Let My People Go – Gideon

Dear fellow Jewish people, I know you have all, at some time, been harassed by Black Hebrews in a public space, claiming that they, not you, were the true Israelites. There are some problems that can’t be solved by showing your penis and reciting the Shema, or telling them you’re a legacy at Columbia. No one talks about the need for a Peace Process here, but it’s a serious threat to security in several parks and subway stations.

But I have the best group of all. That would be Miami’s now defunct Yahweh ben Yaweh Church of Love, a messianic murder cult that, at least early on, demanded you produce the severed limb of a white person to gain entry into the inner circle. That’s not how I became acquainted with them, though. When I lived in Philly, from around 2000-2004, there was a stretch of post-football Sunday television that was up for paid-advertisement grabs. The Yahweh ben Yahweh group had a long informercial with a lot of bad computer animation, mostly of some Scarab of Ra-like sanctum with flames and serpents. The program had to overcome the fact that the man himself was in jail by that point, but it compensated gamely with a very country, very Jheri-curled clergy-like figure (not a touch of Jew to him) reciting the Lord’s Prayer in heavily-accented Hebrew. That was my voicemail for about a year.

The best part about these dudes, though, was that in their early days, they managed to indoctrinate Carter Cornelius of the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, who renamed himself Gideon (or Prince Gideon) and become the group’s musical director. He was really active in the late-eighties, but the crown jewel of his time with the cult is 1970-something’s four-song Let My People Go.

I don’t think I need to tell you that an gospel-soul EP made in mid-seventies Miami about the struggles of the black man, and how Yahweh ben Yahweh’s teachings would fix everything. These mostly consist of taking pride in being a “Hebrew Israelite,” shitting on pretenders, and some vaguely apocalyptic stuff about Yahweh coming soon, which makes little sense since he’s there already and they’re hanging out by the ocean. There’s scatting, slap-bass, sunny melodies, some cranky synths, and yet in Gideon’s falsetto and some well-time chord changes, real pathos. As the guy who sold it to me said before he played it, “don’t laugh, but seriously, this is a really deep record.” And it is, despite the dual signs of silly and scary that hang over Let My People Go (and constantly jar you while listening).

This is the point where I stop and tell you that I paid a sizable sum for this record, even though my copy has a huge water-stain across the totally awesome cover, and had some noise and blemishes at spots. I simply had to have to it, for just about every reason I take an interest in sound artifacts from the past. I’ve also wondered if, as with Amar’e Stoudemire’s trip to Israel, I occasionally identify glibly with these songs, perverse as it sounds. That is, until the next line, when I’m cast out as a devil.

Then again, I’m fairly certain that it’s the appeal of the prophetic tradition, and Old Testament ass-kickers like “Let My People Go” (the Moses story, not the song or EP in question), that provides my point of interface with the Gideon EP—and the point of contention. A brief history that I made up while trying desperately to get rid of additional surface noise and weird clunks that showed up after I cleaned it with the Nitty Gritty: from the fight to end slavery, right up through the civil rights movement, African-Americans have made use of these Jewish texts more evocatively, and effectively, than — and this is problematic — the culture to whom they rightly belong. Moses, not Jesus, might very well be the central figure in black Christianity for that century-long period, at least insofar as Christianity served as a source of meaning and metaphor in social activism.

That’s not to take anything away from my people, but we also had the Mishnah and Gemara, as well as a key place in pretty much every cutting edge intellectual movement, to take into account. Also, Moses ended slavery, and was reincarnated in MLK, but he didn’t do a damn thing to help mitigate the Holocaust. Or, to put it more delicately, African-Americans were delivered from decades of normalized misery. Jews were blindsided. There’s a difference between saving folks from an unjust status quo, and a storm of slaughter that doesn’t stick around long enough to make sense—and that, one could argue, could never have been normalized, unless the plan was to kill everyone in the world until not even Hitler was left.

