<![CDATA[JEFFRY CUDLIN - MUSIC BLOG]]>Tue, 07 May 2024 01:38:14 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Final Thoughts on "Soul Jazz to Post-Bop to New Thing to Electrically Eclectic"]]>Tue, 21 Jul 2020 11:13:45 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/final-thoughts-on-mix-1-soul-jazz-to-post-bop-to-new-thing-to-electrically-eclectic
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Yesterday marked the end of the mix-and-notes for The Never-Ending J-Card—22 track descriptions shared over the course of four weeks, taking the listener from the early ‘60s soul jazz of Grant Green and Hank Mobley to the early ‘70s sonic freak-outs of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis.
 
If you’re reading this now, and you’ve enjoyed any of the posts: Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to hear the entire playlist in order, as intended—instead of clicking on a bunch of individual YouTube videos—you can find it on Spotify here.
 
I want to emphasize, though, that my introduction to all of these tracks came via physical albums, purchased either on vintage vinyl or used CDs—or, often, both, since the two listening experiences are different, at least to me.
 
Although I’d heard or read about most of these titles in advance of buying them, I didn’t necessarily know what I was getting into until I brought each one home, plopped it into the tray or onto the turntable, and did some dedicated listening.
 
With the advent of streaming services and smart speakers, and the decline of physical media generally, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances dispatch their album collections, dump their stereos at local thrift stores, and happily do all of their future music listening on their iPhones, paying monthly fees for temporary access to data-compressed versions of the music they once loved.
 
I understand the stress that clutter and piles of physical stuff can bring to people’s lives. I also acknowledge that finding the dedicated space and free time for a proper listening room—and the resources to buy and maintain decent stereo equipment—implies a certain amount of privilege.
 
That said: There is no experience quite like physically acquiring music, and hearing it in full digital or analog resolution on a properly set-up two-channel stereo while reading the original printed liner notes.
 
Further, the barriers to the ownership of both music and high-quality stereo gear are, at this point, ridiculously low. Nowadays, with a little persistence, anyone can find entry-level-to-good-quality audiophile gear on Craigslist and build an impressive-sounding two-channel stereo system for under $300.
 
Or for free, even: At this point, I have scooped up piles of gear—including, among other things, a 350-watt Klipsch subwoofer, a pair of German-made Canton home theater speakers, and a perfectly serviceable Technics direct-drive turntable—mostly via Freecycle or Craigslist’s “free” section.
 
I have two 2.1 channel stereos in my house, and a 5.1 channel home theater. The components I’ve actually paid money for in those systems have ranged in price from $15–$75.

If you’re patient, and check the new listings once a day, I promise you can find these deals, too.
 
While the resurgence of interest in vinyl means that new 180-gram reissues will run you in the neighborhood of $18–$28 per record, used records are often available in stores priced between $6–$16.
 
Many back catalog CDs are available new for under $12; used CDs will typically run from $3–$8 a pop, depending on where you’re shopping and how common the title is. (Out-of-print or rare music will cost more.)
 
But here again, people are offloading physical music every day, and with a little patience—and a little luck—you will find boxes of unloved music out there for very little money, or even for free.
 
Sometimes I get asked: Is it worth preserving all this stuff? Will it actually last? Or does it all end up unplayable and in the dumpster anyway?
 
When I was young, my dad tip-toed around his vinyl collection; he’d play each record he purchased exactly once, make a copy on cassette, then play the tape from that point on, only removing the record from the sleeve on very special occasions.
 
The prevailing wisdom at the time was that playing a record damaged it, and that each spin inevitably degraded the sound.
 
Similarly, with the advent of mp3s and streaming, writers rushed to caution about the fragile, fugitive nature of CDs—and offer alarming descriptions of bronzing, CD rot, and other unexpected maladies that supposedly make the format unreliable.
 
The truth is that all objects are always degrading to some extent or another—but that most physical media, if stored in a temperature-stable environment, and not abused or dirtied too much, will probably outlast your ability to enjoy it.
 
People have largely gotten over the notion that each play of a vinyl record destroys it. If you store your records upright, keep them clean—I use a spin cleaner to very occasionally wash records, and a brush to remove stray dust before playing—and properly set up your turntable, you should be good to go.
 
In my library, I have a few dozen CDs manufactured around 1985; all still play perfectly and have no issues that I can see or hear.
 
