Different Kind of Jewel: J Mascis was made to love from afar.

Why I Didn’t Talk to J

A faraway love song to J Mascis

By Sara Bir

If things had played out differently, you’d be reading a Jewel interview in this space right now. That’s right, we turned down an interview with Jewel–you know, Jewel, who sang that one song about being sad and wearing pajamas. Um . . . “You Were Meant for Me”? Yeah.

Instead, you get a complete lack of an interview with J Mascis, late of the highly influential proto-grunge band Dinosaur Jr., currently ringleader of J Mascis and the Fog and occasionally busting out a solo thingy every now and then.

J, whose long, flowing “Cousin It” locks have turned a shade or two grayer since Dinosaur Jr.’s late-’80s-early-’90s heyday, is famously laconic in interviews. It’s almost as if he reserves his expressiveness for his soaring guitar solos, which tread a blissfully fine line between easygoing and vengefully shredding.

Interviewing Jewel would be comparatively easy. I saw her on David Letterman once, and she seemed pretty nice. The problem is that no one I talked to cared. At a recent party, I tried to impress everyone with my big-time rock-journalist connections. “Say,” I slyly dropped, “I might be interviewing Jewel.”

The invariable response was, “Why?”

Someone, though, has to be a fan of VH1’s Alaskan queen of Lilith Fair Lite: tickets for her solo acoustic show at the Luther Burbank Center run $65 to $125 a pop. To those people, the chance to interview Jewel might be a big honking deal.

Which is exactly how I feel about interviewing J Mascis, who appears June 7 at the Mystic Theatre. Except that I’m not doing that, either.

The guy was made to love from afar. His typical noncommittal response in most printed interviews runs something like, “I’m not sure, whatever riffs come out” or “I just kind of play guitar and wait for something to come.” He seems like a much cooler person to run into in the airport, in which case I could try and impress a whole bunch of people at another party by saying, “I saw J Mascis the other day!”

And they’d say, “Who?”

No matter. Enough people know J Mascis is God that a number of websites trade bootlegs of his live shows and keep track of the set lists–and it’s not all because they are unequivocally devoted to J’s back catalogue of Dinosaur Jr. nuggets.

Formed in Amherst, Mass., in the early ’80s from the disparate ends of quasi hardcore band Deep Wound, Dinosaur (the Jr. came later) originally featured J and Lou Barlow. Eventually, the bad mojo between the two prompted Barlow’s departure in 1989, Barlow pouring the resulting resentment into all of those tasty manic-depressive songs that came with his successive band, Sebadoh.

Driven by J’s nasal, affably indifferent vocals and free-flowing indie-jam guitar solos, Dinosaur Jr. released a string of albums throughout the ’90s and left a mighty wake in the alternative-rock underground. There’s a terrific bit in Dave Markey’s documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke where a zillion Europeans sing along in complete rapture to the slacker love anthem “Freak Scene,” as Dinosaur Jr. plays one of those massive outdoor festivals. It’s a rare snippet of a transcendent rock moment, the kind that every rabid fan seeks in every live show of every band she adores.

And that is why I never, ever want to speak to J Mascis in a journalistic context. I want to love him for his gross long hair and slovenly T-shirts and big, weird sneakers and all of the rumors that he dated Uma Thurman (not true!) and the chance of experiencing my own sliver of rock transcendence.

The dude is still at it, plugging away at live shows and assorted affiliations, jamming with members of the Stooges, skydiving, playing the drummer of a band in filmmaker Allison Anders’ current project, smoking pot with pal Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine. J’s albums since 2000 haven’t presented us with anything too new, but maybe that’s not the point. He’s here, which is enough.

And I bet that’s how Jewel’s fans feel, too.

J Mascis and the Fog play the Mystic Theatre on Monday, June 7, at 8pm. All Night Radio open. 23 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. $15. 707.765.2121.

From the June 2-8, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Bel Canto: Saxophonist Charles Lloyd says that he and colleague Billy Higgins ‘were deeply in service’ to art.

Billie’s Bounce

Jazz great Charles Lloyd pays tribute to a friend

By Greg Cahill

Ask jazz saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd to comment on the creativity that has driven his music for five decades, and he’ll offer a response that’s both enigmatic and profound. “I’m a musician by nature. Show-biz heaven is never what called me,” he says. “The music has always moved me and I feel blessed to have a song to sing. This world, as you know, is a dog’s curly tail, and [longtime friend and drummer Billy] Higgins and I were deeply in service.

