The Classical
Had quite an entertaining live appearance on Bob Fass' late night "Radio Unnameable" program on Thursday April 23rd at midnight...Fass is a NYC treasure, check out this great profile, "Voice of the Cabal" from The New Yorker...and also this trailer for a documentary about Radio Unnameable...
I first started listening to Bob's show in a kind of lost year for me back in 1975...I had recently graduated from college, and vague plans to open a cinema showing nothing but horror and science fiction films with my partner Bill Moseley, (we had done this horror movie thingy as a weekly event at Yale under the aegis Things That Go Bump in the Night) had remained vague; in any case, I found myself cooling out over the summer in Nantucket and managed to snag a gig playing solo guitar during Happy Hour at the estimable Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant/hotel the day I arrived there--and met the first true love of my life at the bookstore across the street (I love hanging out in bookstores), a much older woman (much--she was 56, I was 22--an incredibly wise woman, super-creative, magical...and very very sexy) and, and well, uh, eventually moved in with her on the upper west side here in NYC that fall. Where I listened to a lot of WBAI, her favorite station (Pacifica Radio's flagship freeform station)...and that is where I caught Bob Fass in action for the first time, spinning Dylan's brand new "Blood on the Tracks" album weeks before its official release...I dug this guy's on-air style and laid-back hipster approach a lot, having been the music director at Yale's WYBC FM myself for a year or so and holding forth over the aether with my own show "The Sounds from England (and other delicacies)" (s'funny, but the two other non-English delicacies I regularly spun on my program were Tim Buckley and Captain Beefheart--and you know the story, I eventually wound up playing with Beefheart, and with Tim Buckley's son Jeff)...
Anywho over the years I managed to hear some of Bob Fass' celebrated air-checks, perhaps the most famous is the time he had Dylan and Dylan's then running-buddy my pal Bobby Neuwirth up at WBAI during a hiatus in NYC from recording "Blonde on Blonde" in Nashville, the date was January 26th 1966...Dylan gets on the mic and starts taking listener's calls and, well, this is a classical exercise in "oh snap!" adrenaline-rapping in which pretty much every well-meaning and innocent fan is sucked into the maw of Dylan's then razor-lined defense mechanism, into which they are all and sundry rendered unto mince-meat or in some gentler moments silly putty, you can check out 12 YouTube audio clips of the entire show beginning here..."Why are some of your songs so long?" "I get paid by the word..."
So years later Bob Fass and I have become Fass friends and he's had me on his program a bunch of times, this occasion I was summoned to celebrate the release of Dylan's new album "Together Through Life", which I like a lot--"hypnotist collector" Mitch Blank provided an advance copy of the record, and we sat there and listened and commented and then I played a bunch solo acoustic, debuting some new songs, the legendary Paul Krassner called in, I used to love his magazine The Realist all the time in the late 60's, he was in excellent form on Bob's show and I am glad to hear he is still going strong. I asked him to elucidate on the writing of perhaps his greatest comedic achievement, "The Parts Left Out of the Manchester Book" and he had me and Bob's unpaid assistant (and hopefully the listening audience) spellbound...Paul has a regular blog on the Huffington Post, check it out here, certainly Paul Krassner is one of the last of the gonzo truth-tellers in the sacred American tradition of visionaries on the order of Lenny Bruce and Hunter Thompson...it was a good night and the program is up for the moment at the WBAI archives, check it out here (scroll down to the April 24th Radio Unnameable entry at 12:00am to download it)...
Wednesday April 29th the Blaueu String Quartet from Amsterdam held forth at the Teatro in the Italian Academy up at Columbia University and they were simply sensational, I felt really bad that more folks hadn't been alerted to this event as it truly was some of the finest interpretive playing I've ever heard...they all played magnificently together in a program that touched on Schubert's Quartersatz in C Minor, a single movement piece that has to rank with "Death and the Maiden" as the greatest of his quartets...by far the highlight of the program was the final piece, Janacek's 1923 String Quartet No. 1, "The Kreutzer Sonata", inspired by Tolstoy's short story, one of the most modern of musical compositions which really provides a programmatic narrative rush in the way the music enfolds as a macabre momento mori, as a chilling tale of jealous passions so stirred by the apprehension of classical music itself as to render the protagonist capable of explosive violence...Nienke Van Rijn on violin, Michaekl Gieler on viola, and Johan Van Iersel on cello were all superb, but for me the real joy of the evening was observing the incredible Emi Ohi Resnick in action. Emi is of Japanese-Jewish descent and is simply one of the finest violinists I've ever heard, ever--she has a riveting presence on stage and a nuance of touch and expressive fluidity on her instrument that just knocked me out...she really shone also in a rendition of Hungarian composer Kodaly's Duo for Violin and Cello with her husband Johan Van Iersel...and I am soooo happy to be working with her on the collaborative score I am composing and performing live along with Reza Namavar and Wilmar Devisser and the Cameleon Ensemble at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam June 23rd and 24th at the Staadschouburg, accompanying a screening of Abel Gance's silent anti-war masterpiece "J'Accuse", newly restored by the Netherlands Film Museum--you can see the flyer for the show here...stay tuned...
Last night Nina Winthrop and Dancers presented an incandescent program of modern dance pieces at the St. Mark's Church Danspace entitled "Glee", and Caroline and i were rapt through an hour plus voyage into the unconscious mind made manifest, the choreography was superb and perfectly fit the scores prepared by minimalist composer Jon Gibson, a long time member of Phillip Glass' ensemble...
woops, Sunday morning, time for waffles at Le Petite Abeille (yeah!!) ...
xxLove
Gary
ps Also wanted to alert you guys to a brand new web-page devoted to my solo concerts--
Webmaster Tanya has outdone herself here, including embedded clips from my solo appearance at the Holland Festival a couple years ago at the famed Amsterdam Concertegebouw...
plus there are a slew of links to YouTube clips of me performing solo in London, Bilbao, and St. Petersburg Russia...
also, Dean Bowman and I have just completed our debut album as Chase the Devil at Shelter Island Studios here in Manhattan, with Steve Addabbo at the controls...Steve got a wonderful sound up to what was essentially a live recording of our spiritual roots duo...check out my myspace site to preview a track from it--our version of William Blake's eternal "Jerusalem" (music by Sir Hubert Parry).
I first started listening to Bob's show in a kind of lost year for me back in 1975...I had recently graduated from college, and vague plans to open a cinema showing nothing but horror and science fiction films with my partner Bill Moseley, (we had done this horror movie thingy as a weekly event at Yale under the aegis Things That Go Bump in the Night) had remained vague; in any case, I found myself cooling out over the summer in Nantucket and managed to snag a gig playing solo guitar during Happy Hour at the estimable Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant/hotel the day I arrived there--and met the first true love of my life at the bookstore across the street (I love hanging out in bookstores), a much older woman (much--she was 56, I was 22--an incredibly wise woman, super-creative, magical...and very very sexy) and, and well, uh, eventually moved in with her on the upper west side here in NYC that fall. Where I listened to a lot of WBAI, her favorite station (Pacifica Radio's flagship freeform station)...and that is where I caught Bob Fass in action for the first time, spinning Dylan's brand new "Blood on the Tracks" album weeks before its official release...I dug this guy's on-air style and laid-back hipster approach a lot, having been the music director at Yale's WYBC FM myself for a year or so and holding forth over the aether with my own show "The Sounds from England (and other delicacies)" (s'funny, but the two other non-English delicacies I regularly spun on my program were Tim Buckley and Captain Beefheart--and you know the story, I eventually wound up playing with Beefheart, and with Tim Buckley's son Jeff)...
Anywho over the years I managed to hear some of Bob Fass' celebrated air-checks, perhaps the most famous is the time he had Dylan and Dylan's then running-buddy my pal Bobby Neuwirth up at WBAI during a hiatus in NYC from recording "Blonde on Blonde" in Nashville, the date was January 26th 1966...Dylan gets on the mic and starts taking listener's calls and, well, this is a classical exercise in "oh snap!" adrenaline-rapping in which pretty much every well-meaning and innocent fan is sucked into the maw of Dylan's then razor-lined defense mechanism, into which they are all and sundry rendered unto mince-meat or in some gentler moments silly putty, you can check out 12 YouTube audio clips of the entire show beginning here..."Why are some of your songs so long?" "I get paid by the word..."
