This writer is a sitting duck for anything Canterbury but, pressed by a gun pointed at the temple, National Health - the group's first album - would probably be my pet choice in their meagre discography. During the years in which many people were starting to be fooled by punk's corporate anarchy-cum-insubstantial imaginativeness and practically everybody felt entitled to whack a distorted guitar, genuinely dreaming English artists were still trying to delicately chisel odd-metre masterpieces lacking the typical pomp of progressive rock, executed with wisdom and dexterity and, in this particular juncture, sung by that flute-voiced angel named Amanda Parsons, a personal darling in the world-famous (ha!) trio “The Northettes” - also featuring Barbara Gaskin and Ann Rosenthal - who graced the music of Hatfield And The North and appeared in other interconnected situations.
Guess what: the craftsmen were succeeding. There weren’t audiences grateful for the attempts though, except for a bunch of romantic desperados. Money? Even less. It couldn't last, yet these kids managed to squeeze out two equally great records after this one: 1978’s Of Queues And Cures and the posthumous D.S. Al Coda, dated 1982, a homage to Alan Gowen who had just left this life's building. Phil Miller, Dave Stewart, Neil Murray (later to become a renowned heavy metal bassist), Jimmy Hastings, John Mitchell, the late Pip Pyle, the above mentioned Gowen. Need I say more? What's comprised by National Health is, purely and simply, history: “Tenemos Roads” and “Brujo” should light bulbs in the memory of any over-40 devotee gifted with sound-related emotional responsiveness. The solemnity of the main theme in “Borogoves” is unsurpassable; the melancholic chords fading the record to black in “Elephants” can make a grown man cry, a milligram of Jagger-ish hype being allowed.
And if someone ever manages to convince Mrs. Parsons to end her retirement and start writing (and especially singing) new songs, I'd be willing to stand under the hard rain to listen to that voice again.
~ Massimo Ricci
The aging father of bop meets the aged father of swing in a shag-carpeted Vegas studio circa ’77. Despite what faction-minded spectators might imagine, it’s far from an oil and water mingling. Dizzy had deep roots in swing and here sounds perfectly willing to temper his battery of bop firepower to align with his elder’s less loquacious leanings. Basie’s predisposition toward pianistic pith leaves plenty of harmonic space to fill while still stabilizing the tunes’ hoary blues edifices. Bassist Ray Brown and drummer Mickey Roker settle into support roles that sublimely support both sides. No surprise in terms of songbook, but the rendering of the antiquated “St. James Infirmary” speaks to the strengths of all involved with a memorable canopy of melancholy. Basie’s economy is the epitome of easygoing confidence. Dizzy drawls long textured lines, often fixing a mute to his bell to advance a ventriloquist’s array of inflections and effects. The session photos further convey the casual feel with the heart patch stitched into Dizzy’s denim jeans echoing the soul patch hanging beneath his lower lip. The phrase “past their prime” might be applicable in a superficial sense, but this pair had an audible knack for sidestepping such shortsighted descriptions.
Been on a blues bender of historic proportions the past few days, what with the Deep Blues Festival and the George Mitchell Collection (posts on each collecting dust on the homepage). Fred McDowell factors indelibly into both in terms of spirit and influence. This Rounder comp, parsed from field recording recitals cut in Fred’s Como, MS living room, contains some of his most focused performances on record. Many of the signposts of his secular repertoire come under scrutiny from “Red Cross Store” to “Highway 61”. No space ceded for spirituals, but the buzzing brilliance of his bottleneck harmonics leavens any potential slights to the Lord. The nasally warble of his voice comes through loud and clear too, wafting over acoustic fretwork by turns biting and anodyne (only the fragment “Como” finds him cradling electric). Sounds of friends and family members in attendance are audible on the fringes and give the music an even greater fly-on-wall flavor. McDowell is part of a triumvirate of Freds in my personal canon, the other two answering to Anderson and Wesley. This is the set that cemented his status though nearly all of his albums are worth hearing and owning, ill-founded charges of sameness and laurels-resting be damned.
Paypal-funded old farts rejoice: come next autumn, Rér will issue the definitive Henry Cow box, nine CDs of previously unreleased archival materials and, get this, a DVD containing the only existent footage of the group. This should definitely carve in stone the fact that this collective – whose name, for the still existing doubters, is NOT derived from composer Henry Cowell – has been an influence, when not the origin, in several fundamental pages of the book that delineates the transition from cultivated rock to improvisation, plus their subsequent (a-hem) fusion.
In a nutshell, 1975's In Praise Of Learning is one of those albums that divide the audience’s judgement in the classic “crucial/forgettable” dichotomy; no need to specify where this writer stands as this is the record that, at the age of 11, definitively shuffled the priorities in my approach to listening (and playing as well). After Desperate Straights - recorded in the same year - Tim Hodgkinson, Fred Frith, John Greaves, Chris Cutler and Lindsay Cooper were once again joined by Slapp Happy’s Dagmar Krause, Peter Blegvad and Anthony Moore, instantly shocking my childhood with the opening “War” – a genial piece if there was ever one, leaving the little kid wide eyed and willing to understand what was wrong in comparison with his "progressive favourites"; to this day, the trumpet solo by the late Mongezi Feza floors me.
This is also the place where two of the most brilliant songs ever written in the 70s are to be found (accepting “song” as a fitting definition for such intricate scores). “Living In The Heart Of The Beast” and “Beautiful As The Moon – Terrible As An Army With Banners” feature Krause’s dramatic interpretation of passionately politicized lyrics - by Hodgkinson and Cutler respectively - in instrumental contexts unsurpassed for emotional matter and technical adventurousness, unquestionable traits even without sharing the ideological essence. That’s what the sheer appeal of significance could once achieve. No scribbled word can testimony how hard the impact of these forms of expression was, and still is.
~ Massimo Ricci
Summertime is always Norteno time at Rancho de Taylor and this generously packed platter is a new found favorite this year. Zimmerle (surname stemming from a German grandfather) adroitly leads the trio with fleet-fingered button accordion (doubling on guitar or bajo sexto on several tunes), but it’s bassist Juan Viesca that often steals the spoils. Nicknamed “El Rayo” (the Thunderbolt), he pummels his strings with a rockabilly frenzy, the bombardment of punishing slaps and stops captured beautifully by Arhoolie honcho Chris Strachwitz’s mobile mics. His irrepressible antics regularly move the rest of the group to raucous whoops and hollers. The setting for the collected sessions is Zimmerle’s living room circa 1974, a good two decades subsequent the trio’s heyday. His day job was at the local air force base, but nights were reserved for raising the roofs of the neighborhood cantinas. The set list mirrors a typical weekend gig at a local watering hole with an emphasis on loping cancions and bouncing polkas, the stray corrido or redova slipped in for surprise’s sake. Zimmerle’s repertoire leaned heavily on the songbook of local doyens Los Hermanos Chavarria and the closing cut on the disc finds him in stirring duet with his idol Martin Chavarria. Arhoolie’s catalog is loaded with conjunto music of the highest caliber, but even amongst that bumper surplus this set easily stands out as one of the best.
There’s something of a cruel joke in Lucky Thompson’s sobriquet. Over three decades as an active influential musician and only a smattering of sides as a leader to show for it. This set is commonly touted as his finest hour and features him in two fruitful formats, one conventional, the other far less so. The eight sides placing Thompson’s ethereal tenor in the streamlined company of guitarist Skeeter Best and bassist Oscar Pettiford border on the transcendental. Bop bled through with pigments of insouciant swing, the pieces float by with such ease and accessibility that beauty and complexity of the improvisations comprising them almost seems secondary. The collection’s other eight sides highlight Thompson’s talents with a frontline partner. He and trombonist Jimmy Cleveland are kindred improvisers in terms of tone and phrasing, their melodic derivations spooling out in gilded ribbons against a pair of rhythm sections anchored by the sturdy constant of Pettiford’s strings. Hawkins and Young are obvious antecedents, but Thompson is hardly bound by his elders, his tenor achieving a superlative merging of weightlessness and profundity. The Impulse version of the collection remains lucklessly out of print though the freebooters over at the Spanish Fresh Sound imprint have found fit to circulate their own version. Hard to fault such an action when the object of their mercenary ways is music of this optimal caliber.
Truth in advertising save for the absence of the titular Count, this jam session under the leadership of the Vice Pres offers meat and potatoes jazz in the best possible sense. Quinichette took hits and praise in near equal doses for his stylistic congruities with Lester Young. The four blowing vehicles from the Basie songbook circa a three year stretch starting in 1937 only cement the similarities. The rest of the band is assemblage of what are rightfully termed “Old” and “New Testament” factions. Nat Pierce, the lone Caucasian, has perhaps the most daunting role filling Basie’s post at the piano stool. His minimalist stride-tempered touch echoes that of the master while retaining an admirable individualist streak. Freddie Green, the Jones Eddie and Jo (no relation) are well seasoned pros at setting up swinging structures for the soloists. Of the horns, the lesser known Jack Washington stands out. Diminutive in frame, he has a bit of difficulty with the baritone’s physical dimensions, but his generously paced solos lack nothing in resolve. Trumpeters Buck Clayton and Shad Collins tussle regularly and mostly stick to open voicings for a combined brassy bite. Quinichette has several good showings on tenor, but the overall feel of the record is that of ensemble camaraderie. Leader’s privileges are only rarely invoked. Producer Esmond Edwards does double duty as session shutterbug and the tinted cover photo he snapped is more than suitable for poster-sized framing. The preponderance of Basie-led sessions of this ilk makes the platter a harder sell, but those with a few shekels to spare will still find them well spent in adding a copy to the shelf.
It's a world of guitar heroes, isn't it? Some of them can't even play the damn instrument, but they were born to be heroes nonetheless (hell, even Kurt Cobain managed to become an icon). That an accomplished guitarist and composer such as Brian Godding is so mildly recognized, despite a long tenure with Mike Westbrook and collaborations with Julie Tippetts, Magma, Centipede among the many (not to mention his own Blossom Toes), remains a scandalous injustice. This album - his only official solo release - dates from 1988, this writer calling it a genuine desert island disc, totally eschewing cliches its noticeable influences notwithstanding.
A sweat-stained effort, muscularly refined and technically heavy-handed, Slaughter on Shaftesbury Avenue features tracks recorded between 1981 and 1986 with three different lineups: G.L.S. (Steve Lamb, bass; Steve Bull, keyboards; Dave Sheen, drums), Outer Routes (Lamb again plus Dave Barry on drums), and Full Monte (Chris Briscoe, sax and Tony Marsh, drums). Highlights: "Blue Sun" begins with breathtaking volume pedal-driven chordal swells, then shifts gear to “cultivated headbanger” areas through an energetic charge of ternary compounds imbued of rock attitude. "Three-legged duck" is built upon a semitone-fueled riff that Jimmy Page couldn’t even dream about, yet is known by hardcore aficionados exclusively. "Stars in Stripes" is a carnival of furious axe-screaming and scarcely responsive guitar synthesizer over a convulsive rhythm section: if you listen via walkman on your way to work, there’s a serious risk of being nominated for the “new fool of the neighbourhood” prize due to excess of smirking in the streets. Godding’s blue collar virtuosity pumps up the whole, virulent enthusiasm dripping off every single pore of mine whenever I spin the bloody thing.
~ Massimo Ricci
Dunmall’s coming to Vision this year!! Though I’m a fairly new Dunmall fan, considering he’s been on the scene as a solo artist since the middle 1980s, I’ve been waiting some four years to hear him live.
His CDR label, Duns Limited Edition, has also reached its 60th release, so I thought I’d dig back in the archive a bit to number 23, this tempestuous live date from September 2002. These veteran collaborators sometimes sound like a regular trio, or almost, during the single fifty-four-minute improvisation. Those moments of registral and timbral familiarity are quite rare as Dunmall and co. switch between all things struck, blown and plucked in gusts of dynamic diversity.
It all begins rather threateningly as Dunmall’s bagpipes blister and pierce along the thunder hurled by Gibbs and Rogers. It dies down eventually, calms so completely in fact that only an apprehensive drone leads into Dunmall’s trademark melodica, which itself contains myriad slants and sharp curves. Along the way, the Duck goes forth, manned skillfully in arco and pizz mode by one of the most versatile bassists playing today. Gibbs hammers with his usual intense subtlety, numerous timbre and pitch gradations in every gesture.
The Duns series constitutes a really fascinating journey. Along with some of the more recent entries, Quaker Center is one of the most fearless, and it’s one of my favorites for that reason. Some are beautiful, some are spare and all are worth hearing, but few plumb the uncompromising psychological depth so fiercely. Keep em coming!
~ Marc Medwin
Preoccupations tend to come fast and frequent to the typical music fan. My latest was brought about last week by the confluence of a Parliament-Funkadelic concert and coming across this comp in a used bin. It’s an excellent gateway disc into the Now-Again catalog, a funk and soul reissue outfit stewarded by one Egon Alapatt. The label is also an offshoot of the larger hip-hop imprint Stones-Throw, home to MadLib and MF DOOM among others. The cuts here, originally assembled by the UK Jazzman label, have special significance to my own situation given their specific regional focus. There’s lots of cribbing and downright stealing from the popular playbooks of James Brown, Funkadelic and the Meters, but by and large the blatant thievery is put to good ends. Exemplary funk bass ostinatos abound and the general tilt toward instrumentals works well as funk lyrics have a tendency to tip over into the inane. Break beats are populous too and nearly every cut mines the pocket for memorable grooves. Even relative clunkers like Messengers Incorporated’s “Soulful Proclamation” and the Wallace Brothers’ “What-cha Feel is What-cha Get”, which mires in a weighty rhythmic roux of honking horn unisons, exhibit moments of interest. On the flip, the Dayton Sidewinders’ “Funky in Here” and The Soul Tornados’ “Boot’s Groove” deliver some of the hardest, most happening funk I’ve heard in awhile. The standout though to my ears is a seven-and-a-half minute tape snippet of Billy (Joe) Holloman, a Twin Cities B-3 organ legend fronting his trio in ’72. Other Now-Again regional comps cover 45rpm troves from Texas, Florida and the Carolinas to a similarly successful extent. I’ve made it a mandate to snap them up and so far haven’t felt even a twinge of buyer’s remorse.
Day jobs have been a necessay component of the free jazz life since the music’s inception. Cecil Taylor toiled as an elevator operator. David S. Ware drove a cab. And so on and so on. Saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc opted for a salary as an architect’s assistant and his lack of new recordings in several years leads me to ponder whether he has returned to the vocation. If so, it’s a sad loss, as Moondoc’s open vulnerability and sentimentalism is still something of a rarity within the genre. This Soul Note date from ’86 shows off those qualities on a program that evinces a heavy respect for history without resorting to regurgitation. Moondoc borrows the title piece from Mingus. His alto sound is a pleasing variant on Ornette Coleman’s precedence, tangy and terpischorian. His preference for ethnic haberdashery parallels that of Monk. None of these influences is slavish or mawkish. Moondoc adds his own personally-honed aesthetic to the mix. Sidemen Rahn Burton, William Parker, Denis Charles, and in particular, Bern Nix bring other singular colors to the canvas. Two to an LP side, the tracks are long and windy. The piquant ballad “Flora” marks Moondoc’s debut on soprano and is convincing despite a slightly shaky intonation. It and the closing “Dance of the Clowns”, a tune that would be reborn as “Dance of the Negro Lawn Jockeys” in later years are my picks of the litter. Open imperative to Jemeel: please find your way back behind the mics and soon!
When I was a sophomore in high school, I fell in love with Lindsay Cooper’s Rags, in no small part due to the brash and impassioned singing of Phil Minton—he made those political songs come to life! Plowing through the used bins of a local record store in early 1988, I was thrilled to find a Minton solo album, A Doughnut in Both Hands—I think it was on Rift records. Those familiar with the album, now on Emanem, can imagine my reaction on getting it home. You know that one called “Wreath,” on which he chokes himself? I put it away for about ten years, and I was amazed at how great it was upon next listening.
Emanem is now releasing the third part of the Doughnut solo voice trilogy, so I figured I’d discuss the second, which is new to my collection. It’s even more diverse than Both Hands, displaying an even more stunning array of … what, extended vocal techniques? Does that overused phrase even begin to cover the imagination in evidence on every one of these miniatures?
I especially like the ones where Minton squeezes two or three notes out of his voice, as with “Ballad.” He produces spot-on fifths, the two pitch components blending in a voice larger than itself. Astonishingly, in “Tip Head,” he gets three pitches out simultaneously in something like a diminished chord.
None of this pedantry even comes close to describing the humor at ever turn; in “Ballad”’s second half, the profundo of the opening minute is imitated by what sounds like a little animal, one of Minton’s cat-fight voices put to different use. Here again, we revisit “Wreath” with even more liquid in evidence. Then, there is the master miniature “Universal Drainage,” a series of low-frequency burbles and rasps that threatens to become speech but never quite succeeds.
I have never heard a voice under better control; Minton has been engaging in myriad sound experiments for so long that it’s just part of who he is. Even in conversation, he’ll launch into any number of momentary sonic diversions. I have no idea what question I asked him, but I’ll never forget the sound he made while thinking about it: “Ooooooooooo …” If you hit the B two octaves below middle C, you’ll have it. These thirty moments have been some of the most fun I’ve had with a disc in a long time!
~ Marc Medwin
This classy guitar and piano duet from 1980 is quite an anomalous outing in Allan Holdsworth's career as it contains rather unusual elements even for such a pathfinder. For starters, two rarities: the acoustic guitar, an instrument certainly not loved by the Leeds virtuoso due to lack of sustain, is vastly utilized throughout - and in "At The Edge" our man sings, with lovely results. There's also a bit of conceptual continuity involved: the title track will re-appear in I.O.U. (1982), its vocal line directly taken from the above mentioned "At The Edge", while the record's opener "Golden Lakes" is a delicate tune from Igginbottom's Wrench (1969), another item that the author plainly hates, which happens with practically everything released until last week (famously, he threw very harsh words against John Stevens after the drummer published their sessions, despite Holdsworth's request to the contrary).
On the opposite front, Beck offers proof of a monstrous digital dexterity most everywhere, all the more noteworthy given that his flurries and articulations remain on the comprehensible side of things even for listeners not really well-versed in jazz. Beck had been a Holdsworth partner since a few years prior (they recorded Sunbird in 1979 with Aldo Romano and Jean-François Jenny-Clark). To this day the cross-pollination of Bill Evans-like lyricism, blues and quasi-atonal juggling – the latter finding a decisive demonstration in "Diminished Responsibility" – constitutes a functional complement for the guitarist's absurdly complicated yet always falling-in-place lines.
Refined, crystalline music that regularly needs to be attentively revisited, although I'm sure that one of the two parties involved would disagree.
~Massimo Ricci
Dues paying doesn’t always pay off. Altoist Junior Sylvester Kyner frustratingly found this out when his repeated efforts at attaining national notoriety were rebuffed by a string of mitigating circumstances. Market saturation for his instrument and a propensity for missed opportunities dogged his career. His moniker wasn’t much help either considering the number of others operating under similar cognomens. The resliency of his anonymity certainly wasn’t a result of the company he kept, as his sole Blue Note album substantiates. Pianist Wynton Kelly and bassist Sam Jones were first call sidemen. Drummer Roy Brooks was no shrinking violet either. All three readily abetted Red’s shot at the big time. He recognized the import of the opportunity too, diving into the seven tune studio program with confidence and creativity that suggested his scuffling streak might be near an end. Bird crops up as a chief influence in his agile phrasing along with Sonny Stitt and Lou Donaldson. The blues are at the top of the menu with several sharply rendered examples interspersed around a small handful of predictable standards. The 1996 Connoisseur reissue adds another five cuts with Red fronting the Miles Davis rhythm section, further proof of his ability to attract top tier talent. Sadly, security and success still proved elusive. Several dates for Savoy and Riverside bracketed his Blue Note carbuncle, but fall short of the modest magic captured here.
Owner of the honorific “udi” signifying his doyen designation on the oud, Kenkulian first made his mark with a series of 78s recorded by RCA in the early 1920s. This collection captures him on more modern equipment in a New York City hotel room sans accompaniment. Just oud and voice in intimately rendered tandem revisiting a series of classical taksims. Kenkulian is sometimes characterized as a purveyor of the Turkish “blues” and his congenital blindness makes comparison to American Pre-War bluesmen all the more convenient. I also hear a kinship to Roscoe Holcomb in his “high lonesome” picking and singing, but any Western corollaries are merely ancillary. His repertoire has indelible roots in the musical traditions of the Ottoman Empire, filtered through the sieve of his own influential advancements on the instrument. Details and subtleties not entirely audible on his early works abound. His tactile interpretations of traditional modal structures contain plenty of grin-inducing moments as notes pile up in perfectly stacked tonal symmetry. The Ampex tape technology also allows him to stretch out, in one case to a dazzling seven minutes on the “Hüzzam Taksim”. Kenkulian’s career was the stuff of celebrated legend and these late in life performances prove why and whence the adulation. A back booklet photo pictures him holding both ud and violin. Evidence of his prowess on the latter instrument is accessible on two collections of his earlier works from Traditional Crossroads, each to my ears as essential as this one.
Throbbing Gristle is working on a cover of this 1970 album, so I thought I’d give it a spin. I’m not really a Nico fan, or wasn’t; I might have been one of the few who enjoyed her contributions to the first Velvets record—a weird sort of authoritarian lasciviousness. I never heard her solo work before today except in bits and pieces, not even a single complete track.
Desert Shore was a shock. I was expecting the harmonium but not the varied orchestration—it has to be John Cale behind those arrangements, right? Nico’s vocal delivery has gained in momentum, swelling out to encompass the world and its myriad emotions as if they were somehow beholden to her. Even during the tenderest utterances, like the heartbreaking “Afraid,” Nico must be in control. “Have someone else’s will as your own.” Her ode to her child seems a lesson rather than any sort of commiseration. True, in the more abstract supplications of “Janitor of Lunacy” and “The Falconer,” she does begin to unlock some of the stark contradictions at the heart of whatever she’s harboring, but how loud her voice is! Talk about protesting too much!
What got me, really hit me between the eyes, was, of course, “Le Petit Chevalier.” I’ve read it was Nico’s little boy whose vocals grace the track. Yet, it’s her whispers to him, his little-boy breathing and gentle sniffle, all miked up so close, and that harpsichord way off to the left! The album should be heard just for this moment of obvious intimacy.
If I’ve bought into a piece of mythology, it’s a touching one. Of course the rest of the disc is very good, the arrangements strange and diverse, and please tell me what’s that penetrating little sound, sort of like a cross between an organ and trumpet? I’m not sure that I’ll return to the album often, but I’m glad I heard it.
~ Marc Medwin
In the fall of ’92, a nondescript Larkins Talent Associates package showed up at the offices of KUPS, a student run radio station in Tacoma, Washington. I happened to be the Jazz Director there at the time: a job that, at the apex of Grunge hysteria, basically entailed opening the trickle of promo packages and adding “worthy” discs to programming rotation. This particular platter captivated me from first spin and would soon serve as my gateway into New York free jazz, never mind the formality that the players were Boston-based. Morris’ brand of harmonically oblique, but exactingly clean guitar picking was alien in one sense though also accessible with its strong blues sensibility. Sebastian Steinberg’s choice of roundly-amplified electric bass and the staggered syncopations of drummer Jerry Deupree also served sturdy bridges for my rock-weaned sensibilities. The track structures were generally of two types: long undulating vamps like “Itan” and “Mombaccus” or terse texture-oriented fragments like the quixotically-titled “Mnemonic Device” series. Morris’ single notes had a habit of slithering in subtly unexpected directions while still adhering to a central rhythmic stanchion. I wasted no time putting the disc into rotation but became disappointed when it didn’t show up on a single play list. An ad hoc PR push of my own did little to persuade the Nirvana-enamored DJs and I eventually took the disc home in a shelf clearing sale a couple months later. It’s still with me and one I return to periodically for a taste of Morris when he was initially making his recorded mark.
Jazz After-hours, a show I used to hear on NPR each Friday and Saturday night, introduced me to this one in 1989. The un-named protagonist of this play—literally spoken/sung text and music—is on his way to see “The Boss” when time goes haywire; he steps off the elevator to find himself without any task on a village street in Peru. But wait … hadn’t this poor underling been unsure whether his boss’s office was on the fourth floor or the twentieth?
The music follows his ruminations with catchy yet witty precision, the participants turning in stunning performances. Charles Hayward provides the rattling of the elevator and some brilliantly in-the-pocket drum work. Ned Rothenberg and Don Cherry exist at the opposite end of the speed spectrum, but both play with heart-stopping emotion. Fred Frith’s customary inventiveness is abundant, he and George Lewis often weaving contrapuntal magic against the fairly conventional beats.
Goebbels’ compositional rhetoric is diverse, encompassing free jazz, NY scum rock and popular music of Brazil, often in fascinating juxtaposition. The text, accessible yet as multivalent as the music, travels through temporal and geographic discontinuities with ease and a certain naked charm. It is Arto Lindsay who infuses the words with just the right anxiety, rage, reflection and nervous indecision.
The composed sections are challenging and beautiful, lush harmonies and sinewy melodies abounding in equal measure against often electronic textures sculpted with extraordinary clarity. Sounding a little thin but finely detailed, this was as good as I remembered.
~ Marc Medwin
Comprehensively chronological in approach, Classics caters specifically to the obsessive-compulsive jazz fan. This Freeman compilation loosely covers a decade of the underrated saxophonist’s recorded output and the resulting cross-section makes for a fascintating repast. Most appealing are the eleven trio sides, which (surprisingly for the era) dispense with bassist and find Freeman in the stark company of pianist Jess Stacy and drummer George Wettling. He sounds a little gangly in spots, but the pared down setting also applies a rare (again for the era) microscope to his diagonal phrasing and limpid tone, both of which would influence the Oval Office-occupying Lester Young. Of the other odds and ends, four tracks team him with boisterous trumpeter Bunny Berigan in a quintet and another four feature him in an octet that includes Bobby Hackett and Pee Wee Russell playing a convincing hybrid of Dixieland and swing. Two novelty tunes stand out too: Red McKenzie singing “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” with gender specificity that intimates homoerotic overtones and the just plain crackpot “Private Jives” where vocalist Minerva Pious and Freeman revel in a slapstick skit of multiple personalities. The mighty Joe Milazzo hipped me to this set years back and it still finds its way into my occassional rotation when the taste meter tips toward swing tenor. Cast that ballot for Bud!
Altoist Richie Cole is a recent acquaintance of mine. I’d encountered his name periodically over the years, but never bothered to investigate at the prompting of passing mentions. Cue cut-out bin and the subsequent acquistion of this satisfying if rough-hewn date from Milestone. Cole had reputation as a cut-up and clown, a guy for whom humor was a fundamental musical ingredient right alongside highly-honed chops. Apprenticeships with Buddy Rich and Lionel Hampton opened the door to a solo career that continues to this day, but he initially gained visibility via his admittedly gimmicky penchant for transforming popular themes into unexpectedly sturdy bop vehicles. Some of his more infamous hybrid specimens include “I Love Lucy”, “Stark Trek” and even “The Price is Right”(!) Hank Crawford, Cole’s elder by over a decade and an audible influence, joins him for this French concert gig from the summer of 1987. Cole shelves the novelty songbook and focuses instead on bop warhorses interspersed with a pair of bossas and a blues. Solos are frequent as are wailing alto chases and the date has a direct antecedent in Fifties face-offs like the one between Jackie McLean and John Jenkins for Prestige. Combining a clean tone with a Wes-influenced octave phrasing, guitarist Emily Remler distinguishes herself as a soloist of merit as well, joining bassist Marshall Hawkins and drummer Victor Jones as a rhythm section perfectly willing to engage the horns head-on. At the very least, the album has prompted me to dig deeper into Cole’s discography, though nearly all of his fertile tenure for Muse in the 70s is regrettably out-of-print.
In both title and content, this 1966 album for Pacific Jazz is reflective of Booker Ervin’s track record in reliability. The tenor saxophonist never cut a shoddy record by my reckoning, and this lesser heralded session is actually one of the better ones within a catalog already known for quality. The Los Angeles locale leads to the somewhat unusual rhythm section of John Hicks, Red Mitchell and Lenny McBrowne. Charles Tolliver spurs Ervin in the frontline with pungent trumpet playing derived from a kindred creative source. The two construct a string of thrilling unisons and exchanges. Four tracks added to the LP’s original eight flesh the disc out to a solid hour. Ervin opts for an eclectic program that bounces between standards, tunes by contemporaries like Randy Weston and Oliver Nelson, and a pair of originals. The quartet even tackles “White Christmas” (a nod to the holiday season recording date) in convincing fashion. Many of the pieces are taken up-tempo, leading to a high frequency of Ervin’s signature hard bitten cries and blistering runs. Ballads like “Deep Night” find voice through comparably virile forms of articulation. Hicks and Mitchell combine in a visceral pairing as well and McBrowne, while lower profile, does a fine job at the cans. Ervin’s sharply finite discography instantly adds cachet to this date. Even if that condition weren’t the case an unequivocal recommendation wouldn’t be hard to come by. About the only potential minus I can come up with is the relative paucity of Mitchell solos. But that’s like faulting Ervin for his preference for blues vernacular, a quibble that ends up beside the point.
I have a soft spot in my heart for anything Gong related. I can remember, in my junior year, forcing a friend to listen to the whole Planet Gong trilogy in an evening: “See, it’s all related man, outer and inner temple, and check out those vibes in seven, and I bet that’s where Plant got that Now and Zen thing anyway, … they eat the phone book and … why don’t you try …” Geoff was singularly unimpressed. “You got any R.E.M.?”
When I got a copy of Fish Rising in 1992, it was as if I’d found the Grail; to hear Dave Stewart do his wah-wah distorto Hatfield thing on “Solar Music Suite” along with Hillage’s spine-cracking guitar gymnastics—just blew the college kid away!! As if all that wasn’t good enough, there was drone a-plenty and a looped bell, Lindsay Cooper came onboard offering some delicious bassoon lines, all over the late Pierre Moerlen’s rock-solid but imaginative drumming! The only thing was, the CD sounded God-awful! Shallow, lots of hiss, some funny nameless cracking things …
2007 saw the reissue of the entire Hillage run for Virgin, and I couldn’t wait to give my beloved “Salmon Song” one more spin. “Knows the way to be …” The philosophy hadn’t aged remarkably well, but the music still grabbed me—complex, visceral and catchy all in the service of some damn fine playing. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that in this case, remastering had done some good, the hiss levels having been drastically reduced. Now, the crystalline opening moments of “Solar Music Suite” shine brighter, and those bubbles in “Fish” plumb further depths. The bonus tracks are fascinating if ultimately inconsequential, but Mark Powell’s notes are typically informative and fun. Anybody with a bit of nostalgia for Hillage’s glory days (I’ve never been as fond of System 7) can’t go wrong with this well-executed reissue of one of the few “prog” records to still hold my interest.
~ Marc Medwin
Drummer Buddy Miles passed away on Tuesday. I never followed his solo career all that closely, preferring instead his protean work with the Band of Gypsys. Both Miles and bassist Buddy Cox were in obvious awe of Hendrix and that dynamic made for a very different relationship than with the guitarist’s flagship band, The Experience. No clashing egos… just three friends making music, jamming as it were. Hendrix reciprocated the respect by readily absorbing several of Miles’ songs into the band repertoire.
This Dagger Records compilation (posthumous by almost three decades) exudes that easy rapport and colloquial camaraderie. Cox is largely absent, appearing only on the comparatively concise but superlatively funky “Strato Strut”. The liners celebrate “Scorpio Woman”, a twenty-odd minute solo medley by the guitarist, as the set centerpiece. To my ears the opening “Keep On Groovin’” holds that distinction. Hendrix and Miles cycle through a succession of riffs and song fragments too numerous to conveniently catalog. Pieces of “Power of Soul”, “Steppin’ Stone”, “Cherokee Mist” and “Catfish Blues” are a handful that lodges in my head, but there are a litany of others. Throughout, Miles reminds me of another Buddy, one answering to the surname Rich. Like Rich, he had his limitations --an occasional rigidity in his rhythms and a bag of stock beats that he regularly pulled from-- but he was also a near ideal accompanist for Hendrix.
He listens intently to the guitarist’s lead and calibrates speed and direction depending upon often split second dictation. Over such a protracted duration there’s some necessary treading water, but the hit to miss ratio is still remarkably high. Miles made his mark at the helm several years later. Many of the hallmarks that would carry him through a nearly four decade career are already in evidence here.
Sub-aquatic rumbles shot through with ice-hot piercing liquid overtones which themselves become fuller and warmer as higher fundamentals chase them—this is the world inhabited by Liles’ concerto. For those yet unfamiliar with this composer/performer, Andrew Liles is obviously one of the most gifted sound-sculptors currently active. He is often in the company of Nurse with Wound and associated acts, such as Matt Waldron and most recently Faust, but he has a strongly unique voice; If I say that his music draws equally on surrealism and drone, the pronouncement says nothing of the overwhelming and often awe-inspiring diversity he brings to every release, of which there are now many. On any given disc, Electroacoustic compositions alternate, jump-cut fashion, with swirlingly miasmic yet somehow precisely minimal layers of morphing staticity.
The Dying Submariner has feet firmly planted, or buried, in lush drone and swell, but it’s as much a study in attack and decay. The opening of the third movement, awash in soft slowly changing colors, is suddenly riddled with insurgent notes that momentarily assume all focus. Liles chooses these renegade pitches with care and executes each attack with equal concern. On a more macrocosmic level, the first movement resembles a long glance upward from some deep abyss, but each gesture also contains intimations of the whole. As complex as some of the sound sources for Liles’ work can be, this is an example of minimal means achieving maximal results.
My copy came with an equally interesting work for bowed guitar, The Dead Submariner. Similar in intent if not in execution, it’s a gorgeous soundscape, harsh and sweet by turn. As fine as these pieces are though, they constitute only a tiny fraction of Liles’ accomplishments. Long may this versatile and endlessly fascinating composer thrive!
~ Marc Medwin
Ol’ man Mose in his young man’s clothes, this is one in a recent round of Concord two-fer reissues that actually makes consumer sense. The program packages a pair of the vocalist/pianist’s early Prestige platters, Back Country Suite and Local Color, in full, and replaces their paltry previous single disc versions in the process. Listening to Allison’s early oeuvre its hard not to think of Harry Connick, Jr., a guy who’s early career is convincingly eclipsed by the elder’s superior shadow. Dryly laconic vocals? Check. Pithy and precocious blend of bop, R&B and pop? Double check. Ear arched astutely to the clever cover tune? Checkmate. Allison taps both Mercy Dee Walton’s seminal “One Room Country Shack” and Ellington’s “Don’t Ever Say Goodbye”. He also turns in early versions of “Young Man Blues” and “Parchman Blues”, two slices of minor songwriting genius that have since graced the set lists of artists as divergent as The Who and Michael Chapman. There’s also a subtle stab at radio-friendly avant garde as Allison’s hoists trumpet, backed only by bass and drums on a rundown of “Trouble in Mind”. Like Connick Jr., he’s sometimes considered lightweight in purist jazz circles. These effervescent early sides argue insouciantly otherwise.
I write Ortiz Montaigne here as that is how this musician is represented on his disc, but this is a baroque recital by bassist Dr. Ortiz Walton. I first came in contact with Walton through a conversation with the late Art Davis, who directed me to Walton’s book Music: Black, White and Blue. Published by William Morrow in 1972, it is a scorchingly intense précis of that which Frank Kofsky would later call Black Music, White Business; Walton, however, brings his musicianship to bear on a study that is at once historically broad and insightfully focused. He devotes a chapter to Art Davis’ discrimination case against the New York Philharmonic, about which my own curiosity led me to interview both men at length. In the process, Davis stated repeatedly that Walton was the best classical bassist he’d ever heard.
The first few notes of Bach’s famous air on a G-String support Davis’ claim. Walton’s tone is strident but never overbearing, and his use of vibrato is, in good period style, spare and tasteful. Throughout this exquisite concert, recorded in Paris, he imbues every note with his obvious love for and knowledge of the music. Harpsichordist Jory Vinikour is a perfect foil, both matching mood and spirit with finesse and skill. While the Bach sonata in D-Major is lush and vibrant, of particular interest to me was the work of Henry Eccles, of whom I had never heard. His faster movements exude wit, while the slower are stately and graceful, Walton’s beautiful ornaments and expressive phrasing being employed to particularly good effect.
It is no wonder that the eminent Charles Munch loved Ortiz Walton’s playing enough to make him the first African American bassist in the Boston Symphony (1957-1962) but Walton also speaks fondly of having played in one of Bill Evans’ first groups! Such an accomplished and multitalented musician, not to mention a freedom fighter, deserves as much exposure as possible. Why his early 1960s activities, with Art Davis, resulting in the introduction of antidiscrimination bylaws to the 802 book hasn’t gotten more press is beyond me. I now know that he is as formidable a musician as he is eloquent in prose, and my respect for him has increased tenfold.
~ Marc Medwin
Early in his career, Ornette made a habit of blithely flipping the Bird to jazz convention. As with Parker prior he set about blazing his own path to the predictable chagrin of conservative critics and listeners. This particular shot across the collective bow of those parties was one of the more egregious, not because of Coleman’s own playing (which was pretty much on par with his past in terms of style and approach), but rather his decision to conscript his then ten-year old son Denardo for the drum chair. Listening with the benefit of hindsight it’s a bit hard to fathom what all the fuss was about. The younger Coleman is certainly a greenhorn behind the kit compared to past compatriots like Higgins and Blackwell, his staccato rhythms spilling out in sometimes wobbly fashion. But what he lacks in finesse he makes up for in exuberance and temerity. Charlie Haden does a decent job of dutifully holding the middle, his weighty lines giving the music welcome heft. Van Gelder’s attentive engineering leaves next to nowhere for any of the three to hide. Ornette’s ornery violin sawing on “Sound Gravitation” and purposefully plangent trumpet bleating on two other tunes seems almost calculated to raise critical hackles. Sure enough, the record’s reception was reliably caustic in some circles with the usual charges of hackery and artifice claiming plenty of ink. Ornette took it all in stride, even admirably holding back umbrage at the more punishing derison directed at Denardo. And he had the last laugh, considering the father and son partnership first documented on this project is still going strong four decades on.
I had the privilege of meeting saxophonist Carl Clements in France last November, at a conference dedicated to John Coltrane. He was in his musicology costume and presented a brilliant paper concerning Indian music’s influence on Coltrane’s reading of “Nature Boy.” At the time, I had no idea that he was also a fine composer and player, but this disc confirms both.
The title track exemplifies perfectly the shifting meters and harmonic complexities that form Clements’ compositional rhetoric. Third relations abound and the quartet sound sports a glossy patina, but there’s a surprise every moment, and the tune’s focus never falls prey to needless harmonic prowess. Pianist Bennet Paster, bassist Jim Whitney and drummer Diego Voglino decorate the suggestive chords with gorgeous fills, ornaments and counterpoint, providing a vibe suggestive of Bill Evans’ best trio work under Clements’ flowing and expressive lines.
The B-section of “Fools and Kings” inhabits similar territory, but the A-section shows how Clements attacks post-Coltrane modality. The head quivers on the edges of D-Minor, toying with it and skirting playfully around it while Voglino and Whitney are way in the pocket, not to mention the mode. When Clements solos on soprano, it’s all about those neat motivic visions Trane was constantly fostering—dyads, glides and atomistic swoops with lots of space and equal vigor. However, Clements’ vibrato is flexible, as with Paul Dunmall’s most recent work, maybe due to his assimilation of Indian music performance techniques. Paster in particular also demonstrates a penchant for New Thing sweep and hammer on this track, contributing to its success.
This is a fantastic disc by a fine scholar and an insider. Like Ekkehard Jost, Clements can articulate verbally and on his instrument with ease and dexterity, and God knows we need more of those in a music that, inexplicably, is still marginalized after some forty-five years.
~ Marc Medwin
Nearly 250 ROW entries to date and for my part not a single Coltrane pick amongst them. There’s a simple reason for it: Coltrane remains a perilous listening proposition. His is a catalog of oceanic import and much of it masks an inescapable undercurrent. Just dipping an ear into the shallow end can effectively sweep a listener out to sea, to be lost for days, weeks, even months. Consequently, lengthy lacunae exist in my Coltrane listening history. I’ll go prolonged stretches without spinning any of the hundred or so discs at my disposal, precisely because exposure compels immersion. On the occasions that I do succumb, this album is usually my first stop in the marathon that inevitably follows. Coltrane revisited the material with Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali added, but I prefer this protean version with the core quartet despite obvious stylistic tensions in the band. “Love” alights on a cascading tenor lead, Coltrane soaring and surging forward flanked by Elvin’s powerful mallets and cymbals. It’s one of the most affecting pieces of music I’ve ever heard. The straining tear-inducing dirge “Compassion” contains the blueprint for David S. Ware’s entire career and that’s no slight intended toward the younger saxophonist. The same could probably be said for hundreds of other tenormen. It’s also my favorite Coltrane performance. Jimmy Garrison’s domination of the concluding alternate of “Joy” feels lopsided in one sense, but it’s a rare studio instance of the latitude Trane accorded him more often in concert and winsome experience because of it. Hard to fathom why such beauty as this lay ensconced in a metal can for a dozen years.
Here’s one of the weirdest Christmas presents ever to grace my imaginary tree. I know nothing about Jim Fassett; I am guessing, from the voice on this reissue, that he was in radio, and it would make sense, given the interwoven history of that medium and the burgeoning “tape music” scene. This is exactly what its title suggests—the Japanese reissue of a symphony made up entirely of bird songs. The liners are, unfortunately, in Japanese, but the recording is in stereo, so I’m going to hazard a late 1950s recording date for this quaint bit of history. A quick search also unearths 1955 as a tentative date, but I’m not so sure, given that I thought stereo’s prominence came a bit later.
The music herein turns out to be more interesting than I’d anticipated—a three-movement piece that follows, loosely, a Fast-Slow-Dance pattern associated with early symphonic plans. The third movement even sports what you might call pitch-based motives, wonder of wonders, developed in what would now be a very easy series of transpositions to bring off, given the early 1980s advances in technology. Most enjoyable, though, are some beautifully layered passages in the “slow” movement, vast sweeps of atmospheric multi-octave trills that still fill the soundstage.
Fassett’s comments, both pre and post symphony, are meant for the Concret novice, providing vivid illustrations of the bird calls and of the processes by which they were manipulated. It’s all good fun, and I’m told the booklet has some great pictures, but a bit of hunting tells me that it’s a fairly expensive proposition, so dig around a bit if you’ve an itch to stuff a late stocking with this slice of lopsided nature.
