I'll Take Sweden...

...was the title of Bob "I Love a Man in a Uniform" Hope's 1965 laff riot, and it might well serve as a credo for my recent tour there with the Magic Band, country is so damn nice and friendly and over-all neat and tidy (its vaunted swinging '60's erotic content now muted/dissipated to very low-level background noise) that one occasionally longs for the gritty urban sprawl and squall of less, uh, manicured climes (Amsterdam is the obverse of Stockholm). Still, a lovely hang nevertheless...

Hit the ground running last Monday with a taping for Swedish TV4, where after a couple hours kip at the flat of my friend Bertil we camped out in the dressing rooms of the studio itself all night waiting for our 4am makeup, tune-up and run-through before unleashing our wakeup clarion call to an unsuspecting populace at 8am or so (you can see this clip of us "in the snow for a blow" as they say on my homepage at www.garylucas.com...thank you Ralf Nygard). Then it was a short flight up to Umea, 50 k or so from Lapland, for a relaxed 3 or 4 days of rehearsals and our eventual performance/Night at the Opera House there (northernly most opry house in captivity apparently, obverse of Fitzcarraldo's) as part of the annual Made in Umea Festival, which thanks to the benevolent kindliness and excellent good taste of program director Eric Palm brought in diverse, non-generic musicians from all over the world (including UK darlings the Tiger Lilies, who opened for Gods and Monsters at the Knit here a couple years ago)...

Caught a revelatory set by Swedish multi-instrumentalist/composer/madman Ale Moller (no umlaut on this computer, sorry) who led a fantastically precise and spirited ensemble in a romp through folky funk-inflected acoustic jazz, which made for one of the most enjoyable nights of music ever... percussionist Rafael Sida, sultry Greek chanteuse Maria Stellas, bushy bearded Canadian ex-pat bassist Sebastien Dube, African griot singer Mamadou Sene, and fiddle player Anders Nygard came together then tore it da fuk up, and gave new meaning (and credence) to the much derided (esp. after 9/11) concept of multi-kulti...and good on 'em I say, as a card-carrying One-Worlder and (green) card-carrier enabler (twice in fact)...in the immortal words of legendary under assistant east-coast promo man Juggy Gayles (a/k/a The Jugulator), spaketh at some Gnu Moo-sick Seminar or other re Dance Music: "We should all try and mix it up more--the white and the black!!" (and the reds and the blues and...) ("Make collages!" snapped Dylan to that Time Magazine scribe in "Don't Look Back", in hot pursuit of an accurate rendering of the Truth...which as we all know, can set you free).

And mixing it up Ale Moller and co. did, with gusto... relaxed, beatific, sublime grooves and improvisatory flash and filigree, breathing as one, une musique joyeuse that partook of all the colours of nature and Supernature, and then some...watching them play together so beautifully, so freely, I felt especially privileged deep in my heart to be part of this global community of music. To get to hurl the thunderbolts...

Next night another excellent multitudinous set by New York jazz cat/teacher/Lenny Bruce-head Dave Taylor, bass-trombonist/composer extraordinaire, who led a night of knotty interactions with handsome Estonian virtuoso bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann, a smorgasbord of challenging new music both electronic and acoustic that brought in young Umea symphony players (crack shots everyone of them), a very hot female dancer named Malin with the most sculptured dorsal musculatura who tripped the lithe fantastic round random radio blasts, and a comely female string trio from southern Sweden name of ZilliacusPerssonRaitinen who had the #1 Classical Record in Sweden last year with their interpretations of the Goldberg Variations (they were amused by my account of former Mute Records act the Medieval Babes--good marketing ploy!-- who performed at this hallucinatory festival in Rotterdam Nick Cave and I played as a duo some years ago, Ein Abend en Wien). I was a last minute add-on to the bill that night thanks to the auspices of Eric Palm, and why the heck not...I was given a Swedish acoustic guitar by request (s'funny, I really got good and busy on a Klira 12 string of Swedish origin back around '65), and I performed an instrumental version of "Fata Morgana" (check new mp3 of my band Gods and Monsters blazing through the full band version of this on my homepage) which got juices flowing, and the entire show was taped for Swedish radio... Martin and Dave are playing here in NYC tonight at the Kosciusczko Foundation and I'm going to head uptown to E. 65th Street momentarily...

Magic Band gig went over exceedingly well Friday night in the Opera House, thanks to the support of guitarist Jimmy Agren and Robert and all the great Made in Umea crew who made us feel so much at home all that week-- and then we flew back in a cloud of nylon foam to Stockholm on Saturday, for a riotously received gig at Club Fasching, famous intime jazz keller with pics of Lester Bowie and Chet Baker and other luminaries on the walls of the club and in the dressing room, crowd was (basically, as in Umea) a bunch of oldsters mit kinder, there was a whole table of serious beards, professionals to the man (a brainy mix of engineers, computer scientists, biologists even-- I checked), couple of petunias peeping through in the form of BBC producer Elaine Sheperd and her lovely friend, also one blonde dominatrix-like reporter name of Pia Della Monro (good moniker) upfront in full leather regalia...and I had my own young, intoxicated cheering section on the Left side of the stage, my pink half of the drainpipe, repeatedly yelling "Gary Lucas is a Legend!" throughout the evening (you could say I paid for this microphone-- yeah, with blood, sweat, and years), we killed 'em, and killed them some more...

and, to paraphrase Lenny Bruce on Jesus--

If we come back...

we'll kill them again...

xxLove

Gary