A chat with ?uestlove

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing the drummer, bandleader and all-around music fiend ?uestlove. We talked in his tiny drum booth, part of a makeshift recording studio adjacent to the Jimmy Fallon set. I sat in a corner, and ?uestlove sat behind his kit, politely facing away from me so as not to spray me with crumbs from the kale chips he was snacking on.

A condensed version of the conversation appears in the next issue of Time Out New York, an advance plug for the Shuffle Culture event that ?uestlove's curating at BAM Thursday and Friday, April 19 and 20. The online cut of the Q&A, which you can read here, is about twice as long.

I'll admit that I'm no expert when it comes to ?uestlove's massive body of work. Much of what I know of the Roots and his various side projects and production jobs comes from the 24 hours of cramming I put in prior to the interview. But every time I've ever heard him play, watched live clips (I wish I could find that vid of him nailing the opening fill on Elvis Costello's "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea") or read interviews, I've always been impressed by the sleek economy of his drumming and the unpretentious wisdom of his R&B/hip-hop scholarship. ?uestlove's career is a lesson in how to become a pop star without compromising your integrity or sacrificing the core music-nerd-hood that made you cool in the first place. I had a blast speaking with him.

P.S. There's way more to the conversation than you'll read above. I hope that eventually I can get around to posting a few outtakes here. For one thing, he offered up great anecdotes re: attending high school with heavyweight jazzers like Kurt Rosenwinkel and Christian McBride.

On fire: Craig Taborn at the Vanguard

Growing up in Kansas City, I played a lot of video games. During one phase, my friend Drew and I became obsessed with a cartoonish basketball title called NBA Jam. A key feature of this game was the possibility of one of your players achieving "on fire" status, awarded after they had scored three consecutive baskets.

After a two-basket streak, the game's announcer would say, "He's heating up…," and then, if you were able to land that crucial third basket, he would yell out, "He's on fire!" At this point, pandemonium would ensue: Your player suddenly became superhuman, gaining the ability to sprint turbo-speed and to take off from half-court for monster anti-gravity dunks. There was a wild ecstasy to these moments, your player turning into some kind of supernova. All you had to do was press a few buttons and rack up the points.

It seems silly to say so, but I couldn't help thinking of "He's on fire!" last night as I watched Craig Taborn perform at the Village Vanguard. I cannot remember the last time I witnessed a performer so utterly ablaze on a stage: pulling off so many dazzling technical achievements while exercising such a purely musical imagination. The show demonstrated that virtuoso skill doesn't have to get in the way of ideas; the two can coexist in a feverish frenzy, the hands doing the bidding of the sparking neurons and the overflowing heart.

Last year, Craig Taborn released a very good solo piano album, Avenging Angel. Around the time that I interviewed Taborn for my Heavy Metal Be-Bop series, I listened to the record obsessively. I found it beautiful but, in the end, somehow impenetrable, one reason I left if off my all-genres-in-play year-end top 10 list for Time Out NY (it did rank on my jazz-only list); I had to come clean and admit that I respected it more than I loved it. On my CD shelf, it's a hushed museum piece, to be savored in rare moments of undivided attention rather than to be really lived with in a practical sense.

For me, the performance I witnessed last night, a trio set with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Gerald Cleaver, was like the fulfillment of every hope I'd had for Avenging Angel. The album enthralled me with its strange, austere logic (in Time Out NY, I wrote of one piece that it "[felt] like stepping out of a spaceship onto an ice planet—vast and iridescent, but with a lurking malevolence…") but in the end, I was yearning for some kind of warm blood pumping through the chilly atmospheres.

That passion, that human pulse flooded the room last night. If Avenging Angel feels like a classic shut-in record, the sound of a man burrowing deep inside himself, this trio set was all about communication. Taborn, well known for his self-effacing personality, was clearly loving being in front of an appreciative crowd (there were whoops and hollers during several climactic moments) and communing with his bandmates, both of whom achieved their own kind of "On fire!" status.

