2008: Sir Victor Uwaifo - Guitar Boy Superstar: 1970-1976
Fuck Vampire Weekend. No, seriously: to paraphrase Dr. Gonzo, those swine should be fucked, broken, and driven across the land. Why make do with watery, lite-FM spoiled goods from those smirking poachers when you can buy organic, straight from the far more deserving farmers who coaxed this stuff out of the ground in the first place?
The title of this compilation is no exaggeration: Sir Victor Uwaifo was a towering pillar of Nigerian music by the ‘70s, one of the true innovators in twining the country’s traditional and tribal music with the electric mayhem coming across the Atlantic from the likes of Atlantic, Stax/Volt, and Motown. Guitar Boy Superstar focuses on Uwaifo’s injection of ekassa (traditional coronation music) with a shot of fretboard lightning, instead of his early highlife work or later disco deviances. The result is a laid-back stew of soul, funk, and rock that is as celebratory as its roots suggest: music of the king, by a king, and fit for a king.
Like a lot of the music to come out of Lagos at the time, Uwaifo’s body of work sounds like the product of sheer joy at the mutant idioms he was forging with his bands, often spilling into outright playfulness. “Agho” even borrows the riff from lounge classic “Tequila” (you know, the one where “tequila!” is the only lyric) for a funky workout between the horns and the keys, with Uwaifo’s licks holding down the rhythm. Uwaifo is frequently compared to Jimi Hendrix, and while that’s a touch over the top, the wriggling, fuzzy wah-pedal lines on some of the slinkier tracks here definitely bring Electric Ladyland to mind, as well as the “play like your momma just died” histrionics of Funkadelic’s forever-underrated Eddie Hazel. This is especially apparent on the last track, “West African Safari,” maybe the best, most eclectic and free-ranging number of the bunch. Parts of the song could almost fit in with John McLaughlin’s axe-slinging in Miles Davis’ fusion bands of the same early-‘70s period. As always, James Brown and the JBs are a heavy influence too, and tunes like “Do Lelezi” show that Uwaifo might have already been picking up moves from that hardest-working African disciple of the hardest-working man in show biz, Fela Kuti.
As far as Uwaifo’s career goes, this compilation is a great sampler pack. He’s certainly one of the more unique guitarists to come out of the wildly creative atmosphere of 1970s Nigeria. But the Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump collection released earlier this year by Strut Records is a better overview of the contemporaneous musical currents Uwaifo swam. Both Lagos Jump and Soundways’ own Nigeria Special compilation pack better killer-to-filler ratios, too. Their lack of focus on a single artist or group allowed the labels to pull a wider variety of tracks from the exploding number of local musicians who often made only a handful of enduring songs (like the Brooklyn blog babies of our own era). But if you’ve already wiggled your toes in the shallows, breathe deep and start plumbing the depths right here.
1967: John Coltrane - Interstellar Space
By the year of his death in 1967, John Coltrane had already exhausted a variety of jazz idioms, though not for a sense of accomplishment. His entire musical career thrived on its fluid, adaptive approach, so it's no wonder that many late-period albums -- Ascension, Meditations, Om, etc -- were not only increasingly free, but more conceptually complex. Coltrane adapted well to the pulse of the time, and his later music mirrored his spiritual state of mind, one that was developed to the point of inextricability. Although the musical cacophony might signify otherwise, his vision was particularly lucid during this period.
But Coltrane's musical trajectory is not easily predictable. Interstellar Space -- a fierce free-jazz rumination in four movements -- was among his last studio sessions, yet a week prior he recorded Stellar Regions, one of his more accessible, melodic albums of the time. What these two albums show aren't necessarily contrasting mindframes, but Coltrane's dexterity, range, and pliability. He wasn't moving from style to style as if to conquer each one; the styles themselves were what made him move. And on Interstellar Space, it felt like he was moving to reconcile free-jazz with spiritual truth.
Each of the album's tracks follows a similar structure, with Coltrane sounding bells while drummer Rashied Ali, the sole other performer, lets his drumsticks dance. Coltrane then introduces a melody, frequently shifting, extending, and modulating until it becomes more swirling impressionism than blues-influenced realism. "Venus," for example, is stretched to its tonal limits, with Coltrane getting downright throaty around the 4-minute mark, resembling younger contemporary Albert Ayler (whose spiritual free-jazz had a tremendous influence on Coltrane's sound during this period). He's not intoning on scales, he's screaming in the upper registers. Around 7:10, he stops for breath during a fast-paced ornamentation, only to continue its statement midway through. It's almost as exhausting to listen to as it must've been for Coltrane to play.
