September 1, 2010. Wednesday.
Situation: Have to work tonight, and I need to leave about 3:45. (About my night and weekend work, I’d like to say that there’s no limit to the amount of preparatory work, to maintain a certain level of performance, that I can do, the many hours of which are not directly billed to anyone; if I were to calculate these hours into what I do get paid, I would probably arrive at a sub-minimum wage – I have not been making mention of this preparatory work in this journal, and, though I say I have to work tonight, I’ve actually already worked about 3 hours this morning – and this is typical for any given day.) That means I’ll have to take Mway for a walk about 2:30, to do all the things I want to do. Right now Mway and Moi are taking a nap, but whenever they get up, Mway and I will be going for a walk.
State of the Path: The ground is again turning white. In the old orchard, next to the Boy’s tree fort is another tree that looks like it has a fort, for all the monkey vines that clamber up it. Though I clipped some of the branches on the multiflora near the hedgerow yesterday, some of its other branches still snag me on the shoulder. As I pass through the goldenrod that rises like a ten-foot green and yellow maze all around me, I feel like I can’t breathe. Down by the creek, I’m already getting too hot. Is the vine I see down here some sort of morning glory, or is it more of that bindweed? – I don’t see any big trumpet flowers on it. I’m still disappointed no dayflowers have bloomed (I see some these days in the garden, where I also see another wildflower I don’t see along the path: one of my favorites, foxtail, with its caterpillar-like flowers that turn silver after a frost). Lots of bumblebees (but no honey bees – ours must stick by the house), monarchs (or viceroys), black and tiger swallowtails, cabbage butterflies, yellow sulphors (is there such a thing? spelling?), fritillaries, something that looks like a cecropia moth, black wings with an orange mark.
State of the Creek: For some reason, the pool at the log jam has turned cloudy and chalky, while the other pools remain clear.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing – guess what? – Mway fetches the stick more times than I care to throw it. I take delight that, on our way back, Mway, who tries to pass me like an aggressive driver, can’t get past me until we reach the walled garden.
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Last night at my usual Wednesday gig, though I felt strangely detached from the whole setting (probably in response to Wade’s usual enthusiasm and ingratiating manner), there were some exciting moments, which now of course have evaporated irretrievably into the past. I did two of Clement’s favorite tunes, Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” and Toots Thielemans’ “Blusette,” but I broke up the phrasing in such a clunky, offcenter Monkian way (or as Brubeck himself might have done in his most impish moments) that as I was performing the tunes I wondered how Clement would like them. But he loved them and applauded enthusiastically (though I wonder in retrospect how much he actually heard, since Clement’s ears are festooned heavily with hearing aids). Wade made a joke about the title “In Your Own Sweet Way,” since the performance was anything but sweet. In between these two pieces, we did, I think, Ellington’s “In a Mellow Tone,” which we haven’t done in a while and sounded very fresh. I brought out a song in honor of the recent hurricane, Huddie Ledbetter’s “Goodnight Irene,” which of course went over very well. I haven’t done this tune in years, but it’s always been a favorite of mine, and last Saturday night I had reviewed it at home while the hurricane’s outermost rains were falling around the house. After that, Tom Flickinger requested one of my own instrumentals because of its title, a boogie woogie called “Highwater Boogie,” and we also played the Flickinger’s favorite dance number “Girl from Ipanema.” Wade’s brother, Dan, who this summer has been receiving treatment for a cancer tumor in his esophagus and hasn’t been able to come out, managed to make it last night – everyone happy to see him, and now that I think about it I should have played his favorite jazz standard, Bobby Timmon’s “Moanin.” Dan had to leave after the first set, as also did half of our audience, people in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s who had to get home for their 9:00 bedtime. For our last two sets I did a couple dance numbers for June and Bob, two snowbirds who I think are leaving soon for Florida for the winter. Our last set was taken up largely by having up three singers from the audience, all of whom sang very well, Tanya Wells, a currently unemployed professor of Religion, Theatre, and African-American studies, who sang a Latin version of “Autumn Leaves,” Sue Smith, Wade’s 60-year-old roadie, who sang Willie Dixon’s “Built for Comfort,” and a young friend of Wade’s wife from Sweden, name something like Keeren, who sang “Cry Me a River.” I tried to get June and Bob back up on the floor with a Louis Prima treatment of “All of Me,” but I guess they were resting, so I finished up the night with “Confirmation,” a Charlie Parker head I’ve lately been trying to get up to speed. At the end of the night, while Wade, Randy, and I were sitting around the table talking with our part-time manager, Lew, about some upcoming gigs, Wade was preoccupied with tabulating some bills from Marissa the waitress. He had probably bought dinner for both his wife, Susan, and Keeren and probably ordered a couple merlots over his allotted one-drink freebie. With the large tip he undoubtedly gave Marissa, he probably depleted his pay for the night. Fifteen years ago, after retiring from the San Francisco music scene, he returned to the family home in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania, and one afternoon, filled with scotch and milk, he pulled a piece of firewood down on his skull and fell into a coma. This is a little of what he has awaken to. Originally I did not want to mention anything about my work in this blog, but since the cat’s been out of the bag for some time now, I thought it incumbent upon me to describe a little what it’s like. Something like I describe here happens several times a week. This comment is not directed to anyone in particular.
For further clarification: I didn’t know Wade when he lived in the family mountain home, but this is what he told me about his time there. He had never cleaned himself up from heroin addiction (still hasn’t) but was (and still is) taking methadone as a script for pain from neuropathy. He brought with him from San Francisco a “hot Latino” woman who liked to give him “blowjobs and serve him eggs in bed in the morning,” but who eventually “went crazy” with nothing much more to do. He was drinking two quarts of scotch a day, with milk, and had ballooned to over 400 pounds. He had had a nest egg but lost it all to medical expenses when he had the accident with the fire log. His coma continued on for half a year. Eventually his brother Dan found a living will in which Wade made it clear he never wanted to be kept alive by artificial means and gave Dan the power to terminate his life. Just as Dan (having consulted with Wade’s two grown daughters in California) was getting ready to pull the plug, Wade began thrashing his fat arms and opened his eyes.
A couple days ago Tanya and Rusty staged a miniconcert to publicize their (as yet unfinished) documentary “Beats from the Heart: Wade Miller and the Music of the S______ Valley.” Scheduled to perform were several of the groups that the self-described “saloon drummer” has “whored” with over the years, including our trio. I almost did not attend, but capitulated at the last moment (Wade, feeling guilty about my being there, picked up my bar tab for me). In the trailer to the documentary a local professor, poet, and sax player, who hires Wade for the occasional performances of his quartet, is quoted as saying (something like): “If you look at great African art, it is anonymous. It is not done for the aggrandizement of the individual, but for something greater. Here is a musician, Wade, who amazingly shuns the limelight that could be his just desserts, and just plays for that something greater” – a statement undercut by the very documentary itself, indeed by this very segment of it. The music that night, admittedly, was very good (it helped that people were not chatting over meals), and Wade played very well, that is, until I got up to perform. Because I’d been drinking all night I decided to do an old folk blues on the topic, and Wade overplayed on it. Wade apparently tries not to play too much on the blues, as I’ve instructed him over and over, but I think he has yet to realize how sparse (and self-effacing) blues drumming is at its best. “You just say this because of what I told you Albert King said to me that one time, about not playing everything I know,” Wade once retorted when I criticized his drumming. “Not just because Albert King said it,” I replied, “but because Albert King was right.” The second song we performed was a Latin number I wrote to feature Wade, and I thought he overplayed on that too (though that could’ve been just from my perspective, my ears being right in front of the cymbals). Other than the blues, my chief beef with Wade’s playing is that often on a standard he adheres too closely to the rhythm of the melody, which interferes with the way I might choose to vary that rhythm and can hamper improvisation in general – it’s as though he’s playing the piano part rather than the drum part. I’m only pointing out Wade’s shortcomings here for the sake of clarification (see blog entry dated November 28). Wade is a good drummer (no one swings better than he does) – but it appears I’m the only one around here who ever criticizes his playing. I guess this is my anti-documentary of Wade Miller.
“I haven’t a creative bone in my body” – Wade Miller, after a first rehearsal of Monongahela, copyright 2009 by Sisyphus Gregor, recorded the same year as part of the compact disc Torn Rivers by the trio of Gregor, Miller, and Till (a/k/a Wade Miller’s trio, Wade Miller’s band, Miller, Gregor, and Till). Immediately prior to the above quote, Wade had thanked me for writing this composition and had said: “I never could have written something like this myself.”
Wade’s local celebrity results from his having been an active musician in a big city, where in the course of his work he brushed against some big names. The local press forever gushes about this, periodically recycling the same news that Wade, who played with so-and-so and on so-and-so, wondrously now lives among us. Wade’s biggest claim to fame perhaps is that he played on the soundtrack of most of the episodes of a certain popular TV cartoon. However, as Wade endlessly takes pains to point out to people, he did not play on the first five episodes of the cartoon, those in which the music indelibly associated with the cartoon -- written and performed by a certain Italian-American jazz pianist whose works are now jazz standards, and whose one tune in particular is a must for any piano player who sets out a tip jar to know – was first presented. Instead, he played on the thirty or so episodes produced after the pianist’s death in the mid seventies, accompanying the forgetful compositions of a far less able musician who contracted the work afterwards. I distinctively recall witnessing this deterioration in the music of the cartoon, sitting down one night, perhaps with the kids, excited but soon utterly disappointed, exclaiming to myself, “What’s happened to the music? This music sucks!” This would have been my first exposure to Wade’s drumming. Despite Wade’s efforts to set people straight, we’ve done several gigs where some of the audience thought not only that Wade played on the recordings with the renowned pianist who wrote the music for the cartoon, but also that I was that pianist himself.
After he emerged from his coma, and after months of physical rehabilitation in a nursing home, Wade decided to unretire. He rented a trailer down by the river from a friend of his brother and started playing in four or five different ensembles, two of which, after the attrition of the leader, I joined as front man. In those early days, since I did not live too far from the trailer, I also roadied for Wade, picking up his drums, hauling them in my car, carrying them in, setting them up, breaking them down, carrying them back out, hauling them back to his place, and setting them back in the garage. In the winter time, I shoveled a path on the trailer’s deck and down the deck steps and sprinkled it with salt so Wade would not slip. I made sure his porch light was turned off, stopped at the mailbox so he could pick up his mail, and carried boxes of wine from the garage to his kitchen. Wade (not yet married to Susan) almost always invited me in to drink merlot after our gigs. While he peeled garlic and set the cloves in olive oil to have with the rabbit or duck he roasted several times a week, we talked at length about music, about Wade’s past, and about life in general. When the bottle of merlot in the refrigerator was empty, I replaced it with one from the closet. Usually before I stumbled out the door to go home, Wade set out Swiss cheese or fried up chorizo for me to eat. One night, while looking for a fork, I found a drawer full of green napkins from one of the restaurants we regularly play at. For a time, since Wade had many stories to tell about himself (as a musician he even garnered a Grammy for best studio musician in the 70’s, which statue lies lost somewhere in San Francisco), I considered chronicling his life somehow myself, and a couple times even brought a tape recorder to the trailer, but this project was soon abandoned as Wade got tired talking into the recorder after about 5 minutes and our gigs made more demands on my time. Often, reflecting on his past musical associations, Wade would say sometime during the night, “I’ve never felt so committed to a group as I do with this trio. I’d like to see us traveling.” And over the next few years, Wade did travel, one time to Spain with another band, one time to Italy with a nationally known piano player, several times each year to California to perform with a jazz group out there, most recently to Sweden with Susan. In 2004 a retired sociology professor, and fan of the trio, Fred Kohler invited Wade to accompany him on a trip to New Orleans. At the last minute, though, Fred suffered some health problems, and he gave me the money he had allotted for himself so Wade would not have to go alone. I kept a diary of the trip, and though I hate to stick one journal into another, it might be appropriate to quote some highlights from the diary in the interests of this short anti-documentary.
