Touchstones

...I have a love/hate relationship with the ECM label (which is now owned by Universal/Decca/Polywhatever). This mysterious European outfit always intrigued me when I was a kid -- our library had a bunch of their titles, and I was mystified by the spacious, almost negative-spacious artwork. I remember staring at one record, probably a Keith Jarrett album, and asking myself "What IS this?" You can't really tell anything from the covers, which usually feature a landscape shot, or sometimes just a block of solid color. I've come to dig the artwork, as it forms a part of the label's brand. In these bland post-digital days, so few labels have an aesthetic. It's nice to see ECM continuing to carry it through.

But what makes it a love/hate situation? Let's break it out into two lists.

Love:

1. At its best, the music is a dramatic extension of traditional jazz, incorporating modal and free elements while still remaining strangely accessible.
2. The cover art is continuous and cool -- you know upon seeing one of their projects that it is an ECM release. What other label can you say that about these days?
3. They support new classical composition via their ECM New imprint, which is fantastic.
4. They supported (eventually incorporating) Carla Bley and Michael Mantler's JCOA and Watt labels.
5. They release Michael Mantler's brilliantly uncategorizable albums.

Hate:

1. At its worst, the music has a droney, new-agey feel. Very easy to make fun of!
2. The cover art is pretentious and often conveys little helpful information to the uninformed consumer.
3. They seem to indulge Keith Jarrett's every fart. They guy is great, but maybe we should rein it in a little.
4. It's hard to find a lot of their classic titles in stores (probably more stores' fault than ECM's).
5. Their list price is always high -- $18.98 per CD. Consequently, most of the ECM titles in my collection are used LPs or used CDs or promos.

It's great to see ECM address the last two factors with their new "Touchstones" series, which takes classic ECM catalog titles and reissues them in simple four-panel digipaks (no great loss, as the original albums rarely had any liner notes or photos, so they don't take anything out!) at a budget price ($11.99). I was surprised to walk into my local record store and find the "Touchstones" reissue of Marc Johnson's Bass Desires album, which I'd been looking for for a while. Other quality titles in the first batch are Bill Frisell's Lookout for Hope and Paul Bley's Open, To Love. Kenny Wheelers Gnu High is also in the first batch, but I've yet to find a copy.

...a worthwhile initiative.

Not-Reissued Wednesday: Nothing Painted Blue

Nothing Painted Blue
A Baby, A Blanket, A Packet of Seeds
Jupa, 1990

This weekend I saw Franklin Bruno do a performance in a small art gallery/performance space not far from my house. I took great comfort in the fact that not only is he a brilliant, insightful songwriter -- he is also a riveting performer and, in our limited interaction, a very nice guy. You know never know when you meet someone you admire or see a favorite musician live for the first time. They could be jerks, they could be lousy performers, they could be both...I've seen it all!

As usual, seeing Bruno live sent me scurrying through his discography which has quietly grown quite sizable, when one considers things under his name, with his band Nothing Painted Blue, and his new outfit, the Human Hearts. He doesn't make bad records, so you can jump in anywhere...

This curiously-titled platter is the self-release debut of Nothing Painted Blue. The little insert boasts "Sixteen hours in the studio, sixteen songs...", which explains the stark, unadorned sound quality. You have to wait four songs to even get a harmony vocal overdub! It sticks pretty closely to the guitar-bass-drums format, with the great, underrated Kyle Brodie pounding the skins. (I actually asked the drummer who played with Bruno this weekend what his name was, on the off chance it WAS Brodie -- it wasn't but he did a great job nonetheless.)

It's definitely a nascent effort. The songs have a lot of future Bruno hallmarks: a sort of nervously skittering intellect, endless wit, bluntly catchy hooks, etc. Bruno's voice isn't quite the bold bleat it is now, and the songs lack a certain depth and nuance, but it's a very exciting debut, and has aged quite well. Plenty of bon mots to go around, like:

She was as subtle as a raw fish
She was as stable as a drug
If she'd been any less standoffish
She would have been a bearskin rug

From what I can gather, this isn't an easy record to come by. It was apparently pressed twice, the second pressing including a bright yellow tour poster -- which is the pressing I had. I got it from a dealer at a record show...it looked like he'd bought the stock of a failed indie distributor, as he had a lot of weird early '90s and late '80s indie rock and punk records. I think this one was $8.00, and it was still sealed. I also got a red vinyl Happy Flowers record and the first self-released Bob Paisley album (which ain't exactly indie rock -- not sure how that got in there).

Most of Nothing Painted Blue's oeuvre is easy to find. I especially like their most recent album, the hard-rockin' Taste the Flavor and the brilliant Monte Carlo Method. But you can't really go wrong with anything Bruno's done...

Here's a shot of him in action from the other night:

On the road again...

So, for the past ten years or so, before even graduating from college, I've worked for record labels, often charged with the task of "supporting" touring artists while on the road. Said "support" consists basically of alerting the local media well in advance of the gig -- press, radio, local societies and such. I hesitate to say it's a thankless job. It's more like covering your ass...you want to be sure to have at least one or two big media hits (like a juicy radio interview or a feature in the local paper), so that when no one shows up to the gig, you can say, "But we had a big feature in the Buttscrunch Journal." The actual correlation between local media and show attendance is, of course, fleeting and unproven.

It was interesting to be on the other side of the fence a few weeks ago, when my young-ish band (we've been together about a year and four months) took in a short tour of the southeast. It was the first time for all of us, and even though it was only six days, I think we learned some lessons...those being:

1. Sleep
If you do one night where you get less than 7 or 8 hours of sleep, you leave yourself open to infection and grumpiness. And headaches. It's a vicious cycle.

