Cobb

The Second Set: Music That Remade Me

I seem to have lived more lives than I expected. These days I tell myself that in life there are two kinds of people, trees and monkeys. I'm a tree for my family, but out in the world I'm a monkey. A flying monkey. So when I looked back at the top 15 albums in my mind that I wrote 10 years ago, I was thinking back. Now a new set of music has ripened and matured in my monkey mind and I need to account for that.

I remember Puck in the first episodes of MTV's Real World. For some reason I associate it with a gig I had down in Jacksonville's Baymeadows district. I stayed at Homewood Suites and ran down to the package store past the gatorholes for a fifth of Jim Beam Rye. The riff from Interstate Love Song was in my head the whole time. Then one day I heard Vaseline and discovered that it was the same band. I had to know more. The album was a revelation, and it seemed that every song was an anthem for dark parts of me. It went in and inverted all of my rock sensibilities. As time went on, STP was for me everything that was right with the new rock, a soundtrack for sections of empty highways on my desolate consulting missions around the country. Lady Picture Show was Cobb Parkway in Atlanta. Meatplow was a two lane strip of black ice in the dead winter cold of Columbus, Ohio. Down was me sitting in a rental car in an alley in Boston. None of it mattered to be timely. I went back and forth in time with it. When I read the release dates of the albums it all seems wrong, like they've existed long before in my mind. They're that deep.

 

The second best apartment I ever had was on the top floor of a walkup brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Seventh Avenue & Flatbush. I bought my NAD amp and my Infinity Speakers for that place. That place with the hardwood floors. With the eat-in-kitchen where I never cooked. With the french doors on the two bedrooms. With the exposed brick. Where the first fat fly of summer buzzed against the windowpanes with the clear view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. It took me weeks to finally make the D Train go away. It rumbled by spooking me into thinking another earthquake was happening. Especially at night. I went to the brand new Virgin Superstore in Times Square and the pleasant young man told me that he knew everything about classical music. He was so happy that I asked him. "Hum anything", he challenged me. "I'll tell you what song it is." I was embarrassed. All I could think about were the clips in the old montage from 'Hooked on Classics'. I declined. But I did know one thing. I wanted the Appassionata. For years after I first discovered Bach, Liszt, and Debussy there seemed to be no solo pianists I could find to match their purity. Of course I didn't know where or how to look and the first person that asked to be a guide was declined. I thought too much of the encounter. I believed he was flirting with me and saw me too deeply because this was music I truly wanted to experience and I was only on the very edges of it. I was me. I wanted to do it myself. I bought Barenboim. His rendition of the Moonlight Sonata, which I didn't know at the time, has been the reference in my mind ever since. Every night in Brooklyn, I went to sleep with that album in the Sony CD player. It is peace.

 

I was bored on the plane and I had an aisle seat. I don't like the aisle because I have broad shoulders and enough bad experience with food carts and my funny bone to think there might be a conspiracy against me in the flight attendants union. At least it wasn't a bulkhead seat. So I actually plugged my headphones into the inflight station and browsed through the printed program guide in the seat back pocket in front of my knees. Hmm, what's this? A new album, a featured album no less, by Bobby McFerrin. Say what? If you know me, you know that I think there are two great injustices in the music world and they cycle around Fishbone and Bobby McFerrin. I know Bobby McFerrin to be a musical genius. I knew it back from his Spontaneous Inventions album back when people were just discovering Whoopi Goldberg's surfer girl routine. Of course the world has been fixated on that one song that paid for his mansion, but I knew better, primarily because of Medicine Music. I was entranced by Bang! Zoom, and in many ways it had been thematic for my early married life in Atlanta. Kids' Toys is still the ringtone for my youngest daughter, and Friends is to me one of the most perfect songs ever made. But nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on that flight. Beyond Words. This is one of the most inventive and transcendent albums ever recorded. As I listen even in this moment, the phrasing is sublime and the melodies seem crafted to soothe. It is a daddy album. It is a jazz album. It is both subtle and magnificent with the perfect interplay of Chick Corea's piano, Bobby's voice, excellent percussion and the most righteously mellow fretless bass playing I have ever heard. All with no lyrics. It is the landmark in McFerrin's career - he has invented something new in jazz vocals as it perhaps was inevitable that he would. OK. So I'm a fan. And yes he went even further several years later with Vocabularies.

 

There's a piano interlude between each of the cuts on this album that immediately takes me back to the days when my fiancee and I lived up near Grant's Tomb in the City. We had the tiniest of apartments sublet by one of the Urban Bush Women (thanks Christine) and it was a miserably hot summer. I had picked up the album back when I lived in Boston picking through the ruins of hiphop in the days of Jurassic Park. And there it was one complete with the Francophone edge of the Native Tongues, Lucien. And it got better from there. It was refreshing to hear the French approach to rap and I especially liked Democrat D's fricatives as well as the sad mellow of Moda et Dan. Of course MC Solaar was the standout. Some years later I found some comfort in Raggasonic, but this was the collection that kicked off my flirtation with Gallic hiphop. It lasted through a few singles later by Solaar, but Menelik and Lucien disappointed in the long run. This was the bright spot, and unforgettable.

 

 

There once was a videogame called Fez. It was a miracle of multiple dimensions. The game was highly anticipated and starred in a movie about indie game developers, unsurprisingly named Indie Game. The game was a smashing, although delayed success. I seem to recall it drove the lead programmer crazy. That was only the beginning. Its soundtrack was a simple marvel and introduced me to Disasterpeace who has gone on to relative fame. But there was a followup album named FZ: Side F that featured a collection of artists that rebirthed my love with electronic music. That included Solar Fields, Morusque, Monomer and my favorite Aaron Cherof. When I finally got around to Cherof, I was blown away, and so his album Anagnorisis has been in heavy rotation ever since 2013. It remains a standout among all of my new favorite electronic composers and DJs.

 

I got bored of jazz, you know. But I was overly into it for a long time. Obviously I loved the stuff that Miles was doing at the end of his life, and I have been a big fan of the Return to Forever crew, especially Stanley and Chick. Herbie has been a lifelong favorite and of course everybody lights a candle at the shrines of Coltrane, Monk, Basie & Mingus. There are several other dozens to choose from but everything new seemed to be a bit derivative of the best fusion and straight ahead. Truth be told I can put up with a lot of Bony James and contemporary smooth. But very little had gotten under my skin since the early 90s. Out of nowhere, really, came The Bad Plus. I was transfigured by the trio's coordination, by the drummer's prodigious fills and polyphony. It was frenetic and captivating. Their rock covers introduced me to songs I never knew - it had to be at least 5 years before I knew their rendition of Tom Sawyer was not original. (I have since put Rush in its appropriate place, I think). Flim, Velouria, too. All of their music had the energy and sophistication I forgot I was hungry for, and it was truly satisfying. I decided that Dirty Blonde would be my theme song - and I even wrote lyrics for it. The album that kicked it off still holds magic for me.

 

Jacques Loussier is one of the greatest jazz pianists ever. He did that French thing, take something old and make it new. They have said that Wynton Marsalis is one of those rare musical geniuses who is both a jazz and classical prodigy. It's true. But I think it is an even greater achievement to rearrange classical pieces that have been interpreted hundreds of ways for hundreds of years and make them jazzy in unpredictably clever ways that retain respect for the original. These are deeply inventive compositions he has put together with his trio, and it seems magical every time he performs. At least I am very convinced. It is almost impossible for me to decide which of his albums impresses me most, but I'm going to choose his interpretations of Satie. Because. I doubt even Satie could have envisioned his pieces so variantly played and I love the way he redoes them several times on this album. Taking nothing away from his performances of Bach and Debussy, this album is special because he renders them mulitple times, each with its own special flavor. For a long time, this has been my bedtime album.

Hiromi has saved jazz for me. Once again this is an amazing fusion of inventive style, prodigious skill, energy and sophistication that had me wondering why the Stanley Clarke Band's first album in 2010 was so extraordinary. I listened and listened but never read any liner notes. So I didn't really know it was her that made the difference. So I watched this video and knew that jazz was alive. What an outstanding trio. I can't say enough about this one, other than that the music is so excellent that talking about it is almost useless. You just want to listen to it over and over, and so I have. By far, I'd have to say my favorite song of hers is Labyrinth, although her play with Beethoven and Gershwin is fantastic. Watching her performances with Simon Phllips and Anthony Jackson is also a miracle to behold. I think only the Bad Plus synchronize in such fabulous ways, differently of course but spectacular. She's as much fun to watch as to listen - real passion on those keys.

 

I think one of the best things about being such a flathead as I am, so subject to the enjoyment of just about everything, is that you don't know what you don't know. That is to say, if there's a lot of things you can enjoy without getting bored, you will always have another opportunity to discover something wonderful you just haven't gotten around to yet. For me musically, that has meant Glenn Gould. As many times as I have ignored the award winning documentary about him, I should have guessed that he was phenomenal. And I have been in a lifelong quest for the perfect solo piano artist. I can remember first hearing in my college apartment bedroom Andre Watts playing live Listz Transendental Etude #10 so ballistically he popped two strings on the piano. I can still hear the KUSC announcer saying '..and survive it did.' Yes it stands as probably the greatest piano performance ever in my mind and experience. But actually the recorded album, which I eventually purchased, did not meet a very high standard of production. But this is about Glenn Gould. I can remember literally spending an afternoon holed up in a San Francisco hotel room watching the documentary of his second recording of the Goldberg Variations with commentary describing the difference between the newer 1981 recording and the original 1955 version. Astounding. As wondrous as all that is, it has been the French Suites that has captured my imagination. Am I heading down that corridor towards chamber music, after all that Prokofiev? It may be so. The French Suites stands out. It may be that his Scriabin gets me in the end, but for now it is the French Suites.

