CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW

Irony isn’t dead. In fact, it’s a living yet intangible part of the odd vibes that abound after the disasters of the worst human assumptions being acted upon. It feels like some smirking ghost at the side of the road laughing at us while we scratch our heads wondering what happened to our best-laid plans. Occasionally, it takes decades for some ironies to become revealed, noticed, observed, as in what, I think, was some of a barely noted reversal of mainstream attitudes about the right and wrong ways of making music. In the early Sixties, around the time of the British Invasion, I remember all sorts of cartoons and jokes about citizens and music fans attempting to commit suicide when they were exposed to the vocal styles of Jagger, Dylan, or a good number of gruff, nasally singers in the pop world. I remember the Rolling Stones’ appearance on the old Hollywood Palace variety show on ABC in 1964.

Hosted by Dean Martin, who was either entirely drunk and on his fourth sheet to the wind or doing a brilliant impersonation of a stumbling sot, The Stones performed their songs for the first time to an American TV audience, an historic event enhanced by Martin’s slurred insults to the British band. There was a trampoline act at mid-show, I remember, a circus act that had a leotard-clad family doing impressive tricks of the bouncing variety. When they were done, Martin came on stage again and announced that the elder man in the troupe was the father of the Rolling Stones and had been trying to kill himself with this trampoline act for years. That was a real gasser. Why the hate? The answer was obvious. The Stones were reintroducing America to a native art, black music, that it had all but forgotten about and found the renditions by the Rolling Stones of classic blues and soul songs alien, offensive, immoral and dangerous. It wasn’t good singing and offensive to the idea of music! It wasn’t even music.

Somewhere along the line all the stoned hippies and rebellious teens grew up, got jobs, had families, and in effect became both their parents and THE MAN, and the same gag now substitutes MOR performers like Dionne Warwick, Michael Bolton, Michael McDonald, and some others for the old guard. These folks can certainly sing but the kind of music they make is antithetical to the true liberating and expressive poetry of what REAL music is. Authenticity as criteria for judgment (an ever-vague and elusive concept) has advanced over technical competence and romantically “pretty” offerings. I have had this debate on both sides over the decades: first with my parents, aunts, uncles, and school teachers defending Dylan’s music and especially his singing; and through the decades arguing with young people that boy bands, pop tunesters like Dionne Warwick and slow jam funk were criminally commercial junk that was without conviction or soul.

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MUSIC I HEARD ON MY BIRTHDAY

 

Released in 1969, the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed is the centerpiece of my round up of favorite albums. It's a grand crescendo of the styles, personas, and attitudes they've been developing in the years before this, easily displaying less a fusion of acoustic folk and blues traditions than an early Americanish "blend" of the plugged in and unplugged traditions. It's fair to say that every element of sound we hear sounds as if it's always been there, perfectly formed, waiting to be discovered. Jagger is in peak form as a vocalist--there seems little in the way of traditional and more contemporary styles at the time he couldn't make his own--and his lyrics were never better, subtler, wittier, more British eccentric oddball. In an interview some time ago in Rolling Stone, Mailer found fine writing in the lyrics of "Live With Me" when the interviewer played him this record, praising the baroque and telling detail, the scene shifting line to line, the quick outlines of an upper class family's secret insanity fully exposed. The only track that doesn't work is "You Can't Always Get What You Want", intended seemingly as a grand , showstopping statement with just bit of philosophy delivered in the chorus. Overwrought, drawn out, very slow, anticlimatic, Jagger's singing uncharacteristically falls flat here--he sounds winded --and the not-quite surreal gibberish he usually excels at suffers in a determination to be "poetic".

