#rod frantz

[77musicclub]

Episode 2.2: URBAN VERBS

In our very first oral history episode, we are extremely proud to present the story of Urban Verbs, an integral band in the shaping of Washington D.C.’s burgeoning punk scene in late 1970s and early 1980s.

With the frenetic energy of punk buzzing out of New York and London and the first bursts of post-punk already beginning to enter the airwaves, Urban Verbs stood at a crossroads of sonic and cultural possibilities. They had their own uncharted terrain on which they could create a scene of their own, with their own experimental sound: Their home base, the now-legendary 9:30 Club, spawned a singular new wave movement, one whose influence can still be felt among D.C. bands of today. Their unique meshing of the visual arts crowd with the music world helped to usher in a unification of the D.C. creative community.

Only circumstance separated the Verbs from widespread national acclaim, so with this episode, we offer a candid telling of a story that we feel deserves recognition, a story of music that still sounds as fresh, driving, and progressive today as the day it was recorded. These are the recollections of an extraordinary period in time, told by those who lived it.

Read more on the site » Listen on Soundcloud » Subscribe on iTunes »

[rederiswrites]

Bare-bones beginning lampworking kit:

[I wrote this up for classes but thought my followers might appreciate it as well]

Hothead torch–specifically a Hothead, which is designed for lampworking. A plumbing torch, etc, will not work. You also need an angle bracket, hose clamp, and c-clamp to safely secure the torch to your working surface. These things should be provided in a hothead kit.

Flame-resistant work surface. Even a cheap cookie sheet in front of your torch is better than nothing and will give some peace of mind.

Fuel. Hotheads are designed to take MAP/Pro fuel canisters, but can be adapted to take bulk fuels as well

Something to slow cooling so that beads don’t break–you can use vermiculite, which is cheap and available, but fiber blanket and thermal beads are readily obtainable online. If you ever wish to sell your beads, you will need to upgrade to an annealing kiln.

Didymium safety glasses protect your eyes and greatly reduce the sodium flare coming off the heated glass, thus allowing you to see your work more clearly. 

Lighter. People use sparkers, matches, cigarette lighters, grill lighters, etc.

Marver–basic shaping tool. Graphite marvers are nice, but even a putty knife will do at first. To avoid confusion, note that any tool used to shape hot glass can be called a marver. What you need is something with a broad flat surface for rolling and pressing and crisp edges for basic shaping.

Vice grips or bench vise to hold the mandrels while you pull the beads off. 

Mandrels. These are the metal rods you wrap the bead around. Smaller sizes create a hole size closer to that of most commercial beads, but larger sizes are less likely to burn up in the flame or bend while you are removing the beads.

Bead release. This is the mixture of clay and other ingredients that you dip your mandrel in so that you can later pull the bead off. 

Tool rest. Anything you can use to securely keep the hot end of your tools and glass off your work surface. I have used bent pieces of metal with holes punched to create divots to hold the glass/tools in place, and I have made tool rests out of cut and bent hardware cloth.

Tweezers or needle nosed pliers. Used for shaping, pinching excess glass off, applying decorative elements like murrine, and pulling stringers. The expensive tungsten-tipped ones are much nicer, but you can use most anything. 

Glass. Lampworkers generally use glass with a CoE (coefficient of expansion) of 104, also known as “soft glass”. You must always use the same CoE glass within a piece, or the different rates of expansion and contraction will cause the piece to break. Effetre is affordable and reliable glass, and a great place to start. Creation is Messy brand glass comes in all sorts of fun colors and I rarely have compatibility or working problems, but it’s not quite as reliable as Effetre. Other brands such as Laucha and Double Helix sell wonderful glass, but considerably more expensive. Devardi is cheap, but very poor quality. I think beginners should avoid it.

There are many, many more tools you can buy, but these items will allow you to safely make wonderful beads. Our ancestors did amazing things with less.

Sources: 

Arrow Springs makes and supplies excellent tools.

Mountain Glass is a retailer of a wide variety of glass, tools, and supplies, and I’ve had nothing but good experiences with them for many years. 

Frantz Art Glass is also a retailer of glass, tools, and supplies and often has a slightly different selection from Mountain.

There are many other excellent makers and sellers of tools, but these will get you started. Do check to see if you have a local glass shop, which will probably be focused on stained glass and fusing, but may also carry some lampworking supplies.

Price estimate: 

Hothead: $45

Mounting supplies: hose clamp $3, angle bracket $4.48, C clamp ~$11

Didymium glasses: ~$80

Marver: basic graphite paddle marver $52

Vice grips: $15

Fiber blanket: $30

Mandrels: 20x 3/32” mandrels, $12.50

Bead release: 8 oz Fosterfire bead release $14

Tool rest: $7.75 or make your own

Tweezers/pliers: $4.50 or use what you have

Glass: Effetre top 20 starter pack $20

    Total: 299.23

Prices are taken from the Mountain Glass and Lowes websites ca. July 2022. I have not included fuel because it is a commodity and thus subject to price fluctuations. Currently Map/Pro canisters are experiencing a shortage, and available for between $14 and $20.

Mountain Glass also sells a kit containing most of these things for $200, which may well be a savings.

It should be understood, though, that fuel and glass will be significant ongoing expenses, and that upgrading to an oxygen/fuel torch and buying an annealing furnace will be large expenses. This is not the cheapest hobby and I think it does beginners a disservice to ignore that.

[scorpionc]

Spinning Sunday or: The Haul 3/2/19

Spinning Sunday or: The Haul 3/2/19

Salutations™!!

We had a brief encounter with warmer, sunnier weather yesterday. That was nice and it made it harder for us to stay indoors and listen to records, but hey, we were listening to records and that’s one of our favorite pastimes. So, it worked out. But, we pulled a lot of stuff home yesterday from Underdog Records. Here’s the haul:

©Sub-Pop

The Japanese House – Good At Falling — I had…

[immortalsynn]

New Album Arrives Friday, June 24th!

Hey all! Just a quick update that our newest album, 7 Sÿnns, will arrive to most major streaming platforms THIS FRIDAY! And don’t forget, if you live in Denver, we have a show to celebrate on June 25th at The Venue. We will be playing for Forbidden Temple’s EP release alongside Sound Awake and Metal Disorder. Tickets can be purchased by CLICKING HERE. To learn more about the album, check out the press release below!

7 Sÿnns is the upcoming compilation album by Immortal Sÿnn, comprised of new and previously-released material all recorded during the Force of Habit sessions. The record has a digital release date of June 24th on most major streaming platforms.

The first, and only previously-unreleased track on the album, “Aegri Somnia”, features friend of the band, Marisol Vasquez on flute once again. The track lends itself more to power metal and folk metal than other tracks in the band’s catalog. This song is a sequel to “Anamnesis”, and continues the storyline established therein. 

“Let Them Eat Metal” was released as a bonus track on the vinyl edition of Force of Habit. It is a much faster and thrashier version of The Rods’ track.

“Eternal Night” was the first of two bonus tracks originally released on the CD version of Force of Habit. This song has power metal elements as well as some more modern ones, but still retains the band’s old school feel.

“The Night is Young” was previously released as an Apple Music exclusive when Force of Habit was first released. It features lead singer, Duel Shape, and bass player, Frantz Pierre, sharing vocal duties. Allen Maddox of Heartsick Heroine plays a guest solo on this track.

“State Oppression” is the first of two bonus tracks previously released on the cassette tape version of Force of Habit. It is a thrash metal song with a political theme, for which the band is known. Allen Maddox of Heartsick Heroine plays a guest solo on this track.

“Tired and Red” is the second of two bonus tracks previously released on the cassette tape version of Force of Habit. It features guitarist and founding member, Tony Z, on lead vocals as well as lead and rhythm guitar. This is a straightforward cover of Sodom’s track from their 1989 album, Agent Orange.

“La Balada” is the second of two bonus tracks previously released on the CD version of Force of Habit. This is the first song in the band’s catalog to be sung entirely by drummer Axel Berrios, as well as the first song to be sung entirely in Spanish. Sharone Borik (Sharone) and Mia Paris provide backing vocals for this song. It is a cover of the Mexican band, Cuca, with many layers and parts added to Immortal Sÿnn’s version to give it a much grander sound and feel.

