Hey hey, there’s a live chat with Travis Morrison this morning at Washingtonian.com. Ask him about the New York City tap water, or maybe how it feels being a “predecessor to the dance-rock movement,” or his days as a cab driver, or even something about computers. He knows a lot about computers.

A friend just pointed out this post from Jessica Hopper’s blog, in which the blacklist-happy music writer goes after Chicago black-metal band Nachtmystium. The problem? Well, Hopper thinks they’re racist and homophobic.

Now, I loved Nachtmystium’s last album from 2006, an arty slab of psychedelic metal called Instinct: Decay. But I don’t go around doing due diligence on every band I like, so I’d never read any interviews in which frontman Blake Judd uses questionable language, or expresses questionable ideas.

But I decided to Google Nachtmystium and “Zionist conspiracy” and got nothing but Hopper’s blog. (Googling “Nachtmystium” and “Zionist” gets you here.) I didn’t bother with the f-word, because it seems clear enough that the guy is upset with message board lurkers, not, um, gay people.

Now, I’m not going to condone what Judd said, but, if Hopper’s going to call out poor Stephin Merritt for not liking rap, then perhaps she will understand that–as Faulkner once said about the South–some of us like despite, not because of.

In case you have yet to see this choice XXL interview with DMX, here’s the highlight:

XXL: Are you following the presidential race?
DMX: Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Read the rest of this entry »

Lisner Auditorium may not resemble the Sahara, but Thursday night’s “Festival in the Desert” concert featuring Tinariwen and Vieux Farka Toure may at least conjure up some images of that annual event 65 miles north of Timbuktu. A year and a half after his father, guitarist Ali Farka Toure, passed away from cancer, guitarist Vieux Farka Toure has released his self-titled debut, recorded shortly before his dad’s death. Vieux not only attempts to capture his pop’s unique high-pitched Malian-meets-John Lee Hooker technique, he is joined on several cuts by him. Toure responded via a translator to some e-mailed questions that I sent his way:

1. Did your father teach you to play guitar at a young age?

WELL, I USED TO LISTEN TO MY FATHER AND HIS RECORDINGS ALL THE TIME SO I JUST ABSORBED HIS TECHNIQUE OVER THE YEARS. MOSTLY I PLAYED PRECUSSION THOUGH (CALABASH) DURING MY EARLY YEARS, I REALLY ONLY STARTED STUDYING GUITAR SERIOUSLY WHEN I ENTERED THE CONSERVATORY IN 2001.

2. Did you and your father record the songs you played together on, live in the studio, or separately with overdubs?

EVERYTHING WAS RECORDED LIVE, MOST OF IT IN ONE TAKE.

3. Do you listen to rap? Do you ever think you might want to incorporate newer genres into your own?

I LISTEN TO RAP, I LIKE ALL KINDS OF MUSIC …IN SPITE OF MY NICKNAME “VIEUX” (WHICH MEANS OLD IN FRENCH) I AM YOUNG SO I LISTEN TO JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT IS OUT THERE: REGGAE, RAP, ROCK, SALSA,.MY MUSIC IS FIRMLY ROOTED IN TRADITIONAL MALIAN MUSIC BUT I FEEL THAT I HAVE TO ESTABLISH MY OWN STYLE SO I BUILD IN LOTS OF ELEMENTS OF WHAT I AM HEARING ALL THE TIME.

4. Do you feel pressure because of your father’s accomplishments to try to keep up with what he did and to be compared to him?

NOBODY CAN EVER WALK IN ALI’S FOOTSTEPS, MY FATHER WAS A GENIUS.ALL I CAN HOPE TO DO IS SOMEHTING DIFFERENT, HOPEFULLY BETTER . HE WAS ALI, I AM VIEUX…

Last month, I wrote a feature for a metal magazine about Witchcraft, a Swedish band that is playing the Black Cat this Sunday. One of the folks I interviewed for the article, which has yet to run, was Lee Dorrian, the owner of Witchcraft’s label, Rise Above, and the frontman of British doom act Cathedral (Dorrian also sang with Napalm Death once upon a time).

I wasn’t able to use everything Dorrian wrote in his response to my two questions, so I thought I’d post his answers here. Dorrian runs an excellent label—one of my favorites—and I think he has something interesting to say about influence.

Brent Burton: Part of Witchcraft’s appeal seems to be its “vintage” or “retro” sound. As a fan of the band, and also as someone who is no doubt one of its inspirations, how do you feel about this assessment? Is it fair?

Lee Dorrian: At the end of the day these are trivial points. The main question you have to ask yourself is, Is it good?’ To use throwaway words such as ‘Retro’ just cheapens people’s notion of the way something is going to sound. Just because a band doesn’t want to use modern recording techniques or jump on whatever bandwagon is driving through town, does not make it invalid.

