WAYNE SHORTER

 

JuJu – Wayne Shorter (Blue Note)

Wayne Shorter – tenor sax / McCoy Tyner – piano / Reggie Workman – bass / Elvin Jones – drums

A 1964 session, sweetness, and light meet fire and deep-seated anxiety in seeming alternating breaths. Shorter is thoughtful, probing the moods of his ingeniously laid-out material with finesse that hints at more expressionistic playing to come–his tone always struck me as inner-directed–while the band delivers everything their names promise. Elvin Jones continues to be convinced that he is the greatest drummer in jazz history.

Sorcerer – Miles Davis (Sony)

Sorcerer, the 1967 album from Miles Davis, has been in my CD player the last couple of days and, to pun badly, I have been more than a little entranced by how amazingly well these improvisers, all of whom are distinct and potentially dominating in ensemble efforts, work so cohesively as a group. There is a perfect kind of modal combustion here, with Miles Davis contrasting his spare and angular sense of improvisation with the formidable resourcefulness of this album’s principal ensemble, Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (double bass) and Tony Williams (drums). The music is an unusual combination of the unforced and the aggressive, resisting the temptation to either go slack in their pace or stray toward the harsh vicissitudes of anguished, strident experimentation, a pulsing course of off-accented rhythms, musical swaths of varying tones and colors, and ingenious interlacing between primary soloist Davis, Shorter and Hancock. Ensemble exploration at its peak, it seems, as the three of them actively listen to and anticipate each other’s ideas during the respective solo spots. This is what the great Davis groups did: find unexamined nuance and moods in the musical tones. Davis and Shorter offer up a few exquisite moments of dialogue as they answer, query, interrogate and respond to musical propositions put forth by the other. As great as the previous occupant in the saxophone chair had been, the redoubtable and effusively brilliant John Coltrane, Shorter was a better fit for Davis’s ideas for the ensemble at the time, 1967, when this disc was recorded. His solos are less galvanic than Coltrane’s were, more composed, filled with lithe and delicate phrases , wonderfully respondent to the rhythms and pulse Williams and Carter provided and the full range of ideas Hancock underscores and textures the sound with. Davis is at his best: lyrical, on the edge of atonal, bracing when needed; the tone of his notes isolated and longing.

A Tribute to Miles Davis – Wayne Shorter (saxophones) Wallace Roney (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums).

You need to bear in mind that this is not a dusty museum exhibition where the music of the late trumpeter and bandleader is dutifully eviscerated and mounted on a pedestal. Quite the opposite: Davis alum Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, along with firebrand trumpeter Wallace Roney perform a few familiar tunes with vigor and intensity. Mere reverence is replaced with passion and a willingness to stir things up. Roney is a wonder and an inspired choice to fill the trumpet position; he has a hard-core virtuosity that rivals Freddie Hubbard, and yet retains a sublimely modulated, vibrato-less tone: clean and pristine. His register-jumping flurries on the live version of “So What” or the delicately etched readings are remarkable examples of pace and phrasing. For an instrument known for its uniformly declarative sound–with the notes as executed by the most superlative of players sounding sharp, full; hard bits of color sculpting whole structures of sound from the metaphorical block of granite–Roney had something else: the rarest of things in jazz trumpet; the ability to make his extemporaneous statements fluid; one note flowing out of the one before it and into the one that follows in a deceptively easy legato that made you think of the accelerated fluidity of saxophonist John Coltrane. Roney, I’d wager, is the obverse of Hubbard; in my life I’ve witnessed the glory of two of the most compelling jazz trumpet players: one, the skyrocketing lyricist Hubbard, for whom precision and speed were in the mastery of musical ideas that sped by in breathtaking forays; and the other, no lesser, Roney, whose virtuosity was in the service of seemingly unlimited ideas of restatement, reconfiguration, and reimagining of a composer’s written score.

And, square as it may sound, it is always great to have Hancock et al return from their wanderings in the fusion wilderness and apply their singular skills on material that requires the best of their improvisational genius. Shorter, for my money, remains the best saxophonist of the post-Coltrane generation, assembling his solos in abstracted sections and deliciously snaky tangents. Williams is, to say nothing else, an astonishing drummer: a continuous rumble of polyrhythms, rising and falling with the many sly turns of this music. Bop, ballads and casually asserted samba rhythms are highlighted with William’s strong, graceful stickwork.

Both Directions at Once – John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter

Incredibly, what comes to be a full-length album of mostly new, previously unheard material from John Coltrane has emerged lo these many years since the man’s passing, and it is masterful. What’s mind-boggling is that after decades of posthumous Coltrane releases that were previously unheard versions of familiar material --I haven’t done a precise count, but it occurs to me that there are enough live versions of Coltrane’s disassembly and reconstruction of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune “My Favorite Things” to warrant a series critical comparison in how the saxophonist and his collaborators adjusted their improvisations gig to gig-- but rather something wholly fresh: new compositions and ideas recorded when this ensemble was at their peak. 

The story told as to why this album has surfaced on now comes from Wikipedia, which asserts that the band --Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones-- entered Impulse Records studio in 1963 to lay down the master tape of an album of new material for eventual release. Somewhere in the lapse between that recording and its 2018 release, the original tape was destroyed when the label decided to cut down on expenses regarding storage; what we have here is from a copy of the tape Coltrane had given to his wife. It’s not useful to dwell on the reasons for the delay and best, I think, to appreciate how profound this gift of music happens to be. Both Directions at Once, the title, comes from a discussion Coltrane once had with Wayne Shorter at some point, in which had come up the idea of starting their solos in the middle and working their ideas backwards toward a calmer section that would have been the casual, tentative build up; and then the other way: toward greater fluency, acceleration, intensity from the tenor saxophone’s horn; going “both directions at once.” You get what they were talking about in mere minutes; Coltrane’s playing is serpentine and advances effortlessly through the registers with rail-splitting chromaticism. 

He darts, dodges, telegraphs and races along melodic lines he creates on initial choruses and subsequently rethinks and rewrites with each return to the song’s head; ideas brawl, embrace and interweave in swift, howling glory. The improvisations are as fine: searching and soulful as anything he released in his lifetime. On hand were the members of his Great Quartet: Elvin Jones on drums; McCoy Tyner on piano; Jimmy Garrison on bass. This is a quartet that has weathered time; circumstance; hundreds of hours playing together; with the sinewy yet agile polyrhythms of the ever-brilliant Jones and the no less skilled Garrison buoying and propelling Tyner’s color-rich harmonies and Coltrane’s thick sonic weaves. There is nothing tentative about his disc. It is quite a bit of music from this epoch-defining unit; there is nothing better than coming across Coltrane you’ve have not borne witness to yet.