All songs were recorded during the sessions for Force of Habit in 2020 and 2021. Due to the firing of the band’s previous lead guitarist and bass player after their 2019 summer tour, almost all of the instrumentation on the record was handled by drummer Axel Berrios and guitarist/founder, Tony Z. Duel Shape joined the band shortly after recording sessions began in March 2020, but lead guitarist brad Wagner and bassist, Frantz Pierre, did not join the band until close to the record’s completion. 

While Brad was able to contribute lead guitar parts to three of the tracks on 7 Sÿnns, Frantz only recorded backing vocals and one lead vocal to share with duel on “The Night is Young”, as all of the bass parts had been recorded by Tony or Axel by the time he joined.

The band was happy to once again utilize its female friends to contribute to the record. Marisol Vasquez once again contributed her flute skills to 7 Sÿnns. She could be heard first on “Whiskey II: The Wrath of Corn” from Force of Habit. Sharone Borik of Sharone sang on an Immortal Sÿnn record for the first time and contributed her vocals to the track, “La Balada”. Mia Paris also contributed vocals to “La Balada”. Mia first sang backups for Immortal Sÿnn on the track, “Novus Ordo Seclorum” from the album, Machine Men, released in 2017.

All tracks on 7 Sÿnns were recorded at Rusty Sun Audio in Parker, CO. They were engineered and mixed by Nick Nodurft, and mastered by Jason Livermore (Rise Against, Descendants, As I Lay Dying) at The Blasting Room in Fort Collins, CO.

All tracks, apart from “The Night is Young”, will be released digitally for the first time when 7 Sÿnns goes live on June 24th.

[stue1967]

This one is a local affair.

When I moved to Muswell Hill almost twenty years ago, the primary reason was to move in with the girl I had fallen in love with. Slow forward on to 2017 and we are still here, stranded in a local London property hotspot. The area has changed and we’ve changed. The local high street is now full of estate agents and chain stores rather than the independent traders that were so appealing. Recent trips out of east London to watch This Is The Kit and enjoy the wonderful Typing Room restaurant in Bethnal Green have revealed what N10 is now missing. Whilst it is convenient to have the supermarkets in walking distance and a decent cinema (or two), the high street is looking more homogenous by the day. The typically arty local residents (actors, painters, writers etc) have been overtaken by the influx of professionals lured by the quality of the state primary and secondary schools, a rarity in London in recent years.

The band in action at Rough Trade East

It is one of those schools, Fortismere, which was where the members of Girl Ray met. Fortismere has had a storied musical history which has added to the local reputation of Muswell Hill as somewhat of a musical enclave. Amongst others, Rod Stewart, three quarters of the Kinks (Ray and Dave Davies plus Pete Quaife), Michael Kiwanuka, Viv Albertine of the Slits and Jess Glynne all attended the school. Chuck in the Fairport house where the members of the Convention convened just down the road on Fortis Green and it is an extraordinary array of talent.

  My 13 year old daughter attends the school now and she is beyond excited at the prospect of a band made up of Fortismere pupils becoming successful.

Girl Ray’s elevation in the last twelve months has been swift. Their debut album has just been released on Moshi Moshi after a series of 7″ singles and in November, only twelve months after their first single “Trouble”, they are headlining at the sizeable Scala venue in Kings Cross.

“Earl Grey” by Girl Ray

My daughter had seen the band perform at the recent wet Port Eliot festival in Cornwall and they had charmed the socks off of her. A bass/guitar/drum three girl combo augmented by Mark on keyboards and guitar live, they slightly sell themselves short in a live environment. When we saw them at the Rough Trade in-store, there were fluffed intros, missed choruses and breaking voices. They clearly aren’t the untutored musicians that their air of incompetence suggests. If you listen to their single “Trouble”, someone has been listening to Todd Rundgren’s “I Saw The Light” and skilfully using it as a template for their own confection. One of their influences is Pavement and I’ve seen Stephen Malkmus’s gang pull back from the precipice of incompetence on a few occasions and indulging in that “we really can’t play our instruments” bluff.

David Brent was watching

Still teenagers, “Earl Ray” isn’t just a quick three chord thrash-through of C86 influenced pop (although there is a little bit of that). One can sense directions to be followed and playing live, they put me in mind of ’77 era Talking Heads. “A Few Months” headed down a funky avenue.  Think “Pulled Up” relocated to London N10. The four piece on stage at Rough Trade East directly translated to the David Byrne/Tina Weymouth/Chris Frantz/Jerry Harrison version of the Heads, their spindly white twitching dance pop showing where the band could go next as did a couple of new songs, a grungy rock number and a glam stomper.

Sophie Moss (Bass), Iris McConnell (Drums) and Poppy Hankin (Guitar)

The rather good new songs bring me to the one key issue that I’ve got with the LP. It starts off a rare old pace and side one flies by. However side two hits the buffers a little with some less than mature song craft. The 13 minute long “Earl Grey (Stuck In A Groove)” is the type of track that 30 years ago would have graced the back of a 12″ single. As the first track on side two of the vinyl, it saps the momentum build up on side one. It feels like the kind of free form studio jam that they need to embark upon to arrive at more ambitious material such as “A Few Months” and doesn’t add to the quality of the first part of the record. It sounds like process rather than product. A couple of songs later, along comes a reprise of “Stupid Things”. On it’s own it would be a cute trick but combined with the lengthy “Earl Grey”, it feels like the material ran out. Given the new songs performed at Rough Trade, maybe it would have paid to have wait a little more time to get that debut album on the streets.

Sophie Moss on bass

The band are clearly talented and have personality and potential though. They have a charming stage presence, emphasised by their Lee Marvin & The Shadows-like dancing during “Don’t Go Back At Ten”. They invited members of the audience up to play percussion. Whilst they are influenced to 80s indie, such as the Shop Assistants and the Dolly Mixtures and the opening track “Just Like That” has a distinct Edwyn Collins tinge, it isn’t just a rote reheat of the formula. There is a musical richness and depth here. They just need locate their edit button occasionally but this will come in time.

We said hi to the band after the gig, my daughter got her 7″ of “Trouble” signed and headed off into the East London night. Maybe seeing the band perform can spur my daughter to continue her own musical endeavours.

One can only hope.

Edit this setlist | More Girl Ray setlists

It is @G!RLRAY debut LP time and a @RoughTrade Album of the Month with instore gig This one is a local affair. When I moved to Muswell Hill almost twenty years ago, the primary reason was to move in with the girl I had fallen in love with.

[hammondcast]

Jon Hammond Show Public Access TV Broadcast 02 11 NAMM Show Wrap Up At The Rainiest NAMM Show Since 1992!

