Nemu is becoming, more and more, an intriguing label, a point of reference for those who are interested in knowing new artists coming from the world of improvisation but willing to listen to stuff less conditioned by the need of an easy listening as more emblazoned artists. In fact, I cannot get why many reviewers are praising some musicians, who are now becoming famous, even if in their music composition and improvisation are not really tied up.
In listening to some albums that are acclaimed In these last months or even years, I can significantly find out a decreasing in that adventurous practice that is improvisation. There are musicians that gain important prizes and that don’t solo for an entire piece or an album. Let’s not call jazz this music. It can be even beautiful music – even if I find it boring for the most part – but it’s not jazz, even if it’s part of the African-American continuum and deserve to be respected – in fact as a critic part of my job is taking act where the music is going.
Now, I finally had the opportunity, instead, to enjoy an album by a quartet of musicians that in 2019 took the stage of the FreeJazzSaar festival in Saarbrucken, Germany, to substitute Charles Gayle, who has unexpectedly fallen ill. The set is very energetic from the first note, and the musicians involved show a mastery as individual players as much as a collective, as a group.
Frank Paul Schubert, who here plays alto and soprano saxophones, started playing as a self-taught musician in 1982 (being born in 1965). Between the many musicians he was involved with, you’ll be probably familiar with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Johannes Bauer. Active with different projects like duos, quartets, etc., Schubert has a more contemporary style (as an example) on alto than his likewise references.
Seemingly a contemporary musician can be defined Michel Pilz at bass clarinet. Differently from Eric Dolphy, just to name one, Pilz is less ‘cubist’ and anchored to tradition at the same time, as we exposed reviewing Incarnations by Mingus few days ago, but he is a proper virtuoso in his own right and his style fit perfectly with that of his partners. Devotee performer accompanied by the likes of Manfred Schoof and Michel Portal, he sadly passed away in 2023, so this record is also a beautiful occasion to pay him an homage.
Stephan Scheib, first an electric bass player, switched on acoustic bass becoming a well renowned improviser and composer. Founder in 1987 of the Liquid Penguin Ensemble, he is devoted to mixing different forms of art, like dance, theatre, and visual arts with music. Prized with his works for radio, here in this record you can find him texturing all the music with a particular grace but also engaged in a virtuosic solo.
Finally, drummer Klaus Kugel, active with Carl Berger, Charlie Mariano, Thomasz Stanko, Ken Carter, Kenny Wheeler, Sabir Mateen and many others is a drummer whose melodic elements and the percussive one are shared with mastery for all the recording, that features a 43 minutes long group improvisation plus a couple of encores. Hymnodic and dense as we expect this music at his best – I think about the ‘music from the lofts’ – it is one of the albums you can’t miss this year.
I’m happy to listen to music like this, since possibly Germany, as other countries like Portugal, about which we’ll talk in the future, is finally producing some music worth of the brilliant past of this genre. In fact, this album contains timeless compositions and improvisations, the genre I bet we’ll listen to in the future years not thinking about the greater progress in the art of jazz but nonetheless with the desire to look for more or this.
Candid Records was a notorious label founded in 1960 that, in more than six months of existence, released about 30 records. And what records: between them, the here reviewed Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, the other masterpiece We Insist! Freedom Now Suite by Max Roach, albums by Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, records of blues and more.
After planning some reissues last year, this Incarnations was published last November 2023 for Record Store Day, but then it was re-released both on CD (for the first time) and vinyl this year 2024. The album consists of 5 compositions recorded in October 20 and November 11, 1960, at Nola Penthouse Studios in New York, and they feature musicians such as Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, Paul Bley on piano, Dannie Richmond and Jo Jones on drums between the others.
Far from the violent expressionism of the sessions we were accustomed thanks to the still mentioned Presents album, the music here collected is mostly gentler and sweeter, even if more excited moments are also present. One of the reasons of interest of this album is the presence in these sessions of such diverse musicians as the avant-gardist Dolphy and Roy Eldridge, who was tied directly to the swing era.
But let’s start from the beginning. The Lp presents as first Mingus’ composition Bugs, an 8 minutes tour the force with solos by Charles McPherson on alto, Booker Ervin on tenor and Lonnie Hillyer on trumpet. Paul Bley here is more than a mere accompanist, and his solo take place after Mcpherson’s filling the room with both his hands and creating a nice contrast between lower and upper registries before Ervin statement.
Differently from Hillyer’s, Roy Eldridge’s trumpet on R&R, one of his own compositions, is muted. Subtly nuanced and accompanied through the melody exposition by Dolphy’s alto, his solo is sometimes scratchy and mostly anchored to the jazz tradition. It seems appropriate choice for Mingus to introduce trombonist Jimmy Knepper after Dolphy’s solo, just to widen the colors of this execution.
Dolphy here is coherent with what the music requires, since his raucous and oblique style is way more consistent with the ‘old’ style, a lesson that the devotees of tradition are in need of relearning, instead of polishing and refining something that was full of ironic statements and near the colloquial eloquence of the old blues/swing era.