Ali, meanwhile, matches Coltrane's intensity with cymbal-heavy flourishes and tumbling snare-tom aggression. He's relentless on his set, sounding each drum and cymbal with equal confidence. Although the emotional limitations of the drum sound restrict his stories from reaching the level of Coltrane's commanding declarations, it's no less important to Interstellar Space's aesthetic. On "Saturn," Ali simply owns his instrument during a two-and-a-half-minute introduction, easing us into Coltrane's final, most rhythmic assertion of the album. From there, the two rip through a movement so raw, so visceral, so complementary that their respective approaches become that much clearer when sound together.
Although it may not have the significance of A Love Supreme and Giant Steps, Interstellar Space better captures what Coltrane had learned throughout the years, especially in terms of style (overtones, multiphonics, the altissimo register) and spiritual philosophy. It's an album indicative of growth over transition, the album I go to when I want to be challenged. Many might characterize his later style of playing as "abstract," but that would only serve to undermine his intent. Coltrane believed in the essentialism of musical notes, that they had universal meaning and that the musician's job was to understand and employ them. He was obviously trying to communicate something deep on this album. And when that effort comes with as much spirituality and philosophy that Coltrane brought to the jazz vernacular, you can't help but get caught up in the romanticism.
1995: Morphine - Yes
In the ’90s, it wasn’t the strangest thing for a hip band to have horns. It was the heyday of the ska revival, after all, and Cake -- an artsy rock band with trumpet in nearly every song -- was on the charts. But Morphine was different. They had two saxophones, drums, and slide bass guitar. While most bands would have treated this setup as a gimmick, Morphine used their unique instrumentation to make gloomy, dangerous pop music.
Yes was the band's third album, after ’91's Good and ’93's Cure For Pain. By the time of its release, they were poised for a break; college radio and international touring had given them substantial exposure and a strong fan base. But Yes, with its dark corners and ominous imagery, probably wasn’t the mainstream bid their fans had in mind. The album was foreboding, but also offset by fast tempos and catchy melodies.
Lead-off track “Honey White” is as poppy as Morphine gets and became one of the band’s signature songs. It's also quintessential Morphine: singer Mark Sandman’s low voice is layered on top of the even lower bass and saxophones, pounding away furiously. The melody is only a few notes, but paired with Sandman’s lyrics about a deal with the devil, it serves its purpose beautifully.
The rest of the record unfolds more quietly. Second track “Scratch” is as subtle as “Honey White” is abrasive, and a fair representative of Yes as a whole. Sandman’s voice is typically resigned, and his lyrics -- “I lost everything I had/ I’m starting over from scratch” -- are both bleak and funny. This darkness shows up elsewhere on Yes, from the repeated warning “sharks patrol these waters” in “Sharks” to the heartbreaking closer “Gone For Good,” a breakup song that features only Sandman’s hushed vocals and acoustic guitar.
“All Your Way” finds middle ground between the band’s sweet and bitter extremes, resulting in one of their best songs. The lyrics are about love gone wrong -- “I found a woman who's soft but she's also hard/ While I slept she nailed down my heart” -- yet the pretty melody slinks around major chords, and the song’s saxophones sound almost happy. It may be the closest Morphine gets to serenity.
The record’s other highlights -- the punchy “Super Sex,” the madly romantic “Radar” -- don't shake things up too much, but they fill out the album nicely. The only missteps are ones of excess. “The Jury,” with its beat-poetry delivery and dull atmospherics, is a glaring weak spot and, being the ninth track out of twelve, slows the record’s momentum.
But as a whole, Yes perfectly represents what made Morphine great. Underneath the murkiness, the roaring saxophones, and the sinister vocals are songs full of pathos, wit, and perfect melodies. It’s easy to see why Cambridge, Massachusetts named a city square after Mark Sandman. Why the rest of the country didn’t follow suit is anybodies guess.
1970: Curtis Mayfield - Curtis
Curtis Mayfield kicked off his debut album, Curtis, with a string of racial epithets aimed dead-on at no one in particular. He had America in his crosshairs. From the crumbling inner-cities to the finely manicured suburbs -- black and white, those both privileged and down on their luck – Mayfield wanted to garner the attention of the masses. And over the 40-odd minutes that followed, he would dissect and explore the deep-seated sentiments of injustice, poverty, and revolution that were afflicting this country in 1970.
