Back-to-Back Jacks: Foday of Remembrance

Foday Musa Suso & Jack DeJohnette - World Wide Funk

I didn't really plan it this way. Not at all.

Originally I was like, OK, Jack DeJohnette is as impactful a musician as any single person I could name has been on my life, but 2 1/2 hours of prime, undercirculated music that didn't even exist as a ROIO until I streamed and steam cleaned it for 12 hours is enough, right?

Of course, I had this other show I wanted to work on where JDJ collaborates with the guru of Gambian kora, Foday Musa Suso. But there's so much stuff to do related to these musical passings, I gotta pick my spots. Naturally I can't stand at this terminal 16 hours at a time, with only Edwards' Chocolate Satin Pie to sustain me, and expect to not lapse into a diabetic coma, or at least some form of hypoglycemic shock.

Well, I put that show -- which circulated 20 years ago, in the old SHN lossless format, in a very volume-lacking DAT transfer -- on last night, because honestly the music is so damn great, I was leaning toward taking a shot at it anyway, despite the joint pain.

Once I discovered that Foday Musa Suso -- essentially the Shuggie Otis of Gambia, and well worthy of a day on here any year ending in an Arabic numeral anyway -- had himself passed away at 75 at the end of May this year, I was opening Audacity faster than one of these 117 MPH sinkers these pitchers are throwing on my muted TV screen.

So in honor of these two friends that have unfortunately gone on to The Great Gig In The Sky recently, I stayed up all night messing with this performance, which was well-captured but for the lacking volume and a slightly drummy mix, which I ever-so-slightly rebalanced with the AI stemsplitting tool. There's also some strange and fascinating electronical flourishes in it on and off that I have no idea the origin of -- it might be Jack, but it happens at points where his hands are occupied percussing, so I can't be certain -- but there's looping and blurpy stuff going on for sure, unless someone put PCP in my grapefruit juice. Again.

We eulogized Jack yesterday, so a bit about FMS, who was an authentic African griot and was 400 years descended from the inventor of the kora. He wasn't just a kora master, but proficient at a bunch of different instruments, some that would be considered Western and some distinctly not.

At 27, in 1977, he emigrated to Chicago, and played with just about everyone there at the time. These eventually came to include Jack DeJohnette, himself a native of the Windy City, with whom he forged a decades-long bond of friendship and music.

The name with whom I most associate Foday Musa Suso in my tiny, provincial mind is that of Herbie Hancock, and I think the first time I remember ever hearing anyone play the kora was FMS on the pianist's 1984 electronic masterpiece Sound System.

When you hear what these two giants get up to in this 66 minutes of blissness, you'll understand why I had to rinse this one in the washer and get it blasting.

Foday Musa Suso & Jack DeJohnette

Jazzfestival 2002

Otto Gruber Hall

Saalfelden, Austria

8.23.2002

01 JDJ introduces the concert 

02 Ocean Wave

03 Ancient Techno 

04 Rose Garden

05 World Wide Funk

06 'Gouni

07 Kaira

08 Makola

09 Mountain Love Dance

Total time: 1:05:38

Foday Musa Suso - kora, doussn'gouni & vocals

Jack DeJohnette - drums, percussion & vocals

plus unidentified electronics

soundboard DAT of indeterminate origin

very slightly remux-rebalanced, edited and remastered for unity by EN, October 2025
347 MB FLAC/direct link

I have even more mortality, queued up like the line for an overdosed starlet around the rainy funeral home, in the coming days, but this show was so cool -- and I love JDJ and FMS just that much -- that I felt compelled to pare, flair and share their paired wares from the very first time, 23 years ago, they met on a stage.--J.

2.18.1950 - 5.25.2025                     8.9.1942 - 10.26.2025

Walkoff Jack

Jack DeJohnette's Directions - Eiderdown III

You can surmise how much I hate writing these, but the deaths are piling up worse than the trash on the streets of Manhattan during a 1970s garbageworkers' strike. So I'm using this week to catch up to them all, beginning with this one, which is as devastating as any.

This backyard pic was taken 48 hours before he passed, which made a lot of folks disbelieve the initial reports the other night. Annual checkups might be in order, as much as I distrust for-profit medicine.

The next morning, it somehow all turned out to be sad but true, and I began the Sound Eulogy Process that's been working way OT of late.

To acknowledge this to represent as big of a loss as the death of any possible living musician is somehow an understatement, something I know I'm well known for the world over.

I almost don't know what to say about him. The breadth of his talents and the meaning of his music to me are so extensive as to be nearly indescribable.

What can you say? Is it even possible, in a human life, to have a more tremendous and as lasting of an impact, across such a wide stylistic spectrum, upon one's chosen field than this one?

