Mike Janssen

My WAMU story about artist Matthew Best

Mike — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:29:19 +0000

Some months ago I was at the Whole Foods in Arlington and happened to notice the art on the walls in the cafe area, and the accompanying artist’s statement. The artist said his artwork was inspired by his hobby of foraging for edible wild plants. Immediately I thought, This could make a really cool radio story.

I tracked down Matthew Best and later interviewed him in his studio at the Arlington Arts Center. He took me to Roundtree Park in Falls Church and gave me a forager’s tour. Months later (my trip to Brazil intervened) I finally wrote, edited and mixed the story, and it aired on WAMU’s Metro Connection last week. It’s my first radio story since I left WFDD in 1999. (Wow.)

You can hear it here. (I asked WAMU whether I could post an MP3 so you don’t have to deal with their proprietary audio formats, but I’m not sure that they’ll oblige.) Also, I created a Flickr set of the photos I took of Matt’s art. (I would have liked to take pictures of our tour through the park, but I had my hands full with the mic and minidisc recorder.)

WPFW playlist, November 18, 2009

Mike — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:20:20 +0000

Playlist for Late Night Jazz with Mike Janssen on 89.3 FM WPFW, 11pm–1am, Nov. 18, 2009

I’ll be on again this week, Nov. 25, so tune in. I might have to play “Alice’s Restaurant.”

“Make It Funky” — Roots Foundation, Various Bilongo
“Olvidalo” — Brownout (download)
“Armee Mali” — Rail Band, Belle Epoque Vol. 1: Soundiata
“Bemgnot Alnorem” — Girma Bèyènè, Tesfa Maryam Kidané and others, Ethiopiques Vol. 1: Golden Years of Ethiopian Music 1969–1975
“Chronology” — Ornette Coleman w/Don Cherry, The Shape of Jazz to Come
“Next to the Quiet Stream” — Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Old and New Dreams
“Twin Stars of Thence” — Sun Ra, Lanquidity
“Bald Headed Blues” — Saffire the Uppity Blues Women, Havin’ the Last Word
“I’m In the Mood” — John Lee Hooker and Bonnie Raitt, Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues (this tune and the previous one by request from Larry the Bread Man)
“Laughing to Keep from Cryin’” — Kenny Brown, live on WFMU
“Man Trouble Blues” — Jaybird Coleman, Harmonica Masters
“Stop Breakin’ Down” — White Stripes, s/t
“It Must Be a Camel” — Frank Zappa, Hot Rats
“The Orange County Lumber Truck” — Frank Zappa, Weasels Ripped My Flesh
“The Grade” — Money Mark, Mark’s Keyboard Repair
“Spacial Tic” — Curha
“Blue 7” — Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus
“Soul Station” — Hank Mobley, Soul Station
“Star Crossed Lovers” — Randy Weston, Mosaic Select 1

WPFW Playlist: November 4, 2009

Mike — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:14:00 +0000

Playlist for Overnight Jazz with Mike Janssen on 89.3 FM WPFW, 11pm–1am, Nov. 4, 2009

I’m back on the air at WPFW in a new time slot — 11pm–1am alternating Wednesdays. So the next show is Nov. 18. I’ve resurrected up my WPFW Twitter feed — check it out for a live playlist and use it for requests, comments and questions. Also, I started a Facebook page for the station, so become a fan.

Without further ado, the playlist:

“Ugali” — The Tony Benson Sextet, Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-sounds & Nigerian Blues
“La Realite” — Amadou & Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako
“Boulmamine” — Orchestra Baobab, Bamba
“Weigh Your Blessings” — Chopteeth Afrofunk Big Band, s/t
“November” — Tom Waits, The Black Rider
“Autumn Leaves” — Cannonball Adderley, Somethin’ Else!
“When Autumn Comes” — Bill Evans, The Tokyo Concert
“The Lizard” — Bill McHenry, Roses
“Glad to Be Unhappy” — Eric Dolphy, Outward Bound
“Drift” — Cuong Vu, Bound
“India” — John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings
“Ipanema Weeknight” — Glows In the Dark, Music to Listen to Glows In the Dark By
“Momentary Lapse (No. 1)” — Mary Halvorson Trio, live on WFMU
“Carolina Moon” — Thelonious Monk, Genius of Modern Music Vol. 2

Review: Terkel’s “Giants of Jazz”

Mike — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:30:56 +0000

Some quickly dashed-off thoughts about Studs Terkel’s Giants of Jazz, which I finished last night and just reviewed on Goodreads.

