Basra lives: RIP Pete La Roca

I'm not an authority on the work of drummer Pete La Roca (born Peter Sims), who, as Ethan Iverson, A Blog Supreme and Sonny Rollins have reported, passed away this past Monday. But I am a fan of his work. I remember some friends turning me on to Basra—La Roca's 1965 debut as a leader, and the only session he led for Blue Note during that period—in college, and it grabbed me hard. I've returned to the record periodically, and it's had the same effect every time. I spun it yesterday when I heard the news, and it seemed stronger than ever—dark, swirling, heady, raw but incredibly tender. The tones of the instruments are so present and unadorned; you feel like you're right there within the mix.

It's because of this kind of record that I get queasy when I see all-time "Best Jazz Albums" lists that stick to the same old narrow canon. Kind of Blue is a great album; I like A Love Supreme very much. But not only are there tons of respective Miles and Coltrane records that I love more, there are so many classics that you'd just never see on a list like this, records that might hit neophytes harder that the so-called staples. Basra is one of these records.



Re-listening yesterday, what struck me about Basra was its droney expanse, the patient way it constructs a mood and just lets it ride. Iverson used the word "folkloric" to describe La Roca's left hand, but I'd apply that term to the entire feel of this album. Listen to the title track, how it sprawls out, like an improvisatory incantation. The rhythm section brings out some of the freest, most speaking-in-tongues playing of Joe Henderson's career, not via commonplace fire (I think here of La Roca's astute critique of free jazz in the interview Iverson links to, e.g., "Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all.") but via hypnotic drift, an authoritative yet almost ghostly pulse, like a James Brown groove slowed way down so that the funk becomes merely implicit. The Henderson figure that starts at 4:43, this overblown, Spanish-sounding thing, just slays me; and then listen how he trails off into this writhing tail of a phrase. What I feel when I hear this saxophone solo is that it is a sort of conjuring on the part of the rhythm section, i.e., that these strange sounds are being drawn out of him by Sims, pianist Steve Kuhn and bassist Steve Swallow. Not to take any credit away from Henderson—just to say that this is a band discovering sound together in real time.

Listen around 5:37 as Sims begins to imply a backbeat feel, faint yet stealthily funky. Then into a kind of bass-drums joint solo, with La Roca limiting himself to hand work: snare rolls that remind me of Tony Williams and the occasional thunderous, Elvin-style tom thwack. But the dynamics and the groove are all his own; he's soloing, yes, but also protecting the pocket, riding the drone. When Henderson reenters at 8:55, the entire band sounds like it's in a stupor, hypnotized by La Roca's faint, earthy churn and Kuhn's eerie high-end textures. I really can't think of any other jazz like this, so engaged with the drone and the sprawl, the way-sublimated funk. And this vibe is no accident, heard on this track alone; it pervades the entire album. La Roca was in search of a mood here, and he nailed it. Blue Note albums, as wondrous as they tend to be, don't often feel fully coherent, holistic in this way, which is why a deliberate concept album like Wayne Shorter's The All-Seeing Eye (recorded just five months after Basra) seems like such an anomaly among the BN discography of that period. I think Basra deserves to be called a concept album as well; its concept is its sustained mood, the one that propels Henderson to an ecstatic trance state, sounding, to me, more unfettered and in-the-moment than on any other of his countless sessions.

La Roca does provide some clues to Basra's otherworldly mood in the aforementioned interview, citing how his two early records as a leader—the other is Turkish Women at the Bath, an interesting LP but not the intoxicating powerhouse that Basra is—were built around "ethnic themes." He cites "Basra" in particular as a Middle Eastern melody (the title comes from a city in Iraq), though it seems to be credited to La Roca himself in the various discographies. Does anyone know if this is a traditional tune of some sort?

The opening track on Basra, "Malagueña" (by Cuban pianist-composer Ernesto Lecuona) uses a very different rhythm than the title track—a classic, Elvin-y 6/8 swing feel—but the vibes of the two pieces are similar, and Henderson reaches that same place of ecstatic incantation. I love "Malagueña," dearly, but during my pass through Basra yesterday, the other track that stood out most prominently was "Lazy Afternoon." I'm not sure that it's possible for a ballad performance to conjure more mystery or more grace than this one does. It feels to me as though the entire quartet is dreaming the same dream, drifting along on the same cloud. Pieces like this, where you stop feeling the genre, the style and start feeling total mood immersion, are the ones that really sold me on jazz in the first place (Andrew Hill's "Black Monday" is another one that hits me this way) and the ones that still fuel my devotion. Listen to how La Roca's brushwork starts pushing ever so slightly harder at about 4:10, like a whisper growing more passionate without getting very much louder. And then by 4:50, back down to that hushed dream state, which sounds like it could last forever. That's how I think of Basra as a whole, as a reverie with no defined beginning or end. It's a sensation you step into, along with the players: a group trance, a collective prayer.