Trip to NOL
1/18/04 Sunday. Snowy roads to Amtrak station in HAR. At station scale Wade weighs in at 285 lbs., Moi, hanging with us for a while, at 135. I save my quarter. Wade moves away from evil hacking woman, worries we might have to sit next to her in train….At 30th Street Station in Philly, Wade and I eat Chinese, Wade pocketing chopsticks, for “percussive purposes.” Wade has a nylon, back-pack style bag, with wheels and carrier frame. I feel real out of style lugging old suitcase….on the train Wade falls asleep within minutes, wakes only to eat and drink merlot….he meets girl who gives him half her sandwich. Learns she is getting doctorate in sociology. "You'll do real well. Good people study sociology. A retired sociology professor, who was to make this trip with me but couldn't, has given us a thousand dollars just so my friend here can come”….in smoking compartment Wade scolded for smoking his pipe. "It clogs the filter," attendant admonishes….Wade talks to a 75-year resident of New Orleans sitting across the aisle (Wade turns to me, whispers “did you catch what he said his name was?) Wade explains to (Morris? Moe?) that he’s a 35-year veteran musician, never been to New Orleans, and has been hired to perform a fashion show with daughter of a friend. “But I’m mainly going there to absorb the music." (Morris? Moe?) tells Wade "the city will take care of you”….
1/19/04 Monday. Stop in Birmingham on Martin Luther King Day. Wade steps outside to smoke his pipe….at breakfast, we both try grits (Wade says he never really liked them). He also orders a side dish of sausage and orange juice….Wade asks (Morris? Moe?) to spell his name. "C-l-i-f-f-o-r-d T-h-o-m-a-s." Clifford recommends eating at Dooky Chase's. "You guys going to end up playing there in New Orleans, I tell ya”….for supper we order breakfast sandwiches from the snack bar. Because Wade had given him his NY Times the chef brings us a tray full of mashed potatoes and corn that he'd otherwise throw out…Arrive in NOL around 9:00 pm…
taxi to hostel, $10.00 fare, Wade leaving $5.00 tip….Wade discovers he brought wrong adapter for his cell phone. He conks out on sofa, recuperating from long sleep on the train, as I head out to spend the evening at Le Bon Temps Roulé….
1/20/04 Tuesday. Wade and I ask hostel manager the closest place for breakfast, then we walk one block to Jackson, another block to St. Charles. Wade buys New York Times in front of Williams Supermarket. We walk two more blocks, past culinary school where we see roomful of students in toques, to the Trolley Station, favorite restaurant of local cops. Wade orders eggs, grits (which he decides now are to his liking), a side of hot sausage, coffee, and a large tomato juice. Leaves large tip. We take the trolley to Bourbon Street. Walk down Bourbon, then right onto Saint Peters, Wade always a few steps behind me. He stops at Pat O'Briens to rest and have an espresso. We then walk to Jackson Square. Wade sits down. Two trombonists, drummer, and bass player are busking at the square. "Down by the Riverside," "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Wade leaves tip. We walk through the square, cross Decatur, and walk up handicap ramp to view the river. Wade sits down. Then we walk down Decatur, stop in bookstore where Wade buys books by Nat Hentoff and Ned Rorem. Wade stops at Cafe du Martin to rest and have a cappuccino. We then zigzag, Wade sometimes falling a half a block behind, through the Quarter to Canal Street. One block from trolley stop, Wade grabs a lamp post, crying out to me he's going to wave down a cab….Back at corner of Jackson and St. Charles, Wade buys bottle of wine, bottled water, orange juice, and a ham and cheese po' boy at Williams Supermarket. Back in the room, he leaves cell phone messages to his daughters: "I'm calling here from New Orleans, just to tell you we're having a terrific time. The city here just exudes music. It's on the street, it comes out of every bar. We passed by Cafe du Monde today, and you'll just love it here when you come. It's terrific." Wade checks his phone messages: Sammie has left several incoherent ones. Wade realizes his cell phone minutes are being rerouted through Pennsylvania and are being used up quickly…. Wade flops down on the sofa he’s claimed as his bed, surrounded by sections of the NY Times, medicine bottles, pipe tobacco, strewn clothes. He falls asleep to Nat Hentoff…His cell phone wakes him up: it’s Lane, Sammie's roommate, says she'll pick us up for practice and have a barbecue for us around 6:30….
We wait for car outside in front of hostel. Sammie finally shows, her brother, Mike, with her. Sammie drives through midcity for an hour and a half, up and down Broad Street, looking for house of "this dude" named Josh, a didgeridoo player she's enlisted for Lane's fashion show. Finally find the house; I help Sammie figure out which apartment Josh lives in. His two Goth-style companions pile in car with us….At Lane's house, near Magazine St, Wade sits behind Sammie's drum set, Sammie picks up various percussion instruments, Josh crouches on the sofa, blowing funk rhythms. The girlfriends look at astrology books. Lane begins a campfire outside, explaining that a week before the neighbors, disturbed by smoke, had called the fire department on them. Wade offers to buy Sammie a new snare drum head. She and Lane continually bum cigarettes from me, but we have to go outside to smoke. I'm shivering all night. We meet River, who practices her Nina Simone tune a capella on the front porch. Around 11:30, burgers are ready. Wade complains to me that his is frozen inside. Back at our room, he realizes he's lost his favorite pipe case. I look outside for it, but we conclude it probably fell out somewhere in Lane's car.
1/21/04 Wednesday. We look for the Bluebird Restaurant, which Mike has recommended for breakfast. It's on Prytania, one street up from St. Charles, but after walking two blocks on Prytania, we don't see it, and return to the Trolley Stop for breakfast. Wade buys his New York Times in front of Williams. He orders eggs and grits, a side of sausage, coffee, and a large tomato juice. He also has a list of things he has to get: a new adapter for his cell phone, a walking stick, and some Maalox. At the hostel office we'd found a Radio Shack on Magazine St. listed in the phone book, so we take the trolley to Washington and walk to Magazine, Wade stopping twice to rest on stone fences and once on a tomb at the Lafeyette Cemetery. He buys a new adapter, then stops in at a Starbuck's for coffee. He debates for a while whether to call a cab, but decides to walk back to St. Charles and take the trolley back to the room, where he rests for the afternoon. I continue on to Bourbon St….
Back at the room I suggest to Wade that to preserve money we have Popeye's chicken for supper. I walk down St. Charles, but the Popeye's is farther than I thought and also has no greens (Wade expressed a desire for vegetables). So I go instead to VooDoo BBQ, bring back pulled pork and gris gris greens for both of us. I also pick up a bottle of merlot for Wade, and he praises me for instinctively selecting his preferred brand, Marcus James…. Wade notices I'm coming down with a cold and plies me with zinc and herb tablets. He calls his daughters, his brother, and Fred Kohler….When Wade falls asleep, I go to the hostel office to try to use the timed internet machine. But I don't know how to work the finger pad and waste $3.00 on incoherent messages to Moi.
1/22/04 Thursday. At noon we again toward the Bluebird, this time with directions from the hostel manager. Wade picks up the NY Times….The Bluebird is a friendly, nouveau-cuisine-type place, twenty-something, short-haired waitresses with tattooed arms. Even at this place, with professional types dining, there are no smoking restrictions, though I notice one man grimacing at Wade's pipe smoke. Wade orders eggs and grits, side of sausage, large tomato juice, coffee…Our waitress recommends to Wade that we go to the Music Factory record store, where her husband works, to hear free music on Saturday. We get directions to Latter library, where we hope to use the internet. A short trolley trip to Robert St. Sign up smoothly for internet time -- free for one hour. I email Moi. Take trolley back to hostel. Wade orders a po' boy from Williams. Sit outside in garden reading Times….at 5:30 pm Sammie comes to pick up Wade for their rehearsal. I decide to stay and nurse my cold….by 8 I'm really hungry and head down St. Charles to get some food.....When I get back to the room, Wade is there. He says rehearsal was largely for Sammie's benefit, opportunity for her to learn her lyrics. Says he found pipe case in Lane's car. We stay in for the night, reading old New Yorkers we picked up free from the library.
1/23/04 Friday. Slept from 11 to 11. I feel a little better today. Wade is ready for breakfast when I wake up. We head for Trolley Stop, Wade saying he's going to try New Orleans bacon. Pick up NY Times and Picayune. Wade orders eggs and grits, side of bacon, large tomato juice....he gets out yellow notepad and writes down agenda for the day: pick up a walking stick, find a post office, find a drug store for some Goldenseal and Maalox. Man overhears us and gives us directions to post office. We take a crowded trolley to Howard Street. Get vague directions to Loyola St from man staggering across gas station lot, who asks for a dollar in return. Wade realizes he shouldn't keep his wallet crammed with twenties in his white pouch, so switches his wallet to his front pocket and jams wad of dollars in his other pocket, for "karmic purposes." Head down Howard, Wade finds a bamboo pole in the gutter, "perfect for a walking stick," which unfortunately falls apart after a block. "Is that Loyola Street?" Wade constantly asks. "It's right up there," I reassure him. We ask passersby for further directions. A block from Loyola, Wade spots a metal bench, sits down. We follow zigzagging pedestrian markings across Loyola to post office. While Wade buys stamps, I look at the philatelic displays. Outside post office, Wade heads off in wrong direction. We retrace our steps, find metal bench, sit. Walk back down Howard, I see sign on building roof in the distance: "Zeitgeist." "Is that St. Charles Street?" "Pretty soon," I reassure Wade. At Lee Square, he rests on bleachers set up for Mardi Gras. Cross street to car stop, Wade ecstatic that there are stools there to sit on while waiting. While Wade takes trolley back to the room, I decide to walk back from Lee Square….Back at room Wade has a po' boy and another bottle of merlot, hands me twenty to get water and Maalox. Don't find Maalox at Williams, but come back with gallon of Abita springwater for 99 cents and, for my supper, some jambalaya from the Garlic Clove restaurant next to Williams. We sit in the garden under the live oak, Wade smoking his pipe and reading NY Times. I point out squirrel nests in tree. "I never realized squirrels built nests," Wade remarks. He mentions that the chilblains on his fingers have disappeared. "Chilblains!" I exclaim. "Yeah, my doctor never even heard of them before," Wade says….We get ready to go to Snug Harbor, where we have reservations to see Ellis Marsalis. The hostel manager calls a cab. I let Wade get in first, and as he sidles across the seat, his shoe comes off and falls on the street. "That used to happen to me all the time in San Francisco," he explains. "With my neuropathy, I have no feeling in my feet." Cab takes us to 626 Frenchman St. Girl at counter says my credit card won't go through the processor. Wade figures they're trying to scam us somehow, but girl lets us in and says she'll try processing the card later. We find seats in the balcony, directly overlooking Marsalis's piano…."This is it. This is what I came for!" Wade exclaims. I have two merlots, Wade has four, at $5.00 a glass….After show we cross street to the Snoop Cat, 8-piece band, with bass and guitar, fiddler, bass saxophone. Walk down street to the Blue Nile. Wade decides to take a cab back to the room, but I continue walking down to Decatur, go through Jackson Square, and walk up Saint Peter….