Taborn mentioned at the outset that he wasn't one to do much "mic work," and that we shouldn't take his lack of announcement as an indication that he wasn't thrilled by our presence. I'm paraphrasing here, but he went on to say something to the effect that, rather than taking breaks to speak and catch his breath, he preferred to dive into the deep end and remain submerged for the duration, the better to focus on (I believe this was the phrase he used) simply "creating music."

And thus it was so, especially during the first piece in the set. I have no idea how long it lasted; my guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 minutes. (No titles were given, so I can't help you there.) The piece felt to me like an expanse, a onflowing river that the players waded into and then ever so gradually began to attune to, growing more and more powerful, joyous, daring, until they evolved into some kind of collective superhuman aqua-being, capable of harnessing the water's enormous energy and using it to his own creative ends.

Okay, that's an out-there metaphor, but I'm struggling to convey the sensation of this piece. It had a feel that I'd liken to midtempo electronica, a steady, almost breakbeat-ish drive, but without the clichéd sped-up James Brown groove; there was no sense of typical jazz swing, just a subtle, airy funk laid down by Morgan and Cleaver. Sometimes Taborn would hammer on the rhythm, constructing these ingenious hypnotic vamps that sometimes sounded to me like sped up Tim Berne themes. Other times, he would let the left hand handle the vamp and unleash the right in a fit of wild expressionism, smearing it across the keys or leaping between distant notes. If the moment grabbed him, he'd let both hands free and let fly with a downward-stabbing, knitting-needle-like frenzy.

You couldn't not think of Cecil Taylor watching these outbursts, but I'm hesitant to invoke the Maestro, simply because the effect was so different. With Taylor, there's often this sense of private ecstasy, a feeling that he'd be playing exactly the same way if he were at home alone; with Taborn on the other hand, I felt a real exuberance, a "Come along with me" feeling. Juxtaposing these daredevil flights with infectious rhythmic drive had a "Eureka!" affect: Taborn's playing had all the extroverted thrust of McCoy Tyner comping behind John Coltrane—but employed in the service of a much more contemporary-sounding groove—combined with the unbounded imagination of Taylor. For me, it was a whole new kind of chocolate and peanut butter: two great tastes I'd never thought I'd get the chance to taste together.

I can tell that my description is doing a disservice to the pervasive collectivity of this performance. In a sense, yes, Taborn was the leader and the star. But in another sense, he was more a servant to a vibe than its master. The piece (I'm still talking about this marathon opening selection, which moved through several transitions and likely included two or three distinct compositions) was the real focus and all three players were giving themselves over to it. Taborn was going off, as it were, but it rarely felt like he was soloing in the traditional sense. At all times, the three players were building something, participating in something collective. There were no clear cues to orient you in terms of foreground/background: "Now he's soloing; now he is," etc. Taborn eased back just as often as he surged forward, and you felt the music playing itself.

Cleaver was absolutely unflappable throughout this piece, keeping up an airy future-funk texture—I hesitate to even call it a groove; it was more of a sensation; you felt that you were moving forward, even though it was hard to tell at what speed or for what duration. What he and Morgan (who like Cleaver, gave himself over to this strange, enveloping onrush) were providing was a kind of endlessness. When I was describing above how the music felt like the players were wading into a river, what I was trying to get at was the idea that this imaginary river had already been flowing for eons before the musicians waded in; they were participating, communing with, thriving on the strength of some kind of preexisting current. In that sense, the music did feel a whole lot more like great electronica than like jazz. It was an unmarked superhighway, and however turbulent Taborn's embellishment got, you still felt like you were just cruising. That's a testament to Morgan and Cleaver's marvelous attunement to Taborn's strange, ambitious, very un-jazz-like concept. (The cohesion makes sense b/c this trio has been touring Europe regularly for several years; you can download two 2009 concerts here, though, respectfully, as good as these bootlegs are, they pale in comparison to what I heard last night.)

