Category: Music

Steve Coleman and Five Elements – The Tao of Mad Phat (Fringe Zones)

The Tao of Mad Phat <Fringe Zones>

Steve Coleman and Five Elements – The Tao of Mad Phat <Fringe Zones> Novus 63160-2 (1993)

Steve Coleman.  There are perhaps few figures in 1990s jazz quite as pretentious.  He indisputably was a central figure of that time.  So many, from his now well-known early cohorts like Cassandra Wilson to later figures like Vijay Iyer, have taken influence from him.  He practiced a style of music he called “M-Base”, short for Macro-Basic Array of Structured Extemporizations.  Now, okay, I just called it a style.  Coleman has this to say on the matter: “Music critics have constantly stated that M-Base is a musical style and this is not true.  Since the beginning of time critics have by and large been unable to deal with any creative expression.  M-Base is a way of thinking about creating music, it is not the music itself.”  Mmmm, right, okay Coleman.  M-Base merely fits the accepted definition of “style”, but he say it’s not a style.  I guess this just puts him in the same category as teenage garage bands that sound just like The Stooges but refuse the connection and insist they are totally unique man!  You know, the kind of adolescent posturing that tries to talk a big game but does not deliver at nearly the same level, though, in fairness, is perhaps just due to being inarticulate and lacking self-awareness–dooming them to repeat musical history.  But that aside, Mr. Coleman should go read Science and Sanity by Count Alfred Korzybski, who famously said “the map is not the territory”, and then reflect on the fact that a table is not a table, it is merely something that is collectively understood by the word “table” and the word is not the thing itself.  Now that I’ve sufficiently blown your mind, writing more about Coleman and this album is probably a fucking waste of time, but, frankly, I don’t give a shit.  Come back and read the rest later.  I’m making a goddamn point here and it needs to be made.  Coleman has often used a trick much like many modern economists and their veneer of mathematics used to conceal their faulty assumptions and circular logic (or like Ornette Coleman with his “harmolodics” for that matter), which hides some rather simple ideas behind a bunch of technical jargon and big words.

Tao of Mad Phat has to be among Coleman’s best efforts from the 90s.  It was recorded “live” in studio before a small, select audience (not unlike Beach Boys’ Party!).  The hallmarks of the man’s sound are all here: lots of electric instruments and synthetic sounds.  The focus is on shifting rhythmic textures, with things like melody a mere by-product of the rhythms.  But then there is “Incantation”, which features a number of guest spots rather than his usual backing band, and which feels different in many respects from the typical M-Base style.

The basic sound though is kind of cyclic.  It’s like James Brown and Maceo Parker, sort of.  Though the focus on rhythm gives the music a narrow objective that lacks the daring of Miles Davis‘ funky fusion of the 1970s that took the limitless possibilities of Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s electronic music and applied them to jazz.  Steve Coleman usually took the sonic textures of fourth-tier 1980s funk and incorporated them into a jazz setting.  The tendency was to produce listless schlock like Black Science.  But Tao of Mad Phat isn’t listless at all.  The atmosphere provided by the staged “live” setting gives the band a chance to stretch and adjust their rhythms in a fluid manner, without the claustrophobic search for perfect meter, pitch and other distractions to spoil things.  For a change, performance takes precedence over theory.

There is the other issue of the “spirituality” of Coleman’s music.  This album avoids much direct expression of it in the performances.  It’s noticeable mostly in the titles of the songs.  Part of this element comes from a very vaguely Pan-Africanist view of the African diaspora, with similarly vague allusions to Asian religions.  The Afrocentrist elements were hardly unique to Coleman, as this was the era of One for All and that whole aesthetic.  While there is something noble, perhaps, in Coleman’s intentions, most often the problem is that stacked next to, say, Pandit Pran Nath or lots of other purely religious music, Steve Coleman’s stuff just…sounds…so…cheesy.  He comes across as the guy with statutes of Buddha, the Virgin Mary, and Ganesh in front of his house, because, well, he values all religions, and he shows it with plaster lawn ornaments.  It seems slapped on top, without deep foundations in the music.  Here at least, that whole aspect of the music is pretty easily disregarded.

