Month: October 2014

Nina Simone

Nina Simone was an enigma.  She is often described as a jazz singer.  She wasn’t one of consequence.  Stack her next to an actual jazz singer and this becomes pretty clear.  She developed a reputation as an artist with moral integrity.  Yet that reputation wears thin when looking at how many misguided concessions to pop fads are littered all through her recording career.  Much is made of her bitter break from Euro-classical music early in life.  Denied entry to a conservatory (The Curtis Institute of Music) as a pianist, she turned to singing in lounges.  Little of her piano playing impresses on her own recordings, though it can be effective in accompaniment.  But when you hear her voice on a good recording, she definitely had something special.  Singing may not have been her desire, but it was her great talent.  Sometimes talents choose their medium, rather than the other way around.  She was often at her best when adding a rough blues or gospel or jazz inflection to burningly austere chamber pop songs.  She was sort of a gothic shadow cast from commercial pop.  It was the tone of her voice that embodied a palpable sense of anger that drove so much of it.  Close listening doesn’t reveal much clarity in her rhythmic phrasing, her control of vibrato, her pitch range, or even her use of melisma.  All that aside, she had the power to deliver songs as if saying, with a firm scowl, “I will sing this song and I will make you remember it.”  The single-minded resolve to put her own identity into her music is fiercely determined.  This makes the greatest impression on the material that resists that approach.  When she worked with jazzy orchestral backing, as was a prevailing style for a time during her long career, the resistance to her identity could be too much.  When she played straight blues or even militant soul and R&B, there was nothing really working against her identity to put up any challenge.  She reversed her formula and added formal pop technique to rougher electric soul and R&B, and it came across as a reflection of her limitations rather than her positive talent.

What follows is a long yet incomplete set of brief reviews of her albums.  This is limited to what I’ve heard, which does not include anything from her time with Colpix Records.  Continue reading “Nina Simone”

Black Flag – Who’s Got the 10½?

Who's Got the 10½?

Black Flag – Who’s Got the 10½? SST CD060 (1986)

Listeners self-segregate into a number of different camps when it comes to Black Flag’s music:

Group I – The early Flag (pre-Henry Rollins) is the pinnacle; believes that proficient performance is blasphemous to punk rock; usually explicitly dislikes Henry; loves The First Four Years, Everything Went Black

Group II – Damaged is great but doesn’t understand what the big deal is with anything else; loves Damaged

Group III – Admires the sludge-rock, free jazz/punk experiments and metal touches of the crop of 1984 albums; most likely to appreciate the band’s entire career arc in varying degrees; loves My War, Live ’84, The Process of Weeding Out

Group IV – This group doesn’t actually exist, but theoretically they like the slicker hard rock of the later years; loves Loose Nut

These groups aren’t clearly demarcated.  But by-and-large, Groups I and II tend to dominate.  Count me in Group III.  But it’s worth keeping in mind where you fall on the spectrum, because if you fall in Group I, you’ll probably never like the later years.  Too bad, though, because Black Flag was a group that evolved and made a lot of great music in surprisingly different ways through the years.  The much-maligned later years garnered a poor reaction in part from two studio albums (Loose Nut, In My Head) that have wide reputations as being too slick and failing to capture the group’s strengths.  Their popularity declined too.  Once capable of filling sizeable venues, they were playing to scant audiences in small places by the later 1980s.  Personal frictions within the band also didn’t help matters.  But they could still put on a fierce, well-executed performance and Who’s Got the 10½? is all the evidence anyone should need.  In fact, anyone skeptical of the later years should head here first.  Every song cooks, with a pummelling energy that is paradoxically wielded with scalpel-like precision.  If you stack up all the lineups (ALL of the them), you probably have to concede that this one was the most technically proficient.  The real surprise is drummer Anthony Martinez, who manages to find the perfect balance of straight-ahead hard rock steadiness with a supple ability to switch gears that perfectly supports the music.  If you want Greg Ginn guitar freakouts, you won’t get as much as the ’84 live album, but still plenty to keep you happy.  Kira is still a more versatile bassist than Chuck Dukowski, even if Dukowski had more punk bona fides.  What you end up with is a well-oiled machine.  This band sounds professional while at the same time sounding like one with something real to say.  Unlike the studio albums of this era, Who’s Got the 10½? actually makes full use of the group’s strengths.  It’s the most sympathetic document of Black Flag’s work of this time, free from essentially all encumbrances of the studio.

