The producer Don Was has taken that last concern public, in this short essay first published by the Metro Times of Detroit.
Of course he’s right. The generation now ascending is missing a vital part of the music exploration experience, the part that begins with questions like “who is playing that demonic guitar?” and “what were the conditions under which this recording was made?” The credits aren’t just credits – they’re portals into under-known realms. The notes aren’t just some sort of “bonus” material – they offer perspective and context, a window into the creative process.
When somebody downloads an album from most places on the Internet, what they get is a file containing fairly decent digital representation of the music and a tiny image of the front cover. For those who come to music to expand their horitons, it’s essentially a dead-end. More than that, the absence of information sends a signal: The folks who were involved in the creation of this work are relatively meaningless, just a shade more important to the end-user than the factory worker who bolted the player together. We’re basically training this generation to think of musicians and recording and mastering engineers as interchangeable parts, anonymous and easily replaced. The comments responding to Was’ post say all the usual things about how easy it is to search for this stuff; I’d argue we shouldn’t have to search, especially for personnel information. It should just be there, all the time, to spark curiosity and inspire a new quest. The fate of the guitar player who tears up some Dixie Chicks tune doesn’t matter to Apple, but it should matter to the listener. Maybe that guitar player has a project of his own, and is of course counting on his Dixie Chicks connection to spread the word about it. Maybe it’s a masterpiece. The way things are now, lots of us will never know. Oh well.
Donald Van Vliet didn’t read music. His creations were extemporaneous; if some musician happened to be around or a tape recorder was running, a stray idea might evolve into a song – according to myth, much of Trout Mask Replica, the Beefheart magnum opus, started this way.
Sometimes with this type of creativity, what survives is a tiny spark from the creator and lots of editorial input from the “transcriber.” Apparently this is not the case with Beefheart. His rhythms announce themselves like threatening gangs entering a quiet street; they’re audacious lurches that demand attention first for their sheer noisy brazenness, and then for their notation-defying oddness. And yet as dizzy as things get, there’s usually something solid to grab onto – the whipcrack backbeat of the blues, some scurrying attempt at whiteboy boogaloo. Most pop songwriters create accompaniments that can sustain, with some variation, across a set of stanzas; Beefheart wrote in fitful episodes, and didn’t worry if sometimes that meant different notation (involving different rhythmic systems) for each measure. On his most memorable records – Trout Mask, Safe as Milk, Doc at the Radar Station – the shifting pulses are high theater in themselves. It’s almost a bonus hearing how they contain and come to symbolize the "sense" of the narrative, deftly reinforcing the scatter of words and images that seem perpetually moving in several directions at once.
Then there’s the harmony, which is every bit as individual. Beefheart and his crew accentuate the feeling of upheaval at every opportunity, with constellations of piano thunder and plinking stabs from the guitar. The harmonic schemes are studies in the careful deployment of dissonance: Though at times the Magic Band can summon a massive free-jazz wail, most often the chord clusters and instrument combinations are the work of a precise mind, a finicky anarchist who knows exactly what size of drillbit he’ll use to open your skull and the method that’s most effective for the job.
For me, the loss of Beefheart represents the endpoint to a fairly significant musical language. We need the cranks and crazy folk of music, perhaps now more than ever. And we especially need the ones whose ideas test the limits of rational thinking and conventional wisdom. It’s often said of composers that they possess a singular “thumbprint” that’s the sum of their instincts and their ears. Beefheart’s musical identity was massive in size and provocatively original in conceptual scope – his music was an island that lots of aspirants tried to visit. But nobody could ever settle down there. It was his, and his alone.
JOHN ELLIS AND DOUBLE WIDE: Puppet Mischief (ObliqSound). This romping stomping decade-hopping mashup suggests that Wynton Marsalis was not wrong when he insisted that young jazz musicians need to study the gems of the past – he was just way too hoity-toity and precious about the tradition. Saxophonist and composer John Ellis is fluent in Marsalis-approved lineage but far less reverent, and that stance alone unlocks some tremendous possibilities. He picks and chooses randomly, tossing historically important jazz devices – second-line parade beats and big-band shout choruses and dissonant free-jazz cries – into a happy tumult, or a funkified free for all. Drummer Jason Marsalis keeps the pulse clear and honest but can scramble it at the slightest provocation, leading the ensemble through a surprising range of moods. Sometimes they sound like buskers entertaining French Quarter tourists. Sometimes they’re denizens of the Manhattan lofts of the ‘70s, tearing apart the last vestiges of consonant harmony. Sometimes they kickstart an uproar, and sometimes on the way to uproar, they arrive at an elegy.
