Steve Reich, Electric Counterpoint, Daniel Lippel, Guitars

Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint for multiple electric guitars is surely one of the landmark modern works of its kind. Pat Metheny did a version in 1987 that came out as part of an album that included "Different Trains." That was a beautiful take on it but now we have another excellent one, multi-tracked by Daniel Lippel (New Focus CD).

The piece as Reich conceived it was in part based on traditional Banda-Linda music of Central Africa. Lippel worked with NYU ethnomusicologist Martin Scherzinger to accentuate the African rootedness of the work. I must say the music sounds wonderfully well, perhaps the best it ever has in Daniel Lippel's hands. It is marvelously resounding and drivingly rhythmic.

I am a huge Reich enthusiast and so it did not take any arm-twisting to hear this version. It is exceedingly beautiful to begin with, and even more so in this extraordinarily well articulated version. Keep in mind that this is an EP with around 15 minutes of music. A better 15 minutes I cannot imagine, unless it were to be on some other planet!

All guitarists should hear this. Everyone else, too, while we are at it. Seminal.

James Burns, Let's Go to Hell, Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers

"So you wanna be a rock and roll star?" asks the Byrds in a notable song from the mid-late sixties. Their prescription for success is comically simple, a lyric that pokes fun at the whole enterprise as it extols its own status. Things are far more complicated than that. And perhaps no more complicated than in the heady days of punk-and-after in the music of the '80s-'90s, and perhaps epitomized in the harrowing adventures of an off-center band that became a legend and then was in effect swallowed up by its own success. I speak of the Butthole Surfers, a band that somewhat disqualified themselves for easy fame by virtue of their very name, and in the process of their long rise (and fall) endured and thrived by talent, determination and, yes, a kind of excess, even a depravity.

The new book devoted to that narrative of the band, Let's Go to Hell by James Burns (Cheap Drugs, 495 pages, paper or casebound), gives you an enthralling, detailed look at the band's career.

It is a well-documented piecing together of what the band's anti-marketing-marketing stance made a point of obscuring--the actual ins and outs of the trajectory of a band living for a decade on the very edge of collapse, touring continually in circumstances of dire poverty and deprivation, living solely for the music, yet also in their dire excesses living on the brink of physical and mental collapse.

It is a harrowing yet at times funny story of a band seemingly totally out of control both on stage and off, yet evolving into one of the era's very best post-punk alternative rock outfits. The story begins in the early '80s, as they are an upcoming punk outfit, details how they manage to outlive the punk era to become one of the rock underground's boldest avant rock guitar bands, evolving into a neo-psychedelic extreme-noise juggernaut, a premiere guitar band who mostly resisted the synth-pop era and kept the music evolving and on the edge.

Perhaps the extreme irony of the scene is enacted by the Butthole Surfers as with so many other bands of that era. The rise of Nirvana and grunge gave bands like the Surfers a mainstream popularity that through a major record deal and increased exposure created their presence on the national-international scene yet set the scene for their self-and-outward destruction. Success gave them for a time improved economic prospects yet alienated their original audience and put more and more pressure on them to retain a commercial success that belied what made them so interesting to the underground scene-mavens in the first place.

The book grabs you from the beginning and gives you an inside look of what it was like to be in the band. It will appeal to Butthole fans as a comprehensive chronology of lineups, tours, recordings, style changes and creative circumstances. But even if you are not a huge Surfers devotee it is a fascinating read and an important document about the socio-cultural and economic history of underground rock in perhaps its very peak period. The cultural wars between conservative factions and the underground is an underlying theme of great interest to anyone interested in the period, too.

Highly recommended. But be prepared for the hell of what it was like to be on the fringes then!

Andy Brown Quartet, Direct Call

Andy Brown's new quartet album Direct Call (Delmark 5023) opens with a rousing version of the classic Rabbit/Duke number "The Jeep is Jumping" to clear space for an artful set. Brown shows us a refreshing take on electric guitar artistry that owes something to the swing-bop nexus that Charlie Christian made so irresistible and others that came after like Barney Kessel worked through into a modern jazz guitar style. This music reminds us that the human prehensile grip not only has enabled us to do cool things like fashion spears, paint masterpieces, but also has given us the ability (for some anyway) to play the guitar like a mother, and of course to invent and craft the instrument in the first place.

So this album makes us glad of that, surely. The album does not rest with "Jeep" but continues on for a program of standards and originals that compliments his earlier album Soloist (type that in index box for my review) with a swinging quartet date and makes us further realize just how excellent a guitarist we have here.

He has very sympatico bandmates in pianist Jeremy Kahn (with some greatly swinging and hip solo time and the kind of comping that really drives everything ahead), bassist Joe Policastro and drummer Phil Gratteau. The rhythm gets it all going, setting up the Brown doings in all the right ways.

Andy has had all the schooling and knows what to do with it, that is clear. And while he digs into the stylistic block swing-bop he adroitly manages to avoid the cliches and come up with his own performative niceties.

It is an album all guitarists and all their friends will find hard not to like. It boils over with guitar brilliance. You must hear this! Then you must smile! Well, not must, but I do think you will. I did. I am smiling to myself right now!

Marc Edwards & Slipstream Time Travel, Mystic Mountain: Trouble in the Carina Nebula

Here we have an EP of great electricity, improvisational strength, and the uninhibited free mayhem of the spacey, special sort we have come to expect from drummer-bandleader Marc Edwards and his Slipstream Time Travel band. The album is titled Mystic Mountain: Trouble in the Carina Nebula (JaZt TAPES CD-057). It was the band as it sounded live at The Pine Box in Brooklyn, last October 2015.

