Delicious Noisettes Hazel Nut Spread/Mailer Vs. Mailer

Best fucking British band in ages, certainly, along with Jeremy Warmsley, giving hope once again for a creative resurgence/kick in the nuts to a moribund UK music scene, Noisettes Shingai Shoniwa, Jamie and Dan came to Brooklyn last Friday night (Studio B precisely) and beat the sonic shit out of the seemingly sedated bobos who stood there more or less sheep-like (what is it about New York audiences anyway that makes them so unforgivingly dull and passive), true, some stood with mouths ajar, agog at the spectacle of three skinny Brit kids doing it the way it should be done (to death, in other words)...the response was warm and cheering at the end but not quite matching the energy level emitted by this non-stop exploding nebula/nutella neutrino/constellation of stars--if there was any justice in the whirl Noisettes should have been headlining...but I digress...from the opening clarion call of "Don't Give Up" (with its revved-up roots in Mingus' "Boogie Stop Shuffle" and Bird's "Now's the Time"), Caroline, Shaista, Richard and I traipsing out to Greenpoint were knocked out by their high NRG performance, which verged into free jazz improv territory (more please) in the coda of "Scratch Your Name Into the Fabric of This World", best damn anthemic rabble-rouser to drop on a lackluster scene where the so-called standard bearers are well uh don't want to name names here but I hold in my hand a list of 57 commmmmmmm-unists...didn't catch 'em next day at the Coney Island Siren Fest unjfortunately but hey y'know as good as the New York Dolls and MIA are the Noisettes more than command a stage, they own it when they play...see them soon as humanly possible...

Went up to the Walter Reade on Sunday for the start of the Norman Mailer "The Mistress and the Muse" film retrospective (good title), thoroughly enjoyed the over-the-top verging on cheese spectacle of late-80's Norman directed "Tough Guys Don't Dance" (rampant coke snorting and pot consumption abounding in a winterized P-town, loving references to Screw Magazine and Isabella Rosselini's substantial womanly hips, suburban wife-swapping with a Tammy Faye and Jim Baker- type couple, swipes at freeze-dried America/late capitalism gone to hell, decapitation, sleaze-ball biker studs, ghosts of dead hookers returning to haunt pretty boy Ryan O'Neal, ironic score in places by Angelo Badalamenti reminiscent of Russ Meyer/Roger Ebert type sarcasm in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" --but hopelessly askew--I mean, "Land of Hope and Glory" as a sardonic commentary on the current American gilded age? Wrong country, team Norman!)...film reminiscent at times of John Huston's "Reflections in a Golden Eye" for sheer rococco/ florid dialogue, narrative, and unconsciously camp performances...really an enjoyable laugh in the dark, definitely in its own weird universe, I'd like to see it again soon!

...then out shuffled Norman (on two walking sticks, yet--one of which he raised and brandished at the nearly full house before taking his seat, his way of saying hello I guess) looking pretty dessicated but feisty still, ears like two radar stations poking out despite his own references to incipient deafness--still--definitely compos mentis...and he and Kent Jones and a couple of Norm's retainers fielded questions for an hour or so that shed not much light at all on the film we'd just sat through but roamed discursively through bits and pieces of his career with occasional revelations (Jean-Luc Godard "the third most thoroughly unpleasant person" he'd ever met; Ronald Reagan being #1 on his list--too bad, as I'd just caught a screening of "King's Row" at the weekly filmclub soiree my downstairs neighbor the Chlotrudis.org film critic Bruce Kingsley has been holding in his flat, a film whose high point is the eternally chipper Reagan's heartfelt "Where's the rest of me?" peroration after a sadistic doctor has amputated his legs--good film, and after that I was actually starting to like the Gipper)...Norman also revealed that--like Isaac Bashevis Singer, though he didn't make the analogy--he thoroughly believes in the supernatural--alright!!

Once upon a time--back in junior high school, fer chrissakes-- Norman was my intellectual hero, a pugnacious literary Jewish punk/rebellious icon/flamboyant loudmouth with a fine palpable charisma/aura of brilliance turning up to bait the rabble live on tv Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett's shows... mad provocative existential insights into life as lived in these here United States--armed with an obsessive male/female anal rape idee fixe as lovingly delineated respectively in his short story "The Time of Her Time" and novel " An American Dream", both on the cutting edge of psycho-sexual whatsis... beautifully turned phrases about what it meant to be alive in the 60's in an encroaching culture of deadness/plasticity (a Zappa precusor)-- who then unfortunately slipped severely in my humble estimation a few years post "The Armies of the Night"-- especially after the Jack Henry Abbot fiasco (Abbot resembling nothing so much as one of his rage-filled Rojack-like characters summoned up from hell to walk the earth), which occurred just about the time I'd moved to Manhattan...

