Syd Fablo – Page 186

Tom Waits – Small Change

Tom Waits – Small Change Asylum 7E-1078 (1976)

Fans of Tom Waits’ later work aren’t always on board for his earlier stuff, and vice-versa. Aside from briefly dabbling in soft rock, his early period was primarily marked by boozy bar songs, piano ballads, a sprinkling of orchestrated numbers, and a gentle subversion of traditional pop with an eye toward the seedier side of life. Well, for his early period, Small Change might be the best. It opens with the lush, maudlin “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).” The next song “Step Right Up” showcases the off-kilter songwriting talents on which Waits would increasingly rely. The rest of the album focuses more on piano bar jazz and blues, with borderline incoherent vocals and a fascination with the dark corners of down-and-out society. It all works though, somehow. This is right on the pulse of late-night drunken melancholy. If you played this at an AA meeting you’d probably make some people cry.

David Ruffin – David Ruffin

David Ruffin – David Ruffin Motown M762L (1973)

This self-titled album was my first exposure to David Ruffin’s solo material, back in the late 1990s. I knew him as the lead singer of The Temptations, and hey, those glasses were back in style! Definitely not his best. Yet stuff like “I Miss You, Part 1” is still decent. The problem is that he’s not doing the sweet, sumptuous string backing thing but also hasn’t fully committed to the psychedelic soul sound that would work well on his next effort Me ‘n Rock ‘n Roll Are Here to Stay. So he’s stuck in some kind of middle-ground limbo. It’s that, plus the material is forgettable and his voice isn’t as effective as elsewhere. He had that once-in-a-lifetime coarse soulfulness in those vocal chords. Here he comes across as almost hoarse much of the time. Adequate, but unessential.

Richard Davis – Epistrophy & Now’s the Time

Richard Davis – Epistrophy & Now’s the Time: Recorded Live! at Jazz City Muse MR 5002 (1972)

A pretty great live date recorded 7 September 1972 in New York City. The original LP had one extended song per side, but the 1992 CD reissue adds another superb cut. The set opens with Monk‘s “Epistrophy”. Davis on bass plays in a way similar to Miroslav Vitouš, seamlessly drifting between playing lead and comping — though more often he’s on lead here. Cliff Jordan plays the melody on sax in one of the most awesomely sleazy interpretations I’ve yet heard, It’s classic Jordan, totally ribald but with a token veneer of politeness. The performance is strong, but the band is really just warming up. Charlie Parker‘s “Now’s the Time” is where this set really takes off. It opens with a wild drum solo from Freddie Waits, who really is on fire throughout this whole album. Then Davis enters, and right away Clifford Jordan jumps in to state the melody of Parker’s song. The rest of the group joins in to direct the sound to more of a bop setting. But before long, the group is off in other directions. At times, the performance sounds like acoustic fusion. Later on, it strongly resembles Don Cherry‘s later 1960s world music jazz. Then Joe Bonner turns everything around and plays something in the style of Cecil Taylor. Bonner has somewhat of a lesser role through the set, but his contributions are superb, adding perfectly stated accompaniment and occasional flourishes of solo statements. Davis is playing arco (with a bow) by the end, blending modern classical influences as he was known for, though if you didn’t know it you might think someone had entered on electric guitar. Toward the end, the melody to Parker’s song is restated, to bring back the bop influences. Finally, the bonus track “Highest Mountain” ratchets up the energy even more to close the set on a high note.

The sound on the recording is a bit mediocre, and definitely is a product of the 1970s. The soft, slightly muted dynamics are reminiscent of Rahsaan Roland Kirk‘s Bright Moments from the same era. But the musicians are really open stylistically and in top form as technicians. Some of the “songs” they play are almost like afterthoughts. It seems that these guys were out to play some music and they are really just offering extended quotes from jazz standards more so than truly covering the songs in a conventional fashion, as is especially the case on “Now’s the Time.” That gives this album a relaxed, welcoming feel. The spontaneous shifts between widely different styles is something that probably never would have happened in the studio.

