Album of the Week (full episodes) - Josh Rutner

Episode 44: Sleep Gunner Plays the Louvin Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1 (Sleep Gunner, 2014)

Josh Rutner

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There’s a wordless documentary film about august Dutch drummer and visual artist Han Bennink and one scene from it has stuck in my mind since I first saw it: we see a close-up of a needle dropped on a record, and as the well-worn grooves play Tommy Flanagan’s introduction to the Charlie Parker song “Relaxing at Camarillo,” the camera slowly pans—past a floorful of items including the record jacket (Flanagan’s 1957 debut as a leader, called Overseas), a pair of heavy cowbells, and what appears to be a rubber ear resting on a ping-pong paddle—to Bennink, playing along—truly swinging his ass off—with brushes upon a cardboard box.

What’s so striking to my rubber ear is not the brilliance of the playing—though brilliant playing it is, both Flanagan’s pre-recorded and Bennink’s card-boarded—nor the humor of the box under the brushes played by a grown man sitting on the floor, but rather the resonance between the two. Neither, it should be noted, is faked—Bennink is well-studied in the ways of straight-ahead jazz and a practiced absurdist—and that’s important. His sincerity and clear respect and love for the style bolsters and boosts any sense of irony with which he may deploy such stylistic considerations in different contexts.

Dutch jazz has for decades embodied this tendency toward conceptual amalgamating. The cover of Kevin Whitehead’s invaluable book on the subject, New Dutch Swing—which, appropriately, features an image of Bennink at his drum set, smoke clouds rising up from his hi-hat in which he’d started a newspaper fire—contains the equation: “Jazz + Classical Music + Absurdism = New Dutch Swing.”

This week we look at a 2014 release by the Amsterdam-based guitar duo known as Sleep Gunner, called Plays the Louvin Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1, in which they swap out some elements of the New Dutch Swing equation but retain its logic. As the title suggest, the material they’ve chosen to home in on is that of the Louvin Brothers—a prolific country and gospel, guitar/mandolin close-harmony duo of the ’50s and ’60s—and laid atop and woven throughout that base are strains and strands of noise rock, conceptualist humor, “out jazz,” and more.

Like Bennink, the guitarists of Sleep Gunner—Jeroen Kimman and Mark Morse—have nothing but honest-to-goodness affection for the music that they take pride in being able to both pull off as such as well as deconstruct as wanted. (Or as needed: Kimman confesses that they were “trying to learn to play country and making up for our flaws by throwing in the noise-making weirdness we were doing anyway.” Morse echoes the sentiment when he says, “If there’s ever a comedic or ironic element, it usually comes from not being able to take our own guitar playing seriously—the comedy’s not directed at the songs, the genre, or the Louvins.”)

To be sure, these guys are no golden-leafed Nudie suit-wearing country stars, but that doesn’t stop them from playing the crap out of this music. One of the things I love most about this project is that they don’t simply play the lead-sheet versions of the songs in a so-called modern jazz style, but rather have taken the time to go deep into the bends, twists, and turns of the Louvins—to capture a feeling, rather than obscure it with a thick coat of cool, or bleach it away with abstraction. Fittingly, the pair describes their Louvin Brothers project as a “playful and plaintive attempt to break their own modern conceptualist hearts.” That said, they have clearly worked hard to get the style right.

About the song “Gonna Lay Down my Old Guitar”—the lyrics of which tell of a sick, bedridden man, alone and on the edge of death, wishing he could take his guitar with him when he goes—Kimman would say, “the arrangement had some fun ‘bending concept’ which made the skin come off my fingers. The finger-picking, which was new to us, made Mark have some serious shoulder issues.” It’s a great arrangement, theirs, featuring a final chorus that is slowed down so severely as to make one think that the first line of it is the song’s big finish, but the two lumber onward at that tempo, as if refusing to give up their old guitars, crawling all the way to the end.

The album begins a with a few seconds of string scratching, whining feedback, and fuzzy distortion—like some-sort of fucked-up transistor radio trying to tune into a station—out of which blooms a slowly strolling version of “Put Me on the Trail to Carolina,” a song by the Delmore Brothers, an early influence on the Louvins. It’s a smart tune to open the album with, particularly handling it as Sleep Gunner does, giving each verse and chorus its own feel, through orchestration and guitar effects. It might even be abstractly referred to as an overture, dipping as it does into so many sonic themes that appear through the rest of the album. The song itself is gorgeous, with a harmony line that, like harmonies on much of the Louvin Brothers’ output, is boldly inventive.

One of the Louvins’ more well-known songs, “You’re Running Wild,” is a favorite for Kimman and Morse, and was the first song they recorded under the auspices of Sleep Gunner. On this album, they kick it off with some tame, tail-chasing noodling before diving headlong into the deep boom-chick two-beat groove that underpins the off-kilter song. The two relish the harmonies and smartly just play the form once, for maximum punch. Their take ends with understated humor.

Ira and Charlie Louvin grew up in Alabama, working in the field, picking cotton for a taskmaster father who didn’t hesitate to whip the boys—Ira, the elder troublemaker, in particular—with a hickory stick or, as Charlie remembered, if their father wasn’t calm at the time, “with whatever was at hand. A chunk of firewood, a piece of furniture, whatever.”

They learned songs from their Mother, and she didn’t hold back. One of their favorites, taught to them before they were old enough to go out in the fields, was the exceptionally tragic “Mary of the Wild Moor,” which tells of a young, unmarried girl returning home with child to seek shelter from the biting winds on the moor. Her father turns her away, only to find her the next morning dead on his doorstep, grandchild still alive, “closely grasping his dead mother’s arm.” The man realizes what he has done and tears out his grey hair in grief. The child dies soon after, the door is overgrown with willows, and the property becomes a local legend: “there Mary died, once the gay village bride / From the wind that below across the wild moor.” The Louvins’ mother also taught them the murder ballad called “Knoxville Girl,” a morbid song about a man who beats his girlfriend to death for her roving eye. They would record both songs on their 1956 debut full-length for Capital Records, the appropriately titled Tragic Songs of Life. Two other songs on that album, “Alabama” and “Kentucky”—substantially less tragic, being rather sweet odes to states the singers long to return to—appear on Sleep Gunner’s collection.  

Of course, given that this is an instrumental record, there is no extra resonance or tension that can occur when one hears the lyrics. This is not a new thing: jazz musicians have forever been playing instrumental versions of songs. But there is something to be said for knowing what the song “says,” particularly when it is at odds with the music. I think, for example, of what a bonus it is to know that the wildly leaping melody that begins the bridge of Duke Ellington’s song “Prelude to a Kiss” is sung with the lyrics, “Though it’s just a simple melody / With nothing fancy, nothing much.” Or, more apt here, how a song like “But Not For Me” by George Gershwin, set in a major key with no sign of pressure, is set with lyrics by his brother—another older brother named Ira—that detail a depressing litany of heartache. All this to say that while listening to Sleep Gunner’s versions of Louvin Brother songs will hit you hard and satisfy you, getting into the original recordings to hear the lyrics will only add to the experience.

Actually, I should mention here, there is one instance where we get to hear the lyrics and that’s in the song “New Partner Waltz,” when Sleep Gunner strapped into vocoders to tell the quaint tale of emotional betrayal at a dance.

One of my favorites on the record, and a good place to end, is the song, “Hoping that You’re Hoping,” the lyrics of which contain the R. D. Laingianly knotted phrase, “Every breath I take I’m hoping that you’re hoping that I’m hoping you’ll return to me.” It’s on this track that Morse and Kimman let loose most fully, lengthily devolving from a bouncy and bendy overdriven romp into what as well be a haywire truck engine revving in front of your ears. The extended breakdown here is to me reminiscent of the musical “viruses” employed by the ICP Orchestra (a near fifty-year-old institution of “New Dutch Swing” co-founded by pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg and the aforementioned Han Bennink), which, as Kevin Whitehead puts it, are “booby-traps designed to mess up any piece’s structure from within.”

