Pieces Of A Man (2)

Continued

Guitar Soloing: Blood from a Stone

For a brief spell there is the early 1980s, things got a little peculiar with the major record labels in the States. Having over-invested far too much of their product line in disco and glutted the market in the latter half of the prior decade, it was as if they were in a frenzied scramble to diversify after the post-1979 backlash. All those A&R guys, one imagines, scouring an array of clubs and cornering various scenesters, beating all the bushes in order to find out what kind of new music people might actually wanna hear. The end result was -- for a short spate of time, at least --  that some of the major-label rosters got oddly "pluralistic." In some instances, a few artists who would've otherwise never gotten a major contract at any other period in music history suddenly did. As one would expect, they'd get their three-disc run, often putting out albums that were widely and well-reviewed in top-of-the-rack publications, only to slide into obscurity and the discount bins a few years later.

One such artist was South Carolina-born blues/jazz guitarist James 'Blood' Ulmer, who briefly ended up on the Columbia label. Ulmer had come to New York City some years earlier, looking to play in the big metro leagues. He'd already spent the latter half of 1960s gigging around the rustbelt cities of the Midwest as an itinerant member of a number of funk combos, and had also recorded as a sideman with 'Big' John Patton, Larry Young and a number of established jazz musicians. By the time he arrived in New York, it proved to be auspicious timing, as the city's "loft jazz" scene was gearing up its 1970s hotbed furvency. He soon fell under the tutelage of Ornette Coleman, learning to apply the free-jazz pioneer's theories of "harmolodics" to his own repertoire of jazz, blues and funk licks.

Soon enough, he was playing with Ornette, David Murray and a broad array of the downtown avant set. By decade's end, he'd released Tales of Captain Black, and formed -- alongside Murray and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson -- the Music Revelation Ensemble. He also put together his own large ensemble, which wound up playing at the Mudd Club and the Knitting Factory, frequently wedged onto the bill with the likes of James Chance & the Contortions, the Lounge Lizards, or Kid Creole & the Coconuts. It was about this time Rough Trade took note, signing Ulmer and his group for the album Are You Glad To Be In America? It was about this time that Columbia Records came calling.

{     Here it is we've been talking about guitar solos for a week plus, and if the name of Jimi Hendrix has come up, I've somehow managed to skim past it. No matter, and perhaps just as well. We all know how it goes, what with the excessive reverence heaped on Hendrix, and those esteemed mega-titans (Carlos, Clapton, Garcia, Cosey, McLaughlin, whoever & etcetera, amen) who fall within a tight orbit in the grand cosmology of such stuff. But hell, even Ulmer reputedly claimed that modern guitarisms hadn't evolved a single step post-Hendrix -- which probably played no small part in the why & how of Mr. Blood himself seizing upon the whole harmolodics thing and busting his own balls to take his instrument apart, hoping to put it back together in some new, jarringly freakish reconfigurational way.     }

Ulmer would get the standard run of three albums out of his deal with the label. Freelancing (1981) and Black Rock (1982) were each an extension of the sort of material the guitarist had been exploring with his big band in the past few years -- often serving up a dense, multihybrid funk-fusion mutation that at times sounded like On The Corner being fed through a woodchipper. Heady moments were plenty, but it was perhaps of the more scaled-back moments of Freelancing in which Ulmer dazzled the most. At a few points on the album, Ulmer performs in trio mode with bassist Amin Ali and drummer G. Calvin Weston, and it's at those moments that his guitar takes the foreground -- with Ulmer charging up and down the frets and summoning up spikey clusters of notes that erupt like glass-slivered blossoms...






With the release of 1984's Odyssey, however, Ulmer lost a few listeners. The album found him slipping into a largely rhythmic mode throughout many of the tracks, leaving the lead to the improvised soloing of violinist Charles Burnham. While Odyssey was deemed Ulmer's most accessible album, it prompted some to ask, "What happened to the funk?" Fact is, the funk was still there, albeit it a (once again) different mutational form. It was as if the guitarist was starting to take it back to its Delta origins, by way of an extended, meandering sojourn through the Appalachian foothills.