A

Vinyl

 

Nostalgia is something that cuts both ways across the generation divide. On the one hand, we have Boomers, those born post World War 2  who grew up with vinyl records, 45s and 33 and 1/3 RPM, who will insist that the original 12-inch releases of the Abbey Road or Safe as Milk  had a clarity, depth, and warmth that later  digital versions, marketed on the much-loathed Compact Disc format, ruined by making it flat and sterile. The cry was thus: CDs may not scratch and stand to last forever, but we sacrifice the genuine texture and sensuality of the music therein. The new versions are merely heard not felt. If by that they mean that the full force of Beethoven symphonies or the corrosive caterwaul of Ornette Coleman's extensions of Western jazz improvisational strategies are abrasive only to the degree to which they assault merely the nervous system and not the soul as well, then I am with the naysayers. Sadly, though, there is more to the "felt" description, which is surface noise, pops, hisses, clicks, clacks, the corrosive percussion of the damage and ware that attends the ownership of a vinyl record collection.

 Because I had no interest i the hi-fi freak's compulsion to keep his albums pristine with a ritualized way of putting his albums on the turntable--holding the disk only on the edges with lightly pressed fingertips, wiping the disc with a clean dust cloth in a particular circular motion, no variation, setting the expensive needle on the disc gently, gently, gently, GENTLY GODDAMNIT! , repeating the process in reverse when the record was done playing--I just put my records on and just played them, whatever happened on the record surface. I took heed from my best friend, a bigger slob than I was, who shared,  "I don't let my possessions possess me". It was an easy matter to accept the scratches, pops, and skips as part of the listening experience; I joked that the imperfections were bonus rhythm tracks, free of charge. Still, as used as I had become to vinyl albums, it was a matter of time before I had to acquiesce and purchase a CD player because it turned out, the record companies had stopped releasing albums in vinyl formats, save for some independent holdouts hither and yon. I  was amazed at how fast I became a CD convert; the music sounded fine, it sounded clean, it sounded exciting. The digital age claimed another convert. It has become the case that saying that we should listen to vinyl only so we may "feel" the music better is like remarking that we should not have paved roads or modern cars because travel means nothing artistically unless we feel every pothole, puddle, rock and uneven patch of cracked earth on our long journey to some goddamned family holiday dinner. It was a dead argument made by grumpy white men who wanted it to be 1968 forever, without end.  The only thing I miss about the vinyl experience was the "thingness" of an album--something to open, to read, stare at, take pride in as you put back in the sleeve and add it your large and varied record collection. 

I admit vinyl was an inferior medium given the crystal clear digital offered , but there was a value-added quality, where the music on the disc was something I paid attention to, fell in love with or hated and argued passionately with other music fanatics and would be pop pundits about why such things were more important than sex. The vinyl album was something that contained music the way a book contained words that told a story, and you had to figuratively live with it for a period, so the glorious transformation of literature can have on our worldview could take effect. That is less the case these days, much less, as everything is digitized, stored in figurative clouds, seemingly every song ever recorded stripped of context, liner notes, album art, credits, and private jokes and turned into bits of code that one can turn on or off like a light switch, absent-mindedly appreciative of the ruthless efficiency in the retrieval of the music, but not moved to linger on lyric, to pause during a hooked up chorus, to move, shake. 

YO

In his 1969 book Rock from the Beginning, corrosive critic Nik Cohn maintained that Dylan wrote his best lyrics when he was being mean spirited and out to settle accounts in his rhymes. I'm inclined to agree in part with that; the Dylan who wanted to slay dragons, deliver payback and indict the previous generations for the foulness of the world they brought him into is the Dylan that wrote the most memorable lyrics and are the foundation to claims for his genius. In many ways, Like A Rolling Stone was a prototype for what eventually became rap , where the talking blues tradition Dylan emulated early on morphed to the sardonic talk-sung bray of "Rolling Stone" . And of course, there are several Dylan songs from the time that would fit the same description, Its Alright Ma, Masters of War, Gates of Eden, Desolation Row. But I thought Like a Rolling Stone in particular begged for a hip hop rendition, to how Dylan's angst, anger and agitated rhymes would hang with different generation's beats. Here's an interesting stab at it.

Short notes

 

I witnessed Wall of Voodoo for the first time at the Urgh concerts in Santa Monica in 1980, sharing the bill with Pere Ubu, Dead Boys, Magazine,a wholly transformational encounter. The band applied the ticktock reductionist rhythms with a sense of apprehension. It was almost Hitchcockian, as in any scene when a nervous protagonist under duress hears an overly loud clock ticking away . "Ring of Fire" was masterfully drawn out, and Stan Ridgeway seemed to me the best talk-singer since Lou Reed , a flat, hardened monotone , leering and braced by a slight ironic tone, reflecting LA Noir no less than Marlowe. "I Can't Make Love" was my takeaway from the entire night, an underrated lament of A loser, battered on both sides by the lure and dispatch of the affection he craves. This is a lament of someone so saddled with self loathing that he can't complete a sentence. The pleading refrain of "I'm a nice guy" as the song fades is stark and stripped of illusion, it is Lear without the poetry. The abject despair and self-pity that's revealed is equal parts moving and repulsive, which is a remarkable accomplishment.

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The Band's rendition of Tears of Rage, cowritten by Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel, ranks as one the greatest interpretations of a Dylan lyric ever to meet the public ear. One of Dylan's most subtle, evocative, and melancholy lyrics. It exhibits every strength he possessed as a wordsmith when he was at the height of his power, elliptical, diffuse, surreal in the way it can be a snapshot precise in detail and yet remain elusive as to final meaning. Richard Manual's melody, a brooding, and morphing tone poem with quirky shifts in emphasis and patterning and yet maintaining a gospelish flavor, and his vocal I find utterly heartbreaking in its suggestion of a rural family tragedy, incest, insanity. His singing is soulful and mournful , equal parts soul and country wail. He gives Dylan likely the best reading of one of his lyrics to grace vinyl.

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In his 1969 book Rock from the Beginning, corrosive critic Nik Cohn maintained that Dylan wrote his best lyrics when he was being mean spirited and out to settle accounts in his rhymes. I'm inclined to agree in part with that; the Dylan who wanted to slay dragons, deliver payback and indict the previous generations for the foulness of the world they brought him into is the Dylan that wrote the most memorable lyrics and are the foundation to claims for his genius. In many ways, Like A Rolling Stone was a prototype for what eventually became rap , where the talking blues tradition Dylan emulated early on morphed to the sardonic talk-sung bray of "Rolling Stone" . And of course, there are several Dylan songs from the time that would fit the same description, Its Alright Ma, Masters of War, Gates of Eden, Desolation Row. But I thought Like a Rolling Stone in particular begged for a hip hop rendition, to how Dylan's dread, anger and agitated rhymes would hang with different generation's beats. 