With Sleep Gunner, though, it may be much simpler than that. In a post from 2012, introducing what they refer to as “the latest Louvin craze,” they explain that “Our goal here is to go really uptempo for a change, maintain all the romance, and try to sound like an 8-bit old computer game, since we’re modernist conceptualists, and we found ourselves with newly bought fuzzboxes so there.”

Head over to Sleep Gunner’s Bandcamp page to get yourself a copy of Plays the Loving Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1, and while you’re there, check out their two live recordings, which show off some more stretching than you hear on Vol. 1 and also introduce a few additional Louvin tunes to their book, which, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to hear on Vol. 2 some day soon.

I’m Josh Rutner and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 43: Call Me (Al Green, 1973)

Josh Rutner

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Within his autobiography, called Take Me to the River, published in 2000, Al Green reminisced about one cold morning in a rural Michigan hotel room while on tour, approaching the window, which looked out “across the empty highway to the frozen fields on the other side”:

“As I watched while the sun slowly seeped into the dark sky, like milk being poured into a bowl, I felt myself standing in the middle of some great empty place, as if the universe and everything in it had been cleared away in a circle from all around me. It was a lonely, solitary sensation, but the strange thing was, I didn’t feel the ache of a man left to himself. It was more a peaceful feeling, a kind of soothing sensation, as if I was far away from every human sorrow and strife.”

Call Me, Green’s sixth album, released in the spring of 1973, was “supposed to be about nothing more than flirtation and romance and the hot passions that spring up between a man and a woman.” In truth, Call Me is much less about hot and heavy romance per se and more about the emptiness, the solitude, the loneliness of a pining lover.

Unlike “Let’s Stay Together,” his big hit from the year before, which is about an extant couple whom the narrator is lovingly suggesting stay together forever, the songs on this album circle around unrequited love, undone love, unbegun love. We hear a man who is crying out for lovers, sometimes nostalgically engaging with exes in stiff and stilted colloquialisms (as in “Have You Been Making Out O.K.,” and the cover of Willie Nelson’s song “Funny How Time Slips Away”) and sometimes pushing, pleading, praying (as in the title track and “You Ought to Be with Me”).

The following line from “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” is indicative of the feelings expressed in this album: “It always ends up this way / Me begging you every day / A love that I cannot have / You broke my heart into half.” The love he can’t have in “Here I Am” is powerful, and even explosive—“All this love inside of me / I believe there’s going to be an explosion,” he sings—and therein, in that potential energy, lies the dramatic strength of these songs.

In Take Me to the River, Green wrote about what it took for him to shift—pressed by producer Willie Mitchell, with whom he had worked since their meeting in 1969—from his harder-edged, more “mannish,” Otis Redding-type vocal style into his signature floating falsetto, “like a little boy crying for his mama,” as Green put it, “or a grown man weak for the love of a woman. To sing like that,” he explains, “you’ve got to let something inside of you loose, give up your pride and power, and let that surrendering feeling well up inside until it overwhelms you and uses your voice to cry out with a need that can’t be filled.”

In a late-1970s interview with Lynn Norment of Ebony magazine, Green acknowledged that satisfaction is not his aim and even something he avoids: “I’m afraid to become satisfied, like being afraid to fall in love; it frightens me to death. When you are satisfied, you let yourself relax, and you don’t do your best.”

With this in mind, we might view the lack of fulfillment within the songs on Call Me as at least unconsciously self-inflicted—a sort of productive self-sabotage. The lyrics in “Here I Am” go on to say, “Keeping you and loving you means / Laying all my troubles down,” and when rubbed up against his statements above, we might conjecture that Green—the persona if not the person—is strategically unwilling to accept any such state of happiness, despite his entreaties for the addressee to “come and take me.”

In an earlier, 1976 article in Ebony, also penned by Ms. Norment, Green said of his millionaire lifestyle—his “money, jewelry, cars, houses”—that “none of that stuff means anything unless you are happy. I am not really happy.” After pausing, and staring out across the lake that his eight-bedroom Memphis ranch house overlooked, he continued, “What is happiness? To understand the reasons of life itself… things beyond my control. I have been in an arena with 40,000 people, but I was the loneliest man in there.”

Which brings us to another significant theme of Call Me: that of loneliness.

The fourth track, one of my favorites on the album, is Green’s cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The song was originally released by Williams 1949 as the flip-side to the danceable but lyrically lacking “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” “I’m So Lonesome” was never the hit that Williams knew it could be when he was alive, but it did eventually get its due. The start of the fourth verse alone—“The silence of a falling star / Lights up a purple sky”—is bursting with such bold poeticism as to make the tune a classic in my book. Lyrically, it’s not a narrative so much as a set of discrete metaphorical images of nature—falling stars, dying leaves, weeping robins, and so on—which is very much in line with Green’s outlook on the outdoors. He cites his earliest influences as “the rain on the window, the wind in the corn crop, or the water lapping on the banks of the river. That,” he says, “is music to my ears… I can still remember childhood days when I’d wake up early to the birds singing in the trees and throw open the window just to catch their whistles and chirps.”

He even tweaks Williams’ lyrics in the first verse, so strong is his love for such sounds, turning the lonesome whippoorwill who “sounds too blue to fly” into a lonesome whippoorwill who “sounds too good to fly.”

Loneliness is a complex thing.

Production-wise, this album is quintessential Willie Mitchell, with Green’s lighter-than-air velvet funk afloat high above the rhythm section’s nastily tight foundation. The horn arrangements are strong and the Memphis Strings are used effectively, and for the most part are not laid on too thickly or haphazardly. Green had, by this time—along with Stevie Wonder and others—joined Marvin Gaye’s multi-layered lead vocal trend, which Gaye had pioneered (at first quite by accident) on his 1971 album, What’s Going On. The hard-left panning and boosted levels of Green’s secondary lead voice can, admittedly, sneak up on you, particularly listening in headphones. He seems on this record to still be working out the kinks of the technique for himself, often providing I-just-sang-what-you-sang redundancies rather than complementary support.

That said, there are moments where that second voice shines, either musically, as in the harmonies on the choruses of the ultra-gentle, salivatiously close-mic’d “Have You Been Making Out O.K.,” or textually, as in the commentary on the lyric in “Funny How Time Slips Away,” in which “Never know when I’ll be back in town” is flat-footedly answered with an at-first seemingly innocuous, “maybe tomorrow.” Of course, the lyrics in the latter continue with, “Remember what I told you / That in time you’re gonna pay,” so, “maybe tomorrow” suddenly doesn’t feel as downright neighborly as it did a few seconds back.

In “Funny How Time Slips Away,” as the title suggests, time speeds by, such that so long ago seems like only yesterday; and, by contrast, in the other country cover, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” nights are so long, and “time goes crawling by.” Splitting the difference is the album’s centerpiece, “Your Love is Like the Morning Sun,” wherein the warm sun shining down is ultimately in the present of the narrator’s mind. As if bolstering this idea, the drums provide a reassuringly constant tick-tock cross-stick groove as Green—as ever the ex-lover—compares his love to a summer’s day. Her lease, too, it seems, had all too short a date: love faded to gray.

It’s enough to imagine Green alone, again, in a hotel room, facing the morning sun seeping into the dark sky, whispering to himself, “I'm tired of being alone / Still in love with you / Let's stay together, together.”

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 42: Malvina Reynolds...Sings the Truth (Malvina Reynolds, 1967)

Josh Rutner

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The first judge to be recalled and replaced in the state of Wisconsin was Archie Simonson of Dane County. It was 1977, but the circumstances surrounding his recall remain all too familiar today: faced with three teenaged boys who had pleaded no-contest to the gang rape of a girl in a high school stairwell, he added to the injustice of his paltry sentences the stunning insult of blaming the victim for dressing “inappropriately.” “Are we supposed to take an impressionable person 15 or 16 years of age,” he said of the teenaged rapists, “and punish that person severely because they react to it normally?” He went off on a tear and rattled off a handful more gems, complaining that he can’t go around exposing his genitals “like [women] can the mammary glands,” pointing out the existence of women in court rooms who have the gall to not wear a bra, and that women in court and in schools wear “dresses up over the cheeks of their butts.” Rolling Stone later quoted him as saying “Whether we like it or not, women are sex objects.”

