Walkin'

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Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, "Walkin'," (download until 1/7/09) from "The Hottest New Group in Jazz."

I've only known a few people who were into Lambert, Hendrick, and Ross before. Lots who knew the name, others who'd heard that great take of "In Walked Bud" on Monk's "Underground" that Jon Hendricks cut, some who had the LP years ago, and then just a couple who were straight-up fanatics. One was a friend in college who was a jazz buff for different musicians that me--into Dexter Gordon where I preferred Sonny Rollins, etc.--and the other is my wife. I use this to point out that an old dog can learn new tricks.

I'd never been much into vocal jazz growing up--I got into Jazz in the seventh grade, via "Kind of Blue" like so many--and I sort of felt myself hardcore saying, as a seventh grader, that yes, it was Miles' record but Coltrane took all the best solos. I suppose that that was in fact pretty hardcore for a seventh grader, but I developed all the predictable kind of a sense of superiority that I really only did the instrumental stuff, not anything that reeked of "pop." I could do Billie Holliday because of the Lester Young connection and hipster cred, but because my mom liked Ella Fitzgerald--now my favorite singer, I hasten to say--I avoided even her.

I also allowed myself to dig that cut Jon Hendricks did on the Monk record. Monk was and at some level continues to be the musician who speaks to me above all others. I had read a little bit about "Underground" and liked that it was an autumnal renaissance of sorts for Monk, loved the cover (of course), dug the tunes, and made an exception to my no-vocals policy for the last cut, because it was a little different thing to distinguish the record from other Monk records and because it was so undeniably good. I then proceeded not to investigate the singer who made it happen. In college, the aforementioned friend was very, very into Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, and I impressed him by saying in conversation, "oh yeah, isn't that the guy who cut that cool track on the Monk record?" and then went back to my room to listen to Ornette Coleman, no doubt worth a listen then as now.

Fast forwarding twenty years, having not taken the opportunity to get into Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, I approached my new relationship with my future wife with intelligence, and when she had this disc and wanted to play it in the car, I said, "oh yeah, I know Jon Hendricks. He cut this cool track with Monk back in '68. Let's dig it." And dig it we did.

So this is as good an example about why the jazz buff types who can't loosen up enough to really connect to the vocal stuff need to check themselves. You could say, correctly, that, oh, it's not like the band is as good as the quintet Miles had with Philly Joe Jones. But you'd be an idiot to say that. This is the thing that makes Jazz the gift that keeps on giving. The level of musicianship, and not just in a technical sense but the kind of musicianship that connects to the music and the audience from a spirit of love and community, from your average working jazz player in New York in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's was really astonishing. So you had working players backing up the vocal group, and while you can say that they weren't the finest players there were--it's not Jackie McLean taking that alto solo--the sheer quality of the performance is overwhelming. The lightness of it is one of those "knock me over with a feather" things. That's the secret of jazz--this is hardly an original observation--the lightness of it.

And of course "vocalese" is a singular creation. Jon Hendricks, still, last I'd checked, performing, really did have something to offer, and is certainly one of the two absolutely great singers still working, alongside Jimmy Scott. Yes, this was Hendricks' group, his act, his concept, and that takes nothing at all away from Annie Ross or Dave Lambert. It's almost unfair to say that I would rather have an Annie Ross record than a Dave Lambert record, but it's true. Nonetheless, the group wouldn't have happened without Lambert, and really the key is how they worked together. This is what people who know both how to rehearse and how to let things go sound when they get together and make music. It's a lost art.

Leeora

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The Sea and Cake, "Leeora," (download until 1/6/08) from "The Biz."

I was introduced to The Sea and Cake by a friend who has exceptionally diverse but often mediocre taste in music. I've never understood how someone can be a music obsessive who's obsessed with fundamentally second-rate music. His idol was Frank Zappa, who made a career out of being different, just different, as opposed to being different and really good.

And The Sea and Cake really blow me away, it's almost bizarre. I love their music--quite the contrary from my feelings about Zappa--but I don't actually think they're that great. I can think of any number of bands whose music I think is much better but to whom I listen much less. This friend of mine gave me the best bad recommendation of my entire life, and I'm grateful.

What the Sea and Cake have in their favor seems to me like it could have been cooked up in someone's head before anyone picked up an instrument. "Well, we're in Chicago, so we can't do what the people on the coasts are doing. So no distorted guitars. And we'll reference bossa nova. The New York hipsters are doing that John Zorn faux free jazz stuff. We'll be different, because it's the only way to call what we have a scene. That's life in the Second City."

This all seemed to me ready-made for me to hate it. The extent to which I hate anything scene-y is sort of disturbing when I actually take a moment to examine it. And I cringed when my friend said, "what? You don't know the Sea and Cake? Let me play it for you."

I held my breath, I swear it, like I was about to dive into water that was much too cold for a person to dive into. And then, it was actually kind of cool. I nodded my head, which I rarely do, I usually shake it as you might imagine, and I said, "yeah, it's good." Only nothing about it is actually great. No memorable melodies and at the same time not any swell jazz-inflected melodic lines on a Steely Dan level. The bass parts aren't bass parts, but they're not bass parts in a way that seems calculated rather than inspired. Brian Wilson's not-bass-parts are inspiredly so--not here. And we won't even deal with the lyrics here, because the energy it takes to dismiss them out of hand is more energy than they merit.

But I put this track, and not only this track but all kinds of Sea and Cake tunes, on repeat, quite often. I don't know what this is a sign of, and the more I try to understand it the less I understand.

Manic Depression

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Jimi Hendrix, "Manic Depression," (download until 1/8/09) from Are You Experienced?

