Windham Hill Sampler 84. What happened during the 80s was a burst of creativity in the popular culture of the sort we're likely to see after we get out of the current depression, and in that time was the creation of Silicon Valley as a cultural as well as an industrial center. Windham Hill was a big part of that movement and I felt very much a part of that. The haunting beauty that was David Bowie's This is Not America was the the other end of the electronic spectrum from the jarring bombast of the Art of Noise. There was of course Moments in Love in its various incantations, but that was not enough. There had to be an entire ocean of mellow, and that's where Windham Hill shined. With its minimalist approach, it was pristine and crisp. It was logical and soothing.
Mark Isham's On the Threshold of Liberty was an anthem that struck stirring noble emotions in direct counterpoint to the lament of Bowie. And while Andreas Wollenweider ended up getting on my nerves, and Jean Luc Ponty always seemed to be too busy, there was balance and a lack of pretense in the Windham Hill artists. All except for Liz Story whom I found to be a great disappointment. For many years I had a solo piano search.. well that's another long story. In the end, I must say that I never did find that solo pianist who did New Age properly for me, but I have been spoiled by Herbie, Chick, Andre, Martha, Vladimir and Glenn.
Crossroads - Tracy Chapman. I fell in and out of love around this album with the woman I would eventually marry. And for her there are a number of albums that resonate with romance and affection from that same time in my life. Those would include UB40, Basia, Clifford Brown (with Strings) and most notably the Stanley Clarke project Animal Logic. Lyrics! Not since Stevie and EWF have we had music that speaks to the soul. Again, there is a kind of purity and simple beauty in this that I found inspiring. It helped that the very idea of a black woman of unconventional beauty in dreads who spoke of unplugged revolution was automatically appealing to me back in the late 80s, but we all knew talent when we saw it.
Crossroads was her second album and although my favorite of all her songs continues to be 'I Used To Be a Sailor', this collection hangs together as the center of gravity of Chapman. The sweet sadness of A Hundred Years, the defiance of Born to Fight, the smug condescension of Material World, the heartfelt and plaintive This Time. It's an album for the ages.
Keep On Movin' - Soul II Soul. For me as I believe with many millions of others, this was the watershed album that helped initiate that international level of cool I called New World Afrika. It was one of the first acknowledgements of a global set by my generation. You knew that EWF travelled around the world, but they never brought anyone back with them. Jazzy B had the voice, the look, the sound and the humanistic vibe that took everybody by surprise. What's funny is that I remember that he came out at the very same time as Al B Sure! when all that New Jack Swing was still trying to be cooler than it possibly could be. I remember just feeling sorry for hiphop at the time when Special Ed was still on the charts as well as Kwame (whom I thought was the coolest and most avant guard in the days before De La Soul) and ESD. When Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis could still make or break people as if all of urban contemporary was closely held as if prisoner of a New Jack City redoubt, in sails Soul II Soul like an irresistible force and blows them all away. When sophisticates like myself and my buppie crew were just getting fed up with the frenetic energy of Rob Base and the Beastie Boys (not to mention Milk is Chillin'), the smooth vocals and pounding beat of Soul II Soul was the perfect respite in between them and the super smooth of Double Vision. No not Foreigner, James and Sanborn. Speaking of which, there are other albums that really locked me in during the years between 86 and 90 and I'm going to do a special on them because in that spot was some great happenings, and music was one fourth of my focus. More on that later. As for Soul II Soul, they picked the exact right shade of brown, something that wouldn't be repeated until Janet.
Fishbone - Fishbone. Now I'm going to take a step backward in time to Fishbone. I happen to believe that Fishbone was one of the greatest rock bands on the planet. And it is certainly the most underrated bands ever. This was their debut and it changed the world. For all the music in the world I grew up with, all of it was cool. Cool is not enough and sometimes you just need to be weird. For weird there was Parliament. But even that was not enough. Fishbone was frenetic. They represented the energy of the moment, and it wasn't until I knew the music, smart, fresh, funky, rocking, ska-rythmic and loud that I could express that energy of mine. It turns out that these were neighbors. Some of the band members went to middle school with my younger brother, and I can distinctly remember when I used to hang out with Angelo during that brief period in my life when I was not above disco roller skating and pop locking in the streets of Hollywood. Fishbone was on the edge, and if I didn't spend my entire life trying to be respectable I would be exactly like them, and it is that dynamic that lead me to the mosh pit at the Santa Monica Civic for the first concert of the Black Rock Coalition, in shirt, tie and jacket. I have been lucky enough to have found a woman who actually understands Fishbone. I wish I knew her then!
Hallucination Engine - Material. This album remains my absolute
favorite of all. It is finally, after many years of searching, exactly
my kind of music. There is the purity of ambient synthesizers, there is
the sophistication of polyrhthmic beats. There is big boom of bass, the
improvisation of bebop, the integration of Eastern themes. All that and
Arabic lyricism as well. I have been following two threads of this kind
of music since the 80s. One of them culminated in the music around
Adrian Sherwood and OnU and the other around Bill Laswell and Axiom. In
the end, Laswell was the champion and his music explores all the
dimensions of sound I find fascinating, compelling and majestic. His
collaborations with everyone from Sly and Robbie and Peter Namlook to
his recreations of Bob Marley and Miles Davis are stunning. But in my
opinion, his greatest work to date can be found on this album. It is
track number seven, entitled The Hidden Garden / Naima. Yes, that
Naima. It is, in my opinion, better than Coltrane's original. This is the music I have played in rented cars through the streets of Brooklyn and Tampa and Houston with the windows rolled down, just trying to show how that big boom can carry so much sophistication and flavor. This is the music that carries the literal wit of William S. Burroughs about deals with the devil.
The odd thing is with this album is like so many others, I don't associate a name with the songs. I just know them. They occupy a nameless place in memory because there is no communicating them. It's like a secret knowledge, a fountain of inspiration that you try to share but the water slips through your hands as you attempt to remove it from the source. I can say 'Laswell' to a few that know him and then what? There's this, of course, but there is also the perfect Dub Chamber 3. There's also the extraordinary Panthalassa. I know a man named Benzon who once looked after my son. If there's a man who knows my mind perhaps he is the one. In music he understands the power it transduces through the brain. I look at him with library envy and wish I could explain. I'll tell him Laswell and he'll nod, then pick up his horn and play a stretch and hang on to a note mystical and forlorn. And I'll say yes after a moment and say how did you know. He'll shrug and ask me don't we all who listen for the flow? And I forget this epic trance was dreamed in God's own mind, as I just wrangle syllables interpolated for the purposes of explicating that which transpired without any sense of time as if binded to the blind.
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