Thursday, June 24, 2010
Scream of the Week
Here's a classic. The story goes (according to my formidable research skills applied to a 30 second glance at wikipedia.org and allmusic.com, anyway), that former boxer, soldier, and Tiny Grimes vocalist Screamin' Jay Hawkins had envisioned his 1956 hit "I Put A Spell On You" as a ballad to feature his operatic, Cab Calloway inspired delivery, but he got wasted with his band and recorded the classic version in a drunken blackout.
It's hard to justify this recording as a mistake, though, given the rest of Hawkins' career, and the creepy lyrics to the song. Hawkins gloriously presented himself not as a great singer, which he could have done, but as a character from any number of matinee horror/adventure b-movies. It's all there on the recording, and this television appearance just makes it obvious. The cheap, darkly lit, gothic set, the parody-horror of a 5-and-10-cent store pair of false teeth, and of course the trademark bone through the nose and skull-on-a-stick sceptre all evoke not true terror, but the mid-Century "horror" trope. A generation that saw the true terror of the Holocaust and nuclear warfare coped with the experience in better times by poking fun at the feeling and distancing true threats with humor and an artificial world. And Hawkinns, for all his convulsions and wide eyes and speaking in tongues, keeps the audience comfortable with a konked out hairdo. It's a neon sign glaring at the audience saying, "I'll creep you out for now, but I still spend hours at a time in a barbershop making sure I still look like one of you when I'm done with the act."
But boy, does Hawkins commit to the performance. Through all the humor and stereotype, his screams sound awfully real, and they come from the gut the same way Roky Erickson's would later (without the friendly winking). It's one thing to let an audience in on a joke, but it's another to welcome people in so they can hear what they might not otherwise want to hear. This song, and this performance, is all about control, and the need to live in a magical world outside this one to have any control.
Is it too much an extension of metaphor to say that "I Put A Spell On You" is about the nascent Civil Rights movement? Consciously, it probably is. But on one hand, it's not too much of a stretch to say that this song directly says in the lyrics, and indirectly says in the performance, "I can't get what I want in this world, but I am entitled to have it, so I'll just change the world to one in which I have what I want." A man who, due to his skin color and background, can only aspire to serve richer, paler people, can serve them by fantasizing a world in which he can kill them and put their head on a stick.
This kind of thing is hardly unique in African American culture, either, or I wouldn't be so quick to buy my own interpretation. While watching this clip this morning, I decided that it's time to start a series in this blog, profiling African American science fiction fans in music. That sounds a little silly until you seriously look at the list of folks to profile. Just off the top of my head: Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, Anthony Braxton, Michael Jackson and Doctor Octagon come to mind without thinking too much, and I remember other examples like John Coltranes titles in his late career that frequently touch on outer space and astrology, and the opening minute or so of the seminal De La Soul album Three Feet High and Rising, featuring the creepily (and comically) intoned "Blood Sucking Freaks, just like yo momma." I could probably go on like this for weeks if I'm not careful, and I invite your suggestions for other examples. But they all, on a fundamental and occasionally explicit level, say the same thing: as a black man in America, I have to live in a world I don't want, but I can at least fantasize about a different world as an artist, and show you the power of which I am capable.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Free Improvisation, Memory, and Recording.
I'm just back from Brooklyn, where I spent the weekend recording my free improvisation quartet, Carlos' Red Shoes. I suppose I'm pretty happy with the results - I'll post tracks here as soon as they become available - but recording improvisation is always a massive head trip to me, and I generally find my own thoughts more interesting than the recorded results when I record unplanned music.
About ten years ago, I did a recording session of some improvisation, and one the players (I wish I could remember who, sorry) told me, "look, improvisation is always more fun to do than to listen to, so there's no point in worrying about how it sounds." As jaded as that perspective is, it really does take the pressure off the musician to come up with something engaging off the top of his or her head, and I find it helpful to remember it when I'm sitting in the corner with furrowed brow, trying to figure out what to play (which is more often than I'd like, but sometimes the best thing to add to a sound is nothing else, too). Call me an idealist, but I have a different take on what I'm doing when I improvise freely - my goal is still to have fun doing it, but I also think total improvisation can be the best way to address a moment as it happens - right now, I don't really want to hear a Serge Gainsbourg tune, I think I'd rather hear a tuba played with a saxophone mouthpiece, and if I'm improvising, I have the extreme luxury of playing my tuba with a saxophone mouthpiece right now, and I get to hear it. Because of this approach, I tend to forget pretty much everything I played right after I've played it. Partly because the moment is passed, and what I played doesn't serve a purpose for me anymore, and partly because I was so darn busy playing the stuff that I couldn't really make a note of what I was playing. The other guys in CRS tell me that I had a pretty nice extended tuba solo going on at one point, and I do remember that at one point everyone stopped playing except for me, and they all came in again at the same time and I had a good feeling. But I have no idea what I played, for how long, and whether it felt good because it sounded good. It didn't matter at the time and I can't really go back and play it again anyway. But the strange thing to me is that in a week or so when I get the rough mixes from Sunday, I'll know exactly what that sounded like, and if it's good enough to make the cut and we release it, anyone who wants to know what my playing is like will have that moment to listen to and come up with an impression of my musical approach.
