Great Spirits

Janelle Monae: Talented, Intelligent, Innovative...But Is She Great?

     Sometimes you run into an artist who is clearly talented, clearly intelligent, is interesting and takes chances….and yet doesn’t necessarily create great music. On one end of this spectrum are artists such as Prince, Frank Zappa, and George Clinton who are all of the above and sometimes create something great but often fall short of that, maybe partly because all of them have been wildly prolific. At the other end of the spectrum are people who fit this description but almost never create anything great. You keep waiting for them to do it. Often the root cause with those folks is they are simply not great songwriters. I was thinking of this as I listened to the new Janelle Monae album “The Electric Lady”. an ambitious futuristic concept album with music ranging from orchestral mood pieces to Prince-like funk to retro pop to dance-pop, hip-hop and retro R & B, with lyrics/storyline revolving around androids (this being the sequel to her first album “The Archandroid”). Before that first album even came out, a whole bunch of people ranging from Big Boi to P. Diddy and scads more were touting Janelle as a prodigy with something truly fresh to say. So expectations were being raised from the git. Before there was music there were photos….Janelle often in a man’s suit-coat and tie, her hair in a quasi-natural-pompadour, clearly announcing that she was not going to conform to any expected categories for a black artist. That in itself is praiseworthy because so many black artists on the pop scene today tend to fall into one of two or three lanes….understandably because the industry—and the culture—has never been particularly kind to black artists who break the assigned mold. Major labels—sadly, often  often at the behest of African-American executives—tend to push black artists in these pre-determined lanes, more so than white artists…maybe feeling the need to play it safe, either because all concerned feel economically precarious or maybe because the alternative black audience is numerically much smaller than the alternative white audience (though perhaps the same size percentage-wize). Bottom line it takes some guts and determination for a young black artist to step outside the lines of expectation being drawn around them. Janelle Monae clearly has such determination. And seemingly the talent to back it up.

       My first glimpse of her came with her performance on national tv—it might have been Letterman—of her song “Tightrope”, which too many was a fun, high-energy take on a James Brown routine. It was tight, well-executed and made an impact, though of course wasn’t totally original but still kinda fresh:

 

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZnao2fbRQ

 

   Anyway when her first album came out I bought it and was impressed. The music was diverse, the lyrics often abstract and allusive but it didn’t sound pretentious. She held it together pretty good.  I enjoyed listening to it, though I confess that on-rushing life prevented me from really getting deep into it. But my interest was piqued sufficiently so when “The Electric Lady Came” out, I grabbed it (it was subtitled “Suites IV and V”, which is a pop artist’s way of signaling that the work is supposed to be taken seriously; danger, danger when a pop artist is self-consciously serious…only a rare few can bring it off.

 

     The cover presents multiple images of Janelle in different hairstyles, clad in a black and white patterned dress that at first glance suggests the old-style prison garb (before the orange or green jumpsuits of today); her various expressions suggest anxiety, surprise, wariness…and there is a skull to one side.  Inside is a missive addressed to “Dear Listener” allegedly from one Max Stellings, Vice Chancellor of The Palace Of The Dogs Arts Asylum. It is part of the futuristic story-line…..which I have not yet figured out if its supposed to be taken seriously or is just meant to be amusing diversion or if, a la George Clinton, it is supposed to be both.  But on to the music.

 

    The album opens with a beautiful arranged orchestrated “overture” that kicks off “Suite IV”, which comprises the first 10 tunes; real strings are employed, a rarity in these expedient, sample-dominated times. The overture slides into some rather ponderous rock-pop with Prince guesting on guitar and various vocals—making the Prince inspiration in Janelle’s palette explicit. Sonically strong but not a great song, it segues into a plodding rock-edged hip-hop groove with Janelle mixing it up with Erykah Badu; this was the initial “single” but while interesting it fails to ignite. The music is interrupted by a radio dj skit, that recurs throughout the album, much of the patter revolving around androids. Next up is a nice, vibey ballad featuring Miguel….this is the first real song and it grows on you, before transitioning into a sampled bhangra riff that kicks into a very catchy dance tune called “We Were Rock ‘N’ Roll”; I feel the album taking off:

 

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqKP8VzPbAg

 

    The dee jay is back for an interlude that kicks into another catchy, bubbly almost teeny-bop dance-pop. It’s cool but surface…fun!  That melds into a dreaming, slightly bossa acoustic guitar-driven pop tune with strings. Janelle sings in a different voice, very clear and pretty, in the style of 50’s and 60’s pop. The melody is quite pretty; she displays a great melodic sense on this album even if on some cuts the melody isn’t really brought home. But on this cut it is.

 

     Then we have another orchestrated overture and we’re into Suite V. The first tune is a retro R & B ballad, with a distinct Delfonics vibe in the melody and vocal style, with a little Michael Jackson thrown in. Another nice melody but Janelle’s voice isn’t quite up to the demands of this melody in this particular range. Next up is a funky kinda Brazilian feeling dance tune with another very nice melody, which runs into another DJ interlude, in which a caller denounces “robot love” and the dee jay says “how can you know that unless you’ve tried it.” There follows a solid R & B ballad followed by a quite sophisticated pop balled named after the female astronaut Sally Ride, the first woman in space.  Then comes a Latin-tinged mid-tempo groover with smooth vocal and another real nice melody and the suite finishes off with “What An Experience”, a solid pop/r ‘n’ b ballad that kicks into a reggae section, that somehow is less than the sum of its parts.

 

      So what do we have with “The Electric Lady?”  First off, it is a true album, meant to be listened to as a whole—all too rare in these track-oriented times. As such, many tracks function as building blocks for the overall architecture and only a handful of the 19 tracks are impressive on their own. Janelle really presents a better sense of melody than most of what’s on the scene today but only three or four of the tracks are really strong songs. She pulls off the difficult feat of taking many disparate musical elements and making them work together in an unforced way—that’s no small achievement. The album rewards multiple listenings and its growing on me. Janelle Monae is truly an alternative artist who transcends category and hopefully she will be dealt with as such, unlike other black artists such as Laura Mvulu who is written about as if she were an R & B  or “soul” artist even though her music really isn’t primarily R & B.  Janelle represents a growing number of sophisticated black youth of diverse backgrounds who refuse to be ghetto-ized. If her ambition is not yet fully realized she nonetheless has created a work that is head and shoulders above most of what’s coming down the pike these days. The bottom line with any recording is: do you want to listen to it again. I do and I am!

 

renewing the blog

My Love Affair With Record Stores

      As 2014 draws to a close it is natural to reflect, to look back over the year or even back many years. This past year saw a continuation of a long-running trend—the demise of record stores. Among the casualties this year were two big-city mainstays:  J & R Record World in New York City and Sound Of Market Street, also known as Jazz Sound in Philadelphia. I have been a patron of both for many years though I must confess less frequently these days as I am not often in Lower Manhattan before 7PM nor in Center City Philadelphia in daylight hours. Still, whenever I was in those areas during the day I made it a point to stop by these establishments. I’d been patronizing both for more than three decades and loved both for different reasons. 

     J & R Music World was a music/tech emporium of—at its height—three stores. Their selection of music was unrivaled—no matter what genre—and they made it a point to hire people who loved and knew music (and I knew some of these folks personally). If you asked somebody where to find something they quickly led you to it. If you asked them for a recommendation or opinion, you most often got one. And their summer free concert series—featuring major R & B and jazz artists—was a boon to any music lover who found themselves in Manhattan during the summer. They may have been the largest independent music store in the country for most of their existence though in recent years I suppose Amoeba on the West Coast, with their large stock of used items, may have surpassed them.  But whether it was classical, jazz, hip-hop, dance music, metal or any other genre, J & R ‘s selection of domestic and imported CD’s was deep. I could easily spend a couple hours their browsing and taking in the tastefully selected music on the in-store sound system. Considering that Tower and Virgin have both been long gone, J & R was the last full-catalog music outlet in Manhattan—a rather stunning state of affairs.  I hear that they may re-open at another location. I hope so.

