Digging in the Crates: Art Webb Reissued on CD!!

At various times in the history of digital music since CDs started to take over in the 1980s, reissues of pre-CD LPs have gone through many phases. When digital technology first took over, record companies rushed to put parts of their catalog back on the shelves. I remember furiously making the rounds of record stores every week, hoping against hope that some of my favorite wax albums had been upgraded and brought back to life by CD. Sometimes I scored, often via costly European and Japanese imports. As CD technology improved, record labels would go through another wave of back-catalog reissues, and sometimes in addition to re-reissuing remastered albums they'd dig a little deeper and broader and more forgotten vault treasures would spring back to life on the shelves. Falling for record-company hype over and over again, there are even a handful of albums I have bought three times on CD. It's a familiar pattern. The first digital reissue was welcome but didn't sound so good. Then the remastered version. WOW! And then the remastered deluxe edition in a nice digipak or mini LP-sleeve with bonus tracks. DOUBLE WOW! And the record company makes money over and over again from the same repertoire. But some albums just didn't seem to make it into the CD age, and I have on several occasions replaced favorite worn out-of-print vinyl LPs with slightly fresher less worn-out used copies.

A few years ago when digital downloads and iPods started to change how music was consumed, free (called by some, illegal) file-sharing became the rage. All of a sudden thousands of lost LPs were digitized by music lovers and shared for free over the internet. What fun! As both a consumer and sharer (through my music blog Ile Oxumare), I found this amazing. LPs I thought I had no hope of hearing again or for the first time even circulated freely among a community of music heads, real fans most of them, dedicated to the love of the groove.

And yet as the death of the CD is hourly reported, as music lovers have rediscovered crates and crates of great old LPs, it seems record companies have discovered that licensing old titles out to semi-independent labels has a little more money-making life left in it. Music blogs seem to have proved that crate diggers and seventies-grooves connoisseurs are still a loyal audience who buy enough CDs to make a new, even deeper, foray into the vaults worthwhile.

Which brings me to my discovery that two of my favorite 1970s discofied jazz-groove albums have finally made it to CD. Courtesy of the Wounded Bird reissue label, I am happy to welcome back flautist Art Webb's albums "Mr. Flute" and "Love Eyes," both, I believe, originally released back in 1977. (I bought both my copies from Dustygroove.com of course).



I bought both of these LPs back in the day. Having fallen in love with Blue Note jazz flautist Bobbi Humphrey's albums when I was in high school, I somehow assumed that all jazz flute must sound like her. Sorta funky, gurgling with danceable energy and complex, heady electric arrangements, and the occasional mellow if unvirtuosic background vocal, when I started consuming jazz LPs upon my arrival at college I kept running into disappointment in the pursuit of more jazz flute. Artists I now respect as awesome like Lloyd McNeill and James Newton disappointed the hell out of me at the time. Herbie Mann? Gees, guy pick a style and stay with it. And then I found Art Webb.

Art Webb turns out to have been a mainstay of the New York Latin music scene, and while these albums are not Latin music per se, his cred in that area comes shining through. "Mr. Flute" does conclude with an almost Santana-like Latin fusion tune cut with the group Raices, but I tended to skip that track in my hip-swinging youth. The real starmaker of "Mr. Flute" is producer Patrick Adams, who spent the late 1970s and early 1980s pioneering a gloriously glossy urban sound. And by urban I mean disco, baby. This album sounds like jazz funk dipped in a little Salsoul, with sweeping strings, a propulsive Latin beat, and the best background grooves studio singers and musicians could sell. Oh yeah and Art Webb plays the flute.

