Johnny Otis! Johnny Otis! Yeah Johnny! My GodFather- I roadied for many years including Monterey. Brought him the records to play on his Sunday night radio show. What a band; what a leader, Johnny stopped Jim Wynn mid solo during rehearsal “This is rock and roll, not jazz!” You hear that trademark vibes and you know it’s a JO recording. He was a longtime Watts resident when we worked together- discovered talent at the Watts Barrelhouse club that he ran. EMBCA celebrating Johnny’s Greek heritage- cool. Must give it a listen. But when Johnny talked about Afro Americans it was “us” and “we.”
It was great to encounter the piece highlighting Alvin Lucier in the blog. I first met Alvin when I interviewed for my tenure track job as an ethnomusicologist at Wesleyan University. Alvin would ask all candidates who their favorite ‘modern’ composer was, and he routinely dismissed anyone who came up with a typical university music curriculum stand-by (Stravinsky or Schoenberg, for ex.). Instead, I got into it with him, talking about my appreciation of some so-called mystics (Pärt or Taverner), conceptual artists like himself, minimalists, and then challenging the separation of art music and music theatre, rock and pop composition…
In any case, he didn’t veto me, and starting in 1990 I ended up working just down the hall from (we were separated by Anthony Braxton, another extraordinary and unique musical genius!). To my thinking, he was one of the ‘Yankee’ artists at Wesleyan – a kind of New England brand of experimentalists from the days that John Cage was there in the ‘60s. It was a music department with no “normative” music (i.e. classical!) – it was a mix of anthropologists, experimentalist composers, ethnomusicologists and performers. It was an amazing and inspiring context to be working on music in the broadest sense—studying, performing, composing music from all over the world and from any era, and for a long time Alvin was the heart a sould of the composition program.
I seldom saw Alvin smile – he had a somewhat serious, even dour, demeanor, and he couldn’t stand pretense or bs. But he had such an uncompromising vision and he imparted that to generations of students as a compositional pedagogue. And he was really quite kind, generous, and humble … gentle.
One of my favorite memories of Alvin came from a presentation he did at the weekly music colloquium. He had a close friend in the artist Sol LeWitt. LeWitt is best-known for massive murals for which he creates a “score” only to have others enact the work. LeWitt had sent a postcard from Europe featuring an Alpine landscape, which Alvin turned into a score, which then became the subject of a LeWitt painting, and back and forth they went inspiring each other, working at the fruitful intersection of visual, sonic and conceptual art. Even late in his life he was always inspired by ideas and by sound.
Johnny Otis! Johnny Otis! Yeah Johnny! My GodFather- I roadied for many years including Monterey. Brought him the records to play on his Sunday night radio show. What a band; what a leader, Johnny stopped Jim Wynn mid solo during rehearsal “This is rock and roll, not jazz!” You hear that trademark vibes and you know it’s a JO recording. He was a longtime Watts resident when we worked together- discovered talent at the Watts Barrelhouse club that he ran. EMBCA celebrating Johnny’s Greek heritage- cool. Must give it a listen. But when Johnny talked about Afro Americans it was “us” and “we.”
It was great to encounter the piece highlighting Alvin Lucier in the blog. I first met Alvin when I interviewed for my tenure track job as an ethnomusicologist at Wesleyan University. Alvin would ask all candidates who their favorite ‘modern’ composer was, and he routinely dismissed anyone who came up with a typical university music curriculum stand-by (Stravinsky or Schoenberg, for ex.). Instead, I got into it with him, talking about my appreciation of some so-called mystics (Pärt or Taverner), conceptual artists like himself, minimalists, and then challenging the separation of art music and music theatre, rock and pop composition…
In any case, he didn’t veto me, and starting in 1990 I ended up working just down the hall from (we were separated by Anthony Braxton, another extraordinary and unique musical genius!). To my thinking, he was one of the ‘Yankee’ artists at Wesleyan – a kind of New England brand of experimentalists from the days that John Cage was there in the ‘60s. It was a music department with no “normative” music (i.e. classical!) – it was a mix of anthropologists, experimentalist composers, ethnomusicologists and performers. It was an amazing and inspiring context to be working on music in the broadest sense—studying, performing, composing music from all over the world and from any era, and for a long time Alvin was the heart a sould of the composition program.
I seldom saw Alvin smile – he had a somewhat serious, even dour, demeanor, and he couldn’t stand pretense or bs. But he had such an uncompromising vision and he imparted that to generations of students as a compositional pedagogue. And he was really quite kind, generous, and humble … gentle.
One of my favorite memories of Alvin came from a presentation he did at the weekly music colloquium. He had a close friend in the artist Sol LeWitt. LeWitt is best-known for massive murals for which he creates a “score” only to have others enact the work. LeWitt had sent a postcard from Europe featuring an Alpine landscape, which Alvin turned into a score, which then became the subject of a LeWitt painting, and back and forth they went inspiring each other, working at the fruitful intersection of visual, sonic and conceptual art. Even late in his life he was always inspired by ideas and by sound.