Wade Miller -- a big lumbering man, who occupies a room like a majestic tree by the riverside. The bald dome of his head is oaken, fringed by dark shoulder-length hair, a great brown beard spreading across his chest (he claims to use no dye). His voice is booming, stentorian, but when he tries to sound affectionate (to his daughters, to his wife) it assumes the dopey lilt of his favorite TV character, Homer Simpson.
Should I continue with the NOL journal? Well – at least through the fashion show.
1/24/04 Saturday. This morning I suggest new restaurant for breakfast, the Please U, which I checked out on my walk yesterday. Wade is up for walking the extra block and a half. He orders eggs and grits, side of sausage, coffee, a large tomato juice, but when the waitress says they're out of sausage, I suggest the oyster omelette. "This is the best omelette I've ever had," Wade is soon saying to the waitress. After breakfast, he heads back to the room and I decide to walk to the Quarter…. When I get back, Wade shows me a note that the room next door had tacked on our door: "Dear Neighbors, We have decided, in consideration of the thin walls between our rooms, to propose a noise ban after 10 pm. No radios or loud laughing..." Wade wonders if he should confront the people; I suggest just forgetting about it. Sammie calls and asks if I could do the sound for the show tonight. Wade tries to disabuse her of the notion. She comes to pick us up in her boss's van at 5. The plan is to get there, do a sound check, go out for po' boys, then start at 8. The fashion show's to last 20 minutes; Sammie is then to do a set, followed by a performance by River. The place is in Bywater. "This is a real cool neighborhood. A lot of artists, musicians, have moved here. It's a bad neighborhood though," Sammie explains. We pull up to a mansion called the Country Club. As soon as we walk in, River walks barebreasted out of the model's dressing room, an appearance she maintains while Sammie guides her through the procedures for her upcoming performance. I look at the PA system, and haven't a clue how to operate it; Sammie, nevertheless, gives me all kinds of instructions of when to turn this and that on, when to turn this or that down. "This is where you'll sit," she points to a chair next to the amplifier. She moves mike stands, speakers, untangles speaker wire, plugs and unplugs chords. Squawks of feedback. I sit down at the piano, and Sammie goes through her repertoire. She decides I'll sit in on two songs, "Come On Into My Kitchen" and "Lovelights.”
I walk up to the bar to get a cup of coffee. A model with an auburn afro smiles at me. Another orders a drink and tells the bartender to put it on "Lane's mother's tab." An indoor swimming pool lies beyond the bar. I go to the bathroom. Behind the wall-length urinal is a vast mirror, which affords a wide view of my crotch and any others that another time could be beside me. I go back to the parlor. Josh has come in and is fussing with cushions on which to rest the end of his didgeridoo. He says he's thirsty and wonders if the drinks are free for the musicians. "No, No. I don't think so," Wade says, holding up a glass of merlot. "I had to pay for this."
People start milling in, young same sex couples, old different sex ones, undifferentiable singles, well-heeled oldsters. Wade calls me over: "I don't think we'll have time to get something to eat." I go into the bar and attack the cheese and veggie plates someone has set out. Josh's two girlfriends hover over them too. When I come back, Lane is telling Wade, "I'm not going to start right at 8; I'm going to wait until people are finished coming in." Some male friends of Sammie's arrive, bearing drums and guitar. "That's cool," she tells them, "Hey, whatever. If anytime you feel something, you know, just join in."
The place is filled, and Lane finally gives Sammie the nod to begin. Josh blows into his eucalyptus bore. Steve snaps his brushes. Sammie, unable to find the groove on her drum, looks up at me with consternation. The models, in extravagant outfits with exotic colors, prance in one by one, do a dance step in front of the musicians, then sashay onto a platform in the middle parlor. I sit in an armchair, ignoring the PA. Sammie gets a miscue from River on her fourth or fifth entrance, thinking it's time to do her song, and stops the music. She's flustered. But Josh starts in again with a more emphatic beat. Beneath the weird sounds emanating from his instrument it seems to me he is intoning, "Oedipus. Oedipus. Oedipus." The audience nods their heads.
River finally does her song, with Wade, Sammie, and Josh clapping a gospel offbeat, signaling the end of the fashion parade. "That was an hour and a half we played," Wade tells Sammie. She runs off to get a drink and bum several cigarettes, returns in half an hour to begin her set, which runs for over an hour and includes several songs with a "Lovelights" groove. I'm smoking too much and drinking water to stave my hunger, going to the bathroom frequently. When Sammie finishes, River gets up and does 6 or 7 songs, accompanying herself on guitar. Throughout the night, a woman, who appears to be in her late sixties, has been dancing drunkenly, bumming cigarettes from whoever lights one up, mumbling incoherently. At one point she throws a "bank note,” a fake $1,000 dollar bill, on the piano, then when we finish she retrieves it and throws the same "bank note" and an empty Chinese Choh Choh envelope onto Wade's drums. I learn later that this woman, who is only about forty, is Bernadine, Sammie's boss, owner of the laundromat where she works. At last Sammie finishes with the two songs on which I’m suppose to play. The gig is over sometime after twelve.
Sammie's male friends pick up her guitar and drums and begin jamming aimlessly, one of them beckoning me to get back up on the piano. Wade and I collar Sammie for a ride home and hunt down Lane to say goodbye. "Oh, yeah. Thanks," Lane stammers. "The music sounded great. Thanks a lot." Outside Wade nearly falls into Josh's instrument bags, dumped in the middle of the sidewalk.
Sammie brings a gin and tonic with her into the van. "I'll drink some of this while you're driving," Wade says. She tells Wade that she's not been using, and Wade tells her that’s good to hear. "Of course, if you want to do something, I could pick up something no problem," she says. "No, no," Wade says. "I mean I'd love to do something, but no, no." She stops at the Popeye's on St Charles and I pick up a 10-piece for Wade and me. Then she loses her way and gets easily annoyed when I tell her which turns to make. She declines our invitation to come in. While we're gobbling chicken, Wade (whispering so not to disturb our neighbors) considers taking Sammie and Lane aside tomorrow or the next day and lecturing them on respect for musicians (the fact that they like to get paid, etc.). "No, I wouldn't do that," I advise. "Some people can take criticism, but Sammie's not one of them." "You're right," Wade agrees. "You're absolutely right. Sammie's clean, that's all we can hope for right now. She's clean, and that's that."
Wade is a good drummer – no doubt about that. Wide range of experience (which can however fall into glib clichés), an attentive ear (so long as it does not flagrantly copy my rhythms). On a fast bop tune, or fast swing tune, he swings the best that can be swung (so long as he does not rush the tempo). But on a Monk tune, he has a tendency, Randy too, to think that he should do Monkisms, and I have to continuously yell out, “Keep it steady!” On ballads and medium tempo tunes, I also sometimes have trouble with his playing. On a swing-era standard he might punctuate the rhythm in a big band style, and as I’m pummeling the keys I think to myself, “don’t do that in a piano trio.” On a slow tune, he often pounds out the one and three of the measure to drive me to distraction. “Just swish those brushes,” I shout. This is what happens on “Mood Indigo” or “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” On the latter tune, especially, the one and the three are pronounced enough in the melody line, there’s no need for the drummer to add his two cents. Listen to the recording on “Mingus Ah Um” -- as Mingus, Horace Parlan, and the horn players come down on those beats, Dannie Richmond lays back delicately. And now that I’ve listened to it, I realize in addition we’ve been improvising on this tune all wrong – the solo section breaks free from the “Real Book” chords and lands on a melodic minor (or major-minor) tonality, with different chord changes. I’ve even found a transcription of this online -- I guess I’ll have to inform Wade and Randy about this sometime. But will Wade ever lay back on the tune? “If you just want me to play time, okay, I’ll just play time,” Wade says, before he slips back into overplaying again.
“Maybe you need to play with a different drummer” -- Wade Miller, after an argument I have with him about “Satin Doll.”
“You’ve already had enough coffee” --- Sisyphus Gregor to Wade Miller, before the first set of the Sunday Jazz Brunch.
Should I post more of the NOL journal? It seems to go on rather long, but it contains some good anti-images that serve my purpose here. I’ll condense it down.
