Telegraph cables that sing down the highway

Remember the days when the murderer's flashback played inside the frames of his / her sunglasses? I do. Pictured above: John Cassavetes in Columbo: Étude in Black (1972). Searching for other examples I came across this scene from Columbo: Death Lends a Hand (1971).

Note past errors in Robert Culp's specs... and the score by Gil Mellé, Blue Note jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Mellé scored many films and TV shows. Here he is taking things for a cool, brisk walk on the opening credits of Columbo: Short Fuse (1972):

Mellé was an electronic music pioneer who built his own instruments. He played with an all-electronic jazz ensemble at Monterey in 1972 and composed one of the first all-electronic scores for the movie The Andromeda Strain in 1971:

He was also an exhibiting painter whose work appeared as sleeve art for Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Monk, among others. He lived in Malibu, California where he died age 73.

Here's the Gil Mellé Quartet doing a particularly lovely 'Moonlight in Vermont' from Patterns in Jazz (1956):

New favourite bassist

Esperanza Spalding live in Copenhagen. At NPR Music she talks about her decision to play the double bass:

That's like the vein of jazz... It's that ability to immediately be able to communicate with someone that you don't know. And in those first five minutes of this instrument that was completely foreign to me, in a way I touched right upon that vein. I mean, I hit it, I hit that nerve. Now, after nine years, everything I've learned about jazz kind of all comes back to that first realization in that room.

Esperanza's official website is here.

Smokin'

There has been some debate in the Muse Lounge about the new anti-smoking laws. Basically Gretchen and Cedric still smoke like chimneys and none of the bar staff are going to be telling them to put it out. Recreational drugs tend to find their way into the Muse Lounge regardless of external fashions for or against. This permissive attitude is a natural product of the Hooves' European heritage and has caused problems in the past, most famously with the Lounge's accountant, Hugo Galvis. Cedric himself hired Hugo to work on the business's books after a two-day night on the town in the early 90s. Tellingly, even after 48 hours of socialising and hijinks the older Cedric remained unaware that Hugo came from San Cristobel let alone spoke not one word of English. "The time we spend together, she had flown by," Hugo told translators. "The old man - he see a little of himself in me, I think, with the fire in the eyes." In another piece of bad news, Hugo's luck with numbers has turned out to be inversely proportional to his success with the ladies, resulting in the Inland Revenue imposing full tax audits on the Muse Lounge following the break-ups of his first and second marriages. His third - to controversial Italian women's hockey star Annamaria Raffo - has seemed to take, however, and projections for the second half of 2003 are looking good, delivered as always in Hugo's crabbed handwriting on chunks of plasterboard borrowed from the painters and workmen permanently renovating the couple's ninth-floor Herne Bay apartment. "Annamarie, she is life to me," Hugo explained, wiping the sweat from his face. "Aiyee - see how my face burns? Hayfever all the time from your stinking Pacific island - hayfever! I leave you all one day!" His departure however has been delayed by inquiries from various United States agencies and a late night telephone caller identifying himself only as "El pez grande".

– Apr 19, 2003

Gretchen Hooves interview part I

Gretchen Hooves has become quite the recluse in her later years, choosing only to appear on certain club nights, so it is with no little excitement that I welcome the news that she has agreed to be interviewed by me as part of our small collected history of the Muse Lounge. An accomplished flautist in her early teens, Gretchen first met her future husband and creative partner, Cedric Hooves while they were both attending art school in the late 1950s. From there, romance and exciting business was to follow. I go to meet Gretchen in the early afternoon at the Muse Lounge. She appears a long green gown and with one of her now trademark paisley head scarves and joins me for a mai tai and a little conversation.

JANWILLEM DORIN: Tell me about your work at the Delft College of Arts and Sciences. What were you reading there?

GRETCHEN HOOVES: I was working in the field of interpretative ceramics, which was a very progressive school of ceramics in Delft. It's difficult work because you are pushing the materials to their limit. It's also very labour intensive because the completed structures are fragile and need to be rushed into the kiln quickly before their finer points start to sag. The masters of interpretative ceramics actually work with the kiln door open, the fire burning right at their shoulder, the hands of the flames actually waiting to accept the completed ceramic form as it passes from the hands of the master. This is a very exciting thing to see - very emotional, although obviously not for beginners as there are many dangers. It was certainly not an acceptable working environment for a young girl like myself.

JWD: Why was that?

GH: [laughs] The official reason was that because we girls were all wearing our hair very long then, in the bohemian style, that there was some concern that it would catch fire.

JWD: But you wore safety equipment, working with the kilns like that, surely.

GH: Oh, but of course. There was a big hood that you wore with a face plate - a very heavy thing, my goodness, with shoulder pads that would catch on your clothes. I don't know how many sweaters I ruined putting it on and taking it off. But no, of course, safety was not the reason at all. Although the field of ceramics has attracted many women - some of the greatest ceramics designers in the Netherlands have been women - the field of interpretative ceramics was very male dominated, like the Beats - they didn't like women. We were ornaments to them, a little, I think.

