We interrupt our Sun Ra retrospective once again just to acknowledge that after a 38-year career, we're officially retired as of today and are finally free. We can't think of a more fitting song to match our mood at this milestone in our life than Eno's Golden Hours from 1975's Another Green World (even back then, we were listening to songs about growing old).
This is how we feel today, and this is the mood we're taking into the next chapter of our life, which begins. . . right. . . now.
This song probably best expresses our reaction to the news of this week, from white, male Republican lawmakers turning the clock on women's rights back to 1964; to the discovery that half of the species extant when we was born are now extinct; to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaching 415 ppm; to provocations and rumblings of a new mid-east war, this time against Iran; to North Korea once again testing new missiles; to more lies, insults and filth spewing forth from the White House; to continued police brutality, economic inequality, voter suppression, and racial injustice across the land; and finally to the deaths this past week of Doris Day, Peggy Lipton, and Tim Conway.
Preview, from 1968, by the Jazz Composer's Orchestra featuring a very animated Pharoah Sanders and, although she's not credited in the lineup above, Carla Bley.
It's quite arguable that no other musician participated in as much of the history and development of jazz as Max Roach. In the 1940s, he helped innovate the be-bop style with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In the 1950s, he became identified with the hard bop style of Sonny Rollins and Stanley Turrentine. In later years, he recorded free jazz with avant-garde masters Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, and Abdullah Ibrahim. He even surprised fans by performing in a hip-hop performance with Fab Five Freddy and the New York Break Dancers. With the possible exception of Miles, we honestly can't think of another jazz musician whose career spanned such a wide range of styles and influences.
But back in 1961, Roach recorded an LP on Impulse! Records called Percussion Bitter Sweet that features some of the last recorded performances of trumpeter Booker Little before he passed away that October. In addition to Little, the lineup included Julian Priester (trombone), Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet), Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Mal Waldron (piano), Art Davis (bass), and the opening tract, Garvey's Ghost, featured a rhythm section of Roach, Carlos "Patato" Valdés, and Eugenio "Totico" Arango, and vocals by Roach's then-wife, Abbey Lincoln.
Roach passed in Manhattan in the early morning of August 16, 2007. We never got to see him perform, but we heard him on countless records.
It was 1973 and we were lost. Literally and figuratively.
We didn't know what to do with our life - hey, we were 19 and who does then? But we were particularly, almost existentially, lost. We had graduated high school but just barely, and we knew we weren't ready yet for college. We found it difficult to find a job and when we did, it would only pay minimum wage, not enough to buy us a car, and then we had a hard time holding that job down, much less getting there without a car.
Our parents had moved since our graduation, but we were forced by various circumstances to take a room in their new house, a small office room with a roll-out bed next to the laundry machine. We were miserable and had no plan on how to improve things. Our prospects looked like things were just going to get worse and worse.
One Saturday, out of sheer boredom and with nothing else to do, we borrowed the Mom's car and drove as far east as the roads would take us before they ended at the sea (we lived on Long Island). And somehow we managed to screw even that up. We got lost. Not that we had anyplace particular to be, so "lost" is a relative term - you can only be "lost" when you have someplace else you want to be.
Anyway, we randomly pulled into a railroad salvage store that we came across, a used junk shop that sold things that apparently fell out of freight cars or something. No particular reason, we weren't in the market for railroad salvage, but we had no place else to be that day and don't know what else to do with ourselves, so we start randomly rummaging through railroad salvage.
Along with various appliance parts, storm-door fittings, and broken lamps, we saw a box of records labeled "Used Jazz." We aren't into jazz - it was 1973 and like everyone else that we knew at the time, we were listening to David Bowie and Alice Cooper. But we start looking through the box anyway because why not?
We recognized some of the names on the albums but were totally unfamiliar with the music. But, oh look, there's Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass (pass). And there's something by somebody named "Boots" something (ditto). Nothing in the box intrigued or interested us.
But then we came across a record called King Kong: Jean Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa. We had no idea who this Jean Luc Ponty guy was (nobody did at the time, he was French and hadn't started recording in the States yet except for this one obscure album) but we were fans of Frank Zappa, and we knew that Zappa was into jazz (he talked about it all the time on his record liner notes), so it made sense to us that a record like this might exist. It was only $1.00 and didn't seem to be too badly scratched, so we splurged and bought it and took it back home to hear what it was like.