I wouldn't say that it was pointless to make that moment permanent. On one hand, I enjoy some recordings that I understand to be completely and freely improvised and I'm glad that those particular moments have been made permanent. On the other hand, well, CRS has had trouble with clubs and gigs, and maybe yesterday we played something that will catch the right ears, and they'll hire us to play, and we'll make back a little bit of the money that we spend to keep the band going. I think I will say, though, that a recorded improvisation is a completely different entity than the actual improvisation that got recorded. It's pure chance that the recording sounds like it does, that the moments we were playing were the same moments that microphones were present and that zeros and ones were arranged on a hard drive in a specific order to make a machine reproduce the sounds of that moment. But there's no going back to change that data now. What had been a flexible, reactive, fluid moment is played back the same way, every time, with no change, for eternity. It almost feels like I have no part in the recording part of recorded improvisation, and the stuff on that hard drive is not what I played in the same way a framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence is not the actual birth of a nation from a rebellious British colony.
And at the same time, what we played yesterday was in response to a strange moment. It wasn't just what we felt like playing at the time. It was what we felt like playing at the time, with microphones pointed at us, and a guy in the other room making sure that what we felt like playing was being made into a permanent thing, a list of numbers that will not change once we're done with the technical fiddling. Now, that's as valid a moment as any moment we might spend on stage, or in a rehearsal space, or wherever, but it's no more typical a situation in which I might make up some music than if I were to be riding on the back of a zebra down Canal street with a tuba in my lap.
I will know, in a few weeks, once I've forgotten the weather, and the conversation I had had the night before, and the endorphin rush when Dave and Dan kicked in together at the end of my tuba solo, whether what we recorded is worth listening to. But as a performer, there's really no way I can listen to my music and tell you whether it's any good or not. Not while I'm playing it, because I don't have time and I'm focused on playing the stuff. And not while I listen back, because I hear what I thought were mistakes at the time and I hear the band giving up on what we were trying to do and just floundering for a few minutes - all while you just hear music, the completed result of what we ended up playing at that moment. On some level, that's always true. I know things about the structure and method and style of my playing that you don't and likely can't hear, and in exchange, I can't hear the music I make in the way it's listened to by anyone besides me.
And in the meantime, I never have these thoughts when I listen to a Derek Bailey album. They don't matter. I can't hear them and I don't care. And while I still generally say that there's no good in recording improvised music, that what we play with no preparation is not intended to be heard past the moment in which we decided to play it, I can't say I've ever turned down the opportunity to listen to a few favorite albums multiple times just because I knew that the music was only to be played live once and then never revisited.
About ten years ago, I did a recording session of some improvisation, and one the players (I wish I could remember who, sorry) told me, "look, improvisation is always more fun to do than to listen to, so there's no point in worrying about how it sounds." As jaded as that perspective is, it really does take the pressure off the musician to come up with something engaging off the top of his or her head, and I find it helpful to remember it when I'm sitting in the corner with furrowed brow, trying to figure out what to play (which is more often than I'd like, but sometimes the best thing to add to a sound is nothing else, too). Call me an idealist, but I have a different take on what I'm doing when I improvise freely - my goal is still to have fun doing it, but I also think total improvisation can be the best way to address a moment as it happens - right now, I don't really want to hear a Serge Gainsbourg tune, I think I'd rather hear a tuba played with a saxophone mouthpiece, and if I'm improvising, I have the extreme luxury of playing my tuba with a saxophone mouthpiece right now, and I get to hear it. Because of this approach, I tend to forget pretty much everything I played right after I've played it. Partly because the moment is passed, and what I played doesn't serve a purpose for me anymore, and partly because I was so darn busy playing the stuff that I couldn't really make a note of what I was playing. The other guys in CRS tell me that I had a pretty nice extended tuba solo going on at one point, and I do remember that at one point everyone stopped playing except for me, and they all came in again at the same time and I had a good feeling. But I have no idea what I played, for how long, and whether it felt good because it sounded good. It didn't matter at the time and I can't really go back and play it again anyway. But the strange thing to me is that in a week or so when I get the rough mixes from Sunday, I'll know exactly what that sounded like, and if it's good enough to make the cut and we release it, anyone who wants to know what my playing is like will have that moment to listen to and come up with an impression of my musical approach.
