Music Notes

No shows this week, still in a drought but they are slowly coming onto my winter and spring calendar.

But I did finish reading Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli’s 1971 book Free Jazz/Black Power and figured I’d talk about it a bit here.

This is a 1971 book by a couple of French philosopher types. So yeah, it reads like that a bit. But for a couple of guys pretty distant from the American jazz scene’s roots, they sure understood a lot. First, they absolutely and correctly see free jazz as part of the rebellion against white racism and supremacy that was part of the civil rights movement. Specficially, as the title suggests, they see free jazz as a central part of the Black Power movement. Indeed it was, as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka could tell you. He plays a big role in this book. But it isn’t that a kind of arch form of jazz is personally or racially liberating. It’s that this is set in the history of the white appropration of jazz. This is central to the book as well. For these French guys, the history of jazz is whites stealing Black music and making it accessible to white markets. That’s not exactly unheard of–we all know this is a big part of our musical history. But they are lacerating to how this process happened and it’s filled with bitter quotes from Black jazz men about it. Moreover, they note just how much easier it was for people like Dave Brubeck and Red Garland to succeed versus their Black colleagues. While they would probably have told you that themselves if they were still alive, the point is real. Watching the famed 1959 documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day, what was immediately remarkable to me was how white the performers were compared to jazz as a whole. I’ve long had my critique of Newport Jazz along these lines, but it was quite stark in that film and that represents the genre as a whole.

So you have this world in which Black expression becomes whitened by radio, record labels, etc. People do what they have to do to survive. Louis Armstrong is basically portrayed as an Uncle Tom figure here and that’s not an uncommon critique of him, though it tends to make people really mad. The whole cool jazz scene is another part of jazz history that comes under pretty harsh critique, though given how boring I find most of that music, I can’t get too upset over that.

But the real point here is that whatever you want to think about previous histories of jazz, what free jazz was in the 60s was something so commercially impossible to be impossible for whites to steal for profit. It was a music of liberation and a music of the masses. Now, it wasn’t a music of the masses really. That’s because not that many people actually liked it, and that includes in Black Power communities. I mean, it is difficult music after all. On the other hand, it is music of the masses in the way that Marxist texts were philosophy and politics for the masses. People didn’t read that stuff either, but like it, free jazz was an attempt to provide a text for liberation that whites couldn’t steal. That it wasn’t successful is somewhat besides the point. It was the stated goal of its leaders such as Rashied Ali and Archie Shepp and Alice Coltrane (John passed before Black Power had truly reached its peak but he obviously engaged heavily in Back to Africa kind of messaging in his songs).

Now, there are two epilogues to the book, one written before a 1980 reprinting and one before a 2000 reprinting. Carles and Camolli have to admit that free jazz did not lead to Black Power and that while the music still exists, the moment of the politics when they wrote is gone. Black Power is still a thing, but it’s a very different thing. Free jazz is also still a thing and also a very different thing. The epilogues tend to thus focus more on the personally liberating sense of the music and that’s true too. But the politics are certainly still there for a lot of these guys, starting with William Parker and Jason Moran but really being quite significant. Think back to my discussion of the Mali Obomsawin show a couple of months ago, when the music of free jazz merged with Native politics for a fascinating and powerful night of music.

Free jazz will never be more than niche music, but it’s fascinating niche music and the politics are a big part of it. Some of the book doesn’t age super well, but it is well worth your time if you into the music or the politics.

In other news…..David Crosby. OK, look, I appreciate that Crosby grew a lot as a person over the years. He deserves credit for this. Him being the biological father of Melissa Etheridge and her then partner’s children is an example of this. He’s been a mentor for Jason Isbell and others. But that doesn’t totally erase the fact that this guy spent a half-century as one of the worst human beings alive. Now, to be clear, I don’t really care. I am well on record as being indifferent to the politics or personal behavior of the artists. I just don’t get how one can be OK listening to David Crosby or David Bowie but thinks watching Chinatown or Annie Hall or even Manhattan as being an unacceptable choice. As a commenter once said here, I think around the Loretta Lynn nonsense in which our commenters engaged in full-throated aesthetic Stalinism because they didn’t like her politics, basically this whole debate comes to whether we like the artist or not. I just don’t want to hear from anyone mourning the loss of Crosby on these debates without referencing why his terrible behavior is OK compared to some other person who was also a terrible person.