Now, we'd like to tell you that we had some kind of profound revelation - that our first jazz album changed our life or how we heard music. But that's not the case. We liked the album, but not because it was jazz or sounded different from what we had heard before, but because it sounded like Frank Zappa. It was even produced by Zappa and the cut Music for Electric Violin and Low Budget Orchestra is virtually a medley of songs from Uncle Meat and Absolutely Free. But other than finding ourselves an apparent "undiscoverd" Zappa album, it was no great revelation.
We'd love to say the record somehow turned our life around, gave us new meaning, or pointed out the way for us, but it didn't. We remained lost for several more years before we finally sorted ourselves out.
But somewhere deep in our slow-witted late-adolescent brain, a dim light bulb briefly flickered, telling us not to be afraid of the label "jazz," that this music might be okay, at least as long as Frank Zappa was involved in it. And maybe this Jean Luc guy. Maybe some others, too. We still weren't gonna listen to no Herb Albert shit, though.
We eventually found our way back home (Long Island, if nothing else, is highly linear and if you drive in any one direction long enough, you'll eventually either come across salt water, Montauk Point, New York City, or home). The Moms got her car back before it was too late.
After recording King Kong, Jean Luc became a member of Zappa's Mothers of Invention for a couple of years before starting off on his own long and terrible career, first as a generic jazz-fusion musician and then as a bland, middle-of-the-road, adult contemporary, "smooth jazz" hack. We hate that kind of music and would prefer to rub sandpaper on our eyeballs than subject our eardrums to that kind of torture, but to each their own we guess.
We'll still always have King Kong and memories of Montauk railroad salvage stores.
Michael White was an American jazz violinist who was born on May 24, 1930 in Houston and grew up in Oakland. He took up the violin when he was six years old, and his initial career break occurred in 1965 when he played with the John Handy Quintet at their infamous Monterey Jazz Festival set.
During his long career, White has played alongside John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Wes Montgomery, Joe Henderson, and Richard Davis. His music influences and techniques incorporate Western, Middle, and Far Eastern classical music, as well as blues, R&B, and the jazz tradition. His signature sound was a sort of double stop produced by plucking a string on the neck of the violin while he was simultaneously bowing. White was among the first to play the violin in an avant-garde jazz setting and in the late 1960s he became one of the first jazz violinists to play jazz-rock fusion with his band The Fourth Way.
White's first album as a leader, 1971's Spirit Dance on Impulse! Records, contained the song John Coltrane Was Here, a tribute to the towering Impulse! figurehead. Somehow, that LP manifested in our record collection sometime around 1975, our first introduction to Michael White. In the mid 1990s, after a long period of obscurity, he performed in the reunited John Handy Quintet and in 1997, he recorded Motion Pictures, an album with guitarist Bill Frisell. The song Mechanical Man from his 2006 album Voices won the 6th Annual Independent Music Award for Best Jazz Song. White eventually settled in Los Angeles.
Michael White died on December 6, 2016. His creative musicianship and innovative approach to the violin essentially paved the way for other subsequent violinists such as Jean Luc Ponty, Michael Urbaniak, Sugarcane Harris, and Papa John Creach. His style and influence are still apparent today, in musicians as diverse as Taiwan's C Spencer Yeh.
During the last decade of the 20th Century, jazz music seemed to many people to have simply disappeared altogether. That was certainly the conclusion of documentarian Ken Burns in his mammoth series Jazz - people just stopped playing the music sometime around the early 90s, at least until (in Burns' opinion, not ours) Wynton Marsalis came along and rescued it.
In our opinion, Marsalis didn't rescue jazz but instead stuffed and embalmed it. He's a skilled player - no question there - but he didn't articulate a new voice or define a new direction like the Masters celebrated in this series, but instead codified it and archived it, and now forums like Jazz At Lincoln Center treat jazz music like museum pieces that have to be played in a very precise and particular way in order for the tradition to survive. This is ironic for an iconoclastic musical tradition that had always thrived on innovation and change.
What Burns missed was that jazz and morphed in the 90s from a music dominated by the saxophone to something that, like most other all popular music at the time, was dominated by the electric guitar. Guitarists like John McLaughlin and Pat Metheny and Al DiMeola and Larry Coryell and Stanley Jordan and Sonny Sharrock had become the dominant voices in jazz (outside of a semi-ironic downtown NYC art scene led by the Lounge Lizards and the Microscopic Septet). Burns couldn't connect the dots between the old-time swings bands of the 40s and 50s with the modern crop of musicians, and therefore simply declared "jazz is dead" or rather "jazz was dead until Wynton Marsalis."
