On September 3, 2017, John Ashbery and Walter Becker both passed away.

Sasha Frere-Jones tweeted on September 3:

hard to imagine Ashbery or Becker in any other century or how different that century would have been

we think abt line breaks differently because of Ashbery and we think of rhythm and lyric differently because of Becker also idk everything

The NY Times recalled Ashbery’s relationship with his audience:

Mr. Ashbery rejected the idea of deliberately “shocking” the reader, a tactic he compared to wearing deliberately outlandish clothing and which he dismissed as “merely aggressive.”

“At the same time,” he said, “I try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own imperfect mode of dress.”

And NPR suggested Becker’s guitar playing was always in service of the larger piece of music:

Becker approached his guitar and bass playing (and, really, the entire production) as part of the songwriting process, an extension of it. He and Fagen were both obsessed with tone; there are countless stories of the duo chasing a particular snare drum sound for days on end in the studio. As a guitarist, Becker understood the ways distortion and other textural effects could change the atmospheric pressure of a track, and he used these devices to more musical ends than most guitarists. Becker's rhythm-guitar accompaniments had a spiky, almost confrontational air. His bass playing was devastatingly simple, a smack to the gut. His leads could be brainy or spooky or confounding or obtuse — whatever would best enhance the vibe of the song.

Where most guitar heroes of his era charged into the center ring with fistfuls of notes and blazing chords, Becker preferred to sneak in through the back door, and in just a few measures and fewer notes, rearrange all the furniture. The result was something instantly riveting that you'd want to hear again and again — even if (especially if) you were not even paying attention to what the guitar was doing. Forget about the moment of solo glory; Becker wanted — and attained, with astounding consistency — the thick and undeniable vibe that made a piece of music magnetic.

Brainy or spooky or confounding or obtuse.

I recall the easy way we slipped into shows in earlier days. Pre-purchasing tickets was something we almost never did: there was always room for one or two more. Though a part of me knew that the Grouper show at Swedish American Hall would “sell out” I also did not want to commit to leaving the house after 8pm on a Friday: the days start early in our house, and that Friday began before 5AM. So when I arrived and the gatekeepers sheepishly turned me away, suggesting I come back in an hour to see if there was room, I wasn’t totally surprised. “Sure,” I said, “I’ll just grab a beer and come back.” But strolling down Market and passing Lucky 13 and Blackbird, the smell of stale beer kept me moving. Across the way stood Aardvark Books and it had been awhile since I browsed there. 9PM and they’re still open, fantastic. The guy behind the counter barely looked up as I entered, and I was immediately attracted to the Staff Picks box with a paperback copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. I’d never read Whitehead before, and I was drawn in to the first few pages. But the music playing in Aardvark continued to give me pause, a cast recording of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, especially “Somewhere” and the lead up to The Rumble.

Earlier in the week I read a few pieces on Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math blog that mention West Side Story in the context of Buddy Rich’s show-off drum virtuosity vs. the devotional music of free jazz players:

A story about Mel Lewis: Mel hated giving lessons, but finally a kid talked him into letting him come by a record session and watch Mel at work. During a break Mel gestured for the kid to sit behind the kit, and said, “Play me a snare roll.” The kid played a good, professional roll. Maybe not as good as the one that starts the movie Whiplash, but still, a good roll. Not easy to do. Mel took his sticks back and said, “See, right there is your problem. You shouldn’t be able to do that. I can’t do that. You gotta quit that shit and start becoming a drummer.” That’s a fun story, but truthfully drummers do need to learn how to roll. Mel himself surely learned to roll at some early point. However the point is clear. At least for Mel Lewis, devotion has precedence over chops. Another way to say it is: After you are good enough to learn your military rudiments, are you good enough to let them take a back seat to feel?

While browsing the stacks, among many posters for various anarchist book fairs, Aardvark proudly displays a poster version of Chris Ware’s Penguin Classics cover of Voltaire’s Candide: Or Optimism. A thoroughly engaging and depressing piece.

Back to Swedish American, and the sleepy gate keepers were surprised and happy to guide me in to hear some music. I entered during Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s performance. Enchanting, haunting, bubbling.

And then Grouper. I’d prefer to leave Haunting as a descriptor for her set. She played sitting cross-legged on the floor, Paul Clipson films projected on the wall behind. I recall seeing her in Portland at Holocene in 2008 with a very similar vibe to her set. That rush of hiss and crackle, the sound of her guitar so “live” or “hot” you can hear the jangling of her bracelets through the pickups, the strings so open, so much room between them, but everything reverberating. A dream, surely.

