DAVID MURRAY CUBAN ENSEMBLE PLAYS NAT KING COLE EN ESPANOl;   Motema. Nothing like the original except the tunes. Murray, always adept at finding new ways to frame his music, works with a nine-piece ensemble and strings to do what he does best: cry, caterwaul, lose control (never; it only sounds like it) and get fresh during ballads. More to come on this outstanding recording.

FURTHER EXPLORATIONS, Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez, Paul Motian; Concord Jazz, release date: January 17,2012. Recorded live at the Blue Note in NYC and celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of Bill Evans Explorations this two-disc set warms us with the sort of interplay that LaFaro and Motian attained on the original. Nobody would mistake Cora for Evans and that’s the beauty of it. For the late Motian, an extension, a perfect circle.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY SOUNDTRACK  by Alberto Iglesias; Silva Screen Records. Pedro Almovodar’s favorite composer has strung together a variety of downbeat themes that sound as a continuous whole. We hear some John Adams, some Phillip Glass, even some Steve Reich in this moody music. More on this later as well.  

Spalding Gray struck me as the perfect balance of author and performer, someone who wrote well and revealingly of himself and then brought that self to the stage. As a long time Gray fan, I was anticipating the release of The Journals of Spalding Gray this month until I read the excerpts printed in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. Yes, Gray is introspective and thoughtful, curious as to who he is and why, just as he was in his monologues (if not as deeply as in his published work). But something seemed lacking, something prevented my usual embrace of his story. And I realized that I was getting only half of Gray, the writer without the performer. And I was disappointed in myself for needing the visual, the audible, the theatrical factor that made Gray unique.

One excerpt caught my attention.

Problems with father tempted by the idea that all I do may be a reaction against my father — I look at his life and do all I can to live my life in opposition to this makes my life inflexible and rigid.

This idea of the reactionary life, particularly in light of my own father, has long been a source of discomfort and discussion. Was the protest movement of the 1960s motivated by politics or psychology?  That we might be seeing it in generational terms — my 60s-’70s rebellious and politically radical generation was a reaction to the organizational and blue-collar patriarchs of the post-War generation, wasn’t it? The current Occupy Wall Street movement resulting from reactionary tendencies directed towards the greed-is-good generation of the ’80s and now the ’00s –  it’s powered by the same motivations isn’t it?  It’s a troubling question.  I believe the current movement is ideologically motivated, a reaction to the conditions and the protestors’ perceived future. But ours, a generation that embraced ideals and sold out a decade and more later? I’m not so sure–Cabbage Rabbit

For many of us, the 1960s never ended. Tom Hayden takes that belief a step further. The ’60s continue…for everyone.

Hayden’s book, The Long Sixties, takes the political history of the ’60s and finds its legacy alive today in the social movement that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. He sees Obama as a reflection of the movement politics of that decade. Movement politics –the actions of groups sharing similar visions or issue positions– can be found  in the emerging progressive- populist, anti-finance and anti-corporate movements and in the ignored but tangible anti-war movement. These movements, anchored in their correctness, grow in reaction to the resistance they meet. Without the ’60s, Hayden suggests, hope would go missing from our politics.

Despite the tired joke that memory of that special decade implies absence, Hayden was there. He was a founding member of the Students For a Democratic Society and led the drafting of the student manifesto The Port Huron Statement. He was indicted as a co-conspirator of the Chicago 8, charged with inciting riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 (his conviction was overturned in 1972).  He traveled to North Vietnam during the war with Jane Fonda (in 1973), an act that still inspires outrage from his adversaries, before going on to spend time in California politics in the 1980s and ’90s. He has not only been controversial among his enemies on the right, but with radical progressives who, at times, saw him compromising to join the political system.

Hayden describes his political and social beliefs with “the M/M model,” progressive movements in opposition to the Machiavellians “power technicians” who represent the various power institutions of government, business and the military. He places the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the anti-corporate movements of the ’60s in this model. The movements  grow, as he says, “when sufficient rage and frustration lead to a perception that all peaceful, legal means have been exhausted.”

