Outside the Honky Tonk Dream Syndicate, Vol. 6

featuring John Lee Hooker, the San Lucas Band, and the Master Musicians of Jajouka

Hey guys! I still write these! Apologies for such a long delay. This most recent Beloved transmission was one of my favorites so far, listening to it front to back just made me so happy I get to do this show, and I wasn’t going to let myself get away with not writing anything about it. Let’s get on with it!

Milford Graves - Grand Unification

Milford Graves wasn’t the first free jazz artist I listened to, but he’s definitely one of the ones who had the greatest impact on me as a listener. The multifacetedness of his creative practice, his studies of heart rhythms and martial arts, all of that taught me how much bigger this music is than just free-form improvisation. The documentary on his life, Full Mantis, is easily one of my favorite music documentaries. The footage of him performing at a school for autistic children in Japan will stick with me forever. This is the opening track from Grand Unification, his first solo percussion album. It’s the sound of Graves completely in his element as a rhythmic scientist. The album cover is a photo of Graves surrounded by various different drums, and I imagine Graves as a painter with all sorts of different materials, bringing them all together on a sound canvas. This is living, breathing action music.

John Lee Hooker - Pouring Down Rain

John Lee Hooker is one of those artists I could listen to forever. Just a perfect guitar sound and a perfect sense of groove. Hooker was a master of minimalism, someone who could pick out the most essential driving elements of blues music and zero in on them with true precision. This track is one of his heaviest, and the guitar cuts like a buzzsaw. It’s just him and guitarist Eddie Kirkland on the track, but it’s impossible to listen and not get swept up by Hooker’s sound entirely. The plunking of Hooker and Kirkland’s guitars definitely gives off the feeling of rain splashing off the gutter. It would make an interesting companion to Derek Bailey and Min Tanaka’s Rain Dance album, a favorite of mine.

Mofu people of the Zob village - Walay Mépli Sla

One of my greatest musical obsessions is the Ocora label, one of the largest collections of ethnographic music I can think of. Hearing this music from Jon Hassell was apparently the impetus for Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts album, and Carl Stone mentioned them to me as an influence when I interviewed him a while back. It would be tough to pick favorites, but the Cameroun: Flûtes des Monts Mandara album may very well be the diamond of the whole collection. The album focuses on flute music from the region of Cameroon surrounding the Mandara mountain range, and it covers a wide range of sounds. This track, for instance, uses instruments that sound closer to horns than flutes. The horns weave in and out of each other beautifully, and it’s a wonderful piece of collective improvisation. You can hear the roots of both Albert Ayler and contemporary minimal music here.

Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band - Peon

There’s really been enough written about Captain Beefheart at this point - I feel like I’ve seen at least a million different videos from YouTube music theory dweebs with names like “this terrible sounding album will melt your brains!!!.” So forgive me for skimping a bit on the contextual info here - I don’t think Mr. Van Vliet is really on this track anyway. This is from the colorfully titled Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which might be my personal favorite Beefheart record. It’s (I believe) a solo guitar track from Zoot Horn Rollo, whose name will never not make me think of that one I Think You Should Leave skit with Tim Heidecker. It’s a beautifully angular little number, one that sounds sort of like a fandango being wrung through a meat grinder. And this is an obvious observation but you can definitely hear the roots of the guitar style that folks like Henry Kaiser would later pioneer. Dig it!

The San Lucas Band - Chufa (The Chuj)

This record is a trip. It was originally issued as part of an ethnographic series on ABC under the title Music of Guatemala, but it’s all the work of one group of musicians, The San Lucas Band, a Mayan brass band who recorded a very peculiar mixture of funeral music and contemporary popular songs. The horns are dissonant, the harmonic content is unconventional, the violin playing is as scratchy as it could be, and the percussion feels less rhythmic and more designed to puncture the rest of the tunes. The album apparently has a cult reputation, with the late, great Jon Hassell and Charlie Haden among its fans, and it was only just reissued for the first time. Something about the way the music comes together in spite of its eccentricities is really beautiful and moving to me.

