so find some way to start utilizing em.  Whatever you do, do it with BigBigLove, and everything’s gonna turn out fine.  Hell, everything’s probably gonna get a whole lot better.

Thank you, my brothers and sisters, for listening, for reading, for supporting WWOZ with your ears and your hearts, for all the good things you do, here on our beautiful blue planet.  Until next time, remember that I love you, with all my ridiculous heart.

See you Monday night, mi gatitas.

~mockingbird~

A gentleman from Ontario, Ian MacEachern, called me during this morning’s show, and we had a lovely (if brief) conversation about our cats and about Canadian and UStian history and their respective inadequacies.  He later sent me an email with a link to his website full of incredibly beautiful original photographs.  I mean, really.  His Asylum series sent my heart secretly palpitating a stuttering 7/8 rhythm.  His appreciation of emotion and light compelled me to further involve myself in each piece, again again again.  Just wonderful.

Back to me (cause I’m closing in on passing out):  if you wanna read the whole playlist , assuming you haven’t already, do head over to WWOZ’s site to check it out.   And then poke around the site and find some cool stuff to do this week.  Lord knows we got music goin on.

Thankee Thankee, from the middles of my bones, to every last one of you who took the time to call and email me tonight.  You brought me a buncha joy with that.  Thanks.

Awright, kittencakes.  I love y’like nobody’s business, but I gotsta start thinkin about gettin horizontal.  That vertical sleepin’s for the astronauts!  Huh!

Waving and grinning and lovin you like mad,

~mockingbird~

My darlin Blue Bear, my thickfurry B’way, the dearest onliest cat boyfriend I’ve ever loved Just Like That, died of poisoning three mornings ago, oh so unexpectedly.  His thickthick fur was the colors of all the finest chocolates.  His eyes the cool blue of Autumn sky.  His sensuality is/was, in my experience, absolutely unmatched in all the feline world.  He was to me what no other human had ever been, will ever be.

…Oh, my baby Blue….

Instead of staring glazey-eyed at his favorite trees for hours and days, I’ve got a show t’do.  Dunno if I’ll be talking much tonight, but I will be playing plenty of stuff I used to sing to him, stuff dedicated to him.  Kinda like our last date, I guess.

I’m reminded, of course, of all the folks stranded on rooftops during the Federal Flood 2005 who would not, could not leave their animal companions behind.  I am reminded of all the barely sentient humans who scoffed at these animal-lovers’ supposed folly…

And I am reminded how lucky we are, those of us who understand the grace of a loving relationship between different species.  Every wise being understands that the truly important stuff, the really colossal emotional stuff, the love and grief and joy and desire, will always be sold short by the inadequacies of language.  Always always always.  Ain’t no way to put that stuff into words because words are just symbols used to represent the thing itself.  Y’dig?  We can use a bazillion elegant terms to describe the enormity of the ocean (or mountains or rainforests or caverns or insert breathtaking Wonder here), but, when it comes down to it, you just kinda gotta see it for yourself.  To start wrapping your mind around how lame language is for communicating life-quaking emotion, understand that y’can’t just see it yourself, you’ve also gotta feel it yourself.  You can only communicate that stuff with the eyes and with the skin.  With mirrors and heartbeats.  Period.

For people who’ve traded in feeling for power, who’ve replaced pain with pomposity, who’ve covered their inability to truly love with a haughtiness that tries to circumscribe love into easily marketable, highly marginalized boxes:  until you have been stripped down to the emotional bone, until you have lost everything everything except your life, until you have been carved up and cut apart and made to understand how fundamentally unimportant you are in the greatest, grandest perspective, in the Universal…until you give Job a run for his money…

Until then, baby, just keep your mouth shut.  With every dismissal of Love you utter (whatever form that Love takes), you are proving yourself an object of pity.  You are showing yourself incapable of Love.  You are showing yourself to be Less Than Human.

To be truly human is to cultivate Love.  Cultivate compassion.  What better examples of Love and Compassion for our egotistical human species than the animals that choose to live with us?  To love us?  Considering them beneath us degrades us.  Loving them unabashedly, without thought or reservation, without qualifications or caveats, is a step toward our species’ evolution.