“It’s the last night of the play–whether they boo or applaud, the song must be sung.”

The depth of that commitment can be heard on Which Way Is East, a new double-CD that captures Lloyd and Higgins just 12 weeks before the drummer’s untimely death three years ago from liver failure. Lloyd will pay tribute to his late friend at the upcoming sixth annual Healdsburg Jazz Festival (Higgins was a frequent guest at the North Bay event during its formative years).

One listen to Which Way Is East–which features Lloyd’s fluid sax and flute lines with Higgins’ performances on trap drums, berimbau and even acoustic guitar–is enough to underscore the special relationship between these two jazz greats.

Lloyd recalls, “Billy and I met when I was 18 and he was 19. We were friends and played gigs together in L.A., and then he left to go to New York with Ornette [Coleman]. I went later, in 1961. We would see each other in New York, but we didn’t play together again until 1993. It was instantly clear that we had both been through a lot, we had both cleaned up [from substance abuse] and we still loved to make music more than anything. From then on, our friendship and relationship on the bandstand became tighter and tighter.”

Higgins dazzled fans and colleagues alike with his extraordinary talent and his youthful exuberance. “His spirit was so undiluted,” Lloyd explains. “He was the music, no matter who he played with. As jazz critic Stanley Crouch so aptly put it, ‘Billy gives you a tailor-made suit no matter what.’ He had the ability to make anyone sound great. More specifically, his swing was out of this world, his subtlety and nuance, his élan. Billy always said that he and I had an inside thing, which lent itself to open explorations.”

For the final sessions, Lloyd set up borrowed recording equipment in the living room of his house and dusted off the same sax he’d been playing when the two first met as teens. “The music flowed like a river to the sea.”

In the decades between those meetings, Lloyd established himself as an innovator who helped usher in the world-music movement. During the 1960s, he worked as a sideman with the Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley bands. In 1966, Lloyd made his debut as a leader, releasing Forest Flower and performing (and recording) a breakthrough set at the Monterey Jazz Festival in a band that featured a then-unknown piano whiz named Keith Jarrett.

“We were young and fearless,” Lloyd remembers. “It was a different time–the world at large was really open to new experiences. There was a lot of cross-pollination on radio, and that year we performed at Monterey. Things were in a rapid upward trajectory. We were just playing and loving every moment of it.”

Lloyd’s fame grew and he went on to open eclectic bills for Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and other acts of the psychedelic-rock era. But Lloyd startled fans by retreating from the music scene for most of the ’70s. He was sidelined with illness, spent time at the Big Sur artists’ retreat studying Eastern religions and reemerged in 1996 with the critically acclaimed album Canto, followed in 1998 by the Higgins collaboration The Water Is Wide.

But accolades meant little. “I’m always looking for my voice as an artist, and still finding it,” he says of his ongoing quest. “My voice has always been there, but as the interior work intensifies and deepens, you can hear it in my tone and expression.”

These days, Higgins is still on his mind, even as Lloyd stretches out into new musical terrain. “For me, because we were so close and so in tune with each other,” he says, “playing with Billy was effortless. It was flight. But I am now opening a new chapter, being able to make music with [former Marin percussionist] Zakir Hussain, which is an incredible experience. He comes from a tradition of tabla playing that goes back centuries. His father, Ustad Alla Rakha, was one of the baddest cats on the planet, and so is Zakir. Playing tabla and dancing with rhythm is in his DNA. But on top of that, he can swing in the most musical and effortless way.

“So he and Higgins have that in common–and the letter h.”

Charles Lloyd and percussionist Zakir Hussain perform a tribute to Billy Higgins on Saturday, June 12, at the Raven Theater as part of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. 115 North St., Healdsburg. 8pm. $28-$45. The Healdsburg Jazz Festival runs Saturday, June 5, through Sunday, June 13. Other featured performers include the Geri Allen Trio and Fred Hersch (June 11); the John Heard Trio (June 11-12); the Carmen Lundy Quartet (June 12); and the Roy Haynes Group with Kenny Garrett and Frank Morgan Quartet (June 13). For complete details on all events, call 707.433.4644 or go to www.healdsburgjazzfestival.com.