~ Marc Medwin
Thumbing leisurely through the Pablo titles in my collection, of which there are surprisingly many, I recently pulled this album for some afternoon easy listening. Davis’ collaborations with Edison constituted the third successful pairing (not counting the Count) of his career. Both men changed their vernaculars little over the years. Sweets was a master of understatement, speaking volumes with just a handful of notes. Jaws had a tone that contorted and distorted like an image in a funhouse mirror, but always seemed apposite to his surroundings and attuned to cerulean hues. As first tier alumni of Basie, both could swing with the best. This welterweight date comes from relatively late in either man’s oeuvre. Though the songbook is relatively slight (there’s a better selection on Edison’s Lights, an album recorded a year and a half earlier, partially in the company of the Count) and consists mainly of easy to swallow blues, it still works well for the sort of relaxed blowing that Edison and Davis opt for. Largely anonymous bassist Harvey Newmark and journeyman drummer Jimmie Smith don’t light any fireworks either, but the presence of neo-bopper Dolo Coker brings the rhythm section up a notch. The cover shot of Sweets, replete with lamb chop sideburns, damp process, hippie medallion and wide-lapelled leisure shirt pretty much encapsulates the session vibe. Coker’s turns on electric piano and the crew’s Pall Mall-scented stroll through “Feelings” offer other clues. Even with these subjective minuses, the two principals still keep the swing torch lit and any LP that opens with a tune titled “Dirty Butt Blues” has to have some entertainment cachet, right?
Link’s been in the ground a few years but his spirit lives on in the sonic DNA of innumerable bands. “Grandfather of the Power Chord” isn’t some idle boast. This generously sequenced Norton set documents the genesis of that sobriquet over the course of 63 singles cut for the Swan label in the Sixties. The crunch and growl of his signature pen-perforated amp sound is in full effect throughout. Raw-boned riffs are regularly recycled and many of the tune titles are tacked on, one fuzz-tone roof-raiser folding easily into the next. But between the various “Rumble” variations and other largely interchangeable instrumentals arise surprises, like Link’s raucous takes on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Hidden Charms” and Elvis’ “Hound Dog” and his heartfelt interpretation of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country”. Also endearing are weirdo novelty tunes like “The Shadow Knows” and an organ-blitzed send-up of the “Batman Theme” with Wray voicing the part of the Caped Crusader. The B-sides well out number their A-list counterparts, but that attention to obscurata is a chief reason why this exhaustive collection is so much fun. The booklet contains a boon of period snapshots and Wrayological anecdotes and in true Norton style even includes a marble-patterned guitar pick. Amidst the continuing proliferation of compilations that offer piecemeal portions of Link’s catalog, this set is still the one to get, both for its Bear Family-worthy inclusiveness and its attention to his salacious salad years.
A bit of a relic from Fat Possum’s not-so-distant past, the label has since wisely moved on to stewarding more reliable and lucrative wards like Dinosaur Jr. and the Heartless Bastards. Back in the Nineties though, they still banked their wildly fluctuating fortunes on the blues and a specially cultivated branch of that variegated vine that T-Model Ford could easily have been the poster boy for had R.L. Burnside not beat him to the post. Ford always struck me as the most pragmatic and self-aware among the Fat Possum stable. He knew his persona as an obdurate bad ass was mostly a sham but he took to it anyway and had a helluva time propagating it. This record, his debut at the ripe old age of 75, revels in the sort of boasting and vilifying that’s been parcel to the idiom since its inception. It certainly helps to have the lyrics coupled to snarling over-amplified guitars and stomping metronomic snare beats, all filtered through brittle and bracing back porch production. Veteran bluesman Frank Frost adds Farfisa on a couple cuts and the story goes that he and Ford almost came to blows on several occasions during the session; the former man aggravated by the latter’s blatant disregard for quality control. “Cut You Loose” predictably recounts love gone past the shelf date while “Turkey and the Rabbit” burns with pure gin and distortion-soaked boogie. “Nobody Gets Me Down” is instant theme song material with Ford growling: “I been shot, and I been cut, nobody gets me down.” Several songs meander well past their welcome and calling Ford’s rheumatic wheeze an acquired taste is probably too kind, but damn if he doesn’t consistently deliver a good time. The cover and title win points too, demonstrating conclusively that even the local youth aren’t beyond the reach of Ford’s corrupting influence.
I’m very new to this record, but I couldn’t resist. I’ve heard all the buzz, but I now see the glory, and no, it’s not a royal scam. It’s about an hour and a half of some of the most visceral and satisfying thrum and buzz I’ve had the pleasure to ingest.
Recorded live in the studio under the loose direction of Fluxus composer Takehisa Kosugi and consisting of four long pieces, the set prefigures what would happen if Sunburned Hand of the Man met Birchville Cat Motel halfway. The drone on “Part 1” sneaks up, emerging out of a cloud of rhythmic delay, clatter and heavily-reverbed fly buzz, whistles moving across the soundstage invoking Tim Blake’s work with Gong. The instruments are largely acoustic, but they’re manipulated in such a way as to become larger than they are, marimba vying for prominence with what sounds like French horn and violin.
I cannot begin to describe the slow build and the complexities that make up the drone’s core. True, there are the sudden harmonica blasts, some sort of DeFord Bailey meets Magic Mother Invocation Jamboree, but these are subservient to the all-encompassing drone. Even when a particular instrument has a solo spot, like the muted guitar at the beginning of “Part 2,” it’s just a momentary diversion from the onslaught of collectivity. It’s mixed so beautifully, however, that each level of drone is apparent, making the whole like a sculpture that you get to see from several angles, each providing new revelations on every viewing.
Tonality, timbre, rhythm—each prove to be fluid constructions as this journey progresses. This, the group’s second album proper, is much more expansive than the first, sonically as well as temporally; yet, ironically, there is a certain stream-lined aesthetic at work here. As with early AMM, details emerge from collective obscurity with stunning clarity. This is definitely a feast for the ears, one I almost missed but whose time has come.
~ Marc Medwin
I spent one of the best summers of my life serving as an intern for the Smithsonian/Folkways label in Washington, DC. Part of the job entailed working as a field recording technician for the Festival of American Folklife, an event held annually on the National Mall designed to explore the arts and music selected regional cultural groups. A contingent of Old Regular Baptists was on the performance roster that particular summer and the music they shared had an unexpectedly metaphysical effect on my consciousness. Versed in a centuries-old style of European lined out hymnody and steeped in the pastoral climate of their Kentucky origins, the Baptists were like beatific delegates from another age. Everyone on the recording team expected them to keep to themselves*, but those assumptions were dispelled almost immediately as the Baptists mingled enthusiastically with the West African and Mississippi musicians who were also on the festival docket that year. Their music had a similarly immediate and inclusive effect on audiences, somber and mournful in one sense, joyous and celebratory in another, communicating ardent faith in often-otherworldly fashion. There really is nothing like it and it’s one of the rare assemblages of sound that can readily bring tears to my eyes. The faith-based verses, sounded first by leader Elwood Cornett and answered in heterophonic fashion by the congregation, may not resonate in terms of meaning, but the angelic mass of shifting meters and inflections burrows straight to an emotional core. Released the same summer, this recording doesn’t do the live experience of the Baptists justice, but as a memento of a pivotal time in my life it’s still one I return to often.
*The cover graphic takes pains to sustain the Baptists’ anonymity as per their mandate. Similarly, no liner photographs are included.
Pierre Boulez has just finished his Mahler symphony cycle with an account of the Symphony of a Thousand, and it seemed a good time to give the survey another listen. While it will never replace the contributions of Rattle, Gielen, Horenstein, Mengelberg and other top-drawer Mahlerians, the Boulez readings are consistent in an approach to detail that is somehow simultaneously cool-headed and satisfying.
His rendering of the multifariously tragic sixth, with which the whole cycle began in mid 1995, sums up the fairly complex approach. I was surprised, at the time, with just how successful the emotive qualities were brought off without being overdramatized. The opening march, or rather the march’s opening, maintains excitement with some hairpin dynamic and timbral shifts and juxtapositions, but the dense counterpoint belies a beautiful sense of long-form development rather than the modernist approach I had been expecting from Boulez. The more chamber-like sections of the huge and immensely varied finale are treated similarly, tuba, harp and strings interacting so that timbre never displaces line, as happens in the seminal Barbirolli studio recording.
Even more surprising, on re-assessment, is how beautiful the sweepingly majestic slow movement becomes in Boulez’s hands. Placed third in his reading, it is a streamlined and busily detailed but never overactive performance where the Andante somewhat overrides the Moderato. That said, a certain elasticity keeps any sense of hurry at bay; as happens so often through Boulez’s Mahler survey, slow movements are presented without drag or rush, a credit to the Maestro’s admirable sense of large gesture.
I have never understood how critics could praise this sixth, as they did upon release, and dismiss many of Boulez’s other Mahler renderings. His vision is strikingly unified, maybe a bit too unified. There is a certain clinicality in his interpretations that can be fascinating but might distract those in search of a more visceral experience. I love them, all nine, and he has a fine Das Lied von der Erde as well. Looking back, the sixth commenced a remarkable achievement from a conductor whose musical aesthetic has remained uncompromisingly his own.
~ Marc Medwin
Big Joe Williams was no stranger to plugging in when he cut this live date at Rockford College in 1965. His ouevre had been divisible between acoustic and amplified blues for decades, with the druthers for either hinging mainly on his own whims rather than those of his audience. A self-taught luthier, he routinely salvaged guitars from the trash to assemble his own Frankenstein creations. The six-string he uses here has an additional three strings soldered to its neck, but more notable is his decision to jack a tremolo attachment up to the level of near distortion. The resulting waves of shimmering twang give his craggy picked lines abundant presence and smoothly oscillating texture. It’s a contrastive combination with his bullfrog croak of a voice and colloquial delivery and therefore unique in his canon. And that’s saying something considering Williams played and recorded constantly, traveling from place to place and completely ignoring copyright and contract considerations on many of his stops. The 17-song set list encompasses a few covers like John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun” and Sonny Boy Williams’ “Good Morning Little School Girl”, but Williams primarily dips from his own bag of snuff with “Mellow Peaches” and “Vitamin A Blues” being standouts. He never concerned himself much with playing things “right” and there are plenty of switchbacks and “mistakes” in his homespun fretwork, but again, that thick glaze of tremolo has the weird effect of polishing off the points and cracks. Normally, that would seem a negative, but in actual practice it makes for a fascinating coupling of urbane and back porch moods.
Leave it to Dave Holland to create a pioneering solo bass record both daunting to the student and dependably satisfying to the layperson listener. Holland’s been quietly making big waves since his early gigs with Miles, moving from acoustic to electric incarnations of his instrument with ease and playing in every style from free to postbop to fusion. This ECM set from relatively early in his career presents his Olympian powers on upright via an intimate program of originals and a pair of disparate ‘covers’. The label’s limpid production suits the action and resonance of his strings, leaving all the nuances of his intonation exquisitely audible. A broad melodic acumen percolates through pieces combining with a persistent rhythmic mutability. These are carefully considered song forms, not just inventories of extended techniques that would cause even the most erudite bull fiddlers to take pause in admiration. Even the interpretation of one of Braxton’s schematic compositions carries a funky underpinning. Holland keeps the prevailing mood warm and inviting, even on the introspective “Under Redwoods”. Bow leaves scabbard only on a pair of pieces and the album feels the better for its focus on pizzicato. Holland also corrals his imagination into the confines of a single LP’s dimensions. Any longer and the session might begin to suffer under the relative starkness of the set-up. Holland would wait 16 years before releasing another solo recital, this time on Intuition. That set is well worth hearing too, but this one holds the privilege of precedence.
I threatened to do this weeks ago and here it is. I know almost nothing about this middle 1970s “prog” duo, except that Kieran O’Connor and Ken Elliot combine the whimsy of Bowie’s most interesting work with the stereophonics of Dark Side era Floyd, and they produced one of the all-time masterpieces of any genre.
No they didn’t really, and in fact, a fair amount of Psi-Fi is interesting only in that it shows a different side of synth-pop than, say, Suicide; I barely remember the first half. However, the last two tracks on the album, “Camera Obscura” (in compound duple!) and “Star Palace of the Somber Warrior” (Not!) are truly masterpieces. “Plastic Palace Alice,” sing-shrieks one of them, “Through the looking glaaaaaaasss,” as a relatively harsh dissonance inducts the listener. Connected by a swirling droning display of technology that gives “On the Run” a run for its money, these two mini-musicals represent symphonic rock at its finest, timbre for once rivaling tone constructs for innovation. The lyrics are delivered with all the conviction of innocence, as impassioned as Peter Gabriel in finest form and as clever as … er … Ambrosia? Yes, that seems fair—Ambrosia on their first two albums anyway. Actually, the theatricality of Ambrosia’s delivery isn’t so far away from Seventh Wave, the latter boasting fine harmonies and good through-composition in the romantic style of those obsessed with the theater of Wagner-induced outward and inward journeys.
At their best, Seventh Wave combine Avant-Garde sound experiments with the often pretentious but somehow charming excesses of progressive rock, and if you’ll accept an album of the week for two tracks, they’re sure to provide some nostalgic fun.
~ Marc Medwin
Barney Kessel looked the guitar geek part openly, resembling in his youth the possible lovechild of Peter Lorre and Alfred E. Neuman with a penchant for tweed coats and turtlenecks. As one of Norman Granz’s favored plectrists he took part in a steady series of dream dates with aging giants of the swing era, everyone from Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins to Roy Eldridge and Lionel Hampton. A record deal with Contemporary allowed for a contemporaneous outlet for his own work, though even there standards and show tunes served as preferred menu items. That back-story and the resultant body of excellent, if mostly orthodox, work is part of what makes this later session for the label both a curiosity and breath of fresh air. Kessel had grown disillusioned with his lucrative position as a professional LA session man. His search for higher-octane surroundings led him to tap a crew seemingly incongruous with his earlier career. The title on this album announces the personal transformation in rhetorical fashion, as the tunes aren’t “free” in the sense of Ayler or late-Coltrane. But Kessel does launch himself enthusiastically out of his previous comfort zone. The crucible is Elvin Jones, who holds nothing back in the way of muscle or momentum, building mighty polyrhythms without censure. Kessel responds by cranking his amp up and tossing welcome pinches of gravel into his previously whistle clean tone. Bassist Chuck Domanico plays complex LaFaro influenced lines and Bobby Hutcherson brings the cogent blend of harmonic creativity and luminosity that graces so much of his Blue Note work. The set list is a mix of pop hits, one by Bacharach, another by Simon, and originals geared to emphasize the casually emancipated interplay. Kessel also enforces a credo of minimal multiple takes, preferring to leave minor mistakes in rather than compromise the consistent élan. His “free” phase wouldn’t last long, but the brief stroll on the “wilder” side would inform the remainder of his lengthy career.
One among an elite fraternity of bleeding fingers plectrists, Joe Maphis set the guitar bar almost impossibly high in terms of speed and precision. While his approach on custom Mosrite double neck electric clocked velocities similar to the go-for-broke bluegrass sessions of elders Ralph Stanley and Uncle Dave Macon, his ears were also open to the genres of jazz, blues and rock and roll and his mind just as receptive to making a buck. This astutely titled program of instrumentals finds him in an ideal element with a crack studio band at his flanks and a selection of tunes arranged to feature his mercurial arpeggiations with no crooning or yodeling to compete for the spotlight. The other players settle into their supportive roles without guff and gladly accept the solo scraps Maphis tosses them; it’s clearly his show from the get-go. At times there are as many as six guitarists (including lap steel) picking away against a steady string bass thump and snare beat. The music is as fastidiously arranged as Maphis’ Opry duds pictured on the LP cover, but that doesn’t mean it lacks in the least for verve or variety. Maphis even hangs up his chief axe on a few for equally convincing turns on mandolin and banjo and slow waltz “Sweet Fern” shows off his sentimental side. Seven bonus tracks borrowed from two more LPs and a single join the original dozen for the reissue, expanding the album length to a healthy 50-odd minutes. Maphis is largely credited with bushwacking a stylistic path for the surf guitarists of the 60s and his liberal use of twangy reverb here bears out the claim. He also appears to have been the (unwitting?) model for those plastic hillbilly teeth so easily procurable this time of year.
This is the fifth installment in OJL’s monumental survey of the complete Bix Beiderbecke. Any discussion that would do justice to the first twelve discs in the set is obviously beyond the scope of a column such as this. However, the final volume stands on its own as a compendium of artists that demonstrate, obviously or otherwise, Beiderbecke’s far-ranging influence.
There are the obligatory homage’s, notably the beautiful Red Norvo transcription of “In a Mist” for xylophone (though it sounds like marimba) guitar, bass and bass clarinet, the latter played elegantly by Benny Goodman. Recorded at the end of 1933, it prefigures the sound that would come to be labeled Chamber jazz, its texture sumptuous yet transparent.
Then, there’s the whimsy of Vaudeville singer Marion Harris’ take on “Singing the Blues.” Originally recorded by Bix and Frankie Trumbauer in 1927, their solos are given fresh lyrics, presumably by Harris, concerning how a spurned lover would dispatch with her man and the “oceans of gin” it took to build up the necessary courage and conviction. Harris sing-speaks the solos with a disarming mixture of reverence and wit.
There are also those tributes that bespeak style at a deeper level—something in the phrasing or in the way notes are paired, grouped and phrased. “Sweet Sue, Just You,” with Lennie Hayton accompanying Bing Crosby, has Bix written all over the piano part, a winning mix of stride and impressionism. The same is true with Hoagy Carmichael’s piano solo on the first recording of “Stardust;” it’s redolent of Bix, whose influence HC never tired of acknowledging.
Of course, trumpeters abound here, contributions from Rex Stewart and Jimmy McPartland especially noteworthy, but for die-hard Bix collectors, two recently discovered alternate takes are included, on “Futuristic Rhythm” and “Raisin’ the Roof.” The former is infinitely better than its original issue, Bix in better form and providing a much more energetic solo.
This is a wonderful culmination to a lovingly prepared set, and the transfers are first-rate throughout, having been initiated by the legendary John R.T. Davies and continued by Michael Kieffer. This is definitely worth investigating by anybody interested in vintage jazz.
~ Marc Medwin
When it came to contests of name noteriety, Earl Hooker always seemed to end up with the short end of the guitar string. Unlike the famous cousin with whom he shared a surname, Hooker recorded only sporadically as a leader, spending the bulk of his career as a Chicago session man. The reasons are a bit hard to fathom considering his considerable prowess on the frets. The man could play almost anything on his customized double-neck Gibson and counted proficiency on organ, drums, piano, banjo, harmonica and mandolin as other weapons in his armory. Still, fame never fully came his way and he cashed out to TB in the spring of 1970 after a chronic struggle with the illness. Specifics on this LP are similarly hard to glean with guitarist Jimmy Dawkins the only identified sideman and that designation a dubious one, at best. The album’s eleven cuts are all instrumentals, Hooker’s preferred format since pipes were the only category where his prestigious cousin had an undeniable edge. Wah-wah and B-3 grease figure prominently in the mix and the songs are very much in a soul blues bag as the cover of Booker T & the MGs “Hold On” makes manifest. Hooker has room to try out all sorts of plectral tricks from the keening harmonics of “Two Bugs in a Rug”, a variant of his signature tune, to the treble-spackled chicken scratch that etches “Dust My Broom”. The backing band, whoever they are, is tight and well tuned to Hooker’s needs. No great revelations or strides to speak of. Instead it’s just the aural equivalent of a savory skillet-cooked meal washed down with several cans of local brewed suds. A Crumb concocted cover is a bonus, rubber-stamping the album with late 60s counter-culture character even if the music doesn’t exactly follow suit.
“Give me Bass-Relief!” screams a frenetic Captain, my Captain, (“Oh, hell yes!) as “Debra Kadabra” kicks into one of the coolest and most kick-ass syncopated grooves offered up on a mostly live and classic FZ record. In 1975, the pair reunited for the tour that produced this marvelous slab of bizarre genius. Oh Helios, we get some great harp playing on “Advanced Romance” and “Poofter’s Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead,” but Van Vliet also contributes some of his trademark rasp to “Muffin Man”’s minimalist chorus.
Are you with me on this people? There are also beautifully cerebral Zappa constructions, like the studio trickery and tack-hammered piano of “Cucamonga” with its “Nanook No-No” bit of conceptual continuity. It’s the George Duke/Napoleon Murphy Brock that gives the vocal harmonies their luster, as “Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy” makes plain, one of the greatest songs ever about stomping all over a woman who was certainly asking for it.
That particular track also sports one of the finest FZ guitar solos, a career highlight that I’ve found myself humming often over the last 20 years, more often than I’d care to admit. Same goes for the scorching solo on “Muffin Man,” as Zappa riffs countless quasi-imponderables over a good old three-chord vamp, a bit a nostalgia for the old folks in tandem with some high-powered widdley-widdley-weeing for the young sophisticate.
There are very few moments as awe-inspiringly silly as Zappa’s band introductions, delivered preacher style, building up to that now legendary shout-out, “Goodnight Austin Texas wherever you are!” As Terry Bozzio’s emotive and impeccable drumming leads into a final instrumental chorus of “Muffin Man,” ending a superb album with a brilliant fade, no more need be said.
~ Marc Medwin
Some of the best moments by Keith Jarrett’s venerable Standards Trio occur when he, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette abandon the parameters of their signifier altogether. In this particular case from early in their association, they discard the reliable territory of the American songbook in favor of collectively improvised interplay that takes on almost Eastern devotional dimensions. Jarrett’s usual tropes are present and even magnified under the circumstances, but oddly enough, they enhance rather than diminish the four performances, each taped in different U.S. city. Here is the pianist allowing his ascetic and affective impulses unbridled avenues of expression. “Dancing” works off a darkly syncopated ostinato, incessant in its recurrence and gravitas. “Endless” is epic in scope and intent, rippling out as a series of variations on a pathos-pregnant melodic motif. Peacock and DeJohnette lock and release, generating oceanic swells of rhythm while paying particular attention to building texture around Jarrett’s sweeping and dramatic patterns. The effect brings to mind the emotional peaks and valleys of a tumultuous romantic relationship and Jarrett’s audible sighs, murmurs and swoons magnify the mental impression. The liners carry the supercilious fungus that seems to sprout regularly from the the fissures in the pianist’s Ivory Tower psyche and the Zen enso inscribed on the cover is also a bit much. Musically though it all works, maddeningly substantiating Jarrett’s claims of instrumental superiority.
While the infamous “Bad Boy”’s romp through industrojazz is this fascinating disc’s centerpiece, it is certainly not the only point of interest. Among the miniatures on offer, John Cage and Lou Harrison’s “Double Music” from 1941 stands out, is this hypnotic collaborative gem for various tuned and untuned percussion with which I was unfamiliar. There is also a rather astonishing rendering of the Salterello-Presto movement from Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, arranged by Paul Lehrman for sixteen player pianos, a wild expansion of the four-hand piano trope.
Then, there’s the ballet. For the uninitiated, it’s loud, a relentless half hour of rhythmic bang as a problematic child of the equally infamous Rite is born. While there have been several recordings of the piece, this is the first for the 1924 version, not quite the original version but very close. All but impossible at the time of composition, the present revision, for xylophones, tamtams, siren, airplane propellers, bass drums and sixteen synchronized player pianos, was not premiered until 1999. Jeffrey Fischer conducts the University of Massachusetts Lowell Percussion Ensemble in an engaging performance where volume never supersedes clarity. The rhythms are strong, the stratified layers well defined, and each instrument is beautifully recorded in a resonant space.
I played this performance last Sunday morning on a friend’s radio show. We programmed it to follow one of the Lassus Penitential Psalms, and I couldn’t help feeling just a bit of that bad boy glee.
~ Marc Medwin
A husband and wife team whose union weathered all manner of career peaks and furrows, Billie and DeDe Pierce played the Crescent City scene for the better part of forty years. Billie initially sharpened her piano chops in the black bottom bands of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ida Cox while DeDe was a regular on the marching band circuit. Produced by Chris Albertson for his short-lived but indispensable New Orleans Living Legends series, this late in the game session visits them in the company of local percussionist Albert Jiles, who doubles on kit and an assortment of tuned bells. The blues and tonks promised in the title constitute meaty fare for the three and they celebrate such staples as “St. James Infirmary” and “Millenberg Joys” with audible zeal. Their take on the former song is one of my favorites on record, roughshod, but ripe with the regal melancholy at the root of the mortality-obsessed lyrics. DeDe’s brass style is built on an obvious Armstrong chassis, his smears and trills aping early Satchmo as Billie generates forceful rolls and fills at his flank. Her colloquial vocals encompass a belting delivery and she isn’t the least bit averse to turning a blue verse either as her frank musings on the ode to harlotry “In the Racket” ably indicate. Jiles inculcates himself expertly into the duo’s personalized sound; keeping an unobtrusive syncopated beat, but also veering off with oddly pitched accents from his struck bell tree. The trio taped enough material at the session for a second volume, but it’s this one that I return to most frequently for a ration of trad jazz refreshingly off the beaten path.
I read somewhere recently, or maybe I heard, that Ian Anderson viewed this album as a sendup, kind of a joke for the concept album loving progsters. I know it’s supposed to be true for Thick as a Brick, but this one? Come on!! It’s the most adventurous record they ever made, it might be the best musically speaking, and there’s a healthy chunk of lyrical meat on the bones as well.
OK, so maybe the keyboard work doesn’t stack up to Moraz in Refugee or to the best moments from PFM or Gentle Giant, but I still like the slowing heartbeat synth in the intro, not to mention the high-frequency-enhanced reverb on the acoustic guitar accompanying the line “The silver chord lies on the ground.” If the vibrato machine on Anderson’s voice gets a bit tiresome after a while, the lyrics speak to a seriousness and contemplation missing from every album they’ve released since. While the God/devil flip-flop is nothing new, the insertion of the “Hare who Lost his Spectacles” story brings things back to earth again; its musical setting is downright irresistible, and I sure wish I’d done that orchestration!
I’m assuming that much of the Bags readership has heard this, so I needn’t address the multiple power inversions, often simultaneous, found in lines like “In that forsaken Paradise that calls itself Hell.” For those that haven’t heard this, only Igor Wakevitch and Frank Zappa bring “classical” music and rock closer together. This is an album that reels in derision and lip service in equal measure, and I think it deserves a few more serious listens. It even stands up to Seventh Wave for musical excellence—anybody remember them?
~ Marc Medwin
The tincture of influence can be a burdensome thing, an indelible mark even when its presence is more mirage than reality. Stitt had to deal with the Olympus-sized shadow that was Bird. Brötzmann’s been living down a knee-jerk Ayler analogue for decades, despite his contention that they developed their styles contemporaneously. In the realm of the blues there’s Jack Owens and Skip James, both longtime residents of Bentonia, Mississippi. James remains the household name, primarily for the string of epochal “race” sides he waxed for Paramount in 1930. Those few who have even heard of Owens often first hear him as an impersonator or at best, disciple. Closer listening divulges both subtle and substantial disparities in their styles. Owens reminds me more of hill country contemporaries like Junior Kimbrough and Robert Belfour, particularly on this 1970 album for Pete Welding’s Testament imprint. He hardly seems concerned with conventional song constraints or strict tunings, spooling out spidery, undulating guitar lines that scuttle along for durations up to several times that of the typical shellac 78. His vocals, a weird blend of adenoidal wail and sorrowful rasp don’t match the eldritch falsetto of Skip, but carry instead their own bundle of broken aspirations in dryly suspiring form. Confrere Buddy Spires adds haunting mouth harp fills and the pair shapes improvisations that sound at once ramshackle and rococo. Their renderings of “Good Morning Little School Girl” and “Catfish Blues” reduce claims of unoriginality to little more than burnt hog moss. Owens even has the huevos to cover James “Cherry Ball Blues”, divested here of its genre signifier and significantly looser in design. Asked to chose, I’d still readily pick Skip, but Owens is more than worth a lingering gander.
Last Wednesday was Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 79th birthday, and I’ve been spinning this one ever since. It’s Volume 9 of the composer’s complete works, which can be ordered, along with many scores, directly from his own site.
This is a particularly important issue as it encapsulates many of the compositional and emotive currents into which Stockhausen was then tapping with a vengeance. It is well documented that the two Mikrophonie pieces, from 1964 and 1965 respectively employ the microphone as an active instrument and represent some of the earliest excursions into live electronics. The first, for tamtam, two microphones, two filters and controllers, uses a kind of moment form to invoke an extraordinary universe of sounds usually inaudible without amplification. Beginning life as a two-man improvisation, the piece still exhibits a spontaneous quality as it follows its highly structured path. The 27th structure, for example, sounds like anything but a tamtam, taking on the surprisingly Orientalist quality of a zither. This version is beautifully recorded, each thunderous groan, slight rustle and stark silence absolutely clear and present.
“Mikrophonie II,” for choir, Hammond Organ and four ring modulators, delves deep into the human psyche, as per the composer’s directions to the vocalists: “Like a conceited snob,” or “Like a baby.” He has spoken, with justified pride, of waking the monsters within his chosen singers, a quality often amplified (exacerbated?) by the ring modulators. The eight times during the piece in which earlier Stockhausen compositions emerge, via tape, are extremely effective, combining with traditional counterpoint in certain sections of the high-register lines to create stunning temporal disunity.
“Telemusik,” composed for tape in Japan during a 1966 visit, prefigures the monumental Hymnen (1967-68) in that it draws on sounds from many diverse cultures, a kind of world music before all the clichés rendered the term meaningless. As fascinating as that is, the intuitive logic of the way each structure unfolds, skewing perception of time and space, is the real joy and innovation of the work. Structures 2-7, for example, seem to be about deceleration and entropy as the interregistral sounds decrease and decay, or disunify, over increasingly extended periods, as almost recognizable cultural markers permeate the spaces below and around them.
I am increasingly awed by these three pieces, and their presentation here is second to none, as it is in every volume I have of the admittedly high-priced but beautifully prepared Stockhausen edition. Happy Birthday, Maestro!
~ Marc Medwin
I came to the Buzzcocks late through the back channel of Hüsker Dü and Bob Mould’s breathless encomiums about the band. It was a dubious means of ingress, akin to discovering Bad Brains via Living Colour (another among my many cart-before-the-horse musical sins). But ever since their autumnal addition to my rotation they have seldom left for very long. This 1991 compilation lives up to the utilitarian promise of its title by presenting twenty-five of the Buzzcocks prime cuts across triple as many minutes. That temporal ratio distills their role in the rise of bubblegum punk, that curious blend of aggro angst and commercial song craft that built the careers of countless bands after. As with Phil Spector before them, their best songs are two to three minute paeans to youth and romance, in this case shot through with teeth-gnashing doses of insolence, indolence and ire. “Orgasm Addict” is an ideal and instructive opener, not to mention a near-impossible act to follow. Lascivious lyrics reflecting a fevered equal opportunist sex drive couple to buzz saw guitars and a pummeling drum beat. “What Do I Get?” carries the egotism even further as Pete Shelley whines about his sorry luck with love. “Autonomy” is anthemic and disarmingly intricate in its fretwork. “Fast Cars” is fairly inconsequential from a topical standpoint; its charms cached instead in Steve Diggle’s gargantuan bass line and more layered guitars. The energy and economy of the group falters a bit on later, longer cuts, but there really isn’t a bum one in the bunch. I never bothered to check back in with the Buzzcocks on any of their reunion efforts over the years. This dog-eared and well-spun primer still has pretty much everything I need.
Olé Coltrane’s history is well known: It was Trane’s last date for Atlantic, recorded in 1961, in fact, just after his first for the new Impulse! Label. Eric Dolphy (George Lane) and Freddie Hubbard augment the emergant classic quartet, making for a great disc all around.
I picked the album, however, for Art Davis, to complement Derek’s mention of his passing in an earlier thread. To this day, his playing is underrated, if not neglected, and while the reasons are multiple and complex, he brings majesty and mystery to the title track of this seminal album.
Percussive at first, alternating arco and pizzicato, Davis’ is the higher voice in this bass duo with Reggie Workman, prophetic of Grimes/Silva in Cecil Taylor’s two Blue Note dates. When Davis finally takes a solo, he effectively annihilates much arco that preceeded him in several strokes and with a few masterfully placed harmonics. First a G, then a D, the notes drifting and hanging poised above the Moorish fray with such delicacy and grace as to be dream-like, or heartbreaking. His approach to modality is boundless, matching Coltrane’s own in gesture after gesture telling of the nascent freedom ready to burst out all over New York, all over the country, as each phrase ascends in pitch and intensity. Mirroring the recent independences on the African continent, Coltrane’s conception pulses with life and vigor, and Davis is an invaluable contributor.
For anyone that hasn’t heard this album, and I’m doubtful that Bags readership has many of those among it’s ranks, “Aisha” is a beautiful McCoy Tyner composition, and “Dahomey Dance” immortalizes, as Coltrane did so effectively and so often, the struggles for identity and freedom associated with late 1950s Africa. The disc is a marvel of diversity, both in terms of topos and playing, and it is with sadness that we bid farewell to one more of its participants.
~ Marc Medwin
In the pantheon of baritone saxophonists, the late, great Pepper Adams holds a special position of prominence. Adams wasn’t a fraction of the composer Mulligan was, nor did he travel exotic spaceways like Pat Patrick, but when it came to bringing out the blustery best in his horn he often had his contemporaries soundly beat. A chief reason behind that edge was the determination to embrace the instrument’s gutteral bottom end and couple it with an inherent enthusiasm that was also resolutely cognizant of form and function. An Adams solo, even a riff, is rife with vitality and muscle, but also respectful of structural integrity. To cite just one specimen: my favorite passage of Mingus’ Blues and Roots involves Pepper’s garrulous prodding bleats that open the deliriously down home “Moanin’”. This Enja set, taped in a tiny club in Munich in the summer of ’75, offers a striking contrast between Adams’ physique and sound. A booklet snapshot shows him pencil-thin and balding, presumable side effects of chemo, hoisting his horn with matchstick arms. Fortunately the rugged physicality of horn remains largely intact and comes through clearly in the clean live recording. A rhythm section of Walter Norris, George Mraz and the Makaya Ntshoko help out with swinging backdrops as Adams taps a songbook made up mainly of originals and tunes borrowed from his colleague Thad Jones. The title ballad, composed jointly by the leader and Mraz in honor of Cannonball Adderley, is particularly effective with Adams blowing bold cerulean shapes against the bassist’s steady commentary and finishing off with a soaring cadenza that belies his horn’s built-in gravity. Adams recorded all too infrequently in quartet settings, a regrettable circumstance that only augments the value of this already priceless late-in-the-game outing.
I love this album. Many of my friends, who seem to cultivate reasonable opinions about many things, hate it. Last year’s reissue partially resurrected the debate. Is it ahead of its blah blah, or just old, in the way, avoiding putting itself gracefully out to pasture? Pay your money, take your choice. I remember falling head over heels in love with the Kathryn Wheel music, and then I needed to hear everything associated with Byrne, Eno, Talking Heads, and it all still sounds pretty good to me.
There’s something visceral about the album, something so headstrong about each sound and how it’s placed, that I find it irresistible. I still thrill to the heavy-duty gospelizations as “Help me Somebody” transforms itself from jungle-primitivism to funky R&B; the eerily mechanized voices, contrasted with the preternaturally fast ones, on “Mea Culpa” still registers some vague paranoia. I find a new layer every time I listen—well, almost every time. OK, not really; in fact, I got through all the layers years ago, but is it ever fun to hear those tin cans, pots and pans, tribal boomings, skewed percussive things …
Maybe that’s all it amounts to. I have a lot of fun listening to the album, even if the bonus cuts on this most recent reissue aren’t particularly interesting. Larger than life, like the new liners exhort? Not a bit of it. A great disc to have on while domesticating? Absolutely.
~ Marc Medwin
Sequestered within an aged chapel space adjacent to his rural French home, Barre Phillips second meeting with the Maneris evinces a subtle evolution in ensemble sound. Father Joe and son Mat deconstruct the “soft-to-loud-to-soft” dynamic, so often the stereotypical trajectory for free jazz, and stretch it to deliciously perplexing extremes. The “angles” referenced in the album’s title retain relative degrees of “repose” over fluctuating temporal spans only to be shattered by bursts of cacophonous dissonance. Predicting these seismic explosions can be problematic as they are often timed to the elder Maneri’s internal improvisatory clock. Phillips is the self-professed “scalar” player, constantly recalibrating his attack in relation to the atomizing pitch streams of Joe’s horns and Mat’s viola (yet another departure from the earlier trio recording Tales of Rohnlief where he played electric 6-string violin). One of the things I adore about the disc is how completely the stark ECM engineering aesthetic jibes with the complex acoustical interactions of the instruments and the recording space. The overlapping sound conjured collectively by the three ricochets off the stone walls of the chapel (another allusion to the titular geometries) and creates an auditory experience that at once demands attentiveness and rebuffs pretension. Liner scribe Steve Lake cannily likens the trio to back porch bluesmen and damned if I don’t hear it, in the hearty hiccupping of Joe’s Rosicrucian reeds, the sliding vernacular of Mat’s close-shaven viola and the reverberating thump of Phillips’ bull fiddle.
Well I had to confront this one in writing at some point. It obsessed me during my high school years as I tried to write, first like librettist Paul Haines and then like composer Carla Bley. I suppose, looking back now as I prepare to talk about this “Chronotransduction” in class tomorrow, that it was the way in which the lyrics and music almost make conventional sense that got my attention all those years ago; only just skirting logic and reason, each character delivers everything from seemingly logical aphorisms of advice (“Don’t do it if you haven’t done it.” Or “Don’t let no five-and-dime baby break your million-dollar heart.”) to stunningly evocative near-gibberish (“Tell the scheme to you, who grow on us like falling hair? Oh, Rawalpindi.”)
Taking some three years to record and amassing huge debt by its 1972 release, the three-record album boasts music so strange and sublime, so expertly performed, that it still brings on a shudder twenty years after I first heard it. It’s not just that Gato Barbieri drops one of his most awesome and beautiful solos in “Small Town Agonist,” or that Jack Bruce delivers some of the most convincing singing of his career, good as he usually is with Bley and Michael Mantler. The orchestrations are superb, innovative for the time and still effective, the tinkling purity of “Little Pony Soldier” especially fresh and evocative. Even though I now know that Don Cherry’s chanting was a stable part of his repertoire, I still find it extremely moving, the whole desert scene of EOTH defying categorization without the need for post-modern pretense. And how can I get the much lamented Jeanne Lee’s vocal acrobatics out of my mind and ears, swooping and diving over Bruce’s “It’s again!” and atop a star-studded chorus whose membership is too huge to list.
Desert scene? I still don’t know the plot, and I don’t care. I once wrote to Mantler and Bley asking the question, and of course I got the press pack in return—it doesn’t matter! From lush big band chorals to proto-fusion to tape experiments (the beginning is the end backwards) it’s as coherently incoherent as anything from the period, the last gasp of the psychedelic era proper and a wonderful testament to the efforts of many talented individuals, some of whom have indeed gone … over the hill?
~ Marc Medwin
The name-only title for this collection is telling indicator of its subject’s stature. No “Master of the Turkish Clarinet” tagline necessary, Mustafa Kandirali’s name speaks for itself amongst fans and scholars of Turkish music. Traditional Crossroads gives Kandirali the royal treatment in terms of packaging too with a slipcase and 100-page hardbound book as accoutrements to a 15-track disc culling the purported best of his work from the 1970s and 80s. Where the collection falters is in the accompanying essays, which are long on superlatives and adoration, but bereft of discographical specifics. It’s an odd omission considering the number of pages the compilers had at their disposal. Frustrating as that facet of the presentation is, the music is anything but, featuring Kandirali’s keening clarinet in spectrum of settings from solo to small group accompaniment. Building on the innovations of Sukru Tunar, the acknowledged high doyen of Turkish microtonal clarinet, his is the equivalent of that “high lonesome sound” heard across cultures in everything from Roscoe Holcomb’s Kentucky hymnody to the Sufi devotionals of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Expert accompaniment on oud, violin, darbuka and def bracket Kandirali’s whirling improvisations on taksim, romani and havasi song forms sometimes at vertigo-inducing tempos. Compiled mainly from LP and cassette releases, the fidelity of the recordings is uniformly excellent. Kandirali’s passion and genius are helpful reminders that conventional Western music constitutes but a drop in the bucket in the larger scheme of global musical activity.
In preparing my undergrad class on psychedelia this summer, I had the pleasure to revisit this Sundazed reissue of 2004, replete with bonus tracks and sporting better sound than any other version I’ve heard. For those who don’t know the disc, composer, teacher and American music historian Joseph Byrd’s vision of what a guitarless group could be, shame on you! I think this is one of the best things to come from the West Coast of 1968, although Byrd had also spent considerable time steeping himself in New York’s Avant-Garde.
I still find “The American Metaphysical Circus” delightfully disturbing, complete with Ivesian allusions and constructions, and I still chuckle at the sadistic absurdity of “I Won’t Leave my Wooden Wife for You, Sugar.” Now though, more than ever, I’m amazed at what must have been considerable compositional chutzpah, the Byrd arrangements effectively diverse and consistently interesting. Even a somewhat dated tableau like “Stranded in Time” really isn’t, thanks to the fine string writing and rapid-fire environmental juxtapositions, one sonic world swapped for another with speed and precision.
Yet, the disc would be nothing without the superb vocals of Dorothy Moskowitz—seductive, clinical and haunting by turn; on the ethereal and reverb-drenched “Osamu’s Birthday,” she’s obviously learned to sing her vocal part backwards, and when reversed, the effect is stunning, perfectly in tune with the track’s disembodied Orientalism.
USA can rock, glide, rumble and crash with any of the best groups from an extremely fertile period in American music, and Sundazed has given them the royal reissue treatment. The bonus tracks range from interesting to revelatory, a personal favorite being an alternate version of “Circus,” where “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” is right up front in the mix. This disc is worth hearing even for those familiar with the album, and for those uninitiated, what are you waiting for?
~ Marc Medwin
Bird tributes have been a reliable jazz staple for over a half century. This one probably ranks as my first pick amongst the Hitchcock-sized flock. Max was in the midst of a creative watershed that initially made his look back on the Parker songbook seem slightly anachronistic. Closer scrutiny exposed notable departures in his homage, most obviously in the absence of piano, a move that deposited increased responsibility on his own trap kit for shading and accompaniment under the horns. Bassists Nelson Boyd and George Morrow weren’t top tier players, but they work well enough in meeting Max’s sounding board needs. Kenny Dorham is the constant in the frontline while Hank Mobley and George Coleman alternate on tenor. An additional four tunes with the Mobley line-up are included on the Verve single disc reissue as are the Roach devised percussion preambles on two more, the opening “Yardbird Suite” and “Au Privave”. Dorham’s agile improvisations on “Parker’s Mood” and “Raoul” present potent bop statements in smooth-toned guises. Mobley isn’t quite so sure-footed in the sans-ivories setting, but it’s still exciting hearing him make his way through the limbered up changes. Coleman, conversely, isn’t hindered by any such compunction. After an initial blurred note salvo from Dorham, he blazes through a brush fire rendering of “Koko”, Max’s voracious cymbals nipping at his heels. The drummer’s home stretch solo gives peer Blakey cause for pause in the province of press roll supremacy. Max is sadly no longer in full possession of his faculties, a case where advanced age has exacted an exceedingly cruel toll. This set bookmarks his prime when there were few, if any, who could match his combination of arranger’s acuity and instrumental excellence.