Needless to say, the story made national news, and a petition to hold a recall election was successful, with over 36,000 signatures. One person in particular who took note was Malvina Reynolds, who, by 1977, nearing her 80s, was a well-established singer-songwriter. She took it upon herself to help the cause in the way she knew best: she wrote a song, called in favors to get it produced quickly as a single, and distributed them like handbills. The sleeve of the 45 had a two-paragraph detailing of the situation (with an all-caps headline, “THE JUDGE WHO SANCTIONED RAPE”) along with the lyrics of her freshly penned song, “The Judge Said.” If you’ll indulge me, these two verses of the song will give you a pretty good idea of the cut of her jib:

The judge said, Screw ’em!
Boys, you’re only human,
They brought it on themselves
By being born a woman.
Like a mountain’s there to climb
And food’s there to be eaten,
Woman’s there to rape
To be shoved around and beaten

Now if you beat a horse or dog
Or violate a bank,
Simonson will haul you in
And throw you in the clink.
But violate a woman,
Your equal and your peer,
The judge will slap you on the wrist
And lay the blame on her.

Simonson was recalled in that special election, and, in his stead, the people of Dane County voted in Moria Mackert Krueger, Madison’s first female judge.

Reynolds was a late-comer to the world of music. Born in 1900, she was approaching fifty when she first met Pete Seeger—nearly twenty years her junior—at a California hootenanny and hit him up for advice about how she might begin to do what he was doing. In Seeger’s words, “I remember thinking, ‘Gee, she’s kinda old to get started.’ I had a lot to learn. Pretty soon she was turning out song after song after song!”

Her voice was distinctively untrained. Contemporary reviews of her albums pointed out this fact with adjectives like “primitive,” “childlike,” “unsophisticated,” and just plain “not beautiful.” She herself acknowledged the lack of polish in her voice, but of course that was no matter. She saw her music as providing a function beyond the aesthetic: she wanted to effect real change. About the song “The Judge Said,” mentioned above, Reynolds would say, “We got out this great statement, this great song. And I say it’s great because it worked.”

Reynolds, above all, was interested in singing the truth. In her song, “What’s Going On Down There,” which appears on her second release, 1967’s fittingly titled Malvina Reynolds…Sings the Truth—this week’s Album of the Week—she speaks to the American political and legal system that looks to hold tightly to its power with white-knuckled fists against any sense of justice. The fix is in, she claims, with lyrics like: “They throw you in a jail / all covered with blood. / The higher-up man / won’t do you any good. / He also wears the hood.” Her airy, low-larynx’d notes—one of my favorite aspects of her voice—which appear here and there throughout this record, in this song act as a nice bit of text painting when she sings “down there.” The final verse issues marching orders to the listener: “We sing you this song / so you know what’s true / and you’ve gotta take it with you everywhere you go / because it’s up to you.”

The truth ain’t always easy to hear and Reynolds wasn’t known for being a softie. She is, after all, a singer of songs of discontent. In the thirteen songs on Sings the Truth, there are blatant or subtle references to slavery, nuclear testing, income inequality, racism, the KKK, middle-class conformism, and oh so much more. That said, sometimes even her toughest tunes are tempered with witty, gentle imagery and some are even downright funny.  

The lead-off track, for example, “The New Restaurant,” is an acerbic mocking of the misplaced standards of modern era, by way of a comparison to a brand new restaurant, where all the superficial aspects—from gleaming fixtures and delightful crockery to masterfully laid-out menus and linen napkins and mats—are impeccable, but the food is terrible. The final verse contains the stinger: that in another generation—that’s us—the clientele would altogether forget the taste of food; that so long as waitresses are charming and the décor is “symphonic,” the people will happily eat plastic. There’s a video of Reynolds performing the song on Seeger’s short-lived, mid-’60s television series called Rainbow Quest, and at its conclusion we see a shot of her in profile, breaking character and shooting Seeger a smile-eyed, toothy grin, after which Seeger lays down his guitar and lets out an “Oh, that’s too sad!”   

Reynolds was born Malvina Midler in San Francisco to immigrant parents who had joined the socialist party shortly after Reynolds’ birth. In later interviews, she referred to herself in her school years as “quiet, shy me.” That aspect of her personality is brilliantly laid bare in the hilarious song, “Quiet.” “I don’t know much about much,” she sings, “And what I don’t know I don’t say / And when I have nothing to say / I’m quiet.” But she was also a vocal activist at heart, leading protests and petitions even in high school. Note that the chorus of “Quiet” begins with the line, “When there’s occasion to holler, I’ll buy it / I can make noise with the best.”

Due to her parents’ opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, her high school refused her her diploma. Nonetheless, she eventually found a way to enroll in UC Berkeley, and to receive, as she put it,  “all the degrees possible,” culminating in a PhD in English in 1939.  She graduated with honors straight into the tail end of the depression, and that, combined with the fact that she was slightly older than her classmates, a woman, and a Jew, contributed to her difficulty in landing a teaching job. She thus found herself tossed back in the thick of the working class movement, a movement whose message at the time she viewed as not being particularly well expressed for its intended audience to hear. Her work as a singer-songwriter would be her effort to smooth that seam between the radical movement and the People with a capital p.

If anyone is familiar with Reynolds’ work these days, it’s likely by way of her 1962 song “Little Boxes,” which was used as the theme song for the popular Showtime show Weeds. The song was written quickly, in a moving car while driving by the hills of Daly City, California on the way to a gig. If the OED is to be believed, the song stands as the earliest usage of the term “ticky-tacky,” a term meaning both the description of cheaply constructed buildings and the cheap or inferior construction material itself. It’s a great song, with a punch in its message that architectural mundanity and social mundanity go hand in hand: it’s not just the little houses that are made of ticky-tacky, but also the people who went to universities and came out all the same. They too are ticky-tacky. Seeger would cover the tune in 1963 and it resonated, even reaching number 70 on the Billboard Hot 100. Reynolds wouldn’t release her own version until Sings the Truth, four years later.

The album’s powerful black and white cover photograph was taken by the prolific Jim Marshall at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. The lines upon her face, and her at once serious and sympathetic expression, bespeaks a hard-fighting life, already well-lived. The coat she wore that day, which was bright white, as we can see in other photos, was smartly subdued in the album cover version, helping her contrasting, cotton-candy wisps of white hair to stand out. 

Reynolds throughout her career shook cages with her music, and used it like a plow to turn soil for seeds to grow, or like a saw to cut to the core. Always at the root of her sword-crossing with those she disagreed, though, with was a central tenet of love and care for a flawed world. She loved it like a fool, this world.

But if there’s one takeaway from Reynolds’ life and work, let it be that each person has great power to effect change. In the fifth track, “God Bless the Grass,” she paints truth as blades of grass: tender, easily bent, and yet able to burst forth through the cement that aims to keep it down. After a while the grass lifts up its head, “for the grass is living and the stone is dead.”

One of my favorite examples of this idea comes in Reynolds’ song “The Little Mouse,” which was written in 1976, just two years before her death, and released posthumously on the album Mama Lion. That summer, she’d noticed a report in the San Francisco Chronicle that told of a mouse, loose in the Central Clearing House of Buenos Aires, that had chewed up a computer cable, thus disabling check-clearing operations for both banks and the stock exchange within the city. Reynolds, in her late 70s, sang the following:

“Hooray for the little mouse / that fucked up the clearinghouse / and set the stock exchange in a spin / and made the bankers cry! / So much for the electronic brains that run the world of banks and airplanes. / And if one little mouse can set them all awry, / why not you and I?”

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

 

Episode 41: Fewer Moving Parts (David Bazan, 2006)

Josh Rutner

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It was early spring of 2012 and two friends and I were winding through Williamsburg toward the East River, working our way toward the apartment of a stranger. The building was one of those swanky, newly constructed shiny high-rises that had been and continue to pop up and penetrate the Brooklyn skyline, stalagmite-like. We entered, nodded to the doorman like we belonged there, got into the elevator, pushed the button labeled “PH,” and up and up we went.

