News for the End of the Month: Some Sobering, Some Optimistic

In a grisly development that’s been unfolding over the past several months – guess why – funeral director Richard Hirschman appeared on the Dr. Jane Ruby Show a couple days ago to explain the strange white fibrous material he and his colleagues have recently been finding in corpses during the embalming process. Asked if he’d saved any of it for lab analysis, Hirschman replied that he only had samples from one body because fifty to eighty percent of the cadavers he’s seen since this past summer all have the strange clotlike strands. Grossout alert: the images of dead bodies in the video link above are brief and respectful, but the stuff that Hirschman and others in his field have been pulling out of veins and arteries is not easy to look at. Thanks to Mark Crispin Miller for passing this along. 

Dr. Robert Malone, who appeared on the Rogan podcast about mass formation psychosis that “broke the internet,” for search terms at least, has been hailed as a hero. The mainstream narrative is that the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology came over from the dark side to fight lockdowns and join forces against the kill shot. Not so fast. As you can see from this video, Malone has not exactly cut ties with the dark side. In a pitch meeting for the Relcovax genetic modification shot, Malone asserts that his latest project aims for an adverse effects rate of one in a thousand. You read that right: one in a thousand. Big names like Del Bigtree and Dr. Peter McCullough, who have championed him recently, may have some tough questions for him.

The Defender reports that Pfizer’s latest attempt to delay the release of the documents submitted for FDA approval in 2020 involves invoking the Trade Secrets Act as a latest excuse to evade full disclosure. Maybe this is pure coincidence, but Pfizer is being represented in court by the international law firm DLA Piper. Douglas Emhoff, who is married to Kamala Harris, was a partner in the firm until a little over a year ago.

Let’s end this with some good news. New Hampshire state representative Leah Cushman has introduced House Bill 1022, which would make ivermectin available over the counter. It’s a savvy business move for the ruggedly mountainous little New England state, whose economy relies heavily on tourism and is still recovering from 2020.

This Is the Real New York

Who can forget their first visit to the American Museum of Natural History? It’s probably safe to say that pretty much every New Yorker has been there at least once. This blog’s owner made the first of many trips there at age four. Looking up at t-rex – and the lifesize blue whale model, and then getting to see australopithecus, and cro-magnon man, and the other exhibits – was a thrill.

But these days it seems like it’s cro-magnon man who’s running the show there. Watch these heroic freedom fighters in action as they try to get into the museum without muzzles, vaxxports or other proof of taking a lethal injection. It appears that everyone in the crowd has already paid museum admission.

There’s no violence, although you can watch the woman who appears to be the head guard racing and yelling at the other guards to “Close the doors!” For whatever reason, beyond the muzzled middle-age man who seems to be in charge, the museum staff summoned to get rid of the unmuzzled patrons won’t engage in any kind of dialogue (fast forward to the five minute mark for some very powerful footage).

There’s an equally telling exchange starting at 6:58 where a woman in a wheelchair explains to the guy who seems to be in charge that being unmuzzled and not taking the kill shot is simply her way (and the majority of New Yorkers’ way) of staying safe. He seems to sympathize. “I hope we. say, next week, throw the masks away.”

Is he just blowing smoke? It’s hard to read his body language, considering that you can’t see most of his face. He sounds sincere, or at least fed up with totalitarian restrictions. Is there any hope that life at the museum will return to normal, and a whole new generation of kids can discover t-rex, and the whale, just for starters?

What we have to keep in mind is that the museum was weaponized as a lethal injection site very early on, possibly as early as December of 2020. For surviving people in the neighborhood, this building is going to have the same kind of resonance as the churches and schools used for torture during Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1970s. Assuming that the place actually reopens without restrictions, you’ll be walking under the whale and thinking, “myocarditis.” Or worse.

Why has the museum signed on to that agenda? The AMNH has a long relationship with the Gates Foundation that goes back years. Even worse, the AMNH is a partner of Peter Daszak’s Eco-Health Alliance, who funneled Fauci money to the Wuhan lab where Covid was manufactured.

