Just before Dr. King took the stage to deliver his I Have a Dream speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the grandfather of one of my most treasured friends took the podium and delivered this short, stirring, still-apropos address. Since you are all presumably familiar with the former… let me introduce to you, today, the latter:

Takeaway quote:

When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not ‘the most urgent problem.’ The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.

Joachim Prinz — March on Washington Speech

…or, at least, no worse than it would be on a Friday by any other name…..

To simultaneously soothe and rile you, here is a lovely duet/duel between F. Zappa and L. Shankar, circa Hallowe’en 1978:

For more information (and audiovisual recollections) regarding the once-wonderful, now NYU student-full Palladium, look here and here and here.

Make no mistake: presenting one of the most unique, illogical and inexplicably compelling rock albums ever made was no mean feat. Eno himself never attempted its live performance.

This review presumes familiarity with the source material. If you are new to th’ fold, hie thee at once to the closest (or most convenient) purveyor of sonic treasures, open sufficiently wide thy wallet, and plug, posthaste, this most unfortunate of lacunae in your musical preparation.

WNYC Radio engineer, guitarist and et ceterist Rob Christiansen assembled a top-flight core band, comprising:

himself…

Rob Christiansen's well-deserved Frampton moment

Brett Lefferts on keys…

Brett Lefferts (keys)

Jessica Bruder on six strings…

Jessica Bruder on six strings

Glenn Mohre on six more strings…

Glenn Mohre on six more strings

Roger Paul Mason (bass) and Vince Fairchild (keys):

Roger Paul Mason (bass) and Vince Fairchild (keys)

The visually way-in-the-back, but sonically all-encompassing Bill Bowen on drums…

Bill Bowen (drums)

Ian Peksa on marching and percussives:

Sonically and symbolically, Ian played a mean drum...

And the redoubtable, resplendent and bi-coastal Trouble Dolls on backing vocals, incidental percussion and front-line glam(our):

The Trouble Dolls, (L to R): Pam Weis, Cheri Leone, Chris McBurney and Matty Karas

• Bad Seed, Grinderman-man and Vanity Settee Jim Sclavunos;
• Jim Thirlwell (Foetus, Wiseblood, Steroid Maximus, Manorexia, &c.)
• Vernon Reid (Living Colour, Ronald Shannon Jackson/Decoding Society, Black Rock Coalition, lots lots more)
• Paul Duncan (Warm Ghost)
• Bryan Scary (Shredding Tears)
• Dominic Cipolla (Phantom Family Halo)
• Siobhan Duffy (The Gunga Din, Angels of Light, God Is My Co-Pilot)
• Travis Morrison (Dismemberment Plan)
• Rachel Lears (Os Postiços, The Mystery Keys)
• Sohrab Habibion (Obits, Edsel)

The show was emceed by radio legend, Eno fan and guitarist-of-no-small-stature John Schaefer:

John Schaefer: a more well-schooled emcee could not be found

The show touched down with all cylinders firing — Paul Duncan and Bryan Scary captured and projected Needles in the Camel’s Eye’s abstract urgency, creating a sound that was bigger than the both of ‘em:

Paul Duncan (L.) and Bryan Scary (R.): one eye, two needles, no waiting

Next, Trouble Doll Cheri Leone and Dominic Cipolla carried the crowd through Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch, an odd historical-fiction melodrama centering around real-life ostensible-pyrokineticist A. W. Underwood:

Cheri Leone and Dominic Cipolla: no choice need be made

Getting the next song right was particularly important.

Robert Fripp’s legendary Baby’s on Fire solo, an incendiary assault that beats the listener’s mind and body into submission for three-fifths of the song’s duration, has rightfully earned pride of place in the pantheon of rock guitar expression. Three of the greatest minutes of anything ever caught on tape. Finding a suitable soloist would be no easy task.