1/25/04 to 1/29/04, Sunday thru Thursday…don't get up until one….no Sunday Times in the box in front of Williams….board trolley to Canal….stumble into the Country Flame, Mexican restaurant in an alley below Royal. Wade orders quesadillas and calamari, a large orange juice, coffee. "This reminds me of San Francisco”….a block away on Chartres Wade finds a cigar shop, sits down, has a coffee, smokes pipe….walk to Jackson Square…Wade rebuffed by busker who argues with drunk…walk by Café du Monde….wave down a cab for Tipitina's (according to Wade, there’s "homegrown music,” beginning at 5, no cover charge)…doorman demands $9.00….we’re incensed by false information….watch patrons dance to pop Cajun, look at bust of Fess….cab back to St. Charles….”We haven’t had a big meal down here yet,” Wade says…at Garlic Clove, orders Cajun rabbit and crawfish etoufee…back in room, I scrutinize Offbeat, discover Wade, having read across semicolons, misconstrued information…. up by 10….Wade strikes out on his own down Carondolet, braving tree roots, crooked sidewalks….I catch up on St Charles….at Please U Restaurant, order oyster omelettes….drink coffee for two hours…."What do you want to do today?" Wade asks….take trolley to Decatur St…."You know,” I tell Wade, “the Café du Monde is just a ways down. You've been saying you want to go there, for your daughters, ever since we got down here. Now’s the time to do it."….rest in front of tour guides, horses and carriages….at Café du Monde, Wade orders coffee and beignets….pigeons descend on beignets left on tables….Wade takes out yellow notepad: "Sitting at Café du Monde. Great coffee and beignets. Image -- pigeons on the table."….walk back down Decatur…."We should get something for Fred Kohler," I say. "Great idea," Wade agrees….Wade lumbers to La Petit Espresso for a cappuccino….we begin walking again….Wade cries out maybe we should flag a cab...... trolley to Jackson….Wade buys a hot sausage po' boy, a gallon of water, a half gallon of orange juice, two bananas, two hard boiled eggs, bottle of merlot…that night take trolley to Bordeaux, walk toward Magazine to Le Bon Temp Roule….cab back to Carondolet….Wade steps out, cries out he’s lost a shoe…back in the room Wade calls bar, asks them to check street for shoe…next morning, without coffee or shower, I go to Payless Shoes on Canal St, buy Wade new shoes for $20…. Wade praises them…. at Please U, Wade orders a side dish of hot sausage with his oyster omelette…. back at the room Wade plans to make phone calls to drummers….Wade tells me he wasn't able to get in touch with any drummers but had long phone conversations with brother and Fred Kohler….for supper Wade has shrimp po' boy from Williams, spiced up with leftover sauces from VooDoo BBQ, a can of Roland artichoke hearts…after scrutinizing Offbeat and Where, we stay in for the night….next morning Wade heads out on his own again….when I meet him at the Please U he’s already laid out with NY Times, Swiss cheese omelette, grits, coffee, a large tomato juice, and side of catfish. No oysters today….back at the room we check our finances. I have a $100 bill left from the money Fred Kohler gave us, and Wade insists I give it to him, so he can put it in his sock….Wade naps….we go to ATM so he can get more cash…trolley to the Quarter and the Country Flame…Wade orders Cuban sandwich…walk down Chartres, Wade turning to me, “I’m really shot. I know where the cabs are. I’m going back to the room”….Wade wakes up when I get back to the room, tells me he had a good conversation and dinner with Sammie’s brother, Mike, who picked up the tab….I express worry about getting up tomorrow to catch our train home at 7:20 am. Wade tells me not to worry, “oms” himself back to sleep. As I lay reading "This Week in New Orleans," every now and then hear him sputtering awake, mumbling "Wake up at six, wake up at six”….
….next morning we return keys, take cab to station….on train have breakfast of grits and eggs, a side of sausage, coffee, a large orange juice….Wade falls asleep in his seat….in Atlanta trains fills up and someone takes the seat next to Wade….in the snack car, he whispers to me, "I lost that $100 bill. I had it when I bought a sandwich for lunch and then I looked in my bag back in the seat and it was gone. I can't look for it with the guy sitting next to me”….next morning, while guy goes to the bathroom, Wade and I look unsuccessfully for the bill. "I couldn't sleep all last night,” he tells me, “but I had a great conversation, with the people next to me. About politics, racism. A wonderful, wonderful conversation”…..arrive in Philly early afternoon, switch to train to HAR....picked up by Wade’s brother, Dan, and his wife, Laura, who tells us about all the things she did in New Orleans when she visited there a few years ago.
Several weeks ago, I overheard Randy telling Wade that he plans to film part of “Wade Miller” in San Francisco – presumably whenever Wade goes out to California to visit his daughters and play with the jazz group he plays with out there. I don’t know if that will ever happen. Randy has a tendency to make plans that he never fulfills – eg. he’s been working on repairing my PA system for two years now (we’ve been using his); he wanted to learn to bow the head of “Come Sunday,” but after a couple painful run-throughs, appears to have given up. If they do go out to California, that means of course that I will have to stay behind and hold down the fort of Gregor, Miller & Till -- which is something I’m use to. Randy plays in a couple other bands and has no compunction about taking off from a trio gig if one comes up at the same time with one of the other bands, and of course Wade makes his biannual forays to California and travels wherever else he can cop a trip. At such times I play with subs, and, except for my originals and certain other tunes I’ve rehearsed with those with whom I share equal billing, the trio of Gregor, Miller & Till sounds essentially the same as the trio of Gregor and, say, Martera & Kirk.
THE ANTI-DOCUMENTARY MYTH DISPELLER
What most people think Wade Miller did: He played in the most famous psychedelic jam band from San Francisco.
What Wade Miller actually did: He played in a short-lived side band led by the bass player of the famous band. The bass player formed the side band because he was bored playing in the famous band.
“I’m a terrible business man” – Wade Miller
Coincidentally Drew, my friend from college, happens to know the original drummer on the TV cartoon from which Wade derives much of his local celebrity, and Wade happened to know this drummer in San Francisco (perhaps they shared gigs and dope together, I’m not sure). Let’s call the drummer Tod (the original drummer). Tod, a few years older than Wade, now clean and a Buddhist for years, teaches drums at the same institute in Canada that Drew writes for. The last time I saw Drew he told me that Tod is bitter because he has never received any money for his work on the famous TV cartoon. I relay this the next day to Wade on our way to work. I begin by saying that Drew told me Tod has been upset for years about his work with the cartoon, then pause. “That’s my major source of income,” Wade says, and before I can go on, shaking his big head, fills in the blank, “And he never got a thing for it.”
Originally I had thought to end my anti-documentary of Wade with the comment above. Well, actually I simply ran out of time -- that’s all I could get down by the time of my last post on December 24, 2011. But I’ve been re-reading this blog since then, and inserting a few more comments here and there. At odds with the original purpose of my blog, the anti-documentary has already done its damage. So might as well do some more.
THE ANTI-DOCUMENTARY MYTH DISPELLER
What many people think Wade Miller did: He played with Frank Sinatra.
What Wade Miller actually did: He cringed when he saw this false statement on some promo material prepared by Mona, serial entrepreneur.
“You should get yourself some anti-depressants.” Wade Miller, former junkie and current methadone, amphetamine, citalopram, insulin, and who-knows-what-else user, to Sisyphus Gregor. “Those were good times,” Wade Miller adds, referring to the days when I was taking Zoloft, rep samples given to me by Barb Dennehy when she worked as a receptionist for a doctor, a supply that abruptly ended when the doctor retired and Barb lost her job.
On a break at a typical Gregor, Miller & Till gig, as the pianist rests behind the piano with a grimace on his face, and the bass player rushes off with his cell phone to discuss business with another band, you can see the great hulking figure of Wade Miller, reaching for a polished oak staff that somebody made for him, rise up from his drum set. With wild hair and beard frizzing about his face, wide suspenders holding up his huge black trousers, he lumbers to the nearest table, voice booming, arms outspread: “Glad to see you….Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful….Brother, nice of you to come….Come on, give me a hug.” As he hunches over the table, a young man approaches and says he saw Wade a few weeks ago backing up a singer-songwriter at the Apple Street coffeehouse. “You a musician?” Wade asks, and the young man explains he’s an aspiring guitarist. “That’s great. Tell me your name again,” Wade handing him his personal business card. “Give me a call. I’d like to jam with you some time.” A couple in a booth are smiling, and Wade, planting his hands on the top of the staff, grins (dentures courtesy of Frank Kohler). “Hi. Have we met before?” The woman explains that she and her husband read the recent feature article on Wade in Valley Life Magazine. “Yes. I get a bit too much press these days. I’m afraid people will get tired reading about me.” Ho-ho-ho! The woman wonders if the trio can play “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. “I’ll see if the piano player knows it.” Wade looks around, his black T-shirt, topped with a wood-bead necklace, drenched with sweat. But before he can find a seat, another couple comes up to him, the father, holding a child in his arms, telling Wade that he saw him a few years back doing a drum circle at the Quaker school in nearby M_______. “Hi. What’s your name?” Wade inquires of the child in his Homer Simpson voice. The father introduces the kid as Ethan. “Well, Ethan, I can tell you’re going to be a drummer someday,” and Wade shuffles back to his drum set, the father following and setting his son on Wade’s lap. Wade whips out an old drumstick, places it in the boy’s hands, and, guiding with his own hands, shows the kid how to tap on a crash cymbal and a tom-tom (which the piano player thought were both a bit overused on the drum solos of the last set, whereas the high-hat, probably because of Wade’s neuropathy, was hardly used at all).
Schmooze: to chat in a friendly and persuasive manner especially so as to gain favor, business, or connections (merriam-webster.com). “I never used to schmooze in San Francisco. There on a break it was always to a restroom or out to the back alley. But I find here it’s the only way to get people to come to your gigs.” Wade Miller.
(By the way, Moi has also appeared on the cover of Valley Life Magazine, for a feature on her brain tanning of deer hides (which she seldom does anymore). And like Wade, her picture, showing her smiling behind her fiddle, appears frequently in local newspapers. She says this is only because photographers like to take pictures of fiddlers.)
“What you should do is get yourself a solo gig somewhere. I think about it sometimes myself. I think I can play the piano well enough.” Wade Miller to Sisyphus Gregor, after an argument over the trio’s treatment of a slow ballad. (By the way, I have tried to follow Wade’s suggestion, but there are impediments, as I’ve explained to him. The first is the paucity of real pianos in restaurants and bars, the trend being to prefer to outfit music venues with PA systems or even drum sets rather than pianos, under the assumption that, if any anyone really wants to hear piano music (say, rather than karaoke, a DJ, a guitarist singer-songwriter, a house stereo, a fiddler, or a drum circle) digital electronic keyboards are now as portable as guitars. But for me (despite claims to the contrary: “In tests musicians were unable to discern the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano.” -- wikipedia), a digital keyboard is to an acoustic piano what Tang is to orange juice, or supermarket kielbasa is to what you can still buy at coal region meat markets, or -- fill in you own analogy. (It amazes me that Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the digital piano, is so deaf to the difference between a sound and its electronic reproduction as to envision that a nanoscan of a brain’s neurons downloaded onto a microchip will be, without question, an entity continuous with the brain scared shitless – but who knows; I could never have predicted that American families would prefer to have a Casio keyboard rather than a spinet piano in their living rooms.) It’s bad enough to have to use a digital keyboard as part of a piano trio, it’s even worse as a solo instrument – and whenever I can I use an acoustic piano in either situation, even when it’s a piece of junk. (Two Lester pianos that I’ve played on my gigs, and the subsequent re-discovery that my piano at home is a Lester, inspired the following hokum-blues-style song:
She’s got eighty-eight teeth, black and white.
Some are missing, but some all right.
I love my baby, I love my pianna gal.
She’s a regular wreck, but I love her anyhow.
She can’t keep a tune. She’s sharp or flat.
She doesn’t even know what note she’s at.
But I love my baby, I love my pianna gal.
She’s a terrible mess, but I love her anyhow.
Her name ain’t Baldwin. It ain’t Steinway.
Her name is Lester, but that’s okay.
I love my baby, love my pianna gal.
She’s a piece of junk, but I love her anyhow.
She shakes and rattles. She buzzes and creaks.
Her tone is sour, and her big feet squeak.
But I love my baby, love my pianna gal.
She’s falling apart, but I love her anyhow.
