Sunday Night Schmalz: A Taste of Honey

Remember Herb Alpert doing his early-sixties signature song "A Taste of Honey"? It's the hit track from the album showing a model covered in "whipped cream" with a seductive look on her face, and it's a sort of cliche of swinging sixties pre-rock bachelor pad music. Well now forget about that. Here's a version of that song from Andy Bey and the Bey Sisters, the singing group that launched the career of the amazing honey-voiced singer Andy Bey, who is quite still around. Recorded in 1964, this version slows the tempo way down and takes the song from the height of the party to late night at the bar. What is in other hands almost cloyingly perky is transformed into something else altogether. All of a sudden it's introspective melancholia, the perfect accompaniment to a neat glass of booze, some dim lights, and, like tonight, a chilly evening with dark streets that may or may not lead you to where you expect them to.

I didn't know it before looking it up for this entry, but it's originally from a 1960 Broadway show and was also popularized by... The Beatles. When I was younger I didn't get this kind of slow, bittersweetly lush vocal music. But as a middle-aged gay man this stuff seems to get right under my skin.

"I will return...
I'll come back for the honey and you."

Is That All There Is?

Two great American songwriters left this world this week: the great Nickolas Ashford, first of Motown songwriting fame and later of the duet Ashford & Simpson with his wife Valerie; and Jerry Leiber of the Leiber and Stoller songwriting team responsible for many classic early rock and pop hits. I have to say that while I've long thought Ashford & Simpson incapable of writing anything other than a masterpiece, most Leiber & Stoller songs are not really to my taste. With one important exception: the song made into a hit in 1969 by the great Miss Peggy Lee, "Is That All There Is."

Unlike much of their other work such as "Hound Dog," "Kansas City," or "Stand by Me," Leiber & Stoller's "Is That All There Is" is not a swing-your-hips, tap-along stormer of a tune. It's a deeply cynical, existentially world-weary expression of disillusionment and disappointment. Performed by Peggy Lee to utter perfection long after her own girlish romantic optimism had transformed itself to an almost stiff aloofness and detachment, the song is better served with a shot of whiskey than a champagne toast. I remember hearing it the first time as a young boy on the radio and being transfixed by its daring lyricism: I was amazed somebody was celebrating such a message of hopelessness. It still provokes a dark chuckle every time I listen to it. It was probably the first time I ever heard the interpretive genius of Peggy Lee as well. I read this week that the song had been first offered to Marlene Dietrich who turned it down. Lee's knowing delivery is an absolute triumph, transforming the work of pop ditty songwriters into that of high cabaret artistes.

It makes me surprised that Leiber & Stoller didn't go on to write musical theater. But after a song like this, well, maybe that's just all there needs to be.

The Left Rev. Mc D: Eugene McDaniels, R.I.P.

Singer, songwriter and music producer Eugene McDaniels passed on yesterday at the age of 76. Who? You might not know his name but if you were around in the 1970s you know and love some of the songs he penned, the two most famous of which are Roberta Flack's big hit "Feel like Making Love" and Les McCann and Eddie Harris's "Compared to What."

Gene McDaniels got his start in the very early sixties singing pop soul. He had a string of hits, "A Hundred Pounds of Clay, and "Tower of Strength" come to mind. He had a beautiful voice and these are masterpieces from a very mainstream genre. But times changed, and those times set McDaniels free.

"Compared to What," although not performed by McDaniels himself, went to number one on the legendary 1969 Les McCann/Eddie Harris album "Swiss Movement." Very different than his earliest soul songs, it's been covered by hundreds of artists, including Roberta Flack, who became one of his key songwriting partners in the 1970s and the linchpin of his behind-the-scenes commercial success. It's one of those songs, like the work of the somewhat harder-edged Gil Scott-Heron, also recently lost, that is foundational to hip-hop with its almost chanted lyric couplets.

"Compared to What" is a political classic, a bitter statement of the times:

"Slaughterhouse is killin' hogs
Twisted children killin' frogs
Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs
Tired old lady kissin' dogs
I hate the human love of that stinking mutt (I can't use it!)
Try to make it real — compared to what? C'mon baby now!

The President, he's got his war
Folks don't know just what it's for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason
We're chicken-feathers, all without one nut. God damn it!
Tryin' to make it real — compared to what? (Sock it to me)"

About the same time McDaniels created the lyrics and the strikingly original vocal arrangements for jazz vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson's album Now. It's an almost psychedelic existential concept album, full of the creative ferment of the moment, bridging the acoustic and electric sounds, and raising political and spiritual consciousness. McDaniels also created similar vocals for Billy Harper's 1973 Strata-East album Capra Black that show a masterful command of harmony.

While McDaniels also went on to produce songs and albums for a long range of artists with a more commercial sound albeit with his musical integrity intact, to me his most exciting works are his two early 1970s Atlantic solo albums "Outlaw" and "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse," and his side project "Universal Jones." (That's the track "River" from Universal Jones above). Styling himself "The Left Rev McD," McDaniels immerses himself in a genre-bending hippiefied contusion of lyric and sonic transgression. The album Outlaw features the cover statement "Under conditions of national emergency, like now, there are only two kinds of people – those who work for freedom and those who do not … the good guys vs. the bad guys.”

