Interlude (or Moment's Greatest Hits 4)

A sound I didn't know I was in search of. Some kind of unself-conscious prog/roots hybrid. Pure mellow intrigue. See you down the rabbit hole.

Other recent delights:

Bob Mould Patch the Sky
Raw and immediate. More uncut, even provocatively unfinished-sounding Bob, in the vein of last two excellent LPs.

Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith a cosmic rhythm with each stroke
The record-to-get-lost-in record of 2016 so far. Two artists' current flowerings entwine; each works hard on this album to showcase the other.

The Snails Songs From the Shoebox
Seriously charming Future Islands offshoot. Some thoughts.

P.S. Happy Cecil Taylor renaissance.

craw weekend 2016: It's a wrap

craw at Saint Vitus
Photo: Remi Thornton

The previous post was about my reaction to the craw-centric events of the past few days. All I wrote there applies to my experiences of the Cleveland and NYC shows, which surpassed any and all expectations. (Go here for photo and video evidence.) But I left Saint Vitus last night with a different feeling, call it a community awareness, a sense of how an intense, bizarre and uncompromising underground band can become a portal to a shared feeling of transcendence.

I saw so many fans moved on such a deep level by these performances, both those who had seen the band back in the day and those who never got the chance. I saw band members giddy with disbelief at finally getting the reception they'd always deserved but rarely ever got before. I saw a mutual celebration of the enduring art that craw created, honed and perfected with painstaking effort all those years ago. I saw 75 minutes of classic songs, performed with pure spirit fire and channeled through a frontman who radiates a raving, possessed intensity. I saw sublime musical terror of exactly the sort I remember witnessing when I was a teenager—and all while standing within inches of some of my dearest, oldest KC friends (shouts to Drew, Kyle and Jeff), who saw craw with me the first time around, and my NYC blood brothers, who have loved the band's records for years but hadn't seen them play.

It was all just beyond magical. In particular, I want to thank Drew (a.k.a. Remi Thornton) for coming along for the ride and taking some brilliant pictures; Northern Spy and Aqualamb for all their hard work on the box set; my friends and STATS bandmates Joe and Tony (and constant comrade / special guest Nick) for sharing the stage with me at Saint Vitus; the Great Iron Snake, Murderedman and Black Black Black for their great opening sets; the Grog Shop and Saint Vitus for being such gracious hosts; Esra Y., Ron K., John P. and Georgia Z. for the CLE hospitality; Brad Cohan, Evan Harms and all the other writers who previewed the shows; new friends Patrick W. and Rob H. for their enthusiasm and fellowship; all the kind, gracious fans I met at both shows; and of course Chris, Rockie, Neil, Zak, Dave, Joe and Will for playing (and screaming) their asses off. I also want to thank Torsten Meyer for the following video. (More documentation of both shows coming soon.)


Lastly, I want to thank Pyrrhon vocalist and writer extraordinaire Doug Moore for putting together the below article on the band, a fine piece featuring insightful commentary from craw's Joe McTighe. The piece was slated to run before the shows, but did not go live as planned. I reproduce it here for posterity, and as a complement to the wealth of articles found here.

Guest post: Doug Moore on craw

"Meet Craw, the Greatest '90s Noise-Rock Band You've Never Heard"
by Doug Moore
[See the end of this post for context.]

In many ways, the story of the '90s-era Cleveland band craw is a classic tale of monastic devotion and unrewarded work. But it's also a triumph of stubborn individualism, a "toxic cultural stiff-arm," as vocalist Joe McTighe put it in an email interview. Though unrecognized in their time, the band's four albums constitute a vital piece of the bedrock from which modern underground metal and hardcore now proceed. A new deluxe reissue from the Brooklyn labels Northern Spy and Aqualamb, 1993–1997, aims to bring this influence to light.

Craw emerged from a fertile period in the American rock underground. At the end of the '80s, when the band formed on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, many of the barriers that had previously constrained rock's artistic expansion had fallen. Weird stylistic mutations like post-punk, No Wave, math rock and thrash metal thrived via DIY recording and touring methods. Eventually, these styles began to interbreed.

One byproduct of this mix was a frightening expanse of shifting time signatures, blaring amps, shrieking chords and yowling singers, known variously as post-hardcore and noise rock. Many of the bands that first explored it—the Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Today Is the Day, Neurosis, Helmet—achieved surprising renown. And most of these acts shared bills with craw.



