New Album From Mushroom: Psychedelic Mood Music

With younger baby boomers getting older, and the Elvis generation still older, it is predictable that the former group has gotten a soft spot in their hearts about those fleeting hippie days. . . that five minute summer of love and the long aftermath of disco designer jeans and Ronald Reagan notwithstanding. As a member of that group I have long felt the pull of the short-lived counter-culture, especially in its cultural efflorescence as psychedelic rock.

Mushroom gives you a kind of mood music for a would-be love in. It's a San Francisco collective and their twelfth (!) album is just out: Naked, Stoned & Stabbed (4 Zero/Royal Potato Family).

Now don't get me wrong, this is music that takes its role seriously. The mellotron, dron-ish jams, guitars, sitars, and the like come together for an hour's worth of mostly instrumental music. It's almost like you get the jam endings from a number of would-be rock albums of the period. All I can say is it really is time to take this musical era seriously and Mushroom takes what was positive about the music of that time and does something with it that is pleasant and not insubstantial. There isn't quite as much of the "heavy" feedback drenched sounds of the era, but others do that and so that's cool.

This is music that mellows you out. And it's fun too.

Algernon and their "Ghost Surveillance" Music

Algernon does not fit easily into a preconceived notion of what a band should be doing. It's a five-man outfit, essentially two electric guitars, vibes, bass and drums. Dave Miller, one of the guitarists, writes most of the material.

Ghost Surveillance (Cuneiform) is their latest release and it is an intriguing mix of ambient instrumental rock music. It has a progressive edge to it but goes everywhere at once. The main thrust is a fascinating group sound of vibes, guitars, synthesizers and a hip rhythm section. Now that might sound like a lot of things but the compositions have a kind of quirky individuality that sets the band apart. The melodies are strong, sort of riff oriented sometimes. It's music that has a tunefully different spin on what a band can do. Every cut is different and the arrangements are elaborate yet directly communicating.

If you want some smart prog rock, here's where you'll find it.

Alvin Queen and Some Significant Others

February 5, 2009—The world of freewheeling hard bop remains alive today. Sometimes the blazing hell-for-leather onslaught of the best moments can be missing from some of today’s sessions. That’s a pity.

However, the Alvin Queen CD on tap this morning has plenty of the intensity of the classic dates. Queen is a very good drummer who has played with all sorts of people and the CD Jammin' Uptown (Just A Memory) is graced by the presence of some of the very best on the contemporary scene. The now deceased John Hicks mans the piano, Terence Blanchard is on trumpet, Robin Eubanks on trombone, Ray Drummond on bass, and the under-heralded Manny Boyd is on reeds. This music was originally released in 1985 and has been reissued with bonus material.

What you get are nicely turned blowing vehicles and some very nice contributions from all at hand. If you like the classic Art Blakey Jazz Messengers line-ups this will certainly appeal to you. You might find yourself shouting “go” like you were sitting at a table in the Birdland club, 1955.

Politics, Deep Avant Rock and Compelling Guitar Work from Barry Cleveland

Guitarist, songwriter, producer, journalist and politically involved Barry Cleveland surfaces with a new album that may raise a few hackles with the far northpaw political contingency. Hologramatron (Moon June) assembles an all-star lineup to produce a vibrantly luminous album of progressive-protest rock.

Of course rock has had a tradition of speaking truth to Power, and this album follows in that lineage. He takes on big oil interests, laissez faire excess, religious right versions of Christianity, the spoilage of our environment and other issues with a sarcastic wit. Of course if the music was not interesting, I would not be covering this release. It is.

There's an attractive space-rock ambiance throughout and a varied program that keeps interest up. In addition to the spiky originals there's a remake of the lovely anti-war song "What Have They Done to the Rain," which was a hit for the old Searchers back in (was it?) 1966. Then there's a rousing version of the instrumental oldie "Telstar" (anybody else have the Tornadoes album?) which totally sounds right.

If you voted for Genghis Khan any time in the last 20 years you might not like this album. If you didn't I think you'll be pleased.

Gary Lucas & Dean Bowman Do Blues, Gospel, Spirituals and More

One thing about Gary Lucas that I admire is that he is unpredictable. Chinese pop, Beefheart, movie music, world music collaborations, one can never be sure what will be next. What is a constant is his consummate artistry.

And so with his latest, Chase the Devil (Knitting Factory Records), a series of duets with vocalist Dean Bowman. It's a moving collection of roots music of a gospel-blues sort. There are traditional spirituals, classic Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gary Davis, Blind Willie Johnson, a Judaic hymn, and some rooted originals, among other surprises.

What makes it here is the convincing blend of soulful vocals, classic material and Gary Lucas's wide-ranging acoustic and electric guitar artistry. Gary's wonderful fingerpicking is on display but so is his blazing electric work. Superficially one might think this is leagues away from his work with Captain Beefheart in the years past. But no, the Captain was in most respects an avant blues artist and this album carries on the idea that the blues is what you can imagine it to be. Gary and Dean imagine a different spin on it all. They succeed superbly.

