Blind William Can't Tell

A Whole Nother Devil

2011-07-24T06:53:00.007-04:00

It's a thesis song and it speaks for itself. "The whole concept of this video is to basically show how the two worlds collide. I have a street background coming from The Clipse, the Re-Up Gang. Tyler comes from this independent subculture. I think people would not expect for us to be able to make a record that's so fundamentally hiphop sounding." Got it.

We have no need to write on the self evident and we don't work on our fresh in these pages, but there's so much blue devilin' in the track, we thought we'd drop a couple of footnotes on you.

We begin 97 years ago, w/ Richard M. Jones, the ancestor who conjured one of the dominators of the 20th c., "Trouble in Mind," in 1924. It's a song so familiar that it's gruesome ending, when the narrator commits suicide by letting a train crush his head, has become inaudible. Did I hear someone holla "Yonkers" nearly a century later? We thought we heard something from the back of the club. Satisfy my mind, ya dig?

It's easy to take Jones's tune one way, as a variation on the worried blues theme. As many covers as there are to the song there are very few real versions on it; the take is pretty standard.

Then we got worry's opposite: "So much trouble on my mind. I refuse to lose."

This back and forth puts Ralph Ellison's first rule of the blues into of our mind. The blues don't stay where you thought you put them. The blues swings front, back and side to side. Ellison tells us that the blues is "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger the jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." This is the rule we'a play by when we spin Pusha T and Tyler through the night, when we spin all of the trouble songs that come before and will come after, 'til the breakadawn.

So we got the worries, but then we got the menace, the lyrical otherside of worry, knowhatimsaying? And you got the tragedy and the comedy all mixed up, too. They're ibeji, y'all. Just like in the video. But now we're writing about the self evident, so we should step out.

Here's a clip of troubles. Load your Mac w/ 'em and play on, kingz and queenz.

Thesis: The Worried Mind

"Trouble in Mind Blues," Thelma La Vizzo, featuring Richard M. Jones, piano (1924).
"Trouble in Mind," Chippie Hill, featuring Richard M. Jones, piano, and Louis Armstrong, cornet (1926). Reference version. Surprising how close the covers stay to the spirit of this one.
"Trouble in Mind," Dinah Washington (1952). There is no better blues singer. Female Muddy Waters.
"Trouble in Mind," Lightnin' Hopkins (1977).
"Trouble in Mind," James Blood Ulmer (2003).
"(I've Got) So Much Trouble on My Mind,"Sir Joe and Free Soul (1972). Funky retake of the old worried blues. "Give me the strength, 'cause everything I've got is gone."
"Trouble," Shinehead (1992).

Antithesis: I Refuse to Lose

"I Refuse to Lose," James Brown (1976). Ellpee version.
"Wanna Rock," UTFO (1989). Flips Sir Joe into a boast.
"Welcome to the Terrordome," Public Enemy. Huge, wild insertion into the tradition. Runs loose over the whole business.
"Trouble in Mind," Natalie Gardiner (2003). Wild and sexy retake, adding both menace and confidence to the bluesy mix.

Synthesis: Whole Nother Devil, Dig?

"So Much Trouble on My Mind," Pusha T, featuring Tyler the Creator (2011).

Softly Asking Over and Over Its Old Question

2011-06-25T09:15:00.004-04:00

:: pours the rum in a circle ::

:: scatters red beans ::

:: lights cigar ::

:: reads the tracings ::

"Again the old 'Hesitation Blues' against the trills of birds..."

We approach ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ slowly. Because the poem breathes so deep, conjures so much, we take care w/ each step, like a woman walking on softboiled eggs.

Before we begin, let us remark, tho,' about how much AYM means to professional readers of Langston Hughes. Those professors label the poem w/ heavy terms -- classic, epic, masterpiece. They use it as a basis to compare Hughes to T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. We have big love for those brothers, but we think the Book of Langston is (obviously) composed on its own terms, a vocabulary distinctive because the author's interesting approach to both audience and multiple media. We note this now, even as we have made this point before, because we believe this is one of the big points in the Book of Langston, and that many readers just plain miss it because they are reading for the wrong thing. The poet laureate of Harlem, just like the King of the Zulus, just means more than most of us currently realize.

And so we start our what we have to say about AYM by remarking that it is conceived as a language experienced both visually (on colorful, carefully crafted pages -- not the first time Langston played for book as object) and as a musical performance* (and as we have been noting, this is an effort in his career that he returns to from beginning to end). In fact, if we think AYM as an LP (thought for a later post), complete w/ tracklist and liner notes, we have a third and highly timebound and mediated take on both of the first two approaches -- Langston knew how to play w/ the dialectic, dig? We always take AYM as all of these experiences and make the most of them to understand it.

Like that great ancestor, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston's has made the visual rendition of music one of the first things the reader sees.† The score stands at the beginning of the book like a veve, conjuring the drinking gourd to guide the book forward.

Like Vachel Lindsay, an ancestor who has fallen to disrepute even tho' he got the jazzy groove and played with the materials of the age as well as any more acclaimed modernist, Langston gives stage directions to guide future performances. The dancers got to know what they're doing when they improvise. There's a limit to everything. Dig?

So will all deliberate speed (ask your Mama about this), we take up Hughes's first direction:

The traditional folk melody of "The Hesitation Blues"

is the leitmotif for this poem. In it and around it,

along with other recognizable melodies employed,

there is room for spontaneous jazz improvisation...

We've been unable to establish a reference version of this tune. In fact the opposite, it's one of those jes' grew tunes that the tin pan alley gangstas (people like Smythe, Middleton and Gillham or Handy who made it, or not, stackin' bundles in the early 20th c. song dealing game) tried to line up property rights to their bankaccounts. From the beginning of rekkids, there's "Hesitation" and "Hesitating." The versions were kicking around dancehalls, vaudeville, the fields and anywhere else cratediggers went looking for their fresh back in the day. The different versions develop different takes on the impatience, but both come around to the question, "Can I get you now, or must I hesitate?" We think this undetermined origin is part of what Hughes wants us to think on, and that the tug of war between different authors for ownership creates a legacy of consequences he wants us to think on, too.

As Handy remembers it in his indispensable Blues Anthology, the early versions of the song are salacious. "Le me be yo' rag doll till yo' tidy come,/If he can hear me raggin,' he got to rag it some, ma honey,/How long has I got to wait?/Oh, can I git you now, or must I hesitate?" Ask your Mama whether the blues starts w/ something sexy. Can we say it again? Good God, y'all. It goes on and on and on and on.

Desire is desire. Delay is delay, the thief of time. So all the wise owls say. It's high time to stop putting off. Tomorrow isn't today. And it is easy for us to go from here to the dream deferred because it is where the poem takes us, and because the deferred dream takes such powerful place throughout the Book of Langston. The song reminds us that we're tired tired of the procrastination. Obviously, bro,' obviously, then as now, we want our freedom and we want it sooner, not later. Ask Max Roach. So we mark this.

Then we mark that there's more. The same book teaches us much about taking and remaking, taking and crossing over, taking and getting a piece of the pie, just as the blues song does, even from the beginning. In this slang rap democracy, however, we're always making new out of old, and we're always moving forward by taking things from the past and fashioning them to new purposes. Paradox? Ask your Mama. We can see from here to freedom in this movement -- stealing from that sexy bandit Jes Grew so you can BMF on copyrighted material, and then bootlegging from the copyrighted material to make collages of future freedom. Like a bird in orbit, mayn.

Here's the formula the poem proposes against the constant delay: Put the tradition to work. Make it out of the things from the past that help reframe the present, so you can see more clearly what is right going forward. Make it out of what what you find. When we take something from the past, even when it is not ours for the taking, and make it into something of our own, we propose our freedom, even when we are not fully free. And because we can propose our freedom, we make visible the limits on it. That's what Handy did, and he was more free for doing so. And even though Smythe, Middleton and Gillham (unbound by the just plain old evil of Jim Crow) were more free than Handy to do so, they made 'Merica more free for freely indulging in one of the true sources of 'Merican originality and putting the people to work on the dancefloor with it.

So it is. With every new take on the song, we get another little piece of what's ours back, and make a little piece of what is ours to be in the future. Let's begin reading from AYM w/ these notes in mind.

Here's a clip w/ hesitatings, hesitations, a procrastination and how longs, each one a give and take in the dialogue that begins with the same question:

I. Early Big Band -- maybe our favorite renditions because they show what was at stake in the early slangrapdemocracy days of the 20th century. Sh*t is on the run.

"Hesitating Blues," Prince's Band and Orchestra (ca. 1915).
"Hesitation Blues," The Victor Military Orchestra (1916).
"Hesitating Blues," James Reese Europe's 369th U.S. Infantry "Hell Fighters" Band (1919). We have big love for this version. Dr. Europe's arkestra rules the old school.

II. Hestitatings. We put these down closer to versions closer to W.C. Handy's: a slightly more organized song w/ some drama: Phone line's down & can't reach my baby. My baby's left on the evening train. Shouldna hesitated. Shoulda said yes yes.

"Hello, Central! What's the matter with this Line?"

"Hesitating Blues," Esther Bigeou (1923). A nominee for the reference version, for sure. It has all of the W.C. Handy song in one place and Esther is a wonderful singer.
"Hesitating Blues," Lena Horne (1962?). Earns a namecheck in the AYM.
"Hesitating Blues," Eartha Kitt (1959). "DELIGHTED! INTRODUCE ME TO EARTHA."
"Hesitating Blues," Louis Armstrong and his All Stars. In his way, Pops flips the tune and flips it again. It's a duet. He's trynta get in touch w/ his girl. She's regretful that she's lost her beau. He's willing to take his place. You see Pops, like Langston, was really never gonna wait. This is the masterpiece of mid20th c. attitude that they both conjured. Each in their own way called on Ogoun, the ironman politician, and made impatience out of patience.

III. Hesitations: These are more like the Smythe, Middleton and Gillham versions, but they remind us that the song cleaves to the principle of "incremental repetition" we hear Zora talk about elsewhere: "It's one of these things that's grown by incremental repetition until it's one of the longest songs in America." There is a press shuffle logic in the versing and chorusing.

"Hesitation Blues," Jelly Roll Morton (1938). "I kept the sheet music where nobody could see it." We are more than a little fond Jelly to the Roll's patter about staying one step ahead of the copywriters @ the beginning of this joint. and then he leans into the song all gentle and singsongy: "If I was whiskey, and you was a cup, I'd dive the to bottom and never get up."
"Hesitation Blues," Leadbelly (tracking down the date, but from the Rounder version of the LoC recordings).
"Hesitation Blues," Sam Collins (1927). We love every track lined and laid down by Sam Collins, but this one, w/ its haunting, sassy vocals has a special place in our hearts: "My gal grinds her meal at home."
"Hesitation Blues," Taj Mahal. Strangely, we have no date on this. Nevertheless, the song introduces a thought we cannot quite find in others -- that the hesitation was a dance step.

IV. "Procrastination is the thief of time..."

"Hesitating Blues," Big Maybelle (?). She takes the tune to the bridge and stays there, making it something else. She gets a namecheck in AYM, too.

V. "How long, babe, how long has that eveining train been gone?" Here's where we go from incremental repetition to speculation, but, as Eric Lott is quick to remind us, this is a world of love and theft, and Leroy Carr's been known to take a little bit of what he loves and flip it into a moneymaker of his own. Each of these tunes, which takes another step into the distance from Handy and Smythe, Middleton and Gillham, come back to the same deferred desire. No longer the subject of Langston's namechecks and stage directions, though, they prove the point that incremental repetition is a step in the direction of freedom, the dialectic that Langston plays over and over, on and on.

"How Long -- How Long Blues," Leroy Carr (1928). We have no reason to dispute the speculation that Leroy Carr, always the opportunist in an opportunistic mode of production, took both the evening train and the lonely chorus of this song from one or another version of "The Hesitating/ion Blues." No big, tho,' because as we already noted, he was stealing from jes' grew, which isn't like stealing chickens from a rich man. Carr's his own versionologist and he incrementally repeated (took from and made new) "How Long -- How Long Blues" five more times before he died. As the years pass, his versions begin to address the hard times -- greenbacks hard to see in the depression. (We must recognize: Elijah Wald is the teacher, blues is the preacher in this case. We benefit from much science about Leroy Carr and the pre-war blues business from Escaping the Delta.)
"How Long," Frank Stokes (1928). No evening train, but no loving since his baby's been gone, too.
"My Road is Rough and Rocky (How Long, How Long)," Sam Collins (Before 1932). Now a straight, no chaser blues song, 'cept three's someone chasing. "Chickens on my back and hounds on my track."
"How Long How Long," Kokomo Arnold (1935). The looming future regret caused by deferring the dream. "Some day you're going to be sorry you done me wrong."
"How Long," Sister Ola Mae Terrell (1948). Desire for love now flipped into desire for salvation. "How long, you gonna live in your sin, great God, how long?"
"How Long (Betcha Got a Chick on the Side)," The Pointer Sisters (1975). Flipped again. Desire deferred is a woman's right for suspicion. "It might hurt me for a while, but of one thing I am sure. I'll get over you."
"How Long Jah (Extended)," Trinity (1976-78). The chorus is still really the same thing we've been working on the whole time. But the song is now full of the ironman's fire: redemption and salvation are part of the same political/spiritual passage. AND THE TOLLBRIDGE FROM WESTCHESTER/IS A GANGPLANK ROCKING RISKY.
"How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?" Sharon Dap and the Daptones (2005). Flipped more gently than the Pointers, and very much reprising a version of the old hesitating blues.
"How Long Can U Front," Kool Keith & 54-71 (2009). Flipped out. Because it takes on the recession, signifying on the hardtimes blues of Leroy Carr, we could not help but keep it in the clip.

-----------

* See The Langston Hughes Project, whose effort to perform AYM should be brought to disc.

†

Out of Yesterday's Night

2011-06-04T06:50:00.002-04:00

:: lights cigar ::

:: offers smoke ::

:: scatters five plus five iron nails ::

:: reads ::

It is commonplace in the book of Langston to find him conjuring the light of hope from the fire of politics: Ogoun's way of peace, dig?

It is from this same hot iron that he worked w/ Randy Weston, Melba Liston and an all star band* to record Weston's act of orchestral syncretism, Uhuru Afrika. The opportunity came to Weston after he made a deal worthy of Robert Johnson: he agreed to record showtunes from Destry Rides Again, a slab his record company thought would sell more, for approval of the nationalist suite. We got the crossover move working in all directions here.

Weston was, if not a a kind of muse to Langston, than at least a frequently chosen accompanist. Langston almost dedicated Ask Your Mama to him, before he realized that it would be better to dedicate it to someone born July 1, 1900. Later he invited Weston to arrange and perform the music for his funeral service, so he could sound good when he went back across to glory and joined the ancestors.