JASON MORAN: Ten (Blue Note). Jazz pianist Jason Moran said earlier this year that for most of its decade-long existence, the trio he calls the Bandwagon (with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits) has avoided the gigging treadmill. Conventional jazz wisdom says it’s important for groups to work regularly to evolve; Moran’s group has had years where they only played together for a total of three or four weeks. That little fact is remarkable when you consider the intuitive communication these three have developed: They go for months working in other bands, and then, upon reconvening, they find themselves immersed in some unhinged experimentation that demands almost superhuman reflexes. Perhaps that’s one reason Ten feels so boisterously alive: It’s the sound of three alert musicians flying on wits and instincts. The material is almost irrelevant: Whether playing a hymnlike Moran original or a well-traveled standard or a study by composer Conlon Nancarrow, these guys approach everything as a blank canvas, and are determined to fill it in novel ways. Don’t believe me? Compare the original “Gangsterism on Wood,” from Facing Left, with its decade-later corollary, “Gangsterism Over Ten Years.” Same idea, different galaxy.
THE NATIONAL: High Violet (4AD) Here’s the rare album that will outshine the heaping oversized bandwagons of hype that attended its introduction. Celebrated as a masterwork before the files even leaked, the delicately appointed High Violet uncovers new novelistic ways of looking at a tired songwriting topic, the pain that accompanies love’s dissolution. Vocalist and lyricist Matt Berninger presents himself mostly as a victim of the tides, pondering the state of things in poetic code: “Sorrow found me when I was young/Sorrow waited, sorrow won.” And every now and then, he pushes his caustic, bewildered baritone into a place of highly refined sullenness, where even if you can’t quite grok the meaning of the lyrics (those lines in “Terrible Love” about walking with spiders), you can’t miss the ever-darkening mood. A masterpiece.
ROBYN: Body Talk (Interscope) Swedish siren Robyn Carlsson created the grabbiest and most refreshingly unformulaic dancepop of 2010, and she delivered it in bulk. The three mini-albums in the Body Talk series represent an unusually cohesive creative outpouring, a feast of exuberant, sassy, instantly memorable hooks backed up by correspondingly wicked (and mostly gimmick-free) dance rhythms. Whether chasing bliss in the form of a one-night stand or delivering a sharp-tongued manifesto on self-reliance, Robyn sounds like she has inspiration to burn. Hope Lady Gaga enjoyed that victory lap, because between Robyn and Janelle Monae – the singer and songwriter whose frenetic Little Richard-inspired live show remains more interesting than her recordings – there is formidable competition on the horizon.
Ten More, All Close Calls: Robert Plant: Band of Joy; Eminem: Recovery; Elton John and Leon Russell: The Union; Big Boi: Sir Lucious Left Foot…The Son of Chico Dusty; Gorillaz: Plastic Beach; LCD Soundsystem: This is Happening; Mumford & Sons: Sigh No More; The Unthanks: Here’s the Tender Coming; Corinne Bailey Rae: The Sea; Brad Mehldau: Highway Rider.
Wish I’d Discovered This Last Year: Efterklang: Performing Parades. Given the sheer volume of music that comes hurtling at us each year, it’s inevitable that some great life-altering releases escape notice. Every year for the last several, I’ve encountered at least one record that would have been on my yearend shortlist had I discovered it in time. It seems only fair to share it. German prog-rock conceptualists Efterklang put out a record in 2010, the grandiose, Radiohead-reminescent Magic Chairs, that will totally reward repeated investigation. Last year, though, the group brought its 2008 effort Parades to life with help from a 50-piece orchestra, and though it didn’t get tons of U.S. love, the resulting document is a game changer: Haunting wordless vocal melodies and correspondingly bold orchestrations make Performing Parades one of those fragile and breathtaking works you almost don’t trust the first time.
]]>KING SUNNY ADE: Baba Mo Tunde (Mesa/Bluemoon).
Not everything of musical consequence happens in four minutes. Sometimes when a band is as adept at groove-making as this one, a tune can cruise for a good while, building intensity in a bubbling, slow-simmering way that proclaims the primacy of rhythm. Indeed, when the pulse is this multifaceted and intricate, it’s all you need. In this singles era, we don’t encounter too much of what might be called “extended” music making under studio conditions, and that’s one reason King Sunny Ade’s two-disc Baba Mo Tunde, his first studio effort in a decade, is essential. Ramping up in a delightfully methodical, unhurried way, and then cruising along for 15 minutes or more, Ade and company show how thrilling the marathon journey can be.
