Album of the Week (full episodes) - Josh Rutner

Episode 34: Red Headed Stranger (Willie Nelson, 1975)

Josh Rutner

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“I guess I was trying to figure out how a man could do something as crazy as that,” Willie Nelson said in a 1992 interview. The “that” Nelson is referring to is the killing of a woman for reaching out to touch—supposedly with the intention to steal—a man’s horse. The song in which these events are relayed—“Red Headed Stranger”—does give reasons that alone could provide a logical, if still indefensible, justification: the bay pony he leads behind him belonged to his lost wife, who “lay asleep on the hillside”—that is, dead. Because of that, the bay means more to him than life; and he is wild in his sorrow.

OK, so a man’s wife is dead, and in his grief he protects her horse as a totem, to the point of killing anyone who would dare lay a hand on it. That’s the basic idea of the original song, but Nelson, egged on by his wife—who suggested his first record for Columbia Records be a concept album—saw something else in the man’s murderous action beyond grief: guilt.

And so, with “Red Headed Stranger” as the textual kernel, Nelson built a world for the song’s anti-hero, before and after the events in the song proper. We learn the man is a preacher, married, of course, but he’s been cuckolded and left alone. The shock ages him, and, as we learn in the Ecclesiastes-laced song that frames the record and checks in from time to time, “Time of the Preacher,” the time for preaching and lessons is over. The wild sorrow in the original song takes root here as he cries like a baby and screams like a panther. He sets off on his stallion—her dancing bay pony presumably in tow—to track his wife and her lover and restore his dignity. (Or so he believes.)

After a dozen records released on the RCA label in the '60s and early '70s, Nelson signed on to Atlantic Records in 1973 and recorded two albums: Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages, another concept album, like Red Headed Stranger. But Atlantic soon shuttered its country music division, leaving Nelson without a label. He’d already grown disenchanted with the ho-hum Nashville sound—the overfull production with strings and back-up singers aplenty—and the unfortunate incident of his Nashville house burning down had provided some cover to escape that scene and relocate to his home state of Texas. Nelson was a hot song-writing commodity at the time—he’d had a huge jukebox mega-hit with Patsy Cline’s version of his song “Crazy”—so he was able to strike an artistically advantageous contract with Columbia, which afforded him complete creative control—something that would become necessary when Nelson finished the record and it was first played for management. Bruce Lundvall, president of Columbia Records at the time, had proposed sweetening the thing up to give it that Nashville glow—in fact, he’d assumed at first listen it was merely a demo, so spare was the orchestration. But Waylon Jennings, Nelson’s friend who happened to be in the office with their shared manager, hopped up on Lundvall’s desk—so the story goes, anyway—and called him a “tin-eared tone-deaf son of a bitch,” who clearly didn’t get what Nelson was going for with the album. When the record went gold within a year, Lundvall supposedly sent Jennings a gold record with a note that read, “This is from that tin-eared tone-deaf son of a bitch. You were right. Here’s your album.” Red Headed Stranger would go on to become the first million-selling country album ever.

The fourth track, a medley, sutures an original song, “Blue Rock Montana”—which, in just over a minute, describes the tracking and killing of the stranger’s wife and her lover in a local tavern—to a brief iteration of the title track.

In so doing, Nelson smooths the seams between the preexisting and the new, sowing narrative seeds that will come to bloom in the B side of the record. For example, there are poetic—if gruesome—parallels between “Blue Rock Montana” and the flipside’s opener, “Denver,” which—again very briefly, just under a minute—details the stranger’s sauntering into the Colorado city of light, and spying a woman who might absolve him. Both events, the double homicide in Blue Rock and the meet-cute in Denver, take place in “a tavern in town in a quiet little out of the way place.” In Denver, “they smiled at each other as he walked through the door, and they danced with their smiles on their faces / and they danced with a smile on their face.” In Blue Rock, they—the couple that proved his wife’s infidelity—smiled at each other when he walked through the door,” and—owing to the speed of the Red Head’s draw, “they died with their smiles on their faces / they died with a smile on their face.” The songs are nearly identical in structure, harmony, and instrumentation—save the added piano in “Denver”—and it’s an incredibly effective move. Similarly, the framing device of the song “Time of the Preacher” is powerful every time it returns. The story moves forward with a familiar narrator at the helm.

“Denver” leads directly into a pair of instrumental numbers, during which we the listener imagine the red-headed stranger dancing with this new stranger—both smiling—in the out of the way tavern. First a waltz: the very popular “Over the Waves”—believe me, you’ve heard it and would recognize it—followed by a solid version of the up-tempo stomper “Down Yonder,” featuring Nelson’s sister Bobbie on piano.

After they’ve danced their smiles off, the stranger asks the woman—by way of a cover of a tender Jeannie Seely song released in 1973—if he can sleep in her arms. Here, four-fifths of the way through the tracks, we feel most powerfully the taut pull of the narrative Nelson has established against that of a preexisting cover: the narrator of “Can I Sleep in Your Arms,” which of course we hear to be the voice of the stranger—a man who, remember, thus far has killed two women on his journey—gently tells his potential lover, “I assure I’ll do you no wrong,” and, “Don’t know why but the one I love left me.” In this psychologically complex dissonance, both the cover and the grand narrative are imbued with deeper, subtler meanings. Even the perspective shift from Nelson’s originals’ troubadour-like, third-person relating of story to many of the covers’ first-person POV lends a healthy dose of emotional depth to the record.

In the end, with the song “Hands on the Wheel,” the stranger and, presumably, the Denver woman seem to have settled down and had a child—he saw himself in her, and thus found a way home.

So what lessons can we learn from Red Headed Stranger? Well, practically speaking, stay the hell out of the path of ragin’ black stallions, and don’t lay a hand on a stranger’s bay pony. They’re probably not well. Also, if someone is wild in their sorrow, it’s probably best to wait it out until the morning—maybe they’ll ride on. But perhaps most importantly, if Willie Nelson says the record’s done, the record’s done.