Any compromised CDs I have owned (and since replaced) were damaged thanks to my own carelessness. I once was a crazy oil painter, and in my desperate grad school days I handled lead-based white paint, turpentine, and some of my favorite CDs bare-handed and simultaneously, thanks. Pro tip: Don't get solvents and varnishes on your music.

I have also loaned CDs to friends who I have to assume enjoyed using them as beer coasters.
 
Just remember: Everyone worries about scratching the playing side, but the label side actually contains the data. Handled only by the edges, and always returned to their cases, your CDs should bear up just fine for many decades.
 
What about the technology? Will you still be able to play this stuff in the future?
 
Turntables are simple mechanical devices, and pretty reliable. You can pick a forty-year-old old one up at a yard sale for $25, clean and oil it, slap on a new cartridge, and aside from some simple routine maintenance and adjustments that you can definitely find someone explaining on YouTube and perform yourself, you will likely be set for continuous listening enjoyment for years to come.
 
I purchased a Sony single-disc CD player in 1993; I have used it for at least an hour every day since then, and have never had it serviced. It still works to this day. I recently purchased a brand new Yamaha CD player for my basement music studio; given my previous experiences with the technology, I assume it will continue working until I’m dead.

If you find speakers from the 1980s or '70s, you may see that the foam gaskets around the woofers have started to fall apart; the sound may also start to get muddy as the capacitors dry out. Kits are available online to glue in new foam surrounds—it's potentially messy work, but takes no special skill. If you have a soldering iron, or a friend who does, re-capping a speaker is not too scary, either...or just avoid buying speakers that are almost as old or older than you.
 
Why bother with all of this? I’m no high-end gear hound, nor am I an engineer, but to the extent that I understand it: Recording engineers have historically worked to create either faithful reproductions or convincing simulations of the experience of being in a particular room, with specific acoustic properties, and hearing a group of musicians arrayed in space and responding to each other.
 
Even if instruments are now sonically isolated in “dead” rooms, or overdubbed, or processed using various effects—even if some of the instruments are electronic, or sampled, or not instruments at all—the engineer’s goal is still to create a unified listening experience, and create a certain type of coherent soundstage.
 
Every step down in audio quality—from stereo separation to mono; from large speakers to small; from high resolution and dynamic range to compressed and limited sound—removes the listener further and further from fully hearing what was played, and, by extension, what ideas the musicians were trying to communicate.
 
If I rip an ostensibly full-res WAV from a song on one of my CDs, the resulting file will likely take up 27–30 megabytes of space on my computer’s hard drive.
 
The same song converted into a decent mp3 file format will occupy a mere 5–9 megabytes.
 
Question: Where did those lost 20+ megs of data go?
 
Answer: Not into my ears.
 
Anyway, if you love music, I encourage you to own it, and take care of it, instead of leasing it…and to play it on a proper stereo, instead of banishing it to some small speaker in the corner of the room. Don’t short-change your ears—or your brain.
]]><![CDATA[22. “Black Satin,” Miles Davis, from On the Corner (1972)]]>Mon, 20 Jul 2020 12:25:34 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/22-black-satin-miles-davis-from-on-the-corner-1972​When he entered the studio in June of 1972, Miles Davis ostensibly wanted to make an album that celebrated Sly Stone and James Brown—and spoke directly to young Black audiences. “It was with On the Corner and Big Fun that I really made an effort to get my music over to young Black people,” he explains in his 1989 autobiography. “They are the ones who buy records and come to concerts, and I had started thinking about building a new audience for the future.”
 
Yet Davis was chasing other seemingly incompatible influences during the summer of 1972, including the harmolodic theories of Ornette Coleman, the baroque counterpoint of J.S. Bach, and the electronic music and tape manipulation of Karlheinz Stockhausen. His close listening to Stockhausen was largely spurred by his then-houseguest Paul Buckmaster, a British composer who played electric cello—an instrument not often associated with funk.
 
How did Davis marry these far-flung ideas in a session that also included three drummers, three keyboard players, tabla, and electric sitar? The key was producer Teo Macero’s aggressive tape editing and mixing: Perhaps like no album before it, On the Corner was assembled through cutting and splicing, overdubbing, and fader-pushing that occasionally drops nearly all of the instruments out of the mix to briefly highlight drums, hand-claps, or a lone trumpet, blown atonally through a wah-wah pedal.
 
