1. Luna - Space Swell
Prelude - Nisaba in the Grass - When I first came to UC-Berkeley in 1964, I discovered that there were a dozen or so piano rooms in the basement of the Music Building. These rooms were always open, never locked (they were not locked regularly until around 1969-70). At the time I was still mourning my lost love Dina, who left me when I couldn't say that I was going to give up gay sex completely. Considering the emotional torture that my mostly gay bisexuality put my later wife Carole Lacey through, Dina probably made the right choice. Then again, my marriage to Carole produced Jason Cronbach Van Boom, now a wonderful guy and a pretty well-known modern philosopher and political commentator on the Internet. And if Carole had married a different man with a different gene set ..... who knows?
Every day I played completely free music - I didn’t know any chords or scales, and my piano reading had stopped with the easier Chopin preludes, so my playing was limited to two styles: very rhythmic two-fisted piano slamming and chromatic, elaborate finger runs (see We'll Think of that Later) and simple emotional melodies with minor or major triads (the only chords I knew). After I married Carole Lacey, my simple melodic style moved from sadness and pain to nostalgia and present happiness. At the time I was strongly influenced by Country Joe and the Fish's romantic piece, “Porpoise Mouth,” which also has a bittersweet style: very romantic and yet in a minor key. (It goes to show how gay I am that I didn't realize the symbolism of the lyrics until I listened to it again on Youtube fifty years later!)
“Porpoise Mouth” link; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwhzcQJ3y8
Anyway, my melodic style coalesced into one piece, where I actually memorized the melody and the left hand accompaniment. (You can hear it in the first minutes of “Nisaba in the Grass”).
Nisaba in the Grass - music clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIsJ2SJ3FEQ
Carole and I had some wonderful moments in the first three years of our marriage. The best ones were when we lived on Milvia Street, just a half-mile downhill from the Berkeley campus. Many a magic Bay area evening we hiked uphill, through the whole UC-Berkeley Arboretum, until we arrived at whatever campus building was showing avant-garde or early classic movies. (This was in the days before videos, let alone CDs - if you wanted to see any interesting avant-garde or archival films, you have to go to an 'art movie house' or a college film society showing old classics in a campus building). With the lights of the widely spaced streetlights falling through the trees, and the leaf and shrub perfume suffusing the air, it was as if we were walking through a magic Tolkien kingdom of elves and hobbits. When we reached the art cinema or campus building where our film was being shown, it was as if we had already passed through the boundaries of reality.
Naturally. the grass cigarette we had shared on the walk increased our feeling of being in a truly enchanted kingdom.
And naturally, by the time the movie was over, "the munchies" hit us hard, and for the perfect ending of our night out, relief was just 15 minutes away - a classic American diner right at the border between the Berkeley campus and our neighborhood. Hamburgers, milkshakes, french fries, and all the other standard diner menu items (and so much more flavorful than the burger chains sad imitation of the same), and we scarfed them down and then would leisurely walk the ten minutes back to our apartment - upstairs at 1640 Milvia Street, a beautiful tree-lined street.
And why the title "Nisaba in the Grass"? Well, when I composed the final version, both Carole and I were studying ancient languages (Carole Latin, me Cuneiform texts of the ancient Near East: we met in a Beginning Greek class) and smoking a lot of grass, and Nisaba was the Babylonian divinity of scribes and all literary activities, and wheat and other grains (she was originally an agricultural deity) hence the title "Nisaba in the Grass."
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| Nisaba pictured on a fragment of Akkadian pottery |
A - Cuneiform inscription: when I first came to Berkeley I stayed in a small attic room. There were three other little rooms all right next to each other, and so inevitably we close neighbors became good friends. Forrest Curo later moved to Sacramento where he became a teacher. Ron Schoss became a leading member of Scientology. I was starting Cuneiform studies, and so for fun wrote on the wall between two rooms a list of all the attic tenants and visiting friends. My cuneiform inscription stayed up there for 23 years; then the whole building was rebuilt into a condominium complex; and the attic was first sealed off completel by a metal firedoor, and then torn down.
