Author Archives: Joseph Neff

The Philadelphia-born drummer G. Calvin Weston is probably best-known for his work with James “Blood” Ulmer and as a member of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, though along with releasing numerous records as a leader he’s also played in the Lounge Lizards and with Marc Ribot. His latest and third for 577 Records pairs him with the Phoenix Orchestra, and it’s as jazzy-funky an affair as one might expect, but with some added treats, including dual violins (plus viola and cello), Weston blowing a little pocket trumpet, and even some vocals courtesy of Kayle Brecher. Vinyl lovers with a hankering for robust fusioneering have reason to rejoice; Dust and Ash is out on wax May 24.

Grant Calvin Weston’s connection to Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time is undeniably a major feather in the artist’s proverbial cap, though back in the day (i.e. the late ’80s) I’ll admit to being more struck with his work on James “Blood” Ulmer’s first two records, especially 1980’s classic Are You Glad To Be In America? This is partially because Coleman’s two earlier electric band outings, ’76’s Dancing in Your Head and ’78’s Body Meta, had already nailed me but good; the saxophonist’s ’80s albums featuring Weston weren’t just more of the same, but they can be evaluated as something of a refinement.

On the other hand, Ulmer’s second and third albums, both of which I’d heard before his ’78 debut for Artist House Tales of Captain Black (which featured Coleman and Weston’s Philly-based friend and future Prime Time cohort, bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma), were upon introduction both striking affairs. Over time the impact hasn’t lessened by much.

Are You Glad To Be In America? offers the selection “Jazz is the Teacher (Funk is the Preacher)”; its title is a decent summation of Weston’s mode of operation across the decades. To expand a bit, he’s drummed with all three members of Medeski Martin & Wood, contributed to the work of techno artist Tricky, and along with Tacuma, taken it far outside in trio with the late Brit avant guitarist Derek Bailey. A fine recent example of his aptitude with improvisational fire and power groove would be his work in the Young Philadelphians alongside guitarist-leader Marc Ribot, Tacuma, and guitarist Mary Halvorson.

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Described by Anthology Recordings as “an exploration of North American 70s FM covering folk, soft rock, West Coast jangle, power pop and late night jams,” the 2LP compilation Sad About the Times is something of a revelation, going deep into the realms of obscure musical hopefuls while maintaining a higher level of listenability than a mind should reasonably expect. Assembled by Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s Mikey Young and Anthology’s founder and head of A&R Keith Abrahamsson, the set’s 21 cuts blend a melancholic, often singer-songwriter air, regularly touching upon the difficulties of human interaction and amour in particular, with sharp and occasionally excellent playing. It’s out now.

Although it emerged as an alternative, by the 1970s FM radio was pretty firmly ensconced as a rotator of popular music. However, as Anthology’s promotional writing for this release points out, playlists and format constraints were not yet rigid, which meant that songs by unfamiliar artists regularly hit the airwaves; if they stirred-up a strong response in listeners (or maybe just struck the fancy of a DJ) these tunes would likely get a few more spins (at least), but if the opposite proved true the vinyl was destined to be filed away and forgotten.

That is, until wax stack excavators (like Mikey Young and Keith Abrahamsson) put together a well-considered overview of their time spent. Sad About the Times is devoid of chart action but is all the better for it, because the hits of yesteryear aren’t difficult to soak up in the here and now. Much more interesting is this collection’s alternate history of popularity; Anthology’s claim that all these tracks could have been hits isn’t an overstatement, but even better, the results avoid the hackneyed moves or the outright obnoxiousness that can result when musicians are desperately striving for chart success.

The release’s presiding lyrical concerns, when combined with crucial stylistic range, surely assists in helping this stuff to go down so easy. The opening title track from the group West effectively drives home a downtrodden ambience, though the words never falter into the annoyingly sensitive, in part because the thoughts expressed get mingled with a blend of sunshine folk and budding soft rock introspection. Notably, the song is culled from a ’69 LP.

