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- The Retrographer, Issue 55 (July, 2 0 1 9)
The Retrographer, Issue 55 (July, 2 0 1 9)
Haim, Prince, Taylor Swift, Tray Haggerty, Freddie Gibbs, Madlib, Maxo Kream, Angel Olsen, DIIV, (Sandy) Alex G, Blood Orange, Porches, Ian Isiah, John Coltrane
The Retrographer, Issue 55
Bulletins
My friend Emily asked for a playlist good for a cocktail hour on a farm in the Hamptons. Part crunchy, part bougie, part linen pants, part Polo, it got me thinking about our current Grateful Dead revival, the Birkenstocks renaissance, the inescapable tie-dye fad… and how we did all of this 20 years ago, too. What is it about the 70s, the 90s, and the 10s? Ponder along to the music.
To that point: I saw the Rolling Stones last week – a lifetime in the making that has me on a deep YouTube binge.
Please check out my brother PW’s essential Summer 2019 playlist.
I got named to the Recording Academy! Thank you to Matt Lipkins and Adam Hoffman for their nomination. This is insanely cool.
What have you been listening to recently? Hit reply on this email and tell me what you’re on!
“Summer Girl”, HAIM (Spotify / YouTube) – Danielle Haim’s deep, clear voice promises, with the magnanimity of love, that everything will be all right. In fact, she insists on the strength you (or he) so badly need. “Walk beside me / not behind me.”
“Wouldn’t You Love to Love Me?”, Prince (Spotify / YouTube) – A gift to Taja Sevelle in 1987, Prince sounds as much like his DIY neighbors (and admirers) The Replacements as he ever would on this scuzzy demo. The groove seems to never end (never let it).
“The Archer”, Taylor Swift (Spotify / YouTube) – Jack Antonoff is back, committed to veer Swift toward his idea of Born in the USA-era Springsteen. But Taylor is Taylor, and her themes are her themes: Just as she once warned “Love's a fragile little flame, it could burn out” now asks, “Who could ever leave me, darling? But who could stay?”
“All Mirrors”, Angel Olsen (Spotify / YouTube) – After a star turn on Mark Ronson’s Late Night Feelings, Olsen returns dark, glossy, fatalistic, almost Wagnerian in its drama, a fitting tribute to the passing of time. “At least at times it knew me…”
“2 Sides”, Tray Haggerty (Spotify / YouTube) – Just like the cover art, Haggerty somehow evokes both sunlight and nightlife at the same time. Both sides of his personality come out clearly: “No, I don’t gotta choose sides!”
“Cataracts”, Freddie Gibbs, Madlib (Spotify / YouTube) – Madlib is famous for nabbing a perfect sample and then doing almost nothing to it in order to make it a perfect beat. Gibbs’ clarity of vision is similar, coasting and “swinging it like a battle axe.”
“Meet Again”, Maxo Kream (Spotify / YouTube) – A heartbreaking, common story of perseverance. Kream is both talking to his imprisoned friend and to himself. And like his friend, he’s got time: An over-five-minute song in 2019 might as well be a Homeric epic. “I got homies in the grave, I got brothers in the pen, I got some that’s coming home, I got some that’s going in.”
“Berlin”, Blood Orange, Porches, Ian Isiah (Spotify / YouTube) – On the border between Prince and Frank Ocean, and as enigmatic, Dev Hynes weaves, like a specter, between Aaron Maine’s darkness and past collaborator Isiah’s laser-clear falsetto.
“Skin Game”, DIIV (Spotify / YouTube) – Zachary Cole Smith has survived his heroin addiction and seen all its tragedy and poison irony along the way: “Strung out to please the king / In Metropolitan's Sackler wing.”
“Hope”, (Sandy) Alex G (Spotify / YouTube) – Giannascoli sees addiction from the other end in more ways than one: “Yeah, saw some people cryin' that night / Yeah, Fentanyl took a few lives from our life.” This pandemic touches these artists and their audiences alike.