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

Episode 33: In My Room (Jacob Collier, 2016)

Josh Rutner

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By the time we reach the end of the first track of Jacob Collier’s debut solo record, In My Room, we’re left a bit dizzied. In the four and a half minute track, called “Woke Up Today,” we hear playfully punchy and tight synth hits—shades of bands like KNOWER and Dirty Loops abound—singable melodies laid atop ever-changing reharms and interlocking rhythmic grooves, a melodica solo that would force any jazz nerd’s jaw to floor, nods to Brazilian music, dense multi-voice a cappella, and tons more—I’m pretty sure I saw the kitchen sink flying by at one point.

I can imagine a past version of me—one I’m not proud of—hearing this first track and thinking to myself, jealous and embarrassed in my defensiveness, “OK OK, the kids got chops”—did I mention he is playing every instrument on the record and produced the damn thing himself?—“But there’s so much going on! It’s showy! Bet he couldn’t play a ballad…” Blah blah blah.

Collier is young—21 at the time of In My Room’s release—but he’s been soaking in and, importantly, soaking in music for his entire life, and, you know, he’s pretty freaking great at it. Oh, and if playing ballads would’ve satisfied ol’ petulant past me, I’d’ve only needed to stick around for track two, an incredibly patient and funky and sensitive arrangement of Brian Wilson’s song “In My Room.”

In fact, the album as a whole has a maxamilist touch to it—everything in moderation, even excess—which is interesting given the road to grace Collier chose for recording the thing: holed up in his music room at home; the medieval via negativa of the monk’s cell and the hermit’s cave. Of course, his cave had tens and tens of instruments lining the walls and the floors, an internet connection, and a mother on the other side of the door encouraging him to come for a bite every now and then so he doesn’t starve.

Writer John Barth, another maximalist, would often recall an anecdote in which his friend and colleague in the so-called “postmodern,” Donald Barthelme, visited a seminar Barth was teaching, and a student asked Barthelme how she and her seminar-mates might improve as writers:

"Well, for one thing," Barthelme answered dryly, "you might try reading all of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help." And when the young woman gently pushed back, noting that Barth had already advised them to read all of literature, from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom up through last semester, "That, too," he replied. "You're probably wasting your time on stuff like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and go read everything."

Collier—a British singer, songwriter, arranger, pianist, guitarist, bassist, drummer, percussionist, etc., etc., etc., etc.—in a way, lived that Barthelmaniacal advice. Recalling his two years in the jazz piano program at the Royal Academy of Music, Collier says, “Every day I’d listen to an album on the way in and on the way home. That’s like 1,500 albums. I just kind of drank them in. From pop music to classical stuff and music from India and Africa.”

When asked in another interview if he could remember the first album he ever bought with his own money, he pegged it as Stevie Wonder’s 1972 record Talking Book, which, as it happens, contains on it a song that Collier covers wonderfully in his record—the song “You and I.”

Collier made a name for himself posting on YouTube six-part singing-head videos featuring a cappella arrangements of songs like Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” and Rogers & Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Over the next few years he would start biting off and chewing more and more in his videos, arranging for a multitude of instruments, and editing them to show you bits of vid for everything that’s going on as it happens.

Those roots in a cappella and reharm are clear in the aforementioned arrangement of “You and I” as well as the hard-to-deny-despite-every-urge-to-do-so arrangement of the "Flintstones" theme song. The song has been an unfortunately aren’t-we-clever addition to the jazz world for decades now—I remember playing a big band arrangement by trombonist John Fedchock at a high school festival in the '90s—surely due to the fact that composer Hoyt Curtin wrote the tune over the oft-used chord changes of George Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm,” so the fact that Collier picked it to go wild on is less funny than it could have been, but, you have to admit that tearing to threads and sewing together again so spectacularly an otherwise throwaway piece of cultural cloth has its appeal. 

There’s a lot of novelty in this album, though, believe me it’s not empty calorie novelty—but the meat of the thing comes out in songs like the ode-to-his music room, “Hideaway,” and the spare “In the Real Early Morning,” where his full voice stretching—as opposed to the gentle control of his falsetto we hear on most of the record—really lets loose deep emotional resonance. 

In a 2004 essay by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris called “Disciplined Excess: The Minimalist / Maximalist Interface in Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart,” the authors begin the section called “Minimalism into Maximalism Will Go” by quoting the first four lines of William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence,” which I think are a fitting close here, not simply because, yes, Collier created expanding and exploding worlds all from within his room, but also fitting because these very words, I came to discover, were set to music by the English composer Benjamin Britten in his song cycle, Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, Britten being a composer that changed the way Collier viewed harmony. Collier, at the age of 13, before his voice broke, performed in an English National Opera production of Britten’s chamber opera called The Turn of the Screw, in which he sang the high treble part of “Miles.” “The harmonies are so, so cool,” he says about performing Brittain’s music, “that my mind was shattered outwards.”

Here’s the quotation from Blake’s poem:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

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

 

Episode 32: Odessey and Oracle (The Zombies, 1968)

Josh Rutner

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Abbey Road Studios—the summer of 1967. The Beatles had, just about a month earlier, wrapped up their ground-breaking sessions that would become their eight studio album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In walk another set of loveable English lads—The Zombies—well-dressed, well-rehearsed and raring to go, working on what they were already quite sure would be their second and final recording, Odessey And Oracle. They’d had a #2 hit in America with their 1964 debut single, “She’s Not There,” but reception of the band was quieting, and they were still living with their parents. So? One last hurrah. They’d had a clear vision for their songs and thus were able to convince CBS records—“with smarm and charm,” as they say—to give them £1000 and, importantly, to let them self-produce. Abbey Road Studios post-Sgt. Pepper’s was an ideal place to realize their lush, multi-layered backing vocal tracks, and instruments left behind from the Beatles’ session, such as the Mellotron—an early sampling keyboard that allowed them to quickly and easily infuse their often baroque arrangements with strings and flutes—provided a nice assist. Other instruments, on the other hand, like the pump-organ with its "high gothic top" that accompanied Chris White’s appropriately claustrophobic World War I-inspired song, "Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914),” had to be carefully transported to the studio by the band.

The influence of the Beatles as well as the Beach Boys shines through in the backing vocals of the bouncy opening track, called “Care of Cell 44,” which takes the unique form of a man’s letter his loved one, soon slated to be released from prison. After the verses, we hear those hums plus “bum-bum-bums” that so readily signal Beach Boys, followed immediately by open-throated, Beatlesque “Ah” backings.