THE BLACK KEYS: Brothers (Nonesuch)
Pretend you have ten minutes to teach overprivileged ten year olds toting their overpriced Stratocasters to the local School of Rock a lesson in any pop music subgenre. It’s a fabulous parlor game, and trickier than you think: Remember that even the most precocious cratedigging tween may not yet be up to speed on German prog circa 1974. If you choose blues-rock, where the innovative leaps stop with Lynyrd Skynyrd (ok, maybe Govt Mule), at least you’ll be able to share some of this totally ripping, irrepressibly hooky career-best statement from the Black Keys. At first, the compact tunes here sound like ordinary riff-based genre studies that follow the guidelines established by the early Stones in the pre School of Rock era. Hang with Brothers for a little while, and you discover a band that’s distilled oddly shaped blues shards into a profoundly new elixir, and from there added only the most essential ingredients – terse prechoruses and blunt refrains and two-bar rhythm guitar punctuations that are comfortably familiar and pure hotwired magic at the same time.
THE ROOTS: How I Got Over (Def Jam).
This summer’s homage to the consciousness-raising soul of the ‘70s, the Roots/John Legend collaboration Wake Up!, seemed woefully late on arrival. The idealism that Obama rode into office had dissipated into plodding partisanship, leaving even the most loyal believers bewildered and already nostalgic for the rhetoric of Summer 2008. Wake Up! was fine as far as it went, but the most acidic comment on this malaise moment was found on The Roots’ appropriately agitated How I Got Over. Here, rapper Black Thought looks around at all that has not changed – the relentless bleakness of inner city poverty, a latent systemic racism, and most of all a widespread apathy – and shakes his head at the hollowness of the platitudes, the emptiness of the response. He sounds almost resigned to dismay about the status quo, and meanwhile the band is fired up and clearly not engaging in any kind of go-along-to-get along. It takes more than tightly wound genre-blurring rhythms beats to stamp out disillusionment, of course, but the way these guys play, the smack of the attack, is a good start. Extra points for the title track, which recasts the faith-based exaltation of a ‘50s gospel standard as an ode to resourcefulness, what it takes to make it through the daily scramble.
NEIL YOUNG: Le Noise (Reprise)
We are lucky that Neil Young, rock legend, remains curious about rock music as a present-tense pursuit and not just a tired artifact. He’s explored every interesting combination of raw guitar sonics and tender , pitying vocals, and hasn’t fully exhausted all the possibilities yet. Sometimes his experiments misfire, and sometimes they lead to music that is ear-stretchingly vital and utterly distinct from everything else. That’s Le Noise in a nutshell. Here Young drills deep into a fundamentally new approach, inspired not just by Daniel Lanois’ stately background atmospherics, but also by the broad, harrowing tone coming from the guitar. (In an interview, Young marveled at how Lanois made the guitar sound “like God.”) The menace and murk in these settings turns out to be an ideal backdrop for Young’s ruminations on decay, loss, and that strange postmodern condition of too much information and not enough insight.
The groove of “Baba L’oun S’obun Googbo,” one of seven electrifying tracks on the latest from King Sunny Ade, kicks abruptly into a higher gear after the tune has been humming along for several minutes. The first slivers of solo guitar genius happen seven minutes in, when Ade casually drops a few lines that connect Wes Montgomery’s chordal musings with West African arpeggios. All told, the tune takes over eleven minutes to unspool, and at its conclusion, you’re left with the sense that the African Beats, 18 strong, might just be getting started.
So it goes throughoutBaba Mo Tunde (Mesa/Blue Moon), the first studio set from Ade in a decade. Six songs (plus one King Britt remix) are spread over 2 crisply recorded discs. The title track is a thirty one minute journey through jagged hills and shimmering valleys and outbreaks of brilliant talking drum euphoria. Sure, it’s possible to fast-forward and land directly on any of the salient “highlight reel” moments, but as is true of Beethoven and really enduring music of all types, to fully savor them, you have to take the whole ride.
It has been a long, long time since Ade made a record like this one. Why? Cue that tired refrain we call the “talking music-business blues.” During the early days of Ade’s tenure at Island Records, the expectation was that he’d become the African Bob Marley, and so most of his ‘80s records for the international market were oriented toward songs – the episodic brilliance of the African Beats’ slow-to-unravel groove was compressed into bite-sized chunks. This might have helped raise awareness about Ade and juju, but it offered an increasingly telescoped juju experience – one governed by a Western pop song aesthetic, not the simmering pulses and surging crescendos that made the band’s live performances irresistible.