For the record, we're now almost 30 years past the heyday of the jazz guitarist and the music has moved on since those times, but there are still some guitarists out there doing the jazz thing, such as Marc Ribot and John Scofield and Mike Stern, as well as, until recently, John Abercrombie and Allan Holdsworth, who both passed away in 2017 along with Mr. Coryell.
And Bill Frisell survives. Another non-traditional musician, Frisell fearlessly incorporates anything from rock to showtunes to folk to world music to noise, and even some occasional schmaltz, into his own unique brand of jazz. You literally never know what to expect from the next Bill Frisell record. It could be 55 minutes of feedback with power tools as accompaniment, or a maudlin version of When You Wish Upon A Star, played solo and acoustic.
Frisell has been recording prodigiously since at least the mid 80s and yet we've never seen him perform live. Fortunately, he'll be one of the performers this year (next week!) at Big Ears, so that may change.
JayVe Montgomery, who records as Abstract Black, left Chicago for Nashville, Tennessee six years ago. Since then, Montgomery has become a fixture in Nashville's experimental-music underground. His basic approach to music, as demonstrated in this video, is to build intricate loops of samples and rhythms beneath a bluesy saxophone tone.
His record In Circles With Self has been described as a "mediation on mystery, or map of the search for some amorphous truth."
To answer our own rhetorical question, Evan Parker is a British free-jazz sax legend. Having pioneered or substantially expanded an array of extended playing techniques, Parker became a pivotal figure in the development of free jazz and improvisation in Europe. The critic Ron Wynn once described Parker as "among Europe's most innovative and intriguing saxophonists."
His music of the 1960s and 1970s involves fluttering, swirling lines that have shape rather than tangible melodic content. Sometimes he makes use of pure sound in a manner that recalls Steve Lacy's more radical 1970s recordings or the work of the AACM. He began to develop methods of rapidly layering harmonics and false notes to create dense contrapuntal weaves; these involved experiments with plastic reeds, circular breathing and rapid tonguing which initially were so intense that he would find blood dripping onto the floor from the saxophone. Ron Wynn noted that "his solo sax work isn't for the squeamish."
Parker has increasingly become interested in electronics, usually through inviting collaborators to process his playing electronically, creating feedback loops and shifting soundscapes.
"New Master" is a bit of stretch, as Parker is now 75 and has been recording since 1970. But although his style and techniques have paved the way for musicians such as Colin Stetson and Bendik Giske, he's still exploring and creating new music himself, and will be performing at this month's (!) Big Ears festival.
A Pulitzer finalist, Doris Duke Artist Award winner, and Guggenheim fellow, Wadada Leo Smith, the son of an early Delta blues guitarist, is a national treasure. After working as an integral member of Anthony Braxton’s early ensembles, Smith applied his unique trumpet tone, somewhere between the moan of a blues guitar and the ascendance of the human voice, to his debut album, Creative Music - 1. He has since composed for and improvised with ensembles of almost every imaginable size, from small bands to orchestras, and developed his own beautiful and specific system of graphic notation, dubbed Ankhrasmation, to the point that the scores have themselves become the stuff of museum installations.
A fan of monolithic, focused works, Smith released Ten Freedom Summers, a four-disc ode to the Civil Rights movement, as well as the Yo, Miles! series of LPs, both a tribute to and a reinterpretation of songs from Miles Davis' electric phase. With America’s National Parks, Smith composed a suite inspired by the scenic splendor, the historic legacy, and the political controversies associated with the country’s public landscapes.
The spark for the project came from Ken Burns’ 12-hour documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. "The idea that Ken Burns explored in that documentary was that the grandeur of nature was like a religion or a cathedral," Smith said. "I reject that image because the natural phenomenon in creation, just like man and stars and light and water, is all one thing, just a diffusion of energy. My focus is on the spiritual and psychological dimensions of the idea of setting aside reserves for common property of the American citizens."
The 28-page score for America’s National Parks was composed for his Golden Quintet. Pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Pheeroan akLaff are joined by cellist Ashley Walters, affording the composer and bandleader new melodic and coloristic possibilities. "The cello as a lead voice with the trumpet is magnificent," Smith says, "but when you look at the possibilities for melodic formation with the trumpet, the cello, the piano and the bass, that’s paradise for a composer and for a performer."
