STUFFS & THINGS & THINGS & STUFF (STTS-23)
Frank Lowe, the Dead C, Wadada Leo Smith, Earth, Wind & Fire, Shabaka Hutchings, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, Kim Gordon & Dimitri Tamblas, Derek Bailey & Min Tanaka, Ego Summit, show meme thingie
Random shuffle drops me deep into charged territory where I have no immediate way to get any bearings or leverage, i.e. “The Loweski Pt. 2,” recorded in 1973 by tenor saxophonist Frank Lowe with an all-star/all-scar wrecking-crew lineup of (a 21-year-old) William Parker on bass, Rashid Sinan on drums, Raymond Lee “The Wizard” Cheng on violin, and Joseph Jarman on soprano and alto saxes. The particularly astute among you have already recognized this as the exact lineup on Lowe’s holy Black Beings LP, also from 1973, but unlike some of the fiercely composed and performed themes on that album, “The Loweski” seems more like complete improvisation, and when I tell you that I have no bearings or leverage, “The Loweski Pt. 2” in particular starts at such a heightened and fevered pitch of anti-embouchre reed extrapolation between Jarman and Lowe, tangled so densely with Cheng’s violin chaos vectors, that I might as well be watching one of the monster scenes from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982, d. John Carpenter) instead of listening to a goddamn record. You can see why the purists and the traditionalists freaked out! And why this entire musical movement was effectively excised from popular history 30 years later by the Jazz docuseries on PBS (2001, d. Ken Burns).
For improvised music of another era and region, the random shuffle takes me from 12 minutes of Frank Lowe and friends in the NYC of 1973 to 20 minutes of the Dead C in the New Zealand of — now? Sometime this century, at least, and possibly even this decade. The track is called “Garage,” which is on the Future Artists album, which came out in 2007. Which is, my god, 17 years ago. Which in post-internet 21st Century years is basically . . . now! And I gotta tell you, after white-knuckling it through all 12 minutes of “The Loweski Pt. 2,” and going from those burning reeds/strings/drums textures to this kinda dribbling crude-rock half-blues lazy-drone from a good 5 or 6 albums after the Dead C chucked their repertoire and went fully improvised . . . nah, I’m not gonna make it for 19 more minutes, not now. Still love the Dead C forever. Back in ‘95 they were my Sex Pistols, or perhaps more accurately my No New York.
But here I am chasing records all day long and still didn’t even really know about an incredible epic masterpiece like Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers getting written, performed, recorded, and released way back in 2012. A four-CD box set album release, clocking in at over four and a half hours of music, spread across 19 compositions that Smith had spent 34 years writing, all about various Civil Rights heroes and other allies, named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and definitely feeling like it belongs in the “great book” category of musical works. This is a serious comparison, because sometimes I think music and literature work in a more similar way than might be immediately apparent; words are not the images and feelings they represent, and neither are lyrics, notes, and melodies, but yet they all represent and draw out so much. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a melodic/harmonic/rhythmic passage worth? (My answer: also one thousand, at least.)
Been listening to one episode of the Questlove Supreme podcast after another, non-stop interviews with so many great black (etc) musicians, ancient to the future. At the end of most episodes the host team goes around and shares what they learned from their guest and interview, and no one asked me, but I’ll tell you what I just learned from the episode with Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire: that only he and Maurice White generally sang all the vocals on Earth, Wind & Fire studio recordings. Just the two of them in the vocal booth, layering, harmonizing, and stacking vocal tracks. And now I’m listening to a buncha tracks and it’s so obvious and amazing and it blows my mind that I previously had no idea. I think I literally just assumed there were like 9 amazing vocalists in Earth, Wind & Fire, because that’s how good these two are. A second thing I learned on the episode and that I also now can’t unhear is Philip’s love of and influence from Brazilian music (he specifically names Milton Nascimento). And one more thing I kinda picked up on is that when Maurice White’s arranger, father figure, and general hit-production guru (not to mention one of the more undersung geniuses of American music history) Charles Stepney died suddenly of a heart attack at age 45 in 1976, the only person that came close to fulfilling that role for White afterwards was none other than eminent 1980s-pop cheeseball David Foster, who also filled a very similar pop-guru/writer/arranger role for Chicago not long after, after their dismissal of manager James William Guercio and death of Terry Kath had left them rudderless for a few years. I mean, “After the Love is Gone” (ARC/Columbia, 1979) is pretty undeniable, but soooo Fosterfied, and still kinda the beginning of the end, the monumental (and Fosterless) “Let’s Groove” (Columbia, 1981) notwithstanding.