Catching a thoroughly disappointing set by the 79-year old Konitz this past Friday at the Artist’s Quarter in Saint Paul seems reason enough to comment briefly on this singular curio from his catalog. The album was first pressed back when Steeplechase was prone to bare bones packaging so there’s nothing in the way of liners or ephemera other that the basic particulars: Konitz and his alto in a Copenhagen studio summer of 1974, waxing loquacious on two standards and putting his status as top-tier improviser to a simple yet rigorous test. The acoustics are dry and a shade flat, but they do little to compromise Konitz’s debonair tone and insouciant delivery. Expanded from an LP-edit to its original nearly 40-minute length, “The Song Is You” consequently has its share of lulls and cul de sacs. Konitz takes these periodic moments of pause and possible quandary and folds them directly into the performance. Paying meticulous attention to all that transpires in the stream of seemingly endless melodic variations doesn’t seem to be the point. Instead, I find it best to let my mind drift in out of focus on the trajectories of his ornamented, slightly acerbic lines. At nearly 18-minutes the reading of “Cherokee” is far more than cavalier coda, offering another canny succession of spontaneous interpolations and extrapolations. Lacy’s many solo recitals are an obvious analogue, both in sound and scenario. Considering his success here, it’s a small wonder that Konitz hasn’t returned to this format over the years. In other words, it’s high time that he did and I only wish that he had on Friday.
With all the controversy surrounding Yoshi’s at the moment, I thought I might bring back a fond memory for somebody with this one. I’ve come to enjoy it very much, though it’s a fairly recent addition to my Braxton collection.
The fabled quartet of Braxton, Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway was near the end of it’s tenure in the summer of 1993, when twelve sets were recorded at Yoshi’s for possible release. A two-disc set emerged, beginning with the other-worldly Composition 48. Ethereally, it rises and falls, the quartet sounding as unified as I’ve ever heard it, with Mark Dresser providing some stunningly precise yet absolutely emotive arco. By the time we swing into Composition 23M+108C, the tension is almost unbearable, the jagged unison lines doing much to lighten the mood but maintain the energy.
Hemingway’s drumming is captured quite well on this release, a mixture of raw power and subtle timbral concerns. His dynamic range is more than impressive, belying a sense of melody on the kit. Similarly, I have never heard Marilyn Crispell in better form, especially on the epic Composition 171, a solo piano piece transformed into a group effort. Its sinewy melody has a few of the hallmarks of what would emerge as Ghost Trance music two years later.
Braxton plays his usual arsenal of instruments, and the audience is respectfully enthusiastic. This is a set that deserves more discussion than it has received so far, signaling as it does the end of an era.
~ Marc Medwin
Among the multitude of storefront R&B labels that littered the regional music marketplaces of the Fifties, I can’t think of one that had a more pithy and fitting name than Dig. The roster fit the succinct title to a “T” too. Obscure personalities like the landlubbin’ Sailor Boy and Hozay, a Mercy Dee Walton devotee, vied with barely better-knowns like Abe Moore and Preston Love for paltry PR dollars. This Ace comp contains some of the cream of that tiny provincial crop. Tunes bridged rural and urban by tastes mixing hot horn sections with the equally ardent sounds of bracingly amplified guitars to the degree that the mics were occasionally overloaded. Lyrics didn’t break any molds, but the performers still managed to personalize the verses. Slim Green and the Cats from Fresno were a crew with roots more firmly planted in the menacing boogie-built sounds of the Motor City than any laidback Left Coast locale. Their “Old Folks’ Boogie” spins off the John Lee Hooker’s protean single chord “Boogie Chillun”, twin guitars dipped in acidic reverb, chugging across a loping drum beat as a booting tenor blares a honking lead. The colloquially-minded Moose John mines similar territory on the rockabilly-infused “Talkin’ ‘Bout Me” while Sidney Maiden brings some wailing harmonica to the Cats sound on “Hand Me Down Baby”, blasting through a dimestore amp with excoriating glee. Dig did eventually end up earning enough capital to record relative celebrities like Johnny Otis and Sugarcane Harris, the latter represented by two closing cuts that do little to showcase his fiddle prowess, but still pack plenty of punch. Blues works particularly well to compendium form where the potential tedium of the idiom gets broken up by individual eccentricity. The folks at Ace remain true to their name in terms of sequencing a deck with a satisfying series of selections and this early effort is no exception in terms of coming up with that particular suit.
I have to go back to all my art-rock favorites once in a while. Selling England by the Pound, the first UK album, Eddie Jobson’s first, Happy the Man—some still hold more interest for me than others; Tales remains one of my favorites. Sure it’s overblown, but it’s brilliant; sure I’ve heard so much claptrap about it, but I have always loved it for being the beautiful monstrosity it is, for pulling no punches. The music and the lyrics reach for something they’ll never quite attain, the earthiness of rock and that cosmic symphonic thing, “the magic of the source,” that Yes always strove—OK, not quite always—to convey. It’s so Holst, and yet something romantic deep in my heart continues to respond to a group that makes a motivically unified suite. I still love Magma as well.
Anyway, Tales got reissued a few years ago, along with the other Atlantic Yes, and I rushed out to grab my copy, as previous issues were simply rotten, at least the ones you could get here. Nice reissues, useless bonus tracks, fairly informative notes and, above all, much better sound! I got it home, popped the disc in, and … wait, … thunder? Waves, wind? Did I buy the wrong … ah, but there’s that familiar descending second in Steve Howe’s guitar, shimmering Rick Wakeman keyboards in back, prefiguring exactly what happens when Jon Anderson’s lyrics enter; it was always an abrupt entrance I’d never really thought to question, but everything makes more contextual sense given what is obviously a new and stunningly atmospheric beginning!
The sound is everything I wanted it to be, revealing more detail than I’d heard on vinyl or CD. Lines like “But only through him we know, send flowered rainbows” still make me nostalgic for a time I never witnessed, a time, according to those that speak to me of its power, where people really believed that anything was possible. A record like Tales is impossible now without apology, and every other day or so, I think it’s too bad we’ve come this far.
~ Marc Medwin
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
I’ve had this eight-disc set for about seven years, and I’m only now just beginning to appreciate how fantastic it is. I’ve paid lip service to the second great Miles quintet, but how great they really are! The group was booked for two weeks in December and early January, 1965-66, at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel club, the present set presenting December 22 and 23 in their entirety.
Forget the fact that audible splices join pre-existing tapes with then newly discovered ones, allowing for complete versions to be issued of theretofore truncated takes and producing some dizzyingly strange sonic phenomena. Disregard, also, the ebullient fellow off to your left, the guy shouting “Miles, you lucky Miles” during a Ron Carter solo, and “Blew Miles right off the bandstand” after an admittedly fine Wayne Shorter contribution. I let distractions like these put me off one of the greatest recorded documents in music history for too long! None of the group’s studio material, no matter how probing and penetrating, demonstrated such telepathy, such a wealth of spontaneous compatibility. Check out “Agitation” from December 22’s second set for an extraordinary venture toward free jazz, prefiguring the so-called “lost” Corea/Holland quintet’s musings of 1969; Hancock works inside the piano, time becomes elasticized, and all is propelled by Tony Williams’ supremely and incomparably energetic drumming.
Yet, somehow, nothing is overstated in this music. Even the loudest portions of “So What,” from the second night, maintain a feeling of control, of something about to explode but contained at the last moment. Much of the music is understated, whether in Herbie’s beautifully wandering lines that never quite loose focus, or in the insanely fast interlocking as Williams and Carter blaze through up-tempo tunes. Shorter is heard as he really is, blowing through a third space somewhere between Coltrane and Jimmy Lyons, cranking out tiny compositions moment by moment, Hancock with him at every turn. The set demands much more space than I’ve afforded it, but as I’ve been unable to put it down all week, it seemed the only logical choice. Spin it again, and enjoy!
~ Marc Medwin
Picturing suits and sunglasses coupled with calmative bible salesmen demeanors, the portrait covers of the two Specialty albums collected on this two-fer suggest starchy gospel for the suburban set. The sort of thing your pious grandparents might play as a soundtrack for a post-church Sunday brunch. The actual performances couldn't be farther from that false impression. The Five Blind Boys of Alabama may have been a marketing gimmick in moniker, but their music was brimming with bonafide Holy Ghost Power. The twenty-four spirituals here feature the fivesome in a variety of reverential moods from penitential to ecstatic. Accompaniment is suitably sparse. On the opening cuts a tremolo-treated guitar rings out shimmering chords behind their impassioned shouts. Elsewhere it's piano and drums or foot stomps and handclaps providing rhythms for the energized exhortations. Clarence Fountain and the Reverend Samuel K. Lewis share lead vocals and the lion's share of arranging chores, backed by the layered harmonies of tenor George Scott, baritone Olice Thomas and bass Johnny Fields. Nearly every track is a winner, but it's rapturous ones that I return to most. The Five's signature song "Oh Lord- Stand By Me" kicks the set off in fine fettle, their voices exuding a gruffness and candor that makes the faith-based plea of the lyrics palpable to both believers and agnostics alike. A favorite of bluesman Fred McDowell's "You Got to Move", demands that the listener do just that and the braiding voices bring the on-high directive home through another raw and regal performance. Other pearls include the Civil Rights anthem "I'll Fly Away" and the harrowing "Alone and Motherless", both imbedded with resilient kernels of hope at their cores. Gospel is always a hard sell amongst my friends, but I'm hard pressed to think of another genre where emotions are so naked and truly stated. These sightless songsters deliver some of the best.
How many deaths will I have to address this year? Andrew Hill was special to me, and his work brings me comfort in a time when death seems more present than usual, given the flood of recent events, including his own passing; his 2000 album, Dusk, helped me toward a new appreciation of what can occur when improvisation and composition merge in the most creative hands. I wouldn’t hear Strange Serenade for another five years, but my reaction to this masterpiece was similar—dumbfounded admiration.
Recorded in Italy in 1980 along with Faces of Hope, his first studio work since the recently Mosaic-released California with Love sessions, Serenade sees a considerable upping of the ante, and Hill has the group to make it successful. Freddie Waits and Alan Silva are as sympathetic partners as Hill ever had, and nowhere is the group chemistry more evident than on the vast peaks, valleys and resonances of “Mist Flower.” Silva’s arco contributions are especially luminous as the piece draws to a close, his high-register harmonic reverberations augmenting Hill’s aphoristically coherent pianism. Every stroke Waits offers is well placed, transparent but pithy, a perfect complement to Silva’s pizzicato interjections.
Hill’s playing of the period is frustratingly verbiage-resistant. More and more, I hear it as terraced, almost baroque in phrase construction as heard in many current period-practice recordings; volume rises and falls suddenly while an overall sense of flow is somehow maintained. This paradox, true also for tempo, defines the title track and “Reunion,” two studies in controlled elasticity. The pieces are tonal while remaining mysterious, Hill’s unique approach to chromaticism seeing to that. Only “Flower” gets close to the abyss, as with the title track from Compulsion, charting territory he hadn’t explored for years.
Hill is spurred on by his cohorts, and he gives them plenty of impetus, resulting in a disc that has kept me coming back for two years and counting. There are so many jewels in Hill’s catalog, most of which is now available on CD again. He will be sorely missed, but it was gratifying to watch his resurgence and subsequent return to Blue Note in the final years of his life. RIP, Andrew.
~ Marc Medwin
The practice of touring as a "single" has a storied history in jazz, particularly amongst saxophonists. Sometimes synching with a local rhythm section yields dazzling sparks; other times the results just fizzle. This live date, recorded five days prior to my birth, is a prime example of the former situation. Joe Henderson was in the midst of an eclectic ten-year tenure with Milestone, a relationship that would produce a string of interesting albums, but nothing resembling a commercial hit. Part of the reason was the waning fortunes of jazz in the States, but in Japan, the music was experiencing an upward spike in sales. Capitalizing on this differential with a short tour of the Orient, Henderson hooked up with a pick-up band led by pianist Hideo Ichikawa at the Junk Club in Tokyo. Ichikawa's electric keys date stamp the performance, but also establish engaging retro feel to the four-tune set. Bassist Kunimitsu Inaba and drummer Motohiko Hino turn in decent support and cogent solos, but otherwise wisely staying out of the way and deferring the spotlight to Henderson who blows some of the loosest and most viscerally effective solos of his career. “'Round Midnight”, already a standard with more creases and coffee stains than most, gets a fresh reading thanks to Henderson's sagacious seven-minute solo, brimming with his signature kindling dry trills and modulations. "Out 'N' In" interpolates the title cut of one of his earlier Blue Note outings and "Blue Bossa" comes from the same label source. The four close up with a shambolic fourteen-minute blues in honor of the venue, and an album that would become an informal aural textbook for legions of saxophonists is born. It's a definitive case of wishing more had made it to tape. The shirtless, Afro-ed Joe on the cover is the ponzu on the pot sticker.
A perfectly prosaic title for a disc whose contents are anything but. Yes, there is the expected ecstatic element so often, too often, associated with free jazz, especially apparent in “To Live” and “To Run,” but the ensemble supports Jenkins at every turn, and his playing is as good as I’ve ever heard it, equaling the vigor and conviction in his work on the stellar Swift are the Winds of Life with Rashied Ali. Jenkins does not so much lead as allow and coexist, certain as he is of the brilliant choices he’s made in cohorts, pianist Denman Maroney, pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen and percussionist/composer Rich O’Donnell.
Each player is allowed ample time to stretch out, Maroney’s unique brand of piano preparation informing and transforming “To Sing.” He adds life to whatever project he undertakes, and the decision to juxtapose his microtonal musings with the pipa’s inflections was a stroke of genius. All comes to a glorious head on “to Believe,” where Jenkins himself indulges in a brief but beautiful flight of solo fancy, the others gradually joining him in a manner much closer to the hyper-communicative gestural fragments I associate, loosely, with European improv. As the piece progresses from drama to drone, violin, piano and pipa circling each other in a motivic interweaving, it is O’donnell’s percussion that denotes change, marking strangely irregular time as the others hover in static chant-like reflection.
“To Believe,” and the disc as a whole, is a fitting testament to the late Jenkins, whose musical voice and creative spirit is sorely missed. Many thanks also to Mutable, for this document and for providing an outlet for composers and performers to push the boundaries of their art even further.
Eighties harbinger to such early Nineties pop radio juggernauts as Hooty & the Blowfish and The Spin Doctors, Huey Lewis & the News was one of the first groups to break out of the “bar band” ghetto and attain stadium-sized stature through major label marketing and multimedia sponsorship. Their first few albums for Chrysalis faltered under uneven production and occasionally faulty song-smithing, but the formula hit stride on this, their third effort. Lewis and his pals took time-tested principles of yacht and blues-rock and integrated more timely elements of “Greed Decade” bachelor pride. Huey was the charismatic front man, his chiseled good looks, pinstripe suits and well-coiffed mullet fitting right in with the band’s calculated yuppie urbanity. On stage and in video the affable, aw-shucks persona provided a balanced blend of eye candy for the ladies and backslapping, high-fiving masculinity for the guys. The twin guitars of Johnny Colla and Chris Hayes worked as a tandem riff machine on most numbers, but Sean Hopper’s synths also factored heavily into the band’s hook-laden, radio friendly book. FM anthems like “Heart of Rock & Roll” and “I Want a New Drug” (a ditty that divulged much about the decade’s pharmaceutical excesses while retaining a public friendly candy coating) showcased the straighforwardness of the sound. Power ballads were also prime fodder, as the polished doo-woppy strains of “If This is It” made crystal clear. None of the tracks would match the Billboard performance of later colossal hits like “The Power of Love” or “Stuck With You”, but as a whole, this set still stands as their most artistically satisfying album before massive stardom and worldwide record sales signaled an inevitable creative wane.
“He’s a poser, and it makes me uncomfortable,” one man said from behind the record store counter. “I think he found a market, cornered it and has fostered this image very well, kind of like blackface, or parody at least.”
“Nah,” the other man said, “I think he’s who he is when he wakes up in the morning, same as who he is going to bed at night.”
I fall somewhere in the middle where Tom Waits is concerned. Sure it’s humorous, but I can’t help feeling an overarching love of humanity, or a deep understanding of why he doesn’t love humanity, or both. Small Change took Waits from the comedy routines of Nighthawks at the Diner to someplace else, a dark space populated with the rogues and bums that would become such an integral part of his later work. I mean for God’s sake, he even made the dwarves’ worksong into a trudgingly bleak proletarian anthem! Small Change is part surreal, anticipating later characterizations like “Tabletop Joe” in imagery while keeping to earthiness in its jazz combo instrumentation. “The Piano Has Been Drinking” is as over the top as he ever gets, but “Pasties and a G-string” is already walking bar, transcending the hoots and yells of burlesque watchers to whatever interior monologue is left after however many beers and shots. These intimations, bursts of transformed and publicized inwardness, would lead to the hauntingly strange landscapes of Rain Dogs; but then, there are the heartbreakers, the portraits of lonely down-and-outers that still bring tears to my eyes—“Invitation to the Blues” or “Tom Traubert’s Blues”, where the absurdity of Matilda killing “Bout a hundred” is subservient only to the “Battered old suitcase, and a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal.” Yes, the delivery’s part Louis Armstrong and part Broadway, but there’s plenty of every-man hipster guru in there as well. It’s a record so full of fused opposites, where bad livers and broken hearts meet for nothing more portentous than getting to the bottom of the bottle, that I simply can’t trust either man behind that record store counter. How wonderful to be so right and so wrong, but given the scope of Waits’ subsequent vision, “What the hell do you expect?”
~ Marc Medwin
A band with more break-ups to its name than harmonious years in business, Bad Brains remains a pioneering punk institution that refuses to die. The built-in fractiousness of the foursome has also manifested in fluctuating musical quality, mainly due to the repeated retreats of frontman H.R. and drummer Earl Hudson. Guitarist Dr. Know and bassist Darryl Jenifer have long served as anchors as well as the principal architects of the group’s incongruous speed punk bridging to reggae dub sound. The Brains have always been best experienced in person and this ear-imploding set, taped in the spring of ’87 at an Amsterdam club, is arguably their finest commercially-available live document. It’s also the album I come back to most amongst their all too finite discography. Running to a tight 47-minutes, it packs in seventeen songs with only a handful of stretched out dub-inflected tracks lending respite from the pummeling onslaught of P.M.A. anthems like “Rock for Light” and “Let Me Help.” Everyone is beautifully miked, particularly the core team of Know and Jenifer whose lightspeed riffing and knee-buckling basslines propel songs like “House of Suffering” to new heights. The significance of the locale isn’t lost either as a cover of “Day Tripper” rolls out on a chest-reverberating bass vamp through what must have been a fog of ganja smoke. Other bright moments: a ferocious “Sacred Love” punctuated by Jenifer’s amp-toppling bass slaps and a version of “At the Movies” that features a some of Know’s most majestic supersonic fretplay ever. The Brains are touring once again at halfmast, H.R. and Earl predictably absent and replaced by members of the Cro-Mags. Their glory days are well behind them, but this disc is a handy reminder of the magnitude of once was.
Choosing quality Mingus albums from the 50s and 60s is a bit like spearing fish a barrel. Even so, this ’59 date recorded at the long since defunct Nonagon Art Gallery stands out in my personal pantheon of picks. There are many plusses that make it so, from the pared down powerhouse frontline of altoist John Handy and tenorist Booker Ervin, to the sharp fidelity that captures the Baron’s bass in all its magesterial glory. Cravat connoisseur Dannie Richmond is also in inspired form, closing in in extrasensory conversation with his employer on the closing empyrean ballad “Alice’s Wonderland” a harbinger of telepathic colloquies to come on the pair’s Candid and Atlantic ventures. An extra element of cool comes with the news that “Nostalgia in Times Square” would serve as soundtrack grist for John Cassavettes first stab at feature-length filmmaking several years later, the seminal Shadows. Ervin and Handy are magnificent foils for one another, contrastive and amicably combative, going the distance in a telepathic, truncating series of chases on “No Private Income Blues.” Mingus indulges in some of his most capacious and eloquent solos of the period, his stout, strikingly adroit fingers coming up with bracing improvisations that put his peers on immediate notice. Then there’s Rudy Van Gelder’s recording, which captures all but the pinch-hitting pianist Richard Wyands in some of the some of the best sound of the period. Filling in for workshop regular Horace Parlan, Wyands’ was a bit of the odd man out, but he acquits himself well to the setting and makes good use of the generous solo space accorded him. The only frown-worthy foible comes in the Michael Cuscuna disclosure that four more tracks performed at the gig escaped recorded capture. In light of the uniform quality of what’s here that error on the part of Van Gelder almost seems unforgivable.
Finally, a chance to pay homage to one of my very favorite concerts of improvised music with this two-disc reissue. The date was February 3, 1974, and while I’m no expert on these matters, the stars or planets must have been in perfect alignment, because the SME raised the roof on the ICA Theater.
I will resist the temptation to resort to overly poetic descriptions of such epic music making, focusing instead on the details, the moments of individuality that coalesce so often and to such stunning effect, keeping the music from ever growing stale. Check out the opening of “Forty Minutes, pt. 2,” where Evan Parker slaps a dyad down on the table, then repeatedly jabs it in the air, backed by a few masterstrokes from John Stevens; Kent Carter grabs it by the tail, inverts it, and raises the second note of the dyad up an octave or so. The two engage in some whiplash dialogue. Trevor Watts moans his way into the discussion, making a momentary trio. Just as Derek Bailey snaps a customarily swelled arpeggio into place, Parker rides it with an upward gliss as if the two were born together, Watts hot on his heels in similar fashion. The players recognize the importance of the moment, allowing the natural build in dynamics to continue until time is held momentarily captive in a multilayered drone, or a single exhale …
OK, so much for avoiding hyperbole, but they keep this kind of communicative energy going for eighty-five minutes! How do I even begin to catalog all the moments of telepathic interplay, or the individual gestures that spawn them? Carter’s heart-stoppingly gorgeous double and triple stops, Stevens’ tiny pearls of wisdom that invoke Webern and Art Ensemble of Chicago in a single staccato ripple—these are subjects for volumes of analysis, and I can only hope that this single-package reissue of two old favorites will win new fans. I haven’t even touched the 21973 material, and that’s because I’ve hardly come to terms with it. John Stevens’ voice is extremely moving, almost frightening, and while I find the results extremely powerful, I think that the 1974 concert is unsurpassed in the SME catalog; it should be in the library of every fan of improvised music.
~ Marc Medwin
February is Black History month here in the States, and the more conspiracy-minded among my friends are always fond of reminding me that it’s also the shortest month of the year. I thought I’d mark the passing with a shout out to a blues record that always manages to slip back into my regular rotation, one representative of a tiny sliver of African American tradition that now sadly teeters on extinction. Under the nominal leadership of Frank Frost on harmonica, piano and pawnshop Farfisa, the Jelly Roll Kings, were a fixture on the Seventies Mississippi juke joint scene, though Frost’s first associations with guitarist Jack Johnson and drummer Sam Carr date to a full decade earlier. The title of their debut Earwig album encapsulates their performance mantra while their chosen moniker hints euphemistically at off-stage preoccupations. Musically the trio folds in songs and styles from the four points of the blues compass. “Mighty Long Time” mimics the slowdrag Excello swamp sound. Instrumentals like “Honeydrippin’ Boogie” and “Cleo’s Back” find Johnson channeling the fret mannerisms of Long John Hunter through ferrous reverb and long snaking solos. The folksy “Slop Jar Blues” taps the stage mien of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee in Johnson and Frost’s unision vocal turns while Big Jay McNeely’s “Something on Your Mind” features Johnson crooning in a nicotine dusted croak atop more chintzy organ, twangy guitar and a broom-dusting snare beat. Elsewhere, Johnson unplugs for a version “Catfish Blues” where the three trade earlier jocularity for a backwoods gravitas. Variety and informality abound and the whole thing has a gloriously low rent, cheap eats feel to it, equivalent to the carbonized edibles named in the raunchy closer “Burnt Biscuits.” The cover shot is priceless: Johnson with his mussed process, Bootsy shades and salmon-colored leisure suit and the homemade PR placard balanced in front of Fender amp being just a few of the facets that make it suitable for framing.
The merits of this reissue have been well documented. To say that these autumn 1962 recordings capture Cecil Taylor in flux is to overstate the academic and to understate their vitality and immediacy. The melodies here are sensual and disjunct, invoking Ellington and Monk as the harmonies embrace and reject modality with every gesture. Such concerns, magnified and codified as they would become in Taylor’s later years, have simultaneously thwarted and encouraged analysis, depending on the imagination and historical knowledge of the scholar.
One aspect of the 1962 recordings that remains underrepresented is the work of Jimmy Lyons. Nowhere in his own all too meager discography is his work on this seminal date surpassed, and the torrent of ideas pouring from him, not to mention the fluidity and grace with which they are executed, is awe-inspiring almost forty-five years later. “Call” provides a perfect showcase for his take on “freebop” long before the fact, as he darts and weaves around and through Taylor’s jagged but delightfully sentimental harmonic constructions, calmly negotiating lightning-fast shifts in mood, attack and, most impressively, register. Tiny whiplash scale fragments, slides and sudden rushes to unbearably full silences speak to stunning technique subservient only to an overflow of inventiveness. The second disc’s longer compositions allow for some of the exploratory developments that have come to be associated with Taylor and those who follow him, and Lyons’ innovative spirit never flags.
Do I need to say that I am in no way denying Sunny Murray’s contributions—his expansion of swing, his impeccable sense of timbre and placement? There have been many players to imitate Taylor and very few to really compliment him. Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray engaged formal complexity without the benefits of hindsight, and these concert recordings become more enjoyable, sound more achingly intimate, each time I listen.
~ Marc Medwin
It was a move easily construed as a band capitulating to crass consumerism: In 1971, the Jazz Crusaders dropped the key qualifier in their name and revamped their sound to incorporate a phalanx of electric guitars and slick studio production. Also evident in the metamorphosis were stylistic changes that introduced facets of rock, funk and AM radio pop. Saxophonist Wilton Felder added amplified bass to his instrumental range and pianist Joe Sample supplemented traditional ivories with a battery of keyboards. The ensemble’s inaugural effort on the new streamlined moniker announced these changes in unequivocal terms with the opener “That’s How I Feel.” Wah wah and fuzztone guitars weave with comping electric and acoustic keys and rubberband bass line to create savory slice of urban funk. Carole King’s “So Far Away” receives an epic treatment, stretching to almost 12-minutes and moving well beyond the familiar hummable melody into prolonged passages of mohair and Pall-Malls-scented loungeness. The remainder of the double album strikes a sometimes-wobbly balance between elements from Westbound lite funk of “Put It Where You Want It” to the Rhodes and rhythm workout “Full Moon.” The JB’s receive a nod on the twangy crawdad feed “Mud Hole” with tight horn charts riffing atop another bed of wah wah guitar and bait-bobbing bass while Sample gets back to juke and chapel roots with “Georgia Cottonfield.” “A Shade of Blues” slinks and slithers like an Isaac Hayes blaxploitation outtake with a killer Felder tenor declaration while the closing “Mosadi (Woman)” taps early Earth, Wind & Fire. The Crusaders were still finding their sea legs in a fresh crosscurrent of influences and it shows, but that doesn’t make this any less listenable or germane to a freewheeling party setting, saccharine sections and all.
I am usually skeptical about remastering. I’ve been burned with “remastered” classical discs too many times to trust anybody. Sure, there are exceptions in every genre, like the deluxe A Love Supreme, where the differences are blatant, but unless the disc has some great bonus material, I’ll stay away.
Enter the entire Can catalog, remastered in SACD hybrid form. OK, I had the whole set of original CD issues, I don’t have a SACD player, and there are no bonuses on these reissues, so I steered clear of them for about a year and a half.
After being told by people I trust that the reissues were worth the price, I broke down, took my old copies in and traded them for the new ones I really wanted, among which was Monster Movie. The treatment of “Father Cannot Yell” is worth every penny I laid down for the disc. Extra fizz and buzz, not to mention distorted grind, is apparent on the top end, severely augmented thump and bump down below. Searing guitars are punchier than before, raw-powered drums way up front, and is that some kind of rippling synth --maybe an Arp 2600-- that shrills the tune into existence? Of course, the rest of the disc is stunning, and the twenty-minute “You Do Right” still makes me wanna get up and dance!
They use some heavy noise reduction on these discs; you get about a second of hiss at the beginning of each tune before it drops out, which is a bit disturbing with headphones. That said, I’m not noticing any lack in range or color, and Monster Movie is a fantastic place to start for anybody who knows Can by reputation but not through personal experience.
~ Marc Medwin
“Out of sight, out of mind” is a regrettable malady I suffer from all too often as a music listener. I was a big Bowie fan in my late teens and the crown in my modest collection was a Ryko cassette copy of Ziggy Stardust, played ad infinitum on a cheap Sony boom box, often to my Dad’s vociferous chagrin. Somewhere along the way, I lost the tape or maybe it broke, I can’t remember which. Years passed and I kept meaning to reacquire the album on disc, but every time it cropped up in my consciousness, I’d always find myself dissuaded by Virgin’s exorbitant pricing scheme. The Ryko edition with its small cache of bonus tracks had long since fallen out of print into collector’s status. Enter Yourmusic.com and their complete line of RCA masters for six bucks a pop. Recognizing the bargain, I quickly parted with the coin for ZS, The Man Who Sold the World and this 2-disc collection gathering “the best” of Bowie’s voluminous work for the BBC. Too many highlights scroll by to detail in the short space here, among them rocking renderings of Chuck Berry’s “Almost Grown”, a pair of Velvet Underground staples and raucous takes on the best cuts from ZS. Instead, I’ll touch on the two versions of “Ziggy Stardust” that grace the second disc. Guitarist Mick Ronson earns MVP on both and practically every cut on which he appears. His fanged, fret-shredding sound, replete with scorching flange effects on the first take at the January ’72 session, ramps to a transcendent peak in equal parts glam and metal. It’s an exemplary candidate for air guitar ascendancy. The second take from four months later is more refined and in line with the iconic album version, but Ronson once again pulls the stops in a barrage of feedback-trailing riffs that infuse Bowie’s bitchy transgender vocals with even greater punch. It’s good to be back in the Thin White Duke loop after such a long hiatus and this set is a potent reminder of what I’ve missed.
I have heard all the opinions imaginable about the late Alice Coltrane, from “She’s riding on Trane’s coat-tails and her music is wallpaper,” to “She’s the real visionary and her music is pure revelatory genius.” I have enjoyed her work, especially this fairly early effort. There’s nothing easy or serene about the title track, nor does it sound very much like husband John’s later compositions. Alice’s enveloping organ playing does much to set this disc apart from “Meditations” or “Ascension.”
Beyond clusteral experimentation, the soundworld is lush, carpeted with strings and percussion to the point of achieving a Specteresque wall of sound, to beautiful effect as the disc progresses. “Hare Krishna” floats through a haze of violins and organ drones, light bells, cymbals and harps heralding the jasmine-scented organ trills that serve as the main melodic material. Thick folds of bass and other namelessly pervasive and heavily effected lower-register instruments give the sense of opening onto the infinite, especially on a nice pair of headphones.
It is a slowly emerging wonder to hear the “world music” component become sparser throughout, so that by the time of “The Ankh of Amen-Ra,” only bells and harp, peppered with cymbals, open the proceedings. Rashied Ali and Jack DeJohnette provide sympathetic accompaniment to Alice’s often-distorted organ ruminations, whether monodic or shrieking chords.
I have not enjoyed all her discs as much, but they are all worth hearing. Yes, it’s mood music, sure it’s formulaic, but it’s a sound and vision I’d come to enjoy and respect. I always felt comforted when I heard her voice in interviews, a fact of which I’m reminded as the album fades with a gently wise whisper, exuding deep joy beyond appellation. I’ll miss her presence in the world, the upcoming release of new material providing some small consolation. My heart goes out to those to whom she provided spiritual guidance, those who knew her by quite another name. To me, at this point in my journey, her music is testimony enough, and I thank her for it.
~ Marc Medwin
Mingus’ memorable quip about a gunslinging Bird and a whole lot of dead copycats could easily be extrapolated to Coltrane and the saxophone climate of the late 60s and early 70s, so wide was latter’s sphere of influence. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to imagine Trane picking up a pistol and dispatching his manifold disciples in a manner that the vengeance-minded Mingus might. Billy Harper was one of the few of the era who took Trane’s teachings and used them to construct an original and instantly recognizable voice. Play a Harper platter and you’re virtually guaranteed equal parts spiritualized passion and beyond-the-textbook technique. With such an impressive persona, it’s a mystery why he’s recorded so infrequently over the years, relegated to sporadic spurts rather than a well-warranted steady succession of sessions. This Parisian date from start of ’79 finds him in preferred quintet surroundings stretching out on a customary three pieces that feel more like concert performances than a controlled studio enterprise. A youthful Fred Hersch is the standout in the rhythm section, playing McCoy to Harper’s Trane and erecting grand chordal edifices to carry the tunes. “The Awakening” opens with Harper accapella, intoning a mantra-like riff that opens into an incandescent solo that extends the length of the piece. A staple of his songbook, “Soran Bushi-B.H.” taps the saxophonist’s Asian experiences and works off an somber, yet soaring modal vamp that eventually locks onto a muscular groove, Harper and trumpeter Everett Hollins dovetailing in a controlled wail and onward to mic-melting solos. The set closes with the African-influenced “Cry of Hunger” a rhythmic suite-like piece broken by crevasses of silence. I’ve honestly not heard a Harper performance that did not succeed in unstoppering the ecstatic. This short, but energized set is no exception.
I remember some discussion of this record on Bagatellen, but it never got a proper review. For me, it was one of the best discs of 2005, not to mention the Hopscotch label’s crowning achievement to date.
The crystalline opening of “Love Is” doesn’t so much set the mood—nothing so trivial!--as portend a mysterious journey; many openers function similarly only to be let down by the rest of the piece or by succeeding tracks. Not so here! Tsahar’s clarinet is exquisite, buoyed by the pan-Eastern ripples and alien bells of the always-stunning Tatsuya Nakatani, whose range of dynamics and timbre on this disc borders on frightening. The string work, a quartet from which the individualities of Katt Hernandez and Audrey Chen often stand out, can also be extremely unified. Check out the title track for exemplary quartet interplay, but also for some of the most movingly nostalgic music on the disc. It somehow breathes 1930s air, primarily due to Tsahar’s Humphrey Bogart tenor, sincere without being overly smooth, until Nakatani’s gong flips planet momentarily—American guilt usurped by Korean Han?
Whatever the underlying emotive states, and they shift throughout, this is a well-executed and extremely moving disc. The recording is also first-rate, space and detail in perfect symbiosis, making for a really satisfying listen. I hope to hear more from this configuration, sooner rather than later.
~ Marc Medwin
Like most artists who persevere long enough to see the popular styles of their origins fall sway to new ones, Hugh Masekela readily opened his music up to the sound diaspora of the Seventies. Signing to Casablanca, his LPs of the era reflected the diversity of the label’s roster, drawing on disco, funk, R&B and rock to color his core template of Township jazz. The imprint was home to both Donna Summer and the Wildflowers Loft Jazz Sessions for a time, after all. This valuable Verve comp contains the entirety of Masekela’s debut along with a pair of songs apiece from his three subsequent platters. Strong funk horn charts and percussion-thick vamps suffuse many of the cuts from the opener on down. “Toe-Jam” sounds uncannily like an unused outtake by the Westbound funk band The Counts. Vocals harmonies are also heavy elements in the playbook, with Masekela’s crisp trumpet runs usually trading in easy riffs rather than improvisations. There’s also a fair bit of Fela-style Afrobeat on tracks like the syncopated ode to maternal appreciation “Mama” and the tribal chant “Ashiko,” an extended number that allows the leader some welcome space with his horn. My favorite tune, “Colonial Man” covers some the Nigerian icon’s same political concerns blending Afro-Cuban and Reggae components into a tasty Santana-like stew and indicting a rogue’s gallery of European colonial catalysts along the way. Some cuts betray their age in corny combinations of dated keyboards and hip banter and all carry strong doses of studio polish and production. Nevertheless, the joy and brio of the performances counteracts any calculated commercialism. The cover shot of Masekela’s crew in the midst of a congenial beach party conclave captures the laidback vibe of this collection just right.
It’s a slogan in circulation since Bird flew the coop for the great hereafter, but one given continuous credence in the sounds of countless active saxophonists. Whether explicit and implicit, Charlie Parker tributes truly are legion. A few of my personal favorites include Max Roach’s Plays Charlie Parker; Bird’s Night, a Savoy date teaming the saxes of Cecil Payne, Phil Woods and Frank Socolow; and this memorial concert taped at Chicago’s Bird House in March of 1962. Ira Sullivan is someone for whom that overused appellation “living legend” most certainly applies. Here, his formidable sax skills are silenced in favor of trumpet and flugelhorn. The lacuna leaves reed duties Nicky Hill and results in some of the enigmatic saxophonist’s most extended soloing on record. The rhythm section includes Jodie Christian, Don Garrett and either Wilbur Campbell or Dorel Anderson on drums, two of whom would soon flirt repeatedly with freer forms. The first disc focuses on nutritious and delicious Bird feed, from a rippling “Klacktoveedsteene” to a closing medley of Gillespie’s “Be-Bop” hitched to the nursery-derived “Humpty Dumpty”. The second opens the quintet’s songbook to hardbop with readings of “Milestones”, “Omicron” and John Lewis’ “Sketches” alongside a small cache of earlier standards. In addition to plenty of illuminating playing from Hill, there are also strong showings from Christian, Garrett and Campbell and the band is tight without being constrictive. Sullivan’s brass sings through it all, matching persuasive bop velocity and precision with a tonal integrity that never wobbles or wavers. A museum exercise this most certainly is not and the vibrant declaration of the title resonates true in each well-recorded number.
Nineteen-sixty-five was a deleterious year for so-called Cool Jazz. Art Pepper was serving a prison stretch on smack possession charges. Gerry Mulligan had just dissolved his Concert Jazz Band and would spend the next few years looking for a new direction. Stan Getz was several styles removed having conquered bossa nova and successfully embraced orchestral arrangements. Chet Baker, former erstwhile poster child for Cool had just returned from Europe, his ongoing imbroglios with narcotics blackening the eyes of his previous playboy reputation. Baker was on the ropes and urgently in need of a constructive creative outlet. A rescue ladder out of the abyss came with a marathon session for Prestige that mirrored Miles Davis’ earlier cycle for the label in terms of gerund-centric titles. Richard Carpenter, Baker’s industrious manager, provided the majority of tunes and assembled a terrific backing band comprised of Memphis-born tenor George Coleman, just one year removed from his high profile post with Davis, and a Detroit-based rhythm section led by young pianist Kirk Lightsey. The other twist was Baker’s decision to stick solely to flugelhorn and the rounded tone of the larger horn suits him. Coleman’s Coltrane and Rollins influenced tenor is a surprisingly better fit with Baker than it was with Davis and as frontline partners go the two are uncommonly copasetic. Baker responds to the earthier surroundings by sharpening his attack, but the underlying polish and poise that were his trademarks are still intact. To date, I’ve only heard two in the trilogy of collections, this one having a slight advantage over its companion Stairway to the Stars. Baker would fall off and on the wagon repeatedly over the next several decades before falling out a window and ending things permanently. With that level of hindsight, there’s something overtly poetic about this survey of a damaged jazz man vying for a comeback and, for a short time, succeeding in his cause.
I know, I know, everybody’s got the Zoltan Kocsis set on Philips, and one can hardly blame you. Yes, there’s also Gyorgy Sandor’s digital remakes, without Microcosmos, of the mid 1990s, very good in their own right; let’s not, however, forget Sandor’s pioneering set of the early 1960s—a bit looser, rhythmically and otherwise, but very nicely recorded, not to mention cheap as hell! I just bought the set for about $20, not bad for five generously filled discs.
Sandor died about a year ago, at the ripe old age of 94, and that fact got me thinking that I’d never really studied his earlier Bartok survey. I remember being stunned by the Sony digitals when I bought them in 1997—poetic, forceful and often down-right dazzling, especially given his age when recording them. The Vox set is more complete, though it doesn’t match Kocsis for the kitchen sink syndrome, and the pianism is certainly a bit more solid. What had me concerned was the terrible vinyl versions I used to hear at Eastman, which kept me right off these fine performances for years.
The 2003 remastering is worlds better than anything I’d imagined; the recording is a bit dry but beautifully imaged, as nice on headphones as over the speakers. I should note, however, that vinyl was used for some portions of the fourth and fifth discs, but the transfer was well done, from, astonishingly where Vox is concerned, a fairly good-sounding copy! My only real complaint about the programming is that each book of Microcosmos is a single track. Beyond that, the set is superb.
Sandor’s credentials are in no need of rehearsal here; the fact that he knew and studied with Bartok, premiering the third piano concerto after the composer’s death, is ultimately less significant than the obvious delight he takes in these seminal keyboard works. A bargain, a must-have, and, might I suggest, a good stocking stuffer.
~ Marc Medwin
Sweet (and often bitter) Papa Lou. He was my poet laureate in college, a passport to prismatic city streets where pathos and malice were opposing proprietary forces. New York was my principal entry point with its convoluted and now amusingly dated politico verses and stripped down garage rock sound. Onward through Songs for Drella and Magic and Loss, and then I lost touch, fully immersing myself in other music, mainly jazz. This summer, on a whim, I stopped by a discount music site and key-worded his catalog. Another half dozen albums added to the bottom since my early 90s break, most priced at less than two bucks. I picked three, one studio and two live, and waited patiently, wondering if my fond memories would find fresh purchase in his “new” work.
