Kip Hanrahan ‎– 'Coup De Tête' (American Clavé)

Coup De Tête is an odd one, and a record eclipsed by its followup, Desire Develops an Edge, if only because the latter got mentioned in The Wire magazine's list of '100 Records That Set the World on Fire'. It's hard to imagine anything about this setting the world on fire, though it's a hell of an interesting stab at bringing together a bunch of avant-leaning New York musicians and trying to create a new kind of fusion. Percussion is the main game here, with most tracks being built around Hanrahan and two or three other musicians on bongos, congas, and iya (plus Anton Fier usualy on trap drums). Both sides end with a drum-free cover version - Marguerite Duras' 'India Song' on side 1 (sung by a throaty Carla Bley) and Teo Macero's 'Heart on My Sleeve' to end the whole album (with Macero himself as guest). While listening to this you have to read the liner notes to follow who plays on what, as there's a bunch of big names almost hidden. Guitar duties are mostly Arto Lindsay but Fred Frith makes an appearance; their gutsy attacks are mixed quite low, almost inperceptible at times, underneath the percussion, but I think that was the right decision. Hanrahan is the wild card - when he sings, it's more like an earnest spoken-word chant, and as the record goes on he starts to disappear from it. He's really the producer, composer and Svengali here, more than he is an active musician, and some of the best tracks don't feature him at all. The standout is 'This Night Comes Out of Both of Us', featuring Lisa Herman (last heard on Kew. Rhone) and Bill Laswell's usual weird dub farts; somehow the percussion layers make this into a really dark, crisp, electric forest which sounds completely striking today, 36 years later. Herman's vocals are breathy and mysterious, getting into sexually explicit lyrics in 'A Lover Divides Time (To Hear How It Sounds)'. I've always really liked this record because it's a weird oddball - it feels like an environment where Hanrahan gave just enough structure to let the musicians really explore while sticking to a vision. It feels like a weird take on the idea of 'world music' while also having traces of rock and a lot of jazz but somehow not sounding like any of the above, which I guess is the best thing one could hope for from the idea of 'fusion' anyway. I don't think there's a lot of people repping Kip Hanrahan records in 2017 which means you can probably find them fairly cheap (if at all) and this and the follow-up are certainly worth your time -a rare case of a supergroup that works.

Miles Davis - 'Live-Evil' (Columbia)

It's to the other side of Miles Davis now, with this record proclaiming it's inner evil, or at least un-goodness.  But Live-Evil is just a palindrome, a title to reflect the dark-tinged yet inevitably circular musings found on these four sides.  There's slightly different personel on different cuts but the liner notes are written in a long, horizontal format that makes it too much effort for me to sort it out.  But all the titans are here - McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Airto Moreira, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. Here's what's really different from Sketches of Spain - this is rock music, with an aggressive rhythm section (drums are either William Cobham or Jack deJohnette; Michael Henderson, Ron Carter or Dave Holland on bass).  And you know what, Henderson's rockmonotony on 'What I Say' actually takes the cake over the more nuanced bass playing of the bigger names.  This lets Davis and later McLaughlin lay more flabbergasting solos without too much discordance.  It's the dictionary-definition of fusion, but it creeps close to the Dark Side without ever fully leaping in.  The fidelity is hot and I've always preferred this to Bitches Brew though both have that strong, surging riff to start off ('Sivad' here, which lays it on thick and lets the piece swell into a juggernaut, when you can actually feel restraint leaking out of the grooves).  We get solos galore here - deJohnette's lengthy, plodding one on side two is so brightly recorded that it really soaks into the air, and when Jarrett brings in the funky keys to reprise the theme, all is right in the world.  Jarrett also kills it on 'Funky Tonk', with a long, shimmering section of just he and Moreira, which burns like a warm winter radiator.  These are the most clichéd passages - the ones that rely on groove, momentum, and rhythm like we expect a jazz-fusion record to - but since it's records like this that define the genre, it all gets a pass.  But at it's most inventive, Live-Evil croaks, creaks and flounders under it's own rhythmic stress, like a lumbering behemoth of madness.  When Miles tries to cool it off - 'Little Church' and 'Nem un Talvez', for example - the elegiac tones just set up more distrust when the band comes back in.  But it's these moments of respite that make Live-Evil so complete, and such an oddball mishmash of live sessions.  It flows, and it's cohesive, despite being mashed together from different sessions and with different personnel.  Two LPs is a lot, and by the end of side 4, which is dominated by the lengthy 'Inamorata', I'm beached.  It's a record as pregnant with ideas as the fertile African goddess on the cover, and all of the swampy electric licks really create a beast that rages out of control.

