I almost couldn't believe it when I saw Sonny Sharrock featured so prominently in Questlove's new Summer of Soul doc. It's a phenomenal movie in general, but this was something I never expected. If only we could see the rest of the Herbie Mann set that this brief clip was drawn from!
It's a general guiding principle of mine that I take any/every opportunity to talk or write about Sonny. When I get right down to it, I think he is my single favorite musician of all time, the one whose soundworld resonates with me more than anyone else's. It's a bit heartbreaking to dwell on the fact that I'll never see him in the flesh, but new glimpses like this provide fresh inspiration.
Here is my latest attempt to pay homage to his towering achievement, and to hopefully invite a few new listeners in. (And here's an older piece, specifically focused on Guitar, that touches on some of the same ideas.) As hard as his music hits me, year after year, his words, from the many archival interviews out there, carry nearly the same weight.
*Frank Mullen's final NYC show as the vocalist of Suffocation (a band I've written about at some length on DFSBP) turned out to be a surprisingly touching event. I'm very interested in the idea of true mastery in a field like this (i.e., death-metal vocals), which to 99% of the populace would scan as pure absurdity. But Frank has put in the time, to say the least, and now gets the last laugh. In the end, I feel like mastery in a field like extreme metal, which when you get down to it, is a pure fan-powered meritocracy, is maybe somehow even more "authentic" than mastery in a more "legitimate," "respectable" artistic field. In short, Frank Mullen is a guy who simply got extremely good at something for which, during the time he was coming up, there was really no established rule book (let alone rewards or accolades). Insofar as there is a rule book for death-metal vocals now, he helped write it, along with a handful of others, like Chris Barnes, for instance. Anyway, yes, this was a hell of a night, and here is my attempt to convey why.
*Hemispheres is definitely in my personal Rush-albums Top 5, likely in my Top 3 and possibly in my Top 1. Here is my take on the new expanded reissue. Ryan Reed's Geddy Lee interview from a few weeks back, linked right up top, is essential reading.
*Some thoughts on a new David S. Ware archival release. David S. Ware was "breaking" (in Rolling Stone, for one thing) right around the time I was getting into "this music." I was engaged with his work then but not, I have realized and continue to realize, as engaged as I ought to have been. (To be more specific, I think I was still pretty immersed in the history of free jazz at the time, to some degree at the expense of the music's present, though I did get out there plenty.) The more I listen, especially to the quartet, on albums like Go See the World, the more impressed I am. This trio with William Parker and Warren Smith is a very different animal, but it's dawning on me that there is really no lesser DSW.
*Harriet Tubman are, at this point, something of an NYC institution. Their new album is fitting of such a group, in that captures a band fully at ease with itself, and with the fact that it will probably never fit neatly into any scene, let alone genre. As discussed in this track write-up, with commentary from the musicians, there are strong and sturdy Sonny Sharrock–ian overtones to the Harriet Tubman project, which manifest in a particularly gritty and transportive way in the Bob Marley cover under discussion. Given my Sharrock fanaticism, I do not point out the above lightly — since his departure, few have managed to even touch on his aesthetic zone / life force, let alone harness core elements of it. That's not to say that this is some kind of tribute band or copycat endeavor. Harriet Tubman are a whole universe of sound and sensation unto themselves, and this new album is an excellent demonstration of its scope and character.
Also, re: Heavy Metal Bebop in general, if you have enjoyed past installments, please stay tuned. As always, the series is in glacial yet perpetual motion. We're heading somewhere with HMB, slowly, steadily, and I will share details when I'm able.
"Remember that your improvisation must have feeling. It must swing and it must have beauty, be it the fragile beauty of a snowflake or the terrible beauty of an erupting volcano." —Sonny Sharrock
"In the last few years, I've been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song. I know it's possible. I remember seeing John Coltrane standing there, his saxophone screaming; hearing the Flamingos sing at the Apollo. All that pretty music! I hope I'm as greedy as those musicians were. I want the sweetness and the brutality, and I want to go to the very end of each of those feelings. ... I want it all!" —Sonny Sharrock, 1991
Sonny Sharrock's Guitar, my favorite album by my favorite guitarist, is now on Bandcamp, in a newly remastered edition courtesy of its producer — and Sharrock's frequent collaborator — Bill Laswell. (I spoke with Laswell about Last Exit and Sharrock in general during our 2011 interview.) I love Black Woman and, of course, the masterful Ask the Ages (which Laswell also remastered and reissued a couple years back, though I'm not sure that edition is available digitally), but ever since I first heard Guitar in the early 2000s, I've thought of this 1986 release as the ultimate Sharrock statement, the final word on his doctrine of "sweetness and brutality."
