Red wine, dead writers...

Red wine again and 5.40 am. Been up since three o clock. I'm tired but my mind is in high gear -surfing the net I found some stuff on William Burroughs that I hadn't read before in a memorial/tribute by Levi Asher – transcript of Lee Renaldo phone conversation with Old Bill not long before he died. Interesting – Burroughs talking about Old Morocco and the Jajouka musicians among others. Burroughs comes across as someone with a great courtesy in his manner – not the wild drug addled old queer crazy naked luncher one might imagine. But for aficionados of the Great Man that was part of his enigma and charm. Patrician manner and all that old St Louis jive which reveals a wild and dangerous – and darkly funny - world underneath. Burroughs a massive influence on contemporary culture – especially in music. And I don't mean the Soft Machine, boys and girls. A lumpy band in my opinion, Brit jazz rock never having the street flash and bounce of the Fountainhead – the Prince of Darkness, Monsieur Miles Davis. Not that I have ever been much of a fan of Brit rock stuff in any form. That's another story/rant...

Soundtrack Last.fm again – looping some nice Steve Lacy playing Monk – and shit, Lacy is dead as well...

And of course Allen Ginsberg had died not long before this particular Burroughs interview. And the next section of the tribute/valediction is by Robert Creeley. Who also died a while back. And maybe there is some synchronicity here as my mother is probably dying slowly as I sit here, a few miles away in her Nursing Home. Far gone with vascular dementia and a failing heart – which sums it up, I think. While she still had the will to go on... one could still see something of the old Afrikaaner fire. But now, I guess that she has no heart any more for the struggle. But what do we really know of those who have slipped out of our world into some twilight zone which may be some biological mercy for the lack of memory and increasing physical malfunctions, the brain stuttering to grasp what is going down – and failing. Or realising only too well and compensating with surrealism... We just have to assume that they have some degree of happiness as they seemingly freewheel through the episodes of their life- like a Burroughs cut-up, slicing through the linear space/time of the so-called real world into some creation of their own beyond our immediate comprehension.

I suppose I should figure it out that at my age – knocking on sixty – most of the influences from my early life, people I dug mightily, like Burroughs and Creeley and co (and let's not forget an obscurer name, the late great Ed Dorn who really should be better known – a fine rebel American gunslinger of a poet whom I had the great privilege to meet a few years ago at a reading and afterwards. Next day we were sat in a bar in Aberystwyth – I kid you not – drinking Bass just after opening time to cure the previous evening's excesses – I was trying to finish my dissertation at the time – on Jack Kerouac's 'Mexico City Blues' – I'm nothing if not perverse! - but could not bring myself to be a fan or a groupie – I was too old perhaps – and although I knew Dorn had known Kerouac contented myself with a bizarre hangover conversation about football – a game I loath – and Paris – a place I love. Then the car arrived and Ed was gone to another reading in Cardiff or Swansea or somewhere down south of where we sat).

And I just had a strange but pleasing image come into my mind – thinking about Creeley and his poem – Drive he said – and suddenly I saw my father driving along some back road in Devon where we used to go as kids, no doubt on the way to some country pub. He was a drinking man. And maybe he is on his way to take my mother home with him to a place where they were both happy. Away from her present turmoil...

As the Art Ensemble of Chicago play it out with 'Song for Charles.' This Last.fm stuff is good...

Monk...

Thelonious Monk. Backstage, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1963.
Photo copyright 1989 by Jerry Stoll

Just turned midnight and I'm sitting here drinking some cheap wine and thinking about music and how I started out on this journey. My family were not particularly musical but I started buying records at an early age – first one was Jerry Lee Lewis – 'Great Balls of Fire' – you shake my nerves and you rattle my brain... I was a Jerry Lee fan from the start as opposed to Elvis and it must have been one of the last 78's put out because I remember buying the follow up – 'Down the Line' I think - which was a forty five – went in my old man's car out on a sunday somewhere and had it with me and it warped in the sun. One of the minor tragedies of childhood in the days when you saved for weeks to buy a disc. And somehow I got into traditional jazz which I loved – maybe some influence from my father who used to go out with his friends to see Mick Mulligan's band in Nottingham when George Melly was singing with them. (Strange – for years now I've found Melly irritating – some kind of camp burlesque of Bessie Smith). The program about British Jazz last Friday night on BBC2 brought back all the innocent duffle-coated splendour of the Trad Revival...
But the real epiphany was seeing 'Jazz on a Summer's Day' at one of the local cinemas – I haven't watched it in years but can still feel the impact it had. The hazy summer vibes of Newport, the esoteric sound of the cello in Chico Hamilton's group – Jimmy Guiffre playing 'Train and the River' – but most of all – MONK. The impact of whom still goes on down the years. My man. The fountainhead of all ensuing weirdness. Because Monk was – different. A big, imposing figure behind impenetrable shades always sporting a different hat. And the piece he played in the film was 'Blue Monk' which is an archetypal Monk blues – seemingly simple but having little twists that make it quintessentially -Monk. I saw the movie through several times which was a feat of endurance as it was second bill to a not very good flick called 'Paris Holiday' – Bob Hope and Fernandel. Crap... But the sonorities of 'Blue Monk' still ring through...