I can’t exactly say I’m a huge fan, but this is a pretty good album, and it’s worth it if you have an interest in the upside of some of the most stultifying forces of the halcyon days of 1990s jazz.

Graeme Thomson – Willie Nelson: The Outlaw

Willie Nelson: The Outlaw

Graeme Thomson – Willie Nelson: The Outlaw (Virgin Books 2006)

A good biography on Willie Nelson from Thomson. It seems well-researched, and avoids the rank hagiography so prevalent in these sorts of music bios. The author doesn’t shy from questioning Nelson’s motivations and worst behavior. He also does an excellent job articulating the crazy fine line Nelson walked between positive-thinking new age guru and lazy bum coasting on a reputation without continued hard work as a songwriter and performer. Yet, at the same time, the book doesn’t dwell on tabloid gossip. As for the book’s weaknesses, Thomson falls prey to a few misplaced British anachronisms, like comments about a “football pitch” when he means to say “(American) football field” — there is no way that Nelson was playing soccer in his youth deep in the heart of Texas! Then, too, Thomson stumbles are a pure music critic. He often criticizes some of Nelson’s best work (like The Sound in Your Mind) and praises marginal efforts (particularly early stuff and Nelson’s biggest commercial successes of the 80s). He certainly doesn’t seem to go back and revive some of Nelson most overlooked material (like The Words Don’t Fit the Picture) or necessarily place Nelson in a broader continuum. But, those flaws are fairly easily ignored in a generally fine book.

Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007)

Ross brings a lot of enthusiasm to the subject of 20th Century classical composition in The Rest Is Noise. Unfortunately, that is one of the few highlights here. The book’s problems are many. It is probably a little too dense and heavy on music theory for many casual readers, but also too light and uncritical to make waves in a scholarly sense. Books of that sort tend to only succeed when the writing is taut and engaging. But this is too long by at least a third (a whole chapter on Britten, really?). Ross is also in desperate need of a fact-checker (he apparently doesn’t know what “stochastic” means, nor does he know why Angus MacLise left The Velvet Underground). Most fatally, though, Ross lacks an understanding of 20th Century socio-political and socio-economic circumstances, and so his attempts to reference music against those contexts range from the superficial to the very misguided. He comes across as to beholden to nationalistic, cold-war era Liberal paranoia. This makes the middle chapters on the periods around World War II a great chore. For example, no mater what Ross or anyone else thinks of him, Lenin was certainly not a prototype dictator of the 20th Century — Iran’s Shah would fit that description much better. When discussing Soviet music, he also seems fundamentally unable to distinguish the Stalin era from the Lenin one. It all makes sense in way, because Ross is merely trying to portray Shostakovitch as something other than a hack, and that helps Ross’ narrative. Another big flaw is the occidental outlook of everything. Although he name-drops a few non-Western and women composers towards the end, one can’t help but wonder why those names weren’t featured more substantively in the book. I wanted to like this but couldn’t help getting tired of it as I plodded through.

Miles Davis – Big Fun

Big Fun

Miles Davis – Big Fun Columbia PG 32866  (1974)

It is somewhat amazing to think that despite the intense creative peak Miles Davis achieved in the early 1970s, On the Corner from 1972 was the last proper studio album he consciously assembled for roughly ten years, until The Man With the Horn in 1981.  Everything in between was either archival in nature, a live recording, or, like Big Fun and Get Up With It, an amalgamation of leftovers spanning a period of many years.  When it comes to Big Fun, rather than taking the rather disparate material — from the moody, atmospheric “Great Expectations/Orange Lady” and “Lonely Fire” from the late-1960s Bitches Brew era to the grinding rock of “Go Ahead John” from the Jack Johnson period to the murky, paranoid, Eastern-flavored “Ife” that was recorded following the On the Corner sessions — and either accepting the incongruity or else massaging the material in the editing process to homogenize it, Davis and producer Teo Macero take a third path.  What happens is that they take raw material as if in a highly elemental form, and Macero uses studio effects and cut-and-paste techniques to transform a lot of it into something different than any of its origins.  This is perhaps most apparent in the harshly chopped and distorted editing of guitarist John McLaughlin‘s solo(s) and Jack DeJohnette‘s drums on “Go Ahead John.”  This was remarkable stuff.  The editing process was a conscious and audible part of the final work.  There were precedents.  Modern composers had made similar experiments.  For instance, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (whom Davis greatly admired) stitched together national anthems for his Hymnen, and Steve Reich chopped up a spoken word sample to create Come Out previously.  But Davis and Macero were taking those techniques and trying to apply them to popular music.  This was meant for the masses!