There is a mountain of sound to be heard here, perhaps the density of which at times is unprecedented. Marc of course occupies the drum chair and gives us his unparalleled, tempestuous virtuoso barrage of percussive significance. David Tamura adds a welcome and contrastively volcanic tenor sax. But then the threesome of Karl Alfonso Evangelista, Colin Sanderson and Alex Lozupone, the three on very high-crank electric guitars, Alex (who also is leader of the band Eighty-Pound Pug that I have happily covered here) on combo electric guitar and bass.

The three guitar onslaught creates extreme metal densities of a special, invigorating sort. What a sound they get. Marc and David are determined to create counterthrusts of sound and they do so nicely, but the guitars make for a highly psychedelic sort of present-day Ascension that floats and drives the music into a beautiful chaos like no other. This may be their most anarchically exhilarating album yet! And if you let yourself open to its insistence, I think you will find it drives you outward into a space that is infinitely over-the-top.

So, kudos! If you seek something polite, this one is not for you. But if a very electric freedom can motor your listening self, this one is tailor-made for such a trip. It's a great noise indeed!

For more info and to find out how to order this go to http://www.janstrom.se/7.-jazt-tapes-15468036

Paul Carrack, Soul Shadows

I am of the age where the music of Paul Carrack carries lots of connotations, half-memories of an age spent listening to the radio and hearing the classic soul hits we now realize were only there for a time as an active musical entity. Or were they? What is special about Paul's album Soul Shadows (Carrack-UK 026) is that he spins a full album of songs that in their make-up and their arrangements recapture un-selfconsciously that classic era. The songs are new, the arrangements are perfect, Paul sings very well and plays guitar that is more a rhythm than a lead item here, but no matter.

To say it is what it is is to say nothing, and not very precisely at that. But it is. This might have come out on Stax in 1968, say. But it didn't. Jimmy Ruffin? That and more. The songs are the thing and they are good. But then the vocals and arrangements carry it forward to make it real.

And so this music speaks to me, as it will to anybody who appreciates that period of soul-pop that filled the ears of those of us who were there, but also can communicate of course to younger folks who can dig what it is putting down.

This one grew on me, little-by-little. It has an authenticity and commitment to a sound that sounds right, in a beautiful way. Enough said.

Fred Van Hove, Peter Jacquemyn, Damon Smith, Burns Longer, 2008

From the significant holdings of releases by avant bass master Damon Smith comes this single-mindedly focused trio outing from 2008. It consists of European avant free piano icon Fred Van Hove mixing it up in excellent ways with two bass voices of note--namely Damon and Peter Jacquemyn. Burns Longer (Balance Point Acoustics BPA-2) may have an amusing, ironic title that echoes with the tone of the cigarette ads many of us were brainwashed with before they were banned, but it also captures the essence of this date.

For this outing does give us some excellent long burns, "Archiduc 1" and "Archiduc 3" respectively clocking in at 27:39 and 35:38, with number two adding another 10 minutes. But the point is that the length brings us an intensity of focus. We get some thorough fire-spitting piano (and some hip accordion) such as Fred Van Hove has built his reputation upon. Add to that the sprawling matrix of two bass adepts laying down an ever-varied carpet of rumbling, searing, widely colorful bass emanations. And you have something.

This is the sort of uncompromised free attacking that gives you a kind of Zen equilibrium as you experience it start-to-finish. Everybody is in high gear and the distance traveling willy-nilly through rugged terrain brings on a feeling of exhilaration that the best of this sort of thing will do if you let go and go where it leads.

I am reminded very pleasantly of some of the old BYG recordings done in 1969. It does not stand on formalities. It lets loose and you get with it or it will not work.

Needless to say this excels for the two-bass contributions and how they interact with Van Hove's unrelenting inventiveness.

I recommend this one to you for its nervy outness and the success it achieves. This IS what free music is about!

Avataar, Petal

I don't suppose that anyone familiar with the history and trajectory of "Fusion" is unaware of the importance of classical Indo-Pak and African elements in the development of the first seminal outfits that were categorized as such back in the early days. Of course there was John McLaughlin as a clear example of the Indian strain, but the rhythmic structural influence could be heard in some classic Miles of the day among many others, and the melodic element was a pronounced aspect of many sides. As for the African element, I only mention it here--for later discussion.

Avataar updates the Indian-jazz nexus on the recent album Petal (InSound Records IS003). It is the brainchild of saxophonist Sundar Viswanathan. He's put together a very able and flexible group and they give us a new and exciting spin on Indo-jazz-rock doings. Sundar brings us a full CD of nicely crafted and arranged originals that open us up to something different. Key to it all is vocalist Felicity Williams and her oft-times wordless vocal instrument, which especially in the compositional segments plays an important role in the shaping of the ensemble melodies--sometimes in unison with Sundar's soprano or alto, or perhaps the electric guitar of Michael Occhipinti as well--who by the way plays some angelically demonic guitar here in the solo zone.

And there is supreme musicianship to be heard all-around--Justin Gray on bass, Ravi Naimpally on tabla, Giampaolo Scatozza on drums are all huge contributors to the sound.

The compositions stand out as especially fine. All players have a foot in both western and Indian camps, no more so than Sundar, who combines the two in his solo work beautifully well.

It is music that those new to this sort of thing may dig right off, and those who love the Indian-Jazz-Rock nexus will feel like they are in a new home, with all the things they might expect and definite fresh twists, too, for a happy result. Excellent!