Kayhan Kalhor, Erdal Erzincan, Kula Kulluk Yakasir Mi, Mid-Eastern Classical Music

I grew up in the generation that believed in the idea of "Brahms, not bombs". There has been nothing that has happened in my eventful life to change my mind. "We" may not have always gotten along with all other nations and people in my lifetime, but I do believe in the power of music to heal us all and eliminate the distance between self and others, or at least understand what positive difference there can be and what can reconcile those so we all can get on with our lives. So much for my pitch as to the power of music.

But there is more, wait. One way to embrace differences in a positive way is to explore the rich heritage of humankind's music-making. No serious student of music, the guitar and/or any instrumental tradition one might work in can afford to ignore the great traditions of other places, and sometimes, other times.

In the spirit of this and because the CD at hand is such an excellent example of another tradition, I give to you Kayhan Kalhor and Erdal Erzincan's Kula Kulluk Yakisir Mi (ECM B0018884-02). It is a live date of two extraordinary virtuosos performing Mid-Eastern classical music. Maestro Kalhor is Persian and plays a fiddle-like instrument called the kamancheh; Maestro Erzincan hails from Turkey and plays a lute-ish instrument called the baglama. The repertoire is for the most part traditional. There is long developmental scalar improvisations, important compositional motifs and a general ambiance of concentrated ultra-expression.

This is not their first album but it is an excellent album. Listening is the best way to understand why this music is essential. I recommend it without reservation. These two are marvelous musicians.

Studebaker John's Maxwell Street Kings, Kingsville Jukin'

Everybody is always talking about what went down at Sun Records and how that managed to conjoin the blues with what eventually became known as rock. Now I have nothing bad to say about all that. But from the perspective of right now, it seems to me that what went down in Chicago, both right then and a little bit later, has proved to be more influential to rock (at least once England got into what was doing) than Presley, Lewis and those cats did, though of course Elvis got all that attention.

Think of Elmore James and the classic bluesman who recorded for Chess, Checker, VeeJay and of course eventually Delmark. To me they stand the test of time and get more hard rocking things happening that still sound as good today as ever. I don't really care if somebody says I am wrong about it. My ears tell me.

Very much on that note today is Studebaker John's Maxwell Street Kings and their new album Kingsville Jukin' (Delmark 830). Now this isn't the first from this guy, but man, it's the BEST. Studebaker John gives out with the vocals, harmonica and hard-driving rhythm guitar and he is aided and abetted by a hot band of 2nd guitar, bass and drums.

What gets me especially about this new one is how consistently they hit it with that old time hard rockin' Chicago blues. It's 16 slices of stompin' swamp rock that does not let up. Some songs you'll probably get the feeling you recognize somehow, some not. But it's the best kind of deja vu because unlike Yogi Berra's version it isn't "all over again". It's been there but its back, it's new. Because it has enough that identifies it as Studebaker John and his band that you don't at all feel like a clone in cloneland. It's Kingsvilleland, and you are no clone, right?

I am not going to lie to you. Why would I? I am not getting paid to say it. I am not getting paid, PERIOD, dig? THIS is gonna pop your cork if you gravitate to that hard rocking, boogie jukin', no-prisoners-taking stomp. And my partner Susan agrees, so that seals it. I tell you no lie. Get this one and roll back the rug!

Ellery Eskelin, Susan Alcorn, Michael Formanek, Mirage

There can be no real rules that limit the way music can and should be made, except those the musicians themselves choose to accept. This is how we get innovation, how music can flourish, advance. And so today we have an example of a trio working within the freestyle world of today's avant jazz, who have adopted certain practices and have agreed (not necessarily by a lot of verbal discussion, but at least intuitively so) on a set of assumptions to create a series of improvisations that have their own internal consistency.

I speak of the album Mirage (Clean Feed 271) as played by Ellery Eskelin on tenor sax, Susan Alcorn on pedal steel guitar and Michael Formanek on acoustic bass.

These three are well-suited to work together in the exploratory zone. Eskelin has for quite some time been a tenor player of great imagination and inventiveness. He comes through once again here with some inspired playing. Susan Alcorn may not be a household name right now but has established herself as that most unusual of things, a free-avant player of the pedal steel guitar and she is good, very good. Then there is Michael Formanek, a contrabasses's bassist, a guy that can and does do it all, whether pizzicato or arco.

Put the three together and set them loose as they are on this album, and you have something. In some ways it is the plastic, open sound of Alcorn's guitar that immediately places this sound world elsewhere than where one might expect. But then it's the three together that make real magic. It's a live recording from 2011. It was a most productive meeting.

You really should hear this one.