Richard Davis’ discography as a leader is somewhat slim, and it includes quite a number of live recordings released on relatively obscure jazz labels. Now’s the Time might be a standout among those. I saw The Pyramid Trio (with Roy Campbell, Jr., William Parker and Hamid Drake) in early 2003, and what those guys were doing was pretty similar to what Richard’s band was doing live over 30 years earlier. In fact, much of what The Pyramid Trio did was exactly the same as what Richard Davis’ group does on Now’s the Time. Maybe that can be explained by the fact that William Parker studied with Davis at one point. But it also shows how Davis’ style of performance hasn’t lost any relevance through the years.

Sun Ra – The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums

Sun Ra – The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals / Crystal Spears Evidence ECD 22217-2 (2000)

Rescued from the dustbin of history by Evidence, this pairing of albums originally intended for release by Impulse! in the early 1970s (a few tracks from Cymbals were released on Deep Purple) highlights Sun Ra in electric small combo settings. Cymbals is very a much a continuation of efforts like “The Night of the Purple Moon”. Yet where The Night of the Purple Moon had Sun Ra up front, Cymbals finds Ra taking a more secondary role while the reed players are at center stage. Songs like the lengthy “Thoughts Under a Dark Blue Light” are based around extended sax workouts, and built out with plenty of welcoming grooves. Crystal Spears goes in a different direction though. The performances are more challenging. Sun Ra takes on a more prominent role too, with John Gilmore getting a ton of space to himself on “Sunrise in the Western Sky”. It’s the more intriguing and unique of the two discs, though it may leave a few listeners behind not in tune with the noisier aspects of Sun Ra’s music.

Sun Ra’s synth (mini-moog) blasting out raw sound on “Crystal Spears” is not unlike Miles Davis‘ keyboard in the mid-1970s. Miles would lean his whole forearm on the keyboard to create massive blocks of sound, as on “Maiysha” from Get Up With It or much of Dark Magus (“Tatu” for example). This took Davis away from any tonality of course, but it also broke the bonds between melody, harmony and rhythm by presenting sounds that were independent from much of what else went on with the music. Davis got these ideas from German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (thanks to house guest Paul Buckmaster), whose compositions like Prozession pointed the way for electronic music organized in elemental terms based on moment-to-moment relationships rather than any kind of overarching guiding structure. Most call it “noise”. Noise? “2 a : sound; especially: one that lacks agreeable musical quality or is noticeably unpleasant b : any sound that is undesired or interferes with one’s hearing of something.” “noise.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 20 October 2009. But the negative connotations that term carries are purely relative, because it’s only disagreeable or unwanted if you assume from the start that traditional rules about tonality and the implicit guidelines set by standard musical notation define the exclusive boundaries of “agreeable” music. For the rest of us we can just enjoy the more wide-ranging possibilities that exist outside those assumptions. That undoubtedly was how Sun Ra looked at it — he was a guy who wouldn’t hesitate to mention that he was from Saturn after all (though it is interesting to note that Stockhausen too believed himself to be of extraterrestrial origin, and also was greatly influenced by swing-era jazz).

In the final judgment, both discs here are highlights from a fertile period when Sun Ra and his faithful cohorts were finding new ways to make their music more accessible while still retaining the essence of the loose, free musics on which they had established their roles as interstellar musical travelers in the preceding decades.

Anthony Braxton – For Alto

Anthony Braxton – For Alto Delmark DS-420/421 (1971)

This one does not live up to its reputation. For one thing, it’s poorly recorded. But that aside, I think the biggest problem is that Braxton just isn’t able to pull off many of his ideas. The big ideas are here, and they are big indeed. But geez, this sounds like a Phish concert some of the time, with kind of wanky solos that trample the underlying concepts beyond the point of being interesting anymore. Braxton’s angular style was never particularly tactful, but I think he quickly picked up enough tact to get to a higher plane following these recordings. In other words, there is a self-indulgent quality to this that holds it back — always his Achilles heel. Later Braxton recordings are better. Though I suppose this does deserve credit for helping to create a space for recordings as uncompromising as this, with an entire album of abstract, screeching saxophone solos.

