A Dearth of Heroics

Reasons.  They wanted liner notes and liner notes they shall have (though more than they bargained for at that).  About the music, there’s not much to say.  Say what?  Some heads won’t get it.  And hell if I care.  If it’s about anything, it’s about going places — and even that meek attempt at an explanation is cryptic.

 

I think too much and it’s not worth my time.  But that’s a fix I’ll never kick.  My folks are just proud I haven’t cursed yet.  

 

Music is a simultaneously soothing and agitational artform and these cats can play.  Straight ahead, funky or hip-hop… phantom distinctions here… with Mo’Ming it’s about doing what they do.  

 

And these tunes are barely a taste.  Chosen mostly because they were easy to record or sickeningly catchy (…I wonder if they’ll actually print that…).  But moms always say put your best foot forward.

 

And break it off in someone’s ass.

 

(Sorry Mom.)

 

Apologizing for execution, not intent.

 

So be moved.  Be moved to dance, be moved to jump — to shout, to laugh, and cry.  We dedicate this to influences and role models.  The music isn’t abstract, but it is real.  I just hope some heads do get it.

 

Call us funk, call us jazz, call us hip-hop — Whatever tickles.  It’s a love thing, you know.  They wanted liner notes, and liner notes they got.

 

They can find their own reasons.

 

– akie bermiss 2/21/03  12:45am

Bermiss, Akie. 2008.

From blogstuffs

good morning all.  its the year 2009.  and i, your hapless neighborhood musician and blogger, am back on the horse.  its been a difficult few months.  what with brokeness and hunger and electical bills being damnably high.  and i haven’t been writing.  not on the blog.  and this, now.  when i should most definitely have been writing on it.  so much going on.  so much happening.  so many things coming to fruition.  i feel, now, like everything i should have said is over.  and now i am left trying to express further things further in the past.  more and more irrelevant.  or unnecessary.

***

last night was the completion of a year+ long project.  the premier (and only appearance in that incarnation) of Belinda Swaby’s Grace And Mercy Me.  the play for which i have spent precisely the last twelve months writing original music.  Belinda met me at Saje back when i was playing Sundays with the Mimetiks there and told me she wanted to put on a musical.  she gave me the script.  i dug it.  we decided to make it happen.  so using her lyrics i put together five original songs: My Advice, Looking For Love, It Hurts, Perfect Harmony, and Fly Away (which i still refer to in my mind as: Darkest Day).

Last night, at the Black Spectrum Theatre in Jamaica, New York.  We put the show on.  After a year of trying to do a full-on production we had to face facts and just go with a shorter hour-long skit version of the play.  including all the original songs, but significantly fewer cast members and a sort of abridged plotline. i put a band together of Kyle Jaster, Aaron Steele, and myself.  Couldn’t swing any back-up singers for what we had… so i sang the back-up lines while Music Directing.  and the play came off well.

its always nice to finish a project.  close the book on it, so to speak.  next may come a recording of the music.  or some sort of film version of the script.  or an attempt to make the production bigger… we’ll see, dear reader.  we shall see.

***

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of last week was the aabaraki studio recording session.  that is myself, Brian Forbes (on guitar and mild horn), Ari Folman-Cohen (on bass and argyle sweater), and Aaron Steele (on drums and, of course, Blackberry.) I think it was back in September that Aaron first asked me to come out to a session in the Bushwick/Williamburg.  We drove over to the spot and i was introduced to Mr. Forbes and Mr. Folman-Cohen.  we set up our respective instruments.  and played.

aaron ‘juse’ steele

out of this session came three tracks of varying lengths (though 8 minutes is a fine average).  no singing.  all playing.  there’s a funky one… an outSide one… and then a sort disparate, mid-melt cohesive one… a sick combination of our four sounds.  a month later (?) we met again, this time to try our hand at putting some tracks together possibly.  we set up a mic, went back into the room, turned on the instruments and reShaped sound once more.  eidolon, the shaping, the summoned-forth spirit-walker is called Aabaraki.