While these preserved landscapes offer the inspiration of powerful natural beauty, Smith’s always open-minded view of the world leads him to find that same inspiration wherever he is. "Every concrete house is from nature," he says. "Every plastic airplane that flies 300 people across the ocean comes out of nature. Every air conditioner conditions a natural piece of air. I think that the human being is constantly enfolded in organic nature and constructed nature, so I’m constantly inspired, inside the house or outside the house."
At this year's Big Ears Festival, Smith will play two sets: one titled Reflections and Meditations on Monk, a tribute to Thelonious, and the other a performance of his LP Divine Love, a 1978 set that had the now-departed trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Lester Bowie joining Smith on trumpet.
Since 2015, the Paris-born Makaya McCraven, has been redefining the genres of jazz music with his unique brand of organic beat music. Raised in New England and a long-time Chicago resident, his breakout album, In The Moment, was culled, cut, post-produced and re-composed by McCraven. Using recordings of free improvisation he collected over dozens of live sessions in Chicago, In The Moment established a procedural blueprint that McCraven has since been sharpening and developing ever since.
Now, after four-plus years of refining his approach, McCraven has produced an ambitious new work, Universal Beings, a culmination of the concepts conceived by In The Moment and his most elegant and articulated work yet. McCraven traveled to Los Angeles, New York, London, and back to Chicago to record gigs with a top tier of players, from Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming) and the AACM's Tomeka Reid to Jeff Parker and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. He then edited excerpts of these sessions together, forming a globetrotting and style-shifting narrative that weaves in and out frames like a masterful mixtape or a well-written travelogue. Universal Beings projects an all-encompassing message of unity, peace and power by embracing transcendence in all its expressions. It's no surprise, then, to hear echoes of Alice Coltrane in the cut Mantra.
At this point, I doubt you'd be surprised to learn that McCraven will be performing next month at the Mill & Mine in Knoxville, Tennessee as a part of the Big Ears Festival. In a cruel twist of fate, he's performing at the same time as the legendary Harold Budd at St. John's Cathedral and as Nils Frahm at the majestic Tennessee Theater.
On the positive side, his set will be followed by Sons Of Kemet, also at the Mill & Mine, so there's that.
Last week's New Master was London's Shabaka Hutchings and his band The Comet Is Coming. This week's New Master is Shabaka again, but this time for his band Sons of Kemet. Consisting of sax, tuba and tandem drums, Sons of Kemet became one of 2018’s breakout bands, and their third album, Your Queen is a Reptile, made the end-of-year lists on many music sites. Sons of Kemet add chunks of Caribbean influence and hip-hop to horn-and-drum marches as rich as the best of New Orleans, taking modern jazz into new directions.
But here's the exciting part - we're going to get to see Shabaka next month! Sons of Kemet will be playing at The Mill & Mine in Knoxville, Tennessee at midnight on Saturday, March 24 as a part of the Big Ears Festival. This will be after a performance by the legendary Harold Budd at St. John's Episcopal Cathedral, about a mile away, and if we've timed it right, we can stop in at the Tennessee Theater on the way between those two venues to catch the end of Nils Frahm's set.
But wait, there's more! On March 22, before the Sons show, The Comet Is Coming will also play The Mill & Mine. We should be excited about that, but at the same time, as a part of the festival's ECM showcase, the legendary jazz guitarist Ralph Towner will be playing at St. John's. That's unfortunate - we've never seen Towner perform live but we'll choose the new over the old, and besides, logistics: before The Comet Is Coming, we'll be watching Alien Flower Sutra at The Standard, which is much closer to The Mill & Mine than to St. John's, and after The Comet we're going to have to hump it over to the Bijou Theater to see Evan Parker's trio with Paul Lytton and Alexander von Schlippenbach. Busy day, and sorry Ralph.
And who knows? With free time over the rest of the festival, Shabaka will be free to drop in for guest spots throughout the festival, which includes many other like-minded musicians, some of whom he's recorded with and some of whom he hasn't. It should be interesting.
Reedman extraordinaire and all-round artist Joseph Jarman passed away on January 9, 2019, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. His passing was announced by the New York chapter of the AACM on their website. He was 81.
Jarman was a founding member of the AACM and of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but was also involved in Zen Buddhism and the practice of aikido. He began his study of aikido in the early 1970s and began studying Zen in 1990. He visited various monasteries in Eastern Asia and a few years later opened Jikishinkan ("Direct Mind Training Hall"), his own dojo/zendo, in Brooklyn. He later became a Shinshu priest and held a fifth degree black belt in aikido.
