Shop our Big Takeover store for back issues, t-shirts & CDs
Follow The Big Takeover
The jazz bagpiper’s psychedelic 1972 album – reissued this week, and the only one of his five classics on CD – has buckets of gospel organ and backbeats heavy enough for P-Funk. “The Crack” is a groove with eerie synthesizer, over which Harley wails. On a thrilling version of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” that fans of Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “The Old Rugged Cross” will dig, organist Bill Mason gets some spotlight time and Larry Langston drums up a storm. “Hypothesis” speaks in the modal jazz language of John Coltrane. It’s back to heavy funk on “Gods and Goddesses,” with the electric bass of Larry Randolph added. The closing “Etymology,” also with Randolph, is a hard-driving 12/8 prog-rock excursion. Harley’s bagpipes and electric soprano sax are never just novelties; there’s superb musicianship here.
Two of the twelve performances from this December 1993 solo concert have been issued before (though not in the U.S.), but the rest are released for the first time this week. The only feedback here is accidental, but the Dinosaur Jr. songs hold up anyway because they’re well-written (especially “Get Me”), and because as ragged as Mascis’s singing is, it’s full of distinctive character. He also “cooked up” (his words) two excellent covers, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Every Mother’s Son” and Greg Sage’s (Wipers) “On the Run” (“because he’s one of my idols”). His guitar skills? Never in doubt. And even though it’s a new release, it’s mid-priced.
Various Artists – John Peel and Sheila: The Pig’s Big 78s (Trikont)
This new CD of some of the famous BBC DJ’s favorite 78-rpm platters was compiled by him before his death in 2004. The range of styles here is headspinningly broad, from Cantonese music to an English brass band, from an impressionist’s duck, car, dog, airplane, baby, etc. to hot jazz, from early rock ‘n’ roll to comical music, from South African tin whistle music to blues, from a tango to a foxtrot to a yodeling whistler – and more! The age of the tracks runs from 1908 up to 1955. There are a few famous artists – Lightnin’ Hopkins, George Lewis, Earl Bostic, Sonny Terry – but the obscurity of the rest (at least to Americans; Brits might recognize more) is part of the fun. Some of these records are brilliant, some bizarre; as a whole, they make a great memento of the late John Peel. His wife, Sheila, comments on all the records.
In a style full of individualists, Skip James (1902-1969) still stands out. Few if any blues artists in the 1930s placed artistic value so far above entertainment. James lived in and around Bentonia, in the Mississippi hill country, and developed in relative isolation his styles on guitar and piano. The devastated “Devil Got My Woman” was his signature piece; the sardonic “I’m So Glad” is more familiar now because of Cream’s cover. Some of his instrumental breaks are quite imaginative, whether on guitar (as on the dazzling “Special Rider Blues”) or piano (the frenetic “22-20 Blues”). James made a comeback, after years away from music, in 1964, but his playing is far more brilliant and his singing more haunting on these scratchy 1931 records than after he’d relearned his material. These 18 tracks can be life-altering listening.
The highlight of this 1976 release, the band’s Warner Bros. Debut, is the live version of “Cosmic Slop,” a classic from the band’s days on the Westbound label, but the mature blend of funk rhythms, goofy vocals, post-Hendrix guitar, Bernie Worrell’s one-of-a-kind keyboard work, and general weirdness was no letdown from indie glory.
Bryars’s successful modus operandus here, as on Point’s earlier release Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (like this, a revision of a ‘70s recording), is to take an emotion-laden situation with a musical basis and stretch that music out over a glacially progressing Minimalist framework. Bryars utilizes the Episcopal hymn the band played as the Titanic sank, taking it through a variety of sonic permutations incorporating survivors’ interviews and nature sounds, but always retaining a watery, noble mood that’s similar to Ambient and quite effective.
Nowadays, this guitarist may be best known by some for having had some of his groove-heavy Blue Note tracks sampled by Us3 and others. This 1964 recording, with Joe Henderson (tenor sax), James Spaulding (alto sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass), and Elvin Jones (drums), while certainly full of grooves and soul, goes deeper than that into progressive bebop, with Henderson’s inventive solos and Jones’s propulsive, ever-varied beats especially noteworthy.
For the full Waits experience, you have to hear him live, playing his lounge-lizard image to the hilt the way he did here in 1975. It was quite a daring move for a third album to tape an in-studio concert of all-new songs. Some of them are excellent (“Better Off Without a Wife” is almost a template for his smart-ass yet touchingly vulnerable ‘70s material), but it’s his between-songs comments and lengthy spoken introductions to some tunes that make this set (originally a two-LP set, now a 74-minute CD) most memorable. His hilarious mix of clever wordplay, hipster slang, and outrageous imagery is classic. The top-notch jazz accompanists include tenor sax legend Pete Christlieb and pianist Mike Melvoin.
Eno’s 1973 debut recording as a leader is the closest he came to making a “normal” pop album — often much more throbbingly loud and insistent than most of his work. Though somewhat uneven, it includes such high points as Robert Fripp’s twisting, screaming guitar solo on “Baby’s on Fire,” the early-Lou Reed-like “Cindy Tells Me,” and the anthemic title track.
Before he became a star with his own Comedy Central show, this L.A. comic worked the standup circuit getting his laughs through a combination of outrageousness and astute pointing out of societal hypocrisy and absurdity. One of his funniest rants on this 2000 album finds him saying that he is not, as a Latino, insulted by the Taco Bell dog: “It doesn’t make Mexicans look stupid, it makes chihuahuas look smart.” He chides Tiger Woods for being offended by Fuzzy Zoeller’s characterization of African-American’s favorite foods, advocates regular oral sex for the President to relieve job stress, and in general complains that “Nobody Can Take a Joke Anymore.”