R& throws Uhuru Afrika into the crate of projects celebrating African/Afro-American liberation that includes Max Roach's Freedom, Now!, and Sonny Rollins Freedom Suite. Willard Jenkins tosses in another four "albums addressing the African-American social landscape included Art Blakey’s Africaine, John Coltrane’s Africa Brass, Oliver Nelson’s Afro-American Sketches, Dizzy Gillespie’s Africana." We must begin by recognizing that these records are no "small memory."† They are part of a powerful aesthetic political action that deserves it's own entry here @ the blue light.

But when we think of Uhuru Afrika as a page in the book of Langston, rather than an album by Randy Weston that paid a few of Langtson's bills, we draw three more conclusions:

The first, one we've been drawing now for several entries here @ the blue light and over @ the red light, is simple. Langston is a multimedia artist and his musical legacy needs to be reckoned with as a musical legacy, not the musical dabblings of a writer. I am sure there is fine secondary work on Langston's musical efforts. But we do not find his discography in the back pages of R&'s fine bio lined up as column of work next to his bibliography. His credits over @ discogs, another fine resource offered through the collective wisdom of the internets, are also way underdeveloped. (We must add, too, that we yearn for his videography, too. There's not a single frame of primary material boasted visibly to the internets in any of the archives, and YouTube offers only sad tertiary sources for the most part.)

The second, is that Uhuru Afrika is a project that takes its place in the book of Langston alongside of his late 50s and early 60s political poetry. This body of work is caught up in a utopian exchange that goes back and forth freely (can we say that enough) across the Atlantic (& we're coming back to this in a ¶).

The lyrics Langston composed for the introduction is a simple invocation. The invocation is then doubled in a second language that wishes for a single, unifying language:

Africa, where the great Congo flows!
Africa, where the whole jungle knows
A new dawning breaks. Africa!
A young nation awakes! Africa!
In his own tongue, Kiswahili, Sanga salutes the new Africa, Uhuru!
The freedom wind blows!
Out of yesterday's night Uhuru –
Freedom! Uhuru! Freedom

The lyrics he composed for the suite's second movement is a sequence of two statements, both address the "African lady," who is part muse, part metonymic vessel for holding as many wishes as the two speakers can place within it.

African Lady

female voice
Sunrise at dawn,
Night is gone –
I hear your song.
African lady.
The dark fades away,
Now its day,
A new morning breaks.
The birds in the sky all sing
For Africa awakes.
Bright light floods the land
And tomorrow's in your hand,
African lady.

male voice
Goddess of sun
And of sea,
My lovely one,
African lady,
Your eyes softly bright
Like the light
Of stars above.
Smile and the whole world sings
A happy song of love.
Dark Queen! In my dreams
You're my Queen!
My Queen of Dreams,
African lady!

Both poems speak with a bright optimism of the era's liberating moment. For the bookbound who are looking for the similar, we urge you to put this work alongside "Africa," "Envoy to Africa," "Dixie South Africa," "Angola Question Mark," "Lumumba's Grave," "We, Too" "Drums," "Emporer Haile Selassie," &c. Moreover, we imagine we're missing much from his prose from the same years. This is a coherent body, whose purpose it is to conjure one out of many, to make a unity.

The third conclusion is drawn from the powerful trope of crossing over. It is a bright thread in the musical and poetic fabric of Uhuru Afrika. It is also a magic thread that all but possesses the soul in the book of Langston. In the eyes of the small-minded, crossing over is divisive, selling out, leaving behind. And that nearly goes without saying, whether we're talking about the rap game or the more horrible passage that followed the sun west across the Atlantic. But the crossing over is never in just one direction, no matter how hard the small-minded would have it so.

Crossing over makes a bigger world, a "we too" to "rise with you." The ancestral genius that inhabits the book of Langston knows this. That spirit inhabits Langston and becomes his genius, too. It is and always will be a cosmopolitan genius, one that declares affirmation in negation and fashions self out of everyone else. That's how it did.

Read this, now, and ponder all of what Langston means when he crosses over:

"Old Walt"

Old Walt Whitman
Went finding and seeking,
Finding less than sought
Seeking more than found,
Every detail minding
Of the seeking or the finding.

Pleasured equally
In seeking as in finding,
Each detail minding,
Old Walt went seeking
And finding.

The is the back, forth and side to side, and not just moving in one way. It's the what Ogoun calls for when we try to start a movement. Dig?

Here's a clip of bullets documenting the primary source. Play on, Player.

"Intro," Randy Weston Orchestra (1960).
"1st Movement: Uhuru Kwansa," Randy Weston Orchestra (1960).
"2nd Movement: African Lady," Randy Weston Orchestra (1960).
"3rd Movement: Bantu," Randy Weston Orchestra (1960).
"4th Movement: Kucheza Blues," Randy Weston Orchestra (1960).

We've got so much more to say. Look forward to posts on Langston's Simple musical, his gospel plays, his recorded children's books and his operas, especially his operas w /Kurt Weill.

----------

* Randy Weston Orchestra

Randy Weston piano

Clark Terry trumpet, flugelhorn

Benny Bailey trumpet

Richard Williams trumpet

Freddie Hubbard trumpet

Slide Hampton trombone

Jimmy Cleveland trombone

Quentin Jackson trombone

Julius Watkins french-horn

Gigi Gryce alt sax, flute

Yusef Lateef tenor sax, flute, oboe

Sahib Shihab alt sax, baritone sax

Budd Johnson tenor sax, clarinet

Jerome Richardson baritone sax, piccolo

Cecil Payne baritone sax

Les Spann guitar, flute

Kenny Burrell guitar

George Duvivier bass

Ron Carter bass

Max Roach drums, percussion

Charlie Persip drums, percussion

Wilbert G. T. Hoggan drums

Candido congas

Michael Babatunde Olatunji percussion

Armando Peraza bongos

Martha Flowers vocal

Brock Peters vocal

Tuntemeke Sanga narrator

Melba Liston arrangements

Langston Hughes liner notes

Teddy Reig producer

† I have this

Strange small memory

Of death

And seven trees

Did You Hear That? An Ensemble Riff: Langston's Long Page

2011-05-28T10:27:00.001-04:00

The more we read from the book of Langston, the more we are compelled to add to the public record.

First, like Pops, he exceeds critical efforts to describe him in terms of genre or media. Langston Hughes worked opportunity, not "the novel," or "poetry," or "autobiography." It is in this light that we should make a conscious effort to explore all of the objects in the archive. You can see this, as we have noted before, in R&'s most excellent record of the poet's life, where apparently trivial tasks, like making the musical Simply Heavenly, spill way more ink on his pages than making the book Montage of a Dream Deferred." We are averse to aesthetics (much room for misjudgment), and therefore leave it to others to determine which project deserves more attention and love." But we care deeply about the ways we remember our ancestors, and therefore will make every effort we can to document these projects as thoroughly as possible.

Second, we take note of the fact that Langston left behind so many efforts at an historian. "History's long page/Records the whole vast/Prelude to our age." We should assume someone as practiced as he his has a working historigraphy, and that it is worth our attention.

Thus, third, we take up with interest this project he whipped up for Moses Asch. Under no circumstances should work that contains the line "with them came their rhythms" be passed over as a trifle. Although much of his version of the jazz story bends under facts we have had the privilege to learn since the record was made, we are convinced by nothing more than the power of his voice when he creates the story of "the Mississippi, mighty river, bearing cotton, and music and dreams." He establishes jazz as ultimately but not originally 'Merican, and blends it with more than just the drums of west African and the blood of slaves, but also with the French, Spanish and West Indian roots it owns, too.

Langston rewrote the word 'Merican from an identity into multiple identities throughout his career, and this is one more time he makes that rewrite sound like child's play, an understatement that intentionally belies how profoundly true the statement is. Langston's gift for understatement needs to be more fully explored. When he says "The people of New Orleans heard all of this music," he is not reciting a fact, or an assumption that passed from one mouth to another, from one page to another in jazz historiography. He is reciting a cosmopolitan creed. "They began to put it together into a music of their own, always syncopating the rhythms a little bit more, always a little bit more, influenced no doubt by the congo drums."

He acted on his cosmopolitan beliefs and asked others to do the same throughout his career. It is the source of his impulse to put into writing the words of the blues again and again. And it is the source of his advice to Nicolás Guillén and Jacques Roumain to write down what they heard. It is an impulse he knows that he is not making up, but passing on from one person to another in the same way that Louis Armstrong takes the blues from "traces of the work songs, field hollers and plantation cries of the deep south."

It is not a simple childish act to imagine that "Maybe one hot day a man was working in a rice field, and a song came to his head, then out of his mouth." Nor is it a simple declaration of origins. Remember, on this record, Langston makes up one origin after another. It's Langston's own artistic ontology, packaged up into a little project by Moses Asch. It's also an historiography of compound re-origination. Later in the rekkid he tosses off another sentence, one about how white players taught themselves to play like the New Orleans players who followed the money and the soul north, "They tried to learn to play as they played." Ripped out of context, this sentence gives us so much more. It's almost as if Langston imagines the economy of influence, but without Bloom's anxiety. "People listen to jazz for fun, dance to jazz for fun and play jazz for fun." In the end, its "Boys making up their own music, just like the old timers did. Improvising, just for fun."

Here's the rekkid. Make more of it than you are at first tempted to. There's much more there.

"The Beginnings," Langston Hughes
"The Blues," Langston Hughes
"Characteristics," Langston Hughes.

But This Will Bring You Back

2011-04-17T08:10:00.006-04:00

We make no claim to have opened the book of Zora in a serious way. All we have is the necessary reverence for Their Eyes Were Watching God. We promise that we'll take up the the book, but we fear that when we look Zora's work full in the face, it will take full possession of our soul.

How do we know of this power? We were strumming through the Library of Congress's dusty files looking for artifacts of Langston Hughes. Instead we found ourselves in a file folder of depression era field recordings from Florida (and we commend the whole folder to you). Tucked inside, like someone meant to lose them, was a small treasure of Zora Neale Hurston recordings. For the last two days we have found ourselves dazzled outta listening to Langston's big crossover project Street Scene by this string os shiny objects.

What we're hearing: Zora's doubled up, on the one hand herself is digging the crates of her own memory and the street for material and on the other she's been a hand working in the field for the documentating anthropologist. She's both subject and object on both ends of the verb "to record." And then, to redouble, she makes a record of her voice. Now keep this trouble in mind. She does this long before some idle listener conjuring the past from the internets can anticipate that her voice will be one we want to carry the aura of the original. Of course we can chalk this up as the drudgery of the anthropologist who cannot anticipate the magic of the fieldworker. All they were doing was filling the ledger w/ obsessively kept records of the soon to be lost past work songs.

In keeping, this pocketful of songs carries all of the dutiful anthropologist detailing, including snipe hunting patterns and more true sources. There's card playing songs and track lining songs, references to the sawmills and geechees and the jukejoints, all of the places the unnaground places that A&R men go hunting for the next act to appear @ SXSW and coachella, right?

In "Mule on the Mount," you can listen to Zora in dialogue w/ the anthropologist riff up the whole theory of the tradition out of partial answers. This is how it really happened. How it came back and became the biggest song in America. In response to the sourceseeking questions she patiently develops a reply that tells much more of a story than the questions imagine they are asking for. "[The song] has enumerable verses and whatnot about everything under the sun.... There's nowhere you can't find parts of this song.... The tune is consistent. But the verses you know, in every locality you find new verses.... I'm gonna sing verse from whole lotsa places.... Yes, sometimes they sings thirty and forty verses.... It's one of these things that's grown by incremental repetition until it's one of the longest songs in America."

Zora, tho,' can take this quest for cool and turn it back on itself. As you work through the material and get to songs like "Uncle Bud," and "Mule on the Mount" and "Po' Gal" there is no helping yourself. The spell has been fully cast. These are beautiful songs because Zora knows them the way she knows them and sings them as beautiful as she can. And we are hypnotized by the beauty. But there's more. We are also hypnotized because now her historical grandeur outsizes the sum of the recordkepping and the beauty of the source and her beautiful take on it. The conjure power is as much because it is Zora's voice, carried back from the past, even as it carries back these tunes from a further past. This is the twice Lazarussian true record of the unnaground coming back, Orpheus coming back from the Orpheus story w/ the true music back from the dead.

We lined these records up into smaller clips. Take 'em to church. Shout 'em to the congregation. Call for the resurrection.

"Georgia Skin," Zora Neale Hurston (1937). They lose money to the drop of a card.
"Let the Deal Go Down," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

"Wake Up Jacob," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
"Description of Lining Track," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
"Shove it Over," Zora Neale Hurston (1937). The captain's got a pistol. He's tryn to play bad, but I'm gonna take it if he makes me mad.
"Let's Shake It," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
"Gonna See My Long Haired Babe," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

"Dat Old Black Gal," Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
"Mama Don't Want No Peas and Rice," Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
"Halimuhfack," Zora Neale Hurston (1937). Hoodoo, hoodoo, hoodoo working.
"Crow Dance," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).
"Evalina," Zora Neale Hurston (1937). You know the baby don't favor me.
"Tilly Lend Me Your Pigeon," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

"Oh, Mr. Brown," Zora Neale Hurston (1937). See all of the versions. Stuff for a future post.
"Oh, the Buford Boat Done Gone," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

"Uncle Bud," Zora Neale Hurston (1937). It's one of those juke songs.
"Mule on the Mount," Zora Neale Hurston (1937). There's nowhere you can't find parts of this song.
"Po' Gal," Zora Neale Hurston (1937).

We'll see you when your troubles get like our'n.

The Darkness, the Song and Me

2011-04-12T07:32:00.145-04:00

We've been working our way through the book of Langston for about 3 months, now. And as always, there's so much things to say that for now we'll only one or two: Like Pops, Langston runs past our expectations, no matter how high they are, no matter how low they are. He doesn't get penned up neatly in a book. As he moved from from one project to another (like the troubador), he defied those who's expectations would have him a poet, or a novelist, or a communist, or a gospel songwriter. We are compelled to say that he is none of these jobs -- lines of work -- because he is all of them. So high you can't see over it; so low you can't get under it.

W/ this job defying tendency in mind, we have been looking up the word music in the book of Langston. Yes, yes. We find Langston, blues poet, Langston, poet of song, Langston, poet teacher encouraging his spanish language colleagues to do the same; Langston, pop songwriter, Langston, maker of musical theatre, Langston, maker of historical operas, Langston, jazz performer, Langston, jazz historian, Langston, groove theorist. His trick is to be all of this.

