Dancing in Your Head

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 IN
DANCING
Y°UR HE^D
Jazz, Blues, Rock,
and Beyond

Gene Santoro

OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

New York Oxford

Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay
Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi
Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne
Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1994 by Gene Santoro

First published in 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1995
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Santoro, Gene.
Dancing in your head : jazz, blues, rock, and beyond / Gene Santoro.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-507887-X
ISBN 0-19-510123-5 (Pbk.)
1. Popular music—United States—History and criticism.
2. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3477.1.S25 1994
781.64'0973—dc20 93-15186

10 9 87 6 5 4 ? 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Preface

Putting this compilation of previously published pieces together has

been exhilarating and scary. Exhilarating because during my work on it,
from assembling the list of potential entries to editing and updating
them, some things became clear to me—well, clearer than they had
been. I couldn't help noticing, for instance, that I had actually been up
to something relatively coherent over the last few years. It was quite a
kick to scan the assembled table of contents and find that, despite its
originally deadline-driven nature, it was actually held together by some
kind—my kind—of historical and critical sense—an overview. The feel-
ing was a bit like being a little kid who recognizes his own reflection in
the mirror for the first time.
Like most of the writers I know, I never think anything I'm working
on is done. Deadlines are just tools for structuring my time. And again
like most of the writers I know, I like to think I've learned more since
each and every one of these pieces got untimely ripped from my hard-
disk drive. But I can now admit that they have a value aside from my
own ongoing education in print. Despite obvious gaps, they form a view
of music's history and development.
As a kid I'd been exposed within a very short period of time to three
major sonic explorers who blew me away: Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane,
and Bela Bartok. I was too young to have much of a technical grasp of
what the last two were doing, though I played enough guitar to be able
to grasp the basics of Hendrix's revolutionary attack. But I could hear
what they were doing; I could feel the reaction in the pit of my stomach.
I could intuit that they had more in common than not. That sense
of wonder and discovery is what happens when you've been hit
by art's immediate vatic power; it's quite possibly art's most essential

v
 Preface

cultural by-product. It has never left me, has been touched and renewed
by each encounter I've valued. These pieces chronicle some of the re-
sults.
In that sense, they represent my coming to intellectual grips with that
first brain-addling set of experiences. They don't avoid formal categories
and distinctions, though they leaven them with enough anecdotes and
asides so that their value is limited, as it's meant to be, to the merely
descriptive. So the musical subjects in this book range literally across
lines of all kinds, whether geographical or formalist. In and of itself,
that's not the point. The point is that music travels along with other
forms of commerce and, as it collides with other cultures, changes. So
good listeners have to be willing to stretch and bend and learn and be
willing to discard, however provisionally, what they think they know in
order to be able to understand afresh. In other words, to become a little
more like the artists they're listening to.
So my job has, I think, two distinct aspects to it. Sometimes they
overlap; sometimes they clash. But in any piece I write there's always
play, if not tension, between the roles of critic and advocate. I think
that's true of any critic who ever mattered, from Plato to Erich Auerbach
and Edmund Wilson to John Berger. For me starting to write about
music, two of the most important models were Robert Palmer and Gary
Giddins. Both writers seemed learned and broad-minded to me. But
what hooked me on what they did time and again was the passion that
glowed through their words, their attempts to translate the immediate
experience of the music that moved them into prose and thus communi-
cate it to others. Enthusiasm was the key to understanding. If I've ever
had a goal for what I do, it's been to emulate that talent. This book is the
natural product of that hope.
There are many people who have to be held responsible for my being
able to make this book at all. Several years ago, when I was editing books
about music, two of my writers who are now my friends, Allan Kozinn
and Peter Guralnick, persuaded me that I'd be good at scribbling about
the stuff. Kozinn especially counseled me on everything from how to
lead the freelance life without starving to where to line up editorial
contacts, and often knocked on doors for me. Other established writers,
like Palmer and Giddins, encouraged me to believe I really did have a
clue about what I was supposed to be doing. And then-c/ownfreaf editor
Art Lange boosted my self-esteem by putting me on that long-lived
Vi
 Preface

magazine's masthead while helping me take a more conceptual tack

toward reviewing.
Elizabeth Pochoda, then the arts editor at The Nation, brought me,
via Giddins, into that venerable journal as non-classical music colum-
nist. Besides handing me a practically limitless portfolio, she let me
discover, via her incisive line-editing and rapier comments, just what I
could make that job mean, where it could take my thinking and writing.
The column has been my laboratory ever since. Elsa Dixler and Art
Winslow, her successors, have been consistently supportive and insight-
ful. Maria Margaronis, whom I met at The Nation, and Giddins both
opened up spaces for me at the Voice that let me stretch in other
directions. Marilyn Lipsius, head of RCA's publicity department, sug-
gested to Don Shewey that I'd be perfect for his Arts section in the then-
unborn 7 Days, where he let me run consistently amok over the areas I
loved. Again thanks to Lipsius, Cathy Cook let me do likewise in the
pages of Taxi. Sue Byrom, then the arts editor at the New York Post, let
Pochoda and Diane Stefani persuade her that I was what that news-
paper's music coverage needed. My time there was an education in
itself; as—again thanks to Pochoda and Ron Givens—my time at the
New York Daily News has been. And many others, like Brian Cullman,
then at Spin, Thorn Duffy at Billboard, Jim Oestreich at the New York
Times, Charles McGrath at The New Yorker, Chris Smith of New York,
and Laura Jacobs at Stagebill opened their pages to my stuff.
And of course, Sheldon Meyer, my editor at Oxford University Press,
not only accepted my proposal for a book but worked up a head of
enthusiasm for topics that must have seemed even more foreign to him
than Alma-Ata.
To all of you, my deepest thanks.
My friends, musicians and non-, have been amazingly willing to
suspend disbelief about what I thought I was doing without letting me
get away with too much. The ever irascible Bob Quine taught me more
about music history than any professor I ever had. Ornette Coleman,
Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Geri Allen, John Zorn,
Marty Ehrlich, Tim Berne, Mark Helias, Mark Dresser, the Neville
Brothers, Nile Rodgers, Bernard Edwards, Ronnie Drayton, Melvin
Gibbs, and Vernon Reid taught me more about how to think about
music and the music industry in larger contexts. Music-industry workers
like Lipsius, Karen Goldman, Bob Merlis, Gregg Geller, Howard
vn
 Preface

Thompson, Bill Levenson, Jerry Rapaport, Brian Bacchus, Mary-

Claude Nouy, Peter Clancy, Yale Evelev, Verna Gillis, Bruce Ricker,
Craig Street, Jim Fouratt, Terri Hinte, Andy Caploe, Jonathan Rud-
nick, Steve Karas, Mary Melia, Fred Kelly, Margot Core, and Wayne
Rosso ushered me inside the music-biz maze and helped me believe that
what I was doing made a difference. Friends like Kozinn, Guralnick,
Geller, Cullman, Oestreich, Billy Bergman, Leslie Berman, Ricky
Martinez, Joe Milner, Bar Bizsick, David Dunn, Yvonne Tost Ervin,
and Ellen Spross all spent time listening to me whine my way through
some tangled idea, and usually managed to translate my bellyaches into
a direction via a few well-placed questions.
Then there's my family. My parents didn't live to see this book, but
before they died they'd realized that I was getting serious about that
childhood dream of becoming a writer, and they'd seen enough of what
I'd done in print to know I wasn't bluffing. My wife Tesse and my
children, Donna and Linda, have put up with the peripatetic, not to say
frantic, life a writer covering the turf that I do leads. They seem to think
it was worth it. As one of my cousins put it at a recent family reunion,
"You made up your own job, you created something where nothing was
before. And you get to have a blast and get paid for it. I think it's great." I
have to admit, so do I.

New York City/Shokan G. S.

June 1993

vm
Contents

1. Phonograph Blues, 3
2. Hellhound on His Trail, 9
3. Lift Every Voice and Sing, 12
4. Doing It to Death, 18
5. Take It to the River, 24
6. Born on the Bayou, 28
7. New Orleans's Hidden Treasures, 31
8. Soul Queen of New Orleans, 33
9. Uptown, 36
10. Country Comforts, 48
11. Androgyne with a Lariat, 54
12. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 56
13. Austin's Eraserhead, 58
14. The Layla Sessions, 60
15. Beckology, 70
16. Rockin' in the Free World, 85
17. Still Alive: The Grateful Dead, 89
18. New York Lou, 91
ix
 Contents

19. On the Border, 95

20. Payola Guys, 97
21. Turn On Your Love Light, 99
22. Rock Vaudeville, 103
23. Good Day at Black Rock, 108
24. The Godfathers of Rap, 112
25. Don't Believe the Hype, 117
26. Mr. Ambience, 125
27. Them Ol' Bahamas Blues, 128
28. Dancing in Your Head, 131
29. The Blackwell Project, 138
30. E.S.P., 144
31. Rolling with the Tape, 150
32. The Serpent's Tooth, 160
33. Prince of Darkness, 163
34. Notes from Underground, 172
35. Hidden Histories, 179
36. Gunther Schuller's Memory Palace, 185
37. Preservation Hall Comes to Carnegie, 192
38. Nature Boy, 194
39. The Two Oscars, 198
40. The Gypsy King, 204
41. The Wizard of Waukesha, 206
42. A Box of Mr. Overdub, 211
43. Collier's Ellington Follies, 214
x
 Contents

44. Epitaph, 218

45. Mingus's Sancho Panza, 220
46. Rahsaan to the Moon, 225
47. Space Is the Place, 228
48. Surfing on the Keys, 234
49. Music by Association, 237
50. Unplugging the Enlightenment, 243
51. Child Is Father to the Music, 248
52. In and Out of the Tradition, 254
53. The Knitting Factory, 258
54. Monk Goes Downtown, 260
55. The Nurturer, 267
56. The Clark Kent of the Electric Guitar, 270
57. Downtown Scenes, 273
58. Fractured Fairy Tales, 277
59. CaosTotale, 278
60. On the Street Where You Live, 279
61. East Village Jumpcuts, 281
62. Naked City, 286
63. A Star Is Made, 287
64. Master of Tributes, 295
65. The Big Apple Avant-garde, 298
Index, 305

XI
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Dancing in Your Head
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 chapter,

Phonograph Blues
When Robert Johnson recorded it, in November of 1936, his "Phono-
graph Blues" was one of the first blues references to the technology.
Recording hadn't yet transformed the blues from a collection of widely
variant regional styles, each with its own salient characteristics, into a
more homogeneous approach that, by the 1960s, had become virtually
generic. For though an essential part of his myth (and life) was ram-
bling, Johnson's own blues reflected not just his actual travels, where he
picked up different regional attacks—the minor-key broodings of Skip
James, the slashing Texas call-and-response vocals-plus-guitar, the rag-
timey Piedmont jaunts, and the hardcore "deep" Delta blues of his
Mississippi birthplace. Instead, his blues also pivoted around what he
heard on records. And as blues historians like Peter Guralnick and
Robert Palmer have pointed out, Johnson's compacted, crafted songs
differed from most of his contemporaries' (with rare exceptions like
James's or Leroy Carr's) because they were clearly shaped (or could be)
for the three-minute recording limit 78s carried.
Bluesmen (and the very few women who played the blues) performed
primarily for dancers at juke joints, outdoor parties and picnics, as well
as on street corners—wherever an audience with spare change and spare
time could gather. Armed with preset verses, like the Homeric bards
wandering ancient Hellas, they could plug parts in or yank them out,
depending on whether a particular song reached their audience. As a
result, many blues lyrics from Johnson's time and before can seem
anything from disorganized to borderline incoherent: their plots simply
had less to do with their formatting than audience reaction did.
Like Skip James, Johnson apparently pruned his lyrics, honing them
to a terrifying edge. Also like James (and unlike most of his contempo-
3
 Dancing in Your Head

raries, at least from the recorded evidence), he seems to have formatted

his musical accompaniments very tightly: alternate takes from his 1936
and 1937 recording sessions display some shifts of detail from one take to
the next, but always within a set arrangement. (The one exception is
"Come On In My Kitchen," where the alternate take lacks the menac-
ing, hovering atmosphere of the issued take—a clear argument for the
taste of Johnson's original producer, Don Law.) Besides offering mes-
merizing virtuosity, Johnson's arrangements rotate around individual,
distinctive riffs that mutate during the song's course to underline its
lyrics. They whipsaw crossbeats back and forth between Johnson's pierc-
ing high-pitched singing and his achingly vocalic bottleneck guitar, and
in the process foreshadow the latticework of rhythms webbing the post-
war electrified urban blues pioneered by the likes of Muddy Waters,
Howlin' Wolf, and Johnson's stepson Robert Jr. Lockwood. Eventually,
of course, Johnson's feels found their way into the blues' stepchild, rock
and roll.
In 1962, when producer Frank Driggs compiled Robert Johnson King
of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia) from the masters for the blues
legend's 78s, he understood that Johnson's art was highly wrought, even
though little was known of the bluesman's life at that time. So Driggs
shaped the album to reflect the curve of an imagined performance:
kicking off with the haunting supernatural loneliness of "Crossroads
Blues," taking listeners through the double entendres of "Terraplane
Blues" (Johnson's only regional hit), and building on the bitterly rising
ironies of "Last Fair Deal Gone Done," "32-20 Blues," and "Kind-
hearted Woman Blues." Fittingly, he wrapped up the album's 16 cuts
with what may well be two of the most frightening blues of all time, the
aching Faust-in-Mississippi "Me and the Devil Blues" and its jagged,
twitching companion piece, "Hellhound on My Trail."
A few years later King of the Delta Blues Singers Vol. II, which
collected 16 additional Johnson tracks, including alternate takes of
"Kindhearted Woman Blues," "Rambling on My Mind," and "Preach-
ing Blues," was issued. Other alternate takes surfaced over the years on
specialty labels, like "Milkcow Blues" on Bottleneck Blues (Yazoo).
In nearly three decades since the first Columbia compilation, John-
son's musical influence changed from being indirect (via his blues disci-
ples) to stunningly direct; rockers from the Rolling Stones and Eric

4
 Phonograph Blues

Clapton on down reinterpreted a lot of his material for young audiences

who'd never heard of Johnson, and in the process redirected the genre's
sound. Then too, thanks to the untiring detective work of historians like
Mack McCormick, who doggedly pursued flimsy decades-old leads to
dig up Johnson's relatives and friends, the biographical slate gradually
filled in. By the time Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson (Obelisk/
Dutton) was published last year, it could (with generous acknowledg-
ments to McCormick) present a fairly complete and compelling picture
of the seminal blues great's life and times.
So now, to the usual major-label fanfare, comes Robert Johnson/The
Complete Recordings (Columbia). This two-CD set is just what the title
says: for the first time, all 41 takes of Johnson's 29 tunes are collected in
one place. But the digitally remastered sound is no better than the earlier
Driggs albums'. And the added come-on—the 48-page booklet, which
boasts fan's-eye appreciations by Keith Richards and Eric Clapton as
well as an essay, lyric transcriptions, and discographical data written and
gathered by would-be Johnson biographer (and the reissue's co-
producer) Steven C. LaVere—is less than it seems.
I say "would-be" because LaVere's lack of insight is, along with
corporate unconsciousness, what keeps this long-awaited compilation
(it's been in the works for over 15 years) from being more than just a
collection. Certainly his notes don't have me panting for his book on
Johnson. The biographical section does present the facts, but it devolves
too often into uninspired rehashes (especially of McCormick and Gur-
alnick) alongside colorful but fanciful stretches of the known data. On
the other hand, the section called "The Music" is simply appalling.
Some samples:

The dilemma of playing music for the rural mentality, while striving
to divorce himself from it, not only served to extend to its furthest
reaches the form and capabilities of the country blues, but since a
strong element thereof is one of self-destruction, it quite logically and
perhaps predictably, destroyed itself—its form and more importantly,
its relevancy to its culture—and its practitioner as well, as a direct re-
sult.
The obvious strife within a sensitive mind like Johnson's not only
was the seat of his self-destruction, but its existence pre-created an
urban neurosis.

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 Dancing in Your Head

Regardless of what Johnson was singing about, the reality of his sit-
uation can be powerfully felt. Certainly he felt this and knew it, too,
but it is obvious from his own words that he didn't understand it.
This unconsciousness or awareness of the subconscious without a
thorough understanding of its implications is the most pathetic aspect
in all of Johnson's being. It is the underlying element of and key to his
romantic appeal, both to women in his own time and to others, years
and lifestyles removed.
Johnson shrouded his ignorance while confessing his confusion in
four main thematic communities. Those of love, mainly unrequited;
traveling, usually fleeing; evil thoughts, especially wrongdoing by him-
self or a lover; and intent mental activity dominated his work. He ac-
knowledged being out of control with his surroundings, his fate, his
destiny and yet he wasn't satisfied to blindly accept that fact, at least
not without a good deal of thought.

Certainly LaVere could never be accused of a good deal of thought.

Johnson's music is so tough-minded and taut, so rife with rich imagery
and rippling with sexual and supernatural energy, so supple with humor
and double entendres and so variegated in texture at the same time it
repeatedly faces the echoless places within the human psyche, that the
only explanation for LaVere's alleged aesthetic characterizations is Ro-
mantic racism. What he gives us is Johnson the nach'l nigger, anato-
mized, as by a lobotomized Northrop Frye, into his ridiculous "four
main thematic communities."
Almost as unfortunate are LaVere's lyric transcriptions, which in-
clude phonetic inconsistencies supposed to represent some, but not all,
of what LaVere calls "Johnson's dialectic pronounciation." Then there
are the misrepresentations, errors, and omissions that riddle LaVere's
version of Johnson's words and their meaning.
Of what value is an annotator who cites Webster's to explain "cross-
roads" and "hellhound" and "break down" but neglects to explain any of
Johnson's double entendres—like the shrimp in "Dead Shrimp Blues,"
a term for whore that originated in the 17th century? Who points to "the
only instance in Johnson's lyrics where he uses the uncontracted present
participle" but underlines several passages of meaningless syllables
which, he explains, "are phonetic approximations of what Johnson
sings, which, in truth, may be nonsensical"? And as a transcriber—well,
let's just say that LaVere drops the last verses of "32-20 Blues."

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 Phonograph Blues

In some key ways, the flaws of Robert Johnson/The Complete Record-

ings reflect more than LaVere's foolish incompetence. With the tri-
umph of the CD, the record companies—those corporate custodians of
our cultural history—have been rushing to unload the vaults they'd so
blithely ignored for the last 20 years. Some of the reasons are simple:
CDs are more profitable than LPs were; old material can be resold to its
audiences with a minimum of effort in time and dollars; thanks to
massive advertising, "digital" has become a word that automatically
means "better," even though the translation of any single piece of music
from analog to digital technologies is a matter of myriad small decisions
that each producer and engineer makes differently, thus creating a
highly variable meaning for the words "digital transfer"; and so on.
So right now, for the record companies, CD boxed sets—collections
of musical careers—are all the rage, and Johnson's boxed set illustrates
the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the genre. It's obviously
important and valuable that the widespread musical treasures of this
country's regionally and ethnically diverse populations be treated with
deserved respect, not be left to molder away unheard, be made available
so people not content to be segmented by radio-prescribed formats can
find it between the marketing cracks. But how to do that is the question,
and an unresolved one.
Only a collector or a critic would want to sit down and listen to two or
three takes in a row of the same song, and even a critic would probably
tire of the archivist posture pretty quickly. Records, after all, are aes-
thetic experiences that, like any other, are meant to have a form: artists
and their producers make decisions about which takes of songs to release
based on their aesthetic assumptions. With the advent of the album,
even the order of the tunes became an important art, and not only with
such '60s "concept" albums as Sgt. Pepper. Musicians and producers
strove to create an overall aesthetic impact, a meaningful shape that
would make an album more than just a collection of pieces—a portrait
in time.
When a historical compilation covers a long career, there's a real
argument to be made that chronology can be a useful key to an artist's
evolution. Hearing an Eric Clapton grow over a sensitively thought-out
selection set like Crossroads (Polydor), for instance, can teach initiate
and fan alike something about the guitar hero. But it can only do that
because of pleasure involved; only the weird eat spinach because it's
7
 Dancing in Your Head

good for them, and they're the only ones who'll suffer through even an
exemplary by-the-numbers chronology just to learn something. If the
tracks chosen and the order in which they are presented don't grab their
listeners, they won't have any. That's one defining distinction between
an album and an archive. To release 10 CDs with all of Bird's Verve
recordings (Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve, PolyGram) is
an enormously important archival act to be applauded and appreciated
and bought by any reasonably serious jazz lover (and library), but it's not
a picture of the essence of Bird's art that will reach beyond the already
converted. To do that, PolyGram has rightly re-released individual Bird
albums.
As far as Robert Johnson's art, the case for presenting his small body
of work in purely chronological order is as weak as it can get. (And
besides, as a couple of reissue producers pointed out to me, if the matrix
numbers for the original masters were out of sequence—a common
occurrence—this set's supposedly strict chronological order is fictitious
anyway.) Johnson's entire recording career consists of a handful of ses-
sions over an eight-month span. Nothing in the tunes suggests any
major or minor shifts in his talent or vision. Of course, he predated the
LP and CD, but since his three-minute performances were so highly
conceptualized, it's easy to see that Frank Driggs's original LP compila-
tions extended and articulated Johnson's own aesthetic frames. After
listening to the Driggs, listening to LaVere's timetable approach is about
as meaningful as hearing a sentence after it's been taken apart and
restacked in alphabetical order. If you're curious about chronology, you
can always check the discographical info that's included.
Fortunately, for the Johnson set, as well as for the countless reissues
of individual albums that have alternate takes implanted to break the
original conceptual flow, technology, which is part of the problem's
source, is also the solution: program the original sequence into your CD
player. In Johnson's case, use the order of the two Driggs albums,
followed, if you're interested, by the alternate takes. That way, you'll get
some sense of why Robert Johnson could inspire literally hosts of musi-
cians like Keith Richards, who's quoted in the booklet as saying, "You
know, you think you're getting a handle on playing the blues, and then
you hear Robert Johnson—some of the rhythms he's doing and playing
and singing at the same time, you think, This guy must have three
brains!'"
8h
 Hellhound on His Trail

After all, in many ways musicians understand their art best. Eric
Clapton has never been accused of being a critical theorist, but for an
aesthetic understanding of Robert Johnson's music he's a more useful
guide than a dangerous geek like LaVere—who, in addition to his other
flaws, had the gall to copyright Johnson's tunes under his own King of
Spades Music. (Peter Guralnick was originally scheduled to write the
notes for this package, which would have made them intelligent and
useful; he set up the interviews with Richards and Clapton, but, thanks
to corporate indifference, his Clapton transcription is marred by ran-
domly italicized portions—an unfortunately apt symbol for CBS's ap-
proach to this project.) So it's worth pondering when the guitarist says of
his idol's music,
His best songs have never been covered by anyone else, at least not
very successfully—because how are you going to do them? In some
ways a song like "Hellhound on My Trail" is hardly there, it's almost
in the air—what he doesn't say, what he doesn't play, it's so light and
menacing at the same time. . . . It would be just great if people
could simply appreciate his music for what it is, for its truth and its
beauty, without its having to be a scholarly event. [1990]

chapter..
. r. .TV.-,- •

Hellhound on His Trail

In 1989, it's hard to imagine that anybody who listens half-seriously to
American popular music could not know who Robert Johnson was.
After all, many of his tunes, like "Love in Vain" and "Stop Breaking
Down," "Crossroads Blues" and "Walking Blues," have been repeatedly
covered by folks like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, the Rolling Stones,
and Eric Clapton. But long after his shadowy murder—its actual date,
place, motives, and methods weren't confirmed until two generations
passed—Johnson remained a mythic figure whose legends were unen-
cumbered by historical data and fed only by his music. Intense and sly,

9
 Dancing in Your Head

supple and omnivorous, Johnson's blues are raunchy, terrifying, sophis-

ticated, and different from nearly every other bluesman's. Like Skip
James's, they represent a highly wrought set of conscious aesthetic deci-
sions that, when Columbia gathered together an LP from his late-1930s
78s, justified crowning Johnson "The King of the Delta Blues Singers."
Nearly everyone who's ever played that album remembers the first
time he or she heard it, usually with a mind-boggling circumstantial
vividness—as if Johnson's raggedly keening voice, astonishingly agile
guitar, in-your-face creative abundance, and haunted sense of the su-
pernatural's day-to-day power impresses itself on listeners so deeply that
they become poets-by-proxy. Nearly everyone who's ever played that
album has wondered what forces drove Johnson, where the inspiration
for his towering achievement came from, what made him him—when
they weren't wondering about who he was and whether he'd really
existed.
Peter Guralnick isn't nearly everyone. A renowned music critic and
historian (Feel like Going Home, Lost Highway, Sweet Soul Music),
Guralnick is dauntingly knowledgeable and an engaging stylist. He se-
duces you with the flow of a sentence before you realize you've just
swallowed a chunk of history or critical analysis. That's because Gur-
alnick combines heart and head; he wears his knowledge with the easy
grace born of real love, and since he genuinely wants to share what he
knows he writes with an honest, direct emotional attachment. So while
he reconstructs the music's genealogy and structural components and
larger social pictures as few others could do, he also vividly remembers
the first time he heard "The King of the Delta Blues Singers."
Which is how Searching for Robert Johnson begins. Guralnick in-
structively reminds us, who are drowning in the glut of undifferentiated
information that now doubles as a kind of censorship in this culture, of
the impact "The King of the Delta Blues Singers" had in the info-black-
hole of 1961, when he was a blues-loving freshman at Columbia:
I had perhaps fifty albums of country blues . . . it seemed as if there
could scarcely be any more. Names that are as familiar as presidents'
today, touchstones for anyone familiar with the roots of contemporary
music, were the exclusive province of collectors then. My friends and
I studied the little that was available, attempted to piece together vir-
tually indecipherable lyrics, pored over each precious photograph,
constructed a world of experience and feeling from elliptical clues.

JO
 Hellhound on His Trail

. . . I don't know if it's possible to recreate this kind of feeling

today—not because music of similar excitement doesn't exist, but be-
cause the discovery can no longer take place in such a void.
From there, with a thoroughness that belies his book's slender size,
Guralnick traces Johnson's lineage in the history of the Delta blues,
from Charley Patton through Muddy and Wolf; reconstructs the chro-
nology and paths of his development as a key player whose influence via
recordings swept the blues; re-creates the two recording sessions from
which the two LPs released in the '60s were compiled; and develops a
circumstantially detailed picture of his family, loves, and travels, thanks
partly to painstaking research by historian Mack McCormick and partly
to extensive interviews with Johnson's disciples/companions Johnny
Shines and Robert Jr. Lockwood, whose mother was one of Johnson's
regular female stops on his endless road.
Nor is Guralnick content with reconstructed data. He locates John-
son's life in a context that makes it, and the process of building a
narrative about it, resonate more meaningfully:
The thing most commonly misunderstood is just how shadowy was the
world in which Robert Johnson was moving about. . . . Communi-
cation . . . was almost exclusively oral . . . contacts were almost al-
ways tangential; the stories . . . were in a sense as mythopoetic as
those of the ancient Greeks. Johnny Shines and Robert Lockwood,
playing partners today, met, for example, through Johnson and became
friendly years later in Chicago, but though each was well aware of the
other, neither shares a single experience or memory of their time with
Johnson. In a certain sense, in fact, each is suspicious of the other's
memories and of the memories of others, because in their experience
if simply didn't happen that way. Shines remembers an illiterate Rob-
ert Johnson, and Lockwood scoffs at the suggestion, which in turn
seems to prompt a shift in Shines's memory.
Sifting and recording such treacherous but illuminating shifts, com-
bining the results with the researches of others and his own acute critical
insights, Guralnick has outlined as good an answer as we're likely ever to
get to the question of who Robert Johnson was. But as he points out, the
real mystery of Robert Johnson demands a never-ending search through
its timeless clues, his slashing, ribald, aching blues. [1989]

JJ
 chapter 3

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Anybody who's attended urban storefront or rural clapboard churches or
tuned in to their Sunday evening radio broadcasts has been hit with a
sense of raw power: the stomping feet that shudder the walls, the yearn-
ing vocals that swell out of any proportion to the congregation's size, the
incantatory preaching with its fervent call-and-response. This is the
heartland of African-American gospel, whose intense and highly
wrought musical styles have seeded the breeding grounds for leaders
from W. E. B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King to Jesse Jackson. Not
coincidentally, gospel provided some of the civil-rights and antiwar
movement's most stirring anthems.
Black gospel grew out of the mongrelized American spirituals tradi-
tion and the Pentecostal revivalism rampant during the early part of this
century. It's as peculiarly American a hybrid as its contemporaries and
cultural antagonists/partners, blues and jazz, and its secular stepchild by
them, rock and roll. As Anthony Heilbut put it in his recently revised
The Gospel Sound (Harper & Row/Limelight Editions), which is still the
best overview of the style, "Its language combined the stately periods of
18th-century prose with the richness of southern country talk and ghetto
slang." Back in 1971, Heilbut was also among the first to point out rock's
roots in gospel—a notion others, like Peter Guralnick in his Sweet Soul
Music (Harper & Row/Perennial Library), have since detailed.
Gospel's internal conundrums are twisty and rich. Deprived of their
own cultural identities once they were hauled here, black slaves were
gifted with massa's religion. White Protestant hymnals served as a foun-
dation for a very different musical approach. The slaves and their de-
scendants felt free to adapt what they were given—at least when massa
wasn't looking. (In the early 1800s, slaves held their own "brush arbor"
services after the official ones, whence come allegorical "sorrow songs"
like "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.")
In The Souls of Black Folk (Bantam), W. E. B. Du Bois explained,
12
 Lift Every Voice and Sing

As bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed
by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first
church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely orga-
nized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among
the members of each plantation, and roughly designated Voodooism.
Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of expe-
diency gave these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after the
lapse of many generations the Negro church became Christian.
Given the historical context, maybe it's not surprising that African-
American gospel songwriters described biblical figures like Solomon and
Jesus as black. In the process, they nourished an Afrocentric tradition
that enters our culture's stubbornly recurrent bouts of historical
reinterpretation—like those that now have hardcore canonists and polit-
ically correct deconstructionists tearing at each other's throats.
Also ironically, gospel's fierce undercurrents of sexuality are enough
at times to make you want to tear somebody else's clothes off despite the
idiom's apparent prudishness and sanctified lyrics. According to Heilbut
and other observers, that's just what happens very frequently indeed
when gospelers meet their church groupies. Jubilation is a mighty aph-
rodisiac. This may seem unsurprising in our post-Jimmy Swaggart era,
but its significance in the black gospel scene, as Du Bois and others have
pointed out, lies elsewhere. In African cultures, the line between ritual
and sexuality—between ritual and life—is usually placed quite differ-
ently than it is in Christianity. There rites are an integrated part of the
social fabric, mark key passages and turning points in ways that parallel
the relationship devout urban-ghetto and poor-rural folk in this country
have with their churches.
Like most theologians, gospel adherents divide the world into the
saved and the un-, which has yielded odd and ironic but enriching
cultural by-products over the last few decades. Take the manifold but
always uneasy (and sometimes downright acrimonious) dialogue of the
last half-century between African-American gospel music and its popu-
lar counterparts, from blues to rock and hiphop. Plato's portrait of the
artist as partially sighted, parasitical misleader is no stranger to gospelers.
Gospel vocalists take well-justified pride in their jazzy flights of improvi-
sation, but almost always cite their virtuosity's end as transcendent salva-
tion. Art without a theological or philosophical harness is out of control.
So churchgoing folk have always despised blues players, for instance, for

13
 Dancing in Your Head

their refusal to abide by "traditional" values, their racy lyrics, the sexual
innuendo of their rhythms, the goings-on where they perform, their
references to black magic and other vestigial descendants of African
belief systems.
In their turn, the feelings of blues folk toward their religious brethren
have run an apparently bewildering gamut. Many blues greats shuttled
between the sacred and the profane. Some of them, like Skip James,
lapsed into silence for decades because they wouldn't sing "the devil's
music" once they returned to the church. If they had, of course, they
would have been expelled. That's part of the reason for the venom of the
great Son House's "Preachin' Blues." As a boy, House dutifully learned
the church ways his father practiced. By his own account (to Sam
Charters in The Blues Makers) he was sincerely devout. Then he
dropped it all to become a bluesman, and wrote the jabbing "Preachin'
Blues," whose opening lines are, "I'm gonna get me religion and I'm
gonna join the Baptist church/You know I want to be a Baptist preacher
so I won't have to work."
Interestingly, there's also a small but dynamic tradition of spiritual
blues singers. (Some are collected on Preachin the Gospel: Holy Blues,
Columbia/Legacy.) Blind Willie Johnson, a truly scary bottleneck gui-
tarist who was a contemporary of Blind Lemon Jefferson, drew haunting
renditions of now-classics like "Dark Was the Night." Charley Patton,
the fountainhead of Delta blues, recorded religious as well as secular
tunes. For his Library of Congress field recordings, Muddy Waters
played spirituals. Adherents like the Reverend Gary Davis backed reli-
gious lyrics with ragtime guitar. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, propelled by her
guitar and a jazz-band backing, scored gospel's first crossover best-seller
with the hard-swinging "Rock Me." And in the Caribbean, where the
white hymnals-meets-blues tradition is remarkably like ours, Bahamas
guitarist Joseph Spence in his unique way recaps the street-singer tradi-
tion that includes Blind Willie Johnson's religious duets with his wife.
This meeting of the sacred and profane has flowed in the other
direction as well. The '40s harmonies of groups like the Mills Brothers
and the Ink Spots were gospel-derived, and paved the way for the '50s
doo-woppers who likewise crossed gospel into pop. Sixties soul music
and soul-jazz also grew directly out of gospel, which turns on py-
rotechnic vocal exhortations and improvisations. Many r&b performers
did like Ray Charles, who appropriated a gospel ditty for his sexy shout,
14
 Lift Every Voice and Sing

"I Got a Woman." Singers like B. B. King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and
Dinah Washington all annexed churchy melismas and moans to their
secular heartaches. Early soulsters like Solomon Burke, who himself
vacillated between church and secular worlds, crossed over preaching-
style monologues and call-and-response female backup vocals. Wilson
Pickett's gruff confessing came right out of the gospel-quartet tradition
he'd been raised in. And Aretha Franklin, whose father C. L. was one of
the black church's famed preachers, heard heaven's door slam shut
behind her when she testified with a ferocious vengeance in top-40 hit
after hit.
Like Aretha, some artists were faced with hard choices because of the
gospel world's harsh attitude toward secular backsliders. Sam Cooke
started his career singing with the famed gospel quartet the Soul Stirrers,
but had to change his name when he secretly cut his first soul singles.
Once he decided to go overtly secular, his gospel career was instantly
over. (His murder at a motel, complete with sexual scandal, had gospel
folk shaking their heads with a grim sense of expectation fulfilled.) Then
there's the Reverend Al Green, whose silky Cooke-ish singing has been
transformed into a kind of incandescent religious ecstasy—a St. John of
the Cross for soul music. A house-rocking preacher with his own con-
gregation in Memphis these days, the Reverend has changed almost
nothing about his music and lyrics except their putative addressee-—
which makes him feel (with some justification) still unaccepted by his
peers. As you might expect, he also projects a more tolerant attitude
toward pop culture than most of his brothers of the cloth.
One of the few links in the tradition who reconciled his secular and
sacred sides was Thomas A. Dorsey, Dorsey was, in essence, gospel's
godfather. He recharged the sentiments of widely used hymns like Dr.
Watts's and Dr. C. A. Tindley's (who at the turn of the century merged
black folk material with poor-white evangelism) with bluesy structures,
composing thousands of gospel standards that became the movement's
bedrock. With singer Sallie Martin, he founded the Gospel Singers
Convention, and helped pave "the gospel highway," the touring routes
that established the music as the lingua franca of black (and many white)
churches throughout the land. (As Heilbut rightly argues, populism
coexists with reaction in the evangelical movement: Aimee Semple
McPherson's services, for instance, were always integrated, and in 1936
featured Martin.) In his earlier incarnation as bluesman Georgia Tom,
15
 Dancing in Your Head

he'd accompanied Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, and as partners with

guitarist Tampa Red penned and recorded any number of highly sugges-
tive tunes like "It's Tight like That." But 20 years ago, Heilbut reported,

He is completely secure in his several roles and feels no qualms about

his life in show business. He remains a member in good standing of
the Chicago Musicians' Union, and his attic studio is filled with pic-
tures and records of Georgia Tom. "No, no," his voice cracks calmly,
"I'm not ashamed of my blues. It's all the same talent, a beat is a beat
whatever it is."

Since ritual is art's earliest source, it's no surprise that gospel music
radiates a visceral power that can thrill the most devout atheist. And it
continues to evolve a long ways from its bluesy "folk" early days and the
barbershop-quartet-based jubilee style of the '30s with its simple piano
or guitar backing. In the '60s James Cleveland, gospel's "Crown
Prince," pioneered more complex melodies and harmonies, and in the
70s the likes of Andrae Crouch and Edwin Hawkins led choirs that
mimicked contemporary pop formulas. Today, younger contenders like
Green and Philip Bailey take on hiphop rhythms and synthesizer sonics
as well.
Getting a sense of the spread and wealth of gospel music is a bit easier
now than it's been for a while, since the new audiences and higher profit
margins created by the compact disc have moved record companies to
rummage through the vaults for this material as they already have for
blues and jazz. So it happens that three fine compilations, each with a
particular purview, have hit the marketplace recently. / Hear Music in
the Air (BMG) offers a solid intro to the early folk-quartet days with the
likes of the Rev. J. M. Gates and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet. The
Gospel Sound of Spirit Feel (Spirit Feel)—from Heilbut's own tiny but
outstanding label—casts its nets wider. It serves up important contribut-
ing artists who include Clara Ward, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta
Tharpe, as well as seminal sweet-gospel quartets like the Dixie Hum-
mingbirds, the Fairfield Four, and the Sensational Nightingales.
The Specialty label was central to gospel in the '50s, as it ironically
was to rock and roll. Owner Art Rupe recorded not only the cream of
contemporary gospel quartets but emerging gospel-driven rockers like
Little Richard and Sam Cooke. Greatest Gospel Gems (Specialty) is a
sterling selection from the label's mother lode, dazzling gems like Sam

16
 Lift Every Voice and Sing

Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, the Travelers, the Silvertones, Alex Brad-
ford, Dorothy Love Coates, Sister Wynona Carr, and Cleveland.
For many observers, gospel's golden age comes with the postwar
period, the so-called "sweet gospel era." That's when record companies
began capturing the sounds of male quartets like the Soul Stirrers.
During this era the quartets grew into quintets and sextets, and moved
from the simpler antiphonal and chordal backings of jubilee to close
harmonies supporting contrasting dual lead voices (usually a liquid
tenor and a gruff light baritone) that trade off and improvise within a
denser call-and-response format. Specialty plans to reissue Stirrers' clas-
sics with both Cooke and his mentor/model, Rebert Harris, as well as
the bristling and intense material by the heart-stopping Dixie Hum-
mingbirds. In the meantime, grab the Swan Silvertones' My Rock/Love
Lifted Me (Specialty) or the Pilgrim Travelers' The Best of the Pilgrim
Travelers (Specialty). The Silvertones' tenor Claude Jeter is another
whose lilting, fiery flights became a model for soul, and the group's
smooth-but-pulsating harmonizing remains a gospel hallmark. The
Travelers were massively influenced, as were many, by the Harris-era
Soul Stirrers, but that doesn't diminish their yearning musicality.
The next decade saw the triumph of "hard gospel" quartets like the
Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, whose appearance a few years
back in the wonderful Greek-tragedy-goes-gospel Oedipus at Colonnus
stopped the show. Lead vocalist Clarence Fountain is an incandescently
ragged stylist who incarnates the physical growling and piercing screams
of this period on Oh Lord—Stand by Me/Marching up to Zion (Spe-
cialty).
Women also rocked out in small groups. The Best of Dorothy Love
Coates and the Original Gospel Harmonettes (Specialty) is a collection
of one of the finest examples. Coates folds race consciousness and poet-
ically charged recastings of received images into her scintillating songs,
then fires them via her torn but amazing voice, which dips and whirls
and leaps over intervals with throaty abandon. You can hear her echoed
in Mavis Staples (whose own background is gospel, with guitarist-father
Pops and siblings) and Irma Thomas, the soul queen of New Orleans
who still sings in church every Sunday.
The great women soloists, like Sallie Martin, Mahalia Jackson, and
Clara Ward, have been tireless and indispensable gospel workers. One
of the greatest vocalists in the Bessie Smith tradition is Marion
17
 Dancing in Your Head

Williams, whose sturdy, nuanced Strong Again (Spirit Feel) finesses

older styles. (It boasts a version of Billie Holiday's "God Bless the
Child," for instance.) Heilbut has written tellingly, "She defines and
reconciles her twin dispositions, for she is both a modest saint . . .
and an overwhelming showman. The two impulses . . . aren't always
balanced, but when spirit and style converge, the result is unpar-
alleled. . . . If she's saved to the utmost, she's also as worldly as any
gospel singer."
That duality is at gospel's heart. In the end, by lifting their voices with
the incredible expressivity and dazzling technique that they've devel-
oped, gospelers resemble the great medieval cathedral builders. Their
labors intend to reflect the glory of God, but they shout as loudly about
the glory of humanity, its ability to triumph over its apparent limita-
tions. [1991]

chapter. 4
Doing It to Death
On September 24, 1988, in an office complex he owns in his hometown
of Augusta, Georgia, James Brown brandished a shotgun at an insur-
ance seminar. He complained that someone there had used his private
bathroom next door. The cops were called, Brown dove into his pickup
truck, and they pursued him for 10 miles—with between 10 and 14
vehicles at speeds up to 85 m.p.h. Surrounded during the French
Connecrzon-style chase in an abandoned lot, Brown slammed his truck
into reverse, and the cops shot out his front tires. (Brown, who'd been
convicted of assault and battery involving an officer that February, said
he'd been stopped for ten minutes before the cops showed up.) Though
he had his shotgun with him throughout the incident, the police said he
didn't threaten them with it or attempt to use it. Brown's truck had 23
bullet holes in it when he finally ran into a ditch. As he told one
18
 Doing It to Death

interviewer, "I was scared to death." And to another: "They're trying to

make you antagonize 'em so they can kill you."
On December 15, 1988, Brown was convicted of failing to stop for
police—a felony in South Carolina—and assault of a high and aggra-
vated nature (trying to run down his pursuers). His time: 6 years for the
so-called "blue light" offense, and two concurrent 5-year terms for as-
sault that were suspended to 5 years of probation not concurrent with his
6-year sentence—which, for purposes of parole eligibility, was equiva-
lent to an 11-year term. His lawyer, Reginald D. Simmons, said, "It was
extremely harsh, not commensurate at all with the crime."
As Dave Marsh points out in a new epilogue to James Brown by James
Brown with Bruce Tucker (Thunder's Mouth Press), the fine auto-
biography reissued in 1990, the media weren't much kinder. They cer-
tainly weren't addicted to the facts. Marsh cited Rolling Stone, which
muddled actual charges against Brown with allegations. But Stone, as
usual, wasn't alone. Tabloids like New Yorfe Newsday hoisted Brown
with the headline "Cell Brother No. 155413." Time's rather sneering
piece, entitled "Soul Brother No. 155413," inaccurately suggested that
he had long been sliding into musical irrelevance. Nor did the music
world Brown has been crucial to for three decades seem interested in
sorting things out: there were no organized demonstrations, and only an
embarrassing handful of individual protests, on his behalf before his
parole. (Marsh duly outlines racist hypocrisy within the music indus-
try—and by implication, the country at large—by contrasting Brown's
fate with the treatment given famous white rockers in trouble with the
law.) And when he was finally released early this year, People ran a
mocking piece that focused largely on the 57-year-old's teeth implants,
tattooed eyebrows and permanent lower-lid eyeliner, use of Lysol to
clean his cell, and work in the prison kitchen.
Despite the jabs and the silence, James Brown was paroled after
putting in two years and two months for trying to flee arrest. He'd served
15 months of his sentence at the State Park Correctional Facility near
Columbia. Then he was transferred to Aiken, where he worked for the
nonprofit Aiken and Barnwell Counties Community Action Commis-
sion counseling youth about drug abuse for 11 months. (Although South
Carolina police said Brown tested—voluntarily—positive for PCP use
when they finally corralled him, although he'd been busted earlier that
year for possession of PCP and again on September 25, 1988, for driving
19
 Dancing in Your Head

under the influence of PGP and pot, he was not convicted on either
charge. Jesse Jackson, who visited Brown two months into his term, read
a statement by the singer that said he wasn't on drugs and hadn't engaged
in any violence toward the cops.)
The Hardest Working Man in Show Business went right back to it.
(During his stir time, a constant if ironic refrain in interviews was, "I'm
rested, well rested.") On the Potomac Productions has produced and
marketed a video documentary called James Brown: The Man, the Mu-
sic & the Message that's been airing via syndication around the country.
On June 29, Brown began a summer-long tour. And then there's James
Brown Star Time (Polydor), a four-CD compilation of digitally re-
mastered seminal cuts from Brown's long and varied career.
Few artists can claim the far-reaching influence on the pop music of
the last three decades that Brown can. Star Time boasts 71 cuts that
illustrate how he managed to go from motherless street urchin, who
lived in a shack, scoured through garbage for food, danced for World
War II troop trains for pennies, and served an 8- to 16-year term for
breaking into four cars at age 16, to The Godfather of Soul, whose
international disciples include jazzers, rockers, disco-ites, Afropoppers,
reggae-ists, and rappers. (Brown has guessed that about 150 of his tunes
have been sampled without royalties by hiphoppers. Estimates of how
many hiphop tracks ride JB samples run as high as three thousand.) Sly
Stone, George Clinton, the Rolling Stones, the Electric Flag, Chic,
Bob Marley, Tower of Power, Talking Heads, Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti,
Michael Jackson, Prince, Public Enemy—all bear his mark. Like few
other bandleaders—Count Basic, Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters,
Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman—he has both main-
tained a core of loyal players and molded changing lineups into his
musical image. In the process he's trained some of the era's outstanding
musicians while redirecting the evolutionary flow of pop culture world-
wide.
For a while along the way, he acquired visibility, wealth and holdings
that swelled pride in the black community—his 12-room mansion in St.
Albans, his Lear jet, his limos, his string of radio stations. But the
corporate institutionalization of pop music and radio, which promoted
disco and realigned markets, shriveled much of his music-based empire.
In 1971 he moved to Polydor from the small indie King, which theo-
retically should have sustained, if not extended, his huge multiracial
20
 Doing It to Death

reach. But he claims with at least some accuracy in James Brown that
Polydor helped derail his hit-making via insensitivity to his live-in-the-
studio recording methods and lack of insight into his audiences. (Not
surprisingly, Star Time's notes indirectly dispute this.) Then in the
mid-1970s one of his managers was convicted of payola to get airplay for
the previously invulnerable Godfather's discs. Soon after, his jet was
repossessed. He sold off the radio stations one by one. He sunk a million
dollars into an abortive TV show. And since 1985, his 62-acre farm
outside Augusta has been under lien by the IRS.
The IRS claims Brown owes $9 million in taxes—$4.5 million for
1969 and 1970 alone. On the video he taped with Dick Cavett, Brown
asks, "Why do all black people wind up penniless? Why do they come
and take tax from me? That case is 25, almost 30 years old, and was
never about but $211,000 from the git-go." Whatever the actual num-
bers, with his IRS overseers Brown joins a long line of successful blacks
who've come under harassment, from Joe Louis through Chuck Berry.
Still, he thinks of himself as an African-American version of Horatio
Alger. He meant it when he told Time, "I've been the American
Dream."
In many ways, his life reflects in intensified form the contradictions
many African Americans feel about this country's promise even when
they affirm the myth they're only partially included in. As ]B hornman
Fred Wesley told Cynthia Rose in the interesting, if sometimes over-
reachingly interpretive, Living in America (Serpent's Tail), "Contradic-
tion is the very thing which feeds his nerve. . . . He is just as fragile as
he is tough." So there are his hardhitting anthems like "Say It Loud (I'm
Black and I'm Proud)," his talk about payola as a method of financial
redistribution between white station owners and their underpaid black
DJs, the street-jive realism of his lyrics. There's his endorsement of
Nixon and hobnobbing with Reagan and Bush. There's his ceaseless
entrepreneurial drive and patriotic tunes (which caused cries of "Uncle
Tom") like "America Is My Home." And there are his longtime friend-
ships with the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
But mostly, and most importantly, there's his music, which in its
insistent individualism arising from a wealth of diverse influences is very
much a culmination of at least one aspect of the American Dream. Star
Time picks from the panorama of Brown's nearly 40-year-long evolution
by emphasizing both hits and significant musical turning points—a solid
21
 Dancing in Your Head

strategy for dealing with his enormous, syncretic, and idiosyncratic out-
put.
In his early days (collected on The Federal Years, Vols. I and II, Solid
Smoke) JB extended the silken gospel-based cries of Roy Brown with the
frenetic jump-blues of Louis Jordan. His ballad stylings—he told me,
"I've never really been an r&b singer, I was always a lot more of a ballad
singer, and then I started singing more uptempo songs"—owe a lot to his
other heroes, Jackie Wilson and Little Willie John. (John's hit "Fever"
made more money for Peggy Lee than for him; he died in prison for
manslaughter at 30.) Fusing them and models like fellow Georgian
Little Richard, Brown fashioned the nonstop stage show that climaxed
with "Please Please Please" and half an hour of the famed cape routine
he'd adapted from '50s wrestler Gorgeous George. It all culminated in
the universally acclaimed 1962 album Live at the Apollo (Solid Smoke),
which Brown cut despite record-label opposition. The disc topped the
pop charts for over a year—a rare feat for an r&b artist.
The New Breed Thing—what became funk—kicked off with 1964's
"Out of Sight," and deepened with the landmark "Papa's Got a Brand
New Bag." Harmonic movement disappears in favor of vamps and the
primacy of poly rhythms. The coiling instrumental lines intersect, pair at
different but cyclically repeating points, then expand away from each
other until the next touchdown, creating an irresistible chug-a-lug ef-
fect. Riffing over, under, around, and through this whole percolating
juggernaut is the band's rhythmic key, that voice: the battle-scarred
grunts and "Good Gods," the torn screams, the jagged phrases, the calls
for the bridge that pushed generations of happily frenzied young whites
and blacks alike onto the dance floor with hit after hit, like "I Got You (I
Feel Good)," "Cold Sweat," and "I Got the Feclin'." The way JB
explained it to me, "The horns are really gospel with jazz licks. That's
where soul music comes from, y'know. It was totally different from
anything else that was out there. I was too far ahead of the people,
though. So I recorded 'I Feel Good' twice. I cut it first like jazz, but then
I went back and cut it again." (Both tracks are on Star Time.) During this
period, he literally changed the face of popular music around the world.
By the early 1970s Brown's music had modulated the violently synco-
pated popcorn rhythms into heavier funk grooves. Tunes like "Funky
Drummer"—a favorite of hiphop samplers—and "Brother Rapp" illus-
trate just how far ahead of his time Brown still was. It's a disparity that's
22
 Doing It to Death

been pointed up over the last decade-plus by the differences between his
burning stage shows and his often mediocre recordings. He put it to me
this way:
I would rather record live, because I want to have that live feel in
there. If you hear my band, it's so far ahead of what I'm doing on
record it's scary, y'know. But they don't ever let me put that on record
anymore, and I can understand that, y'know—it's also so people can
grasp it a little bit easier. I actually have to go back to more elemen-
tary things to put on a record as opposed to the way I do it live, be-
cause when we do our hard thing we speak very very fast, y'see. But I
think the audience can handle it. I don't think the record companies
can. They don't want you to be different, an Einstein in an ABC
world.
That problem—the inability of his record companies and even his
audiences to keep up with his relentless musical changes—plagued him
from the mid-1970s on. After a series of black-power anthems like "Say
It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)," "Soul Power," "I Don't Want
Nobody to Give Me Nothing," and "Funky President," many whites
began to avoid his shows while many blacks began to embrace the
pallider disco beats he'd helped spawn. A cadre of his key musicians, like
Maceo, mutinied and signed on with George Clinton's Parliament-
Funkadelic, that fabulous sci-fi/funk cosmological groove academy. His
empire was crumbling, despite solid efforts like the pathetically titled
The Original Disco Man (Polydor). Stabs at movies—he had cameos in
The Blues Brothers and Rocky IV—didn't really lead anywhere. In 1984
he hooked up with rapper Afrika Bambaataa for Unity (Tommy Boy),
where phrases from outstanding }B tunes swirl through a rap-meets-funk
entreaty for peace and brotherhood and against nuclear holocaust. Ma-
terial he cut with reggae rhythm masters Sly and Robbie and a gospel
album with Sharpton didn't manage to find label homes before his
imprisonment.
Four years in the making, Star Time traces this remarkable and
unsettling achievement with sensitivity and intelligence. Including un-
edited cuts, for instance, allows us to hear Brown and his crackerjack
bands shaping tracks in the studio live as the tape rolls. The digital
remixing clarifies individual lines without sterilizing the overall result.
The accompanying booklet supplies a good intro to Brown's life and
music. The set's only real drawback is its 6- by 12-inch case. This new

23
 Dancing in Your Head

industry standard, the result of retailer pressure, makes box sets unsuita-
ble for either CD- or LP-sized shelves.
But swell package aside, the ultimate thing about James Brown is the
contradiction-healing groove. Densely filigreed, it lifts you with an easy
inevitability. It's like a brief return to Paradise. As JB told me in his
purring, gospel-preacher singsong,
Y'know, one thing about music: it's the key to everything, the universal
language of man's commitment to be together. Yeah, a baby can feel
before it can see, so the feeling is far beyond sight, sound is far beyond
sight, umm-hmm. So that we ought to have music everywhere: in the
churches, in the political meetings, in hospitals, in dentists' offices.
'Cause see what the music is doing? It's so vasf, or beyond our think-
ing, because it reaches your soul and you can feel before you can see,
that it's mind over matter. You say ouch and don't even know where
the pain's coming from, but the feeling is real.
And more than anyone, James Brown's got the feeling. [1991]

I •
chapter. 5
Take It to the River
"I am an artist," says the Reverend Al Green, "and what I do is supposed
to be enjoyed as a work of art. If the church world today were more open
to that, I think I could cut more songs that would be more art-oriented
instead of always religious-religious-religious oriented. But in the
church, y'know, we have our way of doing things and we're kinda set in
the pattern, so therefore you're kinda in a bind about what you can do a
little bit. Except me—I'm the black sheep, liable to do anything. I
mean, I still cut songs like The Mighty Clouds of Joy' that was done by
B. J. Thomas some years ago. It's just art; that's what I think it is,
anyway."
Whether as Al Green, the '70s' sensitive soul singer with a sinuous
falsetto the rival of Smokey Robinson's, or as the Reverend Al Green, for
24
 Take It to the River

the last decade the soul-shaking pastor of Memphis's Full Gospel Taber-
nacle, a low-slung space-age structure not far from Graceland, he's been
honing that art for twenty years. On secular hits like "Tired of Being
Alone," "Let's Get Married," and "Sha-la-la" or church-oriented out-
ings like He Is the Light, Green unleashes a voice supple and sinewy
with the right pauses, curlicues, twists. As he insists, he's just moved his
artistry to the sacred side of the musical aisle.
The split between the sacred and the secular runs through the history
of the blues, rock and roll, and soul music, as well as Green's own
musical career. Born Albert Greene in Forrest City, Arkansas, in 1946,
his home reflected that polarization. "My father played bass in different
r&b groups, but he only played Christian gospel records at home. Even-
tually he formed a gospel group with me and my brothers called the
Green Brothers. I got bounced out when I was nine for listening to
Jackie Wilson, 'cause at that time it was kinda taboo, y'know."
So by age 16 he'd transferred his guitar playing and singing from the
sacred to the secular realm. "Soon I kinda joined this r&b group, the
Creations, in Grand Rapids after we moved up there." (Green's family
moved from Arkansas when he was 13). In 1967 the group, by then
called the Soul Mates, cut "Back Up Train," which got Green booked at
the Apollo Theater.
The Soul Mates soon fell apart, leaving Green to tour the chitlin'
circuit and get nowhere for the next year or so. Then he walked into a
Hollywood-style scenario for being discovered. A 1968 night found him
in a Midland, Texas, club opening for trumpeter Willie Mitchell, then
riding a crest of instrumental hits like "Soul Serenade." Mitchell dou-
bled as chief producer and a&r man for the small but important Mem-
phis Hi label.
Watching the young man loosen up, Mitchell heard in his softer-
voiced but passionate soul a sound he'd been searching for. "I wanted
somebody who could sing pleasant enough to appeal to black and white
audiences with the same record, not like some of the rougher-voiced
singers," he says. So he called Hi's owner Joe Cuoghi to tell him he was
bringing Green back to Memphis. After a lot of coaxing, Green bounced
along on the hump of Mitchell's band van for the several-hundred-mile
ride. Time and conversation—and the fact that Mitchell loaned him
$1500 to pay off Grand Rapids bills—convinced him this was the right
road.
25
 Dancing in Your Head

A few weeks later they were in the studio cutting cover tunes like "I
Want to Hold Your Hand" and their first hit, a Southern-style funkified
version of the Temptations' "Can't Get Next to You." But Green had
been writing songs, and obsessing on one in particular, for years. "After
we had cut almost the whole first album I said, 'Well, I have a song.' So
everybody says, 'Yeah, right, right (laughs). Maybe we could cut . . .
Let me see. . . .' I said, 'But you haven't heard my song.' So finally I
got a chance to play it on guitar, and it turned out to be our first million-
seller. "
"Tired of Being Alone" outlined the soul-man turf Al Green would
claim as his distinctive own. Until he'd met Mitchell, Green's vocaliz-
ing was, in his own words, "more in the harder vein. I'd been listening
to Otis Redding, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, B. }. Thomas—all the
stars who were singing with a certain, you know, strength. That was the
thing at the time. But Willie wanted me to just relax and not sing so
hard, just to find Al Green. So there I was, trying to create myself as well
in the middle of all this recording. Apparently I stumbled across it
(laughs)." Apparently he did: "Tired" hit number 11 on the Billboard
charts, the first of Green's nine million-sellers.
The string of hits and big-venue tours ran pretty much unbroken
until 1976, punctuated by a searing experience at Disneyland in 1973.
"We'd played with Smokey Robinson in San Francisco, then got a
private jet to take us down to Anaheim for this special midnight show,"
is the way Green tells it. "I went to bed collapsed and exhausted, and
woke up in the middle of the night praising God. It was amazing; I'd
never experienced anything like that before. I ran into the bathroom and
tried to keep it from coming out, stuffed a towel in my mouth, but that's
impossible to do—even if you have a towel."
His co-workers weren't exactly thrilled to learn of his conversion.
"When I was telling Willie and the others about it, at first they found it
difficult to believe. Oh, man, there's a great current pulling back and
forth in there within the (music) industry, between secular rhythm &
blues/pop and Christian gospel. It's tremendous to try to change from
one place to the other. You have to be mentally strong to do that. There
was so much stress and strain from everyone in the industry: the man-
agers, the promoters, the booking agents, the club owners."
In fact, Green himself spent over three years seesawing back and forth
across that line. "I spent a lot of that time doing songs where the lyrics
26
 Take It to the River

were deliberately ambiguous about what their object was, whether I was
singing to a woman or someone else," he grins. His life reflected that
ambiguity. He'd become involved with a woman who, unknown to
him, was married with three children. It was a recipe for the disaster that
struck in 1974. "I was in my apartment in a separate part of the house.
She had just proposed to me, and I'd said I didn't know whether I wanted
to marry her, what I wanted to do." Her reaction was to take a pot of
boiling grits, bring it to Green's quarters, and toss it all over his back,
scalding him severely. She then went downstairs and shot herself.
The sensational case recalled how Sam Cooke, one of Green's biggest
vocal influences and himself a singer who crossed from gospel to r&b,
was killed in a cloud of sexual innuendo. It pushed Green into painful
skin grafts and convalescent seclusion for almost eight months. Coupled
with his Anaheim conversion, the trauma led Green to recross to the
sacred, so he bought the somewhat dilapidated Full Gospel Taber-
nacle and began preaching there in the mid-1970s. He continued to
record and perform what sounded like soul music with increasingly
ambiguous lyrics. "I did an album called The Belle Album where that's
kinda evident. There's one song that goes, 'It's you that I want, but it's
Him that I need'; that's the epitome of the pyramid, the tip of the
iceberg, if you will. That's where I began to say it out loud."
It was also the first time he'd produced himself, since longtime pro-
ducer Mitchell bowed out. The Belle Album sold well, but it marked the
last of Green's soul music. By 1979, after nearly being badly hurt by a
fall from a concert stage, he dedicated himself solely to gospel. With
that, his audience too began to shift. "That was inevitable. But it's like
anything else: if you go for the flashy, high-roller-type life you get the
flashy, high-roller-type people. You know, if you live more down-to-
earth, you draw that kind of a crowd. So when you change like that
people are gonna disagree about whether it's a good thing or a bad
thing." As they continue to do to this day about the Reverend Al Green,
with his Grammy and his gold records and his 1982 stint with Patti
LaBelle in Broadway's gospel smash Your Arms Too Short to Box with
God and his performance of sections from Duke Ellington's Sacred
Concerts and his Sunday midday preaching into a sweat—from both
sides of the aisle.
I Get Joy (A&M) is likely to stir everybody up a bit more—especially
when they catch the video for the single, "As Long as We're Together."

27
 Dancing in 'Your Head

According to Green, "Our concept is about love, and I suppose if I

could save a soul from hatred I'd be saving a soul from death." Still, the
gyrating dancers aren't exactly holy rollers. Two years in the making,
built with overdubs from Green's basic guitar-plus-vocals tracks,
rounded off with churchy lyrics over backings from jubilee shouts to
dance-floor beats, I Get Joy is shot through with jubilant vocals.
And for his supporting tours he's been reincorporating secular hits
like "Let's Stay Together" into the light- and smoke-filled show. For the
message the Reverend Al Green serves up at the Tabernacle and New
Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and the Beacon Theater stays constant:
Love is universal, and love is meant to be broader than just a little
narrow box. If I'm to love my neighbor as myself, I don't know who
my neighbor may be; I ought to check and find out. The command-
ment is simply love each other as we love ourselves. And since that's
the case, it's true no matter who our neighbor is. One may want to lis-
ten to Duke Ellington, one may want to listen to Count Basic, one
may want to listen to Mozart, one might want to listen to Bruce
Springsteen. You see what I'm saying? But the commandment is what
it is. So therefore, should I take your music from you? Should you
take my music from me? Not so, I don't think. [1989]

chapter, 6
Bom on the Bayou
Outside New Orleans, between Baton Rouge and the Louisiana-Texas
border, stretches the swampy, waterway-laced countryside familiar from
films like The Big Easy. It's called the bayou, and from the mid-1700s on
it became a refuge for the French-speaking inhabitants of the Canadian
province Acadia. The British government began uprooting them after
the French loss of Canada; though the Crown tried to resettle them
elsewhere, many successfully fled to New France, where they re-
28
 Born on the Bayou

established their communities and culture and became known as Ca-

juns.
Their cultural baggage included the informal back-porch sounds of
scraping fiddles and percussive guitars, wheezy squeezeboxes and
scratched rubboards; high nasal vocals arched over modified waltzes and
simple but driving two-step dance rhythms. The mix thrived in the
bayou, where it began to rub against some of its neighbors and exchange
characteristics.
The other large group of bayou settlers were French-speaking blacks,
the Creoles. Though descended from runaway slaves and freedmen, the
Creoles shared more than a fractured patois with the white community.
Creole and Cajun culture developed along similar lines in many areas,
like cuisine; in music, they crossfertilized to the point that their sounds
were frequently interchangeable stylistically, with instrumentation,
rhythms, and mournful vocals in idiosyncratic French staying fairly
constant across the color bar.
At least until the '20s and '30s, when other influences on the music's
development entered the bayou via records and later radio. For Cajuns,
the key new entrant was country music—the early raw hillbilly kind
derived from the Anglo-Celtic folk traditions of jigs and reels and bal-
lads, not Nashville's corporate product. For Creoles it was blues, which
thrived along the Mississippi River in bustling ports and on backwoods
plantations alike. Not surprisingly, these musical strains continued to
crosstalk, with Creoles picking up on country stylings and Cajuns adapt-
ing blues elements.
The single most important name in zydeco, as the Creole gumbo of
black, French, and country traditions is known, is still Clifton Chenier.
Accordionist/vocalist Chenier, who died in 1988, earned his title King of
Zydeco by fashioning a unique rollicking hybrid from his early record-
ings in the '50s on. Especially as captured on essential albums like
Clifton Chenier Live (Arhoolie), he transformed a more laid-back rural
music into an electrified rhythmic dynamo. Singing now in French,
now in English, over the insistent rasp of his brother's metal rubboard
and the powerhouse backing of a band boasting ripsnorting sax, B. B.
King-ish guitar, and unstoppable rhythm section, Chenier cut such
blues-drenched masterpieces as Boogalusa Boogie (Arhoolie). His stamp
continues to define latter-day practitioners like his son C.}., Buckwheat
Zydeco, Boozoo Chavis, and Rockin' Dopsie.
29
 Dancing in Your Head

Zydeco, like its Cajun cousin, is the music of a community; unlike

the commercially produced musical formats we're used to hearing on
the radio, it reflects a particular way of life and values. To get a better
sense of what those are, grab documentary filmmaker Les Blank's Red
Beans and Rice, which captures Chenier and his music on their home
turf.
Despite Louisiana's horribly depressed economy in the wake of the
oil bubble's bursting, Cajun musical life on the bayou has, like its
zydeco cousin, been enjoying a revival of its own. That's thanks in part
to fiddler/vocalist Michael Doucet and Beausoleil, his band named after
the leader of the 1755 Acadian uprising against the British. Playing in a
duo with accordionist Zachary Richard, Doucet became inspired to dig
into his culture's musical roots, which, like many local traditions in this
country, was being steamrollered out of memory by the media onslaught
of the commercial mainstream. So he studied with old Cajun masters
like Dennis McGee and the Balfa Brothers as well as Creole fiddle great
Canray Fontenot, then formed the nucleus of Beausoleil in the
mid-1970s.
Though the band got attention in folkie circles early on, their regular
appearances on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion in 1984
were what broke them to a wider audience. Meanwhile, Doucet has
loosened up from his early stiff preservationist correctness with mix-'em-
up albums like Hot Chili Mama (Arhoolie), Bayou Boogie and Bayou
Cadillac (both Rounder). And if Beausoleil's soundtrack for Belizaire the
Cajun displayed their continuing concern with their history, their
culture-crossing song for The Big Easy, "Zydeco Gris-Gris," demon-
strated their entwined black and white roots, versatility, and potential
pop-audience reach via those foot-stomping beats.
Laissez les bans temps roule! [1989]

30
 chapter 7
New Orleans s Hidden Treasures
Everybody knows that jazz was born in New Orleans. But the range of
music born there before and since is more diverse than you'd think from
just stopping in at Preservation Hall or wandering along Bourbon Street,
and it's thriving in the otherwise economically depressed Cresent City.
The conceit that New Orleans is really a Caribbean city helps explain
its musical diversity. The percolating rhythms of military marching
bands mingled from colonial days with the African-derived polyrhythrns
and call-and-response forms of slaves (who were brought from Africa)
and free blacks (who migrated from Caribbean islands) eventually to
yield early jazz. That mix was replicated differently in the Europeans'
Caribbean colonies, but it set up a continuing exchange: Jamaicans tune
in New Orleans radio stations and New Orleans musicians pick up early
on Caribbean developments like soca and reggae.
So New Orleans is a kind of paradox: a near-foreign city where music
is a more natural part of the cultural fabric than in any other U.S. place,
it's produced quintessential American sounds. Take its famed Mardi
Gras Indians, who've combined African roots with a commemoration of
an Indian-aided slave revolt to create elaborate pageantry and a loose-
limbed, exuberant parade music for the family- and neighborhood-
oriented tribal organizations. Driven by fierce percussion and call-and-
response vocals, their ornate costumes and street celebrations have to be
witnessed to be truly appreciated, but recordings like the Golden Eagles'
Lightning and Thunder (Rounder) can give you a taste. And for the
VCR-lover there's A/ways for Pleasure, the fine documentary by Les
Blank that captures the omnipresent music and unbusinesslike attitudes
toward life and time that define New Orleans.
For a long time the brass-band tradition thrived in the Crescent City,
but even there it began to peter out along with cultural holdovers like
funeral processions, which were among the bands' work staples. (The
catchphrase "second-line" used to describe New Orleans's parade-based
31
 Dancing in Your Head

rhythms comes from processions: the band, or first line, would lead the
strutting dancers, or second line.) Then a few years ago the Dirty Dozen
Brass Band bent the moribund format's perceived limitations. Playing
traditional marches back-to-back with bebop or Rolling Stones tunes,
the DDBB lace it all with a good-time rhythmic feel that makes not
moving impossible. Check out My Feet Can't Fail Me Now (Concord
jazz) or Voocfoo (Columbia). Other participants in the current revival
are compiled on Down Yonder (Rounder).
The piano has been basic to New Orleans since the days of barrel-
house "professors" and houses of ill repute, and two of the best pianists
of recent days are having posthumous revivals. Henry Roeland "Pro-
fessor Longhair" Byrd and James Booker III were musically omnivorous,
dextrous, and rhythmic with a catchy complexity that can baffle even
drummers. Not surprisingly, they reached legendary status among
locals—the famed club Tipitina's was named after a yelping party-down
mambo by Longhair. Standout recordings include Longhair's New Or-
leans Piano (Atlantic) and James Booker Volume One (JSP).
Which brings us to one band that embodies New Orleans's cultural
diversity and spirit. The Neville Brothers, after years of working sep-
arately in different lineups (like the amazing Meters, the Big Easy's
funky answer to Booker T and the MGs, who opened a Rolling Stones
tour) and scoring some hits, united in 1975 to play with their uncle
George "Jolly" Landry, a chief of a Mardi Gras Indian tribe. The result-
ing classic, The Wild Tchoupitoulas (Island), crossed parade tunes with
rock and roll—like Mardi Gras on the dance floor.
The history of the Neville Brothers encapsulates the problems facing
New Orleans musicians. Off N.Y.'s and L.A.'s beaten corporate paths,
operating with a casual, tribally based trust that has repeatedly left them
open to rip-offs, a racially mixed group who attract racially mixed audi-
ences, the Nevilles have until recently seemed trapped by commercial
pressures and pigeonholes, though their infectious funk and astonishing
voices have repeatedly crowned them champs of the New Orleans Jazz
and Heritage Festival.
Yellow Moon (A&M) mixed Bob Dylan covers and horn work from
the Dirty Dozen Brass Band with the Jamaican rapping called toasting,
party-down funk with spacey textures and bluntly political lyrics dealing
in racism and war and imperialism. Subsequent albums like Brother's
Keeper (A&M) extend the mix. As their always amazing concerts show,
32
 Soul Queen of New Orleans

the Nevilles can wreak their special magic on anything from Ellington to
Mardi Gras standards, from raunchy rockers to delicate soul ballads.
And as they stir up traditions from far and wide, they, like their home-
town, make an unmatched musical gumbo that has to be tasted to be
believed, [1989]

8
.......

* ""*?^«*«c\ chapter

Soul Queen of New Orleans

Now in her early fifties, she's beautiful and sassy and the mother of four,
and she wields her rich, throaty voice with the nuanced command born
of long experience. New Orleans's very own Queen of Soul, Irma
Thomas, has been winning back the national spotlight her musicianship
and spinetingling vocals deserve.
Born in Pontchatoula, Louisiana ("The Strawberry Capital of the
world," she laughs), and raised in the Crescent City, Thomas has been
immersed in music from her earliest days. During the week she was
glued to the radio listening to hits by r&b greats like Percy Mayfield, and
on Sundays she sang, as she does to this day, in church, where she, like
so many other soul singers, draws out her gospel-derived vocal swoops
and swerves, from the aching catch in the throat to the flat-out belting
scream.
Her break into show biz came in 1958, while she was waitressing at
the Pimlico Club. "Tommy Ridgley and his band were playing there,
and I asked myself up onstage to sing a tune with them," she says,
grinning at the memory. Ridgley, a key musical figure in the Big Easy,
liked what he heard; and so when Thomas was fired ("The people in the
club didn't mind me getting up on stage, but the man who was paying
me to be a waitress did"), he set up an audition for her with the local
label Ron Records. "He took me to the audition on Monday, I recorded
on Wednesday, and I had a record out the following week," she recalls.
33
 Dancing in Your Head

"That's how it happened in those days." The tune, "Don't Mess with
My Man," had a refrain that ran, "You can have my husband, but
please don't mess with my man," and put her lusty contralto squarely on
the musical map.
It also launched her on the checkered, label-hopping career typical of
New Orleans artists, partly because of that scene's neglect by major U.S.
record companies. So Thomas worked for a succession of labels over the
next 15 years, cutting big regional and r&b hits like "Time Is on My
Side" but making it onto Billboard's national top-40 pop charts only
once, in 1964, with a primo tear-jerker called "Wish Someone Would
Care."
In the course of moving around, she got to work with most of the
region's acknowledged masters, like pianist/songwriter Allen Toussaint.
Toussaint was one of the driving forces behind the legendary Minit
Records, and at various points nearly all the great New Orleans artists
passed through Minit's studios. Among them was Thomas, who remem-
bers the association with the same easygoing but blunt candor that
characterizes her generally. "I didn't have any choice about what I
sang," is how she puts it.

He'd write a song and say, This is for you, and I'd do it, just like ev-
erybody did in those days. See, at that time I was 19 years old; what
did I know about choices, anyway? I'd only been in the business for a
few years, I was still very naive, and all I was doing was just trying to
hang in there. Besides, if there's some degree of success, you have to
respect the people you're working with; and he obviously hadn't done
me any great injustice with the material, so why not go along?

