I am bound to follow up on the discussion of the music that made me, the albums that I obsessed over in my youth. There's just stuff that has to be said by me as a writer about music, so much of my life I had arguments in silence with Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, and now I'm out here not talking about it. What's wrong with me? Time to turn that boat around.
I am bound to follow up on the discussion of the music that made me, the albums that I obsessed over in my youth. There's just stuff that has to be said by me as a writer about music, so much of my life I had arguments in silence with Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, and now I'm out here not talking about it. What's wrong with me? Time to turn that boat around.
We start at the top with The Last Poets - This is Madness. Along with Moms Mabley, this is an album I found in Pops collection that I probably wasn't supposed to find because it was filled with cursing. It must have been one of those long summer days when I was bored to death and started poking around in the bookshelves, and I come across this album with a bright interior. And the words! The words just leapt of the page searing my consciousness - I never saw them written down before. Imagine the nerve of such people, talking about revolution and here it all was. Now my father liked Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, The Four Freshmen and Nancy Wilson. Now that I think of it, I can probably recall a great number of his favorite records, including the transparent red vinyl of Peter and the Wolf he got for me. But seeing this in the bunch was too much. Of course I memorized the killer track Mean Machine and still remember snippets like 'automatic pushbutton remote control, synthetic genetics command your soul'. It was difficult for me to understand how this record could exist - it was pure uncut revolution on wax - who turned the other way at the record factory? And look at those black Africans on the cover. They were beautiful and powerful with big afros and fire. It was the coolest, most subversive, thrilling thing that could be. Just listening to it gave me thrills. I don't know if I ever let my father know that I knew that he had this album. It was that powerful.
All N All- Earth, Wind and Fire. I found All N All on the downstroke. The album had been out for years, I'm sure, before I actually purchased it. In fact, I lived a relatively impoverished life with music. It wasn't until I was around 19 with my first real fulltime job that I was anything more than a slave to the radio and the tape deck. I remember the cassette I owned with a piece of 'Be Ever Wonderful' that cut off suddenly and began to play backwards. I fell in love with half a song and played it for years not knowing the rest since it had fallen out of radio rotation. So when I finally got the album it captured me completely. One night at USC as a tender frosh, I got to dance the perfect slow dance to 'Would You Mind'. Ahh where did you go? How many hours have I spend staring at the artwork of this album? But the great personal triumph and impression was 'Runnin'. This was a completely new discovery, the kind of jazz I was just beginning to appreciate. I don't know what the term is for that transition they did with the horns and voices in the middle of the song, but it blew me away. Runnin' is probably the first song I knew that made me comfortable with multiple tempos in a single performance. If you don't understand me, it's your fault.
Dirty Mind - Prince. When Prince's first album 'For You' came out, I wanted to be Prince. When Prince's second album came out, I didn't want to be Prince any more, but I could see maybe how I might try something as crazy as riding naked on a horse. When Prince's third album Dirty Mind came out, I just stood there with my mouth open. See, I could handle the blistering guitar and screaming of Bambi. It was way cool to be into that - it was pushing the envelope. But Dirty Mind didn't only rip up the envelope, it burned down the post office. Yes, 1999 was a much richer and more rewarding album, and Controversy lived up to its name. But Dirty Mind was the album that had a much bigger impact. To say that you were a fan of Prince before he became the huge success that he was by Controversy was to take a serious risk. I took the risk.
Majesty of the Blues - Wynton Marsalis. Wynton came along right at the perfect time. As soon as I read up on him, I purchased Think of One. We were born in the same year and he spoke directly to that part of me that was respectful and arrogant at the same time. I dug him on that album, played it to death and then even more with Black Codes from the Underground. And then with Herbie Hancock's Quartet my favorite jazz ballad for a long time would become 'I Fall In Love Too Easily' featuring a melancholy Wynton that betrayed something I hadn't heard before. JMood, years later broke through but it wasn't until Majesty of the Blues that he connected with me on a gutbucket level. The astounding Death of Jazz just brought me low. I determined that this was going to be the song they played at my funeral. And then with Premature Autopsies, I had words that connected me emotionally to all the things that jazz and the black soul in America symbolized. It was an album which was a soundtrack to my pathos, and it put me on a road to a more robust feeling of something ancient flowing in my blood.
Tutu - Miles Davis. Nobody wants to say so, but Tutu is the greatest hiphop album ever recorded. It wrecked jazz for good by bankrolling Kenny G, 94.7 The Wave and every jazz artist desperate to escape for bebop. It may not seem like it but it's true - just nobody wants to say so. Miles went the length whereas with Youre Under Arrest, he was just playing. But in Tutu is a reinvention that showed everyone that the masters can work with the sixteen beat and that Herbie wasn't just out there freaked out. The nerve of Miles to do a Scritti Politti tune just completely solidified everything I had been out in the wilderness saying back in the days when I wanted to scratch Hey 19 and put some meaty beats under a jazz arrangement. I got a chance to see Miles around that time down in San Juan Capistrano. It was phenomenal.
Carmel - Joe Sample. There were three distinct moments in my life when I decided to really understand jazz. The very first time was when I was about 19, and I must have asked around, because my first album was Joe Sample's Carmel. This was one of those albums I always liked playing end to end rather than picking a track and then lifting the needle again. It always put me in a good mood to listen to Joe Sample whereas other jazz I listened to at the time (not much) tried to prove its cool. I listened to Billy Cobham, Seawind and Tom Scott, and of course there was Spyro Gyra's Morning Dance and Hiroshima. But Joe Sample was the coolest of them all.
