Crashing the gates

Oh, yeah: we are in fact the "wild-eyed progressives" the Beltway insiders warned their children about. This is the same old, old, alliance between and including all the have-nots. Matt Stoller's got it:

The informal alliance between African-American progressives, white progressive organizers and bloggers, and disaffected union members can beat any Democrat in any primary anywhere in the country. If you can attach an effective general election strategy to that alliance, we have a progressive America.

This is precisely the alliance (ethnic minorities, progressives, writers/authors/artists, and workers) that the Populists and Sockless Jerry Simpson and the Farmers and Workers Union tried to put together in the 1890s, and that the Wobblies tried to put together in the 'Oughts, and that Gene Debs fought and went to jail for. Hell, they called it "Progressivism" even then.

This is the real "Rebel Alliance"--it has fuck-all to do with ethnicity, or inter-trade warfare, or "conservativism" versus "liberalism." It has to do with the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

For centuries in this country, the oligarchs in power have used ethnicity, competition, or red-herring social/ethical disputes to divide and distract those below them on the economic ladder. If you could keep "True Blue Americans" fighting with recent Irish immigrants, or poor Southern whites fighting with poor Southern blacks, or farmers fighting with industrial workers, then you as the "owner-class" (e.g., the small economic minority who derive income, trust funds, possessions, and their children's inheritances from owning things rather than working for things) had a chance of maintaining your hold.

But if those have-nots ever figured out that all those other issues were red herrings, used to divide them and to distract them from the economically-exploitative world the oligarchy intentionally set up to keep their own snouts in the trough (keep them dumb with lousy public education, keep them distracted with mindless mass media, keep them divided by choosing the "wedge issues" of personal ethical convication which no politician actually wants to legislate but which every politician will use to divide)--if they ever figured out, I say, who the real enemy is, then watch out, Jack--because then it'll be your gates that the barbarians will be crashing, and your power, money, and privilege that will fall.

Class warfare? Betcher ass.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 042: Stravinsky/Monteux/Columbia SO: Petroushka

Before I ever found Larry “Guitar” Baeder, or Dean Magraw, or Mike Bierylo, or Tom Binkley, or Dave Baker, or any of my other great teachers, LP’s were my first teachers. And—like my teachers—records seemed to find me when I needed them.

One of the greatest moments in 20^th century music, and certainly the greatest moment in the greatest ballet ever written, and certainly the greatest musical moment in my life before the conservatory: First Tableau (“The Shrovetide Fair”) in Stravinsky’s 1911 Petroushka, when the polytonal hustle and bustle of the Russian peasant crowd suddenly coalesces into the magnificent pedal-point polymeter of the circus troupe that includes the Old Wizard, the Ballerina, the Moor, and the title character, the mournful, happy/sad post-commedia dell arte clown called Petroushka.

This was the role that Nijinsky was born to dance. He had scandalized Parisians with the eroticism of his Faun in Debussy’s Prelude and changed the language for the prima danseur in Debussy’s Jeux, but nothing in his past career had prepared anyone for the intensity of his Petroushka—as nothing would prepare anyone for the revolution he, with Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Roerich, would concoct with Le Sacre du Printemps. Certainly the “Rite,” of the three Russian ballets, is conventionally regarded as the real watershed—but Petroushka is the harbinger, and here’s why: the Rite was consciously intended as a confrontation; as a subversion of everything that went before; of a direct assault upon the 19^th century’s fixation on chromatic harmony, complex formal structure, and toxic self-absorption—and it succeeded. But that also led to a “shock for shock’s sake” aspect to the Rite.

That’s not the case with Petroushka. In that work, Stravinsky gets as close to Bartok—and Bartok’s unself-conscious assimilation of traditional music’s rhythmic and modal implications. It’s the most folkloric of Stravinsky’s ballets and, actually, far more influential in the long term than the Rite. Throughout the 20^th century, composers from Bartok to Janacek to de Falla to Ives would explore the possibilities of developing a personal—but cool—modern compositional language out of the implications of folk music. Dvorak had told us to do it (“you have in the melodies of the Negroes all the resources you need for a great national music”); Vaughan Williams had shown that it was possible (in numerous pieces based upon the modal and melodic implications of English folk music); even Debussy and Ravel had found a way around the Viennese hegemony of Brahms and Mahler by going to other sources: popular music, old French music, and “exotica” from around the world. Stravinsky, who was notoriously resistant to any attributions of influence—he had way too big an ego—nevertheless succeeded, as he always did, in drawing on the new ideas most pregnant with possibilities.

And it’s so beautiful. There is so much love in this music—for the Russia he left behind, for the folk musics he learned as a child (hilarious anecdote he told in his autobiography about hearing a moujik on the family estate playing fart-noises in his armpit), for the people that he left behind. At different stages in his career, Stravinsky made entirely contradictory statements about the presence or absence of Russian elements in the Rite, depending upon whether he was pissed at the Soviets for taking away the ancestral estates or sucking up to them when they treated him like a returning hero.

It’s a dark, sad, story, picking up on the Expressionist fascination with clowns that played out in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and their close cousin, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. In Stravinsky’s version, Petroushka is a sad, sawdust-stuffed clown, ensorcelled by the Wizard, but pining perpetually for the Ballerina, who has eyes only for the Moor.

The score is full of the hyper-diatonicism Stravinsky had derived from his Russian forebears—chiefly Rimsky—and which had provided a way to both retain the flavor of folk music and up the dissonance ante. In 19^th century German music, the solution had been to stuff more and more chromatic alterations into the functional harmonic language. What the Russians, the Eastern Europeans (especially Bartok and Janacek), and Ives had figured out was that you could retain the shape and character of modal folk tunes, but create a powerfully dissonant language, by juxtaposing instruments or groups playing in different key areas simultaneously. That meant that one section would play, more-or-less diatonically, in one key, and another in another key, and the relationship between the keys (close or distant) would determine the level of harmonic “crunch.”

It’s potent in Petroushka (and overpowering in Le Sacre), because Stravinsky builds it into the very fabric of the characters’ themes: the “Petroushka chord” combines two triads, harmonically distant from one another (a C major triad and an F# major triad), either of which could work in a perfectly vanilla way—but juxtapose them, play them simultaneously, overlap them, trade them off with one another, and you have an astonishingly flexible range of dissonant options.

It has different meanings in different places, because the dissonance can be dark or light, crashing or fluid. And it does throughout this piece: the hustling hurly-burly of the crowds at the Shrovetide Fair in the First Tableau; the brutality with which the Wizard exiles Petroushka to his cell and the lonely sadness with which he responds in the Second; the stomping brutality of the Moor in the Third; and the return to the hustle of the Fair in the Fourth and final Tableau.

The story ends, actually, with horror: Petroushka interrupts the Moor’s seduction of the Ballerina, and the Moor chases him into the market-square and hacks him to pieces with an axe; but the Wizard demonstrates that he is nothing but sawdust and straw. At the very last moment, after the Wizard’s departure, and the apparent defeat of all Petroushka’s hopes—and shockingly—the ghost of the puppet appears on the roof of the market-building, uttering one last fortissimo, spiky, bitonal chord: one last curse for the Wizard, a and for the complacency of an audience that would let it happen.

But it doesn’t matter; the music is so beautiful. There were a half-dozen or so LP’s that I owned as a child, things I found either in our family collection (a weird amalgam of mostly unpredictable and not-very-good stuff) or, peculiarly enough, at yard sales. I was kind of fascinated by the idea that you could find interesting music that other people liked—and I was already well-programmed to be obsessive about saving money. So used records were perfect for me (I would only have had to be a little bit more neurotic to wind up as much of a record- and comic-collecting weirdo as Harvey Pekar or Robert Crumb).

But the universe looked out for me, I guess: one summer, around the age of around 11, at a yard sale in my home town, I found LPs of Petroushka and of Beethoven’s #3 (Eroica). The Stravinsky was a Columbia “Living Stereo” release of the 1947 version. Here’s the miracle: the disc cost me a quarter, and it was conducted by Monteux, who conducted the premieres of both Petroushka and the Rite. Other conductors have led more impressive or more impeccable or more astringent performances (certainly Nagano and Boulez have both done commanding versions), but Monteux conducted the premiere. How much more immediate and visceral an understanding of the work’s original intent could you have?

I played that record—and the Beethoven—on a virtually daily basis for a good eight years. And I imprinted on it, the way you will, the way I did on Live at Fillmore East, and Born to Run, and a few others. Even now, 35 years later, I can teach these pieces with total passion, totally from memory, and as if I’m discovering them for the first time. I can still sing the opening passage and nail Monteux's opening tempi for all Four Tableaux. I still remember the Gauguin painting on the cover, and the clicks and pops at crucial moments, and the ways those records (and a few others, and a few books) helped make sense of my world.

And “The Shrovetide Fair” still makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 041: Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt: A Meeting by the River

There’s a depth to modal music—and that depth can connect modal musics of wild diversity. Certainly the musical texture of a melody moving against a drone, with harmonic chords either absent or an afterthought, is a texture shared across very different music cultures, from South Asia to West Africa to the Near East to the South Seas. It connects ancient and modern music cultures: both medieval European chant and East Asian vocal genres share the drone-plus-melody texture. And, of course, the melody + drone texture, with its radical emphasis upon tension and resolution, upon the light-and-dark artistic possibilities of dissonance and consonance, of the expressive possibilities of all the micro-tones “between the notes” and the world of bends, slides, slurs, and glissandi that can connect them, connects to the most ancient instrument of all, the human voice.

Couple that with an instrument capable of reproducing all that microtonal expressive information (preeminently the voice, but also bowed strings, winds, and a competent blues guitar player or harpist), and you have both a wealth of diverse implicated idioms and, potentially, a shared technical language.

