Proud to present an in-depth look at Emergency! by the Tony Williams Lifetime, via Pitchfork's Sunday Review. This record means a lot to me. Lifetime looms large in my ongoing Heavy Metal Bebop research — it's come up again and again in the various conversations I've had on the topic of the jazz/metal intersection. In some ways, it represents the birth of that concept: There was no jazz-rock, and then suddenly, with Emergency!, there it was*.
Beyond its historical significance, the record also just completely kicks ass. I think a lot about the whole "musical time machine" question, i.e., what bygone act would you go back and witness if you had your pick. For me, lately, the original Lifetime — maybe at the October 1969 Ungano's run recalled by Herbie Hancock in the review — tops that list.
*This phrasing is a bit hyperbolic. There were of course plenty of precursors. One I need to delve into more is Gary Burton — I found an interview where Tony specifically cited him as a genre-blending pioneer, and I've often heard Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell do the same. I don't know this body of work well, but I intend to remedy that!
This one, a Rolling Stone interview with John McLaughlin about his upcoming (final) U.S. tour and the history of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, was definitely a cross-it-off-the-bucket-list type of deal. Would've loved to have had more time with him on the phone — not to mention a better connection on the line — but he was so generous and forthcoming during our chat. I got chills listening to John describe gigging with Lifetime, a group that's probably in the top 10, if not five, of bands I'd choose to go back in time and see live if given the chance.
I'm still making my way through Bathed in Lightning, Colin Harper's exhaustive but extremely readable history of McLaughlin's early career, but this book is invaluable. If you're a fan — or if you've ever found yourself wondering, as I do often, how the fuck music as advanced and inspired as Mahavishnu's could come to exist on this planet of ours — you need it immediately. I'm also a fan of Walter Kolosky's Mahavishu biography Power, Passion and Beauty, an unconventional and informal book that nevertheless has a ton of great original research. The testimonials from many prominent artists who saw Mahavishnu (and Lifetime) live are priceless.
I leave you with this clip of what has become my favorite Mahavishnu piece, "Hope," an easy-to-overlook interlude on Birds of Fire that the band turned into a heavy-metal cataclysm onstage:
I also can't recommend the bonus disc of the classic '73 Mahavishnu live set Between Nothingness and Eternity highly enough. That entire concert is just utterly transcendent and staggering. I'm more in awe of this band than ever, and that's saying something, considering how much they've meant to me over the years.
I also enjoyed getting to know the later Mahavishnu records, such as Apocalypse and Visions of the Emerald Beyond, which I'd mostly overlooked before. They lack the otherworldly drive and focus of the early stuff but are still very much worth checking out. And there's so much more to McLaughlin's vast discography: the mix-and-match post-Mahavishnu all-star date Electric Guitarist and After the Rain, a 1994 trio album with Elvin Jones and Joey DeFrancesco, are a couple I've found myself going back to. And of course the phenomenal Extrapolation. Long live Johnny Mac…
Sometimes I get hung up on the details. Right now, it's the intro to "Fred," from the Tony Williams Lifetime's Believe It (1975). Six staggered bass-drum/crash-cymbal thumps, then a switch to the open hi-hat for one last washy punctuation mark. So sparse and so complete.
And Tony's performance on the piece itself: The pinnacle of "fusion" drumming, to my ears. That airy, syncopated groove on the opening theme, then the tension-building shift to the ride cymbal at 1:08 and the whitewater full-band accents / solo spots starting at 1:14. I love the muscle and the drive of this passage, the way Tony is just bashing, owning these breaks, knowing how badass he is. But I also love how he comes right back down to earth afterward: He resumes the opening groove (1:28), yet quickly thinks better of it, opting instead for a brisk, thrilling little cymbal swell.
Tony Williams in the ’60s (with Miles, and on Blue Note, with Sam Rivers, Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur, Andrew Hill and others) was one of the sounds that initially sold me on jazz. I checked out his early work with Lifetime in college and then had a real moment with it last year. For whatever reason, though, I hadn't followed the thread further until pretty recently. Believe It is my latest Williams obsession, and I feel as strongly about it as I do re: any of his work. If there is such a thing as jazz-rock drumming (something I've been pondering in my Heavy Metal Bebop series, i.e., is it possible for one player to excel at both of these styles, either independently or simultaneously, given their disparate demands?), this is as good as it gets. You have true brute punch on one hand, and on the other, Williams's patented elasticity, a skittering nimbleness, like the aural equivalent of one of those basilisks sprinting over the surface of the water.