Even looking at the cover mellowed me out and reminded me of the peaceful camping trips I had taken up in Big Sur - a romance with that area of California I have never shaken.
Modern Man - Stanley Clarke. Not long after I took in Joe Sample, I ran into a cat named Ronald Stephens. He knew things about music that put me to shame, especially on the jazz side. And I wondered how anybody who had any hair growing out of them could possibly be excited by the mellowness of jazz. He looked at me and said, you obviously don't know Stanley Clarke or Jeff Beck do you? Who? He said Stanley Clarke is the greatest bass guitar player on the planet. I'm like, you can't be serious - don't you know about Louis Johnson? He yawns. He says, I play bass guitar and I can play every Brother's Johnson song, but I can't even come close to that. This I got to hear. It turns out that right around the way in the high end stereo department, the guy with a rack of Soundcraftsmens and the biggest speakers that JBL makes is cranking up Rock & Roll Jelly and Closing Statement. So now I've heard it, and I realize that I will never be the same. People are asking me if I've never heard of Stanley Clarke - I see the School Days album and realize that I have heard him before, but only in that odd way. If you've ever hung out with record store geeks, something we all used to do but never do any longer, then you know what it's like to be in the store when they play something that only the guys behind the counter can get into, and people in the store are like... you took off the Commodores to play this? There used to be a record store between Rocket Cleaners and Boys Market on Crenshaw in the hood, and I can still remember the day they did that for what was then Stanley Clarke's newest album, School Days. I stayed to listen to the whole thing, liked Desert Song, walked out and forgot all about it. What I really wanted to hear was 'Running Away' by Roy Ayers - that was about as jazzy as my teenaged sensibilities allowed me to be. It had to be funky. Still Stanley Clarke was a great revelation to me and expanded my musical world with themes that I still find fascinating.
Sequencer - Synergy. If it's not obvious to you, then here's a clue about me. Ever since Space Race by Billy Preston, I have been absolutely addicted to electronic music. In high school, I thought that the world's greatest musician was Walter Orange. That had something to do with some confusion on my part, because I saw a picture of him and we bore each other some resemblance. What I recalled was that there was a man seated in the middle of five keyboards and Moog electronics. Every funk band that used synthesizers became associated with Orange in my young mind, and he was me. That association stayed in my mind until George Duke broke through with Reach For It, and then was completely obliterated by Larry Fast and W. Carlos. Still, I didn't own any of that music until I was 19, and on the same Soundcraftsmen / JBL setup at Fedco La Cienega's Coastron concession was the introduction of several new albums that fundamentally rearranged my musical tastes. One was the Alan Parsons Project - specifically Pyramid. The second was Mannheim Steamroller's Fresh Aire III. I dug the big Doobie Brothers album that was hot that year and Supertramp's Logical Song was often on my mind. For the first time, I really listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon - the problem being that anytime I inquired into the matter, people who knew looked at me like I was crazy. So, not willing to pay up for the super duper quality remastered version, I could only get a little piece of that music at a time up until that point. The second biggest favorite of that time period would have to be the debut album by the Yellow Magic Orchestra, which did the right things with electronic music that was perfectly original and not part of a disco tune. Still, the granddady of them all was Larry Fast's Synergy. At times when I get nostalgic, like right now, I think of how I used to daydream over the sci-fi illustrations of an artist whose name I need to recover to the strains of the New World Synphony. This remains one of the albums of which I never tire, and that period of music was signature in my life.
Duck Rock - Malcolm McLaren. Duck Rock was for me very likely the thing it was for everyone else. A glimpse into the future, the success of a shotgun method without any rhyme or reason that nonetheless struck more than a chord but established an orchestra hit. I have only now discovered the fact that my other idols, The Art of Noise, collaborated on this LP. But in fact it was Hobo Scratch, the 12 inch remix that just wore out the needles on my turntables.
Go ahead, say it. We're on a world tour with Mr. Malcolm McLaren. We're goin each and every place including Spain, Asia, Africa, Tokyo, Mexico. A hiphop bite that's been bitten all over for decades.
You've got half the aesthetic that would dominate for the next decade in the album cover with Keith Haring and the iconic ghetto blaster, and the hard beats with scratches and electronics and signature voices, accents never heard, outtakes. Insane. Brilliant. Addictive.
Daft - The Art of Noise. AON became for me something of an obsession. Beyond the crystalline beauty of the synthesized note put to funky use by the brilliant Thomas Dolby whose Blinded Me With Science, like no other song beside Morris Day's Tricky, put me into uncontrollable break dance spasms it was Close (To Ehe Edit) that was the song that gets the Michael Bowen Lifetime Achievement as the 'Something about the music gets into my pants award'. And what's even more crazy is that Beat Box was on the same album. Astounding! I would have to say that without question {Rockit, Beat Box, Close, Tricky} are the all time greatest break dancing songs ever. The answer to your question is yes, I could break. I never managed a head spin or the signature windmill or flare. I would have needed a crew to practice with, something I wouldn't find on campus. I satisfied myself that I was the best breaker at State and famously won the campus Nerd Contest for breakdancing with taped glasses, flood pants and a pocket protector. Props must go to Charles Walker however, I did have red black and green pens in that pocket. As well I spun on my back after winning a scholarship at an awards ceremony dance. Of course I dug Scritti Politti, ABC and Yes' Owner of a Lonely Heart was a smash, but the Art of Noise was king and remained champion. There was something of an underground art to them and ZTT; I loved that they were texty. It was from them I expected codes from the underground.
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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