One of my rules is always let the credits play until the end (yes a pox on these streaming service pop-ups where you have to scurry and push a goddamn button or two just to let the goddamn credits play like any true cinema aesthete would, I mean fuck), and while doing so just now noticed that Shabaka Hutchings, along with Neal Charles and Tom Skinner, is part of the “jazz trio” credited, along with the London Contemporary Orchestra, with playing Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which was released in 2012, a full five years before I was introduced to Hutchings by watching him absolutely kill it on tenor saxophone while wearing a dope tanktop/wool bucket hat ensemble with Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Five Blokes ensemble at the 2017 Chicago Jazz Festival. And I thought I was ahead of the Shabaka Hutchings curve! (By the way, I’m far from a Paul Thomas Anderson stan but love Boogie Nights forever and goddamn The Master was reeeeaaally good. My strong second favorite of his, so far, having not seen Phantom Thread or Licorice Pizza. 3rd place is Punch Drunk Love, 4th There Will Be Blood, 5th Magnolia I guess, but Hard Eight is probably better. I did like Magnolia better than Inherent Vice, but I don’t think it’s very good. I should give it a rewatch — more on this already parenthetical topic later. Maybe.)
Okay, think of the careers of Jimi Hendrix and Brian Wilson. You could call both of them acid casualties, in that a prodigious musical talent coupled with advanced (and quite frankly dangerous) 1960s mind expansion techniques allowed both of them to envision a truly awe-inspiring and almost literally godlike musical vista that ground down their respective careers and muse to a halt as they worked ceaselessly to capture the ineffable chemical impossible. Wilson was defeated by the SMiLE concept (not realized until 2004), and Hendrix was defeated by the First Rays of the New Rising Sun concept (not released until 1997, twenty-seven years after his death, with really bad cover art that Jimi would never have allowed). Even at the time of Hendrix’s tragically premature death in September of 1970, he hadn’t released an original studio recording for almost two years, since Electric Ladyland came out in October of 1968. Slowing him down further was another visionary move, his building of a state-of-the-art subterranean recording studio in the heart of Manhattan with all of the attendant and inevitable construction delays. The First Rays sessions were mostly crammed into the first part of 1970, when the studio was finally ready, and yielded dozens of various and diffuse tracks. There was a unified sound — funky groovy R&B soul rock — but Hendrix passed away before the end of the year, and before a real cohesion or through-line could be found in the tracks. There is a prospective track listing for a double LP in Hendrix’s handwriting, purportedly made a month before his passing, but it’s 25 tracks long and exemplifies the challenge of the material; that a good rock double-LP needs space in the sequencing. Not all of the tracks can be punchy 4-minute tunes; there needs to be at least a smattering of longer tracks, shorter tracks, instrumentals, interludes — anything to make the sequencing breathe. Even just those short piano interludes on Husker Du’s Zen Arcade do the trick (oh yeah, closing with “Reoccurring” fucking “Dreams” helps too), and Hendrix really didn’t have too much of that kinda breathing room in the First Rays material like he did on Electric Ladyland with its extended “Voodoo Chile” jam closing out Side A, and all-time psychedelic-classic “Merman” suite taking up most (all?) of Side C. Without clear direction, most of the First Rays tracks were released immediately after Jimi’s death on a few posthumous and contractually obligated LPs; despite (or perhaps because of) the chaos, I think if you play the first two back to back, Cry of Love (Reprise, March 1971) and then Rainbow Bridge (Reprise, October 1971), that’s as accurate of a First Rays double-LP experience as you’re going to get, despite all of the possibilities. It’d make a good ragged first two sides, sorta like a first set by the Grateful Dead, and then Rainbow Bridge’s sides three and four have the few longer/experimental/atomspheric tracks, more like a second set by the Grateful Dead, such as the all-time funky fusion instrumental jammer “Pali Gap,” the guitar-symphonic studio version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and a monster close with the 11-minute live blues/scorch blowout “Hear My Train A Comin’” followed by what I believe to be Jimi’s greatest post-Ladyland song (beautiful ballads “Angel” and “Drifting” notwithstanding), the epic 6-minute quasi-title track “Hey Baby (New Rising Sun).” Of course the Dead were just one of many influences stuffed into the First Rays music-making, which absolutely spills over with ideas and creativity and playfulness, often at the expense of great hooks, but that’s OK, the grooves are great and Hendrix’s guitar playing is amazing, blasting out not just blues, soul, funk, R&B, and jazz, but all music of the African Diaspora everywhere and folk rock too of course. This was Hendrix’s impossible vision, a sprawling funky folky rhythm & blues fusion rock, truly a music of the global African diaspora that could no longer fit in the relatively narrow psych-pop prism the marketplace and Chas Chandler had previously dictated for him. I think he just needed a few less songs and a little more breathing room. POSTSCRIPT: Check out Lewis Shiner’s rather beautiful 1993 book Glimpses for a vision of what finishing both SMiLE and First Rays might’ve been like if the artists had pulled it off in their prime.
