When I heard the news about Rudy Van Gelder, I thought about this track, with its almost surreally present-sounding Roy Haynes drum intro...
...and I started thinking about how when I hear Roy Haynes in my head, or Sam Rivers or Jackie McLean or Tony Williams or Andrew Hill or Richard Davis or Eric Dolphy or Bobby Hutcherson or Don Cherry or Ed Blackwell or John Coltrane or Elvin Jones or so many of my other jazz heroes, what I'm hearing is actually a collaboration between the artist in question and this greatest of jazz recording engineers.
JazzWax: What’s the biggest misconception people have about you? Rudy Van Gelder: Some people think I'm a producer. I'm not. I'm a recording engineer. I don't hire the musicians nor do I come up with concepts for albums or how well musicians are playing. I'm there to capture the music at the time it's being created. This requires me to concentrate on the technical aspects of the recordings, which means the equipment and how the finished product is going to sound.
No dispute there, but didn't there also have to be some spiritual dimension to his art, some reason why so much magic happened there in that room in Englewood Cliffs? I think of those gorgeous Francis Wolff Blue Note photos, so many of them taken at Van Gelder's — the visual equivalent of the RVG sound: unadorned yet full. Clear, wholesome, true.
If you learn about the discographical history of jazz through RVG recordings, which, to me, seems like just about the best way to do it, you come to expect a certain integrity and rightness in your jazz records, a circumstance in which the temporal and spatial veil between you and the artist(s) is all but invisible. So many jazz records of the '70s and '80s sound so strange, so bad, so awkward, warped, hollow. So much so that for years, I dismissed those years aesthetically as well. Now, without really thinking about it, I tend to listen past a record's sonic quality whenever I feel like I have to. But you never have to do that with an RVG record. The word "timeless" is suspect, but I think it's basically an indisputable fact that the majority of the recordings Rudy Van Gelder made for, say, Blue Note and Impulse in the '60s — which only comprise a small sliver of his discography, in the end — sound pure and true and, somehow (spatially, spiritually) correct.
We all know that every recording is an act of interpretation. Cue Werner Herzog:
"...for me the boundary between fiction and 'documentary' simply does not exist, they are all just films. Both take 'facts,' characters, stories and play with them in the same kind of way."
I'm all for that idea. But I think there is a certain way of documenting sound which conveys, second-to-second, the engineer's deep drive to relay that sound's true voice, not simply "how it really sounded," but how it ideally would sound were your hearing perfectly acute, your engagement perfectly complete, your environment perfectly calibrated, your filter perfectly clean. This is an elusive and problematic idea, but it really boils down to the oft-repeated adage that "art is the concealment of art."
So Rudy Van Gelder is, in a sense, in between us and some great percentage of the jazz we hold in our heads and hearts. He's there, but he's invisible. Invisible, that is, until we hear recorded music that he did not take part in documenting (a fact that can often seem like an aesthetic tragedy). Then we know how much this invisible man really did for us, and for the artists, and for the art form. Without question, he lives on and on, further than any of us can see or know.
"I'm on the wrong side of this microphone. This is very strange for me. I just feel very uncomfortable. I'd rather be on the opposite side..."
Also love this:
"If you wanted to think of a way to inhibit creativity in jazz music in the studio, I would come up with a multi-track machine.... It's a machine of mass destruction."
As a fan of metal and related styles, you become pretty accustomed to music that ostensibly deals with pain, suffering, even violence but that doesn't sound particularly painful. Cannibal Corpse, for example, a band I love, actually evokes an idea of extreme achievement, of musical drive and athleticism, much more than a sense of horror and trauma. It's funny, given that they've built an entire career out of portraying actual murder, that their music takes no real human toll. It doesn't hurt to listen to it; personally, it makes me want to get up and run around and live.
I'm working through this concept because I'm trying to find a way to describe the sensation of seeing Couch Slut live. I'm far from an expert on what's going on musically day-to-day in NYC at this moment, but I would have no problem labeling them as the best band in the city right now. It's a title I would have formerly bestowed on the mighty Vaz, before they left town. These two bands share very little in common, but the area in which they do overlap is crucial: When I watch either band play, I feel, underneath a sense of exhilaration at the aggression, the command, the extremity, a sense of unease, of alarm, of "How far exactly are they going to take this?"