In the big scheme of things rock & roll music has only really existed for about half a century so why do people spend so much time obsessing about doing something ‘new’ with it. I think purely by putting yourself into the music it is going to sound new anyway, because there has never been a ‘you’ before.

If all you’re about is blatant plagiarism and deliberately trying to replicate another band, then that is pretty pointless, I will agree with that.

I just think the way that hard rock & heavy prog/psych was played & recorded in the late 60’s/early is the real benchmark from which a lot of good heavy bands take their cue. Personally speaking, I totally understand why, as I think the great underground records recorded mainly between ‘68 – ‘72 have a total magic of their own. The bands actually sound like real bands, which is something that is going away from modern music; that basic human feel.

Brent Burton: One popular metal writer thought that Witchcraft’s second record, Firewood–which is my favorite–was kind of a letdown in comparison to the band’s doomy debut. Not metal enough, I guess. What would you say to someone who claims that Witchcraft’s latest The Alchemist is not metal enough?

Lee Dorrian: Well I guess the debut album was so monumental, it would be very hard to better it, no matter what they would have done. I think with the new album they’ve managed to get a good balance all round, though I would say it’s a lot more accomplished, musically, than both previous albums.

If someone says ‘The Alchemist’ is ‘not metal enough’; not metal enough for what? It’s not a metal record. It’s a great hard rock record.

Larry Appelbaum is a familiar name for jazz fans all over the country. As Senior Studio Engineer at Library of Congress, he discovered the legendary tape of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall in 1957, a recording that was released by Blue Note records in 2005. Appelbaum, who is now a Senior Music Reference Specialist in the Music Division at the Library of Congress, also writes about jazz, programs concerts in D.C., and has a weekly radio show, “Sound of Surprise,” on WPFW.

In the spring, Sonny Rollins will release another one of Appelbaum’s discoveries, a broadcast recording of the saxophonist’s 1957 Carnegie Hall debut.

I corresponded with Appelbaum over e-mail earlier this week.

Black Plastic Bag: I just read in the Nation that Sonny Rollins is releasing another one of your discoveries on his Doxy label. Was this tape better marked than the Monk-Coltrane tape?

Appelbaum: Both the Monk-Coltrane and the Sonny Rollins Trio tapes were discovered at the Library of Congress at the same time back in Jan. of ‘05. All of these eight Voice of America tapes from the benefit concert were labeled “Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957″ on the spine, and the Rollins tapes included hand-written notes on the back with his name and the song titles. For what it’s worth, we also found the original reels of the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker, the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra and Ray Charles from that same night. Billie Holiday also performed that night but the tapes haven’t been found and may not have survived.

Black Plastic Bag: What can a Rollins fan look forward to hearing on this tape?

Appelbaum: Sonny Rollins was a special attraction for this concert, so his sets that night were very short. In one, he just performs “Moritat” (a.k.a. “Mack The Knife”). In the other he plays “Sonnymoon For Two” and “Some Enchanted Evening.” He’s backed by Wendell Marshall, bass and Kenny Dennis, drums. As jazz fans know, 1957 was a particularly fruitful time for Rollins (think Way Out West, Newk’s Time and A Night At The Village Vanguard) and it’s great to hear him live, in his prime. His version of “Moritat” is especially memorable.

Black Plastic Bag: What was the reaction from the Rollins camp when you told them that you’d found it?

Appelbaum: We sent a copy to Sonny Rollins via his nephew Clifton Anderson and I never heard a word back from them. Then last month I read in Ben Ratliff’s New York Times piece that they are going to release it along with the recordings of his recent Carnegie Hall concert inspired by the discovery of the 1957 tapes.

Black Plastic Bag: How does it feel to be unearthing all of this exciting archival material?

Appelbaum: I’m just glad that the world will finally be able to hear these performances, and it’s nice that it happens while Rollins is still with us to enjoy the fruits.

On a related note, Appelbaum is promoting a show that is happening tonight at Twins. Here’s the info:

New Orleans Avant Jazz Legend Makes Rare DC Appearance

Transparent Productions presents:

KIDD JORDAN - saxophones
JOEL FUTTERMAN - piano,sax, indian flute
ALVIN FIELDER - drums, percussion

Thursday Oct. 11, 2007
8:00 pm

at

Twins Jazz
1344 U St. N.W.
(202) 234-0072
http://www.twinsjazz.com/index_tj.htm

admission: $15 + one drink minimum
100% of the door goes to the musicians

The other night, Lissy Rosemont of Junior League, the subject of this week’s One Track Mind, came over, chain-smoked on my window sill, and explained how her solar-panel-powered house led to songwriting advice from Death Cab for Cutie. (However, she’d only do an interview if I agreed to name her many band-mates: Dale Manning, Devin McGaughey, Rob Blunt, Martin Thomas, Alex Platt, Elias Cohn, and Kailin Yong.)

