Author Archives: Joseph Neff

Out July 19 on vinyl, CD, and digital, Bad Education Vol. 1: Soul Hits of Timmion Records delivers many things at once: Foremost, it documents the high quality found in the recordings issued by the Timmion label of Helsinki, Finland. It’s also testament to the good taste of Daptone enterprises, who compiled and are co-releasing the LP, and additionally emphasizes the soul scene camaraderie in the association. Furthermore, with Carlton Jumel Smith, Nicole Willis, Wanda Felicia, Bobby Oroza and others on board, it underscores that soul singing is far from a lost art. Just as importantly, the instrumental contributions are consistently sharp.

In short, Timmion Records offers the whole package in soul terms, with Bad Education serving as a fine primer into their discography. For those already hip to Timmion’s wares, all but one track is previously released, either on 45 or LP. However, everything here unwinds with such well-considered verve that folks who already own most (or even all) of these selections might end up springing for a copy anyway.

It kicks off with one of the highlights from Carlton Jumel Smith’s 1634 Lexington Avenue, a recent release (just a smidge over two months old, in fact) that establishes the label’s foothold on soul quality hasn’t loosened. Upbeat, brightly hued and oozing positivity, “This Is What Love Looks Like!” is tangibly early ’70s in its soulfulness. The guitar line is fleet, the saxophones hearty, and Smith is in firm command.

It’s followed by El-Paso, TX-born, San Diego, CA-raised Jonny Benavidez’s falsetto showcase “Tell Me that You Love Me,” culled from a 2017 45 where he’s backed by Timmion house band Cold Diamond & Mink, who lend plenty of warmth and enough rhythmic kick to insure things don’t go full-on velvety (Benavidez’s vocal panache could’ve carried this into straight-up lovey-dovey mode).

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Veteran singer-songwriter Mark Mulcahy, he of Miracle Legion and Polaris, has a new solo record out, adding to his already ample sum, and it’s safe to say that folks into his prior work will find it of interest. The artist’s aim to cut the record with strangers didn’t pan out, but the results still lack the aura of mere motions traversed. Inevitably deepening the familiarity that comes with a long career, The Gus is largely an invigorating and purposeful addition to his catalog. It’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital via the Mezzotint label.

With his 2013 return to musical action Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You, the titular man received praise from novelist Rick Moody, which in literary terms is a considerable accolade. And for The Gus, which comes after 2017’s The Possum in the Driveway (his follow-up to Dear Mark J.), Mulcahy found inspiration in the writing of George Saunders.

This may leave Mulcahy newbies suspecting that he’s a fine lyricist (or at least trying to be), but unsure over his instrumental strengths. These doubts might relate to how musicians who get singled out for the quality of their words (or who find influence or simple stimulation between the covers of books) often accompany their verses and choruses with sounds that can strike the ear as almost an afterthought. Or perhaps the music is precious or trite (as if the lyrics are transforming cliché).

Worry not, however. While it’s clear Mulcahy spends time in the reading room, it’s just as plain he’s been inspired and has honed his craft in clubs and bars. Plus, he’s been at it a long time, with Miracle Legion debuting in the mid-’80s. Mulcahy has obviously witnessed a lot of changes firsthand, though his solo stuff has maintained a pretty consistent mingling of “classic” singer-songwriter and indie qualities.

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Born in 1931 in an Alberta, Canada mining town and deceased in 1988 from heart failure, Bruce Haack is rightfully considered one of the trailblazers of electronic music. He’s responsible for an eclectic and often eccentric oeuvre, but his most famous LP is the one he made for Columbia in 1970. The Electric Lucifer remains an inimitable and visionary work.