B - Carole and Jason - Carol insisted that if I was going to leave her, I had to at least give her a child. The result was our son Jason – he doesn't look like a world-class exponent of semiotics and philosophy, does he? That would be a few years and 5 countries later. Jason has just edited Sign, Method and the Sacred, vol.5 in the De Gruyter series The Semiotics of Religion, and maybe one day I will understand the first page. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110694925/html?lang=en
1. Luna - Arhoolie and Chris Strachwitz
Free jazz –
Free jazz was at the peak of its popularity in the mid-60s - although even that peak was minimal. Loud, often screeching microtonal ensembles without a melody - as played by Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Coltrane in his later recordings, Roswell Rudd, and others - was popular mostly with fervent Black nationalist, revolutionary Afrocentric groups and politically Leftwing players such as myself. Free jazz records had minimal sales - the main exception being Coltrane's A Love Supreme - but that recording was not really free jazz: a lot of it is modal and consonant, and the free parts, when played only by Coltrane's quartet (as was the whole album), went down easily with the ears of average jazz fans. Free jazz was also popular with beginning musicians - for obvious reasons - and with players who loved the escape into unknown dimensions that free jazz would take the players.
In the mid-1960s I fell into ALL these categories. My elder brother Mike Cronbach and I were both very sympathetic to the Black Freedom movement, and had both worked with civil rights groups - Mike spending a summer in Atlanta with the SDS (students for a Democratic Society), myself with St. Louis CORE in the 2 years I was going to college at Washington University. I loved the 'high' I got with the wilder free jazz ensembles, and bought over a dozen Sun Ra records, as well as Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp.
With no training in or theoretical knowledge of music, other than 4 years of beginning to intermediate classical piano lessons with an Armenian emigree who despised all forms of American popular and Afro-American classical music, and so turned me off studying music other than my free improvisations.
I had only two styles, and everything else was a variation: 1) atonal fast free - slamming the keyboard and playing as many notes as loud as possible, and 2) a sweet melodic style for modal love songs and drifting through space fantasies.
Arhoolie Records
Somehow I heard about this label: a) that it was located right there in Berkeley and b) that it was basically a one-man operation, everything recorded and produced by Chris Strachwitz, and most significantly, Chris loved to record folk music, which he defined as music by untrained or trained only in the oral, not written, music tradition. So I phoned Arhoolie, made an appointment to see Chris, and took my two best tape recordings (this was over 5 years before the arrival of casette tape recordings) up the hill to the Berkeley heights, where Chris lived and had his office in a classic Berkeley red pine house.
Chris immediately took a liking to my melodic pieces, and scheduled a recording session. He suggested I might want to find some other musicians for an ensemble piece.
I knew only a few other musicians, mostly a group of 4 or 5 people in a Black Arts building in South Berkeley, so I put a notice in the Berkeley Barb (the leading 'underground paper' in the East Bay), saying that I had a recording session planned and wanted free jazz musicians to work with me on it. The 'try-out' was going to be in a large room for ensembles that was down in the Music Department basement band practice room (my old stamping ground). Actually, 'try-out' was a a misnomer, since I couldn't say 'no' to any musician - or really any sound-producing life-form - who might have wandered into the ensemble room that day.
Pat Wallace and the Oregon group - And the first to appear was a group of friends from Oregon, led by Pat Wallace, a skinny, Irish-looking saxophonist, and his drummer partner Bill Grauss, an even skinnier and taller musician. I forget how many of the other players were from the Oregon group, and how many were locals responding to my notice in the Barb. Soon Pat took over a lot of the recording; most of pieces on the record were in Pat's style of free playing, and he conducted them. I had three pieces: Space Swell, a smoother free jazz style, for which I drew a diagram and made copies for the musicians: the idea being that showing louder or softer sounds by curves going out (louder) or going in (softer) ensemble or duets by writing next to a curved line the instruments 1 wanted. This piece, which combined both my and Pat's musical desires, was the cleanest of the pieces and so Chris decided to name the record after it (Space Swell).
Chris recorded the sessions at Sierra Sound Studios - no separation, we were all in one big room. And I must admit it was really exciting performing Pat Wallace's numbers with all those horns going at once in that huge space.
Space Swell is about getting smaller than getting bigger then getting smaller. I arranged and conducted it, telling the players when to come in and how loud or soft, they should be (though I was surprised by HOW soft the 'invisible' drum solo was (2:40 - 3:20) The album cover was designed by Wayne Pope, a friend of Chris, and it illustrates what the music is doing. You can imagine riding down that blue and black river/ribbon on the album cover. It also relates to the current 'big bang' theory: the universe is now constantly expanding from the energy of the initial explosion of the first particle, then at some time it will have used up that energy and will start contracting, until all the stars, planets, and other matter are pressed into one small point, which sets off another explosion and the whole thing repeats again ... ad infinitum.
