LAST OF THE COUNTRY GENTLEMEN by Josh T Pearson

All of a sudden, a lot of people seem to know about Josh T Pearson.  Those of us lucky enough to discover his now-defunct first band, Lift To Experience, always felt like we were part of something special; some kind of secret society dedicated to the appreciation of biblically-inspired post-rock played by Texans with huge sideburns.  At the moment, however, it's difficult to look through any music publication (of worth), both online and off, without coming upon yet another review heaping praise on this, his debut solo album.  For most people this recording may have come out of nowhere, a breakthrough effort from an enigmatic and laconic singer-songwriter who wouldn't look out of place in a John Ford film, but some of us have been waiting a very long time for this record.  Almost ten years, in fact.  So with all this anticipation surrounding Pearson's first album since the heady days of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, we have to ask whether the old magic is still there.

The easiest (and arguably laziest) approach would be to compare Last of the Country Gentlemen with Pearson's work under the Lift To Experience banner.  Interestingly, such a comparison throws up as many similarities as it does differences.  While the sound of LTE was dominated by waves of delayed electric guitar, the performances on this album consist of no more than Pearson's vocals and delicately picked acoustic guitar, occasionally accompanied by a pared-down string section.  While this understated set-up might sound a long way from the full-on sonic assault of Pearson's early work, it is no less devestatingly effective.  Given so much room to breathe, his songs reveal themselves as compelling and nakedly emotional miniature symphonies, shot through with the strong country influence which was often masked by the walls of sound on his previous recordings.  Such a minimalist approach also gives centre-stage to Pearson's awesome vocals, a mixture of soaring high notes, quiet crooning and muttered spoken word which has become his trademark.  It's not difficult to see why his voice has earned him comparisons with the late Jeff Buckley in the past, especially when listening to opening track Thou Art Loosed, featuring as it does an ornate vocal line that wouldn't sound out of place in one of Giovanni Palestrina's choral masses. 

Pearson's lyrics for Lift To Experience dealt with subjects as grand as the return of Jesus Christ and the battle of Armageddon, and while the songs on this album have their share of biblical imagery, (especially on the bad-tempered Sweetheart I Ain't Your Christ) they seem to deal with - at first listen - much more mundane tales of relationship woes and existential crises.  But part of the brilliance of Pearson's songwriting lies in the fact that in his hands, the tale of a single argument between two lovers or the slow breakdown of an unhappy marriage takes on the apocalyptic grandeur of an endless war between heaven and hell; the rage and anguish of a thousand angels and demons condensed into a single broken promise or crossed word.   

This is an intensely beautiful album.  In these seven tracks, Pearson has crafted heartrending stories of love and loss, soundtracked by wearily picked guitar arpeggios which wax and wane in the near-silence, fading only to make way for that incredible voice.   The sense of bittersweet yearning in this music is almost overwhelming, and speaks of the regret left behind by years of hot passion and cold fury.  But despite the downbeat subject matter, Last of the Country Gentlemen is not a miserablist work.  It's an album of undeniable warmth, an album which transcends style and genre and connects with the listener at a primal, emotional level.  In short, it's the Josh T Pearson album that we've been waiting for.

BITCHES BREW LIVE by Miles Davis

The title of this album is misleading.  Reading it, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is simply a live recording of Miles and his band performing his seminal 1970 album Bitches Brew in its entirety.  But if you know a little about that album, you'll know that a live version of that material faithful enough to justify this record's title is an unlikely proposition.  Bitches Brew was created by Miles directing his 13-strong band in collective improvisation for hours at a time, in his quest to meld rock, funk and jazz into a revolutionary hybrid of musical forms.  The results were cut and pasted by pioneering producer Teo Macero into several vaguely coherent pieces of music which then became the album.  A brilliant combination of composition, musicianship and studio trickery thus resulted in one of the most important albums of the 20th century, but such unusual origins obviously made this music difficult to recreate in a live setting.