I've also been exploring Williams's sideman work from around this time. The performance below, with Stan Getz, Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke (the same band on Captain Marvel) kills me. The dress, the sound, the attitude. I love how Williams sort of cocks his head to the side before he starts, like, "Are we ready to melt some faces? Okay then." Dig the extended close-up at 4:10.
And then this one, with Clarke again, and Jean-Luc Ponty on violin. (I think both of these clips are from ’72.) Check out the virtuosic pugilism around 3:10, and the way Tony eases the feel down to light swing at 3:30. It's one of those patented on-a-dime Williams transitions; he never seemed to require any significant amount of runway in order to smoothly land the 747.
For any Williams buffs reading this, what are your favorite Tony performances from the ’70s and beyond? Million Dollar Legs, the follow-up to Believe It, has a terrible reputation, but I'm looking forward to an in-depth firsthand study. Other records that intrigue me: Didier Lockwood's New World (recorded 1979), Michael Mantler's Movies (’77) and the super-rare 1980 Williams session Play or Die. I'm not well-versed in the later, more postboppish Blue Note period either. Would greatly appreciate any recommendations.
P.S. [After the fact] Another record that merits mention is Hal Galper's Now Hear This (recorded 1977). Williams goes tornado at the end of the title track.
P.P.S. There is also, of course, the Man Jazz meltdown that is Trio of Doom.
This past Saturday night I heard Black Host, a new project led by drummer Gerald Cleaver, at Cornelia Street Café. (The band was concluding a five-night mini tour of NYC, during which it had stopped by three other local venues.) What drew me in was partly my recent interest in Cleaver-led projects (his latest album, Be It As I See It, is a stunner) but the personnel—Darius Jones on alto, Brandon Seabrook on guitar, Pascal Niggenkemper on bass and the mighty Cooper-Moore on piano—was also a major factor.
Throughout the evening's two sets, I kept thinking about the make-up of the band, or more accurately, the fact that in jazz bands are often made, period, custom-built for each gig or recording session. Of course there are exceptions, groups like the Bad Plus that have impressed me precisely because they don't conform to this "leader plus the auxiliary players he or she happens to have convened for the night" model. I kept thinking about the fact that even once players have established themselves, not just as improvisers but as bandleaders and conceptualists, they can still appear in other people's projects, without any sense of it being beneath them. If you happen to be a jazz bandleader—it helps to live in New York and have a decent budget—you can actually assemble your dream group.
It's an obvious fact, one of the first principles of modern jazz, really, that personnel is fluid, but watching Black Host last night, I was re-struck by the special-ness, the vast potential of that idea. Say you're Gerald Cleaver, a great drummer and an experienced bandleader; you can think to yourself, I'd like to put together a project that includes four other established players, bandleaders in their own right: Cooper-Moore (one-time leader of Triptych Myth, multi-instrumental legend), Jones (increasingly prominent leader of a trio and quartet), Seabrook (leader of the punk-jazz force Seabrook Power Plant) and Niggenkemper (I'm not as familiar with his work, but his PNTrio has two CDs out). You can write some engaging music to fuel the enterprise; then, best of all, you can wind the whole thing up and watch it go.
(In rock, the band-building process typically happens once, right at the start. Personnel might shift, of course—guitarist Joe Petrucelli and I founded STATS roughly a decade ago, and we've worked with four different bassists during that time—but really what you're looking for is fixed membership.)
In the case of Black Host, you were hearing what happens when this process pays off, when you draft various players for a project and they get along outstandingly. What I love about this whole phenomenon is how, due to the x-factor of improvisation, a bandleader can't know in advance exactly how his recruits are going to interact. At Cornelia, I was struck specifically by the Cooper-Moore/Seabrook connection. There was one episode, I think it was during the second set, when C-M took a particularly wild solo (one of many that found his fingers, and forearms, scampering across the keyboard, summoning a riot of notes—chaotic and yet fully coherent, tasteful and related to the piece at hand) and lighted upon this violent, trilling figure. Seabrook looked up, clearly transfixed by the pattern, and then began to mimic it, employing the turbo-picking right hand that serves him so well when playing banjo in the Power Plant. The two men, a pianist in his mid-sixties and a guitarist in his mid-thirties were engaged in maniacal game of Hot Potato.