#WATCHMOVIE HERE: Jon Hammond Show Public Access TV Broadcast 02 11 NAMM Show Wrap Up At The Rainiest NAMM Show Since 1992! Jon's archive https://archive.org/details/JonHammondShowPublicAccessTVBroadcast0211NAMMShowWrapUpAtTheRainiestNAMMShowSince1992 Anaheim California -- Wrapped up now at the rainiest NAMM Show I can remember since 1992, when Katella Avenue turned in to a little river - in those days we stayed 5 guys to a room in a 'suite' at the Heidi Inn motel which was located directly across the street from the original round Anaheim Convention Center before the posh new digs were built - good times and of course we had the best parking spot, all we had to do was cross Katella and we were there! - Jon Hammond https://vimeo.com/202617378 Jon Hammond Show Public Access TV Broadcast 02 11 NAMM Show Wrap Up Photo by Lawrence Gay - Drummer Heinz Lichius from Hamburg Germany and Jon Hammond seated on the rained out CenterStage presented by Pioneer DJ Jon Hammond reminiscing about past NAMM Shows in the NAMM Oral History Program Anaheim Caifornia -- Jon Hammond Show Public Access TV Broadcast 02 11 NAMM Show Wrap Up at the rainiest NAMM Show since 1992! - This week's show for MNN TV opens up with the annual NAMM Industry Tribute 2017 Memoriam Event from Jon Hammond's camera - annual event and archive from NAMM Show​ Historian Dan Del Fiorentino​ - this year many personal friends honored - this clip includes additional music from Jon Hammond​ "Jennifer's Song" for rights reasons, keep the Spirit! R.I.P. Lutz Büchner, Gregg Gregory Gronowski​, Keith Emerson, Dan Hicks, Paul Kantner, Toots Thielemans, Rob Wasserman, Prince​, Maurice White, Buckwheat Zydeco and many more "The NAMM Community will never forget you." *actual clip LINK: https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/namm-memoriam-industry-tribute-2017 *Note: This always happens on the first evening of the Winter NAMM Show - this year it was on Thursday January 19th at 5:30PM - moved inside due to heavy weather! LIST ACCORDING TO JON HAMMOND: John Bellone, Leo Beranek, Bruce Bergh, Paul Bierley, Bobby Blackford, Dick Bridgeman, Ernie Briefel, Jim Broadus, Don Buchla, Lutz Büchner, Prince Buster, Al Caiola, Toby Capalbo, Nicki Carano, Rob Carey, Phil Chess, Gary Christensen, Buddy Church, Barrett Clark, Guy Clark, Tim Coffman, Leonard Cohen, Rosemarie and Ed Coles, Bob Cranshaw, Johnny Craviotto, William Dettman, Dick DiCenso, John Edmondson, Sam Eisenman, Keith Emerson, Frank Fendorf, Chuck Flores, Orrin Foslien, Peter Fountain, Cassie Frantz, Carla Frederick, Glenn Frey, Bob Furst, Juan Gabriel, Ben Germain, James Glanville, Roberta Gottschalk, Buddy Greco, Christina Grimmie, Gregg Gronowski, Merle Haggard, Joe Halloran, Bill Harris, Nicholas Harris, Yasuji Hayashi, Glenn Hefner, Mary Henkin, Mark Herman, Hoot Hester, Randy Hewiston, Joe Hibbs, Dan Hicks, Charles Hill, Bobby Hutcherson, Bill Irwin, Wayne Jackson, James Jamerson Jr., OJB Jezreel, Steven Johnson, Luke Johnston, Ziggy Kanstul, Paul Kantner, Dick Knaub, Gladys Krenek, Rick Kylan, Greg Lake, Larry Larson, Francois LeDuc, William Locke, John D. Loudermilk, George Lukas, Lonnie Mack, Sir George Martin, Jack Maxson, John McCrea, Henry Cullough, Owen McPeek, Mo Meloy-Pameteer, Nick Menza, Al Moffatt, Chips Woman, Paul Monachino, Scotty Moore, Alphonse Mouzon, Jerry Muenchow, Robert Nagel, Richard Norris, Milt Okun, Pauline Oliveros, Harvey Olsen, George Opperman, John O’Sullivan, John Otte, Robert Paiste, Bob Parker, Sylvia Perry, Csaba Petocz, Richie Pidanick, Bill Price, Prince, Anthony Pulcini, Curtis Purdy, Cora Rather, Al Realo, Jack Ripperger, Vale Robinson, Leon Russell, Helen Saied, Stanley Schireson, Zenon Schoepe, Hugo Schreiber, Dorothy Schwartz, William Scotti, Dan Sheehan, Shinichi Shimada, Rose Shure, Tom Size, Dan Smith, Vern Smith, Sid Smither, Jerry Snyder, Ralph Stanley, Chris Stone, Rod Temperton, Toots Thielemans, Victor Tibaldeo Sr., Isao Tomita, Dana Tracy, Martin Travis, Ed Uribe, Rudy Van Gelder, Vincent van Haaff, Bobby Vee, Maxine Volley, Cathy Wagner, Saul Walker, Nannette Ward, Rob Wasserman, Christopher Waters, Bob Wegher, Bobby Wellins, Maurice White, Monty Lee Wilkes, Tom Wilson, Duane “Pudgy” Wong, James Woolley, Bernie Worrell, Dolores Yaeger, Don Young, Buckwheat Zydeco (156) - according to Jon Hammond Producer Jon Hammond Audio/Visual sound, color Language English -- Next segment, the traditional NAMM Show Sunday Blues and Jazz Session with Jon Hammond and Friends in Hammond Organs stand 5104 and Suzuki Musical Instruments 5100 "Lydia's Tune" and Jon's Theme Song: "Late Rent" Musicians: Koei Tanaka chromatic harmonica, Joe Berger guitar, Chuggy Carter percussion, Jon Hammond at the Sk1 Hammond organ + bass - camera credit: Jesse Gay -- 3rd segment, very special Jon Hammond with the late great Joe Franklin at the microphone - Joe Franklin the legendary broadcaster wraps up this show from his offices on West 43rd Street kown as "Memory Lane" with Jon Hammond's long time theme song "Late Rent" - Jon Hammond Show is now in it's 34th year broadcasting on Manhattan Neighborhood Network MNN TV Community Channel 1, air time: 01:30 AM every late Friday night or early Saturday mornings EST and streaming worldwide aka HammondCast ©JON HAMMOND International http://www.HammondCast.com Photo by Lawrence Gay: John Riddle NAMM Trade Show Floor Manager and Jon Hammond LINK: https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/john-riddle "John Riddle plays a vital role in the NAMM Trade Show and has for decades. His strong relationships with exhibiting companies is proof of his dedication for customer service when providing care for NAMM members, all the while ensuring that they adhere to the rules and regulations. Walking the show floor with John is an education of its own. He has been dedicated to the core values of NAMM in such a way and for so long it is hard to know which services NAMM always had and which ones John created for us to follow. " Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Jon Hammond Show, Public Access TV, NAMM Show Wrap Up, Anaheim California, Jazz, Blues, Soft News, Hammond Organ, Chromatic Harmonica, #NAMMShow #HammondOrgan

[differenceworkinggroupblog-blog]

GETTING IN AND OUT

Who owns black pain?

  By Zadie Smith

   July 2017 issue

    Discussed in this essay:

  Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele. Blumhouse Productions, QC Entertainment, and Monkeypaw Productions, 2017. 104 minutes.

  Open Casket, by Dana Schutz. 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. March 17–June 11, 2017.

  You are white—

yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

That’s American.

Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.

Nor do I often want to be a part of you.

But we are, that’s true!

As I learn from you,

I guess you learn from me—

although you’re older—and white—

and somewhat more free.

     —Langston Hughes

  Early on, as the opening credits roll, a woodland scene. We’re upstate, viewing the forest from a passing car. Trees upon trees, lovely, dark and deep. There are no people to be seen in this wood—but you get the feeling that somebody’s in there somewhere. Now we switch to a different world. Still photographs, taken in the shadow of public housing: the basketball court, the abandoned lot, the street corner. Here black folk hang out on sun-warmed concrete, laughing, crying, living, surviving. The shots of the woods and those of the city both have their natural audience, people for whom such images are familiar and benign. There are those who think of Fros­tian woods as the pastoral, as America the Beautiful, and others who see summer in the city as, likewise, beautiful and American. One of the marvelous tricks of Jordan Peele’s debut feature, Get Out, is to reverse these constituencies, revealing two separate planets of American fear—separate but not equal. One side can claim a long, distinguished cinematic history: Why should I fear the black man in the city? The second, though not entirely unknown (Deliverance, The Wicker Man), is certainly more obscure: Why should I fear the white man in the woods?

  <https://tinyurl.com/y8ryxglm>

  A few years ago I interviewed Peele as he came to the end of a long run on the celebrated Comedy Central sketch show Key and Peele. On that occasion he spoke about comic reversals—“I think reversals end up being the real bread and butter of the show”—and about finding the emotional root of a joke in order to intensify it: “What’s the mythology that is funny just because people know it’s not true?” Get Out is structured around such inversions and reversals, although here “funny” has been replaced, more often than not, with “scary,” and a further question has been posed: Which mythology? Or, more precisely: Whose? Instead of the familiar, terrified white man, robbed at gunpoint by a black man on a city street, we meet a black man walking in the leafy white suburbs, stalked by a white man in a slow-moving vehicle from whose stereo issues perhaps the whitest song in the world: “Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run run run …”

  Get Out flips the script, offering a compendium of black fears about white folk. White women who date black men. Waspy families. Waspy family garden parties. Ukuleles. Crazy younger brothers. Crazy younger brothers who play ukuleles. Sexual psychopaths, hunting, guns, cannibalism, mind control, well-meaning conversations about Obama. The police. Well-meaning conversations about basketball. Spontaneous roughhousing, spontaneous touching of one’s biceps or hair. Lifestyle cults, actual cults. Houses with no other houses anywhere near them. Fondness for woods. The game bingo. Servile household staff, sexual enslavement, nostalgia for slavery—slavery itself. Every one of these reversals “lands”—just like a good joke—simultaneously describing and interpreting the situation at hand, and this, I think, is what accounts for the homogeneity of reactions to Get Out: It is a film that contains its own commentary.