So it’s no wonder that two modal musicians specializing in playing plucked strings with a slide might find common ground. In the Hindustani tradition of the vichitravina, a sitar-like lute, sitting on gourd resonators with a lengthy wire-strung neck parallel to the ground, is played with fingerpicks called mizrab and “fretted” (really, “has its strings stopped”) with a small polished stone held in the left-hand. The instrument thus borrows from the grand-daddy Hindi plucked lute, the vina, which is often depicted as the favored instrument of Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, music, arts and speech, and the patronees of truth and forgiving. She is a river-goddess first. But the chitravina also borrows from the slippery intonation of the sarod, the short-necked lute with a polished metal fingerboard, which comes into Hindi music from Islam (Arabic: sir-‘ud, meaning “the grand oud”). The chitravina may have borne a Hindi music influence into Polynesia, and thus may be one of the unacknowledged ancestors of the Hawaiian slide guitar.

There’s a direct connection between Hawaii and the Mississippi Delta blues guitar as well. Though there are ancient and multiple traditions of bowed and plucked lutes in West Africa, the one perhaps most closely shaping slide guitar traditions is the musical bow, which comes into the New World as the Afro-Brazilian berimbau and the American South’s diddley-bow—both single-string instruments with pitch shifted by manipulation of a smooth stone.

Playing the guitar with a slide in the South seems to have been an innovation by African-American musicians who heard Hawaiian lap-slide players on 78s released as demonstrations by catalog companies selling Victrolas. W.C.Handy claimed to have heard slide players in the Delta in Oughts (around 1906), but certainly by the ‘30s, the Delta had seen at least three generations of great slide players—most significantly for the present essay, the great sanctified singer from Texas Blind Willie Johnson, whose instrumental Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground was preserved on a gold-plated LP (along with Bach and Beethoven) that went “out there” with the Voyager space shot.

Miracles and horrors can result when two worlds collide. Thankfully—in both music and global relations—when there is sympathy, humility, and most crucially a willingness to listen, to find ways to coexist in one another’s worlds of experience, the result is more often miraculous.

So with this CD, the record of the very first encounter between the Hindi chitravina player Vishwa Mohan Bhatt (who plays a wonderfully personalized, modernized version of the instrument, adapted from an arch-top jazz guitar with added sympathetic and drone strings) and slide guitarist Ry Cooder, whose touchstones on the instrument have been Blind Willie and the great Robert Johnson. Cooder was drafted to recreate Robert’s style for Hollywood film Crossroads, which had the misfortune to feature Ralph Macchio and an abysmal screenplay but also some chillingly-evocative moments (the encounter with a modern-day “Mr Scratch” at the crossroads, driving a jet-black late-model Camaro; the climactic cutting contest between Macchio—who, appallingly, wins by playing Bach—and the Devil’s guitarist, Steve Vai), none more so than the opening few seconds, which recreate the mythological moment in a Dallas hotel room in 1936 when Robert Johnson laid down the original of Crossroads Blues for Ralph Peer.

Water Lily Acoustic’s audiophile engineer/owner put them together in a small Catholic mission in Northern California. They were introduced, had dinner, sat down with their usual accompanists (Ry’s son Joachim, Bhatt’s tabla-player Sukhvinder Singh Namdhari), and this record was the result. There were no second takes—no additional sessions. It captures a moment of holy listening, when sympathy, humility, and compassion come together in the hearts and hands of two master musicians and the world is saved by the sounds that result. They play Hawaiian tunes (Isa Lei), a very logical point of connection between Hindi and American stylists; original blues (Ganges Delta Blues), and two free-improvised pieces. It’s probably fair to say that, brilliant as Cooder is, on display here is mostly his impeccable musical taste: knowing when not to play, when to lay back and allow Bhatt to take the lead (a lesson Ry might have remembered a little better on the Buena Vista Social Club project, where he’s not quite so tactful). This takes guts: the courage to keep one’s paint out of the picture. At the same time, he’s ballsy when he needs to be: there’s an incredible moment in Longing, in the midst of a long (brilliant) solo by Bhatt, when, after 8 minutes on the tonic drone, Cooder shoulders his way into the sound-mix, playing an unmistakable and bluesy six-string glissando that takes the tonal center up to the IV chord—something that is never done in Indian music. I asked Cooder about that, and he laughed and said “You noticed that? Yeah, I thought, ‘Fuck it! I’m gonna take him to the four chord!’”: an amazingly confident and courageous improvisational decision.

The greatest playing is probably on the title track, which also opens the disc, and was the first tune they played together. At a certain level of development and in certain contexts, master musicians are no longer really playing instruments, no longer really thinking about music. They’re freer than that, able to use the decades of technique not only to escape physical limitations, but to escape the emotional, egotistical, and cultural blinders that trap us all inside our too-small individual worlds. A Meeting by the River captures that.

There’s a quote from my beloved Rumi on the liner notes, from the Mathnawi, about “letting the beauty we love be what we do.” No question that is the ethos here. But I think another Rumi parable captures this music even better (paraphrased here from the great Sufi Coleman Barks, a Georgia boy whose lifelong encounter with Rumi’s work has been one of the most extraordinary journeys in American poetry—equaled only by those of Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg):

An ocean frog visited with a frog who lived in a small pond. The pond frog dove to the depths of his home—a distance of two feet—came back to the surface, and said “Look at the depth of my world.” He swam across the pond—a distance of five feet—came back to the shore, and said “Look at the breadth of my world.” Finally, having exhibited the full expanse of his pond, he said “Isn’t that amazing? What is it like where you live?”

The ocean frog replied, “I can’t describe it to you. But I’ll take you there someday.”

In A Meeting by the River, by listening and if only for a short while, we can go there too.

Rick Steves in Ireland: Make it stop! Make it stop!

Rick Steves in Ireland: I can't stand it! Now he's in Temple Bar! Now he's in Kilmainham Jail waffling about the 1916 Martyrs! Now he's elbowed his way in to the front of the queue for the burial tomb of Newgrange on the winter solstice! Now he's in the bar above the Guinness Museum talking about how "that thick black pint is no longer your only option!" God, he just used the transliteration "BOW-dran"!

Make it stop! Make it stop!

ps: what's worse: he has a conscience. I just wish he didn't look/act so much like Steve Martin playing a consummate nerd.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 040: Albert King: Live at Montreux

Albert King was larger than life: in his person (6’4”, over 300 pounds), in his singing voice and his laugh (a huge, gravelly bellow), in his former profession (he looked like the bulldozer driver he’d been), in his guitars and tuning (he played a Gibson Flying V upside down and backwards, tuned down to a low C), in his technique (he played with his thumb, a spatulate digit about the size of a ballpeen hammer), in his tone (a huge, grainy, tactile stab), and in his influence (most especially, upon Jimi and upon Stevie Ray). He came up after BB and he borrowed BB’s surname, but there could not have been a greater difference between them. B (still with us, thank God) is one of the great blues shouters, with the strongest possible influence from gospel and a fluid, singing tone derived from T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Johnson, and, indirectly, from Django Reinhardt; Albert, in contrast, brought the funk, recording with the Stax/Volt musicians and covering everything from Sleepy John Estes to Herbie Hancock.

I was living in West Texas—the first time—working as a blowout-preventer mechanic for an oil-drilling company, trying to pay off my first round of college debt. I’d been renting a spare room from a very proper Texas lady in her 60s whose husband had left her for a second, trophy wife, but we just didn’t get on, and I moved out, sharing a house with an ex-biker-turned-truckdriver named Bob and his young wife, whose blue-collar family actually thought they could change him (OK, I haven’t always made realistic housing choices). Very weird days: most of the guys I worked with smoked weed and bred fighting dogs (Mexican dirt weed was 10 dollars a lid in W Texas in the late ‘70s, and the drilling-yard workers were mostly either ex-bikers down on their luck or Mexican guys working illegally), but I spent my time reading virtually every interesting book in the town’s small library (the library ladies got to know me very well), and starting to grapple with the idea of being a professional musician. I had only a few records, but I’d finally reached a stage where I knew a good record from a bad one, so it was a good collection: Live at Fillmore East, Born to Run, and Albert’s great Live at Montreux double-LP set. The previous year, at Chicago, I’d figured out on my own how improvisation worked: you had to know the scale the song was in, and then, if you knew the fingerings for the scale, you could play pretty much anything in the scale you could hear. My friend Fred Duca and I spent some 8-hour nights sitting in the stairwells in the Shoreland Hotel working out the implications of that—and 30 years later, I’m still playing modal music. I had an old Ephiphone semi-hollowbody ES-335 knockoff I’d bought at a yard sale (wish I still had that one—it went missing somewhere in the years that followed) and I’d crank Albert up on the stereo and pace the empty house, playing along, while Bob and his wife were out at the honky-tonks trying to “patch up the relationship.”

Albert was great for schooling: gutsy, great phrases, huge tone, fantastic interplay b/w his singing and his guitar soloing, and impeccable choice in tunes: he plays Lemon Jefferson (Matchbox) and Charlie Patton (Killing Floor), T-Bone Walker (Stormy Monday) and Herbie Hancock (Watermelon Man). That latter tune gets as another of his strengths: his receptivity to newer black styles (most notably funk—Albert recorded for years with the Stax/Volt rhythm section) and his willingness to recruit bands who could play it: most notably, on this record, the young rhythm guitarist Donald Kinsey, who went on to play with Bob Marley and his own, funk-tinged Kinsey Report.

To go with his larger-than-life presence, Albert had a larger-than-life sound, as well: when he sings in that big, gravelly voice (less fluid but ten times as macho as BB’s), when he squeezes out major-3^rd bends in that low-C tuning (what Albert called “the woman tone”, and when he chuckles between lines at his own double-entendre jokes), he owns the festival, be it the huge roster of bigger sellers than he at Wattstax, or the long list of jazz heavyweights at Montreux Jazz. And, true to that larger-than-life presence, Albert always managed to pull the groupies. He played on a triple bill with Hendrix and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (incubator of a whole series of blues-rock guitar luminaries) to open the Fillmore West in San Fran in February 1968, and people who were there say Albert blew the other two off the stage.

