Here it is, the final days of February and the first blog post in over a month. Usually, January finds me pretty energized and prolific here, especially in the wake of Winter Jazz Fest. The entries usually stay fairly consistent until the spring, or even summer. Not this year. You'd think The Man came and took me away.
Not quite, thankfully. The good news is that my lack of blog posts can be attributed to being busy in other places. With JazzTimes back, online only at this point, I've been busy working on assignments for them. In addition to my dispatch on the Manhattan Marathon of Winter Jazz Fest (see previous blog post for a link), I've contributed three pieces this month:
My Overdue Ovation on bassist Steve Tintweiss, a piece which was overdue itself, having been slated to run in JazzTimes around this time two years ago, right before the magazine was sold and the new owner (who has since sold it) got rid of all of us "gatekeepers." That piece appeared on this site but the version in the link has been tightened up and updated.
It's great being back in the JzzTimes fold, as my first entry into the magazine happened just over 22 years ago, when I profiled Marshall Allen not long after he had taken the helm of the Sun Ra Arkestra. (Marshall recently turned 100 and just released an album as a leader of a smaller group.) Plus, some of the writers from JT's prime are back too - including editor David Adler and contributors like Morgan Enos, Geoffrey Himes and Allen Morrison. Please check it out. David is posting new stuff almost every day and I need to catch up. Don't begrudge the ads that are there. We have to generate some revenue in order to survive.
Along with those pieces, I also have a review in the February issue of the New York City Jazz Record of the latest album by cellist Christopher Hoffman. This link goes to the whole issue, which can be read and downloaded, which I recommend. There are a lot of good features this month - and a little bit of me.
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A few days ago, I finally watched We Were Famous, You Don't Remember: The Embarrassment, a great documentary on the great, unsung Wichita, Kansas band the Embarrassment. (I've very, very slow with getting to films.) They existed from the late '70s into the early '80s, causing quite a stir in their hometown, which created a ripple effect that touched people far beyond in other cities. They did it without releasing more than a couple EPs and a few single, all on their own. They're one of those bands that is not widely known, but the people who do know them are absolutely fanatical about them. With good reason.
Through some stroke of luck, filmmakers Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach uncovered a bunch of live footage of the band, much of which had decent-to-good sound quality. The four-piece band was clearly one of those groups that took a smattering of musical knowledge and combined that with youthful enthusiasm to make things up in their own. Watching them tear it up at a basement party, I felt like I was there because I was bopping around on the couch picking up on their energy.
When you watch a film with the subtitles on (like I do), it gives you an extra perspective on the band's lyrics, since they often flash up on the screen. I knew the band was clever to begin with, but singer John Nichols really slayed me when I caught when he was singing in "Celebrity Art Party."
The main reason it struck such a chord with me - aside from relating to the band's excitement and the idea of writing songs about wild topics that might have been discussed in a college class right before practice - probably had something to do with that period of time being long gone. Granted it might be easier now for a band like the Embarrassment to get the word out about what they do, to make connections and get to more cities. But at that time, there was no real standards set, especially in literal Middle America. You did what you felt because it felt right.
And in conjunction with all of that, the end of it bummed me out a little bit. I know that's the basic story arc of these things. They didn't have a tragic ending like some bands. They had just had enough. But the stories from people they knew back then about how crushed they felt - I think that's the part that got me. A small flock of people felt really invested in this band. They believed in them because they had this "thing" that made the hearts beat faster. I'm getting overly poetic about it but it again harkens back to a more innocent time when bands could really felt like something more than just a band.
Of course, Embarrassment guitarist Bill Goffrier would soon more to Boston and get into Big Dipper, who rocked the next breed of music geeks like me, making the whole life of putting out records on a small label and traveling in a van seem like the greatest life there was. So there is that happy epilogue. (About a year ago, I found out that the Embarrassment played Pittsburgh's fabled Electric Banana once. Bill said he mentioned it the first time they came here which is probably true but I was too wound up that night to remember that.)
We Were Famous (whose title comes from a song lyrics) is streaming on Tubi, so you should watch it there. Or go to the official site for it and find out how to watch it.
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