How does Langston play this trick? We don't know. That's why it's a trick, we figure. The devils are in the details. Not a little bit here and a little bit there, but in the details everywhere. This morning we're'a call up a spell to Papa Guéudé and ask him to help straighten out what we know about Langston, 'cause he's the one we ask about the ancestors when we need to keep them straightened out. We want his guidance when we're trynta leave true memories behind.

R& gives us the prompt. He tells us that Langston worked the Village Vanguard w/ Charles Mingus/Phineas Newborn, and later Ben Webster, and later w/ Randy Weston @ the Village Gate. He catches the ups and downs of Langston's views from an interview w/ the Toronto Star. "Jazz gives poetry a much wider following and poetry brings to jazz that greater respectability people seem to think it needs. I don't think jazz needs it, but most people seem to." We want a piece of this action. There's ideas running in every direction, and we need help so we don't overstand this.

So this morning, we offer up The Weary Blues and Other Poems Read by Langston Hughes. Really, it's two sets in one, both produced by Leonard Feather. The first is w/ dixieland elder Red Allen (tp) and veteran sessionmen Vic Dickenson (tb), Sam Taylor, Al Williams, Milt Hinton (b) and Osie Johnson (d). It's easy for the afficianado to write off this session as Langston and the moldy figs, but we're long over that distinction, and we find a number of the performances, especially "Testament," to be full of Langston's bigsoul. We have no date on this session , except we infer from the date in the Mingus discography that this one takes place in the same year. The second, recorded March 18, 1958, includes Charles Mingus (b), Shafi Hadi (ts), Jimmy Knepper (tb), Horace Parlan (p, who gets leader credit on the album jacket), and Kenny Dennis (d). We cannot live on tomorrow forever. We need to take up the past and make a new present understanding. Take it on the download and listen hard. You may remember your ancestors straight.

"Hey (Night)/Too Blue," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Note on Commercial Theater," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"The Weary Blues," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Blues at Dawn," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Six Bit Blues," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Morning After," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Could Be/Bad Luck Card," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Life is Fine," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Hey Hey," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)
"Testament," Langston Hughes w/ Red Allen, etc., (1958)

"Consider Me," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Warning: Augmented," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Motto/Dead in There," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Final Curve," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Boogie: 1 AM," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Bed Time," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Day Break," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Tell Me," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Good Morning/Harlem," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Same in Blues/Comment on Curb," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)
"Democracy/Island," Langston Hughes w/ The Horace Parlan Quintet (March 18, 1958)

All this makes us wish for more recordings. Those Mingus nights, those Webster nights, they must've been, as the kids say, dope. There must be tapes boxed up at Yale or Schomburg or the LoC. You won't be finding them be in the old or the new Smithsonian collections, and they won't be in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, or even the three volume version. The details. This is what we hear when we listen to Allen Lowe asking us to listen to That Devilin' Tune. And that's certainly what we wanna hear.

So we ask The Baron to help us find the devils. They'll get our ancestors straight. The Devils? Could be. Must be.

Do You Remember?

2011-04-10T08:11:00.001-04:00

Through thickest glooms look back, immortal shade,

On that that confusion which thy death has made.

-- Phillis Wheatley, "On the Death of Dr. Samuel Marshall 1771"

When we say the dubscience is a conjuring way, we're telling neither secrets nor lies. Dub fulfills the wish of turning making and remaking into one and the same action. It's a way to get more out of nothing, the old surplus value sleight of hand. It's a way of tying together the loose ends, looping the full circle of the root and the branch, the unnaground and the business, the remembered and the forgotten, the dead and the living.

In this way we find ourselves possessed by Burning Spear's albums Marcus Garvey and Garvey's Ghost. They are simple albums based on each based on a simple concept: the first is a set of 10 songs that invoke the importance of Marcus Garvey to the young Jamaican; the second, a song for song echo of the first. The first is an assembly of a-side versions, the second, its b-side twin.* The back and forth casts the spell of the most powerful purpose: bring back the dead, forgotten leader, who, in new form, might lead us across the water where we can see a new land, a new way of life.

From the first track, it's a simple spell. It takes the form of a lesson (the subject is history) that comes with twin prospects: the threat of further struggle, even harm, on the one hand, and the promise of relief, even redemption on the other. "Marcus Garvey" is recast into "The Ghost." The a-side begins with the powerful incantation, "Marcus Garvey's words come to pass" in the face of hunger and deprivation, "Can't get no food to eat. Can't get no money to spend," and makes a private offering to the listener, "Come little one, oh let me do what I can for you, and you alone." The b-side is groove alone, fading horns and dubbed piano repeating in the distance against a churning rhythm section, ghostly give and take that does all it can to enact the album's first important proposition: "He who knows the right thing/and do it not/shall be spanked with many stripes," which turns into the plea, "Do right. Do right. Do right Do right. Do right." The a-side is the conjure word; the b-side the the conjure word becomes conjured deed. Now gone in the first breath, it is true to say that "Marcus Garvey's words come to pass" in the form of a ghostly echo.

Together, the twin albums do this gesture ten times over. "Slavery Days," turns to "I and I Survive." "Jordan River" turns to "Dread River." "Resting Place" turns to "Reggaelation." Taken together they create a simple back and forth, a call and response that creates unity among those who have been separated. I and I survive? Yes. Even with the turn from the first title to the second, the next spell is cast, the next lesson is learned. It is a way that makes future from the past, and makes new dreams out of old dreams. And in this way, the dead come back to life.

Here's a clip of sacred bullets for the double barrel, kingz & queenz. Humble yourself, my little ones. Humble yourself. Wa da da.

"Marcus Garvey," Burning Spear (1975).
"The Ghost," Burning Spear (1976).

"Slavery Days," Burning Spear (1975).
"I and I Survive," Burning Spear (1976).

"The Invasion," Burning Spear (1975).
"Black Wa Da Da," Burning Spear (1976).

"Give Me," Burning Spear (1975).
"Brain Food," Burning Spear (1976).

"Old Marcus Garvey," Burning Spear (1975).
"Farther East of Jack," Burning Spear (1976).

------------

* See:

a.)

b.)

Damballah's Divine Graces and Favors

2011-02-26T08:22:00.008-05:00

We were listening to Pharoah Sanders last week, and we were pulled by the gravity of the Karma album to shuffle up all of the version's of Creator Plans we could dig out of the crates.

This tune is basically a gospel/spiritual collage, a prayer to glue together the loose scraps of the world -- it's past and present, it's eastern coast and its west coast, all of its opposites -- into something satisfying.

Pharoah's reference version is above all a musical comfort, less raucous than A Love Supreme, even though it's grounded in the same groove and the same aesthetic, and above all it is about the resolution of all of that screamin' and hollerin.'

The versions that spin out are all versions of the same comfort, some with more surprises to resolve than others. We find the pared down simplicity of the earlier live quartet in many ways more forceful.

And we find the Leon Thomas/Louis Armstrong take more than a freaky amusement. Pops is dying when he takes up the mike, and yet his voice fills the room with the same depth and volume it does when, say, he steals the show from Ella Fitzgerald in their duet of "Summertime."

More than once in this here place we have written about the power of the version, the conjure and reconjure that makes up tradition. This clip of bullets remakes point again, different.

"The Creator Has a Master Plan," Pharoah Sanders (1969).
"The Creator Has a Master Plan," Pharoah Sanders (1968).
"The Creator Has a Master Plan," Leon Thomas w/ Louis Armstrong (1970).
"The Creator Has a Master Plan," Don Cherry (1972).
"The Creator Has a Master Plan," Quayshaun, produced by G-Clef Da Mad Creator (1993).
"The Creator Has a Master Plan," Brooklyn Funk Essentials (1994).
"The Creator Has a Master Plan," Elouise Burrell (2010).

Bonus

"The Creator Has Other Plans for Me," Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble (2007).

"What a f*cking family picture"

2011-01-29T08:14:00.010-05:00

When we say dubscience, the science we talk to is a conjuring way. It steals the lost from where they were, brings them back transformed. We have nothing to write today about the greatness of the island dub, though ('xcept indirectly we will, because how can we avoid it really -- that's the power that takes over and fills our fingertips with someone else's words). Instead we write about William Attaway, who rises again through the juju of Lil Wayne.

:: lights cigar ::

:: mixes vodka w/ a spritzer ::

William Attaway wandered his life up into a story that has been ignored by biographers. Literary types think of him as a two novel footnote. Brovah gains no mention, for instance, in the 8 volume Cambridge History of American Literature. No matter how infrequently we say his name, there is an accumulation of wisdom in what he left behind when he walked off this earth in 1986.

His second novel, Blood on the Forge, is built on the rock foundation of the blues, and is most famous for being misremembered by Ralph Ellison for its failings, when its strengths are partly in its single-minded failing to rise up with more than the world offers to those who are displaced. In BotF, you wake at four, you piss on a rock, you hate your boss, you lose your woman, you lose your land, you lose your strength, you lose your sight, you lose the will to sing, and you find yourself going away with no place in mind in the company of blind men who are hearing things. Ain't no transendence to a greater humanity.

On his journey, Attaway collected calypsos and children songs. He wrote for early tv. And he gave Harry Belafonte the words the words of the dawn, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song.)"

Harry Belafonte is another misremembered one, because of our problems w/ authenticity. Today's ear places him far from the street. That's a mistake. Like Attaway, he's a rover and holds the gift of crossover, a power much admired by the loa. The one who brings him back needs to remember much, including his genius for funding the early civil rights movement.

We forget that Calypso, a creole masterpiece, was as big as Michael Jackson in the early days of the ellpee. It's centerpiece, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" is tossed into the crates w/ the novelty songs, samples for sports chants and other negligibles. We should hear it the way we do, of course. But we should be wondering it's constantly returning power, like the smell of honey. And we should think of the juju that created that power.

"Dayo" is a work song. Tally my bananas, Mr. Tallyman, I want to go home. You'll hear that song over and over again when you thumb the pages of BotF. And you sing it yourself at quittingtime, whether you want know it or not. But Attaway and Belafonte whip up a homegoing that is about more than just the end of the day. Like all of the great sorrow songs, this one is about leaving the world and going back across the water to find the old family, the one lost when we were displaced. It is the full tragic joy of the song, a melody and lyrics we wish we could remember more from, because then we'd be home once and for all.

So when we spin Lil Wayne's "Six Foot Seven Foot" and we hear the track dubconjure up a groove out of "Day-O," we hear all of Weezy's juju in full effect. On the one hand, it's the standard self assertion at the heart of the blues. "Tell them b*tches I say put my name on the wall./I speak the truth, but I guess that's a foreign language to y'all." Wayne is always capable of taking the form up higher, though, crossing over "like a subject and a predicate."

But then watch how he do:

You don't want start Weezy, 'cause F is for finisher.

Mo misunderstood, but what's a world without an enigma?

Two b*tches at the same time, snchronized swimmers.

Got the girl twisted 'cause she open when I twist her.

Never met the b*tch, but I fuck her like I missed her.

Life is b*tch, and death is her sister.

Sleep is her cousin, what a f*ckin' family picture.

Now he's working the other hand. This is more than the stuff of workingstiff battlerap. Weezy's f*cking w/ the two most powerful women, life and death, synchronized swimmers of the large sea. By the end, all the Guédé are around him and he's in the center. And he's crossing back and forth in a fully breathed exercise of death and fertility that brings Attaway's work back across the water in new form. Work it, bruh bruh.

Daylight's coming.

It can't stop. And it won't stop.

That's what we mean when we say 'til the breakadawn. Ya dig?

Here's the bullets for this clip.

Harry Belafonte, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)." 1956
Lil Wayne, "6 Foot, 7 Foot." 2010

Ain't No Telling

2011-01-17T05:36:00.015-05:00

:: lights cigar ::

:: pours a little liquor on the ground ::

We blew the dust off some John Hurt songs this morning, and were struck over and over by the way Hurt's soft spoken approach to the blues mixes up w/ the gangsta sh*t he sings about.

By the end of "Got the Blues (Can't Be Satisfied)," he's done some damage:

I said, "Baby, what makes you act this a way?"

I said, "Baby, why did you act this a way?"

Says I won't miss a thing she gives away.

Took my gun and I broke the barrel down.

Took my gun and broke the barrel down.

Put my baby six feet in the ground.

I cut that joker so long deep and wide.

Cut that joker so long deep and wide.

Yet got the blues and I can't be satisfied.

When we think dissatisfied, we think the full-throated "I feel like snapping a pistol in your face" hollered by Muddy Waters. John Hurt's soft droning on the guitar and sweet, near whisper make an understated haunt, not the usual volume that cuts a a backdoor man deep and wide. You can make up a catalog of this quiet violence when you dig through the Hurt stacks.

He delivers it the same way he delivers the much more matter of fact.

The way I'm sleepin,' my back and shoulder's tired.

The way I'm sleepin,' Babe, my back and shoulder's tired.

The way I'm sleepin,' my back and shoulder's tired.

Gonna turn over try it on the other side.

Hurt mixes the sweet and everyday in his menace. It sticks in our mind because we can't reconcile it. It's like killing someone because he took your hat. It's also not the voice of someone whose seen trouble all his days. It's the voice of someone who puts trouble after trouble behind, as easy as you can flirt w/a mermaid. But the more we listen, the more we think that's the all about it. It leaves us uneasy in an at ease way. Are you feeling it? Turning around is about the turning, not the next new direction you strike. All directions carry you to your grave. Turning around is the move of the most powerful loa. It's John Hurt's move.

It's in this sense that we understand "Spike Driver Blues."

With that in mind, we turn back and restudy John Hurt. With each turn we find ourselves satisfied. So we're loading the clip with some John Hurt bullets:

"Got the Blues (Can't Be Satisfied)," 1928.
"Big Leg Blues," 1928. Rambling because he's tired of a leg over his in the morning.
"Candy Man," 1928. In anticipation of the candy shop, where you can get a lollipop f/ 50¢. "It don't melt away. It just gets better, so the ladies say."
"Blue Harvest Blues," 1928. Dread when there should be none.
"Spike Driver Blues," 1928. Turns John Henry into a reason to quit altogether. "Take my hammer and give it to the captain." Jyeah.

Gonna make it to my shanty 'fore day.

What We're Hearing

2010-12-05T10:52:00.005-05:00

In his review of a different chapter of Jay 2 tha Z's ongoing autobiographical/autoentrepreneurial project, the dean makes the following persuasive observation:

Sean Carter isn't the first crime-linked hitmaker with a penchant for kicking broads out of bed at 6:15 in the morning. Frank Sinatra beat him to it. Right, Sinatra never boasted about his own callousness--not publicly, in song--and that's a big difference. Jay-Z has too many units tied up in playing the now-a-rapper-now-a-thug "reality" game with his customers, thugs and fantasists both, and only when he lets the token Amil talk back for a verse does he make room for female reality.