One Album for July, 2 0 1 9
John Coltrane recorded his last album, Interstellar Space, on February 22nd, 1967. He died from liver cancer less than five months later. With his death, biographer Ben Ratliff writes, “the momentum of jazz stalled, and nearly stopped.”
Starting when he first recorded with Miles Davis in 1955, listeners’ ears turned to Coltrane. Even among the famously cutthroat competition of Downbeat-ranked horn players, he stood apart. His solos on Davis’ Kind of Blue bent musical precepts: They were dense and intensely intellectual, yet even casual jazz listeners could sing them back like they were simple pop melodies. The complexity of his playing seemed to describe nature in its fluid mechanics. His career as a bandleader found more ways to remove guardrails other players seemed to abide by without noticing. The title track from 1960’s Giant Steps is a totem of jazz: Its tonality is far outside the strictures of pop, and yet again it is jazz’s version of popular music. 1961’s iconic My Favorite Things performed the same trick in inverse, denuding a long-loved jazz standard by pulling from it an endless strand and unraveling way of hearing that song carefully sown by generations of predecessors.
Coltrane recorded Interstellar Space alone with drummer Rashied Ali. Ali had played with Coltrane consistently at the end of the saxophonist’s life, along with bassist Jimmy Garrison and pianist Alice Coltrane. When he arrived at this session, however, he found himself Coltrane’s only accompanist with five compositions to record. He may not have known it, but this was Coltrane’s last opportunity to remove guardrails.
Interstellar Space begins with a liminally musical sound: the organized disorganization of sleighbells. With sleighbells, even a rhythmic shake of toned individual bells rattle randomly, creating a miniature cacophony of sounds, only grossly controlled by their percussionist. Coltrane rings them for a few seconds, signalling Ali to respond to their disorganization with the snare and tom of the set. Then Coltrane steps in, replacing the sleighbells, his horn another naturalistic puzzle.
“Mars”, “Venus”, and “Jupiter” each begin with this shimmering rattle; Jupiter closes with it, too, segueing into closer “Saturn”’s skittering drum solo introduction. In each, Coltrane’s melody stands alone alongside Ali. With no bass or piano, the listener has no means to harmonically frame Coltrane’s runs. No piano chords frame his notes, no bass notes anchor the chords he orbits. Are they minor, major, or tonal at all? In just under 40 minutes, the ear adjusts: Instead of placing notes for their harmony, they’re heard linearly – how does one note, or a cluster, or a groaning waterfall, commune with its successor? Should they be heard as tones, or sounds, or vocalizations? Where “Mars” begins with a torrent of notes, “Venus” starts with a sweet melody. But each change as it progresses: “Venus” stretches into shouts and pleas. The tone of its introduction soon becomes a memory to be reconciled with its harsher present. This linearity is part of Trane's game: Listeners may recognize “Venus”’ melody from eponymous track of the album’s predecessor, Stellar Regions. The conventional rules and ideas of jazz shed behind him.
John Coltrane practiced meditation and used his saxophone to pursue a radical idea that music could express universal oneness, both abstract and natural. His playing stripped, piece-by-piece, strictures of hearing; musical references; their social context; the racialized legacy of American Songbook that jazz sprung from. With late titles referencing a Sun Ship, Cosmic Music, Stellar Regions, and then, ultimately, Interstellar Space, Coltrane got “far out”; he marked his movement further and further from the pale blue dot of his origin.
Those were Coltrane’s last notes. If the momentum of jazz stopped, perhaps it was because that last guardrail was removed. Rather than slowed, maybe artists were now freed – to orbit any planetary body they chose, or else to float past their pull altogether, deep into the inert beyond.
READ THEM ALL AT TINYLETTERMONTHLY
#55 July, 2019 | John Coltrane, “Interstellar Space”
#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”
#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”
#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE
#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”
ANNUAL