Stevie Ray Vaughan, who—though derivative—was always good about acknowledging his influences, did a series of gigs with Albert, which was a nice gesture—particularly since most of what Stevie didn’t get from Hendrix he got from Albert. Listen to Stevie play any slow blues, and you’ll know what I mean.

I always laughed to hear Cream’s version of Born Under a Bad Sign: they were great players, certainly with lots of chops, and I still think Ginger Baker is one of the great unsung geniuses of the ’60s rock era (and so did Bill Laswell, who coaxed him out of retirement as an Italian olive farmer to record for Axiom), but there’s simply no denying that, for all Clapton’s notes, for all Jack Bruce’s histrionic melodrama, there was simply no way those three white boys could hang with Albert’s original.

There’s a story about Hendrix working with a rock rhythm section (might’ve been Billy and Buddy—see future “100 Greats” post on Band of Gypsies) in rehearsal at the Fillmore East, working on a version of Crosscut Saw, “playing the tune, then shaking his head, going back to the side of the stage, lifting the needle, and playing the record again. It never sounded the same.” When I hear that story—when I realize that even Hendrix, maybe the greatest electric guitarist ever (see “100 Greats” #31), was still going to school on Albert, even after Monterey Pop and taking England and America by storm, then I feel connected to something much, much bigger, and those isolated days, pacing through a deserted, ramshackle little house on the poor side of a windblown West Texas oil town, with Live at Montreux blaring out of the stereo and me playing along, don’t seem so pointless.

Not so pointless at all.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 039 Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah-Um

I studied jazz with David Baker. That’s roughly like saying “I studied violin with Joseph Gingold” (actually, I didn’t—but I bought him Fritos), or “I studied Indian music with Hariprasad Chaurasia” (I did—but only for a year), or “I studied medieval music with Tom Binkley” (I did—but fortunately never had to accept a grade from him). I have been blessed with a few poor and mostly fantastic, superhuman, brilliant, genius teachers: the above is only a short list. So there’s some braggadocio involved. But, really, my place in that roster is not due to my own merit, but rather to the generosity and the wealth of positive energy those teachers put out in the world, for thousands of students over many decades. I was just the latest and least in a long line—but I am honored and proud to be part of those lineages.

The first time I heard David Baker play was on cello in his 21^st Century Bebop Band: terrible band name, but typically a fantastic roster of rotating players drawn from his most senior students. Dave had started playing cello after his jaw was broken in a car wreck (and, neglected by the racist subhuman pigs staffing the KKK-dominated hospitals of Martinsville, Indiana, his embouchure never recovered). When his cello chops were up, David was a fantastic improviser—and he was always a magnificent composer and teacher. I’d encountered him, though, several years before that, through the series of teaching methods he authored and put out on his own small press. And, of course, through the playing, teaching, and materials of the people who played and studied with him, a list that began with Wes Montgomery, continued through Eric Dolphy and Michael Brecker (RIP), and included my contemporaries Ralph Bowen (Rutgers), Derrick Gardner (Basie), Brent Wallarab (librarian for the Smithsonian Jazz Orchestra), and Tom Walsh (best of the contemporary classical saxophonists). I am honored to have been included among them.

I studied with Dave for three years, everything from bebop styles to jazz history to pedagogy to arranging to, most notably, composition. In pretty much all situations he was indefatigable, regularly carrying a quadruple teaching load and never allowed to retire, as IU repeatedly offered him more money to keep him on. As I write, he’s 75 and still going strong. I don’t play jazz anymore (one of the things Dave taught us was to play the music brilliantly, or not to play it at all), but David Baker’s part of every lesson I teach—I still use his pedagogical methods in teaching blues and Irish trad.

Dave also introduced me to Mingus’s music. Oh, I had heard it, but I first had the chance to play Mingus’s tunes in Dave’s big band, a fantastic opportunity to learn not only the mainstream repertoire of the swing era but also Dave’s great expanded compositions, blending bebop and advanced 20^th-century serial techniques—they were a blast to play. Dave had us play some tunes as head arrangements, the way the Basie band put them together, he had us experiment with free improvisation, and he also had us play Mingus. This disc captures some of my favorite Mingus repertoire.

There are a lot of things I love about Mingus’s music: the way he managed to reconcile the virtuosic pickiness of bebop with the balls and joy of blues and gospel grooves; his insistence (like Ellington) that music could be “street” and “art” at the same time; his political outspokenness and his brilliant ability to use music to make political statements; his prototypical sense that jazz music could become a powerful tool of black identity; his skills (and temper) as a bandleader, providing some of the best and most challenging improvisational settings that soloists like Pepper Adams, Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Jackie McLean, and Jimmy Knepper (who lost some teeth to a Mingus punch) ever experienced—and I’d give a month of my life, maybe more, to have heard Rahsaan Roland Kirk with the Jazz Workshop; his interest in extended compositions, freer forms, and collective improvisation, all of which prefigure both the free jazz of the 1960s and the jazz collectives of the 1970s; his titanic bass playing (as Dave said “the worst thing that ever happened to jazz bass was the invention of the pickup”—Mingus played on telephone cables and his acoustic sound could fill a room), which had driven the astonishing Bird/Diz playing on 1953’s Live at Massey Hall; and, most overwhelmingly, the sheer heart and beauty of his compositions.

There are a bunch of great and a few not-so-great Mingus albums (I’m particularly partial to Mingus Mingus Mingus etc, because it features one of the first and still one of my favorite charts to play—the volcanic II B.S.), but Mingus Ah-Um is a great place to start, as it collects some of the best-known compositions and some of his most characteristic writing.

There’s Ducally-rich color (Self-Portrait in Three Colors and Open Letter to Duke); a tribute to Parker (Bird Calls), Jelly Roll Morton (Jelly Roll), and Lester Young (the masterpiece Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, one of the greatest blues ever written—and it’s not a blues); fantastic and brutally-effective political satire (the open-form Fables of Faubus, whose lyrics, mocking anti-integrationist Arkansas governor Orville Faubus, were scrubbed from the record before the initial release), and a personal favorite: Better Git It In Your Soul, an intentional and very effective evocation of jazz’s gospel roots, complete with shouting preacher (Mingus’s bass as superhuman lead voice), call-and-response choral vocals, and the rhythmic grooves that have driven black music in this country since the 17^th century.

Mingus had a very rocky personal life—feuding with critics, fighting (sometimes physically) with his sidemen, battling depression and substance abuse, at one point in the ‘60s being physically evicted from his apartment for indigency, but the music, when he could tear it out of himself, was always personal, emotional, and beautiful. Mingus couldn’t quite do what Ellington did—that is, preserve the hard-won veneer of sophistication in the most demeaning of circumstances. On the contrary: when Mingus was suffering, he let the world know it, but his music is all the more powerful for that.

I look at what the Italian-suited Young Lions of Jazz (now pretty old in the tooth) have wrought, turning the ultimate street music into an academic discipline, and while I celebrate the music’s survival, I weep for what we’ve lost—what Mingus never forget: that it was people’s music first. This music is as rich as Duke Ellington’s—and it has the courage to reach beyond Ellington, while never neglecting the earliest pre-jazz roots of the music, and to point toward the music of the future.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 038: Kate Bush: The Sensual World

You wouldn’t think I was a great candidate for induction as a Kate Bush fan. I mean, here’s this airy-fairy sylph-like child prodigy in a leopard-skin leotard, singing in a voice that sounds a little like Marilyn Monroe on helium. About cats and Charlotte Bronte. I mean, she was first signed by David Gilmour, for God’s sake! The prog-rock train left the station, without me, a long time ago.

But you never know where the music will lead you, and when you open up to one kind of experience, you never know what other kinds you’ll find yourself opening to…

We were living in Indiana, trying to finish grad school, and I was playing in an 8-piece horn band (great band, too hip for most of our audiences, eventually riven by internal disputes and an infantile—but virtuosic—rhythmic section who wanted to play INXS instead of the Neville Bros). We played all over the Midwest, typically bar gigs from 10pm-2am, and then another hour-and-a-half of loadout while the sound company broke down the PA and the Good Doc (Dr Jolt, keyboards) loaded, unloaded, and reloaded his pickup “for best road stability.” I’d stand around waiting, the horn players having taken off with the nearest waitress within moments of the last tune, and wait ‘til the Doc was satisfied with the load. Then we’d clamber in, I’d say “are you OK to drive?” and he, wired after the last set would say “I’m OK!!!”, and I’d conk out.

We’d roll into Bloomington at 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning, and, if I didn’t have to go directly to the public radio station for the Sunday sign-on Morning Edition shift (Scott Simon had nothin’ on me), the Doc would drop me at home. Usually I’d try to crash out straight away, so as to have at least a couple of hours sleep before class. Sometimes I’d be too wired, and would mindlessly surf the TV while trying to come down. That’s how I discovered the much-missed, live music program Night Music (hosted, awkwardly enough, by David Sanbourn, missed by Michelob, and booked by Hal Wilner), about which I’ll post in future, but it also meant that occasionally I’d see something on MTV, which I didn’t watch any other time. And that is how, one late night/early morning in 1989, I saw the video for the first single off Kate Bush’s disc entitled The Sensual World, for a song called “Love and Anger.” The first 90 seconds of that video made me a die-hard fan, at least of that record.

Of course, she was a good dancer and easy on the eye, so the sight of her in clingy black leotards under a rain of gold dust was not unpleasant. But, what’s that?!?...Mevlevi Dervish dancers spinning as in the sema? Some guy playing the Malagasay valiha? I was riveted by the visuals of the thing before the music and lyrics even registered. And that was the first aspect of Love and Anger that leaped out of the confines of the MTV-environment: that it was a little short film, saturated with images of transport and transcendence, and remarkably free of the pandering that MTV specialized in.