In walked Vernon Reid, whose unique right hand position makes it look like he is not so much wielding his axe as clutching a machine gun. The visual metaphor was apt, as Reid brought the fire(power) to his unrelenting solo for the better (and best) part of Baby’s on Fire:

Vernon Reid lighting Baby on Fire

Pairing Reid’s machine gun etiquette with Siobhan Duffy’s chanteuse stylings was just the sort of counterintuitive coupling that Eno himself would have relished:

Vernon Reid and Siobhan Duffy

Cheri Leone returned to the stage, adding new-millenial nuance to the distraught ’50s nostalgia of Cindy Tells Me…

Cheri tells us.

… while the other Trouble Dolls kept the crowd swaying:

3/4 of the Trouble Dolls

Next, Paul Duncan lurched through the discordant angst of Driving Me Backwards:

Paul Duncan, ever-driven

On Some Faraway Beach was then sung (more or less) by Travis Morrison:

Travis Morrison, faraway

Suddenly, the stage appeared to have been beset upon by a seven-foot-tall lumberjack in a surprisingly dapper pink suit. ’twas, in fact, Jim Sclavunos, who careened (with equal parts sonic and sartorial aplomb) through the terrifying tale of Blank Frank, by turns howling and hebephrenic:

Jim Sclavunos: Blank Frank's messenger

Dead Finks Don’t Talk brought Siobhan Duffy and Travis Morrison back to the fore.

Ms. Duffy nicely captured the sly coyness of Eno’s original oration. Mr. Morrison had the devil-may-care-bopping-in-place-with-one-hand-in-pocket-and-t’other-grasping-a-brew move down pat, although one wishes he had spent a little more time learning the lyrics, centering his pitch and the like…

Don't Talk

Next came one of the musical high-points of the evening, viz., a short, sweet, swirling, squelchy, sprawling, spiraling soundscape by Jim Thirlwell, serving as the brain-cleaning segue from Dead Finks Don’t Talk into Some of Them Are Old. It was impossible to divine, from my angle, from what diminutive demon box he called forth these raging spirits:

Jim Thirlwell and tiny, unidentified (but decidedly effective) noisemaker

Following a lovely, lilting flute-and-recorder lead-in, Rachel Lears and Sohrab Habibion harmonized sincerely through Some of Them Are Old…

Rachel Lears and Sohrab Habibion: what's old is now new

… accompanied by a three-way slide-guitar interlude:

Matty Karas and Jessica Bruder: Slides 1 and 2

Rob Christiansen: Slide 3

The album drew to a close in suitably grand fashion, with the band slowly building on the opening riff of Here Come the Warm Jets while a two-man processional snaked slowly through the rapt audience and joined the rest of the band onstage:

Glenn Mohre and Ian Peksa, leading us to the alb's grand conclusion

The sound, now a twenty-eight string extravaganza, continued building:

Glenn Mohre, Roger Paul Mason and Rob Christiansen: strings 1 through 16

John Schaefer and Jessica Bruder: strings 17 through 28

The song reached its culmination as the Trouble Dolls sang the admittedly nonsensical, albeit strangely moving, lyrics… the heart soared, while the head scratched itself:

Nothing to say... and, thankfully, they said it disirregardless...

Finally, Messrs. Mohre and Peksa returned to the primordial sea from which their procession began:

Glenn Mohre and Ian Peksa: All good (and great) things must come to an end

First up, Bryan Scary returned to tell the tawdry, under-told tale of The Seven Deadly Finns.

This bawdy beast sits at the midpoint of an aesthetic arc drawn between the Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R. and the Damned’s “1 of the 2.” Bursting with raw punk energy and sung with a lecherous sneer, it prefigured British punk by a good two years. Brimming with sexual double-entendres and cobbling together everything from Japanese erotic torture references to puns on the name of the, er, progenitor, of Systems Theory, it balances (however metastably) erotica with esoterica. Never released on any album, it remains one of Eno’s lesser-known masterpieces.

''Although variety is the spice of life / A steady rhythm is the source...''