Theoretically the Blind Faith super group, comprised of Eric Clapton,Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker and Rick Gretch, should have worked, as they brought a demonstrated array of talents to the fold around instrumental chops, vocal strength and in songwriting especially. Though commonly felt by many to be a failure at the time of release, the lone Blind Faith studio release yielded an impressive number of all time gems--"Can't Find My Way Home", "Presence of the Lord", 'Well All Right". Even lesser material such as the structurally awkward "Had to Cry Today" and Ginger Baker's everybody-gets-a-solo excursion "Dow What You Like" provide sufficient joy. The Baker tune especially is worthwhile for Clapton's guitar solo, which to myhears has him revealing , maybe, a bit of influence from Mike Bloomfield's solo on "East West". The reason for abandoning this project would seem to be the expected issues of drugs, egos, and most likely that their hearts just weren't into it. A shame, they could have been one of the best.

Miles Davis is known as a man with great taste in highlighting the work of great sax players in his bands--Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Sonny Rollins. Add Sonny Stitt. Often derided as a knock off Bird, a grossly unfair charge, Stitt is shown here as lyrically expressive, technically sublime and engagingly melodic improviser for establishes his ideas of bebop chromaticism to the music's superb body of energy. Davis, in fine form here with his brief statements, quick , surgically inserted note clusters and his pure, nearly vibratoless tone --not to mention his genius use of space between his solos--has made it working habit to pare his minimalist expressiviseness against busier second voices like Coltrane and later John McLaughlin. With his band, with peerless support from alto and tenor saxophones, Wynton Kelly, piano, Paul Chambers, bass, and Jimmy Cobb, drums--we have Stitt in that position. His choruses are choice, crowded but not crowding. Recorded sometime during the 1960s, according to some vague notes on the CD.

I went looking for a relevant live set by a great fusion band to post here and decided to post this very elegant and , yes, at times searing live set from the Gary Burton Quartet , IN CONCERT, featuring an early appearence by the late guitarist Larry Coryell, who man consider the man most responsible for laying a foundation for the jazz fusion to come. In any respect, this record hasn't aged at all since it's its release in 1968--that are no ugly fuzz tones , fake sitars or faux poetic-philosophical lyrics one needs to rationalize about--but is , rather, a vivid statement of what a innovative unit had been up to that moment and being able to reimagine their inventions yet again. The rhythm section of Steve Swallow on bass and Bob Moses on drums, navigate a variety of musical ideas and rhythms, buoying the remarkable contrasts between primary improvisers Coryell and Burton. LC's blues intonations seamlessly merge with rapid fire bebop complexity and an unfailing classicist precision, the same no less from Burton, who makes his percussive instrument reveal tones, undertones, and shades in a rapid flurry that might make you think of the dense fabric of an Art Tatum solo. A band remarkable that helped clear the ground for a stretch of great jazz rock.

Side two  of Mountain's 1971 release Flowers of Evil is live for nearly forty minutes and is pretty much the Leslie West Show. West wasn't the most fluid of blues rock guitarists--nearly anyone else could play circles around him in terms of speedy cliches and such--but what he had was phrase, taste and tone and a killer hand vibrato , featured here oh so brilliantly on the Dream Sequence segment of the side: "Dreams of Milk and Honey" by Leslie West and Mountain, from the second side of their album Flowers of Evil, recorded at the Fillmore East in NYC in 1971. It is one of the great moments of Hard Rock guitar, with a great, lumbering riff that distorts and buzzes on the low strings with crushing bends and harmonics squealing at some raging pitch that might make one think of natural calamity, a force that cannot be withstood. West, never the most fluid guitarist, had, all the same, a touch, a feel, a sense of how to mix the sweet obbligato figures he specialized in with the more brutal affront of power chords and critically nasty riffing. The smarter among us can theorize about the virtues of amplified instrumentation attaining a threshold of sweetness after the sheer volume wraps you in a numbing cacophony, but for purposes here it suffices to say, with a wink, that is a kind of music you get and accept on its own truncated terms, or ignore outright. There is an aesthetic at work here, but it might as well come to saying that you had to be me, at my age, in 1971 when I was struck by this performance to understand a little of why I haven't tossed the disc into the dustbin. He is in absolute control of his Les Paul Jr., and here he combines with bassist Felix Pappalardi and drummer Corky Laing in some theme and variation that accomplishes what critic Robert Christgau has suggested is the secret of great rock and roll music, repetition without tedium. There are no thousand-note blitzkriegs, no tricky time signatures, just tight playing, a riffy, catchy, power-chording wonder of rock guitar essential-ism. I've been listening to this track on and off since I graduated from high school, and it cracks me up that my obsession with this particular masterpiece of rock guitar minimalism caused a number of my friends to refer to me listening yet again to my personal "national anthem."

