Album Notes

“Monogram Sighting: The Gifted and the Stray” By Raleigh Collins Reprinted with permission. CityLights, August 2003 Tim Duffy comes to us from a bizarre cocoon of sightings, searches triggered from an early 60's kid sighted under the stage, sneaking in at the early Newport Jazz Festival as early as 1964, hypnotized by Mose Allison, Howlin Wolf, and Coleman Hawkins - and an encounter with Monk in an alley in Boston at age 12. Manchild Duffy went on to be an art student at RISD, sculptor, breaking out on weekends to be the music guy for "happenings" with Alan Kaprow, in the museums, the forerunner to what is now called performance art. Sun Ra's bag man for a season at the Monday night stand in 1966 at Pookies Pub, roadie for Miles Davis for a minute, the same for Muddy Waters. In the east coast coterie of Charles Lloyd and Keith Jarrett, Tim experienced improvisation with a spiritual and cosmic bent that bent the way that only 1966 could bend you. He started writing songs and scatting with blues bands, and fell into a surrealist's manifesto that only an art student raised on jazz could do. He was tipped by Spade Arson, legendary bodyguard for Jimi Hendrix (and later the inventor of JiffyPop), that musicians he needed were in Colorado. Without skipping a beat, he ceremoniously left the east coast directly from the grave of Jack Kerouac in 1969. A surrealist kid from the museum circuit, writing songs, singing, and bandleading wild contingents, he coined "an event orchestra." Sculptor, madman along the fringes, absurdist, and R&B frontman, he hitched to Miami to try to make a band with 14 year-old Jaco Pastorius, and was out of there in ten days. He appeared as "Tato MoonSprings, the Unchained" for a year on a midwest R&B club circuit - wearing 70 pounds of plastic fruit onstage - to the aloof or bewildered responses of those calling out for "Shotgun" and "I Feel Good." For Duffy, writing included an array of elements, including James Brown tributes, "interruptionism," and “surprise arrangements" - pointillistic staccato that the R&B horn section studied like gospel. He received respect, but didn't find the gestalt he sought until he broke into "Shake Your Beanie Bag," an obscure hit he had on the Fire label ("if it's hot, you know it's on Fire!"). He held pride in the hit, although it had been banned by the New England High School Principals’ Association in 1964 for fomenting teenage rioting at two high school dances. As a scrub rock journalist out of Lawrence, Kansas, I first saw his show-as-spectacle in Kansas City's Blue Flames dive in 1969. With lightning speed conducting, what the newspaper ads listed as an event orchestra (dubbed "The Terchumsheds"), he conducted improvisation. I had never seen someone conduct improvisation. In his words the players were asked to be "mutable." Since it was a confused reefer chitlins Midwest circuit, and preceded Funkadelic by a few years, I guess that's an alright comparison, but put some Moondog and George Crumb in there too. And one could swiftly offer up the Mothers of Invention as peers. This incensed Duffy when I brought it up, meeting Tim for the first time backstage at the Embers in 1970 in Des Moines. He took this ire onto the stage and presented incandescent surrealist R&B for two straight hours with a packed crowd that was rabbled and roused - "euphorically agitated" as my article would spout, enough so that the state police were called in. Holed up on the bus, when I did get to him after the mayhem, Tim exhaled and harumpfed. "Fifth riot in my career. This one's for Man Ray." In the hot summer of 1970, when black and white shared the dance floor, Tim Duffy was in headdress holding up geometric patterns as charts for the horn section. Players were kept on their toes, and the word got out that to play with Tim Duffy was a never-to-forget experience. Shit howdy. Fusion players and roots bluesmen passed thru the ensemble, and the outfits were R&B or jazz, depending