Often relegated to at best a second-class status, Big Fun is a better record than that spotted critical history suggests.  Yet it also isn’t the most immediately impressive entry into the long line of great 70s fusion albums from Miles.  Most listeners will perhaps want to put this further down the list of Davis albums of the period to check out.  But bear in mind that if anything from the period hooks you, you will almost inevitably seek out the rest, and Big Fun definitely earns its place in that search.  This has a more agitated and fiery flavor than the earliest of Davis fusion efforts in the late 1960s, but also a more ambient quality than much of the dense and funky early/mid 1970s recordings.  If there was a way to convey the tumult of the times, this would have to be it though.  It’s a record that isn’t always satisfying, at least not for more than moments.  If that sort of approach isn’t for you, then the album won’t necessarily be for you.

Wynton Marsalis – Black Codes (From the Underground)

Black Codes (From the Underground)

Wynton Marsalis – Black Codes (From the Underground) Columbia FC 40009 (1985)

Wynton Marsalis has become the poster child of the conservative movement in post-1970s jazz, which tends to view the genre as something entirely mapped out with well defined boundaries that has survived certain “failed” formulations that are only worthy of being derided or ignored.  He is relied upon as the “definitive” musician-commentator on jazz.  And so he has been regularly featured in films, etc. pontificating about the meaning of the music as a whole.  Naturally he does so from within the narrow confines of his own definitions of what jazz is and should be.  And, naturally, I hate his fucking guts for that.  But Black Codes (From the Underground) is still a success.  In spite of its scarcely-concealed agenda of skipping over all jazz history since Miles Davis’ second great quintet from the mid-1960s, there is conviction behind it.  This doesn’t exactly wow or thrill me, or even surprise me.  I still have to admit that this is a good album.

Johnny Cash – America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song

America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song

Johnny Cash – America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song Columbia KC 31645 (1972)

The early 1970s were a turbulent time in America, with the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam war, the biggest economic crisis the Western world had faced in many decades, continued fights to implement integration, women’s liberation, and much more.  Oh, and there was a lot of stuff happening to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the nation’s independence from England in 1776.  Along comes Johnny Cash, with this album, depicting him on the cover in a military-style jacket on a decrepit farmhouse porch behind a flag, and subtitled “A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song”.  The theme is American history.  It looks pretty heavy-handed on paper.  The thing is, he does a pretty good job with this concept.  He re-records a few tunes he had done before, and performs an assortment of other songs, mostly new ones written himself.  There is a lot of between-song spoken dialog, and even a recitation of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Some of these tracks were recorded exclusively for the astronauts on the Apollo 14 space mission (the one where Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon), but ended up here instead.  Like much of Cash’s early 70s output, the songs have a minimalist, folky feel, and there are only a couple of cuts with his trademark boom-chicka-boom rhythm (“Paul Revere,” “These Are My People”).  And while this looks a lot like a very rudimentary recitation of the standard “story of America” taught to little kids in grade school, it ends up being slightly more nuanced than that.  “Big Foot,” about the Wounded Knee Massacre, wasn’t something frequently taught in school history classes — would Cash have dug Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States when it came out years later?  This release predated the Pine Ridge Incident, erupting in response to the anniversary of Wounded Knee, by only a matter of months.  Yet Cash elsewhere celebrates genocidal madmen like Christopher Columbus, so there are still contradictions.  Listeners who want Johnny in good voice, recorded well with a crisp and talented backing band will probably find lots to like here.  Those who focus on lyrics more than the instrumental contributions probably will care a lot less for this one.  In any event, this was one of Cash’s last concepts albums.