Couch Slut's music can take the form of frenzied, rhythmically jagged hardcore, or of leaden, thudding noise-rock, with hints of punkish black metal and swaggering riff rock poking through, but their strength as a band is not about style; it's about sensation. Whatever tempo they're playing at, their music gives me a Sisyphean feeling, a sense of grinding, methodical labor — a sense of relentless effort without payoff. A sense of "This is going to hurt us as much as it hurts you." A sense of the assumption of a great burden. A sense of extreme resignation coupled with extreme determination. Of music that asks a lot, that takes a real emotional toll rather than just alluding to that concept.
Couch Slut, in their current lineup, are operating in a very classic "three machines and a wild card' configuration. I'm talking about Led Zeppelin, the Jesus Lizard, etc., where you have an absolutely deadly, precision-engineered guitar-bass-drums band set against the presence of a singer whose job it is — and obviously the Lizard are the more apt comparison here — to essentially unravel, to flail, to purge.
Try "Little Girl Things" here (it's the first track, so you'll have to click backward) to get a sense of what I mean:
Music that is both ever-advancing and never-progressing, tension that is ever-heightening. And on the flip side, vocals that are ever-exorcising but never getting to the relief at the end of catharsis, pitched at the harrowing intersection of a scream and a sob. I don't pretend to know exactly what Megan Osztrosits is giving voice to via her performance of this music, but the song titles alone — which, on My Life as a Woman, the band's sole release so far, include "Lust Chamber," "Rape Kit" and Split Urethra Castle" — go a long way toward situating the listener in a place of degradation, despair and sexual trauma. As with the music, there is a quality of alarm inherent in paying witness to her performances. I'm a drummer more than a vocalist, but I've done my share of catharticscreaming, and the sense I have is that you don't tap into anguish as profound as that which Osztrosits summons without revisiting some kind of private hell.
As at last night's outstanding show at Aviv, an intimate, great-sounding venue on the Greenpoint/Bushwick border, Osztrosits tends to spend most of Couch Slut's live sets standing on the floor in front of the stage, getting right down into the mix, breaking the fourth wall in a purposeful way. Each line she howls is another mini mission of despair, sometimes accompanied by a hoisted, spewing beer can. She slams the microphone into her face or legs. She leans into each sentiment with the force of involuntary convulsion.
Meanwhile, the musicians behind her — I know their names, but they seem to favor quasi-anonymity online, so I'll respect that — operate with grim determination. The cliché of "It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it" seems to apply here. A sense of repetitive, churning labor, yes, but coupled with — and this element seems to have increased in prominence in the year or so, and this makes the Lizard and Zeppelin comparisons seem even more apt to me — a quality of true old-school rawk nastiness. If you took AC/DC and re-deployed their supple groove and hip-shaking swing in the service of harrowing pain rather than easy pleasure, you might have something like Couch Slut. Their music moves with a rare kind of looseness, even as it's advancing toward you like a tank — or, maybe, considering the aura of sordid, noxious nastiness that envelops this band and its listener, like projectile vomit in slo-mo.
The takeaway here — for me, at least — is that "metal," or what have you, is no guarantee of anything, in terms of actual affect. What I seem to be looking for these days — and have been looking for ever since I can remember, really — is music that antes up emotionally, Crowbar being an almost comically extreme example. Couch Slut doesn't just co-opt or shallowly depict pain, they convey it. And I mean that in the sense of "to express," but also of "to carry." A great burden (aesthetic, emotional, physical) is being shouldered, by all four members, when this band takes the stage. And if you value so-called extreme music, of whatever flavor, you owe it to yourself to be there next time to pay witness – as it were, to pull your weight.
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*Here's a fairly recent live video. (Disclaimer: As with all truly great bands, any recording or representation of Couch Slut is almost an insult to their overwhelming power as an in-the-flesh performing entity.)
*Bbigpigg — proudly carrying on the legacy of the late, lamented Drayton Sawyer Gang, two of whose former members play in this band — and Multicult — whose sound resembles a tightened, sped-up Shellac with all conceivable musical excess trimmed out — also played last night. Both were pulverizing and great.