This is the first book of Terkel’s I’ve read, as well as his first book. It’s a model of clear and effective writing and a loving and reverent portrayal of 13 great jazz musicians. (I admit I skipped the chapter about Woody Herman, since I’ve never listened to much of his stuff.) The writing level would probably suit a middle-schooler just fine, but that’s no insult. In fact, the simplicity of the writing and the relative absence of complicated musicology would make this an excellent read for even the most casual jazz fan, which can’t be said of some other books about jazz. The profiles are not overloaded with biographical detail. Terkel breezes through their lives with a remarkably light touch, in each case covering many years in surprisingly few pages but always seeming to hit the important notes.

Terkel illustrates several key points worth remembering about jazz: that it’s a music of the people, that came from the people (is this at all the case today? a question worth considering more deeply at some point); that its innovators were truly courageous in pursuing their visions and did not always meet with immediate success (a worthwhile reminder for anyone following a creative pursuit); and that jazz’s greatest musicians became such thanks in part to a diet of steady encouragement from the larger jazz community. It’s heartwarming to read of the friendships the musicians forged and of their passion for what they created.

I found the book’s only weakness to be that the final two profiles, about Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, felt somewhat thinner than the rest. Perhaps this was because Coltrane charted such a different path from the other figures (who range chronologically from King Oliver to Charlie Parker), and at the time Terkel was writing, maybe listeners and critics had not yet come to terms with Coltrane. (Maybe they still haven’t.) It might also be that Terkel didn’t speak directly with Coltrane. (The book’s sourcing is unclear–it’s hard to tell when Terkel had actually spoken with the musicians, and when he might have been imagining the details of their childhoods that he relates.) But that’s a minor shortcoming when compared with the book’s overall accomplishments.

WPFW Playlist: October 13, 2009

Mike — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:08:34 +0000

Playlist for Overnight Jazz with Mike Janssen on 89.3 FM WPFW, 3–5 a.m., Oct. 13, 2009

“Zombie” — Fela Kuti, The Best Best Of
“Fogo Fogo” — Chopteeth, Chopteeth Afrofunk Big Band
“No Agreement — Part 2” — Fela Kuti, The Best Best Of
“No Discrimination” — Tony Allen, No Accomodation for Lagos — No Discrimination
“World War IV” — Antibalas, Various Ouelele
“Rings” — Nomo, Ghost Rock
“Live from Tigre Lounge” — Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Inspiration Information 3
“Hasabé” — Tèshomè Meteku, Ethiopiques Vol. 1: Golden Years of Modern Ethiopian Music, 1969–1975
“Security Lock” — Glows In the Dark, Music to Listen to Glows In the Dark By
“About You” — Gabe Noel, six thirty
“Surreal Feel” — Reggie Nicholson Brass Concept, Surreal Feel
“Forrowest” — Forro in the Dark, Bonfires of Sao Joao
“Tradicão” — Caetano Veloso e Gilberto Gil, Tropicália 2
“Caboclo Do Matto” — Regionale Archestra, The Secret Museum of Mankind Vol. 4: Ethnic Music Classics 1925–48
“Chora, Me Liga” — João Bosco e Vinícius, Curtição
“St. Thomas” — Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus
“Stevie” — John Coltrane and Duke Ellington, s/t
“Tulip or Turnip” — Duke Ellington, Complete Live at Newport 1956
“Black and Tan Fantasy” — Duke Ellington, The Very Best Of
“The Chant” — Jelly Roll Morton, The Chicago Years
“West End Blues” — Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, Louis Armstrong Vol. 4: Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines
“A Smo-o-o-oth One” — Charlie Christian with the Benny Goodman Sextet
“Huckleberry Duck” — Raymond Scott, The Music Of Raymond Scott: Reckless Nights And Turkish Twilights
“Taxi Driver (I Don’t Care)” — Bobby Benson and His Combo
“The Tree and the Monkey” — E.T. Mensah and His Tempos Band, Marvellous Boy
“Caroline” — Lionel Belasco, Goodnight Ladies & Gents
“Bye-Ya” — The Thelonious Monk Quartet, Monk’s Dream
“Step Right Up” — Tom Waits, Small Change
“Parisian Thoroughfare” — Bud Powell, The Best Of

WPFW Playlist: October 6, 2009

Mike — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:26:13 +0000

Playlist for Overnight Jazz with Mike Janssen on 89.3 FM WPFW, 3-5 a.m., Oct. 6, 2009