(I find the two videos above to be related.)
Summarily giving the Ego Summit LP (1997, Old Age/No Age) its every-5-years-or-so spin. Shepard’s “Illogical” sounds even more Xpressway than ever, and I’d have to reread my FE’s and Popwatches to be sure, but I betcha it wasn’t even that he was geeking out on the NZ underground, instead a pure parallel development due to very similar highly regional home-recording means and influences. Like the liner notes say: “These thirteen songs reflect the blues, folk, and punk roots/heritage of all involved,” in Aotearoa as in America. I do believe that American blues and folk were the actual beginning of American punk rock (you might say blues:punk::folk:indie-rock, and for fun let’s add ::Little Sandy Review:Forced Exposure to the equation, the latter of which wrote very well about all four styles) and it’s absolutely all a through line, a single cultural movement that coincides with the Great Wars and the resultant quote-unquote Golden Age of Capitalism. In fact, blues/folk/punk might just be the counter-narrative to this Golden Age, the mirror movement, we peasants’ truest response and widest option for opposition against it, in all of its crushing opulence and horrific complexity. Also on the liner notes (which have a music-nerd-friendly “trails to Ego Summit” map on the other side and — I think — were only released with the still-cheap 2013 reissue on 540/Old Age/No Age), I can’t help but get a tear in my eye when I read this line: “It was generally agreed that some documentation to that fellowship should be recorded on tape before the participants doddered off into old age.” Of this fellowship, Ron House, Don Howland, and Michael Hummel remain. RIP Jim Shepard and Tommy Jay. I see Tommy Jay was born in 1955, and passed away in 2022 at the age of 67, which means he was about 42 when this was recorded in 1997. I believe Jim Shepard was born a year earlier than Jay in 1954 because he was 44 when he passed away in 1998 (and if you click on that link, heads up that the headline of that obit actually is “Lo-fi Loss,” c’mon RS, are you kidding me?!) The internet doesn’t seem to know the birth years of the others, but I’m guessing they’re all pushing 70, and hopefully not doddering yet, but hey, I know I’m definitely starting to dodder and I’m only in my (mid-)50s. Happens to the best of us. POSTSCRIPT: Wanted to include this thoughtful 2018 blog post from somewhere in Melbourne riffing on Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius,” as opposed to the concept of a lone genius; scenius being a collective genius that comes from a group of artists rather than from any one single artist, with the blog post using the Mississippi Hill Country Blues movement, an LP by Melbourne collective Snake & Friends, and this very Ego Summit LP as three examples. And P.S. don’t worry, I fully believe in the concept and think it’s beautiful but I will never actually use the word “scenius,” except in quotes.
Because I really actively dislike posting on social media (except for the increasingly occasional Instagram post), thought I’d put my own answers to this “first concert/last concert/etc” FB meme here instead:
First concert - The Jacksons Victory Tour (Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City, July 1984).