I wouldn't say that it was pointless to make that moment permanent. On one hand, I enjoy some recordings that I understand to be completely and freely improvised and I'm glad that those particular moments have been made permanent. On the other hand, well, CRS has had trouble with clubs and gigs, and maybe yesterday we played something that will catch the right ears, and they'll hire us to play, and we'll make back a little bit of the money that we spend to keep the band going. I think I will say, though, that a recorded improvisation is a completely different entity than the actual improvisation that got recorded. It's pure chance that the recording sounds like it does, that the moments we were playing were the same moments that microphones were present and that zeros and ones were arranged on a hard drive in a specific order to make a machine reproduce the sounds of that moment. But there's no going back to change that data now. What had been a flexible, reactive, fluid moment is played back the same way, every time, with no change, for eternity. It almost feels like I have no part in the recording part of recorded improvisation, and the stuff on that hard drive is not what I played in the same way a framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence is not the actual birth of a nation from a rebellious British colony.
And at the same time, what we played yesterday was in response to a strange moment. It wasn't just what we felt like playing at the time. It was what we felt like playing at the time, with microphones pointed at us, and a guy in the other room making sure that what we felt like playing was being made into a permanent thing, a list of numbers that will not change once we're done with the technical fiddling. Now, that's as valid a moment as any moment we might spend on stage, or in a rehearsal space, or wherever, but it's no more typical a situation in which I might make up some music than if I were to be riding on the back of a zebra down Canal street with a tuba in my lap.
I will know, in a few weeks, once I've forgotten the weather, and the conversation I had had the night before, and the endorphin rush when Dave and Dan kicked in together at the end of my tuba solo, whether what we recorded is worth listening to. But as a performer, there's really no way I can listen to my music and tell you whether it's any good or not. Not while I'm playing it, because I don't have time and I'm focused on playing the stuff. And not while I listen back, because I hear what I thought were mistakes at the time and I hear the band giving up on what we were trying to do and just floundering for a few minutes - all while you just hear music, the completed result of what we ended up playing at that moment. On some level, that's always true. I know things about the structure and method and style of my playing that you don't and likely can't hear, and in exchange, I can't hear the music I make in the way it's listened to by anyone besides me.
And in the meantime, I never have these thoughts when I listen to a Derek Bailey album. They don't matter. I can't hear them and I don't care. And while I still generally say that there's no good in recording improvised music, that what we play with no preparation is not intended to be heard past the moment in which we decided to play it, I can't say I've ever turned down the opportunity to listen to a few favorite albums multiple times just because I knew that the music was only to be played live once and then never revisited.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Scream of the Week
The best screams don't always have to come from the human voice. One of my favorite screamers of all time is Pharoah Sandars.
I chose this live performance of the Coltrane Quintet from 1966 mostly because Sanders takes the first solo, but you can hear his astonishing screaming throughout his career, and especially when he played with Coltrane. Here, the most obvious examples of what I'm talking about happen at 2:20, 4:40, 6:00, and 8:00 of the clip.
To my ears, the piercing squeal that Sanders achieves, almost always built up with rising glissandi, and similarly trailing off into Ayler-like smears down in pitch, have that same kind of existential rawness that I talked about Roky Erickson having a couple weeks ago. The context makes it maybe a little less jarring than Erickson's screams, since this is some pretty up-tempo, chaotic, screamy music to begin with. But it's also probably a little more direct because of the same context.
There's also a sense in which each of Sanders' screamy moments in this solo serve as a microcosm of the solo itself. Each of those moments is a little louder, higher, and more human than the one before it, and like the ahh-ahhh-ACHOO effect of each moment, he builds over four minutes, and then trails away. Sanders isn't working much with pitch motives or melody in his solo (that's Coltrane's job in this group, and by the way, Sanders really never avoids melody or harmony as a player, with the exception of his work with Coltrane - I suspect it's an overlooked clue about the degree of control and arrangement that Coltrane had in his freer, noisier performances that he could convince Sanders to focus almost entirely on non-tonal, gestural, and screamy playing with the group, even if Sanders' own interests lay elsewhere), but he builds a long-term structure on repeated ideas in a way that reminds me a lot of Lester Young (no joke!).
I chose this live performance of the Coltrane Quintet from 1966 mostly because Sanders takes the first solo, but you can hear his astonishing screaming throughout his career, and especially when he played with Coltrane. Here, the most obvious examples of what I'm talking about happen at 2:20, 4:40, 6:00, and 8:00 of the clip.
To my ears, the piercing squeal that Sanders achieves, almost always built up with rising glissandi, and similarly trailing off into Ayler-like smears down in pitch, have that same kind of existential rawness that I talked about Roky Erickson having a couple weeks ago. The context makes it maybe a little less jarring than Erickson's screams, since this is some pretty up-tempo, chaotic, screamy music to begin with. But it's also probably a little more direct because of the same context.
