Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz Percussion Ensemble
Miles Away
Young Jazz Rebels
Slave Riot
Sean Witzke: When you’re talking about 2010 a few years from now, you might say it was the year Kanye was everywhere. Or describe it as James Murphy’s victory lap. Or the year Supergrass broke up. Or the cultural moment when we all took Nicki Minaj seriously, at least until her album came out. Or, I dunno what's actually popular? Taylor Swift? Is Nickelback still a thing? As a whole, the year’s best music, even at its most popular, felt anxious and weird and burnt-out, but in a good way. There is a problem with discussing a year in music, because certain artists are working as a part of a gigantic conversation, either as a part of, or a reaction against, the rest of the music that’s coming out. But there are also the fringe cases - the Scott Walkers and Kevin Shields who obsess and work on one song for 6 years, the basement tape weirdos like Ariel Pink, and people who keep hammering away at a sound regardless of what's happening like Squarepusher has been the past decade.
For me, the most remarkable, jaw-dropping fact about this year was that Madlib dropped 13 albums. It would have been 16, you know, if his studio hadn't caught on fucking fire.
Madlib produced tracks for Erykah Badu and albums for Guilty Simpson and Strong Arm Steady, and planned 12 entries into his Medicine Show series. Nine Medicine Show discs made it out into the world--volumes 1-8, and 10. He made some tracks for Kanye’s album which haven’t seen the light of day yet. And yet, Madlib’s most interesting releases this year weren’t part of the Medicine Show or producing other artists. His best releases were his two entries into his self-created fictional jazz universe. Madlib has a long, storied history--imagine that fabled file cabinet where Salinger kept all the unpublished Glass stories--of pseudonymous session men which make up his band Yesterday’s New Quintet, which then splintered, recorded solo albums, and recombined in new and different ways. In 2010 this idea materialized as The Last Electroacoustic Space Jazz Percussion Ensemble, and “their” album Miles Away; and the Young Jazz Rebels, with Slave Riot. In order to navigate this mess, Tucker and I decided to hash these two albums out.
Tucker Stone: Here’s the thing about Miles Away--it’s a really solid fan album. He makes it easy to follow what he’s paying homage too by providing titles or copying actual music (the Coltrane song has actual Love Supreme riffs), and it’s probably a lot better piece of jazz than Madlib would have created out of whole cloth. But that doesn’t make it a very “jazz” album in the way that I think he wants it to be, because the people he’s paying homage to were deeply involved at that time in following their own muse, in chasing their own sounds as far as they could at the time with the materials (and talent) they had at hand. In the same vein, there’s a bit of fannish insularity to this that can be a bit off-putting, like when he drops Derf Reklaw (a 70’s flute and percussion musician), etc.
Have you heard Yesterdays Universe? Did you know this was part of a fictional jazz world?
Witzke: Yeah - I’m not 100% versed in which character is which (of Yesterday’s New Quintet), I tend to just listen to the things as a whole - the High Jazz album is like Universe where each track is made by a different member of the Quintet.
Stone: I don’t know the story behind this stuff at all. That fictional backgrounding does put a different spin on the music, but I’m not sure whether it’s negative or positive, honestly. This is good fusion, but it’s also kind of generic? That’s hard to explain or put an example too, i’m not sure I want to go too far into criticizing it on that basis. It just has a strong tendency towards soft takes on Herbie Hancock, it’s very sleepy music.
What’s that thing about Nazis in fiction? Where you can’t use Nazis as a salt, because they become the whole soup? That’s Hancock for me. As soon as he gets in there it takes over.
Witzke: He is all over it - and it’s 70's Hancock too, and Madlib doesn’t shy away from it - I think of the 4 jazz albums Madlib put out in 2010, Hancock is all over them. Even on the mixtape he has this lecture of Herbie saying that he doesn’t need to be stoned to play jazz, corny 90s sample style.
Stone: Hancock is a great, important musician, but when Miles Away reaches conclusion--and I hate saying this--Madlib starts messing around with Love Supreme, and it kind of points to how much more interesting this whole album could have been, if he’d just made an entire suite of songs where he’s dealing with Love Supreme. I don’t know that you can improve or explore much with Hancock, he always felt to me like he’d reached the extension of what he could do with that sound, and if you wanted to go further with his style--well, you go rap, you go Bootsie Collins, that sort of exploration. But Love Supreme--that kind of tenderness, the politics underneath the whole thing, the attempted sublimation of intellect that resulted in one of the most emotionally intelligent pieces of jazz ever recorded--that’s such a deeper chasm, one that I’d like to see Madlib go much further into. And that track felt like it was the warm up for that album, but here, it’s just an ending.
