Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Mon, 9 Nov 1992 09:38:01 EST
From:         "Michael H. Bloom" <MHB@MITVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      The Weekend that Time Forgot

Friday night: Peter Brotzmann Trio at the Middle East Cafe: I was actually
planning on going to something else (Inner Beauty & Concussion Ensemble at
Bunratty's), but we found out Brotzmann needed a place to stay so we offered
our humble abode. Brotzmann was his typical full bore intense stuff-- as I've
said before, he makes the clarinet sound like an alto sax, the alto sound like
a tenor, and the tenor sound like a typhoon. Gregg Bendian on drums was quite
agile-- there were noise gimmicks like dragging a length of chain across the
kit, and a lot of spontaneous firestorms with mallets; plus he kept looking
like Calvin (as in "... and Hobbes"). William Parker on bass was likewise
bizarre. (This rhythm section also works with Cecil Taylor.)

Despite his tendency to reduce saxophone reeds to quivering jelly on contact,
Brotzmann turns out to be a very nice and highly cultured fellow, who drinks
a frightening amount of alcohol.

Saturday: took ultimate net.babe Carol sightseeing around Boston. In the North
End, a classic Italian neighborhood where we stopped for lobster pizza (which
I now regard as a key component of the Boston dining experience; it was swell),
we stumbled upon a peculiar shop that was all musical instruments on the right
hand wall, and firearms on the left. ("I'd like a set of violin strings and a
12-gauge shotgun, please!") And, wonder of wonders, they had bodhrans in stock!
Carol had an attack of good taste and bought the plain one, rather than the one
with the Guinness logo printed on the drum head. They also carried bagpipes,
full fledged Scottish highlander pipes-- and, moreover, they carried practice
chanters, and since I broke mine several years ago, I may go back and get one.
They didn't have any E-bows, though-- probably just as well, I don't need my
favorite music store to be somewhere you can't possibly park.

Then we hit my local used record store, where there was a bunch of stuff in
the old vinyl technology that Carol wanted. We found some old Peter Gabriel,
Gentle Giant's _Free Hand_, a solo album by one Hugh Marsh who plays violin
in Loreena McKennitt's group, and Eugene Ormandy playing Prokofiev's Sixth.
In the evening, Judas & Natasha rehearsed. I was hoping to make it to Roger
Miller's new group, the Exquisite Corpses, who were playing a set way across
town starting at 11:30, but I was just too crispy to attempt it.

Sunday afternoon: we hooked up with Carol again and had a dim sum lunch in
Chinatown, then moseyed on over to the Museum of Fine Arts and saw Hamza El Din
play a free concert to celebrate their new gallery of Nubian art. He played oud
(Arabic fretless lute, had at least a dozen strings, apparently all in pairs)
and tar (frame drum similar to the bodhran, but a tad smaller and didn't have
the crosspieces) accompanying his own singing. He was charming-- very soft and
gentle voice, reminded me of John Cage in a turban.

And finally, Another Knitting Factory Tour at Johnny D's: Amy Denio was first,
playing some stuff from her solo CD and a few tunes from the second Tone Dogs,
as well as some new and/or unreleased stuff. It was definitely tunes, which she
sang accompanied by her bass (remarkably fluid-- I was watching her for clues)
or accordion. She was totally solo; there was an occasional drum machine, which
she referred to as "Ernie," and some digital delay looping (for her sax solo "I
Will Be Sad"-- it appears on _Birthing Chair Blues_-- she built up a bed on the
delay line to play the head over). She was overwhelmingly adorable. For me, she
occupies the niche that the best Canterbury bands used to: slightly gratuitous
melodic complexity in mostly major or augmented keys, suffused with good humor.
The KnitFac concession table had a couple of her solo cassettes; I bought one,
which I haven't had a chance to listen to yet-- I'm way behind on my listening.
Marco, I asked her about the songs in foreign languages, especially the ones
that don't make any sense. She says getting into other language's rhythms is
fun for her-- and also, she hates to write lyrics, and in other languages it's
much less obvious how silly she's getting. She said she had one song where she
says something like "Waiter, another pair of pajamas, please," in some Slavic
tongue where it sounds really liquid and poignant.

Roy Nathanson & Anthony Coleman deconstructed a lot of jazz and some history of
the world. (Nathanson does a lot of this with the Jazz Passengers too.) Coleman
really exploits his sampler keyboard, using patches ranging from conventional
piano to toy music box, double bass, extra saxes to intertwine with Nathanson,
Phantom of the Opera organ, etc. I didn't pay too close attention, though, as I
don't know enough about jazz to follow all the inside jokes, and I also found
Nathanson's soprano sax too shrill to endure for long.

Negativland devoted well over half their set to the U2 debacle: representations
of both sides of the single, and then a bunch of pre-taped rant about copyright
law and how far obsolete and stuffy it is, some of it accompanied by projected
footage off _Rattle and Hum_. Some of it went back to the conspiracy theories
about the U2 spy plane that was shot down over the (old) Soviet Union, how the
CIA had contrived the whole thing and sabotaged the plane to scuttle the summit
meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev (sp?), and that invoked the "How many
time zones in the Soviet Union" bit from _Escape from Noise_. There was a real
cut-up "Christianity is Stupid," with the toasters, and an encore where Mark
Hosler cut his fingers off. (He's a trained professional, kids, don't try this
at home.) Don, the tape guy, knows what he's doing and has a real nice sense of
the rhythm of this sort of collage, and they're saying some very useful things
about the quality of the information we get to access and where the bottlenecks
are. But there's a sense in which they're sucked in to the media they accuse of
hornswaggling us all-- it's like the ultimate tar baby that they got stuck on--
and I find their nyah-nyah attitude wears thin over a whole set. They reminded
my wife of the Residents, while not sounding much like them musically.

So here I am propped up at a terminal. I feel like the only reason I came in
today was to type this report. But I suppose I'll try and do some work before
I collapse...
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU