ROCKPILE on the road

“sunday aug 23, leif showed up with koto and lou liberty with her
smaller taiko (taiko means drum so don’t say taiko drum, as like rio
grande river). i played some asian pentatonic scales on my alto. &
i’d have to say we sounded downright beautiful.

leif also brought his hurdy gurdy. as he says it is good for about 20
seconds of shock value. it definitely grabs your attention.

we did talk also about a gameplan for outpost gig. as lou said we
need a beginning, middle, and end. my feeling as well. what we also
discussed was that there not be any “dead air” to the performance, so
that some kind of sound be present at all times. tho this would be
more as what leif described as “uncluttered air” like subtle plinks,
plonks, tones, etc. or as lou used a taiko term “mah” or active
silence. as in dance, she said, where one is poised or moving from
one position to the next.

very enjoyable discussion as to how to create a poetry event that is
enjoyable. “do not bore ye ol audience with thy ego.”

i will try to get a something from the poets so we know what they
plan to do. on the one hand we want to accompany them, but also they
to be participants in what we do. how to make the event cohesive is
our task i believe. the beauty of free improvisation, as we have
found out, is that there are no wrong sounds if one is listening to
what everyone else is doing. that interactive element of surprise we
have come to be good at.

so saturday august 29, or sunday, august 30  or both at 1pm at my studio in placitas is the next
clambake.

i would also like to try setting up as if we would be on stage, so to
organize the sound projection for both ourselves and to an audience.
i will not be taking my rat fink drum kit to outpost for the gig, so
our drums will be those you bring. i am happy to use my conga tho, if
someone wants. same goes for the temple blocks or any other
instrument so desired, but choose your axe. of course there is a
visual delight to our vast array, which is part of the whole thing.

there should be much more discussion as to said gameplan. signals?
“uncluttered air” solos? sound dynamics? flow, et c”

—–JB Bryan

(David Meltzer)

IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC


Brilliant ideas arrive like celestial comets as Mercury conjuncts
Uranus. Think of your mind as a radio transmitter and receiver.
The Aquarius has one of the sharpest intellects of the zodiac. Paint
the town red tonight.

The old tale teller’s ploy: Where to begin? How to start? In the
middle of the night and day of you are the one, it’s always been
music and never words enough to say it, within it or beyond it.
Profound dyslexia. Metaphor abounds. But no way into what the music
is, was, does, reveals, conceals. Ammiel and yrs vaguely spend a late
afternoon in The Musical Offering cafe in Berkeley. “Ami” “El” =
“friend/beloved of God” (?) and “David”, singer/psalmist, the Temple
music director, in a delere. The music jones; Ammiel back from a
blitzgrieg at Amoeba in San Francisco and David fresh from a quick
taste at Berkeley’s mothership Amoeba, backpacks stuffed with CDs
zagging and zigging across crashed empires of diaspora and meltdown.
If you’re in the predatory imperial mode, one can buy and therefore
own any CD art wafer from too many disasters of class warfare,
racism, pimping between the two lines of defeat, exploiting the
exploiters. Hip-hop gangstas are square because they align with
market capitalism venality — hey, we’re fucking entrepeneurs; we
drive Mercedes and don’t pay taxes. We’re just like you, why do you
hate us?

When we talk of music it is about love impossible to speak of.

Jazz Kabbalah, the black & white of it, the page, the letters, ink,
its black absence its white presence

describe the revolutionary harmonic shift wrought by Debussy, Ravel,
Satie, a jazz pianist said, ‘Yeah, they’re playing the black keys’

the sounds made are colorless until pulled out of the air &
transcribed, not even trance- scribed, but blacked onto white onto
black lines of the page

don’t belive it: Scriabin & Huysmans — one shapes sound, the other
pages, but others see chromaticism as color-coded & kabbalistically
each letter has a musical equivalent or each word in Hebrew
explaining or deliniating a musical term is mutable & permutable —

thieves invent moral order;
crooks create classic art;
salesmen are at a loss even though they win when poets don’t

we riff our ruin into say-no amulets & say-yes run-the-lotto-down
dream-book number code
moving the move to alert
Publishers Clearing House to reroute its TV crew in the new SUV to my
front door

numbers & letters
notes & tones

immense hope of overcome & underpay plus underplay oy vey to
reach-out & pull into ongoing networks connected at the core of more