While it's true that these Frankenstein tracks would become the basis for many of Miles' live sets during the 1969-71 early electric period, that's all they ever were.  Despite Miles' love of the groove and rhythm venerated by funk, he remained a jazz musician at heart, and jazz for him was all about improvisation.  It's not surprising, then, that the recorded music from Bictches Brew serves purely as a point of departure for the fresh improvisations captured on Bitches Brew Live.  The first 3 tracks on this release come from a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1969, which actually took place a month prior to the recording sessions for Bitches Brew.  Despite these tracks being named after pieces from the studio album (and in the case of track 3, one from the previous album - In A Silent Way), one can hear only snatches of the music which would crystalise during the recording and editing sessions in August of that year.  In fairness, Wayne Shorter's Sanctuary is recognisable in all of its varied permutations, thanks to its powerful, dominating horn theme which floats above the rhythmic tumult underpinning the track, but Miles Runs The Voodoo Down and It's About That Time are connected to their recorded namesakes only in the most tenuous of ways.  The band here is only a quartet, which results in what was a remarkably stripped-down sound for Miles at the time.  There's a lot of reliance on Chick Corea's electric piano, and since much of the music is still in an embryonic stage this is a nice opportunity to hear the furtive beginnings of what would become a paradigm-shifting transformation.

The remainder of this album, however, is an entirely different proposition.  If the release of Bitches Brew first announced the arrival of a whole new way of making music, then this bold statement was fully cemented by Miles and his band with their legendary performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival.  In front of a crowd of half a million rock and folk fans, they unleased the full power of of the musical monster they'd created in a single, 34 minute improvisation, propelled unrelentingly by the dark grooves concocted by Jack DeJohnette (drums) and Dave Holland (bass).  It's important to stress that this performance was an original, improvised piece of music, long referred to by fans as "Call It Anything", after Miles' response when asked post-gig what the piece should be named.  Indeed, it appears on its previous (and only) official release as Call It Anything; the bonus track on a 3-disc compilation of Miles' 80s live recordings.  What I find perplexing, therefore, is Columbia's decision to finally give it a proper release only to split it into 6 tracks, and market it under the name Bitches Brew Live.  This peformance has passed into the folklore of both rock and jazz, and it's not like it wouldn't have sold under its own name, so an attempt to cash in on the title of Bitches Brew seems pointless.  It's also misleading because the music only occasionally references the recorded material with which the sleeve notes have identified it, thus compromising the performance's independence from the album.

But griping aside, it's great to hear a decent recording of this wonderful piece of music.  A year had passed since the performance captured on the first 3 tracks of this disc, and the funk had well and truly seeped into the band's playing and improvising by this point.  In particular, it's impressive to hear how funky Dave Holland's playing has become as his electric bass punches through the mix and (along with DeJohnette's dextrous drum rolls) weaves a deep groove which dominates the feel of the music.  The collective jamming of keyboards, saxophone, bass, drums and percussion at times sounds in danger of becoming cacophonous, but Miles' trumpet always returns to the fray to guide the rest of the band.  His playing is sensational its own right, but what is truly fascinating is the way in which he uses certain phrases and runs to prod his musicians in the direction he desires, whether it's the gentle, descending notes he uses to reduce a frenetic boil to a bubbling simmer, or the sudden crescendo he hurtles into during the last minutes of the performance to summon up a visceral groove to act as a finale.  The playing from everyone on stage is inspired, as you'd expect from such masters of their craft.  Miles made a habit of surrounding himself with musicians at the top of their game, and the almost telepathic interplay between Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett's warring electronic keyboards, the flexibility of the rhythm section and Gary Bartz' shimmering sax playing are all a testament to that.  The performance is full of great moments, but my own personal favourite comes about 10 minutes in, when Dave Holland (reading Miles's intentions perfectly) takes one of the bass parts from the title track of Bitches Brew and morphs it into the ugliest, sludgiest riff you'll ever hear from a jazz man.  Jack DeJohnette's synchopated snare hits encircle the groove, and the whole band are dragged into an atmospheric vamp that seems almost beyond their control.

By the time the performance had ended, the crowd at Isle of Wight had been won over.  You can hear their elation in the background following the last note, and it's hard not to feel the same.  What is it that makes this performance so exiciting?  The improvised nature of it, that's what!  The band's whole performance is lit up by the nervous energy felt by musicians who, despite their considerable ability, have no idea where the next note is coming from.  The tension at times is almost unbearable and it's thrilling to listen to, but then that's the beauty of improvised music.  It's said that when he was composing, Mozart felt like he could get inside his symphonies and change them from within, as though they were some sort of physical structure.  That's what you can hear Miles Davis doing during the performance from the Isle of Wight; wading into a mass of music and guiding its creation in the moment of its genesis.  This performance is utterly unique, which makes its being labelled as merely a recreation of Bitches Brew all the more confusing.

SWIM by Caribou

Dan Snaith has pulled a fast one on us.  He's convinced the world that with Swim, he's created a dance album, albeit one with some great melodies and moments of genuine emotion.  What he's actually done, of course, is create a dance album that you're not supposed to dance to.

