Voyage to the Retro Cocktail Hour

 "Voyage to Scorpion Island" will be featured on one of my all-time favorite radio shows -- The Retro Cocktail Hour -- tonight around 7:30pm CST (and forever in archive #721 starting at 31:30).  Download to Donate to the Lawrence Humane Society and help animals like William the Bunny.

LYON - Londres à Lyon

   Years later I would conjure the intricacies of walking routes across the two rivers and up leafy passages to Lyon’s summit.  Life brought me to many places, including London.  I lived in small confines on Gower Street, where chimneys cap the row of flats ranging from Euston Road to Great Russell Street, and where during the day the endless stream of red double-decker busses and black cabs produces enough exhaust to make Gower Street itself a chimney.  While all the grey & smoke at times lended a romantic quality to everyday life, it produced, at others, a weariness.  So at night I would sit & play music by a window that faced University College London's Bonham Carter House, dazed from the pace & price of the city, and sometimes drifting off to pastoral spaces.  I once spent a summer crashing on the floor of my oldest friend, reading books, playing piano in mornings  & evenings at the university, and searching for fireflies on walks at night.  My time in Lyon bore that same hideaway spirit – a simple season and easy breath after tense times in harder cities.  

Faudra-t-il toujours revenir sur ses pas, pensa-t-elle en dépassant le kiosque à journaux qui clignotait sous le bleu.

LYON - Sortilège

     I was living in a tiny apartment in the attic of a church on Cours de la Liberté during what would prove to be the hottest summer on record.  The roof over the attic was glass, so the heat that would build up all day was punishing – like walking in the summer afternoon sun in Las Vegas.  So I would lay there, listening to The Clientele's The Violet Hour and A Fading Summer EP, and try to think "cooling" thoughts.  I would imagine the view of the church – located in an exquisite district right next to the Rhône – from above, then swoop down, mentally gliding over the two rivers and their many bridges.  Then I would do variations of this process, sometimes zooming out even further, looking over not just the church and surrounding neighborhood, but the entire city, and other times zooming in close to revisit tactile details of intricate walking routes from the church to the city's overlook on Fourvière Hill.  The sensation of old stone walls against my fingertips, waxy green leaves under moonlight spilling over the footpath down from Tour métallique de Fourvière, the immense wash of sound swirling around Lyon Cathedral – a conjuring & ordering of a thousand details to cast a spell of sleep.

C’était loin déjà le Missouri et je marchais là, été plein, couleur mauve, j’avançais dans la lumière du soir et je me souviens avec une extrême précision (moi qui ne me souviens de rien) de mes mains s’ouvrant toutes seules comme actionnées par un levier, je me vois ouvert tout entier comme une prune, dégoulinant, libre enfin : je suis tombé à terre dans l’été, j’ai regardé la Saône, j’étais là.

Vinyl Reissue

     I'm thrilled to announce that Pretty Olivia Records of Alicante, Spain will be reissuing Please Kid, Remember (2008) on vinyl.  200 copies will be pressed and made available this fall.

Voyage to Scorpion Island

     A first foray into Exotica -- a form of tropical jazz popularized by Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, and others in the 1950's and 1960's -- "Voyage to Scorpion Island" was written in Chapala, Mexico this past winter.   It features field recordings from beneath the Orozco murals in the Cabanas Cultural Institute in Guadalajara, birds from the actual Scorpion Island on Lake Chapala, nods to Antônio Carlos Jobim, Love, Vince Guaraldi, and the loose vibe that visits Chapala around Christmastime. 

Download to Donate to the Lawrence Humane Society

LYON - Croix-Rousse

     In Lyon I would walk down Rue Pierre Corneille and across Place du Maréchal-Lyautey where there were often men playing bocce, down Rue Godefrey to the back entrance of a building, up an old-fashioned paternoster lift elevator situated in the middle of a courtyard, out into cool air over stone steps, and finally through a stout, wooden door into my sister's apartment overlooking Croix-Rousse – a stunning hilly neighborhood that rises from the Rhône to a plateau at the city's highest point.  Lyon is intricate in this way, with secret passages and rooms within even older rooms within even older buildings.  I sometimes wonder about places that went undiscovered though right under my nose, and others that were never even on the verge of being discovered.  On walks home, the red glow emanating from a third floor apartment window on Rue Godefrey would distill that sense of mystery into one image.

Romain passa sous la fenêtre de Carla sans voir la main tendue et le rideau blanc.

LYON - Genève à Lyon

     Begun in a little apartment on Rue Pierre Corneille in Lyon, France in April 2010, "LYON" is complete at last.  Please enjoy listening to opening track "Genève à Lyon," featuring Chicago-based violinist/violist Andra Kulans, and return here for music, stories, photos, field recordings, videos, and poetry by French author Pierre Ducrozet in the run-up to the album's release on the 2017 spring equinox.

     Before Lyon was even a possibility, I spent some rather fraught time in South Korea.  My last moments there – watching the sun rise over mountains surrounding the city of Daegu – were slow-motion sepia tones.  The first moments in Europe, by contrast, were lush countryside and 3D low-hanging metallic clouds – all racing by a train window en route from Geneva to Lyon.  A bracing beginning – color-speed and ultra-sensory beauty after a long, greyish burn in lonely places.

La ville, pourtant, n’était encore qu’une idée.