Shapeshifter: In praise of Bruford/Wetton/Fripp King Crimson

Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time self-educating re: rock from the ’70s. We always hear about the ’60s, specifically the end of the ’60s, as a rock heyday, but the next decade seems to me to be the One, when all the warning shots had been fired and the premier bands were all just, to use a term coined by Damión Reid, showing up to crush. As usual, I speak only for myself, oriented according to my inescapable biases, biases that go by names like Black Sabbath (who started out strong but attained some kind of exalted state of fried-mind excess around the time of 1975's Sabotage), Thin Lizzy (who issued their own fireball of a record that same year, just one of at least five all-time-great LPs they'd release throughout the decade) and Led Zeppelin (let's stick with the ’75 theme, and take a moment to reflect on two of the sickest grooves ever recorded: exhibits A and B).

I will love all of these bands/records for as long as I am on Earth, but at this point, they are like comfort food to me: known quantities with a predictable, though not commonplace effect, i.e., they yield ecstasy the way great coffee yields a buzz. But much of my RLT (recreational listening time) over the past week has been spent chasing down a different kind of feeling, furnished by a band that thrived contemporaneously to the woolly rock mammoths enumerated above, but was on, as they say, a whole different trip.

I'm speaking about King Crimson, specifically the version of King Crimson that existed—with more or less stable personnel, give or take percussionist Jamie Muir and violinist David Cross—from (I think I've got this right) the summer of 1972 through the fall of ’74. Aside from perennial KC mastermind Robert Fripp, this lineup was all about bassist-vocalist John Wetton and—I feel like I need to cross myself while typing this, so large does this musician currently loom in my personal pantheon—drummer Bill Bruford, who reported for Crimson duty as soon as he had finished laying down tracks for this prog monster.

If this specific version of King Crimson occupies a different galaxy than the Rock Gods I mentioned above, the Sabbaths, Zeppelins and Lizzys, it also has surprisingly little to do with what I think of as capital-p Prog. I love much of the output of the aforelinked Yes, as well as that of Rush, who really came into full flower later in the ’70s on albums like Hemispheres (some will point to 2112 as the Rush landmark from that period, but that was just the icebreaker), but at this point, those bands too are known quantities, both to me and the World of Rock. They really do exemplify most of the traits they're said to exemplify: long-ass songs, foregrounded virtuosity, helium-voiced vox, etc. (Those descriptions aren't loaded in any way; they're simply neutral catalogs of what those bands sounded like at that time.)

But BWFC (Bruford, Wetton, Fripp Crimson) is, again, something other, and I've spent the last week or so trying to get to the bottom of exactly what that is, or at least observe the full range of its behaviors. I'm finding those tasks extremely daunting but at the same time, I'm enjoying myself immensely. This is not a band you comprehend right away, and that is primarily because BWFC is a shapeshifter. You cannot get your head and heart around it via conventional means, i.e., albums; you have to experience it, live with it, in the wild—that is to say onstage. For several years now, I have really enjoyed the BWFC studio output, namely Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and Red. (I included the first chapter of the two-part Larks' title track in a math-rock mix I compiled a couple years back.) But to be honest, at this point, I'm considering this trilogy as little more than a digest version of BWFC. I feel like I never knew the band until very recently, when I started digging into the band's own immaculately maintained live archives, known as DGM—i.e., Discipline Global Mobile—Live. (Search 1973 and 1974 here to get a sense of what a treasure trove this is.)

So far, I've picked up three shows: 10/23/73 in Glasgow; 3/30/74 in Mainz, Germany; and 6/28/74 in Asbury Park—the latter of which is heard, in edited/meddled-with form, on the USA live album. (It's funny to think about how in June of ’74, Asbury Park's most famous musical export, Bruce Springsteen, a.k.a. prog's antithesis, was in the process of becoming a star.) My knowledge of these official bootlegs is no means encyclopedic—Steve Smith, the most avid/learned Crimsophile I know, is your man—but I can vouch for every one of these shows, and more specifically, for the way they complement each other. Yes, there are song overlaps—I'm starting to sound like a Deadhead here, and though I'm no die-hard there either, I do love me some cherry-picked live Dead—but these are three completely different concerts: different energies, different trajectories, different purposes. I was hoping I'd purchase three of these boots and feel like that was enough, but sadly (for my bank account, i.e.), I think I'm just getting started.

So what is it about BWFC? What's the big deal? I really wanted to link the Glasgow version of "Easy Money," one of BWFC's signature jams, here, so the music could do the talking, but it isn't on YouTube. I just put on a snippet of said track, to get the scent back in my nose. What is it? It's ear-bleeding art-funk, primed for maximum timbral abrasion, gritted-teeth extremity, with harsh and peculiar textures protruding from every strata of the sonic spectrum. That latter point is key for me. One of the chief joys I derive from BWFC is how strange and utterly distinct each sound you hear is. The timbres of the various instruments don't comfortably jell, as is the case in, say, Sabbath or Zeppelin; they war and clash. You've got the flopping, distorted, ungainly beast that is Wetton's bass tone in the low register—like the grotesquely exposed metal skeleton of a sci-fi cyborg—then you have Fripp's merciless high-end fuzz, scratching at your right ear like steel wool; and then there's Bruford's multifaceted soundmaker—I hesitate to call it something so mundane as a drum kit: the ugly wash of the hi-hat; those way-tight toms, which sound like crude timbales; and that piercing snare, softening often into a Tony Williams–y press-roll caress.

The band does kick and slam as one but what makes BWFC special is the way they elude and toy with the groove—each player off on his own orbit like a planet in a solar system—as though no one member wants to be caught playing it straight. Bruford in particular seems to love the delicious tension that comes from hinting at a metallic stomp; he could easily Bonham (to coin a verb) his way through the grooves—"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One" comes to mind—but so often chooses to keep the beach ball in the air, so to speak, giving the band the low-end kick it needs but satisfying his own improvisational drive with destabilizing fills and other purposeful inconsistencies. He is not exactly a busy drummer; it's more that he's a restless one. The lumbering doomgroove in the middle of the Red track "Starless"—the definition of a musical slow burn—is a great place to hear what I'm talking about. During the Mainz show, the band draws out the off-kilter riff for more than two ominous minutes, with Bruford limiting himself to minute cymbal taps, before kicking in. But even when Fripp and Wetton near their crescendo, the drummer is still strutting and stuttering along, totally unperturbed; he increases his volume and power, but rarely goes two measures without throwing in some sort of ungainly fill or daring syncopation. In this section, Bruford makes me think of a train-jumper who toys with a slow-moving freighter for miles, flamboyantly hopping on and off as he pleases, never content to simply pick a car and ride. (You get a sense of what I mean around 6:30 in this 1974 TV clip, though the out-of-sync-ness of the audio and video bums me out sufficiently that I held off on an embed. You can view the full four-song performance in excellent fidelity on the 2009 CD/DVD reissue of Red.)