The sun was setting over Manhattan as we entered the apartment, and in the far corner, beyond the forty or so mingling attendees, tucked into the semicircular crush of couches and chairs—there, setting up a floor lamp that he had seemingly brought with him, was David Bazan.

Bazan is a curious character in the world of indie rock, mainly given his past as a so-called Christian rock musician, and his present as an apostate. While his faith was true and steady and the music and lyrics were certainly not put-on, “Christian rock” was a badge that, if he wore at all, he wore partially obscured. He formed Pedro the Lion—less a band than a process, he says—in 1995 while attending a Pentecostal liberal arts college just outside of his hometown of Seattle. It’s not hard to find write-ups of Pedro the Lion’s music that are completely oblivious to the fact that the band had any ties to the Christian rock scene at all, so subtle the songs were. Heavy-handedness was never the way. At school, where this son of a Pentecostal music pastor spent a couple years studying religion and philosophy before dropping out to focus on touring, he began to shed, as he puts it, “the first, most absurd layers of his cultural belief system—namely the Pentecostal layers.”

What started turning him was a growing awareness that the Christianity he had practiced was in fact blocking the kind of ethical behavior he wanted to engage in. Over the years, to the dismay of many family, friends, and fans, that shedding would become more and more complete. For a while, it seemed that the space his jettisoned religious baggage left was being filled with alcohol. By mid-2004, Bazan’s drinking was becoming a serious problem. He ditched the Pedro the Lion moniker the following year—ending a ten-year run—and took it upon himself to cut out on his own, to “go solo,” culminating in the 2006 self-release of his debut EP under his own name—and this week’s Album of the Week—Fewer Moving Parts.

Eyeing the track list, the first things you notice about the album is that it is comprised of five songs performed in electric, full-band arrangement, and then those same five songs are performed again, in order, with just acoustic guitar and voice. In the hands of a lesser artist, this move—particularly on an album of essentially brand new songs—might fall totally flat, but Bazan has a way about his acoustic arrangements that both breathe new life into the tunes—a new perspective, not least for most via a new key—and somehow radiate with the glowing remainder of the full-band sound with minimal tools: the second iteration is haunted by the specter of the first. In this sense it’s anything but redundant.

Looking at the first song, “Selling Advertising,” as an example, the initial, full-band instance is bold and nearly fanfare-ish with its wild drum fills and pew-pewing synths, underpinning the lyrics which lay sardonically into music reviewers, saying, “You're so creative with your reviews / of what other people do / How satisfying that must be for you,” comparing the artist/critic relationship to an ancient holy war. In the B-section, the drums chill out and the guitars accompany the voice with a counter-line that is crisp and logical—something you might hear in a Beatles song. The full band version ends with another, more overt Beatles shout-out: as Bazan sings, “And if you get tired of making taste for free / you can always start a band with me / or anybody,” there is final swelling crescendo with backing-vocal “ah”s channeling the lovable Liverpudlians.

Compare this to the much more relaxed acoustic version that almost slips into existential sadness while listing the ways a click-hungry online music reviewer makes their living: “selling advertising / tracking trends / corralling demographics / and maximizing traffic,” ending in a whisper. Throughout the acoustic version—and indeed, through almost all the acoustic tracks—Bazan’s voice and guitar are doubled, making for a really full sound, but also affording him the opportunity to pare down even more, as in the ending of “Selling Advertising,” where on the final line of the song (“or anybody”), one of the voices drops, leaving just one, sounding more vulnerable than it ever might have if it were a single voice the whole time.

The third (and eighth) track, “Fewer Broken Pieces,” is an semi-ironic take on Bazan’s going solo. “I had to let some go,” he sings, “don’t think I don’t regret it / ’cause I do and I don’t / think I’m better off alone.” A compellingly mixed message occurs in that line due to the enjambed phrase “’cause I do and I don’t,” which could conceivably tie to either the phrase before or after it—either “don’t think I don’t regret it, ’cause I do and I don’t” or “’cause I do and I don’t think I’m better off alone.” The cover art, by graphic artist Zak Sally, shows Bazan, Onceler-like, with an ax shouldered, staring straight-faced, straight ahead, leaving behind him a field of mere stumps. Yes, fewer moving parts mean fewer broken pieces, but it gets complicated when you have to break off pieces to get there. The song ends, “Man we could have had a big sound / but I love to let my good friends down.”  

Something I love about Bazan songs, particularly ones on this EP, is how little they rely on traditional verses, choruses, bridges, and so on. They move as the stories move, creating their own unique forms. In addition, long stretches of lyrics, often meted out in short bursts, cover tons of ground. These lengthy sentences force you to listen to the whole of it to get the payoff.

In “Cold Beer and Cigarettes,” for example, the song builds to a peak in which the narrator, a wayward husband and father on a three-day bender, bellows at the senseless cruelness of God after witnessing a multi-car fire. To get to that moment, we hear, above a steadily building arrangement, “A car’s on fire in the parking lot / and nobody wants it to rain / but God isn’t listening / so all of the windshields glisten / The water and oil mix / causing the fire to spread / to five or six / innocent automobiles / waiting in their nearby spots / What a cruel God we’ve got!”

In Bazan’s post-Christian mode, there seems to remain in him a Job-like fist-shaking interaction with a God that likely isn’t there. But more than that, there is a pragmatism that guides his thinking. In a lovely interview with the journal Image, Bazan said the following, which really struck me, and is as good a place as any to end:

“I used to believe that justice was coming in the future, at the hand of a creator who was an advocate for the poor and downtrodden. I no longer believe that. I think that justice is the responsibility of us all, now. That other view is, on the one hand, understandable as a comfort to the people who will never get justice in this life, but for those of us who have the opportunity to create justice, it’s a cop-out… It’s not just my own efforts, though it relies heavily on them; it’s how evolution continues to push forward through the offspring of people who give a shit and are taking justice seriously.”

Take a listen to Fewer Moving Parts and go hear Bazan perform when you can.

He’s still out there, doing the work.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 40: Telefone (Noname, 2016)

Josh Rutner

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By late September of this year, the number of homicides in the city of Chicago was already climbing beyond 500, which, as the New York Times reported, is “more than in Los Angeles and New York combined.” August alone saw the killing of 90 people there, making it the deadliest month the city has seen in about twenty years. Distrust of the police has only escalated as news of unarmed black life after unarmed black life being shot dead streams in.

Growing up, Chicagoan poet-turned-rapper Noname (née Fatimah Warner) turned to poetry to cope with the world around her. In 2010, as a junior in high school, she entered the Louder Than a Bomb teen poetry slam. Founded by Kevin Coval, a powerful poet himself who has appeared several times on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, the competition is intended as an outlet for diverse teenage poets in the Chicago area to express themselves, break stereotypes, speak truth, and, importantly, to witness those voices they might not otherwise get to hear up close and unfiltered. To come together, to cope, to thrive.

Noname’s poem, “When Dreams Come True,” is a tale of a choked-off, misplaced American Dream—about a fallen woman who is prostituting herself to support her crack addiction. The high is the dream, or the dream substitute, or the path to the substitute dream. A piece of the poem: “I remember when her beauty was more captivating than the sunrise when it sets in the moonlight. She was more beautiful than the sunrise when it sets in the moonlight, but the moon’s light don’t shine on her anymore. For it doesn’t want to reveal the blisters and burns on her lips where the crack pipe sits.”

Noname placed third.

Over the ensuing years, she would shift from poetry to rap—going on to provide a smattering of laudable guest verses here and there, most notably for fellow Chicago native Chance the Rapper on his 2013 mixtape, Acid Rap—and further develop her cool flow, her lyricism, her biting insight, the melody of her voice. And on her long-awaited and recently released debut mixtape, Telefone—this week’s Album of the Week—we hear her in full force.