Now, after seeing him in the flesh, I was starting to like him and his (under the bluster) fundamental boyish charm...his Hitler book is apparently filled with devils and demons and imps, much like Singer's "Satan in Goray" and shorter fiction, and as someone who's waded fascinated through all of Ian Kershaw's recent 2 volume Hitler biography as well as Allan Bullock's seminal work and Joachim Fest's revisionist tome--Ron Rosenbaum's "Explaining Hitler" is the best read of all of them by far, btw-- I am duty bound now to peruse Norman's between-two-worlds take on der Schickelgruber)...

Anyway they then screened "Maidstone", which I'd seen up at Pennebaker's offices in 1977 when I first moved to NYC and a friend (Gopal Sukhu) who worked there arranged some marathon after-hours screenings...I'd read the redacted script culled from the dialogue which came out in paperback after the film's aborted release--I really liked it then, especially after vewing his momentous, neigh titanic performance in "Town Bloody Hall"--Norman vs. The Feminists-- which boasts the great lesbian wrestling scene with my friend and neighbor former Village Voice dance critic Jill Johnston. and Norman's uncomfortable chastising thereof as Jill and her femme paramour roll around making out on the stage of Town Hall : "Jill, Jill...be a LADY, Jill!"...essentially an improvised home movie with a flimsy running-for-president/CIA sponsored assassination subtext/pretext...but... I love Norman's larger than life character strutting and preening throughout, same with "Beyond the Law" which I brought up to Yale in 1973 as a director of the Yale Film Society (this is the best of Mailer's films in my estimation, with another good improvised zinger at the end,the Irish-cop impersonating Mailer accosting police detective Buzz Farbar in a bar: "Tell me me boy--have you been toolin' me wife?")...

So last night I went over to Anthology Film Archives to catch the missing link (for me anyway) in the holy trinity of Norman's early films, the legendary "Wild 90"--well, I wasn't exactly totally disappointed, wasn't all that thrilled either--superb performance by apparently Actor Studio habituee Norman, a real brute force of nature here, playing an Italian gangster holed up in an NYC loft with his buddies, muttering/spewing untranslatable inarticulate imprecations,invective and primal grunts, Whitman's barbaric yawp unbound--whispering, howling, baying at the moon, barking on all fours at Jose Torres' dog in a drunken rictus of passion..and...couldn't understand one word of dialogue (well, was famously forewarned by all the reviews of this film over the years)... Anthology's echoic sound sytem didn't much help either (an ongoing problem there, come on Jonas! I'll play a benefit for ya)...Norman's then-wife Beverly Bentley looks incredible too, big hair sixties style and thick mascarred lashes...but back to the sound... at the end, the sound man/culprit is revealed in the credits to be none other than "Robert Neuwirth"--my friend Bobby, painter/singer/songwriter/cultural catalyst/star of Pennebaker's Dylan doc "Don't Look Back"!--

and then, as an aperitif, in a strange, Chris Marker-like repetitive time-slip/trope, seeing as Norman was a no-show although billed to make an appearance in person last night (Alec Baldwin was there with a female friend, though, and left 5 minutes after the film started) (he'd make a superb Mailer if they ever do a biopic come to think of it) the Anthology guys elected to screen a clip that Jonas Mekas himself had filmed of Norman introducing the same damn film at Anthology, only 15 years earlier, the last time it'd been screened in NYC (I think Norman looks better now than he did 15 years ago)...in this weird double shot of my baby's love Norman mentions the poor sound quality in passing in his introductory remarks to the Anthology audience (a few more souls 15 years ago then were there last night)... and says: "this guy Bob Newhart (sic) had never done sound before, we kept asking him as we filmed how it sounded, and he just kept smiling and nodding his head..."