Then I heard the Trio Bulgarka singing the background vocals, and the beautiful groove being laid down by slapping bass and drums, and then I heard the chorus, which reminded me of nothing so much as Rumi: “Take away the love and the anger/And the little bit of rope holding us together/Looking for a moment that’ll never pass/Livin’ in the gap between past and future”, and as I watched the video, I felt myself virtually going into a trance myself. By the time she was carried, in an apparent swoon, to a stage where Gilmour was ripping out a solo, and began dancing ecstatically, I knew I had to get the record.

And what a record it is: bursting with what Bush herself later called “female energy”, it’s heavily dependent upon the collaboration of the Trio Bulgarka, who she said “just cuddled me and sang with me”; the various global instruments of her brother Paddy (yes, there’s a Mick in the woodpile—the Bush’s are Irish, going back), including kabosy and valiha (I was discovering Malagasay music at the same time), a lovely sample of her father’s Oxbridge voice, at the beginning of The Fog, saying “Just put your feet down, child…Because you’re all grown up, now”; and a succession of spooky, sensual, remarkably naked songs.

And it’s almost all written from the female's point of view, not of an teenage nymphomaniac as imagined by a coke-snorting blow-dried LA-songwriter-asshole, but of a grownup woman who understands that the gap between men and women, between the sensual and the technological, between the instinctive and the rational, might possibly only be bridgeable with love. And, in song after song, love—in all its most Apollonian, Dionysian, light and/or dark manifestations—is the topic: the opener and title track, which quite intentionally evokes Molly Bloom’s orgasmic, holy “Yes” at the end of Ulysses; the chilling noir of a woman who discovers her own yearning toward the sexiness of dark evil when she wakes up from a dream to discover she’s been dancing with Adolf Hitler (Heads We’re Dancing); the loneliness that comes to all when a loving parent is gone (The Fog); the stark loss of love in Never Be Mine; and also deeper, more complex, and more transcendent loves: a lonely soul who unexpectedly discovers love in the form of a computer program’s empathy, voiced in Deeper Understanding by the boops and beeps of her Fairlight and the voices of the Trio Bulgarka (as Kate said, “I tried to imagine what would be the most loving, unearthly sound I could, and that was the Trio”); the acceptance of the loss that love “Between a Man and a Woman” will almost surely entail and of the particular pains that each gender faces alone (This Woman’s Work, used to accompany a scene of miscarriage in the film She’s Having a Baby), and the absolutely astonishing, holy ecstasy of Love and Anger.

After staying up til all hours on multiple nights to see the video again, eventually I purchased the VHS (I had never done that with MTV shit before) and watched it many more times. I was so blown away by what I thought I saw in it—both visual and textual references to Sufism, mystical Christianity, pagan and Goddess religion, the ecstasy of religion and of rock music, the inarticulable but nevertheless real ways in which men and women experience the world differently, and the way that art can unite these halves and produce ecstasy—that I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on it, arguing that the video itself was a holy document, like a sand painting or a mandala or the decorations inside a mosque: that watching this video with the right intentions, surrendering to the absolute tidal wave of archetypal spiritual imagery she had carefully and “using women’s ways of knowing” had built into the document, could itself trigger a spiritual experience.

My revered dissertation advisor once said to me “you should never write a musicology paper unless you think that by doing it you can change the world.” And that was certainly the goal behind my paper on Love and Anger. The bibliography name-checked Sufi commentators like Idries Shah and John Lewin, feminist scholars like Jean Shindoda Bolen and Mary Field Belenky, pagan authors like Starhawk, poets like Omar Khayyam and, especially, my beloved Rumi. When I gave the paper (for a group of ethnomusicologists specializing in visual sources) I must have seemed a little bit like a fakir (a “God-intoxicated man”) myself: I was so convinced of the brilliance of this piece of art, so persuaded that this represented an extraordinary realization of the tools for ecstatic reunion still available in the technological West, that I gave the whole paper, verbatim, including all still and video excerpts, with virtually no reference to the printed text—and then couldn’t remember the experience afterward.

This piece of art found me when I was just about to slide into a deep valley of confusion, alienation, and crisis in my personal life: most particularly, in my relationships--both contemporary and very, very old--with women. Studying Love and Anger, grappling with it, trying to find the words to speak of the baraka (the spark of transcendence) which it created, I now see, also helped me begin to climb out of that valley again.

I honor Kate Bush for the human empathy, spiritual courage and pure stick-to-it-ivity it took to create Love and Anger—and I’m grateful it found me when it did.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 037: Magic Sam: Live at Ann Arbor and Chicago

In the winter of 1978 I was living on the South Side of Chicago, marooned with a bunch of other U Chicago undergraduates in a largely-condemned 1920s-era hotel on the shores of the Lake, which the University was renting from the city to house its overflow undergrads. The hotel itself was a spooky place, with, as I’ve said, multiple floors which were condemned and thus off-limits to the students living there. Of course, that didn’t stop us, late at night, from sneaking up elevator shafts and down fire escapes to check out the deserted spaces, especially the roof and the ballrooms—which were very spooky, with tattered curtains still blowing in the drafts of the 40-foot windows. Every morning we’d schlep onto City-of-Chicago busses for the run east, into and across Hyde Park, to the UC campus.

I hated the place: I was coming off a freshman-year here, which had been one of the most amazing intellectual experiences of my 17 years, and UC by comparison was big, pretentious, oblivious, and had a visible inferiority complex toward the Ivy League. The snow lay piled four and five feet high on the sidewalks (Blizzard of ’78 in Chicago was a brutal time) I also experienced my first grand passion and the pain that usually accompanies same (word of advice: if at all possible, don't fall in love with a poet--especially if she's a good one), and my first encounters with the Sex Pistols. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have coped very differently and a lot more happily (but, with hindsight, don’t we all say that?). As it was, I just fell into a pretty classic spell of depression, and spent all my time sleeping, reading in the UC library (great library), and discovering the blues clubs on the South Side.

See, UC and its Hyde Park community were a white enclave in the midst of the black ghetto. During orientation, UC staff had issued us dire warnings about how paranoid we needed to be, and about how we should not under any circumstances ride the El or otherwise mingle with the “locals.” I blew that off—I had been living in Manhattan for a year, in Alphabet City, and walking everywhere on the island, including volunteering and listening to proto-hip-hoppers in the Parks the Bronx and Spanish Harlem. So I rode the busses and the El and I went out to the funky little blues clubs that dotted the South Side, in the old days before the blues in Chicago literally went “uptown” into neighborhoods the white Yuppies would venture into. Teresa’s and Pepper’s were the most famous but my favorite was the Checkerboard Lounge, owned by guitar great Buddy Guy, who’d recorded with Muddy and, by the time I lived there, was a regularly jamming party of English blues guys like Clapton and Beck (in fact, I heard a great story in the Checkerboard about a night when Clapton had dropped in to jam, and Buddy got word that a raid was going down, and slipped out, leaving Slowhand to take the bust; it was probably the greatest night of Clapton’s life).

The Checkerboard was in Bronzeville on 43^rd street, and most nights, especially when Buddy was out of town, the gig was held down by his rhythm-guitar-playing brother Phil, from who I heard my first P-Funk and Johnny “Guitar” Watson tunes. There was a great ribs joint next door that stayed open ‘til the bar itself closed. There was a chain across the open door to the Checkerboard and a large gentleman would check ID’s and collect the admission charge (usually $2 for people from outside the neighborhood). Inside, the bar was along the right hand wall, separated by a row of cheap lally columns from the tables and vinyl-upholstered chairs of the club section. The stage was just inside and to the left of the door and was maybe 6 inches off the floor. We went there a lot of nights. I was pretty comfortable there, and would bring UC friends down: the neighborhood was used to young white boys coming in to check out the blues, because it had been going on ever since the late ‘50s when the YWB were Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield.

But there was a whole ‘nother blues scene, beyond the South Side, in the 1970s, and neither I—nor, I’d guess, most other denizens black or white of the Checkerboard—was much aware of it. That was over on the West Side, in even tinier clubs like Rosa’s, where the bandstand was so small that you couldn’t fit a second guitar player, so the guitarists over there learned to hold down both parts themselves. King of that scene had been Mississippi-born Magic Sam Maghett, already a noted recording artist for Cobra (Otis Rush’s label), who had gone on to lead bands and record for Bob Koester’s great blues-revivalist label Delmark: his West Side Soul was a great record, capturing the interaction of Sam’s Memphis-flavored Strat and a band of heavy-hitters out of Muddy’s band, but (in my opinion) it didn’t really capture what Sam himself was capable of. He was a great singer and fantastic and funky guitar player, schooled by playing for gospel quartets and in six-fingered Homesick James’s hard-rocking band, but he was at his greatest with the minimal backup of bass and drums.

In August ’69 White Panther John Sinclair had put together a blues & jazz festival for Ann Arbor, running it virtually head-to-head against the upcoming Woodstock fest. And, with his contacts around Detroit and Chicago, he’d been able to put a stellar lineup, that really reminds us of what the waning days of the blues revival were like for blues heads: it included BB and Freddy, T-Bone, Muddy, Wolf, Otis, Buddy and Junior, but also Arthur Crudup, Clifton Chenier, Roosevelt Sykes, Sleepy John Estes, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Big Joe Williams. It’ll never again be possible to get such a constellation of legendary bluesmen, representing the entire history of the music its ‘20s roots in the Delta (Son) and Memphis (John and Big Joe), its reincarnation as jump blues in the hands of T-Bone and later BB, its detours to Texas and Louisiana (Lightnin’ and Clifton), and its modern Chicago manifestations (Muddy and Otis) and next generations (Buddy and Junior). My friend Bob Franke, a student at UM-Ann Arbor, was volunteering, and he remembers it costing 2 bucks to get in.

Sam was supposed to go on at 3pm on Sunday, but, in typically relaxed West-Side fashion,arrived late with his regular bass player and no drummer. He recruited Sam Lay out of Muddy’s band 2 minutes before they hit the stage, some anonymous hippie volunteering as sound man turned on a tape machine patched out of the board, and this is the record that resulted.

