Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton/Nils Petter Molvaer

Allen:  More quickly than the subject deserves, I think that the best of Mock Tudor and Mirror Blue can be found either on Action Packed, the Capitol years BO or Live from Austin, Texas. A lot of Old Kit Bag is worthwhile, especially "A Love You Can't Survive", "One Door Opens", "Destiny", "Sight Unseen", "Outside of the Inside", "Happy Days and Auld Lang Syne" and maybe "Pearly Jim". Not much of Front Parlour Ballads though.

He has been in Portland, Seattle and then Eugene from Monday through Friday of this week, but we are going to miss it all so that we can be ready for and then manage a moving project on Saturday.   They will be the first of his shows locally we've missed in quite some time I think.

Cam, have you ever heard the four disc box set of Fairport at the BBC?

[Fairport] were really on fire, in their comparatively quiet way.  

In honor of International Heavy Metal Day (11/11/11), I’ve decided to count down my 10 favorite HM albums. This is highly subjective, both in terms of what I like and what constitutes metal. I’ve stayed away from Teena Marie-isms (Mr. Eddy), although I thought about including Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods. Every one of these titles is probably instantly recognizable to folks around here: I’ve never had much success in deviating off the mainstream for my metal fix. Nor is much of this recent vintage in spite of some effort on my part to find a fresh metal stream to swim in. Enlighten me: It wouldn’t be a decent list if there wasn’t room to squabble.

10. Peter Brotzmann: Machine Gun

9. The Stooges: Fun House

It’s always a challenge to determine how far to go back in a genre exercise. But it does seem to me that there is something about free jazz that served as a spark for what became heavy metal even if its sonic maelstrom was largely expunged from the metal juggernaut going forward—it was a spark that, once the fuse was lit, wasn’t needed for the explosion that followed. At some level bands like the Stooges and the MC5 and early Blue Oyster Cult used distortion and trebly guitar notes to approximate the evanescent epiphany that the best late 60s avant jazz could muster. To me, these two albums are yin and yang, one turning free jazz into proto metal and the other using blotches of quasi-structured atonality to create rock that was not merely heavy. The one element that neither of these records touch, but that becomes a required spice in a lot of heavy metal from late 70s onward, is the progginess of Devotion and Red, both of which just miss my metal top 10.

You mean same problem or same tone?

Jazz is America's classical music" - pure marketing

but what if (as is the case) I didn't vote but my favorite won?  Can I cheer?

On one of NPR's round table things a few years ago, the group was asked their favorite Thompson record.  Bob replied: Pour Down Like Silver.  Which was kind of flip, but I think evident of how much that album seems to have "improved" over the years (personally, it took me a while to get into it, compared to the more "canonical" albums). 

Too bad about the NPR group -- Xgau's piss and vinegar is much missed from those things.  I loved when he nay-sayed Nick Drake in one episode, to the horror and dismay of the others.   I like those programs, but they can be so predictable taste-wise sometimes.