Strains of melancholy run throughout the album, but nowhere quite so plainly as in the second track, “A Rose for Emily.” The title was borrowed from a 1930 Faulkner short story, but aside from both texts invoking images of graves and the view that, in the face of tragedy, nothing can be done, the song’s “Emily” was drawn from whole cloth. The song’s character is described—through the beautifully empathetic voice of lead-singer Colin Blunstone—as being surrounded by, but always left out of affairs of love. Summer arrives, but her sky is overcast. She tends to her rosebush, from which young lovers, swirling around her, pick flowers to give to anyone but her. Her pride, the only thing protecting her from pain, is no match for time’s nonchalant snuffing-out of both her and her roses. Heigh-ho, alas, and also lack-a-day: Not one rose left even for her grave. The elementary piano accompaniment complements beautifully the deep and luscious backing vocals.

In “Brief Candles,” three numb, spent lovers, fresh out of relationships, assess their respective loneliness, seeking the worthwhile in separation, enjoyment in their symptoms—their sadness makes them smile. Bassist Chris White, who wrote the song, said, “I suppose really it’s just about the ridiculousness of trying to make reasons of things.” The verses are quiet, accompanied only by piano, ramping up each time to the choruses, where the tempo and feel upshift, and bass, drums, and organ join in.

For such wonderfully psychedelic cover art—the misspelling of Odessey on the sleeve, by the way, uncaught by CBS’s art department through to the final pressing, was long face-savingly played-off by certain members of the band as just a hip play-on-words—anyway, for such a swirlingly-psychedelic artwork on the cover, the album is quite taught and composed through and through. No long and winding jams; and as for spacey effects, it’s pretty much limited to the brief, spooky fever-dream introduction of “Butcher’s Tale,” which lasts only 10 seconds before the pump organ appears and we’re off to the trenches.                                           

In the original release’s sleeve notes, the band included a foreshortened and slightly adjusted quotation from ol’ Will Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Be not afraid[afeared]; / The isle is full of noises / Sound[s], and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twang[l]ing instruments / Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices.” 

Rest assured there’s nothing to be afeared of, listening to The Zombies. And much to delight in. So check out Odessey and Oracle, following the advice of the jester Trinculo, who, after Caliban utters the words above, says, “The sound is going away; let's follow it, and after, do our work.”

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

 

Episode 31: Frank Fairfield (Frank Fairfield, 2009)

Josh Rutner

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It was June 2015, and Frank Fairfield was calling it quits. At long last, the anachronistic singer, guitarist, banjoist, and fiddler was officially done with the music racket. “I don’t feel I have a thing to offer,” he wrote in a Facebook post, of all places. “There are a few scattered dates already booked throughout the year which I’m obliged to see through. Hopefully after that I won’t have to play another damn note of music.”

It had only been seven years that Fairfield was enmeshed in that racket—which is to say, known outside of those within earshot of his street busking. In 2008, he was spotted on the street by Matt Popieluch—the former frontman for the band Foreign Born—who quickly came to manage Fairfield’s music career, and hooked him up with those darlings of the new-folk scene, The Fleet Foxes, for whom Fairfield would spend a season as the opening act. Soon thereafter, Fairfield was connected with Tompkins Square records—a label dedicated to old-timey music, both archival and newly-hewn—which would release this, his self-titled first full-length.

The album, released in 2009, is a collection of what might be broadly referred to as “traditional” tunes, though Fairfield sees them more as popular tunes, intended for everyone to sing. They’re not old songs, they’re now songs. He pooh-poohs the concept of owning a song—and even that of covering a song—dismissing them as modern corporate inventions. “You don’t ‘cover’ a Chris Smith song,” Fairfield explains. “You just sing it… These guys didn’t write these songs to own them, they wrote these songs to put into sheet music so they could be sung across the whole country.”

Fairfield is careful to respect the style while not resorting to treating it as some fragile egg, not least by digging into and finding his own way through the songs. On the opening track, called “Nine Pound Hammer,” the percussive plucking and strumming on the banjo is frantic and unyielding—chasing its tail, yipping and yapping—but always right there, dogging the ankles of his calmly strutting, melismatic vocal.

On the track, “Call Me a Dog When I’m Gone”—a tale of a groused-about gamblin’ man who just knows people will change their tune when he shows back up with a ten-dollar bill—we get to hear Fairfield’s mastery of the fingerstyle guitar. His style is full and driving—with a rhythmic pop reminiscent the great blind Reverend Gary Davis.

Fairfield is no mere cosplayer of the bygone; he embodies the aesthetic in everything from his high-waisted pants and buttoned-up button-downs to his sparsely-decorated apartment where gramophone grooves trump television channels. Born in southeast Texas, the son of a Mennonite minister, Fairfield had worked many odd jobs to stay afloat, but he came to find busking—playing on the street for whomever passes by—a more satisfying way to make a living. He shrugs off the overly romantic view, so often lobbed his way, that he is born of the wrong era—a man out of time. “I just think everything is as it should be and everything is just fine,” he says. His way of moving through life relies on letting what comes come—not forcing anything. He speaks softly in a gentle tenor mumble and sings with a quiver in the voice—a tremble in the tone that you don’t hear much nowadays. 

On track five, we’re treated to a stark and powerful interpretation of “The Dying Cowboy”—a song that might be better known to most as “The Streets of Laredo,” notably performed by Johnny Cash. Fairfield’s version is accompanied by his doleful fiddle—perched down in the armpit rather than up under the chin—with a single ornamented melodic line, dancing around a single open string, droning throughout.

One of my favorites on the record is the banjo-backed English ballad called “Margaret and Sweet William.” In the song, Sweet William remembers his long-lost love Margaret, who, whereupon having spied William and his new bride from a high window, tosses herself out that very window to her death. In Fairfield’s version, Margaret appears to William at the foot of his bridal bed that night as an apparition, spurring him to return to her home, only to find her cold corpse, which he then proceeds to kiss—hand, cheek, and lips. He falls asleep in her arms. In some versions of the song, William at this point dies of grief. Talking about the natural urge to sing heavy lonesome ballads, Fairfield notes, “We hear the owl hoot, and it just sounds so lonely. Everything mourns. The wolf howls. It’s perfectly natural to make a mournful sound, just as well as making a real chipper one.”