Witzke: I think he finds the same problem with the track for Roy Ayers too, while he’s not as rich a vein as Coltrane, the Ayers tribute feels like he’s come to Ayers secondhand through sampling rather than an actual love of the original albums. The keys and tones definitely sound like Ayers but they’re not being taken anywhere, even to Madlib’s own style.
Stone: You ever have any dealings with the SYR project “Goodbye 20th Century”? It’s the fourth one, where they cover avant-garde classics.
Witzke: That’s the one with “Pendulum Music” on it?
Stone: Yeah, Steve Reich. That’s the one. That’s what I felt like would’ve been a stronger choice? Maybe I should retract what I said about Madlib not following his own muse the way that his idols did, because he didn’t do a covers album. But maybe he should have? “Goodbye 20th Century” isn’t a great album, it’s too diverse of a beast, the same "huh" thing would’ve showed up here--Derf Reklaw?--but I think he might have been able to eliminate the “Herbie Hancock fan dedicates songs sorta to Coltrane and some lady you’ve never heard of in the voices of a fictional character”.
Okay, that’s too harsh. This does have a great sound to it, and if I’m being upfront, it’s far more interesting than the last 10 new jazz albums I’ve heard. It’s nowhere near the stuff it’s nodding towards, but comparatively speaking, it’s very good.
Witzke: The Dwight Tibble track I think makes up for a lot, I think. On the basis that, whether or not you know the guy or the reference, it’s is a grabbing piece of music.
Stone: Definitely. That’s one of the spacier ones, I could’ve used more of that sound. Maybe it’s because I saw a Ravi Shankhar thing not too long ago, but it seems really odd to use a sitar (which has to be digital) as a backing sound. Either bring that shit or don’t, but don’t throw windchimes in there as well, that crap just brutalizes music.
Witzke: It does have that great pace just short of jumpy that grabs you right in. I get what you’re saying about “Goodbye 20th Century”, but covers records are universally mixed bags - whether or not they’re for the avant garde or classic rock, I don’t know if tribute albums don’t do the same thing.
Stone: I think I should also admit that there’s a place for something like this when it comes alongside so much other solid work. If this was the one album released by an upcoming jazz musician, it wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating to deal with. Context counts for a lot with Madlib, and there’s a larger context to deal with here.
Witzke: You were talking to me before about how digital a lot of this album is, specifically the drums, and how it took a lot of it down a level for you.
Stone: Well--and I don’t know how deep I should get into race, but I think it matters that he's deeply referencing a period in jazz where the racial aspect was so deeply ingrained. These were artists--(not all of them, but Davis and Coltrane and Hancock for sure) that were resolutely black men, they were strong, aggressive, proud and unwilling to bend or take bullshit. It wasn’t just about anger, it was about integrity, how these were guys who stood up in front of crowds--at first black, eventually mixed, and finally rich and white--and fucking blew, while guys like Art Blakely beat the shit out of the drums and taught a generation about hard bop and how to play out, how to form your own groups and earn a living creating art. It meant something that this stuff was coming out of black men, that they lived and breathed in front of the same people who sent them to separate bathrooms. When the human aspect gets taken away, I think there’s a loss there, something that shouldn’t go ignored. Hard bop, free jazz--nobody made this stuff that wasn’t politically alive, politically intelligent. Putting it in bedrooms and on computers bothers me in a way that it absolutely doesn’t in any other kind of music. That’s all personal, I don’t think it would be fair to attack Madlib for it too much--he can’t make this shit on his own, he doesn’t have the time to dedicate fully to it.
Witzke: Well I think it points out a real important factor to Madlib which is that everything he releases feels like he’s bedroom demo-ing it for a larger group. It’s very insular, and part of that is because the guy works on a dozen projects at once, and part of that is because he’s a studio rat who basically just gets high and makes records every single hour of every day, like Pete Rock used to. But you have to account that this is music made by a guy who’d rather play all the instruments under pseudonyms than hire a band.
Stone: Yeah, he’s basically Ryan Adams, but still interesting.
Witzke: Have you heard the Jackson Conti album?