2. Eat Well
Fast food and donuts also lead to headaches, crankiness, and indigestion.

3. Friends Are Great
Call it playing it safe, but for this first round we hit towns where we had a lot of friends and family. They came. They bought a lot of merch. They brought us snacks. They cheered loudly.

4. The Media May Not Matter
We didn't have any big media hits, outside of some good radio spins in one town. And it didn't seem to make much difference...which is fine, because local press and radio were astonishingly unfriendly and unhelpful.

5. Seven Hours Is Probably Too Long
Driving seven hours (which turned into eight-plus with traffic) and doing a show that night may be too much. Again, tired and headaches and crankiness can result.

The above makes it sound like the tour was a big malnourished crank-fest, which it wasn't! We just noticed that these little things would start to come up, and fortunately my buddies are all too nice and civil to act on any ill-achieved impulse. It was great fun...

New Release Monday?

...I'll fess up -- I've been bad! I went on tour with my band a week ago, came home sick for a week, and am only just now feeling like standing up for longer than it takes to stumble to the bathroom. Forgive me. I'll resume posting with some regularity this week.

I got this awful cold in Athens, Georgia. I've since spoken to a bunch of folks who were at the same event, and apparently something was going around -- and not just excitement and enthusiasm. One of the worst effects of this bug is that my ears are really clogged -- I can't hear well out of my right ear. So I don't want to assess anything critically right now, feeling as how I am somewhat incapacitated.

It's ironic that one of the records I really want to sink my words into is Brian Wilson's new one, Lucky Old Sun -- the irony being that Brian is deaf in one ear...I'm only temporarily impaired, but I still want to let it clear up before I talk about someone else's music. I will say that, while far from perfect, this is by a great length his best (non-SMILE) solo album. The lyrics (mostly written by bandmate Scott Bennett, but also one tremendous tune from Van Dyke Parks and one okay one by Brian himself) are a big improvement, and melodically and arrangement-wise, this is much more ambitious.

I'll also blog a little bit about what it was like to do a short tour myself, after supporting touring artists for the past ten years in a different capacity. Stay tuned...

...gone pickin'...

...I'm traveling and playing music this week, so there will be no posts for a while!

Forty-Five Friday: Alan Licht

Alan Licked (aka Alan Licht)
Calvin Johnson Has Ruined Rock For An Entire Generation
Eighteen Wheeler, 1994

...I don't delve into the used seven-inch bins at record stores all that much. In the northeast, at least, that usually means a ton of gutter-punk singles, that all look and sound pretty much the same....that said, today I found a few random platters at one store that were intriguing -- no more so than this one. The cover says it all, doesn't it? I actually don't mind Calvin Johnson, though I am seeing a lot of indie pop bands taking on his mannerism without his wit and soul...

As far as Alan Licht goes, I've had mixed success with his records. I liked his CD Sink the Aging Process, but his two-disk set New York Minute didn't do much for me. I should revisit it. I really enjoy his writing on music, like his short book An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn and the liner notes to Sink.

But I won't lie. I bought this one for the cover. I started to play it, and it sounded like a looped bit of guitar noise, but my wife made me take it off after the first minute. Still, great cover, right?

Cocaine Reggae

The other day I posted this question on a social networking site:

Does liking the new Walter Becker album make me a bad person?

I'm only partly joking when I ask that...Becker, best known as one-half of the joint-chamber known as Steely Dan, has a new disk out called Circus Money. Of course, the Dan made a career (and hopefully a fortune) in welding a sort of wry, after-hours cynicism with a sophisticated harmonic palette. Theirs wasn't really a Randy Newman-style pop misanthropy -- it seemed more first person, in the sense that Newman's narratives play out as grand fiction, whereas Fagen/Becker's writing seemed more like reports from the frontline of depraved boredom.

Becker always intrigued me, as he was something of a silent partner in Steely Dan. He co-wrote everything, but rarely sang, and while he contributed much in the way of guitar and bass, a lot of the more heralded bits of their oeuvre came courtesy of hired guns (like "Skunk" Baxter on "My Old School" or Chuck Rainey's bass lines on Aja). Becker stepped forth with a solo album in 1994, which was intriguing but a bit gauzy...it had a smoke-filled quality that I couldn't quite reconcile, despite some strong songs and the surprising soulfulness of Becker's singing.

Circus Money is different. It's very sparse -- although slickly executed and immaculately produced, the tracks feel pared to the bone. The predominate feel is reggae...but to call describe it as "really relaxed reggae rhythms" as Stephen Thomas Erlewine does in his remarkably uninsightful allmusic.com review, is to miss the point entirely. This is a tight, profoundly uncomfortable sort of reggae...if most reggae is pot fueled and mellow, this is dry, flaky, cocaine reggae. It reminds me of the way your nose feels once it finally stops bleeding.

It's a record worth hearing...Becker's bass playing is tremendous -- he knows his reggae shit, but isn't afraid to stray from the formula. The chord progressions are typically ingenious, with quirky modulations all over the place. More than once the band will lock into a one-chord groove over which a keyboard will layer a second chord progression, creating a great sense of tension. Lyrically Becker is in fine mettle, dashing off disgusting scenarios populated by loathsome characters, wrapped in desperation. I think my favorite may be "Darkling Down," which wraps up with this little run:

Who will feast on this buzzard's banquet?
Who will render my heroic bust?
Who will choke on my lachrymose musings?
Who will eat my zero dust?
Who will wear this puke-streaked tunic?
Who shall gorge on this cup of spleen?
Who will sing about the good bad and ugly
And all and everything in between?

I believe that this disk is the first recorded work produced by Becker without the involvement of Donald Fagen...maybe that's significant, maybe it's not. But it is an intriguing project...not the kind of stuff I usually listen to, but maybe that's why I'm listening to it so much.