It’s tough to say whether Fairfield will fall back, or get dragged back into the music racket anytime soon, but rest assured that, in the meantime, he’ll abide, calmly making mournful and chipper sounds both, on the streets of some city, drawing smiles out of anyone smart enough to listen.  

If nothing else, take from Fairfield his outlook on finding the far-out in the everyday: “You're as far out as you're ever going to be anywhere you are. There's nowhere to go. Everything is wild and exciting.”

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

Episode 30: Olesi: Fragments of an Earth (Georgia Anne Muldrow, 2006)

Josh Rutner

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In a 2013 lecture–interview for Red Bull Music Academy, Roots drummer and Tonight Show bandleader, Questlove, reminisced about his mid-'90s conscious unraveling of the metronomic precision he’d long strove for, sparked by producer Jay Dee’s work on The Pharcyde’s second record, Labcabincalifornia. The kick drum on one song in particular sounded, in Questlove’s words, like it was being played by a “drunk three-year-old.” In 1996, when recording D’Angelo’s epic album Voodoo, Questlove was pushed to the brink, recalling, “He constantly… wanted me to drag the beat but then he dragged the beat behind me.” Any of you familiar with Voodoo surely know the feel I’m referring to here.

For Georgia Anne Muldrow, that feeling of laying back—in a word, her swing—is innate and required no unlearning. If the backbone of the beat is the metronome, her music is the circulatory and nervous systems, lub-dubbing and firing on different planes but always in harmony. It’s as if she regards the beat as it goes by rather than riding atop it. In a dual interview with her mother, singer-songwriter Rickie Byars Beckwith, Muldrow admits with laughter: “I always clap late. My whole life—I clap late. I sing late, I nod late. I come to interviews late; I’m just—late!”

Her 2006 album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth—her first full-length release—is a wonder of self-production, and, as the subtitle suggests, an otherworldly collection of snippets and snatches, some ending abruptly, some quickly fading out. 21 tracks under 50 minutes. For that very reason, this album is a great introduction to Muldrow’s work. The sampler-like record acts almost like a collection of journal entries—letting you in close for a peek, and then, the page turns.

The most substantial track—in length, if not subject matter—is the lead-off, called “New Orleans.” It is a brutally powerful opening statement, with Muldrow kicking the song off by singing, “Murderer / damage / a human life alone to die.” As listeners, we find ourselves awash in splashing cymbals, drowning in swirling ghostly background voices, and pounded and puctuated by an crooked machine-gun snare loop. Only one tiny window, at one and a half minutes in, offers a moment of relief—a brief chin above water, affording us just a half-breath—before being dragged again into the relentless deep. Muldrow’s voice doesn’t let up, approaching screams as she sings of the water and the flesh-and-blood it contains. Only in the last 15 seconds of the five-and-a-half minute song does the deluge recede, and she sings, “Listen child, dontcha know / It’s just my natural ebb and flow.”

In one interview, Muldrow tells of her formative memories hearing her father, guitarist Ronald Muldrow, playing "Giant Steps," which, for those unaware, is a composition by John Coltrane that was ground-breaking for its constantly shifting harmonic ground, never settling down into a “home base,” where complacency—in artist or listener—might creep in. That constant, clear-eyed vigilance and harmonic fluidity—the feeling of freedom to cross borders, or, better, eliminate them entirely—permeates Olesi. With squinting ears, one might even hear resonances of a beautifully wobbly cassette tape—the Doppler affecting the landscape.

Often compared to jazz luminaries like Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald, Muldrow once replied, in a manner that bespoke both her modesty and her bold ambitions, that, “for me, my aim is not to sound like Ella; my aim is to free my people.” Elsewhere, when asked about how she would hope people would see her legacy—what she’d want them to say about her—she took a beat, and said simply, “The greater legacy I hope to leave is what people will say about themselves.” For my money, Muldrow is less Simone and Fitzgerald, and more in the vein of June Tyson, the long-time vocalist with the Sun Ra Arkestra. I hear it in their sinewy melodic contours, their socially conscious and poetic lyrics, the space they don’t leave.

The indefinite article in the album’s subtitle, “Fragments of an Earth”; the name of her label, “Some Other Ship”; along with more overt references to outer space within Olesi’s lyrics, points to Muldrow’s hitching of her wagon to the rocketships of artists like Sun Ra himself, George Clinton, and others who used outer space references and iconography to explore such themes as alienation and identity in the Black experience.

Nearer to the end of the twentieth century, in a 1993 album, another vocalist and political activist, Abbey Lincoln—who, as it happens, like Muldrow also has a near-jarringly laid-backness to her style—poignantly invoked the outer reaches of the universe when she sang the following, in an ode to her mother: “Evalina Coffey made the journey here / Traveled in her spaceship from some other sphere / Landed in St. Louis, Chicago, and L.A. / A brilliant shining mother ship / From six hundred trillion miles away.”

Among the many tracks on Olesi, one can hear doo wop within boom bap, diamond basslines and parallel choirs, spoken word and rap and everything in between, salsa brass samples and garage beats, new-soul and old-school rubbing shoulders, and so on.

Olesi is a dense record, inhabited not only with Muldrow’s voice—or, rather, voices, what with her lush multi-tracking—but also the voices of generations before her. Her relationship to the past is deep and reciprocal: “I’m working on my receptive energy, for the ancestors to sing through me, so you’re going to hear a lot of different things because I’m giving them permission. And they’re giving me permission to sing, you see? And so I give them permission to use me to sing.”

On the track called “Wheels,” inspired by a John Outerbridge sculpture, Muldrow ties things up nicely: “Fabric of mankind is bursting at the seams / do as the birds do: keep singing ‘til you’re free.” 

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

Episode 29: New Orleans Piano Wizard: Live! (James Booker, 1987)

Josh Rutner

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In the 2013 documentary Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker—a film that only very recently was made available on streaming services—there is a full minute of footage containing people who knew pianist and singer James Booker telling the multifarious stories they had heard about how Booker had lost his left eye:

Goons hired by a disgruntled record contractor;
creditors who gave him a choice of an eye or a finger;
a fight in Angola;
the CIA;
a simple infection;
the Mafia;
a pool cue whack to the side of the head;
“something to do with Jackie Kennedy”;
defenestration;
plied out by an owed drug dealer.