“Black Satin” is not so much a song as it is a collage of rhythmic fragments; it begins and ends with the same copied-and-spliced piece of tape, a disjunct mash-up of looped tabla and high-pitched electronic whistling. This approach reflected lessons Davis had drawn directly from Stockhausen’s work: “I could see that I didn’t want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars, because I never end songs: They just keep going on,” Davis explains. “Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition.”
 
The result was, at the time of its release, Davis’s worst-selling album ever, and it completely baffled the critics. “Take some chunka-chunka-chunka rhythm,” as Downbeat magazine describes it, “lots of little background percussion diddle-around sounds, some electronic mutations, add simple tune lines that sound a great deal alike and play some spacey solos…stick with it interminably to create your ‘magic.’ But is it magic or just repetitious boredom?”
 
Even the musicians who participated had regrets. “It was my least favorite Miles album," says Paul Buckmaster—who felt largely ignored by Miles and the rest of the musicians during the recording process, despite having written the arrangements for the session. Saxophonist Dave Liebman was equally unimpressed: “I didn’t think much of it,” he recalls. “The music appeared to be pretty chaotic and disorganized.”
 
The structures that Davis introduced on this album and explored over the next three years—long, repetitive vamps; competing melodic vignettes that appear, disappear, and re-emerge with minimal development—bore little resemblance to either the jazz he had played before or the Top 40 radio sounds of the day. Yet this idea of music as layered motifs, accumulated and pared down over time, would make perfect sense to future generations of dance music producers, hip-hop DJs, and post-punk noisemakers. Despite the incomprehension with which it was originally received, On the Corner would go on to be re-examined, heavily sampled, and treated as a blueprint for groove-oriented dissonance long after Davis’s death in 1991.
]]><![CDATA[21. “The Noonward Race,” Mahavishnu Orchestra, from The Inner Mounting Flame (1971)]]>Fri, 17 Jul 2020 15:24:37 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/21-the-noonward-race-mahavishnu-orchestra-from-the-inner-mounting-flame-1971In the mid-1960s, John McLaughlin was a rock and R&B guitarist, playing in groups like The Graham Bond Organisation—alongside Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, who would go on to form Cream with Eric Clapton—and as a session musician, appearing on recordings with Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, and Petula Clark, a British pop star best known for her 1964 hit, “Downtown.”
 
But McLaughlin's heart belonged to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. “I’m listening to Coltrane and the Beatles come out with their first record and I said, ‘What is this shit?’” he recalls. “I mean, I wanted to hear ‘Giant Steps,’ not ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’…don't forget, I must've been 15 when I heard all that music—Miles, Trane, Cannonball, Red Garland, Jimmy Cobb, Philly Joe Jones…a whole new school of jazz came out…so the idea of going ‘yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I mean...no way. It was impossible.”
 
When Tony Williams heard a demo recording of McLaughlin jamming with Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, the second great quintet's drummer knew he’d found a guitarist for his own new project, Lifetime, and quickly arranged to bring the Brit to New York.
 
McLaughlin was ecstatic—he would finally get to play with his jazz heroes—but at the end of the '60s the newest school of jazz embraced souped-up psychedelic rock and R&B sounds.
 
As it turned out, it was a cultural moment that perfectly matched McLaughlin’s skill set and training. After a year spent transforming jazz into a space suitable for wah-wah-infused double-necked guitar pyrotechnics, both in Lifetime with Williams, and, simultaneously, on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew with Davis, McLaughlin finally formed his own band.
 
In July of 1971, Mahavishnu Orchestra emerged as a crossover-hit-generating monster. Featuring Czech keyboard player Jan Hammer, Panamanian-born drummer Billy Cobham, Irish bassist Rick Laird, and American violinist Jerry Goodman, the international group incorporated elements of British folk and Indian classical traditions into a pummeling, speed-oriented sound built around sinuous, elaborate melodic lines.
 
Billy Cobham describes the band’s level of intensity: “When we started…I used to put all my energies into it and I’d come away huffing and puffing and really, it would frighten me. I’d come off the stage and my heart would be beating so fast because of the energy. Then, all of a sudden, I began to learn how to pace myself. It was either that or die.”
 
“It was the loudest thing I had ever heard,” remembers guitarist Pat Metheny, describing a show the band played in Florida in 1972. “I think the term ‘face melting’ would fit here.”
 