But comparing craw even to these oddballs does a disservice to the specificity of their sound: a staggering, weaving keen-roar; a relentless improvisational churn, by turns sinister and poignant, anthemic and ambiguous. Their music combined metal heft and layered noise; jazz chords and compound rhythms; insane structural ambition; and McTighe's swerve-throated antisinging, in which he incanted elliptical yarns informed by contemporary science, politics and literature, leavened with snark. (Asked what contemporary writers best capture craw's lyrical concerns, McTighe responds: "Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow and some of what J.G. Ballard wrote. Both writers create worlds in which the social systems overwhelm and transform the individuals inhabiting them.")

In order to achieve the technical mastery required to execute their staggeringly detailed songs, craw subjected themselves to a brutal discipline. They practiced together incessantly, sometimes daily, while living in privation and working crappy jobs to get by. The gritty details of these gigs would creep into McTighe's lyrics; a gutter-cleaning job that both McTighe and guitarist David McClelland held inspired the 12-minute epic "Days in the Gutter/Nights in the Gutter."

Craw's efforts produced three dizzyingly inventive '90s LPs, but never translated into a large following. Their demanding approach—too feral for hipsters, too shredding for punks, too ragged for metalheads, too smart and weird for virtually everyone—made them difficult to market, and thus difficult to sustain. The lengthy tours craw undertook were especially taxing; McTighe remembers his frustration well: "At the time I romanticized it as doing my bit in the marketplace of ideas. This self-delusion continued until poorly attended shows burst that bubble."

By the time craw connected with renowned art-metal label Hydra Head for 2002's Bodies for Strontium 90, the exhausted band had begun to drift apart. The members went their separate ways shortly after its release.

Craw's grueling run won them scattered but devoted admirers, though. Among them was noise-rock prime mover and recording legend Steve Albini, who worked on their first three albums. ("They never imitate," said Albini of craw in a 1997 interview. "Other bands imitate them.") Also in Craw's corner were the artist Derek Hess, who provided them with album cover and flyer illustrations; and Hydra Head label boss, and former leader of acclaimed avant-metal outfit Isis, Aaron Turner. "Their appeal was pretty black and white—people either fell in love with it or just didn't know what to do with it," says Turner of the band.


But craw's biggest fan is almost certainly the Brooklyn-based writer and musician Hank Shteamer, who admits that he's tipped into full-on obsession at times. "In terms of my own listening, I hold these albums up alongside the work of John Coltrane, Led Zeppelin and other acknowledged masters," says Shteamer of craw. He first encountered them in the mid-'90s while growing up in his native Kansas City, and has since become their unofficial historian and chief public advocate.

Frustrated by craw's lack of critical recognition, Shteamer recently recruited the indie record labels Northern Spy, Aqualamb and Hydra Head for a crowdfunded campaign to reissue Craw's first three albums as 1993–1997, a vinyl box set with a companion oral history. Thanks in part to the success of the release, craw will play two reunion shows—one at the Grog Shop in their native Cleveland on March 11th, another at Brooklyn's Saint Vitus on March 12th, with both shows featuring all seven members who appeared in various combinations on the band's four albums.

Craw have reappeared in a heavy music landscape that makes their prescience obvious. Freewheeling stylistic alchemy has become commonplace; dissonance and dense rhythms have infected every corner of the metal world; wild dynamic shifts garner applause rather than confusion. In short, metal has become highbrow, just like craw. Even McTighe's lyrical themes—technology run amok, the invasive creep of surveillance and corporate power—now scan as predictive, though their author credits his found sources ahead of his own foresight.

Both Shteamer and Turner agree that craw would more readily find fans today, and this consensus was part of the impetus for Shteamer's reissue campaign. But ultimately, such questions are immaterial to the band's members and always have been. They were concerned solely with pursuing their wild, withering vision—a purity for which their struggles were a small price to pay. And those struggles produced the kind of memories that nobody would give up.

"We got the songs," says McTighe of his years in craw, "The songs that are part of us by choice and by repetition, the songs that were ignored by most yet received as gospel by a few fanatics, songs that are a challenge for us to play well, songs that remind us of our time together—petty bickering as well as genuine friendship, songs that also remind us of the people we met on the road—the freaks, the outcasts, those beyond the pale, those with whom we immediately recognized as fellow travelers, those that helped us when we didn't expect help and those that took the air out of our tires (literally and otherwise), the songs around which our lives were shaped for many years."