a CD review from 1976, the genuinely faddish Axe squats for the crowd

IT'S A CIRCUS WORLD -Axe (1976

Axe is a rare example of Sixties psychedelia that ranks with the best of the Blues Magoos, 13th Floor Elevators, The Music Machine, The Count Five, The Electric Prunes, The Seeds, The Leaves, The Ambouy Dukes, The Barbarians, The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Frijid Pink, David Axelrod and other obscure bands that have been shelved with other rock arcana. Psychedelic music occurred in the late Sixties when drugs, most notably LSD and other chemicals that transfigured one’s perception into a parabola of surrealism, became the latest fashion among youth culture. Many young rock bands flirted with the effects of these substances, and in their need to make their music more than throwaway pop culture (a symptom from the release of Sgt. Pepper), looked to express their “insights” and “understandings” in song. The results were naive lyrics about love, peace, the search for inner essences, fantasies about hijacking starships, the effusiveness of nature, paens against violence and in general expressions about the need to escape from the bummer of reality. To amplify the themes and the art-consciousness of the music, there were guitar solos with fuzz tone effects, sitar playing, classical quotes, serious singing that sounds like the mewling of a spoiled kid and so on. Sixties psychedelia, for all its seriousness and cerebral assertions, was a time of innocence that’s been lost forever to history. Those bands’ efforts were the prattling of a child playing with advanced concepts that the child was incapable of understanding. Psychedelia hasn’t been lost completely. Axis, the former backup band for Rick Derringer, are on the surface one of the many competent but undistinguished heavy metal bands vying for Nugent’s spotlight, but lyrically they’ve placed themselves in a cosmic time warp, distinct from Nugent’s machismo or hard rock’s penchant for cock pride themes. On “Juggler,” lead guitarist/songwriter Danny Johnson sings: “Time is like a monster/ … .it can never be stopped/Turn it all around, turn it upside down/You just can’t break God’s clock.” Who else but a child of the Sixties psychedelic naturalism would have the gall to deliver a fractured sermon to an audience that expects its heavy metal lyrics to be as Hobbesian as the music itself? In " Ray’s Electric Farm” (a perfect title), Johnson posits the worn out notion that he can find an earthly utopia: "I’m going down to Ray’s electric farm/Where the nights last for days and/Guitars grow on the lawn … " Johnson is a visionary who thinks that rock and roll ought to be organic and free of bills. Presumably, all a rocker need do on the “electric farm” is plug into the nearest bush and let the music rip. Johnson has a subversive personality at heart, a mind that seeks to undermine the murder mentality nihilism that dominates hard rock and replace it with the cosmic effusiveness that rock audiences repudiated long ago in favor of either nostalgia or cynicism .Johnson is a dumb kid who has assumed the piousness of progressive rock bands like Yes and Kansas and is delivering the message in plainer language through a more understood motif. It probably won’t be long when Johnson and Axis will have their lyrics on the lips of hard rock fans. The thought of it should terrify all of us who’ve remained sane up to this moment.

