Month: April 2015

Don Cherry – Symphony for Improvisers

Symphony for Improvisers

Don Cherry – Symphony for Improvisers Blue Note BST 84247 (1967)

Cherry leads an all-star cast through a “suite” with plenty of space for raging solos.  Some bag on this album because Cherry refined and perfected the style later on Eternal Rhythm, etc.  But taken on its own this is still fine stuff.  The uniformly excellent performances make it worthwhile.  Saxophonist Gato Barbieri has hardly sounded better, Karl Berger is stunning on vibes, and bassist Henry Grimes is sublime.  Count this among Cherry’s best.

Johnny Cash – The Johnny Cash Show

The Johnny Cash Show

Johnny Cash – The Johnny Cash Show Columbia KC 30100 (1970)

Thanks to the mega-success of two live albums recorded in different prisons at the tail end of the 1960s (At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin), Johnny Cash was offered his own TV show on the ABC network that premiered in June of 1969.  It was filmed at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the former home of the Grand Ole Opry.  Cash had been banned from the Opry a few years earlier after he smashed out all the stage lights with a microphone stand in a drug-fueled fit.  But now he was back as the main attraction.  The show marked the absolute pinnacle of Cash’s popularity.  Broadcast to millions of homes across the country (and rebroadcast internationally), he went from being a star to a cultural icon.  It was a whole new level.  The program was a musical variety show, sort of a country music counterpart to The Lawrence Welk Show.  A lot of big stars appeared on the show over its run.  A sampling of recordings from guests — and Cash — was posthumously featured on The Best of The Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-1971.  There were country stars, but also rock, folk and comedy performances.  There were regular appearances by familiar supporting musicians like The Carter Family, The Statler Brothers and Carl Perkins.  An orchestra was regularly featured too.

Cash met Kris Kristofferson on the set.  Kristofferson was working as a janitor at the auditorium at the time, yet to really make it as a musician.  Cash performed Kristofferson’s great “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and made it both a hit and the definitive reading.  It’s the clear highlight here.

Cash did a regular “Ride This Train” segment on the show, named after Cash’s 1960 concept album, that featured medleys and stories about Americana themes.  It was a part of the show that Cash felt strongly about, but the Network tried to cut it to please advertisers.  Cash did more religious content over time, and even went so far as to make announcements about his christian faith.

This album, The Johnny Cash Show, only scratches the surface of what was on the TV show.  Only a small fraction of the series has been released on album.  It’s a shame because there were actually many great and interesting performances on the show, worthy of attention.  But what is here is good stuff.  “Sunday Morning Coming down” is definitely the highlight.  Yet every last track is enjoyable.  There is a kind of smoothing over of Cash’s routine.  Don’t expect his trademark rock-inflected boom-chicka-boom rhythm or any joking around.  This is clearly “professional” music aimed at as wide an audience as possible.  Though it doesn’t really lose much, if anything, in cleaning and polishing every facet.  But it is a different side of Cash’s music than just about any of his other albums — even if some video releases into the 1980s have more similarities.

The show ended in March of 1971.  Cash later wrote that he was exhausted from the schedule and felt he had done everything he could with it when it ended.  But it was the network’s decision more than anything, as rural-focused programs were dropped in favor of more urban programming, not to mention Cash’s refusal to cave-in to advertiser demands.  The show did give Cash tremendous exposure, which enabled him to tour incessantly in the following years.  His touring act picked up much of the content and form of the TV show, resembling a sort of traveling Vegas show.

Ironically, while “The Johnny Cash Show” was one of the major successes of his career, and the entire reason many fans knew him in the first place, it became a sort of forgotten aspect of Cash’s legacy for younger listeners.  This album going out of print probably has something to do with that.  While it might not be everyone’s favorite side of his music, it deserves more attention than it has tended to receive.

Gary Burton – Alone at Last

Alone at Last

Gary Burton – Alone at Last Atlantic 1598 (1972)

Excellent solo outing from one of the biggest innovators of the vibraphone.  Burton’s greatest contribution was proving that a jazz musician could take the ostensibly fixed-tone free bar instrument and produce bent notes (by pressing one mallet into a bar to change its natural frequency while impacting it with another mallet).  Alone at Last is something of a template for other great virtuoso solo albums like Bobby McFerrin‘s The Voice and Sonny Sharrock‘s Guitar.