One of my favorite sound series in recorded music occurs during a five-second span here, from 6:11 to 6:16:
Bobby Hutcherson: Clang! Tony Williams: Thud-thud
Bobby Hutcherson: Clang! Tony Williams: Thud-thud
Bobby Hutcherson: Clang! Tony Williams: Thud-thud
That passage, to me, epitomizes Blue Note's glorious mid-'60s flowering, of which Hutcherson was such a vital part: this quality of poised, wired, almost perverse exploration that, on records like Out to Lunch!, contrasted with breathtaking cohesion and musicality. (The title track of Dialogue and "The Omen" from Happenings — recorded, respectively, roughly a year and two years after OTL!, and featuring Hutcherson on marimba as well as vibes — embody a similarly adventurous spirit while pursuing a spookier mood — free jazz that had nothing to do with Fire Music, per se; this was genuine collective, spontaneous, open-ended, genre-transcendent soundmaking.) These are the records that made me a Jazz Person, all honorary Bobby Hutcherson Dates whether or not he was the nominal leader: Evolution, One Step Beyond, Judgment, Andrew!!!, Dialogue, Components, Happenings, Destination Out and others that I'd discover later on, like Time for Tyner, Oblique and Patterns.
Hutcherson also had a knack for a very unguarded sort of tenderness — hear his own joyful waltz "Little B's Poem" — as well as an almost psychedelic command of texture. Hear Andrew Hill's "Alfred," on which he doesn't solo but nevertheless brings to the theme statements a magical quality of otherworldly singing — that sense of shimmering space, a quintessential expression of the vibraphone's potential. (Walt Dickerson was another vibes player who loved to build up waves upon waves of a kind of sonic gel, inviting the listener to come and float and surrender.)
Listen, for example, to what happens around 3:20 here:
Bobby Hutcherson goes texture-mad, exploding his solo into a ringing, singing soundmist.
And at the other end of the spectrum, you have his somewhat more conventional contributions to an album like Destination Out, where he plays a pianist's role in the ensemble but still revels in his instrument's idiosyncrasy.
Hutcherson was integral to the Jackie McLean / Grachan Moncur III concept, explored here as well as on One Step Beyond and Evolution; his odd, bulbous protrusions, metallic yet also pillowy, helped to sharpen the bracing whiff of eccentricity these records give off. Like Out to Lunch!, these are piquant albums, subtle in their way but insistent in the way they stand apart from hardbop convention. Almost like a synth player or electric guitarist might function in a jazz group several years later, Hutcherson helped to give this music an almost sci-fi quality. He sounded like the future.
Many of the albums discussed above are compiled into this Spotify playlist.
I'm no expert on Hutcherson's later work, such as the celebrated band with Harold Land, in which he seemed to lay back a bit more, elevating the jazz mainstream with his ever-classy approach rather than exploring the margins. This would be the kind of track that my younger self would have been likely to gloss over or even dismiss, but now I just hear it as a consummately well-rounded musician exploring another side of his talent:
For more of Bobby in the '70s, check out this great archived WFIU radio show hosted by David Brent Johnson. Hutcherson's discography starts to get a bit unwieldy in this later Blue Note period and beyond. I'd be grateful for any recommendations re: his essential albums that fall outside the "classic" mid-to-late-'60s phase discussed above.
Thank you, Bobby Hutcherson, who helped to draw me in closer to what, for me, is the very center of jazz, where the mystery lies.
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*Nate Chinen's very eloquent NYT obit, which hits on some excellent descriptions of Hutcherson's textural command: "luminescent and coolly fluid"; "resonating overtones and chiming decay"; "coloristic range of sound."
*Peter Hum's remembrance, featuring a collection of musician tributes, is a great read.
"I may be the best writer in this country ... But I'm still a 'mystery writer.'" —Raymond Chandler, from a letter read by Ian Fleming as a preface to this 1958 BBC interview. [Note: Scare quotes around "mystery writer" are mine, but the context makes me think they're warranted.]
By coincidence, I was just finishing up my first Chandler novel, The Lady in the Lake, last week, when I attended a show featuring the bands Carcass and Crowbar at the Gramercy Theatre. That convergence got me thinking about the pros and cons of genre, whether that be "mystery writing" or the practice of playing capital-M Metal music — how these frameworks can restrict an artist's work in the commercial or critical sense but maybe also protect it in the creative one.
I have a long history with each of these bands, dating back more than 20 years. I'm pretty sure I first encountered Carcass and Crowbar for the first time on MTV's Headbanger's Ball and that I bought their respective 1993 albums — Heartwork and Crowbar — soon after they came out. (I saw Crowbar the following year when they set the stage for an astonishing Pantera set in support of Far Beyond Driven.)
