Going for the Godhead (Lift the Bandstand!)

Gary gets a Big Hug from the original Po from the Teletubbies outside the temporary Teletubbies Store, Bleecker and West 10th Street, NYC

photo by Andrew Marks | click to enlarge

What an AMAZING week of really different kind of musical performances...some different shit, for sure...and yet, despite the radically disparate nature of each project (electric Indian heavy dub-groove mashup vs. heavy metal transmogrification of 19th century Austrian composer Anton Bruckner), somehow-- really similar--insofar as the 2 projects I'm so enthusiastic about here both partook heavily (drank the long draught down) of the ecstatic, the transcendental, the spiritually immanent-- qualities I seek in all the variegated sonorous trajectories pursued to date (limbs gone out on, you might say)--including excursions into 1930's Chinese pop, radical Jewish music, avant-garde rock, jazz, folk, blues, and beyond...

First up was the performance debut at Joe's Pub, the wonderful plush nightclub/boite carved (in part) out of the former 80's screening room/ theater in Joseph Papp's imposing Public Theater space, of a new ensemble consisting of myself on electric guitar and fx along with my friend the Indian world music star Karsh Kale (tabla and percussionist extraordinaire, vocalist, electronic dubmaster organizer, all-around impeccable musician--check his solo albums on Six Degrees), the hypnotic, charismatic Indian quawwali singer and harmonium player Vishal Vaid, and genius electric bassist/producer Yossi Fine, who's played with Lou Reed, Bowie and many other greats...

and I must say we truly WRECKED the joint at 9:30pm last Saturday night in front of an absolutely sold-out house... and then did it again, maybe even better (some did say) at 11:30pm to a pretty darn nearly sold-out house, that included lots of friends like the Rubin Museum's Tim McHenry, Invasion Group's Steve Saporta, insane-in-the membrane fox Shaista Hussain and comix maven Gus, my guy the newly appointed Soros Foundation's legal eagle/3rd world corruption roto-rooter-outer Kenny Hurwitz, my other mainman, Cineastispumanti imbiber (drink the long draught down, again) Richard Porton, composer Lukas Ligeti and galpal whose name I shamefully forget--sorry!--, BBC music producer Allison McGourty, Karsh's wife Anya and her lovely daughter, fetching Kate DeRosset, and myriad gorgeous and hip multi-kulti/ multi-coloured men and women,...it was quite a magic night, we played as one with very little rehearsal, both Karsh and myself each bringing his own compositions to the table which we distributed equally amongst the guys...

The evening began with Karsh and myself playing in an acoustic duo format of tabla and acoustic guitar, and then we were joined by Yossi and finally Vishal...and the whole thing started throbbing and pulsating and wailing like some wholly holy Karnatic carnal carnivale... until-- ASCENSION...ending on a particularly awesome, eerie synchronistic close at the end of the first set when Karsh and I faded out in precise sympathetic unison, beat for beat, my guitar emanating a tremelo'ed pulsating pattern I set up and sustained, eventually decaying and dying away exactly at the same time as Karsh faded on tabla with the same pulsating pattern, yes o my brothers and sisters we were rockin' in rhythm...really such a pleasurable sonic throwdown/r. u. ready to rock experience-- I LOVE playing with these guys! Just wait till you hear us :-)...

And then it was up up and away after very little sleep once again, outward bound on a plane to Montreal, where my old friend the crafty and amusing intellectual tummler Sandy Pearlman was a'waiting..and after lunching at the famous Schwartz's Hebraique Deli (their "smoked meat" sandwich--Canadian parlance for pastrami--is a killer--literally, cholesterol city...but what the hey), I got down and dirty at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University where Sandy is a Distinguished Fellow, and plugged in my '66 Strat--the better to test out the Marshall and Vox stacks Sandy had assembled for my delectation in order to shatter eardrums and minds, as I was earmarked to perform my Bruckner Fantasia the next day for his and Music School Dean Don McLean's graduate and undergraduate students, who'd signed up for Don and Sandy's jointly taught course entitled "Bruckner and Heavy Metal" (yes, Virginia, there is an elective eclectic electric affinity here)...

