One of the unfortunate side effects of having an extensive familiarity with recorded music in its many permutations is the realization that it gets harder and harder to surprise oneself with new discoveries or unheard-of efforts. This is not to suggest that I've come close to sampling all the music worth hearing - indeed, the more music I listen to, the more I realize I know absolutely nothing about music. I've been studying the work of Miles Davis for over 15 years now, probably have amassed nearly 70 CDs of his work, and have come close to memorizing entire lengthy segments of everything from "So What" to "He Loved Him Madly" - and yet I still feel there are entire horizons of the man's music that I haven't even uncovered. If that's how I feel about someone like Miles Davis, what could I even begin to say about things like klezmer, baile funk or dancehall?
And yet, I'll admit that I long ago concluded I didn't need to sample every up-and-coming emo quartet or MTV2-hyped hip-hop figure to maintain a firm footing on contemporary pop cultural innovation. There's simply too many good and unheard sounds out there to get bogged down in the trend wars of the day. As somebody who's more likely to be reading 19th century novels than the latest offering from Dan Brown, I've always felt there was more to be learned by studying the past than getting too overwhelmed by contemporary supposed innovations - innovations that, all too quickly, resemble discontinued flavors-of-the-month. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were 2004's Butterscotch Lemon. Will Grizzly Bear be 2009's Cherry Tootsie Roll? (I'm not gonna tell you, you're gonna have to tell me....)
My wife and I have both come to the civilized agreement that, given limitations in space, funding and time, I should not be allowed to re-enter the world of vinyl anytime soon - a world I once had a passing familiarity with, and that now seems to be reaching the peak of a several-year revival. There's no denying that vinyl carries with it a sexiness that CDs and (choke choke cough cough) Mp3's do not - the heft, the crackle, the spinning ooze, the billboard-sized cover art. What adds even more to the mystery of the LP are the entire warehouses filled to the brim with obscure (many deservedly so) releases that never had a snowball's chance in hell of moving more than a few copies. Much of this detritus has little to offer beyond ghastly cover art and insipid, uninspired music (cringe-inducing lyrics, too, mustn't forget them). But those of us with a nose for the overlooked can't help but feel that lurking in every dusty crate or mold-infested record shop is a potential pot of gold - an obscure LP of notable quality.
Blame hip hop and beat hunters for taking much of the mystery out of these forgotten glories. Ever since the hipper DJs started realizing they'd need to start looking beyond The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" for suitable breaks, the hunt has been on. Literally thousands of records gained a second life as the basis for hip hop anthems large and small. And when the unlikely figure of Gilbert O'Sullivan changed the future of hip hop and sampling in the early nineties, beat experts merely went further underground, lifting beats and licks so obscure and manipulated that it would take a new kind of detective to track down the sources and throw copyright law at their feet. Think DJ Shadow, think Peanut Butter Wolf, think the ever-innovative Prince Paul.
Me, I'm no kind of DJ, although I play one in my head all the time. The innovations of late-20th century sonic collage has penetrated my subconscious so much that I tend to mentally deconstruct nearly every song I hear, wondering what that bass lines might sound like out of context, how that high-hat could be looped, whether or not the middle-eight could be dropped atop a King Sunny Ade percussive break. I dream of mash-ups between Keith Jarrett and Mongo Santamaria, looping a spacey Yo La Tengo interlude with an Idris Muhammad sample. That kind of thing. But lacking anything in the way of the necessary sophisticated equipment, the majority of this stuff just stays in my head, which is probably all for the best - most of it would never come close to being translated.
There's been something of a revolution taking place online over the past half-decade or so, in which music and file sharing has taken on a distinctly different hue from the original Napster revolution of the 1990s. One can take all sorts of positions on the legality or illegality of something like Napster, and one needn't feel much sympathy for the preening likes of millionaire Lars Ulrich to suspect that moral and legal boundaries were being overtaken during that drawn out episode. I'm not too concerned about teenagers downloading compressed sound files of over-hyped bands for their homeroom-listening pleasure. My own feelings on Napster were of the slightly bemused variety - interesting idea, of dubious legality, not applicable to me and thousands of other music lovers because our interests went beyond Top 40 artists. Downloading a Madonna single or a Papa Roach CD seemed almost too banal to bother with. Where was the mystery in that? Couldn't the internet help out those of us seeking more elusive prey?
