Phil Sargent Brings Good Songcrafting and Musical Guitar Artistry to New Album

With all the influences bouncing about in guitarland these days, we have today a practitioner of the art that doesn't wear his influences on his sleeve. I refer to Phil Sargent. His album, release just this month, drives that point home.

A New Day (Sargent Jazz) puts Mr. Sargent in the company of a readily responsive bass-drums trio context with added keys on two tracks and the quite pleasing wordless vocals of Aubrey Johnson. Songs generally feature Ms. Johnson taking the lead melody and Phil doubling or accompanying her. There are seven Sargent compositions represented and they are lyrical, melodically distinctive and quite attractive. They occupy the interstices between fusion and electric jazz. Phil's playing is quite impressive. He alternates between sub-shred subtleties and melodically oriented fuze-shred. He is an true artist of lyrical yet sometimes forceful lining. He sounds modern without sounding anything more than obliquely influenced by those who have great cache in guitar circles these days (Metheny. Abercrombie. . .).

A New Day gives you a damn fine set. It has joy, it has a quiet intensity and it has very expressive musical content. This is music for those who love well-developed, sophisticated electric jazz. Well worth hearing!

Bruce Soord of Pineapple Thief Talks About the Band's New Album and Musical Direction

The band Pineapple Thief has amassed an impressive track record of albums and acclaim over the years. Their new recording Someone Here is Missing (KScope) came out yesterday. It’s a further development in the band’s evolution and should get the attention of a new group of listeners. Gapplegate Music recently had a conversation with band principal Bruce Soord. He spoke rather eloquently on the making of the new album, the direction the band is taking, and the big picture ahead.

GREGO EDWARDS: Did you have any idea ten years ago that you’d be where you are now as a group? You’ve developed an extremely loyal and zealous group of fans. Have they bolstered you all in your determination to keep going, seemingly on the brink of a much wider audience?

BRUCE SOORD: Yeah, I keep trying to rewind my brain to where I was 10 years ago, alone in the spare room of my mid-terraced house with a sampler, crappy synth and a very slow and unreliable PC. I remember a recent blog post where I imagined going back in a time machine and telling myself what I’d be doing in 10 years time (ignoring the paradox of meeting myself of course). I wouldn’t have believed me. So yeah, I’m thankful.

GREGO: Did you have an overriding vision of the music you wanted to make when you first started out? Has it changed? How, if so?

BRUCE: I always wanted to fuse ideas and genres within the rock envelope without making it sound contrived. I think my vision has always stayed the same: the music has to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Whether that is because of a lyric, a beautiful series of notes or a kick arse heavy section it really doesn’t matter. It’s a personal thing to each listener who “gets it.”

GREGO: It seems that your new album Someone Here is Missing keeps the sort of spacey and original sounds you have always featured so effectively and adds a crisper, more compact approach to the song form. Do you think? If so, was that change deliberate or did it just kind of evolve over the years?

BRUCE: It was definitely deliberate. When we took the songs on the road I realized how much I needed to strip the arrangements back so they worked live. A lot of the time I tended to hide my less successful compositions behind layers of sounds and “ear candy” production. Strip it all back and a song should work with just me and my guitar. That was the rule for Someone Here is Missing – it had to work as a song when I “hummed and strummed” it.

GREGO: When you are in the studio do you have a particular sound you aim at for each song or do you experiment until you are happy with the sonic direction? Or both?

BRUCE: I’d say both. Most of the time I go into the studio after mulling over the arrangement with my acoustic guitar for a few days, carefully thinking where I want to travel with it. But often, I’ll end up taking a completely different path by accident and end up with a totally different sonic experience! “Waking Up The Dead” is a prime example. The bass and beat came by accident and the song appeared without very much effort at all.

GREGO: Was it therapeutic and/or symbolic to sum up the first phase of the group on the 3,000 Days anthology album? Did you feel like you were entering a new beginning for the group after that was compiled?

BRUCE: I think it really helped me sculpt a new sound for Someone Here is Missing. After compiling work from seven albums it really hit home that I needed to move on to a serious new territory, away from the layered, gentle melancholia of old TPT. I still love that sound, but I needed to try something new to keep the passion going.

GREGO: In the studio how do you tend to lay down tracks on a song? Is there a kind of standard grouping of live instruments/rough vocals for the first step of a song or does it vary?