     Sound of Market Street opened in the 1970’s, one of several “Sound Of” stores that opened in the city (others being Sound Of Germantown and Sound Of Upper Darby) but always the best one.  Not as large as J & R, Sound Of Market Street still had a tremendously broad selection of many genres, including a great selection of 12” vinyl. The store catered to dee jays, especially in its early days, and in that sense meant even more to the Philadelphia music community that J & R did to the New York music community.  It was a place where people would just stop in, not only to check out what was new but to talk to manager Darryl King and others on the staff.  You often could find items there that you would find nowhere else, whether releases by local artists or indie artists from other areas, bootlegs, and idiosyncratic releases that were not on mainstream radar.  For instance, one day I stopped in to browse the bins and I found a Bettye LaVette bootleg from Holland containing most of her best material from the Sixties and Seventies. Since most of the material had never been on available on CD, I bought it and when I listened I had an epiphany:  that Bettye LaVette was the greatest unrecognized R & B singer of the past 40 years!  That discovery started a chain of events that led to me not only coming to know her but helping her to her first U.S. recording deal in a long time. Another time, having just been blown away by hearing a Kim Burrell CD for the first time, I was browsing in the Sound Of Marketplace bins and found a copy of Kim’s first recording. Doing a little research I realized that this album had never been widely distributed. I contacted Kim’s manager and made a deal to release it nationally; since then we have released two more Kim Burrell albums,  helped her score her first Top Ten gospel hit, and will release a fourth album by her next year. All due to Sound of Market St.!  The sad thing is that Sound Of Market Street didn’t close because of economics; the owner of the building decided to convert it to condos and so they had to vacate.

     Thinking of these great record stores causes me to reminisce.  The first record store I ever encountered was called Prein’s and I first entered it when I was only 11  years old, growing up in the San Fransisco Bay Area. I had just started to listen to the radio intensively and was really excited to hear so much great music on the local Top 40 stations, KEWB-AM and KYA-AM. But in those days if you really loved a song you had to buy the record if you wanted to be certain of hearing it predictably in the future.  I think it may have been my parents who took me to Prein’s; my father may have stopped in to buy a record. Prein’s wasn’t really a music-store per se; it was an appliance stores that also sold records and sheet music. This was a remnant of  the early days of the music industry when appliance stores and dry goods stores were the outlets for records.  And another throwback:  Prein’s had listening booths. You could take any record into the booth and listen to it!  What better place for a soon-to-be-twelve-year-old without much money to get a musical education!  And I did get an education, thanks to their great selection of rock ‘n’ roll, r ‘n’ b, blues, pop and country 45’s (they had a limited selection of albums on the wall but LP’s were not the main market in those days—though I specifically remember looking longingly at albums I couldn’t afford by The Flamingos and Moonglows on those walls!) and those afore-mentioned record booths plus, most crucially, a guy who worked there named Mark. Mark looked old to me but he was probably in his 20’s;  he was an R  & B fan and was probably the reason for the great stock of R & B in a store with a 99% suburban white clientele. Mark was always willing to talk, even to a 12 year old who was haunting his store and very rarely buying anything. I remember asking him one day if the new single by Ronnie & The Daytonas (of “Little G.T.O.” fame) was any good. I still remember what he said:  “it doesn’t turn me on. Here why don’t you listen to this.” And he gave a compilation LP of R & B artists to listen to. I knew “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia but had never heard anything else on the album. That was like a door opening. So Mark was a music missionary, particularly for R & B; and that was the beginning of my own love affair with R  & B. I can still remember coming in to Prein’s;  if it was a day I had some money saved, I might have a dollar or sometimes two dollars, to spend. 45’s cost 99 cents (sound familiar?) so that meant I could only buy one or two. I would then spend an hour combing through the bins of 45’s, which contained both new releases and “oldies”, agonizing over what to buy. I remember puzzling over B.B. King’s section; I knew Ben E. King; I didn’t know B.B. King and yet their were more releases in  B.B. King’s section than Ben E. Kings. Off to the listening booth I went. When I heard Ike & Tina Turner’s “Can’t Believe What You Say” on the radio, I made my way to Prein’s to buy it ….and discovered a whole bunch of releases in the Ike & Tina Turner section; I had only known “A Fool In Love” previously. I still have that “Cant’ Believe What You Say” single today. So it was a real loss for me when my family moved to the East Coast and I no longer had Prein’s as a resource.  By then I was also frequenting a discount store that carried records that opened up in town.  The great thing about that store is that it carried cut-outs or older singles, packaged in polyurethane 3 for a dollar. It was tricky because you were at the mercy of whoever packaged them; and they deliberately put what they considered “dead stock” with a recent hit. I would twist and turn the polyurethane so that I could read the titles of all three 45’s and often enough found combinations worth buying.

       In the Philadelphia area, out in the suburbs at least, there was one decent indie record stores but it carried mainly current singles and had no one like Mark to turn me on to great music. And then there was E.J. Korvette’s department store in a nearby shopping center that had a pretty good selection of albums at cheap prices; my memory says $2.99 for monaural LP’s….and I only had a mono record player anyway. I remember buying Live At The Apollo by James Brown, because it has all his hits on it, not realizing it was a live album; boy was I in for a surprise! By then I had a little more money—I was 16 and doing odd jobs for spending money—so I could indulge my music addition a bit more. The Philadelphia music culture was completely different than that of the West Coast.  Going to dances I’d hear records like “Bila” by The Versatones and “Wine Wine Wine” by The Nightcaps, along with Motown stuff.  Philadelphia had had strong vocal group scene and that music was being kept alive by a local dee jay named Jerry Blavat who often played great vocal group records that had never even been hits, along with current fare. He hosted huge dances in Philly and was a local celebrity. One day a friend and I rode the train into Philadelphia and went by a record store at 10^th and Chestnut called The Record Museum. Stapled to the walls, with impressively high prices scribbled on them, were dozens of rare of 45’s, many of the records that Jerry Blavat played. I heard sounds in there that I had never heard before and that shop opened up a whole new world to me also.

     During this time the premier record store in the country was Sam Goody’s flagship store in Manhattan.  Every week Sam Goody would take full-page ads in not only New York papers but also Philadelphia newspapers—touting an all-label sale for, say, Columbia Records. Everything on Columbia would be at a low sale price for a week. The next week it would be  a different label and every so often independent labels would be on sale. When I got  a little older I would make pilgrimages to Manhattan (the Philly Sam Goody stores were ok but nothing like the main Manhattan stores) and once again their vast selection of LP’s opened a whole new world to me—worlds of jazz, folk music and music from around the world. It was at that store that I first saw—and bought—a Sun Ra record and the first place I saw an Om Khaltoum LP (I didn’t know who she was at that time).  Come to think of it I bought a Pennywhistlers record there…a Nonesuch released which introduced me to the extraordinary beauty of Eastern European vocal music.

     In the early Seventies I was living in upstate New York and driving daily to my counseling job in Irvington; on my way down I would pass through Ossining which happened to have a little hole in-the-wall record shop catering to an African-American clientele. I was listening to WBLS-FM—during the first golden era of Frankie Crocker—and hearing tons of great music. Every week I would stop in this little shop and ask “what’s new? What’s hot?”  they would play me the latest and greatest and more often than not I walked out with three or four new singles. Also during that era I stumbled upon a small record shop in the small mall attached to the White Plains train station; it was run by a Jamaican and there was a treasure trove of JA singles in a bin. I was getting into reggae seriously at the time and felt like I had found buried treasure when I came upon “Kaya” by Bob Marley & The Wailers on Lee Perry’s Black Heart label, among other gems. In that pre-internet era such finds were exhilarating.  Much of the Seventies found me in Nigeria, where little record shacks off the street had a wonderfully diverse selection of African and American music. Again, whoever was running the shop was happy to play me whatever I wanted and I was able to get into a wide range of highlife, Congo music, Afrobeat, Afro-rock, juju, apala, fuji and myriad traditional musics, not to mention some cool reggae releases that came from the UK.