Carcass is a band I didn't think about terribly much in the years between that initial exposure and 2008 or so, when they reunited for some touring. But by the time Surgical Steel, their 2013 comeback album, came out, I was fully back on board; it's one of my favorite records, in any style, of the past 10 years or so, and easily my favorite metal record of that period, in part because of the way it gleefully tramples on the idea that various arbitrarily distinct subgenres ought to be kept distinct from one another. I think it's every bit as good as Heartwork and the band's other true back-catalog classic, 1991's Necroticism.
With Crowbar, the situation was a little different. I'd loved that self-titled album back in the day — the one that spawned a couple singles/videos that Beavis and Butt-head had a field day with — but even though, unlike Carcass, they never disbanded, I stopped paying attention for some reason.
That changed quickly at last week's show. Onstage, Crowbar radiated intensity, passion and the kind of blue-collar conviction that had drawn me to them in the first place. Original bassist Todd Strange (known in the ever-witty world of New Orleans metal as "Sexy T") recently rejoined the band after a roughly 16-year gap, which is a blessing, because he and vocalist-guitarist Kirk Windstein were clearly born to play together: Two burly, bald, bearded men, now in their early fifties, laying down a classic form of dirge-blues-metal that's sometimes, reductively, pegged as "sludge," while wearing that classic hard-rock scowl — that forbidding posture tempered, between songs, with Windstein's expressions of unabashed gratitude and enthusiasm. (Fellow Southern-metal institution Corrosion of Conformity, whose sometime member Pepper Keenan formerly worked with Windstein in Down, embodies a similar kind of dark/light duality, an "an auspicious evil borne out of sheer fun and bro-hood" as I called it here; same goes for Crowbar's NOLA comrades Eyehategod, whose guitarist Jimmy Bower also played in Down.)
Crowbar's set last week featured a few of my old favorites from Crowbar, including punishing opening track "High Rate Extinction," in some ways the quintessential Crowbar song — an excellent example of the band's ugly, relentless churn and clench, the way its riffs slam down on you over and over like heavy machinery. But, near the end of the set, they also played this, a song from 1998's Odd Fellows Rest that I wasn't previously familiar with:
After the show, I did some Googling, found out the name of the song and dialed it up, and I was absolutely floored by its artfulness, how it married Crowbar's trademark agonized trudge with yearning pop vulnerability. I hadn't been totally oblivious to the hook-y side of Crowbar — Windstein sort of roar-croons a gorgeous melody during the "Save all that you feel for me" bridge of Crowbar's signature song "All I Had (I Gave)," the same track Beavis and Butt-head ripped on — but I had no idea to what extent Windstein, the band's leader, chief songwriter and only consistent member throughout its lifespan, had cultivated and refined this element of the band's work over the years.
"Planets Collide" was the spark. In the week since the show, I've listened to every one of the band's 10 albums, from 1991's Obedience Through Suffering through 2014's Symmetry in Black, finally placing Crowbar into its proper discographical context. A few things are clear: 1) As much as I loved (and still love) that self-titled album, I've been sleeping on the true power and majesty of this band for quite some time. 2) Crowbar is a classic American band with an incredibly rich, consistent discography.
The latter point brings me back (finally!) to the reason I cited that Raymond Chandler quote above: Crowbar is a band that's perhaps destined to be underrated by the world outside the metal community.
In interviews, Windstein has always flaunted his diverse tastes — citing influences ranging from Thin Lizzy to Steely Dan, U2, the Neville Brothers and Wings — and the band has recorded gorgeous and brilliantly Crowbar-ized covers of both Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter" and Gary Wright's Wayne's World–enshrined soft-rock classic "Dream Weaver."
But while Windstein has never been shy about namechecking his varied influences and, accordingly, gradually broadening the scope of his own work in surprising and often revelatory ways, he's never tried to portray himself as anything other than a humble metal craftsman, grinding away in the trenches. Windstein begins every show by bellowing an endearing greeting to the crowd: "We're Crowbar from New Orleans, and we're gonna kick your ass!" He's comfortable in the role of the ass-kicker, and he's one of the best in the business; his commitment to the monolithic macho groove has never wavered and even his most melodic songs are often delivered with guttural anguish. But as with Chandler, there's a risk of camouflage here: that Crowbar will forever be seen as merely a great genre band rather than a great band, period.