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1998's Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory was a project that should have worked but tragically did not. It seemed like a sure thing, two pop music masters in a team up that ought to have been magic .Instead, the enterprise got stuck in a ditch, wheels spinning, engine roaring uselessly. There is an insistence on medium ballads or funeral march ballads, sadder-than-dead fish torch songs. There is merit to a good number of them, as Bacharach is the Beethoven of ageless heartache, but the melancholy turns into a stupefying torpor. It had been remarked on point that Bacharach found his perfect vocalist in Dione Warwick, a singer with range, timing, and tone who could seamlessly negotiate the deceptively tricky turn arounds in his melodies. Not so with Costello, who overestimates his vocal abilities. Each song he sings, he attempts to hit the high notes at seemingly the same moment, as if he had a live magpie taped to his face. It's a horrible, piercing experience before long, and the rationale that it's a brave thing he's doing by using his limited apparatus for the lofty points on the sheet music won't cut ice. Bacharach, I recall, wrote a good number of spry up-tempo songs as well, and had a sense of humor. Perhaps he felt he needed to get serious now that he was getting some serious attention from critics because the acclaimed Costello deigned to work with him. Over time, the album is dour, gloomy, and utterly depressing; they should have canned half the songs and released only the truly memorable work. It would have been better if they remembered to bring their sense of humor to the sessions when they recorded this thing.

A better album, much better, is an earlier EC disc from 1986, King of America. Costello loves rummaging around in many genres, most of it being half-baked, over wrought, or atmospherically formless for the last decade. With country and western, his has been a case of trying too hard to get that stoically restrained emotionalism that is the genius of the truly great singers. This song, though, is where he gets it right. The melody is doleful , on the downbeat and yet brisk in tempo, the lyrics are a nicely constructed metaphor that sustains itself through each chorus, and Costello's singing is tuneful and free of the vocalistics he often mistakes for emotional dynamics. Here he sounds matter of fact, clear-headed, a little choked up as he admits the larger truth of a doomed love affair. The quivering near sob on the last lines is perfection.

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ANOTHER BURKE FROM BEFORE TIME BEGAN

 Honestly, I love critics who are smart and love the sound of their prose so much that they soak their subject in overripe, purplish grandiloquence, which makes getting to their usually inane insights a fun adventure in well-managed if excessively mannered evaluations of popular culture. The present example is the photograph accompanying his piece, a review of an Elvis Presley album by a G.C. Burke, no relation, in the May 1957 issue of High Fidelity magazine. (My thanks to music writer Mark Miller, who posted this intriguing specimen in a Facebook group dedicated to music journalism.) 

Perhaps not so oddly, I feel some kinship with Mr. Burke and wonder if he’s a distant and likely belated relation. I read John Simon for years in New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The National Review, and often marveled at how a man of such obvious erudition and flawless prose ability could be so magnificently elegant in expressing amazingly pedestrian opinions of books, plays, films, and movies. His vitriol couldn’t elevate his sour takes on the arts from the routinely knee-jerk reaction. I wager that Simon’s vocabulary and acerbic virtuosity buffaloed his readers and editors with the flashy pyrotechnics of his word-slinging; what I thought of as Simon’s conspicuous ineptitude as a critic of cultural expression was summarily overlooked.

Burke obviously wants to consider himself a public intellectual, a mission much greater than being a mere record reviewer, and here attempts to pigeonhole the ill-making cultural habits of the times that are spoiling the rest of us. Sophistry itself, this amateur sociology and such, but what fun it is to read a smart person use every weapon in his arsenal to swat a fly. But again, honestly, quite honestly, quite vainly, G.C. Burke’s makes me think that those of us sharing the last Irish-borne surname share a genetic fascination for padded hyperbole. (Forgive me my indulgence if I’ve elevated myself to the likes of Edmund and Kenneth Burke, genius scribblers both.) Obviously, it would seem, that I’m inspired to indulge my verbal excesses after reading G.C. Burke’s energized dalliance with the philosophical broadside. Perhaps I can find a collection of his further thrashings of pop musicians of his time and become insufferable myself.

KIM FOWLEY IS STILL DEAD ( or is he?)

 "Kim Fowley is such a ---shuck that he ought to be placed in a time capsule."--Robert Christgau. 

That line has stuck with me and characterized Fowley for decades, and now it comes full circle where we have an opportunity to examine how the Sixties counter culture produced marginal sorts who were happy to have a niche somewhere in the music greatness of others, and those like Charlie Manson who wanted to change the world into a larger version of their insane selves. It was a crap shoot either way, and lucky for us, Fowley wasn't as crazy as he pretended to be. It's always been my impression that Kim Fowley preferred you speak about him in the past tense when you were in his presence, the closest and quickest thing he can have to his desire was to eaves drop on his own funeral. 

Only a fool too fast of tongue or slow to truth would argue that Fowley didn't have some kind of observable genius in the happenstance of his life. He was an Ezra Pond sort of his era, someone with a smattering of talent themselves who had a more acute instinct for the large talent of others. It can be a tedious thing to hash through again, but it bears repeating that Fowley's greatest masterpiece was creating a series of performance oriented personas, all the extreme, gaudy, tacky, neurotic and rather desperate in their attempts to equal the art being produced by artists he was attracted too. Fowley was someone who, like thousands of others at the time, were trying to berserk themselves into genius who, despite hard work and an unblinking commitment to the mask he was wearing, never convinced anyone that there was anything there but an egocentricity that was oddly ingratiating Fowley, I suspect, knew that we were onto his game from the get go and let it remain as such. Fowley was someone who wanted to leave his mark on history and didn't quite much care what damage to his reputation he suffered in doing so. It wasn't damage at, I think he'd have explained to us, since this was a reputation he was reputation he was creating in place of one that didn't exist in the first place. What he wanted was to be known, to be creative, to be a part of the throng at the higher creative plane. He wanted to leave his mark on history, not change it, not destroy it, not change the course of things to come. He desired to be in the perennial now of whatever was intense at the musical time and space, and to have a sufficient version of his cover story to accompany. Likewise, he was a man who lived his life in the present tense.

What is remarkable is that he remained in the game as long as he did. Fowley was a fake, which was the source of authenticity. He decided to "act as if…" and never stopped acting. I regard Fowley's whole life as being something like Kafka's Hunger Artist; the man who refuses to eat draws a crowed around him, and it's that artist's job to keep the crowd distracted while maintaining his cover. Fowley kept the mask on, but remained an approachable anomaly. No easy thing to do.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG by Bob Dylan: Book Review

Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, an ironic designation if only because Dylan wasn’t a man of books, but rather a songwriter. The gist of the argument for the musician being awarded the prize was that his lyrics, in a brief span of time, evolved from clever imitations of the folk and blues artists he admired and imitated to become a rich libretto for his age. Surrealist nightmares, black humor, rhapsodic tone poems, acute observations of ingrained varieties of bad faith revealed in personal lives and in the political sphere, songs like “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I Want You,” and “Positively 4th Street” brought a new, serious poetry to the jukebox, leading the way for a generation of other songwriters. It was a common sight in nearly any graduate student’s apartment that Dylan discs like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde cozily nestled next to the typically dog-eared paperbacks of Pound’s Cantos, One Dimensional Man or a coffee table book about Max Ernst or Diane Arbus.