Prince – Sign ‘O’ the Times

Prince – Sign ‘O’ the Times Paisley Park 9 25577-1 (1987)

Prince always was best when he attempted everything under the sun on one album and tied it all together only by the fact that he was writing, arranging, producing, and performing his music entirely by himself. Sign ‘O’ the Times is just that kind of album. A few select guests keep the album hopping with psychedelic R&B flavor. The many different faces of Prince each make an appearance. He never made a better album.

Disc 1 has a bunch of winners, enough to make any album great. “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” “Starfish & Coffee” and “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” tell of urban social decay, surreal childhood memories, and dark romantic journeys.

Disc 2 is a goldmine. “U Got the Look,” “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” “The Cross” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend” are big deliveries even for a superstar. Prince had a talent for dance rock that could keep going all night. The ideas are easy to grasp. Prince builds rhythm by repeating what you need to hear as many times as you need to hear it.

Throwing in two or three note riffs on the keyboard was that thing only Prince seemed to get right. 1980s pop music tried to break everything down to simple little songs. Prince dared to make things simple and help the word “simple” grow along the way. His guitar solo on “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” has all the recognizable points of a hit song. It also can wrap you into the guitars and drums completely. It’s hard not to relate to Prince. He reaches to be a friend to the lonely girl he meets. She wants more than he’s willing to give. Her sad situation is enough to have him thinking her problems over, and telling her he’s not good enough to be the answer.

“The Cross” is a tremendous rock-gospel song that has fire and brimstone held in check. Prince uses enough guitar and sitar to overpower any heavy metal song of the day. He is careful not to use any padding.

Sign ‘O’ the Times was made when Prince was on top of his game, and it stays right there. As a listener, though, it gets hard to resist the urge to wander off. Temptation is all part of the game!

O(+> – Emancipation

O(+> – Emancipation NPG Records 7243 8 54982 2 0 (1996)

Let’s take a look at the largest arcs of Prince’s career, to better understand where Emancipation fits. His early days in the 1970s had him doing closet R&B, very much as a one-man show, and very much in line with R&B of the day. He was singing in a falsetto almost always, and his songwriting wasn’t particularly attention-grabbing, though it started to become more and more provocative as time when on. In these early days, commercial success and popularity came at best fitfully to Prince. Then came the 1980s. His star rose higher and higher, and with 1999 and then, most significantly, Purple Rain, he became as big a star as there was in pop music. Some of his recordings in the 80s were uneven, especially as the decade wore on, but there was good stuff found on anything with Prince’s name on it. He had hits galore. Into the early 1990s, things definitely changed. Prince’s recordings were becoming a bit patchier, and he was starting to chase after fads like “new jack swing” and cater to what was popularized by others. There is some terrible stuff in this period, along with some worthy bits and pieces. The good stuff was fewer and farther between. There is a hard fact of Western popular music during this larger era that artists usually only have about 5-10 years of relevance before they are cast off in favor of something else. By the 1990s, Prince had already had his decade. His response? Feud with his record label. He changed his name to an unpronouncable symbol in 1993 (people referred to him as “the artist formerly known as Prince”). After he entered the new millennium, Prince had a comeback of sorts. He was something of a respected elder of pop music. But there was a crucial transition during the 1990s. It was then that Prince’s abilities as a songwriter faltered. The guy could still play, but he was only coming up with one or two catchy songs every few years. Rather than face up to that, he started the record label feud and engaged in other distractions that kept his name in the press for reasons other than the content of his work. Now, as to the feud, the man did have a few decent points about musicians getting too small a slice of the pie. However, those seemed like excuses drummed up after he already wanted to stir controversy. But into his later period, it was really apparent that this guy was a total professional as a performer. His was playing as well as ever, even if he wasn’t writing new songs of much interest. This was clear to anyone hearing him play some of his old songs. He would sometimes change them up and present new versions. He could still wow audiences that way, mining his back catalog.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, Prince released two multi-disc albums, first Emancipation and then Crystal Ball. There was the late night sketch comedy program that in the 90s made a fake TV ad for a bank that supposedly only made change, and when asked how they made money responded by saying, “volume.” That gag is built on the same principle as Prince’s 1990s multi-disc albums. He wasn’t able to write any particularly engaging new material, but he could churn out new recordings by the bucket load. These recordings leaned on covers, and also thin re-treads of old Prince songs. If anything, these years gave him the chance to hone his already-impressive skills as a performer.

