The Musical Box

steve ferguson.

In the midst of what has been an especially active October for live music, we lost an often neglected artistic neighbor. Steve Ferguson, founding guitarist for NRBQ and a longtime staple and elder of the Louisville music scene, died last week after an extended battle with cancer. He was 60.

A Louisville native, Ferguson’s tenure with the acclaimed NRBQ was brief. He stayed for two albums - a self-titled debut recording (noted for its crackup cover of Sun Ra’s Rocket Number Nine, a tune that would pop up in NRBQ’s stage shows well into the ‘90s) and Boppin’ the Blues (a collaboration with rock ‘n’ roll forefather Carl Perkins) - before leaving the band in 1970. But an extraordinary live document of Ferguson’s NRBQ days was offered in 2006 thanks to a concert recording pulled from the archives of shows held at Cincinnati’s fabled Ludlow Garage.

Over the past two decades, especially, Ferguson became a fixture in Louisville clubs with his band the Midwest Creole Ensemble. Stabs were made at forging a similar following in Lexington. But aside from a few slimly attended shows at the defunct Lynagh’s Music Club, such an audience never materialized.

The NRBQ link remained strong enough, however, for Ferguson and fellow NRBQ founder Terry Adams to reunite for a 2006 studio album called Louisville Sluggers. But slip on Ludlow Garage 1970 and you will hear the splendidly ragged guitar speak of Flat Flew Flewzy and the wonderful rootsy corrosion of Wan Do. Within the playing are seeds of the wondrous groove Ferguson would explore so inventively later with his own bands.

rashied ali.

An extraordinary improvisatory voice on percussion and a free-jazz journeyman for nearly 50 years, Rashied Ali died on Wednesday at the age of 76.

Perhaps not an immediately recognizable name to some, Ali collaborated with such masterful and diverse jazz innovators as Lee Morgan, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, James Blood Ulmer, Jackie McLean, Gary Bartz and dozens of others. He also operated a New York club from 1973 to 1979 called Ali’s Alley that catered to the avant garde. But like Ali himself, the venue operated without blinders on and kept an open ear out for a variety of adventurous jazz styles.

Topping Ali’s underappreciated legacy, however, will always be his mid ‘60s work with John Coltrane. Like Sanders, he was a key band key band member as Coltrane’s more spiritually inclined music plunged deep into the avant garde. Though limited to roughly three years, the alliance produced a flood of music that included three rugged, exploratory classics: 1965’s Meditations (which featured Ali playing alongside Elvin Johns, the workhorse drummer from Coltrane’s previous quartet), 1966’s Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (which is split between breathtaking versions of Naima and My Favorite Things) and one of the great avant garde excursions of all time, the improvisational drum sax/drum recording  Interstellar Space. The latter was cut five months before Coltrane’s death in 1967.

Ali performed in Lexington in April 1998 as part of a tribute to ‘60s jazz spearheaded at the Kentucky Theatre by the acclaimed bassist and educator Richard Davis. Though full of engaging music, especially a mantra-like vamp on Coltrane’s immortal A Love Supreme, the evening turned ugly with Davis and an audience member exchanging verbal barbs in the midst of the concert. Many patrons walked out. Still, exchanges between Ali and pianist Stanley Cowell possessed an arresting, conversational flow.

Recommended Ali listening: a wonderful 1991 Coltrane tribute with saxophonist Charles Gayle and the extraordinary bassist William Parker titled Touchin’ on Trane, the two Judgment Day recordings from 2006 that Ali cut with his quintet and, for those hungry for the heavy stuff, Interstellar Space.

les paul at the iridium.

During a series of New York trips taken during the winter months over the past seven years or so, I made the Broadway jazz club Iridium a regular destination. My excursions were invariably on weekends. But the Iridium beckoned all patrons to stay over until Monday. That night, week after week, belonged to the vanguard guitarist Les Paul. My travel plans never allowed for that. But many times I wondered what the mood was like on Monday nights, with Broadway theatres traditionally dark and the great Les lighting up the Iridium.

