Jon Blondell CD Release

The Luv Doc Recommends

July 7, 2010

Elephant Room

Yes, you can dance to jazz, sort of in the same sense you can milk anything with nipples. At some point, however, perhaps when you have a double-fisted death grip on the teats of a stampeding mother rhinoceros, you’re going to find yourself asking, “Was it worth it?” Yes, jazz dancing has its pluses. The biggest of course is that you get carte blanche to do the Bob Fosse “jazz hands.” Nowhere else outside the realm of street mime performance can you get away with such overt hamminess without inspiring a gangland style beatdown. If you’re going to swing for that fence, you might want to put on a pair of white gloves first – really makes it pop. Then there’s the footwear issue. Jazz dance traditionally requires jazz shoes, but those are for formal jazz dance – the kind you learn in a real dance school. Dancing to jazz music only requires the shoes of a questionably crazy person, and here the styles of footwear are as diverse as the variations of insanity itself. To be sure, actual jazz dance shoes are pretty nutty looking outside of an actual dance studio, but don’t discount Crocs and socks, woven huaraches, or Vibram FiveFingers, those creepy looking glove shoes. Wearing FiveFingers is pretty much an outright admission that you never want to get laid again for the rest of your life. If the Vatican ever finds out about FiveFingers, they will become standard issue footwear in monasteries across the globe. Not even an altar boy would allow himself to be molested by someone wearing FiveFingers. “Forgive me Father, but you and Vibram have committed a mortal sin.” Really, the only place FiveFingers are apropro are Leftover Salmon/String Cheese Incident mosh pits and … well … jazz clubs, where ruthlessly innovative footwear has an actual chance of gaining a toehold, especially among people for whom nerdiness is a badge of honor. Make no mistake, jazz is cool. There is even an actual genre called “cool jazz,” but jazz is the absolute nerdiest of music forms, edging out even classical and polka. If music were math (and essentially, it is), jazz would be calculus, and jazz musicians would be mathletes. When someone has the chops to reach the level of a music mathlete, they usually turn to jazz. It is at this point that their nerdiness reaches such a density that it actually folds in on itself like a collapsing star and creates an alternate universe of cool. Aside from some obvious anomalies like axe murdering and scrapbooking, nothing is cooler than being exceptionally accomplished. Great jazz musicians are exactly that. They may be broke, alcoholic, homeless, marginally or even fully insane, but at the very least, they are exceptionally accomplished, and that is cool. Knowing that you can do/have done something that few people in the world ever will is surely liberating in many ways. If, for instance, you forget to bathe or shave or pull on some clean clothes in the morning, it’s probably no big deal. At least you can still do some amazing improvisational runs that might get you some free drinks and maybe even a roll in the hay with some moon-eyed jazz lover. Life is good in 5/4 time. This Friday at the Elephant Room you can find out how good when the Jon Blondell Quintet celebrates the release of its new CD, Bone-Nanza. The band features David Bowen and JJ Johnson on drums, John Fremgen on bass, Carter Arrington III on guitar, Jeff Helmer on piano, and Jon Blondell himself on trombone. Even if you don’t know Blondell, you’ve surely heard him. If not on his signature trombone solo on Sublime’s “The Wrong Way,” then surely as a bassist or trombonist on cuts by Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, B.B. King, Pat Green, Doug Sahm, James McMurtry, Dale Watson, or Ray Benson, just to name a few. Point of fact: Jon Blondell is huge, not only in stature but also in talent, and even if you aren’t brave enough to dance to his music, you will appreciate and enjoy it nonetheless.