The piece finally did stop, but there was no break. Taborn played alone for a little while, entering into what sounded like traditional jazz-ballad territory, but extremely slow and tender. It was a startling juxtaposition. Again, back to my earlier point that yes, Taborn often reminds me of various piano giants, but he seems much more willing than, say, Taylor to employ relatively conventional devices. I don't mean to say that he's somehow reliant on clichés; I mean that he seems totally okay with dipping into traditional modes for moments at a time if it suits his overall purpose. When you hear Cecil Taylor, you're hearing Cecil Taylor; and that's it. There's a wall there. Taborn has a very different kind of humanity to his playing; he wants to blow your mind—and, maybe, his own—but he wants to welcome you through the door. I guess what I'm saying is that this particular solo ballad section was straightforwardly gorgeous, and juxtaposed with the magic-carpet ride of the previous long piece, it felt like a revelation. You're exploring the ice planet, this vast, alien landscape, and all of a sudden you come across an inviting little cabin, with smoke coming out of the chimney.

The band worked back up to another Berne-ish prog-groove peak in the final piece. Morgan took a poetic bass solo somewhere in there; Taborn and Cleaver both laid out for several minutes, and then Cleaver reentered not with a sound produced from the kit, but by rubbing his palms together. Somehow, you could hear it perfectly. There was a real sense of meditation in that club, of everyone knowing they were experiencing something rare and magical. When the band finished, stopping together on a dime, there was a glow in the room, not to mention wild applause.

In case it isn't clear from the above, I'm feeling evangelical about this performance. If you live in New York and you've ever had any interest in Taborn's music, you must see this trio play tonight or tomorrow (sets at 9 and 11pm; check the Vanguard site or Time Out NY for details). With respect to his existing body of work, this was, idiomatically, some whole other shit. I always know that a show is going really, really well when I shoot astonished glances at my wife and she mirrors them, rather than simply humoring me. We were both floored by this show, and I'd have a hard time imagining that any attentive, open-minded listener (no "jazz-fan" credential needed) wouldn't be. I cannot wait to hear where this trio goes in the coming years; right at this very moment, they are my favorite band on the planet.

P.S. Before the Taborn show, we caught Billy Hart's magnificent quartet, discussed in the previous post. I don't mean to short-shrift that set here; it's just that they're a known quantity to me, about whom I've already written at length, whereas I was encountering this Taborn band more or less fresh. I will say that Hart himself was on the warpath last night; I can't remember the last time I heard a drummer of any kind thwack a floor tom or bash a cymbal with such conviction. You can still catch the Hart band too; they're closing out their Birdland run tonight.

P.P.S. There's been some good Taborn-trio buzz building throughout the week. I've deliberately held off reading Ben Ratliff's review or checking out too much of the archived set (plus very cool A Blog Supreme interview) that's up at NPR b/c I knew I wanted to attend myself and approach the music without too many preconceptions. Now that I've seen the show and weighed in myself, I'm looking forward to catching up on the conversation.

The Billy Hart Quartet: A portrait

Here's my new TONY profile of the Billy Hart Quartet, based on an interview with Hart and Ethan Iverson, conducted back in February at Birdland. The occasion is All Our Reasons, the long-awaited (by me, anyway) follow-up to 2006's Quartet.

Hopefully it's not too evident in the writing, but I struggled a bit with this piece, mainly because I had so much I wanted to do justice to in such a confined space, not to mention a ton of exposition, aimed at the jazz novice. I also had an insightful, wide-ranging joint interview to draw on. I hope the subjects will pardon me if, in the end, I used less of their verbatim thoughts than I'd expected to. As I was working, I realized I was after a portrait more than a photograph, a way to convey the special camaraderie shared by Billy Hart and Ethan Iverson (and by extension, Ben Street and Mark Turner).