  For black viewers there is the pleasure of vindication. It’s not often they have both their real and their irrational fears so thoroughly indulged. For white liberals—whom the movie purports to have in its satirical sights—there is the cringe of recognition, that queer but illuminating feeling of being suddenly “othered.” (Oh, that’s how we look to them?) And, I suppose, the satisfaction of being in on the joke. For example, there is the moment when the white girl, Rose (Allison Williams), and her new black boyfriend, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), hit a deer on the way to her parents’ country house. She’s driving, yet when the police stop them he’s the one asked for his license. Rose is sufficiently “woke” to step in front of her man and give the cop a self-righteous earful—but oblivious to the fact that only a white girl would dare assume she could do so with impunity. The audience—on both sides of the divide—groans with recognition. Chris himself—surely mindful of what happened to Sandra Bland, and Walter Scott, and Terence Crutcher, and Samuel DuBose—smiles wryly but remains polite and deferential throughout. He is a photographer, those were his photographs of black city life we saw behind the credits, and that white and black Americans view the same situations through very different lenses is something he already understands.

  <https://tinyurl.com/ybdjlwwv>

  This point is made a second time, more fiercely, in one of the final scenes. Chris is standing in those dark woods again, covered in blood; on the ground before him lies Rose, far more badly wounded. A cop car is approaching. Chris eyes it with resigned dread. As it happens, he is the victim in this gruesome tableau, but neither he nor anyone else in the cinema expects that to count for a goddamned thing. (“You’re really in for it now, you poor motherfucker,” someone in the row behind me said. These days, a cop is apparently a more frightening prospect than a lobotomy-performing cult.) But then the car door opens and something unexpected happens: It is not the dreaded white cop after all but a concerned friend, Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery), the charming and paranoid brother who warned Chris, at the very start, not to go stay with a load of white folks in the woods. Rod—who works for the TSA—surveys the bloody scene and does not immediately assume that Chris is the perp. A collective gasp of delight bursts over the audience, but in this final reversal the joke’s on us. How, in 2017, are we still in a world where presuming a black man innocent until proven guilty is the material of comic fantasy?

  These are the type of self-contained, ironic, politically charged sketches at which Peele has long excelled. But there’s a deeper seam in Get Out, which is mined through visual symbol rather than situational comedy. I will not easily forget the lengthy close-ups of suffering black faces; suffering, but trapped behind masks, like so many cinematic analogues of the arguments of Frantz Fanon. Chris himself, and the white family’s maid, and the white family’s groundskeeper, and the young, lobotomized beau of an old white lady—all frozen in attitudes of trauma, shock, or bland servility, or wearing chillingly fixed grins. In each case, the eyes register an internal desperation. Get me out! The oppressed. The cannibalized. The living dead. When a single tear or a dribble of blood runs down these masks, we are to understand this as a sign that there is still somebody in there. Somebody human. Somebody who has the potential to be whole.

  As the movie progresses we learn what’s going on: Black people aren’t being murdered or destroyed up here in the woods, they’re being used. A white grandmother’s brain is now in her black maid’s body. A blind old white gallerist hopes to place his brain in Chris’s cranium and thus see with the young black photographer’s eyes, be in his young black skin. Remnants of the black “host” remain after these operations—but not enough to make a person.

  <https://tinyurl.com/ychdagwr>

  Peele has found a concrete metaphor for the ultimate unspoken fear: that to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved. Disgust and passion are intertwined. Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies. The capacity to give birth or to make food from one’s body; perceived intellectual, physical, or sexual superiority; perceived intimacy with the natural world, animals, and plants; perceived self-sufficiency in a faith or in a community. There are few qualities in others that we cannot transform into a form of fear and loathing in ourselves. In the documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), James Baldwin gets to the heart of it:

      What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man…. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.

  But there is an important difference between the invented “nigger” of 1963 and the invented African American of 2017: The disgust has mostly fallen away. We were declared beautiful back in the Sixties, but it has only recently been discovered that we are so. In the liberal circles depicted in Get Out, everything that was once reviled—our eyes, our skin, our backsides, our noses, our arms, our legs, our breasts, and of course our hair—is now openly envied and celebrated and aestheticized and deployed in secondary images to sell stuff. As one character tells Chris, “black is in fashion now.”

  To be clear, the life of the black citizen in America is no more envied or desired today than it was back in 1963. Her schools are still avoided and her housing still substandard and her neighborhood still feared and her personal and professional outcomes disproportionately linked to her zip code. But her physical self is no longer reviled. If she is a child and comes up for adoption, many a white family will be delighted to have her, and if she is in your social class and social circle, she is very welcome to come to the party; indeed, it’s not really a party unless she does come. No one will call her the n-word on national television, least of all a black intellectual. (The Baldwin quote is from a television interview.) For liberals the word is interdicted and unsayable.

  But in place of the old disgust comes a new kind of cannibalism. The white people in Get Out want to get inside the black experience: They want to wear it like a skin and walk around in it. The modern word for this is “appropriation.” There is an argument that there are many things that are “ours” and must not be touched or even looked at sideways, including (but not limited to) our voices, our personal style, our hair, our cultural products, our history, and, perhaps more than anything else, our pain. A people from whom so much has been stolen are understandably protective of their possessions, especially the ineffable kind. In these debates my mind always turns to a line of Nabokov, a writer for whom arrival in America meant the loss of pretty much everything, including a language: “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”

  Two weeks after watching Get Out, I stood with my children in front of Open Casket, Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, the black teenager who, in 1955, was beaten and lynched after being accused of flirting with a white woman. My children did not know what they were looking at and were too young for me to explain. Before I came, I had read the widely circulated letter to the curators of the Whitney Biennial objecting to their inclusion of this painting:

      I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum … because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time.

  I knew, from reading about this debate, that in fact the painting had never been for sale, so I focused instead on the other prong of the argument—an artist’s right to a particular subject. “The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.”

  I want to follow the letter very precisely, along its own logic, in which natural rights are replaced with racial ones. I will apply it personally. If I were an artist, and if I could paint—could the subject matter be mine? I am biracial. I have Afro-hair, my skin is brown, I am identified, by others and by myself, as a black woman. And so, by the logic of the letter—if I understand it correctly—this question of subject matter, in my case, would not come up, as it would not come up for the author of the letter, Hannah Black, who also happens to be biracial, and brown. Neither of us is American, but the author appears to speak confidently in defense of the African-American experience, so I, like her, will assume a transnational unity. I will assume that Emmett Till, if I could paint, could be my subject too.

  <https://tinyurl.com/y9kxfy8a>

  Now I want to inch a step further. I turn from the painting to my children. Their beloved father is white, I am biracial, so, by the old racial classifications of America, they are “quadroons.” Could they take black suffering as a subject of their art, should they ever make any? Their grandmother is as black as the ace of spades, as the British used to say; their mother is what the French still call café au lait. They themselves are sort of yellowy. When exactly does black suffering cease to be their concern? Their grandmother—raised on a postcolonial island, in extreme poverty, descended from slaves—knew black suffering intimately. But her grandchildren look white. Are they? If they are, shouldn’t white people like my children concern themselves with the suffering of Emmett Till? Is making art a form of concern? Does it matter which form the concern takes? Could they be painters of occasional black subjects? (Dana Schutz paints many subjects.) Or must their concern take a different form: civil rights law, public-school teaching? If they ignore the warnings of the letter and take black suffering as their subject in a work of art, what should be the consequence? If their painting turns out to be a not especially distinguished expression of or engagement with their supposed concern, must it be removed from wherever it hangs? Destroyed? To what purpose?

  Often I look at my children and remember that quadroons—green-eyed, yellow-haired people like my children—must have been standing on those auction blocks with their café au lait mothers and dark-skinned grandmothers. And I think too of how they would have had many opportunities to “pass,” to sneak out and be lost in the white majority, not visibly connected to black suffering and so able to walk through town, marry white, lighten up the race again. To be biracial in America at that time was almost always to be the issue of rape. It was in a literal sense to live with the enemy within, to have your physical being exist as an embodiment of the oppression of your people. Perhaps this trace of shame and inner conflict has never entirely left the biracial experience.