All the band members' performances during this period—my apologies for short-shrifting the often-breathtaking David Cross, whose keening violin is a key feature of these gigs I've been checking out—tend toward the same controlled-chaos brilliance, to the extent that it's easy to forget just how special the material itself is. The variety is simply awesome. Yesterday I marveled at the four-song run at the end of the Mainz show: After "Starless," you've got the relatively concise "Lament," maybe the single strangest piece in BWFC's repertoire. It starts off exemplifying one of the band's key song types, i.e., the brief, ballad-like, almost stagy ditty (I wish I could think of a more dignified word), in which Wetton—whom I've begun to regard as quite possibly the most compelling singer in so-called progressive rock, and one of the most underrated in rock, period—plays the husky yet tender straight man to lyricist Richard Palmer-James's wry satirist. Then, much like in "Starless" itself, the scene changes completely: after a brief instrumental interlude, the band explodes in a deranged art-funk riff fest, with Wetton sounding like he's coming completely unglued. Next up is "Improv Trio," one of the many impromptu interludes that marks this period of Crimson; these pieces take all different shapes (there are four very different ones in the Mainz show alone), but this one is like a pastoral bit of drumless soundtrack music, on which I believe Fripp and Cross are both playing sparkly Mellotron while Wetton lays down a chilled-out bass skeleton. The piece leads into the grandaddy of BWFC's many balls-out jams, the aforementioned "Easy Money," rendered here as stumbling, seething, drunken death funk, with Wetton's signature scat episode at the beginning coming off as a burlesque of airheaded rock & roll. "Easy Money" is always a set highlight, but this version is particularly dire and ragged—a noisy morass. And this very punk element of BWFC is part of what sets them apart from any other contemporary band that you might be tempted to label prog: BWFC understands the value of pure amplified slop, and how effective it can be when juxtaposed with a very British kind of proper-ness and refinement (I think of other brief, chill tracks of the "ditty" variety," such as "The Night Watch"). And there are so many other elements and imperatives at play in the BWFC repertoire: quirky, riffy, Woodstocky blues-rock (see "Cat Food," a track from the pre-BWFC Crimson album In the Wake of Poseidon, which closes the Glasgow show) sits next to obsessive-compulsive epics like "Fracture" and "Larks' Tongues… Part Two." Anyone with even a passing interest in math rock needs get familiar with the former (the Glasgow version is tremendous); the juxtaposition in moods—from notey geekery to flailing violence—is something later exponents of the style have rarely been able to capture in such an organic way. And I'm still getting my brain around the many improvisations that dot these set lists.

There's something very unusual going on in these performances—a marriage of prog's grandeur and virtuosic flash with an almost proto–mid-’80s–Black Flag live-wire scrappiness—that I'm not sure you hear in any other band of the period. Mahavishnu does skew "punk" on their first two records, but they never let themselves sound as frenetic, as hungry, as wild (or on the other hand, as unmoored or abstract) as BWFC do in these performances. This version of Crimson seems to embody the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses—each one pushed to the limit—in a single uncanny unit. I've yet to really get to know Crimson before or after this period, but from what little I do know, BWFC was a unique episode in the history of the band, and maybe of music, period, at least the Western styles I know and love best (rock and jazz).

BWFC was a meteor shower, smashing the airlocks that separated the proto-metal space station from the fusion one and the postbop ones and setting all those impulses free. Pretty much everything I love about music from the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s is here somehow: the mercurial looseness of the Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet, the bombed-out bash of early Sabbath, the D&D-presaging sweep of Yes, the white-hot shred of Mahavishnu and even an undercurrent of especially grimy funk. It didn't last, of course, but for that glorious moment, BWFC had it all, and we are extremely fortunate that the fossil record is so complete. If you need me, I'll be in the DGM archives…

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P.S. Speaking of archives, a mammoth new Larks' Tongues in Aspic box set—bulging with extra live audio and video—is coming 10/15. Scroll down a bit here for details.

The drummer, given some: Albert "Tootie" Heath with Ethan Iverson at the Vanguard

What do we mean when we say "Give the drummer some"? The trio of Ethan Iverson, Ben Street and Albert "Tootie" Heath—which I heard at the Village Vanguard last night—is one answer. The band grows out of Iverson's "Seek out your heroes and play with them" initiative, also the engine behind the pianist's ongoing Billy Hart collaboration. The idea isn't simply that you give the drummer a lot of solo space; it's more that you simply play really great jazz in the company of the musician in question, while drawing the listeners' attention, both verbally and through sympathetic arrangements, to their brilliance.

I knew Tootie's name before attending last night's show, but I didn't know his work and his sound the way I know, say, Roy Haynes's. I may have even seen him play one other time—as part of the Heath Brothers, I believe, at a Jazz Foundation of America event—but he wasn't really on my radar in the way he ought to have been. And this is sort of the point re: the aforementioned "Seek out your heroes" initiative: The gig—in this case, a run at the Vanguard‚is no longer just a gig; it's a work of advocacy. What it says, is, "This masterful musician walks among us; he's playing better than ever; come pay your respects."(One of Iverson's many Heath intros last night went like this: "As we live and breathe, 'Tootie' Heath on drums!")

I heard such wonders coming from the drum kit last night that I felt embarrassed by my prior ignorance of Mr. Heath's work, by the fact that I'd never deliberately set aside a night, or ten, to go hear him play. There was the wicked bouncing march he laid down on "The Charleston," a quasi-backbeat—I think I remember a 16th-note feel, played with the left hand on the hi-hat—that reminded me of the Purdie Shuffle (see around 3:30 here) on Sonny Rollins's "No Moe" and some of the most exquisitely swinging brushwork I've ever heard on the head of "Shiny Stockings." (The way Heath's wire brushes grabbed the snare and lifted out the sound on the latter piece made me feel like I understood for the first time what was really meant by the term "trap set.")

But it was the mallet playing that really floored me. In his recap of Tuesday night's sets, Iverson mentioned Heath's "African mallet patterns" on Paul Motian's "It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago." I wouldn't have been knowledgeable enough to identify the beat in question—played with one mallet on the untightened snare, the other on the rack tom—as African, but that description makes perfect sense; relistening to the pattern in my head now, I'm pretty sure there was some three-against-four going on. Technicalities aside, though, the important thing about the beat was how it fit into the arrangement. Much of the rest of the set had to do with swinging in the conventional sense, pieces in which Iverson and Street reveled in Heath's spacious, gracious pocket, in which the trio grooved as one entity. But "It Should've Happened…" was something different. The performance was about coexistence rather than straightforward agreement. Iverson's melody floated over Heath's mallet pattern, the two seeming totally independent of one another but totally attuned. It's the kind of arrangement that, it seems to me, has to just sort of happen. It's like, "I'll play this, you play that, and I'll see you at the end of the tune." The parts jelled beautifully, even though their actual relationship was a mystery. And thus, as a Motian tribute, it made perfect sense. If that mallet episode played to me like a little mind puzzle, the one on "How Insensitive" was an exercise in simplicity. I'm not sure I've ever seen a drummer make more poetic use of minimal materials than Heath did on this piece. He held the mallet in his right hand, using it to lightly strike the floor tom while he rustled the fingers of his left hand over the head of the same drum. There were variations in the pattern, but mostly it was just pure pulse, with ever-so-slight embellishment. You heard the piano and the bass, but what you felt was the drum, a plush murmur in time. If I had to guess, I'd say that the piece lasted two minutes, maybe two and a half (all the pieces were brief, which made for excellent variety), but it felt so generous in its lulling hush. As with the brushwork, what I really felt here was a new understanding of the materials of jazz drumming: why you use brushes here, sticks there, mallets in this other context. The kit can speak in so many different tongues, and Albert Heath is fluent in them all.