This album hit a bull’s-eye. It’s a strange amalgam of earlier directions stretched to a nearly 80 minutes that doesn’t seem overindulgent or disproportionate. Some tracks feature a horn section; many pivot on that crunchy Reed guitar sound I so love, harsh and biting but also twangy and bluesy. From the juke joint riffing of “Paranoia in the Key of E” with its rolling fuzz bass and basic backbeat he had me back on the hook, the lyrics arcane as usual in the pursuit of rhyme. The last aspect gets a bit silly on the slow drag “Mad” with Lou limiting himself to Dick & Jane simple variations on that titular emotion, but the fact that a ridiculously titled song like “Future Farmers of America” can rock as hard as it does restores my faith in his process. “Modern Dance” and “Tatters” are a couple of the album’s melodious power ballads, Lou dreaming of romantic peregrinations with a partner on the first and reflecting on a screwed up relationship in the next. “Rock Minuet” seeks to surpass his most dystopian street fantasies with a hustler protagonist completely mired in immoral muck while “Like a Possum” reels out as a Velvets-reminiscent 18-minute opus steeped in fuzz guitar that opens strong, but eventually submerges in tedium. Even misfires like these have replay value and my overdue homecoming to Lou’s personal universe leaves me with a lingering feeling in line with the album’s title.
This is one of my favorite discs in the Emanem catalog. Sylvia Hallett is, for my money, one of the most diverse but consistently interesting improviser/composers to come out of that loosely unified amalgam known as the British Improv scene. Her duets with Clive Bell have been beautifully transparent and strangely industrial by turn, and her solo discs for the Mash label have some roaringly funny and heartbreakingly intimate songs whose instrumentation exists just on the edge of conventionality; this doesn’t even begin to touch the multitudinous projects, for theater and concert, in which she’s been involved since the late 1970s.
White Fog is an entirely different beast. Closer in spirit to the instrumental Hallett/Bell duets but sporting lyrics, what Hallett calls “half-songs”, the discs exudes a chilly and semidetached vibe. The instrumentation is sparse and airy, sometimes damn near windy, a mixture of loops, rattles and ghostly slides and sputters.
The voice is mature, somewhat reserved except for key moments, the specifics of which I will leave to the interested listener to sort out. The characters exist, as I perceive them, in static moments that bespeak past and future conflict or isolation. In large part, these are not stories; they are tableaus, memories or visions carved, fleetingly, in the fog, absolutely brittle and seemingly ready to vanish. Ironically, this is how they achieve their greatest strength and longevity.
~ Marc Medwin
Plenty of ink relates the joys of the Kenny Dorham/Joe Henderson frontline captured on a cache of sessions for Blue Note. But prior to that stellar run, Dorham shared a shorter association with another Blue Note regular that I’ve long considered on par. The results, gathered on this now out of print disc pairing single albums for United Artists and Pacific Jazz, team his characteristically charismatic trumpet with the incendiary alto of Jackie McLean. Both platters reflect the influence of Dorham’s 1961 tour of South America as a member of Monty Kay’s traveling American Jazz Festival. The first date, taped in a NYC studio, opens with a bracing one-two punch: Dorham’s darkly hued “El Matador” and the even darker “(Melody for) Melanie”, one of McLean’s finest compositions rendered here in its definitive version. Pianist Bobby Timmons accomplishes his most adventurous recorded solo on the latter and the horns precede his ingenuity in a rippling convergence of contrasting convections. Nineteen months prior to his career-making turn with the New York Contemporary Five, drummer J.C. Moses also contributes mightily to the action, Dorham closes the date with an ambitious duo reading of Villa Lobos’ “Prelude”, Timmons’ keys artfully in tow. The second date, recorded live at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop, isn’t quite so enterprising, but with the exceptional rhythm section of Walter Bishop, Leroy Vinnegar and Art Taylor, the horns still receive reliable swinging support. Musical peaks include a protean portrayal of Dorham’s “Una Mas” and a concluding romp through the set list staple “San Francisco Beat.” I’ve spun this one countless times since parting with the necessary cash at a Seattle Tower Records (RIP) in late-1991 and is shelved prominently amongst my most treasured jazz recordings.
Here’s a reissue of this Italian group’s second disc, one of only two released during its existence. I’d not heard them until this release showed up in my mailbox, and now I realize what I’d been missing.
This largely instrumental record defies easy comparison, though if I had to enter such dangerous waters, I’d say that some kind of Henry Cow/Frank Zappa collaboration was in the offing. If Zappa is a model, it’s the Lather material from which the Italians draw, heavy on the vibes and always sporting an undercurrent of Stravinsky. Those beautiful modal melodies Zappa could spin out at will are also in abundance; when vocals do occur, as on the series of pieces entitled “La Sgargianza”, the Cow harmonies and voicings come to the fore. Abrupt chromatic shifts speak to the compositional pallets of Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, not to mention those exquisite chords!
Never, though, did the Cow engage in the “telephone” effect from “Sgargianza” Part 2. In fact, it’s as if the afore-mentioned influences were stripped down, serialized and shuffled, or blended, to create something familiar but jarringly different; it’s the disc’s strong point, seconded only by the playing itself, which is obviously virtuosic but never flashy or self-aggrandizing. Deceptively simple, the disc demands repeated listening for full effect, and I intend to do just that.
~ Marc Medwin
A germane choice given the site’s recent forced hiatus, this disc is also long overdue occupant in this slot thanks to its role in the naming of these environs. As far as I know, this group still holds the title for longevity as a working free improv collective. The trio is also a model of the superfluous nature of idiomatic boundaries and the advantages attainable by players who spend regular time apart. Parker, Schlippenbach and Lovens only convene infrequently and the intentional arcs of absence make their meetings all the more musically momentous when they do occur. It’s a sensibly modified implementation of Derek Bailey’s Golden Improv Rule. On this studio date from the spring of ’90 the trio moves swiftly and effortlessly between the nebulous jurisdictions of jazz and free improv. The mix of brief bagatelle-sized pieces with more predictable longer form fare makes it a standout. Schlippenbach’s opening “Aries” and its immediate neighbor “Beelzebub’s Tales: Revised” deploy delicate piano meditations tinged with hues of mellow Monk. Flanked by Paul Lovens precision brushes, Evan Parker’s soprano multiphonics pull from the free improv spectrum as genre boundaries continue to blur and dissipate. The instrumentation echoes Cecil Taylor’s classic 60s Montmarte ensemble with Lyons and Murray, but the players capitalized on decades of hindsight, evincing a far more inclusive dynamic range, operating within studio acoustics that cleanly corral all the action. Even split-second outbursts suggest spontaneous consensus born from an abiding rapport and while there’s a fair share of racket, it never feels perfunctory or premeditated. Also impressive is Schlippenbach’s ability to preserve a melodic center whether he’s clamoring about under the hood of his piano, as on “Analogue: Scaled” or constructing a relatively straightforward jazz line. All in all, a favorite from a trio whose severely finite discography is both intentional and meaningful.
As much as I tend to be absorbed in contemporary improvised music (taomud), I try to consistently remind myself that, objectively, it’s just one of many approaches and, indeed, a particularly Western one (allowing Japan into the “Western” purview for this purpose). When I actually drift into a record store, my bent (if I don’t head up to the classical section to replenish my endless supply of Feldmans, Xenakisae, etc.) is to visit the “world music” area, to be overwhelmed by the enormity of things I haven’t heard, but should. By the way, it’s been commented on forever, but what a hateful term that is. As though everything outside of US and Britain can be lumped into a single, general category. Anyway, I usually choose a geographic division and begin browsing, often quickly losing myself in the depths of my ignorance. I’d been meaning to listen to more Indian music for some time but how to choose? Even if I go for a “safe” choice, say, Ravi Shankar, I’m clueless as to which disc to opt for, guided only by the relative repulsiveness of the packaging on a given recording (but even then, who knows?). A losing battle in that sense: there will never be enough time to hear all these things. I can only take a semi-educated stab and see. If nothing else, I’ll go by record labels, knowing that Ocora, the Nonesuch Explorer series, King’s World Music Library, etc. are time-tested for quality.
So there I am the other day, browsing the Indian section, when I look up and see (Pakistan being close enough for the purposes of Tower, I guess), this 5-disc set of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s. I didn’t own anything by Khan though, of course, I’d heard him on radio any number of times over the years and had always greatly enjoyed his work. I may have been a little put off 15-20 years ago when the likes of Peter Gabriel championed his music a bit (several things on Earthworks, right?) figuring there must be some nagging problem if that crew was pushing him. But I brushed those prejudices aside and, happening to have the cash on hand, went ahead and bought the set.
Excellent decision. As I’m writing this I’ve only listened through twice but damn, what wonderful music. Two lengthy concert recordings from 1985 and 1988, not very different from what I’d expected, but endlessly fascinating to experience. I gather Khan had done some projects within more dubious, pop-like surroundings, but this, as near as I can ascertain, consists of straight ahead Islamic religious song. That’s another thing. I’m as irreligious, indeed anti-religious, as anyone you’re likely to meet. Had Khan been singing in English about the glories of Jesus, I’m not at all sure I could have blocked out the meaning level of the music; it likely would have irritated me enough to mar the overall enjoyment. Happily, delivered in Urdu (?), I can blithely ignore its fundamental meaning. Right, blithely. Is this an honest thing to do? Probably not, but you have to draw a line somewhere. I’ve always figured that the enjoyment I derived from the vast majority of, say, Afro-Pop I’ve listened to would have been greatly reduced were I able to understand the lyrics, which I assume to be pretty much as vapid and cretinous as Western pop lyrics. But in the same way as you (or, at least, I) can admire a Velazquez crucifixion regardless of the creepy theology behind it, you can put aside the Islamic trappings of Khan’s song and simply revel in the glorious sound.
The image of this rather portly personage, sitting mound-like on a bed of pillows, arms flailing in abandon as alien glossolalia emerge from his mouth is a strangely captivating one. When he erupts suddenly from a languid alap section into one of these torrents it’s like a flash flood cascading over a rocky parapet. Couched with two harmoniums and a tabla as well as backing singers, the shuddering ecstasy encountered in many of the pieces is as satisfyingly orgasmic as any proper religious experience should be. I have no basis whatsoever to comment on the performances critically—I’m guessing they’re deemed pretty hot stuff within the genre though who am I to judge? —but I will say that to the neophyte in Pakistani music as well as to anyone with ears even slightly ajar, this is some spectacular stuff. The discs are apparently available individually but that would rob one of the cumulative effect of each evening. I may well be preaching to the choir and perhaps most of you have long since sampled the late Mr. Kahn’s wares but, if you’re like me and had simply never gotten around to it, do yourself a favor and wallow away. It wouldn’t surprise me if Khan hadn’t the foggiest notion who John Cage was (let alone AMM or Bill Dixon), but who cares?
For certain players, career fecundity ensures that examples of their work will always be commercially available no matter how fickle the public’s buying tastes. Stan Getz certainly fits in this privileged circle with a discography running well into the triple digits. Still, even with the surfeit, several prized albums in his vast catalog are currently out of print. This late ’54 concert set from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles is one of the most unfortunate casualties. Getz is coupled with Bob Brookmeyer, a partnership that largely circumvented the usual interpersonal friction that the cocky saxophonist so often seemed to engender in his collaborators. The duo make for a mutually satisfying match across the ten tunes, not just breezing through easy heads solos schematics, but instead delving into exceptional interplay on numerous occasions. Getz even changes up mouthpieces between pieces to enhance the band’s tonal possibilities. The rhythm section of John Williams, Bill Anthony and Art Mardigan keeps pace, but doesn’t crowd the horns. Getz and his valve trombone-slinging colleague are free to parse apart the tunes that include ringers like “Lover Man” and “I’ll Remember April” as well far as less referenced fare like “Pernod” and Brookmeyer’s “Open Country” and there’s not a clunker in the bunch. Fidelity is also impressive, especially for the vintage, with clean separation between the instruments and a full warm ensemble sound. Getz’s announcements from the stage are intimate and surprisingly self-effacing, though one early segment finds him unflinchingly belittling a heckling audience member. There’s a truckload of Getz available out there for purchase, but this currently sidelined set stands as one of his early best and a well-played favorite of mine.
Comparisons are a common, if ultimately dispensable, part of music appreciation. This artist is better than that one; this album puts that one to shame. Bagatellen probably wouldn’t exist in the absence of such completely subjective pursuits. This brings me in a roundabout manner to Son House and this particular late period collection from Columbia. Every time I spin it I find myself unconsciously measuring it against the benchmark of House’s epochal Library of Congress Recordings, now available in at least a half dozen commercial guises. These New York City performances, taped during a fertile three-day stretch in April of 1965, have a number of cosmetic advantages over those earlier Delta sides. Firstly, there’s the untarnished studio sound, leagues ahead of the Lomax field sessions of the Forties in terms of fidelity. House’s National Steel Body guitar rings out with stentorian size, free from surface grit and aural grime, his slide raking across strings to create slicing rhythms in line with his age-weathered vocals. Next, there’s the temporal elbowroom available through modern tape technology. “Levee Camp Moan” stretches to nine-and-a-half minutes and eight more tunes ease well past five-minutes apiece. Far from sterile or overly rehearsed, these tracks bring out House’s protean talents, particularly on the spirituals where he sets down his guitar and switches to simple, but penetrating handclaps. Great as these are, my prized moments come with the two versions of “Death Letter,” a harrowing lament with topical roots in common with “Saint James Infirmary” and for my money just as monumental. House was one of the giants, not just of the blues, but also of American music in general. Are these his definitive performances? Who cares. They encompass an indispensable body of song, one that I’ll continue to return to with regularity until the day they lay me on that cooling board.
Last year, Nate Dorward reviewed this trio’s beautifully enigmatic SOS Editions debut, and his experience matched my own. Earlier this year, I bought a bunch of Wright’s back catalog, and this newer offering was tucked away in the package. I heard it once and was so surprised I put it away for several months.
Elegance and understatement have now been replaced by some of the most in-your-face skull-boiling I’ve heard from any of these three, and I’ll admit to some initial disappointment. However, on coming back to this one over the past couple of weeks, the almost unbearable tension and release in the music have changed my listening completely. Where the SOS disc presented sound and silence serially, the boundaries between them even slightly blurred, No Stranger is much more unified, the fact that the trio sounds physically closer together here fostering the aesthetic. Whether or not this results from the mix, the playing is condensed, a series of overlaps, interruptions and half-finished phrases that smell like old-time radio dialogue.
The music moves in waves of innovation and retrospection. Linkages with the past are somehow simultaneously more present and buried. Shrills and overtones abound, the two saxophonists reeking “new thing” havoc on my unsuspecting ears when I was prepared for 21st century intricacy. Then, without warning, some kind of dial-tone drone, an illusory hint of electricity and an ending, a hollow pop, the sudden stop after a long fall, the slow decay of a rhythm. For the last of these, just check out Nakatani’s opening gestures—a clattering roll that slows to a trickle, slickly picking up a bit of momentum again before disintegrating. Transient peak whistles, thuds and tiny engines drone, buzz and chirp above Nakatani’s expertly recorded bass drum and equally forceful chimes, until they suddenly disappear with a mild clatter.
The horns are of a piece, breath matching shake and flutter matching slow trill in ways that are both beautiful and almost too vocal for comfort. Bowed and struck percussion of all sorts complement perfectly every nuance Wright and Doneda can serve up, admittedly no mean feat and even more convincingly accomplished on this new disc.
The live recording is very nicely detailed, the entire frequency spectrum being wonderfully captured, and it’s all here, from the lowest rumblings to the most piercing sopranino, almost bell-like at times. I’m glad I didn’t try to talk about this disc when it came out. Some things just take time.
~ Marc Medwin
Ever ponder the possibility of alternate career courses for your favored musicians? A long while back we had a thread discussing just such divergent realities and recently, in the spirit of that exercise, I got to thinking: What if Steve Lacy had chosen to stick with a career in Dixieland jazz and not switched tracks to the avant-garde via the music of Cecil Taylor and Thelonious Monk? I like to think he would have followed a path similar to that of Kenny Davern. Davern has been a purveyor of trad jazz sensibilities for going on a half century, but his perspective on the idiom are far removed the creaky repertory music of Preservation Hall. He’s regularly welcomed younger, more freewheeling, players into his fold, among them, bassist Greg Cohen on leave from his Masada post. Davern’s most popular and enduring association has been as part of the ensemble Soprano Summit, teaming him with kindred soul Bob Wilbur. The band was a festival favorite in the Seventies and has engaged in recurring reunion tours over the years. This early concert taped in the fall of ’76 documents one of their strongest conclaves. Guitarist Dave Cliff and bassist Peter Ind, two players linked to the Tristano School through collaborations with Warne Marsh, make for sympathetic and intrepid consorts with the horns. Drummer Lennie Hastings keeps the crew moving with an unfaltering sensitivity from behind his kit. The set list is a typical cache of blues and early swing standards with plenty of exuberant blowing room for all involved. The dual vibrato-weighted soprano attack on version of Ellington’s “The Mooche” is as fine a distillation as any of the co-leaders deep rapport. Davern and Lacy shared salient similarities (both initially doubled on soprano and clarinet) and the two even recorded a date together (w/ Steve Swallow & Paul Motian as rhythm) titled, appropriately enough, Unexpected. Lacy is gone, but Davern is still with us, still making tradition-true music that still manages to test and temper parameters.
There are moments in life when what was once familiar can appear startlingly strange. Perhaps it is the way the light falls on an ordinary object, casting its features in a dense curtain of shadow that obscures its ordinary dimensions and reveals an aspect utterly foreign to the eye. The same holds true for words: there are moments when a word, taken for granted after being written, spoken, or heard thousands of times in the course of a life can inexplicably look like an awkward assemblage of letters that have no internal logic, but are rather the bearers of a foreign dialect long buried by centuries of neglect. In my experience, these moments of discovery can be quite unsettling, as if the familiar ground under one’s feet has been rolled away, exposing a heretofore hidden terrain that was also always underfoot but never before examined or appreciated. Certainly, there is a loss of comfort that attends this fracturing of what was once familiar, but such experiences are also a window to a kind of beauty that has the ability to astonish.
This is the effect that this record has on me whenever I listen to it. Like the names of the ten track titles, each recombining two letters into patterns both recognizable and oddly disconcerting (some of them look less like expressions or proto-words than exhalations of breath that have never been codified into language), the music on this disc takes familiar elements and recasts them into forms that are all at once strange, haunting, and beautiful. The first track, ‘eeeh’, is an excellent illustration of the power of this music. Fragments of melodies that sound as if they must have come from some song we’ve heard before waft through the air, at times contrasting, at times merging with, the familiar rhythm and texture of the needle spinning on a turntable, or the submerged singing of a century-old recording projected through an old gramophone. One of the hidden gems of the Erstwhile catalog, ‘eh’ is an important musical document, combining and recombining old idioms into new patterns, new languages.
David Jones
Dewey Redman’s gone. They’re dropping off like flies this year, as I suppose they do every year, and yet I can’t help but feel a bit lonelier in the world while the first half of “Orbit of La-Ba” plays as I write.
I’ve always been drawn to drone, to the exotic simplicity it offered, for the myriad possibilities that become fact over a beautiful long tone, or some phat beetz shot through with bass punctuations; for my money, nobody put down a better jazz groove than Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell. At their best, they were the loosest and tightest support you could work out over, and Redman takes every advantage of that on “Orbit”, tearing increasingly frantic holes in space and perception with a musette that keens and screeches.
Every track on this second Old and New Dreams record is a minor miracle, the Don Cherry/Dewey Redman axis a perfect foil for the semi-static rhythm section. My favorite though, the one I return to most often, is the stirring rendition of Coleman’s masterpiece, “Lonely Woman.” Beautifully paced, reverberant and just a bit hot around the edges, it represents what this quartet could do so well. Cherry’s sudden braps and frenzied bursts are balanced by Redman’s steadier but equally passionate lines, fusing bebop exploration with more immediate and heartbreaking blues references, slides and meditative swirls. The album is a high point in a wonderful career, and I’m only sorry I have to write about it under these circumstances.
~ Marc Medwin
Even within the tiny novelty niche of yodeling Hawaiian Steel guitarists, Tex Carman stood out. Record companies sold his music under a country canopy, but it only subscribed to the signifier in a loose sense. Claiming Cherokee blood, Carman further bucked the cowboy code by cross-dressing as an Indian. His stylistic tastes were equally idiosyncratic mixing hulas, railroad songs, rags and polkas into repertoire that refused fealty to any single idiom. This handy Revenant compilation gathers a cross-section of his work for the Capitol and 4 Star labels along with a three-song air shot for the U.S. Airforce’s “Country Music Time” (ca. 1957). Carman’s crazy stage persona and boundless enthusiasm deflects some of the glaringly dubious aspects of his technique, including a sense of rhythm that could kindly be described as “distinctive”. He was a self-professed expert at imitating locomotives, cannon fire, bugles and drum corps on his guitar and examples abound of his skill at crafting aural facsimiles of these and other sound effects. “The Artillery Song” with its staccato guitar strums and bizarre jangly breaks sounds downright cracked. His singing suggests a weird crossbreeding of Uncle Dave Macon and Bascom Lamar Lunsford, with a reedy wizened inflection that sounds aged beyond his years. “The Stutter Song” tosses the P.C. handbook in the trash heap as Carman imitates the titular impediment both vocally and on frets with aplomb. “Hillbilly Hula” finds him blending Cherokee and Polynesian patois into an incomprehensible war whoop all his own. A fair bit of surface crackle coats the earlier sides, but the later Capitol selections sound clean as a whistle. Carman’s unabashed kookiness is something I find inspiring every time I spin this disc.
Nobody carried the hard bop banner better than trumpeters Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. Long after hard bop’s innovators had become bored with the genre’s limitations and moved into newer territory, Morgan and Hubbard were still there, grinding out album after album for Blue Note from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. For the most part, there isn’t much to distinguish between the Sidewinders and Rumprollers, the Goin’ Ups and Here to Stays. All were played competently and passionately, doggedly sticking to the same forms, techniques, and materials that had brought both musicians their fame.
I find something admirable in this sort of artistic consistency, when it is done well. Too often, I think, we tend to focus on whether a piece of music is “challenging” in a conceptual sense, or whether or not it “explores new territory.” As a value in itself, exploring new territory is problematic: sometimes it works, sometimes you end up making New Grass.
The Night of the Cookers might be the last great album of the hard bop era. From Morgan’s brilliant muted solo on “Pensativa” through Big Black’s conga assault on “Breaking Point”, the music bristles with energy and life. The recording takes place at Club La Marchal, which provides a more boisterous atmosphere than Blue Note’s usual haunts at Birdland and the Café Bohemia. Morgan and Hubbard seem to feed off the crowd’s energy, and off each other throughout the two discs, and the rhythm section of Harold Mabern, Larry Ridley and Pete La Roca provide excellent support.
If that sounds formulaic, well, it is. In the years after this recording, both Hubbard and Morgan would drop the hard bop banner; Hubbard to chase the fusion pot of gold, and Morgan to die at the hands of a jilted lover at Slugs on February 19, 1972. This live recording, made seven years earlier, captures both of these hard bop giants at their very best, and is not to be missed by fans of the genre.
David Jones
In 1997, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Floyd’s first full-length, a mono version was released, and I only got to hear it within the last few months. I’d cut my teeth on the inexplicably truncated Nice Pair version, finally reveling in the studio rendition of “Astronomy Domine” in about 1988, but the mono mix simply knocked me out, making me hear the album anew. Subtle changes in effect abound, moment to moment gradations that can alter the flow of an entire track.
I’m sure many have heard this, so I’ll limit myself to a few examples. The much lamented Syd Barrett’s whoops and shouts on “Take up thy Stethoscope and Walk” are simply dripping with delay, and instead of an environment being set, as with the stereo version, the contrast between “Dry” and “Wet” is continually morphed, probed and explored.
Radical structural changes also made the album fresh; the coda of “Flaming” is shorter than on the stereo version, as is the case with “The Gnome.” All told, the disc comes off as more whimsical and less sloppy than its stereo counterpart, and while I have not actually compared the CD reissue with a mono LP, any Piper fan would do well to seek out this now out-of-print gem. For me, it really defined an era that was somehow larger than itself without ever really being sure of what it was, a kind of pop non-containment that could only fragment. Newer psych, in following the leader, diminishes itself in a small but irreparable fashion; the music is often very good, but the strangely haunting spontaneity of Barrett’s Floyd vanished with the crazy diamond.
Personal note: I was teaching Piper to a class of undergrads the day Syd died. I’ve been listening to him since I was nine years old, and I felt like I’d lost an old friend. RIP.
~ Marc Medwin
It’s a rare occasion when I choose to duplicate music in my collection. Eyeing this disc in a budget rack several weeks ago prompted one such decision. I’m pretty sure all of the material is contained on the Goodman Mosaic set currently buried in a cardboard box in my closet, but not having it handy made the prospect of a catch-all single disc seem like a sound investment. Ken Burns’ lionizing of Goodman as a consummate Caucasian jazz technician did little to fortify his reputation with postbop and free jazz cognoscenti. These twenty sides, taped by four different Goodman trios in ’47 and ’54 make as strong a case as I can think of for reconsidering the claim. Goodman’s clarinet is a beguiling marvel and his pianistic partners respond with poise and personality. Given his illustrious history with the clarinetist, Teddy Wilson tends to garner the most consistent praise, but Jimmy Rowles and Mel Powell, two disparate and highly adroit technicians in their own right, give as good as they get. By comparison, the string of drummers starting with Jimmy Crawford and tying off with Bobby Donaldson isn’t as dynamic, but each does a respectable job on sticks and brushes. Anyone arguing Goodman as starch-collared or stiff-backed need only audition smoking numbers like “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “There’ll Be Some Changes Made” to have such allegations summarily dashed. It’s interesting to note that the later cuts, while recorded in the LP era, still adhere to the time strictures of 78s. Goodman doesn’t need any extra time. His lines evince the elegance and symmetry of cursive script, tracing melodies with a toothsome tone that never seems to falter or sour. I’ve taken to listening to this disc on commutes in the city where the temperature of the pavement often parallels rising driver temperaments. It’s proved the ideal reagent in reattaching unglued nerves and keeping an even emotional keel.
Most music makes too much noise. This is what I have concluded after years of listening to head-banging power chords and free jazz blowouts. Especially in our currently overheated climate, sometimes the best thing a musician can do is shut the hell up, or, to put a finer point on it, allow the spaces between the notes the room and air they need to breathe. It is for these reasons that most of the contemporary music I listen to now is of the lowercase variety, and it is also for this reason that I have recently found myself returning to the understated improvisations of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
I have long had my issues with the MJQ. I never much cared for their concert hall aesthetic, which has evidently long appealed to the more conservative element in the jazz community. (Honestly, there is no reason why any grown man should willingly choose to wear a bow tie.) Be that as it may, a listening session with a friend earlier this week forced a reappraisal. After a few minutes of chatting, my friend put on Fontessa, originally released by Atlantic Records in 1956. I was immediately drawn into the placid waters of this music, the ringing solos of vibist Milt Jackson, John Lewis’s elegant figures on piano, and Connie Kay’s deft touch on percussion. But for some reason, Percy Heath on bass stood out the most. When he walked down a line on the standard “Willow Weep For Me,” playing notes that a thousand musicians had played before him, and a thousand more would play after him, somehow the sensitive way in which he handled his work, imparting to his notes a soft, boozy sentimentality that one often experiences after that fifth glass of beer, made me feel completely at home, happy to be lost in the music. My friend, noticing the pleasure I derived from Heath’s playing, leaned towards me and said, with some urgency, “You need to play the bass. Don’t worry about being any good. I’m not talking about playing in a band or for anybody else or anything like that. You need to play the bass for yourself. Get a bass, and play it until your fingers bleed, and then keep playing it. Then you’ll be able to hear music like this from the inside.”
~ David Jones
In the recent Topography of the Lungs thread on this site, some discussion about Lou Gare and his role in early AMM music caught my interest, leading me back to listen to this solo disc with revitalized historical curiosity. I was surprised by what I heard, as I was when I first received it several months ago. It’s deeply resonant listening on many levels, and repetition brought clarity for me.
I have never heard Gare play solo before, and to my knowledge, this is the first disc under his name. His approach to soloing is centered—meditative, endlessly alert to every dynamic and articulative detail; I have also never heard anyone play tenor with a sound quite like his, and the closest I can come to worthwhile comparison involves a mixture of Don Byas’ fluid lightness and Coleman Hawkins’ warm phrase endings, vibrato and sudden bursts of raw power.
Such historical precedents say nothing about the material, which thrives on the reiteration of scalar and melodic fragments that seem to unfold over glacially slow but unheard changes—detached harmonic areas rather than established tonalities or modalities. Some recur; some disappear, especially over the 20 minutes of the title track, occasionally augmented by “New Thing” cries, multiphonic honks, swells and shudders that never cross the boundaries of taste.
There is fire here, but it’s a cold, slow burn, the spaces between utterances and the live acoustic on much of the disc reminding me of environmentally produced dissonances in recent Aquatanian polyphony recordings. Speed and agility, while occasionally stunning, are never a primary concern. I am unable to avoid hearing something aged in the playing, and as much as I’ve tried to put it down to my respect for the artist, all five tracks insist on breathing some nostalgia into every listen. I never would have expected it from a member of one of the most innovative groups the 1960s produced, but it is presented without pretense. I am left with the impression that the playing is never meant to make any further statement than existence. It is one of the most personal and intimate discs I’ve heard in some time, and I love it all the more for that.
~ Marc Medwin
In my internal seasonal music schematic, summer shouts Ska. The loping, southpaw rhythms originally-spawned out of Roscoe Gordon’s R&B single “No More Doggin’” are perfectly suited to high heat and humidity accompanied beach front strolls. Amongst scores of would-be successors, the Skatalites still hold the genre-defining crown both in terms of reach and longevity. Far more comprehensive compilations of their catalog exist, but this 32-track bonanza is still my go-to source when I’m visited by the jones. I caught the band in Flagstaff during a whiteout blizzard around the time of its release. Trudging to the club early, I mustered the courage to knock on their tour bus door. A bag of graduate school herb secured my entry and we spent the remainder of the pre-show hour hanging out. All I really remember was the incongruous sight of three foot snow drifts outside the window and the soundtrack of warm island riddims and ganja-scented horns enhancing the ensuing confab. But I digress; back to the topic at hand. All the early hits are here: slippery Don Drummond spectaculars like “Fidel Castro” and “Occupation” where he nods to J.J. Johnson with his lubricious trombone; tag team tenor numbers like “Hot Cargo” featuring Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso; even a handful of tunes as the backing band for vocalists like Bob Marley and Ken Boothe. Each of the two discs clocks at generous LP length, avoiding overkill and supplying just the right dose of consummate ska in easily digestible three-minute morsels.
I did not like this record when I first heard it—yes, I was one of those, and my only consolation for my nearsightedness is that I wasn’t alone. I bought the new double-disc reissue because … well, because I had to; because I love the group, because my devotion to Faust means that if they put out the sound of a cat scratching a table-leg, there’s probably a reason, and I’ll go for it!
The best part of the whole scenario turned out to be a new appreciation for what is a fine platter. I’d never realized just how much fun “The Sad Skinhead” was, or how demonically Rudolf Sosna’s guitar work ejaculates from “It’s a Bit of a Pain,” skewing the chansonesque vocals, presumably courtesy of Jean Herve Peron.
Enough has been written about “Krautrock”, and the reverence with which the powerful instrumental is justly treated means I needn’t add any extra ink to the flood. I’ll only comment on “Jennifer,” to which the “Dirge” descriptor does an injustice. It’s gorgeous, hypnotic and achingly simple, Sosna’s voice sounding like Peter Synfield at his most childlike without the theatricality. It should be heard with headphones, if for no other reason than the majestically acousmatic wash at its conclusion—simply stunning!
I hear very little difference in the reissue’s sound, save for some welcome hiss removal in “Bit of a Pain”. However, some alternate versions make the second disc worth hearing, including an interesting remix/recasting of the track I know as “Psalter”—a whimsical acoustically driven romp in thirteen with rhythmically atmospheric psalter set just far enough back in the mix to be edgily unobtrusive. There’s also a piano piece that sounds remarkably like Neu! Circa 1975, very atmospheric and permeated with similar electrobreath.
Owners of RER’s Faust box or of the BBC Sessions disc will duplicate some material here, but the BBC material here is better indexed. I’m not convinced that the track list on the album proper is correct yet—isn’t that “I’ve got my Car and my TV” at the end of “Giggy Smile?” So, for anyone not in ownership of the disc, the reissue’s the way to go, and for those in search of yet another alternate Faust track, this set doesn’t disappoint.
~ Marc Medwin
The Dolls are a band best digested in morsels. Dave Johnansen’s whiny flamboyant shtick (spawn of Aerosmith’s Stephen Tyler and so many other silk-scarfed clones) was meant to grate and bait; the glam personas of Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop decked out in nylons & cabaret top hat, and soaked in a heavy solution of snotty irreverence. The sloppy rockabilly riffs of Johnny Thunders and Syl Sylvian delivered a jittery, jangly counterpart to Johnsanen’s manic antics at the mic. Androgyny and aggression shot up with stiff doses of coke and smack and tossed in the faces of any audience willing to pay a cover. They were a joke at first, much like their progeny the Sex Pistols, which gradually gained cult credence and a record contract. This compilation gathers material from their only two label-financed albums along with a small clutch of outtakes. At nearly 77-minutes of music, it’s probably all a casual listener will ever need. The song craft is fairly mediocre throughout, largely interchangeable proto-punk riffs played under lascivious lyrics with lots of parodic attitude. But in small doses, it’s a hoot and there are regular flashes of brilliance amidst the caked-on trash and raunch. “Lonely Planet Boy” channels Bowie, trading up electric guitars for strumming acoustics and distant stereo-bifurcated sax. “Who Are the Mystery Girls” brings stomping Detroit garage rock to the Bowery replete with a cadre of female back up singers while the schizophrenic “Stranded in the Jungle” gives Screamin’ Jay Hawkins a run for the money in terms of genre demolition absurdity. From Johansen’s mealy blues harmonica on the honky tonk “Lone Star Queen” to the power chord superhero anthem “Jet Boy” the Dolls prove that their enduring reputation as punk pioneers was well earned.
I just bought this; it arrived a few days ago. The more I listen to it, the more I like it. I do think it’s good, a veritable circus of talent in cleverly and closely juxtaposed snapshot.
Released in 1993 to inaugurate the now thankfully re-awakened Soul on Rice imprint, this is a series of duets, some readily discernable as such and many not; I was struck by how much of this record faces forward, anticipating music in which many are now reveling as innovative. True, there’s a lot of cutup here as Djll’s live sampling keeps things fresh, but listen to “Magnetopause” as it quenches the claustrophobic semi-smoldering of “Wipum”, one of the Djll/Jack Wright pairings. It shimmers into life, following its own path of overtones in beautifully harmonic manifestation of sonic temporaries, the Djll/Ed Herrmann duo conjuring drony visions of recent William Basinski. Temperaments and timbres morph and fade with tortoisian inexorability, a stunning contrast to the disc’s largely jump cut and whiplash aesthetic. It’s one of the longest tracks on offer here, and one of its most successful.
I’ve made this stuff sound so damn serious! The disc is huge fun, as much Zappa as Stockhausen, the titles often as humorously evocative as the half-recognizable samples flitting in and out of focus. “Carnivore of Venice” finds Doug Carroll providing a basso continuo while Djll busts out misshapen loops that chase their own tails right out of the gate.
Veterans like Myles Boisen and William Winant appear and disappear along side folks with whom I’m entirely unfamiliar—who’s this Hillary Double-D, (Please don’t let my ignorance rob you of veteran status, Hillary!) and where can I hear more of her incisively random and socio-politically abstract poeticizing? Oh, I’ll just press play and enjoy it all again!
~ Marc Medwin
Walt Dickerson’s Seventies output for Steeplechase gets surprisingly sparse consideration these days. Cruise the net and there’s precious little commentary on the vibraphonist, let alone that segment of his career where he let his coiffure grow, and his chest hair show through the low-cut collars of garishly patterned leisure shirts. This concert set, taped in his hometown of Philadelphia in the bicentennial summer of ’76, delivers instructive goods on his working trio of the era with electric bassist Rudy McDaniels, recently rechristened with the far more funky nom de fretless Jamaladeen Tacuma, and drummer Edgar Bateman in tow. Dickerson’s more discursive improvisatory tendencies are in full evidence, his mallets birthing luminous chains of notes that defy easy enumeration and traverse multifarious trajectories. All but one of the five pieces blossom to labyrinthine lengths. Tacuma’s melodically sensitive bass lines work as reliable contrapuntal shadow to the leader’s less-gravity reliant structures and his tonally-rich solos evince a facility on par with his far better established contemporary Stanley Clarke. Liberal doses of pedal sustain further enhance an ethereal feel, particularly on the solo opener “My Prayer.” Various junctures arise where the three sound in danger of dispersing in completely different directions. Bateman’s ambitions behind a kit sometimes outpace his abilities. But his decision for subtlety and delicacy over brashness and momentum works as additional agent in the music’s consistently contemplative cast, especially during several tandem detours with his employer. At a solid hour, it’s the sort of disc appropriate for solitary dimmed lights listening, ripe with quiet, but continuous interplay indicative of Dickerson in the midst of his second artistic wind.
This was one of the first discs I’d heard involving Bill Dixon, and it continues to be a favorite. I have enjoyed the disc for what it is rather than what I’d hoped it would be or thought it should have been.
The disc has garnered a fair amount of negative press, the most scathing of which blames Dixon for ruining the May 2002 Victoriaville concert by forcing the other musicians to approach him on his own terms. If it was Dixon that facilitated the interplay I hear on this disc, bravo to him! I have never heard these three stellar musicians listen, really listen, in the way they do here.
I now view the performance as a real act of courage on the part of all three participants. The proceedings are generally quiet, but not exclusively. By this time, Dixon had largely transcended traditional trumpet vocabulary, even pitch itself, preferring to juxtapose meditative passages with exuberant exclamations of varying durations and intensities. It is he that sounds what I will call, for convenience, the first few notes, in truth demonstrating the vast range of sound he can invoke with the smallest gesture. Throughout, he plays orchestrally, every dynamic shade and overtone evidenced with fluidity and precision.
What Dixon accomplishes from moment to moment, Taylor and Oxley expand and amplify. Taylor’s work is all the more admirable for its restraint; like Alfred Brendel’s third set of Beethoven sonatas, wisdom, borne of vast experience, keeps virtuosity in check until the precise moment that it’s required, and then no holds are barred. This concert has many of these moments, Taylor’s customary cascades swelling out of the expectant calm like titans only to disappear again.
I have long admired Oxley from a purely sonic perspective; he brings multicolored life to every context, and this has obviously included several classic records with both Dixon and Taylor. On the Victo set, he seems eternally poised, ready to interject responsively at any opportunity, complementing Dixon’s tuba-range utterances with high-frequency resonances, aiding and abetting Taylor when the volume rises and density increases.
As with so much of the improv discussed on this site, volume and energy are completely unrelated, and this disc is absolutely suffused with energy. It’s unlikely that we’ll hear these three make music in this way again, and I find it a shame. I’m only glad that the document exists, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on its behalf.
~ Marc Medwin
I’ve been reviewing CIMP titles regularly for going on seven years. Over that span, I’ve followed the triumphs and tribulations of the imprint with spectator’s interest: the controversy over Bob Rusch’s recording philosophy (called visionary by some and stubbornly Luddite by others) that seems to come and go in waves; the ever-blossoming roster of improvisers and projects; and the label’s subtly changing visual esthetic reflected in Kara Rusch’s hand-painted cover art. After about a year of polite financial solicitations in the form of folded pamphlets included with each release, the label is the midst of auditioning a new marketing tack. Their fulcrum is a fancy new full-color website that will make the vast catalog far more browser friendly to visitors. The news prompted me to peruse their output of the past half decade, stored mostly in a single Napa Valley cd crate thanks to the space-saving plastic sleeves that are another facet of Rusch’s preferred aesthetic. This nominally Duval-led album strikes me as an apposite encapsulation of both the strengths and occasional encumbrances of the CIMP approach. The cast is stellar collection of talent. Three brass (Joe McPhee, Tom Varner and Steve Swell) and three strings (Duval, Jason Hwang and Tomas Ulrich) exploring a patch quilt of a dozen pieces with a loose unifying theme of Americana as inspiration. Resplendent renditions of “America” open and close the album and make full use of the rich chamber sonorities of the ensemble to create Aylerian overtones. Duval organizes several smaller combinations ranging from a duet with McPhee’s cornet on “Jomanik Duphee” to brass plus bass quartet on the two-part “Plumbing the Lines.” Some of the pieces have minor technical flaws, a ragged cue here, a rambling stumble there, but the blemishes give the date a homespun feel that fits beautifully with the material. The zenith comes with “Amazing Grace,” a frequent Duval and McPhee feature in their Trio X configuration with Jay Rosen, here given an even deeper resonance through the blend of instrumentation and madrigal-like arrangement. They even tackle Monk’s dog-eared “Round Midnight” and once again the mesh of reverberating metal and wood yields nascent improvisatory magic.
This second release from the Unheard Music Series is still my favorite in a catalog that now numbers well into the double digits. The cover gives it instant cultural currency: three swarthy Swedish longhairs, looking more like a Hawkwind tribute band than a free jazz combo, paying homage to their titular hero with an album of muscle-flexing musical ebullience. Led by saxophonist Gilbert Holmström and enlightened by drummer Conny Sjökvist’s Sixties sojourn spent hanging out and sponging up the sounds of Big Apple luminaries like Don, Albert and others in the ESP orbit the band races through eight-track program of covers and originals beginning with a rousing rendition of Ayler’s “Spirits.” Holmström’s whinnying tenor chews up the familiar singsong theme while his mates crash and cavort at his flanks. Kjell Jansson’s electric bass strings feed febrile funk into Ornette’s “Ramblin’” and the seeds of such latter day outfits as Mat Gustafsson’s The Thing and Vandermark’s Spaceways Incorporated are sown. And I love the fact that they choose to plant their flag in a groovy Gary Bartz composition right alongside the so-called outré fare. The homegrown tunes are great too, especially Holmström’s supple ballad “Bananas Oas” where Sjökvist unexpectedly trades explosive-tipped sticks for muslin-soft brushes and the epic ensemble conflagration “No Hip Shit,” a riveting blowout that echoes primetime Frank Wright. The three bonus tracks recorded two years later at the tail end of the trio’s existence boost running time to an even hour and find them toeing closer to a postbop line. Holmström’s heartfelt work on “Consolation” in conversation with only Jansson’s bass puts him on par with any mainstream contemporary I can think of when it comes to creatively playing the changes. I’ve spun this in a multitude of situations and it has yet to sound the least bit stale. The trio’s name reads like clever hyperbole, but the commensurate music proves their height and reach no idle boast.