Which comes across as mean, I suppose, but what I realized from Bobbi Humphrey and Art Webb both is that the flute is a brilliant focus for a groove, riding along like foam on the crest of a wave, but I have no idea if their playing is particularly good. Oh the music is brilliant: it seduces each part of my body to the parallel lines of its groove. A little chunky guitar, the congas and cowbell, the cooing of female vocalists, the glorious bells, buried harmonies of golden horns, the sweep of those strings. Some of these songs have words, I suppose, but they're not lyrical ballads, these snatches of phrases and words whose beauty is momentary and whose meaning is nothing except the joy of getting lost in this beautiful sound. When that singer commands us to Smile in my favorite track of "Mr. Flute." that is exactly what I do. And if Herbie Mann's attempted forays into disco about the same time sounded crass and cliched, almost embarassingly forced, Art Webb via Patrick Adams gets it exactly right. While I don't think this music made it big on anybody's playlist -- it was still, after all, consigned to the deadly bins of Jazz -- the sound captures something about the spirit of the boogie, if you will, all in it together, no stars, no self, just groove.

I even featured a scratchy rip of one of these albums in the early days of Ile Oxumare. The new CD sounds terrific though, and my rip is now officially retired.

"Mr. Flute" was an album of mostly originals, and as much as it made an impression on me, it didn't really crack the charts. The follow up, "Love Eyes," tried to remedy that by including some covers, strangely all from the orbit of late Charles Stepney-era Earth Wind and Fire. There's "You Can't Hide Love" and "Devotion" which EWF both performed, and the amazing "Free" which made Deniece Williams a star under EWF's tutelage. Hubert Eaves is now in on electric piano and Patrick Adams is replaced by the eclectic John Lee and Gerry Brown, flown in from the continent on some starmaking errand, no doubt, from backing up for obscure-in-America European fusion musicians. The covers are more than serviceable -- God bless a world filled only with Earth Wind and Fire covers, I mean, really -- and even though the general formula is the same as "Mr. Flute," the album doesn't have quite the same brash freshness to my ear as the first. Not that I could live without either of these albums. These are wonderful things to have on pristine digital reissues, and whether or not the end of the CD is nigh--certainly the first thing I did when I got these is rip them to my iTunes--I'm thankful that somebody is still digging in those crates and bringing these tunes back into the light.

Thanks Art, for making this music!

10 favorite albums #8: MARVIN GAYE--What's Going On, Tamla/Motown, 1971

Marvin Gaye was the bravest man in Motown. A mainstay of the Detroit-based record company's soul-music hit-making machine he helped turn black music into the "sound of young America." Turning the bright, unthreatening Motown pop sound, favorite of African-Americans, into the favorite of urban white Americans was a kind of miracle, and along with Barry Gordy and Lamont Dozier and Norman Whitfield and the whole roster of producers, musicians and singers, Marvin Gaye was a miracle maker.

I myself had a tremendous boyhood crush on Motown's Miss Diana Ross, though I'm not entirely sure my desire to sing along with "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" in 1968 wasn't some nascent draq-queen stirring in my gay boy soul.

Marvin was brave because in 1970 he turned his back on the hit-making machine and began to self-produce his heart out, creating a concept album on the troubled state of America. By all accounts he struggled to convince the label to release the music, and only after its first single was released and started roaring up the charts did the album become a viable entity.

Gone were the happy love songs. Gone were the sad love songs. Gone were the songs for teenage heartache, or teenage flirtation, or teenage sexuality. Instead Marvin delivered an album of rage and grief and spirit and hope: What's Going On.

America was heavy on Marvin Gaye's mind. From the opening lyrics of the title song, "Mother, mother, there's too many of you crying. Brother, brother, brother, there's too many of you dying. You know we've got to find a way, to bring more lovin' here today. Father, father, father, we don't need to escalate; You see, war is not the answer, For only love can conquer hate..." Marvin's mind is clear. The Vietnam war, then raging, needed to end.

Gaye goes on to address unemployment and social disillusionment ("What's Happening Brother"), drug addiction ("Flyin' High (In The Friendly Sky)"), ecological crisis (years ahead of Al Gore in "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)"), and urban crisis ("Inner City Blues"). Sprinkled between, though not at all as a happy ending, are calls for faith ("God Is Love," "Wholy Holy"), calls to safeguard the future ("Save the Children") and a rumination on the healing power of love and solidarity ("Right On").