There’s something absolutely life-affirming about hearing a veteran who, having endured the dance of commerce and compromise, prevails by reclaiming some foregone essence of his art. That’s what’s happening here. Inside Baba Mo Tunde are all the crucial elements of juju – the relentlessly light and everlastingly buoyant rhythm, the vocal incantations, the hypnotic guitar latticeworks that serve as structural foundation and countermelody at the same time, the stray wonderful sparks from Ade’s lead guitar. As in every great Ade performance I can remember, the individual elements can be savored as distinct little engines, operating in perfect alignment and helping to synchronize the whole. Each contributes some necessary bit of energy, and what you realize, after following these threads through a hurtling, perpetually unfolding story, is that though it might take awhile, journeys like this are rare. And worth every minute.
Solomon Burke was one of those.
I was lucky enough to talk with him at length several times, and each time came away not just enriched, but genuinely moved. The Philadelphia-born soul singer – father of 21, grandfather of at least 50 (accounts vary), owner of a string of hit songs and a chain of mortuaries – died over the weekend in Amsterdam. A significant slice of music history went with him.
Burke was one of the singers signed to Atlantic Records when soul music exploded in the 1960s, and though he didn’t sell as many records as labelmates like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, he was always the revered one, the singer who could be counted on to bring down the house every night. He recorded a country tune several months before Ray Charles “went” country, and was decades ahead of Prince in his blending of the sacred and the profane.
Burke’s method was simple: He’d sing as though preaching, confiding about love trouble in a way that gave romance the aura of a divine calling. Building his case through un-showy gospel cadences, he phrased with the devastating confessional directness of a blues singer, his casual delivery seizing on – and magnifying – the urgent swing of Atlantic’s house rhythm section. When Burke would talk about the Atlantic days, he focused on the characters who were part of so many sessions – the singers, the musicians – and also the atmosphere of spontaneous creation that prevailed every day. “You’d do everything live, all within two or three hours. King Curtis (the great saxophonist) would come by, other guys would just jump in…..People were always walking in off the road just to see what was going on at the (Atlantic) studios…..Guys would say “Let me get some of that.” They weren’t thinking about money. They were interested in the feel of it, the soul.”
We talked about the unfairness of the music business. He’d had more than his share of down times, and yet kept any lingering bitterness hidden, for the most part. He knew he was well loved by soul-music scholars and a coterie of rabid fans – his “people” included a truck driver who wore out an old 8-track, who came backstage holding it, trembling, wanting to know if he could get it transferred to cassette. Burke knew that other artists revered him – for a long time, it wasn’t a true Van Morrison show unless the Irish songwriter invoked Burke at least once. And when Burke began his comeback in the late 1990s, he was gratified that record executives were saying things like “he should be as famous as Otis Redding,” and moved that several well-known artists, including Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits, wrote songs for his late masterpiece Don't Give Up On Me (1000 Recordings, pg. xxx). That album is an excellent starting point for an exploration of Burke, but don't stop there, because in terms of soul music, an anthology covering the "King of Rock and Soul's" Atlantic years is downright essential
Waits’ entry, “Diamond In Your Mind,” tells of maintaining a steely inner focus in the face of adversity. It resonated with Burke as soon as he heard it, he recalled in 2002: “It really hit hard, that song. We’re taught as Americans that diamons are one of those very important things to own, but, really, you’ve got to keep the biggest diamond in your mind. You have to keep going forward.” He pointed to his own experience: “Look at me. I’ve never been number one. I’ve never even been in the Top 10. But I’m here, and I know I’m number one in God’s book because I always kept that diamond in my mind.”
In every interaction I had with Burke, he’d drop some bit of metaphysical or spiritual insight, a thought borne of pure humility and grace. And then he’d launch into a discussion of the business that revealed him to be an astute, even shrewd, navigator of the music industry shark tank. Once, he got going about the offers he repeatedly declined to perform on “Soul Revue” stages on the oldies circuit. Starting in the 1970s, he almost always turned these gigs down, he explained, because he’d watched some of the singers of his peer group burn themselves out playing state fairs. Years before his return to secular stages, he realized that his market value would be lower if he’d traveled all those oldies-circuit miles. “When I present myself in public, I want people to see Solomon Burke at his best,” he said. “I knew that if I dedicated myself to singing the same handful of old songs every night I would wind up with no voice left, and to me that spelled trouble – I watched too many people lose their gifts over the years….I know I’m old. But I also know I’m still good.”
And, for a remarkable half century, he was.To the end.
Actually, it’s long past time. The burly tenorman, author of the definitive performance of “Body And Soul,” (see 1000 Recordings, page 348-349), has been relegated to a certain fixed appraisal for decades – he’s regarded as the elegant titan of swing-era tenor, perhaps the last great pre-bebop soloist. Other saxophonists speak of Hawk in hallowed tones, but that admiration still hasn’t spread beyond the cognoscenti, perhaps because, for many hipsters, bebop is the cataclysmic event and what happened before it was a quaint warmup. As a result, Hawkins’ profile hasn’t changed much in the 70 years since he returned from several years in Europe, wandered into a studio and put down a solo some consider “the” masterwork of improvisation.