-- which, for a number of reasons, I’ve yet to perform in public -- not least of all, because I’m afraid both Wade and Randy will overplay on it, and I’ll have to yell at them once again). In the last couple years, however, I have come across one restaurant, in my very own hometown of all places, that has a decent piano, and I began soliciting gigs there as soon as I heard about it. But although both Wade and Randy recently have done gigs there with other bands, I have been unable to secure a foothold in the place, either for myself or the trio. It must be that, in sharp contrast to Wade, I present anything but a lovable demeanor – a second impediment. Moi has said that I used to “scare” Jazz’s friends when she was a teenager. Wade has said that I look “like a pirate or something.” It suddenly dawns on me, thinking about this just now, that my unpublishable novella about the face-making, door-encountering imp Ammrrrrrghhrlgblahbleh could be considered more realistic autobiography than surrealistic fantasy:
From the beginning I have dropped down to the doorsteps where hang stiles of oak, cedar, pine, or elm, my hump toward the welter of the roadways, my eyes facing those imperturbable boards, imperturbable because most of the times you have preferred to keep them still. On one side or the other you shout or pant, rant or murmur, deep behind blocks of travertine or walls of granite or out in the dust and glare. Those boards, nothing but the mark of a passageway for you, a beginning or an ending -- those boards have thankfully separated me from those places where you go, the indoors or outdoors. Your places are my void, your void has been my home. For the most part you have left me to myself before those planks towering toward a lintel, below which I delightedly scrunch my neck and curl my spine. Your yells, your moans, are muffled, battened shut by that silencer wood, which there is no way around -- that wood which presents in silence its flat, dark face to me….From one door to the next I fly….My flights from door to door are dreamless journeys through a dark vacuum, and my first step in front of each door is among my last, as within seconds, a lifetime for me, I poke out my gut, turn my shoulders, and wriggle my chin, lips, and brow….)
(The contemporary contempt for the piano is reflected, for example, in a 1987 digital remastering of the album Waltz for Debbie by the Bill Evans Trio, recorded live at the Village Vanguard in the early 60’s. While certainly Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian are as important to the music as Evans, Joe Tarantino (he’s proudly put his name on the label) remixed the sound so the bassist sounds likes he’s right in front of you, the drummer close behind him, and poor Bill’s off in another room. And I don’t think my judgment here is just the prejudice of old, high-pitch-deaf ears. Admittedly this effect is not as pronounced on my bedroom CD player, where just since the last sentence I’ve replayed the recording, as it is on the car CD player, which the Boy set up -- but no matter, I think it’s still there, and anyway I’ve heard piano drowned out much worse in live situations. This effect, of pushing the piano back into another room, almost occurred on Gregor, Miller & Till’s CD Torn Rivers. The recording engineer, Martin Supic, whose work I respect very much, originally boosted the bass when we mixed the sound so, as he says, the bass could be heard on all CD players. I first acquiesced to this, but later had Martin turn down the bass, which he finally admitted was perhaps a bit too loud. Neither Wade nor Randy attended the mixing sessions (at the time they were involved in a recording session with another musician). Wade, as I remember, made an effort only to say, first during the mixing process, that “despite all the problems we had” -- he had fallen down in the studio one night – “and I don’t think it was our best playing, it sounds absolutely great” and, later when the remixing was completed and the recording off to be duplicated, “I can’t hear the drums very well.”)
Wade loves his cell phone almost as much as Randy loves his. At a recent Wednesday night gig, while Sue Smith was setting up his drums and I was fitting up mikes around the Lester baby grand (in my opinion the piano shouldn’t be miked at all, but so much for my opinion), Wade was over in a booth talking on his cell phone. I could hear him as plainly as if he were talking directly to me. “Just want to let you know that John DeFalko got in touch with me. He seems like a real nice guy, and I’m looking forward to meeting him and perhaps doing some recording with him. It’s a wonderful idea.” The name John DeFalko sounded familiar to me but I didn’t at the time think anything about it. Then at the trio’s pre-gig meal, Wade said to Randy, “Just want to let you know that I spoke with Mona tonight and told her that I talked with John DeFalko. He’s even talking about moving here.” Then I suddenly realized who John DeFalko was – he was the New York-based guitarist that the Boy said he had gotten together with a couple times to play bass on some informal private jams in Astoria, a guitarist (John DeFalko is not his real name) who, although not well known himself, has played in the past with several big-name jazz musicians (a familiar curriculum vitae). A few days later, at our Sunday gig, Mona showed up to sit in on flute, and I saw her going around putting up posters for a gig she apparently arranged: “Coming this Wednesday. John DeFalko: the Guitar Legend.” On our way home, I told Wade that John DeFalko was, coincidentally, a musician that the Boy had played with in NYC. “So whenever you get together with this guy, could you tell him my son says hello.” A few weeks later, after I overheard Wade telling someone that he had met John DeFalko, I asked him if he had said hello from the Boy.
“I mainly just sat there and let him do all the talking.” Wade Miller to Sisyphus Gregor, trying to explain why he didn’t say hello to John DeFalko from the Boy. “He says that the music scene is terrible in the city. There’s few gigs for someone who lives there, and what there is doesn’t pay. And he’s thinking -- .” “I know all that.” Sisyphus Gregor, cutting Wade Miller short, then hurrying outside for a cigarette.
THE WADE MILLER ANTI-DOCUMENTARY Q. & A. FORUM
Q. What musician, far more famous than Wade Miller, also appeared on the cover of an issue of Valley Life Magazine, like Wade and Moi have?
A. February 29, 2012
Davy Jones, Lead Singer of The Monkees, Dies at Age 66
The Daily Item
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Davy Jones, the lead singer of The Monkees who has maintained a country home for the past several years in B_________, S________ C_______, has died in Florida. He was 66.
Q. Did Wade Miller ever play with Davy Jones?
A. Apparently not. Wade, however, played for a time in a three-piece band led by Dennis Dennehy, replacing the bass player, Eric Rains, who, also a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, performed and recorded with Davy Jones both regionally and nationally. Rains’ daughter, Amber, is a childhood friend of Wade’s pianist’s daughter, Jazz, who, on at least one occasion, accompanied Amber on a visit to the late Monkee’s country home, where, she fondly recalls (as Moi relates from Facebook), that the singer was a very nice man and she swung on a big tree swing and the singer made supper for them and when she didn’t eat it because she was suspicious of any food her mother didn’t make he gave her crackers instead and when Eric and Davy were playing music she and Amber went upstairs and poked around in his dresser drawers and among his personal belongings.
Q. Does Wade Miller have any other connection with Davy Jones?
A. Wade Miller, along with his bassist and pianist, made a recording with Native American flutist Paul Paulsen at a music studio near B________, where the late Monkee also recorded occasionally. The studio has recently gone out of business or been downsized. Paul Paulsen’s daughter, Laney, is also a childhood friend of Eric Rains’ daughter, and spent even more time than Jazz at the singer’s country home, especially because she was fond of his horses. Paul Paulsen, who at one time was almost, but not quite, something more than a friend to Jazz’s mother, and almost, but not quite, as big a schmoozer as Wade Miller, used to accompany his daughter a lot to the country home. (Paul died several years ago. He was in his mid 50’s. At his funeral, his recording of Native American flute accompanied by whale singing was played. As was his request, his ashes were placed in a watermelon, set afloat on the river, and blown up with M-80’s.
Q. Has the local press done as many features articles on Davy Jones as it has done on Wade Miller?
A. No research has been done to answer this. The local newspaper did carry a report of the late Monkee’s arrest on a DUI charge and perhaps another on a disorderly conduct charge.
Q. Does Wade read the local newspaper as well as the New York Times?
A. Yes.
Q. What is Wade Miller’s favorite section of the New York Times?
A. The obituaries.
Q. Why is this his favorite section?
A. He likes to read about musicians who have died before he has. He finds it amazing that he has lived as long as he has.
Q. How old is Wade?
A. 66 years old.
Q. Wasn’t there some other real famous person who lived near B__________ and who was a friend of Wade Miller’s father and mother?
A. Yes. Euell Gibbons, outdoorsman, forager, and author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus.
Q. Wasn’t Euell Gibbons an alcoholic and didn’t he die of an ulcer or something like that?
A. According to wikipedia, he died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm, a complication from Marfan syndrome.
Between songs on a typical Gregor, Miller & Till gig, if you focus and ignore the chatter of the audience, you can just barely hear Miller’s pianist calling out the next tune. You then see Randy Till nod and punch up a chord chart on his iPhone (which, however, does not include a melody line that would give him a fuller understanding of the harmonic progression). Wade Miller, however, is shaking his head. “What are we playing next?” he cries out, “I can’t help it if I’m half-deaf and didn’t hear what you said.” If you listen very closely you might then just hear the pianist muttering that he doesn’t want Wade to know what the next tune is. (The pianist, however, does not explain that by this he hopes to mix him up and force him to play something different from an over-insistent demarcation of the melody line.)
“I don’t know why you’re always making fun of my infirmities. It’s not funny after a while,” Wade Miller to Sisyphus Gregor, who’s holding Wade’s 48-oz. convenient store coffee while the drummer, huffing and puffing, takes five-minutes to buckle up his seatbelt. “You’re right,” Gregor replies. “I’m sorry.”
A few years ago, a retired teacher came to the town of L______, where Gregor, Miller & Till have managed, largely, if not entirely, through the artful business tactic of Miller’s schmoozing, to maintain a weekly gig at one venue or another for ten or eleven years. The man, Lew, bought the independent bookstore in town, where Wade Miller every morning for years has picked up his New York Times (next door to the liquor store where he also picks up his bottle of merlot). The new businessman very quickly became smitten with the lovable drummer. “Great bookstore you have here. Just great,” purchasing a book or two along with the New York Times. “Well, I hope to make a go of it. We’ll see. Thank you, for your business.” “Wade Miller’s my name,” handing out his business card. “Come to see my trio play sometime.” “Thanks. Pleased to meet you. Lew. Uh, Lew is my name.” Lew began going regularly to the trio’s gigs, he started taking drum lessons from Wade (the people Wade has given lessons to include every roadie he’s had except me, his former and present landlord, every kid in the neighborhood around the trailer down by the river, and who knows how many people from our audiences). Eventually Lew hired the trio to perform an evening of “jazz noir” at the bookstore, combining our performances of such tunes as “Harlem Nocturne” and “Angel Eyes” with a promotion of the “noir fiction” he specialized in. He hired solo and duo acts to perform on the sidewalk in front of his bookstore – not only Wade on drums, but Randy on solo bass, me with my digital keyboard, Moi and her fiddle, and a number of the guitarist singer-songwriters in the area. He began taking an interest in the fate of Gregor, Miller & Till, especially when the owner of the restaurant where we were then playing cut our performance schedule down from every Wednesday to every other Wednesday. Eventually he offered to become our full-time manager, succeeded in moving our Wednesday gig to a more favorable venue in town, and, though the year he was our full-time manager did not live up to everyone’s expectations (it was also the year his bookstore went out of business, thanks to a chain bookstore coming to town), he remains our part-time manager to this day. One venture that Lew put together (though he lost money on it) was a series of special trio performances called Jazz Dialogues with Gregor, Miller & Till, where, in connection with children’s books that Lew would try to sell, the trio performed various styles of jazz (Swing, Great American Songbook, Bop, Hard Bop, Latin, Cool) and then engaged the audience in a discussion about them. Wade always led the discussions (except for the performance of Christmas Jazz, for which he developed laryngitis), which usually ended up being a rambling monologue where Wade went off topic and got into a jag about how jazz is a music white people stole from African-Americans or a music underappreciated in a country focused on the cult of pop celebrity. (“The music you hear tonight is as good as anything you can hear in New York City.”)