I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, I'd love to see Kirk Windstein enshrined as a great American songwriter, which I think he is. On the other, the conditions of the contemporary metal underground, the way it allows bands to achieve a certain degree of traction and success — regularly selling out club dates in the U.S. and playing high-profile fests in Europe and elsewhere — without ever truly "breaking," do seem especially conducive to fostering the kind of consistency that Crowbar embodies. How many other bands can you name that have put out nine very-good-to-great albums during the past 25 years, as Crowbar have? (I say nine rather than 10 because I'd count their debut, Obedience Through Suffering, as more foundational than essential.) Hell, how many bands can you name that have put out five, or even two? Looking at some of the great Big Rock Bands of our time, at least the ones whose music I enjoy, I see either spottiness (Pearl Jam and even Queens of the Stone Age who, as brilliant as they are, I find to be hit-and-miss on record) or frustrating sluggishness, bordering on inactivity (I'm looking at you, Tool). And so many of the great '90s hopes left us with stunted discographies: Rage Against the Machine or Pantera, or less widely known but equally worthy bands such as Quicksand, Helmet and Jawbox. (Fugazi had a hell of a streak going there, but they're gone too.) Or they simply evolved into something less urgently great, like Metallica — I love a lot of what's on Death Magnetic and even some of St. Anger, but it's hard to argue that some essential magic, even with re Black Album era, hasn't been lost over the years.
What I'm saying in a nutshell is: Could it be that remaining firmly ensconced within Metal has allowed an artist like Windstein the freedom to evolve while also keeping his band from going off the rails aesthetically or simply imploding due to industry pressure and interpersonal b.s.? Is the ceiling (or umbrella) of genre somehow beneficial in this way?
One thing that's clear: Metal, and especially the underground, is definitely a culture of the long game. As a fan, one reason I've stayed interested for so long is that there's just so damn much material out there. Even when bands make only the slightest incremental changes to their core sound — let's shout out the almighty -tions here: Incantation, Immolation and Suffocation, three groups that I hold up as gold standards re: all that's great about a "lifer" approach to metal in specific and music in general — there's something so rewarding, so fulfilling about these shelf-filling discographies, this consistency of quality product, issued steadily over the course of decades. If you're an album-focused listener, the world of extreme metal is a vast treasure trove.
I'd peg all the -tion bands cited above as relatively conservative when it comes to aesthetics and the progression of time. They've refined their approaches over the years, but these days, they're out to satisfy, not to surprise. None, of course, are as conservative as Obituary, and on a slightly lower rung of recognition/impact, Asphyx, both of whom take what is essentially an AC/DC-esque, ain't-broke-wouldn't-dream-of-fixing-it approach to extreme metal. On the other end of the spectrum, you have your Gorgutses, bands for whom evolution and experimentation are part of the deal — an approach that can — in the hands of Luc Lemay and others on his level of genius, though there aren't many — work wonders (as it did earlier for, say, Death and the sadly defunct Cynic).
I realize that Crowbar aren't a death metal band, but I find the above taxonomy and implied spectrum of aesthetic pathways useful. So where do Kirk Windstein and Co. fit? There is a certain Obituary-esque stick-in-the-mud quality to the band, a basic allegiance to Crowbar's core low-and-slow dirge-rawk style, intact for a quarter-century, but as a songwriter and, most notably, a singer, Windstein has never stopped pushing himself. Read the following Windstein quote (from a 2000 Chronicles of Chaos interview; emphasis mine) and compare the aforementioned "High Rate Extinction" with "Planets Collide" or with that choice "Dream Weaver" cover.
"It's cool because we made a couple of changes beginning with 'Nothing' on Broken Glass. That was the first song we ever wrote that way; melodic vocally. I really got bored with all the
barking-type vocals thing. For some of the faster hardcore ones
it's cool, but for some of the riffs — the riffs are getting
more melodic even though they're really heavy — it's better to
do something melodic on vocals on top of it. We've been doing this
shit for twelve years, we'd get bored doing the same thing over
and over again. We always want to stay true to what Crowbar's
about, but we feel that we've made subtle changes over the years
that enable us to do different stuff now: to not feel like we can
only play this one style."
