Sometimes you get THE show ...

Sometimes not. While I enjoyed Steve Kimock Crazy Engine's session at Asheville's Orange Peel on November 12th, and the friends with whom I went, both of whom had seen Kimock in various bands before, had a good time, not everyone was ecstatic. Long-time fan David Riddle, for instance, decidedly was not:

Musically, this was probably the low point in my Kimock career. That's not to say that it was bad...because it didn't feel bad, per se, but there was pretty much no emotion whatsoever. It was as unimpressive a band performance as I've seen in a long time. There was just no energy at all. Kinda weird really...but whatever, better luck next time right?
...
... there were absolutely no IT moments. Regardless of my past shows and interest in Steve's career, the one thing that has always been a constant is some moment during the show where he takes you on a trip that melts the flesh, and has you floating in a sea of sonic bliss. This show didn't get close. That's a first for me personally...
...
The weirdest part of the night was probably whenever Steve took the mic and said, "Well...normally this is the time of the night where we say goodnight and walk offstage." They'd played 8 songs and had been on stage for roughly 75 minutes. That was a true "what the fuck" moment for everyone there. Trevor and John were standing up and looked to be thinking setbreak...then looked entirely confused. Steve then said something like, "we're just gonna play a little more and then walk off". Somehow they stretched it til maybe 10:45 and got two hours out of the set, but the whole scene after that was just weird....and I don't think that's subjectivity either...it was palpable confusion. The venue's curfew was 1am and people were just starting to wake up. We were on the street looking for something to do by 11pm.

The relative shortness of show was weird for me, too, since every Kimock show I've ever been to, aside from festival sets, has raged on for a good hour longer.

So maybe the band had an off-night. Bands do that. That's one reason that, back in the day, even I, not a tour rat, would try to catch a couple of shows when the Dead were nearby; and the Dead, during the later stages of their odyssey, made it easy to catch multiple shows by playing two and three night stands in major cities. You were almost certain to get a few IT moments, as Dave calls them, out of the run.

And the Kimock band seems to have taken things up a notch the next few shows, and got rave reviews on the Kimock list for their performances in Charlotte and Atlanta. I'll keep an eye out for them on the Live Music Archive; so far there's no recording there of the Charlotte show, and the Atlanta recording is missing the second set. Oh, well. Hopefully another will turn up.

And, for now, I'll just wait for next time.

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Photo: Steve Kimock Crazy Engine at the Orange Peel. L to R: Steve Kimock, John Morgan Kimock, Trevor Exter, Melvin Seals.

Steve Kimock: Further Adventures

Before this March, it had been over three years since Steve Kimock had hit the road to tour with his own band. Fortunately for those of us who lurk in this part of the world, he closed out the last tour of the Steve Kimock Band in 2006 with a series of gigs in North Carolina, one in Asheville, and the last, a few days later, in Carrboro, only three and a half hours east by interstate. As I mentioned in a post at the time, they were excellent shows.

Since then there have been many sit-ins and one-off gigs, jams and shows in various repeated configurations, more shows, up until the death of horn player Martin Fierro, integral to Zero's sound, with his old band Zero than any time since 1998, and lots of good playing. Very little of it, though, occurred in the context of Kimock's own material, which is, for me, where he best displays his gift for the architecture of sound.

The most interesting of his various recurrent gigs, for me at least, Grateful Dead fan that I am (or was; I have to admit that I've put their work aside for the last few years. So much music to explore, so little time), have been his performances with various former members of that band. He was an integral part of the Rhythm Devils during their tour in the summer and fall of 2006, along with Micky Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mike Gordon, and during the summer and fall of 2007 he toured with Ratdog, Bob Weir's band, filling in for Mark Karan, who was undergoing treatment for cancer. He toured again with Hart in 2008.

Hart appreciated Kimock's strengths as a player, of course; they've played together in various configurations through the years. The context of the Devils, though, with its emphasis on percussion, didn't often give him room to stretch out.

Ratdog proved a more congenial context. In fact, Kimock sometimes transformed that band's sound. Weir said that he found himself astonished five or six times every show, and if you listen to the shows, you'll hear why.

In the summer of 2008, the Mickey Hart Band included more players on strings and keys, and proved a fine context for Kimock's style of extended playing. Their July shows are still worth a listen.

