A recalcitrant record label. The estate of jazz bassist Charlie Haden. A major U.S. bank unfamiliar with foreign tax law. Music royalties. Combine them and the result is a delay in Josh Haden’s Memoire posts.
My goal is to publish every three or four days. If you detect a slowdown, it’s probably because I’m busy contacting the Internal Revenue Service, a bank, record companies, or all at the same time. Making sure my father’s myriad contracts are honored properly is a constant vigil on my part. The time and energy it takes negatively effects my Substack writing, not to mention the work I need to do on my own music.
I know it’s part of the bigger picture. But I have, since my days as an idealistic teenager, felt that the stifling of artistic expression, and the assault this incurs and represents, is caused by certain “non-artistic” entities for particular reasons.
Concierto Con Tambor Y Metralla (“Concert With Drum And Shrapnel”) is a kind of psychedelic pastiche collage of the words, sounds, and music of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). La música de la Guerra Civil Española appears on almost all of Charlie’s Liberation Music Orchestra albums. Starting with recordings lent to him by my mother’s parents in the late 1960s, my father collected all kinds of revolutionary music as research for his own projects. This 1980s-era cassettte is one of them. I post the track listing below. Return here next week for side two.
I found this cassette in a box of hundreds of tapes documenting live performances, radio interviews, rough mixes of studio recordings, etc. If you like what you hear, please consider supporting the preservation of Charlie’s estate, as well as the writing of my book, by subscribing to this substack. Solid, Jackson. Thanks for listening.
Concierto Con Tambor Y Metralla, Side One