Stone: Not yet. Worth it?
Witzke: Yeah, it’s pretty good because it’s him working with a percussionist. I think he (Conti) might ever pop up on Miles Away or Slave Riot, but how could you tell?
Stone: Exactly! Let’s move over to Young Jazz, I’ve been dealing with it for a while now.
Witzke: Well, of these two albums, I got stuck on Electroacoustic and didn’t pay attention to Slave Riot until recently and I think I messed up. It’s definitely the better record.
Stone: I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s improv or not. “Forces Unseen”--the one with the horns--doesn’t sound like it is, but “On The Run From Mister Charlie” does. This is just nastier music, there’s a lot of unusual sound getting thrown in. It sounds like he’s shaking poker chips in a bag instead of using the drums to accent the bass. Like Matmos, but less effete.
Witzke: I think that it’s just a different set of references, yeah, there’s Miles Davis in there but it’s the On the Corner spazz stuff. The poker chips and the spring noises and old sequencer beds - to me that sounds like Suzuki-era Can and those guy’s solo albums, like “Boat Woman Song” and shit.
Stone: There’s a lot of referencing going on here, that’s for sure. It’ll start off sounding like 70’s Miles, but then it’ll go early Ornette Coleman free jazz, but all of it seems to ignore hard bop until the drums kick in for a second or two. It keeps throwing me off, I don’t expect it to go in a lot of the directions it keeps taking. Here, I think he’s successfully using the technology better than on Miles Away. It makes sense.
Witzke: That does make sense - it’s a more interesting tone to a lot of the songs for me, the vinyl crackle on every song is a little stupid but I think it adds to the headspace of it being a bunch of fragments from 70s records. Like a mixtape of newly created tracks.
Stone: It’s also pointless, since I’m sure anyone who gets into this album is going to buy it, it’s totally geared towards the physical copies of fake retro things audience. The graphic design on the albums alone is so controlled and specific to them, it's a part of the package.
Witzke: All of Stones Throw is like that, though. They’re the guys who put out 10 disc vinyl sets for no reason other than packaging*. *this is totally okay if this involves Ben Marra, though.
Stone: Hell yes it is, I own a Ben Marra illustrated record. He was wearing a fur coat and no shirt when I did so. I’m skipping ahead a bit to Slave Riot Parts 1-3, as well as Parts 4-6. They strike me as being a possible answer to the political problems I have with Miles Away.
Witzke: Really? Because other than the title I don’t know that it’s political at all.
Stone: No, i think you’re on the right track. This is needless. Skipping to part 4....Wait, what the fuck, it’s dub! That’s dub!
Witzke: Yeah, 1-3 is totally him doing “Aumgn” off Tago Mago and 4-6 is totally dub.
Stone: Dude, he totally threw a plastic bag with the recycling in it into a plastic trash can. What’s that got to do with slavery? Is he talking about being a slave to consumerism and the nanny state?
Witzke: I dunno, being Madlib you’ve got to wonder if he just liked the sound of the title.
Stone: It gets really weird in the middle there. Like he’s strangling a computer mouse. I think he’s using a sample of the signal in that Charlie Sheen movie with the aliens whose knees bend backwards.
Witzke: Do you know Zappa’s “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet”? Because it's just guys dicking around with a dozen drum kits and... yeah. It sounds like this.
Stone Zappa’s always been a blind spot. I like my experimentalists to be a bit angrier. It’s a pure, unfounded prejudice.
Witzke: I hear ya, I just know that because Freak Out is one of my Dad’s favorite albums. But it’s definitely in that vein - Zappa, Can, weird ass musique concrete rather than jazz. At least until that ultra-filtered trumpet comes in at literally the last minute of the song.
Stone: The last song--”Black Freedom” is pretty great, actually. It sounds like movie credits and is using the same weird sounds that John Carpenter likes so much. Really obvious digital drumming. Also, he’s laughing at you, which is a genius way to conclude the piece. It’s all a game! We’re having fun!
-Tucker Stone & Sean Witzke, 2010
Good to see Madlib (or some of his five hundred alter egos) on the list.
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | 2010.12.18 at 19:53
You have a pretty cool dad if Freak Out if one of his favorite records. I'll have to hunt down Slave Riot, even though Madlib sometimes strikes me as an artist who makes Prince look like a model of restraint!
Posted by: Marc Burkhardt | 2010.12.19 at 03:57