Read on for more from the cutting-room floor.

When “Pennies” starts out, it has a nice, deep clarinet-ey sound. Is that just you singing?
Yeah, that’s me humming. Well originally we had done the hums to help the fiddle player know the rhythm. It’s so slow, we didn’t want to use a click track. Rob [Byers], the audio engineer…suggested that we go ahead and keep the hums.

Who played the accordion?
Kailin…He has just been so supportive, helping me become ready to write. That was a really hard time for me, after Rosemont [Family Reunion] broke up, where I didn’t know if I was a songwriter or how to write songs…He was very affirming, and I was able to catch up with his own belief in me.

Where did you come up with that melody?
I just heard it in my head. It was sort of a series of events: The last band broke up, and then I had a really fun time with Death Cab for Cutie. They were in town at Constitution Hall, and my housemate knows their manager. And so they were at the house–I live in this solar panel green house thing. Mike who owns the house wrote an op-ed for the Post. It’s one of the first green houses and we don’t get any electricity from Pepco or anything. And Andy, his best buddy from home, is one of the managers of Death Cab. So they were in town and they wanted to tour the house. So…I started to pick Chris Walla’s brain, the guitar player, about songwriting.

What did you get out of talking with him?
I knew how I needed to write songs. I wanted to try to be the ability to be abstract–tell a story like a country song, but also keep it loose enough so people can bring their own interpretations. I also knew I didn’t want to write a space-jam-band out-there kind of thing, where you have to be in Phish to understand what it means…I had a big old folder of my favorite words. And then I take a melody I hear in my head. It is sort of like catching them. I was in Barcelona, my sister and my grandmother and my godmother, we all were traveling and touring cathedrals and I had just started to hear the beginning of Pennies and I had brought my microphone and my Mac to record what I heard.

To hear you came up with that tune in while you were touring cathedrals is interesting because the drone in the background has a monk-like quality for me. Was that in your head from the beginning?

I knew I wanted it to be really, really slow. It is, probably, the only love song on the record that is just a straightforward love song; that is not demented in some capacity. It is the love song on the record so I wanted a simple melody…I wasn’t thinking about monks and monasteries as much as just that sort of meditative serious place of true affection. I wanted the music the match.

It’s not a happy song though; it’s got a mournful sort of sound to it. Where does that come from?

Probably from failed love….Perhaps if I was in love at the moment, it would be, um…

A polka?

Exactly. But I kind of like that it is–I don’t think as much mournful as tense, you know, and probably expecting the complications that come with the feelings of love. It is not always happy. That felt very right. It’s a love song; it felt right to keep it extremely sad.

A long, lazy YouTube trawl yielded some clips from Jeff Bagato’s 1999 film The Blab, which features Baltimore performer-poet-writer Mary Knott, who, among other things, is part of The Dirt. Bagato, who runs the monthly Electric Possible show and is a fixture in D.C.’s experimental music scene, plays tonight as part of the group Spaceships Panic Orbit at the Sonic Circuits Festival. Here’s what Bagato had to say via e-mail about filming Knott:

I basically aimed the camera at Mary and let her talk. I can’t claim to have done much as a filmmaker, as there were no edits or camera angles or anything. The blurb was “One Woman, One Camera, No Cuts.” I can’t even claim the idea was original; an artist named Tentatively a Convenience had the idea of filming Mary for an indefinite period, but he
never did it. I thought that was a great way to document the experience of hanging out with Mary. She talks about meeting Perry Farrell, and her fandom for Marilyn Manson, hanging out with Gwar, and all kinds of stuff. The clips on YouTube are pretty funny, but some guy in Philly put them up there after he bought a copy of the tape from me. Since then, Mary has put a whole bunch of stuff up–you can search for her name or Geeky Dorks or the Dirt. I always figured Mary was destined to be a YouTube star, so maybe her time has come.

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Anat Cohen is one of the fastest- and highest-rising stars in the jazz world; the Israeli reedist is a rare breed, specializing in both tenor saxophone and clarinet. The former makes her an even rarer breed: female saxophonist. Cohen headlined a show at Bohemian Caverns with her quartet on Saturday night, and was a member of the United Nations Orchestra, which played at the National Mall’s Sylvan Amphitheatre on Sunday. That morning, we discussed her career trajectory over breakfast and Starbucks coffee.

How did you first encounter jazz?
Actually, there are a few elements to the answer. My father and my mother loved the American songbook, and in Israel there was always some hours that you could hear some of the old songs on the radio. It wasn’t necessarily jazz, but just the songs, the American repertoire. So I already loved the songs. And when I was about 12 or 13, before I played the clarinet, I played the organ–we didn’t have a piano in the house. And you don’t play, really, the classical repertoire on the organ, so my teacher got some songbooks that were like “Have You Met Miss Jones” and all kinds of songs that later on I realized were actually standards, again from the American songbooks.