I hope to see the band live next week at Birdland (they're there from Tuesday, 4/3 through Saturday, 4/7). I've got my fingers crossed for the more meditative material from All Our Reasons, e.g., the sprawling mood piece "Song for Balkis" and the superbly unflashy drum feature "Wasteland." Nothing against the upbeat stuff; it's just that, to my ears, the band's sweet spot is a dusky sound space, like the distant rumble of an oncoming storm.

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*Here's Ethan Iverson's interview with Billy Hart, which I mention in the piece.

*Here's a nice promo video dealing with the new record.

*Here's Nate Chinen's take on All Our Reasons. I'll heartily second "the dark shimmer of [Hart's] cymbals and the raspy catch of his snare."

*And here's a new Jazz Session interview with Mr. Hart. Haven't gotten a chance to take this one in yet, but I can't wait.

Playing the tortoise: 20-plus years of Unsanity

Via Pitchfork, here's my review of the new Unsane album, Wreck.

My current thoughts on Unsane tie into a post I wrote last November on the veteran death-metal band Obituary. I enjoyed both of these groups in high school, but my enthusiasm for each was lukewarm; back then I was looking for something more ambitious, and neither quite fit the bill. Unsane was up against craw, Dazzling Killmen and other purveyors of extreme post-hardcore, while Obituary competed against the mighty Morbid Angel.

It's telling that none of that competition really exists anymore. Craw and Dazzling Killmen have broken up, and while Morbid Angel persists, I feel okay admitting that none of their future releases are likely to affect me as much as Covenant did back in '93. In the Unsane review, I referred to them as the tortoises of the NYC noise-rock scene, and Obituary have played a similar role in the Florida death-metal movement. Each has barely progressed since the early '90s; instead they've both chosen to simply dig in and micro-refine over a steady stream of albums.

This is the kind of achievement that's easy to overlook. (It's also the kind of achievement that's not always praiseworthy: A "tortoise" band only seems continually respectable if their current work feels as true and from-the-gut as their vintage material.) What I've realized recently is that, for me, unchanging-ness is no longer a knock in and of itself. And Unsane has certainly endured its share of knocks on just that count; Pitchfork's reviews of its previous two records, Visqueen and Blood Run, were not kind. If I feel that a band continues to mean what they're doing over time, and if what they're doing sounds good to me, I'm completely okay with that essentially anti-evolutionary approach. This flies in the face of that whole "Better to burn out than it is to rust" concept. There's a third alternative there: Keep driving the same car, but make sure it stays polished. I'm not an expert on, say, Motörhead, but I think they've followed the same principle.

What I'm saying in short is that I still believe Unsane. They don't surprise me, but I like the feeling they give me. The dire-ness does not feel forced. Not every band has to "progress." Sometimes progression really means diffusion. Take, say, Mastodon. I enjoy their latest record just fine, but it doesn't have that "Holy shit…" quality. It feels almost casual, in comparison with a back catalog (Remission, e.g.) that at its best has felt deadly serious. That's the risk of evolving, I guess. (And it's worth keeping in mind that records are not always these sacred texts, removed from reality; sometimes they're just a collection of songs to play live. Another thing Unsane and Obituary have in common is that they're both hard-touring bands who continue to kick ass live precisely because they don't mess with the formula onstage or in the studio.)

For me, the real takeaway is that there's no one right way to play it. Longevity is the first priority, and if a band can hang around and still make vital, enjoyable records 20-odd years after it started, I have no problem with the fact that those records sound pretty much exactly the same in the macro sense. (Nor, I should make clear, do I have a problem with progression and evolution; the trick, though, is how to accomplish that without forsaking intensity and conviction.) I've listened to the entire Unsane discography over the past week or so, and while I was barely surprised at all, I rocked out pretty much nonstop. Now, later in life, that means more to me than it did. I don't think it's that my aesthetic palate has dulled; I think it's that I appreciate the raw craftsmanship of rock more. Pick a style and churn it out. That's good enough for me.