For an album that was so long in the making—three years between announcement and release—Telefone is surprisingly open and airy. The production is smooth as hell but somehow it retains a homemade quality—handclaps and finger-snaps right up in your ear. Striking, off the bat, is that these tracks don’t wait for choruses to give you hooks—though those choruses hook you plenty—there are sharp and barbed melodies throughout, even within Noname’s verses. Harmonically speaking, the ten songs of Telefone lean for the most part on sturdy and solid staples of the jazz and gospel language, orchestrated thoughtfully and slickly. This reliance on “feel-good” harmonic movement that makes sense (this follows that), peppered occasionally to great effect with an unexpected twist, puts listeners at ease, heads deeply nodding and wide opening ears to what Noname has to say. She needn’t shout. In fact, a marker of Noname’s style is her laid-backness. Don’t, however, mistake it for weakness or weariness: think Billie Holiday. She says of the album that she hoped to capture the feeling of being on the phone with someone for the first time—“all its little intricate idiosyncrasies.” That intimacy and lightness stands out.

But the telephone isn’t just the facilitator of innocent awkwardness and laughter, as Noname details in the seventh track, “Casket Pretty”—its ring can be a portent of death. The sampled giggles and coos of a baby belie the tale of widespread death of young men and women in the streets her “happy city,” Chicago. “I’m afraid of the dark / Blue and the white / Badges and pistols rejoice in the night,” she says, indicting the police for an all-too-common crime. “I hope to God that my tele’ don’t ring.” We’re given a moment to let the idea sink in when she says, “Too many babies in suits.” It echoes.

In the cover artwork, a stunning painting by Nikko Washington, we see death in the form of a small skull looming above a young girl—unseen by her but ever felt—and blooming flowers crowding her right side. She stares forward with wide eyes unblinking but very much alive. I got lost in those eyes today and in so doing, I eventually realized that she is not looking straight ahead, back into the viewer’s eyes, but just above, presumably checking out the skulls atop the heads of others.

And yet somehow, despite the darkness, a hope shines through Telefone. A month before the tape dropped, Noname tweeted, “Everything is Everything (my new religion).” The phrase itself—everything is everything—makes an appearance on three difference tracks. The reference, I have to imagine, is not to Donny Hathaway’s debut album of the same name from 1970, but rather to the song of the same name on Lauryn Hill’s debut album from 1989. Hill’s song is an embodiment of hope in darkness, or at very least the idea that in time, eventually, change comes—winter becomes spring.

In the summer of 2007 on the blog for the Poetry Foundation, called Harriet, another poet from Chicago, Patricia Smith, wrote a post about what Robert Frost might be able to teach “performance poets.” What she was railing against in “about 75% of the poets I’ve heard lately, well-intentioned bellowers who are masters of pretty pictures strung together or rants laced with vitriol,” is, well, enthusiasm. A certain kind of enthusiasm, which Frost, quoted from his 1930 talk, “Education by Poetry,” describes as “sunset raving. You look westward toward the sunset, or if you get up early enough, eastward toward the sunrise, and you rave. It is ohs and ahs with you and no more.”

Noname is in the clear here.

Smith goes on, in solidarity with Frost, “The idea is paramount; the idea should be the result of the poet’s eye and his intellect. The idea will guide you toward softer ways to say hard things; it will teach you the benefits of quiet, of knowing when a scream is warranted. Enthusiasm, when filtered through this solid beginning, is no longer of the ‘sunset raving’ variety. It’s not ohs and ahs at the mere appearance of the sizzling gold, the persistent heat. It’s whispering quiet thanks that the sun has chosen to rise at all, again.” 

In Noname’s debut, we get just such lush talk about the hardest of things.

Everything is everything.

America
Are you listening?

Be the receiver and let the drop of Telefone lift you up.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 39: Plexure (John Oswald, 1993)

Josh Rutner

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There's a great video of Dolly Parton performing her song "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?" in 1977 on the West German television show Der Musikladen. Accompanying herself on guitar, she sings a cool and bouncy version, backed up in close harmony by the boys in her band. At the song’s conclusion, she admits, grinning, “We have another version of that same song we'd like to try a little bit of for you. Let's pretend,” she says, “that we have the record recorded on a 45-speed record, and we flip it up on 78-speed.” And off they go, performing the exact same tune in chipmunk voices sung through broad smiles, Parton’s long-nailed fingers deftly driving the tempo. They do just one verse and a chorus—after all, as expertly executed as it was, it’s intended only as a gag—and cap it off with Parton quickly saying “Thank you,” still in her sped-up voice.

I think about the folks who watched that performance at the time, about whether those passively consuming fans who, after witnessed Parton’s parlor trick, might have taken it upon themselves to “try this at home,” to experiment with this most basic form of active consumption of music: to take the music that’s given to you and “flip the switch up”—to listen at a different speed just to hear what it’s like.

In 1985 at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto, Canadian composer and sometimes-saxophonist John Oswald presented a paper called “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative,” in which he commented that, for consumers of music, “passivity is still the dominant demographic,” and prescribed—in a Partonian spirit—that “an active listener might speed up a piece of music in order to perceive more clearly its macrostructure, or slow it down to hear articulation and detail more precisely.” Just a few years later, on a track called “Pretender” within his first album, titled plunderphonic, Parton’s brief musical joke would be stretched—along with the threshold recognizability—to its logical extreme. Using a version of Parton herself singing—fittingly—“The Great Pretender” as the source material, we hear, as the song goes on, the pitch of the song slowly but dramatically drop, until, as Oswald put it to Norman Igma in 1988, “Dolly experiences a sex change.” Then, toward the end, the original, perky Parton returns to duet with her inverse-self.

plunderphonic came out in 1989—the same year, as it happens, as De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, another album of extreme appropriation. Unlike Three Feet High and Rising, however, in an effort to avoid litigation, plunderphonic was never made available for sale; it was instead freely distributed to radio stations, libraries, critics, and musicians. Despite these steps taken, Oswald’s manipulation on the album of Michael Jackson’s song “Bad”—and, surely, who are we kidding, the cover art, depicting Jackson’s head atop the body of a nude white woman—irked Jackson’s lawyers (a.k.a, “prudes in the Recording Industry”) enough to force Oswald to cease distributing the disc, and destroy any remaining copies.   

Which brings us to 1993, when Oswald, commissioned by John Zorn, released his most extreme plunderphonic project to date—his “most dense and crushing heavy assemblage,” the album’s press release states—and this week’s Album of the Week: Plexure.

The EP clocks in at nineteen minutes and nineteen seconds, and while diligently divided into twelve “movements” ( marked off by tracks with titles like “Urge,” “Blur,” “Zoom,” “Cyfer,” “Worse, “Temperature,” and “Massive” ) and twenty-one “submovements” (with titles like “Suck,” “Rip,” “Slice,” “Blink,” “Wow,” “Hazzard,” and “Tremendous”), it is intended to be played through in its entirety, underpinned as it is by an “underlying morph” that moves from the very slow to the very fast indeed—from 47 beats per minute to 384+. The beat, as such, is one of the things Oswald leans on in offering a foothold to those for whom such music may not an easy climb be. “Tapping your foot to Plexure is a bit of an adventure,” Oswald confesses, “but it can be done.”

For a plunderphone to be a plunderphone and not simply a sample, its source must remain recognizable in spite of any transformation. “The plundering has to be blatant,” Oswald says. But the threshold of recognizability opens up a beautiful can of worms, particularly when the samples to be recognized are seconds-long or less, and scrunched up tight against thousands of other equally potentially recognizable snippets. A snatch of bass line here, a snippet of snare there; peeks of vocal shouts and coos—I know I’ve heard that before. Prince and Huey Lewis and the News. Nirvana and Paula Abdul. The Eurhythmics and U2. Peter Gabriel and the Beastie Boys. Michael Jackson and Michael Bolton. Bombarded with such a disorienting barrage of material, so quickly and thickly, one might be unable to finger specific sources, but will most certainly sense waves a familiarity. And rightly so. The source materials Oswald used for Plexure include chart-toppers on down in Western popular music from 1982 to 1992, which is tantamount to the entirety of the first decade of the “compact disc era.”