Received message. Here is a possible rewrite with half of the adjectives removed: Axe is a rare example of Sixties psychedelia that ranks with the best of the Blues Magoos, 13th Floor Elevators, The Music Machine, The Count Five, The Electric Prunes, The Seeds, The Leaves, The Ambouy Dukes, The Barbarians, The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Frijid Pink, David Axelrod and other obscure bands that have been shelved with other rock arcana. Psychedelic music occurred in the late Sixties when drugs, most notably LSD and other chemicals that transfigured one’s perception into a parabola of surrealism, became the latest fashion among youth culture. Many young rock bands flirted with the effects of these substances, and in their need to make their music more than throwaway pop culture (a symptom from the release of Sgt. Pepper), looked to express their “insights” and “understandings” in song. The results were naive lyrics about love, peace, the search for inner essences, fantasies about hijacking starships, the effusiveness of nature, paens against violence and in general expressions about the need to escape from the bummer of reality. To amplify the themes and the art-consciousness of the music, there were guitar solos with fuzz tone effects, sitar playing, classical quotes, serious singing that sounds like the mewling of a spoiled kid and so on. Sixties psychedelia, for all its seriousness and cerebral assertions, was a time of innocence that’s been lost forever to history. Those bands’ efforts were the prattling of a child playing with advanced concepts that the child was incapable of understanding. Psychedelia hasn’t been lost completely. Axis, the former backup band for Rick Derringer, are on the surface one of the many competent but undistinguished heavy metal bands vying for Nugent's spotlight, but lyrically they’ve placed themselves in a cosmic time warp, distinct from Nugent’s machismo or hard rock’s penchant for cock pride themes. On “Juggler,” lead guitarist/songwriter Danny Johnson sings: “Time is like a monster/ … .it can never be stopped/Turn it all around, turn it upside down/You just can’t break God’s clock.” Who else but a child of the Sixties psychedelic naturalism would have the gall to deliver a fractured sermon to an audience that expects its heavy metal lyrics to be as Hobbesian as the music itself? In " Ray’s Electric Farm” (a perfect title), Johnson posits the worn out notion that he can find an earthly utopia: "I’m going down to Ray’s electric farm/Where the nights last for days and/Guitars grow on the lawn … " Johnson is a visionary who thinks that rock and roll ought to be organic and free of bills. Presumably, all a rocker need do on the “electric farm” is plug into the nearest bush and let the music rip. Johnson has a subversive personality at heart, a mind that seeks to undermine the murder mentality nihilism that dominates hard rock and replace it with the cosmic effusiveness that rock audiences repudiated long ago in favor of either nostalgia or cynicism .Johnson is a dumb kid who has assumed the piousness of progressive rock bands like Yes and Kansas and is delivering the message in plainer language through a more understood motif. It probably won’t be long when Johnson and Axis will have their lyrics on the lips of hard rock fans. The thought of it should terrify all of us who’ve remained sane up to this moment.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN AND HOW IT TURNED OUT

 Theoretically, the Blind Faith super group should have worked, as they brought a demonstrated array of talents to the fold around instrumental chops, vocal strength and in songwriting especially. Though commonly felt by many to be a failure at the time of release, the lone Blind Faith studio release yielded an impressive number of all time gems--” Can't Find My Way Home”, “Presence of the Lord”, 'Well All Right”. Even lesser material such as the structurally awkward “Had to Cry Today” and Ginger Baker's everybody-gets-a-solo excursion “Dow What You Like” provide sufficient joy. The Baker tune especially is worthwhile for Clapton's guitar solo, which to my ears has him revealing, maybe, a bit of influence from Mike Bloomfield's solo on “East West”. The reason for abandoning this project would seem to be the expected issues of drugs, egos, and most likely that their hearts just weren't into it. A shame, they could have been one of the best.

+++

John Lennon had a grudge against bandmate Paul McCartney , so he wrote a song about it , laying everything out except Sir McCartney's name. As an issue of disrespect, it's in a class by itself, but the howler of this whole enterprise centers around the most quoted lyric, “…the only thing you did was yesterday..." The longer view of the Beatles reveals PM's contributions to the creative surges was, in fact, profound, at which point it makes me consider the idea that McCartney would likely have been a pop star of some sort without Lennon. Lennon, always a raw dog who improved vastly as a tune smith , singer, and lyricist due to his association with McCartney, would likely have had a rougher go of it.