The majority of the book frames many of the seminal radical events of the decade inside the model. In the process, Hayden paints a history of the times that counters attempts at whitewash and demonization.  His “Promoting Amnesia” section warns, “The general approach is to reduce the whole sixties to a blurred story of violence, sex drugs, and rock-and-roll signifying nothing. This requires a difficult removal of civil rights, feminist and farmworker movements…” The most visible example of rewriting history from the era, he says,  is the effort to “wrap Vietnam in triumphalism…”

Hayden declares that while the political successes of the era were compromised in the following decades, the ’60s counterculture revolution succeeded in taking over the culture at large. “Sixties music and artists still retain a dominant influence. The general public is supportive of the decriminalization of marijuana and a treatment-centered approach to drugs. Things organic, foods and medicines, hold vast sway. Above all, environmental programs  such as renewable energy and conservation derive from approaches that were considered part of the extreme fringe thirty years ago.”

Hayden is quick to point out that the sixties did not hold onto its political victories. War, repression, racisim and exploitation of workers continues and, indeed expands. The movement was absorbed and co-opted, he states, and parts of it were separated from the whole. “Green politics still remain white politics,” he says, echoing Van Jones. The Machiavellians, ascendant during the first several years of the new century firmly control the agenda.

It’s when Hayden ties the movement lessons of the ’60s to more recent events that his book speaks the loudest. And nowhere is this most apparent than on sections devoted to Obama. Hayden, along with Barbara Ehrenreich and others, famously endorsed Obama in a March, 2007 piece for The Huffington Post (published in the book). Yet Hayden has not relented any of his positions to support the president, taking him to task for his extension  of the war in Afghanistan and calling out the media as well as the White House for ignoring its casualties.  “…one hard lesson has become clear to me from experience:” he writes with added emphasis, Domestic progress has been continually derailed by dubious wars.” Though he has not addressed class struggle and the financial crisis as thoroughly, he has, in true Hayden style, linked the two to the actions and philosophies of the Obama administration.

“Obama is trying to navigate between Machivavellians he has either inherited or appointed–the generals, military contractors, national security elites, Wall Street bankers, and hedge fund speculators–and a public opinion of high hopes and growing anger…” he writes in the book, which was published in 2009. “To permanently shift the American balance of power in a progressive direction, the Obama administration needs to encourage both structural shifts and cultural ones, not policy change alone…” But even some of Obama’s recent policy, despite its achievements, must unsettle Hayden.

The book’s last sentence addresses both the president and ourselves. “What he needs, then, and what we need is a New Left.” In other words, what’s needed is a return to the movement politics of the sixties, founded on unclouded understanding of the issues, cast in current terms and propelled by contemporary technology. We’ll be looking to see if Hayden’s take on Obama and the current state of America has changed in the last two years when the paperback edition of The Long Sixties, hopefully updated, is published in April.–Cabbage Rabbit

Making sense of the 1960s is a futile task. Rob Kirkpatrick doesn’t even try. His comprehensive 1969: The Year Everything Changed, offers an overwhelming  compendium of events in that cataclysmic year. The book’s thoroughness, without over-riding purpose, is apparently an attempt to find the year more influential than, say, 1968. Suggesting the threads of the moon landing, the Vietnam moratorium and I Am Curious (Yellow) will knot cleanly, Kirkpatrick instead ends up with a tangle. If only he’d spent more time trying to unravel it.

But Kirkpatrick has done us great service. He points out that the decade’s most examined year–1968– boasts any number of books (among them Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, Charles Kaiser”s 1968 In America: Music Politics, Counterculture and the Shaping of a Generation and Jermi Suri’s anthology The Global Revolutions of 1968).  Certainly the political upheavals, not only in the U.S. but in Europe as well, mark 1968 as something of a turning point in the revolt against the rigid status quo. Kirkpatrick’s thesis, that 1969 marked “the death of the old and the birth of the new–the birth, …of modern America,” not only gives his text meaning but form. As he explains, “One of the pleasant surprises in writing this book was the ways in which these chapters emerged ‘organically’–e.g., stories of the sexual revolutions of springtime, the flowering of the counterculture in the summer, the apocalyptic standoffs at the year’s end. Life does not happen in neat and orderly ways, as if following a timeline, but the story of 1969 is one that develops in dramatic tension, builds to a climax, and concludes in its December denouncement.”