P.S. For more on these themes, see last December's Immolation post.

Cleve Pozar: Live and on camera

Longtime DFSBP readers will recall my perpetual fascination with the life and work of percussionist Cleve Pozar. On that front, a pair of brief bulletins:

1) This weekend, Cleve will fill his car with equipment and drive from North Carolina (his current home) to Brooklyn for a performance at The Firehouse Space, taking place on Sunday, March 11. The concert will feature works from Cleve's stunning early-’70's solo LP, Cleve Solo Percussion, and it marks the first time in roughly three decades that Cleve has performed this material. Two good friends of mine, Russell Baker and Will Glass (a student of Cleve's), open as the Ball Governor. More info, via Time Out New York.

2) Go here to view a trailer for "I Did the Number," an in-progress film about Cleve that I've been working on since 2008, with help from my wife, Laal Shams. I want to extend a huge thank-you to Dan Scofield—a great musician, filmmaker, multimedia artist and friend—for his editing expertise.

P.S. For a primer on Cleve, here's a profile/interview I put together in 2008 for Perfect Sound Forever.

YouGrail: craw live in 1996

I've been reading an essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan—you can find it in the excellent Pulphead—about caves in the South that contain wondrous Native American paintings and artifacts, so old and disconnected from recorded history that no one really has any idea what they mean. Not to get dramatic, but I find myself thinking about the video above, a 1996 performance by the now-defunct Cleveland band craw [sic], as a similarly momentous find.

For a long time, I've relied on oral history—or more accurately, my own rambling recollections and paeans—to transmit my feelings about this band, and how hard they smacked my teenage consciousness, crater-ing deeper than any other art that bombarded me during that extremely impressionable time. I've bored countless friends (not to mention my wife) with the minute details, the descriptions, even pantomime of the band members' stage movements. Folks have listened patiently, humored me, to a degree. "You don't understand," I would say, shaking my head, "how good they were." (Prior to this, there were craw videos on YouTube, but not of "classic" vintage.)

That's not to say that after watching the above video, the level of my devotion to this musical entity will seem any more clear. It's just YouTube; it's just some old clip; it's just five guys on a stage, seen and heard through the veil of 16 years, during which heavy underground rock music has changed immeasurably, though, I would argue, evolved maybe not that much at all. But at least I can say, "There they are. That is more or less what I witnessed, standing a foot away, as a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old. That is what consumed me and made me so impossibly happy," in the way that only a deep connection with a marvelous human creation can. That is what I spent hours puzzling over. That is what made me say, "This is the benchmark. Anything else that comes along will have to reckon with it."

I have no idea how it will appear or sound to you. Maybe you'll be intrigued. If so, I implore you to track down the record that features this song. It's called Lost Nation Road, and it is my favorite record, full stop. If not, I don't begrudge you. It's just a YouTube clip. It isn't, objectively, some momentous excavation, something awe-inspiring dredged up from the dirt, some link to a lost civilization. To me, though, it's a big deal.

My friend Dave (the guitarist you see on the left in the video) e-mailed me a link to this video and another one from the same show, and I clicked on them while I was at the office today. I watched for a few seconds, but I knew I had to turn them off, wait till I could really engage. I felt this weird rush of something, nostalgia, I guess. I felt hyperactive, like I wanted to tell everyone I knew, but worried, also, that my enthusiasm wouldn't be matched. In the end, that is the reason for this blog you're reading, so I can enthuse and enthuse and not bore my friends and loved ones.

So anyway, the video is above. If you're interested in hearing more about craw, I'll be happy to talk (or e-mail) your ear off any day of the week. If it doesn't grab you, I totally understand. But in my tiny corner of the internet, this is some holy-grail shit.