“Bee Vamp” — Eric Dolphy, Live at the Five Spot Vol. 1
“Conversation #4” — Connie Crothers and Bill Payne, Conversations
“Strata (For Max Beckmann)” — Vandermark 5, Elements of Style
“Blunt Instrument” — Naked City, Torture Garden
“The Lagoons” — The Muffins, Air Fiction
“Interplanetary Music” — Sun Ra, We Travel the Spaceways
“Panis Et Circenses (Bread and Circuses)”
“Ave Lucifer” — Os Mutantes, Everything Is Possible! The Best of Os Mutantes
“Misterio Stereo” — Curumin [free download]
“Visgo de Jaca” — CeU, Cangote
“Beardsman Ska” — The Skatelites, Foundation Ska
“Ride Your Donkey” — The Tennors, Broken Flowers (sdtk.)
“I Wish It Would Rain” — The Techniques, Jamaican Beat
“Police and Thieves” — Junior Murvin, Police and Thieves
“Conquering Dub” — Yabby U and King Tubby, The Rough Guide to Dub
“Angeke Ngilale Ezintabeni (I Won’t Sleep In the Mountains)” — Moses Mchunu, Planet Squeezebox
“Bakari Jan” — Banzoumana Sissoko, African Roots
“James Alley Blues” — Richard “Rabbit” Brown, Anthology of American Folk Music
“Mama, Don’t Dog Me” — Mance Lipscomb, You Got to Reap What You Sow
“Porgy (I Loves You, Porgy)” — Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby
“Ruby My Dear” — Thelonious Monk, Genius of Modern Music Vol. 1
“Blue ‘n’ Boogie” — Miles Davis, Walkin’

Well

Mike — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:25:25 +0000

Obviously I’m moving my blog over to WordPress. It’ll probably be a few days before I have things looking better and get my old blog’s posts into here, so hang tight. Visualize a sweet “Under Construction” GIF circa Web 0.1.

rev. billy brings the gospel to dc

Mike — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:29:56 +0000

I walked in to the Busboys and Poets at 5th and K Sts. in D.C. just as the show was getting underway. Reverend Billy was descending a spiral staircase in the middle of the two-story space, and the noise he and his entourage of 16 singers, dancers and performers — the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir — was turning heads throughout the restaurant. The Reverend was clad in a cerulean jacket with matching slacks, a black shirt, and a priest’s stiff white collar. Most of his performers, who ranged widely in age and appearance, wore shiny green robes. One was an older man with a long gray beard and green granny glasses. Another, younger one sported a fanciful mustache. Dark lines ringed the eyes of a young singer with a brilliant smile who exposed tattoos on her arms when the sleeves of her robe slid up. The ensemble went through a set of double doors and into a back dining room, and before joining them I waited an inordinately long time at the bar for a beer. I reflected on the irony that my desire to consume was keeping me from hearing the beginning of Reverend Billy’s show, which was sure to focus on the evils of rampant consumerism. Eventually I went in to the crowded room and was guided to one of the few empty seats, which was directly in front of Reverend Billy. As the night went on and Billy’s spit or sweat or a commingling of both rained upon me and into my pint of beer when he declaimed before me, I wondered if the seat had been empty for good reason. At one point, as one of Reverend Billy’s sermons was reaching a fervent crescendo, he placed his palm on the crown of my head, and I laughed to disguise my embarrassment about being singled out. Billy’s choir sings high-energy, spirited, gospel-styled songs about topics such as not shopping at Wal-Mart, or Starbucks exploiting Ethiopian coffee farmers by paying them miserable amounts for their beans. I tend to be inattentive to listening to lyrics as it is, even in person, and sometimes I just got too overwhelmed by the spectacle of the whole choir to follow what people were singing. I knew little about Reverend Billy before I showed up at Busboys last night, and what I did know had caused me to expect amusing gimmickry and little more. Instead I found myself in the middle of an earnest and stirring service, a revival of sorts. Although the trappings of religion were being put to other ends, and though past experience has not tuned me to resound to religious song in particular, I found the framing of the message of peace, love and anti-consumerism to be powerful and genuine rather than purely ironic. Reverend Billy and his singers are not joking. Billy evinced a sense of humor, but the presentation was heartfelt. In what seemed to be about the middle of the evening, Reverend Billy told an inspiring story about being in Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G20. I’d paid little attention to coverage at the scene at the G20, and I’m glad I heard Reverend Billy’s account. He described the sea of young protesters outside the building where the G20 was meeting behind a wall that cost millions to erect, protected by a phalanx of recruits in military outfits (Billy described them as Robocop costumes), all lined up. Billy said the international cohort of protesting youth were dressed as trees and dolphins and other organisms, defying their humanness and exploring other species, and acting out these species. Their anarchic organismic ecosystem contrasted with the closed-off nature, the rigidity, the privation of the world leaders. He also drew what I thought to be a compelling parallel between the uniformity of the security at the G20 — the people standing as a human wall, the horizontal lines formed by their chins and their waists — with the structural evidence of gentrification in our cities — buildings all looking the same, condominiums going up in New York and in the neighborhood of DC where we were all sitting. It’s a problem when such sameness rules, whether among people or the structures people live in. Billy fed all of this into a message of peace — the importance for activists focusing on all causes not to forget peace, that peace is inside us, the Earth is inside us, and there are tornadoes and tsunamis (fallout from global warming) because these things are inside us too. I was listening to him speak and began thinking about how an answer was for all of us to love each other, to accept each other as we are, which I think is really a hard thing to do. Even when I think I’m doing it, I still catch myself focusing quite often on what makes other people different from me — not what we have in common. Billy made mention of “sexy peace,” which made me smile. And as he spoke and his passion mounted, his choir, who had taken seats on the stage and in seats around him, began to hum and moan, and people in the audience did too. Then a guy sitting to my left yelled out “Love more!”, and the uptick in the room’s energy was palpable. Billy said “Amen”, echoed by the audience, and we also began yelling “Love more!” At this point I was moved to think of Kenneth Koch’s “Some General Instructions”, one of my favorite poems, in which Koch writes, “Enjoy the people you see. Put your hand out / And touch that girl’s arm.” The evening was invigorating. It was good for me to be among activists and to reconnect with those desires to strengthen community in the face of corporate interests. I don’t consider myself an activist — I don’t think of myself as a very “political” person. If anything, I’m a Taoist anarchist who would simply like to ignore the powers that be, hoping that without my cooperation, they will just shrivel up. Yet I know that I’m often complicit in what is a destructive system, so simply ignoring it is not enough. After Reverend Billy and his entourage left the room, singing of course, the audience clapping, and as the crowd began to disperse, I thanked the guy next to me for yelling “Love more!” He made a difference last night.