The use of recognizable material on Plexure, much like its focus on a pulsing beat, can also help ease in the listener who may not already have a knowledge of or a taste for styles outside of the mainstream—it’s an effective way to bridge the gap between the avant-garde techniques of the twentieth-century with pop music.

Make no mistake, though: Plexure—which is a word meaning “an interweaving”—is unrelenting. It is so tightly packed with moment-to-moment shifts that the closest thing to respite we get is the varied pseudo-looping of material for just about thirty seconds on the Madonna-infused ninth movement, “Mad Mod” before we are knocked over the head once again with a dizzying barrage of familiar sounds.

The album’s eleventh and final movement, called “Velocity” (which includes the final two sub-movements, “Tremendous” and “Tremulous”) takes what is already an idea taken to its radical conclusion to its radical conclusion, concluding as it does with rushing flood of millisecond-long electroquotations—the sound of a decade, flashing before your ears.

It’s true that while, generally speaking, cassette and even CD mix tapes are a thing of the past, we’ve regained some strides from an architectural perspective at least—what with playlists on Spotify and such—in the sense that we can control which tracks we hear and can hop from song to song without worrying about the remainders of albums, but overall we’re not that different from our 1985 counterparts in how with interact with the music itself.

I hope you’ll find twenty minutes to sit with John Oswald’s Plexure in its entirety. It’ll be a workout for many, but a manageable one, and one well worth it. And at very least, I encourage you to find a way to free your own consumption of music from the binds of exclusively passive listening. Make a mix for yourself or someone else. Download a free audio editing platform like Audacity and futz around with your favorite music for a while. If in doubt, take Dolly Parton’s advice, and just see what happens when you flip the switch up from 45 to 78.  

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 38: The Art of the Theremin (Clara Rockmore, 1977)

Josh Rutner

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In December 1968, a children’s opera premiered in Hamburg, Germany called Help, Help, The Globolinks! In it, the composer and lyricist, Gian Carlo Menotti allegorizes his get-off-my-lawn-you-kids-with-your-rock-’n’-roll-and-hula-hoops anxieties about the shrouding of melodic, old-fashioned music by what he saw as the dark clouds of electronic and computer music rolling in. The opera’s plot is simple enough: Squishy and squiggly monsters from outer-space—the titular Globolinks—have landed on earth and are turning humanity into hunks of angular metal as they bleep-bloop along. While traditional methods of warfare—tanks, cannons, guns—fail against the comically horrible creatures, it is discovered that the only sure way to prevail against them is via music. You know, proper music. Our heroine appears in the form of a young schoolgirl named Emily whose practiced, controlled, and melodious violin playing leads the charge toward scattering and finally reversing the alien threat.

We might reimagine this opera with Clara Rockmore as the heroine, except, rather than using an acoustic instrument like the violin to repel the creatures, she instead tames the great and powerful theremin into doing her bidding, drawing from it—in essence, through drawing with her hands about it—not the “spooky noises” of horror films and thrillers, but great masterworks of the past, replete with “humanistic” vibrato. Those Globolinks wouldn’t know what hit ’em.

Rockmore herself, like young Emily in Menotti’s opera, began her music career as a violinist. She was a prodigy, in fact. But after developing an unbearable pain in her bow arm from, as she tells it, practicing the hell out of the Beethoven Concerto in the weeks and months following the death of her mother, she eventually needed to hang the instrument up. But the music she loved remained in her head and ears and all she needed was a mode of expressing it.

Enter the enigmatic Russian electrical engineer, inventor, and cellist Lev Sergeyevich Termen—anglicized as Léon Theremin—who, in 1918, designed the first version of what would eventually become known as, simply, the theremin, a musical instrument that could be played without being touched.

Theremin gained a private audience for his new instrument with Vladimir Lenin at the Kremlin in 1922, performing for him, among other things, Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan,” a gliding and shimmering piece originally written for cello—a piece which Rockmore too, perhaps as an homage to Theremin, would perform throughout her career and eventually record on 1977’s The Art of the Theremin, the only album she released in her lifetime, and this week’s Album of the Week.

Theremin was sent by Joseph Stalin to the US in 1927 on a temporary visa, to “demonstrate inventions” and, at the same time—so the story goes—to relay any secrets of American technologies back to the motherland. A real live Soviet spy, he was! The details of his eventual departure remain a bit hazy, but after ten years living on a perpetually extended six-month visa, Professor Theremin was mysteriously spirited away to a prison camp in Russia to invent surveillance devices for the government, a time which produced at very least a device still very much in use today: the wireless bug. 

The theremin, visually speaking, consists of a cabinet—though modern, transistorized versions are more like a sleek slab of wood—with a horizontal antenna jutting out to the left to regulate volume—the closer the hand, the quieter the output—and a vertical antenna shooting upward to regulate pitch—the closer the hand, the higher the tone.

When Theremin and Rockmore, Russian immigrants both, had met early on to discuss his instrument, he, realizing she was a violinist, offered to switch the placement of the antennas since she was used to producing vibrato with her left hand, rather than the right. But she, full of youthful enthusiasm and, let’s be honest, crushing hard on the svelte, lab-coated professor, insisted that she learn the instrument as it was invented. What Rockmore did eventually take issue with was the slow volume response in the left hand—“molasses,” she called it, “you couldn’t shake it off”—and the limited range of her 1929 RCA model, both of which Theremin was happy to rectify with a custom cabinet made especially for her.

The sales brochure for the RCA version touted “AN ABSOLUTELY NEW UNIQUE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT ANYONE CAN PLAY,” and it’s certainly true that it is very easy to produce a sound—the same way anyone can make sounds on a piano, or the drums, or harp; all one needs is a working limb or two—but to control it, to make music in the traditional sense, proved exceedingly difficult and the general public certainly wasn’t willing to put in the hours. And because of this, most players simply took the sweeping, gestural portamenti and wobbling vibrato they were able to pull from the strange antenna’d cabinet as a defining characteristics of the instrument.  

For Rockmore, however, the instrument was both theoretically and practically no less expressive or nimble than a violin or a voice, particularly in the hands of one with her ear and her technique—“aerial fingering,” she called her ability to articulate intervallic passages—and she would make her mark playing romantic works from the classical repertoire—works that are relatively slow-paced, broad and emotional, and where occasional expressive slidings from one pitch to another are natural and welcome. The lead-off track of the record is one that shines a light on the vocal quality of the Theremin. “Vocalise” was written by Rachmaninoff to be sung without words, on the vowel of the singer’s choice. Rockmore’s version is lovely, dynamic—singing, even.

Throughout The Art of the Theremin, Rockmore is gorgeously accompanied by her older sister, Nadia Reisenberg on piano. The two lead the listener down a path well-trodden, to be sure, but no less beautiful for it. Both pour their souls into squeezing powerful harmonies and aching melodies out of their respective instruments.

A favorite of mine on the record is the second track, Rachmaninoff’s “The Songs of Grusia,” a song originally composed for tenor voice and piano based on a poem by Pushkin. In the English version, the lyrics tell of a man imploring a Circassian maiden not to sing the old songs of Grusia—Grusia being the country of Georgia—because they flood his mind with otherwise-repressed memories of his long-lost beloved. The piano accompaniment is brutally beautiful here, descending and descending as we picture the man’s heart sinking, as his memories return one by one.

When we first meet Clara Rockmore in the opening scene of the 1993 documentary called Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, she is gently admonishing the camera man for standing too near, explaining, “Nobody can stand anywhere near me, because then I can’t tune or do anything. That’s a crazy instrument; it’s not your fault.”

Since the time of Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera, the Globolinks of electronic music have returned and more or less set up shop for good, but, like most tales of immigration, the new is never as nefarious as detractors claimed out of fear, and, importantly, the more we learn about and from the other, the better off we all become.