Quickly dropping out of Julliard in the mid-‘50s, Bruce Haack initially made a living writing both pop songs and scores for dance and theater, but on his way to electronic music immortality he also simultaneously devoted his energies to serious composition, completing work in the highly prescient musique concrète style, a form wildly popular with the ‘50s avant-garde. He was also a creator of early synthesizers, with his inventions landing him on television programs such as The Tonight Show and I’ve Got a Secret, where Haack often demonstrated his heat and touch sensitive Dermatron. As such, he’s often linked with Raymond Scott as an inhabitant of the oddball-visionary wing of electronic music, the ties to Scott enhanced by a significant portion of his discography being designed for the enjoyment and benefit of youthful ears.

In the case of the three volumes of Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, the intended audience was still lolling in the crib, but the records produced by Haack for his own Dimension 5 label took on a more educational approach. Offered in homemade black and white covers with the assistance of dance instructor Esther Nelson, pianist Ted “Praxiteles” Pandel, and later Haack’s friend and business manager Chris Kachulis, their look and sound does give off a strong whiff of the unconventional.

However, spending time with Emperor Norton’s 1999 CD/LP survey Listen Compute Rock Home – The Best of Dimension 5 reveals an aesthetic that’s ultimately not much stranger than the early personality of Jim Henson, sharing with the Muppet man a desire to engage the growing mind through imagination rather than exuding superciliousness or thinly veiled attempts at conformity. And the creativity and frequent sense of humor allow the music to transcend its didactic aims and to be of continued interest to inquisitive adults.

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Emerging from the Germantown & Mt Airy neighborhoods of Philadelphia in 1970, the Sounds of Liberation are a noteworthy chapter in the labyrinthine progressions of 1970s jazz. This is in no small part due to the participation of vibraphonist Khan Jamal and saxophonist-flautist Byard Lancaster. Out now on vinyl through Dogtown Records in collaboration with Brewerytown Beats Records and with CDs available through Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey label, Unreleased (Columbia University 1973) documents the group’s unusually wide stylistic reach. Offering what its makers dubbed Black Liberation Music, it’s an enlightening pleasure for the ears.

In addition to Jamal and Lancaster, the Sounds of Liberation consisted of guitarist Monette Sudler, bassist Billy Mills, and drummer Dwight James, with significant input from percussionists Omar Hill and William Brister (aka Rashid Salim). In March of 1972, they first hit the studio for an LP that was issued the same year by Dogtown, initially as New Horizons.

Later pressings, including Porter Records’ 2010 LP/ CD reissue, were eponymous; under either title, the album delivers a killer journey into the funky-spiritual jazz dimension. As it hasn’t inspired much in the way of conversation or articles either in print or on the web, I’d also argue that the set is underrated (it’s OOP physically but currently available for the hearing on digital platforms).

Sounds of Liberation’s name does come up in relation to the Khan Jamal Creative Art Ensemble’s Drum Dance to the Motherland, which was recorded in October of ’72 and also released by Dogtown (with CD and LP reissues by Eremite in 2006 and 2017, respectively). If New Horizons/ Sounds of Liberation resides pretty plainly in the neighborhood of spiritual jazz groove, Drum Dance to the Motherland (which features Sudler, James and Mills in the band) was just as clearly a break from exploratory post-Fire Music norms, featuring in-the-moment sonic processing that’s tangibly and strikingly dub-like.

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Lulu Lewis isn’t a person but a Harlem, NYC-based band, the core of which is vocalist Dylan Hundley and guitarist Pablo Martin, the husband-and-wife co-songwriters joined live by bassist William X Hawley, drummer Jay Mumford, and keyboardist/ percussionist Bruce Martin. Back in 2017, they released a self-titled cassette EP that offered a tight introductory four-song set of new wavy/ post-punky pop-rocking, a sound their debut full-length Genuine Psychic expands upon to fruitful result. It’s out July 12 digitally and on vinyl in a limited edition of 100 copies through Ilegalia Records; the same day they play a record release show with DC’s Messthetics at Brooklyn’s Union Pool.

If the name Dylan Hundley rings a bell, that might be due to her participation in the cinema of Whit Stillman, specifically Metropolitan, the director’s first feature from 1990 and a significant (if sometimes overlooked) entry in the US independent film canon. And if Pablo Martin sounds familiar, there’s a good chance that’s related to his role in Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s Tom Tom Club.