  To be biracial at any time is complex. Speaking for myself, I know that racially charged historical moments, like this one, can increase the ever-present torsion within my experience until it feels like something’s got to give. You start to yearn for absolute clarity: personal, genetic, political. I stood in front of the painting and thought how cathartic it would be if this picture filled me with rage. But it never got that deep into me, as either representation or appropriation. I think of it as a questionably successful example of both, but the letter condemning it will not contend with its relative success or failure, the letter lives in a binary world in which the painting is either facilely celebrated as proof of the autonomy of art or condemned to the philistine art bonfire. The first option, as the letter rightly argues, is often just hoary old white privilege dressed up as aesthetic theory, but the second is—let’s face it—the province of Nazis and censorious evangelicals. Art is a traffic in symbols and images, it has never been politically or historically neutral, and I do not find discussions on appropriation and representation to be in any way trivial. Each individual example has to be thought through, and we have every right to include such considerations in our evaluations of art (and also to point out the often dubious neutrality of supposedly pure aesthetic criteria). But when arguments of appropriation are linked to a racial essentialism no more sophisticated than antebellum miscegenation laws, well, then we head quickly into absurdity. Is Hannah Black black enough to write this letter? Are my children too white to engage with black suffering? How black is black enough? Does an “octoroon” still count?

  When I looked at Open Casket, the truth is I didn’t feel very much. I tried to transfer to the painting—or even to Dana Schutz—some of the cold fury that is sparked by looking at the historical photograph of Emmett Till, whose mother insisted he have an open casket, or by considering the crimes of Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who falsely accused him of harassing her, but nothing I saw in that canvas could provoke such an emotion. The painting is an abstraction without much intensity, and there’s a clear caution in the brushstrokes around the eyes: Schutz has gone in only so far. Yet the anxious aporia in the upper face is countered by the area around the mouth, where the canvas roils, coming toward us three-dimensionally, like a swelling—the flesh garroted, twisted, striped—as if something is pushing from behind the death mask, trying to get out. That did move me.

  What’s harder to see is why this picture was singled out. A few floors up hung a painting by a white artist, Eric Fischl, A Visit to?/?A Visit from?/?The Island, in which rich white holidaymakers on a beach are juxtaposed with black boat people washed up on the sand, some dead, some half-naked, desperate, writhing, suffering. Painted in 1983, by an artist now in his late sixties, it is presumably for sale, yet it goes unmentioned in a letter whose main effect has been to divert attention from everything else in the show. Henry Taylor, Deana Lawson, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Cauleen Smith were just a few of the artists of color lighting up the Whitney in a thrilling biennial that delved deep into black experience, illuminating its joys and suffering both. Looking at their work, I found I resented the implication that black pain is so raw and unprocessed—and black art practice so vulnerable and invisible—that a single painting by a white woman can radically influence it one way or another. Nor did I need to convince myself of my own authenticity by drawing a line between somebody else’s supposed fraudulence and the fears I have concerning my own (thus evincing an unfortunate tendency toward overcompensation that, it must be admitted, is not unknown among us biracial folks). No. The viewer is not a fraud. Neither is the painter. The truth is that this painting and I are simply not in profound communication.

  This is always a risk in art. The solution remains as it has always been: Get out (of the gallery) or go deeper in (to the argument). Write a screed against it. Critique the hell out of it. Tear it to shreds in your review or paint another painting in response. But remove it? Destroy it? Instead I turned from the painting, not offended, not especially shocked or moved, not even terribly engaged by it, and walked with the children to the next room.

  We have been warned not to get under one another’s skin, to keep our distance. But Jordan Peele’s horror-fantasy—in which we are inside one another’s skin and intimately involved in one another’s suffering—is neither a horror nor a fantasy. It is a fact of our experience. The real fantasy is that we can get out of one another’s way, make a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them. For the many of us in loving, mixed families, this is the true impossibility. There are people online who seem astounded that Get Out was written and directed by a man with a white wife and a white mother, a man who may soon have—depending on how the unpredictable phenotype lottery goes—a white-appearing child. But this is the history of race in America. Families can become black, then white, then black again within a few generations. And even when Americans are not genetically mixed, they live in a mixed society at the national level if no other. There is no getting out of our intertwined history.

  But in this moment of resurgent black consciousness, God knows it feels good—therapeutic!—to mark a clear separation from white America, the better to speak in a collective voice. We will not be moved. We can’t breathe. We will not be executed for traffic violations or for the wearing of hoodies. We will no longer tolerate substandard schools, housing, health care. Get Out—as evidenced by its huge box office—is the right movie for this moment. It is the opposite of post-black or postracial. It reveals race as the fundamental American lens through which everything is seen. That part, to my mind, is right on the money. But the “us” and “them”? That’s a cheaper gag. Whether they like it or not, Americans are one people. (And the binary of black and white is only one part of this nation’s infinitely variegated racial composition.) Lobotomies are the cleanest cut; real life is messier. I can’t wait for Peele—with his abundant gifts, black-nerd smarts, comprehensive cinematic fandom, and complex personal experience—to go deeper in, and out the other side.

    “SIGNS,” by Deana Lawson, from a series of staged photographs that explore the perception of race in American culture. Lawson’s work was on view last month as part of the Whitney Biennial

  A STILL FROM GET OUT

  THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH!, by Henry Taylor. The painting is based on the video made in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Philando Castile by a Minnesota police officer in 2016. Taylor’s work was on view last month at the Whitney Biennial.

  OPEN CASKET, by Dana Schutz.

  © 2017 Harper’s Magazine Foundation.

[ashes-of-balder]

💥🍳🎣🎼

💥- if Your muse wakes up with complete amnesia, how would they react? How scared would they be? What caused it?

Well, if he ended up with complete amnesia, that would mean he had hollowed, which would be really bad. In fact, one of the things he actually has anxiety over is his memory for that exact reason, where he gets stressed out really bad and starts panicking if he doesn’t remember anything with 100% crystal clarity. He keeps an extremely detailed journal for this reason, and has currently filled two of them and is working on a third. One that is filled with his life in Lordran, the one that he currently keeps regarding his travels post-Lordran, and a third that is just filled cover to cover with names.

🍳- What does your muse’s typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner look like after their larder has been fully replenished?

Frantz doesn’t exactly have a larder per se. It’s more of a large sack, given his wanderer (read: homeless) lifestyle. It is usually filled with just the essential food groups, specifically food that requires little to no prep work (he is a BAD cook), and he never bothers with herbs or seasonings. Salted meats and dried fruits mostly, sometimes fresh fruit and vegetables if he manages to scrounge together the coin for it while stopping in a town. And on super special occasions, a roll or two of bread which is quickly eaten due to how poorly bread keeps. The freshest food he eats is what he gathers himself from hunting or fishing, favoring small game like birds or rabbits. He rations this food carefully, usually restricting himself to one decent sized meal at sunrise, and one very small meal at sundown.

🎣- Would your muse go fishing for any reason? Would they catch-and-eat or catch-and-release?

Frantz goes fishing, but he uses a crossbow instead of a rod, with a rope tied to the bolt to pull in his catch. Always catch-and-eat, never catch-and-release. The idea of fishing as a leisure activity is completely foreign to him, as his sees it as purely a survival skill, and is extremely focused the entire time.

🎼- What part in a choir would your muse sing? Soprano (½), Bass, Tenor, or Alto?

Frantz is a Tall Boy™, and as such his voice is deeper than most people. In a standard choir, he would definitely be put in the bass category, but if put in a choir of fellow Balder knights, he would actually be considered a tenor.

