Keep On The Flip Side of Life

Ahoy, fellow travelers! Here we are again, buckaroos, with the morning chores all done with time for another raving session.

Last night I had a bebop freakout, spinning:

Miles Davis -- At The Royal Roost 1948-At Birdland 1950, 1951, 1953 (Charly)
Fats Navarro -- The Fabulous Fats Navarro, Vol 2
Dizzy Gillespie -- Professor Bop (Charly)
Charlie Parker -- In A Soulful Mood (Music Collection International)
and to break up the horn thing
Herbie Nichols -- The Art Of Herbie Nichols (Blue Note)

in the changer, set on shuffle play. Bopped til I dropped with some hootie to get out of workin' day mode, yessir. Believe it.

Before signing off for the night because I need my beans and I need my daily rest, I put on this here:

Seven Guitars, which is Disc 7 of my man Jon Abbey's great Erstwhile label's Amplify02: Balance box set, featuring Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama, Oren Ambarchi, Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Burkhard Stangl, and Taku Sugimoto performing a 38+ minute version of Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise," followed by a half hour free improvisation. Great stuff. For those who might not know, Erstwhile is the flagship label for a kind of electro-acoustic improvisational music, that gets called eai mostly for lack of a better thing to call it. Freely improvised music featuring computers and other electronic gadgets and acoustic instruments played in far from traditional ways. It's an extreme minority taste in free music that I stumbled on by accident via a jazz friend who doesn't like jazz much anymore who led me to Abbey who, the irony isn't lost, I encountered on a jazz bulletin board I've been frequenting for years, Jazz Corner, which has been getting kind of stale lately hence this here blog. I say irony because Jon is also a regular there at Jazz Corner, though he insists that jazz is a creatively dead musical form, as does my other buddy Brian, pretty much, who frequents the same place nevertheless and also keeps a blog called Just Outside. I don't agree with them about jazz but we like a lot of other things besides jazz so who cares. Me? Nope.

Anyways, it was a boppin' night around these here parts, swinging into the late hours and then chillin' to sounds that don't swing at all on purpose, hey. No disasters. Chow was still hot and we was still not taking any incoming. Plenty of hoot. What else can a man ask for? If he's me, not much.

I dig that Tetuzi Akiyama cat's recordings. He plays free improvised acoustic guitar (mostly) but you can tell that he's heard a lot of that there delta blues that I loved since a teenager first opening up the ears to sounds beyond what now gets called garage rock like we played in my high school band but didn't know it was garage rock. We called it rock and roll. You can call it what you want; I call it messin' with the kid.

And of course Keith Rowe is a largely unacknowledged king of what used to be an electric guitar with various other gadgets tossed in to the mix including the random short wave radio broadcast. One thing that made me dig him to start, actually, because I used to listen to that short wave and marine band radio late at night as a kid, with the old tiny earphone stuck in me ears so the 'rents wouldn't know I was awake late, and up to no good, which has always been my primary ambition -- met in most ways, most people would have to say. And on them Loran C mid-watches when the chiefs and officers was long snoozin', I used to set one of our redundant radio receivers to no station so I could listen to the atmospherics. It was a lot like that guy in Thomas Pynchon's *V.* who had the crazed atmospherics mission in the Transvaal during yet another vicious war of conquest featuring white people in what had been someone else's neighborhood for many thousands of years.

But they's all masters in their own right, them cats in Seven Guitars. Check 'em out if it sounds like you'd dig it and don't if it don't, see. That's the way it works.

Not to change the subject but ...

I was remembering this morning about one time while stationed at the USCG Loran Station on Iwo Jima years ago, in '76, I had the interesting experience of learning to live with -- and watch out for -- scorpions and centipedes the size of a small, young garter snake, and they bit, too. And literally countless little gekko lizards, who remained an utter mystery. Sometimes we'd have to break out an enormous, replacement vacuum tube for our Loran C transmitter (3.5 megawatts, both air and water cooled, it was like a radio, in fact it was a radio, that you could walk into and around). The boxes would be sealed like a motherfucker against moisture for obvious reasons. Every single time we opened one, sealed or not, there would be gekko eggs in the motherfucker. I never did figure out how they did that or even why. They were everywhere, inside and outside. Harmless, but they made a continuous noise at night, like crickets do in the States, that it took a while to get used to. One time when we were smoking pot in what had been the Japanese general's hq pillbox (reinforced, bombproof concrete -- it had five or six different rooms, all with machine gun positions, interlocking in all directions so there was a continuous field of fire). Guy was a genius, really. He organized what was very arguably the strongest defense in depth, ever, in military history. Anyways, we were pretty red, four or five of us, smoking Thai (which we called Buddha), and no one was talking. Suddenly we heard what must've been a Jurassic dinosaur of a gekko go off, *GEKFUCKINGO*! At first we were all startled and then we laughed for longer than we'd laughed in a good long while. Must've been the original granddaddy gekko.

And that's the goddammit truth right there, Jocko. Believe it.

That's what you say, Sam.

I know that's what I say. I just said it. See youse on the flip side, always on the flip side, keep on the flip side of life. Yr pal, Crispo