The band quickly moved from nightclubs to festivals, and from jazz magazines to Rolling Stone and FM radio, yet the original lineup splintered after only two albums. Members blamed a jam-packed touring schedule—more than 300 gigs in just two years—and a lack of shared creative input in the studio. Certainly McLaughlin's locked-in style of leadership played a role—and his no-drugs, all-yoga-and-meditation lifestyle, defined by his relationship to guru Sri Chinmoy, who dubbed the guitarist “Mahavishnu.”
 
“The whole relationship with Sri Chinmoy was a cause of acrimony,” McLaughlin explains in an interview with guitarist Robert Fripp. “For me, I can still say music is God, music is the face of God…but that’s not the way everybody sees it. [During interviews] people would ask me questions and I would talk about development and ideals…and [the other musicians] would say, ‘We don't want to feel that way at all; we're not into that.’”
]]><![CDATA[20. “Rock the Clock,” Ornette Coleman, The Complete Science Fiction Sessions (1971)]]>Thu, 16 Jul 2020 12:01:25 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/20-rock-the-clock-ornette-coleman-the-complete-science-fiction-sessions-1971Ornette Coleman’s tenure at Columbia records lasted only one year, ending with Skies of America (1972), a symphonic piece living somewhere between jazz and classical—a space composer Gunther Schuller dubbed “third stream” music—and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. The album introduced listeners to harmolodic theory—which, according to a message from Coleman in the liner notes, “uses only melody, harmony, and the movement of forms…harmolodic modulation [means] to modulate in range without changing keys.”
 
Coleman explained his novel harmolodic method in a number of not-entirely-consistent ways over the years, but here it seems to involve marking the same melodies in the treble, bass, alto, and tenor clefs without necessarily worrying about transposition—a kind of chance operation that yields different notes in each register and creates some truly weird polytonality. The resulting work in one long movement—broken arbitrarily into 21 different “tracks”—features both a full drum kit and tympani, often plodding or thumping along without apparent regard for the rest of the orchestra.
 
In the year prior to unleashing Skies of America, Coleman worked on an album that reunited him with trusted collaborators from his past yet presented a bold afro-futurist vision. Science Fiction brought trumpeter Don Cherry and bassist Charlie Haden back into the fold, both of whom had played with Coleman on his groundbreaking albums in the late 1950s. But it also included sultry vocals from future space-disco icon Asha Puthli; spoken word by poet David Henderson, soaked in electronic echoes and broken up by the sounds of a crying baby; and drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell, often playing as if disconnected from the rest of the band. On many of the tracks, the horns stagger around in front of or behind the tempo set by the drummers’ busy interplay, giving the record a floating, unmoored feeling.
 
Writer Howard Mandel once referred to the song “Rock the Clock” as “funk-spoof”—presumably meaning that both the propulsive drum pattern that emerges halfway through the song and Charlie Haden’s wild, snarling electric bass, blown-up with distortion and cartoonish wah-wah, are played for laughs. Adding to this perception, Coleman solos over the damaged groove ecstatically on not one but two instruments on which he has no training: first with shrieking assaults on trumpet, then sawing and squealing away on the violin.
 
Though all of this does sound parodic, amateurism and wild, unschooled sounds were career-long preoccupations for Coleman. Take, for example, his decision to use his son, then-ten-year-old Denardo Coleman, as his drummer in 1966. Denardo would appear on three albums by decade’s end: The Empty Foxhole (1966), Ornette at 12 (1968), and Crisis (1969). Bassist Charlie Haden predicted that the boy would “startle every drummer who hears him,” but West Coast drummer Shelly Manne—who appeared on Coleman’s second album, Tomorrow Is the Question! (1959)—captured the critical consensus of the time by describing Denardo’s tentative, rudimentary playing as “unadulterated shit.”
 
Yet Coleman picked Denardo because he wanted to play with musicians who could abandon their preconceptions—and, unlike most drummers, his son hadn’t established any yet. As with Denardo’s tenure in his band, Science Fiction illustrates how Coleman was willing to follow his instincts wherever they led and risk misunderstanding and derision as long as it promised discovering something new. The record threads his past compositions, emerging sounds in popular music, and disorienting studio experimentation into one definitive statement.
]]><![CDATA[19. “Ostinato (Suite for Angela),” Herbie Hancock, from Mwandishi (1971)]]>Wed, 15 Jul 2020 11:52:04 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/19-ostinato-suite-for-angela-herbie-hancock-from-mwandishi-1971In October of 1973, pianist Herbie Hancock became an international superstar: His album Head Hunters was a monster crossover hit, selling over a million copies. Sporting a day-glo purple, pink, and yellow cover, the album buzzed with the overdriven staccato sounds of Hancock’s electric clavinet alongside Harvey Mason’s dry, in-the-pocket drumming; Paul Jackson’s streamlined funk bass lines; and congas, chanting, and pygmy flutes courtesy of percussionist Bill Summers.
 
