This story first appeared in Nippertown, my first story there in months, and I’m pleased to be back, again. Let me explain. The late, great Greg Haymes (“Sergeant Blotto” in Albany rock-comedy band Blotto) and his partner in life and creativity Sara Ayers published Nippertown for a decade until Greg passed last year. I wrote and photographed stories there when they didn’t fit the Gazette style or format and felt proud doing so: It was the hippest, best-curated view of music and other arts in the Albany area. It retains that mantle since Sara handed the keys to publisher Jim Gilbert late last year. A big shout-out to Jim for opening this door.
I miss the stairs, and much else about Caffe Lena – but we don’t have to miss the music entirely.
Blues great Mississippi John Hurt was playing there, first time I climbed those stairs; and blues were on the menu when I went up the virtual stairs Wednesday as the Mark Emanation duo (with guitarist Tom Dolan) played to three cameras in a house empty but for host Sarah Craig, stage tech Ian Hamelin and camera-video/broadcast sound tech Joel Moss.
The venerable (60 years) Saratoga Springs coffeehouse presents live music nearly every night in its Stay Home Sessions, both live streams and archived shows; plus instructional sessions.
Accessing Wednesday’s show was easy via Youtube at www.caffelena.org, Choosing what virtual show to watch via Mac from my Schenectady home-office desk, less so. Shows streaming Wednesday included the peripatetic Erin Harkes from hereabouts, also Nashvillians I’ve met while visiting my brother Jim Hoke there: Joe Pisapia at my cellist-nephew Austin Hoke’s poker-dinner parties, John England leading the hardest-hitting hard country band on the neon-splashed lower Broadway bar strip from Roberts Western Wear. But I digress.
The blues seemed right for me Wednesday, though, in memory of both Mississippi John Hurt from my first Caffe visit and Emanation’s long association with Ernie Williams, whose ghost climbed the stairs with him and Dolan.
Emanation, hereafter MA, started by placing himself in the Caffe’s history, citing past shows there including benefits that burnish the bluesman’s long reputation with Williams, Folding Sky, current crew Soul Sky and almost uncounted others.
MA and TD have made music together since their early teens in Watervliet schools; and it showed Wednesday. At their best, they flowed smooth and easy. Handoffs and endings sometimes felt ragged, though, yet that seemed OK in these days when practicing seems problematic. They know what their best stuff is, so after warming up on two songs with more generic than specific messages, they hit an early peak by getting sadly real in “Watervliet Waltz.” Here they mourned change as loss, noting globalism as a zero-sum game our Rust-Belt towns are losing.
The production was sharp, MA’s vocals and both guitars coming through clear. Three cameras caught the action (though both played seated), pivoting on the beat to catch TD’s solo in “What Am I Gonna Do,” then right back to MA for his break, for example. MA aimed his voice south in songs set there including the plaintive post-Katrina “Rain Keep Fallin’ Down,” pleading “Can we make it” in words that seem sadly apt today. Mourning marked the next number, too: “He Don’t Live Here Any More,” dedicated to departed fellow bluesman Tom Healey; but in this number and others with local settings, MA sang in a distinctly northeastern, Springsteen-echoing, Rust-Belt howl.
The mood shifted to anger in CSN&Y’s “Ohio,” intro’ed with MA’s recollection of protests announced in placards inserted in newspapers he delivered as an 8thgrader appalled by the Kent State National Guard murders. They nailed it, and held their mood of modulated outrage through “I Remember Bobby Sands” about the Irish hunger-strike hero. While TD riffed most of the hot solos – his break in “”Frozen” might have melted a glacier – MA’s coda in “Ohio” and fiery lead in “”Sands” sparkled just as bright. So did his slide solo driving the stoic shuffle “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be Another Working Day.”
Late in the show, they riffled back through the Ernie Williams songbook, MA explaining how he and his band mates transmuted Williams’ road-trip stories and recollections into songs they’d write for their elder-leader to sing. MA’s humility in noting they’d had to grow into those songs spotlighted in powerful poignancy how the blues flow from generation to generation.
Their best songs followed me down the Caffe’s virtual stairs as they wound down, reaped the applause from their audience of three; so did CSN&Y’s “Ohio,” written in a time as troubled as our own. I remembered, too, how Graham Nash told me in an interview how proud he was of “Ohio” – although it followed and eclipsed his own idyllic “Teach Your Children Well.” Nash recalled “Ohio” pushed “Teach” off the singles chart, but suggested it deserved to, that its message was that important.