There's also a sense in which each of Sanders' screamy moments in this solo serve as a microcosm of the solo itself. Each of those moments is a little louder, higher, and more human than the one before it, and like the ahh-ahhh-ACHOO effect of each moment, he builds over four minutes, and then trails away. Sanders isn't working much with pitch motives or melody in his solo (that's Coltrane's job in this group, and by the way, Sanders really never avoids melody or harmony as a player, with the exception of his work with Coltrane - I suspect it's an overlooked clue about the degree of control and arrangement that Coltrane had in his freer, noisier performances that he could convince Sanders to focus almost entirely on non-tonal, gestural, and screamy playing with the group, even if Sanders' own interests lay elsewhere), but he builds a long-term structure on repeated ideas in a way that reminds me a lot of Lester Young (no joke!).
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Destroying Classics for Fun and Profit.
Okay, not profit. But maybe to cover expenses.
I've been putting off this review of Puttin' On The Ritz's new project, a full scale re-arrangement and performance of the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat for several reasons. One reason was due to family obligations, but the rest have been musical. Here's a link to singer BJ Rubin's blog post about the album, with a link to a free download of the whole thing, and a youtube clip of the recording of "Sister Ray:"
http://feelfreefeelfree.blogspot.com/2010/06/puttin-on-ritz.html
To put my personal connections out of the way first: Kevin Shea, the drummer (and for a long time, the other half) of Puttin' On The Ritz has been a friend of mine for 15 or 20 years. We go way back, and have played together a lot. I also once sat in for BJ during a POTR gig at a loft party in Brooklyn and had a grand old time.
Kevin is brilliant. No one plays drums like he does, and in the right context he is a powerfully engaging, fun, and almost shocking performer. In the wrong contexts he can be overpowering, but he has the wisdom to keep those situations to a minimum. BJ is an engaging and charismatic performer, too, and one of the worst singers you'll ever applaud at a show. That's the schtick - POTR was originally a duo that stuck to the Great American Songbook, with no reference to pitch and only occasional attempts at keeping the rhythm together. If it sounds awful, well, it was awful, and hilarious, and pretty refreshing a few years ago.
Eventually, all projects mature, even the deliberately immature ones. White Light/White Heat sees the group expanded with bass and a horn line, and the deliberately amateurish sloppiness is mostly gone from the band, save for Rubin's highly stylized, mostly pitchless vocal delivery. For this project, that's really too bad. I think it's a little easy to do what POTR did a before with older material that's pretty removed from our generation. With the decision to recast the Velvet Underground, though, the band commited a kind of cultural suicide. Folks my age and Kevin and BJ's age still worship White Light/White Heat and Velvet Underground and Nico, and the attachment to the "classic" label is real for us. While it's still possible to have a respect for Rodgers and Hart, it's difficult in 2010 to feel the kind of cultural resonance for Old Broadway that we feel for a group that really started punk rock and indie rock and the whole nihilistic slacker thing that white people in their 30s happily accept as the label we got stuck with.
I think the mistake that POTR made in their deconstruction of the Velvet Underground is that they didn't get their own joke, or maybe they got it but they blew the delivery by overcommitting, like a nervous guy on a first date who tries too hard. There's some very, very nice playing from some of my favorite New York weird jazz musicians on this record, but it's wasted on the wrong context. If the intent of this record is to kill idols, then there needs to be violence, but the arrangements are too polished and too committed, and they barely make reference to the songs they're recasting. If the intent was to show respect with a new voice, well, songs like "Sister Ray," as grand as it is, are too simple re-envision, and rely on the performance for success - and that's precisely what's missing from the POTR version. And if it's a parody, then it's just too high-concept. These guys love the Velvet Underground and they're only able to parody their own fondness for the record. BJ's bad singing, when applied to songs we're used to hearing sung by Mel Torme or Nat King Cole or someone, is hilarious because BJ's commitment to his singing is obvious, and the contrast with what we expect to hear from a lounge singer works. But Lou Reed is a bad singer, with a weak voice, and a committed but poor delivery. So what's added by doing that again, but louder? I really wanted to have an answer to that question besides "nothing," but instead I just couldn't get through the record. It's a shame.
I've been putting off this review of Puttin' On The Ritz's new project, a full scale re-arrangement and performance of the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat for several reasons. One reason was due to family obligations, but the rest have been musical. Here's a link to singer BJ Rubin's blog post about the album, with a link to a free download of the whole thing, and a youtube clip of the recording of "Sister Ray:"
http://feelfreefeelfree.blogspot.com/2010/06/puttin-on-ritz.html
To put my personal connections out of the way first: Kevin Shea, the drummer (and for a long time, the other half) of Puttin' On The Ritz has been a friend of mine for 15 or 20 years. We go way back, and have played together a lot. I also once sat in for BJ during a POTR gig at a loft party in Brooklyn and had a grand old time.
Kevin is brilliant. No one plays drums like he does, and in the right context he is a powerfully engaging, fun, and almost shocking performer. In the wrong contexts he can be overpowering, but he has the wisdom to keep those situations to a minimum. BJ is an engaging and charismatic performer, too, and one of the worst singers you'll ever applaud at a show. That's the schtick - POTR was originally a duo that stuck to the Great American Songbook, with no reference to pitch and only occasional attempts at keeping the rhythm together. If it sounds awful, well, it was awful, and hilarious, and pretty refreshing a few years ago.