What follows is a litany of the year’s events, from Nixon’s inauguration and Led Zepplin’s first American tour (which actually began in December, 1968) to the violence at Altamont. In between, he addresses the student revolt, the Jets Superbowl victory over the Colts, details of the moon landing, the tragedy at Chappaquiddick, the nation’s discovery of the My Lai massacre (which occurred in April, 1968), the installation of the first Automatic Teller Machine, the Stonewall Riots and the New York Mets rise to the World Series.  Kirkpatrick’s thoroughness provides more than a few memory-jogging surprises (I somehow remembered Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, which changed our percpetion of Dylan more than 1966′s Blonde On Blonde, came out a year or two later; likewise Mario Puzo’s epic novel The Godfather). Those paying attention at the time–and what 19-year-old student radical wasn’t?–won’t learn anything new. Instead, Kirkpatrick delivers the pleasure of recount, reminding us of events not thought or discussed for years. Remember Tom Seaver saying, “If the Mets can win the pennant, why can’t we end the war”? Neither did I until Kirkpatrick  pointed it out, drawing the chronological connection between the World Series and anti-Vietnam war National Moratorium Day.

What Kirkpatrick doesn’t do is attempt to make sense of it all. The Mets and the war stand apart, as one would expect, despite Seaver’s query. He tells us that he wants to define the year’s “zeitgeist–literally the ‘time spirit’” of that year. He quotes historian and social critic Theodore Roszak (The Making of a Counter Culture) to explain what he is seeking: “that elusive conception called ‘the spirit of the times’ [that] continues to nag at the mind and demand recognition, since it seems the only way available in which one can make even provisional sense of the world we live in.” After reading 1969, the nagging continues. Kirkpatrick is hesitant to take sides in political issues and seems reactionary in his treatment of say the Black Panthers and the Students For a Democratic Society and their frustrations with the status quo. Though there are parallels and influences to be drawn from the roles of politics, art (especially movies and music) and athletics, Kirkpatrick doesn’t offer any. His common thread is little more than the expression of 1969 being exciting times.

In the final chapter, Kirkpatrick does attempt tracing the year’s influence (or lack of influence)  into the future. The war– eventually–ends. The environmental movement goes on. Rock music becomes big business and album-oriented. Outdoor music festivals thrive despite Altamont. Free agency changes baseball. The sexual revolution leads to Studio 64. Just as Tom Hayden sees the ongoing legacy of the 1960s in his book The Long Sixties: From 1960 To Barack Obama, Kirkpatrick sees the decade as formative to modern times. “Whether American society had come full circle or had simply circled back on itself, the ripples of 1969 continued to emanate throughout the rest of the century and into the next.” Unlike Hayden, he leaves us wondering at what those ripples stirred.

Still, there’s plenty of thought-provoking room to draw conclusions.  Kirkpatrick doesn’t address, say, the irony that the film Easy Rider and it’s anti-mass culture message creates as it influences a generation in dress and lifestyle. But he does quote  Jack Nicholson’s character Hanson, stating, “You know, this used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”  We’re left to wonder alone, some 40 years later, how much more  has gone wrong.–Cabbage Rabbit

The Rabbit’s always thought the jazz-poll category “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” was bogus or, at best, mislabeled. What jazz musician, with the exception of one or two, doesn’t deserve wider recognition? Even the best of them are widely unknown to the general public.

Consider Charles Owens. A fixture on the Los Angeles Jazz scene since the early 1970s, Owens has the kind of resume that his fellow musicians  envy: ten years with the Mercer Ellington-directed Duke Ellington Orchestra, important stints with Mongo Santamaria, Buddy Rich (he arranged “Ode To Billy Joe” for Rich’s 1968 recording Mercy Mercy: Recorded Live At Ceasar’s Palace) and Toshiko Akiyoshi; a tour of Europe with Frank Zappa, time with John Mayall, studio work with Diana Ross, Natalie Cole and Barbara Streisand. He’s worked inside with the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and outside with James Newton and James Carter and graced the bands of nearly every important Los Angeles-based jazz ensemble, from the Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra to the revered Horace Tapscott’s Arkestra.