String band music has long grappled with stereotypes of fogeyism and obsolescence. Iconography of wizened geezers confined to rocking chairs on porches, playing tunes older than the hills on antiquated banjos and fiddles continues to cause younger audiences to grimace and turn up their noses. As one of the most revolutionary revivalist outfits, the Red Clay Ramblers infused welcome vitality and creativity into the idiom while still holding fast to its roots. First, by drawing on an instrument cache that rivaled Art Ensemble of Chicago proportions and included: fiddles; banjo; guitars; 5-string Merrywang; mandolins; bass; trumpets; pennywhistles; harmonica; trombone; piano; organ; kazoo and Autoharp. Second, by revivifying familiar song forms with a fresh array of influences and droll humor. This Flying Fish twofer reissues a pair of their definitive studio efforts from ’76 and ’77 with a five-man line-up holding court over 25 tracks. In addition to being accomplished multi-instrumentalists, the band members were also fine singers. Warm vocal harmonies breathe life into tracks like “Twisted Laurel” and “Daniel Prayed.” The poignant reading of the Carter Family classic “Will You Miss Me” features the rich pipes of Mike Carver with simple acoustic guitar support. Other pieces like “The Corrugated Lady” and “The Ace” tap the crew’s ample keg of corn liquor-fed whimsy in a Country Joe McDonald vein and with surprising lyrical complexity. Playful puns fly freely and brass band pungency further sweetens the stakes alongside some hot skillet fiddle from Bill Hicks. Elsewhere, breakneck banjo numbers like “Molly Put the Kettle On” and “Rabbit in the Pea Patch” plant socks in the mouths of skeptics unwise enough to claim the Ramblers couldn’t play it fast and straight when the shared whim struck them. I’d stack the latter ditty against the finest Flatt & Scruggs has to offer with a sawbuck on the line as ante. This isn’t a disc I dust off often, but when I do, a persistent and pleasing tingle of satisfaction always arrives within the span of a few songs.
One aspect of Monk’s music that doesn’t get enough air these days is its wry humor. If you’re tired of Monk tributes that sound more like Monk dissertations, Thelonious Moog has the antidote. Take a Love Bug full of analog synth gear, a Nashville studio rhythm section, and two seriously demented arranger-performers (Joe “Guido” Welsh & Steve Million), and before you can say, “Pass the patch cord,” boinnng! Thelonious Moog! A chorus of unabashed whoops and yibbles fill out the harmonies of a broadshouldered pack of Monk tunes. Worse, it’s all set to the cheesiest funky/loungey/Latiny/u-name-it-jazz beats you’ve ever smelled.
I love it.
Yes We Didn’t isn’t a lounge record. It’s a synth-geek record, with all the kitchen-sink sounds, taste-defying gimmicks, and nerdy in-jokes you’d expect from obsessive-completists. “Bye-Ya” and “Rhythm-A-Ning” dish up Esquivel; “Ugly Beauty” is a W. Carlos space oddity; “Mysterioso” is a Moog-Monk-surf bash. Sometimes the fun gets wearisome, as on “Oska T”, where the repeated banjo punchline has one groping for the remote. The same kind of hump-till-sore repetition actually enlivens “Jackie-ing”, with its layered circus-tent psychedelia. This one, along with “We See” and “Evidence”, gives the best testimony for the lost glory of the analog era. Vocoders, a Buchla Music Easel, Arp 2600, Moog System 12, Moog Voyager, Minimoog, Mellotron—all these (and more!) plug in to the time-portal to shout across the decades. Perhaps my favorite piece is the quacky-quilt title cut Welsh & Million stitched out of five Monk classics. Here, a thick layering of boogaloo, spoken silliness and mixed chorus bring the George Clinton tribe to mind. (One nation under a Moog?) Is it earnest, or ironic? Who cares? Let’s plug in and get down!
~ Tom Djll
In the mid-Eighties, my Dad made it his audiophile mission to procure most of the Windham Hill catalog on the still nascent format of compact disc. George Winston’s December and Liz Story’s Solid Colors were staples of his collection, but Lynch’s Breakfast delivered something different and quickly rose to the top of his play list. Awash in carbonated keyboard pastels with the occasional presence of processed flute and viola, it blended pop classical leanings (Lynch was conservatory-trained on guitar and piano) with the kind of contemplative navel-gazing at the core of the label’s adult contemporary aesthetic. My parents’ study had a huge set of bay windows overlooking the Pacific and I remember spinning the album regularly at sunsets, the deep reds, oranges and blues of the dusk-darkened sky supplying a visual analog to Lynch’s color and texture saturated melodies. In true pseudo-philosophical fashion the song titles were borrowed from a then-unpublished tome by Sri Da Avabhasa, a leader of the Free Daist Communion, giving the music a heightened esoteric air. “Celestial Soda Pop” was the big radio hit. It and swirling “The Oh of Pleasure” reminded me most of my boyhood hero Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I could imagine corduroy sport-jacketed Sagan seated in his crystals-powered spaceship, sailing through the Magellanic cloud to the strains of the dancing synthetic strings. Sort of Pink Floyd lite filtered through a porous Vangelis sieve. Home for few days at the Old Pueblo outpost of Rancho de Taylor, I revisited the record, this time with the brilliant Southwestern sunsets against the Rincon Mountains as visual counterpart. My findings: the desert landscape works just as well as a northwest coastal one and Lynch’s music still stands up to my nostalgic recollection of it.
At the risk of going out on a serious limb (I’m really not much of a rap fan; more of a recent, potential convert) and also over-intellectualizing (a vice that is hardly new for me), this album strikes me as a post-postmodern exploration of sound, identity, and popular culture. With this collaboration, underground rap artist MF Doom (the mask-wearing fellow on the cover who constructed an alterego based on the Marvel Comics classic supervillain Dr. Doom) and underground mix artist and producer Madlib, push rap’s aesthetic of pop appropriation and self-aggrandizement to new (?) levels of absurdity. The album’s 22 tracks are filled with fleeting sound clips from third-rate horror flicks, fourth rate pop songs, Doom’s typically blunted lyricism, and various other scraps of pop detritus. Sun Ra also makes an appearance, in a clip taken from Space is the Place (the movie), and there are at least two snatches of lounge piano jazz.
Each track averages slightly over two minutes, which makes for a jarring listening experience, as if Doom and Madlib want to make sure that the music never falls into a long groove. In this respect, it’s an unsettling, schizophrenic album, never comfortable, jumping from sound to sound, throwing out images and clips that obliquely relate to the music’s message. If indeed there is a message.
I’ve been on a serious Gary Bartz jag lately. It’s a bender bolstered mostly by his parts on the Cellar Door Sessions, which, while hardly revelatory, still throw down hard. Along with the listening, I’ve come across commentary from a couple folks on a sister jazz site busting Bartz’s chops. This ROW pick is meant as both a recrimination and a general cry of phooey toward such claims. Any of the Ntu Troop records waxed for Prestige in the early Seventies could lend credence my side of the debate, but the live nature of this one gives it an edge.
Bartz was still feeling the contact high of his Miles assignment a few years previous when he and his band gigged the Montreux Festival in ’73. Crowds were smaller by an order of magnitude than the gargantuan dates with Davis, but Bartz brought the same level of enthusiasm and showmanship to the stage. The Troop mustered at his flanks exposed his Blakey-like proboscis for sniffing out young talent. Harold Eaves replaced the absent Andy Bey on keys both electric and acoustic, his Fender working from a particularly groove-rich reservoir. Stafford James exhibited a similar versatility on basses both upright and slung. Bartz assumed vocal chores alongside his customary alto and soprano, and Howard King, all of seventeen, fashioned exuberant funk and rock-fed rhythms from behind the drum kit.
Bartz establishes the laidback mood on the double album opener “Nommo-The Majick Song” with an Africanized entreaty to everyone in the audience with “bad thoughts and bad vibrations” to split forthwith. Subsequent tracks also borrow from other Ntu Troop albums. “Jujuman” cops its core theme freely from Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” while “Bertha Baptist” gets into swirling funk fireworks on the strength of Eaves’ rippling lead line and a driving rhythm from James and King. Bartz’s soprano is tart, his alto less acerbic, but exhibiting equal agility through a steady succession of solos. Lyrics are lame in spots with slogans like the “dancing is part of being black” directive of “Don’t Fight That Feeling” bluntly dating the set. If anything though, they also indicate that Bartz’s world-class afro wasn’t just for show.
In the annals of Greek myth, it’s said that Helen of Troy’s face launched a thousand ships. In the chronicles of rock & roll, Chuck Berry’s guitar could lay claim to launching a thousand bands. Actually, that figure should probably be recalculated by several orders of magnitude to reflect any sort of accuracy. Berry’s influence on popular music is at once indelible, and in today’s American Idol-narcotized culture, largely taken for granted. His seminal Chess sides still work as a perfect memory tonic and while I don’t revisit them often, when I do this single-disc collection is the only time-traveling apparatus I need. With a simple, marquee-ready title that says it all, The Great Twenty-Eight assembles nearly all of Berry’s early jukebox hits onto a 70-minute silver platter. Back in the spring of ’56 Berry hit like a Space Age T-Bone Walker, sped-up and amped-up with a metallic tonality on par with the orneriest juke joint bluesman. Together with Willie Dixon’s tall timber slap bass and a succession of skinsmen laying down the signature-perambulating beat he brought a planet of teenagers to their knees in giddy supplication. In addition to the indispensable presence of Dixon, Berry’s payroll reads like a roll call of Chicago Blues royalty including Fred Below, Otis Spann and Lafayette Leake. On the first couple of cuts, there’s even an appearance by forgotten maracas maestro Jerome Green, on loan from label mate Bo Diddley. Berry’s epochal tune-smithing relied heavily on locomotive rhythmic momentum coupled to cutting lead guitar riffs, but his talents as a lyricist frequently occupied the same crackerjack league. The 1984 remastering is undeniably long-in-the-tooth, especially when indexed against the near pristine-fidelity of subsequent comps like Anthology from 2000. Nevertheless, it’s good enough for my Plebian ears and the specific sequencing has long since become a familiar security blanket. Cranking cuts like the high-octane hotrod anthem “You Can’t Catch Me,” and the reverb-drenched “Too Much Monkey Business” in my jalopy, speeding tickets become a very real possibility.
I arrived very late to the Jackie McLean parade, and by the time I got around to this record, the parade was already over and everyone was in the bars crying over their beer. The Penguin Guide, which has so often in the past guided the order of my purchases, is not very charitable to Capuchin Swing, implying that the participants in this April 17, 1960 session sleep-walk through much of the proceedings, flubbing notes, losing the beat, and so forth. Not to these ears.
In choosing this record, my intention is not to proclaim that Capuchin Swing is even one of the five best McLean Blue Notes. Surely, his later explorations of the terrain between bop and free merit top consideration: Let Freedom Ring, One Step Beyond, Destinition Out, Right Now, Action, and others. However, sometimes we focus too much on the top echelon of records, and not enough on the "middleweight" offerings in an artist's oeuvre. The five players on this date, McLean, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Art Taylor all play with the kind of crackling intensity that made hard bop such a rich idiom. Bishop in particular stands out in this session, laying down soulful proclamations on "Francisco" and "Don't Blame Me." As an ardent Chambers fan, one of the highlights of this outing is his ever-so-brief bowed solo on "Francisco." It lasts for only 15 seconds or so, but Chambers launches into it with such gusto and swing that it carries me away like a tornado, then abruptly places me right back in the center of the music, as if I had never left.
Finally, there is McLean, his acidic tone and pungent phrasing so well-versed in the bop idiom, and yet even here constantly trying to challenge the imposed boundaries the music erected around his ambitions. We know to what heights this journey led him, but sometimes it is nice to retrace his steps and listen to the process as it unfolded, record by record, in those days of giddy creativity in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
What music would you wish played at your funeral? That sobering question revisited me yesterday when I learned of the passing my grandmother Helena Lawson, aged 86, in Tucson, from pneumonia. I last visited her this past Christmas and realized then that we probably would not have much time left with her. While not a shock, the news still left me with a shroud of sadness and emptiness that will likely linger for some time. This collection of elemental African American fife and drum music has worked as an aural paregoric in the hours since. Many of the 28 tracks are mere fragments culled from field recordings made in and around Waverly, Georgia and Como, Mississippi in 1942 and 1970, respectively. The patriarchs of the rural argot are all in represented: Otha Turner, Sid Hemphill and Napoleon Strickland among them. Hemphill was laid to rest in 1998. Strickland passed on in 2001. Neither released a full-length record during his lifetime. Turner, widely regarded as the last living griot of the tradition, died in 2003. But not before putting out a pair of discs and passing on the practice to his grandchildren. The music here is raw and unpolished, particularly in the case of the few selections from the ’42 session, but MS dates boast well-balanced sound. Carved out on drums, washtubs and even waste baskets, martial beats that echo New Orleans second-line and Hill Country blues rhythms underlie whistling cane fife melodic leads. The music’s history is another example of African American reclamation of European musical implements that were originally African in origin. The songs suggest a sampling of secular folk staples like “John Henry” and “Shout, Lula with the Red Dress” and sacred fare like “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Crowns of the collection include rough and tumble renderings of “My Babe” and “Granny, Will Your Dog Bite” with Strickland handling fife and Turner weaving an cardiac beat on kettle drum in tandem with R.L. Boyd’s bass variant. Obvious funereal aspects arise in this music, but the performances are also the celebratory soundtrack to community barbecues and picnics. It’s my educated guess that my grandma never heard these sounds, but I can’t help envisioning her smiling and dancing along if she had. They’ll be piping through the chapel speakers at my own send off if I have any say.
Four days after the spring semester ends, I am taking a plane from New York to Amsterdam. From there I will catch a connecting flight to Johannesburg, and then a flight to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. The trip, including layovers, will take in excess of 30 hours. My stay in Namibia is going to last 28 days, and I’m going by myself.
As I think about how I am going to manage living by myself in a Third World country for one month (this will be my first trip to Africa, let alone Namibia), I try to focus on bringing things that will remind me of home: pictures of my family, yes, but mainly music. I don’t have an Ipod (and no, I’m not getting one anytime soon) so I have to strategize about which cds to bring. What are the really essential items in my collection? Many nominees come to mind, but this I know for certain: if I could only bring one disc, it would be this one, Too Beautiful To Burn, which I’ve compared in the past to Kind of Blue. But really, that isn’t a fair comparison. Too Beautiful To Burn is better.
For some reason, I remember very well the day that I bought this album. It was late May, 2004, during the Vision Fest in New York City. I didn’t go to the festival, but I did attend one of the hangs in lower Manhattan, where for the first time I met several people I had previously known only through online message boards, including Brian Olewnick, Jon Abbey, and Michael Schaumann. The only thing I remember about the conversation we had over our imported beers was a discussion of the outfit Cecil Taylor wore to Elvin Jones’s funeral, and also something about Boston Red Sox second baseman Mark Bellhorn.
As I got ready to leave, Jon, playing the role of a drug pusher to perfection, opened up his black duffel bag filled with cds, and asked me if I wanted to buy any. (I’m not sure if I have ever seen Jon without his duffel bag full of cds. I like to think that if I ever run across him in the supermarket or at the bakery, he’d have that duffel bag with him.) Anyway, he asked me if I wanted to buy Too Beautiful To Burn, which I had never heard of before. I was a bit dubious; up to that point I had only purchased two or three cds from Jon, and while I liked what I had heard, I recognized that the music he was pushing was a radical departure from everything else I listened to. I think I feared that the music would brainwash me to the point where all I would want to do with my life would be to sit in an empty room and stare at a blank wall, pondering the futility of all human activity. Of course, later on I discovered that this is pretty much what eai does to listeners, but it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. Anyway, I was unsure whether to get the disc, until Michael jumped in and said, “Yeah, get it. It’s fucking awesome.” So I did.
I went home and listened to it, and felt something I had never before experienced as a music listener. It wasn’t quite as profound as an epiphany, but nearly so. The music was like the sculpture of Apollo which prompted Rilke to conclude one of his poems with this stirring line: “You must change your life.” That is what this music was saying to me: You must change your life. You must think differently about music. Listening to the music for the first time, all categories dissolved. I didn’t care which musician was making which sounds, whether what I was hearing qualified as “electro-acoustic improvisation” or which portions of the disc were improvised and which the result of post-production editing. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t.
I realize that I have made it this far into this piece and haven’t actually described any sounds on the disc. This is as it should be. The music is there to be heard, and it certainly doesn’t need any artificial elaboration from me. Rather what I have tried to focus on is the human dimension of my encounter with this music, the memories and feelings it evokes for me when I listen to it. That warmth, that vitality, is what the album conveys: on the first listen, the fiftieth, and the hundredth. It is not just another disc to be assessed with a one sentence review, another piece of plastic to be piled onto the heap of “good” or “great” releases that emerge every year to earn our praise. It is sui generis, too beautiful to burn, and too beautiful to pass over.
The mentor and pupil relationship has been a musical staple since the first proto-sapiens struck wood on stone. In jazz, there exist innumerable albums where youthful students join aged teachers in celebrating the lineage they share, so it’s always a welcome occurrence when one stands out. At the time of this ’91 studio recording, thirty-year old O’Connell was sixty years Humphrey’s junior. Willie, brother to trumpeter Percy, was a peer to licorice stick legend George Lewis and a New Orleans mainstay since the Roaring Twenties. Banjo player Les Muscutt, bassist Frank Fields and drummer Ernie Elly serve as a revolving miniature bullpen and the generously sequenced disc features ensemble aggregations ranging from trio to quintet in size. There’s also a solo steel string guitar version of “Lover Come Back” that shows off Muscutt’s nimble arpeggiated fret play in fine fettle. All of the tunes originate from the august Crescent City songbook with renderings of “Stardust,” “Bourbon Street Parade” and “Little Liza Jane” winning my ears over as lively standouts. Humphrey wears his advanced years through sometimes slightly dodgy phrasing, but his jowly tone and infectious pep eclipse any chops troubles. He even finds inspiration to sing on a trio of tracks, most beguilingly on a droll rundown of the double entendre-driven “The Cabbage Song.” O’Connell quickly corners the distinction as the more technically adept of the duo. His seven numbers with only Fields and Muscutt in tow draw delightful parallels to Louis Cottrell’s Bourbon Street album for Riverside, both in terms of basic instrumentation and temperament. I’m sucker for this sort of chamber style Dixieland and this is as agreeable an example of the custom as I’ve yet come across. The titular porch may only be figurative, but the dulcifying vibe of a laidback afternoon hang amongst congenial compadres comes across loud and clear.
In addition to being one of my favorite bassists and composers, Charles Mingus is also one of my favorite vocalists. Of course, I use that term very broadly, to refer to any and all sounds created by his voice—from his celebrated grunts, yelps and hollers to the poetry that embellished a few of his albums, including this Columbia recording from 1972. “The Chill of Death” is not a great poem—it was written when Mingus was still a young man and on the page it reads like a third rate version of Poe or Frost—but the manner in which the graying Mingus delivers it is indeed extraordinary. At times his voice, deep and resonant, thick as gravel, trembles in a way that somehow manages to convey both strength and vulnerability, wisdom and uncertainty, fitting combinations for its Whitmanesque composer. Though he went on to make other recordings, I always like to think of this as Mingus’s epitaph.
I’m not a religious person; as a lapsed Presbyterian, the noncommittal crown of the agnostic now sits snugly around my forehead. Even so, sacred music remains one of my chief sources of aural pleasure. From predictable purveyors like Mahalia Jackson and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, to the darker Old Testament tributaries traveled by Blind Willie Johnson and Reverend Utah Smith, my ears are always open to sounds touched by theistic hands even if I’m not always on board with the sentiments underlying them. Such is the case with this collection from Arhoolie, the first of label’s forays into documenting sacred lap steel music and an excellent cross-section of some of the more talented movers & shakers on the instrument. The program breaks conveniently into two halves with the first covering a selection of instrumentals and concert segments by three distinct Floridian stylists: Sonny Treadway, Glenn Lee and Willie Eason. Part Two focuses on samples culled from live congregational services again featuring the work of Treadway along with selections from Henry Nelson and Aubrey Ghent. The songs are mostly public domain spirituals with only Eason represented by original material. Most cuts feature a minimum of drums accompaniment with a fair number also featuring small bands in support of the guitarists. Sterling slide work stays front and center and ranges from the polished tonal vacillations of Treadway on tracks like “At the Cross” to more openly ebullient stylings of Lee who slips in some shaggy blues licks along with the more sectarian riffs. My favorite of the cache are the solo numbers by Eason whose limpid crying tone, hotly amplified lines and unvarnished vocals remind me of a mellowed out and more pious Hop Wilson. As usual with an Arhoolie release, accompanying notes and photos are generous. Chris Strachwitz parlayed the success of the disc into an entire niche for his label’s catalog, though the stream of releases seems to have stoppered for the time being. This is a choice place to drink freely during the dry spell.
“A race needs clowns. In earlier days people knew that. Kings always had a court jester around. In that way he was always reminded how ridiculous things are. I believe that nations too should have jesters, in the congress, near the president, everywhere…You could call me the jester of the Creator. The whole world, all the disease and misery, it’s all ridiculous.”
Though it remains an important part of his legacy, in many ways Sun Ra’s outrageous persona, his personal mythology and bizarre Astro-Afro-Egyptian equations, have clouded our appreciation of his contribution to American music in the twentieth century. Indeed, when one considers his early experimentation with electronics and recording effects, his technical adroitness at the piano, his brilliant ensemble writing, and his fluency in multiple musical languages—from swing to free jazz and beyond—Ra suddenly looms very large in the musical pantheon. This opinion, developed over the past few years as I have taken a crash course in Ra’s life and music, seems all the more justified after listening again to When Angels Speak of Love, originally released on Ra’s Saturn label in 1966, and reissued in 2000 on Evidence.
Though not usually the first Ra album to be name-checked when listing his greatest works, When Angels Speak of Love remains my favorite, at least of the titles that have made it to compact disc. The genius of this music lies in the way it was recorded. The liner notes to the Evidence reissue tell us that Thomas “Bugs” Hunter, a percussionist in the Arkestra, created the album’s distinctive electronic echo by (accidentally?) connecting the reel-to-reel tape recorder’s output to its input. As John Corbett writes, “By plugging a live microphone into the other input and controlling the output level, Hunter was able to create an interactive signal processing unit, turning the tape recorder into a crude effects box that he ‘played’ while the band was also playing.”
This process was used on other Arkestra albums, but it works to greatest effect here, where the relatively (by Arkestra standards) minimalist orchestration takes on an other-worldly quality. Separated from the performance by two layers of technology (the actual recording and the reverb), the listener is placed into a disjointed sound world that seems to echo from the distant past, submerged in the off-center accompaniment of Ra’s piano and the distant beat of Clifford Jarvis’s drums. Yet at certain moments, the past pushes insistently into the present, through Walter Miller’s haunting trumpet or Marshall Allen’s frenzied saxophone. To put the experience in Ra’s cosmology, it is almost like excavating a rare artifact from ancient Nubia, and after removing the sand and dust, discovering that the object in your hands is actually an issue of the 1950s comic book The Crypt of Terror. From Piankhy to William Gaines, the universe of Sun Ra enveloped the past and the future, the majestic and the vulgar.
I’ve been missing Frank Lowe a lot lately. The condition comes and goes. But when the pangs pop up I reach for and spin this CIMP date the most. It’s not his best album and there are some connoisseurs of his catalog who actually might rate it rather low, especially when stacked beside his earlier efforts on Soul Note and Black Saint. For me though it’s a near perfect prospectus illustrating his approach to improvisation, deep understanding of jazz, and the strong humanist appeal of both. The presence of sixteen tracks makes the promise of extended improvisatory flights rather slight. Instead, Lowe and his colleagues Steve Neil and Anders Griffen focus on paring each tune down to its skeletal constituents and rebuilding up from there. Lowe had insatiable ears and the diversity of material here is another instantly endearing feature. In addition to a nice clutch of originals he stacks the deck with canny selections from the songbooks of Rollins, Coleman, McLean and even Percy Mayfield. His version of “Alfie’s Theme” is emblematic of the trio’s collective economy. Lowe slinks through the Rollins-cum-Mancini theme, lacing his phrasings with grainy rasps as Griffin’s clipped cymbals and Neil’s sedulous bass keep loose burlesque rhythm. “Softly As in a Morning Sunrise” sounds echoes of Rollins’ seminal Vanguard version while “Little Melonae” distills to its JacMac cerulean essence. Lowe’s latter-day porous tone and wounded articulation, two attributes that could be considered liabilities in lesser hands, are in full effect and add immeasurably to the performances. He’s like a post-loft jazz Paul Gonsalves and the arid Spirit Room fidelity furthers the comparison. On the originals front there’s a pithy, but unhurriedly swinging take on “Addiction Ain’t Fiction” and a funky rundown of “Lowe-ology” buttressed by Griffen drum solo that nods meaningfully to the memory of Lowe confrere Charles Moffett. All that’s missing is an epigrammatic rendering of “Nothin’ But Love.” Some of the tracks are near high wire acts, with Lowe slipping on occasion, but always catching his footing before a fall. That supple and subtle testing of slowly-fermenting personal capabilities reminds me of twilight Lester Young and it makes me miss him all the more.
I have always had a strange relationship with the 1960s recordings of Andrew Hill. After discovering him through the indispensable Penguin Guide to Jazz three years ago, I have picked up every Hill session in print, beginning with the highly-regarded Point of Departure and continuing through Smoke Stack, a December 1963 session reissued as a Rudy Van Gelder edition last week. Oddly enough, considering that I keep buying his stuff, I have been almost uniformly disappointed by every release. With each album, I sense that I am supposed to think this music is good, but find myself underwhelmed all the same. And yet I keep digging into the catalog, perhaps more out of habit than anything else.
Reading through the liner notes and listening to the albums again over the past couple of weeks, a common theme emerges: in its attempt to sell Hill’s music in the increasingly-narrow jazz market of the 1960s, Blue Note sought to portray Hill as, above all else, a musical problem-solver, daring enough to push against the boundaries of the jazz idiom, but yet sufficiently respectful of the music’s tradition to remain within that framework. Listening to those sixties Hill sessions again through this prism, my troubles with Hill’s work became clearer. Too many of his compositions feel like academic exercises rather than artistic statements (if one can even draw a distinction between the two!) It was almost as if Hill set out to write a piece of music in order to prove that he could, for instance, write a 50-bar tune that maintained some semblance of a cohesive structure. Complexity became the central purpose of Hill’s art; his ideas became more impressive precisely because they were so convoluted.
Yet with Smoke Stack, something causes me to pause at these over-generalizations. With a two-bass lineup of Richard Davis and Eddie Khan, the music on this date attains an unusual thickness, a propulsive density that seems to force Hill to make his playing more declarative and insistent. With Khan playing a supporting role, Davis is also free to push his music into more melodic terrain. His bowed work on “Wailing Wail” provides the album with its most moving performance, and is part of what makes Smoke Stack the finest Hill session of the 1960s.
Segovia on speed: that’s how a friend of mine described Carlos Montoya when I spun this disc in her presence several years ago. It’s a clever cache phrase, and both men did share the lifelong goal of taking the guitar to new places. But ultimately it’s not an entirely fair comparison considering Montoya’s skills were audaciously subservient to his desire to astound audiences. By most accounts he was foremost a shamelessly populist performer at heart. He used revered flamenco conventions to create a personal and frequently peacockish solo improvisatory style. His modifications attached lots of flamboyant flash to the gypsy idiom, pioneering tactics that served as the primary source of the combustive connotations so often ascribed to it today. In predictable fashion classical purists balked at the revisions, denouncing them as catchpenny parodies and affronts. But Montoya’s music found a global audience just the same. The difficult-to-date pieces in this Tradition collection are loaded with blindingly fast displays of dexterity. Ripping legato strums slice away at acoustic strings, no doubt taking a fair share of underlying body lacquer with them, on tracks like the boisterous “Bulerias” where unidentified voices join clapping hands and stomping feet in supplying rhythmic punctuations. It’s a performance that would likely leave most deified thrash metal guitarists awestruck with fingers bleeding after attempts at following suit. Elsewhere callus-cracking single string tremolos contribute to delicate webs of gilded melody as on the haunting ballad “Granadinas.” Montoya unequivocally had chops and they’re on exhaustive display here, but his music is best digested in small parcels as his ferocity tends to fray the senses over the long haul. When I’m in the right mood this music is like a caffeine-saturated cup of gourmet Iberian coffee, perfect for clearing mental cobwebs and tapping sleeping toes awake.
Any consumer afflicted with the addiction of music acquisition is sure to have a checklist of quests in various stages of completion. Mine own are myriad, but one recently came to a satisfying close several weeks ago when I forked over bills for a copy of this collection. I’ve been hunting, rather lackadaisically, for years for a budget priced comp that covers all of my Cat Stevens bases and needs. The pricey box set On the Road to Find Out offers overkill. Single discs like the antiquated Greatest Hits and the more recent The Very Best of… and Remember: The Ultimate Collection don’t hold enough. And it’s strange to think that a musician as vilified as Stevens was after his admittedly dunder-headed comments surrounding the fatwa against Salman Rushdie has seen so many retrospective projects in the wake of the transgression. For me, the biggest boon of Gold is the inclusion of the full “Foreigner Suite,” all 18+ minutes worth of the experimental pop salmagundi that sounds like Headhunters, John Williams, Davids Axelrod & Shire, Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin and a dozen other eclectic referents tossed together into a blender, set to frappe & filtered through a wall of vintage keyboard consoles. The predictable hits are here too, like the stripped down “Father And Son,” a strikingly effective encapsulation of the generation gap that still resonates with me today when I reflect on my own strained relationship with my dad growing up. Signature pieces like “Peace Train,” “Wild World” and “Where Do the Children Play?” alternate with b-sides like the fast-rocking rhythm feast “Bitterblue” and “Angelsea,” which sounds like Cat fused with Rush circa “Closer to the Heart,” bright acoustic strums strung with swelling drone keyboards and phantasmagorical lyrics. At the center of nearly all the tracks lies the vibrant and creative song craft, so often cached in highly potable pop folk forms. Spinning these discs in the car the rush of nostalgia is face-flushingly potent, prepubescent memories of cruising the freeway with my folks in their purple Ford van, the miles peeling by to the strains of Stevens’ passionate sentiments and songs.
For me, the most interesting performance from last year’s Erstquake festival (or at least, the most interesting performance during the two nights I attended), was also among the most maligned in many post-fest write-ups of the event. If I could summarize the criticism of the meeting between Keith Rowe and Julien Ottavi, it would be that Rowe and Ottavi fiddled around with their radios for awhile, predictably fishing up reports of the war in Iraq and the devastation in the Gulf Coast before surrendering the performance when Ottavi snagged a string quartet from the airwaves and the duo walked off stage, the quartet still playing on Julien’s radio.
All this is more or less accurate, but for me what made the performance was what happened next. The lights came on, and for a few moments the audience seemed unsure of what to do. When does the performance end? The performers had taken their seats among the audience, and for just a few moments, sat as they did, hunched over, quietly listening to the radio signal. Then, it began to unravel. A few people started clapping, and soon the whole room was applauding. Since this was the last performance of the evening, people began to stir about the room, chatting with each other and generally packing up their things to head home. I remained seated, however, still bending my ear toward Ottavi’s radio, which was still playing the music from the string quartet. Gradually, the people moving about the room disrupted the radio signal, and the quartet performance became submerged in static. A few minutes later, the radio was turned off. Walking back to the hotel that night, it occurred to me that the audience, rather than the musicians, had ended the performance. By walking off the stage while the radio was still playing, Rowe and Ottavi had effectively handed the car keys over to the audience, which became a third participant, deciding when to officially end the proceedings. Theoretically, the performance could have continued indefinitely, with a room full of people quietly listening to the radio still playing in the center of the small stage.
Which circuitously brings me to this recording, Taku Sugimoto Guitar Quartet, released on the German label Bottrop-Boy in 2003. For those familiar with Sugimoto’s work over the past few years, there is really nothing surprising about this music. Like its neighbors in the Sugimoto discography, TSGQ explores the infinite space between 1 and 0, placing smaller and smaller fractions of music within longer and longer periods of inactivity. A guitar note is played, it hangs in the air for a moment, then dies away. A few minutes pass. Another note is played. More time passes. Another note. And so forth, for 60 minutes or so.
Given this somewhat repetitious minimalism, what has distinguished each Sugimoto recording is not what happens when Sugimoto (or in the case of TSGQ, the other three musicians accompanying him) plays, but what happens when he doesn’t play. There is the rainstorm from Live in Australia, the distant mechanical hum of passing cars in appel, and in this recording, digital silence cloaking the slightest movements of bodies, inhaling and exhaling, shifting in their chairs. In each of these live performances, the degree of unintended ambient noise that we hear in the recording is determined not just by Sugimoto’s reticence, but also by the audience’s willingness to match it. After all, when Sugimoto doesn’t play his guitar, why should the audience remain quiet? Because they are gripped by the tension building between each note? Because they are bored out of their minds? Regardless of their reasons, the audience has become Sugimoto’s most important collaborator, entering and shaping each performance in utterly unique ways. In this sense, Sugimoto’s work could be rightly viewed—perhaps paradoxically—as among the most democratic and participatory in improvised music today. And like the Rowe/Ottavi performance at Erstquake, in many cases the audience may be collaborating in the performance without even realizing it, unaware that the line between performer and listener is slowly dissolving, the musician’s restraint a reflection not just of an evolving set of aesthetic principles, but also a mirror aimed at the small crowd of devotees who have assembled around them, hanging on their every gesture.
David Jones
Saddled with a name that’s about as generic as they come organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith also had the added baggage of sharing a surname with the reigning emperor of his chosen instrument. Jimmy Smith was the undisputed king when the pair of records on this Prestige two-fer were taped at Van Gelder studio. But his rule fortunately left of room for plenty of peers to share in the popularity. Further suggesting superficial ties to Jimmy, Thornel Schwartz, a Smith alum, handles guitar and second chair soloist duties. Drummer Leo Stevens and bassist George Tucker complete the laidback Harlem lounge-style ensemble. Smith skates easily and expressively through 14 tracks calculated to mirror a handful of his typical club sets. It’s all fairly predictable to any connoisseur of the idiom, but also laden with numerous groove-suffused moments and capacious amounts of “soul” in a down home, unaffected sense. Standards like “ Secret Love” and Bye Bye Blackbird” alternate with vamp-rooted blues numbers to create an overarching mood of imperturbable agreeability. Schwartz’s loose-gaited single note improvisations bookend a seven-minute stroll through an original blues “Easy Like.” Tucker’s solos are exceedingly spare and Stevens hides shyly behind his hi-hat much of the time. But Smith’s the star after all and capitalizes on earned latitude to explore virtually every setting on his console at one point or another. His numerous experiments include a crazy take on “I’ll Remember April” that sounds like he’s filtering his strings of notes through a cheap Casio attachment. Prestige was something of an assembly line for these sorts of sessions in the late 50s and early 60s -Smith cut nearly two dozen himself between 1956 and 1971- but as organ dates go these two early Smith sides are rich in charm and replay value.
Here’s another one of those fortunate finds. You know the kind. Those conveniently forgotten platters tucked away amongst stacks of dross in the bargain used bins of a local record shop, procurable for the pittance of a single dollar bill. The cover, a high contrast photo of what looks like a historic Havana plaza lifted from an old 50s postcard, caught my eye along with the Ansonia label and the typed assurance of: “Long Playing High Fidelity”. Trio Matamoros, led by one Miguel M. whose surname serves as band moniker and whose composerly skill yields 11 of the 14 tunes was formed in Santiago de Cuba on May 8, 1925. This album comes from almost a quarter century and countless gigs later. Some quick Googling reveals Miguel’s cachet as one of the most talented Cuban son and bolero composers of the 20th century, second only to Ernesto Lecuona in the estimation of many. Here he occupies the first guitar chair and handles lead vocals with Rafael Cueto on second guitar and Ciro Rodriguez lending colorful accents with clave and maracas. A string bassist and a conga player are also present on most cuts, though openly solving the mystery of their identities would no doubt have weakened the trio mystique. Songs like the percolating “Mientes” and “Oye Mi Conga” mix lilting guitar chords, sturdy hand percussion beats and distinctive folk-informed vocal harmonies in an insouciant mien that recalls the colloquial appeal of a rural cantina combo. A sultry “Guajira Ven A Gozar” amplifies the heat with a syncopated son rhythm and more filigree fretwork as voices recount a tale of amorous woe in rondo fashion. Over the holiday I burned this disc to my portable Muvo player and listened to it on long jogs in the desert. It proved an optimal soundtrack supplement to the cloudless cyan skies and red-rock topography of the Western Tucson foothills- sunburns be damned. Now that the wave of the Buena Vista Social Club craze has largely broken on the reef of consumer capriciousness, the time seems opportune for a Matamoros renaissance. I’m just happy to have found my own taste in the most unexpected of places.
It's pretty absurd I didn't come across this 1994 release until recently, because it's nearly as great as the best works of Doctor Nerve and possibly one of the three or four best albums in Nick Didkovsky's oeuvre. A trio with avant-garde superhero Kevin Norton and saxophonist Gitta Schäfer, this lean, stripped-down format brings Didkovsky's electric guitar genius into the foreground where it can be savored with less distractions. Didkovsky's singular talent and concept for the instrument is something like a mix of Jimi Hendrix, Milton Babbitt, Fred Frith, metal, and fusion. Compared to his disappointing (but still wonderful) power trio guitar feast from 2003 under the Bone moniker with Hugh Hopper and John Roulat, this sole release by the Ankle to Nose trio captures Didkovsky as a player in a real-time ensemble more than a multi-track-happy studio craftsperson and composer, with corresponding rewards in space, clarity, and rhythmic breathing. Particularly on "Laubgesänge", the open bass-less trio sound occasionally hits the magical post-jazz territory of Dave Douglas' Tiny Bell Trio, A.D.D. [Arguelles/Dick/Doran] Trio, A.B.D [Anderson/Bennink/Doran] Trio, Lucas Niggli's Zoom, etc.
Curiously, the compositional work is assumed by Schäfer more than the other two, yet Didkovsky's characteristic aesthetic of jagged and interlocking parts permeates the entire disc. The opening cut, Schäfer's "Belated Woman", has the herkyjerky feeling of vintage Doctor Nerve, Kombinat M, Chainsaw Jazz, Blast, and Il Berlione. Didkovsky's sole extended composition on the disc, "Eyes Bigger Than Her Forehead", is unsurprisingly even closer the Nerve template, with a bit of the metal riffing he brought to the forefront in the Doctor Nerve album recorded around the same time as this, Skin. As much as I have heartily enjoyed Skin from the day it was released, in my view it was the beginning of a mild downward trend for the band in which their pioneering rhythmic concepts lost their frenzied vigor and visceral punch, perhaps something of a post-punk edge in the early Nerve albums that makes me want to flail my limbs with spastic abandon. Ankle to Nose definitely doesn't have this edge either, but I like this disc more than Skin because it has more detail and nuance in the timbres and rhythms, especially on the eight great free improv miniatures (12 to 80 seconds) sprinkled throughout.
Kevin Norton's playing is what really pushes this one to the level of a high-rotation album for me. Even in his jazz and post-jazz projects he's fond of angular and precise rhythms, so he's absolutely perfect for this batch of compositions, where his advanced control of timbral and dynamic details can elevate the simple jagged groove passages. The disc has one nugget of blissful aggression, the 99-second "The Ballad of Dean Melberg", with ripping avant-shred from Didkovsky and a rare example of Norton playing something like blastbeats! Norton contributes a single composition to the program, the 7-minute "Uncommon Sense", in which he foregoes his drumkit to focus on tuned percussion. The piece splits its rhythmic backbone between Norton and Didkovsky and slowly evolves through loop structures, reaching only a few brief, sublime moments of intensity. Highlighted by Didkovsky's intricate riff patterns and understated distorted tone, this fabulous piece would sound perfect on a Bang on a Can album.
Schäfer writes some clever and exciting pieces and kills on alto sax in the vein of Urs Leimgruber. Who is this person? And why hasn't this perfectly matched and deeply inspired trio made another album in the 11.5 years since this self-titled debut was recorded?
~Michael Anton Parker
[The sorrowful news of Derek Bailey’s passing should alone warrant a platter by the plectrist holding this spot. Alas, I’m at my parents' place for the holidays and didn’t pack any of his catalog for the trip. Since I don’t feel comfortable attempting to do any album justice solely from memory, it’ll have to fall to someone else to handle the eulogistic duties elsewhere on-site & I sure hope someone does.]
Considering their common Tristanoite origins, clambakes between Konitz and Marsh were comparatively rare over the course of their careers. On occasions when their schedules did overlap the outcome was certain to yield memorable musical repartee and synergy. The mid-70s represents an especially prosperous time for recordings by the pair. This archival set released on Peter Ind’s Wave imprint dates from a stretch when several European tours were organized in succession. It’s basically a straight reissue of the original LP with no material added, but what’s here is relaxing and exhilarating in equal measure. Ind and drummer Al Levitt, mostly on brushes, cloak the horns in a transparent halo of supple, responsive rhythm, one that fits snugly, but never stifles or constricts. Proof of shared improvisatory bravado, the principals also repeatedly jettison the support for brief spells, braiding helium-light lines in acapella tandem on pieces like the jovial Bach fragment “Invention in a Minor.” The majority of other pieces resolve through lithe improvisations based on basic chord progressions of denuded standards like “It’s You or No One” and “All the Things You Are”- the general preferred diet of both saxophonists, Marsh’s palate in particular. Each man sits out on a tune apiece, leaving his colleague to coast and cavort in the company of the rhythm section alone. Konitz tackles “You Go to My Head,” his wistful gauzy tone voicing a lilting extemporization built on lucent legato phrases. Warne’s ingenious reading of “Easy Livin’,” rendered under similar conditions in a mere (4:24), arrives as a high point amongst already skyscraping peaks. Conventional wisdom argues the apogee of Konitz/Marsh encounters as being the now out of print 3-disc Storyville set preserving their meeting at Montmarte in 1975. I wouldn’t know as I haven’t heard it! So at the risk of revealing the true reasoning behind this ROW & in the spirit of St. Nick, is there anybody out there who might be able to help a fellow music maven out & burn them for me? I’ve got an extra copy of this disc that I’d be more than happy to offer up in exchange.
This 1991 release is a pinnacle of avant-fusion and most of the credit goes to Joachim Kühn's gloriously raw and distorted electronic keyboard sound. As a guitarist, it's hardly surprising that Miroslav Tadic would summon prototypes of ecstatic electric music like Jimi Hendrix and Allan Holdsworth, but for a musician best known as a pianist, and occasionally a rather bland one, it's a real shock to hear the same prototypes summoned by keyboards. The timbres don't overlap with Mike Ratledge's mythical playing in The Soft Machine, but the intensity and dirty analog feeling are comparable, a rare achievement to say the least. The combination of Tadic and Kühn equally assaulting a bevy of warm jazz melodies and harmonies with slurred, fuzzed, blistering fury is a feast unlike any others I can cite. It's easy to hear the similarities to the heavy guitar attack of stuff from the same rough time frame like Ronald Shannon Jackson's fantastic Red Warrior, Sonny Sharrock's uneven rock-oriented platters, and the Christy Doran / Stephan Wittwer collaboration Red Twist and Tuned Arrow, but even as he explores sonic territory typical of electric guitar Kühn's sound here is so distinct from any guitar sound that his blend with Tadic is a singular wonder.