Windstein is essentially operating as a soul singer here:
And there are examples of those "subtle changes" all over the Crowbar catalog, even predating Broken Glass, from 1996, which Windstein cites as the turning point. See Crowbar's "I Have Failed", "I Feel the Burning Sun" (Equilibrium, 2001) or "Symmetry in White" (Symmetry in Black, 2014), not to mention the almost chamber-music-esque palate-cleansing interludes that started to crop up on the band's albums around the time of 1998's Odd Fellows Rest.
Similarly, Windstein's lyrics have progressed from self-flagellation (see "I Have Failed" above, which memorably features Windstein bellowing, "I have motherfucking failed!") to self-help, e.g., Symmetry's "Walk With Knowledge Wisely" ("I am the living proof / That you can right what is wrong in your life"), mirroring what was apparently a long, hard path to sobriety for Crowbar's leader. (The longest, hardest stretch being chronicled, one suspects, on 2001's Sonic Excess in Its Purest Form, an aptly titled album that's surely the most extreme and excruciating in the Crowbar discography and possibly one of the two or three best.)
So there is an evolution here, but it's tempered with a common-sense, don't-fuck-with-the-formula instinct. Not surprising, given that Motörhead — a band that changed with the times just enough to avoid stagnancy while keeping its core sound within its sights at all times — embodies Windstein's own personal career ideal. From the same Chronicles of Chaos interview:
"... my main goal, when I started the band, was that if we could just
get to where Motörhead is or something ... You know, not like
mainstream, not on the radio, not on MTV, not on none of this shit,
but able to just go on for fuckin' twenty-five years. I want to
be the Lemmy of my generation. I want to be fuckin' fifty years old
and three hundred fuckin' pounds. Full of tattoos, drinkin' beer
and fuckin' jammin' my balls off because that's all I know how to
do."
(Tangentially, I love how Windstein talks about how he never feels the need to play faster than what he calls "Motörhead speed" in this Metal Injection interview.)
The result of all this is that you have a band that, in 2016, sounds unmistakably like the one I fell in love with 20-plus years ago but with just enough variation that you can tell that Windstein has remained engaged, passionate, prolific, humble, driven.
It was apparent at the Gramercy Theatre show that Kirk Windstein is Crowbar, that his personal journey — finding greater visibility with Down, a relatively high-profile supergroup, only to leave that project and focus solely on his signature band — has led him to a place of absolute leave-it-all-on-the-stage conviction each night. (I find the speech he gives here, an impromptu tirade against a stage-crasher that culminates in a statement of total vulnerability — "My eyes are closed; I'm singing my goddamn heart out" — extremely moving.)
At that point, when you, as an artist, are also the nerve center of your own small business, a business whose only product is what we refer to as a sound — in the case of a metal musician, this nexus of word and riff and emotion and volume that you have wrought and so carefully, methodically refined over so many years — you're existing in a kind of exalted space. Sure, Metallica is still going strong, but do I believe the 2016 James Hetfield onstage like I believe the 2016 Kirk Windstein? Not a chance. That's because unlike Hetfield (an artist who long ago transitioned from Metal Musician to Rock Star, as a novelist might from Mystery Writer to Famous Bestselling Author), Windstein is still operating according to the contract of the underground, still paying the greatest cost and reaping the greatest reward of a life spent toiling in that sphere, gradually working his way toward a music that is as natural as breath, that is the result of the anguish of living being swirled together with the joy of creation and sublimated into something so harsh it's soothing. So grizzled it's constantly renewed. So familiar it's a revelation each time. The fan shows up and meets the artist in that space and a brotherhood is formed, another contract is drawn up and signed: "I'll keep showing up if you do."
I want all that out of music, and as Crowbar — all 27 years' and 10 albums' worth — shows, it's not too much to ask.
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Here are 16 Crowbar songs I love for various reasons:
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P.S. I'm intrigued by this musical nexus that unites Crowbar, their fellow New Orleans artists — such as Eyehategod and Phil Anselmo of Down and Pantera — and NYC's now-defunct Type O Negative (R.I.P., Peter Steele). Crowbar toured with Type O back in the day; Windstein shares a heartwarming story about Steele's generosity here. He has the green Type O logo tattooed on the back of his left hand, and he dedicated the song "Symbolic Suicide" on Symmetry to Steele.