More and more, that's what the post-Napster online music scene is beginning to resemble. There are still plenty of opportunities to download compressed files of your favorite artist or pop entertainer, and the mighty iTunes has made it easier than ever to purchase a desired track with the click of a mouse (and the removal of 99 cents from your PayPal account). But this is really little more than a slight adjustment in venue for market-driven music industry standards - where once you stood in line to pay for your product, now you wait in front of a screen. A bit more convenient, but a situation in which the consumer is still limited by the choices offered by the store / site in question. Far more interesting to me is a new generation of music lovers and collectors who have popped up throughout the murky world of the blogosphere to post ripped copies of obscure vinyl from their impressive collections and share them with fellow enthusiasts. For the most part, this is an informed and scholarly crowd, made up of kindred souls who firmly believe that the life of a piece of music should not flourish or wither based on the whims of record company executives - that if an LP has long been out of print, and has failed to be integrated into new media formats, then it's fair game for uploading and a new audience.
You can, I suppose, call this copyright infringement, although that seems a little boorish given the rather small audiences we're talking about here. One constant I've noted while visiting these music-sharing sites is that the individuals in question are quite upfront about only posting music that is unavailable and out-of-print - never transferred to CD, fetching ridiculous collector prices on eBay, long deleted from official catalogs, or originally released on small and now-deceased minor labels. When an album does receive the jaws of life and rejoins the world via a newly remastered CD version or a limited-edition vinyl run (and this is happening more and more, thanks to innovative reissue-focused record labels), the majority of these bloggers yank the albums in question and urge their guests to purchase the goods. I suspect many do. One can't worship obscure grooves without realizing that their creators rarely saw a dime for their work, and any opportunity to change this sorry situation is welcomed.
I can't offer any kind of definitive list of the great music bloggers out there, but I thought I'd offer recommendations for a few who have focused their efforts on a much-maligned genre of popular music - the world of electric jazz, or jazz-funk. Fusion has struggled to make any kind of comeback within the jazz crowd, possibly due to the sheer market saturation of the stuff by the late-1970s, and the advent of elevator jazz in the 1980s - a degradation of the improvisatory scene that has inflicted serious damage. But there are entire worlds of electric jazz that have been swept under the carpet in an effort to hide any evidence of Fender Rhodes or slapping bass lines. We have the beat hunters, the samplers, and the hip-hop crews to thank for keeping at least some of these grooves in the national subconscious, and with a quarter-century of beat worship now behind us, it's sometimes amazing how excellent these electric tracks now sound. I'm not going to make any wild claims about jazz -funk supremacy - there's no denying some of it (ok, most of it) is gimmicky and trendy, uninspired, silly, technology-infatuated and just plain asinine. But there are some killer grooves lurking inside those gaudy covers and sandwiched between the rote vocal tracks. If a company like Rhino Records ever feels up to the challenge, there's a monster of a box set waiting to be compiled of multi-label 1970s jazz-funk - an all killer, no filler type of deal.
I'll highlight two very different yet equally respected music bloggers of the jazz-funk variety, My Jazz World's Smooth and Never Enough Rhodes' Simon666. Smooth is seemingly inexhaustible, and his postings now run well into the triple digits. It's hard to put a finger on what his jazz world consists of, because he has clearly amassed a staggering collection of jazz and jazz-related albums from the early-60s era to the present time. At the risk of insulting a very generous individual, I'll state upfront that our tastes do not always converge. Much of what Smooth enjoys is far too, well, smooth for me, jazz-funk of a much silkier variety than the fiery stuff that gets me going. And yet, given the sheer number of albums he's uploaded there's no denying that he's introduced me to literally dozens of offerings that I'd never have stumbled across otherwise. Some of this has been interesting to me purely as a music scholar - I doubt I'll ever listen to something as polite as Vic Juris' 1980 "Horizon Drive" unless being ordered to do so by an armed felon, yet I was fascinated to discover, thanks to some YouTube sleuthing, that a two-second snippet found at the 3.29 point in the title song (heard here) would later form the basis for the great Gang Starr track "Mass Appeal" (heard here). As some wag posited in the comments section, what kind of golden ears and listening skills are required to pull such a killer sample out of such a limp track?
But I come to praise Smooth, not bury him. For every LP he posts that isn't my kind of thing, there are others that floor me. I'll keep it short.
- Neal Creque's 1972 "Contrast", a swampy rhodes-infested groove set, with upbeat workout "Bacalau" an early-morning favorite.
