Thurs. Sept. 29 & Fri Sept. 30

Remember Jack Henry Abbott? The convicted Killer, thought to be a literary light and championed for release by Norman Mailer? Abbot killed again upon release. It wasn’t the first time this kind of thing happened, and it’s the case of Austrian sociopathic serial killer Jack Unterweger which is at the crux of John Malkovich’s one-man play. Its called “The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer,” and plays at the Cutler Majestic Theatre two nights, Thursday Sept. 29 and Friday Sept. 30. The play was first done in California in 2008, then Vienna in 2099 and in London earlier this year. Now, Malkovich brings it back home. (He is after all a Cantabridgian.) The actor calls his character “a bad, bad guy.”
   Ya think Malkovich can play bad? Oh yeah. Let’s see: “Dangerous Liasons,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Shadow of the Vampire,” to name but three. I’m am anxiously awaiting how Malkovich assumes this character.
  This is a one-man play, but Malkovich is not only guy you’ll see and hear. Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra Los Angeles and soparanos Sophei Ku and Claire Meghnagi break up the monologues, with music from Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart and others. This has being called “darkly comic” and “other times bleak and brutal.”

Thurs. Sept. 29

True story. First time I saw Michael Gira's Swans I was at the Rat, fascinated, apalled, pinned against the back wall of the club by this intense, slow, grinding, pummeling sound. I remember the waves from the bass ripping through my solar plexis. It was brutal, assaultive and it sucked me right in. This was in 1986. Swans pulled a 180 degree spin about two years later and began creating delitcate, atmopsheric music. It was a move away from rage and toward sadness. "I'm sick of flying my skin off for people," singer-guitarist Michael Gira told me back then. "By the end of the show I was naked. There was blood, pretty bad." Gira felt they'd descended into self-parody. Gira put Swans on the shelf in 1997 to pursue other projects, most notably Angels of Light. They recently resurrected Swans and they're on tour - at Royale Thursday Sept. 29 - celebrating the late 2010 release of "My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky," the first new Swans album since "Soundtracks For The Blind in 1997."
   So what to expect: According to publicist and former rock crit Howard Wuelfing, the current two hour long set includes two news songs that will appear on the next Swans album: “Apostate” and the half-hour long “Avatar”; the rest of the set mainly comprises songs from their most recent album plus an older tune “I Crawled” -- all these performances are prolonged exercises in high volume, incredible intense and dense soundscaping.
    "About reconstituting Swans, Gira says, “There was a point a few years ago during a particular show when I was on tour with Angels Of Light, with Akron/Family serving as the backing band. It was during the song ‘The Provider.’ Seth's guitar was sustaining one open chord (very loudly), rising to a peak, then crashing down again in a rhythm that could have been the equivalent of a deep and soulful act of copulation. The whole band swayed with this arc. Really was like riding waves of sound.  I thought right
then, 'You know, Michael, Swans wasn't so bad after all...' Ha ha!
It brought back - in a flood - memories, or maybe not memories, more a tangible re-emersion in the sensation of Swans music rushing through my body in waves, lifting me up towards what, I can only assume, will be my only experience of heaven.

Tues. Sept. 27

 Prog-rock 'n' jazz heads have quite a night for them in store at Royale Tuesday Sept. 27. First, there's Stick Men, boasting one-time Brookliner, bassist Tony Levin, and next up there's the Adrian Belew Power Trio. We had an email chat with Levin - who just released the Levin/Torn/White CD - about what's up and what's to come.
JSInk: You've been in so many different ensembles over the years. What kind of pleasure to you get in collaborating with so many and varied artists?
Levin: Double pleasure. Of course it's great playing music with great players - it's FUN. But also, I've found through the years I can learn a lot from excellent players, whatever their instrument, which I can apply to my own playing. So it's fun and it's a going to school experience too.

