A Music Journey
(I'm guessing that a lot of my subscribers don't necessarily share my passion for music and in particular the musical genres that I favor. Nevertheless, for the small number who do, I have tried to make this a bit of a musical voyage by highlighting (underlining) selected performers whose names or designated link you can click on to see old YouTube videos of their artistry. For those who don't, open your minds and ears and check it out. You might be surprised. The videos aren't necessarily in intimate venues because they simply didn't film in little clubs, but rather at festivals or studios. But I thought it might be fun for those who share my passion, who may or may not be familiar with these individuals. Some you might like, others not so much - it's totally subjective. It’s music. So click away on any name or link that is underlined. Play them loud. Get drunk. Smoke a doobie. You might enjoy it. You will enjoy it!)
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All five of the human senses are entirely subjective. From the fragrant aromas that arouse us, the tastes that stimulate us, the tactile senses we find pleasurable, the visual cues that represent beauty to us, and the sounds and music that move us, all derive from our generational experiences beginning in youth and likely imprint themselves upon us for the rest of our lives over the first few decades of our lives. Each generation has their own preferences and generally looks upon prior and future generations with disdain as to cultural differences that evolve. It is no different for my generation. Certainly intra-generational tastes can vary, but for any one given individual, their tastes are formed from early experiences in their lives and tend to persist unwaveringly.
For me, the most powerful and inexplicably moving human sense is music. Even to this day, I really have no understanding why music can evoke such powerful feelings and emotions. And interestingly, despite growing up in the period of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, the music that moved me most was gospel, the blues, and jazz. Along with sex and drugs, of course. Fortunately, I grew up in a period of musical intimacy, where one could listen to the greatest musical artists in these genres in settings that allowed almost personal interactions. Which is no small thing compared to watching a performer on a Megatron screen in a stadium seating 100,000 people. At a couple of thousand dollars for the cheapest seats. It's an entirely different thing and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to have experienced it.
I grew up in a home where music was appreciated for listening, but no one in my family demonstrated any particular musical skills. My earliest memories of music were along the tastes of my father who loved gospel, and one of his absolute favorite artists was the legendary Mahalia Jackson. (Don't be scared, click on her name for the link, goddammit!) For the uninitiated, she was the most famous gospel singer of her generation and our house was filled with her music much of the time. I got to see her perform at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and several black churches in the New York metropolitan area as a child and youth. Though she always refused to sing secular music throughout her unbelievably successful career, her singing style had profound effects upon the other genres, just as Bessie Smith had influenced her singing style. Resultantly, she was a great influence on future blues, R&B, and even jazz vocalists, from Aretha Franklin to Della Reese to Mavis Staples. I revere her singing to this day and still listen to it frequently.
But one's musical tastes fortunately grow and are nurtured by new experience and exposure and my own tastes grew into a love for the blues and jazz. And for someone like me, I really did grow up in the perfect times. The greatest performers in the world were completely accessible in both small club and theater/auditorium sized venues at ridiculously affordable prices. The world was my oyster in terms of music.
In high school, the essential focal point of my musical experience was without doubt the Schaefer Music Festival. If you are a New Yorker and my age, no further explanation is necessary. But for others, I will clarify. This festival occurred almost every night or every other night throughout the entire summer beginning in 1968, well into the '70s. It took place in Central Park at the Wollman Skating Rink, accommodating perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 people. So while not intimate, you could get pretty damn close to see those performers. And the price? A buck. That's right. A buck to see the greatest musical performers of the western world. It started with a free concert featuring The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, three of the top bands in the nation at the time. And from there, here's just a taste of the featured performers that appeared: Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, BB King, Duke Ellington, Frank Zappa, The Who, Paul Butterfield, Joni Mitchell, Traffic, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Byrds, John Lee Hooker, Led Zeppelin, Sly and the Family Stone, The Band, Van Morrison, Jethro Tull, and on and on and on. Blues, jazz, folk, rock, gospel, you name it. I don't believe there was anywhere else like it on Earth. And if you didn't want to spend even a buck, you could do what a lot of people did and myself as well. You could just climb up in the trees surrounding the skating rink in a haze of cannabis smoke with an indelible sense of communal musical vibes. The sound and view were great from there. Though long forgotten to most, it is an unforgettable musical memory for me and thousands of other people in the New York metropolitan area. I went to scores of concerts there.
Perhaps my single greatest musical concert experience occurred while in high school when a few friends and I won some tickets to a James Brown concert (in the town of Freeport, New York) in some record store contest. We barely remembered entering. Now I like James Brown a lot but he's not a major part of my music collection. And we went to that show not really expecting much. But I can tell you that James Brown didn't give a concert. He essentially invented performance art. The greatest showman I ever saw. It was the single most exciting, exhilarating, best choreographed, and hilarious piece of R&B showmanship that I have ever seen, never to be duplicated by anyone else I ever saw and I've been to hundreds and hundreds of concerts. My friends and I were hoarse and couldn't speak for a couple of days from all the screaming and shouting that we participated in along with a couple of thousand other people. It was literally impossible to stand still and control your hands and legs or your entire body. And I am certainly no great dancer. The show was deliriously intoxicating and if you're not familiar with James Brown's Finale Cape Routine (and even if you are), you owe it to yourself to check out this video clip for a somewhat calmer studio version (click here). It is iconic and downright contagious if you are physically there.
Attending college in the Boston area afforded incredible opportunities to attend concerts and music clubs due to the large number of colleges in the area. Again, I could give a long list of similar names but that would be redundant. Suffice to say that the opportunities were endless, often intimate, entirely affordable, often even free.
