brooding ’bout stuff
This is a second conversation with dancer-choreographer Rudy Perez, taking place last month on May 30. During our review of Part 1 Rudy raised a few topics that I wanted to pursue. And, of course, there had been the murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day, and the reactions from coast to coast.
What follows has been lightly edited for clarity. Many thanks to Susan Perry Miick for her help with photographs.
Continue reading “Portrait of Rudy Perez 2: Remain in Light”
Last year, in Everybody Dance Now 1, I reminisced about studying with dancer-choreographer Rudy Perez in the early 1980s. Nearly four decades later Rudy agreed to let me interview him a week ago, on May 13. What follows has been lightly edited for clarity.
We begin where I left off in that prior post.
Continue reading “Portrait of Rudy Perez”
This second and likely last installment of Electric Evangelists (see Part 1) looks at longer works by two composers, both choosing to present religious texts simply spoken atop electronic scores. The third and fourth pieces are artifacts of pop culture, coupling SoCal evangelical eccentricity with European élan. The last composition contains no text at all.
Continue reading ““Eat the book”: Electric Evangelists 2″
The year 2003 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Their killing had a great impact on my wife Andrea Carney (see Part 1 and Part 2 of our trilogy). Somehow I learned that a major commemoration would be held in New York City on June 19, the same day they were killed. It was produced by the Rosenberg Fund for Children, founded in 1990 by the Rosenbergs’ son Robert, who was grateful for the support he and his brother Michael had been shown during the jailing of, and after the killing of, their parents. The fund’s purpose is “to find and help children today who are enduring the same kind of nightmare he endured as a child.”1
Continue reading “Rosenberg Resistance”
Exactly a year ago my discussion with a comrade about music-compelled-by-struggle led to my first original post here, Attica: Coming Together. Last Friday, talking with this same friend caused me to create a list of musics that employ the spoken word—faith-based speech specifically. After jotting down a few titles I came across an extensive list posted for Easter 2013 by one Mr. Fab, a Los Angeles-based deejay and musician. He helpfully includes the name of each orator, which indicates the popularity of two in particular, R. W. Schambach and Gene Scott. My list nearly ended with Praga Khan’s setting of the former in 1991, but Fab provides twenty more years of titles.
My Friday conversation involved Brian Eno and David Byrne’s album My Life In the Bush of Ghosts for which they used the voice of Kathryn “I Believe In Miracles” Kuhlman. While her estate wouldn’t approve licensing, a 1980 UK bootleg of the intended track and others circulated apparently before the official album was released in early 1981.2 Bush of Ghosts was completed in October of 1980 and Eno and Byrne must have scrambled to replace Kuhlman’s vocal: the substitute was an “unidentified exorcist” recorded the previous month in New York. Both these speakers are acts in their own right, with the exorcist commanding (below), healer Kuhlman exploring (at least initially).
On the bootleg (at 2:32) Kuhlman seems to introduce a guest, perhaps on her television show? Her phrasal pauses are electronically elongated in contrast to the musical pulses, turning prose into something this side of poetry.3
Sit down by my side.
Tell me all about that wonderful experience
when you were the possessorof that wonderful gift
whereby you were enabled to see into the spirit world.
This is what he saw…
This is what who saw? Inexplicably (the track does hiccough as if it’d been trimmed)—and murkily in the mix—Kuhlman turns to scripture: the story of Lot, King James Version (itself a poetical prose).
19 And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground;
2 And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant’s house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night.
3 And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat.
At which point, of course the men of Sodom demand that the angels be flushed out, “that we might know them.”4 To which Lot generously offers his “two daughters which have not known man.” The tale goes even further downhill from there, but Kuhlman—via the X-acto blade of Eno and Byrne?—omits all of this, returning cheerfully to:
But he’d been given that wonderful gift,
which enabled him to see into the spirit world.
These were angels,
angels with Lot,
and angels are just as real in your life and just as real in my life as they were in the life of Lot.
Only he was given a gift whereby he could see into the spirit world and he saw them.
Surely the men of Sodom also were given the gift, else how would they have known there were new men to be known?