The connect b/t the business, man and the chairman of the board is an obvious one, but merits mentioning nevertheless. A different member of the VV diaspora (the best faculty a music and movie loving boy could want in the 80s), Gary Giddins might take it further. He'd draw the line b/t Sinatra and Der Bingle, Der Bingle and the minstrel circuit, the tricky bidness of makeup and voice. He might take us then to Bert Williams, one of the true kings of the 20th c. That would then give us a route back to really understand the business, man.

Get it: We are at the crossroads again. And we're on our knees.

Take this and put it in context:

"D'Evils," Jay-Z (1996).

What We're Hearing: Pops Alone and Together

2010-11-27T07:38:00.009-05:00

The more we hear this piece, the more we hear a before and after story about ensemble playing.

There is one approach to the ensemble at the beginning, one where the melody is owned collectively. The ensemble rolls for foaty seconds w/ the 4 piece rhythm section, making a deep bottom. It's all for one.

Then there's a cornet/banjo break, followed by the clarinet/banjo break, really just set ups for the drama of the big pops solo moment that gets all of the attention. (Johnny Dodds squallers his response in contrast to Pops' first break, which is short, dynamic and versatile, and we don't knock it, but because it comes after, it sounds like he's just trynta shout over Pops' imagination, especially in the first two or three bars of his second run through of the chorus.)

And we don't argue the fact that from about a minute and fifty to about two and thirtyfive, pops the soloist is all there is, maybe all there is in the universe -- Emerson's transparent eyeball. We all already know that that's why we call him Pops: he fathered the 20th century by being all of it and by giving it all of his being. So when Ted Gioia or Terry Teachout* make their appropriate and now canonical claim that this is the moment when he's 'venting modern jazz, they are stating a matter of fact.

But our attention is drawn to the one for all final chorus, the last 25 seconds of the song. The melody is reframed, and it makes a new sense, not because of the solo runs leading into it; they are just drama. Rather because Pops owns the whole thing and the ensemble is hanging in w/ his every not making groove groove, making the song really sing.

We're not certain this is modern vs. old NO any more than it is Pops vs. the band. We think it goes a different way. We think Hot 7 had to make a song out of those solo choruses, a song w/ enough drama to take back the hearts and minds of the audience after the solos. And in this case they did so by exceeding themselves as soloists, as difficult as that may seem in hindsight.

We also think this is part of the essential knowhow that Pops brings to the game when he is on his best. He uses the solo and the ensemble, the one for all and all for one, to great dramatic purpose. We don't need to strum our fingers over the body of his work. We just need to press play on "Struttin' with Some Barbecue." It is a scientist's simple lesson on the interplay between individual and group making the most memorable drama.

Take it. Take it.

"Potato Head Blues," Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven (1927).

-----------

* "However 'Potato Head Blues' came to be, it is one of the greatest solos recorded by a jazzman, a landmark of modern music that long ago achieved iconic status, both music and cultural."

Erzulie, Make Us Reach in the Files

2010-11-07T08:56:00.016-05:00

The trick in ancient to future is to be in more than one time at a place. Like Erzulie, who's both rada and petwo. It's the old tricky like this, tricky like that manuva. Chea.

A weekend ago, the VV threw us a clue in this direction and asked us to pay attention to Greg Nice. We took it up like a gift left on the roadside, and started digging though the Nice and Smooth crates. Cause this is how we take.

As we lissened, what we found was a profound betweenness to their work. It was more than the dang diggy dang wordplay of the late 70s, and it had more than the odor of the streets that rap took up quick in the first new school. There was a love of the dancehall, a love of the battle, a love of the streets and a love of the afrofuture in egypt jewel of the nile. It's all packed in the titles, lyrics and music of two songs, "Old to the New" and, even moreso, "Same Old Brand New Style (I Can't Wait)." These two mouthfuls would feed a supperful of hungry posts here at the redlight. To paraphrase, We are always impatient for the recurrence of the old in the definitively new. Always for the first time, and for the first time, just like always. Ahh, effervescence.

In fact, just like when you call on the loa, you get more than you ask for. And it was then that we heard Dewey Redman, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, the masters of conjurng the old and the new. Can't wait, you dig?

So let's cite the bullets

"Old to the New," Nice and Smooth
"Same Old Brand New Style (I Can't Wait)," Nice and Smooth
"Old and New Dreams," Old and New Dreams

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

While we're on this, let's mark again: we have much to say about Smooth's verse in Same Old. Brovah calls a lotta names, but finally gets to this:

I'll beat you like Bruce, when he turned into Cato.

Who be the winner, the snake or the monkey?

Hard to tell, but this beat, this sh*t sure is funky.

We are not sure what's going on here, but this is what we mean when we say, you see? Sh*t made us break out the Harold Courlander (you know, the new school remake of the prewar sociology and anthropology, and an old school folklore author) and ask all about the snake and the monkey, cause it's one of those things that makes you go hmmmm... while you're walking to the library. And we found some good stuff 'bout gold weights and such, but nothing that stuck the snake in a tangle w/ a monkey. So we asked the internets and we got a reference to some razzledazzle, and even if it has nothing to do w/ snake and monkey proper, we're gonna call it.

That's the way Lady Erzulie would call it, too, in the in between of the in between.

Rock on. Shock on. Get on. Get on.

Rock on. To the breakadawn.

Don't You Want to Go?

2010-10-09T06:14:00.004-04:00

For those displaced (and that's all of us -- we are all out of the place we are meant to be), home is away, out of reach. For that reason, moving on is as inevitable as the arithmetic of footsteps: you know, "One and one is two." Just as inevitable is a sense of longing, the sense that loss can be restored, that it is possible to leave this mean old place and return to a better one, the place you come from.

Call it Eshu's paradox: He who stands at the crossroads urging you on, is the same who walks by you when you travel home to your final resting place. How is it that in the blues about being homesick, "Ever time de trains pass/I wants to go somewhere"? Langston goes on to capture the emotional paradox. "To keep from crying/I opens my mouth an' laughs." And there, with both ends of the equation in his hands, he's conjures Eshu.

It's a temptation to try to get more meaning out of a blues song than it offers. Brovah Elijah Wald is probably the best teacher on this subject. The song is nothing more or less than where it stands in a jukebox, a record company's ledger, and the variations from one version to the next.

Before it was a thesis/anthem that demanded a crackerrock antithesis/antianthem about, of all places, Alabama, "Sweet Home Chicago" was nothing more or less than a simple rambling song. It marks itself with cryptic references of places too distant to imagine (California, Des Moines Ioway, and Chicago). And it cries a lonesome wail inviting companionship on the ramble ("Baby, honey don't you want to go?" -- a question asked in a way that leads the listener to wonder whether Johnson is begging her because she's saying no). Going home? Rambling? Alone? Together? Eshu will tell us these cannot be separated, anymore than laughing and crying.

As we listened, we began hearing the variations more clearly. There's Kokomo and the original that comes 6 years later. There's "Sweet" by a bunch of other names, like "Don't You Want To?" You can go to Chicago or the country. You can go home or you can leave home forever. Eshu knows that when you are on your knees at the crossroads your are always coming and going. So we're reloading a clip of bullets for your own exercise in versionology:

"Kokomo Blues," Scrapper Blackwell (1928).
"Old Original Kokomo Blues," Kokomo Arnold (1934).
"Mr. Freddie's Kokomo Blues," Freddie Spruell, accompanied by Carl Martin (1935).

* * * * *

"Sweet Home Chicago," Robert Johnson (1936).
"Don't You Want to Go," Walter Davis (1940-1946)
"Baby, Don't You Want to Go," Tommy McClennan
"Sweet Home Chicago," David "Honeyboy" Edwards
"Sweet Home Chicago," Pyeng Threadgill (2003).

* * * * *

"Going up the Country, Don't You Want to Go," The Lapsey Band (1954).
"Going up to the Country" (Version 1), Jessie Clarence Gorman (1969).
"Going up the Country/Paint My Mailbox Blue," Taj Mahal (1968).

* * * * *

"Come On, Don't You Want to Go?" I.C. Glee Quartet
"Don't You Want to Go," Arizona Dranes
"Don't You Want to Go," the Soul Stirrers

We're uncertain about any direct line between any of these songs, 'cept perhaps the line drawn by Wald between Kokomo Arnold and Johnson's original retake. Pure sharkbiting. This is a roots maneuver and we've got nothing more to say about this kinda trickery but that you better think it's still going on all over the panhiphop tradition, and has been from ancient to future. In this way, we can take up all the retakes, from Johnson's own to Pyeng Threadgill's, and we can trace a line of longing, a longing to get back home to you name it: the people we want to be with; the people we lost; the slow groove of good loving that we been missing; you name it.

But there's more to the tradition that working the repeater pencil to draw a line between your audience and your pocketbook. There is something about coming and going that is more than just passing a coin from one hand to another.

There is the temptation to go back. When we we're studying up for this piece we read through the primitive liner notes of musicologist Frederic Ramsey, Jr., who anthropolgized the Lapsey Band's approach to Albert Ayler. He gave voice to this temptation. "As a tentative but not binding objective, we hoped to tap as many sources as possible that would lead us back to the music and the story of the period 1860 to 1900." But the Laspey's are pure ancient to future, music from the spaceways. We give Ramsey props for his diligence when we say he's got the direction wrong. Home is away, not back.

This is why we our soul stirs when we hear the line drawn between Johnson, who's pact w/ the devil is the stuff of movies by the Coen Bros, and Arizona Dranes, or even more, the I.C. Glee Quartet. That's the home: the place we can only wish for after we've lost it.

Eshu's a homesick loa, and he knows that is a joyful disease because it promises the slow groove of return.

Ibeji

2010-09-11T06:02:00.007-04:00

A week past now, we were thinking on the power of Bitches Brew. Something about 40 years brought us back. From there we travelled a dusty road to Sonny Sharrock. The next fork took us to Wayne Shorter's super new, then back, as you might expect, first to Bitches Brew and then to its precursors. We say ancient to future, and it is paths like this we represent. The crossroad where the past crosses itself with the new and the new crosses with the past.

Here we fell down on our knees, the weight of the pondering upon us. Gazing in all directions we heard an echo, from the time before Miles plugged in, and the time when, after Miles plugged in, he and his fraternal twin brother Wayne, decided to part.

We offer this clip for your own pondering.

The brothers laid the tracks down once together in June 1967* as ensemble pieces. It's the great Columbia quintet on these tracks, and they are in fine form. The compositions, all Shorter's, are developed as relaxed duet melodies, played by both brothers in unison, and long solos developed over Tony Williams' steady glide, and Ron Carter's reminder that there is beat that holds it all together.

The later versions were laid down in August 1969, as Miles and Wayne were in the middle of Bitches Brew, and though the musicians walk across from the one session to the other, the tracks on Super Nova are Wayne's tracks. They are the tracks of a single leader, separated from his brother. He's switched from tenor to soprano. The band is no longer the standard quintet, but a rhythm heavy line up w/ two guitarists, Jack Dejohnette (who rocks the house whenever he find the place), and additional percussion (Chick Corea on drums?).

The separation is not complete. The brothers play together into the early 70s. Wayne describes the motivation as shared: Well, I had a time limit for myself in a sense. Five years with a band -- like with Art Blakey -- that's enough. With Miles it was a little more than five years... Miles was saying [whispers]: 'Don't you think it's time for you to get your own band?' And I had so many ideas, and the music was coming out like water and everything, and I said, 'Yeah. I think it's time. I think it's really time.'"† But the separation is underway.

Listen:

"Water Babies," Wayne Shorter (ss), John McLaughlin (ac-g, el-g), Sonny Sharrock (el-g), Miroslav Vitous (b), Chick Corea (d, vib), Jack DeJohnette (d, per). August 29, 1969.
"Water Babies," Miles Davis (tp), Wayne Shorter (ts), Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (b), Tony Williams (d). June 7, 1967
"Capricorn," Wayne Shorter (ss), John McLaughlin (ac-g, el-g), Sonny Sharrock (el-g), Miroslav Vitous (b), Chick Corea (d, vib), Jack DeJohnette (d, per). August 29, 1969.
"Capricorn," Miles Davis (tp), Wayne Shorter (ts), Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (b), Tony Williams (d). June 13, 1967
"Sweet Pea," Wayne Shorter (ss), John McLaughlin (ac-g, el-g), Sonny Sharrock (el-g), Miroslav Vitous (b), Chick Corea (d, vib), Jack DeJohnette (d, per). August 29, 1969.
"Sweet Pea," Miles Davis (tp), Wayne Shorter (ts), Herbie Hancock (p), Ron Carter (b), Tony Williams (d). June 23, 1967

We approach September 26, the feast of the twins. The loa remind us that the twins are the most ancient, and tricky, and that they have power over water and healing, as well as separation and reunity.

After Wayne left Miles, they both had plenty of 'splaining to do, as much to themselves as any. One of the ways Wayne tells the story is here,† and perhaps the most noteworthy portion is doubled down over @ the red light. Miles worked heavily between conjuring muses and conjuring doubles, before and after his work with Wayne.

After listening and pondering at this crossroads we think we should prepare to consult the jumeaux and ask their help. We walk in separation from so much more than our lost brothers. We want their aid with those blues.

* We have much respect for the brovahs @ the Jazz Discography Project for making the chronology of an era more visible to mere mortals.

† Wayne Shorter is usually generous in his interviews, and this one is along those lines.

Make a Change: A Little Archeology on Broom Dusting

2010-08-22T07:46:00.006-04:00

As already noted over @ the red light, we've been lissening to Robert Johnson, and it has prompted us to think about the transactions that make up the tradition we're working. It is a tradition of, among other things, leaving and returning, rambling and coming home. And that powerful metaphor builds both content and form. The constant revision of songs, and the constant reversion to earlier songs are part of the same motion (and the same emotion of loss and reconciliation -- should we second this?).

And as we've been hearing Rob't, we've been hearing the echoes of things past and present. So we thought we would load up a clip of those echoes for you.

Leroy Carr, "I Believe I'll Make a Change."
Kokomo Arnold, "Sagefield Woman Blues."
Kokomo Arnold, "Sissy Man Blues."
Robert Johnson, "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom."
Roosevelt Sykes, "Mr. Carl's Blues."
Elmore James, "Dust My Broom"
Ike & Tina Turner, "Dust My Broom"
Pyeng Threadgill, "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom."