"There Comes a Time," over time

I didn't know what to make of Tony Williams's "There Comes a Time" when I first heard it, on a used copy of the 1971 Ego LP that I picked up in college. The raw, gnashing instrumentals on Emergency! were much closer to what I was seeking from Williams's Lifetime band, and the presence of vocals on that record and on Ego baffled and even bugged me. I don't feel that way anymore. When I reexamined Emergency! last year, Williams's dreamy recitation on the track "Where" ("Wheeeeere are you going? Wheeeeere do you come frooooom?") really struck me. A psychedelia time capsule, sure, but also an effective interlude on a loud, brash album. (I'll admit that I still have trouble sitting through the monologue on "Beyond Games.")

The key Williams vocal performance, though, is "There Comes a Time." What a strange, strange song… It's built around this swelling, snowballing odd-time swing vamp (I think it's technically 5/4, but I find it easier to count as ten beats). On the original Ego version, the organ of Larry Young (billed as Khalid Yasin) adds a glimmering haze to the steady, ominous march of Ron Carter's bass line, while Ted Dunbar layers juicy guitar twang on top. Williams works up to a bashing cymbal froth, and around the 3:00 mark, the vocals finally emerge:

There comes a time when you want to be older
There comes a time when you want to be bolder
I love you more when it's over

It's a cryptic, vaguely unsettling sentiment, which takes on added menace in the next verse:

There comes a time when you're helpful
There comes a time when you're doubtful
I love you more when you're spiteful

That "spiteful" gets me every time. One word that encapsulates this entire weird, creeping shadow of a song.

The critical consensus seems to be that Williams's vocals are a nuisance. (Think of Ornette's equally maligned work on violin and trumpet.) "Unfortunately, both of those tracks ['There Comes a Time' and another Ego song 'Lonesome Wells (Gwendy Trio)'] are bogged down by vocals (by Williams and Jack Bruce, respectively) singing Williams' own earnest and not terribly inspired verse," Stewart Mason asserts at AllMusic.

I would side with the ever-broad-minded Gil Evans (recall his Hendrix tributes), who elevated the song to something like standard status on his 1976 album There Comes a Time, and then later performed it with Sting. It's something of a shock to hear the Police-man state, "This is a song by Tony Williams" in the clip below (almost as though he were shouting out Cole Porter or some other well-known Great American Songbooker), but he does a great job with the piece.

Here's the original "There Comes a Time," from Ego:



Here's the Ego incarnation of Lifetime performing the track live in ’71:



Here's the Gil Evans Orchestra's 1976 interpretation [Billy Harper on gut-busting tenor]:



Here's a take by a later Lifetime lineup (’79, I think) ["There Comes a Time" starts at 20:53]:



Here's a version, strangely retitled "Lawra," from Williams's elusive 1980 trio album, Play or Die [Tony's voice still sounds great]:



And here's Sting's "There Comes a Time," with the Evans Orchestra (’87) [I believe that's George Adams on backing vox and tenor]:



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Anyone know of any additional versions of this underrated Williams classic? You'd think that Sting's performance would've inspired other singers to give it a shot.

Brute/skittering: Tony Williams in the ’70s

Sometimes I get hung up on the details. Right now, it's the intro to "Fred," from the Tony Williams Lifetime's Believe It (1975). Six staggered bass-drum/crash-cymbal thumps, then a switch to the open hi-hat for one last washy punctuation mark. So sparse and so complete.

And Tony's performance on the piece itself: The pinnacle of "fusion" drumming, to my ears. That airy, syncopated groove on the opening theme, then the tension-building shift to the ride cymbal at 1:08 and the whitewater full-band accents / solo spots starting at 1:14. I love the muscle and the drive of this passage, the way Tony is just bashing, owning these breaks, knowing how badass he is. But I also love how he comes right back down to earth afterward: He resumes the opening groove (1:28), yet quickly thinks better of it, opting instead for a brisk, thrilling little cymbal swell.

