The Runners-Up is a monthly column, wherein we will analyze an album that isn’t the consensus first choice or most canonical title by a given artist, but is one worthy of more attention than it’s received to date. The album we’ll look at this month is…
Peter Brötzmann/Han Bennink/Fred Van Hove plus Albert Mangelsdorff
Live in Berlin ’71 (FMP)
by Phil Freeman
When you see the name Peter Brötzmann, you generally see one of two two-word phrases after it: “Chicago Tentet” or “Machine Gun.” The 1968 album of that title isn’t the German saxophonist’s first album—that would be the titanic trio date For Adolphe Sax, from one year earlier—but it’s easily his best-known work, and indeed one of the most namechecked albums in all of jazz and improvised music. A single listen will drive home exactly why it’s discussed in tones of flushed exhilaration.
The front line is Brötzmann on tenor and baritone saxes; Willem Breuker on tenor sax and bass clarinet; and Evan Parker on tenor sax. The “rhythm section” (ha ha) is Fred Van Hove on piano; Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall on basses; and Han Bennink and Sven-Ake Johansson on drums. They clatter and roar, crash and throb, shriek and blare, but there’s a core of unity and discipline at work, too—this isn’t the everybody-play-everything-at-once school of European improv; it’s the ultimate hard blues, a squad of horn players (and a sympathetically destructive double rhythm team behind them) who sound like they’ve just leapt onto the bar not to walk its length riffing, but to have a better angle from which to strafe the helpless patrons. Machine Gun was recorded 45 years ago next month, and/but it still leaves new players coughing and staring at the floor in embarrassment, wondering how they’ll ever top it.
But I’m not here to sing the praises of Machine Gun. There’s been enough hyperbole spilled over it already. I’m here to tell you about a trilogy of albums released three years later that are every bit as brilliant, and possibly even more worth your time: Couscouss de la Mauresque, Elements and The End, collectively reissued as Live in Berlin ’71.
The Runners-Up is a monthly column, wherein we will analyze an album that isn’t the consensus first choice or most canonical title by a given artist, but is one worthy of more attention than it’s received to date. The album we’ll look at this month is…
Isaac Hayes
Truck Turner (Stax)
by Nate Patrin
Here’s a question I used to ask myself every so often: what’s Isaac Hayes‘ third-best album? Even before I started digging into the man’s back catalogue—from 1967′s lounge-jazz jam session debut Presenting Isaac Hayes to the mixed-bag post-Stax disco stuff—the top two slots seemed easy enough to figure out. There was Hot Buttered Soul, the 1969 solo sophomore release on which the songwriter reinvented himself as a reinterpreter of the contemporary American pop songbook through a filter of orchestral psychedelic soul. And then there’s Shaft, the soundtrack that made him the Henry Mancini of blaxploitation and revealed his flair for scene-setting and motif-driven eclecticism. But after doing some digging through his peak early-mid ’70s catalogue several years back, through To Be Continued and Black Moses and Live at the Sahara Tahoe, hearing Hayes’ soundtrack to Truck Turner finally led me to discover what his third-best record was.
By which I mean the Shaft soundtrack. I’m going to lay it on the line here and declare Truck Turner to be Hayes’ second-best album, even if no single track on it is any real competition for “Theme from Shaft” when it comes to defining (almost) everything that made Hayes great in less than five minutes. What Truck Turner does have going for it, though, is the fact that it’s a double LP’s worth of compositions that show off every musical trick and innovation at Hayes’ disposal right before his artistic peak was behind him. You want a ramped-up title theme that says as much about a single man’s badassery in as little time as possible, preferably with the assistance of a chorus of women shouting the dude’s name? You got it. Want some deep-cut slow jam love songs with his voice drizzled over it like some kind of narcotic syrup? There’s plenty of those. Want enough sample fodder to choke an MPC? Get yourself a copy.