The takeaway here is that the AMNH insiders are up to their eyeballs in the global totalitarian agenda. So until muzzles, and mandatory testing, and vaxxports are banned in New York State – which they assuredly will be, Kathy Hochul be damned – we can forget about paying our respects to t-rex.

Let’s just hope that until then, t-rex stays where he is, and that some hedge fund crook doesn’t decide that a big scary fossil would look good as decor in a mansion on some private island.

A State-of-the-Art, Majestic Big Band Suite From the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra

The world is in a very strange place right now, and some of the least likely candidates are doing herculean work just about everywhere you turn. So anyone who might be surprised that some of this era’s most sweeping, majestic big band jazz would be coming out of Manitoba hasn’t heard the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra album Twisting Ways, streaming at Bandcamp. It’s more symphonic than solo-centric, comprising a couple of suites and a lyrical vehicle for tenor sax.

Pianist David Braid and composer Philippe Côté utilize texts by Lee Tsang in the shapeshifting series of themes in the album’s title suite: the group doesn’t linger long on any of them. Singer Sarah Slean traces a spiritually-inspired narrative about a mythical nightingale and an unseen hand (no, not the one that Adam Smith imagined).

Part one, The Hand follows a big, upward symphonic trajectory. “Has darkness transformed my life?” Slean asks over Braid’s uneasy piano glimmer. The nightingale ponders her “need to succeed” as the enveloping resonance rises behind her. Drummer Eric Platz rings his cymbal bells while bass trombonist D’Arcy McLean pushes the rest of the brass to dig in.

A triumphant flourish signals a pensive Braid piano break. Slean’s nightingale ponders defeat and seeks redemption while he textures fill the space from top to bottom, Braid cutting through tersely. A big swell introduces vibraphonist Stefan Bauer’s eerie cascades; the group take it out with a slow, steady lustre.

A suspensefully dramatic drum break kicks off the brief second segment, a series of emphatic, riffmic (how’s that for a new jazzapeak term?) exchanges between piano and the orchestra, building triumphantly through echo effects to a momentary calm. From there, Braid moves from insistence to spacious lyricism in the solo piano interlude Opening Glimmers

A blustery swing ensues in the epic conclusion, Hope Shadow, colorful motives bouncing from one section of the ensemble to the next, Mozart-style. The group reprise the ominous vibes theme from the opening movement, Braid taking over with a glimmer that stretches from a distant menace to find familiar comfort amid towering brass harmonies. Slean’s nightingale lands home triumphantly: “It shines, softly; it shines, oddly,” but – it shines.

Karly Epp takes over the mic the rest of the way through. She soon finds herself “drifting through clear ether” in Lydian Sky, a vast northern plains tableau, the enveloping lustre of the group serving as a launching pad for an unhurried, rising and falling Mike Morley tenor sax solo. The final number is Côté’s Fleur Variation, Epp’s crystalline vocalese serving as a foil to Bauer’s phantasmagorical vibes as the group gather steam, through robust, staggered, brassy counterpoint, a tantalizingly chromatic solo from bassist Karl Kohut up to a misty, oceanic swirl worthy of Debussy.

This is one of the most ambitiously memorable big band albums in recent months, a triumph of inspired playing by a group that also includes saxophonists Neil Watson, Sean Irvine. Shannon Kristjanson, Jon Stevens, Paul Balcain. Lauren Teterenko and Ken Gold; trumpeters Jeff Johnson, Shane Hicks, Richard Boughton, Richard Gillis and Andrew Littleford; trombonists Joel Green, Jeff Presslaff, Keith Dyrda and Francois Godere.

Goodbye Neil Young and Joni Mitchell

As Dr. Meryl Nass has observed, it’s funny how over one hundred thousand Canadian truckers can mobilize against the vaxxport, and suddenly two famous Canadian musicians from the 60s appear as shills for global totalitarianism.

Nass goes further, in connecting what appears to be a canned script for Mitchell that eerily echoes the simpering, patronizing rhetoric used by Eco-Health Alliance’s uber-sinister Peter Daszak in 2020. You remember him, right? “The key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to get to the real issues. Investors will follow if they see a profit.”