GUITAR RIFFS

 

Old guitar riffs do not die as long as I live, as they are the soundtrack of many routines and daily walks up the stairs to work, treks to the stores, adventures in scattered beach area parking lots, the journey to the forbidden and familiar knowledge behind a girlfriend’s front door. Or the entrance to a doctor’s office, for that matter. I had often joked that each of us requires a “signature riff”, a power chord mini-anthem ourselves that we have on constant mental standby as we go about our routine tasks and past times; I often imagine the open assault of “Mississippi Queen” commanding a room’s attention once I enter if only to perform the mundane obligation of paying a gas bill. The theme song changes, to be sure–there is no channel changing that’s faster or more assured than what goes on in the car radio dial of the mind–and there are those days when what I carry in my imagined soundtrack in my imagined movie are the genteel whispers of Paul Simon’s three-hankie whining, the grating, rusted scraping of early Velvet Underground, the guitar amnesia of Larry Coryell. It varies according to mood and what lies on the to-do list that day. (Not that I have a to-do list.)

It’s what I remember to get around to accomplish, get over with or finish from an earlier, half-hearted attempt. I am not so organized. I am a fifty-eight-year-old man, almost fifty-nine, who has the personal habits of, say, your average 17-year-old just in college, in his first off-campus apartment with a room of his own). That said, the last few days have been one of stupid-making idleness since I tripped in my apartment earlier in the week and ran my already-game knee into something hard and unforgiving. The last four days have been missed work, icing the swollen knee --no breaks or fractures, thank goodness-- and diving into an old record collection. Some of this stuff does not sound so bad.

Robin Trower, for example; the former Procol Harum guitarist is very possibly the only Hendrix inspired fret specialist who fully established his own distinct approach to guitar melodrama while still maintaining the ethereal quality of his Mentor’s style. Twice Removed from Yesterday, his debut was a wonderful tone poem start to finish emphasizing mood and atmospherics by way of the dreamier parts of Electric Ladyland. His choice of Jim Dewar ex of Stone the Crows for a lead vocalist was inspired a gritty soulful belter whose lower register gravitas gave the core idyllisism of the lyrics something very solid to wrap around. “I Can’t Wait Much Longer” is that rare breed of power ballad that manages to make you feel the ache of heart that hungers for a love that won’t reciprocate.

Bridge of Sighs veers from the mystical tone and lands on a hard rock style with a solid grounding in R&B grooves: solid riffs and rhythms charging solos very fluid guitar work. Where the first album was strong on thick overlays of guitar tones and coloration to produce a spaced-out elegance Bridge shifts more towards hard rock and rhythm and blues up-tempo hooky riffs and blockbuster vocals. Dewar and Trower are as fine match of lead singer and guitar hero as we’ve seen emerge from the cantankerous era of Sports Arena rock as finely twined on production and material on these two releases as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were on Led Zeppelin’s entire body of work or more appropriately as Paul Kossoff guitar and Paul Rodgers vocals were in their seminal blues-rock band Free. The secret might be that the two of them are aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses–they complement each other with nuance style a bit of emotional reserve that makes the tension of their best songs here–“Day of the Eagle” “The Fool and Me” “Too Rolling Stone”–continually satisfying. Trower is a blues guitarist at heart and knows the value of fluidity and restraint.