Several available Hawkins titles, particularly his recordings from the late 1940s, suggest that he was a sophisticated thinker whose slyly modern playing transcended swing. Now comes astounding further proof of this, in the form of a live Hawkins performance of “Body and Soul,” from 1940, roughly four months after he made the studio gem. The music comes from a radio broadcast captured by an engineer and musician named William Savory, whose collection of extended airchecks from the late ‘30s has recently been unveiled by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. (An excellent New York Times story on the material is archived here.) If the rest of Savory’s collection is as intense as this performance, long-held notions about jazz are destined for revision.
On the new discovery, which is just beginning to receive an ambitious cleanup effort by audio engineer Doug Pomeroy, Hawkins plays four choruses, double the length of his studio solo. Those who know the classic will recognize motifs and ideas Hawkins deployed on the original – except in performance, he mulls them over more casually, and he takes them further. A riff that sits in one tonal area on the original blossoms into something unexpectedly complex, with Hawkins transposing it into several adjacent keys. Each variation pushes further against the established harmony, with thrilling results. And each suggests an approach to chordal “freedom” that didn't become a fixture of the jazz vocabulary until the 1960s. Yet Hawkins doesn't come across as a radical revolutionary on the horn: He drops these forays into an athletically arpeggiated solo that swings easily, and sounds entirely effortless. The logic, from phrase to phrase, is always crystalline: Even when he’s stepping “out,” he outlines the harmonic as Bach would, one careful resolution at a time.
The contrast between this governing sense of order and Hawkins’ facile stream-of-consciousness invention is positively stunning, and reason to visit the fledging museum, which requires advance reservation for playback of the Savory material. I had to ask the museum’s director, Loren Schoenberg, to play the tenor solo several times, because at first I couldn’t quite fathom what I was hearing. A musician and educator, Schoenberg spent twenty years trying unsuccessfully to convince Savory to share his trove; this one solo explains that quest. It’s one of the rare instances where an exhumed artifact doesn’t simply enhance our understanding of an artist – it suggests the common perception is inadequate, in need of revision at the least and perhaps a complete overhaul.
The Savory collection includes nearly 1000 discs. One wonders how many other reputation-altering recordings await within it.
Building the 1000 Recordings list, I began from the presumption that the reader would be approaching “cold,” ie, wouldn’t know any of an act’s output, and so my first consideration was always accessibility: Is this album a good point of entry? This led to no small amount of agonizing between personal preference and accepted wisdom, between the big influential hit and the lesser-known gem.
With R.E.M., the tug of war involved Murmer, the debut album that is widely credited with opening up new pathways for rock bands, and Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), the band’s third full-length effort, which contains some of its most cryptic and wonderful songs. There’s a newly remastered version of Fables, a two-disc keepsake complete with an entire disc of demos. It’s the perfect Next Stop for anyone who started with Murmer and is curious about the band’s subsequent trajectory. Though the demos are not essential, Fables itself emerges as something brilliant and rare, a hurtling, slightly blurry, mesmeric travelogue filled with half-scenes and mysterious impressions. I got reacquainted with it during hour two of a five-hour road trip; from the opening cathedral-bell guitar tritone of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull,” it held me completely. It’s arguably the most engrossing lane-changing music in the band’s discography.
That’s partly because the songs seem to all connect, in some way, to the notion of travel – even in the slower songs, there’s a sense of things moving forward, if not careening out of control. And it’s partly because of the odd characters one meets on journeys, the train conductors and creepy porchdwellers and lost GPS-lacking souls seeking directions at filling stations – the forlorn ones with rusted vending machines and signs advertising long-defunct regional brands. But it’s also because of the circumstances: The band had been on the road for most of four years, playing songs from its first two records, and had yet to take a reappraising breath. As guitarist Peter Buck says in a brief liner note, “the four of us were completely out of our minds at the time.” Where tunes from the previous albums had been road-tested, Fables was a studio creation.
The remaster sharpens the edges of the songs, and, at the same time, makes clear that Fables wasn’t just about edges – the band was in pursuit of a diffuse, dusty-road psychedelia in which graceful guitar arpeggios support sprawling and often beautifully harmonized vocal ruminations. Producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, countless others) plays a George Martin-like role here, showing the band some of the ways the studio can expand, and make awesome, the noises produced by four individuals. He takes care to ensure that each element in the layered schemes is rendered distinctly – he catches the fleeting dissonances in the stacks of vocal harmony (“Green Grow the Rushes”) and provides each of the overlapping vocal parts, in the gloriously unhinged peak-moment chorales of “Driver 8” and others, with enough space to shine. Turns out those under-the-hood details, mostly lost on earlier CD iterations, are essential to the sound – and powerful enough to argue for a (long overdue) Fables reappraisal.