 

Steve Coleman and I have a very troublesome relationship. He represents the oversophistication of jazz that has made it fun for musicians and theoreticians, but not for listeners like me. A funny story is that my brother, who used to be a sound engineer, was a friend of Steve Coleman's original pianist Andy Milne. I knew about Milne because he ran clinics in Leimert Park at the World Stage, but I didn't know he had played for Steve Coleman. So I went to see him play at the Mondrian for the debut of his new album Forward to Get Back. My brother couldn't make the gig, but I spoke with Andy after the show. I said, I really like your music. I told him that it reminded me of Steve Coleman without the pretense. He cracked up. Ha ha very funny. Anyway, Steve Coleman did release what I say is one of the greatest rap albums of all time. Steve Coleman & Metric Tale of 3 Cities. Dude. I still don't know who the rappers are because I don't care. I expect that the golden age is over and my expectations and tastes have moved on, but damn when I was holding on the the last breaths there are two albums that stand head and shoulders above the rest. This is the first. Well I may as well mention the other which is Aphrocubist Improvisations from the Broun Fellinis, but that's going a little bit too far back dealing with a hiphop thread that is mostly dead. Nevertheless, more than even Buckshot LeFonque, A Tale of 3 Cities is the stand out, last stand standard of the most righteous genre of hiphop, serious lyrical force backed up with funky jazz. This is the last and greatest, right here. Get it if you can find it.

 

There is one last thing to say here and I'm not exactly sure how to say it because on one hand it is very conventional wisdom to say that Radiohead is one of the greatest rock bands ever. And it is also quite conventional to say that OK Computer & Kid A represent them at their most mindblowing and transformative. On the other hand, I like the reggae dub versions of these great songs, for the most part, better than the originals. This album, in addition to being a straight out genius arrangement, holds the distinction as one of the very last CDs I ever went out of my house to shop for. I recall the hybrid store out on the Santa Monica Promenade that let you pick and choose a dozen mp3s and they burned you a disc. But I had to have this entire record. It also bears mentioning that Vitamin String Quartet also Vitamin Dub has done a strikingly awesome cover of Just which is a favorite song of mine to play loud challenging the powers of my subwoofers. Radiodread's version of Airbag had been my daughter's favorite song ever, so it also has to be one of mine.

Nathaniel Rateleiff is, outside of Nancy Wilson, my favorite vocalist ever. I discovered him about 6 years ago. I looked around, bored, for critically acclaimed independent new music. The last time I did that, I found Coldplay. So I was batting 1000. The album cover caught my attention so I gave it a shot. OMG. To this day, I still haven't puzzled out the actual lyrics to half of his songs, but every time I have, it has been rewarding. His music is like nobody else's. It's like bluegrass, but not. Like country but more like western. But that voice. I've never thought I'd seriously consider the genre of 'singer songwriter', but his stuff gets to me. Like an abstract cryptogram of the heart, of suffering and of persistence. Like the souls of Modest Mouse with no need or desire to be stars, but the love of the music just comes through, haunting, vivid, like a bright red rash on the face of a hobo who just fell out of a moving boxcar. This is soul music. Soul music I say. Like Bill Frisell on a lonely day.

 

That's about it. To include more is to go beyond writing about the personal and into more generic music criticism, which I think I've indulged for the last time right here. So let's see. Here are the honorable mentions. Love Stories by Frank McComb, Treat Me Right by Eric Sardinas, Chant Down Babylon the Bob Marley covers by hiphop artists, Dub Chamber 3 by Bill Laswell. Real Enemies by D'Arcy James Argue. All kinds of stuff by Squarepusher, Tycho, Boards of Canada and Big Giant Circles, Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse, Crystal Planet by Joe Satriani and various musics by Gorecki and Elgar.

The Streaming Creek is Drying Up

I have a big enough music library to recognize some dimensions of the market. The recent change in policy by Amazon Music has killed off some of my more interesting selections. I was warned.

My reaction is to spend a bit more money and time on vinyl, and to never again sell a CD. It's tricky to maintain several terabytes of digital music, but the convenience of streaming music is seductive and risky.

For example. I once had but no longer have an album of the Dave Rose Orchestra. This guy recorded 'The Stripper', a classic. You may immediately recognize the music, although not the girl, from this video.

I would be provocative to suggest some censorship is going on. I wouldn't doubt it but I cannot prove it. It makes little difference in a renter's market whose tastes are crowded out. But I suspect that the renter's market is only marginally larger than the buyer's market when it comes to digital goods online, and what's going on is the shrinkage of the renter's market to the minimum. Some understanding of the economics of 'ultimates' and 'superdistribution' is in order here.

The bottom line is that the major cloud providers are out of ideas and can no longer provide cheap or free storage for the long tail of digital goods and streaming services. The internet is no longer and infinite library.

I'm looking forward to TBL's SOLID, and forming some online collectives. Books, movies, and music are disappearing.

The Limits of Funk

About ten years ago I purchased a bass guitar. Like the millions of my generation, I was in rapture to the funk. Something about the music got into my pants and I had to get up and get down on the dance floor. The basslines of my youth are in my limbic brain like a gator in the swamps, a primitive, ancient, irresistible, a beast of prey. In a matter of months I was able to replicate its fundamental simplicity and the staid confines of my suburban bedroom. I never got to master the instrument or any of its greatest triumphs, like the bassline of Glide, but it was remarkable how easy and satisfying some Cameo and Slave were.

It has been quite a while since I've changed the nine volt battery, or even tuned my blue bass. I started with the cello as a youth and my left hand will always be too clumsy for six strings even though I think about my future around campfires plucking the acoustic. Still the basslines call out to me, and I hum internally all the right chords. Some days I think I will never learn anything new, but when I feel confident, I think about making music in my retirement. It's possible I tell myself - the music was always in me. So I think back to the basslines of youth. 1979.

I've always looked up in my life. I had never been satisfied with what is around me. I hate the very idea of feeling limited, claustrophobic amid the mediocrity of everyday life. It grinds me down to short declarative sentences. Somehow I never managed any facility with establishing elaborate friendships. I couldn't perceive my own fellow travelers. I lived for the future, for in the present I was dead, rolling my own boulders uphill, struggling against the brown leather fetters on my feet but still looking forward. I believed in my promise and I never doubted that I deserved better. But I was always conservative. I didn't run and charge and push people aside. I listened to their reasons. I considered the options. I learned the alternatives. I could quote angels and demons alike. I was even-handed and broad minded. I thought that all the winners in the world were so deliberate. I was wrong.

So while I looked forward to the ultrawave, the fusion of new wave and funk, while I listed for the next beat and melody to inspire me, I had to DJ as well. A DJ must spin the music people want to dance to. As I write this today, it never occurred to me to just listen to the radio and write down all of the hits that were playing and buy those records first. I had to look forward. With my passion for the best funk, I couldn't compromise. One Way didn't cut it. I got sick of Skyy.

There was a party in the Mid Wilshire district. Up in the neighborhood of Shatto, north and east of my highschool was an area fraught with libidinous danger in my imagination. The latin girls behind the Shatto Bowl, danced in my fantasies. Inside that bowling alley, many bus transfers from my own neighborhood, there were the eight pound balls I could swing. I bowled a rare 145. I popped on the pinballs in my senior year. And so two years after that in somebody's apartment on Commonwealth Ave, I found myself dancing while somebody else spun the records. The right kind of girls were there, articulate with permed hair in clingy dresses and heels, like the album covers of Chic. I asked and she danced. We spoke and she asked where I was at school. I worked a union job, and I didn't lie about it. She turned her back and left. I was stunned back into my brittle, peasant reality.

If you asked me in the days when I used to care, I would have told you that the next great funk band was going to be Breakwater. They had all of the elements of funk, of space, of dance. Best yet, their album cover was perfect. They made me want to wear yellow boots. They were thematically perfect and their first track was 'Splashdown Time'. Nothing could prepare me for the third track of their debut album. 'Release the Beast'. It was energetic, raw, complex and from my perspective, perfect. I spun it at every party where I was a DJ. I played in the Radio Department at Fedco when demonstrating the most expensive JVC ghetto blasters we sold. It was on all of my mixtapes. But nobody liked it better than 'Ready or Not' from Herbie Hancock. Nobody liked it better than Sister Sledge or Ray Parker. I had to admit that 'For Those Who Like to Groove' was all that, but even Parker's All-American band Raydio got shot down when I played another favorite, "Rock On'. It was as great a frustration as I could possibly imagine.

I studied the grooves. I bought the electronics. I lugged the record crates. I used Discwasher. I cranked my Advents as loud as they could handle and I delivered the all funk I had to offer. I moved the slider and the crowd moved only minimally. They got up but they didn't blow their disco whistles. I was a disabled enabler, a servant to the collective, wanting to dance, willing them to dance, like all the producers in Hollywood, guessing and second guessing the public mind. I was a 19 year old, trapped beneath my fro learning the limits of funk. It was painful. It was the end of the 70s. I was on the last legs of the first journey into the dark matter between the star souls of the billions, in my corner of the galaxy, trying to communicate through somebody else's music.

I'm listening to Boogie Oogie Oogie right now through Amazon Music. I know Taste of Honey made the hit. This version is by GQ. I never knew they recorded it. GQ was a better band but they didn't make it pop. Their disappointment must be like mine, like yours. Like every voice spoken into the space between humans and not quite heard right. Get on up on the floor. Shake it. It's alright. Boogie. Ugh! Sooner or later, we just can't boogie no more.

Giant Steps

It's strange that in jazz I found many things and tried many ways to explain those things. In the end it was all somewhat ineffable, like the way you read some stranger's face for a smile. You don't know enough about their smiles to know exactly what it means. So I talk about a song and I watch people smile or bob their head or close their eyes. Something is recognized, something human, but to be more precise requires magic.

Giant Steps is a song I didn't know that I knew. I heard it throughout my youth without listening. It means jazz profundity of some sort I cannot recall without re-hearing Countdown. And now that I am this moment it echoes more in memory exactly as the song plays. Finally at the end I get it in full flavor, but only for that last moment. Then the genie of YouTube playing on a hidden browser tab takes me to Equinox, another song I knew but didn't know that I knew.

Fables of Faubus is the title of a journal entry and a cassette tape recording I made in my late 20s. There is a dimension of unknowing when you are not a musician. When a piece of music is riveting, you don't know necessarily if it's the performance or the music itself. You experience the complexity in the single dimension of hearing, which again is different from listening. Some music demands that you listen, and musicians in learning must listen. I know that during that period when I made jazz recordings, I was needing the background material in order to speak the metalanguage of jazz appreciation, so I was listening intently and searching for things to experience. Somewhere there is a journal entry that will take me back, but right now I'm not going to look for that song in my library.