While Hayes’ versatility shines through in all his best albums, there’s something about the selections on Truck Turner that seem to push things a bit further—maybe because it’s not just another Isaac Hayes soundtrack, but the Isaac Hayes soundtrack to an Isaac Hayesmovie. As a film, Truck Turner is wildly, knowingly ridiculous: its cast includes Nichelle Nichols (best known as Lt. Uhura from Star Trek) in her only blaxploitation role as a foul-mouthed madam with half of the movie’s best lines, Yaphet Kotto as a far superior bad-guy heavy than his cornball “Mr. Big” role in Live and Let Die, and Hayes as the titular bounty hunter with a klepto shoplifter ladyfriend and a shirt that smells like cat piss. With that kind of mise-en-scene to work with, Hayes went all out and put together seventeen tracks’ worth of material that lent every last ounce of his artistic weight to a movie that, frankly, isn’t especially deserving.
The vocal cuts range from solid enough to fantastic—the latter category belonging primarily to the title theme, which is like “Theme from Shaft” on uppers, all rubber-kneed rhythm and sucker-punch horns. Meanwhile, “You’re in My Arms Again,” “A House Full of Girls,” and “Give it to Me” are Hayes in seductive, sensitive loverman mode, and if you ignore the goofy circumstances of Hayes writing themes for his own love scenes—in other words, scoring himself scoring—they’re every bit as smooth as his best circa-’70 ballads. But most of the record is taken up by instrumentals, and the majority of those lean towards a mixture of fuzzed-out raw funk and airy soul jazz that embodies Hayes’ street-level sophistication. A few cuts—“Driving in the Sun,” “Now We’re One,” “House of Beauty”—emphasize a noticeable jazz influence that add some unpredictable spark and intricate musicianship to what could’ve otherwise been unremarkable downtempo background cues. Others, like “Blue’s Crib,” “Dorinda’s Party,” and the breakbeat favorite “Breakthrough,” lean heavily on fuzzed-out funk and soul that seem tailor-made to soundtrack parties long after the film left theaters.
And two tracks in particular stand out as classics in their own right. “Pursuit of the Pimpmobile” is the longest cut on the album at just over nine minutes, and while its car-chase origins fit the film well, it doubles as a monster of a proto-disco jam, working its way up from a sneaky hi-hat curb-crawl to a frenzied, tense conga-driven groove. On the other side of the LP—and the other side of the spectrum—is another extended workout, “The Insurance Company,” the theme for a trio of assassins sent to terrorize Truck Turner. That song’s an oozing, skulking, suspenseful trudge that rides off flanged piano stabs and reverbed plastic-bottle rattles, then erupts into a horn-driven, icy-fingered slab of psych-soul that sounds like Bernard Herrmann workshopping with the J.B.’s. If there’s anything Hayes did in his musical career that’s more diabolically chilling, I haven’t heard it yet.
Unfortunately, neither the movie nor the album were blockbuster hits—at least not on the level of Shaft. As celluloid immortilization goes, Hayes probably won more admirers as the Duke in Escape from New York or (god help us) Chef on South Park. And this soundtrack is only commercially available as a two-fer that lumps it in with the music from Tough Guys—itself a fine record and the first soundtrack Hayes released in ’74, but not nearly as expansively ambitious as its followup. Hayes wouldn’t record anything else this front-to-back great for the rest of his career, and for the rest of the ’70s it usually took him three or four LPs to even bring up as many ideas as this one soundtrack does in its 72 minutes. But it’s not necessary to think of Truck Turner as the last great album from Isaac Hayes‘ prime—all you need to do is hear it as a good personification of what his prime actually meant.
The Runners-Up is a new monthly column, wherein we will analyze an album that isn’t the consensus first choice or most canonical title by a given artist, but is one worthy of more attention than it’s received to date. The first album we’ll look at is…
Laurie Anderson
Mister Heartbreak (Warner Bros.)
by Leonard Pierce
When Laurie Anderson distilled elements of her ambitious, impressive performance piece United States into a single album and convinced bewildered Warner execs to release it as Big Science in 1982, it caught the critical establishment entirely by surprise. Here was a record by a quirky, unique, clever and intelligent female voice that grafted the bourgeoning electronic pop format with arty psychedelic elements to create something like—well, that was the point: there really wasn’t anything like it at the time. It was widely, and rightly, regarded as a minor masterpiece, with the cool, post-modernist ballad “O Superman (For Massanet)” singled out as representative of its unique and strangely appealing tone.
