The Allmusic Blog

Victor Wooten: Bassist, Author, Mystic

Thom Jurek — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:07:01 +0000

Bassist, producer, and composer Victor Wooten is without question a master musician. He’s played with everyone from Larry Coryell and Bela Fleck to Gov’t Mule and Mike Stern; from India Arie to Branford Marsalis; from Daniel Amos to Natalie MacMaster. He’s released seven albums under his own name. His eighth, Palmystery, drops April 1 from Heads Up.

Wooten has also written a number of popular — some would argue necessary — instructional manuals for bassists. The Music Lesson is self-published by his Vixboox imprint and it marks his first foray into the role of novelist. According to some (see below), his story is about enlightenment, told through the eyes of a bass player (big surprise there) who encounters a rather amorphous and ambiguous character that becomes his musical and spiritual teacher. It is cosmic, but it hardly qualifies as a “new age” tome. It’s far too funny and even random for that. And while it is about music, it’s also about the process of living. Narrated in the first person, Wooten’s novel feels like a story told intimately over dinner, and the protagonist’s voice comes across as both stunned, kinetically charged, and in a state of near constant surprise as he unfolds his tale. The novel has flaws: Its character development is sketchy, and it feels more like an autobiography than a fleshed-out novel, and the “plot” is almost nonexistent. But it’s no big deal. It’s a first book offered with an immediacy that puts his voice in the ear of the reader and it’s a good yarn.

Bassist Tony Levin claims in his back-cover blurb that: “Victor Wooten is the Carlos Castenada of music.” And Shannon Pable, a non-musician who is a master garden designer, claims in hers: “Don’t let the title fool you… it’s not just about music. Victor’s book blended beautifully with my vocation… In fact, it applies to everything we do in life.”

Um… yeah. Don’t let those stop you. The Music Lesson is fun, a quick read that asks more questions than it answers — those are for you to tangle with when you’re done.

Back to the ’70s: Ian Carr’s Brit-Jazz Tome Re-Published

Thom Jurek — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:06:57 +0000

Ian Carr fans rejoice! Some 35 years after its initial publication, trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and author Ian Carr’s long-out-of-print tome Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain has been re-published by Northway Publications in the U.K. Though Carr has also authored fine biographies of Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis, Music Outside remains his greatest achievement as a writer. This is perhaps due to his first-hand knowledge and experience of the scene that emerged from the 1960s and into the ’70s. Carr was a member of the EmCee Five — his brother Mike’s band — in the early 1960s, and co-leader of the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet. This amazing group released seven albums between 1964 and ‘69, all of which are available on the BGO imprint. Carr may be best known as co-founder of the influential jazz-rock ensemble Nucleus with future Soft Machine saxist Karl Jenkins. That band included future Softs drummer John Marshall, saxophonist Brian Smith, bassist Chris Hynnes, and guitarist Chris Spedding. Its first three recordings, particularly Elastic Rock, We’ll Talk about It Later, and Solar Plexus, are seminal. Even the dates with later lineups (with Tony Coe and Norma Winstone) are all worth hearing; luckily, Nucleus’ albums are available on BGO.

Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet - Tan Samfu
Nucleus - Earth Mother
Nucleus - Changing Times

Music Outside examines at length the music made outside the margins of pop in Great Britain, and makes a case for all of the artists he was involved with, and others in the scene at the same time, clearly analyzing and predicting their lasting influence. It’s packed with knowledge about not only music, but also the emerging musical culture in the U.K. Music Outside includes chapters on Mike Gibbs, Mike Westbrook, Derek Bailey, John Stevens, John Hiseman, Evan Parker, Trevor Watts, Chris McGregor, and even Carr himself(!), to mention a few. Colorful characters that make their way through its pages are Garrick, Winstone, John Surman, Rendell, and Kenny Wheeler. In addition to the original volume, there is a new chapter in this edition as well, written by Roger Cotterell, a barrister who is also a widely recognized jazz journalist, critic, and historian. He does his own fine — if somewhat brief — bit to trace this fascinating story from the end point of Carr’s original tome.

The book can be purchased from Northway Publications in the U.K. Inquiries can be made to its address at 39 Tytherton Road London N19 4P. But there is better news for punters and fans: Music Outside will be distributed in the United States by ParkWest Publications in Miami. ParkWest confirmed that it would be available within the next two months. Email queries can be made to mail@parkwestpubs.com. A quick look at Amazon in the U.S. and the U.K. revealed no listings for the title.

Credit where it’s due: Thanks to http://wyattandstuff.blogspot.com/ for the original info. Another resource for all things Carr is the unofficial http://www.iancarrsnucleus.net/.