Round about that time I had inherited an old upright piano and also was living in my own part of the large house we had then, my own space where I could clang away on the piano and teach myself to play jazz as we had no money available for lessons – via Boogie Woogie sheet music and some Monk lead sheets that I somehow managed to get hold of. 'Blue Monk' of course and 'Trinkle Tinkle' which is a bastard to play – show that to anyone who says that Monk had no technique... And in the obsessive way I had – I started to read up on Modern Jazz in the books available at the time, not forsaking the old stuff, rather expanding my ears and my horizons. Discovering Kerouac at about the same time was the literary equivalent of wild bop. I started hitchhiking round the country under the second hand influence of Kerouac and the Beats. Jazz and the Beat Generation -the two big forces of liberation at that time. Sex and drugs and rock and roll came later... But through the music of Monk especially I travelled into bop and beyond – Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and then Cecil Taylor whom I first heard playing 'Unit Structure' on a scratchy radio medium wave broadcast from somewhere in Europe. (Oddly enough, I never encountered Albert Ayler who became one of my all time favourites until I heard some of his records in Paris at a friend's apartment in the early Seventies). In the age of instant Internet access, downloads and streaming and massive CD rerelease programs when you can pick up all your old albums so cheaply - it all seems so long ago...

When I was writing about Allan Ginsberg in a university essay a few years ago, I came across the following anecdote which I used to finish the piece. It ties up the mix of Beat and Jazz neatly...

Allen Ginsberg gave a copy of Howl to Thelonius Monk and a week later ran into him standing outside the Five Spot. He asked him if he had read it.

"Yeah, I'm almost through," said Monk.

"Well?" asked Allen.

"It makes sense," replied Monk.

Monk freed me up - I took up playing guitar which was more portable but the harmonic lessons I learned on the piano from Monk are still with me... It makes sense...

Grey Monday...

About a year or so back I became very ill with breathing difficulties and was diagnosed as having laryngeal cancer. Only way to deal with it by then was a laryngectomy - so I ended up without a voice - but alive! Most people who have had this operation can now regain a level of speech via a valve inserted into the throat - I was one of those who couldn't speak - had to utilise a voice prosthesis - which always provoked a laugh or two at least as it resembled an elaborate vibrator that I shoved into the side of my face and used to speak like a robot/dalek. Also made interesting noises when passed over the strings of my electric guitar... A good improvisor will always find new ways of making sound!
Recently, at long last, I started to speak via the valve and after almost nine months of relative silence was able to communicate more or less - still getting to grips with it but it gets easier.
I write all of this to get it out the way. I was working in a straight job and have been on indefinite leave since last September. Life has strange compensations... I had been planning on getting my music back on track and now had plenty of time to create. I still have a lot of fatigue and have to pace myself accordingly but the opportunity to play music and participate in the various projects I have planned with my collaborator Murray Ward (see us over at www.plexusmusic.co.uk ) has been a great solace. Also had the time to finish one book (sent of to publisher a while back - still waiting for reply!) and write the guts of another. The end of which has been weird - an aborted double suicide bombing on a concert hall in Paris with one of the perps shot by the French cops - which I wrote the week before the bomb attacks in London and the recent tragic shooting of the Brazilian guy. I had planned the ending months ago - but a week after the actual writing - even though it is set in Paris rather than London - was a bit of eery synchronicity to say the least. In one sense the bombing attempt in my story was at a tangent to the main story - but I realised over the last couple of weeks that we are overshadowed now and probably for a long time by the ongoing war with Islamofascism. I also thought back to William Gibson's last novel 'Pattern Recognition' which is so far the best post 9/11 book I have read. The falling of the towers is in the background of the book but slowly permeates all the way through. The zeitgeist with a vengeance to use an old term. Difficult to escape - and difficult to write about.
These random thoughts - since my illness I keep strange hours woke at 4 A.M. and had a hot drink then as ever started surfing and listening to music - just joined up with an interesting site - Last.fm - which builds a profile of your music choices and when enough tracks have been played creates your own radio station for streaming. Worth a look...
Went back to sleep about 11 A.M. and woke again at 2 P.M. The day will now be fucked maybe - a grey wet day outside - your archetypal Monday for psychotics everywhere. I'm sitting writing this and listening to a stream of Doom Metal from Last.fm - about right for today...
I may go back to the book I was reading - 'The Divine Invasion' by Philip K Dick. Read a lot of his stuff years ago, just coming back to it. Wacky ontological tricks with your head - just what I need today...

STARTING UP...

There will be no attempt at ordering this blog at the moment. I want to see where it goes organically - without falling into too much self-indulgence. A place where I can post random thoughts and ideas about the things that concern me most - the things I like such as music and books and paintings and movies. With the occasional rant thrown in, maybe... Politics? Maybe... I feel that my core values are the same pretty much as they were many years ago - but I've moved on in the more outward manifestations of those values - radically in many ways. As one should... standing still leads to death of the spirit...