There are several different types of pieces on the record, but the most prevalent follow a simple structure, where Sharrock sets up a cleaned-tone simple melody or chord structure on one track and then solos over it on another track with that classic grimy distortion of his. I could be mistaken, but I don't think Sharrock ever played shows like this, i.e., using live looping or somesuch; I believe this was entirely a multitracked studio creation. But it's a shame he never went further with the concept, at least in a documented setting, because it seems to capture the absolute essence of his concept.
I'm listening to "Princess and the Magician" right now, the first section of the four-part "Princess Sonata" suite that concludes the album. The vamp Sharrock sets up at the outset has a bright, hopeful quality. The lead-guitar "voice" enters quickly, feeling out the territory, and then entering into this kind of cyclonic dance, gradually picking up momentum and grit. There are moments when his adornment of the melody starts to resemble outright defacement, and it's obvious from the many stories of him leaving audiences aghast when playing Herbie Mann and others that many saw him purely as a chaos agent. But to me, the sweetness and the brutality of this music are entirely symbiotic; it's almost as though for Sharrock, there was no greater expression of his love for sublime melody than to slather it with aural exhaust, a brittle, snarling tangle of sound-mucus.
Last Exit was undoubtedly a powerful statement in its own right, but to me, the reason Guitar is so essential is because of this central dance of song and its opposite, the most tender, peaceful lullaby and the rawest, most unhinged noise. This dichotomy was obviously a central feature of Sharrock's idol John Coltrane's art as well — he also loved to set up a haunting melody and then systematically blow it to bits. But I'm not sure that practice, that perverse and revelatory blur of clashing emotional colors, has ever been captured on record in such a distilled and concise way. (That's another strength of Guitar — it is not a long record, and the pieces themselves hover around the four- or five-minute mark; there is "free jazz" in this music but it does not sprawl; it is fundamentally an album of songs.)
Other tracks take different approaches: the bluesy "Black Bottom" piles on multiple layers, including a track of this weird sort of warped, unsettled distortion, like a river of sludge flowing slowly underneath the rest of the song, and, by the end, a second lead voice; "Kula-Mae" is the album's outright rocker, which after a brief overture, turns into a swaggering shuffle that, thanks to Sharrock's engulfing fire-bath lead, sounds like a bar band playing in hell; "Devils Doll Baby," also featuring that sludgy textural effect in the background, is a more static sound-object, a contemplation of a few evocative licks that braids the noise and the melody together so tightly that they become a single, writhing mass; "Like Voices of Sleeping Birds" (another part of the "Princess Sonata") features Sharrock using his slide to achieve this kind of mind-warping sonic wobble, a lead voice that lurches drunkenly across the stage of the sound in a kind of absurdist contrast to the tranquil chord sequence; and of course "Blind Willie," one of Sharrock's anthems, first presented in acoustic form on Black Woman and here as a kind of poetic, rumbling electro-psalm, contrasting bagpipe-like bursts of melody (Sharrock uses an odd, synth-like effect here that doesn't appear elsewhere on the album) with swampy, deliberate soloing.
Overall, the record is so insanely pleasurable and engaging that in revisiting it, I catch myself wondering why all music can't organize itself by such simple logic, i.e., you set out a very basic framework (in this case, the struggle between noise and melody) and explore its infinite variations. But few musicians have such a stark kind of conviction about what they do. It's hard not to think about Sonny without thinking about what could have been; he released another classic, Ask the Ages, in '91, seemingly to great acclaim, and, according to some sources, was on the verge of signing a major-label deal when he died of a heart attack in '94 at age 53. But I'll always be thankful that the Sonny Sharrock Doctrine was captured so aptly, so lovingly, with such shattering clarity as it was on Guitar. Everything he stood for is on this record, and as far as the feeling of music is concerned, I regard essentially as a religious text. Dive in, again or for the first time, and go with Sonny to the very end.
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*Check out Bill Laswell's Bandcamp page for more Sonny, including a newly remastered version of the very fine full-band album Seize the Rainbow and various Last Exit recordings. And head on over to the Trost label page for a Sharrock / Peter Brötzmann live duo album that's a fascinating complement to their work together in Last Exit.
*Do not miss this outstanding 2016 Sharrock feature at Premier Guitar, in which Ted Drozdowski tells the complete Sharrock story in as great of detail as I've ever read, with help from Sharrock's daughter, admirers such as Carlos Santana (who memorably states that "if you want to get a tone like Sonny Sharrock ... you have to be really willing to die"), Henry Kaiser and others. There's also a nice selection of live videos at the end.
*Margaret Davis's "Sweet Butterfingers" tribute compilation, which, in its original paper zine form was invaluable to me when I was first getting into Sonny's music, is online in full, including archived interviews, tributes, obits and a discography.