So years later Bob Fass and I have become Fass friends and he's had me on his program a bunch of times, this occasion I was summoned to celebrate the release of Dylan's new album "Together Through Life", which I like a lot--"hypnotist collector" Mitch Blank provided an advance copy of the record, and we sat there and listened and commented and then I played a bunch solo acoustic, debuting some new songs, the legendary Paul Krassner called in, I used to love his magazine The Realist all the time in the late 60's, he was in excellent form on Bob's show and I am glad to hear he is still going strong. I asked him to elucidate on the writing of perhaps his greatest comedic achievement, "The Parts Left Out of the Manchester Book" and he had me and Bob's unpaid assistant (and hopefully the listening audience) spellbound...Paul has a regular blog on the Huffington Post, check it out here, certainly Paul Krassner is one of the last of the gonzo truth-tellers in the sacred American tradition of visionaries on the order of Lenny Bruce and Hunter Thompson...it was a good night and the program is up for the moment at the WBAI archives, check it out here (scroll down to the April 24th Radio Unnameable entry at 12:00am to download it)...
Wednesday April 29th the Blaueu String Quartet from Amsterdam held forth at the Teatro in the Italian Academy up at Columbia University and they were simply sensational, I felt really bad that more folks hadn't been alerted to this event as it truly was some of the finest interpretive playing I've ever heard...they all played magnificently together in a program that touched on Schubert's Quartersatz in C Minor, a single movement piece that has to rank with "Death and the Maiden" as the greatest of his quartets...by far the highlight of the program was the final piece, Janacek's 1923 String Quartet No. 1, "The Kreutzer Sonata", inspired by Tolstoy's short story, one of the most modern of musical compositions which really provides a programmatic narrative rush in the way the music enfolds as a macabre momento mori, as a chilling tale of jealous passions so stirred by the apprehension of classical music itself as to render the protagonist capable of explosive violence...Nienke Van Rijn on violin, Michaekl Gieler on viola, and Johan Van Iersel on cello were all superb, but for me the real joy of the evening was observing the incredible Emi Ohi Resnick in action. Emi is of Japanese-Jewish descent and is simply one of the finest violinists I've ever heard, ever--she has a riveting presence on stage and a nuance of touch and expressive fluidity on her instrument that just knocked me out...she really shone also in a rendition of Hungarian composer Kodaly's Duo for Violin and Cello with her husband Johan Van Iersel...and I am soooo happy to be working with her on the collaborative score I am composing and performing live along with Reza Namavar and Wilmar Devisser and the Cameleon Ensemble at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam June 23rd and 24th at the Staadschouburg, accompanying a screening of Abel Gance's silent anti-war masterpiece "J'Accuse", newly restored by the Netherlands Film Museum--you can see the flyer for the show here...stay tuned...
Last night Nina Winthrop and Dancers presented an incandescent program of modern dance pieces at the St. Mark's Church Danspace entitled "Glee", and Caroline and i were rapt through an hour plus voyage into the unconscious mind made manifest, the choreography was superb and perfectly fit the scores prepared by minimalist composer Jon Gibson, a long time member of Phillip Glass' ensemble...
woops, Sunday morning, time for waffles at Le Petite Abeille (yeah!!) ...
xxLove
Gary
ps Also wanted to alert you guys to a brand new web-page devoted to my solo concerts--
Webmaster Tanya has outdone herself here, including embedded clips from my solo appearance at the Holland Festival a couple years ago at the famed Amsterdam Concertegebouw...
plus there are a slew of links to YouTube clips of me performing solo in London, Bilbao, and St. Petersburg Russia...
also, Dean Bowman and I have just completed our debut album as Chase the Devil at Shelter Island Studios here in Manhattan, with Steve Addabbo at the controls...Steve got a wonderful sound up to what was essentially a live recording of our spiritual roots duo...check out my myspace site to preview a track from it--our version of William Blake's eternal "Jerusalem" (music by Sir Hubert Parry).
posted by Gary Lucas at 9:20 AM
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