Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
John Frusciante – Curtains Record Collection 9362-48959-2 (2005)
The last entry in the series of albums John Frusciante began releasing in 2004, Curtains shines through with his best vocals and most consistent songwriting yet. An emphasis on acoustic guitar suits the somber music. Frusciante’s lyrics are still somewhat lacking, but this album is so heartfelt and genuine that such concerns wash away with the gentle melodies and soothing harmonies he always seems to find.
John Frusciante – The Will to Death Record Collection 9362-48800-2 (2004)
When iconoclastic filmmaker John Cassavetes started making movies he funded entirely himself, he filmed them in a way that ignored getting a scene “in focus” or the sound “just right” if that would in any way inhibit the actors. The Will to Death is one of six (!) albums John Frusciante released in 2004. He recorded it without worrying about his guitar going slightly out of tune or missing a beat here or there. More important than any detail is the basic spirit of each song. That is what matters to music like this. It’s not polished, but it sure is sincere.
An interviewer once recalled meeting jazz luminary Sun Ra at Ra’s place in Philadelphia. Sun Ra was looking around for some sheet music while the interviewer waited. When asked about the random piles of things, Sun Ra responded by saying that if he organized, he would only find what he was looking for. That story might explain a great deal about John Frusciante’s The Will to Death (and maybe Cassavetes too). Recorded quickly, without extensive revising and adjusting, the album thrives in what Frusciante perhaps never expected his songs contained.
The brooding, frustrated guitar sounds mark the introspective music of The Will to Death, as might be obvious from the title alone. Yet, it is his resilient attitude that makes John Frusciante fascinating. He survives the contradictions of being the self-destructive outsider in his comfortable other gig (Red Hot Chili Peppers). Surviving wouldn’t seem to be his objective, though. There is an unending desire to grow in each of his songs. Despite the occasional maudlin flourishes and the many clumsy lyrics, there are no diversions from that basic desire. The missteps in the music are weaknesses it seems are shared in the person of John Frusciante. What places The Will to Death far above his previous solo recording is his courage to proceed straight through those flaws. The hidden beauty of the album is that it does proceed without stopping to question itself. To do that genuinely is always enough.
“The Will to Death” is probably the best song Frusciante has written to date. In a somber melody, he wraps the hopelessly romantic ideas that can define a life. “Loss,” “The Days Have Turned” and possibly “Time Runs Out” follow as the next best examples of Frusciante’s evolving songwriting skills. At their best, the songs, in both trivial detail and grand aspiration, simply are what they are. The same also goes for Frusciante’s voice. His vocals have greatly improved across the years. Together with Josh Klinghoffer‘s nicely suited contributions on drums and some miscellaneous instruments, the difficulties of making music like this fade away.
An album like this probably isn’t for everyone. The immediate pleasure of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ recordings will surely appeal to many more people. Those songs are direct reflections of attitudes often found so desirable. The Will to Death is something different. It is obscure, indirect. Any reaction to it has to be earnest because no guidance is given toward a particular one. John Frusciante has made a commendable — courageous — effort here. You might be surprised what you find in hearing it.
Link to an interview with Vicenç Navarro:
“How Should Economics Be Taught? A Conversation With Vicenç Navarro”
Sun Ra – Lanquidity Philly Jazz PJ666 (1978)
Disco has never found such fine improvisational treatment as on Lanquidity. Sun Ra was one of the most interesting musical figures of the last century. He claimed to be from Saturn, and it is practically impossible to prove otherwise. The myth he developed enhanced the music by giving the whole experience a charm all its own. Always one to challenge conventional wisdom, Sun Ra expanded what you could do with “serious” music.
Why a disco-jazz album? Generally, people don’t expect a jazz pioneer to take up doo-wop, R&B, or disco, not to mention both free jazz and big-band jazz. But Sun Ra did, and there is no better way to obliterate worthless preconceptions. In the liner notes to a CD reissue executive producer Tom Buchler quotes Sun Ra saying, “’People are sleeping, and I’m here to wake them up from their slumber.’” While bold statements of space-age philosophy are a natural part of Sun Ra’s myth, there is a literal meaning as well. Occasionally known as “Le Sony’r Ra” or Herman “Sonny” Blount, he was a master of using sound to alter moods — like waking someone in the audience from a drunken stupor, a true story.