On Emancipation, Prince chose to use every ounce of his skills as an instrumentalist. The performances are rich and textured. His band The New Power Generation (NPG) works perfectly as a spotlight on him. Improvisational elements form the core of this work.

“Sex In the Summer” is a fresh reconstruction of Sly Stone’s “Hot Fun In the Summertime,” complete with nods to other influences like Mahalia Jackson. Prince manages to avoid superficial worship, and delves into lush arrangements. He always liberally quoted other material. This is not cutting corners on the creative end, but benchmarks in a fun way (“Get Yo Groove On” takes a line from “Another Saturday Night”).

This is a mature and wiser Prince — now a music “professional”. Emancipation still finds “the artist” fuming over past recording contracts, but he’s rarely bitter. With over three hours of music, he does have plenty of opportunities to touch base on just about anything. Though the song structures are fairly traditional, that more directly emphasizes his change in direction. While Emancipation isn’t quite the accomplishment as his legendary 80s material, it isn’t so far behind that you don’t recognize Prince as Prince. This is likely an album only intense fans will take a chance on, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Prince knows how to make music people will like, and this album is far more accessible and durable that it seems.

There is a lot to Emancipation. More importantly, there is a lot to like about it. It’s an album that many will probably find more enjoyable and listenable than expected, though there isn’t much on it to convince you to listen in the first place.

Rob Urie – Wall Street and the Crisis in Greece

Link to an article by Rob Urie:

“Wall Street and the Crisis in Greece: When Only Bad Choices Remain”

Bonus link: “Putin: U.S. Hegemony at Root of Ukraine Crisis”

Carpenters – A Song for You

Carpenters – A Song for You A&M Records SP-3511 (1972)

The Carpenters have a reputation for being safe popular music. How wrong! Like F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby (1925) is so often described as telling the story of the empty heart of the jazz age, so the Carpenters made music that revealed dark and empty places inside a lifestyle with all the appearance of success. Loneliness, heartbreak, alienation are the hard core of that success. As another reviewer put it, “Not only does Karen Carpenter sing like a wounded angel through out, but their famously exquisite harmonies both purr and soar like you wouldn’t believe.”

A Song for You is considered by many fans to be the duo’s finest album. The first side is for Karen. Her voice is the centerpiece. This, however, is no surprise. Her voice was always the most brilliant feature of all the Carpenters’ hits. Side two, though, is for Richard. He was a talented arranger. Across the album, without being showy or gratuitous, he manages to work in a saxophone solo, a flute solo, an electric guitar solo, layers of acoustic piano and Wurlitzer electric piano, strings, and more. As to the “more,” his biggest stroke of genius is the use of an oboe and cor anglais. Playing sweet melodies, as on “Goodbye to Love,” the woody yet sour timbre of the instruments are the ideal expression of the emotional tone of numerous songs on the album. The instrumental “Flat Baroque” builds from (as the title implies) a baroque chamber pop song to include touches of light jazz. Later on, “Crystal Lullaby” has more Euro-classical orchestration. Then “Road Ode” displays a faculty for convincing contemporary, orchestrated pop jazz (like Antonio Carlos Jobim‘s Wave). “Top of the World” is country — this album version sounds more country than the single version. If there is a glaring flaw anywhere, it is the latin easy listening horn arrangements that arrive in jarring fashion in a few places.

