The Duke of Ook

by Stephen Calt

While there is no mistaking the mad artistry of Alan Seidler, one of the few pianists of our time with the rare gift of being able to improvise an endless stream of ragtime, blues, pop and classical riffs and never (never) strike a wrong note, there are numer¬ous theories as to what this artistry ultimately represents. Refusing to disclose all but the flimsiest details about his past or present, he has become a figure as baffling as Moondog. Even the FBI would have difficulty ascertaining where the real Alan Seidler leaves off and the legendary Duke of Ook (his performing alias) begins and who Seidler the private individual really is. So far as is known, music is but an avocation for him. He sometimes represents himself as an efficiency expert in a Long Island Factory that produces nuclear warheads, or as the president of a theatrical production company (Ook Ook) whose fortunes are currently contested in small claims courts throughout New York, and whose guiding genius (Seidler himself) busily dodges subpoenas and creditors from one week to the next, As a performer, the Duke Of Ook is as allusive as Seidler, the shady businessman, he is wont to appear, unannounced, in fashionable musical salons and setting, as when he recently accompanied the great Nick Lucas at Town Hall. But never does Seidler seem to settle for a single artistic identity; he is just as likely to turn up on the Bowery, offering his latest compositions in seedy bars for the price of a drink.

His oddball string of musical credits testifies not only to his erratic nature, but to his tremendous versatility. Together with a convicted felon named Jeff Dews, he co-authored Al Green’s soul hit, “God Is Standing By” which Dews, strapped for cash, sold to Johnnie Taylor for $50. Recently he made to a private birthday record (to the tune of “Ballin’ That Jack”) for the artist Alexander Calder. “His Tracks for Orchestra” was hailed by the conductor of the New York City Opera, Charles Wendelken-Wilson, who planned to introduce it in the 1971-1972 Wolftrap Festival, only to be beset by union difficulties and forced to flee to Denmark. His latest patron is John Fahey, who has recorded him for Takoma Records. For each of these clients and benefactors, Seidler has worn a different musical mask, displaying a wizard’s grasp of contemporary, classical, and vaudeville forms but swearing true allegiance to none of them.

Seidler-watchers (who populate bars like “The Ginger Man”, where the artist does much of his serious composing) fall into three distinct groups, each bitterly divided on the subject of his genius. There are those who believe he is a brilliant maniac, those who believe he is a clever fraud, and those who label him a cultural phenomenon, a basically religious (or sacrilegious) composer working within a historical musical vein. Even this last group is splintered into two camps: those who see him as a quack, and those who see him as a visionary.

The maniac theory explains Seidler as a child prodigy gone berserk – a budding classical composer whose mind snapped under the strain of strict discipline imposed at Juilliard (where Seidler once studied composition), who now avenges himself on the academic world that destroyed him by playing nonsensical songs and disreputable Tin Pan Alley tunes. Some of the known facts about Seidler’s history lend superficial credence to this view. For example, it is certain that Seidler was already composing classical works at the age of six; by the time he was nine, he had written no less than twenty-one symphonies and three operas, of which he once remarked: “The fact that each of these was a page long, if that, mattered little in the precocious mind of the composer.” Those who have seen the inside of Seidler’s New York apartment testify that he keeps (along with a pet gorilla) a framed certificate of dismissal from Juilliard on his bathroom wall.

The theory that Seidler is a charlatan was first publically proclaimed by two-time Pulitzer prize-winning composer Elliot Carter, who has denounced him as “The worst composer in the State of New York.” But this judgment (if valid at all) applies only to a limited part of Seidler’s canon: those pieces (such as “Three Profundities for Screaming Unison Chorus”) called “pageonholes musik.” They were written in a frank rejection of what Seidler himself calls “modem” or “serious” music, and regards as effete. Thus only by default does Seidler champion his own works; with disarming humility, he says: “I feel that “Cast into the Flowing Pea Soup of Vonaglona” is representative of the finest poetry of our age. It pains me to say – yet I must say – that the state of ‘serious’ music being what it is, the greatest cantata of this century is my own “Three Mute Kaws.”

But none of these works (all written for large orchestras) are relevant to Seidler’s solo album, his first major undertaking since he brilliantly accompanied Britain’s Jo Ann Kelly on Blue Goose 2009. It is Seidler the songster who concerns the Blue Goose listener, the Seidler whose skillful variations on Tin Pan Alley, blues, and ragtime motifs have no parallel in contemporary music. Are these the work of a budding Bach gone bananas, or, as he would put it, ape?

Probably not, for Seidler has always had a keen appreciation of popular music. Even as he was studying the classics he liked to amuse himself with pieces like “St. Louis Blues”; as a high school student in New Rochelle, New York (whose Italian neighbor¬hood is immortalized on “Old Vitoville Blues”) he directed various musical reviews that specialized in such works. He holds the American pop music attained its real greatness between the late Teens and the Depression, and it is basically this period that inspires his own efforts. Afterwards, he says, music was corrupted by what he calls “phony Continental influences” which led to cocktail music and (ultimately) to muzak. Although Seidler pleads guilty to having appeared on “The Joe Franklin Show”, he denies that his own music constitutes a syrupy stroll down Memory Lane. My music is not nostalgia,” he says scornfully. “Nostalgia is where people go to their record players and snicker: ‘Look at what the little lads did back then, heh-heh-heh.’ If music was good then, it is good now. I’m not interested in ‘little lads.’ Big gorillas are more my speed.”