Heath's witty banter was a show unto itself. The bowtied drummer was obviously in high spirits last night—though I'd venture to say that he probably is every night he's onstage—cracking constant jokes in between and even during the pieces. He'd turn constantly to the young man seated immediately to his left and offer commentary on the music as it was happening. One of my favorite of these moments was when Iverson was playing an eerie uncaccompanied intro to the ballad "Memories of You"; Heath leaned toward the audience member in question and stage-whispered "Frankenstein!" Then he pantomimed a scary monster, curling his hands into claws and baring his teeth. He was obviously poking fun at Iverson's love of the esoteric flourish, but in a loving, old-school way, the way one seasoned comedian might roast another. And after Iverson announced "Shiny Stockings," Heath turned to the young man and asked, "You know 'Thong Song'?" He explained that "Shiny Stockings" was pretty much analogous to that Sisqo favorite, before singing a little snippet of the immortal chorus ("Thong-th-thong-thong-thong") for the benefit of the entire crowd. Then, after Iverson spoke about Heath's association with Mal Waldron—the trio had either just played or was about to play Waldron's "Fire Waltz," the killer opener to the classic Dolphy/Little/Waldron/Davis/Blackwell Five Spot recordings, with Heath unleashing a merciless series of triplets on the snare—and recommended the Waldron record Impressions as a good example of that partnership, Heath said, "I think that record went rust instead of gold… or maybe it went mold."

As if it wasn't clear whose show it really was, Iverson and Street both sported "Tootie" buttons, with Street even wearing a Heath-style bowtie. This dynamic, i.e., generations mixing onstage, with the younger element (namely Iverson) making it very plain how thrilled they are to be onstage with the elder, has the potential to be corny or cloying. But the reason it's not in this case is that however worshipful Iverson's intros of Heath are, once the music begins, he's performing as an equal. Often, you'll see younger sidemen to distinguished older musicians playing a sort of "Yes man" role. Here, it's almost the opposite; Iverson's job in this trio seems to be to keep Heath surprised and energized. You can tell it's working because Heath plays in a constant state of delight, smiling and letting out appreciative whoops. Sure the style and the repertoire—familiar standards like "Now's the Time" and "All the Things You Are" alongside eccentric choices like the aforementioned "Fire Waltz" and the Motian—are designed to flatter, but in the end, the point is not simply to cater to the drummer but to stimulate him and thus to give the listener a sense of his breadth, to cultivate in the audience the kind of appreciation for this great man that Iverson himself harbors. And in all those senses, this project is entirely successful.

When you see this ingenerational link done right—i.e., when there's mutual respect, but also a real head-on engagement between equals—it's one of most inspiring, satisfying phenomena in jazz. I think about Jon Irabagon and Barry Altschul, or Darius Jones and Cooper-Moore, or Anthony Braxton and any one of his current much-younger collaborators. The Iverson/Heath hook-up (and I mean no disrespect to Ben Street; his role is vital—not to mention clearly impressive to Heath, who listened to the bassist's solos with rapt attention last night—and my discussion here is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the complex dynamic of this particular trio) is one of the most successful examples of this that I've seen, a partnership that makes "old" jazz feel entirely new. I'm not sure I can remember enjoying a set of so-called straight-ahead jazz more than this one, and it's because the setting encouraged me to focus on the nuts and bolts, to not take for granted the decades' worth of class and experience and good humor and skill seated behind the drums. In short, the set made me a Tootie fan for life. Mission accomplished.

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*If anyone can think of other great intergenerational collaborations, either current (like the ones mentioned above) or past (Miles Davis and Tony Williams, say), I'd love to hear about ’em in the comments.

*It's interesting to think about how the Iverson/Heath partnership differs from the Iverson/Hart one. Hart is just five years older than Heath (the men were born in 1940 and 1935, respectively), but that gap is important. The current Billy Hart Quartet is playing a much more, for lack of a better word, modern strain of jazz than this Iverson/Street/Heath group, focused on long, exploratory performances and mostly original repertoire. The bands sound nothing alike, and they complement each other beautifully.

*Here is Steve Smith's sharp appreciation of the Iverson/Street/Heath trio, which he caught this past Thursday. I'd like to thank Steve for the tip, which spurred me to attend last night.

 *As is customary with the Iverson collaborations, there's an extended interview on file.

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UPDATE: Thanks, Mark Stryker, for his informative intergenerational-collabo overview, which you'll find in the comments. I know a few of those examples well (Shorter, Haynes, etc., and the Cookers absolutely rule!), but some are new to me. Psyched to look into the Louis Hayes group in particular.

List-o-mania: 1996–2011

Over the past week or so, Pitchfork has been polling readers, staffers and contributors re: their favorite albums from the years 1996 through 2011, i.e., the 15-years-and-counting lifespan of the site, via a project called the People's List. My friend and former TONY staffer Colin St. John tipped me off to the project—check out his own list and commentary—and after a little procrastination, I began frantically compiling my top 100 in time for yesterday's deadline. You can view my list here, and those of other Pitchfork writers here.

Lists of this nature are strange; that fact is well established. They are strange because when it comes to such a vast and vastly diverse art form as music or movies or books, consensus is pretty damn near impossible. Phil Freeman wrote passionately and persuasively on this topic last January, with regard to his feelings of alienation from the Kanye-obsessed hordes of fellow Pazz and Jop voters. In one sense, I do not share Phil's feelings; I really enjoyed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (the consensus critical pick for best album of 2010), and I included it on both my year-end top 10 list, and this most recent 15-year-spanning list. On the other hand, when I view friends' and colleagues' contributions to the People's List—here's a typically well-rounded one from another FAFTS ("friend and former TONY staffer"), Corban Goble—I can't help but feel a little apart from the Conversation at Large.

Again, this not out of hostility or reactionary-ness re: what I'll call the Indie-Rock Canon that has cohered during this Pitchfork lifespan (and which has in recent years expanded to included hip-hop/R&B—both mainstream and underground—as well as certain strains of metal, electronica, experimental music, etc.). I included quite a few records in that zone, including three Strokes albums, a bunch of Will Oldham selections, LPs by Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Dinosaur Jr., Battles, Dr. Octagon, Deerhoof and Sia, and a few more. And I like a lot of the other consensus faves, albums by Radiohead (I haven't listened to OK Computer in a good while, but I got really into it in college), Joanna Newsom (Ys is a beautiful, epic album), Built to Spill (ditto re: Keep It Like a Secret), Modest Mouse (the first song on The Lonesome Crowded West destroys me, but on the whole, I like This Is a Long Drive… better; didn't realize that was from ’96—probably should've included it!), Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, Japandroids, Fucked Up, Wavves, the Flaming Lips, Animal Collective and on and on. But it would've been disingenuous for me to include any of those latter albums on my top 100, because none of them has captured my heart and mind the way that, say, Colossamite's Economy of Motion (to pick one great yet largely off-the-radar album from my list) has. So my list is simply what it is, all that it really could be, i.e., a totally subjective catalog of normalcies, idiosyncrasies and, in some cases, by virtue of what is not included, blind spots, one very major one being hip-hop.

Over the past couple years, I've definitely tuned in to hip-hop more than I had in the previous decade. But I'm still no expert, and that's much of the reason why even in the case of a lot of rap I know I like (Ghostface, Outkast, Eminem), I didn't include those records; I simply haven't put in the time that in and of itself is an indication of love for an artwork. That is to say, when compiling my year-end best-of lists each December, I try not to overthink them, i.e., I simply reflect back on what I spent the most time voluntary listening to throughout that time period. In other words, you don't pick your favorites; they pick you. Last year, the Frank Ocean was a no-brainer, as was the Francis and the Lights the year before that, and the Propagandhi the year before that (speaking of Supporting Caste, which came in at No. 5 on my People's List ballot, I've started to think of this as an all-time-great album, certainly the best new record I've heard since I started to work as a full-time writer-about-music). These are simply the newly released albums that demanded my sustained attention, obsession, care, zeal, etc. during this time period. And that is all I have tried to do with this 1996–2011 list: catalog, in hasty digest form, that sustained attention over these past 15 years. I speak for no one other than myself, which is why I prefer to consider lists of this sort as lists of "favorites" rather than reflections of some monolithic "best"-ness. Taken as honest reflections of a single person's tastes, they become a whole lot less threatening and a whole lot more fun. Coming upon a list like Colin's and Corban's, where in the case of about half the selections, I know them only by title or maybe a lone track, is a chance to know more. Conversely, if even one person who checked out my picks was inspired to take a first listen to John Fahey's Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites (in TONY, I said: "During five lengthy ruminations, in which original and public-domain material mingles with Ellington, Artie Shaw and Bola Sete, you hear the haunted, heartbreaking sweep of American music as filtered through a single encyclopedic mind"), Tim Berne's The Shell Game, or anything by craw [sic], Keelhaul or Cheer-Accident, that would make me extraordinarily happy.