ari folman-cohen

so four months and some 12 or thirteen tracks later.  we set up to record at The Gallery.  and went to work.  twelve hour days is no thang when you’re recording in this fashion.  trying to get a whole album done.  not just a single or EP.  and this was just the beginning.  working out tempos.  playing to a click.  doing scratch vocals.  making several takes.  and then going on to the next number.  energy is high, then low, focused, then diffuse… but all the while music is getting churned out.  in between, there is some driving and some sleeping (and i had to run out and do a tech rehearsal for Grace and Mercy Me on thursday night for two hours).  i don’t remember much.  but word is, from B, that the music sounds good.  and so now… the long dark night of editing and mixing.

Me.
but remember this, dear reader, Aabaraki is.

***

then there is the small matter of Daniel Jose Older and his mysterious musical worlds.  Burundanga contiues to play.  in fact, we played once again at 169Bar on friday night (after a full day of recording for me.  i honestly have almost no recollection of the event — so exhausted was i.)  And Daniel working up for a big show called the City of Love and Disaster in march at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center.  so big gear u.  learning alot of new music.  alternately through-composed and openly improvisatory.  i really only know the music end which is cool enough, but it seems like he’s got a crack team working on the staging and such.  it is probably going to come off spectacularly.  so i’ll keep you posted.  otherwise, look for Burundanga around the city at 169Bar and Le Toukeleur (in the BK) and sitch.

***
akiebermissquartet ’08

***

that said, all the other projects are still on as well.  a couple of song-writing projects, a possible independent film score, FacetheMusic, the akie bermiss quartet*, et cetera.  and then, of course, the UNknown.  which too may present itself and alter the courses of all things.

this morning i was asked for psychological advice.  me.  how absolutely absurd.  asked if i knew the difference between a good person and a bad person.  asked if being “judgmental” made a person bad.  (simultaneously i was being dreamed about in a scenario that painted me very much as a bad person.)

i like that word, thought.  judgmental (this is how its spelled?)  Judge and Mental.  together.  i mean, its a bit misleading.  as if to say there is away NOT to be Judge-Mental.  like one can observe something, think on it, and not produce some sort of idea or personal consensus on the matter.  if there ARE non-Judge-Mental people out there — don’t bring them here!  there’s nothing i like less than someone who is cool with everything.  any and every experience is worthy of being mentally catalogue inasmuch as it contributes to one’s overall sense of the so-called “right and wrong.”  or, perhaps: good and evil.

let’s back track, shall we?

there was a time in my life when i’d polarized things so severely that i thought there truly was an objective righteous and evil.  no in between.  and that one had to choose with whom to throw one’s lot in.  as if all existence where a game of dodgeball.  where everyone lines up.  and captains from opposing sides stand-up and choose teams.

then i loosened up.  thinking perhaps there were no captains.  that one had the opportunity to choose for oneself whether to be happy or sad.  good or bad.  for the right or for the wrong.

but then also, it occured to me, what if everyone is choosing. then they can also choose to think of you as being on whatever side they decide.  people meet people and decide: i like this person.  and they go off with them and they are friends (to put the matter very simply).  or they meet someone and they decide: this person is wack.  no good.  no love for this person.  they are not of my people.  and so lines are drawn.  good and bad and right and wrong and evil.  and its quite difficult to say which is which.  that is — am i a good person?  or am i a bad person?  one asks oneself.    you may say, “well i certainly think i’m a good person.  i got to sleep every night.  i work and get tired.  i care about the people i care about.”
and that may be enough for you.

but what about your enemies?  are decidedly bad JUST because you see yourself as being good?  i wonder, wonder, wonder and wonder.  all the time over this issue.  how do we evaluate the goodness in ourselves?  (given a shared moral sensibility… of course.  which is a whole ‘nother bag of fruit.)  are we marked by our good deeds?  or by how well-loved we are?  how many love and trust us?  by the things we HAVEN’T done?  drugs, alcohol, sex?  types of drugs, types of alcohol, types of sex?!  did we intervene when we thought something wrong?  or stand back and mind ourselves?  should we enforce our sense of right on others?  are we willing to have theirs enforced on us?

lets not even talk about blame.

shall i endeavor to please everyone?  whether they endeavor to please me back or not?  if being right limits the power i have to DO right?  what then?  be right?  do right?  shouldn’t they be the same thing.  is can one BE bad with out DOING bad?
and yet… it just doesn’t seem to work out like that.