Suddenly I am reminded of you, my friend, and it literally brings a tear. Your library is immense and your mind so fertile and sharp. Where will it all go, and who will be able to know the way you do when you are gone?

When I learned how to grill chicken, a skill my wife would have me know as our children reached kindergarten age, I began handling my tongs and timing on Saturday afternoons to the tempo of Coltrane's Giant Steps. It finally coalesced in my subconscious as the songs progressed from track one of the compact disc how quickly I should return to the grill and turn the bird. In this moment I cannot reproduce that sense, but it was my first thought as I gathered thoughts for writing about listening and Coltrane.

Finally, when my father comes to visit, it is Coltrane and Miles Davis that he must hear. Anything else issuing from my hi-fi is a waste of his time. He lives in that era of jazz seriousness and suffering. The very hint of a smile in Satchmo's ourvre makes him angry, and Wynton Marsalis makes him sick. I do know my father's smile and his frown as well...

Obligatory Seriousness on Hiphop & Black Culture

Hiphop has been a net positive. There’s no way I could say that any of our lives would be richer if hiphop never existed. There has been too much brilliant innovation. But also hiphop is folk music, and folk are not always enlightened. I would not venture to say that any kind of folk music is a cause so much as an effect. Your mind doesn’t play tricks on you just because you listen to Ghetto Boys. That’s their confession, their life, their reality.

I take a much broader view of black culture in America. Hiphop may have all the attention of somebody, but somebody ain’t everybody. Jazz, Gospel, R&B, Blues and Hiphop are all creations in this broad culture, and anybody that knows that kind of music (IE can create it) knows that there are many different styles in all that. So I object to the idea that Hiphop owns ‘black culture’. Because most everything I know about hiphop is the hiphop of another time.

As for what is negative and positive in ‘black culture’, I can only presume that one means what are good and bad results of the choices black individuals make, and how do they explain themselves. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I leaned on Marvin Gaye and Al Greene to get the attention of the woman I married, and I love renting convertible sports cars and blasting Bruno Mars. But my intent was there before those songs ever existed. So a lot of people get into a kind of chicken and egg loop here, but I try not to. I’ve heard people say that if it wasn’t for movies and restaurants, they would never know what to do on a date. If it weren’t for Prince, 1 million babies wouldn’t be born. And yet that’s not a machine. You can’t just play Nelly on a hot night and guarantee that women will take off all their clothes. And if you listen to DMX, he’s telling you straight up that you aint strong enough. That’s a self-conscious distance between even the studio gangsta and his audience. Hiphop, especially gangsta is always reminding its audience who is real and who is not. Hiphop is smart enough to recognize it’s not causality. So anybody who takes it that seriously is either fooling themselves or actually stupid.

So of course there are fools and idiots everywhere. And yes we live in a society that has industries that capitalize on the weaknesses of fools and idiots. I’m just not so sure we can actually call that culture. There is not so much one should expect from folk music, folk dress, folk dialect, folk cooking anywhere in the world, especially when it’s in a consumer society aimed at its fools and idiots.

Individuals will always find a need to express themselves. In the English speaking world, most all poetry has gone into remission except for the 4/4 time rhymed couplets of most hiphop. I think if you give American culture and the English language the respect it deserves, it will be easy to find hiphop and poetry capable of expressing virtue, elegance and intelligence. If hiphop never did that, we could all write it off. But it did. For the world, and it probably will again.

 

Nathaniel Rateliff

Nathaniel Rateliff is the greatest American singer alive today. It might take you a while to find that out if your first exposure to him is his new album with his new band, The Night Sweats. You've got to start somewhere. 

I first heard Rateliff about five years ago. His album, "In Memory of Loss" was listed as one of the best of the year on Amazon. I bought it and found it miraculous. It took about four listenings until I could figure out what was going on. There were lyrics that didn't rhyme and songs that seemed to end before they were over. There were pauses and rhythms that stepped out of time. There was singing that sounded like talking, like the man was sitting just on the other side of a dying campfire with his guitar telling you the saddest story you ever heard. He has all of your attention, and then you realize you are listening to a simple marvel. Songs. Something mournful that seeps warmly into your bones like soup with a spice you can't identify but know like the memory of an old uncle's boots.

Listening to Rateliff is like listening to a man beyond pretense. It is music without artifice. its only embellishment is its own deep soul, plaintive power and lonesome wailing. It has a purity. It makes you say yes that's exactly how a harmonica should sound right there. 

One day I'm going to come back and perfectly describe Rateliff, but perfect is the enemy of good. In the meantime I'm going to just leave you with his lyrics.

 

When you get tired of wings that carry you nowhere
You stretch out your arms to see if the wind will blow you over
It seems like it's tightening the line in the crease of your shoulder
But never enough to get off the ground
Remember the good work you done

 

A Rude Review of National Anthems

A few years ago I found myself comparing women singing Christmas songs. I started and I couldn't stop, not even for Celine Dion. Now I find myself listening to national anthems and I have to be judgmental.
 
Brazil
This is actually a marvelous song. I find the lyrics admirable and that music a perfect mix of martial and lyrical. 

Finland
It's smooth and sounds like it should be sung in church. I like it very much. Not bad at all.

Czeck Republic
Kind of sing-songy and romantic. It sounds like it could be the theme for a Judy Garland movie. I just see a woman in a long dress singing on top of a mountain meadow.

Sweden
No. Puts me to sleep. Something's just ineffably wrong with it. 

Portugal
Dignified for sure, in a kind of low key way. Not bad.

Korea
That's immediately sounding like a national anthem. Magnificent, florid lyrics with drama. Still, why do they have to sing the same thing three times?

Ukraine
This is one of my favorites. Just soaring dramatic and lyrics so well comported to the melody. A little weird at the end.

Chile
OK This one sounds like circus music. Ick. Stretching out simple words over long notes. Rep

Cuba
Can you say Oompa? Yuk. It just evokes a parade of strutting teenagers. Sad. Just sad.

Croatia
Romantic and prideful, understated and dignified. Lyrics about oak trees and mountains. Gotta love it. 

Netherlands
It's difficult for me to be cool with songs about blood. War I can deal with, just the word 'blood' doesn't work for me. It's a bit of a dirge this one. Dignified for sure, but a little on the churchy side. 

Brunei
I'm kind of sure I got a bad version of this. Sounds like they had too many 13 year old kids singing in it. Kind of directionless music and phrasing. 

Germany
This is actually one of the greatest anthems out there. Catchy and magnificent at once. Gets to you. I've heard a number of arrangements of this so it's probably not fair to those others I've heard only this time. 

France
Speaking of blood. France has the the most disturbing lyrics of all. It's hard to get over that. But you've got to give them a hat tip for the music. It couldn't be much of anything else but a national anthem.

India
It works. Miraculously this has India all over it. Just a droning kind of drug of a song, puts me into a trance.

Russia
The Russian national anthem is probably the greatest of them all. It just begs to be sung by masses of men and women. Swelling bosoms from left to right. Even in its quiet moments it never loses track of the victorious strains. Poetic throughout and just flat glorious. 

Japan
OK I just don't like this. It is absolutely very Japanese and has a kind of unapproachably haunting beauty, but it's a tone poem, not an anthem. 

China
Scary confidence in that choppy lyricism. Sophisticated for certain but bloody again. Yike. 

Bangladesh
After listening to the marching Chinese, the fragrance of mango groves is a welcome respite. Still, I don't get it. Very villagey sounding. 

Nepal
Wonderful. A perfect mix for a small country. 

Canada
Oh! When done right, this is bloody brilliant. Definitely in the top ten.

Italy
I hate the arrangement I'm listening to. I'm thinking there must be a version that doesn't make it sound like a circus march, but maybe not.
 
South Africa
Hard for me to be objective about this one. Like Germany, England and Russia, I've known this one for a while and hummed it often. Corny. It grows on you.

Turkey
The blood in this one is nicely sculpted. But like the language, it's quirky and unsubtle. 

Greece
Gotta love the lyrics to this one. Hard to beat. Of all the repetitive anthems, I suppose these are the least tedious. 

Azerbaijan
Why does this sound like the overture to an epic black and white movie made in 1925? Yike. Self importantly beautiful.

Spain
The most tortured lyrics ruin a song that.. well, I'd just like to hear the instrumental version. Just too monosyllabic. No flow whatsoever.

Bulgaria
Deliciously dramatic. And oh those minor keys! Mother give us manly strength. What a charmingly magnificent song. This is what a national anthem should be.

Dominican Republic
Of all the Latin nations, these guys have done it right. Booyah. Thank you. I was beginning to think Spanish was a language just incompatible with a properly lyrical anthem. 

UK
Yeah this one works. You kind of get the idea that they might have invented the very idea of a national anthem. Not that I'm biased or anything. Heh. 

US
Often misunderstood, but bloody brilliant when done right. Definitely in the top five.

Egypt
Very simple and elegant. I have a feeling that the lyrics, which I don't have, would make it suck, but the instrumental is pretty good. 

East Germany
You're not likely to hear this one anytime soon, but if you get the chance, it's gorgeous. Just wow. 

Cote D'Ivoire
A proper anthem. Straightforward, crisp and clean.

Ethiopia
Sounds just like music from a great John Ford movie. Sleepy in the middle and gets lost a bit, but recovers nicely. 

Iran
A stately march, but it doesn't go anywhere musically. Like they wanted to keep it down to the fewest notes possible. 

Iraq
Very Soviet. Holy smokes. Am I listening to the right version? I can see the warheads on parade. 

Australia
A sweet combination of modesty and pomposity. Starts off meek then punches you in the jaw. It works.

 OK that's enough. 

Apple Beats

The purchase of Beats by Apple is such an obvious and welcome development, I'm only really surprised that in the end it was Beats. As an ex-audiophile, I have been waiting for this move for quite some time and what sticks out in my mind primarily is the manufacturing facilities that this purchase entails. 