Meanwhile, Tessa Lena has taken a deep dive into how half of Neil Young’s catalog was purchased by the Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which is partly funded by the Blackstone Group. While the Blackstone Group and BlackRock are separate entities, BlackRock – as you might have guessed – owns a piece of Blackstone.

And here’s the punchline: Jeffrey Kindler, former CEO of Pfizer, is an advisor to Blackstone. You can’t make this shit up.

There are no Neil Young albums in the vast but selective New York Music Daily archive. The CSNY album with Ohio on it, rescued from a pile on the street in the East Village sometime in the mid-zeros, is going back where it belongs. It will be sad putting all those Joni Mitchell records in the trash, just like the Springsteen and Wynton Marsalis albums in the summer of 2020.

A Darkly Colorful Big Band Masterpiece From the Jazzlab Orchestra

One of the most deliciously epic, intricately imaginative albums of the past several months is Montreal band the Jazzlab Orchestra‘s latest release Loguslabusmuzikus, streaming at their music page. This is one of those records where there’s so much going on that it would take a small book to cover it all. The compositions are tuneful and playful, with a frequent noir sensibility. It would not be overhype to call this a logical descendant in a long and fiercely individualistic tradition that Gil Evans crystallized in the early 60s.

The band like funny, surreal song titles. The first is La Grande Sauve Majeure, its wary, circling initial riff anchored by Samuel Blais’ bass clarinet. Brighter harmonies rise as the song gathers steam, Felix Stussy’s piano keeping the steady, brooding undercurrent going as the melody grows puffier. Trumpeter Jacques Kuba Seguin chooses his spots, swoops and dives over the loopy noir underpinning. Bassist Alain Bédard hints at a sprint; trombonist Thomas Morelli-Bernard channels brooding blues over drummer Michel Lambert’s moody latin tom-tom flourishes. Bright but acidic horns join the churning backdrop: these detectives are going to close the case soon – but wait, Seguin has to make sure the coast is clear first. And that’s just the first song, all eleven minutes of it.

Humor de la Second Noche is another deliciously dark number, an altered noir mambo with hints of dub reggae. Lurid Gil Evans blue-neon modes from the horns color the scene over Bédard’s marionettish pulse. The uneasily quadrangulated saxes of Blais, Mario Allard. Benjamin Deschamps and Annie Dominique flicker and flutter around Lambert’s steady sway; Stussy takes a tantalizingly ominous break echoed by the trombone.

The album’s second ten-minute-plus monstrosity is Pum la Suite, introduced by a thoughtfully spiraling soprano sax solo, the group come in and find themselves punching in to answer Stussy’s ripples and enigmatic glimmer. Cheery, brassy swing gets cuisinarted at slow speed, bookending an increasingly feral sax solo. Coy horn and drum clusters go back and forth, trombone stepping out as the voice of reason.

Catchy, circling, slowly swaying phrases also fuel the next number, Bluesy del Lunedi. trombone and then alto sax resonate and then race over Stussy’s judicious modalities. Soprano sax – it’s hard to tell who’s playing what, considering that all the reed players in the band seem to play every sax there is – takes the song in a darker direction, to a brass-driven, stairstepping conclusion.

Catchy, wary syncopation and staggered variations on bright riffs also figure in Criucm, Stussy becoming a pierrot lunaire in a vigorous, all-too-brief solo. A punchy bass solo brings back the eerie, chiming piano. The horns get more emphatic, but without a hint of resolution, on the way out.

The group follow a similar pattern, but with more of a gleaming horn interweave in Le Grain Blanc dans les Voiles – there’s definitely wind in these sails. Pensive soprano sax swoops and prowls; the group tease with a suspenseful closing riff but opt instead for a spare trumpet solo grounded by growling bass clarinet.

How much bloodshed and mayhem is there in the album’s most epic track, Casse Pattes – Casse Gueule – Casse Têtes? None, it seems, but it’s a lot of fun. Punchy brass herald the illusion of a bullfight, tightly scampering piano riffs and a lefthand crush from Stussy filling in the blanks. Alto sax rises matter-of-factly over an energetically modal vamp; after a terse drum solo, the group reprise the previous number’s false-ending trope, but with more predictable results.