Jim Sclavunos: recasting the logistics and heuristics of the mystics

Jim Sclavunos and the Trouble Dolls: slated for becoming divine

Schaefer’s didactic delivery made for a subtle but nice shift from Eno’s original detached recitation. Having listened to the man through the radio box for about thirty (!) years, and being used to his calmly authoritative broadcasting demeanor, it was particularly gratifying to see him command as cacophonous a stage as this…

Jessica Bruder, Bill Bowen, Vernon Reid, Rob Christiansen and Jim Sclavunos: all Heaven breaking loose

Glenn Mohre, Jessica Bruder, Bill Bowen and Vernon Reid: more Heaven, more breaking

Eno sayeth: ''There was John...''

Armed with only his bible, some dangling religious tchotchkes and a bullhorn, Cipolla successfully called Jesus “Out… Out…” and expelled the Jezebel spirit that dwelled deep within Cheri…

… or did he?!?!?

Dominic Cipolla and Cheri Leone: ''Out. Out Jezebel. Come out now!!''

3/4 of The Trouble Dolls and all of Glenn Mohre, keeping the deadliest of grooves

''I break your power Jezebel. Loosen your hold on her mind...''

The core group did a heroic job throughout, successfully channeling the many moods of this protean production.

They, and the guest singers and musicians put on a blazing show that successfully captured the anarchy that first forced its way into unsuspecting ears nearly forty years ago. The audience made their pleasure known:

Lost forever in a happy crowd.

The bottom line: You should have been there.

With any luck, Messrs. C and E will be bringing this show to your town in time for this grand album’s proper anniversary………………….

Featuring, after about eight minutes, Wobble on drums — rather than sheepishly miming their “hits,” the band rightly embraced the artifice, first by forsaking their prerecorded roles, and ultimately by swapping instruments … An undoubtedly surprised Dick Clark proved to be a very good sport about the whole affair (while the show’s insurance underwriter probably had an apoplectic fit):

First up, last night, NYC’s ambient cognoscenti were treated (literally and figuratively—the show was free) to a lush, luscious, and transportive audiovisual rendering of Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks album in the spacious World Financial Center Winter Garden.

The free event, dubbed The Apollo Project”, was the kick-off of this year’s New York Guitar Festival.

The core of the group consisted of instrumental duo itsnotyouitsme (violinist Caleb Burhans and guitarist Grey McMurray) playing guitar, violin and keyboards, Bob Dylan/Levon Helm/Woodstock Mountains Revue alum Larry Campbell on pedal steel, and Phish bassist Mike Gordon.

The were joined, at various times, by musicians Jeff Parker (Tortoise), Noveller’s Sarah Lipstate, and veteran master of guitar-texture David Torn. They were accompanied, throughout, by visuals extracted from filmmaker Craig Teper’s as-yet-unfinished documentary about Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, “Man in the Right Seat.”

Apollo has always struck me as a unique album, its drifting spacescapes like the empyrean An Ending (Ascent) interspersed among airy country-inflected pieces like the lilting Deep Blue Day. Country music made a strong impression on a young Eno, who listened to American Armed Forces radio as a child in Woodbridge. In Eno’s hands, the Very American form takes on a quintessential, aethereal, almost weightless quality.

In the hands of the Apollo Project musicians, the diaphonous raw material was given propulsive power, lifting and carrying the audience into the lunar, cosmic, Earth-from-afar and occasionally abstract realms depicted on the raised-high video screen.

The main ingredient for me was Larry Campbell’s pedal steel. As I learned, not too long, ago, the mechanics behind creating deceptively-simple-sounding pedal steel parts are incredibly complex (be it on a real or sampled instrument). Campbell’s playing was exhilarating and infused the material with an unexpected vigor and liveliness, whether he was filling the low end with drone, punctuating walls of sound with sharply-plucked high notes, or gently lifting/lowering the audience with perfectly-placed glisses. Free from the tired tropes of ‘new’ country, this pedal steel soared through Terra incognita (or perhaps, using Lunar nomenclature, Mare incognitum)…

David Torn brought some well-controlled, perfectly-manicured feedback and six-string manipulation to the proceedings, sounding in spots like Live at Pompeii’s Echoes‘ midsection’s David Gilmour, on aestheroids.

