But you know me — I’m an information magpie, always interested in shiny bits of intel. I’ve never gotten in trouble because of knowing too much.
Blood Engines
Welcome. I’m Gary, music editor and Archive diver. A query from a loyal reader about our Archives prompted me to take a deep dive into our reviews of, first, Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw’s short-lived but influential SFF zine Flytrap. I like what Kestrell had to say about the zine, in her review of Flytrap #7:
”The tone of Flytrap is set in large part by editors Shaw and Pratt, who list themselves on the masthead as “enablers,” and indeed, their chatty offbeat editorial columns encourage a sense of having been invited into their living room for an evening of literary experimentation. With all the bad news in the SF genre regarding the buyouts and downsizing of numerous publications, it is a welcome change to find chapbooks such as Flytrap maintaining the ‘zine tradition of creating a sense of shared conversation among publishers, writers, and readers.’
Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and so I rummaged around some more to see what else our staff has had to say about the other various projects of Mr. Pratt and Ms. Shaw, as you’ll see below…
To Faith fell the task of reviewing the final Flytrap, #10. This last (for the foreseeable future) issue is a good one, too, with a little bit of something for many tastes. Besides Heather and Tim’s final editorial, with a picture of their terribly cute son, we have fiction, poetry, truths and oddments.’
Faith also worked a short review of Flytrap #8 into a twofer review. She liked it except for the poetry. ‘There’s also an excerpt from Alan DeNiro’s poem “The Stations.” I must admit I couldn’t finish it. It’s the sort of poetry that makes my head ache, but you will probably love it.’
Kestrell also reviewed Flytrap #5, noting that it published twice yearly, ‘except when it isn’t because the editors were on their honeymoon (see the pictures of Hawaii which illustrate this issue). Such eclectic elements are part of what makes this zine so reminiscent of the early days of SF zines. Another element that evokes the lure of zines is the often playful tone of many of the works. Most of the contents are one to three pages in length, allowing one the casual variety of a summer picnic.’
She also nabbed and reviewed Flytrap #6. ‘One of my favorite regular Flytrap features is Nick Mamatas’s column on writing, “Life Among the Obliterati,” and this issue is no exception as Mamatas takes a long hard (and ironic) look at what he calls the “MFA Cliché,” in which he discusses his experiences participating in a Master of Fine Arts program.’
And Flytrap #7! ‘Flytrap 7 is the perfect antidote when you begin to feel your reading has become stale and predictable, but you don’t need to wait until then to enjoy the wit and originality of the writing.’
In fiction by Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt separately, we start with Camille, who reviewed Poison Sleep, one of the books in Tim’s (writing as T.A. Pratt) Marla Mason series. ‘Insightful, philosophical introspections about the nature of the universe this book most definitely is not. Crazy — even immature in a snickeringly charming way — grownup humor and stylish magic clashing against stylish magic at a breakneck pace is what Poison Sleep offers in spades.’
Cat was wowed by Tim’s Rangergirl. ‘ The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl is easily the most impressive debut novel I’ve read in a very long time! It is also one of the best novels I’ve ever read, period. I’ve included it on my list of Best Reads of 2005.’
He ran out of superlatives in his review of one certain collection of Tim’s fiction, Hart & Boot & Other Stories. ‘I’ve read hundreds of single author short story collections over the decades — I must say this collection is far better than almost any of them. Indeed it’s good enough that I’ll be keeping it for re-reading!’
When Tim Pratt went to collect his favorite stories about the Devil, he took the same sort of long view as Richard Thompson did when asked for his favorite songs of the previous millennium. Denise reviewed his Sympathy For The Devil. ‘Besides the usual spooky short-story heroes — Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Neil Gaiman — there are authors that are close to my heart, like Holly Black and China Miéville, as well as perennial GMR favorites Elizabeth Bear, Charles de Lint and Kage Baker. The old-timers are here too, with Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stephenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Dante Alighieri putting in appearances.’
Jason had lots of good things to say about Pratt’s Little Gods, a collection of short fiction. ‘Watch out for Tim Pratt; his name will soon be associated with all the big awards, and his books displayed in stores for years to come. His career is just starting, and if this collection is any indication, it will be a long and fruitful one.’
Kestrell reviewed a collection of Heather’s dark fantasy shorts. ‘When We Were Six contains some very compelling dark fantasy stories and, with three of its six stories being retellings of traditional tales, I would suggest this collection to anyone interested in fairy tale retellings. Additionally, anyone interested in reading prose which contains an almost photographic sensibility (a style which I associate most closely with the writing of Elizabeth Hand) should find these stories extremely satisfying.’
She also liked Tim’s (writing as T.A. Pratt) Blood Engine, another in the Marla Mason series. ‘While I would recommend Blood Engines to anyone who loves a fun and fast-paced fantasy adventure, I would particularly recommend it to readers who enjoyed Jenn Reese’s Jade Tiger, as the descriptions in the martial arts scenes reminded me of Reese’s book even before I read Pratt’s acknowledgements at the back of the book which thanked Reese for the martial arts advice.