My latest listening jag concerns the saxophonist Joe Henderson. For the past five days or so, pretty much all my recreational music intake has centered around him. The phase is a follow-up investigation to a flea-market LP purchase I made a couple months ago: Henderson's Black Narcissus, from 1976.
The fact that I picked up that record—an highly unusual and indisputably of-its-time session, slathered in a thick vintage-synth glaze—and my intense enjoyment of it speaks to a change in my jazz tastes over the last few years. To put it concisely, I've thrown what I now identify as my former snobby purism out the window. When I was first getting into jazz, in college, I developed a series of parameters about what periods and aesthetics interested me. Maybe this walling-off was merely practical then; getting my head around the genre was such a vast undertaking that I had to set some limits. Anyway, guided by my own innate taste and also likely by the general critical bias—shared by some of my then-colleagues at WKCR—against fusion or what I'd call posthippie jazz of any kind, I homed in on the mid-’60s Blue Note aesthetic, exemplified by Andrew Hill, Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur III, Sam Rivers, Bobby Hutcherson, Larry Young, Wayne Shorter and others, as my personal gold standard. For many reasons, records from that pool have aged incredibly well: They sound amazing, thanks to Rudy Van Gelder; they embody the most appealing characteristics of so-called "in" and "out" jazz aesthetics; the leaders and the sidemen are all virtuosos, who came up in the trenches, so to speak, and who took improvisational originality seriously; and they were made before rock, funk and pop influences whooshed into jazz, muddying the gene pool. (Rudy Van Gelder aside, the same could of course be said for the Miles quintet records of the same period.)
Simply put, I learned then a kind of prejudice against the ’70s and ’80s. What you wanted, it seemed to me, were those beautifully designed Blue Notes of the Lion/Wolff period, not the garish—visually and sonically—jazz records of the ’70s, with their super-dated graphic design and equally outmoded fashion statements in the artist photos, with subpar production values, either too clunky or too thin, to match. To bring my main point back around, I'm pretty sure I would've picked up a record like Black Narcissus out of the used bin a decade ago, noted its vintage and instrumentation (synths! congas!), and thrown it right back, confident that I wouldn't be missing out on any of what I loved about Joe Henderson's work on Pete La Roca's Basra, Andrew Hill's Point of Departure or Larry Young's Unity. (For whatever reason, I've only studied up on Henderson's great leader records for Blue Note more recently; I spent time with In ’n Out this past weekend and adored it.) I'll admit that I'm still wary of this whole "Deep Jazz"/"Rare Groove" aesthetic, as popularized by outlets like Soul Jazz Records (any longtime Wire reader will recognize their back-cover advertisements), but somewhere along the way, I realized that to wall myself from what I'll call, for my own purposes, the post–Blue Note years in jazz—i.e., post-1967, say, the year when Alfred Lion retired from Blue Note, John Coltrane died and Miles was in the process of bidding farewell to acoustic jazz—was a mistake. Sure, many musicians, maybe even Henderson himself, were swept up by the current in the ensuing decade or so; sure, the rigorous quality control that prevailed at Blue Note wasn't necessarily in evidence during Henderson's stint at Milestone (1967–1976); sure, records like Black Narcissus, and some other Milestone Hendersons I've been loving over the past few days—Black Is the Color, Canyon Lady, In Pursuit of Blackness, Power to the People—don't seem as uncannily undated as the mid-’60s Blue Note catalog does. But what I'm realizing is that purism-for-its-own-sake just isn't as interesting to me anymore; or rather, maybe it is, but I'm just as excited about jazz that is of its time, jazz where you sense a strange kind of friction between artist integrity and label bottom line; jazz where producers were setting soloists against all kinds of faddish backdrops to see what might sell; jazz, like Black Narcissus, where the confluence of free-jazzy experimentation and DJ-friendly grooving-ness makes your head spin. The title track (a piece that also appears on Power to the People, in a much more conventionally "tasteful" version) is one of the less audacious pieces on the record, but it still gives you an idea of the album's general bent, the way in which it reflects the jazz-industry climate that spawned it:
That "tasteful" I wrote above is important; in many ways, it strikes at the core of the point I'm trying to make. Is this a dated recording? Sure. It's unlikely you'd hear synths applied so liberally on a 2012 jazz album, and if you did, there would probably be some very deliberate kitsch-ification going on. Does this record have the unadorned elegance of a classic Blue Note recording? Certainly not. But then comes the trump card: Does Joe Henderson slay on this record? Absolutely. Listen as he heats up from about 2:50 on (I love that tranced-out tic around 3:10). Sure the synths are swarming around him, threatening to drown him out, but he's pushing back mightily, asserting his trademark grit and agility with as much potency as ever. In short, despite the eyebrow-raising sonic wallpaper, there's no mistaking this for anything other than a Joe Henderson record, and given what a tough-and-tender monster Joe Henderson was (RIP), a true force from the ’60s through the ’90s, for a fan of Henderson, and more broadly, of jazz to wall him/herself off from the man's output during the ’70s due to some straitjacketed notions of "good taste" seems like an aesthetic crime. Does everything on these records work? Of course not. (Some of the meandering cosmic-free-jazz abstraction on Black Is the Color springs to mind as an example thereof.) But is there some absolutely dynamite Henderson, some of the best playing I've ever heard from him, playing that's far more intense and unhinged than what you'll hear on his Blue Note recordings, on these records? Indeed. In short, any serious jazz fan needs to eventually learn to toss their superficial aesthetic hang-ups out the window if they're going to really wade neck-deep in this glorious music. Everyone loves the ’60s (and, for that matter, the ’50s); they're an easy sell—pure class, no funny stuff. But the ’70s offer a very different kind of pleasure; in the case of Henderson records like Black Narcissus, they're excessive, scattershot, confounding and also bubbling over with joy and invention. As you can see from the back-cover portrait, Henderson isn't sweating the sea change in the music:
He's going with the flow, yes, but he's also standing his ground. Many of the great ones did the same during the ’70s and ’80s. I think of Sonny Sharrock, whose Highlife I once disdained for its aggressively poppy, borderline smooth-jazz sound palette. But there comes a time when you realize that you'll follow certain artists anywhere and that you usually won't be disappointed when you do. Is Highlife on the same level as Ask the Ages? (With Sharrock, the Henderson timeline above is reversed; Ask the Ages, his last album, is the most "Blue Note," that is to say "pure," recording he ever made and certainly one of his best.) Perhaps not, but you're depriving yourself of some highly enjoyable Sonny if you skip it. And more importantly, in walling yourself off from where your ’60s heroes went in the ’70s and ’80s, you're over-idealizing them, making believe that they didn't have to struggle to find their way during those uncertain times for jazz, that they didn't have to reckon with the industry at large and the public's changing tastes. In the case of artists as raw yet adaptable as Henderson and Sharrock (recall that the latter played in Herbie Mann's band for years), that kind of negotiation was a central fact in their career and a principal reason why their respective discographies can seem so unwieldy. But we should embrace that unwieldiness, embrace the fact that the Henderson fossil record includes exquisite specimens such as In ’n Out up as well as more transitional, rougher-hewn ones such as Black Narcissus or Canyon Lady (a lush, soundtracky, Latin-centric session, released the year before Narcissus). As I suggested above, it's all Joe Henderson, and thus it's all great. As with Sharrock, it didn't really matter what was going on around him; when he played, he spoke the truth.
A couple caveats/clarifications:
1) Granted, we're talking about very high-caliber players here; I wouldn't adopt this "I'd follow you anywhere logic" with respect to just anyone.
2) Though it touches on the same period championed in the great Behearer revolution of 2006—that is, the overdue glorification of the best jazz of the ’73–’90 period—the point I'm making above isn't the same one being made during that hive-mind blogathon. Personally, my main takeaway from the Behearer episode was an appreciation for masters such as Henry Threadgill and Keith Jarrett, artists who made their first essential statements as composers/improvisers/bandleaders during this period (give or take a couple years). In other words, neither of these artists had, like Henderson, established himself during the era of Blue Note purism. (With Sharrock, it was more an Impulse/ESP purism, e.g., as established on Pharoah Sanders's Tauhid and Marzette Watts's & Company; he does appear on a Blue Note record, Wayne Shorter's Super Nova from ’69, but there's nothing conventionally pure about that wild, esoteric-yet-rewarding LP.) "The ’70s in jazz" wasn't something that Threadgill and Jarrett had to reckon with, react to, assimilate in particular; it was simply their breeding ground. Whereas Henderson, an artist who made his name in that golden era of jazz purism, was exactly the kind of jazz musician who is often thought to have "lost his way" in the ’70s, to have bowed to the aesthetics of the time rather than helped shape them. And while it may be true that Joe Henderson was no Miles Davis, in terms of forging ahead with a clear idea of what he wanted out of his post-purist jazz, what I'm saying is that that matters less to me now than it once did. As long as I'm hearing Joe Henderson play tenor, I'm happy, whether that's in a classically styled quintet in 1964 with Kenny Dorham, McCoy Tyner, Richard Davis and Elvin Jones (damn, that lineup…) or at the center of a synth-drenched post-fusion maelstrom in 1976. I understand now that each is enriched by the other.
