News from the darkest corners...

Just in case you weren’t paying attention, these tour dates for the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen are now shown at Thesunraarkestra.com:

July 1st. Philadelphia, PA, Institute of Contemporary Art
July 4th. Lisbon, Portugal, Setubal/Arrabida World Music festival
July 1Oth. Vienne, France, Jazz a Vienne Festival
July 3Oth. Sardinia, Italy, Cala Gonone Jazz Festival
August 1st. Standon, U.K., Standon Calling Festival
August 15th. Providence, Rhode Island, AS220 Festival
Sept. 26th. Durham, NC, Duke University
Oct. 31st. Philadelphia, PA, International House

Sky Saxon, lead singer and bassist of ’60s garage rockers the Seeds, died Thursday in an Austin, Texas hospital. He had been in the ICU since Monday suffering from an undisclosed illness until his wife, Sabrina, announced his passing via Facebook.

Influenced heavily by the Rolling Stones, Saxon – born Richard Marsh – founded the Seeds in 1965 in California. The next year, the psychedelic rockers released two albums, ‘The Seeds’ and ‘A Web of Sound,’ and had hits with ‘Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ and ‘Pushin’ Too Hard,’ their most successful song. In 1967, the band released two more albums: ‘Future,’ a psychedelic rock album, and ‘A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues,’ which was credited to the Sky Saxon Blues Band and featured liner notes by the legendary Muddy Waters.

After some lineup changes and a few more commercially unsuccessful albums, Saxon dissolved the band in the early ’70s. He joined a California commune, the Source Family, adopted the name Sunlight and occasionally performed with their trippy house band, the Ya Ho Wa 13. In 1989, Saxon reformed the Seeds to tour with other ’60s acts like Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Arthur Lee and Love. They toured again in 2003, and Saxon kept busy musically, releasing an album last year, and recording with the Smashing Pumpkins. Though he fell ill last Thursday, Saxon still managed to play a short gig on Saturday night at Austin rock club Antone’s.

In the spirit of Frank Zappa’s final message to the fans: “Play my music”, Project/Object is delighted and proud to announce that in July they will be doing a 9 date tour of the Northeastern United States. Project/Object’s special guests are Ike Willis and Don Preston, who have had the distinction of recording & touring with Frank.

One of Frank’s greatest skills was his incredible sixth sense in identifying something magical in each of the musicians he hired. Recognizing this – Project/Object continues its singular mission to present the music as it was recorded -but also to respect and develop the creative “live” aspect that Zappa always pushed his band towards. With the support of the fans, Project/Object chooses to do this with the “Alumni”: the people who were there with Frank as the music was created, recorded and performed.

Visit the P/O website at www.projectobject.com for all tour dates.

Ali Akbar Khan, 87, a Bengali musician who was regarded as one of the finest artists of Indian classical music and who spread classical Indian music to the West on television, record and stage, died June 18 at his home in San Anselmo, Calif., of a kidney ailment. Khan was born April 14, 1922, in British-controlled East Bengal, now Bangladesh.

The son of a revered musician and teacher, Khan began intensive training as a child and partnered with sitar player Ravi Shankar performing duets throughout India.

Ali Akbar Khan was a virtuoso of the sarod, a 25-string instrument in the lute family. His chosen musical genre is based in part on the concept of the raga, which consists of improvised music based on a variety of scales. From these scales, or permutations of them, Indian musicians follow traditional forms but add their own inflections and feeling.

The late American violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who became one of his earliest champions in the West, said he considered Mr. Khan “an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world.”

Khan was appointed court musician to the maharaja of Jodhpur in 1943, and his international career launched under Menuhin, who organized a showcase of Indian music at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955 and made the sarodist a principal performer.

As Indian culture and music began to infuse Western pop culture in the 1960s, widespread interest in musicians such as Khan grew. In 1967 he established the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley, Calif., which he later moved to Marin County north of San Francisco.