And that possibility, of turning someone on to something new, or inspiring them to reconsider something they thought they knew fully, is really the only reason I can see for this whole writing-about-art thing to exist in the first place. These albums speak for themselves, but for some reason, the babble of history drowns them out and we have to dig them up and praise them and let them reiterate what it is they have to teach us. Which brings me to Colin's final point, i.e., what are the sleeper 1996–2011 picks, the great albums, in any style, yet uncovered by any of the participants in this hive-mind People's List exercise? I'd be grateful for any readers' comments.

P.S. I'm already kicking myself over the purely accidental omission of Boys Life's Departures and Landfalls. I did include a record by the related Farewell Bend (Brandon Butler and John Rejba were in both bands), but Departures is a true all-time fave ’round these parts. And all of the following were records I intended to include but had to cut to get myself down to a nice, round 100:

William Parker Clarinet Trio Bob's Pink Cadillac
The Octagon Nothing But Change
Cannibal Corpse Evisceration Plague
June of 44 Tropics and Meridians
Behold… the Arctopus Skullgrid
Yukon Mortar
Territory Band–2 [Ken Vandermark] Atlas
Dan Weiss Trio Timshel 
Obituary Darkest Day 
Charred Walls of the Damned Charred Walls of the Damned
Ornette Coleman Sound Grammar 
Axis of Advance Obey

Also a shout-out to Nicki Minaj's mixtape Beam Me Up, Scotty, a shrewd selection by Corban that I totally forgot about.

P.P.S. The 1996 cut-off point was interesting for me, as it comes just a few years after the release dates of some of my favorite records of all time, albums that surely would've ended up near the top of the list had the initial year parameter been, say, 1993: two more masterpieces by craw (craw and Lost Nation Road), Morbid Angel's Covenant, Face of Collapse by Dazzling Killmen, Slip by Quicksand, Helmet's Betty, Death's Symbolic and many more.

P.P.P.S. There isn't a whole lot of jazz or improvised music on this list. I'd attribute that to a couple of factors: I didn't start listening to jazz seriously till about 1999, and much of my jazz attention up through about 2005 was devoted to playing catch-up, i.e., schooling myself on the music's vast recorded history, a project that still persists: I'd estimate that older, non-contemporary jazz still accounts for about two thirds of my current jazz intake. Also, I'd say that on the whole, album-oriented lists favor song-based, i.e., largely non-improvisatory, music. It's a silly generalization to make, I know—I'm already second-guessing it—but it's the best way I can think of to account for the fact that there's nothing by, say, Joe McPhee, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Henry Threadgill, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton on my list. All of these artists have meant a lot to me over the past 15 years, but my high estimations of their work have formed from a composite impression of live performances I've seen, records I've heard new and old, interviews I've conducted  and just a general kind of "living with" the work and attendant philosophies of figures such as these. But on the other hand, the jazz records I did include—albums by Andrew Hill, Tim Berne, the Bad Plus and others—are all albums I've savored in much the same way as the mostly rock-oriented selections on my People's List ballot: via repeated, sustained, voluntary attention. I'd like to hear folks' thoughts re: great 1996–2011 jazz records I might have overlooked; I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, especially from the period before ’05, when keeping up with current jazz releases wasn't yet part of my job.

P.P.P.P.S A running list of other worthy records from this time period, listed as I think of them:

Henry Threadgill Where's Your Cup? 
Anthrax Worship Music 
The Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers 
Weezer Pinkerton 
One Day as a Lion One Day as a Lion 
Björk Medúlla 
Xiu Xiu The Air Force
Coptic Light EP and LP

P.P.P.P.P.S Here's a great, jazz-heavy list by Destination: Out's Jeff Golick. Wadada Leo Smith's Tabligh is one of many shrewd selections here.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #8: Damión Reid

The eighth installment of my jazz/metal interview series is now live in both extended and abridged versions. I've loved Damión Reid's drumming ever since I first heard him with Robert Glasper (it was either 2005's Canvas or 2007's In My Element), and more recently, his work with Steve Lehman and Greg Ward has been blowing my mind. But I had no idea he was a metal fan until Matt Merewitz, who had been keeping up with Heavy Metal Be-Bop, suggested that I talk to him for the series. So a big thank you to Matt for the tip, and to Damión for being so generous with his time. I had an awesome time working on this one.

The pleasures of post-purism: Joe Henderson in the ’70s

 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?

P.S. This clip doesn't relate to Joe Henderson in the ’70s, but I can't resist linking to the man's appearance on Charlie Rose in 1997.

The spirit of radio: WKCR's blessing

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.

Flushing the pipes: Channel Orange and the art of speed-reviewing

Here, via Time Out New York, is my review of Frank Ocean's Channel Orange.

This version of the piece, the same one that appears in the current print issue of TONY, is actually my second stab at an assessment of Channel Orange, and the one I'm much happier with. At the end of the review linked above, you'll find a link to the first review I published, which went live the day of the album's surprise-attack midnight release.

The short answer to "Why are there two?" is that soon after I published the first one online, I realized that it had been a rush job. I spent more time with the album over the next couple days, and it steadily grew on me. I realized I could still complete a new version of the piece in time for our print deadline, and thanks to my patient and understanding editor, Steve Smith, take 2 is the one that ended up running.

This sequence of events sounds pretty straightforward, but the fact is that it kind of drove me insane last week. (My wife could certainly describe this state of mind in greater detail.) My initial response to the record—the follow-up, I should add, to my favorite album of 2011—was mixed, and as the rave reviews started rolling in, I started to second guess myself, not because I felt like my take needed to mirror everyone else's, but because I realized that I simply hadn't spent sufficient time with the record.

During my career, I've had to write surprisingly few rush reviews. Typically if I'm reviewing a record, I have the music weeks or months in advance. With the Ocean, though, that wasn't an option. I heard it for the first time when everyone else did, last Tuesday morning. As soon as the reviews started going live—i.e., pretty much immediately—I felt compelled to jump into the fray. I was talking about the album with some friends and fellow music writers over e-mail, but that didn't suffice; I felt, for no reason other that that journalists in the internet age tend to feel that they're late on a story (even something as in-the-grand-scheme-of-things trivial as a review of a newly released work of art) mere hours after the window on said story has opened, that I needed to publish immediately.

The problem with that urgency is an obvious one: First impressions are iffy. (I should state another obvious point here, i.e., that there's no such thing as a "correct" record review, only one where the writer has had sufficient time and space to get familiar with the album in question and work out their formal impression of it—the argument they want to make.) This is a constant pitfall of deadline-oriented writing-about-music (or writing-about-art, period) and this particular instance certainly wasn't the first time I'd published a review and second-guessed it. What was special in this case, was the intensity of my bummed-out-ness re: that second-guessing: not exactly the feeling that I had let the artist down (because, let's be serious, my Channel Orange review was one of approximately a zillion that have been published; in the end, what I said matters to relatively few people aside from myself), but the feeling that I hadn't given myself the time and space I needed to simply do a good job on the piece, to come up with something I could stand by and be happy with going forward. The latter criteria, incidentally, do apply to the second version of the review, the more positive one you'll find at the link above.