CAGE: I like the Marcel Duchamp directive. The way he expressed it, if I can remember correctly, is “To reach the impossibility of transferring from one like image to another the memory imprint.” In other words, to come to the point of living like a tourist.

—John Cage on experiencing life, and thus art, in the present, from an interview with Brian Eno. Musician: A Meeting Of Sound Minds

From a father/daughter brilliant scene in Holy Motors, this Sparks song has been running through my head since last night’s screening.

Zappa albums valorise the idea of virtuoso instrumentalists and guitar heroes (or rather, Jean Luc Ponty, Terry Bozzio and Steve Vai) to a point which is beyond parody, however. We were always meant to worship these people, make no mistake about it. (You can never get through any piece on Zappa without certain giveaway buzz phrases cropping up: “chops”, “seamless virtuosity”, “modal run”, “great studio sound”, etc.) This is, in essence, as un-rock or un-subversive as music can get, in a way that Terry Riley or Morton Feldman or John Cage, say, never were: this is all about how fast your fingers can go. … And how low your sarcasm can dredge.

—The Wire pulling no punches on reviewing Zappa’s oeuvre. Frank Zappa: Don’t do that on stage anymore

I would stack Music For Airports up against Glenn Gould and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Colin Turnbull’s recording of those pygmies and Alan Lomax, and all of that. Music For Airports makes the world a finer place, makes the people in it more palatable, and we really should launch it out into space and prove to the people on those distant planetoids that we are not just warlike simians bent on auto-destruction

—Rick Moody on Brian Eno’s sweet spot, among other things.

I went to Anthology Film Archives Thursday night to see and hear Iannis Xenakis' La Légende d'Eer. In attendance were Thomas and Paul---appropriate companions as the three of us met during a residency at Xenakis' Ateliers d'UPIC in a smelly suburb of Paris.

La Légende d'Eer is a piece from 1978 created for the opening of the Centre Georges-Pompidou that included a 7-channel tape composition, an architectural construction of Xenakis' design and a visual component of 1,680 lights, 4 lasers and 400 mirrors. Thursday night's performance was composed of a video of visual documentation of the installation in the form of 350 photographs by Bruno Rastoin plus a surround-sound seven-speaker version of Xenakis' music mixed from the orignal master tapes live by Gerard Pape.

I was impressed, enjoyed the music and revelled in the rare occasion to hear Xenakis in NYC. Gerard Pape did a masterful job presenting the sound component: not sure how much leeway Xenakis leaves for the mixer of the sound, but any liberties Pape took were well received. The visual component was interesting, not wholly necessary, and I did close my eyes occasionally to take in the music as three dimensional. Watching the images on the screen sometimes flattened the sound, forcing me to focus too much on the two dimensional surface and not on what Xenakis was trying to explore in terms of sound in space. That said, the photographs themselves were often times stunning, the transitions in the still images were well executed and the whole product could be seen as an experimental documentation of an event/space. I would consider purchasing the DVD (the video presented at Anthology and a 5 channel version of the music component) for such a documentation. In all, an interesting night returning me to thinking about Xenakis.

Listening now to Twenty Estudos of Brazilian composer Camargo Guarnieri (1907--1993) on WKCR 89.9 FM NY. No Wikipedia entry or satisfactory biographical/overview website about him that I could find in my initial searching, so I am making some notes here for myself. The etudes are interesting---flowing repetitions and variations of melodies over these almost staccato bass lines. Certainly 20th-century sounding, but harking back to an earlier---perhaps Romantic---era.

"At home [in California] I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds."

He described how bird calls had been recorded and then slowed down in playback; the bird calls had a timbre similar to that of a flute. Conversely, he said, a symphony flutist recorded these bird calls, and when the recording was played at a fast speed, it sounded like birds.

Having made his point about the connection of bird whistles and flute playing, Dolphy explained his use of quarter tones when playing flute.

"That's the way birds do," he said. "Birds have notes in between our notes-you try to imitate something they do and, like, maybe it's between F and F#, and you'll have to go up or come down on the pitch. It's really something! And so, when you get playing, this comes. You try to do some things on it. Indian music has something of the same quality-different scales and quarter tones. I don't know how you label it, but it's pretty."

