Category: Jazz

Bobby McFerrin: Circlesongs (1997)

bobbymcferrin_circlesongs

Say what?

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: A “number one” record must feel like the first delirious puff off a crack pipe cause nearly every musician who’s tasted it fiends for another hit, turning an endless number of dignity-lowering tricks that result in an ever-thinning body of quality work.

But once in a while a number one artist uses their new powers to assert their integrity, like reclaiming their birthname (John Cougar Mellencamp), refusing to prance around in music videos (Pearl Jam), or making increasingly challenging music. After scoring big in 1988 with the pop anthem “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, Bobby McFerrin majorly shifted gears and began to conduct orchestras. Yes, with a baton and everything.

Freed from having to produce a hit record his albums became increasing experimental, reaching a watershed with the release of 1997’s miraculous Circlesongs. You know when vocalists sing little nonsense words before or after the real lyrics, sometimes scatting or repeating the ends of words along with the beat? McFerrin concocted an entire album around this concept. He used twelve vocalists but not a single real word is ever uttered.

Each song is structured around single cyclical riff while other voices improvise on top of it. Through this simple recipe he rolls out endless melodic variations and fascinating textures. Breaths become percussion, high voices dive and soar like seagulls. Deep monk-like drones share space with showtune chirps and African chants. Sometimes one syllable is passed back and forth like a hacky-sack then devolves into a gentle choral gibberish. All the rhythms are clean and precise which magnify the joyful and oddball tonal smears that bounce off each other.

It’s a celebration of community, of spiritual awakening, and it’s a lot of fun.

THE FALLOUT: The album and resulting tour was well received by the tiny few who knew the album was even released. Honestly, did you know this album existed?

Circlesongs is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:

Radical as a tandem unicycle and way easier to ride, Circlesongs gives hope that major labels can embrace Black departure albums, just as long as they come from someone uncommonly famous. Well, it’s a start.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Blackalicious fires a warning shot.

Burnt Sugar: Blood On The Leaf (2000) — now with podcast!

burntsugar_bloodontheleaf

Listen to an exclusive interview with Greg Tate, leader of Burnt Sugar.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Although best known for his wondrous music column in the Village Voice and for co-founding the Black Rock Coalition, Greg Tate is also the conductor for his genre-demolishing improvisational ensemble Burnt Sugar, whose first album is the heady and mesmerizing Blood on the Leaf. Inspired in part by Miles Davis’ freeform extravaganza Bitches Brew, Burnt Sugar births songs as living organisms, formed on the spot yet sounding uncannily like heavily practiced compositions.

This magic trick is the result of combining dozens of musicians from around the world, each bringing their unique slant to performance, and Tate’s use of Butch Morris’ Conduction System, by which one can “play” the orchestra members as one can play keys on a piano.

Which sounds downright bizarre if not next to impossible but, like hot sauce on a watermelon slice, Blood on the Leaf produces new flavors that would never otherwise exist.

Sonically Burnt Sugar reveals an endlessly inventive palette of textures, shifting from warmongering alien landings to chilled-out meditations, usually within the same song. Motifs vanish and return with new friends, sometimes dignified and dapper, sometimes troubled and frantic, and almost always funky.

Check out the interview and you can listen to Greg Tate discuss the challenges of promoting a Black orchestral improv group, their reception in Europe and their upcoming “R&B crossover album”.

Blood on the Leaf is available through Amazon and you can listen to tracks below:

Effortlessly emotional and three-dimensional, Blood on the Leaf sears into your veins like blood transfusion and charges you up with exotic quasi-legal nutrients.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Cee-Lo gets his freak flag dropped to half-mast.

Kid Creole and the Coconuts: Wise Guy (1982)

kidcreole_wiseguy

Where your mai-tai is always refreshed.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Oh Europe! You lover of American culture you! How thankful we are that you support jazz and techno and comic books and interpretive dance cause we here in America need a helping hand to validate our own greatness! We love us some Hendrix but damn if he didn’t have to go to England to get a leg up.

This outright dismissal of homemade brilliance happens less in New York, and its downtown music scene of the early ’80s is where the zoot-suited Kid Creole and The Coconuts made their mark. Their revelatory blend of swinging salsa, frenetic funk and big band Broadway show tunes populated their 1981 album Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, which found only a tiny audience. For their next album they turned up the gloss without losing the crunch, resulting in the dazzling Wise Guy.

An audio vacation cruise to exotic unknown locales, each cut shimmers and shakes with lusty abandon. Much like the Kid himself all the songs are danceable, humorous, nuanced and oh-so-sharp. The calypso and soca-fueled “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy” cleverly shows off the lighter side of pre-DNA paternity testing (“cause if I was in your blood, then you wouldn’t be so ugly”).

The romantic and dangerous “The Love We Have” mixes cold strings and warm horns into a frothy jungle drink of icy confusion. “I’m A Wonderful Thing, Baby” features a subdued swagger, its rippling muted guitars supporting a laundry list of the Kids’ liaisons.

Straight outta the speakeasy slides “Stool Pigeon”, a gangster-hard cautionary tale of ratting out to the Feds:

If you wanna squeal, said the FBI
We can make a deal, make it worth your while
So he told it all and in return
He got a credit card and a Thunderbird
He got a spanking new identity
And a condo down in Miami
He bought a plane, a boat and jewelry
But he couldn’t buy any company

Deep grooves with dark themes cloaked in confectionary glaze, how could anyone resist?

THE FALLOUT: Like Jimi Hendrix and James Baldwin, Kid Creole and the Coconuts blew up in England big time. Retitled Tropical Gangsters, it was a top five album, produced three hit singles and stayed on the charts for nine months. But back in the States it fell off the chart faster than a baby bird out of a malformed nest. Except for the rare dance hit, Kid Creole and the Coconuts never broke through to most of America.

Wise Guy is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:

Groundbreaking in its world music synthesis, Wise Guy dances alone.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Click into the future with Spacek.

MeShell Ndegéocello: Bitter (1999)

meshell_bittter

Truth in packaging.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: In 1996 singer/bassist/composer MeShell Ndegéocello released her second recording, the funky and soulful Peace Beyond Passion. Adding to her repertoire of romance tunes were songs about racism, religion and homophobia — just enough food for thought for commercial radio to drop her from playlists. Three years later she returned with all-new reasons for radio silence, the wounded Bitter.

Raw as a salted wound, Bitter is the fresh grave of a dead romance; the sounds that come out of your mouth after you’re all cried out. Gone are the rubbery bass lines and synthetic articulations, replaced with acoustic instruments played at speed of melting ice.

Her voice remains a smoky hush but now blackened with ash. Pleading with vulnerability, her empathic grief extends to every song, every tone, but never becoming pitiful. In the measured “Fool of Me”, her anguish is so deep perhaps the brushed drums are the only thing keeping her from falling to pieces.

“Beautiful” is even more fragile, revealing the intimate talk between lovers that we probably shouldn’t be hearing:

such pretty hair
may I kiss you
may I kiss you there
so beautiful you are
so beautiful
beautiful

please
don’t move
you feel
so good to me
tell me in my ear

beautiful

Even the instrumentals offer no solace. The casket-black beats of “Adam” anchor the weeping violins, while the plucked strings of “Eve” sound lost in a void of displacement.

The faster tracks sparkle with restrained tension. The pastoral regalness of “Satisfy” is a woodsy, forest dream. “Wasted Time” is a sparse skeleton dance of the burnt-out, with a tasty dehydrated slide guitar.

Ndegéocello also reinterprets Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” as a quasi-East Indian raga that hovers and darts into space music. Within the confines of the album this zigzag of styles is intoxicating, but outside the album….

THE FALLOUT: Named “Album of the Year” by many journalists, Bitter infuriated fans who wanted the funkier MeShell back, and it tanked. Ndegéocello revisited her approach again in 2005 with the release of the jazzy and challenging The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance Of The Infidel.