Tony Williams in the ’60s (with Miles, and on Blue Note, with Sam Rivers, Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur, Andrew Hill and others) was one of the sounds that initially sold me on jazz. I checked out his early work with Lifetime in college and then had a real moment with it last year. For whatever reason, though, I hadn't followed the thread further until pretty recently. Believe It is my latest Williams obsession, and I feel as strongly about it as I do re: any of his work. If there is such a thing as jazz-rock drumming (something I've been pondering in my Heavy Metal Bebop series, i.e., is it possible for one player to excel at both of these styles, either independently or simultaneously, given their disparate demands?), this is as good as it gets. You have true brute punch on one hand, and on the other, Williams's patented elasticity, a skittering nimbleness, like the aural equivalent of one of those basilisks sprinting over the surface of the water.

I've also been exploring Williams's sideman work from around this time. The performance below, with Stan Getz, Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke (the same band on Captain Marvel) kills me. The dress, the sound, the attitude. I love how Williams sort of cocks his head to the side before he starts, like, "Are we ready to melt some faces? Okay then." Dig the extended close-up at 4:10.



And then this one, with Clarke again, and Jean-Luc Ponty on violin. (I think both of these clips are from ’72.) Check out the virtuosic pugilism around 3:10, and the way Tony eases the feel down to light swing at 3:30. It's one of those patented on-a-dime Williams transitions; he never seemed to require any significant amount of runway in order to smoothly land the 747.



For any Williams buffs reading this, what are your favorite Tony performances from the ’70s and beyond? Million Dollar Legs, the follow-up to Believe It, has a terrible reputation, but I'm looking forward to an in-depth firsthand study. Other records that intrigue me: Didier Lockwood's New World (recorded 1979), Michael Mantler's Movies (’77) and the super-rare 1980 Williams session Play or Die. I'm not well-versed in the later, more postboppish Blue Note period either. Would greatly appreciate any recommendations.

P.S. [After the fact] Another record that merits mention is Hal Galper's Now Hear This (recorded 1977). Williams goes tornado at the end of the title track.

P.P.S. There is also, of course, the Man Jazz meltdown that is Trio of Doom.

The grease in the gears: (Alex) Van Halen, 2012

A strong candidate for my favorite album of the year so far is A Different Kind of Truth, the new Van Halen record (as you've surely read, their first with David Lee Roth in close to 30 years).

I feel similarly about Truth as I did re: Worship Music, last year's Anthrax comeback record. As with Anthrax, Van Halen meant very little to me growing up. MTV saturated my childhood, so VH were unavoidable and, to me, unwelcome. I found them silly, the soundtrack in a party I didn't want to attend.

Since then, my feelings re: this sector of rock & roll have done a 180. Suddenly, a few years back, I found myself no longer taking the art and craft of what I'd always thought of as "good-time" rock (Zeppelin would be the biggie there) for granted. Maybe it had something to do with playing in a rock band and experiencing firsthand how hard it was to execute a simple groove with real feeling, real relaxation, and coming to understand that the real masters of this practice weren't the staunchly arty indie bands I'd grown up with (no disrespect, of course), but the gods of the arenas, the titans of classic-rock radio.

I started to sense that one day, I'd need to reckon with Van Halen. I knew that friends whose tastes I respected worshipped them. But I still wasn't quite ready. I had this fixed image of them as too happy, too hammy, David Lee Roth in a top hat, etc.

But man, this new record. The song that blew off my blinders is the one above, "China Town." The drumming on this song humbles and thrills me. In conjunction with my ever-ardent John Bonham obsession, I've developed a serious interest in Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice (I spent much of my "winter break" playing through The Ultimate Realistic Rock Drum Method), as well as his brother Vinnie, a member of the Dio-fronted Black Sabbath (later called Heaven and Hell). Before I heard "China Town," and thus really started to appreciate the talent of Alex Van Halen, I always thought of these men as a sort of school of three: to borrow a prehistoric comparison from my friend and colleague Steve Smith, the Brontosaurus School, a set of percussionists obsessed with wideness and grease, musical slipperiness, the paradox of a cumbersome mass dancing with marvelous agility.

