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- The Retrographer, Issue 70 (September, 2 0 2 0)
The Retrographer, Issue 70 (September, 2 0 2 0)
Infinite Scale, Kelly Lee Owens, Fleet Foxes, Ian Wayne, Adrianne Lenker, Lake Saint Daniel, Jazmine Sullivan, Mustafa, Neon Brown, Kim Dawson, Mark Clifford, A$AP Ferg, Tyga, TGUT, Herbie Hancock, and more.
The Retrographer, Issue 70
Bulletins
Last month I announced my first single “California Days”, and my album, Sunday, out 11/13/20. Pre-order the vinyl here and read the story of the album here.
Today I’m proud to announce my second single, “Pete Williams”. You can stream it anywhere using this link.
“Pete Williams” is named for my high school guidance counselor, who offered me a steady hand at an uncertain period of self-definition in my life. I worried a lot about what my future after graduation would be like, and he met that angst with calmness and confidence. I’ve often drawn on the impression of sturdiness he left with me in unsure passages along my journey.
I was sitting in my childhood bedroom one day a year and a half after my dad died and found my high school transcript. At the top read my name along with Pete Williams’s. Looking at it, I felt a fissure of emotions:
On one hand, I remembered the solidity and balance that people like Pete Williams and my dad gave me, and wished I could find similar reassurance in my shaken world. I felt lost and longed for someone to help me find my way.
On the other, I thought of the worries and concerns of that past self, who thought a piece of paper defined him, and the very different world that he inhabited then. I felt so changed, so disfigured by my grief, and so far away from that me that it felt like another life lived by another person. I felt trapped in a shattered present, unsure if things were going to be okay, leery of my own attempts at reassurance, and the words I tried to channel from lost guides. So I wrote this song.
I hope you’ll listen to it and if you have ever similarly felt trapped in a wrecked present, reach out and tell me what you’re going through. It’s the one song on my album that doesn’t try to counterbalance the hard feelings of grief I was in, but rather looks right at them and tries to see them for what they are. It’s not a balm; It doesn’t offer relief so much as release, and maybe commiseration. When I wrote it, I didn’t feel that I could fix my pain, but I could validate it. It gave me some respite and, if you’re going through something and don’t know the way out, I hope it does for you too.
“Finding the Perfect Job”, Infinite Scale (Spotify / YouTube) – It both sounds like the loading music for the omniscient program processing the request in its title, and the mechanistic formalism of daily life expressed in songs like “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”.
“Flow”, Kelly Lee Owens (Spotify / YouTube) – Owens has always appealed to an almost primitivist asceticism in her work, her sounds layer in patient development that reveals its full shape only after repetitions leave their impression in towering aggregate.
“Maestranza”, Fleet Foxes (Spotify / YouTube) – Robin Pecknold’s voice is as clarion as it's ever been, and here he sounds the call for a world on fire: “Smoke all around the south hill, these last days con-men controlled my fate. No one is holding the whip, and the oil won't stick – but I will.”
“People”, Ian Wayne (Spotify / YouTube) – “We could be anyone,” Ian observes amid a street-corner dustup with someone with whom, in his words he’s trying to tie a tangle from such different angles. A beautiful way to describe a difference of opinion. Then later, “It could happen to anyone.”
“anything”, Adrianne Lenker (Spotify / YouTube) – Listening to Lenker’s music, it’s easy to feel like quotidien concerns, the things that block you from loving fully or reaching out, can just be wiped away, let go, unburdened. “I don't wanna talk about anything, I wanna kiss, kiss your eyes again.”
“Faking Asleep”, Lake Saint Daniel (Spotify / YouTube) – This sound of history whooshing by before your eyes is a little Pinegrove, a little The 1975, a little Clairo. It’s nostalgia, it's a kind of aching regret, it’s shock: “I always thought I’d do the same when I got older, now I’m older.”
“Lost One”, Jazmine Sullivan (Spotify / YouTube) – Only Ms. Lauryn Hill mustered this kind of pain, forgiveness, honesty, intimacy, empathy. Swimming in heartbreak, she makes a simple request, an impossible one: “I know that that's too much to ask, I know I'm a selfish bitch,” she admits. But who can blame her for asking?
“Air Forces”, Mustafa (Spotify / YouTube) – Shout out Brendan. This beautiful, translucent beat, with the heartbreaking visuals in its video, just set up the power of this song. “To what are we evеn destined?” Mustafa asks. “Where we have wives and children, or is that not written for you and I?”
“The Bringer of Light”, Neon Brown (Spotify / YouTube) – Shout out Ponte. Also shout out Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine”, Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness”, Eddie Kendricks’ “Intimate Friends”, and the timeless awe of spacing out.
