THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”― Thomas Wolfe,
Every once in a while there are artists who give a new voice to their instrument…provide the energy, acumen, and artistry to take a sound maker we all know well and make it sound as if it was created specifically for that person to make that sound. The guitar has had its share of innovators over the years: Jimi Hendrix, Rev. Gary Davis, Ronald Jones, Elizabeth Cotton, Keiji Haino, Wes Montgomery. There have been a lot of them sprinkled throughout recorded time. And last night I saw another.
Thanks to my friend Parker Gibbs, I was given last minute tickets to see Niger artist Mdou Moctar at the Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma. My friend Todd Krieger went with me, who had seen him at Jazz Fest a while back and who was in love with his music and his story.
Mdou Moctar comes from a somewhat recent tradition of dessert rock and roll….from a similar landscape that birthed the great Tinariwen (from Mali). Esquire did a fantastic expose on him already, so I won’t belabor his backstory…but there are a few key aspects that blow my mind. He started playing on homemade instruments, he gained fame from the trading of sim cards with his music on it, and he became such a sensation in his homeland, that he starred in his own biopic that was an homage to Prince’s Purple Rain called “Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red In It” (I guess there is no word for Purple in his language).
But for me, the greatest thing about Moctar is his guitar style, based on the regional Tuareg style but mixed with Hendrix….Sabbath…deep deep electric blues (with some Hill Country there too)…all while playing left-handed. He took the stage last night in dessert garb with his band behind him (bass, drums, and second guitar) and jumped into a circular hallucinatory riff straight from Niger only to pivot mid-song into a chorus that was pure Hendrix at Monterey…all with a sweet sweet smile on his face, watching the crowd watch him with the most modest swagger of any guitar god I have ever seen.
And thus the set began, and grew and intensified with every song, each with a funky/krautrowky beat provided by a drummer whose arms blurred when erupting a groove that I have not felt since “the time before” (seriously, the drummer was a sensation)…he and the bassist just locked in, giving Moctar the ability to ride atop with his signature style. Each song was a plot, and while I could not understand the words sung, I totally felt the celebration and surprise that Moctar brought to his music. He would go from gliding across the stage with, one hand creating she shapes of his sounds while the other danced in the air, sometimes encouraging the audience to join him in ecstasy…to being hypnotized by his own repetitive melodies which gained momentum as the song went on.
And for the final number, he walked into the audience….right in front of me…throwing down his penultimate riffs before saying goodnight. Breathtaking.
Moctar just released a new record, Afrique Victime, with a documentary about its making along side of it. But as my friend Todd said after the show…the records are good, but the live show is out of this world with the rising Mdau Moctar, and the new guitar voice he is singing all over the planet.
Kazuo Ishiguro: People in Service, A Life of Meaning
Ishiguro is one of my favorite modern writers (and I am in deep need of reading his newest one). I love the focus of memory that weaves its way in so many of his novels. I’m bummed to have missed this interview from last weeks National Book Festival but happy to take in some of the insights that came from him about his craft….
Mysteries of The Deep: The Making and Unmaking of Orson Welles’s Dead Reckoning
Welles’ later period is filled with unfinished work that we enthusiasts will spend the next lifetime trying to make sense of. I had seen mention of this film in various lists of his projects, and this article does a great deep (no pun intended) dive into it…with some stills!!!
Dazzling Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest
I missed this when it was announced last month, but it is worth sharing even though 2 weeks late. These photographs are stunning. Just stunning.
BOBBY RUSH CELEBRATES 50 YEARS OF "CHICKEN HEADS" WITH VINYL BLACK FRIDAY EXCLUSIVE
So let’s face it: Bobby Rush created true soulful originality with his gold-selling 1971 funky classic Chicken Heads. Produced by Calvin Carter (Jimmy Reed, Canned Heat, Jackie DeShannon, Little Milton anon anon anon) on the small indie label Galaxy, there is nothing like Chicken Heads, and if you have not heard it….you shouldn’t spend another life minute without:
I'm dreaming about you
Love that gal
Love them chicken heads too
A Postcard from the Volcano
By: Wallace Stevens
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is … Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