There's really no revelation here, is there? The first few bullets are drawn in part from ElijahWald's close reading of the body and soul of Rob't Johnson's work, Escaping the Delta, a book for which we have much proper respect. The last three are versions we have been unable to forget. The cumulative story is nothing but that of persistent creolization of the same material. But as it moves, the material absorbs again and again its own opposites. The major themes are straightforward: leaving at the end of something bad and getting a fresh start. They are deep in nuance, too: the broomsweep has hoodoo resonance; the tension between giving up and getting started again has sweet promise and sad consequence on both ends -- both plea and curse in the same step. There is no one pattern of right and wrong: there's plenty of wrong doing and quitting going on, and in enough directions to make a good soap opera. The big, restlessmaking horizon calls from faraway, but the call may also to be return home like the prodigal, giving up on the taking business for something more generous. But if the themes are straightforward, they are turned and turned again in the retelling.

======

In the last four months, we shoulda been here more, but it's like that, so we have nothing more to say about our absence. We are just glad to be back. We'll come back to the unfinished work, too, especially the big opus on OB4CL. The force of the work is to great to put it down forever.

Body and Soul: Hawk Reversions Himself

2010-04-10T08:33:00.001-04:00

Body and Soul Coleman Hawkins

Just because he dropped the reference version, doesn't mean the Hawk would leave the tune alone. Rather he deviled and re-deviled it. we're pretty sure his primary point is that he can do it again and not be the same. The desperate exchange of body for soul, the Faustian heartbreak in the song, is easy to lose when this is the approach. Therefore, it is interesting how he brings the heartbreak back into all three versions. Lissen for it.

Coleman Hawkins with Billy Byers and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." We're not sure Hawk gentles himself into this smoothjazz ensemble, but then maybe that's the point. By the end, its his voice alone, not even against the orchestra.
Coleman Hawkins, "Picasso." Here all w/ both accompaniment and melody dropped, Hawk takes on blues and the abstract truth. We believe this bullet ranks w/ Armstrong/Hines "Weather Bird" as an intellectual exercise, even if it lacks the zing the two duelists put into their piece. It is, of course, about the breakdown that occurs when you are alone. That's the point. It's after the tragic ending of the reference version, "an echo of a tale that's been told."

Working Through OB4CL: P R O S P E C T

2010-04-04T06:34:00.000-04:00

There's no way we will start at the beginning, because the crossroads is always the middle of more than one thing. And that's the way. Word to your moms.

:: makes a small circle of gunpowder on the ground ::

:: centers a bottle of henny in the circle ::

:: scatters pepperflakes ::

:: bows head ::

Wu Tang Clan, "Can It All Be So Simple" is the emblem of both what comes before OB4CL and the wish for a better time before. It is, therefore service to the lwas in the form of ingnition, match to the ring of gunpowder.

And so we begin.

We begin making a small altar that places OB4CL at the foot of the tradition, knowing that there are those who, when they come by, will take up pieces, and leave other pieces behind. And that's the way. Word to your moms.

And this because in its own way, OB4CL is itself an ilé, a shrine that looks in all directions at once. Up. Down. Side to side.

What we will do here is locate our ilé making project to think through the slab. What we build here, then, is a shrine to a shrine, which will serve as a call to those who want to hear it.

OB4CL then. Seven threads, then, that run through it.

Movement: "We gotta migrate."
Collage: "poisonous paragraphs."
The damning (oppressing) and redeeming (liberating) power of business: "slang rap democracy."
Clan and Gang and Family: "this rap wonderama team got drama"
Secret knowledge: "It's manifested. The gods work like appliances."
Secret identity: "a.k.a."
Crossing over: "Chef may resign to boat across the Verrazano."

Each of these threads is pending, and each starts in the full fabric of the tradition. We will work them back into the tradition, but leave them still pending. And that's the way. Word to your Moms.

When we hear Rae tell the fellas in OutKast, "We handling the earth right now," we take his word as bond. We cannot get past this statement without thinking first of Nas and the more than brilliant "The World is Yours." Yes, yes y'all. We think on that view @ the beginning of the first Scarface that is the omega of Tony Montana's dream to get out. We read Rae different, though. We think that he's telling us that he's already there. "It's the pot of gold right here man. This is it, man, this is glory." We think he's not signifying here. Nah. He's representing.

Here, hit this Henny. Fuse is already lit.

Body and Soul: Art Tatum

2010-03-20T06:14:00.005-04:00

When we reconcile the song to the solo, we find more confusion in the pianoed versions of B&S than either the vocalized or tenorized. It may be that Hawk's footprint is so large he leaves room for nothing but gravity, but we don't think so. It may just be that the too many piano renditions come at the song with a lightfingered musical approach, which isn't bad initself, but something that leaves at least this lissener wondering where the song's torch went.

One exception to this rule the Art Tatum solo version that he dropped in that legendary two day blast for Norman Granz in the early 50s that produced 8 volumes of the good sh*t.

His take on B&S begins lagging, teasing sadness from the melody. Even as Tatum's imagination takes over the song, he resists the temptation to pep it up, as he does earlier in the disc (we gots no session records at our grasp, so we can't tell whether it really comes first) with his take on "Love for Sale." It's in the second chorus, though, when he proves how subtly he conceives of the song. There he interpolates a sweet passage from "Nobody Knows...," making the bluesy connection from pain to salvation. Which is the song's all about it.

Here you go:

Art Tatum, "Body and Soul," Solo Masterpieces Volume 1.

Is There Confusion?

2010-03-14T08:42:00.021-04:00

A friend asked us to throw down some recommendations on Betty Davis, an easy enough task. We'll load up a clip in no time.

But she's left us some devilishly difficult 2ns, and we hesitate to throw such things into anyone's field of vision without offering a few prayers of our own.

:: pours a little liquor on the ground::

In Betty's work there's the groove, the voice and the visuals. And then there's sex (as in m/f) and beauty (as in aesthetics). They pile up all over Betty, just as she wanted, but, if the record (as in public, and as opposed to rekkids, slabs, 2ns or the whathaveyous we use to refer to the work in the tradition) tells us anything, it is that we treat her work as a ball of confusion.

Light in the Attic's rediscovery of Betty Davis was not only inevitable, but long overdue. Erudite cratediggers shoulda, coulda, woulda found their way to her stuff in the Thriller era 80s, instead of waiting 'til the Lady Gaga and Shakira era* 00s if they were brave enough. There must have been business hurdles they couldn't jump, or her sh1t woulda been loose again in the market before Rick James was smoking crack.

When Betty's albums first hit the racks there was no shortage of demand for groove. For those of us lissenning so late in the game, the trick is to distinguish it from all of the lofty precursors assigned in hindsight to Betty's list of influences. She's got deepsoul in her biography: the Jimi Hendrix boo rumor, the Miles Davis husband portion of her biography, the Greg Errico connection to Sly Stone and the Larry Graham connection to Graham Central Station. But we gotta call her sh1t her own. She shakes it fast, and right in front of us. She's not hanging behind it, waiting for us to find her lurking.

Her voice has more to do w/ Gil Scott Heron or the Last Poets, than Chaka Kahn, Patti Labelle, Marva Whitney or Vicki Anderson. The listed queenz all have something to tell us, but Betty is working hard to teach us a lesson on top of it. This expressly didactic tone in her voice sometimes feels, at least after the fact of nearly four decades, like a lecture on how to get the whole sexual power thing right. The too easy thing to do today is to call her ahead of her time. There is something much more fair to her than to call her the forerunner of a sexual revolution that is now over. She's only as good a singer as James "Blood" Ulmer, but that's the point. And that is why she sounds more right to lissenners versed in hearing Ma Rainey or Missy Elliot.

Then there's her body of visual work†, prolly the biggest source of distraction for fans and detractors. It's not surprising that someone who began her career doing fashion spreads for girls magazines has an eye for her own appearance, and a strong sense of how to push people around using that media. Her visual rhetoric, a move she busted the streets 7 years before Prince delivered his Dirty Mind,‡ is an outmoving spiral of irony and sincerity. It doesn't stop being one or the other. Just like Prince, Betty uses sex to write checks she can't fully cash. Just deal and move on. There's no point in averting your eyes, even if it won't free your ass when you keep on staring.

So, like Marvin says: "Come on, get to this":

Betty Davis, "Anti-Love Song," Betty Davis (1973).
Betty Davis, "Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him," They Say I'm Different (1974).
Betty Davis, "He Was a Big Freak," They Say I'm Different (1974).
Betty Davis, "They Say I'm Different," They Say I'm Different (1974).

These bullets are more than Brechtian exercises in drawing the lissener into a trap of desire x guilt = historical consciousness. They are an articulation of a tension the harsh voice of the day today and the sweet voice that promises something better that made Phillis Wheatley make a fetish of looking to the east (as in back across the Atlantic) to a creole dawn.

About 60 years before Betty Davis invited us to meet her at these crossroads to witness her conjure a Black Madonna, Jessie Fauset, who's now a sister of Maman Brigitte, invited us to pray to another angel, Sojourner Truth:

Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,

Pounding our stubborn heart on Freedom's bars,

Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set

Still visioning the stars.

This is Betty's tradition. This is our tradition and we're happy to join her there. So high you can't get over it. So low you can't get under it. It goes on and on and on and on. To the break of dawn.

* We got nothing bad to say about these followers of Madonna. They are well-educated and offer a theory of action. There's just so much more things to say.

†

, etc.

‡

, etc.

Working Through: P R O S P E C T

2010-03-07T11:01:00.002-05:00

Now that we are moving our quicker thoughts, glimpses and lissening notes over to the red light, the blue light becomes the place for our longer thoughts only. The Body and Soul Project, still underway, is the best and maybe the only example of what we gonna be up to.

In upcoming weeks, we'll be working through extended exercises that we will call working through. The all about will remain the same, though. We're gonna make the fabric of what the AEC called ancient to future out of other peoples' threads.

Five starting points:

James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry
Devilin.' This thinking was given to us by Allen Lowe, a heroic anthologist, who proves there is salvation at the crossroads between what we know and the new details we learn.
Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Links
Goodie Mob, Soul Food
OutKast, Aquemini

There's plenty of other threads, and we expect to work them in as we go. The last three are, obviously, an indulgence in the love massive we have for a body of hiphop that takes its place in a history it enacts.

In the mean time, we'll keep elaborating on the threads we're already playing out:

Life and Times of Marvin Gaye (what ever happened to that one, anyway).
Body and Soul
Versionology. The psuedoscience that the old world likes to label variation on a theme (to be confused w/ fugues and fugue states, conditions it treats with escalating gravity, hoping to cure it w/ copyright and other controls.).

Body and Soul: Vocal Approaches/Lyrics

2010-02-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

By now, we've laid out one of those pictures with two sides.* On one side we have "Body and Soul" the framework for heroic solo instrumentalism.† On the other, we introduced a foundational post, where the song stands up in its earliest versions as a singer's tune.‡

The singers remind us that it's a song w/ lyrics, not just Johnny Green's work, a torchy melody wrapped around some tough chord changes that have lured the mighty tenors of the 20th c. into a titanic struggle with one another.

First, a couple of bullets:

Frank Sinatra, "Body and Soul" (1947). Another reference version. Blue-eyed soul worth knowing by heart.
Louis Armstrong and His New Sebastian Club Seranaders, "Body and Soul" (1930). We already cited this masterpiece as the beginning of the jazz versions of the song. Listen for Lionel Hampton on the vibes.
Sarah Vaughan, "Body and Soul" (1954). From the extraordinary slab, Swingin' Easy, which sports John Malachi on piano, Joe Benjamin on bass, and Roy Haynes brushing out an elegant and gentle groove on drums.
Billie Holiday, "Body and Soul" (1940). Includes some soulful bars at the intro and the break by Roy Eldridge, as well as a solid combo composed of Jimmy Powell and Carl Frye alto sax, Kermit Scott tenor sax, Sonny White piano, Lawrence Lucie guitar, John Williams bass, and Harold "Doc" West drums.

Today, though, the words of Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton draw us. If we discard the bad latinate grammar ("for you I sigh" or "my life a wreck you're making"), the song starts our sad and gets sadder. Rejected, the singer must offer more and more of themselves to prove their devotion. Loss yields surrender, and surrender escalates with more loss. It's excruciating. Each of the first three versions cited above turn on the third verse:

My life a wreck you’re making.
You know I’m yours for just the taking.
I’d gladly surrender
Myself to you body and soul.

Sinatra's version just plays the loser's version straight. Armstrong's ends with the heartbreaking grunt. Sassy's grows torchier with every verse.

But no one suffers in song like Billie Holiday. For all others, "Body and Soul" is a about giving up it up after it won't matter. Lady takes a sad song, flips one word -- "wreck" goes to "hell" without the author's permission -- in the first line of the third verse, and makes it one of spiritual loss.

My life a hell you’re making
You know I’m yours for just the takin’
I’d gladly surrender
Myself to you, body and soul

She's giving up her soul, not her body. In other versions it the other way around. And where others foreshorten the song, lyrically, she drags out Heyman, Sour and Green for all its worth:

What lies before me?
A future that’s stormy
A winter that’s gray and cold

Unless there’s magic
The end will be tragic
And echo a tale that’s been told
So often

With her recast version, we can almost re-read the entire song, line by line, as a version of "Crossroads Blues." In the face of a stormy future (no one sings about bad the promise of bad weather better than the Lady), she begs for a spell to stave off the too familiar sad ending.

Due to this dubscience, the final verse takes on its own totally new meaning:

My life revolves about you
What earthly good am I without you?
Oh I tell you I mean it
I’m all for you, body and soul

Earthly good? None. The tossed away remains of this Faustian bargain have no heaven, only hell. All for you, body and soul.

* Maybe it's a 7" rekkid, which the people have mislabled a "single" even though it's got an A side and a B side.
† Stop here and here.
‡ Stop here.

School of Ragtime

2010-02-20T13:08:00.007-05:00

We're in a 'nothering field again, kings and queenz. We enter w/out as much preparation as we should, really just playas. But we're moved to come off of the wall and enter, even tough we're not ready.

But as we enter we find some of the same things, even if they're arranges differently: You start w/ the darktown swells, raising the standard*; then there's the wild creole style; there's the sexy allure of dance step instructions†; there's the tension between the old world and the new; and then there's the accusations about paving the road to hell.‡ Finally and never to late, there's a buncha scholars who think they missed it, so they go back to find their way back to the roots.

Here's a couple of bullets in the clip for you to marinate on.

Scott Joplin, "Ragtime Dance."
Air, "Ragtime Dance." We've been lissening to this one since it was an unnaground hit in the vinyl days. Best drum solo in the 70s, a real shoe tickler.◊

You must learn.

* Take partners do the "rag two step", I know you are enjoying yourselves,
You are representatives of dark town's wealth. Stop where you are!

† Ev'rybody now "form a line", Dance nothing but the real ragtime.
Do your best, "forward four steps", you are all very fine.
Let me see you do the "back step prance", Be graceful at ev'ry chance.
You are now enjoying the "ragtime dance". Ev'ry body sing.

‡ The hall was illuminated by electric lights, It certainly was a sight to see;
So many colored folks there without a razor fight... 'Twas a great surprise to me.

◊ Notice. To get the desired effect of "stop time" the pianist will please stamp the heel of one foot heavily upon the floor at every word "stamp." Do not raise the toe of the foot from the floor while stamping. Author.

From Terence's Library

2010-02-08T09:35:00.004-05:00

At the risk of being labeled a repeater pencil, what we're all about here is pulling together the threads into a fabric. Fact is there's so much things to say, that we are opening another store, one where we pull our loose and stray threads out before we weave them together here. It's mainly a copybook, but you may want to drop by to find out what we're working on.

P E A C E

Body and Soul: Prehawk

2010-01-31T08:07:00.007-05:00

We've put a tied up a coupla knots in this B&S thread already. Let's now get to the start.

"Body and Soul" is a pop tune, from back in the day when pop tunes came from musical theater. It was a feature song in Three's a Crowd. The versionologist to takes it from the stage, samples it, makes it new by putting it into the tradition. Again and again. That's how we begin.

To this end, let's load a crowd of bullets in the clip from 1930. It's a straightforward case:

Ruth Etting, "Body and Soul." Etting was not above living the blues. Check that portion of her bio where her husband shoots her lover and gets a year upstate.
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." The vocal is by Whiteman's trombone player, Jack Fulton. No need to tell you that Whiteman was the Elvis or Eminem of his day, grinding hits that more proper people wanted curbed 'cause they were creating bad habits among the youth. But that's all in the tradition, too.
Louis Armstrong* and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." Odd man out. Here's where the story begins.

J Y E A H

* We have so much things to say about the man. We'll be back at it. He basically made the 20th century up from mud and straw in the streets. We're still living under that spell.

Digging

2010-01-28T19:51:00.005-05:00

All over that Quincy Jones OST. Ready to look through the crates and move on to The Italian Job. We are already everywhere.

J Y E A H

Note added 12 hours later: there is something to be said about creating menace w/ what at the time was an "urban" sounding soundtrack in a movie bout terror far away from any city. A future remake should consider using Dock Boggs tunes to make the point. Think on it.

Upcoming Reading

2010-01-24T14:28:00.004-05:00

We're behind in our readings. Just wanted to show you that we'll get to it.

In the mean time, we're opening up another front here: commonplace. We think of it more as a copybook, but it's all part of the same on and on and on and on.

P E A C E

Body and Soul -- Reference Version

2010-01-18T06:55:00.007-05:00

A few days ago we mapped up a project to go through our stacks of "Body and Soul." We loaded a clip of 38 bullets and began walking the streets of the Diamond, our ear to the ground. At that moment, this project, like every one, became bigger just as we began. We look up. We look down. We get case of the vertigo. For us this means we gotta keep on, even tho the work is so high we can't get over it, and so low we can't get under it. Isn't that the way it is, all the time and any way you choose it. You can find it. You just can't lose it.

So let's lay down the next mark, one that will hold our gaze as we listen to e/thing else.

Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul."

Constant readers will predict that when we first spun this hit up, it was from the Smithsonian text book. We started listening to it 37 years after it hit the jukebox, and we been listening to it for 33 years. That makes it one of the foundation stones, at least in our pile.

We put these marks down on the first of two days of the martyrs (w/ the other coming in February). As we keep marking this thread up, we'll be putting down what we learn from studying the versions. This versionology is an occult science.

Here, tho, is all we can say today: there is something in the spell cast by a foundation stone. It's not the first. It's not the last. It's the one that holds other to the building. We think that on a day like today, Martyr's Day, this is something to think on. Body and soul.

P E A C E

Something Sweet, But No Twankle

2010-01-16T04:51:00.008-05:00

We'll get back to the Body and Soul thread before long.

In the mean time, we were up before the break of dawn, listening to the other J5 and we found more proof of the one and on and on and on. Therefore a couple of bullets:

San Juan Government School Girls, "There's a Brown Girl in the Ring." Old school. Direct to tape demo. No overdubs. No sampling. Unnaneath the street. Right from the crossroads.*
Jurassic 5, "Brown Girl." The Jurassics were certainly dub scientists, and were signifying in every direction on this cut.

It's a great abundance, even w/out Boney M. Too much to keep it to ourselves.

Find peace in this holy week, kings and queens, and if you stop step in the circle, show me your motion.

* Don't neglect the Girls greatest hit, "Sammie Dead-O."

Found Object -- Harlem Visage, Recast in the Dirty, Dirty

2009-12-29T21:44:00.004-05:00

Augusta Savage, Gwendolyn Knight, 1937. Worth knowing. Worth the travel.

Found Object

2009-12-29T14:32:00.004-05:00

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Untitled, ca. 1895. Our apologies for the lo-fi repro. In the meantime, the Duke Ellington of painting moves on.

Found Object -- Old Time

2009-12-29T09:48:00.006-05:00

Floyd Gordon, unknown title or date. Found rolling in the back woods of the dirty dirty.

We never quite know what to do with this kind of picturing of the old south. The brovah, who stands above most of this work for his strong views of the city & storybook colorism, consistently traffics in nostalgia, and we're asking ourselves whether that's a bad thing. It may be a very different kind of unnaground that he's walking through, and while he's busy resurrecting what he wishes happened, we're walking the streets doing only the same and wishing for the wrong things.

I would ask the queen of the blues what she thinks, but only after Dust Tracks. She might have the right thing to say.

Found Object -- Gots to get us more of these Pancaribbean flashes

2009-12-28T09:03:00.009-05:00

This washed up on the beach, sent to us in a bottle from an island friend. "They want to go like this, like Farrah Fawcett," rasta stylee.

Found Object

2009-12-24T14:51:00.003-05:00

William Arthur Cooper, Lumber Industry, 1934.

Strange Sights from the Land of Harmony

2009-12-05T05:52:00.015-05:00

'Member that project w/ devils and the alphabet?* We're at the letter j. Brings us to James Reese Europe. In the face of the re-discovery of Europe, we must just pause to observe a few convergences.

There's the pre-war stuff: hyenawild instrumentation, big groove, yowling bandleader, sexy dancers and an explosive mix of disciplined bandsmanship on the one hand and dionysian improvisation on the other. They've been telling us that we gotta do a re-eval on this period for decades now. You lissen to these few slabs, you can hear the shout: bring us more, bring us more. What's going on? There's a riot going on.

Then there's the Hellfighters stuff. It brings out the devils, too. It's a cauldron of entendres, doubling over. See those notes flying everywhichway? That's cause the boys in the band gointa free the minds of thousands of Europeans who've been waiting for this kind of liberation for, well, maybe centuries.

Get to this, from 1919:

They call it "Jazzola!"
Nobody knows its origination,
Jazzola!
It's just a dance full of syncopation,
And if you crave a new sensation,
Come with me,
You will see,
Strange sights from the land of harmony!
Old folks and young folks cry for Jazzola!
It's like a tonic, take it with each meal;
How good you'll feel!
My old granddad heard the news,
Dropped his cane for dancing shoes!
The whole world's going crazy 'bout Jazzola!

Just take your sweetie sweet
Out for a jazzy treat,
And she'll love you like she never did before;
What's more,
No need of fine wine,
You'll have a much better time,
Get those jazz musicians,
Choice positions
To play it o'er and o'er!

More gangsta sh*t, straight outta the second decade of the 20th c. The second verse is almost Snoop Dogg in it's pleasure principle, and you gotta love how the spirit of jesgrew, one of the real devils @ the crossroads, occupies the first.

It's time to come and get to this short clip for your lissening pleasure.

James Reese Europe's High Society Orchestra, "Down Home Rag." Do you feel better?
Lieutenant Jim Europe's 369th Infantry Hellfighter's Band, "That's Got 'Em."
Lieutenant Jim Europe's 369th Infantry Hellfighter's Band, "Jazzola."

There are these rumors that the Clef Club† sometimes brought together as many as 150 musicians into a single show. We think there are hundreds of minds, freed by this example, that imagine a sound this full of noise. It's been an example our people've been looking to copy every since.

Our purpose is not to be writing history; we are not wishing to bring back the past. We are talking about what's going on. But sometimes a tear or two falls from our historiographical third eye and leaks into these jottings. From that source, we drop a couple more bullets into the clip, just to make a point. And when we do, voila, the political reappears -- strange sights from the land of harmony.

Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, "Journey Towards Freedom." Could be James Reese Europe's greatest follower, and without doubt one of our heroes.
Funkadelic, "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow." George Clinton always makes himself relevant w/out further ink.

* We started this 'nothering exercise here. We had the time and inclination a coupla weeks ago to spill our a box of devils in a different order. It's been harder to pick up the project since those days, if only because the day to day subtracts the free time that makes such exercises possible. As of today, we still rest in the letter j.
† There is so much lore in these two words that wikiologists can only leave a stub behind.

Found Object

2009-11-29T12:47:00.006-05:00

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Lions in the Desert, ca. 1897-1900. This guy is so good that I am beginning to see him in the same light as Duke Ellington.

Found Object

2009-11-29T12:43:00.006-05:00

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Fishermen at Sea, ca. 1913. It was the Queen of the Blues who said, "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon."

Going to 'Nother Territory

2009-11-27T05:51:00.011-05:00

One of the things that our role models have in common is that they all know it's so high you can't get over it, and so low you can't get under it. They are the proof that it goes on and on and on and on... So we are big fans of Noz and the whole movement @ T.R.O.Y. Since they are always on the lookout for that 'nothering place, we will always rep their threads.

We thought we would take the luxury of a free Thursday and a slow Friday to follow in their direction. We gathered up all of the tracks in Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune* and spilled 'em out in alpha order by artist using the magic of music management software. All we wanted was out of the ties that bind when you dig through the crates in chronological order.

We weren't through w/ the letter a when we found that source of inspiration we were looking for: some gangsta sh*t straight outta the dirty south by Alphonso Trent. I put a few bullets in the clip for your edification, and then loaded some Li'l Jon up next to 'em just to put the obvious in front of you more plainly. This is club music @ its best. It is as distinctive as bounce,† or gogo, or music from the yay, or any of those territories we go to when we look for the unnaground.

Here's the all about it, 80 years apart: big crews taking up space and getting loud, call and response, get your stuff off the wall and an excess of move in the groove. And when you get up, you've found your fresh again.

Alphonso Trent & His Orchestra, "St. James Infirmary."‡ Straight up gangsta. She's dead. He wants to look good when he's in a coffin.
Alphonso Trent & His Orchestra, "I Found A Brand New Baby." You gots to be heartless to lay her out on a cold white table and then follow up w/ this. As outrageous as anything coming from the club floor these days.
Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, "Throw It Up."
Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, "Get Low."

We'll let the scholar's sort out the difference between Alphonso Trent, Walter Page and Bennie Moten. They'll wake up 80 years later and get the book on the differnece between Lil Jon, E40 and Project Pat. You got the point: it's regional music on the move, mang.

And as for that alpha list, we'll keep you posted. Two days in, we're to the letter d.Throughout the procedure, we will rise again and and again w/ new fresh.

P E A C E

* Rumor has it that Allen Lowe is gonna do his thing w/ a 36 disc blues set. Long overdue. Someone has to school our ears on that sh*t. We'll keep you posted on those devils.
† And where is that 10th Ward Buck book, anyway?
‡ There is a long post on this song coming from somewhere. If you make a list of the great songs of the 20th century and this one's not on it, the problem is with the list.

Marvin 3: Do You Know the Meaning of Being Sanctified?

2009-10-31T05:01:00.005-04:00

Almost as an afterthought, Marvin throws down the pop quiz @ the end of "Let's Get It On." We find that quiz @ the end of the first track on a slab that veers off into the deep blue every track. Since the question comes at the beginning, we think all of those blue tracks that follow are the answer, and that Marvin's not kidding us.

Marvin's got four albums too big to contain themselves: What's Going On, Let's Get It On, I Want You, and Here, My Dear. There are days when we find In Our Lifetime and Midnight Love in that crate, too. Each one of them is so high you can't get over it & so low you can't get under it. In pieces and in their total, they are each their own hunk of the tower of babel.

And all of 'em answer after answer to the quiz that's the all about of Marvin: "Do you know the meaning of being sanctified?"

Carpetbagging biographers leap out of the cut to take advantage of the facts of his tawdry life, punishing him for not living like a saint, and then sanctify him as a martyr to this or that. It's like that pitcher of him as a ghost we throw up on the head of this post. He's like brovah Nas dead hip hop in that one. It's the wrong way, the wrong way. When stare at him in this fallen condition, it just lives up to the masochism Marvin lived for in the first place.

The first thing to do when trying to come up w/ the answer to Marvin's quiz is undo yourself from the life, undo yourself from the street, undo yourself from the club, even undo ourself from the game. There's too much of that in every other place you look. Marvin's work makes better sense when you go there.

Then you gotta put on the headset. You'll hear the answer Marvin's got to offer, 'cause he offers it again and again. Like when he says "My body wants it," and says "Help me," in the same overdubbed breath.

Or this one, where he's trying to make math in "Just to Keep You Satisfied,"

Though the many happy times we had
Can never really outweigh the bad
Oh I'll never love nobody like I loved you baby

He keeps it up w/ the scales 'til he gets to this question, which is just another version of the quiz we been riffing on here:

How many hearts, baby...
Have felt their world stand still

Millions never, they never never
And millions never will baby
They never will.

And after he counts up to the millions who will never see what he knows to be salvation, he finally tells us the formula.

Oh, If I should die tonight
Oh baby, though it be far before my time
I won't die blue, sugar yeah
'Cause I've known you.

The all about it. The what we've been looking for. "I won't die blue." The what it means to be sanctified. Jyeah.

In light of that clear unnastanding, here's a clip of sanctified bullets:

Marvin Gaye, "Let's Get It On"
Marvin Gaye, "Please Stay"
Marvin Gaye, "If I Should Die Tonight"
Marvin Gaye, "You Sure Love to Ball"
Marvin Gaye, "Just to Keep You Satisfied"

P E A C E

Destination: OUT

2009-10-17T09:17:00.003-04:00

They been running the age old prove-it-jazz-isn't-dead thread over @ Destination: OUT. We left a couple of pennies over there.

Those pennies speak for themselves, and we got nothing more to say about all of this Lazarus stuff. But two things are in order.

