Secret Society

I guess a man's got to do what he's best at

And people wonder why I I'm so angry:

19-year-old US Army Private LaVena Johnson, was found dead on the military base in Balad, Iraq in July, 2005 and her death characterized by the US Army to be suicide as a self-inflicted M-16 shot. On April 9, 2008, Dr. John Johnson and his wife Linda, parents of Private Johnson, flew from their home in St. Louis for meetings with US Congress members and their staffs. They were in Washington to ask that Congressional hearings be conducted on the Army’s investigation into the death of their daughter, an investigation that classified her death as a suicide despite extensive evidence suggesting she was murdered.

[…]

After two years of requesting documents, one set of papers provided by the Army included a xerox copy of a CD. Wondering why the xerox copy was in the documents, Dr. Johnson requested the CD itself. With help from his local Congressional representative, the US Army finally complied. When Dr. Johnson viewed the CD, he was shocked to see photographs taken by Army investigators of his daughter’s body as it lay where her body had been found, as well as other photographs of her disrobed body taken during the investigation.

The photographs revealed that LaVena, a small woman, barely 5 feet tall and weighing less than 100 pounds, had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument, perhaps a weapon stock. Her nose was broken and her teeth knocked backwards. One elbow was distended. The back of her clothes had debris on them indicating she had been dragged from one location to another. The photographs of her disrobed body showed bruises, scratch marks and teeth imprints on the upper part of her body. The right side of her back as well as her right hand had been burned apparently from a flammable liquid poured on her and then lighted. The photographs of her genital area revealed massive bruising and lacerations. A corrosive liquid had been poured into her genital area, probably to destroy DNA evidence of sexual assault. [Emphasis mine.]

Despite the bruises, scratches, teeth imprints and burns on her body, LaVena was found completely dressed in the burning tent. There was a blood trail from outside a contractor’s tent to inside the tent. She apparently had been dressed after the attack and her attacker placed her body into the tent and set it on fire. [Emphasis mine.]

[…]

The Army investigators initially assumed Private Johnson’s death was a homicide and indicated that on their paperwork. However, shortly into the investigation, a decision apparently was made by higher officials that the investigators must stop the investigation into a homicide and to classify her death a suicide.

As a result, no further investigation took place into a possible homicide despite strong evidence available to the investigators.

More at FireDogLake, Feministing, Electronic Village, Kate Harding (Salon), Buzzflash, and Megan Carpentier (Jezebel).

There's a petition for a full investigation at Color of Change, and a heartbreaking interview with LaVena's parents on Democracy Now (starts 23:58).

I hear you calling his name, I hear the stutter of ignition

I am so glad I don't have to go through this electoral season without Fafblog. Giblets's latest missive is brutally funny but completely deserved:

What these namby pamby privacy-pamperers don't seem to realize is that in order for Barack Obama to affect real change, he has to get elected president, and in order to get elected president he has to appeal to the millions of ordinary hard-working Americans who want to get wiretapped by Barack Obama - ordinary hard-working Americans like the staff of the Obama campaign. Now that doesn't mean Barack Obama doesn't stand for change, because he totally does! He isn't just going to be spying on you and blowing up the mideast - he's going to be the first black man in history to spy on you and blow up the mideast!

Remember -- now is the time to hold Obama's feet to the fire. After the election is too late -- after the election, he doesn't need us anymore.

RIP Hiram Bullock

I am late with this, but the Independent has a wonderful, heartbreaking obit of the former Gil Evans guitarist. As Ethan says, everyone knows his (great) solo on Sting's (not-great) cover of "Little Wing."

Here is a more recent clip, from last year's Wolfsburg Jazzfestival:

RIP Johnny Griffin

Griffin was one of the first great jazz musicians I saw live, at the Commodore Ballroom during the Vancouver Jazz Festival. I was clearly far too young to be at the Commodore but that was back when they had more of a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude towards carding minors. (Brian Nation surely knows the gig I'm talking about.)

Ben Ratliff (NYT)

Adam Bernstein (WaPo)

Peter Hum (Thriving on a Riff)

David Brent Johnson (WFIU Night Lights)

Peter Margasak (Chicago Reader)

Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)

David Adler (Lerterland)

Here's an example of what Griff did best: a burning uptempo blues from the Vanguard (1981) with Ronnie Matthews, Ray Drummond, and Kenny Washington:

So think about this little scene, apply it to your life

Theatre director Isaac Butler weighs in on the, uh, Complexity Wars, as they pertain to his own corner of the art world:

There's a lot of really great thorny complex bizarre freaky shit out there, and I love that stuff. I love the overwhelming nature of Decasia (which has one of the best final ten minutes of any music piece I've ever heard) and the raw crazy trance power of Animal Collective, I like Jason [Grote] and Shelia [Callaghan's] writing and Songs From the Second Floor is like my favorite movie ever. What all of those works and artists have in common is that the complexity (or thorniness, or experimentalness or whatever we're calling it these days) is fully integrated with the thematic concerns at the root of the work. Furthermore, as Douglas Wolk talks about in Reading Comics, by to some extent frustrating easy conventions, it leaves room for the work to have a different kind of impact, closing one door opens a few others.