- several mid-70s offerings from acoustic piano great Cedar Walton on his "Mobius" series, who digs deep into his newly-purchased synthesizers and comes up with some surprisingly successful experiments (take out the uninspired vocal lines from his cover of War's "Low Rider" and you've got a track that'll get your party moving - attention DJs).
-stand up bass player Leroy Vinnegar's weird and wonderful venture into echo-laden electric settings, 1972's "The Kid". His melding of acoustic bass, wet keyboard squirts, and a slamming backbeat on "Doing That Thing" is the kind of find us groove hounds salivate over.
-Hysear Don Walker and his dual volume "Complete Expressions" from the early 1970s - miniature explorations in stunted grooves and rhodes patterns that sometimes sound like po-mo deconstructions of Ray Charles' intro to "What I Say".
-future peddler of soft jazz pablum Tom Scott in an earlier phase of 1970s r&b overblowing, with album opener "Looking Out for Number Seven" veering sharply towards honk 'n screech while floating atop a bubbling beat of epic proportions.
-weirdness from Wes Montgomery's electric bass-playing brother Monk, in a 1971 LP experimenting with fuzz pedals and the like over loping grooves. Music for walking sideways to.
-the unlikely yet captivating slice of disco "Scream and Shout" put down by the duo of Paul Humphreys on drums and Tony Drake on bass and guitar from 1979's "Me and My Drums" - not sure what audience they were aiming for with this lengthy stomp with minimal development and country-flavored guitar over swishing disco drums, but they've found a fan in me.
-the genre-bending "Marchin' On" by the Heath Brothers, with their African thumb piano and strutting snappy beat on the 4-part "Smilin' Billy Suite," lifted by Nas for "One Love," among others.
No need to go on. Suffice to say, if you go digging through the chaff, you'll come up with some wheat, of the golden variety.
Not much space left here, but I'd like to throw some props up to my other blogging discovery, Simon666 of Never Enough Rhodes. Simon is less active than Smooth, posting fewer albums, but what he may lack in quantity he more than makes up for in quality, and his blog post descriptions are often worth the price of admission alone. He hands out personal compilations of Brazilian 70s funk prominently featuring his beloved Fender Rhodes keyboard, or showcases hip hop tracks sampling or incorporating the contraption. He generously offers links to and from other music blogs when files are down. He amasses staggering lists and collections of entire discographies, and helped gather together a collection of Herbie Hancock electric bootlegs that now number nearly 50. This is killer stuff - the "Live in Bremen 1974" lift has become a recent favorite, with excellent sound quality picking up every cymbal brush and bass thump as the Headhunters lurch their way through three extended funk workouts, although I'm even more partial to the murky sound on Hancock's "Live at Ultrasonic Studios 1973" - I'd love to hear something from this surface on the next Mos Def release. And what can I say about wonderful obscurities like the amazingly Anglo-Saxon The Daly-Wilson Big Band Featuring Kerrie Biddell, which must win the award for being The Least Likely Album to Sport a Killer Mobb Deep Sample - "Dirty Feet," later to appear on the Mobb's "Shook Ones Part II". And there's an extensive collection of early 70's "spiritual jazz" recordings that were only released in small runs from local labels, exclusive to overlooked scenes like Buffalo, NY, that Simon666 has brought out - things like The Cosmic Twins, The John Betsch Society, and Birthright. Think mid-period John Coltrane, heavy on modal vamps, tinkling percussion, and electric keyboards fitted with wah-wah pedals. It's much more intriguing than I'm making it sound.
Why go on? I've given a taste here of what's available from just two of many, many record collectors with the technical know-how and dedication to share their findings with the rest of the music loving community. I still think compressed music files sound shitty compared to the rich whomp of vinyl, and I'm not even close to waving goodbye to record labels and stores - I recently bought into the hype and repurchased a few newly remastered Beatles albums on CD (final verdict : decent), and have fallen hard for the brave efforts of the Dusty Groove label, who just this year brought Bill Cosby's swampy electric one-off, 1971's "Badfoot Brown & the Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band," back into print after years of obscurity. Not a word or joke in sight, just two long jazzy tracks of the Bitches Brew-variety, with echoed keyboards courtesy of Cosby himself and long liner notes detailing Martin Luther King's funeral written by The Cos that bristle with intelligent black rage. A Tribe Called Quest sampled a section of the melancholy funeral march for "We Can Get Down". That's what crate digging is all about.
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