As the songwriter’s lyrics became darker, more mystical, expressively abstract, the deeper the appreciation of the baffling brilliance of his work became—and soon enough the serious vanguard of modern American poetry—Ginsberg, McClure et al., counted the man from Hibbing as one of their own, a sage who could see beyond the flat appearance of the material world and provide glimpses of what’s behind the veil. Dylan née Zimmerman had a run of genius, the length of which wholly depended on how dedicated one is to the continuity of the songwriter’s brilliance. My interest is more about his earlier career, 1962 (Bob Dylan) through 1969 (Nashville Skyline). In my quizzical estimation, his work has been inconsistent since that time, occasionally animated with outbreaks of energy and verbal intensity (Blood on the Tracks). But Dylan zealots are a bright and well-read part of the listening population, and those who found worth, insight, and inspiration from albums from Street Legal or Empire Burlesque (two random selections from the years I call “the Great In-Between”) defend the later work with energy, solid thinking, and good writing. That’s the Dylan whose work and reputation provokes an alarming amount of cogitation. 

An endless variety of books have been published about Dylan and his songwriting in the six decades since the release of his first album, some purely for pop music fans, others gossipy, and many that are a kind of interpretative analysis that approach the inscrutability of the maestro’s best stanzas. But Dylan, again, is a songwriter, not a writer of books in the main. His catalog of songs abounds with much of the most original, penetrating, and innovative lyrics of the 20th century, and many achieve the status of High Art, genuine and compelling poetry. “Visions of Johanna,” “Desolation Row,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Memphis Blues Again.” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” and the full version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” reveal a man in love with the varieties of idioms available to him; he loved language enough to ignore the formalities in front of him and merge the styles he loved in the simple melodies he often borrowed from others. He could rhyme, and his couplets were adroit and left you saying “oh, wow” as he finished each verse. This virtuosity didn’t carry over to books, as the pair he’s written up to now wind up head scratchers at best.

Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up” technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. It remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock, although there are some rather striking and evocative tributes to a woman named Aretha, most likely Aretha Franklin. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic invention and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.

Dylan’s next book Chronicles Volume One, published in 2004, is said to have started as the author’s attempts to write liner notes for his then-forthcoming reissues of Bob Dylan, New Morning, and Oh Mercy. The project grew larger and became what is described as part one of a three-part memoir. While fascinating to read the usually opaque lyricist convene in readable prose, his recollections are limited to some worthy remarks about the making of his first album and then protracted memories of the relatively obscure New Morning and Oh Mercy. Chronicles spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list and was generally well reviewed, though there was disappointment in the matters he chose to talk about and not discuss. Worse, there were rumblings that Dylan had fabricated much of what he did bother to disclose. Clinton Heylin, a thorough Dylan biographer, who has published eight books on the singer in the last 30 years, has been quoted as saying that while he enjoyed reading Dylan’s book as a work of imaginative literature but that “… almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction…”

So, we arrive at Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. It’s a handsome, oversized tome that has Dylan bringing us a stream of brief essays that discuss an odd, seemingly random set of 66 songs that were popular throughout American history. As expected, the songs are a confounding selection of tunes, as he opts not to opine or analyze the landmark music of the last century or so but instead goes for a good many tunes that are painfully obscure and not necessarily worth dwelling on at length. From 2006 to 2009, the singer had Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly, one hour satellite podcast where each program’s playlist centered around a theme instead of a specific genre. The song choices were unusual in large part—the odd, the quirky, the gorgeous, and the amazingly bucolic varieties of American music played to whatever the mood of the week was, the music on each program peppered with Dylan’s offhand remarks, jokes, anecdotes, historical trivia, and brief biographies of the musicians. The Philosophy of Modern Music appears to take the same strategy and avoids a traceable thesis through the essays where Dylan chats about the songs he’s chosen for elucidation. A fascinating assortment, including songs by the Eagles ("Wichie Woman"), Rosemary Clooney (“Come on a My House”), Johnny Taylor (“Cheaper to Keep Her”), Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti”), Cher (“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”), and other songs of far-reaching style, attitude, and subject that are, truthfully, perfectly fine, and often brilliant classics but that have little obvious connection apart from the Nobel Prize winner selected for a book.

The book is hailed in promotion materials as a masterclass in songwriting and refers to the essays, while being nominally about music, as being “meditations and reflections on the human condition.” “Essays” is perhaps too generous a term to describe what Dylan has written for these songs, as their lengths and depth of thought don’t particularly rise above an average blog post. What’s revealed is that Dylan is not really the philosophical sort to take apart concepts and deal with them critically in archly specialized language, and that he wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature based on his prose. Anyone desiring weighty and eloquent clarity on the purpose of existence will find the book wanting, but for those who consider Dylan to be a gifted artist with interesting things to say about some musical landmarks that got and kept his attention, The Philosophy of Modern Song is an intriguing, frequently surprising set of remarks and musings from one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic figures. The individual pieces are remarkably poetic and literate on their terms. What connects this wide swath of tunes is Dylan’s skill at putting himself in the narrative at hand rather than analyze the melody and lyrics for subtler inclinations and nuance or hypothesize how a hymn offers a critique of social relations; Dylan imagines cinematic scenarios, sees archetypes of modern myth negotiating their respective terrains, and finds the souls of errant knight of endless variation questing for a greater glory with what gifts or curses that mark their lives.

The lyricist hasn’t the prose polish of John Updike or James Baldwin, but his language is vivid, colorful, and skillfully emphatic as he delineates the dilemmas and joys each song undertakes to describe in a short expression. A theme does emerge as he runs through a host of the music, the notion of perseverance and persistence even in the face of hardship, heartbreak, and the cold inevitability of a certain fate. A random selection of the essays brings this. Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” has a strong feeling of a classic movie western as Dylan writes of the narrator—a lone cowboy at a border town to meet a challenge he cannot forestall, emphasizes the weight of loneliness of the gunslinger, an existence where every joy is fleeting, and the shadow of death lurks in every unlit corner. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” was a 1971 hit for Cher, a torrid bit of fanciful exploitation that was considered to be a cardboard pathos at best, but Dylan thought deeper on the matter and found resonance. It stretches credulity, but his insistence on this song makes for reading you can’t draw away from. He uses the pronoun “you” in writing about the title’s tawdry trio, the intended effect being to imagine yourself as a member of this wandering community, the only home being the wagon that carries you at the outskirts of every town. He lays it own a little too thick by essay’s end, with his penchant for stringing three or more adjectives together when one would have been just as effective, but he does what he sets out to do to give you a strong impression of what life at the edge of society would be like. To that end, it reminded me of my time as a carnival worker, going from town to town up the coast, selling chances to win dusty stuffed animals to townies who obviously held the orange shirted show folk in contempt. It was a rush of memory, a chill in the bones, and an adventure I consider myself lucky to eventually walk away from.

