8 posts tagged “breaks”
I was in the ninth grade when I discovered the "imports" section at the local record store (Waxie Maxie's), filled with stuff that looked downright weird. Even better, though, was the discounted imports bin, and one day when I had five dollars to spend I waffled between Chrome's Red Exposure, which looked strange and interesting, and Jack-Knife's I Wish You Would, which had John Wetton, who was a known quantity to me, on bass. I opted for Jack-Knife; years later I got really into Chrome and eventually found another copy of Red Exposure to buy. Would having bought it the first time have changed the trajectory of my musical fandom? Chrome was decidedly different, and I sometimes wished I'd gotten an earlier start in alternative music. But a few tunes on the Jack-Knife album hold up well; on the title track Wetton plays one of his most kinetic basslines, and Curt Cress opens the song with the funkiest drumming you'll ever hear on a rock record. Then there's the fantastic guitar solo by Richard Palmer-James which, when it sounds like it's over, picks up again for another several bars of wah-wah ecstasy:
Jack-Knife was a one-off, Wetton getting some old bandmates together to have some fun between U.K. recording sessions in 1979. As such it's surprisingly good, and groove miners can find a lot of first-rate breaks (some with cowbell!) to sample.
To the elite group of musicians who have mastered the art of retro-disco-cop-show-funk-o-lounge-a-phonics (i.e. Skeewiff and Shawn Lee) add Frenchman Chris Joss, who since 1999 has built up an impressive catalog of recordings in that vein. His latest album, Teraphonic Overdubs, is out now on ESL Music. Now that I can embed a MySpace player I don't have to try to pick out one or two songs to share, I can simply present what he's sharing already. If you listen to just one track, scroll down to "Luna Rides Back" and listen to that one:
Amazon link:
Taking me even further afield from trumpets and dark cabaret is my discovery last weekend of another whole box of CDs (about 200!) that I hadn't unpacked since moving into this house eighteen months ago. And in that box was The Fluid Soundbox by the instrumental band Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited. The lounge music revival of the 90s (see Combustible Edison) brought with it a revival of "spy music," and The Fluid Soundbox is the absolute best example of that subgenre. Ostensibly Swiss (though everything about them seems made up), they are obviously steeped in vintage lounge, surf, spy, and cop show music, to the extent that Soundbox is practically a catalog of those styles. Even their song titles are genius: "Triple Threat," "Formulator," "Robot A Go Go," "Project QX 5;" here is "Dragon City"--
That was from 1998. One of the best spy-music pieces of this new century was composed by Mark Mothersbaugh, of all people, taking a break from scoring nursery-school cartoons to write the original music for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The music accompanying the kidnap-rescue raid on the pirates of Ping Island starts out with the playful motif heard throughout the movie, then adds a brass-and-tympani-heavy orchestra for unbeatable spy-music goodness:
Okay, I kid, Mark Mothersbaugh has done plenty of work outside of his Rugrats meal ticket (including all of Wes Anderson's films up through this one), but with kids of my own guess what music of his I've heard the most of over the last decade?
Just this week some brand-new spy music has dropped into my lap. One of Mrs. Veneer's net pals, Scott Rupp, composes kickin' action themes and has begun uploading them to imeem.com. On "Agent Koto" he combines two of my favorite styles, spy music and breakbeat:
I've been laid low by illness for the last few days, too sick to blog, but I did manage to listen to some music and find a nice trifecta of funky guitar instrumentals from the 70s. The grandaddy of them all is Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio" from 1971. As one of Motown's in-house Funk Brothers band, Coffey, with his wah-wah guitar, was one of the architects of the "psychedelic soul" sound that would later become the de facto soundtrack music for the entire blaxplotation movie genre. (Template: poverty and discrimination force ghetto residents into moral compromises.) In "Scorpio" Coffey's guitar sounds like an electric knife cutting through a steel rod (that's good, BTW), which I assumed to be the work of an effects pedal or three. I was wrong, though, it's simply nine overdubs (thanks to Oliver Wang for doing the research on the occasion of "Scorpio" being NPR's Song of the Day on January 18, 2007). Wang also gives the details on one of the funkiest, most generous (and therefore sampleable) percussion breaks ever, which involved four percussionists. Get down!
"Scorpio" must have spawned a galaxy of imitations (Coffey did some himself, such as "Taurus" and "Son of Scorpio"), since I found two this weekend without even trying. First up is Donald Austin's "Side Saddle" from his sole solo LP, Crazy Legs (1973):
Then there's "Dr. Abraham" by Janne Schaffer of Sweden (and ABBA), from his 1974 album Andra:
Coming soon, some new vinyl rips of 80s obscurities I just received from Platters That Matter Records!
Protest music can come from the unlikeliest places. German DJ and recording artist Malente came up with the supremely catchy "Open Secret" last year, which turns out to be quite a relevant protest song as well. The lyrics are clever, offering ironic support for government's lust for ever-increasing search and surveillance powers (all for our "security," of course) and culminating in the chorus of
All the things I do, the things I say
Are an open secret, that's okay
Tell me how to funk, and I'll obey
'Cause I'm an open secret anyway
That's right, if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to worry about. That's the theory. It's refreshing to find incisive political commentary in a music genre (electronic breaks) littered with lyrics like "Breakbeat suckers, we're the real motherfuckers" (Cirrus) and the like. So "big ups" to Malente, or whatever we're supposed to give people these days to show appreciation. (Kudos? Props? Two snaps up in a circle? High-five? Chest thump? "Yee-ha!"? Any ideas?) (Not that I don't like Cirrus, in spite of the idiotic lyrics. That's guilty pleasure #422 or thereabouts.)