Full-spirit wince (or: craw 2016, an invitation)

Joe McTighe and Will Scharf of craw, with the author in background. Photo: Remi Thornton

I have often called craw my favorite band. To declare something one's favorite anything is a forceful but not all that evocative statement—one that holds little meaning for anyone who isn't saying it. Yesterday, though, sitting on the floor in a rehearsal space in a dingy building behind a lumber yard in Cleveland, watching and listening to craw rehearse for their shows tonight in town at the Grog Shop and tomorrow at Brooklyn's Saint Vitus, I felt like I had a better sense of exactly what I've meant by that all these years.

We speak of being "moved" by music, or any kind of art. That is to say, we're taken somewhere. Sometimes that transport is gentle, a subtle and gradual conveyance. Other times, it's more urgent. To some degree, any heavy music is transportive—exposure to extreme volume, way beyond the cacophony of, say, an average urban commute, has a certain automatic effect. But what I realized about craw's music yesterday, as vocalist Joe McTighe howled and grimaced over writhing stop-start cadences, monumental swells and catharses, and perversely shimmying riffs, is that it is essentially unbearable. It elicits in me a kind of full-spirit wince, a masochistic thrill.

It is so harsh and unrelenting, but also so full of naked feeling and twisted insight. Their creations are fanatical, fantastical, so bizarrely outside the realm of what so much other music, even heavy music in craw's general aesthetic ballpark, would ever think to attempt. It is a private, insular art, so clearly in service, first and foremost, to its creators' obsessive vision. It doesn't care if you're listening, and yet its self-presentation is, for all its complexity, immaculate. It is a hyperarticulate shriek, so stupendously apart from the notion that music is meant to accompany anything, even, say, stereotypical metal behaviors such as headbanging or moshing. You don't do anything in its presence except for behold it, and, in my case—and I've seen this reaction in a few others—sort of tremble before it, fascination mingling with fear. That feeling is the closest thing to the sublime that I have known in art—it's the same for me now as it was 20 years ago.

And having seen the 2016 incarnation of craw up close, I can tell you that the magic is intact. I'm happy to report that this band—bands, really, since craw is performing this weekend in at least two equally brilliant but completely different lineups—can still pin you against the wall. Consider this an invitation to come experience the feeling for yourself:

Cleveland tonight (Friday, 3/11/16).
NYC tomorrow (Saturday, 3/12/16).

See you there. You can follow the weekend's progress on Facebook and Instagram.

craw live

To any Cleveland or NYC folk who might be reading this, I hope you will join us this weekend for two special craw reunion shows in support of the recent box-set release. If you plan on attending, I recommend purchasing advance tickets via the links below:

Friday, 3/11/16
The Grog Shop; Cleveland, OH

Saturday, 3/12/16
Saint Vitus; Brooklyn, NY

These shows will feature music from all four of the band's studio LPs, performed by all seven members who appeared on those albums. Plus some special surprises!

These will be the first craw shows of any kind since 2010, the first with vocalist Joe McTighe since 2002, and the first with several of the ex-members since 1994–95. The Saint Vitus show will be craw's first live appearance on the East Coast since 1997.

There will be plenty of merch available, including box sets, new T-shirts and signed prints of the above poster, designed for the occasion by the awesome Derek Hess.

Updates, enticements, info:

craw website
craw on Bandcamp
craw on Facebook
craw on Instagram
craw on Twitter

DFSBP archives: Beaver Harris

As WKCR—the world's greatest jazz broadcasting outlet and the place where I learned much of what I know about this art form that I love—continues to struggle with its online-streaming rights, I present a digital version of one of the most enjoyable shows I helped to organize there: a 2000 tribute to drummer-composer William "Beaver" Harris.

The role I played in this show was a background one. Glo Harris, the show's principal host and key architect, clearly had the whole thing covered. I can't recall exactly how the program came about, but I remember Phil Schaap mentioning to me—then an eager, inexperienced student broadcaster—that he had a project I might be interested in. I believe Glo, who had been married to Beaver, had approached Phil about putting together a radio show in her late husband's honor. At some point, Phil graciously handed me the reins. I engineered the show, talked on-air a bit and may have had some input into what musical selections were played—at that time, I was a huge fan of Beaver's work on the 1976 Steve Lacy–Roswell Rudd album Trickles—but this was Glo's brainchild, and the warmth and sincerity of the finished product is a testament to her enduring love for Beaver, both as a man and a musician.

