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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: The Ludic Log isn't moving, but its
proprieter is. Updates may be spotty for the next several weeks,
but tune in anyway. All six of you.
"Chaldean queries with Jesus song" "Rouge the Bat naked nude art hot" "teach me how to rap freestyle" "demographics for soda pop" "MODOK history" "old tin baseball scoreboard" "rubberduck dick" "big black non-stag beetle" |
10.21.2004
ROGER EINHORN, JAZZ HISTORIAN: Tomcat Jepsen changed the way that people thought about jazz kazoo, there's no doubt about it. BILLY MOORE, TENOR SAXOPHONIST: I remember we was at the Woodhull Lodge up in Syracuse. It wasn't a big jazz town at the time and the Woodhull was about the only place in town you could really wail. I was there with Jody and Yank and Big Bill Murfree, and we was just shooting the breeze, having a few drinks, wating for Monroe who was the headliner that night, when suddenly this short skinny dude who's been up on stage without none of us even starts to take notice draws a harp up to his mouth. At least we thought it was a harp. But man, what come out don't sound like no harp I ever heard. ROGER EINHORN: Of course, before Tomcat Jepsen, nobody thought about jazz kazoo at all. It wasn't considered one a jazz instrument. It still isn't, really. TOMMY "BLUE" RODGERS, BANDLEADER: At the height of his career, when we were playing with Tomcat at the Blue Note in D.C., we had some reporter from the San Francisco paper come snooping around, looking for the next big thing. And at the time, we thought that was Tomcat Jepsen. So he asks us to say what it is about the notes he'd blow that was so special. And Hilton Fontaine, who was our clarinetist at the time, he said, "Man, you got to stop listening to the shrill, buzzing, annoying notes he plays. You got to listen to the shrill, buzzing, annoying notes he doesn't play." I never forgot that. That's how come I can tell it to you right now. ROGER EINHORN: People like to say he's the greatest jazz kazooist of all time. Other people like to say he's the only jazz kazooist of all time. A few people like to say he's the worst jazz kazooist of all time. Who can say who's right? Maybe all of them. Maybe none of them. KEVIN DUCOTTE, JAZZ CRITIC: The kazoo has always borne a curiously muddled reputation. Half musical instrument, half vocal technique, half that trick you do where you put a piece of paper in front of a comb...there are some schools of thought that say it's the most underrepresented instrument in the jazz idiom since the Jew's harp, while most contemporary critics argue that you can't get anything out of the kazoo you can't get out of a vocalist with throat cancer humming. But everyone agrees that Tomcat Jepsen is the beginning and ending of the conversation about jazz kazoo. Hopefully. ROGER EINHORN: Bird, Miles, Diz, 'Trane, Monk -- I think it's safe to say that all of these giants of jazz were completely unaware of Tomcat Jepsen's existence. He didn't play with every single one of them. He never met them or interacted with them in any way. He was aware of them, though -- he covered all their material, on that golden kazoo. It was a pretty one-sided relationship. BILLY MOORE: He was really tearing it up, brother, I tell you that. There was such passion, such intensity, such fire in his playing -- it sounded like the way an angel would play, or maybe the Devil. There would be times when you'd just get so caught up in the moment, so overwhelmed and just blown away by the performance...I mean, sometimes it would be three, four seconds before you'd say to yourself "Wait a minute! That motherfucker is playing a goddamn kazoo!" And then you'd walk the hell out. But those three or four seconds, they were something else. ROGER EINHORN: It wasn't literally golden, of course. It wasn't even painted gold. It was red and silver. I don't know what it was made of. Tin, I guess. VICTORIA JEPSEN, WIDOW: What is a kazoo, when all is said and done? It's just a cheap instrument you can get for a quarter at a toy store. It's a little metal tube with a membrane on the side that makes this really irritating buzzing sound when you hum or talk through a hole into it. But when my Tommy would play it, it became...well, it was still a kazoo. But it kept him out of the kitchen. That's something. |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must be knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers -- perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life." (Rainier Maria Rilke) |