The album’s infectious, radio-friendly appeal was no accident. “I was beginning to feel that we were playing this heavy kind of music,” Hancock explained in 1997, “and I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter.”
 
That “heavy” music had appeared over a trio of ambitious albums at the decade’s start: Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972), and Sextant (1973). “Ostinato,” the lead-off track for Mwandishi, was dedicated to then-imprisoned political activist Angela Davis. It sports futuristic electronic effects and dense tangles of percussion, and is anchored by a trance-inducing, unchanging bass groove—all of which superficially could describe the sound of Head Hunters, too. But it’s set in 15/8, an off-kilter time signature that defies listeners to bob their heads or tap their feet, much less get up and dance.
 
“I wanted to write a tune with an underlying rock beat, but using it in a more open way than usual,” Hancock explains in composer Bob Gluck’s 2012 book, You’ll Know When You Get There. “Having 15 beats in a bar automatically sets up a little tension, because just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it eludes you. At the end of each bar we all hit a phrase together, and that’s a release.”
 
“Ostinato,” then, was an attempt to play with rock and funk conventions yet challenge both his band and his audience—and it suggests a middle ground between music-as-artistic-gesture and music-as-unrepentant-groove. By the time he recorded Head Hunters, though, Hancock was apparently done with intellectual gamesmanship and ready for a full-throated embrace of the pop culture moment.
]]><![CDATA[18. “Mr. Clean,” Freddie Hubbard, from Straight Life (1972)]]>Tue, 14 Jul 2020 11:32:38 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/18-mr-clean-freddie-hubbard-from-straight-life-1972In 1961, producer Creed Taylor launched Impulse records as a jazz imprint for ABC-Paramount. Though the label would eventually become the home of John Coltrane, Black liberation, and all things avant-garde, Taylor’s formative contributions mostly involved brand identity and quality control. With graphic designer Fran Attaway, he helped establish the signature orange-and-black logo and spine for the label’s expensive-looking, laminated gatefold records—all of which carried striking photos by frequent collaborators like Pete Turner.
 
Prior to Impulse, Taylor had created high-concept packages like Sing a Song of Basie (1958), an all-vocals-plus-rhythm-section studio experiment featuring heavily overdubbed treatments of Count Basie’s big band classics. His output during this time also included gimmicky effects-laden projects credited to the Creed Taylor Orchestra: Shock Music in Hi-Fi (1958), for example, featured Halloween-themed jazz peppered with the sounds of creaking doors, thumping heartbeats, and thunderclaps.
 
Taylor actually signed Coltrane to Impulse, but then abruptly left less than a year after launching his baby. After a stint at Verve records, where he attracted artists like Bill Evans, Stan Getz, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, in 1967, he founded his own label, CTI (Creed Taylor Incorporated), first as a subsidiary of A&M, then in 1970 as an independent. CTI would cement Taylor’s reputation for deluxe studio productions, but by the end of the ‘70s, the label would also be regarded as a major force in the ascendency of smooth jazz—thanks to a series of critically unloved albums with syrupy string arrangements, shortened track lengths, and R&B-meets-soft-rock bedroom appeal.
 
Yet in its early years, CTI released some bona fide fusion classics. Take, for example, Freddie Hubbard’s 1970 album, Red Clay—in which the trumpeter and a band featuring his frequent collaborators Herbie Hancock and Joe Henderson scrambled hard bop, soul jazz, and fusion. The album would be regarded as Hubbard’s finest moment and the emergence of his then-signature sound.
 
“Mr. Clean” comes from Hubbard’s more aggressive 1972 follow-up, Straight Life. The album might seem out-of-character for CTI, featuring no lush arrangements, hard-charging rhythms courtesy of drummer Jack DeJohnette, and two main tracks that clocked in at the radio-unfriendly lengths of around 15 minutes apiece.
 