Ana Moura, Fado Goddess!

If you don't know about Portuguese Fado music, or even if you do, Ana Moura is someone you must not miss. Her voice has the full yet tender sound equal to some of the greatest Fado singers, which means that the singing is just unbelievably beautiful.

The Fado tradition goes back many centuries and has a quality that must be heard to appreciate. The minimal ensemble consists of an acoustic guitar, nylon or steel stringed, and the Portuguese guitarra, which has 12 strings tuned in a particular way. That's true of the music on Ana Moura's new album Leva-Me Aos Fados (World Village), though it sounds as if there are two guitarras in the ensemble, most of the time, plus a bass instrument, sounds like an upright at least part of the time.

The point however, is that the kind of exquisite melanchology that Fado portrays so poetically is ever present in Ana's vocal style that one does not have to understand Portuguese (I don't) to hear the passion in her voice. Like the blues, Fado should be expressive!! Well, Ana Moura is the best thing I've heard in a long time. What a voice!! Need I say more? Wow!

Jambands, the Radiators

February 4, 2009—Today starts a series of blogs on jambands. In the coming months I’ll be looking at a bunch of bands as represented in the "Live Music" section of the site www.archive.org. There are thousands of live shows reposited there by bands that give permission to tape and disseminate their performances (provided they are traded or given away free, but not sold commercially). You can check out the shows of a particular band by streaming or downloading what’s on the site, searching by band name, then date or other factors. I’ve spent hundreds of hours lately immersing myself in the various offerings there. I’ll be covering some of the more interesting or representative shows from time to time here on this blog. I must note that of course if you like a band you should support them by paying for their regular releases and/or catching them live.

First a little history, much of which may be quite familiar to readers, but not everybody. Starting in the late ‘60s there were a number of bands that regularly included jams as part of their live shows. Cream, Hendrix, and the guitar hero sorts of bands did that regularly. The San Francisco groups were especially appreciated at the time as artists who did much to promote and develop these sorts of practices—the Airplane, Quicksilver, and of course especially the Dead. And it was in part due to their longevity and in part by their preferences that the Dead built a huge following who appreciated the long jams and musical forms involved, centering mostly around Jerry Garcia and his formidable inventive abilities and what the band did as a whole during these segments.

Well, when Garcia passed there were many Dead-dedicated groups playing out there in the local bars and stages across the US and beyond, but I suppose it was Phish that gained the most recognition by building a repertoire and stage presence that continued in the Dead tradition of ever-changing set lists and plenty of jam space. Sometime around then as more bands and audiences began to take to the idea that this kind of music was something to be expanded and appreciated on its own terms, the name “jamband” began to be applied.

The big record conglomerates have covered this music when and if a group had what is considered potential “hit material.” But it is clear that as far as Jamband status is concerned, a band can create quite a cache for themselves without such support, especially with the medium of the internet as a factor.

In my informal survey of the Archive’s live music holdings, I found that, as with any music form where there a great number of people involved, there can be imperfections or negative musical factors at work with some of the bands. I’ve found that many bands are strictly Dead clones or so close to the Dead that they have no real identity of their own. This can be found either in the songs themselves and/or the jams, which may closely ape what Jerry and company’s jams sounded like at any particular stage of the Dead's existence. (This of course is not a bad thing if the band contains former Dead members, like with Ratdog, Phil Lesh and Friends, etc.) Other bands may play lackluster originals that detract from the show. Sometimes a facile kind of funk may become a crutch to what is going on in a set. Sometimes the jams are undirected—the lead guitarist may not really have many ideas and to go on at length can be a little snoozy. The rhythm sections can be stiff with some folks, really not up to the standards set by the Dead at their best, so that a groove never develops.

On the other hand I’ve experienced some truly interesting bands and shows on the Archive. And I’ll be noting what’s good out there as I address particular shows in the months to come.

Today’s show involves a band that’s as old as dirt, or nearly so. New Orleans’ Radiators formed in 1978 and still make the circuit today with the same original five members. That is a rarity out there. They may not have had much conventional music business success as far as the “hits” go, but their live shows are exciting, party and jam get togethers. I’ve been listening to a full, three-CD performance of the band recorded live at the Great American Music Hall on March 20, 1993. The sound quality is very good and they run through originals and interesting covers—everything from Blind Willie Johnson’s classic “Everybody Out to Treat a Stranger Right” to Creedence’s “Born on the Bayou.” Now these guys don’t get involved with 20-minute jam sequences but there’s a looseness and some nice guitar soloing throughout. The show catches them in their middle period more or less and by 1993 they had really found a nice groove on just about everything they did. So I’ll cover more of these shows from time-to-time. Stay tuned.