If you put this amazing blend on top of a hot rhythm section playing typical fusion pulses and grooves, you'd likely get a masterpiece. Instead of this, electric bass guitarist Tony Newton and drumkitter Mark Nauseef did something slightly better: they deconstructed fusion rhythms into multidirectional, unpredictable, unstable motion. In the same sense we often speak of free bop, this music is a perfect example of free fusion. Newton and Nauseef's playing is almost as adventurous and intriguing as Tadic and Kühn's, and the conventional bipartite structure of rhythm section and lead instruments often collapses so that the entire quartet becomes a rhythm section and Newton often deals with pitch material as much as the guitar and keyboards. A great example of Newton's virtuosity and flexibility is the three-way interlocking geometric phrases in "Don't Disturb My Groove", but Kühn probably deserves even more credit for this passage as the composer. He's clearly the conceptual engine behind the project; almost all of the original material on the album is composed by him and the three very short pieces from the other three musicians' pens are interludes that serve the album only by way of contrast to its main stylistic thrust.
Newton's bass guitar also occasionally gets almost as dirty and wanton as the guitar and keyboards. One of his best moments is the ingenious subterrenean locomotive growl-riff-chugging he does towards the end of "Heavy Hanging", elevating an already fascinating passage that trades the quartet's signature gourmet skronk for a fairly sparse passage of clever, uncliched call-and-response interplay without any idiomatic references to jazz, rock, or fusion, including some great clean, jagged, spiky guitar lines from Tadic. The album is nearly as impressive for its compositional cleverness as for its bristling raw energy and rare timbral blends.
This disc can put a gut out of commission right from the gate with ten minutes of mind-blowing avant-shred to the tune of Dolphy's "The Prophet". The only version I know of this piece is the loquacious reading on the 1961 Five Spot set. Curiously, there's yet another Dolphy cover on the program, a take on the post-"Hat and Beard" chill-out "Something Sweet, Something Tender", short at only 3 minutes. The core melody is there, but it's hardly recognizable otherwise. And not just because of the dirty electric sounds, but in terms of the entire arrangement. Newton and Nauseef take a pretty generic constant-activity approach in contrast to the measured and brief pizzicato episodes of Richard Davis that magically offset the floating harmonies in the original. Unexpectedly, the intrigue of this liberal variation on "Something Sweet" has little to do with Dolphy and presents a strange connection to a certain musician that lurks right below the surface of this music for much more obvious reasons. I find Tadic and Kühn's flowing long lines in the piece to be incredibly similar to Allan Holdsworth in their specific harmonic content, and it becomes for me a tantalizing glimpse into the post-bop jazz sources of Holdsworth's music that are often obscured by his timbral and phrasal innovations.
A strange connection, but it's downright uncanny to consider Newton's history. In fact, I know nothing of Newton aside from this album and his work on the two albums by The New Tony Williams Lifetime where he lent a warm subtle funk-tinged muscle to some peak excursions by none other than Allan Holdsworth. 1975's Believe It is one of the landmarks in fusion history, foreshadowing numerous developments in the next decade and holding up damn well 20 years later. 1976's Million Dollar Legs holds up quite well too in its peak moments (e.g. the explosive ending track "Inspirations of Love"), but of course suffers from a few throwaway cuts and greater concessions to the commercial funk fusion zeitgeist. Williams' supple, loose heaviness was just the icing on the cake of memorable melodies and warm, round, legato heaviness, though Alan Pasquale's electric piano work in that group sure seems timid and merely functional if we're thinking about Kühn's scorchery here. The unforgettable melody of "Snake Oil" that leads off the 1975 classic is taken for a 81-second ride here, surely with light-hearted intentions as Nauseef spits out some fucked up electronics and digital drum sounds into the slashing splatters that overlay the repeated catchy core melody. It bears observing that the overdriven dirty sound of the disc is actually closer to the original McLaughlin/Young version of Lifetime, while at the same time Newton's bass guitar is firmly planted in the Believe It-->One of a Kind-->Brand X-->Atavachron-->Tribal Tech-->etc continuum and Tadic's guitar playing owes much more to Holdsworth, not to mention Starless and Red era King Crimson (an aspect of the Tadic/Nauseef synergy best heard on Dark's Tamna Voda, an album as mind-blowing and intense as the present one), than to McLaughlin. For my tastes, any combination of all these fusion building blocks is bound to be bountiful.
I found this rather strange remark about the album buried in a Kühn bio page during my googling for this review: "Here, combining the influences of Béla Bartók, Eric Dolphy, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, and Tony Williams' Lifetime, he set new standards for a contemporary and distinctively European blend of concert music, rock, and jazz." Sure, there are two Dolphy covers, fair enough, though they sound almost nothing like Dolphy save for the lifted harmonies. The Hendrix and Lifetime bits are pretty obvious, but I don't get the Bartok and Beefheart references. Maybe it's just that I take for granted the sort of great, asymmetrical Drumboing around Nauseef dabbles in here. But I thought it would be fun to share this quote if only for amusement value. "distinctively European"??? Whoa, where did that come from? A bizarre nonsequitur if I've ever seen one. The world could get along quite well without nonsensical PR blather like this. At the least the author has great taste in music.
The Bill Bruford flavorings of Nauseef's playing here is almost too obvious to mention, and somehow it's not suprising to see a quote on the Nauseef/Tadic joint website from Bruford (1991 interview in the Wire) praising it. I recommend visiting that page if you don't have this album, because there are three sound clips you can weigh against my present gushing. They also quote Henry Kaiser's effusive praise, and with his well-documented love for electric Miles, it definitely makes a lot of sense that he was blown away by this album. After all, major rhythmic differences aside, that is the most obvious dirty avant-fusion this album owes a major debt to and I think this album would be as likely to thrill an electric Miles fan as a King Crimson fan or a fan of the more creative strains of 90s fusion like Scott McGills' Hand Farm, Attention Deficit, etc.
CMP has an impressive and singular legacy, but I can't think of another CMP release (not counting the priceless ethnomusicological stuff) that has stung me this hard. Bill Milkowski's nice historical overview of the label suggests I'm not the only one accounting this album in a special category.
~Michael Anton Parker
Like a woozy greco-roman art-deco sun-marine destroyer, "Pollution" is the revolution in sound abounding like a cantankerous cacophonic cloud surrounding the shrouding pale. Franco Battiato's first two masterfully pieced-together reliefs give more respite and resolve than any reconstituted weed or leaf between your gritting teeth. This is and was evermore shall beast. It beat and bleat and breathe avant-garde idiomatically auto-didactically entrenched inestimably on electronic stifled sullen proclamation. In rough-hewn dedication to breaking fashions and hodge-podging his own meshed sonic clothing exterior marked refuting to be sparked by nothing less than cyan matter not no god art alive, striving writhing googolplex cortex brain matter splatter jumble yaya across the plains rebuffing sage and subtly sprayed with the age of 'future we upon us,' this classic from the early year of 1972 and paired up toddy-boo with it's predecessor "Fetus" stressing and genuflecting before this newly constructed shrine spine supper sublime. These are two distinct and spectacularly brilliant albums shining brightly to the foreground of the mind's eye imagination-speak. It is simply no wonder that they are still aeons ahead of their time. He and those works are a haze pathogen to the very core and crux of the creative lifeforce itself - nevermores and wheretofores will undoubtedly not be able to be refracted sharply enough from the stuff of alien threshing heaving the chest, rings the navigation incessant, blessing the present most pleasant.
There’s a particular scene from the too-little-seen The Woman Chaser, a film based on Charles Willeford’s pulp novel of the same name, that periodically pops into my head. In it the story’s protagonist, a sociopathic used car salesman turned movie director, hires a young blues guitarist to score his fledgling film. His one directive: “I want you to play as loud & mean as you can.” I’m always on safari for this sort of thing- music played by guys (and occasionally, gals) who take the Modern label sides of John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins as their templates for frying fuses and blowing amps, tone and attitude trumping finesse and technique. Luckily there are many that fit the bill, from pioneers like Hop Wilson and Slim Green to more recent purveyors represented by much of the Fat Possum roster. Louisiana Red also belongs among the anointed and this album from ’82 originally waxed for the B.O.B. label revels in a stripped-down, speaker-imploding sound. Red plugs in and unceremoniously plays eleven tracks, sometimes pausing for anecdotal asides, but generally sticking to the task of keeping the needles angled well into the red. The slashing opener “E Street Bridge” sets the bar for intensity, a single excoriating chord scalding the mics with acidic electricity. Crank the volume dial and the effect cements into an all-enveloping auditory ring. Red’s vocals aren’t particularly fetching or inspired, scarred by the dual pipes-eroding agents of liquor and cigarettes, but they do the trick. Besides it’s the tone and feel that matters most here. “Sadie Lee” and “Back Door Friend” are all broken glass strums and barbwire string shredding, millionth-something missives aimed at enterprising two-timing women. Thankfully, Red reels back the ugly misogyny that pollutes some of his earlier work (see his tune “First Degree” on the Tomato label for a bitter taste of that fetid fruit) and turns in a tight little record, heavy on jangling primitive riffs and free of the feel-good sentiments that pass for the blues in friendlier, less socially-crippled circles.
Out of the many records cut by the Doctor Umezu Band during the 80s, this 1985 session released by the German label ITM is the only one I've come across. If this discography (Japanese only) is accurate, it's their sixth album, so I can only wonder how their music developed. In any case, it's a wonderful early slice of the soulful and vibrant sound Kazutoki Umezu has continued to mine for the past twenty years and it marks the period when he first came into contact with the thriving post-jazz underground in Manhattan, then in the peak phase of the celebrated "downtown scene". Umezu would go on to collaborate extensively with downtown folks, making the trek over from Tokyo often enough to become a familiar presence at the Knitting Factory and releasing a handful of notable records, highlighted by 1987's Abandon in duo with cellist Tom Cora and the 1992 masterpiece Eclecticism, possibly the finest hour for both Umezu (not counting Omedeto) and guitarist Marc Ribot (sitting right alongside his monstrous Rootless Cosmopolitans) and one of the truly essential documents of that era that captures a prototypical downtown synthesis of post-Ayler jazz, rock, swing, blues, surf, and funk.
Eight Eyes and Eight Ears is an unmistakably dated album; Takeharu Hayakawa's electric bass guitar and Takashi Kikuchi's drumkit never stray from the sort of lockstep stiff funk grooves that ruined countless albums in the 1980s as the human race suffered through the growing pains of drum machine technology. I generally can't abide that slick, mechanical rhythmicality, but I count this disc as an example of how great music can be made within any aesthetic framework, no matter how depraved. I won't go so far as saying these grooves actually breathe (to hear that achieved in the most profound way within the same rhythmic zeitgeist, look no further than Bill Connors' timeless work from the same period), but they do move in all the right directions to enhance the explosive joyfulness of Umezu and Hiroaki Katayama's catchy riffing and squealing, so the music transcends its dated sound. There's also an impressive level of nuance and craft in Hayakawa's playing on the ever-problematic bass guitar.
In "Dekoboko-Yama/The Bumby Mountain on the Bank", Hayakawa and Kikuchi jump from the gate with a punchy, slightly jagged groove that could almost pass for something off Massacre's Killing Time (but of course neither this album nor any other album ever made short of The Stick Men gets anywhere close to the rhythmic ecstacy of the mythical Frith/Laswell/Maher unit). Somehow these clipped and clear rhythms remind me of a video game that I played a few times when I was a kid called Pac Man, in which the player maneuvers a crude round yellow thing with eyes and a pie wedge mouth meant to suggest a head whose sole purpose is to traverse a maze and chomp on little electronic nuggets without getting eaten by other critters from the zoo of vintage digital minimalism. Curiously enough, via overdubbing Hayakawa also provides some soft background electric guitar spikes alongside his ripping bass line, as if to make explicit reference to Massacre, though only briefly and weakly before Umezu and Katayama take over with twin sax riffing and the tune playfully bounces between themes and tempi with a passing episode of jackhammer breakdowns a la Etron Fou Leloublan.
The use of overdubbing, while fairly limited, tasteful and effective (except Umezu's superfluous piano jabs in the first track), is another aspect of the album that pins the music down to an era when jazz records became produced more like pop albums than attempts to capture the feeling of a live band. Happily Umezu survived this with a session that invigorates and delights twenty years later instead of the hideously popified skeletons in the 80s closet of creative jazz peers like Oliver Lake and Jamaaladeen Tacuma.
While I can't say there's anything truly great about the rhythm section playing here, it maintains a consistent creative edge and justifies the post-funk alternatives to bop rhythms as an expansion of the jazz lexicon that isn't limited to slick commercialism. What makes the record great is Umezu's tunes and his killer alto sax and bass clarinet playing in tandem with Hiroaki Katayama's tenor sax. Their styles are so idiomatic they almost seem quotational (Rollins, Ayler, Adderly, etc), so everything boils down to good old fashioned melody and soul carried on a fat, beautiful tone. These guys have the gutbucket soulfulness and melodic clarity of George Cartwright in the classic early days of Curlew, most certainly a kindred group in the pursuit of avant-garde party music at the time and probably the most musically successful. The sheer tunefulness of the music is hard to resist; almost every melody on this album sounds lifted from a traditional folk tune of some East European or Mediterranean variety or another, and counts as an early entry to the rich explosion of klezmer-infused creative music of the past two decades. A precursor to some of Ken Vandermark's great reconciliations of post-Ayler reed rawness and concrete grooviness, tracks like "Keep Your Hands Off the Door" find Umezu and Katayama in hard funk riffing synchrony with bass guitar and drumkit grooves going hard and deep into the pocket, only to rip into unbridled screams of passion a moment later.
Free of any blemishes I could cite, Eight Eyes and Eight Ears is a minor classic of light-hearted post-jazz that's gassed me up everytime I've pulled it out since it first passed through my stereo some six years ago and I've yet to be disappointed by an Umezu disc.
~Michael Anton Parker
Bouncy merry. Elastic plasticene walls crumbling all around you.. this is the sound that first emanated from Kentish England: the thrall of Canterbury is difficult to resist and it persists in elevating spirits to lofty regions of heaven-soaked, lighthearted jazzy cakes tenderly eked out from the ovens of Miss Bliss Blitz. There is hardly a genre that exudes hopping mad happiness and a life devoid of strife than this.
Non-native purveyors we have here, spilling into our ears with their whalloping dose of syncopated perfection, a confection to be treasured above others. "Volume 1" is all there ever was and evermore shall be - an exercise in Belgian finery of the aural kind - melting euphoric chutzpah and hoo-hag-haw. In the 70's, there is much to the reflection of comely musical goodness to appear peeking from this corner.
Strains of tippled sax lines ripple from the stratosphere, doubling over and frolicking with hefty swatches of patched keyboard jelly in a near-acrimony.. conversing in playfully teasing, tersely intertwined, jocular retorts.
Lumpy-bumpy beds of "I can't believe he just chunked me, all thumply and bo-humply with the four thick-stringed splatter, haltering to falter all over my face," leaving crinkum-crankum splotches of bass in its place.
Drum somersaulter kicks the kit, stop-start her, time-keeping grandfather tick-tockler, filling the crevices in the morass of this musical crevasse. It's no wonder that it is easy to get lost in this marmalade jammed all up onto the shelves' high cupboard.
Guitar lines snake.
Vocal discourse woos.
- - - - -
Wash your own hair clean and listen for yourself, never officially issued on CD:
~Cesar Montesano
The pleasures of Kenneth Norville can be a tough sell to listeners weaned on the lingoes of hardbop or free jazz. Norvo’s xylophone-derived style on vibes favors the instrument’s most dulcet and mellifluous associations. No quadruple mallet dissonance a la Dickerson or Hutcherson here. No eerie, gravity-nullifying sustains either. But what’s not always appreciated is his placeholder as one of the progenitors of free jazz. “Dance of the Octopus,” waxed way back in 1933 with the spare chamber combo of guitar, bass and Benny Goodman’s bass clarinet presaged the free-interplay of Tristano’s “Intuition” by fifteen years. Taped two decades later these trio sides for Fantasy were as adventurous in their own way and an evolution of Norvo’s earlier incarnation with Charles Mingus and Tal Farlow. Bassist Red Mitchell succeeded Mingus in ’52 while Jimmy Raney joined as a replacement for an injured Farlow in ’53. Norvo recalls that formal arrangements were rarely if ever employed and that collective improvisation was the strategy on every tune. The extrasensory nature of the trio’s rapport makes the absence of charts all the more suprising. Norvo may be the nominal leader, but when the three leave the starting gate all are equals. Raney swaps lead and accompanist roles without ceding a single wrong note, his delicate strumming approximating the scuttle of a brushed snare beneath his partners’ solos. The placement of Mitchell’s rotund pizzicato is always the harmonic equivalent of a bull’s eye. His may not be as edgy and angry as Mingus’ arco stylings in the earlier unit, but the trade-off arrives in a more consistent and cohesive swing. Norvo adjusts amicably to his colleagues youthful bop proclivities, encouraging their swift interlocking runs on tracks like the mercurial “’Deed I Do,” a number that finds Raney and Mitchell in full gallop race of neck-and-neck single notes. The three are like super-intelligent laboratory rats negotiating the twisting contrapuntal mazes of each track, the figurative cheese earned through flawlessly executed circuits from start to finish. Appended to the original fifteen titles are four more commemorating Farlow’s return to the ensemble. Sweet and charming on the surface, the extrasensory interplay in abundance here could put the vast majority of harder hitting ensembles to shame.
[this ROW respectfully dedicated to Tom Djll- mallets & planks, amigo!]
There are two reasons why I think this is a very interesting disc to talk about. First off, there's a clutch of songs on here I'm really addicted to; I'd rate this is as an essential obscurity for fans of the two or three 60s pop prototypes it mines. Secondly, it mines these prototypes so unabashedly and successfully that it offers a solid conceptual handle on the phenomenon of idiomaticity so central to discussions of the avant-garde music in which it often fades into the ether. So I shall regale you on my currently preferred very non-avant-garde song-drugs and hope we walk away with some thoughts more broadly useful.
Before going any further, let me as frank as possible. I'm obsessed with The Byrds. You need to know this, because there are songs on this disc that basically sound like The Byrds except with the familiar male vocals swapped for splendid female vocals. Simple enough, but, damn, this is just what the doctor ordered. I've been listening to The Byrds absurdly often for the past few years, catching up on an timeless and astounding chapter in the history of song music. Writing this review, I'm tempted to go off on some marathon tangent about The Byrds, but it's really not necessary.
Saying "sounds like" is the big point I'd like to dwell on here. I've played the first five Byrds albums literally dozens of times each in the past year or two alone, with an almost academic obsession of knowing the songs in and out, forwards and backwards. In a way I've tried to simulate the experience of being there in 1965 when the first one hit, spending time with each album and moving slowly forward chronologically as I "release" each one to myself. So I chance to get this Vejtables disc about a month or two ago and, wham, it hits me hard right away and as I play it over and over I keep thinking "damn, this has to be a Byrds cover", but I really couldn't place any of the songs in a specific way at all. What a bizarre feeling, to be playing songs over and over thinking they are covers of songs I know in and out, forwards and backwards. It drove me nuts, but only in the cognitive background as my total immersive pleasure in The Vejtables jangle-blissed out the foreground to the point where it really didn't matter. So I decide to write this review and force myself to get to the bottom of this matter. After having played this Vejtables disc a good 20-30 times (or at least the handful of songs that really kill me on here), just yesterday I finally looked at the song titles, credits, liner notes, etc for the first time. No hint of there being a Byrds cover. I played the first five Byrds albums back-to-back to see if I could catch any quotes or the like. Nada. Wow. There's not a single Byrds song that sounds specifically similar to these songs, and in fact there's only one cover song on this disc and I'd never heard the original before. These songs are originals penned by a short-lived San Francisco era band in the period of 1965-66 that only had one song to even crack the top 100 chart. But still, damn, there are a handful of songs here that really truly feel like The Byrds but with a great female singer! And they're as good an example of that formula as you'd hope for!
Then again, maybe these songs really sound like some other pop group from the same era, rendered anonymous in my mind through the boggling quantity of similar music made in that era. For several years about half of my music-listening has been devoted to the pop music of 1965-1969, trying to sort my way through the endless stream of great songs put on record in that seminal burst of rock creativity, but it still can blur together in the most unsettling ways. The blurring is enhanced by the simple fact that I don't really pay close attention to this kind of music in general when I'm listening. Once in a while, I get totally fixated in rapture, but it's generally some kind of soundtrack to other life/mind activities, and my listening concentration is generally reserved for avant-garde free improv. As well as I know a big chunk of this music, I'm continually amazed by the degree of idiomaticity achieved in this domain. Bands would literally spring up in every town across America and elsewhere virtually imitating the latest breaking development in pop songcraft. Seemingly every permutation of elements was tested for every song template. Sound familiar? Yep, this is the recipe that all traditional music follows to some extent and in a global socio-informational context like the 20th century the process can run amok. Take a look at the history of jazz and 90s dance music for two profoundly analogous examples. Idioms get beaten into the ground and every tiny twist in the formula is like a new scene, to the utter delight of the folks who've installed the right musical grammars in their minds. You like X? Well, here's a few hundred other things you're sure to like. Modulo the sociological scope of the artform, it's really no different in essence from any traditional music, whether it's Indian ragas, Italian folk dances, klezmer, or whatever. Finding a musical formula that works is vastly more useful and desirable to human beings than finding a new one. Tradition will always be deeper than novelty. 60s pop is traditionalist business-as-usual gone exponential in the incipient throes of the information era.
And thank the computationally intractable universe for it, because a band like The Vejtables counts about as much for me as any of the canonized and famed groups of the era. It's a reminder of how much a culture's canons can be arbitrary shams. For many fans of 60s pop, this disc might seem second-rate, but it's first-rate to me. The proof is in the playback frequency. I often play pop albums in my bathroom stereo while showering, shaving, etc. Half-awake and blurry-eyed in the morning, I'll just press the "play" button without having to worry about selecting music for that little chunk of quality listening time. In practice, I simply leave the same disc in the player until I grow weary of it in some way. It's a great way to really test a pop album. Last year I had one of the Byrds albums in there for over a month! So here's the data: this Vejtables disc lasted for almost two weeks before getting ejected. Actually, sometimes I feel guilty for playing something too much when I think about the hundreds of discs I've got sitting around waiting to even get a single audition. I can't say I'd really gotten weary of it as much as I'd felt I really "mastered" it well enough. Well, the only way to put this Vejtables disc to rest is to review it! In the course of playing it again and again and really paying attention in the hope of finding something interesting to say, I'm sure to wear it out. At least temporarily, that is, because there's some songs here that'll make my permanent high-rotation 60s pop canon.
"Cold Dreary Morning" sets my spine tingling with warm joy, and I can play it repeatedly without losing much of the effect. In the comically elaborate quest for the gems amongst the endless piles of filler undertaken by obsessive pop-sound-processors like me, it's songs like this that justify everything. Like those others, the song is oh so familiar sounding. I swear it could be a cover of a tune from the first Fairport Convention album or Eclection, two of the folk-rock platters I'm hopelessly addicted to. "It's a cold dreary morning. It's a drab, crabby day... Watch men live or watch men die, and there's no difference...We're a cold, dreary people; we're a drab, crabby bunch..." These bleak words are sung with such cheerful, serene, Grace Slick style authority that they stand in sublime contrast to the scrappy, upbeat, uplifting feeling of the song.
As far as the scrappiness goes, chalk it up to the fantastic drumkit work on this track. It's pretty basic playing, but the rhythms have such exuberance and vim I can focus in on them alone and get my jollies. The cymbals get absolutely smashed and bashed in an unusually dense offering of accents, a handful per measure at times. The rawness and energy reminds me of how important the drumkit work in classic late 60s Fairport Convention was to making that music folk-ROCK and not just folk. It's all in good clean time, but with a restless, almost punkish energy and she really bashes the living daylights out of those cymbals. For a 60s band, the gender is a surprise. Nowadays it's bad taste to refer to the gender of instrumentalists, though sadly still a common habit, but in the 60s it was a bold and rare phenomenon to challenge gender norms and people took that stuff pretty seriously. Having just finally read the wonderfully informative essay in the liner notes to this Vejtables disc, I'm surprised to learn that this awesome drumkit playing was the work of a teenage girl who started playing drumkit about one week before her first gig with the band in 1965! It's a nice story: her dad was a drumkitter and always wanted his little girl to take up the trapset, but she resisted until a chance event at a rock club got her invited to join a band as the drumkitter, at which point her many years of piano lessons, love of music, and natural singing talent suddenly came to the fore and made for a group that launched into a promising career before anyone could blink. Even if the original motivation to have Jan Errico play in the band was heavily based on the gimmick-aspect of her gender and nubile attractiveness (there was another band in the same scene making a big splash with a female behind the traps), she turned out to be a real talent as a instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter, all the more remarkable for her young age and lack of experience.
The group got a lot of minor breaks, but no major breaks, and Errico left the band in 1966. She wound up in The Mojo Men, a band I'm looking forward to checking out soon. Before that lineup dissolved, it had released two exceptional singles to little response and tried to release a single under Jan Errico's name as a solo artist, for which Errico adopted the name "Jan Ashton". She recounts: "I picked that name because it sounded British. I adored Paul McCartney and his girlfriend was Jane Asher." The single was never released, and the band moved on to various lineups without Errico. "Cold Dreary Morning" was the A-side and went criminally unreleased until 1985's issue of Nuggets, Vol. 7: Early San Francisco. The equally great B-side, "Smile Smile Smile" is one of the two Errico-vocal tracks on the disc that finally saw the light of day on this 1995 Sundazed reissue that collects every last morsel the band laid down. The other Errico cut unveiled here is a killer alternate version of "I Still Love You", the A-side to the band's first single from 1965.
1965 is fairly early in the game for this stuff, and here's a band who really dished it up about as well as the big names of the same months. They were from the same San Francisco scene that the Beau Brummels came from, and shared both musical qualities and the seminal support of the Autumn record label. I've spun the first Brummels album and their other early work a few times, but it hasn't stuck and is pretty well filed in the archives at this point, whereas The Vejtables are in heavy rotation. It's not just because of Errico's great female vocals, though; the tracks with male vocals that comprise the bulk of the band's output are excellent too. Historically, though, the Beau Brummels are a very important band. They were the first California band to break big and were even a significant influence on The Byrds. On the other hand, The Vejtables are a real obscurity at this point. It's really enlightening to see how all this music was happening around the same time and interacting in all sorts of subtle and retrospectively surprising ways. On a site billing itself as The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco, I found a "Chronology of San Francisco Rock 165-1969" documenting a remarkable event: "May 14, 1965 “Boss of the Bay,” KYA presents the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, Beau Brummels, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the Vejtables, at Civic Auditorium." So The Vejtables were contenders in the scene for sure. Uncovering the tangled history of these song styles and listening to some of these gems tempers the tendency to put famous bands like The Byrds, or even the Brummels, on a pedestal above the also-rans and lose sight of the arbitrariness that drives the successes and failures of the commercial music business. I'd be the last person to question the monumental greatness of The Byrds, but, damn, a few of these Vejtables tracks with Errico's vocals are right up there!
Another historically intriguing connection is the role of Sly Stone (then known as Sylvester Stewart before he became a pop icon) in the group's music. According to an excellent article on Stone, "After Stone took courses from Vallejo Junior College in music theory, he met pioneering radio DJ Tom Donahue in 1964, who asked Sly to record and produce for his Autumn Records." Errico and Stone knew each other from before the Vejtables days, and Stone was an active artistic factor in the recording of the group's early singles, cited for an advanced creative sensibility and studio panache.
There's more to be said about the un-self-conscious acceptance of the traditionalist essence and the quest for refined idiomaticity that marked these groundbreaking days in the history of pop music, which is hopelessly lost in today's sterile mass-market music culture with its tenuous adoption of the originality criterion and discouragement of cover tunes. The lone cover tune here is Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on my Mind". Paxton created the song in the Fall of 1964, and by the time The Vejtables took a stab at it in early 1966, three other acts had already hit the charts with their own versions! Mitchell Trio, Peter, Paul, & Mary, and Marianne Faithful, to be specific. What's more, according to William Ruhlmann's researches for All Music Guide, the song went on to enter the songbooks of a boggling array of acts in the following years: Charley Pride, Hank Locklin, Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton, The Move, Neil Diamond, Bill Anderson, Chet Atkins, Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Glen Campbell, Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, José Feliciano, Flatt & Scruggs, Anne Murray, Willie Nelson, the Seekers, and Hank Snow! I can't imagine something like that happening in the current popular music climate. In any case, it's a damn fine song, and I'd be surprised if I'd enjoy anyone's version more than the Vejtables'. Then again, Sandy Denny's takes are unfortunate gaps in my collection of her uniformly impeccable work, and she's likely to set the standard. It appears that she issued a take on 1967's pre-Fairport Sandy and Johnny and an alternate version came out on 1970's It's Sandy Denny.
If the six Errico cuts leave me with a nebulously delicious "déjà entendu" feeling, the generous helping of eleven non-Errico male-vocal tracks on the disc are downright maddening. I hardly have the fortitude to investigate the matter, especially since they largely mine a Them/Yardbirds type idiom I'm not really attracted to or versed in. As far as I can tell, they're credited as originals, but you can't get more idiomatic than a cut like "Feel the Music", with its blatant nods to the famous song "________". Aaaaargh!! Those blanks are maddening! In any case, with those six Errico vocal cuts, I'd file this disc under "essential 60s rock", but even without them the remaining cuts are strong enough to warrant a hearty "recommended for specialized lovers of the era" rating. The proof is in the playback, and as much as I pick out the Errico tracks for high rotation, I've let the full disc spin a good many times without any urges to pull the plug on the group's completely uncelebrated later work as it hobbled on its last legs through various lineups before crashing to the history books.
~Michael Anton Parker
Is your bicycle broken? Don't let the joke run along, getting mighty sprightly ahead of you, strong stroke those spokes and become a muse sick wish with this man. The terrain is the map, scraping jiggly-wiggly pedal-metal, this is designed of the wide end of the track with lots of latitude for your longitudinal attitude readjustment frock cemented into the zone relegated for and scored in the free-form stratosphere invisible ink paste gumbo stilt throw. Charts? What charts? Improvisational is where it starts and barring one elegiacally perfected tune room at the 'Rock'n Roll Station,' reaching seekers freaking for a fixated melody embellished plea are left in the lurch sans the search.
Squelching Neanderthal parrot. Charlie parks one lip asleep skip town. Blubbering chiggle-chaggled and you feel the teeth dangle impressionistic sputtering farts, soft squawks, rippling retorts amidst staccato sharps poking the jolly jester in the arse. Feel the breathing become part of the music, flittering mouse patter leads the trail to comforting and familiar, yet obtuse squall and response alliteration saucier and fluffier until pup-puh-puh-pum-pumpum-pumpeh makes smile.
Machinery. Strained kite string lollygag horn trill. Randomly interspersed impromptu comments seeming story in French. Before you know it, your shift at the fantasy avant-garde factory is over and you can go home to the next song.
Making a horse neigh. Staying the course lain. Jacques Berrocal has the power to ensconce with his deft use of independently structured spontaneous creation. These are ideas that may have been toyed around with before, but were not dropped to trollop unsuspecting ear cheers releasing fears that continual beat impressions are necessary for the mind to make connection directions with what seem like obtuse chortles colliding in space, bouncing, and the swerving wending the same path immediately.
The doormat reads 'everything is possible' - you are at the original 'second pirate session of a strange wax:' "Rock'n Roll Station" - Nurse With Wound covered this tune to great effect, naming an entire marvelous album afterwards in nepotistic frenzy alluding to the steady dour retelling in repetition of Vincent Canby accompanied by steady 3-notes-bass thrung-thum-blugneah wheel spinning crank clickety-clack interference bells, whine on rubber, words slightly morphing elongated syllable perplex. 'Jacques bicycle is music to my ears, do you remember?' Final wheel screech click-tap matched for tring-a-ling fades to coughing, and frog, lighter, poured water, laughter, muted bike vamp, utensil plated tangle stop.
'Bric-a-brac' is over 25 minutes and takes the entirety of side two into submission. This is opus direction, outré style. Dining with pleasure, listening to all the sounds around wooing for flickered dispersion. Mounted violin parapet intermittently stroking a straddle, evolving rubato in anomalous supportive crumble. All in chip fin and disquieting escapes the face making master powerful, juiced avant-pounce by the ounce, poured in a splash at a time. Incorporating footfalls, plate wobble, pot lid organic percussion, string struck
precision childlike mercurial atonal pluck, megaphone grunts, metal sheet wobbler, requisite pterodactyl shrills from elephantine monster spills of sonic departure ticket-stamped voucher felling the glacier hearts for the 'out-there' that is easy to feel 'in-here.' Sterile is not to be, cacophony reigns supreme and ropes the corralled scene warm blanket sheen away to cortex inner drum posed leaning to. Not to think of no, periodic shifts to rudimentary follow me simple attention. Getting surprised and being able, on follow stride short sublime, to
then reel from getting trapped in the belly walrus shell again, a piano comping akimbo percussive scatter jagged swagger introduces itself and a winding horn innuendo distend blow. Coiled runs afterwards and the return of the sun melody 3-note upright-chunked stomp from the only verifiably structured tune, now accomplice typewriter in tow, rhythm sectionally lunch lurch unclothed jubilant quasi-musical stenography replete - a new narrator recalls fragmentary discussion of another whole whale of a history tale all together, a French accent giblet freshly mustachioed story: 'interested simultaneously by moving.. and by noises... like music... [...] you know what, I am just waiting for Vince... I mean, Rock'n Roll Station... I'm just waiting for him... always in love, but is not.. here.. anyway, go home, go on.. [...] during a surrealistic demonstration by the Camelots of the king... what a strange thing he is making me doing... what a strange story.. you know I don't know what I am doing there.. you know, really... what a strange story, what a strange thing;' fade the flock out, big hawk lands throned. Swoon baboon new golden dongle spoon soon, put your cap tarts on, staring ague eyes open meden agan agar-agar. Everything is possible and this album just made it probable. 'We can do what we want to do.' Hear here.
~ Cesar Montesano
Steve Lacy may have monopolized the magazine polls over the years, but few would contest Evan Parker’s mutual place amongst soprano nobility. Each man wears his virtuosity prominently like brightly-hued plumage on this 1985 concert meeting, making the pate-slapping moments of stupefaction at their joined ingenuity manifold. What’s even more gratifying and downright entrancing is how each man bends to the others’ ticks and preferences: Parker embracing Lacy’s meticulous melodicism, and Lacy tailoring to Parker’s prevailing tonal latitude. The accords are so amicable that if not for the stereo channel separation, their identities could easily overlap and blur during certain segments. Listeners who off-handedly lodge pejoratives like “aloof’ or “overly-academic” at either player would be wise to spend some time assimilating the warm and inquisitive colloquies of this set. “Full Scale” spools out with a narrative improvisatory logic intact across a full third of an hour, countless expository notes and tones issuing forth from the respective raised fish horns. In the waning minutes it’s Lacy, not Parker, who coarsens his tone with growling trills and stutters prior to a final tandem display of spiraling airborne acrobatics. Everything is accomplished with surprisingly slight reliance on the sort of extended techniques so often used to gauge an arch improviser’s mettle. Parker’s storied circular breathing doesn’t even enter until the final minutes and then only for a brief spate. With “Relations” the pair once again commences chatting in limpid, tonally-forthright language. While the disc omits the solo recitals that preceded the duo portion it does contain three bonus “Nocturnal Chirps” taped after the audience’s exit from the recital hall. Miniatures by comparison to the main pieces, they still offer plenty of gorgeous reciprocity and with a fidelity that feels even more inclusive of the performance space. Another side perk comes with the photos of saxophonists together in the accompanying booklet. Lacy shows himself among the few who can match the stern countenance of Parker when so inclined. And the flying saucer street lamp cover makes me smile too.
With the Blues, more than most idioms, the onus lies not on the song, but on the performer to stamp it with his own peculiarities and personality. It’s the chief reason why a tune like “Catfish Blues” can reveal a fresh catch even on its nth reading, providing the bluesman doing the fishing is using his own pole and bait. This collection of folklorist George Mitchell’s field recordings from ’67 and ‘68 makes that case in bold letters with the caps lock emphatically in place. Deviating from the first volume, which features a dozen names, this second sampler shaves the cast down to three, five if you count Robert Nighthawk and James “Peck” Curtis (dubbed The Blues Rhythm Boys) backing Houston Stackhouse on the final four cuts. Joe Callicott gets eleven, including two vintage 1930 sides from his youth, and R.L. Burnside receives ten. The music is definitely of the Delta and its adjacent Hill Country zip codes, but takes an array of surprising detours. Callicott sounds like Mississippi John Hurt might if the latter man had the wind in sails sucked away by chronic insolvency and world weariness. A warbly yodel invests his “Lonesome Katy Blues” floating above an anchoring acoustic strum. On “Laughing to Keep From Crying” the steady buzz of a bass string keeps rhythm as he voices vignettes that advance an almost Buddhist mindset: life is suffering so you might as well have a long hard chuckle in the face of inevitable and unending adversity. Burnside’s program pays heavy respect to Muddy Waters on tunes like “Goin’ Down South” and “I Rolled and I Tumbled,” but there’s far more menace and angst imbued to his versions. Early minimalist takes on tunes like “Skinny Woman,” where a knuckle-on-wood rhythm laces his raspy vocals to create the aural illusion of the title entity tap-dancing in clogs on spindly tree branch legs, and “Long Haired Doney” presage the misogynistic persona cultivated during his later career. Amplified and heavily soused, the Stackhouse cuts are bit incongruous with what’s come before, but Curtis’ quixotic beats and daffy cowbell accents readily fulfill the requisite originality quotient.
Parts of New Orleans are still underwater. Large portions of the populace remain displaced; their residences devoid of basic civil amenities like electricity, running water and working sewage. Hollow apologies for FEMA’s colossal fuck-up in the face of the disaster have come and gone. But saints be praised, Fats Domino was found safe and sound. If that last point reverberates with a bit of cynicism, so be it. Fats’ plight coupled with celebrity status made for good news copy. But his story was just one of hundreds of thousands of others, most of which will never receive a drop of reporter’s ink. Listening to this choice album by Tremè Brass Band over the weekend my thoughts went out to the members of the group, wondering about their whereabouts, their safety in relation to Katrina’s city-razing swathe, above all just wishing them the best. The nearly eighty-minute program here serves up a traditional Nawlins gumbo of joy and solemnity, powdered jazz stirred into a fizzy ameliorating concoction of liquid blues. Tremè celebrates Canal Street history with collective ears equally enamored of the more modern argots of postbop, funk and hip hop too.
The opening title jam ambles out on an infectious fatback meets Congo Square rhythm. Kirk Joseph’s moist tuba burbles a cool-stepping bass vamp as the saxes of Eliot “Stackman” Callier and Fredric Kemp riff and solo boisterously across the syncopations. The trumpets of James Andrews and the higher profile Kermit Ruffins (the pup of the band at “30”) join trombonist Corey Henry as a hot-blowing brass battery. Benny Jones, Sr. and Lionel Batiste, Sr. supply the serviceable snapping beats on snare and bass drums respectively, the latter man also furnishing raspy lyrics on the vociferous vocal numbers. Most of the men have direct ties to other city brass band royalty like the Rebirth and Dirty Dozen outfits. They cover the typical bases, delving into lengthy expositions of “Hindustan,” “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and “The Old Rugged Cross” along with couple original blues. Four of the tunes even find a pair of fearless Japanese tourists joining the rambunctious professionals on borrowed banjo and piano. Some cuts are overly circuitous with a fair amount of ramshackle riffing replacing tightly rehearsed charts, but if anything the roughshod informality only adds to the listening experience. News agency opportunists from CNN to MSNBC have taken recently to expounding endlessly on the indomitable Spirit of New Orleans. It’s right here for the hearing as far as I’m concerned.
After encountering LaDonna Smith for the first time last week and witnessing a fabulous performance, I was happy to recall this fine recording and pull it out for some overdue proper attention. Smith is one of the pillars of improvised music culture in the US, especially known for her duo with Davey Williams, a musical partnership running for around 30 years and still going strong as I heard from the violinist herself last weekend. Smith's writing and editorial presence in the pages of The Improvisor has been registered in my mind ever since I devoured a few issues of that remarkable magazine as a nascent free improv fan, and I'm pleased to report that the publication is still alive online these days, with a compilation of intriguing essays well worth digging through. While Smith's reputation as an underground legend must surely owe a lot to her irresistible spirit of creativity and immersion in live performance I was finally able to enjoy first-hand, she's a formidable improv violinist and violist taken solely as a recorded entity in this trio program with Misha Feigin and Craig Hultgren recorded and released in 2000.
Misha Feigin is a key example of an artistic career paralleling the transformation of Russian culture from Communist restrictions to Capitalist freedom, and alongside so many other artists documented on Leo Records, he's a pioneer of improvised music in Russia. More than an improvisor on classical guitar and balalaika, Feigin has formed his reputation as a troubadour of sorts, bridging gaps between Russian-language and English-language audiences with his synthesis of folk tunes, improv, singing, and storytelling. While primarily capturing his skills as a pure improvisor, this disc portrays the scope and aesthetic diffusion of an artist resolving the conflicts between a foregrounded singer/storyteller role with accompaniment and an equal collective free improv format. All told, his voice weighs in as the feature on three pieces totalling about 16 minutes out of a 64-minute program. Additionally, on "Curley" his voice elevates the music considerably as a subtle element of collective interplay for one passage. On "The Singing" and "Dimensions Lost (A Giant Twang Out of the Sky)", Feigin more or less recites English poetry from his own pen, and while it's easy to cite the virtues of his wordcraft and the tremendously effective improv that Hultgren and Smith wrap around it, I honestly have found his mildly jarring accent and effusive melodrama to be a bit too much to take on repeated spins through the disc, skipping ahead to the tracks without vocals.