Roscoe Mitchell - The Little Suite

This is the centerpiece of Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound LP, which, if I’m not mistaken, might be the first ever album to come out of the AACM. Either way, it’s one of the most legendary and pivotal free jazz albums there is - it’s really difficult for me to imagine the later achievements of the 70s loft era without this album’s influence. This record features the three earliest members of what would later become the Art Ensemble of Chicago - Mitchell, trumpet player Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors - alongside percussionist Alvin Fielder, a giant of the avant garde, undersung tenor saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre. Rounding out the sextet is Lester Lashley on trombone and cello, whom I somehow hadn’t heard of until I sat down to write this; he only has three other credits to his name. This piece is driven by Fielder’s powerhouse drumming and Bowie’s harmonica, which foreshadows the barrage of tiny instruments that would help define the Art Ensemble’s sound. As a side note, I always felt there should be way more avant-garde jazz harmonica records - the only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Kaoru Abe’s Akashiya no Ame ga Yamu-toki, which is another one of my all time favorites. Why should Toots Theilemans have all the fun?

What I love about this early era of the AACM - which I associate with recordings from the 60s/early 70s on labels like Delmark and Actuel - is that it isn’t just avant-garde in the sense that it’s some guy making a lot of noise on the saxophone. There’s a real touch of danger to what Roscoe and company are doing here, and it feels like the music could just explode at any moment, even in the quieter moments. It’s easy to look at the inclusion of the harmonica as just a bit of playful silliness, but it puts the ensemble in the direct lineage of blues traditions. Considering how shocking this music must have been to jazz listeners - or any listeners - when it first came out, that’s an incredibly bold and powerful thing; “Ancient to the Future,” as the Arts Ensemble would say. I had the pleasure of seeing Roscoe Mitchell perform surrounded by an exhibition of his paintings (which fucking rule) at Corbett vs. Dempsey a while back, and he’s still operating on a whole other wavelength. 

Jin Hi Kim & Eugene Chadbourne - Howdy Partner

Jin Hi Kim plays the komungo, a Korean zither-like instrument generally associated with Sanjo music, and helped introduce the instrument to American avant-garde music. Sanjo generally has a wavering pitch and shifting rhythmic elements, so it’s really fascinating to hear elements of this music in an avant-garde context. This track is taken from the album KomunGuitar, which features Kim playing with a true holy grail of avant-garde guitar players, including Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser (both of whom make frequent cameos in this newsletter), Elliott Sharp, David First and German weirdo extraordinaire Hans Reichel. On “Howdy Partner,” she’s accompanied by Eugene Chadbourne, who I think of as the great jester of the American free improv scene. Chadbourne’s music is a heavily abstracted version of country music that often devolves into free-form fuckery. It sounds like he’s taking the piss out of country, and he definitely is taking the piss out of American exceptionalism (he has an album titled Jesse Helms Busted With Pornography), but his approach to country music clearly comes from a place of reverence. Kim’s komungo makes a perfect low-register counterpoint to Chadbourne’s banjo plucking; her playing is tight and controlled but also energetic and driving. This music is rich with the spirit of mutual discovery that, to me, defines great improvised music.