Wade Barnes, the late drummer, educator and NYC jazz torchbearer, is a genial and insightful presence in parts I and II of the broadcast, and the supporting cast only snowballs from there. I still remember sitting in the main WKCR control room, then housed in Riverside Church, as master after master materialized, either on the phone or in person. Part III features an Andrew Cyrille call-in, and Rashied Ali and Grachan Moncur III drop by in Part IV, joined later by impromptu call-in guest Jack DeJohnette. Like Glo, they all clearly admired this man as a player and loved him as a human being. Their stories flesh out a career that's sadly underrepresented in the official discography.

Beaver Harris is a fascinating figure, and this program makes a compelling case for just how underrated and little understood his genius was, and still is. You'll hear Barnes discuss the "from ragtime to no time" ethos that guided Harris's work, and the concept wasn't just a clever phrase: whatever the idiom, Harris played with command and coherence. As a sideman, on Trickles, on various Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp recordings, on lesser-known sessions with Chet Baker and Lee Konitz, Ken McIntyre, and Rudolph Grey's Blue Humans, he was explosive (always wielding that slashing China cymbal) or supportive, as the moment demanded. He danced and pummeled with equal skill and flair.

As a leader or co-leader, on marvelous and almost completely overlooked albums such as 1976's In: Sanity (featuring Dave Burrell), 1984's A Well Kept Secret (featuring Don Pullen) and Thank You For Your Ears (recorded '84, released '98), he was even better. He wasn't just a drummer; he had a sonic and conceptual vision, which he aptly labeled "360 Degree." It was eclectic (those steel drums!), inclusive and fantastical. One of his pieces, "African Drums," even became a sort of out-jazz standard, recorded by Shepp and David S. Ware.

Beaver Harris made his mark. Start here and go forth:

Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. I
Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. II
Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. III
Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. IV

Download the broadcast at the links above, or stream via the blue bar at the bottom of the page.

Thank you again to Glo Harris for putting together this incredible program, and to Phil Schaap for making the introduction.

/////

Other Beaver Harris resources:

*Clifford Allen's valuable career overview

*1987 WKCR interview re: Ayler (go here and scroll down)

*1983 live recording with Sam Rivers and steel-drummer Francis Haynes, who also appears on In: Sanity and A Well Kept Secret

*1975 live footage with Archie Shepp and Chet Baker

Incidentally, the broadcast above led, either directly or indirectly, to my later interviews with Moncur, Ali and Cyrille.

Moment's Greatest Hits 3

The third in a series of recent faves.

Voivod
I saw Voivod play at Gramercy Theatre on Super Bowl Sunday. It was a good show, but more importantly, it reminded me of what fun, peculiar band they are. Widely recognized as one of the emblematic groups of the '80s metal underground, Voivod are, it turns out, not really emblematic of anything other than themselves. Their music is not particularly forbidding or aggressive. It has a lighthearted quality to it that comes through all the more when you see how friendly and excited they appear in the live setting: guitarist Daniel "Chewy" Mongrain bounding around the stage with a huge grin, drummer Michael "Away" Langevin flashing a peace sign when frontman Denis "Snake" Bélanger introduced him with a playful soccer-stadium chant ("A-wayyyyy / Away, Away, Away...").

Voivod is an idea. Or a series of ideas. They decided long ago what the parameters of their audiovisual presentation would be, and they've stuck to those parameters through the decades. It's fascinating to me that since the sad passing of Voivod's sonic architect, guitarist Denis "Piggy" D'Amour, in 2005, the band has almost become more idiosyncratic, more Voidvodian, than ever. After Piggy died, Voivod put out two albums using guitar tracks he had recorded before his death, 2006's Katorz and 2009's Infini. I like these albums, but not as much as like 2013's Target Earth, the first Voivod album to feature Chewy instead of Piggy. Chewy is the quintessential torchbearer: He initially learned guitar by learning Voivod songs, and he approaches his role in the band with an acolyte's fervor. The result is strange sort of reanimation, or suspended animation, of the Piggy-era Voivod aesthetic.