For the type of jazz emergent from the late 50’s through the 60’s (typically called free jazz), we came up with the term Experimental Jazz. In addition to covering the music of Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Coltrane, and the like, I suggested we play John Cage’s 4’33’’, a piece that I’ve always longed to perform. (John Cage, if I have not mentioned this elsewhere, is an important influence on this blog, notwithstanding his insightful clarification of the distinction between indeterminate music and jazz.) Randy, a devoté of ambient music and the like, was also excited about the proposal and said he could even pick up a copy of the score (which he actually did do). Wade went along with the idea. The performance of 4’33’’ was videotaped (as was everything from the Jazz Dialogues), and what follows in the next comment box is a not too horribly inaccurate transcription of that performance as videotaped. (The actual performance of this piece, I believe, is egregiously never fully perpectible by anyone; for example, the environmental sounds most manifest to me during much of our particular performance included the loud bell-like thoughts of me counting the seconds.)
The DVD I have of the performance is skipping over it for some reason, so my transcription here is of my long-term memory of the performance, and thus consists only of the auditory and visual aspects of the piece as I recall them after a long lapse of time and distort them in putting them down.
Wade’s spoken introduction: “Many of you, I understand from talking with you on break, are familiar with our next piece. Those of you who aren’t – well, without further ado, we present to you now John Cage’s 4’33”.
(Pianist opens and shuts piano lid. Drummer, observing pianist’s cue, picks up drumsticks then sets them down on snare drum. Bassist clutches neck of bass.)
Movement I (Duration: 30 seconds): TACET
(Audience is respectfully quiet.) (Thought-sounds of counted seconds.) (Whir of Wade’s electric fan.)
(Pianist opens and shuts piano lid. Drummer, observing pianist, picks up drumsticks then sets them down on snare drum. Bassist clutches neck of bass.)
Movement II (Duration: 2 minutes 23 seconds): TACET
(Audience is respectfully quiet.) (Thought-sounds of counted seconds.) (Whir of Wade’s electric fan.)
(Pianist opens and shuts piano lid. Drummer picks up drumsticks then sets them down on snare drum. Bassist clutches neck of bass.)
Movement III (Duration: 1 minute 40 seconds): TACET
(Wade bellows out: “Don’t worry, folks, you’re more than halfway through this.”)
(Laughter.) (Pianist shakes his head.) (Audience gradually resumes respectful quiet.) (Thought-sounds of counted seconds.) (Whir of Wade’s electric fan.)
Raw Footage: Today at our Sunday gig Randy was having trouble with the pick-up on his acoustic bass, so in the middle of the set he went out and got his electric bass. Since that instrument not only sounds very different from an acoustic, but Randy, whether he wants to or not, also plays on it differently, I thought it was a good time to stop pretending my Yamaha P-80 played through a Fender Passport PA was an acoustic piano (besides which Randy has still not gotten around to fixing the sustain pedal on it), and, knowing that one of the bands Randy plays in does 70’s disco, I called out Fly Me to the Moon, prepared myself mentally to switch variously through the electric piano, electric organ, and strings settings, and told Randy and Wade to accompany me with a disco beat. When we finished that, I then told them we were going to play Punxsutawney, one of my own compositions, in the same fashion. “That was great,” I said. Wade then cried out: “That was cool doing disco for a couple tunes. But let’s stop now.” “No,” I said, “keep up the disco beat,” and launched into Ellington’s Come Sunday.
I think this will be about it for my anti-documentary of Wade Miller (after all, shouldn’t I have better things to do? – well, at any rate, I feel this is a good time to end – end something that I should never have begun -- originally begun to make “no one in particular” feel a little better?)
I don’t know how the official documentary is coming along. Wade is going to California this week, and it looks like Tanya or Randy have not made any plans to follow him out there. And oddly I don’t see them doing much filming around here either. But maybe they do a lot of it when I’m not present (it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re trying to leave me out of it as much as possible). I think from time to time about asking how it’s going – actually I think most about asking Wade how it’s going, because he would most likely respond with an off-camera remark. But then I worry something he’ll say will piss me off, so I don’t bother. As for my anti-documentary here, Wade knows about this blog – and he can at anytime make a comment here. He’s quite capable of supplying his own perspective on his life and work. But on second thought, maybe he isn’t. Wade knows about this blog, but the last time I talked to him about it, he didn’t seem to know how to find it online. And even if he could find it, I doubt he has the patience, the devotion to John Cage, to read though it, till he comes to this. And come to think of it, even if he found these comments, I think it likely that he would only make, if anything, the briefest of comments in reply. For Wade, as untaciturn as he is, is no writer, as he’s so often lamented to me. I think he lacks the power of concentration to write. As much as he enjoys reading, as much as he buys books from local poets and local bookstores, now that I think about it I’ve only known him to read things that are relatively short – such as an article in the New York Times or a passage in the Tao-Te-Ching. This lack of concentration, this short attention span, which hampers at least traditional kinds of writing – it suddenly dawns on me – is also characteristic of his drumming style. Rather than following through and developing or maintaining an idea, he often flits from one idea to another, giving in to some mechanism of association in his head, or responding too anxiously to what another musician is playing, or indulging in a device he knows the audience will find easy to consume. In certain amounts this can be interesting, but if given too much reign, this style of drumming can hinder what another musician is trying to play and, in itself, become cutesy and frivolous. It’s as if Wade is a kid on a playground shouting out “hey, look at what I’m doing now!” – or perhaps better, a kid who’s continuously pointing out the tricks his dog can do or the funny clothes he’s now put on it. And this kind of drumming, if you talk to him, is what Wade will say he deplores. I don’t know – Wade, you’re welcome to put your two cents in here on your own behalf. ON THE OTHER HAND, WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT? WHERE IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, AND WHAT SOMETHING ELSE DOES IT PUSH ITS BOUNDARIES AGAINST? It’s been a long day – a typical Sunday. Usually I spend Sunday evening zoning out with Moi to a Net Flicks movie (the subscription to which Jazz got us for a Christmas present in 2010). But I decided tonight, since we got the wrong movie in the mail, I’m going to go off now to read A Year From Monday, a book which was also a Christmas present from Jazz, and which I haven’t had the chance to read until I’ve just taken the chance just now. Tomorrow the Boy is coming home by train, since he no longer has a car, to visit for about a week for his birthday. Moi or I will have to drive down to pick him up at the train station.
ON THE OTHER HAND, WHAT THEY TALKING ABOUT HERE?
HONG KONG (Reuters) - American International Group (AIG) is selling part of its stake in AIA Group to raise about $6 billion to help the U.S. insurer repay a huge federal government bailout….
Institutions may be drawn to the offering by AIA's strong performance since it listed in a $20.5 billion Hong Kong IPO in 2010 - Asia's third-largest public listing - but a big run up in its stock price may have some feeling the offer is expensive.
But, with such a large sale on to the market and AIA's free float increasing, the company's weighting on benchmark indexes should rise, making it a target for fund managers tracking the Hang Seng and the Hang Seng Finance Index.
"The issue of getting the deal through shouldn't be a problem, plus there should be some index buying," said the head of a large U.S.-based asset manager in Hong Kong, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the AIA sale….
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs are the "active" joint global coordinators (JGCs), according to two sources with direct knowledge of the process, who did not want to be named as they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Deutsche and Goldman were among the four banks that led AIA's IPO, along with Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. The sources said Citi and Morgan Stanley were taking "passive" JGC roles in the current AIG sell-down.
The distinction is important not just for the fees that are paid on such a large offering, but also in the league table credit that can help a bank's external marketing. For the AIA sell-down, the banks will get equal league table credit, but Deutsche and Goldman will take home the fatter fees, according to one of the sources.
The deal should be "well-distributed" among different investors, instead of large chunks going to just a handful of buyers, the source noted.
Shares of AIA, headed by former Prudential Plc executive Mark Tucker, have risen 47 percent since early-October, and last week touched a 7-month high. The shares closed at HK$29.20 on Friday….
BONUS FEATURE: Since it’s doubtful Wade will make any kind of reply here, I might as well end this too brief anti-documentary with something that puts him in a good light. Often on our Sunday gigs Randy rushes off at the end to go to a rehearsal or gig with another band, so he forgoes putting in a food order, one of the fringe benefits of the gig. Over the years Wade figured out we could pretend to order food for Randy, then take his order home for ourselves. Even though Randy’s a vegetarian I would usually order garlic wings for Randy, which would give me an extra order that I could take home and share with Moi (or the Boy when he lived here) and I would still have enough wings from my own order to de-bone and put in my Ramen noodle stir fries for the next couple days. Yesterday, as I was breaking down my piano and PA, Wade called me over to where he was standing with Nikki, the afternoon waitress who’s been taking our orders the last couple months (Wade always gives the waitress $10 out of our pay for a tip). “Want to put in your food order?” Wade said. I told Nikki I would have an order of garlic wings and a Cobb salad with piece of salmon on it (a specialty salad that Wade has concocted and usually orders for himself and then takes home to give to his landlady, Berrice). “Also,” Wade went on, “I ordered garlic wings for Randy. You can order the rest of what Randy wants.” I was confused and felt guilt-ridden. It seemed preposterous to order more garlic wings for Randy since Nikki knew that Randy never ordered meat products. “I don’t know,” I stammered. “What does Randy usually get?” “Well,” Nikki explained, “he sometimes gets nachos.” “Okay,” I said, “I’ll order nachos for Randy.” Later when we were at the table, where Wade was eating some of his “organic” burger and sweet potato fries and having a merlot before we got into my car to go home, I pointed to the bag containing the clamshell of Randy’s wings and said that was really what I wanted to order. “What did you order for Randy?” Wade asked. “Nachos,” I said, explaining why I got them. “You don’t want them?” Wade asked. “Not really.” “Take the wings then. I’ll take the nachos.” “No. That’s all right. They’re yours.” “Go ahead. Take them. If you take them, will you eat them all?” Wade went on, “Because often I bring food home and end up throwing it out anyway.” I assured Wade that all the wings would get eaten. “Take them then,” he said. “I really appreciate this,” I said. I finished my pint of apricot wheat beer. “You going to have another?” Wade asked. I told him that we really should go. Wade still had a few items to bring out to the car, his stick bag, stick stand, and electric fan. “If you can get the food and the fan,” he said, “I can get the bag and stand.” Rick, a Mick Jagger look-alike who’s been coming to the gig to learn jazz bass, saw Wade move and went over to carry out the bag and stand for him. He also grabbed the fan. After I put all the items in the car, I realized the stick bag was missing. “We must have left it inside,” I said to Wade, “I’ll go check.” On the way, I ran into Rick, who had left the stick bag absentmindedly slung around his shoulder, coming back toward the car. “Thanks for noticing the stick bag was missing,” Wade said to me. “That’s all right,” I said, “Now I feel like I’ve earned your garlic wings.”