At other points I recall Cooper-Moore watching Seabrook or Niggenkemper solo with obvious glee, clearly fascinated by their ingenuity (throughout the evening, Seabrook was sampling various passages, particularly Jones's saxophone lines, with a small tape recorder and playing them back through his guitar pick-ups; other times he'd toss out razor-toothed ninja stars of notes, like the final flourish in John McLaughlin's epic riff at the end of Miles's "Right Off," from A Tribute to Jack Johnson—one iteration of McLaughlin moment I'm referring to comes right at 18:49 here; and during Niggenkemper's solo intro to one piece, the bassist held some kind of metal bowl, or maybe an aluminum pan?, against the strings to produce a fruitfully abrasive texture). It struck me in these moments that by convening various players, you're not just inviting them to play together, but also to listen to one another, to simply be together for that segment of time. (This fifth straight night of performance seemed like just the right juncture to savor the new relationships within Black Host: The players were comfortable together, but still a bit in awe of one another, still full of wonder.)
Darius Jones contributed his trademark combination of volcanic passion and laserlike focus. As impressive a bandleader as he is, I was struck last night by what a model collaborator he is as well. During the written portions—particularly during the second piece in the first set, a staggeringly gorgeous ballad that I immediately wanted to hear again as soon as it was over—he served Cleaver's vision, articulating the melodies with total clarity and a complex sensation of harsh sweetness—like honey with an underlying pungency—the tenderest notes paradoxically seeming the most effortful. And during the improvised portions, Jones served the hive mind, the collectively settled-upon direction of the music. Sometimes he led, delivering a full-on burry blare; other times, he sat back and reveled in the mayhem, grinning, cheering even, homing in on the Cooper-Moore/Seabrook firestorm, and doling out brief punctuation phrases. Like Cooper-Moore, Jones is a model onstage listener; you feel what others are playing more deeply while watching him respond to it. And that goes back to my point above: As a bandleader, in bringing players together, especially players like these, ones with huge personalities, you're creating this little society, a forum for new relationships to develop. I know Jones has a history with Cooper-Moore, but I'm not sure how much either player has worked with Seabrook, or whether any of the three had previously played with Niggenkemper but there was a very clear sense of camaraderie to Black Host, and one thing that fascinated me was how out of the spotlight Cleaver, the man with the plan, was. In light of what was going on up front, his drumming was a subtle glue.
You did feel his guiding hand in the written material, of course. There was a lot of variety to it. Unlike on Be It As I See It, which features short, chamber-music-like episodes, here the focus was on lengthy pieces that set up an atmosphere and explored it. The opening piece of the first set featured a subtle funk backbeat, with other instruments swirling on top; then came the remarkable ballad I mentioned above, a truly poetic song without words—not unlike "Charles Street Sunrise" from Be It—and a more hectic, uptempo piece. The second set was both harsher and more abstract. I remember some patient, drawn-out melodies and others that were more jagged—weird little sound shapes played in unison by Jones and Seabrook. I remember both hurtling uptempo swing and moments of pure, out-of-time weightlessness. Overall there was just enough shape and contour to hold the enterprise together, but Cleaver had left a lot of room for the spontaneity. I remember that the second set ended with all players partaking of a collective freak-out: Jones barking harshly, Seabrook wringing staticky squeals out of his tape-player/pick-up apparatus, Cooper-Moore leapfrogging his hands across the keyboard. Cleaver stood behind his kit, pressing a stick vertically into the head of his floor tom and threading it up through his fist (a technique I've seen before and experimented with myself but that I know of no proper name for), taking in the whole enterprise stoically yet attentively.
This was the kind of "It's alive!" moment that I've been trying to describe here. As a jazz bandleader in a forum like this, you're composing and preparing, yes; like the host of a dinner party, you're cooking, cleaning, stocking the fridge with beverages, making sure you've got enough place settings, etc. You're probably micromanaging a bit throughout the evening, especially during those first crucial, perhaps tense moments when the guests start to arrive. But at a certain point, you're letting go, allowing your friends to make of the evening what they will. There's a certain joy in seeing the preparations pay off as you expected; someone loves a particular dish that you labored over, say. But what makes you proudest is watching the guests socialize, seeing unexpected new friendships blossom in real time. You've ceded control; now the personalities themselves are in charge.