These are songs of perseverance and persistence are again short testimonials that crop up on the radio, in movie soundtracks and music videos of individuals of many origins, backgrounds, and varying degrees of stress, who are determined to stand their ground lest the final remains of what is truly theirs vanishes in self-loathing rituals of compromise and surrender. That seems what has found in 66 songs, wildly disparate in era, style, and sentiment; it’s the one tangible thread I’ve found. He is at his best when he gives vent to the full range of ironies contained in the Who’s 1965 proto punk rock anthem “My Generation,” with its famous line “I hope I die before I get old…” The singer and songwriter who brought us the line, Roger Daltry and Peter Townsend are neither dead and are, in fact, old reflects on the arrogance of youth. The stuttering youth of the song is barely articulate and has no idea of what he wants to do, has no idea about why he’s angry and impatient, and is happy to simply be that way. It’s a grand and immature f**k you of self-assertion, a declaration that shocked and inspired a generation of kids to think that things will get better when they take over after the last wicked adult dies. But Dylan writes that you’re in a wheelchair being pushed around to the places you need to get to—doctor’s offices, the bathroom, the community meal hall; your mind is alert, but the body fails in subtle and significant ways every day. You’re eerily close to whatever dying day will award you, and you hear noise and brash men having their own good clamorous time in the thrall of their youth. You’re annoyed, you’re sleepy, you fall asleep. Dylan’s writing is particularly effective in this essay that should have aged well. At 81, I suppose Bob Dylan hear what the lyrics declaim and vividly recalls being the speedy, in-your-face Dada King, who rarely missed a chance to confound and confront the Old Squares who didn’t get it, a character in full sympathy with the romantic tragedy of a genius poet’s early demise. But his musing takes him to the next thought, which is that he’s far older than he might have expected, his memories are fuller, richer, more far-reaching than he thinks he has any right to, and the songs he’s paid attention to aren’t merely audio postcards of long-ago places but rather a means to remain connected; he intends to live fully and well and on his terms, in his words. Meandering and off the wall and syntactically awkward as it is at times, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wonderful glimpse into how this perennial mystery man thinks.

 You Can't Go Home Again--Chet Baker

Trumpet player Baker has a cool, lyrical, muted style that bears an incidental resemblance to that of Miles Davis from his Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain period, and on You Can't Go Home Again, applies himself more tactfully and imaginatively than a dozen other flashier players could, Freddie Hubbard (Liquid Love style) included. While notable, the taciturn qualities that Baker and Davis share--a constructive use of silence and spacing between phrases, a whispering quality of tone, the absence of vibrato--Baker's improvisations have their particular character. The music is generally lyrical and moody with heavy orchestration by Don Sebesky (whose career as CTI house arranger has converted many a talent into a white faced, mass market commodity), but Baker's pensive, searching emotionalism transcends the limits, as well as the efforts of a superb group of sidemen, including drummer Tony Williams, saxophonist Michael Brecker, bassist Ron Carter, guitarist John Scofield, along with other famous names like Hubert Laws, Paul Desmond, and Alphonso Johnson, The group playing is infectious and allows for several sparkling moments, particularly in the solos of Scofield, Desmond and, Brecker. The lyricism here is terribly handled, without the goo of sentimentality: Baker's power seems to come from a deeper, emotionally richer resource source, a source that creates spontaneous melodies that, all said and done, requires repeated listening. The nuances here are sublime.

COSTELLO AND BACHARACH: it should have worked, but it didn't

 

1998's Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory was a project that should have worked, but tragically did not. It seemed like a sure thing, two pop music masters in a team up that ought to have been magic. Instead, the enterprise got stuck in a ditch, wheels spinning, engine roaring uselessly. There is an insistence on medium ballads or funeral march ballads, sadder-than-dead fish torch songs. There is merit to a good number of them, as Bacharach is the Beethoven of ageless heartache, but the melancholy turns into a stupefying torpor. It had been remarked on point that Bacharach found his perfect vocalist in Dionne Warwick, a singer with range, timing, and tone who could seamlessly negotiate the deceptively tricky turn -arounds in his  melodies. 

Not so with Costello, who overestimates his native skills to extend his vocal skills. He continually tries to hit the high notes at seemingly the same moment in each song, with his pitch being the equal of having a live magpie taped to your face. It's a horrible, piercing experience before long, and the rationale that it's a brave thing he's doing by using his limited apparatus for the lofty points on the sheet music won't cut ice. Plainly, he's trying too hard.  Bacharach, I recall, wrote a good number of spry up-tempo songs as well, and had a sense of humor. Perhaps he felt he needed to get serious now that he was getting some serious attention from critics because the acclaimed Costello deigned to work with him. The album is dour, gloomy, utterly depressed eventually; it would have been best if they canned half the songs here and released only the truly memorable work. It would have been better if they remembered to bring their sense of humor to the sessions when they recorded this thing. The lack of more spritely paced songs--remember that Bacharach among other virtues had a genius for tempos and alterations of time signatures and keys-- and Costello's inadequate vocal range overwhelmed the bright spots with a sad, impressionistic murk. The main problem for many were the vocals--typical of the user reviews of Painted from Memory on Amazon's listing was that Bacharach was in excellent form, but EC dragged the material down. Perhaps someone can present us new versions of the best material with other singers who would be a better fit for the challenges the songs present.

Costello obviously wants to be a master of all styles of music because he loves, seemingly, every style that's ever been invented. His problem is that he nearly always seems eager to out do or improve on established genres, rather than truly adapt the motifs to his strengths as a songwriter. His output starting in the late eighties with Mighty Like a Rose became distressingly erratic. "Inconsistent" is too polite a word. He did sporadically bounce back with a strong release and solid songs, but his wild swerves to projects that turned out to be perfect messes--The Juliet Letters, The Delivery Man, Mighty Like a Rose, Kojak Variety--resulted in my lowering his stature in my personal canon of all-time greats. Once I thought he was the greatest rock poet, but I took that crown away from him and handed it over to Tom Waits, who had a brilliant career start to finish, all killer, no filler.

JAZZ AS A DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES:

Bop, Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs by Martin Torgott, (Da Capo Press) 

It is a rather large subject, but author Martin Torgott soft-pedals his main thesis: that drugs were an essential ingredient in the creation of the world. Instead of weighing his subject with burdensome clichés, Bop Apocalypse at its best provides is an anecdotal history. A narrative that jumps through time, cutting between jazz musicians and beat writers, in a series of essays and recollections that seek the precise moment when the artists were introduced to drugs. 