Up in my NOL journal I’ve just noticed that I wrote “As I lay reading” rather than, as I should have since I was in the present tense, “As I lie reading.” There’s nothing I can do about that lapse in proper grammar now, since my publisher doesn’t permit the editing of comments. My mother was an English teacher, so not only in school but also at home I received a sound drilling on the different conjugations of “lie” and “lay.” I can’t believe I still get them mixed up after all these years. It makes me wonder what right I have to say anything if I still can’t keep when I lie straight from when I lay. But what I think happened here is that somewhere in my auditory cortices lies lodged an engram of the title of the Faulkner novel As I Lay Dying, embedded there as a melodious phrase, and, during the synaptic firing of a syntactically similar phrase, that neural pattern laid itself athwart the Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas and belied the engram that differentiates “lie” from “lay.” Bringing up Faulkner, I’m surprised I didn’t ask M (or rather MM) her opinion of this writer back when I was asking her her opinions of writers other than Joyce – or even more appropriately, surprised I didn’t ask her about Hemingway, in particular The Sun Also Rises. But, at the time, I was coming up with names from books on the shelves in my office, and all my Faulkner and Hemingway books are up in the attic, although MM should have encountered some of their writings in my Norton anthologies. If MM had read The Sun Also Rises it seems reasonable to me that she might have fixated on that novel instead of Ulysses (about equally hard to understand, if I remember correctly) – would I then have been freed from some of her criticisms, and less embarrassed by her praises? Or Tolstoy (the last time I saw Wade and his brother, Dan, sitting together, they looked to me like Tolstoy and Turgenev head-to-head in heated conference – what were they saying, these brothers raised as pacifist Quakers, but the one a dilettante of Eastern religion and lover of 60’s San Francisco culture, the other an atheist, radio political commentator, and local racecar enthusiast? -- probably talking in puns: “Is this your tip lying here, brother?” “Yes, unless you want an angry waitress on your hands, take my tip and don’t take it.” “Tip of the hat for your warning.”) -- if MM likes sensuous writing why not use Tolstoy as a model? Except – as I must conclude -- that she’s never read him either, even though Anna Karenina sits there on the shelf (although, admittedly, up there high in a corner). Glancing quickly over my shelves, I wonder what MM has actually read: Homer? Ovid? The I Ching? Saint Augustine? Dante? Chaucer? Swift? Boswell’s Life of Johnson? Fielding? Richardson? Defoe? The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam? Austen? Coleridge? Dickens? Goethe? Stendhal? Henry James? Dos Passos? Gertrude Stein? Ethel Waters? Mezz Mezzrow? Upton Sinclair? D. H. Lawrence? William Carlos Williams? Henry Miller? Anais Nin? Jean Genet? Barbara Leaming’s biography on Orson Welles? Robbe-Grillet? Sylvia Plath? Louis Zukofsky? Gunter Grass? Borges? Cortazar? Italo Calvino? John Barth? Nabokov? Horowitz’s New Traps in the Chess Opening? Witold Gombrowicz? Yukio Mishima? Ntozake Shange? Thomas Wolfe? John Ashberry? Sherman Alexie? Douglas Adams? The Best Free Things for Seniors?
On the front of my Sony CD player in my bedroom I found two buttons, one marked Mega Bass and the other Sound. By pushing these I’ve discovered I can lower both LaFaro and Motian in the mix and bring Evans out a little more. But when I do this I suddenly miss the thick juicy bass notes I first encountered, so I push the buttons to return to the sound that I first complained about.
Yesterday, perhaps because I hear her talking about them all the time – and maybe also because I need a break from A Year from Monday -- I asked Moi to give me one of the novels she’s been reading lately. Already she’s handed me The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani, and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Coming from Cage’s essays on Johns, Duchamp, and the “mud” of Ives (for a time Wade used to proclaim that “The Unanswered Question.” was his favorite piece of music), I don’t know which of these novels to read first. And just now Moi has handed me yet another book that she picked up from the thrift store, The Art of Racing in the Rain. This one’s ostensibly written by someone named Garth Stein, a human, but the narrator is obviously nonhuman: “I have no words I can rely on, because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.” On the one hand, I think: oh no, not another dog using human language! But on the other hand, I say, Welcome! In the words of my autobiographical double, Ammrrrrrghhrlgblahbleh: “Genio-hyo-glosse! Hyo-glosse! Stylo-glosse! Palato-glosse! Transverse linguae! Verticulis linguae! Longitudinalis superior and inferior! Splatter my tongue against my lips like the waves that dash against the pink rocks of Cyprus and lap upon its foamy shores.” Of all the books Moi’s handed to me, I could probably most immediately get into this last one. But for now I think I’ll just set it down (notice I didn’t write “sit it down”) here on the floor.
One other book I wonder if M. (or m. or MM.) has read is T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays, wedged randomly, as it has been on my shelves, between The Complete Works of John Milton and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. Seems to me “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its vivid “self-pitying” lines, notable fantastic imagery, and cadences echoing Poe’s “The Raven,” so appealing to adolescents, would also be the kind of thing M. would like, especially considering its opening line. Then there’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” And, of course, “The Wasteland,” which, with its fragmentary, Pound-lopped, structure, is the perfect allegory of the waste place or waste field we traverse almost every day. If M. had read this book, seems to me she would have fixated upon it as much as she has on Ulysses, and, back in the Spring of last year, would have suggested what is probably the best alternative title to this blog, Walks with Mway: In Search of One Particular Wasteland. So, for some reason, she probably has not read this book – a major gap in her reading. On the other hand, I’m amazed that she does seem to be familiar with Shakespeare, which, to have become so, she would have had to knock off the shelf the large, cumbersome Riverside Shakespeare and pawed through its thin pages – which I’ve found no evidence she has done (but I’m not now going over to pull the book out and inspect if further). Somehow or other, she knows at least the play Hamlet – perhaps she was motivated to peer into that by Stephen’s discussion in the library. Or could she have been drawn to the book by the puns in its title? Who knows? Trying to explain any particular contingency can be as vexing as wondering how something could come from nothing in the first place.
THE WADE MILLER ANTI-DOCUMENTARY MYTH DISPELLER: CORRECTION. BREAKING NEWS !!!! I hadn’t meant to add anything new to this anti-documentary, but recently my attention has been drawn to something that compels me to add this correction to something I say above, apparently a myth about Wade that I myself unwittingly helped to perpetuate. In one of my comments above, I state that Wade won a Grammy in the 70’s for some studio work he did back then. This is something he told me back in the days when he still lived in the trailer by the river, those wine-drenched days. I mention it above almost in passing because I take the Grammy awards with a grain of salt (for instance, search Past Grammy Winners at the grammy.com website and you’ll discover that Thelonious Monk never won a Grammy – although Miles Davis has, but never mind); nevertheless, a Grammy, as I once told Wade one night when he seemed to be self-effacingly poo-pooing his award, is a prestigious thing, a sign of recognition one can be honored to have been awarded (it’s like winning a blue ribbon at a dog show), and so I included mention of his award in all the publicity materials I’ve ever written for our trio, particularly in the bio I wrote up on Wade at my website, sisyphusgregor.com. Consequently, this mention of a Grammy has been disseminated on the Web (sometimes my very wording from my website being simply copy/pasted by a newspaper or magazine) and throughout the print media in our little community (“Who Is This Grammy Award Winning Drummer?” Valley Life Magazine writes across its cover photo of Wade leaning on his specially designed, hand-crafted walking stick; another Valley Life article, supposedly on the local jazz community, focuses almost entirely on the “Grammy award winning drummer”), so that “Grammy award winner” has become like an epithet attached to Wade’s name (“grey-eyed Athena,” “clear-headed Telemakhos,” “canny Odysseus,” “Grammy award winner Wade Miller”). But this past week I got an email from this guy, Ron Martin (I don’t know him; he says he’s writing an article – or something), who tells me that my statement on my website that Wade is a Grammy winner is in error: he explains that he checked the records of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, using the Past Winners Search I mention above as well as emailing persons in the organization, and that those records do not show any Wade Miller ever winning a Grammy, for anything. After double checking Martin’s research, I forwarded his emails to Wade, with a note asking Wade what I’m supposed to say on my website – “In 1976 Wade Miller won a Grammy for Best Studio Musician, or so he claims”? Wade immediately wrote back to me saying that his statue was in storage at some friend’s place in San Francisco, that he couldn’t recall exactly what the award was for, but that he was sure the San Francisco chapter of NARAS would have a record of his receiving a Grammy. I drafted an email to the chapter and forwarded it to Wade, asking him if he wanted me to send it. A few days later, I got an email from Wade, implying he checked with the San Francisco chapter himself, saying that for 38 years he thought he won a Grammy, but (in so many words), in fact, he never did.
So the past few days I’ve been trying to change my website. On my 2003 Microsoft Office Publisher website builder, I’ve deleted all mention of Wade’s winning a Grammy and also added a correction note apologizing for my previous error. But poor Moi (who helped me before to publish my site) has been working diligently putting the pages through file transfer protocols so they appear at my Yahoo!-hosted site, yet she hasn’t been able get them re-uploaded right – links aren’t working, pictures aren’t appearing. Right now all I have is a broken website, with nothing but part of my first page showing – but at least Wade’s bio doesn’t appear.
