Patent for a distortion device (detail), 1962
From today’s Pitchfork interview with Simon Reynolds, about his new book Retromania, (which we have sort-of been discussing on this site):
It’s weird listening to a lot of old radio. Living in L.A., there’s a lot of classic rock, and you listen to a group like the Police. They’re as mainstream as you come, and a lot of it was very forward-looking in its time. They were engaging with other influences, but they were contemporary influences. There’s really nothing retro about the Police’s music, and they were one of the most successful groups in the world. Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, big name mainstream figures, particularly in Britain but also globally, adhered to these progressive ideals.
I enjoy listening to ELO, but ELO were never given any serious respect because they were so blatantly Beatles-influenced. I think there are plenty of groups nowadays that are just like ELO in the sense of being blatantly based on something else, and they get huge amounts of praise and attention. That’s just weird for me. It sounds bogus to say, but I think there’s a slipping of standards, really. I think people aren’t being as stern as they should be with some of the stuff that’s around. But people take enjoyment where they can find it.
This strikes me as more baldly fallacious than any of the earlier quotes we’ve discussed, both in its “narrative-of-progess” conception of music and the apparent sacrifice of meaning and form for novelty. For example, I can’t take seriously that ELO represents a “slipping of standards” compared to The Police, no matter how heavily indebted they are to The Beatles. Elsewhere, Reynolds regretfully refers to the absence today of any game-changing device, as the sampler was for the 80s. This is a technology-first approach to art that always reminds me of manifestly obsolete Futurist clichés (Brandon Kreitler goes in for it too). And I don’t see why what Reynolds sees as today’s promiscuous appropriation of styles couldn’t itself be characterized as another kind of “progress,” moving in the direction of appropriation art.
Still from a television network promotion, detail 1970s
Jennifer Egan, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad explores the early punk rock scene in Northern California, discusses her musical tastes in a recent Q&A with New York Magazine:
Is music important in your life?
Not as much as people tend to think from Goon Squad. I don’t listen to it while I work — or all that much, period. I do have an iPod, and I love to listen to music while I run. That’s probably the time when it’s most important because something kind of meditative happens while running, and having the right music to accompany that is so important. Like if my iPod doesn’t work, I do not run. It is not an option.
What do you listen to when you’re running?
Pop music, for the most part. A lot of music from my own past, which seems to be important for reasons I’m not clear on. New stuff, too. I have a lot of Eminem on there — my son is a crazed Eminem fan, he’s downloaded a lot of Eminem’s music, some of which I really like. I listen to Lady Gaga, but, also, there’s a Dave Brubeck song called “Unsquare Dance” that’s really great, which has a lot of clapping and drumming in it. So a huge range. I can’t explain the logic of why I want to listen to what I do at particular times, but it’s important. It’s not like just anything will do. The wrong thing is just not helpful.
It’s interesting that Egan does not name a single black musician, despite the fact that her “huge range” of listening tastes encompasses two overwhelmingly black musical idioms. It seems to me that no black American of similar education and stature would respond to this question with a list composed entirely of black musicians, particularly if that person’s musical tastes leaned toward, say, rock or country (the only musician Toni Morrison mentions in her Paris Review interview, in the context of black folklore, is the white jazz pianist Keith Jarrett). And music is one of the few cultural spheres in which black Americans can actually afford to be chauvinistic. It’s a minor example, but, it shows how musical preferences, consciously or unconsciously, are often an extension of racial preferences for many Americans.
For a more insidious example of musical race-consciousness see this piece about the Republican-dominated Texas legislature’s recent decision to adopt Texas Swing as the state’s official music.
Hospitality advertisement (detail), 1980
My favorite jazz albums change from day to day. They might include Born to Be Blue, You Must Believe in Spring, Cris-Cross, McCoy Tyner Plays Duke Ellington, or Fuego. To me these albums are perfect or pretty damn close to it. They engage me from beginning to end. But others have gotten me through long stretches of boredom and loneliness. One summer several years ago I wore the hell out of A Love Supreme and Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. When I was at Morehouse Something Else was a reliable companion. I listened to The Big Beat so often three years ago through a pair of crummy headphones that I suspect it is partly responsible for a lengthy, unwelcome episode of hearing loss and tinnitus.
The Ray Bryant Trio, however, is my crown jewel.