Get the CD version.  The original LP issue was shortened, and there are plenty of good tunes added to the expanded CD.

Black Flag – In My Head

In My Head

Black Flag – In My Head SST 045 (1985)

A couple good ones here, “In My Head,” “Drinking and Driving.”  Nothing is bad, exactly, but there is a claustrophobic effect to this one, like Greg Ginn letting perfectionism and micromanagement run amuck.  Rollins is so far down in the mix his presence seems only grudgingly permitted.  The drums are still all done up with a gated reverb effect that seems overused.  This is hard rock but it is recorded in a way that sounds almost hollow.  It’s not the band’s best, and probably closer to their least, but I’ll still take it.

Sun Ra – Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1

Jazz By Sun Ra - Vol. 1

Sun Ra – Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1 Transition TRLP J-10 (1957)

Sun Ra didn’t start releasing recordings as a leader until he was well into his forties, making him somewhat of a late arrival–like Sam Rivers or Bill Dixon.  Recorded for Tom Wilson‘s Transition label in 1956, Jazz By Sun Ra, Vol. 1 (later issued as Sun Song, the CD edition of which Includes the bonus track “Swing a Little Taste” from Jazz in Transition) is made up of the type of skewed big band music featured on Jazz in Silhouette and a smattering of other recordings The Arkestra made in Chicago but did not release until they had relocated to New York City in the 1960s.  As an album made specifically for a willing record label, this sounds quite a bit more hi-fi than the many rehearsal tapes from the same time period released on El Saturn records in the coming years.  As for the music, it’s all quite good.  The Arkestra sounds very polished.  Some great songs too, with Sun Ra’s arrangements giving this an adventurous feel.  The harmonies were advanced and novel for the day.  Hindsight may not make this seem all that innovative, given what came later, but you wouldn’t have found solos like John Gilmore‘s on “Brainville” or “Future” anywhere else in 1957 (save perhaps Jazz Advance).  The prominent percussion on “New Horizons” and “Street Named Hell” were also rare in a jazz context when this came out (though Buddy Collette and others had similar notions).  Then of course there is the closer, “Sun Song”, on which Sun Ra’s organ gives a big hint as to where he would go in the next few decades.  This album is pretty consistently good from beginning to end.  Sun Ra and his Arkestra may have made even better recordings, but this still ranks among their most listenable efforts.

The Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale – Batman & Robin

Batman & Robin

The Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale – Batman & Robin Tifton 78002 (1966)

Batman and Robin is a fun novelty item.  Credited to “The Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale,” it was the product of a one-off session organized by renowned producer Tom Wilson that paired members of The Sun Ra Arkestra with members of the rock group The Blues Project.  The record was released by a toy company.  It was designed to cash in on the popularity of the “Batman” TV show.  The band simply runs through some dance-rock jams in a Swinging Sixties style, with plenty of wild blues rock guitar riffs and some elements cribbed from Euro-classical music and The Beatles.  The horn charts are simple, bright and punchy, not unlike the style of Jamaican ska.  Some claim Al Kooper is featured on side two in place of Sun Ra, but Kooper has denied being present and it’s more likely Sun Ra throughout.  This was arguably the most accessible album Sun Ra ever recorded.  Don’t look to this for any special insights into Sun Ra’s compositional or performance styles.  The Blues Project folks have equal input it seems.  There are still some very subtle Ra-like moments to be found, as when the band drops out for a few seconds most of the way through “Batman Theme” to spotlight a wall of sound from Sun Ra’s Hammond B-3 organ. “Robin’s Theme” is a good one.

Sun Ra – Space Is the Place

Space Is the Place

Sun Ra – Space Is the Place Blue Thumb BTS-41 (1973)

What Space Is the Place (not to be confused with the soundtrack to the movie of the same name) offers is a broad and eclectic overview of the multifaceted musical philosophy of Sun Ra and His Arkestra.  From here you can move into a lot of different territories of Sun Ra’s oeuvre according to what strikes your fancy.  This is one of the very best introductions to Ra’s music, even if further exploration of the catalog will likely quickly supplant it with new favorites.  The title track is one of the group’s space chants, but at an extended length that allows room to go a bit further out than usual.  “Images” is a fresh new performance of one of the band’s swinging evergreens.  It’s probably my favorite version, with a hint of smiling sourness in the horns, a hearty electric bass that stands out from the rest of the band without just playing a walk, and Ra himself clanging away at the keys in perfect rhythm.  “Sea of Sounds” is free-form noise that would appear a bit less frequently in the coming years.  “Discipline” and “Rocket Number Nine” fill out the album with more of the quintessential afro-futurist Sun Ra sound.  An excellent place to start.