Along the way, Owens recorded a handful of respected, if obscure, albums: The Two Quartets and Plays the Music of Harry Warren with his New York Art Ensemble that included a host of then-or-soon-to-be L.A. musicians including Ray Brown, Red Callendar, James Newton and Roy McCurdy (both discs issued on the Discovery label) . Both were made over 25 years ago.

Owens has a new recording, Joy, and it’s worth seeking out (full disclosure: the Rabbit wrote liner notes for the project). If musicians, like everyone else, can be judged by the company they keep, Owens’ reputation is secure. Through his vast experience and associations, he brought aboard bassist Ron Carter, pianist Mulgrew Miller and drummer Lewis Nash. The top-shelf rhythm section fits perfectly with Owens’ varied, wide-open approach in play and musical forms. The accompanists take an upfront role in the nine-tunes, serving to frame Owens’ expressive play in best light. Add the dean of recording engineers, Rudy Van Gelder, a man who has been involved with many of the most important recordings of all-time, and you have one very ambitious, high-end project.

The tunes reflect the leader’s taste and background. His interest in Middle-Eastern forms and Coltrane-like modal tunes is balanced with emotional ballads and r-&-b flavored workouts that suggest a strong West Coast influence.  He opens with Eddie Harris’ clasic soul anthem “Sham Time,” giving Miller and Carter prominent solos before opening up on soprano and then, in the style of Rahassaan Roland Kirk, blowing tenor and soprano simultaneously. The soulful feel is  extended on “Mildred’s Groove” and “One For Bags,” both Owens originals. These tunes feature his sterling flute play which is sometimes warm and inviting and often sharp enough to cut diamonds.

Owens shows his ability to find new meaning in familiar tunes in interpretations of Victor Young’s “My Foolish Heart” and Guy Woods’ “My One and Only Love,” the former on soprano, the latter on tenor. But it’s his originals that show the most emotion and passion. “Wildfire,” propelled by Nash’s aggressive polyrhythms, is full of flame and heat. “Spiritual,” a tune dedicated to the children of Iraq and Afghanistan, is at once somber and optimistic and proves that there’s at least one musician out there who hasn’t forgotten the innocent victims of ongoing war. The saxophonist displays his sense of humor when he quotes from “It Ain’t Necessarily So” during his piece “Praise God.”

Joy is an album worthy of its title and, like its leader, worthy of all the recognition it can get. You can wrap your hands on a copy by e-mailing halleowens@aol.com or, if extremely lucky, picking it up at one of Owens gigs. Let us know what you think.–Cabbage Rabbit

“I am the man who has best charted his inmost self.” Antonin Artaud quoted by Helen Weaver

Helen Weaver’s account of  her early days in Greenwich Village is misleadingly titled. Weaver, a new age author and translator nominated for a National Book Award in 1977 for her reading of Antonin Artaud, was a member of New York’s hip set in the 1950s and ’60s. She had affairs with Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce, a longstanding friendship with Allen Ginsberg and worked in the heart of the publishing scene for Harold Vursell and Roger W. Straus Jr. at Farrar, Straus and Cudhay, later Farrar, Straus and Giroux. So who’s the awakener in all this?

Well, it’s the guy whose name will sell the most books, thus the subtitle A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties.  But a large part of  the book deals in Weaver’s life without Kerouac. Equally interesting sections, some maybe more so,  deal in her relationship with Bruce and her own life in Greenwich Village, smoking pot, getting into jazz and generally pursuing a life of her own. If you’re thinking the book is strictly about Kerouac, you’ll be disappointed. Women also named Helen as well as guys named Tommy and Monty all help shake Weaver into consciousness.

