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.