And so Eno and Byrne, having been forced to excise Kuhlman, swapped in an exorcist with a demonic laugh, who declares that his exorcisee’s “husband is the head of her house.” Thus the track moved from house to house, from the spirit world to “The Jezebel Spirit,” its title on the album.5
It’s been noted that Eno and Byrne’s vocals appropriations had an antecedent at least ten years earlier with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen (Anthems, 1966–1967), which sourced national anthem recordings from several countries around the world. And in 1969 Holgar Czukay (German co-founder of Can) with Rolf Dammers created Canaxis 5 by taking a choral a cappella track from a Folkways album, Music of Viet Nam, and giving it a lush setting.6 On Bush of Ghosts Eno and Byrne would do the same with three tracks from the album Music in the World of Islam (a six-LP box set that I let slip through my fingers when I moved back to Colorado). In 1987 Czukay employed the (mostly sung) vocals of Pope John Paul II, below. “We were blessed by the appearance of His Holyness Popestar Wojtyla and His Swinging Nuns during the Easter ceremonies,” Czukay writes in the credits to the Virgin album Rome Remains Rome.
As can be heard, Eno and Byrne’s careful craft is in contrast with Czukay’s nonchalance. The latter approach also is taken by John Adams in a 1973 composition, a recording of which was released by Eno on his Obscure label. Christian Zeal and Activity is the middle movement of Adams’s triptych American Standard. The ensemble performs a deconstructed “Onward Christian Soldiers” but without benefit of bar lines—and with or without a baton. (Eno would use a similar technique for his Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel.7) Adams’s ensemble is accompanied by the “extra material” of a radio talk show recording, which the composer called “touching,” “funny,” and “disturbing.”8 This description actually could apply to all of the repurposed preachings in Mr. Jay’s list.
(Regarding the image used for the following stream of a 1973 performance…9)
At the time of Adams’s success with his opera Nixon In China (1987), but before that work’s release on record in 1988, Nonesuch issued an Adams sampler, demonstrating that the composer already had a portfolio. For that album, in November of ’86 Edo de Waart conducted (or did he?) members of the San Francisco Symphony in the stand-alone Christian Zeal and Activity, this time with the “extra material” of an uncredited 1976 text-sound piece, Sermon.10
Perhaps the most famous stand-alone text-sound creation in history is Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, featuring the voice of “a young black Pentecostal preacher who called himself Brother Walter.” He was recorded in San Francisco’s Union Square; the piece was “composed” there in January of 1965.11
It’s Gonna Rain was incorporated along with other Reich works (including Come Out, which I discuss in my post from a year ago) into Megamix, released by Nonesuch in 1999.
Megamix was crafted by Michael Kandel, aka Tranquility Bass, whose early collaborations under that moniker with Tom Chasteen employ found vocals, such as the Apollo 11 line in 1991’s “They Came In Peace” (a later “Sea of Tranquility” mix echoes Reich), and the South Asian/Latin stylings of ’93’s “Cantamilla.” As far as proselytizing goes, a relatively soft sell is contained within the duo’s 1993 “Mya Yadana (Kin Kin)” (named after the restaurant the two frequented in Bagan, Burma in 1988 and their server Kin Kin).
Less restrained are the appeals of R. W. Schambach on the first of John Oswald’s famous mashups, “Power” (1975), which aligns the preacher’s calls with Led Zeppelin’s power chords.12
In the 47-page booklet that accompanies Oswald’s Plunderphonics compilation (pictured above), the artist explains:
This is a track which i made while i was working on the « burrows »
—both he and John Adams were taken by the cut-up method (and results) of William S. Burroughs13—
and at the time i somewhat astigmatically decided that the repeating sample idea was not a direction i wanted to go in, and i put it in the closet. Five or six years later i heard that Bush of Ghosts record, which featured electroquoted preachers over rhythm tracks, and the thought crossed my competitive mind that i had already done this, better.
But Oswald explains further:
The basic premise of « power » was a long-standing one for me which dated back at least to my first hearing of Brother J. C. Crawford’s exhortations on the MC5’s Kick out the Jams. Before i knew much about Jerry Lee Lewis’ background, this seemed like the devil’s music. Rock, was eminently suited to be juxtaposed with ranting evangelistic rhetoric, and its brethren in the political arena, exemplified by guys like Adolf Hitler.