It’s an absolute tour-de-force in the blues power trio. Nowadays, with every corner bar holding a Stevie Ray clone and a rock rhythm section, we forget that nobody played the electric blues in a power trio format. Buddy had yet to take on the Hendrix fixation that he in turn passed on to Stevie, and the presumption was that every blues band needed a rhythm guitar player, and probably a piano-player, just to lay down the groove that would get the dancers out on the floor.

But Sam’s revved-up Memphis-style thumb-and-finger playing was an entire orchestra in itself, the way that Robert Johnson’s had been (and there are stories that just prior to his death in ’38, Robert had been gigging around the Delta with an electric rhythm section)—so the minimalist bass-and-drums rhythm section doesn’t drag, but rather fills out the sound. He plays Jimmy Reed (Tore Down) and Freddie King (the instrumental San-Ho-Zay), even throwing in a turbo-charged version of Robert’s Sweet Home Chicago, and the set is like a primer in how to play modern blues guitar: you can actually hear the rhythm section picking up on what Sam’s doing, growing more and more confident and assertive with each new tune in the set. I certainly learned to play the blues guitar from this two-LP set.

The electric blues should be like jazz—it should allow for wildly idiosyncratic individual choices (viz Lightnin’s “Lightnin change [the chord] when Lightnin’ want to change), but it should also be a shared musical language. It’s exhilarating to hear this prove out: bassist Bruce Barlow (another young white boy learning the blues, who would go on to play with Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen) knows the tunes and the changes, but drummer Sam Lay is having to pick up on Magic Sam’s moves moment to moment. The amazing thing is that it works, and there’s a visceral excitement about the recording, horrific technical quality though it is, simply because you’re hearing it develop moment by moment. By the time they played Sam’s closing signature song, the funk-tinged Looking Good, the crowd was screaming so much that the producers brought the band back on—whereupon they played an encore of Looking Good, once again.

The blues reacts: if somebody jumps up on the sticky red-and-white linoleum tile of the Checkerboard and wants to sing on, if someone else in the club is celebrating a birthday, if a police raid is going down and the bar-owner has slipped out the door to avoid it, if the guitar-player shows up at the festival with no drummer—the music is supposed to be able to adapt and react.

It’s a great treasure to have such a fantastic example of this adaptivity, at such a crucial moment in the revival’s final twilight. Within a year or two some of these players would be gone: Freddy in ’76, Sleepy John in ’77, Son and Lightnin’ in the 80s. It was a last flowering of the music’s full recorded history—and of Sam’s: on Dec 1 1969, less than four months after this performance, he keeled over and died from an unexpected heart attack. There have been other recordings and reissues, some with better sound or more extensively-rehearsed bands. But, thanks to that anonymous hippie at the soundboard, Live at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival captures the West Side blues the way I remember it, warts and all, from that cold, sad, life-altering, mind-expanding winter 30 years ago.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 036: Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick: Life and Limb

You can’t contain the breadth, intensity, diversity, and astonishingly consistent high quality of Martin Carthy’s 45-year recording career on a single disc. And, even if you could, what side of Carthy would you emphasize to the detriment of others? The traditional singer, who translated the insights of source singers like Sam Larner and collectors like Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl to practically everyone in the Brit-folk revival? The magnificent guitarist, who, more than any other folkie except possibly Davy Graham, figured out a way to translate the stuttering, herky-jerky, heartbeat life-blood of traditional piping, fiddling, and singing to his loopy, percussive, and utterly idiosyncratic guitar style? The bandleader, whose Brass Monkey lineup found a way to synthesize village brass bands, folk choirs, and rock ‘n’ roll in a wonderfully hairy and funky acoustic lineup? The prototypical folkie-turned-rocker, who was the trad-music cornerstone of Steeleye Span (and which band went straight down the tubes, in terms of quality, when he left)? The slyly anonymous composer, almost all of whose “traditional” songs contain added texts by Carthy which are even more powerful than the original fragments? The road warrior, willing to hold 10,000 Frenchmen in the palm of his hand at Lorient during a solo performance of Skewball, and play the next night at a church-hall folk club? The avatar of political folk-song, whose fantastic musical taste led him to Leon Rosselson and the world of radical contemporary folk-song before anyone else? The brilliant accompanist and duet-partner, who, with both fiddler Dave Swarbrick and button box player John Kirkpatrick, redefined the possibilities of fiddle tunes and Morris tunes, making utterly contemporary and very powerful music?

You can’t contain Carthy’s brilliance on a single CD. So what do you do: go for quantity, with the excellent (but rather eclectic) 4-disc set Carthy Chronicles (another of Free Reed’s masterful boxes), or for a “classic” single disc like Crown of Horn, or for one of the great duo discs with Swarb like Prince Heathen? How do you account for the great, irreplaceable songs which are scattered through the other discs? And, how can you have any adequate representation of Carthy that omits his titanic version of The Famous Flower of Serving Men, which brings together his fantastic idiosyncratic vocal phrasing, his interpolation and expansion of traditional sources, the spitting venom of his percussive guitar in this tale of jealousy, murder and revenge? To say nothing of the greatest riff in folk-rock, a stuttering, tumbling pentatonic line which Fairport pinched as the “big rock lick” in Matty Groves but which Carthy casually tosses off in endless spinning permutations under his contrapuntal vocal?

Well, you can’t. So you have to make a choice that some things will be omitted while others are included (if traditional music teaches you anything, it’s that life is flawed and choices have consequences). So my choice, today, is the masterful live duo with Dave Swarbrick, Life and Limb. Tomorrow’s choice might be different—and you’d probably have to pry my copy of Carthy Chronicles from my cold, dead iPod. Anyway:

Swarb was a Geordie from Birmingham, but with Scots-Irish roots. He played in ceilidh bands (and still continues an association with the fantastic vamping pianist Beryl Marriott), but in 1966 teamed up with Carthy in a duo that virtually redefined the playing of trad English music. Couple Carthy’s astonishing detective- and reconstruction-work with songs, his fantastic piping-and-droning guitar, and his dry wit with Swarb’s loopy, sliding fiddle and irrepressible singing and stage patter, and the telepathy they almost instantly developed, and you have the template they’ve worked with for the past 40 years. But, as with so many musicians who maintain decades-long associations—and who are working in musical traditions that have some spine and longevity to them—you have recent reunion discs that are better than anything they’ve previously recorded: the 90s-and-later discs really are better than the “heyday” discs of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

So—Life and Limb. Swarb’s health has been terrible since the ‘80s—the archetypal image of Swarb was of him vamping on fiddle, singing, eyes closed, into a microphone, with a cigarette hanging out of his month—and he eventually had both lungs replaced to counter his emphysema (the Daily Telegraph published a premature obituary and Swarb gleefully quoted Mark Twain’s “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”). This disc, recorded in 1990, captures the duo pre-surgery but post-reunion—two old friends playing with astonishing empathy, telepathy, and virtuosity, with an air of casual command that makes aging seem pretty attractive (for another example of same, see the Fierce Old Lions of the Planxty reunion DVD, in response to which, paraphrasing The Commitments, “I’ll bet Lunasa are shittin’ themselves”).

The disc touches on some—but not all—of what made (and makes) this duo great: Carthy’s definitive version (as so many of his versions are) of Child Ballad #3, the female-highwayman-in-disguise story of Sovay; the understatedly-brutal political satire of The Begging Song (another of Carthy’s rewrites out of folk tradition, updating the traditional song with new lyrics about the Thatcherite horror) and of his own song A Question of Sport (which uses the language of British pub quizzes to describe Thatcher’s "banality of evil" response to apartheid’s torture policies); the wonderfully loopy, spinning-and-twisting instrumentals including The Pepperpot and Carthy’s March (the latter a Swarb composition, a dreamed tribute to Carthy); and the closer: the seven-plus minutes of their extended workout on Byker Hill, which nearly accomplishes the impossible task of encapsulating everything that was (and is) great about this duo. It’s a tune that appeared previously in their repertoire as both an instrumental and a song (a great funny miner’s lyric in 9/8) and was always the vehicle for improvisation.

It begins with a beautiful guitar solo in more-or-less free time (or, as Carthy learned from Bert Lloyd, “in One”) which recalls nothing so much as Keith Jarrett on one side and the great Malagasay guitarist D’Gary on the other—but it’s just Carthy…free. Then he goes into the groove, in a mode stunningly distant from where he’d gone (and I’ll bet three quarters of the audience had no idea the song was coming) and begins to sing:

If I had another penny
I would have another gin
I would have the piper play
The “Bonny Lass from Byker Hill"...

with Swarb’s fiddle dancing along every step of the way. They go into the solo, and it’s like listening to a great Afro-Cuban band, where everybody in the band is hearing the clave (or, in the case of Carthy/Swarb, the “One”) but nobody needs to play it—it’s that much part of their shared heartbeat. And then, after the solos, they casually modulate up a whole step to another key—not an easy task on open-tuned guitar, let me tell you!—to take the tune out. Only when the room erupts in applause do you realize how much they’ve held the audience hushed throughout the tune. It’s a performance that captures the guts, balls, and fierce joy that Carthy and Swarb found in the working-class roots of traditional music—and the world they opened to the rest of us.

A year or so ago: our old friends the Right Reverend Colonel Lemual B. Rikkitts and Dr. “Pappy Lilt” Masbrow, specialists in “Appalachian Murder Ballads and Celtic Songs of Love and Death,” are in town for a show. There’s been a lot of hanging out, a lot of hysterical quotation of dialog from O Brother Where art Thou? and High Fidelity, biscuits "and a orange" for breakfast, and some great music. The night before they leave, Dharmonia asks the Rev if he's ever heard Martin Carthy. He says “no,” the Doc says “not much,” so she lays Famous Flower of Serving Men on the two of them. They listen motionless, the Doc stroking his beard and the Colonel prone on the couch, to the whole 11 minutes of the Shearwater version. At the end, after the murderous mother is consigned by her son to the flames (“and they spat and rang in her yellow hair”), they continue to sit motionless…until Pappy says “I have GOT to learn that,” and the Rev falls off the couch, moaning “Oh fuck...oh fuck...oh fuck...Why did you let me know he was that great?!?” That’s the reaction we all had—Carthy sent us all back to school and the woodshed. And he humbled us.