      On my return to the States, I settled in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and found another hole-in-the-wall record stores similar to the Ossining shop noted above, at Germantown and Chelten Aves.  Most every Saturday I stopped by to hear what was hot and new in the R & B world and can still remember the thrill of hearing first solo releases by Stephanie Mills, Teena Marie and others. I also became aware of a great record store downtown—Third Street Jazz, located on Third Street just off of Market Street. As the name suggested they had a magnificent and deep selection of jazz, which I was starting to get into more deeply, aided in no small measure by the playlists of shows on WRTI-FM which, though a college station, was staffed mostly by jazz heads from the community. If I heard something I liked, chances are I could find it Third Street Jazz. Most of the people working at Third Street Jazz were jazz heads themselves and they served up stimulating dialogue and opinions about the music along with the wares on offer. I became friendly with the owner, Jerry Gordon, among others and so going there was like going to see friends. The store was unique in that it had a large stock of many privately pressed, often with hand-made jackets, LP’s by Sun Ra & The Arkestra, as Jerry had come to be trusted by Sun Ra. I wish I had bought more of them because many are now valuable collector’s items. Third Street Jazz was more than a store; it was a crucial part of the jazz musician community.

     When Tower Records began opening stores on the East Coast it was like the gates of heaven open for music lovers. For many years the flagship store was the 4^th & Broadway store in New York City. By 1981 I had begun working for Shanachie Records and was often in Manhattan so I was often in the 4^th & Broadway store with its three floors of music. They stocked virtually everything and hired buyers based on their knowledge of the genre they were supposed to buy (what a concept!).  It wasn’t necessarily  the best business model—they buyers often bought what they thought was great and much of what was stocked did not sell—but it was paradise for music lovers.

      Countless other great record stores with passionate, music-loving personnel and interesting stock not determined solo by the charts greatly expanded both my love for music and my knowledge of it. There are precious few of them left.  I still enjoy dropping into “Other Music” on 4^th St. in Manhattan, across from the former Tower location.  I haven’t yet been to the new Rough Trade store in Williamsburg which opened just last year, swimming against the tide of record store closures. The internet is a fabulous tool—I’ve discovered much great music in YouTube and through social media—and probably 90% of everything ever recorded in the Western World and much of the rest of the world is available somewhere on the internet. But for me nothing was sweeter than a passionate music fan in a little record store handing me a record and saying “you have to check this out!”

DAVELL CRAWFORD: PIANO PRINCE OF NEW ORLEANS

 

    New Orleans may have the greatest tradition of piano playing in America, if not the world. There were the “piano professors” of the Storyville and pre-Storyville era, the bridge between parade bands, ragtime and jazz, entertaining brothel patrons with a notably eclectic and unique repertoire. There were seminal players such as Jelly Roll Morton (who once claimed to have invented jazz). There has been a long line of great piano players such as Tuts Washington, Professor Longhair, Little Brother Montgomery, Champion Jack Dupree, Roosevelt Sykes, Archibald, Fats Domino, Huey Piano Smith, Edward Frank, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey Piano Smith, Dr. John, and Ellis Marsallis. Eddie Bo, a notable piano player himself, as well as great songwriter, producer and funk-master, has reconted in interviews that in black neighborhoods in New Orleans “every other house had a piano” when he was growing up, even though, as he noted, “most people had to have a fish fry every other week just to get by.” But then there have been the hundreds of amateur piano players who played just for pleasure and at parties. George Landry of The Wild Tchoupitoulas was one of those. New Orleans piano playing is uniquely percussive and rhythmic oriented, with Latin, Caribbean and African rhythms incorporated, as well as those quintessential New Orleans street parade rhythms. And New Orleans has a classical tradition going  back to the Creole orchestras of the 19^th Century and noted Creole/Jewish pianist/composer Louis Gottschalk. I fell in love with the style without knowing it when I heard records like Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-In-Law”, Lee Dorsey’s “Ya Ya”, Franki Ford’s “Sea Cruise” and of course Fats Domino’s records.

    Back in the early 90’s, a teenage piano player burst on the New Orleans music scene. 17 year-old Davell Crawford was a young man with an old soul, a prodigy who started out in church and was performing publicly by age 7. He could play a blues or old rock ‘n’ roll number with complete naturalness and authenticity. Steeped in gospel, influenced by the likes of Professor Longhair, James Booker and even Liberace, he soaked up the myriad sounds around him in Louisiana. His grandfather was James “Sugarboy” Crawford, a New Orleans bandleader who had been the first to record “Iko Iko.” He was a young player with an impressive command who could seemingly do anything on the piano. Interestingly, he has claimed not to really have know New Orleans music so well growing up, as he shuffled between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but this may be disingenuous.

     We first saw him at the old Showcase Lounge in Gentilly, where Davell, playing both piano and organ, led a band of veteran players with both his playing and evocative singing. Like James Booker, Crawford’s vocals are not on the same level as his playing but somehow carry an expressive power. Like many New Orleans musicians he moves easily from R & B to blues to gospel to jazz to second-line grooves, often blending elements in the same song. We later saw him at a French Quarter club around 1AM, this time backed by just a rhythm section. The spare crowd was dominated by a table of loud women. Davell kept turning around to scowl at them but they were oblivious. I finally went over to them and suggested they go somewhere else if they weren’t interested in the music and they shut up.

    Davell’s first album came out on Rounder Records in 1995; he was being heralded as New Orleans’ “Piano Prince”, the new generation’s standard-bearer of the New Orleans piano tradition. The album presents a representative selection of R & B/blues/gospel from Davell’s repertoire at that time, with no song newer than 1970, except for the couple of originals Davell wrote, one called “Gumbo Piano” a showcase for his piano chops. He put his stamp on the hoary set of tunes. Subsequent albums, including a surprisingly lackluster organ trio set—brought jazz and Davell’s soulful interpretation of pop standards (“Who Can I Turn To?”) into the mix. Though his reputation was getting him concert gigs in major U.S. cities and in Europe, his albums did not sell much. There was a sense that maybe he lacked focus or perhaps Davell was just not ready to make a definitive statement yet. But his JazzFest performances were always highlights for those in the know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XndIB2Gfapc

    And then he kind of disappeared for a while. A colleague of mind discovered him playing in a New York City hotel lounge, an unheralded steady gig. I made a note got catch him there but somehow failed to do so before the gig ended. So when my wife and I went to New Orleans this past May, arriving on the last day of Jazz Fest, a major goal was to see Davell Crawford, hoping that he’d be staying in town after the Fest. But we couldn’t find any notice of any appearances by him. Walking down Decautr St. into the Fauborg section of town, I ducked in Louisiana Music Factory to pick up a copy of Offbeat Magazine to check out the music listings. I heard what sounded like live music coming from the rear of the store and when we strolled back there, lo and behold it was Davell Crawford, with a killing young drummer and bass player playing a “record release” in-store performance in honor of the release of “My Gift To You”, his first CD release in many years. He was in great form, sing and playing exuberantly. He alluded to having come through a period of depression and also played tunes such as “Junco Partner” and “Iko Iko” which he had avoided playing previously, not wanting to be boxed in by expectations. At one point he called up some friends from the crowd to sing with them and soon gospel harmonies were in the air. It was a sublime experience,  one of those unheralded almost impromptu musical events that New Orleans specializes in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQr8bcVyJOI

      The new CD is a much more personal statement; it includes a version of “Junco Partner” and “Can’t Find My Way Back Home” but also expansive, decidedly non-traditional original compositions and interpretations of pop material such as his own “Dreams,  “Creole Man” and Billy Joel’s “The River.”  The overall feeling of t he album is moody, with little of the ebullience of much of his earlier work;  long-time fans might be disappointed but the album rewards repeated listening as the depth and subtlety of the music comes through.

