What with Gaza/Israel/Iran/US giving it (yet again) a good biffo, friend of the blog and regular visitor to the Lounge who wishes to remain anonymous (and is not Q, I hope) has kindly put his frustration into the form of today’s mixtape. Thanks Anon! Some excellent tracks here and the images for the art work very sobering.
My 18 month gig in the Concrete Jungle has come to a quicker than expected end. I will be leaving Thailand this weekend to return (at least for now) to Australia. I’ll not post till I get settled back there.
Cheers
Once, when I worked for the Red Cross in Australia, we asked an advertising agency to help us figure out the level of public interest in HIV/AIDS, one of the main focuses of our international work. The answer came back: somewhere between snake bites and stomach cancer!
I was reminded of that dire reality when I read yet again that jazz music accounts for around 1% of the recorded music market in North America. Just above children’s music and just below classical. In Germany, jazz holds a whopping 1.5% of the market. In Britain, where jazz is enjoying an especially hot renaissance, the genre gets 2% of the loot.
For years I force-fed myself this music. If I was to claim to be a true music nut I had to love Jazz. Loving Jazz was an essential brick in the wall of my credibility. Something that would set me apart from the casual listener and metal head. Jazz was music for smart and cool people. And I definitely wanted those attributes, especially to impress women. A bit of Oscar Peterson or Lionel Hampton in the background as we ‘talked’ was the go-to ritual for the few dates I managed to conjure as an undergrad.
That Jazz was hard to understand was an important part of the blessing it bestowed on listeners. This was something I valued yet really resented. But I was as determined as Jacob in his wrestling match with the Angel, to come out with a win. I knew that if I did get victory over Jazz, I would be able to feel a similar gravitas and intellectuality as I projected onto my classical loving siblings.
I bought lots of CDs. Monk, Miles, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Randy Weston, Bill Holman. They were mostly played when I had other things to do, like finishing a report, or answering emails. Over-egged background music. Finding a groove or melody that struck with me was rare, and other than Underground by Thelonius Monk, I never remembered what a particular CD sounded like the next time I listened. I perceived a block.
But still I persevered.
Putting a bunch of tracks together in a mixtape helped somewhat but only in the way that repeatedly eating a food you don’t like allows you from time to time to chomp on something tasty.
I kept on buying the stuff.
Occasionally, there would come a breakthrough.
In the days before downloading and streaming, I picked up a cheap CD at Melbourne airport of Coltrane’s greatest hits. If there was one guy that I wanted to ‘get’ above all others it was Coltrane. Many hours later I’m sitting in the tiniest of hotel rooms in Geneva checking my emails. My new CD is playing on the tinny laptop speaker. I stop before hitting ‘send’ completely blown away. I’m overcome by what I can only describe as ‘the Spirit’. Coltrane is not playing his sax, his sax is singing, more like shouting or raving, seemingly of its own accord. Coltrane, the blower, is almost irrelevant. Like some djinn released from the confines of a tarnished oil lamp the music grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said, ‘now, hear this motherfucker.’ The intensity and urgency of the sound was almost visible. Rather, the sound of the music made we perceive my surroundings in a new way. I could see sheets and waves of music all around me. For the first time I wasn’t looking for a hook or a riff or a melody line. I don’t even remember now which track it was, but I felt every note coming out of his saxophone. It was, to steal Keith Jarrett’s description of electric music, ‘vast’.
For the first time ever, I was feeling music.
Sadly, I’ve not felt that intensity again. About 2 years ago I stopped listening to Jazz. The agony of defeat. I had given it the old college try but just did not connect. I grew resentful. Who did Jazz think it was, anyway? So pompous and arrogant and indecipherable. I didn’t want to work that hard. I was also troubled by the unavoidable conclusion: I just wasn’t smart enough to appreciate Jazz.