Just as with the band's classic work—I spun 1988's awesome Dimension Hatröss last night—this track (from the band's upcoming EP, Post-Society) defies you to engage with it on anything other than its own terms. The strange harmonic atmosphere of the music, like this sort of funhouse-mirror version of punk/thrash, where all the notes sound sour, bent. Snake's nasal, heavily accented, almost sickly moan, perhaps this very strange band's strangest aspect. The swirling, dreamy interludes. That awkward, dissonant art-funk breakdown around 4:40. The general sense of a music taking its time, stretching its legs, being what it feels like it needs to be, regardless of genre. Over the years, Voivod have forged their own musical ethnicity, and it's such a pleasure to see them embracing it ever more deeply as they age. The music they're making now is both profoundly self-indulgent and exactly what any fan could hope for. ("Post-Society" is another instant Voivod masterpiece.)

The Replacements 
The other day I had the pleasure of editing an excerpt from the upcoming Replacements biography, Trouble Boys. The bit in question concerns the band's disastrous SNL appearance in 1986, or disastrous if you happen to have been one of the parties invested in establishing the band as a legitimate mainstream force. A faction to which, as is clear from the account and the surviving videos, the band members clearly did not belong. Their concern, it seems was merely, to echo the Voivod assessment above, to be themselves, and the results were wondrous. I don't know that I've seen a more potent distillation of the reckless-youth aspect of rock and roll than this "Bastards of Young" performance.



It's just a heartbreakingly raw, true, exuberant moment, the kind that every great rock band seems to have, as the buzz crests and they either continue on up, as Westerberg puts it, the "ladder of success" to superstardom or flame out or slowly decline or some combination of those three. There's a nothing-to-lose quality about this band at this time—sort of reminiscent of the Strokes here; try "Hard to Explain" at 12:35—that's just really poignant and timeless to me. And re: Westerberg's vocal prowess and overall charm/charisma, there really are no words. (I remember hearing him for the first time on the Singles soundtrack, loving his contributions and having no idea as to his musical history.)

James Salter
Speaking of that sort of moment, when a life or career crests precipitously, Cassada, a 2000 rewrite of the late, great James Salter's 1961 novel The Arm of Flesh, is an incredible encapsulation of same. Salter's subject is, as always, men and their pursuit of immortality, meaning, fulfillment and, yes, women. This is a brief book, an impressionistic one—a semi-autobiographical, '50s-set tale of American fighter pilots training in Germany, who never see combat—but its emotional impact is heavy. The book does a great job of contrasting the transcendent, almost holy feeling of flight with the listless, dysfunctional, stunted on-the-ground lives these men lead. Salter's obsession was the taste of greatness, or of true happiness, and how that taste lingers, haunts, even when the feeling leaves.

Michael Mann
Speaking of quintessentially masculine art, I saw a director's cut of Blackhat as part of BAM's Michael Mann retrospective, which winds down tomorrow. In much of Mann's work, whenever human beings are conversing, or having sex, or doing anything that isn't shooting or running or preparing to run or shoot, the film in question can veer precariously close to unintentional parody. The phenomenal Heat isn't without its silly moments, but it's one of Mann's greatest achievements precisely because, probably due to the caliber of actor he was working with, he managed to right this imbalance: The intimate, non-action-movie moments are as compelling as the astonishing set pieces. Blackhat is, in many ways, the exact opposite, and thus one of the most quintessentially Mann-y movies he's ever made. To put it bluntly, whenever the focus is on anything but action, the movie is profoundly, laughably absurd. (That's not to say I don't relish the cheese; I absolutely do, and could watch 100 examples of this kind of movie in a row.) But when the choreography and orchestration of violence kicks in, you're reminded that you're in the hands of a master.

Sicbay
Speaking of being reminded that you're in the hands of a master, Sicbay's 2001 debut album, The Firelit S'coughs, has been reissued on vinyl by the Modern Radio label. Nick Sakes has never been in a band that wasn't great, and like all his other projects, Sicbay were great in a totally different way than any of his other bands. Sakes was coming off the singularly demented Colossamite when he co-founded Sicbay in Minneapolis in 1999. His foil in the new project was the unsung guitar master Dave Erb, who brought to the table a beautifully honed melodic expertise. Together with a series of drummers—the first of whom, appearing on S'coughs, was current Deerhoof guitarist Ed Rodriguez, who also played guitar in Colossamite—they crafted a borderless sound: part hooky indie rock, part discordant post-hardcore, but all compact and refined. Sicbay were masters of song form. Whatever the objective of a given song, it was typically apparent within 20 seconds or so. Perfectly formed verses, choruses, post-choruses, bridges flying past in two or three minutes. And yet, as the same time, the music could be as gnarled or daunting as Sakes's prior triumphs with Dazzling Killmen and Colossamite. S'coughs is where it all started—the rawest and most diverse of their albums. But even at this early stage, they had the whole thing figured out. Masterpiece. (Albums two and three, Overreaction Time and Suspicious Icons, are also essential.)