     In August, I saw Davell open for Roberta Flack at Lincoln Center, on the outdoor stage. Back by a sizable band of mainly New York session players and vocalists, he opened with “Iko Iko” and was quite the showman, clearly reveling in the big stage, concert grand piano and the large audience. On the verge of 40, Davell Crawford, after more than 30 years of performing, may be poised to embark on his most exciting artistic period yet.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-7IzwWpQy0

BOBBY WOMACK: THE STREET PREACHER

BOBBY WOMACK: THE STREET PHILOSOPHER

 

      Hearing over the weekend that Bobby Womack had passed away was a shock. Though I knew he had  been experiencing various health problems in recent years, I knew he was still performing. In fact, I had narrowly missed seeing him at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this year. He went at on 3PM the final Sunday of the Fest and our plane landed around 1:30PM. If I had known, I would have scheduled an earlier flight; I never saw Bobby perform. And now he’s gone.

        What is strange to me is that so many people seem unaware of what a monumental figure has left us. A fair number of people in my close circle of friends and acquaintances know the extent of Bobby’s talent and achievement. But many other people seem bemused when I express what a great loss it is.  I am experiencing the same surprise as when a couple years ago I was talking about doing a Nina Simone tribute recording and a couple people who I know are pretty aware musically said something like “Nina Simone….isn’t she a cult artist?”   That description stunned me. A cult artist? Who didn’t know that Nina Simone was one of the deepest, most profound musical artists who ever lived? I thought everyone knew that. Apparently not. Same with Bobby. He was a top session guitarist, who played on many hit records and indeed wrote George Benson’s breakthrough instrumental hit “Breezin’.”  He started out young in his family gospel group, was mentored as a teenager by none other than Sam Cooke, had a couple hits when the group—re-named The Valentinos—went secular. Their recording “It’s All Over Now” was covered by The Rolling Stones and became a big hit in 1964. By the late Sixties Bobby had launched his solo career and recorded a string of  R & B hits, truly hitting his stride in the early 70’s songs such as “Woman’s Gotta Have It’” “Looking For A Love”, Harry Hippie”, “You’re Welcome, Stop On By”. His trademark was his spoken intros, little bits of preaching and street philosophy, delivered in his raw, raspy voice.  Bobby’s voice was not a beautiful instrument but you recognized it instantly.

More importantly, he wrote massive hits and classic album tracks for other artists such as Aretha Franklin “I’m In Love”,  Wilson Pickett “I’m A Midnight Mover”, Millie Jackson “I’m Through Trying To Prove My Love To You” and Janis Joplin “Trust Me.”  He also hit with the title track to the film “Across 110^th St.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe9s63ruvpo

      But he was never really a crossover artist—he only had one Top Thirty pop hit—“Looking For A Love.” And even in the R & B world, his only had two periods of strong solo success—1971 – 1976 and 1981 -1985.  But musicians, hard core R & B fans and people close to the streets knew how special Bobby was. You see Bobby was kind of a complex guy. His talent and his approach to life took him outside neat categorical lines.

For instance some of his successful early solo recordings were re-workings of such relatively middle of the road pop songs as “California Dreamin’” , “I Left My Heart In San Fransisco” and the standard “Fly Me To The Moon”; of course he rendered them completely in his own style. He knew blues, he came from gospel, and he stretched naturally into jazz. He was just one of those pure musicians who could make music out of anything. 

        And his lyrics revealed perspectives that were far from rote; Bobby was deep!  A lot of his lyrics sounded like they came from quite a bit of pain, from someone who had seen the dark side, even slipped into it sometimes himself. Usually they were close to the bone, without illusions, like a street hustler who has survived.  His cover of of the Depression-era song “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” is so natural you’d think it was one of his songs. Sometimes the songs come from his life or the life around him that he has observed. “Harry Hippy”, for instance, is about his free-spirited brother a died an untimely death.  That death, along with death of his mentor Sam Cooke, and the death of a son, no doubt haunted him.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn9hpgXaWAg

     In any case, even many of his lesser-known songs are gems, even if they aren’t necessarily “hits.” 

       I never met Bobby, never saw him perform, but crossed his path a couple times. One time was when he took part in a tribute recording to Don Covay that my company was producing. Bobby flew in and did a great version of Don’s song “I Was Checking Out, She Was Checking In.”  I wasn’t in the studio that day, but I remember paying the bill for the car we had hired to take him from the hotel to the studio. He kept it for 24 hours! ‘Course those were in his dark, drug fueled days.  More recently, I suggested that newer generation R & B singer Calvin Richardson record an album of Bobby’s songs in tribute to Bobby, knowing that Calvin not only was a Bobby Womack fan but that vocally he could cut it. I sent a copy to Bobby and later called him He liked what Calvin had done.

       Bobby Womack was a giant but maybe not in obvious ways. Listen to his songs and you can see the multi-faceted greatness. We won’t see the like of Bobby Womack again soon!

Walking To New Orleans....

WALKIN’ TO NEW ORLEANS….

 

     Well, I’m not going to walk, I’m going to fly.  But the idea is the same. Seems like started thinking about going to New Orleans at a young age. My father’s family on one side was from there originally; my grandfather was born there (he was forbidden to speak French as a boy—his family was of French background) and one of my father’s aunts according to family lore had been an entertainer there. My father spoke of visiting there with his parents and having dinner at Antoine’s. So family roots were strong. And when I was about eleven years and a budding piano player, I heard a couple records that had a style of piano playing on them that was fascinating. The records were Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother In Law” and Lee Dorsey’s “Ya-Ya.”  The sound and feel of the piano playing on those records was percussive, rhythmic, rolling, with strong chords in the mid-register, a very organic sound.  At some point I became aware that these records had been made in New Orleans and a little later I learned that there was a great piano tradition in New Orleans that stretched back to the early days of jazz. That was the beginning of a musical connection with the city that only grew stronger as I heard more music. In 1964 I heard a record on the radio “I Wish Someone Would Care” by Irma Thomas. Her smoky voice and soulful delivery made a huge impression on me.  I saw her album in the record shop…it was a black cover with an illustration of Irma, wearing a white dress, with a white necklace, contrasting with dark face, arms and legs. I found out she was from New Orleans.

 

 

        I didn’t make it to New Orleans until 1982. Don’t know why it took me so long. Ostensibly I went for JazzFest but in reality I was simply fulfilling a long-time dream. The city did not disappoint…..I rented a ten-year old boat of a car from Cheapie Rent-A-Car and cruised the city, the radio tuned to WWOZ which played all sorts of vintage New Orleans music and took in though architecture of the houses that ranged back 50, 100 or 150 years depending on the house. Some neighborhoods seemed frozen in time. Between JazzFest and various clubs and bars, I was in music heaven. By now I knew a lot about the town’s musical history……its jazz and R &  B and rock ‘n’ roll. And I saw many legends and many obscure notables—Allen Toussaint, Ernie K-Doe, The Meters, Dr. John, Kid Sheik, Tuts Washington ( a piano player who had been born around 1910 and had gotten his start in the Storyville era),  Dave Bartholomew and a host of others. And on a riverboat cruise, I saw Irma Thomas and Aaron Neville sing together. Irma was wearing a pure white dress and white necklace. I roamed the neighborhoods….happily sampling red beans in rice at bar on a Monday night,  wolfing down a Po Boy at a neighborhood lunch counter, and enjoying crawfish etoufee and gumbo at some finer establishments. I even did a little research in 19^th Century city directories and found three of my father’s familiy’s residence…..on Bourbon Street no less! One was now a souvenier shop and two others were strip clubs. But they were the original structures.