3) I don't mean to suggest that all of Joe Henderson's Milestone records are as aggressively non-purist as Black Narcissus or Black Is the Color. There are plenty of more-or-less straight-ahead, or inside-outside, if you will, LPs among them, In Pursuit of Blackness and Tetragon being two that stand out among my recent listening. Power to the People (1969) is another one that, while certainly funk-oriented, nicely encapsulates the more conservative (i.e., hard-/postbop-informed) brand of electric jazz that flourished at the time.
I'd love to hear about readers' similar experiences re: "How I learned to stop worrying and love the ’70s/’80s output of Jazz Musician X." I'm very curious about, e.g., the CTI catalog. Which of those records are, as they are rumored to be, poppy and slight, and which of them are rewarding in the same way that Henderson's Milestone releases are?
Last evening I drove to Westchester with my wife to celebrate a happy family event. On the way, we listened to WKCR, catching the tail end of Afternoon New Music (featuring side A of Distinction Without Difference, an intense 1979 Billy Bang solo set I'd never heard before) and the first chunk of Jazz Alternatives.
The show began with Chico Hamilton's Man from Two Worlds, a 1963 record that was also new to me. The title track started with a shifting bed of uptempo rhythm from Hamilton (sounding more Elvin Jones–like than I've ever heard him) and bassist Albert Stinson—a carpet of almost Indian-esque drone. Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabo drifted in with tranced-out tenor and guitar, engaging in a brief improv tangle before launching into the sing-songy, unmistakably Ornette-ish head (written by Lloyd, I'm now finding out). It was classic inside-outside jazz: steady and propulsive underneath and ear-bending up top. Unlike the Bang, it made sense as drive-time music, but the calories weren't empty. The same went for the next selection: side B of Jimmy Smith's Got My Mojo Workin'. I wasn't in love with the title track (a showcase for Smith's gruff vocals), but the Ellington (Strayhorn?) pieces that followed, "Johnny Come Lately" and "C Jam Blues," killed me with their combination of sass and class; the rhythm section alone—Kenny Burrell, George Duvivier and Grady Tate—had me doing internal cartwheels.
I didn't get to listen beyond that, but what a pleasure: to tune in at random and hear this wonderful—and in the case of the Hamilton, fairly obscure—vintage jazz, not being played to celebrate an anniversary or a new reissue, or to commemorate a passing, but spun just because. A set of music that challenged but didn't alienate, that, in the end, served the function you'd hope radio would serve around 6 p.m. on a weeknight.
For maybe a year and a half in college, I hosted a show on WKCR, the 5–8:20 a.m. Daybreak Express program, which segued right into Phil Schaap's Bird Flight (thus giving me ample opportunity to learn firsthand from the sensei). These days, I'm more a WKCR appreciator than a participant; I still host the occasional show, but whenever I tune in to the station and hear something great, I can't help but wish I still spun there regularly. I spent so many hours in that incredible library, scanning the LPs from A to Z, writing down the names of hundreds of titles that interested me (I did the same at Jazz Record Mart in Chicago around the same time), and checking out five or so at a time for dorm-room research.
Some of my happiest times at WKCR were when listeners would call in to say, "I dig what you're playing," or some variation thereof. (Plenty of times, you'd get the opposite: "This isn't jazz!" etc.) One instance in particular stands out: It must have been about 7 a.m., and I was playing "Who Does She Hope to Be?"—that gorgeous and perfectly accessible ballad from Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages. A man called the studio and said, with genuine rapture in his voice, "I love this song." It was a brief exchange—I'm pretty sure I thanked him sincerely for listening and that was pretty much it—but it planted a vivid picture in my mind. I heard background noise that suggested a car, and I imagined him cruising across one of the NYC bridges, convertible top down, just drinking in the Sonny and the sunlight and smiling contentedly. Sure, I spun plenty of "out" records during my time at WKCR, but it was at moments like this when I felt most deeply connected to the DJ's trade and to the glory of jazz radio. I felt like I was both meeting my own needs, i.e., those of a discerning curator, and the customer's, as it were, i.e., giving this kind man something beautiful to listen to on his a.m. drive. It's like Neil Peart said in "The Spirit of Radio":
Begin the day with a friendly voice, A companion unobtrusive Plays that song that's so elusive And the magic music makes your morning mood
We are all our own DJs, scouring the internet, cramming our hard drives full of obscurities. But sometimes you want to surrender to a trusted source, tap into something communal, let the current carry you. Do not take WKCR for granted. To be able to turn on the radio at random on a weeknight and hear Billy Bang, Chico Hamilton and Jimmy Smith consecutively, from original LP sources and without commercial interruption? That is what is called a blessing.
I'm happy to report that Heavy Metal Be-Bop, my jazz/metal interview series, has returned from a little hiatus. The sixth installment, a Q&A with Bill Laswell, is live in abridged form at Invisible Oranges (metal is the focus here, of course) and in a greatly lengthened director's cut at the series's online home, heavymetalbebop.com. (HMB #7 is already in the can, though no promises re: how soon I'll be able to post it.)