His music is an entire world. He may have started out as a folk-revivalist, but (like Keith Richards’ lifelong accomplishment with Muddy Waters) his dedication was true, and the tradition survives in no small part because of him.

You can live inside Carthy's music. There's a whole world there.

[h/t to the Rev for the corrected dialog]

100 Greats in 100 Days # 035: The Pindar Family with Joseph Spence: The Real Bahamas Volume 1 & 2

This music comes from a place—and a world of experience—that is gone. And it was a better, kinder place than the world we live in.

The Bahamas, before the tourist trade took the islands away from the people who actually lived there and turned them into picturesque denizens of a semi-tropical theme park, were a wonderful, kind, and gentle place. Mostly people lived very simple lives, with a lot of leisure time and a close connection both to nature (fishing, sponging, growing vegetables) and to God.

The tradition of the lining-hymn got started on the sponge beds: fishermen out on the beds who were unable to get back to shore for Sunday service would hold it on the boat instead. Services mostly consisted of improvised singing, when the song leader would “line-out” verses from the Bible (especially the Psalms) to improvised melodies and improvised responses from the other choristers. It’s a beautiful, unselfconscious, and truly devout musical language. Eventually the style moved off the boats and back on shore. It became, in fact, part of people’s dying: when a member of the community was not expected to live, the community on Andros or Freeport or Cat Island would gather in the stricken person’s home, clasp hands around the bedside, and sing lining-out hymns until the person passed. It must have been a gentle and loving way to say goodbye.

These are recordings made by Peter Siegel and Jody Stecher in ’65, when word was already out in the Boston/Cambridge folk community, as a result of Sam Charters’s 1958 recordings, about this carpenter/stonemason/guitarist on Andros. What I love so much about this record, even more than Spence’s astoundingly joyful solo records, is the way it reveals the musical world that Spence came from, when people sang together, and when singing was part of all kinds of daily activities: living and dying, joy and sorrow. Spence was a valued guitar player, but he was probably just as valued as a carpenter or a stonemason. And, while he was happy to take the check from the “boys from Harvard,” he was also equally happy to play at a friend’s party for a bottle of rum and the chance of a game of dominos.

The record is beautiful, in which old gospel revival hymns lie like Standing In The Need Of Prayer and Kneelin' Down Inside The Gate are friendly neighbors with Spence’s magnificent solo performance of Out on the Rolling Sea (one of the most beautiful pieces of American music ever recorded) and guitar instrumental Great Dream from Heaven, upon which an entire generation of fingerpicking guitarists built their styles, and without which (and Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground), Ry Cooder would inhabit a much less rich musical world. And Bid You Goodnight, which became an anthem for everyone from Aaron Neville (the only version to come within shouting distance of Spence's own) to the Incredible String Band to (shudder!) the Grateful Dead, is simply one of the most loving texts ever set to music.

Spence himself was related by marriage to the Pindar Family, one of the islands’ great musical clans, and he’s all over this record as accompanist and obbligato singer. He would be absolutely unmistakable no matter how far down in the mix. His guitar style was a marvelously corrugated, twisted, and impossibly funky extrapolation of the implications of ragtime piano (and especially the guitar-ragtime of Blind Blake, who Spence probably heard while working the tobacco fields of Georgia as a migrant) and 4-part gospel song. He played everything under the sun, from folk hymns to Tin Pan Alley to Afro-Caribbean blues, and he was a complete orchestra all by himself, not only in his wildly-contrapuntal guitar (all in the key of D—and for more on that, see below), but also in the irreplicable vocal soundtrack he supplied to his own guitar. You can’t really call it singing, encompassing as it does the widest-possible range of whistles, grunts, cackling laughter, and so on. He sounds happily demented, but he’s actually “living on the hallelujah side,” bringing the whole sacred/secular world of the Bahamas into his solo playing.

Spence is kind of a litmus test: people I play him for either love him or hate him: they start laughing hysterically or pleading with me to take it off. Just as with Blind Gary Davis or Arnold Schoenberg or The Minutemen, you have to listen past your own expectations of what “beauty” is and accept it on their terms—and if you do, your musical world will be bigger.

Years ago I talked to Jody Stecher about that ’65 trip, when the boys from Harvard must have thought they’d entered a virtually Edenic pre-industrial world. Stecher, a magnificent guitarist and a gentle, kind person himself (and a practicing Buddhist), tells the story very well. But he also told me the story of Spence’s rationale for playing everything in “D”. See, he used dropped-D tuning on the guitar, in which the lowest-pitched string is dropped an additional whole-step from E to D. This limits the number of keys you can employ (essentially to D, G, A, and their respective modes) but expands both the range and the contrapuntal capacities in those keys. “folk” musicians, unlike classical players, have never made a fetish out of technical difficulty for its own sake: play some impeccable, finger-busting etude in Db for a folk fiddler or guitarist, and he’s likely to say “you know, son, if you move that up a half-step to D, you’re gonna sound a lot better.”

So with Spence. Jody S told me that, in his guise as good little Topworld folklorist, he asked Spence why he played everything in D. Spence replied, in the gravel conversational voice that was an exact parallel of his singing, “I used to know all them keys! I knew ‘em all: A, and B, and D, and H…I used to know all them keys!” Stecher asked, “well, Mr Spence, if you knew all those keys, how come you don’t use them anymore?” Spence replied, “I got TAHRD of ‘em!”

What an amazing, kind, and bursting-with-creativity man. What a world that must have been. It’s gone—but this recording is like a daguerreotype to remind us of what we’ve lost.

The "Justice" Department

Gonzales is lawyering up for Bush/Cheney.

The projected charge?

War crimes.

Turd Blossum and the Big Lie

Karl Rove never has been able to keep subject and predicate, cause and effect separate. He's made a lot of money teaching people dumber than he how to tell the Big Lie:

Rove: Reporters slam politicans to save selves.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 034: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni (bootleg of Pearlman/Boston Baroque 1986 performances)

Possibly the greatest moment in the greatest opera ever written: in Mozart’s brilliant, scabrous, and subversive masterpiece Don Giovanni, when, after two acts and three hours of irony, satire, playful political commentary, outrageous sexual innuendo, and Marx Brothersian slapstick, the Don’s world is revealed to be shockingly darker, realer, and far more consequential than anyone in the cast or the audience had realized: when the Commendatore, father of Giovanni’s latest conquest, who the Don had killed in an offhand, wisecracking duel in Act I, appears, an animate Golem-esque statue, at the end of Act II, and, basso profundo, calls out to Giovanni, threatening him with the flames of hell unless he repents.

There are three perfect operas—if, like me, you find Romanticism to be gimcrack self-engrossment and thus discount the 19^th century: the first real opera, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, when he recognized that, in the effort to recreate the affect of ancient Greek drama, he could draw from all the musics around him; this one; and the only 20^th-century opera that comes within hollering distance of Mozart, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress: a conscious effort to recall the brevity, directness, and synthesis of slapstick comedy and vertiginous surreality of the Mozart. Giovanni might be the greatest of all three.

The “classical” in the world of European aesthetics is a conscious attempt to seek “coolness,” clarity, symmetry, balance, and immediacy. In its broadest interpretation, it’s the willingness to work within the confines of a genre—be it the sonata or the string quartet or representational painting or the 12-bar blues—as opposed to insisting upon an individualistic, idiosyncratic reinvention of the art form in question. A whole generation of composers, in the wake of WWI, essentially abandoned the hyper-romantic individualism of the expressionist style (Strauss’s Elektra and Salome being the canonic examples—dark, contorted, cynical, deeply sexual), horrified that their obsessively autobiographical fetishization of nationalism and individualism might have somehow contributed to the conclave of stupid reasons for that stupid, unnecessary war. Another generation of composers, in the wake of Buchenwald and Nagasaki, abandoned the last remnants of populist nationalism and retreated—regressively and, let’s be honest, with a degree of social cowardice—into the academic enclaves and hyper-“rationality” of serialism, itself an unwittingly fitting soundtrack to the button-down neurosis of the Cold War.

Mozart would not have understood the point of abandoning stylistic conventions: musical satire cannot work unless an audience has expectations which can be invoked, teased, shocked, or subverted. As Allanbrook makes clear in her masterful exegesis, the musical humor in DG depends upon the audience recognizing the references: the way that Leporello evokes and subverts the long tradition of comic operatic basses; the way the Don’s misconduct engages and scandalizes Viennese sexual mores (there’s a reason this opera had to open “out of town” in Prague); the way the music for Dona Elvira, based in formerly au courant styles, is just a few too many years out of date, and played too fast for grace; the way the diegetic music onstage during the first act Finale slyly quotes Mozart’s own operatic catalog. Such references are the best single argument for studying musicology—they are entirely of the time, place, and people of the original context, and recognizing and understanding them can add an entire additional layer of comic reference to the listening experience.

They’re also the best, and an entirely consistent, argument in favor of the historical instruments and performance practice of this recording. Pearlman and the Boston Baroque understood the style of Giovanni from the other end—instead of the tinkering hindsight revisions of Mendelssohn, Stokowski, Karajan, or Bernstein, Pearlman and my homies begin by asking, not “what do I think this should sound like?”, but rather, more modestly, insightfully, and “classically,” “what did Mozart think this should sound like?”

A common critique of historical performance is that it seeks the impossible: to “recreate the music exactly as it sounded.” This is bullshit: what HP seeks to do is simultaneously simpler, more modest, and more ambitious: it seeks to understand the composer’s intent and the composition’s impact. What was the impact of the references and allusive quotations in DG, to music, politics, and public figures of the day? How shocked was the Prague (and later Viennese) audience by the sexuality? How do we have to play to allow this to come out?