[hammondcast]

NAMM Industry Tribute 2017 Memoriam Event (from Jon Hammond's Camera)

NAMM Industry Tribute 2017 Memoriam Event (from Jon Hammond's Camera) #WATCHMOVIE HERE: NAMM Industry Tribute 2017 Memoriam Event (from Jon Hammond's Camera) Jon's archive https://archive.org/details/NAMMIndustryTribute2017MemoriamEventfromJonHammondsCamera NAMM Industry Tribute 2017 Memoriam Event (from Jon Hammond's camera) - annual event and archive from NAMM Show​ Historian Dan Del Fiorentino​ - this year many personal friends honored - this clip includes additional music from Jon Hammond​ "Jennifer's Song" for rights reasons, keep the Spirit! R.I.P. Lutz Büchner, Gregg Gregory Gronowski​, Keith Emerson, Dan Hicks, Paul Kantner, Toots Thielemans, Rob Wasserman, Prince​, Maurice White, Buckwheat Zydeco and many more "The NAMM Community will never forget you." *actual clip LINK: https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history/namm-memoriam-industry-tribute-2017 *Note: This always happens on the first evening of the Winter NAMM Show - this year it was on Thursday January 19th at 5:30PM - moved inside due to heavy weather! Pictures by Jon Hammond: "The NAMM Community will never forget you.", Dan Del Fiorentino NAMM Historian still with hat on! NAMM Chairman Mark Goff giving benediction, Greg Herreman NAMM Production Manager about to move a microphone, Dick Bridgeman - Hammond Organ Co., Lutz Büchner - ndr big band / Jon Hammond Band, Leonard Cohen, Bob Cranshaw, Keith Emerson - Emerson Lake and Palmer, Glenn Frey - The Eagles, Buddy Greco, 'Gregg' Gregory Gronowski - Hammond Organ USA, Merle Haggard, Hoot Hester, Dan Hicks, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Jackson, James Jamerson Jr., Paul Kantner, Greg Lake, Lonnie Mack, Sir George Martin, Scotty Moore, Alphonse Mouzon, Harvey Olsen, Robert Paiste, Prince, Jack Ripperger - Hammond organ co., Leon Russell, LA Scots Pipe Band played, Rose Shure - Shure microphone co., Ralph Stanley, Toots Thielemans, Martin Travis, Bobby Vee, Rob Wasserman, Maurice White - Earth Wind and Fire, Duane "Pudgy" Wong, Bernie Worrell, Buckwheat Zydeco, "The NAMM Community will never forget you.", "In Memoriam A Tribute to our Industry Friends Thursday January 19, 2017 - Winter NAMM Show LIST ACCORDING TO JON HAMMOND: John Bellone, Leo Beranek, Bruce Bergh, Paul Bierley, Bobby Blackford, Dick Bridgeman, Ernie Briefel, Jim Broadus, Don Buchla, Lutz Büchner, Prince Buster, Al Caiola, Toby Capalbo, Nicki Carano, Rob Carey, Phil Chess, Gary Christensen, Buddy Church, Barrett Clark, Guy Clark, Tim Coffman, Leonard Cohen, Rosemarie and Ed Coles, Bob Cranshaw, Johnny Craviotto, William Dettman, Dick DiCenso, John Edmondson, Sam Eisenman, Keith Emerson, Frank Fendorf, Chuck Flores, Orrin Foslien, Peter Fountain, Cassie Frantz, Carla Frederick, Glenn Frey, Bob Furst, Juan Gabriel, Ben Germain, James Glanville, Roberta Gottschalk, Buddy Greco, Christina Grimmie, Gregg Gronowski, Merle Haggard, Joe Halloran, Bill Harris, Nicholas Harris, Yasuji Hayashi, Glenn Hefner, Mary Henkin, Mark Herman, Hoot Hester, Randy Hewiston, Joe Hibbs, Dan Hicks, Charles Hill, Bobby Hutcherson, Bill Irwin, Wayne Jackson, James Jamerson Jr., OJB Jezreel, Steven Johnson, Luke Johnston, Ziggy Kanstul, Paul Kantner, Dick Knaub, Gladys Krenek, Rick Kylan, Greg Lake, Larry Larson, Francois LeDuc, William Locke, John D. Loudermilk, George Lukas, Lonnie Mack, Sir George Martin, Jack Maxson, John McCrea, Henry Cullough, Owen McPeek, Mo Meloy-Pameteer, Nick Menza, Al Moffatt, Chips Woman, Paul Monachino, Scotty Moore, Alphonse Mouzon, Jerry Muenchow, Robert Nagel, Richard Norris, Milt Okun, Pauline Oliveros, Harvey Olsen, George Opperman, John O’Sullivan, John Otte, Robert Paiste, Bob Parker, Sylvia Perry, Csaba Petocz, Richie Pidanick, Bill Price, Prince, Anthony Pulcini, Curtis Purdy, Cora Rather, Al Realo, Jack Ripperger, Vale Robinson, Leon Russell, Helen Saied, Stanley Schireson, Zenon Schoepe, Hugo Schreiber, Dorothy Schwartz, William Scotti, Dan Sheehan, Shinichi Shimada, Rose Shure, Tom Size, Dan Smith, Vern Smith, Sid Smither, Jerry Snyder, Ralph Stanley, Chris Stone, Rod Temperton, Toots Thielemans, Victor Tibaldeo Sr., Isao Tomita, Dana Tracy, Martin Travis, Ed Uribe, Rudy Van Gelder, Vincent van Haaff, Bobby Vee, Maxine Volley, Cathy Wagner, Saul Walker, Nannette Ward, Rob Wasserman, Christopher Waters, Bob Wegher, Bobby Wellins, Maurice White, Monty Lee Wilkes, Tom Wilson, Duane “Pudgy” Wong, James Woolley, Bernie Worrell, Dolores Yaeger, Don Young, Buckwheat Zydeco (156) - according to Jon Hammond Producer Jon Hammond Audio/Visual sound, color Language English **List from Elizabeth Dale and Dan Del Fiorentino - NAMM History Department - Just In: As follows: (Unfortunately / Sadly all are deceased - dates, names 2017 NAMM Industry Tribute - JH: Allison Mose 1927 2016 Baker Dave 1931 2016 Belli Remo 1927 2016 Bellone John 1928 2016 Beranek Leo 1914 2016 Bergh Bruce 1955 2016 Bierley Paul 1926 2016 Blackford Bobby 1950 2016 Bridgeman Dick 1932 2016 Briefel Ernie 1919 2016 Broadus Jim 1939 2016 Buchla Don 1937 2016 Büchner Lutz 1968 2016 Buss Skip 1926 2016 Buster Prince 1938 2016 Caiola Al 1920 2016 Capalbo Toby 1930 2016 Carano Nicki 1967 2016 Carey Rob 1972 2016 Chess Phil 1921 2016 Christensen Gary 1954 2016 Church Buddy 1952 2016 Clark Barrett 1981 2016 Clark Guy 1941 2016 Coffman Tim 1946 2015 Cohen Leonard 1934 2016 Coles Ed & Rosemarie R- 1961 E-1958 2016 Cranshaw Bob 1932 2016 Craviotto Johnny 1946 2016 Dettman William 1950 2016 DiCenso Dick 1941 2016 Edmondson John 1933 2016 Eisenman Sam 1930 2016 Emerson Keith 1944 2016 Fendorf Frank 1925 2016 Flores Chuck 1935 2016 Foslien Orrin 1942 2016 Fountain Pete 1930 2016 Frantz Cassie 1943 2017 Frederick Carla 1950 2016 Frey Glenn 1948 2016 Furst Bob 1933 2016 Gabriel Juan 1950 2016 Germain Ben 1927 2016 1 Glanville James 1925 2016 Gottschalk Roberta 1941 2016 Greco Buddy 1926 2017 Grimmie Christina 1994 2016 Gronowski Gregg 1951 2016 Haggard Merle 1937 2016 Halloran Joe 1967 2016 Harris Bill 1934 2016 Harris Nicholas 1978 2016 Hayashi Yasuji 1923 2016 Heffner Glen 1953 2016 Henkin Mary 1928 2016 Herman Mark 1956 2016 Hester Hoot 1951 2016 Hewitson Randy 1955 2016 Hibbs Joe 1953 2016 Hicks Dan 1941 2016 Hill Charles 1935 2016 Hutcherson Bobby 1941 2016 Irwin Bill 1923 2016 Jackson Wayne 1941 2016 Jamerson Jr James 1958 2016 Jezreel OJB 1966 2016 Johnson Steven 1955 2016 Johnston Luke 1966 2016 Kanstul Ziggy 1929 2016 Kantner Paul 1941 2016 Knaub Dick 1936 2016 Krenek Gladys 1924 2016 Kylan Rick 1946 2016 Lake Greg 1947 2016 Larson Larry 1933 2016 LeDuc Francois 1939 2016 Locke William 1944 2016 Loudermilk John D. 1934 2016 Lukas George 1927 2016 Mack Lonnie 1941 2016 Martin Sir George 1926 2016 Maxson Jack 1940 2016 McCrea John 1927 2016 McCullough Henry 1943 2016 McPeek Owen 1927 2016 Meloy-Palmateer Mo 1943 2016 Menza Nick 1964 2016 Miller Larry 1966 2016 2 Moffatt Al 1947 2016 Moman Chips 1937 2016 Monachino Paul 1924 2016 Moore Scotty 1931 2016 Mouzon Alphonse 1948 2016 Muenchow Jerry 1943 2016 Nagel Robert 1924 2016 Norris Richard 1936 2016 Okun Milt 1923 2016 Oliveros Pauline 1932 2016 Olsen Harvey 1937 2016 Opperman George 1918 2016 O'Sullivan John 1936 2016 Otte John 1926 2016 Paiste Robert 1932 2016 Parker Bob 1944 2015 Perry Sylvia 1919 2016 Petocz Csaba 1960 2015 Pidanick Richie 1952 2016 Price Bill 1944 2016 Prince 1958 2016 Pulcini Anthony 1993 2016 Purdy Curtis 1947 2016 Racher Cora 1948 2016 Realo Al 1943 2016 Ripperger Jack 1929 2016 Robinson Vale 1935 2016 Russell Leon 1946 2016 Saied Helen 1924 2016 Schireson Stanley 1917 2016 Schoepe Zenon 1960 2016 Schreiber Hugo 