Snarky Puppy
And in closing, this tasty confection from Snarky Puppy. I was a few years late to the party for these guys, but once I sampled their wares, the appeal was obvious. This performance flirts with cheese—and the song itself can sound like beefed-up TV bumper music—but there's an exuberance here, a delight in the details, that's irresistible. A modern-day Brecker Brothers with hints of Meshuggah, maybe? In this day and age, playing music of such flash, intricacy and unabashed joy comes off as downright punk.

Moment's Greatest Hits 2

Another survey of recent faves.

Damon Che
The great Don Caballero drummer speaks in this essential Brad Cohan interview of "[learning] how to breathe behind the trap set over time." Quite an understatement, given that the style he developed in the early '90s and perfected on albums such as Don Caballero 2, What Burns Never Returns and American Don amounts to one of the most beautifully aerated percussive achievements I know. A true punishing caress. If you can watch this (dip in at, say, 3:20 for a quick taste) without weeping, inwardly or outwardly, at the raw poetry of each flail and bash, we have very different listening brains.

I only very recently gave Thee Speaking Canaries—the band in which Che plays guitar and sings—a close look, which seems like some kind of travesty. The '93 Songs for the Terrestrially Challenged album in particular is a triumph of muscular, offbeat indie rock. It has sort of this grandstanding classic-rock swagger about it (thanks to Nick for helping me spot the cover of Van Halen's "Girl Gone Bad" sandwiched into track 5), some incredibly tasty and eccentric riffing and the general sense of sprawling, indulgent abandon that makes the period of Don Cab I cite above so wonderful.

I highly recommend the tracks "Houses and Houses of Perfectness" and "Terrestrial/Famous No Space." Drumming in Damon Che's band must be a little like playing bass in Charles Mingus's (as Doug Watkins did here), but Noah Leger does a hell of a job of it on this record.



Also: shout-outs to Chunklet for their valuable work unearthing gems from the Che archive, e.g., Thee Speaking Canaries' Platter Base Must be Constructed of Moon Rock (on which Che plays all instruments) and Don Cab's Five Pairs of Crazy Pants. Wear 'Em (a sort of pre- and post-history of Don Cab's burly debut, For Respect).

Krallice
This album continues to be an object of fascination and awe. Not to take anything away from the overall architecture of the songs and the LP, but the sheer amount of insanely cool moments on Ygg Huur is frankly obscene. (Let's start by talking about the crazed fanfare that breaks out around 5:20 into "Over Spirit.") Am also digging the new EP, Hyperion, which actually predates YH recording-wise, and I had a blast seeing them live at Saint Vitus last week.

Leonard Cohen
Cohen is a genius, and I hang on his every word. Been digging into a few of the '70s albums that I never knew as well as I wanted to. I've loved, and very often feared, Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs From a Room for ages, but there's something about the period that follows (Songs of Love and Hate, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Death of a Ladies' Man and Recent Songs) that's really speaking to me right now. The early stuff has that beautiful austerity, but during this phases, he's really letting it rip in an appealing way, getting as bawdy ("Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On"), mythic ("The Guests"), depressive ("Dress Rehearsal Rag"), ominous ("Avalanche"), sardonic ("Is This What You Wanted") or straight-up manic as he pleases. To exemplify that latter quality, let's focus for a second on the final minute or so of "Memories":



Bruce Springsteen
A younger and more populist singer-songwriter hero. I'm all in with The River, thanks in part to the recent reissue, and I can't wait to see Springsteen and Co. play it live on March 28. On paper, everything about this period of Springsteen seems contrived: the portraits of small-town love, heartbreak and socioeconomic struggle. But in execution, it's sublime. You don't even have to suspend your disbelief when listening to a master like this—you simply soak up the conviction and dramatic truth radiating from the songs.

