I’m sure you all know about Fleetwood Mac‘s roots as a blues band, led by the ax-work of the talented, troubled Peter Green. I’ve got a box set of early Fleetwood Mac that is loaded with da blooz, and from what I can tell, it’s actually well done. Bluestoneologists like HVB will sure have a better read on early Mac’s value, but the band could jam. My box set even includes two albums worth of them jamming with Chicago blues greats, but not being the world’s greatest appreciator of Chicago blues, I’ve chosed this long jam for our JAMuary celebration instead. It’s got one of those funny blues song titles that always appeal to me.
I hope you dig this, and I hope this jam opens up some discussion on what constitutes a kicking blues jam, what the Brits brought to the blues that may have actually been helpful to keeping the spirit alive, and so forth.
The wisdom here in The Hall continues to amaze. In the early days I was intimidated but realized over time that although there are many here much more knowledgeable than I, it was the collective wisdom that was so daunting and impressive.
It is in that spirit that I want to launch a new regular feature that is not only for the people but by the people.
The concept is simple. This is a place to seek specific wisdom from the collective intelligence. These are not to be philosophical queries but rather to seek advice and wisdom on specific rock questions. I see it most used as a place to seek listening and purchasing recommendations.
I will start with a very simple request, one which may spark lengthy conversation, or not, but will hopefully illicit some sage advice.
The initial goal of this thread is to offer the opportunity for folks to ask similar questions and receive similar advice. The topic shouldn’t necessarily focus just on my topic.
Soooo. Here’s the question I would like to ask The Orockle. Continue reading »
Back in my younger days, it took me a long time to warm up to more traditional acoustic jazz, even after being hooked on Bitches Brew-era fusion. My problems centered around the ride cymbal-centered drumming common in pre-1969 jazz and the stiff formality of sequential soloing broken by arranged ensemble pieces. Of course these were pinhead impressions based on my very limited exposure to the wide variety of jazz available, but that’s how I saw things.
Pharoah Sanders’ Karma changed all that. This large ensemble jam based on thematic material from Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, provided the gateway to stronger, more dangerous forms of jazz. It acclimated me to traditional jazz approaches to drumming and its acoustic instrumentation cured me of my adolescent aversion to non-electric jazz. Although featuring some loose arrangement details, such as the flute carrying the basic theme through long sections of Pharoah’s soloing, the epic magnitude of the piece, and the floating nature of the soloist versus the accompaniment, makes it a fine JAMuary candidate. Don’t miss the double double-basses; Lonnie Liston-Smith’s piano; and the thick broth of french horn, flute, and various drummers/percussionists. Finally, Leon Thomas’ vocal is the jazz vocal for folks that don’t like jazz vocals: a jammin’ bit of late-’60s ingenuousness sitting comfortably in the ensemble, extending and, in some sense, rectifying Coltrane’s singing on A Love Supreme.
The album consisted of two pieces, “The Creator Has a Master Plan” and “Colors.” The former, included here, originally spanned a side and a half with a transitional fade to get from side A to side B. When first purchased on CD, I was very disappointed to find that MCA had skipped the expense of revisiting the master tape to restore the continuous take. Fortunately, they corrected this transgression on this subsequent improved quality release.
They’re only human. Great musicians can fall back on signature sounds, or a motif, as readily as any hack whose run out of ideas while jamming in the basement. As a “now playing” example got me thinking, whether by design or default, Ornette Coleman, on “The Ark,” from from his excellent Town Hall, 1962 can’t help but play the 4-note theme that’s best known from his electric free-jazz breakthrough “Dancing in Your Head.” Go back to the earliest Coleman recordings and you’ll hear him play that 4-or-so-note run. That’s the essence of Ornette Coleman, his Colemanessence, if you will. All the other millions of free notes he and his bandmates have played for the last 50-plus years might be meaningless to all but hardcore jazz explorers like our very own “Boom Boom” Buskirk if not for our ability to trace – and cling onto – the development and recurrence of that 4-note motif.
Then I got to thinking, Pete Townshend was the first rock musician that came to mind who had such a distinctive motif. For him I’d say it’s the suspended fourth he uses with his chords. It’s something he must have picked up from Phil Spector arrangements, which often hinge on the suspended fourth note (eg, “Then He Kissed Me”), and it’s there in early Who songs like “I’m a Boy,” eventually serving as the driving force in the entire Tommy album and, with a twist, Quadrophenia. As much as his windmill power chording, Townshend’s reliance on the suspended fourth chord is his signature sound.
Can you identify signature sounds that best define the works of other musicians? I don’t mean something as broad and obvious and Bo Diddley and his beat but something more subtle that is prevalent and even expected in the sounds this musician creates. Without actual sound samples to post, just point to a part of a well-known song that represents that artist’s signature sound.