In 1971, a civil war transformed Mr. Khan’s homeland, called East Pakistan at the time, into the independent country of Bangladesh. The war created an immense humanitarian crisis among the already poor population. Former Beatles guitarist George Harrison, a student and performer of Indian music, assembled a number of musicians for a relief benefit concert held at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Ali Akbar Khan and Shankar performed at the Concert for Bangladesh with musicians such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. An album and a movie of the concert were later released.

John Coltrane’s Last Performance At Newport July 2, 1966 has been released on the Free Factory label. This is the first time that this material is issued on any format.

Coltrane performed three extended tunes at the festival, including a version of “My Favorite Things” that is much freer than ever, a beautiful reading of his ballad “Welcome” and a powerful version of “Leo”, a song he had taped in the studio six months earlier. Coltrane was too ill to perform at the following edition of the Newport Festival, and he died shortly after at the age of 40 on July 17, 1967.

John Coltrane had played at Newport in 1958, 1961, 1963 & 1965. Coltrane’s 1966 appearance at the festival would be his last. By the time the 1967 edition took place, in July of that year, Coltrane was at the hospital fighting the liver cancer that eventually killed him on July 17, 1967.

The 1966 Newport set, which appears here for the first time ever on CD, showcased Coltrane with the last group he fronted, which was moving further and further in the direction of free jazz. From the classic quartet, only bassist Jimmy Garrison remained. Coltrane’s wife Alice McLeod (aka Alice Coltrane) is at the piano, Rashied Ali is on drums, and Pharoah Sanders (who had also collaborated with Coltrane on his 1965 album Ascension) plays tenor sax, piccolo and percussion. Portions of this performance were filmed in color on 8mm without sound and appeared on various documentaries of Coltrane. The music, however, was recorded separately.

Buy Last Performance at Newport from Amazon.com

Bob Bogle, the lead guitarist and co-founder of the rock band The Ventures, known for 1960s instrumental hits like “Walk, Don’t Run,” “Perfidia” and the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” died Sunday. He was 75.

The Ventures sold millions of albums and heavily influenced other rock guitarists. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. The hall’s Web site hailed The Ventures as “the most successful instrumental combo in rock and roll history.”

“Walk, Don’t Run,” written and first performed by Johnny Smith in 1955, reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart for The Ventures in 1960; a revised version, “Walk, Don’t Run ’64,” reached No. 8 in 1964.

The band’s instrumental version of “Perfidia,” a much-covered song by the Mexican songwriter Alberto Domínguez, was also a hit in 1960. Charlie Parker, Mel Tormé, Glenn Miller, Nat King Cole and Linda Ronstadt, among others, have also recorded versions of it.

The Ventures scored yet another hit in 1969 with their cover of the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” the long-running police detective show that had its premiere in 1968.

The band got its start in 1958 in Tacoma. Bob Bogle initially played lead and bass and Don Wilson played rhythm guitar. They were soon joined by Nokie Edwards, another guitarist, and the drummer Howie Johnson, later replaced by Mel Taylor.

The Ventures were particularly popular in Japan, where Wilson and Bogle played as a duo during their first tour in 1962 because the promoter couldn’t afford to pay the other two band members.

The two Americans made such an impression, Wilson recalled last year, that when the band came back in 1964, “there were 6,000 people at the airport.” He said he didn’t realize at first that the Japanese fans were there to see The Ventures.

The festival for independent culture, ZXZW in Tilburg, The Netherlands, will change its name to Incubate immediately. After four successful years, the organization decided to go on with a new name that matches the content of the festival.

“Five year ago we started the underground music festival Zuid bij Zuidwest,“ says Joost Heijthuijsen, one of the organizers of the festival. The name, ZXZW for short, was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the American music festival SXSW in Austin, Texas. “We’ve grown substantial in the past four years. And since a great deal of our audience, artists and press coverage comes from abroad, we get more and more confused with the SXSW festival. Because we are a different festival, including arts, contemporary dance and movies, we decided for a name change.”

“Incubate is more suitable for the character of the festival. Incubate stands for growth and stimulation of cutting edge cultural developments,” states Heijthuijsen. This is something ZXZW has already done over the last years. The festival brought jazz veterans Sun Ra Arkestra, copyright collective Negativland and guerilla knitters Knitta to Tilburg.