Jon Theodore
Picking up on the Che thread from above, another one of the great drummers of our time narrates the story of his life and music in this extremely valuable Dean Delray podcast episode. I find the accounts of him joining the Mars Volta and Queens of the Stone Age—probably the two greatest Big Rock Bands of the past 20 or so years—to be particularly thrilling and inspiring. Bonus: This is probably the closest we'll get to a thorough examination of Theodore's incredible, hopefully not-defunct One Day as a Lion project with Zack de la Rocha.

Mastication of Brutality Uncontrolled
Yes, you read that right. In recent years, I've developed a serious soft spot for the lunatic sub-sub-genre of death metal known variously as "brutal" or "slam." You often find this stuff coming out of Europe and Asia, and labels such as Willowtip, New Standard Elite and Unique Leader are always reliable outlets for the freshest and sickest offerings. (The connoisseurs at Burning Ambulance, Isolation Grind and Invisible Oranges also help keep me in the loop.) Anyway, the below—the 2015 debut LP by Germany's MOBU—was just something I stumbled across on YouTube while browsing for new delights in this genre. Skip the first track and dive right into "Mother Earth Abortion."



I find the over-the-top, almost giddy quality of this music to be profoundly life-affirming. It wears its off-the-charts technicality lightly and practically begs you to scoff at how absurd it comes off by any normalized standard of what music ought to sound like. And yet, brutal death metal is an extremely narrow niche, with its own rules of production, technique, etc. As with any example of such a tightly defined style, the pleasure is in the details—here, it's those laser-gun guitar strobes and rapid-fire "He can't possibly be saying words" grunt/squeal/retch vocals. Turn off your brain and savor the splatter.

Earth, Wind and Fire
Respect to Maurice White. I need to get to know this wonderful music much better than I do.

P.S. I invite you to enjoy this recently launched craw website, expertly designed by my dear friend Drew.

Glenn Frey

There are musicians who capture their time, and render out of it something timeless, and there are those who rack up serious hits—both equally noble achievements. Sometimes, a given artist can do both. I think Glenn Frey was one of the latter.

The Eagles were (are, always will be) the '70s, and as great as "Hotel California" is, you can't get more Eagles, more '70s, or, really, much greater than "Take It Easy." It's Jackson Browne's song, but he needed a character like Glenn Frey to really sell it, bring it to the masses and add that seal-the-deal line about the girl, my Lord, in the flat-bed Ford. (The same is true of Jack Tempchin and Robb Strandlund's "Already Gone.")



Likewise, "You Belong to the City" drips with '80s-ness, so much so that it was written especially for Miami freakin' Vice. A pop poem in neon. Radio-friendly existentialism. The apotheosis of MTV sax.

I came away from the Eagles documentary, History of the Eagles, as entertaining and enthralling a rock doc as I've ever seen, with a serious respect for Frey's vision. He seemed to have it all—star-quarterback good looks and charisma combined with an authentic blue-collar work ethic and a journalist's eye for detail (see: "Lyin' Eyes")—and he put his gifts to damn good use. And you can't help but love the straight talk, most of it centering on Frey's troubled relationship with bandmate Don Felder.

David Bowie was the aesthete's choice. When he died, the tributes poured forth on my Twitter feed, and do so still. But Frey and the Eagles were a people's band. Tonight, on the phone, my parents and I shared a moment of mourning for him.

There is something profound about music that cuts across generations this way, rather than compelling you to choose sides. You can call it safe, and once, I may have, but these days, noble is the word I'd use.

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More on Glenn Frey:

20 essential songs

Will Hermes reflects

Moment's Greatest Hits

A while ago on Twitter I used to roll out what I called Weekly Greatest Hits—a round-up of anything new or old that was currently hitting me hard. In that spirit, here are a few current faves. (This may or may not become a regular DFSBP feature.)

James Brandon Lewis  
Days of FreeMan



As I indicated in my 2015 round-up, I slept on a lot of music last year. Here's a late-breaking head-slapper. Days of FreeMan would've been an obvious, high-ranking inclusion on my jazz top 10, at the very least, if I'd heard it in time. (Seems like this flew under a lot of folks' radars; Phil Freeman and Seth Colter Walls were among those looking alive.) Little needs to be said—the appeal is immediate. Lean funk- and hip-hop-informed jams with tons of swagger and soul. I'm not sure I've heard backbeat-oriented jazz done this well before. Missed JBL at Winter Jazzfest last night, but I plan to remedy that soon.