You've pioneered the stick bass sound. I recently interview Les Claypool and he was giving you major props for him doing what he does. Can you talk about how that style developed and what it's done for you, which, in my book, makes you stand out as one rock (or prog-rock's) preeminent bassists. And using the bass as another lead instrument.

I don't feel I necessarily use the bass as a lead instrument... I certainly don't intend to do that - but I enjoy lending bass parts to a song or composition that hopefully make it a better piece. If that means being really simple, I do that. If it seems to call for some action in the low end, I'll try that.  What the Chapman Stick brought to me is another option, sonically and in a percussive way, that I can bring, as a tool, to the encounter with new music. I found especially in the progressive music of Peter Gabriel, and King Crimson - which seems to be the ideal setting for new and unusual approaches, that the Stick fit in perfectly.

Your best moments (recording or in studio) with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson? Does Crimson still exist and if so when might we see it?

I don't keep track of best moments, I'm afraid ... takes me some time thinking to remember things that happened - I think most musicians, like me, live pretty much in the present, and in the future ... so scanning all the past shows isn't something that comes easy. As for Crimson, i'm pretty sure nothing is coming up for us in the next year or so - it's up to Robert Fripp, our leader, who has said he's not going to do any Crimson-izing for awhile. After that is a question mark for me as well as the fans. I certainly hope there will be more recording and touring.

Wed. Sept. 28  

  “I want to avoid painting this as ‘celebrity-makes-a-book,’” said Colin Meloy, author of the new young-adult novel “Wildwood.” “It’s not a vanity project for me.”
    Meloy is best-known as the lead singer-songwriter of Decemberists, the Portland, Ore.-based alt-folk-rock band. The 11-year-old group scored its first No. 1 album with “The King Is Dead,” earlier this year. Having scaled that mountain, the band is now on the shelf indefinitely.
     “The book predates what I’ve done with Decemberists, but it’s a companion to the writing in Decemberists,” Meloy said on the phone from a stop outside Chicago, where he’s on a promotional book tour. He comes to read at the Coolidge Corner Theatre Wednesday with his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis.
    Meloy said he and Ellis, who met in 1997 at the University of Montana, began working together on what became “Wildwood” years ago. They were living with other artists in a Portland warehouse while Ellis was doing illustrations for Meloy’s musical projects. They picked up the book again following Decemberists 2009 tour, after the birth of their son Hank.
    “Wildwood,” the first in a trilogy, concerns a 12-year-old girl named Prue, who enters the dreaded Impassable Wilderness – aka Wildwood – a fanciful and frightening take-off on Portland’s Forest Park. She charges in with her friend Curtis to rescue her one-year-old brother Mac, who has been snatched from his stroller by a murder of crows and taken into the forest. In Wildwood, they encounter verbal and vicious coyotes, among various creatures, human and otherwise.

Fri. Sept. 23

 Les Claypool has had a long antagonistic relationship with two things: Runaway consumerism and the lower rungs of pop culture. "Sometimes it’s disgust and most of the time I just ignore it," said Claypool, 47, singer-songwriter-bassist for the revived trio Primus. "I don’t go traipsing through the kitty litter box unless I have to," he added, on the phone last week from his Sebastopol, Cal. home. "That’s pretty much the way it’s been since I started spewing hunks of vinyl, plastic and now digital dots and dashes."

That would have been back in 1990 when the fractured funk band released the "Frizzle Fry" album and its key song, "Pudding Time." Now, Primus has delivered "Green Naugahyde," its first studio album in 11 years, with songs like "Eternal Consumption Engine" and "Moron TV.’

Claypool on reality TV: "It’s cheap to make and people like to watch car crashes. So when you see these car crash individuals being glorified, what I’m assuming is that’s compelling to certain people. But when I’m watching my kids see something like ‘Jersey Shore’ and looking at the glorification, I get a little miffed."

Frank Zappa is an obvious influence on Claypool. "I grew up on satire and humor," he said, "and it’s an extraordinarily powerful weapon. Standup philosophers as Mel Brooks used to say."