A Whole Nother Devil

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

::  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.

†  

Do You Remember?

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

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).

Don't You Want to Go?

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

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

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: Art Tatum

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.

Body and Soul: Vocal Approaches/Lyrics

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

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.

Body and Soul: Prehawk

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.

Body and Soul -- Reference Version

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

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."

In the Summer Groove

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

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.

Reversion: In Walked Bud

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: She Gwanna Raise the Devil

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.