Check out some of the lyrics for the title tune of Outlaw:
"She's a nigger in jeans
She's an outlaw she don't wear a bra
She's a whitey in jeans she's an outlaw she don't wear a bra
Her disposition is mean
She's the grooviest lady you ever saw
She does not fry her hair
She's an outlaw she don't wear a bra
She does not dye her hair
She's an outlaw she don't wear a bra
She thinks justice is fair
That's why she's living with nature not the law
She bows down to no man
Although she's in love with three..."

And there's "Love Letter to America":

"Hey America
You could of had it any way you wanted it
You could of been a real democracy
You could of been free
Hey America...
I could have loved you more
More than you will ever know
You are my homeland
Hey America
The only thing you can respect is violence now
You lost the gift of love don't ask me how
But you lost it now..."

Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse continues his exploration of a psychedelic sound somewhere between jazz, rock and folk. It also serves up a healthy dose of anger at the times.

Here's some of "Supermarket Blues":
"Strolled up to the counter
Slammed my hand down on the cashier and said, 'scuse me please
But I bought this can of pineapple the other day
When I got it home it was a can of peas, goddamn
If I'd wanted those I'd have picked my nose
And thrown on in the back to the vegetable freeze
Just then the supermarket manager hit me from behind
Brought me to my knees y'all
I've got the supermarket blues and it's really more than I can use
I've got the supermarket blues and if I've got to choose
It's really them I'd like to lose

When I came to, sirens were wailing away
When I touched my face my hand turned red
As I struggled from the floor the crowd called out for more
Some old lady kicked me in the head, goddamn
For God's sakes lady I only want to trade a can of peas for a lousy loaf of bread
Just then a cop rushed in and joined the fun
Threatened my life with some lead y'all
...
The old lady who kicked me in the head
Called me a communist jerk and just generally got uptight y'all
She said "how can a savage like you know anything, boy
You ain't even white," goddamn
I really wish I had stayed home and gotten high
Instead of coming into the street and having this awful fight..."

While McDaniels continued to work up until the day he died, he did seem to withdraw from the urban chaos that seems that seems to have haunted him. In the last clip below he describes himself as a "hermit living in Maine," with his wife of may years.

"There's a river somewhere
That flows through the lives of everyone
I know it flows through the valleys and the mountains and the meadows of time
yes it do
There's a star in the sky
Shines in the life of everyone
You know it shines in the valleys and the mountains and the meadows of time
Yes it do
There's a voice from the past speaks through the lives of everyone
You know it speaks through the the valleys and the mountains and the meadows in time
Yes it do"
—from "River," 1972

What a great loss, but what a poetic legacy of music.


"Lovin' Man" from 1971, on his album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse.


"Now" from Bobby Hutcherson's 1969 album of that name on Blue Note.


Last year McDaniels talks about "Compared to What." See his website for more of these.

Lyrics copyright by Eugene McDaniels; transcribed here by me.

Anti-war Anthems: Ursula Rucker

A few weeks ago when jazz poet/prophet Gil Scott-Heron passed, I asked "who would tell the truth" in his absence. I realized shortly after that I had a prime candidate in mind in Ursula Rucker, a Philadelphia-based poet and singer. She's recorded three conventional albums, released two digital-only albums, and has worked as a featured guest with a host of important artists on the cutting edge of socially/spiritually/politically conscious music.

The video above is "Awakening," from the 2007 album Play with the Changes by the genius British duo 4hero. The chill-out groove is pure 4hero but the lyrical message is all Ursula Rucker: a sort of dialogue between mother and daughter about carrying the torch to the next generation.

"Sister girl wanna tell you about this thing
that's been weighing heavy on my heart
haunts both my dreams and my first breath,
hmmm where to start well
Revolution it seems has become an antique when
in my youth revolution was what we rose with the sun to seek
we were fierce

Now, our glory days are nothing but a page,
in an edge worn book
an afro a raised fist,
a black beret, black pride
set aside to mere history,
it saddens me,
hmm it saddens me,
but will these words fall on deaf ears cos my tears won't
fill up the riverbed of resistance and change,
it's gone dry
and gone and unkown are the names which gave that river its
tranquility, its beautiful force and godspeed
rise up out of the complacency induced sleep
we need, an Awakening.

Bring the noise daughter
now is the time for you and your generation to put this universal
chaos in order...

But Mama, the resistance seemed so futile,
when all the while, government and media massacre my dreams,
We, my brothers and sisters and me,
are at the mercy of Dotcoms,
Bombs that kill at least 30 daily
the constant downward spiral of music and humanity,
a general lack of concern, knowledge and history,
our potential leaders and spokespeople are chasing
materialistic ideals
seems our fates have been sealed with a Bling Bling kiss...

Mama, i still question the meanings of freedom and peace
but i will not retreat, i will instead meet
this challenge head on and heart strong.
Sing my protest songs..."

Rucker's poetry is often political like this, delivered in a beautifully eloquent shifting hybrid of poetry slam, singing, rap and confession: it's hip-hop at its most creative and conscious. I saw her perform once in New York City backed by only a guitarist with a sequencer: I was spellbound. She's angry sometimes, righteously indignant; she really knows how to preach. But if she can channel an angry Mother Earth as she does in 4hero's "Loveless" (another great video on youtube), she can also be vulnerable and even maternal.


