JAZZ; THE FINAL FRONTIER

Even as swashbuckling a sonic adventurer as Cultureberg will admit under minimal pressure and few drinks that the many facetedjewelthat is jazz music can remain A Challenge. This is part of its attraction. I'm not partial to Jazz that tastes of creme de menthe and buttermilk, or Jazz that smells of pipe tobacco and Werther Originals, the faint wiff of patchouli oil and the tinkle of cymbals and exotic percussion will find favour on the Cultureberg Plinth.  Those Classic Albums of Stature which smell of the sweat of effort and fear, though, are the most welcome of all.

The listener loves The Challenge.  Even a recent benchmark like Kamasi Washington's The Epic, approachable as it is, is clothed in the waxed jacket and walking boots of its triple album format.  With all due respect, people listen Because it is there.  It has weight.

Recently I was leafing through the Jazz shelves of The Wall of Sound in the Disc-o-vault.  I took out Cecil Taylor's Live in Bologna, bought maybe a decade ago and never listened to (not a unique state of affairs, sadly), and took it through to The Jungle Room for a spin.  I have yet to have been in the right frame of mind.  Bulding up to it.  Does this ring any cymbals?

So, the well balanced reader may ask, what is a good entry into this sphere of challenge and trepidation, of stature and hipness?  Cultureberg', when as open as the early morn dew and as green as the grass on which it glistened, discovered Keith Jarrett, and this week read his biography, by former Nucleus fusioneer Ian Carr, published in 1989.  It is a good read and recomended to those somewhat jaded by mid atlantic rockbiogery.  Mr Carr is particularly readable describing the recorded legacy, avoiding both the technical disassemblies of many sleevenotes and the hyperbole of aforementioned hackery.  It will, and did (cliche alert!) send you back to the music.

As a callow youth Little Ant lent me a copy of Jarrett's mid 70's album Arbour Zena, where Jan Gabarek's saxophone burst through the clouds like sun, like rain, and Charlie Haden's bass anchored the orchestra somewhere between the dive and the conservatoire.  Above all this, Jarretts piano strode between the accessible and the sublime, neither elitist nor diluted.  Bought and sold, mate.  I listened to it again a few weeks ago for the first time in maybe three decades and every twist and turn was still locked in the synapses.  It is such a marvelous and Proustian work I resist recomending it lest memory and sentiment are tainting my judgement, thoug really, who gives a flying ostinato as long as it hits the spot?

Mr Carr correctly identifies that Mr Jarrett appeals to both goatee strokers and sun-dried tomato and porcini mushroom spotify users.  He seems to have been both denied a place in The Pantheon and achieved significant market penetration; the Koln Concert, the halfway point between the aforementioned Mr Taylor and Windham Hill, had sold a million and a half copies by the time of the books publication, which is quite some going for a double album of solo piano improvisations.  What he has in common with The Downtown Canon (Thank you, Mr Becker) is a dgree of Challenge residing in the variety, breadth and garrolousness of his work.  There are solo improvisations and solo classical recitals, trios, quartets, original compositions and investigations of the standards, pieces for orchestra, organ and drum duets, niaive flute pieces, some cymbals and some exotic percussion.  He not only covers the waterfront, he pulls on his boots and is off up the mountain, because it is there.

This immense variety and productivity contributes to The Challenge, but is leavened by the aformentioned, somewhat unique, ability to straddle abrasive awkwardness and benign spirituality; particular favourites like Mysteries and Death and the Flower (both on Impulse with his american quarted featuring Paul Motian, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden) are both challenging and inclusive in a way some Jazz just isn't.  (Mr Carr's biography describes Mr Jarrett's parents' separation at aged eleven and his absorption in piano at that point, and one could get all psychodynamic here; rest assured, this won't happen).