Apple already has made the claim that it is one of the world's largest producers of small magnets of the sort required for headphones. Beats started day one with the premise that most consumer headphones were ridiculous and unable to reproduce the serious bass a studio musician in hiphop needs to hear. Dre would know. More than any other figure, he made the leap from music to film and is basically the man who got hiphop soundtracks in hundreds of films starting in the mid 90s. By the time Space Jam made it all silly in 1998, Dre was already floating in millions. And ultimately Beats have been a huge success in the market.

So how seriously is Apple going to take the potential for a new digital standard and higher quality audio electronics in its product offerings? I find it difficult to believe that the iTunes store would offer FLAC over its own AAC format at a premium price, but it could happen. I find it less difficult to believe that Apple would move towards hi-fidelity electronics attached to Apple TV and the Mac Pro. Once again, Apple is capable of being everything Sony once was when it comes to manufacturing consumer electronics. Some of that *must* be high end. 

Bang & Olafson, Jambox, Beats and a host of other manufacturers have made serious middlebrow efforts to capture the outputs of the revolution in digital music that is sourced from iPhones and iPods. The markup on some of these products is ridiculous. In that crowded market, Beats subsumed into Apple can win big. 

So now we have to start dealing with Apple like Kodak. If Kodak film begat a whole ecosystem of products, so will Apple digital music. None of this seemed probable in 1995. It is now inevitable. Too bad for Sonos and Nest.

Ten Albums I Still Play

I bought my first LP when I was about 19. I can't remember what it was, but a good bet would be that it was either Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut or Spyro Gyra's Morning Dance. The first 45 I bought was EWF's "Getaway" and the first pop songs whose words I memorized were Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On", "The Bells" by Originals  and "Ball of Confusion" by The Temptations. Of all those songs and music I've purchased over my lifetime, there are some that I've had for many years and still play now.

1. Moonlight Sonata
When I moved to Brooklyn from LA, I began a nightly ritual that helped me sleep despite the D Train's rumbling reminding me of earthquakes. The first would be that I would watch Charlie Rose on my 9 inch black and white television, the second would be that I would play Maurizio Pollini's version on Deutche Grammophone. 

2. Material - Hallucination Engine
This is most likely my favorite album of all time. I never ever tire of it. If my personality were a five sided two dimensional object, this album would represent a full 20% of me. If I were HAL and you unplugged my mind, the last thing I would sing would be this album's version of Naima. 

3. Synergy - Sequencer
Of all the electronic synthesizer music in my world, this album remains singular. More than Switched on Bach, more than anything by Billy Preston or Stevie Wonder. 

4. Steely Dan - Aja
The first time I heard Aja was in an Avis Rent-A-Car office at the San Jose Airport the year that it came out. I had heard that it was the jazzyest album he had done, and unlike everybody else who was a big fan, I hadn't run out to get it. But the title cut seeped into my consciousness while I was waiting in line, and suddenly I just knew this was it. 

5. Windham Hill - Sampler 84
There's something about this album that I keep coming back to. Well, everything. I was on a quest for the soundtrack of my new life as the mellow yuppie programmer I believed myself to be. This was my album. My generation's Montovani.

6. Bobby McFerrin - Beyond Words
The first time I heard this album, coincidentally, was on an airplane flight. It was literally on the plane's jukebox. I was stunned, floored, blown away. What McFerrin and Chick Corea did on this album was singularly profound, and I think it's one of the greatest treats in music that most people don't know about. It is joyful music that defies the misery of our age. 

7. Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West
I think most people will agree that this is probably one of the greatest rock albums of the last 20 years. It still works. I still gravitate to it. If you haven't seen the documentary, please do.

8. The Bad Plus - Best of
Well, I made this album myself because I love this group and I just had to have a collection to play in my truck. It includes all of their popular covers and my other favorites. 

9. Stanley Clarke Band - The Stanley Clarke Band
This is the newest album in the collection here. Just three years old, but I play it end to end all the time.

10. Radiohead - Best of
My favorite Radiohead songs are almost all covers. So yeah, I made a mix of my favorite cuts which include some of the originals and covers by Vitamins and Radiodread. Awesome. 

Artificial Black Scarcity

This morning I'm listening to Natalie Cole and remembering that both Stephanie Mills and Ren Woods launched their singing careers through their association with the Broadway production of The Wiz. Later, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russel, Richard Pryor and of course Diana Ross burnished their careers in association with this same old American standard, blackified version. 

Whenever I listen to black music of the Seventies (including that which I just immersed myself finally having viewed Jamie Foxx' extraordinary portrayal in the film 'Ray'), I am reminded of how it emphasized the 'natural'. Very much like with Ray Charles, Earth Wind and Fire hit upon an innovative combination of more basic Negro styles and combined them with state of the art recording techniques into something nobody had ever heard before. The early EWF, and their live performances require my best ear to hear the fundaments of the blues. But peppered through all of this modern combinatorial is the gruff punctuation of huffs, puffs, grunts, wails, screams, moans and groans. It seems at times that they were almost afraid to leave any air dead for mere virtuoso instrumentalism unless it was a bass break. 

It couldn't be more simple then for all this ceiling bashing breakthrough talent to redefine American culture. The ambition had to be expressed in every dimension, and the cultural window planks could not stop zombie black music from breaking into the big house and infecting everyone with big funky bites of rhythm and blues. It's rather easy to see in retrospect, and we are greatly fortunate that the extraordinary shoulders of those talented pioneers were more than broad and strong enough to bear the scrutiny. But was it our Black?

It sounds to me that Natalie Cole is singing to me. But surely when I first heard her I thought she was singing to black men in the same way surely Marvin Gaye was singing to black women. It was nearly impossible to consider that they were 'universal' artists. No, we were sure that they were our heroes alone. It wasn't love, it was black love - the kind of love the whole world was missing until we showed 'em. We alone were keeping it real and the rest of the world's pulsations were pallid imitations.. But now we can't be so sure. I certainly am not going to assert that all that emoting was much more than what got recorded, not that it was what the Negro was or a complete well-balanced accounting of his culture. 

So it occurs to me that we black Americans latched onto what was made available through markets and appropriated it as our own, thinking it rare and precious and unique - even knowing it was the tip of our own iceberg of culture. Nothing burst this wide open so much as the advent of post-soul, when finally my generation was able to listen to our own music. Hiphop expressed everything else left out that soul, jazz, blues, r&b and gospel didn't cover, and the lid was off for being cool and proper. And still, hiphop reflected that same artificial scarcity. Hiphop did what it could - but it was what got recorded, it wasn't a complete well-balanced accounting of black post-soul culture. 

The other day I heard (in GTA5's Los Santos) NWA's Appetite for Destruction, and that still sounds to me like the bones upon which rap is built. My colleagues in black cultural criticism might find my opinion reductive but it seems to me that amongst the other black styles of music, along with gospel, hiphop has said the least. In other words, by being very specific and thus being rare its influence is overrated as compared to the breadth of actual black American experience and culture. No other form of black American music has been so specific about its blues. Snoop has got it down to an area code in the LBC, and a generation of producers shout out to each other by name. 

Ultimately it is the test of time which will show what matters and is representative, but I think that is something that the vast majority of commercial cultural production does not serve. The rarity of the good stuff does not make it literature, and the artificial scarcity of black cultural productions should not necessarily make black Americans special beneficiaries. We've just cherished any drink in the desert, that doesn't make it fine wine.

I feel very particular to Ren Woods and Courtney Pine and Shinehead. There are many musical artists who spoke to me uniquely and it felt like a  black thing and then they disappeared. Who can say how universal any of that was? 

 

Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis

The more you listen to the lyrics, the more you wonder how he got a chorus to agree the world truly needed to hear these words.

On the other hand, perhaps he believed his music was being evaluated for secret messages to the black underground.

Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar

Simple

This is definitely an album worth getting. DP puts together the best aspects of Squarepusher trimmed down and Daft Punk funked up. It is signature work from the sountracker of Fez. If you liked Fez and wished it wasn't so dainty all the time, this album satisfies with space operatics and funk ovations. If Skrillex had a bit more composition chops and had worked longer at keyboard skills, this is what he'd sound like when writing for a small audience instead of a drunk crowd. Bam.

 

Deep

This is my second Disasterpeace, but I have been listening for 30 years. I'll tell you what's going on in this generation, because I have three kids about 16, 18, 19 years old. People in this generation are recognizing that not everything great is new, and not everything old has been perfected. And so they are a generation with the right attitude about retro. It's not about retro for kitsch sake, it's about making classic what was yesterday's new. This album, speaking with the Fez album in mind as well, creates what had yet to be created when the first synth pioneers blew our minds. If you can remember the work of Larry Fast and Walter Carlos and the synth playing in Queen, Mannheim Steamroller, Steve Miller and The Alan Parsons Project, you know that a revolution was afoot. But the more popular rockers who dabbled, especially during the New Wave, never quite achieved so much outside of the baselines. Disasterpeace composes that sweet choppy sequencer with melodic coherence and fury. When synthesizer licks were just licks approaching music we could groove on the break, but these are full songs. Songs to imagine space travel by. Songs to program computers by. Songs to turn off the sound and watch motorcycle racing by. They are engaging without being overwhelming. They are witty and sharp.

A Musical Psychological Test

Listen to this music. What does it make you think?

Chris Bowen: First Trumpet

Jazz and the City

It has been a long time since I've heard any really good jazz and if I hadn't stopped spontaneously by Cleopatra's Needle in NYC this week, the time would have been longer. And you would have thought that wouldn't be the case considering the legends and veues I attended.

My first stop of the three was at the Village Vanguard to see Jeff Tain Watts. Tain has the problem all jazz drummers have, personality. Personality is supposed to be interspersed in the spaces between notes. But when it comes out ahead and behind accompanying musicians and tends to dominate, well that's not as musical as it should be. The evening was a lesson in virtuosity, of fast and furious energy - like when my son puts Guitar Hero on extreme and plays the fastest practice track. Sometimes it can be impressive, and that's what I witnessed. But it's a lot better if the music can be enjoyed.

I suppose I will always remember the evening by the expressions on Tain's droopy eyelids. Most of the time I watched the miraculous ability he has to drum up a perfect storm with an absolute Sphinx expression of emotionless dread. It was as if he had mastered the ability to resist the spirit within himself that moved his arms and legs around the kit. Percussion was happening around him, this Buddha, but he was somewhere else. Not tranquil but zombified sleep with eyes open. But then the magic would happen and in the moment of synchronicity Tain would come alive and do that thing, you know, that jazz musicians are supposed to do which is collaborate in the swinging mood. He would smile and then the cymbals would dance. 