Along with the aforementioned bummed-out-ness came a painfully complete understanding of why I felt that way, and what I needed to do in the future to avoid feeling that way again. Film reviewers may very well have to settle for one pass through the movie in question, simply because of the logistical impracticality/impossibility of watching the entire thing again in time for their deadline. But music reviewers tend to have the luxury of at least a couple spins, and here's the reason why we ought to take full advantage of that luxury (or at the very least, why I plan to in the future): When you're hearing a record for the first time, especially a record that you've looked forward to, by an artist you already know you care about, you're not really hearing the record. You're hearing some kind of composite sonic image: the record you hoped you'd hear, overlaid on the actual thing. In many cases, and I think in the case of my Channel Orange experience, your expectations are so extensive and so powerful that they simply drown out the sounds that come out of the speakers. Listen a few more times, and you can begin to edge that essentially meaningless set of expectations out of the picture; you can, in other words, hear the record on its own terms rather than on yours. Now again, I'm not saying that at that point, whatever you write is somehow "correct." What I'm saying is that at least you're engaging with the given record in a fair way; you're giving it ample chance to reveal itself.

Record reviewing is no exact science. There may, in fact, be few more inexact sciences. But as I said above, it really comes down to the writer's own feelings. If others get something out of the piece, that's all the better, but as a writer, you simply want to be able to stand by what you wrote, to feel afterward that it accurately expresses, in an objective way, how you feel, what you'd meant to say. As any writer could tell you, sometimes that isn't the case, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes you finish a draft of a piece and it appalls you. If you're on deadline, you might hand it in anyway, because you have no choice, but you don't feel a sense of proud ownership. And that sense of proud ownership is all I mean to ponder here, i.e., how best to end up feeling that way. In the super-specific case of a record review, I think it's important to take one's time, or to take as much time as one has, because you're more likely to end up proud of what you've written, or at the very least to feel comfortable standing by it. Now, of course, there are plenty of records that have taken me far more than a few spins to warm up to—several years' worth of spins, in some cases—but I'm speaking here about a deadline-oriented situation. What you want to do in these cases is make sure you've flushed the pipes—that is to say, eroded as much of your essentially irrelevant and potentially insidious expectations as possible—before you drink the water. That's when you're doing your job, i.e., writing about the thing in front of you, rather than the version of the thing you've been carrying around in your mind. I was fortunate enough to get a second crack at Channel Orange; I hope that next time, I'll have the good sense to wait before taking my initial swing.

The misery/mastery of Asphyx and other recent raves

A busy spell has kept me away from DFSBP for more than two weeks. Here's a top-heavy summary of what's been on my mind, musicwise.

Asphyx
In my Maryland Deathfest round-up, I mentioned some new friends my wife and I made that weekend, a metal-obsessed couple from Wisconsin. During the whirlwind "Dude, you need to check this out" discussions I had with H.S. (the male half of the pair) at MDF, he was more fired up about the Dutch outfit Asphyx than any other band he recommended. I'd heard samplings of their stuff in recent months—material from the new album, Deathhammer—but hadn't yet spent good time with any of their records. A few weeks after the fest, I received a package in the mail from H.S. containing a few old-fashioned mix CDs, one of which featured a whole bunch of Asphyx songs, including a few from their 1991 debut LP, The Rack. These tracks sent me into a delirious Asphyx obsession. I respectfully took temporary leave from the mixtapes and went burrowing into their discography, not coming up for air for something like two weeks.

While the early stuff hit me hard, it was the more recent material—Deathhammer, which came out this past February, and 2009's Death…the Brutal Way—that really ensnared me. As DFSBP readers may have noticed, old-school death metal—or more specifically, recent work by old-school death-metal bands such as Obituary, Cannibal Corpse and Immolation— has formed a major pillar of my listening over the past few years. A lot of what I've been craving this sort of gruesome primitiveness, expressed most purely in Obituary's work. It's an anti-evolutionary stance, a commitment to improving as a band without "progressing" in obvious, easily quantifiable ways. (I also touched on this in my recent Unsane review.) It has something to do with becoming more and more one's self as a band without messing with the core formula. Having stacked the old Asphyx records up against the new—and I'm specifically talking about the work they've done with their signature frontman Martin Van Drunen, i.e., two early-’90s LPs, and then these two latest ones, made after he rejoined the band in 2007—I can say that they are a perfect example of this. The latest Asphyx records sound a thousand times crisper and more hi-fi than the band's ’90s output, but they also have this unquantifiable x-factor that I also hear in recent Obituary. I can only describe it as the weight of years. Like Obituary, Asphyx thrives on the concept of anguish. The simulation of pain and suffering and ponderous psychic weight is their bread and butter. These new Asphyx records are among the most sheerly pained I've ever come across in the realm of death metal. Even at fast tempos, the band—and especially Van Drunen, who has one of the most genuinely dire, soul-vomiting deliveries I've heard coming from a death-metal frontman—sounds like its being driven against its will through frozen wastes, the music serving as a "Why have you forsaken me?" outcry.

The Asphyx songs that hit me the hardest were the slow ones, grim death marches like "Minefield" from Deathhammer. Like much of Asphyx's recent material, this song deals with a horrors-of-war theme. Martin Van Drunen (along with current Asphyx guitarist Paul Baayens) also plays in a World War II–themed metal band called Hail of Bullets, and he's funneled that same obsession into Asphyx. Here's a stream of "Minefield"—play it deafeningly loud, I implore you—and a sampling of lyrics:

Crawling through barbed wire
Into no-man's land
Soil soaked in blood
The crying of men
Terror unveiling
In between the lines
They scream mutilated
Detonating mines

You wouldn't think twice about lyrics like this if you read them out of context. I guess that's kind of a "Duh" observation, but I think it's worth pointing out. More than many bands I could name, in any genre, Asphyx is about raw sensation. Formally, i.e., when it comes to the on-paper aspects of what they do, they could not be more straightforward or potentially dismissable. They play some of the most easily pigeonhole-able death metal I know; basically they pick a tempo, either crawling or galloping (in the hardcore-derived sense—no blast beats here), and just let Van Drunen loose over it. But the sensation they give off, this feeling that you get from "Minefield," of trudging depression, of men being ground mercilessly into dust by their own savage impulses, of the cold unforgiving-ness of the universe, is the furthest thing from commonplace. In terms of pure feeling, I can think of very few metal bands that sock me in the gut the way Asphyx do. I love the minimal structures of their songs, the way they only shift gears when they really mean it. The first 2:20 of "Minefield" is straight crawling-on-hands-and-knees molasses doom, and then at that point, they switch into this woozy, lumbering shuffle groove. I can't get enough of this relentless drive, the way the band gradually flattens you with one texture till you absolutely can't take it anymore, and then switches to another and does the exact same thing. Death metal should feel like this: endless, vast, utterly miserable. You should want to tap out because it's so unrelenting. It should make you wince, as if against a biting wind, and Asphyx at their best have that effect on me. Crucially, they can also bring me to the verge of tears. Listen to the downshift back to trudging misery that happens at around 4:25 in "Minefield." Here Baayens blindsides you with an incredibly majestic lead, an Iommi-worthy elegy that lays aside brutality in favor of epic sadness. This is some funereal, bell-tolling, hand-of-doom shit here, people. It sounds to me like an epilogue to the gruesome war depicted in the main body of the song; you imagine a surviving soldier standing beside a mass grave as the rain drives down on him, realizing he's no better off than the ones who perished. (I should note here that Asphyx named their second LP Last One on Earth.)