Over the course of a period from perhaps 1960 to 2000 (to speak in very rough terms), genre became not only the key way to interpret popular music, but one of its most powerful modes of creating a hierarchy of value. From the authenticity – and authority – of rock to the “Disco Sucks” campaign of the 1970s, and from the much-touted “realness” of country music to Wynton Marsalis’s increasingly strange, transphobic comments from the early 1990s on fusion as a kind of musical “cross-dressing,”… Baby Boomers and Generation Xers invested heavily in a discourse of genre purity as a way of attaching value to their chosen object of attention. [Gabriel Solis]
During those self-imposed ‘learning to love Jazz’ years, I bought my CDs in record stores where such music was clearly and boldly (usually in permanent marker) labelled. If there was anything other than Louis Armstrong, the bebop heroes, Wynton Marsalis and an occasional Dixieland collection, my mind didn’t register it. Jazz to me was trad and bebop full stop. This is what JBHifi and Readings filled their Jazz sections with.
Artists that I really liked–George Benson, Mose Allison–seemed to fall into a different category. A hybrid genre of pop, blues and R&B with jazzy overtones. Ernest Ranglin. Great guitarist but more reggae than Jazz. My inclination to gather all these and others (Jimmy McGriff, Big Joe Turner, Ramsey Lewis) together with Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan and Bill Evans and call them Jazz seemed heretical. My Jazz-loving friends told me so. Benson was a joke. Big Joe was a blues singer and Ramsey Lewis was 70s smooth jazz, which by its very description signalled ‘embarrassment’. Get real mate!
But what about Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone? Somehow, even though they had the critics’ ‘seal of approval’ they all seemed to be just as easily at home in that hybrid genre as in Jazz. And why was Aretha, who made some fabulous Jazz records in the early 60s, dismissed as a mere ‘soul singer’?
Yet these artists, even someone like Fela, seemed to tick all the hallowed boxes of Jazz.
Complex. Tick
Improvised. Tick
Swing. Tick
Fun to listen to. Tick Tick Tick.
That last, was something I found hard to credit McCoy Tyner or Albert Ayler with at all.
Of course, what I was up against was not the music but the labelling and marketing of the music. Jazz was the label given to not just a genre of music but to a supposed philosophy, an historical epoch, and an academic discipline. Jazz had its journals and PhD theses. Bow-tied nerds loved to break it down into bitty little bits and explicate it. Jazz was American Classical Music, goddamit. Take it seriously, boy!
This Brahmanical sniffiness was the source of my resentment. Unlike almost every other type of music I listened to, Jazz came encumbered with expectation, sacrality and politics. Even though I was sympathetic to the politics I begrudged all the trappings that apparently could not be separated from the music. To me it seemed the music was the least important part of Jazz. Jazz was a ginormous project and social force. I just wanted to smile and tap my feet.
Of course, I always loved jazz. It was everywhere. It was in some respects the very foundation, or maybe the glue that held so much of the music I love together. But I had to drop the label and all its associated baggage to come to this point. Who doesn’t like improvised music that swings? I mean, come on! I found jazz in the horn playing of Pakistani wedding band clarinetists, as well as in Carnatic music. It was in all sorts of African music not just rumba and soukous but afrobeat, benga and Highlife. I heard jazz in Patsy Cline’s singing as well as Miriam Makeba’s renditions. Memphis Slim, and Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown played jazz even though I’d have to look in the ‘Blues’ section at record stores. Bob Wills and The Band, Asleep at the Wheel and the Dead played a version of jazz too. And George Benson, Brother Jack McDuff, Lou Donaldson, Trudy Pitts and Chuck Mangione, all those soul jazz cats, were now luminaries, not outcasts.
Disco and funk, hip-hop and country all washed their clothes in jazz and vice versa. What a relief it was to break down the Great Wall of Bebop and mainstream American jazz. There was cool jazz (y) music coming from Poland, the Balkans, Japan, India, Latin America and Lebanon. Listen to some of the soundtracks from Hindi films in the 1950s and you’ll hear jazz there too.
In my various series, “Is This Jazz?”, “Jazzy Vocals” and “Global Jazz” I am trying to capture those exciting, global and surprising sides of this great American enterprise known as jazz.
Here is my latest roll of the dice.
01. Brother Brigham, Brother Young (Corb Lund) Of late, what one confesses and to whom has become a bit of sticky wicket for religious orders that claim confidentiality trumps (pun intended) the law. The Mormons have (as you’d expect) an elaborate theological framework for why confession is essential and good for the soul. But of course, there are certain things, like abusing a child sexually that need not be confessed or at least very loudly. Even Mr. Brigham Young, the worthy latter-day Saint to whom Brother Lund confesses in this song, had some pretty clear ideas on the extent of spiritual confession.