As I mention in the intro to the Q&A, which you'll find at the links above, it's hard to discuss the jazz/metal connection without bringing up Bill Laswell; along with John Zorn, he's an elephant in the room. You'll find some Laswell talk—specifically, comments on Last Exit, the polarizing ’80s improv quartet he worked in with Peter Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson—in two prior HMB installments; check out Melvin Gibbs's thoughts here and Craig Taborn's here.
I'm not sure when I first heard of Bill Laswell. I remember that my teenage interest in Mick Harris's idiosyncratic dub-metal project Scorn (I still love the Evanescence LP) led me to the Laswell/Harris collaboration Equations of Eternity, and that a review in the sadly departed metal rag Rip tipped me off to Painkiller, Harris and Laswell's avant-grindcore trio with John Zorn.
As I got more into both jazz and metal though, I developed something of a distaste for Laswell. I remember being immensely excited when I first learned of the existence of 1997's The Last Wave, a trio record with Laswell, Derek Bailey and Tony Williams (!) under the collective name Arcana, and of Last Exit itself. Being a Bailey and Williams nut, as well as a Sharrock obsessive, it seemed that I couldn't go wrong with this material (not to mention Material, a Laswell project that featured guest turns from Sharrock and a bunch of other free-jazz heroes set against a backdrop of off-puttingly synthetic—for me, at least—’80s art-dance). But in the case of The Last Wave, the strange, boomy production, and in the case of Last Exit, a funk-oriented bass presence that struck me as a sore thumb, kept me on the outside. Records like these were classic examples of "On paper, this looks tailor-made for me, but I just can't get with it in the flesh."
Over time, though, I realized that I couldn't stay away. I wasn't going to let my aesthetic quibbles keep me from savoring some of Tony Williams's final recordings (the drummer died during the making of the second Arcana record, Arc of the Testimony), or an extended series of exchanges between musical heroes of mine such as Brötzmann and Sharrock. The more I sat with the Laswell discography (or at least the wings of it that intrigued me most), the more it impressed me. What I realized was that, like John Zorn, another artist whose own work I have mixed feelings about but whose curatorial/community-forging instincts I admire greatly, Laswell's greatest achievement has been his bridge-building, his willingness to forge connections between artists who never would've found each other (note Herbie Hancock and Akira Sakata's names on that Last Exit LP jacket above), or at least probably wouldn't have thought to document their meeting on record: Bailey and Williams, say, or Keiji Haino and Rashied Ali (who appeared with Laswell in a collective called Purple Trap), or Sharrock, Brötzmann and Shannon Jackson, who seem like soulmates after the fact but who, to my knowledge, hadn't played together before Laswell convened them. The Praxis project is another example; I'm not in love with the later material (oriented around Buckethead and Brain), but it warms my heart to read the personnel list for 1993's Sacrifist, which includes Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell alongside the dudes from Blind Idiot God. Laswell's work as an intergenre unifier is less well-documented than Zorn's (in founding Tzadik, Zorn created an invaluable umbrella entity that Laswell never managed to maintain for an extended period), but it's equally undeniable. I'm thrilled that these records exist.
And to branch out briefly into Laswell's work as a producer, the musical world owes him a great debt for helping to resurrect the career of Sonny Sharrock. Guitar and Ask the Ages are among my most treasured records, period, the two best presentations of Sharrock's heartrending magic. (Seize the Rainbow, a Laswell co-production, is an idiosyncratic keeper as well.)
Part of the fun of the Heavy Metal Be-Bop series has been interrogating some of my old aesthetic prejudices. To ignore Laswell outright would a major self-disservice. Just as I don't love all of his records, I don't agree with everything he has to say in the conversation linked above (for one, his estimation of Dave Lombardo's limited musical scope seemed overly dismissive, and even disrespectful), but I'm grateful to have had the chance to sit down with him and discuss this strange musical nexus. Tony Williams, whom Laswell knew well and worked with often, acted as a fulcrum for the conversation, and I think we ventured into a fair amount of underexplored territory re: Williams's ambitions and aesthetic goals as a rock-oriented player.
I hope you enjoy the interview. I'd like to sincerely thank Mr. Laswell for taking the time to meet with me.
I'm proud to present the fourth installment of this ongoing series. Thanks as always to Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges for his design/layout expertise and for playing host, and thanks, of course, to the subject himself, Melvin Gibbs.