"Release" from Rucker's 2003 album Silver or Lead, featuring music by NY Latin/groove DJ Little Louie Vega, is her 9/11 song:

"And blue that day
When, everything changed
What changed?
Who really changed?...

When towers be falling
And Babylon be calling your name, my name
How will we answer?
How will we answer?

With dread?
With faith?
With misplaced power or power of prayer?
With bigotry?
With humanity?
With love?
With love
Release

Release your heart"

She reverently follows the footsteps of important, and too often forgotten, female voices like Sonia Sanchez and Jayne Cortez who married poetry, music, feminist consciousness, and political commitment. Importantly she brings a youthful accessibility and hipness like Dana Bryant and Jill Scott, though I find her focus sharper and her edge harder. Aside from 4hero and Louie Vega, she's worked with Jazzanova, the Roots, King Britt, and even slick UK acid jazz group Incognito. Her recitations marry well with the European techno-groove sensibility that harvests American jazz-funk of the 1970s for inspiration, which also means she's perfect for my own taste in music.

While not all of her work is political, when she makes a statement I can't think of anyone else who presents the politics of social justice and liberation in such a profoundly spiritual way. From her perspective these things are not separate: the way human beings treat each other is called to a higher level of respect and consciousness. While these songs are not single-issue anti-war tunes, her observation of the blights on our world and society is unsparing and far-reaching.


This song is less overtly political, but a live version of the highlight title track from her most recent album "She Said," this one borders rock and roll. It's impossible to forget that hers is a woman's perspective, where love and hope share space with hope, bitterness and frustration. She specializes in, well, the truth.

As she sings on her recent album: "Wake the fuck up, cause t'ings have run amock!"

Who Will Tell the Truth Now that Gil Scott-Heron Is Gone?

Gil Scott-Heron had a way with words; a way with the truth.

Some people think that America invented the blues
And few people doubt that America is home of the blues

The blues has grown
by the country has not
The blues remembers everything the country forgot

America has got the blues
It's got the blues because of partial deification
of partial accomplishments
over partial periods of time
Halfway justice
Halfway liberty
Halfway equality
It's a half-assed year
And we would be silly in all our knowledge
In all our self-righteous knowledge to acknowledge anything less than the truth
About this bicentennial year
And the truth relates to 200 years of people and ideas getting by

It got by George Washington
slave-owner general

It got by Gerald Ford
Oatmeal man

Ronald Reagan, it got by him
Hollyweird
Acted like a actor
Acted like a liberal
Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California
And he acts like somebody might vote for him for president

It got by Henry Kissinger
The international godfather of peace
A piece of Vietnam
A piece of Laos
A piece of Angola
A piece of Cuba

The blues is in the street
America has got the blues
But don't let it get by us
(Bicentennial Blues, 1976)

He had a complete vision of the way things were. He wasn't afraid to take the symbolism of America head-on. He knew the history and the facts, and he knew what it was like to experience the reality of racism, violence and hypocrisy. He knew how much life costs.

And now democracy is a ragtime on the corner
Hoping for some rain
It looks like he's hoping, hoping for some rain
And I see the robins perched in barren treetops
Watching last-ditch racists marching across the floor
Just like the peace signs that that vanished in our dreams
Never had a chance to grow
And now it's winter
Winter in America
(Winter in America, 1975)

He was pissed off. And found a way to express it clearer than any. He channeled bitterness into lyric beauty. Here he is on the pardoning of Richard Nixon.

We beg your pardon because the pardon you gave this time was not yours to give.
They call it due process and some people are overdue.
We beg your pardon America.
Somebody said 'brother-man gonna break a window, gonna steal a hubcap, gonna smoke a joint, brother man gonna go to jail.'
The main who tried to steal America is not in jail....
We beg your pardon America because we understand now much more deeply than we understood before
But we don't want to take the pardon back, we want to issue some more
Pardon brother Frank Willis, the Watergate security guard, he was only doing his job
Pardon H. Rap Brown, it was only burglary
Pardon Robert Vesco, it was only embezzlement
Pardon Charles Manson, it was only mass murder
And pardon us while we get sick
Because they pardoned William Calley, 22 dead, and America in shock....
We beg your pardon America because we have an understanding of karma
What goes around, comes around
And we beg your pardon for all of the lies and all of the people who've been ruined and who look forward to next year because they can't stand to look at this one.
We beg your pardon America because the pardon you gave this time was not yours to give.
(Pardon Our Analysis, 1975)

But Gil Scott-Heron knew how to laugh through tears. His poems — his songs — were witty and expressive and moving, but they also expressed a wry sense of humor. Mixed with outrage, for sure, and brilliance, but deadly funny.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkins strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.
(The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 1971)

He was not always an optimistic man. His outlook could be bleak: he knew what the odds were, the strength of what he was — we are — up against.

So you cry like a baby
Or you go out and get high
But there ain't no peace on Earth, man
Maybe peace when you die
(A Sign of the Ages, 1971)

There's a sense of duty and obligation in his lyrics too. He knew what he had to do. Even as he fought his inner demons he couldn't set down his weapons in the battle for justice. I think it made him weary. But he was never able to stop, completely.

We want to be free
Yet we have no idea
Why we are struggling here
Faced with our every fear
Just to survive
We've heard the sound
And come around
To listening
(Beginnings/First Minute of a New Day, 1975)

He cut many great albums in the 1970s and some adequate ones in the 1980s. I had the sense that his tragic miscalculation about Ronald Reagan — indeed the tragic miscalculation about all of us on the left that America would actually vote a person like that into the presidency — haunted him, and dulled the certainty of his vision.

As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation
And here's a look at the closing numbers: Racism's up, human rights are down.
Peace is shaky, war items are hot — the house claims all ties.
Jobs are down, money is scarce and common sense is at an all-time low on heavy trading. Movies are looking better than ever and no one is looking because we're starring in a B-movie.
You don't need to be in no hurry
You ain't never really got to worry.
Just keep repeating that none of this is real.
This ain't really your life,
Ain't really your life,
Ain't really nothing but a movie.
(B-movie, 1981)

Gil Scott-Heron was, to all appearances, an anguished soul. He fought drug addiction his whole life, and lived that side of his life in the lyrics of his songs, openly sharing his pain. His last two records were full of the hard toll on his life. His honesty is almost painful to listen to.

Life is like a circle and you end up where you started
If you end up where you started ain't no other side
Yeah but if like is like a curtain then I'm 90% certain that I'm looking through at something
Yes I'm almost touching something on the other side
If life is like a mirror than the nearer you get clearer
You can see it so much clearer
Feel like you know about the other side
My friends all swear they know
What I should do with my life
How I should run my life
What should be happening with my life
They're on the other side
They're on the outside
I'm on the inside
(The Other Side, 1994)

Gil Scott-Heron is gone now, way too soon, at the age of 62. I'm happy for the legacy he left behind, the music; but I can't believe I never got to see him, and I can't believe there will be no more.

Early this morning
when you knocked upon my door
and I said, Hello Satan, I believe it's time to go
Me and the Devil walkin side by side
Say I don't see why you keep on dogging me around
You may bury my body down by the highway side
So my old evil spirit the Greyhound bus can ride
(I'm New Here, 2010)

Who will tell the truth now that Gil Scott-Heron is gone? Peace go with you, Brother.

Straddling the darkness
he controlled the bucking thrusts and rode on
into the emptiness that he alone would try to fill
into the middle to try to be the bridge between spirits
EXPAND he screamed
the vacuum was aroused, suspicious and alarmed
who would dare? but on he rode...
(And then he wrote Meditations, 1972)

(All italics are lyrics by Gil Scott-Heron).

UPDATE: Here's an audio tribute from my friend Blackclassical.

RIP Gill Scott Heron by Black Classical on Mixcloud

America Has Lost a Prophet: Gil Scott-Heron RIP

Sad news indeed: I've just learned that jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron has passed on at the age of 62. The above video is a not-so-famous later-day performance of one of his well-known songs from the 1970s, "Winter in America." His most famous songs are probably "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," "The Bottle" and "Home Is Where the Hatred Is." He had a hard life frequently struggling to deal with uncontrolled substance abuse, but he was an absolutely brilliant prophet of the American condition. He pilloried all the problems of American society, and with them a succession of politicians, holding Ronald Reagan up to the light of brutal excoriation. He was a singer and a poet; indeed many people call him the originator of rap music, as his first records in the very early 1970s consisted largely of spoken-word rants over spare jazz arrangements or percussion.

I can't believe he's now gone: I'll try to come back with a greater appreciation of his work later.

(I previously presented one of his songs here.)

Love Is Our Nationality

This lovely song was recorded by the California collective Build an Ark on their first record "Peace With Every Step" back in 2003. I suppose this music is called jazz, but that seems really inadequate. I'm not sure I understand why the urge to make peace is always the first thing set aside. At the risk of sounding like a naive flower child, making the world better begins with one's own personal actions. Are they not as simple as this song suggests?

"Let's make peace
And stop the war
Let's make peace
And stop the war

Put down your gun
Pick up your baby
Undo your collar
Open up your arms
Strip off your uniform
Salute to your equal
Unpin your badge
Reveal your ribcage
Dismount your tomahawk
Untrain your tongue
Swallow your mushroom cloud
Civilize your crosshairs

Aw put down your gun
Pick up your baby
We are citizens of each other
We learn hope from one another's past
We are together
We are sweet-talking freedom fighters
We are literacy to curious children
Pattycake and pickup sticks played with bilingual rules
We are citizens of each other
No soldiers trample our ancient passion
When we are together we erase our fear of fear
We stand at attention without rifles
We march to the cadence of dreams
Love is our nationality

Our embassy safeguards persecuted touch
We are ambassadors of intimacy
We are diplomats of secret whispers
We are beauty without flags
We are emotions elected by a landslide
Giddyup love giddyup
Show me the power eyes inflamed with doubt can witness
Giddyup giddyup
Dress the morning sky in crimson when I pray
Giddyup giddyup
Spread moss under my feet when I dance after sunset's call
Giddyup giddyup
Show me love
Show me power
Put down your gun, pick up your baby..."

May it be so.

The main vocal is by Peter Harris, who also wrote the poetic lyric. The music is by Build An Ark, based on a theme by Funk Inc. Transcribed by me. You can try looking for this album or any of their excellent followups at Dustygroove.com.

Music & Memory

I love my iTunes. My home PC is clunky and annoying and in need of replacement (yes I am knocking on wood), but what a pleasure to conjure up so much music right from my desktop. Even with tens of thousands of songs on my iTunes it's only a fraction of my music collection, but I've organized most of it into accessible playlists and when I sit down at the puter I page through trying to match my mood.

The other day I started playing through my "ECM" playlist: it's all songs and some full albums from the German ECM label, which started in the 1970s with a vision of supremely intellectual mostly instrumental music rooted in jazz but branching far out from there in several rarified directions. As I was playing songs, mostly long introspective ones without much in the way of hooks and whose melodies are not the kind of things you can sing or dance along to, I kept having these weird half flashbacks. I know most of these records well, having carted around their records and then CDs for years before loading them into my computer. They weren't simply memories: They were angular flashes of light, of remembered instants and smells and temperatures.

It wasn't like I remembered where I was or who I was with when I heard a song repeated from some earlier decade. It was something much less distinct and both more subtle and more real. It was a weird sense memory. I remember buying Jan Garbarek's "Dis" album sometime in the very late seventies when I lived in Chicago. It's a memorable record: along with Ralph Towner's distinctive guitar and Garbarek's unmistakable soprano saxophone, Garbarek plays an instrument he calls a wind harp. I don't remember how he actually described the instrument on my long-replaced vinyl record sleeve, but I pictured some strange device set out on nordic ice causing the ceaseless impersonal arctic wind to reveal its sensitive inner vibration. It's a drone sound on the record that is unforgettable. I must have played this record hundreds of times, though certainly years have gone by (you know that makes me a certain age to be able to say that) when it was silent and untouched. But the other day when the song "Vandrere" from "Dis" came up through my computer speakers (Bose, thank you), I remembered -- no, I felt -- some particularly clear winter sunlight coming through a morning window in Chicago. I remembered not which apartment I was in but how I was standing and where the sound was coming from. It wasn't a complete enough feeling to be nostalgia. But it was like brushing a ghost from the past.

"Seriously Deep" from Eberhard Weber's "Silent Feet" album came up in the playlist. Slow bass and piano lines converge before a minor key groove kicks in, riding cymbals and a spiralling soprano horn filling the empty spaces. One would not mistake this for American jazz: it's very European. Make that very northern European. And yet there is some weird moment when I've felt this music before. A previous moment of late-night or afternoon introspection. I don't remember the thoughts this music conjured up so many years ago, but I feel the catalyst, this music, as a strangely physical sensation.

Looking over my iTunes playlist I'm reminded that I have a playlist actually called "Nostalgia." But even here, these are not the songs of a memorable concert or road trip or love affair. These are sounds, on this list mostly from albums lost to the mists reclaimed via downloads, strangely obscure and privately experienced. There's a handful of Brazilian albums I failed to convince anyone else to love (Zeze Motta!). There's a haunting lost album by Mercedes Sosa from the 1970s. There's an Aretha Franklin ballad ("As Long As You Are There") that never made it to CD. There's Grace Slick's utterly cheeseball solo album from the early 1980s "Software." There's soul songs I discovered as a little boy that my parents disdained. These songs conjure up not exactly memories but feelings.

There are certainly songs from the past that have more specific meanings and associations. The relationship bookended by Con Funk Shun's "Make It Last" and Lisa Loeb's "Stay," well let's just say the pain has drained out of those songs. The first song I heard a drag queen lip-synch (Linda Clifford's "Don't Give It Up"); the songs from the first huge concert I ever went to (Earth Wind & Fire!); the glorious song that will always reminds me of late 1970s house parties and a boy I had a mad crush on (Ronnie Laws' "Always There"). Those are nostalgia.

But a certain old disco song comes on, and there I am stepping over a threshhold in my memory, not remembering a specific night or lost or surviving friends, but feeling the air change from outside to inside, feeling again anticipation and vibrating energy, blinking color lights in another room, a familiar beat beat beat, strings sweeping me up in a moment of transcendence.

Jarringly I return to earth. The light shifts in sound.

Legends of Black Jazz Reunite

The Black Jazz label was a pioneering jazz record label in the early 1970s. Similar to the Strata-East label, it was artist-owned, independent, and specialized in giving its roster of artists the opportunity to freely express themselves. The early 1970s was the high-water mark of post-Coltrane "spiritual" jazz, and the artists who made the music were culturally aware, political conscious, and saw themselves at the nexus of a movement to convey a sort of spiritual awakening through the artistic expression of newly empowered African-American community. Some of the Black Jazz artists, bassist Henry Franklin comes to mind, are still around and recording. Others passed on or slipped into obscurity. What I never thought is that in 2010 I would have the opportunity to hear a concert by some of the most influential and creative of the Black Jazz legends. Last night I did.

Billed as the Doug and Jean Carn Reunion Concert, a celebration for Kwanzaa, the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium brought these two amazing legends back together before an audience at the Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. Keyboardist Doug Carn recorded three albums with his then wife Jean in the very early 1970s: Infant Eyes, Revelation and Spirit of the New Land. The music was not lost to the ages: though the original vinyl in their distinctive black-and-white sleeves commands hefty collector prices, eventually all the Black Jazz albums have been reissued on CD first in Japan and then by a reactivated Black Jazz reissue label in the U.S. The Carns specialized in putting lyrics to some of the standards of spiritual jazz: songs like John Coltrane's "Welcome," "Naima," and "A Love Supreme," or Wayne Shorter's "Infant Eyes," or Bobby Hutcherson's "Little B's Poem" as well as some Doug Carn originals all gained new dimension as vocal works.

Jean Carn moved on to be one of the leading voices of 1970s spiritual jazz. Singing on records by the likes of Norman Connors, Azar Lawrence and others, her multi-octave soaring voice became a trademark of the genre. She then broke out into the mainstream by singing with Philadelphia International's wiz Dexter Wansel, and then gaining a contract of her own with the label, went to disco fame with several albums including the one that spawned the massive club classic "Was That All It Was." She dropped off the radar sometime in the 1980s. Doug Carn recorded an album in the late 1970s as Abdul Rahim Ibrahim combining his new Islamic faith with the sounds of jazz-funk. He recently made it back on the scene recording for independent jazz labels.

But here in Brooklyn last night Doug and Jean Carn were back, singing the songs of those three classic Black Jazz albums. Doug Carn played piano, and was joined by Stacy Dillard on sax, Duane Eubanks on trumpet, and two brothers named Carter on stand-up bass and drums. They played two Doug Carn instrumental originals before Jean Carn made her entrance. At sixty-three, she was in incredible form. Dancing around the stage in the apparent body of a twenty-something, her voice has lost none of its power and range.



The band performed an extended set, covering many, many of the songs from Doug and Jean Carn's three Black Jazz albums. Opening with strains of "Welcome," and then into "Little B's Poem," they soon performed "Time Is Running Out," Horace Silver's "Peace," and "Power and Glory." Ms. Carn left the stage for the band to perform an instrumental tribute to the late Dr. Billy Taylor who just died; a song I couldn't quite identify but was one of the highpoints of the evening. The saxophonist Stacy Dillard really impressed me -- and the audience; he had them shouting and whistling -- with some incredible playing. Jean Carn returned and the they played "Moon Child," "Revelation," and the absolute highpoint of the evening, "Infant Eyes," dedicated to their daughter, now grown, a lawyer, and in the audience. Jean Carn's range and soulful feeling, from her soaring heights to her trademark gospel growl were simply extraordinary. The audience was on its feet. They continued on playing "Naima," "Acknowledgement" from "A Love Supreme," and their vocal version of Miles Davis' "Blue in Green."

I felt like it took a moment for the band to coalesce and get into the swing of things, but when they got going the music became quite amazing. The harmonies between trumpet and sax evoked the classic modal Blue Note sound, and the almost apocalyptic religion-tinged lyrics evoked the moment of consciousness nearly forty years ago that gave birth to them. There was a righteous positivity about them that is the extension of gospel music into jazz. Straight-ahead instrumental jazz with extended bass solos can leave me a little cold sometimes, and it's the spiritual edge or the oomph of a thrilling vocalist like Ms. Carn that makes it accessible to me: the concert was all that, exciting to witness. To hear Jean Carn still able to vocalize this music was really inspiring.

It was a great audience. Because of the snow lingering on the ground from our "snowpocalypse" this week, the auditorium took a while to fill up. The show started late, opened by an extraordinary dance and drumming troupe let by a charismatic dancer from Cote D'Ivoire. But the show ran long and nobody was complaining ending at 11:30 pm on a cold winter night. I'm so impressed at the overwhelmingly African-American community that's so appreciative of this art form and working so hard to keep it alive and appreciated. And it was a treat to see incredibly well-behaved little kids air-drumming along in their seats.



I don't know if this was a one-time thing or if the Carns are planning on taking this show on the road, but if you get a chance to see these two veteran musicians, don't miss it. The original Black Jazz albums are now available at Dustygroove; hopefully the bad relationship between the label's new owners and the best record store on the internet having been patched up.

(Top photo shows Doug and Jean Carn together; the middle photo shows Ms. Carn between the Carter brothers. Bottom photo shows saxophonist Stacy Dillard next to Doug Carn at the piano. All photos by me; if you snag these please credit The Cahokian and link back here.)

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!

Doug & Jean Carn Reunion?

Wow! A friend passed the above flyer to me: a reunion of Doug and Jean Carn in performance at Boys & Girls High School in Brooklyn on December 30. Spiritual jazz afficionados and groove heads will remember the three amazing albums they cut together on the legendary Black Jazz label in the early 1970s before going their own ways. Doug Carn later recorded an album as Abdul Rahim Ibrahim "Al Rahman! Cry of the Floridian Tropic Son" somewhat recently reissued on CD. Former wife Jean Carn went on to be one of the amazing voices behind Norman Connors's and Dexter Wansel's blends of spiritual jazz and sophisticated soul grooves, and then becoming a big star for Philadelphia International Records with a string of disco hits including the awesome "Was That All It Was." I'm trying to rustle up more information about this concert, and hopefully, a pair of tickets. Stay tuned!

Update: A review of this concert is now up at the top of the blog here.

The terror and beauty of difficult music and the miracle of creation

I know I'm not the first person to think that Ralph Gleason's liner notes to Miles Davis's classic 1969 album "Bitches Brew" are about the best piece of music writing ever. I mean, he won a Grammy for those notes. Now I'm lucky if I can even read, much less admire, the liner notes on modern CDs, the type is just too fucking small. But I could read Gleason's essay over and over:

"there is so much to say about this music. i don't mean so much to explain about it because that's stupid, the music speaks for itself. what i mean is that so much flashes through my mind when i hear the tapes of this album that if i could i would write a novel about it full of life and scenes and people and blood and sweat and love."

I love a lot of kinds of music. There's play music, and cry music, and help-me-get-my-work done music; there's love-making music and boogie music; there's music to make the world go away, music to make the world more fun music, and music that makes the company of friends even better. But it's really a certain kind of music that Gleason really puts his finger on:

"it's all in there, the beauty, the terror and the love, the sheer humanity of life in this incredible electric world which is so full of distortion that it can be beautiful and frightening in the same instant."

It took me a long time to get into Miles, to get into "Bitches Brew." For that matter it took me a long time to get into John Coltrane too, though maybe starting off with "Infinity" wasn't the best way to go for that. The music these two guys came to play wasn't always pretty, although they knew how to do that. But the kind of miraculous jazz they played just sounds terrible in the background. It's because this is music that demands you pay attention to it. It's not like you can sing along or anything, and while your body can certainly feel the pulse, the beat, sometimes even that gets a little abstract.

I suppose anybody can learn to play an instrument and make it shriek. Mercifully I gave up on my junior high school clarinet lessons before I hurt anybody. There's a lot of shrieky ain't-I-cool musicians out there, and sorry, but few have ever impressed me.

One day about ten years ago I was walking down a quiet tree-lined street in Brooklyn. Somebody standing in front of building handed me a leaflet about a free concert about to start. I had nothing better to do and went upstairs to some sort of meeting room. The guys who started playing are known on the NY independent jazz scene, and well, they're not generally my cup of tea but there was something about this afternoon. I'm fishing for names in my head I think William Parker was the bassist. Anyway the music just started. There wasn't a huge audience, and it was daytime. The music was free, and intense. I didn't know if I liked it. A woman in the row of chairs ahead of me had her eyes closed and her head was moving, far gone into the sound. Most everybody seemed to be like me, a random individual. When the music stopped, there wasn't really applause, because it would have been completely superfluous. Everybody just sort of looked up, a little dazed. We all kind of stood up, straightening our clothes out as though we had just been through something physical like an afternoon's romantic liaison. There was no chit chat. The sound of anybody's voice seemed jarring after what we had experienced...and it was sort of hard to look at other people in the eye. People just left, and went back out on the street. But there was this sense, for a moment, of having participated in something miraculous. We all returned to the regular world as though we had just changed out of our superhero costumes at the corner phone booth. As Gleason wrote:

"it's not more beautiful, just different. a new beauty. a different beauty."

Back in the eighties my friend Dean dragged me to an abandoned apartment building in the East Village. A friend of his was going to perform at some sort of impromptu venue. I can't quite remember if it was on the first or second floor of this building; I remember a dusty ruin inside open to the outside air, a couple rows of chairs for the audience and a row of chairs facing them for the musicians. The group was sort of a string quartet: my memory is dim but I'm pretty sure I remember the full complement. We were all in for a bit of a surprise: the audience pretty much all quietly gasped at once as the quartet started to play their instruments not with bows but with rusty wire brushes, and metal ball chains, the kind you hung around your neck as a kid with a key hanging from it. It was an incredibly painful cacophony, screeching and scratching. It was LOUD, and there was no discernable melody, hell I'm not sure if there were notes. I don't know how long the performance went on; it seemed interminable. You felt this "music" in your skin, which stretched and curled against this noise in rebellion. And then suddenly, quite coincidentally, an ice cream truck out on the street started to play a few notes on a bell. The musicians stopped playing and everybody looked up, knowing that it was not possible to proceed. Everyone in that room was smiling ear to ear, musicians and audience alike. It was the most glorious moment of musical ecstasy I have ever experienced. The simple beauty of the mechanical bells had somehow resolved and released all the tension wound up in this experimental free weirdness, in perfect counterpoint. There it was, Gleason's "beauty and terror and love" all laid out in this random accident of transcendence. I've never forgotten it, and I've never forgotten the sense of gratitude I felt -- I think we all felt -- to the strange musicians and the passing ice cream truck for allowing us to experience such a cosmic blessing.

When I can spare the time to focus on what I'm listening to, that's the time to turn to Bitches Brew, or turn to Impulse!-era Coltrane. Cause it's music for thought, no maybe music for experience, for working through the thoughts to a state of just being. Maybe that's what art is all about; it's an act of creation that engages our spirit to be present. Gleason's short essay is so keyed into that same creative energy that Miles was channelling. It conveys the excitement and awe and awakening that is the gift of Miles's creative act. It's like the thundercloud spinning out of or into somebody's head and the raw elemental forces on the archetypically freaky "Bitches Brew" cover art, shown above.

I'm reminded (again) of my favorite Gato Barbieri quote: "i sing sometimes, not because i like to sing but because the music needs singing. and when I scream with my horn, it's because the music needs screaming."

The world keeps spinning. It can be one fucked up place. But I thank the gods of music, of creation, for the chance to be present, to experience that which can't easily be put into words, to scream when needed, to express myself, to be.

Jazzsupreme.com RIP

I'm sad to announce the passing of my long-running long-neglected but ground-breaking website, jazzsupreme.com.

Back when I was a newly-initiated Iyawo in my Santeria faith, spending a year dressed in white, trying to be good and avoiding going out and about in a normal social life, I conceived of a website that would fill a void for jazz lovers. Back in 1996 there was a buzz around spiritual jazz, but no music blogs, few essays, few discographies, and little information to be had about what had become my favorite music: the "kozmigroov" sound of folks like Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Leon Thomas and others.