Taoist Priests of Hsinchu - Ballad of the Skeletons

This is from a LP of Taoist ritual music from Taiwan, released on the venerable Lyrichord label. It was recorded by John Levy, a fascinating figure - a British mystic born into a rich aristocratic family who, later in his life, became a prolific musicologist. His recordings document musical traditions from China, India and Korea, and they’re among my favorite ethnographic recordings. One of the frustrations of listening to this music is that it’s often far more difficult to find information about the musicians who made the recordings than the musicologists who recorded them. It should be pretty obvious at this point that ethnomusicology is, in many ways, inextricable from the colonial mentality that birthed it, and the ideal would be artists recording themselves on their own terms. I think the internet has helped level that playing field to some extent, but unfortunately if you want to engage with recordings of musical heritage, you have to confront this problem. I don’t think that’s any reason to not engage at all, though - this is extremely important music that everyone would benefit from listening to. This track is full of clattering percussion (I’ve been trying to figure out the name of the cymbal that makes those staccato sounds for ages - you can also hear it right at the very beginning of this radio show, if anyone wants to help me) and piercing reed instruments. It’s a sound that could cut through just about everything - it lives up to the name “Ballad of the Skeletons,” which is high praise. 

Ragnar Johnson & Jessica Mayer - Kureh

This is another ethnographic recording, taken from the most recent in a series of releases by the Ideologic Organ label documenting the musical traditions of Papua New Guinea. This is ritual music performed on the jaw harp, one of my favorite instruments. It sounds particularly stunning when used in a trance music context such as this - there are many comparable examples from rural central Asian music. Not much to say here, the music speaks for itself. 

Oorjak Hunashtaar-ool - Brat Moy, Spoyu Borban

I used to intern at Smithsonian Folkways back in the day, and I discovered a lot of incredible music from that experience (there’s a lot of great weird electronic stuff on that label!). One of the albums I discovered during that time was Tuva, Among the Spirits, which presents vocal music from the Tuva and Sakha regions of Russia alongside nature recordings, and it blew my fucking mind. I just couldn’t comprehend that this kind of singing was possible; this was long before I knew anything about experimental music, among other things. This track is from a compilation originally released on Melodiya, the state label of the Soviet Union. I wasn’t aware the official Soviet state label was such an incredible resource for ethnographic recordings until relatively recently, but it is, especially for central Asian musical traditions that are hard to find documentation of otherwise. It was reissued by the good folks at Dust-to-Digital, and it’s probably my favorite album of this music. To this day this is still just one of the most stunning examples of overtone singing I have yet to hear. Once again, the music speaks for itself. 

James Brown - I Don’t Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I’ll Get It Myself)

Oh, James Brown. It’s hard to think of a great musician who was more of a piece of shit than the Godfather, but at the same time it’s hard to think of anyone who made better music at the same time. James Brown was every bit as much of a radical game-changing visionary genius as Coltrane, Miles, Xenakis, you name it. He took the elements of the music that he came up with and rearranged them into something that must have sent a shockwave through the system in the late 60s/early 70s, and he completely transformed music as a whole in the process. There’s funk records out there for pretty much every day of every year of the 70s, but James Brown is still his own musical planet to me. This might be my personal favorite James Brown track, though that’s a pretty arbitrary distinction. The way this thing bulldozes through the gate and just pummels you with its energy, which it keeps up for ten minutes that genuinely feel like four, is absolutely electrifying.

Ornette Coleman & The Master Musicians of Jajouka - Midnight Sunrise 

I believe I learned about the Master Musicians of Jajouka in the same “best alternative albums of the 60s” article that introduced me to Gamelan. I listened to some of the Pipes of Pan album and had no idea what the fuck I was listening to, but over the years I grew to love shrill, high pitched free-reed instruments and terrifying, thunderous percussion. Behind the somewhat bizarre and orientalist marketing and the whole Brian Jones thing is some of the most powerful trance-inducing music there is. Learning that Ornette Coleman was associated with them only sealed the deal for me. This is the last track from the Dancing In Your Head LP, which was Ornette’s first foray into free-form funk music. Most of the album is taken up by the two-part “Theme From a Symphony,” but then at the very end “Midnight Sunrise” is there. It was recorded almost four years before the rest of the album and has nothing to do with the other two tracks, which is such a power move. Listening to Ornette jam with the Master Musicians is a beautiful thing (he’s also joined by Robert Palmer from 60s weirdos The Insect Trust on clarinet). He clearly had such a deep understanding of the music and where they were coming from.