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- The Retrographer: Issue Seven (July, 2015)
The Retrographer: Issue Seven (July, 2015)
July, 2015
The Retrographer, Issue Seven
I’m sorry for the delay on this issue of the Retrographer. In the last three weeks I’ve attempted to take a vacation, failed to find a new apartment, couch surfed, sort of found a new apartment, and spilled coffee all over myself. Nobody likes excuses, so I’m just glad that I’ve changed shirts and got back on track with my true goal: presenting you with the best in music of the past month (as of two and a half weeks ago).
Bulletins:
Firstly, and distantly most importantly, my friend and bandmate Ian Wayne put out his solo EP “King Wimp” under the moniker Cereal. It’s available virtually everywhere -- I’m talking Spotify, Bandcamp, Tidal, the list goes on. You name it, he streams it. It’s got several of my favorite songs this year, including one that made it very prominently on this playlist.
A dude I don’t know (but wish I did) also just put out his album: Ronnie Stone. I’ve got a whole movie pitch around this guy, but give it a listen first.
Cymbal is doing all kinds of cool stuff! We got Domino Records, Ultra Records, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Small Black, and a whole mess of other exciting people on the app. You should be next! Follow me, I’m @charlie. We also did press in Forbes, Vice, and The Next Web, among others.
My friend Winston wrote a review of Chance the Rapper and Lil B's collaborative freestyle mixtape. He compares Lil B to Keith Jarrett in the first sentence, so you know it's a good one.
I saw Taylor Swift at the MetLife Stadium and it was insane.
Titus Andronicus, “Dimed Out” (Spotify / YouTube) - On his first three albums, Patrick Stickles did the impossible: he took a genre that butters its bread in 90 second increments and deployed it in 9 minutes operettas. Here he does the impossible again, but backwards, by articulating the thesis of all those protracted battle cries in a third of their usual lengths.
Young Thug, “Pacifier” (Spotify / YouTube) - Like Thugger's Jamie xx collaboration "Good Times", "Pacifier" would stick out like a sore, albeit very sunny, thumb in Barter 6's dank, formless den. But both show the exquisitely indecipherable rapper's surprising proclivity for 60s soul and ska.
EZTV, “Bury Your Heart” (Spotify / YouTube) - A hell of a riff, doubled by an acoustic, then later tripled with some chorused-out guitar, and finally quadrupled with a fingerpicked clean electric. It doesn't sound like much when you first listen, but a closer probe reveals just how much thought went into this breezy summer jam.
Ezra Furman, “Lousy Connection” (Spotify / YouTube) - Reminds me a bit of Matt Duncan’s timeless "Summer Song" in it’s easy soulfulness. It's heavy-handed political lyricism and clunky scenery may labor it a bit, so focus on Furman's carefree verses and thundering choruses.
Anderson East, “Only You” (Spotify / YouTube) - "If there weren’t a Sam, there might not have been a Rod," Rod Stewart once said. Ballsy move, copping parentage to a guy you fully ripped off. Anderson East is, at least, a bit more sly with it.
Lianne La Havas, “What You Don’t Do” (Spotify / YouTube) - She starts by copping the Brothers Johnson's "I'll Be Good To You", and with honey voice tells just how she knows love is real. It's so easy to say "I love you", but so rare to say it without saying anything at all.
Tame Impala, “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” (Spotify / YouTube) - In his work with Aaliyah, Timbaland synthesized an ethereal quasi-orientalism in hip hop that's still emulated today, even among psychedelica's Lenin-Lennon.
Kurt Vile, “Pretty Pimpin” (Spotify / YouTube) - Just like in Kafka's Metamorphasis, Vile’s narrator is startled to find one morning that he doesn't recognize himself. But Vile never makes it clear if he's awake or dreaming, joking or confused, if it's Monday, no Tuesday, no Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...
Cereal, “Small Space” (Spotify / Soundcloud) - Ian's a good-hearted genius who writes about loneliness with equal parts longing and transcendence. He watches time pass without anxiety, less concerned with self-determination than self-discovery. It's a time of decision, but if all else fails there's the drawing board to go back to.
Jason Isbell, “Speed Trap Town” (Spotify / YouTube) - When my father died a little over a year and a half ago, for the first time in my life, I couldn't find a song I felt understood me. At some moments I can still feel the powder from those hospital gloves again, or the impossible weight of fluorescent lights. But no sound, until this familiar opening scene.