Gene Ess, Fractal Attraction

There is never a shortage of lesser known, upcoming players out there. What of course is heartening is that some of them are very good. Guitarist Gene Ess is one, as much here today as upcoming, that caught my ear by way of his album Fractal Attraction (SIMProductions 130315). He graduated from Berklee after studying with Jerry Bergonzi and Charlie Banacos and moved to New York in 1991. He was a member of the celebrated Rashied Ali's group through 2003. And he has gotten attention and acclaim with two albums prior to this one.

Fractal Attraction is an album in the progressive contemporary jazz mode. It features some hip, sophisticated compositions by Ess and one co-written with vocalist Thana Alexa, as well as one wholly by Alexa, who is an important part of the quintet on the album. She is featured as wordless vocalist and scat artist to very good effect. Rounding out the band is David Berkman playing some rather advanced piano and a strong rhythm team of Thomson Kneeland (bass) and Gene Jackson (drums).

The band has very much its own sound--thanks in part to the melodic-harmonic stylistic progressiveness of the compositions, the vocalist as ensemble member and the beautifully acrobatic playing of Maestro Ess. It's music that pulsates nicely, has interesting changes-based improvisation structures and maintains a consistently high level of musicianship from first to last.

Thana has real scatting chops and holds her own as a "horn" in the soloing routines. Gene can blaze over a set of changes in very cool ways while keeping a personal style to the forefront. He isn't a "sounds like x" player so much as HE is an X himself, which is saying a great deal in a contemporary guitar world filled with influenced players.

The whole band has something going for themselves. Fractal Attraction will give great pleasure to those who like jazz that is fully of today yet has postbop roots. And the Gene Ess guitar presentation will make you a believer. Lots of wonderful music here. Get it!

Simak Dialog, The 6th Story

The Indonesian fusion group Simak Dialog makes music like nobody else. They are into I believe by now their 6th album, aptly titled The 6th Story (MoonJune 056). It plays on my computer as I write this.

The new album continues the trajectory set by the others. A three-piece Indonesian percussion section lays down a hip combination of traditional rhythms and more fusoid beats. The bass guitar of Adhitya Pratama, the guitar of Tohpati, and the keys of Riza Arshad layer on top in a deft combination of contemporary fusion and melodically Indonesian elements.

Chick Corea in Java? Not exactly. Riza is the composer and engineer for these sides and he plays some very respectable keys, both solo and ensemble. His compositions have heft and much originality. Tohpati can rock-fuze out in his own original way and he does. The melody lines often feature intricate guitar-key lines that keep the ears perked up. And Tohpati gets some excellent guitar solos going now and again for you plectrum fans.

By now there is a very strong music meld between group members. They are tight and very simpatico. They may rock a little less hard on some numbers than on some previous albums but there is continuous flow throughout and the music is challenging in interesting ways, always.

It's another winner. You might do well to start with one of the earlier ones if you don't know the band (do a search in the appropriate window on this page for reviews of older albums), but this one gives you Simak Dialog in full bloom. Listen and dig!

Gary Lucas, Touched by Grace: My Time with Jeff Buckley

Ding-dong! A couple of nights ago my doorbell rang. It was the UPS, delivering a mysterious package. I opened it with some haste. "Oh, good. The publisher sent me a review copy of Gary Lucas's book," I mumbled to myself. I had heard about it. Of course I was and am no stranger to Gary Lucas and his music. I consider him one of the very most important, most innovative guitarists of our era. And the book is about a momentous time in his career--his collaboration with the exceptional vocalist/poetic lyricist and expressionist Jeff Buckley. I was glad to know more of the details since the music had struck a nerve with me.

And so the next day I hunkered down with the book, Touched By Grace: My Time with Jeff Buckley (Jawbone, 317 pp., paperbound). It is a page turner. In two days I was finished reading it, touched by the grace in my own way.

I always knew Gary could write. I knew his background. I had read some of his more casual social media posts and other, more polished, more developed things. But none of that quite prepared me for THIS.

It tells the sort of story legends are made of--only it is a slice of real life, surely not a legend at the core. No. It's too real, too heartbreaking a tale to read for it to be a legend in itself. Yet it tells the tale of an industry that often by definition is in the legend-making business. Jeff Buckley from the start of his public career had a special something about him that made him grist for the legend-maker's mill. But Gary Lucas tells us... the truth about the whole jumping, complex set of events leading to the creation of the legend and in the end gives us a stunningly clear picture of the many contradictions, interdictions and general sweet-fast talking jive behind what ultimately launched Jeff's career and perhaps led him into dangerous psychic territory and destruction in the end.

I am getting ahead of the story though. And this story is as much about Gary and his circumstantial yet fundamental presence within the story as it is about how the musical/starformed Jeff Buckley came to be.

