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| Ray Manzarek's New CD Atonal Head and New Book Snake Moon Looking for cool stocking stuffers this holiday season? Add Ray Manzarek's new CD Atonal Head and new novel Snake Moon to your list. Manzarek's best known as keyboard player in The Doors, a band whose music incorporates rock, jazz, blues, pre-World War II German cabaret, beat poetry, cinematic imagery and youthful rebellion. Manzarek is still very active today with two exciting new projects: Atonal Head (PBM Records), Manzarek's first foray into electronica, a collaboration with the Polish expatriate jazz musician known simply as Bal and the novel Snake Moon, a Civil-War era ghost story (Night Shade Books). Atonal Head covers a lot of ground, geographically as well as musically. Opener "Shinjuku Nights", evokes a swinging part of Tokyo. "Kundalini Rising" provides a taste of India, while "Feijoada" travels to Brazil on the wings of Bal's classical guitar playing. Manzarek and Bal also provide one of the sexiest covers ever of Duke Ellington's "Caravan." And, in the great Doors tradition of album-ending epics, they conclude with the 22-minute title piece, a free-form composition Manzarek describes as "totally insane." Bal had already performed with top-caliber musicians like pianist David Benoit, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (Frank Zappa, Sting) on his 1999 jazz CD Sometime Soon, as well as with Ricky Martin ("Livin' La Vida Loca" and "Shake Your Bon Bon"). Ever since his teenaged years growing up in communist Poland, Bal was one of the millions of "next generation" Doors fans, dreaming of one day playing with Ray Manzarek. Manzarek describes his second novel, Snake Moon as "a story of the supernatural, forbidden love set in the Civil War, which sweeps two young men into a state of madness." Adapted from a film script he co-wrote with Rick Valentine, with whom he previously wrote the screenplay for Love Her Madly, "Snake Moon [the novel] is written like scenes in a movie -- each chapter is no more than three or four pages long." "The idea", Manzarek elaborates, "came from my interest in things Americana, the world of phantoms, and the possibility of transubstantiation. Could the world of solidity somehow be joined by the world of the shades? And what is it that drives men to risk everything for the feeding of their egos?" write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |