Primary Colors: Tuareg

Tuareg: Camel Tournament
16" x 20", oil on canvas, 2015

Music for a Camel Tournament performed by Tuareg women was recorded during the Henri Lhote Expedition of 1948. A small black and white photograph taken during the recording sessions dons the liner notes. They are the notes to the album African Music from the French Colonies which is Volume 2 from The Colombia world Library of Folk and Primitive Music series compiled by Alan Lomax. On the recording one can hear a chorus of women accompanied by a tindi (a mortar converted to a drum) which is played, witnessing the photograph, by a little boy. The setting is in Algeria in the Hoggar Mountains of the Sahara Desert. I can't discern any mountains in the photo but I'll take Lomax's word for it. It was my intention to paint one red dot in the sky, which could possibly have been interpreted as the sun. Once one starts to place dots...

Obituary: Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman
12" x 16", oil on canvas paper, 2015

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman died last month (June 11) in New York City. He was 85 years old. Coleman's legacy is an enormous discography and the concept of free jazz, which was also the title of one of his earlier recordings. I've made a number of Coleman paintings over the years, some belong to the best the archive has to offer. He is included again this year, established months before he died. NPR critic Kevin Whitehead reviewed Coleman's newest record (which turned out to be his last) New Vocabulary on February 10th this year. The album was recorded in 2009 with Jordan McClean and Amir Ziv and released on System Dialing Records in 2014. In the 2000s Coleman was not very active any more but this record sounds as fresh as his early 1960s recordings. The song in the top 100 is Baby Food, but likely others will follow as I've played many of his records (and YouTube videos) since. With the passing of Coleman the world has lost one of the most influential jazz musicians and one of the top 100 musicians in my 33 years of counting.

Primary Colors

Suicide (Alan Vega, Martin Rev)
10" x 16", oil on canvas paper, 2015

The image of the women in the center comes from a 1920 photograph by an anonymous photographer and is part of the Uwe Scheid Collection. It's getting a little ridiculous, these series of musicians flanked by anonymous (nude) women from that collection (the photos by Gerhard Riebecke that were used last month also belong to the collection) and it will stop soon (there is one more on its way). Why these women appeared in the paintings in the first place has to do with the Buzzcocks painting that was part of the previous series of paintings (with the musicians superimposed on found paintings). A very objective reason indeed. (There are more subjective aspects to it too. The mind wanders places and the unconscious is being well taken care of.) Anyway, here's Suicide, the two-man band consisting of Alan Vega and Martin Rev. The song, no surprise, is Ghost Rider, the track used by M.I.A. in her song Born Free, the number one in consecutive years. As noted in Bun Bun, Martin Rev (who co-written the song with Vega), appears on my favorite version of it. Ghost Rider appeared on Suicide's self titled debut of 1977, in which format it appeared in this top 100. The current version listed is however a live recording found on YouTube filmed at CBGS's in 1977 or 1978. The audience boos and Vega anticipates.