I will leave the final word to Mr Jarrett who in the manner of 70's jazzers loves the gnomic non-sequiter.  "I believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realises the impossibility of his task - and then continues to do it."  If you dig that quote, it seems to me you are prepared to take on The Challenge.  If you think the quote is hokey, you are happy to settle for fuctionality.  The Classics of The Downtown Canon have a confrontational edge.  One may opine that Kind of Blue, for all its unimpeachable quality, can also function as vinyl vymura, but one cannot say that for Bitches Brew or A Love Supreme, or anything by Monk, Mingus or Dolphy.  All these giants are taking on The Challenge - you can hear it - and Mr Jarrett is amongst their number.  He says that nearly all his compositions could be called Hymn or Prayer, and cocking an ear to any of his records will make you recognise the accuracy of this comment, so cock an ear to this track, Prayer, from Death and the Flower...

WALTER BECKER - FIRE IN THE HOLE

         


I never heard a Steely Dan song I didn't like.  Even their off-cuts are stellar - Here at the Western World, FM, Dallas, American Lovers (a cover by Thomas Jefferson Kaye).  Young Cultureberg's Mount Rushmore would have featured Walter Becker's  profile, all grizzled beard and stringy hair, alongside those of Mr Dylan, Mr Morrison (the Belfast Cowboy or, as my Dad referred to him, The Singing Dustman)  and of course Mr Fagen.  More than other great songwriting duo Fagen and Becker were joined at the hip, and a very hip hip at that.

 As time past, Mr McCartney and Mr Lennon became very different entities.  Mr Forster and Mr McLennan's individual traits were visible to the cognoscenti long before The Go-Betweens split for the first time.  Fagen and Becker, though, were an intimidating two-headed hipster, party to secret knowledge, inhabiting and observing a nocturnal boho-zone of midnite cruisers and pearls of the quarter.  Even on most of their solo ventures Fagen would produce and play keyboards, Becker produce and play guitar (though neither appeared ontheir last solo ventures Sunken Condos or Circus Money .).  The run of 7 albums from Can't Buy A Thrill to Gaucho maintains a level of quality and consistency to be found in no-one else's catalogue, and though the two "comeback" albums are not quite up there there are moments - let's say West of Hollywood - that are sheer class and breathtaking brio.  And you still could not see the join between Fagen and Becker.

The Dan receded after Gaucho.  Did they split up?  Were they not really a group anyway?  A foggy mist surrounded their doings as if an inevitable by-product of their clever-dickery.  They seemed to spend so long in the studio finessing and equivocating, it seemed impossible to know what was going on, especially in the eighties, before total information overload and the fetish-isation of classic rock.  Mr Fagen broke the silence first with The Nightfly, then Kamakiriad, both in their way statements of retro futurism, imagining a science fiction future set to warped jazz and r and b.  It is often customary for vocalists to be credited with being the voice of their bands, and Fagen's solo albums seemed to inadverdantly claim authorship of the ouevre.  Mr Fagen's singing voice, which has the highest visible co-relation to the word sardonic in all music journalism, is central to The Dan. Indeed, it seemed he and Mr Becker collaborated by hip-osmosis and his vocalising is undoubtedly the perfect channel for their wry and cryptic lyrics.  However, consideration of Mr Becker's two solo albums - even without a spin through his literate and hilarious pieces over many years on the band's internet home page - makes the case that whilst both Mr Fagen and Mr Becker contribute more than 50% each, maybe Mr Becker has been terribly underappreciated.

If pressed Cultureberg would say that the best two Dan solo albums are Mr Fagen's Sunken Condos and Mr Becker's Eleven Tracks of Whack.  The latter shades it for me.  The wispy, cracking voice that Mr Becker unveiled here  is the perfect instrument for these songs of wobbly romanticism and snarky hedonism, as the songs exhibit a more open and (it seems to me -  you can never really know) autobiographical dimension without losing the capacity for trenchant observation.  Take this from opener, Down in the Bottom

Saw your old lady in the park today
The legendary smile is wearing thin
Behind that guessing game you make her play
Now that she knows that she could never win
I guess you're never gonna take her down
Down to the bottom of your little black heart


and this from the even more downbeat, shoulders stooped with resignation, of Junkie Girl.

