This is one you may not have heard of. Or may have forgotten.
The Golden Palominos were a working outfit from 1981 to 2012, when their last record came out. Their first album was a work of No Wave, a punk jazz fusion thing that highlighted bandleader Anton Fier’s massive drumming, and lots of skronking and wailing by downtown notables like John Zorn, Aarto Lindsey, Fred Frith, and bassist Bill Laswell, who played with the band consistently.
I’m not impugning the first album, but like much of No Wave, the joys are hard earned. Worthwhile? Probably, but it is on their second album that Golden Palominos became music for minds like mine.
This is a great rock record. For one thing it features guest vocals by Michael Stipe, John Lydon, and Jack Bruce. It has a cover of Skip Spence’s Omaha. Richard Thompson plays guitar. Carla Bley plays organ on Buenos Aires. And it introduces us to Syd Straw, who in subsequent permutations became one of the Palominos’s front people.
I only saw them once, on stage at Studio 54, with the great Ordinaires opening for them. But this is a record that is heavy, jazzy, poppy, full of songwriters and singers, with great playing and a killer rhythm section.
Try it out.
This post is about this odd project by Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason, who was looking to do his first solo project in 1979. After kicking some ideas around, undecided which way to go, the great jazz composer Carla Bley sent him a cassette of some “punk songs” she’d written. He decided to record them because he liked them and they were ready to go. He said, ” So I thought it would be much better to do that than to struggle desperately to find things that work together.
The music is not punk rock (not close) and it’s not Pink Floyd (though closer). It is instead an odd melding of jazz and progressive rock that maybe tips its cap to Zappa, a little. But I’m not sure about all that. What I am sure is that they got it right, at least for me. This is a captivating synthesis of art rock and jazz that feels ornate and grand and yet not grandiose or bombastic.
Maybe some of that is the lovely vocals by Robert Wyatt, who was once the vocalist for the Soft Boys.
I’m A Mineralist is a good example of what’s going on here. Lyrical and then funky, by turns, maybe serious but then funny and not self-important. If you like it a little the album is worth checking out.
The most atypical cut on the album is the first, which is the only one Wyatt does not sing on. Curiously, I just discovered that one of the voices on this fun cut is that of my old friend Vincent Chancey, who back then was playing French horn in Sun Ra’s Arkestra. I don’t recognize which one is his.
This massive hit album had a number of big singles, including Funky Stuff and Hollywood Swinging, and an epic jazz jam, Wild and Peaceful, that gave it its name. It also had this song, which should have been corny or terribly MOR but instead, to my ears, is bravely earnest and sweet and delightful. Scientists of sound, indeed.
This is jazz, recorded live in 1960 in Sweden. So What is a classic jazz cut, the first track on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It is the kind of music that even if you think you haven’t heard it, you’ve heard it.
This live performance from Sweden is a classic demonstration of jazz and why. Fantastic performers, all five of them, take the tune and turn it into something huger. Yeah, that’s the best word I can come up with. Huger. A better word than amazing, but that, too.
If you want to check out the original album cut, which is great, too, here it is.
Wikipedia note: The actor Dennis Hopper at some point claimed that the name of the song came from a philosophical conversation Hopper had with Davis, during which Davis would say something and Hopper would say, So what?
I loved much of this music. Virtuosity was important, but so was a big bottom. In my memory this was music that pounded was aggressive, like rock, but also exulted in notes and playing, and felt really good.
Sanneh gets that, which is why I’m here.
One thing I remember was that Scott Muni, the program director of WNEW as well as DJ, would often put on a whole side of Yes or the Moody Blues in order to take meetings while DJing. That usually worked, though WE knew.
There are lots of good suggestions about what you should listen to in Sanneh’s story, so go and listen to them. I’ve had three conversations in recent weeks about the Mahavishnu Orchestra. As Sanneh says, not prog, but passing.
And more than anything, you should listen to Bitches Brew.
The centenary is a big one, and Ella’s is coming up next week. She’s perhaps the greatest of jazz singers, without a doubt in that conversation and most likely on top of the heap, but rooting around in her discography yesterday I came up with a record called Sunshine of Your Love, which was recorded in San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel in 1968.
It isn’t a rock album, but it takes it’s title from Cream’s classic rock song.
