Minstrels Anonymous Spoken Word Album Available Now on Bandcamp

Today marks the release of my first full-length spoken word CD, Minstrels Anonymous. Tracks can be bought individually for download, or it can be purchased as a CD On Demand. There will be no vinyl or cassette releases (I can't believe people are making and buying cassettes again, but whatever!).

Minstrels Anonymous is my first solo album after several decades of making noise in the trashed-out back alleys of Hollywood. Years spent haunting clubs like The Masque, The Roxy Theater, The Gaslight, The Shamrock, The Hollywood Palladium, The Whiskey A Go-Go, and a million dead ballrooms.

After years of playing ear-splitting noise punk I've settled down to playing neofolk music on my mandolin and free jazz on my pocket trumpet and tenor saxophone. Neofolk is folk music with heavy goth and industrial influences, artists like Death In June, Emily Jane White and David Eugene Edwards, formerly of 16 Horsepower and now Wovenhand, just to name a few.

What prompted a writer who swore off a music career into making a spoken word record? When the pandemic hit and I went into lockdown I released a long-shelved novel, Red Coffee, and then proceeded to work on my poetry compilation, Year Of The Bat.

After editing, re-editing and rewriting Year of The Bat to my satisfaction I sent it off to the DIY publishing house for formatting. What they sent back was a nightmare.

It looked like a drunk five-year old got ahold of the manuscript and formatted the whole thing. Titles in tiny font running into the opening lines of the poem, pages not aligned properly, fonts changing up and down for no rhyme or reason - and not bad enough to even be deemed avant garde, for Christ's sake! It was like they hated the whole project and threw it back in my face.

After a week of nagging me constantly DO YOU APPROVE? PLEASE APPROVE? and then the annoying TELL US HOW WE DID begging, I sent back a message saying KILL IT and I WANT A REFUND.

Instead of crying in my beer about the savaging of my poetry book, I sat in front of my synthesizer. Then I played with my drum machine. Then I turned on my mp3 player in dictation mode and started reading these very same poems. I've since bought a Tascam 4-track recorder, but the earlier recordings have a weird metallic vocal sound to them. That's the mp3 player.

The first recording was Hollywood Is Killing Me, which I posted on SoundCloud. Ideas for new recordings started pouring out of my brain like a leaky faucet. I made the most of my lockdown by staying in and recording constantly, until the album you're holding represents the majority of my aural output for 2020.

As spoken word artists go, my main influences are monologists like Joe Frank, Ken Nordine, Lord Buckley, and the great Gary McFarlane. The Kenneth Patchen album with the Canadian Jazz Quartet was also a major influence on my album.

I made every effort to make each and every track sound unique and separate from each other to avoid any kind of monotony, which can often mar many spoken word recordings. Some tracks have folk backing. whereas others are heavily influenced by early Seventies electronic artists like Ruth White, Delia Derbyshire's White Noise, and Jean-Jacques Perrey.

Track listing:

1. PKW
2. Hollywood Is Killing Me
3. Stainless Steel Trees
4. Disney Superstar
5. The Scenester
6. Tomboys
7. Nerdy Girl
8. Rorer 714
9. Power Trio
10. Dreams That Money Can Buy
11. Action Painter
12. Suburban Adam & Eve
13. Halloween Birthday

Minstrels Anonymous is available for download or CD format via Bandcamp.com. You can find it at: https://andysevenltd.bandcamp.com/album/minstrels-anonymous

Newer tracks can be heard at: Soundcloud.com/andysevenltd

Albert Ayler

ALBERT AYLER

Albert Ayler is haunting your town
Albert Ayler makes a joyous sound
two-tone head and a saxophone voice
he and his brother have come to make noise

A joyous noise check it out now
military marches, spirituals and nursery rhymes
starting out like a little cartoon mouse
and then roaring and screaming like an uncaged lion

Sweet and innocent like the newborn day
carnival tunes deconstructed into sonic ferocity
like the screaming of a people
begging for salvation in prayer

“We rejoice in the beauty of God’s name with noise” – Andy Seven, Trash Can School Deep South tour 1992

Albert Ayler set list:
HOLY ghost
the truth is marching IN
SPIRITS rejoice
light in DARKNESS
omega is the ALPHA
Spiritual REBIRTH
INFINITE spirit