BRUCE: I always track some basic drums first to play along to, then lay down guitars and vocals – that’s when I know whether a song is going somewhere great or should be sent to the “crap_bag” folder on my studio PC. Once I have a basic arrangement down I usually leave the studio and run the parts over and over in my head. Sometimes I can try out ideas in my head without the need to be sitting in the studio. It’s good fun but can drive me a little crazy. I can’t even go shopping without my songs.

GREGO: Where do you see Pineapple Thief going in the second decade of its life??!!

BRUCE: For the first time in my career I can see the music really getting out there to a new generation of fans, young and old. That has always been my raison d'être, not to make tons of cash (although that would be nice!) or to be mobbed every time I stepped out my front door, but for as many people as possible to hear the music. It’s frustrating for me to hear fans telling me how they’ve only just discovered us. How many more people like that are out there?

GREGO: By the way, the cover art for your new album is just stunning. How did the idea come about?

BRUCE: It wasn’t my idea – it came from Storm Thorgerson and his studio. When he offered to do our design (which was a great moment for me) he invited me up to his studio to interrogate me on the meaning of my songs. He and his team then sketched a series of ideas while listening to early demos of Someone Here is Missing very loudly. One of the sketches was the “post-it man.” Before I knew it I was on a train to London to be covered with post-its. . .

James Blood Ulmer Gets Root-sy

There is the blues and there is James Blood Ulmer. Do not confuse the two. Mr. Ulmer has been an artist who can go in any number of directions over the years. Funky things, more outside electric excursions, and music that has a rootedness in the blues, but really is James Blood Ulmer music.

Some of this is quite clear in his recent album In and Out (In and Out 77100-2). He plays guitar in his own inimitable way. It is not blues guitar exactly, at least in the sense of the urban blues traditions coming out of the '50s and beyond. The same goes for his vocals and his songwriting. These are songs sometimes drenched in the blues. Like Hendrix before him he flirts with the blues but rarely actually directly launches into the medium per se. Now if you don't care for definitions of what is or isn't in cases like this, I don't blame you. The point is that he should not be pigeonholed because he has his own thing going on.

In and Out gives you several sides of the Ulmer approach. He's working with a trio of himself plus bass and drums and they kick things along nicely. Mark Peterson plays both the electric and the upright in ways conducive to the Ulmer bag; drummer Aubrey Doyle is right there as well.

There are root-boppish numbers, mostly instrumental, a few flights into the stratosphere for his guitar, and rooted, blues inflected rock-funk of a high order. If I once called him a sort of John Lee Hooker for today (in a Cadence review) it was meant in terms of how he can pare down to the elemental core of soulfulness when he chooses, saying-playing more with less.

He does that on this record. And he does it so well, so much in his own way, that perhaps the comparison doesn't seem necessary anymore. James Blood Ulmer is James Blood Ulmer is James Blood Ulmer. And that's a good thing to be. In and Out finds him in excellent form, pared down to fighting trim.

Florian Larousse, Young Classical Guitarist

French guitarist Florian Larousse won the Guitar Foundation of America Competition in 2009. One can hear why on his wide-ranging recital disk (Naxos 8.572565). The program covers a broad spectrum of pieces in the repertoire: a little John Dowland, 19th century composers Giulio Regondi and Napoleon Coste, transitional 20th century figure Antonio Jose and a modernist, one Nuccio D'Angelo.

The first thing that strikes me about Larousse is his beautiful tone. It sparkles. His phrasing is astonishingly fluid, no matter the style at hand, and he shows an interpretive knack that is on a par with the best of the modern classical pianists. That is to say, his rubato is unexaggerated, his tonal nuance subtle and varied according to the needs of the composition.

Jose's Sonata (1933) showcases Larousse's finessive flair in a wonderful way. The sonata's traditional Spanish guitar passagework segues smoothly back and forth in alternation with the more contemporary sounding motifs. He makes of it all an organic unity that breathes life into the music and lets you fully appreciate the beauty of the sonata.

Mr. Larousse does not choose to wear his technique on his sleeve. All that is subjoined to what is important: the composition at hand and the most expressively subtle realization of the notes as the composer conceived of them.

Larousse's considerable talent and a selection of lesser performed gems from the repertoire make for excellent listening. It is a most successful and attractive outing!

Univers Zero Returns to the Studio After A 14 Year Hiatus

The band Univers Zero made their last studio album in 1986. We are fortunate that they've been back to the grind, putting out a new and fascinating album they call Clivages (Cuneiform 295). Like the return of Ulysseys, we rejoice first, then worry later about the adventure they no doubt have been on. I'm sure that is an epic story in itself. We welcome the wandering heroes with our ears open. And our reward is great.