Curiously, before working with these post-Dead bands, Kimock had little relation to the Dead's material. He wasn't a Deadhead; he had his own work to do. And when he helped form Zero, it wasn't to play Dead material. The Zero songbook was much less rooted in Appalachian Americana, more bluesy, and their playing, initially driven by the guitars of Kimock and Quicksilver Messenger Service veteran John Cipollina, sounded very little like the Dead's, even if both groups explored the boundaries of small band improvisation.

During Mark Karan's convalescence, Blair Jackson interviewed him and relayed this recollection at Dead.net:

Kimock's been playing the Dead material now for years, and has played with almost every band that's emerged from the Dead family, from Missing Man Formation, The Other Ones, Phil Lesh and Friends, to the current incarnations of the Rhythm Devils and Ratdog. He may not have been so well versed in the material initially; Mark Karan said awhile back that Kimock often got credit for his work when they were both in The Other Ones.

That tour with The Other Ones went down in 1998. By the next year and the 1999 incarnation of Phil Lesh and Friends, though, there's no disputing that Kimock's playing on Dead classics was magisterial and magnificent. Listen, for instance, to the version of the Dead standard "Terrapin Station" from 10/23/1999 (but give yourself plenty of time, since it's forty-five minutes long - and worth every minute. If you're too busy for the whole song, hang in through the twelve minute mark for an extra-tasty ensemble transition ). The jamming is sharp and tight, and offers a richer development of the song's motifs, especially the later, Terrapin-proper, ones, than any other version I know - including, even, any ever played by the Dead. Paul Barrere (of Little Feat) plays wonderful counterpoint to Kimock's "anti-gravity guitar"- that's Phil's description - and Bill Payne (also of Little Feat) complements the guitars with powerful and tasteful playing on keys.

Still, the material in which Steve Kimock is most at home is his own, and the tour with his new band, Crazy Engine, featuring Melvin Seals on keys, Trevor Exter on bass and vocals, and John Morgan Kimock (Steve's son) on drums, gives those of us who are his fans new cause to rejoice as we prepare for transport on the waves of sound Kimock generates with his guitar.


Steve Kimock and Crazy Engine play the Orange Peel Thursday, November 12. Doors at 8:00, show at 9:00 PM. Tickets are $15 in advance, $17 at the door.

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The video features a Crazy Engine version of Kimock's composition "A New Africa" from July 25.

Another birthday for guitarist Steve Kimock

This clip has Kimock joining old friend Billy Goodman at The Concert Hall in New York, NY, on September 27, on Goodman's "Best Friend."

Happy Birthday, Steve.

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Thanks to Kimock lister (and much more) Charlie Miller for the link.

Steve Kimock: Further Adventures

Steve Kimock is back on the road with a new band - it's one, though, that includes some folks he's played with many times in the past, like Melvin Seals (keys, especially his trademark B-3), Billy Goodman (guitar and vocals), and his son, John Morgan Kimock, who's become a fine drummer. Susan J. Weiand has some nice photos, including the one above, up at Jambase. Like they say, check 'em out.

Here's his last great band playing "Tongue N' Groove", from the 2005 CD Eudemonic, which she likewise shares:

Some Steve Kimock

(Experimenting with Playlists, still looking for a way to get audio files onto Blogger)

Enjoy!

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Update: Sorry about the autostart "feature"; I'm looking through the Playlist FAQ in search of a way to disable it in Blogger. So far no luck, and there's no apparent switch in the HTML code.

Further update: Fixed; it's a switch in the code generator over at the Playlist site. Not sure that this app will resolve the issue I thought it might, though - at least until I upload the audio files I'd like to offer to another Internet host, so the Playlist search engine can find them; users can't directly upload audio to Playlist.

Mr. Kimock at work ...

This is actually from long ago 1998, when Kimock (that's Steve Kimock) was playing in Kimock-Vega-Hertz-White, or KVHW (and sometimes KVHHW, if Terry Haggerty was sitting in). The song is "Tangled Hangers", and the video seems to capture most of the initial improvisational section. Keep your eyes peeled, and around three minutes twenty seconds in, you'll see SK demonstrate what it means to play while not-thinking. Tasty.

The Return of Zero

There's a nice review of the recent three-night Zero "Chance in a Million" reunion in Denver at Jambase. It was written by Andy Dorfmann, long-time member of the Zero and Kimock list servers, who coincidentally first heard Zero in 1997, the same year I did; it sounds like Andy enjoyed the shows!