If these sorts of sensations appeal to you—maybe "appeal" isn't the right word; it might be better to say, "If you feel the pull of this cold, dark, gritty art the way I do…"—I encourage you to check out Deathhammer in its entirety. The great thing about Asphyx is that they're not a one-note band; maybe a three-note band, but definitely not a one-note band. Aside from the molasses-paced, war-is-hell-and-so-is-life vibe they're working with on "Minefield," latter-day Asphyx has also been digging into this meta-metallic theme, i.e., the idea of actually pairing death metal with lyrics about death metal. It's an idea that's no so uncommon in, say, hip-hop, where part of the point is to rap about how good one is at, well, rapping. Asphyx does something very similar on their two latest albums. It's important to understand that the titles Death…the Brutal Way and Deathhammer refer not simply to dying, but rather to the craft of death metal itself.

Here's how drummer Bob Bagchus (the only remaining original member of the band) put it in a Decibel interview:

Decibel: What is the Deathhammer?
Bob Bagchus: Deathhammer represents the book of death metal. Our view on real death metal. It’s like the rules of what real death metal was supposed to be. Death metal was supposed to be hard, raw, dirty, creepy, dark and brutal to the bone. Music to be scared of. Just listen to bands like old Venom, Messiah, Slaughter, Hellhammer, Possessed, old Death, Autopsy, Necrophagia, early Mayhem, Necrovore, Incubus (Florida) etc., and you’ll know what we mean. During the last decade, it seems that death metal has turned into this hyper-blast technical nonsense bullshit that they dare to call “death metal.” In fact, it’s a contest of who can play the fastest bpm or riffs (sometimes 10 in 1 single song) and they seem to forget about the song itself. I mean, where’s the song? Where’s the catchiness and where is the atmosphere? Nowhere! And this is supposed to be death metal? It’s a joke! We say, “Go listen to Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death and discover what real death metal is!” So we thought that there should be a sort of guide book to remind those people of the essence of real death metal. We, of course, don’t want to be arrogant—hell no—but since death metal is in our hearts and souls, we hate to see it destroyed by those technical-bullshit-musically-graduated-soulless bands, pretending they know it all. Death metal comes from the heart, not from the mind.

As if the album's title track weren't already a perfect summation of these principles, dig how van Drunen growls, "This is some death metal, you bastards!" during the guitar break around :37:



The point that Bagchus makes above might seem like sort of an obvious one, but the truth is, it's an important gauntlet to lay down. Over the past 15 years or so, death metal really has bifurcated to an almost absurd degree. You've got this staunchly primitive, slither-through-the-muck-and-bang-your-fuckin'-head aesthetic that reemerged old-schoolers like Autopsy (and, I'd argue, Obituary, though I'm not sure whether or not they'd have a place in Bagchus's death-metal "guide book") and a bunch of neo-old-schoolers (I'm not knowledgeable enough about that movement to name names) champion, and then on the other hand, you've got this noodly, absurdly intricate technicality, as perfected by bands like Necrophagist. Now I absolutely love Necrophagist, and I also love Atheist and a ton of other bands that I'd place in that latter category, but listening to a super-techy but, to me, hard-to-really-love band like, say Origin, or a million faceless typewriter-blast-beat outfits, it's hard not to agree with Bagchus's polemic. Fortunately, this is music not war, and no one has to take sides. I'm sure that whenever the new Necrophagist album drops, I'll be happily indulging the side of my death-metal brain that can't get enough speed, precision and virtuosity, but lately, my compass has been pointing straight toward Aspyhx's shaggy, mud-smeared version of the truth.

P.S. I leave you with a a further illustration of Asphyx's lovably nerdy death-metal orthodoxy, a lyric excerpt from the title track to Death…the Brutal Way, which actually narrates the band's 2007 comeback gig at Germany's Party San festival. (Note that "Vermin" and "The Rack" are Asphyx song titles.)

Krushing at the Party San, hear the hordes rejoice
Filth to feed the Vermin, 'n beer to oil the voice
We'll beat your eardrums useless, and tie you on the Rack
Bones and nerves are grind to pulp, we are fucken back
Again we set the standards, get the message clear
Leave the fucken stage bitch, no room for you here
Mercy won't be given, as we enter our domain
Endlessly you'll suffer, on the altar of pain

Merchants of brutality, death our only rule
The doctrine of true metal, gods of the old school
Die by fucken Asphyx, ultra loud we slay
Skinned alive you humbly beg for death the brutal way!

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Other recent raves:

Marc Ribot Trio
I adored the Marc Ribot Trio set I saw at the Village Vanguard last Friday. Thank you to Nate Chinen (and to G.G., who dropped me a breathless 2am e-mail the next night) for encouraging me to attend.


Rush's Clockwork Angels
The new Rush album is outstanding. I will always be a Rush completist, but I've been mixed on their most recent studio output; I love 2002's Vapor Trails but I find 2007's Snakes & Arrows a little ponderous. This new one, though, is a straight killer: brisk, muscular, extremely varied and catchy across the board. It might be my favorite since 1993's Counterparts, which I consider to be the gold standard for their late-period sound. The title track is a standout, combining the Police-style pop-reggae lilt of their '80s work with the ass-kicking power-trio-ism they've excelled at since the late '70s:


Nick Sakes
This man needs no introduction 'round this parts. (If I'm wrong about that, go here.) Just this week, I discovered a guest-DJ segment that Nick did for WFMU back in March, via the Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine program. Go here to check out an extended on-air interview and various musical picks from one of my favorite living musicians. (The Sakes portion of the program begins a little over an hour into the stream; WFMU's pop-up player allows you to navigate there easily.)

News: Ween and Frank Ocean
Ween breaks up! Frank Ocean is gay! I've been a little dismayed lately by the sensational treatment of stories like these, especially since said instances concern artists that mean a lot to me.

In the case of Ween, I think it's best to exercise a little patience before we nail the coffin lid shut. The facts are simple: 1) Gene and Dean have been pursuing separate lives/careers for a while now—you know of Mickey's Guide Service, yes?—and Ween has really been more of a sporadic touring project over the last few years. 2) Gene has recently sobered up, not for the first time. He's got a cool new solo record out, and he probably just wants to put a little space between "Aaron Freeman" and the drug-fueled caricature that the Gene Ween persona has become in the minds of a lot of fans. 3) Both men have families, and Ween live shows are presumably their main respective sources of income. It makes a lot of sense to me that the project would be taking a little breather right this second (and even that the hiatus might hold for a few years), but the idea that Ween will never perform/record again seems a bit far-fetched to me. It sort of bugs me how people fall all over themselves to write these grandiose epitaphs in such circumstances. Aaron Freeman is a troubled guy who's obviously developed a bit of a love/hate relationship with the band that made him famous, but that has also been his personal undoing in many ways. So he has no plans to record or tour with Ween for the time being—so what? Let's give the man some space to come to terms with his demons. If in, say, five years, Freeman's solo career is thriving, Mickey is still out on his fishing boat full-time and there's been no further word about Ween qua Ween, then yeah, maybe we'll have a clear answer. Right now, at least as far as I—a serious Ween enthusiast and devoted fan—am concerned, this "break-up" is still a temporary hiatus.

In the case of Frank Ocean—who made my favorite album of 2011 and whose new one, Channel Orange, I can't wait to hear—why reduce such a beautiful and elliptical personal statement as this to a mere black & white revelation of sexual preference? The more important revelation is the continued intensity of this dude's self-inventory, and the fascinating methods through which he's seen fit to share that process with his ever-growing audience. I'm proud to be a Frank fan.