We don’t know what important angry, compassionate or even funny messages our singers will sing about these times. But we can expect to hear many of them at the top of the stairs of Caffe Lena.
Live chat and a virtual tip jar to support the performers and the Caffe are available during streams.
Son Zak suggested I grab and gab: pick out, listen to and talk about an album. So I picked a buried treasure, Accept No Substitutes, a half-forgotten masterpiece by Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. It’s a 1969 classic from the mid-south by way of LA, a record Jimi Hendrix described as “Call it spiritual, and leave it at that.” I’ve loved it since the summer of Woodstock.
Acceptmay be less well known than Motel Shot, a later effort whose bulging talent roster boasted British superstar Eric Clapton. “Slowhand”/God jumped the sinking ship of Blind Faith to sail instead on the soul-gospel-R&B wings of the loose crew of flyover-state pros Mississippian Delaney Bramlett recruited from LA’s Wrecking Crew studio gang. An elastic ensemble, Delaney and Bonnie’s “Friends” featured top talent including George Harrison, Duane and Gregg Allman, Dave Mason, King Curtis and more. Clapton once said Bramlett taught him how to sing. This album shows those lessons in Delaney’s confident soulful swagger. Then-wife Bonnie – likely the palest ever Ikette (background singer in Ike and Tina Turner’s Revue) – more than holds her own with power and subtlety.
Like the Mad Dogs and Englishmen touring juggernaut he launched a few years later behind Joe Cocker, and with some of the same players, Leon Russell was the guiding principle shaping the Friends as keyboardist and arranger. But here, the hit-record aim of LA studio cats animates the music more than the laid-back Tulsa shuffles that dominated his later music, while also miraculously retaining a proud regional tang.
Acceptis a glorious monster of deep soul.
Only Dan Penn’s exhortation “Do Right Woman” stretches past five minutes and most tunes hit it and quit it in around three. They’re righteous radio-ready blasts of concise power.
Like “Do Right,” many songs urge better behaviors, but without preaching or pretense. They deliver their wisdom from the neighboring barstool, not the pulpit. Huge sonic generosity confers a welcoming acceptance that renders the album title deliciously warm, un-ironic.
There’s a dancefloor beat under nearly everything. Voices and horns mass into choirs with soloists standing up amid muscular harmonies. They shake out their robes and reach for the stars; most later became stars. The Friends on Acceptinclude future luminaries Jim Keltner, drums; Carl Radle, bass; trumpeter Jim Price, organist Bobby Whitlock and saxophonist Bobby Keys, guitarist Jerry McGee and singer Rita Coolidge. But the album is less about star-time than about speaking to us since these masters play with such low-key, well, human-ness and a well-oiled command of sounds that, like The Band’s music, predates commercial trends of the time. It helps that Keltner’s drum sound feels way clearer and cleaner than most percussion engineering of the time.
The opening “Get Ourselves Together” enlists the listener in the vibe right out of the box. More than reminding us that we’re all in this together – a lesson compelling enough in these times – it announces that we’re doingthis together; active and energetic. Just try to listen passively to Accept– can’t be done.
Next, “Someday” revs the sonic-righteous force with a tempo shift in the middle that carries your pulse with it, inside it.
“Ghetto” is Delaney at his most powerfully plaintive, riding Russell’s choir-loft piano like sun sparkling on moving water, until women’s voices edge their way in, pushing him into falsetto, then shouts, as strings gang up on us for a minute.
A march beat chugs foursquare under “When the Battle Is Over,” Bonnie’s voice answering Delaney’s power in “Ghetto,” This time, stirring women’s voices lock to bluesy piano-and-guitar chords before Delaney knocks on the door, walks in, sings his piece (or peace?), both challenging and decorating Bonnie’s lead. On its face “Battle” may seem a simple, obvious report on the battle of the sexes – and Delaney and Bonnie divorced three years after this album hit. So the next three tunes – “Dirty Old Man,” “Love Me a Little Bit Longer” and “I Can’t Take it Much Longer” – deliver pleas powered by defiance more than desperation. In “Dirty Old Man,” Bonnie warns, “Darling, listen here” and growls strong in accusation.
If “Do Right Woman” is the album’s moral fulcrum, its last two tunes bear enough heft in exultant forgiveness to balance it. The pulsating “Soldiers of the Cross” waves the flag of united action, in humility, before breaking out into “This Little Light of Mine,” Bonnie leading in proud exhortation. After its up-and-down dynamic, you wipe sweat from your face and marvel that this great band drove us so hard in just a few breaths over three minutes.