Or, as a popular one goes, perhaps Beatle Ringo Starr put it out—sure, why not—and Booker memorialized the occasion by wearing an eyepatch decorated by a gold star. In the words of Booker’s old classmate Elaine Parker-Adams, “I’m sure Booker knew how he had insured himself. But you will never know.”

Booker was an enigma. A wild, unpredictable, hilarious, strung-out, don’t-give-no-bones-about-what-anyone-things, flamboyant enigma—who happened to be one of the most incredible pianists there ever was.

When producer Joe Boyd floated the idea that perhaps Booker record a solo album—just him and the piano—Booker scoffed, claiming if he was gonna make a record, he’d need his band. Three weeks later, as Boyd recalls, when Booker was in need of money, he’d gone back to Boyd and took him up on the idea after all—on the one condition, that is, that his piano in the studio be outfitted with a candelabra. Why? Why, he’s The Black Liberace, of course. Those studio recordings became the beautiful 1977 release, Junco Partner.

This album, titled New Orleans Piano Wizard: Live!—also just Booker and his piano—was recorded in front of an enthusiastic-if-rhythmically-challenged Zurich audience the same year as Junco Partner’s release, and posthumously re-released by Rounder Records a decade later, in 1987. From the first pair of tunes—the silver-lining-focused “Sunny Side of the Street” and the deep-and-dark blues, “Black Night” (a pair you could call Bookers’ theme songs, of sorts)—one is given some insight into the scope of Booker’s emotional range. 

In “Black Night,” Booker sings with a birdless, existential loneliness what, in a lesser artist’s hands, might come off as a trite and cliched blues lyric: “Nobody cares about me / and I ain’t even got a friend / my baby’s gone away and left me / and when will my troubles end?”

On “Sunny Side of the Street,” rather than sing the usual final A section’s buoyant lyric as “If I never had a cent, I’d be rich as Rockefeller,” Booker ditches the analogy and simply, and powerfully, sings, “If I never ever had another cent, I still really wouldn’t be so worried.”

He had within his spidery hands many musical lineages from which he could draw. His parents were both pianists and they had outfitted him with piano lessons through age 12. In the few recordings he produced, you could hear Chopin in his harmonies; his alternately pillow-soft and knock-your-socks-off-with-one-punch touch bespoke years of diligent training. But of course the man was no conservatory conservative; he was steeped in music of New Orleans, and pulled too from the records of more well-known pianists. On New Orleans Piano Wizard, you can clearly hear the influence of Ray Charles on the patient, gospel-tinged slower blues numbers—particularly on “Come Rain or Come Shine”—and the steady left hand against the time-taking right of Erroll Garner on tracks like “Keep on Gwine.”

His chugg-a-lugging and modulating version of “Something Stupid”—which even nods for a few seconds in the direction of a cha-cha groove—is a tidy and sweet little gift that pushes the hungry audience to beg for more.

While “Something Stupid”’s lyrics, which, sadly, we don’t get to hear Booker sing, tell of the narrator going and spoiling a good thing by saying something stupid like “I love you,” I can imagine Booker playing it and thinking back to, say, when he and Dr. John, then involved with a bogus road act—passing themselves off as famous bands of the day like Huey Smith and the Clowns, whose “Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” had sold over a million copies—were pulled over by Mississippi state police after getting found-out and busted by a local promoter. While Dr. John envisioned the dungeon they’d surely be locked up in, Booker hopped from the car and told the cops, “Now look, don’t you worry ‘bout what the man told you. We threw the weed out the car miles back.” As Dr. John remembers, the cops laughed, they didn’t even search the car, and they just told them to get out of town and stay out.

Saying something stupid that went and saved the day.

To me, the crown jewel of the record is the penultimate track, the heartbreakingly raw love song “Let Them Talk,” a song that tells the whispering gossipers to shove it, sung by a man whose sexual predilections at the time surely elicited their share of talk. We hear here Booker standing most tall, open and defiant, as he lived.

If you’ve never heard James Booker, get into him with New Orleans Piano Wizard: Live!, and supplement that dose with the documentary Bayou Maharajah. They will open up your ears and eyes both. It’s likely Booker will never receive his full due. But ask any pianist in the know: many would give their left eye to play the way he did.

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

Episode 28: DADO v. The Universe (Shape King, 2016)

Josh Rutner

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After a brief and goofy introductory nose-trumpet fanfare, DADO v. The Universe begins.

The album’s seemingly lofty title—a title which alludes to the many personal and practical hurdles that Raphael Peterson, a.k.a. SHAPE KING, faced in bringing this project into existence—is immediately and hilariously undercut by the message of the tip-toeing opening track, titled “Get Mine,” in which our anti-hero proclaims, “I just wanna get mine. I can’t save the world, I don’t have the time.” We come to learn that in fact there is a battle raging about-but-out-of-sight-from this college-educated, comfort-obsessed Bacchus; but he simply prefers—and has the necessary privilege—to enjoy his wine and Laceycakes in peace upon his plush recliner. In one of the lovelier lines I’ve heard in a long while—and this is an album brimming with lovely lines—Peterson sings: “I’ll quantify the crimson drops that tickle on my tongue / and turn them into points of pleasure ‘til the battle’s done.”

It’s this quantification of things that would or should otherwise be unquantifiable—wine drops, comfort, and people alike—and the subsequent possibilities for their exchange and exploitation that drives Peterson here. To turn into numbers is, in essence, to de-essentialize. The digitalization of the world.

Throughout the otherwise austerely orchestrated song, the stereo field is littered with the dings and cha-chings of cash registers and the rhythmic tape-advancement of accounting calculators. The sounds, that is, of the commerce of an earlier, mechanical era.

The album continues with the wholly different tune called, “We Are Together,” which, refuting the self-centeredness of the previous track’s narrator, bursts forth with the smiling-eyed awareness of a thousand contingencies and a contingency. And what could be more feel-good than contingency? We could be so many things and we’re all together. The tune’s emphatic steady pulse pushes one to dance—while wily synth lines titter and spin. Peterson’s melody here can’t be beat, and with the subtle and effective shifting between 5/4 and 6/4, it’s got just enough going on to keep you on your toes.