The problem of course is that as soon as the horn guy got off the stage and it was time for improvisation, the bassist and the piano player dropped into the background functionally, struggling as they did with the printed music on pages in front of them. Hell is being Tain's piano player, and homeboy was in the seventh level. 

--

The Blue Note is another place, that for some reason I never got a chance to visit when I actually lived in NYC. But this time I had Rachelle Ferrell and chicken wings as she took the masses into the opiates of infinite possibilities.

I didn't know who she was. Now I know. She is the majestic aftermath of an emotional trainwreck, or perhaps shipwreck or better yet spacewreck. Imagine the matter-scatter of a collision between a gossamere solar powered butterfly-ship on kilometer long and a radioactive cobalt asteroid. What we watched was the slow motion spinning of the flinty splinters finding a new orbit and occasionally reflecting starlight. 

It's rather sad to see five men trying so hard to make waffles out of the spaghetti of Ferrell's soul. The woman refused to end the song as she squeezed every last possible intimate whisper on the final notes. After three painfully drawn out endings, the audience began clapping sooner, without waiting for the absent physical clues. After Tain, though, it was refreshing to groove in a familiar beat and have the comfort of listening to a song, rather than a physics experiment. 

Ferrell, whom I've never heard before - even her classics, has got the voice in the lower registers that I missed from NDegeOcello without the crimson political speech, but it too comes with its own gravity well of emotional baggage. It doesn't work. It's too late. Ferrell's mania would be appropriate for a wartime audience in a Blitz basement, but only serves as a soundtrack for the irony of smartphone protesters seeking healing. It was a night of moonbeams and invocations of spirits and unicorns for grownups. 

On my way out the door, I caught Ferrell and another woman in the sort of embrace usually reserved for funerals. It's too bad she didn't sing the actual blues. 

---

My cousin emoted the proper 'deep' and 'spiritual' refrain and the three of us (hmm now isn't that a mystery) headed uptown to Cleopatra's Needle which was convenient to my hotel. 

Now I know where jazz lives in New York. 

Perhaps it is because there is something ephemeral about the use of classical tools in the hands of youth, like inheriting at long last Dad's Mercedes that makes for the respect of the form. But a dozen anonymous young musicians just pwned all of the grizzled vet of the prior experiences with renditions of standards that just kick the self-serving sorrow of the elder two into the bottomless cistern. This Is Jazz! they proclaimed, and they made it so.

There were there were six at the level of outstanding. The first was the young lady in the green turtleneck who is on her way to reminding us what the vibraphone is all about. She plays it with a jazz piano sensibility that is uncanny and melodic. There is almost nothing to compare it to, what a fabulous invention.

The young singer has cloned off Ella Fitzgerald - and it is something she will hear the rest of her days so long as she only dresses like and is determined to have nothing else in common with Erika Badu but complexion. I sat there with my jaw dropped. The lady has power. I sat for 100 minutes with Farrell waiting for her to belt a note. I got two notes per hour. Here, it just kept coming, washing over us in velvet waves. You wish that there were somebody anywhere on the planet who could write her new lyrics. As well as she could scat, nothing could bring us closer to the truth of the torch than the ballads crying out to be carried on her voice. I must find and name this woman because we have not heard this voice in a generation. And my God she not only works the band but she works a pair of denim jeans like a super model. Everybody needs to know her before she becomes Irene Cara.

The piano player here with the bushy eyebrows and the dynamic shoulders remembers that jazz is a conversation best held by those who are not merely verbose but witty and wise. He has the of vocabulary and the humility not to make it about himself but man... smart fingers, smart fingers. He did what homebot at the Vanguard never once managed to pull off, switched up the tempo a measure and took us down a salsa path when the moment was spicy and off atonal when the groove required it, and yes echoed the melody. It's the interplay, that's what the swing is all about brother. Thank you. Thank you.

Sharp. Bright. And that incredible thing she does with her tongue. Take your mind to the kung fu ballistics of the first Kill Bill and the girl with the flying chain in the Tokyo nightclub and imagine all of the acrobatic martial art converted into a trumpet solo. The young lady who tore the house down wore red. Her energy is fierce dynamic precision. It is so distinct that it makes almost every other jazz soloist sound overblown and manic, sweaty and profane. Of all the performers passing through the jam session that Saturday morning, her style is the most complete. She is phenomenal.

And then there was the big bad wolf. At first I wasn't sure, but then I began to be convinced and then in a moment I knew it was true. The man on the sax was bored with the standard scale and did everything in the parallel off-kilter key AND improvized like Coltrane with chord changes in every arpeggio AND hit high registers with blinding speed and accuracy. The man was thinking so incredibly quickly that it was scary - when it worked. Lightning only has to strike once. Ouch.

The clarinet has been punked and we all know it. G Who Must Not Be Named now has a nemesis. Thank God for The Kid. He can bring the clarinet back to the front of a jazz band doing the straight ahead thing with the sort of omniverous competency of a true band leader. He plays all the angles swiftly, never much changing tempo though, and he too is thinking quickly. You could tell everybody's comfortable with him in the lead. Nicely done, son. 

There were more. The silky smooth trumpet girl in demin with the tone to match Clifford, the almost persnickety well groomed dude who reminded me of a younger me who had a bad night on his vintage trumpet, the dude on the 'bone who was doing something squeaky weird on the high notes and trying to make it into a style, the elbow flying drummer nicely banging, the competent bassist who did some mind-bending chord fingering, the redhead on the trumpet just slightly behind the beat who could do some really killer stuff when he gets his other training blended well into straight ahead. 

It was a remarkable night of music - one I will never forget. Much props to my cousin and R, for the suggestion to go uptown.

Tom Lehrer & Clinton Ford

Just listening. 

Jimmy Webb on the Rdio

I have just discovered this dude cruising the new streaming music service 'Rdio'. Rdio is making me qualify all of my previous praise for Spotify. Spotify is great if you know what you want, but absolutely lousy for streaming radio. Let me put it this way. I spent (wasted) two hours listening to Spotify's jazz radio yesterday and I heard about five different artists. (Norah Jones, Miles Davis, John Coletrane, Duke Ellington and Nat Cole). That's a 12 year old's list.

My old existential partner Cuda Lee Brown gave me the quick digits 'rdio > spotify'. Damn right!

So I Rdio some Sergio Mendez, and it's groovy. Some of Brasil 66' Beatles covers are a little tiresome but they have some delightful period music. Best hippie music ever - you can hear the sensibility of Pop Art just before it ran off the rails into delirium. Specifically, the hilarious 'Malibu U' and the elegaic 'The Island'. My favorite is 'Casa Forte' which sounds rather like early EWF with beautiful and uplifting vocal harmonies. You just don't hear men and women singing together anymore in America, unless you're in church. 

Then I hear 'Wichita Lineman' which I recognized by the chorus but never knew the name. So I check out the YouTube of Glenn Campbell and instantly I see this guy who strikes me as the superstar that might have been. Weird. How does it happen that I'm digging on Glenn Campbell? He's right on the edge of being pure commercial and something else, very original with a bit too much self-respect for the era. 

But it's the song of course, and it turns out that the author is Jimmy Webb. Hot damn. I didn't know 'Galveston' but I did know 'MacArthur Park' - hell everybody does. And then blam. I walk into his album 'And So: On'. There's a cut on it called 'Highpockets' that is just got me blown away and it hits me in a minute. 

Jimmy Webb is the inspiration for everything Steely Dan became.

'And So: On' variously sounds like the blueprint for Steely Dan, the precursor to Return to Forever's romantic stuff and like the soundtrack for Billy Jack. But Webb can actually sing so it sounds better than most of the 70s stuff I recall. Is this the reason the Fifth Dimension albums always disappointed me? Because all their best stuff was Jimmy Webb? Sounds like it to me. I'm wishing to get the lyrics for all of his stuff. 

 

Ponta de Areia

All my life until this moment, I thought this song was first and only recorded by Earth Wind and Fire.

#NowPlaying Milton Nascimento – Ponta De Areia on @Spotify

http://open.spotify.com/track/4QuauNSOi3VvHcVl3MPS1H

#NowPlaying Wayne Shorter – Ponta De Areia on @Spotify

http://open.spotify.com/track/241a7EFlsfQpggghbM6t28

#NowPlaying The Whiffenpoofs – Ponta de Areia on @Spotify

http://open.spotify.com/track/3O3g8IU3Rn0S3nqz7ER1xs

 

 

 

Back on the Block - The Gospel of 1989

An everlasting omnipresence is my present
State of being, seeing the unpleasant
Sight of righteous souls live like peasants
The mind stunts growth in adolescence
My insight enables me to enlight
The weakest of minds, and I put em in flight
As I transcend, a-scend or de-scend
Re-create, re-incarnate and re-send
The powerful spirits of our ancestors
For those that don't know how God blessed us
Because man messed up, the media dressed up
Lies perpetrated as truth, and it left us
Confused, but I've seen it all before
From Babylon to the Third World War
I'm more than a man, I'm more like an entity
Back on the block, and this time my identity
Is the Dude

I'm listening to this album and it strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that somebody like me took just a bit too seriously. Yeah I knew it was fun. Fun like coming out a Spike Lee movie and fronting. At this distance it marks the era properly - just a few years after the invention of the term 'African American' at the birth of multiculturalism and Afrocentrism and the death of Soul. Mark Anthony Neal writes of the Post-Soul Generation. I mark Back on the Block as the divider.

As a milestone this Quincy Jones album cannot be denied and I'm coming to think of it as the last 'black cast' event. The moment at which the baton was passed from the elders of the prior forms to the new jacks. The title track could stand as the last time that Jesse Jackson was literally given the last word. The album won album of the year and seven Grammys, reprised some popular cuts redone in the double cut percussion of the new jack swing.