Eventually, all projects mature, even the deliberately immature ones. White Light/White Heat sees the group expanded with bass and a horn line, and the deliberately amateurish sloppiness is mostly gone from the band, save for Rubin's highly stylized, mostly pitchless vocal delivery. For this project, that's really too bad. I think it's a little easy to do what POTR did a before with older material that's pretty removed from our generation. With the decision to recast the Velvet Underground, though, the band commited a kind of cultural suicide. Folks my age and Kevin and BJ's age still worship White Light/White Heat and Velvet Underground and Nico, and the attachment to the "classic" label is real for us. While it's still possible to have a respect for Rodgers and Hart, it's difficult in 2010 to feel the kind of cultural resonance for Old Broadway that we feel for a group that really started punk rock and indie rock and the whole nihilistic slacker thing that white people in their 30s happily accept as the label we got stuck with.
I think the mistake that POTR made in their deconstruction of the Velvet Underground is that they didn't get their own joke, or maybe they got it but they blew the delivery by overcommitting, like a nervous guy on a first date who tries too hard. There's some very, very nice playing from some of my favorite New York weird jazz musicians on this record, but it's wasted on the wrong context. If the intent of this record is to kill idols, then there needs to be violence, but the arrangements are too polished and too committed, and they barely make reference to the songs they're recasting. If the intent was to show respect with a new voice, well, songs like "Sister Ray," as grand as it is, are too simple re-envision, and rely on the performance for success - and that's precisely what's missing from the POTR version. And if it's a parody, then it's just too high-concept. These guys love the Velvet Underground and they're only able to parody their own fondness for the record. BJ's bad singing, when applied to songs we're used to hearing sung by Mel Torme or Nat King Cole or someone, is hilarious because BJ's commitment to his singing is obvious, and the contrast with what we expect to hear from a lounge singer works. But Lou Reed is a bad singer, with a weak voice, and a committed but poor delivery. So what's added by doing that again, but louder? I really wanted to have an answer to that question besides "nothing," but instead I just couldn't get through the record. It's a shame.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Scream of the Week
After last week's existential bellow, I thought it would be a good idea to get a little more traditional with the screaming. Starting with the first cry of the title sans band, Poly Styrene lets forth a a continuous, adolescent, slightly whiny scream of defiance and anger for the entire performance of "Oh, Bondage, Up Yours" that is more punk than punk.
With the passing of some 30 years since this record was made, it's pretty easy to hear X Ray Spex as classic early British punk, but in many ways the band were a scene unto themselves. The Ramones and the Sex Pistols both excelled in a kind of bratty, sarcastic shock tactic that was really at the core of a lot of early punk, celebrating child abuse ("Beat on the brat with a baseball bat"), tearing down idols with biting sarcasm ("God save the Queen. We mean it, man!"), even celebrating Nazism with a shallow, meaningless, our-parents-are-going-to-HATE-this nihilism (I won't offend readers by posting the image here, but I will post the link and let you decide - this is Siouxsie Sioux in her usual club hopping outfit circa 1975 or so: http://images.newstatesman.com/articles/2008/1026/026_p22.2.jpg). But there is no winking here: Poly Styrene, at the time she recorded "Some say little girls should be seen and not heard," was a little girl trying desperately to be seen and heard. Instead of terrorizing the old guard with the threat that she might be trouble, she's trying to BE trouble, to really break the shackles of English polite society. It's barely even a metaphor.
Saying it better than I can, from some documentary I haven't seen but need to track down soon:
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
People made a video and I didn't know about it.
By which I mean the duo of Mary Halvorson and Kevin Shea. It's not new, nor is the song, but I need to get out of the 1960s on this blog as quickly as possible:
Later tonight I intend to review one of two ironic cover albums that Kevin has done this year - Puttin' On The Ritz's cover of the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat. He has also apparently recorded a version of Kind of Blue with Moppa Elliot's band Mostly Other People Do The Killing.
I will have a LOT to say about Kevin's involvement in two projects to re-record entire classic albums from an era before he was born. But in the meantime, this is a nice, short song to get you accustomed to Kevin's playing and his fondness for dropping stuff during performances.
Later tonight I intend to review one of two ironic cover albums that Kevin has done this year - Puttin' On The Ritz's cover of the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat. He has also apparently recorded a version of Kind of Blue with Moppa Elliot's band Mostly Other People Do The Killing.
I will have a LOT to say about Kevin's involvement in two projects to re-record entire classic albums from an era before he was born. But in the meantime, this is a nice, short song to get you accustomed to Kevin's playing and his fondness for dropping stuff during performances.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Scream of the Week
I wanted to do a little essay on Great Screams in Music History, but I got a little overwhelmed thinking of the possibilities. So I hereby designate every Thursday as Scream of the Week Day. This week, the Godfather of Psychedelic Screams:
First, full disclosure: I studied tuba with Roky Erickson's youngest brother, Sumner, and we became good friends, and I have met Roky a few times and he always remembers me. Not that it presents a conflict of interest or anything, but... well, it's an opportunity to brag.