 

       Since that first trip, I have been back to the city many times. Like so many, I fell under its spell.  New Orleans has always been a cliché’ in the popular imagination—“the city that care forgot” “the birthplace of jazz” “Storyville’s ladies of pleasure”  “Cajun cuisine” (although the real cuisine of New Orleans is creole, not Cajun!), “Mardi Gras”, “Bourbon Street.”  Well the clichés were rooted in reality, or more accurately were distortions of reality. But there are many realms beyond these clichés but the real deep culture was not well known to most people outside the city. Gradually, though, thanks to Jazz Fest and the touring of musical ambassadors such as The Neville Brothers, and ultimately the television series “Treme”,  the deeper, more esoteric currents of New Orleans culture became widely known. And then came Katrina.

 

 

       Katrina was devastating and heart-breaking. Many in the outside world had no idea just how devastating its impact was to the culture of the city. Whole neighborhoods were wiped out and these neighborhoods were the seedbeds of musical styles, of the Mardi Gras Indians, of Social And Pleasure Aid Societies, of struggling little haunts that were loci for the city’s soul. Many people—especially poorer folk—were refugees and never returned. I knew many people who lost their homes; many musicians lost everything. Precious artifacts were swept away. Part of what made New Orleans so unique was that it didn’t change much. All of sudden things changed a lot. When I visited after Katrina, it was like visiting a loved one who had been crippled by a stroke or something. I knew it would never be the same. Indeed, the historic Treme’ neighborhood has been gentrified.

 

The projects emptied. Neighborhoods disbursed. Parades banned and street musicians arrested.  Many of the great musicians I had seen and met had passed away.But the city’s culture cannot be so easily killed. It has too many fierce protectors. Trombone Shorty is a younger generation musician taking New Orleans music to the world. His brother James Andrews has opened a nightspot in the Treme’. Recently a new city noise ordinance was successfully protested by musicians and their supporters. Jazz Fest—though corporatized—lives on and lesser festivals, like the French Quarter festival, carry on the Fest’s original mission of showcasing local musicians. Tipitina’s is still in action, even in its original Uptown location. New Orleans has many fans now around the world…..people willing to fight to preserve its traditions, its culture, its uniqueness. Thirty years earlier, that cadre of fans and supporters outside the city did not exist.

 

 

      So I’m going down to New Orleans. I’m going to James Andrews’ Oop Oop A Doo Lounge. I’m going to have a meal at Mandina’s , the first place I ate dinner at on my initial visit to the city. I’m going to catch Charmaine Neville at Snug Harbor and Zigaboo Modeliste, the Meters’ drummer at an Uptown club. I’m hoping Davell Crawford will still be in town; he’s the current generation heir to the great piano tradition. I’m going to try to get a copy of my great-grandfather’s birth certificate. Going to roam the neighborhoods and stop in at the quirky little joints that have always been a part of the city, though there are less of them now. Maybe I’ll even get to see Irma Thomas. I wonder if she’ll be wearing a white dress.

 

RESCUING TREASURES FROM MOROCCO AND YEMEN!

RESCUING TREASURES FROM MOROCCO AND YEMEN!

 

 

      The Sixties and Seventies were exciting times for popular music in America and Europe. But what most people don’t realize is that those decades were incredibly exciting times for music in many parts of the world. Mass movements of people from the countryside to cities brought traditional music in collision with pop music—both of the particular country and from around the world. The proliferation of records, radio and cassettes meant that musicians were being exposed to a dizzying array of sounds and rhythms and, as a result, creating all sorts of new music. And traditional styles were getting heard far more widely. During my time in Africa in the 70’s I saw and heard a wide array 45 rpm singles in shops, marketplaces, bars and restaurants. I bought some; I wish I’d bought more because a great portion of these singles has never appeared on CD or on digital outlets. And the same situation existed in countries all across Africa, The Middle East, Asia and Latin America. I’ve thought for a long time that someone needs to rescue the music on these obscure 45’s before they disappear. Many of these countries do not have good archives even in radio stations and often the records were manufactured in small quantities and stored in harsh environments—non-airconditioned, hot, sometimes humid, sometimes dusty environments. And international record collectors were more focused on collecting ‘78’s than ‘45’s.   In recent years, companies such as Analog Africa, Soundway, Dust To Digital, Sublime Frequencies and others have begun to release compilations of such 45’s but there’s a huge amount of music that needs to be preserved and the market for these collections is quite small.

 

        I have been particularly hoping someone would issue a great compilation of Moroccan 45’s from the Sixties and Seventies. I have a special appreciation for Moroccan culture…the food, the music, the architecture  and art, the folkways and the people. Moroccan music has a number of vibrant musical traditions, among them: The stately Andalusian classical styles, various Berber traditional and popular styles, gnawa trance that originated with immigrants (often slaves) from the region of Mali, rai music originating in Algeria, and of course chaabi, the popular music style that draws on both Moroccan traditional styles and pan-Arab styles, including Egyptian film music. When I first traveled to Morocco in 1977, I saw quite a few 45’s and some LP’s and bought a few. I wish I could have afforded  more. Recently when I was in Morocco again, a restaurant in Essaouira, the charming former Portuguese settlement on the Atlantic coast., had hundreds of vintage Moroccan 45 rpm records stacked in the reception area. I asked about them but the owner, evidently a collector, though pleased at my interest was too busy to spend much time talking to me about them. And the next day we were gone. I felt like I had walked away from El Dorado.

 

      http://www.dust-digital.com/kassidat/

 

 

 

       I was thrilled, therefore, to see on the internet news of a brand new CD compilation entitled KASSIDAT: RAW 45’S FROM MOROCCO, apparently a collection of 60’s and 70’s Moroccan music. I immediately ordered it from Amazon and when it arrived I wasted no time putting the disc in my CD player., hoping not to be disappointed. Not to worry. From the open moments of the first track, a raw sounding chaabi, the music was exactly what I had been longing for. The chaabi combination of oud, fiddle, drums and handclaps underpinned a call-and-response vocal between a male singer and female chorus. Classic stuff!  The next rack is Berber music, a style from Southwest Morocco feature rebab (tradition one-string fiddle), lotar (a banjo-like instrument) and male/female call and response. The other tracks encompassed Moroccan rai (led by a raspy wooden flute), gumbri-led Berber music from the Central mountains, and trance music from the Rif Mountains (home of the famed Jajouka Pipes of Pan) with keening double-reed horns.

 

All of it is great…filled with the wild energy that so much Moroccan music has. The only disappointment is that there are only six tracks on the CD; yeah they are all at least six minutes long but there was room for at least 5 or 6 more. Here’s a bit of music by one of the artists on the album, though this is not on the CD and the CD’s tracks have much better sound without much snap, crackle pop:

 

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC4Ffj0Bm74

 

 

      Released simultaneously by Dust To Digital is a similar compilation of vintage 45’s from Yemen entitled Qat, Coffee and Qambus These days Yemen is thought of as an obscure, remote place, a wild strange land barely known. But it wasn’t always thus. In antiquity Yemen was a major trade crossroads between Arabia, Africa and India. There was a thriving and at times quite affluent civilization there. As recently as the early 20^th Century the port city of Aden was very cosmopolitan commercial crossroads run by the British. Yemen’s musical traditions aren’t as wide-ranging as those of Morocco but , despite the region’s exposure to the outside world, the musical traditions are relatively pure. The opening track of this compilation is an intense piece featuring just a keening female vocalist and the distinctive metal tray percussion which is unique to Yemeni music. Most of the other tracks feature oud but sometimes it is played in a rhythmic style that is distinct from the way it is played in many other locales. The tracks are spare, usually with only two or three instruments (including percussion), perhaps handclaps and singers. Happily this collection has nine tracks; one cut after another of vibrant, resonant Arabic music that is not being played much these days –except in Yemen!