Straight Life was as close as Hubbard would come to the Miles Davis funk-fusion sound of the early 1970s, and it underscores the differences between the two bandleaders: Whereas Miles was a supreme stylistic innovator and mood-setter—playing, as the truism goes, not what others couldn’t play, but what they wouldn’t—Hubbard typically came across as a trumpeter's trumpeter with a big, athletic sound. Hubbard’s output would soften markedly after this, reflecting the CTI house style, but for a brief moment he demonstrated unmatched power as a funk-fusion pugilist.
]]><![CDATA[17. “Vashkar,” The Tony Williams Lifetime, from Emergency! (1969)]]>Mon, 13 Jul 2020 13:40:53 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/17-vashkar-the-tony-williams-lifetime-from-emergency-1969In February 1969, Tony Williams played with Miles Davis for the last time, propelling the roughly three-hour session that would yield In a Silent Way. Though Bitches Brew (1970) would have a much larger impact—and sell millions of copies​—most critics regard In a Silent Way as the first true fusion album, and with Davis's inclusion of organist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, it effectively marks the end of the second great quintet.
 
In the studio, Davis asked Williams to play simple, repetitive figures with no fills—a two-handed sixteenth-note hi-hat pattern on “Shhh/Peaceful;” a clacking hard eight on the hi-hat and snare rim for “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time,” with a brief explosive rock-and-soul foray on the ride and snare during the middle section.
 
It’s odd that Davis assigned these minimal timekeeping duties to Williams given the defining features of the drummer's playing: high-decibel attack with thick marching band drumsticks; unpredictable all-over-the-kit fills; and the ability to squeeze and stretch tempos like silly putty. All of this made him more suited for high-wire act improvisation, preferably with musicians using large, overdriven amplifiers.
 
“I like to play loud,” Williams once said in an interview. “I believe the drums should be hit hard.” Or as he put it on another occasion: “I’m interested in the drums and I want to beat the shit out of them all the time.”
 
Three months after In a Silent Way, Williams was back in the studio with a new group of his own: The Tony Williams Lifetime, a trio committed to playing loud, hitting hard, and beating the shit out of everything. With fellow In a Silent Way player John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young (credited here as Khalid Yasin), the group recorded a furious, risky, and at times uneven debut.
 
Why uneven? On three tracks, Williams sings—or, more accurately, sing-speaks—in a gentle, high-pitched, decidedly un-rock voice, offering improvised-sounding lyrics about love and personal growth. “I told you everything is said in the bed,” he coos in “Beyond Games.” “And it shouldn’t change just ‘cause you’re wed.”
 
Though Williams wanted to bring the fury on his drum kit, he was apparently looking to more tender models for his vocal stylings: “The way that I’d like to sing would be more like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett,” he admitted in an interview. “I like the way they sing.”
 
Williams’s tepid vocals may date the record, but instrumental tracks like “Vashkar” sound like they came from another universe entirely. Written by composer Carla Bley, the song as first recorded in 1963 by her husband, pianist Paul Bley, feels airy, abstract, almost tentative; Lifetime transforms the tune into rollicking, barely-controlled chaos. Building from the initial sound of low murmuring hammer-ons from McLaughlin, this version explodes with Williams playing frantic, ever-shifting patterns—propulsive, not quite fills, but not exactly grooves—which recede to make space first for McLaughlin’s angular fretboard workouts, then for Young’s pulsing washes of unnerving atonal chords.
 
Emergency! was a pioneering album—arriving in record stores a year earlier than Bitches Brew—but Williams saw poor sales during his time with Polydor, in part because Lifetime bore little resemblance to the wave of popular 1970s fusion groups that followed. "Tony plays jazz-rock, not fusion," drummer Lenny White explains. "The connotation is different...Tony played grooves and beats with a jazz sensibility. He’s got Papa Jo Jones up top with his back beat stuff on the bottom with bass drum and snare, playing in-between like a great jazz drummer would.”
 
