19.IX.83

Dear Angel of Dust,

We played a gig at the Comeback Inn over in Venice night before last, a place on Washington about a third of the way between Lincoln and the canals that’s been around for about ten years. I heard Joe Farrell there five years ago. We were pretty surprised to get the call, our stuff being more outside than what they normally book. Evidently it had a lot to do with last year’s Kool Jazz Festival, a lineup called “New Directions in Sound and Rhythm” that most folks in town still haven’t gotten over—some in a negative way, some positive, as appears to be the case with the owner of the Comeback Inn. It was an unlikely lineup for a Kool Jazz Festival, especially one here in L.A., a bit like an invasion from Chicago, the AACM side of Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Air, Lester Bowie’s From the Root to the Source, Leroy Jenkins’s Sting, Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound and Space. Also on the bill were James “Blood” Ulmer, the World Saxophone Quartet, John Carter, Laurie Anderson and the Nikolai Dance Theatre. Though we had mixed feelings about this kind of music being presented under as commercial an imprimatur as Kool (Aunt Nancy at one point claimed to wonder if the balloons would begin emerging as smoke rings), it was all rather beautifully anomalous, inspiringly so, nowhere near business-as-usual. One funny thing we’ve heard is that the night Laurie Anderson, Leroy Jenkins’s band, the Art Ensemble and the Nikolai dance troupe performed at the Santa Monica Civic more than a few people showed up expecting to hear Sting the rock singer. Anyway, the owner of the Comeback Inn specifically mentioned the Kool Festival. “It really opened my ears,” Lambert told us he told him when he called, going on to joke, “It might’ve even grown me a new pair.” He went on to say he’d been meaning to get in touch for a while and asked if we’d play there some night. Lambert said yes and they decided on a date.

It’s a small restaurant with not much in the way of a stage, just a spot in one of the corners where they clear away a few tables. It was no great shakes, but a number of friends showed up and it all went well, with a few moments here and there that more than simply went well. Penguin took an alto solo on “The Slave’s Day Off,” for example, that had Aunt Nancy, draped over the bass like a rag doll, sustaining a rafters-rattling walk that belied her rag-doll diffidence, a walk whose lowest note repeatedly served as Penguin’s moment of truth. Repeatedly, Aunt Nancy’s walk’s furthering pulse notwithstanding, Penguin, with a broken gait and ghost timbre recalling John Tchicai, took stock of the wherefore of going on, assaying, it seemed, every reason not to. A rummaging hover, low to the ground it seemed, the horn’s low-register audit, Hamlet-like, left no dissuasive stone unturned. Repeatedly, Penguin pulled free of such hover by way of an angular but oddly damped move into the middle and upper registers, refusing to posit such ascent as triumphant (“flat” refusal, lateral dispatch), a resolution of the quandaries by which he was beset. Repeatedly, he offered no resolution, as though resolution could only be false, the more false the more triumphalist, the more false the more defeatist as well. It was some of Penguin’s headiest, most heartfelt playing ever, a mesmerizing insistence upon and abidance in a third way that wasn’t just a middle way, a hypnotic hum, hover and run of a solo that didn’t so much finish as fade, beg off ending, beg off going on, Penguin pulling away from the mike playing less and less loudly. As I’ve said, there were other moments as well.

Arguably, however, the gig’s aftermath upstaged the gig itself, its most eventful moment occurring afterward, as though a time lag of some sort were in effect. Drennette, that is, tells us that two balloons followed her home (as she puts it) after the gig. She says that yesterday as she was unpacking her drumset, setting up to practice, they emerged as she lifted the lid to the parade snare’s container. Before she took the drum out of the container, before she even reached in to take hold of it, a balloon floated up out of the container, emerging from under the slightly lifted lid as though the opening effected by the lifting were the container’s mouth. The balloon, floating just above the opening, contained these words: Too funky. Too forward. So rude the way of the world, too crude. The nerve of him to come on that way, slick-chivalric. “Be my queen,” he said. “Let my face be your throne. I’ll lick your pussy, I’ll sniff at your ass-crack.” So crude a way to put it, so rude the way of the world. It hung there a while and then vanished, at which point a second balloon floated up out of the container and hung just above the opening. Inside the second balloon were these words: “You oughta not be so funky with it,” I should’ve said, semisung, Aretha-like, mock-operatic, and would’ve said, semisung, Aretha-like, mock-operatic, had I only thought of it in time. Instead, I stood speechless, taken aback. It hung there a while, just above the parade snare’s container’s opening, and then vanished.

Drennette says the balloons (the first one in particular) remind her of the X-rated balloons that emerged from the dancers’ fists during our record-release gig at The Studio back in February, the emergence our recourse to a 4/4 shuffle meter brought about. She can’t help surmising, she says, that the two balloons might be tied to a somewhat similar moment during our second set at the Comeback Inn, a passage during “Tosaut L’Ouverture” in which Aunt Nancy touched ever so lightly upon a 4/4 shuffle, not so much committing unequivocally as alluding to it. In response, Drennette resorted to an obliquely stated backbeat, bordering on tongue-in-cheek, a manner of statement that had it both ways, both advancing the backbeat and beating it back, holding it at bay. It was a passing moment, not at all drawn out, but Drennette says it was that moment, she’s convinced, that passage, that gave rise to the balloons in the parade snare’s container. That they hid and followed her home, she says, rather than emerging right there during the gig (no balloons appeared at any point during the gig) adds a new wrinkle to this whole balloon phenomenon that we need to think seriously about.

Drennette went on to say, as we talked about this during rehearsal, that she noticed a certain concord (as she put it) between the leverage she and Aunt Nancy had applied to the backbeat and the 4/4 shuffle and the casting of the first balloon’s X-rated material in quotes, to say nothing of the explicit distancing from and disapproval of that material the balloon expressed. She wondered if, consistent with this, the balloons’ delayed emergence doesn’t bespeak reserve, a sense of restraint, modesty even, albeit the business of hiding away and following her home does have, she can’t help feeling, a sinister side. Or does the delay, she went on to speculate further, have to do with the speechlessness or the inability to immediately respond, the being less than quick on the uptake, to which the second balloon confesses? What also strikes her, she went on to say in an outrush of questions and thoughts that made it clear how deeply the balloons had gotten to her, is that the balloons appear to have a sense of history, so unmistakably, in this instance, harking back to an earlier emergence.

A good amount of discussion ensued, none of us quite sure what to make of this new development but each of us, notwithstanding, venturing a comment or two, a question or two, a surmise or two. Lambert, for example, led off by all but asking Drennette, whose manner was ponderous, weighty, bordering on distraught, to lighten up, noting that it wasn’t the balloons’ sense of history he was struck by but their sense of humor, especially the second balloon’s reference to Aretha’s “nasty gym shoe” ad lib on the Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) album. Aunt Nancy, on the other hand, agreed with Drennette regarding the rapport between levered backbeat and 4/4 shuffle and the balloons’ recourse to quotation, adding that the use of the conditional tense appeared to her to have to do with this as well. Thus, things were off and going.

Much got said during the discussion but we all continue to give this new development thought. And though much got said, not everything that might’ve been said got said. Djamilaa mentioned to me later that she didn’t bring it up, for obvious reasons, but there seemed to her to be a strongly personal element to the balloons’ manner of emergence and their content both, that it seemed they wanted to say something about Drennette or even that Drennette wanted to say something about herself: putatively hard-ass Drennette, putatively repercussive Drennette, Drennette Virgin. “‘Slick-chivalric,’” she said, “rhymewise and otherwise, has Rick written all over it.”

More anon.

Yours,
N.