Okay, all that said…

For darlin B’way, I’m mixing at least an hour’s worth of music, and, specifically, Cat Power’s “Blue“.

My beautiful boyfriend, my sweet soul companion:  these 3ams just ain’t right without you.  Thank you so much for blessing and bullying and basting me with your Love for so long.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

Not nevah.

~mockingbird~

I am consistently amazed at how much more I am able to learn about my own country from sources outside my country.  Once again, The Guardian offers up the most forthright article to date on the U.S. healthcare debate by, y’know, going out and interviewing folks who are directly, profoundly affected by the ridiculous squabbling happening on Capitol Hill.  These are not isolated cases.  This is damned near everyone I know.

We’ll leave that lie for a bit and get on to what we listened to on the radio tonight.  Howzat?

Whatever comes, I Love You.  F’Real.

~mockingbird~

Artist / Track / Album / notes

Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis / That’s All / Two Men With the Blues

Garaj Mahal / The Shadow / Blueberry Cave

The Quintet / Salt Peanuts / Jazz at Massey Hall / Recorded in 1953 in Toronto, this is the only assembly of these incredible musicians:  Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach.  I meeeean…are you kidding me?!

The Bad Plus / 1980 World Champion / Prog

Randy Newman / You Can Leave Your Hat On / Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1

John Coltrane Quartet / Africa / Africa – Brass

Ravi Coltrane / Epistrophy / Blending Times

Jeff “Tain” Watts / Dancin 4 Chicken / Watts / There’s some language disallowed by the FCC within the first minute of this track.  Before you go scandalizin the church ladies, y’know….

Fast ‘n’ Bulbous / Smithsonian Institute Blues / Waxed Oop / 2009

Astral Project / Once Was / Blue Streak

Fahir Atakoglu / Gypsy in Me / Istanbul in Blue

Fareed Haque & The Flat Earth Ensemble / The Chant / Flat Planet

Saco Yasuma / The Fifth Season / Another Rain

Garaj Mahal / Bicycling in Bombay / Blueberry Cave

Fareed Haque & The Flat Earth Ensemble / Bengali Bud / Flat Planet

Tony Allen / Asiko / Black Voices

Dorothy Ashby / Soul Vibrations / Afro-Harping

Bantuous Jazz / Watchi Wara / The Shrine Presents Afrobeat

Hugh Masekela / The Seven Riffs of Africa (Medley) / African Breeze:  80s Masekela

Rodrigo y Gabriela / Foc / Live in Japan / 2008

Jeff “Tain” Watts / Wry Koln / Watts

Hugh Masekela / Child of the Earth / Still Grazing

Stanley Clarke Trio / Take the Coltrane / Jazz in the Garden /2009

Between the gaping hole in my head (scheduled to be even more cavernous the week after next) and the ridiculously high-maintenance automobile, uhm, maintenance, I completely forgot to update the blog.  So sorry. While the soapbox beckons (with shouting and flaming flares), I just don’t have the time right this second.  As soon as I carve out a second, I’ll tear loose my muzzle.  Promise.  And if this tooth-trouble thing keeps going the way it’s going, the written word may be our only source of communication.  If that’s case, Watch Out, brothers and sisters.  Verbosity, in some folks, is like a magma flow:  always lookin for the Never Enough outlet, makin do with creek channels for what needs a riverbed.  Fast, ferocious, undeniable.

Until then, sweet siblings, let’s play a little catch-up on (jeezus) two weeks ago.

I love you.

~mockingbird~

Artist / Track / Album / notes

Cannonball Adderly / Hummin / Country Preacher

Ingrid Lucia / What Is This Thing Called Love? / St. Valentine’s Day Massacre / 2009 / local New Orleans artist

Groovesect / Bad Blood / On the Brim / local New Orleans band

Groovesect / Bass Solo / On the Brim / local New Orleans band

John Coltrane / Saturn / Interstellar Space / This album was performed solely by Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali, who just passed away this last week.  Rest in Music, Mister Ali.

Rob Wagner / Desoparia (They Handed Out $12 Billion Cash in Iraq but Couldn’t Give New Orleans Drinking Water) / Trio

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis / Meditation on Integration / Don’t Be Afraid:  The Music of Charles Mingus / Wynton is, of course, of the New Orleans Marsalis family.