But to get back to Gideon, who is suspiciously silent on the subject of the Holocaust: before some academics started advancing arguments about the blackness of Jesus, before Africa, Cradle of Civilization meant that everyone ever was black, there was this simple fact: if you squinted hard enough, Jewish religious texts belonged to blacks as much as they did Jews. Except Jews didn’t mobilize them in the same way, to address major problems in society and take up the prophets’ call to speak out (note: obviously, the very concept of critique is the modern equivalent of this, but whatever); hell, if you look at their respective places in society, blacks were the Jews, Jews just some other white people. Not surprisingly, this coincided with heightened tensions between blacks and Jews in this country.

So hey, why not make the leap and say “they’re missing the big picture with this religion and ignoring the power of their past. How are they, and not us, the heirs to the Biblical Hebrews?”

(Note: It’s telling that “Hebrews” is always used by these sects.)

(Note 2: Again, I am trying to get inside the head of a madman and the people he brainwashed. This is full of holes that open up and say “hey dumbfuck, what about Jews and activism?” or “a changing group identity doesn’t mean your history is up for grabs, and typology is not the same thing as identity”.)

So sorry, Gideon and Yahweh, I think we can both agree on a few things here. I like your music, even if you want to kill me, and we both find ourselves in cultural contexts informed by the same old stories—even if in my case, they are refracted, seen from a distance, and meant to be both translated and challenged. I guess this is where, out of writer-ly obligation, I say that this record is very personal to me—even if the folks who made it would deny me my birthright and wish ill upon me.

Of course, taking things a step further, as I always have to do, my attempts (note that) to clean this one up sucked me into the narrative of the record itself. As if someone had written the whole thing as a sketch for a comedy show with an audience of exactly me, an African American friend of mine was over during the whole ordeal. I sat there cleaning and re-cleaning, rinsing and re-rinsing, the Gideon EP, playing it over and over again to try and convince myself that I’d banished this weird, totally unexpected new distortion. I even got tired of joking that it only made sense that the Yahweh ben Yawhweh cult would find a way to torment me with its record, a record that I had once counted among my most prized possessions. At some point, my friend told me that I was brainwashing him, and he was really starting to hate white people.

That’s when it dawned on me: I was engaged in exactly the same kind of behavior that this cult expected of me. Instead of digging the music and whatever meaning it held for me, I was worrying about (possibly money-related) details. Never mind that, for me, fidelity is inseparable from the meaning of a record. I like hearing this clean, as if it weren’t produced by some shadowy group and hidden in a basement. That it’s got relatively high production values, or at least was done in a fancy recording studio, makes the whole thing seem that much more otherworldly; I want to hear this. That makes it a more haunting artifact, sure, but it also presents it, object-like, as a public statement that can neither suck you in nor bring you down. It’s not complicated; it’s a clusterfuck of the absurd and the explicative. Where it really came from only gets in the way of what’s really behind it.

But that doesn’t mean we should, can, or want to ignore its origins all together. That’s also why the EP is impossibly rare, and the fact that it now sounds like shit left me semi-traumatized and wanting to beat this record-cleaning machine to shreds. So thanks, Yahweh and Nitty Gritty, you are the combination that ruined my Labor Day and killed this blog.

P.S. I have plenty of records I cleaned but didn’t write about yet.

Here’s some video of late-career Prince Gideon:

The Giant Is Awakened – Horace Tapscott Quintet

This blog provide some justification for a silly weekend project. It’s been an airless, weightless space where I can get my writing sharp (or at least lively) again. I’m also realizing that these posts are slowly circling back to a piece I’ve been promising The Awl for weeks. That happened when I noticed that, although this LP now plays like baby blood, I had left some water damage on the label that wouldn’t heal. Expect said post soon.

Today began with Horace Tapscott’s The Giant Is Awakened. Is it possible for a title to be so good that it kills a career? When I first encountered Tapscott in high school, this record’s title, plus the track “The Dark Tree”, had me expecting music beyond anything I’d ever heard before. I used to have this problem a lot, and with criticism, too. I can’t keep track of how many times I read about a record first before hearing it, only to find it totally  wan compared to what I’d imagined.

I guess I was always supposed to write, and not feel, or at least not then. Wait, that says more about criticism at its worst—and most detached, and most solipsistic—than me. Or more about me at age 17 than criticism at its worst. Or maybe criticism preys on those of us already cut off from our feelings.