I didn't "get" this album straight away, like a lot of my friends and most of the music press seemed to.  I'd quite enjoyed Andorra, the previous Caribou release.  Parts of it reminded me of early Pink Floyd, which is not a comparison appreciated in some quarters but there you go.  Swim is a big change of direction in some ways, but not so much in others.  The biggest transformation is the inclusion of a pounding electronic beat in almost every track, which is the main reason for the "dance album" tag the record has received.  But the omnipresence of that beat is the very thing that makes you forget it is there.  Behind the wall of (admittedly tasteful) electronics that Snaith has erected around his songs, there is still the recognisable influence of psychadelia, and the backgrounds of shifting melody become all the more apparent through their juxtaposition with the pulse of the synthesisers.

The first couple of times I heard this album, the beat was what dominated my listening experience.  It could be that's because I don't actually listen to an awful lot of beat-heavy music, but whatever the reason it took me a few listens to hear everything that was on the recording.  The flute and horn parts on the tracks Kaili and Hannibal; the reverbed, staccato guitar part on Found Out; the warm woodwinds on Leave House and the ever-present mixture of acoustic and electronic percussion make for a much richer listening experience than I'd originally realised, something that seemingly everyone else had cottoned onto a long time previously.  Most importantly, Snaith's plaintive vocals remain the emotional core of the music, summed up by an extraordinary section on the track Lalibela where he seems to be channelling a form of Gregorian chant backed by electric organ.  Awesome. 

Dance music is a functional artform.  It's meant to make you move your body; it's designed to provoke a physical, kinetic response.  Despite appearances to the contrary, Dan Snaith's main focus is still songwriting.  He has co-opted the techniques of dance music to accomplish his ends, but they're merely more colours on his palette.

DISFARMER by Bill Frisell

Mike Disfarmer was an American photographer known for taking grittily realistic portraits of the residents of rural Arkansas in the early part of the 20th century.  Not exactly a likely subject for an instrumental concept album, you might think (who is?!), but Bill Frisell has never been a musician known for sticking to the standard template.  A friend reportedly came to him with the idea for creating a musical project based around the life of this unsung and slightly bizarre artist, and Frisell leapt at the chance to explore what he saw as a lost piece of arcane Americana.

Bill Frisell is nominally a jazz guitarist, but his recording output over the years has been so stylistically diverse (as Disfarmer aptly demonstrates) that any attempt to pin him down as belonging to one particular genre is doomed to end in failure.  In the same way, Disfarmer is nominally a country album.  The standard instrumentation of steel guitars, mandolin, violin etc is all present and correct, and Frisell's melodies (as evidenced by the reoccurring Disfarmer Theme) certainly conjure up mental images of rustic farmland and lonely nights on the range, but there's a good deal more going on here.  For a start, the music is full of flourishes that could only have come from a composer steeped in the jazz tradition; a slightly odd chord choice here, an hint of swing there.  Also, Frisell's affinity for guitar loops, as well as the repetitive, hypnotic phrases favoured by violinist Jenny Scheinman (especially on the tracks Focus and No One Gets In) are reminiscent of the sort of minimalism usually associated with the likes of Steve Reich and Terry Riley.  The music still wears its country influence on its sleeve, though, when the band embark on some instrumental covers of genre standards like That's Alright, Mama and Hank Williams' I Can't Help It.  The two sides of this album's sound are however married beautifully on the track Little Girl, in which Frisell's delicate electric guitar melody intermingles with Scheinman's violin ostinato and Greg Leisz's ethereal steel guitar playing, creating a heartbreakingly bittersweet tune which is so much greater than the sum of its parts.  

The absence of vocals, as well as the range of moods conjured by the music almost gives Disfarmer the feel of being a soundtrack to a film which doesn't exist.  I guess in some ways that's appropriate, as Frisell intended the album to be something like a soundtrack to Mike Disfarmer's life.  That said, the music never feels like it's missing anything, and though it is by turns both exultant and bleak, it's shot through with a sort of pastoral warmth which is never less than captivating.  Despite all the research that went into this project on the part of Frisell, it's likely that the more traditional parts of the album sound more like how we imagine early 20th century rural American music to have sounded than how it actually did.  But if the object of this recording was to evoke the feeling of a time and place now lost to us, and the life of a strange old man who somehow captured that feeling in his photographs, then maybe it's succeeded.