I have to say, I've rarely had more fun preparing for an interview. I knew a bit of Rollins Band back in the early-to-mid '90s, but I definitely wasn't savvy enough as a teenager to hear the outfit as a "combination of Funkadelic and King Crimson," as Gibbs brilliantly describes it. And though I may have been vaguely aware of Gibbs's presence in the group, I didn't have a clue what his history was.
Street Priest by Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society (thanks to Steve Smith for digging this out), Seize the Rainbow by Sonny Sharrock, Strange Meeting by Power Tools, I Am a Man by Harriet Tubman, For You - For Us - For All by SociaLybrium. These are just a few of the great records Gibbs has made, and I'm still discovering more (e.g., Ellery Eskelin's Ten, which I can't wait to hear). He is a hero of a movement that doesn't have a name: postfusion, hardcore-informed, noise-embracing, funk-loving.
Currently, Gibbs works with Harriet Tubman—check out their new Sunnyside release, a 2000 live interpretation of Coltrane's Ascension with special guests—which played at Undead Jazzfest just the other night. If anyone caught the set, I'd love to hear about it via the comments. He also just completed a tour of Europe with Encryption, his trio with Vernon Reid and Ronald Shannon Jackson (you can hear an exclusive live track on the interview page at Invisible Oranges). Keep up with Gibbs via Tumblr, Bandcamp (where you can hear two full albums by recent Gibbs-led all-star projects) and Twitter.
P.S. As of this writing, two more Heavy Metal Be-Bop interviews are complete and in the queue. Stay tuned!
A few disparate musical topics to blab about this balmy Sunday evening...
STATS (above, photo by Peter Kleeman) is up and running again after a month-or-so hiatus. Very happy to be rocking in this manner once more. In two weeks' time, on March 23, we will perform as part of the hallowed Precious Metal series at Lit Lounge. Come one and all. More spring shows are in the works and new recordings are coming soon.
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I have heard the new Mastodon album, Crack the Skye, which officially appears 3/24. (It's already up for grabs in the file-sharing netherverse, but--strangely--sans the tour de force 13:00 album closer, "The Last Baron.") In fact, I've heard it like ten times. I'm utterly addicted to it. Though my reaction is extremely positive, I'm just a tad hesitant re: raving about it at this early stage simply because I remember having the exact same "Holy shit!" initial opinion of 2006's Blood Mountain. But after a few weeks, I remember feeling like I'd exhausted that album and that its appeal was distinctly ephemeral. Amid all the Crack the Skye buzz, though, I've been coming back to Blood Mountain (and Leviathan as well) and feeling pretty well-sated.
Anyway, re: Crack the Skye, a lot of the early press has cried, "Prog!" and I'm not going to disagree there. The album is one huge, epic mood piece, inviting all the usual BIG adjectives like "sprawling" and such. There's a wide array of dynamics, a smattering of Moog-ish keyboards and a continuation of Blood Mountain's heavy reliance on *sung*--i.e., as opposed to shrieked, bellowed or roared, as on Remission--vocals. The hooks on this record are simply monstrous. Nearly every song has at least one moment of grand-slam catchiness (behold "Divinations" and its solid-gold chorus here) and the singing sounds a good deal more natural this time around. It's very much a record of unabashed beauty, yet when the heaviness comes, it's massive and furious.
It's pretty safe to say at this point that Mastodon is a band for the ages. They may not be Yes and they may not be vintage Metallica, but at their best, they do provide some magical combination of the pleasures of both prog and epic technical metal. (Crack the Skye probably leans more toward the former pole.) They are pretty much the cream of Big (i.e., major-label) Rock these days, and I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't be extremely excited to hear a new Mastodon disc. I just hope I feel as psyched about Crack the Skye at the end of the year as I do now. That's all I'll say for now, but watch this space for more Mastodon coverage soon.
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Before and between my Crack the Skye intake, I have been listening exclusively to Last Exit. Throughout my listening life, there are always a ton of bands, albums, artists, periods, genres, etc. that I know at some point I'll have to check out but that I just haven't quite gotten around to. I tend to mentally refer to such a scenario as having a date with an artist.
I've had a date with Last Exit for many years. It's not that I've never heard them before. Far from it; I've had plenty exposure to them ever since a co-worker handed me a cassette dub of Headfirst into the Flames one summer during college. But I've never before really wholeheartedly embraced them like I have over the past few weeks. In many ways, I'd always considered Last Exit a dream band, boasting as it did the twin towers of guitarist Sonny Sharrock and saxist Peter Brötzmann (the latter of whom I touched on a few weeks back). But it also boasted a player who for me has long been a stumbling block, namely bassist Bill Laswell.
I could write volumes on my wariness re: a fair amount of what is often termed downtown music and especially re: two of its signature artists, John Zorn and Laswell, but I'm not in the mood to rant (nor, to be fair, have I really put in the extensive listening that would be necessary to back up my lukewarm appraisal of each man's work). I will say, though, Laswell's funk- and dub-infused improv work--not to mention his production aesthetics, e.g., on this quizzical recording--has often struck me as heavily cheesy and dated.