Space Swell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKuvbEIAB88
Because I always wore an second-hand army jacket with “Private Luna” on it, Luna was chosen by Chris Strachwitz for the album’s name. I begged Chris not to do it, being sure that jazz critics would say this was just as the moon is a pale reflection of the sun, this is a pale white imitation of Sun Ra .... and sure enough a Canadian jazz mag did just that! It went so far as to say the band members must have memorized licks from Sun Ra records. A really ridiculous statement, seeing as most of the band - definitely including me - did not yet have the ability to take any jazz licks off the record.
True, there is some Sun Ra influence, but more Harry Partch., and the Nisaba track is heavily influenced by Mingus and Country Joe as I said earlier here. oh well. The record did get a rave review in a German jazz magazine, in which I was hailed as "a magnificent technician on the piano". (See the photo copy below).
The other pieces on the album were led by Pat. They alternate solos, duets, and whole group ensembles, with fast and furious playing alternating with very quiet sections. On all these I played my two-fisted and super-fast chromatic runs (see for example We';ll Think of that Later).
Nisaba in the Grass - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIsJ2SJ3FEQ
2. The Cosmic Pimps - After Luna came out and the musicians went their own way - many of Pat's friends moving back to Oregon - I decided to try again, and see if I could get my dream band together, free but melodic, even sweet, and with a solid R&B rhythm underlying all the melodic excursions.
The first response was E.J., a tall, jet black, soft spoken congero from Oakland, who- I found out later - was the first choice for R&B stars playing San Francisco or Oakland and needing a percussionist. E.J. said he had answered the ad because "I wanted to see what you Berkeley hippies are up to". As soon as we started jamming it was clear that this was musical love at the first 8 measures. We fell right into a fluid, lovely groove, and never failed to do the same for the 16 months the Cosmic Pimps lasted.
E.J., by the way, was the one who came up with the name. "Cosmic stands for you Berkeley hippies, and pimp for the cool guys in the Oakland scene."
Three other key players answered the first month of the ad - Joe Friedman, who slipped right inside the groove that E.J. and I were making with his Spanish guitar chording; and two key players whose names alas I have forgotten, alas - a Mormon cellist from Reno, Nevada and a trombone-player from North Berkeley. The cellist loved our free yet consonant sound so much he drove all the way from Reno and back for every rehearsal as well as every performance (since we rarely if ever got paid, 'gig' would be a misnomer!) Mark the trombonist always came in barefoot and wearing blue overhalls, contrasting with the cellist's three piece suit. Mark was a dedicated Transcendentalist-M.M.Yogi follower, and always meditated a little before starting to play.
The final touch to our original group were two teenage flautists
from Oakland, one white, one black, both with almost foot long Afros - one brown, one blonde. This group stayed together until 1968, (just between the King and Kennedy
assassinations), when the flautists told me that they had decided to play only church music - in churches. This was the beginning of the end of the Pimps - the flautists were replaced by two revolutionary taxi-cab drivers from New Jersey, who both played alto sax in the same free dissonant style that I disliked so much on my Luna recordings. Soon after that, E.J. went on the road with Jackie Wilson (a major R&B singer of the time), and that was the end of the Cosmic Pimps.
The classic Pimps sound was what I was really looking for and
enjoyed back then - a rhythmic foundation of congas, Spanish guitar and free piano,
over which the cello, trombone and two flutes floated melody upon melody. It
was such sweet music - now gone forever, as even my memory of that sound of 60 years ago is almost completely evaporated. I just remember the feeling. We performed often at free jazz concerts produced by a jazz entrepreneur Wesley Robinson (not sure if the name is right), and also in friends' houses facing on the street with their door open for the neighborhood to listen.
Our best performance by far was a tribute to Martin Luther King that we played on the afternoon of hearing about his assassination. We played on the porch of a friend's house, and people gathered round as the sweet mournful sound got more and more impassioned, and then died away as the sun set. Funny, and annoying- I have an almost perfect memory of the setting but cannot remember even one note of what we played! Just remember the mixed feeling - playing so well but the music coming from such a disaster for our country.