There is an earnestness to Peterson’s music that is undeniably endearing, and it doesn’t hurt that DADO v. The Universe is overflowing with quality songwriting and performance both.

The third track, "Bushwick Bitch," is, in Peterson’s words, “an ode to an idea of the Bushwick Woman: erudite, articulate, well-educated, beautiful, tattooed, crass.” He adds that, “It’s also a critique of people of any gender who embody some of those characteristics air-dropping into Brooklyn and altering neighborhoods.” The narrator, in hushed and distorted tones, sing-speaks his complicated adoration of her ways, and his urge to spend the night—wanting her to set him right.

“Bushwick Hitch” could be read as the culmination of this set-up. A love song sung so sincerely that not even the nearly silly, tourist-island counter-rhythmic xylophone nor the in-your-face wobbly synth can take it down. Pretensions drop like hairpins and blue jeans.

The eighth track, “Odyssey,” takes as its premise the idea of a modern-day Odysseus, trying to make it home, tempted by the Siren song of needing to check his phone. He is, as the tune begins, already comfortably complacent—much like the couch-bound lead of the opening track—but begins to feel a resurgence of will, only to plonk down again on account of all those blinking lights and vibrating encasements that promise something better, but in the end of course can’t deliver. The song ends with a whiff of hope, with our Odysseus seemingly ready to overcome his obstacles, aiming for that something better still waiting for him at home. 

According to Peterson, “[Odyssey] goes hand in hand with ‘Virtual Vacation’,” the track that precedes it—a wordless soundscape featuring the thick, low, white noise of waves. It’s intended, he says, “to be the sound of watching a video about a vacation on your phone while on vacation.” To my mind, “Virtual Vacation” in turn goes hand in hand with track five, called “Waterfall.” One of the melodic themes from “Waterfall” rocks atop “Vacation”’s waves, slowly corrupting its ending with crunchier, spookier harmonies as it loops, until it finally finds home again, resolving into a major triad.

“Waterfall” itself is masterful. As with so many of these tracks, the presence of familiar sounds of bygone eras laden with cultural baggage—in this case a descending 8-bit waterfall—is both intentional and welcome. Peterson’s lyrics are flawless here: “And when I get to the top I’ll let all my worries go / I’ll fall down in a veil and drop like a heavy stone / and drag myself from the bottom then rise again.” The floating melodic line on “heavy stone” gorgeously counters any expectation for pat text-painting. The chorus, awash as it is with cave-like reverberation, compounds the chant-influenced, meditative feel of the song.

While not a concept album per se, connections run through the album between many songs. Such struts and ties—intentional or no—help make DADO V. The Universe the alluring tensegrity structure that it is.

I can’t speak highly enough about this album and strongly urge you to head over to shapeking.bandcamp.com to, you know, get yours.

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

Episode 27: Nebraska (Bruce Springsteen, 1982)

Josh Rutner

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Taste and judgement: the two needn’t align. In fact, as W. H. Auden once wrote, “As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.” He went on to list the five possible verdicts that an adult reader (so to speak) might come to. Four of them seem obvious enough:

• I can see this is good and I like it;
• I can see this is good but I don't like it;
• I can see that this is trash but I like it; and
• I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

But it’s the fifth verdict—the one Auden drops without fanfare between the pair of pairs above—that I view as the most compelling, and, given that in this episode we’ll be discussing Bruce Springsteen—that hugely popular icon that divides listeners into believers and non-believers—the most apt: “I can see this is good and though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it.”

For as long as I can remember, The Boss has been for me back-burner at best. More often than not, I wrote him off as a wheezing phony, whose pedestrian, workaday lyrics—masquerading as high art—were laid atop unimaginative and uninspired bedding, supplied by what sounded to me like a solid corporate wedding band. And yet! I’ve never given up the idea that with perseverance I might find a way in, if not actually come to like it.

In 2011, I attended a birthday concert for Sting at the Beacon Theater in New York, and among the long list of musical guests, which included Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Lady Gaga, Mary J. Blige, Vince Gill, and Herbie Hancock, was one Bruce Springsteen. When he appeared on the stage toward the end of the show, alone with a twelve string—fans in the audience performing their traditional “Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce” welcome—I braced myself. What I heard in that solo, out of time version of Sting’s “Fields of Gold,” was shimmering and lovely, sensitive and solid, humble and confident. The door had creaked open a crack, and I glimpsed the golden light. There was a way in for me.

He followed up with a full-band reading of another—admittedly, Springsteenian in tone—Sting tune, “I Hung My Head,” which tells of a man who accidentally shoots another, and the utter existential shame it brings upon him. Springsteen takes the liberty—as Johnny Cash had before him, in his 2002 cover—of pulling the tune down out of its original liltingly crooked 9/8 time signature, into the four-beats-per-measure signature of the every man. In hindsight, the odd-meter treatment of the original almost feels more clever than anything else.

Springsteen sold me that night, providing me at very least a foothold that I might use to find the next.

A few weeks back, I asked my most knowledgable and Springsteen-minded friend which album he thought I should cover. And in an instant, he said, “Nebraska.”

The 1982 record, Springsteen’s sixth, has a good deal going for it for someone like me. Fittingly, while it’s not necessarily the top choice for John Q. Brucehead, it’s been referred to as “the only record you can push on the non-believers.” Among other things, it’s a one-man, bedroom production: no E-Street Band, nor throngs of screaming die-hards to contend with.

Rather than spend the cash working out demos in the studio, he had asked his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, to get him set-up with one of those newfangled portable four-track cassette recorders in his Colt’s Neck, NJ house. The songs he produced there in early January, 1982—layered with guitar and mandolin; glockenspiel and harmonica; organ, synth and tambourine—were intended to act as demos to give his band an idea of what he was aiming for. The four-track recordings were mixed down through a guitar Gibson Echoplex unit, and then onto a boom box. “Not finely-honed recording equipment,” Springsteen would laughingly admit, but the kind of boom box you take to the beach that “sucks in the sand and keeps playing.” This questionable equipment helped lend Nebraska its patina. And when the band couldn’t successfully recapture its eery aura in the studio, the demo cassette, which Springsteen had been carrying around willy-nilly in his pocket for three weeks, was—aside from some serious mastering to clean up all the tape hiss—released as it was.

