Amy Sheffer - I Am Shee

Also in Great Neck, I Am Shee, as in Sheffer, as in the lost ululations of loft jazz singer and painter Amy Sheffer. Some of the best free jazz instrumentation figure skates invisible lines between symphony and cacophony, chords and discord, genius and insanity. When it comes to free jazz vocals, one often expects howls, scats, and throat singing. In Sheffer's capable voice box, such extended vocal techniques punctuate bouts of operatic virtuosity. She sang in the New York City jazz scene from the late 1960s through the 1980s, eventually returning to the house where her parents raised her in Great Neck. She recently told Tone Glow:

"There’s very little mind expansion in my life outside of my artwork and my music. I’m an 81-year-old woman with two roommates and I’m trying to get along with them. I don’t wanna bother people the way I might have bothered people when I was younger. I’ve got body dysmorphia, I’ve got insomnia, so mostly I’m just trying to keep myself together, do some shopping, take care of the house ... But it’s not like I’m in the psychic realm I used to be in. You know? I mean, it was like I would go around talking to people who weren’t there and all that kind of stuff. I’d have strange visitations. It was weird. Back in the day I went to a therapist and they showed me what the therapist had written about me: he had said 'possibly psychotic.' I felt very involved with the cosmos back then. Where I’m living now in Great Neck, it’s not very far-out."

Whether Sheffer has heard the latest from fellow Great Necker AWOL Da Mindwriter, I cannot say. I will say that Sheffer's equally vibrant work and personality should serve to remind readers and listeners that we never know what untold depths of experience and perception inform the 81-year-old women we may randomly run into at the grocery store. All the more reason to question one's elders and kindly offer to carry their bags for them.

AWOL Da Mindwriter & August Fanon - Now Loading

Story time: Back when your faithful narrator lived in the very humble Stewart Manor abode pictured in the Me, Myself & I section of this site, one of the neighbors with whom we shared our eastern wall was a complete fucking basket case—what my brother and his colleagues at the airport would call an EDP, that is, an emotionally disturbed person. I'm not worried about being insensitive here, because although he may indeed have had bipolar disorder as the landlord claimed to have heard, he was also a racist lunatic who would scream all sorts of horrible shit at his girlfriend, who was Latina. I hope she got out of there. If she'd killed him, I wouldn't have told. As it happened, he also played videogames at extreme volumes and screamed insane racist shit at people while doing that, too.

Thought experiment: Listen to every bar on Now Loading as if AWOL Da Mindwriter is screaming it at someone he's playing against in a videogame. (Maybe August Fanon?) You'll find there are actual inflection points—moments where the music aligns exactly with such a device, as if Pink Floyd really did record certain parts of Dark Side of the Moon over The Wizard of Oz. The lunatic on the grass would be the skit at the end of "Hands on Me," down you'll go "Swatting." If AWOL was simply the videogame name check version of The Game's rap game name check, there wouldn't be as much to say. Instead, he's more the augmented reality hologram projecting 64 bit graphically rendered matrices of a day in the life (of August Fanon), Channel Zero dream casting Channel 37. Log on.