Genuine Psychic offers a fresh avenue of recognition for the pair, with the album’s songs well-rounded, the better to appeal to older heads and youngsters alike. As mentioned in the intro above, the taster EP placed them securely in pop-rock territory through a sensibility that was more than a bit reminiscent of the late ’70s-early-’80s; Hundley has pipes and frontwoman presence that’s descended from the likes of Debbie Harry. This isn’t to suggest she hits peaks as high as Harry at her best, but Hundley does get close at times, and hey, this is just Lulu Lewis’ first LP.

Smartly, Genuine Psychic grabs the two best songs from the EP and puts the very strongest right up front, with “Gone to LA” spotlighting a distinctive, bubbly-on-the-edge of breaking vocal quality in the choruses. It’s a treat, and in fact the song is a definite all-around earworm. That’s not a positive in and of itself, but here, yes, which is credit to the musical foundation.

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Saxophonist Sonny Stitt made plain that the best way to emerge from another artist’s shadow is to simply persevere. Well, that and focus more on the tenor sax. Initially downgraded (if not totally dismissed) as a Charlie Parker imitator, Stitt didn’t let the criticism slow him down; from the late 1940s to the early ’80s, he recorded well over 150 albums. Of course, not all of those are great. The brand-new Lone Wolf: The Roost Alternates does flirt with that level of quality however, rounding up unissued takes from the ’52-’57 period of his lengthy association with the Roost label. Out June 28 on Run Out Groove through Warner Records, it offers Stitt in fine form and leading consistently sharp bands.

Indefatigable and adaptable; both terms fit Sonny Stitt like a glove. As the decades unwound and the records piled up, he who was once belittled for his similarity to Charlie Parker came to be valued as one of the grand survivors of the original bebop era. All the while, he was refusing to be boxed in by this reversal of esteem, picking up the electric saxophone, exploring the potential of soul jazz, and dishing albums of pop covers (like ’73’s Mr. Bojangles), though he could still deliver in the trad Modern Jazz manner. He recorded and gigged regularly up to his death from cancer on July 22, 1982.

Stitt was a strong player with classic LPs in his discography and an impressive list of achievements. He briefly played with Miles Davis, co-led two groups with tenor-man Gene “Jug” Ammons, and played in the bands of Dizzy Gillespie and alongside the trumpeter in the ’70s-era outfit The Giants of Jazz. As said, time has vindicated Stitt, and it can be tempting to completely dismiss the naysayers as being hypercritical. However, there is still an important distinction to be made.

Charles “Yardbird” Parker Jr. remains one of the great musical innovators of the 20th century (if one whose rep has been somewhat unfairly eclipsed by that of John Coltrane). Stitt has claimed that his style on alto was a case of parallel development, and I’m in no position to dispute that claim. But Stitt, to my knowledge, has never been pronounced as an architect of a new musical form, which is not to put him down but just to state facts.

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To soak up Vanilla Fudge’s talent as song-interpreters the best route is their eponymous ’67 debut. A further understanding of them as a singles act is most appropriately gleaned through the Rhino compilation Psychedelic Sundae. If an immersion into the multifaceted positives and negatives of these trailblazing late-‘60s hard rockers’ everyday reality is what one wants however, then one should look into the contents of Near the Beginning.

There’s no question Vanilla Fudge are an important band. “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” the group’s reading of a Holland-Dozier-Holland tune originally by The Supremes, is a vital evolutionary brick in the hard rock megastructure, and it stands as a one-song distillation of nearly everything that was good and potentially less than stellar about this hard-touring New York quartet. There are two versions of the Fudge’s recording, a just shy of three-minute single edit and the take found on their debut; that one’s over twice as long, and this duality is to an extent indicative of the group’s creative problems. It’s far from that simple though, and their somewhat brief and highly eventful initial existence provides a consistently interesting story, if one that’s only sporadically fruitful in musical terms.