It’s not often that you find a book that perfectly combines an intereset in literary history and things culinary. Denise found it in a slim volume, Kim Wilson’s Tea with Jane Austen. ‘At a mere 97 pages, I have to admit I wasn’t holding out much hope for anything really engaging at first. Instead, I found a treasure trove of information disguised as a coffee (tea?) table book that kept my interest and left me happily surprised.’
April wrote a glowing review of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast. ‘Cocteau makes remarkable use of light and shadows, texture, and literally human architecture. The Beast’s castle is otherworldly, cold stone cast in shadows from flickering candles in gilt candelabra held by human arms jutting from the walls. Human statuary flank the dining room fireplace, their eyes shifting to take in the scene before them. An arm rises from the table to serve Beauty or her father. Simple effects put to stunning use with paint and lighting.’
In new music, I review a couple of unearthed live jazz recordings from the jazz detectives at Resonance Records. First is a sprawling set from trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, On Fire: Live From The Blue Morocco.
‘If you love to hear a trumpet and tenor sax playing together as much as I do, you’re in for a treat with this one. Hubbard and Maupin are locked in from the opening of the first track “Crisis,” one of four Hubbard originals which along with two standards and one by bassist Bob Cunningham (who played on a Hubbard album that same year). If you’re doing the math, seven tracks over three LPs or two CDs means these are long tracks. This combo really stretches out, with Hubbard, Maupin and Barron taking some long solos on every tune.’
Next up is one of my favorite Resonance releases ever, Kenny Dorham’s Blue Bossa In The Bronx. ‘This date, released as a double LP for Record Store Day as well as on a single CD, is the epitome of mid-century jazz, played by a top notch ensemble. Dorham is joined by alto saxophonist Sonny Red (Sylvester Kyner), pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Denis Charles. I hope they had as much fun playing this music as I’m having listening to it (I suspect they did).’
I also review another couple of new jazz releases from Steeplechase, guitarist Yves Brouqui’s Mean What You Say, and organist Brian Charette’s Borderless. Of the former, I note, “This album is a solid demonstration of swinging straight ahead jazz focused on hard bop styles. Brouqui plays his hollow body electric with classic tone, an ear for melody and a sure sense of rhythm on seven standards and a three originals.” And sometimes Charette plays it straight, sometimes not: ‘But he takes an unusual approach, coaxing some highly creative sounds out of the organ on the standard “Willow Weep For Me,” and turns Huey Lewis’s ’80s hit “If This Is It” into a lush lounge excursion — pass the wine cooler!’
Inspired by April’s review of the Cocteau film (above) I came up with some francophone music reviews from the Archives. First, my look at four North American Franco folk music recordings: ‘North America has a sizable contingent of French speakers, including much of the Canadian province of Quebec, and much of southern Louisiana. The two regions are connected by history, too; the ancestors of the Louisiana Cajuns were driven out of parts of Canada that were originally francophone when the British consolidated their hold there. The folk songs and dance music of these two regions also share certain traits. You can hear it in these four newly released francophone discs: one Quebecois, one from the Maritime provinces, and two from Louisiana.’
Jack reviews Gwazigan’s Y’Vait du monde: ‘This album’s a sheer delight, but then I tend to like anything that comes from the Quebec musical tradition. This is a group with violin, mandolin, guitar, vocals — and Uillean pipes. Yes, Uillean pipes! Brigid, me dear wife, says this reminds her strongly of Moving Hearts, the near legendary Irish super group that lasted but a few short years in the 80s. No doubt, it’s the pipes, but it does suggest something ’bout the bleeding together of the various Celtic traditions over the past thirty or so years.’
Evangeline Made is just the sort of music that Kim loves: ‘Cajun music is a beguiling, seductive, heady mixture of influences –rhythms borrowed from the Creole, French fiddle and accordion, full voice American vocal styles in which notes are emphatically held and the voice wavers around the tone. Along with its cousin Zydeco, it is one of the best strains of North American roots music: danceable, rhythmic, and oh so congenial’ . Now read her review to see why she was apprehensive about this particular recording.
Red Dog Green Dog’s Good Afternoon, This is Roughly Speaking is also to the liking of Kim: ‘Wow. Get this disc now! You’ll be dancing to a twisted, psychedelic mixture of bagpipes, accordion and hurdy gurdy that’s written after the French folk dancing music tradition. It’s great, man. You won’t be disappointed!’ Sadly this is the only album from this group despite them being around for many years.