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Last September, a serving of ’70s material from the late pianist-harpist-composer Alice Coltrane came out on 2CD through Real Gone as Spiritual Eternal: The Complete Warner Bros. Studio Recordings. That was cool, but the vinyl rights went to another label, namely Superior Viaduct of San Francisco, and their editions of ’75’s Eternity and ’77’s Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana, and Transcendence are out now through the label’s ’60s-’70s reissue subsidiary Antarctica Starts Here. But the icing on that three-layer studio cake is the release of ’78’s Transfiguration, an excellent live performance return to the jazz zone and simultaneously (temporarily) her commercial swan song. It’s a wondrously searching gem.

Jump back 30 years and the prevailing opinion on jazz in the ’70s is that it was something of a desolate wasteland brought on by the intermingling of commercial desperation, self-indulgence, and an abandonment of the music’s roots; as the wadded-up pages of yearly calendars amassed in the waste basket, the traditionalists simply bided time until the cultural pendulum swung back toward the conservative.

And then for many, as the ’80s dawned, things were momentarily right in the world; hey, jazzmen (with a renewed emphasis on men) were again wearing suits (often, tuxedos) while appropriately paying their dues through worship at the bebop altar of Charlie Parker. Of course, as the last few decades have helped to clarify, the matter was never so simple; for starters, amid the sometimes-craven attempts to establish a crossover audience in the ’70s, there were pockets of major worthiness within the realms of Fusion (naturally so, as it was the locale of Miles Davis’ last great creative stretch).

Plus, the avant-garde/ free scene, long the bane of the jazz traditionalist, if still recouping from the loss of two key trailblazers (John Coltrane and Albert Ayler) and a growing disinterest on the part of major record labels and club owners, continued to explore the possibilities of collectivity across festival stages, in free spaces, in educational contexts, and notably, in lofts. On the recording front, there was a blossoming of small, often artist-run labels, as a considerable percentage of the players began expanding upon a long-extant aspect of the music; specifically, they were focusing on the spiritual.

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You may not know him by name, but as a producer on the crucial first-wave NYC punk albums Ramones, Blondie, & Suicide, Craig Leon’s impact on modern music has been incalculable. But hey, that’s old news; the new scoop is that his Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 2: The Canon is fresh out through the RVNG Intl. label, and it’s a terrific follow-up to the initial installment, which compiled, to Leon’s long-delayed satisfaction, his groundbreaking and underheard electronic proto-New Age records Nommos and Visiting, originally released in 1981 and ’83 respectively. ‘Twas one of 2014’s stronger reissues, but even more impressive is how this fresh volume unfurls with hardly a letdown.

I’m not generally in the habit of giving producers too much credit, particularly as a substantial chunk of music history is devoted to how creators have struggled and suffered at the hands of these often cocaine-addled corporate liaisons and supposed experts, but Craig Leon’s oversight connection with three defining, wildly different, and enduringly worthwhile punk documents is surely deserving of a modicum of praise.

Not to speculate too much into the reasons behind this triple crown of success (there are additional worthy pop-rock production credits in his background, plus a long, more recent career in the same capacity in the classical field), but, as the title and intro to this review make obvious, Leon is an artist himself. This reality surely didn’t guarantee that the man would be more understanding in regard to the desires and open to the core sounds of three groups making their debuts from inside an emerging rock subculture, but it couldn’t have hurt.

And I’m guessing that maybe by now Leon is tiring of how those production jobs, which occurred nearly a half-century ago, reliably serve as a lead-in when articles and reviews outline his own musical thing, and especially now that he and his partner, the vocalist Cassell Webb, are following-up the collected reissue of his first two LPs with new music. That the results here maintain such a high level of quality is certainly worth dwelling upon, particularly due to the significant passage of time.

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Founded by the late Florian Fricke in 1969, Popol Vuh became one of the more enduringly interesting acts associated with the whole Krautrock shebang, especially after they began an extended collaboration with their countryman director Werner Herzog. BMG has recently reissued five of their ’70s LPs as expanded CD digipacks, but vinyl aficionados need not fret, as those titles have gotten the 180gm treatment and are packaged together as The Essential Album Collection Vol. 1. The set includes 1970 debut Affenstunde, ’72’s Hosianna Mantra, ’74’s Einsjager & Siebenjager, ’75’s Aguirre, and ’78’s Nosferatu. It’s not all of the worthwhile stuff, but it is a substantive hunk of expansive, spiritual glide.