Another toreador riff kicks off Lunes et Marees, a devious trombone/bass clarinet conversation increasingly overwritten by a colorful parade of voices. Extended solos from flute and soprano sax make this the airiest tune on the record; even the bass clarinet can’t resist going up the scale. They take it out on a genially bluesy note.

The group conclude their report in Compte Rendu, the closest thing to straight-up swing here with its blue-sky ensemble riffage and a piano solo that finally spins into wee-hour contentment. If you love big band jazz as much as this blog does, don’t blink on this inspiring, imaginative crew.

Poignant, Gorgeous New Songs For Viola Da Gamba on Almalé’s New Album

Pilar Almalé’s axe is the viola da gamba. It’s an unusual choice for an original songwriter, especially since most of the repertoire for the instrument is from the baroque era and before . Almalé has an expressive voice, uses the gamba for both cello-like sustain and basslines, writes strong melodies and reinvents older material with considerable flair. Her new album, Hixa Mia (My Daughter), released under her last name, is streaming at Spotify. She has a fantastic, similarly adventurous band. Violinist Thomas Kretszchmar and guitarist Alex Comín blend terse, imaginative jazz and Romany influences without cluttering the sound, percussionist Fran Gazol adding flamenco and Middle Eastern grooves.

Almalé opens the album with the title track, a catchy, Andalucian-flavored, poignant minor-key anthem with a swaying, levantine-tinged groove and a stark, jazz-inflected violin solo. You could call this folk-rock, or Romany music, or something fresh and new. The string harmonies on the slow, gently syncopated second track, simply titled Passacalle, are stark, rich and reedlike, a close approximation of an accordion. Comín bobs and weaves and chooses his spots, whether with feathery tremolo-picking, big lush chords or carefree single-note jazz lines.

She opens A la Luna, a gorgeously slinky, trickily rhythmic Turkish-inspired number, with a broodingly bowed solo, bringing a visceral sense of longing to the lyrics. Kretszchmar subtly builds his solo to a searing peak.

Pianist Lucas Delgado plays carefully articulated, somber lines in Flow My Tears, a moody, klezmer-esque ballad which Almalé sings in low-key, cadenced English. The group veer between brisk Romany-flavored jazz, a moody ballad and the baroque in the instrumental Blue Lamento. It makes a good bridge to Folias Gallegas, an upbeat, Celtic-tinged circle dance with an austere, baroque-flavored solo gamba break midway through.

La Patetica, a solo gamba piece, comes across as a stormy mashup of Tschaikovsky and a Bach cello suite. Almalé launches a-cappella into the album’s final cut, Los Guisados, a rousing, rustically waltzing anthem that rises out of an unexpected lull to a tantalizing white-knuckle restraint. It’s unlike anything else released in the last several months. Fans of music from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Black Sea will love this stuff.

Let’s Kill Kathy Hochul’s New Concentration Camp Scheme

Every year, there are a whole bunch of crazy bills introduced in the New York State legislature. Most of them are there just for show, and virtually of those loony proposals die before they get to committee. You may remember New York State bill A416, which would have given Andrew Cuomo the right to detain anyone for any reason.

Its sponsor, N. Nick Perry of Brooklyn, withdrew it after it stirred up a whirlwind of resistance. See what happens when we fight? We win!

Now we’re going to have to do the same with Governor Kathy Hochul’s sneaky end run around the legislative branch. She’s resurrected Perry’s scheme via a very vaguely worded regulation inserted into a long series of other regulations scheduled to take effect in a little more than two weeks, unless we stop it. We have until February 14 before things get really ugly.

The full text is here at this downloadable PDF. Like A416, it’s presented under the guise of a public health measure. It gives the Governor authority to detain anyone indefinitely for any reason – and force them to undergo any medical procedure deemed “necessary,” a flagrant violation of the Nuremburg Code. There are subtle changes in the language of existing quarantine measures: as just one example, “diagnosed” is changed to “determined” – by whom? Hochul doesn’t say.

