Random Ten: the Infinite Improbability iPod


 


1. Todd Rundgren - Good Vibrations
2. Frank Allison And The Odd Sox - Love Her 'Til You Die
3. Sophie Yates - The Queenes Almain [William Byrd]
4. Chris Squire - Silently Falling
5. Allan Holdsworth - House of Mirrors
6. The Tallis Scholars - Missa in gallicantu: Sanctus
7. Rachel's - Precise Temperature of Darkness
8. Hey Mercedes - Everybody's Working for the Weak
9. David Bowie - Subterraneans
10. Tori Amos - I'm Not In Love

And the knob up to 11: James Young Band - Heart's Not The Same

Hey, a really, really white mix this time. And two tracks from my brother's (so to speak) record label: Frank Allison is this amazingly tuneful guy from Ann Arbor, MI--one of the great obscurities I come by unfairly, but he's got a wild well-tuned falsetto and a crisp, professional band in the Odd Sox--and the James Young Band is, yes, the ultra-OMG legendary lead guitarist of Styx. He's a nice guy, and his work has all this musicianship and integrity, but in all fairness, to get whiter than Styx, you'd have to be David Bowie.

But it's a decent time to say that while the music of African America gave a living beating blood circulating soul to an unformed American culture, the thing that really made it a world-beater was that the European forces embraced it. Given the fact that America still dribbles racism out every one of its orifices, it's easy to focus on the black artists who still get less respect than they should--but if Black American Music had been isolated like its practitioners, it would still be powerful, but would not have conquered from Papua New Guinea to the Orkneys. The harmonic complexity and huge tonal palette of the American orchestra, and the anchoring of the Drum and the slip-sliding beat in the larger european structures, in a master like Ellington sounded a new note never heard in the world before. The European-American audiences and musicians were hungry for the sexual magical treasures of the African, and they changed it when they heard it, danced to it, played it. The wonderful synergy between the Jism and Tin Pan Alley, with it, sweet and clever melodies supported by the elaborate chording pulled loose into the lightning of that interactional improvisation that nobody but nobody had been doing before, was more than the sum of its parts. And I probably couldn't prove it historically, but I think that European Classical music's semi-suicidal leap into the twelve-tone aleatory chaotic abyss, even if its own products remain largely unlistenable, allowed The john Coltranes And the Ornette Colemans, the Albert Aylers and the Archie Shepps to make that similar leap. (Whether or not their stuff was any more listenable than Webern is purely a matter of personal taste: and at least the white guys didn't have extended bass solos.)

And when it came to pop music, the mix was even more reactive. As John Lennon put it, if Rock'n'Roll had another name , it would be Chuck Berry. However, Buddy Holly and Brian Wilson both embraced that Berrymusic with their pure white boys souls, and while they could not play the blues, they internalized it, and you had the long snake moaning about surfboards and motor scooters. Sweet Little Sixteen was magnificent--but Surfin' USA conquered the world.

And the poor American and British white boys couldn't play the blues: they took Albert Collins's and Elmore James's agility and turned it into a nitro-fueled NASCAR competition; and they took it to India and played it on sitar and tabla, and hooked it up to racks of electronics--pushing the Drum to places it maybe didn't belong, but where it hadn't been before. It was sweetened, choired, changed but not diluted: Hermes became Mercury, but still delivered the flowers, and Aphrodite a Venus in blue jeans.

It's that creamy beige rock'n'roll that gave Japanese kids their idoru, that slipped into Bollywood at the expense of a vast sophisticated percussion tradition, that had Greeks and Turks and Slovaks and Magyars sounding like David Bowie imitating Elvis Presley imitating Big Joe Turner imitating Baron Samedi on a work crew.

Willie Dixon would not have anticipated Chris Squire or Yes, and it's a long long way from Charley Patton to the legato SynthAxe runs of Allan Holdsworth, though both pale Brits would far sooner trace back to them than to Gregorian Chants. And despite the seemingly irresistible appeal the entertainment biz has for a white face, anybody who looks back more than six months in music knows where the genealogy goes.

But after all, when it comes to that wonderful monster of American culture, success really does have a thousand fathers.

Posted: Sunday - May 20, 2007 at 01:25 PM        

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