The Retrographer 62 (January, 2 0 2 0)

February 06, 2020

Destroyer, The 1975, Thundercat, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, Jeff Parker, Pinegrove, Ben Seretan, Andy Shauf, Andrew Daly Frank, Westerman, Jess Tambellini, Yusef Lateef

The Retrographer, Issue 62

Bulletins

Ten Songs for January, 2 0 2 0 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Cue Synthesizer”, Destroyer (Spotify / YouTube) – Magnified by its great, bleak music video, with everything shrink-wrapped like the fake drums he cues in the chorus. “The idea of the world is no good,” he sings, but not to call for the real earth either. “The terrain is no good.” 

“Me & You Together Song”, The 1975 (Spotify / YouTube) – Matt Healy likes to play the heartthrob; He likes being an asshole, too. This song sounds like it’s from the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack and has the treacly romance of lyrics like “I’ve been in love with her for ages”, even despite starting with a boorish lyric like “I can’t remember when we met because she didn’t have a top on.” You sign up for both with the 1975.

“Black Qualls”, Thundercat, Steve Arrington, and Steve Lacy (Spotify / YouTube) – Stephen Bruner’s songwriting so often reflects the dark self-abnegation that comes out of staring at your phone for too long: “Just moved out the hood, doesn't mean I'm doing good / Wanna post this on the 'Gram but don't think I should. Is it just me or am I paranoid?”

“Max Brown”, Jeff Parker (Spotify / YouTube) – This isn’t like Parker’s work with Tortoise; It’s dark like Mingus, moody like Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, it stumbles like D’Angelo, it climbs around changes like Thundercat and Kamasi Washington’s arrangements for Kendrick Lamar.

“The Alarmist”, Pinegrove (Spotify / YouTube) – A rung below Evan Stephens Hall’s best songs, and that’s high praise. His publicized, yet confuddling sexual misadventures make it hard to stand behind his work without doubt. Yet it’s easy to imagine this song anticipates the conversation which led to that disclosure: “Do what you feel you gotta do but be good to me.” This sense of purpose and vulnerability is, even in this context, what’s best about his music.

“Power Zone”, Ben Seretan (Spotify / YouTube) – A scratch lap steel player with a full-hearted smile, it’s easy to feel the sunlight shining from Seretan’s music, even when he’s forlorn: “I knew you when my heart was full but now I am alone in the power zone. You will always be hungry for something you can’t hold.”

“Neon Skyline”, Andy Shauf (Spotify / YouTube) – Shauf has a lot going for him: A distinctive voice, an ear for clarinet arrangements, an ease with playful melodies. Yet the most fun thing about his music is his long, character-rich narratives, like 2016’s “To You” and this one here.

“Miracle Ghost”, Andrew Daly Frank (Spotify / YouTube) – Frank’s music always reminds me of a late winter day at an empty beach: grey, tan, green; open, billowy, evocative. Yet each element here hints at a refraction to the broader rainbow: At 1:15, the lonely duo of guitar and synth sizzles into more sounds; The babbling jazz licks bubble through the outro. Color everywhere.

“Blue Comanche”, Westerman (Spotify / YouTube) – Ever since his breakthrough single “Confirmation”, it has been clear that Will Westerman is, at his core, otherworldly. His opening lyrics – ”I'm nearly there, cyborg / Ready to take your course” are distant, yet beautifully opalescent.

“Crowtail”, Jess Tambellini (Spotify) – For Steed and More is just 19 minutes, but you’ll find yourself unable to take any other information in while you’re listening to it. That 19 minutes is a little planet, and this – the last track – contains its stunning, unexpected twist. 

One Album for January, 2 0 2 0  

Yusef Lateef, “Eastern Sounds” (Moodsville, 1961) (Spotify / YouTube) 

In 1920, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq left England for Philadelphia. A Muslim born under British rule in India, Sadiq traveled halfway around the globe to spread Islam and its message of peace and unity. The branch of Ahmadi Muslims he belonged to had virtually no presence in America; When he arrived he was perhaps the first Ahmadiyya missionary in American history. 

Sadiq had a New York headquarters set up by April but relocated to Chicago in October. He saw for himself the country’s infamous racial segregation, which in his observation resulted in keeping Muslims apart based on their skin color. African-Americans, Indians, and Asians each faced variants of discrimination, which, in Sadiq’s view, divided the very community he had come to unify. His mission became clear: Battling American segregation was key to strengthening Ahmadiyya in the United States. Within three years, Sadiq converted hundreds of Americans to Islam under the banner of empowerment, solidarity, and salvation, and left to return to India. 

In the ensuing decades, this religious movement spread across the country, converting thousands from all races. Many African-Americans in particular witnessed Ahmadiyya as an awakening, seeing its message of racial syncretism as not only an antidote to the American system of racial division, but a means by which to reclaim a idea of identity understood to predate the dislocation, extirpation, and westernizing identity erasure of slavery. Sadiq’s goals were aligned powerfully with the emerging civil rights movement; Conversion to Ahmadi Islam became a popular means by which to commit to the goals of the movement as expressed through a religious identity, originating somewhere in the east, a declared precedent to the deracination of slavery.