The Steve Kimock Band show in Asheville was, to my ears, outstanding - and the consensus pick on the list for best show of the southeast tour. It also sold out, a first for the band in Asheville; more than five hundred fifty people packed the Grey Eagle. I drove down to the flatlands for the show in Chapel Hill (or Carrboro) on Sunday night, and really enjoyed it as well. It featured some songs relatively new to SKB, "Vernal Equinox", a song by bass player Reed Mathis (he's performed it with Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey since 2001), and "Adelita", a Robert Walter tune introduced in December. It's named, according to Charlie Miller, the band's recording engineer, for "a whore house in Tijuana". The show has now been released by the band as a free download.

I've posted some photos of the SKB shows at Flickr, and also shots of the Zero show in 1997 that introduced me to Kimock's playing, the KVHW show I caught in Athens in December, 1999, and an early SKB show in Winston-Salem in October, 2001.

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The photo of Zero features an earlier incarnation of the band, with Bobby Vega on bass and Chip Roland on keys. It was used by the venue to publicize the recent Zero reunion shows.
Original content © 2006.

More Tangled Hangers

Andy Boyd provided a link to the Zero set at the Black Mountain Music Festival where I first caught Steve Kimock in the comments to my post on Steve Kimock: it's here.

And, he adds it was a "very fine Tangled Hangers indeed..."

Update: I've fixed the link; for some reason, Andy's brought up a "no such show" error for me. If you'd just like to download that "Tangled Hangers" (in the lossless flac format; others are available), the link for it is here.

It seems I wasn't the only one particularly moved by this Zero performance. Sawbuck, in the reviews of the show at Archive.org, says this:

My first live Zero show ... Steve's tone blew us all away! Tangled hangers was everything we had hoped for. Yes , It's true, Just like the dead it was everything we had heard on tapes (remember those) and more, it was the real deal. Tears rolled down my face.

Steve Kimock: Life Beyond Zero

As a poet, I know I engage the world through language, much as a sculptor might engage it in terms of mass and form, but I've always had an ear for music. There were no musicians in my family as I was growing up, though my father had been a singer in men's choral groups in his youth, and clearly loved music; he would unwind when he came home from the office by listening to records in the living room, leaning back on the couch, his eyes closed. My sister and I both had our obligatory music lessons (I still have my clarinet stuck away in a closet somewhere), but music didn't stick for me as a way I could articulate my take on the world, my sense of it.

Still, one of the dimensions of poetry is, in fact, its music, the sound of the poem. Melopoeia, Ezra Pound called it, borrowing from the Greek, "wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning." Basil Bunting, the great Northumbrian poet who died in 1985, said it this way in a conversation with Jonathan Williams in 1976: "I believe that the fundamental thing in poetry is the sound, so that, whatever the meaning may be, whatever your ultimate intention in that direction might be, if you haven't got the sound right, it isn't a poem. And if you have got it right, it'll get across, even to people who don't understand it." Perhaps it's that dimension of my own approach to the world that's given me an open ear, and a deeper than usual commitment to making music of almost all kinds a real part of my life.

And, then, perhaps it also was the entheogens (more familiar still as “psychedelics”), those sometimes harrowing keys to the doors of perception. Certainly they opened my ears anew in the late sixties and early seventies, and let me hear dimensions of music I'd not appreciated before – the spiritual, sacramental quest that can sometimes happen when musicians are listening deeply to one another, finding a common voyage. I've heard this it, this groove, in the performance of classical music – a really good string quartet, say, can certainly find it – but have found it more often in musical idioms that are more improvisational, like jazz and, well, "electric music for the mind and body", as Country Joe McDonald used to call it, good old rock-and-roll. When improvisational musicians take their voyage, they take us with them; aware of their roles as navigators, they set out to discover new territory in their playing, and bring themselves and us all somehow back to port, transformed by the adventure.

It was their commitment to such musical discovery that made me a fan of the Grateful Dead in the early 1970s. It's cool these days, of course, to disparage the Dead, their music, and particularly their "scene", and, in truth, as their audience grew from a few thousand to a few million, as guitarist Jerry Garcia fell more and more into the power of his own druggish devils, there were excesses, and there were losses. But whatever might be said about the later history of the band (on a good night, they were, to my ears, still very, very good, right till the end – but there were fewer good nights), the first fifteen years or so of their run produced some amazing shows, concerts after which you knew for a certainty that something indefinable had changed in your understanding of the world, and of yourself as you stood in it – in, perhaps, the very balance of the Cosmos – and it had changed, against all odds, for the better.