J. C. Crawford‘s resemblance to the latter-day Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping notwithstanding—
—Oswald denies these juxtapositions are ironic.
Rock fans were uncomfortable listening to talk about god and jesus. God and jesus fans were known to be uncomfortable about rock. So, even early on i was striving for my music to be unpopular.14
As I noted up top, preacher R. W. Schambach was a popular subject of electroquotation, to use Oswald’s term. In 1985 the British group :zoviet*france: included its song “Ram” from ’84 on a multi-artist audiocassette compilation, Ritual: Land’s End, issued by Touch. The track actually overlaps the preceding track, “Greater Faith Cathedral broadcast, rec by S/Z,” which is an otherwise unaccompanied exposé by Schambach of the truth behind the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. “Ram” appeared also in 1985 on the group’s own audiocassette album, Popular Soviet Songs and Youth Music, issued by Singing Ringing/Red Rhino, but it omits Schambach’s speech. A 1992 re-release of “Ram” on the group’s own compilation-from-compilations, Collusion (The Grey Area of Mute Records), resurrects the Schambach, perhaps because of the line that had been made famous the year before by Praga Khan.15 But before we get to those tracks, listen to the beginning of “Norsch Baelmaen,” recorded in 1982 and released in 1983 on the Red Rhino EP Norsch, which features another preacher.
And the backwards version…
“Ram” is the first track on Collusion by :zoviet*france:…
…from which Praga Khan borrows key bits, making his own message, calling for an abandonment of the old modus.
And since we’re on the subject: “Jim Jones” by the L.A. band Party Boys, from the 1984 LP No Aggro issued on Independent Records. No electroquotation here but rather the band’s recitation of Jones’s words.
A somewhat sour note to leave you on, but in Part 2 I look at Ralph Swickard’s Sermons of Saint Francis, Pierre Henry’s take on John the Evangelist, Cabaret Voltaire on Gene Scott, and more.
Last month I saw Gang of Four for the third time.
The first was at a small club, probably their show at the Starwood in West Hollywood, capacity 400–800, May of 1980. Earlier that same year, the band had opened for the Buzzcocks and later, Iggy Pop, both at the much larger Santa Monica Civic. But those garnered lousy reviews by the Los Angeles Times, the first due to bad sound, the second to fatigue. The Civic could put a lot of distance between the stage and the floor. And it ostensibly seated 3,000, but when I saw the Clash there, the seats were replaced by metal plates; when we bounced, so did they—and there were a lot more than 3,000 bouncing.
Obviously that Starwood show in 1980 featured the band’s original lineup: Hugo Burnham on drums, Dave Allen bass, Andy Gill guitar, and Jon King vocals. It was riveting. The stage was small enough to bridge the Civic’s divide, but broad enough to allow Jon King his signature sprints between microphones. If King was a gazelle, Gill was a beast of prey, exactly as described by poet Ted Hughes in his “Second Glance at Jaguar”: “He coils, he flourishes/ The blackjack tail as if looking for a target.”
I keep forgetting we have the realm of music at our fingertips. Long-forgotten or barely remembered works are available if I’d only think to search online. Not long ago I went crazy looking through my LPs for the electronic manipulation of a Chef Boy-Ar-Dee jingle sung by the Andrews Sisters—not remembering I could have DuckDuckGo-ed the keywords. I couldn’t even remember the name of the composer. Turns out it was Jon Appleton, and I had it on a CD…
Tonight I finally wised up and did the search, which led me to a YouTube stream by way of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the label’s founder Moses Asch having recruited Appleton to help in the release of electroacoustic works. Chef d’œuvre (1967), the object of my pursuit, is emblematic of such manipulations, being so well known perhaps due to its popular-culture source material. In the notes for his CD collection, Contes de la mémoire (Memory’s tales, 1996), Appleton complains good-naturedly “that composers are often saddled by others with a ‘signature’ work.” And so it is with Chef d’œuvre. “It is my Boléro,” he writes. Its now-doubly-ironic title translates roughly as “masterpiece.”