I can remember the end of the Apartheid Era and the beginning of American gospel choirs singing as if they were in the cast of Sarafina! There is that bold new confidence in this album, this becoming emblematic of the potential of that thing we called the New World Afrikan Diaspora. I can remember wincing at the possible mispronounciation of Dizzy Gillespie's name by Big Daddy Kane in his introduction to the cover of Zawinul's Birdland, did he or did he not drop the baton? It had to have that iconic perfection. 

Alas poor Tevin Campbell. It was impossible for the kid to compete with the big boys in the market. It's a joy to hear that innocence, but despite the superstar backing, he couldn't compete with the new jacks coming out of Philly, the East Coast Family. 

But what an album.

Nick & Val

If you want to get married today, chances are that the romantic songs you want played at your wedding were written yesterday. Of course Mendelssohn's Wedding March was written over 160 years ago and Wagner's was written just a few years later. But most of the folk you and I know would like to include a bit of the music they fell in love to.

The passing of Nick Ashford doesn't prompt my usual deadpan. And yet I tried to love them as performers more than they deserved. They wrote great songs, some of my favorites for the Brothers Johnson, but their own productions all seemed to drag on too long. They were not the singers you wanted to be, they were the lovers you wanted to be.

Better than Peaches & Herb, better the Captain & Tenille, better than Patti Austin & James Ingram, better than Rick James & Teena Marie, Nick & Val were tops. The world has only produced two possibly superior duets and that would be Gaye &Terrell and  Flack & Hathaway.

Ndugu

Never to be ignored again.

Get Up & Do My Thang

There's so much I can say about this video; it captures the energy and spirit of a time when there was so much more healthy creativity in the pop world. I've been chasing down the original System (Don't Disturb This Groove, You Are In My System) and then moved down the timeline towards that renaissance in Hiphop that became the New Jack Swing. 1988-90 were the landmark years. Do The Right Thing. (Redhead Kingpin too). Bobby Brown. Robert Townsend. Magic Johnson. Robin Harris. Guy. De La Soul. Queen Latifa. BDP. Public Enemy. Kwame. Janet. EPMD. Beastie Boys. NWA. Eric B & Rakim. LL Cool J. Rob Base. Salt n Pepa. Self-Destruction. Soul II Soul. Tracy Chapman. Take 6. Biz Markie.

Reggie Watts

I couldn't make this up. What if you had an entertainer who was a combination of Bobby McFerrin, Robin Williams, Tay Zonday, Bobcat Goldthwaite and Stephen Wright? You'd have Reggie Watts on a bad day. This man is completely and totally spontaneous - even moreso than Eddie Izzard, but without Williams' mania. OK. Enough 'splaining. Just check this out. 

A Few of My Favorite Jazz Things

At some point I am going to redesign or slightly modify Cobb to take into consideration the two or three latest Epicurean interests, music, coding and reading. The reading thing is mostly done, but I hope to get something in Google plus that can make for instant book clubs. After all, I'm really only interested in what I'm reading now.

But this week I'm in a listening mood and am experiencing music in a magical way in the spirit of both Recovery and Discovery, thanks to the attorneys over at Spotify who have managed to get the music I know into the hands of programmers who can finally do the right thing we have been waiting for since the dawn of Napster. 

My first musical surprise came as I was listening to Billy Cobham. Now Cobham, if you don't know, is a jazz drummer who would be something of a star if it weren't for the superstars of fusion. He's at one remove, in my way of thinking, from Lenny White, but still better from my point of view than Alphonse Mouzon. I first encountered Cobham when I was about 19 or 20 and trying to get my first grip on jazz as a more serious listener. At the very same time, I was sucked into the vortex of Stanley Clarke. But Cobham had an album out there in collaboration with several other musicians I did not know called Alivemotherforya. And I did play "Anteres" to death on my newly purchased Walkman. So I'm looking for that album last night and I come across his top hits according to Spotify. First cut, meh. Second cut 'Red Baron', holy heart murmer. It's 'Words of Advice' from my favorite album of all time.  Stunning.

I leave it on the Cobham channel and now and then I get music that pulls me away from the work I'm doing. I listen to a lot of music while I write or code or eat or clean up my room or drive, and only rarely is it so dense and beautiful that I simply must pay attention. Now I have some Billy Cobham, an artist who is hard to know. 

I should say as well, that I was in the mode to chase down some Mahavishnu stuff. Just previously, on Thursday as a matter of fact, I found multiple versions of 'No Mystery' which is becoming my favorite song from RTF, even though nothing will ever replace 'Romantic Warrior'. And as usual, 'Birds of Fire' does almost nothing for me. So I'm thinking that there's a trend here. There is no doubt that if I look up Bobby McFerrin, the number one hit will be 'Dont Worry, Be Happy' which is about as unrepresentative of his work as possible. But let's forget Mahavishnu's orbit for a moment so I can give some due to Bobby. (Except to note the fusion connection with Chick Corea)

First of all, check out this video and understand the spirit of the man. If you did watch the entire thing, that's actually enough to give you a clue as to what his music is like these days. You'll hardly make a better musical investment than listening to Beyond Words, his breakthrough album of 2002 which completely blew my mind. 

For Christmas, I got *the* boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald live in LA back in 65 I think it was. Stunning performances. I wore out 77 tracks in a month and a half. Gotta bring that up again... 

 

The Rock I Don't Get

I grew up in an era called 'crossover'. It was the early 70s, before America's bicentennial when every public mural had different color hands shaking. The years presaged the Rise of Lionel Ritchie and all the mediocre goodness that ensued. At some point I might be forgiven for hanging out with the sort of kids that liked Jackson Brown and The Eagles, instead of Aerosmith and Foghat, but it all sounded foreign to the rhythms of my blues. 

Over the years, I have participated in what I call Recovery, which is essentially feeding my adult mind with those things that perplexed me as a youth. It's one of the dualistic aspects of a rather persistent memory. More often than not there are fine rewards to grasping the subtlety of some arcane bit of music that escaped my younger ears. Sometimes I discover that there is basically no sense to be made of that stuff. 

On the nonsense front we have matters like the lyrics of McArthur Park, the proferred profundity of Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder, and the all the greatness that is supposed to be the stylings of Eric Clapton.

Clapton is a real puzzler because I don't generally have the patience to listen to enough of his stuff to figure him out. And I've never heard him do any rendition of a standard that make me say aha. Cocaine? Please. I Shot the Sheriff? An insult to the great Bob Marley. Layla? It sounds just as good when Weird Al Yankovich does his version. 

At some point I will probably listen to an entire song by Jimmy Buffett, but probably not until I retire and have absolutely nothing better to do. 

Somebody did tell me that I would like Jethro Tull. The same person told me that I had the personality to appreciate a band called Rush. It turned out that Aqualung is probably my all time favorite song to play on RockBand. But Rush I have yet to hear out.

Sometimes it's a near miss, and such is my experience with Pink Floyd. Of course I loved The Dark Side of the Moon, and sometime you might ask me about my altered state enjoyment of Animals. But it took me years to finally hear Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb. Maybe The Wall was a very good album but only it wasn't the only album you knew of them. 

This is, largely the tip of the iceberg. Now that I have Spotify, I expect that I can do a great deal of Recovery. So I can tell you, for example that I am hearing A Sacerful of Secrets for the first time. OK. That's interesting. I wonder how long it would take somebody largely unimpressed with Earth Wind and Fire to hear 'Runnin' for the first time. 

 

Black John's Blues

One of these days, hopefully not too soon, we are going to run out of people who knew and worked with Miles Davis personally. Until that time, you should make it your business to seek them out and discover what they have been doing. This man, John Bigham. You can't ignore him. He's got something that you know. Something unsaid. He's from my generation. I feel him like a brother. He plays the guitar upside down. His lyrics are like short declarative sentences that take a tangent off a fat soul. He nails it down without scratching the finish. Not trying to be too fancyfied. Not pretending to be more dirty than ordinary life.

Jazz Under the Stars

Featuring Chris Bowen. The best birthday gift is to see your children doing well.

The Redemption of Michael Franti

I didnt' want to watch Michael Franti's show at the Jazz Fest. But I had friends in the audience with cold beer and a little patch of space. The reason I didn't want to see Franti's show is because I fell out of love with his music. Falling out of love with an artist can be one of two experiences. You're either disappointed with what they have become, or you become disappointed with what you used to be. For me it was a combination of both that made much of his stuff insufferable.

In particular, I refer to the tearjerking pathos of his album 'Home' or perhaps it was the other Chocolate Supa Highway? There's something about the border of folk music and politics that unnerves me. So I don't want to hear a song about the contemplation of suicide, or getting a letter about HIV in the mail, or any song that seems to require 'fuck the police' in the lyrics. It's not that I simply disagree with the politics but the juxtaposition with such agitprop inside dance music is unnerving. In other words, Franti makes art, not just entertainment, and I don't like mixing the two.

Franti is 1/3 of the way to redemption in my eyes, but not becuase I think any differently of him, but I think he has recognized that he has to have a party show, and today he had a party show which was a very long way from the music that made him famous. Today being the final day of the Jazz Fest in New Orleans, my first time. 

Franti is a frantic figure who knows how to rock the right crowd. But I almost hesitate to call him a performer. He is not so much a performer as he is a minister, and his performance is to create an effect in his audience. The effect was effective.

I dont' like crowds. At the same time, I think very highly of the idea of having mass rituals. So in my mind, which wasn't so far from alien observation mode, I am thinking about what happens when a man on stage directs a crowd. It's different from a DJ, but less different from a political speaker at a rally. The political content of the rally is what gives me pause, and I know that Franti is not merely in the music business to make people feel good but speaks of empowerment.

Franti uses a hiphop concert formula which is tried and true, which is to get the crowd to do the work when beats and lyrics from the stage are all unsurprising and the bars begin to drag on. You know the old critique - don't ask me to say 'ho' and raise my hands in the air and jump, if the music inspires, I'll do that on my own. Franti never stops asking.

The odd bit is that when he brought a violinist (or I should say fiddle player) onto the stage, he didn't have to ask twice. Here is the border between bluegrass and hiphop and the crowd absolutely loved it. I loved it. It had a kind of energy that is rarely heard anywhere outside of Phish (I think), and I hope to hear more of that.