I remember a particular winter night, during a snowstorm when we persevered to attend a small club named Lenny's On-The-Turnpike, just outside Boston to hear George Benson, who at the time was rated the greatest jazz guitarist in the world in various polls. His quartet included an 18 yr old acoustic guitarist named Earl Klugh, who was almost as good as Benson and went on to have a separate distinguished career, though playing music that wasn't to my taste. Their performance was great, but the fascinating part was that due to the small size of the club and the snowstorm, there were a total of 12 people in the audience. We were literally chatting between each song, they asking about us and us about them. It was like sitting in a living room and having them play for us. A totally unique experience. Not sure, but I think tickets were five bucks.
Nevertheless, the most profound impact on my musical experiences came through being a part-time roadie for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band during college, through a friend of my college roommate. Whenever they toured through New England, for concerts or festivals, I got the call and was sure to go. During summers I spent weeks on the road with them. While they are one of my favorite bands due to my love of the blues harp (harmonica), the real impact came through seeing firsthand, the greatest living blues legends in America who were playing with them, either as the opening or featured act, and being either on the side, back, or front of the stage the whole time. And watching them interact with each other both personally and musically. No, I didn't become friends with any of them and I was barely noticeable to most. But watching the sweat dripping down BB King's face or the raw power of Howlin’ Wolf (all 6’6” of him), or watching Muddy Waters talk up and joke with the audience, while they were playing their hearts out was absolutely profound and for me, truly unforgettable.
A minor side benefit for me as an amateur blues harp player, was my ability to develop a small collection of Paul Butterfield Hohner Marine Band harps, some of them ‘permanently borrowed' through sleight of hand, and others grabbed when he would toss them away flippantly. He didn't seem to mind.
One of my favorite stories that I tell people is when I had dinner with BB King at the iconic Ratner’s restaurant in New York City, open 24 hours a day and the dining room to a veritable Who's Who of entertainers and New York City mobsters. After one show, both bands and their roadies were invited. This had to be BB's choice because Butterfield was never that generous. And now I will fess up. BB and I sat at different tables and never said a word to each other. Nevertheless, in my mind I like to think that we had dinner together. In a spiritual sort of way, unbeknownst to him.
And just to prove my reputed intimacy with musical artists, I did in fact have dinner for four in Boston with the renowned North Carolina blues man, Mose Allison, after a club performance along with his cousin Graham Allison and his wife Liz, who I happened to work for as a research assistant in school. A charming, loquacious and engaging personality, even beyond his musicality. Oh, Graham and Liz too.
Back in New York for med school, my main musical haunt was the West End Bar in Morningside Heights. No cover except you had to buy two beers for 35 cents each. Most nights they had a house band named the Countsmen. Except it wasn't a band. It was a nightly rotating group of members of Count Basie’s band (past and present) along with other well-known New York jazz figures who just popped in, thus featuring some of the greatest jazz musicians in America. A few times some of my true jazz heroes showed up, including one time, the great Clark Terry. For those who aren't into jazz, he was one of the greatest jazz trumpeters ever. As Dizzy Gillespie succinctly put it, “Clark Terry is the greatest trumpet player on Earth. Period.” And he was one of the funniest as well as seen in this clip sans trumpet (click here) as the eponymous Mr. Mumbles (accompanied by the legendary Oscar Peterson Trio), later broadly popularized when he was the first black member of Johnny Carson's band (or any national TV band, for that matter).
But for my generation there was music everywhere and you didn't have to live in New York City. In the late '70s, my family briefly moved to Minneapolis and there was a small cafe within the Student Union or some such building on the campus of the University of Minnesota. It was a free cafe, seating about 50 to 75 people and would have performances once a week or so. I don't know who ran the place, but they certainly knew their music because there I saw the likes of John Hammond (who once put a band together in a New York club for one week that included Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix together as his lead guitarists, that was unfortunately never recorded), Willie Dixon (who besides Muddy Waters, is considered the most influential Chicago bluesman in history and a writer of over 500 blues tunes), and the truly fabulous jazz bass player, Ron Carter. Ron Carter is so respected in the jazz world that he was/is the most sought after and recorded jazz musician in history having appeared on over 2200 albums and apparently is still going strong in his late '80s.
In Minneapolis, there was also the Cedar Riverside Cafe, a tiny non-alcoholic establishment, right next to 4th Street, as in Bob Dylan's, “Positively 4th Street”. A common trio there was Spider John Koerner’s, sometimes joined by the rapidly-becoming-famous Bonnie Raitt, probably the most unassuming and friendliest celebrity performer I ever met. She took a liking to my son and would occasionally sit at our table with my son on her lap between songs or sets, just chatting away about anything. A remarkable woman and great musical artist.
I'll wrap this up by reminiscing about free jazz concerts in Philadelphia down by the Delaware River at a small band shell that probably sat a few hundred people every Friday night during the summers, though normally there would only be 50 to 100 people there. One night there was an advertised birthday party concert for the great jazz drummer, Mickey Roker, for his 80th birthday. So I went down to listen since it was only a few blocks from my house. It started out just fine with great local Philly musicians and then suddenly some of the most famous jazz musicians in the world started slowly walking out individually after each song, playing their instruments and it was everybody from Dizzy Gillespie to the entire Modern Jazz Quartet, paying homage to one of their own and giving the 50 or so of us in attendance, an unexpected thrill of a lifetime.
I can go on and on dropping names and talking about the fabulous music I was able to intimately hear and see, in stark contrast to the barely accessible great musicians of today. But that's enough. I think the point is clear. We've lost a great deal by placing great musical artists at an immense distance from ourselves, eliminating any sense of musical intimacy and in that way, we've lost touch with their artistry, emotions, humanity, and in some ways, even their music.