Where to go from there but “Gift of Love” with its serene mid-tempo benediction reassuring us that “love is everywhere.”
As it fades, Bonnie’s voice rings in the choir behind Delaney’s comforting words.
In Jazz Fest pilgrimages with Dennis Bidwell and Mike Gondek, nicknames developed: Dennis is Boogaloo, I’m Muffuletta Slim and Gondek is, well, Gondek. Dennis keeps a Jazz Fest journal and sent his own reaction to the mysterious appearance of the converted psychedelic school bus in my First Jazz Fest account. We both regret not boarding this conveyance to wherever and who knows what.
That will always remain as a What The Fuck Were We Thinking in not boarding the Interstellar Transmission that night. An ultimate lost opportunity. It would no doubt have been a life-changing trip to a parallel universe, with Ken Kesey as travel guide. But we, timid souls, let it slip by.
From The Journal, Thursday, May 3, 2012:
“Then on to dba on Frenchman for Little Band of Gold. Warren Storm (75 yrs old), the leader of the band, on drums; CC Adcock on guitar; Don Egan keyboards; 2 old sax players; pedal steel. All from Lafayette area. Warren was a pop swamp guy in the 70’s . Ani Di Franco appeared for several numbers. Glen Hansard (Ireland, Once) guested. Also Billy Squire (Boston heavy metal, 80’s) on guitar, and a harmonica player who looked like he was from KISS. Fantastic set in a very hot and crowded spot. Great beers on tap – including NOLA Hopitchoulas IPA.
We emerged to be greeted by Intergallactic Transmission – a psychedelic converted schoolbus with band playing inside, open rear door revealing drummer wailing away. A couple stumbled out – “Where Are We?”. They cruise around, taking passengers, playing for tips.
I’m a Hoke or Hokey, just as every Hochanadel has shared those nicknames and can verify that MANY mistaken versions pop up in writing and aloud. We laugh, we groan, we share them with siblings and cousins and collect them in a bulging file.
Hokem-otto, Hasanudu, Hoke-a-pock-a-newberry blues
Lastly, I like this one faxed to my dad on his last job: Hoekenettle
I used to dread the first day in a new classroom where a teacher would struggle, settling on either a good-faith-but-faulty pronunciation or a joke. Either way, every class would break up into laughter. So my first function in each new school was comic relief – and maybe respite from ridicule for any classmate vulnerable by appearance, odor or faulty family reputation.
My musician younger brother Jim changed his name to Hoke on finding the only employer who consistently pronounced Hochanadel correctly was Emmylou Harris, a goddess in many ways.
And considering how Jim and I co-discovered music together, this whole thing is a sort of hokes (plural, like hokes’) jukebox anyway.
I was ready to love Jazz Fest when I first pilgrimaged there in 2008
The first music I ever loved was traditional jazz, called Dixieland everywhere but New Orleans, where Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong and other street kids, rebels and inventors devised it from African, European and Caribbean roots.
Then came the jovial bounce of Fats Domino, the fierce glee of Little Richard – I know, he’s from Georgia but made his best records in New Orleans – the zooming accordions of zydeco… I could go on, and I think I have, as guitarist Leo Kottke said once onstage at Troy Music Hall.
Crowd enjoys Kirk Joseph’s four-Sousaphone band at Jazz Fest 2008. Photo (c) Michael Hochanadel
Jazz Fest would happen right soon in normal time: the last weekend of April and first weekend in May. It’s cancelled this year, like almost every other cultural expression that depends on and rewards gathering. But New Orleans public radio station WWOZ presents a virtual Fest on the air.
Here’s how it hit me, my first time, as I reported in my column:
People said for years that I had to go, and they were right; but they also warned me it’s instantly addictive, and I’m afraid they’re right about that, too. My first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival – “Jazz Fest,” as attendees call it, though there’s less jazz than of everything else – was the biggest, best, mellowest music experience I’ve seen since the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Words fail, mostly, by which I mean, here are some snapshots.
Jazz Fest may be the only place on earth where I would leave a perfectly fine – well, up and down, really – Stevie Wonder show to see trumpeter Terence Blanchard lead his jazz band and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in his “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina).” Raindrops big as crab cakes fell during Stevie’s set, but a rainbow formed – I swear! – as he sang “Ribbon in the Sky” and the sun shone like Blanchard’s trumpet into the jazz tent as he etched an eloquent message of loss and hope.