“Were I to relate here to you my private faults from day to day, it would . . . not strengthen either the speaker or the hearer, and would give the enemy more power. Thus far, I would say, we are justified in what some call dissembling. . . . Many of the brethren chew tobacco . . . If you must use tobacco, put a small portion in your mouth when no person sees you. . . .
But if you have stolen your neighbour’s cattle, own it, and restore the property, fourfold if it is requested. . . . I believe in coming out and being plain and honest with that which should be made public, and in keeping to yourselves that which should be kept. If you have your weaknesses, keep them hid from your brethren as much as you can. . . . Confess your secret sins to your God, and forsake them, and he will forgive them; confess to your brethren your sins against them, and make all right, and they will forgive, and all will be right.
Keep your follies that do not concern others to yourselves.”
2. Bad Man (Loudon Wainwright III) Wainwright asks deep questions in his inimitable ‘aw shucks’ way. Written around the time of the first Bush war in Iraq the focus is on Sadaam Hussein but he also mentions Manuel Noreiga. Remember him? In this article on media reporting during the Gulf War, the author actually finds the roots of the sophisticated and well managed media space in America’s recent wars in the invasion of Grenada. Remember that?
The US government has used terms like collateral damage’ to sanitize the war and turn it into TV news and entertainment. Early Pentagon reports said, for example, that when US Marines occupied Noriega’s head- quarters they found ‘a desk stuffed with pornography, a closet containing a portrait of Adolf Hitler, voodoo paraphernalia and 100 Ibs. of cocaine’. Subsequently, less publicized stories revealed the pornography to be Spanish-language copies of Playboy, the picture of Hitler was in a Time-Life photo history of World War 11, while the voodoo implements turned out to be San Blas Indian carvings. The ‘cocaine’ was analysed and found to be tortilla flour, stockpiled for emergency use.
3. The Ballad of John Bonham’s Coke Roadie (TISM/ aka. This Is Serious Mum) Australian alt-rockers TISM offer up a not entirely accurate suggestion that famed and ill-fated Led Zep drummer John Bonham had a coke habit. Now, I’ve not been able to find any evidence of that other than he was a top rock and roller in the 70s when cocaine was like Tik Tok, everywhere and used by everyone. And neither have I been able to uncover a coke roadie, though perhaps a certain Rex King, a man with the broad and loose title of ‘Assistant to John Bonham’, might be a candidate. What is better known and even sadder than the possibility that Bonzo had a toadie/roadie, was the way Bonham committed slow suicide with alcohol.
John Bonham threw his fourth quadruple vodka of the morning down his neck and took a single bite of a ham roll. He grinned at Led Zeppelin’s assistant Rex King, charged with getting one of rock’s most mercurial and hedonistic drummers to rehearsal in a fit state to play. “Breakfast,” he said. So begins the story of Bonham’s last days as reported in The Independent.
4. Long May You Run (The Stills-Young Band) A love song to Neil Young’s 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse who went by the name of Mort. One day in 1962, Mort stopped working and Neil sent a postcard home to ‘mummy’ to tell her the bad news! Of course, the story of how Neil and Bruce Palmer managed to bump into Stephen Still and Richie Furay on Sunset Strip is well known and attributed to Stills recognizing the vehicle and its Ontario license plates. But what is often not known is that the death mobile that Stills recognized was not Mort the Buick but Mort II, a Pontiac hearse that Neil bought after the demise of the original.
5. Armstrong (John Stewart) On the day Neil Armstrong took his ‘small step’ on the lunar surface I was 12 years old. Our boarding school in India gave us the day off. TV was rare in India in those years so I never saw him doing what he did but it seemed every magazine for the next year featured the photos. A few moon rocks eventually made their way to India for exhibition in some of the major cities. The Prime Minister, Ms. Indira Gandhi hailed the event in a press release that said in part, “Armstrong and Aldrin who walk the moon today are delegates of the irrepressible spirit of man—the spirit which discovered fire and thought, song and silence, the spirit which crosses oceans on a bundle of reeds and leaps from one celestial body to another in a small vehicle of its own making.” This song celebrates the awesome impact that first moon landing had on the world.
