Mango Pudding Blues 3.0

TAKE THE A TRAIN

Longtime readers are aware that we here at Mango Pudding Blues have a powerful love of the hippie jazz best personified by the mighty Pharoah Sanders. And so it was with great toe-curling anticipation that we endured the long wait for the arrival, from Amazon by mail, the 1969 album Spririts Known and Unknown by the late Leon Thomas.

Of the tiny portion of people who seriously listen to music there is a tiny portion who listen to jazz, and a tiny portion of them know Leon Thomas best as the man who yodels on Pharoah’s signature song, The Creator Has a Master Plan.

Yes. So. And it came, and it did not disappoint.

And the CD has nine extra tracks that have in fact nothing much to do with Spirits Known and Unknown, tracks that were recorded over ten years earlier, in 1958, at Thomas’ first session as a leader. These tunes, the liner notes said, aren’t really like the crazy dashiki jazz of Sprits Known and Unknown, which Thomas got into later. And so we thought we would find them a bore. But among those tracks is a recording of Duke Ellington’s Take the A Train that is among the strangest things we’ve ever heard.

The arrangement is insane. Two minutes flat of punchy horns and breakneck skatting, whooping and hollering from Thomas, whose voice here has a raw red corona of some weird, very nearly grating high overtones to it, opened by a textbook rockabilly drumming style and finished by a swooping pop doo-wop angel girly choir. Unbelievable. The song is on high rotation here at radio Mango.

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Monday, July 14, 2003

SPELLBOUND

1) We here at Mango Pudding Blues no longer tend, gentle reader, to tipple as assertively as we once perhaps did in our squandered youth. Or as we also once perhaps did during our late-blooming second squandered youth, which took up a large portion of our early mid-thirties. No. We are now generally more restrained in our imbibing.

2) Nevertheless, we have been known from time to time to topple from the wagon of moderation.

3) Which results in hangovers sometimes.

4) And last night, in the grip of a pure foodie fever brought on by our recent tour (with our beautiful girlfriend Killer, on tandem bicycle!) of the picturesque Niagara peninsula and its winerys, we set out to make a brilliant meal of pan-seared bison steaks with a red wine and rosemary sauce and sour-cream mashed potatoes and a succotash of market-fresh vegetables roasted in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, served with the star discovery of the trip, a foxy Cabernet Merlot from previously-unknown-to-us boutique winery Lailey Vineyards (barely available in stores!), and followed up for dessert with a late-harvest Cabernet Franc, a bizarre little curiosity from Cave Spring.

4.1) The Lailey, incidentally, we first drank sight unseen the evening we arrived in Niagara-on-the-Lake in a restaurant called The Epicurean, which is now our favorite restaurant in Canada for many reasons, not the least of which was the seared sea scallops on orange and ginger salsa with black bean sauce.

4.2) And the meal we made, the bison steak, was a rousing success. Bison!

4.3) As were the wines. Which were too successful, causing us to over-imbibe.

5) Interestingly, we have observed on some occasions that our brain chemistry during a hangover produces fantastic illusions that can manifest themselves in moments of extreme discomfort or dread over certain words or topics deployed in conversations, certain rooms or portions of events, certain film trailers or facial expressions. Once, for instance, in the storied Empire Diner in New York City, nursing a massive Chelsea Hangover, we were forced to excuse ourselves after breakfast because we suddenly simply could not tolerate anything about the period of time between when the bill came and when it would be settled. We forecasted, in a harrowing moment that lasted forever in our mind, the fumbling around, the digging in purses, the scrutinization of the bill and the computation of the tip, the endless endless ticking of minutes between the delivery of payment unto the plastic tray and the collection of the tray by the waiter, followed by the eternal wait for change and its associated gathering of jackets and cameras and its expectant small talk about what would happen next and the sucking of teeth and the smacking of lips and the crinkly unwrapping of mints and the glances outside and the looking at watches and the discomfort of the pressure on the esophagus from eating too large an omelette. No. We could not tolerate that and instead went outside for a little walk and made our companions pay for our breakfast without even offering them an apology.

On the other hand, the same strange hot hangover aura of warping perception that can toxify a simple exchange of glances can imbue the ordinary with magical overtones that fill us with awe. A well-crafted sentence, the weave of the fabric of a pair of trousers, the wetness of the water in the shower, the color of the sky or the taste of a french fry can inspire in us fervent, frothing reveries that threaten to catapult our racing heart out of our throat and into the heavens on wings of ecstasy.

6) Which makes us recommend you take with a grain of salt the following statement, which we have been wending our way towards: We believe that Spellbound, the recent documentary about the American national spelling bee, is the finest film ever made. Ever.

Yes! We saw it Sunday afternoon, unshaven and slightly smelly, ashamed and groggy, too desperately sucking on the diet pepsi in hand for its life-giving caffeine, and found ourselves driven deeply into our seat, squirming, a worm of warm joy perpetually uncoiling in our stomach, tears streaming down our shiny cheeks when a trio of twelve-year-old smalltown word nerds on screen in perfect b-boy baggy shorts discussed the words on which they were eliminated from their regional bee. When the Mexican immigrant east Texas ranchhand father of a contestant yodeled at his cows and the cows answered back. When the privileged Connecticut yuppie child said, lying, “I don’t do it because I love spelling or anything.” When the filmmaker delivered a rapid-fire sequence of the reactions of stunned and anguished national kids when they heard the bell that tolled their elimination for incorrect spellings. Beautiful. Beautiful.

7) And so we add Spellbound to the small list of films we truly love, which includes Amelie and Run, Lola, Run and Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters and The Milagro Beanfield War and Casablanca and Raiders of the Lost Ark and High Society and Blade Runner.

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