When I set out to the Black Mountain Music Festival in the fall of 1997, it'd been over two years since Jerry Garcia had died in his sleep, and I'd become reconciled to the likelihood that his death had meant the end of my experience of music as a soul-making venture. Phish, as good as I could hear they were, didn't have it for me. The jazz greats who were still living, still doing vital work, didn't come to Appalachia very often, and that's where I lived. I was fifty-two, had been married, was then separated, a father twice over, and had long ago given up tripping at concerts I was able to attend. The festival that fall featured Bruce Hornsby, Peter Rowan and Tony Rice, and I enjoyed their various approaches to music; Bruce, after all, had played keys with the Dead during one of their good late periods. So, as I sat on my tarp on the wet ground beneath the cloudy October sky waiting for the scheduled performance by Rowan and Rice, I was expecting a show I'd enjoy. The intermittent rain had thrown things off schedule at the outdoor stage, though, and finally someone with the festival came on to say that Rowan and Rice would be performing on the stage in the gym instead, and another group, Zero, would be up soon on the outdoor stage. Zero? I'd never heard of them. Hmm. Oh, well. I gathered my backpack and tarp, bade goodbye to the folks in near proximity with whom I'd been passing the time, and proceeded down past the stage toward the gym. As I neared the stage, though, a woman whom I knew from the food co-op, a recently found friend, greeted me. She asked where I was headed, and I explained that I was off to the gym to hear Rowan and Rice, thinking that she'd perhaps missed the announcement. But she hadn't.

"You don't want to do that," she said.

"I don't?"

"No, you really want to stay here. You want to hear Zero." There's was something about the way she said it that led me to put my gear down over by the speaker tower and wait for them to come on. She'd heard them in Colorado, where she'd lived for a decade before coming to Asheville, and thought they were a special band. I knew she was a member of some standing in the great anonymous association of entheogenic voyagers, a true head, so I decided to see what might happen here as the band set up and plugged in.

And then they started playing. The opening number, an instrumental, positively lifted the top of my skull, and within a minute I was down at the front of the stage dancing, tears flowing down my cheeks. A month or two later I learned that they’d opened with "Tangled Hangers", one of their signature songs, written by their guitarist. That was my introduction to the music of Steve Kimock.

That was Zero's one foray into the southeast, so I never heard them again. I signed up for their listserv, though, and soon was collecting tapes of Zero shows, and dubbing them for others. The band continued to evolve – mostly, it seemed to me, because Kimock was becoming more and more adventurous as a player. By the spring of 1998, he and Bobby Vega, Zero's bass player, had formed a side-project with drummer Alan Hertz and Frank Zappa veteran guitarist Ray White: Kimock Vega Hertz and White, or KVHW. Over the next two years, through the end of 1999, KVHW played more gigs, and Zero played fewer and fewer; by the end of 1999, Zero was effectively history. Unfortunately (or not) so was KVHW. White, who had been somewhat erratic – late for some gigs, absent from others – through the run of the band, didn't show for a scheduled performance, and his band mates decided they'd had enough. After a month off, Kimock was on the road again, once more with Vega, later with Vega and Hertz, but this time the band was unmistakably his; it was the Steve Kimock Band. And, no matter the changes in personnel along the way, it's been so since. Since that first show on February 11, 2000, at the Wetlands in New York City, the band has played nearly 400 show (Setlist.com lists 397 as of yesterday, the end of November), including three in Asheville. They'll be back again, at the Grey Eagle, on Thursday, January 19th, 2006, doors at 8:00 PM.

Joining Steve this time will be the extraordinary drummer Rodney Holmes, Steve's principal collaborator since November of 2000; Reed Mathis on bass; and Robert Walter on keyboards. Rodney’s played with a host of other great lights in rock and jazz, including Santana (he played on Santana's huge radio hit "Smooth"), Wayne Shorter, Larry and Julian Coryell, and Joe Zawinul. Mathis also plays with the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. Robert Walter, of New Orleans, sometimes leads his own bands; the best known is probably Robert Walter’s 20th Congress. I've not seen this lineup, but I've listened closely to several shows (SKB shows taped from the stage are available at digitalsoundboard.net, and audience recordings of many shows are available for free at the amazing Internet Archive (www.archive.org ), and these guys have a wonderful warmth and play with a freedom of interactive imagination that can only rise from being absolutely dug in to what they’re doing.