Hear, hear.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 37: Masterpiece (Big Thief, 2016)

Josh Rutner

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Years ago I saw an old episode of the 1983 BBC television series called Fun to Imagine in which theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, sitting in a wing chair in his California home, takes a crack at explaining how fire works to a lay audience. He describes, in his thick Queens, New York accent, how the carbon that makes up the wood of the tree came from the air and how that carbon is pined for by the oxygen in that same air, but to connect again requires a boost of speed via heat, and so on. But the part that knocked me out and stayed with me was how he described what’s happening when you put “tree substance” in a fire: “The light and heat that’s coming out,” he said, “that’s the light and heat of the sun that went in. So it’s sort of ‘stored sun’ that’s comin’ out when you burn it, a log.”

In the title track of Big Thief’s 2016 debut album, Masterpiece, lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker sings to a loved one on a hospital bed, “Old stars filling up my throat / you gave ‘em to me when I was born, now they’re coming out.” I can’t help but think of a Feynman’s “stored sun” every time I hear that line. Sometimes it just takes the emotional heat of loss to loosen the stars from one’s throat.

While Big Thief, now rounded out by drummer James Krivchenia—who joined up on the drums after engineering Masterpiece—is a solid and tight-knit unit, the root of the project lies in the pairing of Lenker and lead guitarist and back-up vocalist Buck Meek. The two—who met and kindled a working friendship the first day Lenker moved to New York—have for years been writing and performing music as a duo, releasing two acoustic albums in the spring of 2014 called a-sides and b-sides, respectively.

To steal an idea from Lenker’s song “New York City”—a lovely, old-fashioned ditty that appears on b-sides—she is the Blossom Dearie to Meek’s Buster Keaton. It’s an spot-on comparison, and one I wouldn’t have so blatantly ripped off except I literally couldn’t best it. Both Dearie and Keaton had about their art a forward-facing presentation that veiled the deeper levels of their talents, if not their souls: Dearie, a sharp-witted, heart-rending vocal powerhouse packed inside a light-touch, near-saccharine delivery; Keaton a world-class athlete and comedic artist enveloped in a shroud of the hapless tramp. Offhanded exactitude is a particularly dramatic and exciting way of messaging expertise. 

Lenker for her part parries in her songs emotional blow after emotional blow with airy composure—little throwaway whips of voice tossed upward like magnets hit their targets. See, for example, the wide-leaping verses on “Vegas.” Meek, Keaton-like in his solos, wanders around plucking crunchy extensions from the air and wobbly bending low—see his feature in “Real Love”—but when the two-ton façade of the building finally tips and falls as Lenker’s vocal returns, he has somehow managed to get himself to exactly where he needs to be—of course he did—coolly stepping out of the window frame and walking off as if nothing happened.

Lyrically speaking, no punches are pulled on this album, and thank goodness. Lenker is a poet of the highest order, moving us alternately by way of opaquely evocative distance—love is “a gentle thing,” “thicker than a velvet ring,” for instance—and a stark and naked matter-of-factitude—“love is a cold infection alright,” and “real love is a heart attack.” This album, and indeed all of Lenker’s available output that I was able to find, is rife with gorgeous turns-of-phrase that, in the words of one such phrase, “catch your distraction,” pulling your ears right up close to the speakers to take it all in.

The music on the album is, to put it plainly, very very good. Startlingly so, when taken as a whole. Masterpiece may not a capital-M masterpiece be, but it most certainly is a collection of masterfully constructed, and powerfully presented songs, each with its own scope and vantage point. Track after track after track of burning catharsis. We’re drawn from scene to scene by the ears and dared to keep them open as tales of vicious arguments, domestic violence, mental health melancholy, loves lost, parental abandonment, and more play out in full-color. Of course, there is another side to the emotional on this record, but it’s not happiness per se. More of a softness. Still on the edge of weeping, but tender.

There is an element of lo-fi sound—particularly in the form of field recordings—peppering the otherwise pristinely recorded album, which has received short shrift by many reviewers, baffling them. I myself find them to be incredibly moving pieces of tape, and the perspective shifts alone deepen the experience of listening. There is the recording that appends the fifth track—called “Interstate”—of little Matteo Spaccarelli sing-speaking, “I like a car, I like a truck”—turning the words over and getting a feel for them, clearly elated at the content; but for me, it’s the bird sounds that appear at the end of the penultimate track, “Randy,” that really get me. “There are blue jays all in bloom / all along the cement floor,” Lenker sings. “You don’t know me but you know my name / will you say it till the light is gone?” Then the buzz of her amp rings out and cross-fades into a recording of song birds and I’m there. It goes for 30 seconds but I could have gotten lost in that recording for hours. More than the birds themselves, it’s the butting-up of spaces that brings out in each that which might otherwise go unnoticed or underappreciated.

In a sense, this idea is used as a framing device at the very start of the record, where the first thing we hear is a wave of tape hiss and Lenker singing “Little Arrow,” a song which, according to Meek, she’d written in the middle of the night during the recording sessions, while the rest of the band slept, and, he says, “recorded it on a cheap tape player the moment she finished writing it.”

“Is it, could it, was it dreaming?”

The transition from the dusty “Little Arrow” to the cleanly recorded title track which follows is stunning and effective. Meek says that the band considered trying to record “Little Arrow” as a group, but in the end there was something so pure about that first version, “like a birth,” he said, that it made sense to leave it be, and even open the album with it.

Masterpiece is a thrilling debut, and one whose music and lyrics are deep enough to warrant many repeated listenings. There is, within Big Thief, a fire burning, and their stars are only beginning to come out.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 36: ¡Olé Tormé!: Mel Tormé Goes South of the Border with Billy May (Mel Tormé, 1959)

Josh Rutner

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“Have you ever been embarrassed / when you’re in a smart café / when they play that Latin tempo / is your dancing quite passé?”

Sure, we’ve all been there. It’s the worst.

Luckily, while Madam La Zonga’s Main Street dance studio has surely long since been converted into luxury apartments, we have the bullishly powerful yet playfully mano a mano recorded collaboration between El Sr. Mel Tormé y El Sr. Billy May—1959’s ¡Olé Tormé!  Mel Tormé Goes South of the Border with Billy May—to guide our ears toward what was hip in the late 1950s with regard to Latin-tinged jazz. It’s less “bringing out the Latin in you”—as those six lessons from Madam La Zonga advertised—and more a gentle misting of yourself with a commercial and highly polished version of the style.

I say “the” style, but in fact May and Tormé for this album chose a collection of songs of or—let’s be honest, more often than not—at very least name-checking Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic.

The album’s cover photograph shows Tormé standing proudly in a full-on torero getup, holding the requisite roseate flag—better than a fruit-hat, I suppose—and May, ever the cut-up, sitting on the ground, bedecked with sombrero and Mexican blanket, scowling at the camera with his hands in the “Hey, what gives?” position.

From the opening, old-time rock-and-roll groove on “Malagueña” (a.k.a. “At the Crossroads”), it’s clear that there is more to this album than exotic parody. And when the big band swings, it swings like hell, and when the brass section rips forth its joyous mambo splats, it does so with verve and heart. Say what you will about the very real potential for and existence of the problematic in a project such as this—you can’t say May and Tormé don’t give it their all.

While there is just plain no getting around the fact that the “Latin” elements that grace this record are almost entirely rooted in the gaze of an outsider charmed by an exotic otherness, for May, at least it’s not his first rodeo. In the late ’40s, for example, May was tasked by Capitol Records to provide original music for a 3-disc set of 10-inch records featuring child-star Margaret O’Brien called Let’s Fly to Mexico: A Travelog for Children. Described briefly, in its stunted, space-saving manner, in a March 1948 issue of Billboard magazine—then called “The Billboard”—the project “relates story of [O’Brien’s] Mexican vacation in interesting, appealing fashion. Starting with plane trip to the land south of the border, Margaret leads young listeners around the fascinating country, acting role of Mexican child as well as herself.” (As an aside, there was neat feature at the end of these old The Billboard snippets that gauged how the album might fare in jukeboxes and in the hand disc-jockeys, respectively: “Jukes and Jocks.” For those keeping score at home, Let’s Fly to Mexico is “not suitable” for jukeboxes, but “great for recorded kiddie shows.”)

A more contemporary example comes in the form of May’s first collaboration with Frank Sinatra entitled Come Fly with Me—which was its own musical travelogue of sorts—released in 1958, just a year before ¡Olé Tormé!

