Organist Edward Torres at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater

Up the freeway a few miles from Downtown Los Angeles, the streetlights flicker on as I approach the warm glow of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Inside, I meet organist Edward Torres.

What was once a silent movie house, long ago, now buzzes with the sound of children, their parents, and a handful of chatty 20 somethings who are neither.

This is the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, and through the swinging doors from the lobby, a bright red carpet unfurls down a gentle slope, all the way to the bright red stage curtain.

To the left of the stage, still a few minutes from showtime, another red curtain has been pulled to the ceiling, and in a raised alcove, the back of an ornate jacket faces the audience, light glints off the shining sequence.

The person wearing this jacket is almost entirely enveloped by a cockpit of levers, foot pedals, buttons and 4 rows of piano keys. His fingers glide across all of these options with amazing fluidity.

This is Edward Torres, the organist at the puppet theater, and he weaves through a medley of arrangements like a driver dipping seamlessly from lane to lane, each song a passing exit or town.

“At an early age I discovered that I could play my emotions through my fingers... performing on this particular instrument for me, is an extremely personal zen, if you will.” - Edward Torres

Bob Baker Marionette Theater does puppet shows in cabaret style, which means the puppeteers are fully visible during the performance. For most of the shows they wear a striking all-red outfit which blends into the theater’s backdrop but you can see them the whole time on the strings. The stage is lower than the seats, on a gentle slope, and the puppeteers don’t act or provide vocal accompaniment. Instead, a prerecorded track of layered audio plays through the house speakers featuring voice actors, sound effects and vintage show tunes, to which the puppets sing along and perform intricate choreographies. It’s hard to describe the form, but the effect is an arresting cascade of expressive, blinking works of hand-crafted art. The audio tracks are a work of art too, many assembled by Bob Baker himself, splicing together physical tape from a deep archive reaching well into broadway and hollywood history.

“…it’s getting back to basic human interaction. And the overall feeling of being a part of something. Truly. It's beautiful, I think. But anyways, I just play the organ, I don't know!” -Edward Torres

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater was founded in 1963 — Bob Baker had been creating puppets since childhood, and he founded a physical theater on the edge of Downtown los Angeles, which ran shows and enchanted children for 50 years in that location. After Baker’s passing in 2014, the theater fell on tenuous times, and they were pushed out of the building that the organization, and it’s collection of thousands of puppets had called home for decades. The building was slated for redevelopment, but still sits vacant. They were able to find this building, what was once the York Theater, a silent movie house in highland park, and had been a whole string of things including a church in the mean time. It transformed into a dreamy, whimsical space, complete with a theater organ.

The move to this new space was in 2019, and just 4 months after it opened, the pandemic hit, again threatening the theater’s survival. But, they pulled through, and returned post-pandemic with a show called Reopening Revelry.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, interior.

An oil derrick and mountain lion puppet hang dormant backstage after the show.

“…in terms of theater organs, I think that they will survive and thrive in the new world setting not just as being a solo instrument, but as being a part of something else. I think that's their best bet to survive in this world.” -Edward Torres

“Audio is not a technology, but a process that employs technology to construct temporary social architecture made of air.” - Micah Silver, Figures in Air

Tags, Topics and Mentions: Edward Torres, Ed Torres, Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Theater Organ, Organist, Puppets, Puppetry, Puppet Theater, Puppet Theater Los Angeles, LA, California, Figures in Air, The Wind, Organ, Silent Movies, Silent Movie Theater LA, Highland Park, York blvd, Freeway, Western Tanager, Mockingbird Car Alarm, Historic Theater, Organs, Historic Organs, Edward Torres Organist

Henry Real Bird at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Off the train in Elko, Nevada we meet cowboy poet Henry Real Bird, former Montana Poet Laureate, teacher and bronc rider from the banks of the Little Bighorn.