JWD: And yet you were attracting to what sounds like a difficult and perhaps dangerous working method.

GH: It wasn't too difficult. As long as one worked honestly, and with feeling - that was the main thing. We all got very muddy of course, because you work with a very wet clay, especially for the last stage of a work, but that was part of the fun, I think. There was a system of mechanical arms for lifting the finished pieces into the furnace, so that made that part of the job easier.

JWD: So the machines freed you to work.

GH: They did the lifting, yes, although they didn't do the thinking for you of course. We called them robot arms but really they were a system of pulleys and weights with only rudimentary electronic component to record and repeat movements. The switches were sound operated. When your piece was finished you would step back and clap your gloves over your head - because the safety hood muffled your normal speech - and the pulley arms would lower and pick up your wet sculpture and lift it into the furnace. We girls of course, thought this was fantastic.

JWD: And of course, the sound switch -

GH: Yes! The sound switch was always breaking down. The mechanism was very crude technology. The person who could fix it was Cedric. He was quite the audiophile even back then.

JWD: Was that significant?

GH: At the time it was very brave. There was a lot of union opposition to this sort of automation. People felt it would cost jobs in the ceramics industry if the furnace blasting process was controlled by machines. It's a big industry in the Netherlands - interpretative ceramics was very far to the left of that of course, but there was concern that these very bourgeois concepts and experiments would leech into the lifeblood of the industry and poison it for others.

-- Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch March 2002
(First reproduced | Mar 29, 2003)

Mike W Hall interview

For almost 25 years now Mike W. Hall has been supplying tropical fish to the glitterati of Auckland. Here today in this interview he speaks with Jazz Dispatch editor Janwillem Dorin about his personalised work for the Muse Lounge before and after its move to the Whyte Tower.

JANWILLEM DORIN: How long have you been dealing with fish?

MIKE W. HALL: My father imported tropical fish in the 60s. He and my mother were naturalists - nudists, actually - and he himself was very active in promoting bio-filtration to New Zealand breeders and fish enthusiasts.

JD: By bio-filtration, you mean using plants to clean the tank water.

MH: Yes. It creates a more natural environment for the fish and of course it doesn't waste power. My father despised undergravel filters - I remember accompanying him on a protest march once outside one of the major tropical fish dealers. He and his friends were campaigning for better pet environments in general and the machine filter suppliers were getting pretty annoyed. It was a close thing actually. Anyway, I took over the business after my father retired and it looks like my son will be running it too, someday. He has a real knack.

JD: You of course are very well known for your work with the fish tanks at the Muse Lounge, both at its first and second venues...

MH: That's right. I had met Gretchen at a nudist beach near Opotoki and we had a long conversation about tropical fish. She had been standing out waist-deep in the water bending over trying to spot tropical fish through her swimming goggles, and of course she hadn't seen any, and she was very disappointed. I remember her hair was up in these sort of plaits and her eyes were red - I thought from crying but it was just the seawater. I had to explain to her that New Zealand isn't a tropical country - she was surprised by that, I think Cedric had misrepresented it to her slightly when they came out here.

JD: So Gretchen was the tropical fish enthusiast of the two of them?

MH: They were both keen on it, if I remember rightly. I checked out the club when I was back in Auckland - it was very hard to find then, in a very odd place - and Gretchen introduced me to Cedric. He was a little slurred, from the drinking and everything - I mean, I don't know what else was going on there, I'm a pretty straight arrow. Anyway, I said I dealt in tropical fish and he was immediately very excited about it, and said he wanted to turn all the walls into fish tanks.

JD: For the first venue?

MH: Yes, that's it. We didn't do that of course, because the weight alone would have gone through the floor. But we set up the big tank by the lift entrance with mostly anabantids. We needed a good community fish and that was a good place to start. We had Dwarf Gourami and some bubble nesters -

JD: But then came the second venue.

MH: Yeah, yeah, and that's when Cedric went for a grander scheme, with the big oval windows and the uplighting and the big tanks surrounding the couches at the north end - three giant walls of tank with the water and the fish.

JD: And the girl?

MH: Yes. Yeah, Tania - she was in the tank on some nights.

JD: Swimming and performing for the guests with the music and so forth.

MH: I don't know how it came about. It certainly wasn't my idea because the perspiration off a human body alone is raising the urea levels in the water, let alone the vibration. And a large body - anything larger than a fish, I mean - is stirring up the temperature layers that naturally settle around the plants in the tank, and that's not good. Apart from that the tank size worked well. Bio-filtration really comes into its own in the larger tanks because it works with the natural currents and movement of the fish.

JD: How did Tania actually get into the tank?

MH: I think she fell in.

JD: Really? She was intoxicated?

MH: Oh, probably. She slipped - she had these very high platforms on one night and she was leaning on the tank talking to someone and she leaned back a little further and she just... slid under. The water was very warm. We ran the tanks at about 27 degrees to support the fish's immune systems. Tania, of course, thought we kept them like that just for her.