Art Ensemble of Chicago - 'Live at Mandel Hall' (Delmark)

Hey everyone, the kids have come home! Back in the town where they belong, and on the label where they probably belong too. And just look what they've learned from their lengthy Euro residency! This is the 8th consecutive Art Ensemble album I've listened to in a row, and the second double live album, but it still sounds fresh. I feel my love of All Things AACM growing with every recorded moment. See, this is the first AEoC I ever heard, tho on the CD format (which I believe concatenated this one long performance together as one 75-minute track). On vinyl things can open up and breathe a bit, though there are some awkward pauses in the middle of the jams, when you have to change records in the middle of a squaking horn freakout. But it's all here, pretty much. Almost every trick and idea we've heard in the Paris recordings comes back at some point in this long improvised melee. The weird hulking vocals are there, some hypnotic traditional African percussion, and some proper jazz as well. It's all so dense, yet it feels light as air. By the time the record is over, it's like it never even happened. And even a slight warpage on the outer regions of plate #2 can't stop me from being totally amazed at music this 'of the moment' - music that has evacuated my brain already and making me struggle to describe it, just minutes after it's been experienced. So I'm going to cop out on this one, figuring I deserve it by now.

Art Ensemble of Chicago - 'Live in Paris' (Get Back)

Wikipedia incorrectly reports that Don Moye plays on this, which is an easy guess to make since this came out in '74, but the recording is from '69 in pre-Famoudou Paris; I'll stand by the liner notes. But more confusing is the essay in the gatefold, which is from the late 70s so it refers to events that haven't happened yet when this music was being made. Also I should note that my cover is slightly different than this as the word "Live" is actually in grey, and it says "Live in Paris" and the Affinity logo isn't in the bottom right. A beautiful black gatefold with four black sides of great black music - about 100 minutes of it! The first record is "Oh Strange", supposedly a Jarman/Bowie tune though it sounds like a group improvisation if I've ever heard one. It's long and sprawling and it changes a lot but has some absolutely jaw-dropping moments of groupthump. At one point near the end of the second side the band shifts into a detuned, strummy banjo-led bit but instead of referencing some American folk music or country lineage, it's a warped abstracted soundworld. If you told me it was some cassette from the corners of the American underground avant/noise scene of maybe 3, 4 years ago, I would have no reason to doubt you. This prescience is evident at all points of the piece but it sounds most 'current' here; clearly, the rest of the world is still catching up to these guys. The second LP is "Bon Voyage", penned by Bowie, which explodes with a drumset-led freeform freakout. I assume the drums are being played by Malachi Favors though we also hear bass and marimba or vibes or something pulsing underneath. Whoever's doing it is a madman, exploding in little shouts with a rampant nervousness that drives the horns to accelerate towards the sun. Bowie is seriously one of the most expressive trumpet players ever, even if he's just shooting flutters to the winds - they feel so human, and so warm, that they bring a dynamic basis to the colder moments. When it finally starts to settle down we get a really melodic, repetetive trance and then special guest Fontella Bass, aka Mrs. Lester Bowie, chants with the rest of 'em. This record really sounds 'live'; great fidelity, but you can hear the room and feel the energy of the audience (Ils ont été perplexe, non?). I don't mind the fadeouts at the ends of sides 1 and 3 either - it's almost necessary to have a breather in the middle of these dense pillars. Listened to chronologically (by recording date, not release) it's a nice release after all the carefully calculated space on the last couple of records. Some might decry that they've moved into a more traditional free jazz area here, but there's still so much depth and sensitivity in their playing that's more like they moved free jazz into their area.

