Great Spirits

This week's musical treat: Kuku

     A few weeks ago we profiled the Nigerian singer-songwriter Kuku in our April 19th blog entry...this week we post in our Musical Treats section a lovely track entitled "Too Much Pride Is A Sin" from his unreleased album "Soldier Of Peace" for your listening/downloading pleasure!

the strange and wonderful captain beefheart

     The strange and wonderful Captain Beefheart has been on my mind recently. He certainly could
have fit with the artists in my book Great Spirits but, although, did see him perform once in the late Seventies, I really had no other personal encounter with him or people in his circle. His personal eccentricities and outlandish artistic vision spawned media attention (he was on the cover of Rolling Stone and even appeared on Late Night With David Letterman in the Eighties) disproportionate to his record sales. Yet those who embraced his music did so with great fascination and devotion. Many of those folks's interest was ignited by his landmark 1969 recording entitled Trout Mask Replica, a two-LP set of sprawling  creativity encompassing jagged blues jams overlaid with free jazz outbursts, acappella surrealistic poetry, stuttering, spastic electric guitar-framed balladry and more. It is not uncommon for folks to say that the first few times they listened to the album they couldn't make any sense out of it. At some point, it would come into focus for them, and then they felt it was a monumental artistic statement. Rolling Stone placed it on the list of great rock albums of all time.
      Trout Mask was my introduction to Beefheart (real name Don Van Vliet). I'd heard a little bit
of the garage-band rock of his earlier "Safe As Milk" album but Trout Mask was something entirely different. It created its own universe, with characters named Ella Guru, Big Joan and The Old Fart.
The rhythms were unique and the harmonic structure of the music was startling, often deliberately
dissonant, sometimes in two or three different keys simultaneously. My initial reaction was fascination.
I didn't necessarily love it but was intrigued. Some tracks immediately stood out. "Dachau Blues" was
a strange, haunting meditation on the Holocaust, underlined by desperately sad bass clarinet meshing with Beefhearts vibrating moans with lyrics such as " Dachau Blues....those poor Jews....one mad man...six million lose."  The striking, painterly (Van Vliet was also a painter) imagery of poems such as "Oranger Claw Hammer" was instantly indelible.  The music lurched and jumped; sections would have structure and then those sections would be abruptly sabotaged.
      Then there was Beefheart's voice, breathlessly described in the press as possessing an eight-octave range.  He might have been able to produce sounds at the extremes of eight octaves but the truth is that Beefheart declaimed more than he sang, often in a yodeling bellow, other times in a pinched growl
that owed a lot to Howling Wolf with a bit of Wolfman Jack in there.
      Much of Beefheart's music is challenging to listen to and Trout Mask is among the most challenging of his work. To appreciate it, it is best to suspend your usual standards of music appreciation and just
open yourself to the roller-coaster of sounds, rhythms and words that at their best evoke and explore the twists and turns of the human condition.
     My thoughts about Beefheart were stimulated by my receipt of a gift copy of drummer John French's
book about his years playing (under the nom-de-plume Drumbo) with Beefheart. It recounts his experiences in almost excruciating detail--remarkable that he can remember to such a small scale.
French places Beefheart in the context of the socio-culture of the desert town of Lancaster, California, which gave rise to a music scene that yielded not only Beefheart but the great Frank Zappa, among others. French comes off as amazingly normal in what was one of the weirdist musical ensembles of all time.  He debunks the media -generated myth that Van Vliet wrote all the material for Trout Mask Replica in eight hours. In fact, it was French and the other musicians who spent countless hours assembling fragments of random inspiration from Van Vliet into some sort of musical coherence.
     The book led me to pull out my CD of Clear Spot an album released a few years after Trout Mask Replica and was generally considered at the time to be a simpler, more easily-digestible, even deliberately "commercial" version of Beefheart. Clear Spot is indeed far easier to listen to than Trout Mask but though it may lack the same wild, dizzying flights of inspiration it makes up for that with
a welcome coherence. Though tame compared to Trout Mask, Clear Spot has many moments of brilliance and compared to most popular music is still plenty edgy. There is the quirky, hyperactive, cowbell-driven "Nowdays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man", for instance,  the raw boogie blues of "Long Neck Bottles", the slinky funk of "Low Yo Yo" amongst genuinely pretty tunes such as "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles" and the Memphis-soul homage "Too Much Time."  The album's high point comes with "Big Eyed Beans From Venus" which takes the off-the-wall rhythms and simultaneously funny yet cosmic lyrics of much of Trout Mask and contains them in a tight, logical, brilliantly-played structure. As the music pauses, Beefheart intones "Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo...hit that long, lunar note...and let it float", whereupon the slide guitarist hits a low, tremolo chord that sustains into quavering feedback.
      Beefheart might not be the musical genius that his greatest admirers claim he is but he
is an artist with original, provocative vision who created sound sculptures--not static sculptures but ones that danced and twisted and leaped. There has not been anything quite like it before or since and
with Van Vliet retired from music-making, it is not likely to come again.