Roky Erickson is one of the great masters of screaming, and he lets loose multiple times in this, his biggest hit and one of the greatest and earliest examples of psychedelic rock. I think he takes off from Little Richard's (also brilliant) screams, and uses them similarly, to punctuate phrases and put climactic moments over the top. Little Richard clearly gets it from gospel music, and so does Screaming Jay Hawkins in his own weird way, but if I trace it all the way back I'll end up with a book, and anyway every week is a chance to further discuss the great screamers.
Anyway, Roky starts where Little Richard leaves off, but when Little Richard goes in with a nice, satisfying "Woooooo!" it's all party. Roky gets much, much deeper, just opening his mouth wide, and shaking his head a bit and letting loose from the depths of his gut. It's usually "AAAAAAAAWH!" But it's more than that - it's the unfettered cry from the core of his being, uncluttered by consonants, or any effort to make a sound in English or any other language. It could be absolutely terrifying, and I've heard a few recordings where Roky is, in fact, absolutely terrifying. Here, it's more existential. The song is already an affirmation of existence and importance - you might be mean, but I'm more important than you think, and you're gonna miss me. So pretty much every minute - at the top of the song, the top of the second verse at 1:05 and on the way out of the song at 2:05 - he blows like a train whistle.
It's not the only scream in Roky's vocabulary, by the way, even if it might be the one that makes him an important singer. Check out that weird bark at 1:34, right before the second bridge. I'm not even sure what that sound is, besides intense. I am reasonably certain that this will not be Roky's only Scream of the Week - there are a lot of screams of his worth writing about.
First, full disclosure: I studied tuba with Roky Erickson's youngest brother, Sumner, and we became good friends, and I have met Roky a few times and he always remembers me. Not that it presents a conflict of interest or anything, but... well, it's an opportunity to brag.
Roky Erickson is one of the great masters of screaming, and he lets loose multiple times in this, his biggest hit and one of the greatest and earliest examples of psychedelic rock. I think he takes off from Little Richard's (also brilliant) screams, and uses them similarly, to punctuate phrases and put climactic moments over the top. Little Richard clearly gets it from gospel music, and so does Screaming Jay Hawkins in his own weird way, but if I trace it all the way back I'll end up with a book, and anyway every week is a chance to further discuss the great screamers.
Anyway, Roky starts where Little Richard leaves off, but when Little Richard goes in with a nice, satisfying "Woooooo!" it's all party. Roky gets much, much deeper, just opening his mouth wide, and shaking his head a bit and letting loose from the depths of his gut. It's usually "AAAAAAAAWH!" But it's more than that - it's the unfettered cry from the core of his being, uncluttered by consonants, or any effort to make a sound in English or any other language. It could be absolutely terrifying, and I've heard a few recordings where Roky is, in fact, absolutely terrifying. Here, it's more existential. The song is already an affirmation of existence and importance - you might be mean, but I'm more important than you think, and you're gonna miss me. So pretty much every minute - at the top of the song, the top of the second verse at 1:05 and on the way out of the song at 2:05 - he blows like a train whistle.
It's not the only scream in Roky's vocabulary, by the way, even if it might be the one that makes him an important singer. Check out that weird bark at 1:34, right before the second bridge. I'm not even sure what that sound is, besides intense. I am reasonably certain that this will not be Roky's only Scream of the Week - there are a lot of screams of his worth writing about.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Albert Ayler, part III.
I originally wanted to finish my opening volley on Ayler with a 1966 performance of "Truth Is Marching In" from Berlin. Actually, I wanted to do write on Live In Greenwich Village from the same year, but I couldn't find a handy youtube clip to link to. Turns out that's fine, though, because I found yet another 1966 performance of the same tune that makes a pretty darn interesting comparison to me.
Here's the Berlin performance - to my ears, this recording is a little harsh with high-end, and the violin is a bit too hot in the mix, so be ready for that:
Looking back over the last two posts, I think I've been so eager to talk about my argument that Ayler is less far out than he sounds that I haven't really talked much about how he sounds. This performance has a lot of what I think of as typical Ayler - the simple melodies and repeated riffs, the cluttered, in-your-face textures, the kind of smeary yowl that he plays when other folks with his technical facility might go for Coltrane-like showers of arpeggios and scales. The opening and closing sections are really lovely - very reminiscent of a New Orleans funeral - but importantly, Ayler likes to include all the cracks in the surface that appear in a good field recording. There are deliberately sour and out of tune notes all over the place, and the musicians are free to leave the choir playing the main melody and chatter along in parallel, like folks talking during a performance, or maybe weeping and wailing during a funeral. After a couple centuries of listening to big and loud groups work their hardest to sound like one voice, the seeming lack of cohesion that Ayler goes for can be pretty disconcerting. Fifty years ago, you either got this sound or you didn't. And while free jazz is certainly a sound that many people are used to now, it's still far from the kind of cliche that you can safely play in Starbucks without people noticing. Of course, that's the point of playing like that. Pretty in a vacuum becomes boring. If you want to get from pretty to beautiful, you have to include contrast, and you have to include enough ugly to make things more like your life. That last chord is the simplest and most common major triad that you can hear in last chords dating back at least to the 15th Century. It's no big deal. But the ugly moments in this performance (most free jazz fans won't call the music ugly, but we're being a little disingenuous, I think. We just like ugly and try to rationalize it later) make it sound transcendent. We all just went through all that together - it was loud, and chaotic, and we couldn't get a grasp on what was going on, but now we're through it, and back on solid ground, but transformed. Shoot, Greek tragedy works on that premise.
