Holly Golightly; Miles Davis; Russia's Blast; Witches & Devils' Free-Jazz Squealing and Roaring
When I heard Holly Golightly's 1995 debut, The Good Things, I was immediately captivated by what at first seemed to be a conspicuous lack of soul. Her singing was remarkably without affect, but that in itself was strangely fascinating. Like one of Poly Styrene's germ-free adolescents, she seemed frozen, almost arrested. But there was a dark undercurrent to her singing that held a lot of promise. And she was always very precise.
Five years later, she's not frozen anymore. God Don't Like It is a roller-coaster ride through Golightly's raw feelings about and razor-sharp observations on love and romance. It's tremendously appealing, even compelling, and a little bit frightening all at the same time?like Peggy Lee singing "Why Don't You Do Right?" Golightly snarls and growls sometimes?another reviewer described her vocal style as a perpetual sneer?but she never overdoes it. Musically, the album is good fun, full of bluesy and country-tinged rave-ups that lope along like something off December's Children. Golightly and her backing band are out of the Billy Childish school?she's one of Thee Headcoatees?so the production is retro, too, with tons of reverb. There's an amateurish quality to the accompaniment that's mostly endearing, but occasionally distracting?for example, on "Nothing You Can Say," when the bass is noticably out of tune.
The lyrics and vocals make this record. Golightly wrote almost all the songs herself, but she covers both "Pretty Good Love" and Bill Withers' "Use Me." The two songs sum up the poles of her persona nicely. "Baby my love is deep/deep as the bottom of the ocean/pure as a newborn baby/it outshines the sun above/that's a pretty good love." Golightly is either tough and fierce as can be, bragging and acting wise, or she's utterly vulnerable and consumed with self-doubt. Both at once, really. There's the moment on "Use Me" when the guitar stops and her slighly distorted voice emerges with: "But I wanna spread the news/that if it feels this good getting used/then keep on using me until you use me up." That's some soul, right there.
Golightly's stage name is appropriate; she's like an actress playing the character of herself. An actress with perfect lines, perfect delivery and a perfect supporting cast in her sidemen. But, thank God, instead of "Moon River" we get "Nothing You Can Say," which begins with the lines, "I survive on nothing but/the reason to give up/sometimes there ain't enough/to sustain belief in love," sung in a way that makes it sound simply inevitable and punctuated with bluesy harp blasts from lead guitarist Dan Melchior. Sometimes she's almost too painful to listen to, like in "Easy on Me": "You'll be easy on me/and steady as we part/you'll come up near to me/and carefully you'll break my heart." And sometimes she's the aggressor, as on "Here Beside You," where she plays the part of a stalker. After a creepy riff reminiscent of "I Put a Spell on You," you hear lyrics like "anything you need/I can be for you...you know who you can turn to...everywhere you go/I'm supposed to go with you." Yikes.
The twangy country tune "I Don't Know" is the best exploration of self-destructive logic I've heard since Phil Ochs' "Pretty Smart on My Part." "Someone tell me I exist/tell me just where I belong/C'mon help me out with this/so I can tell when I've moved on/and stopped sinking down slow/yeah I'm sinking down slow 'cause I don't know." When I hear lyrics like that I get a little worried, but Golightly's a survivor. She knows the difference between life and music, between love and a love song, and she sums it up on "Second Place": "you just turned yourself into a song/and that's all you been afraid you would become all along."
Eva Neuberg
All critics have blind spots. I'd have to say, as a critic, there are two areas where I lapse. One is Sonic Youth: other than an occasional good tune here and there ("Cotton Crown," "Death Valley '69"), I've never been able to determine what the fuss is all about. A fairly boring art band who fool around with weird tunings but aren't capable of carrying a tune in a bucket?who cares?
The other area where perhaps I'm missing the point is Miles Davis' much-vaunted fusion work. Sure, I recognize the potential of Miles' experiment, combining electric instruments with jazz ideals. But to me the fusion has never really worked, and Miles carried it on far too long.