 

      I’m hoping that more of these collections will surface. Unlike some such collections, where the compiler doesn’t really know what is good and what is not, the tracks on these CD’s are well-selected. Everything is good or great. I’m in heaven! I know I’ll be supporting them with my dollars. If you have any interest in authentic sounds and rhythms of North Africa and Arabia, you won’t be disappointed by these CD’s. I am hungry for more!

 

ETHIO-JAZZ: THE NEXT WAVE!

ETHIO-JAZZ: THE NEXT WAVE

    Ethiopia is an ancient land, a fabled land, home of one of the oldest Christian sects as well as an early branch of Judaism. There are churches there carved out of solid rock hills and Ethiopians say the Ark Of The Covenant is there. The last reigning monarch, Haile Selassie, who was overthrown in 1974, could trace his linage back to ancient times, some say to Solomon and Sheba and was considered a manifestation of God on earth by Rastafarians. Huge and mountainous, Ethiopian has its own unique musical traditions. Until Francis Falceto launched his exemplary Ethiopiques series of compilations in 1998, not much Ethiopian music was heard outside Ethiopia and Ethiopian communities around the world. With the exception of a couple of remarkable albums by female vocalist Aster Aweke and some recordings by male vocalist Mahmoud Ahmed, . Now up to nearly 30 volumes, Ethiopiques has brought to light a wide range of Ethiopian music, especially from the Golden Age of the Seventies, before a Marxist government shut the music scene down. During that era in Ethiopia bands bringing together jazz, funk and Afrobeat in combination with the distinctively haunting Ethiopian traditional scales and off-kilter rhythms created a new style of popular music.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJcOTy2G1c0

      The music began to be heard more widely around the globe, thanks to Ethiopiques, sparking the imagination of many musicians. Now a new wave of Ethiopian and Ethiopian-influenced recordings is surfacing from artists ranging from original innovator Mulatu Astake to various aggregations of European, American and Ethiopian musicians such as The Debo Band, Dub Colossus, The Imperial Tiger Orchestra, The Either/Orchestra and The Invisible System Band. What’s striking about these artists is that they aren’t content to simply replicate the glories of Ethiopia’s Golden Age but are breaking new ground as they bring sounds and rhythms from around the world, from jazz, rock, soul, reggae, and electronica, into the mix. The good news is that most of them are great!

     Let’s start with the new album from the master musician, Mulatu Astake. Now 70 years old, Astake studied music in the UK began playing jazz and in the 196o‘s became the first African student at Boston’s Berklee College Of Music, studying vibraphone and percussion (he also plays keyboards). Hanging out on the jazz scene, he became very involved with Latin music and also encountered Nigerian percussionist Olatunji. Returning to Ethiopia in the early 1970’s, Astake created a new style which he dubbed “Ethiojazz”, fusing Latin music and jazz with Ethiopian music. As bandleader, composer, arranger and sideman, Malatu Astake influenced the course of Ethiopian popular music and was involved with creation of many hits.

     His beautifully recorded  new album, “Sketches Of Ethiopia”,  seems to be a distillation of all the best elements of Astake’s work. “Azmari”, the opening track, feels like an overture, with Latin percussion, Ethoipian fiddle and cello and horns topped by fiddle soloing. The second track, underpinned by an Afrobeat bassline, quotres a horn line from a Studio One reggae hit as Ethiopian vocals break down into something resembling Ituri (pygmy) polyphony. And so it goes, shifting textures and sounds from track to track, always with organic feel and gorgeous results.

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtlaUBhY7m8

     The Imperial Tiger Orchestra is a Swiss-based group formed in 2007 by a polyglot group of Europeans who met at a jam session. Their performances have a very “jammy” feel but in a good way with a sense of spontaneous fun. While Ethiopian scales and rhythms are central to their music-making, they have no compulsion to replicate Ethiopian music literally. So their music is jazz but a jazz whose palette includes not only jazz and Ethiopian elements but other elements as well. Imperial Tiger Orchestra follows their inspiration freely. They have four albums; I’ve heard two, 2010’s “Addis Ababa” and 2011’s “Mercato”; both are consistently excellent. They released “Wax” in 2013.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8XjgrV5fVw

     The Either/Orchestra is a Boston-based “small” big band formed nearly two decades ago, one of the few ensembles to creatively carry on the big band tradition but with more improvisation than usual in a big band context. They’ve worked in a number of different styles, including Latin music and avante-garde-explorations. In 2000 they started incorporating Ethiopian elements in their palette. In 2004, they were the only non-Ethiopian group to perform Ethiopian Music Festival in Addis Ababa. They then recorded an album in collaboration with a number of Ethiopian musicians, including Mulatu Astake. This was released as Ethiopiques #20. Later they recorded an album with Mahmoud Ahmed. Their outstanding, fiery playing makes these inspired recordings.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUlEooT8V4s

     The Invisible System Band is more than invisible. It doesn’t actually exist. Rather it is the project of UK producer Dan Harper, a former aid worker in Ethiopian. His modus operandi is to bring together a shifting, wildly diverse array or musicians from Africa, Europe and America to make free-wheeling fusions of Ethiopian music, reggae, dub, techno, rock, psychedelia and folk music. Much of the music was create spontaneously in studio jams and some of it seems to have been assembled from disparate pieces recorded at different times. It is the type of thing that often turns into an incoherent mess or a dull document of musicians failing to connect with one another. Amazingly more often than not The Invisible System Band succeeds, delivering music that is fresh, viscerally exciting and substantive. It is the rare cross-cultural experiment that works.

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKfZJZ53wQ8&list=PLxk8n4uhh-TO2rE2XE_Q5of2uVf76DzF-

     As these albums show, Ethiopian music is now an accepted part of the palette musicians around the world draw on. Like reggae, Afrobeat and jazz, formerly esoteric and parochial Ethio sounds and rhythms are now truly components of humanity’s “universal language.”

 

 

      

ROCKING IN THE SAHEL!

ROCKING IN THE SAVANNAH

 

      Some folks trace the origin of the blues—and, by extension, rock ‘n’ roll-- to

the West African savannah or Sahel region, which stretches from Chad through Northern Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Ghana and into Guinea and Senegal. This is a crossroad area, the nexus between North Africa and “sub-Saharan” Africa, the meeting place between the heavily Islamic and the notably Christianized, the mixing trough of Arab and African cultures. The ancestor of the banjo originated here as did a call-and-response style of music-making between singer and instrument, that sounds very familiar to blues lovers. So Paul Oliver wrote in “Savannah Syncopators” that the headwaters of

the blues lie here.