Mingus finally can also cut out for himself the right space for a solo introducing again Eldridge, finally free to express himself without the damper: it is his turn to show how modern his solutions can be. Dolphy and Knepper agree with few statements before an enthusiastic ‘tutti’.
All The Things You Are (All) opens with a unison between the arcoed bass and Knepper and Woodman trombones, before leaving space to an ensemble work that was typical of the 1950s Mingus’ works. Interestingly enough, Mingus introduces the track with a speech in which he explain to have added the ‘All’ to the title in order to get the royalties he deserves as arranger of the composition.
Reincarnation of a Lovebird (2nd Version) is opened by a piano intro by Paul Bley embellished by Dannie Richmond snare drums. Differently from the most famous version o the album The Clown (Atlantic, 1960) here we have a more expressionistic rendition, with the slow section more stretched and a swinging section more thrilling.
The album closes with a Body and Soul that is structured as the previous piece, with Dolphy soloing on alto followed by Jimmy Knepper and Britt Woodman on trombones, Bley on piano, Ted Curson and Hillyer on trumpets. With All The Things You Are as the only true unreleased composition, this album is nonetheless an important document of how the music of Mingus was multi-faceted, with one ear rooted in the tradition and the other pushed into the future.
For those who want more, I know there is a boxset somewhere, released in 1989 on Mosaic, featuring all the bassist releases for Candid Records. Mingus’ music won’t cease to give surprises to those who will come close to it. Musicians like Dolphy, Richmond, Bley, Curson, and all the bass player’s cohort will amaze you with their inventiveness and musical mastery.
One of the most praised bands of the 1980s and 1990s by the likes of Kurt Cobain – you can find three of their compositions covered by Nirvana in the beautiful album Unplugged in New York (DGC, 1994) – Meat Puppet, from Arizona, have always been a peculiar band difficult to classify, to put into a box, even if they basically created a bridge between hard rock and psychedelia (in the terms of her less polite son: acid rock).
The reissues of their back catalogue from the beginning to 1989 started last year and since this February we had the possibility to listen again to a masterpiece like Meat Puppets II (Megaforce, 2024) originally released in 1984. While enjoying this album, one wonders how it could have been approached by a contemporary fan or even by a casual listener back then.
Meat Puppets II has few hardcore punk moments – and sometimes they are mixed with other worlds such as in Teenager(s) – while for the rest you can listen to ragged country as in Plateau, or more intimate moments like Lake of Fire. Some critics have compared Curt and Chris Kirkwood creature to Holy Modal Rounders and Grateful Dead in the past years.
Far from the stardom of more clearly recognizable groups, Meat Puppets have always opted for their creativity in full instead of giving to the public what they were supposed to want – net of some albums more refined in terms of sound – and they have paid becoming a ‘cult’ band, a well kept secret between fans and musicians, more than a commercial successful rock band.
In a way, it is correct to find in them, as it happened, some prodrome of grunge, since their freedom of expression and their will to go beyond the categories, and their being in a way a revival of genres at their peak during the 1960s and 1970s is coherently in line of the characteristics of bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Screaming Trees.
And if in tracks like What To Do Meat Puppets are able to fuck around with style, in the best rock tradition – think about the lyrics of Arnold Layne by Pink Floyd – the project of the band, whose records in those times were released by the label SST as it happened to Minutemen and Dinosaur Jr, was solid and devoted to variety from the very beginning.
Mirage (Megaforce 2024), originally released in 1987, marks a first shift into a more easy to listen music, becoming more abstract and full of nuances thanks to Curt Kirkwood’s chisel work with his own, mostly acoustic, guitars. This was an era in which many bands coming from subcultures understood they had no possibility of surviving if they wouldn’t clean up and refine their sound, becoming more commercial.
Meat Puppets followed this trend, with pieces like Quit It. Another term of comparison for the band in these years was not only Jerry Garcia but also Neil Young, meaning that the Kirkwood brothers were not only well refined instrumentalists but also nice composers, firmly anchored to the tradition of rock songwriting.
Country and folk elements are still audible as in Confusion Fog, and will become preeminent also in the future albums of the band. And if in I’m a Machine Meat Puppets break into an attempt to give life to funky oriented music, in A Hundred Miles they present themselves as anti-heroes, with more doubts than pillars in which to believe.
As previous re-releases by Rykodisc in 1999, even this new prints present extra tracks (after a Liquified that seem like Devo from the Freedom of Choice era) like, in this case, the demos for The Mighty Zero, I Am a Machine, the same Liquified, Rubbernecking’ and Grand Intro. More openly melancholic than the previous releases, Mirage is in the end the perfect predecessor for the following Monsters, originally released by SST in 1989.
Monsters is for Meat Puppets an attempt to create a music with a commercial appeal but full of details coming from the alternative world. It can be considered a pair to Neil Young’s Trans, in a way. Attacked by Monsters, the fist track, seems like Alice in Chains becoming synthetic, with electronic drums and synthesized guitars. Compositions are longer now, reaching six minutes each with The Void and Touchdown King.