6. The Galveston Flood (Tom Rush) The “Night of Horrors” September 8, 1900, begins as a 15-foot storm surge rolls across Galveston, Texas, killing over 8,000. Dawn breaks over a grisly scene of bodies in the streets. The Galveston flood is remembered even to this day as the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States.
7. God Moves on the Water (Blind Willie Johnson) The disaster of the sinking of the Titanic probably was as significant a culture touchpoint in the first part of the 20th century as the Apollo moon mission was in the latter part of the century. In this song the amazing BWJ visits three great disasters of his time, the Titanic, the 1926/27 Arkansas floods and the great fire that destroyed San Francisco of 1851. Each of them is a demonstration of ‘God moving’ presumably to punish the sinful of the land.
8. Atomic Power (The Buchanan Brothers) A couple decades on from the Titanic, God apparently is really pissed off. And he’s done with icebergs, fire and floods. His latest means of retribution is, as the Buchanan Brothers sing in their 1946 top 10 hit, “Atomic power, atomic power/Was given by the mighty hand of God” to punish the Japs.
“Hiroshima, Nagasaki paid a big price for their sins
When scorched from the face of earth their battles could not win”
9. Happy Blues for John Glenn (Lightnin’ Hopkins) Before Armstrong came Glenn (and before him Gagarin, of course) who more than any other figure brought the space age into the culture of 1960s America. He spent 5 hours orbiting the earth 3 times and then splooshed back into the Atlantic Ocean a bloody hero. Hopkins captures the excitement and joy Glenn’s flight gave to Americans but he also alludes to a near disaster upon re-entry. I was too young to be aware of Glenn’s big adventure when it happened and so I thank Mr Hopkins for giving me a few details in his song that I probably would never have known.
10. Fuck Aneta Briant (David Allan Coe) The title pretty much sums up this song. It seems another world when Anita dominated the TV screen with her orange juice commercials and rants against the ‘homosexuals’. Unknowingly her advocacy against the ‘gay lifestyle’ probably did more to create an opening for public acceptance of that lifestyle than anything the “homos” did by themselves. Coe, who spent time behind bars, points out in his 1978 song, just how important gay men are to surviving prison life. This ‘progressive’ attitude is discussed by country music scholar Nadine Hubbs in this interesting article. Coe was and is a fringe artist to mainstream America and this song is probably unknown to most. But criticism of Bryant from those smack bad in the middle of your living room during prime time was also part of the broad opposition to her campaign that Bryant inspired.
11. Indian Nation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian) (Billy Thunderkloud & The Chieftones) This song is notorious. Written by John D. Loudermilk it not only is full of historical inaccuracies but Loudermilk’s claims to how he came to write the song are also false. Wikipedia gives a good summary of that history. It seems that in American popular culture, ‘Cherokee’ is a cipher for ‘native American’ with all things supposedly ‘Indian’ being dumped into the idea of the Cherokee people. This website is a great resource for the myths surrounding the Cherokee as well as other interesting critiques of how culture has misunderstood their people. One such data point, is that this song is ranked as the 5th worst song about the Cherokee people ever composed. So what the hell is a Canadian Indian band doing covering this bit of stereotyping? They play the song straight and as Indians themselves it has a bit more gravitas then Paul Revere and some of the others mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Clearly, from the Chieftones, the song was a statement of pride and identify. Who cares if the actual facts contradict some elements of the narrative. The Chieftones had a small moment in the 70s as a costumed-country band and though they were not as popular as Redbone or as respected as Jesse “Ed” Davis, they were and are beloved by their fans of all backgrounds.
12. Joaquin Murrieta (The Rowans) Few Mexican-American folk heroes loom as large as Joaquín Murrieta. An outlaw of the California Gold Rush era, Murrieta and his exploits were posthumously fictionalized in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (sic) by novelist John Rollin Ridge in 1854—one short year after Murrieta was allegedly killed by California rangers in a gunfight in Fresno County. In the years after his death, the legend of Murrieta grew: He was the protagonist of a play by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, and he’s been credited with inspiring fictional vigilantes from Zorro to Batman. Like the term ‘Cherokee’ the name ‘Joaquin’ became a catch all phrase of Mexican American bandits that attacked European migrants into California at the time of the Gold Rush. And interestingly the myth that developed around Murrieta originated in a book written by a Cherokee Indian, John Rollin Ridge. I commend the above linked article to you. Fascinating.