Pearlman elicits a performance whose guerilla lightness, flexibility, transparency, and intensity lets the soloists (including the great Sanford Sylvan) float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. And, like Ali in his prime, Sylvan’s Don, at the climactic moment when, confronted by the Don, he must choose between either submitting to conventional bourgeois apology and surviving, or defying even Hell’s power to control him, categorically refuses. Threatened with ejection from the boxing world for refusing to fight in Vietnam (“them Viet Congs never did nothin’ to me”), Ali accepted his exile—and, at the 1996, refusing to submit even to Parkinson’s, he lit the Olympic Torch. He earned it: he was one of the bravest men in the history of American athletics. Unlike Ali, the Don wasn’t brave, but he had the defiant pride of Lucifer, and, like Lucifer, he was cast into hell rather than submit. It’s no surprise that the Viennese censors hated this opera—and no surprise that I love it: I don't do well with authority either.

A radio broadcast, around 1986, of a concert version of DG. We were blasting it through our funky little rented graduate-student house, and at the climactic moment, I sang the Commendatore’s basso profundo command: “Don Gio-VAAAA-ni!” Dharmonia thought it was the broadcast: my finest (and only) operatic moment, a thumb in the eye to all the people in my childhood who told me I couldn't sing.

Two more who didn't get their asses kicked hard enough in high school...

(1) Whoever is the ad-agency genius who came up with the high concept for the new Nick Lachey commercial in which he minces through his day, totting up come-on looks he gets from teenage models on a little audience-counter thingie.

(2) Nick Lachey himself, for thinking anyone over the intellectual age of nine would find him, or the commercial, appealing. The dumb fucker is so self-absorbed he makes Jessica look like Jane Addams.

Jeeeezus.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 033 Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath: Country Cooking

Chris McGregor was one brave son-of-a-bitch [ETA 6/5/07: and now, I find out, my kinsman!]. Growing up a white South African with an interest in jazz, he took that interest where it led him—straight into the townships, the “tribal homelands” in which the white minority government had segregated blacks. By corralling them in these barely-livable “independent states,” they could absolve themselves of any responsibility for infrastructure (you know, minor things like food, clean water, schools, sewage disposal, and so on) under the heading of “maintaining security.” Of course, these homelands were completely surrounded by white enclaves in which curfews and paramilitary police forces made sure blacks couldn’t travel freely for work.

The result was great for whites: a captive, essentially slave population who, desperate for work, would cross over into the enclaves to clean houses, do the laundry, mow the lawns, nurse the children, and so on—and then cross back into the homelands at night, to try to rustle up the same resources for their own families. White South Africans in the apartheid era had a higher, artificially-inflated lifestyle than any other nation with the same average per capita income. Of course they didn’t want it to end. Just like whites in the American South didn’t want Jim Crow to end. Just like entirely too many Zionists don’t want Gaza to be opened. It’s not about security, or “respecting cultural differences,” or “allowing the subordinate population its own governance.” It’s about “I got mine and I’ll keep my foot on your neck as long as necessary to keep it.”

Chris McGregor, Johnny Clegg, and a few other white musicians had the balls to defy this white minority color bar. McGregor was a pianist interested in jazz, Clegg a guitarist interested in Zulu music, but they both had the ferocious determination to learn that took them out of the white ghettos and into the townships.

Black South African music under apartheid, as is ironically the case with so many such situations, was an incredibly rich, diverse, and exciting world. In the mining camps and gospel churches, on the Jo’burg streets and in the Durban shebeens—and just occasionally on college campuses and in unannounced “guerilla” concerts—musicians of many ethnicities including Zulu, Xhosa, and Shangaan were working out syntheses of their various musics with each other and with the musics that had come with the Afrikaans and British colonizers. Guitars and concertinas became Zulu instruments, pennywhistles and pianos became kwela (street jazz) instruments, and, in 1962, McGregor formed the Blue Notes, a racially-mixed jazz group which included future greats Dudu Pukwana (alto), Johnny Dyani (bass) and Louis Moholo (drums).

They were a fantastic band, playing a mixture of hard-bop, standards, Ellington-esque originals, and, most originally and enchantingly, improvisational tunes based upon township grooves (the gorgeous and eloquently-simple mid-tempo marabi chord progression—I IV I6/4 V--among them).

After the 1948 elections, when the Afrikaans National Party roared into power and enacted sweeping new apartheid laws, it was illegal for musicians to perform or crowds to congregate in mixed-race settings. It only got worse after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960: just as South African national radio maintained a psychotically paranoid playlist and censorship policy (consciously promoting European classical music as “South African” music and keeping anything but the most innocuous indigenous music off the air), the security forces kept the audiences separate as well—they had learned from America’s Jim Crow laws. So the Blue Notes, and the crowds who loved them, had to perform in the gray areas between legal and illegal venues: little bars, college “folk” clubs, and on the street. They finally left in ’64, part of the exodus that also saw the departure (and legal banishment) of other great musicians including Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela. In almost all cases, they would not revisit their shared homeland for the next 30 years (the exception was Dudu Pukwana, who with truly breathtaking courage slipped into Soweto in the late ‘70s to record an LP defiantly entitled In the Townships).

Like many expatriate musicians—and especially bandleader/composers, who somehow have to corral enough players to play their charts!— McGregor scuffled for years, playing around Europe’s festival circuit with various pickup bands. He had the guts—and the stamina—to keep after his original vision. Though times were tough, his presence in Europe, along with Dudu’s and Johnny’s, was fantastically liberating for the British free-jazz scene of the early Seventies. Eventually, his peripatetic big band, the wonderfully-named Brotherhood of Breath, included along with Dudu and Louis Moholo, John Surman, Evan Parker, and Kenny Wheeler, who would go on to become stalwarts of Britain’s new- and free-jazz scenes.

The Brotherhood pointed a new way for a big band, moving past the riffing-sections-under-soloists models of conventional swing and post-bop arranging, past the (beautiful, but meticulous) orchestrations of Gunther Schuller and Gil Evans), toward a more open, interactive, sprawling, conversational texture. In fact, they played more like an African band or percussion ensemble, with a sense of improvisational-but-responsive, loose-but-tight-knit give-and-take which is like a breath of pure country air.

I first heard them on the LP Country Cooking. I was living in Indiana, going to school for jazz, but interested in a wide range of world (especially African) musics. I was playing with the great Heather Adou, a singer, dancer, and percussionist from Mali, and with Alain Barker (another culture-crossing white South African who was lambasted for doing it), from whom I learned my first Zulu dancing, drumming, and panpiping. Country Cooking, the title track on this LP (based once again on the venerable but irreplaceable marabi chord progression) was so simple, so clear, and yet the solos and the overall aura of the record were so technically commanding, that it seemed to point a way toward a synthesis of those two worlds—jazz and African music—that I loved.

Maybe it’s the egolessness which African musicians are expected to develop. Or the sense, always present in South African music, of sacred joy under the simple grooves. Maybe it’s the unshakeable sense of self that jazz players under apartheid had to maintain to survive. But I think a lot of it’s Chris—his personality, his charts, his piano playing, and his vision of the band are all over this music.

Two years later, I gave a final master’s jazz recital of original charts which blended jazz, blues, Afro-Cuban, marabi, mbaqanga, and izihlabo styles, with a “pocket” big band of ten players, some of whom later went on to the Basie band, and two dancers.

Afterwards, a tight-assed ethnomusicology student, who had half the cultural insight and one-tenth the musical chops of anybody on stage, said “was that supposed to be some kind of joke?” At the time, I was too taken aback to articulate all the snotty comebacks I later thought of. But in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t: the best way to fight apartheid of any sort, from any source, and whether in the jazz clubs of South Africa or the recital halls of Indiana University, is to play music that denies its existence.

Chris McGregor taught me that.

Senior Pentagon analyst's new book on Bush/Iraq: "Fiasco"

Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post "serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive."

We knew it, we said it, we screamed bloody murder about it, we marched against it.

They ignored us, jailed us, mocked us, wire-tapped us, "Swift-Boated" us, and did it anyway.

They were wrong. We were right.

On their heads be it.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 032: John Coltrane Quintet: Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings

There is almost no way to describe this music. It is certainly some of the greatest jazz ever recorded—but that is faint praise. It is certainly some of the greatest American music, some of the greatest improvised music, ever recorded—but that is faint praise. It is certainly some of Coltrane’s own greatest playing—but that is faint praise.

It captures Coltrane teetering on the edge of one more breakthrough: having come up through the cerebral fury of bebop, the gutbucket funk of “big-toned” bar-walking tenor saxophone R&B, and the down-home groove of hard-bop; having helped birth modal jazz with Miles on Kind of Blue; having happily subjected himself to the funhouse-mirror of Monk’s musical world (subject of a future “100 Greats” post); having burned through and annealed himself to chord changes with the harmonic steeplechases of Giant Steps and Countdown; having cured himself of booze and junk; and finally having been fired by Miles (which Miles dig for his own good—Trane was so self-effacing that he probably never would have left), Trane found himself leading a live band for the first time under his own name. It wasn’t yet the “Classic Quintet”—that would have to await the arrival of bassist Jimmy Garrison in ’62—but two permanent members and one special guest, all of whom would boot Trane’s burgeoning genius into the stratosphere, were already on board. McCoy Tyner, a bare 22 years old, had already developed a muscular, athletic, and harmonically-liberating approach to the piano: instead of laying down the complex dominant-7^th based “shell voicings” pioneering by beboppers like Bud Powell, Tyner had worked out a rolling, percussive, open-voicing-based piano style which (with the benefit of a lot of hindsight) owed as much to Ellington, gospel, and the blues. The titanic drummer Elvin Jones—certainly one of the two or three greatest drummers jazz ever produced—became the cornerstone of Coltrane’s live bands virtually to the end. An astonishingly powerful, visceral, and creative player, he had developed a “circular” style which eschewed even bebop’s “ching-chinga-ching” ride-cymbal patterns for roiling cycles of polyrhythms, which sounded like nothing so much as West African percussion ensemble music played on drum kit. More than any other player, Elvin had the chops, the guts, and the sheer physical stamina to keep up with Trane, who in this period was sinking deeper and deeper into an obsessive, 12- and 15-hour per day practice regimen. In all of the live gigs, there’d come a point in one of the simple modal tunes they played (really vehicles for virtually free improvisation; tunes like My Favorite Things, Greensleeves, Impressions, or Chasin’ the Trane), 6 or 8 or 10 minutes into the tune, when McCoy and the bassist would drop out, and Trane and Elvin would go at it, playing and playing and playing, pushing each other higher and higher.