It was a return to roots that Ulmer would follow in the years to come; first narrowed his focus to more standard avant-jazz outings, than narrowing it further to concentrate on playing and signing in a strictly traditional and unadorned Delta blues style. Talking to a magazine many years later, he recalled the days of the late 70s and early 80s when he and his group had played for crowds at the Mudd Club. "There's no way a person could keep playing that way -- the way we did, with that kind of energy -- night after night for very long," he said. "That would've killed us."

World Machine

"….in the business of life a man’s disposition and the secret workings of his mind and affections are better discovered when he is in trouble than at other times; so likewise the secrets of nature reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they go their own way."

- Francis Bacon "Novum Organum"

"See how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted with folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad."

- Ochwiay Biano to Carl Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections"

"Here it comes again
Chugging like a train
Round and round
An impeccable groove"

- Level 42 "Hot Water"

It is a little-known fact that all our popular culture today owes its existence to Francis Bacon’s philosophical work of 1620, the Novum Organum. This document was instrumental in the development of what we now call the "scientific method" in its empiricist declaration that nature is best understood not from general observation, but by the manipulation of it in artificial settings, by its "vexing" in a laboratory. It was this insight, combined with the insight of Rene Descartes’ Discourse On Method, that mathematics was the purest form of reason, that gave birth to the modern scientific consciousness that both shapes our society today, and provokes the antinomian forces that set themselves up to oppose it.

We may find the world view of the medieval peasant, in which for example an object fell to the ground because it loved the earth which was its home, impossibly quaint, but what we fail to understand is that such a view filled life with an intensity of meaning that we can barely begin to appreciate from our modern atomised viewpoint. Until the Scientific Revolution, man belonged in the world. The adoption of Cartesian dualism, in which we are subjects in a world of objects, and the adoption of Baconian empiricism, in which all of nature exists to be manipulated for numerically quantifiable advantage, are the roots of our deep alienation. Capitalism, far from being a Ding an Sich, a thing in itself, was merely the new scientific rationalism translated into the social sphere, and that in turn is why it has always proven such an elusive foe to those who would oppose it.



The rise of this "new science" in the early 17th Century, was not, as is popularly believed, due to it "disproving" the magical-alchemical world view through rational falsification, but because the established church needed a political tool to counter the proliferating heretical movements that were rising against it. The attack against alchemy was conducted by a Minorite friar, Marin Marsenne, via the Collège Royale in Paris and the Royal Society in London, utilising Cartesian dualism and a philosophy of atomism to posit God not as immanent in all things but as an external director, inaccessible to independent religious or political thought. Hermeticism was so effectively suppressed and discredited that it wasn’t until the investigations of Carl Jung in the middle of the 20th Century that it was tentatively recognised as a systematic psychological worldview rather than merely an abortive, bungled form of early chemistry.

As the historians Christopher Hill and Keith Thomas pointed out, much of the tumult of the English Civil War revolved around sects such as the Levellers, the Diggers, and the Ranters who wanted to maintain their animist and alchemical beliefs against the rationalising forces of the new science, which was seen as the acquisitory ideology of the rising Protestant bourgeoisie, whose credo of elevation through wealth or good works denied salvation to every class below them. It was this linking of alchemical beliefs with communistic sentiments, known at the time as "enthusiasm", that led to its proscription by the governing establishment. The reason why Sir Isaac Newton, who had far less faith in his mechanical conception of the universe than his modern-day apologists, kept his extensive alchemical work secret was more through its explosive political ramifications than through potential professional embarrassment.

Today of course, the rational-scientific world view sits squarely in the middle of our culture, apparently politically neutral, its tenets unquestioned even by those who are most opposed to its social manifestation as Capitalism. And yet for all this, modern Western man, like his 17th Century forebears, still carries with him a nagging sense of emptiness, of the deep alienation that results from a world that has had its meaning deliberately extracted by a rationalising ideology that has sunk itself so deeply into the culture as to be almost invisible. It is no surprise that Britain, perhaps the country that was most deeply rationalised by the Enlightenment, has also been the home to the most magical revolts. These revolts have been almost endlessly diverse in their form, from drug cults and druid revivals to incursions of Eastern mysticism, but perhaps the most visible recent revolts have been those that have been provoked by the arrival of black musical styles from the USA. It is no accident that many of the post-war youth cults have more than a passing similarity to the outbreaks of "enthusiasm" of the Civil War period.