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch 1997
translated by Kirsty Widdell

(First reproduced | Dec 06, 2002)

Jazz Dispatch #1

The original Muse Lounge was opened in downtown Auckland in 1968 by a young couple from Antwerp, Cedric and Gretchen Hooves. Cedric Hooves was a qualified architect; Gretchen trained as a flautist and worked briefly as a photographic model before settling on a career in interior design. The newlyweds emigrated to New Zealand in 1967 to set up a business importing the latest European furniture, leasing commercial premises on Fanshawe Street to display their wares.

This new underground showroom, however, soon became better known as a place where writers, artists and musicians would gather to socialise with other members of Auckland's bohemian community. Together these loud and sometimes overly colourful crowds would smoke weed and listen to jazz into the small hours as they discussed the outre concepts of the day.

It was Gretchen who named these gatherings the Muse Lounge after the experimental fusion combo led by legendary drummer and vibes man Trip Checker. A jazz buff since childhood, Gretchen had followed the Muse Lounge since their first performances in Paris and Montreal. When the Muse Lounge proper opened a few blocks away on the corner of Wolfe and Albert Streets in 1970, Checker himself joined the house players for a fifteen minute improv set that included versions of 'Blue Skies / de Gier' and 'Gretchen's Hat', a fierce 7/4 workout dedicated to the young Mrs Hooves.

The property boom in Auckland's central business district saw the Muse Lounge move up to split-level premises in the Whyte Tower and a limited licence in 1976, but the ambience and the decor, famously, remain. For over thirty years the sculpted oval lobby of the Muse Lounge has been the first stop for young people, tourists and those in the know. Drop in any time after sunset and you'll find interesting people of all ages scattered across the bubble chairs and curving white couches. Cedric, grey haired in his kimono, still likes to drop into the sound booth and personally tweak the levels. Gretchen likes to take a seat by the bar where she can smoke and watch the crowd. All sorts of bands play there now but the place still has that twilight vibe. The girls smile and the boys tap their feet. Talk in the Muse Lounge makes music you hear nowhere else.

-- Janwillem Dorin, Jazz Dispatch / June 1999

Trip Checker interview (excerpt)

Leaning back in a patterned brown and orange booth of 246, the new space age arcade of Auckland City, New Zealand, Trip Checker enjoys a prawn cocktail and one of the latest drip percolator style coffees as the shoppers stroll beneath us on the ground floor. A week has passed since his discharge from Auckland Hospital: always bony and unshaven, the gentleman drummer is a little paler than usual. But he has kindly consented to keep the agreed appointment with Jazz Dispatch where we are keen to discuss his latest commercial forays plus rumours of a possible Muse Lounge reunion.

TRIP CHECKER: Is that thing on?

JANWILLEM DORIN: Yes I believe so. In 1969, you -

CHECKER: It's so damn small.

JD: It's one of the latest Japanese products.

CHECKER: And the mike picks up everything I'm saying?

JD: Yes. I was wondering if we could -

CHECKER: I'm hip.

JD: - if we could talk a little about Montreal.

CHECKER: That's a great town.

JD: Yeah?

CHECKER: It's a sweet gig. Yeah, I mean... we'd all meet up there, not in a planned way, you understand, but we'd meet up there see - I'd say to Clive [Janitor] and Elmore [Holdall] "see you at Montree." That was what we called it.

JD: Montree was your name for Montreal.

CHECKER: Swinging. [indistinct] So we'd be hanging around the tent. There were several tents, actually but the main tent you... [indistinct] ...the desk, right? And one of us would say - Elmore, usually, he'd say "let's do a gig." And we just would.

JD: With no rehearsal.

CHECKER: No, no. No rehearsal. Rehearsal's for squares, man! Rehearsal, I mean, hey, like we're not at school, you know? We're not like in class, this is not a class, man. You have to be there. You have to be there.

JD: But you had some sort of tonal framework, I understand -

CHECKER: No framework.

JD: Nothing? You had a scale worked out or something.

CHECKER: We had nothing, man. Nada.

JD: You just went in there?

CHECKER: You got it.

JD: And what if things didn't go as planned?

CHECKER: How could they? We didn't have any plans.

JD: I mean, what if things went wrong?

CHECKER: Then they went wrong. It's like life, you know? Why should Montree be any different?

JD: I think the danger is that the audience could think you were being indulgent.

CHECKER: We were always being indulgent. The only reason anyone ever heard us in the first place is because we decided to indulge ourselves by becoming a band. Everyone's indulging themselves. This interview's indulging you, I'm indulging myself by talking, you're indulging yourself by listening -

JD: Yes -

CHECKER: I mean, it's all indulgent, you know? We're all indulgent.

JD: OK. So, moving along -

CHECKER: I mean just moving along is indulgent. You dig?

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch, 1974
Translated from the original by Kirsty Widdell
(First reproduced | Dec 02, 2002)