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Peter Stenshoel's album of the week: Staying On the Watch by Sonny Simmons
We continue our salute to the elder statesmen of free jazz in America.
Reedman Sonny Simmons and his then-wife, trumpeter Barbara Donald, laid some stunningly hip vibrations on the jazz cognoscenti in the mid 60s. Staying On the Watch is the first album recorded under his own name. Huey "Sonny" Simmons had been playing with Eric Dolphy, Prince Lasha, and Charles Mingus prior to arriving at his style of approach.
While John Coltrane was experimenting within the standard jazz structure that could be characterized as head-solos-head, Simmons wrote highly imaginative suites: head-solo-head-solo-head-solo-head, etc. Instead of Trane's modal (trance-like) sorties, Simmons and Donald celebrated their bop backgrounds with bouncy, ebullient declarations, followed by mind-bending deconstructions as uninhibited as you will hear within the annals of free jazz, yet completely coherent and musical.
Simmons, in his 70s, is still playing, though there were many years of homelessness--he made his money playing on the street--before his resurfacing in the 90s. He has recorded prolifically since. Donald recorded a couple fine LPs on Cadence Records, but reportedly had to give up playing for health reasons. Barbara Donald is not only the finest woman jazz trumpeter America has produced, she is one of the finest jazz trumpeters of all time.
Listen to City of David to hear Sonny and Barbara's tight ensemble playing and the way these cats fearlessly performed their solos:
A Distant Voice shows a very different side of Simmons. Bassist Teddy Smith takes up his bow and Simmons blows slow and haunting in a duet that never fails to take me on a journey. At one point, Sonny's horn goes into a Spanish Flamenco-cum-Balkan flourish:
Hats off to these pioneers of American music!
Artist in Music Awards Friday night in Hollywood
Independent artists from around the world will be trying to go home with a statuette after the first annual Artist in Music Awards held at the historic Key Club on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood Friday night.
Created by Mikey Jayy, the host of The Great Unknowns Presents, the show honors (and promotes) the best independent artists who are not signed to any record company.
Like the Grammy’s, there's no specific genre the award show focuses on. They include rock, pop, rap and folk music. Some of the nominees performing live on stage include Katie Cole (pop), Breaking Day (pop), and Monte Pittman (rock).
Each category winner gets a statuette, but the award everyone wants is the Alan Freed Lifetime Achievement Award, named for the man who is said to have coined the term "rock and roll" and who, in a segregated era, promoted and played what was known as "black" music.
(Alan Freed. Credit: WJW)
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was founded in Cleveland because of Freed’s movement to integrate the styles of artists like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.
I'd like to see this new Artists in Music Awards show become the fan favorite. After all, unsigned indie artists far outnumber the ones with record deals.
The red carpet event starts at 7 tonite, with the show following at 8. Club TigerHeat is hosting the after party.
LA Times tries to make new photo look old, but why bother?
This one comes from the "just show us the damn thing" department: The Los Angeles Times (via the Huntington Beach Independent) posted a story today on how cuts to the US Postal Service might force a historic Huntington Beach post office to close its doors once and for all. It's sad, yes, the Times ran a photo of the facility, because how else would we know what it looked like? Here, look at a screenshot:
The photo is black and white, which seems silly to me. Are they trying to make us think this is some 50+ year old archive picture? Yes, the buildng is historic, but the photo clearly isn't--unless that SUV was designed by Doc Brown. This is a photo of the Huntington Beach post office:
It's available via Creative Commons license, too (taken by Alheard on Flickr, with nc/nd, by the way), so why not just use that? There's even a present day, non-time traveling SUV added in for good measure.
Getty starts cooking class - how NOT to make pancakes
The Pancake Maker , 1782. Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, ca. 1732–1806).
The Getty Museum announced the acquisition today of French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard's cooking demo from 1782. Seriously, talk about the French Revolution ... those pancakes must have been just as revolting.
This drawing, and "The Trinity with the Virgin, Saints John the Evangelist, Stephen and Lawrence and a Donor," from 1479, attributed to the Peter Hemmel von Andlau Workshop, go on display at the Getty in March.
Investing in rail - with coins on the tracks
Here's what happens to a penny and a quarter when you put them on the Gold Line tracks. I suppose this is illegal, so I won't say that I did this during lunch today.
This week on Off-Ramp, we put pennies on the tracks, whistle down the holler', knock on the Window Estes' door, steal apples from the MacKenzies' orchard, and get caught smoking by Grandpa.
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