This was a wonderful, soothing warm-up for Sunday night’s sure-to-be-raucous Here Come the Warm Jets Tribute at Joe’s Pub.

The package, available until December 1, 2010, includes four meticulously recorded, richly-detailed, highly-customizable Kontakt libraries:

• Pedal Steel Guitar — An incredible MIDI implementation of a surprisingly complex instrument, this library gives you “ten bendable strings,” adjustable portamento speed, adjustable vibrato speed/depth, the ability to bend single notes in a sustained chord, and realistic amp simulation. A brief description of this library, and a link to a recent song built around it, can be found in this earlier post

• American Zither — A gorgeous hammered dulcimer, inextricably linked to traditional American, European, Asian, Indian and Persian musics. It sounds beautiful played “clean” and, thanks to its hard attack and harmonically rich timbre, it serves as the ideal substrate for building exotic and textured sounds and effects. An example of this library played “clean” is The Moon Lies Black Upon the Straits; An example of it processed into an “ambient electric guitar” is Dark Matter I;

• Clavichord — The Medieval/Renaissance/Baroque precursor to the Hohner Clavinet (the defining sound of such classics as Jeff Beck’s Led Boots and Stevie Wonder’s Superstition);

• XpanDrum — a collection of two clay bongos and two wooden darbukas, featuring independent tuning, volume, panning and timing/dynamics randomization, coupled with a velocity sensitive Low-Pass Filter that creates realistic dynamics with low processor overhead.

Additional audio examples, magazine reviews, &c., can be found on the Wavelore Demos Page.

This too-good-to-be-true offer is rooted in tragedy… and routed towards the potential light at the end of the tunnel for a long-time MS sufferer. As the Wavelore website explains:

The sale is in support of the John Reid Liberation Fund. John is a longtime Multiple Sclerosis sufferer, and a dear friend of Wavelore Instruments, who is trying to raise funds for a revolutionary new surgery that could alleviate or eliminate many of his MS symptoms. We are offering this unprecedented deal to you, in hopes of supporting John’s treatment. If you’d like to get a no-brainer deal on everything Wavelore has to offer (over $700 worth of sample libraries!) while supporting a great cause, please use the buy now button below, and we’ll donate 75% of all proceeds to John’s cause. You can find out more about John’s condition and treatment, or donate directly to the fund at http://johnreidliberation.wordpress.com

Support Wavelore — buy these libraries before December 1, 2010.

Support John Reid — donate directly to John Reid’s Fund.

Challenge met, I’m quite happy with the results:

Alan Blattberg, ''Low Plains Drifter''

The piece, Low Plains Drifter, features the incomparable — as gorgeous as it is complex — Wavelore Pedal Steel Guitar.

Creating this song required the crossing of three musical bridges:

First, I had to familiarize myself with the mechanics of playing both the actual instrument and its MIDI implementation, so that I could become reasonably well-versed in both the broad strokes and nuances of this hemidemisemifamiliar instrument’s musical vocabulary.

Next, I had to become better acquainted with the ways in which the pedal steel’s vocabulary is expressed by its more learned practitioners.

It became apparent, rather quickly, that I had much to learn on both of these fronts. I will address the traversing of each of these bridges in subsequent posts.

Finally, I had to incorporate the instrument into a more personal — and thus, perhaps, less intuitive — musical environment… to “make it my own.”

The end result? Not quite yer old man’s (or anyone’s) “country”… Dark strings, electronic drones, ghostly piano… What you might hear if Flying Saucer Attack and Wilco co-scored a David Lynch western…

My friend and high school classmate Anthony Brissett passed away, Monday, due to complications from a massive heart infection.

I can’t think of a more tragic and unwarranted pronouncement by the Fates. Tony was a bright, funny, and generous person, deep of character and rich of spirit. He carried with him to the end a cadre of dedicated friends, some nurturing bonds that were formed decades ago, and others (like me) forging Facebook Era friendships after years of post-high school separation.