Johnny Cash – Ragged Old Flag

Ragged Old Flag

Johnny Cash – Ragged Old Flag Columbia KC 32917 (1974)

Johnny Cash’s recordings of the 1970s aren’t usually regarded well.  He seemed to struggle with issues that tend to face every big star eventually:  what happens when you’ve been around the business for long enough that popular tastes have changed and new trends and fads have come along?  Stay true to what you always did (even if that is less popular) or adapt to the times (can you pull it off)?  Interestingly, Cash tries a little of both with Ragged Old Flag.

The title track finds Cash displaying his most chauvinistic, nationalist populism, which is presented as mere patriotism during the midst of the Watergate scandal.  It’s always hard to pin down Cash on politics, but it is common for people who lived through the Watergate era and fully understood Nixon’s crimes to insist that the president shouldn’t have gone to prison or been removed from office, just out of some vague sense of “patriotism”.  Cash seems to take a similar view, at least by implication.  It’s maybe also worth noting that Cash had met Nixon personally by this time, and had performed for him at the White House.

The album often recalls the “old” sound of Cash’s 50s recordings.  But Charlie Bragg is the co-producer, and he seems responsible for providing a more contemporary country flair to some of the material here, most notably “Southern Comfort.”  Cash has good support from Earl Scruggs on banjo and The Oak Ridge Boys on backing vocals throughout.  Some of the folkier moments build on what was achieved on Hello, I’m Johnny Cash and Man in Black too, with a little more slick and polished sound.

Cash wrote (or co-wrote) everything here.  Some of those efforts are worthy of note.  “Don’t Go Near the Water” is an environmentalist paean.  It’s something unusual for a country star.  Then there is “King of the Hill,” a song that prefigures a lot of what Bruce Springsteen would become known for a few years down the line.  It’s a song about “manly” men who want to succeed in life and go to the coal mines rather than the cotton mill to do it.  But by the end, the song conveys that eventually all the coal will be gone, and if you’re not dead already you can call yourself king of the hill.  But it’s a kind of sad prize, and Cash very subtly makes it an ironic one, implying (without clearly stating it, except through a little chuckle) that maybe it was all a waste.

This album is among the better of Cash’s efforts of the decade.  Much of side two runs a little thinner after the good “Lonesome to the Bone,” but side one in particular delivers some good performances and songwriting with energy and conviction.  This isn’t the place to start with Cash.  Still, admirers may want to take a listen at some point as it would be a full twenty years before he made another album this good.

The Golden Age of Movie Musicals: The MGM Years

The Golden Age of Movie Musicals: The MGM Years

Various Artists – The Golden Age of Movie Musicals: The MGM Years MGM P6S 5878 (1973)

While showtunes and soundtrack music might not be things that I personally enjoy all that much, you can’t go wrong with this set if you want an introduction to those genres.  I really respect what was done here.  From a historical perspective this collection of recordings is amazing.  It features some of the most well-known music of the 20th Century.  People who wouldn’t consider themselves music listeners in the slightest probably still know the melody to “Over the Rainbow” and “Singin’ in the Rain”, or could recognize “Theme from ‘A Summer Place'”.  The common denominator of this music is its simplicity.  In terms of rhythm, nothing here is beyond a remedial level.  The melodies are all straightforward and uncomplicated.  The vocals often lack much subtlety, but instead focus on brute force vibrato.  The instrumental film music on the final two “bonus” discs deals only in broad strokes, with lots of syrupy string arrangements and melodramatic surges.  Despite the enormous popular recognition of this music, it would seem that already most of it is nothing more than a historical oddity.  The theatrical and vaudevillian aspects of this stuff — cartoonish, larger-than-life emoting that doesn’t leave any room for a reaction other than the one intended — isn’t all that common outside of Bollywood just a few decades on.  It’s a wonder how tastes change so fast.  I guess that Bollywood comment might make for an interesting comparison: is this music something that is borne out of socioeconomic conditions to fill a gap between the general public’s cultural sophistication and its more rapidly rising disposable income?  At its worst, that is probably exactly what it does.  But here we get some of the best and brightest moments, where there’s something more at work.  “Over the Rainbow” and “Singin’ in the Rain” are so well known because they simply are great songs.  And there are plenty more great songs here.  There was also a book of the same name by Lawrence B. Thomas released just before this LP box set, which might be of interest.  There are no liner notes to speak of with this set, so perhaps the book has more information about the music (I haven’t read it).