Which is what she did until Minit, like Ron before it, collapsed
financially, leaving her contract to be picked up by Imperial, where she
cut "Wish Someone Would Care." When Imperial folded not much
later, Thomas found herself scuffling from one project to the next. By
1970, in fact, she'd left New Orleans and music for L.A. and a day job
clerking in a Montgomery Ward, singing only sometimes on weekends.
"Opened for James Brown on a tour, and cut 'It's Man's Woman's
World' (a female-ized version of Brown's early hit "It's a Man's Man's
Man's World") for one of his labels. Even went back and recut some of
my old hits for different labels. Did a disco thing for RCS in '79 that was
just a little too late for the disco craze; so even though it was a good

34
 Soul Queen of New Orleans

record, and we made a video that ran on HBO, it was down the tubes
again."
In 1984, Thomas began her association with the Boston-based indie
label Rounder, hoping that the combination of their track record at
selling her kind of music and the resurgence of interest in '60s-style soul
could coalesce into something better. The New Rules brought her
honey-smooth voice to lesser-known soul classics like "I Needed Some-
body" and "The Love of My Man," as well as pumping new tunes full of
the good-timey soul grooves and silken vocals she and her band special-
ize in. The Way I Feel found Thomas's stunning renditions of "Dancing
in the Street," which roasts that soul chestnut in her sexy heat, and
"Baby I Love You," where her darker-voiced, focused, torchy intensity
couples with the spare, almost reggae-like instrumental backing to create
a very different feel from Aretha Franklin's slower-paced, gospel-driven,
pyrotechnic original.
Part of the albums' sheer punch derives from the way Thomas and
her band work; for them, there is little distinction between how they
perform live and how they record. Where many artists in this age of the
48-track studio assemble a tune fragment by fragment, one instrument
on tape at a time, Thomas takes her chances by cutting the entire band
and her vocals as if they were on stage. Aside from occasional punch-ins
to fix a bum note here or there, those performances find their way to
vinyl undoctored, and so can hit home with the stunning impact
Thomas unleashes in a club.
When she graciously drives me back to my New Orleans hotel after
our interview, we get to talking about kids, and she offers to pick up a
present for mine—a T-shirt sporting an embroidered crawfish with tiny
removable sunglasses. She drops it off the next afternoon—to the aston-
ished, worshipful reactions of doorman and concierge alike, who ask
incredulously, "Do you know Irma?" Well enough to know that the
Soul Queen of New Orleans is one of the great overlooked singers of our
time, that she's finally coming into her own again. When I come back to
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, she's always one of the biggest
reasons. [1988]

35
 chapter. 9
Uptown
The Birthplace of Jazz and the Blues. The Paris of America. The Cres-
cent City. Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, gumbos and jambalayas and
pralines, riverboats and levees and Cajun queens and wrought-iron
railings. New Orleans is more than just a city, it's a mythology, a
cultural stew, an intersection where different ways of life meet and
merge and shape new forms.
And has been from its beginnings, this home of Louis Armstrong and
Jelly Roll Morton, washed with the tides of Delta blues and warmed by
the same humid sky that kisses other Caribbean ports. No accident,
then, that the Big Easy was the place in the late 19th century where
Latin beats unleashed a firestorm of syncopation within the marching
bands so popular here, as in the rest of the U.S. Nor was it an accident
that ragtime and Delta blues, flowing downriver with the Mississippi,
collided here with those tangy beats—dubbed by Jelly Roll "the Spanish
tinge"—to create a hybrid called jazz. Nor is it surprising to learn that
Caribbean islanders in the '50s began listening to the powerful signal
from New Orleans radio stations like WINX, picking up on the early
r&b sounds of pioneers like Fats Domino, which they then reworked
into rock-steady, ska, and reggae. So with roots reaching to such diverse
musical styles, it seems inevitable that this town should produce a musi-
cal institution as flexible, subtle, and propulsive as the Neville Brothers.
The musical mix that scrambles over their second-line syncopations
marks them instantly as a New Orleans band, a part of the relentless
hybridization process that produced first jazz, then rock and roll. But the
voices hold the key to their identity. If the Everly Brothers sing like the
tailored halves of a single voice, then the Neville Brothers meld a single
voice from four seamless doo-wop parts.
Still, despite their unparalleled abilities, until lately they'd garnered
little exposure and less financial reward. Critics have raved over their
previous LPs, putting Neville-ization on every Ten Best of 1984 list from

36
 Uptown

Rolling Stone to Time. Musicians like Keith Richards, Ron Wood,

Ronnie Lane, Jimmy Buffett, Rod Stewart, and Patti LaBelle have
praised them to all comers. They've opened tours for the Stones and
Huey Lewis, among others. So if you've never had the chance to hear
them, maybe the problem lies with the record companies and radio
programming directors, who can't seem to find easy marketing slots for
the band's earthy, good-time groove, its blend of r&b, funk, gospel,
jazz, Afro-Cuban, blues, and soul music.
The tangle of roots that thread through their music has been sketched
by an excellent two-disk compilation called Treacherous. Starting with
Art Neville's first 1955 hit, the Hawketts' "Mardi Gras Mambo," Treach-
erous boasts selections from virtually every phase of the Nevilles' careers,
both as solo artists and together. Not that they are relics from the reissue
bin: their fifth LP as a group, Uptown, is full of chugging beats and
soaring harmonies. It rates high on what Art, at 49 the eldest of the four
Neville brothers and their spokesman/patriarch, calls "the chill-bump
factor."
As Art tells it, there is no mystery to the band's cult status:

The record companies didn't know how to sell Neville-ism. The stuff
we did for them was so raw, I figure at some point on our career we
will be able to do some stuff like that and get away with it—I mean
really get away with it, where people want to buy it. Then it won't be
one of those deals with the marketing shit, where the guy don't know
how to sell it 'cause it don't have no label on it. Well, everybody was
afraid to touch us because they got all round holes and we're a square
peg. We're just as hip as all those round holes, but there just ain't no
place to put us. So there's the problem. You got a predominantly black
band, and they figure right away, Black means r&b. And when I hear
r&b, r&b means real black to me. But here you got a band that's got a
95% white following all over the world. This totally baffles the record
companies, to the point where they would just say, These cats can't
make it, we don't want to touch 'em, we can't change 'em. That's
when they go and send producers in on you. They may send a pro-
ducer that really loves the band, and he'll let you do a lot of the stuff
that you want to do; but then when you finish, the company can't sell
it. They're used to selling grapes and bananas and here you done give
'em a hip watermelon [laughs]. So they don't know what to do. I
mean, when they go to talking 'bout r&b, we couldn't compete with
the groups that are doing r&b out there right now, if they would try to

37
 Dancing in Your Head

call our stuff r&b. That's going backwards for us, saying crossover, you
got to go to the black stations first and then cross over from there.
That's bullshit, when you got a 95% white audience: somebody out
there just don't know how to do their job in a situation like that, man.
That's the bottom line.
With Uptown, the bottom line may meet the Nevilles' second line
for the first time. The Nevilles have, with this LP, ventured into the
mainstream realms of synthesizer-driven pop. The very notion may
horrify their longtime fans, even before they've heard the disk itself. But
remember, after all, that Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll
Morton, and other Crescent City innovators—including the Neville
Brothers—never intended their music to be a fossilized art form.
For the Nevilles' story is the tale of a way of life and of the city in
which that lifestyle flourishes, a New Orleans which tourists catch a
glimpse of once a year at Mardi Gras, far from the riverboats and
picturesque French quarter and the Superdome. For this story, we've
got to go Uptown, as the locals call it, to the 13th Ward.
St. Charles Avenue uncoils south out of downtown New Orleans
through a brief bit of East Village-type scenery: purple teased hair, torn
punkers' clothes, splashes of neon, eyes heavily ringed with mascara.
Then suddenly it opens out to become a broad, tree-lined boulevard
whose old and often large houses face each other with a settled quiet
across the oldest American streetcar line in continous operation. But
when Mardi Gras comes, St. Charles explodes into a riot of colors and
smells and sounds. Here the Wild Tchoupitoulas Indians—one of many
black "tribes" that painstakingly create elaborate Indian-inspired cos-
tumes for the pre-Lenten celebrations—make their annual parade along
the avenue to the ageless marching tunes handed down from generation
to generation. Traceable to the slave rebellions of the early 1800s, which
were apparently fomented by free blacks from Santo Domingo and
possibly Haiti, the tribes continue rituals which memorialize how the
neighboring Indian nations hid escaping slaves from their owners' ven-
geance.
Where Valence crosses St. Charles marks the heart of the Nevilles'
home turf; a left turn and a few blocks, and we pull up to a small one-
story frame house whose wooden shingles are peeling from lack of new
paint. In the driveway sit two late-model American-made cars; their
dashboards and rear decks groan with stereo equipment. The kitchen

38
 Uptown

door swings open, and Art Neville rubs his sleep-rimmed eyes and
suggests we meet him at the other side of the house, which is where the
band rehearses and records demos. The others will drift in as they can:
they worked late last night, they're leaving for the road day after tomor-
row. We walk back around the front of the house and pull open the front
door.
The room isn't that big to begin with—maybe 12 feet by 12 feet—and
in an odd way it looks even smaller now that all the equipment is gone.
Somewhere between here and L. A. the rig rumbles over superhighways
with its load, rushing to Burbank to answer the last-minute summons
that calls the Neville Brothers to The Tonight Show. "Our hair done
turned gray together, but brother, but we still here, man, we made it,"
grins Art as he imagines the conversation he and America's longest-
running talk-show host will have. The last few weeks have been a blur of
rehearsal for the Nevilles' two-week minitour of the Pacific Northwest,
then it's back to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras, and then off to
Europe for a two-month swing. Art settles into a battered leather chair in
the second practice room, where the Teac open-reel four-track and the
Tascam four-track cassette studio sit amid the welter of Tandy elec-
tronics and stereo gear. Cartons holding electronics gear—wires, jacks—
huddle at the floor's edges, while in one corner a lone keyboard rack
stands, left behind from the rig. Covering the walls are bits of mem-
orabilia plucked from a career that stretches back 32 years. There's a
poster announcing that the Funky Meters will play at Tipitina's for a
week in 1969, a poster from the Police's first U.S. tour, a small fading
photo of Art at around seven on the back of a pony, a sepia-toned photo
in an oval frame which depicts Art as a Chicago-style mobster complete
with tommy gun, the cut-out front panel of the Neville-ization
LP. . . .
Now Aaron drifts in from down the block, huge-shouldered and
tattooed ("They say I couldn't go on The Dick Clark Show because of the
tattoo on my face, but that's not true," he says at one point in his soft-
spoken but no-nonesense way), and hunkers down onto the hastily
refolded chairbed that tech-wiz Eric Kolb ("Mr. Spock running the
show l:ere," grins Art) had flopped on until we arrived to roust him.
Soon Cyril shows from across the street, lean and sharp and topped with
a Rasta's knitted cap; he drops onto the long-legged stool that squats
beneath one of the elaborate speaker setups with outboard tweeters.
39
 Dancing in Your Head

Wiry Charles fingers his Fu Manchu moustache as he considers an-

swers, and three-year-old Ian, Art's son, scampers around clutching
drumsticks and occasionally working at his drums in a room farther
back.

You Can't Stop Running Water: 1954-61

The second line has always taken precedence over the bottom line for
the Neville Brothers. Music has filled their homes, no matter where or
how poor they were—-a genetic link for this family-centered group that
pulses with the blood in their veins. "Our uncle George Landry and our
mother, who was his older sister, were a dance team, run it down to us
that they were the best dancers in New Orleans—even had an offer to go
on the road with Louis Prima," Aaron begins with obvious pride, adding
with a laugh, "Good thing my grandmother wouldn't let them do it, or
there'd've been no Neville Brothers." Art continues, "They put on
shows around town. My mother and father listened to the same music:
Charles Brown, Nat King Cole, Wynonie Harris, Louis Jordan, Louis
Armstrong. It all influences what we're doing today."
It was natural for the next generation of Nevilles to absorb as much as
they could—though not always by orthodox means. "I learned to play
piano by playing other people's," Art laughs. "Any chance I got to play
around this neighborhood I did." For the others, musical training con-
sisted of messing around at home and in the neighborhood, and various
school band programs.
By age 16, Charles, a year younger than Art, had already taken his sax
on the road, while the oldest Neville slid into a group of fellow high
schoolers called the Hawketts. "By that time," he recalls, "we'd moved
from the 13th Ward into the Calliope project, and I started doing these
little talent shows at NORD, the New Orleans Recreation Department.
So these guys the Hawketts had a singer/piano player named Mac Mol-
lette that had a bigger gig: he went out with Fats Domino—that's a long
time ago (laughs). There were seven pieces: two trumpets, trombone,
tenor, alto, guitar, bass, and drums." Which cut the now classic "Mardi
Gras Mambo" at the studio of local radio station WWEZ; reissued every
year at Mardi Gras time, it's sold over a million copies from which Art
says he's never received a penny. It was the first link in a chain of alleged
financial deceptions and legal sleights-of-hand that has grown to bind
40
 Uptown

the Nevilles until today. They claim to have reaped little financial
reward from their music, asserting that until their recent success with
Yellow Moon, Brother's Keeper, and Family Groove (all on A&M) their
earnings have gone to a succession of colleagues, managers, and the like
employing shrewd or shoddy business practices. If such allegations are
all too common in the record industry, the sad fact is that they are all too
often true.
However, while many first-generation rockers got ripped off, few
have had the musical and spiritual staying power that has enabled the
Nevilles to face trial after trial. "I see a lot of guys are bitter," says Art,
"saying, Man, I didn't get no money, I'm mad with everybody. But
man, if we're sounding so good today, and we're all together, and we're
getting ready to unleash some stuff that's cold-blooded, so then all those
people who saw fit to take and take and didn't put nothin' back in didn't
stop us. We must have something that's real genuine, that's real mean-
ingful, else we wouldn't still be here," Aaron prompts him: "It's like
running water, mon." Art nods, smiles, and explains, "Had a friend
from Trinidad used to tell me all the time, You can't stop running
water. So hey, here we are—we must be like running water. Now it's
beginning to be cool running, man (laughs)."
After "Mardi Gras Mambo," Art's next shot at recording came
via famed Crescent City reedman and arranger Harold Battiste, who
inked him to Specialty Records in 1956. "He was one of the top-
line musicians here," is how Art tells it, "and so he got a job with
Specialty. That's when we did 'Cha Dooky-Doo,' 'Zing Zing,' 'Oooh-
Whee Baby,' all that stuff like that." All of it classic New Orleans rock
and roll of the '50s, brandishing push-pull rhythms and Art's warm,
smooth vocals.
Among the other local legends that Art and Aaron worked with
during this period was pianist/vocalist Larry Williams, whose two 1957
singles, "Short Fat Fanny" and "Bony Moronic," cracked Billboard's
top-lS pop charts. "I hooked up with Larry first," Art explains.

Larry knew the whole family from right out here, with the '54 Ford
station wagon with the Hawketts painted on the side of it. So he asked
us, You cats wanna go on the road? We didn't know nothin' 'bout no
road—Baton Rouge was the road far as I was concerned (laughs). So
we went out with Larry, which was real real real good experience.

41
 Dancing in Your Head

Played behind people like the Spaniels, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who's
one of my favorites, on package tours. We played the Howard Theater,
the Regal Theater, Chicago. Used to play the Brooklyn Paramount all
the time before they messed Alan Freed around with that race music
and devil music stuff. Rock and roll won't last ten minutes—that's
what they said then (laughs). I was 18, just about to turn 19, and
things was looking pretty good.
Until Uncle Sam came looking for him in 1958: his touring had
made him miss the Naval Reserve meetings he'd signed up for in high
school in order to avoid the draft. Since the Hawketts clearly needed a
stand-in for Art while he served out his two-year stint, his father, who
was now managing the band, plugged brother Aaron, three years youn-
ger than Art, into the slot. "Singing doo-wop in the high school bath-
room's where I got my education," Aaron laughs. "Doo-wop was the
beginning of all of this stuff, we all had it," Art chimes in. Aaron
continues, "But my singing heroes, besides people like Nat King Cole
and Sam Cooke, were Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. When I was little I
wanted to be a cowboy, and I used to go to the movies all the time to see
shoot-'em-ups; whoever was the main character, that's who I was when I
came out (laughs). So I used to do the yodeling like they did, like Gene
Autry and Hank Williams." And so Aaron took over his brother's band.
"I was the front man, singing 'Cha Dooky-Doo,'" grins Aaron. "I didn't
even hear it on the radio until I was in the Navy, and didn't get the
chance to sing it till I was out," Art grins back.
Once Art came back from the service in 1960, Aaron started his own
solo career, scoring a hit ("Over You") that featured his effortless croon-
ing and the yodeling technique he'd refined into a soulful version of
Sam Cooke's lilt. All this over a classic New Orleans bump-grind beat,
rolling piano, and a bleary, good-natured horn section. "I wrote the
other side of that, called 'Every Day,' when I was in jail for auto theft,"
he says softly. The A side was penned by another local legend named
Allen Toussaint. A mainstay of the New Orleans session scene as a
pianist/arranger/composer/producer, Toussaint often credited his songs
to Naomi Neville, apparently his mother's maiden name. And as house
writer/arranger/producer at Minit Records until it was absorbed by
L. A.'s Imperial Records in 1963, Toussaint crafted tunes for Aaron that
would maximize the effect of his eerie voice and hybrid yodel.

42
 Uptown

Tell It Like It Is: 1961-68

Joe Banashak, who owned a number of small New Orleans labels like
Instant and Minit, had been impressed by Art and Aaron as individual
artists. And so, when Specialty Records, where they were first signed,
moved to L.A. in 1960 he bought their contracts and set them to work
cutting records for him.
"That was through Larry Williams too," explains Aaron. "I had went
on the road with him, and he turned me on to Minit Records, him and
this disk jockey named Larry McKinley. Worked every day, split sessions
between me and the Del Royals—I'd do two songs, they'd do two
songs." Unfortunately, according to the Nevilles Banashak rarely paid
them—or any of the other musicians—anything like a regular wage.
"He was a trip," says Aaron with a mixture of irony and disgust. "Get a
hundred dollars from him, you done good. Then after he give you the
hundred dollars he see one of the other fellows coming and looking, say,
Don't tell Ernie K-Doe or anybody that you got no money from me
(laughs)."
Just about two years after he'd bought their contracts from Specialty,
Banashak had to fold Minit and its affiliated labels; and so Art and Aaron
found themselves no richer, a little better known, and without contracts.
"I started doing odd jobs, driving a truck, working on the riverfront,
whatever, taking care of family, y'know," says one of the most unique
vioces ever to waft over the air waves. "Every once in a while they'd put
together a show with me and Ernie K-Doe and Benny Spellman and
Irma Thomas, things like that. And all in between them times I was
leaving town, going to California with Cyril—we left with five dollars
and a bag of chicken (laughs), going to this place and that to seek my
fortune (laughs). I had a few little episodes, y'know."
Four years later, in 1967, the lightning finally struck when Aaron hit
number one on Billboard's national pop charts with "Tell It Like It Is," a
silky-smooth skein of entreating vocals. "I went for about a year on
that," says Aaron, "making all kind of gigs. Had a tour with Otis Red-
ding, then the Apollo Theater. That was like a dream, the Apollo, I'd
heard so much about it: stayed there for two weeks, they kept us over for
an extra week, myself and Billy Stewart and a bunch of others. Then we
went up through Canada, even got to the Virgin Islands." He adds,
characteristically, "I never even got no gold record; the record company
43
 Dancing in Your Head

got the gold record." Given their intense family loyalty, it's no surprise
to learn that Art accompanied him on the road, backing him on key-
boards.
By the time Aaron got back home in 1967, he and two of his broth-
ers—Art and Cyril, at 36 the youngest—banded together in a seven-
piece group called the Neville Sound. "It was me and Art and Cyril and
Gary Brown and the Meters," says Aaron. That lineup worked for over a
year around the Crescent City. "Then," continues Aaron, "the deal
came up with Art and them going to this other club, 'cause the gig just
called for four pieces."

Second Line Strut: 1968-75

If that gig meant the end of that first Nevilles-dominated lineup, it also
marked the start of one of the funkiest four-piece rhythm sections out-
side Memphis, where Booker T and the MGs and the FAME/Muscle
Shoals crews backed virtually every soul singer in the '60s at some point.
The Neville Sound rhythm section—at first called the Funky Meters,
then the Meters—became the leading proponents of New Orleans-style
funk. The popcorn feel propelling the hits of James Brown blended with
Sly Stone's more psychedelicized excursions and Stax-Volt soul, all
leavened by the Crescent City's characteristic good humor. The lean
syncopations and spare arrangements that resulted marked a dramatic
shift in style from the work of earlier New Orleans artists like Battiste and
Dave Bartholomew, whose charts wove thick saxophone textures every-
where.
And when the Meters hooked up with Sansu Enterprises partners
Marshall Sehorn and Allen Toussaint, they burned a lot of wax that
more than holds up, backing vocalists like Sansu artist Lee Dorsey as
well as out-of-town stars like Robert Palmer, Patti LaBelle, and Paul
McCartney. In addition, three LPs of their own were cut on Sehorn's
Josie/Jubilee Records; their first release, a single called "Sophisticated
Cissy," jumped almost immediately into the top 20.
Art left, then returned to the Meters in the mid-'70s, when Cyril and
Aaron went back to doing the Soul Machine, the other half of Neville
Sound. That group played around New Orleans for nearly seven years;
then, as Cyril says, "Everybody started going to Nashville, so we moved
the Soul Machine up there." Meanwhile Aaron had been cutting rec-
44
 Uptown

ords for Sansu, covers of soul hits and original material like "Hercules,"
which boasts wah-wah guitar and falsetto vocals in the Curtis Mayfield
mode.
By the early '70s Warner's Reprise arm began leasing the Meters'
recorded output from Sansu. In the process, as still often, happens when
major labels face sounds that don't fit their marketing-determined cate-
gories, Reprise bent the Meters' slinkiness to fit something called the
mainstream. Even the band's recording methods were forced to change.
"That was all head charts," says Art of the earlier material—meaning
that the Meters, like most soul house bands, invented arrangements on
the spot, working around the vocalist's idiosyncracies and the demands
of the song to produce something that would use both to the maximum
effect. "After the fight, we'd play some serious music," is Art's line,
which cracks the room up.
The Soul Machine, too, had hit some brick walls, which led to a
decision. "Cyril and myself left Nashville and went to New York, where
Charley was," says Aaron.

Fz'yo on the Bayou: 1975-82

In New York they hit the streets with the same intense determination
that they'd hit stages all over. "By then I'd been on tour with all kinds of
people, like B. B. King, Bobby 'Blue' Bland, Wilber Ware, George
Coleman, lots of folks," observes Charles, while Aaron notes: "We just
called ourselves the Wild Tchoupitoulas. I was playing piano, Charles
was on horn and washboard, and Cyril was on congas." "We did a little
of this, a little of that; played places like 'Catch a Rising Star,'" interjects
Cyril. And Aaron declares, "Got a chance to talk to people, some
saying, Hey, man, I'd like to record you but I can't 'cause you're under
contract to Sehorn and Toussaint."
But in 1975 came the event that pulled the four brothers back to-
gether and gave them a chance to pool their interlocking talents. "That
thing with Jolly's what did it," declares Aaron, and everybody nods
agreement. He's referring to the uncle who nearly toured with Louis
Prima, who'd encouraged and helped train his nephews in the ways of
music and the Indian ways, George Landry, Big Chief Jolly of the Wild
Tchoupitoulas tribe. Art was already in New Orleans, working with the
Meters; he'd called Cyril back after four months in the Apple so he could
45
 Dancing in Your Head

put vocals and percussion on the last Meters LP. So when Charles and
Aaron returned, the foursome began using their roots in the black In-
dian cultural traditions not only to reinvigorate their music but also to
honor the older generation.
Hence The Wild Tchoupitoulas. Charles recalls the making of it this
way: "It was the first time we'd done anything together in I don't know
how many years. It turned out so magical, with all the tunes and words
my uncle had written based on the traditional Indian chants. There were
no real arrangements until we got into the studio, where it all just
happened. That record had so much magic in it, it was obvious we
should all get together." Magic indeed. With the Meters—on what
would be one of their last recorded collaborations—pumping out the
stuttering syncopations that dared all hearers to keep their seats, the four
Nevilles wrapped their rich harmonies around Jolly's gruff growl to
create a spellbinding rendition of Mardi Gras Indians' music.
"He was more than just Uncle to me," declares Cyril of Landry.
He was Big Chief Jolly: I had followed him in the street, you know, to
the Indian practices. He taught me this whole thing, the Indian cul-
ture, an altogether different culture than I thought we were. I found
out we had a lot more going for us than I had been taught previously.
Putting one of them Indian costumes together is serious, it's one of the
highest forms of primitive art. Then there were all the other rituals
that went on at the Indian practices; they go all the way back to the
times when the Indians and the Africans had to get together to—well,
we all know why they had to get together [laughs]. It taught me all
about myself and how unique we as a people are. Not just anybody
could be no Indian, and certainly not just anybody couldn't be no big
chief. These are all working-class people, but they find the time and
the money to make these costumes. So to be able to go in the studio
and document this culture—that's what it all meant to me. Even
though I didn't get no money for it, it's something I can pass down to
my children and my grandchildren.

While this record did little for the Nevilles financially—they claim
they were told it sold only a ridiculously small quantity—it put major
labels on the alert about them, which led to their signing with Capitol
and cutting The Neville Brothers. Their next project, three years later,
was Fiyo on the Bayou, and if they didn't exactly get rich off that one
either, at least it captured what they do better than anybody else.

46
 Uptown

But with no promotion or airplay ("The producer and management

cats spent much more bread than they were supposed to," says Charles,
"but the company thought we got it, so some of the money that
should've gone for promotion went to them"), the Nevilles hung in
something like major-label limbo. Three years passed before they re-
leased anything new. And when they did roll the tapes in 1982, it was
live at the club named after one of Professor Longhair's most famous
tunes, Tipitina's.

Whatever It Takes: 1982-87

As a result, Neville-ization (which wasn't released until 1984 due to legal
hassles) marks the only time the rhythmic crossfire and incredible vocals
that are this band's onstage trademark have made it to wax undoctored.
"All the record company people had seen us," says Charles. "What we
kept hearing was, Yeah, the albums were really good but they didn't
capture the thing that happens on stage. Tipitina's was the most magic
place to play, it was the first gig in New Orleans the Neville Brothers
ever did. The atmosphere was highly electric, highly charged with fans
ready to get down, and the music has always been at its peak there."
Indeed, the disc is a succession of peaks. And followed by the gradual
breakthrough to mainstream America of Uptown, Yellow Moon,
Brother's Keeper, and Family Groove, it's meant the Nevilles are, for the
first time, riding the airwaves and making hard cash. Few bands have
worked harder to get there, or deserve it more. [1987/1992]

47
 chapter 10

Country Comforts
More than any other American musical form, maybe more than any
American genre but its cousin the movie Western, country music is
based around commercially generated nostalgia. The Grand Ole Opry,
the industry's ideological centerpiece, has traded in its retrospective
image's value from its 1925 beginnings on Nashville's WSM. As Opry
founder George Hay wrote of his audience, "They were hungry for the
rhythm of the soil and the heart songs, plus the rural flavor and humor
which spiced it." So while the salesmen for the National Life and
Accident Insurance Company, WSM's owner, used free tickets to see
the Opry as icebreakers for their pitches, Hay exerted strict control over
every aspect of his performers' presentation, from how they dressed and
talked down to their biographies and politics and instrumentation. The
solemn Old Judge, as Hay was known, thus set the pattern Nashville's
country-music establishment follows to this day.
Although the past country music evokes (almost invariably at the
present's expense) is, like the movie cowboy, a largely idealized fabrica-
tion, it's also a mirror that reflects American history as it refracts the
present through its guilty dream. Think, for example, of how this na-
tion's deep-seated anti-urban prejudices are outlined so clearly in coun-
try music. For every song about a soothing pastoral landscape, where
even the hardest times can produce a transcendental moment (via reli-
gion, family, or true love), there's another about adulterous honky-
tonkers adrift on a post-industrial sea of pain.
One aspect of that city-as-sinkhole-of-iniquity stance stems directly
from the population displacements brought by the Great Depression and
the postwar economic shifts. But another is as American as cherry pie
and brokers a complex interaction of nativist myths. That second strand
stretches from Thoreau and the Jefferson/Jackson mandate for a nation
of sturdy white British yeoman farmers. It meanders through the Pro-
gressives' fear of European-immigrant hordes, who were mostly penned

48
 Country Comforts

into large urban centers once they got here. It underlies the creation of
our system of now-endangered national parks, conceived by the likes of
John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt as outlets where urbanites be-
leaguered by the alien onslaught could retire to revitalize via the healing
forces of Nature. And it finds its present outlooks in everything from
jingoistic patriotism and kneejerk political reaction to the attitude of
many Americans, which seems to mix a sense of divinely ordained
retribution and glee, toward the decay of our once great cities.
Of course, a hundred years and more ago, back before country music
was manufactured in L. A. (not coincidentally the World's Movie Capi-
tal) and Nashville, there were the hymns and ballads and schottishes and
fiddle tunes and so on that the early WASP colonists brought with them,
which became the roots of so much American popular music. Today,
preservationist folkies—a too often self-righteous and over-solemn lot
who nevertheless perform an invaluable service—tend those roots. For
what until the postwar era was disparaged as hillbilly music is as much a
recent set of hybrids as any of its cousins, from the blues and jazz to rock
and rap. Like them, too, country music is an umbrella term sheltering a
broad set of styles.
Country's historical interactions with other genres have been consid-
erable, and the results diverse. More often than not, they've also been in
defiance—at least initially—of the Nashville music establishment un-
less they've served an obvious commercial purpose. (As far as chroni-
cling the nervous insularity and negative attitude toward cultural/social
innovation that marks the Athens of the South, Robert Altman's blister-
ing epic Nashville is right on the money.) In the 1930s, for instance,
Nashville pushed the tie-in with ersatz movie historicism that spawned
the singing cowboy; the marriage was an obvious way to broaden its
audiences. So too with the soft-focus Nashville Sound of the mid-1950s
on: by glopping strings and chorales onto Tin Pan Alley lyrics, it re-
sponded to rock's commercial success, which knocked postwar crooners
off the airwaves, and thus opened a space where country could recoup its
own sagging sales.
But most other upstart styles have generally been either ignored or
marginalized by the country-music powers-that-be until they could fol-
low the dollar signs. Take a few examples. A lot of the "old-time" music
first recorded in the 1920s grew up side-by-side with the blues, which
was being recorded at the same time; each showed the other's influence.
49
 Dancing in Your Head

Western swing grew out of big-band dance music and the popularity of
the Hawaiian guitar. Honky-tonk, based largely in Texas and then Ba-
kersfield, was country's postwar analog for the hardening beats and
dislocated cries of electric urban blues. Rockabilly welded urban blues
with the bluegrass revivalism that reacted against Nashville's poppier
bent. In the '60s, groups like Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds spear-
headed a remating of rock and honky-tonk that led to still widely preva-
lent country-rock. And the Austin-centered outlaw movement of the
mid-1970s—actually a group of relocated, dissatisfied Nashville singer-
songwriters—infused country with r&b, rock, and Tex-Mex angles.
In time, Nashville (and its L. A. partners) accepted and capitalized on
all of these movements. That's when the myth-making machine has
always kicked in. Suddenly outcasts become retrospective heroes; in-
siders are transformed into retrospective rebels. Approaches that were
condemned by their contemporaries as heretical become orthodox. The
process can be almost as fascinating as watching Reagan and his Nauts
laying claim to the mantles of Lincoln and FDR. A rash of reissues has
made it possible once again to look at the process while listening to some
of country music's rich historical reservoir of material.
Almost at the beginning of what would become country music looms
the Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers. The Early Years, 1928—1929
and First Sessions, 1928—1929 (Rounder) are the first two installments of
what will be an eight-CD set compiled by Richard Weize, who's worked
on some of the staggering multi-CD compilations put out by Germany's
Bear Family label. Rodgers dealt in a variant of what Ralph Peer, the
legendary Victor talent scout who first recorded him, called "nigger
blues." Though you could see him that way as a kind of '20s Elvis,
Rodgers wasn't unusual. White and black string bands of the time played
overlapping repertories, for instance, and blues greats like B. B. King
have cited Rodgers's recordings as influential. While Rodgers's rhythms
are usually less complex than most used by his blues contemporaries, his
yodeling bent and fluttered notes in astonishing ways that presaged both
singing cowboys like Gene Autry and r&b greats like Aaron Neville. The
exemplary recording quality and notes of this set make it a fine introduc-
tion to country's roots.
While it also does some of that, the five-CD Columbia Country
Classics (Columbia) sits at the other end of the compilation spectrum.
It's basically a solid, if obviously chosen, greatest-hits sampler that spans
50
 Country Comforts

eras and styles, from old-timey to the current New Traditionalism. The
good sound and in-depth notes by Rich Kienzle make each volume
worth having for devotees, but to my admittedly prejudiced ears the
music is far more uneven. The first two volumes, The Golden Age and
Honky Tonk Heroes, span from the Carter Family and Roy Acuff to
Lefty Frizzell and Roy Price—by far the more interesting stuff, if only
because it's less processed-sounding than what's to come. Volume 3,
Americana, gathers novelty tunes like Fess Parker's "Ballad of Davy
Crockett" alongside classics like Frizzell's "Long Black Veil" and swill
like Charlie Daniels's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." The last two
CDs, The Nashville Sound and A New Tradition, demonstrate all too
clearly the music's mainstream decline into formulas.
The Country Music Foundation is Nashville's academic arm. It
publishes learned monographs in the Journal of Country Music, for
instance, and does serious historical research as well as filling a conve-
nient PR function. In that way, it recapitulates some of the Music City's
larger schizophrenia. So it's no surprise to find that its first five ventures
into major-label partnership)—the Country Music Hall of Fame series,
kicking off with Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, Bill Monroe, Kitty Wells,
and Loretta Lynn (MCA)—are meticulously annotated and well engi-
neered. In this series, each CD is built around a well-conceived greatest-
hits approach to an individual artist.
Tubb was Jimmie Rodgers's most fervent disciple, and Rodgers's
widow Carrie helped him promote himself as the Blue Yodeler's suc-
cessor. But he didn't hit until "Walking the Floor over You," a genial if
soft-edged proto-honky-tonker that landed him some roles in Holly-
wood. Most of his tunes are standard-issue country weepers, but a few of
the more interesting stick closer to the blues he learned from Rodgers
and elsewhere. And "Two Glasses, Joe" is a good example of the early
honky-tonk surrounding Hank Williams.
Foley was one of the reasons country-music recording finally shifted
from Chicago and New York studios to hometown Nashville after
World War II. During the process, he shaped the mold in which the
Nashville Sound then congealed country's regional roots: he estab-
lished, for instance, a set group of session players who did "head" (un-
written) arrangements of tunes tor everybody who recorded in the stu-
dio. Though these were accomplished players, a certain sameness
settled—perhaps inevitably—over their work as they ground from ses-
51
 Dancing in Your Head

sion to session. This album, aside from its treacly sentiments, demon-
strates that easygoing boredom.
Mandolin virtuoso Bill Monroe reached back to string band days to
invent bluegrass, a kind of bluesier version of old-timey music. (Like
Rodgers, Monroe learned to play in part from black musicians.) Pitting
fiddle, breakdowns against guitar, banjo, bass, and his own vigorous
picking, Monroe created a rhythmic filigree—not something any form
of country is noted for—that he laced with his high lonesome vocals in a
kind of neo-Appalachian blues, complete with Rodgers-ish yodeling for
punctuation. Nice as these selections are, however, none is drawn from
what aficionados regard as the quintessential Blue Grass Boys—the
1945-58 group featuring banjo genius Earl Scruggs, guitarist Lester
Flatt, and fiddler Chubby Wise.
Wells embodies an older country-music female template-—the stay-
at-home woman who's gentle and understanding and righteous and
tough and true and plaintive and passive and usually, though not al-
ways, hangs by her man through whatever comes down. In other words,
a familiar part: morality's underpowered arbiter. Newer country women
like Loretta Lynn are allowed anger and divorces and even, lately, affairs
of their own, although for Lynn's generation the role of moral guardian
remained intact. Lynn, as the "Coal Miner's Daughter," personifies one
of country's favorite fantasies, where sturdy families overcome grinding
poverty through strength of spirit. Her tunes also depict her spending a
lot of time sparring with other women about just who's gonna get the
man in the middle. If the dull-witted morality plays aren't enough to
make you skip these, imagine Wells's nasal dentist's-drill of a voice and
Lynn's patented syrupy twang gracing the insipid, repetitive arrange-
ments from The Nashville Sound Handbook, pages 54-62.
One of the most mythologized figures in country music is Hank
Williams. Depending on the perspective of the storyteller, he was either
Mr. Inside or Mr. Outside with the Nashville establishment and music
critics—one of his least scrutinized accomplishments. I guess his com-
posing talent, performing style, burn-it-at-both ends lifestyle, and result-
ing early death are flexible enough to be rhetorically useful to different
camps.
Williams probably came closest to the cry of the blues than any
country star since the Blue Yodeler himself. A friend of mine once
described them without irony as slit-your-wrists music. But in fact,
52
 Country Comforts

Williams's highly self-conscious craft spanned a host of styles, from Tin

Pan Alley to rawly gut-churning. So it was fascinating when, a couple of
years back, Polydor's archivists issued an exhaustive 8-volume, 16-
record set of his complete recorded output. Unfortunately, as satisfying
as it was for critics and fanatics to listen to Williams's skills grow and
develop incrementally, for less dedicated or crazed types it was just
exhausting and expensive. So now there's The Original Singles Collec-
tion . . . P/us (PolyGram), which, as three CDs, is more compact and
cheaper but still cuts a pretty revealing cross-section.
The power of Williams's tunes comes from their apparently un-
adorned directness. Like all the best country tunes, they tell simple
stories. No deep ironist, Williams churned out plenty of emotional
mush in the country-weeper vein. But the jagged-edged aches that make
you want to open your own veins—"So Lonesome I Could Cry," for
instance—turn around spare metaphors that pack a pain as seemingly
artless as the torn yodels racking his voice on "Lovesick Blues" or "Long
Gone Lonesome Blues."
Of course, like the best tunes of Jimmie Rodgers, like the blues of
Rodgers's contemporary Robert Johnson or Williams's contemporary
(and Johnson's musical offspring) Muddy Waters, Williams's songs are
highly crafted and self-conscious. But like Rodgers's and unlike John-
son's or Muddy's, they often betray the stiff sense of rhythm that under-
pins nearly all country music, even the stuff you're supposed to dance
to. Commentators have often claimed honky-tonk is the white man's
blues, but if I'm right in saying that country music is a guilty dream of
America, that comparison misses a point. Country's mythology masks
its fears and its real past, while the blues stands up and looks it square in
the face. Maybe that's one reason the blues and its descendants can
dance more freely: unlike their masters' music, they're not dragging the
luggage of nostalgia. [1991]

53
 \ chapter. 11

Androgyne with "# Lariat

She sports a modified ducktail haircut and a startlingly direct candor.
Deliberately makeup-less, she's as likely to wear a man's Nudie suit as a
cowgirl's fringed dress onstage, where she'll erupt into a slam-dance-
gone-hoedown. She's copped the prestigious Canadian Juno award and
been nominated for three Grammies, appeared with the likes of Bruce
Springsteen and Elvis Costello on Roy Orbison's Cinemax special, be-
come a Tonight Show regular and done the Pee Wee Herman Christmas
Special.
She's k. d. lang, and she raises some serious questions as she moves
her big, supple alto voice from country weepers like Patsy Cline's "Three
Cigarettes in an Ashtray" to her own offbeat "Watch Your Step Polka"
(picture newlyweds swirling through a cow-pie-littered gym).
"Country music is this huge thing," says lang, who lowercases her
name in homage to e. e. cummings.

There's more country radio stations than any other kind in North
America. It doesn't reflect in sales, because those audiences don't buy
records, but they listen to the lyrics. Arid the subject matter is mostly
so myopic, so sexist and stupid.
I don't mean to sound like I'm above it, but I just saw so much
room to talk about things that need to be talked about. That's one of
the things that has drawn me to country music: the potential to work
a different sort of thinking and consciousness into it.

lang's sort of thinking, manifest in her androgynous look, her some-

times loopy and satiric humor, and the topics of her songs, violates
Nashville's usual norms. According to those rules, men, women, and
children have well-defined roles; Christianity and political conservatism
combine to create a passive acceptance of authority; and songs and
arrangements—and the images of the artists performing them—take
well-worn, predictable forms.

54
 Androgyne with a Lariat

"What you see on t.v. /all them sparkles/ it ain't me," drawls lang in
pointed parody of just that mindset during a typical verse of "It's Me," a
tune from Absolute Torch and Twang (Warner Bros.). After 1988's
Shadowland (Warner Bros.), a nostalgic outing with Nashville vet Owen
Bradley (who produced lang's idol Patsy Cline nearly 30 years ago),
Absolute Torch and Twang marks a return for lang.
Once again doing her own material with her own band, the reclines
(named in honor of Cline), she extends the highly charged, category-
bending contemporary style she outlined with her 1984 indie-label re-
lease A Truly Western Experience (Bumstead) and her critically ac-
claimed 1987 major-label debut, Angel with a Lariat (Warner Bros.).
Like other younger musicians—Jason and the Scorchers, Lyle
Lovett, Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, Nanci Griffith—lang
wants to release the populist power of country music from the string-
infested, self-serving cliches of the Nashville Sound. So Absolute Torch
and Twang draws from all over the musical map. Says lang, "My music
is a hybrid of a lot of things, but really the biggest influences on it are
jazz ballad singing—torch music—and hillbilly twang, with some sort
of polite balance between the two of them."
Raised in a house filled with classical music and Broadway show
tunes in the 650-person town of Consort, Alberta, Kathy Dawn Lang
began writing songs and performing as a kid; later she listened to model
popsters like Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, and the Carpenters. After
studying painting in college and working as a performance artist, in 1982
she landed the role of country-vocal great Patsy Cline in a play. It turned
her on to country music, which she'd grown up disliking in its sac-
charine Tammy Wynette/Kenny Rogers form.
Soon lang had shaved her head and donned outrageous parodies of
Nashville stage-style country—sawed off-cowboy boots, a wedding gown
to accept her 1985 Juno award for Most Promising Female Vocalist—
and was penning tunes no Nashville producer would touch, like "Watch
Your Step Polka."
But though she started her country shtick as a performance artist,
lang's goal went beyond snotty parody. "First of all, the thing that pulled
me into this was the love of the music. My first reaction to it was more
on the rebellious performance-art side. Then the more I performed it
and wrote it and sang it and listened to it, the more real it became. So it
just became easier for me to be completely honest."
55
 Dancing in Your Head

Which is why she wins over audiences wherever she tours. As she
puts it, "I think it's just a matter of people seeing hhme. It's hard to capture
the wind on a piece of wax." [1989]

chapter. 12
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Around its edges, country music is sprouting fascinating hybrids. Youn-
ger musicians like Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle, and Lyle Lovett con-
sider country music their natural heritage, but they're also fed up with
Nashville's syrupy sound and greeting-card sentiments. So they and
others like them are seizing that heritage and remaking it.
Among the others are two young women whose songwriting chops
are matched by their interpretive skills. In many ways, Nanci Griffith
and Lucinda Williams are polar opposites, but they share the country
music tradition that encompasses tough-minded females from Maybelle
Carter to Loretta Lynn.
Griffith first. Born in Austin, Texas, a center for outlaw-style coun-
try, she began picking guitar at age six to imitate some of her dad's
favorites: Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, and Buddy Holly. A few
years later she was gigging steadily at local dives, and slowly, by word of
mouth, developed a devoted cult.
It's not hard to hear what drew them. After four albums on indepen-
dent labels and another two on MCA, Griffith has honed her music to
an understated edge—the unexpected fist in the velvet glove. She may
look like a little girl, she may be soft-spoken and friendly, she may sing
in a quavery twang that recalls Emmylou Harris, and she may write and
cover songs that seem folky-gentle (she calls her music folkabilly), but
Nanci Griffith has some razor-sharp twists to her.
One Fair Summer Evening (MCA), recorded live in the Houston
club where Griffith used to go as a teenager to hear older Texas song-
writers, illustrates how. Take the wry heartbreaker called "Looking for

56
 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

the Time (Workin' Girl)." Through a series of deft, novelistic images—

her favorite authors are Larry McMurtry and Carson McCullers—
Griffith paints a scene of hard-bitten regret: a street prostitute has to turn
away someone she's clearly attracted to for, er, business reasons. This
minor tragedy of love-for-money pivots on its ironic shrug of a chorus:
"If you ain't got money/Take it down the avenue /'Cause I ain't got the
time for you/'Til daylight."
One Fair Summer Evening offers a potpourri of voices and moods.
Alongside slices of life from America's Midwestern past, when shy folks
met and fell in love in what city slickers think of as unlikely places, is an
eloquent plea for this country's credit-drained farmers. This disc is more
than a fine collection of songs—it evokes an entire way of life.
That's exactly what Lucinda Williams (Rough Trade) does, in its own
way. Like Griffith, Williams somehow projects vulnerability and
strength simultaneously. In large part that's because she too has paid her
club-circuit, small-label dues while she's pursued her craft and nurtured
a following.
Born in Louisiana, home to some of the U.S.'s most vibrant sounds,
Williams started on music early; not surprisingly, country blues came
naturally to her. She tried her luck on the club scene in New York about
a decade ago; she cut two previous albums for the Folkways label, one a
collection of blues covers and the other original tunes in a country-blues
style. When personal problems broke up a potential major-label deal,
she picked up the pieces to head west. For a while she lived in Houston
and Austin, prime incubators for the new wave of country-rockers; there
she met and competed for attention with folks like Lovett and Griffith,
but eventually settled in L. A. Wherever she landed clubgoers discovered
her and drew record execs in their wake, but for years labels would get
excited by her earthy music and then back away because they didn't
think they could package her. Until last year, when Williams finally
landed a deal with a major U.K.-based indie.
Lucinda Williams illustrates her broad musical background and
tough heartache perfectly, over a deliberately ragged, roadhouse-style
mix of country touches, Cajun reels, gutbucket blues, and rock beats.
Her songs are barstool tales shot through with pathos and humor and
resignation and grit; she scrawls their contours with a voice whose ach-
ing pathos, smoky burrs, and threatened loss of control recall late Billie
Holiday.
57
 Dancing in Your Head

Like Griffith, Williams unfolds her stories from unusual perspec-

tives. But the capper is "Changed the Locks," a hilariously paranoid
catalog that acerbically sums up the peculiarly depressed/exhilarated/
frantic state of mind that hits right after a relationship has ended, that
fragile time when even your ex-lover's shadow still wields immense
power: "I changed the lock on my front door /1 changed the number on
my phone/I changed the kind of car I drive/I changed the kind of
clothes I wear/I changed the tracks underneath the train/I changed the
name of this town." That oughta do it. [1989]

chapter 13

Austin's Emserhead
Pencil-thin, nattily dressed, smiling through a rough-hewn face that
looks like the product of a stone ax, crowned with extremely tall curly
hair that recalls Eraserhead, Lyle Lovett doesn't much resemble country
music's Hollywood-handsome new traditionalists, like Randy Travis.
He doesn't take himself as seriously either. Without cutting off its coun-
try roots, Lovett's music is broader, more self-conscious, more offbeat,
and just plain funny.
Take his breakthrough second album, Pontiac (MCA). The surrealis-
tic "If I Had a Boat," pictures a seagoing cowboy on horseback. "L.A.
County" describes how a jilted lover, "with my old friend at my side,"
pursues his ex and her new boyfriend crosscountry to the altar; the old
friend turns out to be a .45, and when he gets to the wedding he blows
them away.
Lyle Lovett and His Large Band (MCA) extends his musical
boundaries. Kicking off with Clifford Brown's hard-bop instrumental
"Blues Walk," the album hits its oblique stride with "Here I Am,"
which alternates apparently simple-hearted pleas and a monologue
punctuated with hammy pauses out of Jack Benny: "Hello/I'm the
guy who sits next to you/And reads the paper over your shoulder/

58
 Austin's Eraserhead

Wait/Don't turn the page/I'm not finished / Life is so uncertain."

If the ironically mixed feelings behind the satire are familiar enough
to New York straphangers, they've also landed the 31-year-old, Texas-
born-and-bred Lovett in the midst of some misunderstandings.
"I realize that with some of my stuff, you can't listen with half an
ear," he explains. "If you do, it'd be really easy to misunderstand some
obvious things. For example, The Wedding Song' off the first album
(Lyle Lovett, MCA). There have been places that I've played where
people take it exactly the wrong way. It's like, 'Yeah, right on, white is
the color of the big boss man.' That's a very scary thing, but that's the
kind of stuff that happens. Irony is like that."
Not that it stops Lovett: despite charges of misogyny (which he de-
nies) he persists in writing tunes with titles like "I Married Her Just
Because She Looks like You" and lines like "She's no lady, she's my
wife." But at the same time, he can pen touching portraits and frame
complex emotions.
Lovett's ability to switch deftly from satire to straightforward emotion
owes a lot to the models he absorbed in Texas clubs and from records
friends turned him on to rather than to country-radio staples. "I feel I
was influenced more by people that I used to actually go and see, guys
like Michael Murphey," he says. "The stuff that I would find out about
and get really interested in, like John Prine or Bonnie Raitt or Ry
Cooder or Little Feat, Randy Newman or Jesse Winchester or Tom
Waits, was stuff you didn't hear on the radio.
"The idea of a big-time commercial success didn't enter into the
songwriting," he continues. "I think that makes for a different kind of
song. It's an attitude that was influenced by the late '60s, when Guy
Clark and Townes Van Zandt—who are songwriters' songwriters—lived
and played in Houston."
Born in the small Houston exurb of Klein, founded by and named
after his great-great-grandfather, Lovett graduated Texas A&M with a
degree in journalism—which accounts for the slice-of-life feel to many
of his lyrics. Doing cover versions of his idols' tunes, he worked the
restaurant-coffeehouse circuit in the '70s. "I remember one night, I was
doing a set and all of a sudden I heard this thwack. I figured I'd busted a
string. I looked down at my guitar and saw a tomato stain—somebody'd
thrown a pizza crust at me."
Persistence built him enough of a following to put him on a six-week
59
 Dancing in Your Head

tour circuit. In 1983, a lucky accident threw him together for a month
with a band called the Rogues at a big Luxembourg fair. "They'd lis-
tened to my songs and liked them, and they felt sorry for me because
things weren't going real well with the audience for me," he grins.
The temporary alliance was cemented into a long-term relationship
when Lovett & Co. began recording tunes that would eventually find
their way onto his three albums. In 1984, though, cutting them was just
a way to get a record out, to try to grab Nashville's notice for a deal. So
for a year Lovett bounced between Country Music's Capital and Phoe-
nix, where he and the Rogues, who still form the nucleus of his record-
ing and touring band, would hit the studio.
The result was a contract with MCA and his 1985 debut, which
yielded four hit singles. After the last year of racking up appearances on
TV shows like Night Music and David Letterman as well as knocking
live audiences out with his barbed asides, Lyle Lovett has clearly ar-
rived. [1989]

14
I
chapter

The Layla Sessions

Twenty years after its release, some of what makes Layla and Other
Assorted Love Songs a pivotal album in rock history is clear.
There's the crackling energy— the key ingredient in the best rock and
roll. Derek and the Dominos ripple and burn with a high-voltage pas-
sion that infuses the entire album, gives it that unifying feel that makes
even the order of the tunes seem inevitable, predetermined somehow.
They were a band, not a made-in-the-studio confection, a garage band
writ large.
The quintet's personal chemistry was crucial. It pushed Eric Clapton
and Duane Allman to strafe each other in mock battle to the edge of
their considerable limits and beyond, especially on songs like "Key to
the Highway" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"
60
 The Layla Sessions

and Clapton idol Freddie King's anguished tune about fooling with your
best friend's wife, "Have You Ever Loved a Woman." It pushed Bobby
Whitlock to keep pumping vocals that drove Clapton's, to keep swirling
keyboards to get a foothold amid the bristling guitar army, to keep
scribbling lyrics that transformed jams into songs. It pushed Carl Radle
and Jim Gordon to come up with offbeat material from their own
backgrounds and invent startling, shifting rhythmic patterns that force
your feet to move by sounding deceptively simple. Take "Bell Bottom
Blues," where Gordon virtually turns the beat around for the whole song
and drops deep-toned tablas into the chorus to stunning effect.
Their interaction joined with the quality of their material to unleash
their imaginations and impose structure at the same time. So they
remade Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway," a gently insistent on-
the-road-again boogie, into a slash-and-burn eighteen-wheeler rum-
bling directly at your brain; Clapton, for effect, deliberately garbled
lyrics that were perfectly intelligible when Broonzy sang them. More
ambitious formats like "Nobody Knows You" (where Allman wails on
bottleneck through one of Whitlock's Leslie cabinets) and Jimi Hen-
drix's "Little Wing" set high standards for their own material: the tunes
Whitlock co-wrote with Clapton, for instance, reflect the Memphis
native's sure grasp of soul-music song forms.
The edge-city finesse with which Derek and the Dominoes hot-wired
their staggering assortment of influences and ideas has made Layla and
Other Assorted Love Songs into a kind of inadvertent monument. An era
was ending, and Layla was one place where it found both its final voice
and one of its finest summations. Beginning with the English Invasion
of 1964, the period marked the revitalizing of American rock and roll,
mostly by forcing it back to its roots—the blues and r&b and country—
for inspiration. (Remember whose tunes the Beatles and Stones and
Yardbirds and Animals were all scrambling to cover.) The jams-away
excesses of the psychedelic summers that followed came out of the
roadhouse, where bands played for hours while folks partied and
danced. It was only toward the period's close that audiences collapsed
back into their seats to watch the performers put on a show.
But while the emerging forms of proto-metal and jazz-rock fusion
shed their danceability in favor of long solos, soul music percolated with
can't-sit-down beats and taut song structures that foregrounded ensem-
ble work instead of solo flash. On Layla, Derek and the Dominos
61
 Dancing in Your Head

combined the two. As Clapton explained to Robert Palmer in a 1985

Rolling Stone interview, "We didn't really have a band with Cream. We
rarely played as an ensemble; we were three virtuosos, all of us soloing at
the same time."
So Derek and the Dominos embodied many of the era's possibilities,
played them, brought them to a kind of fullness and fruition, and then,
in the best Romantic manner, blew apart. But their legacy lives in The
Historic Layla Sessions. Digitally remixed, remastered, and issued for
the twentieth anniversary of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, this
set includes never-before-heard jams and alternate takes that, besides
being good music, offer fascinating peeks into the process of creation.
From late August through early September 1970, then again for a
couple of days at the beginning of October, Clapton, Whitlock, Radle,
Gordon, and Allman were ensconced at Miami's Criteria Studios. By
now, the circumstances behind the blues-and-soul-driven rage of Layla
are well known enough to need only a quick recap.
Cream had finally blown apart in 1968. Despite enormous hype,
Blind Faith never realized its potential during eleven months of life. So
Eric Clapton, weary of the frontman's role, joined Blind Faith's opening
act, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlert and Friends, as a semi-anonymous
guitarist; Delaney taught him to sing with gutsy fervor. Then Eric Clap-
ton, his eagerly awaited debut as a leader (which included future Dom-
inos), put Clapton's take on J. J. Gale's "After Midnight" on the air-
waves.
The guitarist's personal life was, if anything, more turbulent than his
professional life. His blues had been made flesh: he'd fallen madly,
despairingly in love with the wife of one of his best friends, ex-Beatle
George Harrison. Pattie Boyd Harrison would eventually leave her then
husband and marry Clapton, but in the period before the Layla sessions
she'd basically just flirted with him at parties. At the same time, he
started to read The Story of Layla and Majnun, by the Persian poet
Nizami. So inconsolable that even his deepening involvement with
heroin couldn't dull his ache, Clapton was speared to the core by
Nizami's obscurely metaphoric, romantic tale of an apparent madman
who falls hopelessly in love with a moon-princess whose father marries
her off to someone else. It inspired him to fashion one of rock and roll's
greatest albums from his pain. (The gently yearning "I Am Yours" sets
some of Nizami's words to music.)
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 The Lay la Sessions

The Dominos came together out of a combination of chance and

previous contacts. All of them had been members of the Delaney and
Bonnie troupe of Friends—including Duane Allman, who'd preceded
Clapton in the group. As Bobby Whitlock tells it, "Delaney was a little
James Brownish—real hard to work with, him and Bonnie fighting all
the time and carrying on. Everyone got disenchanted with the situa-
tion. " So when Leon Russell passed the word that he was recruiting for
the Mad Dogs and Englishman tour behind Joe Cocker, most of the
Friends jumped ship. Only Whitlock stayed—and even he split after a
while.
He called Clapton from L.A., and the guitarist told him to come on
over to England. For the next several months, Whitlock lived at Clap-
ton's house while he and the guitarist hung out and jammed and wrote
the tunes that would become the core of Layla and Other Assorted Love
Songs. When the Cocker tour wound down, they called their Delaney
and Bonnie buddies Dave Mason and Carl Radle, who brought Gordon
along. (That bumped Jim Keltner, who'd been slotted for the drum
chair. "Of course, Keltner wasn't real pleased," drawls Whitlock.) That
quintet became the house band for George Harrison's All Things Must
Pass. Says Whitlock, "That album is essentially Derek and the Dominos
with sundry guest artists. We were jamming all the time—that's where
'Apple Jam' on that album comes from." And so passed another few
months.
Meantime, Whitlock and Clapton were tightening up as a songwrit-
ing team. Whitlock recalls,

"Any Day" we just sat down and wrote. "Why Does Love Got To Be
So Sad"—same thing. We started doing that intro on the bottom
end of the guitar neck, then Eric whipped up to the top end and it
started sounding right. Songs just evolved, like they did with Issac
Hayes and David Porter. We weren't writing to have great songs; we
wrote just to have something to play.
"Tell the Truth" I wrote one night after we'd been up for days on
one of our marathons: we used to just play and play and play. We
would play literally for three days without stopping. Anyway, I was up
by myself sitting in Eric's living room when this thing just hit me. I
wasn't reflecting on Otis's "Tell the Truth" [the '50s r&b smash by
Lowman Pauling's Five Royales that Redding and James Brown both
covered], even though that's my roots. I was thinking about "The

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 Dancing in Your Head

whole world's shaking, can't you feel it?" I was a young man, gaining
experience and getting older; that's what I was thinking about. I wrote
the whole thing that night except for the last verse. I made up the
chords on an open tuning Duane had showed me. Then I went into
Eric the next day, and he thought it was great, so we sat down and
wrote the last verse together.
The initial version of "Tell the Truth" made its short-lived debut
as a single, backed with "Roll It Over," which added Harrison to the
band. (Both cuts are included on Crossroads, the four-CD anthology
from Clapton's 25-year career issued two years ago.) Produced by Phil
Spector, it was drastically different from the attack the group put to-
gether a couple of months later, and was quickly recalled because,
Whitlock says, "We didn't think it was a good representation of the
band, and we wanted something that was more like what we were
sounding like."
What they were sounding like was a mix of grungy, overdriven guitars
and soul-style material and vocals. Says Whitlock,
The basic concept of Derek and the Dominos—and this was from
when Dave Mason was in the group, at the beginning—was that we
didn't want any horns, we didn't want no chicks, we wanted a rock and
roll band. But my vocal concept was that we approached singing like
Sam and Dave did: he sings a line, I sing a line, we sing together.

After a brief tour around small clubs in England, the Dominos

wound up at Miami's Criteria Studios, the domain of Tom Dowd,
longtime staff engineer/producer at Atlantic records who'd helped pi-
oneer eight-track recording and stereo. Dowd had worked on everything
from Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife" and John Coltrane's Giant Steps
to Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and Cream's Disraeli Gears, Wheels of
Fire, and Live Cream; Clapton, who has called Dowd "the ideal record-
ing man," asked him on board as the Dominos' executive producer.
(The group itself is credited with arranging and producing.)
Criteria was where much of the late-1960s soul material for Atlantic
was cut, and Dowd had moved down there from New York to handle the
flow. (The stream of material out of Criteria was so large that Atlantic
installed a mixing room in Dowd's house so he could work whenever he
wanted.) In many ways, the world of pop music was smaller then; career

64
 The Layla Sessions

tracks overlapped more frequently. So it was with the Dominos: Dowd

had used a Clapton fan named Duane Allman on some Aretha Franklin
and Wilson Pickett sessions.
It's a nice historical irony that Dowd got a call from Clapton's orga-
nization while he was producing the Allman Brothers Band's Idle-
wild South. (He'd later produce their breakthrough album, Live at the
Fillmore East.) "We never did an entire album at a sitting," he
smiles.
We'd do three or four songs, break off, and they'd go back out on the
road, rehearse, and then we'd record some more. We were in the mid-
dle of that process when [Clapton's then-manager Robert] Stigwood's
office called me from England and said Eric would like to record with
me in Florida. Now, when the call came I was in the studio with Du-
ane. I said, "Hey, that's a hot one, kid; that was Eric Clapton's man-
agement talking about him coming here to record." Duane looks at me
and says, "You mean the guy from Cream? Do you think he'd mind if
I just came by to watch?" I told him no problem.
When Clapton turned up, Dowd was floored by his equipment.
"When I had done the Cream sessions," he explains,
I'd had to protect Ginger (Baker) from the electrified instruments, be-
cause Jack (Bruce) and Eric were using double stacks of Marshalls. So
my problem was recording the drums; no matter where I put a micro-
phone I had enough of the guitars. So for these sessions Eric walked in
with a (small Fender) Champ and a (tiny battery-powered) Pignose. He
was getting more intimate with his technique, and he'd gone back the
other way, in terms of equipment. So we set it up with camp chairs
holding up amps. If you walked into the room and sneezed, you made
more noise than they were making.

The magic of the studio: it's hard to believe when you're hit with Layla's
whipping gusts of sound.
Whitlock adds,
It was just getting the quality of the sound—that's what was important.
The piano had this big boatlike thing on top of it for a cover, the Les-
lie was in the sound room, Jim Gordon was in a carousel. It was iso-
lated but open; the amps were in the room, so we got a little of that
bleed.

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 Dancing in Your Head

Which let them jam to create and get into material.

For despite the band's months of work, their first sessions were tenta-
tive. Dowd remembers,
Whitlock had two or three songs, Eric had one or two blues he wanted
to do, and we were looking for old records so we could be authentic
about this or that lick. Carl Radle was into Chuck Willis, for instance,
and so we dug out a bunch of Chuck Willis records—which is how
"It's Too Late" made it onto Layla.
Originally a supplicant's doo-wop-style ballad, it was transformed by the
Dorninos during their jams into a grittier cri de coeur.
The arrival of Duane Allman helped catalyze the Dominos into that
kind of exploration. The way Dowd tells it,
We fumbled along for a couple of days like that while we were getting
sounds and breaking ice. Then the phone rings one afternoon and it's
Duane. He says, "Hey, the band's doing a benefit concert at the Civic
Center down there on Saturday, can I come by?" No problem. So I
put the phone down I told Eric who it was. He says, "You mean that
guy who plays on the back of (Wilson Pickett's) 'Hey Jude'? You know
him?" 1 tell him he's doing the concert, so he says, "We have to go."
So that Saturday we went into the studio about two or three in the
afternoon, fumbled along till about six or seven, and called down to
get in. They snuck us in. They had a barricade between where the
public was and the riser for the band, sandbags and gobos up there to
keep the people back. They got us in by the side of the stage and we
crawled in on our hands and knees so we wouldn't obscure the stage
and propped ourselves against these sandbags, sitting on our butts look-
ing up with our hands holding our knees together.
Duane was in the middle of a solo; he opens his eyes and looks
down, does a dead stare, and stops playing. Dickey (Betts) is chugging
along, sees Duane's stopped playing, and figures he'd better cover, that
Duane must've broken a string or something. Then Dickey looks
down, sees Eric, and turns his back. That was how they first saw each
other.
So we piled into cars and Winnebagos and whatever the hell and
went up to the studio at about three o'clock the next afternoon with
nobody having gone to bed. They were trading licks, they were swap-
ping guitars, they were talking shop and information and having a
ball—no holds barred, just admiration for each other's technique and
facility. We got back, turned the tapes on, and they went on for fif-

66
 The Layla Sessions

teen, eighteen hours like that. I went through two or three sets of engi-
neers.
It didn't take much to insinuate Allman musically into the Dominos.
Jam V, which features what became the Dominos' final lineup, is
nuanced with sudden dynamic turns, throttled into high gear by Du-
ane's daredevil bottleneck as it skids up the fretboard until it digs in
somewhere over the pickups—dog-whistle territory. It's a snapshot of
what's to come. Then, lifted from the random bits and pieces of those
jams that pepper the multitracks, is the most complete picture of what
the post-concert day was like: Jam IV, which basically takes off from
Howlin' Wolfs "Killing Floor," features the Allman Brothers Band,
Clapton, and Whitlock. (The piano at the very end is Gregg Allman,
who apparently arrived just in time.)
As Dowd remembers it, the Allmans had a couple more shows they
had to do, but Duane promised to come back as soon as they were done.
"That," he says, "was when the band got serious about what they were
doing. All of a sudden the catalyst was there; it was just a matter of
putting things into shape." Whitlock agrees,
He brought the best out of us, even with the songwriting, 'cause the
songwriting came out of the jamming. Like "Any Day": Eric and I had
already written it, but then Duane came up with that slide part. He
said, "Hey, check this out; let's make it like a Roman chariot race."
He was doing that kind of stuff all the time. You can tell, listening to
all the jams you've got now, that the whole album just evolved. We
were just getting ideas, shaping them afterwards.
Like on the two "Tell the Truth" jams included here: the testing of
different speeds, the boxiness of running the riff on the beat, all illumi-
nate the small creative decisions the musicians made along the way as
they searched for what they wanted to hear.
The sessions' rock-and-roll spontaneity is encapsulated in the story of
how "Key to the Highway" made it onto Layla. As Dowd recalls,
Sam the Sham (Samudio) was in the studio, and the chaps heard him
doing a number in the adjacent room. They thought it was a great
tune. Eric or Duane picked up on it, Radle jumped in, Whitlock, who
knew all those tunes, jumped on it, and before you knew it everybody
was trailing along and I turned around and yelled, "Hit the goddamn
machine!"

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 Dancing in Your Head

It was one of the few times Dowd was caught off guard: on the original
multitrack tapes, the tune opens mid-solo, which is why it fades in on
the album.
The loose atmosphere was famously thick with drugs and booze. Says
Whitlock,
We didn't have little bits of anything. There were no grains around—
let's put it like that. Tom couldn't believe it, the way we had these big
bags laying out everywhere. I'm almost ashamed to tell it, but it's the
truth. It was scary, what we were doing, but we were just young and
dumb and didn't know. Cocaine and heroin, that's all—and Johnny
Walker.
The sessions finally burned to their end on the title track and the all-
acoustic "Thorn Tree," which was recorded live, with the band sitting in
a circle around a stereo microphone. Then they took off on tour while
Dowd listened to what they'd left in the can. The way he tells it,
I sat down and did a rough mix, and lived with it for a couple of days.
Then I got serious and remixed the whole thing myself, and sent
copies to Eric. Then the Dominos were doing a concert in Miami and
came by to listen to the whole thing. They decided they wanted to re-
mix three or four of the songs, change a part here and there. Thank
God we had good notation by the staff so we could get back to where
we were. You've got to remember, everything was done much quicker
in those days—which is ironic, because there wasn't any automated or
computerized equipment. But I dare say, my initial mix probably took
a day or a day and a half. Then for the final mix I took maybe three or
four days, with another two days with them when they came back in.
One measure of how things have changed in the art of rock and roll and
its attendant technologies: engineer Steve Rinkoff and producer Bill
Levenson spent 16 days digitally remixing this boxed set.
One track that got touched up when the Dominos pulled back into
Miami was "Layla" itself. Dowd says,
"Layla" stood up until the back end, when they wanted to add on the
finale. So we had to go back and get as close as we could to the origi-
nal mix up to the point they liked, then figure out how to cut in this
other part. I think we wired two or three tapes together to get the tran-
sition the way it was supposed to go, then readjust the front end to fit

68
 The Layla Sessions

the back end—there were weeks between the way it was originally re-
corded and the time we put the back end on.
The Dominos continued on their drug-powered tour (minus Duane
Allman, who'd returned to his own band after the sessions), and cut
their live double album. Clapton told Palmer,
By the end of the tour, the band was getting very, very loaded, doing
way too much. Then we went back to England, tried to make a second
album, and it broke down halfway through because of the paranoia
and the tension. And the band just . . . dissolved. I remember to this
day being in my house, feeling totally lost and hearing Bobby
Whitlock pull up in the driveway outside and scream for me to come
out. He sat in his car outside all day, and I hid.

(In fact, the band recorded at London's Olympic Studios in May 1971
and, before its drug-induced dissolution, cut some tunes, five of which
were included in the Crossroads anthology released by PolyGram.)
At this point in time, of course, Layla is an etched-in-stone classic,
but when it came out twenty years ago it didn't make much noise over
the airwaves or on the charts. Dowd sighs when he recalls what went
down:
When we finished it and were mastering it, 1 felt it was the best god-
damn album I'd been involved with since The Genius of Ray Charles.
And (Atlantic Records heads) Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry
Wexler were absolutely enamored of the album, but they couldn't get
the goddamn thing on the air, they couldn't get a single out of it.
Nothing. I kept walking around talking to myself for a year. Then sud-
denly it was the national anthem.

For all the reasons discussed at the beginning of this essay—and

more—Layla, along with other masterpieces like John Coltrane's Im-
pressions, Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, and Jimi Hendrix's Electric
Ladyland, remains a brilliant monument to its time. But like them, it's
no nostalgia piece. Like the moon-princess receding from her madman
lover's embrace, Layla is always dancing at the edge of its creators'
reach, stretching their resources and stamina, demanding more than
they think they can put out and yet somehow manage, time after time,
to come up with. It's an album musicians and people who can't carry a

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 Dancing in Your Head

tune play over and over and over again with equal awe. Which is, after
all, the democratic knockout packed by the art form we call rock and
roll: one hit to the body and another hit to the soul. Layla hits you on
every level. That's why, twenty years after it was made, we're still listen-
ing to and celebrating it. [1990]

chapter 15
Beckology
The guitar may slash and burn or sigh an aching melody, blaze a
fusillade or arc a lyrical air—but from the touch, the phrasing, you
know it's him. He's idolized by several generations of guitarists because
along the way he's helped invent psychedelia and heavy metal and
change the shape of jazz-rock fusion.
Since 1963, when he first put it down on tape, there's been no doubt
about it: Jeff Beck has a sound, a unique and characteristic way with the
guitar that's instantly recognizable yet constantly evolving. His strong
vibrato, his fierce attack and fat tone, his acute microtonal sense of pitch
when he bends or slides into a note, his sophisticated sense of rhythmic
and melodic phrasing, his ability to wring painfully true notes from up
by the guitar's pickups, his continuing use of the electric guitar to
generate textures as well as notes—add them up, add the spontaneous
magic of inspiration, and you've got a sense of why a Jeff Beck guitar solo
sounds like no one else's.
Like most of the Brit rockers of his generation—the Stones and
Beatles, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page—Jeff Beck (born in Surrey,
England, on June 24, 1944) backed into the then-fledgling sounds of
rock. At eight, he was made to practice piano for two hours daily until,
as he recalls, "I ripped one of the black keys off. My mother got the idea
than that I wasn't too keen on it." Abortive violin and cello lessons with
an uncle followed, leaving as their residue a love of legato melody.
By the mid-1950s, rock and roll was beginning to filter into the U.K.,
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 Beckology

then dominated by trad-jazz and skiffle. But information about its com-
ponents was scarce. A poster for The Girl Can't Help It outside his local
movie house inspired the 13-year-old Beck to build his own electric
guitar and plug it into the back of a radio. At 15, he joined a local band,
the Del-Tones. "We played a lot of Shadows-—Hank Marvin," he re-
calls. "It was easy stuff that any band with the slightest bit of proficiency
on their instruments could learn in a day, like 'Apache.' Cliff Gallup is
one of my heroes; the stuff he did with Gene Vincent sends me up the
wall every time I hear it. The things James Burton did with Ricky
Nelson are still incredible." Then a year or so later came soul music:
"Once people started getting into Booker T and the MGs, I never
wanted to go back to copying Gene Vincent." And in 1962, the craze
that swept a generation of British rockers, the blues: "There were the
same people that Eric (Clapton) got inspired by, Otis Rush and people
that just took your face off, Buddy Guy and Chicago blues. I didn't get
off on the bottleneck-scratching kind of stuff—I didn't have any ear for
Jimmy Reed, because it wasn't really useful enough. I prefer the wild-
ness of Buddy Guy."
By 1963, when he'd joined the Tridents, Beck started scrambling
those basic guitar premises with the sonic approach of his idol Les Paul,
whose gizmos, from soundshaping boxes to overdubbing, pioneered
modern technology. On his '50s recordings with then wife Mary Ford,
Paul mustered multiple guitars via overdubs and speed shifts, transform-
ing them into a sweeping impressionistic backdrop that presaged guitar-
ists like Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Adrian Belew, Bill Frisell, and Robert
Quine.
Says Beck,

Les was at his peak during an era of great melody, all those lovely
chords, so he had a whole ocean of stuff to put his expertise onto.
Mary Ford sang great old standards, then he'd go bananas with all his
effects, showers of notes and what not. We were anchored by one
chord and a big beat; it was a whole different thing. But I still wanted
to get those atmospherics. I was just as unrestricted, in a way, as Les
because our music was a wide open sea of emptiness where I could do
what I wanted.

The Tridents sides—demos cut to help land better club gigs—show

how early and intensely Beck got into painting with sound. On "Nursery

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 Dancing in Your Head

Rhyme," Beck's guitar howls with snarling abandon. Nothing else out
there, not even Link Wray's "Rumble," sounded quite like it. "I had a
German echo unit, a Klempt Echolette, I messed around with," he
explains. "It had alternate delays. I knew how to hot-rod the sounds
without actually touching a soldering iron to it. It was an advanced little
box for the time, but it broke down a lot at gigs. There'd be a tempera-
ture change, and the tape would snap halfway through the first number
and all my tricks would be gone."
Playing at Eel Pie Island, a Richmond club in the middle of the
Thames that was a center of the British blues revival, the Tridents
peaked for several weeks in late 1964, when they packed in 1000 rabid
fans. Says Beck, "It was an elite club; people wanted you to imitate their
idols. That's when I started to kick some butt. I remember detuning the
low E and A strings and just whining the hell out of 'em, making
ridiculous noises, and everyone went berserk. There wasn't an ounce of
musical sense to it, but they loved it because it was different."
The young iconoclast shared his sonic interests with another fledg-
ling guitarist named Jimmy Page, who had gone to art school with his
sister. Their first meeting ("He played us a Buddy Holly song while his
mum made us cups of tea," Beck grins) began a long relationship that
proved to be Beck's entree into a raunchy, blues-based rave-up outfit
called the Yardbirds.
With Clapton On guitar, the Yardbirds were, despite no hit records,
becoming well known in the burgeoning circles of the '60s U.K. blues
revival that also sired the Rolling Stones and the Animals. But in late
1964 they decided (with producer/manager Giorgio Gomelsky) to mount
an attack on the pop charts via a harpsichord-flavored tune called "For
Your Love." So they brought keyboardist Brian Auger into the studio
and relegated Clapton the blues purist to boogie runs in the bridge. He
decided to call it quits; he wanted his music, he said, to be taken more
seriously. He went on to join the seminal edition of John Mayall's
Bluesbreakers that led to the formation of Cream.
Meanwhile the Yardbirds approached Page, who was then doing
constant session-guitar work for everyone from the Kinks and Stones to
Donovan and Jackie DeShannon, about replacing Clapton. Page's high-
dollar demands and reluctance to leave the security of the studio led him
to suggest Beck. Beck remembers the results:

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 Beckology

One night, when I was playing with the Tridents at the 100 Club,
Giorgio and his sidekick Hamish Grimes, the artist who did all the
Yardbirds' logos and worked in the office, came down and dragged me
off after the set. I was all sweaty, had hair down to my ankles. They
said, "You're coming with us." I said, "Can I swear?" He said,
"You're gonna be in a top fucking band. Be at this address tomorrow."
It was the Marquee Club. When I turned up there was a Yardbirds van
outside. "Let's go," I thought. There were other guys auditioning, but
I think they knew I was gonna be the one.
He sure was. Although rock iconography stresses the Yardbirds'
mighty triumvirate—Clapton, Beck, and Page—Beck's 20-month stint
marked the group's apex; his guitar was the raw octane fuelling the band.
As former Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty sees it,
The great thing about Jeff was, because we leaned on him so much—
we relied on him to fill up the sound—he developed a lot of his futur-
istic ideas, things that people called gimmicks at the time. We'd been
used to playing with Clapton, who was playing much straighter r&b
solos, and then Jeff was something much wider. He was interested in
people like Les Paul, and all these footpedals and fuzztones and feed-
back, something we hadn't had before that was very exciting and al-
ways unpredictable.

Former Yardbirds rhythm guitarist/bassist Chris Dreja agrees, and adds,

"We all feel, I think, that the period Jeff spent with the band was the
most creative. His scope of inventiveness was probably the widest of
the three guitarists we played with—and none of them were exactly
slouches."
Which is why so much of Beckology's first CD is devoted to that
period. Beck burst out of the frame immediately. As he recalls,
The very first track I cut with them was "Steeled Blues." We cut the B
side first to warm up and get the balance. Two takes, boom, that was
it. For "Heart Full of Soul" they had a sitar player. They'd liked the
way that Brian Auger worked, putting an unusual instrument on their
sound, and they wanted to do it again. But I was thinking, "I've just
joined, and already they're getting these other guys." The band was
saying, "Don't worry Jeff, you'll blend in with these guys." And I said,
"Well, are they coming on the road with us, then, 'cause there's not
much point otherwise." The sitar player couldn't get the 4/4 time sig-

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 Dancing in Your Head

nature right; it was a hopeless wasting of time. So I said, "Look, is this

the figure?" I had the fuzz machine, a Toneblender, going. We did
one take, it sounded outrageous. So they kept the tabla player, who
could just about make it work. They rushed that out, and the rest was
a rollercoaster ride.
The rollercoaster started off slowly, however. According to Beck,
The tours were four or five weeks of England, just up and down, up
and down. (Singer) Keith Relfs father would drive us in his builder's
van; there were sand and bricks all round underneath the bench seats
in the back. When the band took off it meant that there were less bags
of cement in the back. The less cement, the more successful we were.
It was a clear equation. Then Hamish sign-painted the front of the
van, The Yardbirds, and we knew we'd gotten somewhere, 'cause we
had a painted van. The first time we were on Top of the Pops, it was
still quite clean, when we parked it outside the BBC studio in Man-
chester. When we came out it was smothered in lipstick—the win-
dows, the windshield, everything plastered with girls' names and phone
numbers. I thought, "This is great! Not only am I enjoying the shit
out of what I'm doing, but I get fame as well." So we did one TV
show, and I raced home to tell my mum, and the people next door
cutting their hedges said, "Saw you on the telly, very good." They
were the same people who, up to this point, were yelling for me to
turn it down all the time. All of a sudden, I was somebody. It was a
mindblowing experience.
It got even more mind-blowing when the Yardbirds hit the States.
The way Beck remembers it,
We were halfway across America when we did "Shapes of Things."
We were at Chess Records, the home of our heroes—we were thrilled
to bits to be there. We didn't have any songs written; we just did it.
Like "I'm a Man": we heard the playback and just went berserk. The
bass drum was shaking the foundations of the building. We weren't
playing that loud, but the engineer did Muddy Waters and Chuck
Berry stuff, so he knew how to get that. We'd jam, Keith'd rush off
and write some lyrics in the toilet—it was exactly like that. Some-
body'd say, "Let's do something modern and exciting; we know we can
get a good blues sound, so let's spread out a little bit." It was all spur-
of-the-moment, man: "I know: after four verses, let's go into this raga
thing." I kept changing guitar sounds all the way through. So we did
two or three takes of my guitars and blended them all together. But the

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 Beckology

solo on 'Shapes of Things' was pretty honest up until that feedback

note that comes in over it.
With classic intuitive insight, Beck made a virtuoso's virtue of his
equipment's limits, learning to play the sounds other players at the time
avoided. He continues,
I started fooling with feedback because we began playing larger gigs
where we couldn't be heard. The equipment we had was woefully
inadequate, and we all had beer running down into the amp imputs
anyway. Those AC-30s would still work, but they really weren't up to
the size of the places. In the end I just got berserk and turned it flat-
out. I thought, "Wow, that whistle's controllable; it's coming from the
string." So I'd just bend the note around the feedback. The more I got
into it, the more I found I could control it. I started finding the reso-
nant points on the neck where it came in best. I loved it because it was
a most peculiar sound that contrasted wildly with a plucked string, this
round trombone-like noise coming from nowhere.
Though he erupted into U2-style scratch-picking and near-feedback
on the studio "I'm a Man," Beck had forgotten nothing about the blues;
even a quick listen to the Buddy Guy-meets-Elmore James solos on
"The Sun Is Shining," a James tune, makes that plain. Nor had he
abandoned Les Paul, as "Jeffs Boogie" demonstrates. But he was spin-
ning off into increasingly outrageous experiments, since the Yardbirds
kept opening the spaces for and reacting to his sonic inventions. Thus
they pointed the way into the then uncharted realms of what would be
called psychedelia.
By the time they recorded the landmark Yardbirds—the first album
they recorded as an album, which they did in a week—they'd forged a
new musical synthesis of Eastern sounds, jazz, blues, rock, and noise.
"Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" kicks things off with Beck at his
most impressively manic: sirens whirl, chords rumble and explode, hot
rods raunch and rheum. The rave-up section of "Lost Woman" rides
out on a recurring feedback-and-whistle cloud of powerchords; the first
section of "The Nazz Are Blue" solo closes out with a single sustained
note spiraling into feedback—and this in 1965, a full two years before
Jimi Hendrix's revolutionary Are You Experienced? All told, Yardbirds is
a primer of the Jeff Beck Sound, and was studied as closely as any primer
by both the guitarists of San Francisco's Summer of Love bands and the
embryonic heavy metallists of the late '60s.

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For a brief while in 1966—long enough to film their bit in the movie
Blow Up and start a U.S. tour—Page and Beck shared guitar duties in
the Yardbirds. "I remember Phoenix," says Beck,
where we were playing in this unbelievable place, packed solid, with
the ceiling onstage just above our heads. And the air-conditioning had
gone. So I had one of my tantrums. I pushed this amp speaker out the
window, but it hung on by a cannon socket, swinging about an inch
over people's heads. It was a Dick Clark tour: 600-mile-a-day jaunts in
the bus with Gary Lewis and the Playboys and Bobby Hebb. I suppose
it was mix-and-match, but it was dreadful: there was no camaraderie. I
stayed about two weeks. Then right in the middle of Kansas I felt like
I'd die if I stayed another day. I broke down in the bedroom and told
Jimmy (Page) I was out of there. It was awful, because I had to shove
all the duties onto him the same bloody night.
Right before Beck split the Yardbirds in 1966, he recorded with Page,
John Paul Jones, and the Who's Keith Moon, who was thinking about
exiting Townshend's group. One track was called "Beck's Bolero," a
kind of shriekback tip of the hat to Ravel shot through with insane guitar
slashings and billowing feedback. Beck explains, "We did 'Bolero' and a
couple of other outrageous things in one day. Halfway through 'Bolero'
you can hear Moonie screaming. He hit the mike and smashed it off, so
all you can hear from then on is cymbals." When the foursome's plans
to form a band stalled on contractual hassles, "Beck's Bolero" became
the B side to Beck's first solo single "Hi Ho Silver Lining." One of Beck's
few ventures as a vocalist, it's a cut he's had a 20-odd-year love/hate
relationship with.
"Silver Lining" was the opening salvo of Beck's brief career as a
singer-guitarist. After leaving the Yardbirds, he returned to England and
signed a contract, all too typical of the time, with Mickie Most. "It was a
fabulous contract that guaranteed that I wouldn't get anything no matter
what," he laughs ruefully. But he felt he had no choice, if he was to keep
his career going:
So I did what he said. I didn't like the song—it was ghastly, stupid.
But it's still a mega-success all around England: they play it at the
end of discos now, turn it off halfway through and everyone sings
along. That double-tracked guitar solo, where everything is slightly
off, sounds like two guys playing? I was actually trying to get it right
but couldn't, because I had all these little inflections in the first take

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that I couldn't copy. "That'll do," Mickie said. He was one of those
guys who always said that: "Next. We've got Suzie Quatro coming
in."
The way the first Jeff Beck Group came together and survived is
characteristic of the late '60s. At the time, the world of rock was in
transition. From models like the do-it-yourself British blues revival and
American folk renaissance, underground scenes began to spring up.
They were more spontaneous and less dependent on hits than the record
industry. With them came clubs and radio stations that hosted non-
top-40 material and print outlets that covered alternative sounds and
lifestyles. So even without a tune on the charts, a group with a following
could support itself by performing. Some, like the Grateful Dead and
Jefferson Airplane, surfaced to land major-label contracts. Because au-
diences were open-minded, many rock bands experimented with a flu-
idity and freedom of expression more typical of jazz. The Dead and the
Velvet Underground, for instance, cited influences like Ornette Cole-
man and John Coltrane for their noise-driven jams.
If the world of rock was in transition, it was also much smaller than it
is today. The way Beck tells it,

One very slack night at a club, there was one guy there plowing into
some food and getting drunk on his own: Rod Stewart. He didn't even
look at me, so I went over to see what was happening. He was really
drunk. So I asked him whether he was still playing with Steampacket;
I'd seen him with them, and he was outrageous. He said, "No, I'm not
gonna stay with them." So I said, "If you ever want to put a band to-
gether . . ."He said, "You're joking." I said, "No." He said, "You
ring me tomorrow, I'll leave Steampacket." So I rang him and that
was it.

As Ron Wood remembers it,

I knew Jeff from meeting him at various clubs, so I rang him when he
left the Yardbirds. A lot of people don't know that when I first joined I
played guitar along with Jeff, and we had Dave Ambrose, who used to
play with Brian Auger, on bass. Jeff couldn't take him, though, so he
asked me, "Would you mind switching to bass?" I'd seen the Yardbirds
a lot at the Crawdaddy in Richmond, so I picked up a lot about bass
from watching Paul Samwell-Smith. But I also learned from sticking
with Jeffs licks.

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 Dancing in Your Head

Substituting Mick Waller for Aynsley Dunbar ("Mickey didn't have the
drive Aynsley did, but he was funkier, more Tamla-Motown, and could
still play blues," Beck observes) rounded out the final lineup.
Though Led Zeppelin's debut album is usually cited as the opening
blast of heavy metal, Truth, along with some of Beck's Yardbirds sides, is
clearly where Page copped his ideas about how to thicken and mutilate
sound. That first Beck Group made some of the music molten, barbed,
downright funny noises of all time—and helped spawn Page's paler-
sounding, more studio-bound group in the process.
A feedback-riddled reworking of the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things"
kicked Truth off. Says Beck,
We had a great sound, but nobody'd written anything. Rod wrote folk
songs then, which wouldn't really have worked out for us. So he sug-
gested "Shapes." I said, "Let's slow it down and make it dirty and
evil." I got a Sho-Bud steel guitar and messed around with it. We were
always messing around with other instruments to see how they'd work.
"Superstitious" was an early wah-wah novelty. I like the Crybaby pedal
because it was bloody irritating after a while. Clapton and Hendrix
were using it differently; I wanted it more like a warclub, so I found
the holes for it. I put slap echo on it to accentuate the edge in it.

Even their management wasn't quite sure what with this beyond-the-
edge lineup. Beck explains,
We were literally down on our last crumb. We had nothing left. But
Peter Grant, who'd been over to America with the New Vaudeville
Band, was smart .enough to see there was an underground scene hap-
pening, where bands were making it without being seen on the
surface—newspapers, records, none of that. So he said, "I'm gonna
put you out there." It was a last-ditch thing, to keep the band going.
So we rehearsed. But we had just one set of good clothes that had to
last us the whole tour.
Rolling the dice, they landed at that alternative-music Mecca, the
Fillmore East. Grins Beck, "We played two numbers in a segue to open.
Finished with a big RRRARRHHHH. Rod came out from behind the
amps—he sang from offstage—in a mackintosh and a hat, ready to go off
home. I said, "I think you can take 'em off; they liked it.'" The next
day's rave review in the New York Times was headlined, "Beck Upstages
Grateful Dead." Recalls Beck, "It said, 'Beck and Stewart were playing

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like two angels with a Pinter script.' Wow! I'll never forget that magic
night in New York, the warmth that came from the audience."
But after a year audiences wanted more material, not just ever wilder
variations on what they'd already heard. According to Beck,

We cut the tour short, went back home and straight to the studio. We
did Beck-Ola in about two weeks: four days for the tracks, a week for
the overdubs and mixing. That whole album was pretty much dreamt
up on the spot. I didn't know what I was gonna do in the morning at
breakfast. That's one of the things that's lost these days: spontaneity.

Two chunks of Presley gold, "All Shook Up" and "Jailhouse Rock," get
rudely blasted into new shapes as Beck's multitracked guitars screech
and wail over Wood's galloping bass to hedge Stewart's sandpaper vo-
cals.
It was too good to last. Ironically, the high-tension egos that fired the
high-wire musical acrobatics were the very ingredient that blew the band
apart—on the eve of the mammoth Woodstock Festival, where the
group was scheduled to appear. Says Beck,
I deliberately broke the group up before Woodstock. I didn't want it to
be preserved. Even though we were playing really well, the vibes in
the band were totally shredded. So I figured, "It's only one gig." Of
course, it was the biggest gig ever. But I couldn't face it. I didn't have
any control over the P.A., anything. I couldn't have stood the failure.

So it was back to England and a new idea: combining Stewart's vocals

with the dense, slamming bottom of ex-Vanilla Fudgers Tim Bogert on
bass and Carmine Appice on drums. Stewart opted out; he was headed
on the singer-songwriter course that threaded early '70s pop. Then, in
November 1969, Beck's car hobby took a wicked turn. When a tire blew
out on his '23 Model T Ford, he careened into a small Morris. The
Morris's driver sustained a broken knee, but the guitarist was thrown
onto the road; he broke his nose and opened the back of his head. Lucky
to be alive, he was sidelined for six months, and suffered recurrent
headaches for a long time thereafter.
In mid-1970, looking to get back into it and hooked on the Motown
Sound, Beck took drummer Cozy Powell with him to Detroit, where
they recorded eight vocal-less tracks, including "(I Know) I'm Losing
You," released here for the first time. Beck shakes his head:

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 Dancing in Your Head

Talk about going a long way to get something! Let me put it this way:
we went to Motown to get the Motown sound. The first thing Cozy
does is remove the Motown drum kit and put his own in. (Bassist
James) Jamerson said, "You want the Motown sound? You've just
taken it out."
Still, the session led Beck to form the second Jeff Beck Group. After
producing Rough and Ready himself, Beck decided he wanted to com-
bine Motown with the Stax sound, so he asked MGs guitarist Steve
Cropper to produce the follow-up. "Steve tried to explain to Cozy that
you play soft, and it comes out loud," he says.
Steve was used to playing with Al Jackson, who was so understated.
See, I wanted to play like Booker T and the MGs, but we had the to-
tally wrong impression of their music because it was always played
loud. They recorded it soft. I mean, look what happened to "Going
Down" when we did it. We took that song and turned it inside out.
But honestly I didn't know what I was doing; I was walking around
with headaches all the time.
In late 1972 Beck finally hooked up with Bogert and Appice, a lineup
that can still make him wince:
It was miraculous 100-mph boogie stuff—when it worked. But they
overplayed everything. And I heard only a fraction of it, with the mon-
itors the way they were then. But we flattened Japan: they loved it.
Smoke pouring out of Carmine's drums, enveloping the drum riser,
and he'd filter in a tape recording of a drum solo, so that when the
smoke cleared the drums were still playing. It was impressive at the
time. It was like in Spinal Tap, "Spontaneous Combustion"; I think
that's where Rob Reiner got some ideas.
Although BBA was guilty of excess, it offered Beck the room to move
sonically: he introduced The Bag. "It was a horn driver encased in one
of those Mexican drinking-bottle bags," he explains.
Instead of having the horn deliver the sound, it was unscrewed, and
we put a piece of plastic piping in the little round threaded hole where
the horn used to go. The whole thing was encased in rubber to keep
the sound in and drive it up the tube. So the extension leading from
the amp used this as an amplifier. You put the tube in your mouth,
and form a voice box where you mold the sound by the shape of your
oral cavity. You don't sing at all. Then it comes over a mic to be re-
amplified. People were quite amazed.

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 Beckology

You can hear why on "Black Cat Moan" and "Blues DeLuxe/BBA
Boogie."
BBA's patented showstopper came from yet another soul-music
source: Stevie Wonder. The multi-instrumentalist had hunkered down
in Electric Lady Studios soon after Jimi Hendrix's death; his contract
with Motown was running out, and he wanted to renegotiate for more
money and artistic control while he stockpiled the sounds that later
surfaced on albums like Talking Book. Among the contributors to that
breakthrough disc was Beck.
"Somebody at Epic told Stevie that I love the shit out of him,
and asked him if he could maybe write a song for me," remembers
Beck.
Forget it—I was 20 feet tall at that. So I did a couple of tracks on
Talking Book, which went down very well; he liked what I did. Then it
was his job to write us a song. One day I was sitting at the drum kit,
which I love to play when nobody's around, doing this beat. Stevie
came kinda boogying into the studio: "Don't stop." "Ah, c'mon,
Stevie, I can't play the drums." Then the lick came out: "Supersti-
tion." That was my song, in return for Talking Book. I thought, "He's
given me the riff of the century." We played a version that he quickly
put down. Stevie is a businessman; he said, "Hold the session, I'm
paying for it from right now." He went out and jotted it down; he
knew he'd hit gold. So he took our quickie demo to Motown and got
his contract. My band had a great stage number with it, but we didn't
get the hit.
Two years later, after passing on an invitation to join the Rolling
Stones, who needed to replace Mick Taylor, Beck ripped out Blow by
Blow, where his spectacular overdubs, newly expanded chordal vocabu-
lary, and razor-sharp technique built rich textures from modal and
fusiony material as well as two more Stevie Wonder tunes. Powered by
FM radio, it shot to the top of the album charts, a rare feat for an all-
instrumental disc. One Wonder cut, "Cause We Ended as Lovers," is
dedicated to the late Roy Buchanan—with good reason, since Beck
duplicates Roy's partial-harmonic picking and severe note-stretching.
Partially thanks to producer George Martin, Blow by Blow brought
out Beck's ballad side—a consistent thread in his playing from singles
like "Love Is Blue" and album cuts like "Greensleeves" on Truth. Ac-
cording to Beck,

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" 'Cause We've Ended as Lovers" is one of the most beautiful tunes
I've ever played. I first saw Roy Buchanan in Boston in the early '70s; I
was locked up in a hotel room with two guards because there was a
threat on my life. So I was checking the TV out. I didn't have the
sound up, but there was this guy playing a Telecaster on a rock pro-
gram. Amazing sound: it was Roy. He gave me another supercharge up
the bum, you know: you can get away with playing like this, people
want it, they love it.
I went from heavy riff tunes to things that were a bit more classy. I
guess I have this natural understanding of where chords are going, and
what they enable me to do. Max (Middleton) was always hitting me
with nice chords. I'd have to be like a twerp for about two hours while
I fumbled around with them. That's what I've always done, though:
just opened myself up and said, "I can't play guitar, but I'll have a go
at this." And being totally honest and open and willing to start from
square one works better than to try to force something that you already
know over something new.
A year later, Wired, with its haunting rendition of Charles Mingus's
"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," marked the beginning of Beck's fruitful if
conflict-laden collaboration with keyboardist Jan Hammer. Says Beck,
George Martin was a gentleman in every sense of the word. And he
was a middleman to stop the musicians from wrangling. It worked re-
ally well on Blow by Blow. But by Wired I'd gotten the power bug back
again. I wanted more vicious power, but with more concise playing—
the way Jan plays, that spitfire thing, a million notes but concise. I
wanted to take a chance with Mahavishnu-type blasts. I just lost
George with that. "I don't know where the hell you're going," he'd
say. But we toured with McLaughlin and went down really well.
Actually, I first heard "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" when John
(McLaughlin) played it on acoustic. One day I was fooling around
with it and Max said, "I know that song." He played some of the be-
ginning chords, but he didn't really know the rest, so he came out
with his own version. The Mingus chords are unbelievable. With the
voicings Jan used, I used to think I was playing the wrong notes: every
night onstage I would have to watch my hands.
Jan loved to take my guitar licks and feed them back to me; it was
like musical turbocharging, total self-propulsion. We were having our
own party onstage. That's what I sensed: it was too self-centered for
people to handle, which is why I backed off. The size of gigs we were
playing, we couldn't get away with that stuff; it was for clubs, really,

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where you can sit and enjoy every note. But in a huge arena with
86,000 people nobody was really hearing it. It must've sounded like a
jet engine.
Two years after touring Japan in 1978 with Stanley Clarke, Tony
Hymas, and Simon Phillips, Beck recorded There and Back. Using
Hymas, Phillips (one of his favorite drummers), and some bass lines by
Jan Hammer and others by Mo Foster, Beck recapitulated the chame-
leonic styles of his long career. That lineup toured extensively. Then
five years later, Flash tried to harness his lunacy to a techno feel with
little success; that shouldn't have been surprising, since, as Beck puts it,
"I always need a strong drummer to play off, to get me going. Someone
like Simon is just the ticket." Of course, Flash did reunite Beck with
Rod Stewart for "People Get Ready." A short-lived tour, instigated by
Stewart, foundered. The way Beck tells it,
He wasn't forthcoming with any ideas which involved me, and I was
slotted to about fifteen minutes. I just couldn't see the sense of touring
the U.S. in that context. When my fans turned up, they'd be thinking
I'd gone mad . . . or moody.
For all his virtues as a sonic explorer, Beck is no overall con-
ceptualizer—which is why, like Roy Buchanan, he's sometimes seemed
like a guitar genius in search of a context. As the man himself admits
ruefully,
I'm no good as a bandleader. Years and years of lack of responsibility
and application to the job, I guess. I always think some magic's gonna
happen and someone else is gonna do it. Then I realize that it's me
who's meant to be organizing it. When I really gave it authority, it
bloody well worked. As soon as I went iffy and namby-pamby, it was
the too many cooks thing. It's probably a hangover from the Yardbirds
days. I don't want to have anything premeditated, or else I'm not able
to do what I do, which is come out of the woods with all the guns
blazing. I just like to hear the thread of an idea, and I'll beat down the
door—you don't have to open it and usher me in.
Beck's car-building fanaticism nearly cost him his thumb in 1987:
I was in my garage working on the hot rods. I have a deep six-foot pit,
an inspection pit; I don't have a cover for it other than these oak
planks, which are really heavy. I picked up one of them and pulled it,

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and the other end went about four feet down into the pit and kicked
and pinched my finger up against the chassis. It was just squashed,
broke. I had two bottles of whiskey to kill the pain and went to the
hospital. I practiced with the remaining fingers for six months, and
started using the thumb even though it was bound up—I'd get sticky
plaster all over the strings. Then the feeling didn't come back to the
tip for about a year.
Two years later, the ironically named Guitar Shop used Beck's scat-
tered sensibility as a structural tool, surrounding his alternating rage and
lyricism, tempered by his inevitable wit, with varied styles. As he sees it,
It's got some very basic early-Beck-style elements, like from Beck-
Ola, in it, which help people recognize my playing straightaway.
But I added new elements, like electronic keyboards.
Recording it was incredible. When I saw Terry's drums go up I got
the old heartbeat going. I suggested he get into some wild jungle
grooves, because I couldn't handle going to thousands of nightclubs
and seeing people trying to get into a non-happening groove. You
know what I'm saying? That mechanical nonsense. People have never
danced to that in thousands of years, and all of a sudden everybody's
dancing to a fake, perfectly spaced mechanical beat. I can't believe
that's what music's about. All the great records from the '50s that I
love were recorded in real time: you pushed the button and that was it.
You got the electricity when you performed, and it was captured.
That's what we wanted to do. And before we knew it we were going
from cassette to two-track to twenty-four track—we had the twenty-four
track rolling in half an hour! I was trying to capture that now thing.
Beck's recent work has also featured him in more congenial settings.
Of the U.K. single "Wild Thing," for instance, he remarks, "It ex-
plodes, right? Totally solid overload. I wanted to bust back out, Hendrix-
style, to establish that I was still kicking after Flash."
Looking back over a career that's lasted more than a quarter-century
isn't easy for Beck. He's an incessant risk-taker who prizes in-the-
moment spontaneity above all else. "I don't think about the past at all,
really," he shrugs.
Yesterday is gone. I do flip back in my mind to what's worth keeping
sometimes. I mean, I've skated through this business without any hit
records. I've never wanted to be flavor of the month. In fact, I get
frightened by the things that I know people like, 'cause then that sets

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the standard for what they expect of me. So you've gotta quickly rub it
out: "Try this instead." That's the attitude I keep a strict hold on. I
want what I do to be fresh; whether it's in the right direction or not,
time will tell. But there's gotta be that stab. That's the way I play. The
only thing I carry is the memory of what people have said to me, gen-
uine appreciation, not bullshit. That's enough for me.
For the rest of us, there are the blazing, heartfelt, indescribably outra-
geous sounds of his guitar. [1991]

chapter. 16

Rockin in the Free World

Neil Young has always been one of the scariest rockers around. It's not
just his screechingly inventive torture of the electric guitar. It's not just
the seized-up quaver of his thin nasal voice as it wobbles precariously
around notes. It's not just his willingness to shift (with wildly uneven
results) from grungy rocker to delicate folkie to technohead. It's the truly
frightening intensity those qualities grow out of. Even at his worst—
which he often is—Young is always emotionally naked, and he doesn't
care who's looking. He's rock's shaman, a holy fool.
Ragged Glory (Reprise), which reunites him with the late '60s garage-
band trio Crazy Horse, characteristically tackles head-on two central
problems '60s rockers and the fans who grew up with them have been
facing: aging and history. It's not just coincidental that rock's last few
years have been marked by the deepening grip of nostalgia. The cycles of
repetition draw closer and closer together as sanitarily repackaged de-
cades come on and off the market as "memories"; the pace is so hectic
that soon we may be officially nostalgic for the '90s.
Right now, though, the '60s are back, for the second or third time in
recent memory, in every manifestation from clothes to graphics to vo-

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cabulary to drugs of choice. And so reformed bands and ghost bands

from the period have been reprising hits and near-hits, sounds and
attitudes and gestures for the graying folks who were kids then and their
kids.
It can be an enjoyable and fascinating and even comforting phenom-
enon to watch the two- and three-generational crowds at, say, Grateful
Dead or Eric Clapton concerts. (In fact, those two '60s icons have
genuinely pursued their music, even if the results have been mixed.)
And unpretentious reunion concerts can be the easygoing fun they're
supposed to be, despite the abusive rage many critics have been heaping
on them. But the overall thrust of this '60s redux, whether from older
players, like The Who and The Band, or younger recyclers, like the
English wave of neo-psychedelic groups being highly touted throughout
the industry right now, is eerily disembodied by nostalgia. It recalls
Reaganism's repeated gestures at a fictitious '50s. But where the connec-
tion between Reaganism and the '50s was ideological, the only real
cultural link between now and the '60s is commercial. (This round of
revivalism was solidly in place long before Operation Desert Storm gave
commentators the mistaken opportunity to compare the Middle East to
Vietnam.)
So even if rock's current obsession with the '60s seems to be analo-
gous to the Reagan-era retreat of young jazzers into pre-existing lan-
guages like bop and hard bop after the creative ferment of the '60s and
'70s, it's not. Of course, culture goes through cycles of exploration and
retrenchment, and so what's happened recently within the two genres
looks superficially alike. But rock isn't jazz. There's no obvious place in
rock for an elder statesman like a Duke Ellington. Outside of garage
bands doing cover versions, there's no standard repertory, and only a
limited sense that songs can—or might, or should—be detached from
their original performances. From that perspective, part of the struggle
within this wave of nostalgia is a renewed attempt to find out whether it's
possible to develop a sense of history within the music itself that goes
beyond simple imitation, pastiche, and genealogies of influence.
In a curious way, because it was marketed from its beginning as
"youth culture," rock is powered by a relentless pseudo-romanticism
that doesn't allow it to acknowledge its own lengthening history and the
age that implies. Live fast, die young is still the template, and it's a major
semiconscious source of critical rage at the so-called dinosaur bands that
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 Rockin in the Free World

have been touring around with more frequency and more fanfare since
Woodstock's 20th anniversary two years ago.
Whatever you might think about the too-often cynical motives driv-
ing these revisitations, it's still true that the best (and the far-less-than-
best) of this usually disposable music can and does find lasting meaning
in people's lives. If it didn't, we'd need a radically new definition of
culture. But that points to a central conundrum rooted in rock's roman-
ticized contradictions: the commercial cult of the perpetually new can't
face its past organically, doesn't allow for either continuity or growth—
two of culture's primary functions—outside narrow genealogical limits.
In response, some critics have elevated disposability itself into an aes-
thetic, consciously or unconsciously buying into a kind of corporately
administered planned obsolescence for pop culture. That seems like a
dead end, a blinkered and contradictory stance, unless you're willing to
concede that pop music is a totally manufactured commodity foisted on
an unsuspecting gullible audience—which I'm not.
On the other hand, it's also true that once most rockers are divorced
from their historical moment, they become purely commercial proposi-
tions, not engines for development. If Neil Young is one of the rare
exceptions, it's because he understands the passage of time and its inevi-
table distancing, acknowledges the distance but refuses to lapse into its
nostalgia, remains determined to be as naked now in his forties as he was
as a teenager in the seminal Buffalo Springfield. To a large extent, in
fact, that's exactly what Ragged Glory is about. In "Over and Over," for
instance, while Crazy Horse snorts barely controlled explosions and his
guitar snarls, Young sings, "Remember the nights of love and that
moment on the beach / That wasn't really too long ago / But we paid the
price of time and now it's out of reach/And so the broken circle
goes/Over and over again."
Most of the rest of Ragged Glory, as nasty and brutish and exuberant
and creative a garage-band guitar bash as rock has ever had, is just as to-
the-point. Take "Mansion on the Hill," which appears to be an un-
apologetic evocation of flower-power days. The first verse runs,
Well I saw an old man walking in my place/When he looked at me, it
could've been my face/His words were kind but his eyes were wild/
He said, I got a load to lug but I want one more try/There's a man-
sion on the hill/Psychedelic music fills the air/Peace and love live
there still/In the mansion on the hill.

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 Dancing in Your Head

That's a characteristic Youngian (pun intended) metaphorical land-

scape. In "Love To Burn," for example, he sings about "walking
through the Valley of Hearts"; there he finds the desolate couples who
perpetually argue because they've lost themselves by refusing to spend
their ability to love on each other, and tells of his own Orphic encounter
with a spirit who advises him "you better let your guard down / you better
take a chance on love."
Young has always projected his emotions as a world, however para-
doxical or inexplicable—which is why at times he can be utterly awful,
and why at times he can write such powerful and terrifying songs. He
refuses to protect himself with pat judgments and revisionism. He nei-
ther ignores the past nor irradiates it with a nostalgic haze. As in "Man-
sion on the Hill," he stares into his aging face, acknowledges its history,
seizes the multiple ghostly images that trail from its present, and then
melts his selves down in the fury of the immediate creative moment.
Young's insights into the interactions of time and pop culture
could—should—offer a model for rock that's as far from the bored stage
antics of founders like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley as you can get. It's
equally far from the extravagant onslaughts, however successful, of
bands like the Rolling Stones and The Who, who are effectively trapped
by their own images and aesthetic within a perpetual time warp. As
Keith Richards said to me before the last Stones tour, "We've got to find
a way to make rock and roll grow up." Ironically, the Stones haven't.
The Steel Wheels road show boasted terrific performances, but the
Stones haven't generated memorable new material, a new sound, a new
direction, for over a decade. That's at least partly because they can't face
growing up in their music; they can only doctor their romanticized
images. Neil Young, who's a true romantic, isn't afraid of or trapped by
time in that way. [1991]

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 chapter.. 17

Still Alive: The Grateful Dead

In this Woodstock 20th-anniversary year of 1989, the Grateful Dead
have logged a quarter of a century in a peculiar countercultural nether-
world where they thrive long after their contemporaries have either
bailed out, gone stale, or started churning out corporate ads. The Dead's
sheer longevity—they're releasing a solid new album, aptly titled Built
to Last (Arista), on Halloween—is ironic for several reasons. A typical
Grateful Dead concert—like those in mid-October at New Jersey's
Meadowlands Arena, part of a national tour running through De-
cember—defies the apparently ironclad rules of arena performing: no
massive light show, no choreographed band steps, no constant patter, no
fixed set list. Then there's the Dead's legendary willingness to break
open any song for extended jamming—a strategy that takes uncontem-
porary chances even as it bucks the current sound-byte mentality.
That's partly due to when and where they come from. Their original
nucleus—bluegrass banjo/guitar picker Jerry Garcia, folk/jazz guitarist
Bob Weir, and blues-drenched organist/harpist Rod "Pigpen" Mc-
Kernan—hooked up in 1964 to play Bay Area coffeehouses as Mother
McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, then soon added r&b drummer Bill
Kreutzmann and jazz trumpeter/electronic composer-turned-bassist
Phil Lesh. The off-kilter sounds that came spilling out of this odd
melange tossed musical ingredients in ways that transcended Summer of
Love sloganeering.
The Dead paralleled 1960s jazzers in their desire to explore and
appropriate Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern
sounds; they also picked up on the "free" ideas of Ornette Coleman and
John Coltrane as well as the modal approach of pre-fusion Miles Davis.
So their acid jams began to deepen in texture, to become more than
guitar solos stretched over a three-chord rock backing repeated ad infin-
itum. Spearheaded by Garcia's spidery, Django Reinhardt-inspired off-
beat triplets and spiraling arpeggios, the Dead remade their rock lineup
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 Dancing in Your Head

into something more flexible: Lesh's loping, octave-jumping bass would

bounce in loose counterpoint or doubling of Garcia, Weir's increasingly
sophisticated chordal and rhythmic variations would cluster around the
dual drummers' polyrhythms, and the tune at hand would gradually
mutate into free-form space. That approach eventually inspired bands
from the Allman Brothers to Television.
Especially since the punk outbreak of the mid-1970s, with its much-
needed attack on the arena-inspired, corporate-rock flatulence of bands
like Yes and Journey, the Dead have often been criticized for their
meandering jams and hippie ways. And in fact, they've had bleak
patches of pointless four-hour-long concerts topped with fingernails-
down-the-blackboard vocals. The last couple of years, though, have
brought renewed vigor to their shows and their first-ever hit single,
"Touch of Grey"—a statistic they can add to being the first band to
record on 16-track equipment, to invite fans to private-tape their free
radio broadcasts, to create the forerunner of the modern arena P. A.
system, to play at the Sphinx, and to stay consistently popular without
radio hits among several generations of rockers.
For the Grateful Dead's audience reaches across generations with
fanaticism. Tie-dyed fans who weren't even born by the time the Dead
got to Woodstock as well as those who were follow them literally around
the globe from show to show, like Pirandellian characters out of a period
movie. Part of what draws them is the dialogic sense of community that,
during the Dead's late-1960s heyday, found voice in the counterculture.
The band still infuses that spirit into its extended-family attitudes toward
its followers (e.g., by funding hotlines and magazines to disseminate
info) and its longstanding political affiliations (especially with environ-
mental groups like Greenpeace).
As it updates the Dead's core sound with appropriate synth washes,
Built to Last touches on timely concerns like drug addiction and the
earth's rape as well as sometimes fuzzily expressed ones like love and
hope—which, after all, were always the message sent by the Dead's
engaging way of being. It's not a great album, but it'll do. For when
they're playing as well as they're playing now, their balletic, democratic
communication validates the old slogan: there is nothing like a Grateful
Dead concert. That may explain why they, unlike most of their contem-
poraries, have avoided the irrelevance of nostalgia. [1989]

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 chapter 18

New York Lou

The Velvet Underground has had an amazing posthumous career for
the last twenty years. History, if you like, caught up with them about a
decade ago, when the punkers and incipient New Wave rediscovered
the virtues of sonic assault and coupled nerve-shredding decibels with
hyper-alienated lyrics. So it is that Sonic Youth and Husker Du, Jesus
and Mary Chain and the Smiths, and countless others can claim the
Velvets for ancestors.
Taken up by Andy Warhol soon after their formation in 1965—he
put them on the road, produced their first album, and furnished the
artwork that makes its "banana" cover a MOMA exhibit and collectible
today—the Velvet Underground became notoriously chic in some New
York circles. That enthusiasm didn't exactly mushroom: their shows,
especially outside New York, were sparsely attended, and their albums
sold in microscopic figures.
And no wonder. While the counterculture was painting itself day-glo
and ingesting consciousness-expanding substances, organizing its poli-
tics and becoming a kind of cartoon guerrilla army that parodied the
Asian military buildup, Lou Reed, at the V.U.'s creative core, was
penning lyrics about heroin and homosexuality, sado-masochism and
street violence. The music was shot through with grungy feedback,
spewed nightmare screeches from Reed's howling-at-the-abyss, brutal
guitar and Gale's sawed-to-the-bone electrified viola and droning key-
boards; underneath rumbled the punnmeling of Maureen Tucker's
drums and Sterling Morrison's guitar and bass. It was a deadly and
riveting mix, heightened on their first album, The Velvet Underground
& Nico (Verve), by icy Dietrich-pretender Nice's vocals. Between that
and White Light/White Heat (Verve), the V. U. brought the Marquis de
Sade's jaundiced ironies into the 20th century.
Or at least, that describes the Velvets of classic tracks like "Heroin,"

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 Dancing in Your Head

"Waiting for My Man," "White Light/White Heat," "I Heard Her Call
My Name," and "Sister Ray." But they had their other sides too: the odd
folkiness of "I'll Be Your Mirror," the inflated psychedelia of "All To-
morrow's Parties," the jejune schmaltz of "Sunday Morning."
The V. U. staggered along for two years after Gale left in 1968, but the
dialectic of astringency and excess that powered them had fractured. By
the time Reed went solo in 1970-71, he was on his way to parodying
what would make him a cult hero years later. He spent a lot of the '70s
recycling or unearthing songs he'd written during the Velvets period; he
seemed to be wandering through identities, trying them on, discarding
them without even a shrug—as if irony alone would save his muse. He
attacked the first wave of his disciples, glam-rocker proto-punks like the
New York Dolls, but reconfigured himself to emulate glam-rocker su-
preme David Bowie on Transformer (RCA). He stopped playing the
guitar on and offstage, and left his live music to uneven bands. He got
bloated from booze and drugs, sped and vitamined himself down to
Dickensian thinness (the Bowie Look), cut his hair, dyed his hair, and
cut some utterly spectacular tunes (the hilarious space-shot sendup "Sat-
ellite of Love," the grimly funny jive of "Sally Can't Dance") along with
lots of crap. The Street Poet of New York, as he was billed, rode a
creative rollercoaster to nowhere in particular, but his credentials ap-
peared on his album sleeves via titles like Growing Up in Public (RCA).
The punk/New Wave revolt penetrated Reed's solipsistic universe.
On the one hand, the bands spearheading the move, like Television and
their offshoot Richard Hell and the Voidoids, drew plentiful creative
ideas from Reed's V. U. material; on the other, they simply disregarded
most of what he'd done since. Faced with a new musical vanguard,
Reed's reaction was again to co-opt, but this time he got lucky: when
Hell's Voidoids ground to a halt, he picked up guitarist Robert Quine
(and later drummer Fred Maher), added bassist Fernando Saunders and
drummer Doane Perry, and thus assembled the band that would push
him back up to the front ranks of rock and roll.
Their only album, The Blue Mask (RCA; o.p.) pits pastoral breathers
against Reed's genuinely harrowing descent into the hells of sex-and-
drug-driven terror, rage, and violence—a place that nobody else can
plumb with his scarred power. Even the apparently gentle songs bite.
Saunders's growling, octave-jumping lines and Perry's vicious rhythms

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 New York Lou

kick the rockers into bloodcurdling shape while the dual guitars chime
and slash.
Quine, a hardcore Reed fan since the '60s and a seminal guitarist on
the post-punk scene, pivoted his idol's direction. He not only convinced
Reed to play guitar again, but deliberately recreated the Velvets' grind-
ing, droning chordal textures and riddling solos. The band helped refur-
bish Reed's mordant ironies, which run on disjunctions—between
words and music, between socially accepted values and id-like horrors,
between apparent meanings and actual events.
"The Gun," a Peckinpah-like nightmare of robbery and rape, packs a
wallop because of the arranged control, the tension between the icily
restrained music and the lurid lyrics; "The Blue Mask" is a litany of self-
hating incantations, roars, and rages; "Underneath the Bottle," an alco-
holic's rationalizations, gets an almost jaunty setting with melodic coun-
try trills. But the killer is "Waves of Fear," a DT anxiety nightmare that
rides out on Quine's mewling, puking guitar solo, deliberately raw and
formless as a baby whirling in a blender.
That was 1981; a year later came Reed's new mainstream look and
sound. He peeled off his band, mixed Quine's wrenching guitar to near-
inaudibility on Legendary Hearts (RCA). By 1984's New Sensations
(RCA) he'd become a self-parodic name-dropper.
Then came January of 1989, when Reed and Gale reunited in a
Brooklyn church to preview their fourteen "Songs for 'Drella." These
will form the backbone of a music theatre piece (to be premiered this
winter at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave 1989 Festival)
about Andy Warhol and the scenes that swirled around him. Even in
this embryonic stage the music came across as powerful and promising
and unpretentious. I was so relieved and fired-up I went home and
plowed through my old Velvets' records, my favorite 70s cuts, Rock N
Roll Animal (RCA), The Blue Mask, and even the videotaped A Night
with Lou Reed (RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video).
The very next day brought New York (Sire) to my door, along with the
predictable chorus of critical raves greeting its release. Lou. The Street
Poet of New York. The Archetypal Punk. The Legend in His Own
Time. But this is The New Improved Legend. (Maybe record com-
panies are on to something when they call their output "product.") After
touring for Amnesty International and appearing on the anti-apartheid

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 Dancing in Your Head

Sun City album, Reed has apparently undergone a political con-

sciousness-raising. Living in exurban New Jersey, he's become an envi-
ronmentalist; married and settled, he's apologetic about sexism, vehe-
ment about anti-Semitism, and virtuously down on crack.
Unfortunately, the product at hand displays just how unsubtle and
fuzzy the New Lou Reed's new social awareness is. There's the muddled
anti-anti-Semite attack on Kurt Waldheim, the pope, and Jesse Jackson
called "Common Ground," the empty rhetoric of "There Is No Time,"
the implicit sterilize-'em solution of "Endless Cycle," the warmed-over
Springsteen Viet-vet homilies of "Xmas in February," and the down-
right jejune pseudo-myth called "Last Great American Whale."
To be fair, all Lou Reed albums have moments nobody needs, which
on a good or great Lou Reed album are overcompensated for by extraor-
dinary peaks not found anywhere else. And New York does have good
tunes that showcase Reed's masterfully savage ironies at work: "Hal-
loween Parade," set over a bouncy little riff, looks at AIDS and the
ghosts conjured up for him by that annual Village street blowout; "Dirty
Blvd." slices a patented Reed view of the drug-and-whore netherworld;
"Beginning of a Great Adventure," a wry and relentless look at the
always tangled motives behind having kids, offers classic Reed lines like,
"It might be fun to have a kid that I could kick around create in my own
image like a god I'd raise my own pallbearers to carry me to my grave and
keep me company when I'm a wizened toothless clod."
But even the best songs here are hobbled by a kind of musical apha-
sia. There's no tension, ironic or otherwise, between Reed's monotone
vocals and the insipid arrangements punctuated by barely competent
Keith Richards-type licks. New York sounds like a collection of demos
with the redeeming vitality somehow drained out. [1989]

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 chapter 19

On the Border
The cover for his latest album, his seventh in nine years, is startling. A
hulking skull, leering toothily from beneath a Mexican cowboy hat,
sprouts from a clothed skeletal body which straddles a horse rivaling
Quixote's Rocinante for malnutrition; the right arm brandishes a
reverse-field Jolly Roger. Its fierce mouth open, eyes literally blazing,
the steed clatters across clusters of worn skulls and pieces of bone against
a dour, dark sky. It is a graphic reproduction of an engraving of Em-
iliano Zapata, possibly by the Master of the Wormeaten Skull; and it
serves notice that Joe King Carrasco's Bandido Rock has some things to
say about how the U.S. conducts its business south of the border. He's
come through New York a few times this summer to perform it live for
the folks who've been following him and his music while, in the rock
and roll tradition, he follows the road.
Not of Latino descent himself, Carrasco (ne Teutsch) has drunk in
the south Texas musical traditions that find a polka beat firing through
so many border sounds. Because of the heavy concentration of German
immigrants in both Texas and Mexico, some say partly because of the
Emperor Maximilian's abortive reign, the polka was imported from its
central European spawning grounds and transplanted to the region,
where it melded with Spanish traditions to produce the two-step. The
style infiltrated swing music via the territory bands of the region, re-
sounded in the Western swing bands of folks like Bob Wills, then resur-
faced in the budding pop idioms of Ritchie Valens and his pal Buddy
Holly. During the '60s, Texas-based rockers like ? and the Mysterians
and Doug Sahm and California types like Cannibal and the Headhun-
ters and Sam the Sham kept the flame, and, more recently, bands like
Los Lobos and the Cruzados have picked up the torch. This long-
running current in pop's wide river has, thanks to the massive success of
La Bamba, suddenly been rendered visible beyond cult borders again.

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 Dancing in Your Head

And so, I hope, will Carrasco. Like the currents in a river, his
mongrelized music has flowed in a general direction: from the friendly
party-animal brawls of his early days to the still-good-humored, if by
turns fierce and ironic, political commitment of his recent efforts. Un-
like Los Lobos, who paint devastating portraits of the underclass but look
to a kind of spiritual resolution for the dilemmas of economic and
cultural imperialism, Carrasco gets ever grittier in search of an earthly
revolution. With his last two albums, he seems to have found one, in
Nicaragua. In a way, he's become like an updated Woody Guthrie,
peeling off song after song that takes a flinty-eyed look at official pieties.
But Carrasco isn't a moldy folky classicist: his medium is the raun-
chiest of bar-based rock and roll, the slop-it-up, stomp-it-out, tear-this-
roadhouse-down variety. You can think about the lyrics, all right, and
you'd probably better, but you're gonna have to do it while the urgent
beat, the snarling guitars, and the wheezy organ and accordion blast you
and your Dos Equis into Partyland. Like all the best descendants of the
Stones' "Street Fighting Man," Carrasco's political rock swaggers with
compelling dance-floor rhythms that are far from cerebral to put the
message across. Take Bandido Rock as an example. Picking up the overt
political direction he began with Bordertown, the LP bristles with self-
explanatory titles like the churning, darkly minor-key "Hey Gringo 'No
Pasaran'" and the closing track, "Fuera Yanqui," as well as the ironic
singsong called "Banana."
Still, it's got live that you really want Carrasco: the clubs strung out
along the road are really more his natural home than vinyl, which can
only suggest the sweaty, smoke-filled celebrations that follow him
wherever he plays. It's often been said that rock and roll is basically a
community rite, not an act of solitude; even a narcissist like Billy Idol
wants to dance with himself in front of a crowd. Carrasco doesn't have
money or fame, doesn't play arenas, and tramps around the country
with only a road map and a beat-up van instead of an entourage. But
when he and the band pull into town you're guaranteed 100 percent
from the heart of rock and roll. [1987]

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 chapter 20
Payola Guys
Hit Men by Frederic Dannen (Times Books/Random House) looks at
the development and consolidation of the recording industry over the
last twenty-plus years. As late as the 1960s, it was still a ragtag collection
of hundreds of vari-sized companies that could compete on different but
roughly equivalent levels. A tiny label could produce a major national
hit partly because everyone shared the same fragmented regional distri-
bution systems, partly because radio was looser and more open, via
payola and the independent tastes of individual disk jockeys, to smaller
companies' efforts. Now the industry has evolved into a bare handful of
major labels that control 96 percent of the U.S. retail market and boast
the only national distribution pipelines around—which means their
products are the only ones guaranteed an automatic presence in stores,
especially chains, across the country.
While it touches on this, Dannen's book focuses on another part of
the market-control mechanism at play in the record industry: the indus-
trialized institutionalization of payola. According to Dannen (who's
based much of his research on previous reporting), the payola scandal of
the '50s that broke the likes of Alan Freed inadvertently led to this
situation. First, responsibility for choosing what would go on the air was
taken from the DJs and centralized in station program directors; the
theory was that that would minimize abuse. What it did instead, as
Dannen sees it, was create an opportunity for the major labels and
organized-crime affiliates. Dannen's sources estimate that in the 1980s
CBS—which, he says, helped formulate the system and used it most
heavily—spent $10 million annually to hire independent promoters,
who in return supposedly generated widespread airplay for the records
they were paid to rep. By upping the ante for the promoters' services
beyond the smaller labels' reach, the majors could effectively dominate
radio, and thus guarantee themselves a hammerlock on chart-toppers
and an ever increasing market share.
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 Dancing in Your Head

The ironic twist came when the promoters began to hold the industry
hostage for those vast amounts—and more. Their power, as Dannen
notes, derived not from their ability to make hits; contrary to paranoid
myth, nobody's ever really figured out quite how to do that. But the
promoters could guarantee that if they didn't get their cut for a record, it
wouldn't make the airwaves, and thus the charts—the negative power of
the gatekeeper. Since radio has progressively stratified stylistically into
narrowband formats dictated by PDs and programming consultants over
the last two decades, and since experimental, pioneering, and even just-
left-of-center sounds have disappeared from the medium that broke rock
and roll when it was just a fledgling regional style, it looks like the
strategy worked.
Dannen leaves his plot cliff-hanging: some of its major characters are
awaiting trials whose outcomes will presumably determine the industry's
(and the government's) next steps. The ending doesn't significantly af-
fect Hit Men's value, since its prime virtue is that it collects this story in
one place; most of the puzzle's pieces have been exposed before. (Dan-
nen meticulously cites sources in back-of-the-book notes.)
Possibly because of what he sees as the personality-driven nature of
the record biz, and possibly because the best-selling books about busi-
ness are usually driven by insider gossip, Dannen combines solid re-
search and reporting with what seems meant to be an intimate behind-
the-scenes flavor. There's amateur psychologizing about label heads'
backgrounds and motives and insecurities, for instance, and annoying
and unprofessional stylistic tics, like referring to protagonists by their
first names. There's a somewhat unsettling tendency to reduce corporate
struggles to personality conflicts. Then too, Dannen doesn't always get
his factual details right, which isn't reassuring: he woefully underesti-
mates the number of annual releases, for example. But despite its faults,
Hi'f Men is a useful and provocative and highly readable perspective on
an industry that still likes to pretend it's not. [1990]

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 chapter.., 21
Turn On Your Love Light
Following the resurgence of apparent social commitment in pop music
since the punk explosion of the late 70s, When the Music's Over: The
Story of Political Pop by Robin Denselow (Faber & Faber) or something
like it was probably inevitable. Not only because the subject is begging to
be covered, but because the entertainment conglomerates that dispense
information to us all tend to milk any trend or money-maker that comes
up in every format available. And as Tracy Chapman and Bob Geldof
and countless others have shown, good politics can translate into good
numbers—and good numbers are the only ideology the accountants
care about.
You won't come away with that sense from When the Music's Over,
however. For Robin Denselow—a British journalist who, according to
the dust-jacket blurb, "specializes in both pop and politics"—the world
of political pop is a relatively simple if rambunctious place that consists
largely of good guys (the politically committed) and misguided guys (the
politically confused or uncommitted) and bad guys (politicians, corpo-
rate executives, and the like). Sometimes the good guys and the bad guys
go eyeball-to-eyeball; more often various varieties of good guys engage in
the kinds of intramural power/ideological struggles/backbiting the left is
so adept at.
Within this reductive frame, Denselow charts a history of political
pop that is largely a fair and interesting re-telling. Beginning with folkies
like the Weavers in the '50s, he walks us through the '60s civil-rights/
antiwar era in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, and Greece (that last more off-
the-usually-beaten-path than his other material), the 70s and '80s in the
Caribbean and Africa, the '80s in Ireland, and the recent mega-media
campaigns against nuclear power, apartheid, Thatcher, and so on.
Most of this comes out about right in Denselow's hands, although he
spends a disproportionate amount of his attention on developments in
the U.K. and his editor Pete Townshend and Townshend's extremely
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 Dancing in Your Head

unpolitical band, The Who. And he gets myriad details wrong-—calling

Pete Seeger Peter, Keith Richards Richard, Charles Mingus's "Fables of
Faubus" Fables ofForbus, and so on. Still, he does cover events over a
wide geographical and cultural range, focusing primarily on charismatic
figures like Ewan MacColl and Bob Marley and Billy Bragg, as well as
outlining a generally solid, workmanlike picture of music's interaction
with political movements and ideals over the last 40 years.
The terms around which his book revolves, however, are never re-
solved, or even raised significantly—which both limits and frees him.
Since he effectively never defines what he means by the "political pop"
of his book's subtitle, he seems unshackled by dogma and able to
roam—which he does, literally around the world and across generic
lines with what might seem like commendable impunity if it didn't seem
more like naivete.
What exactly do Pete Seeger and Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte
and Bob Marley, Miriam Makeba and Harry Chapin and the Sex Pis-
tols and Tracy Chapman, Ewan MacColl and The Who and Bob
Geldof and Sweet Honey in the Rock, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan
and Thomas Mapfumo and Jello Biafra and U2 have in common?
Denselow never explicitly says; he just assumes a kind of time line of
continuity—the retrospective reasoning of naive history—between old
folkies like Seeger and MacColl and rock and rollers around the globe,
whether political activists or simply rebels by cultural definition. But
where folkies like Seeger and many Third World rockers hearken back to
an ageless worldwide tradition of the news-bearing troubador—a tradi-
tion Denselow rightly notes—First World rockers (and, as they enter
First World-run pipelines into the international marketplace, musicians
of every stripe) have another, completely different heritage and milieu to
deal with as well.
For while rock was born as a folk music, its surging popularity quickly
made it a commercial property whose stock kept fluctuating—and whose
managers kept manipulating it to their own ends as best they could. By
the early '60s, for instance, the rockabilly rebels of the '50s were dead or
in the army, Chuck Berry was in prison, and oodles of Dick Clark-
sponsored voiceless wonders were crooning "rock" songs that Bing
Crosby could have felt comfortable with.
Unfortunately, the closest Denselow comes to articulating anything
about rock as commercial music is in passages like this: "Rock'n'roll was
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 Turn On Your Love Light

under attack from the start, but this exuberant new style, unsure of its
power or even whether it would last, merely tugged a forelock politely at
the establishment. [Bill] Haley tried reason, Elvis joined the army, and
none of the first generation rockers rocked the political boat."
The civil-rights/antiwar movement of the '60s changed that, of
course, with its explicit, folkie-derived recognition that music, as part of
culture, can help create a community and articulate shared ideals,
values, goals. Bernice Johnson Reagon, longtime activist and leader of
the women's harmony group Sweet Honey in the Rock, puts it suc-
cinctly: "The singing was used to create the climate, to get people ready
to address the issues. So any statement from lawyers, any testimony from
someone who'd been arrested, was presented on a bed of song. And the
song-leaders were absolutely essential. . . . A job had to be done by
the singing, and it wasn't done by someone singing a solo."
But just as Woodstock has now, in the post-Reagan years, become
what Adweek in late May called "sanitized as both a memory and
a marketing tool" so that that Festival's logo can appear on 20th-
anniversary ashtrays and barrettes and T-shirts, so too with rock's politi-
cal edge in the '80s. The key change over the last 20 years has been the
sheer growth and consolidation of the entertainment industry.
Rock is now a mega-business—if you don't believe me, just ask Sony-
CBS or Time Warner—that grosses some $7 billion annually in the
U.S. alone. The bits and pieces of the modern delivery system that
began to emerge in the '30s—radio, for instance, which made Woody
Guthrie and Benny Goodman folk heroes—have, over the last decade
and more, been assembled into a more homogenized and controlled
mass-marketing organ. Among its components: playlist-radio and MTV
(which functions as the linchpin between Madison Avenue and rock,
drawing directors and casts back and forth across the nonexistent line
between music videos, which are of course ads themselves, and com-
mercials), corporate underwriting and sponsorships of tours and major
events, record companies (owned by larger conglomerates with far-flung
interests), retailers (more and more, mega-chains), and, of course, the
press.
While this doesn't translate into a cabal of evil geniuses who are able
to predict what will go to number one on the charts, it does mean
enormous amounts of pressure can be exerted in a casual way to keep
other smaller players (in the form of indie record labels or breaking

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bands, for instance) off the field. If you can manage to find out where
the field is: as nearly anyone who's ever worked in a record store can
explain, the Billboard charts that serve as the industry's sales bible are
steadily if quietly manipulated by enticements of various kinds from
record companies to the underpaid retailers who report sales figures to
that trade magazine.
This massive, sloppy pipeline also intrudes inevitable distortions on
virtually any overt political act and/or message sent through it by a
musician, however well intentioned. When Amnesty International runs
tours sponsored by Reebok, with the TV and radio coverage saturated
with ads boasting endorsements of motorcycles and soda pop by the
people coming on and off the stage, you have to stop and wonder just
what the messages getting to the audience are, even though AI's mem-
bership rolls and general-public awareness level obviously get a deserved
and needed boost. The same issues can—and unfortunately, must—be
raised for Live Aid, Farm Aid, and every mega-event mounted by con-
temporary mega-conglomerates.
The implications roll on from there. Just one example: What does
the outpouring of environmental concern on the part of musicians
mean in the context of an industry so dependent on petrochemicals?
(Once you've noticed that, it does seem odd and perhaps revealing that
so much concern is lavished by U.S. and U.K. rockers on Japanese
fishing practices and Brazilian logging.)
Underlying questions remain. Does anyone—can anyone—in a cul-
ture as commercially fractured and driven as ours actually respond in a
lasting, meaningful way to messages about revolution, racism, poverty,
sexual freedom, child abuse, and teenage pregnancy that are sand-
wiched between the same old 30-second spots about acne medicine and
chewing gum? Whether in the form of mega-events or a tune played on
commercial radio, 1980s political pop is not, after all, some direct
modern analog to the wandering singer setting up in the town square—
as much as we all pretend at times that it is, if only because the contra-
dictions are too thick and daunting to deal with.
I don't have any answers to these questions, but I wish Robin
Denselow had at least raised the issues. Then we might actually be able
to begin talking about what political pop is. In the meantime, at least
he's taken a fact-oriented first step on the long road ahead. [1989]

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 chapter., 22
Rock Vaudeville
They scamper onstage, just the two of them and their prerecorded
backing tracks and a weird assortment of instruments that includes elec-
tric guitar, accordion, baritone sax, and stick—as in limb of a tree. They
don't wear Spandex or black leather or funny suits with water-squirting
flowers in their lapels or big floppy shoes on their—well, wherever
they'd put them. But they do sometimes don gigantic puppet heads and
hands and ridiculous wicker hats that look like something the tomb-
builders for Ramses II discarded. They twitch and pogo during their
tunes in a schizoid frenzy that suggests they're recent escapees from an
electro-shock clinic. They are They Might Be Giants, whose whimsical
irony and sharp-witted parodies have cut them a path to the high-school
and college audience that listens to the Smiths and Sonic Youth and U2
and Run-DMC and has, it seems, begun to perceive the web of social
pathology linking their individual angsts.
Whimsy and irony aren't words you find nestling comfortably
alongside rock and roll in too many places even though they have a role
that goes back to the music's very beginnings. As Robert Christgau has
suggested, those qualities explain how a lot of Chuck Berry tunes—
"Memphis," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "No Particular Place To Go"—
gently overcame the distances separating this black adult (thirty years old
and already a prison vet when he penned hit after hit) from white
teenage America. Duck-walking across the stage, slinging his guitar over
his back and between his legs as he played, Berry is a Founding Father
not only of rock and roll, but of rock vaudeville.
Berry and other key performers of that first generation—Elvis Presley,
Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard—were the main vehicles by which the
minstrel show and vaudeville came into rock and roll. Twist Berry's
good-natured view of adolescence into the surly, know-it-all smugness
brandished by many teenagers and you get the Mothers of Invention.
The Mothers' early social critiques were soon squandered on two mutu-
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 Dancing in Your Head

ally exclusive (though neurotically connected) directions: increasingly

feeble "satire" (largely limited to sneering at safe targets like suburban
America's hypocrisy) and inflated musical pretensions (leader Frank
Zappa's constant citations of Edgard Varese as his model—the need to
justify by appeal to European classicism that infects the American body
cultural).
While the Mothers were squatting in the Village in the late '60s, at
the theater upstairs from the Cafe Au Go Go, the Fugs were down the
block in the basement of the Cafe Wha?, hurling Beat-style lyrics and
deliberately disjointed rockabilly- and country-flavored tunes at the tiny
audience in a kind of anarcho-hippie cabaret. No small historical irony
that this club was where a then unknown guitarist named Jimi Hendrix
(calling himself Jimmy James, and his band the Blue Flames), first
played on his own. Hendrix, of course, reclaimed and expanded the
wilder staging aspects of rock vaudeville, which had been left largely
dormant (except for the likes of James Brown and the Velvet Under-
ground) outside the black music ghetto known since vaudeville's heyday
as the "chitlin* circuit." Hendrix had played that circuit, and developed
his onstage mania, behind stars like Little Richard and the Isley
Brothers.
There were other vaudevillians at work in different directions. Begin-
ning with a free-form radio show allowable in the late '60s (and verboten
ever since on commercial radio), Firesign Theater molded old detective
novels, B movies from the '30s, TV channel-jumping, social and politi-
cal radicalism, and rock and roll into a thoughtful and hilarious Joycean
pastiche that became at once an acute social critique and a lot of re-
cycled fun. Monty Python, their British TV counterparts, often worked
with Neil Innes, co-conspirator in the collection of zany Brits known as
the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Less overtly political and more self-
consciously arty than some of their contemporaries, the Bonzos shared
with their fellow vaudevillians the genre's defining traits: a highly devel-
oped sense of parody, a broad knowledge of musical formats, a love of
wordplay, a keen feel for the ridiculous.
Which brings us to They Might Be Giants. The Giants have indeed
been laughing hard all the way from the now defunct East Village
performance club called 8 B.C. (a bomb-crater of a basement where I
first saw them years ago) to the Ritz (one of N. Y.'s top-line venues) and
MTV. One of the best things about their drawing closer to the bank is
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 Rock Vaudeville

that there's no single cause behind it, no simple way to explain how their
quirky parodic anthems, their knotted and witty takes on adolescent
viewpoints, have reached out to the numbers they obviously have. The
Giants have no major-label contract, and so there's no machine grind-
ing out PR releases by the truckload, spitting out pieces of vinyl by the
truckload to radio stations and print media, rounding up rock critics by
the truckload, hauling in truckloads of TV promo spots on The Tonight
Show and all. Instead what you have here, as with hiphop, is a phenom-
enon that is both at the roots of rock and roll and periodically almost
forgotten—word-of-mouth, spontaneous appeal through shared values
and the call to rebellion. It's no accident that some Giants' tunes have
titles like "Kiss Me, Son of God" and "Alienation's for the Rich."
Nor is it a coincidence that the Giants have translated their developed
sense of how skewed the world is not only into biting songs but into a
mushrooming popularity stoked by their simple, useful, and brilliant
insight into how the skewed music biz functions. Since doors did not
exactly fling themselves open at the Giants' approach, they devised Dial-
a-Song. Pick up the phone, punch in 1-718-387-6962, and you get that
day's Giant-penned looney tune (there are over 300 to choose from). To
understand how subversive this tack is, especially in light of its success,
you have to understand a few things about the U.S. music industry.
It's no news to anyone that over the last 15 years the handful of major
labels have come to dominate the release of "product," as they call the
items they make from pop music. (Previously they'd limited themselves
more to raiding whatever "fad" established an audience for itself, as
when RCA bought Elvis's contract after his initial hits on the minuscule
Sun label.) This effort to regularize the market, to make a more predict-
able commodity out of recordings and more predictable and massed
consumers out of a jumpy patchwork of audiences, was just another
instance of the way top-heavy corporations grew via mergers and mutual
monopoly agreements in almost all other areas of the U.S. economy
during this period. There's no need to invoke a conspiracy theory of
history to understand how this narrowing of possibilities for both musi-
cian and audience is enforced: it's in the same depersonalized mode that
characterizes the interlocking and self-regulating control apparatus we
call industrial bureaucracy everywhere. That way, options are rendered
unavailable (I use the passive voice deliberately).
That apparatus, as it currently exists within the recording industry, is
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 Dancing in Your Head

built from three main parts. First are the large labels—WEA (Warner-
Elektra-Atlantic), CBS, RCA, Capitol-EMI, PolyGram, and MCA, all
of which shelter clusters of smaller lines beneath their expansive corpo-
rate umbrellas. Their sheer distribution muscle—they own the only
truly national pipelines to service retailers—both determines what they
release (sales are intended to average six-digits' worth of "product" to
break even) and casts them as Charles Atlas to everyone else's 97-pound
weakling. Then there are the large commercial radio stations, whose
reach over the airwaves via their high-wattage signals and metropolitan
locations is all the more damaging given their neurotically focused and
formatted playlists. Those commandments take what "product" makes it
through the pipelines and break it down even further according to the
"demographics" (read racist, economic, and cultural imperatives) the
labels and stations share as ways to categorize sound, and decree which
are playable on what particular station. (A healthy cadre of "program-
ming consultants" has grown up over the last decade to service just this
neurosis; they do the breakdowns, make the playlists, and take the sta-
tion's responsibility to the audience whose airwaves it rides into their
own well-manicured hands.)
Finally (though the bloom has worn off this particular rose in the
industry to a certain extent because of its volatile audience figures) there
is MTV. Initially owned in large part by Warner Communications,
WEA's corporate parent, MTV has since been bought by Viacom, a
subsidiary of National Amusements that deals extensively in music vid-
eotapes. Whatever its ownership, MTV has in effect appropriated the
narrowcast formats that have effectively throttled creativity on commer-
cial radio.
They Might Be Giants neatly sidestepped (and quite possibly under-
cut) the whole thicket with Dial-a-Song. And when you think about it,
what else could they have done, short of accepting their own oblivion as
inevitable and just? Outside of college radio, that beleaguered and
wildly uneven haven for the idi.osyncratic, what programmer would
have knowingly (never mind willingly) aired songs like "Youth Culture
Killed My Dog," a tragic tale of a puppy whose mind was blown by
hiphop and white funk when all he really loved were Bachrach-David
tunes; or "She's an Angel," a literalization of that cliche which observes
of the winged folk, "When they sing you can't hear, there's no air"; or
"Everything Right Is Wrong Again," which traces "the line dividing
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 Rock Vaudeville

laugh and scream" (one of the Giants' favorite live ploys is to ask their
audience between songs to "scream like you're in hell")?
Surely one reason the Giants have succeeded in circumventing the
industrial apparatus between them and their potential audience is that
they give that audience credit for brains—something few major-label or
commercial-radio execs can be accused of. Not only are their lyrics
consistently well worked and able to turn on thought-provoking para-
doxes or allusive situations, but their music grips and shakes those lyrics
with the tenacity of a grinning pit bull. Thus their brilliantly executed
parodies: of Elvis Costello's paranoid Hitchcockian visions ("(She Was
a) Hotel Detective"); of The Who's '60s-youth-culture banalities ("Hope
That I Get Old Before I Die"); of the pseudo-Rimbaudian babble that
Bob Dylan and his ilk all too often palm off as poetry ("Absolutely Bill's
Mood"); of that tired country and rock staple, the road song ("Toddler
Hiway"); and on and on.
The social implications undergirding their mordant satires and their
self-marketing campaign become clear on a number like "Put Your
Hand Inside the Puppet Head": "Ads up in the subway are the work of
someone / Trying to please their boss / And though the guy's just a pig we
all know what he wants/Is just to please somebody else/If the puppet
head were only busted in / It would be a better thing for everyone in-
volved / And we wouldn't have to cry / Put your hand inside the puppet
head." Whether the puppet head is MCA's, IBM's, or Reagan's, the
advice couldn't be better. So put your hand inside the puppet head and
pull out their LP (They Might Be Giants, Bar/None Records) and their
12-inch single ("Don't Let's Start," b/w three tracks not on the LP, Bar/
None Records); they'll give you as much laughter as you can take and
you'll help them edge closer to the bank. That's what I call a fair
exchange. [1988]

107
 \ ^ chapter. 23
Good Day at Black Rock
Via the mongrelized sounds of rock and roll, some of the key questions
Living Colour pose on their debut album, Vivid (Epic), deal with the
divisive nature and state of racism in this country. Take the pointed,
frantic, punk bash "Which Way to America?," which describes the
chasm still cutting between the two Americas a generation after the
assassination of Martin Luther King. "I look at the TV / Your America's
doing well/I look out the window/My America's catching hell/I just
want to know, which way do I go/To get to your America?" Then, over
a stomping drums-only backdrop: "Where's my picket fence, my tall
cool glass of lemonade? / Where's my VCR, my stereo, my TV shows?"
It's an indictment that, flying on rock-and-roll wings, may well reach
more ears than the Kerner Commission Report.
In fact, Vivid poses two levels of questions, one simply by its exis-
tence. That's because Living Colour is led by guitarist/chief songwriter
Vernon Reid, who's also co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition. The
BRC began in 1985 as a cooperative organization for black musicians
dedicated to breaking the color-bar stereotypes and marketing categories
slammed across music by the recording industry. In effect, certain areas,
like rootsy rock and roll and heavy metal and other college-radio-
oriented sounds, are simply designated off-limits to blacks.
Fundamental to how this industry-wide segregation works is a way of
organizing and describing sound not stylistically but racially, as if that
division were self-evident. Every major record company has a separate
a&r department, marketing department, and publicity department to
handle r&b (read black) artists. Radio stations, especially in lucrative
urban markets, are categorized by the putative color of their audiences,
and the music they play is programmed by their consultants accord-
ingly. Retail outlets organize their bins and departments to follow suit.
Publications that survive largely on industry support, from fanzines to
trades, follow that racist lead religiously; even jazz magazines, covering
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 Good Day at Black Rock

a field clearly dominated by black players, tilt heavily toward covering

whites, especially in big features. So the lock-up is pretty complete.
From the industry's standpoint, this kind of segregation has the ob-
vious advantage of neatening the crazy quilt of sounds it sells. Black
musicians are expected to follow one of three or four permissible proto-
types for the music they're told "their" audience wants to hear. But
however obvious the advantages of this policy may be to a large, estab-
lished, and ever-more-consolidated industry seeking to control its output
and regularize its markets by increasing compartmentalization, the
equally obvious problem is that music, like any art form, is messy, and
spills over even such apparently airtight borders as race.
Given the relative weakness of the musicians in this marketing game,
it's no surprise that the struggle is usually resolved in the circular form of
self-fulfilling prophecy. If blacks are "supposed" to play a certain con-
stellation of styles for their pre-assigned black audiences, and if to get a
hearing for their music they have to make it fit the pre-existing slots,
most times they will.
Nor should it come as a surprise to learn that these racially segregated
arrangements aren't reciprocal. White musicians can appropriate
"black" styles like funk with the same ease that in the '50s found
cardigan-wearing Pat Boone covering the hermaphroditic, gospel-
derived raunch of Little Richard for white America's eyes and ears.
Since black audiences constantly learn about official white culture while
whites have to delve to get into black culture, one ironic result is that
black musicians can more easily reappropriate "white" sounds for their
own ends—like when Run-DMC incorporated heavy metal into rap.
As Jesse Jackson has done in the presidential forum, the BRC has
tried to reformulate the debate about these topics by insistently pointing
to the racism and economic inequalities that structure it and seeking
ways to escape its contradictions. It uses two basic approaches. One is a
regular program of meetings that gather musicians, writers, anyone
interested in music to address the free-floating agenda of racism in the
industry and how to combat it. Topics can range from how and whether
to set up an alternative method of recording and promoting black musi-
cians not playing within their accepted formats to how to combat the
dominance of high-priced, high-powered synthesizer technology by
whites—who, just by possessing it, automatically gain access to gigs
more lucrative and high-profile than blacks can without it.
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 Dancing in Your Head

The other prong of the BRC's attack has aimed at infiltrating the
clubs, the incubators, after all, of music, audiences, and opinions alike.
In a kind of floating guerrilla road show, they've staged performances at
a variety of venues all over New York: artsy sites like the Kitchen, punk
havens like CBGB's, Third World centers like SOB's, downtown hip-
rock pockets like Siberia, where their last show was a fund-raiser for Jesse
Jackson. The purposes have been several: to raise money, to re-evaluate
accepted myths about black and white roles in U. S. pop music history in
public, to introduce different member bands/players doing their differ-
ent musics to different audiences, and—driving all the others—to edu-
cate audiences about the racism and politics underlying the musical
categories they are forced to hear every day. Reid, for instance, dubs the
AOR radio format—the initials stand for Album-Oriented Rock, which
translates as '60s-dominated sounds from records by white musicians—
Apartheid-Oriented Radio.
The blazing jewel of the BRC is Reid's Living Colour. When he
started the first version of the group, Reid was known primarily as one of
the younger jazz-based players coming up on the downtown N. Y. scene;
he'd played with the swaggering Decoding Society of Ornette Coleman's
ex-drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson for years. But he had grown up
listening to all kinds of rock-based sounds, like almost all musicians his
age, and he also played them. He became determined to find a way to
mold them all into a musical shape he could call his own.
This kickass quartet successfully realizes that concept in its astonish-
ing range and surefooted commitment to explore cross-cultural sounds
regardless of color, origin, or destination. Like rappers mixing all kinds
of records on their turntables, Living Colour thrives on its phenomenal
breadth of musical influences. The ingredients they blend so skillfully
are—in contradistinction to the industry's unwritten codes—attuned to
roots-digging college-radio types and buppies, ghetto posses as well as
alienated suburban metalheads: hardcore metal raveups slam into bluesy
ballads and psychedelicized pop, lilting Caribbean inflections collide
with hiphop scrambles of prerecorded material and touches of funk.
One of Vivid's killer tracks is a drastically rearranged version of the
Talking Heads' classic "Memories Can't Wait," which sharpens its edge
on a long rideout of overdubbed guitars that wheeze and groan like a
Cajun band on acid. There's no small irony in covering a cut by a white

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 Good Day at Black Rock

group that first broke into the mainstream by covering Al Green's "Take
Me to the River."
This talent for coming up with the unexpected shapes everything the
foursome does. Opening in hiphop fashion with a snippet from the last
speech by Malcolm X before his death and closing with "Ask not what
your country can do for you" from Kennedy's inaugural and FDR's
famous "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself platitude, "Cult of
Personality" thunders its coiled riffs as Cory Glover pumps his big,
supple voice along a list of warnings: "I'm the smiling face on your
TV I . . . I exploit you, still you love me /1 tell you one and one makes
three /I'm the Cult of Personality." Reid's guitar solo blisters and
screams its anger in response, while bassist Muzz Skillings and drum-
mer Will Calhoun pummel the rhythms into outrage.
If it's obvious from those lyrics that Living Colour isn't shy about its
commitment to combining music with social commentary, a quick run-
through of some song titles confirms it: "Cult of Personality," "Desper-
ate People," "Middle Man," "Which Way to America?," "Open Letter
to a Landlord." But the beauty of how they sculpt their attack comes not
just from what they say but from the way they shuffle up sounds to
match words. It's a tack as contemporary as the 48-track studio.
Look at how "Open Letter to a Landlord" is built. It kicks off with a
sweet-chording, attackless guitar that floats rubato in mournful anticipa-
tion behind the chorus: "Now you can tear a building down / But you
can't erase a memory/These houses may look all rundown/But they
have a value you can't see." Suddenly the song snaps into a hard strut
driven by Skillings's stuttering bass and Reid's crunchy, swerving chords
and snarling fills, as Glover wails:
This is my neighborhood . . . I call this place my home/You call
this place a slum/You want to run the people out/This is what you're
all about/. . . Last month there was a fire/I saw several children
die/You sent flowers to the families/But your sympathy's a lie/'Cause
every building that you b u r n / I s more blood money that you earn/We
are forced to relocate / From the pain that you create.

It closes with the rattle of an elevated train. What's created is more than
a descriptive song, however evocative: it's a physical, three-dimensional
sonic portrait that puts you into the rhythms, the stances, the scene.

Ill
 Dancing in Your Head

Living Colour does that just as deftly for more personal themes as
well. The satiric "Glamor Boys" bounces along its nonstop buoyant
Afro-Caribbean dance groove as it cuts the superficial party lovers who
spend their lives chasing the right club and the right clothes—on debil-
itating credit, of course. The pseudo-bottleneck swells weeping through
"Broken Hearts" match its lyrics' age-old laments with the sound of the
blues, '60s style: if it recalls the Stones of Beggars Banquet vintage, that's
partly because Mick Jagger plays harp on it.
The sheer mastery they deploy to put over their messages is a major
reason Living Colour has attracted and held a growing multiracial audi-
ence during the long search for a record deal. Another has been their
fierce but user-friendly stage show. In fact, the buzz about them going
around New York was what lured Mick Jagger and Jeff Beck down to
CBGBs one night over a year ago to see them. Blown out by their set,
Jagger—whose Stones started life as a cover band doing "black" music—
offered to produce a demo they could shop around for a deal. Eventu-
ally, they wound up at Epic. To its credit, that arm of Columbia seems
genuinely interested in promoting what they've signed. [1988]

chapter 24
The Godfathers of Rap
As rappers and hiphoppers have become more and more mainstream,
most have shed, retargeted, or blunted the edge of rage and truth-telling
that drove the wordplay of 70s pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa and
Grandmaster Flash. It's the American Way: the closer you get to the
center (of politics, the market, whatever), the less likely it is you're
gonna say anything that significantly offends your audiences/buyers.
Could M. C. Hammer or Vanilla Ice make anyone angry except via
their own lack of talent? Do the widely heralded gangster-rappers prolif-
erating up and down the West Coast really serve up anything but swag-
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 The Godfathers of Rap

ger and audio versions of bad B movies and Saturday morning cartoons?
The Last Poets don't like the direction a lot of rap has been going in,
so six years after their last album they've made a counterproposal with
the pointed and musically diverse Freedom Express (Celluloid). "We
produced this ourselves from scratch," says Sulieman El-Hadi, one-half
of the Poets. "We recorded it at the Brent Black Music Co-op in En-
gland; they gave us the studio at a good rate because we do a lot of things
for them." Shopping around for a distribution deal was no snap, but the
disc wound up with their previous label, Celluloid, in the U.S., while
in England they hooked up with Acid Jazz, which puts out many of the
jazz-rappers currently surfacing.
The Poets have been pushing the envelope—and making it possible
for rap to surface—for nearly a quarter-century now. So Sulieman's
view of the current rap scene is telling:
The medium that we deal with is the truth. And so consequently, our
stuff is serious. So some of the people we deal with in the media and
people that are in the recording business are afraid to deal with us, be-
cause of the political content of our work. But they're not only block-
ing our stuff, they're actively ripping us off.
I've been really hoping to do some things with the young brothers,
but we seem to keep missing each other. Some of them are good mani-
festations of the seeds we planted. I feel like all the young brothers
are talented, but the content of what they're saying isn't always posi-
tive; in fact, a lot of it is foolishness. The sex stuff, the gangster stuff—
I think they should cease and desist from that stuff right there. The
blow should be how to uplift the youth and themselves. And they
should research their material so they can address more serious
themes. That would be much more beneficial, since they have such
an influence on their listeners.
Not surprisingly, Sulieman numbers Public Enemy, KRS-One, Doug
E. Fresh, Queen Latifah, and the Jungle Brothers among his favorite
contemporary rappers.
Coming from the Last Poets, that's no idle evaluation. After all, since
they started out in the late '60s by extending the connections between
poets reciting and music that go back to the dawn of time and up
through Langston Hughes and the coffeehouse-jazz declamations of the
Beats, the Last Poets hammered out one of rap's early templates on a
series of albums—The Last Poets and This Is Madness—that became

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 Dancing in Your Head

impossible-to-find underground classics. (These two once-again-hard-

to-find discs were reissued by Celluloid in 1985. At that time Celluloid
also reissued Doriella Du Fontaine, the Poets' fiery collaboration with
Jimi Hendrix that foreshadowed the rap-meets-metal crossover of later
artists like Run-DMC.) "We're just the speakers, the amplifiers for the
people," asserts Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin, a.k.a. Alafia Pudim,
a.k.a. Lightnin' Rod, the other Poet. "What we do comes directly out of
reality. There are poems, like people, lined up around the block for us."
The line goes back to Harlem in 1967, the era of black power and
Vietnam. There, a group of writers shared a loft called East Wind,
where they would gather on Friday nights to read and perform their work
for the people of the neighborhood, accompanied only by house percus-
sionist Nilaga. They learned to use their voices like the frontline horns
of a jazz combo: one voice would solo with the lead while the others
would combine in a kind of riff-like refrain running behind it. Gradually
they built a word-of-mouth following because they tackled some major
problems that bugged their fellow ghetto dwellers head-on, things like
racism and poverty and the struggle to survive.
They were nameless until, with the kind of historical irony that's
usually reserved for bad novels, South African poet Willie Kgostile
showed up to read his work. The way Jalal recalls it, "He wrote that this
would be the last generation of poets before the generation of the revolu-
tion, and so that's why we called ourselves the Last Poets."
Their social-activist vision was fired by their Muslim beliefs—a com-
mon crosspollination during the late '60s that's recurred in the Afro-
centricity of many contemporary hiphoppers. These themes came into
play while the Poets explored the technique they'd developed for pre-
senting their work. Dubbed "spoagraphics" or spoken pictures, their
declamatory narratives were partially written and partially improvised.
Based in part on the long-enduring African-American dialogic format
called the dozens, spoagraphics armed the Poets with a verbally dextrous
attack for their political outrage. Their following grew, and word about
them began to leak out of Harlem.
Soon they found themselves on a PBS show, where they caught the
eye of producer Alan Douglas. At the time, Douglas's other ventures
included working with the likes of Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, and Jimi
Hendrix—which is how the Poets hooked up with the guitar hero. In the

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fall of 1969, Douglas was producing a Hendrix recording session with

drummer Buddy Miles, and then-Lightnin' Rod was in the control
room. Hendrix was late, so Douglas suggested that Rod rap. When
Hendrix showed up in mid-improvisation, he was fascinated, so he and
Miles stirred up some heavy funk-rock grooves with jazzy inflections
while Rod took flight on "Doriella Du Fontaine." It was one of the ways
Hendrix, who at that point felt cut off from black audiences because of
his management's marketing strategies and black radio's refusal to play
his music, tried to reconnect.
Douglas already knew what Rod could do before he asked him to take
the mike at Hendrix's session. He'd recorded the Poets that June, but
hadn't done anything with the tapes. According to Jalal, "He came up to
our loft and listened to us, and said he wanted to record us. We recorded
The Last Poets in June of 1969, but he didn't put it out. We kept at him,
saying either put it out or give it back to us. So he finally released it in
1970."
The Last Poets got virtually no airplay, but still managed to sell
hundreds of thousands of copies—some estimates run as high as
800,000. In the process, it helped foment a musical revolution, thanks
to what Jalal characterizes as "largely word-of-mouth sales. It was the
grassroots people that bought our records, because the record companies
found out at the beginning that the Last Poets couldn't be bought or
compromised. We wouldn't turn into plastic just to sell records." And
so, despite the larger-than-cult success of The Last Poets and This Is
Madness, despite the group's indie release of three more albums over the
next six years, they disappeared.
It was an oblivion that they insist, with some justification and some
hyperbole, was prepared for them by the corporate record powers-that-
be. Says Jalal, "We were in industry-imposed exile because we were too
real, too honest. We wouldn't be stars, because we wouldn't lose touch
with the earth, the people." Denied access to the media, the Poets took
their messages back to the places they'd sprung from: the streets, the
prisons, the people. The way Jalal puts it, "Media comes from the Greek
meaning in the middle, but the way they do it is more like this. (Stands
up, gets between two people, turns to one.) Yo' mama. (Turns to the
other.) Yo' mama. (Steps out from in between.) Now you dudes are
ready to fight each other—and you don't even know why."

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 Dancing in Your Head

Uncovering why is at the heart of what the Last Poets do. "We do
research in libraries, where they bury the lies, to get at the truth," puns
Jalal in a weirdly Sun Ra-ish fashion. Sulieman explains,
We keep each other in check, balance each other off, looking to find
the light. You find stories in the papers, like how one in every 250
Americans can expect to be murdered this year, but for black males it's
one out of every 23. Or companies that make birth-control products
that kill the women who use them. Or AIDS, or defense contractors.
That's reality. That's where it jumps off.
In 1985, the Poets got another chance to jump off with Oh My
People. Produced by Bill Laswell, it sported his patented production
techniques that combined hiphop-style drum machines and African
talking drums. With that, the Poets moved into the '80s with a ven-
geance. They sure didn't lose their edge. Take the haunting "What Will
You Do," which recites the threats and promises of a Muslim Last
Judgment over almost percussive background vocals and Aiyb Deng's
polyrhythmic talking drums, congas, chatan, and cowbell. "Let your
voice be heard/Train yourself to speak the righteous word," they chant.
Freedom Express continues their pursuit of righteousness. "Un-holy
Alliance," for instance, puts an indictment of the European conquest
and ruling of Africa over an engagingly floating highlife beat from West
Africa. "We used that rhythm because of the subject matter," says
Sulieman. "It's the highlife blues dealing with a highlife situation. We
always try to fit the music to the thematic sense of the poem. That's why
no two of our songs are the same." And it's why the Last Poets' broad-
stroked portraits of some of our time's ongoing and basic social conflicts
are still a useful and informative corrective to much of our official
culture. [1986/1991]

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 25
chapter 25
Don't Believe the Hype
If you strut into a party brandishing an Uzi, even a plastic toy replica,
you're gonna get noticed. The image encapsulates the approach, tri-
umph, predicament, limitations, delight, and calculation of Public En-
emy. They've provoked commentators who normally don't waste ink on
popular phenomena as well as culture pundits. The results: a tidal wave
of pronouncements about an attitude, a snatch of lyrics, a handful of
interview quotes, and a truckload of hype.
By now, Public Enemy has in many ways become more mirror than
entity. The group's attackers and defenders alike often bypass the music
for rhetorical flourishes, fanzine gush, and vague sociological analyses
scooped from their own preconceptions and fears and hopes. Rarely do
you find a simple statement like this: their second album, If Takes a
Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (Def Jam/Columbia), released last
year, was an inventive, astonishingly varied and textured collection of
musical challenges that greatly expanded on the promise of their debut,
Yo.' Bum Rush the Show (Def Jam); its recent follow-up, Fear of a Black
Planet (Def Jam/Columbia), stands above most competition but doesn't
live up to P.E.'s full promise.
The music and its quality should not be irrelevant to the debate
raging around Public Enemy. Hiphop, born in the black ghettos of
Brooklyn and the Bronx from the dub toasting and sound systems of
Jamaican immigrants, is that startling thing, a new way to imagine
sound. Looping, defacing, and recontextualizing isolated snippets
("samples") from old records—a bass line's rumble, a horn section's
punctuation, a guitar's shrieking wail—DJs who work turntables replace
bands as sound sources. Left out of the high-priced music wars by their
lack of access to state-of-the-art equipment, the early 1970s black street
music artists, concurrent with the rise of graffiti artists, surfaced. They
redefined an entire wing of rock and roll by grabbing what was cheap
and available: a couple of turntables, old records, manual dexterity, and
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 Dancing in Your Head

a new concept jostling shredded musical history into new shapes within
a single new tune behind the singsong, usually macho-deep-voiced
street-style poetry that descends from the dozens.
In the hands of early rappers like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
Five, that concept had social and political teeth: their 1982 hit "The
Message" was a searing indictment of the economic and social decay
accelerated by Reagan-era programs. But raps of the lighter sort—
variants of the usual teen-tune stuff about sex and posing—were gener-
ally what penetrated the commercial mainstream. After a decade as the
African-American equivalent of garage bands, after serving as the
soundtrack of the streets and illegal clubs, hiphop hit the big time and
the big labels with tunes like Run-DMC's "Walk This Way/' which
reworked the old Aerosmith proto-metal smash.
Turbulent density has been Public Enemy's main sonic contribution
to hiphop. Three-dimensional sounds, raw and cooked, crosscut with
the zigzagging speed of a dial twirling on a cosmic TV during P.E. tunes
like "Bring the Noise," where leader and chief rapper Chuck D., with
typically pungent self-awareness, underlines hiphop's pivotal role in
recent music history despite the prejudices it's encountered:

Beat is the father of your rock'n'roll / Music for whatcha, for whichin',
you call a band, man/Makin' a music, abuse it, but you can't do it,
ya know/You call 'em demos, but we ride limos, too/Whatcha gonna
do? Rap is not afraid of you / Beat is for Sonny Bono, beat is for Yoko
Ono.

As even that brief sample shows, P.E.'s lyrics turn on a reprise of'60s
black power and Afrocentrism; they speak of a repressed American cul-
ture for and to a generation of increasingly disenfranchised young black
males. Yet, despite the street poses essential to hiphoppers, the most
successful, including Run-DMC and Carlton Ridenhour (Chuck D.'s
real name) come from suburban middle-class backgrounds filled with
most of the same perks, car-cruising, TV and movie images and pop
music as their white counterparts. In fact, according to Chuck D.,
Public Enemy's early audiences were largely white—undoubtedly at
least partly as a result of that cross-cultural assimilation and understand-
ing.
While P.E.'s first album was sonically adventurous, Chuck D.'s
lyrics opened up on the second, which brought more complex and

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ambitious political statements into play—and thus manifested some of

the other contradictions facing not only Public Enemy but American
pop culture. Their first record sold over a quarter of a million copies
with little promotion, but their next album hit the million mark, and
CBS, their distributor, backed the group's PR reps with cash as they
began pouring on the promo hype, exploiting the group's black-
nationalist politics to sell product by, for example, organizing extensive
media coverage of P.E.'s 1989 "solidarity" appearance at New York's
Riker's Island prison.
Then the group's Minister of Information, Professor Griff, parroted a
Louis Farrakhan line of anti-Semitism during a May 22,1989, interview
with the Moonie-owned, right-wing Washington Times, "jews are
wicked . . . [and responsible for] the majority of wickedness that goes
on across the globe." He continued to say that Jews had financed the
slave trade, that they are "responsible for what's happening in South
Africa," and wondered about whether it's "a coincidence that the Jews
run the jewelry business and it's named jewelry." He also noted that he
admired Idi Amin, Muammar Khadaffy, and Ayotollah Khomeini.
All hell—if hell is where pundits are properly stored—broke loose in
the media. The shadowy Jewish Defense Organization, which claims
3000 members, announced a boycott of P.E., and sent a group armed
with baseball bats and chains to P.E.'s management offices. (For-
tunately, if comically, they had the wrong address.) The JDO also
peppered record company execs and retailers with flyers reprinting
Griffs incendiary remarks. In retaliation, Chuck D. announced that the
group was disbanding, that it was not disbanding and was preparing its
third album but would boycott the record industry (how was unclear),
and that Griff was dismissed. For a month, his position on all three
points seemed to change with each bulletin.
Griff was P.E.'s in-house ideologue and media brain. A U.S. Army
vet and martial-arts freak, he also trained and led the Security Force of
the First World (S1W) that brandishes plastic Uzi's onstage at P.E.
shows while doing martial-arts steps that look like doo-wop moves—a
weird parody of Malcolm X's Fruit of Islam elite that metaphorically
draws a line between entertainment and politics. An adherent of Far-
rakhan's Black Muslim beliefs, as is Chuck D., Griff is the kind of
two-dimensional Malcolm X white liberals and conservatives need:
he is what they tried to paint Malcolm as. Hence the jubilant outcry,
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 Dancing in Your Head

from the Village Voice to Rolling Stone, from the New York Times to
People.
But P.E.'s connection with Malcolm is vital and revealing, even
though any comparison is enormously to Griffs—and P.E.'s—dis-
advantage. A vocal segment of young African Americans, which P.E.
has helped nurture, has become increasingly Afrocentric, in cultural
terms. In that sense, they're among Malcolm's heirs; they self-
consciously voice his contention that black Americans must elevate
their own values, must build their own economic bases, must under-
stand that worldwide political and social movements against power
structures are inextricably linked via Eurocentric racism opposing them.
The Black Muslims, including Malcolm, identified with the Arabs of
the Mideast, an anti-Zionist alignment that fed into an already existing
resentment in certain segments of African-American communities like
Harlem toward the Jewish retailers, real-estate owners, and bankers who
were a visible face of white oppression.
That's part of the historical context for the inflammatory remarks that
got Griff kicked out of Public Enemy, after the JDO threats of boycott,
enormous media noise, and vacillations by Chuck D. about whether or
not he'd fired Griff—which naturally added fuel to the media fire. A
month after Griffs interview was published, Chuck D. held a press
conference and announced Griffs formal dismissal:

The black community is in crisis. Our mission as musicians is to ad-

dress these problems. Offensive remarks by Professor Griff are not in
line with Public Enemy's program. We are not anti-Jewish. We are
pro-black, pro-black-culture, and pro-human-race. Griff was to trans-
mit these values. He sabotaged this. We are not here to make enemies
but to say that the system is the enemy. To use the mechanism that
you're fighting against definitely is wrong.

Then came an astutely self-imposed silence, during which "Fight the

Power," P.E.'s anthem for Spike Lee's highly charged film Do the Right
Thing, climbed the charts. (Chuck says now that the reason for his
silence was to take the heat off the movie and Lee.) It was followed by
"Welcome to the Terrordome" (Def Jam/Columbia), their latest single.
The following lines were read as a metaphorical defense of the now
departed Griff and the group and a reiterated anti-Semitism:

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 Don't Believe the Hype

Crucifixion ain't no fiction / So-called chosen frozen / Apology made

to whoever pleases / Still they got me like Jesus /1 rather sing, bring,
think, reminisce / 'Bout a brother when I'm in sync / Every brother
ain't a brother cause a color/Just as well could be undercover/Back-
stabbed, grabbed a flag/From the back of the lab/Told a Rab get off
the rag/Sad to say I got sold down the river.
Not surprisingly, its release stirred the embers of racial controversy back
into blazing life.
So—is Public Enemy anti-Semitic? It's hard to imagine a lyricist as
smart as Chuck D. being unaware that those words reek with age-old
attacks on Jews. Is Griff? Definitely, and anti-white to boot—as is his
replacement Harry Allen, self-described Hip-Hop Assassin and Media
Activist who's been circulating a half-assed recycling of Elijah Mu-
hammed's "scientific theory" that all races derive from the black race by
evil experimental grafting. According to Washington psychiatrist
Frances Cress Weising (whom Chuck D. has endorsed), whites' lack of
pigmentation marks them as genetically and psychologically inferior,
which they make up for by oppressing blacks. (Malcolm X rejected
idiocies like these long before his assassination while retaining his belief
in black nationalism, and split from the Black Muslims to form his own
group while reaching tentatively for broader interracial support—all of
which led to speculation that Elijah's Muslims had killed him.)
Maybe even more to the point, Chuck D. 's justifications for Griff and
his lyrics are the kind no African American would be likely to accept
from a non-black person trying to explain remarks that seem self-
evidently anti-black. But as Malcolm himself saw, that's a problem with
certain aspects of black-nationalist ideology: while American anti-black
racism is uniquely institutionalized, in the hands of rhetoricians like
Public Enemy it can justify black manipulation of racial guilt and slurs.
Conceptually as well as in reality, black racism holds no higher moral
ground than any other, and is a dangerously double-edged sword: wit-
ness the flare-ups in Flatbush between Caribbean immigrants and Ko-
rean grocers, the beneath-notice-by-leftists slurs about Guidovilles in
the wake of Yusuf Hawkins's murder, the flattened stereotypes shaping
Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, the claims by some black musicians that
jazz and rock and roll are all-black legacies, which ignore their indelibly
mulatto nature.

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Institutionalized racism against blacks in America has deep and un-

arguable historic roots, of course, and there's no denying that blacks,
especially young black males, are stuck at the bottom of the socio-
economic shitstream. That, rather than how the American system delib-
erately pits groups low on the pyramid against one another, remains
Public Enemy's main point. However reductive, it's been validated over
recent months by scorching articles and TV shows, replete with barely
submerged anti-black racism, about hiphop in the wake of the P.E.
controversy.
In one of the most outrageous manifestations, Newsweek ran a bilious
diatribe called "The Rap Attitude" that ranted against hiphop, overtly
because of its sexism, racism, and disrespect. Since heavy metal, men-
tioned only in passing, covers precisely the same ground—which is, in
fact, one reason rappers have used metalloid backing and samples for
nearly a decade—you don't have to be African American to wonder
about the unstated biases of the article's writer.
"Having an attitude," huffs writer Jerry Adler, "means it's always
someone else's fault: cops who disrespect (or 'dis') you when you walk
through a housing project with a gold chain that could lock up a motor-
cycle. . . . The viler the message, the more fervent the assertion of
honesty that underlies it."
Besides racism, the biased attitude here is generational: hiphop, like
heavy metal, has less depth and resonance than, say, the Rolling Stones
because it's not the creation of the postwar generation that sees itself, in
retrospect, as a repository of history and taste—as if rock and roll wasn't
always about sex and provocation and adolescent attitudes. Check out
any video of swivel-hipped Elvis with his bedroom sneer, pouty Mick
Jagger peacocking across the stage in imitation of James Brown, las-
civious Jimi Hendrix dropping to his haunches, flicking his tongue, and
flailing his guitar-phallus.
But according to Adler's intro,
OK, here it is: the first important cultural development in America in
25 years that the baby-boom generation didn't pioneer: The Culture of
Attitude. It is heard in the thundering cacophony of heavy metal and
the thumping, clattering, scratching assault of rap—music so postin-
dustrial it's mostly not even played, but pieced together out of pre-
recorded sound bits. It is the culture of American adolescent males
frozen in various stages of adolescence: their streetwise music, their

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ugly macho boasting and joking about anyone who hangs out on a dif-
ferent block—cops, other races, women and homosexuals. Its most
visible contribution has been the disinterment of the word nigger, a
generation after a national effort to banish it and its ugly connotations
from the American language. Now it is back, employed with savage
irony by black rappers, and dumb literal hostility by their white heavy-
metal counterparts. Nigger! Faggot! What ever happened to the idea
that rock and roll would make us free?
In fact, the decade of the '60s was a time of similar contradictions: the
racial and economic segregation that marked movements and audiences
as earlier, broader political and cultural coalitions gave way to multiple
divergent agendas, including black nationalism; the Beatles and Stones,
among countless others, getting their starts in the highly commercial
project called rock and roll by covering black sounds for a white audi-
ence; the Youngbloods' "Get Together" and Sly and the Family Stone's
"Stand!" and James Brown's "Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud"
sharing the airwaves with S/Sgt. Barry Sadler's "The Ballad of the Green
Berets," the Guess Who's "American Woman," and Merle Haggard's
"Okie from Muskogee." Despite the love-and-peace image of Wood-
stock, the '60s were driven by polarization, and the music, then as now,
reflected that.
In the years since, the polarizations have been exacerbated by govern-
mental policies. Is it surprising that the generations that have come up
under that ever expanding institutionalized racism, sexism, and vio-
lence reflect it? How can they be held responsible for it, when it's what
they've been taught? Is it their fault that their schools are less funded,
that their textbooks are dullingly simplified, that they've inherited a
culture increasingly commercialized and regimented by a handful of
international conglomerates that, for instance, make and sell over 96
percent of the recordings available in the U.S.?
Public Enemy recognizes and, to its credit, tries to educate about
some of these problems. Take "Burn Hollywood Burn," which attacks
racial stereotyping in the media. But the same tune embodies P.E.'s
own internal contradictions: the mid-section by guest rapper Ice Cube
transforms its pungency to rank sexual boasting. That's all too typical of
the slack lyrics on Fear of a Black Planet. But dwarfing Chuck D. 's
poetic failures this time out is the larger, continuing problem P.E. has
created: their salient positions—the need to empower African Ameri-

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cans, to rewrite standard histories to accommodate non-Northern Euro-

pean achievements, to undo cultural stereotypes—are inevitably under-
cut when they themselves perpetuate anti-white mythologies and stereo-
types about Jews and women and gays. Take "Meet the G That Kills
Me," which deals with AIDS by saying "Man to m a n / I don't know if
they can/From what I know/The parts don't fit/(Ahh shit)."
It's our loss that P.E.'s points are getting lost in the noise instead of
raising real debate, but in the end it's only rock and roll, and it's all good
for business. From CBS's perspective, carrying a plastic Uzi into a party
gets you those looks, and those looks sell product. With provocation as
their entree, Public Enemy has touched a responsive chord in literally
millions of consumers. So now political provocation has become a
potent marketing tool.
Witness this recent CBS publicity release:
Music is about change, revolution, forward progress. . . . With the
release, in 1987, of their first album, "Yo, Bum Rush the Show," Pub-
lic Enemy became, instantly, the most important Black spokespeople
in America. Their emphasis on Black knowledge and awareness, rather
than the wearing of gold "ropes" and buying a "Benz," has become the
standard by which rap music is measured in the 1990s. . . . FEAR
OF A BLACK PLANET is the most eagerly-awaited album in rap—
and music—history. . . . The main theme of FEAR OF A BLACK
PLANET is confrontation, a theme echoed in many a sociological
study about what the 1990s held for the races as a whole. There is
widespread acknowledgement that society is reaching a boiling point,
what with crumbling governmental systems, homelessness, drugs,
gangs, the decentralization of Black life and culture. In sixty minutes
of FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET, Public Enemy supplies uncanny
insight and, who knows, possible solutions.
Who knows, indeed: as a friend suggested when I showed this to him,
the most obvious "possible solution" is to buy the album. It would be the
final sad irony in Public Enemy's convoluted odyssey if their activist
rhetoric becomes just another sales pitch. [1990]

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 chapter 26
Mr. Ambience
On the 19th floor of New York's Vista Hotel, overlooking the shimmer-
ing Hudson on an autumn afternoon, composer/producer Brian Eno sits
strumming his new acoustic guitar with the rapturous singlemindedness
of a lover. Nothing so odd about that, right? Except that if there's one
style of music Eno is not identified with, either in his time with Roxy
Music or his ambient pioneering or his work with others like David
Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2, it's acoustic music.
But then again, if there's one thing Eno isn't, it's predictable. Not
only in his own musical career (who, for instance, could've foreseen his
investigations of African music after Roxy Music's art-school ironies?)
but in his opinions. His take on the New Age phenomenon—which
may surprise New Agers who see his ambient music as a forebear—is
just one case in point:
What happened with New Age is that it unfortunately became Music-
Minus-Something. What it has generally left out is what I think makes
us all dislike it: [composer] Harold Budd said it best when he said,
"What I hate about it is that there's no evil in it." It doesn't have to be
a clenched-fist kind of evil, but you really have to sense that there's
some complexity to the emotion, and that complexity means that there
has to be some darkness as well as all this lovely misty light. It doesn't
hold your interest otherwise, it doesn't seem like anything real.

For Eno wants no part of the psychobabble shrouding New Age; his
preoccupations are more material:
When you make a piece of music, one way of looking at it is that you
create a place. That is more than simply metaphorical. By the time I
was making records like Discreet Music (Antilles) there had been a lot
of technical advances in terms of reverberation, echo, digital delay,
harmonization, chorus, flanging, phasing—in every studio there were
tons of all this stuff that is telling you, the listener, about a place,

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 Dancing in Your Head

about space. Reverb is a description of space; synthetic reverb is a de-

scription of a place that doesn't exist. So that means when you are a
composer and very actively working with these things, you're building
spaces, not just melodies and rhythms.

And in fact Music for Airports and On Land (both Editions EG)
capture that physicality in the often ominous electronic spaces they
seduce you into inhabiting. Unlike the unyielding repetitions of New
Age music, what Eno calls ambient music refracts worlds through differ-
ent dimensions; even changing the volume or the level of your attention
alters your relationship with the music, uncovers startling aspects that
wouldn't otherwise become manifest.
Eno's background makes him unusually suited for thinking about
music in these terms. Trained, like many British rockers, in art school,
Eno also studied with John Cage disciples like composers Gavin Bryars
and Cornelius Cardew. Hooking up with Bryan Ferry, he provided the
offbeat electronic flourishes that made early Roxy Music stand out, like
the whirring synthesizer line careening through "Editions of You" (on
For Your Pleasure . . . , Warner Bros.).
After Eno left the band in 1973, he gradually expanded his role as
electronics wizard into that of producer for a series of pivotal artists. His
credits are staggering: David Bowie's tortured peaks on Low, Heroes, and
Lodger (all RCA); Devo's hilariously crucial Q: Are We Not Men? A: We
Are Devo! (Warner Bros.); Talking Heads' head-turning classics like
More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in
Light (all Sire/Warner Bros.); his own remarkable pre-Graceland explo-
ration and synthesis of African musics with David Byrne on My Life in
the Bush of Ghosts (Sire/Warner Bros.); UZ's chiming attack expanded
into an arena-rock colossus on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua
Tree (both Island). Big names aside, however, the innovative sonics and
mixes on all these discs demonstrated the practical results of Eno's
apparently abstract preoccupations with space-creating textures—and in
the process helped rearrange the shape of recent pop.
Not content just to shape other people's sounds, Eno continued his
own composing, moving past the arty pop of his early '70s efforts like
Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
(both Island). A 1975 sickbed experience had unexpectedly redirected
his curiosity about soundscapes and electronics. When a friend brought

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him a record of harp music, he dragged himself to the stereo to put it on;
once he laid back down, he realized only one channel was playing at an
extremely low volume, but he couldn't get up to fix it. Ironically,
listening that way focused his ideas, and helped lead to the creation of
what he calls ambient music:
Fifteen years ago, there was an old-fashioned idea that when you
bought a record, you rushed home, ripped off the wrap, and sat there
like this (stares fixedly ahead) in front of your stereo—the classical im-
age of how you listen to a record. Well, we all know that that doesn't
happen very much any more. People put the record on, they go on do-
ing what they're doing, and they sometimes sit and listen to it; but be-
cause of records, music has become a different thing. It's not the
special and sacred event it used to be, it's part of the background of
one's life a lot of the time. And not only the background; it comes out
of that background and into the foreground as well. So that was what I
thought about ambient music: it wasn't Music-Minus-Something, but
an acknowledgement of another way of using music. It was really a
way people were using it, but now saying, I'm a composer, and in the
knowledge that this musical niche exists I'm gonna work for it.
I would try to imagine what a piano would sound like under the sea,
for instance, where the density of the water is constantly changing.
What is it like to imagine we are listening in oil or in very thin air? I
started to find that what you were evoking could tell you things about
climate: you can hear the difference between somewhere snow has
fallen and somewhere it hasn't. Those are things we're evolutionarily
equipped to distinguish, just like my finger knows the distinction be-
tween smooth and rough. So with these records I'm very consciously
saying I want to capitalize on this body of psycho-acoustic intuition we
all have and which composers haven't been able to work with before,
except in very limited ways. [1989]

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 chapter 27
Them Ol' Bahamas Blues
Underpinning an entire school of folk and rock guitar is the idiosyncratic
work of Bahamanian guitar great Joseph Spence. Acclaimed as a mentor
by such astute pickers as Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, and David Lindley, his
tunes popularized by '60s trendsetters like the Grateful Dead and the
Incredible String Band, Spence first garnered some attention in this
country during the early heyday of the folk revival spearheaded in the
Boston/Cambridge region. In those days of the late '50s and early '60s,
musicians and fans alike went on a search for musical roots with a
determined intensity that parallelled the enthusiasm of dedicated
Depression-era folklorists like John and Alan Lomax. Taj and Cooder
and Lindley, Clarence White (guitarist with the Gram Parsons-era
Byrds), Alan Wilson (later singer-songwriter with Canned Heat), John
Fahey, Dave Van Ronk, Stefan Grossman, Sarn Charters (who recorded
for Vanguard and wrote the seminal The Bluesmen), Frank Driggs (who
assembled the Robert Johnson compilations), Nick Perls (who founded
Yazoo Records), historian Stephen Calt, Chris Strachwitz (of Arhoolie
Records and Down Home Music fame), filmmaker Les Blank, and
countless others embarked on voyages into little towns and villages all
across America looking for the survivors of the 30s, or into record stores
and peoples' attics looking for worn old 78s, which were then transcribed
and later dubbed and reissued on LPs. In the process they turned up
such pivotal figures as Lightnin' Hopkins, Son House, Skip James,
Mance Lipscomb, Sam Chatman, Rev. Gary Davis, Snooks Eaglin,
Clifton Chenier, and Flaco Jimenez, to name just a few, and introduced
them to a whole new generation via folk festivals and small clubs.
Thus it happened in 1958 that Sam Charters found himself on the
Bahamanian island of Andros to record local musical traditions, and
heard about local legend Joseph Spence. His curiosity aroused, he
sought out the then 48-year-old picker and, enthralled by his unique
sounds, recorded him as he did other indigenous musicians. And so
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 Them Ol' Bahamas Blues

Music from the Bahamas, vol. 1 (Folkways), brought Spence's unique

music—a heady, raggedly syncopated mixture of hymns and sea chan-
ties, Tin Pan Alley and traditional calypso—to a much broader audi-
ence than he'd ever dreamed existed.
That music was fully formed by the time Charters captured it on
tape. Spence's characteristic attack on his single-pickup hollowbody
guitar is based largely around a number of stable components: his
dropped-D tuning (not exactly Western-style well tempered but capable
of producing resonant microtones); medium-gauge bronze strings and a
heavy steel thumbpick (which produce what Ry Cooder likens to "organ
tones"); a highly syncopated counterpoint between his thumb on bass
and his index on treble, which often skitters and tosses the melody back
and forth across the registers with playful abandon; and a broken poly-
rhythmic accompaniment that, as it sketches the parts for a complete
calypso band, clusters around that croaking voice, itself leaping in and
out of the melody like a frog in a pond—he may never enunciate a full
set of lyrics, but his vocals function as a perfect portable horn section.
Add in a fondness for triplets in turnarounds and connecting phrases, as
well as a penchant for times other than 4/4, and you've got some idea of
what made Spence's music so captivating in its idiosyncracies.
And captivated is exactly what many guitarists were when they caught
wind of that first Folkways release, which was soon followed by Music of
the Bahamas, vol. 4 (Folkways). Taken together these depicted Spence
as he assayed both sacred and secular material, backing up other vocal-
ists as well as himself with his typically sweet-and-sour phrases and
lurching sense of rhythm. Soon he'd become something of a cult hero,
and so it's not surprising to learn that folkie Fritz Richmond (a member
of the seminal Kweskin Jug Band that also numbers among its alumni
Geoff and Maria Muldaur) took off for the Bahamas in early 1964,
determined to find Spence so that Paul Rothschild (who later produced
such bands as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and The Doors) could get
more of him down on tape. Success came when ragtime picker Blind
Blake, who happened to be in the Bahamas at the time, introduced
Richmond (as he would Cooder and Taj) to Spence, who was now living
on the island of Nassau. "Bring 12 sets of medium bronze strings and
tape recorder," read the cable Richmond sent to Rothschild. He did,
and thus was made the delicious Happy All the Time (originally Elektra,
now reissued on Carthage).
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 Dancing in Your Head

This LP captures Spence on his own (with only his wife Louise
supplementing his ferocious vocals) and in his prime. Take "Out on the
Rollin' Sea," where his guitar churns up frothy fills while he grumbles
his way through parts of verses; "Bimini Gal," which offers a frenzied
guitar part meant to approximate the steel drums of a calypso band; the
flowing filigrees of "We Shall Be Happy"; the ragtimey intro and overall
feel that marks "The Crow"; the punchy slurs that punctuate "Diamond
on Earth"; the rollicking "Uncle Lou/No Lazy Man," dedicated to the
flute-playing relative who taught Spence music basics. Then there's the
waltz-time "How I Love Jesus"; the punning "Conch Ain't Got No
Bone," riding on its edgy guitar calypso that ends by dismantling the
tune's time and harmonic structure; and the nearly 14-minute tour-de-
force called "I Am Living on the Hallelujah Side," where Spence un-
corks a fierce and stomping barrage of blistering guitar work to his own
guttural vocal accompaniment.
It was probably inevitable, then, that when 21-year-old Peter K.
Siegel and 19-year-old Jody Steicher arrived in the Bahamas in 1965 to
record spirituals for Nonesuch, they spent their first day in Nassau
kicking off their search for Joseph Spence. "We asked everyone," they
wrote later, "and the response was uniform and predictable: 'Sure mon,
I know Spence'—until we arrived in his own neighborhood. Nobody
knew of Spence, and a young woman standing in the doorway of a
cottage asked us sternly why we were looking for him. When we said that
we wanted to record Spence's music she brightened and offered to take
us to his house; gathering several small children from behind her long
skirt, she escorted us next door. In the corner was a black guitar and
a small amplifier bearing a sign: 'Joseph Spence—the Voice from
Heaven.'" When the guitar master himself arrived home, he took the
duo on a tour of his banana trees and then recorded roughly half the
tracks (alone and accompanying others) that appear on The Real
Bahamas, vols. 1 and 2 (Nonesuch).
Six years later, Spence made a trip to the home of the folkies, per-
forming in Boston to a delighted cadre of devotees. There he acquired a
Martin D-18, and thus equipped recorded Good Morning Mr. Walker
(Arhoolie). While it reprises a couple of the tunes available on LPs
already mentioned, Spence's fertile inventiveness keeps those reprises
from being mere repetitions; and this disc offers more than enough in
the way of new riches to warrant snapping it up. "Coming in on a Wing
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 Dancing in Your Head

and a Prayer," for example, showcases to excellent effect the axman's

uncanny ability to unravel the fabric of any tune and reweave it into a
denser structure, while his version of "The Glory of Love" has to rank
among the great, if skewed, adaptations of all time. Of course, there are
also tunes like "Sloop John B" and "Mary Ann," which present Spence
performing familiar Caribbean material and working his strange and
intricate spells on it with equal and startling fluency.
So there you have it. Joseph Spence's recorded legacy may not rival
Les Paul's in size, but for intensity of feeling and depth of technique
it's on a par with those left by the great blues masters. And as with most
of them, his influence was disseminated more widely than his
name. [1986]

28
, . . . . .

"fj "'***>
chapter

Dancing in Your Head

Folks who write about jazz have certain conceits they're fond of. One is
the homology between the way a musician talks or acts offstage and the
way he plays. Often enough it works. But in the case of Ornette Cole-
man, the brilliant pioneer who's sketched the main lines of jazz explora-
tion over the last 30-plus years, it breaks down. Yes, he often speaks in
gnomic utterances worthy of the Delphic oracle, and he relentlessly
circles his ideas concentrically instead of plotting a linear tack—modes
of discourse that parallel his prismatic music. But next to his plaintively
feverish cries on alto, his distinctively oddball blatts on trumpet, and his
fingernails-down-the-blackboard attack on the violin, his Donald Duck-
ish voice is jarring. And alongside the fierce density of his music, which
even in its balladic forms shoots off sparks of intensity, his genial person-
ality is a shock. You expect him to breathe fire, but he wants you to
enjoy yourself. Just don't mess with his music.
His music, of course, still sets the mainstream on edge, even after his
decades on the scene. His sheer endurance; his high profile thanks to
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 Dancing in Your Head

influential critics like Martin Williams, Gunther Schuller, and Nat

Hentoff, who embraced his revolutionary forays early on; and his conse-
quent ability to attract both enlightened record company execs like
Atlantic's Nesuhi Ertegun and patrons here and in Europe have made
him impossible to ignore, even for people who wish he'd never mate-
rialized. So it happens that every few years he lands a slot in the conser-
vative JVC Jazz Festival in New York, as he did in 1991.
Part of the reason Coleman's ongoing revolution makes people un-
comfortable is precisely because it's ongoing. At age 61, he remains
remarkably unwilling to sit where he, or anyone else, has sat before.
Instead, he's been in almost constant motion since the early 1950s,
when his quartet—trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and
drummer Billy Higgins (later Ed Blackwell)—broke out of what had
become jazz's prisonhouse of language: the recurrent cycle of chords,
basic to the 32-bar song form, that it acquired by using Tin Pan Alley
material as the launchpads for its flights of improvisation. Coleman, a
kind of left-wing Charlie Parker disciple, insisted on the primacy of
melodic freedom. His tunes, which then as now tend to turn on bluesy
boppish figures or near-nursery rhymes, were designed to be open, so
that the musicians could modulate—from key to key, chord to chord,
rhythm to rhythm—when the need struck them. As Gary Giddins has
observed, he also blurred the background/foreground distinction of post-
Louis Armstrong jazz, which pits the soloist against the rest of the band.
In a sort of mutant Dixieland revival, he's freed everybody to blow.
That notion was put even more severely to the test in the early 1970s,
when Ornette went electric and incorporated funk, African, and Eastern
ideas into his music on classic albums like Dancing in Your Head
(A&M). Prime Time, as he's called his shifting lineups since, alienated
many of his early supporters. They understood Ornette's intelligible if
idiosyncratic language as spoken in a modified jazz format, but, to their
ears, it got inaudible and hostile once the volume got turned up and the
dialects within multiplied. Harmolodics is what Ornette calls his kalei-
doscopically hybridized idiom: the collapse of harmony, melody, and
time in a kind of post-Einsteinian universe. No element is dominant;
each is developed by the individual voices within the band. This demo-
cratic model dares musical anarchy as it flirts with dangerous and expan-
sive energies.
Coleman himself explains it this way: "Bebop deals with only one
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 Dancing in Your Head

solo at a time. Even Dixieland, although it's similar to harmolodics, still

deals with one solo at a time, because it's using the same device [the
chord sequence] to play the way they're playing. Whereas in harmo-
lodics someone might be playing minor, someone else augmented,
someone else major—all at the same time. It's closer to folk music and
church music, where anybody can make a contribution to the emo-
tional part of it. Technically, it means transforming the four basics of
music—harmony, melody, rhythm, and unison—into your own voice.
In addition, it means that you can transpose any chord or melody or
change and still maintain the original [compositional] design by mod-
ulating to any sound that you hear from that design."
Ornette's refusal to let himself, his bands, or his audiences lapse into
stasis is illustrated by a characteristic irony of his last appearance at the
JVC Festival in 1987, at Town Hall. He had just released an astonish-
ing double album, Ornette Coleman in All Languages (Caravan of
Dreams). One disc featured the 1950s acoustic quartet, the other his
then current edition of Prime Time. It was a neat joke, and a typical
comment on hierarchy and linearity, when he opened with Prime
Time, forcing antis to sit through (or walk out of) the slashing electric set
before getting to what they'd come to see.
From that vantage point, contrasting Coleman with Miles Davis is
revealing. In terms of his influence on the vanguards of the last thirty
years, Miles is one of Ornette's few peers. At times they've worked
similar lines: 20-odd years ago, for example, both moved into exploring
electronics and rock, funk, and African beats.
But though he's made jagged leaps into the new since, Miles has
seemed to pull back from the brink, the logical if outre extension of
where his ideas were taking him, once he upset nearly everyone with On
the Corner (Columbia). That percussion-foregrounded firestorm, mixed
like a hard-rock record, still registers as a key influence for many of the
vanguardists on the so-called downtown New York scene. (Both Miles
and Ornette, along with John Coltrane, have also had an enormous
impact on seminal rockers like the Yardbirds, the Byrds, the Grateful
Dead, the Velvet Underground, and Television.)
But Miles didn't follow it out. The boiling jazz-rock fusion he'd
pushed into on Bitches Brew (Columbia) and subsequent albums was,
thanks to its popularity among rock-raised listeners, transformed into a
commercial seedbed. Out of it came the repetitious reams of radio-ready
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 Dancing in Your Head

but musically pointless noodling that dominate the industry sales charts
and clog the airwaves. More disappointingly, Miles's own takes on his
music have also become largely codified. His disheartening appearance
at this year's JVC found him coasting through Cyndi Lauper's "Time
After Time" and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature," which have been
the unrearranged, crowd-pleasing staples of his sets since the 1985 al-
bum You're Under Arrest (Columbia).
Ornette's set at Carnegie Hall eight nights later demonstrated the
distance in that respect between the two giants. Fronting an energetic
septet that included self-taught Indian percussion master Badal Roy, a
former Miles sideman, and keyboardist Dave Bryant—his first keyboard
player since Paul Bley—he and his cohorts shook up even the older
tunes they played. "Bourgeois Boogie," from his most recent album,
Virgin Beauty (Epic), which had surprised most listeners with its rela-
tively airy gentleness, grew more raucous. Then there was the way he
had Chris Rosenberg pick up a nylon-string guitar and play what
sounded like an adaptation of a Villa-Lobos piece (there were no pro-
gram notes). After a couple of rounds, Prime Time piled in and blew it
apart via simultaneous lines of improvisation.
That explosion demonstrates Coleman's incisive understanding of
jazz's peculiarly American dialectics—something he's underscored be-
fore with drastic reformulations like "The Fifth of Beethoven" on The
Art of the Improvisers (Atlantic). First is the relation between the role of
composition and the role of improvisation—the tension that's jazz's
heartbeat. Second, like every important figure in the music from Jelly
Roll Morton on, Coleman has sought his own way to reconcile the
corollary pull between the individual, whose need to shape a unique
voice out of the past's shards is a key jazz axiom, and the group, whose
ability and need to interact in close spontaneity and support for the
individual is obviously necessary if the music is going to make internal
sense.
These tensions draw fine lines jazzers have had to learn to walk. In
the European classical tradition, for instance, what had been an impro-
viser's art in the days of Bach and Mozart and even, more rarely, as late
as Chopin, shriveled into modes of interpretation, as the professional
musician, the written score, and that post-Beethoven invention, the
conductor, asserted increasing, then near total, authority over music-
making. Along with the disappearance of the amateur musician and the
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 Dancing in Your Head

appearance of the phonograph, those made music a passive activity for

its audience. Even Wynton Marsalis—normally viewed as the cham-
pion of importing so-called classical norms into jazz—balks at duplicat-
ing in jazz the pattern that has helped enervate much American classical
music and locked its producers into writing largely for each other and
grants proposals. As he told me, "The purely intellectual approach,
which was designed for the aristocracy in European music, has helped to
destroy the classical-music audience. The thing about jazz that really
sets it apart from other art forms is that you have that type of intellectual-
ism combined with the communal type of feeling that African music
has."
The collection of musical idioms we label jazz has only one thing in
common—improvisation. So jazz can only go the purely interpretive
route if it's willing to die. Instead, it's sought to reconcile its apparently
contradictory pulls—composition and improvisation, the individual and
the group, the past and the present. In the process, it's proliferated a vast
number of dialects. That breadth helps mark jazzers as avatars of a
quintessential American figure, the self-inventor.
That's not the same as saying that jazz musicians are untrained—
something Ornette, for instance, has been accused of for decades. But it
does mean their relationship to the cultural past hasn't been circum-
scribed by hierarchical values. (Duke Ellington's famous line, "There
are only two types of music—good and bad," underscores that.) Re-
cently, however, many observers, like the neobop revivalists being
touted in the mainstream press, have called for more "classical" training
for jazzers. Now, jazz musicians have been training themselves since
the music's beginnings, by studying their predecessors and each other.
It's how they create themselves. It's how they've pushed the musical
envelope—of instrumental technique and sonic properties, for in-
stance—far beyond anything imagined or allowed in the European clas-
sical world. And on a technical level, there's no difference, say, in
harmonic theory from one type of music to the next—the notes stay the
same. So the call for standards is misleading and not a little condescend-
ing.
What I mean by self-inventor derives from this country's history and
mythology: it's the place people come to wipe the slate clean and start
afresh. Its cultural development, sometimes to its detriment, sometimes
to its advantage, has followed those same lines. After an inevitable
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 Dancing in Your Head

period of European imitaters, Charles Ives and James Reese Europe

forged idioms derived from American materials and folkways. But their
brand of classical music was ironically derailed by the prewar influx of
European refugees. As composer/conductor Maurice Peress has pointed
out, the emigres took over the cultural establishment here and turned it
back to Europe-gazing. That twist has left arts combines like Lincoln
Center with unresolved conundrums about their relationship to the
culture around them—conundrums that show in the programming.
But while imported cultural commissars like Theodor Adorno were
abhorring what they found here, what you could call the left wing of
American classical music went underground and reinvented itself.
Hence the barbaric yawps of joyful noisemakers like Harry Partch.
Partch, a typical American eccentric, decided that post-Bach European
scales were inadequate for his conceptions, and so he simply discarded
them in favor of a 43-note system of just intonation he based on ancient
Greek and medieval theorists. Naturally, he also had to invent instru-
ments to play the music, and a notation system so musicians could
duplicate performances. So he did. The sometimes eerie, often hilar-
ious, always infectious results were beautifully realized during the June
1991 Bang on a Can Festival in New York, where Partch's "The Way-
farer" was performed. Eliding "high" and "low" culture, Partch took
Depression-era hobos as his heroes, and their scrambling lot as his plot.
The staging at the Circle in the Square rightly bypassed the proscenium-
arch division between audience and stage. All told, the production
showed why Partch became a major influence on other composers
and, via disciples like John Cage, on the broad conceptual frames of
American art.
While classical music is usually thought of—wrongly—as a mono-
lithic European import, movies, like jazz, are often cited as a classic
American art form. After all, D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and
Buster Keaton idiosyncratically mapped out the medium's methods of
communicating while the Marx Brothers, for instance, were hard at play
subverting structure itself. But Hollywood in the 1930s, like "high"
culture centers, fell prey to what you could call recolonization: Euro-
pean directors and actors flocked to Tinseltown for political freedom,
safety, bigger bucks. Still, a writer-director like Preston Sturges iron-
ically turned an imported giant like Ernst Lubitsch on his head by
injecting unarguably American setpieces like the Ale and Quail Club

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 Dancing in Your Head

into a Lubitsch homage like The Palm Beach Story. And then there's
Orson Welles, who got hooked on celluloid by accident, ransacked an
ad hoc grammar assembled for him by an RKO editor, then upended
everything from cinematography to mise-en-scene with his first com-
pleted effort, Citizen Kane. (He had been planning to film Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness, something disciple Francis Ford Coppola
attempted three decades later.)
So maybe it's not surprising if American self-inventors like Partch
and Welles share key techniques (like the lapping voices that fragment
narrative structures out of the guise of omniscience, the aggressive em-
phasis on disjunction that allows the audience—indeed, forces it—to
participate in the activity of the artist) with Ornette Coleman, who
taught himself composition and theory while working as a house boy
and elevator operator. There's a strong Romantic or idealist strain com-
mon to revolutionary American autodidacts. Partch, for example, em-
phasized music's physicality, with its natural roots and role in human
life—attributes he considered lost. His homemade instruments were
attempts to retrieve that immediacy. Likewise Welles complained to
biographer Barbara Learning, "You have to hate the camera and regard
it as a detestable machine because it should be doing better than what it
can do. I have this terrible sense that a film is dead—that it's a piece of
film in a machine that will be run off and shown to people." According
to Coleman, "I was so in tune to music that I picked up my first
saxophone as soon as I assembled it and played the same as I'm playing
today—only I didn't know music, I was just hearing music. Which made
me believe that every human being has some of that quality to do just
that. There's a natural instinct that tells people how to do things even
before they learn the skills of how to apply them." Which is exactly the
premise garage bands and punk rockers act on.
Seen in this context, the emphasis of today's young hard-bop revival-
ists on standards, both in their selection of tunes and formats and in their
insistence on a timeless hierarchy of values, simply underlines their
Reagan-era conservatism. Not that there's anything inherently wrong
with playing bebop: it's one of jazz's many available dialects, and its
going from the fringes to the mainstream hasn't invalidated its beauties.
But the emphasis on pedigree—certain figures "in the tradition" are
canonized as sources of all that's good—is unsettling and self-de-
structive. No less sacrosanct a figure than Louis Armstrong, after all,
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 Dancing in Your Head

famously dismissed bop as "Chinese music," and the Dixieland revival-

ists who counterattacked bop's exploratory ways used arguments that
recur when Wynton Marsalis wannabes put down music "outside the
tradition"—as if jazz, that continuing accretion of languages, had a
neat, univocal history.
That attitude is actually a reach for moral authority. It recalls how
critics like Yvor Winters and F. R. Leavis codified literary tradition
along narrow and intolerantly prescriptive lines. Ironically, such ideo-
logical baggage weighs on its carriers, pushes them to replicate the past's
voices rather than use them to discover their own. Ironic too is the fact
that none of their heroes, from Satchmo to Duke to Bird, would have
understood such a nostalgic stance. They wanted to make their own
music to speak to their own times and beyond.
Which brings us back to Ornette Coleman:
I think music should have meaning for people first of all, and secondly
it should have a quality of you that people can appreciate. The natu-
ralness of music, of sounds, is basic to human expression. When I was
young, I didn't understand that music came in sets of categories—
music for babies, music for teenagers, music for old people, music for
black people, music for white people. I thought it was all just music.
We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes;
we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music
from life. [1991]

chapter 29
The Blackwell Project
Born in New Orleans on October 10, 1929, drummer Ed Blackwell
spans an astonishing number of musical worlds. Partly that's because the
Crescent City, the U.S.'s Caribbean crossroads, tends to develop multi-
faceted musicians: so many traditions collide and entwine there and
there's so little work that players are forced to learn versatility.

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 The Blackwell Project

Blackwell is best known for his long association with Ornette Cole-
man, which started in 1951 when he moved to Los Angeles, broke off in
the mid-1950s when he went back home, and continued from 1960 until
Ornette put together Prime Time, his mid-1970s punk-funk outfit. The
drummer's greatest achievement, in this context and elsewhere, was
how he harnessed the infectious parade rhythms that kick so joyously in
his hometown to free jazz. Like Max Roach and Paul Motian, Blackwell
reached back to Baby Dodds for his own starting point: the dancing
lyricism, the melodic attack, that made Dodds the font of jazz drum-
ming from his stints with Fate Marable and King Oliver, Jelly Roll
Morton and Louis Armstrong.
So Blackwell's groundbreaking work with Ornette, Don Cherry, Eric
Dolphy, Anthony Braxton, Dewey Redman, David Murray, and others
involved redesigning jazz's pulse. Cherry puts it this way: "He started out
tapdancing in the streets, played with r&b bands and Mardi Gras parades
and funeral marches, and travelled through Africa with [pianist] Randy
Weston, where he learned lots of different tribal rhythms. He put it all
together as independent beats he played simultaneously." Or, as trum-
peter Herb Robertson sees it, "He took jazz's swing and put that New
Orleans groove to it, straightened it up just enough so that younger
players like me, who were basically coming out of rock and roll, could
find ways into contemporary jazz, so that it wouldn't feel foreign to us."
Cutting across generational and stylistic lines, dozens of musicians
repaid the debt via the Blackwell Project, a benefit for the drummer that
ran on January 7, 1990, at the Knitting Factory and January 14 at
Riverside Church. Blackwell has had kidney problems requiring home
dialysis since 1973; growing acute, his condition forced him back onto
hospital dialysis and, complicated by pneumonia and a hernia, left him
unable to work. Thus these two eight-hour-plus cavalcades.
Even Congress and Corporate America finally seem ready to admit
that the health-care delivery system in this country is a disgusting sham-
bles that systematically deprives the sick. Most musicians—most U.S.
artists—are among the most deprived populations. Workers without
"regular" jobs rarely have "regular" insurance coverage; without insur-
ance comes the right to languish in an underfunded and understaffed
public hospital (if you're lucky) or to die. Then there's the additional
problem of paying the rent: sickness is, after all, one of the main reasons
homeless people wind up that way.
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 Dancing in Your Head

With an outstanding contributor mired in that bog, the Blackwell

Project revived the jazz world's sense of community. In the process, it
showcased the exploratory vitality of the many different stylistic strands
that we tie together as jazz, and applauded Ed Blackwell for being
central to them.
The first Sunday at the Knitting Factory boasted sets by mostly youn-
ger players and (usually) working groups. Kicking things off was a power-
house trio: flutist James Newton, bassist Anthony Cox (one of the Proj-
ect's organizers), and drummer Andrew Cyrille. They leapt outside in a
constantly unfolding free improvisation so breathtakingly nuanced and
controlled that it sounded composed—which it was, on the spot. New-
ton is, quite simply, the jazz flutist of our time. Taking his cue from Eric
Dolphy, he's massively reimagined the instrument: he coaxes and yanks
tones that range from gentle recorder to near-tenor sax with admixtures
of shawms and bagpipes, as he splits tones, hurls multiphonics, bends
actual chords. Cox and Cyrille, both prodigiously supple, dug into
rhythms from funk to straightahead to African. Mesmerizing isn't a
word I use often, but this performance was, for over an hour.
Next up, with Cox still on bass, was a contingent of M-BASErs, that
jazz-funk amalgam coming out of Brooklyn: Greg Osby on alto, Gary
Thomas on tenor, Graham Haynes on trumpet, Teri Lyne Carrington
on drums. What happened during their set reflected the case of many
M-BASE players—early promise with little recent development. Osby,
for example, has a cutting tone and a lot of chops, especially as a
balladeer, but more and more his solos wind up sounding like a bird
careening around a cage, looking unsuccessfully for a way out. His
compositions are even more imprisoned by his stylistic limits, as the
meandering one-chord funky vamp the group closed with showed.
Thomas, normally a dynamically barrel-chested soloist, kept getting
hemmed in by echoing outbursts from Carrington, who sounded like
she misunderstood the relation between, say, Blackwell and Ornette or
Elvin Jones and Trane. Haynes alone played near his potential, sharply
wrenching dynamics and grooves to his liking, but even he only sus-
tained his ideas over a couple of solos.
Veteran bassist Dave Holland's trio includes M-BASErs Steve Cole-
man on alto and Marvin "Smitty" Smith on drums; the group often
sounds bigger than it is. Smith is an at-the-ready drummer full of odd-
meter, African-derived attacks and sonic touches, and he locked up with

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 The Blackwell Project

Holland's amazing speed, technical control, and sheer zest to create

telepathic grooves. Unfortunately Coleman's adept solos were overlong
and strangely emotionless, as if he, like his friend Osby, is stuck in what
he already knows. That was underlined by the contrast with Holland's
solos, which were at once so sure-footed and daring that they almost
made Coleman's seem plodding. Still, their set was shot through with
epiphanic moments.
Trombonist Ray Anderson led guitarist Allan Jaffe, bassist Mark
Dresser, and drummer Pheeroan AkLaff through gutbucket funk that
rode either sprung rhythms or second-line struts. Plagued by technical
difficulties, their set couldn't really build, but Dresser overcame a bro-
ken string to play a dazzling solo punctuated with two-handed taps and
slides, and AkLaff filled the time it took for him to change strings with a
remarkable, slow-burning excursion that used deftly buzzing cymbals as
a foundation drone while expanding in explosiveness.
Bassist Mark Helias is a growing composer whose mosaic-like struc-
tures juxtapose feels, themes, grooves. His quintet boasts crackerjack
soloists: pianist Anthony Davis, altoist Tim Berne, trumpeter Herb Rob-
ertson, drummer Tom Rainey. The combination created an unbroken
incandescence. Berne's jagged romps, fierce with boppish angles and
blues cries, balanced Davis's more cerebral classicisms to open a space
for Robertson's daredevil trumpet, which updates and extends Cootie
Williams's vocabulary of growls and snorts into a stuttering, speechlike
arc.
Multireed wielder Marty Ehrlich finished with the indefatigable Cox
and drummer Bobby Previte, and the trio ended the first night of the
Blackwell Project on the high plane that began it. Ehrlich has mastered
so many instruments, played in so many groups with so many greats,
that it's about time he got more recognition; he's a consistently probing
inventor. An iconoclastic composer, Previte drums with conceptual
shape and bristling energy. And Cox reiterated that he can fit in with,
push, and prod virtually anybody and anything. Not surprisingly, sparks
flew and ignited their long, roiling improvisations.
The following Sunday found the Blackwell Project uptown at Co-
lumbia University's Riverside Church, where mostly older players,
many of them the drummer's cohorts, took the stage. First up was
Tailgater's Tales, led by trombonist Craig Harris and featuring clarinet-
ist Don Byron, guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist Kenny Davis, drummer
Ml
 Dancing in Your Head

Ralph Peterson, and special guest multi-instrumentalist Henry Thread-

gill. As a composer Harris interweaves sharply contrasting themes and
sections, usually with a startling and challenging freshness—a carnival
feel is chased by a funky street beat, say. As a bandleader he's attracted
top-notch sidemen: Byron pushes his ax far beyond Buddy De Franco
via mellifluous, rangy leaps, Ross is successfully plotting his way past
Bill Frisell, and Peterson and Davis manhandled the changing grooves
with easy precision. Harris himself growls and laughs and smears as he
gracefully darts around the pulse, and Threadgill—well, Threadgill is a
genius as an instrumentalist, arranger, or composer; he's inherited the
mantle from Ellington and Mingus, and his playing with Harris re-
sounded with the canny humor, arching lyricism, and aching, edgy
blues that mark his horn.
Where Tailgater's Tales were pretty tightly plotted, Structure IV—
vibist Karl Berger, pianist Geri Allen, bassist Anthony Cox, altoist
Carlos Ward, tenorist Dewey Redman, and drummer Lewis Nash—was
a blowing session that unfortunately went slack. Redman, for instance,
started "Take the 'A' Train" with fluidly enjambed lines that gradually
lost their bite. There were excellent moments, though. Cox and Nash
sharpened incisive grooves, whether behind Ward's spiraling Trane-
isms or Berger's flat-footedness. And Allen, an ex-M-BASEr, continues
to grow: juggling pulses that she then zigzagged across, rolling barrel-
house chords that thickened and mutated into minor-mode smears a la
Cecil Taylor, clustering Monk-isms, Oriental motifs, and boppish cas-
cades with stunning confidence, she told gripping stories that stole the
set.
Pianist Don Pullen's solo spot showcased his rubber-wrist, scrub-
brush-across-the-keyboard attack that creates an eerily imploding feel,
almost as if the piano is folding in on itself like a Mobius strip. Individ-
ual notes sink into whimpering, startled by sudden left-hand thumps in
an almost ragtimey/stride vein as imagined by Henry Cowell. Long
overlooked, Pullen is idiosyncratic but captivating and technically
breathtaking.
The World Saxophone Quartet—tenorman David Murray, bariton-
ist Hamlet Bluiett, altoists Oliver Lake and Arthur Blythe—followed.
With the departure of founding member Julius Hemphill, the WSQ
seems to have settled into a rather bland combination of relentless riff
tunes and solos-plus-section-drones. It may be that's the dead-end wait-
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 The Blackwell Project

ing for such a lineup, though Hemphill, probably the group's most
inventive arranger, found ways around it. It may be that their growing
popularity dictates easy-to-grasp hooks that can launch their spectacular
solos: Murray can still astonish with his hurtling runs from low-end
blatts to r&b squalls to dog-whistle squeals, and nobody touches Bluiett
for reimagining the baritone and extending its range. But the undeni-
able virtuosity sounded like flash without more variety in their material.
Branford Marsalis led the ever present Cox—who was stage-man-
aging when he wasn't onstage himself—and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts
through an exuberant set that worked through the young tenor's heavy
debt to Sonny Rollins. Marsalis has adopted the jagged phrasing and
oddly floating spaces Rollins adapted from Monk, among others, and
prodded by his energetic rhythm section, he stretched rhythms and
reached for fetching substitutions: he's becoming a better narrator by
miming a master, though he hasn't yet found his own voice.
But the high point of the benefits came with their close: the reunion
of Cherry, Redman, and bassist Charlie Haden, all of whom, with
Blackwell, had played with Ornette and then later formed Old and New
Dreams. Appropriately holding down Blackwell's chair was Paul Mo-
tian.
As a sizable chunk of Blackwell's musical legacy, Ornette's tunes,
from "Blues Connotation" to "Happy House" to "Lonely Woman," had
threaded both benefit dates and were often stunningly played, but the
rich history wrapping these stellar musicians transported them. Cherry's
puckered whimpers and angular dartings, Redman's now-burly, now-
whinnying tenor, Haden's deep-toned lyricism, Motian's elastically me-
lodic drumming, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos's tasteful
embroidering, set up a charged sonic force field that warped tempos and
lines, suspended pulses and detonated expectations in a truly magical
way. Joined for a final jam by Ornette's drummer-son Denardo, Pullen,
and Marsalis, the lineup became a living embodiment of Blackwell's
wide-ranging musical contribution.
At the show's end an enfeebled Blackwell, clearly moved, said sim-
ply, "I must be loved." With reason: he's a cornerstone of postwar jazz,
and in one way or another all the participants at his benefit are his lucky
heirs. So are his listeners. [1990]

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 ^.^•^AMMM^^MVKSX
chapter 30
E.S.P.
By September 1964, 38-year-old Miles Davis was already widely ac-
knowledged as one of the most audacious and probing and influential
musicians in the history of what we call jazz. As he shifted musical gears
from bebop to cool to orchestral to modal approaches, he helped spear-
head the music's overall development.
Partly, of course, that was due to his own instrumental prowess: his
puckered, often muted trumpet punctured the expected solo forms,
ignoring staccato fusillades and high-register pyrotechnics for mid-
register swerves and floating silences. But it was also due in part to his
early emergence as a leader—an ability that linked him to the likes of
Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. From his
early days, Miles demonstrated an uncanny knack for finding the best
musicians available and letting them realize the new concepts taking
shape in his restless, fertile imagination. For over forty years, the one
constant in the fruitful and controversial career of Miles Davis has been
the unpredictable changes that have come as he's shifted from band to
band.
As a teenager who'd come to the Big Apple from his St. Louis home
under the pretext of studying at Juilliard, Miles had made sure he was
present at the rapid maturity of bebop, since he'd missed out on its birth;
the language's pioneers—Bird, Dizzy, Bud—were his mentors and
bandmates. But in hindsight, it's clear he was with them but not of
them. His own conception surfaced in his solos, which tended to be less
frenetic and more obsessed with spaces than the typical Bird clone's spew
of licks. The shaping of a melody and the structure surrounding it, not
the bop epigones' one-upmanship running of changes at a breakneck
pace, was what snared (and kept) Miles's interest. In that respect, he
shared an ironic kinship with his sometime antagonist Thelonious
Monk, another mislabeled bebopper.
Then, in 1949-50, Miles began to explore some of his conception's
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ramifications with Birth of the Cool, his first collaboration with Gil
Evans. It was also the first evidence of Miles's leadership technique:
basically, he gathers players who are sympathetic to the general direc-
tions he wants to head in, then gives them their heads to map out the
new territory while he threads the results together with his concept and
trumpet. So it was with Birth of the Cool: the album was actually a group
of sessions that grew from exploratory rehearsals of offbeat orchestrations
by Evans and John Lewis. Its unusually instrumented nonet featured
high-caliber players like Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, J. J. John-
son, and Max Roach, all of whom contributed their ideas while, as
Mulligan put it, "[Miles] took the initiative and put the theories to work.
He called the rehearsals, hired the halls, called the players, and gener-
ally cracked the whip."
Released on 78s, collected on LP only in 1957, Birth of the Cool
became, along with combos like Lewis's Modern Jazz Quartet and the
Red Norvo Trio, a key influence on what was called (misleadingly) West
Coast jazz, whose "cool" practitioners—especially the overpraised Chet
Baker—did little but clone and dilute Miles's and Evans's ideas. (The
label "West Coast jazz," like so many in the history of the music, was
misleading for simple reasons: not only was "cool" a dialect spoken
elsewhere, but the California scene at the time was itself rich with other
dialects spoken by talents like Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Eric
Dolphy.)
With Birth of the Cool, Davis and Evans cemented a legendary
partnership and friendship whose musical dialogue continued until
Evans's death in 1988. Along the way, they scaled orchestral settings on
albums like the 1960s' Sketches of Spain. Taking Evans's evocative and
moody arrangements of Spanish compositions and folk tunes as their
departure points, the tone poems against which Miles darted and curved
his vocalic trumpet melded the notion of European concertos (which
Duke Ellington had already appropriated into jazz via compositions like
"Concerto for Cootie") with Bird's pioneering if not fully realized work
against string backdrops. But the results Miles and Gil got on Sketches
were strikingly integrated and quite suggestive, even if albums like Porgy
and Bess made the conception uneven overall as a body of work.
Typically enough for the ever restless Miles, at the same time he was
pursuing the more orchestral and composed sides of jazz he continued
to explore different angles of improvisation, the other pole of the dialec-
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 Dancing in Your Head

tic powering jazz's engine. So 1959 witnessed Kind of Blue, which

followed up on earlier efforts, like Milestones, in attempting to combine
modes and open-ended improvisation into a band vehicle. Boasting
John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Cham-
bers, and Jimmy Cobb, it was a pivotal effort. Other musicians from
George Russell (who was heavily involved in the experimentation and
theorizing in Gil Evans's basement apartment that yielded Birth of the
Cool, and with whom Bill Evans had worked) to Sun Ra (whose John
Gilmore deeply influenced Trane) had delved into modes as the basis for
a new improvising language that would complement or displace the Tin
Pan Alley song structures that generated bebop's thicket of chords. But
Kind of Blue brought the idea into the mainstream.
Ironically, Miles himself retreated from this improvising revolution.
(It wasn't the only time he'd do that: after On the Comer, where he
foregrounded outrageous explosions of percussion against rock- and
funk-derived textures, he lapsed back into the by then more formulaic
fusion forged on Bitches Brew.) Although following Kind of Blue he cut
the orchestral albums with Gil Evans, his active bands between 1959
and 1964, which were recorded almost entirely live, were still playing
early repertoire like "Walkin"' and "My Funny Valentine," standards
with set changes—the very approach that Kind of Blue had set aside. But
that's the nature of revolutions in music as in life: a breakthrough is
usually followed by consolidation, retrenchment, and then, at last, a
return to the barricades.
So it's no surprise that by September 1964, Miles had finished assem-
bling another group that would help continue his ongoing musical
revolutions. While pundits predicted jazz's death—that same year, the
Beatles had led the successful English Invasion that resuscitated rock
and roll and pulled most younger fans out of jazz venues and record
sections—Miles was bent, as he was so often, on reshaping the music
into something vital, not mourning its alleged passing. By the time
E.S.P. was recorded in early 1965, his ace lineup—Wayne Shorter,
Herbie Hancock (credited on the original sleeve as Herb), Ron Carter
(credited as Ronald), and Tony Williams—was already churning up
sounds that would earn it legendary status.
Shorter was the last element in the band's kinetic chemistry to fall
into place. Five years earlier, he'd been recommended to Miles by
Coltrane for the tenor slot; Trane wanted to spread his own wings, and
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 E.S.P

Snorter's adroit mix of influences (Trane's achingly acerbic tone chief

among them) coupled with his own coiled sense of time seemed, to the
older sax great, to mark Shorter as his natural successor. He was ulti-
mately right, but for that moment Miles persuaded him to stay one more
time, and Shorter signed on with Art Blakey's perennial Jazz Messengers
instead. Trane, of course, left Miles anyway, and though his slot was
filled by high-quality players like George Coleman and Sam Rivers,
those bands are generally regarded as interim groups.
That changed when Shorter finally joined Miles's quintet. Between
then and the time E.S.P. was cut, the band's entire internal texture, its
attack and crosstalk, mutated dramatically. As Jack Chambers, author of
the acclaimed Milestones (Beech Tree Books), noted simply, "Shorter
was the catalyst." But in fact, all the band members had the unique
ability to, in a sense, lead themselves, which, besides their obvious
instrumental and compositional prowess, is what made them prime
candidates for a Miles lineup anyway.
For like Duke Ellington, like Charles Mingus, Miles set up a feed-
back loop between his sidemen, himself, and his musical goals. But with
a difference: Duke's loop was closed (as was Mingus's), and thus shaped
all the material coursing through it to his image. Even when he appro-
priated the players' input and custom-wrote parts and solos for them, the
results became embedded in the ongoing body of work that -was the
Duke Ellington Band. By contrast, Miles's feedback loop has always
been open. When he's listening to his sidemen, he doesn't have a
hidden agenda; he's there to hear what happens and then deduce where
it can go. That attitude forces the players to be participants in the
democratic model we call a jazz combo even as it helps clarify his next
direction in the leader's own perpetually searching mind.
There's an archetypal story told by nearly every musician I've ever
talked to who's worked with Miles. Melted down, its various versions
run together something like this: "We were sitting in the studio jam-
ming, and the tapes were rolling like they always were," says MilesMan.
"Miles was just standing with his back to us, and all of a sudden he spun
around and looked right at me and said, '(Fill in the blank with some
very specific directive like, "Don't let me hear you playin' none of that
bebop shit," or, "Why don't you leave some space in there?").' It was
about the only straight direction I ever got from him."
From that perspective, Miles Davis as leader is the epitome of Zen,
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 Dancing in Your Head

the blank shrug that answers the cliched question of which, creatively
speaking, came first, the chicken or the egg, the band or the concept. He
deliberately places his own creativity on the line, surrenders it to be at
the mercy of the band he heads; to a large degree, his course is set by the
sounds raging from his personnel. Of course he picks them, but less to
align with preconceived notions ofwhere he's headed than because he's
reacting to how they might get him to someplace—and this is the key
operable word in Miles's vocabulary—"new."
What "new" is or will be, exactly, arises from the friction between
Miles's studied technique of avoiding imprisoning his players with too
much direction and the band members' evolving sense of community
and purpose, their gleaning from his oblique hints what salient points
he's hearing about what they're doing. The process completes an ironic
circle that Duke's men never had to deal with. In effect, Miles's players
are always trying to guess what he's making of their attempts to guess
what's on his mind, when in the end what he wants—and when it
works, what he gets—is what's on their minds: he wants them to plot out
their own methods for having the musical conversations we call impro-
visation. That way, his players do more than infuse themselves into
his music. They become the music as much as he does. (Which is
one underlying reason that Miles since the '60s has usually refused to
play old repertoire with new bands. "How can you play that stuff," he
once asked me, "without Bill and Trane and those guys? Why would
you?")
His players became the music on E.S.P., creating something new
from a meeting of hard bop and modal attacks through both their com-
positions and their improvisations. Most commentators agree that
Williams's shimmering cymbals and odd-meter superimpositions pro-
vided the music's distinctive underpinnings and signature. The young
(he was nineteen at the time E.S.P. was cut) drummer's fractionated
pulses thrust his compatriots outward with centripetal force; Carter's
deep-toned lines spun out the tightropes that the soloists cavorted on,
while Hancock's snaky comping and conspicuous absences warped, and
let his compatriots warp, the ever looser harmonic structures. Through
it all, of course, Miles's now-singing, now-phlegmatic horn jabbed left
hooks and poked into brilliant and unpredictable corners and arced with
a ferocious grace. The irresistible combination of ingredients made this

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Miles quintet the last of his bands virtually all jazz critics and fans can
agree to call great.
You can hear why from E.S.P.'s outset. The almost singsong sway of
the theme for the Miles-penned title track falls away to Shorter's muscu-
lar come-on, which deliberately evokes Trane, then Miles's agile and
angular romp, then Hancock's sprightly dashes—all of them goaded by
Carter's sprinting bass and Williams's sudden slams and bucking cymbal
rides. "Eighty-one" takes a characteristically idiosyncratic turn on the
soul-jazz so popular at the time (thanks largely to Miles alumnus Can-
nonball Adderley), mutating into a growling blues for its B sections.
"Little One" opens with lush, post-Impressionist piano chords; soon
Miles's bleak trumpet scrawls a theme followed by an anguished solo as
the rhythm section kicks into modified waltz-time balladeering;
Shorter's sax conveys a kind of sophisticated heartbreak that's no less
painful for its world-weariness; Hancock, whose tune this is, paints in
spare, somber tones—a Rothko in sound. Rounding out the LP's side
one, Carter's piece, "R.J." lights out for hard-bop territory with high-
strung bass pumping that suddenly downshifts for the turnarounds.
Sometimes the titles jazzers hang from their tunes seem either myste-
riously unconnected or banally direct; but "Agitation," which used to
open side two, isn't one of those. The Williams solo that lifts it off is no
befuddled or frenzied banging. In fact, it continues the album's intro-
spective mood while, like the tempo changes and stalling pedal tones
that punctuate the rest of the tune, clearly suggesting the swirling emo-
tions lurking behind the polished surface. "Iris," penned by Shorter,
finds first the melancholy sax, then the voice-of-the-wasteland trumpet
framed by Hancock's nimble, leapfrogging comping to a rare extent.
Rounding things off is "Mood," another Carter piece; filigreed with
breathy, muted trumpet and understated sax in a counterpoint that
purposely sidesteps dialog, it lingers in the memory like the fog- and
smoke-filled mise-en-scenes of the noir flicks it could accompany.
After E.S.P. came the deluge of remarkable albums featuring this
powerhouse quintet: Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, Sorcerer, Filles de Kiliman-
jaro, and so on. And then the quintet finally disintegrated as Miles
pressed on into fusion, driven by the iron law of change that has shaped
his vast but deliberately discontinuous body of music in the same way it
drives life itself. For Miles Davis, motion is life, stasis is death—it's as

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simple and basic and relentless as that. So change isn't caprice or whim
for him any more than it was for Darwin. Rather, it's a strategic interplay
of forces—in Miles's case, the literal interplay on stage, and the concep-
tual interplay between himself and the players he picks for his bands—
that allows the chance of adaptation, and hence survival. By its enduring
beauty, E.S.P. demonstrates just how successful Miles Davis's aesthetic
strategy could be. [1989]

chapter. 31
Rolling with the Tape
Trace the story of Miles Davis the recording artist, as opposed to Miles
Davis the stage performer, and it means tracing the birth, growth, and
development of the modern art of recording jazz. That may sound
oversimplified and overdramatic, but it's not.
When Miles started recording in the late '40s, jazz records were more
or less cut the same way they had been since the earliest days of the
Edison cylinder. All the musicians gathered in the studio, ran through
the tunes, got set for the red light to blink on, and then did however
many takes it took to get one that would satisfy the producer and
performers—and it was hoped eventually, the customers in the stores.
Working with producer Teo Macero, his longtime cohort and collab-
orator from the '50s until he left Columbia Records in 1983, Miles
changed all that. Instead of being largely transcriptions of live perfor-
mances, Miles Davis records from the mid-1960s on began to tackle the
studio in ways paralleling those developed by rock-and-roll explorers of
the period.
To understand how revolutionary this was, you need some techno-
logical and historical background. For starting in the mid-1960s, the
recording studio became more than a collection of technology; it be-
came a place where musicians could do more than simply hope to
capture an outstanding live performance. That breakthrough amounted
J50
 Rolling with the Tape

to a reorganization of thought, and is strikingly similar to the epis-

temological shift that occurred early in the century after the birth of the
movies. Then film directors realized they didn't have to shoot their
sequences in real time, but could use editing to create the illusion of
continuity by shooting their scenes in the most convenient order regard-
less of the story line, and then paste them together into a narrative after
the fact.
Blame the similarly new sense of the recording studio that took hold
in the 1960s on Les Paul. By the early 1950s, guitarist Paul—a classic
American dabbler whose inventions included the solid-body electric
guitar and countless special effects that presaged the huge racks of equip-
ment and synthesizer banks so common on rock tours today—had pi-
oneered a primitive form of overdubbing using multiple records.
Laying down one guitar part on the first disc, for instance, Paul
would then play that disc back and play another guitar part along with it
into the microphone. And so on, and so on, until he developed the
dense but sweet sound that marked his highly successful career with his
then-wife, singer-guitarist Mary Ford. Their string of million-selling
hits included "How High the Moon," "By Bye Blues," "The World Is
Waiting for the Sunrise," and "Vaya Con Dios."
Obviously Paul's primitive disc-by-disc method of multitracking, as
overdubbing would later come to be called, was cumbersome and far
from being the kind of technology that was widely, easily applicable.
Still, pop singers like Patti Page and Neil Sedaka took full advantage of
the technique to overdub their vocals again and again on a single song,
creating the impression that they were harmony groups rather than
individuals. And Paul himself, years ahead of anyone else, developed
the first (if cumbersome) multitracking tape equipment.
With the widespread adoption of tape after World War II, recording
got simpler in some ways, more complex in others. For years, tape
consoles in studios were more or less easier-to-use versions of the long-
standing disc technology. But tape had a basic advantage over discs: you
could reuse it again and again just by erasing whatever you'd put on it. A
recorded disc, on the other hand, was a one-shot.
With the appearance of commercial stereo recordings in the late
1950s (stereo recording, in a primitive form, had begun in 1919!), that
single difference flowered into myriad applications for tape. First two,
then as the technology developed multiple mikes were used to capture
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 Dancing in Your Head

the sounds generated in the studio and feed them onto two tracks of tape.
Those two distinct ribbons of sound were then mixed down—in other
words, were sonically balanced against each other electronically to pro-
vide a "realistic" stereo image when played back through two speakers.
So even though the sound was being manufactured in a studio via a
process that was growing more and more remote from live performing,
the concert hall remained the mental touchstone of everyone from
producers and engineers to the performers themselves. The idea of
stereo was to make recordings seem more "real"—that is, more like a
live show.
As the 1960s progressed, the number of tracks available in the studio
increased. Let's take the Beatles as an indicator, since they did some of
the crucial pioneering in the studio. Their first album was recorded on a
two-track machine; by the mid-1960s they were cutting albums like
Rubber Soul on four-track machines; by 1967 they'd started using a
prototypical eight-track studio (made of two four-track machines yoked
together) to produce Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. That intri-
cately laced, farsighted album demonstrated a dense recording meth-
odology and almost futuristic sonic imaging that set standards for
years—and in fact still sounds uncliche'd.
The Beatles had given up the idea that recordings should be made in
real time, and also that idea's corollary, that an album should sound like
a captured live performance. Along with a host of other rock and
rollers—the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin—
they demonstrated that far from being simply an extension of stage
shows, a recording could dare and achieve things no touring unit could
effectively duplicate. To put it simply, they raised the use of the record-
ing studio into an art form in its own right.
They also established the recording format that, despite some
changes due to technological developments since, has remained the
typical pop approach to working in the studio. First come the basic
tracks: rhythm section, maybe another instrument or two. Then are
overdubbed lead instruments and/or vocals, usually one at a time. The
isolation of each stage of the recording process is intended to guarantee
the finest signal quality for the final mix-down, when the whole jigsaw
puzzle is reassembled into a performance that never actually took place.
Which is why both the classicaland jazz communities basically

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shrugged their shoulders at this imaginative leap. For their different

reasons, each of those genres posited the automatic primacy of live
performance. In the jazz world, of course, the whole point of what was
at once one of the music's greatest achievements and its fundamental
language—the language of improvisation—seemed to demand direct
transcription to disc. Anything else was deemed inauthentic and even
downright fraudulent, because it tampered with the real-time flow of
invention and could be used to cover up mistakes and faulty ideas that
would have had to stand onstage.
And yet, as brilliant producer Brian Eno—for whom Miles's "He
Loves Him Madly," a tribute to Duke Ellington on Get Uf> with It,
triggered many of his own sonic insights—put it to me,
When you make a piece of music on record, one way of looking at it is
that you create a place. This is more than simply metaphorical. By the
time I was making On Land there had been a lot of technological ad-
vances in terms of reverberation, echo, digital delay, harmonization,
chorus, flanging, phasing—all those kinds of things, which had been
quite exotic when I started recording, but now every studio had tons of
the stuff.
And what all that stuff is doing to you, the listener, is telling you
about a place, about space. Reverb is a description of a space. Syn-
thetic reverb is a description of a space that doesn't exist—which is
very interesting. So that means if you are a composer, and actively
working with those things in the studio, you're building spaces, not
just melodies and rhythms.
Miles Davis was one of the first jazzmen to grasp those implications,
thanks at least in part to friend and colleague Teo Macero. Macero had
played tenor and baritone saxophone with Charles Mingus in the early
'50s, and had been one of the cofounders of Mingus's revolutionary Jazz
Workshops. Along with friends like Mingus, scholar/composer Gunther
Schuller, and Modern Jazz Quartet pianist/composer John Lewis, Ma-
cero wrestled with shaping the classical-jazz fusion they called Third
Stream. Hired at CBS initially as a music editor, he became a record
producer with one of Miles's most important albums, Kind of Blue;
amid the literally thousands of other recording dates he's worked on
since, he produced Miles Davis albums until 1983.
Over those years and in the process of working so often with Miles,

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Macero—who estimates with a shrug of the shoulders and a laugh that

he must have worked on around 3 500 records in his long career—also
changed the concept of what producing Miles Davis—and in his wake,
many other jazz artists—meant.
Still ruffled because Miles said some derogatory things about him in
print a couple of years ago, Macero spoke only grudgingly about his
revolutionary work with one of jazz's most revolutionary figures:
He claims he did it all himself. All those ideas that he had, like taping
his live concerts and using them as raw material—where the hell do
you think he got those from? Not from his own head, but from my
head in the studio, from watching me remixing and cutting the tapes
up and all that crap. Even the idea of using electronic instruments—
he never did that except for once in 1968. But he never gave me any
credit for that or anything else.
It's very strange when you consider that I was only with him for
about 27 years, and made almost every record he ever made except the
first two, and I worked on the second one, Porgy and Bess—I did all
the editing for Gil (Evans). But he hasn't talked to me in four years—I
can't believe it. So they asked me to be on a PBS television show to
talk about him, and I wouldn't do it; and somebody who's writing
Miles' biography wanted me to sit down and do interviews, but I'm not
really interested—I don't need it.
But at the time we worked together we were really pretty tight—we
were like two brothers. I got him through both of his sicknesses; his
life was not a pleasant one, and I went through it all with him. Not
only in the studio, but personally.
How he did it in the studio was, in part, by adapting rock ideas about
recorded media to a jazz sensibility.
The whole way we made records was much more like rock and roll of
the time. In those days, the late '60s and '70s, we used to do things in
the editing room that were extremely radical, especially in a jazz con-
text. But if you look back at Miles' career, you'll recall he stopped
playing twice. During all those periods when he was not playing, his
career went on—thanks to me, working in the studio, with the tapes
we'd amassed. Without that, he would've been in the soup.
Macero is referring to periods like the early '60s, when Miles had
basically taken himself out of the studio and stayed on the road—partly
because he was riding a crest of popularity, partly because his band's

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personnel turnover was so frequent. CBS, of course, needed product to

release to the growing crowds of Miles Davis fans.
It fell to Macero to reconcile the two distinct, and somewhat op-
posed, priorities. Which he did, ingeniously. Using some of the first
sophisticated mobile sound studios, Macero tracked Miles from hall to
club, and reshuffled the reams of live tape he collected into albums like
Live at Carnegie Hall 1961 and the two-album At the Blackhawk. With
that, Macero started serious tape editing.
The insights he gained from that process, the ways it reorganized his
own thinking about the studio, tape, and sound, allowed Macero to
make the next step. By the time Miles, incapacitated regularly by a host
of illnesses from 1975 to 1981, needed albums to release, Macero could
concoct outstanding studio recipes like Water Babies.
Actually recorded in the late '60s, Water Babies wasn't released until
1976. But in the seven or eight years that passed between the time the
raw material was taped and the album hit the stores, much changed. In
a way that became paradigmatic for nearly all of Miles's albums from the
late '60s on, Macero's forceful editing skills were put to the test in
patching together performances out of long, often rambling jam ses-
sions.
More and more Miles's studio approach boiled down to something
like this: take a group of players into the studio with a few scraps of music
and a deliberately vague sense of general direction, turn on the tapes,
and go. Via the painstaking process of splicing selected segments to-
gether, Macero and Miles created compositions, textures, effects that as
often as not hadn't even been imagined by the folks who were playing
when the red light was on. It was the beginning of a whole new era for
jazz recording, one whose implications have only come clear over the
last few years. Concludes Macero,

We revolutionized the way jazz records were made, though no one

gave me any credit—not Miles, not CBS, nobody. In fact, compared
to some of the records they're making today, which sound flat and
dull, the things we were doing even as early as '59 sound great. I
would never have let that shit go by. I used to fight every artist right
down the pike. I wanted all the records I produced to be better than
what they were.
So we used to have some battles. But the end result was what I was
concerned about, not the fighting. When I got into the studio it was

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not a personal thing. I went in there with blinders on; if I didn't like
the guy, it didn't make any difference. I went in there to make it better
than it would be if I just took the times.
Most guys still go in there and just take the times: take one, take
two five minutes, and so on. Who needs that shit? I was out there
jumping around all the time with all these artists—with Monk, with
Brubeck, even with Ellington I used to go out and ended up conduct-
ing the band a couple of times. I didn't like what he was doing and
told him so, so he gave me the pencil and gave me the paper and said,
"Here, you fix it." And I said, "Fine," and went out and did it.
Once the tape left my hands, as the producer I always felt I should
go and sit in for the transfer to the final disc, make some changes there
too. It's like a final edit, during the master. I used to do that with all
my records at CBS—no record was ever put out unless I was sitting
there in the mastering room. Or I'd get an acetate the afternoon the
mastering was done, and if I didn't like it I'd go right back and work
with the guy all day if we had to.
While Miles may not have relished Macero's insistent input, he
clearly learned from its prophetic method—and depended on it. But
with a change of labels (from CBS to Warner Bros.) Miles also changed
recording direction, leaving Macero and live-in-the-studio recording
behind in favor of an even more contemporary pop-inspired approach.
Since multitrack recording had grown to offer 24 and more tracks
during the 70s, pop musicians (and their producers) had tried to take
advantage of the technology to make the instrument sounds sharper and
more defined while also providing producer and performer maximum
flexibility in the final mix-down (where individual tracks are balanced
into the stereo image you get from your album at home). The best way,
it seemed, to accomplish both—and get a performance whose quality
would be so good the band would then have to learn how to approximate
it onstage—would be yet again to change the method of recording itself.
Thus arose the much more expensive and time-consuming method
of recording outlined earlier—track by track, with the final assembly of
the finished product only at the end of the process. It's the method that
still dominates pop—and now, ironically, a lot of jazz as well.
Not so ironically, Miles has depended on one of his former sidemen
for production in this new realm. Marcus Miller played bass with some
of the outfits Miles put together during his last years at CBS, but he
brought to those groups a distinctive sensibility based less on jazz than

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on the funk he grew up hearing and learning from. Miller honed his
skills on the tunes of funky groups like Mandrill, as well as more jazz-
inflected funk by players like bassist Larry Graham, whose Graham
Central Station attempted to translate the farsighted funk of Sly and the
Family Stone (where Graham got his start) into a hybridized context.
Now, Miles is famous for almost-never-give-direct-orders guidance
in the studio. As he once explained to me,
I don't lead musicians, man. They lead me. I listen to them to learn
what they can do best. Like Daryl Jones play a bass line, and he forget
it. I won't. I'll say, "Daryl, you did this last night, do it again." He'll
go, "What?" I'll say, "It's right here on the tape (of the show)." That's
what gives playing that feeling, like when you see a pretty woman and
say, "Shit, wait a minute." Listening to what they do and feeding it
back to them is how any good bandleader should lead his musicians.
That's why athletes have coaches, right?
"A recording is only a guide for what you might play," he continues,
expanding on the key distinction between live and studio work exploited
by the Beatles, alluded to by Eno, and seized on by Teo Macero. "In the
studio I play an entirely different music like, I don't know, Alban Berg or
one of those composers. But outside it's social phrases, you know what I
mean? In the studio you have control; you can put in and take out
whatever you like."
In this larger context, then, Miller brought his funk-derived concept
to the jam sessions that went on while the tapes rolled. He'd been doing
jingle dates and other sessions, had made something of a name for
himself as a session player and had become technically proficient on his
bass, but he admits candidly,
At that time I didn't feel like I had an identity. Miles was the one who
made me nail something down as far as a style. See, the music he was
playing really didn't have any predetermined base style to it—I had to
come up with something, and that forced me to come up with some-
thing of my own. The tape would just be rolling all the time. So
sometimes what came out wouldn't be so hip, but sometimes it would
be serious.
When his stint with Miles was over, Miller began writing tunes and
producing records for session wizard saxman David Sanborn; Miles
heard them, and liked what he heard. So when he moved to his new

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label after 30 years with CBS, he tapped Miller's multifaceted talents for
Tutu.
Recalls Miller,
It started off that I was only going to do two tunes. See, right after
Miles signed with Warner Bros. I was talking to (producer) Tommy
LiPuma and he said, "Miles wants something different." So he sent
me a tape of the George Duke tune ("Backyard Ritual"), and there was
a drum machine on it, Synclavier sax, and stuff like that. I thought,
Hmmm, I didn't know Miles wanted to go this way. So when I sat
down to write, I know I didn't have to be limited to anything, that
whatever I did Miles would be open to it. I just kept him in mind,
which for me means seeing his face; if I went over the melody and I
could see him in my mind playing it, see him with the horn up to his
mouth, then I knew it was gonna fit him. It sounds corny—but it
works.

LiPuma and Miles clearly thought it worked too. They okayed Mil-
ler's tunes before they even heard them, and booked studio time in Los
Angeles. That was Miller's first shock. When he flew out from New
York, he got his second.
"There was no band there," he remembers of his arrival at the
studio.
Tommy says, "I'd like to try this with a drum machine." I was game; I
thought it'd be interesting to hear if Miles could make the drum ma-
chine swing. So we worked a while on "Tutu," which is the first tune
I came up with, programming the sounds to make them feel like they
were breathing. Miles was grooving. When he heard "Tutu" he said,
"I think you're in a real creative period. I think you should write some
more stuff."
Back home in New York, that's just what Miller did. "I saw the
album developing as a conversation between Miles and me," explains
the multi-instrumentalist, who played nearly all the instruments from
synth to sax on the six tracks of Tutu he produced. "You know how jazz
artists used to do albums with big bands: they'd play the melody, then
solo for 16 bars, then play the melody again? That's how I envisioned
this record."
Since he was also, in some key senses, trained by Miles, Miller also

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found himself incorporating conceptual frames borrowed and adapted

from earlier Davis collaborators.

Gil Evans was a big influence; I knew him, and I've really been influ-
enced by him as a person. But I never really checked out Sketches of
Spain until a couple of years ago.
What I did check out, though, was one of my main influences—
Herbie Hancock's writing, especially around his Speak like a Child pe-
riod. He was writing really interesting stuff, using chords he didn't
even have names for—they just worked. Then one day I pulled out
Speak like a Child and I read on the back that Herbie during that pe-
riod was inspired by Gil Evans. [Miller laughs.] So now I under-
stand when people tell me that Tutu sounds like Sketches for
the '80s.

Still, the operative word is '80s—which Miller's production, from

Tutu to Siesta to Amandla, is very reflective of. Again using Tutu as the
example of his studio relationship with Miles, Miller explains,

I really wanted to use colors, I wanted it to sound different—that's why

you hear a lot of sounds, all the synths and sampled stuff. That comes
from making other records, other kinds of records. You can use sounds
to create all kinds of moods, and they're available now, thanks to the
technology.
What you don't want is that they become the main element; a lot of
bad writing is covered up by great sounds, especially in the music you
hear on the radio. But that background gives Miles a different sound.
And he reacts off 'em, they really inspired him.
We recorded Tutu in an organic way. I'd lay down basic rhythm
tracks, then the two of us would play together. I'd go back in and sup-
port what was done, then he'd come back in and play again. I mean,
he'd walk into the studio when I'd be putting these weird sounds on
and put on the headphones and start playing; it was like an orchestra
would hit him in the head through the left ear and he'd go "Ernnnh,"
just fall over to the side and hit a couple of notes. He was having a
ball.
I mean, you've got to figure the cat's over 60 years old, he's heard it
all, he's played with all the best. So it's an accomplishment to find
something that startles him or inspires him. It was a very controlled
setting, a very unusual album, and I'm real pleased with it.

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He should be, for with Tutu Miles Davis got the opportunity not only
to continue his pioneering quest for more modern use of the studio but
also to update an outstanding piece of his past. Sketches of Spain, which
started from the carefully wrought Gil Evans score and had taken so
many musicians, takes, and tape edits, had been reformulated by a duo
surrounded by machines they used to translate ideas into music one
track at a time, only assembling the final work at the end of the pro-
cess. [1989]

chapter. 32
The Serpent's Tooth
Miles Davis is one of the few jazzers who could get away with putting
just his first name and picture on the front of a book and still sell more
than a handful of copies to aficionados. After all, for the 40-plus years of
his professional career Miles has repeatedly been standing at or near the
center of one musical earthquake after another.
If he came to New York on the pretext of studying at Juilliard, he
soon found his real mentors, Bird and Diz and Monk, and so from the
ripe old age of 18 he worked with bebop's revolutionaries. By 1949, he'd
decided to pursue a new musical direction with arranger Gil Evans and
players like John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan; thus was born The Birth of
the Cool (Capitol), which gave rise to pallid imitations from Chet Baker
on down. After kicking his habit in 1953, he gradually pulled together
the landmark unit with Trane, Cannonball Adderley, and Bill Evans
that worked modally, rather than simply cycling through chord changes
as jazz had done since its beginnings. A few years later his crackerjack
outfit with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony
Williams pushed that notion beyond its limits, and coincidentally
launched what became known as fusion. In love with Jimi Hendrix's
guitar and Sly and the Family Stone's straight-up funk, Miles went out
On the Corner, which not only helped change the way jazz was recorded
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 The Serpent's Tooth

but earned the undying enmity of jazz critics—including Wynton Mar-

salis, who has loftily passed belittling judgment on all of Miles's work
after the '50s while obviously owing Miles an enormous musical debt.
And so on.
So it's more than just a little ironic that Miles is also one of the few
jazzers to endure literally decades of bad-mouthing from most of the
jazz press. Which, not at all surprisingly, is one of the major leitmotifs
running through his autobiography. If Miles is famous for anything
outside of his music, it's his running putdowns of the white-run jazz
industry, from producers to critics, and his street-style mouth—another
of the book's major linguistic leitmotifs.
Actually, tiresome as it gets, that's one of the more endearing traits of
Miles: The Autobiography, since it accurately reflects its subject. The
book reads like Miles talked it into a tape machine, except for the set-
piece opening chapter, which strives for a hackneyed epiphanic/
prophetic moment between a very young Miles and the blue flame of a
gas jet. For the rest, Miles talks his way through his life, his music, his
grudges, his fistfights, his persecutions, his addictions, his triumphs.
That makes Miles: The Autobiography by turns fascinating and irritating
and controversial and self-contradictory, lyrical and boring and pungent
and self-aggrandizing—in other words, a lot like the man himself.
Most people want spicy backstage revelations and settlement of old
scores in "star" autobiographies, and here at least Miles doesn't disap-
point. Down side first. Apparently the quick-to-anger Miles is as fast
with his hands as he is with his mouth, and doesn't much seem to care
which person of what gender he hits. Without trying to justify or excuse
how disgustingly often he hits the women who pass through his life
"upside the head," it's important to note that Miles—who's abused
virtually every drug known—became a pimp during his early '50s period
of heroin addiction, and a lot of his lingo and habits come from those
dark days rather than his relatively sunny, upper-middle-class upbring-
ing in East St. Louis. Then too, he makes it real plain how much he
thought of his father, who appears to have supported him emotionally
and financially with virtually no strings attached, as well as how little he
liked his mother, who first fought with her husband continually, then
divorced him. So there's plenty of fodder for would-be psychologists in
his repeated antipathy toward a wide range of women, his myriad casual
affairs during his marriages, his recurrent fallback on physical brutality
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 Dancing in Your Head

when dealing with wives and girlfriends (and, for that matter, band
members and friends), and his shrug-of-the-shoulders attitude toward
the whole thing.
Other musicians, even Miles's idols, also get brutalized physically
and emotionally, or are paid back for old grudges and/or placed in new
contexts. For example, Charlie Parker, shown as a brilliant musician
and raconteur, is also depicted as a manipulative creep willing to shovel
any mountain of shit, shortchange any friend or bandmate, to feed his
habits; the famously caustic Miles is remarkably unsentimental about
either Bird's genius or his—and bebop's—excesses, both musical and
drug-related. Wynton Marsalis, too, gets some well-deserved lumps for
his self-serving posturing.
Although the emphasis is definitely on personalities and events, trials
and successes, a sense of the dizzyingly varied musical styles Miles
pioneered or helped launch over the nearly unparalleled span of his
career manages to twinkle through the sensational aspects. That part of
the trumpeter's life got less space and depth than I'd expected, mainly
anecdotal peeks behind the scenes, some fascinating, others rehashed
from what looks like other sources. And when strictly technical points
are raised, they're too rarely properly explained.
But that's consistent with how Miles's personality is presented here:
largely unreflective, readily cynical, oddly vulnerable and shy, quick to
anger and slow to forget. Outside of the bandstand and the recording
studio, where he's plumbed the depths of his being to dredge up sounds
and ideas that have consistently turned music on its ear, he seems to
keep himself deliberately visceral but shallow—as if too much reflection
would dull his intuitive edge. Translated into the book, that means, for
instance, that his discussions of racism in the music industry often
become more rhetorical or egocentric than they had to be, rants rather
than indictments. This disappoints because Miles is one of the few
jazzers who's made it with a large enough audience to make big bucks;
coming in a more informed and organized way, his slashing verbal
attacks on racism in the music biz and America could have been deadly
enough to extend the legacy of his father, a man active in African-
American movements, and teach the rest of us a few things from the
inside.
But that's like wishing Miles was Montaigne. The music will mostly
have to continue to speak for itself, as it's done so eloquently for so long;
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 Prince of Darkness

for those more interested in that side of things, there's always Jack
Chambers's academically toned but factually solid Milestones. The life,
at least, is now officially documented. That split, I guess, fuels my own
ambivalence: I raced to get the book, raced to read it, and don't expect to
pick it up again for quite a while. Your move. [1989]

chapter 33
Prince of Darkness
Start by thinking of Miles Davis as jazz's Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy,
Whitman, or Joyce. Like each of those epical and epochal figures, his
encyclopedic body of work—40-plus years' worth—both sums up what
preceded it and recedes into the future like a challenge, a clarion call.
Though he began his career playing with beboppers, he was never really
one of them. Though he ended playing frequently shapeless funka-
thons, when his health and his chops and his too often lackluster 1980s
bands rose to the occasion he could still ignite them with a jabbing run
from his incandescent horn. Though he vowed time and again never to
go back to his past, his final triumph before his death on September 28,
1991, came at the Montreux Jazz Festival, where he played what was, by
all accounts, a stunning version of his old collaboration with Gil Evans,
Sketches of Spain.
So Miles was, like the looming literary figures above, a great conun-
drum as well. Impatience and restlessness seem to have dominated his
psyche. Acute as he was about music, in other ways he was, judging by
his autobiography (Mites, Simon & Schuster), profoundly unreflective.
But however distressing and hurtful, his impatience with the people
around him, and his restlessness even within the successive scenes he
participated in or led, fed an overwhelming drive that for most of his
career steered him toward upsetting the status quo. The ramifications of
his many revolutions still haven't been fully worked out.
Unlike writing, where you spend your creativity listening to influen-
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 Dancing in Your Head

rial ghosts while staring at your lonely blank page waiting for something
to arrive, jazz, like another great popular American form, the movies, is
a collaborative art. For all his vaunted viciousness, Miles knew how to
draw his cohorts into his ideas, understood how to let them take posses-
sion of what he thought he wanted to hear. Like Duke Ellington and
Charles Mingus, Miles set up a feedback loop between his sidemen,
himself; and his musical goals. The difference was that Duke's and
Mingus's loops were closed. Ellington, for instance, would take the
flashing scrawl of an inspired lick by a Johnny Hodges or a Tricky Sam
Nanton and ramify it into an arrangement; the codified results became
embedded in the ongoing body of work that was the Duke Ellington
Band.
Miles, by contrast, led by indirection. His feedback loop remained
open: he waited to hear what would happen and deduce where it could
go. Thus his impatience and restlessness, balanced by his ability to
listen, backed by an irascible toughness that ultimately became at least
as much mask as accurate projection, helped him become a rare and
successful leader. "Don't play none of that bebop shit," or "Lay off your
left hand," or "You don't have to plug every hole" were typical remarks
he'd make while waiting for his bands to figure out what to make of his
sketchy imperatives. For it was his democratic model of leadership—
letting his cohorts fill out his skeletal notions, then seizing and synthe-
sizing the results and pointing them toward an overall goal—that
spawned one stylistic turn after another of a career that spanned nearly
half a century, one of the most astonishing careers for longevity and
productivity that jazz has ever seen.
At the center of that career, of course, was Miles's instantly recogniz-
able trumpet: eerily vocalic with its parched, acerbic tone, its elastic
sense of space punctuated by note flurries, and its occasional dramatic
stab into the high register. The combination, which may have owed
more to Bix Beiderbecke than anyone, made him an alchemical bal-
ladeer who could transmute Tin Pan Alley tripe like "Bye Bye Black-
bird" into burnished gold. It also marked him as one of the first post-
Louis Armstrong hornmen to back off from the rush to stratospheric
high notes as a sign of virtuosity. Even if that was because, as has been
claimed, he simply couldn't make them, he made a virtuoso's virtue of
his limitations, and thus redefined the sound of jazz trumpet. In the
process, he helped expand the horizons of what we label jazz, that ever
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 Prince of Darkness

growing accretion of stylistic choices. For if Miles was one of jazz's great
conundrums, he was also one of its major nexus points.
One of Miles's key talents was his ability to synthesize the salient
points of a seemingly unbounded musical space broad enough to in-
clude Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Gil Evans, Tadd Dameron, Charles
Mingus, Sun Ra, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, James
Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Prince, Ravel, Debussy, Harry Partch,
John Cage, Stockhausen, African sources, technology—it was all the
same to him. He took what he wanted from wherever he found it. He
once told me, for example, that he wanted Herbie Hancock to lay off his
left hand during the mid- to late-1960s partly because he'd seen an
African concert with an mbira that turned his whole conception of piano
around, and later fed into his use of synthesizers. That imaginative
talent could be, and could be seen as, opportunistic. But opportunism is
one quality all artists share. As Stravinsky put it famously, "Lesser artists
borrow; great artists steal."
His restlessness made Miles anathema to many critics and musicians,
who deplored his abandonment of bebop and acoustic jazz for the rock-
and funk-driven sounds he pursued from the mid-1960s on. On the
other hand, it won him an idolatrous audience among the then kids he
touched for the first time at venues like the Fillmores. As a result, he
eventually became a wealthy man, which inflamed his detractors even
more. But though his turn to fusion seemed like a great treason to those
who scorned it, it was only one of the series of watersheds he hurdled,
which left him as he came to them: driven and divided.
When Miles came to New York in 1945, it was ostensibly to study at
Juilliard. That, at least, is how he sold the trip to his father, a prosperous
farm-owning dentist in East St. Louis. Instead, he looked for Bird, who
roomed with him while he studied bebop firsthand on the bandstands of
clubs and at jam sessions. But Miles, who was cheaply dismissive of
Parker in his autobiography, never really played bebop, didn't clone
Bird or Dizzy Gillespie's lines the way so many did at the time. That
independence and contrast probably made it easier for him to land a gig
as Bird's sideman of choice.
On Bird/Savoy Original Master Takes (Savoy Jazz), which collects
early sessions where he played with Parker, Miles is clearly hearing
different harmonies stacked in different ways. Like Thelonious Monk,
his sometime antagonist, like contemporary American composers, he
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 Dancing in Your Head

was interested in silence as a component of sound. Though he became

perfectly capable of boppish note flurries—that's especially evident on
his series of adrenalin-charged live recordings, even as late as the excel-
lent 1964 Miles in Berlin (Columbia)—he more typically chose to halo
his spiky lines with silence. So he never got hung up by sheer velocity
divorced from soul or ideas to become its own alleged reward—
ironically, much as it would, 30 years later, for the fusion epigones
following in Miles's wake.
Bebop spoke to the changing realities of postwar life, which was
faster-paced and marked by the fact that millions of black Americans had
participated in the war effort, gotten real jobs and salaries or been in the
armed forces, and weren't about to go quietly back to sharecropping. As
music historian Martin Williams once remarked to me, "The first time
I, as a white Southerner, saw Bird's combo, what struck me even more
than the music was the attitude coming off the bandstand—self-
confident, aggressive, it was something I'd never seen from black musi-
cians before." This new generation was not given to accepting Jim Crow
niceties; Art Blakey and Max Roach have both recounted how they
directly confronted segregation in ways that were unthinkable for earlier
jazzers. Miles came directly out of that experience, and fought against
racism in the record industry as he encountered it. It's no surprise to
learn he never really lost his distrust for white people in authority.
Still, he was deemed a potential leader by the white men who ran
(and generally still run) the record industry early on; keep in mind that
he was recording with Bird at the ripe old age of 19. But he pulled the
first of many stylistic surprises when, taken by the ideas of ex-Claude
Thornhill arranger Gil Evans, he became a member of an impromptu
musical think-tank that gathered in Evans's basement apartment. The
1948-49 nonet that resulted yielded cuts later collected as Birth of the
Cool (Capitol). Birth not only slowed down tempos and featured ensem-
ble passages as much or more than solos, in direct reaction to bebop, but
became the seedbed for the West Coast "cool" jazz scene and the long-
lived Modern Jazz Quartet, whose John Lewis was himself an arranger
and player on the sides. As Miles recalled some of the sources for the
concept, "Gil gave me an album by Harry Partch in 1948, where there
were drums and keyboards that really sounded like what John Cage was
doing. He played Ravel for me too."
In what would become a characteristic zigzag, Miles didn't follow up
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 Prince of Darkness

on those innovations himself. Heroin addiction claimed the young

trumpeter until 1954, when he went home to St. Louis to go cold
turkey—which he successfully did. The recordings from this period,
many of them collected on Chronicle (Prestige), find his playing un-
even, and his approach moving toward hard bop, that stripped-down
take on Bird that Blakey, Roach, and others were also pushing into. As
Gary Giddins has noted, it's ironic and revealing that two seemingly
antithetical movements of the time, hard bop and cool, stemmed largely
from a single source.
The 1955 Newport Jazz Festival marked Miles's return to the front
ranks. According to Jack Chambers in his meticulous two-volume biog-
raphy Milestones (Beech Tree Books), "The public image of Miles Davis
was refracted, like an object catching the sun in a clouded pool. He was
regarded as inconsistent and undependable, but the addiction that had
made him that way was now cured. His records showed him struggling
technically and playing indifferently, but he had recently recorded mu-
sic that was both technically proficient and passionately stated. He was
considered by even the well-informed fans as a figure from jazz's recent
past, but he was actively working at a new aesthetic and surrounding
himself with important new sidemen. The gap between public image
and reality narrowed almost overnight." His appearance had critics and
fans raving. Suddenly Miles could book his band and was approached by
Columbia Records—the beginnings of a long-term relationship.
Later that year, Miles began using a little-known saxist from Phila-
delphia named John Coltrane; their earliest recordings, which tug at bop
with a reckless abandon that foretells some of what was to come, are also
collected on Chronicle (Prestige). Then Miles transferred his recording
contract to Columbia, and his band went through a series of personnel
changes that eventually resulted in the lineup—Trane, Cannonball
Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones—that cre-
ated the haunting, groundbreaking five-tune album called Kind of Blue
(Columbia).
It was the period's capstone. Each tune, organized along different
modal principles explained briefly in the liner notes by Evans (which
mistakenly reverse the descriptions for "Flamenco Sketches" and "All
Blues"), is a classic. Working from those approaches, this amazing band
broke open jazz's prisonhouse of chord changes. Soloists could deter-
mine the shapes of their melodies without having to refer back to the
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 Dancing in Your Head

same irritating chordal repetition. Along with the pioneering work at

more or less the same time by Sun Ra's Arkestra, Mingus's Jazz
Workshop, and Ornette Coleman, Kind of Blue was a glimpse into one
of jazz's futures.
The trumpeter resumed his collaborations with Gil Evans for Miles
Ahead (Columbia), a highly eclectic collection of ideas. In some ways,
it's more musically successful than its more famed outgrowth, Sketches
of Spain (Columbia), which has since become a touchstone for attempts
to fuse jazz phrasings, harmonies, and tonal qualities with a classical
orchestral scope. The pulses and timbres employed throughout reflect
Evans's highly unusual approach to big-band arranging: the rhythms, no
matter how syncopated, are always understated, while the instrumental
voicings, no matter how strangely tilted toward the bottom end and rare
combinations, seem muted, pastel, undemanding. It's as if the surface
was set out with a deliberately deceptive sheen, a mirrorlike stream in
which the narcissistic listener will hear little but which the deeper,
attentive diver can penetrate to glean pearls aplenty.
By 1962, Miles felt he had to redirect his music. Hiring a young
bassist named Ron Carter, he plugged into a network of younger jazz-
men who helped bring it back to the cutting edge. Drummer Tony
Williams was only 17, but did for Miles what Elvin Jones did for Trane:
take the metrical flexibility the band needed and stretch it even further,
relying especially on his cymbal splashes and extraordinarily subtle sub-
divisions of the beat. Pianist Herbie Hancock, fresh from recording on
Blue Note, brought his gnarled melodic conception to the fray when he
signed on in 1963. George Coleman lasted longest of any post-Trane
saxist during this period; he'd briefly filled in for Coltrane years before,
and had a fat tone that made him a better foil for Miles's breathy, spare
trumpet. For a bit over a year, this was the Miles Davis Quintet. The
recordings of the period, all live, rely primarily on standards and ballads,
Miles's strong points from the mid-1950s, while, characteristically, they
virtually ignore his later breakthroughs.
By 1964, Miles finally added the last key element to his next all-star
lineup, a young tenorman from Newark. Ironically, Wayne Shorter had
been offered the slot by none other than Coltrane four years earlier,
when Trane was getting ready to split himself. Shorter was the perfect fit:
his tenor could burn with the rough plangency of Trane's while snaking
his unpredictable lines through more implied chords than any arranger
168
 Prince of Darkness

in his right mind would have written. The band's repertoire imme-
diately reflected the nature of the shift by dropping the standards and
ballads the leader had been leaning on for his post-Trane groups. Every-
body was writing—odd, angular, rhythmically supple and subtle tunes
that were sharp departures from the preceding four years of watertread-
ing, however graceful.
In effect, only now did Miles pick up the musical threads he'd help
unloose with Kind of Blue. This quintet developed modally based im-
provisation to near ultimate flexibility. The tonalities of their tunes were
either ambiguous or constantly shifting; the rhythmic underpinnings
swung furiously around a basic 4/4 pulse but by overlaying or implying
all manner of deviations from that beat, thanks to Williams's cymbals
and kick drum. Carter's deep-toned lines spun out tightropes for the
soloists to cavort on, while Hancock's snaky comping and conspicuous
absences warped, and let his compatriots warp, the ever looser struc-
tures. This period is where today's hyped crop of young neoboppers draw
much of their inspiration. E.S.P. (Columbia), Miles Smiles (Colum-
bia), and Nefertiti (Columbia), with their brilliantly off-center rhythms,
coiled ensembles, and spiraling solos, have inspired jazzers as diverse as
Wynton Marsalis and Bill Frisell.
When Miles in the Sky (Columbia) added George Benson for a tune,
it signaled that, once again, the winds of musical change were blowing.
They started relatively imperceptibly, on albums like Filles de Kiliman-
jaro (Columbia), where Miles had Hancock play electric piano—which
caused major consternation among jazz purists of the time, just as other
changes would. Water Babies (Columbia), recorded during this period
but unissued until Miles's "retirement" in 1976, documents yet another
step along his gradual transition to what would be called fusion: one side
offers cuts from mid-1967 by the quintet, the other captures some of the
earliest sounds—mosaics that fit their pieces together by stretching out
over increasing lengths of time—by an expanded lineup with Chick
Corea and bassist Dave Holland.
But In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew (both Columbia) are usually
heralded as the birth of fusion—even though it's arguable that earlier
rock albums like the Butterfield Blues Band's East West (Elektra),
Cream's Wheels of Fire (Atco), and Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland
(Reprise) deserve equal credit. Rock-style beats, heavily electronic in-
strumentation, a loose improvisational attack, and a growing use of
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 Dancing in Your Head

studio editing to create jagged soundscapes combined to create a massive

young audience as well as a new kind of music. Miles, in fact, had been
very taken with Hendrix's expansive psychedelic blues, and had made
plans to work with the rock guitar genius that were foiled only by
Hendrix's death. In addition, he'd been listening heavily to the deep
grooves of James Brown, the acid funk of Sly Stone, the open-ended
forms of Ornette Coleman, and the spacy electronic imaginings of
Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Collaborating with his longtime producer Teo Macero, Miles knew
just what he was doing by moving the percussive and sonic firestorms
he'd unleashed into the foreground on the albums beginning with On
the Comer (Columbia). Mixed like a rock record, it violated jazz sensi-
bilities by once again using heavy editing to elide deliberately distorted
textures into a hypnotic whirl. Miles and Macero had started recording
the hornman's groups live during the '60s; Macero actually constructed
live albums like Live at Carnegie Hall 1961 (Columbia) from reams of
tape. By the time of Bitches Brew, Miles's typical studio procedure was to
bring musicians in to jam off a basic script of material, and then, with
Macero, build finished pieces out of tape, like a movie director. Rock
groups—Hendrix and the Beatles in particular—had pioneered the pro-
cess; to jazzers, raised on the ideal of live improvisation, that approach
was a violation of the premise that recordings should simply document
the musicians' thought processes in real time.
Nevertheless, Miles and Macero continued pushing their method to
its limits for Get Up With It (which boasts "He Loved Him Madly,"
Miles's offbeat elegy/tribute to Duke Ellington) and the brilliantly evoc-
ative Jack Johnson soundtrack (where Macero honed his editing skills to
new heights of aural collage). But as Kevin Whitehead's astute notes
point out, by 1975's Pangaea Miles's band was able to create the kalei-
doscopic sonic collages and dynamics live. That's all the more remark-
able when you consider that Pangaea is the funkiest, most overtly
Hendrixy of these discs—a kind of Hendrix-meets-Trane hybrid, thanks
to the presence of guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas and saxist
Sonny Fortune. Along with the rest of Miles's output from this period, it
combined with Ornette's to wield massive influence on the jazz and rock
scenes alike.
A wide variety of physical incapacities, including debilitating knee
surgery, led Miles to take a long layoff from 1975 to 1981. When he
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 Prince of Darkness

"came back," the fires of exploration seemed quenched. The quality of

his music, both live and in studio, tailed off dramatically. Tunes like
"Back Seat Betty" (from The Man With the Horn, Columbia) are the
gold amid the dross. The same intermittency plagues Aura and A-
mandla (both Warner Bros.). And his 1950s fashion-plate image, which
had veered into countercultural style with a high-chic flourish during
the fusion-and-funk era, exploded into the near self-parody of oversized
sequined tops and balloon-seated leather pants that helped breed the
neobop revivalists' fierce polemics against him.
What actually underlies that reaction's intensity is the fear of loss of
codification, the broadening of possibilities that represent the fruit of
Miles's sonic swerves. Ironically, in that sense he was simply doing what
all jazz explorers from Armstrong to Ellington to Bird and beyond have
always done: reaching for something new that was his own. But because
his career endured, because he didn't die young or record only sporad-
ically, and because he generally refused to dwell in whatever he'd previ-
ously carved out, his encyclopedic output threatens the stasis any hier-
archical aesthetic demands.
Career, however, is a key word that reflects some of the non-aesthetic
tensions informing his music's long and twisty history. Miles Davis was
that relative rarity, a jazz star with a broad popular following. (Think of
how many jazz musicians the average American can recognize by just a
first name.) He represented a peculiarly American confluence of celeb-
rity hype and genuine achievement. Like Wynton Marsalis—one of his
greatest denigrators and debtors—a decade ago, the very young Miles
was groomed to be star material by his record company—the same
company (Columbia, now Sony) that records Marsalis.
Not surprisingly, one of Miles's ongoing dilemmas became bridging
artistic goals and financial imperatives—both corporate, since CPAs
aren't interested in stringing along former hotshots solely on the strength
of past glories, and his own, since fame and wealth create their own
momentum and needs. The treadmill loomed. By the early 70s, Miles
was frantically recording several albums' worth of material a year, and
arguing with Columbia, which sat on most of it, about releasing it faster.
As Chambers observes wryly, "[His] increased production . . . still did
not succeed in balancing Davis's accounts with Columbia, at least dur-
ing Clive Davis's term of office [as president]. 'At no time did Miles ever
fully recoup his advances,' Davis says."
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 Dancing in Your Head

In the end, his music paid the price. During the ten years after his
"comeback," when he wasn't in the hospital with one or another
rumored illness, he was usually on the road with bands whose members
he'd typically hired by someone else's recommendation, churning out
versions of crowd-pleasers like his covers of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After
Time" or Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." In the studio, he was
more passive, as crossover producer-writers like George Duke and
Marcus Miller increasingly shaped his radio-ready output.
But none of that should obscure his many and lasting achievements.
For most of his career, Miles Davis was an incredible seismograph, a
man whose sharp ears registered the sounds of the future as they shud-
dered faintly on the horizon. Despite his personal vices, like his pen-
chant for beating women, and his inevitable aesthetic missteps—think
of Paradiso, the ending of Don Quixote, Tolstoy's exhortatory pam-
phlets, Whitman's self-reviews, or Finnegans Wake—he's left that hori-
zon much broader and our culture much richer. [1992]

chapter. 34
Notes from Underground
The last few years, a lot of jazz talk has revolved around tradition. It's a
word that can confuse as much as clarify. Used in a reductive way, it
creates the illusion that jazz—in itself a blanket term that oversim-
plifies—is the history of well-known key figures who pass a narrowly
defined musical torch from one generation to the next, like Herculean
Olympic runners.
The truth, like life, is more complex. After nearly a century, the
many different musical strands we tie together as jazz have spread,
combined, unraveled, and recombined in more ways than can be
counted. That's one reason that today you can find releases like Wynton

172
 Notes from Underground

Marsalis's Standards Volume 3 (Columbia) and Muhal Richard

Abrams's The Hearinga Suite (Black Saint) sharing the jazz racks.
Jazz's diversity of sounds is supported by an undergrowth of musi-
cians' musicians who've eluded notice by the public for reasons that
don't necessarily have anything to do with aesthetic value. Take John
Dennis and King Fleming. You couldn't drop either name to >mpre .•
the cocktail-party crew, but the two pianists, who spent most of their
careers working lounges, heavily influenced Abrams, one of the pivotal
musical minds of the last 30 years and co-founder of the seminal Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1965.
Via Muhal, their insights filtered into the AACM, and from there to
other musicians like the "downtown" scene in New York.
Abrams, who won the prestigious Jazzpar Prize—one of the few
"official" recognitions of his enduring vision—sets the context: "I think
the nature of so-called jazz is to change, and to reintroduce itself peri-
odically while it's changing. It's uncanny. It'll change, be rejected, turn
over and reintroduce itself years later—it keeps turning. The musician
sometimes is caught in a bad position in those turns. Some don't make
it, and their output, which finally represents them, outlives them.
That's the tragic part of this process."
John Dennis fits that bill exactly. Some of his music, virtually un-
known even when it was made, will get a shot at a wider audience in
resurrected form, since Fantasy is inadvertently reissuing his work as
part of a 12-CD boxed set of Charles Mingus recordings. The Phil-
adelphia-based Dennis recorded two albums on Debut, the small inde-
pendent label Mingus and Max Roach started up in 1951. One, cut in
March of 195 5, was a sideman gig on Thad Jones (Debut) that showcased
the then unknown trumpeter with Dennis, Mingus, and Roach.
Thirty-five years is a long time, and Max Roach says,
There's so little I do remember about John. He was just coming into
town; he never did become a permanent resident in New York, to my
knowledge. He played solo piano, cocktail gigs: his solo playing was
what was impressive about him. He never was in the mainstream of
the Philadelphia jazz scene, like Jimmy Heath was. Mingus and I were
caught up with him because he was a new face who could handle the
instrument so well. He was probably around the same age as we were
at the time.
Jimmy Heath recalls,
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 Dancing in Your Head

We used to call him "Fat Genius." I know he went into the ministry
for a while. When I had my big band in Philly—which included peo-
ple like Coltrane and Benny Golson—there were a couple of occasions
where my piano player didn't make it, so he sat in. One in particular I
remember. We went to a little place outside of Philly called Darby,
and when we got to the gig the piano was so flat, it would've caused all
the saxophone players to have to pull way out to the end, and they re-
ally couldn't play like that. He told us, "Don't worry about tuning up
to the piano. I'll just transpose everything." So he played a half-step
up, for the whole night. That's why Cal Massey gave him the name
"Fat Genius."

On Thad Jones, Dennis plays it pretty straight, probably feeling his

way in some awe of his company. Muhal agrees with Max: "In the group
playing, he's not that impressive. It seems like he was trying to fit in,
because his melodic concept was so different. When he played with
small groups he had a kind of funky line that he'd play, which would
give one the sense that he was limited to a certain type of approach. But
then when he'd play the solo," he laughs, "everything would just open
up."
Some of Dennis's work on Thad Jones, like his fascinating uses of
augmented chords, hints at his two-handed, orchestral approach to the
piano. That approach put him out of step with the dominant idiom of
his day, since it harkened back past the period's Bud Powell clones, with
their vestigial left-hand comps and right-hand speed-demon contests, to
earlier masters like James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum.
Mingus and Max must have heard the hints, because that July found
Dennis back in the studio with them for New Piano Expressions (Debut),
the pianist's sole shot as a leader.
Muhal puts the album in perspective:

Dennis was coming from that full pianistic approach, which is why I
speak of him in the same breath as Hank Jones—who successfully
merged a bebop right hand with a stride left hand; Ahmad Jamal; El-
lis Larkins; Dwike Mitchell of the Mitchell-Ruff Duo—who's another
pianist people should be talking about, that album the duo did of
Strayhorn pieces; and King Fleming, of course.
His solo pieces were complete. All the improvisation and the written
parts stayed together even rolling round and round through many vari-
ations. I haven't heard a pianist that combines what some people

174
 Notes from Underground

might look upon as a cocktail situation with a more artistic jazz situa-
tion and a sort of classical situation into one thing. Yet it comes out
as a good jazz feel.

And foreshadows the AACM's mix-and-match musical attack.

The Fantasy set offers outstanding examples of Muhal's point: two
previously unissued takes of "All the Things You Are" taken at a dis-
tinctly Baroque tempo and filigreed with contrapuntal flourishes that
would sit easily on a harpsichord. Dennis's relaxed command of that
idiom indicates once again that, hype aside, there's nothing new or
spectacular about jazz musicians who can play European concert-hall
music—they've been around at least since the days of James Reese
Europe. Ironically inverting Charlie Parker's appropriations of Impres-
sionist harmonies, Dennis's Baroque adaptation of a bebop standard is a
sly homage that gently implies what John Lewis and Steve Reich,
among others, have said: that Baroque music, with its heavy reliance on
improvisation, was the jazz of its time.
Unfortunately, because the Fantasy reissue focuses on Mingus, the
set doesn't include the four solo pieces that are the high points of New
Piano Expressions. "Odyssey," a disguised blues, is full of unexpected
augmented moves as well as angular, bitten-off lines that wrench it
beyond the typical. "Chartreuse" is Dennis's most clearly Tatumesque
effort, a ballad swept through with the Impressionistic harmonies and
glissandos that innumerable cocktail pianists would mimic and debase
by rote repetition—and make harder for us to hear, in their wake. Here,
as always on his solo spots, Dennis's elastic rhythms expand and contract
with a lilting, graceful subtlety.
According to the liner notes, Dennis spun "Variegations" cold, with
no run-through. Its compositional/improvisational shape evokes the
silent-movie accompaniments that employed the great stride keyboard-
ists like Fats Waller (another of Muhal's heroes) at the organs of'20s film
palaces. Listening to it, you'll find yourself starting to project flickering
mental images as it shifts moods around its theme, using those emo-
tional changes of tone to build and develop its main motif. Last and far
from least is "Someone To Watch Over Me," which surveys increas-
ingly imploding chord substitutions over subtle rhythmic variations as
Dennis tosses functions back and forth like an effortless juggler between
his right and left hands.
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 Dancing in Your Head

Back in Chicago in the early '50s, Muhal learned a lot from King
Fleming's two-handed attack, which pointed him to Tatum and Teddy
Wilson. Fleming was leading a big band around town when his ar-
ranger, Will Jackson, who'd taught Muhal arranging rudiments,
brought the younger pianist down; Fleming hired him as second pianist
and arranger. Unlike Dennis, Fleming is alive, and working around
suburban Chicago in restaurants and taverns.
That Fleming had a sleeveful of rhythmic invention is clear from his
Stand By (Argo), where none of the 11 tunes repeats a beat. It was his
second album, recorded in Chicago on March 2 and 9, 1962. (His other
albums are The Weary Traveller and Misty Night.) Fleming's trio for the
date was bassist Malachi Favors, then a year into his work with Muhal's
Experimental Band, the AACM precursor, and drummer Royce
Rowan. There's an occasional vibist unidentified in the album credits;
according to Fleming, his name was Stephen or Stephanie, which
Muhal says means he was probably Charles Stepney, who later wrote
and produced a string of hits for Earth, Wind & Fire.
Fleming himself is an expansive talker who, understandably enough,
has some trouble remembering details from a session from 28 years ago.
He begins,
I had classical training for six years before going into jazz, from Pro-
fessor Turner. When I first started playing all I played was classical—
"Flight of the Bumblebee," "The Warsaw Concerto," that caliber. Jazz
wasn't in it at all. Then I saw Tatum and Teddy Wilson, so I switched
over. I had a 17-piece band for several years back in the '50s; I've had
small groups since; now I have a trio.
I wrote seven out of the eleven tunes [on Stand By], and them and
the arrangements are all copyrighted. [As did Dennis's, Fleming's re-
liance on original material foreshadowed the AACM dictum to avoid
standards partly because they're owned by the publishing arms of the
major labels, whose royalty fees further cut the musician's already
small percentage of the profits from what the industry calls "product."]
I try to stay melodic, to be pretty and listenable. I want people to enjoy
what I'm doing. Of course, I have to enjoy it, or else I don't think
anybody else is going to, but I want you to be able to just listen.

In fact, Stand By stands up to most of the piano discs put out in its
day. Like Dennis's work, its uneven surface can be deceptive: Fleming is
obviously checking out a wide musical vocabulary that he cloaks in
176
 Notes from Underground

lounge-lizard congeniality. "Time Out," his theme song ("I still use it
today," he says), is a sneaky shuffle that can lull you if you're not intent;
astringent spareness a la Basic crosses with Wilsonesque lyrical arpeg-
gios. He transforms "Green Dolphin Street" into a cha-cha, where his
piano twinkles in characteristically understated fashion. His attack, gen-
erally light though not always delicate, often couples nuanced shadings
of expression with a fondness for the keyboard's upper register.
But Fleming was hardly locked into one idiom. There's Ramsey
Lewis-type soul-jazz and thundering Rubensteinian chords in cuts like
"Stand By Part 1," a minor-key blues, while "Song of Paradise" coils
right around "Yellow Bird." "Then I'll Be Tired of You," a standard
associated with Fats Waller, lets Fleming show off stride roots. The
breakneck hopper called "Gypsy in My Soul" finds him distinctively
cutting the time, racing only in short bursts and jabbing chords, and
dropping Paderewski's famed "Minuet in G" into the last few choruses.
But the album's killers are farther out. "Between the Toes" sounds
like it stepped out of the Book of Professor Longhair: its rolling barrel-
house rhumbas dovetail with chromatic left-hand slams for a party-
down. "That sold pretty good for us in Chicago," notes Fleming
proudly. And as for "Stand By Part 2"— well, there just wasn't a whole
lot of stufflike it around in 1962. Picking up the minor-key blues of "Part
1," the trio breaks it down completely. The piano drops out to reappear
only in fits; voices trade African (possibly via New Orleans Mardi Gras
Indians) call-and-response vocals in an unintelligible argot, with one
voice taking a griot's role; a firestorm of percussion chatters through it
all, a constantly rising and falling wave of propulsion. "It was my drum-
mer's idea," shrugs Fleming when asked about this astonishing piece.
"He studied classical music too, I think at the Roy Knapp School. We
just expanded on what we were doing in clubs at the time." Along with
Dennis's and Fleming's shared willingness to use musical vocabularies
wherever they found them, "Stand By Part 2" would feed directly into
the AACM's preoccupations with African sounds, percussion, and pre-
sentations; Favors, after all, went on to become the Art Ensemble's
bassist.
So like New Piano Expressions, Stand By illustrates how misleading
it can be to focus on major trends as explanations for jazz's many
evolutionary paths. Bebop may have overwhelmed other postwar lan-
guages in New York; cool jazz may have smothered different West Coast
177
 Dancing in Your Head

dialects. But that doesn't mean other paths weren't taken by players
whose time may not have come yet, but whose subterranean influences
have already been at work before it does.
Muhal explains why Chicago could breed a King Fleming, when
other places with more prescriptive attitudes didn't:

Look at all the different themes that he used just on Stand By. In Chi-
cago, most of the musicians were like that. That's why you could have
an AACM and a Sun Ra come out of there. It was an atmosphere
where one could pursue his or her own approach to the language of
the music. That atmosphere allowed us the liberties that we took. See,
there are creative and inventive people all over the world, but whether
there's a community for them to grow and thrive in—that's the ques-
tion. In Chicago there was such a community, and no one dialect that
was dominant.
Everything was there. I remember older musicians who'd played
with Pops and Jelly Roll and them, a lot of New Orleans guys who
were still on the scene when I joined the musicians' union. They had
brass bands that'd play in parades and in the parks. That's different
from either coast, 'cause a lot of those people just settled in Chicago
before they came here or there. It really was a source of nourishment
for all kind of approaches. You couldn't get really strange in Chicago.
You could get outside, but after a fashion it wasn't strange. We had a
tremendous audience. Playing total improvisation for hours, even be-
fore the early '60s, we could pack the place.

Resurrecting New Piano Expressions and Stand By—and albums by

Clyde Hart and the Mitchell-Ruff Duo—could also remind us that the
broad tangle of jazz traditions should be an energizing force, not a
limiting one: its function is not just to conserve the past's breakthroughs
and values but to empower the present and future to find their own
voices by revising their understanding of what's gone before. The way
Muhal specifies it,

Fleming and Dennis don't play licks; they play ideas. That's that older
school again. Those guys weren't interested in a body of licks that were
set down by one or two people that they could grab and make cliched
connections with. It's a different way to think—trying to tell a story in-
stead of showing off flash. That's one thing that impressed me about
them and contributed to my approach.
All these impressions encouraged me to go further into doing things

J78
 Hidden Histories

my own way. At the same time, I'm always trying to maintain the kind
of control they have. That's the work in it: shape the story, don't just
spit it out. No matter how original the approach is, it's very interesting
how your mind can rework certain ideas, certain impressions, to make
a situation for you. Yet the essence of the impression is still there.
There never has, and never will be, any best of this or that. What
we have is a lot of talented, creative people. That's the challenge of
the scene: to be able to function in that atmosphere on your own
without thoughts of being the best, just being strong in what you are.
There's nothing that can happen now to remove Ornette or Coltrane
or Cecil Taylor or the AACM or Charlie Parker from the scene. If
people like John Dennis and King Fleming had gotten even the
publicity that I've gotten over the years, who knows where they'd
be? [1990]

chapter 35
Hidden Histories
Allan Bloom has his analogs all over the cultural landscape, and jazz is
no exception. The One Great Tradition theory currently popular in
neocon jazz quarters—the Jelly Roll to Louis to Duke to Bird lineage
that sounds like a triple-play combo—is its chiseled-in-stone pantheon.
And yet it takes nothing away from such indisputable greats to admit that
there have been numberless musicians whose names have rarely be-
come known to general audiences, or even to most jazz fans, yet they've
exerted a profound influence on the folks they played with as well as on
those who've come after them.
Take, for example, the impact on Muhal Richard Abrams, founder
of the seminal Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians, of two historical ciphers, King Fleming and John
Dennis. Fleming led a big band in Chicago in the early '50s, and gave
the then fledgling pianist Abrams his first arranger's gig. In 1962, Flem-

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ing cut Stand By (Argo), an extraordinary excursion into rhythmic in-

vention. His recordings never got out of Chicago in any significant way;
now in his seventies, he plays lounges in suburban Illinois and the
Midwest. In 1955, the Philadelphia-based Dennis made one record as a
leader, New Piano Expressions (Debut), for the label founded by Charles
Mingus and Max Roach, which was also poorly distributed. Nobody's
quite sure what happened to him afterwards, except that he's probably
dead. But the two-handed approach to the keyboard he and Fleming
favored caused Abrams to rethink the post-Bud Powell attack that, with
its atrophied left hand and lightning-bolt right, dominated postwar jazz
for a couple of generations.
As Abrams—who, along with the AACM, is now based in New
York—sees it, "Fleming and Dennis don't play licks; they play ideas.
That's the older school, like Fats Waller and Art Tatum, again. Those
guys weren't interested in a body of licks that were set down by one or
two people that they could grab and make cliched connections with. It's
a different way to think—trying to tell a story instead of showing off
flash." In line with that way of thinking, over the last 30 years, since his
Experimental Band and the founding of the AACM, the incredibly
open-eared Abrams has consistently expanded his own vocabulary to
include everything from stride to swing to serialism to post-Ornette
Coleman, post-Albert Ayler breakthroughs to international musics.
To cite just one example, on his 1991 album, the deftly brilliant The
Hearinga Suite (Black Saint), he wittily combined gorgeously written
ensembles and thick-textured charts a la Duke and Mingus with blithely
skipping playground-type tunes a la Ornette for an 18-piece band of first-
rate players, including multi-instrumentalist Marty Ehrlich, trumpeters
Cecil Bridgewater and Jack Walrath (a Mingus Dynasty veteran), and
bassist Fred Hopkins. And in mid-September 1991 at New York's Sym-
phony Space, he led an eight-piece ensemble that included six percus-
sionists through the beautifully articulated jazz-nneets-gamelan piece
"Percussion 26 (1)"; it projected a vivid three-dimensional sonic image
as it moved gracefully from section to section. In some ways, it was the
conceptual extension of On the Corner (Columbia) Miles Davis never
made. And on his 1992 Blu Blu Blu (Black Saint), he updates and
redefines the gritty electric blues of his Chicago youth: the title cut is
dedicated to McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters. As Abrams
characteristically puts it, "It takes me backwards and forwards."
ISO
 Hidden Histories

Subaural pioneers like Fleming and Dennis—and, for that matter,

Abrams himself, whose influence on three generations of musicians via
the revolutionary AACM is as incalculable as it is largely unknown
to the general public—are the knots tying jazz's history together just
below the surface. So when you discover one, there's often a sense of
deja vu, because you've heard his stuff before through the scrim of the
folks who've picked up on him. But that's counterbalanced by the won-
derful zest of strangeness, which reminds you that you've only caught
the refraction, not the light source itself.
Horace Tapscott is just another outrageously powerful example of
this underground current of history and duality of perception at work.
Beginning as a trombonist until he was sidelined by a car crash in the
early '60s, Tapscott played in his Los Angeles school band with Eric
Dolphy and Don Cherry, and later worked with bandleaders Gerald
Wilson and Lionel Hampton. Switching to piano—his mother had
trained him—after the accident, he settled back into the Central Avenue
scene that had nurtured him. As John Lirweiler explains in his definitive
The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (Da Capo), "Back in 1961, four
years before Chicago's AACM, the long-experienced Horace Tapscott
founded the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension (UG-
MAA) to produce concerts by his Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra." Along
with the late clarinet great John Carter and cornetist/trumpeter Bobby
Bradford, he helped spawn a new generation that includes David Mur-
ray and Arthur Blythe of the World Saxophone Quartet; Blythe, in fact,
made his recording debut with Tapscott.
All of which makes the incendiary but disciplined sounds of Tap-
scott's The Dark Tree (hat ART) very welcome indeed. Art Lange's
detailed, insightful notes point out that the pianist's releases over the last
ten years have rarely made it out of L.A. So this stuffed-to-the-
soundbytes two-CD set joining Tapscott with Carter, bassist Cecil
McBee, and drummer Andrew Cyrille opens into a panoramic view, a
retrospective culmination of what we've been missing.
As a composer/arranger, Tapscott can wax complexly lyrical, like on
the haunting "A Dress for Renee," where he strides from Impressionism
to ragtime in a beautifully dovetailed art-song ballad. Or he can plug
into a genially loping blues-with-a-twist like "Bavarian Mist." But on
The Dark Tree he focuses primarily on driving ostinatos that power the
soloists into post-Ornette territory. With the fabulous rhythm section
J8J
 Dancing in Your Head

and soloists the album boasts, that's a recipe for a hypnotic force packing
the wallop of Hurricane Bob.
Carter, like Bradford, was a boyhood pal of Ornette's and one-fourth
of the underrated Clarinet Summit quartet—himself, Murray, New
Orleans great Alvin Batiste, and longtime Ellington sideman Jimmy
Hamilton. The group released finely wrought albums during the '80s on
small labels like India Navigation and Black Saint. Although all four
reached beyond Benny Goodman's swing and Buddy DeFranco's be-
bop, Carter in particular brought the reed instrument out of its then
somewhat anachronistic status. His astonishingly vocalic clarinet some-
times recalls Dolphy's as it cries and whinnies, sings and screams with a
stunningly rhapsodic abandon.
He was also, of course, a frighteningly ambitious composer in his
own right; his five-album series Roofs and Folklore: Episodes in the
Development of American Folk Music (Soul Note and Gramavision) was
one of the last decade's outstanding achievements. It traces in musical
form the intersection of pre-slavery African civilizations and Western
cultures and their ensuing entwined history, without ever lapsing into
static allegory. Drawing, for instance, on forms of the various periods it
covers, from field hollers to blues and swing, it reinterprets those sounds
into contemporary idioms, including noise, dissonance, and chromat-
icism, in order to create a compelling sonic narrative. Voices, either
scatting or singing pointed lyrics, appear periodically. And fierce os-
tinatos, like Tapscott's, are used to suggest the thrusting drive of postwar
life. But while the series made a number of critics' end-of-the-decade
ten-best lists, it didn't make much of a dent in a marketplace, and Carter
only got to perform sections of it on a couple of rare occasions, like for
an underattended performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in
1989.
Local scenes, like the '60s L.A. scene that Carter, Bradford, and
Tapscott played key roles in, are more often than not underdocumented
in recordings, and what records there are are more often than not poorly
distributed, since the only true national distribution pipelines in the
U.S. are owned and operated by the six major labels. European and
small U.S. labels, the typical sources for non-mainstream material,
typically either have to rely on a patchwork of regional distributors, who
are notoriously unreliable, or else piggyback on a major's network,
which leaves their relatively small-selling releases at the mercy of an
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 Hidden Histories

uninterested sales force. Even the 1991 major-label reissue West Coast
Hot (Novus), which collects some terrific Flying Dutchman sides from
the Ornette-inflected 1969 Carter-Bradford quartet and Tapscott's 1969
quintet, including an earlier version of "The Dark Tree" that features
Blythe, was simply dribbled out unheralded.
Worse still, recording for a small label is not necessarily helpful these
days when performers are looking for gigs. Promoters and most club
owners, like radio program directors, prefer to deal with artists who have
big-company "product" in their pockets, if only because of the promo-
tional budgets that then back them. But even if a small- or no-label
player lands a live date, it doesn't necessarily follow that it will be
covered by the press. The farther away from the media margins you get,
the more likely it is that editors want stories tied to current recordings
and chart positions. While that's understandable from the standpoint of
circulation, it also completes the closing of the vicious circle that ties
together recording and distribution control, record company promo-
tion, press coverage and airplay. (To get a hint of how that circle can
work, take a look at the enormous orchestrated media play a commer-
cially successful rock band like Guns 'n' Roses can currently command.)
So whether you're a jazz or rock musician, if you don't have a big record
on a big label, more often than not you won't get noticed except for ever
decreasing segments of the music press and the occasional review in a
local daily or "alternative" weekly paper. And thus your anonymity, and
misleading notions like the One Great Tradition theory, become mutu-
ally re-enforcing.
At least some of the many music festivals held around the U.S. every
summer try to partially correct that misperception by featuring local
artists along with national headliners. The New Orleans Jazz and Heri-
tage Festival, for instance, puts the big touring acts on two big stages,
and reserves the many small stages and tents for regional musicians who
generally have no record deals and rarely, if ever, get outside the Deep
South. There you could have seen saxophonist Edward "Kidd" Jordan,
an omnivorous player who's willing and able to share the stage with
hoppers, lounge lizards, free jazzers, and rappers alike. Later in 1991,
you could have caught him at the edges of the Chicago Jazz Festival,
where he hooked up with some of Chicago's little-known legends at
South End MusicWorks, a small loft-style venue. Along with saxists
Fred Anderson and Douglas Ewart, and Art Ensemble bassist Malachi
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 Dancing in Your Head

Favors, and drummer Dushun Mosley, he created a Pharoah Sanders-

inspired set full of dynamically shifting overtones so finely calibrated
that the room itself felt like it had begun to vibrate along.
Like the New Orleans shindig, the Chicago fest always includes
regional acts, like pianist John Young or violinist Johnny Frigo or
second-generation AACMer Vandy Harris, who don't get out of the
Windy City. And because it's free to the public in lakeside Grant Park, it
draws curious crowds who, in the course of any evening's varied pro-
gram, can get turned on to music they didn't know anything about
beforehand. Like any big festival, it also acts as a magnet that energizes
more outboard segments of the local scene. Since folks from around the
country come to town for it, after-hours jams at small clubs like South
End or Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase can introduce the curious to new
sounds, like the music of Hal Russell.
Like Tapscott in L.A., multi-instrumentalist Russell is an offbeat
local hero in Chicago, an elder statesman who works consistently with
younger players, most of whom also double on various instruments.
Russell's music, however, stays pretty far from the dark anger that fuels
much of Tapscott's. His NRG Ensemble can slide easily from broad
vaudevillian humor to outside blowing, sometimes in the space of a few
bars. So on Conserving NRG (PJP), the quintet swerves from off-the-
wall ensembles to pure blasts of angular outside improvisations to
wickedly funny jumpcuts and parodies, while Hal on Earth (PJP) boasts
a hilarious medley-tribute to Fred Astaire, complete with the sound of
dancing feet. Finally, in spring 1992, ECM, a decent-sized German
label with reasonably credible U.S. distribution, released The Finnish-
Swiss Tour. A typically probing and wacky combo, it's the first Russell
album to make it out of Chicago, except for the copies the man himself
sells from the stage at the end of every performance. [1991]

184
 \ _ chapter
: u
jr*Ml|MMMM£&^ ''' 36
Gunther Schuller's Memory Palace
Gunther Schuller—musicologist and scholar, musician and critic, tire-
less advocate of the offbeat, from the classical-jazz fusion (which he
helped pioneer) called Third Stream to Ornette Coleman—is, to put it
mildly, a daunting figure. They loom, he and the first two parts of his
overarching History of Jazz. Each volume clocks in at several hundred
pages of densely informed (if not always elegant) prose, riddled with
numerous (and often lengthy) musical examples and explications, the
obviously thick undergrowth of knowledge and listening and, yes, even
pure pleasure that he's compacted so richly and suggestively into a
sweeping narrative. The footnotes alone bristle with more fascinating
background info and critical insight than most entire books of what
passes for jazz criticism. Put it all together and you've got the most
amazing effort to systematize and sum up the dispersed, underex-
amined, and undervalued history of what we call jazz that I've ever read.
Period.
Not surprisingly, over 20 years stand between the publication of
Schuller's first (Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development) and
second (The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, J933-J945) volumes.
Because of the project's prodigious scope and ambitions, after the sweat-
ing messenger arrived with the package from my editor and I sat down
and opened it and started to read I felt like I was back in grad school for
Comp Lit. First year, actually, and getting overawed by Germanic gi-
ants like the Schlegels and Curtius and Auerbach and their encyclope-
dically knowledgeable tomes, their imperturbable Olympian certainty
not only that they knew exactly what they were doing with their innu-
merable languages and texts and easy cross-cultural familiarity, but that
it really mattered—enough to devote, in Baconian fashion, a lifetime or
several to.
Schuller is a more direct descendant of folks like Curtius and Auer-
bach than critics like Foucault, Said, or Jameson could or would want to
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 Dancing in Your Head

be. His methodology is downright old-fashioned. His unflagging posi-

tivist's insistence on irreducible (and utterly fascinating) facts like the
historical transmission of musical data (who influenced Coleman
Hawkin's revolutionary approach to soloing, where did the breakaway
from the Fletcher Henderson choir-by-choir system of structuring big-
band charts first come into play, and endlessly so on) will no doubt seem
primitive to devotees of intertextuality's more speculative philosophic
sophistication and more nebulous claims. I guess it is. But in this case it
also delivers—big.
That's fitting, since the subject of this second volume is basically the
big bands. Unravel Scorsese's deft marriage-as-metaphor depictions in
New York New York and you've got one of the plot's hairy strands, the
conflict between the commercial tugs of Tin Pan Alley, managers, and
record labels on the one hand, and jazz on the other: their sudden
heated affair, their temporary and productive detente, their final cata-
clysmic divorce. The big bands, as Schuller sees them, formed the
battleground where American musical tastes and sensibilities were
fought over. If the gladiators (commerce vs. art) at times seem drawn too
patly, think of them (Scorsese did) as escapees from a medieval play,
moralistic "types" rather than "realistic" characters whose aesthetic
function resides precisely in their general applicability, their non-
specificity.
For like all the great cultural critics, Schuller writes from within a
defining set of moral perspectives that he is resolutely unembarrassed by.
He makes a consistent, sweeping indictment of the racism and mindless
commercialism—the modifier is crucial for him—that permeates
American culture and all its artifacts. Along with the growth and devel-
opment of the musical formats of swing's heyday, those moral bifurca-
tions form his story's spine.
And what a helluva narrative it is, covering those glory days of the
new receding American Century. It begins with a chapter called "The
'King' of Swing," where Schuller debunks some Benny Goodman myths
without fully tearing the mantle off—he simply knows too much not to
be fair. Goodman was a salable white-bread version of the music that
had been sweeping the black ghettos of New York and Chicago and L. A.
as well as countless towns and college campuses throughout the Mid-
west and Southwest—the Elvis or Sting of his day. But even though he
was crowned by the media for achievements that were not really his—

J86
 Gunther Schuller s Memory Palace

the charts swinging his band came from the pens of folks like Fletcher
Henderson—he could, and did, play real hotshit jazz, Swing Era edi-
tion, and cast a huge shadow over other reedmen because of his appar-
ently effortless fluency and usually flawless technique.
Schuller understands the contradictions here only too well, and
seizes them to put much of the "King" 's achievement (and the era he's
come to symbolize retroactively) into perspective. There were the small
groups (and editions of bigger units) that didn't swing as well as their
historical rep would lead you to believe, largely due to Gene Krupa's
show-offy, old-fashioned drumming. There was Goodman's stubborn
resistance to change, his natural reluctance to tamper with a hit-making
formula to go in any different musical directions, his somewhat lazy
faith in his own technical finesse.
Yet Schuller balances his tale of the ego and the reed with acute
observations about the band's invaluable musical legacy. Of the swag-
gering '40s outfit sparked by the innovative arrangements of Eddie Sau-
ter he writes, "The Goodman orchestra—and Goodman himself—
played with a dazzling brilliance that was the envy of all the other bands.
The emphasis was not on soloists—as with Basic, for example—but on
the orchestra, and on jazz as arrangement and composition. The more
purely improvised jazz was relegated to the Sextet performances and
recordings." He also cites Goodman's own fluid jazz playing, his early
and prophetic "crossover" experiments with Bela Bartok's material,
and—most important—his creation of "an alliance between national
popular taste and a creative music called jazz" as proof of the clarinetist's
true accomplishments.
Because truth is what's at stake here. This ain't no postmodernist's
party, this ain't no duck-walker's disco, this ain't no market of loose-
lipped ideas. The table of contents nearly stands at attention with the
names that count, from Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford to
Claude Thornhill and Woody Herman, from Coleman Hawkins to
Lester Young and Ben Webster, from Fletcher Henderson and Benny
Carter to the Casa Loma Orchestra and the Dorsey Brothers and the
territory bands. We're talking musical canon formation, but luckily for
those of us who give a shit about this stuff, Schuller is no Allan Bloom or
E. D. Hirsch. Yeah, his canon is shot through with a lot of names you'd
expect to see. But how exactly do you write an Olympian history of
Swing Era jazz and not focus on Ellington and Goodman and the like?
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 Dancing in Your Head

And if the short answer is, You can't, then how do you avoid focusing on
them to the exclusion of the environment that made them what they
became, the musical challenges they heard from their (often now un-
nameable) contemporaries and responded to with their own, the fruitful
dialogues that created history and that history has lost?
For Schuller the long answer—and vital corrective—to a rehashed
100-Most-Beautiful-Melodies survey emerges from within the tradition
of the anatomy, the ancient methodology that's bequeathed pleasurable
texts from Aristotle and Lucretius through Rabelais and Burton to Joyce
and Proust, even up to Frye and Pynchon. With ingenious aplomb,
Schuller wields his book's sheer bulk as a weapon on behalf of the
previously neglected and overlooked. It's as if Bloom tucked into The
Closing of the American Mind lectures on Hopi mythology or Shangaan
folktales. Partly that's the result of Schuller's inalienably liberal-arts
liberalism: he genuinely tries to broaden any perspective he can reach
because he's committed to the notion that the best students are those
who learn to think for themselves. Partly, too, it's due to his resolute
unwillingness to endorse received opinions: he's determined to churn up
new facts, viewpoints, ideas even where the material seems dessicated
and overplowed. And so offbeat names, dates, perspectives flesh out this
historical Anatomy of Swing.
For example, while Schuller tells the tales of outstanding band-
leaders and soloists, he also generally tries to recast the history of the big
bands in terms of composers and arrangers. So instead of wading
through endless lists detailing the chart-topping achievements of the
Ozzie Nelsons and Guy Lombardos, Schuller opens the hoods of those
sleek 12-cylinder big-band machines and explains how they ran, musi-
cally speaking, on what the arrangers pumped into their semi-sized fuel
tanks. (That's a crucial point being made on the bandstand now by
repertory big bands like the American Jazz Orchestra, which is trying to
gather a library of the period's arrangements to preserve and play them.)
But if Schuller reinstates the arranger in his rightful place for the
period, he doesn't do it in a roseate haze. Here is his characteristically
careful distinction between composer and arranger:
An arranger is not necessarily a composer. He is rarely creative in the
full sense that fine composers are. Great composers, whether their
names are Ellington or Beethoven, develop and expand their musical
language, often to the extent that their late works seem barely traceable

188
 Gunther Schuller's Memory Palace

to their early ones. With arrangers that kind and degree of creativity is
seldom considered desireable. Rather, they are required to be excellent
craftsmen, rarely creative innovators. (To the extent that one of Good-
man's later arrangers, Eddie Sauter, attempted to be innovative and to
reach beyond the established Goodman style, his work was largely ig-
nored by the public and, it seems, on occasion by Goodman himself.)

He then goes on to devote much of his long chapter on Goodman to

Sauter's groundbreaking accomplishments, their extension of Elling-
ton's rich harmonic and rhythmic languages and their prophetic relation
to Gil Evans. It's a pattern he repeats, so that by the book's finish he's
uncovered for the general reader a genealogy of the period's major
arrangers (as well as a lot of minor ones).
This large-scale redistribution of credit finds its formal mimesis in
Schuller's own textual distribution. The footnotes here swell into info-
stuffed asides, sometimes even mini-essays, that Schuller uses to limn
the sidepaths and back roads off history's main drags. Take as an exam-
ple his footnote on Ellington vocalist Herb Jeffries:
One particularly fascinating Jeffries performance is "I Don't Know
What Kind of Blues I got," for in it we hear exactly the kind of timbre
and inflection we know from Billy Eckstine in the mid-forties. I am
not certain who was imitating whom, although my hunch is that the
younger Eckstine was influenced by the older Jeffries. Coincidentally,
both singers sang with the Earl Hines orchestra, Jeffries in the mid-
thirties, Eckstine in the early forties. What confuses the picture is that
Jeffries generally tended towards a kind of contrived crooning in many
of his Ellington recordings, but here "I Don't Know" suddenly came
out with a new "voice," whereas Eckstine seems to have been much
more consistent and individual over the years with Hines in his ap-
proach. Perhaps both singers mutually influenced each other at various
times. It might also be said that both were not unmindful of Bing
Crosby's enormous popularity, even with black audiences—particularly
Crosby's success with the ladies for his famous glottal scoops, for
which he earned the sobriquet "The Groaner." Both Eckstine and Jef-
fries worked hard at incorporating this device into their singing styles,
although with a black coloration that Crosby did not attain.

Racism and the cultural inferiority complex that haunts America and
keeps it from embracing the true achievements of its own artists are sore
points for Schuller, as for any thinking American critic. In his remark-

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 Dancing in Your Head

able discussion of piano legend Art Tatum, for instance, Schuller argues
that Tatum's arrangements of tunes, harmonically far-reaching and
overpoweringly influential among jazzers as they were, were largely set-
pieces built from European classical techniques the pianist had studied
and adapted. Typically, however, he doesn't stop there; he turns the
point inside out to make another—in a footnote:
The long-held myth that Vladimir Horowitz was an ardent admirer of
Tatum seems to have no basis in fact. (See the introductory foreword
on Tatum to Time-Life's Giants of Jazz.) I suspect, moreover, that
those classical artists who admired Tatum did so in the generally pa-
tronizing way that classical musicians have traditionally viewed black
and/or jazz artists, not to mention blind ones. Black musicians have
earned renowned white classical musicians' admiration only when
they were perceived as emulating classical standards and properties. It
is interesting that Tatum's technique was admired by classical musi-
cians in the 1930s and 1940s clearly for its classical leanings and tech-
nical perfection, qualities they could relate to. But where were the
classical admirers of Thelonious Monk's or Pete Johnson's more "unor-
thodox" and intrinsically jazz-rooted techniques?
That single footnote blows away many of the ridiculous assumptions
undergirding James Lincoln Collier's wretched Ellington biography, for
instance.
A Rabelaisian catalog of random footnotes turns up a mini-history of
the introduction of the electric guitar into jazz by Eddie Durham, Floyd
Smith, and Leon McAuliffe; the connections between the diametrically
opposed sax sounds of Ben Webster and Lester Young—they played side
by side in Young's father's band as kids in Texas and cut their teeth on
Frankie Trumbauer's "Singin' the Blues"; a paragraph of (I think mis-
guided) observations about "effeminately voiced crooners" in American
pop; a debunking of pioneer arranger Don Redman's status as "the only
orchestral innovator in the early days of jazz." One of my favorites—and
if that sounds like an odd way to talk about footnotes, all I can say is,
Wait 'til you've read 'em—begins "Paul Howard's Quality Serenaders
was a now-forgotten nine-piece orchestra that deserves at least a footnote
in jazz history." Well, now they've got it.
Of course, in a real sense Schuller's simply skewing the Olympian
view slightly to the left. The Hegelian kind of history Schuller has
attempted seeks to inscribe its own future corrections within it; it needs

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 Gunther Schuller's Memory Palace

to be timelessly true, correct, believed. One of Schuller's most directly

apologetic footnotes runs, "It represents a frequent problem for the jazz
historian that certain players (and orchestras) who happen not to have
recorded prolifically (or at all), or who died prematurely, or who had
peripatetic careers not easily traceable through recordings, are difficult
to appraise." Uh, yeah, you could say that again several hundred times
and still not answer the musical question, How well does the Owl of
Minerva fly at dusk wearing mirror shades and smoking dope?
Sure, Schuller's prose and posture is deliberate and measured, at
times borderline ponderous, in that academic way, but it's a surface
often overcome by its resonating depths of enthusiast's knowledge. Once
you start reading you adjust to the notion that jouissance in Schuller's
terms is the complete transcription of the famed, groundbreaking 64-bar
solo that Coleman Hawkins took on "Body and Soul" in 1939. (Gary
Giddins tells me Schuller can transcribe music the way lesser mortals
write a letter, but from the number and size of the examples in The
Swing Era that letter-writer would have to be an unreconstructed 18th-
century quill-pusher just to qualify for the competition.) Sure, a num-
ber of his dominant modes of thought, like the evolutionary models he
frequently invokes and the organic metaphors he's so fond of, seem
unexamined for the less-than-useful implications, like a faith in teleol-
ogy and the asssumption of progress, they may harbor (in a way that
Foucault et al., for instance, would never allow). But those concepts
also stem directly from the Hegelian tradition that informs his work.
Much as that tradition's larger and problematic frame sometimes creaks,
it gives the book a more meaningful shape than the simpleminded
Mount Rushmore model most music critics seem to use to understand
the development of the sounds they try to explain.
But maybe what most amazes me about The Swing Era is that you
don't have to be a musicologist or fanatic to actually sit down and read
it—just read it. If you can't follow the many musical transcriptions—
and they're not essential since, as Schuller points out, even the best
capture only the outlines of the music, not its nuances—you can simply
rely on the solid descriptions to get the gist. Just skip the too intensely
musicological parts the same way you skim the whale-anatomy sections
of Moby-Dick. Because like a 19th-century novel, Hegelian history is
about a plot, and Schuller's got the makings for a major potboiler: sex
and drugs and music and corruption and racism and exploitation and
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the creation of a musical form that's traveled the world and won honor
everywhere but the land of its birth.
Yes, through this music Harlem and equivalent black neighborhoods
across the country were overrun with invading whites and left, once the
party money ran out, with the legacy of depression and unemployment
and numbers and drugs and prostitution and violence and poverty that
still defines life for too many of our people. And yes, the vast majority of
jazz musicians live(d) and die(d) under those clouds and relentless com-
mercial pressure besides. And yes, yes, yes, despite the very obvious
impossibility of it all they somehow forge(d) a new, multifaceted art form
that is universal in its appeal, timeless in its reach, awesome in its
democratic intensity. Gunther Schuller knows and tells all that; maybe
more to the point, he believes in the ultimate triumph the story's self-
evident values imply, the victory of art's eternal verities somehow rat-
ified by history. His is a neater, more rounded, more satisfying world
than the one I know. That difference is one of the main reasons—aside
from everything else he knows that I don't—that he can actually write a
history like this one, and I can't even contemplate it. But I'm more than
happy and grateful that he's done it; I mean to ransack the hell out of
it. [1989]

chapter 37
Preservation Hall Comes to Carnegie
Don't be deceived because the Preservation Hall Jazz Band appears at
Carnegie Hall. Down in New Orleans where they hail from, the loose-
limbed music they make, with its crossfire rhythms and its overlapping
melodies, is no dusty fossil; it's as natural as red beans and rice and
Mardi Gras. You can hear it resounding still when marching bands strut
the streets, or in clubs and bars where the musical descendants of the
turn-of-the-century cathouse players swing with an easygoing, infec-
tious lilt. And when the PHJB pour their catchy exuberance into every
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tune from Crescent City standards like "Lil Liza Jane" to Duke
Ellington's "Mood Indigo," you'll feel just how alive the music is: it's
mighty hard to stay in your seat, however plush.
There is, of course, a historical dimension to what the PHJB does—
even to their very existence. Watching the bands (there are several
lineups traveling under the name) can be a bit like watching one of the
dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History come to life and
begin enacting, before your startled eyes, the tumbling flow of a time
and place long gone. For as the story goes, it was to New Orleans that
the rough-hewn cry of the blues flowed down along the Mississippi;
there it mingled in a catchy whirlpool with the snappy march beats of
the city's countless brass street bands, so much the rage at the last
century's close. Warmed by the kiss of the Caribbean sun and sea, that
fertile primeval mix stirred into the first movements of what we now call
jazz.
Basically, as it evolved in New Orleans, the music took two forms,
both of them, then as now, functional. One style, New Orleans jazz,
was for church dances, and emphasized ensemble playing; the other, for
jitney dances, sported the hot solos characteristic of Dixieland. Neither
style has ever been adequately represented on recordings; like Natural
History's dioramas, recordings can only snatch frozen moments from a
tumult of development and change.
One of the PHJB's virtues is that, over the course of one of their long,
exhilarating shows, they do so much more than that. Playing deftly in
both styles, moving seamlessly across the vast catalog of standards in
each, they breed contagious enthusiasm because they live and breathe
the sounds they play, have learned them from the masters rather than
studying them in books. Usually Dixieland bands are hampered by their
lack of gut feeling; trying to be historical re-creations, they lack the
continuing influence of these sounds that remains so obvious in New
Orleans. Minus that context, their music shrivels into superficiality,
becomes stylized. Europeanized technique too often overshadows or,
worse, replaces, the ragged, stomping vitality, the deliberately altered
timbres and skewed intonations at the music's roots: the bleary sweet-
and-sour trumpet with its climactic shrieks; the molten clarinet with its
New Orleans fingerings and chirpy quality; the boozily grumbling trom-
bone, the brightly splayed piano, the thwacky banjo, the slaphappy bass,
the rioting drums. (Contrary to popular misconception, tubas and
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 Dancing in Your Head

marching drums were commonly used only in street brass bands, not
early jazz ensembles.)
Since they were born at nearly the same time as the century, most
members of the PHJB have heard and played these sounds from their
earliest days—they don't have to re-create them. All of them have, in
the traditional New Orleans fashion, learned their instruments by ap-
prenticing themselves to master musicians and absorbing techniques
and tunes by watching their mentors perform and by performing with
them; this frees them from nostalgia. Simply put, it makes the difference
between joyful volatility and studied stiffness.
The PHJB are anything but stiff, belying their ages. Their utter
unpredictability includes refusing to prearrange what numbers they'll
perform at a given show; they prefer to trust their own moods and their
shrewd sense of the audience's reaction when they call tunes onstage.
Given their seemingly limitless repertoire, their endless enthusiasm,
and the spontaneous outbursts of snake dancing and clap-and-sing-
alongs that seem to burst out wherever they play, it's not very surprising
that their shows can often stretch on for two or three hours—or more.
Too bad Carnegie Hall has fixed seats. [1988]

chapter. 38
Nature Boy
His instantly recognizable voice attracts adjectives the way Homeric
heroes trail epithets: velvety, silken, intimate. But adjectives can't de-
scribe the swinging, ingratiating self-confidence laced with tenderness
that colors Nat "King" Cole's singing. His baritone/tenor is so airy and
elemental, so palpably physical, it invites you in, then surrounds you
glowingly, like the lit cave of a magic mountain emanating song from
somewhere deep.
February 15, 1990, marked the 25th anniversary of Cole's death—
ironically, given his dense voice, of lung cancer. Folks who discovered
Cole through the amiably engulfing sound of hits like "Unforgettable,"
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 Nature Boy

"Mona Lisa," and "Ramblin' Rose" pouring out of radios and jukeboxes
may not realize that Cole, a brilliant pop singer, became a feted enter-
tainer because he was also a lot more. In fact, Nat "King" Cole's adven-
turous musical forays form crucial pivots which helped turn and delin-
eate the directions of pre- and postwar sounds.
It all started in California in September 1937. The year before, pia-
nist Cole, then 19, had joined his bassist brother Eddie, who'd toured
Europe with famed bandleader Noble Sissle, to cut his first sides (col-
lected on From the Very Beginning, MCA). Soon the Earl Hines-
influenced keyboardist had enlarged his band to tour with the 1936
revival of Sissle and Eubie Blake's hit musical Shuffle Along. Shuffle
folded when it hit L. A., and the unknown Cole gigged around solo for a
while at bargain-basement prices. Then the owner of the Swanee Inn on
La Brea suggested he put together a piano-guitar-bass trio.
Forming a small independent group in the heart of the big-band era
was near heresy; forming one with that instrumentation was simply
unheard-of. But not long after Cole, electric-guitar pioneer Oscar
Moore, and bassist Wesley Prince joined forces as King Cole and His
Swingsters, soon renamed the King Cole Trio, they began blazing trails
that widened to superhighways once their innumerable followers surged
into the openings.
Like the best of the big bands, the trio didn't straddle the often thick
dividing line between jazz and pop; they just ignored it. Right from their
earliest recording dates for radio-station use only (Nat King Cole and the
King Cole Trio, Savoy Jazz) they began scrambling an idiosyncratic
stylistic mix that included yearning ballads and unison-vocal novelty
tunes, bouncy swing syncopations threaded with jump-r&b-ish slurs and
rests and thickened proto-bebop chord voicings and lines. Infectious and
revolutionary, popular with other musicians and jazz fans, the Cole trio
(with bassist Johnny Miller) didn't make a real national splash until
1944, when Capitol Records released "Straighten Up and Fly Right" (on
The Best of the Nat King Cole Trio, Volumes 1 and 2, Capitol).
Cole's Hines-meets-Teddy Wilson piano, not his voice, defined the
trio, but although it defined, it didn't dominate or suffocate. The group's
engaging beauty comes from their essentially democratic nature on out-
standing tracks like "Sweet Lorraine," "Route 66," "Gee Baby, Ain't I
Good to You," "It's Only a Paper Moon," and "Body and Soul." Their
telepathic attack finds Moore's astonishingly supple, bluesy lyricism
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 Dancing in Your Head

curving and skittering around Cole's gently angular, bop-forecasting

chords—and vice versa—to weave a seamless mesh. Percussionless, they
insinuate and drive, sway and circle beats with arch displacements only
an outstanding drummer could imagine.
Thanks to its riveting if deceptively understated musicality, the King
Cole Trio became the model for folks like Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson,
Red Norvo, and the Modern Jazz Quartet. Not coincidentally, it also
predicted cool jazz a decade before Miles Davis cut The Birth of the
Cool. And just as Cole's fondness for near-imploding chords, jagged
spaces, and lyrical lines points toward Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans,
Moore's coiled solos shaping alternate melodies presage Wes Montgom-
ery and Jim Hall. Nor was their influence limited to jazz: via the Louis
Jordan combos sparked by novelty tunes, Moore's own late '40s group,
the Three Blazers, and no less a fan than Ray Charles, whose early sides
are distinctly Cole-derived, the King Cole Trio left its thumbprint on
r&b as well.
It may seem incomprehensible now, but until 1946's "The Christmas
Song," his first recording with a studio orchestra, Cole's voice basically
remained just another instrument in the trio. In the group's early days,
Cole was hardly an accomplished vocalist; as Moore explained with
delicious historical irony in a 1957 down beat interview, "I didn't even
think of Nat as a singer." The proof is in the string of female-singer
auditions the trio held at its start, not to mention the countless (and
revolutionary) unison vocals of their first recordings.
But Cole's warm rasp quickly gained both strength and confidence, as
even a casual listen to The Best of the Nat King Cole Trio demonstrates.
(More dedicated types can hunt up Any Old Time, Legend, for 1944-45
radio and V-disc sessions, as well as The Forgotten Years, Giants of Jazz,
which includes 1945 transcriptions of the trio's appearances on Bing
Crosby's Kraft Music Hall.) Learning from Billie Holiday (as did his
only contemporary male vocal rival, Frank Sinatra), Cole avoided ex-
travagant embellishments, opting instead for a combination of elastic
rhythms and flattened melodies that approximate a conversation rather
than an aria. Perhaps not surprisingly, his genius found its fullest expres-
sion in ballads, which first led him to augment the trio with strings, then
go on to record with orchestrations by, among others, the same Nelson
Riddle who did so much for Sinatra's flagging fortunes. (These, along
with Cole's Capitol trio recordings, have been collected in the mam-
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 Nature Boy

moth 18-CD set, The Complete Nat King Cole Trio Capitol Recordings.)
By 1948's chart-topping "Nature Boy," Cole had dropped the trio and
become a pop vocalist. His huge following had grown steadily from his
first national hit, "Straighten Up and Fly Right"; combined with his
popular appearances and recordings with the 1944-46 Jazz at the Phil-
harmonic tours (with Les Paul on guitar), his broad appeal made him
one of the first black jazzmen to have a national radio show in 1948-49.
By the 1950s he was internationally known, playing the supper club/
concert hall circuit and getting film roles, most notably in 1958's Sf.
Louis Blues, where he portrayed W. C. Handy. In 1956-57 he became
the only African American with his own weekly TV show, which he left
in protest because he couldn't sign up a national sponsor despite good
ratings.
This is the period captured on three recently reissued CDs. Recorded
in 1956, After Midnight Sessions (Capitol) is a good compilation that
displays Cole's still-solid piano chops. Misleadingly billed as "Nat 'King'
Cole and his trio," it actually features a quartet (with Tatum alumnus
guitarist John Collins, bassist Charlie Harris, and drummer Lee Young)
augmented by four excellent soloists—altoist Willie Smith, trumpter
Harry "Sweets" Edison, trombonist Juan Tizol, and violinist Stuff
Smith.
The other two CDs follow the Cole-with-studio-orchestra pattern
that, to these ears at least, cloys around his wonderfully direct voice.
Songs for Two in Love (And More) (Capitol) is, except for a couple of
tunes like "Autumn Leaves," a state-of-the-art recipe for wall-of-drecky-
strings blandness; Just One of Those Things (And More) (Capitol) at least
offers—ironically—some grittier big-band charts. Despite their ex-
tended CD times, though, neither boasts the sheer-gold value of an
older, more straightforward package like The Best of Nat King Cole
(Capitol), which includes "Mona Lisa," "Sweet Lorraine," "Too
Young," "Route 66," and "Ramblin' Rose"—in other words, the tunes
you probably know and want to hear.
Cole's career was shot through with odd turns. But it's a sadder
historical irony that his most enduring and influential recordings, The
Best of the Nat King Cole Trio, Volumes 1 and 2 and his Decca material
(now owned by MCA, some of which is available on Trio Days, Charly),
remain out of print in the land of his birth 25 years after his
death. [1990]
197
 chapter 39
The Two Oscars
Pick up a typical jazz history, and thumb to the section on the guitar—if
you can find one. You'll find a heavy concentration on two names:
Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian.
There are some perfectly valid reasons for that. The gypsy guitarist
certainly transmuted the American jazz he'd taken as his model, espe-
cially the collaborations of Italian-American guitarist Eddie Lang (Sal-
vatore Massaro) and his violin-toting Philadelphia sidekick Joe Venuti.
Cracking Lang's brief arpeggiated solos open into full lines, Reinhardt
overcame the dual problems facing the guitar's entry into jazz soloing:
what could it do, and how could it do it.
Since this version of history neatens things into clear-cut stages of
development marked by personalities, Christian is inevitably the next
up. Emerging at the same time as the electric guitar, he harnessed that
technology to a new vision of the instrument, one grounded in scalar
rather than arpeggiated runs, that took horn lines as its model.
All this is true—as far as it goes. Problem is, it masks the actual
bumping and lurching, the false starts and the roads not taken and
doubled back into, that is the sloppy, scrambled, crowded road we all
follow through time and space. By singling out towering individuals,
this view reduces cultural achievements to a banal triumph of individual
wills over (usually threatening) circumstances, like a Punch and Judy
version of Macbeth. Take Django's burned hands, or Christian's TB and
early death, as emblems of how this sort of romanticism reduces history
to a series of oppositions between blind adversity and a maimed hero.
While there are, of course, such things as geniuses, they're not iso-
lated. Because of his hookup with Benny Goodman, Christian certainly
focused attention on the newfound versatility the electric guitar con-
ferred, and equally certainly bequeathed a vocabulary for it, but he was
hardly the lone figure on the scene. Les Paul was inventing the solid-
body guitar; Mary Lou Osborne and Eddie Durham and Oscar Moore
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 The Two Oscars

were among the many dabbling in electronics independent of Christian;

Christian himself and T-Bone Walker were influencing each other as
they richocheted in and out of territory bands.
This sense of time as motion underlines how history, even at its best,
is only a series of Muybridgean photos that try to seize it into stillness.
And so it follows that the pictures we take in our never-ending efforts to
understand our past gain in intelligence and intelligibility from depth of
field and shifts of perspective. Hence this attempt at filling in some
background to what Reinhardt and Christian actually achieved so bril-
liantly. Without it, history lapses into a cartoon.
One place to start filling in the recessions of the real is with Argen-
tinian guitarist Oscar Aleman—not exactly a name that rings through
the standard histories. Maybe it should, even though in the U.S. the
only available recording of Aleman's fret work is the 16-cut Swing Gui-
tar Legend (Rambler). This outstanding compilation starts with the late
30s, when Aleman was based, like Django, in Paris, where he worked
from 1931 to 1939 primarily as Josephine Baker's musical director; it
spans to the mid-'40s, when he'd returned home to avoid Hitler and
World War II. Judiciously slicing selections from that range, it offers
some tantalizing glimpses of what Aleman could have offered jazz if he
hadn't been so overshadowed by Django in his Paris heyday and then
mostly stayed in his off-the-beaten-jazz-track homeland for the last 30-
odd years of his life.
Even though some of the tunes feature Aleman in the guitar-violin
frontline setting that both Django and he adapted from the Lang-Venuti
team, even though they both recorded some of the same standards of the
period, like "Sweet Georgia Brown," there's no mistaking Aleman's
guitar attack for Django's. What superficial resemblances there are fade
quickly under scrutiny. They are no more musical twins than their
instruments, differ as surely as Django's Maccaferri ax shares only its
rough silhouette with Aleman's National resonator metal-bodied guitar.
Aleman's background—orphaned at ten, he became a young street
musician in Brazil by learning to play Afro-Brazilian folk tunes on the
cavaquinho, a four-stringed ukelele—gave him a fondness for Latinate
trilling as punctuation for his solos, a trait the gypsy Django shared.
Unlike Django, though, Aleman even on his early discs tended to
pepper his runs with accidentals, alter the value of what notes he played
against the changes to pursue to the melody he heard in his head. Their
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 Dancing in Your Head

very different solos on "Sweet Georgia Brown" or "I Got Rhythm"

demonstrate how that works. "Russian Lullaby," recorded in 1939 with
another guitarist and bassist, shows spectacularly how Aleman was be-
ginning to search out scalar possibilities, played bob-and-weave with the
very arpeggios Django would have used—instead of running through
them he swerves around them here, skips over them there with a sly
grin.
Then there's the way Aleman incorporates that bedrock element of
jazz, the blues, into his Latinate style. Django didn't so much draw on
the blues for his solos as replace it with the brooding eastern European
modalities so natural to his gypsy melancholy. It was a brilliant manu-
ever, and it opened up new dimensions in both his own playing and the
playing of his many followers. Aleman, on the other hand, fused the
blues into his Afro-Brazilian background with real understanding.
"Doin' the New Lowdown" exemplifies how the blues can inform every-
thing from his note choices to the way he bends.
Aleman's outstanding finger-picking technique—something Djan-
go's injured hand didn't allow him to explore—is another surprise. Here
too, Aleman seems to have combined approaches that seem inimical,
even antithetical. On the tunes he recorded solo, he's clearly drawing
from the flamenco- and folk-based styles learned in his youth, but he
resolves them into an attack uncannily close to the ragtimey Piedmont
feel of bluesmen like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller. "Nobody's
Sweetheart," for instance, intricately interweaves the syncopated inner
voices of each chord over now-rolling, now-double-thumbed bass lines:
it sounds eerily like music that somehow traveled down the Mississippi
to the Amazon.
Of the cuts on Swing Guitar Legend, it is a solo showcase that is
arguably the set's masterpiece. Recorded in Copenhagen in 1938,
"Whispering" draws its inspiration from Eddie Lang, who used a similar
chordal-plus-arpeggios approach to tunes like "A Little Love, a Little
Kiss." Overlaid onto that attack for the rubato opening is a heavy dose of
flamenco feathering; when the tempo kicks in, Aleman's ragtimey/bossa
finger work shreds the melody and harmony into a thousand subtle
subdivisions. Shooting throughout are glissando slides that keen in a
way clearly meant to evoke Hawaiian guitar—Aleman, in fact, played
Hawaiian guitar with a traveling vaudeville troupe before he went to
Europe, and like the old bluesmen (who also tended to use resonator
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 The Two Oscars

guitars for volume) did all kinds of tricks while he played, like picking
the guitar behind his head.
Aleman recorded in Argentina steadily in various formats until the
late '50s. He then disbanded his group and dropped out of sight, teach-
ing a few students. In the '70s, the Argentine arm of EMI began reissu-
ing some of his early records, and he began touring and recording again,
notably with Jorge Anders's orchestra in a Kansas City swing-type set-
ting. In this country, though, he's known only to a tiny cadre of afi-
cionados. Since he passed up the chance in 1933 to leave Josephine
Baker and hit the road with Duke Ellington, who admired him greatly
and tried to enlist him in his band, he's remained in jazz oblivion.
Despite that, he kept up with the music's development in the U.S. In his
later years, whenever he was asked who his favorite guitarists were, he
would invariably reply, "Charlie Christian and Oscar Moore."
Even a quick listen to Aleman's work would tell you what attracted
him to Moore's. As he told Argentinian critic Tomas Mooney, "Oscar
Moore played in my way, though we never met." There's a lot of truth to
that, although in some ways the two men couldn't have had careers
more different.
Oscar Moore achieved celebrity for almost a decade, while he was
playing in the famed Nat King Cole trio, that musical incubator. So
much jazz and pop went into the threesome's music and came out the
other side transformed that it's impossible not to see them as a major
nexus in the music's history: from swing to bop and r&b, their simul-
taneously laid-back and relentlessly driving sound, their ability to re-
think old standards and fondness for novelty numbers made them a
major musical influence even as it garnered them enormous popularity.
That popularity rubbed off on Moore, who swept the honors in beauty
contests like the down beat readers' poll and the Metronome poll from
1945 to 1948. Besides jazz pickers like Barney Kessel, his most avid
fans—who illustrate the influential sweep of his melodic touch—
included B. B. King (also a devotee of Django's) and Robert Jr. Lock-
wood, the revampers of postwar electric blues guitar.
It's not surprising they'd hear the blues weeping in Moore's guitar.
Born in 1916 in Austin, Texas, Moore was surrounded by it, like those
other seminal players T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian. But where
Walker bailed out of the territory and Western swing styles to burrow
deep into his Texas blues roots and electrify them, where Christian
20J
 Dancing in Your Head

assiduously adapted horn lines like Lester Young's to create a swing-to-

bop soloist's vocabulary for the newly developed electric instrument,
Moore accreted a swirl of ideas from his own past to sculpt a unique
attack.
He was, for instance, the first guitarist to develop the modern notion
of comping. Earlier axmen had bomped on the beat; Freddie Green,
for example, became the rock on which the Basic band built its swagger
precisely because of his metronomic intensity. That concept shaped the
rhythm attack of all swing band guitarists, and Charlie Christian was no
exception.
But in the King Cole trio, the dominant sensibility derived from
Cole's pianistic heroes like Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, and Art Ta-
tum—especially Tatum's Impressionistic chordal voicings, his spinning
and hovering rhythms. In the trio's percolating crosstalk, those ideas
were parsed into the individual player's rhythmic and melodic attacks
which wound like genetic strands, a kind of triple helix around a drum-
merless core. And so Moore's elastic chordal work formed the perfect
complement to Cole's piano. Listen to how the opening chorus on "Too
Marvelous for Words" (Best of the Nat King Cole Trio, Capitol, o.p.) or
his counterpointing chords and fills on "Sweet Lorraine" (Trio Days,
Affinity) predicts what later players like Joe Pass would perfect. That
smoothly jagged approach became the standard once bop shook loose
the eight-to-the-bar beat dominating swing.
In the afterglow of Charlie Christian's meteoric impact as a soloist,
an entire generation of guitarists from Tiny Grimes to Barney Kessel
became "Little Charlies." Possibly because he'd already developed his
own voice in some of the very same places Christian had, Moore never
aped his more famous contemporary even though their vocabularies
inevitably overlapped. Two cuts from Trio Days illustrate how. On
"Gone With the Draft," Moore's fills snake behind the voice like Prez's
behind Billie Holiday's, while his solo spot floats totally un-Christian
spaces and intervallic leaps. For the blues "That Ain't Right," he does a
kind of aerial act with the typical blues-based riffs of the period, tum-
bling over the expected phrase, the usual interval, at the last minute; his
solo is a marvel of economic precision, its punctuating trills (another
trait the two Oscars shared) and melodies spun effortlessly, hung
gracefully from the occasional jabbing spike.
Some other stylistic points that would both endear him to Aleman
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 The Two Oscars

and distinguish him from Christian appear in concentrated form during

the instrumental on Trio Days called "This Side Up." In call-and-
response with Cole's piano, Moore slides chords and slurs glisses for a
Hawaiian effect; his solo spots bristle with one of his favorite phrase tags,
a fierce double-picking clearly meant to evoke c&w mandolin but kin to
the Spanish feathering Aleman often used. Where Christian concen-
trated on the relationship between scales and chords in a proto-bop
manner, Moore was more interested in delving into melodies and re-
fashioning them in his own image—which often happened to fore-
shadow bop's expanded harmonic sense. A prime example is his solo on
"Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You" (Best of the Nat King Cole Trio).
Sputtering a mandolin-stinger intro that resolves into a chicken-picked
bend a Nashville cat could envy, Moore constructs a sensual, ragged,
skittering melody that rivals the original; no scalar run-through, no
chordal maze-running, it stretches but never loses touch with the tune's
harmonic motion.
Unlike Aleman's, a sizable chunk of Moore's discography with the
Trio is findable. Besides the two albums already mentioned, there are
Nat King Cole Trio (Pathe Marconi/EMI), a reissue of part of the out-of-
print Capitol collection; Intimate (The Classic Series), a decent-
sounding dub of a 1940 New Orleans club date that offers Cole set
standards like "Paper Moon" and "Sweet Lorraine"; From the Very
Beginning (MCA), an electronic-stereo reissue by that corporate giant's
U.K. arm of half the Decca material they've left in print in their U.S.
catalogue, though that homemade version is difficult to find in stores—
the Affinity disc picks up the key titles from it; Body and Soul (Topline),
an annoyingly recorded L.A. gig from the mid-1940s; The Forgotten
Years (Giants of Jazz), good-sounding live radio dubs from Bing
Crosby's Kraft Music Hall, among others; and Any Old Time (Giants of
Jazz), a novelty-heavy compilation of a 1944 down beat radio broadcast
and 1945 V-discs.
When Moore left the trio in 1947, he rejoined his guitar-toting
brother Johnny's r&b trio the Red Blazers for a while; then he put
together his own groups, recording a couple of albums of which only
Oscar Moore (Tampa) remains available. While it's an uneven effort,
when it cooks it burns—as it does on that old chestnut "Brother Can
You Spare a Dime," for instance. Here Moore hangs notes at the ends of
phrases in an almost cantilevered way, as if daring them to fall off the
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 Dancing in Your Head

changes. His hearhvrenching bluesy bends avoid easy diatonic resolu-

tions, and he shifts periodically to the broken chordal movements that,
wrapped exquisitely around the alternative melody he explores, fore-
shadow the work of Joe Pass and Jim Hall. It alone is worth the price of
the album.
By the time he cut it in the '50s, Moore had already slid into oblivion
as far as jazz critics and audiences were concerned. Though in the early
part of the decade he'd backed ace r&b vocalists like Charles Brown, Joe
Turner, and Ivory Joe Hunter, he never attained the studio prominence
of a Mickey Baker. By the time he died in 1981, he'd been inactive for
over a decade and virtually forgotten, whited out of the typical textbooks'
cartoons because his own weird twists didn't fit their simplified plots.
Unfortunately but inevitably, their lack of insight and archaically rigid
categories have thus been perpetuated as our lack of knowledge. [1988]

\_, chapter
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40
The Gypsy King
Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt offers an early modern (read post-
phonograph) example of how pop music travels from its native habitat, is
heard through alienated ears, and yields a hybrid no one could have
foreseen. Introduced to jazz by an avant-artist pal who played him Louis
Armstrong records, entranced by the discs of early jazz guitar-violin
duos like Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti, Django and his patrician fiddler/
co-conspirator Stephane Grappelli took their models and infused them
with a jaunty but fiery feel, a lyrical touch of Old World melancholy
and knowingness that was consonant with but distinct from the blues
underlying the best of early American jazz. In less impressionistic terms,
where Lang had hung his pioneering stabs at guitar solos largely around
his chordal work, where fellow trailblazer Lonnie Johnson had leaned
on blues-derived pentatonics, Django played with brooding eastern Eu-
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 The Gypsy King

ropean modalities, broke those chords open into arpeggios and ran them
into twisty, spidery figures that belied how three fingers of his left hand
had been welded together in a gypsy caravan fire.
The results changed the whole nature of the guitar as an instrument;
only Charlie Christian, who a few years later would introduce the elec-
tric guitar to jazz and with it, the possibility of the guitarist using long,
hornlike, scale-based lines, had a similar impact at the time. To put it
even further into context: B. B. King credits Django's records with
helping to teach him certain techniques, like tremolo and swooping
note bends, that younger rock and blues players have been copping from
him ever since. Other key Django traits were equally seminal. His manic
right-hand slashing at the chords his left hand was sliding around the
fretboard and his flight-of-the-bumblebee single-string picking filtered
into rock via disciple Les Paul and his followers like Jeff Beck and Jerry
Garcia. His famed use of octaves in the final chorus of "Sweet Georgia
Brown" prefigured Wes Montgomery's and, later, Jimi Hendrix's. And
so the spiral continues.
Unlike Charlie Christian, Django lived long enough to record in
many different contexts with some startlingly diverse results. From his
earliest days as a banjo-picking accompanist to his impromptu recording
sessions with Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter to his matching wits
with dual violinists Grappelli and Eddie South on appropriated Bach
pieces to his playing classic big-band swing with the Benny Carter Or-
chestra to his wartime use of Hubert Rostaing's clarinet, Djangologie/
USA covers most of the ground. Central, of course, are the priceless
Quintet of the Hot Club of France recordings from the '30s, where
Django and Grappelli duel and dare each other through early jazz
standards like "Limehouse Blues" and "Rose Room" and "Body and
Soul" and "Honeysuckle Rose" like a couple of ace fighter pilots strafing
in spins and loop-de-loops over their earthbound two-guitars-plus-
string-bass rhythm section. There isn't anything else quite like it.
Which is why it's a relief that DRG has taken real care with the sound
of this collected set of reissues. The balanced restoration of some previ-
ously dimmer top and bottom end lends a nicely consistent sonic sheen
throughout. Aficionados—and, for better or worse, how many folks who
spring for the money this box costs won't be?—will be ecstatic to find the
detailed discographical and session info on the cuts included as well as a
bonus, a booklet crammed with the minutiae of Django's complete
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 Dancing in Your Head

discographical output. My only quibble: the labels on one of my discs

were reversed, with side one mismarked as side two.
So let's just put it this way: this collection can usher you into the
multihued, panoramic world of Django Reinhardt better than any other
single source I know of. Once you're in, of course, it's a whole 'nother
story. You'll absolutely have to have the two Quintet records (Django
Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelly With the Quintet of the Hot Club of
France and Parisian Swing) on GNP Crescendo, since none of their
wonderful outrageous tracks is duplicated on this set. Then there's the
four-volume Everest set that among other things catches postwar Django
trying out electric guitar against Rostaing's clarinet and a regular rhythm
section. Then there's . . . [1988]

chapter, 41
The Wizard of Waukesha
Lester Polfus—a.k.a. Les Paul—has a lot to answer for in the history of
music. He is one of the prime inventors of the electric guitar: Gibson's
Les Paul model, pummeled by the heavier players of rock's spectrum
like Cream-era Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Duane All-
man, has snarled its way through countless tunes. He dreamed up
technologies that spawned the racks of modern soundshaping equip-
ment filling recording studios and stages, effects like echo and tape delay
and phase shifting. He changed the very way music is recorded: in one of
the rooms of his spacious Mahwah, New Jersey, home looms the first
eight-track recording machine, each track its own huge (by today's stan-
dards) separate tube-filled, VU-metered box. From that came modern
overdubbing, the process by which instruments and vocals can each be
recorded, erased, and redone individually. Using this process (they
called it "The New Sound"), he and his then wife Mary Ford sold over
ten million records (a phenomenal figure in those pre-Beatles, pre-
Michael Jackson days) by 1952. Their single most famous collaboration,
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 The Wizard ofWaukesha

a smoothly upbeat version of "How High the Moon" stuffed with guitars
and Mary's multiple vocals, alone moved one and a half million copies.
Stacked, the number of records they sold would soar 18 miles high.
An impressive pile of facts, but like most facts they only tell part of the
story. What they leave out is Les Paul: the sardonic nonstop talker whose
trunkful of memories comes spilling out in answer to a question like the
clothes from a ridiculously untidy closet once the door's opened; the
unquenchable Tom Edison-style tinkerer who can't resist clambering
around the low-slung ceiling at the New York jazz spot called Fat
Tuesday's to try to fix the air-conditioning system one hot summer night
an hour before his set; the birthday boy who'll show up for his party at
Area decked out to hold court over a club full of celeb fans.
Yes, the 76-year-old techno wizard—whose bright, darting eyes,
curled-lip grin, gaminish face, and ready, barbed wit belie his age when
he takes the stage every Monday night at Fat Tuesday's—has more than
made his historical mark. And if he's earned his billing as a "Living
Legend" from his guitar playing and showmanship as well as his inven-
tor's prodigality, he's not at all shy about taking full credit. "Robert
Moog always says to me, 'Les, if it wasn't for you there wouldn't be a
synthesizer, because no one else around was doing it,'" he asserts of one
of his many techno offspring with his typical combination of ego and
blunt candor. Why shouldn't he claim paternity, when his audiences
are so frequently sprinkled with Stardust? Musicians like Beck and Page,
Paul Shaffer and Al DiMeola and Stanley Jordan drop by to pay tribute
to and even climb onstage with the man they acknowledge as the Father
of It All.
It's a long way from Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he was born in
1916, to the radio, recording, and television success that has made Less
Paul a household name, but he started chasing his wide-ranging goals
very early on. At the tender age of nine, he was already playing harmon-
ica and building crystal radios; what came over the airwaves first was
someone playing guitar, which he—as impulsive then as now—
immediately decided to learn. Like most players of that time, his six-
string came from Sears, Roebuck, and once he learned a handful of
basic chords he added voice and harmonica (jury-rigging a rack from a
coat hanger), dubbed himself Rhubarb Red, and began gigging at Lions
Clubs, PTA meetings, and the like, playing tunes he picked up from
hillbilly discs by the Skillet Lickers and the Gully Jumpers.
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 Dancing in Your Head

Not long after, he found an Eddie Lang 78. "That's what got me
interested in jazz," he says. Lang's arpeggiated runs were among the first
recorded single-string guitar solos, and influenced key guitarists like
Django Reinhardt, another Paul idol. By age 13, he'd built a mini—radio
station and a primitive recording machine, and also improvised his first
electric guitar. "I ripped the back off my Sears and stuck the pickup on
an old phonograph arm through the soundhole, then I turned the record
player on so the guitar sound would feed through its little speaker," he
explains almost brusquely, as if that bit of technical legerdemain were
self-evident to everybody in 1930.
Soon the precocious picker hit the tour circuit with a western band,
then formed a successful duo called Sunny Joe and Rhubarb Red, which
not only toured the Midwest but played over the radio waves as well.
They wound up in Chicago, where, when they broke up in 1933, Paul
began a schizophrenic, if successful, career as a DJ and recording artist.
Mornings found him on one station as country musician Rhubarb Red,
and using that moniker he cut a few hits for Sears and Montgomery
Ward. Afternoons he'd become Les Paul and front a jazz combo on
another station or accompany "race" artists on recordings.
By 1936 he killed off Rhubarb Red, because he'd started to focus on
jamming around Chicago with heavy jazz hitters like pianist Art Tatum
and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. A trio he'd formed with Chet Atkins's older
half-brother Jim bluffed their way into accompanying Fred Waring and
His Pennsylvanians, whose five-days-a-week national broadcast over
NBC's radio network ran from 1937 to 1940, and featured Paul on still
rare electric guitar. "I used to get more mail than Fred did, and boy, did
that make him mad," he grins.
Following a stint as a radio-station musical director and with a tour-
ing big band, Paul headed to Los Angeles, where in 1943 he began
backing stars like Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, the Andrews Sisters, Dinah
Shore, and even comedians like Burns and Allen and Jack Benny. Using
yet another pseudonym, he also cut an outstanding album called Jazz at
the Philharmonic (Verve) with a piano player credited as Shorty Na-
dine—he was actually Nat King Cole.
It was his pal Crosby who urged the ever tinkering Paul to put to-
gether the multitrack recording studio he felt he could fashion out of
then existing technology. From wax discs and multiple turntables, Paul
devised a primitive overdubbing system. After recording on one disc,
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 The Wizard of Waukesha

he'd play it back and record it onto another disc while he added a second
guitar line, then repeat the process until he had the dense, one-man-
band sound he wanted. With the release of hits like "Lover" and "Bra-
zil" in 1948, the Les Paul sound was unveiled. "It took over 500 wax
discs, and an awful lot of time and painstaking—I mean painstaking—
care to get the synchronization just right on each of those," he recalls.
"If you made even one mistake, it was basically forget the whole thing,
and all the way back to disc number one."
The hits launched him into a big-league success that barely missed
turning into a major tragedy. In the winter of 1948, Paul was en route
from his New Jersey home to a New York gig during a storm when the
car he was driving skidded on an icy bridge and plunged 50 feet down
into a snowbank. There he lay for eight hours, until help arrived. When
he finally got to the hospital, his extensive injuries were cataloged:
smashed nose, broken collarbone, six broken ribs, cracked vertebra,
pelvis split from back to front, and right elbow joint knocked clean off.
In those more primitive days of medical technology, the options about
joints in that kind of condition boiled down to amputation. Fortunately
for music history, the doctor in the emergency room was a Les Paul fan,
and devised a Les Paul-like way around ending Paul's career. He fash-
ioned a metal plate that would hold the guitarist's arm together, but
would fix it at nearly a right angle; at least, the pair reasoned, Paul could
continue to play. With seven screws holding the plate in place, and a
cast that stayed on for one and a half years, the invention worked,
though for a long time its beneficiary could use only his thumb to pick
while he recorded. In fact, to this day Paul's right arm is welded into a
permanent picking position.
By the early 1950s Paul was back in the big time, thanks to the magic
of television and his professional and personal partnership with an ex-
Gene Autry protegee named Mary Ford (nee Colleen Summers). That
was partly due to his continuing technological breakthroughs. In addi-
tion to pioneering (simultaneously with Leo Fender) the notion of a
solid-body electric guitar (as opposed to the basically amplified-acoustic
type used by other early electric guitarists like Charlie Christian), he'd
transferred his interest in multitrack disc recording to the medium of
tape. Working with Ampex, the huge tape and machine manufacturer,
Paul designed what would become the standard sound-on-sound feature
still found on home tape decks today.
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 Dancing in Your Head

"I just had Ampex drill mounting holes for a fourth head in front of
the erase head of a recorder," he says in his matter-of-fact way. "I didn't
explain to them why I wanted it." He wanted it to put in a second
playback head. "That way," he explains, "things were a lot easier than
with the disc-to-disc method. I could record a track, rewind the tape,
and play it back so the pickup (second playback) head would read the
signal before it passed through the erase head. I'd hear it through head-
phones and play a second track that would be recorded in synch with
it—voila, overdubbing." The frenetically paced classic, "How High the
Moon," jammed to near bursting with twining guitars and silky-smooth
vocals by Mary, was one of the first products of this technological revo-
lution. By the time the sweetly mournful "Vaya Con Dios" topped the
national charts in mid-1953, the couple had arrived as full-fledged stars.
Their marriage and business partnership yielded commercial en-
dorsements, a glut of guest TV shots, and finally their own Les Paul and
Mary Ford at Home show, which ran seven years. Mary singing at the
kitchen sink while Les tinkered and played in his workshop became
images (and sounds) impressed on the retinas and subconscious of an
entire generation. And of course the hits kept coming through the '50s.
But by 1963, the couple had had it, and divorced a year later.
It hit Paul hard, and he put down his guitar for a decade, not even
playing at home. In 74 some friends (Chet Atkins among them—their
album Chester and Lester on RCA is a must-have) prevailed on him to
play and record again, which he did for about five years, then quit again.
A year later he'd sunk to a physical and mental low, and found himself
in the hospital yet again—he'd already had four ear operations because
someone accidentally hit him. "It seemed like if I counted up all the
years from 1940 to 1980 that I spent in the hospital it would add up to
half that time," he says, shaking his head. This time, though, he was
facing coronary bypass surgery.
Ironically, his recovery from that drastic 1980 operation combined
with the long-term after-effects of his 1948 accident to bring Paul to his
now celebrated gig at Fat Tuesday's over nine years ago.
By 1983 I had thought about playing again, but I had a very serious
problem. I have very bad arthritis from that car crash, so it started to
really take away my fingers. I didn't mind that so much until I got to
thinking about the thing I like to do best, which is play, and that was
the one thing that was being taken away. I now have two fingers on my
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 A Box of Mr. Overdub

left hand that are useless, and three fingers on my right. Seeing I was
in a mess, the doctor said to me I should exercise and keep what mo-
bility I had left. So I figured the best thing to do would be to play the
guitar. It worked. The arthritis got me in here, but what keeps me here
is playing for the people. When I see a nice look on someone's face, if
I'm making them happy, that means an awful lot more to me than ar-
thritis.
The proof is in the full house at Fat Tuesday's virtually every Monday
night since he's started there. In spite of the Hollywood happy-ending
quality of his life, Paul is no jazzy Pollyanna: his onstage shtick com-
bines one-liners, occasional stinging put-downs of members of both the
audience and his trio in the Don Rickles vein, and a free-floating
willingness to stop any song at any time and shift gears into some other
tune—his backing band has stay loose and ready, because they can never
tell when he might jump from "C Jam Blues" to "How High the
Moon." While his disabilities have inevitably taken a toll, his picking
still high-steps deftly and even, at times, curlicues his characteristic
Django Reinhardt-style phrases to make fun of itself in an impish way.
From the looks on the audience's faces, it's clear that after all these years
Les Paul still knows how to make them happy. [1989]

chapter 42
A Box of Mr. Overdub
The first time I met now-76-year-old Lester Polfus—a.k.a. Rhubarb
Red, a.k.a. Les Paul—was during the summer of 1984. The air-
conditioning at Fat Tuesday's, where he'd begun playing Monday
nights, was broken, and so this particular legend was crawling around
the ductwork an hour before his set—much to the club owner's
chagrin—yelling, "Don't call the repairman, I can fix it."
To me, that scene encapsulated Paul: the big but offhand ego, the
insatiable curiosity, the indefatigable will. Those qualities help explain

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 Dancing in Your Head

why he became the Thomas Edison of the electric guitar, soundshaping

gizmos, and modern recording. Guitar World readers know he pretty
much invented the solid-body guitar. His recordings, whether instru-
mental or featuring the vocals of his then wife Mary Ford, created weird
and ornery soundscapes stuffed with overdubs. In his agile hands, multi-
ple guitars sped up like Martian mandolins or slowed to a bottom crawl,
seesawed and leapfrogged and kicked and twirled in tightly choreo-
graphed patterns across trills and arpeggios, and created a sense of tex-
tured depth that's often orchestral. Meshing via another of his loopy
inventions, multitrack recording, those textures wove a radically new
notion of what a pop record could sound like, how it could communi-
cate.
Paul himself, a garrulous man with a biting and sarcastic wit, avoids
anything even remotely "highbrow" like the plague. So he wouldn't
think of it this way, but he brought into mainstream American pop some
of the sonic concepts being explored by contemporary vanguardists like
Harry Partch and John Cage. On the other hand, he'd absorbed the
easygoing gypsy melancholy and ingratiating, swinging whimsy of his
idol Django Reinhardt: the graceful glissandos, the jagged arpeggiated
runs, the sudden flashes of musical humor. His hit records, his work on
radio and TV, his touring with the likes of Bing Crosby and Nat King
Cole all marked him as a key, if somewhat eccentric, player on the field
of music history. It's no coincidence that he influenced virtually every
important rock guitarist who came in his wake, including Jeff Beck and
Jimmy Page (who, when they're in town, usually beat it down to Fat
Tuesday's to catch their hero), Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Richard
Thompson, Billy Zoom, Robert Quine, Adrian Belew, and Bill Frisell.
Without Les Paul, the noises that made these guys famous, the expan-
sive sense of soundscape that's basic to their music, wouldn't exist.
Lately there's been an avalanche of boxed sets. The world could
easily live without many of them. But Les Paul: The Legend and the
Legacy (Capitol) makes a valuable contribution to understanding Ameri-
can pop culture since World War II—and is a helluva lot of fun besides.
A four-CD set boasting over 100 cuts that have been remixed under the
seal of Paul's approval, its first three discs follow the chronology of Paul's
career, solo and with Ford. Filling out each disc are segments of his
early '50s radio show with Ford, replete with wretchedly funny puns and
silly gags. The first has commercials for Robert Hall clothing stores and
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 A Box of Mr. Overdub

Rheingold beer—both defunct. At the time, they must have sounded

like they'd been broadcast from a galaxy far, far away. (Fair warning: the
ads, shows, and instrumentals like "Goofus," "Brazil," and "Jingle
Bells" are among my favorite cuts.) Rarities like his first stereo recordings
are sprinkled throughout. The fourth disc, loaded with 34 out-takes and
previously unreleased tracks, and the detailed booklet, with in-depth bio
and Paul's track-by-track commentary, ices the cake. Since the guitar
great's later work for Columbia and RCA pales next to these Capitol
sides, this box isn't missing much.
It's a giddy mix. The Wizard of Waukesha's oddball sonic sensi-
bilities altered most tunes he touched, regardless of their quality. His
zany antics reached a mass audience—something that would probably
be much harder to do now. Of course, he wrapped many of his experi-
ments in novelty appeal and pure schlock. There's sappy schlock like
"Vaya Con Dios" and "In the Good Old Summertime." There's flat-
footed schlock like "St. Louis Blues" and "Alabamy Bound" and "Send
Me Some Money," where Mary Ford's pleasant vocals betray her acute
lack of bluesy and rhythmic subtlety. That strategy eventually held Paul
captive: listening to these CDs consecutively can make a lot of the ideas
seem more formulaic than they were. But then again, most tracks re-
deem themselves: the original one-man guitar army almost always de-
ploys himself in some bent way no one else could have conceived of.
With its authoritative sweep and translucent sound, Les Paul: The Leg-
end and the Legacy is a fitting monument to a complex giant of Ameri-
can music. [1992]

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 chapter 43
Colliers Ellington Follies
What's strangely off-kilter about James Lincoln Collier's new book,
Duke Ellington, is that it attempts muckraking without either new infor-
mation or a fresh critical point of view. The author of a fairly well-
received book on Louis Armstrong, Collier has this time out mixed a
rather dated and puzzling brew—part formal analysis and part biogra-
phy, it is structured around a number of fuzzy and outmoded critical
concepts. Among them are an oversimplified personality analysis of
Ellington and a persistent misreading of what Collier calls "symphonic
jazz" as opposed to what he calls "jazz" or "commercial music. " Collier
objects to symphonic jazz of the Paul Whiteman/Gershwin variety for
what he considers its pretentious use of European classical forms.
Strangely, he groups Ellington's longer and more ambitious works un-
der that rubric, and then attacks them for not being formally structured
along the lines of European models Ellington never used.
On the muckraking front, Collier's claim that Ellington didn't really
write many, if any, of the tunes his fame rests on, but instead lifted and
adapted themes from his leading soloists, is hardly news. No one who
knows anything about the Ellington band is going to be surprised that
this or that melody originated on the bandstand or at a jam session or in
a recording studio with Johnny Hodges or Cootie Williams or "Tricky
Sam" Nanton or Juan Tizol. If Ellington's genius allowed him to recog-
nize the seeds of a good number in a horn line, and then enabled him to
polish and set it in one of his dense and inventive arrangements, that just
comfirms what has often been said about his music: the orchestra was his
instrument, and he played it with an attentive dexterity few others have
equaled. But even beyond that, trying to attribute a specific melody line
or fragment, in whatever context, seems about as useful as trying to nail
Jello to a wall.
Nor is it startling or even useful to explain Duke's borrowings thus:

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 Collier's Ellington Follies

Ellington carved his creations not so much with raw talent, as did the
Armstrongs and Charlie Parkers, but with the chisel of his character.
Who Duke Ellington was is critical to the work he produced. If he had
been different in this way or that, his work would have been different
and might not even have existed.
Can't the same be said of Armstrong and Bird? Were they too "raw" to
have characters? Or to reverse the question: What is raw talent, and how
can it be spoken of as separate from the individual who possesses it? This
dilemma leaves Collier gasping for air at the book's conclusion, when he
has to somehow justify the tome's existence by smudging over most of
the issues he's raised, like "originality" and "character." But by that time
he's into the muck way over his head.
For starters, according to Collier, "character" in Ellington's case was
the product of a turn-of-the-century black middle class that shared its
values and assumptions with its white counterpart:
Of particular importance was the presence in this Victorian culture
of a genteel interest in the arts. The "best" art—the music of the
"Three B's," the painting of the academic formalists, Greek statuary,
the plays of Shakespeare, and the novels of Scott—was thought to
be "uplifting" and to turn the mind to higher things and away from
depravity and debauchery. Art, and especially good music, had moral
connotations to the Victorians.

This may well be true; it's certainly cliched. But, aside from making
vague gestures toward the Zeitgeist and reciting a short string of family
anecdotes drawn from Ellington's autobiography, Music Is My Mistress,
Collier doesn't really show this worn Victorian ideology at work on the
mind of the young man. Since Collier also disparages (rightfully) the
truthfulness of that autobiography at other points in his book, his use of
it to document his central thesis does seem curiously inconsistent.
Though Collier's sense of character is crude, even lazy, his energy for
repetition never seems to flag, no matter how many times he flogs a
point. Take as an instance a quote from record producer Irving Towns-
end, who worked with Ellington during Duke's later years, about The
Queen's Suite, which Duke composed after being introduced to Queen
Elizabeth. In his discussion of the piece, we find a neat microcosmic
wrap of what, in Collier's eyes, passes for a critical methodology:

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 Dancing in Your Head

The meeting [between-the queen and Ellington] meant a great deal to

him. Ellington had always had a weakness for both celebrated people
and women, and who could be more celebrated than a queen? He
thereupon created this six-part suite. . . . Irving Townsend . . .
said, "Ellington went about the composition of The Queen's Suite'
with greater concentration than he displayed for any other music with
which I was associated."

The Townsend quote appears more than once in Collier's book. On

its face the remark seems a neutral, or even positive, description of
Duke's attitude toward this suite. Not in Collier's eager hands, however.
Townsend's passing observation becomes a link in Collier's case against
the longer, ambitious works that claimed Ellington's attention later in
life, and is moreover evidence of Collier's point that those works owe
their existence to the master's being a celeb groupie.
According to Collier, Ellington's crucial character flaw was com-
pounded from his middle-class Victorian snobbishness and his innate
laziness, which meant, for instance, that he rarely wrote without a
deadline. (Neither do any writers I know.) If Duke's snobbishness led
him to what Collier revealingly describes as a "weakness for what he
considered 'serious' music," then his lack of formal study and laziness
meant that he couldn't organize and structure that art to accord with
Collier's quaint formalist canons. As he notes in his dissection of Remi-
niscing in Tempo, one of Ellington's earliest extended pieces:
Ellington, of course, would have said that it did not matter whether
the piece fit anybody's definition of jazz, and quite rightly so. But this
does force the critic to view it against other than jazz criteria. Jazz
pieces are frequently based on quite routine forms: architecture is not
an important concern of most jazz musicians. But more formal music
is exactly that, and this piece never goes anywhere, but simply mean-
ders hither and thither, almost entirely without direction.

The issues glossed over by that half-paragraph are so numerous: What

is jazz, exactly? Why are the "other criteria" available to the listener
limited, in Collier's view, to western European classical models? If
architecture is not a concern of most jazz musicians, how can they write
memorable tunes, build widely emulated arrangements, venture suc-
cessfully into creating longer forms or even craft improvised solos? In
short, the antithesis proposed by Collier, and the one on which his book

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 Collier's Ellington Follies

turns, is the old, discredited one whose culturally and racially imperial-
ist rationale takes many forms: high versus low art, trained versus intu-
itive artists, and so on. So by those dim lights, if Duke Ellington aban-
doned what he did really well, like cobble together unusually voiced
three-minute jazzy tunes from other people's input, for things he didn't
understand, like large-scale works beyond both his incredibly limited
formal training and his slapdash working methods, how could the result
be anything but dismal?
The hoary dichotomies and dishonored hierarchies that structure
Collier's thinking make his repetitious dismissals of one longer Ellington
work after another almost laughable. If they weren't all successful
musically—and they weren't, as the majority of critics have long
agreed—their failings might be more instructively considered in the
context of their persistent influence over other musicians. Ellington's
method of crafting parts for individual voices in his band, his juxtaposi-
tions of unusual musical ideas and formats, and his constant attempts to
extend the ghetto-ized boundaries of the music its creators never named
are a major part of his musical legacy, no matter how much Collier may
pretend otherwise.
As it is, Collier's pretense of muckraking leads him to twist history,
logic, and music way out of shape. Thus, Ellington's putative lack of
keyboard skills exemplifies both his laziness and his haphazard approach
to his music; his manipulative personality explains how he held together
the band he was ripping off; his alleged ignorance of work songs and
church hymns as a child is supposed to belie his frequent assertion that
he was composing Negro music, not jazz, in his longer works. And so,
despite its occasional insights, Duke Ellington adds little but distortion
to our understanding of one of the 20th century's outstanding composers
and his enormously rich and satisfying work. [1987]

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 L I
chapter. 44
Epitaph
Charles Mingus had musical ambitions and abilities as prodigious and
far-reaching as his other appetites. An avid student of European com-
posers like Debussy and Bartok, he also saw himself inheriting the
mantle of an illustrious lineage that includes Jelly Roll Morton and
Duke Ellington.
One central concern for those giants was the relationship between
composition and improvisation, the dialectical motor that powers jazz.
How to reconcile the more expansive structures made possible by a big
band with individual soloing became a subject Mingus investigated as
well. His updated vision opened the territory for later investigators like
Muhal Richard Abrams, John Carter, Henry Threadgill, David Mur-
ray, and Marty Ehrlich.
Epitaph is one of Mingus's major statements on the matter. Hefting a
score 500 pages (and 4000 measures) long for a 30-piece orchestra, the
ambitious piece was only rediscovered in 1985, by the composer's widow
Sue Graham Mingus and musicologist Andrew Homzy. Homzy pasted
the yellowing fragments together, in some cases bar number by bar
number; then critic-composer-musicologist Gunther Schuller, a long-
time friend and professional associate of Mingus's, adapted the results.
So in June 1989, nearly 30 years after it was written and a decade after
its composer's death, Epitaph debuted to a sold-out Alice Tully Hall. (In
November 1962, there was a famous abortive attempt to play and record
it at Town Hall, but due to time constraints and poor planning the
performance was a fiasco and the United Artists album that resulted was
mangled.) Several months later, the two-CD Epitaph (Columbia), a
recording of the Lincoln Center set, was released, with a 44-page book-
let of exhaustively detailed notes by Homzy and Schuller.
Conducted by Schuller, the orchestra boasts all-stars like trumpeters
Randy Brecker and Wynton Marsalis, altoists Bobby Watson and John
Handy, tenorman George Adams, trombonist Britt Woodman, and pia-
2J8
 Epitaph

nists Sir Roland Hanna and John Hicks. They tear into the opus's 18
sections with an appropriately fierce vengeance—although had Mingus
been at Lincoln Center, in his ever restless way he might well have
infuriated the participants (and goosed the proceedings) into an even
feistier mode.
The music demands every bit of the players' considerable drive and
talent. It's difficult, at times almost inchoate, partly because of Epitaph's
sheer magnitude and many shifts. But it's also rewarding: its riotous
gargantuan sweep scrambles gutbucket blues and the sanctified church,
Morton and Ellington and Monk, Stravinsky and Bart6k and Tin Pan
Alley.
In classic Mingus fashion, perspectives multiply as styles careen
across Epitaph's sprawl. From ominously mournful ballads to grungy
uptempo stomps to classically organized set pieces, the orchestra
crackles with dense, chameleonic firepower. Sometimes the ensemble
work, which is usually taut, hovers with the lush and gradually unfurl-
ing harmonies that mark Mingus's introspective side. At other times the
band explodes into strutting and swelling, the edge-of-cacophony exu-
berance that's also quintessential Mingus. Solos, both scored and im-
provised, sometimes take centerstage and sometimes, in varying num-
bers, just flicker at the ensemble's edges. Though the work's overarching
structure remains hazy, even a casual listener has to be staggered by the
music's reach and power. If nothing else, Epitaph reaches from beyond
the grave to confirm Mingus's power and continue his standard operat-
ing procedure—shaking his audiences up. [1991]

219
 \ chapter
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45
Mingus s Sancho Panza
"I topped 'em off last year, but look at the way they're growing back. I'm
gonna have to do it again," says Jimmy Knepper. His Staten Island
kitchen, like much of the charming little hilltop house he shares with
wife Maxine, is under reconstruction. Cabinets sit in the middle of the
floor for refinishing. The basement bathroom the Kneppers paid $3000
to have put in isn't done. The path down to the yard needs fixing. The
$1500 decorative gates got clamped onto the ground-floor windows after
the fourth robbery—the perps got the family silver, the stereo, odds and
ends. But in the big yard that slopes dramatically away from the kitchen
tower the firs he's talking about. Trimmed, they give Knepper a clear
bead from the Washington Bridge almost to the Verrazano. It's breath-
taking, and in his understated way he wants it right.
Knepper likes straightforward structure, but he's spent his life within
irony. Born in Los Angeles on November 22, 1927, he's marked by his
1957-61 association with Charles Mingus. It wasn't exactly a meeting of
the minds. Knepper runs wry variations on phrases like,
In those days, where could somebody who wanted to play jazz trom-
bone work? The regular bands had trumpet and tenor. To have the op-
portunity to play jazz, I used to think. "I'm gonna be stuck with this
guy for the rest of my life." Even after he's dead I'm stuck with him.
The publicity says, "Jimmy Knepper is probably best-known for his
work with Charlie Mingus," and it's true. I'm thankful that when I'm
eighty years old, if I can still put the horn together, I'll be able to
work. It won't be because of my ability; it's because of that recognition
factor. And that I owe to Mingus.
Dead on: Knepper made his name with his skin-crawling blues on
"Devil Woman," his exuberant lyricism on "The Clown," his pungent
call-to-arms on "Haitian Fight Song," his unmistakable voice on a series
of albums—Mingus Ah Um (Columbia), Blues & Roofs (Atlantic), and
Oh Yeah (Atlantic). But the relationship between Knepper, the devout

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 Mz'ngus's Sancho Panza

bebopper whom Whitney Balliett has called "the first original trombo-
nist in the modern idiom since J. J. Johnson," and Mingus, the Rabelai-
sian who swallowed musical viewpoints, feels like the love-hate mispri-
sion between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. To Knepper, Mingus's
sprawling legacy is disorganized clutter:

Mingus's music used to depress me. In fact, it still does. A lot of his
tunes I didn't really like; a few I did. A lot of them are illly put to-
gether. If Mingus had a snatch of melody and got stuck he'd just put it
away. Years later he'd resurrect it, doodle another few bars, and put
them together. That's why a lot of his tunes aren't compositionally to-
gether.

The instrument that put Knepper's name on the jazz map via Mingus
wasn't his choice either. The six-year-old had an alto handed to him at
Page Military Academy; he quickly switched to baritone for the march-
ing band. Three years later, his mother decided on trombone: "She
wanted something I could play in the marching band and the orches-
tra." Which the non-Catholic youngster did, through his years in Cath-
olic elementary and high schools. Soon he was playing stock charts with
local and touring bands, and joined the union at 15.
He heard swing in theaters and on radio. "But," he says, "I was
always kinda disappointed in the trombones. In Basic's band, Lester
Young and Harry Edison and Buck Clayton seemed to really dig into the
stuff, where—well, it was obvious Dicky Wells could play, but he
seemed to treat it like a joke." Knepper hums a mechanical line. "But
then Bird came along and turned everybody around." Including a tenor
player Knepper met as third trumpeter in the Charlie Cascallas band.
His name was Benedetti.
Dean Benedetti taught Knepper standards and how to build alternate
chords off piano charts; in 1945, they formed a band with tenor, alto,
and trombone. Bird, just out of Camarillo, was at the Hi-De-Ho in 1947
with Howard McGhee, and knocked the duo out even more than his
discs. Benedetti, living in Knepper's mother's house, got a disc-cutting
machine to capture Bird live—the basis for The Complete Dean Be-
nedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker (Mosaic Records). The pair went to
the Benedetti family's house outside Reno to transcribe and study Bird's
solo flights.
Why Bird?

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 Dancing in Your Head

He was very fluent; it was like he was speaking through his horn. He
articulated every note. The saxophone is one of those instruments
where you can play a note, then lift your finger, and another note
comes out. That's responsible for a lot of saxophonists' technique: they
don't articulate hardly at all, just move their fingers like lightning. But
brass instruments, especially the trombone, should, in my view, articu-
late everything. With the trombone, you're playing off a partial har-
monic series, so smears are part of tjie instrument. Knowing that you
don't have to articulate everything is a trap trombone players fall into
unconsciously.
In early 1948, Knepper and Benedetti, touring with different bands,
got stranded in Chicago. There they duped live recordings by other Bird
fanatics. Knepper says that's what's behind stories that Benedetti tailed
Bird:
Practically everything Ross Russell says about Dean in Bird Lives! isn't
true. Dean never followed Bird around the country. He never sold any
pot. He was a street hustler but not for dope. He'd sell watches that
didn't keep time, shavers that didn't shave, stuff like that. The boxes
looked great, though. And Russell has Dean as a pimp in New York in
1943-44 when he was in jail, or in Tommy Reynolds's band, or in
LA.
Mingus came into Knepper's life when Benedetti hired him for a San
Pedro one-nighter. "All I remember is that he scowled at us all night.
Years later, he told me that was the first white band he'd ever played
with, and we were all enthused about Charlie Parker. He'd heard of Bird
but hadn't paid much attention," says Knepper. Aside from a bop date
and an early '50s big-band demo session ("It was Mingus's music, but it
was all screwed up"), that was it until 1957.
In late 1956, Knepper moved to New York and joined Claude Thorn-
hill's band, which toured Army and Air Force bases in Europe and
North Africa over the holidays. Meanwhile, Willie Dennis called. "He
left word he was leaving Mingus's band, and Mingus needed a trombone
player," Knepper drawls. "But before I could call him Mingus called
me."
Bar by bar, Mingus taught them tunes by playing piano or bass or
singing:
I didn't really dig it. It was time-consuming. But Mingus had a preju-
dice against writing things down, because he'd try to be accurate, and

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 Mingus's Sancho Panza

it's almost impossible to read something written down like that with
the intended feeling.
Mingus came on like he was as black as the ace of spades, but from
what he told me when he was growing up in Watts he didn't fit in at
all. Watts was a mixed community, but he wasn't white, he wasn't
black, he wasn't Indian, he wasn't Mexican, he wasn't Oriental. He
was all by himself. That influenced his perspective on life. Also, it was
the Depression when he was a youngster,' but his father worked the
whole time. Mingus was a rich kid. He always had milk. His family
indulged him. He was Charles. I was one of the few people that liked
him. Dannie Richmond wouldn't even deliver a eulogy for him. To
the day he died Mingus gave Dannie a hard time and threatened to
fire him. And they worked together for a quarter of a century.
Mingus boiled over at Knepper just before the infamous 1962 Town
Hall concert, for which he'd hired Knepper as head copyist a few weeks
earlier. (Like most jazzers, Knepper upped his meager income—his
1957 worksheets total some $2000, most of it from Mingus record
dates—by doing everything from pit-band work, when he'could get it, to
playing parades and copying.) "Let me talk about it," Knepper says,
"because a lot of the stories aren't true."
Knepper started copying nightly, and soon caught up to Mingus,
who'd write a few bars (in concert) just to stay ahead: "It was badly
orchestrated. I'd say, 'Mingus, the tenor saxophone cannot play a low G;
it's out of his range.' 'Oh, put it up high.' It was surprising: he grew up
around horns, yet he couldn't write characteristic parts for them."
As the date closed in, Mingus hired arrangers like Gene Roland:
Mingus gave him a score sheet with a melody line and said, "Expand
this into a composition." On Epitaph, Mingus gets credit for that
piece. He also gets credit for "Moods in Mambo," which had about
nine arrangers. I studied that score, and it wasn't Mingus. But for Epi-
taph, all the scores were lumped together and bars numbered as if it
was a complete piece. It has more to do with Gunther Schuller than
Mingus.
When the last charts arrived at midnight of concert eve, Knepper
dropped them at a copying service and figured his job was done. But
Mingus called him over the next afternoon:
He said, "I want you to write some background figures for soloists." I
said, "Mingus, this is your music. You should write it." At that he

223
 Dancing in Your Head

said, "You don't want to help me, you white motherfucker, you white
faggot," and he hit me. It didn't hurt or bleed or anything. But my
front teeth were capped, and he broke off the cap on one. I felt all this
gravel in my mouth, so I figured I'd better fall down so he wouldn't try
to hit me again. Then I got up and walked off while he cursed at me.
Knepper delivered his copying to the rehearsal, then pressed charges.
Mingus was convicted of criminal assault and put on probation; Knep-
per filed a civil suit that never came to court. Then Mingus apparently
tried to set Knepper up by mailing him a few dollars' worth of heroin and
tipping the feds the night before it arrived special delivery. He also made
threatening calls to Knepper's family.
And the dental fallout?
I lost about an octave, maybe, of range. More importantly, I'd reached
a plateau where all I had to do was think of what I wanted to play and
it came out. After Town Hall, I had to push everything out. When I
play fast, things get kinda garbled. I had to get this special stainless
steel apparatus for that one tooth that—hook-hook-hook-hook—needed
four teeth to support it. I played like that for years. Now I've had them
all pulled, and I've been getting used to my new teeth—for four years.
In 1960, Knepper worked with Gil Evans during a six-week gig at the
Village Gate rehearsing what became Out of the Cool (Impulse MCA).
Here Knepper copied and transposed Evans's sketches. He also inadver-
tently got the lead for "Where Flamingos Fly," which helped nail his
rep. Evans intended it as a Keg Johnson solo, but Johnson didn't deliver
so he had Knepper overdub it. Melancholy but spiky, it showcases the
smearless legato, the rounded tone, the precise, unpretentious lyricism.
Like most jazz journeymen, Knepper cut a mere handful of his own
albums. The tunes are usually standards, either straight or reworked.
His 1957 debut as a leader, a four-song EP on Mingus's Debut label,
went unreleased (except in Denmark) until the recent Charles Mingus:
The Complete Debut Recordings. "Cunningbird," which he later re-
recorded, boasts a stunning, tautly voiced opening based on Benedetti's
intro to "You Go to My Head." "I've changed it considerably," he
explains,
to make it more exotic. I put it in 5/4, for instance. The tune came
out 9/8, like a blues in waltz time. That's why the little rhythm play—

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 Rahsaan to the Moon

to set it up. Mingus screwed up that bass part every take we did. And
there was nothing hard about it. Finally I gave up, blew my parts, and
came in the next day and overdubbed Mingus's part.
None of his discs is revolutionary, but all offer gems. Take the up-
tempo title track on Idol of the Flies (Bethlehem BCP-6031). After a
deftly harmonized, boppish head, Knepper's expansively melodic solo
weaves registers with seamless speed. Or the moody ballad "Languid" on
Cunningbird (SteepleChase SCS-1061), where, damaged mouth and
all, he nears his description of Bird's vocalic playing. Or the delightfully
limber reading of "My Old Flame" on Jimmy Knepper in L.A. (Inner
City 1C 6047). (All are out-of-print.)
We're discussing Knepper's recordings in his music room. It's dark
now, but he doesn't turn on the lights, just keeps talking. Hearing
himself on a Tony Scott record taught him how he approaches solos: "I
start with some motif, then imitate that motif, then imitate the imitation
to lead into something else. That comes from listening to classical
composers, where the repeats hold it together." Of producer Ed Mich-
el's line—"Jimmy Knepper never said the same thing the same way
twice"—he grins, "It's 'cause I can't remember." That deadpan irony
shapes his best playing. So it's no surprise when he says, "I love the
trombone because it's a utility instrument that can blend in with
anything—including the buzzsaw." [1991]

chapter 46
Rahsaan to the Moon
If Rahsaan Roland Kirk hadn't existed, somebody—maybe Charles
Mingus—would've had to invent him. As it is, he invented himself. Not
coincidentally, he invented a couple of instruments—the mandello,
which he adapted from the B-flat soprano sax, and the stritch, from the
E-flat alto; resurrected the Dixieland notion of ensemble improvising;
brought circular breathing into jazz; took the vaudeville stunt of playing

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 Dancing in Your Head

multiple horns and made it into a musical statement; and ignored labels
like Dixieland and bebop and free by playing right across them. A
trickster who often cloaked his mind-bending insights within jokes,
which brought him some derisory reactions from solemner types, Kirk
drew more out of music history—and I don't mean just jazz history—
than most other folks hear, let alone use.
The Complete Mercury Recordings of Roland Kirk (Mercury/Poly-
gram) is a ten-CD compilation (plus a bonus CD of "A Stritch in
Time," recorded live by Kirk's quartet at the 1962 Newport Jazz Festi-
val). It's been lovingly assembled and digitally remastered to a fine
clarity by producer Kiyoshi "Boxman" Koyama. (Why is it, several years
post-CD, that so much well-thought-out stuff still comes out of Japan
and not here? And extra kudos to PolyGram for casing the set once again
in a CD-sized box; I'm tired of having to shelve CD compilations in with
my LPs.) The set collects the master multi-instrumentalist's sides for
Mercury, Limelight, and Smash during the 1961-65 period.
As Dan Morgenstern explains in his excellent notes, this was "Roland
in his straight-ahead prime." But in Kirk's case, straight ahead meant a
room without walls. His conceptual leaps reach back to Tchaikovsky
and Sidney Bechet and Hindemith while zigzagging through the likes of
Lester Young, Don Byas, Kurt Weill, Bunny Berigan, Villa Lobos,
Charlie Parker, John Lewis, Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, and Barbra
Streisand. (The cover of "People" on disc 8 is fascinating and hilarious
by turns, finishing up with a characteristically ironic quote from The
Wizard ofOz's "If I Only Had a Heart")
The settings are as varied as the material. Various quartet and combo
dates weave in and out of sessions with the Quincy Jones Orchestra; the
personnel listing is peppered with names like Art Davis, Hank Jones,
Wynton Kelly, Roy Haynes, Tubby Hayes, Walter Bishop, Jr., Louis
Hayes, Andrew Hill, Clark Terry, Phil Woods, Jim Hall, Virgil Jones,
Richard Davis, James Moody, Harold Mabern, Gary Burton, Major
Holley, Benny Golson, Dizzy Gillespie, Jaki Byard, Elvin Jones—you
get the idea. If you didn't have a clue about Kirk's deft musical adroit-
ness, just a quick flip through that lineup should tell you.
But broad-ranging as he was in stylistic terms, Rahsaan was no
session-sprinting chameleon. Everything he played came out him—odd
and gyring turns of phrase, sudden explosions of his one-man horn
section, flute-and-vocal conversations, reed squeaks, overblowings,
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 Rahsaan to the Moon

growls and vocal outbursts a la Mingus and horn squalls and all. For to
come out "him" meant entertaining as well as provoking. Brilliant and
out there as he often was, he wanted to convince his audiences to come
along for the ride without compromising either his vision or their need
to enjoy what they heard. So cuckoo clocks and windup music boxes—
shades of the AACM—made regular cameo appearances on his discs.
More often than not, they helped him get to his listeners, then take
them somewhere they didn't expect. The serious folks who groused
about his alleged buffoonery never got it.
Maybe that was because, no matter how deep his love and knowledge
of the past—and he had few rivals in either—he didn't want simply to
resuscitate it. No Roland Kirk performance is reducible to a history
seminar. In his playing, his compositions, and his arrangements, he
bent what he gleaned from it to his time and his needs, updated it,
tinkered with it, made it his own while proudly pointing to its genesis.
He didn't see history through Reaganesque rose-colored glasses; he
heard it, flaws and triumphs alike, through the voracious ears of a
musician alive to every possibility he could plug into. The Complete
Mercury Recordings is an incredible panorama of some ways he did that,
and worth its price for that alone, since Kirk remains one of the most
undervalued and pivotal figures in a field with more than its fair share of
the underappreciated.
Although the terrific Atlantic reissues like The Inflated Tear capture
Kirk at his conceptual peak, anyone who wants to fill in Kirk's extremely
broad musical picture around the edges has plenty of options to con-
sider. Check out Kirk's Work (Prestige). Pitting the slippery multi-
instrumentalist (often as a one-man horn section) against an organ trio
powered by Jack McDuff, this disc isn't the best place to meet Kirk for
the first time, but it does offer an unusual perspective on him. Then
there's Rahsaan Roland Kirk & His Vibration Society Paris—1976
(Jeal). This showcases post-paralysis, one-handed Kirk, and it marks his
triumph of spirit. Matching wits with Steve Turre and Hilton Ruiz, he
plays and sings with such humor and charm on this mostly bop-oriented
date that his handicap diminishes. Thirteen months later, he was
dead. [1991]

227
 chapter 47
Space Is the Place
You've never seen a show quite like it, except maybe for the Neville
Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Sunny Ade, James Brown.
It's certainly not like any other jazz performance. The musicians snake
onto the stage in a long line, stepping in time, chanting a tune like
"Space Is the Place" to handheld percussion, wearing spangled headgear
and flowing, colorful robes that suggest an extremely foreign origin.
Settling in with their instruments, the dozen or more players segue with
an easygoing sense from old big-band tunes to ultra-free jazz, sometimes
jump-cutting to keep the audience on its toes. A few numbers later, the
leader himself ambles out, takes his place behind a bank of acoustic and
electronic keyboards, and starts calling tunes from the immense reper-
tory his group has built up during the 30-odd years the core musicians
have been working together. Ellington and standards careen into spacey
blowouts with no beats dropped by onstage or offstage crowds. They
know that with Sun Ra, Ruler of the Omniverse and leader of the
Omniverse Arkestra, you can only expect the unexpected. Nothing
seems alien to him.
And yet, according to him, everything here is alien to him. "I've
never been born, I arrived," is how he opens the conversation we're
having in a two-room suite in Time Square's Edison Hotel. He's sitting
on the sofa sporting a straw fedora atop his red hair, a blue chasuble-style
robe, and boxer shorts, while we watch the five-minute segment a local
news show has pieced together from footage shot the night before at New
York's Sweet Basil.
There are some very powerful forces, an unknown force more powerful
than God, Satan, Lucifer, the Devil. It's not written in any books, and
it's never been spoken on this planet. That's what's kept me all of these
years; I've been knowing ever since I've been a child about these
forces. It's the reason I've got a band, 'cause they keep sending me
people so I can keep on moving like I've got to. The Creator is using
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 Space Is the Place

me, 'cause people are ready for something better. I do what The Cre-
ator tells me; I'm not a man-—I'm really an angel. I'm not a minister,
a preacher, or a politician. There is no classification for what I am
here to do. Sun Ra is the only name that can help the planet Earth,
now that words have gone bad from the Tower of Babel. I don't want
anyone to worship me or my people, I just want to get this planet back
on its feet.
Musical crackpot, self-deluded weirdo, hypocritical self-promoter—
just a few accusations that have dogged Sun Ra and his freewheeling yet
highly disciplined sounds ("I prefer to call myself a tone scientist rather
than a musician") for the generation he's been making them. Along the
way, he's also explored directions that, if they seemed off the map at the
time, are now firmly and indelibly etched into the jazz world. Elec-
tronic keyboards, for instance, which he took up in the late '50s ("I
bought one of the first electric pianos Wurlitzer made," he claims) to
nearly universal ridicule, using them to create the offbeat, spacey tex-
tures his vision required. Free blowing, which took him and the Arkestra
so far outside the pale when they began trying it in the early '60s that
they stayed confined to a handful of venues like New York's Slug's.
Using light shows and dancers and mimes and outrageous costumes as
part of the celebratory swirl and vaudeville ritual that constituted, then
and now, the extravaganza of a Sun Ra Arkestra performance. Reviving
big-band standards and section work while good-naturedly skewering
and updating the stylistic and harmonic assumptions inherited from the
Swing Era and bop alike. However you trace through the past three
decades, you're bound to see Sun Ra's footprints.
As he does in his impossible-to-classify music, so too in his conversa-
tions Sun Ra circles around a widening gyre of motives and topics,
returning time and again to touchstones. "You don't have to turn the
tape machine on or take notes right now. I'll get back to it, I always get
back to it," he smiles at one point, then reiterates, "There isn't a birth
certificate, 'cause I wasn't born." But the story goes that he first appeared
as Herman Blount 70 or so years ago, in Birmingham, Alabama. "The
first instrument I played was a kazoo," he says offhandedly, "and I came
home one day and found a piano and just knew how to play it. I've
always been that way: all I have to do is feel it in my heart, and I can play
it. No one has ever had that talent on earth before, because the spirit
couldn't find nobody who was willing to give up everything, including

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 Dancing in Your Head

their life, including their death—everything." Trained in high-school

bands and at Alabama A&M, he continued his musical career by work-
ing as a sideman with the likes of blues belter Wynonie Harris and fiddle
master Stuff Smith as well as in society bands. "Bands I was in played
everything from Dixieland on up," he shrugs.
Moving to Chicago in the late '30s, he did the music for the floor
shows at the Club DeLisa, that way hooking up with trailblazing big-
band arranger Fletcher Henderson (his charts put the Benny Goodman
Orchestra over), whose band also performed there. For about a year in
the late '40s, in fact, Sun Ra was Henderson's pianist. "There aren't that
many people left who know how Fletcher and Jimmie Lunceford and
those leaders worked out what they did, how they led their bands. Not
everybody can play their music. I can and I do, because I was there, so I
can write what the old people were playing off the records."
When his tour with Henderson was up, Sun Ra began to lead his own
orchestra. "I first was introduced to Sun Ra by a drummer name of
Robert Barry after I had gotten out of the Air Force," recalls longtime
tenor mainstay John Gilmore.

He was playing down at Shep's Playhouse on 43rd St. in Chicago. Sun

Ra and Pat [Patrick] had been working regularly, and he had used an-
other substitute tenor player for Pat, and Barry said I might get the gig
if I came out. I brought my horn, he say come back the next night,
and that was it (laughs). So we built the band from three pieces on up:
added Richard Evans the bass player, Dave Young on trumpet, Jim
Herndon on tympani, and Bob Barry was on drums. We had about
eight pieces: Johnny Thompson was on tenor for a while, Von Free-
man played alto for a while, Lee O'Neill—his son is playing drums
with us now.

Even then the seeds for the Arkestra were sown: the group often wore
exotic costumes and played an array of African and Eastern percussion
instruments. By the early '50s they were known (among myriad names)
as the Solar or Myth/Science Arkestra, and on their gigs at Chicago
venues like the Pershing Hotel wore beanies and white gloves and
blazers. Gilmore continues,
So we built it up to about eight pieces and started working in a place
called Budland, the equivalent to Birdland in New York. Stayed there
a long time, about a year. Ahmad Jamal was working upstairs, used to

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 Space Is the Place

come downstairs and steal Sun Ra's stuff. Every Monday for about an
hour he'd be in the phone booth listening, right, Sunny? A whole lot
of people came that year, everybody who'd come to town would stop
in. Ray Charles came in one time, says, "I can't see these dudes but
whoever they are they sure are smoking." (laughs) Sonny Rollins came
through, all of the cats who lived in Chicago. It was a moving city at
that time, people always in and out, a lot of things going on. We
backed up all kind of people, like Dakota Staton and Sarah Vaughan,
Johnny "Guitar" Watson, all kind of people.

By the late '50s the core octet had moved from being a backup band to
intensive rehearsals and its own gigs.
The music they made during this period has been compared to hard-
bop style of contemporaries like Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, but
its idiosyncratic twists and turns seem more in line with what Charles
Mingus was doing then: shredding big-band and bop tactics and reweav-
ing them into something distinct by dint of his acute, probing sensi-
bility. Like Mingus (who also accumulated long-term allegiances from
key players), Sun Ra rerouted the path of the large-ensemble tradition in
jazz, and thus became a precursor of younger musicians leading big
groups today, like Henry Threadgill, David Murray, Craig Harris, and
Olu Dara. (Harris, in fact, toured with Sun Ra for about three years,
mostly in Europe, and recorded with him on Strange Celestial Road,
Rounder CD 3035.) Among the cues Sun Ra's work offers this growing
movement is how to harness the explosive language of free jazz to a
larger group's more organized, rhythmically centered charts—since he
is one of free jazz's inventors and has led a big band for over 30 years,
there are few better places to begin that course of study.
Sun Song (originally Transition J-10, reissued as Delmark DS-411)
and Sound of Joy (Delmark DS-414) were cut in the mid- to late-1950s,
when, as the liner notes point out, Trane was an unheralded sideman
and Ornette Coleman was still unrecorded. Listening to them now, after
two generations of jazz experimenters have passed through the scene, is
still a revealing and charged experience. Recognizable in outline as bop-
influenced, the music stretches and warps that genre.
One key element Ra changed was the rhythms: layering interlocking
polyrhythrns via his multitudes of percussionists, shifting tempos within
tunes, he reached beyond the abilities of even a sophisticated trapsman
like Blakey to suggest the African underpinnings for his music. His
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 Dancing in Your Head

harmonic structures more and more avoided the repeating chord cycles
jazzmen borrowed from popular tunes and substituted modally based,
recurrent, open-ended melodies. (That approach would later lead Miles
Davis and his then sidemen John Coltrane and Bill Evans to produce
classic LPs like 1959's Kind of Blue, which helped shift jazz's focus.
Trane's self-confessed admiration for and derivations from Gilmore's
tenor work are well documented.) Rather than using the piano as a
polyphonic horn, the attack that dominated jazz keyboards from the
days of Eubie Blake on, Sun Ra would move from boogie and stride
stylings to percussive poundings ("Transition"), generating dense tone
clusters and sonic bursts a la Thelonious Monk or Henry Cowell or
Harry Partch.
By 1959, Sun Ra's compositions had become naked displays of ham-
mering percussion and wildly varied instrumentation that unsheathed a
new, rawer edge. At roughly the same time that Ornette Colefnan and
John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor were blasting free of
bop's conventions, Sun Ra was leading his Arkestra into the strato-
sphere, helping launch free jazz. (The Arkestra of this period was cap-
tured on film, The Cry of Jazz, in the same year that saw the release of
Kind of Blue.) They also abandoned Chicago for a small town outside
Montreal, where a gig turned into an extended stay. A tour in Spain
followed, and they landed back in New York in 1960.
Gilmore and Allen and especially Pat Patrick (who'd preceded the
rest of the band to the Apple on his own, working there while they were
in Canada and Spain) lined up a host of outside gigs, doing everything
from jingles to pop sessions, to help support the communally housed
Arkestra. According to Sun Ra, one key session found him, Gilmore,
and Allen together: "We was all there to do the theme for the Batman
TV show, but nobody ever give us no credit. And I did a record with
Chief Ebenezer Obey then that the company never put out, and one
with James Moody.",But if they managed to hustle work, credited or
released or not, the city was, as always, an extremely expensive place to
live, especially for a large commune, and there were other inevitable
problems. "Our neighbors started complaining about us practicing,"
explains Sun Ra, "and we couldn't find anyplace where they didn't
complain." In 1971 they did, in the Germantown section of Phila-
delphia, where the Arkestra is still housed today. As Sun Ra puts it,

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"Our neighbors there like us to rehearse, they enjoy it, they say it helps
them sleep," Maybe it's better to just imagine their dreams.
Like the eternal present of a dreamscape, the music of the Arkestra
has never "evolved" in the sense that their current sounds abandon their
past; in what they do, all periods and styles coalesce simultaneously. "I
can play everything," says Sun Ra. "I'm a Gemini; I get bored with one
thing, but I have to play everything, 'cause otherwise I get bored.
Whatever I'm doing, the part of me that's a Gemini be saying, Enough
of that. I have to follow that. That's one reason I have the big band: I
want to hear the alto, then I want to hear the tenor, then I want to hear
the trumpet, then I want to hear the rhythm, then I want to hear me—
keep moving, that's my nature. As long as I'm doing that, everything is
harmonically balanced with me."
The early '60s found the Arkestra veering into unexplored territory. A
cut like "Beginning" on 1961's aptly titled We Are in the Future (origi-
nally Savoy 12169, reissued as Savoy Jazz SJL 1141) points the way: dense
percussion overlays support the mournful, vaguely Eastern modalities
Gilmore pulls from his bass clarinet in conversation with Allen's chirp-
ing, quavering flute. At the same time, "Tapestry from an Asteroid"
swoons like an Ellington ballad whose lushness has gone slightly awry,
and "Jet Flight" romps like uptempo bop, reminding us that nothing
disappears in Sun Ra's cavernous musical cosmos.
The big band is Sun Ra's self-described ideal vehicle; he has no use
for small combos, explaining,

I always played in big bands, I know how to take a band and create for
it. The bigger the band, the better. Every time my band rehearses they
learn something. I'll write something they can't read, and they have to
study for about six months, something very simple, maybe a fingering
that they got to work out a solution. On a lot of my tunes, like "Jet
Flight," they don't have to miss but one note and they'll never get
back in. I always have my own style, play it differently every night.
The band has to be accustomed to some strange chords. They have to
play the same things that are written on somebody, but then I might
think of something else to add, so I'll play it real quick and then I
want somebody in the band to catch that. That's how it becomes
deeper, more profound, and more in keeping with the exact psychic
pitches of people. [One Sun Ra LP is called Cosmic Tones for Mental

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 Dancing in Your Head

Therapy, Saturn 408, reissued as Impulse 9291.] It works, it works all

the time. I'm reaching a part of people, I don't know whether it's the
soul or what you call it, it's the part of them that science don't know
about. I do know about it. That's when the soul starts to wake.
In his entire approach Sun Ra demonstrates what he means when he
says, "I know the whole history of jazz, the whole history of music. My
[music] equations tell me all that." As with his music for the Arkestra, his
solo keyboard work encapsulates a panorama of styles and periods. Gil-
more puts it this way: "It's such a joy to hear Sun Ra play, it's like history
on the bandstand: bits of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, James P.
Johnson. I mean, where could you go that you could hear all that in one
night—on the gig [laughs]. He's covering some territory." Then there are
the echoes of Ellington himself, and Monk as well. Nor is jazz the only
musical link to Sun Ra's peculiar keyboard stuff, as John Cage Meets Sun
Ra (Meltdown Records MPA-1) indicates, connecting Sun Ra with the
Ives/Cage axis that runs through American "classical" music.
And so Sun Ra and the Arkestra ("Next Stop Jupiter") continue to
endure, if not exactly prosper, despite real and imagined persecutions.
"I've been bypassed for a lot of things. That's why they sent the Art
Ensemble to Europe before they sent me. They've invited Ornette Cole-
man to write symphonies and things but not me, because I talk about
space and things so they think I'm a kook. That's what they think. I think
so too for even bothering to explain it. We do not disagree." [1987]

\ chapter, 48
Surfing on the Keys
For the uninitiated, a Cecil Taylor performance can be like sitting in the
middle of a breaking tidal wave on a leaky rubber raft. He stalks the stage
moaning surrealist incantations, his braided and beaded hair tossing. At
the piano he becomes a barely seated dervish, body reeling and swaying,
arms flailing, legs pumping, hands contorting and stretching impossibly

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 Surfing on the Keys

as they stroke and pummel the keys. Imploded whimperings rise, sob,
sink back into the instrument, explode into note clusters slamdunked by
an elbow or a forearm or a fist. No clear melodies, no certain rhythms,
no song structure.
At age 57, Taylor is a legend among jazzers because of his relentless
pioneering, his driven dedication. Back in the '50s, still under the sway
of keyboard greats like Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Horace Sil-
ver, and Lennie Tristano, the young Taylor was already developing the
idiosyncratic language that makes his piano like nothing else. Learning
from Monk's breakthrough use of the piano's pedals to bend notes from
between the keys, adapting Tristano's drily stripped-back rhythms to his
own introspective emotional emphasis, Taylor mixed jazz-derived id-
ioms with the insights of 20th-century classical radicals like Stravinsky,
Bartok, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and John Cage.
He's been classically trained from his Long Island boyhood. His
mother, who played keyboards herself, started her five-year-old son
studying piano, then timpani, with one of Toscanini's musicians. After
attending at the New York College of Music, he entered the New
England Conservatory in 1952 and exited after three years: he felt the
curriculum was racist because it ignored African-American sounds.
That refusal to compromise continued to mark his character and his
music.
By the early '60s, Taylor's voice was nearly fully developed, and
helped point the way for the emerging avant-garde—John Coltrane,
Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman. With Taylor's music as one of their
fierce beacons, they would not only detonate the song-structure cycle-
of-chords jazz had borrowed from popular music, but in the process
launch into free jazz, where they reinvestigated and dramatically re-
aligned the relationship between composition and improvisation, the
dialectic motor that powers jazz.
By 1962, Taylor was widely recognized among his fellow musi-
cians—besides his own recordings, he'd been showcased by Gil Evans
on the landmark Into the Hot (Impulse). He'd formed his first Unit, as
he usually calls his groups, with alto saxist Jimmy Lyons and drummer
Sunny Murray, who were almost telepathically keyed in to Taylor's
increasingly dense, emotionally structured sound as it hurtled through
charged energy fields that implied, rather than stated, beats. He'd toured
Europe, and the Unit had linked up there with Ayler. He'd won the
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 Dancing in Your Head

prestigious down beat "New Star" award. And he alternated between

washing dishes and welfare because he couldn't make it on his music.
His father had subsidized him; when he died in 1961, Taylor's financial
safety net disappeared. Stubborn and prickly and determined to make
music on his own terms, he struggled through the decade on a handful
of concert dates and low-paying club gigs combined with dishwashing
rather than thin out his bristling conceptions.
From this period on, Taylor's manic excursions more and more
resembled in intent and effect, though not in approach, the trance
music of northern Africa and the Middle East. Melody, harmony, and
rhythm collapsed into an eddying kaleidoscopic whirl that spewed their
wreckage back out in choppy waves. The now-you-hear-them-now-you-
don't fragments were what Taylor dubbed unit structures, which essen-
tially replaced the linear development of musical ideas with a kind of
multilayered call-and-response. What results can feel like a Cubist col-
lage in motion, especially on classic albums like 3 Phasis (New World).
For emotional motion coupled with swashbuckling technique drives
Taylor's gnarled and often frustrating music. His first release on a U.S.
major label in over a decade, In Florescence (A&M), underlines the
concentrated fury of his inward gaze; it also demonstrates why Taylor's
listeners, after about 20 minutes, either bend and relax into his nonstop
assault or move their gritted teeth somewhere else before they break. No
matter who he's playing with or what he's up to, Taylor is a supremely
Romantic artist: rather than engaging musicians and audiences in dia-
logue, he relentlessly expands his interior monologue to try to engulf
them. Now supported by foundations and academia, he's played at the
Carter White House and tours prosperously. Ironically, he's followed
his radical visions to success and fame—one of the few jazz prophets to
be honored in his own country in his own lifetime. [1990]

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 chapter 49
Music fey Association
Outside, the bricks are peeling old paint and the shutters are missing,
warped, or precarious, but inside Cecil Taylor's townhouse is being
massively renovated. "I have the work done in stages, when I have the
money," he says, by way of explaining the stacks of aluminum studs and
two-by-fours, the occasional dangling loops of BX cable and the hole in
the floor where a toilet will someday be. He's launched into a tour of the
house, a thumbnail history of it and the neighborhood ("Five people
were murdered here"), and a quick rundown of the personalities of his
pets—the Akita who for three weeks shat spitefully on the parlor-level's
parquet floors because Taylor was out of town, the white-pawed black
cat who obsessively leaps onto the nearest available lap for stroking.
What I figure is that Taylor, more cautious than his cat, is checking me
out.
After half an hour or so, we gradually settle into what was meant to be
the dining room. Aside from a plain wooden bench and a cracked
captain's chair and an empty magnum of Freixenet champagne (where
Taylor inserts his burning incense sticks) that remains placed at a strate-
gic point on the floor, it's decorated with a handful of posters from the
pianist's past, great semi-orderly piles and rows of books (Dance of Siva,
Broken Spears: Aztec Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, a biography of
Oskar Kokoschka, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Kaffir Boy in America,
West Africa Under Colonial Rule, The History of the Persian Empire)
around the fireplace, and a semicircular table cut out like a quarter-
moon, with a lone chair in its arc's center. Eventually, after fidgeting in
and out of the kitchen ("Do you want some juice? an orange? I wish I
had some beer"), Taylor eases into that chair and says, "So what do you
want to know?" Even as he says it, his head and body begin the kind of
punctuating movements familiar to anyone who's ever seen his version
of sitting at the piano: he throws his head back, drastically shifts his body
weight, squirms and laughs and bites off phrases and periodically, as if

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 Dancing in Your Head

he's starting to feel trapped, cavorts out from behind his protective table
to dance and spin.
Every interviewee with a genuine personality reveals it, each in his or
her own way. Taylor doesn't actually refuse to adhere to the standard
interview format—I ask you a specific question, you answer it. At one
point, for instance, he glances at the yellow legal pad at my feet covered
with scrawled questions and asks, wide-eyed but sly, "What is all that
writing? My, my, my." But by the way he handles the few questions he
allows to penetrate the swirling associative torrent virtually any query
sets off, he simply makes interviewing irrelevant, a category and practice
inapplicable to himself.
Which is also essentially what he's done in musical terms over the
last 30-odd years. Using his "unit structure" building blocks to create
varilength pieces that detonated the song-form limits that had both
housed and imprisoned jazz from its beginnings, replacing the underly-
ing drive of a basic, recognizable pulse with an extremely elastic rhyth-
mic sense he calls "the wave," uniting in his idiosyncratic pianistic voice
the breakthroughs of Monk, Bartok, Milt Jackson, Horace Silver, Harry
Partch, and Henry Cowell, Taylor is an obsessive individualist, an
American Romantic whose inward-gazing, relentlessly kinetic music
either forces listeners to relax into its egocentric demands or drives them
off. Though he no longer has to wash dishes to make ends meet—as he
was doing in 1962, when he won down beat's "New Star" award—he's
no less compromising about his musical visions today, when he's got
actual commissions, a massive 11-CD set of his work, In Berlin (FMP),
and his first domestic release in a decade, In Florescence (A&M). "This
is the first time," he says, between talking of spending six months tour-
ing Europe and the pieces he's been asked to write by his alma mater,
the New England Conservatory, for a student orchestra he plans to
perform with in the late fall, "that I know what I'm going to be doing
more than a week from now."
When Taylor speaks, his voice slides fluently through emphases. He
stretches syllables like a scat singer, drops his pitch an octave and his
volume to a whisper, slips into a cadence that mimicks blank verse and
rounds it off with gradual acceleration and rising dynamics, marks off his
associative insights and false leads with a rhythmic pause or a barking
laugh that seems to suggest his own surprise and delight. In that way, his
rhythmic and tonal speech, and especially his thick, looping, nonlinear
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 Music by Association

associative clusters, which make assertions that he seems to forget about

until whole paragraphs have passed, strikingly recall his gnarled, inner-
seeking musical visions. But since language, like music, has an essence
that resolutely escapes notation, you'll have to imagine the slides and
dips and slurs and accents. For the rest, a suspension of disbelief and
patience are enough.

I was washing dishes in a restaurant at the same time that I was being
written about in places like down beat, and it was very good for me,
because I had to decide what I really wanted to do. Did I want to pur-
sue my ideals badly enough? It was the only way to learn that I did. So
I washed dishes while the guy who owned the restaurant played my
records, along with Miles's records and Coltrane's records. I quit after
a few weeks, though. Then I went out to a place called the Take 3,
and I got the job performing. And it's been going and stopping like
that ever since for me. We—me, Jimmy Lyons, Sunny Murray—
worked there for thirteen weeks; it was the longest gig I ever had in
America. Sometimes the magnificent Henry Grimes would come in: I
remember one night he did, and we played for three hours but I
thought we'd played for about ten minutes. Coltrane heard us there,
and arranged for us to make our first Scandinavian tour.
But the Take 3 gig was a very important one, because I really had
to understand that music, my music, was what I wanted to do. So I
said to myself, you have to try to understand that pursuing music is a
choice that you make, and that any anger that you feel as a result of
that choice is [sings] "what makes the world go round"—that's a line
from a song that Sinatra sang in the late '40s. So you then begin the
process of really getting down to it: the distance between whatever ex-
cellence it is you're striving for in whatever it is you're trying to convey
and the person you would like to be. That's gradually coming together.
After all, ha-ha-ha, it's a life's work. But it means a minimum of con-
fusion about life.
I've been quoted—and they're all lies, all lies—as saying that I
think of my playing as being related to the kind of leaps a dancer
makes in space. You know, my mother used to take me to see tap
dancers when I was little. So I saw Bill Robinson, and the Step
Brothers, and the Nicholas Brothers, and Baby Hodges—I saw them
all. In '62, when I was working at the Take 3, I didn't have any money
but the Bolshoi came to town, so I went to see them at the Met, Swan
Lake. Now I had to work that Sunday night, but I said, "The lessons
I've gotten about what music can do"—because the prima ballerina

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had danced the dying swan three times, and three times we'd all wept.
Even in the pictures you can see that the way the Russians interpret
Tchaikovsky is rhythmical, where we experience it as songs. The melo-
dies are, after all, beautiful, but they're very rhythmical.
I spend a lot of time in discos. I love to dance. Lately, since I've
been doing so much work, I haven't been listening to music very
much, unfortunately. But I love James Brown, I love Aretha Franklin,
I love Marvin Gaye—I thought he was extraordinary. I like music that
makes me dance. Something is happening to me now—I'm not going
to say what. But you ask these questions that can be taken in at least
three different ways: you're not being duplicitous, you're being trip-
licitous, ha-ha-ha. As Billie Holiday said, "Don't explain." It's quite
wonderful, actually.
Last summer, I was invited to a festival for flamenco in Spain, hon-
oring Carmen Amaya, a flamenco dancer who was one of the most
prodigious musical lights that I ever saw, like Billie Holiday. I saw her
for the first time in 1965, then again later at the Village Gate. The
magic that I felt was much akin to what I felt when I first saw Billie
Holiday when I was 12. I could not breathe, I could not think, all I
could experience was what was coming from her.
So I was invited to this festival in Begijar as a guest. They had
erected this huge tent on the edge of this mountain, and in the eve-
ning there was a wind called the tramontane that blew from the Medi-
terranean, which was just over this mountain. Now, I had just come
from spending two weeks on the island of Crete; the last night, my
friend and I were taken way up into the mountains there for a wed-
ding. Well . . . ha-ha-ha. That was something, but we don't want to
talk about it.
So the next night, there I am in Begijar, and one of the things I see
is a film of Carmen Amaya—outside, on a huge screen. I am intro-
duced to all these different people, of different cultures. What hap-
pened was, there were some musicians from China, an extraordinary
group from Pakistan, flamenco dancers, obviously. It was also like a
living historical tableau. Sabicas was there, representing the older
form; one flamenco group, of about six people, represented the sort of
mid-century point of view; but there was a young woman of about 23
named Martine who, when she sang, Sabicas himself cried. And the
intensity of her partner's dancing took me back to Amaya. One of the
magical things about dancers is how they project: if they're 5'8", they
can look like they're 6'4". This young woman looked like she was well
over six feet.

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So what I've been receiving is the wealth of different cultures. Ex-

periences show you that not only are you an American artist, but if
you are allowed to go to other countries and other cultures, you have
something to bring and share and exchange. Once you do this, you be-
gin to understand there is a commonality of human experience that
transcends—of course, obviously, right—but also that if you make the
commitment to the elevation of the song, then you begin to see all
kinds of linkages to people everywhere.
Wherever I go, what I find is that when I perform now it always
hearkens back to something that took me years to understand, some-
thing my father said to me when I was in those really very traumatic
years, though all years, ha-ha-ha, are traumatic. I mean, it took me
about nine years, maybe ten, to find Jimmy Lyons, or for us to find
each other. For the first six years or so after that, we would average
maybe three or four gigs a year. So for most of that time Cecil was be-
ing irritable, angry. My father was a sheriff when I was growing up
way out in Corona, out by the World's Fair, and he supported me
even then, but I would say to him, "You don't understand, you're just
an Uncle Tom"—even though he put me through the Conservatory
and blah-blah-blah.
But finally about four or five years ago, I was playing a concert at
Carnegie Recital Hall. It was an interesting period: I was supposed to
give a series of fourteen concerts in Europe, but I had to cancel them
because Europe turned out to be not nice, there were chiselers behind
them. I said to myself, "Here you are at your advanced age and not a
pot to piss in. What are you gonna do?" So I got on the phone, and
things started to move. The concert at Carnegie Recital Hall was part
of a series of concerts in which you had, within the American hier-
archy of different kinds of music, different cultural expressions of
America. David Amram was the organizer.
So I'm grumpy. What happens is, maybe for the first time in my
life I saw that it really didn't matter, because you, Cecil, were ready to
do it, because you always had to overcome the shit. And then, that be-
ing done, it was wonderful to see that the hall was packed. So I fin-
ished the concert, having said to everyone through the music, "You're
gonna sit there and listen, I'm gonna fix you all for ever and ever and
ever and ever"—and it came that they wanted more. And I came out,
and I played, and 1 understood what it was my father used to say to
me: "I am to serve." That's what he'd told me all those years, and to
finally understand it was so wonderful, because you'd pleasured so
many people that there are no words.

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But we've gone a long way away from Begijar. I decided, of course,
that yes, I would play—they had this beautiful grand piano there.
Well, Carmen Amaya was a gypsy, as you know, so I'm being asked to
play first on the first night. So here I come out, and I'm gonna chant
and wooooo—and the gypsies are all, "Oh no, wait a minute, what the
fuck is this," and the babies started screaming ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, you
know. Well, of course. But here I go. And you know, you do it for fif-
teen minutes, and it becomes quiet. And then I noticed that on the
days when I would be practicing, different members from different
groups would come and just stand there and listen. One day, a young
woman from Martinique came. We all lived in this one building; you
could watch the Mediterranean from the rooftop, it was on three sides
of that roof.
What do I do when I go to dance? They had a party; all the dancers
were there. Ha-ha-ha. A wonderful thing. So I waited, and waited,
you know. Each room had different kinds of music. And then, when I
got ready, I danced. And the dancers understood—which to me was
the solidification of the common-ness of our purpose, and it broke
through.
On that level—when I was in Boston [in early March], I wrote a
piece—the first time I've been asked, ha-ha-ha, to go back to the New
England Conservatory, in this capacity—that brought out that
common-ness once again, only this time it was in America. We
worked for two weeks for these two concerts. There was a Chinese, a
Japanese-American, four women singers, one of whom was from
Poland. Other people from other places.
Now, I have certain ideas about what to do, as musical theater and
composition and how I set it up. So in the middle of this, I pick up
the paper, and one of the people that I love, I found out, was playing
at the Regatta Bar. So I take three of my musicians and we go there,
and there's Milt Jackson. And he plays a piece that J. J. Johnson
wrote, "First Love." It was such an extraordinary solo. It wasn't that he
has changed; I mean, I first heard Milt when I was sixteen, and noth-
ing much has changed, except that the Regatta Bar is now more
money and Milt Jackson is one of the few musicians who, I am quite
glad to say, has made some money. And he certainly deserves it—the
joy that he's given me. To see this man so many years later still doing
it. I said, "Okay now, young adults, that's one part, but here's what I
want. You just wait, be patient. He's gonna play a blues for you the
like of which you've probably not heard. That's why I wanted you
here. You don't have to do it that way, but I want you to be aware of

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this." So we wait, and boy, he does it. And I say, "Now, that's where I
came from. I don't do it that way, but it's a part of me."
So then I decided to go to Washington, and a friend of mine and I
go walking by Blues Alley, and who's going to be there the next night?
I said, "Oh shit, I'm going to stay, you know." "But it's all sold out."
"But you said we had passes." And some people we know say, "We
can't go, take our passes." Well, I remember when I first heard Sonny
Rollins: it was in 1951 when I was living in Boston, and he was playing
with the demon Miles then. Well, when he came in—I hadn't seen or
talked to Sonny in quite a while, though I remember when we—no, I
can't tell you all the stories or you'll never come back again. Anyway,
he was marvellous. Not only was he marvellous, but I learned so
much from him about what I wasn't able to accept.
What I mean is, I was up in Minton's one Saturday night, I was
about 21 years old, and Milt Jackson was leading a band with Sonny in
it. Saturday night! In Harlem! Everybody's, "Hey, hup, ho." Then all
of a sudden Milt and Sonny played this piece, and you could hear ev-
erybody breathe. I said, "Oh." That, to me, is what it's about. You
play from the heart. If that's what you really love, it doesn't matter if
there's one person there or ten thousand. [1990]

chapter 50
Unplugging the Enlightenment
His music is no snap to pick up on: it has none of the glib melodic hooks
of "jazz" radio stars like Kenny G, and skips an easy reliance on can-
onized traditions like bebop. It can be knotty and passionate, Cageian
and Coltranesque, highly structured and deliberately destabilized—and
usually tries to be all those things at once. Like Anthony Braxton him-
self, a softspoken and unassuming man who becomes eloquent about his
music when speaking about it and driven to finessed traversings of sonic
edges when playing it.
After 20-odd years, Braxton has refined his highly ramified musical

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environment without any success in the marketplace. I use the word

environment deliberately. Braxton, like countless other artists, taps into
pre-industrial beliefs to counter alienated Western stances like the privi-
leged notion of technological progress, the automatic division of rational
and mythic structures, the degeneration of culture into entertainment,
imperialism, racism, sexism, and so on.
As a result, for Braxton, as for namers since Adam, sounds are not
abstract and fleeting throwaways, but rather speak to a kind of supra-
reality, function as both barometers and shapers of the time-space sur-
rounding them. Shaman, seer, mystic—these are concepts that, deval-
ued by our society, describe almost exactly the kind of Pythagorean
belief Braxton (and almost every culture but the post-Enlightenment
West) has in the power of music to affect the world.
This is not the escapist mumbo-jumbo of white middle-class New
Ageism. Braxton was an early member of the Association for the Ad-
vancement of Creative Music, the catalytic cooperative that arose in
Chicago in the late '60s under the leadership of pianist Muhal Richard
Abrams. Basically, the AACM launched its own musical revolts from
the iconoclastic sound-pioneering and cultural politics of folks like
Thelonious Monk, Harry Partch, Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Sun Ra,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and John
Coltrane. Following in their soundprints, AACMers placed no more
value on notes than on other sounds, from overblown whistles and
shrieks to elephantine roars to low-end belching; homemade instru-
ments like Henry Threadgill's hubkaphone, a percussion device made of
hubcaps, became integrated into the expansive sonic textures. Partly as a
by-product of this refocused energy, the cyclical form of chordal pro-
gressions, which had been adapted from popular music by early impro-
visers for their own uses and continually extended in its harmonic impli-
cations up through the bebop era, lost its privileged position as the
dominant vehicle for improvisation.
The consequences—which are still being worked with and through
today—were several. But maybe most crucial was the burgeoning if
misnamed "free jazz" movement. Misnamed because, in fact, it dealt
with new kinds of interrelations between composition and impro-
visation—the dialectical engine that powers what we call jazz.
That engine needed an overhaul anyway. Despite the best intentions
of contemporary moldy figs like Wynton Marsalis, proscriptions about
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the music's future shapes have never been easily gleaned from its past.
Who at the time—outside of the musicians whose project it was—would
have deduced bebop, the privileged model of Marsalis et al., from
swing? Or swing itself from the society and dance bands of the '20s? Or
Louis Armstrong's solos from New Orleans ensemble playing? Discon-
tinuity plays as necessary and radical a role in history as any unfolding
evolutionary model.
Not so coincidentally, that's exactly the set of bifocals through which
the AACMers saw their own tasks. On the one hand, they set out to
expand the harmonic riches bebop had picked up from European classi-
cal as well as internal sources; on the other, they moved toward locating
those harmonies in a more open-ended, explosive, dialogically reactive
space than the cyclical chord progression could be bent into.
Their bifurcated approach addressed those two facets of the same
problem. They paid increased attention to composition, with sheet mu-
sic making its reappearance on bandstands (though at least some of that
music was usually the product of band input into arrangements and
solos). They also tried to create "free" improvisation. Like Ellington,
Monk, and Mingus, the AACM grappled with the difficulty of reor-
ganizing composition while using—and keeping the benefits of—the
supple improvisational languages they inherited. For like any language,
jazz carries within it an ideology, in its case a model of interactive,
conversational democracy in which leader (the soloist) and community
(the band) exchange ideas about direction.
So in a real sense, AACMers try to push that democracy farther, by
erasing distinctions between frontline and backline musicians in an
ensemble. At the same time, they want to reintegrate written notation
and improvisation, to outline a different way for them to work together,
to produce a new format that would reach outside the confines of im-
posed generic labels like jazz to suggest, mimic, include the fuller reality
of their diversified cultural experiences as black Americans.
Braxton is so radical about his vector in this direction that he's devel-
oped a totally distinct, geometrically based notational system while try-
ing, via his own writings and lectures, to position his music within the
larger cultural vistas of history, society, and politics. So Graham Lock's
book, Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton
(Da Capo), answers a real need by delving into his music and worldview.
Spending two weeks on tour with multi-reedmaster Braxton and his then
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 Dancing in Your Head

quartet (pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, drummer Gerry

Hemingway), attending all the performances and lectures, interviewing
Braxton himself each day on a wide variety of topics, Lock succeeds in
both capturing a sense of the music and depicting the overarching
contexts Braxton always sees himself working within.
It's not always smooth going. Braxton's own terminology, like Hegel's
or Husserl's, can be gnarled and self-referential, and Lock's somewhat
reductive leftist stances on everything from vegetarianism and feminism
to the music industry can be more annoying than insightful. Take, for
example, his rather smug note on a conversation with Crispell: "Though
I smile to myself at the irony of a pro-feminist man trying to unravel this
concept [he's referring to a notion that music is a male-formulated and
dominated language which needs to be drastically reconstituted by
women for their own use] with a nonfeminist woman, it's not a situation
I feel comfortable with." For good reason.
Still, Lock translates Braxton's concerns with sympathy and excel-
lence. Combining raw interview transcriptions, concert descriptions,
historical and musical and mystical background, he places Braxton
within the rich intellectual, emotional, and sociological realms that
nurture him rather than defining him sheerly musicologically, for-
malistically. It's an invaluable look at a musician whose work is all
too undervalued—even within the exceedingly undervalued jazz
realm.
In part, as the book points out, that's because of the racist/imperialist
assumptions that underlie (however unconsciously) most of what passes
for music criticism. Braxton's music has frequently been attacked as
overintellectual, not swinging enough. The charge may seem incoher-
ent to folks who have witnessed him on the bandstand, where he almost
invariably explodes his material past its limits with the force of his
intensity. But thanks to what Braxton calls "the reality of the sweating
brow," black musicians—especially when they can be pinned with the
label jazz—aren't supposed to think, just sort of squirt out carefree
improvised noises with a Sambo grin; that's their natural talent as well as
their preordained upper limit of cultural achievement. Of course, that
viewpoint also reduces the music to a kind of sexual gymnastics over-
heard as exotica by slumming tourists. So it hits home when Braxton
says,

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 Unplugging the Enlightenment

"I mean, it's taken for granted that a European or a European-

American jazz musician has borrowed some aspects of African-
American language: why should it be such a big thing that I've learned
from Europe? I'm a human being, just like Ronnie Scott or Derek Bai-
ley [two white English improviser/composers]. Why is it natural for
Evan Parket [a white English jazzman], say, to have an appreciation of
Coltrane, but for me to have an appreciation of Stockhausen is some-
how out of the natural order of human experience? I see it as rac-
ist. . . .
"That's part of the dilemma of the African-American intellectual.
James P. Johnson wrote several operas-—I think there's been one perfor-
mance in North America and that not long ago. Most of the perfor-
mances he had in his lifetime were in South America. Why isn't this
information known? I'll tell you—because there's a real interest in sup-
pressing African intellectual dynamics. . . . It's a taboo subject, and
we have all paid for it."
Including Braxton, who lived with his wife and children in the grind-
ing poverty all too typical of jazz musicians until he got a gig teaching at
Mills College. But poverty drove him to learn, to ponder, to articulate.
Along with his mixed-race and mixed-media pantheon of heroes, Brax-
ton's assertions about suppressed Western history—the attribution of
cultural breakthroughs by the ancient dusky civilization of Egypt to the
Mediterranean but whiter Greeks by the even whiter slave-trading na-
tions of Europe's Imperial Age, the claims that Haydn and Beethoven
were black—reiterate scholarly attacks by George G.M. James (Stolen
Legacy, Philosophical Library), Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan (Black
Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkebu-lan Books), and Martin Ber-
nal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roofs of Classical Civilization,
Rutgers) on the cultural hegemony of northwestern Europe—or any-
where else.
One excellent way to start an acquaintance with Braxton's music—
which is so marginally available it might as well be suppressed—is with
the just released Quartet (London) 1985 (Leo Records), which chroni-
cles two sets recorded live with the very quartet Lock toured with. Its six
sides offer many entry points into Braxton's formidable sonic universe,
and Lock's liner notes are useful and informative.
But in the end, as critics are supposed to say, the music is what
matters, and Braxton's matters a lot. Listening to it in this extended

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 Dancing in Your Head

format lets it surround you with its varied preoccupations and goals in a
useful and provocative way: the sheer length forces/allows you to react to
its kinetic changes of mood, texture, form, concept in a kind of flowing
dialogue, the way the musicians onstage have to. Look at it as a chipping
away at the barrier between audience and performer, observer and par-
ticipant, people and culture, that has haunted Western civilization since
the Industrial Revolution and its intellectual arm, the Enlighten-
ment. [1989]

chapter 51
Child Is Father to the Music
"Music is like a child," says Henry Threadgill. His nine-year-old daugh-
ter watches TV in the next room, while we sit amid a collection of
instruments that ranges from a baby grand piano through his army of
reeds to a harp. "The way a child comes into the world, a mother's and
father's genes, which they have inherited from all the generations before
them, are all put back together again to create something new. So the
child has got all the genes of its ancestors, but it's also got genes none of
them ever had."
So it's natural enough that in the music Threadgill composes for and
performs with his trio Air, his Sextett, his WindString Ensemble, his
Orchestra, and his dance band, as well as the film and radio and dance
projects he's scored, you'll catch echoes of the damnedest things carom-
ing off each other. Whether in his dense, swinging compositions or in
his virtuosic excursions on reeds and flute, those meetings—between
Stravinsky and King Curtis, B-movie soundtracks and Muddy Waters,
Bach and Mingus and Ornette Coleman—help create a unique and
powerful voice.

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 Child Is Father to the Music

That voice filters through its contemporary concerns and vocabulary

elements of whatever Threadgill heard when he was a child in a Chicago
ghetto. "Music used to be put out in a more democratic way, before
radio got commercially institutionalized," he says.
It was more or less a hodgepodge of everything. I remember hearing
programs for Mexicans, Polish shows, Serbian, country & western,
black gospel groups, rhythm & blues, jazz, classical music—plus regu-
lar programming like theater pieces and detective shows, outer space
shows. Television was freer like that in the beginning too: The Kate
Smith Show, Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, GE Theatre with Noel Cow-
ard plays, Nat King Cole's show—there was some of everything. In a
way they didn't know what they were doing, because it was uncon-
trolled—which is the way it really should be. The minute the controls
come in, so many people and so much talent get cut out because of
the so-called taste of one group who think that they're doing the public
a service. I know they're doing their pockets a service, because if you
just push one thing people are gonna have to get into it. If you're only
selling Coca-Cola, and you're taking up all the space in the store and
all the ads in the Sunday Times, the other people who aren't putting
things out on that level get swamped.

Henry Threadgill has spent his life making sounds that render catego-
ries superfluous. Trained as a child on piano in a house filled with
music ("My aunt was studying to be an opera singer"), Threadgill was
initially drawn to the bass, but abandoned it for the sax after hearing
Charlie Parker records. Concerts at his high school exposed him to
players like Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins, and he doubled on tenor and
baritone in the school band. Soon he'd added alto, clarinet, and flute to
his growing instrument arsenal. And when he wasn't playing in school,
he was working out in local r&b bands, mastering that swooping, throaty
wail that still resonates in his playing.
A stint in the Army was followed by study in a series of music
programs, where he pursued his craft from unexpected perspectives like
composition and voice training, classical piano and clarinet. "I knew
what I didn't know," he says, "how much I couldn't take apart theo-
retically. I wasn't in those programs the way most students were, to get
their degree; I was there just to take everything they had." His schooling
outside school continued too, in gigs with VFW bands, marching

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 Dancing in Your Head

bands, polka bands, light-classical orchestras, Dixieland combos, and

blues bands.
The earthiness of the blues remains at the core of his writing and
playing:
The blues as I understand the blues is different from what a lot of jazz
players play as the blues. Chicago is a blues town, with people like
Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, the blues that come up from the
South—I don't mean these twelve-bar blues that Charlie Parker and
them were playing a lot of different progressions on. I'm talking about
country blues, which might happen in any amount of bars, even or
uneven. And spiritual gospel music too: it's that emotional thing where
you get inside the note and work it.

You can hear what he means on "Do Tell" (Air, 80° Below '82), where
he digs that trio into a Cannonball Adderley-style gospel vamp; or "Black
Blues" (Sextett, Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket), which kicks off like
a boozy Salvation Army band and lurches into gutbucket squalling; or
"Bermuda Blues" (Sextett, You Know the Number), where he formu-
lates a melody so seemingly familiar it's scary. "It's like enticing you into
the spookhouse with a piece of candy," he grins.
Just as the country-blues players wrote of their times and places, the
floods and droughts and insect plagues and broken hearts, so does
Threadgill see his music—indeed, all music—as bound to reflect social
reality in some way. Thus bebop, with its virtuosic displays, didn't grab
him:
That music was not the music for me to express what was happening at
that time, in the late '50s and early '60s. That was over for me, it was
a whole new world in the United States culturally for everybody. What
Charlie Parker and them were playing about in the '40s after the war,
after these black soldiers had come back from travelling all over the
world and getting another realization of themselves and started making
contacts again with the people of this country, and everybody's head
opened up on a different basis—well, they expressed all of that for that
period, and it took 'em all the way over to the '50s, when the McCar-
thy era started to shut America back down after it got opened up from
the war. So when the '60s erupted it was a whole new day again, and
the music moved too. Trane had moved his music to an emotional
spiritual plane, and had come off the plane of playing progressions that
everybody was comfortable with. Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor,

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 Child Is Father to the Music

Mingus—the whole scene had changed, and emotionally I could feel

it. So bebop couldn't service me: it didn't have anything to do with
people standing up for their rights, it didn't have anything to do with
the Vietnam war, didn't have anything to do with the Gray Panthers,
the Black Panthers—that music couldn't express that. The language
.had opened up and expanded. Artists like Charlie Parker knew that
happens, which is why before his death he started getting into Edgard
Varese—he knew that things were gonna change. Any sensible artist is
in tune with what's going on around him, he knows that the language
has to expand.
Not surprisingly, Threadgill has no patience for nostalgia mongers:
All this revivalism that we're experiencing, I'm really against. It's
funny to see a lot of musicians involved with music that's older than
they are—that's rare in the history of jazz, where they're playing stuff
that isn't relevant today. It's actually musical fascism, all this neo-this
and neo-that. These young traditionalists that make a whole lot of talk
about understanding tradition—forget that. The tradition only becomes
a background of ingredients. Whatever element you want to bring into
your music, you've got to understand ontologically and then synthesize
it in musically. Just in itself, it's nothing; if you can't make something
out of it, the world can do without it.
Nor does he have patience for empty musical posturing:
A lot of young musicians get a lot of credit for being musical athletes,
contortionists, like it's hip to be a virtuoso. Ain't nothing hip about
that: music is not about that, it doesn't say anything, it doesn't even
make you musical to be the fastest-playing person on earth or make the
biggest leaps on your instrument. That is not music. Music has to do
with expression, how to play now musically. There are no rules about
how to do that, no laws: anything goes, so long as it works. Music is
organized sound, that's all, and it's got nothing to do with purism.
You can't create music for your time by speaking an archaic language
that makes reference to other sociological and spiritual and emotional
values in the society—the whole thing is connected symbolically in the
tones.
Those complementary ideas—that the language of music must re-
flect its environment, that musicianship is the means of expressing that
relationship, and that any sound could be a part of that language—were
developed in Threadgill during his participation in the Chicago-based

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 Dancing in Your Head

Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. A nonprofit

group that sponsored performances and recording sessions for its mem-
bers, the AACM grew out of the Experimental Band led by pianist
Muhal Richard Abrams, a large free-jazz ensemble in which Threadgill
played during the early '60s. Its ranks included such musical daredevils
as Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell of the Art Ensem-
ble, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Leroy Jenkins, Anthony Braxton,
and Steve McCall—a Who's Who of younger jazz players. What they
shared was a sense of musical change. Notes per se became less impor-
tant to play than the effects that could be conjured up via instrumental
sounds, any sounds from bleeps and blatts and burps to childlike whim-
pering and sobbing sighs and whinnying overblown shrieks. Coming in
the wake of experiments by Trane and Ornette and Dolphy and Ayler,
the AACM further enriched jazz's vocabulary and bequeathed the mu-
sic some enormous talents.
But like David Murray, in whose original Octet he played, Threadgill
is not only an original explorer but also an heir to the approach favored
by great jazz composers and arrangers like Ellington and Mingus. "I
always have particular players in mind when I'm writing music. It's like
a basketball team, where the guard has particular strengths, and so the
defense is keyed around him. I think that's very important, and that all
good ensembles use that. And I write different pieces for the different
ensembles, because I have that particular orchestration and instrumen-
tation in mind." How much of the music is written and how much
improvised varies from group to group, and piece to piece. "My music is
not complete until the musicians are finished with it" is the one general
rule he has. "Until I hear everything that happens in rehearsal, anything
is subject to change."
One musical constant, especially in the case of his Sextett and Air, is
how Threadgill draws on his free-jazz background to obliterate the divi-
sion between soloist and accompanist. Take most of Airsong, where he
deliberately feeds foregrounded lines to agile bassist Fred Hopkins. Or
"Apricots on Their Wings" (Air Show No. I), where he uses the supple
voice of Cassandra Wilson as another instrumental line at the same time
he is playfully deconstructing the classic Ella Fitzgerald renditions of
Cole Porter songs. "Democracy is part of this country, and it's gotten
into the arts. I use that, highlight all the instruments at different points;
why have all these instruments if only one of them is important?"
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 Child Is Father to the Music

In the case of the Sextett, one result of the musical democracy that
leads him to spread detailed parts around equally is that the group's
sound swells beyond its numbers, as the LP called Just the Facts and
Pass the Bucket demonstrates. Listen to how the title track and "Higher
Places" revamp big-band notions of how to treat ballads with power to
spare. Ponder the murky, noirish atmosphere that periodically bursts
into Stravinsky-ish rituals on "Cover," or the way "Cremation" explodes
from its dirgelike string opening to the cello twittering like a spook over
madly riffing horns. Combine the improvisational talents of stellar
members like cornetist Olu Dara, who can mix Louis Armstrong and
Lester Bowie with ease, or trombonist Craig Harris, who boasts a full
range of smears and whinnies and yelps as well as amazing agility, with
Threadgill's own unpredictable and catchy compositions, and you can
get some sense of the force this supple and idiosyncratic lineup can
unleash. "It's such a good pallette to write with," he grins. "The range of
strings from the bass to the cello goes all the way from the top of the
treble clef to the bottom of the bass clef. With the brass I've got the same
thing. Percussion, too, with two drummers—that gives me 12 drums.
And with all the reeds I play, it's like having a little orchestra. So I
approach it like a reduction for orchestra." And audiences love it.
And so he returns to a favorite motif. "I'm not a pessimist," he
concludes. "I'm a dreamer, and a dreamer is an optimist by definition.
But I have to face the facts around me. Decomposition and reintegration
is what's needed in music today." Characteristically idiosyncratic, he
combines the facts of birth and death, recurrent themes in his work,
with his desire to have a permanent ensemble gig that would allow him
to write constantly for a set group of players. "America is so afraid of
death," he begins.
All these devices—plastic surgery, cryogenics, storage of organs, mov-
ing further and further away from the graveyard—just show a fear of
life and reality. I'd like to put a band in a funeral parlor and work
there. That'd put me in position to be like Bach, to have an ensemble
to write for weekly. It'd be special, something for each person who's
getting married, something for each person who's died. We've got to
accept the idea that death is part of life. A healthier understanding of
that would give us more material to express ourselves in a larger way,
and keep us out of the kind of ignorance that enslaves. [1987]

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 chapter 52
In and Out of the Tradition
Brilliant improviser, adept multi-instrumentalist, talented arranger, and
gifted composer: these are the major talents David Murray has used to
carve out a unique place for himself in modern jazz. Along with such
innovators as Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, and Olu Dara, he is
among the brightest potential stars to emerge from this generation.
Drawing on his understanding of the past's best, like the big-band music
of Ellington and Mingus, he forges composed structures that can ac-
commodate the improvised onslaught of the explosive sonic and har-
monic languages devised by the experimenters of the last generation, the
Ornettes and the Coltranes, the Dolphys and the Aylers. They also
swing hooky melodies like mad, as the bobbing heads and kicking legs
and tapping feet during even the farthest-out solos demonstrate. That
reconciliation of what had seemed, since the end of the Swing Era, to be
two opposing aspects of jazz—its need to explore relentlessly and its
ability to attract a truly popular audience—is one of Murray's highest
achievements.
It's a synthesis that finds its roots in his own musical beginnings. His
mother plays piano in a Pentecostal church, his older brother studied
clarinet, and Murray himself started on alto sax at age nine. "Then I
heard Sonny Rollins play at a Berkeley jazz festival," he recalls, "and
after that I started playing tenor. The alto just couldn't accommodate
what I knew I could do after I'd seen Sonny." He found out what he
could do playing professionally through high school in various r&b
bands, and by his 20th birthday had made a name for himself with
several experimental jazz outfits around his Berkeley home.
As it inevitably does for jazz musicians, the Big Apple loomed large
in Murray's ambitions, and so at 21 he packed his horn and headed east,
where he arrived in time for the hard-blowing loft sessions of the 1970s.
Characteristically undaunted, he plunged into working with such ex-

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plorers as Ornette, James Blood Ulmer, Lester Bowie, and Sunny Mur-
ray, recording edge-city discs with trios and quartets. Equally charac-
teristic, though, is how he both played his way through the cutting
contests and began harnessing the raw energy unleashed by that scene to
power his own evolving vision.
That vision had its first translation to reality at the Public Theater in
1978, when Murray was offered the venue for a big-band performance.
"That was the beginning of it," he feels now. "I'd done ensembles
before, like six or seven pieces, but I never thought of them as a big
band. I never thought that I could actually lead all these people to
somewhere. So I wrote all this music, [trumpeter] Butch Morris con-
ducted it, and it came out pretty well." Well enough to set critics raving
and a cult to following him as he began moving in this new direction.
Murray himself puts his move into historical perspective:
Duke Ellington in his era synthesized a lot of the big band sounds that
were happening before him and while he was there, and to me he took
them into a new era, a modern age, with a much slicker harmonic
base; he used technical things that maybe somebody like a Jimmie
Lunceford didn't have time to explore. Mingus, coming after Elling-
ton, created a resurgence of the "jungle rhythms" of Ellington's band
from around 1927, that African feel, and he refined it, rejuvenated it.
That's kinda what I'm doing in this time and day. I'm not comparing
myself to Duke Ellington or Charlie Mingus, but I do see myself as
one link in a chain of great organizers who can take from the past and
put it into a fresh perspective in the present.
Clearly Murray's project is not neocon nostalgia; unlike the em-
balmer's attitude toward the past boasted by, say, Wynton Marsalis,
Murray's gaze is inevitably directed forward by jazz's key attribute, im-
provisation. "A lot of cats who talk that large ensemble stuff can't really
play that well," he asserts.
I think I'm in the middle: I can play well and I can write well, which
sets me apart already. See, in each generation each of those organizers
has been a great improviser as well as a great arranger and writer.
Since I'm a player first, what I play on what I write is going to sound
good. And with the kind of improvisers I've got in my bands, I'm hop-
ing that what I write inspires them to a level of performance beyond
what they've already done.

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 Dancing in Your Head

Given that the players he's talking about include high-caliber types
like Threadgill, Morris, Dara, trombonist Craig Harris, sax masters
Hamiett Bluiett and Steve Coleman, bassists Wilber Morris and Fred
Hopkins, drummers Steve McCall and Billy Higgins, that's no small
hope. It's also the lifeblood of his music, even though the days are long
gone when a Duke Ellington could keep a stellar band together by
gigging night after night. "I've got to keep people like that around," he
says,
because on any given night I might play better than them, or they
might play better than me. It's that challenge that makes the music
happen. You've got to read people, what's happening in their lives;
that's what enables you to inspire them with your music. Take the
Ellington orchestra, a cat like Paul Gonsalves. Paul never sounded
that way with any other orchestra; neither did Johnny Hodges. They
all came back to Duke because he made them search inside them-
selves and find the genius that was in there. That's what my music is
about: you've got to play, you can't be half-steppin'. A bunch of notes
on a page don't mean nothin' to me; what you're gonna play on it after
you finish the composition, that's what / want to know. A composition
has got to inspire you to another level, because otherwise you might
just as well be playing classical music.
That intersection of the planned and the spontaneous is displayed
most obviously on his recordings with the Octet and his 12-piece Big
Band. Not surprisingly, the tunes, their arrangements, and their impro-
visational glosses resonate with historical gestures that are constantly
bent into new shapes by new contexts. On Ming, for instance, the
material ranges from a pull-out-the-stops update of the loft blowing
scene ("The Hill") through not-so-oblique references to old standards
like "Misty" ("Jasvan") to scrambled reworkings of bop influences
("Dewey's Circle"). Home includes everything from lullabyish melodies
that evoke Ellington ("Home") to strutting multiple melodies that evoke
Ives ("3-D Family"). The title track of Murray's Steps both refers to and
renovates Coltrane's famed "Giant Steps"; the lushly voiced melodies
and dissonant flute echo on "Sweet Lovely" at times seem to picture a
meeting between Duke and Dolphy; and the exuberant calypso stomp
called "Flowers for Albert" in honor of Ayler never fails to blow the roof
off Sweet Basil and get the crowd to rollicking happily even as the music
extends slyly beyond their harmonic pale. The two-volume Big Band

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 In and Out of the Tradition

Live at Sweet Basil offers other crowd-pleasers, like the full-throated

Dixieland bash called "Bechet's Bounce."
It would be hard to overstate the impact of this music: it dazzles the
mind with its complexity, touches the soul with its unleashed singing,
and shakes every booty in sight. As the man himself puts it, "I like big
bands because of the power you can come in with: it's so much more
magnified. It's like the difference between getting hit with a tennis ball
and getting hit with a hard ball. It leaves people breathless."
As does the apparent ease with which Murray moves his concept and
material from a big to a small band. With his trio or quartet, for exam-
ple, he becomes the primary soloist with room to spare, and so he croons
his Coleman Hawkins-ish vibrato, warm and wide, on a classic like
"Body and Soul," or pulls out his bass clarinet for a creamy, occa-
sionally belching rendition of Fats Waller's jokey "Jitterbug Waltz." Or
take the eight-year-old World Saxophone Quartet, which he forms with
fellow reed aces Bluiett, Oliver Lake, and Julius Hemphill. As you'd
expect from its personnel, the WSQ commands a delirium-inducing
array of styles, from raucous riffing that features four deftly independent
lines spiraling outward to the smoothly and lushly interwoven section
work of Plays Duke Ellington, a beautiful if unslavish reworking of
Ellington and Strayhorn tunes. Or the similarly styled Clarinet Summit
LPs, where he joins forces with greats Alvin Batiste, John Carter, and
Jimmy Hamilton for tunes by them and the Duke. Or there are his free-
jazz-style excursions with Blood on Children, for instance, where they
dismember the chestnut called "All the Things You Are" with such
savage good humor that they make it impossible to listen to some lounge
lizard idle over its changes for the umpteenth time without laughing.
Which brings us to our second question: Why has no major U.S.
label signed such a volcanic talent? The answer to that one, unfor-
tunately, rattles lost in the minds of the MBAs who run those com-
panies. The only certainty is that Murray's supple and wonderful music
will outlast them all. [1987]

257
 \^WKWttttttttifiii£&>'
chapter
• '^^W!^M!l^^^^"™*'
53
The Knitting Factory
Scene is a word musicians use to describe their world, but as its theatri-
cal metaphor implies, a scene needs a place to happen, a staging area
where players can try out their ideas on each other and an audience.
Each generation discovers that kind of venue, whether it's the Cotton
Club for budding swing bands or Minton's for incipient beboppers.
Basically, that history is repeating itself for the eclectic music coming
from the hungry and honed young players based largely in downtown
Manhattan and Brooklyn. When 25-year-old Michael Dorf arrived in
New York in 1985 from Wisconsin, he wanted to open a club that would
mesh performance art, poetry readings, and music with his interest in
Flaming Pie Records, which he ran with bassist Bob Appel. They found
a funky second-story streetfront space with a bay window overlooking
Houston Street, put a small stage and sound system next to the window,
clustered folding chairs and homemade tables around, tucked a small
bar and some basic kitchen facilities in a back corner, hung for-sale art
all over, and dubbed the results the Knitting Factory.
What followed illustrates the diverse vitality of the New York music
scene—and, not so coincidentally, demonstrates how younger audi-
ences are, despite industry disbelief, willing to take at least an occasional
chance on what they might hear. When Appel tired of touring and
became the club's engineer, and Jerry Liebowitz formulated the college-
radio series Live at the Knitting Factory, the support systems to create a
forum for the eclectic, overlapping scenes around the Apple were in
place.
Initially progressive-rock college-radio faves dominated the venue,
but that shifted as Dorf began a kind of private crash course. "I'd studied
jazz history up through the hard-boppers and the 5 Spot, but I didn't
really know anything about the new music," Dorf admits. "But Wayne
Horvitz, John Zorn, and other people began playing here and really

258
 The Knitting Factory

turned me on to what was happening around town now, both in jazz

and in improvisation as a genre distinct from jazz."
Dorf s enthusiastic on-the-job training led him to book some of the
scene's most interesting sonic explorers. Since, as he implies, jazz is an
increasingly misleading tag for up-and-comers, none of the jazz venues
in town regularly booked emerging musicians unless they were sidemen
to established older artists. That left them scuffling to showcase their
music; if they were among the lucky, they periodically wound up at a
grant-funded arts venue like the Kitchen. "That's fine for what it is,"
says Dorf, "but I think it's just as important to show that these kinds of
music are commercially viable in a commercial setting. It gives them a
quasi-legitimacy that they don't get, for whatever ephemeral reasons, at
a place like Roulette—even though the show and the crowd might be
the same."
His club's success underscores the point. As Dorf s knowledge of the
scene broadens, so do his booking policies. Key elder statesmen of the
new avant-gardes have begun to show up: Sun Ra crammed his entire
Arkestra in to mix his otherworldly musical alchemy; Cecil Taylor spun
through his mind-warp with a fiery vengeance; Julius Hemphill bran-
dished his alto; organ great Big John Patton reprised his soul jazz with
Zorn, Frisell, and Previte.
That last event indicates how the Knitting Factory has become a
nexus where the many distinct strands of non-mainstream music around
New York can twine in unusual and rewarding ways. In such an inti-
mate space, with relatively low fees and cover charges, the pressure to
package the music is off; players can take chances with their stuff while
the audience listens in and learns. Maybe most telling is the way youn-
ger musicians (and critics, and record company folk) now routinely stop
in just to check out whatever might be going on. [1988]

259
 chapter 54
Monk Goes Downtown
"Jazz"—a word the musicians saddled with have hated from its
beginnings—covers a multitude of sounds and styles. One result is that
as the music moves through history its heroes, movements, truisms are
constantly being re-evaluated in terms of contemporary trends, needs,
potentials.
Take bebop as a prime example. In the '40s the unwelcome term
described musical revolutionaries who were forging a new language in
reaction to the then-mainstream as well as to the dramatically shifting
social conditions of the postwar world. Now bebop is the mainstream, a
language that can still be astonishingly supple and can still tell amazing
stories but that is, like Beethoven's classical idiom, hardly revolutionary
any longer. A product of its time and place, it's become a generally
accepted set of musical propositions, the basic grammar and syntax
taught in the supermarket-style music schools that have prospered in the
last decade or so.
In the larger world, academies exert their sanctioned views of the past
via dictionaries and canons as they attempt to control the natural riot of
development that sprawls into linguistic and cultural growth. In some
ways—and with no little historical irony—that's how the music schools
have used bebop. Its vocabulary and formats and tunes have been ele-
vated to the status of holy writ, its upstarts transformed into an unassail-
able pantheon, its internal tensions papered over with dogma.
And yet, despite the codifiers, history moves on and takes bebop with
it. Outstanding young players like Ralph Moore and Roy Hargrove, who
see themselves "in the tradition," inevitably echo more recent harmonic
and conceptual developments even as they revive bebop-style jams and
call the period's standards; self-described revolutionaries like Steve Cole-
man and John Zorn inevitably echo earlier voices like Bunky Green and
Ornette Coleman. Each meeting with the past creates a kind of two-way
funhouse mirror in which past and present distort, blur, and merge.
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 Monk Goes Downtown

It's an image Thelonious Sphere Monk would have appreciated.

Drawing on his deep roots in stride piano while pursuing outrageously
shifting harmonies, tautly angular melodies, and jagged rhythms, Monk
obviously knew better than to try to tie up all his energizing loose ends
into some consciously neat bundle. In fact, it could be argued that the
enduring power of his music explodes out of the collisions between his
loving debts to earlier traditions and his refusal to view them as sacro-
sanct. If, thanks to his membership in the pantheon, his own tunes have
been incessantly trivialized in cocktail lounges the last few years, Monk's
understanding of tradition and its relation to his music has made him an
ongoing inspiration for explorers like Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane,
Ornette Coleman, and the AACM.
It's no coincidence that Monk himself first started to win public
acceptance with his Monk Plays Ellington (Riverside). At the time, his
musical stock was pretty low: he had no cabaret card, his previous
records barely sold, and most jazz fans and musicians thought his play-
ing was at best charmingly primitive; at worst, incomprehensible and
illiterate.
In his invaluable The Jazz Tradition (Oxford), veteran jazz historian
Martin Williams observes,
To make his playing as personally expressive as he wished, Monk had
even altered his way of striking the keys, his finger positions, and had
largely converted his piano into a kind of horn which was also capable
of stating harmonic understructures. And he did not fake, doodle, dec-
orate, or play notes only to fill out bars or fill time.
The core of Monk's style is a rhythmic virtuosity. He is a master of
displaced accents, shifting meters, shaded delays and anticipations.
Therefore he is a master of effective pause of meaningfully employed
space, rest, and silence. Fundamentally his practices in harmony and
line are organized around his insights into rhythm. And as rhythm is
fundamental to jazz, so one who develops its rhythms also develops
jazz along just the lines that its own nature implies it should go.
And though critics cried sellout, Monk Plays Ellington not only
garnered Monk a new public but also demonstrated his acute insights
into the relationship between composition and improvisation—the dia-
lectic engine that drives jazz's development—as well. Monk approaches
classic Duke tunes with obvious respect and no deference. His arrange-
ments and solos evoke Duke's own stride roots, lilting sense of swing,

261
 Dancing in Your Head

and hard-won harmonic idiom, but they're totally unwilling to be mu-

seum pieces.
Instead, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)"—to
take just the leadoff track as an example—becomes a showcase for
Monk's preoccupations as well. The original melody shadows his solo
whether he's fitting his serrated ideas into its rhythmic contours and
harmonic motion or deliberately going completely against where it
breaks into a rest or negotiates a harmonic turn; the fact that he never
simply takes the changes opportunistically both makes his highly idio-
syncratic attack more accessible and puts it into sharp relief. As he was
later to insist others do with his own material, he demonstrated clearly
that a real composition demands a different improvisatory treatment
from a collection of chords limned by a head.
Monk was trying, in a real sense, to translate jazz composition from
the big-band format to the small group—a project that made him closer
to Ellington than to Bud Powell. That meant restructuring an improvi-
sational language into a compositional one without emasculating it, and
at the same time redefining the relationship between musical piece and
improvised solos.
In this sense, Monk was no bebopper. Though he was present at
the creation and shared many of bebop's harmonic explorations and
preoccupations, he wasn't motivated by the same concerns that drove
Diz and Bird and Bud. His melodies, however skewed and gyring, are
hummably accessible as few bebop heads are. In place of extended solos
that zigzag at hurtling speed over extended changes, he offers short,
pointed expositions that are more like variations on melodic themes. His
slamdunk chords, squashed seconds, and curling rests—which at the
time were heard as his inability to sprint like Bud Powell, whom Monk
had ironically helped tutor—actually form a different, if related, vocab-
ulary, From these perspectives, Monk's concept can be related to an-
other mislabeled hopper's, since Miles Davis—whose airier attack and
honed melodies were precisely what drew Bird to the younger man's
playing, so different from his own—was redefining even the most hack-
neyed Tin Pan Alley standards at the same time Monk was redoing
Duke.
But, aside from Miles and Monk, a generation of "little Birds," in
thrall to the genius of Charlie Parker, spent their time and talent chasing
the chimera of speed through bebop's cyclically repeating harmonic
262
 Monk Goes Downtown

mazes. Not coincidentally, melodies were reduced to "heads"—little

more than an excuse to link a set of changes. Think of the many Bird
recordings (especially live) where he either filigrees the head into rococo
abstraction or just dispenses with it altogether, and you'll get the sense of
how far jazz's internal balance had tipped away from composition at the
time.
Monk's emphasis on his writing accounts for much of his impact on
the loose amalgam of younger players corraled as "the downtown
scene," since for them writing and arranging have regained a status
unthinkable during the '70s loft-session era. But that historical pen-
dulum swing beats at the heart of jazz's evolution. On the one hand,
jazz has developed the dazzling scores and orchestral voicings of key
innovators from Jelly Roll Morton to Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus
to Henry Threadgill; on the other hand, its players have insisted on the
right to spontaneity within a community, the democratic interaction of
voices that can either defy anarchy or deliberately incite it.
The balance between charts and blowing has been tipping back again
partly because a younger generation of musical explorers has been re-
evaluating ti.e past and trying to forge languages that can speak to today
while today's purists cry "sellout." Broadening their sonic and rhythmic
vocabularies with reggae and rap and funk and punk, they pen pieces
that interweave improvisation and writing in such a seamless way you
can't always distinguish the two. They exchange the head/string-of-long-
solos/head bebop format for more scripted, sculpted varieties of ensem-
ble crosstalk, shape solos via oddly floating space and off-balance
rhythms rather than breakneck spews of eighth and sixteenth notes, push
their instruments' sounds with deliberate abrasiveness. Overall, it's a
combination that Monk would have understood—indeed, it echoes his
own efforts and draws inspiration from them.
So it's no accident that two of the best of the emergent generation,
Geri Allen and Bill Frisell, can be found side by side on drummer Paul
Motian's tribute album Monk by Motian (JMT). Listening to Frisell's
throaty, careening guitar and Allen's now-stabbing, now-twisting piano
combine on two such diverse cuts as "Ruby My Dear" and "Off Minor"
may open some ears for these composer-players just as Monk's Ellington
gambit did for him. For while they demonstrate how well they under-
stand Monk's dicta about the seamless relationship between melody and
solos, about the use of space and cunning silences, they filter those
263
 Dancing in Your Head

lessons through their own sensibilities and sounds—as Mink filtered

Duke.
Allen first. Born in Detroit to a Bird-loving father, she counted
funksters like James Brown and George Clinton among her musical
heroes. That gradually expanded when she studied ethnomusicology at
Pitt, where she turned on to worldwide ethnic sounds as well as
AACMers like Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, and Oliver Lake, who were
adapting their own interests in Africa and the Caribbean to their fierce,
distinctly un-bebop brands of jazz. Perhaps not surprisingly, her thesis
avoided pianists and dealt with Eric Dolphy.
Like the AACM folks she admires, Allen's music, especially on In the
Middle (Minor Music), is bristling with varied ideas but keeps its energy
harnessed and focused. Where Ellington drew on the blues and the
church, on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, Impressionism and Afro-Latin
sounds as contemporary ingredients for his compositions, where Monk
mixed blues, the church, stride, bebop, and romantic ballads, Allen
juxtaposes salsa, funk, cubist sonic collages, Impressionistic etudes, and
more. Like Ellington and Monk, Mingus and Threadgill, she fills her
groups with players she's worked with for years, so that she knows how to
write for their strengths and they know how to play her music, with its
demanding angles and dense, crosstalking arrangements.
Her own piano attack combines the forceful key-slamming and inci-
sive pedal manipulation that made Monk's piano technique so repug-
nant to bebop fans. In Allen's hands, as in Monk's, the piano is goosed
into the kind of jarring, warped overtones and clusters that defeat its
well-tempered tuning. Her sense of harmony, and the spareness with
which she comps, recall the Ellington-Basie-Monk-Lewis axis, and
when she solos she avoids the predictable—holding her breath when
you expect a sprint, blitzkrieging a few bars where you expect a pause,
squashing a whole-tone phrase into a crushed delight.
Not that Allen's piano is a Monk clone. Overall, her approach resides
somewhere between Monk's, Herbie Nichols's, and Cecil Taylor's—
which is not as odd a place as it might seem at first reading. Consider, for
instance, that Nichols, who earned his keep mostly by playing in society
bands, wrote the first published article on Monk, and on his relatively
few gigs as a leader used Monk's lunging rhythmic displacements as the
launching point for his solos. Consider, too, that Taylor, after Monk,
has been the most dogged pioneer in altering the actual physical me-
264
 Monk Goes Downtown

chanics of eliciting sound from between the cracks, of pursuing a horn-

like flexibility while working the keyboard's near-unique ability to make
simultaneous harmonic statements. Consider that all three approach the
keyboard as an orchestral reduction. Then you'll have a context for how,
whether she's comping astringently a la Monk or even when she's flurry-
ing notes a la Taylor, Allen will veer with Monk-like suddenness against
the pulse, hold a space open or fracture it brutally, play with and against
the shape of the themes she uses to conjure life in our fragmentary,
information-barraged age.
Her versions of "Bemsha Swing" and "Round Midnight" on her solo
album Homegrown (Minor Music), like Monk's versions of Ellington
classics, serve both to link her to a tradition and to display her unique
contemporary voice. Unlike Marcus Robert's devout neoclassic reading
of "Blue Monk," which genuflects respectfully before a historical giant,
Allen reimagines Monk's music in terms of what's happened to Ameri-
can ears since Monk's day, from Nichols and Taylor to Herbie Hancock
and the hammering conveyor belts of Detroit assembly lines and the
metallic arpeggiated arc of African mbiras.
Like Allen, Frisell is now beginning to come into his own as both a
player and composer-arranger, and as with her, that's partly due to his
grappling with Monk's music and its still pivotal position in jazz's van-
guards. Born in Baltimore, raised in Denver, schooled in the blues,
rock, and Berklee's bop, Frisell has worked in such an astounding diver-
sity of contexts that it's hard to keep them straight. From Paul Motian to
Leni Stern, from Bass Desires to Power Tools, from Tim Berne to
Vernon Reid, Frisell has kept expanding his technical facility; he's now
at the point where his patented bleary, attackless sound can hover
gracefully or spin like a demented frisbee ringed with razor blades, lurch
dissipatedly into space or sledgehammer a note into oblivion. Wrapping
his bluesy roots in a cloud of delay, he reimagines on the guitar the kind
of arcing space Monk coaxed and yanked out of the piano via his idio-
syncratic fingerings and pedal-pumping.
But even beyond his extraordinary detonation and reassembly of the
electric guitar's sound, what links Frisell as a player most clearly to
Monk is his off-balance sense of rhythm, where he mixes Monk's
whiplash aggressiveness with Jim Hall's supportive understatement. Lis-
ten, for instance, to Monk in Motian: working mostly between Motian's
melodic drums and Joe Lovano's spiraling sax, he covers the vast ground
265
 Dancing in Your Head

opened up and makes it coherent by floating Monk-like spaces that he'll

suddenly puncture with fiercely bent, split-toned notes, abrupt register
shifts, provocative intervals and chord shapes. Add his Monk-like insis-
tence on structuring his solos around thematic motifs, rather than riding
the changes, and as with Allen it becomes easy to hear what's exciting
younger players and critics about Frisell's work. He's about as far from
fusion's macho noodling as you can get.
His compositions make that even clearer. Where Monk is grounded
in blues and Allen in the blues' funkier updates, Frisell takes country
twangs and East Village noise barrages and melts them down into a
vicious but charming combo that often finds itself cruising various dis-
guised blues, like his "Some Song and Dance" medley on his latest
Before We Were Born (Nonesuch). Stalking over tripwire beats, his
pieces revolve around melodies—idiosyncratic and gnarled, but like
Monk's hummable, even unforgettable once they penetrate your ears.
Tunes like the two-themed "Little Brother Bobby" and the haunting
"Lonesome" from Lookout for Hope (ECM) tuck into their apparently
simple structures the surprising turns Monk made seem so inevitable in
his own because of the flowing melodic shape. Augmented by the pro-
pulsive crosstalk of his charts, Frisell's music speaks of late 20th-century
dreamscapes in scarred, apocalyptic tongues.
Which brings us to the underlying quality of Monk's music that
appeals across,generations to vanguard after vanguard: a coruscating,
searing irony that can laugh at itself, that unsettles rather than soothes.
The music schools can't teach that; it's dangerous, because it under-
mines notions like canons and pantheons and aesthetic hierarchies of
whatever kind, then pokes gleefully among the pieces. It shatters expec-
tations about sound and how to process it—and hence expectations
about the world. That's a task music can perform only when it's not so
freighted with nostalgia and so overburdened with its own history that it's
always checking out its own shadow. [1989]

266
 chapter 55
The Nurturer
Her piano can dart over curving lines with the jackrabbit agility of a
McCoy Tyner, crush note clusters like a French Impressionist, or float
spare lines over telling spaces with the wit of a Thelonious Monk. Her
versatility has made her a very-much-in-demand side person. Since
1984, she's worked with jazzers as diverse as Oliver Lake, James New-
ton, Lester Bowie, Arthur Blythe, Paul Motian, Wayne Shorter, and
Steve Coleman.
But it's her stunningly individual writing that is propelling her emer-
gence as a leader. Her conpositions range easily over broad musical
terrain; jazz and funk and international sounds percolate through them
without degenerating into pastiche. Beginning with efforts like the trio
Printmakers (Minor Music) and solo Homegrown (Minor Music), she
resolutely extended her approach to larger ensembles for Open on All
Sides in the Middle (Minor Music) and Twylight (Minor Music).
But now, with The Nurturer (Blue Note), Geri Allen has a U.S.
major-label release. Even though the deal came through the back
door—Blue Note's Japanese partner Toshiba approached Allen about
the project—it gives her a shot at a larger audience.
Though it bristles with ideas, Allen's music is very catchy and hardly
forbidding. But it's also sui generis, not a retread of an older style in the
mode currently popular among many younger jazzers. As the thought-
ful, soft-spoken, 30-something Allen sees it,
I think younger people see somebody like Wynton Marsalis and say, I
want to do this too. That's positive in a lot of ways.
Artistically these kids—I'm not that much older than some of them,
but it's really a different generation—are playing on a real high plane.
That's a big plus. But I also think that there's this romance with the
history now. It's really difficult to go for something that is not a
traditional sound per se. Today, chances are people aren't gonna
want to hear it. Maybe they're not as patient, maybe the record com-

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 Dancing in Your Head

panies aren't interested, and if they don't put it out nobody gets to
hear it.
You can make a decision to be great and sound great by getting as
close to what John Coltrane sounded like as you can. Or you can
make a choice and say, People are gonna identify with John Coltrane
because he pulled his weight—you know what I'm saying?—and it's
still fresh. So you can think, Why should I go through all this when I
can really feel good about my playing and not have to go through the
frustrations of doubting myself? Because if I'm gonna play like Trane,
nobody's gonna put me down. How can you put something that great
down?
So in a way I think that attitude is a safety valve. It's more the feel-
ing of being a really good player and getting out there and dealing
right away, because people understand that language. It's clear and it's
been around long enough; it's not fumbling around trying to find a
better way to say itself. It's already there.
I can see my own music taking some time to be accepted that way.
I mean, I play Mary Lou Williams's music, which I love to do; I play
Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. That's always an education for
me. It's like reading a piece of classic literature. It's always fresh,
you're always getting a lot back. But at the same time, it'll never be
greater than it was at its origins, as far as I'm concerned. It can be dif-
ferent, it can be interesting, but it was unadulterated when it came. It
was in its time then. It was one living thing; it was culture fluctuating
itself. So it has a different weight than me playing it today. There's a
distance today that wasn't there then; me playing it today is a historical
act, which it wasn't then.

For Allen, The Nurturer is a deliberate historical act of a contempo-

rary kind. It reaches back to her Detroit upbringing—her parents en-
couraged her and her brother to be interested in the arts—and her
education in the Motor City's famed Cass Tech High School, which has
turned out players like harpist Dorothy Ashby, bassist Ron Carter, and
Eric Clapton sideman Greg Phillingames. There in 1972 she joined
saxist Kenny Garrett, bassist Robert Hurst, and percussionist Eli Foun-
tain to study with trumpeter Marcus Belgrave. Belgrave was Cass Tech's
jazz-artist-in-residence and led an ensemble he called the Jazz Develop-
ment Workshop. With compositions and performances from Belgrave
and his now matured students, The Nurturer is in fact meant to be a
belated record of those Detroit days.

