Ten Recordings You Should Listen To - #6

Chris Weisman teaches guitar, music theory, improvisation and composition at PMAC. He is the director of the New Horizons Blues Band and also directs the summer Rock Camp. He offers up the following:



1) Caetano Veloso - Joia

1975 minimalist spatial compositions in the stereo field creating a MAXIMUM clarity-of-sense of that field, and tossed off will the ease of evening corn husks, a beach pebble into an expanse of black-invisible sea. Brazilian. Read his book Tropical Truth.

2) Wayne Shorter - Atlantis

Right in the sweet spot of wrong careerwise (1985), the cover features a colored-pencil drawing of him with a tanktop and a mustache. Some songs use computers but the band is so advanced in this same gross direction that you feel its office-white presence throughout. AND as if those facts alone weren't tanlalizing enough, the music is utterly alien and pleasurable and soaring, a soprano lazerbeam riding the crest of a morphing conch shell which itself rides a morphing wave of digital-era bad taste. Conceptually of coarse. One song has singing!

3) Roswell Rudd - Flexible Flyer

Made in Maine I think, 1971. Sheila Jordan singing in weird microtonal Worldesque ways (Eastern? Native American?) and absolutely KILLING. Roswell plays Earth Trombone (weird Tom Waits hasn't co-opted this gut yet) and sings some too and the piano player (just a regular jazz guy) brings the most beautiful tune ever: Waltzing in the Sagebrush.

4) Kurt Rosenwinkel - East Coast Love Affair

A luminous genius with some taste problems. Changing Jazz Guitar is boring but this guy does far more, I believe he plays things no one's heard, more science fiction alien rays I guess, pointing to an enchanted future of sound. Pre-Vervecareer (over now) recording of a set at Smalls in 96 (seems like yesterday!). Possibly the worst upright-bass-through-an-amp sound in history. You can hear Kurt singing (unamplified) and encasing the guitar lines in a pink auracloud, something he later augmented with a lapel mic and way-too-much Line 6 delay.

5) Prince - Parade

The 1986 soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon. This falls right between Around The World In A Day and Sign O' The Times, his other best albums. This music is somehow EVERYTHING but at the same time really specific. Clare Fischer does strings and does a lot with harmonic clashes (against music already dense with more-SIMULTANEOUS-than-contrapuntal ideas) that somehow sound like the warm winds of whereever the movie is shot. More Future Tropical, I guess that's the style I like.

6) Steve Lacy and Don Cherry - Evidence

1962. One of my 2 favorite improvisers (Jarrett's the other), this was the first Lacy album I bought after I heard him in Austin Texas at the Continental Club (Tecate please) a few years before his death and had my life changed. Suberb free architecture (he knows harmony SO MUCH DEEPER than the chord thinkers) all placed perfectly in a field with THE MOST POSSIBLE SENSITIVITY to rhythm on a micro level. Don't understand Cherry yet but I believe in him.

7) Keith Jarrett - Spirits

1985. My favorite album. There were real creeks and bent bird notes and dreamcatchers catching wind of a new direction in South Jersey in the heart of the 80s. Call it New Age if you want, but if Spirits is New Age then I am, my heart is in there. Overdub cassette homerecording of states of consciousness achieved after Jarrett cancelled all his gigs (classical, solo piano improvisations) and Native American spirits passed through his body in his barn studio. Lots of drums, flutes, recorders, singing, a little piano and even a little guitar.

8) Robyn Hitchcock - Eye

Steel string, voice, some overdubs of both plus a little piano, real spare but without the headphone-dimension soundworld of Joia. These are post Syd Barrett songs that are often too wacky for hipsters' taste (I think they like The Soft Boys though). He also overdoes 1966-Dylan vocal mannerisms. It's perfect for me though, the Cureheads (they called themselves "The Minions of Darkness") showed him to me in high school because I was a Syd freak. The cover is mostly green with an eye on it. From the cool year 1990 when my style was already a lot like his and became even more so.

9) Donald Fagen - The Nightfly

I LOVE Steely Dan but this is almost better. There seems to be confusion about whether the album is from 80, 81, or 82 but in my mind it's definitely from 80. It's about the sci-fi future from the perspective of a kid in the 50s (Fagen was). It's a sad and beautiful album that lives in the glossy imageworld of the soundfuture that Fagen helped make real much to many's chagrin but not mine AT ALL (see Atlantis).

10) Kurt Weisman - Spiritual Sci-Fi

The title kinda' says it all doesn't it people? George Lucas coined the phrase the "used future" when working on his movie Star Wars. Tools people haven't even thought of yet look beat-up or already broken and used for parts in Kurt's studio. One of the masterminds behind the loveforce (now defuct materially but not spiritually) Feathers. It'll be out on Important Records sometime soon. I'm on it.