We get a three-fer in April’s review of a Disney/Dark Horse collab on Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins: a book, a cookie, and especially some action figures. ‘They stand several inches high and they’re quite substantial, with no moving parts but great dynamism. Each is armed with one of the Gremlin mischief-causing tools (a small pick, a large nail, and a Gremlin-sized, old-fashioned drill, which probably wouldn’t have been nearly so old-fashioned in the 1940s).’
For the Coda, some live music. One of my favorite podcasts, The Rest Is History, just started a series on the Rolling Stones, which is highly recommended for fans and newbies alike. To get you in the mood, here’s a rendition of Paint It, Black from Lyon in 2019.
What’s New for the 13th of April: Anthony Bourdain in print and video; Calexico, Giant Sand and related music; new recordings of ragas, Nordic songs, and vocal jazz, ‘The Night They Drive Old Dixie Down’ performed by The Band
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, la”
The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’
What’s that? A Maypole going up in the courtyard in front of the Green Man Pub? There can be no surer sign that summer’s ‘acumin’ in!’ It looks like the denizens of the pub’s Neverending Session may be lured outside, along with staff members tucked away in offices in the most unlikely places.
Yes, spring has burst out all over, and some of the folks around here seem to be feeling the effects of the impending May Day. Who was that slipping into Oberon’s Wood just now? Well, spring is as good an excuse as any, I suppose.
We’ve got spring greens in our salad, and some of the winter vegetables roasting on the grill, along with some tender lamb steaks, braised with mint and garlic. Are we starting early? I suppose, but this is the Green Man Staff, after all.
So pull up a chair, fill your plate, get Finch to pour you a pint, and feast your eyes on this week’s set of reviews, mostly about Anthony Bourdain, along with music selected by Gary as usual, and ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ performed by The Band.
We’re looking back at some of the late Anthony Bourdain’s productions that we’ve covered, starting with Denise’s review of The Nasty Bits. ‘I’ve always heard that cooks would use “the nasty bits” — pieces nobody else would want, unpalatable to most — to make the most amazing things. Sausages, soups, stews … everything goes in, and the end result is mouthwatering. So it is with The Nasty Bits, a collection of older bits and pieces that have been given new life, and are all the more delectable for being blended together into a single volume.
Joseph praised Medium Raw, in which Bourdain spends more time with those nasty bits. ‘While crassly dropping names and telling foodie stories with an amazing braggadocio, Bourdain’s memoir reveals him to be much more than a superstar chef with a hit show. At heart he is a satirist, whose life requires no exaggeration to act as a mirror to society. Bourdain skewers the foibles of the culinary world with William Thackeray’s surgical precision.’
Mia was less than impressed with Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour. ‘The real problem with this book lies in Bourdain’s choppy narrative; one would expect the chapters to follow his journey chronologically, but scenes in Vietnam are interspersed throughout the book. Did he return to Southeast Asia repeatedly, or did he just need a good editor? Impossible to tell, and the book suffers from the nonexistent continuity.’
While Gary was pulling Calexico reviews from the Archives for the Music section, he came across a review of an excellent performance DVD. ‘Calexico is one of the most interesting bands performing right now, both aurally and visually, and World Drifts In captures the band in all its glory during a festival at London’s Barbican hall in November 2002.’
I was inspired to write up Sudeshna Bhattacharya’s Mohini, which presents three lovely ragas. ‘Bhattacharya plays the sarod, which looks rather like the more familiar sitar, but its neck is made of smooth wood or stainless steel and it has no frets, which requires greater precision on the part of the player and also allows more flexibility in playing microtones. She’s an internationally recognized master of the instrument currently residing in Norway, where she has taught advanced students at the Norwegian Academy of Music — and thus her appearance on this recording by Norway’s Motvind label.’
I greatly enjoyed Erlend Apneseth’s Song Over Støv, played with a large ensemble of top Norwegian musicians. ‘This album is a deep, complex and engaging exploration of the borderlands where Norwegian traditional music meets chamber folk, art song, and avant garde minimalism. We’re in good hands with Hardanger fiddler and composer Erlend Apneseth at the helm.’
I don’t review much vocal jazz, but I very much enjoyed two recent releases, Gary Smulyan’s Tadd’s All, Folks; and Alfie!’s The Songs of Burt Bacharach. ‘American baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan’s project Tadd’s All, Folks brings a batch of Tadd Dameron’s lesser known compositions into the light, assisted by a top-notch combo of pianist Pete Malinferni, bassist David Wong and drummer Matt Wilson, and a new voice sure to make waves in the future, singer Anaïs Reno … Stina Ágústsdóttir, an Icelandic singer who’s one of the top jazz vocalists in Scandinavia, fronts the Stockholm-based quartet they call Alfie!, after that well known Bacharach song. With a repertoire that consists solely of these timeless Bacharach melodies (and lyrics for the most part by Hal David), they’ve captivated Stockholm audiences and now have releaed a debut album.’