Cowboy poetry is often very structured. The good poets play with that structure and surprise you with twists or a pauses, jokes, word play. Henry’s poems do somethin’ else entirely. They feel like suddenly you’re walking down a path and you don’t know where it’s goin’, or if it’s goin’ anywhere, but it usually does and then you’re somewhere a little different and he says thanks and puts his hat back on and sits down in a chair at the back the stage.

Portrait at the Gathering by Kevin Martini-Fuller

“Where am I from? Yeah, I'm from Garryowen, Montana, and that's the Crow Indian Reservation. And that's on the Little Bighorn. And I grew up there pretty much speaking Crow Indian until I was maybe five, six years old. …I grew up, strong, and, now, now that I'm writing more about my life, I see how lucky I am. I was a strong person. I rode bucking horses and then taught and put together a ranch and stuff like that against the odds. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What else?’’

The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering started in 1985, becoming an annual roundup of cowboys, ranchers, poets, artists and the many combinations therein, hailing from all parts the American west and sometimes beyond. Hosted by the Western Folklife Center, the gathering is always held in January/February when folks’ ranches are dormant. Elko’s oft-snowy streets are then marked by the soles of boots, mostly of the cowboy variety, some rounded, some pointed, and most of them pointing into the Western Folklife Center’s Pioneer Saloon, or up the front steps of the Elko Convention Center.

Featuring:

Henry Real Bird | Library of Congress Recording

The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering | Western Folklife Center

Mentioned in the interview: Andy Hedges’ podcast interview with Henry on Cowboy Crossroads. This is a great podcast if you’d like to dig deeper into cowboy poetry.

All year, the words come up from the land itself

and the poets bring them to town.

we all feast

and we leave warm and full, or cold and spent or some combination and the snow falls starting at dusk and then on through the night

Then the wheels rumble beneath us, “tomorrow is only a horizon

It’s the line wavering under my feet” -[M Jiang]

and behind, Elko as a tiny speck,

buzzes away

over the horizon.

Tags, Topics and Mentions: Henry Real Bird, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, Western Folklife Center, Elko Nevada, Garryowen Montana, Crow Indian Reservation, Little Bighorn, Cowboy Poetry, lullabies, poetry, western poetry, Thought by henry real bird, cowboy crossroads podcast, the wind podcast, rural art, rural poetry, american west

Echo from Deep Valley with Ho Lan

A song bounces from slope to slope, emerging from the valley as an echo. Just out of earshot from Spokane Falls we meet star Taiwanese yodeler, Ho Lan.

Fil Corbitt: The yodel is kind of this thing that ties people to wild places in some way. Do you agree with that? 
Ho Lan: Yeah, maybe connected… connected to everything.

White Cloudy Valley with its gracefully winding brook.

I wish to store the great love in my heart, deep within its bosom.

Ah! I call out, with hope that you can hear and understand.

May the valley echo my love to the far corners of the earth.

 
  
Tags, Topics and Mentions: Ho Lan, Echo from Deep Valley, Yodeling, Yodel, Taiwanese Yodel, Puli, Spokane, Washington, Spokane River, Spokane Falls, Expo '74, Manito Park, Yodeling cowboys, Hawaiian yodel, Mike Hanapi, Vicente Fernandez, Josaya Hadebe, Bulawayo Blue Yodel, yodeling in nature, waterfalls, birdsong, Hsia-jung Chang, the wind, eastern washington, high desert, silent night

Jazmine (JT) Green in Brooklyn, New York

The word “transit” comes from the Latin “transitus”, meaning to pass across or through. Off the subway in Brooklyn, down the stairs into the busy green room of On Air Fest, we meet Jazmine (JT) Green.

|| Ephemera, change, sound. ||

Before “As A” night of pleasure • album release party in Brooklyn, New York. 2024

Transformation through Repetition (feat. Jemma Rose Brown) - aired on Jazmine’s experimental audio podcast U+1F60C