Do I like this album? I do.

In the spirit of affirmation, let me count the ways:

• I like the vulnerability—in his vibrato on “Mansion on the Hill,” in his glockenspiel playing on “Used Cars,” in his awkward-but-earnest squeezing of the lyrics “’Til the sign said ‘Canadian border 5 miles from here’” in the end of a phrase in “Highway Patrolman.”
• I like that he packs his bleak lyrical themes in major keys, the way Kelly Joe Phelps talks about hiding his dark stuff in the waltzes.
• I like that he indulges in the true-crime story of the spree killer Charles Starkweather as fodder for a song, continuing the dying tradition of the murder ballad.
• I like that his harmonica is so hot in the mix—at times enough to make you wince—just as Bob Dylan’s was at the end of his “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.”   
• I like Springsteen’s prairie-ish background yelps, barks, and hollers, and I especially like the completely wild-eyed, hazy-minded, delay-drenched, full-throatedly paranoid scream at the end of “State Trooper.”
• I like that that same paranoid narrator in “State Trooper” has “done things” but we aren’t let in on what they are. 
• I like the description of bleak and cold desperation that can lead a man toward sin in “Johnny 99.”
• I like that the closer, “Reason to Believe,” sums up the mind-boggling and unexplainable perseverance of those faced with seemingly dead ends.

If nothing else, I can now say that there’s a Bruce Springsteen record that I truly like. And Nebraska, a deeply personal album that strips away all those excesses I’d come to see as bound up with the artist and his music, has given me reason to believe that, while I do acknowledge the goodness of much of Springsteen’s catalog, with perseverance, I shall come to like more and more.

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

 

Episode 26: Live at Fillmore West (Aretha Franklin, 1971)

Josh Rutner

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Bill Graham barrels through his intro. In one long breath save the final word, Graham says, “For all of us here at Fillmore West this is a long-awaited privilege and a great pleasure to bring on the number-one lady, Ms Aretha… Franklin.”

Pulling no punches from the start, the band, led by King Curtis, with four stomps of a foot rips into a blazing-fast, catch-me-if-you-can version of Franklin’s 1967 mega-hit, “Respect.” The song, written by Otis Redding, sets the tone for this recording, 1971’s Aretha—Live at Fillmore West—in a serious way. A breakdown around two and a half minutes exposes just how incredibly tight the back-up singers—The Sweethearts of Soul—sound. Of course, it’s a crack band through and through, comprising, among others, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Billy Preston on organ, the great Bernard Purdie on drums, and not least, Franklin herself on Rhodes. After some riffing over the outro vamp, Franklin, clearly out of breath, welcomes the well-integrated crowd—leather-jacket-clad Black Power radicals and be-tie-dyed longhairs alike. “Relax and loan your soul to us for a few minutes,” she invites. “I promise you when you leave here, you’re gonna have enjoyed this show as much as any you’ve had occasion to see.”

The crowd is really turned on by the time Franklin gets to her deep blues, “Dr. Feelgood,” another tune, like “Respect,” originally released on her 1967 album I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, this one significantly slowed down from the original. Franklin wails; the audience responds in kind. By the time she reaches the stop-time chorus, she’s joined by a spontaneous chorus of young women who can’t help but join in at full volume. By the tune’s end, she’s taken the crowd to church, shouting fire, asking for “yeahs” and getting them and then some. Who needs Dr. Feelgood when you’ve got Aretha Franklin?

She returns to church later in the set when she plays the title track from her previous record, Spirit in the Dark. The song, which starts out ambling—it’s almost a funky dirge—soon clicks into double-time, as Franklin sings about moving with spirit. But after three minutes, Franklin’s electric piano introduces a newly redoubled tempo, pushing them into truly spirit-moving shout-band territory. After the thrilling conclusion, as band and crowd both catch breath, Franklin pulls from the wings a special guest—the Right Reverend Ray Charles—to join her for a lengthy, packed-with-jam reprise of “Spirit in the Dark.” Charles had to be cajoled into giving permission for his appearance to be released, owing to the fact that he was self-conscious about having muffed the lyrics. But Aretha had no such reservations, saying of the duet, “Between the two of us, soul oozed out of every pore of the Fillmore. All the planets were aligned right that night, because when the music came down, it was as real and righteous as any recording I’d ever made.” She was 28 at the time.

Over the course of the three-night engagement, Franklin had not only included powerfully individual versions of some of her established pop covers, such as the Beatles’s “Eleanor Rigby” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—on which she played the first verse on the Rhodes to great effect—but she also brought forth two covers she’d prepared especially for the Fillmore: Stephen Stills’s “Love the One You’re With”—“a little something we’re experimenting with,” she tells the audience—and Bread’s “Make it with You.” Yes, yes, of course this was a calculated appeal by producer Jerry Wexler to the Fillmore’s regular crowd of flower children, but with all of these songs drawn through Franklin’s brilliant conception, and played by the one of the funkiest, most solid bands there ever was, the result is anything but pandering. "Take the old and make it new; take the new and make it holy."

The album ends as the evenings did, with a relaxed and swaying version of Ashford and Simpson’s song, “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand),” prefaced by a compliment from Franklin to the crowd that they had been “much more than I could have ever expected.”

Take a listen to this old album when you can, and make it new. The holy part it’s already got covered.

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

Episode 25: Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon (Conjure, 1988)

Josh Rutner

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In the 1995 book Plunderphonics, ‘Pataphysics & Pop Mechanics, guitarist Eric Rosensveig of the improvising trio called Fat, compares one of their projects to Kip Hanrahan’s projects, saying, “Players from a lot of different styles or schools, trying to create a music that doesn’t exist but nonetheless would sound very natural.”

Hanrahan, a producer/percussionist, has been pulling together such “non-existent and natural” music for decades now. One of the most enduring and fruitful of his collaborations over the years, that with the writer Ishmael Reed, produced two albums in the '80s: 1984’s Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed, and this week’s Album of the Week, 1988’s Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon. There was third album in the series, Bad Mouth, which would eventually come out in 2005.

