Author Archives: Joseph Neff

On the 25th of November, the great jazz bandleader and drummer Chico Hamilton died at the age of 92. In addition to his various groups, he was also a composer, teacher, abettor of numerous up-and-coming players, and an all-around class-act. He left a large body of work behind to remember him by, but his greatest achievements on record were made with his Quintet of the 1950s.

It’s been a few years since I’ve watched it, but I can still vividly recall one of my favorite scenes from Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Bert Stern’s indispensible documentary covering the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. It occurs early in the film but seems to be happening around dusk, though the timeframe is ambiguous in large part due to the moment taking place not on the festival’s stage or in the audience but in the attic of a nearby house.

In that setting, Chico Hamilton, mallets in hand, rehearses on his drums in preparation for his Quintet’s appearance later that evening. I’m fairly certain a cigarette is clasped between his lips, though I wouldn’t wager anything substantial on that recollection. Without a shadow of a doubt though, Hamilton is practicing shirtless.

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If Professor Longhair had recorded nothing but ‘59’s “Go to the Mardi Gras” he would still be a national treasure. But fortunately he recorded a whole lot more. And it’s a likely story that record store shelves have been undernourished over the years by the potency of Fess’ musical elixir, but his final album Crawfish Fiesta was a grand attempt to reverse this trend. Alas, it too fell out of print. Alligator Records has done the world a tremendous solid by reissuing this fantastic slab of New Orleans gusto, and if a party where people dress up and cavort is in your future, this record will serve as an ideal soundtrack.

In the development of the vast and diverse musical legacy of New Orleans there is nobody more crucial than Henry Roeland “Roy” Byrd, better known to the world as pianist Professor Longhair. Born in 1918, he was old enough to have soaked up formative musical nourishment from the raw energy that radiated like spirit fuel throughout jazz music’s thriving early years (of which New Orleans was the birthplace, of course), but he was also young enough to fall right into the forefront of the formulation of a fresh musical sphere, specifically rhythm and blues, that exploded during the economic and cultural boom period directly after WWII.

The crib notes on the Professor’s widely influential but stridently individualist achievement is that he combined a Caribbean left hand with a boogie-woogie right hand and in so doing became a prime example of 20th Century American Music’s strongest thread, that being Creative Synthesis, a fiber reflective of his country’s status as Melting Pot.

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Foreverly is Green Day honcho Billie Joe Armstrong and contempo pop-jazz vocalist Norah Jones’ tipping of the hat to The Everly Brothers. Instead of cherry-picking a handful of nuggets from that duo’s extensive oeuvre, they decided to focus upon the Brothers’ quite prescient second LP, 1958’s outstanding but highly individual Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. It’s a risky maneuver to be sure, but in the end the plusses outweigh the minuses, and while far from amazing, it stands as more than just a thoughtful gesture.

Recently Colin Meloy, well-known indie rocker cherished as a novelist by lit majors and McSweeney’s-subscribers the globe over, George MacDonald Fraser-advocate, and most importantly, the singer for the Portland Oregon outfit The Decemberists, issued the latest in his string of tour-only single-artist cover-song CDs, with the act under scrutiny on this occasion being none other than The Kinks.

That’s certainly a very nice choice, but when Meloy elaborated upon how he came to his decision, specifically by pulling five records from his shelf at random with the subject of the 5-song EP chosen from that severely limited selection, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment over the vocalist’s stated nixing of Don Everly.

But the letdown was indeed a brief one, for it’s not like Don’s been banished to a corner of neglect to starve for contemporary recognition. Far from it actually, since The Everly Brothers, the duo he comprised with his younger sibling Phil, produced some of the most durable hits of the early rock ‘n’ roll era.

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If the 1983 self-titled debut by Violent Femmes is one of the hot half-dozen expressions of Teen Angst American Style ever waxed, then Hallowed Ground, the group’s still divisive second effort from the following year is one of rock music’s core texts in how to successfully flout expectations. It still succeeds greatly as a document of nervy conceptual growth and as a major breakthrough in terms of individual musicianship.

A lingering wisdom about Violent Femmes’ first album is that it inevitably landed squarely in the lap of any ‘80s teen that had grasped just how inescapably miserable was the struggle of growing up; the isolation, the hopelessness, the short highs followed by extended lows, the sexual overload, the distasteful omnipresence of authority. Instead of just internalizing this knowledge many naturally flaunted their alienation over this unrelentingly oppressive environment via haircuts, clothing choices, and most importantly artistic taste.

The strategic reading of Catcher in the Rye on park benches aside, music has proven a startlingly effective way of expressing that unsubtle concept of Not Fitting In. Indeed, music has long been synonymous with youth in revolt, and if circa 1985 one spied a surly, disheveled teen sauntering along the sidewalks of some suburban landscape with a sticker covered backpack and a Walkman, it was a safe bet that they were carrying a cassette copy of Violent Femmes in the pocket of their tattered thrift-store trench coat.

A true rite of passage, it was also an LP so ubiquitous that I have no recollection of hearing it for the first time; once someone was identified as belonging to the great brigade of young non-conformists it was inevitable that a more experienced member of this community would lend a helping hand and expose the newcomer to the alluring strains of Midwestern anxiety.