Slavoj Žižek on Law

“The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of law.  Law functions only insofar as its subjects are fooled, insofar as they experience the authority of law as ‘authentic and eternal’ and do not realize ‘the truth about the usurpation’.  That is why Kant is forced, in his Metaphysics of Morals, to forbid any question concerning the origins of legal power: it is by means of precisely such questioning that the stain of this illegitimate violence appears which always soils, like original sin, the purity of the reign of law.”

Slavoj Žižek, “The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis,” from Psychoanalysis and… (Feldstein and Sussman, eds., Routledge 1990).

See also, Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) (“Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: ‘Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.’ After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.” [This refers to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who was rumored to have been an illegitimate son]) and Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution and Other Essays (“[The British monarchy:] Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants.”) and David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, Part II, Essay XII “Of the Original Contract” (1758) (“Yet reason tells us, that there is no property in durable objects, such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.”)

John Cale – Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood

Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood

John Cale – Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood Double Six Recordings DS047 (2012)

It’s 2012 and both John Cale and Bob Dylan have new albums  What do they have to offer?  On Tempest, Dylan is operating in old man mode.  He’s interested in a time-worn kind of songwriting, that could have very well passed for something written decades ago — even before Dylan’s career began in the early 1960s.  It’s updated, a little.  But the key is that he’s not really interested in what is happening around him in the music world.  His style exists on its own, carried as long (or as short) as that takes him.  As it turns out, it finds him stuttering, with some stellar tunes (like “Duquesne Whistle”) and some that are much less than that.  In all Dylan is largely back on his bad habit of lazy blues riffing (what he really cemented with World Gone Wrong).  And there you have it.  Dylan remains Dylan, a sometimes insightful but always unshakable and inscrutable curmudgeon.

Cale’s approach could hardly be more different.  As usual, his lyrics are sly, a little bit witty, with clever and intelligent themes but often fumble about short of a poet’s touch.  But what stands out is his clear intent to sound contemporary.  He has auto-tuned vocals that could easily have come from the latest R&B/hip-hop/dance hit.  He’s pretty competent, and not for a second does he seem to lack an understanding of contemporary pop.  Though he never seems to really, really love what he’s offering here.  At times, there are hints of some of his old songs from the 70s like “Mary Lou,” seamlessly re-purposed, though by the same token it’s also hard not to think of them being re-used in place of an original hook.  In the end, this is a continuation of the interest in modern musical production methods that began with Hobo Sapiens, though Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, despite always being eminently listenable, lacks the pathos, the silly humor and personal feel of that former achievement (which has held up quite well almost a decade later).  It may be a reality of making the songs more amenable to live performance.  Despite some stellar support Cale has struggled to make the Hobo Sapiens songs work in concert.

Dylan may be less than a year older than Cale, but on this evidence they seem to inhabit different worlds.  It’s a wonderful thing to find musicians still active after all these years having the freedom to take such divergent paths.  Neither really delivers at his best.  For Dylan, he soars and he sinks, and the sum total is an uneven affair that is best taken in only select doses.  For Cale, he rides an even keel, and even gains some momentum across the album, but you probably won’t find any of his tunes stuck in your head.

Anthony Braxton – Saxophone Improvisations Series F

Saxophone Improvisations Series F

Anthony Braxton – Saxophone Improvisations Series F America Records 30 AM 011-012 (1972)

Anthony Braxton is a guy where either you appreciate his drive to create unique music with little or no commercial appeal, or you don’t.  You either admire his efforts to zig when everyone is expected to zag, or you don’t.  Another analogy: the question of coloring within the lines or not.  Braxton (hypothetically) colors in the lines sometimes, and sometimes not, but he’s also written two dozen new coloring books in the meantime, some of which have no lines whatsoever to color within or without, but he still says they are coloring books.

This album is similar in many ways to Dona Lee [Donna Lee], which was recorded just a week prior.  Though here there are only original compositions, no standards.  Also, rather than group material, this album is played entirely solo.  So comparisons to For Alto are sure to abound, though already Braxton’s sound had opened up a bit from that earlier recording, adding more lyrical elements to his abrupt, cold attack.  This album features compositions from his “Kelvin” series.  While those who seek out unique and uncompromising jazz will surely admire this, there is a sinking sensation that Braxton is trying to be self-consciously “different” and that holds it back just slightly.  His real breakthroughs as a performer and composer were still in the future, swiftly approaching.  This one is perhaps most appealing in how it demonstrates “how he got there.”  Choice tracks: “NR-12-C (33 M)” and “JMK-80 CFN-7.”