Franti is redeemed by his willingness and ability to rock the crowd against no particular big ideas and messages. I can see that he gets that. Using his call and response and moshing it up in the crowd, he created an excellent atmosphere. And while I was marginally annoyed by the hugs and the passing of the herb I had to decline, I enjoyed exactly what he did produce on Sunday. It was the Holy Ghost part of church and the message was Big Easy. Celebrate life. Love. Peace. All good from the folk and party to the people.

So the question is whether such a man who can and does perform alter calls and gets people to send their babies and their grandparents up onto the stage to shake their stuff or rap into the mic or air guitar with real guitar props is content to party in that non-threatening bucket. I couldn't read it on his face that he was 100% in the party moment. There was too much structure and control in the whole offering. Franti is about 6 foot five and handsome, exuding a John the Baptist vibe and moving as widely around as any 45 year old could dream of, swapping out guitars for every song.

I saw another third of Franti on stage. The party man, not the political party man. And all of the music was designed to keep the good time party rolling. It gives me a reason to refresh my consideration of Franti and Spearhead. What's going on?

Russian Street Jazz

Unbelievable!

Trombone Shorty

Saw him yesterday. One of the best live performances I've ever been to. He straight rocked it out, funked it up, and blew the crowd away.

Oh Yeah, Jazz

I recently fell into a Jazz discussion via a debate between Stanley Crouch and James Mtume over the importance of Miles foray into electronic jazz fusion. I forgot that such debates still raged, and I have found some old soulmates in the process.

My hunger for jazz has been rather weak and I haven't looked for anything new for a while. Everything is just a new interpretation of the Standards and I'm happy enough with that. I got the Ella Fitzgerald boxed set for Christmas and that has been the last outstanding thing, although I am really hooked on the latest Stanley Clarke. But basically, other than Laswell and McFerrin, I haven't bothered to make a move to get any jazz and am happy with my casual listening. 

Every once in a while, I might get a Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock. The smooth jazz doesn't bother me much although I absolutely hate the 4/4 version of Take Five. But I've met a new writer Nashira Priester and she's connected via Facebook to Greg Tate and suddenly I am reminded of that whole world of the music/cultural production and criticism. 

Hmmm.

Cottontail

Colors of the Wind

Everyday Sunshine

You can't possibly know me unless you know Fishbone.

Cairo, West Virginia

Everybody's doing it. Walk like an Egyptian.

Hova's Apple

It has been about six months since I last cruised with the sunroof open through Palos Verdes in a white shirt and Ray-Bans. Around Portuguese Bend in the black BMW you could have seen me with the bling hanging out the driver's side. The best rap on the planet blasting. That would be Steve Coleman & Metrics. Since '93 rap has has only been a mood-enhancer and there are only certain moods I enjoy having enhanced by beats and rhymes, driving bogard is first. There was a time when I threw out some couplets, but I couldn't live for making blue collar teens wanna be. So my heart wasn't in the core of the art. I might have thought a broader mix of mental juices could be loosed by the right combination, and a few have tried that hiphop chemistry, but most of the young punks can't hack it. They confuse H20 with H2SO4. I third degree that mimicry of shit we heard before.

And so I take my pleasures elsewhere. 

I couldn't estimate who it would be that would not look as stupid as Snoop Dogg, who is now officially the oldest man in the club. He blew up a truck for Zynga, and that's the state of the art. But Jay-Z has done the extraordinary. He has become middle aged, appropriately.  So I was literally brought to tears when I saw this piece this morning. It is what hiphop should have become, and now, if this is any indicator, has actually become - because this is the man at the top. 

There are several things that strike me about this tribute to NYC in this performance. 

 

The first thing you have to recognize is Jay-Z himself. Everything about his performance says pro. He's up to make the perfection exuding confidence, ease and energy at the same time. He's right in the moment and he knows he is the performance. The chorus, busted out by BK just soars. It's flat out majestic. The stanzas chop with the same piano highlights that made 'Hard Knock Life' groundbreaking, but now all empty space is orchestrated right through to the dramatic swelling cinematic drama tumbling down like boom boom boom. It dances with poise and lets the bittersweet poison of the gritty lyric sink in. But like the best hiphop and why the whole genre always has the potential to change music, you don't get it until you read the lyrics, memorize their poetry, internalize their associative imagery and then spin it back with the dBs up into the plus. 

What's excellent here is that so long as Jay-Z stays in the game there's a level of mediocrity that he won't stand for, and we all stand to win for that. I thought about Linkin Park last month seeing that they put out a new album that's less hiphop and more something else. After their collab with Jay-Z what else hiphop is there for them to do? My prediction. If Jay-Z is all that he portends to be in this performance, then fifty years from now, this will be the sort of stentorian lyricism that rules 4:4 time, and you'll have to go to Bob Dylan and get sparse and rambling to find its equal.  And so there is the reason that he's like Sinatra. May he live that long. 

Brilliant Corners

Take 24.

I thought this might be a nice complement to 'Facts Are Stupid Things'.

The Music That Made Me - 15 Greatest Albums In My Mind

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.

Robert Anton

Quote of the Day

Perverse modernism is the strain in modern art that will do anything to get a rise out of the public. It's not the sum total of modernism, by any means. Rather it's the easy part. Millions of people who cannot grasp the formal innovations of Picasso or Parker have no trouble grasping "art" that rejects tradition, attacks standards, blurs the line between high and low, and (most important) uses shock and offense to attract attention and boost sales. These tactics are often classified as "post-modern," but in fact they've been present since the dawn of modernism. A century ago, certain avant-garde artists in Europe believed that if they made the right anarchic gesture in the right setting, it would spark social and political revolution. No one believes this any more - indeed, there is a vacuum at the heart of today's perverse modernism, where the old dream of revolution once stood. But the bold outrageous gesture is still thought the essence of "creativity" by many people who can know better (artists and pundits) and many who cannot (teenagers).

-- Martha Bayles

Donald Trump Black Version

In an odd kind of confluence of events, one that probably registers in about 12 brains in this whole damned planet, I noticed that there is a guy being sued for misrepresenting himself as an attorney for CAIR. His name is Morris Days.

Morris Dees is the guy who bankrupted the KKK. Morris Day is cooler than Santa Claus baby!

I'm one of those guys who wanted Morris Day to become a much bigger superstar than he did become. His attitude was my attitude, at least back in '82 when I was a freshman at State wondering how I could get into one of those camisole parties thrown by Phi Beta Sigma. In fact, I did go to one of those camisole parties and it was a bit too off the hook for me. But it was pleasing for me to discover that such things actually did take place.

Morris Day is one of those talented individuals who has a website that's five years old still with 'coming soon' parts. There's nothing quite so sad - except knowing in the same breath that he used to represent your social world. Andy Rooney remarked that he didn't even realize who Kurt Cobain was. Cobain had the advantage, like Princess Di, of dying young. Right about now it would be even sadder to see what they would have eventually turned out to be in their fifties. And so it must be with Morris now that he's not, what he wanted to be, Donald Trump Black Version.

When that song came out, back when Morris was a big star, as silly as it sounds, that was quite a miraculous thing to think about. Back in those days, Barry Gordy who owned half of the black slaves entertainers in Hollywood was saying to hell with MTV and music videos - that it was a trend and black people wouldn't respond to flashy videos. Well, except for Stevie. If Stevie wanted a video then it was OK. But the idea that black and white audiences would go for videos of black artists and that such a thing would sell records and concerts.. well there was an industry consensus that this was something neither black artists nor audiences could afford. Morris Day was bodacious enough to record Ice Cream Castles and break through lots of frozen mentalities about race. But he was just that kind of off the wall dude, managing to be classy and subversive at the same time.

Day should have been rich. He held a grip on my generation which was as substantive as Jay-Z ever had on his. I don't know how many parties have been had based on ideas in Jay-Z records, but I have a feeling that Hova just bought the whole girls and their camisoles, whereas Morris, Jerome and The Kid used wit and candor. Day seduced, all the rest of the rappers bullied women into submission. And, as quite as it's kept, I'm hard pressed to think of anyone else who moved the party scene with such finesse and intelligence after the end of Day's salad days. They all became sweaty crooners like Keith Sweat, Orange Juice Jones or Al B Sure, or just little cut-up nasty rudeboys like Jodeci and all the clones around Johnny Gill. Now I'm not really going to say anything bad about Boyz II Men, except that - well they only could rock the party with one song MotownPhilly. After Morris Day fell off, the R&B Party did not come back until Missy Elliott. OK? Yeah there was a little New Jack Swing, but it didn't really last more than two years. Admit it.

Now what I have to admit is that Morris Day kicked the majority of ass for four years around my collegiate days, when time moved slow. So they will always be outsized in my mind, especially for that particular time in my life when I used to rent KITT looking Firebirds and cruised down to San Diego State to front on the locals. And yeah actually Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam rocked the party even harder. BUT. Morris Day and the Time were the last huge R&B party band of all time. And yes they crossed over. I'm trying to think of another band since that has actually got people dancing a new dance with a song about the dance. Not Missy Elliott. She saved it, I've already acknowledged that. Crunk all you want, but what kind of audacity you had to have to make a song about an Oak Tree and make it a dance? That's energy.

The Walk, The Bird, The Oak Tree. The brilliant percussion of 777-9311. That's stuff with sweetness and light that just doesn't happen any more. And it's too bad. Morris Day couldn't blow, and he didn't try. He couldn't rap, but the boy could talk, and he talked in his records improvising at a moderate clip that made all of the 'owws' and 'aawws' of the previous Funk era instantly tired.

The classic in all of this - of Morris Day at the absolute quintessence of game was a single called Tricky. It was a stripped down version of the beats to Prince's Irresistable Bitch, and you have to ask which was the chicken and which was the egg. There was also Cloreen Bacon Skin that almost worked on Prince's Crystal Ball, but it was an extended variation on the theme that was only good enough to be mixed into a good DJ's rep. Speaking of which... that's what killed The Time. It was the beat. Once DJs had the beat at their disposal, nobody needed a band. And without a band, there was no need for a front man. Goodnight Morris.

What we will never know is how the band exactly disintegrated and what must keep certain people awake nights thinking about how they might have been Jimmy Jam or Terry Lewis. They survived the death of the R&B band in the late 80s. The whole thing became a producer's game - and that became clear by the time we had Rob Bass and the Beasties. Jam & Lewis got Janet and the rest is history.