There’s no denying that Big Science was, and is, a terrific album. So why were the critics less than kind to the follow-up, 1984’s Mister Heartbreak? More than a few reasons: there’s the lazy tendency to chalk up any variation or progression to “sophomore slump”; the unlucky fact that in the two years between the albums, synth-driven strangeness had become a bit more commonplace; and the fact that innovation always has more cachet than refinement. Curiously, there’s also a perception that Mister Heartbreak is a more “mainstream” album; while it did do better commercially than Big Science, hitting #60 on the Billboard album charts as opposed to its predecessor’s #124, there’s not a single track on it that could reasonably called, then or now, a traditional pop song or a concession to public taste.
Regardless of the reasons, though, Mister Heartbreak is almost universally held to be a good album, but an inferior effort to the electrifying originality of Big Science. And that’s too bad, because it’s Mister Heartbreak that’s the more listenable, the more accomplished, and the more successful of the two on its own terms. (Neither are the most ambitious; that title belongs to the daunting but masterful United States Live.) While it isn’t as immediately stunning as Big Science, everything that Anderson did well on her first album she did better on her second. Its song structures are more complex and interesting, without losing their pop sensibilities, and by 1984 she’d managed not only to master the Synclavier to the degree that she coaxed sounds out of it that weren’t present in her previous work, but also to add new and fascinating effects to the vocoder and the electric violin—some of which she designed herself—that give the entire proceeding an eerie, otherworldly feel.
Anderson also assembled a crackerjack band to back the pieces she wrote for Mister Heartbreak: Bill Laswell on bass, Adrian Belew and Nile Rodgers on guitar, and the terrific Anton Fier on drums are far and away the best group of musicians she would ever work with, and all are given plenty to do. Anderson’s sense of humor, which so effectively set her apart from so many serious-faced members of the New York arts scene of the day, is in full bloom right off the bat in some of the faux-panicky lyrics of the opening track, “Sharkey’s Day.” And most importantly, the album works, if not as a concept album, at least an album that seems designed to be a thematic whole. Bookended by “Sharkey’s Day” and “Sharkey’s Night,” and carried from strength to strength from the dreamy “Langue d’Amour,” the dense “Gravity’s Angel,” and the languid, gorgeous “Blue Lagoon,” it manages to sustain a consistent and deeply affecting mood and tone from beginning to end.
Some of the criticism of Mister Heartbreak stems from the fact that it seems over-reliant on her arts-scene crowd, as opposed to Big Science, which came off as more of a solo affair. But this only holds up on paper. Peter Gabriel’s presence here isn’t a distraction; his tracks are definitely marked by his presence, but they’re also distinctly Laurie Anderson, and he fits in better than she did in his work. The appearance of William S. Burroughs on “Sharkey’s Night,” likewise, never comes off as stunt-casting, largely because his dry, mordant voice is perfect for her witty lyrics, and the song is too short for him to outstay his welcome. The long tracks use their length to immerse the listener in their mood, while the short ones (“Sharkey’s Night” and “Excellent Birds,” co-written with Gabriel) get their message across without becoming tedious.
Most of all, Mister Heartbreak does something its predecessor never quite pulls off: it adds an element of emotional warmth and closeness while maintaining the arch irony of its postmodern origins. Good as it was, powerful—let’s say beautiful—songs like “Langue d’Amour” and “Blue Lagoon” wouldn’t have fit in on Big Science. Even “Gravity’s Angel”—based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, for goodness’ sake—has an immediacy and closeness (thanks largely to the great band Anderson put together) that separates it from the first album. The album works not because it is more original or more striking than Big Science, but because what that record did, it does just as well or better, while adding qualities that are just as unexpected for the fact that they are so recognizable.