At some point, this life-within-language crept into my daily life in a very scary way. There was a period of several months where I would look at an object, retrieve a word, and then find myself utterly unable to link the two. This wasn’t some intellectual exercise, it was fucking miserable. Words came out, connected to and defined only by each other; phenomena were distant and unfortunate, things my brain fumbled and struggled with. Words were all I had, but they meant nothing. Don’t worry, it passed, and these signs of early onset schizophrenia were probably depression and anxiety (like Heidegger told it). Ironically, it took me a while to understand post-structuralism when I found out about it the summer before college. Two years, I think.

I had this Tapscott on a twofer CD, along with the John Carter/Bobby Bradford Quartet’s Flight for Four. I knew that Tapscott was important for his work in Watts, and an underground legend. Too bad he could never measure up to his titles, had that goofball Arthur Blythe on board, and just soudned repetitive and blustery to me.

I used to have a problem latching onto what one might call “soul” or passion. I chalk it up to my lack of human emotion; a few years later, this therapist I saw exactly twice who talked a lot about analytic philosophers, told me that I wouldn’t recognize an emotion “if it hit you in the head like a barn door.” I remember trying to think about how barns worked before realizing how rude that was. It is true, though, that I didn’t “get” Albert King at first. I preferred Freddie and B.B. because they were more intricate, more sophisticated. I think I only listened to punk at that age as an exercise in pop song demolition, not any kind of anger or outcry.

If I had read any good writing about Horace Tapscott, I might have realized that this album—while it may prove that no mere jazz group can sound like a Dark Tree or Awakening Giant (that’s what orchestras are for)—has a volume and power to it that are almost unmatched in sixties jazz. For all the screeching and banging at home and abroad, I’ve heard nothing that quite harnesses and channels raw power like The Giant Has Awakened. It’s pretty much the Death Star of late-sixties jazz. How about the pathos and thunder of Coltrane circa Transition, plus Cecil Taylor without the fractal-like digressions, asked to make a free jazz record for the pop market with a nod to Cannonball Adderley?

It isn’t subtle, and Tapscott’s fond of raising crescendos that never come crashing down. Arthur Blythe went on to have a pretty mediocre career, but on this (his recorded debut), he plays his ass off. They aren’t really solos, though, so much as they are skeins of texture. And here’s where it hits me: This is free jazz’s Wall of Sound, with everyone Spector intended that style to stand for. I’m just sorry it took me so long to arrive at that conclusion.

Curtis – Curtis Mayfield

If you don’t own this album, you are a terrible person. Mine is beyond repair and needs to be replaced.

It was never in such great shape to begin with, but since I got in Chicago and it was well-loved, this made it extra-authentic. The same day, I didn’t buy a pair of custom wood and leather faux Indian chairs. Getting them back on the plane might have been a problem, but there are planes they sell if you really want it.

It once played with the kind of noise and slight crackle that reminded me that records are living, breathing things, and should be appreciated as such, and live in history, and come to us from out of its haze, and that for some records, such a contextualization is a moral necessity. Or at least essential to really appreciating, as they say, where the artist’s coming from.

But then, like the small details that make a person unique and charming, these qualities turned sour, demanded more attention, and got in the way of the thing-in-itself. Maybe it’s the fact that some of the wear is mine that’s made me change my mind about it; more like, it’s just gotten too fucking noisy. Authentic, my ass. Curtis is trying to say something. That some dude owned it and loved it to pieces in 1971 could matter a shit to me, if it means dampening the message contained therein. Even if the record belongs way more to Mr. Original Owner than it ever will me—no matter how many copies I go on to own.

Incidentally, if anyone has a spare they want to sell, you know where to find me.

Sweet Surrender – Ollie Nightingale

So many more jazz records to write about, except I’m realizing I don’t like jazz much anymore. I’m listening to Ollie Nightingale’s Sweet Surrender, right now, which hasn’t happened in a while. It’s a collection of singles recorded in the early seventies, after he left Stax’s Ollie and Nightingales in 1970. They kept the name, installed Tommy Tate up front, and recorded a song that was the subject of a Wendell Pierce monologue in Treme. A really sexy one, I may add.

