Tony Oxley has left us on Dec. 26, 2023

Born on June 15, 1938 in Sheffield, UK, Tony Oxley left us, sadly, two days ago. Founder of Incus label, present with his name on The Baptised Traveller (CBS, 1969), one of the very first record of European Improvised music where he is drummer and leader followed by Evan Parker on tenor, Kenny Wheeler on trumpet, Derek Bailey on guitar and Jeff Clyne on bass, Oxley was a self taught pianist as a young child and only at 17 he started studying drums.

In 1963 after playing with a military band he gave life to a trio of musicians including Gavin Bryars and Derek Bailey, before moving to London where he became sideman for the Ronnie Scott’s. There he played with musicians like Joe Henderson, Charlie Mariano, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and Bill Evans, and with local glories as Alan Skidmore and Gordon Beck.

In 1969 he played on Extrapolation by Miles Davis’ ex guitarist John McLaughlin and then he formed the above mentioned quintet. Pivotal and key figure for the London Improv scene, at a certain point he inaugurated a long time collaboration with pianist Cecil Taylor and bassist William Parker in the famous Feel Trio. I had the opportunity to see them play live in Italy and the music was outstanding: every musician was playing indipendently from the other twos, but listening to the three as a whole was an enormous experience. They were in fact matching exactly together.

Skimming through his vast discography one can only admire the varius contexts, from due to large orchestra, in which Oxley played with some of the most important avant-gardists of his own time. Strangely underappreciated by the critics who come to jazz from other musical worlds – strangely because Oxley rarely was ‘swinging’ so his approach to drums full of middle- or micro- rhythms would seem appealing to them at least theorically – he was a musician’s musician, but he was also very appreciated by the audience.

Difficult as it was to be an avant garde improviser in Europe since the 1960s – no easy melodies nor easy rhythms to approach, and the will to get rid of anxiety with only a sincere will to be yourself while playing – Tony Oxley always tried to learn new tricks and tips, curious to put himself in difficult and out-of-the-comfort-zone positions in order to understand better the essence of the music he was playing and he was in love with.

 

Kissing Gorbaciov by Andrea Paco Mariani and Luigi D’Alife, Milano, Cinema Beltrade, 12/03/2023

Post Punk is one of the most long lasting musical genre in the alternative rock world. The main characters of that era starting from 1978 until 1984 are mostly still with us – net of some losses like that of Mark Stewart from Pop Group – and a new generation of musicians are setting on fire the world of independent music. In the last months I reported what Idles and other bands have done in this last years. Now’s the time to take a closer look at the past, thanks to the documentary Kissing Gorbaciov.

It was in Italy during the end of the 1980s, in Melpignano, a small town in Salento, that some young guys belonging to the Italian Communist Party took power thanks to the elections in that municipality. It was the same period in which in the USSR Michail Gorbaciov took power and we started hearing those words – like ‘perestroika’ or ‘glasnost’ – that sounded like a promise for a better world. The guys in Melpignano organised a concert of young rock bands, inviting also musicians coming from the far away Russia.

The concert took place and if some bands coming from the land of Lenin and Dostoevskij were some interesting, some less, this event prepared for another, historical one, in which four Italian bands were asked to play in Moscow and Leningrad in 1989. The most famous of these were the New Wave band Litfiba and the Post Punk band CCCP Fedeli alla Linea. The documentary by Mariani and D’Alife we’re referring to is a long interview to the members of the latter. And it’s very interesting.

First of all CCCP Fedeli alla Linea was a band openly and extensively reported also in Symon Reynold’s famous book Rip It Up and Start Again, and that means they were at least for a period of time internationally known or that at least they had an international scope. And in listening to their first E.P.s like Ortodossia II (1985) and Compagni Cittadini Fratelli Partigiani (1985), and their first complete album Affinità/Divergenze tra il Compagno Togliatti e Noi (1986) one can admire how their distorted riffs are perfectly matching with a singular singing/screaming helding always the same note and the drum machine, like in the music of Suicide.