Miles Davis’ playing style, particularly from the mid-50s on, was defined by tasteful restraint. Given an obsessively-cultivated virtuosity and a milieu of world-class musicians, it’s easy to imagine how someone else of his position might, perhaps through competitiveness alone, allow explicit intentions and cascades of notes dominate his music. But taste and taste alone kept his musical ideas to concise, quotable, sometimes deeply-abstract phrases, often in contrast to the exquisite logorrhea of his sidemen.
Taste seems often to be the only explanation for Davis’ impossible longevity and relevance in jazz. As with every genre, Jazz's practitioners looked to expand it by toppling its perceived rules. It was born of the American songbook, and as such was a creature first of popular musicals and shows, but over time cross-pollinated with other genres, and rejected it’s own popular conventions by presenting its standards in increasingly distorted or deconstructed terms. It even challenged it’s foundational ideas of listenability to plunge further and further into abstraction.
How does an artist stay relevant when his goal is to challenge the constructs he established himself within? For Davis, the answer was taste again. By the late 60s he was almost two decades into a career as a soloist that had yielded two very different, yet equally era-defining ensembles: the first, his mid-to-late-50s quintet included at various times John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones, Cannonball Adderley, and Paul Chambers, and defined the genre’s cool period. The second, which formed a decade later, featured Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter.
If you don’t listen to jazz, these names mean nothing to you. If you do, you know how astounding it is that Miles Davis was able to form two such groups consecutively. Each of the sidemen in those groups went on to be arguably the most influential musician on their instrument in that movement of the genre, and many came to the group unheralded from elsewhere. He assembled cadres of musicians who pointed towards the genre’s future; His most singular quality was his ability to determine who was on the right track.
Which leads to Filles de Killimanjaro, Davis’ 1968 album that signaled the end of his second great quintet. In his first era, he brought abstraction and style to the popular songs of the day and yesteryear, before establishing the genre as something independently meaningful with his albums Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. His second era deconstructed the formal rules of jazz: Hancock refused to outline chords; Carter’s basslines didn’t walk so much as wander; Shorter babbled endlessly; Williams seemed engaged in an argument with a band that wasn’t in the room. And yet the group was preternaturally attuned to each member’s actions, anticipating the direction of the song without ever letting on how, exactly. Davis’ performances in 1965 at the Plugged Nickel nightclub in Chicago are fast, fractured, and unbridled, dazzling and often hard to follow conventionally, rendering jazz standards like Frank Loesser’s “If I Were a Bell” in starkly minimalist tones. Listening to this period out of context can be disorienting. Taken in context, however, it’s clear how Davis’ music from the mid-1960s and on was proposed to question the genre’s every hard rule.
Filles de Killimanjaro sits at the end of this period, as he moved from abstract minimalism to his famous electric period, and represents the end of his relationship with the American songbook, a symbolic departure from the genre's roots. It’s a complete encapsulation of both the constructs Davis mastered, and a summation of his challenges to them. Take the album’s 16-minute centerpiece, “Mademoiselle Mabry” as microcosm: The song is an expansive cover, arranged by Gil Evans, of almost-collaborator Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” It also bears no resemblance to the original, in progression or arrangement, and refuses to reference it beyond the trio of chromatically ascending chords that formed the intro of Hendrix’s version. It wanders through a beautiful electric piano solo from Chick Corea, with extended sections where Williams’ drumming consists at most of sporadic articulations on the hi-hat, and often of nothing at all. It’s a cover in the sense that it is spiritually derived from the original, and leaves the listener with a hint of that thinking by providing the riff as reference. But it only follows it’s own questioning, and as such exists as a statement of what it isn’t, while manifesting as something whole and different altogether.
But even as it contests the foundational premises of the genre, this album acknowledges their persistence with little winks. Before wandering off into an extended soli, the title track bears some similarity to Miles' acclaimed early work, The Birth of Cool. “Frelon Brun” opens with an angular, brief head, a familiar form, that abruptly exits to tumbling bass and drum phrases that may make you think you lost a headphone channel.
Even as the album signals an end to an improbably illustrious ensemble, it introduces Davis’ next moment of stylistic definition: his electric period, where albums like On the Corner, and Bitches Brew would embrace the vitality of the psychedelic movement. Even the album that directly followed Filles de Killemanjaro, In a Silent Way, represented a drastic innovation in form, divided into two atmospheric, almost-20-minute movements of electric jazz that hadn’t been invented before. A change that guided jazz into a new place of blurred boundaries and possibilities, behind its enduring tastemaker.
Best-of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."