Tom Waits – Rain Dogs

Rain Dogs

Tom Waits – Rain Dogs Island ILPS 9803 (1985)

Easily Tom Waits’ greatest achievement.  It’s a ramshackle wreck of a thing, and no two songs are great for quite the same reasons.  This one will stay with you for a lifetime.

Waits met his wife Kathleen Brennan while working on the film One From the Heart (1982).  He relocated to New York City from Los Angeles.  This album succeeds in part by jettisoning the last vestiges of his LA sound and fully embracing the freaks, the losers, the rabble — what Barney Hoskyns called a focus on “the urban dispossessed,” inspired by Waits’ recent contribution of music to the documentary Streetwise (1984) about homeless kids in Seattle.

Brennan introduced Waits to the work of composer Harry Partch, known for inventing his own instruments and referencing the lifestyle and language of hobos.  Wait uses all kinds of junkyard percussion and sounds made without musical instruments as such, with a percussion-heavy emphasis on idiosyncratic rhythms.  Partch looms large, and is frequently mentioned as an influence.  This is apparent straight from the opener “Singapore” and then doubly so on the next track “Clap Hands.”

Another influence, or at least close comparison, is Lotte Lenya singt Kurt Weill (1955).  A gem of a post-WWII look back at the Weimar-era theater songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.  These were songs from a time of vibrancy, desperation, and possibility, of contradiction and grand change.  The songs reflect those circumstances.  And Leyna’s 1955 recordings capture the shambolic yet determined and cutting theatrical sensibility that made this music so iconic and emblematic of those times.  Here, on songs like “Tango Till They’re Sore” and “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” the piano and horns tap some of the same slightly seedy and bawdy cabaret energy.  Marc Ribot‘s flamboyant guitar continues that effect across much of the rest of the album.  Waits, who also developed an acting career, always had a flair for theatricality.  Rain Dogs turns those impulses toward something shorn of campiness, more gritty, knowing, and subversive.

But this was also the mid-1980s, the era of big pop tunes.  And this album has those too.  Kathleen Brennan features large here, co-writing “Hang Down You Head” (released as a single) and exerting influence in that direction.  There are quite a number of melodic pop tunes here, including the ballad “Time” and “Downtown Train,” the latter being covered extensively.  These more pure conventional pop expressions manage to sit comfortably among the more experimental offerings.

And there is more.  “Blind Love,” with guitar from both Keith Richards and Robert Quine, is an achingly sad/sweet country-twinged song replete with a fiddle.  And there are plenty of tunes like “Big Black Mariah” and “Union Square” that lean on bluesy rock with Waits’ voice barreling forward at its gruffest, not far from Captain Beefheart.  These elements of American weave throughout the album.

Not yet has been said yet about Waits’ own performances.  His voice is gravelly here.  Yet it still draws, subtly, from his early career trying to make a name for himself as a California soft rock singer trading on sentimental emoting, and his ability to cover a wide range of material and deftly push a song into new areas owes to his time singing barroom jazz, and his ability to deliver, with clever and precise phrasing, a memorable mood or sentiment, like on “Walking Spanish” or “9th & Hennepin,” is a more subdued and, at times, unique and personal form of the kind of beatnik monologues he traded in more crudely in the 70s.  So, yes, Waits’ vocals help make this album what it is.  But, to his credit, this album comes off as a collective effort built on more than just his own presence.  Of course, what that makes that possible is the songwriting.

One thing that still impresses about this album decades later is how consistently good the songs are.  There are some great songs here.  They are full of menace and beauty, characters drifting on the fringes of society, like from a Genet novel, and the eclectic bohemianism of hanging out with the legendary denizens of the storied Chelsea Hotel of the day.  And yet these songs are understated, without ever feeling forced or contorted.  Perhaps just as important as there being great songs, there is not a bum track to be found.

This remains an essential statement from the 80s, one of those classics that is woven through with signs of the times yet also pointing back to deeper history and standing firmly in its own category.