The opening track is "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go." It's eight minutes of fire and brimstone -- a pessimistic caveat to a generation left jaded by the failures that followed the promise and ultimate decline of the ’60s, a rallying cry to the ignorant. Mayfield comes out swinging right from the start, bolstered by the absolute might of his backing band. A chugging funk guitar dances with a percussion setup bent on polyrhythm, consistent only in its sporadic deviations. But Curtis ends up digging us out of the dark, psychedelic "Hell" and greets us, rather abruptly, with a swell of heavenly harps on "Other Side of Town," a lonely ballad about the hopelessness that comes with being penniless. Without rushing, he relays the despair of what the poorly informed might refer to as "the underprivileged."
But he reassures us that there's still beauty worth fighting for on tracks like "Makings of You" and "Miss Black America." They soar due to the work of Riley Hampton and Gary Slabo, who share production credits with Mayfield, and can be thanked for the album's abundance of string arrangements. They took Henry Mancini to the streets, mixed in Mayfield's Chicago soul and shook well. Those strings manage to evoke a grab-bag of emotions, from skittering paranoia to absolute bliss, not to mention the eerie calm that can envelop a city in the dead of night. The expert horn section is nothing short of inspired as well, and they're used to their full potential on cuts such as "Wild and Free." Though the harp may seem like Mayfield's ace-in-the-hole, the horns keep the songs on their toes: that brass force continually provides balance to the vocal's slight falsetto, which might come off as wispy if Mayfield weren't so confident.
One could make the argument that Curtis hinges on two tracks. One of them is "Move On Up," the 9-minute expedition that doesn't need an introduction (especially since a certain Mr. West slowed it down to right a few wrongs and help him write some song). The other is "We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue." It's a beautifully structured catharsis, plucked from the bowels of Curtis Mayfield's soul. It starts off slow, with intention, but before long the band drives into a fury of drumming and blasting horns, only to ease back out over a sprinkling harp, as if the digression was just a bad dream. It's a perfect display of the album's duality, as gliding soul meets the hard-hitting funk that would later be refined on the ghetto symphony Superfly.
By all counts, Curtis got the ball rolling for a new type of socially conscious R&B and soul. It took black music beyond Hitsville, USA and gave it a set of principles, which Mayfield had already hinted at in his earlier work with The Impressions. The importance of his message sometimes overshadows the density of the actual music. Curtis is a lush, thick record that not only supports a healthy dose of social commentary, but also embraces the listener in a distinctive, velvety swathe that, until then, was foreign to soul records.
1996: Tobin Sprout - Carnival Boy
I’ve only seen Tobin Sprout perform once, opening for his former band Guided by Voices on their 2004 farewell tour. Sprout seemed like the polar opposite of Bob Pollard’s notoriously drunken, boisterous crew as he played through a set of solo material alongside some of his contributions to the GBV canon. It’s not just a coincidence that Voices albums began to decline in quality (if not quantity) soon after Sprout left the group following 1996’s Under the Bushes, Under the Stars; Tobin was responsible for some of the band’s best-loved songs, including “A Good Flying Bird,” “Awful Bliss,” and “To Remake the Young Flyer,” and he collaborated with Pollard on many more.
After Under the Bushes’ release in early ’96, Sprout struck out on his own with Carnival Boy, which dropped just a few months later. Not surprisingly, the two records are quite similar – Carnival Boy even reprises Bushes’ “It’s Like Soul Man.” But while Under the Bushes is a 24-song monster, like most Pollard epics, Sprout’s album is comparatively brief – only 14 songs, with minimal filler and quite a few legitimate sing-a-long jams.
Arguably, Carnival Boy is more consistently good than any GBV or Pollard record outside of the immortal Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. If anything, the record is back-heavy, with the stellar trio of “Soul Man,” “Hermit Stew,” and Syd Barrett ode “The Last Man Well Known to Kingpin” closing the deal. “Kingpin,” in particular, is the standout, with layers of Sprouts singing a chorus of “Shangri-La wrecker” so earnestly it sounds meaningful.
It’s impossible to say whether Carnival Boy is so good simply because Sprout doesn’t spread himself as thin as Pollard often does. Regardless, it’s a record often unjustly overlooked by fans of the genre -- a near-perfect nugget of charming ’90s pop from a guy so modest he didn’t even bother to put his name on the front cover.
