Ross Van Loan
03-22-2015, 05:01 PM
Fugue State, Chapter 4: Side A : Cute over Choler
The Ale Blue Dot was a nice place if your tastes ran towards white leather furniture, blue neon, lounge music, argon lasers, and androgynous wait staff. Having completed their pre-set preparations, the regular band of the establishment, The Cat’s Ass, all jazz-funk by way of Henry Mancini & John Barry, proceeded to play within their well established groove.
Everything about The Cats Ass was tuned to the club. Their zoot suits, pork pie hats, and leather shoes made a color coordinated statement that melded band fashion with club decor; even their instruments, white with black detailing, were consonant with the vibe; the music issuing from their use, a trippy Moon River tangent, was equally contextually optimized.Truly The Cat’s Ass deserved their superlative moniker.
The separate components of Fugue State reacted to their surroundings in little ways reflective of their personalities. At the bar, Suki2, dressed in all of the frilly pink, tapped her Chelsea boots, also pink, against the chrome foot railing in musical time as she sipped a frothy marshmallow cake-tini ; Dazzle, gruff in leather jacket over a Ramone’s t-shirt and carefully shredded jeans, glowered greenly as she tossed back the whiskey part of a boilermaker; Cypher in a in a silver barb wire printed little black dress was too busy awarding The Cat’s Ass’ bassist a bountiful gaze of crossed leg from her stage side table to be unhappy with the ill fit of the venue ; Asada, rocking a PVC dress that was the color of her Campari, confabbed, to the disbelief of staff & patron alike, with the famously aloof proprietor; and Khimera, in her scruffy Buddy Holly uniform, scrutinized the performance from over the rim of the establishment’s eponymous IPA*.
When they took the stage, Fugue State, tiger in the teahouse, was the antithesis of the opening act: smolder and ego annexed serenity and integration as the five women took the space. It was only then that the Master of Ceremonies, an epicene lovechild of Peter Lorre und Marlene Dietrich, swept in with the aplomb of the professional compère.
“Ladies und gentlemen, I, your beloved Meister Max, am here to tell you vhat appears to be insanity upon the part of our fine establishment is in reality...” He or she, it was impossible to tell, reduced the volume of the opening statement to a stage whisper...”an experiment!” SHe pivoted gravely to the packed house. “Ja, my loves, ve,” the MC threw out a flourish for the immaculately white tuxedoed owner of The Ale Blue Dot, Humphery Blaine, whom accepted the salute with a nod, “are exploring beyond our habitual musical horizons vith...”
This time the brandish went out to the musicians as they took their swiftly arranged musical stations upon the stage.
“...Fugue State!” Meister Max unfurled a final flourish; elegantly stepped aside as the audience clapped with polite hesitancy.
Asada Strangelove stepped up to the retro fifties mike positioned centre stage and purred, “We ride rougher and faster than what you’re used to, but I’m certain you’ll come to like the fit of our...”At this cue, Suki2 , Ardent and Cypher opened with a cymbal, keyboard and bass backbeat that could only be described as too iconic to miss amongst the unusual clash and rush of a musical tempo that fit in the no man’s land between the musical realms of metal and jazz.
Strangelove finished her innuendo: “...Pink Panther!”
The immediate effects were, while interesting, not interesting enough to crack the composures of the band, the emcee or the owner of the club. Five of the fifty members of the audience left immediately and as cooly--not very-- as they could. The others adopted positions at their tables that, according to their forward or backward postures, suggested how successfully they were weathering the storm of unaccustomed music. More than half of the crowd, those leaning forwards, seemed intent upon at least being open to the experience.
Then Strangelove tore into the main theme with her Gittler guitar; Chang leapt in with a whoop and an appealingly discordant counterpoint to Strangelove’s lead, heightening the storm’s fury; more audience members blew away. The remaining audience of forty, more numerous than expected, reacted to the raucous Mancini with a mixture of stoicism and enjoyment. That there was any applause at the end of the music was a relief; some of it was more than accepting.
Next to take the mike was the carefully disheveled Khimera Chang. Her flat Rs and dental Ds & Ts were as classic New York as her physiognomy was Chinese.
“When I went looking for jazz songs, I never thought that I would find anything but love, puppies, rainbows and scat singing. I’m going to show you just how wrong I was by punking up a famous bit of murder that has involved Ella, Jim Morrison, The Psychedelic Furs and so many others. My particular stab at this bit of nasty business is a half-German, half-English patchwork of three versions of Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s original music that I call, Punky Messer!”