I find the cover of Hey Jude, which precedes this on the elpee, to be the worst of rock-jazz fusions, but this is different and pretty hot. Not Cream, but rockin’. I can just imagine the hep cats in their Nehru jackets at the Venetian Room, waving their cigarettes over their Scotch on the rocks as they listen in time.
Oddly, thinking about jazz and rock and what can work across the genres got me thinking about Anything Goes, an old Cole Porter chestnut that happened to be a hit single for a band called Harpers Bazaar in 1967. Ella covered it in 1956, and unlike the willful nostalgia of the insipid Harpers Bazaar version, and other cute stage versions of the tune, her version is absolutely adult and knowing. An acknowledgement of the ways and passions of the grown ups in the room.
This doesn’t make the music rock, the song is an 80-year-old show tune, but it connects the tune to the emotional directness and honesty that grew out of jazz and soul and r&b in the 50s into much of the best rock songwriting of the 60s and 70s. The singer does that, with the help of a crack band.
My friend Vincent posted this on Facebook recently. Vincent is the French horn player in this band. Sun Ra, of course, is one of the greats. And Billy Strayhorn’s tune Take the A Train is one of the greats.
I didn’t mean to dwell on this, but I happened to put the Hot Licks’ great album Striking It Rich—which came as a die cut fold out, that opened like a matchbook—on tonight and was reminded of more great Dan Hicks songs.
Here are two, tracks one and three, that I feel compelled to share. Great songs, clever arrangements, ace (but not showy) solos, all the homely appeal of a ukulele band, with all the jazz chords and standout performances.
This was a big week for deaths. David Bowie, of course, but also baseball great Monte Irvin, terrific actor Alan Rickman, and scroogie throwing Luis Arroyo, whose best season was the year I totally fell in love with baseball. Which is, I think, why I said, oh no, when he showed up in the obits.
Giorgio Gomelsky was in those same pages today, and you can read William Grimes’ excellent obit for him here. I bring nothing to this except the desire to highlight a few facts and link to a few of the many odd bands that Gomelsky worked with over the years.
The biggest ones were the Rolling Stones. He gave them their first paying gig at the Crawdaddy Club. They each took home almost a buck, which is better than many bands today. Jagger’s School of Economics savvy kicks in for sure.
But he lost the Stones to the droogie Andrew Loog Oldham, so he signed up the Yardbirds. Well done!
One of the cool details from Giorgio’s life is that he was born on a boat going from Odessa, Ukraine, to Genoa, Italy.
Google maps does not offer a boat option for transportation, but this is not an easy trip.
The most surprising fact in Giorgio’s obit is that he gave Eric Clapton the Slowhand nickname.
I had always assumed that it was because Clapton is so dexterous that he made fast playing look slow. That’s what I thought. But no!
Here’s the real story, from Grimes’ obit:
“Mr. Gomelsky also gave Eric Clapton, the group’s original lead guitarist, his nickname. Mr. Clapton told The Daily Mail in 2013: “I used light-gauge strings, with a very thin first string, which made it easier to bend the notes, and it was not uncommon, during frenetic bits of playing, for me to break at least one string, While I was changing my strings, the audience would often break into a slow hand clap, inspiring Giorgio to dream up the nickname of Slowhand Clapton.””
Incredible, no? To me, yes.
But Giorgio went on to better things. I’m sorry that I had no idea about his Tonka Wonka Mondays at Tramps. Brave mix ups of rock and jazz musicians willing to jam should have been a natural for me, but I missed it. This was the bar/club that gave Buster Poindexter a regular showcase, and where I got to see Big Joe Turner live, huger in some ways than seeing the Stones in ’73 at the Garden.
But I digress. The cool thing about Gomelsky, at least according to his own words in his obit, is that he had no eye on a music career, but merely wanted to make things right. I like that impulse.
Here’s a few clips from folks he worked with. But read the obit. I wish more lives like his were memorialized.
This clip is really great. I’m posting more Magma soon. Wow.
Fred Frith’s band, Henry Cow, covers a Phil Ochs song.
Blackstar, David Bowie’s latest album, came out last week. I’d read the warm, enthusiastic reviews but only sampled small pieces before word came this morning that he’d passed on. I was waiting until I found the whole album, Google Music didn’t have it, but it turns out YouTube did. We’ve written about many Bowie songs and projects here over the years. This cut is a worthy piece of ambitious and pleasurable music suffused with the mythmaking heart found in everything David Bowie created. A look backward into a dark future without him (but with his art) that starts today.