***

so here i sit.  condemned.  some how.  some way.  for somethings.  and yet — in some sense: innocent.  meaning to cause no harm.  but naturally well-suited to do so.  am i bad then?  that my innate recklessness and awkwardnesses make me unsafe for delicate things?  shall i martyr my self unto myself?

and say, reasonably, you are a bad man.  you cause harm.  people have been hurt by you.

perhaps.

***

but, suddenly, i am fed up of such things.  meaning no harm, i am causing no harm.  i am indicted of being.  reminds me of how i’d upset my father on sundays.  driving back from church.  he thought i was too angry.  too loveless.  threatened my being of such a bad disposition with send me to a psychologist.  ha.  a psychologist.

it is foolish to ask me for psychological advice.  i am — CLEARLY — confused.

and the injustice enacted upon any one of us, is an injustice against us all.  we have the makings of our own arab-israeli style conflict in this country.  if the police keep shooting and killing young black men for no apparent reason… how are we to maintain some semblance of sanity?

i’ve told shapel, many times, since high school.  the abhorrent nature of those in power is what radicalizes the marginalized.  we can be marginal and happy… i would still think it bad, but at least we wouldn’t be getting systematically rubbed out.  but when this kind of violence becomes — as it has in the past decade — par for the course.  when i hear about some young black man at a night club, train station, walking home late at night… getting shot some INSANE number of times… or being restrained and then, basically, executed.  what do you expect me to tell MY people, america?  “just relax.  it was probably another accident?  maybe there’s an explanation for all this?”

its easy to see myself running amidst smoke and fire and charred bodies.  to hear the thunder of weaponry around me.  to find myself confronted with Ras the Destroyer in the street.  and to either gear up myself and be the worst of the counter-revolutionaries… or to go find my hole in the ground and get high all day and listen to Louis Armstrong records.  i didn’t make this up.  Ellison did.  and yet, with each passing year.  i feel it closer and closer to fruition.

finally, who will bear up the burden of Grant’s body?  whatever he did wrong.  no person IN THIS COUNTRY deserves to be restrained and then shot.

where the fuck are we living?

2009.

i have to say.  i barely thought i’d make it this far.   that i’m able to sit on my crappy Jennifer Convertibles couch in the living room and write this while smoking a cigar is truly a miracle.  no one is more surprised than i.  i didn’t break down and fuck off to europe, upstate, or the west coast.   didn’t give up music, cigars, or fantasy novels.  didn’t cut my hair, lose any weight (this is fats we’re talking about, after all), or go to grad school.

– well i’m more surprised by it than anyone else, honestly.

mom died seven days short of a year ago.  i was constantly sick or physical ailing for a full three months after that.  the summer hit and i worked as constantly as i could.  the autumn came and i tried to save.  failed.  and tried again.  the winter came, christmas, new years.  and: i’m still here.

***

been watching “House of Saddam” on HBO these last two days.  its a shame they killed him.  i mean, i don’t dig the death penalty in general.  so it bothers me.  but also, i would have liked to read HIS memoirs.  callous of me, perhaps.  but i’m being frank.  (no… i’ll be Surely).

Obama got elected this past year.  (i’m sorry my mother didn’t live to see that — of all things.  its incredible.  she missed it by only a few months.)  my sister, last of the Bermisses of my generation, graduated from college and moved to Chicago.  my brother got engaged.  Netflix finally got its “Watch Instantly” feature to work on Macs.

2008.  a watermark year.

i wish i had something profound to write.  but part one is just, banal.  boring.  semi-witty remembrances.  i’m still looking ahead, i guess.  pretty excited about that.

…think i’m just gonna finish this cigar.  polish off my coffee.  and head out to rehearsal now.   sounds good.

akie