But after my recent Brötzmann binge, I knew that I had to reckon with Last Exit in a serious way. This recent spate of listening--which included samplings from the self-titled release, the aforementioned Headfirst, The Noise of Trouble (with a very yet awesome Herbie Hancock cameo) and the hit-and-miss yet nevertheless fascinating studio disc, Iron Path--was the first time I really felt like I was able to appreciate the band as a totality, to hear it without wishing I was hearing Sharrock and Brötzmann with a more genuinely brutal--and less hokey--rhythm section.
And whatever anyone wants to say, however violent an ensemble Last Exit was, it could also be an extremely hokey one. Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson often defaulted to these sproingy, two-beat, almost rockabilly-like rhythms that sounded more goofy than menacing, all but negating the savageness of what was going on up front. But again, this time around, I was trying to hear more openly, less judgmentally, and I found myself embracing these more lighthearted--and even, at times, silly--aspects of the band. Sure there's part of me that wishes they were just balls-out all the time, but there's a really special sort of quirkiness to what Laswell and Shannon do in the band that adds a satisfying variety to the improvisations.
I guess if I could sum up what I'm saying it's that I stopped viewing Last Exit as a flawed dream band and started hearing them for what they were, which is very much a product of their time. Along with the transcendent rawness of their music, there's also a kind of '80s cheese thrown into the mix, a flashy, synthetic glitz that seems to creep into almost anything Laswell touches. But just as I've come to terms with the soupy overproduction of Laswell-helmed Sharrock discs like Highlife, I'm starting to dig and accept how that aesthetic plays into Last Exit as well. Don't get me wrong: L.E. never came anywhere near the bombastic lushness of Highlife, but there's definitely an element of grandstanding, fun-loving cheese about what they do, not to mention an element of perverse playfulness, evidenced--to name two aspects--in the band's cartoonishly macho song titles ("My Balls/Your Chin," anyone?) and Shannon's cryptic avant-blues vocal outbursts.
Nowhere is *all* of this more apparent than the band's killer Frankfurt gig from '86, which is viewable in several forms on YouTube (though, sadly, no longer in the brief version so aptly tagged by Weasel Walter with the phrase "mountains of cocaine"). Note the insanely kinetic, Bon Jovi-esque camera work, which only enhances the over-the-top-ness of the music:
[Note: These two vids depict the same gig, though I believe there's little or no overlap between them. Don't hold me to that, but either way, they're in no way identical and both well worth a peep.]
The whole gamut of the band is here in these clips. First one leads off with that inimitable free-time skronk they patented, with Laswell thrumming away and Shannon skittering behind him, both expressing nervous momentum rather than any metric structure, and Sharrock and Brötzmann just teeing off on top. Then comes a horrifically brilliant Brötz solo feature, where he sounds more like a fuming dragon than a sax player. And then comes Shannon caterwauling away on some free-soul scat madness. Second clip starts off with the "mountains of cocaine" cataclysm itself, then finds its way into a wacky ride-'em cowboy stomp before kicking into some of the most disgusting death-blues imaginable. The close-ups of Sonny around 4:00 are simply priceless, and when he pulls out the slide around 4:50, what was already a puke-inducing display of badass electric rawness turns into something molten. It's thrilling and monumental. From there things descend into horseplay--Laswell's manhandling of the bass seems stilted to me--but the spell never breaks. And that's what's so special about Last Exit: The quartet's project was all about mingling the sublime with the wanky, the profound with the vulgar. They weren't what I had originally idealized them as being--namely the most uniformly fearsome band of all time--but they were brash and awesome and hilarious and staunchly unboring. Hail Last Exit (even Bill Laswell!) and damn, does all this make me wish I'd gotten a chance to see Sonny Sharrock live before he died.
PS: In my YouTube trawlings, I turned up several more excellent related vids, including two (1, 2) bootleg recordings from a 1988 L.E. gig, the first of which begins with a jaw-dropping unaccompanied stand by Sharrock. And for the truly brave, here's Carlos Santana covering Sharrock's classic "Dick Dogs" (WTF, I know). And lastly, for the die-hard Sharrock heads, behold the man gigging with his unlikeliest collaborator, flutist Herbie Mann. This one is just a glorious enigma if there ever was one: A happy, sprightly groove-jazz vibe and then Sharrock comes and just capsizes the whole thing with his frenetic panther runs. I'd heard this juxtaposition on record, e.g. Live at the Whiskey A Go Go, but viewing it is even more disconcerting.
PPS: And finally, an appropriately irreverent Last Exit interview.