Baroque riff serration: In praise of late Cannibal Corpse

 In 2001, Gary Giddins wrote:

"Let's be bold: The David S. Ware Quartet is the best small band in jazz today. I realize that I will almost certainly hear another quartet, or trio or quintet or octet, this week or next, that will make me want to backpedal. But every time I see Ware's group or return to the records, it flushes the competition from memory."

I loved this proclamation when I first read it—the definitiveness of it, the employment of critical license (whatever that might be) to say, "This thing that I think simply is so." Over the past week or so, I've been feeling like making a similar statement re: the realm of metal (specifically death metal, though I'm comfortable with the "extreme" qualifier):

Cannibal Corpse is the best band in extreme metal today.

Some of my greatest musical pleasures over the past few years have involved reengaging with bands I'd previously thought I'd apprehended entirely and moved on from. (One biggie would be Obituary; I also recently awakened to the glories of Immolation, though in the latter case, I was starting from scratch.) Cannibal Corpse definitely falls into that category. Growing up as a death-metal fan, I was blinded by my love for Morbid Angel. Around the time of their 1993 masterpiece, Covenant, Morbid had reached peak arrogance. I remember reading interviews with them where they'd dismiss the entire genre of death metal with a sneer, and simply state, in so many words, "We are the best, the only, practitioner of this music that matters." At the time, and for many years afterward, I tended to agree. I listened to a lot of other death metal in the early-to-mid ’90s—Deicide, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, Disincarnate, etc.—but when I wasn't spinning Morbid records (Covenant and Domination, in particular), it was like I was taking a break. I agreed completely with their self-assessment; Morbid's output did in fact sound 1000 times richer and more distinctive to me than all the rest. They had the most memorable songs ("God of Emptiness," "World of Shit," "Nothing But Fear," "Dawn of the Angry," etc.—all still some of my favorite metal tracks, "extreme" or otherwise), the most outlandish personalities (Trey Azagthoth, the death-metal guitarist who dared to thank not only Anthony Robbins but characters from Street Fighter II in his liner notes) and, on Covenant at least, the most brutal, immediate, uncanned production. Other death metal, to me, was really a competent and—since I happened to be an insatiable metalhead at the time—moderately effective fulfillment of a certain set of conventions: blast beats, growling, lyrical and visual garishness, etc.

I should say, though, that Cannibal Corpse's fourth album, 1994's The Bleeding—an album that A) contains songs such as "Fucked With a Knife" and "Stripped, Raped and Strangled" and B) was purchased for me at Streetside Records in Overland Park, KS, by my mother as a reward for attending a Jewish Sunday-school retreat—deserves an honorable mention in that regard. No, it wasn't Covenant, but it was, and still is, an uncommonly varied, well-crafted and enjoyable set of death-metal songs, about three fourths of which I can still sing the riffs from on command ("Staring Through the Eyes of the Dead" features one of the grooviest death-metal riffs you'll ever hear, while the title track boasts a head-smackingly simple yet completely unshakable low-to-high caveman guitar part). I had the three prior Cannibal Corpse albums as well, but they all seemed to pale in comparison to The Bleeding. I didn't spend enough time with the debut, Eaten Back to Life, to develop a real bond with it, and aside from the immortal "Hammer Smashed Face," which, as everyone knows, appears in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 1992's Tomb of the Mutilated and 1991's Butchered at Birth seemed to have little to offer than shock. Simply put, the playing wasn't that good, especially on Tomb; the band just sounded thin and flimsy to me: a rickshaw in comparison with the unstoppable tank that was Morbid Angel. And the production was simply godawful. Really all there was to fixate on was the unspeakable offensiveness of the song titles ("Entrails Ripped from a Virgin's Cunt," e.g.) and the absurdly low cavebeast growl of frontman Chris Barnes.

I now realize that in this era—again, as demonstrated particularly well on The Bleeding—Cannibal Corpse had one of the more impressive guitar tandems in extreme metal: Jack Owen (who later went on to play in Deicide) and Rob Barrett (who rejoined the band in the mid-aughts and still plays with them). But my real loyalty was with Barnes—along with Deicide's Glen Benton, probably my favorite non-Azagthoth death-metal "character" (and that's how I thought of these guys then, like action figures or something, because I never got to see any of these bands like at the time; my exposure to them was entirely through reading Metal Maniacs, Rip and various smaller fanzines). Barnes was/is an affable, pot-loving dude with a terrifying presence/delivery and a sick, sick mind. (I should say here that I really like Undead, the new album by Barnes's still-thriving post-Cannibal band Six Feet Under.) In the latter regard, the Tomb of the Mutilated chapter in Precious Metal is well worth your time.

Anyway, so right about the time I started drifting away from my first phase of die-hard death-metal fandom in favor of what I'll call, for lack of a better term, a wide variety of "indie" music (ranging from craw and Dazzling Killmen to Hoover, Fugazi, June of 44, Karate—whom I just listened to last night and found to be awesome—Slint, Tortoise and what seems like 100 others), Chris Barnes left Cannibal Corpse. I remember hearing Cannibal's first post-Barnes, post-Bleeding release, 1996's Vile, and feeling crestfallen. It seemed to me that just as Morbid Angel did when they first split from classic-era frontman David Vincent (who's been back with the band since the mid-aughts)—read more about my gradually evolving opinion on Morbid's post-Vincent period here—Cannibal Corpse had backpedaled into generic-ness, a state of contentment re: simply executing a subgenre rather than defining or expanding it. I didn't give Vile much of a chance at the time; after all, as described above, I was fixated on other styles, other avenues of underground, rock-based intensity. But all the same, I knew that the time had come to take a break from caring all that much about what the Corpse was up to.

Flash forward a decade, to 2006's Kill. Somehow this record ended up crossing my desk at Time Out New York—"somehow" is probably a bit of a stretch; I probably heard about the album and sought it out for nostalgia's sake—and I remember being straight-up shocked by how tight, aggressive and musically ambitious it was. Kill was still, in its way, a relatively straightforward death-metal statement, but unlike Vile (and again, I'm still basing my statements on that record on my contemporary opinion; I've yet to go back and revisit it, and I really need to), it sounded ferocious, overwhelming, utterly state-of-the-art—even progressive, which is a description I'd never thought I'd use with respect to the Corpse. I suddenly realized that a band I'd condemned to second-rate-ness was nothing of the sort.

I'm still playing catch-up re: their discography between The Bleeding and Kill—four full-lengths, from 1998's Gallery of Suicide to 2004's The Wretched Spawn, all featuring vocalist George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher, who's still in the band and who at this point has been with them a lot longer than Barnes was—so it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what went down between the Corpse and me. Did I just happen to reawaken to the glories of death metal right around the time that they put out Kill? Or was Kill really a major quantum leap for them? Again, I haven't really spent good enough time with those ’98–’04 releases to answer that accurately—aside from the records themselves, which I've got a date with, the awesome and exhaustive Corpse documentary Centuries of Torment is a good source to consult—but I will venture that Kill was an important chapter marker in the Cannibal Corpse saga. For one, it marked the return of Rob Barrett, who had played on both The Bleeding and Vile, and secondly, it was the band's first collaboration with producer Erik Rutan, best known to many as the guitarist-vocalist-mastermind of Hate Eternal, but best known to me as the auxiliary guitarist in Morbid Angel around 1996 and the composer of some of the strongest, most moving material on Domination.