All of these artists have made (or did make) art that fixates on the concept of negativity and/or depravity, chronicling what it feels like to succumb to these forces, to defy or resent them, to laugh in their faces, or even to conquer them. But their worldviews are very different. At base, I'd call Eyehategod a fundamentally negative band, one obsessed with the idea of wallowing, while I'd call Crowbar a fundamentally positive band, one obsessed with the idea that some sort of mastery, or at the very least progress, is possible. Anselmo's work has run that gamut, from repulsive to inspirational. Steele's work found great power at the intersection of cold ugliness, rapturous beauty and deadpan humor. In all these cases, and I find this admirable, there seems to be a one-to-one relationship between personality and artwork: What you see in the individual is what you get in the music. There's no softening or blunting going on in any of these catalogs.
A little over five years ago, when I was employed at Time Out New York, I received an IM from my friend and music-department colleague there, Steve Smith, about a Ben Ratliff review of a Paul Motian performance at the Village Vanguard that had just gone live on the Times website. Steve and I were both avowed Ratliff fans, but this latest dispatch was, I remember him suggesting, a textbook example of this most unusual and potent critic in his element. There's a section early in the piece that says this of the group in question, a sort of oblique Modern Jazz Quartet tribute unit with Motian, Steve Nelson, Craig Taborn and Thomas Morgan:
"It instructs without directly teaching you a thing. It’s tense and mysterious and completely exemplary. It runs through Sunday night. You ought to hear it."
Anyone who has followed jazz in New York during Ben Ratliff's tenure at the Times knows these sorts of exhortations. When a band was playing at the Vanguard and Ratliff went early in the week and wrote about it — positively, yes, but not just that; also probingly, intriguingly, alluringly and, very often, just plain oddly — it had a way, for me, at least, and I think for a lot of others who have had some sort of stake in this music in this city at this time, of turning that band's weeklong residency into a sort of instant cultural happening. Not just a "see and be seen" thing, though during certain residencies, you'd often go and see all the "jazz people" there. No, it was much deeper than that: upon publication of the right kind of Ratliff review, the ones where he not only loved the band in question but seemed to sort of vibe with it, when, as he discussed yesterday on a special edition of the NYT Podcast (timed to the announcement that he's leaving the paper after 20 great years) his critical-brain "window" or "third ear" was fully open and receptive, and those sensations it registered made it to the page intact, a kind of rare aesthetic eclipse occurred, wherein the interests and passions of an entire community of receptive listeners in a certain city during a certain week aligned with the truest and most sincere and most profound impulses of the musicians, and what resulted was a kind of sustained bliss.
If you were smart and had the time, you did as Ratliff said and you went to hear the band, and you shared in that sensation. He wasn't telling you what to think about the music; it was more that he was saying, "This is what happened to me" and simply recommending that you enter that space, in the company of those geniuses, with that kind of complete openness. He seemed to be cultivating in his audience a receptivity to musical wonder. And for those of us already inclined toward listening in that state, it was a marvel and a gift to have that kind of almost mystical faith in the power of listening, and in the power of a certain sort of oracular, iconic musician like Paul Motian (Taborn and Morgan were also favorites, as were Mark Turner, Bill McHenry, Masabumi Kikuchi — I must have read this beautiful piece something like 15 times — and other artists who embodied that sort of probing quality, the holy mystery at the core of certain strains of jazz), expressed in what all understand to be the Paper of Record.
He wasn't a cheerleader, but he was, I believe, rooting for jazz in general, and for NYC jazz in particular. At his best, Ben Ratliff wasn't writing reviews; he was writing benedictions. When he praised an up-and-coming artist (Kris Davis, for instance), it felt like New York as a whole, "the scene," as it were, was welcoming that musician into the pantheon.
And to have that sphere of influence begin to extend out to another area of music that I hold dear (metal and related styles; see this Greg Fox benediction, analogous to the Davis one above) was more than I or anyone else who happened to share that dual affinity could have asked for, to find yourself reading about Cynic or Liturgy or Salome or freakin' Eyehategod in the New York Times, for chrissakes. (I remember standing outside Europa with Ben and some others after this show, savoring what we'd just heard and beaming with disbelief.) Frankly, it was also a bit intimidating, to be a music writer who happened to specialize in jazz and metal working in NYC during the Ratliff Years. Writing is not, as I see it, a competition, but there was a certain standard being set, or rather a bar constantly being raised, during this period, and you wanted to show up and be present and do right by the art, and the artists, and the community. That was one way Ben Ratliff influenced me, by demonstrating that you can really "get there" with writing, not meaning that you could reach a lot of people and influence public opinion about a certain artist or record or performance, but that you could bottle up some kind of borderline religious experience you'd had while listening to music, which is really what we're always after, and share it and point others that way and record it as a kind of memento of the wonderful time you'd had and how it felt. (That last part is really all I've ever hoped to do with particular blog.)