Ayler's music on the surface level contains a lot to think about and discuss, and it's pretty understandable that there hasn't been a lot of discussion of what's going on beyond that surface. Just about everything I've read about Ayler's music can fit into two categories. There's the introductory spiel: Ayler has a huge sound with a wide vibrato, he likes folk melodies and really simple tunes, and when he's not playing the tune, it's loud and chaotic and can be really hard to take. Or there's the blind fandom approach: Ayler is deeply spiritual, truly free, uplifting and if you don't get it, you just don't get it. I certainly have no argument with either of those angles on Ayler's music, and there is nothing exclusive about either of them. But there is a middle ground that doesn't get a lot of discussion. For all the attention to the "free" part of free jazz, if it weren't still jazz it wouldn't sound the way it does. We hear total chaos every day when we walk out into the street, but it takes some tradition and coordination to turn that into a recognizable performance. In this performance, Ayler sticks to a very clearly delineated form, and for as much freedom as everyone in the group is allowed, they move in lock step from section to section. It opens with that lovely, New Orleans inspired chorale, of course, and stays there for over half of the performance. At 4:12 in the above clip, Ayler introduces new material - that almost Irish sounding shuffle riff, and the rest of the band is right there with him before he even finishes the first phrase. That B section doesn't last long - at 4:40, Ayler shoots up into the altissimo register of the sax, and that's the signal for the group to join him in fast, loud, chaotic blowing. It's the only properly free section of the performance, and again it starts on Ayler's signal and everyone knows to go right into it (it's also the first time the group leaves the firmly entrenched tonal center of the tune. I would not call it atonal, though, which implies using the western pitch system in a way that avoids the implication of a tonic. This is non-tonal playing - pitch is not really the point here at all.). The free blowing goes on for almost exactly one minute, at which point Ayler re-introduces the jig theme and again, no one in the band misses the cue. And at 5:57, it's a return to the opening chorale, shortened to one minute this time, and it winds up on that gloriously quiet last chord. So the form here is ABCBA - that's the more-or-less classic arch form that Duke Ellington famously used a lot, and I think that indicates that Ayler was playing jazz with a depth greater than the often acknowledged nods in his music to Sidney Bechet's sound on the sax and the improvised counterpoint of New Orleans second line bands.
In fact, I think Ayler's attention to form in his performances is something that he has in common with Ellington, George Russell, Stan Kenton, and a few other composers and arrangers of big bands, but it hadn't cropped up in a lot of smaller groups before, who most often are content to stick to the head-solos-head form that makes up probably 90% of bebop and post-bebop jazz.
Funnily enough, on some level, it's the formal aspects of Ayler's compositions that identify tunes for people, even if they don't notice it. I came across this clip from Slug's Saloon in New York from the same year, also titled "Truth Is Marching In."
I don't know who applied the titles to these two performances, but it's not the same tune at all, and not even the same form. I can only assume that it's the opening chorale followed by triple-meter riff followed by basically free playing that gives the impression that they're the same performance. That's funny to me, because this performance is also just as tightly played in just as clear a form, but it's not an Ellingtonian arch. I hear it as a Rondo, which is a form that dates way, way back, and Mozart used it all the time. After the intro, that riff is used as a refrain that pops up between sections of contrasting material. So the whole performance goes Intro-ABACADA(etc.). I'd like to know who identified these two performances and gave them the same title. If it was a listener, well, it was just a careless listener. But if it was Ayler announcing the tunes as such, there's a whole discussion to had some other time about what Ayler considered a composition, or whether he attached much significance to his titles at all.
