In high school, after a brief season attempting to learn guitar, Little Jack Melody turned into a bass player when his church choir had an opening for one. Within a year he'd joined his first rock band, playing occasionally at swimming pool Splash Nights, gymnasiumed high school Victory Dances and other school functions. "It was infectious," Little Jack admits. "I made fifteen bucks the first night I played, and went out the next day and bought a record and a hamburger and kept the change."
After a year of tentative college, and another year split between a four month hiatus in London and eight months painting houses back in Houston, Melody decided to major in music composition at the University of North Texas in Denton. He eventually completed his composition degree, after writing, as he puts it, "the requisite amount of atonal chamber music, most of it serial in nature, almost none of it listenable."
During Melody's last two years of college, and then for many years after graduation, he was the bassist for Schwantz Lefantz, an iconoclastic fusion band in Denton. Originally comprised of keyboards, violin, clarinet, guitar, drums, and bass, LJM maintains, "Everything we played sounded like a Jewish wedding in the ballroom next door; except you couldn't dance to it." The band's principal four writers were influenced by Steely Dan, Frank Zappa, Joe Zawinul, and Martin Mull, respectively. "It was a band multiple personality disorder of the first order," Jack laments.
Schwantz eventually morphed into a safer, party-oriented concern, surviving numerous personnel upheavals before beaching itself in the late 80's. Melody was ready for a change, and following a hunch he began to research European cabaret, steeping himself in the history of the phenomenon and listening endlessly to the works of Brecht/Weill, Hans Eisler and others, and noted similarities in the work of contemporary singer/songwriters like Tom Waits and Randy Newman.
Little Jack adopted his current nom de guerre from a Beat Generation minor player, and fashioned LJM and his Young Turks as a protest group on two fronts: first, with its anachronistic instrumentation of harmonium (pump organ), tuba, tenor banjo, sax/clarinet, and Roaring 20's style trap kit, the band was a Luddite response to the age of digital synths and "the mandate of creating every sound under the sun plus a bunch of new ones that we don't even have names for yet"; secondly, many of his original songs shared the tradition of protest and commentary that characterized the spirit of the cabaret movement in Europe.
Little Jack Melody and his Young Turks became a melting pot of its leader's enthusiasms. Jack found inspiration in the confessionals of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits; he was intrigued by the subtleties of Raymond Carver, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill; he was moved by the sheer power and humanity of Hubert Selby Jr., Henry Miller and Carla Bley; he found metaphors in circuses, Salvation Army bands and Melville.
One of Little Jack's rudest awakenings came with the realization that writing songs, words and music, and the wedding of the two, would be a slow, deliberate process; the songs that evolved into LJM's debut effort, On the Blank Generation took well over a year to complete. The album was released in 1991 and met with conspicuous critical acclaim. Effusive reviews rolled in from Musician, Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder in Esquire, Keyboard, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. In something of a major coup, National Public Radio's All Things Considered did a feature spot on the band and the CD, giving LJM even more national exposure.
1994 saw the release of World of Fireworks, which managed to elude critical notice almost entirely. my charmed life was unleashed in 1997 and marked a turning point in the band's evolution, a transitional period that saw the departure of tuba, its replacement with upright bass, and a more open-ended approach to instrumentation.
A live album, Noise and Smoke was recorded at a club in Denton and released in 1999. Harnessing the live energy of the band, complete with between-song banter and various spontaneous serendipities, the CD comes close to representing the genuine article.
The band's personnel has been in a near-continual state of flux, with Young Turks coming and going with maddening regularity. By today's count, there have been at least 28 full time members of the band, and a full reckoning of occasional subs might yield a head count of another 25.
At present, Little Jack is experimenting with a scaled-down approach to his music. "Right now I'm playing bass, Brad Williams is on all sorts of keyboards, and Don Cento has joined on guitar," Melody reports. "First time I've had a guitarist in the band, and it's really pretty cool. Maybe that's why every other band in the world has one. Man, if I'd only known–"
Information from the artist's site
Musicians
Favorited by these users:
Beth_McCabe, Catherine Cuellar, Jeff Jones, Pascale Hall, RHYTHM_ROBB, Robert Rummel-Hudson, Todd Maternowski, edfoo2000, krys, rap0001, ziaflower
Banner:
No need to right-click the picture!
Click here for the HTML to use this banner on other sites and in email signatures.
Something missing?
If you're a fan or member of this band, it's likely you know more about this than we do. Send us an email and tell us what we missed.
This is not MySpace! (And that's a good thing.) The only way you can directly post content to your page is in the comments. The best way to make additions, corrections, add mp3s or add photos is to send us an email.
Find...
Today
Akira Sato Jazz trumpeter Akira Sato, by way of Tokyo, Japan and Vancouver, Canada, is an SMU faculty member and director of The Meadow Jazz Orchestra at SMU. He is also an adjunct faculty member at UNT where he teaches jazz arranging. Sato is also heading into the studio soon with other area musicians and playing at the Scat Jazz Lounge tonight. With all that he's up to, the least you could do is order a Scotch on the rocks and chill to some tunes. (Photo by flickr user arteunporro. More info
Blogs
- Web obsession of the day: Thai lightbulb ad
Square Pegs - Facebook: Fort Worth does not exist
Square Pegs - iPhone mania tease
Square Pegs
Latest comments
- Jay B. Stevens on Pinebox Serenade / Brent Best / Starhead: Cost : $5-7 Brent Best~ Starhead~ A reading by Jason Ashbaugh~ Plus Special Guests Wally Campbell, M...
- Mike Orren on Colorado-based Sunflower Farmers Market opening branch on Henderson Avenue in East Dallas: Some of us (well, me and Brad) are in Seattle. So it’s only mildly ridiculously late. We’ll see you ...
- Scott Doyle on Colorado-based Sunflower Farmers Market opening branch on Henderson Avenue in East Dallas: Don’t you people have bed-times? (Doyle’s going to bed, btw)...
- Scott Doyle on iPhone mania tease: Well played, David. Come to think of it, a little *too* well played. I’ve got my eye on you, sir.. j...
Latest reviews
- kellicamp on Cadillac Pizza Pub: I had been to the pub on a Friday night a few weeks ago when the place was packed. It took about 50 ...
- Colby Walton on Mi Cocina (Southlake): On a par with the other Mi Cocinas (Highland Park Village, Las Colinas) we’ve been to. Tasty margari...
- Colby Walton on Silver Fox Steakhouse (Grapevine): Outstanding appetizers (crabcakes, shrimp) and steaks put this restaurant near the top of my “favori...
Things you can't miss
Latest stories
- Concert review: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss in Grand Prairie (July 7)
- Theater review: Avenue Q at Bass Hall isn't kids' stuff, but it's funny with a capital letter F
- Swift Tracks: Inner City Kids and Klickitat
- New product Wednesday, at Dallas-area stores: A&W Float
- Shula's steakhouse chain opens branch in Fort Worth



Post a comment
(Requires free PegasusNews.com account.)