By the late ’80s, I’m sure a fair portion of young and curious US listeners received their initial taste of Popol Vuh not on vinyl or even CD, but cassette; the VHS kind, courtesy of the films by that stalwart auteur of the New German Cinema Werner Herzog. My introduction came through 1982’s Fitzcarraldo; I was suitably impressed with that movie and its score so that it was only a matter of days before I borrowed a copy of Aguirre, the Wrath of God from an old hippie pal who ran a local used bookstore.

And for a good while hence, Popol Vuh sorta remained on my radar as the Krautrock soundtrack unit not named Tangerine Dream, basically because in my neck of the woods their early stuff was essentially scarce. If I recall correctly, the easiest record to special order around that point was ’87’s Cobra Verde, another soundtrack to another Herzog film. In the early ’90s, during the inaugural boom of affordable VHS, Nosferatu was released alongside Fitzcarraldo (by I believe, the Anchor Bay imprint). I picked up both.

The ’90s were nearly over before I heard Affenstunde, Popol Vuh’s first album from 1970, and similar to the early work of Tangerine Dream, it was a markedly different affair than I expected, foremost due to the presence of a 4-module Moog Series III synthesizer. With the release of the group’s third record, Fricke would abandon electronic music for acoustic instruments (eventually either selling or giving his Moog, accounts vary, to Klaus Schulze), but Affenstunde is a wholeheartedly electro affair, much closer to space music than the outward-bound tranquility of Popol Vuh’s later material.

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Daniel Norgren’s home is in Southwest Sweden, but his music resonates like he grew up and gained experience in the Southeast region of the United States. It’s very much a rootsy, bluesy, Americana-tinged thing, and yet partly due to a recording aesthetic that’s deliberately if not overly self-consciously lo-fi, it’s difficult to compare his body of work to anybody else’s. He’s cut a slew of records since the mid-’00s, but his latest, Wooh Dang, is the first to really receive an international push. Through maturing songwriting and appealing instrumental atmospheres, it’s certain to widen his fanbase. It’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital via the artist’s own Superpuma Records.

As we’re nearly two decades into the 21st century, it’s perhaps silly to put too much stock in musical regionalism, but still; the depth of Daniel Norgren’s Southern US-impacted singer-songwriter roots action is rather striking. It’s also smart to not overstate his originality, with 2008’s sophomore effort Outskirt, which seems to be the earliest Norgren release that’s easily accessible for listening, offering sustained portions reminiscent of post-Swordfishtrombones Tom Waits crossed with early M. Ward and enhanced with strains of Calexico (taking us further out west) and Dylan in a gospel-blues frame of mind.

But over time, the individual moments on Norgren’s albums have gotten harder to peg to precedent as the home-recorded ambience has intensified. Another way of saying it; his songs have simply gotten better as he’s become adept with scaled-down studio atmospheres that are conducive to varying levels of audio experimentation (it’s this aspect that lends him solid ties to lo-fi as an enduring movement).

Due to the prominent use of hovering organ, Alabursy, the first of two LPs Norgren released in 2015, reminded me a bit of later Spacemen 3 or Spiritualized blended with a singer-songwriting approach maybe a tad evocative of My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. It’s follow-up The Green Stone lessened the former while maintaining the latter to no less-satisfying result.

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Dr. Teodross Avery hit the scene on saxophone way back in the mid-’90s in a decidedly post-bop way, but in the intervening years much of his energy not devoted to academics found him working as a sideman in settings ranging from jazz to neo-soul to hip-hop. A couple of years ago he released an out-of-nowhere duo CD with Marvin “Bugalu” Smith that loosened things up considerably, and now he’s back with the live quartet recording After the Rain: A Night for Coltrane. Digging into a multifaced array of tunes from John Coltrane’s discography (four originals and two covers), the group dive into the sound of the Classic Quartet in expansive mode. It’s out May 10 on LP and CD through Tompkins Square.