So I spent my copious free time writing, designing and setting up the site on AOL's servers. To my amazement the site really struck a nerve. I found musicians contacting me and fans contacting me, everyone expressing gratitude for finally creating a resource for spiritual jazz. I met and became friends with Leon Thomas himself through the site, as well as many many other people around the world who shared information, shared music, and shared their love of the music. I continued to refine the discographies fairly regularly as long as the site, "Ian's Guide to Spiritual Jazz" was hosted on AOL. Up until this week I have continued to receive weekly emails from people who stumbled onto the site. I've even been stopped on the subway -- more than once -- by people who recognized me from my photo on the site.

A few years into the site I was approached by an entrepreneur--a real fan of the music--who wanted to help out with it, perhaps turning it into a great resource for spiritual jazz, or even potentially a profit center. I was eager for his well-meaning help, and he helped me re-host the site from AOL onto his public server under my own domain "jazzsupreme.com." Somehow, though, his life and my own went through some changes, and though the site was up and running at its new home I stopped updating it and our plans for building on it never materialized. When AOL emptied its servers in the last year or two I was sad to see the old surviving mirror go, but was happy to have jazzsupreme.com go on, even un-updated and badly behind the times. My own musical web focus passed to blogs like this one and especially Ile Oxumare, where I get to write about music as well as provide a space for it to be shared.

Well all good things come to an end. The entrepreneur's business has suffered in the current economic climate, and he is no longer able to host the site or renew the domain. As of today, jazzsupreme is no more. I'm not able to take on the financial responsibilities myself either, so I'm going to have to let the site pass on into memory.

I'll probably post some of the more interesting writing here, in this wonderful medium that the Google/Skynet overlords graciously provide for free, but for now you'll have to press that "cached" button in your Google searches to retrieve any of its content (unless anybody reading this not suffering under our modern economy has a server and would like to re-host the site!).

Thanks to everybody who helped make the site such a success. Ago lona, the road goes on before us.

Good news update, Feb 25: Jazzsupreme lives!

Share the Joy

So I have become completely fascinated by music blogs. There are a bunch of music-sharing download blogs out there. Some of them are all about people ripping off the system, and it's actually shocking what you can avoid paying for if you look hard enough. I understand now why the record industry is in trouble: it's clear a new money-making paradigm is needed.

I don't approve of downloading just to get something for free. Musicians deserve to be paid for their labor, just like the rest of us, and unfortunately for them they have to share their income with big record companies.

But there are a lot of music blogs that I think are actually doing the artists a bit of a favor, and these are the ones who rip long-out-of-print vinyl that's not currently available on CD reissue and share it with other music heads. There's a big community of "other music" fans out there after '70s jazz and rare groove, lost psychedelic folk, prog rock from all over the world, you name it. I know I spend a fortune on CD reissues, and hopefully some of those profits go off to the artists. But meanwhile, rather than paying exhorbitant amounts for scratchy used vinyl, there's this whole group of people that's all about sharing sounds and rescuing them from obscurity. Hopefully in so doing they're creating a demand that might generate legit CD reissues for deserving artists from back in the day.

Here's some cool links. As near as I can tell, none of these sites link to downloads that cheat anybody.

* My Jazz World
Great lost jazz sides wth an emphasis on the seventies. The blogger has a taste for organ-based soul jazz and smooth-fusion which I don't share, but he also has some awesome rare groove nuggets up for share.

* Loronix
The most amazing collection of Brazilian albums from bossa to MPB to prog to pop, from the 1950s to the 1980s.

* Abracadabra
More incredible lost Brazilian music.

* Hippy Djkit
Lost psychedelic folk and prog folk and rock with a counterculture sensibility.

* Orgy In Rhythm
Obscure rare groove jazz site.

* Disco Delivery
Amazing disco site. This guy really researches and analyzes the music he shares. A real labor of love.

* Ile Oxumare
Promising new jazz site.

Enjoy!

Joel Dorn, 1942-2007

I was browsing through my CD collection yesterday and realized how lax I had been in not noting the passing of one of the greats of American jazz, So here is belated notice of the passing of renowed, possibly under-renowned, 1960s/1970s record producer Joel Dorn, who left this world in December. Joel Dorn was the consummate A&R guy, working with the giants of R&B and jazz at a key point in American music.

He worked at Atlantic Records when it was still a pioneering indie label, and went on to be a champion of independent label jazz in the CD era. In later days he owned now-defunct 32 Jazz--and later Label M--which if you're into rare groove jazz/funk like I am, you will recognize as an incredibly generous and important CD reissue label of the Muse and Atlantic jazz catalogs in the 1990s. Among his sons is Mocean Worker, a groove/jazz DJ who thankfully carries on Dorn's excellent tastes.

They don't make 'em like that any more.

Oscar Peterson

Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson has died at the age of 82. He was immensely prolific, with an instantly recognizable virtuosic style. My own favorite Oscar Peterson recording is his version of Tom Jobim's "Wave" with a swinging string arrangement by Claus Ogerman, from Peterson's heyday in the late 1960s. It's on Motions and Emotions one of his albums for the legendary German MPS label. He will be missed!

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.