How I Got Over provides a welcome reality check for those vaguely uplifting platitudes about “change” and “hope” that ushered in the Obama era. A series of vignettes about the modern struggle to keep family and soul together under difficult circumstances, it features some of the grabbiest refrains this hip-hop crew has ever offered – for proof, start with “Dear God 2.0,” featuring My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and his Monsters of Folk cohorts. Then check the title track, the ticking-timebomb “Now or Never,” and the elegant “Right On,” which derives some of its wattage from none other than Joanna Newsome.
JASON MORAN: Ten (Blue Note). This inventive trio date marks a decade of collaboration between jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits. The Bandwagon, as the trio is called, has pushed at the edges of jazz convention by incorporating loops of odd sounds (one track here features feedback from the guitar of Jimi Hendrix) and conversations, improvising over hip-hop rhythms, and exploring radical ways to balance consonance and dissonance. Moran’s compositions here continue to push the trio into new territory – check the ambling, beautiful “RFK in the Land of Apartheid” – and there are also striking covers, including two versions of Conlon Nancarrow’s “Study No. 6.”
ETOILE DE DAKAR: Once Upon a Time In Senegal (Stern’s Music). Though it had a short run (roughly three years), the band that launched the career of Youssou N’Dour carved out a reputation for incandescent, impossibly fluid rhythms in support of bouyant, spirit-searing refrains. This 2-disc set surveys the best of the group’s studio recordings, made between 1979 and 1981; many have never been released outside of Africa. Those familiar with N’Dour’s later work know to expect lightning bolts when he sings; the surprises here include what’s behind him – intricate layers of guitar that give the music shimmering, ever-changing textures.
KETIL BJORNSTAD: Rememberance (ECM). The Norwegian pianist Ketil Bjornstad has a gift for earnest, bracingly simple melody – at times on this vivid journey, his compositions approach a murmering modern-day update of Erik Satie’s piano music. The title of this trio work featuring drummer Jon Christensen suggests nostalgia, but there’s no looking back happening here. Instead, the poised Bjornstad pursues a nuanced, pastel-tinged atmosphere that might just mirror the motion of brainwaves during periods of calm reflection. Remarkable for nighttime stargazing.
VARIOUS ARTISTS: Palenque Palenque: Champeta Criolla & Afro Roots in Colombia, 1975-1991. (Soundway). Great dance music is like gumbo: It becomes rich, far greater than the sum of its parts, when seemingly disparate ingredients are blended with sensitivity. An excellent illustration of this is Champeta, dance music that connects Colombian beats, like cumbia, with irreverent appropriations of African rhythm. Fiery and psychedelic, mindful of tradition but shot with a zealous energy missing from much Colombian music, this is an instant party.
The Rolling Stones are no exception – the current catalog upgrade program is at least the third of the CD era. But unlike most acts, the iconic British band has been fanatically stingy with unreleased material -- the 2005 Rarities was the band's first vault project. Sure, the CD reissues have offered perhaps upgraded sound (there’s some contention about this) and packaging, but in each case, it's the exact same music. That changed last week, with the double-disc “expanded” version of Exile on Main Street, the 1972 gem made under mythically debauched conditions and containing some of the most inspired playing the Stones ever captured on record.
This iteration is notable for what the band didn’t do – “sweeten” or correct a mix that vocalist Mick Jagger has complained about loudly for decades. (There’s been a beefy remastering, but the vocals are still somewhat obscured at times, and the guitars still register with that unruly wallop). It’s also notable for what it includes – alternate recordings of a few of Exile’s most inspired pieces (a deliciously unhinged “Loving Cup,” “Soul Survivor”) and a stack of tunes the band recorded during the Exile sessions but opted to keep on the shelf. Some of these are “exercises” – one sounds like a pale “Paint It Black” knockoff.
Still, if you love rock and roll, you need this. Because it provides a slightly wider prism through which to view and appreciate the creative tumult of the Rolling Stones. It catches the band at a key point on the timeline, the moment after they’d coughed up a trilogy of rock classics and were downright fearless, determined to expand the scope of the enterprise with explorations of country, gospel and blues.
You need this because it is one of those rare records that can slap you sideways before any of the words or the guitar chords can even register. No matter where you drop in, you feel this thing. Can the same be said of the new Hole?