But CCCP Fedeli alla Linea were not only a non derivative and original Post Punk band held by singer Giovanni Ferretti and guitarist Massimo Zamboni. Thanks to the help of a ‘soubrette’ (Annarella Giudici) and of a ‘people artist’ (Fatur) they were able to immerse folks at their concerts in a decadent middle-European atmosphere. So, as an example, on the song Curami (‘Heal me’) Annarella was wearing a nurse coat and a helmet for electro-shock.

Just before the Russian concerts, the theatrical part of CCCP was explored greatly thanks to a show in which Annarella and Fatur, onboard because the violence of the music and the quality of the lyrics was freezing the audience, had the majority of the space in detriment of the music itself. But reality is that CCCP wasn’t a mere musical act. They were a (Punk) vision, in which music and theatrical elements could mix themselves or become the one preeminent on the other based on circumstances or will of the performers.

The interesting part of the documentary is that the repertoire images and films are usually used as a reverse shot for the recollections of the musicians, creating a strange nihilistic effect more than nostalgia. Ferretti and friends are recollecting memories while seeing the images under our gaze, becoming newly performers through their own impressions. Sometimes they laugh genuinely in remembering this or that particular aspect of a night or of their creative process, but mostly we see older people and hearing them, younger, singing Produci Consuma Crepa (‘Produce, Consume, Die’) means being put in front of the time that passes inexorably.

The documentary, created through a crowdfunding campaign, is release at the same time in which in Reggio Emilia an exhibition with memorabilia, photos, dresses and other material is available for the first time to the public, and after a ‘Gran Galà Punkettone’, a concert by the re-formed band. Unluckily I was unable to attend at the night in which the two movie directors were present, but anyway the atmosphere was the opposite of a nostalgic event, and this is truly remarkable.

Notes on how some tracks were written – like Curami starting from a guitar riff and a bass line that for the singer were remembering The Cure, so in the end he started to sing ‘curami’, or Emilia Paranoica emerging from a night of pure despair and fog – are interspersed with archive images and recollections from the Communist era of USSR and from the concerts of the other musicians involved, creating a collective narration of a period lost forever, not necessarily worst than the one we’re living in nowadays but destined to oblivion as everything. 

 

Tricky – Maxinquaye (Reincarnated) (Island, 2023)

I was about 23 or 24 the first time I listened to Tricky. I was a student in a State university then. I remember that sometimes I was waiting to take the train to go to the city in which I was studying history, literature and classical music reading some alternative rock magazines I was buying near the train station. I was reading also on the train. That time, there was Tricky on the cover of the magazine. It was 1996 and he was releasing his second soloist effort issued by Island Records, Pre-Millennium Tension.

The fact is that I was always going in love easily with paranoid people. I understood this fact while I started reading William Burroughs. The fact that a paranoid is only a “well informed person” was clear to me after reading Naked Lunch. Please don’t misunderstand me. Tricky is not a paranoid in the worst sense of the word. He is because he cares. In the interview on that magazine, he called back the woman who was interviewing him after few days because of the fear she was misinterpreting something he said about his daughter.

Sensitive people is the people I love the most, so I decided, in an era in which buying an album by an unknown musician was a bet – spending 20 euros for a music previously unknown, I mean – to buy a Tricky album, intrigued as I was also by the dark blue cover with that red globe, and completely noob as far as Hip Hop music. Luckily enough, I would say. In those years Hip Hop was, more or less as it happens today with Trap music, an affair of gangs and killings, with the music being as a patinated sountrack to it after losing his decennial potential as music for a revolution that didn’t came.

I loved both Pre-Millennium Tension and Nearly God. I was constantly listening to those albums. Maxinquaye, Tricky’s first record and masterpiece, came only after for me. But those three LPs and the fourth Angels with Dirty Faces, Tricky last decent output, were like pure gold to me. So I was happy to know this year that a re-release of Maxinequaye, fleshed out with a second disc full of reinvented songs and live performances, was ready for october. Curiously enough I bought it only yesterday afternoon, while there was a transport strike and I was, once again, waiting for a train.