We only saw Jarman perform once, a late 1970s Art Ensemble gig at Jonathan Swift's in Harvard Square, normally a folk-music club. Highlights of the set included the members of the band wandering the stage, picking up random instruments from the small arsenal they had up there with them, play only a few notes on each and then put it back down to pick up another. But experienced improvisors that they were, there were no gaps, no "dead air," between their random sounds. At another point, they were all playing in unison, but one note, over and over, in 4/4 time, for something like five minutes. Just a groove they somehow spontaneously fell into. Wild.
We saw his Art Ensemble bandmate, Roscoe Mitchell, last year at Big Ears, a 12:00 noon performance that blew the clouds off of a rainy day.
Did Joseph Jarman have an influence on us? Consider this: Jarman composed the song Dreaming of the Master, from which we take the name of this regular Friday feature.
Believe it or not, incredibly, this song is actually by Sun Ra, although it's almost totally unrecognizable as a Sun Ra song. Those well versed on Sun Ra and the Solar Myth lore, however, will surely recognize some clues (Easter eggs) on the label, spare as it is. But really, honestly, this is Sun Ra, 1960.
We here at WDW have never much liked Christmas music and once any musician puts out a record of Christmas songs, we generally consider that a sure sign that their career is over. Only Sun Ra could pull this one off - only Sun Ra could make us not only listen to but actually enjoy this song.
To even things out a little bit, to slap a little yin on the yang above, here's some more Sun Ra the way most of us remember the Arkesta.
Hora Decubitus ("At Bedtime") is basically a reworking of Charles Mingus' previous E's Flat Ah's Flat Too and can function as a basic primer on Mingus' music. The song features his driving bass lines, his carefully orchestrated, almost-Ellingtonesque compositions, and the freedom that he regularly gave his sidemen to improvise. My favorite passage is probably Eric Dolphy jumping in at the 2:08 mark.
But the essence of Mingus' best performances is how he regularly pushed the band outside of their comfort zone to make them jam that much harder, and then, just when it sounded like all hell was about to break loose, he gets them to all suddenly snap back into place. Listen to how Moanin', as posthumously recorded by the Mingus Big Band, contains alternating passages of tight ensemble playing and near anarchy.
That bad-ass baritone sax solo at the opening is by Ronnie Cuber.
No doubt, Mingus drove the band hard. Not to speak badly of the departed, but he was reportedly moody and temperamental, and regularly terrorized his band with his demanding intensity. We've hard stories that at least one sideman was so terrified of him, he would pack a handgun to practice sessions. Live, Mingus was probably the first musician to ever drop the mic on stage and the first to smash a piano with an axe live on stage because it sounded so bad. Once, in the middle of an interview in his home, he pulled out a shotgun, aimed it at the ceiling, and fired it indoors. Mingus was the OG. Here's a way-too-short clip from a live, late-70s performance that hints at his ferocity.
Sonny Rollins' East Broadway Run Down from 1966. Rollins is backed on this record by John Coltrane's rhythm section (Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums) and accompanied by Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, but it's mostly Rollins sound on tenor sax that you'll probably remember most from this recording, evoking as it does the sound of syncopated taxi horns and downtown NYC traffic.
The review on AllMusic by Steven McDonald describes it nicely:
Around the ten-minute mark of the title track [actually the 10:50 mark], things get very interesting indeed -- moody and spooky as Jimmy Garrison hangs on a single note, making his bass throb along while Elvin Jones widens the space and fires drum and cymbal hits in all directions. . . it's a supreme moment of tension-building, one that gets repeated after Rollins and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard restate the theme in unison. This is the sound of Rollins' group working in unity.
Later in the piece, it sounds like Rollins is blowing through just the mouthpiece of his instrument, bypassing the tenor sax altogether for something more direct and immediate.
East Broadway Run Down is arguably Rollins most avant, free-jazz recording, and also the last record he released before taking a six-year hiatus from music. During that break, he visited Jamaica for the first time and spent several months studying yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophies at an ashram in India. Rollins is probably most famous, though, for an earlier break from recording that was memorably documented in a television commercial for Pioneer music that aired frequently in the late '70s. The Pioneer commercial was almost all most people knew about Sonny Rollins at the time ("Yeah, that Brooklyn Bridge guy").
