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2011-05-22
Adam Rudolph, Yusef Lateef and ... er ... Next Age Music
All time signatures can be broken down into twos and threes. I learned that in a long discussion with some guy in a long coat out back of the Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles. He'd asked me for a cigarette and we talked for about two hours. Very smart guy about music. It wasn't until the end of the conversation I learned he was the conductor for Yusef Lateef's improvisational orchestras, a composer of note, and the guy who wrote the book of music theory used at CalArts when I was there as a theater student. I'd been talking with Adam Rudolph, and that was a big deal. Best cigarette I ever gave to a stranger. I challenged him on those twos and threes, asking "What about African drummers who accent every 15th beat as a signature in their playing?" Adam rolled his eyes and said, "It's Chapters 12 to 14 in my book." I think I actually swallowed hard at that moment. We'd been talking fast and blowing stuff by each other in a lively and enjoyable exchange. When I recognized that he was the dude with the baton I'd watched in 1984 when Lateef's assembled orchestra played the "Contemporary Music Festival" at my alma mater, I knew he was all that. The band had consisted of a Qawwali singer, tabla, drumkit, Lateef on sax, and some 12 or 14 more pieces from Eastern and Western cultures, and they were all improvising with Adam controlling the flow. It should have been an oil and water mixture, with some sort of academic sound, but it all sounded great. Later that day Yusef Lateef made the statement he didn't mind if his music was put in the New Age bin, so long as it wound up in the record store. This stuff was light years more advanced than the arpeggios of what had come to be called New Age, and that improbable mix of musics may never have been played in that configuration before or since. How the hell did it work? So here's Adam Rudolph standing with me in the alley while his daughter watched some terrific pop music, and I was being taken back to school one on one with a master. Yikes!
We talked about conducting improvisation, which at this level was far beyond deciding who got to solo and when. Rudolph explained that he divided an orchestra into 10 cells and conducted with fingers to indicate which cell he was addressing, and then a fist or a hand to indicate "chord" or "improvise." He added that even at this level with Lateef at the helm, the first improvisation of the evening was finding out who showed up. With players this good, and a band that large, they couldn't pay them enough to ensure they'd all be there instead of a gig that better paid the bills. So first thing, Adam would see who showed up the night of performance and redistribute them into those cells. None of this would matter much if it didn't work, but this stuff was music all the way through. Brilliant, warm, lively, improbable, improvised music from cultures who tuned different, counted different, and who by and large weren't had a different story to tell. I've seen music borrowed here and there and blended into a palatable soup, but never this particular medicated stew. All the flavors seemed to pop, and it tasted great this music right down to the bottom of the bowl. I've only ever seen that kind of compatible blend so diverse and tasty just the once.
So why did the blended stuff East and West that made it to my radio seem to suck? New Age music hit the airwaves in Los Angeles on the station called "The Wave." It had a great beginning with some great successful blendings of musics from Pat Metheny, Bela Fleck, and a host of others who hadn't heard the name New Age but likely were happy someone was playing their tracks. Then it got popular. Yecch! There came to be a genre called New Age and it had the unsatisfying small portion sound of Nouvelle Cuisine. The greats who had been stuffed into this new wineskin at first wound up pushed back into the airy regions of late night public radio in favor of a snappy new subgenre that sold music to people who like their meals prepackaged and easily heated in a sonic microwave. I thought New Age lost it's charm just about as fast as it got popular.
By the time I heard that 1984 Lateef concert, New Age was old hat. I've heard stuff since that gets what's up with the what works in distinct worlds of song and finds it's way through those troubled waters to deliver it's cargo intact despite the vastly different values, timbres, tunings, and timing that weeds out the timid in World Fusion. Matthew Montfort at Ancient Future gets it right. Matt coined the term "World Fusion" and makes that music so right it pleases the initiated as well as the followers of New Age who happen to stray into his bigger tent. That stuff is beautiful.
I can't say I've heard much blending Far East and Way Out West much that pleased the ear, and kept the music from going muddy! Dennis Rea's "Views From Chicheng Precipice" is about as close as I've heard connecting the polar opposites in theory and content, tunings and timings, patience and our own march time and waltz time drive in the Western rat race. That's the next review, and it has been a long long time in coming. I've learned a great deal in the interim, and hope to get it right.
Still and all, I never heard the world sing together like that 1984 Yusef Lateef concert anywhere on vinyl or shiny disc or from any stage anywhere. As time marches on we may be approaching the place prophesied by that concert, but not yet. There are reasons for that, and not just technical stuff. I think our hearts haven't grown big enough just yet. We'll get there maybe if we don't blow up in the meantime. That's someplace new and it might be there will be "Next Age" music right there on our radios everywhere. We are all connected now, but it takes more than tolerance to keep the world's music together at one time on the same stage. It takes a whole lotta love. |
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The last previous reviews:
"American Velvet" is a first rate tribute album to The Velvet Undergound. It is both an introduction to 13 worthy artists and an alternate look at some familiar songs from the original alternative band.