Last concert - Connor Sullivan Quartet at Archie’s Apocalypse Weekend Festival, Archie’s Cafe, Rogers Park, Chicago, USA (RIP Archie’s, I’m really gonna miss your pizza, Loyola University’s real estate portfolio can fuck off). This was just last night (August 23rd, 2024), and was maybe a little too informal to be called a “concert.” For that, it would be Seun Kuti last month at Millennium Park, also in Chicago, USA.
Worst concert - Having a hard time with this because I think I just tune out and ignore bands that are bad or mediocre. Trying to think of someone I had high hopes for but were disappointing. I mean, from another life: Smashing Pumpkins at Peony Park Ballroom in Omaha, touring on Gish, were pretty disappointing compared to how hard the album ripped. Milk Music at Subterranean in Chicago in 2012 were annoying, in full ‘we’re just a ragtag bunch of hippie road warriors who sloppily reject our killer early Wipers-worthy material” mode. That’s all I can think of at the moment, and it doesn’t feel fair to call either one the “worst concert I’ve ever seen.”
Loudest concert - Probably J. Mascis & the Fog for two nights in a row on tour in 2001 (St. Louis MO and Lawrence KS — I was in the opening band and mostly hid backstage).
Best concert - I think it’s between Prince (Lovesexy tour, Ames, IA, 1988) and Neil Young & Crazy Horse (Psychedelic Pill tour, Chicago, IL, 2011).
Seen the most - Probably Wolf Eyes.
Most surprising - I don’t know, maybe Digital Underground opening for Public Enemy in 1991 (Kemper Arena in Kansas City) and then a year or two later headlining at Omaha’s Ranch Bowl, because they were so incredibly good at a time when live hip-hop was kinda hit or miss.
Happy I Got To See - Prince, Neil Young & Crazy Horse (on the last tour before Poncho retired, which is key), Sun City Girls twice, Dead C when they were still using their repertoire (opening for Sonic Youth on the Washing Machine tour, May 1995 in Minneapolis), Dilloway-era Wolf Eyes (truly inzane), two-piano Get Hustle lineup, Dog-Faced Hermans, the Coughs, Public Enemy with Digital Underground opening and Ice Cube doing his “Burn Hollywood Burn” verse, De La Soul opening for Tribe Called Quest in a small club, U.S. Maple well outside of their Chicago No Wave bubble opening for Jesus Lizard in Lincoln, NE in 1998, Tower Recordings, Un, Irving Klaw Trio, and Tono-Bungay at the Cooler in like 1997 and, on a separate NYC trip the year before: Harry Pussy and Market Square-era Charalambides at Mercury Lounge, Art Ensemble of Chicago original lineup (though without Joseph Jarman) at Town Hall, and (all at the Knitting Factory) Anthony Braxton Ghost Trance Tentet, Charles Gayle, Roscoe Mitchell Note Factory, David S. Ware Quartet w/Shipp, Parker & Ibarra, plenty more.
Wish I could have seen - Jeez, so many, John Coltrane Quartet, Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot, Miles Davis quintet with Wayne Shorter, electric Miles with Pete Cosey, the Jimi fuckin’ Hendrix Experience, the Stooges, Velvet Underground, 1970s Parliament-Funkadelic, Thin Lizzy, pre-Rollins Black Flag, Flipper w/Will Shatter, I mean it goes on and on.
Next Concert - Not sure but probably someone at the Chicago Jazz Festival next weekend (August 2024).
Additional Notes/Postscript - I did make it to this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival and saw ripping sets by James Brandon Lewis Trio (super funky/progressive band thanks to Chad Taylor on drums and also in so small part Josh Werner killing on electric bass), Dennis Carroll’s DC & the Love featuring Mar Vilaseca (damn, talk about progressive, reminded me of the Corea/RTF all-timer Light as a Feather!), Jeff Parker & the New Breed (did someone say progressive? With Josh Johnson also killing it on alto sax), the Alfie Jackson Quartet (did someone say progressive, at times dare I say (Tim) Buckley-esque? though female? And my daughter was Alfie’s classmate throughout elementary school!), and the Mai Sugimoto Double Alto Quartet (did someone say progressive? Well, I can’t say this set didn’t make me think of Jade Warrior’s Island period…).