The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting

Stephen Thomas Erlewine — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:09:40 +0000

Myths hover around the Replacements, but they always have. Back when the group stumbled across America in the ’80s their reputation preceded them, as fans found it equally enticing that the band could either be amazing or awful, depending on the night. Some lucky fans saw the ‘Mats at both extremes, some — like Joe Henry — never were lucky enough to see one good night. No matter what kind of concert you saw, the shows you didn’t see loomed as large as the ones you did, so it’s no surprise that there are generation of Replacements diehards that worship the band without ever seeing them live: even at their peak, they were loved for what their fans didn’t experience. The Replacements are romanticized once again in Jim Walsh’s new oral history All Over But the Shouting, the first book ever published on the ‘Mats.

Walsh is a longtime friend of Paul Westerberg — not a close one, by his own admission — and a Minneapolis rock fixture, which lets him get close to the band’s story, yet that chumminess can come across like a self-congratulatory club in print, especially as the book kicks off with a jaw-dropping forty pages of testimonials before getting to the heart of the story. Some of these are entertaining, most are variations on the old theme of “how rock & roll changed my life,” and the sheer number of stories tends to underscore how ‘Mats fans occasionally are a wee bit self-satisfied in their love of the band (it’s the perennial Replacements paradox of how the fans are shocked that a band this good was never bigger, yet they never want anybody to join their club). It’d be easier to complain about the lackadaisical beginning if the book ever gained real momentum or produced some real revelations, but this slow-rolling intro sets the stage for a read that ambles along amiably, offering up the standard big events without digging much deeper. As Paul and Tommy Stinson didn’t cooperate directly, and Chris Mars only offered a few comments, their contributions are all pieced together from old interviews, sometimes sitting along ancient articles pasted in wholesale. All the sources are credited in the footnotes, but the sudden switches between eras can make for jarring reading, as there is no transition between the past and present reflections. Also distancing is Walsh’s habit of only crediting contributors in the appendix instead of when they’re introduced in the oral history — sure, it’s possible to flip to the back of the book to figure out who is speaking, but local scenesters are name-dropped with the expectation that the reader knows who they are, a practice that only enhances the members-only feel of the book.

Nevertheless, the sense that All Over But the Shouting is an opportunity for the in-crowd to tell their tale does enhance the nostalgic undertow of the book, which is one of its chief attributes. Having a closely-knit scene relate how things were way back when winds up capturing how the underground rock of the ’80s was tied together by record stores, mix tapes, college radio, music magazines, crash pads and all-ages shows. This re-creation of a time and place is the best thing about All Over But the Shouting: it captures the essence of the ’80s underground and how the Replacements fit within that, even if it doesn’t offer much analysis of either the band’s music or their personalities, favoring rose-tinted recollections of reckless rowdiness. If anything, all the hero worship gets in the way of a group whose bad behavior was excused as simply rock & roll, but as the stories pile up, the guys kind of come across like a bunch of pricks. Westerberg ruining a demo that a fan gave him merely minutes before while the guy stands in front of him isn’t rebellious rock & roll, it’s just a guy being a dick. There are many similar stories here and Slim Dunlap — the Minneapolis staple who replaced a dismissed Bob Stinson — hints at this unpleasantness throughout his frank, forthright reminiscences of how joined during the group’s third act. Becoming part of a band so beloved by so many — including his own teenage daughter at the time — was clearly a trying experience for him and it’s hard not to empathize with him as he recounts just how unlike a gang the group was toward the end of their run. Toward the conclusion of the book, there’s a story of how he ducked out of a Minneapolis scene concert before the group got around to playing ‘Mats songs, saying he’s heard them enough in his life. He understood the tension of the band, what they meant. Compare that to Steve Foley, Mars’ replacement who is just happy to be there and bewildered that the guys aren’t having more fun.

If one thing is clear from this oral history, it’s that despite all the drunken shenanigans, being in the Replacements wasn’t a lot of fun after Let It Be — there’s a sense that Westerberg’s demons can’t be named but he’ll gleefully let them bring him down every time, and take out as many others as he can with him. Compared to his idols the Faces — an early concert provided Paul a pivotal revelation about what rock & roll can be — where everybody was part of the constant party, the Replacements eventually got to the point where they were alienating everybody, from friends and family to fans, leaving Westerberg as a party of one. As this book stops cold after Bob’s death — no mention of Paul’s solo career or his family, no mention of Tommy becoming Axl Rose’s kept man, no word even of their tentative reunion for last year’s greatest hits album — that impression of that destructive, lonesome loner is what All Over But the Shouting leaves behind, which is an odd way to end a book that begins with so much celebration.