On the other hand, the title track and sole example of Feigin as a flat-out singer is absolutely stunning and not only bears plenty of repeated listening, but is reason enough by itself for anyone to acquire this album. Feigin's voice has both the confidence and power of a stalwart torch-bearer of some folk tradition and the uninhibited expressive urgency of scattish free improvisor, freely alternating between linguistic and non-linguistic vocal contours as he attacks the moment in genuine free interplay with Hultgren's cello and Smith's violin. It's all too rare to hear vocal improvisation suggesting some imaginary folk music and the accreted treasures of wailed melodies, holding itself accountable to no idiom in particular but accepting the underlying old-fashioned musicality shared by traditional idioms. The Russian feeling of his voice is so strong, however, that it could also just be considered a kind of Russian free folk music. I only wish that the album had a few more tracks with Feigin's unbridled vocal improv, especially since the string improv in a few pieces can veer towards tedium for all its consistent balance and craftmanship.
It's hard not to be floored by this disc after the free song music of the title track, mainly because it appears second and the disc's opener is nearly 15 minutes of flawless and profound free improv fully mining the timbral riches of the three acoustic instruments. "Summer Wind, No Sleep" is also the only piece where the trio dips into the tense and edgy abstraction associated with prototypical non-idiomatic free improv like MIC and the golden years of the Russell/Durrant pairing. Hultgren and Smith squeeze out some gripping sustained soft squeals with their bows and Feigin plucks his way into some uncharacteristically non-linear paroxysms. Delicate harmonics are given as much attention as sawing and riffing, and the mood hovers in elegaic territory contrasting with the more sprightly leanings of other pieces.
Even in this epic wonder, the trio displays its distance and independence from the free improv avant-garde. This is a kind of timeless free improv bearing no self-conscious aesthetic agenda or aversion to familiar musical habits. The tremendous compatibility among the players reflects shared old-fashioned musical values; melody, repetition, riffing, phrasal alignment, and extended motivic development are the primary stuctural concerns. With the adventurous spirit to be expected in a free improv setting balanced against a conservative Euro-centric folk/classical underpinning, the music strikes me as a free improv counterpart to the old-world strains in mid-20th century academic music, especially the full-blooded anti-hermeticism of Alfred Schnittke's string quartets. The strident, angular rhythms and narrative unfolding of Feigin's strumming patterns seem rooted in the same East European traditional folk aesthetic that Bartok and so many other pioneers of notationalism adopted to varying degrees of abstraction. Hultgren's playing in particular has the unswerving sense of purpose and control of someone playing a part in a string quartet they've committed to memory as a personal reference point. His virtuosity and confident willingness to repeat lucid motifs instead of constantly searching for new material is evidence of his success in reconciling an academic music background with free improv instead of abandoning this background and groping for a new vocabulary as so many academically-trained players tend to do in free improv situations.
Rarely using extended techniques, but freely accepting harsher sounds as part of their instrument's full timbral spectrum, Hultgren and Smith revel in the warmth and depth of bowed strings, and that's at least half the explanation for the copious rewards I've found in this album; I really just have an endless appetite for the nuances of cello, viola, and violin in pretty much any aesthetic context, but especially in a context like this where the nuances are brought well into the foreground. Of course, delicious timbres alone don't tell the whole story; it's the split-second sensitivity and creativity of master improvisors like these three that complete the timeless package.
~Michael Anton Parker
While visiting the Leo Records page for this album, I discovered that it's currently being offered as a download for a mere $4. However, if this doesn't get you the text in the CD's booklet, it's worth paying a normal price for the CD because Feigin's tale of youthful rock 'n' roll adventures in Russia is a damn good read!
Even by musicanly standards Gil Melle’s ego stretches capacious borders. The odor of the impresario is redolent throughout the self-penned liners to his Complete Blue Note Recordings (now lamentably out of print). In those pages he boldly claims ownership to a number of precedents: first Caucasian musician signed to Blue Note as a leader; inventor of the first prototype drum machine; first to incorporate electronics into a jazz setting through his pioneering ensemble the Electronauts; etc. All are boasts that whether true or false can’t help but carry a stale air of hucksterism. The notes to Primitive Modern are similarly pedantic, but they go into far greater detail toward substantiating Melle’s declarations of grandeur. His sage name-drops of Bartok, Lars Gullin and Herbie Nichols are not idle avowals. The music on the album and Quadrama, its companion in this two-fer, make a case for his prestigious musical place in unequivocal terms.
Melle’s modus is essentially one of potentially jarring juxtapositions: jazz swing with classical consonance and dissonance; simplified rhythmic meters with complex harmonic and melodic patterns, vice versa, and so on. The outcome of these cunning stabs at seemingly-incongruous synthesis is a portfolio of compositions that still possesses the ability to surprise and stimulate nearly a half century after its scripting. Outside the athletic oration of Melle’s throaty baritone saxophone, the chief reason for the albums’ success resides in the supporting cast assembled for the recording dates. Guitarist Joe Cinderella is an unsung revelation. His advanced harmonic sense equals any contemporaneous plectrist from Raney to Farlow on down and it’s combined with chance-taking brio and tonal incisiveness that make tracks like the intricate, rabbit-paced “Ironworks” such memorable excursions. Ed Thigpen’s eloquent showing on traps is strong point too. The accents and textures he achieves on the opening “Dominica,” augmenting his kit with various Melle-designed percussive devices to create an orchestral sound enhanced with surprising moments of dissonance, give the tune a forward-thinking resonance on par with the best Third Stream experiments of the era. Bassist Billy Phillips completes the group, unobtrusively shaping arco and pizz patterns that augment the unshakeable modernity of his colleagues.
A year later Melle hired session pros George Duvivier and Shadow Wilson for Quadrama with confrere Cinderella returning to the guitar stool. While not quite on the same rung of originality as its predecessor, thanks mostly to Melle’s mixing a pair of (beautifully-tweaked) Ellington standards with his own challenging pieces, the session still stacks favorably with the most adventurous jazz of the ’50s. Melle’s sojourn as a jazzman ended up relatively short-lived as he soon became distracted by full-time forays into the visual arts (both albums here showcase his own striking cover art conceptions). The urge to ponder what he would have come up with had he continued to rudder a jazz course is powerful. These early efforts remain vital representative heirlooms of a man who made it his mission to prove the pliable nature of the parameters of jazz.
[for a different take on the disc check out this Ron Wynn review]
“All modern guitarists sound the same.” That blanket assertion comes from plectrist Bill Jennings who made a name for himself in the soul jazz bands of Willis Jackson and Jack McDuff. As a provable thesis his theory accumulates veracity much like a sieve holds water, but Jennings argument does ring true on some levels and in some instances. Take guitarist René Thomas for example. On the surface his sound is very much like that of contemporaries like Jimmy Raney and Tal Farlow. Versed in swing and bebop he quickly came under the spell of Django Reinhardt, adapting some of the gypsy’s fingerings to amplified hollow body and moving to Paris with the hopes of breaking the big time with his extrapolations. The aspirations never fully reached fruition, but he did find the time and means to cut a handful of records. The pair of sessions on this Jazz in Paris collection dates from ’54 and ’56. Originally released on the Parisian Barclay imprint, they visit the transplanted Belgian in the company of two small French combos. Both units are stocked with serviceable, if unmemorable players like pianist René Urtreger and drummer José Bourguignon, the latter a minor ace with the whisk brushes on tracks like the mellow “Someone to Watch Over Me.” The Lestorian tenor saxophones of either André Ross or Serge “Bib” Monville join the leader’s limpid single-note picking on ten out of sixteen numbers.
The songbook is mostly standard bop with pieces like “A Night in Tunisia” and “Lover Man” receiving earnest, ultimately debonair readings (on the latter tune a weird and fascinating moment arises where Thomas’ normally tractable phrasing frays and self-destructs). All are terse and sweet in execution, the longest clocking at a mere 4:48. Monville’s presence on the second date creates something of a poor-man’s facsimile of the far more influential concert sides Stan Getz and Johnny Smith cut for Roost a few years earlier. Thomas taped what was easily his finest session for Riverside a few years later with modernists JR Monterose and Hod O’Brien on the payroll. It’s a better record on almost pretty much every count, but this Continental compilation still possesses ample charms. The snapshot on the back of the digipack channels Thomas’ academic inclinations in humorous fashion looking as he does like the starch-suited love child of Woody Allen and Morton Feldman. He may have moved relatively little beyond the sway of his influences, but his chops were sufficient enough to save face on a regular basis as an improviser with something significant to say.
Recorded Field Recording 001 (1999)
"The Anaplumb is a Bowling Ball Instrument with a complicated weight or "bob." This Anaplumb bob consists of a spring, three heavy vibrators at different speeds, and a large magnet. This bob hovers over another heavy magnet, creating a repellant and anti-gravitational force. The three vibrators vie for resonance with the string and the spring. The frequencies of the string and spring are determined by weight which is fluxed by the magnetic field. This is a finely balanced chaotic system." The Anaplumb, dilemma of jiggle to things without DNA, is, fear of not bouncing enough, a Bowling Ball Instrument, waiting for something not to happen, with a complicated weight or "bob", suffocating velvet mask, This Anaplumb bob, toe stuck in a machine that builds nothing, consists, the dilemma of stillness always a dance, of a spring, it's a recurring dilemma to eat stones, three heavy vibrators at different speeds, if it stopped we wouldn't notice, and a large magnet, one bark doesn't make a dog, This bob, was that enough?, hovers, it was like stubbing a toe but it didn't hurt, over another heavy magnet, it was an excuse not to scrape, creating, I don't know how to choose, a repellant and anti-gravitational force, dilemma of not stopping, The three vibrators, severe restrictions on puffiness, vie for resonance, it's more comforting than a host of other medium-sized objects, with the string, I don't know where to put my ears, and the spring, recurring dilemmas can be ignored, The frequencies, it's a recurring dilemma of bouncing too much, of the string, the alternative was stillness, and spring, I refuse to get upset when shrinking objects get larger, are determined, they told me it was okay to stick my ear there, by weight, the dilemma wasn't shared, which is fluxed, I rarely stooped over in the process, by the magnetic field, if it stopped we wouldn't notice, This, I am not jiggling, is, no jiggle lasts forever, a finely balanced chaotic system, I find jiggling difficult, the solution might lie in aggressive buzzing, The Anaplumb, nobody taught me how to jiggle, it was smaller than a whale but we couldn't measure the microscopic air pockets, and a large magnet, if it stopped we'd just start kind of aimlessly muttering, I'm willing to jiggle, This bob, there are no electric sidewalks in this part of town, alternatives prevailed, hovers, I don't know where to put my ears, it's a recurring dilemma of bouncing without funking, over another heavy magnet, nobody will just come up and stop any of us from jiggling, I don't know how to choose the angle, creating, there are no electric sidewalks in Baltimore, jiggling is almost always optional, a repellant and anti-gravitational force, necklaces that noone would wear, it's a recurring dilemma of how fast to walk, The three vibrators, alternatives prevailed, the anti-bouncing laws were discreetly repealed, vie for resonance, it's frankly okay to leave your ears at home, with the string, it was an excuse not to buzz, the request to stop wasn't clearly articulated, and the spring, I jiggle way more often than that, if it stopped we'd have nothing to talk about, The frequencies, I know where my ears are but I don't want to leave them there, not scraping a banana against a three-hundred gallon teacup, of the string, it's a recurring dilemma to not bounce enough, non-dildo vibrators are unlikely, I'm just gonna stick my ears there and call it a day, and spring, it was an excuse not to stroll along the ocean, the knob was stuck, are determined, if it stopped we wouldn't notice, by weight, the breathing will proceed regardless, I refuse to buzz on demand, which is fluxed, we can always choose the bottom one, palpations don't grow on trees, by the magnetic field, I don't know where to put my ears, I have just the spot for that, a stream is an accident if the earth is tilting in the right direction, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, there are no electric sidewalks in my home, the recurring dilemma of categorizing frequencies, The Anaplumb, I don't know how to choose, we all wish we could jiggle that way, back when those hominids were still around eight-hundred years ago this stainless steel park was a zoo, it's a recurring dilemma of re-entering the room, gravity and rigid objects are purely obedient, the observation of disobedience stymied by the act of observation, a Bowling Ball Instrument, which recurring dilemma should we suffer?, if it stopped we'd have to practice paradiddles, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, I don't know how to choose, everybody knows Swinging Steve, hands and fingers are like rusted rollercoasters missing unstrategically unplaced rails, gravity and rigid objects are purely obedient, the observation of disobedience stymied by the act of observation, with a complicated weight or "bob", I don't know where to put my ears, I know where my ears are, my ears are around here somewhere, if it stopped we'd have to start something else, I may or may not be jiggling right now, anaplumb, nobody taught me how to jiggle, bouncing is optional, before breaking it often worked, This Anaplumb bob, I moved my ears to the left but they are in the same place, a stream is an accident if the earth is tilting in the right direction, stopping is the problem of starting again, was that enough?, I'll just buzz later when I'm done waiting, consists of a spring, I don't know where to put my ears, ardent tools with no function, there are no electric sidewalks in this part of town, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, it's a recurring dilemma to bounce at all times, I don't care if you jiggle, three heavy vibrators at different speeds, the fine ridges of texture in the skin of an elephant cannot be seen without an elephant, if it stopped, not scraping a banana, I don't know how to choose, there's a power switch around here somewhere, a stream is an accident if the earth is tilting in the right direction, it was like stubbing a toe but it didn't hurt, a large magnet, we want to do something with our ears reasonably often, I don't know how to choose, I am not jiggling, if it stopped, alternatives prevailed, stopping is the problem of starting again, I'm not experiencing a power outage—how convenient, it was an excuse not to fall of the rails and get badly injured, I don't believe in ghosts even when they're etched in silver, I'll just move around occasionally, This bob hovers, I don't really need to choose, there are no electric sidewalks in this part of town, Jon Abbey likes this tone, I gather jiggling is not as popular in these latitudes, the fine ridges of texture in the skin of an elephant cannot be seen without an elephant, I haven't chosen anything, gravity and rigid objects are purely obedient, the observation of disobedience stymied by the act of observation, if it stopped we'd just be inept breakdancers, stopping is the problem of starting again, stopping is the problem of starting again, over another heavy magnet, stopping is the problem of starting again, Neil Feather, horses will jiggle but not reliably, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, I don't care if you jiggle, before breaking it often worked, the recurring dilemma of unceremonious buzzes getting lost, spectation is reasonable, it was like stubbing a toe but it didn't hurt, it worked at least once, I'm not sure where my ears are, creating a repellant and anti-gravitational force, if it stopped, I don't swim habitually, I heard that it worked at least once, I don't know where to put my ears, it's a recurring dilemma of not bouncing enough, I assumed it was working in the absence of any indication of what it was supposed to do, the alternative was stillness, some objects are not falsely labelled shrink-proof, The three vibrators vie, it's a recurring dilemma of severe restrictions on puffiness, I couldn't tell if it was an electric sidewalk because I was kinda doing a brisk jog anyway, there no are dilemmas but plenty of recurrences, the alternative was stillness, most requests are gently ignored, stopping is the problem of starting again, a box of those jiggles was lost somewhere during the delivery but it's okay because we have copies, resonance with the string and the spring, I don't care when you jiggle but just let me know about it, I refuse to get upset when shrinking objects get larger, there are no electric sidewalks in this part of town, those aren't dilemmas—just syllables, just stick my ears wherever they'll fit, I am not jiggling, if it stopped..., the expense of the electric sidewalks was prohibitive but they existed, alternatives prevailed, it's smaller than a whale but we couldn't measure the microscopic air pockets, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, it's way too easy to step off an electric sidewalk, it's a recurring dilemma of bouncing without advance notification, gathering materials and leaving them there to unbuild themselves into a vacuum for frozen stares, it's a recurring dilemma, it was like stubbing a toe but it didn't hurt, I'm glad I'm not the only one who occasionally fails to jiggle, The frequencies of the string and spring, the electric sidewalk never makes our hats blow off, one bark doesn't make a dog—you need a stomach, a few legs, a nose, a liver, and other stuff, one bark is one bark at most and possibly much less, I don't know how to choose, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, a stream is an accident if the earth is tilting in the right direction, speed 1, the recurring dilemma of unceremonious buzzes getting lost, there are no dilemmas in this part of town, I couldn't tell if it was an electric sidewalk because I was kinda doing a brisk jog anyway, the alternative was stillness and wasn't appealing 'round the clock, alternatives prevailed, it's a recurring dilemma to bounce, I refuse to ride an electric sidewalk without jiggling, if it stopped we wouldn't notice, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, arches are for bridges, was that enough?, fluxed by the magnetic field, alternatives paused before prevailing, if it stopped..., the expense of the electric sidewalks was prohibitive but they existed, there are no electric sidewalks in this part of town, how can you can tell if you're even jiggling in the first place?, I am a buzz detector with elbows and kidneys, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, we are not aware of any dilemmas, there are no electric sidewalks in this part of town, it was an excuse to rest uncomfortably, we were unable to attend any of the ceremonies for dearly departed jiggles, we were trying to find a place for our ears, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, This is a finely balanced chaotic system, alternatives prevailed but I didn't choose them, thanks for taking such good care of my ears even if they have lost their pink hue, it was like stubbing a toe in the slowest motion afforded by current technology, the dilemma of being interrupted by what you're in the middle of, it's a recurring dilemma to not bounce enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, there are no electric sidewalks that felt spongy enough, I may or may not be buzzing.
~Michael Anton Parker
Earland, better known as The Mighty Burner, made a name for himself via a handful of soul jazz ventures in the late 60s. These early sessions offered a blend of flashy B-3 fireworks and an emphasis on baroque feeling over polished functionality. At the dawn of the Sunshine decade his projects for Prestige veered into some fairly adventurous directions, ensnaring rock, Latin, electronics and even free jazz in a widely cast net. This disc reissues what is arguable prize of the bundle, a concept album that takes its primary cues from fusion and science fiction. Earland espouses a manifesto in common with the more accessible sides of Sun Ra. Surrounded by a nest of then-cutting edge consoles that includes ARP and Moog synthesizers, clavinet, electric piano and organ; he leads a revolving studio band through an episodic cosmic melodrama. The sphinxlike Dr. Patrick Gleeson, a colleague of Earland’s on other records of the era, aids and embellishes from his own ARP and Moog amalgamation. A core flight crew of Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Dave Hubbard, Mark Elf and Larry Killian mans the mothership. Guests like Eddie Henderson, Eddie Arkin and Brian Brake bolster the band in other key soloist slots. Oddly enough there’s no bassist. Earland himself handles that chore, his pedals working overtime so that a conventional upright presence isn’t even missed.
As the undisputed blue chips in the horn section, Henderson and Hubbard display their indefatigable chops on nearly every track. No matter how grandiose and congested the backdrops become, the saxophonist’s machete-sharp tenor still manages to slice through with a postbop phraseology punctuated by emotive honks. Hubbard triggers the boosters numerous occasions too, his rocket-tail runs arcing above the tangled nebula of wah-wah guitars, aqueous recombinating keyboards and slippery funk beats. The other Hubbard and Henderson (Dave and Eddie, respectively) hold their own, but are continually outclassed by their frontline peers. The title cut sets the mood as a perfect opener. Rudy Copeland’s pinched, entreating vocals sketch the skeletal plot points of a dystopian futurist fantasy as the ensemble quickly achieves escape velocity from a socially and environmentally blighted Earth. “Warp Factor 8” layers strata of heavy vamping guitars and keys in a call and response between rhythm section and horns. Other tunes like “Asteroid” and “Mason’s Galaxy” advance the extraplanetary fixations even further. There’s even room for amped-up readings of Hubbard’s “Red Clay” and Henderson’s “No Me Esqueca” in the capacious 79-minute flight plan. The package presents a rare instance where a Prestige two-fer arrives with its original program completely intact without the usual excising of a track or two due to time constraints. Not everything works at an exemplary level, but the overall trip remains a damn engaging and entertaining one just the same.
Is it dated? Definitely. But among Earland’s early oeuvre it’s virtually guaranteed to please.
With a name coined by Joni Mitchell to acknowledge the eclectic nature of the UK assemblage of musicians from Norway (Georg Hultgreen), Canada (Michael Rosen), Australia (Kerrilee Male, Trevor Lucas), and the UK (Gerry Conway), Eclection was a band perched at the nests of jangly folk-rock, sunshine pop, and symphonic rock. This criminally obscure orchestral folk-rock platter was recorded and released by Elektra in 1968, meeting with no commercial success, but winding up firmly ensconced in the pantheon of connoisseurs of that era. It's the kind of record that could've easily launched a group into the stardom that Fairport Convention was quickly acquiring at the same time, but even with the imprint of a prestigious and hip label, somehow got a short straw in an explosion of creative rock music that's still being sifted through to this day.
The multi-national quintet bore an overabundance of talent, quite conspicuously in the case of vocals. Female vocalist Kerrilee Male was in the same league as Sandy Denny, and the way her heavenly voice floats above concise and rich symphonic textures recalls the finest moments of Annie Haslam in Renaissance. Just on the basis of this album, Male has a solid place in my top thirty or so female vocalists. It probably would've been better if the group had just one great male vocalist to balance the sound, but instead they had several men with enough talent to carry a band on their own as a frontperson. Happily for us, all this vocal talent makes the album a benchmark by which to judge the male/female vocal harmonies that flourished in that era and sadly have long lost their foothold in popular music culture. Between the vocal harmonies and the bright, sunny blend of acoustic and electric guitars, it's understandable they're sometimes compared to The Mamas & The Papas, but I find Eclection vastly superior to the underwhelming pleasantries of that California unit. For me, perhaps the only 60s group that I'd rank as high in terms of male/female vocal blends is The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, a group that was so consistently stunning in every aspect that they make my 60s pop top five (alongside The Beatles, The Byrds, The Idle Race, and The Action).
It's noteworthy that the group beckons those American references. While the similarities to Fairport Convention and other UK folk-rock bands is unmistakable, Eclection was a rare bird in that scene, and the sunny orchestral part of their sound is marked contrast to Fairport's stripped-down and edgy tendencies. Primary songwriter Georg Hultgreen (who later changed his surname to Kajanus—his mother was Norwegian sculptor Johanna Kajanus) was a Norwegian who made his way to the jumping London scene by way of stints in Paris and Quebec. The notion that Eclection were on the wrong side of the Atlantic is corrorobated by Kajanus in an interview:
I would agree that the musical direction of the group was probably closer to American folk-rock than anything else. I must confess, having spent my formative musical years haunting the folk clubs in Montreal, Canada and watching all the current folk and folk/rock programs on TV, I was strongly influenced by this music. The most influential artists for me at the time were people like Dylan, the Byrds, Fred Neil, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and Gordon Lightfoot. Pre-Eclection, I was a purist fighting the acoustic battle versus the electric "demons" creeping into the scene. I remember being shocked when Dylan went electric. It is therefore ironic that I should end up a few years later playing an electric 12-string in Eclection.
~Michael Anton Parker
Basically a Basie band minus the Count, Jo Jones sole Pablo date (and one of his paltry few as a leader) mines a familiar swing-based songbook of blues, ballads and burners. His rep as the father of modern drumming more than warrants the Murders Row assembled in support. “Sweets” Edison AND Roy Eldridge, trumpets; Vic Dickenson on ‘bone and the pit-bull tenor of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, able to chew expressively through a riff like few others; how about that for a take-no-prisoners horn section? Also on loan from Jones’ former employer, the redoubtable rhythm sense of one Freddie Green, plectrist par excellence. Tommy Flanagan occupies the piano seat, but his flowery, urbane style isn’t always the best fit for the down-home propensities of the ensemble. With a surname shared but no relation, Sam Jones is an elastic ballast on string bass. He settles comfortably into a wallflower walking role that requires only a modicum of his prowess, giving frequent nods to elder Walter Page.
But enough ink about the roll call. A jam session flavor of old chums, carousing and confabulating, pervades the six tunes. Basie’s “Goin’ to Chicago Blues” commences the party with a couple choruses of rhythm section sans horns sounding off in ode to Jones’ hometown. Stamped by the leader’s pile driver snare, the frontline’s entrance quickly narrows into a gurgling tailgate of Dickenson’s brass and onward to solos by Eldridge, Davis, Edison and Flanagan. Jones’ brushes sashay through “I Want to Be Happy” and sculpt spry time and sibilant volume on par with the harder sonorities achieved with his sticks. “Ad Lib” arrives as his only compositional contribution and it’s little more than riff-piece excuse for more rambunctious horns-and-drums horseplay. At odds with an overly academic title, “Metrical Portions” finds him toying blithely with tempo and mixing up syncopated lather on cymbals amidst sturdy bass fills by the other Jones. A lengthy Buck Clayton arrangement of the old tear-jerker “Dark Eyes” and the gray-mane warhorse “Old Man River” complete the package.
Norman Granz regularly earned black eyes in the critical press for bankrolling albums that favored friction and excess over congeniality and finesse. Running contrary to this conventional ‘wisdom’, this session (and fairly-speaking a slew of others) speaks to his substantive skills as a producer. While it’s a shame there aren’t more Jones-led dates for posterity this late-in-the-game document is also a fitting monument.
Klezmer bands with 18 members are not exactly common anywhere in the world, but it's safe to say this is the only one of Japanese provenance. Reed giant Kazutoki Umezu formed Betsuni Nanmo Klezmer in 1992 and the sprawling ensemble left the world with three public recordings, the 1994 debut Omedeto I shall be celebrating below, and two 1996 releases, Waruzu and Ahiru. Surely a monumental challenge to organize and sustain, the orchestra project was supplemented and eventually supplanted by Komatcha Klezmer, a small group vehicle for Umezu's klez urges that formed in 1995 and continues to be active, with releases in 2001 (Komatcha Kle) and 2003 (Gekkoishi no Shippo). With the exception of drumkitter Kozo Nida, the members of Komatcha Klezmer are BNK alumni: alto saxist Yoko Tada, violinist Ayumi Matsui, accordionist Koyo Chan, and tubist Takero Sekijima, and the two stars (in my mind) of BNK, wunderkind vocalists Tokyo Nammy and Koichi Makigami, have joined the group as occasional guests.
Omedeto is one of the strangest and most cherished items in my music collection. For starters, it's a positively ass-kicking, burning klezmer disc with inspired solos and a rare and devastating orchestral punch. Even more distinctively, the vocal performances by Makigami and Nammy are astonishing triumphs of creativity and virtuosity. More than anything, though, the group stands alone in the annals of klezmer for its alternately sublime and zany postmodernism. The musicians were clearly chosen for their freewheeling embrace of humor and playful antics as much as their instrumental chops. The lineup is something of an abridged who's who of Tokyo's bohemian prankster avant-garde. The total package unfolds as a seamless, ambitious, far-ranging album that doesn't falter for a single moment.
The festivities begin with "Ale Brider", a traditional tune rendered as five minutes of straight, passionate klezmer. The playing is flawless and bursting with the invigorating spirit of the timeless rhythms and melodies. I could listen to music like this for hours on end. My appetite for klezmer has been insatiable since I discovered the music early in high school and launched my obsession with The Klezmatics' Rhythm and Jews, so it's fitting that a tune I find so utterly addictive as this leadoff track on Omedeto features a quotation from The Klezmatics, specifically their 1988 debut, Shvaygn=Toyt. Credit is given to recordings on two other tracks: "Dona, Dona" quotes The Klezmer Conservatory Band's Oy Chanukah and "Der Gasn Nigun" quotes Theodore Bikel Sings Yiddish Theatre and Folk Songs.
For a guy who doesn't speak the language, Koichi Makigami's Yiddhish vocals on "Ale Brider" and throughout the album are unbelievably compelling. He rips through each line with utter clarity and verve, and there are few singers in the world who can rival his booming tone and precise, hovering vibrato. Just as his two mind-blowing landmark solo vocal albums on Tzadik (Kuchinoha and Koedarake) and his similarly astounding duo disc with Ryoji Hojito (Over That Way) place him alongside Jaap Blonk and Phil Minton as a benchmark for extreme extended vocal techniques, his work here (and plenty elsewhere, e.g. the twisted lounge pop of Koroshi no Blues) ranks him among the most advanced conventional singers. And for all the ace instrumentalism here, it's these robust vocals that really captivate me to the point I'd readily leave individual pieces like "Ale Brider" on repeat play. What's more, with 18 members, the vocal possibilities of the group certainly aren't limited to the two frontpersons; spirited unison group vocals push the energy level a notch higher on this song and a few others. When an insistent chanting chorus of "oy oy oy" in several catchy variations kicks into full gear towards the end, I feel like I'm part of the band, vamping away on this glorious diphthong with sheer bliss and abandon, or if not part of the band, at least there at the party partaking in the communal groove. Great klezmer does that.
The strident chorus, Tokyo Nammy's operatic background wailing near the end, and the sheer vigor of the tune as a whole is analogous to Koenjihyakkei, Tatsuya Yoshida's caffeinated and unabashed revision of Magma, in the sense that both ensembles take an idiom and reproduce it so literally and earnestly that it takes on a surreal absurdist comicality. Even while I'm bathing in musical pleasure, as both BNK and Koenjihyakkei fit my musical preferences like a key in a lock, I can't help but simultaneously experience a detached recognition of the parodism lying on the other side of the top they nearly go over. Curiously enough, aside from minor parts on other albums, my familiarity with Nammy is limited to her work in both of these ensembles (she's a pivotal third of the post-Kobaian "choir" on Koenjihyakkei's monumental masterpieces Nivraym and Live at Star Pine's Cafe), which may simply be coincidence given that this personnel overlap was not at all what motivated the analogy. Nevertheless, she's certainly a prime example of virtuosity married to fringe aesthetics, although she also maintains a more prolific parallel career performing commercial music under her real name, Nami Sagara.
After Makigami's lead vocal on the first cut, Nammy steps into the foreground on "Dona, Dona", where she not only rivals Makigami's uncanny ease with Yiddish lyrics, but goes even farther out into the realms of exaggerated vigor, singing with an exuberance that borders on ferocity. Boisterous accenting strikes me as a key feature of klezmer in general, at least in its thankfully ubiquitous hard-driving form, and Nammy conspires with the rest of the ensemble to give certain phrases explosive ending accents, practically shrieking "kalb" in unison with Sachiko Nagata's xylophone cluster in the line "Ver zhe heyst dir zayn a kalb?", and accenting the living daylights out of "shekht" alongside a saxophone blurt in the line "Un men shlept zey un men shekht". Beyond that, she puts some kind of articulatory spin on virtually every syllable. As an indication of the passion she attacks this material with, even when the same chorus is repeated later in the song, it comes out with a spontaneous rephrasing. At a mere 2:24, "Dona, Dona" works as a total joy-juice blowout pop nugget.
Trying to convey the extraordinary nature of the vocal performances on this disc, I find myself tempted to suggest that without the vocals, this disc would be quickly buried somewhere in a stack of great klezmer discs, but such thoughts are quelled when I turn my attention to the instrumental "Der Shtiler Bulgar", with its barnstorming massed horn riffing and wild solos. After a heavy-hitting orchestral run through the tune for almost two minutes, an insane clarinet solo launches a classic mid-section of turn-taking soloism. I can't say for certain which of the two b-flat clarinettists in the group get credit for this incredible upper register playing, but as a long-time Umezu fan with a solid stack of his records, the tone does sound familiar. Wataru Okuma is a ripping clarinettist too, the leader of Cicala Mvta, a wonderful kindred ensemble to BNK based around a kind of rowdy Japanese street music known as chindon in which a small drum is used to accompany peripatetic reedists—a role Okuma adopted himself for many years— but freely wandering into other areas, like Turkish traditional music, Albert Ayler, and, indeed, klezmer, with recent lineups benefitting from the explosive drumkit work of none other than avant-kingpin Tatsuya Yoshida. In any case, that mercurial clarinet playing is just the tip of the iceberg as a handful of reeds swirl around each other for about 30 thrilling seconds. Assuming the steady bass clarinet part is coming from Kazuhiro Nomoto, it sounds like all three clarinettists together for a bit, and some of Kanji Nakao's soprano sax too if I'm not mistaken. The reed thrills give way to brass thrills as Hiroshi Itaya launches into a devastating, roof-raising trombone solo, and the ensemble downshifts a bit to make room for Hidehiko Urayama's banjo solo. After a fake ending that gives Cicala Mvta member Takero Sekijima a chance to go out on tuba for a few seconds, the ensemble kicks back into the high-octane big band themes. A stunner even without a peep from Makigami or Nammy.
After the unrelenting energy of the first three tracks, the opening passage of "Terk in America" is especially effective, a taciturn doublebass solo that evolves into a brawny improv with some percussion. Two doublebassists are in the group, Joji Sawada (a notable composer in his own right) and Yasuhiko Tachibana, so it could be either of them I'm hearing. It's surely an unexpected and welcome pleasure to hear free improv that could pass for a Barry Guy and Paul Lytton duo right smack in the middle of all the smoking klez jams, which is exactly what the ensemble explodes into after about 111 seconds of this inspired improv detour. After ripping through the main themes, the ensemble drops out for an extended drumkit duet between Yasuo Sano and Yasuhiro Yoshigaki. Yoshigaki is easily the drumkit MVP of the Tokyo avant-garde, a master of every permutation of jazz, rock, and improv ever dished up by Altered States, Ground Zero, Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet/Orchestra, Rovo, Shibusashirazu Orchestra, etc. His nimble, powerful style is unmistakable on this album, one of the key instrumental factors that pushes it well beyond an average klezmer platter. On top of the rumbling, popping bed of drums and cymbals, Hiroshi Itaya delivers another devastating (seriously, this guy is the real deal) trombone solo, but this time taking things out into fire music realms, as does Kazuhiro Nomoto with a vicious baritone sax workout. Free jazz this good sandwiched in between klezmer this good—this album is a rarity indeed. And with two drumkitters, two doublebassists, and these kinds of heavyweights on horns, there's a supple, aggressive edge to even the tightly rehearsed klezmer romps. Not to say it's without peers though; we need look no further than Zorn's Masada or the New Klezmer Trio for well-known examples of music that consistently smokes across a similar expressive range.
After these two distinctive and incredible instrumentals, I'm almost tempted to suggest "Vocals? Who needs vocals? An afterthought."! But surely it will come as no surprise when I shortly launch into praise of Nammy and Makigami with effusion to make my earlier encomiums seem lukewarm. You see, as the expansive 8-minute tour de force of "Terk of America" fades out and the tribal drums and vocal freakouts of "Mahouzukai Sarii" enter, I'm jolted back into my main BNK zone. It's all about the human voice. It's rather charming that the lovely foldout paper with lyrics, credits, etc lists the Yiddish song titles (and one English title too) with Japanese translations below, only to give a Yiddish gloss for the album's sole Japanese song title! Then again, these things are all chicken-and-egg escapades anyway. "Mahouzukai Sarii" is given in Yiddish as "Di Makhsheyfe Sally" and translates into English as "Sally the Witch". While all the Yiddish lyrics are faithfully translated into Japanese on the lyric sheet, they didn't go so far as giving a Yiddish translation for the Japanese lyrics though!
I'm getting a bit ahead of myself even talking about lyrics though; nothing like intelligible vocal utterances factor into this song until the 1:27 mark. What comes before then is something that you'll not only never hear on another klezmer record, but on no other record period! But it's not only incredibly strange stuff, it also blows my mind as a triumph of fully realized creativity. Basically, the two drumkitters generate a percolating bed of dense, loose tribal grooves (somewhat reminiscent of Yoshigaki's work in Rovo, a decent group I have no special enthusiasm for) and a handful of the others go nuts on top of it, especially Makigami and Nammy. The closest thing I can think of is Jefferson Airplane's wacky miniature "Ribump Ba Bap Dum Dum" (never released until a CD reissue of Crown of Creation, where it appears as a bonus track), but this is a hundred times crazier. Far from being a chaotic freakout, though, the violin scribbles and xylophone darts are measured, balanced interjections and the whole thing works as a delirious swirl of rhythm and coloration. But most importantly, Nammy and Makigami go out; I mean far out. Hearing Makigami's extended vocal vocabulary is, of course, no surprise, but no less welcome and riveting for that. On the other hand, this precious passage is the only one I've encountered with Nammy offering a parallel thread of invention. Step aside Shelley Hirsch, Lauren Newton, and any other diva of the deranged, this lady is a few zip codes away from her rocker here. Completely mind-blowing stuff. It would be stretched out to album-length in a perfect world. Then again, it is an intro, and what it introduces is so great I can hardly wait till it kicks in! So you're starting to get the gist here. This song would be played on every radio station at least once an hour if the world was full of aesthetic pathologies like me. The fact is that as much as I love every track on this disc and relish it as a continuous experience, in practice "Mahouzukai Sarii" is the song I play most often, a track I pluck for handmade comps and often pop the disc in just for the sake of hearing as a quick fix.
So the song proper kicks in after this magical madness, and how does it begin? With one of the most scalding, gripping, medicinal vocal lines I've ever heard this side of "Civet's Tango" by the Sun City Girls (the leadoff track on disc one of 330, 003 Cross Dressers from Beyond the Rig Veda). Lasting only about seven seconds, it's all-too-brief; Nammy repeats a short line twice and then it's off to the next section of the song. The linguistic provenance of her utterance defies my grasp entirely. While clearly structured syllabically and transcribed in the lyric sheet, it's not any Japanese I can recognize, so I can only speculate it's some kind of adaption from another language or an outright phonetic invention, perhaps intended to suggest a magical incantation befitting the song's playful lyrics about a charming young witch. The best way I can think to describe Nammy's singing might be rather on the mark given the topic of the song: it's like the high-pitched cackle of a witch! Whatever it means and whatever Nammy's doing in her delivery, this singing makes my endorphins curdle.
After this mercurial micro-song, Nammy launches into the delightful Japanese verse about a young witch flying into town on her broom, flashing a mischievous grin, chanting some magic words, and so on—really playful, charming stuff entirely befitting the manic, wacky singing by Nammy and Makigami (in alternation), klezmer rave-ups, and even a irresistible heartfelt group vocal chorus. Being the only song in their native Japanese on the album, Nammy and Makigami clearly are in a comfort zone where they can push themselves into even more expressive depth than the killer Yiddish songs. What's more, the full-out complex group chorus would've been a daunting affair in a non-native language. Everything about this song just bursts with joy, passion, and fun. Best of all, that seven second vocal part comes back near the end!
The next track, "Doina", passes its first half as a simmering sparse klezmer reverie that gives Makigami a chance to go into his experimental vocal wackiness, notably including his Tuvan-inspired techniques, before it suddenly bursts into a breakneck klezmer hoedown with ripping Yiddish vocals so catchy I've caught myself virtually reciting them from memory in idle moments after a session with the disc. I start to wonder if I'm subconsciously learning Yiddish! Probably not, but it's not especially different than English, German, and other close Germanic siblings.
The album closes out with "Der Gasn Nigun", a traditional tune rendered as a slightly somber, sensuous, slow march with drones and langorous melodies from (I believe) all three of the group's bass clarinettists at once, with violins, accordion and xylophone laying out the melodies with old world phrasing . It's a chance to wind down and revel in the vibrant acoustic timbres of the ensemble and hear a side to their musicality besides the high-energy romps.
~Michael Anton Parker
There’s better Bechet to be sure, but this comp collecting a deuce of early 50s sessions by the aging straight horn savant has several advantages, sonically speaking. First there’s the fidelity afforded by studio tape technology that renders both bands in clarity not present on earlier shellac sides. Next there’s the ensembles themselves: two sextets manned by specialists of Nawlins swing vernacular both elder and acolyte who are clearly enamored of their famous front man and more than happy to follow his lead. Trombonist Jimmy Archey is the only sideman shared between the two and his staccato tailgate style jibes jovially with wailing soprano in the customary layered horn polyphony. Bear-shouldered bassist Walter Page lends a slightly more modernist bent to the second session by straying from the usual slap time syncopations with frequent walking detours. It’s great fun juxtaposing his Basie-born approach with that of the venerable Pops Foster who pounds his own strings with merciless glee on the first clambake. A similar contrast arises between brassmen Sidney de Paris and Jonah Jones, the former firing away with crisp clarion clusters while the latter, on the cusp of his career as a mood music cash cow for Capitol, plays it with greater degree of lissome cool. And the drummers display fealties to different eras too. Johnny Blowers’ tribal tom rolls on “Rose of the Rio Grande” recall classic Chick Webb while Manzie Johnson’s lively cowbell and woodblock accents on “Original Dixieland One-Step” give nod to Baby Dodds. The tunes on both dates represent little remove from Bechet’s usual repast. Hardscrabble blowers like “Ballin’ the Jack” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” alternate with cerulean dirges like “Black and Blue.” Bechet’s rapaciously tilted horn holds court at the center of the action, manhandling melodies and subjugating rhythms with a sumptuous vibrato that swells to fill the rooms. “Fabulous” isn’t superlative enough to describe the half of it.
Certainly a serious contender in any “Ugliest Album Cover” contest this concert recording by Charlie Byrd is also one of the guitar albums I reach for most. Byrd was one of those bonafide virtuosos who had the Zelig-like ability of being at the right place at the right time, repeatedly. A student of Segovia, a jam-partner of Django Reinhardt, a cornerstone of the bossa nova movement through his work on Stan Getz’s Jazz Samba, and a man with an inveterate sweet tooth for pop tunes from Tin Pan Alley to A.M. radio, he was a walking set of contradictions when gauged against the archetypal recital guitarist of the 60s and 70s. Despite his massive chops and near-regal pedigree he always remained an unapologetic populist at heart- the Jack Nicholson character in the film Five Easy Pieces, hold the anger and angst. This set, recorded at Redondo Beach, CA in 1974 as part of a Howard Rumsey concert series and expanded to twice its length for the cd reissue, features him in what was probably his favorite format, dipping into a conspicuously eclectic songbook in front of a responsive audience. Brother Joe girds his gilded chords on acoustic and electric basses and the “paint brushes on coffee cans and phonebooks” percussion of Bertell Knox completes the triangle. Byrd’s amplified Spanish guitar approaches the program as an equal opportunist, applying the same industry and brio to each tune regardless of its provenance. Whether it’s a mellow, but slinky rundown of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” where the Byrd has fun fooling the audience with a false ending and drawing out premature applause, or a pastoral reading of Vivaldi’s “Concerto in G” that evokes the ambience of a sun-dappled country courtyard in spring the results are always marvelously listenable. Also of special note on the scorecard, Jobim’s “Wave,” Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean Thing” and a gorgeous interpretation of “Norwegian Wood” that finds Byrd adding rippling syncopations to the familiar wistful theme. Conservatively speaking, I’ve probably listened to this disc a hundred times and the replay value has yet to atrophy. Calling Byrd the Bird of the guitar in terms of the reach of his artistry and worth doesn’t seem a stretch by my estimation.