The festival won several prices. The people of Tilburg voted for ZXZW as the best event in their town in 2008, it was nominated as best festival in The Netherlands and won the Think Ahead Award for its Social Festival Model. Heijthuijsen: “The name ZXZW stood for the geographical position. Incubate focuses more on our vision: what we do and what we want. And that is giving cultural innovation a stage.”

Incubate is the annual celebration of independent culture in Tilburg, The Netherlands. It is a festival exhibiting a diverse view on indie culture as a whole, including music, contemporary dance, film and visual arts. It brings more than 200 cutting edge artists in an intimate context to an international audience. Black metal next to free jazz. Street art next to academic dance.

Incubate takes place from the 13th until 20th of September in the city of Tilburg in the Netherlands. From a squat to the mayors room. From music venue to museum.

For more information visit the website www.incubate.org.

Bass guitarist Hugh Hopper has died at the age of 64, it was announced yesterday. The Kent-born musician is best known as the bass player in Soft Machine which he joined in 1968. He remained with them until 1972 but later became an important part of Soft Machine Legacy which has toured the world in recent years.

Before Soft Machine Hopper worked with Daevid Allen and Robert Wyatt in the Daevid Allen Trio, before forming the Wilde Flowers with his brother Brian, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Richard Sinclair. It was with Wyatt, Allen, Ayers and Mike Ratledge that he was to make his mark on the history of progressive rock and forward-looking jazz-influenced psychedelic groups of the period and since with his innovative fuzz-bass sound.

After Soft Machine, Hopper worked with a range of groups including the influential Gilgamesh and Isotope and began an association with free jazz saxophonist Elton Dean who joined Soft Machine in 1969. Later important collaborations also included work with the late Pip Pyle, Phil Miller’s In Cahoots and since 2002 with Soft Works which later became Soft Machine Legacy. Hopper had been suffering from leukaemia in recent years. A benefit was held for him at the 100 Club in London last December.

The first ever Jandek concert in central Europe will take place at the B72 club in Vienna, Austria, on 14
October. Doors open at 8pm. Tickets are not available online, only to personal callers at the Jugendinfo information centre in Vienna, or at the door on the night.

Sam Butera, whose tenor saxophone provided a raucous counterpoint to Louis Prima’s frenzied “jump, jive and wail” vocals for two decades and who was later a successful bandleader in his own right, died on Wednesday in Las Vegas. He was 81.

Singing and clowning over a driving shuffle beat, Prima and his wife, the singer Keely Smith, became one of Las Vegas’s biggest attractions in the 1950s with a crowd-pleasing mixture of jazz, rhythm and blues, and pure showmanship. Butera’s high-energy saxophone solos were an essential element of Prima’s success, as were the many arrangements that Mr. Butera wrote for the band.

Sam Butera was born in New Orleans on Aug. 17, 1927. His father, Joseph, was an amateur musician who made his living as a butcher and encouraged young Sam’s interest in music.

Butera began studying saxophone when he was 7 and became a professional musician at 14, playing in a strip club on Bourbon Street. At 19 he won a talent contest sponsored by Look magazine, which led to an appearance with other winners from around the country at Carnegie Hall.

After working with the big bands of Ray McKinley, Tommy Dorsey and others, he formed his own group and began a four-year residency at the 500 Club in New Orleans. He was hired by Prima, a fellow New Orleans native, in December 1954 and put together a band, the Witnesses, to back Prima at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas.

Sam Butera and the Witnesses continued to work with Prima, in Las Vegas and later in New Orleans, until Prima fell into a coma after undergoing brain surgery in 1975. He died in 1978.

In the late 1970s, Butera stepped into the spotlight. Doing as much singing as playing, he led a band that performed songs from the Prima repertory and frequently accompanied Ms. Smith, who had divorced Prima in 1961. He retired in 2004.

Among Butera’s best-known arrangements was the medley of “Just a Gigolo” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” that was a hit for the Prima-Smith team in 1956. To Butera’s chagrin, it became an even bigger hit for the rock singer David Lee Roth three decades later.