And you thought all those years of piano lessons were a waste of time …

Stephen Eddins — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:04:56 +0000

English neurologist Oliver Sacks has been a great popularizer of literature on the vagaries of the brain, with bestsellers like Awakenings (made into a film starring Robin Williams) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (made into an opera by Michael Nyman). A large number of the cases of neurological disorders he documents have to do with patients whose musical abilities were unlocked, or amplified, or remained unimpaired, when an injury or disorder otherwise ravaged their cognitive abilities. (The man who couldn’t distinguish between his wife and a hat, for instance, was an expert singer whose musical gifts stayed intact.) Sacks devotes his newest book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, to research about the topic and to some of his most fascinating musical case studies. One finding he reports is that while most artistic work leaves the brain physically unaltered, musicians have brains that are noticeably different from the average: the corpus callosum, which connects the two halves of the brain, is larger, providing a more substantial connection, and the visual, spatial, auditory and motor areas of the cerebellum are also enlarged. This information might bring some comfort to performers or composers scrambling to make it in the cutthroat music business (at least they’ve got expanded brains!), as well as to music teachers who wonder if the effort to get their students to practice is really worth the struggle. It should also cause legislators and administrators to think twice before snipping music classes out of our school systems. And it would be terrific if the idea provided the incentive for the person who always wanted to sing or play an instrument to make the leap and just do it. The pleasure they experience in making their own music should be plenty of reward, even if they can’t feel their corpus callosum bulking up.

Book Buzz: Noise

Stephen Eddins — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:08:25 +0000

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker, was published October 16. It’s been eagerly anticipated by a lot of new music fans, because Ross is an insightful, thoughtful critic with broad enthusiasms, and he’s a fine stylist. During a recent trip to a local bookstore to pick up a copy, a clerk lit up like a sparkler when asked about the book: “It’s selling so fast we can hardly keep it in stock!” Another clerk overheard the conversation and rushed over: “This is the most amazing book! I started reading it two nights ago, and it’s like a thriller — I can’t put it down. It made me want to run out and listen to Webern!”

Reading just the first chapter made me understand the clerks’ excitement. It describes the Austrian premiere of Richard Strauss‘ Salome in Graz, six months after its world premiere in Dresden. Word about the opera had spread, and just about everyone in the Austrian musical world and beyond was there, including Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Gustav and Alma Mahler, the widow of “the Waltz King,” Johann Strauss II, Alexander Zemlinsky, Giacomo Puccini, and Adolf Hitler! Ross does a terrific job of establishing the opera in a musical, literary, political and sociological context, … but hang on — I’ve got to run out and listen to Salome.

Norman Lebrecht’s Pulped Fiction

Uncle Dave Lewis — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:44:22 +0000

No one would blame anyone, bookstore customer and editorial staffer alike, for wondering aloud “It died?!” at the sight of Norman Lebrecht’s book, The Life and Death of Classical Music, published this summer by Anchor. By all accounts, Classical Music is alive and well as always, more alive in some ways – on the concert circuit and among independent labels – in recent days than in awhile, though ailing right along with all of the other arts in these economically challenged times. However, Lebrecht’s take is that major recording concerns – the former Polygram, BMG/RCA, CBS/Sony, and EMI – did the job of husbanding classical music, and its star performers, better than anyone else in history. With their complete re-organization after the turn of the new century into new entities that are handling far less classical music than once was the case, Lebrecht’s view is that this is sufficient cause to declare it dead. This is despite the many concerts, young artists and composers, publishers and independent labels that are out there pursuing it as though it’s still alive. He blames this grim state of affairs on corporate greed, overspending, and kowtowing to powerful classical artists; his highly anecdotal “histories” are also laced with scandals and lots of spicy sex.
It is widely reported that there are an awful lot of errors of fact, or misinterpreted data, in Lebrecht’s books, particularly in The Life and Death of Classical Music. HNH/Naxos founder Klaus Heymann, who once employed Lebrecht as a feature writer for the Naxos website, decided that a section in the book written about him was sufficient grounds to go to court in the U.K. And the court agreed – on October 18, the U.K. courts ordered Penguin Books, the publisher of the English edition, titled Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry, to pulp the remaining stock of the book, de-list it, and issue an apology to Heymann. This will not affect the American edition, still available as The Life and Death of Classical Music, though under the circumstances it appears the rule of law has ordained that reports of Classical Music’s death, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s sarcastic comment, “have been greatly exaggerated.”

Cobain Biopic in the Works

Katherine Fulton — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:08:02 +0000

The past few years have seen a number of films and documentaries that speculate on the life, death, and mental state of the now-legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and it looks like one more is in the pipeline.

MSNBC reports that David Benioff will be drafting a script for the biopic Heavier Than Heaven, based on a book of the same name. Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, will serve as an executive producer of the project, along with her lawyer Howard Weitzman.

There appears to be little known about the project thus far — both a Google search and the Internet Movie Database came up empty — but those who wish to get a jump on the film can buy the source material online or at their favorite brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Official Courtney Love website