From the June 2-8, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Buy one of the following Los Lobos CDs from amazon.com:

‘Del Este de Los Angeles (Just Another Band from East L.A.)’ (1978)

‘How Will the Wolf Survive?’ (1984)

‘By the Light of the Moon’ (1987)

‘La Pistola y El Corazon’ (1988)

‘The Neighborhood’ (1990)

‘Kiko’ (1992)

‘Just Another Band from East L.A.: A Collection’ (1993)

‘Papa’s Dream’ (1995)

‘Desperado: The Soundtrack’ (1995)

‘Colossal Head’ (1996)

‘This Time’ (1999)

‘El Cancionero: Mas y Mas’ (2000)

‘Good Morning Aztlán’ (2002)

‘The Ride’ (2004)

Born To ‘Ride’: Los Lobos return to what they do best.

Wolf at the Door

Los Lobos stage a strong return to form

By Greg Cahill

A cold, wind-whipped rain made for lousy driving that stormy Tuesday night as I cruised to Uncle Charlie’s, a popular but now defunct nightclub tucked into a nondescript Corte Madera strip mall. A few minutes earlier I had been high and dry, sequestered comfortably on the couch in the living room of my Fairfax apartment. The phone call from the manager at Uncle Charlie’s roused me from my pipe dreams.

“You gotta get down here tonight to catch these guys,” she enthused. “The band’s name is Los Lobos. They’re from East L.A., and believe me, they’re gonna be big some day.”

As it turned out, I was one of only two dozen people who saw Los Lobos that night at their North Bay debut 20 years ago. During a preshow interview in the tiny dressing room, guitarist and singer David Hidalgo passed a silver flask of whiskey that he kept tucked into his vest pocket. After a blistering set, the band lived up to the club manager’s promise.

Los Lobos went on to be big, indeed, garnering Grammys and gold records and a reputation as one of the tightest live acts in the industry.

Over the years, I’ve caught Los Lobos on numerous occasions and count many of those concerts as among the best I’ve ever seen, but I have to confess to walking out on their show at the Mystic Theatre last year. That night the band were sloppy, excessively loud and prone to longwinded instrumental jams, never their strong suit.

So it’s satisfying to discover that Los Lobos have reined in their excesses on the newly released album The Ride, arguably the band’s strongest recording in a decade. The Ride features an all-star cast of guest artists–including Dave Alvin, Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Café Tacuba, Bobby Womack, Garth Hudson and Ruben Blades–playing on a handful of new original songs and reinvented favorites.

The band members produced this follow-up to 2002’s acclaimed Good Morning Aztlán, cloaking these songs in a richly textured array of musical styles, from ’50s-style rock and roll, funk and an ethereal Beatlesque production to jazz, salsa and rock en español.

But despite the eclectic approach, these recordings bond remarkably well under the influence of Los Lobos’ patented norteño-inflected border rock. The songs run the gamut from the opening “La Venganza de los Pelados,” a rock en español number that features the Mexican hipsters Café Tacuba, to the swampy New Orleans-style hoodoo of “Charmed”; from Tom Waits’ sassy Latin-soul duet with Quetzal singer and percussionist Martha Gonzales to Elvis Costello’s piano-ballad treatment of the plaintive “A Matter of Time,” first recorded on Los Lobos’ 1984 breakthrough album How Will the Wolf Survive? On the wistful “Somewhere in Time,” on which Dave Alvin croons in his deep baritone, there is a sense that Los Lobos have dug deep to regain the soulfulness that first infused the Latin-flavored roots music that made them one of the top rock acts of the ’80s and early ’90s.

On the remake of “Is This All There Is?” the band finally get to pay homage to one of their spiritual predecessors, as vocalist Little Willie G., of the seminal East L.A. Latin-rock band the Thee Midnighters, lends his woefully underrated brown-eyed soul to this song from the 1987 album By the Light of the Moon.

For a band that once reinvented itself through bold experimentation to now revitalize itself by staging such a stunning return to form should stand this year as one of pop music’s most impressive achievements.

Los Lobos return Friday, May 28, to the Mystic Theatre, 21 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. 8pm. $32. Jeffrey Halford and the Healers open the show. 707.765.2121.

Spin Du Jour

Jerry Garcia, All Good Things: The Jerry Garcia Studio Sessions (Rhino)

Jerry Garcia’s solo albums never generated as much heat as the Grateful Dead’s recorded oeuvre, and there’s little chance that this meticulously packaged six-CD box set will win any new listeners. But diehard fans won’t be disappointed by the ample bonus tracks (though those aren’t always revelatory) that augment Garcia’s five solo works, or the sixth disc of previously unreleased tracks, or the gorgeously crafted 130-page booklet, chock-full of photos, essays and discography.