Universe Zero makes a kind of post-Zappa mix of modern classical and rock. They do it so well that the stitches are not showing. Listening, you forget to care what is what and just revel in the fine musical flow. Clivages weaves together the two styles in ways that give the new hybrid a feeling of organic inevitability. It's how the music is arranged, which is quite skillfully, and the pieces themselves, which are inspired. There are interesting ostinatos, a rock pulse, various contrapuntal intricacies and shifting meters for a sort of rock-classical chamber effect. Band members take turns with the composing. It all has such clear vision and fine-tuned execution that you feel like they all have internalized the sort of music they want to do, and then have gone ahead and done it. And done it extraordinarily well. If Univers Zero hadn't come up with this album, we would all be the poorer. That's how much I think of it. It is simply superb!

After Frank Zappa, Universe Zero produces the very best rock-classical music out there. Thank you Belgium for giving us so much wonderful music over the centuries! Please, Univers Zero, don't let so much time go by this time. Get right back in the studio. We want more!

Highly recommended.

An Obscure But Good New Lost City Ramblers Album

February 23, 2009—As I greet the morning sun and another day, I am accompanied by the sounds of a music not often covered on these pages, but no less appreciated for that.

Sometime between the 1700s and the 20th century a new music sprung out of the hills and dales of Appalachia as well as far and wide in the surrounding area. It was born of a life adapted to this land and the mixture of styles that various immigrants carried with them when they arrived, not to mention sheer musical imagination. I refer to country (and western). The old ballads, string-band songs and early bluegrass gave the US one of its truly original musical identities. (And of course country music thrives today, with or without rootedness in the original styles, depending on the performer.)

The folk revival of the '50s and '60s covered some of this music, and of course there were plenty of local players who kept the tradition alive in itself. Somehow those two strains found their perfect synthesis in a band known as The New Lost City Ramblers. This was a superb group both vocally and instrumentally, in no small part thanks to the talents of Mike Seeger, but everyone involved did a great job with finessing and directly communicating what was (and is) so wonderful about this music. There’s the deceptively plain, unique sound of the vocals and that special twang that many singers today have lost. There’s the wonderful fiddling, and the special picking of guitars, banjos, and mandolins.

The New Lost City Ramblers made a number of albums for Folkways in the late ‘50s-early ‘60s, then broke up. Folkways-Smithsonian has made them all available again and they are highly recommended (there's also a box set. . . ). I’m listening now to one I never had in my vinyl days, Gone to the Country (Folkways 02491). It covers songs not found much if at all on other modern recordings and those songs often have that outrageous nonsense humor and all-knowing naivety spawned from everyday local life. It’s the superb delivery of the songs though that makes this group special. These guys blew the folk revivalists into the dust. The music was and is breathtakingly alive in their hands. Thanks to Folkways you can download or buy their records online at decent prices. Use your favorite search engine and type in Smithsonian Folkways and check them out.

Hector Martignon's "Second Chance": For Some Smart Latin Jazz

Hector Martignon plays some really fine Latin jazz piano, writes very interesting music and arranges it and some choice covers skillfully for a mid-sized group on his new album Second Chance (Zoho 201006).

Martignon's pianism is quite in evidence on this disk. He has both rhythmic drive and harmonic-melodic sophistication. His band here is excellent. Ludwig Afonso stands out as a drummer steeped in the Latin and the jazz side of the equation. Reedman Xavier Perez and trumpet-fluegelist John Walsh add nice solo work. Bassists Armando Gola and Edward Perez both have that post-Jaco line-weaving strength (though there is also some steaming upright on "Alone Together;" I'm not sure who is playing when) that spices the proceedings considerably. And then the guest spot by Edmar Castaneda on harp (for "Coqueteos") can only be classified as brilliant! Traditional South American (Colombian) harp combines in his solo with a jazz context and it's quite impressive. I would love to hear more of him.

But this is Hector Martignon's outing and he shines brightly, while showing us the flexibility of his musical leanings. There is samba and other Latin feels mixed with nicely turned fusion elements and well constructed compositional lines. Listen to their version of Mancini's "Hatari" and Hector's piano solo on it to find a congenial first entrance into this fine set. Mr. Martignon gives us some very good music on Second Chance. It is music to live with, happily.