You need Exile because it is an example of musicians creating in spite of the atmosphere of copious indulgence that surrounded them – on the alternate “Loving Cup,” the Stones sound too blotto to care about tiny details, yet not so far gone that they can’t dig deep and play. Cue this up to hear how looseness can be a high virtue.
You need this for “Plundered My Soul,” one of the newly unearthed tunes. Over a settled, medium-slow groove that has been dismissed by critics as “generic” Stones, Jagger tells of a woman he badly misread, and the misery that followed. Another song in the key of dejection, it is a sly little marvel, with that intensely visceral sound harnessed to a tight, disciplined, endlessly memorable refrain.
You need this because every so often, it’s nice to come face to face with boldness, to be reminded what boldness sounds like. As impressive as the songcraft is – and the basic hammer-and-nails verse-chorus stuff is unassailable here – there’s something more fundamental underneath. What drives Exile is an attitude. It describes a stance (or a series of them), ways of being in the world. Thirty years on, it’s somehow life-affirming to discover that the oppositional framework extended beyond the original texts. That there was more confrontation where “Rip This Joint” came from. And we need to be reminded. Because that energy has long since leeched out of corporate rock culture, and if current recordings are any indication, it’s not coming back anytime soon. On top of everything else, Exile can serve us as a kind of benchmark, reminding how potent rock and roll once was and measuring just how empty it can get when an intangible X-factor, like boldness, leaves the world.
The jazz saxophonist and composer, architect of some of the most challenging and influential tunes in the jazz canon, premiered a new piece (an extended meditation called “Lotus”) with his quartet recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since then, I’ve been thinking back on Shorter’s long career, in search of five recordings (beyond those discussed in the book) that chart at least a bit of his trajectory. These are by no means the only titles to own; as with everything 1000 Recordings, they’re merely starting points for further exploration.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Africaine (Blue Note, 1959). The first recording from Blakey’s group to feature Shorter and trumpeter Lee Morgan, Africaine is a supercharged slice of hard bop. Shorter wrote the title track and the spry “Lester Left Town;” his saxophone solos are bursting with ideas, and Morgan is positively brilliant throughout.
Wayne Shorter: Speak No Evil (Blue Note, 1964). In the early phases of his career, Shorter dwelled in the shadows of his friend John Coltrane – though he lacked Trane’s fluid technique, he borrowed some of the great saxophonist’s harmonic devices for his own solos. By this, his third Blue Note date as a leader, Shorter has found not just his compositional voice – see the majestic “Witch Hunt” and “Infant Eyes,” marvels of beauty and invention – but a distinct identity as an improvisor. Check out the way he claws at and gently opens up the title track’s recurring motif.
Miles Davis: Nefertiti (Columbia, 1967). It is impossible to fully appreciate Miles Davis’ ‘60s quintet from just one studio document – each time the group recorded, it was in a strikingly different musical place. Shorter’s impact is felt first on E.S.P. from 1965, in effortlessly spiralling themes that veer gently toward free jazz. Recorded two years later, Nefertiti is looser and at the same time more introspective, a series of yearning melodies that grow more poignant as they evolve.
Weather Report: Mr. Gone (Columbia, 1978). This album, which followed the fusion group’s massive hit Heavy Weather, is often dismissed for its meandering crossover tries (“River People,” written by the late bass dynamo Jaco Pastorius). But it contains one of Shorter’s most haunting themes, “The Elders,” and a stunning reworking of a tune the saxophonist wrote during his tenure with Davis, “Pinocchio.”
Wayne Shorter: Alegria (Verve, 2003). This ambitious project marks a rebirth of sorts for Shorter, showcasing a variety of musical styles and approaches, from old British folk songs to composer Hector Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5.” Shorter works in a variety of settings here, and while all of them are interesting, the material featuring his regular trio – pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Pattitucci, drummer Brian Blade, now together for ten years – positively sparkles.
Of course it’s already possible to download “Hanky Panky” while reading James’ recollections about his first hit. My thought was for something more proprietary: James does a vivid imitation of music kingpin Morris Levy in his midtown Manhattan office, intimidating competitors and verbally abusing artists and songwriters. Something along the lines of “Click here for a thirty second clip of Levy threatening to destroy a songwriter’s career….”
I’ve never heard Levy’s voice, but there’s plenty of industry folklore around his story – he started out running the souvenir photo concession at a few New York nightclubs (including the jazz mecca Birdland), then went on to own the clubs and run several labels, all while holding down a spot in the upper echelon of the Genovese crime family. Applying mob tactics to the music business, Levy became a larger than life figure, pioneering the pirating of singles and albums as cutouts while refusing to pay artists and songwriters the royalties they earned. (James summerized Levy’s approach this way: “Morris Levy sold music by the pound.”)