What gets me, however, is work that embraces thorniness for its own sake and doesn't really have anything of value to offer beyond it. Now sometimes something is so formally groundbreaking that that's enough to sustain a work of art, but very very rarely. This line is (of course) subjective. I've said many times that I don't think there's much to Blasted or Cleansed beyond the brutality directed towards the audience (although perhaps Soho Rep's upcoming production of the former will cure me of this notion). And part and parcel of my anger at this is the spurious counter argument that claims that saying "work X doesn't really do anything beyond be thorny" is to be either anti-intellectual, anti-complexity, anti-challenging art, or anti-art itself. Frankly, I think that's horseshit designed to invalidate a viewpoint we disagree with.

Read the whole thing. The David Foster Wallace interview Isaac quotes at the end represents a serious turning point in my own thinking about this stuff.

All my pictures are confused and now I'm going to take me to you

Kyle Gann follows up on the David Byrne vs. Bernd Alois Zimmermann controversy that sparked so much discussion here and elsewhere. While I still think people are trying to weigh down Byrne's arguments with baggage he did not pack himself^[1], Kyle's excellent post cuts right the heart of the matter:

Proposition 1: not every thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand piece that's been written is a masterpiece, worth listening to over and over again.

Proposition 2: at least some thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand pieces are beautiful and profound, and those listeners who come to know them well derive immense pleasure from them.

I would hope that both of these statements would seem entirely sensible, non-controversial, and non-contradictory to most people who love music. But in practice, in certain circles -- circles readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with -- it is effectively impossible for anyone to make an argument that flows from Proposition 1 (especially: "this piece of thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is in fact a piece of shit") without people assuming that you are in fact launching a full-bore assault on Proposition 2 ("so you're saying that all my favorite thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is worthless???")

And look, I understand the defensiveness -- especially on the avant-garde jazz side, where the proponents of thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music as The Way Music Must Be did not come anywhere near mounting a successful takeover of the academy, as the hardcore American serialists did. And nobody -- least of all myself -- wants to be seen as trying to re-ignite the Jazz Wars. But really now. We should be able to talk honestly about the merits or demerits of individual thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand works without everyone feeling like the fate of entire swaths of music hangs in the balance. And mentioning that a piece of music offers only thorniness, complexity, and difficulty, without the slightest regard for clarity, communication, and emotional resonance should definitely be fair game.

Anyway, go read Kyle's post, in which he delves into these issues at great length but with terrific incisiveness.

-----
1. Seriously, this is David Byrne we are talking about, people. His latest project is a building as musical instrument. He's collaborated with Robert Wilson on his own crazy-ass operas. He's tried to make art out of a PowerPoint presentation. He's really into Giacinto Scelsi's single-tone music. And perhaps you've heard some of the stuff he did with that band he was in for a while back in the day. A lot of it is, um, pretty weird. David Byrne, of all people, does not hate experimental music. I kind of thought that went without saying.

Laurie Frink update

Amazing news.

Undetected by yes‐men questing for five fleeting nanoseconds of fame

So apparently I'm not even the most famous composer-blogger to attend Netroots Nation this year. (It's not who you were expecting.)

Netroots Nation report - yesterday's panels

Other than Trouble The Water, the two best things I saw at Netroots Nation were Larry Lessig's lunchtime keynote on Saturday, devoted to his new Change Congress initiative, and the panel called "Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Torture and Military Contractors: The Roadmap to Accountability in the First 100 Days," with Vince Warren (executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights), the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, Jeremy Scahill (author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, and Slate's senior legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick. As someone who has music "inspired" by rendition and Blackwater, you have to know I wasn't about to miss this discussion, and it did not disappoint.

The take-home message is that we cannot allow ourselves to become complacent, either before the election or after it. We must hold Obama's feet to the fire on these issues, and the time to do that is now -- because, as Scahill pointed out, after the election, he doesn't need us anymore. Don't allow excitement about Obama's candidacy lull you into complacency -- as we saw in his heartbreaking capitulation on the FISA bill, if he is left to his own devices, Obama will play it safe. It is up to us to ensure that he is not left to his own devices, to ensure that there is constant pressure on him to do the right thing on Gitmo, on Habeas, on torture, on military contractors (who are, by the way, providing Obama's security in Afghanistan), on executive privilege, on the rule of law.

