Jad Fair & Kramer - 'Roll Out the Barrel' (Shimmy-Disc)

Recently, Jad Fair released a 99-song CD set called Beautiful Songs, a career retrospective. That's a pretty apt title, as both words seem to describe the man's output: beauty is a strange one, his not a traditional notion of it by any means, but nonetheless evident in his naive, gentle subject matter and constructed idiot-savant delivery. And "songs" indeed, for even in Half Japanese's most frantic and anti-melodic early work, a dedication to songcraft can still be heard. This collaboration with Kramer hails from 1988 and it's an often overlooked record, at least by me - its been on my shelf since I was in high school but I rarely give it a spin. It's a strong collection, though, as Kramer uses Fair's songs as a framework on which to hang various production and arrangement techniques. These are sometimes spooky and ethereal; he mostly avoids Galaxie 500 reverb on Fair's voice, but Don Fleming's guitar playing is atmospheric and searing on cuts like 'Bird of Prey', 'Best Left Unsaid', and 'When Is She Coming'. Other tracks are a surreal cornucopia of sound techniques, often deconstructing cover versions in that Shockabilly manner. This is around the time Bongwater was releasing Too Much Sleep and that same style of kitchen-sink addition is evident in how these are put together; and honestly, listening to Kramer's most recent release The Brill Building, as tough as I found it to get through, his approach hasn't really changed. Roll Out the Barrel, while diverse and curious, is never slick; even more clean electronic-tinged songs, such as 'Better Safe than Sorry', support rather than overpower Fair's tenor wails. The covers are possibly meat to be ironic - 'Help!', 'On the Sunny Side of the Street' - and the Penn Jilette-assisted 'Twist and Shout' and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' are all pretty great. I fear that Jad Fair's presence might push this into 'novelty music' territory for many, who would then overlook what's a great collection of late 80's art-rock. Despite being NYC-based for so long, the Shimmy-Disc scene sounds so different now from other avant-leaning artists from that place and time, though they were all part of the same gang. Now that we've gone through a few iterations of the hip ebb and flow around song-based work from NYC (with Thurston Moore somehow remaining central to so much of it, present here too) this feels strangely contemporary in the post-everything era, or whatever a more educated cultural commentator would view the 2013 soundworld. My point: blow the dust off this and enjoy it as much as I just did.

Albert Ayler - 'Nuits de la Fondation Maeght vol. 1' (Shandar)

This is one of the prides of my collection, if I have to look at it as a collection (a habit I all-too-often slip into) -- a mint condition copy of the first ever release on the Shandar label, truly one of the greatest labels of all-time. And the discography page online claims that this recording is Albert Ayler's last ever concert. I don't know if that's true - if so, I'm a bit surprised that the music stays so close to the jazz idiom and away from the fusion rock of his last studio work -- but it's a lovely sounding document, with a very different band from what we heard last (which was four years prior). Cal Cobbs (here listed as Call Cobbs) plays piano and his presence is quite strong. His style of long, elliptical runs suggests that he is definitely the pianist heard on 'Angels', a track from the Live in Greenwich Village discs. Allen Blairman is a bit more rigid than either Sunny Murray or Beaver Harris but he infuses the longer tracks with a momentum that can almost be seen as nervousness. Who knows what was going through Albert's head at this point? He certainly has energy. 'Spirits' has him zigzagging all over the map, switching to soprano at points (I think). Cobbs pretty much sticks to a chordal progression underneath most of the quarter-hour we hear it, and those chords sound like they come from another piece. But by this point, Ayler's compositions have all blended into one another and since the titles are all so similar and repetitive it suggests that he's left us one giant body of work instead of a bunch of individual compositions. I think Ayler peaked around 66/67 with the band we heard on the last two releases - I'm a bit biased towards the violin but also it had a more unique character to it. The Blairman/Steve Tintweiss rhythm section here is more rooted in Sonny Rollins and post-bop styles, and while this gives Ayler a grounding it lacks the utter mindfuckery of the marching-band/Negro spritual style he was doing a few years earlier. I guess that's what is the most disappointing about Ayler's last recordings - not that he tapered in ability or vision, but the folk elements were gone (or at least buried, most likely digested and reassimilated into something else). That's not to say that Nuits de la Fondation Maeght isn't great - it's definitely a great great jazz record, but it's only an average Albert Ayler record. But even though Ayler left us so many documents of his work, it still wasn't enough. 'Holy Family' on side 2 sounds exuberant and joyful, but very much a jazz piece. I guess I miss a trumpet to bounce off Ayler's explorations, and the rhythm section really does hold things down a bit. 'Spirits Rejoice' at the end is a familiar theme made beautiful by Cobbs' twinkling, and it's played fairly straight here, a ballad that continually picks up and breathes life into itself just when it's at the point of expiration. And expiration for Albert's life was to come just a few months after this, so it's nearly impossible to listen to this without some profound feelings, looking to hear symptoms of his troubled life in this version of 'Spirits Rejoice'. I'm not sure that I can actually hear that on this record; in fact, it's the lack of pain on this record that is telltale, if anything.