I actually rang Neuwirth after the screening to quiz him about this, straight from the horse's mouth as it were--and he chuckled and said in his defense he'd done several other docs for Pennebaker in that period all of which had excellent sound, blamed the poor sound on Norman and co.'s lurching around the room randomly in a collective drunken stupor throughout the 2 day shoot (really hard to follow such action with a boom mic), and also Norman's total lack of actual film acting experience, with his subsequent dialogue delivery ranging completely unexpectedly from a whisper to a scream in the space of seconds (very very hard to adjust sound levels on the fly like that)...the capper/definitive last word belongs to Neuwirth: "Had the sound been of crystalline quality, it really wouldn't have made much difference at all." :-)

Post-script--one epiphany I had while watching "Maidstone" again--and then "Wild 90" last night--was an unexamined Dylan/Mailer connection (particularly with the Neuwirth behind-the-scenes presence in Norman's first ever film)--methinks intuitively that Norman might well have engaged Pennebaker's services after the stunning triumph of Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back", which succeeded in enshrining Dylan as the hippest guy in New York...and Norman wanting a piece of Dylan's mojo, and a piece of his star-making machinery, even down to later adopting some of Dylan's patented headgear from "Don't Look Back" in "Maidstone" (the Huck Finn cap--albeit in leather--and the top hat)...I mean, he even sings in "Maidstone" (sort of), to his (here, ex-wife) Beverly Bentley again (he's a bluesman--stormin' Norman was actually featured singing "Alimony Blues" a few years ago on an album of singing literati as part of the PEN fundraising album "Stranger than Fiction")...

to adopt Norman's own paranoid mindset on "Maidstone"--could Bob Neuwirth have been a mole planted by Dylan in Mailer's camp to subvert the sound on Mailer's first foray into cinema-- as a kind of pre-emptive strike, as payback for Mailer having the cojones to co-opt "Dylan's director"??

Nahhhh...just teasing :-).. I love ya Bob (both Bob's)...

...and you too, Norman ("General Marijuana")--

The world would be a much, much duller place without your own particular brand of intellectual mishegas (pace Lenny Bruce doing Pontius Pilate addressing Jesus: "Jew--I like you! You've got BULLSHIT that doesn't quit!")

xxLove


Gary

ps. forgot to mention that the end of "Wild 90" has a sequence where Norman playfully feigns hitting Beverly Bentley in the head with an actual hammer...an astonishing correlative to the famous last sequence of "Maidstone" where Rip Torn, (breaking the fourth wall of imposed reality now that the film is--in Mailer's mind at least-- officially over, dragging him unwillingly back into the filmic reality of Norman T. Kingsley, the film director/would-be presidential aspirant he;d been playing), actually hammers Norman in the head with a hammer, drawing blood, while a freaked-out Beverly Bentley screams in the background (Rip later tells his furious victim, who responds by nearly biting his ear off, that he actually pulled his punch with the hammer because of his years spent as a trained actor!)...a mind-blowing example of Life imitating Art imitating Art imitating Life.

See More Glass!

Thoroughly enjoyed the Phillip Glass/Leonard Cohen collaboration, "Book of Longing" up at Rose Hall last Saturday night, big thanks to Judith Mallin for the ticket--Judith is a neighbor and a new friend of mine who has one of the biggest and best archives in the world in her West Village loft devoted to surrealist art, she is delightful company and together we made a visit to the Nassau County Museum of Modern Art last Friday to check out their excellent "Surrealism" show curated by Constance Schwartz, which I urge you to see (if only for the late 30's--early 40's heirophantic/voluptuous drawings of Jackson Pollock--rendered not at all in his signature splatter style, which came later...also some beautiful paintings by Roberto Matta, father of my Parisian musican friend Ramuntcho Matta...also some exqusite Ernst, Man Ray, Dorothea Tanning, and De Chirico (my fave rave)--still, best of show--and not pictured unfortunately in the catalog--an actual jacket handmade by Eleanor Roosevelt--yes, that Eleanor Roosevelt--replete with appliqued demons and devils festooning the front and back that were also caricatures of 30's politicos/ "great men of history"-- I recognized Mussollini on there--with quasi-religious mottos embroidered on the back of the jacket which commented sardonically on this witches brew/rogues gallery of world-historical gargoyles dear Quentin Roosevelt--Teddy's son-- had designed, and that Eleanor had actually put her hand to realizing/conjured up)...

