What more do we need to now about the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson that he hasn’t already told us in his writing? That he had a huge appetite for drugs? His predilection for driving hard and fast? That he had a fetish for lipstick?

[Read more →]

Confession: we didn’t think much of Ralph Steadman’s bug-eyed illustrations for Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas when we first saw them. Maybe it was the drugs we were on. A friend explained it best: “Steadman’s acid trip isn’t my acid trip.”

Sure, Steadman’s drawings for Fear and Loathing, and other of Thompson’s books, had…

[Read more →]

You’ve heard it said, even sung: Every picture tells a story. No where is that statement more true than in comics. And no comic illustrator tells deeper, more meaningful, more entertaining, more eye-pleasing stories than Chris Ware. Ware’s comics are so innovative, so artistic, clever and literate that they bridge…

[Read more →]

You know the rap on baritone sax. It’s “cumbersome,” unwieldy” and requires a typhoon’s worth of wind just to air mezzo piano. These are mainly excuses granted to mediocre baritone players of which there are a very few; guys just don’t want to be heard playing an instrument that controls…

[Read more →]

It’s unclear what President Bush knew of Palestinian life when he visited the occupied city of Ramallah on the West Bank in January of this year. He had something of an eye opener when weather forced him to abandon his helicopter and take a motor caravan through a checkpoint in the…

[Read more →]

Charles Lloyd’s latest release, recorded live in 2007 at the Theater Basel in Switzerland, recalls his early live recording, Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey. That LP introduced those of a certain generation to the saxophonist-flutist and jazz in general. The similarities between the two recordings, though separated by some…

[Read more →]

John Zorn’s interest in film music flickers through all his recordings. His latest project seems a soundtrack for a spaghetti western too twisted to be shot, all sauce and corkscrew pasta (reference his 1985 collection of Enrico Morricone movie music The Big Gundown). Varied and accessible like his 2001 release…

[Read more →]

The 1960s were all about consciousness raising: middle class white kids discovering the poverty and discrimination suffered by people of color, apolitical guys getting drafted and sent to the war in Asia, young women running up against the patriarchal system and nearly everybody expanding—or blowing—their minds on drugs. This lifting…

[Read more →]

In the liner notes to his Thelonious Monk tribute, Ellis Marsalis admits that there was a time he saw Monk’s music as an “anomaly.” He also admits to being in awe of the man, too self-conscious to introduce himself to Monk once upon a time at the New Orleans Jazz…

[Read more →]

I once had a minor tiff with Brad Mehldau, an exchange of words in the pages of the L.A. Weekly that, I hope, ended up serving us both well. It started when I wrote up a plug for a rare Keith Jarrett appearance, saying that Jarrett had influenced a generation of young musicians. For proof one needed to look no further than Mehldau’s recorded rendition of “Blame It on My Youth”

[Read more →]