Lanquidity has more passion and feeling than seems possible. Sun Ra has absorbed the language of Donna Summer into his improvisational vocabulary. His Arkestra — hailing from Philadelphia somewhat late in Sun Ra’s career — is particularly strong with John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, June Tyson, but also Eddie Gale, and people identified as Disco Kid and Artaukatune. The group’s performance is inspired. The singular vision of the album seldom, if ever, falters. When dealing with talented musicians, restraining them to simple material is challenging, just as working intuitive players of limited means into an ensemble is a challenge. Sun Ra pulls off a unified sound without restricting the creative energy of the collective.
Though sometimes strained, Lanquidity is as effective as nearly anything in Sun Ra’s extensive catalog. At the same time, the songs are very comforting. Song like “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You of)” and “Twin Stars of Thence” live up to their cosmic names. The music follows a more conventional structure than albums like Atlantis and The Magic City. This never limits the album. The title track explores every creative possibility without over-complicating the matter. “Where Pathways Meet” finds Sun Ra providing varied responses to the main theme and solos, cleverly remaining in the background for most of the song.
This album’s appeal ranges from avant-garde jazz fans to Studio 54 revivalists. While traditional disco fans might find Lanquidity a bit strange at first, it might grow on them. Keep in mind that many original Sun Ra albums had hand-painted covers. The original release of Lanquidity first appeared with only a photocopy attached to the front. Finding these albums was difficult, except for those who frequented Arkestra concerts. Hopefully every Sun Ra release can eventually find a re-release.
Sun Ra – My Brother the Wind Vol. II El Saturn LP 523 (1971)
My Brother the Wind Vol II is a tale of two sides–Sun Ra had a penchant for programming El Saturn LPs to be rather different from side to side. One is filled with solo recordings of Sun Ra taking his then-new mini-moog synthesizer through its paces. The other side features a full band entering the realm of soul jazz. Vocalist June Tyson is the star of the group material. She must have been born with the same Saturn-ian mindset as Ra, because she seems to intuit all of Ra’s music in a way that hardly could be learned. The group performances feel a bit as if they are making an effort to connect with the organ-driven groove jazz of the type Jimmy Smith played (maybe a closer comparison though would be Larry Young‘s Unity). That was some of the most popular commercial jazz of the last decade. The thing is, it was by this time the music of the previous decade. Sun Ra seemed to be a bit behind the curve when he offered it on an album released in the early 1970s. Nonetheless, the wilder sax soloing here (“Otherness Blue”) is as unexpected as Sonny Sharrock‘s guitar was in Herbie Mann‘s band (Sharrock has told a funny story about an unfortunate gig in Oshkosh, Wisconsin when some old ladies booked Mann, with Sharrock in tow, entirely by mistake out of confusion between him and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass and struggled to be polite after hearing Sharrock’s psychedelic performance on electric guitar). The moog tracks on the flip side were probably pretty out there at the time. Given what others, and Sun Ra himself (The Solar-Myth Approach Volume 1, The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals / Crystal Spears, Concert for the Comet Kohoutek, etc.), did in the coming years, the sense of experimentation feels quite a bit tamer in retrospect. This music can feel a little dated in ways later electrified efforts by the Arkestra wouldn’t. Although this material is decent and pretty accessible for the most part, and it does map out certain elements that would become defining characteristics of Ra’s Seventies period, feel free to skip right past this and come back to it once you have a fair amount of the Sun Ra catalog under your belt.
Sun Ra and His Myth Science Arkestra – We Travel the Space Ways El Saturn HK 5445 (1967)
Sort of a vault-clearing assemblage of material recorded in Chicago between 1956 and 1961. It finds Ra exploring a swinging, bluesy kind of afro-futurist/sci-fi exotica, with a few tracks in a straighter big band mode, though many other Chicago-period recordings are fuller realizations of those styles. Here the musicians sound just slightly tentative at times and the arrangements are shy of Sun Ra’s very best work. Still, “Tapestry from an Asteroid” is quite lovely (better than the more polished version on The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra), and “Space Loneliness” and “New Horizons” are the highlights.