Fans of a continuous timeline will find this book to be frustrating, as Torgoff prefers to present his history and argument in a cinematic style, with jump cuts, flashbacks, and fast-forward. He attempts an impressionistic approach to how particular events are linked to creating the mythos that brought about hip culture. It’s a fractured, frustrating, but fascinating narrative. Early in the book, Torgoff covers the details about the federal criminalization of marijuana, an action initiated by Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Needing a visible symbol of the threat to convince the country of the menace drugs posed, they portrayed African-American jazz musicians as deviants, criminals, and moral reprobates due to drug use. These were the perverts aiming to sully American innocence and lure youth into lives of moral degradation. Later, emerging white writers of the Post War Era discovered the same chemicals, many of whom indulged in them as a means of coping with the crushing conformity of the Eisenhower 1950s. Drugs were seen as a way to free poets and painters and playwrights from their inhibitions, allowing them to create bold new work in their place. Anslinger is revealed as the unwitting creator of the modern idea of hip, the aesthetic, the pose, the manner of being that artists have assumed for decades–the idea of artist as outsider, as outlaw, as iconoclast. The American avant-garde now had a hook to hang its bulky coat on.

Readers familiar with Beat aesthetics–their emphasis on spontaneity, improvisation, a Zen mindfulness free of distortion and subterfuge– will be relieved as Turnoff goes lightly on the usual apologies made on the Beats behalf.  Bop Apocalypse works best when the stories are about central personalities in the period at crucial moments in their lives. One of the highlights of the book is the wealth of telling detail, such as those of writer Terry Southern when he discovered pot as a kid, which grew wild on his cousin.

Miles Davis, Hubert Huncke, John Coltrane, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holliday, William Burroughs, Lester Young, and others have their tales told, some details well-known and others likely apocryphal, the scenes from their lives revealing a similar scenario, their respective introduction to pot, heroin, and amphetamines as a means of coping with their marginalized existence and of forcing their wits and instincts to the edge. What is obvious through the book is Torgoff’s premise of drugs being critical to the creation of art at the end of the chapter on Jack Kerouac, making the claim that the greatness many have given to Kerouac’s body of work would have remained unwritten had he not taken up the tea habit. As Kerouac remarks, “I need Miss Green to write; can’t whip up interest in anything otherwise.” For myself, I’ve always found Kerouac’s fiction and poetry problematic at best, a writer who often mistook breathlessness for beauty, Torgoff’s association of being stoned with quality sounds more than a little day dreamy, likening the author’s body of work as that which would be considered to be “…likened to Proust’s, Melville’s and Shakespeare’s.”

This brings to mind something I’d read years ago in a Downbeat magazine interview with jazz guitar virtuoso Joe Pass, talking about his drug addiction and eventually getting clean. The interviewer asked if he thought he was actually better and more imaginative when he was high. Pass offered a cautious answer all the same–that while he couldn’t say he definitely played better, he certainly thought he was playing brilliantly while he was high. I kept this in mind while reading this otherwise engaging and well-researched book, and remain convinced that the gift to create music or to write poetry are aspects of a personality that exist separately from drug use. That someone can produce chorus after chorus of hard bop jazz a la Parker or compose a monumental poetic masterwork, such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, has more to do with the talent that’s already in place, not because the drugs aided these artists to their particular style of genius. Torgoff does us the favor, though, of presenting the polemic evenhandedly, although there are times when hyperbole gets the best of him. Raising Kerouac’s literary value to Shakespeare and Proust is an example, as is an incident related in a section about Charlie Parker. An intriguing chapter overall, with the sort of telling details of clubs, cities, characters of interest on the risks they took to pursue an art form on the outskirts of what was considered the American mainstream, Torgoff relates the tale of jazz producer and promoter Norman Granz and his organization of a series of concerts billed as “Jazz at the Philharmonic” in Los Angeles, in 1946. At this period in his brief life, Parker’s behavior was erratic due to the complications of his heroin habit. Parker had barely managed to make it to the West Coast from New York. He quickly disappeared–looking to score drugs in a city where he had no connections–and arrived late for the concert, which had already started. Torgoff writes:

“…having found what he was looking for, he showed up 28 choruses into ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and stepped on the stage to play a chorus that brought the music to a whole new level and the audience to its feet, then he stayed on to play alongside Lester Young on ‘Oh Lady Be Good’ …Bird’s choruses astounded musicians and jazz fans everywhere. Everything he played that night would become part of the basic syntax of jazz…”

This is the kind of overpraise even the most ardent admirer winces at, as curious readers are given soft-shouldered platitudes and proclamations instead of colorful, clear, and precise explanations of what the artist is up to, an idea of the tradition that a musician is breaking away from and how he’s creating new music based on the traditions he’s learned from. This is a gift of jazz critic Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddens, vividly highlighting artistry and contribution over sensationalism, a subtler approach that Turnoff does not take on. Worse for Bop Apocalypse is the not-so-subtle idea that the artists who matter–the artists who break tradition, create new forms, innovators whose avant-garde experiments command respect and influences generations many decades after they’re deceased–have to be chemically deranged to have that latent genius become activated and find its fullest and fatal expression. It should be noted that not everyone covered died tragically or fell prey to the foul clutches of permanent addiction–as the biographies of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Ginsberg, and Burroughs attest–but Bop Apocalypse provides a constant suggestion that it’s not enough for committed artists to engage their craft to the best of their ability, but that in doing so one must knowingly risk their lives to achieve a genius level of expression the merely sober among us cannot. Torgoff’s underlying premise crystallizes much of what is afoul with the contemporary notion of romanticism, that the kind of lethal idealization of the drug-related deaths of writers and musicians creates an allure that is seductive and wrongheaded. It is, on the face of it, irrational to consider an early and preventable death of an inspired creator as confirmation of their genius. 

Torgoff, though, brings a wealth of research to the subject and, despite the periodic wallowing in cliches and unexamined proclamations, creates an entertaining mosaic through an electric period of American history. What the book lacks in supportable thesis or in establishing how these artists actually influence each other’s work is made up for by Targoff’s storytelling skills. Imagine this as a film by Robert Altman at his best, a diffuse but alluring tour of the rich details of an aspect of our legacy we must continue to engage. One does wish, though, that the author avoided the unintended irony of writing about artists who changed the way we think about the world with old ideas that merely reinforce our worst habits of mind.

Martin Torgoff’s gifts as a storyteller are superb when he remains with the tale; he is cinematic in his ability to set up a scene and follow the action through. It’s unfortunate that his stories, one after the other, are too often hobbled by his pet theory, an idea that cannot be made compelling regardless of how many times it gets repeated.