Paul died today at the age 94. A landmark innovator as an instrumentalist, recording artist and vocalist, Paul’s legacy will always be his pioneering use of electric guitar. The solid body electric model guitar that Paul eventually gave his name to - the Gibson Les Paul - was a sleek, powerful and efficient instrument adaptable to playing jazz, rock and pop. Paul himself used variations of it for hits that date back to the ‘50s. But as his own career began to wind down in the ‘60s, an entire rock ‘n’ roll generation embraced Paul’s creation. Among the artists to crack thunder with the Gibson Les Paul as their signature guitar were Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page.

Paul’s recordings, from the ‘50s on, generally took a back seat to his guitar innovations. But a prime recommendation for curious listeners is 1975’s Chester and Lester, a warm, unimposing collaboration with another guitar giant, Chet Atkins.

Or if you feel like waking up the neighbors, slip on the remarkable 2008 DVD release The Who Live at Kilburn 1977 and watch Townshend turn an arsenal of Gibson Les Pauls into dangerous weapons indeed.

john "marmaduke" dawson, circa 1970. photo by robert altman.

The death last Tuesday of John “Marmaduke” Dawson closes another chapter from the golden age of psychedelia.

Dawson was the chieftain of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, a rock-minded outfit seriously devoted to progressive and traditional country influences - especially those that made up the Buck Owens/Bakersfield music that resided on the West Coast.

That Dawson was a Detroit native from a well-to-do New York family may have made his position in a ‘60s psychedelic scene centered in San Francisco a curious one. But when the New Riders formed, all kinds of prevalent rock-oriented bands - The Byrds, The Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers, among them - were refashioning roots and country inspirations into sounds of their own.

Granted, it helped that the Grateful Dead figured prominently in the New Riders’ formation. Jerry Garcia was a co-founder in a workingman’s holiday lineup that had him playing pedal steel guitar, a position nicely absorbed by Buddy Cage after Garcia bowed out in 1971.

For many, the package tours the Dead and the New Riders undertook in 1970, around the time the latter’s self-titled debut album was being recorded, represented Dawson’s best work. A recent listen to a bootleg recording of a sterling 1969 New Riders concert made with Dawson, Garcia, co-founding guitarist David Nelson and the Dead’s rhythm section of Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart, revealed an upspoiled looseness that began to drift away as the Dead members left and the band’s reliance on more drug-oriented novelty songs began to steal focus in the eyes and ears of fans.

Dawson only played in Lexington once that I know of, when the New Riders performed at the Kentucky Theatre in the spring of 1979, not long after the departure of drummer Spencer Dryden. Dawson retired from a life in music in 1997 and moved to Mexico. He died there last week from stomach cancer at the age of 64. Nelson and Cage have fronted a new New Riders lineup since 2005.

Recommended NRPS listening: 1971’s New Riders of the Purple Sage for its rootsy psychedelic charm; 1972’s Powerglide for its often overlooked instrumental command; and 1973’s The Adventures of Panama Red for its often confident but shameless renegade spirit.

michael jackson

During a late night dinner with a friend at Ramsey’s following last night’s Dr. John concert, a waitress posed this question.

“What do you think about MJ?”

At that moment, I had no opinion. I didn’t know what she was talking about. But the omen wasn’t good. There is only one reason a server brings up Michael Jackson before even asking for your order.

Sure enough, Jackson had died hours earlier. He was 50. But since the singer spent nearly 4/5 of his life as a performing artist, he seemed much younger. Befitting his often mercurial life, no one last night could confirm the cause of death.

I respected Jackson as an artist tremendously. He also infuriated the daylights out of me. As giant as his talent was, it could never match the out-of-all-bounds persona that surrounded him. He was a genius. He was a star. He was as commanding a presence as pop music has ever known. But his fallibility seemed to be that he recognized all of those attributes before becoming obsessed with them.

Now is not the time to go into that, though. This is an honest tragedy. Whatever the cause of his death, Jackson will always be as much a victim of pop’s grandest excesses as an architect of some of its most lasting commercial hits.

More on this later.

tim krekel

Tim Krekel never broke things open in Lexington the way he did at home in Louisville. There, he was, justifiably, a revered pop/folk/Americana favorite who caught a glimpse of national fame as a one time member of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band and a collaborator and musical chum of everyone from Sam Bush to Bo Diddley to Delbert McClinton.

But Krekel was also a friend to the rock ‘n’ roll faithful in Louisville. Catching him at a festival there was always a blast. But hearing him within the then-smoky walls of the Air Devils Inn was less a performance situation than a relaxed evening among friends.