further listening:  Trout Mask Replica, Safe As Milk, Clear Spot, Doc At The Radar Station

smokey robinson: the genius at 70

     The first time I heard Smokey Robinson's voice I thought it was the voice of a woman. And a very beautiful voice it was:  svelte, liquid, high, sweet but cut with just a tinge of sour, with a a subtle purr at its center. The song was "I'll Try Something New" by Smokey's group The Miracles and the ethereal arrangement was the perfect backdrop for the voice. It is now nearly fifty years since I first heard that song and Smokey has hit seventy years of age. And he has a new album out, entitled "Time Flies When You're Having Fun " .  I approached it with skepticism. It is hard for any singer to maintain their instrument at the age of seventy. It is even more challenging for such a refined instrument as Smokey's voice. Miraculously, the album is very good. There may not be an all-time classic  such as "Tracks Of My Tears" on it but there are a number of songs that are the equal of such solo Smokey hits as "Baby Come Close" and "Cruisin'".  And that one-in-a-million voice still sounds good; only if you listen closely do you hear that it is not quite as liquid as before and sometimes an extra quaver.
      He doesn't try to conform to current trends yet such is the uniqueness of his niche that this music does not sound dated. The album opens with "Time Flies", a langorous ballad that immediately sets a sensual tone. One of the lesser songs on this set is entitled "Love Bath" but that title could apply to a large percentage of Smokey's song-universe. When it comes to love, romance, subtleties of emotion, human frailties, he has been peerless. Bob Dylan famously called him America's greatest living poet, a sly way of saluting his lyricism and uncanny metaphorical flair. He is easily one of the greatest popular songwriters of the past fifty years and would rank high on any list of great songwriters of all time.
In a recent interview he notes that he continues to write songs all the time. In his essence he is a songwriter, just as much now as when Berry Gordy met him as a teenager with a notebook full of songs.
He does it because he loves it.
       So it is interesting that a couple of the standout tracks are cover tunes. There's a lovely cover of
the Norah Jones hit "Don't Know Why" and there is a slinky, wholly original take on the Jackson 5 classic "I Want You Back", which Smokey effortlessly reinvents. It is a "hidden track" on the cd because, Smokey says, he had recorded before Michael Jackson died and he didn't want it to seem like it was opportunistic. One of the album highlights is a duet with Joss Stone on "You're The One For Me", which
is one of that young songbird's better efforts--possibly because Smokey's relaxed style encourages her to stop trying so hard to be "soulful" and as a result she is less wooden. Another duet with India.Arie, "You're Just My Life", is quite lovely. Aside from "Love Bath", the only other less than stellar track is a mid-tempo groover featuring Santana on guitar. It's not bad but the dynamics expose the vocal limitations that have come with age.  Consumer note:  The Amazon MP3 version of the album has a bonus track called "Beside You" which  you only get if you buy the whole MP3 album.
       In an era when so many artists release CD's that are little more than a collection of tracks or, worse, one or two good songs and a bunch of filler, Smokey delivers an album that you can enjoyably
consume by listening straight through. He's an old master who can still weave a spell even if it means
eschewing some of his more audacious vocalizing.  So, if the music of Smokey Robinson means anything to you, check this out; you won't be sorry.