Sandy confessed to me during this trip that he was inspired to make such a connection between mittel-European highbrow orchestral composition and the blasphemous in-your-face noise skronk of heavy metal (a term Sandy can lay claim for coining in one of his great early Crawdaddy Magazine essays) upon hearing me perform Wagner excerpts on my '64 black Strat at the old Knitting Factory in the late 80's... and both Sandy and the witty, jovial Don (a don of Dons--a very nice guy, a sharp intellect, and an incredible ear--and a scholar of both the Second Viennese school, Alban Berg being his specialty, and Slayer-- the school is lucky indeed to have him as their Dean) together make a very persuasive case for Bruckner being a major precursor to modern headbanging round the world, what with the massive armory of 19th century orchestral wood and metal weaponry the guy marshall'ed/stacked at his disposal...and the dramatic, spiritually uplifting, emotionally fraught (some would say almost frightening) method in which Bruckner chooses to fling these instruments' imposing sonic impasto around on the surface of his architectonic scores with their luminous, glow-in-the-dark integrated vertical harmonies, in such transfigurative and transfixing masterworks as his 8th Symphony ( a/k/a "The Apocalypse")...

Sandy and Don had suggested I retool fragments of the 4th movement of this particular sublime composition and reforge them in the smithy of my Fender's friendly-fire...

and so did I spend many long man-hours over the last few months working out suitable arrangements of the major themes and subtle harmonic stratifications inherent in this movement so as to suitably capture the repeated fusillades of galloping staccato'ed unison passages, cascades and cannonades of stark, declarative minor key cadences/motifs (fate knocking at the doorway to hell--the sturm und drang und clang of the Alpine reaper)...and I did not disappoint these students, receiving sustained applause and much enthusiastic feedback, plenty of intelligent questions abounding at the conclusion of my performances for the graduate seminar and undergraduate courses... I added many brooding electronic ruminations/improvisations throughout along with the requisite metal flash and filigree, faithfully reproducing the needle-point lacework and cleanly articulated skirling lines of the original--my template was Wilhelm Furtwangler's definitive 1944 live recording with the Berlin Philharmonic of Bruckner's 8th Symphony, in which, in several lulls and passages of quietude within the 4th movement, you can actually hear the distant guns of the Russian army approaching the gates of the city-- and, in a return to my Beefheartian past, I learned and transcribed the parts to guitar by ear, memorizing them sequentially as I attacked this monumental edifice (a real scream of stone), without benefit of score--the stuff sticks better that way (better get hit in yr soul)...and I now truly know this piece, "from the inside"...

Stephane Giroux, from the Canadian national television network CTV, was there with a crew to film it, and I hope to have a clip of some of my performance up on my website soon...it was really quite a gratifying and thrilling experience, I loved learning and playing such rapturous, impassioned, "byzantine" music (literally--composed at the end of an empire, with appropriate scales and references) ...it haunts me still, the swooning second major theme is running through my head now as I type this at 3am, indelibly burned in my brain...

and after much convivial hanging out with Don and Sandy at some of their various wonderful Montreal restaurants (the swordfish at Mythos and veal a limone at Il Cortile especially is highly recommended if you're planning a trip to Montreal, which I urge you forthwith), I was very sorry to leave so soon...I love Montreal!... such great feng shui/world-in-harmony up there, just a step across the border...

And what do both these two musical worlds have in common?

Well... I remembered up in Montreal that once upon a time I used to run into Sandy quite by chance at screenings in NYC in the mid-80's when he was fresh off of his Clash producing spree tussling with those British punk icons on their "Give 'Em Enough Rope" album--and met him, guess where?-- in that very same Public Theater space that is now Joe's Pub, where I'd just hit the heights with Karsh Kale and co.--met him at a screening of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet's great film of second Viennese school kappelmeister Arnold Schoenberg's modernist opera "Moses Und Aron", wherein Schoenberg, a former convert to Catholicism, firmly declared in this work his adherence to his Jewish roots in a desperate attempt to warn European Jewry of their impending doom under the Nazis before fleeing to Hollywood...and at a screening of "Alexander Nevsky", where Sandy and I both went into paroxysms of awed astonishment at Eisenstein's adroit visual deployment of massed batallions of idealized Teutonic Knights, in tandem with Prokofiev's glorious score...

(No, that's not it!)

But I would say: that the thing that unites both my leap and total immersion in the bubbling cauldron of Bhangra-beat, and rapid ascent into the blue empyrean of Bruckner on wings of purest metal, is nothing less than a bred-in-the-bone shared imperative/impulse to Go for the Godhead...to storm the reality asylum...to ride the tide of the redemptive and healing force of the universe, Mother Music...a/k/a, the Big Note...

Call it the Shekinah...or Shiva...

"You know what I mean..."

Happy Passover/Happy Easter/Happy Rabi Ul Awal

xxLove

Gary