Again, this is not some shocking revelation; by and large, it's the way jazz works. But it doesn't always work as well as it did in Black Host, where you could see the players reveling in these new relationships. (Clearly, it didn't hurt that they'd been sharing stages for four nights already.) At this point, as an artist, you haven't just assembled a cast to execute your vision; you've founded a little village, a self-sufficient community with a vision of its own. Once it's humming along with its own momentum, you cease to be a leader, per se. At that point, you're just living, and letting live.
Emergency!, by the Tony Williams Lifetime, is my favorite album right this second. I remember buying it in college and connecting strongly with the first track ("Emergency" itself), but it never became an obsession. Now I hear it as a mindblower.
The other night on WKCR, Mitch Goldman had Vernon Reid as his guest and they were listening to rare recordings of early fusion—including some live material by Lifetime—the idea being to examine this budding genre "before it had a name." A great concept for sure, and it led me back to Lifetime with fresh ears.
I love the abandon in the second section (beginning at :54, after the Hendrixy intro) of "Sangria for Three" (see above), the dervish spirit, driven by Williams's Latin-ish beat. The boomy bass drum, the singing toms. And the sense of total abandon. Virtuosity, yes, but with true racing excitement. McLaughlin just as much about perverse note tangles as about fluidity (listen at 2:26 in particular). All the distortion, the buzzing volume, swarms of organ from Larry Young. It's music you want to turn up absurdly loud, just to get at the sheer head-busting aspect of it. Take heed around 3:12, when all three hammer on this looped drone, building tension and busting it open.
The music has so much dirt to it, so much punk energy, and the before-it-had-a-name concept is important. I'm not exactly sure when the fusion backlash started in earnest (does anyone know if there were certain critics, say, who led the charge, or was it an across-the-board thing, aimed largely at Miles?), but I wonder if people were hearing this as some sort of concession. What this first version of Lifetime definitely is not, is the sterile concept that came to be associated with fusion, the empty chops displays, dexterity without soul, etc. It couldn't be less that, really. It's hungry music, with terrifying, about-to-come-off-the-rails drive to it. Williams didn't want to show off—he wanted to take a familiar concept, the jazz organ trio (see this fascinating 1997 Williams interview: "Everybody talks about Lifetime being the first fusion band, but it was really sort of a throwback to what was going on when I started out in Boston. I played with a lot of organ trios because that was one of the big sounds there, and that's what the original Lifetime really was."), and get modern with with it, get weird, get out, get severely loud and brain-bent and psychedelic. (On the latter tip, I'd always dismissed Williams's vocals on this record as tedious, but last night, I started to hear them as an integrated part of the whole—this is psychedelic, exploratory, truly experimental music, and the dreamy, textural vocals, on the track "Where," say, help advance that aspect. It's like Floyd jazz.)
And there is SO much freedom in this music, a freedom that moves way beyond Free Jazz. The level of listening in the moment, of following tangential impulses, really gets me. Check out at 3:46 in this track, when Williams drops out and McLaughlin and Young start to paint with pure color. Dabs and blobs of overdriven sound. An acquaintance with the technology ("What is this thing called distortion?"). Actual improvisation, de-styled, and such a wonderful curveball after the sweaty headlongness of the first section. Williams isn't playing, but I bet he had his eyes closed and that he was fascinated. Listen from about 5:22–5:26—I think I hear the snares in his snare drum rattling sympathetically.
Shortly into this second part, Williams drops the brain-rattling beat. Young lays into the keys, yielding a howling wind. Again, the desire to crank this music up is absolutely irresistible; you just want to keep driving it further. During the reprise of the Latin section (about 1:10, introduced by a flurry of Williams's patented molten-lava press rolls), McLaughlin seems to say, "I'm done with notes." He's in this sort of rhythm-guitar trance, tossing out exaggeratedly clipped figures that seem to hint at the full-on staccato-swagger world-swallowing riff he would later bust out in the middle of Miles's "Right Off" (from A Tribute to Jack Johnson—skip to 7:45 here), which was recorded about ten months later (April 7, 1970 vs. May 26 and 28, 1969 for Emergency!). Kicking up dust is paramount here, McLaughlin just riding the dervish rhythm. The band is like a horde, a swarm, a miasma, advancing end-over-end, Williams flattening the time with more unbearably poetic press rolls (listen around 3:06). A shaggy, squawking meteorite, grooving through the universe.