First we got nothing but respect for everything happening at the d to the O. We go there for some of our fresh, and we commend the site to you.

Second we wanna load up a short clip to footnote the post.

Nas, "Money Over Bullshit"
Z-Ro, "Life is a Struggle and Pain"
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones, "Go Down Moses"
R Kelly, "Trapped in a Closet, Pt. 1"
Pyeng Threadgill, "Come On In My Kitchen"

It goes on and on and on and on.

P E A C E

Found Object

2009-09-27T16:54:00.010-04:00

Evening Rendevouz, Norman Lewis (1962).

Found Object

2009-09-27T16:54:00.008-04:00

Swing, Sam Williams (1969). He means that kind of swing.

Found Object

2009-09-27T16:52:00.005-04:00

Death of Cleopatra, Edmonia Lewis. This is the mothership connection.

Found Object

2009-09-23T12:06:00.004-04:00

Just rolled out underneath the skyway in Desert Palms. Was that a smoothjazz cover of "Natural High" I heard as I made my exit? Soul poetry is errywhere.

"Natural High," Al Campbell.

P E A C E

Found Object

2009-09-20T15:13:00.004-04:00

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (2008). He's perpetrating deep. Dig?

Found Object

2009-09-20T15:06:00.004-04:00

Unidentified Artist, Head of a King, (1525-1575).

Found Object

2009-09-20T14:42:00.006-04:00

Edmonia Lewis, Bust of Longfellow (1871).

مصرمصر

2009-09-16T05:39:00.006-04:00

We were digging for threads through the house -- the devilin archeology, 'spose. In one of the back corridors, under stacks of newspapers, we found a clip of bullets that taught us another thing about the unnaground: You dig deep enough into the ground you reach outerspace; you dig deep enough into the past you find Great Black Music, ancient to future.

We been wanting to tug on this thread for a long time, but we 'a begin in the middle.

We first came across Greg Broussard late* in the game, during M.I.A.'s pre-pregnancy tourstop in Dogtown. It's hard to remember back that far, but the recollection is that the show ate him up: too much space; not enough time. But there was something big, even if it was buried under all of M.I.A.'s momentarily big personality/sound system. And it was good to see him fresh, not packed into some oldies tour like Artis Leon Ivey, Jr.

Chaboy threw down his back in the day tracks. The kids got their feet off the wall a few times. They wanted to hear it, even though they never had the opportunity to remember it:

Pyramids are Oh so shiny
The women here are Oh so cute
The freaks are on the floor now
Dancing to beats that I compute

We listened hard and heard all this back-to-afro-futurism stuff all at once. It was like Charles Ives, you know: at the crossroads where all the parades come together. You could hear the Sun Ra. You could hear the Earth Wind and Fire. You could hear the Burning Spear, calling the children of the ghosts back to homelands free of oppression.

We are not sure, now that we listen backwards on this clip where that homeland is, but I think it is somewhere on the dancefloor, somewhere near the serpentine fire.

"Egypt, Egypt," Egyptian Lover
"Egypt Strut," Sun Ra and Salah Ragab
"Little Egypt," The Coasters. Listen for the chipmunks coming in at the end. Fo sho, ma bro.
"Nights Over Egypt," The Jones Girls.
"'Mid the Pyramids," Clarence Jones.
"Serpentine Fire," Earth Wind and Fire

I been reading recently some of Stanley Crouch's hateration (more on that later his genius self gotta give it up and find some love for all of us and not just the 10th that he's in; it's an ungenerous way of life). He needs listen hard to this and find a new path to the crossroads, one that brings all of the 10ths to the future through the past.

P E A C E

* N.B.: We got to admit that when we're devilin' we are always late, we're always falling behind. That's the way.

Found Object

2009-08-23T16:20:00.011-04:00

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Bust of Benjamin Tanner, (1894).

Is this a sculpture of Lester Freamon? Like Lester, it's in Baytown.

Found Object

2009-08-23T16:14:00.004-04:00

Norman Lewis, Untitled (Alabama), (1967).

P E A C E

We Look Down

2009-08-23T08:37:00.009-04:00

The route to the unnaground is sacred. A book of prayer, like Nik Cohn's Tricksta, can teach us a part of the way.

Tricksta is a book that plays out loose threads of undisentangled, troubling fabric of writing about the panhiphop tradition. He's walking up and down the twelve steps bookwide like they were piano keys and he was Fats Domino, coming back as himself after he can no longer tell up from down. As scholar junky emeritus, or as a character in his own after the fact cash in version of Spike Lee's requiem, it is his willingness to describe the crossroads as the up and down, as well as east and west, and his own play it out as a failed Lazarus that makes the book as lively as it is.

We pour a little liquor on the ground for him and load a couple of bullets in the clip.

"Hyena Stomp," Jelly Roll Morton. Massively sacred 2n that we'll be seeing again and again on the pages of this commonplace.
"Rum and Coke," Professor Longhair. The Dr. walks w/ his chicken in his hand. Chea.

Tricksta is not a map of New Orleans. But it is a full clip pointed at the unnaground. No map to the unnaground is complete. And of course they don't have a way in or out.

P E A C E

We Look Up...

2009-08-13T20:13:00.004-04:00

Or you can look in the alley, where the Papa Shady pizza workers deliver what you want, not what you think. But of the two glances, this glances right. So we put a bullet in for to commemorate.

"Lucky Old Sun," Ray Charles. From the hymnody. We always sing, "Amen."

P E A C E

Unbootlegged Sunday Night Pleasure

2009-08-09T20:54:00.001-04:00

The shadows wane. The Dawn comes to New York./And I go darkly-rebel to my work.

-- Claude McKay

In the Summer Groove

2009-08-08T07:47:00.006-04:00

I'm so cocky with it got my iced out clubs like rocky hit
Got your girl on my swagg she lovin them jerkin songs
Like the new ipod just touch it and turn her on
And when the bass start beatin and the waist I'm beatin

We picked this thread up on the car radio some weeks ago. When we heard it, we remembered 50 summers all at once. Could hear some future Nelson George all writing about coulottes and espadrilles 20 years from now, and saying there hasn't been abything this good, this free ever since.

We certainly are not 'bout keeping up -- too old and too much work to do. But this is all over the versionalism tip we put to the paper so many months ago. Chaboy JHawk is the hero in this story, even if the New Boyz and Pink Dollaz steal it, straight up.

All you can do after all these summers is confessing and witnessing. Here's a clip for you:

A primer in the LAWeekly. We got many props for the brovah Jeff Weiss, especially because he talked to the kids. He's in the clubs asking, "Can I get a witness?" And he does his best work when he lets the kids call out the anti-gangsta for the mixed up fashion statement that it is.
Our role model, Noz, has been threading this story for months now. And he's always good for a basket of cookies.
"Never Hungry," Pink Dollaz. The best independent woman track since the first FannyPack biskit was pressed into the free market in '02. This sh*t is as straight up as the raunchiest bouce, pure to the groove.
"P*ssy Killer," Yg. Eat that chicken.

We gonna keep loving this groove.

P E A C E

Versionology: What We're Saying

2009-08-03T06:47:00.010-04:00

Last week we cleaned out the closets @ chaboy Slizzard's house. He's always had our respect. Like his colleague Noz, he's a listener w/ an eye for place. 'Specially the place called bounce.

So I started to spin what he left for us, and found the beauty of versionology all over again. There is this promise of keep coming back in the versionist's best work. It's like how Art Tatum comes back, again and again, each time 'nothering the thing.

Today it's simple stuff from the place called bounce. The version is "Triggerman," but somehow every time we come back, it's been 'nothered again into something else. So we'a load a clip:

"Drag Rap," The Show Boys.
"Monkey on tha D$ck," Magnolia Shorty.
"Drop & Gimme 50," 10th Ward Buck

We'll keep coming back. There's plenty in these closets. When we're there, we're also gonna mark up Nik Cohn's slab on the same project. We'll bring you a magnolia every time.

Glimpsed

2009-07-27T13:27:00.002-04:00

Found this @ a crossroad yesterday. It's already in the fabric. Do you remember?

Old and New Dreams

2009-07-26T06:51:00.011-04:00

In putting ideas into poetry, I have tried in each case to use the medium most specific for the purpose. I owe allegiance to no master.

-- Claude McKay, "Author's Word," Harlem Shadows (1922)

This morning we read these powerful words, and we asked ourselves about McKay's use of the word medium. It was powerful, especially in light of our recent move, and our new home, in Our Piece of the Rock. Any trip from here to there needs a guide.

So we offered: made a small pile of flour and placed an egg in it. We asked to see one way to do less* than splain how we do. Our vision is sketched out in the bullets. It is a pitcher of a journey: beginning, middle, end, middle, beginning. It's a homegoing of sorts. It's a fabric of sorts. It's a beauty of sorts. It's, as always, a story of sorts. It's also the way we do the things we do here.

Give this pitcher a listen. Make of it what you will.

"Ghosts: First Variation," Albert Ayler Trio†
"I Believe I'll Dust My Broom," Robert Johnson
"Handwoven," Old and New Dreams
"Cross Road Blues," Robert Johnson
"Ghosts: Second Variation," Albert Ayler Trio

* That's 'cause less is more.
† The brovah Gary Peacock deserves some very big ups for hanging w/ this caterwaul, creating groove w/out the bars. Chea.

Role Models

2009-07-22T06:46:00.005-04:00

We never going t'be too explicit, y'all. But in the interest of telling some of the truth some of the time, let's point in that direction. You can follow if you want.

Stage right (our left), you'll find 10 kingz & queenz that lay down the frosty tracks -- places to go w/n you're looking for the creamy filling. I'll lift each one out in the upcoming, but for now:

Go visit your bro King Slizzard over @ Twankle and Glisten. he's rolled up a mighty sweet archive and he's gonna shut it down. Dig into his cookie jar. Make sure you leave a thankyou note. He's doing it for the greater good.

P E A C E

Reversion: In Walked Bud

2009-07-19T07:48:00.006-04:00

Back here in OPotR. Brushed the dirt of both travel and admin off my shoulders for a day or two, stared into the stacks and found the 'pod pointed to a deep stream. This is cause for two threads. First, as always, is more. Second, is how versioning be.

ONE -- More

The simplest way to get at this is w/ some bullets. I'm not gonna shoot the clip, but the aim is true on these.

"In Walked Bud," Thelonious Monk. Antipiano version. Or is it the version where the band is the piano?
"In Walked Bud," Amiri Baraka. Black rage version.
"In Walked Bud with a Palette," Clarence Major. Chimp eatin' termites version.
"Blue Skies," Art Tatum. He's the masta versionologist, the refixer, the scientist of the dubscience. He'll steal it from you, sell it back to you and leave you feeling better for the trade. But in't what we're talking 'bout?
"Blue Skies," Frank Sinatra & Louis Armstrong. Play it on Satch.
"Blue Skies," Sun Ra, the Lintels. Sing it on Sun.
"(We've Got) Blue Skies," The Jackson 5. Actually stranger than the Lintels when you listen. When you're off the hits, the J5 is some pretty freaky sh*t. I'm not running it past my family. Are you?

Blue Days, every one of them gone. There's still plenty in the clip and one in the chamber. I'm'a be back on this tip.

TWO -- Versioning

There are about a dozen wotnesses in this house. And someone might say one wotness of this house is to play that dozen into dozens. You following? Good. See, we is Topsy.

Now that's off our chest, we've been about to say that versioning (aka the next number, aka the cover tune, aka the dub) is the way we take was and make it into gonna be again. In other words, it's a way of living.

So when we make a little pile of stones, as we have today, and leave (did we say live, or leaf?) them for you, it enacts that way, just a little bit, so you can pick them up for yourself.

Please feel free to come back by. You can even leave your own stones on the pile. That's the way it works.

P E A C E

Stacks: Palm Base to Our Piece of the Rock

2009-07-14T18:58:00.006-04:00

"In Walked Bud," Thelonious Monk. Nope, not Trane's. The version w/ Johnny Griffin. That's the 1 w/ the mighty conjuring. He unloads the entire clip.

"Suddenly," Carmen McRea. OK. It's not Johnny G. More statesmanlike, as a tribute would be. And a narrative better than most cliches. The characters think and act in their own world.

"One Time 4 Your Mind," Nas. The parlayer. Chyea.

Just enough for the trip. I'm'a put up the files when I get back to OPotR.

Stacks: She Gwanna Raise the Devil

2009-07-13T10:08:00.004-04:00

Until you can find me a biography of Big Joe Williams that is not overrun w/ some made up bluesman story, you better stick to the music. All that wandering and juke joint might as well be in a museum or your ethnomusicology perfesser's textbook.

In the mean time, no one takes"When the Chariot Comes," and versions it all over again into basic gangsta better than Big Joe. While we're stopping on this tip, Thurston Moore might wanna take a look at that 9 string box the man beats on, cause it's further out than 10 Glenn Branca symphonies, even after you take into account the extra points Big Joe gets for getting there way first.

"She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain," Big Joe Williams
"Elevate Me Baby," Big Joe Williams
"Rooting Ground Hog," Big Joe Williams

I root both night and day.

Whereabouts

2009-07-10T21:02:00.006-04:00

Kings and queens!

Been moving. Gotta pray, cause moving has big old mojo.

Left Dogtown for a bigger admin post in Our Piece of the Rock. Spartacus is now my mayor. It's a city of much false acclaim, but for all the rattle of sirens, it's still true blue, on almost every corner. Weren't a subway map for Dogtown, that's for sure.

Gonna rebuild my face here.

P E A C E

"Hell Hound On My Trail," Robert Johnson

Mo Devilin'

2009-02-08T08:30:00.004-05:00

While we're on the devilin' thread, let's make the quick case that chaboys Sacha, Elliott, the Chairman, Gabriel and Brent are a team up ≥ Allen Lowe. They take the slowed down nostalgia for coulottes and espadrilles in Nelson George*and remind us that just 'cause we didn't have the money to by the rekkids during the eight zero area code, or just 'cause we were pimpin the industry (but calling it indie) during the same, doesn't mean we can't listen to more now. How much of hip hop's first 10 years did Nelson miss? I am trying to visualize the circumference of how much he didn't see.

Keep up w/ it. It's a matter of staying close to the truth.

"Rapping and Rocking the House," Funky Four Plus One
"New Rap Language," Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three
"Jazzy Sensation (Bronx Mix)," Afrika Bambaataa Jazzy 5

Yes, yes, y'all. It cant stop and it won't stop. So we'll come back to this, too.

* Let's just confess here and now that Nelson George plays the role of an easy target. I don't want to be a hater, tho. Think of him as the Smithsonian Collection of Classic HipHop. As iffing.