“Likely to have a particular disease” becomes “possibly having a particular disease.” Ad nauseum – you get the picture. Here is where it gets positively Orwellian: “Confinement shall mean enforcement of an isolation or quarantine order through the use or possible use of law enforcement personnel.”

Just for the sake of our sanity, let’s not jiust assume that if this order makes it into State law, somebody in the legislature is going to play hero and stop it. Let’s save ourselves the hassle – and keep wannabe dictator Hochul from calling up a goon squad. Here’s what we need to do:

Find your representative in the New York State Assembly and contact them. They may not be aware of this because it’s not a bill, it’s a regulation coming out of the Governor’s office. We elect our legislators to make sure we have laws to protect us from threats like this. Use the subject line Re: Amendment of Part 2, Section 405.3 and Addition of Section 58-1.14 to Title 10 NYCRR (Investigation of Communicable Disease; Isolation and Quarantine)

Next, make a public comment by sending an email to regsqna@health.ny.gov.

The final step is to contact the two most important players in the legislature and voice your concerns. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie is at speaker@nyassembly.gov, (518) 455-3791. Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins is at scousins@nysenate.gov, (518) 455-2585.

If you’re still all fired up, you could contact the Governor’s office at (518) 474-8390 and vent, but be aware that nobody ever answers the phone there. All indications are that Hochul is locked into the BlackRock/World Economic Forum/Gates Foundation holocaust agenda, so you’re not going to influence her. But if the voicemail overflows, it may create some static among the staffers and that will be useful to us in some way.

Big shout out and thanks to Michael Kane at NYC Uncensored and John Gilmore at Teachers For Choice for their eternal vigilance. Please share far and wide!

A Haunting New Thriller Score by Isobel Waller-Bridge

Today’s episode in New York Music Daily’s second annual January-long celebration of big sounds and towering achievements is Isobel Waller-Bridge‘s 25-track original soundtrack to the World War II thriller Munich: The Edge of War, streaming at Spotify. Interestingly, the composer doesn’t go for retro, whether with orchestration or any of the European or American pop sounds of the day. Instead, her brooding score follows a largely desolate, chilly trajectory that often ends up in ambient industrial territory. It would work just as readily in a dystopic sci-fi thriller.

Tara Nome Doyle sings the opening credits theme, You Dream with a drifting, hazy warmth over lushly orchestrated, moody piano pop. After that, there’s a tensely hurried walk to the British royal residence, coldly plasticky atmospherics and ominous cello beneath disquieted violin harmonics – or their electronic analogue.

From there it’s much of the same. The majority of the tracks here are very brief, under the two-minute mark. Waller-Bridge likes to say a lot with a little: there are no grandiose moments here, only unrelenting grey skies. Sad minimalist piano beneath scrapy microtonal strings, mercilessly mechanical footfalls, grim smoke-off-the-battlefield tableaux and a mercifully brief, eerily whistling cameo by Hitler himself follow in turn.

With its swooping violin, the next-to-last segment, They’ll Hang You For That will give you shivers. Doyle brings the soundtrack full circle with a stripped-down German-language version of the opening theme.

Some Catchy Songs and a Real Heartbreaking One

Been awhile since there’s been a playlist on this page. Four songs in twelve minutes for your listening pleasure. Click on the song title for audio, click on the artist name for their webpage.

Night Palace‘s Jessica Mystic is a drifty, wistful Lynchian jangle-and-keys pop song with a ska-tinged alto sax solo. It all works: go figure.

Churchyard. by Ex-Void is a blast of female-fronted powerpop that’s over in a minute 58. The chorus is “I get so bored.” But not by this song.

Joydah Mae gives us Hands Off Our Children, a big acoustic singalong anthem for our time: “Which side of history will you participate in?”

Warning: this last one will bring tears to your eyes. Teenage songwriter Julie Elizabeth couldn’t record her song Silence because she took the kill shot, “Thinking this would save me, I did what you asked me to…I was loyal to the fight, I lined right up to do what’s right.” And now this up-and-coming performer is too badly crippled to perform. Her friend April recorded it – and sang truth to power over a backing track at the freedom rally at the Lincoln Memorial last Sunday.