When you hear this, you feel like you might know what is truly meant by the term "jam band," the platonic ideal of it. This is actually a jam, an equal ante-ing up by three players, doing their best to assemble the trippiest, most righteous group vibe. It's actually what fusion is supposed to be, drawing on the volume and the balls and cacophony of late-’60s hard rock, as well as the dexterity and deep listening of mid-to-late-’60s jazz (the kind the Williams himself was playing with Miles). But really, you don't think about any of that. You just think about the radioactive dust, the head-busting solar energy.
As before, the beat drops out around 4:10. Listen to the cooling rain of Williams's cymbal rolls. The ensuing McLaughlin/Young duet is like a bath of retro sound, kitschy in its way but so pure, defined by an actual not-knowingness of what will happen next. It must have been so liberating for jazz players to just toss form out the window in this way, and even the form of what was then thought of as avant-garde jazz, which was a more-or-less anti-rock style of expression. No, this is about letting in ALL the noise swirling around at the time, not just a Free Jazz blare, but also the ugliness and the mystery at the edge of the period's rock and funk, the pure-sound bliss out/exorcism that lived in the blank spaces between the genres.
Williams's drops the beat around 6:08. (I think I hear a faint vocal sailing over top.) Larry Young sounding like he's being electrocuted by his own instrument, galvanizing this Frankenstein lurch of a groove. By about 7:10, Williams gives it up, lets the nothingness creep in, and we head into a pure-sound crescendo. You just want this throbbing swell to go on forever. I'm so intrigued by the perversity of this band, its complete lack of decorum or "good taste." And that's not to say this music is not thoughtful or highly interactive; just that it pushes where it needs to go when it needs to go there. If an explosion, a pure-sound sunburst, has to happen at this or that point in the music, it happens.
What a shame that this before-it-had-a-name couldn't have just been seen as the next logical step, as the freedom-quest that it actually was, an improvisational music form that matched the times, rising up to meet all of what was possible. I've read that Tony Williams was a great admirer of John Bonham (and vice versa). He couldn't sound like him if he tried (has anyone ever really been able to?), but he could lob a kind of response bomb to the rock he was digging. That's what this music is to me, an attempt not exactly to get with the times, to concede to them (my sense is that that's what Williams, Miles and whomever else were called out for at the time: selling out, somehow, by plugging in), but to amass and assimilate them, as a rolling snowball would. At its best, as on Emergency!, the result isn't "jazz + rock," it's just pure meltdown—sweat + exaltation.
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P.S. Anyone know the whole Lifetime catalog well? My current knowledge is spotty. I very much enjoy the Holdsworth era, e.g., Believe It, even though it's a lot cleaner and less sheerly mindblwing than the McLaughlin-Young stuff. What else is worth checking out? There are so many records: Ego, Turn It Over, Million Dollar Legs, The Old Bum's Rush, etc. etc. The only Lifetime YouTube clips I can find show the Ego lineup with Young, Ted Dunbar, Don Alias and Warren Smith, i.e., here (picture is overly dark, but the sound is amazing) and here and here (the latter features some nice simultaneous singing/drumming from Williams on "There Comes a Time," which includes the amazing line "I love you more when you're spiteful"). A non-Lifetime Tony Williams bonus track: Check out this beautiful 1972 clip of him in trio with Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty.
I'm also curious about McLaughlin's non-Mahavishnu output from around this time (I know Extrapolation but not Devotion) and Larry Young's fusion-era stuff. Is Lawrence of Newark great? I've never really checked it out. There's also an album he made with Joe Chambers called Double Exposure. Are there other records by these players (or like-minded folks—Larry Coryell, maybe?) that get at the Emergency! vibe, or is this record as rare a bird as it seems to me to be? What about, gasp, TRIO OF DOOM w/ Jaco?
P.P.S. Right as I was done writing, I stumbled on a Howard Mandel essay on Spectrum Road, the Lifetime tribute band (feat. Vernon Reid) that's currently making the rounds. Looks like he gives praise to the original stuff too. Psyched to read.
