Jay Wrote

Half Low; Full King   - Appreciations. Alan Sparhawk and a full-throated audience opened for Halloween Alaska at St. Paul’s Turf Club this week.   Too bad most attendees used the opening hour to hollar at each other rather than listen to the Low leader’s intricate intense solo set.   Sparhawk gradually set deep computer beats, brought up an understated electric guitar and used heavily processed vocals to weave mysterious melodies into his songs.   Absolutely no chance to understand one line of the lyrics.   Thus space music: intricate, contemplative.   Imploring vocals had been mis-processed in an intergalactic satellite’s attempt to forward a message concerning another world’s analogue to deity.   We missed that message in the cacophony.   Or maybe just Jim Morrison come back to re-inhabit some Scots-Irish blues.   This was complicated, carefully wrought music.   Time for me to get the most recent Low recording.   ...

Appreciation: Galaxy Express 555 (Christopher Farstad) “Can you hear the real me?” is a question which is not quite heard in the improvisational soundscape performed Thursday at the Khyber Pass.   The computer generated downpour and hail-storm yielded to quadraphonic waves crashing on Brighton Beach.   The amusement park there is closed but loose ride parts and flapping signs sing with the wind and animated orchestrated pipes and valves ask the question:   Where is the Lizard King? Electric organs breed with birdsongs that haunt this unseen movie’s soundtrack before the Yamaha electrosaxophone stirs up Zappa-esque but guitar-less feedback. Does it matter if Christopher tells the truth about not playing the sax?   Hard to say.   That’s a problem with electronica - if there is skillful intonation, can anyone identify it?   But this music is not about tunefulness, not when your overheated wookie cries elicit eruptions of hilarity...

Manoomin by Jay Wilkinson Shake, shss, shss, shake, shhss, shss. Manoomin whispers against the sides of a birch bark makak, stitched with strips of black spruce roots. Not actually rice, but the fruit of a tall green grass that grows on the lakes of northern Minnesota. Grains the shape of a tun­dra spruce’s shrunken needles; the color of the gray and brown underside of a raccoon. Each like a piece of faded amber, hard and smooth; they snap in half from the pressure of a thumbnail pressed against a grain bridging the gap between the tips of index and middle fingers. Manoomin contrasts with the pellets of black paddy rice in Uncle Ben’s blend boxes. That is an agribusiness item, altered for commercial production, grown in petro-chemical sloughs in Califor­nia, harvested by Korean-built combines. Look at it—indistinguish­able from mouse turds. A joke from my Anishinabe friend, Pat Bellanger: “How you cook paddy rice: Put paddy rice and water in a pot with a stone and boil. When the stone ...

Le Percheron, An Appreciation. Hard use, sweat and passion have stripped the varnish from the neck of Adam Linz’s bass.   The worn surfaces fit in just as well as Emel’s classy black beret at the Khyber Pass last week.   Le Percheron (Linz, Noah Ophoven Baldwin (t) and Cory Healy (d), with Levi (vibes) out ill) settled in quietly at Khyber Pass on November 1.   I’d forgotten Linz’s propensities with titles:   maybe Linz’s childhood memories, perhaps offspring of Magritte or maybe Dillinger Four discards….     Big Bear Chases Me started with a seductive rhythm from Linz to which Healy’s drums added funk and soon enough, Noah’s trumpet murmured across the sound stage, adding greater emphasis as the bars passed until Healy’s aggressive rocking drumming reverted to sharp and quieter raps on the rims.   These introduced Linz’s solo on his plucked and lightly amped bass, full of inventive melody and passion, well-accompanied by his vocal...

A Place,  A Sound, An Appreciation Thursday, returning home from Khyber Pass Cafe and three pieces performed by Trever Hagen (trumpet) , Miguel Hurtado (drums), Brandon Wozniak (tenor sax) and James Buckley (bass), I sought to extend the vibe.   I succeeded; it is amazing how contemporary A Love Supreme by John Coltrane remains 54 years on.   The Khyber Pass in St. Paul is a jazz club once a week; owner Emel Sherzad leaves the door open and lights on after closing time most Thursdays and invites a series of experimental jazz performers and fans in for something nearly as intimate as performances in a living room.  The place lacks a stage and commercial taint --- it is filled with a presence of invention. Hagen sat cross-legged on the floor, adding quiet touches to the rocking aggressive and complicated pace set by Hurtado.  The lead was passed to Wozniak for a soulful solo. Hagen played his trumpet without a mouthpiece the whole ...

Seeing “Scary” People this Halloween? (After bicycling past the tent and tarp encampments of people without homes in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.) You may have seen him. His eyes are smallish in his face, not likely to look into your own. Shaven, but not clean-shaven. Shirt might have been only half-tucked in. You may have heard him. Mutterings, not understood, but you might sense the passion, no, better said: the deep, deep anxiety. He’d been told to leave his brother’s house, my house, after, among other things, leaving the tea kettle on the burning stove and walking away from the house. He walked and walked, looking for work and stayed at a cheap motel. He might have ended in a tent under the sumac near the Mississippi, or, had he gone the way of many, to the band of “dual diagnosis” (mental health and substance abuse) folks at the “encampments" in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Troubled, but not so troubled that he did not know it; he was assessed at the U ...

Inventions at Pech Merle                                    Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits                                     nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. H.L. Mencken              In the caves of Lascaux, I’ve heard, the Aurignacian                 Men and women took leave of the other animals,                 a trauma t hey tried to lessen by painting the animal spirits.                  “No Matter What, and After All, and That Beautiful Word So" Hayden Carruth In southwestern France, in the ...