But this is not  a disappointing book. Weaver’s story is a late coming-of-age tale in an era (and among a generation) that treated women with (mostly) quaint attitudes  (“Jack wouldn’t let me smoke dope; that was for the boys.”). She breaks away from a “middle-class” upbringing in Scarsdale, Pennsylvania and a dull first marriage. Weaver avidly pursues life, embracing hetro and homosexual relationships, indulging in drugs and following psychoanalysis. By the time you finish, you’ll think  Weaver awakened herself.

Weaver’s sexual awakening after undergraduate studies and while she was married has more affect on her development than the undependable, often drunk, brilliant writer who gave us On the Road.  “If women had suddenly been transformed from rivals to the objects of my desire,” she writes, ” then all my previous conditioning went out the window.”

This is also a story of privilege. Despite her claim to the middle-class, Weaver attended Oberlin, her father paid for her first Village apartment and much of her psychoanalysis and her career in publishing came from her connections.  She could afford to be different. When things don’t go well, the family is there to bail her out. Not every struggling artist or bohemian has that advantage.

Still, Weaver’s honesty about it all makes the book sincere and rewarding. She’s refreshingly disarming about her mistakes with men and women and her own youthful preoccupations, especially when viewed from her later years. And she’s particularly descriptive when it comes to her beloved Greenwich Village. Here are the clubs and coffee shops, the quaint streets and magical social scene that made the Village of the late ’50s and early ’60s a sort of Never Land for those avoiding the conformity of that era.

Weaver ends the book with Kerouac considerations, some pulled from reading, some from observation, some from astrology. These short chapters are the ones Kerouac devotees will be most interested in. Even when seeing “Pisces-Virgo contradictions” in the writer’s life, she’ll make insightful revelations: “Kerouac’s struggle with opposites was a rich source of creativity, the shifting ground on which he was able to arrive at symmetry or balance in his art.”   These same sort of contraditions, though less dramatic, make Weaver’s book  fascinating.–Cabbage Rabbit

Pianist,composer and bandleader Chick Corea is one of the jazz genre’s most unique and diverse artists. One of his earliest recordings, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, is a landmark piano trio recording. His stint with Miles Davis, who encouraged him to explore the electric piano, changed the sound of jazz accompaniment. His groundbreaking experiments with Return To Forever, first in a mixed electric-acoustic Latin-Brazilian format and then in pure electric jazz rock, showed a restless ambition.  He challenged the avant garde with Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul in Circle and performed duets with Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck and Hiromi. At one time, he worked with both Acoustic and Elektric bands. In recent years, he’s toured with his bandmate from the Miles Bitches Brew period, guitarist John McLaughlin and synthesized directions with his Freedom Band. In short, there’s no direction or combination of musicians that Corea hasn’t felt a need to explore.

For his feature article in the 2010 Playboy Jazz Festival program, “Pop and Sizzle: Plugging Into Jazz Fusion,” the Rabbit had an email exchange with the always busy Corea about his early Miles experiences, his interest in all kinds of music and how his diverse past affects his equally diverse present. Here’s the complete exchange.

–As Stanley Clarke says in the “Chick Corea” documentary, “Chick has no problems with changing.” You’ve explored and developed so many styles of music—no need for me to list them—what has driven you? Why have you been (and continue to be) open to so many styles and genres? Is your father’s influence a key? And how does it relate to your own composing?

I’m often asked about what others consider my diversity of tastes. Actually, the simple, but most truthful and direct answer is, I never think about it. I follow my interests and find that it leads me to trying to understand other cultures and the artists that create within them. Often, rather than seeing another way of music as only a “curiosity”, I want to understand it more intimately – and that leads me to studying the music of and participating with the musicians of that culture.
–When you look back on the period in 1969 when In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew were recorded, how do you view what was going on then? How would you characterize the musical times? Were you aware that what you were doing with Miles would be thought to be so innovative and different? That it reflected the shifting cultural and social  times?

From present time looking back on the 60′s, it seems that there was more agreement and acceptance in society of experiment and change. There certainly was in the arts. If I compare it to what’s happening now, it seems “The Media” and “big business” has the flow of art locked up and tightened down. The public has gotten used to it. The result is, less individuality and thus everything else that goes along with that negative direction.