It always resonates with me. I can listen to it anytime, day or night. I don’t waver when it comes to its value: it is without question the finest piano trio album I own. Obviously, I have a thing for the piano. No other instrument can match its purity. You could also make the case that it is the only instrument (excluding the drum, of course) that can accommodate the entire range of African-American musical styles. That’s another story. Back to Ray Bryant. No one was making piano trio albums like this one in the ’50s—refined, bluesy, quiet. Bill Evans would arrive at a similar, classical-informed aesthetic, with fewer sprightly and mirthful sallies, in the ’60s. The album is a strange mix of forgotten pop tunes and standards (“Golden Earrings,” “The Thrill is Gone,” and “Angel Eyes,”), classic bop and third stream (“Django,” “Sonar,” and “Daahoud”), and blues originals (“Blues Changes” and “Splittin’”). Each song is sensitively rendered in a distinct style and feels almost like an etude. Bryant could get a deeply expressive sound out of his instrument. His solo on “The Thrill is Gone”—so measured, so precise—conveys more feeling and tension than many artists manage in entire albums. His soloing style was versatile but primarily showed traces of Teddy Wilson and Bud Powell—part stride and boogie-woogie, part bop and gospel. His strong left hand made him a formidable solo player, and his unaccompanied albums, Alone with the Blues and Alone at Montreux ’77, offer excellent history lessons in twentieth century American piano technique. But, far as I can tell, there’s nothing in his body of work, or anyone else’s for that matter, that quite resembles The Ray Bryant Trio.
Bryant, a Philadelphia native (like that other gospel-oriented master Bobby Timmons), died on June 2 in Queens at the age of 79. May he rest in peace.
Magazine advertisement for a bank, 1974
We’ll be back next month with a new hairdo.
Advertisement for international travel, 1984
Every month The Mixtape Club, a project started by Micah Panama and Brian Thomas, publishes ten tapes contributed by guests from around the music world. The results are difficult to predict (this time they range from Alejandro Jodorowsky to the Beatnuts): but then everyone seems to have their own rules for the construction of these somehow ceremonial mixes. On their info page, they quote Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity: “A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, …” Many of my old pals insisted there could only be one song per artist, or that the ideal length was a 45-minute, or a 30-minute side, or that there ought to be some sort of comprehensible message. In the film version of High Fidelity, the protagonist characterizes this as “using someone else’s poetry to express yourself.” I dunno; that sentiment is something I’ve always found to be pretty specious, and probably undesirable. The songs keep their own poetry: that’s why you want to listen to them.
For the July episode of the Mixtape Club, I sent Micah the second half of a tape I made about a year ago, Always Crashing In The Same Car. The night time complement to a brighter, more trebly first half, it chugs from the early Tears for Fears through a forest of 70s and 80s synthesizers before arriving at the present with the Chromatics’ cover of “Running Up That Hill,” originally by Kate Bush. Ever since I started dubbing things onto Maxell XLIIs in fourth grade, I’ve tended to engineer these things for roadtrips or late-night car rides. Originally they were heterogenous to a fault, leaning heavily on Graceland and dipping into contemporary alt-radio hits from the time, but sometimes would bafflingly digress into a crackly Vladimir Horowitz performance or some other passing fancy. That formula took a turn when I started driving (and discovered girls). This one draws its lineage from that later era, when the midnight drive home called for something that stayed a course, but still took you from one place to another.
Still from an Allied Chemical TV ad, 1960s.
This morning, Pitchfork tapped Chris Knox for their 5-10-15-20 series, in which musicians reveal what they were listening to from age five onward. Knox, the New Zealand impresario behind the brilliant pop experimentalists the Tall Dwarfs, suffered a stroke last year. Until this moment I had heard varying accounts of his condition, but the interview makes it painfully clear that he is not recovered. The selections here follow a familiar Rolling Stone-esque path before settling into a friends-and-family pattern, and about which Knox provides monosyllabic responses to leading questions.
Knox was one of the most significant figures in underground pop music in the late eighties and nineties, and his work continued to be exploratory and compelling through a lengthy solo career. Accompanying the Pitchfork piece is “Sign The Dotted Line,” a tune from the 1990 Dwarfs record Weeville, as covered by Jeff Mangnum (Netural Milk Hotel). It appears to promote Stroke, a Merge Records fundraising tribute to Knox featuring Stephin Merritt, Yo La Tengo, Lou Barlow, Mountain Goats, The Chills, the late Jay Reatard, and many others.
Tall Dwarfs
“The Slide”
“Nothing’s Going To Happen”
Chris Knox
“Half-Man, Half-Mole”
“My Dumb Luck”