1979: Rodriguez - Cold Fact
Usually, the best a “forgotten” artist can hope for is to be slowly discovered by proceeding generations. With a little luck, the right taste-making crate digger might stumble across a lost treasure and start talking it up. Maybe Hip Band will talk about what an influence said artist is on their new album. The bloggers will blog, the music journalists will shower praise, and the artist and his/her records will achieve a tiny fraction of the success that, for what ever reason, eluded them in the first place.
A less common scenario involves your records achieving cult status in South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, treasured by a reverent fan-base, while your person is hailed as a revolutionary-slash-messiah. Outrageous rumors circulate: he’s stopped putting out albums ‘cause he killed himself after being jailed for the murder of his wife; he’s died of a heroin overdose; he was electrocuted on stage. Or the best: he committed suicide on stage, either by setting himself on fire or by blowing his brains out.
The latter, slightly rarer situation, is the exact one Detroit folk-rocker Sixto Diaz Rodriguez found himself in in the early ‘90s when, after living a settled life since the early ‘80s, his daughter discovered his legendary status in South Africa through a fan site. His profile was starting to grow in America, and now Light in the Attic (who’ve also delivered stellar reissues from the likes of Noel Ellis, Betty Davis, Karen Dalton, and The Free Design) has re-released his debut, Cold Fact, with expanded liner notes detailing his whole bizarre ascendancy.
While the whole thing might seem a bit underwhelming considering its godhead status with some, Cold Fact is a pretty killer album, even when you remove its strange story. Opener “Sugar Man” channels the same seedy, narcotic vibe as Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman,” and if it weren’t for lyrics like “Silver magic ships you carry/ Jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane,” one might mistake it for some misplaced Donovan B-side. “Only Good For Conversation” follows, bearing more than a little similarity to fellow Motor City rockers like The Amboy Dukes, Frijid Pink, Grand Funk Railroad, and the Bob Seger System. The track's stomping, fuzz-laden approach momentarily erases the careening strings and space sounds that proceeded it, but “Crucify Your Mind” returns things to a trippier place, with gutiarist/producer Dennis Coffey and a band of soul legends (including some members of the esteemed Funk Brothers) providing a supple backdrop for Rodriguez’s truly menacing lyrics. The harsh realities of inner city life are contrasted against the glossy but fading dream of the Woodstock era: “Was it huntsman or a player/ That made you pay the cost/ That now assumes relaxed position/ And prositutes your loss.”
“This Is Not A Song It’s An Outburst: Or the Establishment Blues” could be heard as a send-up of Dylan’s stream of consciousness rambles if it didn’t seem so damn earnest. Rodriguez spits lines like “Adultery plays the kitchen, bigot cops non-fiction/ The little man gets shafted, sons and daughters get drafted” with dramatic, street-level conviction. “Hate Street Dialogue” offers the middle finger to the dreamy San Fran scene, while tunes like “Forget It” and “Like Janis” showcase the bitter, near-punk snarl just underneath Rodriguez’s clear, tuneful vocals. “I Wonder” addresses sexual jealousy over a shuffling Motown bass line, its bouncy, sweet melody creating a perfectly uneasy juxtaposition as he sings about war and slut girlfriends. “Gommorah (A Nursery Rhyme)” blends a busted blues rattle with a terrifically creepy children’s choir that backs up the chorus, then we're treated to a bit of just barely out-of- key “America the Beautiful” on the way out.
“Rich Folks Hoax” and “Inner City Blues” (not a Gaye cover) address the social unrest of Detroit, and the bitter, malicious bent of the lyric contrasts nicely with the hopeful stride of civil rights-era soul, which clearly influenced the sound of the album. “Jane S. Piddy” ends things with a casual shrug of the shoulders. “I saw my reflection in my father’s final tears/ The Wind was slowly melting, San Francisco disappears/ Acid heads, unmade beds, and you Woodward world queers,” Rodriguez intones, seeming more content to sound bad-ass than poignant, but then follows with a mournful refrain of “I know you’re lonely.” The struggle between tenderness and machismo, or the attempt to find one in the other, shades the album, and in the end, Rodriguez resorts to a tiny bit of spoken word: “Thanks for your time/ And you can thank me for mine/ And after that’s said/ Forget it,” siding, at least for now, on the role of steal-eyed realist.
It was that last line, South African myths would report, that Rodriguez delivered just before he blew his brains out on stage. And while it’s true that he never did so, it’s not hard to imagine why one might suppose he could. Cold Fact sounds like the work of a guy who might decide it’s all pretty worthless. But it also sounds like a guy who isn’t entirely sold on the idea. “Bag it, man,” the album ends. “Okay.”
