RIP (Roger) Syd Barrett. While most of the obituaries will tell and re-tell the story of one of the rock era’s most notorious (and dispiriting) disappearing acts and his withdrawal into decades of silence, it’s worth saying how influential Barrett’s post-Pink Floyd solo albums have been, especially for indie music. From the glam rockers through Robyn Hitchcock to Destroyer to Neutral Milk Hotel to the Flaming Lips to Toronto’s own Alex Lukashevsky, you can hear the influence of Barrett and The Madcap Laughs all over the art rock tradition straight into the ’00s - in its looseness, its unexpected juxtapositions, its combines of horror and whimsy, its switches between the plainspoken and the surreal. It’s one of those cases where the music may include the symptoms of psychic distress, but is made by someone so gifted that it is compelling much beyond the voyeuristic element - where the old lines about the blurry border between genius and madness come back to life. We’ll probably never know how the last half of his life seemed to him, whether it was on balance contented. But we can wish that he had a good twilight, and that night fell gently.

Bembe Segue. (Photo from somewhere in Belgium.)

From today’s interview with the keen-minded Bembe Segue (”British broken-beat diva”, playing this weekend at Harbourfront) by Tim Perlich in Now:

“What I do is kind of similar to what a freestyle rapper does, or perhaps a jazz improvimentalist… wait, heh heh, that isn’t a real word, is it? But I want to get the ‘mentalist’ bit in there because you practically need to be a mind reader to keep up with [bassist] Mark [De Clive-Lowe].”

Zap! And with that the language is enriched 100 per cent. No doubt she was subconsciously portmanteauing “improvisor” and “instrumentalist,” but “improvimentalist” is such an improvement (notice what I did there?) on any previously devised term for a jazz-improv player that I henceforth decree it standard usage. Everyone adopt it! We’ll get it into the dictionary!

With a name like Bembe Segue, no wonder she’s got such a fine ear for the lingo.

Bonnie Brett and pianist David Braid at the Montreal Bistro in 2005.

I was startled, if not exactly shocked, to learn of the shutdown of the Montreal Bistro, one of the city’s few remaining and best-appointed jazz clubs, today on the front page of The Toronto Star. The news was announced with a handwritten note taped to the door.

Luckily, the Rex, the Red Guitar, Trane Studio, the Tranzac, Music Gallery and a few other venues continue to bring live jazz/improv and related musics to the city, but none of those are in the supper-club bracket, on the New York model, that Bistro owners Lothar and Brigitte Lang provided, just as Sybil Walker did at the Senator in the past. (This other Star story suggests one way that lack might be filled.) I practically never went to the Bistro - its jazz generally wasn’t my scene - but it was an important plank to the supporting structure, economic and social, of this music in this town. Besides cultivating an audience, it offered work to local musicians supporting touring acts, etc. See my piece from last summer, when the Senator closed, on some of the issues involved for jazz in this city.

Salif Keita of Mali plays Harbourfront tonight, his first appearance in Toronto in 8 years. I can’t go, due to work, but you should, and David Dacks shows you why in a fascinating profile. If it’s anywhere near as great as the last H’front show from Mali - last weekend’s Amadou et Mariam concert - those of us who will not be there are fools.

Kevin Parnell, who’s part of the Wavelength team as well as the scene’s leading shutterbug in his superhero alias of Aperture Enzyme, turns out to have been hiding some of his other proverbial lights under proverbial bushels: He’s also a playwright. This would not always be cause for cheering, but Kevin’s play at the Victory Cafe in the Fringe Festival in Toronto, beginning tonight, seems intriguing - it seems to be trying to balance somewhere between drama and hanging-out.

Making it more a Zoilus matter, the show incorporates cameo appearances by Toronto indie musicians, who open and close the show - the action of the play seems to happen in the set break at an imaginary gig. The roster of musicians is this: Jul. 5: Purple Hill; Jul 6: Purple Hill; Jul 7: Feuermusik; Jul 9: Alex Lukashevsky; Jul 10: Purple Hill; Jul 11: Neil Haverty; Jul 12: The Blankket (Steve Kado of Barcelona Pavilion/Ryvyr/etc., solo); Jul 13: Don Scott Calls It Quits (Don Scott & Michael Herring); Jul 14: Mantler; Jul 15: Purple Hill; Jul 16: Laura Barrett. For show times and other details check out the theatre company’s website.

Also, an innovative event involving one of my favourite Canadian books of the past few years. No music, but the combination of poetry and thrift shopping comes close enough:

On July 12 at 8 p.m., Governor General’s Award-nominated poet Lisa Robertson launches [the reissue of] Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture at the Bloor and Lansdowne Value Village. Drift through the aisles of Value Village, shop for the perfect pair of cords and listen to Lisa Roberston read from her essay, The Value Village Lyric. A launch party for Soft Architecture follows at nearby Ciro’s (1316 Bloor St. West).

Jeff Koons, Lips, 2000. Oil on canvas, 120 x 172 inches. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. T130.2000.
Photo by David Heald. See no. 37.