Which brings us to this latest round of reissues in Sony's ongoing Miles Davis reissues series, focusing on Miles' electric period in the early 70s. The music Miles made during this period, based heavily on rolling polyrhythms, wasn't "funk," "jazz" or "rock"; it was a whole new breed of music that combined the latest technological pizzazz with a kind of ambience that reached back to Africa. But Miles never made good on the promise.
Chronologically, the first album in this series is Big Fun, a collection of outtakes from the Bitches Brew era ('69-'70) that didn't see the light of day until 1974. All the big-name fusion cats are here: Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John McLaughin, Wayne Shorter, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Cobham, Ron Carter. If a bomb had dropped on the studio when they were making this record, the 70s?at least as far as jazz went?would've never happened. It's good stuff, there's no question?the ensemble really jells on stuff like "Great Expectations." Really jells after 25 minutes or so. This stuff is long; both Big Fun and Get Up with It are two-record sets, and so was Bitches Brew. And Miles Davis at the Fillmore. And Agharta. Pangaea was three records. Miles always dealt in excess, which kind of suited his personality as a punkoid. Thing you have to remember about this stuff is that this was the era when Miles was playing a lot of venues like the Fillmore and, as a result, a lot of Big Fun sounds like the Grateful Dead?not so much the propulsive numbers (although both bands had two drummers), but in the sections where the whole thing slows down to a kind of meandering piddle. It's bound to happen with improvisational music, at least of the electric variety. Guys like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy never had any problem with it, but Miles said fuck them. Go figure.
On the Corner is a maddening record, but I mean that in a good way. The only bad thing I can say is that it tends to crinkle with a bit of sameness throughout, which is my major complaint with all this stuff, but once again, maybe it's me. This is definitely an attempt by Miles to push the jungle boogie through the roof, and for the most part he succeeds. McLaughlin's serpentine guitar on the title cut is like a major new direction in funk rhythms, and the handclaps in "Black Satin" add propulsive weight to the whole clomping mass. A great moment occurs on "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X": five giant electric bass notes thump through the cross-pollinating interplay of the musicians, and now the rhythm's really going somewhere.
Get Up with It was kind of the summation of Miles' studio work in the 70s (the subsequent Agharta was recorded live and he didn't record again until 1981). Another double disc, it presents more of the jungle boogie we've come to expect at this point. "He Loved Him Madly," supposedly a tribute to Ellington, is tedium personified, evoking Tangerine Dream if anything. Twelve minutes into the piece and you finally hear a trumpet. Before that it's all boogity-boogity. "Rated X" sounds like Can. "Maiysha" sounds like the Four Tops' "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)," with some Sly Stone organ murk, but only percolates to the gentle intensity level of Santana. Miles might've shared a few lines of coke with the Stooges once upon a time (as recounted in Please Kill Me), but he didn't share any musical lines with them, taking his cue instead from Santana; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Chicago; and Laura Nyro, all of whom also bore the Columbia emblem. Miles was always a company man.
"Honky Tonk" was the bluesiest thing he'd recorded since Kind of Blue. "Billy Preston," true to its name, is funky and goes heavy on the organ. "Calypso Frelimo" is notable for the inclusion of some intense Hubert Laws-style flute, thanks to Dave Liebman. And "Red China Blues" is blues Quincy Jones-style. It's dense stuff?so dense I can hardly tell any of these albums, and the dozen or so that sound just like them, apart.
Joe S. Harrington
Here's the argument: Blast are a great rock band because:
(1) They're from Russia. No, don't sneer. Surely any music that actually has something to kick against, instead of being so firmly ingrained in the popular culture like in America, is valid. Blast singer Noshrevon "Nash" Tavkhelidze is reputed to be the godson of former Premier Yevgeny Primakov, who introduced him to the Beatles at an early age. At 14, during the Brezhnev era, Nash stole a guitar. Later, he traveled to the West to discover that rock isn't supposed to be polite. On their first visit to the UK in May, the band were locked up by immigration for several hours and refused a work permit. Clearly, music still has the power to inflame.