James had an inevitably complex relationship with Levy – after all, he was a teenager when the notorious businessman gave him his first national break. The book chronicles how James came to understand Levy’s personality and the machinations of Roulette, one unsavory confrontation at a time. In the interview, James veered into a teensy bit of Sopranos-speak, but more often used a grave, impatient tone to conjure Levy holding court. It was more than great Q&A entertainment: For a few minutes there, what you heard was the sound of a dark, little-glimpsed sliver of the music business coming to life.
]]>The superlatives attach like burrs to Brad Mehldau, and they grow heavier with each record. The pianist is the last best hope of jazz. A smart, nimble-fingered visionary. A provocative composer who is developing rapidly.
This is no accident. Mehldau has been willing to try stuff, and explore, in bolder strokes and on larger canvases than most of his peers. Though he’s released a bunch of records – some would say too many featuring his trio – he has been careful to vary his endeavors, alternating between live documents and ambitious works like the current 2-disc Highway Rider, a project for quartet and studio orchestra that reunites him with Jon Brion, the wizard who produced Mehldau’s landmark Largo.
That’s just smart career planning. There’s also something more fundamentally musical at work: Unlike Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus and others currently in the jazz spotlight, Mehldau is not allergic to pretty melodies or moments of sublime-bordering-on-blissed-out consonance. Born in 1970, Mehldau has famously covered tunes written by the Beatles, British folk avatar Nick Drake and the rock trailblazers Radiohead. The Bad Plus works similar turf, but Mehldau’s treatments arrive fully baked: Everything he does springs from evident reverence for the melodies – rather than impose his own logic, his flights embrace and reflect the logic of the tune.
Hearing Mehldau’s recent compositions, there’s the sense that he’s “gone to school” on the pop song. He’s internalized the compact structures of pop, absorbed the melodic graces and harmonic cadences, assimilated the schemes of tension and release. The work’s sparkling moments, like the wistful “Come With Me” and the Elliott Smith homage “Sky Turning Grey,” show that Mehldau has integrated this stuff with the rest of his already formidible vocabulary: Lilting, Badfinger-esque piano reveries morph into superfast bebop chase scenes, then broken chords suggesting waterlily impressionism, then assymetrical knots of complex, defiantly tangled dissonance.
Crucially, none of these moments feel like tricks, or contrivances. Like a thoughtful singer-songwriter who worries that production tricks may overtake his message, Mehldau gravitates toward what the piece needs, not what he as an improvisor needs to “prove” within the piece. This humility helps make his solos deeply moving, and remarkably accessible: Where some jazz players use abstraction as a kind of sheild, Mehldau is not afraid to let a simple declarative melody ring, to follow an impossibly sweet line to its endpoint, to share something of his spirit as he navigates the open road.
Partly my tardiness is intentional: I’ve been thinking about how to make this little intermittant blog useful for those who wish to explore music, and one recurring question has to do with how much homage should be in the mix. The automatic media reflex is to stop and appreciate the work of the deceased, and lots of times I’ve been part of that choir. But right after the great Vic Chesnutt died this winter, as I was gearing up to write about his wonderously trenchant, bracingly blunt songs, I stopped short. Since the mission of 1000 Recordings is to celebrate greatness, it seemed of limited value to restate what should be obvious, what scores of people had said, what was essentially in the entry for Is The Actor Happy?
Besides, words only take you so far. I feel the same futility with Alex Chilton: If you don’t get his songs, these wonderfully compact structures that seize and exhaust an idea in the time it takes some songwriters to clear their throats, no pretty adjectives piled high are going to help you. Even the Replacements deleriously giddy “Alex Chilton” – which, with the terse “I’m in love, what’s that song?/I’m in love with that song,” immortalizes the circuitry of pop obsession – might not do it. And it's one of the all-time best tribute songs.
To gauge Chilton, the quintessential underloved pop auteur, drop into a few places in his discography. Start where he started, in a band called the Box Tops, singing a stone-cold classic ‘60s radio song, “The Letter,” that entertained millions. Seek out the strikingly different albums by Big Star, which find him progressing through various tones and colors in pursuit of a singular pop/rock bliss. Spend some time with any of the jangle bands of the ‘80s – notably R.E.M. – and you will hear Chilton’s influence, echoing around the brambles and the barbed wire. Maybe that’s all the tribute necessary: Alex Chilton never sold skadillions after that first hit, but his ideas about melody and catharsis, and his knack for infusing simple songs with deeper meaning, wound up hitting just about everybody.