He really came to the fore in the mid 1960s, when Charles Lloyd hired him as the drummer in that wild quartet with Keith Jarrett.

The legend has it that prior to then, Herbie Hancock had him in his band as the bass player for several months before he realized, hey wait a minute... this guy is really a drummer that plays the drums with the sensitivity and melodicism of a pianist, and he's a damn good pianist too.

He also played reeds, you know. There's a whole sequence in this concert I am about to share where he goes off on tenor sax and duets with Alex Foster, who is at that moment duetting with himself via a very Brian Eno-esque, Roxy Music 2 H.B. Echoplex effect.

Just in the course of the 2 1/2 hours of this show, he bounces from electric keyboards to drums to piano to horn. I imagine if they'd have gone on longer those nights 50 years ago in SF, he'd have eventually seized the bass as well. And maybe sang, and played guitar with his teeth.

That's the thing though, isn't it? When some cats switch from their primary instrument -- what folks think of them as a player of when they spring to mind -- you hear the downgrade in expressive possibilities immediately. If you don't agree, try Ornette on violin sometime. Not that I don't adore Ornette on anything, but you hear the difference from alto to that.

With today's dearly departed deity -- whom most people think of as one of the best drummers ever to grip sticks -- that switch from axe to axe was always a transition from strength to strength.

He's gone now, having passed on suddenly two days ago at 83. Gone, but for the irrevocable fact that the things he did whilst upright and aboveground are so immortal, they couldn't even build a statue to Jack DeJohnette, because such an obsidian edifice would be too static and lifeless to capture the diverse, ever-in-motion life essence of the man.

Jack DeJohnette's Directions

Great American Music Hall

San Francisco, California USA

10.10+11.1975

01 One for Devadip and the Professor

02 Cosmic Chicken/drum solo

03 The Vikings Are Coming

04 Memories/Eiderdown I

05 Eiderdown II

06 Untitled/drum solo

07 Memories II

08 Malibu Reggae

09 Eiderdown III

Total time: 2:31:57

disc break goes after Track 04

Tracks 01-04 & 9: 10.10.1975

Tracks 05-08: 10.11.1975

Jack DeJohnette - drums, keyboards & tenor saxophone 

John Abercrombie - guitar 

Alex Foster - alto & tenor saxophones

Mike Richmond - bass

256/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault

spectral analysis is lossless past the 16 kHz FM cutoff

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited & remastered by EN, October 2025
883 MB FLAC/direct link

So there's 151 minutes of evidence I dragged off Bill's Boots, a minimal fragment to slightly substantiate the deserved superlatives if you don't believe what I just typed. It sounded kinda flat as a pancake sonically, but once I put it in the dishwasher for 12 hours it got clean enough to eat off.

I'll be back sooner than I wanna be, but as long as music figures the inapproachable, toppermost caliber of Jack DeJohnette are gonna keep up and dying, I guess it's gonna be up to people like me to make sure the things they left behind are in the best shape they can be. This, as part of my Cultural Heritage Immortality Program, a necessary innovation when the CHIPs are down like they are.

So ten trillion Thank Yous, of course, to Jack DeJohnette for a lifetime of transcendent and peerless beauty, ongoing since I first heard Miles' Live-Evil -- what JDJ and Airto Moreira get into on that platter basically recalibrates human DNA permanently after 90 seconds of the first track -- and asked "What is this music?!?"--J.

8.9.1942 - 10.26.2025

Ace: The Final Frontier

Ace Frehley - Sister

Wait, what? It's my 59th birthday today? Well HBTM! That can only mean it's the 12th birthday of my page here.

Life nearing 60 being the physically shredded, emotionally draining exercise in overcatastrophized Back Nine that we always heard it would be, I think back to what I was doing at 12, when it all seemed so fresh and the possibilities were only outnumbered, in your mind, by the aspirations.

When I was 12 back in 1979, and about to be 13 on this day 46 years ago, it was the start of 8th grade in a few days and I was about to attend my very first concert.

On that 1st day of September in 1979, other than the recent discovery of what little frenulum the chopper had so graciously left me, there was nothing bigger on Earth -- especially to a boy my age -- than Kiss, a band that couldn't have been more suited to our age group if it had featured video games being played by naked, nubile girls onstage in time to the music.

So to close out Puberty Summer and the Seventies in style, a few friends and I were dropped -- unchaperoned, because that's how the 1970s, jointlike, rolled -- at the Nassau Veterans' Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale on Long Island, where Kiss were greasepaint-thick in several NY area Dynasty shows, with a few Madison Square Gardens wrapped around the lone Nassau we attended.