1927 2016 Schwartz Dorothy 1927 2016 Scotti William 1924 2016 Seaver Larry 1943 2016 Sheeran Dan 1925 2016 Shimada Shinichi 1932 2016 Shure Rose 1921 2016 Size Tom 1959 2016 Smith Dan 1946 2016 Smith Vern 1961 2016 Smither Sid Snyder Jerry 1925 2016 Stanley Ralph 1927 2016 Stone Chris 1935 2016 3 Temperton Rob 1924 2016 Thielemans Toots 1922 2016 Tibaldeo Sr. Victor 1923 2016 Tomita Isao 1932 2016 Tracy Dana 1952 2016 Travis Martin 1916 2016 Uribe Ed 1957 2015 Van Gelder Rudy 1924 2016 van Haaff Vincent 1952 2016 Vee Bobby 1943 2016 Volley Maxine 1959 2017 Wagner Cathy 1954 2016 Walker Saul 1927 2016 Ward Nannette 1953 2016 Wasserman Rob 1952 2016 Waters Christopher 1986 2016 Wegher Bob 1927 2016 Wellins Bobby 1936 2016 White Maurice 1941 2016 Wilkes Monty Lee 1962 2016 Wilson Tom 1933 2016 Wong Duane "Pudgy" 1953 2016 Woolley James 1966 2016 Worrell Bernie 1944 2016 Yeager Dolores 1928 2016 Young Don 1953 2016 Zydeco Buckwheat 1947 2016 Remembering the great Joe Sample in absentia on his Birthday February 1 - born 1939, passed at the age of 75 on September 12, 2014. Joe's manager for many years was the legendary manager/impresario George Greif, Diane Greif-Sheppard's Dad - I knew George, I can't think of Joe Sample without remembering George Greif...also that's James Jamerson Jr. playing bass in back of Joe, very sadly James (son of James Jamerson of Motown Records) has passed as well - I shot this photo back in the year 1981 on my first trip to Europe - R.I.P. Joe, George, James - sincerely, Jon Hammond Joe's wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Sample Joseph Leslie "Joe" Sample (February 1, 1939 – September 12, 2014) was an American pianist, keyboard player, and composer. He was one of the founding members of the Jazz Crusaders, the band which became simply the Crusaders in 1971, and remained a part of the group until its final album in 1991 (not including the 2003 reunion album Rural Renewal). Beginning in the 1970s, he enjoyed a successful solo career and guested on many recordings by other performers and groups, including Miles Davis, George Benson, Jimmy Witherspoon, B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Steely Dan, and the Supremes. Sample incorporated jazz, gospel, blues, Latin, and classical forms into his music. On September 12, 2014, Sample died in Houston, Texas, of mesothelioma at age 75. Birth name Joseph Leslie Sample Born February 1, 1939 Houston, Texas, U.S. Died September 12, 2014 (aged 75) Houston Genres Jazz Occupation(s) Musician, composer Instruments Piano, keyboards Years active 1950s–2014 Labels Blue Thumb, MCA, GRP, Warner Bros., Verve, ABC Associated acts Jazz Crusaders Joe Sample's Bio: "Sample was born in Houston, Texas on February 1, 1939. Sample began to play the piano at age 5. He was a student of the organist and pianist Curtis Mayo. In high school in the 1950s, Sample teamed up with friends saxophonist Wilton Felder and drummer "Stix" Hooper to form a group called the Swingsters. While studying piano at Texas Southern University, Sample met and added trombonist Wayne Henderson and several other players to the Swingsters, which became the Modern Jazz Sextet and then the Jazz Crusaders,[1] in emulation of one of the leading progressive jazz bands of the day, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Sample never took a degree from the university; instead, in 1960, he and the Jazz Crusaders made the move from Houston to Los Angeles. The group quickly found opportunities on the West Coast, making its first recording, Freedom Sounds in 1961 and releasing up to four albums a year over much of the 1960s. The Jazz Crusaders played at first in the dominant hard bop style of the day, standing out by virtue of their unusual front-line combination of saxophone (played by Wilton Felder) and Henderson's trombone. Another distinctive quality was the funky, rhythmically appealing acoustic piano playing of Sample, who helped steer the group's sound into a fusion between jazz and soul[2] in the late 1960s. The Jazz Crusaders became a strong concert draw during those years. While Sample and his band mates continued to work together, he and the other band members pursued individual work as well. In 1969 Sample made his first recording under his own name; Fancy Dance featured the pianist as part of a jazz trio.[1] In the 1970s, as the Jazz Crusaders became simply the Crusaders and branched out into popular sounds, Sample became known as a Los Angeles studio musician, appearing on recordings by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner, B. B. King, Joe Cocker, Minnie Riperton and Anita Baker. In 1975 he went into the studios with jazz legends Ray Brown on bass, and drummer Shelly Manne to produce a then state-of-the-art recording direct to disc entitled The Three. About this time Blue Note Records reissued some of the early work by the Jazz Crusaders as "The Young Rabbits". This was a compilation of their recordings done between 1962 and 1968. The electric keyboard was fairly new in the sixties, and Sample became one of the instrument's pioneers. He began to use the electric piano while the group retained their original name, and the group hit a commercial high-water mark with the hit single "Street Life" and the album of the same name in 1979. In 1978 he recorded Swing Street Café with guitarist David T. Walker. The Crusaders, after losing several key members, broke up after recording Life in the Modern World for the GRP label in 1987. Despite the disbanding of the Crusaders, the members would join each other to record periodically over the years, releasing Healing the Wounds in the early 1990s. Felder, Hooper, and Sample recorded their first album, called Rural Renewal, as the reunited Crusaders group in 2003 and played a concert in Japan in 2004. Since Sample's Fancy Dance (1969), he has recorded several solo albums, including the George Duke produced Sample This. GRP also released Joe Sample Collection, and a three-disc Crusaders Collection, as testament to Sample's enduring legacy. Some of the pianist's recent recordings are The Song Lives On (1999), featuring duets with singer Lalah Hathaway, and The Pecan Tree (2002), a tribute to his hometown of Houston, where he relocated in 1994. His 2004 album on Verve, Soul Shadows, paid tribute to Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton, and pre-jazz bandleader James Reese Europe. In 2007 he recorded Feeling Good with vocalist Randy Crawford. In 1983, MCA released Joe Sample's The Hunter LP. The Hunter sessions had taken place during the previous year at Hollywood Sound Recorders and Salty Dog Studios in Los Angeles, producing a fine body of recordings of which six were brought forward. Fans believe there maybe other recordings from the sessions yet to be released. Amongst the six tracks was the nine-minute Night Flight. UK Jazz Funk and Soul DJ Robbie Vincent premiered Night Flight in its entirety in the spring of 1983 on his Radio London "Saturday Show" prompting a surge of jazz fusion enthusiasts and Sample fans to buy up all the import copies from London stores. For Sample, The Hunter album featured a number of leading musicians of the day including Marcus Miller on bass and Paulinho Da Costa on percussion. Sample was also joined on the album by Phil Upchurch on lead guitar, Dean Parks (also on guitar), Steve Gadd and Bob Wilson on drums, John Phillips on bass clarinet, and Abraham Laboriel on bass. For production, Joe Sample called on his Crusaders' stable mate Wilton Felder. The Hunter album came at a very important juncture in Sample's solo push. Night Flight remains the great achievement from these sessions, although fans were extremely disappointed when an edited version appeared on the compilation Joe Sample Collection.