Amon Düül II - 'Dance of the Lemmings' (United Artists)

Sometimes I think 1971 was a high point in the cultural ooze, though I'm fully aware that we always fetishize the impossible, and this blogspotter was not yet alive so I guess I'm guilty as charged. Maybe '71 smelled really bad or everyone was itchy, but I think there was something good in the water because first-rate records and films kept shooting out like inchoate meteors. We've had to skip Yeti and jump to Amon Düül II's masterpiece, Dance of the Lemmings. The band is honed down to only four people (since Phallus Dei's covershot suggests it was once quite the party) and they've never been further away from their roots (see our review of This is Amon Düül for more on that). Side 1 is given to the 'Syntelman's March of the Roaring Seventies' suite, and the Krautbuzz rarely has hit peaks like this. 'Pull Down your Mask' is just one of the four parts but the one most memorable for its haunting creepy vocals.  Until the end, it's relatively genteel and clean-sounding, yet still trippy, psychedelic, and whathaveyou.  At some point in my salad days I figured out that just turning on distortion and volume does not alone make music 'heavy'; weight comes from the spaces between the notes, the timings, and that which cannot by automated.  I think 'Syntelman's March of the Roaring Seventies' taught me the same thing about psychedelic music.  It's postively barren and sparse when compared to today's hordes of knob-turning  noise kiddies,  but more 10th dimensional and mindbending than most 'psychedelic' dross.   And it's a bad trip, indeed.   It's like the band has reinvented itself from  prog nerdlers into utter bummermongers, and nothing could be more perfect to usher in the decade of bad vibes that was to follow. Even the back cover, with scary goat-skull-tree-man on a comfy sofa, screams 'stay the fuck away'. And the scythe-wielding Amon Düül logo is rendered in a way that would make even the most hardened suburban metalheads skip a breath and force out a "cool". But can they keep it up over the course of a double album? Of course they can, and they do, and it's the second side where we get the walls of burning solder, sawing folk fiddles and klassic kosmische edges.  Plus, for a few bars they kick this perfect hip-hop beat.   The third side is a soundtrack that is obv. more improvised than the first half but still has some insane movement.  There's a lot of piano and some swell bass drones; it all feels a bit edited together, but that's okay cause I'm not a purist about those things.  This may be the closest to 'jazz' we've seen from AD2, though it's really space-jazz.   Bonus points for the records being split into sides 1+4, and 2+3 -- a testament to the olden days of those record flipping contraptions.  I believe we could press a 2xLP like that today and call it a "throwback".  Side four brings us back to the 'songs'.  This side is instrumental, in the classic rock rifftastic arterial way.  Some weird editing at play:  halfway through, one track fades out on a flange-heavy drumbeat and then after a moment of silence, fades back in with the same beat.   A bit of conceptual brilliance or the only way to cover a mistake?  Also, is it just a bit stereotypical to make side 3 your "extended jam" side and return to songs at the end?  Though maybe this defined the trend.  I feel like I should say something about lemmings, who are thought of in popular culture as suicide-prone little creatures and thus an appropriate metaphor for the dark vibes of this album.  But actually, lemmings have no such inclinations  - this is just some murderous lies spread by the Disney corporation.  And I've also made it through this whole review without mentioning the amazing spaceship gatefold, complete with primitive PDA and space-elephant.

A Certain Ratio - 'To Each...' (Factory)

Source: Ross, of course, 22 May 2002 for a couple bucks.

Another gatefold, though I'm not so down with the paintings (by Ann); Peter Christopherson
is credited with 'Cover co-ordination' so hooray for that. These moody Mancunians went to New Jersey to record this and maybe this setting is what pumped a little American disco life into their veins. The bass and clattery drums drive the songs, which to be honest lack a bit in the songwriting department. Things get a bit Seinfeld and there's some porn guitar, but the vocals remind you that this is a record from a Manchester band in 1980. Always gotta love the slight fascist overtones on these things, both in the band name and the weird photo of uniformed men surrounded by red borders (Sleazy's co-ordination again!). This is a great record to listen to if you live in the North, wear mostly black, and have your own club night where you don't play anything made after 1981 except for 'Da Da Da' by Trio. Certainly the long Kraftwerky moments are to be appreciated but you don't know for sure because they aren't as direct as you'd like. A Certain Ratio are probably one of the most interesting 'big' bands from this era but I never completely clicked with them- maybe it's too funky or maybe this was just a consolation prize cause I don't have any Crispy Ambulance albums.