One other anecdote - when the CP's performed in a free jazz free concert that was held once a week in a Berkeley church, and I had been playing my two-fisted percussive style along with various piano sound effects, two Black kids came up to the stage and were peering under and around the piano. "Where is that machine?"they asked me. "What machine?" "The one that makes all those piano sounds.""That;'s just my hands, guys." They looked at me with total disbelief - 'Yeah. right!'And even after I played some of my effects, they still looked pretty dubious that there was no machine involved.
The Fragile Life of Recordings (except for vinyl)
Just my luck - the one and only vinyl LP I have ever made was Luna, with my very first band, when I was just coming out of my introverted phase and had no ability to lead a band. So the recording session was taken over by Pat Wallace and his merry men, a crew of dissonance-loving heads from Oregon. Only two tracks on the album 'Luna- Space Swell' reflected what I wanted to do in music then: "Space Swell" and "Nisaba in the Grass."
So that when a year later I was ready with a free music band that expressed my love of melodic, emotional, and consonant free jazz, and with a really unique orchestration, I could get no interest from the small record company that had produced my first - and only - album. It had not only bombed at a mere 2,000 sales -but also I had inadvertently screwed up the record company's clever scheme to fool the the jazz critics, for which faux pas I was never forgiven. Chris Strachwitz wanted there to be no publicity about the album, no information about the players, to see if he could fool jazz critics who had no information about the players. However, a week after the album was released, I was hanging out in San Francisco with another musician from our session, and we wound up in a jazz club, both high and tired from a long night hanging out in Haight-Ashbury and other places. The club owner asked us to play and announced the name of the album. And wouldn't you know it, the Bay area staff critic for the authoritative jazz magazine Downbeat was right there in the audience, watching every move made by us two - young, partly drunk, partly stoned, attempting to repeat some of the Space Swell moods. So of course the review dismissed the album as a product of "fraternity boys" (!!!) trying to play jazz. And after that Chris Strachwitz never recorded anything else of mine.
However, around 5 years later, Chris put out an anthology of selections from his Arhoolie lps, and Chris included Nisaba! So Nisaba continued to live, until this decade when a site dedicated to the wilder and more unknown recordings in the wild Bay area of the 60s included Nisaba. And then Nisaba was copied and played on yet another website. So Nisaba still lives and gets the occasional hit (total of around 600 views on all three YouTube sites.)
A depressing thought: all my other music, after Space Swell, has been recorded on casette tapes or CDs, both of which have such a limited life span that
the Library of Congress will not accept them as permanent sound recordings.
My only hope for immortality, or even just my music living a few years after my demise, is my Youtube site, which if my son and a couple of fans keep going, will keep my music alive for a while. https://www.youtube.com/@ceelee321/videos
Musical death: the Tragic Tale of the Cosmic Pimps: So, fans, download any of my music clips you like. Otherwise, all my music may follow the fatal road of the Cosmic Pimps - my most melodic and rhythmically interesting music of the 1960s, which by 1970 existed on just four casette tapes. Then a guitarist friend erased three of them -which I made the fatal mistake of loaning to him – taping over them to record himself practicing dominant seven chords instead of listening to them.
The last and only surviving tape was - and may still be in - the possession of Joe Friedman, the Spanish guitar teacher who, together with me and the virtuoso congero E.J., made up the dynamic power of the CP's.
When I visited Joe in1976, he had divorced his wife, and ended his job as assistant for the famed avant-garde composer Harry Partch after Partch had died. As far as I know this was the end of his academic jobs.
When I met him in 1976 - after my work with Chambray and the East Coast bands - he was living in a small flat over a motel parking garage, near broke, and about to move to San Diego. When I begged him for the loan of the last surviving Cosmic Pimps tape, he refused to lend it to me - "that stuff you were doing with the Petrucci band is just the same only much better anyway" was his rationale. Of course it was nowhere near the same, as there was neither cello nor Spanish acoustic guitar nor flutes in my Boston recordings. But Joe wanted to hold onto the last surviving Cosmic Pimps tape. Soon after he moved to San Diego, and then vanished - no phone, no mailing address, and I have yet to locate him on the Internet.
JOE FRIEDMAN, IF YOU ARE STILL ALIVE, PLEASE CONTACT ME ON MESSENGER OR FACEBOOK.
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