This being a blogger conference, naturally there is embedable webcast video, so y'all can watch for yourselves.

Larry Lessig (skip the painfully lame introductions and fast-forward straight to Lessig's speech, which starts about 6 minutes in):

Webcast powered by Ustream.TV

Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Torture and Military Contractors: The Roadmap to Accountability in the First 100 Days:

TV Show hosted by Ustream

Netroots Nation report - Trouble The Water

The remarkable new documentary Trouble The Water (dir. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal) screened last night at Netroots Nation. It tells the story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath from the point of view of Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, a pair of New Orleans street hustlers. Some of the most gripping footage was shot by Kim herself -- she had bought a video camera on the street for $20 the week before Katrina, and began filming herself and her 9th Ward neighbors as, unable to evacuate, they prepared to face the storm. She continued filming during the hurricane and as the nearby levees topped and her city flooded. Following a harrowing exodus, Kim and Scott met Tia Lessin and Carl Deal in a central Louisiana Red Cross shelter. These two Brooklyn-based filmmakers had originally planned to shoot a film about the Louisiana National Guard, examining how their deployment overseas crippled the response to Katrina's devastation. But while these issues and others still lurk in the background, Trouble The Water is, at its core, a disarmingly intimate portrait of Kim and Scott and the way their lives and the lives of those around them are transformed by the aftermath of the storm.

The emotional core of the film comes in a tremendous scene where Kim, who had recorded some homemade hiphop tracks under the name Black Kold Madina, discovers that her Memphis cousin has the only surviving copy of her CD. She throws the disc on the boombox and raps along to her track "Amazing," her pre-Katrina lyrics taking on tremendous new resonance in light of what we've seen her go through. The audience at the screening burst out in spontaneous applause at the end of Kim's performance -- I am betting this happens a lot.

Trouble The Water opens August 22 in NYC and LA. Fercrissakes go. Everyone needs to see this film.

Can't buy a thrill

One thing I discovered at yesterday's film panel is that The Big Buy (Mark Birnbaum & Jim Schermbeck's 2006 movie about Tom DeLay's Congressional shenanigans) has an awesome noir-jazz soundtrack, courtesy of Dallas-based composers John Bryant and Frank Hames. There's even a music video (with footage from the tracking session interspersed with clips from the film) included as a DVD extra, which they showed during the panel. Unfortunately, the video doesn't seem to be online, but here's a clip that begins with the title theme:

Netroots Nation report - Can Film Do the Job Media Used To Do?

As you might expect, there's not a whole lot of artstalk happening here at Netroots Nation -- it's a long way from NPAC, both geographically and philosophically. (Honestly, though, if we are actually serious about building momentum for a national arts policy or cabinet-level Secretary of Culture position, then we should probably have some kind of presence at this conference.) There is, however, a small but notable contingent of filmmakers (including a surprise appearance by this Oscar-winning documentarian), several documentary screenings, and a string of panels devoted to discussion of film and online video. This makes sense -- there's been a real surge of interest in documentary films over the past decade, as technology has radically reduced the barriers to entry and enabled alternative modes of distribution.

Yesterday's panel tossed around the question Can Film Do the Job Media Used To Do? The speakers included Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, both producers on Farenheit 9/11 and co-directors of Trouble The Water (of which more later); Mark Bimbaum and Jim Schembeck, co-directors of The Big Buy; Matthew O'Neill, co-director of HBO's Baghdad ER; and filmmaker and UT Austin prof Paul Stekler.

One recurring topic in this conversation involved the massive technology-driven changes in the film industry in recent years -- changes that, like the transformations in the music industry, are both exciting and terrifying. On the one hand, there are now unprecedented opportunities for independent filmmakers to get their work out there -- as one panelist pointed out, anyone can buy a Flip video camera for $100, shoot a documentary, and upload it to YouTube. On the other hand, much of the existing institutional support for documentary films has gone by the wayside -- Paul Stekler observed that 35 years ago, all of the panelists would have had steady jobs making documentaries at PBS -- that level of institutional investment just doesn't exist anymore. In fact, Mark Bimbaum's latest project, Stop The Presses, is about the looming crisis in the newspaper business, which is on track for a music-industry scale collapse.