In Other Words by the Teodross Avery Quartet was released in 1994 on Impulse, though it didn’t dent my consciousness back then, mainly because my jazz fandom was leading me into more avant-garde areas. In Other Words is a thoroughly post-bop affair (I’ve since checked it out); one could even call it a neo-trad thing, with Avery very much in Young Lion-mode (this designation is a nod to the all-star Vee-Jay LP of 1961, which itself was riffing on the title to the WWII novel of Irwin Shaw, that is considered a highpoint in post-bop/ hard-bop jazz, a style highly valued by the neo-trad movement).

As said, in 1994 my jazz interest was taking me into areas somewhat afield from the neo-trad experience, like trying to locate a copy of the Charles Gayle William Parker Rashied Ali recording Touchin’ on Trane, which came out in ’93 via the FMP label. I mention this record because it ties in nicely with the thematic thrust of Avery’s latest, though the depth of Coltrane’s influence on the saxophonist spans back to the very beginning; his bio relates that a hearing of Giant Steps at age 13 was pivotal to his musical development.

Indeed, the impact of Coltrane on In Other Words is easy to discern. The same is true of Avery’s second album, My Generation from 1996, though that one introduced a connection to hip-hop, with Black Thought from The Roots guesting. As its title makes clear, hip-hop also impacts 2017’s Post Modern Trap Music, though it’s a more subtle ingredient than one might expect.

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When diving into the work of John Coltrane, many begin with a canonical record, likely from his tenure with the Atlantic or Impulse labels. There’s certainly no mistake in that, but anybody building a shelf of the saxophonist’s vital stuff will end up procuring a significant percentage of the material he cut for Bob Weinstock’s New Jersey-based Prestige company. Right now, via Craft Recordings’ attractively designed and thoughtfully assembled 5CD or 8LP Coltrane ’58: The Prestige Recordings, a substantial hunk of it is easy to obtain. Chronologically sequencing the man’s leader or co-leader sessions from January to December of the titular year, it coheres into a powerful statement of budding greatness.

Make no mistake; nothing about Coltrane ’58: The Prestige Recordings suggests that it is a purchase one would make on a whim. A hefty clothbound release with an ample LP-sized booklet of photos, production notes, and excellent words from Ashley Khan, plus the meat of the matter, eight LPs tucked into manila sleeves (the 5CD set is the same with scaled-down dimensions), it’s a package clearly made for both longtime lovers of John Coltrane and Modern Jazz in general and for folks whose recently developed interest in these subjects is unquestionably keen.

As its full title makes plain, Coltrane ’58 documents the saxophonist’s time with the Prestige label, though only partially so; none of the extensive sideman work is here, and neither are his earlier leader sessions (his first album under his own name, Coltrane, was released through Prestige late in ’57). And so, not a completist thing, which would be unwieldly, as the man’s complete recordings for Prestige required 16 CDs, but instead, something better; a digestible and enlightening portrait of a year’s work in the driver’s seat under the supervision of Weinstock and recorded by Rudy Van Gelder.

Prestige didn’t keep alternate takes, so there’s nothing unreleased here. That means those longtime fans who already own all of the original LPs (or picked up either the complete Prestige 16CD box from ’91 or the leader-date truncation Fearless Leader from ’06) will need to calculate whether dropping cash for Coltrane ’58 is in their interest.

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Like any visionary artistic movement, the late-‘70s explosion known as No Wave was both ahead of its time and intrinsically related to its era. This is no more apparent than in the work of James Chance. As leader of the Contortions he debuted on the ’78 Brian Eno-produced compilation that essentially provided No Wave with its name, but Chance and his crew’s long-playing shining moment remains Buy. Initially released in ’79 on the ZE label, a 180gm gatefold edition with bonus cuts is currently available from Futurismo.

AAs the decades have piled up, the whole No Wave shebang has grown in stature from a dissonant and divisive intersection of punk and art into one of the 20th century’s more striking outbursts of indigenous creativity. It couldn’t have occurred anywhere other than the old, cheap, dangerous New York City, its geographical location but one of the factors causing many to disregard its emissions; hey, it’s just a bunch of arrogant Gothamites peddling pretentiousness.