Keep Austin Young: Celebrating the Life of Danny Roy Young

The Luv Doc Recommends

October 14, 2008

Sunday night’s Keep Austin Young concert at the Music Hall might be a little misleading. A quick scan of the lineup reveals that pretty much everyone on the bill qualifies for an AARP discount … or soon will. Surely this irony wasn’t missed by the promoters. More likely they embraced it because the Keep Austin Young concert isn’t a scenester rave or a Methodist youth rally. It’s a celebration of the life of Danny Roy Young, a man who would have appreciated the title’s irony more than most. Young, who died in August at the age of 67, was the owner of the now defunct Texicalli Grill, a restaurant that in its later years occupied a converted Taco Bell on Oltorf next to Curra’s. Unlike its corporately homogenized predecessor, the Texicalli was a uniquely Austin establishment. The walls were cluttered with Young’s collection of music memorabilia, and the tables were usually filled with his colorful collection of friends: musicians, politicians, bubbas, hippies, and slackers. All came to eat good food, drink, and swap stories. Young was as much a raconteur as a restaurateur, and a good part of the charm of the Texicalli was the outgoing, good-natured banter of its owner, the “Mayor of South Austin,” an honorary title that was the result of Young being named Best Mayor for the City of South Austin in the Chronicle’s 1992 “Best of Austin” issue – partly for his political activism opposing expansion of South Lamar (where the original Texicalli was located) and partly because Young was so beloved by his unofficial constituency. As with any true South Austinite, Young was also a musician – a rubboard player for several bands: Ponty Bone, Texana Dames, and perhaps most famously with the Cornell Hurd Band. During their Thursday night residency at Jovita’s, Hurd would often refer to Young as the “Lord of the Board.” In true South Austin style, Young’s rubboard was handmade, played with leather gloves that had mercury dimes glued to the fingertips – exactly the kind of thing you might come up with while stoned at a South Austin back-porch jam session. Although Young retired from the restaurant business a couple of years ago, he continued with his rubboard career as well as his role as a South Austin icon, emblematic of an era when Austin valued creativity and talent more than money and style. The fact that Young’s benefit is at the Austin Music Hall piles on further irony. All the rapacious development – those towering new condos and sleek new businesses were built on the bones of the scene that greedless good timers like Danny Young created. It’s fitting that Young’s family should benefit from them in turn, if only indirectly. If you didn’t know Danny, you still have plenty of reason to pay your respect. He’s part of the reason you and thousands of other people live in Austin. If that’s not reason enough, how about several hours of music from the crème de la crème of Austin’s old guard musicians: the Texana Dames, Ponty Bone, Marcia Ball, Ray Benson, the Cornell Hurd Band featuring Teisco del Rey, Floyd Domino, Blackie White, the Antone’s House Band, and perhaps the finest songwriter in the known world, James McMurtry.

Ray Benson In-Store at Waterloo Records

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

July 11, 2003

Things haven’t completely gone Aspen

If you hear an exasperated sigh from the tie-dyed, Birkenshod, Ewok-looking gent in front of you at the checkout at Whole Foods, it’s probably because he is remembering a time when a sixer of Shiner didn’t completely empty his embroidered Guatemalan change purse. More than likely, he’s just an innocent out-of-towner who stumbled into town with fond memories of a time when Austin was still cheap and easy. Nowadays things are a little more fast and furious. The nut seemed to turn shortly after Richard Linklater’s cinematic ode to creative loafing blew up and became the travel brochure that turned Austin from Slackerville to Hand-to-Mouthville. Invariably, hip people with no money are followed closely by hip people with stacks of it. From there, things can get out of hand and you end up with things like dress codes, doormen, and valet parking. By the turn of the millennium, the tech boom pretty much put the kibosh on cheap living, but there are still a few vestiges of the days when Texas Pride was $1.25 at the HEB, and if you were feeling particularly well heeled you could upgrade to the Falstaff over on the generic aisle for $1.49. There’s the Tamale House for instance, and Sandy’s Frozen Custard down on Barton Springs, the Dart Bowl bar, Deep Eddy Cabaret, and of course, relative newcomers like Beerland and Maria’s Taco X-Press, and you can still live cheaply and central if you’re willing to swap the ’04 on your zip code with the ’02 – so things haven’t completely gone Aspen. There’s also the cheap music. You may be hemorrhaging cash for everything else, but if you’re paying much more than a 10-spot to hear live music, you need to broaden your horizons. Every week, hundreds of musicians of staggering talent play for little more than tips and beer, and if you’re not getting in on that action, you’re paying too much to live here. For example: This Friday at Waterloo Records, Ray Benson will be doing an in-store for free. Where else in America can you see a nine-time Grammy winner for free and get free beer? What other state/city/town/mental institution even has a nine-time Grammy winner? Sure, there are probably a few, but none of them clock in at over six feet six inches (which by the way is an excellent height for a crowded in-store viewing). If you’ve been in Austin more than a couple of weeks and you haven’t seen Ray, you need to look up – or at least go to Waterloo this Friday. Ray is a larger-than-life entertainer and if you’re not so much into Western swing, just relax, enjoy the show, and sample some of the best-tasting beer in the world: free.