The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream

Lost in the Dream

The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream Secretly Canadian SC310 (2014)

Add Lost in the Dream to the growing roster of indie rock bands of the 2010s aping the sounds of late 1970s/early 80s FM radio pop, like Don Henley, Paul Simon, and Jackson Browne.  This is self-consciously nostalgic, “retro” music.

Many of these songs go on longer than it seems they should.  They just vamp over and over again.  If we pick up the Paul Simon angle, it is almost like the scene in The Graduate (1967) — a film famously featuring a Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack — when the main character floats around in a pool all day and when asked what he is doing simply replies, “Well, I would say that I’m just drifting.”  That is what many of these songs do.  They drift.  They have little to say, and that little content is mostly just repeated to make up a song.  There are more interesting bits, like when some horns appear at a transition to a slow resolution about three minutes from the end of the opener “Under the Pressure.”  But these more interesting bits are just brief moments in songs that otherwise seem so uniform as to hardly change from beginning to end.  They melt away into an almost indistinguishable washover of reverb.

It is almost always tiresome when an artist slavishly recreates old forms.  To be interesting, they must go beyond the historical reference point.  They must be more faithful to some ideal than the idol they “imitate”.  So, we can ask, is this more boring that Don Henley?  A question like this is not one everyone would choose to ask.  But it is the necessary question.  The answer has to be “yes.”

If there is a value to music like this, it is that it gives expression to an inability to articulate powerlessness.  The near impossibility of affirmatively “proving a negative” is the challenge it takes up.  Framing the issue this way may be self-defeating, in a larger sense, but it is the chosen framing for Lost in the Dream.  Take a look at the world today.  Capitalism is collapsing.  The prospects for a transition to socialism are still in question.  But a reversion to some sort of new fedualism is showing signs everywhere, with the populations of most industrialized countries reduced passive observers.  Music like Lost in the Dream is tailor made for the sorts of college-educated people who always saw themselves as having (or deserving) more freedom and power than they actually sense they have today.  The music stops well short of putting these things across.  It stops with emotionally portraying the gap.  But this is important.  Boredom is a starting point.  “If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.”

Nina Simone – Little Girl Blue

Little Girl Blue

Nina Simone – Little Girl Blue Bethlehem BCP-6028 (1958)

Nina Simone’s debut.  Basically she’s making a Nat “King” Cole Trio album, and only occasionally doing that well.  There’s a sort of smokey vibe to it.  The atmosphere doesn’t quite carry the whole thing though.  There’s really excellent stuff, the vibrant, effortless buoyancy of “My Baby Just Cares for Me”–with Simone embracing the lightness of the song more than she would later in her career–the smooth, lonely grace of “I Loves You Porgy”–where her gently unobtrusive piano accompaniment suits her plaintive vocals–and the stark, harsh, painful solemnity of “Plain Gold Ring”–a tone she would later use many times over with success.  But there are also plenty of really, overextended flashy gimmicks that go beyond Simone’s range, particularly as a pianist (“Mood Indigo,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “Good Bait”).  The pure instrumental cuts (“Central Park Blues,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone”) drag as rote exercises at best dressed up with touches of stodgy formalism.  It’s as if she tries to insert European classical training directly into a “jazz” setting with the expectation that the mere reference to it adds credibility.  But doing so just seems like pandering to the sorts of audiences who don’t really like “jazz” on its own terms and need reassurance that they are hearing somebody with “real” skills from a different–valid–style.  The poppier stuff (“My Baby Just Cares for Me,” “I Loves You Porgy”) crackles with more vibrancy and confidence.  Simone dives into it, steps out of herself, and treats the material as it deserves to be treated.

This album has more or less continuously remained in print since the 1950s, and is among Simone’s most well-known.  Yet Simone’s most fundamental approach to performance throughout the entirety of her entire career was all about stamping her own personality on her music, and there isn’t so much of that here, for better or worse.  Still, if you chalk up the weakest stuff as “filler” in an era when albums weren’t usually great from start to finish, this compares fairly well to other albums of the day.