Jimi Hendrix is one of a small number of hyped musicians who really are worth the hype. Prince is another, so too the Beatles. Looking at that list I seem disturbingly conventional but I would rush to say that there's a long list of musicians I could type out who are worth the hype but don't get it. So I retain my underground hipster credentials--underground hipster, because I am much hipper than anyone I deal with on a daily basis will acknowledge.

Having made that claim for Jimi, I have to say that while he was and continues to be worth the hype, the hype Jimi got when I was a kid--this is in the 1970's and 1980's--was the wrong hype. Jimi took a place in the Pantheon of Rock to allow white taste-makers a response to any discussion of the inherent racism of rock 'n' roll as a business. And be sure that it's the business end of it that matters to the people involved. "Can I make it on my royalty cheques?": any discussion of racism needs to begin with the economic and not with a glance of who one's friends are.

Now, if you're a white Jimi fan like I am, I just want to go out of my way to be disarming (and this is what we call "modeling," folks, a demonstration in this case of what white people who want to make this a more sensible society need to do when they talk to their fellow white people about how racism functions). Your memories of the guitar god Jimi, stoked by Rolling Stone magazine et. al., do not make you a filthy racist swine. If you're a filthy racist swine, it's likely because of how you deal with your co-workers or something like that. Digging Jimi is perfectly acceptable, and is indeed, as the inclusion of the links above should indicate, encouraged at this blog. But we want to see things as they are.

So foisted upon us as children was the image of Jimi lighting his axe at Monterey Pop, primal, physical, something of a savage. In reality he was likely a bit high like everyone else at the festival, or motivated by the very sensible commercial need to one-up the Who, who merely smashed their instruments. If you take Jimi in this sense, he's less the savage than a very clear-thinking businessman (though we are all aware of the neat correlation of business and savagery under capitalism, to be sure--witness "Monsieur Verdoux" for an illustration). And his marketing plan worked. We don't really talk a whole lot about the Who's Monterey Pop performance in hindsight, at least relative to Jimi.

So what we kids should have learned about Jimi were two things, the second being his music. But the first is this: Jimi Hendrix, guitarist, singer, songwriter, recording artist, was one of the shrewedest businessmen of the Golden Age of Rock. All too aware from the experiences of his colleague Arthur Lee of Love and others of the commercial hurdles he faced in the Jim Crow United States--remember, Brown v. Board only provided the legal precedent which led to the dismantling of legal segregation, the Civil Rights Act, which provided a legal justification for the Federal Government to take action to protect civil rights in individual cases, was only passed in 1964, and it was only in 1965, a year before Hendrix went to England, that the United States suggested, in a statutory sense, that citizens should have the right to vote whether they were white or not--all too aware of this, the author repeats, Jimi got the hell out of Dodge and went to England where he might, as a black American, find a greater measure of commercial success on his own terms, rather than on the terms allotted him by the United States' music industry--Chitlin' Circuit, etc. He got out of Dodge, formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and made both his name and his fortune. It will be noted that his estate, rather than any record company, retains control of recorded legacy and continues, as well the ought to, to profit from it.

Jimi the sharp businessman who would sell but not be sold. No place for that black man in America. No savage he, he returned and conquered the market, and like Duke Ellington made sure that he retained his rights as a creator.

And the music. I could say it speaks for itself but a couple things stand out. It's a sign of the total degeneration of Rock 'n' Roll as a social process that nobody could get away with Mitch Mitchell's drumming on a recording these days. He's playing jazz. Listen to the ride cymbal--it's top-notch. And should anyone question how thoroughly original Jimi actually was (and I often get in arguments with people on the other side of things, pointing out that Jimi actually came from a musical and social context, not, as many of the white cognoscenti of the time thought, from another planet, take a listen to the overdubbed guitars. I don't think anyone after him really dealt with the implications of this playing until My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields more than 20 years later. "Loveless" is right there if you listen for it.

Always Returning

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Brian Eno, "Always Returning" (download until 1/5/09) from Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.

Brian Eno is to me at this point colossally depressing. At some point I think he gave up on quality and exchanged it for cleverness. Retroactively I think he must have come to see his career as that of "idea man" for those who lacked them. I knew things were going wrong when U2 first hired him on when they realized that they didn't have the chops to better "War." I was quite sure he was getting rich in the process.

I then read something in some article I don't remember, and I got the impression that while, indeed he probably was doing better than me financially, he wasn't filthy rich. This is what depressed me. I've enjoyed a number of things he's done in the past decade or so, but none of them have been given general release. His "Long Now" record, available from his website, has some truly great stuff on it, and "Kite Stories" takes the modality he used on the very boring "Neroli" and puts it to good use. But his much-ballyhooed return to singing on "Another Day on Earth" was shockingly dull. The best tune was the one he recycled from 10 years earlier. And this new thing with David Byrne--heard the single, passed on the album.

This is the thing: for an egghead genius type, he's clueless. I'm really shocked. Listen to "Always Returning" above, from Apollo: Atmospheres and Sountracks, from right before the U2 auto-wreck referenced above. It's simple, beautiful, and light, but by no means lacking in substance. Why the boy, Eno that is, can't get it through his skull that his one gift in this world is that he can form music that is all those things at once is beyond me. I have to wonder, not that continuing the Ambient series through volume 20 would have made the man rich, but, well, I'd be a lot more interested in tossing him money for that than anything else, really. Especially The Drop deservingly much maligned. I don't know of a more hate-filled record foisted on credulous fans this side of "Metal Machine Music." Yes, I bought it. Yes, I re-sold it at a terrible loss.

So dig this tune and pour a little malt liquor into the soil for our dead friend Eno. He's missed.