Dizzy Gillespie / Toccata / Gillespiana

La Otra / Todo Pa’La Gente / Todo Pa’La Gente / local New Orleans band

Dizzy Gillespie / Ool Ya Koo / Gillespiana

Machito / Wild Jungle / Kenya

John Coltrane (and Rashied Ali) / Leo / Interstellar Space

Claudio Nunez / Free Improvisation II / Barking at the Wrong Tree

John Coltrane / Expression / Expression / Musicians on this album include:  John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Rashied Ali.  That’s a hell of a lineup.

Bill Frisell / Procissao / The Intercontinentals

Revolution Void / Mind Mapping / Thread Soul

Bill Frisell / Boubacar / The Intercontinentals

Axial / Tamanquero / AXIAL, Volume 1

El Perez / Rumba Alemana / Por Rumbas

El Perez / Rumba Francesca / Por Rumbas

La Otra / Obatala / Todo Pa’La Gente / local New Orleans band

Beyond iguanas and Aztec princesses, there is also the fact that the planet has lost one of its most creative free jazz drummers this week, Rashied Ali.  I’ll be playing some of the work he did with Coltrane, as well as the amazing stuff he did with James “Blood” Ulmer, if I can get my hands on it.

Rest in music, Mister Ali.

Artist / Track / Album / Notes

The Other Planets / Novacaine / Holiday for Vacationers (Everything Awesome All the Time / I somehow managed to knock off the back of one of my molars yesterday and am now staring at the business end of a needle fulla novacaine and some stranger peering into my mouth.  I’m not too concerned about the needle, but the guy pokin around in my mouth?  Ugh.  Gives me rigors.

Bobby Hughes Combination / Nhu Golden Era / Nhu Golden Era

Miles Davis / The Little Blue Frog (Alternate Take) / Bitches Brew Sessions/ It’s closing in on the 40th anniversary of the release of Bitches Brew, y’all, and we’re still so bound by so-called “decency” that we can’t really mention the name of the album until the late, late evening.  Forty years.  Marvel at the molasses-like progression of Good Ol ‘Merican Values.

Bobby Hughes Combination / Magnificent Mr. Morgan / Nhu Golden Era

Esperanza Spalding / Mela / Esperanza

Sun Ra and His Arkestra / On Jupiter / On Jupiter

Ornette Coleman / Spelling the Alphabet / Virgin Beauty

The Other Planets / Living in Harmony with Fuel-Efficient Machinery / Discrete Manipulations

Harry Connick, Jr. / Little Farley / Star Turtle

Astral Project / Dike Finger / Blue Streak

The Bad Plus / Prehensile Dream / Suspicious Activity?

Miles Davis / Lonely Fire / Bitches Brew Sessions

The Other Planets / I Have Oranges and Bananas / Eightballs in Angola / If you get this song, you’ve obviously spent a little time here in New Orleans.  Lucky You.

Garage A Trois / Bear No Hair / Outre Mer

Miles Davis / Trevere / Bitches Brew Sessions

The Bad Plus / Silence Is the Question / These Are Vistas

Marco Benevento / Sing It Again / Me Not Me

Hank Mobley / Recado Bossa Nova / Blue Note Trip: Sunset

Rodrigo y Gabriela / Satori / Rodrigo y Gabriela

Dirty Three / Zither Player / Cinder

Lonnie Smith Trio / Traces of Trane (I Bring Love) / Afro Blue

Orgatronics / Bird Gets Dizzy / Moonfruit

Sun Ra / Cosmos / Cosmos

Marco Benevento / Golden / Me Not Me

Stuart Hamm / Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum / Radio Free Albemuth / Check out the notes on this track at WWOZ’s website

Dirty Three / Too Soon, Too Late / Cinder

Sun Ra / Moonship Journey / Cosmos

Ornette Coleman / Unknown Artist / Virgin Beauty

Allen Toussaint / Dear Old Southland / Bright Mississippi

Okay.  That’s all I’ve got today.

Thanks for hangin out on the living room floor with me, and

Remember that I love you.

Waving and grinning,

~mockingbird~