Vanilla Fudge’s beginnings are in The Electric Pigeons, the soul cover unit featuring organist/lead vocalist Mark Stein and bassist Tim Bogert. They soon acquired guitarist Vince Martell and drummer Carmine Appice, and after hooking up with Shangri La’s producer Shadow Morton, they changed names and focused attentions on the studio.

The first effort turned out to be the best, but it was also a problematic record. Those soul roots were still showing; in fact, they never went away, flaring up rather flagrantly later in their tenure, but on Vanilla Fudge, it’s not a decisive detraction. It’s true that “People Get Ready” (and the first album is composed entirely of covers) is no great shakes, but “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” is one of the better R&B lifts in ‘60s rock precisely because it displays a disinterest in mimicry (a real issue with NYC bands of the era) to instead hone a variation on a then new sound.

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While I can’t claim to be an expert on the breadth of the man’s output, it suffices to say that Frank Hurricane works in recognizable territory while being in a class by himself. His latest is a further refinement of his singular approach as released through a steady stream of cassettes, CDRs, and vinyl since the beginning of the decade. Setting certain aspects of his method mostly aside, perhaps temporarily, Hurricane continues to zero in on the psychedelic, the folky, the laidback, and the eccentric. Life Is Spiritual is out now on vinyl in an edition of 1,000 as a split release from Feeding Tube and Crash Symbols.

Here are some things I have learned about Frank Hurricane. He is an excellent fingerpicker. He likes to swap the vowel i for the sometimes y in words, but not always, so that the title of his 2012 cassette is Night Tyme Vybes. His ’16 release Pymp World (released first on tape, next on CDR and available now on LP through Ultra Eczema) comes with the description “THIS IS THA NEW FRANK HURRICANE TAPE! POP, FOLK, COUNTRY, HIP-HOP, AND COMEDY! MY FAVE THING I’VE DONE IN A LONG TYME!” He enjoys hiking.

More stuff: He is fond of the descriptors “holy,” “psychedelic, “gangsta,” and “off the chain,” and he frequently ends sentences with “dog,” or more appropriately “dawg,” and “man,” pronounced “mane” like Al Pacino in Brian De Palma’s rap culture cornerstone Scarface. Hip-hop is indeed a component in his overall thing, exclusively so on the 2012 CDR EP “Flowin Internal” (released under one of his alternate monikers, Gangsta Love), though his style is decidedly lo-fi, captured direct to cassette and using the presets of an archaic Casio keyboard. He’s from the “Dirty South,” most recently Tennessee.

Upon initially soaking up Frank Hurricane’s reality, I had more than a couple of moments where it was debatable whether or not he was “for real.” This relates to the comedy aspect mentioned as part of Pymp World, but which came through for me strongest in the “story” tracks on his 2013 2LP Quintorian Blues. That one seems to be his first release for Feeding Tube.

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The Gun Club underwent myriad changes in personnel during their existence, but the one constant element was founder Jeffrey Lee Pierce. In 1979 he formed a group whose impact is still being felt today. The best place to begin investigating Pierce’s achievement is at the beginning with The Gun Club’s classic 1981 debut Fire of Love.

Whenever OFF! undertakes a tour there’s undoubtedly a smattering of older heads reliably if reluctantly finding themselves getting a little misty around the eye sockets when the band pencils in “Jeffrey Lee Pierce” for the set list. Deservedly so, for that song, all 1:21 of it, is a tribute to an important if undersung rock contributor, and not by a fan but from a close friend. Indeed, the intro to the cut on Live at the 9:30 Club finds Keith Morris steeped in emotion, his preamble roughly as long as the track itself.

Now, some folks might get a bit miffed over certain umpteenth-generation hardcore whippersnappers only knowing of Jeffrey Lee Pierce because Morris wrote a song about him. But easy there, partners. We all tend to occasionally idealize and even embellish our paths of musical discovery, mainly due to the reality sometimes being as bland as simply plucking a cassette from a discount bin. That was this writer, fishing a severely marked-down copy of the third Gun Club album The Las Vegas Story from a massive box of cut-out tapes in a mall chain store back in 1987.