As for Crosby’s music, I mean it’s mostly pretty boring. CSN was a bad band and Neil Young helped them by virtue of being Neil Young but that’s it and outside of “Ohio,” everything he did with them was better if he was solo or with Crazy Horse. The Byrds finally got good once Gram Parsons forced them to listen and then make country music, but that’s long after Crosby had left. This leads me back to another point, which is Paul’s post on why people care so much about Boomers. The comments to that are Peak Boomer. “Why do all the other generations hate us” is the pinnacle of a complete lack of self-awareness. I dunno (looks at the world burning, all the people in their 60s and 70s moving to Florida to turn it into Franco’s Spain, the average age of Democratic leadership until the other day, the focus on a single generation in advertising for seventy fucking years, all modern musical reference have to start with their music, etc). Also, 1,758 comments. No one likes to talk about themselves like Boomers. Fuck off you old bastards, thanks, Gen X. And don’t talk about us either, no one is more boring than we are.

I should also note that for all the bemoaning talk of “generations,” which I grant you has sharp limitations, we have done this forever. Post-American Revolution history is basically divided up by generations, with historians discussing one or the other of them as a generation, more or less (Civil War/Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Progressive Era, etc, all of which are about one generation worth of time). Starting with the Boomers (and the being projected back to the Greatest Generation, which they are only by comparison with their horrible children and given what terrible parents they were they obviously were to have spawned and raised Boomers, they aren’t), the media has shifted that into something else, but it’s not really that different. People have made random generational divides for the sake of convenience for a long time. It is what it is. Unlikely to change too much.

Again, my position on Crosby’s music is that, like most of the folk-rock scene of the 60s and 70s, it’s sleep inducing. Thank God for punk, that’s all I’m saying. Shaking up that boring ass high out of your mind California bullshit. God, no wonder John Doe and Exene and Henry Rollins were so angry. A friend of mine yesterday was talking to me about Crosby and how good the Woodstock movie is until CSN shows up and then it’s 20 minutes of boring harmonizing. And don’t even get me started on The Beach Boys, the most overrated band in the history of pop music. So yeah, I’m glad he grew as an older man. But his music is still boring. It’s not bad. He was an amazing singer, as far as it goes. I agree with that. I just don’t think it was used that effectively.

One more point. Obviously there’s a lot of great music from the 60s and 70s. I mean, just look at my weekly playlists if you doubt that I feel this way. My problem with this is when the discussions effectively end there, or with artists who started then. There’s certainly nothing better about the 60s and 70s than the 2010s or 20s, at least so far. There’s amazing music made all the time. So our discussions about what is the best music, or whatever, needs to encompass the history of popular music, not just the shit a 75 year old person grew up with and who has looked side-eyed at that hip hop since 1986.

This week’s playlist:

1. Sleaford Mods, Spare Ribs
2. Drive By Truckers, Decoration Day
3. Herbie Hancock, Speak Like a Child
4. War on Drugs, Slave Ambient
5. Gary Stewart, Out of Hand
6. Rodney Crowell, Ain’t Living Long Like This
7. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
8. Palace, Lost Blues and Other Songs
9. John Moreland, In the Throes
10. Richard Thompson, Front Parlour Ballads
11. Jimmie Dale Gilmore, After Awhile
12. Dale Watson, Live in London….England!
13. Drive By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera, disc 1
14. Gary Stewart, The Essential Gary Stewart
15. Daddy Issues, Deep Dream
16. Tacocat, NVM
17. Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold/Tally All the Things That You Broke
18. Al Stewart, Between the Wars
19. Willie Nelson, Phases and Stages
20. V/A, Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country
21. Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City
22. Boubacar Traore, Kongo Magni
23. Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home
24. Chris Stapleton, Starting Over
25. Bobby Bare, Cowboys and Daddys
26. Jerry Lee Lewis, A Taste of Country
27. REM, Document
28. Nickodemus & Quantic, Mi Swing es Tropical
29. Joe Ely, Live @ Antone’s
30. Arthur Russell, Love is Overtaking Me
31. Mount Moriah, How to Dance
32. Natalie Hemby, Puxico
33. Shovels & Rope, Little Seeds
34. Bill Callahan, Reality
35. Wussy, Getting Better
36. Nick Drake, Bryter Layter
37. Chris Stapleton, From a Room, Vol 1
38. Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor
39. Mary Halvorson, Meltframe
40. Leyla McCalla, Breaking the Thermometer
41. Mary Halvorson Septet, Illusionary Sea
42. Patterson Hood, Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)
43. Mitski, Be the Cowboy
44. Gram Parsons, Return of the Grievous Angel
45. Wussy, Strawberry
46. Mississippi John Hurt, Today
47. T-Model Ford, Pee Wee Get My Gun
48. Last Exit, The Noise of Trouble: Live in Tokyo

Album Reviews. With 2022 gone and not too many new releases of interest yet in 2023, this is called clearing the deck for those exciting albums to be released soon.