But it wasn't about genre, as Ratliff's new book, Every Song Ever, posits. You were listening past style and into the realm of pure quality. That now-clichéd but ultimately perfectly true Duke Ellington thing about "two kinds of music: good and bad," he really understood that. So when he wrote about, say, Manuel Agujetas and penned a line like this, you sat bolt upright and you damn well listened: "If you have any interest in the void, Manuel Agujetas is your man." Ratliff basically wrote about that late flamenco singer as if he were a metal artist, and my God did I regret that I'd missed that show. But the piece inspired me to look deep into Agujetas's work and I feel profoundly grateful that Ben led me there.
And then when he wrote about musicians you already loved but wanted to know more about, well, forget about it. Reading The Jazz Ear (a book that began life as a series of Times pieces), which I have done in full three or four times and piecemeal many, many more, I am in a state of pure delight. I've held different opinions at different times, but at this moment, and not just because of the occasion, I feel absolutely at ease calling this my favorite music book. As Ethan Iverson suggests in his elegant Ratliff tribute, the Motian profile here is beyond definitive — it goes so deep and with such a light touch and even humor to boot. It is simply the resource on the man and his mystery. The Metheny piece, the Shorter piece, the Andrew Hill piece, the Bob Brookmeyer piece. There is just so goddamn much humanity and perception and wisdom and fun in that book. It is the perfect confluence of writer and subject, and it is relatively brief and readable and it is profound.
Ratliff in the Podcast linked above takes issue with the word "criticism," a term I also can't stand and avoid using whenever possible. For me I would define what I do when working in this field as simply writing passionately and (hopefully) intelligently about music I love, and, when I'm lucky, doing that in conjunction with actually conversing with the artists behind that music. It's not "criticism"; it's a state of gratitude and perception and bliss — it's the writer returning the favor, repaying the spiritual debt the music has brought about in him or her via conversation (see also these great interviews with Bill Callahan and Jim O'Rourke, the rock-world equivalents of the jazz eccentrics he so treasured) and written reflection — and that state, that exchange, is documented so purely in The Jazz Ear, precisely because we not only get to hear what Ratliff hears in the work of these musicians, but because the book itself is based on the idea of interviewing-as-shared-listening we get to hear the musicians listening and reacting in turn.
Existing with and responding to and questioning and, as Ratliff puts it, really getting inside music is joy. That's the lesson that his work taught time and again. It isn't about being right or having "good taste"; it isn't about judging things; it's about going there, for yourself first and foremost, and then trying to bring back a little bit of what you found and put it on the page so that others can get a flavor of it and, ideally, be enticed to go experience it for themselves.
Of course there's so much we have learned and can still earn from his style, his stubborn idiosyncrasy, pithiness and often just plain weirdness (I will always treasure the WTF quality of this line in a Zs review: "These pieces are all brain-benders; they’re conceptual art objects that set form and content against each other — like, say, a perfect birthday cake made out of sawdust, or a perfect hammer made out of bird feathers.") I know I will miss that "voice" as well as his actual voice on the Popcasts, which I love. But what I will miss most is just that sense that Ben Ratliff is out there, on the beat, keeping it real and teaching by example.
I will also say on a personal note that I appreciate enormously Ben's encouragement and positivity re: my own work, during the handful of times that our paths have crossed. He was kind enough, for example, to let me know that he enjoyed the liner notes I'd written for the Henry Threadgill box set on Mosaic, and to mention the craw project in the 2015 NYT box set round-up.
And so mainly I just want to say what a pleasure it's been to share, as it were, airspace, with this singular talent. Thanks, Ben Ratliff, for doing not just the week-in/week-out work that was asked of you at the NYT but for responding to a higher calling, your own need to "get inside" the music, for drowning out the deafening noise of the online opinion machine and using your forum at the most respected news outlet in the world to go somewhere disarmingly personal. Whatever you publish from here on out, I'll be reading, and I'll be learning from the back catalog for a long time to come.
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*Definitely read Nate Chinen — who gives us all the assurance that NYT jazz coverage will remain in the very best of hands — on Ben Ratliff on Twitter.