THE BRILLIANTLY UNEVEN CAREER OF DAVID CROSBY

Photo by David Ochs

 David Crosby, RIP. He was a wonderful singer who revolutionized folk harmonies, fusing them with the electric strum of loud rock. As a member of the Byrds he played a large part in creating a new genre that influenced thousands of musicians and hundreds of bands, an impact that is still hard today in younger artists. He wrote or cowrote a fair number of genius songs --"Why", "Eight Miles High", "Triad", "Everyone's Been Burned", "Dolphin Smile", "Draft Morning", "What's Happening", "Deja Vu", among others. When the key vocalist and principal songwriter Gene Clark left the Byrds after the second album, he and the other members of the band stepped up their songwriting chops and kept the Byrds a fresh, vital, and energetic sound. Sometimes, he was inconsistent in quality as a songwriter, and wallowing in sheer hippie muddleheadness.  "Almost Cut My Hair"? --but his best songs are among the best of the period. You can go so far that the songs achieve the elusive quality of being timeless in steeply musical terms. The hooks still seduce you; the melodies continue to set a seamless mood; the words evoke atmospheres and situations that refuse the taint of age. Crosby's best words, melodies, and vocals returned you precise moments of wonder.  I can't think of any ballads that set a higher mark than "Everyone's Been Burned" or "Triad". His genuinely splendid work is thin, however, being his studio work with the Byrds and the first two CSN (and Y) releases. I only lent half an ear to his work after those discs and found them inconsistent--some good, some dreadful, some simply unmemorable. Crosby's legacy is secure, though, as he always will be THAT GUY in the Byrds and THAT GUY in CSN (and Y) who help create music that hasn't, on its terms, been equaled. 

An issue I've always had with the original edition of the Byrds' last release in the original formation, The Notorious Byrds Brothers (1968), was the omission of two A plus Crosby compositions, "Triad" and "Lady Friend".  The latter was their previous single, released due to Crosby's conviction that it would be a hit, but it charted poorly on the Billboard charts. The singer's stock within the band fell dramatically according to various accounts, and members Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman chose to release a Gerry Goffman-Carol King tune "Going Back", a saccharine imitation of a Byrds-like song that did, however, do far better on the charts than did "Lady Friend" Tensions within the band were already at a breaking point, much of due to Crosby's habit of giving extended political raps between songs during live performances. After some arguments over Crosby's songs, McGuinn and Hill fired the aggrieved singer and released Notorious Byrd Brothers. Notorious could have been their best album had they passed up on the Goffin-King songs "Goin' Back" and Wasn't Born to Follow" and instead used Crosby's "Triad" and "Lady Friend". 

I'm a decades long admirer of the Goffin and King songwriter team, but their contributions to this album never sat well with me; they sound false, and a bit contrived to construct folk-rock message songs tailored to the band's image. Something like "lets write a Dylan like song that would a sure fire hit for the Byrds." The irony has always been that the Byrds were on the leading edge of a musical movement where lyrics were authored by band members and attempted more depth of feeling and imagery. I suppose by the time NBB came along the originality they introduced to rock had already become clichés and tropes, firmly embedded in the archive of go-to style moves and were ready for weak imitation and outright parody. "Goin' Back" and "Wasn't Born to Follow" sound like parodies, intended or not, and they spoil an otherwise fine album. Crosby seemed to have become a species of professional celebrity, famous for being famous, and I wish he had more brilliant collaborating years than there were. But so many artists become and remain celebrities with inflated reputations on dramatically less quality work than Crosby produced, which is to say that the late singer-songwriter's contributions were tremendous and, most importantly, they were advancements in craft and harmony that still matter over half a century later.  God bless him for that much.

JEFF BECK, RIP

 

In 1965 Eric Clapton opted to leave a plum gig as lead guitarist for the hit-making Yardbirds to join John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. The musician was tired of the pop-rock slant of the Yardbirds and also tired of the relentless touring that the position required. A gig with Mayall would allow him a chance to establish himself. So began a legend, but not the legend you might assume. After offering the band’s the guitar spot to Jimmy Page, who turned it down, Clapton recommended Jeff Beck to become the Yardbirds’ lead musician. The legend I mean is the rapid ascendancy of Beck. After gaining success with the band and becoming a bit of a minor celebrity among British guitar obsessives, Beck left the Yardbirds after a brief stint, in 1966. Recruiting unknown vocalist Rod Stewart, drummer Micky Waller, and Ronnie Wood on bass, he formed the Jeff Beck Group and released his debut album Truth in 1968. 

In a fevered scheme of perfect order, Jeff Beck ascended to the top of the rock-guitar pantheon and remained there for the rest of his playing life. Truth encompassed the essentials of raw blues styles that were key ingredients of what Hendrix and Cream were doing; Beck turned up the volume, gave the feedback a more blistering edge, and framed his improvisations with brio and verve that remains unmatched. The guitar’s fretwork was sparks, fireworks, sirens, a loud swamp rumble on the low end of the neck, and transcendental banshee wails in the higher registers. The first album was, I think, one of the most influential (if not the most influential) pioneering rock guitar records of all time. It and his worthy follow-up release, Beck-Ola, remain relevant because Beck refused to become irrelevant. While fellow Yardbird alumni Jimmy Page and Clapton had their productive runs and each became, to different degrees, retired elders living off fading charisma and recycling their old licks, Beck famously pushed ahead, forging new styles of fusion, jazz, reggae, and the many varieties of funk and electric mojo, confounding and amazing audiences for over six decades with an output that revealed a musician of ideas. Beck remained curious in new elements of music-making and new ways of making bracing, unprecedented sounds from his strings, pick-ups, and amps. He was the guitar god I was seeking. But even the gods give in to the wear of aging.

News of guitarist Jeff Beck’s death comes hard. It certainly breaks my heart, as I imagine it does for anyone who followed Beck in his many incarnations since the 1960s. At 78 years of age, he succumbed to bacterial meningitis. I had the very cool pleasure of seeing him three times in my 70 years of breathing, including his last San Diego concert a few years back. Since the glittery vibe of the ’60s and all cultural eruptions until now, Beck’s guitar work—a shotgun marriage of approaches from Chicago blues, rockabilly, proto-hard rock, and jazz-fusion—was permanently embedded in my life’s soundtrack. Beck is a pioneer in matters of extending the vocabulary of an African-American vernacular and incorporating elements of funk, jazz, reggae, fusion and rockabilly into his particular mix. He recorded quite a bit of music that still makes me turn my head and stare incredulously at the speakers; when he wasn’t being cheap with his playing and willing to lavish more in guitar bravado, his guitar work is of a whole piece. Not just flashy solos, which were, in fact, the least of Beck’s best art, but control of tone color, splendidly tasty fills in the interstices of his band’s alternately rocking or fun. Jeff Beck is a great guitarist because, while his compatriots were concentrating on the number of notes they could cram into a 12-bar or 16-bar phrase, he did what makes him great.

Beck filled his solo slots with the gift of space—fewer notes, high-register bends, and unusual tunings—while others dominated their songs and performances with fusillades that eventually became a comfortable rut. I put forth his first two albums, The Jeff Beck Group and Beck Ola, in evidence and skip ahead to his fusion release, Wired, and still later Beck’s Guitar Shop as prime examples. That sweet, discerning blend of flash, taste, discretionary speed, off-center attack, and an uncanny mastery of electric guitar volume are marvels for future generations to listen to if they wonder what all the fuss was about. These weren’t records by an artist still making his reputation. Currently, his reputation was made, his name now a brand, his work too frequently a stylized snore. Again, I wish Beck would indulge the less savory side of his musical nature and burn a hole in the state no one can leap over. That, though, is part of the fun of treating musicians and their work. All the rapid, distorted, flashier bits are missing in large measure in the interest of a more mature purity, because Beck had refined his style to the point that he was drastically essentialist in tweaking his playing.

