No musician is more represented, or over-represented, in my archives than Le Sony’r Ra, ne Sun Ra. I know why this is so. It’s because Sun Ra’s raucus avant-swing brings with each helping some measure of surprise, of jaw dropping delight. It helps the cause of surprise the flow of newly discovered recordings, formally released or illicit, is apparently to be ceaseless.
Obviously, in a case like this, meeting my desire for ‘ra’ surprise crosses over into mild obsession. Fortunately, Transparency Records aims to satisfy those of us so afflicted. In 2008, they delivered a 28 CD set, The Complete Detroit Jazz Center Residency, that is both well over the top of any normal concept of documentation, and, a nirvana of surprise.
My informed guess would be Sun Ra is the most recorded musician ever. Okay, maybe the Grateful Dead–another dependable source of surprise–grab the ring. (Who knows?) Still, the immense Sun Ra opus is manageable for the neophyte. I’d say to begin to deal with it, one only need deal with 20 records or so. Even this task would require a starting point, and, let’s suppose it is possible to identify the one cornerstone platter no music lover should be without.
I’d nominate two records, Blue Delight (1989), and, Live at Montreux (1976). One or the other… I could nominate twenty more too. Don’t get me started. If the 28 discs of Detroit were boiled down to a single disc, (or two!) I could nominate it. Certainly, the Detroit set is only for obsessives and deluded completists. Still, only the matter of its vastness intervenes in any sensible recommendation. For me, the set is essential and loaded with surprise.
As the two Rolling Stone covers demonstrate, Sun Ra and Neil Young gaze, resolutely, out into the cosmos. Young weighed in with a modest 8 CD set last year, Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972. It was long anticipated and worth the wait. because Young has permitted live recordings to stream into the open source, if you’re torrent-savvy, you can indulge yourself in his own endless live opus. Electrified Neil Young is the only heavy metal I return to again and again.
Vol. 1 reprises the classic ‘first period’ of Young’s career. There are too many alternates which sound too close to the original versions. Otherwise, the set is chock full of prime Neil Young music. The first disc, with the earliest tracks and demos, is especially rewarding.
Incidentally, Neil’s first four Reprise records have recently been remastered and reissued.Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush have desert island status in my book. (Neil Young home page…weird + myspace)
English folkie Bert Jansch collaborated with Mike Nesmith on his 1974 gem,L.A. Turnaround. Nesmith brought along his colleague, pedal steel guitarist Red Rhodes too. By this time, Nesmith was three years into his travels down his own distinctive country-rock byway. Jansch had left Pentangle and returned to a solo career.
I don’t know the back story behind L.A. Turnaround, one of Jansch’s finest–among many fine–records. Much to my surprise, there are on youtube a series of clips of sessions featuring Jansch and Red Rhodes. The setting is a country cottage in Britain. The sessions are marvelous and intimate. Eventually, Nesmith would augment tracks cut in the impromptu studio with contributions from L.A. session men, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and fiddler Byron Berline, as well as Brits, including bassist Klaus Voorman, and drummer Danny Lane.
The three youtube clips comprise a beguiling mini-documentary.
It’s easy to peg records I really enjoyed last year. I’m not–usually–a very close listener. Sometimes I have to work to recognize something extraordinary. …usually, I don’t have to work hard at all.My own immediate ‘belly’ response is decisive in most cases.
When I auditioned Willie Nelson’s new recording with venerable Texas little big band Asleep At the Wheel, I wasn’t expecting the big upside. But then about six or so minutes into the experience I’m vibing to Fan It and realizing all-of-sudden-like, ‘this fantastic!’ No record last year plastered the smile on my soul like this one did.
Willie Nelson is legendary, iconic, all that, and his record last year Willie and the Wheel is simply one of the best records he’s ever made. (Willie & the Wheel home)
If you ask me what I found so pleasurable, I would tell you the record is just great singin’ and playin’ from beginning to end. Heck, it’s kind of like pairing Art Tatum with Ben Webster. You want some analysis to back my sense up? Come on!
33 years ago, 1976, was the bicentennial year, but for me it was mainly the year I latched onto a dream job running a record department in the back of a book store in the college town of Middlebury, Vermont. Very soon after my arrival I struck up a friendship with a like-minded jazzbo and began sitting in on his weekly radio show on the college station, WRMC. One way or the other, I would spend one radio slot a week there for nine years, mostly presenting jazz on Tuesday nights under the title Groovin’ High. Tidbit: for two years CNN’s Frank Sesno read the news after my show.
So, this was the background for 1976. Graham Parker released two superb recordsHeat Treatment and Howlin’ Wind in the same year! I have to confess too: to my tastes, both records wiped away my fascination with the Boss, who had released Born to Run the previous year. To place these records in context, both Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols would issue their debut records the next year. Meanwhile, the FM radio dial was increasingly dominated by corporate rock.
Parker recorded for Mercury, yet their hype machine fell short with his one-two punch in 76. There really wasn’t a place for pub-rock driven singer-songwriter rock and roll on the stateside dial. I didn’t need any extravagant pitch. As soon as I learned that Parker had hired en-mass the legendary Brinsley Schwarz outfit to be his back-up band I was off my rocker. They were my favorite countrified import from the isles, and Silver Pistol (1971) and Nervous On the Road (1972) remain among my favorite listens in the down home vein of The Band and Better Days and Bobby Charles. Okay, as it turned out: guitarist Schwarz and keyboardist Andrews, and they picked up buddy Martin Belmont from Ducks Deluxe.