I first encountered Phillip at a recording session in Soho for his first CBS Masterworks album "Glassworks" some time ago in the early 80's, after he'd been brought to Masterworks by their then visionary vice-president Christine Reed and my friend the producer/composer Richard Einhorn...this was after his triumphant collaboration with Robert Wilson, "Einstein On The Beach", whose spacy sci-fi finale remains my favorite music of his...it was very impressive to see the transparent technique of his ensemble at work in the studio (an ensemble whose membership at that time included another Greenwich Street irregular, the composer/multi-instrumentalist Jon Gibson, who was there at Rose Hall in the audience on Saturday night along with his live-in gal pal, my friend the choreographer Nina Winthrop)--and I became, and remained, a fan (also met James Truman at the "Glassworks" recording session--Greene Street Studios I believe-- for the first time, who was writing about Phillip for The Face)--I recall attending the premiere of Phillip's opera "Satyagraha" at the SUNY Buffalo Art-Park a few years later, conducted by Christopher Keene, and also loving his hyperkinetic score for the very trippy Godfrey Reggio cinematic opus "Koyaanasquatsi"...outside of hearing an occasional film score of his though I hadn't actually attended a concert of Phillip's in many years (was a time he and his ensemble regularly played rock joints in town such as Danceteria)...

thus I am happy to report that this collaboration with Leonard Cohen, another favorite of mine, was on most counts a mesmerizing evening of music, in which various recent poems of Leonard Cohen were set to small ensemble new music arrangements and sung by some very accomplished and emotive classical singers, with occasional taped interjections of the poet himself reading, and also purely instrumental interludes, the best of which were solo turns by Kate St. John on English horn and Eleonore Oppenheim on bowed double bass. The effect, combined with handsome costumes by Kasia Maimone and shimmering faux-primitive drawings by Cohen himself (heavy on feminine deshabille) projected on the wall behind the performers-- spiced with some of Glass' most compellingly introverted/non-generic chamber music in ages--was extremely seductive, as was the pacing of the show, which hurtled along nicely but still maintained an essential gravitas and, dare I say, a certain world-weariness, which appropriately complemented Leonard Cohen's amusing late zen-like apercus (one of the best being "Not a Jew", which in total goes:

Anyone who says
I'm not a Jew
is not a Jew
I'm very sorry
but this decision is
is final

Perfect seque/backtrack to Thursday night 11pm, where I appeared on a panel at Mo Pitkin's club in the East Village on the subject of "Jewish Punk", in the company of my pal Danny Fields, who was as sagacious and side-splitting as he usually is, also "American Hardcore" author and former Seconds Magazine editor Steve Blush; also Russell Wolinsky, formerly of Tish and Snooky's fabulous Sic F*cs (of "Spanish Bar-Mitzvah" fame)...the whole Bookbinder-Rinus was presided over by Steve Beeber, imp- of- the- perverse author behind the seminal tome "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's" (Chicago Review Press), also inda house was lovely Deenah from Secret Salamander, Brice Rosenbloom, a veteran of the nyc booking wars and currently the Mo Pitkins' pickmeister, and a whole lot more folks, got the club to serve us potato latkes with sour cream and apple sauce to keep up the old esprit semitique (they used to feature a heart-attack burger there with a dollop of chopped chicken liver right on top of the juicy patty--but we could only get sliders this time 'o night, zut alors)...

s'okay as I had REALLY chowed down aforehand at the Permanent Mission of the Czech Embassy to the UN up on 83rd and Madison, where I had performed earlier in the evening playing solo acoustic arrangements on my Gibson J-45 and National steel of music by Dvorak, Smetana, and the Plastic People of the Universe--the "Czech classics", in other words, to quote my friend Richard "Faust" Mader--at a party for a departing member of the staff, Janina Hrebickoba, and lots of UN dignitaries abounding, including Andrzej Towpik, the current Polish ambassador to the UN, with whom I had my photo taken along with my old friend Martin Palous, the Czech UN ambassador, who was giving the party--and in fact, was the guy responsible for commissioning my arrangements of this Czech classical music on the occasion of the 14th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution a few years ago when I performed at the Czech Embassy in DC...in attendance Thursday night was the lovely head of the Czech Cultural Office, Monika Koblerova, Martin's wife Pavla, and a bevy of fun and interesting guys and gals...

Heading uptown soon to catch my pal Harry Hamlin, who's is in town with his radiant wife Lisa Rinna (who had a wicked cameo on "Entourage" couple weeks ago), as both of them are starring in the current production of "Chicago" on Broadway (having honed their hoofing skills recently on "Dancing With the Stars")...Harry always was a good singer as well, going back to the Tim 'n Slim days when we were at Yale together (would have made a hell of a Jim Morrison back in the day, pre-Oliver Stone/Val Kilmer)...

xxLove

Gary

ps my pal Howard Thompson, the British A &R legend who ex-pat'ed here in the 80's and signed Alan Vega, Psychedelic Furs, 10,000 Maniacs, Screaming Blue Messiahs, Garbage and so much more great stuff to CBS, Island, Elektra and Almo Sounds over the years, has re-surfaced, and the world is a much better place for it... now living on the far shores of Long Island in bucolic splendor, Howard runs a fascinating 24 hour internet radio site, "Cake Radio", which streams a brilliant 24 hour flow of music from Howard's vast hoard of vinyl and digital goodies--check him out at http://www.live365.com/stations/thespangler (Howard is the silent dj at the controls, under the name The Spangler)...17 years ago this summer I left a cushy day job I'd held down (or rather, was held down) for 13 years to become a full time musician, composer, producer, songwriter, and recording artist, primarilly at the instigation/encouragement of two people--the late avant-cellist/composer Arthur Russell...and Howard T-- and je ne regrette rien. Thank you Howard!