Beck was always the most audacious of the Yardbirds triad, and he was easily the most unique of his generation. Only Hendrix rivaled him for advancing rock guitar, and it’s been our fortune that Beck stayed alive to add to his legacy. Even on most of the material, his improvisations were masterclasses in creating the unusual bend, the eccentric hammer on, the inexplicable quick and slicking note clusters that left you gasping in wonder. Beck fused his blunt and bruising blues essentials with styles that struck his fancy; he reinvented his style and manner of playing several times in as many decades, no less than Miles Davis. As with Davis, Beck didn’t hesitate to try something new and push the perceived limits of his technique. His musical fluency, his experiments, his routine switching gears, moods, grooves revealed a musician who liked to surprise himself with playing what he hadn’t played before. He was riveting like no other guitarist could be. The band from the albums Truth and Beckola rocked hard with a loose but fierce rhythm-section, and Beck’s guitar work seared like nothing else that had come before.

The 2018 concert at the Mattress Firm Amphitheater was a revelation. I’d had the honor of seeing Beck three times previously. Fluid, fast, angular, bluesy, full of blues phrasing framed sidewise, and in reverse order, tonalities from a refined adaptation of Indian classical improvisation, splintered chromaticism, power chords, fusion dynamics, and the sweetest lyric playing one would wish for. And, yes, lots of funk. All of this, of course, with a fine band, including drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (Frank Zappa, Sting, Herbie Hancock), vocalist Jimmy Hall, and bassist Rhonda Smith. Beck spent the majority of his career in a state of perpetual flux. He broadened his understanding of where a solo could go as the decades passed and his technique seemed all of absolute spirit, an undulating electric shimmer without seams, without stitches. Honestly, there was a period before this performance when I was in a depression that wouldn’t lift, and I had taken to lashing out at length at long-time heroes and icons, the usual accusation being that they were “overrated.” I’d written as much on a blog post, when I decided to trash Beck’s reputation, insisting that he was relying on old chops, that old age had slowed down the fingers. The concert was a revelation, though, even with a set list that highlighted a six-decade career; Beck’s singular genius was evident, very obvious. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine that this night was sometime back in 1968-69, and a younger Beck was lighting up the sky with fireworks of his own. It was a stunning rebuff to the gratuitous trouncing I gave the guitarist two years prior. After this show, I felt I owed the musician an amends for all the bad faith grousing about his work. His excellence never ceased, his innovation never ceased, and his playing remained the standard that generations of players are still reaching for.

I hope his tribute can be that amends.

(Special thanks to Liz  Abbott at The San Diego Troubadour).

 

WAYNE RIKER SHREDS THE BLUES

Little can  can   be added to the praise blues guitar maestro Wayne Riker has already gotten,. Much of it bears repeating, with vigor, if only for of music lovers unfamiliar with the magnificence he applies to the blues. In recent memory, Riker has released a scintillating slew of top tier blues guitar efforts, particularly on two grand slam showcases. The first, 2018’s Blues Breakout, is a hard power trio effort with a surfeit of the guitarist’s quick-witted licks. Wayne fills all the spaces and enter a rapture as his long improvisations overrun with slinky, sleek, and slicing ideas, one atop the other. The second, 2020’s Blues Lightning, a pulsing session with swift riffs, a well-greased rhythm section, and a series of guest vocals by an assemblage of the best blues singers available. Punchy, rocking, the guitarist, band, and his guest singers show a proficiency in feeling and finesse for a variety of r&b categories. His new album, Alphabetical Blues Bash Volume l, has a new edition of the Wayne Riker Gathering with bassist Oliver Shirly lll drummer Marty Dodson, and a familiar cast of grit-worthy guest vocalists. As with Blues Lightning, the new release highlights a familiar cast of grit-worth guest singers, Shelle Blue, Lauren Leigh, Billy Watson, Janet Hammer, Deanna Haala, Debra Galan, Ron Houston, Michele Lundeen, Liz Ajuzie, Rebecca Jade, and Ron Christopher Jones. The strategy of the record is an alphabetical, A through M, gathering of diverse blues classics, famous and obscure, highlighting both the quality tones of the respective vocalists and t Riker’s understanding of styles and nuance. An additional pleasure of ABB Vol l are the instrumental pieces, brief impromptus sans vocals where the guitarist’s virtuoso sense of touch is on full exhibit. A tune that grabbed me straight away was a funky version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Checking Up on My Baby.” Riker, and company jack-up the pace, with Wayne’s guitar work pops and punches in rhythmic precision, and his solos add a cutting series of blues licks against the rock steady backbeat. Lauren Leigh’s vocal is hot spice and fire, strong and brassy, with a bit of Aretha coming through as she soars on the high notes.

Scintillating as well is the instrumental rendition on the Robert Johnson -Elmore James work horse ‘Dust My Broom.” Hewing to the traditional arrangement, Riker’s slide guitar states the swooping introductory riff with a smooth, glistening tone and touch as he coaxes, cajoles, and caresses a gallantly melodic improvisation that simulates a singer’s expression of wonder and woe. Riker’s configurations swoop and loop over, and around the foundation. His taste in short fills, quick riffs, roiling accents in the high registers are applied with a painter’s sense of how to fill space. The classic Peggy Lee hit “Fever” (written by Eddie Cooley and John Davenport) receives a sultry interpretation by Jane Hammer, who does well with the low-key arrangement, as her whisper -like phrasing works sexily with Riker’s subdued chord work. This is the sound of seduction.; the guitar solo, spare, framed by exquisitely cresting blues bends and shadings, is the textbook example of creating musical tension and then releasing. Rocking harder is the take on Don Nix’s “Going Down,” a blues rock standard that’s had pulverizing iterations by Freddie King, and Jeff Beck, among others. 

Wayne Riker takes up the tune and refuses to take a back seat. His guitar work soars, stings, and wails down the descending progression, mischievously teasing the edges of Deanna Haala’s in-your-face lead vocal. Especially bracing, in a pleasant way, is the revival of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor,” pushed hard by Michele Lundeen’s rust-coated vocal. The band digs in hard on the changes, with bandleader Wayne unleashing a glorious and bittersweet solo, every note hitting the target dead square. I recommend paying special attention to the two other guitar displays on this fine blues outing, Bill Doggett’s “Honkey Tonk” and ‘Hank Williams’ “Move it Over.” Wayne Riker performs with the feeling and a virtuoso’s ease of play. He is simply wonderful at finding the spirit, emotion, the vibe, and verve of a song and then bringing it out with his guitar in wonderful, atypical ways.