For those less sensitive to matters of attitude in presentation, No Wave’s haughty stridency is inherent to its appeal. Amongst the scene’s most surly was James Chance; as detailed in his notes for Futurismo’s reissue, he left his hometown of Milwaukee after three years of conservatory study, saxophone in hand with an intention to play jazz. Sensibly he landed in NYC, but things didn’t go as planned.

It became clear that Chance, who’d gained experience playing the music of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground back in Wisconsin, was an ill fit for the burg’s loft-jazz milieu; in turn he gravitated toward CBGBs/Max’s Kansas City. Of course, he wasn’t quick to find belonging there either, and Chance and his pocket of cohorts shaped an alternative to creeping commercialism.

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Marvin Gaye is rightly evaluated as a crucial chapter in the story of Motown, but the relationship’s peaks weren’t immediate. Marvin had his goals while Barry Gordy and company had theirs, and across his first batch of releases the results only fitfully align with the vocalist’s popular image. The seven 180gm LPs contained in USM’s Marvin Gaye Volume One: 1961-1965 are still very much of interest however, offering a portrait of the soon to be great artist as a confident young man profoundly concerned with classicist pop objectives.

A recurring theme in the history of 20th century Pop finds record labels big small and in between striving purely in the name of profits to mold and modify a developing talent into a contemporary setting. In the process these actions frequently limited, damaged, or even downright quashed creative promise. In such instances the label’s miscalculations were reliably due to the reactive nature of the whole endeavor, the attempts seeking to capitalize on trends in place of shaping organic wrinkles in musical progress.

The seven albums included here complicate the above scenario considerably, detailing Motown as determined to travel a fertile trail as the young and undeniably skilled Gaye sought not to set trends but instead to examine a Pop/Jazz zone a la Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra just as this tradition was on the wane.

Rather trying to strong-arm him into a mode he didn’t wish to inhabit, Motown displayed a tremendous amount of patience with the singer’s ambitions, though this might not be as commendable as it sounds; Gaye was fully capable of pulling-off (if not truly excelling at) the crooner role, making commercial success in this capacity a possibility. Had that transpired, Motown surely would’ve primed the pump until it gushed. On the other hand, none of the non-R&B focused LPs assembled in 1961-1965 charted, and Motown was unambiguously in the business of hits.

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There has been no shortage of single and various artist Soul anthologizes over the years, but most came encoded on compact disc and ranged in worth from outstanding to moderate to shoddy. Vinyl sets became few and far between, but recently that circumstance has begun to change. Behold A Crate Diggers’ Collection of Rare Soul, a compilation of three 180gm LPs assembled by Rhino Custom in an edition of 1,000 copies and currently available only through Popmarket.

The purported scarcity of the originals corralled here, everything initially issued on 45s from ’64-’75 either by Atlantic and its subsidiaries Atco and Cotillion or Warner Brothers and its sub-label Loma, offers a fine angle of presentation. However, the secret to any various-artist comp, and especially one devoted to a genre so deeply tied to the emotional, is not rarity but listenablity, though the opportunity to hear these selections on vinyl is an unequivocal plus.

A Crate Diggers’ Collection of Rare Soul smartly drafts a smattering of ringers and immediately taps into a cornerstone of the style. Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” was issued posthumously by Atco in ’68 both as a single and on The Immortal Otis Redding. Oft covered and sampled as it features the confidence, precision, and verve of Otis, Booker T & the MGs, and the Memphis Horns, there’s simply no substitute for the original.

Another stone beast is ’66’s deep and slow groover “You Put Something on Me” by Don Covay & the Goodtimers. A somewhat slept-on soul figure both at the time and hence, akin to the majority of the artists on this set Covay was recorded by Atlantic, but like “Sookie Sookie” before and “Somebody’s Got to Love You” after it, “You Put Something on Me” failed to chart, which is difficult to fathom since it pairs with “Hard to Handle” as the best track on this set’s first side.

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