Ken Nordine - Colors (Asphodel)

Decades before John Zorn landed a lucrative gig composing jingles for a Japanese ad agency; Ken Nordine inked a similar deal with the Fuller Paint Company. The contract originally called for ten television spots, but Nordine’s creative tinder found flame under the project and he ended up recording forty-four tone poems, moving from predictable hues like green and blue to encompass obscure colors like sepia and cerise. Thirty-four are ensconced on this Asphodel reissue, including ten not released on the original Philips LP. Nordine lets his imagination flower, devising a rich mythology for the colors of his chosen spectrum, anthropomorphizing many and ascribing singular sets of emotions and motivations to each. Beige is nebbish and passive aggressive, Burgundy obese and lethargic. Crimson is the sociopathic loose cannon while Orange evinces a mindset of pathological optimism. My favorite cut, “Flesh”, skips the mythos altogether and braids some biting social commentary into its brief ninety seconds. It caps with this clever dictum over a fast break jazz guitar rhythm:

“We better forget the flesh and the colors it can be,
and think on the spirit and its singular light.
Otherwise, flesh as a color could be black and blue,
or even a bloody hue.”

Accompanying music ranges from lightly swinging chamber jazz to go-go rock and classical tinged-pop. According to Nordine, everything was improvised on the spot. A crack team of studio musicians brings it to life on a flotilla of instruments with flute, marimba and harpsichord being particularly dominant elements. Nordine’s narcotic voice slinks through it all, his smooth articulation investing the quip-laden lyrics with even greater resonance. Over the years, several of my friends and family have dismissed the disc as corny and trite, but to me, it is a wonderfully wonky 60s artifact and Nordine’s most satisfying album-length effort.

~ Derek Taylor