Suki2 began with an arrogant cymbal beat that slowly grew in swagger behind Ariel Cypher’s bass line that, albeit rougher than anything Bobby Darin would consider musical, spurted out the rhythm that, like the previous number, belonged to only one song, Mack the Knife. Dazzle, dangerously close to jutting out of her distressed jeans, stepped in with an effusion of sound that could only be described as a berserk squeezebox. As Khimera began to sing, both guitarists quietly began to sneak the raucous main theme into the overall musical construct.
Chang commenced with a smoky but almost conventional contralto that was not too far removed from a cabaret.
Obwohl der Haifischzähne, sie tödlich sein
Trotzdem man sie sieht, weiß und rot
Aber Sie werden Mackie Springmesser nicht sehen
Weil er Sie aufgeschlitzt, und jetzt bist du tot
Jenny war ein stripper
Jemand riss ihr von Ohr zu Ohr
Obwohl das Messer Arbeit war künstlerischer
Scheint, dass Mackie war bei weitem nicht
She ratcheted her voice up to a slightly more wild mezzo soprano; the band followed suit: the song became considerably less composed.
On a sidewalk, blue Sunday mornin'
Lies a body just oozin' life
Some, someone's sneakin' 'round a corner
could that someone be Old Mack the Knife?
There's a tugboat down by the river, don't you know?
Where a cement bag, just a'drooppin' on down
Oh, that cement is just its there for the weight, dear
Five'll get you ten Old Macky's back in town
The singer and her band took it all the way to the edge for the big finish: Chang led Fugue State into a speed soprano charge that existed a razor’s width away from crossing the threshold into unmusicality.
Und die minderjährige Witwe
Deren Namen jeder weiß
Wachte auf und war geschändet
Mackie welches war dein Preis?
Und die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die anderen sind im Licht
Doch man sieht nur die im Lichte
Die im Dunklen sieht man nicht
She crashed everything back down into an abrupt contralto finish.
Look out, old Macky's back!
The audience lit up a little brighter than they did for the mad Mancini: a vocal attendee shouted, “Way to jab a little life back into sleepy old Mack!”
Chang, very well shabbily dressed for a threepenny opera, executed a curtsy that was a candied concoction of appreciative insolence.
Dazzle Ardent turned decorously aside to assure that she was still slightly on the shy side of flagrancy--only a slight shift of stiffening shaft--before taking the mike with a growl.
“It took me fucking forever to find something that jazzed me. I call this piece of Mancini’s, Packing!”
Ardent’s verdant fingers stroked the Peter Gunn bass line out of her keytar at the proper tempo and pitch before fractiously cranking things up by slow degrees until, towards the end, jazz had been fully displaced by punk. The audience, thankful more for the slow immersion than the actual music, applauded to appease the angry, green girl.
The next member of the band to take the spotlight was all one hundred and fifty two centimeters & change of bouncy 80s Tinker Bell Suki2.
“Like my...sidekick just said...” The audience chuckled at the charmingly obvious faulty vocabulary; Asada barked, “Holy boner, Batman!” More laughter resulted; Su Su blushed, giggled, bounced ; continued: “...uh...accomplice?...” Asada twirled her invisible Snidely Whiplash ‘stache, and flashed an emerald bird at her lost-in-translation bandmate. That was the definitive moment when the spectators fell in supa-kawaii with Fugue State’s ingénue.
“Anyway, I also thought that Jazz would be nothing but a big bore.” Behind, her bandmates stepped aside as the drum kit rolled to the fore. “Then I met Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa and,” She twirled her drumsticks, “This girl ain’t bored no more!” She all but vaulted onto her stool; launched into a maniacal solo variant of The Drum Battle: Buddy Rich vs. Gene Krupa.
Sticks whirled. Drums throbbed. Sweat flew. At the heart of the storm, Suki2 whooped and guffawed fit to be a full-on Wagnerian valkyrie: it was heady stuff; and the patrons loved it! (It didn’t hurt that, besides the shadowboxing battle alteration, the actual music was almost exactly unchanged from the original material.) Su Su scored the one ovation of the evening. She accepted the esteem with a blizzard of blown kisses, buxom bobs, bows and bursts of giggles.
Dazzle nudged Asada; whispered, “What’s cute got over choler, anyway?”
“It plays more to the audience than to itself.” Strangelove threw an arm around her peevish bandmate. ”Don’t fret, Dazz, this audience isn’t angry enough to appreciate your talent. I’ll get Art to see about booking us into some (im)properly punk venues (He may have to create them.)
Dazzle retorted with an unintended irony that Asada found hard to resist correcting: “Yeah, not that I give two Mugatu shits.”