Of course at the time we were recording In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, none of us were talking about what “impact” it might have on the future. Miles was in a constant mode of search and change; it all seemed perfectly natural. And, for me, still does.

–It would be great to have an anecdote from those days, some unique memory that reflects the spirit of those times. In his biography, Jack Chambers quotes Miles saying that after you first joined the group, you and he would “talk about music until late every night.” Is there anything that stands out from those discussions that you recall? What was the setting?

The first gig the Miles Davis Quintet played after Tony Williams left the band was a week’s engagement at a club in Rochester (Duffy’s Tavern?). Jack DeJohnette joined the band and we just finished the first set. As we were walking off stage, I was following Miles off to the left, he muttered to me: “Change again.” in his familiar cryptic way. I took it to mean that he had scanned his whole musical life in an instant and seen the constant change. Maybe he was resisting it at that moment – - I’ll never know.

–When you did the Five Peace Band Project, did you feel it to be part of a fusion legacy? Or was it something that stood apart, reflecting the current times? Both? How does the spirit of what you did then affect what you do now (ie, The Freedom Band)?

Working with John and the gang in the Five Peace Band felt fresh as a daisy to me. Not much talk about the past during the tours. But there was an unspoken (sometimes spoken) reverence expressed for Miles and “the day” – delivered in a manner not wanting to dwell on the past but with real feeling.
–Fusion can also suggest a combining of personalities, something you’re very familiar with especially considering the wide array of duo performances –Hiromi, Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck, Bobby McFerrin, et al—you’ve done over the years. Can you address the dynamic of fusing musical personalities in performance, how it affects those involved and what they create?

Making music with other musicians is an ultimate joy. To be a part of a group creation when there is complete giving amongst the group is my pay for being a musician. And each musician is a unique world unto himself. This is the subtle and high level challenge of communication between free spirits. Unencumbered by any particular protocol, and with a desire to make the other sound the best he can sound, soulful and satisfying music can be made. I’m fortunate to have these kind of associations with my musician friends.

I remember a wonderful incident when Herbie Hancock and I were first beginning to play 2 pianos together. At first we were careful about “not getting in each other’s way”. The playing moved cautiously and slowly. Then we both discovered that we could play whatever we wanted and never get in the other’s way because there was no offering from the other that wasn’t fully accepted and enjoyed. We were both trying to make the other sound good. We had a good laugh over that.

What is it that’s “invisible” in Paul Auster’s latest novel? It’s not the truth. The truth is there… somewhere … though choosing it from all the various claims and denials batted around by three different narrators and one or two other characters might be an impossible task. Or maybe it’s not. Let’s settle on this: the truth is not apparently visible.

What’s invisible is Auster himself. In the past, Auster has inserted himself to various degrees in his writing (remember the detective Paul Auster in City of Glass?). And his work has often focused on identity; how it’s established and how it’s held. In Invisible, Auster explores how our identity is developed and perceived, by ourselves and others, through the stories we tell.  Here the stories are of  trust, love, murder and incest, made-up and otherwise. Just when we think we know one of the characters, and through his/her telling, the others, the point-of view changes and the new narrator destroys what we believed about them all. As we take more and more interest in the entwining tales, the author of them all goes transparent.

It’s 1967 and Adam Walker,  a student at Columbia and aspiring poet (as was Auster) is befriended by an excitable, mysterious older Frenchman, Rudolf Born, and his younger woman friend Margot. The two become entangled in Walker’s’ already tangled life. Born proposes generously funding a literary journal that Adam will edit. In Born’s absence, Margot and Adam begin sleeping together, apparently with Born’s blessing. All seems hope and promise until Adam and Born are accosted walking on Riverside Drive and Born reacts with surprising brutality. Or does he?