The enormous devastation of what people call “the storm” was every bit as overwhelming in the direction of heartbreak and desolation as Jazz Fest is in its exhilaration and sheer fun.
The only possible complaint about Jazz Fest is there’s too much that’s too good, all at once. Asked on my return if choices arose between two good things at once, I said, “Hell no!” – There are usually about five good things at once on its 12 stages. I saw 26 acts in four days at Jazz Fest including two bands with two sousaphones each, one with three drummers (Jason Marsalis’s mighty Max Roach tribute) and ten groups I’d never heard of, and everything was at least good. There’s no wrong choice among Richard Thompson, Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste, John Boutte, D.L. Menard & the Louisiana Aces and the Ebenezer Baptist Church Radio Choir, but no easy way to choose, either. How could piano fans choose among keyboard killers Art Neville, Henry Butler, and Ethan Iverson with the Bad Plus, all playing at the same time, while the astounding Trombone Shorty was simultaneously playing perhaps the hottest set of all?
The return to Jazz Fest of the Neville Brothers in their first hometown show since Katrina for the closing set promised and delivered a powerful catharsis of sheer homecoming joy that brought tears to many. Guest Carlos Santana played way looser and wilder with the Nevilles than in his own set preceding them.
Randy Newman provided a compelling Jazz Fest anthem with “Louisiana 1927,” singing it in deep sadness after proclaiming New Orleans “my favorite place on earth.” Others sang it there: Marcia Ball, the great but unknown-outside-the-city John Boutte, and Aaron Neville in his reportedly sky-splitting set in the Gospel Tent.
Late addition Alejandro Escovedo made the most of his too-early slot after thunderstorms drenched the place, playing fierce and touchingly sweet Texas rock to a sparse crew happily standing slack-jaw-dazzled in puddles before the Accura main stage, one of three stages that accommodate SPAC-sized crowds.
Playing solo, as Newman had on the same big stage, Richard Thompson said he’d represent “the northern European tradition of complex poly-rhythms,” his wryly arched eyebrow visible at 100 yards. His musically straightforward but lyrically dark songs connected surprisingly well in the hot sun.
Discoveries worked both ways: Musical pilgrims from afar were knocked out by Kirk Joseph’s Backyard Groove or the Melody Clouds – New Orleans acts that don’t play out of town – and it was fun to see New Orleanians get hip to Thompson or to the Oakland funk of Tower of Power, both in their Jazz Fest debuts.
The 1960s era soul singer Bettye LaVette just tore up the Jazz Tent, singing great at 62 and reveling in a comeback she is working hard to earn. Fans fanned out in rapt, dense deltas outside the doors of the mobbed Gospel Tent during a tribute to Mahalia Jackson by Irma Thomas, Marva Wright and Raychell Richard.
The food at Jazz Fest is famous as the music, and the T-shirts and other fashions are cheerfully outrageous. Best Fest foods I found were a giant Cajun duck po’boy and a steaming bowl of crawfish etouffe. Best T-shirts: “Boudreaux’s Butt Paste” (for diaper rash and other afflictions of one’s nether parts), “Bowling for Concubines,” and one promoting a beer: “Polygamy Porter: Why Stop at Just One?” A woman in a barely-there black bikini, cowboy hat and white rubber shrimp-boat boots to mid-calf walked arm in arm with a guy in a white suit, starched shirt and tie, pants rolled to his knees and red alligator shoes tied around his neck, both trudging happily through ankle-deep mud with drinks in hand.
For many, Jazz Fest is just the beginning. There’s dinner, and a throbbing club scene. Waiting for a table in the great cajun restaurant Cochon on Tchoupitoulas Street, my two fellow musical pilgrims (Jazz Fest vets since 1995) and I spotted Diana Krall and her band at the neighboring stand-up cocktail table. Actor John C. Reilly bumped into me in the Jazz Tent without spilling his beer or mine.
At Mid-City Lanes, the famous Rock & Bowl (you’ve seen the shirts) offers 24 lanes, on-the-spot embroidery of your bowling shirt and, the night we went there, four zydeco bands playing at 10 p.m., midnight, 2 and 4 a.m. The next night at Southport Hall, a J.B. Scotts-like place tucked against a levee, the subdudes welcomed a parade of old friends to the stage. And the next night, pianist Jon Cleary jammed the Maple Leaf so full that, standing just 20 feet away, the only person I could actually see onstage was the huge guitar player Derwin “Big D” Perkins. Next door, Jacques Ymo’s restaurant was still serving at 1 a.m. An ancient pickup parked in the street and on the sidewalk was part of the restaurant: In its bed sat a couple delighted with the choicest table in town.