*Io Pale Ale
The Ale Blue Dot was a nice place if your tastes ran towards white leather furniture, blue neon, lounge music, argon lasers, and androgynous wait staff. Having completed their pre-set preparations, the regular band of the establishment, The Cat’s Ass, all jazz-funk by way of Henry Mancini & John Barry, proceeded to play within their well established groove.
Everything about The Cats Ass was tuned to the club. Their zoot suits, pork pie hats, and leather shoes made a color coordinated statement that melded band fashion with club decor; even their instruments, white with black detailing, were consonant with the vibe; the music issuing from their use, a trippy Moon River tangent, was equally contextually optimized.Truly The Cat’s Ass deserved their superlative moniker.
The separate components of Fugue State reacted to their surroundings in little ways reflective of their personalities. At the bar, Suki2, dressed in all of the frilly pink, tapped her Chelsea boots, also pink, against the chrome foot railing in musical time as she sipped a frothy marshmallow cake-tini ; Dazzle, gruff in leather jacket over a Ramone’s t-shirt and carefully shredded jeans, glowered greenly as she tossed back the whiskey part of a boilermaker; Cypher in a in a silver barb wire printed little black dress was too busy awarding The Cat’s Ass’ bassist a bountiful gaze of crossed leg from her stage side table to be unhappy with the ill fit of the venue ; Asada, rocking a PVC dress that was the color of her Campari, confabbed, to the disbelief of staff & patron alike, with the famously aloof proprietor; and Khimera, in her scruffy Buddy Holly uniform, scrutinized the performance from over the rim of the establishment’s eponymous IPA*.
When they took the stage, Fugue State, tiger in the teahouse, was the antithesis of the opening act: smolder and ego annexed serenity and integration as the five women took the space. It was only then that the Master of Ceremonies, an epicene lovechild of Peter Lorre und Marlene Dietrich, swept in with the aplomb of the professional compère.
“Ladies und gentlemen, I, your beloved Meister Max, am here to tell you vhat appears to be insanity upon the part of our fine establishment is in reality...” He or she, it was impossible to tell, reduced the volume of the opening statement to a stage whisper...”an experiment!” SHe pivoted gravely to the packed house. “Ja, my loves, ve,” the MC threw out a flourish for the immaculately white tuxedoed owner of The Ale Blue Dot, Humphery Blaine, whom accepted the salute with a nod, “are exploring beyond our habitual musical horizons vith...”
This time the brandish went out to the musicians as they took their swiftly arranged musical stations upon the stage.
“...Fugue State!” Meister Max unfurled a final flourish; elegantly stepped aside as the audience clapped with polite hesitancy.
Asada Strangelove stepped up to the retro fifties mike positioned centre stage and purred, “We ride rougher and faster than what you’re used to, but I’m certain you’ll come to like the fit of our...”At this cue, Suki2 , Ardent and Cypher opened with a cymbal, keyboard and bass backbeat that could only be described as too iconic to miss amongst the unusual clash and rush of a musical tempo that fit in the no man’s land between the musical realms of metal and jazz.
Strangelove finished her innuendo: “...Pink Panther!”
The immediate effects were, while interesting, not interesting enough to crack the composures of the band, the emcee or the owner of the club. Five of the fifty members of the audience left immediately and as cooly--not very-- as they could. The others adopted positions at their tables that, according to their forward or backward postures, suggested how successfully they were weathering the storm of unaccustomed music. More than half of the crowd, those leaning forwards, seemed intent upon at least being open to the experience.
Then Strangelove tore into the main theme with her Gittler guitar; Chang leapt in with a whoop and an appealingly discordant counterpoint to Strangelove’s lead, heightening the storm’s fury; more audience members blew away. The remaining audience of forty, more numerous than expected, reacted to the raucous Mancini with a mixture of stoicism and enjoyment. That there was any applause at the end of the music was a relief; some of it was more than accepting.
Next to take the mike was the carefully disheveled Khimera Chang. Her flat Rs and dental Ds & Ts were as classic New York as her physiognomy was Chinese.
“When I went looking for jazz songs, I never thought that I would find anything but love, puppies, rainbows and scat singing. I’m going to show you just how wrong I was by punking up a famous bit of murder that has involved Ella, Jim Morrison, The Psychedelic Furs and so many others. My particular stab at this bit of nasty business is a half-German, half-English patchwork of three versions of Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s original music that I call, Punky Messer!”
