Night people person

>> Ralph Alfonso sustains the beatnik vibe into the wee hours

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The celebrated animator Chuck Jones once observed that "inspiration is like a butterfly--you can't catch it with a net, you have to let it settle on your finger." It helps, of course, to be where the butterflies are.

For Canadian cool-culture fixture Ralph Alfonso (colour him a poet/performer/ designer/zine publisher/Bongo Beat label head), that's not so much a place as a time, somewhere between last call and first light--a time without ringing phones, honking horns and hollow-headed normals getting in your face.

"Sometimes you gotta knock the wax out of your ears, get the lumpy gravy out of your head," says Alfonso. "It's increasingly hard for me now--I'm married, I have two, uh, cats, I got all this responsiblity now. I still do it, though--my wife's very understanding. You're sitting around and it's almost like your brain is a receiver for transmissions from somewhere."

Daylight, he notes, only interferes. "It's like there's all these jamming signals coming in. Where's that inspiration signal? I want that, not the rent signal or the take-out-the-garbage signal, or the some-crappy-indie-design-job-is-due-tomorrow signal. Where's the write-a-great-poem signal? That's what I want."

And tune in to it he does. For a decade now, former major-label hype guy Alfonso's been printing up Ralph, a free, deliciously mimeographed zine of his Beat-inspired poetry which would find its way across Canada. Toss in a page of news and reviews and you had a handy guide to following the fallout of Beat culture--rock 'n' roll, mods, punk and "jazzoetry." Currently on hiatus, the 'zine should return not long after Alfonso finishes this tour.

The zine led to a number of albums of his poetry put to music, the latest of which is the suprisingly successful This Is For the Night People, a nod to the nocturnal set. "I think it's probably the best thing we've done, in terms of trying to capture that smoky, late-night vibe," he says.

"I got the two music writers in the band, the keyboardist Tracy Marks and guitarist Michael Rummen, together, and told them I wanted to go in a direction that was more jazzy, more late-night oriented. I wanted this to be a CD you drive around in your car at night listening to. Those were the parameters."

While he's happy to wallow in the clichés of cool connected with the beatniks (turtlenecks, cigarettes, bongos and java), Alfonso avoids pitfalls like existential angst (his poems draw more on sunny, '60s pop lyrics) and self-indulgent streams of consciousness. "I never do any spontaneous stuff--that's kinda lame. You get a lot of, 'I was walkin' down the street/Here's the people that I meet' type of stuff."

Joining Alfonso on his way across the great white north this time is his longtime friend, Canuck metal goddess Lee Aaron, recently reconstructed as a torchy jazz queen. "It's not a prissy jazz show that she does. It's really guttural, really going through the Nina Simone and Peggy Lee songbooks. And she's always had that husky voice, just perfect for that stuff. Her older fans are totally diggin' it."

Ralph performs at Chapters, 1171 Ste-Catherine W., on Tuesday, April 24, 7:30pm, free. lee Aaron performs with the same band at the HMV Megastore on Wednesday, April 25, 1pm, also free