David Bowie 
Live 1973 (from D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars)



Speaking of swagger. The level of charm, charisma and peacock-ish sass oozing off this man in this performance is basically terrifying. I'm not a Bowie completist, but I am a fan, and I've been filling in knowledge gaps during the past sad, intense week. My Rolling Stone colleague Andy Greene is a real Bowie authority, and I learned a lot from this list, which tipped me off to the above.

P.S. Blackstar is a trip as well.

Iggy Pop
"Some Weird Sin" (from Lust for Life)



This Bowie-co-produced track is just staggering. (Note: It also sounds exactly like the Strokes at their thickest and most sensual.) I'm not crazy about what I've heard from the Idiot album, but Lust for Life lives up to its audacious title. Nasty, glammy brilliance; rough, sneering conviction. Listening to this, you can hear Bowie reckoning with Iggy's genius and framing it in just the right context where it can shine in a new, post-Stooges way. It's feral but theatrical too.

Tony Williams
New York Live (1989)

 

More on the idea of swagger... Tony Williams is one of my very favorite drummers, but I know less than I should about his later years. I've read a lot about his brash attitude and confidence (in Bill Milkowski's essential interview compilation Rockers, Jazzbos and Visionaries, the author describes Williams at a mixing session for the 1992 Story of Neptune album: "Pacing around the control room with a fat cigar jutting out the side of his mouth, Tony Williams is a portrait of swaggering intensity"), and those traits are on full display in this outstanding video. The effect is very different to hearing him during his '60s heyday. There was a brashness at play during that period, too, obviously, but here it has ripened into a sort of bullish, cocky, unabashed, Muhammad Ali–like badassery. This is hardbop as take-no-prisoners combat, the embodiment of what Damión Reid calls the "[showing] up to crush" mentality.

P.S. It's downright pathetic that much of the recorded output of the band in the video above is out of print. I've been scouring the 'net for days looking for Neptune and its predecessor, Native Heart.

P.P.S. Vinnie Sperrazza is all over this period of Tony's output.

Mark Turner Quartet
Live at Winter Jazzfest 2016

I'm currently under the weather so I'm sparing myself the full-on marathon WJF experience, but I have to call out the outstanding set I saw by this band at the ECM showcase last night. Lathe of Heaven, from 2014, is a great record, but this group has apparently been gigging a lot since then because the set I saw last night made that album sound tame and undercooked. If there's another current working small group that can rival this band for attunement among the members, high-wire interactivity, and overall poise and alertness and excitement, I'd really like someone to tell me about it. They just sounded so dialed-in. And Marcus Gilmore, dear God... It's been no surprise for years, since he works with so many great bands, but this guy is simply operating on an elevated plane.

Bonus tracks:

Chris Dave with Robert Glasper





Thanks to the aforementioned James Brandon Lewis for reminding me that I need more Chris Dave in my life. What starts to happen—percussively, and with the entire band, really—around the 6:00 mark here is simply obscene.

There's all kinds of hoopla re: the jazz/hip-hop crossover thing. Robert Glasper is obviously a key conduit and has been for some time. I'd love to see him get the kind of attention Kamasi Washington has gotten, but for his trio work like this (and this), which speaks to me way more than his Black Radio output. The message I get from a performance like this is that you don't have to "cross over," in blatant genre-splicing ways, to engage meaningfully across traditions.

P.S. Contrary to the title, this video was not filmed at the Village Vanguard.

Krallice 

This band is still getting tons of plays around these parts. Not just the amazing Ygg Huur (discussed here) but also its predecessor and brand-new follow-up (which was actually, confusingly, recorded before Ygg Huur). You need to be paying attention to Krallice if you care about what is called the "progressive" spirit in music.

Joe Maneri Quartet

This group—the late Joe Maneri on various reeds, piano and the occasional vocal, with his son Mat on violin and viola, Randy Peterson on drums, and a revolving cast of bassists—had such an unmistakable sonic fingerprint. Jazz smeared into near-oblivion, unfolding in a slo-mo Butoh dance that can feel both tortured and whimsical. My favorite album is the hard-to-find Get Ready to Receive Yourself, but was digging In Full Cry recently.

P.S. Hearing Randy Peterson live last week with Tony Malaby's Apparitions band is what got me thinking along these lines.