Today’s JAMuary entry comes courtesy of Townsman “Boom Boom” dbuskirk. I’ll let him tell you about it. As a special treat, he’s spread jam on both sides of the toast: JAMuary’s second double shot in as many days! (Don’t get spoiled!)
Don “Sugarcane” Harris has been on my front burner in recent years, particularly the eight records he recorded for the MPS label back in the 1970s. Sugarcane Harris, who died in 1999 at the age of 61, had an odd career trajectory. He started in the 1950s as half of the duo Don & Dewey, who recorded gritty doo-wop styled tunes for the Specialty label. Together they wrote and recorded the garage rock classic “Farmer John” and “Leaving It All Up To You,” which I first knew as the 1974 Donnie & Marie remake. During the ’60s, L.A.- based Don was in bandleader Johnny Otis‘ stable, singing and playing in Otis’ Revue on what became his trademark axe, the electric violin. However Sugarcane is probably best remembered by rock fans when he guested on some of the Zappa‘s post-Mothers records, 1969’s Hots Rats and 1970’s Chunga’s Revenge (that’s his violin solo on “Willie The Pimp”).
Anyway, without the Zappa connection I doubt Sugarcane would have ended up in the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1971, playing a set featuring European prog and jazz musicians, including Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt on drums, Volker Kriegel on guitar (from vibist Dave Pike’s group), experimentalist Wolfgang Dauner on keyboards, and bassist Neville Whitehead, like Wyatt also out of the Canterbury prog scene.
“Every word of it is true” Sugarcane swears in the introduction of the 12-minute “Where’s My Sunshine,” from Sugarcane’s Got The Blues. Actually there are only seven words in the song (maybe nine if you count “Oh yeah”), but there’s a conviction in everything Sugarcane sings and plays in the song that makes it all seem kinda profound. By dragging this progressive crew back into the blues (and a pretty unusual one too, I’ll leave the more schooled folks here to figure out exactly what time the song is in) Sugarcane stirs this mixture of rock, jazz, soul, and blues into one of those cross-cultural exchanges that gave rock and roll its initial kick.
Then again, for a sizable percentage of rock fans the sound of the electric violin is akin to listening to a cat being skinned, bringing up bad flashbacks of Kansas and Jean Luc Ponty. But for me there is something captivating about this recording, perhaps Sugarcane’s most cohesive, that has made this propulsive track a go-to record when I’m driving by myself. If only Phish sounded more like this.
In my first post about Pub Rock I said that one of the things it was about was the conversation between black and white musical styles. It was also about the musical conversation between the US and the UK.
The Tally Ho pub
The British fascination with American roots music is well-documented, and in the early ’70s the influence of The Band, The Byrds/Burritos, and CS&N was especially important for the bands that unwittingly started the Pub Rock “movement” by playing off nights at the Tally Ho in London.
I had previously known Bees Make Honey and Eggs Over Easy only by name, but I recently acquired the only albums released by these bands that were there at the inception of that scene in the early ’70s and then disappeared into obscurity.
Easy does it
Everyone knows (at least everyone who might visit RTH regularly knows) that Elvis Costello was backed on his first Pub Rockish album by members of expatriate American band Clover. But it was another American band called Eggs Over Easy that started it all. They had been brought over to record an album in London by Chas Chandler, former Animals bassist and discoverer of Hendrix, in late 1970.
They recorded an album that was never released, jump-started the scene by convincing the Tally Ho to host rock bands on Monday nights, hung around for a year or so, and then with work visas expired went back across the Atlantic, eventually getting signed by A&M and re-recording their material in Arizona with Link Wray producing for an album that would be released in 1972 as Good ‘N’ Cheap.
Would you have them any other way?
A trio of singer-songwriters who traded off on guitar, bass, and piano – Jack O’Hara, Austin DeLone, and Brien Hopkins – the Eggs had a much mellower sound than you might expect. Pub Rock later became altogether rowdier with bands like Dr. Feelgood, but there was always a side of it that was more laid-back, leaning towards country/folk rather than R&B. Early Brinsley Schwarz was very much in this mode. Here’s a song with an acoustic feel that would not have sounded out of place on a Poco album:
Here’s one that gives more of a sense of what the band might have sounded like in a pub playing rockin’ good-time music for people who just want to have a beer and a laugh:
But the band never got anywhere. They knocked around for the rest of the 70s, recorded more material, some of which got released (for example the semi-legendary “I’m Gonna Put a Bar in the Back of My Car (And Drive Myself to Drink)”, included here as a bonus track), but by the time they broke up in 1981 the pub rock scene they inadvertently initiated had already been overtaken by punk.