Quinn Boys II just came up in a rotation of songs generated for me by Pandora by giving them a favorite artist as Captain Beefheart. It is by far the best Jandek tune I've heard with messy but rhythmic drums and a strangely compelling simple melody, very un-jarring lyrics. I must admit that a Red Hot Chili Peppers tune off of Californication also caught my ears, especially the overfuzzed guitar solo: Emit Remmus. I've also heard some VU, Pere Ubu, Meat Puppets, Hendrix, Banshees, Stooges, Alex Chilton and GBV, enjoyable all.

Fooling around with WolframTones and quickly came up with these:

• classical | 31.490150419.726427 | pan flute, trumpet, harp, percussion
• [classical | 31.931538443.888351 | percussion](http://tones.wolfram.com/id/G6219xaiSUONBgZ0vWyC1sUl1y59ocwp3CZrT9RWoV933
  )

What a neat micro-composition tool. MIDI can truly be creative once in a while. Reminds me of an afternoon with Thomas and I playing the zelsoft midi package.

###William Duckworth Residency at ACA

Worth exploring his work to see if he would be a good match for a residency. What sorts of multi-channel options for Flash or other user-interface apps are possible for creating during residency. COuld I get the time off work? Use what to apply: some flash audio interactivity, kirchin-esque four-track concretes.

###Duckworthiness?

Cathedral

with a final goal of a whitepaper and possibilities of lecture/workshops on creating cheap/affordable multi-channel audio installations.

+ Linux
+ MacMini
+ Pd
+ FreeSound
+ Mootcher
+ eDealinfo
+ Skimper
+ craigslist
+ junk lying around (Monitors, cables, &c.)

The musicians of Miles Davis' electric period reminisce in Electric Miles: A Different Kind Of Blue about their leader's quality as a listner. Keith Jarret dubs him the best listening band leader. When these young guys were making sound, creating a mass of rhythms and vibrations they often felt lost, wondering what it was they were doing, where it all was going. And then Miles would play a phrase or melody which would illuminate the chaos, revealing the pieces and pointing the way. And the music made sense; the musicans were once again en ensemble. B.Franklin's autobiography coems to mind again, and for two reasons. One is the virtue of patience. Miles knew what he was doing, he understood the tension in balance between form and free expression. His musicans may have felt lost, perhaps confused, but they had the patience -- and foresight -- to rely on their master musican band leader. He had a vision and direction to pick the pieces of music and give it meaning. The other virtue, and the one that allowed the patience of the musicans, was Miles' keen ability to listen. To not always be talking and playing over everybody, feeling and following a groove far out beyond others' perception. He was interested in working with others as a team, as a band. Miles was open to the ideas and the playing of his younger bandmates; in truth, he relied on them. His music is great because he listened to where everyone was coming from and where they were going. And then he gave them all a vehicle to travel in, one that would accomodate all of their points of departure and all of their destination. Creative improvisation with a strong common voice.

Though made by white men, the 1974 film Space is The Place featuring cosmic jazz man Sun Ra, is not a blaxploitation movie. Ra is working against the stereotype of the downtrodden African American of the 1970s. His is a message of empowerment, enlightenment and a promise of spaceways salvation for black people. The arkestra sounds the call as funky space music, enticing people to follow their lead away from the racism and anger of Earth to Ra's outer space. Sun Ra's music is folk music, and this is featured best in June Tyson's performances. Powerfully sung, but fun songs, she is bridge between the Arkestra's roots in avant space jazz and soul funk as protest music. The message: Get with Ra's groove and get on his space ship for an escape from the oppressions of late 20th century America.

• WNYC (NPR, classical, espeically evening music with David Garland--weeknights 7-10pm)
• WFMU (ecelectic freeform, like nothing you've ever heard)
• WQXR (straight up classical)
• WKCR (Columbia mostly jazz, Birdflight weekday mornings with Phil Schapp, all Charlie Parker, homerecordings and takes you will hear nowhere elese. Out to Lunch: more adventurous)

Fine time in headlights. We sink further until she finds us. Drenched with wet sex,we head uptown , upstate, upland and finally upon pine forests sinking in a gradual shift north and east, north again until the Rains. Please reign in that guitar, Southerners, they tell us, though we fail to mention an older version -- B-Side from the nineties -- that offer everything recorded in the West underclassman gymnasium. One of us knew Live. The others, a fucked up situation, and guitars among them all. Hello, Leslie.