Received message. Here is the corrected text: Old guitar riffs do not die as long as I live, as they are the soundtrack of many routines and daily walks up the stairs to work, treks to the stores, adventures in scattered beach area parking lots, the journey to the forbidden and familiar knowledge behind a girlfriend's front door. Or the entrance to a doctor's office, for that matter. I had often joked that each of us requires a “signature riff”, a power chord mini-anthem ourselves that we have on constant mental standby as we go about our routine tasks and past times; I often imagine the open assault of “Mississippi Queen” commanding a room's attention once I enter if only to perform the mundane obligation of paying a gas bill. The theme song changes, to be sure--there is no channel changing that's faster or more assured than what goes on in the car radio dial of the mind--and there are those days when what I carry in my imagined soundtrack in my imagined movie are the genteel whispers of Paul Simon's three-hankie whining, the grating, rusted scraping of early Velvet Underground, the guitar amnesia of Larry Coryell. It varies according to mood and what lies on the to-do list that day. (Not that I actually have a to-do list. It's actually what I remember to get around to accomplish, get over with or finish from an earlier, half-hearted attempt. I am not so organized. I am a fifty-eight-year-old man, almost fifty-nine, who has the personal habits of, say, your average 17-year-old just in college, in his first off-campus apartment with a room of his own). That said, the last few days have been one of stupid-making idleness since I tripped in my apartment earlier in the week and ran my already-game knee into something hard and unforgiving. The last four days have been missed work, icing the swollen knee --no breaks or fractures, thank goodness-- and diving into an old record collection. Some of this stuff does not sound so bad; Robin Trower, for example; the former Procol Harum guitarist is very possibly the only Hendrix inspired fret specialist who fully established his own distinct approach to guitar melodrama while still maintaining the ethereal quality of his Mentor's style. Twice Removed from Yesterday, his debut was a wonderful tone poem start to finish emphasizing mood and atmospherics by way of the dreamier parts of Electric Ladyland. His choice of Jim Dewar ex of Stone the Crows for a lead vocalist was inspired a gritty soulful belter whose lower register gravitas gave the core idyllism of the lyrics something very solid to wrap around. "I Can't Wait Much Longer" is that rare breed of power ballad that actually manages to make you feel the ache of heart that hungers for a love that won't reciprocate. Bridge of Sighs veers from the mystical tone and lands on a hard rock style with a solid grounding in R&B grooves: solid riffs and rhythms charging solos very fluid guitar work. Where the first album was strong on thick overlays of guitar tones and coloration to produce a spaced-out elegance Bridge shifts more towards hard rock and rhythm and blues up-tempo hooky riffs and blockbuster vocals. Dewar and Trower are as fine match of lead singer and guitar hero as we've seen emerge from the cantankerous era of Sports Arena rock as finely twined on production and material on these two releases as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were on Led Zeppelin's entire body of work or more appropriately as Paul Kossoff guitar and Paul Rodgers vocals were in their seminal blues-rock band Free. The secret might be that the two of them are aware of each other's strengths and weaknesses--they compliment each other with nuance style a bit of emotional reserve that makes the tension of their best songs here--"Day of the Eagle" "The Fool and Me" "Too Rolling Stone"--continually satisfying. Trower is a blues guitarist at heart and knows the value of fluidity and restraint.

SONGS OF SUMMER

 

Everyone hates the fact that summer is brief and fall comes upon us much too quickly. In 1966,The Happenings had something to say about that common complaint.' See You in September” is actually rather cheery, with a narrator who says he will pass this way again and enjoy another summer vacation with whomever he's talking to. The best bud, a girlfriend, or boyfriend, straight, gay or cordial, the specifics don't matter in this slight recitation because the background the lyrics set up is the wishful thinking optimism of an earlier time when some pop music was innocent intentionally and meant to shield a listener for three minutes or less against the cultural convulsions that were about to dominate the 60s.

Unlike the Happenings, who took the end of summer as a matter of life and fully expected to have the same kind of fun in the summer still ahead of them. Fully optimistic and even cheerful with the farewells to the friend they will see again. The Doors, on the other hand, were grim, gloomy, moody, sullen and maybe a hint sexy for the 14-17 year olds so eager to see through the veil and get some truth. The end of summer was…the end. A recurring theme with these gentlemen. The Doors also rued the end of summer and the drowsily droned baritone, fashioned by Jim Morrison, wrote a song that made it seem as if this were the end of the world. Many have opined that this was a tune about the loss of youth and innocence and the eventual entrance into adulthood. Perhaps it is on some level, but the level is shallow and I say hooey. The end of summer meant a return to school, or that many teens would have to get jobs or move back in with their parents. Morrison was really decorating a banal displeasure with growing up with a sound that made it seem romantically apocalyptic.

