Filming music is easier than photographing it.
Herman Leonard, one of the greatest music photographers, was accustomed to
capture jazzmen in smokey clubs and venues, where smoke was taken as a direct
emanation of the sound of the instruments. Filming music is easier, as we were
pointing out, since you have both movement and the sonorous aspect of it all.
Having a great film of a performance by a
musician is always so fine. You can see how musicians approach physically their
instruments, how they produce their sounds, and finally many things that
previously, while you were listening to your albums, were up to your
imagination, now are real in front of you, as something your eyes can almost
bite.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Don’t Go
Gentle – A Film About Idles thanks to a small review in a small cinema in
Milano city not far from the train station and the center of the city itself.
It was the fourth and final act of a review featuring movies about Kurt Cobain,
Joy Division and a documentary about the NY city scene. The movies were
introduced by a nice panel discussion held by music journalists, musicians and
other people coming directly from the music business.
Obviously the movie about the Idles was the
most interesting since Idles are the most contemporary musical act between the
ones featured in the review. They tell so much about what can happen to
musicians nowadays, about how they relate to music, to business, to fans and to
themselves, and about the present time.
We are, so, introduced in Bristol, a city open
to otherness through immigration and love for music like reggae and dub since
the 1970s. It’s not a chance that musicians like Tricky, Massive Attack and
Portishead, but also, way before them, The Pop Group, come from this city. Joe
Talbot and his pals started playing for fun and in the end they become
professionals.
This road is filled with mournings, like Talbot
mother’s and son’s deaths, great encounters, like the community revolving
around the band, and obviously great music. The movie is both enojoyable and
strange in a way. It is strange to hear a band in 2020 proclaiming that they
don’t like Pink Floyd as a symbol of progressive rock in general, as an
example.
This is obviously part of an old script, and if
it is thought as useful in introducing Idles’ music, it doesn’t help in
understanding what this music is made of. Possibly Archer’s and the band’s idea
was to let the music talk about itself, focusing all the interest into the
human factor. A winner’s game, since if we all are aware and well known about
post-punk, it would have been useless mimicking Simon Reynolds. A musician is
not a critic.
The movie cover Idles since their beginning
until their first release for Partisan Records with the album Joy as an Act of
Resistance. During this first years they gave life to music that was in a way a
soundtrack for Brexit, problems with immigration, recession and more intimate
topics like the aforementioned mournings, love, friendship and mental health
just to name a few.
Hated by conservatives all around the world,
even by rock fans who in front of them discover to be conservatives – it’s full
and they’re cultivated also by some magazines as such – because of their
‘sloganistic’, or better said anthemic approach to politics, critisiced as a
bunch of white privileged men who try to criticize white privilege itself,
Idles are nonetheless one of the most intriguing band nowadays.
Because of their approach to music, precise as
a razor blade, because of their approach to life, with this attitude made of
bringing to light every possible weak point and made a force out of it, because
of their relationship with fans, that are allowed to feel fragile and open to
each other during meetings and online, they in a way say nothing new in the
realm of the history of music, but say something relevant as far as human being
in the present times.
When Joe Talbot in an interview reported
in the movie says ‘I want to become a better man through music, and so in the
end I want to create better music from it’, these are the exact same words
pronounced decades before by John Coltrane. And if the music is different
stylistically, the importance of this thought is nonetheless that of a person
who want to create a virtous relationship between his art and his life.
The fact that this approach to both reality and
sound is explicit and appreciated is something not completely new but
interesting in a world, that of the art, where we are accustomed to hear things
like “political correctness is impossible to manage because we should erase the
memory of most of the artists in the world because of their behavior towards
other human beings” – think about Picasso and women, or Gaugin and native
Tahitians as good examples.
Far from wanting to create a Police of the
morals through music, Idles and Coltrane, or Idles and other musicians, like
many in the punk and post-punk scenes all around the world, are part of a
history of music and of musicians wanting to create a community to make life
more bearable for its participants. We sould not erase artists, but also we
should not erase the importance of these attemps.