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In the second half of the 1970s, the hilly West Coast burg of San Francisco was noted for some bands, and a few of them specialized in the creation of punk rock. Amongst the more illustrious names are The Avengers, Crime, The Dead Kennedys, and Flipper, but one of the less championed troops in the city’s early punk narrative was Negative Trend. Their terrific self-titled 1978 7-inch has just been repressed by the folks at Superior Viaduct, and it’s an essential purchase for anyone striving to build a comprehensive punk library.

By this point, the late-‘70s punk uprising has been examined from a multitude of angles, with the majority of the approaches offering at least some measure of substantive insight. Since the whole explosion proved to be such a complex beast, indeed so multifaceted that individual perspectives can frequently seem downright contradictory, the value found in such a large number of diverse viewpoints should really come as no surprise.

One particularly interesting outlook concerns how punk’s North American surge was inevitably doomed to initial failure due to the lack of an appropriate distribution network to service its burgeoning creativity as it was emerging. It’s a tempting idea, but it tends to sidestep the reality of what actually did occur after The Dictators’ Go Girl Crazy! (my pick as the starting point of the unhyphenated punk era) first hit the racks in early ’75.

Specifically, the impulse spread like wildfire, or better yet like a disease. In England, the situation grew into an epidemic that sent shockwaves through the country’s entire culture, but in the USA, the very land that gave the form its messy back-alley birth, the transmission remained either underground or largely disdained but the public at large.

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The shockwaves of the ’77 punk explosion were so widespread and commercially underwhelming that it’s no great surprise a bevy of exceptional names ended up slipping through the cracks. One such band was Métal Urbain, Paris France’s influential and still potent kings of drum-box punk.

Before orthodoxy inevitably set in, the punk scene was far less rigid regarding what constituted the form. It was in this period that groups like Devo, Pere Ubu, Suicide, and The Fall were generally considered to be bands hanging out on the less rudimentary end of the punk spectrum. Once convention (and expectations) began taking hold in earnest, the legitimate post-punk movement did start shaping, but the retrospective tendency toward re-categorizing many of punk’s more refreshingly unusual acts as something other than enticingly unique selections in a diverse sonic smorgasbord is an impulse I just can’t cozy up with.

It’s in this early stage of wide-open possibility that Métal Urbain was born. Noted as not only the first band to use a drum-machine in the scheme of punk but also for being responsible for the inaugural release on the legendary Rough Trade label (RT 001), they are notable for so much more than just achieving a stylistic footnote and for providing the answer to a stumper in a music-nut trivia contest. For Métal Urbain shined, if only for a short while, as a beacon of punk rock’s expansive promise and if not vastly influential the group certainly proved crucial in shaping certain corners of the subsequent u-ground rock racket. They were for example the template from which Big Black managed to stir such a divisive storm.

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In 1968 The Firesign Theatre, a comedy troop consisting of Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor, began an excellent string of releases with Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. While not their best work, it is the place any newbie should begin. The smart and surreal environments the disc offers remain unique in the comedy universe, and the rewards are sharply in tune with the long-playing vinyl format.

The comedy album’s rate of productivity remains strong enough in the present that one need not worry over the general health of the form. Yes, people still want to laugh, and to this day the desire of comedians to offer up their art through the medium of records remains, even as the status those performers acquire through the making of said documents has been lessened substantially.

Indeed, the heart of audio-only comedy continues to beat rather strongly, but what was once something like a cultural institution is now closer to a niche genre, largely because the market has always been dominated by the style known as stand-up. Commencing approximately in the 1960s, the boom for stand-up LPs lasted for decades, mainly because it was the easiest way to hear these comedians at extended length, and just as importantly, in uncensored form.

But comedy as performed in night-clubs, halls or auditoriums is also Performance Art, and by far the most widely accepted example of this often derided mode of expression. Throughout its peak years, comedy fans had three main options; the attendance of a show, catching a dose via television, most commonly on late-night talk shows and later premium cable services like HBO, and the purchase of LPs for home enjoyment.

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In 2006 the Athens, GA band The New Sound of Numbers released their debut album Liberty Seeds, and those smitten with the well-built post-punk it offered have no doubt been champing at the bit for its follow-up. Well, the wait is over and Invisible Magnetic, freshly out via Cloud Recordings, is an excellent and highly distinctive second effort from a group of true vets led by Hannah Jones.

The bio of The New Sound of Numbers is loaded with connections. To begin, the band’s guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Hannah Jones was previously involved with Circulatory System, where she played alongside New Sound of Numbers-contributor and alumnus of The Olivia Tremor Control John Fernandes.

Also figuring in the scenario are Greg O’Connell and Jeff Tobias of the Athens unit Bubbly Mommy Gun. And NSoN’s status as a regional act with partial ties to the Elephant 6 scene is only enhanced by Jones also figuring as part of Supercluster, a Vanessa Hay-instigated venture that also happens to include her present New Sound of Numbers counterpart Kay Stanton.

If Hay’s name is triggering a few buzzers of recognition, it’s almost certainly due to her vital role in the shaping of Pylon, one of finest names in Athens’ musical back-story. And her participation in NSoN surely increases those geographical conditions as they chart a course that’s divergent from what’s commonly thought of as the Elephant 6 sound. Specifically, The New Sound of Numbers eschews a psychedelic orientation; instead they’re explorers and extenders of the post-punk genre.

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