Now Maybe Some Day

2009-01-20T06:58:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow morning there will be reports of throngs. We should ask before the fact: to what end? Without the consequence of something better -- for you, for your neighbors, for me, for my family -- then we do nothing but squander optimism.

Therefore we should keep in mind the words of the Frederick Douglass, who should be thought of today like the ghost of emancipation future and the ghost of emancipation past all tangled into a single figure. Speaking before people of impatience over 150 years ago he gave us today's lesson:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.

-- An address on West India Emancipation

Today's challenge will be to take this precursory conjuring into our hands -- it's a sacred relic and a mojo that we should spread -- and remake it into our new conjuring of struggle to remake this nation in our image. Thus today is our beginning, when we make ours the consequence of a better world occasioned by the President's inauguration.

Today this President opens our door. We must live up to his faith in us by walking through and making a new politics, one that drops the grievances of the past, especially the immediate past, and one that begins the real work that we have left undone for so many decades.

Reminders from the prophetic tradition:

Curtis Mayfield, "Keep on Pushing"
Niney the Observer w/ the Heptones, "Keep on Pushing"
Larry Marshall, "Keep on Pushing"

What's Goin' On?

2009-01-19T07:32:00.005-05:00

How much can get undone in one day? That's to be seen. In the mean time, there are already 100s of 1000s lined up to help w/ the work.

An' a city that already looks like America is now looking more like America.

Malachi Thomspson, "Black Metropolis"
Parliment, "Chocolate City"

Let's see how far we can go in one step.

Devilin'

2009-01-18T07:12:00.009-05:00

It's that big.

A while ago, at least for those who grew up when Coleman Hawkins was alive, The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz surveyed the circumference of jazz. I can remember sitting in my room nexta the rekkid playa trynta to put every note of songs like "Harlem Air Shaft" to memory in case I wore the groove flat and I could not find another copy. The collection's purpose was simple: You went in looking for giants and you found 'em.

And yet, you'd listen and no matter where you listened there was no room for Maceo Parker next to John Coltrane, or even Skip James next to Billie Holiday. For every "Lonely Woman," there were 100s of other ones not on the tracklist.

Here is where the Art Ensemble of Chicago comes in. The professors offered a course of "great black music, ancient to future." Although many saw the reference looking backward as a creator of a tradition, in my blindness, I always saw it as forward looking. I could see all around, from vaudeville and ragtime and field songs to Bootsy Collins and Malachi Thompson and Kool Herc.

In this time after, chaboy Allen Lowe*has taken 36 discs to fall short in 1950, proving that circumference a.) is too big to measure and therefore, b.) is a dangerous science. He's composed a quirky box that only sends the listener back to gaze in the fire looking for more because so much is missing, even before 1950. It's no longer about the giants; it's about all them devils living in the details.

The work of making history is really the work of making a beautiful story. Every attempt to tell the story from the beginning is never more than a story where you start out from the end. With this understanding, I take my own devilin' view of things as if there is a panhiphop tradition. That's cause there's angels in the details, angels.

So one place to begin might be at the end of 2008, where chaboy Trav @ radio WYDU has left a cookie jar of 200 tracks from the last year. There's more going on here than in any top 10. I'm'a listen for some mo angelin' tunes.

In the mean time, why'on't you stare into this fire:

Art Ensemble of Chicago, "Nice Guys"
Bert Williams & George Walker, "My Little Zulu Babe"
Elzhi, "Motown 25 (feat. Royce da 5'9")"

NB: part of ongoing observations on historical syncretism and the panhiphop tradition; not to be confused with the tag "historiographers," which signifies exemplary artists whose aesthetic is made from historical syncretism then and now.

* I am amused by, but not convinced by, much of what Allen Lowe has to offer as jazz history. He is correct to check Marsalis and Burns for their errors, but he does not always correct them from any vantage point.

Marvin 2: On Contradiction

2009-01-11T08:47:00.001-05:00

In 1983, our hero told Nelson George, "No conflicts are resolved."

But Marvin's life isn't divided at all. The real problem is that it includes everything -- without resolution. Cocaine & prayer & pussy & taxes & Berry & Anna & music w/out writing it & lyrics & hired songwriters & doowop & funk & jazz & soul & interplanetary anger & shootdowns off of the streets. You cannot hear Marvin as segments of opposites. You have to hear all of it at once.

Take on these three, as if they were all done by the same person:

Marvin Gaye, "You're the Man"
Marvin Gaye, "Sanctified Lady"
Marvin Gaye, "Funky Space Reincarnation"

Ain't no resolution here. That's all.

This Week's Stack: Buffalo Stance

2009-01-11T07:40:00.000-05:00

Who's that gigolo on the street
With his hands in his pockets and his crocodile feet
Hanging off the curb, looking all disturbed
At the boys from home.

Don Cherry, "Brown Rice"

B/t/w: To the wikifier who said this: "After leaving Coleman, Don Cherry eschewed the trend towards funk/fusion and continued to play a sparse jazz often in small groups and duets (many with ex-Coleman drummer Ed Blackwell) during a long sojourn in Scandinavia and other locations." You needa put up your Codona albums and take off your blinkers, only for a little while and find DC's groove. Your first taste should be for the truth, not your aesthetic.

NB: Beginning of a new thread, just taking from what' on the top of the week's stack of listening. Only rule is that it has to have been played more than once in the last seven days. It also solves a productivity problem -- less writing/mo listening.

P E A C E

Mo Historiographer

2009-01-05T07:42:00.006-05:00

Jaki Byard was topping the stacks in December, getting air among holiday James Brown recordings. There are times when it feels like the brother Jaki is trying to pack all of history into a single song.

Here's his lesson (delivered to Marty Erlich in a long lost interview): ''I played Bud Powell solos, and that was a phase. Then there was Garner, and that was a phase, and then Tatum, and then finally I decided to put everything together and say the hell with it, this is it.''

Dig these. Two footnotes, one from the beginning and one from the end:

Marvin 1 -- Starting w/ No Destination

2008-12-19T08:54:00.013-05:00

Just finished David Ritz's book abt Marvin Gaye, Divided Life. Someone had to tell the story this way: a starbio recipe for Teacake. It's a tasty story. There are morsels of source material, special selections from what must be hour after hour of rolling tape conversation b/t the author and his hero.

But there has to be a another way, too.*

So we'll be waiting on the mail for Mercy, Mercy Me: the Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye by Michael Eric Dyson, hoping that he's found a way to write about someone whose records are greater than the sum of his contradictions.

In the mean time, I'll be starting a string of posts that exploit Marvin's contradictions without trying to resolve them into a narrative. It's 'cause Marvin's all over the place and cannot be confined. All I'll do is leave a small pile of blue stones for him.

Let me drop the first stone, then. Not sure Marvin's on the track, but its in the pile for the reals.

The Moonglows, "The Ten Commandments of Love"

So come to me when I am lonely
Kiss me when you hold me tight
Treat me sweet and gentle
When we say good night
Oh, how happy we will be if we keep the ten commandments of love

* Just look at John Szwed's book abt Sun Ra, Space is the Place, for another way to cook up a story about a crazy man.

NB: New thread dedicated to capturing Marvin's reach (which is all over the place at once).

P E A C E

How Close to the Street You Gotta Be?

2008-12-12T07:02:00.011-05:00

Chaboy John Jeremiah Sullivan published a distant autobiographical paper in Harpers. I'm not sure I understand it. The brotha confesses that he listens to blues music while he works the Oxford English Dictionary with his other hand. Therefore y'all should print it, read it and keep it in a safe place so you can come back to it.

Some of his argumentation is already clear and not much about the blues, but everything. "The problem words refused to give themselves up, but as the tape ran, the song itself emerged around them, in spite of them, and I heard it for the first time." I think we just caught him (and his friends in the American Primitive factory) in the liturgical act -- worshipping the aura of the original while listening to a rekkid. Let's not remind Jeremiah that "For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."

Next, Jeremiah trysta get Elijah Wald to redeem his sh*t. J misreads E, adding complexity to J's own misreadings, calling E out for believing that "all folk was someone else's pop." This almost catches our heroes at the crossroads where they dwell: "when the music was all but unknown, they hailed it as great, invincible American art; when people...caught on and started blabbering about it, they rushed to remind us that it was just a bunch of dance music for drunken field hands."

In the end, Jeremiah becomes the shark writah -- copies someone else's story that, though, brilliantly apropos, betrays just the point he's missing, and does it by ventriloquy. It's a long one.

"There's a moment on those discs of Gayle Dean Wardlow's interviews the ones in Revenant's Patton discs. Wardlow is talking w/ Booker miller, a minor prewar player who knew Charley Patton. And you can hear Wardlow... trying to describe the ritual of his apprenticeship to teh elder Patton. 'Did you meet him at a juke joint,' asked Wardlow, 'or on the street.' How did they find each other? It's the kind of question one would ask. 'I admired his records,' answered Brooke Miller."

So here's what's what.

1.) The distinction between primitive and artifice (or underground and crossover, or roots and mainstream, or Robert Johnson and Sam Collins, or etc., etc., etc., or original and mechanical reproduction) means more to shark listeners biting up a way to think 'til they think different. It's not a bad thing to do, but it doesn't do much unless it gets either the autobiography tag or the aesthetics tag or both.

2.) Even then we are all crossovers, even the shark listeners. Send my regrets to Nelson George (but more on that later).

In the mean time, some unnaground queenz for your soul:

Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Words Blues"
Sister Nancy, "One, Two"
Jean Grae, "Nonsense"

Me, I'm'a go admire some rekkids.

In My Lifetime

2008-11-09T21:39:00.005-05:00

While I'm writing another piece on the Underground Kingz of the 1930s, I thought I would give you a piece of tomorrow's history. Find your way here: It's a bigbook, lotsa tunes & worth reading. He's not our Duke Ellington, he's not even our Sammy Davis Jr. But he's ours. Study hard my friends.

Mannish Footnote

2008-11-05T09:00:00.005-05:00

We'll end the dance, one we've earned, between now and January. As we begin the march, we should keep these words from another era in mind:

Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.

Aww yeah. I'm with this.

No B. O child. Y. Not today.

2008-11-04T08:51:00.006-05:00

At the close of the year 1834, Mr. Freeland again hired me of my master, for the year 1835. But, by this time, I began to want to live upon free land as well as with Freeland; and I was no longer content, therefore, to live with him or any other slaveholder. I began with the commencement of the year, to prepare myself for a final struggle, which should decide my fate one way or the other. My tendency was upward. I was fast approaching manhood, and year after year had passed, and I was still a slave. These thoughts roused me -- I must do something. I therefore resolved that 1835 should not pass without witnessing an attempt, on my part, to secure my liberty. But I was not willing to cherish this determination alone. My fellow-slaves were dear to me. I was anxious to have them participate with me in this, my life giving determination. I therefore, though with great prudence, commenced to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition, and to imbue their minds with thoughts of freedom. ...I talked to them of our want of manhood, if we submitted to our enslavement without at least one noble effort to be free.

That represent man.

You Don't Need a Ticket

2008-10-29T12:06:00.008-04:00

Picking up passengers coast to coast.

But now I think I'm able to carry on.

We should be able to see 11/4/08 by now, my brothers and sisters, all the way there.

Who say that?

2008-10-24T07:37:00.003-04:00

your rap inspired me to eat marissa's egg roll out of the fridge just now. no euphemisms here. she's gonna be pissed tomorrow.

Oh water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand

2008-10-19T09:55:00.007-04:00

The oceans, my brothers and sisters, the oceans.

Calypso Blues

Sittin’ by the ocean, me heart she feels so sad.
Sittin’ by the ocean, me heart she feels so sad.
Don’t got the money to take me back to Trinidad.

In Trinidad one dollar buy
Papaya juice, banana pie,
Six coconuts, one female goat
And plenty fish to fill the boat,
One bushel bread, one barrel wine
And all the town she comes to dine.
But here is bad. One dollar buy
Cup of coffee, ham on rye

Me throat she sick from necktie.
Me feet she hurts from shoes.
Me pocket full of empty.
I got calypso blues.

These yankee girls give me big scare
Is black they roots? Is blonde they hair?
Her eyelash false, her face is paint,
And I could swear the girl she ain’t

She jitterbug when she should waltz.
I even think her name is false.
Calypso girl is good alot.
Is what you see, is what she got.

Sittin’ by the ocean because she feels so sad.
Sittin’ by the ocean because she feels so sad.
Don’t got the money to take me back to Trinidad.

Once, by Mona Baptiste.

Masta Historiographer and Polyphonist

2008-10-11T09:36:00.006-04:00

'S what I'm talking 'bout. Find me some more. Tie 'em all together, you got it. Who all da madmen you'll find there with 'em?

I loves you, porgy,
Don't let him take me
Don't let him handle me
And drive me mad
If you can keep me
I wanna stay here with you forever
And Ill be glad

Can't you hear the little chiming bells like little angel wings. Can't dance to it.

Click here.

Stones in My Passway

2008-10-05T10:02:00.004-04:00

Still collecting my sh*t. But when it comes, you're gonna feel it.

Return of the Living Dead

2007-03-18T15:30:00.002-04:00

I walk with a zombie. I always have. I always will.

Take a little trip down memory lane.

Mo Betta

2007-03-14T23:18:00.000-04:00

A lady tell me the other day
No one can take her sweet man away
I ask her what was the mystery
She say coconut water and rice curry
You can cook it in a pot, four for five
You can serve it very hot, four for five
Coco got a lotta iron, four for five
Make you strong like a lion, four for five

Elijah Wald is Right

2007-03-12T20:39:00.005-04:00

Dig this big crux:

"That duality -- sometimes gangsta, sometimes smooth, cuddly and pimpish -- defines Snoop and has allowed him to have a long career in which he's loved by both gangbangers and soccer moms."

Can't find the RS author who wrote this, but it holds.

Oh my God, look at my yard.

NB: Begins a thread where we do some splaining about the panhiphop tradition, which is a story that can only be told backwards, but allows you to include a whole lot of cool characters in ways they haven't been thought about at the beginning of the story.

P E A C E

Can't Get Started

2007-03-11T21:32:00.002-04:00

I've been around the world in a plane,
Settled revolutions in Spain,
The North Pole I have charted,
But can't get started with you.

And at the golf course I'm under par,
Metro-Goldwyn wants me to star,
I've got a house and a show place,
But can't get no place with you.

You're so supreme.
The lyrics I write of you
Dream, dream, day and night of you,
Scheme just for the sight of you.
Baby, but what good does it do.

I've been consulted by Franklin D.,
Even Gable had me to tea,
But now I'm broken hearted,
Can't get started with you.

Ira Gershwin / Vernon Duke

Click Here