Aside from the music itself, the album’s production made it unpalatable to many audiences: Dark, distorted, and occasionally tinny, Emergency! sounds like a creature from the basement. Some critics have claimed that the album’s blown-up aesthetic is the result of carelessness; in the 1991 CD reissue liner notes, session engineer Phil Schaap blames McLaughlin’s tricky effects pedals, a broken studio organ, and an out-of-spec tape machine—and laments the session’s fatally compromised bass drum track. Yet subsequent generations of noise-loving musicians have declared the album’s distortion a feature, not a bug, and now consciously seek their own urgent, lo-fi, in-the-red sounds.
]]><![CDATA[16. “Shiva-Loka,” Alice Coltrane, from Journey in Satchidananda (1971)]]>Fri, 10 Jul 2020 12:01:16 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/16-shiva-loka-alice-coltrane-from-journey-in-satchidananda-1971Alice McLeod and John Coltrane married in 1965; their partnership was tragically brief—John died of liver cancer in 1967—yet it would transform not only their respective careers but also the entire landscape of contemporary music. In many ways, they were co-conspirators, always listening to and processing jazz, classical, and world music sounds together, and daring one another to try new things.
 
A classically trained pianist from the age of seven, Alice fell in love with modern jazz in high school and began playing with her half-brother—bassist Ernest Farrow, who would go on to record extensively with saxophonist Yusef Lateef—in a group that gigged around her native Detroit. In the late ‘50s, she traveled to Paris to study with pianist Bud Powell, a fiery bebop innovator; she also worked there as intermission pianist for the Blue Note Jazz Club. By 1962, she was back in the U.S. and playing with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs at New York’s Birdland when she first shared a stage with her future husband.
 
When McCoy Tyner left Coltrane’s band, Alice Coltrane took his place and developed a manner of playing that matched drummer Rasheid Ali’s own busy, textured, time-free playing. “When I became a part of the group, I only played through two or three octaves like we all did, chording for the soloists,” she explains. “But John said, ‘you have all those keys. Why don’t you play them as completely as you can?’” Thus did Alice Coltrane arrive at a style that was less percussive than Tyner’s, but more expansive, with endlessly cascading arpeggios—and perfectly suited to her husband’s new direction.
 
Unfortunately, many critics were unable or unwilling to see Alice Coltrane clearly—in part because of John Coltrane’s outsized presence, but also due to the difficulties women generally had creating space for themselves in a male-dominated jazz scene. Add to this her omnipresent spirituality: Alice and John meditated and read the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita together; after his death, her interest in Vedic practice exploded. In 1969, she met her guru, Swami Satchidananda—famous for giving the opening address at Woodstock—and began to use her music to explore Indian culture and religion.
 
The result was Journey in Satchidananda, a hushed, dream-like album featuring her former bandmates Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali but defined by the droning sounds of the Indian tanpura, the lute-like Middle Eastern oud, and the plucked chords and shimmering glissandi of Alice’s concert harp—an instrument she and her husband had ordered just prior to his death. “Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of [Swami Satchidananda’s] love,” she suggests in the album liner notes, “which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore.”
 
After releasing a dozen or so albums in the ‘70s—first on her husband’s old label, Impulse; then more lucratively for Warner Brothers—Alice Coltrane withdrew from the secular music world. She became known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda, a Sanskrit name meaning “the highest song of God;” in 1983, she established the Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, California. Though she turned her back on the industry, she continued to create soaring, otherworldly sounds on her own terms, singing Sanskrit mantras and playing an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer on a series of cassettes recorded for her devoted followers throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.
]]><![CDATA[15. “Thembi,” Pharoah Sanders, from Thembi (1971)]]>Thu, 09 Jul 2020 13:54:45 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/15-thembi-pharoah-sanders-from-thembi-1971After John Coltrane’s death, Albert Ayler described a lost holy trinity of jazz: "Trane was the father. Pharoah [Sanders] was the son. I was the holy ghost."
 
“The son” first arrived in New York in 1962. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sanders had spent a few years on the West Coast after high school, studying art at Oakland Junior College and gigging on tenor sax around the Bay area—but he kept hearing that New York was the place to be. “In Oakland, there’s a good time, but all they wanted to do was drink and smoke,” he explains. “Smiley Winters, a left-handed drummer, had to work tarring parking lots. He told me, ‘Yeah, man, with your sound, you don’t need to be here, you need to go to New York City.’ And I listened to him.”
 
Sanders hitchhiked cross-country, and arrived with no money; he slept on park benches, sold his blood to eat, and struggled to find his voice on his instrument. Though he looked rough, others immediately saw his potential, and he started putting together bands. After being invited by Sun Ra to play with his Arkestra—a 1964 gig at Judson Hall was recorded, but the resulting album, Sun Ra Featuring Pharoah Sanders and Black Harold, would not be released until 1976—Sanders caught the attention of “the father” himself.
 