From the Archives, a sojourn in the Southwest inspired me to pull out some reviews of my favorite Arizona musicians including Calexico and Giant Sand.
First up is what remains one of my desert island discs. ‘In Feast of Wire the Tucson, Arizona-based Calexico has made the most overtly political statement in its brief but prolific history. Their fourth full-length CD offers a cohesive vision of the collision of cultures in the desert borderland between the U.S. and Mexico. It also rocks.’
Next, a live show from around the same period. ‘It was a night of sublime “desert noir” for the fans of Calexico at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. The seven members of this road-tested Tucson, Arizona-based combo seemed relaxed but energized as they performed nearly 20 songs old and new in a one-hour and 45-minute show.’
Follow that with Convict Pool, an EP that contains some songs the band still features live more than 20 years on. ‘The prolific desert-rock combo Calexico, after touring for a year behind their latest CD Feast of Wire, offered this EP as a sampler of what’s new in their live show. It features three cover songs that showcase some of the band’s diverse influences, and three originals that show off frontman Joey Burns’ continuing growth as a songwriter.’
Calexico’s Edge of the Sun was one of my favorite albums of 2015 and remains high on my list. ‘To me it’s one of Calexico’s more successful albums in quite a while. The songs have strong melodies – both on the catchy upbeat numbers and the more pensive ones – and deeply felt lyrics that lean frequently toward the melancholy, with glimmers here and there of hopefulness. In the time that I’ve been listening to this album, just about every one of its songs has at one time or another been my favorite.’
My first reviews of anything by the genius behind Giant Sand was a two-fer: Howe Gelb’s The Listener and The Band of Blacky Ranchette’s Still Lookin’ Good to Me. Of the latter, I noted, ‘It’s a lost Marty Robbins classic album, if Marty had been influenced by The Beatles, Captain Beefheart and the Meat Puppets, instead of the other way around.’
The first time I saw Gelb live he was touring behind his 2004 release, Giant Sand … Is All Over the Map, which I said. ‘ …has all of the elements Gelb’s fans have come to expect from another excursion into the world of Giant Sand. There are acoustic ballads, punk rave-ups, punkabilly romps, loping blues-rock, a tango, and piano instrumentals that range from rags to Phillip Glass style prepared piano works. And lyrics that range from heart-rending poetry to absurdist non-sequiturs.’
Gelb parlays his admiration for Thelonious Monk into an idiosyncratic style of piano playing, as evidenced on Ogle Some Piano. ‘It’s a curious disc, even by Gelb’s eccentric standards — 19 tracks of piano meanderings in a variety of styles: jazz, rock, pop, tin pan alley and experimental avant-garde weirdness.’
Also from Tucson comes Naim Amor and his Soundtracks Volume II. ‘This is his second volume of Soundtracks music, the first he’s released on Howe Gelb’s OwOm label. It’s a delightful and quirky instrumental recording that blends jazz, lounge and experimental rock in what Naim calls “avant-French pop.” ‘
Giant Sand’s Danish members have their own band, The DeSoto Caucus, and I reviewed their fourth release, called simply 4. ‘They play a kind of laid-back desert rock that owes a lot to the sound of Giant Sand, but on this album they’ve added a major country-soul vibe, in addition to occasional elements of psychedelica. The lyrics of their songs are mostly co-written and co-sung by Anders Pedersen and Nikolaj Heyman, and this new approach now finds the music closely matching the lyrics.’
Another band with Tucson roots is XIXA, and I latched onto their EP Shift and Shadow. ‘The real treat here is the opening title track “Shift and Shadow.” After a squalling, feedback-drenched distorted guitar noise intro, we hear a catchy melody played on a woozy electronic keyboard that’s made to sound like a cheesy ’80s Casio on its last legs. The dry baritone vocals and lyrics on the verses reflect Gelb’s influence, before the song shifts into a cumbia chorus with Topanga Canyon multi-part harmonies.’
Matthew got what he considered a choice assignment, reviewing a couple of classic Folkmanis character puppets: Troll With Hedgehog, and Pinocchio. ‘Some general features of Folkmanis puppets: They are made from a mix of fibers, mostly nylon. The construction shows the greatest care, with areas of high stress being double-stitched and reinforced to withstand multiple uses. Each puppet also comes with an identifying tag, telling you what the puppet is. On the inside of the tag are facts and stories about the character.’
Anyone here remember The Band? My favourite song by the is ‘The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’.
it’s a story about the American Civil War told in the first-person voice of a losing side farmer as written by The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson, and sung by The Band’s southern drummer Levon Helm, which bthe chronicles the final days of the War Between the States through the eyes of a southern farmer and Confederate soldier named Virgil Caine.
Robertson in Testimony told the origins of the song, discussing the fact that he, like everyone in the group but Helm, was from Canada and admitted he was not at all that familiar with the story the Civil War.
So here is The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’.