(2) They've managed to assimilate their Western influences in a unique way that couldn't have happened with an English-speaking band. Everything is slightly off-balance and askew: it can't really be any other way. The album's title track sounds like a cheeky, incendiary Cockney knees-up transferred to the back streets of Moscow. (Rather scary, in other words.) "Girlfriend" and "No Name Song" sound like they've been listening to all the wrong Primal Scream albums?but hell. They could have been exactly the right ones, as far as Blast were concerned. Oddly, "Following the Sun" sounds precisely like the third single from obscure early 90s Australian band Autohaze, only even more so. "TV or Not TV," meanwhile, can only be described as 1973-era Bowie being battered round the back of the head with a rusty Rickenbacker and a collection of scratched Nigel Kennedy records. As can "Red." This of course is A Good Thing.
(3) Blast have such belief in themselves, so much pride in what they do. I'm not saying that this is the most revolutionary, tuneful or original record you'll ever hear. What I'm saying is, it matters. And fuck. That counts for something.
Everett True
When is it sacreligious to prefer a cover to the original? When the original is Albert Ayler, one of the titanic figures in free jazz, an innovator and an influence on countless musicians who came on the scene only after his mysterious 1970 drowning in the East River. "Witches & Devils" is the title of an Ayler composition and album, and this Chicago improv supergroup (including Ken Vandermark, Mars Williams, Fred Lonberg-Holm and others) is devoted entirely to Ayler tunes and free improvisations. As a saxophonist, Ayler had a big, hard tone and a very prominent vibrato that always kind of bugged the fuck out of me. His tunes were folklike melodies, catchy and beautiful, sounding like they were played by marching bands parading through village greens. Ayler's bands, which often featured the great Sunny Murray on drums, would state the theme and then take off into the stratosphere, returning with little hints of the melody, exulting in sheer sound. His slower tunes, like "Angels," were dirges, long drawn-out slabs of tone, sad and massive and still pretty. So, other than the vibrato, what wasn't to like?
Well, Ayler's music was always a shade incoherent for my taste, more about texture than logic or development. Many detractors would say that free jazz as a whole is incoherent, and they've sort of got a point. Still, an Ornette or a Cecil Taylor (who played with Ayler) or a Joe McPhee or a 70s Miles was never just about freaking out. Ayler's letting-it-all-hang-out quality fit the 60s very well and was part of what made him a true musical revolutionary, but it's not something you can repeat ad infinitum without going stale.
Witches & Devils manages to bring Ayler up to date. One of the ways they accomplish this could be called retrograde, in that Sunny Murray's great innovation was to really use the drum kit for color rather than to keep time. Others had been going this way before him, but he's generally considered the first truly free drummer. On At the Empty Bottle drummer Steve Hunt frames the melodies with more traditional march rhythms and fills. This has the effect of throwing the Americana quality of, say, "Truth Is Marching In," into sharper relief. Because this is a big group, with two tenors, cello, bass, drums and piano, the overall sound textures are denser and more complex than Ayler's.
These guys can come unhinged as spectacularly as Ayler and Charles Tyler did; there's plenty of squealing, scratching and roaring. But, absurd as it may sound, it's a more precise squealing and roaring. Keyboardist Jim Baker's work here is outstanding. Along with Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello and Kent Kessler on bass (filling in for the group's regular, Harrison Bankhead), he provides a rumbling, ever-shifting foundation over which the saxes and drums trade flourishes. The second track on the album is an improvisation that starts out with double tenor squalling and moves into a dreamy piano interlude with hints of a horror-movie soundtrack to it. Lonberg-Holm contributes a great scratchy solo on "Truth Is Marching In" and uses a beautiful, classical-sounding tone on the band's reading of "Angels," which is as solemn and serene as the original. All in all, the band has done Ayler proud, and although they would probably disagree, I think they've improved on his legacy.
Eva Neuberg