Maybe it is because I was reading Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s St. Paul: A Screenplay, which somehow counseled listening to A Song For You, but there is a way to consider this as a “concept album” statement in atheism. This is especially pronounced when listening to “Goodbye to Love”. Intellectuals have adopted this idea that atheism takes on specific meaning when it comes from christian teachings — these people sometimes call themselves “christian atheists”. Martin Scorsese‘s film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on Nikos Kazantzakis‘ book, ends with this sort of a view. Jesus, dying from crucifixion, asks, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” Then he dies, without being saved from death by a god that doesn’t exist, realizing — and teaching — that everyone must learn that no god will guarantee meaning to our lives and we are each alone with our own freedom. This is precisely what “Goodbye to Love” can be read as saying. “Love” is, of course, the foundation of christian faith and religion, a resolution for an abyss of unknowing. And A Song For You has references to christian themes in other songs like “Top of the World,” “Interlude” and “Bless the Beasts and Children.” So, it is fair to read this song as referencing christian values of love. The songs lyrics include: “No one ever cared if I should live or die . . . So I’ve made my mind up I must live my life alone . . . From this day love is forgotten, I’ll go on as best I can.” What is this, Samuel Beckett? There are traces of agnosticism in the lines, “What lies in the future is a mystery to us all / no one can predict the wheel of fortune as it falls / there may come a time when I will see that I’ve been wrong / but for now this is my song and it’s goodbye to love.” But, still, the core of the song deals with how to live without love, without resolution to the “years of useless search” to know what “god” wanted (or wants) from the protagonist. After all, the lyrics already suggest that “no one ever cared,” which must be treated as saying not even “god” cared. If this is the devastating, subjective destitution of “Goodbye to Love,” then it is important to look to the rest of the album to find out what use this atheistic freedom is put to use toward. I think it comes through on side two, and especially from the reprise of the title song concluding the album.

It is significant that “Goodbye to Love” is, aside from a brief half-joke hymn in “Intermission,” at the close of the first side of the album. It represents the final loss of faith that was tested and crumbling already. So, the song “Hurting Each Other” follows “Top of the World.” There is no doubt that “Top of the World” is about finding love. It is the most buoyant song on the entire album. But, it is immediately followed by “Hurting Each Other,” which is about a kind of broken relationship, going on while the couple wounds each other. Then “It’s Going to Take Some Time” implies a breakup, with questioning as to how amends could be made. By the time we reach “Goodbye to Love,” there is a crash, a shattering that plays out to take away the faith that was once present. Side two of the album is about a search for something to take the place of that absent faith. “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” “Bless the Beasts and Children” and “Road Ode,” even “Piano Picker” too, are interesting in this respect. They sort of pull together aspects of things that were present before the crisis of faith, but gives them new significance in the absence of faith. “Piano Picker,” with Richard singing, may be the clumsiest of them, but the song deals with a re-framing of what was in his childhood and young adulthood considered a lack — not being a popular “jock” athlete but instead being alone practicing the piano — and reconstitutes it as a core of what makes the protagonist someone with something to objectively contribute to the world. “Bless the Beasts and Children” and “Crystal Lullaby” both kind of map out aspirations to care for future generations and animals, the most meek and vulnerable (classic themes from christianity).

“I Won’t Last a Day Without You” could be the most problematic song for my interpretation of the album. It follows the very atheistic theme that the scariest thing in the world is the otherness of strangers. But the refrain goes: “I can take all the madness the world has to give / but I won’t last a day without you.” From one angle, this has the trappings of a Jesus song. Yet, if we commit to my interpretation of the album as a whole, maybe the song can be read along those lines, as being about the sense of collective emancipatory potential in non-divine personal relationships. That is, the power of two is collectively greater than what the power of one, alone, can withstand. In a foreword to an edition of the Pasolini St. Paul screenplay, philosopher Alain Badiou notes:

“In our world, in fact, truth can only make its way by protecting itself from the corrupted outside, and establishing, within this protection, an iron discipline that enables it to ‘come out’, to turn actively towards the exterior, without fearing to lose itself in this. The whole problem is that this discipline . . . , although totally necessary, is also tendentially incompatible with the pureness of True. Rivalries, betrayals, struggles for power, routine, silent acceptance of the external corruption under the cover of practical ‘realism’: all this means that the spirit which created the Church no longer recognizes in it, or only with great difficulty, that in the name of which it was created.”