Strange as it can seem nowadays, at the point that such an album can be taken as a pure compromise, one must contextualize this output in the period: the end of the 1980s were years in which all the labels, even the independent ones who mostly were supported by the majors as far as distribution, were heavily asking the musicians to become more commercial.
This isn’t something new in the music business: if John Coltrane had to release an album of ballads and one with a singer before his success with A Love Supreme, why should we be shocked if a rock band in the Reagan era was asked to produce more salable products, even if without selling out completely?
After all, we all know what happened before. We had Nirvana, we had Jeff Buckley, we had pure creativity for a certain amount of time even passed through radios or tv. And never mind if it was mostly a revival of the music from the 1970s: after all we also enjoyed industrial-metal, like NIN, or it was the right time for songwriters like Johnny Cash to resurface.
In a way, without all this music, we wouldn’t had neither post-rock nor some electronic music of pure research like that issued by Raster-Noton, to which many of us came after a short period in which we loved more commercially conscious acts. Without those acts, in effect, none of us would have been prepared to listen to these more adventurous musicians.
Look at the present times, as an example. Not as far as creativity, but as far as broadcasting. We all see what’s missing now, and how much time it will occur to obtain more attention from at least part of the masses for our music. It’s a problem we can’t solve today, nor tomorrow, maybe – maybe – after tomorrow.
Something strange is happening to the music, or is it just me? I’m relistening to the albums that has appeared in this first part of the year, like Kim Gordon’s, Idles’, Wadada Leo Smith’s and Amina Claudine Myers’, and this record I’m about to write by Beth Gibbons; and in all this material I feel as something is missing. Differently than in the cases of Moor Mother and St. Vincent, in listening all this records I hear the lack of a deep drive.
The fact that I’m ok with at least a couple of albums makes me feel comfortable again, but for the rest I can tell that 2024 is becoming maybe a pivotal year. All the Lps I have mentioned are good albums, nonetheless I’m not completely at ease or satisfied when I end listening to them. And this is strange above all in this case, because Live Outgrown is, in theory, the exact record I wanted to hear from Beth Orton.
Arcoed saws, found objects used as percussions, and then guitars, violins, keyboards and drums, every instrument used to create that peculiar sound which, united to the others, give life to a particular soundscape. I have also found interesting the live renditions at the show ‘Later With Jools Holland’ that you can find on the internet, but I can’t help but feel as I was referring to before.
Tracks like the dramatic Reaching Out, the intense and embellished with distorted horns Beyond The Sun, the reflective Burden of Life, a Lost Changes that seem an outtake from Portishead’s first album but with a different, less hip hop arrangement, are all well written and excellent pieces, just to name a few. The arrangements are chiselled with attention and sensitivity.
Lyrics also are intense and only apparently simple, while in effect they deal with becoming older, with the metamorphoses of the soul when the body makes resistance, with the loss of friends and the perspective of death, but again, everything in these songs written in an entire decade are too much contained, quiet, you miss possibly that scratch coming from outside of art and music, from reality, as you can find in the paintings of Bacon or … in the old Portishead albums.
I just know that for many this album, as the others not completely satisfactory to me I’ ve quoted, will be held high as best releases of the year by so many people, but this is more music that will make me think – about the evolution of music itself and the lack of reference to real life through sound and how it is organised, not through lyrics or the meaning of the songs themselves – than music I’ll listen to enjoy.
It is strange to me, in fact, that nobody is observing this lack of a link between this music, the one released this year, and our lives – the ‘scratch’ I was referring to is exactly this: something that through its imperfections open a door leaving the real life enter the art organised in sound – and even though I still need to understand why this is happening, I feel like music is becoming more and more self-referential and less as a medium to get in touch with the real self of the artist or of the audience.
Possibly, I think, in the exact moment I’m writing, this is the key I wanted to find. What if the artists, subconsciously speaking, were in this moment afraid of opening themselves to us, since most of us are hipsters that feel the call of something more real than the bourgeois life but want only the smell of this ‘something’, without having filthy hands for it?
Being an artist requires an open mind and an open heart, and an artist is also a medium, someone who tries to create a connection between people and a deeper reality than society allow us to see, free from safeties and from injustices of civilized life. But what if we as persons are not willing to connect to the artists anymore? Will they stand naked in front of us, metaphorically speaking, while we’re on our feet with all our clothes and barriers on?
No. It is an impossible and unbearable situation I believe. So, unhappy as I am to have written a review in which I’ve given Beth Gibbons, an artist I love, a vote that is only a little more than sufficient, as it is for all the records I mentioned above, after months from their release, I must acknowledge all of this and give it back to you, my readers. I don’t see a bright future for our music, but I’d love to be answered back by a bunch of new great discs or concerts in the next months. For the moment, I’d love you to meditate about my warnings.
The problem is not “we’re too bourgeois”. I’m not referring to the quantity of money we own. The problem is we’re too busy with the occurrences of our lives – society wants us this way, so we will not disturb the rich – and we’re not keen on making new experiences and taking new risks, unless these of a career. But life is not the things we own, etcetera. It is difficult not to moralize, but we don’t have that much time, nor that much music to listen to anymore.