“Dennis Rodman”, A$AP Ferg and Tyga (Spotify / YouTube) – Shout out TGUT, who produced this clangorous beat and makes an excellent cameo in this bad acid trip of a music video (wait until the end). Incredible to hear Ferg extol the posterior by just shouting, “Potato! Yams!”
One Album for September, 2 0 2 0
Herbie Hancock has always been onto the next thing. He left Grinnell College in Iowa at 20 to play with Donald Byrd and Coleman Hawkins in New York. Three years later, at only 23, he was picked by Miles Davis to form his second great quintet with bassist Ron Carter, a 17-year-old Tony Williams on drums, and Wayne Shorter on saxophone. Each player in that timeless group is remembered as among the best chairs for their instruments, and each introduced a distinctive sound to jazz that hadn’t existed before, from Williams’s thunderous drums to Hancock’s open, urbane chord voicings. Through the 1960s, Hancock would stretch out, both with Miles’s quintet and on his dense, intellectual albums like 1965’s Maiden Voyage and 1968’s Speak Like a Child.
As his career advanced and he approached 30, three things became clear about Hancock. First, he was a prodigious talent, able to take his music out to the furthest challenging reaches of complexity and sophistication. Second, he mirrored his bandleader Miles Davis’s insatiable stylistic curiosity, and his music gravitated closer and closer to pop culture’s interest in electric instruments and funk and away from the knotty tonality of bop he hailed from; And third, he was himself a great pop songwriter. Take Empyrean Isles, Hancock’s brilliant 1964 album featuring the quintet’s rhythm section of Carter and Williams, plus Freddie Hubbard, a pantheon horn player on cornet. Of its four tracks, three are brainy and adroit, featuring a long bowed solo from Carter on “The Egg” and knotty diagrams of horns on “Oliloqui Valley”. The other track, “Cantaloupe Island”, is a simple blues as popular as any other jazz recording ever released, on par with Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” or Miles Davis’s “So What”. It has 40 million plays on Spotify today, double Hancock’s next most popular song. Herbie could hang with the jazz geniuses, he could hang with the pop sensations. He was in, even when he was out.
Davis broke up the second great quintet in 1969 and released his first electric album, the incomparable In A Silent Way with key members of the group, such as Williams and Hancock, as well as the next crop of jazz giants, including Chick Corea, whose group Return to Forever would become best known for Light as a Feather and the song “Spain”, Joe Zawinul, who would introduce the world to Jaco Pastorius with Weather Report and their iconic album Heavy Weather, and guitarist John McLaughlin, whose Mahavishnu Orchestra became one of the 1970s’ most innovative jazz fusion groups. Miles released Bitches Brew the next year, a fiery, chaotic masterpiece that stepped him into a switched-on mode he would evolve but never step out of, at least until his final album Doo-Bop, which opened a door for rap experimentation. Miles saw pop music going electric, and particularly admired James Brown and Sly Stone. But he skipped those groups’ accessible dance music and dropped into an acid-drenched, kaleidoscopic blender, emerging with wild music that changed how people listened. It sold a million copies, but would never compete with Sly for the public’s attention.
In 1969, after In A Silent Way, Herbie came out with his first post-quintet album, Fat Albert Rotunda, a synthesis of skills and trends. It opens with “Wiggle Waggle”, a racing soul workout that actually sounds like something James Brown’s group the J.B.’s might release. In subsequent releases, he kept his electric voice, but took it further out. And then, in 1973, he formed a new band called the Head Hunters and the band made an eponymous record with an A-side etched into jazz and funk history forever thanks to the inching bassline of “The Chameleon” and a rework of a composition from his first album over a decade before, “Watermelon Man”. It’s as funky as any band has ever sounded, the new expression of Hancock’s pop facilities. As he described in the 1997 reissue:
“I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered; a connection to the earth... I was beginning to feel that we (the sextet) were playing this heavy kind of music, and I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter.”
The album was a hit on the strength of its first half’s earthy lightness, which overshadowed the album’s gnarlier second side. Hidden there was the new formulation of Hancock’s unbounded intellect. In the ensuing decades, Hancock would achieve more pop success, reaching deep down into the brainstem with root-working funk jams like “Doin’ It” and “Rockit”, yet never abandon his stretched-out experimentalism even as the mainstream beckoned. In 1974, in the heat of this electric funk reinvention, he released a true curiosity: Thrust, an album of only deep, explorative jams, that happened to also be a huge hit.