The official myth of the huge impact that jazz, rock’n’roll, soul music and the blues had on post-war Britain is that they somehow offered a sense of release from post-war austerity and a stiff-upper-lip emotional constipation. It’s a convenient myth because it contradicts any idea that there are any deeper issues with how Western society projects its version of reality. It’s an easily contradicted myth as well - the "sexual revolution" of the 1960’s did nothing to meliorate any deeper sense of alienation, and indeed it’s reasonable to argue that the Britain of the 1950’s was in many ways a more socially coherent and balanced society than that of today.

It is also fairly clear that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of young Britons experienced their first encounter with Black American or Jamaican music as an almost religious moment, and ultimately this is because it to all extents and purposes it actually was a religious moment. What they experienced was, perhaps for the first time in their lives, a colossal infusion of mana, of the sense of wholeness that the feeling of the world being inherently full of meaning provides. In essence, they had temporarily become medieval peasants. Filled with "enthusiasm", what could they then do but gather together, open clubs, dress and talk like their heroes, and even try to replicate the music themselves?

However, all British youth cultures, once they became established, would eventually face a moment of schism - between the "trad" purists and those that want "to take the music further". Often characterised as a fission between luddites and progressives, it was really a debate on how best to preserve the mana, the magic, because when British musicians got hold of a black American musical form, they inevitably subjected it to a process of rationalisation. What happens if we make it faster? Slower? Increase the level of amplification? Combine it with another form? Eventually the result would be something like Led Zeppelin. If a blues singer such as Willie Dixon was like a pharoah, a great king who radiated magical mana, then Zeppelin were the great pyramid built around his tomb. The musical relationship between America and Britain in the post-war period was not just between "black" and "white", but between irrationalism and rationalism, and the eventual fully-rationalised final form meant that the mana was exhausted.

The jazz-funk scene that emerged in the UK in the late 1970’s was in many ways an archetypal example of this cultural process. Inspired by the usual canon of revered records imported from the USA, it went through the familiar pattern whereby a small band of "legendary" proselytising enthusiasts started hosting "legendary" one-off events that turned into "legendary" established clubs, and in turn into a thriving subculture. If there was one major difference, it was that many of the initial movers and shakers in the scene were black Britons, and their musical response offered the possibility that Britain could create its own self-sufficient and fruitful dialogue between black and white musicians; between irrational and rationalising aesthetics.

It was within this early scene that Level 42 emerged as an instrumental-only band, and as the original scene faded around them, were to become its great rationalising force throughout the 1980’s. The band, driven by Mark King’s relentless, machine-like slap bass, replaced the original fluidity and trepidation of jazz-funk with an almost grid-like rigidity. Level 42’s records were enormous constructions, and it was no doubt their sheer propulsion, their sense of going somewhere, that made them so appealing to the yuppies and travelling salesmen of Thatcherite Britain.



Nevertheless, despite the vertiginous awe that robo-funk like "Hot Water" and "The Chinese Way" could induce, Level 42’s lyrical concerns were generally humane - boy meets girl, growing pains, childhood memories. Their rather modest subject matter and personal conduct contradicted the kind of wine-bar upward-mobility with which they were often associated. "Something About You", perhaps their best song, was a love song worthy of Barry Gibb in the way that it used plain, simple language to express eternal verities.



Level 42 were one of the most significant British band of the 80’s because they were the last great rationalisers of African-American music, the last great ziggurat-builders. By the mid-80’s the channel of irrationalism that was supplied by black America was closed off by hip-hop, whose hyper-rationalised cut-up structure and atomised worldview were resistant to white appropriation, mainly because it began where white music usually finished up. White British music, its major source of mana closed off, could only decline into the sterile pattern-work of indie. Ultimately though, popular music has only carried us along, and distracted us from our real duty - to find a way to reinvigorate our world with meaning, which for 99% of human history has been the normal condition of existence, but which for us still appears a paradise far beyond our reach.