Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Medeski Scofield Martin and Wood give me goosebumps

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:00:13 -0700

I've liked Medeski Martin and Wood ever since I first heard them on the Get Shorty soundtrack (one of the grooviest soundtracks to a mainstream movie since the 70s), but I only ever got a couple of their albums. One that I bought was their first album with guitarist John Scofield, issued under Scofield's name alone as A Go Go. That came out in 1998, and MMW dropped off my radar after that. Last week I decided to do some catching up, and got their second collaboration with Scofield, Out Louder from 2006, credited to all four of them this time. I skipped forward to "Miles Behind," which I gathered was a play on Miles Davis's Miles Ahead and may be a tribute of sorts. And it is a tribute: not to the late-50s-era Miles of Miles Ahead, but to my absolute favorite stretch of his career, the wildly creative funk-rock-jazz fusion of the early 70s, Bitches Brew through Get Up With It, so despised by jazz purists but beloved by many who, like me, approach music with rock as their baseline. I first heard Miles's 1975 live album, Agharta, at the Tower Records (remember those?) in Rockville in 1991, and I bought it even though I was broke, because it was exactly the music I needed at the time. "Miles Behind" nails the Electric Miles sound (albeit without a trumpet); it distills that entire oeuvre into less than three minutes, and reliving the rush of my initial Agharta revelation actually gave me goosebumps.

Miles Behind

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Cruisin' with the Big Organ Trio

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 20:39:41 -0700

I thought I was done with the Cruisin' thread, but I just picked up the debut album by LA's slyly-named Big Organ Trio and "Road Rage" cried out for inclusion. Mike Mangan mans the B3 here, getting an almost guitar-like sound on his leads via a wah-wah pedal. The rhythm section of Brent McConnell (drums) and Bernie Bauer (bass) is augmented on this track by Damion Corideo, who provides some Latin percussion. The song is just on the edge of cruising and almost into car-chase territory:

Big Organ Trio - Road Rage

Big Organ Trio

Yes! You know you're doing something right when Keith Emerson keeps coming up on stage to jam with you. What do they sound and look like live? Like this:

Road Rage

There are several live tracks available as free mp3's at the band website (Music page), and an entire show (March 17, 2007 at SOhO, Santa Barbara) posted in the Internet Archive.

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The chase is on!

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:19:23 -0700

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:

06 - Breathless

Atomic Rooster

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.

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