268
 The Nurturer

Says Allen,
Marcus, of course, is reflecting all his years: he played with Clifford
Brown, studied with the same teacher, worked with Charles Mingus
and Ray Charles—there's a whole history there. We worked together
on this like we always worked together; it was very natural. And it's im-
portant for us to get a chance to play with Marcus and have it docu-
mented.
From Cass Tech, Allen went on to Howard University's Jazz Studies
Program in 1975, where she studied with classically oriented composer
Thomas Trilling and ex-Billie Holiday accompanist John Malachi,
who'd also worked with Charlie Parker in Billy Eckstine's big band. After
graduating in 1979, Allen headed to the Big Apple, where she used her
NEA grant to study with undersung piano great Kenny Barron. Six
months later, though, she changed direction.
Allen recalls,
Nathan Davis (of the University of Pittsburgh music department) called
me and said, "Come on to Pittsburgh, I've got this situation for you
here." The situation was a job as a teaching assistant and a place in
the master's program of ethnomusicology. . . . I felt like I needed to
go, 'cause I was slipping, you know? I didn't really feel ready to be in
New York, I didn't feel like I could sustain myself after the grant ran
out. It was a great opportunity to work with Kenny, and have the cush-
ion of knowing I had the grant to get me through. But I wasn't work-
ing, and I didn't see how I was going to be working. I didn't feel like I
was playing well enough to be working in New York.
Her four years at Pittsburgh polished her up so she felt ready. She
listened to jazz's then cutting edge and immersed herself in various
world musics as well as continuing to follow her long-standing interests
in classical music. In 1982, she headed back to New York much less
tentative than she'd left it.
Jazz is still a relatively small world, and even one solid connection
can open many doors for a musician with solid chops. For Allen, her
New York connection took the form of fellow Motowner Dwight An-
drews, with whom she'd studied at Cass Tech's extension program at the
University of Michigan. Andrews, who has penned the music for all of
August Wilson's acclaimed plays, including The Piano Lesson, intro-
duced the neophyte to Oliver Lade and Lester Bowie. Once she cut Plug
It with Lake's reggae-funk outfit Jump Up, the phone started ringing.

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 Dancing in Your Head

But for her first six months back, it didn't ring consistently enough for
Allen to give up her steady gig as a side person in ex-Supremes vocalist
Mary Wilson's band. Playing straight-ahead soul music wasn't the prob-
lem for Allen, who grew up on the stuff. The fact that the gig didn't give
her room to pursue her own ideas and work very often with others was.
On the other hand, it was a steady paycheck. Allen finally took a deep
breath and jumped off the Wilson train, teetered near financial disaster
for a year, and then sighed with relief when the phone began to ring
steadily enough so she didn't have to worry about the rent every month.
Now, married, a mother, a working side person, and a leader, Allen
has left those fears behind. But her ambitions remain the same as they
were at Cass Tech:
I've always felt comfortable about trying to do things my own way,
whether it succeeded or not. All my teachers were saying, That's what
the history is about, people trying to do it their way. That's really the
tradition.
I like to hear people who are really studied, who have really worked
it out, and continue to work it out, but they're not thinking about it
when they're playing. It's so well ingrained and they work it out so
well that by the time you start playing they don't deal with it any
more. Just the music comes out, that moment and what's happening.
Life comes out, and not the technique, not the ego. It's unconscious.
That's what impresses me. I don't care what the genre is; if that's
there, I want to hear it. I'm looking for that human quality. [1991]

chapter 56
The Clark Kent of the Electric Guitar
Even non-music freaks can identify Bill Frisell's guitar within a couple
of seconds. H-is patented tone is unmistakable—a bleary, gritty, echoing
surge—and his snaky, off-balance solos float unexpected spaces and
spear wickedly warped notes instead of running through flashy scales.
But though he's usually pigeonholed as a jazz player, Frisell's music

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 The Clark Kent of the Electric Guitar

overrides categories. Trained on clarinet and music theory from age

nine, the 37-year-old grew up on classical music, marching bands,
blues, rock, soul, and jazz—a mix typical of his generation. So he
combines raw emotion and barbed wit, rock-flavored raunch and jazz
skills, to create a musical patchwork all his own.
Which is why he's appeared on dozens of albums over the last few
years. His deft diversity becomes clear from even a brief sample of his
work. Whether he's playing Kurt Weill songs behind Marianne Faithful
on Strange Weather (Island) or rampaging like a jackhammer on Power
Tools' Strange Meeting (Island), roaming pastoral glades on his own first
album, In Line (ECM), or cruising the siren- and construction-strewn
cityscape on Tim Berne's Fulton Street Maul (Columbia), FriselFs
touch and tone somehow adapt to the material's special needs without
losing the idiosyncratic individuality of his instrument's voice.
Baltimore-born and Denver-bred, Frisell didn't pick up the guitar
until two years after the clarinet; and where his reed training was by the
book, he deliberately kept his early six-string fumblings casual. "At first I
couldn't read music at all for the guitar," he says. "I was using a whole
different part of my brain, just playing along with records." The period's
favorites, like Dylan, the Beatles, and the Stones, eventually led him to
the blues, which became—and remain—a major love.
He was musically restless right away. "My school was about as per-
fectly integrated as you can get, so I ended up playing in soul bands
backing up singers doing their James Brown things. It must've been
pretty strange to see me up on stage playing Tm Black and I'm Proud.'"
A school talent show turned him on to jazz when he had to learn a tune
by guitar great Wes Montgomery to accompany a group of girl dancers.
He was hooked, and began devouring jazz from Bird on up and transfer-
ring his formal training to the guitar.
Not that that made his musical road any straighter. After his band
won an intercollegiate jazz contest, he made an abortive stab at Berklee,
a prestigious Boston music college, then holed up in Denver for a
couple of years, where he taught music and played rare gigs while
becoming, in his own disbelieving words, "a young old fogey. I thought
anything other than the old-style jazz-guitar sound, any kind of sound
that was contemporary on the guitar, was just bad. Then—I don't know
what happened—it just started to seem weird to me that I'd shut off the
whole world that had made me want to play in the first place." So he
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 Dancing in Your Head

started cranking the volume and reincorporating non-jazz moves into

his music again, and soon he was putting together his one-of-a-kind
sound.
By 1975 he was ready for another crack at Berklee. Guitarist Pat
Metheny, among his other teachers, was struck by his promise; and
when Frisell headed to New York in 1979, Metheny got him his first real
gig with drummer Paul Motian—an association that continues. And
though another couple of years passed before Frisell could leave behind
the weddings and bar mitzvahs that underemployed musicians depend
on for cash, he began working steadily with a wide variety of lineups.
In fact, with all the groups he's been in and sessions he's done it's
amazing Frisell could keep his own musical focus. That he did is clear
from the growing depth and sophistication of his composing and
playing—despite small budgets that allowed only a couple of days to
record and mix each album. By his third, Lookout for Hope (ECM), his
range became formidable: some hair-raising, metalloid tunes could be
soundtracks for The Road Warrior, while others paint trail-drive cow-
pokes squatting around the campfire amid bean farts beneath a psyche-
delic sky.
Changing labels partly to win the freedom (and budget) to stretch
even further, Frisell took over a month in the studio on Before We Were
Born (Nonesuch). "I'd never made a record where people got the whole
picture. So the idea was to use people from all the different areas I go
into." The result is a kinetic, cinematic potpourri of styles from the
blues to serialism that collide in unpredictable, thought-provoking ways.
Funny and intense and full of surprises, Before We Were Born holds up a
slightly fractured musical mirror to the 30-something crowd. [1989]

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 chapter 57
Downtown Scenes
Jazz—whatever that means—is headed in some fascinating directions.
Younger musicians keep shirting the balance in their music between
composition and improvisation—one of jazz's innermost tensions, pro-
viding it with a lot of its propulsive power. To a large extent, that is now
helping to rearrange the concept of the band. In the wake of the flat-out
blowing sessions of the '70s, sheet music is appearing on stages more
often, reflecting what in some ways is a return to the older swing-based
jazz bands, where players worked off charts for what they played, often
including their solos night after night. Not accidentally, that coincides
with the rock-and-roll sensibility most younger musicians have grown
up with—the notion of a band fitting the music together in a formatted
way.
Also crucial is the harmolodic revolution led by Ornette Coleman.
"Free" jazz is democratic in the way it approaches composing and
arranging—the emphasis is on the band's movement as a whole, rather
than on a star soloist and supporting players—but what results is not a
chaotic outpouring of raw, unpremeditated musical power. Ornette
insists on the priority of composing even during the unleashed group
improvisations, and claims that the larger percentage of what you hear
on his Prime Time records is written. Like much of what he says, this is
subject to interpretation, but it's more important that younger players
see his work as a vital source for what they do, and know his formula-
tions about it.
Of all the Colemanesque offshoots tendrilling through the new mu-
sic scenes around New York, one of the most consistently fascinating
and provocative centers around alto saxophonist Tim Berne and guitarist
Bill Frisell. They've worked as a duo; Frisell was all over Berne's first
Columbia recording; and the bands they lead share overlapping
members—cellist Hank Roberts and drummer Joey Baron. In many
ways, the sounds in their respective heads couldn't be more different.
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 Dancing in Your Head

Frisell's music is shot through with a mutant Western strain, as if a

bunch of cowpokes around a dying fire under an open sky were swapping
stories of cattle drives and Mexico after downing lots of Jack Daniels and
peyote. Berne, on the other hand, revels in the relentless industrial
sounds of the cityscape: he's the street-smart hipster bopping past a 12-
car pileup, eyes and ears wide open and probing with an avid love/hate.
What they share is reflected in their sharing bandmates, and is in
turn shared by those players on their own outings. First is a love of sheer
electronic noises, and a deliberate avoidance of the "normal" rock or
jazz instrumental lineup—they're looking to redefine the sound of mu-
sic per se. Second is their general approach to making music, which
turns on improvisation but proceeds from heavily composed and ar-
ranged scores that sometimes annotate even solos. The coiled tensions
of that combination give their work a power that can twist music and
listeners alike into knots. As they range from the swaggering to the
subtle, they, along with the Brooklyn-based crew that includes altoists
Steve Coleman and Greg Osby, keyboardist Geri Allen, and trombonist
Robin Eubanks, are mapping some of the main lines for this genera-
tion's musical growth, much as the AACM did 20 years ago.
In Berne's case especially, that's no accidental linkage: he learned his
alto sax and compositional skills at the hands of alto master Julius
Hemphill, one of the key members of Oliver Lake's Black Artists Group,
the AACM's St. Louis analog. (Now Hemphill, Lake, David Murray,
and Hamiet Bluiett comprise the finally acclaimed World Saxophone
Quartet.) Picking up the sax in his late teens, Berne wanted to cross the
rawboned r&b/soul horns he loved (he still listens primarily to soul
music) with his interest in broader composition. That's why he sought
out Hemphill, who was doing just that.
Cutting albums for his tiny Empire label and then for the Milan-
based jazz label Black Saint/Soul Note over the last several years, Berne
doggedly set about forging his own idiom. His two Columbia discs leave
no doubt he's succeeded. The punningly titled Fulton Street Maul (the
gentrifying construction of downtown Brooklyn pounded for years right
outside Berne's windows) sears and jangles and scrapes and slashes and
even occasionally soothes as it hurtles through the urban landscape and
gleans jarring, unlooked-for bits of beauty from the wreckage and end-
less change. Frisell's arching guitar smears its fat tones across the picture
just before tailing off into the cracks of the piano keyboard—he's learned
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 Downtown Scenes

his lessons about un-well tempering well indeed. Roberta's electrified

cello skitters and jags and sings like an unsheathed sawblade, and Alex
Cline's drums are always stirring up trouble.
For his second major-label release, Berne shifted his lineup, replac-
ing Frisell with trumpeter Robertson and bassist Mark Dresser, and
Cline with Baron. Not surprisingly, some of his turbulent music's em-
phasis shifted too. It's as if on Sanctified Dreams Berne no longer has to
wedge the splinters of urban life under your fingernails; he can relax a bit
and ride the sheer energy always about to burst from any corner of his
tightly plotted, incrementally organized compositions and arrange-
ments. While the music is no less intense than on Maul, it's more
accessible, and offers diced-up bop ("Velcho Man") and ruminative
melodies ("Sanctified Dreams") as well as raging snarls. Baron, in par-
ticular, skews any beat he plays with such off-handed authority that
there's no danger of a piece settling into predictability; he prods and
pokes the band into navigating the music's antic mood swings—from
smokily mutant blues to finessed bebop to gritty near-heavy metal—
with strutting exuberance.
Frisell has had more trouble documenting his extraordinary growth
on his own records. ECM's Manfred Eicher, an eccentric wizard of
sorts, insists on swaddling all his recordings in the equivalent of a hyper-
reverberant medieval cathedral. Somehow Frisell has managed with his
latest effort, Lookout for Hope, to capture the jabbing, feinting, greasy
raunch he pours out with endless invention—I've rarely heard him
repeat a lick—and country soulfulness onstage.
His music is kaleidoscopic, a shimmering blur of gentle seduction
and ferocious attack. Over the never-on-the-one beats tripwired by
drummer Baron and the loopy, off-kilter bass of Kermit Driscoll, Frisell
and Roberts fly daredevil loop-de-loops through a cloud of electronic
enhancements, now strafing each other and the tune, now executing
precise split-second formations, all the while spinning a dizzying web of
sound that hangs before your astonished eyes. That's no mere conceit—
part of the music's catchy genius is the way it becomes tactile, insinuates
a literal sound sculpture.
More and more, Frisell's abilities as a composer are equaling his
guitar prowess. That's clear from the way his tunes can stand next to
Monk's "Hackensack," the one cut on Lookout not from his pen. From
the metallic slash-and-burn of "Remedies the Beauty" to the mini-
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 Dancing in Your Head

malism-meets-bebop "Hangdog," from the reggae-inflected "Alien

Prints" to the achingly sweet country sights of "Lonesome," Frisell
never lets his songs get stuck in a single groove. He writes melodies, not
just vamps that are excuses to solo, unfolds sequences of ideas across
kinetic juxtapositions, uses spaces as daringly as he does his electronic
effects to create an unmistakable voice.
Nor is the versatile and much-in-demand Frisell limited to his own
music. His extensive jazz training and outstanding chops make him one
of the few players who can confidently crisscross from downtown N.Y.-
style freneticism to mainstream jazz without a serious misstep. His
recordings and live dates with famed drummer Paul Motian and young
guitarist-composer Leni Stern show off his idiosyncratic guitar vocabu-
lary in more conventionally unconventional jazz settings. His disc with
fellow guitar flamethrower Vernon Reid, Smash and Scatteration, re-
works the history of guitar duos from Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang
on up with barbed, witty intensity, while the aptly named Power Tools,
his collaboration with ex-Ornette Coleman drummer Ronald Shannon
Jackson and his ex-Decoding Society bassist Melvin Gibbs, rips and
roars with all the grace of a ramaging jackhammer. One hilarious num-
ber is called "The President's Nap," while "Howard Beach Memoirs" is
the gently pastoral piece you'd expect.
As a composer, cellist Hank Roberts leans more toward the pastoral
than any of his colleagues, although his musical landscape harbors
whining ghosts that can leap out from behind the smallest bush without
a hint of warning. His debut, Black Pastels, pulls together Berne,
Frisell, Dresser, Baron, and Eubanks, along with trombonist Ray An-
derson and bass trombonist Dave Taylor, for yet another oddly weighted
lineup.
Roberts's cello is an extension of his voice, and vice versa; he wears a
headset with microphone and sings along, usually in a keening wordless
style that deliberately echoes Tibetan chanting. As his voice veers from
drone to wail, the cello haunts it, then sidesteps it to trade places in the
foreground, a shadow becoming substantial. Couple this introspective
dialogue with the group exchanges ricocheting all around him, and
you've got the essence of his music's motive power.
He drives the combination far. The ambitious, gnarled composition
called "Granpappy's Barn/Dance Death Dance" kicks off with a trom-
bone choir in a bleary round beneath Berne's screeching alto, and
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 Fractured Fairy Tales

segues through one inventive, contrasting section after another, from

tottering waltz to burbling, grumbling trombone strut. "Scarecrow
Shakedown" takes off from a basic blues lick to land on the far side of
Alice's mirror; "Lucky's Lament" forges edgy metallic textures into a
modern Amerindian dirge. Meditative and waspish and always moving,
Black Pastels offers another set of possible clues about the shape of music
to come. [1988]

chapter 58
Fractured Fairy Tales
If you're 30-something like Tim Berne and most of the outstanding
players he's assembled here, the title Fractured Fairy Tales conjures up a
world. A childhood world, that is, of Saturday mornings in front of the
tube—Cartoon Heaven.
Up at the pinnacle of Cartoon Heaven ranks the repository/sampler of
arcane jokes and groaning puns and scrambled eclecticism, Rocky and
His Friends, starring a somewhat intelligent flying squirrel and his
dumb-moose sidekick who battled bumbling Russian spies Boris Bad-
enov and Natasha Fatale in epics by weekly installment. Mixed in with
the adventures of Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right and the hare-
brained time travels of the dog-scientist Mr. Peabody and his pet boy
Sherman, Fractured Fairy Tales was a treasured segment on the show,
featuring Bullwinkle's oddly twisted reworkings of Mother Goose and
the Brothers Grimm that ended inevitably with a series of groaners-as-
morals.
The allusions fit the mutant serio-comic sounds this crackerjack band
spins out. Slashing an opening somewhere between Ornette Coleman,
musique concrete, Carl Stalling, the Velvet Underground, Henry
Threadgill, and Henry Cowell, Berne & Company then fracture your
perceptual frame into a post-cubist collage that's strident and energizing
and moving and provoking and edgy and insistent and very, very funny.
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 Dancing in Your Head

Berne's compositions reflect his continuing astonishing growth; he's

evolved a language that conveys a hyper-hip, tongue-in-chic sense of a
world that's surrealistically playful and painful by immediate turns.
Kinda like a world that's so skewed that George Bush is president,
Dan Quayle is vice president, and Ronald Reagan collects piles of cash
on trips to Japan for telling the Japanese film industry that it's making
good old-fashioned American-family-type movies. Kinda like a Sat-
urday-morning world, where Rocky and Bullwinkle, Boris and Na-
tasha, Mr. Peabody and Sherman and the Wayback Machine unfold
absurd, hilarious, and telling allegories for kids of all ages. [1990]

chapter,,,..' 59
Caos Totale
Caos Totale is Italian for just what it looks like. It also describes the brink
Tim Berne's latest group skates along with considerable finesse and wit
on Pace Yourself (JMT). Inspired by the AACM's expanded sonic pal-
lette and idiom-stretching, the altoist scrambles angular boppish heads,
offbeat harmonies, dangling meters, noirish atmospherics, raucous
blowouts, and worldbeat patches that twitter and drone with a wink. The
subtle backing riffs and textures—Berne likes goosing his soloists and
matching unlikely instruments—buttress and contrast with the impro-
vising. Even the solo sections twist mainstream expectations. They veer
away from running-the-chords to juxtapose a cappella breakouts and
stretches of understatement or near silence with plotted free-for-alls.
The result: a compelling and highly inflected language that reflects the
leader's own wryly hip sensibility and the hyperventilating perspective
shifts that define life and culture in our time.
Lately the mainstream press has been trumpeting jazz's return from
the grave thanks to young neoboppers. But Berne reminds us that jazz
didn't die or stop evolving. Looking around with a lopsided but knowing
grin, he orchestrates post-free-era jazz with a focused compositional eye
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 On the Street Where You Live

and a cartoonist's catchy sense of caricature—his last album was called

Fractured Fairy Tales. In the process, he creates a sonically and emo-
tionally volatile soundscape of the late 20th century that is ominous and
ironic, unexpectedly funny and brutally assaultive, and yet coherent.
The soloists personalize its imagery: guitarist Marc Ducret's scrabbling
skids and lunges, omnibrassman Herb Robertson's brilliant comic yawps
and stuttering speechifying, drummer Bobby Previte's rhythmic and
coloristic sense, bassist Mark Dresser's sonically inventive agility, trom-
bonist Steve Swell's srnears-to-silken moves, Berne's own slippery-to-
edgy-to-raging alto. Skirting total chaos as they conjure its abyss, their
voices fill Pace Yourself with the resonant depth that lets us recognize
ourselves in its kaleidoscopic whirl. [1991]

hcapter 60
On the Street Where You Live
Here's the scene. King Curtis decides to do a Charlie Parker tribute on
location in Tibet, where the monks, having blasted their unwanted
Chinese visitors back to Beijing with the spiritual force of their chanting,
are now busy with jackhammers and cement mixers trying to rebuild the
rubble before the Dalai Lama returns. Got it?
If that sounds like a might-have-been painting by Bosch, so does the
music alto saxist Berne's been making these last ten years. Although
what he writes and performs is about as far from ezy-listening yuppie
wimpers like Spyro Gyra as you can possibly get, Berne has managed to
land a contract with a major label (Columbia) and record two albums
(Fulton Street Maul and Sanctified Dreams) that slash and burn musical
categories with the textural elan and flash-fried wit of New York's best
graffiti artists.
Berne's music is simultaneously street-smart and intelligent. That's
partly because he studied with altoist Julius Hemphill, in the late '60s
one of the prime movers behind the St. Louis-based Black Artists
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 Dancing in Your Head

Group. Like its Chicago model, the Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians (AACM), BAG was a cooperative organization that
both sponsored concerts and recording sessions for its members and
investigated the entire landscape of sound; filling in the templates laid
out by revolutionaries like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert
Ayler, they expanded their notions of musicality beyond well-tempered
and blue notes, dove headlong into the cracks between the piano's keys
and blew whinnies and bleets and blatts and wordless whooshes on
instruments that were traditional to jazz, homemade, and from around
the world, and drew on sources as diverse as Dixieland and r&b, blues
and African rituals.
So when Berne gave up the fast breaks and teamwork of basketball
(his previous main squeeze) for a different kind of sprinting, group-
oriented play, Hemphill was the mentor he sought out. "I loved the fact
that Julius could play and write all this complex stuff and at the same
time get such a great throaty r&b tone from his sax," is how Tim puts it.
"I studied the horn and composition at the same time, so for me playing
and writing were always closely linked."
That linkage manifests itself repeatedly on his last two albums. While
there are openings for improvisation in the traditional jazz sense (Berne
calls them "coups" and says, "Anybody in the band can pull one at any
time, but there'd better be a good reason"), much of the music is
through-composed in the dense, heavily structured, definitely urban
idiom that Berne has been evolving since recording on his own small
Empire label. Now that his unusually voiced lineup has gelled—Herb
Robertson's off-kilter trumpet and weird assortment of mutes, Hank
Roberts's electrified cello enhanced by spacey delay loops and Tibetan-
style wordless vocals, Mark Dresser's bass moving from arco whalesong
to two-handed skidding, Joey Baron's never-on-the-one, about-to-blow-
at-any-time percussion—he's got a group that packs the disciplined taut-
ness, near-telepathic communication, and spark-to-flare firepower his
fractured mosaics of sound demand. What results ranges from slippery
ballads to twisted bebop to industrial-strength grunge, all clearly in tune
with the jagged but endless rhythms at the heart of life in the Ap-
ple. [1988]

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 chapter 61

East Village Jumpcuts

More than a dozen years after he first began playing his music around
the East Village, composer/saxophonist John Zorn is still living on the
economic and musical margins of mainstream culture, but with an
ironic twist. More and more, the kind of generic/geographical border-
hopping he's pursued and the kinds of hybrids he's been breeding reflect
a central method of transmission across the world's cultures. This is not
vapid New Ageism: no transcendentalist goals lurk in Zorn's closet, and
his plugged-in feel for noise and speed and form preclude him from
dwelling on the inexorable beauty of pentatonic pablum. Even "eclec-
tic" is far too weak a word to descrbe Zorn's intensely demanding yet
playful sonic assaults. If a whiff of epater ie bourgeoisie hovers about his
work, it's not there just to titillate or shock, but to raise questions and
rearrange expectations about how music can go about being whatever
it is.
Zorn's own attack on that vast subject takes multiple forms that all
hinge on both massive collisions between musical genres and heady
encounters at the borders of improvisation and composition. He's been
honing that attack since his Webster College days in the early 70s, when
he first came in contact with the Chicago-based AACM and its St. Louis
analog, the Black Artists Group, one of whose leading lights, saxman
Oliver Lake, taught at Webster. And so Zorn was introduced to the work
of jazzers like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Leo Smith, who
were exploring different ways of mixing freedom and form.
The result:
It was a real inspiration that helped me break free of the traditional
classical mold, and I began incorporating improvisation into some of
the structures I'd been working on, which ranged from traditionally
notated stuff like Elliot Carter- and Charles Ives- and Eldgard Varese-
influenced pieces to improvisational works coming more from John
Cage or Earle Brown or Stockhausen.

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 Dancing in Your Head

That combination of elements created some unusual strategies, such

as the game structures Zorn employed in pieces like Archery and Cobra
to decenter both the process of improvising and the composition itself:

The game pieces are something very special meant for improvisers
working in a live situation. They weren't really meant to be recorded
because they're like a sport—it's an exciting thing to see, it's very vi-
sual when all the musicians are making signs at each other, trying to
get each other's attention. It creates a more spontaneous situation than
there would be if you just told ten or twelve musicians, "Okay, go out
there and improvise completely," because if you did that all you'd get
would be a big muddle. With this system, you can give a downbeat
and have no idea what's going to happen—you might be playing with
no one or one person or ten people, or you might give a downbeat
where you'll have a pretty clear idea who you'll be playing with but no
idea of what kind of music is going to happen, or you can give a
downbeat and have a clear idea of what's going to happen musically by
using different modifiers like fast or loud. My role there was to set up
rules so that the people in the band have to make decisions, have to
communicate. All I'm concerned with there is that people make the
most possible decisions in the smallest amount of time, so that every-
thing is jam-packed together and the music changes incredibly fast.

Zorn's anarchic approaches to the nexus of improvisation and com-

position have grown as varied and unpredictable as the tangle itself
demands. But there are two attributes that virtually all Zorn pieces
share. The first is how, like many of the best younger composer-
musicians currently emerging, Zorn works in true partnership with the
group of players he calls his family, who bring their own special talents
and insights to shape and fill in the outlines the leader has sketched.
This rebirth of the band concept—-which owes much to rock's influence
on this generation—not so coincidentally cuts to the heart of what
composition can mean. As Zorn puts it in the liner notes for Spillane,
Whether we like it or not, the era of the composer as autonomous
musical mind has just about come to an end. . . . Over the past 40
years, many of the great composers have worked with collaborators.
Ellington had Billy Strayhorn as well as his amazing band, John Cage
had David Tudor and Takehisa Kosugi. . . . Philip Glass and Steve
Reich work closely with their ensembles. The collaborative aspects of
the recording process make this even clearer. When the Beatles put to-

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 East Village Jumpcuts

gether Sgt. Pepper with George Martin, or Frank Zappa worked with
the Mothers of Invention of the early Verve recordings, the collabora-
tion helped produce a musical statement greater than the sum of the
individuals involved.
Zorn explains the connection with his own work:
In the studio it's just pieces of tape that you can splice or not splice to-
gether. So the way I work in the studio now is by creating a collabora-
tive environment with the band I've picked for this piece. The way the
piece is written is unusual, in the sense that I write images and ideas
down on filing cards, order them, and that's basically the composition.
Then it gets scored: I decide this card will be a solo for the guitar, and
the card following it will have the full band, and the card after that
will be the two drummers—see what I'm saying? That scoring doesn't
really get committed until I'm in the studio and I hear what's going
on. As all the musicians are working and coming up with their own
ideas, throwing them into the pot with mine, I realize, "Well, that
next section that I thought was going to be so good has to get ripped
up and thrown away because now that this happened I've got to go
right to the card after that." So it's something that's sketched out in my
head at home, and may even have been notated musically, but it's not
until I'm in the studio that the actual constructing begins.
It's done with the people that I've chosen as the band, the same way
that Duke Ellington worked with his band: he'd bring in a head chart,
or just play the piano and everybody would find their note [within the
section]—"I'll take the third, you take the fifth"—and so it would just
kinda happen, because he'd hired an incredible band that worked that
way, and they knew each other and the music. I'm sure he heard mel-
odies the guys were blowing and took them, but they were on salary to
him, and he was the ultimate producer, the guy who was putting it all
together: Duke Ellington and his band. That's why I say it's a collab-
orative environment, and I call the musicians a family, because
through working with me on these different pieces everybody has
learned their different roles. Each of the musicians has his own musi-
cal world in his head so that, whether he likes it or not, as soon as he
gets involved with something, is interested and excited, he's gonna add
his world to it. That makes my piece, my world, deeper. I think that's
what helps give my music a kind of filmic sweep.
One way Zorn makes sure those minds will interact with his more than
once is by cutting the musicians involved in his projects equal slices of
the artists' royalties.

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 Dancing in Your Head

The other attribute structuring Zorn's work is velocity, the sheer

relentless speed driving the late 20th century. Zorn's art of the quick-
change and the juxtaposition of the apparently incongruous from liter-
ally around the world—a baroque harpsichord flourish next to a spew of
guitar screeches or a circus motif or a strangled human cry or computer-
generated bleeps, a rumba pattern alongside a bit of shakuhachi or a
Brazilian batucada ensemble or diced-up fragments of Beethoven's Fur
Elise—finds its best analog in the jumpcuts and channel-hopping so
natural to the first generation that grew up on TV. Think of what
Firesign Theater did with that conceit on record, and you'll realize what
you're definitely not hearing in John Zorn's music is a bored lack of
attentiveness, a self-indulgent and superficial meandering. Just the op-
posite, in fact: it's a provocative representation of and challenge to
the hurtling, increasingly atomized bombardment of information that
marks life in our hurtling, decontextualizing times.
If you keep those emphases in mind, it's clearly no accident that
Zorn's recordings like The Big Gundown and Spillane spend their time
at the movies and on TV. The first LP collects key players on the East
Village scene—guitarists Robert Quine, Jody Harris, Bill Frisell, Ver-
non Reid, Fred Frith, and Arto Lindsay, turntable mixer Christian
Marclay, altoist Tim Berne, accordionist Guy Klucevsek, bassist Melvin
Gibbs, keyboardists Anthony Coleman and Wayne Horvitz, and percus-
sionists Bobby Previte and Anton Fier among them—for brash and witty
reworkings of music by spaghetti-Western scorer Ennio Morricone.
Zorn takes the Italian's brooding, twangy atmospherics, themselves witty
reworkings of Duane Eddy and the Ventures, and skews them into
scorching surrealism, redistributing the voicings of the original charts
over utterly different instruments and players to produce wild, apocalyp-
tic renditions that refract—Zorn calls them "recompositions"—the still-
recognizable material. If the album's working title was Once Upon a
Time in the East Village, it's because the jagged atonal bursts of noise
alternating with moodier, more melodic feels capture what Morricone
might have written had he been exiled to these margins rather than the
Leone-imagined Wild West.
Spillane's mosaic of a title piece—it charges through 60 sections in its
25 minutes—trafficks mainly in variants of the moody noirish sounds
that accompanied TV detectives in the '50s. The subject grew from
several Zorn obsessions: detective fiction, New York, sleazy sound-
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 East Village Jumpcuts

tracks, and jazz. Another species of Zorn composition is represented

here by "Two Lane Highway," the "portrait" of blues guitar great Albert
Collins that teams Collins with Zorn family members like Quine,
Gibbs, Horvitz, and Previte as well as keyboard master Big John Patton
and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. While the piece's dozen sec-
tions move from shuffle blues to funk to New Orleans r&b in alternation
with rip-'em-up rumbles, they build a powerful impetus; it peaks with its
allusion to the classic organ-trio format in a segment that unites Texans
Collins and Jackson with Kansas City-born Patton, all of them coming
from their region's long blues traditions in very different ways.
While Zorn may be best known as a composer-arranger, his alto sax
playing is as chameleonic and supple as his writing. There are the duck
calls and squeals (often generated by his literally deconstructed sax) on
things like Ganryu Island, his alternately melodic and raucous duo with
shamisen master Michihiro Sato. (Zorn lives half the year in Tokyo, and
finds the richly hybrid Japanese culture fascinating, which is why he
brought some of its on-the-edge performers to the Kitchen for the Hid-
den Fortress series he curated in 1987.) Then there are the freewheeling
Ornette Coleman tributes Zorn stages with fellow altoist Tim Berne at
clubs like the Knitting Factory. Or there is the bop-based but idiosyn-
cratic fluidity displayed on The Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet/Voodoo
(Black Saint).
Along with innovators like Henry Threadgill, whom he admires a
great deal, Zorn disdains neocon pseudo-traditionalism:
It's really that music the way it should be played today—exciting, on
the edge. Bebop is not just running changes the way Sonny Stitt or
Bird did; there's no point to just copying that, you can take out the
record and play it if that's what you want to hear. It's tunes and
changes and a certain tradition that needs to be updated to keep it
alive. I think that music is great today, and I'm trying to play it
today. [1987]

285
 chapter, 62
Naked City
The Weegee photo on the cover of Naked City (Elektra/Nonesuch) sets
you up for downtown composer/alto saxist John Zorn's latest musical
onslaught. Yanking deliberately harsh and grainy shots out of the mix-
and-match sonic grab-bag called pop history, Zorn compresses their
essences into odd-angled Info-Age soundbytes, shuffles, then hurtles
them gleefully, assaultively by. Though patches of relative calm and
even snatches of innocence sometimes hover, ironic subversion lurks at
every turn of phrase.
Naked City was formed to give Zorn a focused vehicle for his omniv-
orous compositions and rearrangements. Taking its name from the gritty
pulp TV show ("There are six million stories in . . . " ) , this collection
of downtown all-stars—Zorn, Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on
keyboards, Fred Frith on bass, Joey Baron on percussion—did a four-
night, eight-set stint at a packed Knitting Factory last summer; they
never repeated a tune. Now tightened and toughened by roadwork, they
jumpcut—often within a single piece—from surf-music buoyancy to
reggae punch, country twang to noi'r-movie sleaze, hardcore slamdunk
to second-line strut with the kind of urgent, methodical grin you'd
expect from a chainsaw murderer in a rush-hour subway car.
Imagine the resulting spatter as a Jackson Pollock, and you'll begin to
understand how they transform everything they touch. Take jazz great
Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman." Coleman, a Zorn hero, wrote
and played it as a brooding, off-balance elegy, but in Naked City's hands
it comes out as a contemporary "Peter Gunn" played by Booker T and
the MGs: the bass line is the structuring riff from Roy Orbison's "Pretty
Woman," and Zorn closes it out by flourishing Ornette's "Dancing in
Your Head" theme. Or take "The Sicilian Clan" (from The Godfather)
by another Zorn fave, spaghetti-Westerner Ennio Morricone: here it
curls up in a cocktail lounge with a cheesy Farfisa organ out of "Tel-
star." Then there are Zorn's originals: raging grungers like "Ham-
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 A Star Is Made

merhead" and mutant cartoon memories like "Snagglepuss," skewed

beach-blanket-bingos like "Batman" and infectious r&b party-downs
like "Latin Quarter," each produced to mimic its genre's classic sound.
Think of Zorn as a rapid-fire dial twirler—the LP has 23 cuts; the CD
and cassette, 26. Part of the listening fun comes in hanging on for dear
life whenever he hits the button. Catch your breath when you
can. [1990]

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63
A Star Is Made
When altoist/composer Steve Coleman hitchhiked from his native
South Side Chicago to New York, on May 22, 1978, a couple of months
short of his 22nd birthday, he didn't bring much with him except a
saxophone and a game plan. He still had the radio-transcription record-
ing of Charlie Parker his father, a Bird fanatic, had slipped into his
suitcase when Steve left for Illinois Wesleyan four years earlier. And he
carried his own addiction to blues and funk and Coltrane, some tunes
he'd been playing with different bands in Chicago, a consuming curi-
osity about the Apple's music scene, and a fierce desire to burn to the
heart of it.
And that was about it. Even his game plan was simple and lean. The
$150 in his pocket was enough to cover his room at the Vanderbilt Y on
East 47th Street for a while—he'd dialed New York City information
from Chicago to get the address of the YMCA closest to the center of
town—since rates ran $10 a day ($11 if you wanted a room with a TV,
which he didn't). It turned out to be a pretty close to ideal location—
until he got kicked out for practicing on the roof.
Every morning he'd grab some breakfast on his way to the corner of
50th and Broadway, where he parked himself in front of the tall black
skyscraper in Paramount Plaza and rolled out pop tunes like "Alfie" and
"Mr. Bojangles" and hits by Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack that
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 Dancing in Your Head

brought in the spare change. He'd pull in about $30 a day, drop some of
it for dinner at the Tad's Steaks down the block, then hop on the IRT
and head downtown to haunt the Village's jazz spots.
Early August 1988, and the phone rings in Coleman's Brooklyn
apartment. It's Herbie Hancock's people; they want him on the tour the
keyboardist was planning for fall. It's tempting. Prestige. Good expo-
sure. Very good money: the weekly salary Hancock's tour would offer is
several times what he can make leading his own group. But it's out of the
question. Coleman politely but firmly refuses.
He has his own plans for the fall. His first major-label album, sine
die, has been getting favorable reviews since its release in June. He and
his band, Five Elements, have booked time in the studio in September
to record the follow-up to sine die before hitting the road themselves,
starting with a gig at the Knitting Factory on October 8 and 9. And in
December Coleman will make his debut in the Brooklyn Academy of
Music's Next Wave Festival, leading a 16-piece big band in two concerts
billed as "M-BASE Jams at BAM." So money or no, prestige or no, it's a
question of commitment—and if there's one thing Coleman possesses,
it's commitment to his music. He can be so focused and single-minded
about it, in fact, that he can drive even the folks working with him either
to distraction or to opposition. So the outcome of the phone call with
Hancock isn't very surprising.
But it does measure how far Steve Coleman has come in the jazz
world's estimation over the decade since he arrived in New York. It's a
long way from playing for chump change on the street and living at the
Y to laudatory features in the New York Times's Arts & Leisure section
and touring with Sting. And while Steve Coleman isn't exactly looking
to buy Trump Tower, he's certainly got a lot more options than he had
even a year ago.
Unlike the pop world—where the right record and the right video can
take an artist from obscurity to international stardom in less than a year
(see Tracy Chapman)—jazz stars aren't made every day. When it hap-
pens, it's because of a gradual convergence of elements: talent (of
course), paid-up dues, connections, a new voice, press buzz. Steve
Coleman's got all those. He's an exciting and thoughtful sax player. And
in his compositions, jazz, African concepts, and funk snake in a double
helix that creates a new idiom. He's apprenticed with masters, and he's
attracted a like-minded cadre of explorers who agreed the scene was ripe
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 A Star Is Made

for change: keyboardist Geri Allen (to whom he was briefly married),
trumpeter Graham Haynes, altoist Greg Osby, drummer Marvin
"Smitty" Smith, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, guitarist Vernon Reid.
Tipped off by the European-released albums and the grapevine, the
press picked upon this group and dubbed them "the Brooklyn crew," a
designation that makes Coleman grumble. "We just live here because
we can't afford to live in Manhattan," he says. "It's not like there's some
52nd Street-type scene happening out here. There aren't even any
clubs."
More important than their mailing address is what these musicians
share conceptually, the musical idiom they call M-BASE. Coleman
grabs listeners with a muscular sound that reflects the Zeitgeist. Like
most emerging players his age, Coleman was raised on pop culture: an
early fascination with science-fiction and comic books, a later passion
for computer technology, and always rock and roll—in his case, funk
stylists from Stevie Wonder to George Clinton. His earliest outings as a
fledgling musician were in South Side funk bands; his hero was Maceo
Parker, the alto titan who wails on the greatest hits of James Brown. But
the jazz tradition also shaped Coleman. His father's gentle persistence
converted him to the Bird cult, and he got tuned on to Coltrane once he
began playing with jazz bands like Von Freeman's in Chicago. Seeking
a territory for himself that could encompass all these influences and
others he'd picked up along the way—African polyrhythms, rap's
punch, kung-fu soundtracks—is what Coleman and M-BASE are all
about.
The search for this sound is what brought Coleman to New York.
Playing on the street and sitting in at jam sessions in downtown lofts led
Coleman into club work. The Chicago connection helped. Chico Free-
man, Von's son, brought Coleman down to tenor great Sam Rivers's
Bond Street loft not long after his arrival; Rivers liked what he heard,
and soon Coleman found himself playing lead alto in Rivers's swagger-
ing big band. Bassist Dave Holland, a veteran of Miles Davis's Bitches
Brew band who was in Rivers's Big Band at the same time, recalls that
the young altoist distinguished himself: "Sam never said much, so it was
very much up to the players to catch what the phrasing should be. Steve
was really quick about that."
A gig like that, in jazz terms, can be like the outside ring of a spider
web—for the skillful player with any ambition, one strand leads to
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 Dancing in Your Head

another. There are traps, to be sure; some get stuck as perennial side-
men, some push too hard and burn out. Building on personal loyalties
and staying away from the perils of substance abuse, Coleman began
working his way to the center. At Rivers's rehearsal studio in the West
30s, he met five-string cellist Muneer Abdul Fataah, a big, muscle-
bound, furry-bearded Muslim whose hypnotic atonal compositions
captivated him. Muneer introduced Coleman to drummer Doug Ham-
mond, and the trio—sometimes with Coleman's fellow Chicago em-
igre^ guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly and bassist Lonnie Plaxico—began
playing around Harlem, mostly at a hole-in-the-wall West 125th Street
loft called Zola's or tiny clubs like Lickety Split at West 137th and Adam
Clayton Powell Boulevard. They made demo tapes on a cheap cassette
deck in the Harlem basement of a friend's house. It was this group that
in 1982 began to attract the charter members of M-BASE, younger
players like Haynes and Allen, to Coleman's ideas. His zeal for probing
other musicians' gifts matches his own inner drive. That, and the inten-
sity of his sound, made converts like Osby and Wilson.
The Hammond-Muneer-Coleman trio evolved into the first version
of Five Elements, and Coleman got a taste of leading a band. They
made a studio tape and took it around to clubs. RT Firefly, a punk-rock
venue on Bleecker Street, was on their hit list. When the hooker asked
Coleman what kind of music his band played, the altoist shot back,
"What kind of music do you want? Punk-rock? That's what it is." When
the booker listened to the tape, he loved it: "Sounds great. A couple of
tunes remind me of jazz, but you can just leave those out of the set." It
was a strategy that set the scene for introducing M-BASE to the music
world. Whatever flavor club owners asked for—free jazz, rock, bebop—
Coleman assured them he could deliver. He got away with it because he
redefined what they thought they wanted to hear and left them begging
for more.
When Hammond and Muneer left for Europe in 1982, Coleman
moved to Brooklyn and started getting involved heavily with building a
sense of musical and political community. Younger black players began
getting together to share strategies to overcome racism, indifference, and
artistic conservatism in the music industry. The Musicians' Referral
Agency, which started out as a jobs bulletin board with political over-
tones, evolved quickly into a revolutionary jazz workshop. While the
typical jazz workshop (whether informal master classes with the likes of
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 A Star Is Made

Max Roach or an impromptu group reading big-band charts) focuses on

problems of intepretation and improvisation, this workshop set different
goals, more like the famed Mingus workshops, where the maestro forged
new musical ideas from the creative heat of the interaction among
musicians.
A basement on Sterling Street was headquarters for this Monday
afternoon workshop. "That way we didn't bother the working people,"
notes Coleman, "and we had a real homey atmosphere." (Five Ele-
ments still rehearses there.) Whether 4 or 40 players showed up, the
process remained fairly constant. Rather than recycle classics like
"Nefertiti" or "Groovin" High" all day, the key participants (Coleman,
Smith, Allen, and Haynes) decided to explore and build on their own
musical ideas.
The workshop spurred Coleman's rapidly evolving ideas and honed
his developing leadership skills. But other gigs paid the rent: a slot with
the Cecil Taylor Big Band, the alto spot in David Murray's Octet and
Big Band, a Far Eastern tour with Rivers's sax ensemble Winds of
Manhattan. A turning point came in 1984. Bassist Holland was recover-
ing from a heart ailment: at a benefit for him Coleman turned up at,
Holland talked about putting a band together to tour and record, and he
wanted Coleman in on it. Coleman shrugged mentally; that kind of talk
is SOP among musicians, and doesn't necessarily lead to anything. A
couple of days later, though, he picked up his phone to find Holland's
trace-of-an-English-accent on the other end asking, "Why don't you
come up to my house here in Saugerties for a couple of days. We can
jam and play some tunes, feel each other out, see how we'd work in a
band." The sessions went off so well that Holland asked Coleman if he
knew any hip young drummers to recommend. Coleman brought Mar-
vin "Smitty" Smith, a Zola regular whose drumming conveyed an Afri-
can sense of interlocking rhythmic parts. The chemistry's been so suc-
cessful that they're still working together.
Most people have no idea how difficult it is for an aspiring mu-
sician—especially a jazz musician—to get demos heard at a record
company when he's got no track record. The albums Coleman began
cutting with Holland for ECM, and the continental tours the group did
to promote them, put him on the European musical map. When Stefan
Wynter, then engineer for enja and now head of his own JMT label, first
heard of Coleman, the altoist was still paying his journeyman's dues,
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 Dancing in Your Head

doing a studio session in New York for flugelhornist Franco Ambrosetti.

Sitting in the control booth while the tapes rolled, Wynter got smacked
by the bluesy tone that had escaped vinyl until then. The way he recalls
it, "I'd heard his stuff with Dave Holland on ECM and liked it, but the
sound of his saxophone live was like the feeling you get on your back
during a cold shower—that was what attracted me to him initially."
After listening to the Five Elements demo tape, Matthias Winckel-
man, Wynter's boss at enja, wanted Coleman but not the context he'd
been developing. Like many self-described purists, Wincklemann then
(he's changed his tune now) refused to accept electric instruments in a
jazz context. Yet electronics are obviously crucial to the postwar genera-
tion's notion of sound, from Buddy Holly to Michael Jackson, and that's
the very group Coleman targets. "Too many jazz musicians talk about
how they want to make music that's all for the head," he says. "They
don't want people to understand it, like that's hip. I want my music to
reach people in every way. I want to give them something for their
bodies and something for their minds."
Coleman won a compromise: he could pick his own band, but it had
to play acoustic. It was from the M-BASE pool of talent that Coleman
drew his collaborators for his 1985 album, Motherland Pulse. When
Winckelmann decided he didn't want the album, Stefan Winter used it
to launch his own label; Coleman and Five Elements cut two subse-
quent albums for him, On the Edge of Tomorrow and World Expansion.
But small European labels, however loyal to the music, can't back
musicians with the distribution muscle of a major multinational like
CBS or Warner Bros. Coleman, like most musicians, wanted to see his
records available beyond New York and a handful of hip record bou-
tiques around the country. Sure, his records might continue to sell on
the 10,000-unit range, a handsome figure for labels accustomed to sell-
ing 2000 copies or less of most titles. But that's still a fraction of what
Wynton Marsalis, powered by the world's biggest jazz label (CBS), sells.
So while Coleman continued his handshake deal with JMT, he began
shopping his next demo around at American jazz labels to see if he
could land a deal.
That was why mid-1987 found him walking into the midtown office
of Pangaea Records, the label created by Sting that is distributed via
MCA's huge pipeline. Despite its marketing motto, "Creative Anar-
chy," Pangaea's greeting was chilly. Pangaea president Christine Reed
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 A Star Is Made

barely looked up from her desk when she took his tape—not unlike any
major label's attitude toward a young, relatively unknown jazz-based
player. But unpromising as that brief encounter seemed, it planted
seeds. On a brief teaching stint at Banff College in Alberta, Canada,
Coleman got a message from New York that a Christine Reed had called
and could he please call her back. As he puts it, "That wasn't enough for
me to call long distance." Two days later, the message was more urgent:
"I've played your tape for Sting; we both love it. Please call right away.
Don't talk to anybody else until you talk to us." He didn't, but he did
hire a lawyer and begin the serious negotiations that resulted, nearly five
months later, in a record contract.
Meanwhile, Branford Marsalis, Coleman's neighbor in Fort Greene,
couldn't make the Brazilian leg of Sting's tour accompanying his latest
album . . . . Nothing like the Sun. So Marsalis recommended Cole-
man to the ex-Policeman. Nobody told Steve, though. When the phone
rang in his Fort Greene apartment in November 1987 and the caller
said, "This is Sting," he figured it was Osby, who loves practical jokes.
STING: "I'd like to ask you to join the tour I'm going to be doing
starting in January, because Branford can't make it."
COLEMAN: "Aw, c'mon, Greg, cut it out, man."
STING: "Greg?"
COLEMAN: "Okay, man, you've had your fun."
And so on, until the Laurel-and-Hardy routine got straightened out.
COLEMAN: "I don't want a gig where I'm supposed to play just like some-
body else, whether it's Branford or David Sanborn or any-
body."
STING: "The reason I'm hiring these musicians for this band is that I
want all of your input. I could hire anybody to read charts—I
want people who can interpret creatively and rearrange
where it makes sense."
It was a deal. Coleman packed his alto in its case and headed up to
the heavily trafficked SIR rehearsal studios, pretour launching pad for
the likes of David Bowie. The photo tacked up on his wall—Coleman in
a Trouble Funk T-shirt and a bare-chested Sting clutching a soccer ball
backsage at their Rio gig with famed Brazilian vocalist Milton
Nascimento—tells one side of the tale, the glamorous life. But Coleman
got work done, too. The sinuous "First Sunrise" on sine die grew out of

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 Dancing in Your Head

it, written on the plane ride back from the Rio beaches, where Coleman
says, "People there walk to that kind of groove—that's why I wrote it."
Written partly during Sting's tour, recorded right afterward at Sys-
tems Two studio in Brooklyn, sine die not only introduced Coleman to
the major-label music leagues but also closed a kind of circle: its stutter-
ing, funkified opener, "Destination," features Coleman and Branford
Marsalis romping through tag-team solos.
August 1988, and Coleman's back in the city after three days' fishing
on a Minnesota lake with his father. He's sunburned and wired up
already: meetings, meetings, meetings. There's the promo taping for
VH-1, interviews and PR pit stops to push his latest album, the page
proofs from a Steve Coleman songbook that need comparing and check-
ing. Not to mention rehearsals, studio dates, the BAM gig.
But tonight is computer-nut night. In the back rehearsal room at
Martin Audio, a studio on West 55th Street, the weekly meeting of a
music-computer group is gradually subsiding from friendly hubbub to
attentiveness. Coleman's up on the small stage with his pal and co-
programmer Joe Ravo, and they're snaking coils of wire from one com-
puter to another to ready Coleman's demonstration of a futuristic piece
of software he's spent three years designing. The program does what
many musicians can't: fed a chord sequence, it improvises over it,
logically and musically, in two variants of Coleman's own alto attack.
Bugs crop up in the studio's gear, the audience buzzes, the duo
onstage works frantically. Finally the demonstrations, and gasps of as-
tonishment mingle with looks of incomprehension. Terms fly around
the room: Pythagoras' Golden Section, Symmetry, the Fibonacci se-
quence, machine language, MIDI and SMPTE. "My concept of a
computer," he tells the 50 or so programmers in his best Jack Benny
deadpan, "used to be Lost in Space—y'know, 'Danger, danger, dan-
ger.'"
When the meeting's finally broken up, an hour past its usual end-
point, the inevitable knot of questioners tails him down nearly to the
D train before he lugs his heavy synthesizer-sax back home to
Brooklyn. [1988]

294
 chaptere 64
Master of Tributes
"I always felt I ended up producing records because it was convenient,"
says Hal Willner in his characteristically offhanded way. "It could have
been anything else. I'm not really in any one musical world. Music
coming from a social place isn't where I come from—kids getting to-
gether. I'm someone who sees music as a book, something you do at
night when no one else is around. Or an extension of film."
That perspective has made Willner well suited for his groundbreak-
ing series of "tribute" albums that use a wide range of often unlikely
musicians to reimagine disparate sounds: Amarcord Nino Rota, Lost in
the Stars (Kurt Weill), That's the Way I Feel Today (Thelonious Monk),
Stay Awake (Walt Disney cartoon soundtracks; all on A&M), and Weird
Nightmare (Columbia), a Charles Mingus outing. But he's also pro-
duced albums like Marianne Faithful's comeback, Strange Weather
(Island); in addition, he was music director of TV's lamented Night
Music, and provides musical atmosphere for Saturday Night Live.
The bulk of the Mingus dates were in late spring at Astoria's Master
Sound studio with Willner's "house band"—Bill Frisell, Don Byron,
Art Baron, Greg Cohen, Michael Blair, Don Alias, and Francis
Thumm. Guest artists like Henry Threadgill, Vernon Reid, and Robert
Quine came in with agreed-on songs that they'd reconceptualized; after
explaining their ideas to Willner and Cohen, who was functioning as pit
boss, the guests led the sessions. Willner said almost nothing when
things were going well—which was most of the time. When they
weren't, he found tactful ways around impasses. Low-key and laid-back
but clearly in control, he provided the overall frame of vision. When the
ideas of those he'd asked aboard the project struck that frame, creative
sparks flew.
But before the Mingus album came out in late 1992, he released an
atypical offshoot of his tribute series, The Carl Stalling Project (Warner
Bros.). Stalling was one of American culture's classic eccentric geniuses.
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 Dancing in Your Head

An organist who accompanied silent movies in Kansas City, Stalling

met a young animator named Walt Disney. When Disney came up with
"Steamboat Willie," one of the first sound cartoons, he turned to Stal-
ling for the music. Using the markings animator Ub Iwerks made on the
film to act as a metronome, Stalling crafted the screwball musical effects
that would become his signature. "Steamboat Willie" opened on No-
vember 18, 1928; an instant smash, like The Jazz Singer, it guaranteed
the end of silent animation. Stalling was Disney's music director until
1930, creating "The Silly Symphonies" series when he-suggested using
Edward Grieg's "March of the Dwarfs" for a cartoon graveyard goof.
Then Stalling moved to Iwerks's MGM-distributed cartoon studio,
which boasted the now forgotten Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper.
But in 1936, he was hired by Warner Bros, animation producer Leon
Schlesinger; he stayed at that studio until he retired in 1958. Working
from the huge trove of popular tunes Warner owned, with a full orches-
tra for recording whenever he needed and sometimes only a few days to
compose for a new six- or seven-minute cartoon, he raised the sound-
track to an art form.
The Carl Stalling Project proves it. After you've listened for a few
minutes, even if you're a Looney Tunes fanatic you forget the images
flickering in your head to concentrate on the zany jumpcut sounds.
Stalling brilliantly sliced and diced music history and salted it with wit:
his often weird voicings and delightfully knowing parodies cut with
vaudevillian timing.
Says Willner,
I think the album works historically and on a fun level. There are the
montages, and a few complete cartoon tracks to break things up. It's a
78-minute album you can get through without going crazy. "Hillbilly
Hare," which opens it, is the typical Warner Bros, sound without ef-
fects. Then we went right into early Stalling—the montage from his
first scores. Then "The Good Egg," which is not a very good cartoon
but a great score. Then a typical Bugs Bunny medley. Then we started
jumping all over the place: that complete Roadrunner score, "There
They Go Go Go." Unbelievable. Then we end with "Porky in Wacky-
land," one of the most popular scores.
The events that hatched the album began in 1985, when producer
Mary Salter called Willner about The Looney Tunes 50th Anniversary
Special. Salter and executive producer Lome Michaels knew him from

296
 Master of Tributes

Saturday Night Live, where he scores sketches with old music. Accord-
ing to Willner,
Obviously I knew who Carl Stalling was: I'd spent a lot of time at the
old Thalia Monday night animation festivals. Just watching the stuff
for the show I thought, "I can't do this without the original music.
We've gotta find it." People said, "It doesn't exist." I said, "It has to
exist; how'd they put the cartoons into Italian?" So I pressed, pressed,
pressed. Oh yeah: there are these things called M & E tapes—Music
and Effects, together. So we sat around and picked out 40 cartoons for
the show. Then the tapes showed up. They blew me away. Separated
from the animation, they were incredible—aggressive and quick-
changing, all these emotions packed into a few minutes.
Greg Ford, one of the special's writers, had programmed the festivals
Willner haunted at New York's old Thalia theater. When the duo sat
down with the music and effects tracks, which leave off the dialogue but
keep everything Stalling wrote, Willner had not only what the show
needed but another idea.
He recalls,
The idea of a record fit something I'd had in my head a long time. So
I let Lome and Mary know. Greg made two shorts for Warners, "The
Duxorcist" and "Night of the Living Duck." We did that together.
Meanwhile Rich Gehr, who works for Warners Animation, came
across these four boxes labelled "music tracks," which had about 20
minutes of complete music sessions from four cartoons, like "Hillbilly
Hare." Alternate takes, everything. We used a lot of those for "Night
of the Living Duck," which opened the New York Film Festival.
Meanwhile, more vaults were opened, and more tapes were found.
I think we've got just about all of it now: Stalling's last score, for in-
stance. Other record companies were interested, but I wanted it at
Warner Bros. Partly that's because I wanted to appeal to the largest
possible audience: everybody should be able to get into this somehow.
It took some brutal work to ensure that accessibility. Willner con-
tinues,
Greg went through and picked out what he thought were the best
scores: there were about 250 seven-minute soundtracks to choose from.
So I went to California for a week—it was like going cold turkey. Put
myself in a Santa Monica hotel by the ocean and listened to 250 car-
toon soundtracks, taking notes. After listening to 60, the obsession with

297
 Dancing in Your Head

the music was over. After 90, I wanted to die. But then Greg came
out, and we mapped out the record.
Originally it was going to be Stalling in chronological order. Instead
it got more like the other albums I've done, became a little journey. I
came up with the idea of the jungle scenes, Greg latched onto the anx-
iety montage idea. We picked out the parts we liked and built these
montages over a week; our first edit came to about 110 minutes. CDs
can only fit about 78. The cassette is actually longer than the album:
"Stupor Duck" isn't on the CD.
Stalling blithely ignored divisions between high and low culture, so
besides being fun, listening to The Carl Stalling Project is like hearing
music history and your own past collide in front of a funhouse mirror.
As John Zorn—who was initially slated to co-produce the album with
Willner—writes in his liner notes, "[This] will go a long way to elevating
Stalling to his rightful position as one of America's great composers.
Like Charles Ives, a true original. A visionary who created the music
most of us were weaned on. The music of our subconscious." [1990]

chapter 65
The Big Apple Avant-garde
The last few years have brought a spate of stories in the mainstream press
about jazz's alleged resurgence. Writers like Tom Piazza have spot-
lighted young musicians who have dug back into hard bop for their
inspiration. But while they've been recycling the past, others have been
scoping out possible futures for the collection of improvisatory languages
we lump together as jazz.
Piazza and his ilk are right about one thing: it's a rare and exciting
time in jazz. But they're right for reasons they can't appreciate. Rules
and concepts are being discarded and reworked, and the results are
revitalizing musicians and audiences alike. One center of creative fer-
ment is the so-called downtown New York scene—a misleading label.

298
 The Big Apple Avant-garde

The scene's influences are as varied as its players. There's Monk's

notion of space and close-interval angularity. There's Mingus's Rabelai-
sian sprawl and eagerness to redefine the relationship between composi-
tion and improvisation. There's Ornette's melodic emphasis, discarding
of bebop's cycle-of-chords cage, and transformation of funk into harmo-
lodics. There are the expansive sonic idioms pioneered by Miles, Ayler,
Trane, and Dolphy. There are the early, heady fusion of Weather
Report and off-the-wall melanges of Captain Beefheart. There are slick
Motown backbeats and fatback Stax-Volt soul, the jazz-tinged funk of
James Brown and the satiric cartoon sci-fi of Parliament-Funkadelic.
There's game theory, post-Viennese atonality, spaghetti-Western and
kung-fu soundtracks, African-derived slants on polyrhythmic interde-
pendence, and post-punk savagery.
Nearly all of these concepts were fed through the AACM and BAG,
musicians' cooperatives formed in the '60s in Chicago and St. Louis.
They combined and extended idioms in ways that sparked the loft-jazz
and no-wave scenes of the '70s and early '80s, when they effectively
transferred headquarters to the Apple. Composer/performers like Muhal
Richard Abrams, Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill are still active around
town, both as working musicians (somewhat sporadically) and mentors.
The younger players are no less difficult to categorize, because they
emphasize jazz's traditional freedom of choice, the right to synthesize a
musical language from whatever shards of the past you choose. So John
Zorn furiously jumpcuts soundbites with Dadaist aggressiveness and an
eye toward TV attention spans. Tim Berne slamdunks postpunk noise,
soul-music alto, and Ornette into an urban-hipster argot. Bill Frisell
bleeds post-apocalypse raunch into a keening pedal-steel longing for a
big sky. Wayne Horvitz swirls The Band and Monk and Sonny Clark
together. Marty Ehrlich jumps off from Muhal and Braxton.
M-BASErs Steve Coleman and Greg Osby combine different
branches of funk and jazz in drastically diverse ways. Cassandra Wilson
updates Ella and Betty Carter with angular originals and dramatically
recast standards. Geri Allen's piano enfolds Ellington through Monk up
to Cecil Taylor and Andrew Hill, while her compositions rove around
the world. As do Bobby Previte's, which shuffle Nigerian juju, Moroc-
can rai, and Elvin Jones. Countless others like Don Byron, Matt Shipp,
Craig Harris, Michelle Rosewoman, Michael Formanek, Thomas
Chapin, Mark Helias, Joey Baron, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway,
299
 Dancing in Your Head

Graham Haynes, Gary Thomas, Andy Laster, Ivo Perelman, Curlew,

and New Winds'scramble new ideas.
For all the scene's musical openness and promising vitality, there are
a couple of disturbing undercurrents, like the tendency among some
black and white players to put unirace bands together. Unfortunately,
only part of the reason is musical. And then there's getting work in the
clubs.
"Scene" is a theatrical metaphor that implies a staging area. When
the Knitting Factory opened in 1986, the loft scene was long dead and
sonic explorers were relegated mostly to grants-funded venues like the
Kitchen and Roulette. For all their virtues as sheltered labs, such show-
cases have the disadvantages of those virtues: drawing the already con-
verted, they rarely expand the cutting edge's audiences.
According to Knitting Factory co-owner Michael Dorf, they have
other drawbacks too:
Often it seems like the motivation, the whole way of presenting music
when it's done from a nonprofit perspective, is different from at least
trying to break even. I have to worry about getting decent attendance
and a way to pay the groups I book based on the market, rather than
just aesthetic or political reasons—although those things definitely en-
ter into the formula. But nonprofit spaces just keep trying to get bigger
budgets so they can spend 'em and lose 'em. That's great; it's like get-
ting a major gift and blowing it on CDs and then giving them away.
But it seems to me you could take that money and put on the same
thing and at least come out with what you went in with, and still have
the shows be great.
The Knitting Factory's policy of booking college-radio rockers,
downtown pioneers, and outside jazzers (like Braxton and Taylor) that
no mainstream club would touch created a stage the fragmentary van-
guards and their overlapping audiences could call home. Its critical and
PR success—it's still skating on thin financial ice—helped lead other
Apple clubs to broaden their booking policies. Visiones puts downtown
types in a few times a month. The Time Cafe, which recently opened a
club in its basement, plans to offer the likes of Perelman and Chapin
and Berne. And the venerable Village Vanguard has begun showcasing
young 'uns like Frisell and Allen. Max Gordon's widow Lorraine follows
talent old and new: "I listen to all kinds of music, and bring in individ-
uals I like and that I think the room will embrace—it's got a ghostly
300
 The Big Apple Avant-garde

mind of its own, and can be very obstinate. I love Bill and Geri, and so
does the room."
Meanwhile, an outgrowth of the London acid-jazz scene has been
struggling in the basement of the Metropolis Cafe, an upscale Union
Square eatery. Every Thursday after midnight DJs jam with live musi-
cians as the audience dances to jazz. It's early days yet: the musicians
and DJs, who change week to week, vary wildly in ability. But execs like
Antilles's Brian Bacchus and Blue Note's Matt Pierson are enthusiastic
about this idea's prospects for expanding jazz's audience.
"It's not a jazz scene," notes Bacchus.
But it's a gas to watch kids dancing, whether it's to Trane records or a
DJ putting grooves under a live sax quartet. One problem is the level
of improvisers. In the U.S. we're used to a higher quality of jazz musi-
cianship. I think it needs support from the industry: bring down artists,
bring down vinyl. The DJs are spinning really hip stuff, and with the
right musicians there could be a real explosion. The most important
thing is that clubgoers get opened up to music they've never heard be-
fore, and so the music gets a shot at reaching a new audience.

The major U.S. labels have barely started to touch a lot of the most
creative stuff spilling off these stages. (Most so-called avant-garde re-
leases are on small labels, often European or Japanese.) In fact, until
recently the majors' jazz divisions have seemed remarkably unwilling to
invest in cultivating these small but rabid-out-of-proportion-to-their-
numbers audiences. It's remarkable because the majors' rock arms are
doing just that with college-radio bands, for instance, by the score.
Using the analogy with broadcast and cable TV, rock execs have realized
that their marketplace is fragmentary and cultish; that only a few block-
busters can sell across the listening spectrum; and that luring buyers back
into the stores means narrowly targeting their tastes.
BMG's Steve Backer sees the selling of jazz's vanguards as part of a
larger historical cycle that is coming around once again:

We signed Steve Coleman about two years ago. I felt that as we got
into this decade, the sociology I think this type of music follows would
allow us to record more adventurous and less in-the-pocket type music.
The '80s were ultraconservative: yuppie-ism, investment bankers, New
Age, all that. The first six months of this decade, on the other hand,
were about enormous change all over the world, things that nobody

301
 Dancing in Your Head

expected to happen. It's like the '60s, with the Vietnam war and black
power, when people were buying Trane and Shepp. If the music fol-
lows the sociology, then more adventurous and difficult music can be
embraced a bit more than in conservative times.

Blue Note's Matt Pierson agrees, and feels that younger artists can
bridge several audiences because of the breadth of their influences.
"People like Osby and Coleman and Allen were brought up on the
Stylistics and P-Funk. What they are doing is putting out the black
American music experience; it's not just jazz," he insists. "It's very
sophisticated music, but it presents itself in a way that isn't lofty or
arcane. This is a really good time for that, because I think boundaries
are opening up all over again now."
If the reins that have been holding in jazz execs' creative license are
the majors' armies of bean counters, the blinders that have been keeping
the accountants happy are the massive reissue programs, which gener-
ally account for well over 50 percent of major-label releases. It's wonder-
ful to have all these vintage recordings available again. (It's ironic, of
course, that it took the CD's higher profitability to push the majors into
opening up the vaults.) But it can also mean that when a major-label
jazz exec looks at his current roster (no, no women run major jazz
divisions), he may well want continuity with his catalog. That way, to
some extent he has a pre-sold market. From this perspective, the ongo-
ing corporate (and corresponding press) push behind the hard-bop reviv-
alists has a certain logic.
Blue Note executive Michael Cuscuna disagrees:
We don't look at scenes; we look at individuals. We want the range of
what's out there pretty well represented. Each month we release three
new things and six reissues. We separate them by two weeks. We don't
want a new artist to be treated by the stores as a reissue; they have to
have more attention and be sold differently. Besides, reissues don't sell
as much as people might think. Aside from the obvious exceptions,
they only sell within the five to ten thousand range.

Of course, the overhead involved in prepping a reissue is a fraction of

a new release's. And it's hard to deny that right down to the dress code,
the neo-hard hoppers look like the covers of reissues their music
mimics. What's behind the logic of that presentation is shortchanging
jazz's future.
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 The Big Apple Avant-garde

The majors dominate distribution and retail like never before, so it's
not enough to shrug that jazz's cutting edge has always relied on indies.
Given the largely conservative lockstep of the majors, retail, radio, and
most club and festival booking policies, jazz's new idioms have to work
harder than ever—and be luckier than ever—to find their audiences. It
could only help if the majors reinvest even a small percentage of their
reissue profits in what they see as marginal sounds. Some of those
sounds are heralding the music's next directions. [1990]

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Index

AACM (Association for the Advance- Booker, James HI, 32

ment of Creative Musicians), 173, Braxton, Anthony, 243-48
178, 179-80, 244-45, 252, 299 Brown, James, 18-24, 104, 122, 165,
Abrams, Muhal Richard, 173, 174-75, 228, 299
176, 178-79, 179-80, 218, 244, 299 Burke, Solomon, 15
Adler, Jerry, 122-23 Byrd, Henry Roeland. See Professor
Aleman, Oscar, 199-201 Longhair
Allen, Geri, 142, 263-65, 267-70, 299 Byron, Don, 141-42, 299
Allman, Duane, 60, 66—67
American Jazz Orchestra, 188 Gale, John, 91, 93
Atkins, Chet, 210 Carrasco, Joe King, 95-96
Ayler, Albert, 256, 299 Carter, John, 182-83, 218
Carter, Ron, 146, 148, 149, 168, 169
Bacchus, Brian, 301 Charles, Ray, 14-15
Backer, Steve, 301-2 Charters, Sam, 128-29
Baron, Joey, 275, 280, 299 Chenier, Clifton, 29
Beatles, 152 Cherry, Don, 132, 139, 143
Beausoleil, 30 Christian, Charlie, 198-99, 202-3,
Beck, Jeff, 70-85, 205, 206, 207 205
Belgrave, Marcus, 268-69 Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour), 118-24
Benedetti, Dean, 221-22 Clapton, Eric, 7, 9, 60-70, 72-73, 86,
Berne, Tim, 141, 271, 273-75, 276-77, 206
277-78, 278-79, 279-80, 285, 299 Cleveland, James, 16
Berry, Chuck, 100, 103 Coates, Dorothy Love, 17
Black Artists Group (BAG), 280, 281, Cole, Nat "King," 40, 42, 165, 194-97,
299 202, 208
Black Rock Coalition (BRC), 108-10 Coleman, Ornette, 20, 89, 131-38,
Blackwell, Ed, 132, 138-43 143, 165, 285, 286, 299
Blank, Les, 30, 31, 128 Coleman, Steve, 140-41, 287-94
Bloom, Allan, 179, 187, 188 Collier, James Lincoln, 190, 214-17
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, 104 Collins, Albert, 285

305
 Index

Coltrane, John, 89, 146-47, 165, 167- Ford, Mary, 206-7, 209-10, 212,
68, 250, 268, 299 213
Cooke, Sam, 15, 16-17, 27, 42 Franklin, Aretha, 15
Country Music Foundation, 51 Frisell, Bill, 263, 265-66, 270-72,
Cox, Anthony, 140, 141, 142, 143 273-77, 299
Crispell, Marilyn, 246 Fugs, 104
Crosby, Bing, 100, 196, 208
Cuscuna, Michael, 302 Garcia, Jerry, 89-90, 205
Georgia, Tom. See Dorsey, Thomas
Dannen, Frederic, 97-98 Gibbs, Melvin, 276
Davis, Anthony, 141 Giddins, Gary, 132, 167, 191
Davis, Rev. Gary, 14 Gilmore, John, 230-31, 232
Davis, Miles, 20, 89, 114, 133-34, 144- Golden Eagles, 31
50, 150-60, 160-63, 163-72, 262, Goodman, Benny, 101, 186-89
299 Gospel Singers Convention, 15
Dennis, John, 173-75, 178-79, 179-81 Grappelli, Stephane, 204, 205
Denselow, Robin, 99-102 Grateful Dead, 86, 89-90, 128, 133,
Derek and the Dominos, 60—70 228
Dirty Dozen Brass Band, 32 Green, Rev. Al, 15, 16, 24-28,
Dorf, Michael, 258-59, 300 111
Dorsey, Thomas, 15—16 Green, Freddie, 202
Doucet, Michael, 30 Griff, Professor, 119-20
Dowd, Tom, 64-69 Griffith, Nanci, 55, 56-57
Dreja, Chris, 73 Guralnick, Peter, 5, 9,"lO-ll, 12
Dresser, Mark, 141, 275, 279, 280, 299
Driggs, Frank, 4-5, 8 Haden, Charlie, 132, 143
Driscoll, Kermit, 175 Hammond, Doug, 290
Du Bois, W.E.B., 12-13 Hancock, Herbie, 146, 148, 149, 159,
168, 169
Eckstine, Billy, 189 Harris, Craig, 141-42, 299
Ehrlich, Marty, 141, 218, 299 Harris, Rebert, 17
El-Hadi, Sulieman, 113-16 Hay, George, 48
Ellington, Duke, 20, 135, 187, 188-89, Heath, Jimmy, 173-74
190, 214-17, 255, 256, 257, 261-62, Heilbut, Anthony, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18
283 Helias, Mark, 141, 299
Eno, Brian, 125-27, 153 Hemphill, Julius, 142-43, 280
Entertainment industry, 97-98, 101-2, Henderson, Fletcher, 187, 230
105-6, 300-303 Hendrix, Jimi, 61, 104, 114-15, 122,
Evans, Gil, 145, 146, 159, 165, 166, 165, 170, 228
168, 224, 235 Holland, Dave, 140-41, 289,
291
Fender, Leo, 209 Horvitz, Wayne, 299
Firesign Theater, 104, 284 House, Son, 14
Fleming, King, 123, 176-79, 179-81
Foley, Red, 51 Ink Spots, 14

306
 Index

Jackson, Ronald Shannon, 276 Mitchell, Willie, 25, 26, 27

James, Skip, 3-4, 14 Monk, Thelonious, 235, 260-66, 268,
Jeffries, Herb, 189 299
Jeter, Claude, 17 Monroe, Bill, 52
Johnson, Blind Willie, 14 Moore, Oscar, 201-4
Johnson, Robert, 3-9, 9-11, 53 Morgenstern, Dan, 226
Jordan, Edward "Kidd," 183 Morricone, Ennio, 284
Mothers of Invention, 103-4
King, B. B., 45, 50, 205 Motian, Paul, 263-64, 272, 276
King Cole Trio, 195-97, 201 Muneer, Abdul Fataah, 290
Kirk, Rahsaan Roland, 225-27 Murray, David, 218, 252, 254-57
Knepper, Jimmy, 220-25
Knitting Factory, 258-59, 300 Naked City, 286-87
Neville Brothers, 32-33, 36-47, 228
Landry, George, 32, 40, 45-46 New Age, 125-26
Lang, Eddie, 198, 208 Newton, James, 140
lang, k. d., 54-56 Nurridin, Jalaluddin Mansur, 114-16
Lange, Art, 181
Last Poets, 113-16 Osby, Greg, 140, 293, 299
LaVere, Steven, 5-8
Living Colour, 108-12 Page, Jimmy, 72-73, 76, 78, 206, 207
Lock, Graham, 245-46 Professor Longhair, 32
Los Lobos, 95 Parker, Charlie, 8, 162, 165-66, 221-
Lovett, Lyle, 55, 56, 58-60 22, 250-51, 262-63, 287
Lynn, Loretta, 52 Parker, Maceo, 289
Partch, Harry, 136, 165, 166
M-BASE, 140, 288, 290-92, Patton, Charley, 14
299 Paul, Les, 71, 131, 151, 206-11, 211-13
Macero, Teo, 150, 153-56, 170 Pickett, Wilson, 15
Malcolm X, 120-21 Pierson, Matt, 302
Marsalis, Branford, 143, 293-94 Powell, Bud, 262
Marsalis, Wynton, 135, 161, 244-45, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, 192-93
255, 267 Previte, Bobby, 141, 299
Marsh, Dave, 19 Public Enemy, 20, 117-24
Martin, George, 81, 82 Pullen, Don, 142
Martin, Sallie, 15, 17
McCarty, Jim, 73 Quine, Robert, 92-93, 284, 285, 295
Meters, 44-45
Metheny, Pat, 272 Redman, Dewey, 143
Miller, Marcus, 156-59 Reed, Lou, 91-94
Mills Brothers, 14 Reid, Vernon, 108, 110-12, 276
Mingus, Charles, 20, 82, 153, 164, Reinhardt, Django, 89, 198-99, 204-6,
165, 175, 218-19, 220-21, 222-25, 208
227, 231, 255, 295, 299 Richards, Keith, 8, 9
Minit Records, 34, 42-43 Ridgley, Tommy, 33

307
 Index

Roach, Max, 173 They Might Be Giants, 103-7

Roberts, Hank, 275, 276-77, 280 Thomas, Irma, 17, 33-35
Roberts, Marcus, 265 Threadgill, Henry, 142, 218, 244, 248-
Robertson, Herb, 139, 141, 275, 279, 53, 299
280 Time Cafe, 300
Rodgers, Jimmie, 50, 51, 53 Toussaint, Allan, 34, 42
Rollins, Sonny, 254 Townsend, Irving, 216
Rose, Cynthia, 21 Tubb, Ernest, 51
Rothschild, Paul, 129
Russell, George, 146 Velvet Underground, 91-92, 104, 133
Russell, Hal, 184
Walker, T-Bone, 201
Sauter, Eddie, 189 Warhol, Andy, 91, 93
Schuller, Gunther, 132, 185-92, 218, Waters, Muddy (McKinley Morgan-
223 field), 4, 9, 14, 53, 250
Scorsese, Martin, 186 Welles, Orson, 137
Shorter, Wayne, 146-47, 149, 168 Wells, Kitty, 52
Smith, Marvin "Smitty," 140-41, 168 Wesley, Fred, 21
Soul Stirrers, 17 Whitehead, Kevin, 120
Spence, Joseph, 14, 128-31 Whitlock, Bobby, 63-64, 68
Stalling, Carl, 277, 295-98 Williams, Cootie, 141
Stern, Leni, 276 Williams, Hank, 42, 51, 52-53, 56
Stewart, Rod, 78-79 Williams, Lucinda, 55, 57-58
Sting (Gordon Sumner), 292-93 Williams, Marion, 18
Structure IV, 142 Williams, Martin, 132, 261
Sturges, Preston, 136—37 Williams, Tony, 146, 149, 168, 169
Sun Ra (Herman Blount), 165, 178, Willner, Hal, 295-98
228-34 Wilson, Cassandra, 289, 299
Wonder, Stevie, 81
Tailgater's Tales, 141-42 Wood, Ron, 77
Tampa Red, 16 World Saxophone Quartet, 142-43, 257
Tapscott, Horace, 181-82
Tatum, Art, 190, 208 Young, Neil, 87-88
Taylor, Cecil, 234-36, 237-43, 264-
65 Zorn, John, 281-85, 286-87, 298, 299
Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 14, 16 Zydeco, 29-30

308