Link to an article by Seymour M. Hersh:
“The Killing of Osama bin Laden”
Bonus Link: “When Liberals Run Out of Patience: the Impolite Exile of Seymour Hersh”
Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come Atlantic SD 1317 (1959)
Ornette Coleman’s second album as a leader has the bold title “The Shape of Jazz to Come” (selected by the producer Nesuhi Ertegun) and few albums earn such bold statements as this one does. His music has always pushed anarchic tendencies. In 1959, he was still accustomed to the format of bop and hard bop, and those habits of thought definitely inform this music. The songs open with a head played by the entire group, and the performers trade solos before returning to the head. Now, the catch is that both the head and those solos don’t sound at all like any others around in 1959, excepting perhaps a few forward-thinking performers like Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra.
The opening “Lonely Woman” is perhaps the single best-known Coleman composition. The sour, dissonant melody played by Coleman on his plastic alto sax (he was unable to afford a metal one in his early career) and Don Cherry on cornet stumbles along, falling forward. Ornette said he composed the song after coming across a painting of a wealthy woman who looked sad to him. As was Ornette’s key approach to music, the song features unusual improvisation with the players free to melodically improvise without fixed harmonic relationships to each other or a tonal center. The result is that music theory and the limiting rules inherent in that kind of knowledge are subordinated (if not completely discarded) to the ideas (Ornette referred to “emotion”) that the performers hold form in their performances. The performers may have been habituated to the format of bop jazz, but they were clearly heading in a completely different direction.
When Ornette plays a slurred trill on “Eventually,” he almost sings into his horn in a way that drives home the new set of values embodied in the music. For if anything, Ornette’s music represented the expression of different political choices that couldn’t be expressed in the old forms. So he crafted new ones. When you hear this, note how fun and happy much of the music is at its core. In a context in which feeling good expressing yourself without guilt is deemed unacceptable, then going ahead is radical. But with Ornette, he does this amazing thing. He fights for this arena to express things in music without positioning himself as some kind of messiah-like figure with unique talents. The way he plays makes you think you could maybe do it too. The Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini said in an interview, “My nostalgia is for those poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord.” This is precisely what Ornette’s music represents, and why it seems right to have a certain fondness for The Shape of Jazz to Come decades later. You can gauge anyone’s politics by how they react to this album — those who want to retain modes of domination in society won’t take a liking to it. And people who claim Ornette had limited abilities should be asked: by whose standards?
It is a commentary on the lack of meritocracy in the world, but Ornette owed much of his “break” into the professional music world to John Lewis of The Modern Jazz Quartet, who helped Ornette find gigs, a record label and gain some kind of credibility from an endorsement by an acknowledged star. Of note, though, is that it was a respected musician like Lewis, who had a masters degree in music and taught music at prestigious conservatories associated with European classical music, had enough credentials to allow him to support Ornette’s music without being criticized as not knowing what he was talking about. Other self-taught musicians who lacked such institutional credentials would risk being labeled as know-nothings for supporting Ornette’s music. But, all that aside, Ornette did well with the opportunities available to him.
With his time in the spotlight on Atlantic Records, Ornette recorded music as radical as anything heard before in jazz. Musicians who worked their entire lives to perfect their skills playing chord changes were probably chagrined to see Ornette throw all that out and place an emphasis on other elements, improvising with composition as much as interpretation in his solos. The more open-minded found in Ornette a visionary. No doubt, Ornette had a much more individualistic conception of musical performance than most listeners (and society writ large) were ready to accept in the late 1950s, which is to say he thought everyone should have much more latitude to express themselves in their own ways without deference to established modes of expression (which invariably are the products of institutions that reproduce social hierarchies). So perhaps under the old critical standards this music is played “poorly”, but the point is that the old standards are self-serving and this music steps outside them.
Ornette plays in a harsh way, with a sound always about a quarter cent sharp. This was partly due to playing a plastic Grafton saxophone. But even after he bought a new metal one, his sound retained its biting qualities. It was simply his sound. Don Cherry played cornet in a similar way. He had a knack for keeping to Ornette’s melodic lines with a characteristic phase-shift, always a split second off of Ornette’s timing. Bassist Charlie Haden plays with a warm, R&B tinge, occasionally playing double stops (“Focus on Sanity,” “Chronology”) in a fluid, buoying way that contrasts with the dissonant horns. Drummer Billy Higgins is basically a very forward-thinking bebop drummer, who grew into the free jazz movement. His playing is rather rooted in bop structure here, which is a major reason why The Shape of Jazz to Come is an easier listen than some of Coleman’s later works with more free-wheeling percussion and rapidly shifting polyrhythms.