Now, amid our first whiffs of the Devil's Lettuce -- courtesy of the 20-something dudes directly in front of us, headbanging to Let Me Go Rock and Roll -- and our barely-developed male Troglo-brains, we were convinced we were witnessing The Greatest Thing That Could Ever Possibly Exist In Three Dimensions as it went on, with Gene Simmons taking flight across the ceiling to the lighting rig and today's (I can't believe he is dead) honoree wobbling around in his Space Boots as the rockets shot from his humbuckers.

Of course we had less than no idea that this was a bloated, doomed Hindenburg that had slid into the obsession with brand and lost most of the band part it was always one custom lunchbox from being eaten and shat out by. But when you're 12 and about to be 13, you're not really channeling your inner Robert Christgau yet and superheroes can still not just get you off, but seem real or at least possible.

I do know one thing that is eternally true, though. And I hope those two other Kissnessmen knew it too, as they traveled together to his funeral last week to pay their respects.

Which is that Ace Frehley, however self-destructively insane he may have been in those days or since, was the secret sauce that took their juvenile odes to fellatio and buttsex into jussssssssssssssst enough of a musical realm of Pure Rawk Power to legitimize what they did and enable it to become, for a moment before the '70s set in, The Hottest Band In the Land.

At 12/13, we always knew he was the most talented one with the coolest, most intriguing persona, who'd designed the logo and whose solos took the songs up notches whenever they exploded, super-novan and always memorably singable, from his sunburst Les Paul.

His solo record back then -- yes, it was the only one I Sam Goodied my butt over to the Walt Whitman Mall to buy! -- must have made those other two guys so mad, with its ridiculous hit single that you still hear on the Mets game when they're stroking the baseball en route to another inexplicable collapse even more cost-inflated than the price tag of a meet-n-greet with Gene. And its proof that even wasted and barely trying, Ace could make something way more engagingly popular and sincerely, fucked-uppedly RnR than his sarcastically sober schoolmarm self ever could.

I don't not like Gene S. and will always have Dr. Love's number in my inner rolodex, but if he or you're wondering why Kiss was ever a thing, it's because of one thing and one thing only to begin with: it's because Paul Daniel Frehley and his mismatched Converse All-Stars ambled into Bill Aucoin's loft that day and plugged in. If that moment doesn't occur, those other guys have to get real jobs likely not involving 8-inch platform heels, bloodspitting demons, marathon Hyatt House orgies and rotating drum risers.

As we can perceive from 12 years of this shit, I grew up (OK let's not get out over our skis, I got older) to go way past the adolescent hipthrusty swagger of Rock and Roll Over --my favorite Kiss record still -- but those guys will always be my first concert. And Ace -- who at age 74 fell in his home studio in September, hit his head, and never woke up again until the doctors at last pulled the guitar cable from the plug October 16th -- will always be a special figure to me. Someone who, in his own spaced way, helped open a gateway for so many musicfolk of my generation, and projected us, like a wayward space beam from his guitar, into all our quantum musical journeys since.

Ace Frehley

The Strand

Providence, Rhode Island USA

5.28.1995

01 tuning

02 Watchin’ You

03 Shot Full of Rock

04 Love Her All I Can

05 medley: Insane/Trouble Walkin’/Rock Soldiers/Speedin’ Back to My Baby/Hard Times

06 New York Groove

07 Sister

08 2 Young 2 Die

09 guitar solo

10 Foxy Lady

11 Cold Gin

12 Strange Ways

13 Stranger In a Strange Land

14 Shout It Out Loud

15 Detroit Rock City

Total time: 1:06:48

Ace Frehley – guitar & vocals

Richie Scarlett - guitar & vocals

Karl Cochran – bass & vocals

Steve “Budgie” Werner – drums

320/48k audio taken from an HD YouTube post of the complete concert

extracted, converted to 16/44 CD Audio, repaired, edited, remuxed for instrument balance & remastered by EN, October 2025
444 MB FLAC/direct link

I yakked this 30 year old show -- from the tour that ended up leading directly to the infamous 1996 Kiss reunion -- off a high definition YouTube clip, but don't run away just yet. For it goes losslessly potent all the way to 20 kHz, and once I muxed up the bass and made things a bit less drummier, it sounds pretty darn heavy if you ask me. These lads blow it up, with The Spaceman on excellent form with a selection of Kiss tunes and solo material including Sister, which I think is as great a cautionary song about drug use as The Needle and The Damage Done. There's also considerably less harmonica.

In celebration of my and the page's birthday, I am gonna death it up this week, with this being just the initial memorial post of several I have worked up in honor of recently-interred music luminaries. Luminaries like Ace Frehley, who made a lot of 12-year-olds -- and a lot of 12-year-olds who grew up to be 59-year-olds -- happy with air in his lungs and that galactic, pentatonic magic in his fingers.--J.

4.27.1951 - 10.16.2025