Coltrane in this period was a spiritual seeker. He’d hit such depths as a junkie, and had pulled himself out of that limbo, seemingly and primarily with the help of his practice regimen. He never left a Christian cosmology, but he intended in this period that his music should be a tool for spiritual enlightenment, both for himself and his audience (this would culminate in the LP-length prayer of 1964’s A Love Supreme). He was investigating the music of India and Africa, looking at the way each of these polyrhythmic and (more-or-less) modal musical worlds used sound as a sacred tool. And he was practicing 12 hours a day—and between marathon sets on the gig.

The Village Vanguard was comfortable, intimate, and familiar to Trane: he, and hundreds of other jazzmen, had gigged there regularly. It was a place where hipsters went, and could listen to the newest and most challenging music in tight proximity, without management bugging them to buy more than one drink. A strange, dank place to serve as the birthing-ground for a recording of spiritual transcendence, but then, jazz has always of necessity found the sacred in the alley and the whorehouse—that’s part of its greatness.

The guest, who though he was in the band less than a year, had a comprehensive impact on Trane, was Eric Dolphy. A Los Angeles native, and an enormously facile technician on a whole range of reed instruments (including, most notably and significantly, the ungainly bass clarinet), Eric was also extremely knowledgeable about both classical music and alternative/healthy lifestyles, a vegetarian, and had never been part of the New York booze-and-junk lifestyle. He was also an astonishingly unself-conscious improviser, capable of playing competent Charlie Parker-style bebop alto but also of the most angular, challenging, anti-harmonic, and “out” sounds anybody had ever heard (my revered teacher David Baker, who wrote a series of charts featuring Eric in the George Russell band, said to me “I dunno…Eric was a freak. I think he just heard that way”). In all of these ways Eric was profoundly influential—really an inspiring comrade—for Trane. I loved his playing so much, heard as such a clear and forceful extension of Bird, that I transcribed a dozen Eric solos on Bird standards, just so I could compare the lines and find the Bird licks in Eric's style.

Trane was also listening to the legendary Sun Ra tenor player John Gilmore, like McCoy from Philly, and indirectly found himself inspired both by the free playing, the musical collectivism, and the spacy Afro-centrism of Ra’s Arkestra.

All these things coalesce on Village Vanguard. They’re playing tunes they knew as well as they knew each others’ breathing patterns: in addition to those cited above, Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, Spiritual, Naima, and Miles’s Mode—all of them open, wispy forms intended to provide the maximum amount of improvisational freedom. They’re in a comfortable venue they knew well and where they could count on simpatico listeners. They had five nights in a row with a sympathetic recording engineer, Bob Thiele of Impulse!, managing the machine and staying out of the way. And they had each other.

There is no way to describe this music. There is no way to describe the places to which these men together take themselves and their listeners. There is no way to describe the spiritual intensity and the sheer sonic beauty of the music they play. It’s as if, for those five nights in November 1961, all the stars and the planets lined up; all of Coltrane’s musical and spiritual quests coalesced; all the (myriad) personality conflicts washed away; all the power, selflessness and courage of which jazz is capable came to the fore. And in India, a feature for the droning plainchant harmonies of Trane’s soprano, Eric’s bass clarinet, and the buzzing insistence of Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s oud (which I think is misidentified: it sounds like a lauto or buzuq to me), with the rhythm section of McCoy, Reggie Workman, and Elvin’s roiling drums churning underneath them, they truly reach a state of grace, and baraka (the Sufi metaphor of blessedness and spiritual connection) rains down upon them all. This music is in the same transcendent company as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Qawwali, Aaron Neville’s falsetto gospel, the polytonal chants of the Gyuto Tantric Monks, and the Bach B-minor Mass.

It's holy.

100 Greats in 100 Days # 031: Jimi Hendrix: Electric Ladyland

Jimi Hendrix was the most visionary musician in rock music.

Many claims are made for him: “greatest guitar player” principle among them, and certainly all rock (and most blues and many jazz) guitar players since then have had to grapple with Hendrix—even if only to attempt to reject him. Certainly both his physical dexterity and his command of the electric instrument’s enormous timbral range were unmatched to his advent, and have been matched by damned few since then: Stevie Ray got within hollering distance of Hendrix’s blues playing, Eric Johnson within range of his timbral acuity, Ernie Isley his overall post-modern R&B approach. This is fitting: there’s certainly no shame in wearing Jimi’s dirty drawers, and Hendrix himself was a masterful synthesizer of prior threads of black guitar playing: the stinging pentatonic licks and sheer, manhandling strength of Albert King; the beautiful hummingbird’s-wing vibrato of BB; the funk of John Lee Hooker and (especially) Jimmy Reed; the heart-wrenching chord-melodies (and poetry) of Curtis Mayfield; the feedbacking psychosis of Hubert Sumlin (with Wolf).

Equally many claims were made for Hendrix as a psychedelic Staggerlee: Anglo-America’s fantasy of the biggest-endowed and most dangerous Black Stud of them all. Jimi understood the bizarre and subliminal neuroses that underlay that (he’d been on the chitlin’ circuit, after all, and he’d seen all those little white kids—and dweeby white hipster adults—slumming at the black clubs), and the fantasies of pimpdom and sexual prowess that drove some of the (positive and negative) reviews (for a real glimpse into the muck at the bottom of Anglo-America’s Superfly fetish, read the outrageously derogatory—but titillated—reviews by British critics of his first England shows; they’re particularly outrageous, because, as dharmonia says, “That was the most beautiful man in rock ‘n’ roll”). And he’d play into that too: dressing more “flash” and with more panache than any Brit-boy could possibly pull off, and always with at least one blonde white chick on his arm. Going all the way back to Bert Williams, and to Mr Tambo and Mr Bones before that, Anglo-America has held an unholy fascination with Big Black Men. Particularly one like this, who looked (they claimed) “like a Mau Mau,” but had been a fucking paratrooper in the Screaming Eagles, the 101^st Airborne--talk about a bourgeois nightmare!

Certainly he built the most persuasive synthesis of psychedelia and improvisation: the Grateful Dead played longer solos, the Jefferson Airplane wrote “trippier” lyrics, Blue Cheer turned the amps up even louder, but NO ONE had both the chops and the imagination to create aural canvases (especially live) that supported psychedelia’s prose imagery. Except Jimi, who had twice as much cosmicity and ten times the funk.

What Electric Ladyland makes clear is that Jimi’s vision was greater than virtuosity, than Staggerlee the Badman, than psychedelia—was even greater than the sum of their parts. Other people prefer other albums (the “Viet Cong have just assaulted Carnaby Street” guerilla pop of Are You Experienced?, where he made a snotty British guitar player-turned-bad-bassist and a snotty British jazz-drummer keep up with him; the funky grooves and smart brevity of Axis: Bold as Love (which has some of his most beautiful songs); and the deep, scary, Black Pantheresque, Vietnam/midnight grooves of Band of Gypsies (subject of another “100 Greats” post), but Ladyland, the 3^rd and last set released (as two LP’s) under his direction, is his magnum opus.

Partly this is because it addresses all of those constituent genres that were his building blocks, and makes them all his, as the “First Rays of the New Rising Sun”: the badass funk of Long Hot Summer Night (complete with black-doo-wop vocals), the chank-style rhythm licks and screaming guitar/vocal doubling of Gypsy Eyes, in which he appropriates (and inverts) the James Brown template, and the lickety-split Come On (Part I), where he turbo-charges Earl King’s already-titanic New Orleans anthem; the lovely Mayfield-esque funk of Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland); the lunar Superfly slow blues of Voodoo Chile (worth the price of admission all by itself); the contemptuously brilliant pop of Crosstown Traffic and House Burning Down; the magnificent version of All Along the Watchtower (which joins Jimi’s live 1967 version of Like a Rolling Stone as the only two covers which ever bested Dylan’s originals—so great that bar bands since then play Jimi’s version, not Bob’s); and most especially the slow, revolutionary funk of Voodoo Child (Slight Return), where Jimi takes the menace of Muddy Waters’s I’m a Man into outer space, “standing up next to the mountain, chop[ping] it down with the edge of my hand,” and, oh yeah, blowing away any boundaries to the guitar as he goes. But his vision is also there in magnificent, courageous, imaginative, and free-wheeling extended pieces: the tape loops and backwards-masking of Rainy Day, Dream Away; the extended solos and spoken word musique concrete of 1983 (A Merman I should turn to be). Some of this sounds dated now—psychedelia had a limited shelf-life, but what you mostly hear in these tracks is an unfettered musical imagination: someone who had cast off the chains of the chitlin’ circuit and the blackface performing-bear expectations of Anglo-American pop, who ahd found a way to use all the spectrum of “Great Black Music” in service of a creative vision. As a composer, as a master of available technology, and most certainly as an improviser and sculptor of musical sound-scapes, I’d put him up there with Ellington.

Hendrix died in 1970 at age 27, essentially killed by a rock ‘n’ roll industry so young, so greedy, and so ignorant that it hadn’t realized how many more millions could be made by keeping its artists alive (even if that meant paying for drug clinics, alcohol treatment, or six-months’-stays in Caribbean island studios). The first time I saw him, in the fantastic and revelatory concert/compilation film Jimi Hendrix, which connects clips of many different kinds of music and many different situations (and also his brilliant and hilarious appearances on the—clearly sympathetic—Dick Cavett show), in a midnight show at the old Harvard Square Theatre around 1978, it made me weep.

It still does.