And when I started playing clarinet, it was in a Dixieland band in the conservatory. And I loved it! I loved the feeling of it: it was really bouncy and happy, and I didn’t have to know how to improvise because in the book they had written solos. So that was my first encounter, officially, with jazz. And after the dixieland, when I started to play tenor, I started to play in the big band, so I really got the traditions of dixieland and big band, then I went to small combos and started to open up the music.

Also, my brothers [Avishai and Yuval, also jazz musicians], when I was still playing more classical clarinet, they were playing saxophone and trumpet and going all the way with improvising. So it was kind of a family thing.

I was going to ask about that. Growing up with musical siblings, was it competitive, or did you play together?
It wasn’t a competitive thing, ever. It was more of an interesting balance - for one thing we played different instruments so there was no competition as far as that. We’d just play: we were in the same groups, we went to the same conservatory, we played in the same dixieland band, big band, youth orchestra. So it was something we just did, we all took the same path and was kind of just natural that we do it without thinking, “Oh, he’s better; he got a gig, I didn’t.” There were no thoughts like that at all. Each of us did what we did. I think it was very healthy that my parents actually put us together.

Growing up in Israel, with the klezmer and folk traditions, was it a cultural thing that you would gravitate toward the clarinet?
No. I basically went to the conservatory because my older brother Yuval was already in it, and Avishai and I arrived and they said, “Pick an instrument,” and I had no clue really. And they kind of helped me decide which instrument, because that’s what they needed in the Youth Orchestra. “Well, we need more clarinets, maybe you want to play this one!” I was familiar with the clarinet, and said okay, but I didn’t go to the conservatory because I wanted to be a clarinet player.

Do you have a preference for one horn over the other, personally?
Yeah, but it depends on the music! For different sounds, different styles, I prefer different horns. The clarinet is softer, it’s more articulate; the tenor is more gutsy. And it depends on how modern, how old the music is. I belong to a lot of different bands, and I play different kinds of music, and each one demands a different personality. And each instrument offers a different personality. And ideally, I’d like time to also focus on the bass clarinet and the alto saxophone, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do everything. But I will!

On your new album Poetica, you play a number of Israeli folk songs. Is that something you did especially for these discs, or is it a direction you want to develop further?
Well, I can only say for certain that I’m interested in it at the moment. Obviously it’s something that’s developed in playing world music, but also from a lifetime of loving these melodies. For instance, the song “Hofim” that’s on the album, I remember that when I was at Berklee College of Music, I would practice by playing that melody in all the keys, just because I loved the melody. So it was with me all the way, and when it was time to record Poetica, I started to think of repertoire, and all of these songs came out; we figured out how to give them a little more modern edge, and also work within tradition. It was just something I wanted to do.

New York, where you live now, is the capital of the jazz universe, but do you ever think of moving back to Tel Aviv?
New York is the capital of jazz, in the sense that a lot of information is passing through that city constantly and very quickly. And the question is, how long can I endure that fast pace? Because you always want to challenge yourself, you always want to learn more and be part of what’s happening, what’s changing, the new information and new music. And in the life of a jazz musician, that never ends. So moving back to Israel is the same as asking, “When will I feel that I can continue it now at my own pace, on my own journey, without the constant stimulation?” Because the stimulation is very healthy, it keeps you on your toes. But Israel, on the one hand, is where I’m coming from; it would be an ideal place to raise a family; my parents are there; I miss it a lot. On the other hand, it’s a crazy place. The fast pace there is a different kind of fast pace from New York: They have other things that keep you on your toes. I’m not ready to make any decision yet.

So what’s next for you after this festival?
I’m going to play at an Arts & Music Festival in Bloomington, Indiana, at the end of September, and then in October I play the San Francisco Jazz Festival and in Seattle, then I’m playing a whole week in November at the Jazz Standard in New York City. There’ll be two nights with a Brazilian Jazz Quartet, then two days with my own quartet. Two more days with the Anzic Orchestra, some repertoire from a forthcoming album. And the last night, the three Cohens, Yuval, Avishai, and me, we’re going to celebrate our new CD release. It’s called Braid and it’ll be out November 4.

The Beastie Boys have been making some weird choices lately: making The Mix-Up–their first album in three three years–entirely instrumental, putting out an entirely fan-filmed concert DVD called Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!

And now an appearance on public television can be added to the list.

For those who missed out on the Beastie Boys’ entertainingly awkward guest spot on Charlie Rose last week, the interview has turned up on YouTube in its entirety. Does Rose seem visibly agitated or is that just how he always acts? Why are they talking about Sorbet? And can someone please explain to me what is going on with Mike D’s helmet of hair?