A Characteristically Epic Texas Blues-Themed Playlist From the Rough Guide Compilers

The Rough Guide compilations were launched back in the 90s to capitalize on the travel guide brand. The book series has fallen on hard times. How are the compilations doing? These tireless playlisters are still at it. Over the past year, they’ve gone deep into the archives for a couple of fascinating volumes of oldtime acoustic blues songs, with a mix of what they call the “roots of jazz,” and a second volume in what is now a Best Country Blues subset. If you aspire to being Steve Buscemi in Ghost World (remember his cabinet full of rare blues 78s?) this is about as close as it gets.

The latest in the series is the Rough Guide to Texas Blues, streaming at youtube. It’s a mix of recently digitized rarities along with some material by well-known artists from the 20s and 30s. It isn’t limited to Texans, nor does it seem to be focused on any one particular style of blues. But it’s a goldmine for fans of old acoustic Americana

Of the big names here, it’s fascinating to hear a young T-Bone Walker when he was still an up-and-coming guitarist: his colorful pianist partner gets the spotlight in their Trinity River Blues. Blind Willie Johnson leads a duet in Keep the Lamp Trimmed and Burning, an early Texas shuffle with gospel ambience. Blind Lemon Jefferson is represented by a scratchy, out-of-tune, cynical One Dime Blues. And Leadbelly – one of the ringers here – sends him a salute in a bracingly picturesque talking blues, My Friend Blind Lemon.

Little Hat Jones was a nimble fingerstyle guitarist. Did he end up in Texas after a time in Virginia Piedmont territory? Listening to his Bye Bye Baby Blues, that wouldn’t be out of the question. Oscar Woods distinguishes himself with his expansive fretwork and deadpan sense of humor in the hokum blues Don’t Sell It, Don’t Give It Away.

In her insistent, practically indignant take of Black Hand Blues, Hattie Hudson refers to her pianist, Willie Tyson as “Mr. Cotton” – a question of provenance? Black Ace’s You’re Gonna Need My Help Someday is set to the tune of Sitting on Top of the World. Which came first?

Bessie Tucker intones Got Cut All to Pieces over tasty, terse, James P. Johnson-style piano. Funny Papa Smith’s Howlin Wolf Blues No. 1 is unusual for having both a rhythm and lead guitarist on it. It’s hardly a stretch to hear how swing jazz could morph out of a romp like Carl Davis and the Dallas Jamboree Jug Band’s Dustin’ the Frets

Native Texan Victoria Spivey – the Madonna of the 1920s – sings It’s Evil Hearted Me with a coy, deadpan delivery over jaunty saloon piano. Crooner/guitarist Jesse “Babyface” Thomas’ grimly detailed Down in Texas Blues predates gangsta rap by sixty years. In West Texas Woman, pianist Whistlin’ Alex Moore paints a surreal picture of a pickup scene under some pretty dire circumstances.

Willie Reed drawls his way through Going Back to My Baby. Ramblin’ Thomas spices his Ground Hog Blues with bottleneck riffs. Gene Campbell also shows off some incisive chops in Western Plains Blues.

One of the more amusing rarities here is harmonica player William McCoy’s solo instrumental workout Mama Blues. A mandolin is the central instrument in the Dallas String Band’s ragtime shout-out to their home turf. When’s the last time you heard swoopy bowed bass in an old ragtime romp?

Texas Alexander’s Bell Cow Blues is the most stark, rustic number here – you got to come on in his kitchen. Coley Jones’ sly talking blues The Elder’s He’s My Man is the most primitive. Andrew Hogg’s Kind Hearted Blues is the most haphazard – did he know the record was being cut? Texas Bill Day and Billiken Johnson’s Elm Street Blues is the downright oddest, with Day’s falsetto vocals.

Other songs have musical resonance that extends to the rock era. The compilation’s opening track, Henry Thomas’ Don’t Ease Me In, was famously butchered by the Grateful Dead. And it turns out that the Beach Boys stole the melody of Frenchy’s String Band’s ragtime instrumental Texas and Pacific Blues for an early hit.