Conjure, as the group would become known by the release of Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon, was more of an institution than a set band proper. This album, Cab Calloway, features a core crew, comprising some of the finest jazz, funk, latin, and free-jazz musicians you could imagine at that time, and peppers the tracks with guest stars aplenty, not least Ishmael Reed himself. While the first record in the Conjure series mainly featured Taj Mahal as the lead vocalist, here, it’s the great Bobby Womack as the headliner. That said, one of the great draws of Cab Calloway is that the music was composed and arranged by various members of the band, and will often feature those very musicians singing lead on their tunes, and beyond that, the record features four additional guest vocalists throughout. With no track-by-track credit listing and so many singers, guitarists, percussionists, etc., one has to make educated guesses about who is doing what. Looked at another way, though, it gets you listening closely to the subtle shapeshifting between, and even within, songs.

Reed’s poetry is alive with the rhythm of the spoken—the spirit of the oral tradition. You could say that with Reed, the gateway between the written and the spoken has been busted wide open, allowing safe passage in either direction. Reed has said that the musicians who composed and played the music for these albums didn’t have to do much, since the rhythm was already there in the writing. A talking book turns into singing. In fact, where I note the few dips and fallings-short of this album is where those buoyant and pugilistic rhythms are forced into and constrained within a boxy framework, rather than allowed to bubble and blossom of their own accord.

Hanrahan is a cobbler and a catalyst, bringing together musical genres and personalities he loves, and seeing what comes of it; Reed is a self-described “ethnic gate-crasher," “a scavenger at work,” a “garbage recycler…reprocessing the trash and the throwaways of the American experience.” In this way, their aesthetics both mirror and complement each other.

In 1973, Deborah Lee of Ebony magazine reviewed Reed’s first collection of poetry, also entitled Conjure, saying that Reed “brought together a black magical selection of his poetry that would please any necromancer… While the poems are largely autobiographical, Reed’s experiences as a black man are universal enough to be embodied in a pan-cultural ethos which he calls Neo-HooDoo.”

Reed explained Necromancy to mean people going back to get “some metaphor from the past to explain the present or the future.” In the same interview, published in 1974, Reed cites the roots of the term: “Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future. That is prophecy. The black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future.”

As for Neo-Hoodooism, Hoodoo has been referred to under many a pejorative banner, including black magic, witchcraft, and devil’s work; but it is also known to many as spirit work, root work, spiritualism, psychic work, and—the term that graced the collective of musicians herein—conjure.

This album’s title is pulled from Reed’s 1970 piece called Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon or D Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful, originally published in the anthology 19 Necromancers from Now and referred to as a “coming attraction” for his 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo. “It was based,” Reed says of Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon, “not upon other writing, but upon examples of dolls I had seen in books and museums. Gris-gris dolls. I wanted to make a crude fetish that would put a “writing” on an individual considered an enemy of the tribe… aim a psychic “fix” at this individual.”

To the music!

The album begins with one of my favorite tracks on any record, "The Author Reflects on his 35th Birthday." Written by bassist Steve Swallow, and featuring Bobby Womack on vocal and the completely unstoppably Eddie Harris on tenor saxophone. Swallow’s bass and Don Pullen’s organ are a dramatic constant, meditatively whirling in tight circles as the narrator comments on how he hasn’t been mean enough thus far in his life, and to rectify this, he implores the personified “35”—his “old friend”—to make him all the types of mean he wishes to become now that he’s met the big 3-5: Mean as the town Bessie sings about “Where all the birds sing bass” / Dracula mean / Beethovenian-brows mean / Miles Davis mean / Don’t offer assistance when / Quicksand is tugging some poor dope under mean / Pawnbroker mean / Pharaoh mean…

Et cetera, et cetera.

The second track, "Loup Garou Means Changes Into," is funky latin written by and featuring on both tenor sax and lead vocals the aforementioned comPLETEly unstoppable Eddie Harris. Translated less poetically, Loup Garou actually means werewolf, the “eager Beast” inside oneself, which Reed, in his poem, looks to shed, or banish. Tied inversely to the lead-off track, mentioned above, the song ends before the poem goes on to note: “Folks say if you get to 30 / You can make it to 35 / The only stipulation is you / Leave your Beast outside.” While in “The Author Reflects,” the narrator is looking to welcome in that Beast at 35—that he hasn’t been mean enough getting there—here the Loup Garou is a liability. As an interesting twist, the laser-focused and funky, ever-under-control Harris plays a killer intro on tenor before handing sax duties off to—or perhaps more appropriately here, “changing into”—the wilder, free-ranging David Murray to tear things up as Harris sings Reed’s words.

Hanrahan has compared his role as producer to that of a film director, a position complicated (and perhaps even problematized) after hearing the snippet of Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon that Reed chose to excerpt and read within the fifth track’s medley. Reed reads:

“He chuckles to himself as he leaves his shop with the dog, three cents, on a leash. He has every reason to be pleased [with himself] because the night before he brought off one of the most difficult feats of sorcery. He entered a man’s dream and walked all over it as if he owned the place. He moved the scenes around with the deftness of a director from the Hollywood pantheon. He called the shots, edited the script, and gave the demons their cue.”

There is so much more to talk about on this album—Don Pullen’s sparkling and swinging vocal performance on his arrangement of the poem “My Brothers”; Reed’s solo-voice delivery of excerpts from his prose-poem “St. Louis Woman”; the solid vocal work by Olu Dara—father of the rapper Nas, for you hip-hop nerds—on the track “Nobody Was There”; and Reed’s relaxed and playful a cappella take on Cab Calloway’s big hit, “Minnie the Moocher,” backed up on the "hi-dee-hi-dee-hi-dee-hi" call and response by Reed’s daughter Tennessee and, I’m guessing based on surname here, Eddie Harris’ daughter too, under the billing of “The Josephine Baker New Magic Chorus”… and on and on.

Suffice it to say that this is a many-layered album that, while not entirely spotless from stem to stern, is a powerful, living document, featuring an incredibly wide array of talent pulling out all stops. Hanrahan has talked about how he often includes not the so-called “perfect” take, but the one “where the mistakes were perfect.” On that take, he says, “the mistakes were showing what we were going for; [and] when we got it right, it was just reciting something that was composed before.”

Get to know your spirits and get thee to this strange orchard.

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