William Huddleston was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1920. His family moved twice before he was 6, first to Lorain, Ohio, then to Detroit, Michigan, when his father changed his family name to Evans. As a teenager, the newly-dubbed William Evans found a community in Detroit that would become part of the foundation of bop and cool jazz, including the iconic vibraphonist Milt Jackson and foundational bassist Paul Chambers. He was quickly touring with the best bands in jazz, from Roy Eldridge to Dizzy Gillespie.

In the late 1940s Evans’ wife Tahira fell ill and he returned from his touring life to Detroit to care for her. There wasn’t enough jazz work in Detroit to support a family, so he took a job in the Chrysler factory. He kept playing nonetheless and, Evans recounted, one night “in about 1946 while I was working with the Wally Hayes Band in a club on the west side of Chicago...a trumpet player named Talib Dawud sat-in with us.” That night would change his life. “He told me that he was an itinerant musician and that he was practicing Islam as a member of the Ahmadiyya Movement." Soon, he changed his name again, this time to Yusef Lateef.

Already a brilliant musician, the message of Ahmadiyya awoke Lateef to a cultural experience far beyond Detroit – or even America  – that lit his curiosity and creativity on fire. He became a bandleader in 1957 and released eight albums on four labels that year alone. His fifth that year, Prayer to the East, is his first paean: It opens with the sound of a gong and groaning, levantine horns rise up around it, as if charmed like the cobra on its cover. And then, like a wipe in an old film, the clattering drums and rolling piano come in, and his old bandmate Dizzy Gillsepie’s “A Night in Tunisia” emerges.

That glimpse of Tunisian music before “A Night in Tunisia” didn’t exactly make Prayer to the East feel like a mirror of its subject matter, but it spoke to the ideas emerging in Lateef’s imagination: Jazz needed new horizons, that looked beyond its country of origin, beyond the American sound. In 1960, at age 40, he enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music to get his Bachelor’s degree and in the almost decade before he graduated, he studied music and instruments outside jazz. The next year, he returned to the east with new approaches to make perhaps his best album, 1961’s Eastern Sounds.

“The Plum Blossom” opens Eastern Sounds, leading with the light pizzicato of bassist Ernie Farrow’s rubab, an Indian lute. Above it, Lateef’s xun – a five-note Chinese flute originating far from the rubab – emerges. Then Barry Harris’s piano emerges, traveling mysteriously around the song’s simple progression. It is a small, striking way to begin the album, and it poses more questions than it answers. It barely reveals itself, except to summon voices from the Muslim world Mufti Muhammad Sadiq sought to unite.

“The Plum Blossom” gives way to “Blues For The Orient”, a straight blues led by Lateef’s spindly oboe. The pairing is a bit odd, and Lateef’s rather general take on eastern tonality can feel token. Its successor, “Ching Miau”, with its loping, oddly-latin style, is as close as Lateef gets here to his contemporary John Coltrane’s meditative explorations like 1963’s “India”.

Nestled among Lateef’s imaginings of the east are exemplary jazz playing, including original works like “Snafu” and the modal masterwork “Purple Flower”, the standard “Don’t Blame Me”, and two interpretations of film themes, from Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglass’ 1960 Spartacus and Henry Koster and Richard Burton’s 1953 bible tale The Robe. “Love Theme From Spartacus” opens with a floating, melancholy oboe head which opens to Harris’ lovely, harmonic piano. These two interpretations of Hollywood’s concept of Rome are beautiful, if unconventional, escapes on an album otherwise committed to an imagined eastern mythos. But their places on the tracklist are opportunities for Lateef to cast them in instrumentation, modalities, and tonality that put the listener outside of show tunes, the blues, even cool jazz material it’s built on. The idea of the east, and the sounds that drift therefrom, make their way into solos throughout the album. It’s not truly authentic to the music of India, or East Africa, or China – but that’s also not quite the point. Eastern Sounds escapes Detroit without leaving; It unifies without melding.

“Christianity cannot bring real brotherhood to the nations,” Mufti Muhammad Sadiq once proslytized. “Join Islam, the real faith of Universal Brotherhood which at once does away with all distinctions of race, color and creed.” Sadiq’s conception of equality may contradict itself in that very statement, but it reflected his fervent belief that those divisive racial distinctions must be toppled. Racial ecumenism was the path Sadiq followed to spread Islam. This unity – a promise of overcoming the racial inequity tattooed onto the American experience – made Ahmadiyya an early beacon for the Civil Rights movement, a new, yet old identity for marginalized Americans like Yusef Lateef to claim. In his spirituality and his music, Lateef sought to bring this diaspora together as his faith aspired. 

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