Blue King Brown is that roots/reggae/Afro-beat juggernaut from Oz that has become Carlos Santana's favorite band. He says they are the future in music. These guys are great!
Baoku Moses and the Image Afro-Beat have brought Afro-Beat to the Midwest with a powerful message of unity against the machine. Baoku's combination of Nigerian and Senegalese rhythm, American jazz, and social consciousness have musicians and listeners together to dance to a different drummer.
Barry Cleveland's Hologramatron is a 21st Century protest record with songs featuring biting, sometimes brutal, commentary on the state of the Western world.…
What's Rattlin' on the Moon is Beppe's dialogue with fellow composer Mike Ratledge. It is as though Crovella were saying, "This is where you took me with that song, and this is somewhere else I found from there." It's a little like describing a dream, or a trip, or a moment of illogical inspiration.…
Pianovagando: "It is an invented word (I like to create new words) that means travelling with piano, in my memories, to me the piano is my 'car' or my 'horse', my diary, my mirror, my portrait."…
"I didn’t know it before writing “Pianovagando” but the subject of ...searchin’ more in our past is fascinating, like watching a film a second or third times when you “get something” you didn’t get in the first play, and sometimes you understand it even more. Differently from Beckett, my jump into my past is “lighter” in “drama” but at the same times full of depths of different kinds, without a real path, just picking up cards, in the big box of our life: sometimes you pick up an event that maybe changed your life and sometimes is just an “innocent” card, that by viewing it more accurately, can show its colors, sometimes in a surprising way!" …
This band does for me what Oscar Peterson did all by himself. The movement in the style of the story in these songs seems to take every angle like some Rashomon of a thing. Instrumental music of any description tends to take a journey or define a specific place in the mind or memory. On Blues for Tony, I feel the wind in my face as I look out the window on the fast tunes. The slower tempos can be as free as a firefly around a specific flame as we sit by and look a little deeper as I listen to the leaves, birds and the crackle of the warming bonfire. …
The Merrg is a band of indigenous Australian's bringing an aboriginal world view to pop with the talent and songwriting ability of a Los Lobos from Down Under. They won an award for Best International Band at a Toronto festival soon after this review. These guys are indigenous genius!
I'm Billy Sheppard and this is Billy's Bunker. The Bunker has been two years in the making before appearing on this website. This writing started as a blog on myspace written for a lark. This site now functions as a filter for good indie music of all descriptions. There are not negative reviews, and very little criticism. I don't believe in five star ratings. I don't think any song is 10% better than any other. Music is a gift, and if it works at all it causes people to feel something. Emotions are unruly things. You know them when you feel them. There's not much to account for what makes a song good. I know it when I feel it. You know it too, and what works for me may not work for you. I'm not smarter than the music, and I don't play it, don't write songs. Most of what I know I picked up from hundreds of conversations with composers and songwriters over the years. I listen to the music I write about longer and deeper than any sane normal listener, and I daresay more than most critics of this music. Maybe these reviews are fan letters, but they aren't some smart guy showing off what he thinks will sell in the marketplace. I'd rather write about a great unknown album that won't get played on the radio than some cookie cutter hit that will line the pockets of accountants and suits in the music industry. If you are looking for something to listen to, this site may have something you need. The world may not be saved by music, but without it there wouldn't be much to save.
Music is music is music is music. Pop, Rock, Classical composition, Death Metal, Hip Hop, Folk, Blues, Afro Beat . . . There's no point in picking one type of music and sticking to it. The more you can hear the more you can feel. The Kronos Quartet and P-Funk/Parlament both are after your heart. Give in and find the joy they have to offer.
"Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is an absolute gift"
~ W.H.Auden from his poem "The Composer"
A word about genres: They suck! A good friend and massively talented guitarist Billy Jenkins has lead me to the opinion that categories generally function to keep the listener from finding anything new to listen to. Record bins benefit from some sort of organization, but something new always seems a little out of reach if you don't stray from your favorite stack. There is a unified field theory of music: A song either makes you feel something or it don't bleeping matter. Finding new music can lead you to a new way of feeling. My favorite category in my list is Category X. Ain't no proper bin for that music. Please please please stray from your normal. There are doors in your heart haven't been opened for a long long time. If you feel, you are healed.
I've never understood a single bar of music in my life, but I've felt it."
~ Igor Stravinsky
THE LINK BELOW WILL TAKE YOU TO A REVIEW OF CHAPA'S "A LOOK TO THE WEST." I BELIEVE THEY ARE THE BEST MIX OF NEW COMPOSITION AND POP MUSIC I'VE YET TO HEAR.
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