Okay, I lied. Once again, in a virtual tip of the hat to Copy, Right?, I present three tracks: the Ornette Coleman Quartet’s “Peace Warriors” (here, the classic Coleman / Cherry / Haden / Higgins lineup), a different version also by Ornette Coleman and Prime Time (his “double quartet” with two guitarists, bassists and drummers each, both from the 1987 In All Languages album), and a cover by John Zorn (with two saxophonists and drummers) from the 1989 Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman album.

Prime Time was conceived as embodying the principle of “harmolodics,” as Coleman’s website explains:

Breaking out of the prison bars of rigid meters and conventional harmonic or structural expectations, harmolodic musicians improvise equally together in what Coleman calls compositional improvisation, while always keeping deeply in tune with the flow, direction and needs of their fellow players. In this process, harmony becomes melody becomes harmony. Ornette describes it as “Removing the caste system from sound.” On a broader level, harmolodics equates with the freedom to be as you please, as long as you listen to others and work with them to develop your own individual harmony.

Which all makes, in an odd way, Zorn’s version somewhat redundant; the Prime Time version already sounds more chaotic and stuffed, but in a coiled, controlled way, and is already sonically far removed from the almost staid original.

I’ve always been a fan of John Zorn, though my interest in him has been flagging in recent years. Content, it seems, to release variation upon variation of the Masada songbook — great stuff, mind you, but repetitive enough to test his fans — Zorn, in my opinion, just hasn’t made music as exciting as he did back in the ’80s and early ’90s, back when he was the real bad boy of Downtown. Granted, The Gift (Zorn’s take on exotica / surf music) and Taboo and Exile (and probably IAO) were, by most standards, outstanding, but pales in comparison to Zorn’s groundbreaking work with Naked City, Painkiller, early Masada, and some of his game pieces.

The concept behind Spy vs Spy — one of those albums in Zorn’s early, more thrilling phase — seems to have been to play Ornette’s compositions LOUD and FAST and HARD; Zorn’s version of “Peace Warriors” is typically intense and brutal, more literally thrash-jazz than, say, the Peter Brotzmann Octet’s Machine Gun ever was. As Zorn writes in his liner notes (where he thanks Napalm Death and Blind Idiot God, after all): “Fucking hardcore rules.” Crank up your speakers.

Hear it: Quartet (3.8 mb), Prime Time (3.4 mb), Zorn (1.9 mb).

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Not much time to write or post anything — I did get back from L.A. / Anaheim in one piece, but am still suffering from indigestion (more later, especially on Izzy at Disneyland) — and Izzy and I are taking off in a couple of days for the Philippines. So you folks who visit for mp3s — sorry, I won’t have any downloads available for a little while.

Meanwhile, here’s E. San Juan, Jr.’s riposte to Patricia Evangelista’s prize-winning speech at the English Speaking Union’s International Public Speaking Competition earlier this May.

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That’s right. Day 7.

After surviving on a part crackers-and-water diet for the rest of the week (with the occasional slip-up, e.g.. not heeding the “Avoid dairy products for 3 days after symptoms disappear” warning), I backslid, as it were, in a spectacular manner, by capping an all-day meeting by going out to a tapas restaurant with the Critical Filipino Studies Collective and assorted partners and friends (among others, Nerissa, Richard, Dylan, Lucy, Robyn, Rowena, Vernadette and Peter, including the special guests of the evening, the out-of-towners Martin and Rick). Rabbit stew! Grilled salmon strips! Parillada de mariscos! And lots of beer!

You can imagine the consequences that long, practically sleepless night. The next morning I watched Martin at brunch, eating his hotel breakfast while I ate saltines from a Tupperware container. And ate more crackers while at my friends’ Keith and Margaret’s daughter’s birthday party later that day, watching the guests eat pizza from the Cheese Board.

Tomorrow we’re driving down to Los Angeles. The crackers are already packed within easy reach. But I am steeling myself for gastrodisaster.

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Day 3 of my bout with food poisoning — and to celebrate today’s anniversary:

Prrprr.

Must be the bur.

Fff. Oo. Rrpr.

Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. Written. I have.

Pprrpffrrppfff.

Done.

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Day 2 of my bout with food poisoning — nothing like it to ruin an otherwise excellent weekend. The likely culprit:: the lechon-BBQ-palabok combo at one of the food booths at the Fiesta Filipina at the Civic Center — unfortunately, I can’t remember the name, but it was one of the restaurants on Mission. Because we — my friends Jeff and Kumi and their daughter “Baby Maia,” which is what Izzy calls her, and Izzy, fortunately escaped unscathed — were there on the second day, and ate early at 11 a.m., I strongly suspect the food was cooked the day before and left out overnight and sitting in the hot sun.

At least I slept like a log last night — none of the fevers and chills and nausea and lack of appetite of the day and night before. But I’m still not completely settled in other ways, which I won’t go into here — suffice it to say that I’m taking a big chance going to the office today. (But I did manage to drag myself out of bed yesterday to have lunch with my friend Cherie, whom I haven’t seen in years — unfortunately I started feeling dizzy before lunch ended, and had to run back home.)

Fiesta Filipina was a bit of a bust — it’s never as exciting somehow as the Yerba Buena celebration, or the ones that used to be held in Union Square. The usual booths were there: the banks, the remittance agencies, the video stores, the assisted-living condos, the spinal examinations, the funeral homes, and so on. But one difference that one begins to see more and more were those specifically for the second generation: the two hiphop radio stations, and tons of “Pinoy Pride” clothing booths.

In any case, there wasn’t much for Izzy to do; she got a free balloon from State Farm but it slipped from its stroller moorings. The day before, however, we were at the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito (which I discovered, much to my surprise, was only 15 minutes away from where we lived), and Izzy had a grand time.

It wasn’t because of the main exhibit, “Do You Know The Way To Sesame Street?,” which (as I told Izzy) would be doubly exciting because there were two generations of Sesame Street viewers to enjoy it. (It premiered in the US about 13 months before I was born, but I don’t think we had a TV in the Philippines until 1974 or so.) I’m not sure she particularly liked sitting in Big Bird’s nest and sitting on the stoop of the 123 Sesame Street (yes, part of the set is recreated in the museum) though; the exhibit is really geared to the adult, with mini-biographies of the cast, a video of the pilot episode, clips of Paul Simon singing “Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard” with the kids (what!? No Stevie Wonder doing “Superstition?!”). I think she was also a little freaked out by this interactive section — we had seen something like it already at the Children’s Museum of Boston, with the Arthur cast — where you sit in front of a screen and it projects you and Elmo (or Zoe, or the Count) on the monitor, talking to each other.

The highlight for Izzy, really, was the big gravel box outside, where she shoveled rocks into a Tonka dump truck. That and the Niman Ranch hotdog she had for lunch (she’s been unable to digest hotdogs before — she’s deathly allergic to soy, and there might have been something in it — so I was pleased to see that the cafe food, being in Marin County after all, was aggressively organic).

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