Billy Rankin-drummer
Bob Andrews-piano
Nick Lowe-bass
Ian Gomm-guitar
Brinsley Schwarz-guitar
Only a little of that flavor is in the mix of Parker’s two opening shots. Parker is a ferocious soulman and one of the great rock-and-roll songwriters, and the Brinsleys morphed into The Rumour so as to match the ferocity with their own fervor. No hits was the reward for two statements of fierce rock and roll. Only surprising—since the era’s trends were unkind to so much terrific music—in that the two records have nary a bad cut, and, including lots of hit-worthy cuts.
(I count Heat Treatment, Black Honey, Pourin’ It All Out, and Fool’s Gold, just from Heat Treatment.) It was the same result for Squeezing Out the Sparks, released in 1979, albeit at least it is considered one of the great rock records. However, it came out in even more ungenerous times: 1979 was the year disco broke through, and, punk ruled most muso’s hearts.
Quality wins out in the end. Graham Parker has been churning out grown-up rock and roll ever since that bicentennial year–enough so that he is one of the masters.
Graham Parker tells the story himself on his defunct blog Chairman Parker. It’s an amusing and edifying read.
VI. Noise. In terms of music, personally, it’s not a mean distinction. It was 30+ years ago that I heard very late period Coltrane. At the time I didn’t understand, nor do I today, why it was termed free jazz. Then came Evan Parker and Peter Brotzmann. Sonny Sharrock. It goes on. Peter’s son, Caspar Brotzmann. Mersbow. Charles Gayle.
It goes on: over there. Actually, when I hear the word ‘noise,’ I think of Jacques Attali; Noise: The Political Economy of Music. It’s one of the essential books about music, but it’s not about noise, really.
What is noise? One can’t say, ‘I know it when I hear it.’ This doesn’t make sense as a report about a coherent act of listening. Still, the actual received—heard—bandwidth, streamed into cognitive apparatus, then inferentially extracted to either ‘feel’ or (some) named perception, is variable “in the subject” but defines nothing more than the available slice. This slice is allowed by the consequence of evolution. Listening is actually very hard to do.
The extremes of this slice might hold some fascination.
quiet becomes
lifeless, short
of this, thumping
passes over
silence
The most intense noise I ever heard was the sound world available while floating in an isolation tank. Beautiful.
About Sunn O)))
SUNN 0))) is the heavy rock equivalent of an institutional-size dose of Largactyl; when you finally get down, you stay down. SUNN 0))) makes sounds of weather formation size meditations, as monolithic as a brick of monosludge. SUNN 0))) music is huge and simple, like a future race of technologists who forgot how to build microchips so had to return to factory-sized computers. Its shamanic appeal is considerably enlivened by the sub-bass disfigurations caused to all bowels in the immediate proximity, whilst the lead guitar clings to your torso like a butter knife spreading Philly Lite first on a piece of toast, then on the bread board, then across the counter over the fridge and up the walls into adjacent rooms.
Ha ha. . .Philly Lite? I guess lava would hurt. Anyway, SunnO))) and Double Leopards figure into my sense, although, the heaviest drone I’ve churned through and out, Low Mera, didn’t make Slidemare.
Part IV. Initially I acquainted myself with the artistry of Robert Rich via his collaborating with Steve Roach on the superb Strata from 1991; but, probably I got to hear it sometime in 1993. By 1993 Rich had released ten records. Yet, at the time, I didn’t seek to unravel the Rich strand in Strata, and so he wasn’t on my radar screen. This all changed the first year working back in a record store. It was 1995 and my very hip assistant manager Chris (aka DJ Weirton,) hipped me to illbient and other urban electronic music. To make a short story shorter, both of us were all over certain labels, so when Asphodel dropped the two sets, A Swarm of Drones, and A Storm of Drones, that year, each slid into the CD player in the store pronto.
The compilations spread a massive exhalation of drones over seven sides. There, amongst tracks by Steve Roach, Ellen Fullman, Stuart Dempster, DJ Spooky, Robert Fripp and Robert Rich–those being the the only participants I was familiar with–were a host of new lights about to shine in my deep space cosmos.
Yet it was Rich and his tracks Bouyant On a Motionless Deluge, and and an excerpt from The Smorgh Sleeps On Velvet Tongues, that leaped out. I jumped on two records released the previous year, Propagation and Rainforest. Wow. Robert Rich’s ambient vision was, at that time, a bit more advanced than that of Steve Roach. His music was more diverse and the tribal elements more organic. I wouldn’t make this distinction about their relative standing today; after all, to me Roach and Rich are the equivalent of Miles Davis and John Coltrane in ambient music. But, back then, Rich’s mellow, exotic, shapely and spacy music drew me to it with an even greater siren song.
Alas, his older records were hard to get. A compilation drawn from those older records, A Troubled Resting Place, helped my investigation. I was restless, and, then excited to learn Rich had a new record finished, a collaboration, with one B. Lustmord.
Stalker. I will say this: it’s the ambient music that had the most far-reaching impact on me. It is in the same esteemed place with respect to my appreciation of ambient artistry as Mingus’s The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady is in with respect to my appreciation of jazz artistry. This is to suggest that it was through dealing with Stalker, that I began to intuit how deep was the craft and technique involved in etching sound worlds where events could be said to happen slowly.
Not as prolific as his peer Steve Roach, Rich continues to present a masterpiece every so often. Although Rich’s tribal ambient style is sustained these days in various collaborations, when left to only his own devices he seems to be recently zeroing in on a simmering, very slow, mellow dark ambient sonic vision. He’s got no competition as a drone-maker.
Part II. influences. Stuart Dempster, colleague with Ms. Oliveros in The Deep Listening Band, is heard, but not seen, in this video in what I will term ‘the cistern series.’ There should be enough clues here to figure out what’s going on. (If not, see his page at epitonic. There, should you register, two free-legal, superb examples of his music are available.
The music of David Hykes, the composer and singer, stormed into the room widened by my encounter with The Deep Listening Band. Singing that left me speechless.