In the song, at least the line “when there’s no getting over that rainbow” might confirm that we are dealing with human social relations, and not divine interventions. Still, this can be viewed as forming relationships for protection, in pursuit of something greater. In the christian world this is the “holy spirit”. If the album makes this point somewhat inconsistently, then it may be the expression of just what Badiou sees as the inconsistency in Pasolini’s St. Paul.

All of this comes full circle at the close, reprising Leon Russell‘s “A Song for You.” A song reprise or prelude can often be a lazy attempt to extend the appeal of a single song through rote duplication. But here, the closing “A Song for You (Reprise)” is more than that. It opens with Karen’s voice, eerie, echoed and only faintly audible — it almost requires turning the volume up to even hear it at all. It soon enough swells to the familiar song that opens the album. Yet the context is now entirely different. After all these songs about crushing pain, heartbreak and loneliness there is still room to return to “singing a song for you.” Significantly, the reprise omits the first part of the song lyrics that first speak of having “ten thousand people watching” but turning away toward a situation in which “we’re alone now.” It instead goes straight to the end of the song, dealing with “when my life is over remember when we were together / we were alone and I was singing this song for you.” Only here, at the end of the album, can the meaning of the opening song be grasped. It was only after the loss of faith, and the recognition that there is no external force to supply meaning, can the protagonist find meaning in being with others and singing. By doing this in a way that returns to the opening song, a cycle is explicitly created. We return to where we began, but with new understanding after the exhaustion and failures contained within the cycle. So even though the album opens dealing with personal relationships, and ends dealing with personal relationships, it goes from being about false, empty relationships to at least understanding better what makes for meaningful, real ones. It allows, at the core, for a process of recognizing a lack of (meaningful, real) relationships, and sets out to try to provide them, if only symbolically.

Didn’t think there was so much to find in a Carpenters album, a group often dismissed as saccharine, safe and boring? In a way, this is revolutionary music. There is definitely more to the brother-sister duo than appears upon a quick glance at their publicity photos that always assure the viewer of their protestant modesty. Look at the liner sleeve that accompanied the original album pressing, printed on “100% recycled paper” as “an anti-pollutionary measure” and replete with slightly ironic cartoon illustrations paired with some of the song lyrics. The real-life Carpenters didn’t manage to hold out the way this album suggests (it is play acting, as the line about going off to the bathroom in “Interlude” establishes). But, indie-rock band Sonic Youth‘s bassist Kim Gordon — an unabashed Carpenters fan — wrote a posthumous open letter to Karen Carpenter re-printed in Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix (2009). She asked, “Who is Karen Carpenter, really, besides the sad girl with the extraordinarily beautiful, soulful voice?” Karen famously died from complications of an eating disorder. Richard had drug problems. Much like Elvis, the Carpenters were crushed under a weighty touring schedule. And just like Pasolini’s view of St. Paul forming the christian church, touring robbed the Carpenters of the music that was their truth and purpose to begin with. But, as listeners, we should not overlook what was there at the start, the kernel of emancipatory potential wrapped in the clothes of the most claustrophobic, conformist MOR pop music of the early 1970s. If this music can appeal to listeners who want sentimental music while at the same time have substantial value under a totally unsentimental interpretation, then A Song for You does transgresses boundaries in a radical way.

David Bowie – ‘Hours…’

David Bowie – ‘Hours…’ Virgin CDV 2900 (1999)

Bowie’s career doggedly refuses to drift into total irrelevance. ‘Hours…’, like so many other later efforts, features one pretty good song — “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” — amidst a lot of not bad but definitely boring, pro forma contemporary rock. This is certainly a lot more consistent than Earthling, but that previous record came up with more than one pretty good song (even if those were balanced with some cringe-inducing moments). Now Bowie had largely dropped the electronic industrial sound (except, ironically for the best song here, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell”). His next effort, Heathen would improve on this album, again with one really good song (“Sunday”) but with filler that was much better and less boring.