Bitter is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:

A fierce emotional letter-bomb, Bitter triumphantly reconstructs the particles of heartbreak into a new, hopeful organism.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Good stuff from Bad Brains.

Miles Davis: Dark Magus (1977)

miles_magus

Kind of Black.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Considering his deification nowadays it’s hard to believe that Miles Davis was once considered washed up. In 1974 he was several years into his “electric phase”, a modern sound that got him booked into larger rock halls but did not reconnect him with the black audience. To fix that problem he added a major dose of funk to his songs, culminating in the recording of Dark Magus.

Miles stopped writing tunes at this time, preferring to bandlead through osmosis and letting the songs flow through the process. He wrapped his new sound around distinct African rhythms, a saxophone player and three, count ‘em, THREE guitarists with a fistful of fuzz pedals. The result was unlike anything else in the Davis canon.

Mean-spirited, brutal, demonic, it’s a harsh trip into psyche of a man at the end of his rope. Distorted guitars rage into the atmosphere, adding a raw heavy metal vibe. The songs don’t really start and stop as much as they transform into different amalgamations of riffs and beats. “Moja” features an oppressive dissonance anchored by a steady cowbell, but that cowbell helps lead the song through its twenty-four minutes of tonal displacement.

Mysterious and muscular, even his trumpet tone had changed from his early ultra-cool mode to an insistent mosquito honk, rattling off brittle bursts in “Tatu”.

Dark Magus was recorded live at Carnegie Hall, a stately room that usually features classical performers and public speakers. Why this was the place to unleash the shrill atonal keyboard mashing of “Wili” is anybody’s guess. Then again, Miles was on heavy diet of Percodan and cocaine at the time, so decision-making wasn’t his strong suit.

THE FALLOUT: Critics hated it. Fans hated it. His own label hated it. In his own autobiography Miles fails to mention it. Dark Magus was so heavy on his soul that he only recorded two more albums before retiring from performing altogether.

Out of print for over twenty years (except in Japan) it’s now available from Amazon and you can listen to tracks here:

From a modern standpoint Dark Magus is quite tame, as music has actually gotten harsher, faster and more acrid since its debut. If you’ve ever wondered what Metallica would sound like as an improv group, this is your album.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: The Jungle Brothers get all Sybil on us.

Divine Styler: Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light (1992)

divine_spiral

Are you ready for the love of Allah, ambience and acid?

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: What was Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate smoking in 1992? Ice started singing with the hardcore punkish Body Count, Everlast turned into the Irish Cypress Hill with House of Pain, and Divine Styler fell into the abyss with the scary-ass freakshow of Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light.

Ever hear a song and think “This is just wrong. Songs aren’t supposed to go like that. Is something in my ear?” This is a whole album of those songs, each one more disturbing and psychically damaged than the last one.

Dropping the strict hip-hop of his previous album, 1989’s Word Power, Spiral delves into psychedelic speed metal, trip-hop, Elizabethan acoustic fingerpicking and jam-band blues rock while unveiling fiendishly intricate rhymes about his Muslim faith and psychedelic drugs. What he doesn’t do exactly is rap, although every other method of vocalizing is present and accounted for.

In “Am I An Epigram for Life” he asks himself muffled metaphysical questions while swirling down the drain of keyboard bloops. The bloops return in “Touch” where he whispers his beat poetry up against a melting CasioTone preset beat, which then decays into a funk march.

It’s unsettling to listen to “Love, Lies and Lifetime Cries” as it consists mostly of him pleading “They won’t let me in!” while he frantically knocks on a closed door. I wouldn’t open it either; he doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to let in the house. But his paranoid ranting over sickly oozing keyboards is highly intriguing.

“Grey Matter” was the radio single, as if wooden flute techno jazz was going to get him spot on “Yo! MTV Raps”. His eloquence is outstanding as it is avant-garde, as he goes way out onto the microledge with “Heaven Don’t Want Me And Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over. He pontificates, seduces and conjoles you with his oratory skills, one step from outright screaming. He saves that for “Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea” a buzzy slab of industrial grindcore.