Suki2 began with an arrogant cymbal beat that slowly grew in swagger behind Ariel Cypher’s bass line that, albeit rougher than anything Bobby Darin would consider musical, spurted out the rhythm that, like the previous number, belonged to only one song, Mack the Knife. Dazzle, dangerously close to jutting out of her distressed jeans, stepped in with an effusion of sound that could only be described as a berserk squeezebox. As Khimera began to sing, both guitarists quietly began to sneak the raucous main theme into the overall musical construct.
Chang commenced with a smoky but almost conventional contralto that was not too far removed from a cabaret.
Obwohl der Haifischzähne, sie tödlich sein
Trotzdem man sie sieht, weiß und rot
Aber Sie werden Mackie Springmesser nicht sehen
Weil er Sie aufgeschlitzt, und jetzt bist du tot
Jenny war ein stripper
Jemand riss ihr von Ohr zu Ohr
Obwohl das Messer Arbeit war künstlerischer
Scheint, dass Mackie war bei weitem nicht
She ratcheted her voice up to a slightly more wild mezzo soprano; the band followed suit: the song became considerably less composed.
On a sidewalk, blue Sunday mornin'
Lies a body just oozin' life
Some, someone's sneakin' 'round a corner
could that someone be Old Mack the Knife?
There's a tugboat down by the river, don't you know?
Where a cement bag, just a'drooppin' on down
Oh, that cement is just its there for the weight, dear
Five'll get you ten Old Macky's back in town
The singer and her band took it all the way to the edge for the big finish: Chang led Fugue State into a speed soprano charge that existed a razor’s width away from crossing the threshold into unmusicality.
Und die minderjährige Witwe
Deren Namen jeder weiß
Wachte auf und war geschändet
Mackie welches war dein Preis?
Und die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die anderen sind im Licht
Doch man sieht nur die im Lichte
Die im Dunklen sieht man nicht
She crashed everything back down into an abrupt contralto finish.
Look out, old Macky's back!
The audience lit up a little brighter than they did for the mad Mancini: a vocal attendee shouted, “Way to jab a little life back into sleepy old Mack!”
Chang, very well shabbily dressed for a threepenny opera, executed a curtsy that was a candied concoction of appreciative insolence.
Dazzle Ardent turned decorously aside to assure that she was still slightly on the shy side of flagrancy--only a slight shift of stiffening shaft--before taking the mike with a growl.
“It took me fucking forever to find something that jazzed me. I call this piece of Mancini’s, Packing!”
Ardent’s verdant fingers stroked the Peter Gunn bass line out of her keytar at the proper tempo and pitch before fractiously cranking things up by slow degrees until, towards the end, jazz had been fully displaced by punk. The audience, thankful more for the slow immersion than the actual music, applauded to appease the angry, green girl.
The next member of the band to take the spotlight was all one hundred and fifty two centimeters & change of bouncy 80s Tinker Bell Suki2.
“Like my...sidekick just said...” The audience chuckled at the charmingly obvious faulty vocabulary; Asada barked, “Holy boner, Batman!” More laughter resulted; Su Su blushed, giggled, bounced ; continued: “...uh...accomplice?...” Asada twirled her invisible Snidely Whiplash ‘stache, and flashed an emerald bird at her lost-in-translation bandmate. That was the definitive moment when the spectators fell in supa-kawaii with Fugue State’s ingénue.
“Anyway, I also thought that Jazz would be nothing but a big bore.” Behind, her bandmates stepped aside as the drum kit rolled to the fore. “Then I met Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa and,” She twirled her drumsticks, “This girl ain’t bored no more!” She all but vaulted onto her stool; launched into a maniacal solo variant of The Drum Battle: Buddy Rich vs. Gene Krupa.
Sticks whirled. Drums throbbed. Sweat flew. At the heart of the storm, Suki2 whooped and guffawed fit to be a full-on Wagnerian valkyrie: it was heady stuff; and the patrons loved it! (It didn’t hurt that, besides the shadowboxing battle alteration, the actual music was almost exactly unchanged from the original material.) Su Su scored the one ovation of the evening. She accepted the esteem with a blizzard of blown kisses, buxom bobs, bows and bursts of giggles.
Dazzle nudged Asada; whispered, “What’s cute got over choler, anyway?”
“It plays more to the audience than to itself.” Strangelove threw an arm around her peevish bandmate. ”Don’t fret, Dazz, this audience isn’t angry enough to appreciate your talent. I’ll get Art to see about booking us into some (im)properly punk venues (He may have to create them.)
Dazzle retorted with an unintended irony that Asada found hard to resist correcting: “Yeah, not that I give two Mugatu shits.”
*Io Pale Ale