When Sanders first joined John Coltrane, the older bandleader was tight-lipped about his intentions. “Being around him was almost, like, ‘Well, what do you want me to do? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,’” Sanders says. “He always told me, ‘Play.’ That’s what I did.”
 
Sanders initially made his reputation unfurling sheets of wild noise—with multi-phonic growling, reed-biting, and other extended techniques. Once Coltrane was gone, though, Sanders seemed drawn to different sounds, and became a pioneer of what critics now call “spiritual jazz,” a style that favored droning, elliptical compositions and featured instruments and textures borrowed from African, Indian, and Arabic musical traditions.
 
“Thembi” closes out side one of Sanders’s 1971 album of the same name. Driven by a smooth-running bass ostinato by Cecil McBee, and featuring drummer Clifford Jarvis contending with a cloud of irregular hand percussion—claves, maracas, various types of shakers or bells—the track showcases Sanders on alto sax, playing with unforced melodic lightness, but still tossing in the occasional overblown squeal.
 
At just over seven minutes, it’s an uncharacteristically brief, focused utterance from Sanders: “Pharoah would play forever,” producer Ed Michel once said. “We worked out a technique where about 17 or 18 minutes in, I would dim the lights up and down in the studio to let him know that he was getting to the point where he should start winding down. The only problem was that at that point when Pharoah would get playing, he would close his eyes.”
]]><![CDATA[14. “Rebirth,” McCoy Tyner, from Sahara (1972)]]>Wed, 08 Jul 2020 12:34:16 GMThttp://jeffrycudlin.com/music-blog/14-rebirth-mccoy-tyner-from-sahara-1972After leaving John Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner spent a year touring with Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, then embarked on a series of post-bop records for Blue Note that turned back the clock on his career. Starting with The Real McCoy (1967)—featuring former bandmate Elvin Jones on drums, Miles Davis’s then-bassist Ron Carter, and Joe Henderson on tenor sax—Tyner recorded a half-dozen albums that resisted not only the experimentation of Coltrane’s late period but also electric instruments and the ascendancy of funk and psychedelic rock. In Tyner’s band, the playing was rhythmically charged; the music was reliably smart and harmonically compelling—but every session sounded a bit like 1964.
 
By the end of the decade, Tyner became increasingly restless, toying with African percussion, wooden flutes, and soaring female vocals on his 1970 album, Asante. In 1972, with his career flagging somewhat, Tyner finally left Blue Note and signed a new contract with producer Orrin Keepnews’s west coast label, Milestone Records—and created the album regarded by many as his very best.
 
Despite consisting mostly of tunes from his band’s standard repertoire, Sahara featured some of Tyner’s most inspired-sounding playing in years. The cover photo reflects the album’s mood: The pianist sits on a wooden crate in a vacant urban lot, surrounded by bare trees, piles of industrial scrap, and chunks of masonry; in his lap is a Japanese koto. As Tyner plays, he looks to his left, contemplating the bleak facades of distant buildings. The image suggests both an expanding world cultural consciousness and the harsh realities of Nixon-era disinvestment in Black communities.
 
That koto on the cover would appear on one track: “Valley of Life,” an exotic-sounding composition that includes reverb-drenched flute melodies and layers of hand percussion. Tyner was not a trained koto player; his approach is intuitive and textural—and seems to echo somewhat the way Alice Coltrane swept and plucked her Lyon and Healy concert harp for albums like A Monastic Trio (1968) and Journey in Satchidananda (1970).
 
“Rebirth,” meanwhile, is Tyner in peak form on piano. Against the frenzied attack of future Weather Report drummer Alphonse Mouzon and the ever-climbing bass lines of Calvin Hill, he delivers crashing salvos of chords with his left hand as his right generates trilling flurries—an ever-shifting wall of sound. Alto saxophonist Sonny Fortune steps in roughly halfway through the five-and-a-half minute running time, parrying with Tyner until the pianist brings the track to its thundering lower-register conclusion.
 
With Sahara, Tyner balanced meditative stillness against waves of fortissimo bomb-throwing, and brought non-western instruments into his traditional quartet. As a result, he created jazz that felt anchored in its historical moment—not aesthetically cutting edge, but not mired in nostalgia, either; just top-flight, intense, personal music, played as if the world might soon burst into flames.
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