East Axis, Cool with That

Yowza, that’s some smoking jazz! Matthew Shipp on piano, Allen Lowe on sax, Kevin Ray on bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums? Yes please. This is a pandemic album, recorded while case rates were low, and you can almost feel the desperation to play in this music, as all four just pour themselves into it. These guys know each other so well and yet each time you hear any of them with each other, there is a totally different sound and experience. Great album.

A

Matt Berry, The Blue Elephant

Hard to listen to some trip-hop/acid jazz immediately after that East Axis album. In fact, it probably just isn’t fair. Berry is real popular in these circles and this is some fairly creative music, but it also just feels super tepid compared to a lot of other creative music these days. Like a lot of acid jazz, it’s pretty good background music that is interesting enough to take the foreground on occasion, but it’s hard for me to call this more than OK.

B-

The Specials, Protest Songs, 1924-2012

I’m not going to lie–I dislike ska. I just don’t think it is a good genre of music. I don’t hate it–I can listen to it without wanting to die like it was Celine Dion or some shit, but it’s not really my thing. But I am interested in any conception of covering protest songs, so I checked this album out by the veteran British band.

But this is pretty timid stuff, both musically and politically. First, it’s not ska at all. They just abandoned it for a roots album. Interesting choice, though one that left me indifferent. The songs out of the Black American tradition, they just can’t do very well. There’s some interesting and weird choices like Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” which I’ve never really read as a protest song per se and Frank Zappa’s “Trouble Every Day,” which actually is a good protest song and it’s too bad Zappa decided to spend his time writing “Joe’s Garage” and dumb sex songs instead. There are some OK choices, such as Chip Taylor’s “Fuck All the Perfect People,” but there’s not enough.

What makes protest music work is a sense of urgency. None of that here. This is just a mediocre covers album that has political topics tying it together.

C

Sunflower Bean, Headful of Sugar

I didn’t like this nearly as much as 2018’s Twenty Two in Blue It’s a bit more generic and lacking in the unique voices of their previous work. This band annoys a lot of people for dumb reasons and the Pitchfork review for this was terrible that way–OMG, the singer is fashionable. Can you believe it? She might not even want to hang out in Brooklyn all the time! Or maybe she only wants to hang out in Brooklyn, whichever is worse! But it’s also a little hard to critique the review when it comes to the music proper, which is kind of bland. It just feels rote. Not terrible. But it’s a minor album.

B-

Dntel, Away

I mostly know Dntel from providing the beats for The Postal Service album, which remains one of the seminal indie albums of the 2000s. In this album, Jimmy Tamborello, who performs as Dntel, provides the beats and lyrics for a number of women to sing some 80s style technopop. It is what it is. Fine. That’s what it is. It’s fine. These are nice melodies. He knows how to do this. There’s a couple of songs that are more angular that at least catch interest a bit more (“No Common”). But does it rise above pretty rote versions of technopop? Not really.

B-

Lee Ranaldo, In Virus Times

Ranaldo basically created a guitar album that sounds like a soundscape for a film about nature or the West. It’s pretty good for that. This is atmospheric and quite lovely work. I don’t think it transcends the genre or anything, but if you were a filmmaker and wanted this kind of soundtrack, I’d give Lee a call.

B+

Ryan Keberle’s Collectiv do Brasil, Sonhos da Esquina

Real nice rethinking of Brazilian-inflected jazz, with the trombone taking the vocal parts. It’s a very classic Getz/Giberto type album, nothing overly new, but executed with real grace and class. Extremely enjoyable listen. Evidently, Keberle does a bunch of different styles, so I need to check more of his work out.

B+

Buster Brigade Records, TV62

Fun label comp from Buster Brigade, a Detroit hip-hop label. Huge varieties of styles and subjects here. Some of these rappers have pretty conventional voices, others are rather unusual, as are some of the styles they present here. Of course some of this you will like better than some other parts, such is the nature of a compilation. But you could do a hell of a lot worse than this tonight. For example, Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

A-

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.