“Peace” is the longest track here, and the group plays with a lot of space, at a slower tempo. The song says as much in the notes left out as in the ones played. Is peace about their being less in the world? Less what? Take a listen and wonder.
The Shape of Jazz to Come is certainly one of Ornette’s most likable albums. He made more challenging ones, in hindsight at least. The vestiges of bop structures make this a bit less demanding, without being a cake walk. Any jazz education should include this album as essential listening. Yet this is also a work well worth revisiting. If the flaws of this album are the ways it can’t get past bebop structures entirely and the overabundance of optimism about unleashing music this radical, those are as endearing as flaws come.
Link to an article by Carl Magnes:
The Ornette Coleman Trio – At The “Golden Circle” Stockholm, Volume One Blue Note BST 84224 (1966)
In 1962 Ornette briefly retired from recording and public performance. He returned to public performance in 1965, after teaching himself violin and trumpet, and then spent the remainder of the decade bouncing between record labels. He recorded a number of albums for Blue Note in the late 60s, as that label started to fade from prominence. Both just before and after his retirement he worked with a trio featuring Charles Moffett on drums and David Izenzon on bass. Most of the Blue Note recordings are considered somewhat second-rate entries in the Coleman catalog. But two volumes of live recordings from Sweden at the “Gyllene Cirkeln” club have definitely withstood the test of time and can stand alongside Coleman’s best work. It was Ornette’s first tour of Europe.
The music here is a refinement of what Coleman did in the late 1950s and early 60s with his combo that featured trumpeter Don Cherry. There is a lightness and optimism in this music that is rather rare in free jazz circles, where dour seriousness all too often predominate. Coleman plays many songs here with melodies that could well double as nursery rhymes. The sparseness of the trio format, without any other horn to play harmony with Ornette, and with Izenzon and Moffett both playing in ways that recall standard bop jazz, make this music a bit less demanding on the ears than Coleman can sometimes be. But for all those reference points, this music also reflects the growth and change in Coleman’s music from the preceding years. This is transitional music. The amazing thing about Coleman is that no matter how radical his approach to music was, it wasn’t static. Here, the radicalism comes in a most unexpected way. It introduces complex, novel structures by appearing to do anything but that.
These songs often find Coleman playing for a long time, without repeating himself and without relying on another wind player to add independent melodic statements (much like on Chappaqua Suite, recorded earlier the same year). He also throws in short little riffs of surprising complexity. No, this is not a performer limited to simply melodies; this is a performer choosing to play them. The effect all this brings about in the music is subtle. At any moment, Ornette doesn’t seem to be playing differently than he was five years earlier, but he’s playing that way for so much longer without tiring that this represents a whole new level of that same type of playing. Reaching that new level opened up new horizons for compositional structures in the music. The group doesn’t return to “heads” (group statements of a theme) in a planned way, as on early Coleman recordings. Izenzon and Moffett are largely free to solo simultaneously with Ornette — though both are fairly restrained players who do so without much flash or pageantry. This becomes the heart of Ornette’s musical theory of “Harmolodics”. This is a trio of musical equals. None of the instruments is privileged over the others. Moffett plays a key role in this. His drumming is bop-inflected, but also more skittering and decentered. He drops a few bass/kick drum “bombs” like Art Blakey, but he works in a lot of hi-hat rides and runs on his tom drums during Ornette’s playing time, with a touch so light and effortless that he turns what would be a Blakey solo feature in a Jazz Messengers performance into supportive “accompaniment” that suits concurrent playing by the other trio members. As the players work together, they are able to react and shift directions as a unit, without tearing the fabric of the performance apart abruptly. Rarely does jazz performance this angular and sharp sound, if not smooth and easy exactly, at least as smooth and well-incorporated as it does.
There is an earnestness in this music that makes it difficult for even Coleman detractors to bag on it. At The “Golden Circle” Stockholm, Volume One is certainly Coleman at his most approachable. It is probably advisable for newcomers to his music to start closer to the beginning, with some of the Atlantic recordings; however, this live set makes for an excellent second course, so to speak. His music reach a pinnacle of complexity in the coming decade, as he began to realize works at the furthest reaches of what his “harmolodics” concepts suggested in music.