The only night I got to bed before 1 a.m. was before a 7 a.m. flight home when the airport was full of hung-over, sunburned, sometimes still muddy but really happy people.
The deepest funk experience of a supremely funky four days was a visit to Ernie K-Doe’s Mother-in-Law Lounge. (Check Neil Strauss’s NY Times story “All Dolled Up in His Lounge and Shrine.”) K-Doe parlayed his 1961 No. 1 hit “Mother-In-Law” into this cozy two-room tavern, with an apartment upstairs where his widow Antoinette K-Doe lives. In the corner of the bar lounges what Antoinette calls “the statue:” a manikin that uncannily resembles the late singer, dressed on the day we visited in a garish red suit, rhinestone shoes and meticulously tended wig. Warmly hospitable, Antoinette spoke of her late husband as if he were still alive, explaining that his caretaker changed his clothes “when he needed that” – for public appearances. She often takes “the statue” around, in a hearse, to her cooking demonstrations, and to Jazz Fest.
See, people go to Jazz Fest, at least in effigy, even after they’re dead.
Daily Gazette May 16, 2008
Re-reading this now, during the Big Ugly, reminds me of how Jazz Fest ALWAYS delivers a miraculous experience on your first visit – a peak of surprise fun that is addictive as any drug and brings you back again and again.
Randy Newman sings “Louisiana 1927” at Jazz Fest 2008. Photo (c) Michael Hochanadel
That’s also why Fest veterans love bringing newbies: to be nearby when that novice Fest-goer gets that miracle.
Mine came in that visit to the Mother-In-Law Lounge in the Treme. We were driving by when Mike* shouted, “Look, SHE’s out there!” Dennis* hit the brakes, gliding to the curb before the scabby lawn alongside the Lounge where Antoinette K-Doe and her sister sat at a picnic table sister snapping beans into a big bowl. Nobody was a stranger to Antoinette who immediately invited us to the dinner she was preparing. She told us she’d also invited Dr. John but he was still up in the air. Literal-linear me, I thought this meant his flight from New York hadn’t landed yet.
She took us inside the Lounge and showed us around, mixing reverence with a matter of fact directness as she brought us to “the statue” – the garish enduring representation of her late husband. Unmoving but not inert, it radiated a presence, a power – conferred and preserved by her devotion to him. Not it, him. She spoke of “the storm, which many surivors won’t, recounting how she hid in the dark, sweltering second floor of the bar, announcing to intruders she heard below that she had a shotgun and would come down and use it. They left. As we left, Mike shook hands with Antoinette. Spotting the sneaky-subtle way he pressed a bill into her palm, folded small, considerately discreet, I wish I’d been as alert to the opportunity to help.
Antoinette’s lesson in the persistence of devotion, through anything, and the permanence of powerful personalities, was worth more than I could ever have paid. Her love had outlived him; just as the Mother In Law Lounge out-lived her. She died of a heart attack, in the Lounge, on Lundi Gras, 2009 – the year after Mike and Dennis and I met her there.
Ernie K-Doe didn’t write “Mother In Law” about Antoinette’s mom. He also liked his first mother-in-law, by all accounts. Antoinette rescued him from living on the streets and helped him buy and run the bar. Get famous in New Orleans, and you stay famous.
We didn’t go back to Antoinette’s dinner that night, just as we didn’t board the converted schoolbus to infinity – “Interstellar Transmission” painted on the side – that roared past us on Esplanade Avenue. It carried a band and fans; happy young black men making music inside, bringing the funk as they rocked the bus, the whole block, as they passed. They waved to us on the sidewalk, inviting us in. The rear emergency exit of the bus was gone and we could see the drummer, just inside, sweat gleaming in the streetlights’ glow as they roared past Buffa’s Lounge, bound for outer space. Mike Gondek and Dennis Bidwell are my Jazz Fest guides, inviting me along on my first (2008) expedition there via Nashville and Houston, then on four returns thereafter. I owe them VERY big. Regulars since 1995, they’d attended the first resumption Jazz Fest after “the storm,” when Bruce Springsteen and his Seeger Sessions Band folk-rocked musical messages of defiant, resilient resolve, on April 30, 2006.
We’ll see what Dennis has to say about the “interstellar Transmission” in an upcoming post.
Hoke's Jukebox 