Ollie Nightingale seems like a perfectly nice guy who happens to have been saddled with the wail of a hellhound. The spoken intros and outros on some of these songs make me want to go buy groceries from a local business, but even when Ollie lights into that feel-good ballad “I’m in Love”, the hairs on your neck straighten up and snap off. I don’t know what it all means, seeing as that kind of voice is supposed to reflect an inner life, not impose itself like some kind of deformity. But it’s kind of funny, especially since Sweet Surrender has such rich, luminous backing, and you can tell that it’s not a record made for someone whose destiny is to sound like a translucent, dust-in-the-brain O.V. Wright. At the bottom of Nightingale’s range, you can hear it peeking out, a little growl or hitch that he’s almost trying to keep inside his mouth. I can’t remember the horror movie I’m thinking of, but something about someone with an awful demon killing force inside him that he has to fight to keep in. Is that just a werewolf? What a letdown.

Let me take a second out from this fine aesthetic gag to say that this album is gorgeous, and the disconnect somehow works a lot of time. There are also definitely points where voice, mood, and sonics are talking past each other, but gestalt be damned, they’re all impeccable. Sometimes, Ollie sounds like a jackal shedding his first tear, maybe at his nephew’s first birthday party. There are moments where I think “I can’t believe they let that velociraptor come to the bowling alley, but he’s actually a great time. And then there are cuts like “I’ll Take Care of You” where the band goes minor, the wind blows throw the empty trees, and you get that kind of death-groove that was O.V. Wright’s classic mode, but Geater Davis took to such an extreme that you want to cut yourself. The paradox of Ollie Nightingale is that he does anguish so fucking beautifully, and yet judging from other parts of the record, so indiscriminately.

Considering his stage name, it makes a strange kind of sense. At the end of the Greek myth of Philomela and Procne, someone is turned into a nightingale. But even the earliest sources are muddled: was it Philomela, whose husband Tereus raped her and cut out her tongue, or her sister Procne, for killing Philomela’s son Itys and serving him to his father?

The record plays perfect now and I plan to listen to it all the time.

Singing and Dancing for You – Starfire

I was trying to go in strict chronological order, to perhaps capture the complete, fulfilling narrative of me cleaning off a bunch of record. Then I realized that a large percentage of them were fifties or sixties jazz “pieces” that I only cared about so much myself anymore. So in interest of widening our fanbase, here’s a slightly later entrant. Entrant? Is their participation willing? Or is it like giving a cat a bath?

Starfire’s Singing and Dancing for You is one of the most brilliantly packaged indie soul LPs I’ve ever come across. For one, some of the material is recycled from their earlier, harder-to-find, and probably less “commercial” Get off with Us, so you know they thought it through this time. While Get Off with Us is very much in the “let us take you on a funky, elevated journey through your mind, where we’ll party and love and talk about the ghetto”, Singing and Dancing—while much lower on indie cred, I’m sure—has one side of party jamz, another of celestial prom night ballads. I’m not kidding about that second part: on the jacket, when you see the dudes jumping off a flaccid, benign space starfish into a field of night most cosmic. With their most fun-loving faces on, you can tell they’ve cranked up the marketing machinery. The angular get-ups, so stylish the first time around, now seem proof they are ready to dress the part.

And I’m just fine with this sequencing. It’s like a 45 where one side is a dancer, and flip a ballad (I don’t know much about that, since I avoid 45s for the sake of my own sanity). The LP should be honest and artistically intent, weaving together various strains and styles to achieve a cohesive vision. That’s great. It’s very seventies. But let’s think about reality. You’re a local soul act in the Richmond area. You’ve got one record that shows your cosmic integrity. Why not bring out a second showing how great you are for weddings and bar mitzvahs?

Starfire can give you Kool & the Gang-style funk, albeit with a rougher edge. Too bad I’m not into that. Disco, fine, but I’m so over funk. Maybe it’s because, in all its permutations, its the sub-genre of black pop most easily appropriated and spoofed by white kids. Am I calling the Beastie Boys insincere? No, but they really created a monster. It’s a shame, since—to get back to that album stuff—what Kool & the Gang, or Earth, Wind and Fire, did were about a overall sonic canvass. It’s an improvement over the funk-by-numbers plague that James Brown set off. Still, and maybe this shows I’m a terrible person with no ear for context, I can do without. You heard it here: DOWN WITH FUNK.