 

        For me, the case for this connection springs from a personal encounter. While living in Kano, Nigeria, an ancient city of the Sahel, I saw on local television a man playing a one-string fiddle, backed by an array of percussionists, some playing “talking” drums,

others calabash percussion, and also a vocal chorus who echoed the riffs he played on the amplified fiddle. He was playing lines worthy of Albert King one moment and in other, wilder moments, distorted, overtone-driven lines worthy of Jimi Hendrix. Who was it? I had to find out.  I was told the fiddle player’s name was Garba Leo. I asked my friend Ed, who was more conversant with local culture and more fluent in Hausa than I, where I

might find Garba Leo.  He told me I could find him right there in Kano, playing at a club in Sabon Gari, the “new city” portion of Kano. Needless to say I went to hear Garba Leo and he was even more fantastic in person, playing his fiddle with a microphone stuck

inside the gourd sounding chamber  and connected to an amplifier that blasted the screaming electrified fiddle through a couple of ancient P.A. horns. Later, sitting with

Alhaji Leo in a bar over beers,  the bar’s sound system was playing Albert King’s performance of “Crosscut Saw” from the Wattstax soundtrack. Alhaji Leo said to me “I can play that.” And indeed he could!  I went in to become his student on goge’ for awhile, but that is another story. I was able, with Ed’s assistance, to record a studio version of Alhaji Leo’s music for Folkways Records; the record showed his virtuosity but lacked the wild edge since I had not had the foresight to have him bring his amplifier to the studio.

 

    It is easy to jump to conclusions about whether there is a direct connection between the “savannah syncopators” and African-American bluesmen. There are points and counterpoints to the argument. Also it important to realize that the musicians of the Sahel, as in much of Africa, have been listening to American blues and soul and rock for three or four decades at least. So the great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure’ sounds like John Lee Hooker in part because he has been listening to –and influenced by—John Lee Hooker’s recordings. But then John Lee’s playing may have been rooted in music brought from Mali to America by African slaves.  There are Taureg musicians now playing a traditionally-rooted kind of desert rock but many of them heard cassettes of Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana during their exile in Libya. Maybe they find something familiar in it. The music goes round in circles! But no matter which way the influences run, it is undeniable that West African sahelian and desert musicians have been making a rocking style of music for many decades.

 

      One of these musicians is Lobi Traori of Mali, from the region of Segou, who passed away recently at the age of 52. Moving to Bamako in his youth, he took up electric guitar and began playing in the city’s many bars. He has acknowledging listing to “a lot of blues” when he was young.  He began recording in the early Nineties, with some of his breakthrough recordings produced by Ali Farka Toure, including the classic mainly acoustic “desert blues” album “Bamako” from the early 1990’s. Lobi Traore is interesting because he moves so easily from deeply traditional to wildly contemporary. The writer/musician Banning Eyre, who spent considerable time in Mali, says this dichotomy extended even to his manner of dress. A short (barely 5’ tall), eccentric man, his free spirit comes through in his guitar playing. A particularly amazing album by Lobi Traore is “Bwati Kono” (“In The Club”), his last recording, made shortly before his death in 2010. Recorded in two different locales—inside a club called Espace Adaemie, where he and his band played for a couple years, and in the courtyard of a “well-known”, according to liner notes, but unidentified hotel in Niger—Lobi and his small band crank up intense tracks crackling with energy. The instrumentation is an interesting combination—electric guitar, acoustic guitar, electric bass, trap drums, balafon and djembe (drum).  The opening track, “Makono” hits with a kicking groove, a kind of Malian stomp beat, with Lobi playing intense, slashing guitar lines reminiscent of a hard rock guitarist. His guitar tone is overdriven, distorted, sometimes phased; he uses a fuzz box as well as feedback. The individual riffs might not be fresh but his phrasing drives them home with great power. “Banan Ni” ramps up the hard rock vibe even more over clattering percussion, with sustained vibrato guitar notes and power chords. Even when he slows things down on “Saya”, which has a drier, more traditional desert sound, keening vocals and keening guitar licks explode over the groove. Elsewhere “Ya Time” moves from the stately desert rock of the Taureg bands to majestic Hendrixian wah wah runs.  In short this is at timeless album, both ancient and modern that is a classic of Africa’s desert rock.

 

    Another album from the “desert rock” spectrum is a new recording by Tal National from Niamey, Niger. Niger is overshadowed by Nigeria to the South and Mali to the West. An extremely poor country with only three significant cities on the edge of the Sahara, its contemporary music scene is limited and hardly any of it’s musicians have emerged on the international scene. Tal National has been around for over a decade with up to thirteen band members, though usually only six or seven are onstage at any one time. Sometimes they split up to play two gigs in the same time slot; in any case, any one gig might last five continuous hours, so sometimes the band members swap in and out. They mix electric guitars and electric base with trap drums, multifaceted traditional kalangui (talking drum) and percussion and chanted vocals. Their sound has a distinct slant due to a strong Hausa influence; Hausa music is not much heard outside its home region of Northern Nigeria and Southern Niger.  Their latest album, “Kaani”, was recorded in primitive conditions in a broken down studio in Niamey. In fact, the studio equipment was largely non-functional but the band brought an engineer from America with recording equipment. The studio doors and windows were left open for ventilation (there was no air conditioning) and this added a great ambient effect to the sound. They recorded during the day before going off for their regular nighttime gigs. While the riffs are not as obviously blues or rock-based, they are played with rock ‘n’ roll abandon as the percussionists churn up a rollicking groove. You can easily picture a crowd dancing themselves into ecstasy.  Apparently a previous album ,, “A Na Waya”, was recorded the same way and I’m going to seek it out!

 

       Blues, rock, traditional sounds and rhythms of the Sahel—all of these elements swirl and recombine in the hands of these and many other musicians who increasingly have come to the forefront during the past decade. Though Congolese music and Ivorian pop, not to mention reggae and African hip-hop have far greater popularity across Africa, the desert rock and blues has found great favor in the West, far out of proportion to its impact in Africa. Westerns can  hear themselves in the music and yet it is something different, something strange, almost mystical. The desert casts its spell across oceans and around the globe!

A Trinidad Trip...

A TRIP TO TRINIDAD…

     I had the pleasure a couple weeks ago of traveling to Trinidad for the first time…not Tobago, just Trinidad. Everyone I’ve ever talked to from Trinidad (including Lord Nelson, who I had the pleasure of recording a number of years ago) always says “you must go to Tobago.” But I was going mainly to take part in a music conference in Port Of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, so didn’t make to Tobago.

    For many decades, Trinidad has been known on the international stage for three things: carnival (the most famous carnival celebration along with the Rio carnival and Mardi Gras in New Orleans),  steel bands and calypso. Most foreigners know little else about the place. Calypso in fact made a huge international breakthrough in the 1950’s thanks to The Mighty Sparrow’s massive hit “Jean and Dinah”, Harry Belafonte’s million-selling album “Calypso” (the first million-selling LP) and various other incursions into popular culture. Along with Latin music, calypso became the defining music of the Caribbean in the minds of most Americans, leading tourists to such places as Jamaica to demand to hear calypso, not realizing that it was dominantly a product of Trinidadian culture.

   Calypso deserved its popularity; it was at its peak a sophisticated, highly refined art form combining a lyrical sense of melody, exquisite wordplay, trenchant social and political commentary, and elegant arrangements and musicianship. With roots traceable through kaiso to West Africa, calypso, along with Afro-Cuban music is a major repository of African culture. The earliest recordings of calypso were made before 1920 and the style came to fruition with such artists as Lord Invader, Roaring Lion and Attila The Hun in the 30’s and 40’s then with Lord Kitchner and The Mighty Sparrow in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. A major feature of carnival has always been competitions between performers and many major artists would compose a new calypso to debut during the carnival season.