13. The Sinking of Reuben James (The Chad Mitchell Trio) A Woody Guthrie song. As the survivors struggled to stay afloat, unsecured depth charges from the Reuben James hit the water as the ship sank. Terrified sailors heard the depth charges arm themselves, and then the charges exploded, hurling debris and men into the air. “If it hadn’t been for those depth charges, we probably would have had another 40 or 50 survivors,” recalled Fireman Second Class George Giehrl. “Some were knocked unconscious. Others were torn apart.”
14. Louis Riel (Willie Dunn) A rousing tribute to Canadian Métis leader, religious guru and politician (and outlaw, according to his European enemies). I had never heard his name before discovering Willie Dunn’s music but urge you to read this quick but informative piece about this “complicated” historical figure.
15. Bin Laden’s Corpse (Vatican Shadow) Article
Australia didn’t impress me the first time. It had the most amazing beaches and you didn’t tip your waiter. Pumpkin soup was a huge as were thousands of labels of wine. All good points. But Aussie Rules football struck me as a slightly colonial game in which men danced around a field in hot pants while tackling each other. Most of the people in my age group took pride in retelling their adventures of years spent overseas, yet gushed unironically about how Australia was the best country in the world. The ‘bush’ was mostly drab, scrappy and slightly alarming to someone who grew up in the Himalayas. Down Under was not just a name, it was also a lonesome feeling; far away from the world I knew.
When it came to music, I was surprised by how most of the songs played on the AM dial were by Australian artists, none of whom I had heard of. A couple of Melbourne radio stations (Triple RRR and PBS106.7) broadcast completely non-mainstream music. Everything from Iraqi and Somali pop to reggae, hard country and all varieties of metal. This was another surprise. How long had it been since any Twin Cities station other than small community stations with weak-as-piss signals had broadcast such diverse DJ-curated sets?
I’ve lived in Australia for close to thirty years now. I have been persuaded that Aussie Rules is the best game ever thought of by humans. The beaches are still great and not crowded. But I now see the scrappy drab bush as intensely beautiful. In the recent years of psycho politics across the world, being hidden Down Under has been a wonderful relief.
When it comes to music, I still know next to nothing about the scene. I am embarrassed by my ignorance especially as I read my music related magazines/sites; the number of Australian bands and artists getting reviewed (mostly positively) is astounding. From time to time, I’ve reflected on why I’ve kept my distance from one of the richest popular music cultures in the world. The short answer is, I’m intimidated. Overwhelmed really. To became even fairly conversant with Australian music a lot of my energy and time will be required. And to date I’ve not been ready to commit those resources.
Not surprisingly, it’s been through country music and related offshoots of the same, that I’ve started to open myself up to Australian music. This mixtape is my first attempt at curating some exclusively Aussie country. As usual, I take a ‘broad church’ approach to country with very little ‘radio country’ making the cut. I’ve no doubt more of that sub-genre will arrive in future volumes.
One of the most fascinating corners of Australian country is Aboriginal country music. Unlike in the States where Native American bands/singers were rarely widely feted, in Australia the number and variety of Aboriginal artists making country music is comparatively huge. Not just today (Frank Yamma, Alice Skye, Archie Roach) but all the way back to the early days. I’ve included some distinctly Australian/Aboriginal tracks here (Jimmy Little, Gawurra, The Country Outkasts) and am excited about sharing more from this rich trove in upcoming volumes.
Australians are very connected to the idea of the land. Our national anthem and many ‘national poems’ speak about the weather, the mountains and rivers and deserts with near-Biblical awe. Aboriginal people see natural world as being a manifestation of the eternal mysterious divine. Locating songs on the vast landmass of Australia has a hoary tradition in Australian rock and folk and country. In the States much of the great interior of the continent has been long resettled, industrialised and urbanized. But in Australia everything beyond 300-400km from either coast is (often hostile) outback, desert, forest and mountains. Because it hasn’t been covered over and turned into a parking lot the sense of earth, rock and land is so much more real down here then up there. All of which is perfect material and context for country music. Several songs I’ve included here are very much in the vein of ‘landed country music’.
I hope you’ll enjoy this initial volume of Sunburnt Country which takes its name from a famous early 20th century poem called My Country by Dorothea McKellar. Here is the second stanza,
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
c90lounge 