This first of four sections seems to fall into a literary model of the type represented by John Fowles’ The Magus. A young man, full of aspiration and desire, falls in with an unpredictable, Svengali-like mentor who, through sinister manipulation, seems intent on teaching his young protege  the cruel and trustless realities of life. But in part II we’re propelled forward some 30 years and given a new narrator, Adam’s Columbia-era friend Jim, who hasn’t heard from him all this time.  Adam is dying from leukemia and entrusts the story–so it was only a story?–of his relationship with Born and Margot to his old friend. Their correpsondence reveals much more of Adam’s story, including his deep, incestuous relationship with his sister. After the Riverside Drive incident, Adam breaks with Born and questions his own involvement. He travels to Paris where he again takes up with Margot. Then he runs into Born, who has become a cipher that marks the point Adam’s life lost all innocence (or was it that incestuous experience with his year-older sister when he was fourteen?).  The affair with Margot becomes less serious even as it’s announced that Born will marry an old acquaintance with a strangely desirable daughter. Adam, anxious to expose Born’s murderous behavior, hatches his own magus plot, one that can only end in emotional–and dangerous– disaster. The daughter, years later, tells her own story.  As Auster writes, “Compelling as those twists and turns might be, they amount to just one story among an infinity of stories, one film among a multitude of films…”

Auster has discussed the power of the stories we tell ourselves previously, notably in 2008′s Man In the Dark. Here, the theme isn’t as much about creating reality as defining it. Identity creates truth, circumstance defines identity and truth, real or perceived, influences circumstance.  Adam and his sister are drawn together by the death of their younger brother. That leads them to intimacy. Born, something of a double agent, defines himself as he sees fit, leaving others to their suspicions. In his pursuit of revenge, Adam seeks a new identity but becomes something entirely unexpected, by him and the reader.

Invisible cements Auster’s reputation as a mystery writer, one who pursues the various clues of meaning towards an ever-elusive answer. In this sense, his writing is as captivating as any detective fiction while vastly superior in psychic and existential puzzles. This writer-as-detective is a stand-in for all of us who have ever wondered who or what to believe. Believing ourselves could be a mistake. Fashioning our lives as stories may or may not help make sense of it all.–Cabbage Rabbit

The same old thing wasn’t going to cut it in the early 1970s. And just about anything recorded before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, in other words before 1969, was the same old thing. That wasn’t going to grab the ears of the hip new audience Miles had attracted with his magnum opus. And record companies wanted that audience…bad.

The music collected on Bridge Into the New Age, all of it (with the exception of one cut) recorded between 1971 and 1974 documents attempts to bring jazz into the age of Aquarius. There are reflections of the political, social and cultural trends that influenced the music, mirrored by peace-and-love themes and cries of “Free Angela!” as well as attempts to meld Afro-centric rhythms and soul–the “bad” sounds of James Brown, Sly Stone and Issac Hayes among others–to an art form which was popularly seen as  becoming to intellectual and formless  (though this wasn’t necessarily so).

As Bridge illustrates, there was much about this movement that was successful. The period (and earlier) produced some great music, not all of it by Davis. Any comprehensive selection of the era’s hits would have to include Miroslav Vitous’ Infinite Search, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Wayne Shorter’s Super Nova, Joe Zawinul’s Zawinul, Weather Report’s eponymous first album and a host of others. Bridge documents the Milestone/Prestige label’s attempts at staying current. That most of the music here is satisfying and timeless in its appeal speaks to the musicians on the label’s roster–Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Idris Muhammad, Gary Bartz–and their ability to maintain their individuality even as their approach to music changed.

The music reflects trends of the era: spiritual and ethnic-consciousness themes, electric instrumentation, emphasis on vocals, percussive color, accessible beats that supported strong and sometimes free-form solos, attempts to include non-traditional instrumentation into the mix, movement towards larger ensembles. Here, those trends are represented by drummer Muhammad’s eight-piece ensemble playing “Peace,” with two additional percusionists (occasionally augmented by saxophonist Clarence Thomas on bells) joining the drummer in rhythmic layering.  Larry Willis attaches echoplex and ring modulator to his keyboard for Henderson’s “Tress-Cun-De-O-La” with the leader’s vocal and guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer providing dissonant elements.  Alice Coltrane brings harp to Henderson’s “Fire.” Todd Cochran, performing then as Bayete, balances clavinet against the horn section on one of “Free Angela”‘s three sections. Gary Bartz sing lyrics from Langston Hughes before cutting loose on alto.  None of the tunes would be identified (except by militant purists) as anything other than jazz. Yet they all sound different than earlier schools of swing, be-bop, post-bop. New.

