Greg Burk

Photo by Christine Marie SOCIAL DISTORTION at the Wiltern LG, November 24 Twenty-six years along, more humans than ever are nuts for this Mike Ness punk. On the first of six sold-out nights, dudes sported the Ness slicked-back hair, Levi’s jacket and bulldog strut. Old friends reunited. Mothers dragged daughters......

Photo by Ray Klein His head is of normal size. So there must be more heads somewhere. Behind a panel here in his cluttered-up studio, maybe — gotta be at least six skulls-w/brains, maybe 10, that he can screw on when he needs ’em. One so he can function as......

(top): Photo by David Gahr (bottom): Photo by Arlie John CarstensORNETTE COLEMAN, CHARLIE HADEN at Disney Concert Hall, November 12 "I hope you won’t be disappointed," Ornette Coleman whispered before his segment of the sold-out program. One of improv-isational music’s most extreme polarizers for 50 years, he knew what to......

Charlie Haden Snap Judgment (1991) Every once in a while, Haden used to show up on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic radio program with Tom Schnabel. Haden would bring in music he liked, play it and talk about it, This is different: We play music for him, and he talks about......

Ornette Coleman learned about music in mother Fort Worth, and he learned about running elevators in Los Angeles. But in the tradition of such matters, we will claim him -- now. As much as from a birth certificate, you identify a person by his scars. By that measure, we'll also......

What is reality? One ’60s sci-fi story speculated that long ago the world actually was flat, and that the seat of human reason actually was the heart, not the brain. The story wondered if pi at one time actually was 3.1, as some old texts say, not 3.14159 etc. You......

CHARLlE HADEN IS ALWAYS LOOKING for something you can’t see with your eyes, which may be why he closes ’em so much when he plays his upright bass. Meanwhile, his fingers, down there on the strings, are pulling up other kinds of memories, the kind you might call "primal" because......

Photo by David Gahr Ralph Ellison’s novelistic Invisible Man; Albert Ayler’s saxophonic “Spirits” and “Ghosts”; Ornette Coleman’s “Angel Voice,” “The Disguise” and “Invisible” — all speak of communication from unseen sources best not ignored. Those three Coleman titles all come from his 1958 debut recording, Something Else!, in which the......

Photo by Thomas Dorn “Beauty Is a Rare Thing” — that was the title of an Ornette Coleman composition on which Charlie Haden played bass in 1960, and Haden has made it his own motto. When Haden tells his students at CalArts never to play a note they don’t mean,......