PopWars

I did my homework this year by reviewing the list before we left the house. It took some of the fun out Record Store Day but it also gave us more freedom to just hang out, drink coffee and eat cookies. There were only a couple of things that caught my eye and I snagged both the Art Ensemble 45 with the African poet, Alfred Panou, and the John Cage Meets Sun Ra 45 (plus dvd of the complete Coney Island performance). I put that on as soon as we got home.

We left our car in the old Tops parking lot on Winton and walked to Monroe where stopped at Bop Shop and Hi Fi Lounge. We stood in front the sound system in the back room. I asked the guy how much the pair of speakers cost and he said “around $300 but don’t quote me. They sounded fantastic and I was considering so I asked the owner when he came in. He said “about two thousand.”.

I brought my Hauser Wirth bag with me and filled it with vinyl, a few more 45s from the sixties and Silver Apple’s debut 1968 lp on milky blue vinyl. They sound like Nod, Can and Suicide, all bands that came after them.

We took a different route over to Record Archive where a big inflated dinosaur was bouncing around in the parking lot. A local brewery called Single Cut was giving away samples of beer that tasted exactly like grapefruit juice. A young mod-like band was performing in the back room you had to get in a long line in order to look at the Record Store Day product.

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I will sleep good tonight. I spent a good bit of the afternoon rebuilding the short concrete wall that sort of marks the property line between us and our neighbors. I do this every years as the pachysandra bed on the other side continues to expand the wall tilts toward us. It is not even a foot high and from our perspective, an eyesore. I proposed removing it but that didn’t fly so I rebuilt it again. 

Our local newspaper has been promoting the Pulitzer Prize winning, USA Today documentary, “The Wall.” The movie was free so we signed up.

Once the Trumpster announced and made the big fence a pledge a group of journalists decided to fly the the border from from the mouth of the Rio Grand to the Pacific Ocean. The winding river makes a natural border for large sections and and the terrain is so rugged and inhospitable I kept trying to picture the engineering feat required to run fence up and down the sides of mountains and over huge ravines  Currently there is only 600 miles with an actual fence. The one feasibility study of effectiveness of the wall, which was done in 2006, showed the astronomical costs would bring negligible benefits. So full stream ahead.

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God creates Eve from Adam’s rib and they have two sons, Cain and Able. Then Cain takes a wife. Did you ever stop to think about where that woman came from? Was there someone around the corner that was also doing creation?

This is just one of the arguments Spencer Tracy’s famous defense lawyer character uses against his famous prosecuting attorney in the 1960 recreation of the famous Scopes trail. This damn movie, which was screened at the Dryden Theater yesterday, is sixty years old and the story it retells is 100 years old. Yet the movie is still relevant. One third of Americans don’t believe in evolution. The clutches of the fundamentalists, those that believe in a literal, word of god, biblical creation story still go as deep as the Tennessee townspeople singing “Give me that old time religion,” in Stanley Kramer’s “In Inherit The Wind.” And I find that depressing. But the movie is not.

The movie is vivid. It is witty. Quips fly by. Gene Kelly playing a reporter from the Baltimore Herald, lets the most fly. The smallest characters are as large life. Claude Akins is fantastic. Fredric March goes over the top. Spencer Tracy is brilliant. Distrust of science and distrust of journalism is nothing new.

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Four of every member of the sax family plus one bass saxophone. A saxophone orchestra. The Eastman Saxophone Project rearranges work for the saxophone and plays from memory without a conductor. We heard at noon today in the Hochstein performance space and you can catch the rebroadcast on WXXI at ten tonight.

With a little bit of help from a small percussion section they performed Emanuel Chabrier’s “Espana,” Astor Piazzolla’s “Contrabajjissimo” and Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, something that would be immediately familiar because it has been used in many movies. It is amazing to me that the sax can do it all. The group will perform again at Kilbourn Hall on Thursday, April 11, 2019 at 7:30PM.

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At a distance the witch hazel can look like Forsythia but it is too early for that. At the end of Wisner there are bunch of witch hazel trees growing near the road and in this spot you can see three different varieties. Into the park and up the hill on Zoo Road is another variety, one that blossoms earlier, like February. It is still in bloom and very fragrant.

Carl used to run a saxophone repair shop on East Avenue. The place was called Shuffle Music and his cliental was mostly Eastman students. He’s retired now but he does some work out of his house. Peggi put her soprano in her backpack and we walked over there today along the lake. We made a loop out of the trip by coming back through the far side of the park where the sewage treatment plant is.

We missed yoga last week because we were at Big Ears. I’m looking forward to to tonight.