Maybe in some parallel universe I recently departed from the info on my bio of Wade is still correct, and there (though I can’t imagine what for) he really did win a Grammy. Or maybe in that universe my website builder has not been rendered obsolete by browser updates and other program changes so Moi can at least get my changed website uploaded right. As I write this (three years now after I first wrote my journal and two years after I posted it as a blog), so many more portals have cropped up on the path – I could be passing through several universes a day. Those portals aren’t so much the monkey vine type anymore as what might be considered honeysuckle types, though as I tried to note them the other day I find them hard to describe: some of the them maybe are a mixed type, part monkey vine, part honeysuckle, maybe even part multiflora, part alder buckthorn. The one that used to be at the outbuilding and draped over onto the chicken coop, I can at least say this for sure, is no longer there; Moi, a couple weeks ago, tore it down as she was clearing away vegetation around the coop after some racoons attacked and killed most of her chickens, leaving only two hens, a rooster, and a peep, the latter two whom she has named Big Boy and Little Buddy, the saga of which, if you’re friends with Moi on Facebook, you can follow there. On the side path along the old orchard there might be a monkey vine portal there, maybe even two, but I haven’t been down that path in over a month because, unlike in the year I describe in this blog, it’s become very overgrown and I haven’t been able to keep it clear. But on the main path there’s definitely two portals before you reach the maples; the second one, the easier one to describe, is all honeysuckle; this is where two bushes, one on either side of the path, were growing across the path into each other, and I clipped back the lower branches, creating an arch from the higher branches, which you can pass under. There’s also an all-honeysuckle portal down by the creek, where the loopy vine on the ground is, similar in shape to the first one, though, now as I try to recall it, there may be other bushes crowding around it, and this one, as you pass under the arch, you also have to watch you don’t trip on the loopy vine. Then at the big locust trees at the midpoint of the creek there’s a bunch of honeysuckle bushes you have to wind through and duck under, though it seems to me there’s also a multiflora bush or two involved here, as well as a low-hanging branch of one of the trees, and this entire arrangement seems more like a canopy or a tunnel (if a canopy can be like a tunnel and vice versa) than a portal, but whose to say it doesn’t function as a portal? Then at the “swale” you come to another canopy or tunnel, perhaps functioning also as a portal, consisting of a number of bushes you have to duck under, duck under very low, though I’m not sure what kind of bushes these are (as I’m ducking, and watching my step, I can’t see under what I’m ducking). Next, at the feed channel, a honeysuckle, sprawling on one side of the path, and a multiflora, sprawling on the other side, come together to form, as I’m thinking about it now, perhaps not quite a portal, as I’ve cut these branches well far back so I have a minimum of obstacles to deal with as I’m crossing the channel. The same for the honeysuckles growing close together on the crest of the skating pond (meaning they don’t quite form portals), the crest where, I might as well mention in passing, I have to duck under some very low branches of one of the oaks along the creek. Then, through the area I once called the area of the “red willows” or “chokeberries,” but now realize I should call the area of “the alder buckthorns” (though a lot of young maples grow here too and other things I don’t know the names of), I also have to do a lot of ducking, not to mention squeezing between bushes and trees, though this area perhaps can’t be considered a canopy or a
tunnel, much less a portal, unless you consider the place where an alder buckthorn and a Russian olive touch each other a portal. But there’s definitely another portal, and this one clearly an all-honeysuckle type, as you pass through the break in the ridge around bugland, so deep a portal, in fact, you could almost call this a room, or a cavern. As for the first portal I meant to describe, but skipped over, that one is back before the maples, past the pig pen – right smack in the midst of the first strand of sumacs, where, this past spring, a number of dead branches, covered with monkey vines, collapsed in a tangle into the path after a windstorm, all of which I had to clear out, leaving, I think, one strand of monkey vine overhead, though I think there’s also a honeysuckle bush involved here, the whole such a complicated affair I’m going to have to look at again before I can describe it here.
THE WADE MILLER ANTI-DOCUMENTARY! UP-TO-THE-YEAR UPDATE! IRONICAL! LIKE ENTERING YET ANOTHER PARALLEL UNIVERSE! Yes, well, here’s yet another thing I’d like to include here with these comments, out of a sense of obligation for its relevance and of fair play, though I’d really rather be done with this whole thing and have no obligation to put anything more down here (just as I was never obliged ever to say anything – but never mind). Anyway, recently I was on youtube listening to Miles Davis’s own version of his canonical tune “Tune Up” and stumbled upon a version by Gregor, Miller & Till. Several years ago Lew had arranged to have this video clip from our Jazz Dialogue program put up online, and I hadn’t viewed it since then. So I was surprised when I saw that this clip had garnered some 11,507 views, far more than the clips of other tunes Lew had also put up online at the same time, each of which had only garnered about a 100 views or so. What happened here I figured is that, “Tune Up” being a kind of textbook tune for jazz musicians, a lot of young jazz students had been searching out versions of the song on the internet and had stumbled upon our version like I had. But not only had they viewed the clip -- I discovered, as I scrolled down the page, that many had also made comments on the performance. So after I viewed the trio’s performance (which I thought was as good a rendition as we could have done – Wade’s slight overplaying hardly being noticeable in this particular context, Randy playing well, my own playing going along decently enough, and my habit of mumbling and humming to myself as I’m playing, like Erroll Garner or Keith Jarrett might have done, not being picked up too much in the recording), I started reading the comments (some 32 in all). “This is very great. To me, this is real music” was the most recent. “this is awesome” was another. Eight or so positive comments were posted, in which, as I noticed, Wade was not being singled out for special attention -- indeed, he’s not mentioned specifically in any comment at all – and I thought, this is great: for once, in a more or less permanent document, the public is not doting upon the celebrity of a certain sideman, but is paying attention to the music itself. Unlike the fluff in much of our local journalism, who you know, what big names you might have brushed against, what big prize you supposedly won, did not matter – all that mattered was the quality of the work you did. Then, as I read along, I saw the comments narrowing their focus and singling out one particular player – not the drummer this time, with his legendary social status, but the piano player, the person simply at the forefront of the tune. And the first comment I read was this: “You know this would be a whole lot better without the jackass mumbling to himself.”
What this was, I soon discovered, was the most recent in a series of comments, most of which were posted a couple years ago, debating whether or not my singing and humming to myself totally marred our performance (no one explicitly mentions my facemaking and twisting and turning on the piano bench, though they could have). As I read along, I soon came upon another young whippersnapper agreeing with the one above: “that piano player is a total chode. Quit trying to act so ‘jazz.’ the best jazz pianists have good technique and don't try to feel, they just do. You sit there and sing it like an idiot just to try and look like you are feeling it…” Immediately, though, I found others who didn’t mind my humming, one bringing up Keith Jarrett (who, as I mentioned above, often sounds like Snoopy when he’s playing): “what the fuck man. so keith jarett is a phony too, right? this man got chops, and if he feels like scatting, then let him be.” Followed by this retort: “its a rare event. But i bet you he could play with the same exact skill level without the humming, therefore it is not necessary you even suggest in your post most jazz pianist who hum aren't very great so it just shows that you dont need to do it. I love keith's playing but it annoys the hell out of me when he makes the fucking noises.” And so on down the page: “C'mon, guys. A lot of great piano players sang solfège while performing. For an example, see Thelonious Monk. There was a quote I read once, and it goes ‘you know a pianist is serious if he/she sings solfège while playing.’ Cut the guy a break. It takes a lot of talent and practice to play and also sing solfège of what you are playing.” In reply: “its obviously just an act to seem like a better player, I'm not saying his playing doesn't sound good but his annoying singing really ruins the music, if he had a better voice it probably would be a lot different. But his voice is so fucking annoying. Plus that is NOT scatting, hes just being a fucking idiot.” Countering: “how could you know whats acting and whats not? and even if, the man right here sounds like maria callas compared too other jazz pianists that like to hum around.”
An act? A phony? Serious playing? In distinguished company? Whatever a viewer might conclude, this was at least a serious discussion of my work, and of jazz in general -- and as such it is much welcomed. My viewers were learning something; I am learning something – the music itself, and not someone’s bloated resumé, is being discussed and explored. And as for the criticism leveled against me, my detractors only raise to a new height of consideration a concern yours truly dickhead has had for some time anyway: perhaps not in this video, but in quite a few other recordings I have made, my humming is so prominent, that, except that these recordings are the only documentation of my performances during that time, I would gladly toss them in the trash. And in this particular video, though some don’t mind the humming, I have not won over all listeners – there is no final judgment on the performance, except perhaps that it would be better indeed “without the jackass mumbling to himself.” So perhaps I got to practice reigning in my humming, just as over the years I’ve stopped my foot pounding because Wade has complained it interfered with his drumming. By the way, my humming, as well as my foot pounding (not to mention my facemaking and twisting and turning on the bench), are not an “act,” but rather the spirit of the music rising up in me (as is the case, probably, with Jarrett and other solfèging musicians), but this does not matter. Though some might like to see manifestations of spirit, others see this as mere posturing. Broadly speaking, this may be a matter of temperment, hot v. cool, romanticism v. classicism, but a more specific question can also be raised: does the emotion behind the performance overshadow, or even worse, outweigh, the emotion in the performance? I have watched videos of hot music, say Fats Waller or the boogie woogie trio of Lewis, Ammons, and Johnson, and have been impressed by these musicians’ relaxed manner. You can be hot without going into a lot of gyrations over it, so that the question above is not even raised – perhaps this is what I should aspire to. Whatever the final judgment is, perhaps there is no final judgment. But I am grateful for these comments on the youtube video, free from anyone cooing “Wow, do you know that drummer won a Grammy?” or “Wow, do you know that drummer played with so and so?” (One can presume that “this is awesome” applies, in due proportion, to Wade’s own performance). Finally, I wish I had come across this video a couple years back, when a certain no one in particular was upset about her work. I could have discussed it then, and perhaps have helped to give her a broader and keener perspective on her own work (which I think was the intention of all my comments here under this blog entry in the first place).
One more thing: I’ve notice that, somewhere in my comments above, I once call Randy Rusty. Again, as elsewhere, the explanation for this must be cognitive incoherence from a parallel universe (cf. elsewhere in this blog).
Julio Cortazar? Yes, in re-reading this portion of my blog once again, I see that I did mention him among the authors on my shelves whom I wonder if M (or m or MM) has read. And I bring him up now, thinking in particular of his novel Hopscotch, that fine amalgam of jazz and modern, Joyce-influenced literature (but did Miles or Monk ever read it? Or for that matter did Beckett? Has Sonny Rollins, who’s mentioned in its pages, read it?), which I last read some 35 years ago and in the last few weeks was contemplating taking its Avon-published version with its brittle pages down off my shelves and re-reading – I bring up this novel only because, coincidentally, this past week, after our usual Sunday gig with the trio (a trio which, I’m sad to say, Randy has recently decided to quit), Wade himself told me he has started reading it. “It was recommended to me by some Spanish professors who sometimes come to see us play, when I asked them what South American novel I should read.” (I don’t know the professors myself, as typically they have only introduced themselves to the trio’s star and chief schmoozer.) “Yes, I read that long ago,” I told Wade (still touted all over the internet as a Grammy-award winner), “I was thinking of reading it again, and if you’re reading it now, I’m definitely going to do so.” That was about a week ago as I’ve said, and I wonder how far Wade has got in it (has he caught the reference to Zutty Singleton, the drummer whose first name he fancies to be his nickname but which has never been used by anyone but himself?). My bets are that he hasn’t gotten very far, as I imagine him picking up the book and nodding off after a few sentences, like he nods off in my car after a few minutes. I myself started re-reading Hopscotch that very Sunday night, interrupting my re-reading of A Different Universe by Robert B. Laughlin. I was pleased to re-discover how short the chapters are, and have been able to strain to keep me eyes open to those chapter ends before my own lids close. In one week I’ve gotten to Chapter 23, the first chapter in the book with any appreciable length and which will probably take me a couple nights to get through. I’m curious to know if Wade has gotten this far, and I’m going to have to ask him this Sunday. In the meantime let it be known that this book, once up on a high shelf, is now on the floor, readily accessible to anyone who might be interested in it (though admittedly it’s on the floor of my bedroom, whose door I most often keep closed, for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain).
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