So let's backtrack. It starts with Gary AFTER his seminal association with Captain Beefheart, Gary the talented but under-challenged copywriter for well over a decade at Columbia Records. The music business in that period, at least the major-label part of it, had begun to drift away somewhat from its flirtations with the underground art-rock that had changed the music scene so radically from the later '60s on. There was a kind of rock midlife no-man's land developing, a gradually increasing re-emphasis on the "hits or nothing" perspective of earlier years.

We catch Gary in the middle of the drift, pretty disgusted with his role in the big machine and its increasing tendency to play it safe, 35 years old, knowing in his heart that he needed to play the guitar and make a statement about what rock still was capable of and what it could be. He returns to the guitar with renewed determination, as a solo act playing marvelous near orchestral pedal-enhanced music on the six-string to no small acclaim. He then forms his band Gods and Monsters, which eventually includes a female singer who falls in at first with what Gary is looking for. He quits the copywriting job and gets the attention of the right folks at Columbia, namely Rick Chertoff, and lands a tentative commitment from them to do an album deal.

Yet there was a willful strain in the Gods and Monsters singer at the time, an ambition to take the music in a direction that in the end did not meet with a good deal of enthusiasm from either Gary or the label.

All that leads up to one of those Kis-metic situations that changes everything. An old acquaintance is putting together a Tim Buckley tribute concert. Tim's son Jeff, then completely unknown in music circles, was going to do some singing as part of the events. Would Gary like to get together with Jeff and work up a couple of numbers for the show?

From that very first moment Gary met with Jeff things started falling very much together. At the same time things also began a slow unravelling, began to fall very much apart, but in ways that were not initially apparent. From that first collaborative moment when the two began working out material together it was clear that something momentous was taking shape. Yet the centrifugal-centripetal forces inherent in Jeff Buckley's complex personality would ultimately bring it all to a grinding halt. Gary does a great job portraying Jeff as a bundle of contradictions: vulnerable-ruthless, open-stubborn, somewhat naive, kind and loving, yet easy prey to the temptation to be single-minded, self-destructive, overweeningly ambitious, duplicitous. Jeff's then hidden dark side combined with some music business machinations and the result was far from pretty.

But for a short, wonderful period of time musical magic reigned. Gary tells brilliantly the happy-sad exhilarating-brooding saintly-demonic story of Jeff Buckley the enigma yet perhaps all the more brilliant at times for it, their volatile but hugely kinetic-cathartic mutual musical combustion-collaboration. The music business side as well as the creative side get detailed, pinpoint-brilliant scrutiny from Gary. Perhaps most fascinating is Gary's right-there description of how they worked together, Gary crafting an intricate, musically contentful foundation that Tim then soared over, creating the vocal line-lyrical content that fit perfectly with and extended Gary's initial creative brilliance into a stratospheric zone, the result surely and startlingly transformed into much more than the sum of the two parts.

In the end there was betrayal. Lucas tells it all in a gripping prose chronology that jumps off the pages at you until you cannot stop reading.

And maybe it is the all-too-familiar story of stardom and self-destruction, insightful music brilliance and naive self-delusion, all teaming up to set the tail of the Jeff Buckley comet shooting rapidly and vertically to the heavens only to sputter and do an equally sure decent into nothingness. But it is told with such vivid life as the details unwind unerringly to the heartbreaking denouement, it is no simple, documented story. It does end up having the quality of a legend out of time, though not one the record execs envisioned, surely.

Lucas as he himself implies is someone who feels compelled to built up the truth of the experience in exhilarating and then harrowing detail. And in so doing he creates a hell of a book.

It is a book one does not forget quickly, if at all. You get a planet full of insights on Gary, on Jeff, on the blinding ecstasy of their momentous collaboration and then on the forces that pulled it apart and ultimately led to Jeff's demise. You see the horror of what the music business can be along with the extraordinary highs of musical excellence the two were able to reach, each bringing to the table a special frisson that in combination was otherworldly, exceptional, a model of what such things can be when everything is right.

Brilliant. Moving. A must-read.

Tail Dragger, Stop Lyin'

Tail Dragger (aka James Yancy Jones) is one SINGER. He has that Howlin' Wolf sort of gruff soul and you can hear it to good advantage on this, his very first album Stop Lyin' (Delmark 828), recorded in 1982. Only two songs were originally released from it (on a 45 and then an anthology), so this is the first time the full album has been available.

He belts out some very solid Chicago blues with an excellent band. As a bonus he reminisces for a few minutes about his early Chicago days at the end of the album. It's very funny-real and informative about what things were like for him and the crew he ran with.

It's the real deal, the real blues, done with lots of soul and fire! Oh yeah, it IS.