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Dan Eaton had a sweet gig with RNews for many years. In a few minutes he talked you through a gourmet recipe and convinced you that a regular guy could do this. He delivered the goods at Rooney’s and Good Luck and Rochester’s finest. He holds court in Hammondsport now, at the bottom of Kueka Lake and will soon be offering a “Chef’s Menu.”

We had dinner there on Saturday and ordered from the menu. We were just digging in to our roasted Brussels sprouts appetizer when the waitress told us Chef Dan would like to cook for you if you agree. We agreed and were blown away. We were were celebrating Jeff’s birthday so booked a room upstairs and shared a bottle of Mescal that he had brought back from Mexico.

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I know girlie magazines is the first thing anyone thinks of when you say World Wide News but they used to be the only place in town where you could buy the English weeklies, Melody Maker, Sounds and NME, the Spanish daily newspapers and any obscure art magazine you could think of. Last time I was in there it was more like a corner store.

It was a beautiful day for a walk around the city. We had lunch at Fifth Frame and a late afternoon beer at Swiftwater. I’m thinking about painting the horseshoes for the new season.

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Spring Break is over. The UT college kids are coming back. We spotted Tim Berne waiting for a ride out of town and then a little further down Gay Street was Ken Burns in a bus wrapped with an ad for his upcoming PBS Country Music documentary. Knoxville is returning to normal.

I’m going to miss the Big Ears app. This festival unfolded so well and our schedule was continually in flux we that depended on the app for everything. To listen to sound samples from the artist’s sites, to get from one venue to the next, and most of all to get continuous stream of updates about surprise appearances and clubs reaching capacity. But most of all I’m going to miss Big Ears, the festival, an astounding collection of great music.

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People were walking toward us this morning with pillows under their arms. We were headed to The Standard where a twelve hour drone was just finishing up. It took a while for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. Bodies were scattered about, some cross legged with their eyes closed, others completely sprawled out or asleep. A different musician or set of musicians took over the drone every half hour. We listened with our full body for fifteen minutes or so and headed over to the Knoxville Art Museum to check out Tim Story’s Roedelius Cells, fragments from old Cluster recordings played through sixteen speakers, eight times stereo. We stopped in a panel discussion with Nate Wooley. He talked about listening, the importance of silence and playing with but not mimicking external sounds. 

A century after the WW1 armistice, Richard Thompson performed KIA with a string ensemble. His songs are based on letters, diaries and verbatim extracts from people directly involved. Peggi counted 10 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos and two basses.

Ever the optimist, Roscoe Mitchell, in the center of a panel surrounded by three current members of the Art Ensemble, said, “It seems like the sixties all over again.” He talked about composing in the moment and how he was trying to do the past members, those who have passed on, proud. “You either have a ticket to ride or you don’t go.” We we’re thrilled to see that Tomeka Reid, the cellist we liked so much in Artifacts, is now a member of the Art Ensemble.

Bill Frisell’s Harmony with Petra Haden singing as he plays guitar along with cellist, Hank Roberts and Luke Bergman on baritone guitar sounded right at home in Tennessee. The old timeyness in a lot of Frisell’s playing in hi many settings is fully fleshed out here.

At the Spanish/Moorish Tennessee Theater the amazing Art Ensemble of Chicago, celebrating fifty years of great black music, closed out the festival like a rocket ship leaving earth with the very best elements of our culture. With only two of the formible five left they had added twelve members and a conductor. Their set and encore were so musically rich our ears indeed got bigger.

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We started our day with a few minutes worth of Dead Souls, the eight hour movie by Wang Bing, at the UT Gallery and then headed down to the Bijou Theater for Joan La Barbara again, this time with Alvin Lucier and the Ever Present Orchestra. It was transcendent. 

Larry Grenadier’s recent ECM release is a solo bass recording called “The Gleaners.” He performed songs from it and mixed Coltrane, Gershwin and Hindemith in with his own songs. He makes the bass sound extraordinarily rich.

Harold Budd opened with a gong piece a Methodist church. The church bells chimed in the middle of his loosely conducted set. Shai Meistro’s trio was amazing. They finished with a cinematic song worthy of an Oscar winning movie.

Absînt with accordionist, Aurora Nealand, Tim Berne, Bill Frisell, and David Torn, performed for the first time together at the Standard, a standing room only venue. It was kind of messy so we ducked out to see Spiritualized. And we finished the night with a brilliant performance by Meredith Monk of her “Cellular Songs,” something she premiered last year at BAM.

We slept like babies after this.

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