But alas, being black where the only color white can see is white
so much white until they’re blind
Albert Ayler felt despair and sadness
and drowned himself in New York’s East River

Listen to Albert Ayler
he played with innocence, turning into sadness,
moving into outrage, protest music we can still feel now
protest music we still need now

Albert Ayler came to town
Don’t forget what Albert Ayler’s putting down

RIP Ornette Coleman

Innovation is no stranger to jazz, but fewer people made a radical difference in sound as Ornette Coleman did. Coleman created new approaches to music and the way we heard it in much the same way Picasso did. The road to innovation is a rocky one, guaranteed to upset the most-minded purists, and in Coleman’s case it turned violent on more than several occasions.

On the first Coleman album I heard he dispensed with the dominant piano in a quartet setting, letting the horns lead the band. And what horns they were! Ornette played a Grafton plastic alto saxophone, and his playing style was a mixture of hardcore fifties rhythm & blues and free jazz. If the stretched out jazz alienated you he would return to some bluesy swing on his horn, bringing it all back home.

But that album cover was punk rock personified via free jazz. An intense Ornette in a beat, threadbare sweater with unkempt hair blasting atonal skronk on a white plastic saxophone, as iconic an image in music as any I've ever seen, prompting me to pick up my Conn Mark IV tenor and howl along to the album. Yeah, that's something else! I wanted to be just like that awesome wild man on the album cover. It was all magick and musick, and as a teenager Ornette set me on fire.

I first heard about Ornette Coleman from interviews with Captain Beefheart, who wished all his fans “drank from the drinking pond as Ornette”. Robert Palmer, jazz critic for Rolling Stone Magazine also stated that Coleman was one of the leading innovators in jazz, no small credit given that in the early Seventies jazz was at its peak in creativity.

With that information in mind I sought out Science Fiction, Coleman’s first release for Columbia Records. The music was super-charged and intense, fueled by a driving rhythm section largely manned by Charlie Haden and Charles Blackwell. The trumpets, either played by Don Cherry or Bobby Bradford were strong and angry, and Dewey Redman’s tenor sax playing was from a whole different dimension. It was the jazz version of punk rock: fast and furious.

Of course, no one album by Ornette tells the whole story, there’s The Empty Foxhole with his then 6-year old son Denardo playing drums and Ornette occasionally playing violin and trumpet, too. There were more albums letting us know we were in for something new and unexpected: titles like Change of The Century, Tomorrow Is The Question, The Shape of Jazz To Come, Free Jazz, and many more.

Speaking of The Empty Foxhole, I just wanted to call attention to Denardo's great drumming on that track. With Ornette playing a dirgey trumpet, Denardo hits his snare conjuring up nightmarish images of a burnt-out soldier marching through a bombed out battlefield. I think the album was a great father & son experience. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with my father and I. The album irritated him like crazy and every time I put it on he'd start yelling at me. He also hated The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny by The Mothers of Invention but even that creeped me out. The Empty Foxhole was an apt soundtrack for many father & son arguments one summer.

The most startling change in a career of startling changes was the 1977 release Dancing In Your Head, an album which introduced his theory of harmolodics, which very simply put, is a system where every musician can play freely at the same time in a band while supporting the other musicians. The result was an album that sounded like the soul sister to Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica album.

Dancing In Your Head had such a profound influence on my friends and I that we added Theme From A Symphony to our band Arthur J. And The Goldcups' set. The pinnacle, however, was finding the promotional 45 RPM single of Theme From A Symphony on A&M/Horizon Records for only 10 cents. Both sides naturally had abridged versions of that bombastic masterpiece. I still treasure my copy of that behemoth single to this day.

I remember seeing Ornette playing with his harmolodic electric band at The Westwood Playhouse in 1982 and it was a pretty wild show. There were twin electric guitarists, bassists and drummers going at it non-stop with Ornette heading the charge. It was one of those jazz concerts you remember for a long time after.

Ornette passed away on June 11 at age 85, a life filled with sounds still seldomely heard, but still inspiring and influential to this day. I still look up to him as one of the biggest influences on my saxophone playing. I also consider his humble attitude and philosophy to be a big part of my musical education.