What is it about Kimock's work that grabbed my head on that cloudy day eight years ago? He's recognized as a master of tone, and plays extremely clean, richly contoured lines. He’s a master of the lyrical phrase, has a phenomenal sense of time (which he loves to warp in ways large and small), and never seems to lose the structure of his work, no matter how discursive and exploratory the jam. It’s difficult to speak about the emotional content of music – two different listeners hear two different shows, and what either hears may have little to do with what’s on the musician’s mind – but Kimock is Zen-like in his attention to getting himself, his head, out of his way. He’s not standing up there thinking about the next note he’s going to play, he’s not-thinking about it, and playing from somewhere else. Of the uniquely powerful and moving structures of sound he builds, a phrase of an old friend of Steve’s, Doug Greene, now passed on, perhaps said it best: his playing gives you both the wound and the balm, its cure.

In a recent interview with Randy Ray at Jambase.com, when Randy proposed a relationship between Steve’s “method” and Zen, Steve said this about his approach to playing:

There's certainly an attitude of some of that which I try, paradoxically, to keep in mind. How best to explain that? Here's the easy way to look at it - for me, when I think the thing is working, when I think people are actually feeling the music, you know, when you're really getting it for a minute, you're not in any kind of dualistic space. You're not thinking, 'Well, I'm here and my feet hurt' or 'I'm doing this and she's doing that. These people are doing this and I wish I was doing this.' You're not in your mind at all. There's no time in it or this, that, or the other thing - it's just a totality.

Anytime you're thinking [you’re in dualistic space]. Anytime you're thinking at all. [When you’re playing] it is not a mental place - it's an entirely feeling place. It is not a place where your mental activities are keeping events discrete. There's no sense of I'm trying to do this or I'm succeeding at doing this or I'm feeling good about myself because I'm doing this.' That is automatically not where it's at. I take every opportunity to steer myself away from those states of mind, so that when I get to a place where maybe I can play, I'm playing from the same kind of place where somebody who is being receptive to music may also be feeling it too. You know what I mean? Instead of being from some ego point of view or a point of view of trying to accomplish something."

RR: Within your own framework, are you trying to gather musicians that think that way? Musicians that don't get in the way of that open space?

I don't know if it's possible to do that, or if it's entirely necessary. I think it's more important to understand how you feel music as a listener, without trying to engage yourself in it in an intellectual way or trying to define what's happening. I think when you're really enjoying something, you're really enjoying something. If you're feeling it, you're feeling it, so I try to leave it there as much as possible."

If you like jazz-inflected small band improvisation, you might want to check his show out. Who knows, you might find your own head lifted. If the creeks don't rise and the sky don't fall, I'll see you there. Whatever they play, I won't have heard it like that before; listening will be like discovering a new book by a favorite poet.


Note: The quote from Pound is from his “How To Read”, included in the Literary Essays of 1954, and the Bunting quote is from a conversation published in St. Andrew’s Review, Spring-Summer 1977, as “A Conversation With Basil Bunting”. Steve’s full interview is here.

Naropa Archives - and Much More

I've added several links to the page, and want to mention two of them in particular: one is to Jacket magazine, a great resource for poetry, including the New American Poetry, which, as I mentioned in the previous post, is published from Australia, and the other is to the Naropa Archive at Archive.org.

The Naropa archive contains audio of decades of readings and lectures from Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and the material is truly rich and diverse. From Allen Ginsberg to Michael Palmer, Eleni Sikelianos to Carl Rakosi, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche to William Burroughs - even reading together - it's all there. While I've heard many of the poets included in person over the years (and even recorded them; more about that another day), I've enjoyed being able to check out some of my favorite poets, given the time-depth of the site, at very different stages in their work. There are some twenty recordings of Robert Creeley, for instance, from 1984 to 1999, and in them he addresssd issues as various as language poetry and eco-poetics, Aristotle on poetics and Robert Frost, among a host of other concerns, as his own thinking about the world evolved over the course of that fifteen years.

The parent site, Archive.org, is truly, literally, a-mazing. It's home to the Wayback machine, for instance, which allows you to visit a given web site as it existed in, say, 1997; I've used it to recover material that clients couldn't remember they'd ever had. It's home, too, of the Live Music Archive, an online source of free concert downloads from several hundred musical groups (27,399 concerts as of today). I first started frequenting the site to download recordings of Steve Kimock, a favorite guitarist (I'm listening to a great stage recording of a show from August 10, 2002, in fact, as I write), and have been back hundreds of times since. If you haven't explored it yet, do check it out; it's really the Internet at its best.