For many lovers of rock and punk music, Trip Hop was the first approach to electronic music. I still remember how many discussions I had in those days with lovers of New Wave about the fact that, as an example, The Prodigy were not serious musicians to listen to because their music was completely or mostly sampled. The same thing didn’t happened with the Massive Attack, Tricky first approach to music, or with Portishead, or with Tricky himself.

Taken for a revolution in sound and music, Trip Hop is nowadays the quintessence of nostalgia. Time passes. But put in perspective, even if some critics are telling us that Trip Hop was pure escapism from an unfriendly world, with those slow soundscapes, the use of marijuana – Tricky smokes it in order to avoid his anxiety for being onstage – and a use of the recording studio as another instrument as it happens to reggae and dub – Mark Stewart had a hand in it, so Trip Hop was black music for Post Punk white guys basically – it’s a fact that this style and genre has renewed Hip Hop itself in a few years. No Run The Jewels or Anti-Pop Consortium, nor Dalek without Tricky.

Coproduced by Tricky and Mark Saunders, Maxinquaye takes his name from Tricky’s mother, Maxine Quaye, who committed suicide when the singer was four years old. The album is full of samples reworked until they become mostly unrecognizable – see the sample from Michael Jackson’s Bad on Brand Now You’re Retro – and of an attempt to use synthesizers and effects in order to create a sombre sound, the aura of death is scratched by a use of the opposite voices of Tricky and Martina Topley Bird, a young girl who started singing – and her relationship with Tricky later – when she was 15 – she was 17 years old while recording her vocals for this album.

But, far from easy scandals, the musical relationship between the twos, and in particular the presence as a lead character of Martina on Maxinquaye – differently from Tricky subsequent outputs – drives us up to a gender overturning that is interesting even nowadays. Tricky co-signs all the pieces on the album, but the main singer is Martina, with her subtly raucous but also sweet amd deep voice that creates a nice contrast with Tricky’s openly black intonation – listen to Hell Is Round The Corner to understand better, or Pumpkin, with his Smashing Pumpkin’s sampled beat.

Maybe predestined to be a petty criminal if not for the music – as a teenager he stayed also in jail for a while for small thefts – Tricky entered the court of Massive Attack renamed Tricky Kid from Adrian Thaws, but sooner some of his earlier productions made record companies look for him to make him debut with an entire album. The second disc included in this reissue features five ‘reincarnated’ versions of Strugglin’, Aftermath, Ponderosa, Hell is Round The Corner and Pumpkin that are basically vocal tracks – where Tricky’s new muse, Marta, substitutes Martina, with minimal drums and a few effects.

Nocturnal and pensive as the new reworked tracks are, and quite different from the original pieces so that they make us think of a rewriting more than of a simple remix of the old songs, after them there are live versions of some of the album tracks taken from some BBC Radio sessions from 1995 and from a Glastonbury live concert of the same year where Allison Goldfrapp embellishes Pumpkin and the electric guitars are more preeminent than in the studio versions, leaving us with the feeling of a suture between Trip Hop and the aforementioned Post Punk, that years before Tricky combined black and white music – see Pop Group, Gang of Four and similar.

Between the following ‘rough monitor mix’ there are the previously unheard on the album She Devil and Just for the Hate of It where Tricky and Martina presences are more balanced, as in the following Pre-Millennium’s Christiansands, while Overcome and Black Steel are possibly, net of some d’n’b sensations, more similar to what Mark Stewart, originally coopted as producer but soon defenestrated because the music he gave life to was too dissonant, intended them. Finally, Leftfield remix for Brand Now You’re Retro closes with an interpretation of Tricky from another, different perspective and sensitivity.

If you missed the opportunity or are too young to have been able to listen to Tricky when a teen or so, this is possibly one of the best opportunities you’ll ever have. Reissues are usually an occasion to beat cash for every artist, but this time, as it happened to Tom Waits few months ago, and in a way also to Nirvana with the recent reissue of In Utero, is the opportunity to reckon with a form of art that says so much about the times it was conceived in. Since also Pre-Millennium Tension, as Massive Attack’s Mezzanine has been reissued this way, we hope to see also Portishead or other Trip Hop heroes being re-released this intriguing way.