[citation needed] The Hunter album has been transferred to CD from the original tapes but fans are still awaiting a remastered expanded edition with previously unreleased material and demos. Sample appeared on stage at The Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 28 May 2000, playing keyboard solo on George Benson's Deeper Than You Think. This concert was recorded and a DVD entitled George Benson: Absolutely Live was subsequently released. A studio version of Deeper Than You Think was recorded featuring Joe Sample in New York in May 1999 during sessions for a Benson collection which took the title Absolutely Benson. Fans again believe there may have been other collaborations of Sample - Benson which remain in the vaults unreleased. Some of his works were featured on The Weather Channel's "Local on the 8s" segments and his song "Rainbow Seeker" is included in their 2008 compilation release, The Weather Channel Presents: Smooth Jazz II. Nicole Kidman sang his song "One Day I'll Fly Away" in the Baz Luhrmann film Moulin Rouge! The very popular "In All My Wildest Dreams", also from the 1978 album Rainbow Seeker, was sampled on Tupac's "Dear Mama", De la Soul's "WRMS's Dedication to the Bitty", Toni Braxton's "What's Good" and Arrested Development's "Africa's Inside Me". Sample had a bassist son named Nicklas Sample (with ex-wife Marianne), who is a member of the Coryell Auger Sample Trio featuring Julian Coryell and Karma Auger. On September 12, 2014, Sample died in Houston, Texas from complications from mesothelioma lung disease.[3] He was 75 years old.[4] Sample had also suffered two heart attacks — the most recent in 2009. According to the Los Angeles Times he had also suffered illness caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, which produces chronic fatigue.[5] In 2013, Sample was hospitalized with pneumonia, according to Variety, the Hollywood and music industry trade paper." Sending up prayers for my good friend Rudy Sheriff Lawless aka The Sheriff - jazz drummer extraordinaire!! Honored by Jazz Foundation of America - special thanks Gina Reder - Rudy photos from Jon Hammond: Oh wow...there goes the Apple Maps Van! https://www.apple.com/ios/maps/ - Jon Hammond Frankfurt, Germany -- Power Shot! My good friend Yu Beniya on another very important international mission for Suzuki Musical Instruments! Congress Frankfurt, Messe Frankfurt Venue GmbH - "Suzuki was founded in 1953, as a harmonica manufacturer.[1] Suzuki's western U.S. distribution center located in San Diego, California. It has expanded to include a variety of instruments including pianos and band instruments,[2] and purely electronic instruments such as the Tronichord, Omnichord, and QChord Digital Soundcard Guitar." In 1991 Suzuki bought the Hammond Organ Co., which is now known as Hammond Suzuki USA http://kernelpanichammondcast.blogspot.com/2016/08/concert-in-suzuki-musical-instruments.html — with Yu Beniya, Suzuki Musical Instruments and Congress Center Messe Frankfurt Most Famous Concert We Never Played, NAMM Show Center Stage Presented by Pioneer DJ Rained Out! IMMEDIATE RELEASE Scheduled Appearance Jon Hammond Funk Unit - Rained Out in Anaheim CA! Musical Instrument Trade Show, International Artists Koei Tanaka from Tokyo Japan representing Suzuki Musical Instruments, chromatic harmonica virtuoso Heinz Lichius from Hamburg Germany drums endorsed by Zildjian Cymbals Alex Budman tenor saxophonist from Los Angeles CA Joe Berger from New York City playing for JJ Guitars UK Chuggy Carter from New Jersey endorsed by GON BOPS Jon Hammond the leader playing Hammond organ + bass just back from Tokyo Japan where he played for Suzuki Musical Instruments Torrential Rains forced cancelation - Rain Date will be made up in January 2018 folks! NAMM Believe in Music https://www.namm.org/thenammshow/2017/events/jon-hammond-funk-unit Photos Credit Lawrence Gay Heinz Lichius at Canopus Drums Stand Chuggy Carter was on Jon Hammond's original band with Bernard Purdie back in 1989 Koei Tanaka the great chromatic harmonica phenom Joe Berger aka Berger-Meister - here with Jon Hammond and Lee Oskar Alex Budman tenor saxophonist on Jon Hammond's Band at a NAMM Showcase Jon Hammond getting the bad news from Greg Herreman NAMM Production Manager on his trusty Blackberry monitoring the situation on well traveled MacBook Pro Rain! Heinz Lichius and Jon Hammond sitting up on the rained out plastic wrapped Pioneer DJ Stage, as scheduled! Friday, January 20, 2017 - 4:00pm to 4:40pm NAMM CenterStage Presented by Pioneer DJ (BC Patio) Jon Hammond Show 01 28 Broadcast MNN TV Jazz Blues and Soft News Winter NAMM Episode Jon's archive https://archive.org/details/JonHammondShow0128BroadcastMNNTVJazzBluesAndSoftNewsWinterNAMMEpisode Youtube https://youtu.be/QjERNl-5_BU Vimeo https://vimeo.com/201233695 Facebook video https://www.facebook.com/hammondcast/videos/10154087971052102/ Jon Hammond Show 01 28 Broadcast MNN TV Jazz Blues and Soft News Winter NAMM Episode First segment: Anaheim CA -- 2017 NAMM Show Sunday Blues and Jazz Session with Jon Hammond and Friends "White Onions" - Koei Tanaka on Suzuki Harmonica - Official Facebook Page chromatic harmonica, Chuggy Carter (GON BOPS) percussion, Joe Berger guitar (TV Jones), Jon Hammond at the Sk1 Hammond organ - camera: Jesse Gay, Special thanks Steve Simmons, Ray Gerlich, Scott May, Suzuki Musical Instruments Team - in memory of Gregg Gregory Gronowski Second segment: NAMM Show 2017, Camera Credit: Jesse Gay, thanks Jesse! -- Thanks to our good friends at Canopus Drums for the Organ Trio Session today with Heinz Lichius drums, Arno Haas tenor saxophone, Jon Hammond Sk1 organ - powered by TecAmp USA neo bass cabinet - and beautiful Italian designer Keyboard Stand by Bespeco Professional, Alex Mingmann Hsieh / P. Mauriat 保爾‧莫莉亞 Taiwan #NAMMShow #CanopusDrums #Bespeco #TecAmpUSA #HammondOrgan #Pmauriat 3rd segment: NAMM Show Sunday Blues and Jazz Session with Jon Hammond and Friends in Hammond Organs stand 5104 and Suzuki Musical Instruments 5100 "Lydia's Tune" and Jon's Theme Song: "Late Rent" Musicians: Koei Tanaka chromatic harmonica, Joe Berger guitar, Chuggy Carter percussion, Jon Hammond at the Sk1 Hammond organ + bass #NAMMShow #PioneerDJ #HammondOrgan #CenterStage #Blackberry #Funk #Jazz #CableAccessTV #MNNTV #ManhattanNeighborhoodNetwork http://www.HammondCast.com NAMM LINK for Jon Hammond Funk Unit https://www.namm.org/thenammshow/2017/events/jon-hammond-funk-unit Producer Jon Hammond Language English NAMM Show Canopus Drums Session by Jon Hammond Jon's archive https://archive.org/details/NAMMShowCanopusDrumsSession Youtube https://youtu.be/noZRV3WW7OQ Vimeo https://vimeo.com/200553239 NAMM Show 2017, Camera Credit: Jesse Gay, thanks Jesse! -- Thanks to our good friends at Canopus Drums for the Organ Trio Session today with Heinz Lichius drums, Arno Haas tenor saxophone, Jon Hammond organ - powered by TecAmp USA neo bass cabinet - and beautiful Italian designer Keyboard Stand by Bespeco Professional, Alex Mingmann Hsieh / P. Mauriat 保爾‧莫莉亞 Taiwan Thanks to Shinichi Usuda President Canopus Co., Ltd. and Canopus Team: Taxi Okuyama, Joey Klaparda, Taka Matsumoto TecAmp USA Glenn Kawamoto, Bespeco Professional S.r.l. Team, Silvia, Ettore, Francesco, Alessandro, Corrado - P.Mauriat Saxophones Alex Hsieh "Go For The Sound", Thomas Pistone NAMM Security, Joe Lamond NAMM President CEO Feel The Weight - Jon Hammond NAMM Show, Musicians, Retailers, Luthiers, Musical Instruments, Memoriam, Documentary, Historian, #NAMMShow #HammondOrgan #Memorial