The Head Hunters’ lineup solidified by 1974. Along with Hancock, there was the multitalented horn player Bennie Maupin, who alternated between saxophones, flutes, clarinets, and other wind instruments; Paul Jackson, an inimitable electric bassist who formed among funk’s greatest rhythm sections with his friend from Oakland, drummer Mike Clark. With them was Bill Summers, a percussionist and ethnomusicologist who introduced a variety of genres and a partytime layer of shimmy to the groove. The band played tight and straight, with long, bouncing basslines and hi-hat and snare lines that cut through the mix like kitchen knives. Hancock’s playing showed both incredible ability, but also an endless curiosity for sounds: He bounded between oceanic synthesizers, guitarlike clavinets, and soulful electric piano sounds, keeping each section of each song interesting and distinct.
The group operated like an organism: Jackson and Clark had a preexisting relationship and, as all great bass-drum duos do, had a kind of telepathy. “We devised a sort of dot and dash rhythmical system that enabled us to displace any note we wanted, at any time we wanted,” Clark remembered, “so that no one knew where the one was but us.” When they met Herbie, this telepathic communion only expanded to absorb him. “He immediately perceived what Paul and [I] were doing, and took it to another level in the first eight bars,” Clark said. “ We played like this for about twenty minutes. Afterwards, Herbie stood up, put on a long black coat, walked past me and simply said, ‘We’ll be leaving for Chicago on Monday.’ Then he walked out the door, silently, looking like Darth Vader.” (That was years before Star Wars came out – Hancock was typically ahead of the times).
The group toured for three months before recording Thrust, and the sessions were highly anticipated. Head Hunters peaked at #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 en route to becoming the best-selling jazz album in history. There was much speculation about what Herbie might do next, and these sessions got off to an auspicious start: The first track, “Palm Grease” – originally titled “The Spook Who Sat By The Door” for its inclusion in the movie of the same name – invokes more of the funk listeners loved on its predecessor. D’Angelo and ?uestlove once compared the essence of funk to “that old bottle of Crisco sitting on the top of your stove”, and “Palm Grease'' draws the same analogy. It begins with an impossibly groovy drum line from Clark, paying homage to the minimalism and groove of R&B with punchy kick, wavy hi-hats, and a shimmering shaker from Summers. When Herbie comes in, he is laying the clavinet under a wah pedal, making the arrangement sound not unlike James Brown’s “The Payback'' from the year before. But the song’s character becomes undeniably Head Hunters when Jackson’s bassline appears: Loquacious yet hard-hitting, punctuating the rhythm while seeming to sing above it. The band steps through sections like they’re stepping through scenes in a Hollywood studio: A minute and a half into the song everyone drops out for a bells solo that seems to presage Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper” or the Roots’ “Double Trouble”; Hancock twiddles with this ARP synthesizer, looking for different tones to sound like imaginary additional players in an ever-expanding funk rhythm section. The song closes with an enveloping, expanding wash of keyboards that sweep the song, and its patient groove, away in a purple cloud like that which Hancock navigates on the album’s cover.
Thrust’s middle pair of songs take the album’s funk further into outer space. “Actual Proof”, named for, as Clark explained, “the act of chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, that one can transform one’s inner life and the environment will respond in kind”, inspired the band to perfect its performance in just one take. The telepathy is on ridiculous display here: Jackson and Clark never get out of time for a second, even as they dive through new sections, drop beats, and echo one anothers’ lines. Clark’s torrent of ride cymbal and snare reach upward and upward in sync with Jackson’s sprinting bass part. Maupin’s flute is gone for whole stretches of the song, where the core trio lands hit after hit, with Hancock’s electric piano diving up and down scales in dyads and triads. It’s followed by the album’s ballad, “Butterfly”, a plunge of hazy, psychedelic jazz, creeping and smoky under Summers’ conga slides and Hancock’s echoing electric piano. Maupin’s horns buzz like a swarm in the distance. The album’s closing track, “Spank-A-Lee”, is its loosest, most similar to its opener “Palm Grease” and with almost as much slickness.
Thrust fully matched its predecessor Head Hunters’s accolades upon release: It also peaked at 13 on the Hot 100, reaching #2 on the soul charts and #1 in jazz. But without iconic singles like “Chameleon” or “Watermelon Man”, it receded from memory and today collects little of the historical legacy the group’s first album did. Nonetheless, it sat Hancock’s ensemble into its brainiest expression of groove and catchiness, an album you can think about or just feel through its journey. It wouldn’t be the last time Hancock sought to reconcile these sounds – the next year’s Man-Child includes some of his best experiments – but it proved out his aspirations to make listeners move and think at the same time. And then he was onto the next thing.
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#70 September, 2020 | Herbie Hancock, “Thrust”
#69 August, 2020 | Special Issue
#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”
#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”
#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE
#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”
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