Here's the Berlin performance - to my ears, this recording is a little harsh with high-end, and the violin is a bit too hot in the mix, so be ready for that:
Looking back over the last two posts, I think I've been so eager to talk about my argument that Ayler is less far out than he sounds that I haven't really talked much about how he sounds. This performance has a lot of what I think of as typical Ayler - the simple melodies and repeated riffs, the cluttered, in-your-face textures, the kind of smeary yowl that he plays when other folks with his technical facility might go for Coltrane-like showers of arpeggios and scales. The opening and closing sections are really lovely - very reminiscent of a New Orleans funeral - but importantly, Ayler likes to include all the cracks in the surface that appear in a good field recording. There are deliberately sour and out of tune notes all over the place, and the musicians are free to leave the choir playing the main melody and chatter along in parallel, like folks talking during a performance, or maybe weeping and wailing during a funeral. After a couple centuries of listening to big and loud groups work their hardest to sound like one voice, the seeming lack of cohesion that Ayler goes for can be pretty disconcerting. Fifty years ago, you either got this sound or you didn't. And while free jazz is certainly a sound that many people are used to now, it's still far from the kind of cliche that you can safely play in Starbucks without people noticing. Of course, that's the point of playing like that. Pretty in a vacuum becomes boring. If you want to get from pretty to beautiful, you have to include contrast, and you have to include enough ugly to make things more like your life. That last chord is the simplest and most common major triad that you can hear in last chords dating back at least to the 15th Century. It's no big deal. But the ugly moments in this performance (most free jazz fans won't call the music ugly, but we're being a little disingenuous, I think. We just like ugly and try to rationalize it later) make it sound transcendent. We all just went through all that together - it was loud, and chaotic, and we couldn't get a grasp on what was going on, but now we're through it, and back on solid ground, but transformed. Shoot, Greek tragedy works on that premise.
Ayler's music on the surface level contains a lot to think about and discuss, and it's pretty understandable that there hasn't been a lot of discussion of what's going on beyond that surface. Just about everything I've read about Ayler's music can fit into two categories. There's the introductory spiel: Ayler has a huge sound with a wide vibrato, he likes folk melodies and really simple tunes, and when he's not playing the tune, it's loud and chaotic and can be really hard to take. Or there's the blind fandom approach: Ayler is deeply spiritual, truly free, uplifting and if you don't get it, you just don't get it. I certainly have no argument with either of those angles on Ayler's music, and there is nothing exclusive about either of them. But there is a middle ground that doesn't get a lot of discussion. For all the attention to the "free" part of free jazz, if it weren't still jazz it wouldn't sound the way it does. We hear total chaos every day when we walk out into the street, but it takes some tradition and coordination to turn that into a recognizable performance. In this performance, Ayler sticks to a very clearly delineated form, and for as much freedom as everyone in the group is allowed, they move in lock step from section to section. It opens with that lovely, New Orleans inspired chorale, of course, and stays there for over half of the performance. At 4:12 in the above clip, Ayler introduces new material - that almost Irish sounding shuffle riff, and the rest of the band is right there with him before he even finishes the first phrase. That B section doesn't last long - at 4:40, Ayler shoots up into the altissimo register of the sax, and that's the signal for the group to join him in fast, loud, chaotic blowing. It's the only properly free section of the performance, and again it starts on Ayler's signal and everyone knows to go right into it (it's also the first time the group leaves the firmly entrenched tonal center of the tune. I would not call it atonal, though, which implies using the western pitch system in a way that avoids the implication of a tonic. This is non-tonal playing - pitch is not really the point here at all.). The free blowing goes on for almost exactly one minute, at which point Ayler re-introduces the jig theme and again, no one in the band misses the cue. And at 5:57, it's a return to the opening chorale, shortened to one minute this time, and it winds up on that gloriously quiet last chord. So the form here is ABCBA - that's the more-or-less classic arch form that Duke Ellington famously used a lot, and I think that indicates that Ayler was playing jazz with a depth greater than the often acknowledged nods in his music to Sidney Bechet's sound on the sax and the improvised counterpoint of New Orleans second line bands.
In fact, I think Ayler's attention to form in his performances is something that he has in common with Ellington, George Russell, Stan Kenton, and a few other composers and arrangers of big bands, but it hadn't cropped up in a lot of smaller groups before, who most often are content to stick to the head-solos-head form that makes up probably 90% of bebop and post-bebop jazz.
Funnily enough, on some level, it's the formal aspects of Ayler's compositions that identify tunes for people, even if they don't notice it. I came across this clip from Slug's Saloon in New York from the same year, also titled "Truth Is Marching In."
I don't know who applied the titles to these two performances, but it's not the same tune at all, and not even the same form. I can only assume that it's the opening chorale followed by triple-meter riff followed by basically free playing that gives the impression that they're the same performance. That's funny to me, because this performance is also just as tightly played in just as clear a form, but it's not an Ellingtonian arch. I hear it as a Rondo, which is a form that dates way, way back, and Mozart used it all the time. After the intro, that riff is used as a refrain that pops up between sections of contrasting material. So the whole performance goes Intro-ABACADA(etc.). I'd like to know who identified these two performances and gave them the same title. If it was a listener, well, it was just a careless listener. But if it was Ayler announcing the tunes as such, there's a whole discussion to had some other time about what Ayler considered a composition, or whether he attached much significance to his titles at all.
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