The panelists observed that (as you might expect) most film and network TV execs are shockingly ignorant about viral video, BitTorrent, and the other technological developments that are transforming their industry, although they are now desperately trying to catch up. There was some concern about how the new types of delivery affect the reception of a work -- there is, after all, a huge difference between an active, collective, powerfully emotional experience like going out to see a film in a theatre, versus watching the same content on a computer or on your iPhone. Everyone recognized the importance of getting the work out to a broad audience and feeding the hunger for new ideas, but no one seems certain how newly emerging formats will affect content -- or how they will affect the bottom line. The traditional model for documentary filmmakers is to try to generate buzz around film festival screenings and ideally some kind of limited (inevitably money-losing) theatrical release, then use that momentum to try to drive DVD sales. But what happens to that revenue stream when the DVD format goes the way of the CD? Some filmmakers are experimenting with house-party screenings and the like, and it's clear there are more opportunities than ever to tell new stories and begin new conversations -- but there are also serious questions about long-term sustainability.

Straight to video

Until we finish mixing the "official" audio from LPR , here's some YouTubage to tide you over:

Ferromagnetic [Tim Hagans, solo]

Transit [Nadje Noordhuis, solo] (via Hooves on the Turf)

War is over, if you want it

I have a piece up at NewMusicBox today, "Dispatches From the End of the Jazz Wars."

Please don't tell me 'bout the news

I got my credentials for Netroots Nation, so tomorrow L. and I are flying down to Austin. I will report back from the massive convo of liberal bloggers, and while I'm down there I will do my level best to get a bit of a dialogue going between the legions of hardcore politics junkies in attendance and the arts blogosphere -- as represented by, uh, me. Obviously, I'll be taking in the local music scene, so if you know of any good shows happening in Austin from July 17-20, let me know.

In other news -- our LPR recording from last week turned out really great. Also: mixing a bigband recording takes roughly an order of magnitude longer than you expect. Especially since the engineer I have been working with on these tracks is about to depart for the West Coast for the remainder of the summer. So please have patience. You've heard lots of raw live recordings from this band already -- we want to bring you something different, something that will be (I hope) an order of magnitude more awesome.

Laurie

Much love and support for Laurie Frink.

You've got to be modernistic

David Byrne reviews the Lincoln Center Festival's insane Park Avenue Armory staging of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 12-tone opera Die Soldaten:

The playbill refers to the piece as both a monument and a tombstone, since music in this genre couldn’t really develop any further. With this opera, the end of the road had been reached: like a Finnegan’s Wake of classical music, an aesthetic and formal investigation was carried to [its] logical — and some might say ridiculous — extreme. Joyce’s novel is just about as unreadable as this music is, for many, almost unlistenable. Funny that in the visual arts, it turned out a little differently: that same all-over chaos, no-holds-barred and no-rules-apply aesthetic resulted in works which many now find beautiful and pleasant to behold. (I think the same is true of the late 70s, early 80s No Wave bands, whose noisy music could only be enjoyed in short bursts, yet their artist friends expressing similar impulses became hugely successful.)

[…]

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?

Having closely observed the behavior of New York’s downtown, avant-garde music scene for a few decades, I can say that this impulse is not limited to academic classical composers. There are many musicians and composers of experimental works who seemingly compete for the title of most obscure and most difficult for the listener, and even record collectors like to play along. In this world, any trace of popularity, however slight, is distasteful and to be avoided at all costs. Should a work become unexpectedly accessible, the artist must then follow the piece with something completely perverse and disgusting, encouraging members of the new, undesired audience to walk away shaking their heads, leaving behind the core of pure and hardy aficionados. This is elitism of a different sort. [My link, not Byrne's, obviously.] If one can’t be fêted by the handful of patrons at the Met, then one can be just as elite by cultivating an audience equally rarified in the completely opposite direction. Extreme ugliness and unpleasantness becomes the mirror image of extreme luxury and beauty.

[…]

In one scene, a group of bourgeois businessmen in pig masks lurch along the runway followed by two guys in Santa outfits, one of whom rapes a young woman screaming ceaselessly. When I saw the approach of the evil Santas, I got all excited — we’d suddenly descended into slasher movie territory. Killer Klowns: The Opera! The folks around me did not seem amused; I’d never seen so much seersucker in one place in my life.

A santa-clad rapist. Apparently played for horror and not kitsch. Really.

Read the whole thing.

Photos from (Le) Poisson Rouge

Sebastian Noelle, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

More incriminating evidence here.

Our deepest thanks to those who came out to hear us last night at (Le) Poisson Rouge. LPR has a genuine commitment to doing things right, which I'm sure I don't need to tell you, makes them practically unique amongst NYC venues.