Some time has passed since my last post on this
blog. I haven’t listened to so much free jazz or improvised music in these last
months or so, as long as I’m listening more to post-punk or other genres. Fact
is that the only record I bought issued in 2023 so far is Algiers’ Shook, an
interesting mix of electronics, hip hop, free jazz, soul, blues, dub, all
played with a punk attitude.
Other artists I’m currently listening to are
black midi, a band who plays punk with a progressive attitude – and some hot horns
on it – and Idles, who are possibly the most important band to come out of
Bristol in these last years. Ah, I wanna name also Fontaines DC, at least their
first releases. Obviously all these musicians, along with others as Shame or
Murder Capital – the less interesting to me, since they hide a lack of
concreteness behind Flood production – are part of an interesting revival that
remains such, even if with a lot of personality.
Anyway I can’t find not even such a thing as a
revival right now in free jazz and improvised or experimental music. Obviously
the great ancient musicians are still producing good stuff, but younger
musicians, if there are some, are insanely hidden and I can’t find them. To
tell the truth, some young or ‘new’ people is sending me music. A young guy
from Italy sent me some audio files of what he calls an attempt to actualize
Lettrism through electronics, but the final effect was sloppy and poor.
This is how younger musicians seem to me. But
since I’m planning to write, as I did with Don Cherry, a retrospective on
Anthony Braxton, I think it’s time to take some pause from wild experiments
with a little bit of rock music tinged at various degrees with free jazz, and
so here you’ll find some advices for your purchases. The first band I’ll talk
about diffusely in this post are Algiers, from Atlanta, capital of the Georgia
state.
They are a quartet composed by Franklin James
Fisher (voice, guitar, piano, percussions, cello), Ryan Mahan (bass,
percussions, piano, synthesizers, voice), Lee Tesche (guitar, loops,
percussions, voice), and Matt Tong (drums, percussions, voice). Born as a trio
at the beginning of the 2010s, Algiers are a politically conscious post punk
band who in their career released four albums all under Matador Records.
Shook is possibly the most intriguing release
you’ll find out this year. A shift in the territories of hip hop (Irreversible
Damage) and electronica (Cold World), the music of this album is full of
references to blues and gospel (Green Iris), free jazz (the sample of Nuclear
War from Sun Ra with an electric bass superimposed), funk (I Can’t Stand It),
and some incursions in the territories of punk music (A Good Man, 73%).
With a strong tie to the post-punk coming out
of Bristol at the end of the 1970s as an interesting interview
with Mark Stewart from Pop Group released before the death of the latter
testifies, both as far as sound (as in the song Something Wrong) and as ideals,
but with all the experience coming from decades passed to refine a sound,
Algiers are the perfect act – you’ll find some intriguing live concerts
captured on the internet – for those of you who’ll want to explore new
territories until pure experimentations will come back to us again.
Far from being a music of pure rage, the songs
contained in Shook will lead the listener to an inner voyage and to discover
how creating a community can be the most assertive part of the work of a
musician. The album is, indeed, also full of hosts, from Zack De La Rocha (Rage
Against The Machine) to Big Rube (The Dungeon Family), from Patrick
Shiroishi to Backxwash.
And if the so called post-punk revival started
at the beginning of the new millennium with bands like Interpol, the acclaimed
gurus of these last years are undoubtely the Idles, to whom even a movie,
titled Don’t Go Gentle and directed by Mark Archer that I’ll attend to next
week was dedicated in 2020. The same year Ultra Mono, in my opinion one of
their most focused records, was published by Partisan, a label you’ll want to
deepen as far as catalogue since PJ Harvey signed with them for her new release
this July.
“How d’you like them clichés?” sings Joe Talbot
in Mr Motivator and two things hit you: first, the band makes always the same
music through their records – sometimes with more anger, sometimes more
introspective – but second, it is always good music. Like the Ramones, never
changing their three chords formula, Idles, composed by Talbot on vocals, Adam
Devonshire on bass, Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan on guitars and Jon Beavis on
drums, are able to build incredibly good songs without boring the listener.