In case you’re curious, here’s the playlist for the three hours of music about (mostly) art, artists and art processes that I programmed for the Power Plant last weekend. Some of the connections are more solid than others, when I was just following whims. From my research, I think I can safely say the peak of people making songs about art took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I sure didn’t find many appropriate songs that weren’t by white people. Was I overlooking something?

1. Pablo Picasso - John Cale (cover of the Modern Lovers)
2. Don’t Stop Now - Christian Marclay (solo)
3. Comic Strip - Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot
4. Smash The Beauty Machine - Future Bible Heroes
5. Ambergris March - Bjˆrk (from the soundtrack to Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9)
6. The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton - The Mountain Goats (”so in script that made prominent use of a pentagram, they stenciled their drumheads and guitars with their names”)
7. Art Class (Song For Yayoi Kusama) - Superchunk
8. Painter In Your Pocket - Destroyer
9. Art For Art’s Sake - 10CC
10. Artistiya - Amadou & Mariam
11. Portrait of the Artist as a Fountain - Simon Bookish
12. He Poos Clouds - Final Fantasy (video-game as art)
13. The Death of the Composer Was in 1962 - Tony Conrad (death of the composer/author/artist…)
14. Race Track - Albatross Note (Marcel Dzama’s band)
15. Abstract Art - The Flying Colours
16. Truckload of Art - Cracker (covering Texan sculptor-musician Terry Allen)
17. What About Me? - The Nihilist Spasm Band (recorded when Greg Curnoe was still alive and in the band)
18. Painting And Kissing - Hefner
19. Kule Kule Reprise - Konono N∫1 (band of readymades)
20. Max Ernst - Mission Of Burma
21. Fluxus - Chicago Underground Duo
22. U-J3RK5 Work For Police - U-J3RK5 (Vancouver early-80s band including Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ian Wallace)
23. Jacques Derrida - Scritti Politti
24. Random Rules - The Silver Jews (”I asked the painter why all the roads were coloured black”)
25. 15 Years - Veda Hille (lyrics from diaries of Emily Carr)
26. Groupmegroup - Liquid Liquid (you know, Group of 7, Aktion Group…)
27. The Beautiful Ones - Prince (”Paint a perfect picture/ Bring 2 life a vision in one’s mind/ The beautiful ones/ Always smash the picture/ Always everytime”)
28. Amazing Backgrounds - Michelle McAdorey & Eric Chenaux
29. Edallab Indelibile - Michael Snow
30. Catholic Fashion - Ninja High School (”fibreglass hummingbird! tiny bird looks rad!”)
31. Every Work of Art is an Uncommitted Crime - ìTheodor Adornoî (aka Toronto artist Brian Joseph Davis)
32. Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan - Matmos (because this song is conceptual art)
33. Abstract Nympho - Chrome
34. Gepetto - Vic Chesnutt (arts vs. crafts)
35. Mona Lisa - Slick Rick
36. Obscene And Pornographic Art - Bongwater
37. Jeff Koons - Momus
38. Art Star - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
39. Run Run Run to the Centre Pompidou - Grant Hart
40. Salvador Dali’s Garden Party - Television Personalities
41. Masters of Our Feelings - Barcelona Pavilion (”your art is lazy and your art is irresponsible!”)
42. Yarn and Glue - Joanna Newsom
43. Mapplethorpe Grey - Pig Destroyer
44. Mario y Maria - Butch Hancock
45. Transformer - Gnarls Barkley
46. What Road? - Destroyer (”able, willing, ready/ fuck the Spiral Jetty/ tonight we work large!”)
47. Elaeu - Tom ZÈ (I really have no justification except that I wanted some Tom Ze here)
48. Approaching the Minimal With Spray Guns - X-X
49. Galang - MIA (the latest most notorious art-school musician)
50. Cut Your Hair - Casey Deinel (Pavement cover, on the theme of creativity vs. careerism)
51. Artists Only - Talking Heads
52. (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures - The Revillos (live)
53. All This Useless Beauty - Elvis Costello
54. Story of an Artist - Daniel Johnston
55. Musical Sculpture - S.E.M. Ensemble (composed by Marcel Duchamp)

The Power Plant gallery at Harbourfront in Toronto is starting a new summer series in which from 5-8 pm every Saturday they have music in their outdoor courtyard programmed by a guest. They nicely asked me to kick it off today, and since I was one of the only non-visual-artists they asked, I suggested we meta it up and I do a set of music about visual art and/or by artists. Of course, that was more work than I expected - 3 hours = 55 songs! - but I think the results are fun; to hear for yourself, head down there in the late afternoon. Local artists in the playlist include Michael Snow, Ninja High School, Barcelona Pavilion, Final Fantasy, Brian Joseph Davis (who’s curating another afternoon this summer) and the Nihilist Spasm Band. Others range from Prince to Superchunk (source of this entry’s title) to UJ3RK5. The full list will show up here tomorrow - at which point you’ll see some of the stretches caused by the shortage of songs about visual art that aren’t by white urbanite herky-jerky punk bands. Before you ask, no, there’s no Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) by Don Maclean. Not that I never sighed at 10 years old to the great wisdom, “But they should have told you, Vincent/ this world was never made for one as beautiful as you.” It’s just that it’s bullshit.