As with the recent Dead reissues, these discs are digitally remastered and presented in high-definition sound. While Garcia’s solo work was wildly uneven, casual fans may want to look for individual volumes to hit the stores later this year–the guitarist’s 1972’s self-titled solo debut, which featured “Sugaree” and “The Wheel” is a must-have, since it serves as a mate to Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, perhaps the Dead’s best works.

–G.C.

From the May 26-June 1, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Strange Soundfellows: Bela Fleck’s banjo and Edgar Meyer’s bass sound better together than perhaps they should.

String Theory

Fleck and Meyer are two of a kind

By Bruce Robinson

Banjo and string bass are not your usual lead instruments, but in the virtuosic hands of Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer, they shed their lowly status to become vehicles of astonishing musical fusion. In their newly released Music for Two (Sony Classical), the duo cover material from Bach to Miles, touching musical reference points that range even further afield while maintaining a sweet, improbable coherence.

Consider the opening track, titled, with characteristic Fleckian whimsy, “Bug Tussle.” It starts with a bright, lively melody, briskly plucked with pizzicato bass counterpoint, then it quickly shifts into a new melodic line, this time lyric and legato with bowed underpinnings. And back again. Then, as the melodies begin to merge, the playing styles intertwine, everything melds into a completely natural cadence, and it’s over. A burst of applause confirms that it was all done live, and then they’re off on a Bach invention. And so on.

Although Fleck and Meyer have occasionally made music together over the past 20 years (including their shared membership in the progressive bluegrass band Strength in Numbers in the late 1980s), this is their first pure duet recording. But both men have a history of pushing the limits of their instruments far beyond traditional roles. Fleck’s jazzy explorations with the Flecktones earned him a higher profile with popular-music fans, who have come to embrace that ensemble as an unconventional jam band.

“I think our music has a little bit too much structure to really legitimately be called ‘jam band’ music,” Fleck told interviewer Daniel Taylor, “because there are a lot of jazz elements to it and bluegrass elements, and just a lot of structure. But there’s a lot of improvisation, too, which is where we do fit.”

Meyer, on the other hand, approaches their collaboration from a deep background in classical music that began with bass lessons at age five. The only bassist ever to win the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, Meyer was lauded by The New Yorker magazine as “the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument.”

Meyer has been a featured soloist with many major orchestras, and performed his own Double Concerto for Double Bass and Cello with Jeffrey Kahane and the Santa Rosa Symphony back in January 1999. At the same time, he has done session work for such disparate pop artists as Garth Brooks, Bruce Cockburn, Lyle Lovett and the Chieftains. He even earned a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2002.

While Fleck honed his improvisational chops, Meyer flexed his compositional skills in projects blending classical and traditional styles and players, such as the Grammy-winning Appalachian Journey disc, on which he played with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and fiddler Mark O’Connor. He also toured extensively in a trio with Fleck and mandolinist Mike Marshall in the late 1990s.

Fleck was among the featured players on Meyer’s 1997 recording project Uncommon Ritual, and the two reversed roles for Fleck’s classical crossover disc Perpetual Motion in 2001. The notion of paring things down to a bass-banjo duo grew out of those sessions, and the two set out on tour together. That worked, so they did it again, adding new compositions to augment the classical repertoire they had adapted, ultimately recording the performances that make up the new disc.

It’s an impressive showcase, including classical improvisation (Meyer’s “Canon”), crystalline readings of Bach keyboard works transcribed for their instruments, a few unorthodox moments where Meyer’s agile bass takes the melodic lead and a furious, breakneck showdown on their joint composition “Woolly Mammoth.” (While his occasional moves to the piano provide some welcome tonal variety, Meyer’s keyboard work invokes too much George Winston and not enough Schumann.) Fleck also plays a little guitar, just for a change, here and there.

Throughout, the compatibility of their two primary instruments is uncanny. As they comment in the liner notes, “Both instruments overlap in register considerably, while retaining a large register that is their own. Both instruments have idiomatic methods of accompanying and of carrying the melody. Both instruments have played notable roles in 20th-century American music, the five-string banjo in bluegrass and the bass in jazz. But most of all, they just sound good together.”

Local listeners will be able to judge that for themselves, when Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer perform together at the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma on June 1, capping a series of three Bay Area concert dates on their current tour.

Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer appear Tuesday, June 1, at 8pm at the Mystic Theatre, 21 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. $32.50. 707.765.2121.

From the May 26-June 1, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.