Within the past year, it looked as if Lexington might be beginning to take more notice of Krekel. There were two splendid but modestly attended shows at The Dame. Then came a Friday evening at last fall’s Christ the King Oktoberfest that had Bush and Krekel making cameos in each other’s sets. When Krekel came out late in the evening to harmonize with Bush on All Night Radio (a song the former wrote and the latter popularized) the sense of camaraderie was almost intoxicating.

That’s when you sensed good things were ahead for Krekel. But then, with musical pals like Bush at his side along with a devoted hometown fanbase following that was just beginning to creep to Lexington, some of that goodness had already been won.

Krekel died yesterday at his Louisville home. He had been battling abdominal cancer since the spring.

“I may just be happier now than I’ve been in my whole life,” Krekel told me prior to a Dame concert in March 2008. “Maybe that just comes from years of doing this. But my expectations these days are all in the right place.”

For more of our interview, click here.

hugh hopper

We lost Hugh Hopper last weekend. The acclaimed British bass guitarist and cornerstone Soft Machine member, as well as one of the flagship members of a fertile Canterbury prog-rock scene that began to boom in the late ’60s, died on June 7 after a battle with leukemia.

We wrote of Mr. Hopper’s wonderful music last Decemeber when several of his prog-rock mates teamed for a benefit performance on his behalf. We refer you to that post again today for recommendations on some of the astounding recordings Hopper released during and after his Soft Machine tenure.

Hopper was a musical journeyman in every sense of the term, only his sense of adventure was always countered by exquisite taste. While his “fuzz bass” tone from the psychedelic prog heyday of the Softs may have possessed a Hendrix-like intenity, his latter solo and band albums turned those temperaments inward with playing that was, at times, blissfully melodic and, in other instances, almost elegantly disruptive.

So this weekend, treat yourself by tracking down or downloading a copy of Soft Machine’s groundbreaking Third or the brilliant 2007 quartet sleeper Numero D’Vol. Kick back. Pour a glass of libation. One of Canterbury’s most prolific spirits will take things from there.

koko taylor

Few artists lived, breathed and celebrated the blues the way Koko Taylor did.

A sharecropper’s daughter born near Memphis, she became one of the few women - maybe the only one - to fully tap into the electric energy of the 1950s Chicago blues scene. From her early Chess recordings to the string of albums she cut for the Alligator label over the past 30 years, Taylor could be as fearsome or sweet as she chose. She seemed to all but channel the great Big Mama Thornton on such trademark tunes as Wang Dang Doodle and I’m a Woman as well as the overlooked Black Rat, a song Thornton popularized in the ‘60s. Taylor’s version of the latter remains a highlight of her 2007 album Old School.

But there was also a graciousness and command about her performances that rightly earned Taylor the uncontested title of Queen of the Blues. During a 45-plus year career, the Grammy winning Taylor wore her crown with dignity and soul.

Yesterday afternoon, the Queen abdicated. Following complications from gastrointestinal surgery, Taylor died in Chicago at the age of 80.

For Lexngton blues fans, this is a seriously tough loss. Taylor was a frequent visitor here through the years thanks to appearances at the old Breeding’s locations on New Circle Road and Main Street, as well as at numerous regional blues festivals.

“The blues came from slavery,” Taylor told me prior to a July 2004 benefit concert for WUKY-FM at The Red Mile. “It came from hard times. I mean, we are black people out here singing the blues. Some of the young people today have no idea what I’m talking about. I picked and chopped cotton. I pulled corn and picked blackberries for our next meal. But I don’t regret how I came up. Them hard times brought me a mighty long way.”

Recommended listening for those unfamiliar with the Queen of the Blues is the 1978 Alligator recording The Earthshaker and its killer treatment of three Willie Dixon gems. She amplifies the already hearty juke joint spirit of Hey Bartender, delivers a version of Spoonful that is nothing short of rattlesnake mean and updates Wang Dang Doodle for a new blues generation.

“All I think about is pleasing my fans, not me,” Taylor added in the 2004 interview. “I don’t need to please me. When I come offstage, I want to hear everyone say, ‘Oh, Koko sounded great.’ That kind of response just does something to me.”

jay bennett.