Anyone who's spent any time looking for music that is both fast and funky has found that 1970s car-chase music, with its relentless hi-hats, wah-wah guitars, and frenetic basslines, will score every time. Then you find yourself spending hours looking through the soundtracks section in used record stores, looking for telltale track titles like "The Chase," "The Getaway," "Pursuit of the Pimpmobile," and so forth. But sometimes great car-chase music will just drop into your lap, which brings me to today's offering. As a teenage record fiend I of course spent all my limited cash on records, scouring the Rolling Stone Record Guide to get an idea of what I should be checking out, and then getting as many of my wantlist items as I could afford. I saw Atomic Rooster records a couple times, but I never actually bought one. And that's too bad, because now that I'm catching up with their first four albums (1970-72), I find that the teenage me would have liked them a lot. Founded by Crazy World of Arthur Brown keyboardist Vincent Crane after that band broke up, Atomic Rooster had plenty of heavy rock organ, and lyrics imitative of Arthur Brown's apocalyptic style, like a Pentecostal Deep Purple. The organ is the only continuity from one album to the next, as Crane was the only permanent member of the group, the other band slots changed a lot. The fourth album, Made In England, has a funkier feel to it than the first three, and a fantastic instrumental (after the false-start gospel) which is pure car-chase, "Breathless." There are a couple passages I like to call "Funkular Bells," and watch out for the guitar solo, it comes in loud:
As with Speedometer, it's the excellent drumming that really drives this song along. Drummer Ric Parnell would turn up years later as a drummer for... Spinal Tap! From an Atomic Rooster fan page:
From "Dixie" Howard, August 2000......*Spinal Tap are a fictional band? Comprised of American comedy writers portraying British musicians who made a movie in 1984 about all the pitfalls bands go through. The ironic thing is, just about every incident in the movie actually happened to some of the bands we know and love. Ric Parnell played Ric Shrimpton the drummer (the only real musician in the band) who died only to be replaced by his twin Mick Shrimpton (who died also - combusted on stage). Very funny stuff. In 1992 they reformed and held auditions for the drumming position. 100's applied (including Mick Fleetwood & the guy from Jane's Addiction ,only a send up). But they settled on Ric & Mick's cousin, Parnell again (only to be credited as the unknown drummer courtesy of Ric Shrimpton, courtesy of Mick Shrimpton) and released a new album "Break Like The Wind"....
Vincent Crane would occasionally get together a version of Atomic Rooster for a concert or two throughout the 70s and 80s, but it all came to an end with his suicide in 1989. His widow, Jeannie Crane, maintains atomic-rooster.com in his memory.
The songwriters I like best are not usually the ones who tackle heavy social issues, or reveal deep emotional truths, blah, blah, blah, etc.; rather, they are the ones who can pack a song so full of hooks that every second is bursting with delicious musical flavor. Shawn Lee is one of them, and while he has been making records for ten years or so, I only discovered him six weeks ago, once again thanks to emusic. I've had his album Soul Visa (released in Japan in 2004, elsewhere in 2006) on heavy rotation ever since. "Some People" is a fine example of his style: a nice breakbeat, some "Brother Louie"-style wah-wah guitar and slinky Ernie Isley-like lead, infectious wordless backing vocals (I challenge you not to sing along with the "bop-bop-bop-bop-bah"s), a bit of glockenspiel, and Shawn's mellowly soulful voice all come together in a perfect pop confection. What's the song about? Not much (some people aren't friendly, or something like that), but it doesn't matter with a sound this sweet.
I had a hard time picking a single song to share from this album, so I went with the most hummable. The whole thing is great, and you can sample all the songs on Shawn Lee's own website (in RealAudio) or emusic (in...some other streaming format).
One of my discoveries on emusic since joining last November is Ann Arbor-based "post-Afro-beat" band Nomo. Their latest offering is the Better Than That EP on Dutch label Kindred Spirits; when it showed up on emusic I downloaded it immediately. Then I checked their website, and lo and behold, they're touring! Unfortunately the closest they were coming to Ithaca was Toronto, Boston, NYC, or Pittsburgh. So I decided to drive to Boston, visit my brother and his family, and go to the show with my brother, something we haven't done together since seeing Bootsy and the P-Funk All-Stars at Kilimanjaro in Washington about...16 years ago?! Was it worth a six-hour drive? (And another one back to Ithaca?*) You bet! It was as if all my favorite elements of all musical genres were all rolled up into a single band. Leader Elliot Bergman plays saxophone, synths (one set to electric piano and the other to what I'll call "Funky Worm Moog"), and kalimba (which I haven't seen anyone play since seeing Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson at the old Birchmere in 1991), there's a drummer and a percussionist, a bassist, a guitarist/percussionist, and a four-piece horn section with two trumpets, an alto sax, and a whomping baritone sax. Elliot even had his younger sister along to play some kind of cymbal-stick. The concert was a rollicking good time with plenty of funky beats, fat horn jams, tribal chants, and wild soloing from all the band members. The baritone sax was especially impressive, with lightning-fast runs in the upper register punctuated with huge bass blasts. And the horn players all played conch shells in one song! Wow! I'm going to have to see them on every tour. They played a cover of Sun Ra's "Rocket #9;" as they are not averse to covers, I would love to hear them take on Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein." Here's "Better Than That:"
The opening act, local eleven-piece Afrobeat band The Superpowers, were no slouches, delivering a tight and energetic set which would have been worth the ten-dollar cover charge by itself. And they had something Nomo didn't: two trombonists, who traded licks in a fantastic double solo in one of the songs.
* I didn't actually do all the driving; many thanks to my lovely wife Eva for making the whole thing possible by coming along and helping out with the driving, and to Basil (age 3) for being such a good boy on our trip!