As of this writing, Sonny Rollins is alive and well and living in Woodstock, New York, one of the few remaining Masters of jazz still among us.
Easily one of the most beautiful pieces of music we've ever heard, composed by Harold Budd, produced by Brian Eno, and released in 1978. The interplay between the musicians is outstanding, each instrument accentuating the beauty of the others. Budd is on piano, Gavin Bryars is on glockenspiel, and there are no less than four marimba players, including Michael Nyman. The standout sound, though, is the incredible alto saxophone of Marion Brown.
Marion Brown was born here in Atlanta. Although he released several albums of his own, he is probably best known as a sideman in Archie Shepp's band, and as one of the monsters in John Coltrane's Ascension. But his interest in music was eclectic, and in Bismillahi 'Rrahmani 'Rrahim he takes the saxophone into a new dimension, far from the fire and fury that marked the free jazz movement. Brown passed in 2010 from complications of several surgeries.
We imagine that if there was a heaven, this is what it would sound like.
We've been a fan of Harold Budd since 1980, when Eno first introduced him to the world in Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors. We don't remember the exact year this exquisite song first entered our life, but we're pretty sure it was '80 or very early '81, after Plateaux but before we moved to Atlanta in March 1981 (we distinctly remember listening to this in Boston with our post-collegiate g.f.).
Budd has been continually composing new music and releasing albums since this '78 recording, and even though his discography includes at least one live recording (from the Lanzarote Music Festival), we've never heard him perform live or even seen him listed as performing live anywhere. So can you imagine how excited we were when we saw that he is going to be one of the featured composers in next year's Big Ears Festival?
Do yourself a favor and give this recording your full attention. It truly is one of those "it'll change your life" compositions.
Sadly, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, who embodied the brightest promise of the next generation of jazz musicians, passed away last weekend at the age of 49. The cause of death was listed as cardiac arrest; Hargrove had been on dialysis for many years and was admitted to the hospital for kidney problems.
NPR described Hargrove as "a young steward of the bebop tradition and a savvy bridge to hip-hop and R&B."
The jazz tradition is still hanging on, if only by the thinnest of threads, and the loss of Hargrove's voice is a monumental loss to the ongoing dialogue.
This isn't about us, the audience, though. We should keep in mind that we are mourning the loss of a human life, not just an entertainer playing for our amusement. Our deepest sympathies go out to Hargrove's family and loved ones.
If you ever wondered what the big deal with Archie Shepp was all about, he runs the voodoo down and explains it all in this cut, aptly named Frankenstein. We recommend you play it loud.
The recent Halloween holiday probably reminded us of the title, but the urgency of the music convinced us that this was the Friday, the weekend before Election Day, to post this composition.
GET OUT THERE AND VOTE NEXT WEEK, PEOPLE! Vote for the sake of 1968 Archie Shepp. Vote the hateful white patriarchy out of office, and replace your corrupt, bigoted Republican governors and senators and representatives with some of the beautiful, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual sisters and brothers running for office this year. Let's elect Stacy Abrams and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Andrew Gillum and Beto O'Rourke. We won't last another two years under the current insane clown posse of an administration allegedly running the country now!
In Frankenstein, Shepp channels all the rage and anger of 1968, the year that saw the assassinations of RFK and MLK, escalations of the Vietnam War, and the police riot at the Democratic National Convention, among many other horrors, and used his art to express his outrage and then to soothe the rawest of emotions, all while never giving up the righteous moral stance. It's a powerful performance, even these 50 years later, and if this doesn't make you want to go out and change the world, I don't know what to tell you - there may be no hope for you, my friend.
Herbie Hancock from 1973 (although we didn't discover this LP until about 1977). In addition to Herbie on Fender Rhodes, this track features Patrick Gleeson on synthesizer, Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, Bennie Maupin on soprano sax, and a rhythm section of Buster Williams (bass) and Billy Hart (drums).
Sextant was the last album of Hancock's early '70s Mwandishi period, when he first started experimenting with electronics, funk, and fusion, and predates the more commercially successful Headhunters era. Julian Cope once remarked that this song, "contains elements of early electronica that might today be described as ambient - kind of like Tangerine Dream if they were a space-funk band mixed with Pomme Fritz-era Orb. Certainly, the sounds within stand up to today's stuff. The instruments kind of sway around each other . . . little solo pieces set off by electronic bubblings and spurglings."
I consider it validation that around 1979 or 1980, a college roommate hearing me play this song told me that I had "the worst taste in music ever."