That’s why I’m so glad for Side 2 of Singing and Dancing, which can be shlocky at times, but is also both cornier than more famous acts (respect the hustle!) and with the stand-out “Make the Most of It”, far weirder. What interests me most about this side is that, unlike Side A, it’s somehow crammed into a weird historical juncture where many things seem plausible, but none of them quite right. Maybe they’re just trying to copy Earth, Wind & Fire, and coming up short. But EW&F had a vision; Singing and Dancing (note the order) feels like inspired product. They reach back too far and look too far forward; there’s crooning that barely qualifies as hip, and cross-rhythms that set up the synth invasion yet to come. In any case, this side cleaned up brilliantly, and I thank the machine for it.

Leapin’ and Lopin’ – Sonny Clark

I’m supposed to be writing about a Sonny Clark record here, but they all run together for me, and I’m already in bed, so the exact title will have to wait until I do the picture and recognize it from the cover. For some reason, I imagine Clark as one of the nastiest, most shit-out junkies of them all, and for years I assumed James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” was based on him.

The horns are Charlie Rouse (ts) and Tommy Turrentine (tp). Rouse is the Igor of the hard bop era. He could assist—and interpret, in the most literal sense–Monk like no other, but on his own he had little to say. Actually, if you met Igor outside of Frankenstein’s lab, he’d be creepy, not workmanlike, and I’m not quite sure what his job was with the good doctor, or if it was even Frankenstein who employed him, or another mad scientist. Charlie Rouse might actually be the opposite of Igor. He might have gone by “Charles” at some point, for all I know. Regardless, not much without Monk.

Tommy Turrentine is the older brother of tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine. Wayne Shorter was the older brother of Alan Shorter, and Albert Ayler older than Donald Ayler. Same with Branford and Wynton. Randy Brecker preceded Michael Brecker. The pattern says it all: In the post-WW2 era of jazz, the saxophone was king, but you didn’t play alto unless you were content with (or up to, whatever) trying to match Charlie Parker. Then, once Coltrane came along, tenor had to be your horn because the great man himself played it. One was a hot-shit maverick, the other a communal experience.

Presumably, the older sibling gets first pick of instruments. If he goes with the tenor, then the young responds by acting out to get attention and ends up some kind of weirdo. All this relative to what his brother does, of courses, since the last thing he wants to do is live in that shadow. If the trumpet is first off the board, then it shows that the older brother is just a huge dork, who will turn into a technician above all else. By contrast, the younger will end up soulful, human, and far more consequential. He’s been given the chance to seize the mainstream, as art as in life.

This is more pop psychology than criticism, and I would jump off a cliff for Alan Shorter, so suffice it to say that Tommy Turrentine is nothing to write home about. Good thing Sonny Clark, unlike Monk, is a master at writing heads that sound best with totally non-descript horns. If you’re the master of the generic—let’s make sure we’re getting “genre” in here, so it doesn’t sound like I’m dumping on someone the Japanese love so much—does that make you generic? Or did I just answer my own question? I’m guessing this is answered by the difference between movies that employ and then transcend the conventions of a genre, and those that are just fine inhabiting them like they had never known any other skin.

Japanese genre pics always take a step further in both directions, putting an auteur’s touch on what on paper seems like every cliche in the book. But does that explain why they like Sonny Clark so much? What do you think?

Sounds a lot better except for the ballad, which is all scratched up and, perhaps not coincidentally, the only standard. It was the first time things turned out passably, though, so we’ll mark this one a success.

Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2 – Thelonious Monk

If you’re like me, you first owned this stuff on the CD box-set, which had every single take of each song in a row, then the two-record set that didn’t have quite as many alternate takes. I know that nothing is ever the same thing twice in jazz, and with a genius like Monk, it’s worth hearing four versions so you can catch the subtle tweaks he makes. Any moron can listen to two Charlie Parker takes in a row and catch what’s changed. Are you a genius yourself or aren’t you? At my age, these things have already been decided, and I’m fine with the original—even if, despite the title, it isn’t programmed in a way befitting a true genius. I’m talking ’bout him AND you.