Anthony Braxton – Dona Lee

Dona Lee

Anthony Braxton – Dona Lee America Records 30 AM 6122 (1975)

An album documenting Anthony Braxton really coming into his own, with his best work just around the corner.  His own playing is more assured than before.  The tendency with Braxton’s early recordings is for the willful complexity of his compositions to be alienating.  Incorporating some standards into his recording repertoire evidences how he softened that alienating effect and strengthened his playing across the board by expanding his palette.  The band here is good, though not as nimble and imaginative as some of the great bands Braxton would lead in later years.  While the rhythm section here is certainly competent, like some early Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman albums one gets the feeling the rhythm section isn’t quite ready to go to all the same places as Braxton.  Just a week after recording the material here Braxton recorded the solo performances on Saxophone Improvisations Series F and the next month recorded his first Creative Music Orchestra piece RBN—-3° K12 at the Festival of Chatellerault in France.  And a few months later Braxton was back in the United States and presented a spring concert in New York City, portions of which were later released as Town Hall 1972, which bears similarities and features some arguably superior performances, although the song selections on that live album put less weight on Braxton’s growing use of standards juxtaposed with new music than Dona Lee.

Suicide – Suicide

Suicide

Suicide – Suicide Red Star RS 1 (1977)

Displaying a very technical glee, inanimate synthesizers churn out their obvious products while hands and mouths force the onslaught. Suicide could provoke almost any audience to drop all the piss they sloshed in with. A Suicide show likely and intentionally would cause a riot (one documented on the flexidisc 23 Minutes Over Brussels). Hearing them live used involve real mortal danger. Lester Bangs once quoted Alan Vega shouting back at the audience, “What’re you all fuckin’ booin’ for? You’re all gonna die.” The grand mess this suggests wasn’t one Suicide created but one they were cleaning up. Like the poet Arthur Rimbaud suggested, Suicide used pain to become voyants.

This was Suicide’s first album (as opposed to their second album of the same title), recorded in three hours plus mixing time. They had already been performing occasionally over the years in New York. Around ’77 they were fixtures at Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center, with some appearances at the “highbrow” CBGB’s. Their influence reached countless bands. Knockoffs may have been more popular, but Suicide was always by far the best.

Martin Rev and Alan Vega, together known as the band/performance art outfit Suicide, had an aggressive, uncompromising attitude. The synthetic sounds mapped personal detours from free jazz and visual arts. Purified angst dribbled out of their few musical machines, collectively dubbed “instrument”. No guitars.

This minimalist approach can evoke a rockabilly snarl in a pristine conceptual stasis with each outbust from Vega. Every delicate melodic statement has a force its own. The power becomes obvious early with “Ghost Rider” and “Rocket USA.” The songs put Rev and Vega’s elegant violence provocatively up front. “Cheree” and “Girl” have Vega’s moaning tuned to a frequency probably outlawed in most states.

Rev and Vega were linked to the streets. That put them on the level of New Yorkers like Thelonious Monk. While committed entirely to sophisticated pursuits, the proximity of the hunger and cold kept their music visceral.

“Frankie Teardrop” was the duo’s signature tune. A song more frightening than a dry read of Hubert Selby, Jr. This contrasts with distracting sideshow tactics. Suicide weren’t con men since they did not lie. They held an essence. Attuning ears to that essence beautifully reveals the solid values driving them. The clarity of their music was necessary to keep it true. Intricacy remained, undiluted.

Suicide anticipate a primitive future more glorious the convoluted one still known today. They make sure “punk” is always associated with confrontation. Suicide clears enough space to remember the forgotten innate beauties relegated to rediscovery among fetid piles of documents, glass, and flesh. Suicide seemed to enter a trance state to convey this from their end. A little bloodshed on the other end is inevitable. They teach fearless listening. It is incalculably more dangerous not to listen.

Suicide is as freaky as it has to be. It is also very cool and surprisingly easy to like. Apparently venom never spoils.