Breathless in Bruxelles (Wild, Wild Rumpus!)

Had a really great, tremendously exhilarating gig in Brussels last Saturday night as Wild Rumpus hit the boards live with myself, DJ Cosmo, and Video Artist Rob Rainbow in tow, playing a set at the Klinkende Munt Festival at the fabulous Beurrschouwburg, an ancient art establissement belgique I had played 2 or 3 times before in the 90's...I've always loved playing there (and in Belgium in general) and this was the best yet--despite some cosmetic alterations a couple years ago the Shu-burg was the same imposing stone edifice/townhouse of high/low art hijinx (with an amazing new terraced dining facility on the top floor) and was rocking rocking rocking with lots of fascinating artists playing and overflow crowds running up and down the stairs as the action was taking place on multiple levels/performance spaces...

Visual artist Rob Rainbow with Wild Rumpus (Cosmo and Gary), roof of the Beursschouwburg, Klinkende Munt Festival, Bruxelles, 7/7/7

Gary with Wild Rumpus, Bruxelles, 7/7/7

photos by Kris Mouchaers | Click to enlarge

Jetted in Friday morning, Brussels was enjoying an early fall apparently but hey it was okay by me as it's been sweltering here in NYC so it was a lovely change-up weather-wise, crashed for a few then had an excellent Italian style lunch with scintillating Sinta Wibowo who was one of the very very helpful festival crew, and we were later joined by Beurrschouwburg artistic director Cis Bierinckx, whom I had last encountered at the Walker Art Center when he was working alongside director Philip Bither when I played there with Fast 'n Bulbous a couple years ago...that night had dinner with our Live Nation booking agent Peter Boonen, a very sweet and funny guy guy who took me out for a real Flemish homestyle treat of flamande and frites washed down with a couple of Maes (great hops de Belge), then partook of 2 excellent sets first by Dez Mona, a cool local band with a singer possessed of an extraordinary counter-tenorish voice and poetic jazz noir sensibility, w/ acoustic bass percussion and keys behind him, very Jacques Brel-ish/Bowie-ish in places, check them out here--I liked them very very much. Later downstairs another treat new to me...Portugese one-man band sensation The Legendary Tigerman (a/k/a Paulo Furtado, check him here), who did a hopped-up variant on low down roadhouse grind ala The Cramps/Alan Vega but with his own thing in place, had some great black and white home made films going on behind him which he keyed in on at critical junctures, replete with half naked models, moody lighting and visual content that referenced the original "Honeymoon Killers" film, the work of Coffin Joe (Jose Mojica Marins), and other seminal cinematic touchstones...he ended with a wild rendition of Hasil Adkins' "The Hunch"--yeah!! Super nice guy too, chatted with him in the dressing room afterwards--knows his stuff, very conversant too with historical precedents Dr. Ross and Joe Hill Louis (forgot to ask him about One String Sam...)

Friday Cosmo showed up from London mid afternoon with Rob Rainbow, super nice guy and a live visuals whiz who last worked with us at the ICA London Wild Rumpus gig a year ago, we grooved around central Brussels hitting the beignets kiosks and chocolaterias for an hour or so, then had a long long sound check set-up...later that night checked out Jeremy Warmsley who preceded us (www.jeremywarmsley.com) an amazing UK singer with another great high voice and a very charming/whimsical songbook, full of left-field hooks--excellent band also! Then Wild Rumpus hit at midnight, first up me solo with some of my silent film clips, then the full-on group experience and WHAMMO! Had 'em up and at 'em and dancing nonstop, Colleen Murphy and I have reached a new level of telepathic rapport viz. improvising off each other's energies with Rob Rainbow's throbbing retinal assault going on behind us, I was burning the blisters off my fingers guitar howling insane with a double amped set-up and we were really going for it and really really in synch at this show...whew!!