But I still think of Morris Day as the last of his kind. That reminds me. I'm going to buy Pandemonium.

A Beautiful Son, Opus One

My son Christopher is now a junior in high school and is at the point where he is notable enough on his own merit for me not to conceal his identity in the blog. Aside from that, I'm very proud of him as his father and find him to be somewhat exceptional. The other day I realized that he was doing something that he normally does, which is making music some way around the house.

Most of the time, he's singing. It might be Sinatra, it might be Jarreau, it might be something I don't know. But it's almost always loud. Other times, he's playing speedmetal on Guitar Hero III on the expert level at full blast. I generally like when he plays Cliffs of Dover, but that's about it. Mostly he plays his trumpet, doing scales or playing along with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band in his room. Sometimes he gives the flute a twirl, but that's more rare these days. He tells me that he's starting to think trumpet and that compromises his flute. This particular morning, he emptied the case in the dining room and had an array of about 15 glasses with various levels of water in them. He managed to get Silent Night out of it, but nothing anyone would want to see on You Tube. Still, I got the new iPhone and it takes movies. So I was able to prompt him over to the upright.

I am always most impressed when Chris demonstrates his musicality on the piano. He never had any lessons, but I can hear what he's thinking as he plays. I've always wanted to be a concert pianist, but I could never get my hands to perform the music in my head, but my son has accomplished that. And what is inside his head is lovely and I find it to be a great achievement in this noisy world. It's not that he's a gifted pianist; I can tell that he'll become proficient over time. It's that he has that beauty inside him. Listen and you'll see why I am fortunate.

This was the first few minutes of a set that went on for 15 minutes. I've been wanting to edit it down to for a while. Enjoy.

I Emerged In London Rain

I've been thinking about my absolute favorite songs of the 80s and have decided to come up with a list of my top picks. These encapsulate my four years of college and that experience that was, for me, everything cool about everything that happened between 82 and 86 when I was in the thick of it all. The New Wave that is. 

I should say that around 87 I discovered Sonny Rollins, Moliere, beach volleyball and cycling. I was through with break dancing. So while the 80s may have continued after 86, they were essentially over for me. I could probably talk a lot about each of the songs I'm going to list here, but it's probably better to leave that alone and for the comments. There's something about music that speaks for itself.

Well it turns out that I had something to assist my memory. Thanks Bing. My method is as follows. I took 600 songs - the Billboard 100 of each year from 82 t0 87 and scored all those that I considered to be worth noting. That turned out to be about 175. And then I gave each song two scores. The first score is the 80s Score, which is the answer to the following question. How emblematic of the 80 New Wave do you consider this song? And then I gave it a second score which is the answer to this question. How much did you really like it?  And that's reflective of all the years between, meaning how much would you now be proud of saying you liked it back then. Since I was only originally gunning for about 50, there's a lot that I left out. Like Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love got left out, and somehow I scored a Wham song that I don't even remember. But it was a lot of fun just going through the exercise. 

 

What are your favorite songs from the 80s?

Bones Come To Life

Maybe. Perhaps. Is this what it felt like when you first heard Bob Dylan? This dude is the real thing. I'm diggin' it, seriously diggin' it. His name is Jonathan Mann.

The Whisky Android

I love this guy.

Dia De Los Muertos Drumline

Awesome. I've been watching drumline & orchestra videos this morning and here's one that sticks in the mind.

All My Fingers In The Pool Go Splash We Must

For the next week I will be delighting in the memories of my favorite songs of the 80s. And right now it's all about Prince's great song Temptation. This is a song that needs to be covered by a roadhouse blues rocker with a gravelly voice. All you have to do is imagine it being done by Mickey Rourke. OK, do you see it now?

This version is fairly interesting, but it's still too Princified. It needs a bucket more gutbucket.

Fantastic Plastic Machine

Very cool graphics. I love this. The song's not bad either.

The Sound Beyond Soul

You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind -- driving you mad. -- Morpheus

My life sometimes hates my brain. And it is for any number of complex reasons that it does. There is certainly a profound social reason, but since I am the sort who likes to believe my own actions matter I tend to take a responsibility which is perhaps larger in my head than in reality. I think my life hates my brain because I can't often get it to that place where it can breathe free and make the connections its hardware dreams of making. Connections between the abstract and the real, between the ideal and the practical, between God and man, man and woman, music and philosophy and a list that wants to go on down this page, but can't because I do have a life.

Between my brain and my life is therefore a compromised mind. A mind that bears up sometimes and wears down other times. That makes excuses and rationalizations and bridges the gap between the desires of my wetware to crank and the time I have on this planet to focus. It is the creature that must worldswap when I'm on a 6AM conference call with the practice manager on the East Coast and my 15 year old daughter knocks on the bedroom door. 

But there are times when I work out the three, the life, the mind, the brain. It is through nothing less than the tried and true - reading, writing, listening. A discipline of engagement one could almost call 'the life of the mind', where all parts are in harmony and mostly satisfied. It was once a journal. For a time it was performance poetry. A decade ago it was an online community or two or three. Since 2003 it has been this blog. I have a category in this blog called Mind Splinter, and I have another.

There is a sound I am searching for. 

Benzon reminded me this morning about the connection between Africa and Europe being played out in American music. Some of that was done and perfected and put down on wax. Wax doesn't last. But memories do, memories of music in my mind. My brain hungers for the things it might generate in the presence of such a sound. My mind could be put at ease in guiding my life and brain to that point of excitement. But I have a splinter. It is the inability to track down where that sound has been recorded. It is a problem of search, perhaps. But it is also a problem of context, because the thing that created that sound in the first place now has no place to go. And that is why I only know of two or three clips of it.

I call it Negro Operatic. And maybe it could be described as African spirit wearing a European Christian dress as Benzon describes the some fraction of that musical connection. But I know that it is close to my home. It is a kind of extremity of performance reaching beyond perfection in the hopes of attaining the practically transcendent. It is a creation of mind, coaxing the brain to achieve something that drags the life out of the dust to the mountaintop and beyond. It is like reaching up and trying to touch the face of God knowing you stand in robes on stage in front of people who may be merely entertained. You take off the robes and head out the back door into the streets. You live for the next moment of creating that sound and your brain hates your life, and your life hates your brain, and you employ your mind on the daily to keep them from snuffing each other out. 

For those who have been trained by it, no discipline seems pleasant at the time but painful. 

Robert McFerrin Sr. sung that kind of music. And I'd like to get my hands on some because I want to be put in that frame of mind. I want to drink from the well of spirit that created the sort of virtue that seems superfluous in today's market of music. I want to hear music that makes me cry - a crying of a different sort than is evoked by swelling violins and deep screen kisses. I want to hear it and I cannot find it. It sounds a little something like this:

Born In A Manger: Sounds of Blackness

Do you hear the perfect diction? Do you hear the perfect harmony? Do you follow the dynamic lead surrounded by the power of the chorale? Can you hear the contrast? Did you catch the off key denouement and diminuendo? Aren't you amazed all that could be done in 79 seconds? I play that album every year during the Holidays and have ever since I've been married. It is in may ways the single most profound piece of music I possess.

But I've heard the sound before. For a moment, Take 6 will go there as they did riffing 'Rock of Ages' on 'David and Goliath'. There is of course McFerrin's 'Discipline'. But that's it. That and the way I sung in the Gospel Choir at St. John's Episcopal Church in 1977. Alto. 

I'm going to start looking. And maybe you and Benzon can help. I fear we are losing some of the old world as everything goes to iPad. There is a sound beyond soul out there. And maybe it might never be recorded. Maybe it isn't a problem of search, but of something else entirely. But there you have my splinter. 

Guru: Dead

If you ask me, there have been fewer travesties to the majesty of the blues than the lyrics penned by Guru. One thing anyone should insist on is grammar. Guru gets a fifty fifty. Listening to Jazzmatazz was like living on the border of sun and shadow on Mercury. It's never as comfortable as it should be.

On the one hand, when Guru put the gangsta in GangStarr, it was righteously good rap. 'Sights in the City' has to be his best cut ever, and it bordered on great. No anthology of Acid Jazz would be complete without Guru. But then when he approached jazz standards, it puts a hole so deep in your heart that it's hard to forgive. Somewhere in that hole is the memory of what he has done, and I have practiced the dissociation long enough to have forgotten the damage done. So I'm cool and I don't want to remember. Still, a cut like 'Loungin' is just methodically wrong.

According to the people I used to hang with and do the hiphop hermeneutic thang, all props went to DJ Premier for arranging the coolest cuts ever, and then some more for putting up with Guru's lyrics and diction. The thing was, as an innovator, there was nowhere else to go. Nobody knows the names of the rappers of Buckshot LeFonque and so nobody could approach what Guru was up to, nobody except Lucien and MC Solaar and that angle of the Native Tongues. Asking for another Guru was like asking for a second 'A Different World'. (I was going to say Cosby Show, but that would be doing Guru too much of a favor). The connoisseurs would demand it, but the broader market (according to the producers) wouldn't support it.

My remedy was going towards French Rap, something of a guilty pleasure, because I knew some of it was gangsta. Nevertheless, Lucien was all that, bi-lingually.

You could say that Acid Jazz survived. You had the Brand New Heavies and others. Certainly The Roots came up behind Guru, vulgar as they were. The best of that lot were the one hit wonders who worked as Metrics with Steve Coleman. A lot of R&B got hiphop/jazzified starting with (ick) Erika Badu and on down the line to John Legend (finally) and the lost, forgotten and nevertheless magnificent and as far as I'm concerned the greatest talent of them all Frank McComb. And we should not forget India Arie or D'Angelo. But on the pure hiphop side, it kinda all began and kinda all ended in the English language with Guru. He ran it like a rapper should, even he never consummated his own skills up to par with what he would have had to if he was more mainstream.

What saved him of course was the music, and for that he is forgiven, and will also not be forgotten. Guru was the closest that mainstream rap music got to permanently edifying itself for the better and properly taking on the mantle and responsibility of jazz. That was a lot to swallow and it has never really been done. But the elements are all there.