When I hear the record now, in light of the sad news, I imagine it as an ongoing present, where Kuhn and Swallow—both still with us—continue to coexist with the late masters Henderson and La Roca, tapping into that otherworldly flow. La Roca is gone, but Basra lives.

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*I recommend this brief take on Basra, from last August, by the outstanding metal drummer Aesop Dekker (Agalloch, ex-Liturgy), via his fine Cosmic Hearse blog. Dekker cites the "exotic, yet grave" feel of "Malagueña" and has this to say of "Basra": "The title track is an absolutely gorgeous landscape of sound, sultry, sexy, and altogether mysterious."

*Anyone heard this 1997 La Roca/Sims session, SwingTime? The samples sound really nice.

Like a prayer: What "metal" can and should learn from Ludicra

Just returned from seeing Ludicra at Club Europa, a show I previewed for TONY. Late on a Sunday, feeling fried, but I'm so glad I went. I think I can say definitively that Ludicra's set was the most organically heavy performance I've ever witnessed by a metal band.

Too often, metal as it exists in my mind is not how it exists in the world. If you keep up with the genre, you know that over the past two decades, a sonic revolution has taken place, namely an abhorrent artificiality that sucks all the life out of the genre. Drum triggers, Pro Tools, noise gates -- it all adds up to fake, inanimate music. It might be a hackneyed argument, but it bears repeating over and over and over. Metal should be heavy. More and more, all this airless-sounding nonsense sends me screaming to my Zeppelin and Sabbath records, craving that fix of warm realness.

Ludicra's set was like a time machine to an era before all this nonsense. I encouraged my bandmate Joe to check out the band's magnificent new album, The Tenant (album cover above), and today he told me that it made him think of Kill 'Em All. I definitely agree that it takes you back via its holy rough fullness, its primal, thudding grace. The revelation that drums ought to sound like drums, the courage to have everything come at you in a real way.

I had a feeling they'd open their set with "Stagnant Pond," the lead track from The Tenant, and they did, and thus began 50 minutes or so of shock and rapture. I guess being a drummer myself I'm always going to fixate on the drummer, but I will tell you that Ludicra's percussionist, Aesop Dekker, is a master, worthy of any accolade. He drove the band with an unholy snare thwack which cut through the guitars like a gun shot, crystal-clear bell-of-the-ride accents placed with poetic accuracy, and a true patience and love of groove, whether that meant a speed-freak blast beat or a half-time trudge.

Bassist Ross Sewage alternately zoning out on the music's epic architecture and regarding the crowd with an unsettling scowl. Guitarist Christy Cather, a true metal hero with her curly blonde mane, Flying V axe and leather vest. The other six-stringer, John Cobbett, running his dancing fingers through their paces. And vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman... I don't even know how to describe it. You won't do better than Laal did, pegging her movements as theatrical and goblinlike. Her vocals convey genuine horror and despair. Not that generic black-metal, screaming-for-the-sake-of-screaming crap. There's no word for what comes out of her throat other than DIRE. She stomps around, contorts her body and face. It's almost but not quite cartoonish, a pantomime of evil, a stylized sort of possession.

The band charges as a team, headbanging in furious unison. Cather and Sewage shared one of those classic leaning-back-to-back guitar-tandem moments. The quintet had such a chemistry, such an effortless group choreography. I'm not sure exactly how long this lineup has been together, but you really got the vibe of a crew, of an "on-and-off-the-court" camaraderie.

And all in the service of maximum epic grimness, the epitome of what all metal really aspires to. This set was like a master class in the history of the genre, cherry-picking the awesomest aspects of all the various substyles. The neck-snapping groove of '80s thrash, as heard on The Tenant's "In Stable," which embodies the midtempo assault of Megadeth at their best. Holy, hymnlike interludes touching on the gothy beauty of bands like My Dying Bride. Hailstorm blast sections that could stand up against any of the Norwegian luminaries. Crawling-through-a-snowstorm-and-finally-glimpsing-the-sun, dark-yet-luminous doom metal. It sounds like a prayer.

I only know the new album so there were a few songs I didn't recognize, including a long, glorious encore. The crowd was so there, so present. I saw so much dancing, so much convulsing, so much screaming at the sky in response to the expertly orchestrated evil-ness of it all, and I was right there. Couldn't have sat down if I'd tried. Eyes closed, grimacing privately.

It was all poetry, all a reminder of why I'd had this music in my blood since my teens. You won't get this reassured feeling from very many bands. The genre is in vogue and it's overrun with... with itself really. With bands that hew closely to convention as if to a buoy in the sea. I say let it all go, unless it's something like this, that sums up the swelling emotion, the vastness, the power, the sorrow -- and served raw, please, without the spit-and-polish nonsense that passes for production, not to mention live sound, these days. Black Sabbath deserves a better legacy. Any band calling itself metal needs to provide maximum mood and maximum chops all filtered through a huge, gut-punching, organic sound. It should feel like getting flattened by a baroquely adorned tank and Ludicra did. Shock and awe indeed.