Appleton’s various compressions in this composition can be seen themselves epitomized three decades later by rock musician Robert Fripp’s five-second condensation of what surely was a much longer “First Inaugural Address to the I.A.C.E. Sherborne House” by J. G. Bennett, included on the album Exposure but understandably absent from YouTube in our era of attention deficit, the Age of the Feuilleton (a newspaper’s necessarily lightweight literary pages), as Hermann Hesse put it. And as they say, “That’s five seconds I’ll never get back.”
Last night YouTube suggested I watch a new short, Cognitio. I reCOGNIzed one of the actors as having appeared in the 2014 Kadie Elder promo for the song “First Time He Kissed a Boy” (from which I lifted this blog’s header image of four pastel-clad youths). The actor is Lasse Steen Jensen and in the promo he plays a slight thing with an almost-mod mop of hearty hair atop a triangular, angular mug, contradicted by an upturned nose; likewise in the promo, his cruelty is contradicted by his curiosity.
In Cognitio Jensen is presented as the psychically slight, artistically bright Tobias, with an unruly mane that suggests a feral nature. This time curiosity is not rewarded, via the darkly seductive yet elusive Emil (Lior David Cohen).
Back in the 1980s I was given tickets to a Southern California kitsch institution, Pageant of the Masters. The concept intrigued: an amphitheater stage filled with “ninety minutes of tableaux vivants (living pictures), incredibly faithful recreations of classical and contemporary works of art, with real people posing to look exactly like their counterparts in the original pieces,” as described on the event website. But the execution, meticulous as it was, underwhelmed. I guess I wanted more vivants in the tableaux, which occurred too infrequently. But it did occur in a sort of sideshow.
That sideshow was not the companion Fine Art Show, which we took in before the Pageant and from which Andrea and I bought a couple of hand-altered Polaroids that hang on our walls today. Allow me to digress…
The Fine Art Show was conspicuous by the omission of skin: many of the artists appeared to be too well constrained by a bland family-friendly bubble-wrap envelope, but not so well contained that we couldn’t detect hints of riskier work. Hell, Laguna Beach (the Pageant/Show’s site) was home to the Boom Boom Room, which OC Weekly (formerly a sibling to Denver’s Westword via Voice Media Group) claims to have been “the oldest gay bar in the Western United States,” its host hotel, the Coast Inn, having opened in 1929, per the founders’ granddaughter’s timeline. Laguna even had its own chapter of the Mattachine Society beginning in the ’50s.
Continue reading “The Pageantry, the Spectacle”
I recently found I could stream films through Kanopy by way of my public library. The first film I watched was A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson’s 1961 award winner set in Greater Manchester’s Salford. Jo, played by Rita Tushingham, the daughter of a libertine mother, Dora Bryan, moves out on her own after her mother remarries. While at home Jo has a fling with a ship’s cook Jimmy (Paul Danquah), who soon sails away slowly (if not into the sunset). At her shoe shop job she meets Geoffrey Ingham (Murray Melvin), a textile design student who’s been kicked out of his flat apparently for his own liaisons—with men—and thus Jo invites him to room with her. And room they have—it’s a top-floor studio apartment—but squalid, as only the black-and-white camera can capture, softened somewhat by Geoff’s student’s style.
I recall Tushingham from her less-free-spirit role of Dot a couple years later in The Leather Boys. And Melvin is instantly recognizable from Barry Lyndon (1975) as Rev. Samuel Runt, the “failed Rasputin” for Marisa Berenson’s Lady Lyndon. But what surprised me were two lines in A Taste of Honey uttered by Jimmy in response to Jo’s urge to “Dream of me” upon their second leave-taking. “Dreamt of you last night,” he says. “Fell out of bed twice.” The lines also appeared in the film’s forebear, Shelagh Delaney’s popular play by the same name. But music fans like me otherwise would remember these from the middle eight of the Smiths’ first song on LP, “Reel Around the Fountain.”
I dreamt about you last night
and I fell out of bed twice