It is the animalistic (“big gorilla”) and symbolic aspect of Seidler’s songs that breaks new ground in popular music, where nostalgia buffs fear to tread. Not since Robert Johnson (“Hellhounds On My Trail” has a singer’s psyche been so intimately bound up in the mythical world of animal lore. But whereas the blues (and Tin Pan Alley) singer is typically serious, Seidler often parodies lyricism itself. To do so, he has invented a vocabulary (see the glossary below) which according to different view-points represents either his diseased imagination or his deeply religious nature.

The vocabulary comes built-in with Seidler’s conversation as well as his music, making him as difficult to interview as his songs are difficult to categorize. When asked a rudimentary question he turns the tables on his interviewer, dictating a statement that is as impromptu and as wacky as one of his piano riffs. To the question “What do your gorilla songs mean?” he replies: “All things considered, it would be reasonable for me to say, in lieu of any other discourses upon these matters, and totally – without prior prejudices to any of the parties herein described, either living or dead, had they furry hooves or raw paws – Ook Ook the gorilla was a big old hairy ape.” Seidler, in fact, regards the gorilla as God and “Ook Ook” as the author of all creation; if pressed he can deliver an elaborate discourse on the origin and tenets of his private religion, which he traces back to Transylvania. Whether he is kidding or not, no one can say.

If it is impossible to elicit serious statements from Seidler, it is exasperating to conduct polite conversation with him. If Asked the time, he is likely to answer: “Time, prime, McDine, in hime, Sime, lowkime, mime, artime, delfime!” He developed this form of rhyming pattern under the warping influence of John Fahey: in Seidler’s hands, it converts the simplest statement into an elaborate ritual of nonsense that ultimately made (or, as Seidler would have it, pade, McDade, in hade, sade, lowkade, made, artade, delfade) by him.

Just as the interviewer has decided that Seidler is hopelessly insane (or “insan”) as Seidler himself prefers to be called(, the artist agrees to deliver a state on his Blue Goose worek. “I regard it as a great pity that only the infinitesimal amount of my work is as yet available on record” he says, wistfully. “A greater pity yet, however is that at the time when popular music of the Twenties and earlier is making a huge ‘comeback,’ it is probably held in less esteem – music qua music – than ever before. To those fash who dare prolong this outrage, I say only ‘You lie prostrate in Gadangis but THE UNIVERSAL APE shall triumph with furry hooves!” Only time will tell if Seidler is correct.

A Glossary

Compiled by: Tim Aurthur

Carnibiwis/adj. (fr. Carnivorous): carnivorous, able to eat fash or meat

Fash/n. (the original pronunciation and spelling-fish-are regarded as vulgar by the Church of Ook and will not be brought into decent use until fash have returned to the Universal Ape) 1: any cold-blooded aquatic animal; 2a: any creature in total rebellion against the Universal Ape; 2b: by extension, any disagreeable person or thing

Gorooka/n (gorilla + ook) slang: gorilla

Herbibiwis/adj. (fr. Herbivorous): herbivorous, eating neither meat or fash

Herbily/adv. (dim. of herbibiwis + -ly): herbibiwisly, in a herbibiwis manner

Kaw/n. (echoic, fr. Sound made by a kaw): 1: the sound made by a kaw; 2a: a long-legged animal with massive protrusions at the stomach and at the lower back, known for its stupidity; 2b: by extension: an inept or stupid person; 3: someone who kaws

Monyock/n. (fr. Maniac): a maniac

Ook/n. (echoic, fr. The sound said to be made by an ape): 1: the sound made by an ape; 2: the proper name of the Universal Ape; 3: an ape (see Ook-Ook 1); 4: the sound made by a creature in total union with the universal ape; 5: any creature in total union with the Universal Ape

Ook-Ook/ n. (fr, ook’s ook- an ape’s ape) 1: an ape 2:in the phrase “ook-ook turned…”, any creature turned from the form of an ape into another form due to rebellion against the Universal Ape

Profligerate /adj. (fr. Profligate): profligate, wasteful, degenerate

Puv/n.: a vuv with furry hooves

San/adj. (fr. Sane): sane

Uk/n. (diminutive of ook)1:familiar term for any ook-ook turned (see ook-ook 1); 2: by extension: any living creature; 3: in the phrase Universal Uk, used as a familiar term for the Universal Ape

Vuv/n. (echoic, originally the sound made by the drawers on the Hill of Slowly Closing Drawers in prehistoric Hadjcaloopsie) 1: the sound made by a vuv (def. 2) or a vvuvver (see vvuvver 1); 2a: any agreeable or interesting person whose disposition denotes awareness of the Universal Ape; 2b: any agreeable person or thing

Vvuvver/n. 1: one who vuvs; 2: a loud exclamation used to catch someone’s attention in a public place