It’s impossible to tell if (or how much) this direction resulted from label influence (as it did from the Columbia label) or if it came from the artists themselves.  And not everything here is music to our ears. Compare vocals from artist themselves (Henderson, Bartz, Cochran’s chorus) to Jean Carn’s strong and convincing voice on Azar Lawrence’s tune that gives the collection its title, or her work on  “Mother of the Future” from Norman Connors’ Slewfoot. The one piece that stands apart from the rest–Jack DeJonette’s “Brown, Warm and Wintry”–was recorded in 1968. Maybe something from the 1975 Prestige date Cosmic Chicken would have better fit the program (his excellent1970 recording Have You Heard? on Milestone may have been too far out or its trio too underpopulated to be included).

Needless to say, much of this music’s positive direction lost out as jazz recording moved on to jazz-rock and fusion. Too bad. But the Rabbit, who owned all but one of these recordings as a bunny, remembers the hopeful feeling this music gave him…and the conviction it gave that there indeed was something new under the sun. Dumb bunny.–Cabbage Rabbit

There’s much to quibble over in Abram’s big, beautiful The Art of Harvey Kurtzman (the “man” in Kurtzman isn’t spelled out but drawn as  simplistic balloon-stick figure). Why include the complete “Superduperman” from Mad no. 4 (1953) instead of  samples from “Dragged Net!,” the parody of television’s cigarette-selling, L.A Cop promoting Dragnet or “Bat Boy and Rubin” that parodied the legal power of comic book publishers and the homoerotic relationship between the protagonists or show more of the incredible post-horrors-of-war Two-Fisted Tales or, or…

That’s the problem with writer, illustrator, editor and Mad magazine founder Kurtzman. His career was so long, varied and important; so influential to American humor at large, that it would be impossible to do it justice in any single volume. His early strip work for Timely Comics and Stan Lee, his sci-fi and war stories for Will Gaines’ EC, the founding of Mad and its turn from comic to magazine, the follow-up publications  Trump, Humbug and Help, the bread-and-butter work of “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy, his late work for the French alternative market; any overview can only touch work that all deserves long and serious consideration.

This over-sized book, selected and annotated by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle, does an impressive job to highlight the obvious as well as illuminate less well-known aspects of the Kurtzman legacy.  Including everything from high-school woodcuts to his 1988 cover-design for the graphic novel Kings In Design this big volume would embarrass any coffee table with its crazed and crazy riches.

Not only did Kurtzman direct the course and tenor of  social satire, he employed and/or influenced many of its greatest artists and writers. Terry Gilliam came up at Kurtzman’s side where he was first introduced to John Cleese. Both Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb credit their success to Kurtzman. Even Gloria Steinem came up through Kurtzman’s rank ranks. Successful humor enterprises from National Lampoon to The Onion all wear their Harvey Kurtzman influences proudly. Kitchen and Buhle effectively quote a host of big names to find Kurtzman’s esteemed place in culture. On their own, they seem to have some trouble defining his importance. His work, they write,  not only gave us “critical insights that shaped our view of vernacular art and its uses, but it also helped shape the world as it came our of the war in the 1940s by giving us a very different future.”  A discussion of how Kurtzman shaped the future outside of the world of graphic arts and satire is lacking.

Kurtzman’s biography isn’t full of success. He was constantly  looking for ways to make money and remain true to his individual and artistic beliefs. It’s not surprising that anyone who challenges the status quo to the extremes that he did would find tough sailing in America. Kurtzman’s death in 1993 was given short shrift by the mainstream press and might have been entirely lost on the public if not for efforts by Spiegelman and Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. His reputation was always secure among those he influenced and those who enjoyed bits of his work, even if it was consumed under bed covers by flashlight. This book goes a long way to lift the entire body of his work.–Cabbage Rabbit