James “Blood” Ulmer plays the hardy perennial “Sittin’ On Top of the World” with backing from Alison Kraus on violin. Though I’ve never really understood the “harmolodic” music theory espoused by Ulmer and his mentor, Ornette Coleman (as with Buckminster Fuller, Coleman’s ideas become harder to understand the more he explains them), I know I usually like what I hear.
Here is Ulmer’s solo version of “Are You Glad to Be in America,” one of his earliest records:
Here’s a showstopper: “First Blood” with Bernie Worrell on Hammond organ:
Check out the lame audience member with his fingers in his ears.
It’s only to be expected that a blues singer who was born in Maine and records for a Canadian label would stand the music on its head, but that’s what Samuel James does most entertainingly on his two recent discs: Songs Famed for Sorrow and Joy and his new one, For Rosa, Maeve and Noreen. James is a superb fingerstyle guitarist and harp player, but for me the biggest selling point is the antic way he twists and remolds blues forms, acknowledging the past but using it very much to his own purposes.
Here’s James playing “Baby-Doll” from the first record:
James has crafted himself a trickster stage persona — imagine a halfway point between Keb Mo and Flavor Flav — and his songs are usually in storytelling mode. Two recurring characters, Big Black Ben and Sugar Smallhouse, liven things up in the new release. Ben tricks a bunch of Klansmen into shooting each other instead of him, while Smallhouse shows up at his girlfriend’s place on Valentine’s Day with nothing but excuses: I bought you a puppy but it fell down a well, I bought you a rose but I just planted it and it needs time to grow, etc. If you’re tired of overly reverential blues (or punishingly bombastic guitar solos) then Samuel James will be a breath of fresh air.
David Hajdu’s profile of jazz eminence Wynton Marsalis — collected in Hajdu’s new book, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture — has this wonderful description of a you-had-to-be-there moment when Marsalis was playing with saxophonist Charles McPherson at the Village Vanguard:
The fourth song was a solo showcase for the trumpeter . . . a ballad, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You,” unaccompanied. Written by Victor Young, a film-score composer, for a 1930s romance, the piece can bring out the sadness in any scene, and Marsalis appeared deeply attuned to its melancholy. He performed the song in murmurs and sighs, at points nearly talking the words in notes. It was a wrenching act of creative expression. When he reached the climax, Marsalis played the final phrase, the title statement, in declarative tones, allowing each successive note to linger in the air a bit longer: “I don’t stand . . . a ghost . . . of . . . a . . . chance . . .” The room was silent until, at the most dramatic point, someone’s cell phone went off, blaring a rapid sing-song melody in electronic bleeps. People started giggling and picking up their drinks. The moment — the whole performance — unraveled.
Marsalis paused for a beat, motionless, and his eyebrows arched. I scrawled on a sheet of notepaper, MAGIC, RUINED. The cell-phone offender scooted into the hallway as the chatter in the room grew louder. Still frozen at the microphone, Marsalis replayed the silly cell-phone melody note-for-note. Then he repeated it, and began improvising variations on the tune. The audience slowly came back to him. In a few minutes he resolved the improvisation, which had changed keys once or twice and throttled down to a ballad tempo, and ended up exactly where he had left off: “. . . with . . . you . . .” The ovation was tremendous.
I’ll bet it was. “I Don”t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You” was written in 1932, and it’s been irresistible to instrumentalists and vocalists alike. The clip above is from trumpeter Clifford Brown, and here’s Frank Sinatra wringing a few tears from the words:
Like a lot of people, I first heard about the Chapman stick when Tony Levin started waving one around with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson in the Eighties. Last week I bought the December issue of Guitar Player in order to read the tributes to the late Les Paul, and found a profile of Stick creator Emmett Chapman that showed he may yet earn himself a place in the pantheon alongside the great player and inventor.
Does the Log lead inevitably to the Stick? Here’s Bob Culbertson playing “Little Wing” on an acoustic Stick:
How about something bluesy on an electric Stick?
Taking it back to the beginning (for me, anyway) here’s Levin leading his solo band through “Elephant Talk,” which helped launch the reconfigured Eighties edition of King Crimson into the stratosphere.