To bring things up to date, this past March, Cannibal Corpse released Torture, their 12th proper LP and their third in a row with Rutan at the helm; that's the album cover you see at the top of this post. It is an absolutely outstanding record, a leading contender for the best metal album I've heard in 2012. (And, like the previous two, it sounds gloriously crisp, full and alive.) It's had the effect of rendering me completely addicted to this latest Corpse renaissance; for the past week or two, aside from various obligatory, assignment-related (and, I should mention, not remotely unenjoyable!) listening and some choice pop (Gotye! Carly Rae Jepsen!), the only records I've voluntarily subjected my ears to are Torture, Kill and the record that falls between them, 2009's Evisceration Plague. I'm starting to feel that this trilogy (for now, at least; hopefully, the Corpse will continue to release excellent records for years to come) represents the peak of what I value in contemporary death metal. Artists such as the ones I mentioned above, Cannibal Corpse included, defined the genre in the late ’80s/early ’90s, and after that initial burst, the genre seemed to calcify, to cease its rapid evolution (a few freak outcroppings like Death excepted). But hearing these records, I can definitively state that late-stage death metal has become its own beast.

Cannibal Corpse may have a relatively limited sonic domain. In other words, their progression doesn't entail obvious face-lifts such as those you might see in the work of, say, Mastodon—the kind of facelifts, I'm slowly realizing, that may elicit a bunch of Oohs and Aaahs off the bat but that don't really amount to all that much in the end. But on the micro level, since the early ’90s Cannibal Corpse has evolved as impressively as just about any rock band I can think of. Most prominently, their work now has a kind of tech-forward giddiness that it never had in the early ’90s, a delight in acrobatic precision. At the same time, though, the band has retained that essential caveman edge that made classic Corpse jams like "Stripped, Raped" so much fun. And though I still don't think that Fisher is as distinctive or compelling a frontman as Barnes, his sheer power and almost comical relentlessness perfectly fits the steroidal direction the band has taken on Kill and the two subsequent releases.

I mentioned "tech-forward giddiness" above. At the end of the day, my favorite thing about these three Corpse records, and about most metal that's dear to my heart, is the sheer quality and quantity of RIFF. Just about every song on these albums features some kind gonzo stunt riff, repeated enough times and articulated clearly enough that it sticks in your mind's ear like melted chewing gum. These are the kinds of riffs that you hear once, and you're like, "What in the fuck was that?!?" Then you hear them a second time and you're like, "Oh, hell yes." Like many of my favorite rock bands, Cannibal Corpse boasts multiple songwriters; in the current incarnation, all members except for Fisher—Barrett, guitarist Pat O'Brien, bassist Alex Webster and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz—are writing, and there's a sense in which they're trying to outdo each other, to see who can achieve the perfect balance of complexity and catchiness. (And let's not forget variety; Evisceration and Torture feature some colossally heavy slow songs—"Evisceration Plague," "Scourge of Iron"—that perfectly complement the uptempo burners.) Not every track succeeds in both respects, but very few songs on any of these three albums feels anything less than ragingly committed.

Watch a feature-length Corpse vid like Global Evisceration and you'll see that what they really are, in the end, is a fan's band. You'll rarely hear from a group that seems to have a better appreciation of the privilege of making a living playing underground music, and along with that appreciation comes a very high personal standard. In Global Evisceration, you'll hear the band talking about set lists, and how they always make an effort to play at least one song from every one of their albums during their headlining gigs. Their records aren't just obligatory merch items; the band is committed to building a quality catalog, both because that's just what long-running bands ought to be doing and because it makes for killer, jukebox-style live shows.

To go back to the Morbid Angel example: It's been a long, slow process, but in the end, I've had to admit to myself that Morbid's 2011 "comeback" effort isn't ultimately a very good album (nor is it total crap either, though!). A cool diversion, maybe, but it says a lot that the band isn't paying it much mind live; when I saw them at Deathfest last month, they were great, but they did not behave like a band that was terribly proud of their newish album. They played two songs from Illud Divinum Insanus, squashed in the middle of what was essentially a greatest-hits set. Cannibal Corpse, it could be argued, simply doesn't have as many "hits" as Morbid does; they didn't produce a trilogy of early albums as world-beating as Altars of Madness, Blessed Are the Sick and Covenant. But if you were to ask me who was the more vital band today, at this very moment, I would say Cannibal Corpse without hesitation. As you can hear on Torture, Cannibal is a band that is as psyched to be crafting straightforwardly fulfilling death metal as their fans are to consume it. And if they're not evolving in immediately obvious ways, they've taken huge steps when it comes to the details. In terms of not only speed and precision, but also re: sheer exhilaration of riff and the ability to bottle that lightning into fully coherent songs—that latter part being, again, the ultimate criteria by which I judge most metal I listen to—I don't think there's a better active-duty extreme-metal band in existence.

Here are five great tracks from the Torture/Evisceration Plague/Kill trifecta. (I hesitate to say they're my "favorites" because there are very few selections on these records that I don't unequivocally love.) I encourage you to buy these albums, because they really benefit from a proper-fidelity listen.

"Intestinal Crank" (Torture):

Key riff sequence begins at :30; it consists of two 5/4 groupings, each with a straightforwardly pounding beginning and a cool flourish at the end. The first time around, that flourish is just a little squiggle, but the second time (listen specifically at :43), it's grotesquely elongated, a writhing, trilling worm of a pattern. (Also, can't beat that five-beat stomp during the intro, a fave device in late-period Cannibal Corpse.)

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"Beheading and Burning" (Evisceration Plague):

Note esp. the irregularly squealing eel of a 9/4 riff that begins at :32. (There's something about the current Corpse guitar method that always gets me thinking along serpentine lines.) The squealing eel comes back in a mutated form around :59 (this time, the riff's in 10/4, I think) and then spirals out into proggy delirium. Some death metal wants to suffocate you, but this style is all about the quick, exacting slice.

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Make Them Suffer (Kill):

A classic Corpse fist-pumper here, maybe the catchiest track of their late period. So many tasty details in the early part of the song, including the drama-heightening guitar break at :28, but what really gets me is the whole breakdown section, which starts in earnest around 1:25. You get this neck-snapping, almost rappish slam riff, followed by the rapidly jostling 1-2-3-4 "Make them suffer!" repeated accent. That sequence returns again after the 2:00 mark, preceded as before by a weird groaning, squiggling variation (around 2:10). From 2:17, it's just head-kick after head-kick, till you're flattened. 

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Rabid (Torture):

These three albums all have gems buried deep within the tracklists. The chugging, filigree-choked pattern that starts around :15 into "Rabid" (the 11th track out of 12 on Torture) makes me deliriously happy. It just. Keeps. Going. Unspooling into total madness. In these riffs, I hear the kind of friendly competition that inevitably arises in a multi-songwriter band. Each composer is constantly on the hunt for the sickest riff, the one that will send the other members, not to mention the listener, reeling. The section is both completely excessive and impossible to forget.

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Scalding Hail (Evisceration Plague):

Nothing too fancy here; just a textbook late-Corpse slammer. But then you get another ecstatic squigglefest around :25 seconds. I love how this band crams so many wrinkles into such a small amount of musical space, and how each one is so starkly audible. Yes, Cannibal Corpse is a technical band, but you'd never describe them as "tech metal." What they really are is a turbocharged thrash band—in the current issue of Decibel magazine, Alex Webster says something to the effect of "If you don't hear Slayer in Cannibal Corpse, you're not listening hard enough"—forever fixated on ingeniously baroque riff serration. You always know they're going to come back around to these patterns, give you another crack at them, and give them another chance to worm their way into your brain.