In the good old bad part of this college town
Men in grey limousines will drive you down
You take their money just like you take mine
Where does it get you on that thin blue line
Now I can hardly hear you anymore
Your eyes are empty and your voice is hollow
I see you waving from a distant shore
And where you're going I don't dare to follow


No foolin'.  And that's just the first two tracks.  Unlike with The Dan, the narrator is more involved  and not the distant observer of, say, Charlie Freak.  Mr Becker also abandoned the machine tooled burnish of The Dan's music and, indeed, of Mr Fagen's albums for a looser, funkier vibe.  You can't hear tape hiss but you can hear the absence of over-polishing.

One can safely surmise that the self explanatory This Moody Bastard is a tacit, however tongue in cheek, recognition of the authors truculence, just as you do not doubt the sincerity of his song about his son Little Kawai, a chip off the old block serenaded in a far better song about fatherhood than, say, Mr Dylan's mawkish Forever Young.  The songs Book of Liars and Hard up Case are bleak and unforgiving and quite likely directed into a mirror.  I know little about Mr Becker's domestic arrangements, though his problems with intoxicants are no secret, but the key point for me is that Mr Becker is writing and singing songs that are honest, direct and enlightening.  They have their own truth and the biographical backdrop is somewhat secondary to this.  The concision, economy and delineation of a demi-monde is all there intact as in The Dan, but Mr Becker adds a doomed directness not previously seen.

Around this time (1993)  The Dan reconvened for live dates - early dates had up to 5 Whack tracks, 7 solo Fagen tracks.  This number reduced quickly and precipitously, replaced by The Dan Canon.  This was what the people wanted no doubt,  though the band stretched out and performed with invention, wit and, as they say, chops.  The tours and shows continued until the man in The Bright Nightshirt  appeared after Mr Becker underwent "a procedure."  Opaque until the end.  Quite right, too.

It was a long wait until Mr Becker's second album in 2008, Circus Money, a beguiling confection which vacillates in Cultureberg's affection.  Apparently Mr Becker had intended to set lyrics to vintage jamaican reggae rhythm tracks, as he is a huge lover of 70s and 80s reggae.  Who knew?  In the end Larry Klein (former Mr Joni Mitchell, producer of Madeline Peyroux and others) was drafted in for an album almost entirely of white reggae played by LA session men, including alumni of The Dan's touring band.  It is to their credit that the album feels natural and the loping and, yes!, skanking  tunes indicates Mr Dylan (on Infidels), Mr Gainsbourg (on Aux Armes et Cetera) and Miss Jones (on most of her stuff)  did not need to have phoned up Sly and Robbie when Mr Becker (on bass) and Keith Carlock (on drums) can essay an authentic jamaican jam of churning bass and echoed rimshots.

Circus Money is more refined than Whack, less gristle, more sparkle.  At times the mix of rhthmic and laconic is unimpeachable.  Take Bob's not Your Uncle Anymore - there aren't many songs that sum up that sobering realisation better, the descending bass shadowing the dawning awareness.  The Cultureberg pick is Downtown Canon, where two hipsters move in together, unpack their totems, try and live for the moment before it all goes wrong in a hurry.  As previously Mr Becker's engagement goes beyond the observational, he knows whereof he speaks, and if he doesn't he convinces the listener he does.

Circus Money isn't as varied or as undisciplined as Whack, and that is a pity, because Mr Becker has a range of voices and is more of a sonic adventurer than The Dan's image as epitome of jazz-impregnated rock would suggest.  Circus Money is a great record at certain times and feels an authentic hybrid.  The Walter Becker of Steely Dan remains an object of admiration and affection, but though he is at least half of that story, if you don't cock an ear to his two solo records you are certainly not getting half the picture.When, in Downtown Canon, he advises " Don't trade today for tomorrow, tomorrow for tomorrow night," he knows that that is only the superficial tip of the ice berg.  There's a name for the winners in the world.  He wants a name when he loses.  In the solo albums he gives a voice to those who lose, often through their own actions and their own fallibities.  He doesn't shrink from the obvious; people will think he's writing about himself..  In doing this he finds his voice, not sardonic, not cynical and worldly wise, but faltering and real, apologetic yet true.