Divine Styler kicks it super-old school, kinda, with the drums-and-space of “Euphoric Rangers” then stays in outer space with “Aura” where he raps over the sounds of a malfunctioning alien probe ship.

THE FALLOUT: Divine Styler impressively wrote, produced, arranged and played most of the instruments on Spiral, but his fearlessness caught hip-hop heads completely off-guard and it bombed. Divine Styler lost his production deal, his record label and eventually his freedom (if not also his tether to the material world).

Spiral is out of print but might be available from Amazon. You can also listen to tracks below:

Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light is unabashedly psychotic but worth the effort of a complete listen.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: What ever happened to Neneh Cherry?

Sun Ra: The Magic City (1965)

sunra_magic

A nice place to visit on your way to Saturn.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Having recorded over one hundred albums in a forty year span, many of them self-released only at his concerts, Sun Ra’s entire canon defines obscure. As a turban-and-robe-wearing, Egyptology-loving outer space enthusiast, his oddball status within jazz circles kept many music fans from taking him or his music seriously. Claiming a birthplace of Saturn, he nevertheless drew attached to his adopted hometown of Birmingham, Alabama and in 1965 he recorded an homage to it entitled The Magic City.

Ra and his band the Arkestra were highly skilled swing musicians, which may explain why their transition into free jazz remains listenable. The title track, nearly half an hour in length, has a dozen movements that could serve as a miniature Sun Ra biography. It begins with a spooky buzzing that’s reminiscent of 1950s alien arrival films. A lattice of stratospheric flutes simulate the wonderment of a new civilization. One can also visualize the growth of modern industry, the vertigo of skyscrapers, the joy of walking your pet in the park, and the madness of traffic jams, all within the rising and falling of the instrumental moods.

“The Shadow World” is a night full of travel where the city never sleeps. Drums pop like oil in a skillet, horns circle like birds around a building. “The Abstract Eye”, appearing in two takes, features wonderfully expressive bowed bass that sounds not unlike the opening and closing of twenty-foot zippers.

THE FALLOUT: Barely known outside of hardcore jazz fans, The Magic City sold poorly, although massive sales were not the point of Sun Ra’s musical experiments at all. Still, many of his contemporaries borrowed his ideas, both musically (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Funkadelic) and presentationally (Earth, Wind & Fire), and received fat accolades while Ra remained a fringe artist nearly until his death in 1993.

Ironically for such an historically hard-to-find album, The Magic City is now available worldwide from such retailers as Amazon, and you can hear tracks below:

A landmark of improvisational music, The Magic City helped redirect the limits of modern composition and still sounds contemporary, forty years after its recording.

NEXT WEEK: Tackhead reformulates and gets the Axe.

Q-Tip: Kamaal The Abstract (2000)

qtip_kamaal

Thanks for advancing music, now drop dead.

Purchase this album: Amazon

(The following article was written in 2005, but in 2009 the album was finally released.)

THE SCENE: As the ex-leader of the beloved conscious rap group A Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip irritated his fan base with his unexpectedly jiggy solo debut, 1999’s Amplified. Sensing that he wasn’t cut out to be a fur-wearing mainstream rapper he completely flipped the script for his next album, 2000’s Kamaal the Abstract.

Much like Sting did for Dream of the Blue Turtles, Q-Tip also assembled a tight team of jazz musicians and crafted a sweet album of finely textured pop songs that crackles with deep grooves and the joy of live band performance. Kamaal the Abstract humbly melds the best aspects of acid jazz, hip-hop and alternative rock into an ambitious and exciting new form.

“Feelin” jumps in with a seemingly ordinary hip-hop track but expands like a peacock plume with chunky guitars and radio static. After rapping and scatting for a bit it’s all about the O.G. organ solos, played so vibrantly you’ll forget that it goes on for minutes. It’s full of “walking down the street on your way to the party” spirit.