In defense of “All You Need Is Love”

Mike — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:13:46 +0000

Entertainment Weekly has picked their 50 best Beatles songs and worst five. And “All You Need Is Love” is … on the “worst” list. EW‘s take: “All You Need Is Love … which get [sic] repeated to the point of self-parody in this catchy but thoroughly maddening novelty song.” (I am not usually a siccer, but I’m happy to sic all over this statement.) Novelty song? Maybe “Octopus’s Garden”, “Yellow Submarine”, “Maxwell Silverhammer”, and “All Together Now” would fit in that category. But not “All You Need Is Love.” From the Wikpedia entry on the song:

“It was an inspired song and they really wanted to give the world a message,” said Brian Epstein. “The nice thing about it is that it cannot be misinterpreted. It is a clear message saying that love is everything.” Lennon was fascinated by the power of slogans to unite people and never afraid to create art out of propaganda. When asked in 1971 whether songs like “Give Peace a Chance” and “Power to the People” were propaganda songs, he answered, “Sure. So was ‘All You Need Is Love’. I’m a revolutionary artist. My art is dedicated to change.” Read the lyrics. More from Wikipedia: It was first performed by The Beatles on Our World, the first live global television link. Broadcast to 26 countries and watched by 400 million, the programme was broadcast via satellite on June 25, 1967. Check the video. These guys were heading up the army of good. To paraphrase Mojo Nixon, the writer or writers at EW apparently have no hippie in them.

wpfw playlist 9.29.09

Mike — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:26:25 +0000

Playlist for Overnight Jazz with Mike Janssen on 89.3 FM WPFW, 3-5 a.m., Sept. 29, 2009

“elevating device” (excerpt) — Nels Cline and G.E. Stinson, elevating device
“Canonic Living” — Quiet Orchestra [free download]
“Hum” — Digital Primitives, Hum Crackle & Pop
“The Grade” — Money Mark, Mark’s Keyboard Repair
“Evil” — James Brown, Soul Pride: The Instrumentals, 1960–1969
“One Mint Julep” — Ray Charles, The Very Best Of
“Grazing in the Grass” — Willie Bobo, Talkin’ Verve
“What’s It Gonna Be” — The Dynamites, Kaboom!
“Shadow of a Memory” — The 21st Century, Funk/Soul Revival: Classic Tracks & The New Breed
“Better Change Your Mind” — William Onyeabor, Love’s a Real Thing: Psychedelic Classics Vol. 3
“Marriage” — Gregory Corso [free download (direct link to MP3)]
“Fankate Dankele” — Rail Band, Belle Epoque Vol. 1: Soundiata
“Adowa (Otanfo)” — Seprewa Kasa, s/t
“A Wish” — Hamza El Din, A Wish
“Hsaing Kyaik De Maung” — Bang on a Can All-Stars/Kyaw Kyaw Naing, Bang on a Can Meets Kyaw Kyaw Naing
“Moonlight Becomes You” — Chet Baker, Grey December
“Blue Monk” — Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane, At Carnegie Hall