moon traveller herald

Satyricon. The film: Much anticipated. Maestro Fellini has promised to visit our planet, as if it were an alien one, by going back to the time before Christendom. I for one cannot remember the world too well in the time before Fellini’s Satyricon. It has been with me since I first heard the music of this film – Fred’s friendly sound genius Nina Rota at hand using BBC-style colonial world field recordings Gamelan and such -- to help conjure the dream. Exposition - It was a much anticipated film not movie, says I. Movie was an American thing. Our invention. But Fellini was the great film artist, and he had a love for the low culture of movies, and this could be viewed as a movie. And I would be there firstly if I could, in this case, making the 25-mile drive to the big city of Milwaukee in Dad’s Buick Wildcat. Awaited, Satyricon was, as film, the form, was in its flower; as a Hemingway novel was awaited in the 20s, a play by Williams in the 50s, or like a Dylan record still some...

To Jim Haas: Looking at this picture of Big Jay McNeely ignites a flying moon traveller firecracker in my brain.  There is this place there - where a legendary rhythm & blues saxman is wailing and honking forever.  My brother Michael and I saw Jay at the Night Stage club in Cambridge in the early 1980s, and it was a gas -  A funny thing though – it was all incendiary. But I cant, when I sit down and try, remember all that much. Anyway here goes…What I remember was we won tickets to see him. I'd been studying blues like a mad monk, and had to know more and more. Had seen Cleanhead Vinson, for example, who'd recently thanks to Harry Duncan's brilliant slate making, had gigged with Sunnyland. This honking sax-oriented feverish R&B was part  of Sunnyland's area of interest – back in the days, days with JT Brown, Jump Jackson, Oiver Alcorn. Was glad to win the tickets. Also knew him as composer of I Know There Is Something on Your Mind*  – a killer track r...