And if the previous Joy as an Act of Resistance
(2018) featured a song against toxic masculinity like Samaritans and a
beautiful cover of Solomon Burke’s Cry To Me, the purchase of Ultra Mono (2020)
is mandatory for those who love hear Jamie Cullum (sic!) introducing a punk
song with his piano (Kill Them with Kindness), the violin of Warren Ellis from
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds duelling with Colin Webster’s saxophone (Grounds),
and to end a punk album with a tight and anthemic cover of True Love Will Find
You In The End originally written by Daniel Johnson aptly renamed Danke.
But in general if you are interested in hearing
a band chatted by the likes of Pearl Jam and the rock’n’roll gotha, Idles are
the perfect act for you. Possibly live – they’re adding dates to their rich
list. And if Idles are making everyone come to an agreement, not the same is
possible to say about our next hosts on this blog: black midi. After their
debut Schlagenheim (2019) they were compared to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask
Replica by Steven Edelstone on Paste, and hailed as the next big thing in the
rock industry; black midi in the meantime have released three records different
the one to the other.
Their last album, Hellfire (2022) is a mix of
post-punk played with a progressive approach (interestingly enough, not vice
versa), with one of the singers more into David Thomas than into Don Van Vliet,
and a good dose of horror vacui that can be handled only by expert musicians.
So Geordie Greep (guitar, voice), Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin (guitar, voice),
Cameron Picton (bass, guitar) and Morgan Simpson (drums) have created a concept
album that depicts a dystopian future populating it with bass, guitars and
drums weavings that are raising the bar of the listener expectations.
While we obviously wait for their future
releases, we can report also how part of the reviewers, at least here in Italy,
have tried to bite the brake of enthusiasm underlying the fact that this music
features solutions that in a way are oddly blasé – there are also some
references to some of the classical Decca songwriters with their albums full of
orchestral arrangements – and that Hellfire can be taken to the utmost as a
good alternative to bands like Porcupine Tree with their loose and limp, and
always equal to themselves, records.
Last band I’d like to give you advice about are
Fontaines D.C., a nice group of musicians coming from Dublin and that since
2019, year the band released their first album Dogrel, issued three albums that
are always more and more a mix of pop music and folk influences, with some
clear limitations in the singing – Grian Chatten is great as a punk singer but
pop music requires a different attitude. We won’t talk diffusely about them
since there are no jazz tinges in their music but if you have ever been into
Joy Division and The Clash you’ll for sure have to give these guys a chance.
Post-punk, as Simon Reynolds stressed
enough through his 2010 book Rip It Up and Start Again, was possibly the last
effort, before Slint, Gastr del Sol, June of ’44, Goodspeed! You Black Emperor
and others in the 2000s, to create a music coming from popular basis but open
to contaminations with different elements, from free jazz to avant garde, from
dub to ethnic tinges. It was also a music in opposition to bourgeois and
conservative values. It is not strange this music is living a revival in our
confused times.
Hope you’ll enjoy this music even if it is not
completely bathed in free jazz because it is vital and interesting. I still
remember how much protest letters came to the desk of The Wire after their
interview to Sunn O))), but interestingly enough movie director Jim Jarmusch,
for whom music is important throughout his movies and as part of his creative
process, after using musicians related to the avant garde as The Lounge Lizards
or Mulatu Astatké deepened the relationship of images and sound through the
music of Wu Tang Clan and Boris, showing how overcoming close-mindedness can be
a victory for creativity.
This is also why I’m happy to host these
musicians on my blog. If you want to enlarge your discographies without
completely betraying jazz, but widening its language, these bands are here for
you. They will also help you to live more the present time and its tensions.
Hope in the future they also will be of incitement for younger generations of
free jazz and avant garde players not to loose both wickedness and self
consciousness, commitment and fantasy. It is also a reminder to myself not to
fossilize into a single genre since music is out there and it’s good in every
shape and form.