Pam Grier’s Jamaican accent disguise in Coffy makes mine sound like Jimmy Cliff. Does Jamaica have a President?

Except for “Monk’s Mood”, all the truly chill-inducing early Monk is on Volume 1. The horns on the Blue Note sessions never did it for me, in large part because no one seems to have any idea what they’re fucking with. The less they do, the better. Most of the horn-happy stuff seems to have ended up on Volume 2. Let’s go back that “genius” thing, shall we? If the horns take something away from Monk’s vision, they presumably make it more accessible, right? So why stick that stuff on Volume 2? Alfred Lion did record Monk when he was considered the most out-there of them all; maybe it wasn’t a gimmick after all, and Lion, figuring this was a vanity project, cut his losses and decided to hit them with the most pure “genius” shit first.

At least the red cover of Volume 2 is a hundred times cooler. The cream/beige looks like it was chosen by shooting pistols at some carpet samples. Though the original 10″ Volume 1 has the best cover of them all.

This one sounds better than before, but it’s big problem was scratches. Monk sounds enough like pops and clunks of damaged vinyl himself, so extra ones just confuse me.

Media Dreams – Sun Ra

Does your copy of Media Dreams look like this? Mine doesn’t It’s got a plain red sleeve, and a plain white label with some dutiful matrix numbering. No hand-drawn cover, but I did buy it online from the people who used to run Plastic Fantastic, and then get most of my money back when it proved to be such a wreck. That was somewhat gratifying.

But enough about me. Lifeforce is almost over, and somehow this one guy escaped an angry vampire mob, closing in on all sides, without even breaking a jog. He only fired one shot. Now he’s in a crowd of them and no one’s much interested in him. Media Dreams was recorded whenever the lots more well-known Disco 3000 was. Its main selling point is the weird instrument Sun Ra plays for most of it; imagine an electric calliope taped to a primitive drum machine with Tinker Toys inside, also featuring one of those oscillating white noise rays that bands today link up fifteen pedals to get. I’m pretty sure it’s on Disco 3000, too, but whatever, I don’t own that. Sun Ra either built it on the spot or is for once genuinely out-weirded by his sonic palette. By the end he’s playing the piano, or at least something so relatively conventional it sounds like a baby grand.

Michael Ray, who I saw play at that bowling alley in New Orleans when I was in tenth grade, is into it, and John Gilmore gamely convinces you that everything Sun Ra does is part of some decades-wide oeuvre in which all things are interconnected and thus deep like infinity. A weaker man might tell you that the instruments steals the show, but I prefer to think of it as Sun Ra making peace with an unfamiliar life form, one that tries to strangle him twice, then eats the Saltines he offers, then radiates orange light and shits sundaes. It still plays terribly, but hey, that’s what you get when a space cult presses its own records and sells them at shows, and then 30 years go by. Sun Ra records have a funny habit of finding their way into weird places around Philly, where who knows what happens to them. As a consolation, it makes sense to have a Sun Ra album that sounds like a 78, since he did believe that ancient Egypt was founded by higher life forms from another planet. See also Alien vs. Predator.

Why We’re All Here

I am known for exactly two things: having once written about music for a living (well, living plus unemployment), and obsessing over the condition of records. That makes it sound so clinical; really I just get all angry and nervous when an LP doesn’t sound as good as I’d like it to, especially when I’ve paid very little for something hard to find. It’s a perfectly normal response.

On Friday, I had one of those nights, and decided to take drastic measures the next day. There’s a funny little man in this city who runs a stereo shop. He will rent you his Nitty Gritty and sell you the necessary fluids for hardly much at all. I decided to take him up on his offer and clean up a few records that caused me great anguish over the years. Now I am watch Lifeforce and doing just fine.

This is a music blog about the records in question. I hope it will give you some laughs and, if you know me in real life, keep you from thinking less of me.