Remembering Anton Fier & Pharoah Sanders, plus other things from this month

What a month it's been - good and bad. First the good. After 11 months in the making, my album is finally all recorded and mixed. When I say "my album," I don't mean it's a solo album. It includes all four members of the Harry Von Zells, plus a few friends. It'll likely be another 12 months until you can hold it, as I want to get it pressed on vinyl once it's mastered. But keep this info in your memory bank. 

Back on September 10, vocalist Catherine Russell came to the New Hazlett Theater for a show presented by the Kente Arts Alliance. I wasn't familiar with Russell before that night, but Kente shows are always a good time, so I felt like I had to check it out.

Russell said she likes music from "the 19-teens to the 1960s - that's it," and she knows how to keep the older material fresh. Along with standards like "You Stepped Out of a Dream" and "East of the Sun (West of the Moon)," she got the theater jumping with "Swing Cats Ball" - a number written by her dad, Luis Russell, and recorded by Louis Jordan - and "Swing, Brother, Swing," her opening number, recorded previously by Billie Holiday. 

The four-piece band accompanying Russell was tight and spare, never overplaying when direct simplicity was the way to go. Drummer Mark McLean (pictured above along with Russell and bassist Tal Ronen) was a master of restraint. Every time it seemed like he would end a tune with a big run across his kit, he instead concluded with a simple crash, which elevated the whole band. 

One weekend later, the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival came to town. I covered it for JazzTimes and the dispatch might be available only to people with a subscription but here's a link to it. If you can't read it, the short answer is, it was a great time. 

Then there was the bad news, which of course is common knowledge at this point. Along with the passing of Anton Fier and Pharoah Sanders, I just read this afternoon that Sue Mingus, the fourth wife of Charles Mingus and gatekeeper of his music, died on September 24 (location and cause of death haven't been announced yet.) She was 92. 

Certain albums could be considered watersheds in my collection, meaning they turned me on to people or music that I might not have discovered otherwise. The self-titled debut by the Golden Palominos was one such album. By 1983, I was fascinated by anything that included guitarist/vocalist Arto Lindsay. I had finally gotten into his band DNA earlier that year and wanted to hear everything he was doing. To add to the intrigue, a review in downbeat gave the album a rare five-star review, calling it a new classic or words to that effect. I wish I had that issue with me (it's probably still at my mom's house) to quote it directly. 

Lindsay's name was all over this album, along with a rotating list of names like Bill Laswell, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and John Zorn, who not only play alto saxophone (my instrument!) but something called "game calls." The other constant musician on all seven tracks was drummer Anton Fier, who had played in the first Lounge Lizards with Lindsay. Fier played on every track on the Palominos debut, while Lindsay sat out "Cookout," an amazing blend of drum machine, live drums from Fier and turntable scratching and bass from Laswell. (It was likely the first time scratching appeared outside the context of rap music. Laswell had it down too.) 

Opening track "Clean Plate" lived up to the downbeat praise, but the rest of the album was a head-scratcher. It was hard to make heads or tails of things, or who was playing what. Could Arto really play or was he just making a racket? What were those game calls that Zorn had, and did he know what he was doing? So I kept on listening. Becoming obsessed with Zorn, I soon followed him onto That's the Way I Feel Now, a Thelonious Monk tribute album and my entrance to the magical world of that pianist. 

I'm getting off track here but the point it, if it weren't for Anton Fier's vision of the Golden Palominos, I wouldn't have discovered all this music. The album has been combined to work by Material, the band helmed by Laswell and Michael Beinhorn, which also had musicians coming and going from track to track. But in 2017, Lindsay told me:

Those songs were totally built in the studio. I was so naïve coming out of DNA. I had no notion of musical structure. Anton, on the other hand, was a budding indie rock producer who was really clear on that. We really butted heads. We wanted to form this band together because in the Lounge Lizards, we had kind of wanted to make a rock band. And we wanted to call the Lounge Lizards 'The Golden Palominos' at one point. 

"Anton and I went to a motel upstate to write these songs. And we, basically, couldn’t really write together. That record was kind of stitched together in a way. The structures, that’s really Anton...Like he’d do a rhythm track and he’d kind of structure everything together. But the way that he put together the grooves and the improvisors, that’s pretty much him." 

Of course, that album was lightening in a bottle, never to be captured again in the studio (though I have a live tape of the core lineup playing some of that music.) The Palominos are better known for their songs with Syd Straw on vocals, or Michael Stipe singing the Moby Grape classic "Omaha," For my money, though, that first album - and the Feelies' Crazy Rhythm - are Fier's finest works.  

In reading about his passing, a friend of a friend on FB said he met Fier later in life, after the drummer had stopped playing music and got some (unspecified) day job. I couldn't believe it. Sure the Golden Palominos, the Feelies and Lounge Lizards might not be huge but this guy was in Sugar with Bob Mould too, and probably had myriad contacts in music. And he gives it up for a day job?! I can only hope that he left us with some inkling about the impact he had on adventurous ears. 

It's very likely that I heard Pharoah Sanders' "The Creator Has a Master Plan" on the radio around the same time that I read about the Golden Palominos. WYEP-FM had a number of jazz shows in the early '80s, including a weeknight one called Fat Tuesday. I'm not sure if that was where I heard  "The Creator" but the title was already familiar to me. Pharoah's albums were printed on the inner sleeve to my Steppenwolf albums, since both were on ABC-affiliated labels (Impulse! and Dunhill, respectively). Other titles like "Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah" and "Summun Bukmun Umyun (Deaf Dumb Blind)" stuck in my head from a young age, making me wonder what they meant or what they sounded like. I'm not sure if that radio show was my introduction to Pharoah's hair-raising altissimo shrieks on the tenor, but a few years later, I was snatching up the few used albums of his that floated my way. 

Kente brought him to town in 2010, and I knew that it was my mission to interview the great saxophonist. It wasn't easy. I called him at several specific times but only got his answering machine. When I finally did get him on the line, he was a man of few words, despite my meticulous way of phrasing questions so they wouldn't sound like the same old inquiries. I felt a little vindicated upon hearing that another local scribe had the same difficulty. I also felt privileged because I got him to talk about John Coltrane, and that's when he opened up.

But Pharoah wasn't the type of guy who would suddenly be loquacious with an interviewer whom he had just met minutes before. A few stories I heard over the years offered a great understanding of the enigmatic musician, who was nowhere near as fierce as the cover shot on The Village of the Pharoahs might have implied. One story came from a session that he did with a significantly younger group of adventurous musicians. When I wondered what the conversation was like, a person close to the band said that topics that would get Pharoah going usually involved subjects like what people were planting in their garden that season.

The other story came from New York trumpeter/bass & alto clarinetist Matt Lavelle. Several years ago, he and Pharoah were walking through Times Square in bitter cold weather. When Lavelle expressed the desire to get out of the cold, Pharoah protested: "No, man, this is nature. And I want to feel it, cold or not." 

Thank you, Pharoah.

Thank you, Anton.

Thank you, Sue.