While Gaye used the same Motown studio musicians, including the strings and the choruses and the bells, the scratchy guitars and the conga drums, he turned out something new and revelatory. Alternating between worry, bitter resignation, fear and yet determination to survive, his songs encapsulated the spirit of the times like no other music. It was the problem of the seventies: would the awakening of the sixties bear fruit of change or be snuffed out in darkness and despair.

I don't remember the first time I heard What's Going On. Surely in Chicago the record was ubiquitous. The gym teacher responsible for social dancing at my junior high had a penchant for Motown and surely, if not perversely, "Mercy Mercy Me" joined the Four Tops "Still Waters Run Deep (Peace)" as crowd-pleasing hits. I have memories, fortunately, only for the music, not the clutch of some sweaty-palmed female classmate's forced embrace. Oddly I never owned the album on vinyl, and so never knew its depth, or its lesser-known numbers, until the 1980s when the death of 1960s optimism became complete, when I bought an early CD reissue.

Several CD generations later, I thoroughly recommend the 2-disc deluxe edition, issued in 2001 (prophetically on the cusp of our new post-9/11 era of war and tragedy). The 2-disc set includes the original album as released, plus a version of the entire album in its preliminary form demonstrating the Motown producers' incredible ear for a hit as the final product is just sweetened up so much better than the original mix. Plus there's a live set of most of the tunes, and the original singles issued before the album itself. Well worth the couple extra bucks.

The songs on What's Going On have been covered a million times by black musicians, white musicians, jazz musicians, singers, you name it. The original remains the best though many are worth a listen. It's just only in Marvin's versions are the emotions so raw and the despair so heartfelt. High among my favorite covers is Aretha Franklin's version of "Wholly Holy" on her live gospel set of 1972, Amazing Grace (itself reissued on an extended CD version).

Marvin opened the gate for Motown's next act as a socially-conscious record label. Especially in producer Norman Whitfield's extraordinary work for the label, Motown's repertoire became much more complex. To imagine the Temptations, for instance, gone from sugary bubble gum to politically-charged psychedelia, one has to remember the times and the trajectory that Marvin so bravely travelled. Marvin's sad death at the hands of his father in 1984 is the music's tragic coda.

"Love can conquer hate everytime..."

10 favorite albums #9: MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA -- Apocalypse, CBS Records, 1974

Fusion. Before the caricature of the sci-fi obsessed masturbatory guitar-synthesizer soloist canoodling after a 15-minute trap drum solo becomes burned into your ears causing you to flip to the next album in the rack, consider how vibrant was culture on the cusp of the seventies. Miles Davis--brilliant, misanthropic, misogynist, narcissistic, drug-addled, virtuosic--had keyed into jazz, rock, funk, blues, and like the armies in front of Jericho before him caused the walls to fall with his trumpet. Maybe his great equalisation was as counter-revolutionary as it was revolutionary, but the jazz-head could now lie down with the funkster, the rocker could now lie down with the classicist, the snob with the plebe.

John McLaughlin was one of Miles' disciples: A white guy from England, an electric guitar player no less, whose muses included not only Delta bluesmen but mystical Indian gurus. After bringing the rock to Miles Davis' fusion of jazz and rock, McLaughlin became a kind of high-priest of fusion. He played Coltrane tunes with Carlos Santana on dueling electric guitars. He played delicate acoustic melodies linking the river valleys of Appalachia with the mighty Ganges in India. And he created the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

In its first incarnation the Mahavishnu Orchestra was like a plugged-in jazz rock combo, guitar-drums-bass-keyboard, adding in a fiery electric violinist. McLaughlin's guitar was not only front and center its metallic screeching and rapidfire arpeggios crowding and containing its space. I like the albums of this first incarnation; but they're not Apocalypse.

I first heard Apocalypse in 1977. It was my first apartment in college, shared with two roommates, one a fellow student, both fellow political radicals and activists. One of my roommates was recently back from Europe. He had long hair, and French girlfriends, and wore a gold ring on his thumb. He had tried to turn me on to Patti Smith (who I now love) quite unsuccessfully. His French girlfriends tried to turn me on to the Stranglers. Ugh. And then he put on side two of Apocalypse.