Jazmine (JT) Green: ...Sometimes transitioning feels like dying in a video game. And then when you're dead, the “continue” icon appears and the countdown appears. And you have ten seconds to say Yes or No. And then you say “yes”, and then you spawn back to that position prior.
And not only in that metaphorical sense... I've had two near death experiences with pulmonary embolisms that, I was physically dead for a brief period of time and then revived.
And it's one of those things when you're on your third shot at life, then you have another metaphorical death. You really begin to look at every single decision in your life, down to the time you spend, and, you're like, every minute, every second is a gift.
[speaking about the album cover of "As A..."]
Jazmine (JT) Green: So the idea of the dead pixel. This is especially prevalent in modern display technology, because things are being made at scale, super fast. A lot of times LCD panels are not perfect. And it's usually noticeable if the screen displays full white.
There may be a single black pixel that is present. And what is present in there is the fact that like one of the panels is not illuminating properly, which looks zoomed out like a single spot on a perfectly spotless image, right? With the cover of the album...the album takes place from the perspective of the girl's smartphone. It's a gridded red, green, blue pattern. It evokes RGB light, the basic color panels that then make up an LCD screen. Like if you've ever spilled water on your smartphone and you've seen it magnified, you may see bits of these red, green, and blue squares pop up.
What I was curious about was utilizing the metaphor of the dead pixel as, like, a metaphor for the girl in the album. Which in turn, since it is an auto-fiction, you know, I would be lying and saying that some of my life experiences are not reflected in the narrative of the record. And thinking about the girl's life as a pristine LCD panel previously, but then having this one imperfection that sort of infiltrates the facade.
And if you zoom in on I made it super high res for a reason. So if you find the 3000 by 3000 pixel version, if you zoom in very closely at the dead pixel, it actually reveals an image. And on that image, it's a portrait that was taken of me by my partner at a concert around this time last year, where I first went out in gender affirming clothing.
And it was a moment where I felt like there was a part of this new self that was punching through the LCD facade that I built until the point that eventually all the pixels will be dead and then will need to be rebirthed into a new panel in a way.

• // •

Featuring:

Jazmine (JT) Green | music • website • Molten Heart

Jemma Rose Brown | website

Thanks to: Eleanor Qull, Jemma Rose Brown, Ray Pang, all the folks at On Air Fest.

Alash Ensemble in Winnemucca, Nevada

From the backroom of a Basque hotel in the Great Basin, Tuvan throat singing flows out through the bar, over the train tracks, and into the vast sagebrush steppes.

 

• • • Alash Ensemble • Website | Albums | Streaming • • •

Alash Ensemble || Ayan-ool Sam, Bady-Dorzhu Ondar, Ayan Shirizhik

Igil - a 2 string bowed instrument with the head of a horse. (made by Oktober Saya)

Kengirge - A big floor drum, played with mallets (made by Ayan Shirizhik and Sholban Salchak)

Shyngyrash - a string of bells that sits atop the Kengirge (made by Ayan Shirizhik)

Doshpuluur - a three stringed banjo-like instrument (made by Sholban Salchak)

Alash Ensemble on this tour || Ayan Shirizhik, Enrique Ugalde, Ayan-ool Sam (Photo by Sean Quirk)

 

featuring:

Alash Ensemble • Website | Albums | Streaming

Enrique Ugalde (sitting in with Alash) • Music

Thanks to: Katie Doyle Donovan, Sierra Jickling, Eleanor Qull, Emily Pratt, Mike Corbitt, Scott Mortimore, Mike Branch, Sydney Martinez, Ayan-ool Sam, Bady-Dorzhu Ondar, Ayan Shirizhik, Enrique Ugalde, and Sean Quirk.

Topics, Tags and Mentions: Alash Ensemble, petroglyphs, freight train, The Martin Hotel, the martin hotel winnemucca, winnemucca nevada, basque, picon punch, tuva, throat singing, xoomei, tuvan throat singing, seven troughs, ghost town, mazuma nevada, tunnel camp nevada, ghost towns, mining towns, casino cafe, the martin hotel menu, bai taiga, Sygyt, Kargyraa, Xöömei, Ezenggileer, Borbangnadyr, great basin arts and entertainment, throat singer winnemucca, winnemucca throat singing concert