Adrian Belew sounded a bit like David Byrne when he sang the original version. To my ears, Levin occasionally veers toward Sacha Baron Cohen doing King Julien. But the man does make his fingers sing.
Fats Domino sings the song that gave this feature its name. In his biography Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock’n'Roll, Rick Coleman claims “The Fat Man” predates any claim Elvis Presley may have to performing the first rock’n'roll song. Because so many blues and R&B performers can also lay claim to the title of Original Rock and Roller, I doubt the question will ever be settled. Shucks, my own choice would be Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry.”
Here’s another well-worn number from the Fats files.
No discussion of great guitar solos is complete without “Maggot Brain,” the title track off Funkadelic’s third album, released in 1971. George Clinton is remembered as the mastermind of P-Funk, but those first three Funkadelic records are heavily influenced by guitarist Eddie Hazel, and “Maggot Brain” was the capper to that early burst of creativity. Clinton says the solo — recorded in a single take over a pre-recorded guitar track — was inspired by his instruction to “play like your momma just died.” The lengthy solo became Hazel’s signature piece. When Hazel was jailed in 1974 on drug- and assault-related charges, Clinton replaced him with Michael Hampton, who aced his audition by playing a perfect note-for-note rendition of “Maggot Brain.” When Hazel returned to the fold, he found himself sharing the spotlight with Hampton and guitarist DeWayne “Blackbird” McKnight on the number that had once been his turn in the spotlight.
I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility to suggest that “Watermelon in Easter Hay,” the piercingly lovely guitar showcase that closes Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage, owes something to “Maggot Brain.” Whatever else could be said of Zappa, he knew guitar players, and it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t familiar with Eddie Hazel’s work.
There are plenty of reasons to be sorry you missed this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, but high on the list would be the chance to hear guitarist Leo Nocentelli tear it up with the Meter Men, a power-funk trio that adds up to the Meters minus keyboardist Art Neville. That’s Zigaboo Modeliste on the drums, of course, and Nocentelli looks to be playing the Epiphone edition of the Gibson “Lucille” designed for B.B. King.
Here’s some more Nocentelli fretwork on “Cissy Strut,” one of the best-known Meters tunes:
There are loads of Meters anthologies out there, but for my money this two-disc set is the best.
You want an isolated childhood? Try growing up in Perth in the Nineteen-Fifties, with nothing but the vast Indian Ocean to your west, the dessicated Australian Outback to your east, and not a whole lot else to your north and south. And yet a Muddy Waters album found its way to young Dave Hole’s ears, and after a false start or two Hole developed a powerful, idiosyncratic slide guitar technique.
Though a southpaw, Hole plays right-handed, keeping his fingers on top of the neck for slide passages. Apparently this is partly to compensate for a finger injury. It also reflects a certain scarcity of guitar teachers in Perth during Hole’s youth, which forced him to work a lot of things out on his own. I’d say the effort paid off.
After spending over two decades touring clubs and bars Down Under, Hole sent his self-produced album Short Fuse Blues to Guitar Player magazine, where comparisons with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King helped him land a deal with Alligator Records and a measure of international fame. I’ve never seen him live, but from all reports he’s a monster onstage, so I’ll have to fill in that gap at first opportunity.
Though the great Wattstax show held in Los Angeles in 1972 is often called the “Black Woodstock,” the Harlem Cultural Festival lays claim to the distinction of having actually taken place right around the time of the hippie Woodstock up at Yasgur’s farm. With a lineup that boasted Nina Simone, B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, the Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson, and Sly & The Family Stone (the only performer to bridge the two festivals, as far as I can tell) you’d think there be a hell of a documentary film about this event, and boy would you be wrong. Even though 50 hours of footage were shot, nothing has been released beyond a few scraps, such as this segment from Nina Simone’s blazing performance, which turned up a few years ago as a DVD bonus on The Soul of Nina Simone. Can somebody explain this to me?
Watch guitarist Simon Angell build the beat for a cover of Daft Punk’s “Da Funk.” Angell’s playing is the cornerstone of Patrick Watson and the Wooden Arms, a band whose sound has been likened by Guitar Player magazine to a union of Jeff Buckley, Syd Barrett, Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht (maybe they meant Kurt Weill), and Tom Waits. The Montreal-based group’s latest CD is Wooden Arms.