When Sinatra came to Capitol Records in 1953—May was, at the time, dabbling with leading a road band—his first sessions included a cover of a May song called “Lean Baby” as well as Nelson Riddle’s unabashedly May-ish arrangement—not least by way of its soupy, “slurping” saxophones—of “South of the Border.” (As it happens, that Riddle arrangement would eventually find an appropriate home as a bonus track in the late-’90s CD re-release of the aforementioned Come Fly with Me.)

In fact, speaking of “South of the Border,” May’s arrangement for Tormé included a brief and comic detour (before a final feel-good modulation) into the well-known “Mexican Hat Dance”—a song that May had arranged some years earlier for Woody Herman’s orchestra under the title “Mexican Hat Trick”—complete with tongue-in-cheek lyrics describing a run-in with his flame’s husband, who threatens to rearrange the narrator’s “face-o” but for one peso.

With a lesser arranger behind the pen, many of the songs on ¡Olé Tormé! could have easily slipped down the series of pegs into tepid and edgeless lounge music. But with May scoring, even the most lightweight songs are brimming with effervescent wit and vitality.

One of my favorites on this record is an Alberto Domínguez song called “Frenesí,” which, aside from being a hit for Artie Shaw in 1940, saw great cover versions from artists as diverse as saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, Ray Charles, and Pérez Prado, a Cuban bandleader dubbed “The King of Mambo.” (Incidentally, Prado would, nearly a decade after ¡Olé Tormé!, release a great record called, simply, Latino, which featured not only “Frenesí,” but also two other songs taken on by May and Tormé on their collaboration, namely “Perfidia” and “Adios.”) Despite the title, Tormé and May provide a most unfrenzied reading of the song, and along with some fun side-slipping modulations toward the end, the version shows off Tormé incredible technique, twirling ornaments with aplomb.

The 1950s was, so to speak, a period of import for Cuban music in the US. (I Love Lucy, which debuted in 1951, was insanely popular, and thus the primary source of many Americans’ knowledge of Cuba and its music.) In 1954, Down Beat magazine reported that “almost all dance halls and night clubs now require its band to have at least some mambos in their books.” The cha-cha-chá arrived on American shores soon after. Don’t be fooled, of course. This music that was unfurling from the hi-fis of Johnny and Jane 50sAmerica was hardly anything that could be described as authentic. This fact alone, though, isn’t entirely disheartening—as ¡Ole Tormé! shows, drawing wispy strains up from the south and gently wrapping them around an energetic big band can really be a kick. But the movement—it should go without saying—did have its share of cultural side-effects.

Writer Louis A. Pérez, in an essay within the 2003 book Inside Cuba: The History, Culture, and Politics of an Outlaw Nation, lamented the Cuban composers and musicians in the ’50s struggling to compete in the market for commercialized rhumba, mambo, and cha-cha-chá: “Simply put,” he wrote, “they could not produce credible adulterations such as ‘Papa Loves Mambo’ and the ‘Davey Crockett Mambo.’ In the process, much creative energy went into the development of execrable material, little of which succeeded but had the net effect of subverting the authenticity of the genre.” There is something about that turn of phrase that Pérez uses—“credible adulterations,” the idea that artists felt forced to try on the kitsch that they themselves inspired—that just breaks my heart.

¡Olé Tormé! for sure has its share of questionable cultural appropriation and lyrical issues, particularly listened to with 2016 ears—I immediately think, for example, of the line in “Six Lessons from Madam La Zongo that goes, “When the madam starts to squawk / that’s her Latin double-talk”—but, that said, does this album sound fantastic? Hell yes it does. It’s quintessential Billy May—bringing beautiful, brash, subtle, witty, grin-inducing big band arrangements—a crazy-solid band packed with first-rate west-coast players and, of course, Mel Tormé, at the peak of his punch.

Check it out.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 35: Birthright (James Blood Ulmer, 2005)

Josh Rutner

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James Blood Ulmer’s 2005 solo release, Birthright, is an album best listened to alone in the dark, preferably at night. It is an exploratory pawing about in the world of the blues, using, to loosen the stone, the harmolodic tools forged by saxophonist Ornette Coleman, with whom Ulmer spent the majority of the 1970s studying and working.   

While it seems after listening only natural that Ulmer would have recorded an album of blues, in fact his strict upbringing in rural St Matthews, South Carolina would draw a firm line between music for the church and blues music. Ulmer admitted to not knowing much about blues music before the guitarist and producer Vernon Reid suggested they collaborate on some projects that placed the devil’s music front and center, but of course the human element had long been in place: “A guy from the south ain’t got to play blues,” Ulmer would say, “because there’s blue shit all over that bad boy. You’re living the blues.”

Ulmer was reluctant, but Reid was insistent, helpfully pointing out the prevalent undercurrent of the blues beneath Ulmer’s beloved harmolodic so-called “free” jazz that he’d used for so long as his preferred mode of expression.

In a Down Beat interview published in 1983, Coleman defined harmolodics this way:

“Harmolodics is the use of the physical and mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group. Harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time, and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from the placing and spacing of ideas.”

It’s this freedom to play with harmonies, rhythms, phrase lengths, and so on, that ties harmolodics to the blues singers of the past. Playing by oneself helped to facilitate this freedom in a very real way—the twelve-bar blues is myth.

The lead-off track, “Take My Music Back to the Church,” is Ulmer’s way of facing head-on the stand-off between the church and the blues. He elevates the blues art form, sanctifies it, and claims that it is—or was, at least—misunderstood, singing: “Some people think it’s the song of the devil / but it’s the soul of the man for sure.”

He found a connection between the blues and church music not only in their respective ties to history, but in their single-mindedness toward a subject, which can lead you to a higher plane: “When you’re singing in church,” Ulmer says, “you’re not singing about nothing except God. So when you’re singing blues you can get a similar feeling—that you’re singing about something that’s not about you.”

From the start of “Take My Music Back to the Church,” we are washed-over by the open-fifth drone of Ulmer’s guitar—a favorite device of his uses to push his playing to new harmolodic heights while still feeling rooted “in key.” His novel open-tuning, consisting of four strings tuned to the same note complemented by a pair of structural fifths interleaved—a “harmolodic tuning,” in the words of a surprised Coleman upon first witnessing it—was literally dreamed up after being frustrated by Coleman’s drill-sergeant practice regimen where Ulmer would play chords for hours on end. 

Sprinkled among the dark and deep and deeply original blues tunes on the record are a few bright and sparkling stunners, namely “Where Did All the Girls Come From,” which was originally released on his 1981 record called Free Lancing in full band format replete with back-up singers, and “Geechee Joe,” an oral history of sorts, telling the true story of his grandfather, a man who had grown up in the insolated Gullah/Geechee culture of the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia. Joe had moved up to Pittsburgh, never working a job where he wasn’t the boss, for, as Ulmer’s song tells us, “he didn’t want to work for the white man.” 

A favorite of mine is track five, “White Man’s Jail,” which is as close to a stereotypical blues form as we get on the record, but the lyrics—muffled and mumbled though they may be—combined with the patient and fluid strolling tempo, and Ulmer’s fluttering voice, make “White Man’s Jail” anything but pat. He takes one chorus of liberty to feature a guitar solo, but that’s it: one chorus. Talking of blues players who know what they’re doing, he says they “don’t take fifteen choruses, they play the song. If the song’s about a chicken, you don’t have the mule in there.”

After the album’s finale, a haunting and take-no-prisoners song called “Devil’s Got to Burn,” during which we hear Ulmer’s creepily devilish cackling, we are treated, after just over a minute of silence, to a coda in the form of a “hidden bonus track”—that vestige novelty that worked so well for CDs but sadly falls totally flat with the spoiler-filled scrubber bars of digital music interfaces—featuring a three-and-a-half-minute solo flute improvisation. It’s an unexpectedly light but welcome conclusion to a most-heavy record.

Do yourself a favor and wait until the sun goes down, turn off all the lights, put on Birthright, and turn it up.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.