The intensely odd and self-concerned Arthur Lee of Love had seasonal matters on his mind as well in 1967. “Bummer in the Summer”, from their release Forever Changes, is a track both punkish and arty, nearly progressive in sound. It all works as Lee announces his discontinuous frustrations. A summer fling that didn't quite work out. An odd and dynamic merging of Dylanesque talk singing and revved up chords that resemble Them's “Gloria,” this suggests the rap and hip hop styles that came years after it. If not rap, then “Walk this Way” from Aerosmith at least. The middle section with the piano pounding out chords that suggest a jazz inclination is among the many unexpected wonders on this brilliant record.

LARRY CORYELL and MICHAEL URBANIAK LIVE

I consider this a public service in posting this admittedly grainy YouTube feature of duets by two jazz masters who are beyond compare. It's a concert video of the late jazz guitar master Larry Coryell and the amazing Polish jazz-fusion violinist, originally released on VHS I believe that hasn't been released as a stand-alone disc. I pray someone will secure the rights and make it available. Coryell was a member of the original Super Guitar Trio with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia, and though his playing was frequently brilliant, he was often hobbled with flubs and miscues; it became obvious that LC's dependence on drugs and hooch lessened his skills, and he was replaced by the ever able Al diMeola. Coryell got clean and sober in 1981 and this effort, recorded in 1982, shows the difference. It's a remarkable performance, thanks in major portions to Urbaniak, whose skills as an improviser are second to none; his unhitched combining of styles ranging from Grapelli through Ponty and his mastery of idiom, technique and tonal nuance gives LC the colorful contrast. Urbaniak's improvisations are swift and melodic and, as with Coryell, seem without end in the configurations his long lines of notes form. Urbaniak as well, demonstrates he has a bass player's instincts and backs Coryell's ultra-virtuoso fantasias. Coryell at this time seems like a man with something to prove. Here the guitarist amply proves his point.

LET IT BLEED

Released in 1969, the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed is the centerpiece of my round up of  favorite albums. It's a grand crescendo of the styles, personas, and attitudes they had been developing in the years before this, easily displaying less a fusion of acoustic folk and blues traditions than an early Americanish “blend” of the plugged in and unplugged traditions. It's fair to say that every element of sound we hear sounds as if it's always been there, perfectly formed, waiting to be discovered. Jagger is in peak form --there seems little in the way of traditional and more contemporary styles at the time he couldn't make his own--and his lyrics were never better, subtler, wittier, more British eccentric oddball. In an interview, some time ago in Rolling Stone, Norman Mailer found fine writing in the lyrics of "Live With Me" when the interviewer played him this record, praising the baroque and telling detail, the scene shifting line to line, the quick outlines of an upper-class family's secret insanity fully exposed. He compared the song favorably with Evelyn Waugh's short stories. The remark that reveals another strand for Stones scholars to research, the bands' effortless merging of American blues with very British absurdity.  The one track that doesn't work is "You Can't Always Get What You Want", intended seemingly as a grand , showstopping statement with just bit of philosophy delivered in the chorus. Overwrought, drawn out, very slow, anticlimactic, Jagger's singing uncharacteristically falls flat here--he sounds winded --and the surreal nonsequitors he usually excels at suffers in a determination to be “poetic”. Aside from the awkward presentation of this Big Statement, the idea of what was supposed to be the album's grand slam  finale is based on a tired aphorism reminds us that even the sainted Rolling Stones can chase a bad idea as diligently as they can a good one.

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.