I'm actually going back again tonight for Jenny Lin's CD launch. Lots more cool stuff coming up... A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Metropolis Ensemble, Matmos, Matt Shulman, Kathy Suppové... this is a great space to hear great music. Show them some love, people.

It will take me a little bit of time to post the audio from last night. Thanks to LPR, we were able to make a 48-channel digital recording of the entire hit (check out some of the sweet mics), and early next week we are going into the studio with Paul Cox to do the mixing and mastering. I'll post the results here when we are done -- this will be a big step up from the usual gig audio! This was a great gig for us and I am really looking forward to being able to bring you this music.

TONIGHT - Secret Society @ (Le) Poisson Rouge, July 9

Darcy James Argue's

SECRET SOCIETY

Wednesday, July 9

7:30 PM

(Le) Poisson Rouge

WHEN: Wednesday, July 9 at 7:30 PM

WHERE: (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street (btw Thompson & Sullivan), NYC

SUBWAY: ABCDEFV to West 4th Street

COST: $15

ADVANCE TICKETS: click here.

*     *     *

Wherever there is a "thriving underground arts ecology," it is all but certain that the villains and miscreants of Secret Society shall be found skulking in the shadows. So it can come as no surprise that rogue composer Darcy James Argue and his cabal of eighteen co-conspirators have ensconced themselves in Greenwich Village's latest house of ill repute, the "burlesqueish performance spot" known as (Le) Poisson Rouge. Word on the street has it that this nefarious order will take the stage to at 7:30 PM on July 9th to proselytize for the dark art of steampunk bigband. Though some may be lured by the venue's seductive amenities — including a 9-foot Steinway, state-of-the-art multichannel sound system, and a practically limitless store of Madam Geneva — those of a delicate and superstitious sensibility would be well-advised to avoid (Le) Poisson Rouge entirely, as it is said that the place is haunted by the ghost of Jacques Brel.

It is with some alarm that we note that Secret Society appears to have lured into its orbit heretofore respectable members of the Jazz Community, including trumpeter Tim Hagans, who was last spotted fraternizing with the Society at the New Languages Festival. Other co-conspirators making their Society debut include trombonists Rick Parker and Pete McIvor, and pianist Gordon Webster, who rejoins the group in New York after having aided and abetted their Canadian infiltration in January. The Society has also successfully lured saxophonists Rob Wilkerson and Mark Small back into the fold after a prolonged absence -- it seems their deprogramming was ultimately unsuccessful. All of them are surely doing their reputations irreparable harm.

Those who have stood vigilant against the Society's insidious propaganda efforts will no doubt be aware that the group makes a practice of recording their presentations and enticing the unwary to down-load them at their leisure. Now is not the time to let down your guard, as rumors are circulating that Secret Society will be making a lavish 48-track digital live recording of the proceedings at (Le) Poisson Rouge, to be subsequently "mixed" and "mastered," therefore allowing steampunk bigband to be distributed to the masses in a much more potent form than ever before. Be mindful. You have been warned.

*     *     *

SECRET SOCIETY

REEDS
Erica vonKleist
Rob Wilkerson
Mark Small
Sam Sadigursky
Josh Sinton

TRUMPETS
Tim Hagans
Nadje Noordhuis
Jason Colby
Seneca Black
Tom Goehring

TROMBONES

Rick Parker

Pete McIvor
James Hirschfeld
Jennifer Wharton

RHYTHM
Sebastian Noelle, guitar
Gordon Webster, piano
Matt Clohesy, bass
Jon Wikan, drums

I drew a map of Canada

Peter Hum notes that amidst the controversy over Dr. Henry Morgentaler receiving the Order of Canada (Canada's highest civilian honor, basically the equivalent to the Presidential Medal of Freedom), almost no one seems to have noticed that Paul Bley also got the nod this year. Bley, is of course, a genius and one of the most influential pianists in jazz, so kudos to the Order's advisory council for giving him the nod.

The other musicians named to the Order this year include trombonist and composer Ian McDougall (of Canada's favorite bigband, Rob McConnell's Boss Brass), José Verstappen (executive director of Early Music Vancouver), Charles Aznavour (honourary) and Randolph C. Bachman.

Wait... Randolph C. Bachman? Bachman, Bachman. You don't mean... ?

Yes.

Sincere congratulations to all.

Your mouth is a cigarette, your eyes are the fever

Happy Canada Day. Here's some Gil Evans -- with a searing French horn solo from John Clark -- seriously, people need to give it up for John Clark -- and Billy Cobham laying it down on, like, a 29-piece drum kit.