Set aside for a minute the prog-metal meltdown of the guitar intro and just behold the drum entrance here. All you can think of is that album cover, pure locomotive motion, a gigantic machine racing forward. You hear Roth let out that orgasmic "Oh!" and you feel right where he's at. How can something so heavy move so fast, generate such lift and buoyance? And the thrilling shift from hi-hat to ride on the chorus (:51), where the whole song aspirates, opens its gills for a minute. And then the herky-jerk accents (1:00), straight out of the Zeppelin playbook, followed by the double-time singalong section, punctuated by massive dumps on the toms; that's all I can think to call them, "dumps." It's like laying down a huge stack of newspapers at the audience's feet. And then we jump back on the train, feeling the wind and marveling at the design, that girth which does not square with the aerodynamism.

I love this whole record, pretty much unreservedly (except for the borderline-crappy lead single and opening track "Tattoo"; god knows why they chose to spotlight it b/c just about everything else on here is stronger…), and I've even come to appreciate David Lee Roth's neovaudevillian hamminess, which, maybe not so surprisingly, seems a lot more convincing to me now that he's actually an old dude, rather than a young dude with a retro shtick. But what keeps magnetizing me is this shaggy Brontosaurus School swing, the kind that conjures visions of a friendly giant behind the drum kit, rendered with such a gracious, natural, unsanitized sound—just pure wideness and warmth and sloshing bulk. (Obviously my perspective is drum-centric; I'm sure the guitar nerds would write a similar kind of praise-song structured around Eddie's contributions.)

In the end, the goal is get you moving, to compel the hips, but what a mysterious science that is, to dance with the drums that way, and to infect the whole band with this breath and easyness and feather-light unperturbedness, which at the same time drops a huge thudding anchor down through the very heart of the music. It's just one instrument, but it's the key instrument, the one that serves as the WD-40, the grease in the gears. Alex Van Halen's drumming here and elsewhere on Truth (try "She's the Woman"—dear God, those hi-hats…) epitomizes the paradox of an entire style and school of rock-music-making: You do the heavy-lifting so that the listener can feel light. Art is the concealment of art, yes, but the art is there if you're looking, and the machinery is so very ingenious, a construction that aims right for your caveman mind, that makes you feel lighter, maybe even high, in the narcotic sense, but that you can also enjoy with both feet firmly planted. That is the self-effacing labor of great populist rock & roll, which I've rarely loved more dearly than on this big, gracious bear-hug of a record.

Live from New York, etc.

A review of Wednesday night's Tool show at the Izod Center, with pics by Laal.

I loved Tool in middle school, but I never really pegged them as a band that would hang around this long, and mean as much as they do to so many. Tool represents a substantial continuation of the prog tradition, and as demonstrated by the sold-out Izod show, their work also functions as great pop: metal-oriented but not necessarily -governed; there's just as much psychedelia and art rock, not to mention alt-rock, in there; and don't forget that Maynard is Joni Mitchell–obsessed. If all you know of them is "Sober," you owe it to yourself to hear Lateralus.

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And a preview of tonight's Jozef Van Wissem/Jim Jarmusch show at Issue Project Room. I've loved Jarmusch almost as long as I've loved Tool, but until I heard Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity, his new record with Van Wissem, I never really thought of him as a musician. Re: Van Wissem, I've enjoyed his last few records a whole lot, but this one might be my favorite. Check out a track from Concerning at Brooklyn Vegan.

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Lastly, Bill Ward's comment on the sorry state of the Black Sabbath reunion pains me. Somebody needs to fix this; Ward is not only a total gentleman, but one of rock's greatest drummers. I really hope that business nonsense doesn't get in the way of my only chance to see the original Sabbath onstage.