     During the Seventies, calypso began to lose steam; it was eclipsed internationally by reggae and by the Eighties had been superseded by a newer style called soca. While I was in Trinidad I heard guitarist Michael Boothman, who had been a session guitarist in Trinidad in the 60’s and 70’s, explain that “soca” is shorthand for “the soul of calypso. But soca was early on less explicitly Trinidadian. It incorporated rhythms from other Caribbean islands, such as the kadence rhythm from the French Antilles and artists from Barbados, Grenada, Antigua and Monserrat had hits. Where calypso had lilting, liquid feel and lyrical melodies, soca has a more driving, more basic beat. The lyrics tend to focus more on partying, dancing, and love, rather than political or social commentary, although some soca recordings do still have that. And with the advent of drum machines and synthesizers, the big band arrangements with intricate horn interplay of calypso were replaced by stripped-down, highly synthesized dance tracks. Arrows scored an international hit with “Hot Hot Hot” (though most people did not know it was soca) and Kevin Lytle also hit U.S. charts with R & B/soca hybrid. Aside from working with Nelson in the 90’s I put together a couple of compilations: “Rebel Soca”, a collection of more politically oriented, musically diverse soca recordings, and “Wind Your Waist: The Ultimate Soca Dance Party” which featured tracks by Arrow, Shadow and some of the other better soca artists.  Many long-time music fans, especially in Trinidad, decry the advent of soca in place of calypso, feeling that a sophisticated art has been replaced by simplistic dance music. In the past few years, soca has often incorporated elements of reggae, especially dancehall styles and artists, as the popularity of reggae has eclipsed both calypso and soca, an ironic reversal of fortunes for Trinidadian music.

       In Port Of Spain, I was surprised to find little evidence of a live music scene. On “the Avenue”, a major entertainment strip, most of the bars and clubs feature dj’s, if they feature music at all. Soca—and even calypso—has always revolved around the carnival season and it seems the Trinidadian music scene has not evolved beyond that into a vibrant year-round culture. There are few breakout stars although artists such as Machel (Montano) and Alison Hinds have managed to cross boundaries and get some notice outside the Caribbean. And I was surprised to hear that local Trinidadian radio in general does not feature much local music; the charts are dominated by foreign pop, R & B and hip hop. At the music showcases I attended I was surprised to find artists performing in a wide array of genres—R & B, rock, gospel, reggae, jazz, folk and hip hop, as well as soca. With the prominence of the internet and smart phones and satellite television, wannabe musicians in Trinidad –like most wannabe musicians anywhere in the world—are hearing and being influenced by all kinds of music (much more so that in the United States).

       It will be interesting to see how things evolve in Trinidad. It would be nice if some brilliant new artist could trap into the rich history of calypso to come up with a vibrant new variant. Perhaps soca will fuse with some other genres to make a splash on the international dance music scene which outside of America is huge. Soca after all is pre-eminent dance music and by virtue of its simplicity, easy to fuse with other styles. So it is not a stretch to imagine a high-octane dance variant of soca producing an international hit or two in coming years.

AFROBEAT PERMUTATIONS

     I remember the exact momentI first heard Afrobeat. It was in 1974 in Kano, Nigeria, at an outdoor cafe', sitting drinking beer with a couple of Nigerian friends. Over the speaker system came a sound...funky, driving, kind of ominous, edgy, with jazzy keyboard and horn solos and a stentorian male voice declaiming: "open...open and close." It was unlike any African music I had heard previously. I asked my friends who it was; they chuckled and said "that's Fela!"  I describe all this in detail in the chapter on Fela in my book Great Spirits: Portraits Of Life-Changing World Music Artists. I had the pleasure of witnessing Fela and Afrika 70 at the original Shrine in Lagos and also later in Kano. Like James Brown in America, Fela created and dominated an entire genre of music. There were other artists and bands who played Afrobeat or incorporated elements of Afrobeat into the music. Sunny Ade injected Afrobeat elements into juju music, for instance. But no other artist could really match the scope, power or sheer magnificence of Fela's Afrobeat. And that held true for his whole life.

     After Fela's passing in 1997, a curious thing happened. Despite Fela's dominance of Afrobeat, the style did not die with him. On the contrary it began to spread around the world as never before. As so often is the case, when a legendary musician dies, attention gets paid his or her music. Fela's albums were re-issued and celebrated. Afrobeat bands formed in Nigeria, Europe and Ameerica. One of the best and  most prominent of these was/is Antibalas, founded in Brooklyn not long after Fela's passing by Martin Perna and other musicians generally in the circle of funk revivalists involved with Desco Records, which evolved into Daptone Records. I think one of the reasons Antibalas was so vital was because the musicians in the group were not slavish in their recreation of Afrobeat. Though they could--and sometimes did--play a Fela tune pretty much as he arranged it, they most often incorporated elements of Afro-Cuban music (a logical connection), jazz, funk and dub into original Afrobeat compositions. They had a clear political pespective of their own also. They inspired more bands in America and of course Fela's son Femi, and later his son Seun were touring widely, spreading the Afrobeat flame, and recording. Still later came the Broadway hit Fela!, which spawned a touring company that performed in many parts of the world, including Nigiera. In a way, Fela's passing freed up the genre to become more elastic, less doctrinaire. And this process continues today. I put together a compilation in the 2000's--"Afrobeat No Go Die"-- and was involved in releasing another-- "Nu Afrobeat Revolution"--to document a number of artists working permutations of Afrobeat.

    But all this does raise a question. How far can Afrobeat be stretched before it ceases to be Afrobeat? Fela himself had very definite ideas about the structure of the music compositionally and arrangement-wize. I think he would take a dim view of many of the more experimental Afrobeat efforrts that have come after his death. But then Fela did not have a particularly flexible mentality. When Celluloid had Bill Laswell re-mix Fela's "Army Arrangement" recording when Fela was in prison, Fela was outraged; he stated: "being re-mixed by Bill Laswell was worse than being in prison."

     The limits of Afrobeat were tested last week by an interesting concert held outdoors at in the plaza at Lincoln Center. Headlined by Fela's original drummer, the legendary Tony Allen, teh program went out of its way to present different, even experimental, takes on Afrobeat. For instance, the concert opened with the wide-ranging string quartet The Kronos Quartet; they played a version of "Sorrow Tears & Blood" , plucking and tapping their strings percussively, a kind of chamber Afrobeat. It was interesting, though I wouldn't say compelling.  The rest of the performers were quite eclectic. The house band for the occasion was called Superhuman Happiness and was made up of members of Antibalas, Rubblebucket, members of the alternative rock group tUnEyArDs, and musicians who normally back singer-songerwriter Iron and Wine (the last two particurly strange choices). They tended to play what I would call impressionistic Afrobeat. At one point rapper M1 delivered a rap about Trayvon Martin over a backing that was more hip-hop than Afrobeat and vocalists Baloji and Sinkane (from Sudan)  sang. Tony Allen took things in a more grounded direction as he led Superhuman Happiness on his 70's composition African Disco Beat. Of course, Allen has since leaving Fela not confined himself to pure Afrobeat, having collaborated with jazz musicians, electronica producers and even rock musicians. Though most of the music at the concert was somewhat fresh, I can't say any one piece came across as powerful or especially moving. Such is the risk of experiments.

      I think it is fair to say that Afrobeat is more elastic than Fela conceived of it and it would be a bit ridiculous to think that it could only be presented and played as Fela performed it. But I do think there needs to be an essence in order to fall within the genre. And that essence for me is the groove, the pulse, which is highly identifiable, rooted especially in Yoruba rhythms but shaped by funk and the Caribbean element of highlife. Some would say that Fela's characteristic horn arrangements are also essential elements of Afrobeat, along with the political content and jazz solos. I find that too limiting. Give me the pulse and explore from there; just don't lose the pulse! The most successful Afrobeat fusions will come from those who truly understand the essence of the music but are free enough to approach it from a fresh perspective. I've heard it happen hear and there....author Michael Veal, who wrote the definitive biography of Fela, had a group that approached Afrobeat from an almost free-jazz perspective, sometimes quite successfully. I've heard recordings here and there by other African musicians or even some Colombian musicians who have integrated Afrobeat into their own playing. And of course Femi himself has deliberately attempted to create his own variety of the music. We have Fela's fantastic recordings to listen to anytime. But it is wonderful that Afrobeat continues as a living, breathing, evolving genre 15 years after his passing!