For nearly two years, Tony lived a tortured and tortuous life. A catastrophic series of strokes (a by-product of an earlier heart infection that had gone cruelly and inexplicably undiagnosed) wiped out most of the right side of his body. His heart required multiple surgeries to repair damage that he never should have suffered in the first place.

He spent the lion’s share of the last two years in various hospitals, staring at blank walls and decrepit televisions, subjected to an unceasing cacophony of others’ wheezes and moans and the constant beeps and pings of the machinery that kept him and his neighbors alive. His birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Eve, &c., were no different from yesterday or next Thursday or two weeks ago…

Such environs could easily (and do frequently) break the spirits of lesser men. But Tony fought with tenacity unparalleled. He was eventually able to get himself out of the hospital and achieve public locomotion — slow but sure — with a cane and quiet, dogged perseverance. Subways included…

One night, several months ago, he hauled his bad self down to the World Financial Center to see a Vernon Reid multimedia performance with me. We spoke of the things that he was going to do, once he got “better” — within whatever parameters of improvement he could actually hope to achieve. Work plans, educational plans, social plans… all of which would take flight in the weeks/months/years to come. Sadly, it is Tony and not his plans that has taken flight.

I have very strong mixed feelings about Tony’s death. He lost his life yesterday but, in many ways, he really lost his life in the summer of ‘08. He has been deprived of a future, and all of the thrilling possibilities that a future can entail… but he has been spared an arduous life guaranteed to be filled with physical restrictions, social/professional struggles and necessarily compromised expectations.

He lives no more but he grieves no more, feels anguish no more and suffers the terror of future surgeries no more… and he will never have to spend another moment in another hospital.

His friends and his family — I’m glad to have met his wonderful sisters and niece in recent months — will continue to carry the burden of his loss and the dreadful story that led to it… but Tony himself is now free and unfettered… and shall be so forever more.

He never lost his sense of humor, even as it began to hew more closely to the gallows end of the spectrum. I was delighted when he pointed out the irony of his checking in for open heart surgery in a hospital located in Valhalla (albeit the one in Westchester County). I’m glad that he picked up on that, ‘cause I wasn’t going to mention it otherwise…

He was also very good at mastering the series of exhortations/exercises we devised to improve the fine motor skills in his right hand: “Dio” (metal horns) . . . “Fox News” (middle finger raised) . . . “Dio” (metal horns) . . . “Rush Limbaugh” (middle finger raised) . . . “Dio” (metal horns) . . . “Pat Robertson” (middle finger raised) . . . [repeat as necessary] . . .

Some people leave their mark on the world by building huge skyscrapers, or by unifying (or destroying) great nations, or by writing one of those awful auto-tuned songs that are okay to dance to and everyone seems to like so it gets played on the radio all the time until it gets unseated by the next awful auto-tuned song…..

Tony had his life taken away from him — and then, ultimately, extinguished — before he had a chance to create that kind of legacy. But he left a substantial and indelible mark of his own through the shining example of how he carried himself in the face of constant, life-threatening, adversity.

Throughout his ordeal, Tony was a pillar of strength, seeking no sympathy from others, attacking his physical limitations with slow, saddened perseverance. Despite each slowing of improvement, each complication, each return to the hospital, he always maintained an air of dignity and stoic grace, coupling resignation with determination. And he fought, tirelessly, right up until the very end. May we all be so brave when our times come. He was truly inspiring, and I will always treasure the time that I and others from the “Bx. Sci.” crew got to spend with him.

Death may have won the decisive battle — it always does — but it didn’t have nearly as easy a time besting this particular conquest as it presumably expected. Looking back over the last two years, the bottom line — the unassailable truth — is that Tony kicked Death’s ass far more often than the other way ‘round.

He fought like a warrior, and he died like a %@$#! hero, earning a much-deserved position of glory in the halls of the real Valhalla.

You ruled, Tony. And you rule. I miss you, man. Like the Bad Brains sang, “Sail on, sail on…”