The sounds of a full string orchestra filled the room, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas no less. A lovely, melancholic melody. Kettle drums. A solo violin. And then something happens. Is it a keyboard? A guitar? Sound seems to ripple and distort, electricity takes over. The orchestra remains but the sound of soaring strings is fronted by interplay of electric guitar and electric violin. The orchestral percussion retreats in favor of propulsive rock drumming.

And so I was introduced to the second Mahavishnu lineup: French electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty veteran of West-Coast hippy-jazz-rock scene of Frank Zappa and George Duke, drummer Narada Michael Walden a young prodigy would go on to become a big pop-disco record producer in the early 1980; keyboardist and vocalist Gayle Moran responsible here for adding a voice of human vulnerability to otherwise divine and lofty playing. [Moran's work here is the strongest of her career. Her singing with later husband Chick Corea and her one long out-of-print solo album might please Xenu but they're nowhere near as sublime as on her two appearances with Mahavishnu.] Bringing up the funk is bassist Ralphe Armstrong.

The cover image (in LP days, sans brick red border) was Mahavishnu guru Sri Chinmoy as Krishna himself, there but not there, reflections within reflections, mysteries within reality. The kind of image that, propelled along by the music on the turntable and the weed in the bong could make you weep for its portrayal of another world so visible yet unreachable (Not quite Roger Dean of Yes cover fame, but it worked for me!).

And after the crescendo of orchestra and electricity, notes bent like a Indian raga cooling off: peace, tranquility, catharsis. That was the gift of this record. The catharsis of fusion energy unbridled and then restrained. The record also revealed, in its mystery, the nether worlds of spirit: the unspeakable shared by the knowing. A taste for me of later quests.

The second Mahavishnu Orchestra went on to record one other album, Visions of the Emerald Beyond which is quite enjoyable though not as sublime. Also of note, though a pale shadow of the original, is the tribute album Return to the Emerald Beyond by the New York-based Mahavishnu Project. John McLaughlin remains a virtuosic player, but to my taste his music is no longer as creative or as interesting. I liked his Shakti albums where he toyed more directly with Indian music, but, like an awful lot of what passes for jazz these days, his current records don't move me like the stuff from the seventies does.

Narada Michael Walden's solo albums also frequently attempt a return to the spirit of Mahavishnu. Even as the albums become more and more discofied to the cusp of the 1980s (and quite catchy, it must be said), each contains at least one song harkening back to the cosmic fusions of Apocalypse.

If the Mahavishnu Orchestra's sound was indeed the soundtrack to the Apocalypse, then let the world come crashing to an end.

10 favorite albums #10: BOBBI HUMPREY -- Blacks and Blues, Blue Note, 1973

A friend of mine calls this "shag carpet and cocaine" jazz. It's definitely not for jazz purists. While flautist Bobbi Humphrey was discovered by renowned jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, her recording career quickly took a turn away from tradition toward the funky, accessible pop sound that Blue Note records was then capitalizing upon.

Her first two solo albums Flute In, reissued on CD in a bizarro-world budget hack job, and Dig This, sadly not yet reissued on CD, are enjoyable period pieces. Primarily covers of pop, soul and jazz tunes they brought a sense of groove to jazz flute. Dig This sounds like nothing so much as a set of instrumental backgrounds for Stevie Wonder. (Indeed she went on to play with Stevie!) The sound was funky but not too funky, intelligent but not effete. Jazz was melding with R&B in ways that many found a kind of dilution. But I am not one of those people.

Blacks and Blues was Humphrey's third album, and the first of three she was to record with ace rare groove producers Larry and Fonce Mizell. Their trademark combinations of analog-synthesizer/keyboard-driven groove, latin percussion, smooth vocal choruses, and busy busy arrangements melding both acoustic and electric instruments created a singular setting for Humphrey's flute and occasional vocals. Like their work with Donald Byrd, the Mizells' work with Bobbi Humphrey conveys sophistication along with an adult sensuality. The essence of what has come to be called Rare Groove, the Mizell sound is the sound of late night. Melancholic, bluesy, jazzy, but also optimistic. The fast tunes are dance music for a house party not a discotheque; the slow ones for making out on a darkened sofa.

While I love all of Humphrey's Blue Note work, Blacks and Blues is my favorite. I first bought her LPs while I was still in High School from, of all places, Columbia House record club. Yes the same company that laid me off thirty-odd years later. The song Chicago, Damn right away captured my nostalgia for the complexities of my home town, since I was then trapped in gray suburban Connecticut. Humphrey and the Mizells are joined by some of the key players of 1970s jazzified R&B: Freddie Perren, Jerry Peters, David T. Walker, Chuck Rainey, King Errison. Check your favorite 1970s groove classics and these names will be associated with most of them.

This record marked the first time Humphrey added vocals to her repetoire. Her vocals are fragile and tentative, but oddly affecting.

It took a while for her work to make it to CD, but now Blacks and Blues along with follow-ups Satin Doll and Fancy Dancer have made it to the digital century. Hopefully her first two Blue Note efforts, as well as her Epic/Columbia albums that followed the demise of Blue Note, will make it out soon. God bless the Japanese and their good taste for leading the way in the 1970s jazz reissue department. Look up the other Mizell productions, especially their work for Donald Byrd, or their rare CTI production for Johnny Hammond, A Gambler's Life.

10 favorite albums, continued.

Wow. This was hard.

7) Egberto Gismonti, Academa de Dancas, 1974
8) Marvin Gaye, What's Going On, 1971
9) Mahavishnu Orchestra, Apocalypse, 1974
10) Bobbi Humphrey, Blacks and Blues, 1973

Runners up:
Airto Moreira, Seeds on the Ground
Madonna, Ray of Light
Rotary Connection, Hey Love
Pharoah Sanders, Karma
Yes, Close to the Edge
Aretha Franklin, Let Me In Your Life
Laura Nyro, Smile
Patti Smith, Horses

I will endeavor to review my favorites over the next few weeks.

my 10 favorite albums

So what might my ten favorite albums be, exactly? Here's a rough go. Kinda hard in a collection of thousands of CDs to pick only ten. I"ve always hoped my desert island would be well-stocked with CD shelving.

OK, in progress and probably not in order, and I'm gonna force myself to limit these to ten different artists. Also, I realize my ten favorite songs might not be on any of these, but the albums gotta stand up as a whole:

1) Joni Mitchell, Hegira, 1976 (?)
2) Flora Purim, Nothing Will Be As It Was, 1976
3) James Mason, The Rhythm of Life, 1977
4) Pharoah Sanders, Village of the Pharoahs, 1974 (?)
5) Alice Coltrane, Journey In Satchidananda, 1973 (?)
6) Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul, 1969 (?)

Okay, second half to come.

Build An Ark

My favorite record of 2004 was an album called "Peace With Every Step" by the collective Build An Ark. With a spiritual, rootsy sensibility, the group created an album of covers and originals hearkening back to the Impulse! sound of the 1970s. Covering Pharoah Sanders and Michael White as well as Detroit's Tribe Records collective, the group achieves a sublime vibe. Standout tracks included the peace anthem Love Is Our Nationality and a cover of the groove standard Always There re-done as a tribute to the departed spirits of jazz musicians who have left this work. The album was first issues in Europe and then Japan, and finally on Plug from the U.S.

Build An Ark is back with their second album, "Dawn" now out on Shaman Work. (Though I picked mine up at Dustygroove, my favorite web CD store.) It's a great record. The highlight is a cover of Big Black's lost treasure Love Is Sweet Like Sugar Cane, featuring the percussionist legend himself. Jason Witherspoon, one of the founders of the Kozmigroov mailing list, turned me on to this song years ago, and I'm ecstatic to hear this new version. Build An Ark captures a lost era: hippy-influenced, spiritual, acoustic, multi-ethnic jazz as graced the Bay Area or New York in the early seventies. They also cover the delicate and beautiful Healing Song from a relatively obscure Pharoah Sanders album. The originals are strong as well.

Build An Ark members include Carlos Nino, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and Dwight Trible, a singer the closest thing we have to a reincarnation of Leon Thomas.

Great work, folks. Good luck with the record.