My Afrobeat tastes run pretty catholic. Fela sits head and shoulders above any other contender and it’s his ample catalog I reach for when the urge for funk-inflected grooves from the Continent strikes. But Malian Issa Bagayogo’s vibrant and forward-reaching music has recently upset my carefully packed applecart. Over the past few years the n’goni-playing composer (an instrument family incidentally also favored by William Parker) has been steadily building an audience for his fusion of Wassoulou folk forms, Afro-dub breakbeats and Euro-trance electronica. His fourth album on Six Degrees, distributed domestically by Ryko, constitutes the most seamless and inviting blend of these elements yet. Fourteen tracks, nearly all in the four to five minute range present an instantly appealing diaspora of organically-combined ingredients. Wood flute dances with wah-wah guitar; the brittle strum of n’goni rides an undulating current of electronic bass; a choir of back-up singers responds to the rich tenor of Bagayogo’s voice and lateral visions of Fela’s charismatic orations slideshow through my mind. Tracks like the tensile funk of “Koroto” where acoustic and synthetic drums weave reverberating syncopations around an anchoring hip-shaking beat and “Kalan Nege” where keyboards and drum machines mimic balafon and djembe in the service of another slippery set of grooves establish the backbone of the album. Mellower tracks like “Djigui” and “Chauffer,” the latter imbued with some convincing blues guitar, convey the comfort of a dry desert sirocco with the leader’s own filament strings prominently featured, an exotic blend akin to the pungent fragrance of pit-roasted coffee beans. The lyrics, sung in Bagayogo’s native Bambaran tongue, might be unintelligible to most Western ears, but their emotional import crosses any linguistic lacuna. These are the sorts of sounds that subvert cultural borders, equally at home in a Koulikoran open air market or Parisian discotheque. As a sum they achieve a supple resonating depth beyond the reach of a lot of world beat, skillfully skirting the over-production and bombast that saddles so many efforts and yielding an album rich in replay value. Fela’s seat at the head of the table remains secure, but Bagayogo well-deserves a chair as a worthy apostle.
The first time I heard the music of Magali Babin was in an evening that included, among other rather distinctive ploys for my attention, two men shoving a few dozen sticks of butter into their mouths and letting it dribble down their chins and onto an amplified table, beneath which John Berndt was crouched on four limbs stark naked uttering animal sounds. It was the touring Québécois performance trio of Babin, André-Éric Létourneau, and Alexandre Saint-Onge. In total contrast to the perplexing conceptual extremes of their two pieces and the utterly disgusting, abominable, shameful attempt at music-making by the trio of Donald Miller, Jack Rose, and Ian Nagoski that began the non-festivities that evening, Babin performed a solo set that gave me an unequivocally sublime experience I still fondly recall some five years later. Instead of indulging a sado-masochistic obsession with loud volume like Miller, et al, she presented an impeccably focused improvisation on a sound vocabulary of her own creation at a medium volume that was ideal to draw the listener into careful and comfortable attention to the nuances of each passing moment without the slightest hint of pretension or bombast.
Babin used a modest array of small metallic objects with pickups and guitar pedals, gently amplifying the hidden world of complex sound as metallic objects touch each other in sundry ways. Her methods are simple, but her music is exquisitely rich in detail and variation. A year or two after that memorable performance I saw in Philadelphia, her solo masterpiece Chemin de Fer was released by the Canadian label No Type, and if you listen to the very first track, "Triturations", you'll have a pretty good idea of the delicate electro-acoustic sound sculpture I heard that evening. As the album artwork suggests, however, Babin's array of equipment is quite a bit more extensive than what she'd brought on that tour. In her native recording environment she explores the microscopic idiosyncracies of a much wider array of metallic objects, especially pots, pans, and kitchen utensils. The notes accompanying the disc report that Babin created this music by improvising, a simple fact that becomes meaningful when I recall the live performances I've enjoyed from her.
"Triturations" is nine minutes of electroacoustic micro-timbral heaven. Some layers of the piece sound like heavy breathing muted and compressed into a detached, nonreferential, yet still vaguely biological texture. With its evenness of texture and density amidst the cornucopia of crackling, rustling, and rubbing details, it feels like a warm cloud of gentle, unpatronising sound that envelops and comforts me.
When Steve Roden coined the phrase "lowercase sound" in the mid-90s he was expressing an incredibly elegant and timeless concept that both echos and splits away from the Cage/Oliveros paradigm. The sounds sought were simply the ones usually hidden or masked, the details that don't call attention to themselves. The phrase went on to be widely misunderstood as having specific implications about volume, velocity, and density, but all of this is extrinsic to that jewel of aesthetic crystillization Roden proffered. "Triturations" and so much other work by Magali Babin stands as an eminent prototype for lowercase music in my mind. It's worth noting that there's nothing especially quiet, nor loud, about it. In fact, it's rather medium-volume, medium-velocity, and medium-density music as a whole. It's at just the right volume so you can hear everything clearly, which seems like the point to me. It's simply the sonic microscopy of moving metal, sounds heretofore unknown and otherwise inaudible. I happen to find most of them sublime and intoxicating.
The second track, "Petit Jardin", is methodologically continuous with "Triturations" but the soundworld is fresh. Two sounds complement each other: a beautiful, softly resonant gong-like sound (probably obtained via a pot or pan) and the tinkling of small metal objects (perhaps something like paperclips?) being dropped against a metallic surface. It's the hidden world of an ad hoc metallic idiophone. "Monsieur et Madame Watt" is another track based on lucid juxtaposition, this time between some faint Erstwhilian amplifier hum and some indistinct rubbing (suggesting to me the sound of a microphone's metal grating moving against another metallic object). I found something ecstatic in these humble sounds, though my feeling dissipated later in the piece as the hum began modulating and assuming greater prominence in the mix; it became mundane.
For more years than I can recall I've had this perversely cherished Kevin Drumm CD listing neither a title nor release date, but it has a solid green cover and says it was recorded to tape in 1996; the label is Perdition Plastics and it's catalog number per007. I don't know much about Drumm's discography and have only lightly sampled his other work because I really hated this CD. In fact, I probably never made it all the way through. But it's always persisted in my thoughts because it's so rare I have a such a strongly negative reaction to any music. It symbolizes something for me, the very extremes of harsh and difficult music. I have no problem with conventional harsh noise; heck, it's just a twist on new-age music in a way, but this Drumm disc is mostly silence sporadically and irregularly interrupted by loud, screeching, painful sounds made by fucking with an electric guitar and amplifier. It was just too much for me and the thought of playing it still scares me. The reason I mention it is that some of Babin's music sounds like the precise opposite—gentle and smooth—yet draws from the same dangerous sound vocabulary of conductive surfaces and amplifiers operating at the threshhold of functionality. It's a fascinating contrast.
This disc is studded with jewels, but it's time to report on the rarest, "Jogging dans la maison hantée", which was "crafted in joyous collaboration with Alain Chénier and Mario Gauthier". Its seven minutes are filled with some fairly generic electronic interjections, but they comprise fairly neutral background to one of life's greatest pleasures: extremely clipped squeaks. A major piece of background information is required here. If there's one piece of music I've played most often in my life, probably upwards of 2000 times by a rough estimate, including a six-month stretch where I played it at least once per day and typically a good handful of times, it's "Bluebird" by Judy Dunaway and Yasunao Tone, from Dunaway's seminal Balloon Music. A piece that should stand in the public consciousness of the current era as an analog to Duke's "Take the A train" or the like, it is in fact unknown to virtually every person I've broached it to among the relevant demographic. Without attempting to account for its unyielding grip on my aesthetic relationship to sound, I'll describe it here for you. It's a seven-minute excerpt of a recording made by Tone applying his standard technique to a CD of solo tenor balloon improvisations by Dunaway. In other words, it's glitching balloon sounds. So to account for my experience of Babin's "Jogging dans la maison hantée" I need to make it clear that there is a thrilling resemblance in these clipped and irregular squeaky sounds that flit across the piece's uncluttered canvas (mingling marveously with the many birds outside my open windows this lovely hot summer afternoon I might add). Further, I don't want to mince any words here: "Bluebird" is by far my single favorite musical composition among all I've heard in my 28 years so far. It's the pinnacle.
A non-squeaky moment in this piece demands special mention. Among self-contained musical events I've heard of roughly one to two moments in duration, [6:22-6:27] is exceptionally exciting, a kind of split-second burst of somewhat ordinary electronic sound that merges with a sine-wavish tone that evenly decays across four seconds. It's not that there's anything special about these two sounds, just like the greatest moments of violin music are made with essentially the same notes that appear in countless other contexts, but the timing and the dynamic contours combine these two gestures into a single unified event that functions as a higher order version of the note, where I'm referring to the familiar category of sound events prototypically represented by a short episode of relatively constant pitch and timbre. It's as if an impossible decay pattern suddenly occurred for an unruly burst of noise. This is a kind of sound event I often fantasize about, but rarely encounter in the external world. It is part of my objection (with respect to individual aesthetic desiderata, aka taste) to the typical high levels of density found in so-called noise music that these kinds of momentary shapes are masked. In the brave new sound world of the technologically-facilitated explosion in timbral possibilities for music in recent decades, I perceive a bifurcation in the way new aesthetics are derived from the new sounds. In one direction, exemplified by the sound event being discussed presently, the new shapes and internal structures of the sounds justify a topology of gesture. In the other direction, the sounds are maximally and continuously generated to create texture and immersion in their brute timbres. I'd argue that because the latter aesthetic can often be achieved with such a lack of technical refinement or effort that it has become undeservedly ubiquitous, regrettably displacing the former aesthetic.
Three of the pieces on the disc—"La Corde", "L'entonnoir", and "Pluie de Homards"—don't go much beyond pleasant for me. "L'entonnoir" is instructive in its contrast with the main thrust of Babin's work. It feels a bit ugly and overbearing, with a sound palette and approach close to conventional textural electronic noise music. The key word here is "electronic". The distinction between electro-acoustic sounds and electronic sounds is fascinating and truly central to contemporary music, a topic I find myself returning to again and again, always winding up in a theoretical quandary. Concretely experienced distinctions like that provided by "L'entonnoir" are surely the key to sorting this out. In the pieces I've praised from Chemin de Fer there is a resonance and spatiality I associate with acoustically derived sounds. There's also a wealth of odd non-repeating details. These are qualities that I'd cite to account for enjoying Mikrophonie vastly more than any other work by Karlheinz Stockhausen, most of which suits me well. Thinking about the metal objects Babin patiently manipulates, I'm driven to speculate that perhaps the true musicological antonym of "electronic" is not "acoustic", but rather "mechanical". In fact, it's the similarities I feel between Babin's work and Howard Stelzer's (arguably prototypically electroacoustic) abstract hissing and crackling cassette vocabulary that inspired me to revisit this disc recently after being immersed in Stelzer's art . Surely it's not trivial that the monumental Stelzer-curated Intransitive Twenty-Three features "Thermidor", a work by Babin that I would cite among her best.
The placement of "Pluie de Homards" as the final track here was wise. An album of moderation concludes with some annihilatory extremes. Babin created the piece with Mario Gauthier's assistance by mixing some of her characteristic sounds with "Rain" by Ian Nagoski, a track from Ian's drone classic Warm Coursing Blood, a 1998 recording released by Colorful Clouds for Acoustics. As Ian recounted to me recently in a chance encounter that allowed me to broach my recent revisitation of Chemin de Fer (recorded in 2000 and released in 2001), he created the piece by recording the water from a shower striking a huge metal pot designed for cooking lobsters and subsequently layering the recording on top of itself more than a few times. When Babin learned of this kindred metallophonic endeavor, she enthusiastically sought to adapt it to her world. "Rain" was already an extremely thick and static slab of sound; with Babin's additions it's that and a lot more sound. I took this review as an opportunity to revisit Warm Coursing Blood, a truly brilliant album in a style of music I have only a nominal attraction towards. One of my listening sessions was a breakthrough for me. One day I somehow found myself in the mood to lay down for a bit and see if I could enjoy being enveloped by Ian's music played at room-filling (but not biologically irresponsible) volume, something I'd not actually tried before. Ian's textures opened up for me and I was mesmerized for two long pieces, "Feather" and "Rain". It was a smashing success. Comparing this to my experiences of "Pluie de Homards", I've concluded that Babin's augmented version of "Rain" is a pleasant and novel whole, but her distinct vocabulary actually subtracts from the eminently cohesive power of the original, which relies on the shading revealed by an extremely narrow and focused range of sound.
~Michael Anton Parker
Near as I can figure Shanachie pioneered the practice of including detailed guitar tablatures with Pre-War blues reissues. Their two-volume Charley Patton set (now made obsolete several times over by a succession of superior releases on other labels) is a prime example. The liner author (who’s name escapes me since I’ve long since anted up for the aforementioned upgrades) goes to great (some might say exorbitant) lengths in ascribing each string stroke and fret slide by the Masked Marvel with the proper terminology. For the layperson all that lingo quickly wears out its welcome. My pet theory posits Fahey, and albums like this one, as the culprits for this practice. With Fahey and apostles like Peter Lang, John Renbourn and Stephen Grossman came a fascination and occasional preoccupation with the technical side of acoustic guitar lore. But to his credit & like fellow iconoclast Robbie Basho, Fahey never lost sight of the mystical, primordial side of his art in a way that peers like Leo Kottke did. In his callused hands the guitar becomes vessel for ingress into the limitless sound cosmos that Folkways swami Mose Asch believed the principle pipeline of cultural information.
This disc is among Fahey’s most nakedly virtuosic. It’s a master class recital in steel-string technique, employing a familiar cache of Fahey themes as fodder for some truly staggering displays of fret dexterity. In his own words: “I practiced a lot to save on studio time. I don’t think there’s one edit on the whole record.” A plurality of sources serve as launching pads: blues, old timey, classical, flamenco, bossa nova, raga forms and Tin Pan Alley, to name a few. Another advantage is the limpid studio fidelity, scrubbed clean of the fine-grain Sligo silt that dusted so many Takoma platters. Annotations take the place of strict tablatures in the notes with each tune and medley placed in proper context. Fahey’s playing is near flawless. The glissing slides that punctuate so much of his playing on previous records are largely absent here, but the results are hardly antiseptic or stolid. Dark locomotive runs dominate “The Red Pony.” Fahey undercuts the staccato main line with a shimmering bass string drone that targets the shadowy side of the psyche- a murder ballad without words. A bottleneck medley of “Snowflakes/ Steamboat ‘Gwine Around the Bend/ Death of the Clayton Peacock/ How Green Was My Valley” exhibits startling lap steel skill as Fahey adroitly massages Dobro bar against frets to create a dew-dappled web of harmonics. There’s a wealth of great Fahey out there, but this is one I reach for when attempting to persuade neophytes of his lionized worth as both visionary guitarist and tongue-in-cheek thaumaturgist.
There's something about a clean, pointillistic guitar sound that has always been a magnet to my ears, phrases demarcated by infinitesimal points of sound, each like a motion vector pointing in a new direction. When it comes to representing shapes, a line drawing trumps a smear. Some large chunk of my musical pleasure seems to be about sound shapes in motion. Perhaps that's vacuous, but whatever texture is, something must be its negation. I like to think of it as phrasal clarity. A Wes Montgomery solo is like a rollercoaster ride, every few notes careening around a new corner; the thrill is in the lapses of kinesthetic stability. Just like there's little room for error in where you place the steel guides and bolts that keep the rollercoaster cabs on course, its musical equivalent requires each note to have definite and precise space-time coordinates. Some music is about the individual notes and the way they wiggle and slide, but what I'm talking about here is the syntax of velocity and I wish to celebrate its most extraordinary concretization in the music of Cheval de Frise, a duo of drumkit and amplified acoustic guitar from Bordeaux, France.
If pointillism and clarity is the goal, an acoustic guitar is certainly a logical choice over an electric. The past 40 years of music history has been dramatically dominated by countless attempts to harness the timbral and textural potential of the electric guitar, from Hendrix to Holdsworth to Haino. Its humble acoustic progenitor has by and large been relegated to strum-and-sing music and post-Bach museum music (aka the dead white European male tradition). But wait, what about Derek Bailey and flamenco? What if they were combined? What if it was augmented with post-punk riffing and slashing? Now we're getting a bit closer to what Thomas Bonvalet does with his amplified acoustic guitar in convulsive tandem with Vincent Beysselance's drumkit.
Bonvalet's clean, spiky notes transcend the permutations of pitch, timing, and accent that drive Wes Montgomery, Larry Coryell, Forever Einstein, Ahleuchatistas, Robert Fripp's League of whoever, Philharmonie and other eminent examples of guitar pointillism. The clarity is there; the precision is there, but it's subjected to the most extreme fits of asymmetric lurching I've ever heard in rock music, or perhaps any music for that matter. Cheval de Frise's compositions stand alongside The Stick Men, Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band, Hella, Rich Woodson's Ellipsis, Yowie, and Fred Frith's Massacre (Killing Time) as a pinnacle of a musical phenomenon I like to call herky-jerkiness, a barrage of contrary motions and metrical implosions that play like a soundtrack for an epileptic seizure. For me personally, herky-jerkiness is the holy grail; it's what I live for as a listener and everything else is a supplementary diversion.
Bonvalet's shards and splays of sick picking come in sudden fits and starts, with wide dynamic leaps and split-second accelerations and decelerations. He's perpetually setting up little themes just for the sake of deconstructing or outright obliterating them. The music is clearly heavily rehearsed, permeated with impossible rhythmic unisons and counterpoint. I've simply never heard this level of detail and complexity in non-improvised music before, and sometimes an entire musical thought is conveyed with a single sound, a kind of minimalistically wrought maximalism where multiple phrases are suggested in a split-second, but none are completed. The very first time I listened to Cheval de Frise it was like a dream come true; this is truly music I've fantasized about, as if these two Frenchmen have the same twitches and glitches in their nervous system as me, the barely noticeable muscle spasms beneath the surface of a biological organism's roughly even flow of overlapping cycles in cellular activity.
Repetition plays a major role here; the formula is disorder via order. Beysselance's drumming is clearly rooted in an aggressive math rock style, but he brilliantly achieves the balance of groove and unpredictable accents and sidepaths that characterizes Jim Black and Tom Rainey, and sometimes it's like Bonvalet took a fragment of a Derek Bailey solo and starting riffing on it, trying to make it groove, but preserving the slowness and sparseness. Other times the pair rocks out with loud, high-energy slow riffing in a fairly generic 90s post-punk or math rock style. Perhaps Shellac would be a good point of reference here, but the heaviness is tempered by the simple fact an acoustic guitar is being used with very little in the way of processing. These passages are very brief and serve as powerful foils to the duo's default mode of microscopic, pointillistic, jagged twitching.
Fresques sur les parois secrètes du crâne is the group's second release, a slightly more introspective album than its eponymous predecessor released in 2000. Released originally in France on RuminanCe in 2002, it was also given a US release by San Francisco's Frenetic Records. The title work is a noteworthy anomaly in their oeuvre. Despite being a very busy, active, mid-tempo piece, it foregoes the standard lurching juxtapositions and proceeds with a calm, even, meditative feeling that reaches a poignant conclusion with a delicate, sustained, thin tone for the last minute or so that wouldn't sound out of place in the electroacoustic improv of the current era, Günter Müller or the like. "Phosphorescence de l'arbre mort" is another example of the group expanding their aesthetic into extraordinary new territory, with some tantalizing vocal timbres I'm assuming Bonvalet somehow conjured with his humble instrumentation, a mysterious and elusive composition that defies much of my above attempts to characterize the group.
Because it both equals its predecessor at its best and introduces a wider compositional range, I'd recommend this second album to anyone wishing to consider a role for Cheval de Frise in their life, but to be honest, the first album will also convey their essential aesthetic equally well and my own listening is split fairly evenly between the two. Since discovering this body of work almost one year ago, I've played these discs dozens of times in a state of peaceful rapture—the herky-jerkiness is so subtle and intricate that I'm not compelled to find expression through bodily movement—and like Trout Mask Replica or Yowie's Cryptooology, I'm sure they will be a constant presence in my life till the end, always kept within convenient reach.
~Michael Anton Parker
In order to find the roots of improvisation, the communicative act that has infused music since its earliest inception, it is necessary to look beyond the tempered scale and bandstand practices to non-tempered and ritualistic practices that imbue those most ‘basic’ ways of making music. To be sure, there are several ways in which non-western source material have found their way into contemporary improvisation. As a spiritual communion, a celebratory act of reverence and worship of sound run through the mill of jazz and western classical music as well as China, India, Japan, Turkey and points in between, ‘ethnic improvisation’ has informed the Sea Ensemble and Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society, among others. Of a more direct approach, and conceived to gain both a more diverse palette and a constancy of new playing situations, the use of an entire catalog of non-western and homemade instruments has informed the work of composers like Mauricio Kagel and the improvisation group New Phonic Art (Michel Portal, Vinko Globokar, Carlos Roqué Alsina, Jean-Pierre Drouet).
Somewhere in between reverence and a knotty neo-dadaist approach to process lies the duo of Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett. Hallett, a regular fixture in the London Improvisers’ Orchestra as a violinist (see Bagatellen for a review of the LIO’s latest), has worked since the mid-1970s with many of England’s most vanguard improvisers, a tireless explorer of high harmonics and lengthy bowed tones: violin, viola, cello, sarangi, bowed bicycle wheels, saws, electronically-produced sounds and voice have all entered into her lexicon. Bell, primarily a shakuhachi player (he studied the instrument in Tokyo) and a collector of Asian mouth instruments, has worked in the LIO as well as with the BBC Symphony; The Geographers is their first recorded duo. Something one has to keep in mind when listening to Hallett and Bell (or any of the above mentioned ensembles) is inherent in the title of The Geographers: making an aesthetic, creative map of the world does, on many occasions, require cultural juxtaposition. Such a concept is part and parcel of this music – as in New Phonic Art, where it is highly doubtful that any other musical situation could employ zurna, alphorn, pipe organ and tabla in a quartet improvisation, so Cretan pipes, electronics and bowed bicycle spokes probably have not met before this duo. Luckily, The Geographers appears as a balance between reverent and post-structural juxtaposition, humming electronics and high harmonics from Hallett’s arsenal girding and filling out the traditionally-played, plaintive and full-bodied sound of Bell’s various pipes and flutes. “Shrugging into Spring” opens with percussion and dissonant reed cries from Bell’s pi saw (a Thai free reed instrument) before segueing into an intense bout of shakuhachi and viola, a slowly building overture of disparates. Sarangi and shakuhachi are employed for “Flying on the Landing,” an exploration of controlled violence, Bell’s shakuhachi given a pinched, terse vocabulary to mate with the sarangi’s 35 tuned blades. The khene, a Chinese harmonica, is given a hymnal workout (indeed, as an instrument, it has a processional quality) to an underpinning of bowed bicycle spokes in “With the Book Propped Up Against the Horse’s Mane.” To be sure, there is a foray into wispy bent notes and wide vibratos commingling, saw and breath in “The Weald,” the thirteen-minute centerpiece in which Bell’s shakuhachi takes on a distinctly bowed, shrill character, a thicker grade of metal to match Hallett’s saw.
Juxtapositions, while undeniably present, are often subtle and, as Bell and Hallett are well aware of the potential of both instrumentation and listening ability, ironic commentary is quashed by the complementary beauty that each is able to bring from their vocabulary. With The Geographers, Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett have created a rather visceral meditation on sound – leaving one to wonder whether the originators of musical communication had such power in mind.
Waylon didn’t coin the outlaw attitude in country (that honor arguably belongs to Johnny Cash), but he certainly lived it and sold it to legions of fans. Whether with his single finger salute to the Nashville old boy’s network or his willingness to plunder the regions of rock, blues and pop for bricks in his personal sound, Waylon bucked tradition while still borrowing the best it had to offer. The “take it or leave it” aura also reflected in his stripped down band the Waylors- a tough as hardtack seven-piece of three guitars, pedal-steel, harmonica, bass and drums. No schmaltzy keyboards or strings allowed within sight of the stage. His personage likewise struck a purposeful pose. From the hand-tooled saddle leather carapace of his Telecaster to the high-collared rhinestone shirts, cowhide vests, dungarees and boots, to the shaggy Southern rock mane and beardstache, all crowned with the rich wounded drawl that was another cousin to Cash, Waylon emphasized wide open space over the confining weight of overproduction and artifice. Everything comes to boil on this seminal live smorgasbord from ’74, a body of music that’s ballooned to over four times its originally circulated size over the course of consecutive reissues. Dubbed The Expanded Edition, BMG’s 2003 version looks to be definitive: 42 cuts (22 previously unreleased) and well over two hours of material culled from a three show stint in Dallas and Austin. It’s more than enough for any self-respecting country fan to gorge his or her ears on several times over. From the crowd-coaxing cover of Jimmy Rogers’ “T for Texas” with a chugging freight train rhythm, stinging pedal steel from old pro Ralph Mooney and wailing blues harp by Roger Crabtree, to the sturdy sign off “You Can Have Her” the band jockeys that tight/loose continuum we here at Bags are so fond of debating. Other burners include “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” where Waylon captures the autarchic Americana spirit in a concentrated 3:23 receptacle, autographing the lyrics with some ripping twang-saturated runs and “Honky Tonk Heroes,” one of his hugest hits were he pays respects to the rowdy ways of the past masters. All are in the two to four minute range and their brisk pacing keeps things from lagging or faltering. Even tears-in-beer ballads like “Amanda” and “Mona” preserve a satisfying simplicity. It’s like a killer honky tonk jukebox made flesh with stimulants aplenty for the involuntary onset of White Man’s Overbite. Stacked beside Live at Fulsom Prison and Joe Ely’s Live Shots it ties as a tip-top trifecta soundtrack for any interstate road trip.
Fripp and Eno’s first joint full-length in some thirty years drags along with it the noiseless chain of history and anticipation that threatens to keep it from even a first breath. While the disc is definitely a retread of now-hallowed ambient ground, sheer sonic depth and tempting textural play lift it just above the mythological nightmare of its own making.
Largely due to a resurgence in popularity of all things droney -- thanks to Fripp and Eno’s work with Matching Mole, which got the ball rolling in 1972 -- parts of Stars even exhibit a degree of fashion sense. “Meissa” opens with the staccato stutterings of what sounds like Eno-tweaked guitar, an advance in the Frippertronics camp bespeaking at least a wink in the direction of recent technological developments. The odd beat even shows its face, best integrated on “Lupus” yet sounding most pedestrian -- not so much offensive as simply outdated and plainly tasteful -- in “Altair”. In fact, “Meissa” might be viewed as the template from which almost every track on offer here is struck. As has been this duo’s wont, long loops swell, fade and then disappear. The overriding atmosphere is one of bliss, static and serene, and anyone familiar with Evening Star knows the formula. Such floatiness does not preclude a few moments of stock sinisterity, as in the first few moments of “Lupus”, and at the right volume, these are fairly effective.
What saves the disc from itself, and what I found most refreshing, are Fripp’s contributions. Occasionally, the worn-out synth patches I’ve come to dread with the audition of each new Crimson album rear their ugly heads, but by and large, we are treated to some beautifully textured improvisations, full of the gorgeous sustains and controlled feedback any Fripp fan has loved for so long. Much of Evening Star’s distortion has gone, or been somehow subsumed, but the playing is even more mature, each note bent, quivering or arrow-straight, fitting perfectly in its surroundings as if it had sprung up and grown tall just there. The disc ends with one of the longest and slowest fades I’ve ever heard, and this might be the most astonishing revelation from a disc that gets better with each spin.
~ Marc Medwin
The Philly-Chicago nexus in creative improvised music has few proponents as persistent as Khan Jamal. The vibraphonist’s career has traveled more troughs to peaks than most, but he’s yet to concede a KO and flip the switch permanently silencing his instrument’s motor. A three album deal with Steeplechase in the 80s notched one of his most artistically noteworthy periods, free from cloying pop jazz proclivities and oriented instead toward adventurous postbop forms.
Coming on like Frank Lowe on alto on the opener “Johnny’s in Malmø,” Charles Tyler jockeys the AACMish head with a bit of difficulty but perseveres with a singing ebullient tone. A languorous waltz, “Just Us” coaxes his romantic side with a subdued Aylerian cry still threaded through his canny articulations. Tyler’s baritone bucks and blusters on “Principal,” bluntly plowing through the leader’s delicate china shop clusters like the proverbial bull to great contrastive effect. Jamal alternates plush cumulous clouds with propulsive lead progressions. His felt-capped mallets, four in number, parse out pastel patterns on the tubular bells that rarely relinquish their melodic import and add luminous breadth to the ensemble politic.
Bassist Johnny Dyani surfaces as unobtrusive linchpin. His stout pizzicato anchors the interplay, but never overwhelms or undercuts it. At various key junctures such as the potent slapping vamp on the title track and the fluid groove of “Hucksterman,” an R&B number straight out of the Noah Howard songbook, his ability to augment instead of grandstand calmly earns him the crown of MVP, a mantle he holds here and on the other Jamal led albums for the label. While hardly a heavyweight drummer Leroy Lowe actually ends up a shrewd choice for the seat. His sticks and skins keep the quartet moving and make the most of the ample space provided by Jamal’s compositions, but also address a willingness to defer to the bigger guns. Tyler’s “Space Traveller,” the only non-Jamalian tune of the set, wears its Arkestral pedigree proudly and the composer pays elegiac homage to that most famous Saturnian with more rocket booster baritone.
After a rather lackluster decade subsequent to this session Jamal’s career got a lift through a signing to CIMP. The relationship survives to this day and it recently yielded an album Black Awareness, teaming Jamal with longtime colleague Byard Lancaster and surprise celebrity guest Grachan Moncur III. The Steeplechase trifecta stands in nostalgic good company with Jamal’s renewed creative edge.
Okay, I’ll admit it; I bought this one based on the cover.The portrait of Graciana Silva in paisley mu-mu poised at her harp, front-teeth capped with gold, won me over instantly when spotted in the bargain bin at Let It Be Records. The venerable Minneapolis brick & mortar is bolting its doors in few weeks, another casualty of the condo gentrification that’s sweeping downtown acreage. With it goes a prime source for procuring on the cheap such finds as Trio Silva’s lone disc for the Rounder-distributed Corason label. Graciana’s been plying her harp in the market and cantina centers of Veracruz since the age of ten. Fifty-eight at the taping of this ’94 recording she’s joined by her brother Pino on jarana guitar (a minature mandolin-like variant used in mariachi combos) and Elena Huerta on second harp. With just three sets of strings (though a combined eighty or so between them), the trio crafts a lithesome and fulsome ensemble sound. The repertoire centers on the son jarocho, a songbook popular among mariachis that blends subtle African-influenced counter rhythms with an epoxy of Spanish and mestizo-derived melodic content. Graciana’s boisterous and occasionally strident vocals dance atop a scintillating surface of braiding harp chords, her “ll’s” trilling with comparable coquettish enthusiasm. Pino strums his jarana jovially beside her, barking out a series of hoarse responses to her calls and sustaining the incessant strutting beat for the zapateado, or traditional foot-stamping dance. Elena plays the wallflower, insinuating supple fills, but leaving the dramatic repartee to the siblings. The music is at once delicate and exuberant, candid and complex. Most of all, it’s contagious, causing toes and heels to tap in instinctual response to the frolicsome fluctuating cadence. They even do a version of the familiar “La Bamba” that playfully strips the polished pantalones off the popular Los Lobos version. A few amigos, a six-pack of Negra Modelo, a grande order of papas fritas y salsa & this disc are all the ingredients necessary for a satisfying late afternoon fiesta.
Back in the pivotal 50s and 60s, Rudy Van G’s storied recording studio residence wasn’t just home to jazz musicians. A fair share of bluesmen also made the trek to suburban Englewood Cliffs, NJ to lay down tracks, mostly for the Prestige subsidiary Bluesville. Few featured instrumentation as unusual as this Shakey Jake platter. It’s a configuration that to my knowledge hasn’t been duplicated on disc since. The absence of any sort of conventional rhythm section (no bass, no drums, etc.) definitely absolves the session from the ordinary. Jake’s harmonica and vocals join Jack McDuff and Bill Jennings and the result is a weird kind of chamber blues sound. McDuff and Jennings were a familiar fit, the latter holding the guitar chair in the B-3 organist’s band. Both men stayed musically fit on steady rations of gutbucket blues goulash. All composition credits go to the mouth harp ace’s mild-mannered alter ego Jimmie D. Harris. But it’s a bit of a ruse since most of the selections pilfer blatantly from existing blues tropes. Shakey stamps each with his cocksure signature, but only minor lyrical modifications. His vocal inflections borrow heavily from Muddy Waters (not surprising considering his Windy City digs) on tracks like the opener “Worried Blues” where his whoops and harp breaks ride out a rhythm of chugging guitar and well-endowed organ swells. “My Foolish Heart” a barely camouflaged retread of “Mannish Boy,” is even more conspicuous in its borrowings. The trio also tackles a handful of instrumentals like the slowly smoldering “Sunset Blues,” which features killer relaxed fretwork by Jennings and a molasses-paced groove from McDuff built on plush sustains and staggered trills. These numbers reveal fascinating collisions in styles and levels of experience between the leader and his ‘sidemen’. Despite the differentials Jake’s reedy blowing and spirited singing dishes out instant charms. From its field holler beginnings the blues has depended on creative appropriation. Jake just does right by the long-standing custom and in so doing crafts one of the singular records of the idiom.
“One of the most beloved cabaret musicians of New York’s 8th Avenue Middle Eastern club scene of the 1950s”- so asserts the blurb on back of this Traditional Crossroads comp and it’s not an overstatement. Udist Marko Melkon did much to popularize his lute-like, watermelon-shaped stringed instrument on American shores, but he accomplished it with ears, fingers and intellect attuned to custom and tradition. Like Markos Vamvakaris, his Greek counterpart on bouzouki, Melkon subtly tailored his songbook of folk melodies and rhythms to the fickle tastes of his Westernized audiences without ceding any of their old country integrity. The 21 tracks here, most rescued from heirloomed sides on long defunct labels like Kaliphon and Me-Re, furnish an edifying extract of his lionized career. Many of the tracks suggest a soundtrack equally at home in a bustling Turkish market or a Lower Manhattan speakeasy stage. Melkon works mostly with a small revolving ensemble of violin, kanun, dumbek and finger cymbals. Gliding microtones abound in the string playing and the leader’s vocals make for pathos-padded counterpoint to the serpentine structures of the tunes. There’s even a small clutch of brilliantly executed solo taksims that zero in on Melkon’s adroit fingering skills and substantiate his storied standing among peers. The set caps with an incongruous artifact: “Asia Minor” an early Armenian/Afro-Cuban alloy that finds Melkon’s amplified axe fronting his son-in-law Roger Mozian’s jazz band. It can’t hold a clave to Machito’s majestic version of the tune, but Melkon does manage to summon some masterful Dick Dale-presaging tremolo in the closing seconds. This set is just one of several Traditional Crossroads discs celebrating canonical doyens of the ud. Others of note include compendiums of work by Udi Hrant Kenkulian and Udi Yorgo Bacanos.
Nearly thirty years before tastemakers at Fat Possum capitalized on the scheme of fusing garage rock with country blues Bukka White cut this asymmetrical album. The aged bluesman was still riding the swell of his “rediscovery”, regularly appearing at Folk and Blues festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Sensing the Zeitgeist he expressed an interest in recording with a backing band, preferably comprised of young turks. Trouble was, like other idiosyncratic troubadours, White’s music worked best as a solitary affair or with minimal (usually washboard) accompaniment. British producer Mike Vernon honored the desire anyway and organized a pick-up band of second guitar, harmonica, piano, string-bass, drums and washboard. Two of the sidemen even adopted the colorful monikers of Harmonica Boy and Anchor for the session. All were mere fractions of their frontman’s age.
The set list is a predictable mix of White’s “hits” as well as ‘standards’ sifted through the Buddha-smiling raconteur’s improvisatory sieve. White called his extemporaneous creations “sky songs,” a phrase touching on his tendency to pluck ad-lib verses and chords from out of thin air. The band responds to his unscripted anecdotal ditties with varying efficacy. The most startling collision occurs early on White’s signature “Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues,” a train wreck on the surface that reveals an odd syllogistic solidarity within the tangled wreckage. Here it almost sounds as if Bukka layed down his vocal and guitar tracks first and the band overdubbed their parts on top days later with the tape decks set to the wrong speed. Chugging backbeat drums, slapping bass and wailing harmonica approximate a speeding locomotive while White resolutely rides a completely different rail. As incongruous as the fit is there are improbable moments where everything synchs up and the effect is electrifying.
The band sits out on a handful of tracks too, like the dour “Drifting Blues” and harrowing “(Brand New) Decoration Blues” ideal vehicles for White’s gravelly bark and hard-strumming fret-play. On the latter he refurbishes the habitual lyrics with a string of virginal verses, slapping his surname on the song credit to boot. With “Give Me An Old, Old Lady” White acquiesces to his band, whooping and grooving on a stomping rock beat and rolling out the lyric: “Got an old lady, sittin’ in my bed, when I come ‘round, she gonna rub my head…” without the least bit of bashfulness. White’s Pre-War sides for Vocalion are a benchmark of his career (and arguably Pre-War blues in general), but this Blue Horizon set makes for a very pleasing detour and anomaly. One lingering question: is that Bukka in the spacesuit or some defacto substitute?
The elegant cover image reproduced above is, as it happens, virtually impossible to make out on the physical artefact: printed black on black, the texts and images are only legible because of the indentations left by the old-fashioned letterpress printing. Similar games concerning legibility and communication play out inside the packaging – a Jerome Rothenberg poem printed in light grey on white, a CD covered in Morse code (a reference, I take it, to the label name). The music itself has a simplicity and stateliness that often suggest a ghostly afterimage of Cage’s Ryoanji. Percussionist Nakatani places each click and drumtap with the precision of a step taken in a ceremonial dance, and often adds soft touches of chimes. Doneda (on soprano and sopranino) and Wright (alto and soprano) both make their horns sound slender as a reed, often concentrating on thin wire-drawn tones perpetually on the verge of disappearing entirely into the musical ether. The resulting music is far from austere: a kind of gradually unfolding micro drama, comprising a series of tiny vulnerabilities, frayings, insinuations, and stretches of miniaturized song. Like so many of the best improv recordings, this one seems to change shape and emphasis with every listen: delicate, languorously paced, yet tough as steel.
~ Nate Dorward
Shall it be said again? Their own instruments. Now that that's out of the way, The Roots have arguably outdone themselves with The Tipping Point, released late last year. Consider the opening segue into "Star/Pointro", from a beautifully reverberated sample from Sly & the Family Stone's "Everybody Is A Star." The Roots fuse their own nostalgia with retrofitted slices and understated beats to deliver allusive messages overflowing with metaphor. Questlove's drums are a high point as usual -- see the stop-time post-production that drives "Web" -- and Black Thought is at the top of his game, "It's Philly world-wide phenomenom/ And reinforcin' that shit is my 9-to-5." There's plenty to sit with, including "Guns Are Drawn," perhaps a necessary counterpart to Phrenology's "Sacrifice", albiet without the luscious vocals of guest Nelly Furtado. Nonetheless, the guest spots on "The Tipping Point" are wonderfully spaced, never stealing from the main act, and always on point as elements -- rather than cosmetics -- to the music. The album's a solid bet for middle-of-the-roaders looking for a safe snapshot of current American hip-hop. For the initiated, you already know the potency of the record.
It’s amusing to ponder the reactions of certain button-down record buyers upon their perusal of Art Blakey’s classic albums on local Woolworth’s racks during the racially-stymied 50s and 60s. Picture Blakey, as snapped by Blue Note shutterbug Francis Wolff: a succession of proud, usually intense, sometimes defiant expressions on his various visages, and always, a healthy supply of sweat. Perspiration is such an intrinsic component to the covers and the music insulated inside. Beaded across his furrowed bald pate on Moanin’, trickling in glistening rivulets down his cheeks and chin on Three Blind Mice- the liquid results of his athletic workouts are a sure-fire evidence of the exponential calories expended in putting his impregnable kit through its paces. A Galactus with sticks, Blakey concocts tsunami-sized cross-rhythms with enough propulsive force to topple skyscrapers. That caricatural comparison isn’t ideal though since the infamous Marvel Comics world-devourer couldn’t command even a fraction of Buhaina’s dynamism or agility.
Free For All embodies the arguable apogee of the fabled Blakey ardor. At just four cuts, it’s a short jaunt, but any longer and the ensuing bumps and bruises might prove chronic. The title cut and “The Core” are tornados of gloriously stentorian rhythm, but the action avoids devolving into Buddy Rich-style bombast. Blakey always holds the helm, but he never browbeats his sidemen. He’s the general who galvanizes his troops and garners the best from them by leading by example. Shorter responds in kind, conjuring some of his most florid and fulminating solos on record, statements that retain their improvisatory incisiveness without ceding an ounce of zeal. Hubbard scales similar heights. Matching Blakey’s mettle on the title piece in a game of dramatic brinksmanship, the clarion-toned trumpeter eventually pulls back. The drummer ploughs forward and past him, detonating a solo that rattles the rafters of Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and likely the dentition of everyone present with a barrage of pile-driving press rolls. Even the characteristically genteel Curtis Fuller reciprocates in the fervor. “Pensativa” acts balm to the towering infernos of the earlier cuts, but Shorter doesn’t let the relative calm restrain him from lighting another bottle rocket of a solo. With more energy unfettered and expended than the majority of the Jazz Messengers live dates, this is also among the venerable outfit’s most incandescent.
One of the freer-thinking Brazilian outfits of the late 60s, the Tamba 4 were something of sore-thumb signing on the Herb Alpert officiated A&M imprint. On one end of the label’s roster sat the brazenly milquetoast Tijuana Brass. The industriously inquisitive Tambans held court at the other. Led by canny pianist Luiz Eça, the ensemble also included: José “Bebeto” de Castilho e Souza on flutes, bass and vocals; Dorio Ferreira on bass, guitars and percussion and Rubens Ohana on drums, jawbone, conga and other sundry percussion. Together they roped in an ambitiously eclectic array of elements from Debussy-indebted lyricism, to pervasively popular Jobim, to indigenous sonorities borrowed from their country’s melting pot culture. Even forays into free improvisatory dissonance weren’t outside the reach of their explorations. “O Morro (the Hill)” uncovers early evidence of their multiplicity of interests as they adapt the Jobim-scripted theme to a shortlist of permutations from rhapsodic piano samba to a romping percussive solo rife with martial stick-play from Ohana that would make Buddy Rich reel in envy. “Moça Flor (Flower Girl)” suggests something else entirely, a moody flute-nourished ballad feature for Bebeto’s satin-soft vocals. “Iemanjá,” a Baden Powell number, evokes mystery via whirring organ, percolating hand percussion, flute and lush harmonizing vocals on a chassis of dark rolling piano chords. Other standout cuts encompass two more Powell-penned tunes. “Chant of Ossanha,” further spotlights Bebeto’s flute and Ohana’s flut