3am and we couldn't play no more, and I managed to get about 2 and a half hours sleep before it was time to split for the airport...bye bye sweet Belgium...another fast 'n furious gig that left me breathless and lit our improvisational creative lights... can't wait for the next one with Colleen, which we hope to announce shortly--stay tuned!

xxLove

Gary

Post Independence (Summa of Love)

"We're all still here, no one has gone away" (true of everyone currently reading this, aint it so) croons Robin Williamson on "Job's Tears", the opening track from The Incredible String Band's tres incroyable "Wee Tam" album--and did you know Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, is a (big) huge self-avowed String Band fan? Might be due to the onomatopoeia factor/congruence of his very own (Christian) name to the aforementioned Scottish bard RW--

Yes the ISB has consistently made several of my Best Album/Desert Island Disc lists over the years, particularly their "5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion" album (folkdom's "Sgt. Pepper") which usually merits my #1 selection--"Rise up Lazarus, sweet and salty"...saw Robin Williamson 9 years ago this spring at Symphony Space in a basically trad. folk duo with my friend John Renbourn, and sad to say he a) stuck to his growling lower register throughout, voice never once ascending lark-like into the blue empyrean--or at the very least the rafters of Symphony Space--with his spooky melismatic patented crafty wail (even the birds when they sing, it's not everything/to them), and b) made a scathing self-deprecatory reference upon (finally) pulling a String Band song out of his wee tam at the end ("The Circle Is Unbroken"--nope, not the American country gospel tune "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?"--though maybe an answer song to that half-remarkable question--nor from the "5000 Spirits" superb followup album "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter"--originally titled/announced in Elektra press releases that year--1968--as "The Hangman's Lovely Daughter"--much better title--I remember these things--w'happen, Danny? Nope, this was from "Wee Tam", one disc of a UK twofer in here it is 1969, sold as 2 separate albums in the US) on the order of "Now I shall sing a song you may remember, featuring lyrics that kept me permanently obscure for years"(!)--I actually wrote "for yeats" by mistake first... but I mean how the heck can the guy be embarrassed about his trailblazing incandescent genius output "through the past brightly" (funny story about the Stones inviting Heron and Williamson to hear a test pressing of "Their Satanic Majesties Request", which contains lots of attempted faux String Band moves/cops, particularly "Sing This Song All Together" and "Gomper"--apparently the Scotsmen didn't quite approve)... Anyway check 'em out--still incredible, still miraculously great (up till around "U", then the Scientology rot set in), most of their music hasn't aged one whit in my estimation, which is alot more than can be said for much of the class of '67 in the current nostalgic creepy-crawl backwards trawl into summer 'o love territory (Steve Holtje has a real good rundown up on CultureCatch.com here)...

Two great local live gigs I'm still buzzing from: Mike Edison, former High Times, Heeb, and Screw editor (how's that for a resume?) at KGB Bar last Tuesday, reading from his upcoming memoirs for Faber "I Have Fun Everywhere I Go", shpritzing the crowd wildly with adrenalized rants over the upstairs room's tinny soundsystem (c'mon, guys, time to upgrade already!), while pummeling a Nord keyboard (same model I gifted Jerry Harrison with before we went to play in Russia last year--good taste is timeless!), coaxing random shrieks and barbaric yawps out of a theremin and boogie-ing to funk and acid jazz grooves courtesy of his Rocket Train Delta Science Arkestra--yeah!! Catch him every Tuesday this month if you're in town...

also Roswell Rudd and his Malicool project at the Jazz Standard last Friday night as part of the JVC Jazzfest, one of the world's greatest living jazzmen and a hell of a stick man improvising his heart out with the creme de la creme of African and Latin American musicians, the kora player lost his passport in Europe and didn't make the plane over (sounds familiar) but really they didn't miss him one whit, swirling and skirling hypnotic deep groove lines abounded, Ros sang a great opening tune too (he should sing more often, he sounds like his trombone) and later summoned up a swinging "All Through the Night"...byootiful!!

Meanwhile my new Wild Rumpus project with Collen "DJ Cosmo" Murphy got another boost this week from the editors at iTunes UK, who picked our new single "Musical Blaze-Up" as one of their Best of the Week featured downloads, alongside the likes of Prince, Gwen Stefani, Crowded House, Happy Mondays--check it out (better yet, download it!) here.

That's all folks, gotta plane to catch, destination Bruxelles for a midnight rendezvous with Cosmo on Saturday as we pump Wild Rumpus live at the Klinkende Munt Festival...

Hope to see summa ya there!

xxLove

Gary