Perhaps somewhat more interesting is what led me to make that purchase. I first learnt of The Gun Club through an article published in an anthology/anniversary issue of Flipside magazine. Having been exposed to punk not long previously, restlessness over the music’s generic inclinations had already set in, and simultaneous to the almost daily unearthing of new delights.

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When clarinetist Michael Winograd’s new record entered this writer’s reality as an upcoming release, some form of coverage was basically inevitable. That its arrival on June 21 includes an attractive vinyl edition surely aided in securing it a long review, but the foremost reason is the quality of its 13 tracks. Worry not, for this isn’t an example of the slightly above-average getting thrust to the forefront for simply being amongst the best the contempo scene has to offer; just for starters, Winograd has played with the great violinist Itzhak Perlman. As the words below illuminate, he is the real deal, and Kosher Style is masterful klezmer. The record is out now through OU People.

Record release PR regularly comes attached with quotes of positivity from relevant parties. These additions range from superfluous to insightful, but they are rarely worthy of non-promotional citation. However, the statement accompanying Kosher Style from Canadian accordionist and klezmer man Geoff Berner is an exception: Winograd is not a dabbler. He isn’t an aspiring 12-tone composer who can play some klezmer. He isn’t a punk-rocker looking for a new angle on approaching his songwriting. He IS a klezmer. He knows klezmer. He fucking blows away the room at klezmer.

Listening to the opening title-track here, one need not be a klezmer expert to absorb the rightness of Berner’s statement, as the virtuosity is undeniable, and just as important is a palpable joyous assurance; at a smidge over two minutes long, “Kosher Style” wiggles and soars as a statement of intent. Along with establishing the band’s overall prowess, the highlights are Winograd’s clarinet runs and a sweet solo from trumpeter Ben Holmes.

Berner’s words could insinuate that Winograd is a stern purist. Track titles like “Bar Mitzvah Bulgar” might strengthen this implication. Indeed, Winograd has been long based in Brooklyn, and it’s doubtful there is a locale in the US where a klezmer specialist could close themselves off from contempo influences in the desire to replicate and preserve the sounds of an earlier era.

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With Tuscaloosa, the Neil Young Archives continue to grow. Documenting a night on the road in 1973 with his band the Stray Gators post-Harvest and prior to the arrival of Time Fades Away, this latest installment is intrinsically tied to both of those celebrated records while presenting broadened and toughened aural portraiture of the artist. The results, incomplete and partially the byproduct of Young’s frustrations during this period of newfound success, cohere quite well and should make a nice addition to the shelves of devoted fans; more casual listeners might find its succinct range appealing. It’s out now on double vinyl (with an etched side four), compact disc, and high-res digital through Reprise.

Neil Young is a musician I respect quite a bit, with a large percentage of his output held in at least fairly high esteem, but somewhat predictably for a music nut, I remain largely indifferent to Harvest, the record that will likely endure as his highest-profile work. Every few years I go back and check out the whole thing again to see if my feelings have changed. Thus far, that hasn’t happened.

Unlike some folks, I don’t dislike Harvest as much as I’m just underwhelmed by its abundantly clear and undeniably effective commerciality. I bring up my lukewarm relationship because that album is a major component in Tuscaloosa’s whole. Of the 11 selections captured in the gymnasium of the University of Alabama (again, not the whole evening, as the soundboard recorder apparently wasn’t turned on at the beginning of the set and ran out of tape before the end; additionally, a few songs were simply omitted by Neil), five are from Harvest.

But partially due to the performance circumstance (delivering these songs in a building intended for playing basketball games), there’s more heft and edge to the Harvest tracks; in the order of their playing, “Out on the Weekend,” the title track, “Old Man,” and “Heart of Gold,” all unraveling as a lump after two pre-Harvest solo songs, “Here We Are in the Years” from his ’69 debut and a solo piano “After the Gold Rush,” and toward the end of the album, “Alabama.”

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