It was easy to lose track of Jay Bennett after he parted ways with Wilco during the making of the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album in 2001. He issued a steady stream of indie solo albums after that, most of which are now out of print. A personal favorite is a 2004 record of starkly defined confessionals titled Bigger Than Blue. I found it in a Cincinnati record stories last winter marked down to $4. It was as if nobody else wanted it.

But it was with Wilco that Bennett made his mark. At the band’s two initial Lexington shows - a 1996 Kentucky Theatre concert that it decidedly stole from the headlining Jayhawks - and a crammed, hopelessly sold out Lynagh’s date the following winter - Bennett was the utility man, coloring in founder Jeff Tweedy’s songs with guitar and keyboard orchestration that was, alternately sullen, sweet and disturbing.

Bennett died in his sleep Sunday morning at the age of 45. Details of his death are still unfolding. But his relationship with the Wilco world was strained and sad during his final days. Earlier this month, he sued Tweedy for back royalties from his Wilco days. In late April, in a detailed post on his myspace page, he wrote that he was facing hip replacement surgery without insurance.

That Tweedy and Bennett were not on the best of terms isn’t a huge surprise. The 2002 Wilco film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart chronicled the deterioration of their professional relationship. This weekend, Wilco’s website simply has the message “Jay Bennett R.I.P.” sitting without fanfare in the upper right hand corner of its home page.

For those unfamiliar with Bennett’s music but are looking for an introduction, we offer these three recommendations.

+ Give a listen to Bennett’s newest album, Whatever Happened I Apologize. It is available for a free, legal download here.

+ Give a listen to Wilco’s 1996 album Being There, a two disc recording that began the transformation of the band from an alt-country troupe to an inventive pop enterprise. It remains the best of Wilco’s early recordings.

+ Take at look at this YouTube video of Tweedy and Bennett in happier days performing a Being There tune, Misunderstood, which still figures prominently in the band’s concerts today. That’s Bennett with Tweedy at the beginning. He plays keyboards during the performance.

maurice jarre last february in berlin. ap photo by markus schreiber.

The music of Maurice Jarre is instilled in everyone with a love of great film, whether they know it or not. His scores for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, both of which won him Oscars, deservedly accorded the French composer and conductor legendary status over 40 years ago. Throughout his career, though, Jarre scored films by a wildly varied array of groundbreaking directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, John Huston, Elia Kazan, Clint Eastwood and Peter Weir.

Jarre died last weekend, reportedly from cancer, at age 84.

Lawrence and Zhivago, of course, were Jarre’s signature works - familiar but very different sounding epics. Lawrence was pure orchestral splendor with a theme as rich, vast and mysterious as the deserts that Peter O’Toole saw as his kingdom in 1964. Here is a link to a youtube video of Jarre conducting the Lawrence theme.

Zhivago was a different beast. While its centerpiece, Lara’s Theme, was often horribly mangled into easy listening fluff by ‘60s pop lounge lizards, the tune itself was the image of romantic simplicity. The bulk of the Zhivago score was as orchestrally ornate as Lawrence.  But Lara’s Theme offered its graceful melody on balalaika.

As a brief remembrance in today’s New York Times editorial section suggests, there were few film-and-music combinations more enchanting than Jarre’s Zhivago score and the images it illuminated of the movie’s most striking presence: a 24 year old Julie Christie.

Here is a link to a youtube video of Jarre conducting a portion of the Zhivago soundtrack.

Jarre was, like all great film composers, adaptable to the ethnic, cultural and even atmospheric settings of the films he scored. Some of his soundtracks graced movies that were massive commercial hits, such as 1989’s Dead Poet’s Society and 1990’s Ghost. But there were also overlooked triumphs that beautifully emphasized the emotive and stylistic scope of Jarre’s music.

A personal favorite among the obscurities was Jarre’s 1986 score for Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast. The music was a blend of nocturnal orchestration, electronics and even soca music. Maybe a better title for the segment featuring the latter would have been Lawrence of Aruba. The Mosquito Coast remains in-print on CD and is highly recommended.

But for the full effect of Jarre’s music, set aside a weekend, lose the cell phone and watch Lawrence of Arabia and/or Doctor Zhivago from start to finish. Hearing their soundtracks on CD is fine. But what Jarre created for these two epics wasn’t simply music. His scores remain some of the most commanding storytelling devices the movies have ever known.