Q-Tip’s commitment to the flow of the groove is so sincere he sometimes vanishes altogether, as he does in “Do U Dig U”. He introduces his spacey and souful singing voice then lets the flutes take over, gilding slinkly across crisp percussion, recalling those smoky bohemian clubs with the small round tables and red lights that serve mojitos.

The electric piano-driven “Barely In Love” warmly invokes the buzz of a new crush with the most joyous hand claps you’ll hear outside of a gospel choir:

When you really think about it
love is truly powerful
the undeniable force
that makes it magnetic
when you can’t explain
when you do
what you do
can’t nobody take away
when you do
what you do

His band turns up the intensity in “Heels”, his playful ode to women’s shoes, with stomping drums and funky xylophone. “Abstractions” is a musically dense bottle rocket of fun where he repositions himself, the new advanced model Q-Tip, as a playful musical adventurer.

THE FALLOUT: Arista Records treated the album with all the love of a stripper at a church picnic, branding it “uncommercial.” Promo copies were released to hip-hop and rock journalists, who alternately raved it up or ripped it to shreds. A Spike Lee-directed mini-movie was commissioned and abandoned. A 2002 release date was set and cancelled, causing Q-Tip to negotiate a release from his contract. Five years after it was completed, Kamaal the Abstract is still lying somewhere in Arista’s vault.

UPDATE: It’s now available from Amazon and you can listen to tracks here:

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Introducing Konoko N°1: the world’s only electrified Congolese trance punks.

Herbie Hancock: Sextant (1973)

herbie_sextant

Jazz can swing, and sing and sting, but what happens when jazz goes ping?

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: By 1973 keyboardist Herbie Hancock had recorded ten albums with Miles Davis, including the historic free-jazz sessions of Bitches Brew. That recording must have of woken up his inner freak-child because his own music started to steadily mutate away from traditional song structures toward dense aural sculptures, light on hooks but ultra-heavy on grooves and atmosphere. Hancock’s future of the funk also used a literal ton of bleeding-edge synthesizers, mostly tweaked to produce unearthly bleeps, blops and, er, pings.

After recording three albums of challenging and poorly selling releases for Warner Brothers, Hancock and his band Mwandishi moved to Columbia Records and unleashed Sextant, a fresh blend of African polyrhythms, melodic brass and layer after layer of tripped-out keyboard sounds.

“Rain Dance” begins with, well, imagine the sound of water slowly drip, drip, dripping onto the metal floor of an empty submarine. This submarine then suddenly drops 20,000 leagues beneath the sea of shrieking horn stabs, switches on the acoustic bass propulsion jets and cruises through the waters of electronic jellyfish and percussive sea critters.

The journey continues on land with “Hidden Shadows”, an arid trek through a rocky terrain populated with dive-bombing synthetic mosquitoes and bubbling percussion volcanoes that erupt drum geysers without warning. The rhythm section gallops quickly as if they are being chased by unknown assailants. Keyboard smears and horn solos hang in the air like angry buzzards circling its prey.

“Hornets” takes you deep inside the rainforest of wild, untamed instrumentation. It’s a twenty minute battle for jungle supremacy as every musician fights for control of the song, trying to ride the humid wave of its primacy while avoiding being sucked into the undertow. The horns and drums maintain a valiant catfight but Hancock’s wall of synths eventually outflanks all comers with a continual venom of exotic textures, both oppressive and effervescent.

Nowadays we’d call this music electronica or ambient, but in 1973 it was called “an unlistenable mound of dung that’s best ignored”.

THE FALLOUT: Sextant didn’t sell and the resulting tour was not well attended so Mwandishi called it day. Hancock focused his next musical project on merging jazz with funk, which was a novel idea in 1974. That album, Headhunters, became the largest selling jazz album of all-time. How’s that for a career rebound?

Sextant is currently in print from Sony and available from your better CD retailers, like this one. It’s the perfect headphone music for that odd trip to the aquarium. You can also listen to tracks here:

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: In the streak-free world of major label hip-hop, New Kingdom brings beats to the grime.