Tag: stevegadd

Peter Gabriel, Up

Diving deep into life, death, contemplation and grief, an album whose pleasures reveal themselves slowly.

Album of the Week, October 17, 2026

Peter Gabriel’s album Us came out when I was in college, in 1992. As the subsequent decade passed there was a live album, Secret World Live; some soundtrack songs; and the OVO project. I began to despair of Peter releasing another album of original material ever again. Though there were rumors of an album being worked on, it almost felt like a joke because the rumored album title was one that was being used by other artists.1 And when Up finally appeared in September 2002, twelve days after the first anniversary of 9/11, I felt an immense relief. Surely, I thought, this would be the longest time between albums that Peter would ever go. Heh.

I also felt, honestly, concern. Because while we were all still mourning a year after 9/11, the depths of his despair as it surfaced on Up were striking. Has Peter been hospitalized? Listening to this album for the first time, it seemed as though the answer was yes, that the therapy that had gotten him to such a helpful place around the time of Us had let him down. But on subsequent listens I found hope and beauty among the emotional desolation.

Up is also a Peter Gabriel album, with all that implies: immaculate production, anthemic sweeps, and a long list of musicians who had recorded with Gabriel before or who had come through Real World Studios and found themselves sitting in on a Peter Gabriel recording session as well as recording their own albums. In addition to the stalwarts Tony Levin, Manu Katché, David Rhodes, and Shankar, they included percussionist Ged Lynch, former drummer for Black Grape and the Ruthless Rap Assassins; Daniel Lanois and David Sancious, both of whom had affiliations with Gabriel going back to So; Passion–era collaborators Hossam Ramzy and Assane Thiam; composer/producer/session player Jon Brion; bassist and Pentangle co-founder Danny Thompson; the Black Dyke Band, who played on OVO; the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; and Gabriel’s daughter Melanie on backing vocals. There were a whole cluster of musicians, influential producers in their own right, who showed up to contribute arrangements, play instruments, or generally bask in the aura, including Bob Ezrin (brass arrangements), Stephen Hague (percussion), Will Gregory (string arrangements), and Mitchell Froom (backwards guitar) in addition to Brion and Lanois. And there were, improbably, the Black Boys of Alabama, a gospel group formed at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega in 1939 and whose first album on the Real World Label, Spirit of the Century, won the Grammy award for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album in 2002.

“Darkness” is appropriately titled; his most abrasive sound since Peter Gabriel 3, the song has screaming guitars and giant percussion as Peter recites a series of confessions from the heart of a depressive episode: “Every fear I swallow makes me small… I’m afraid I can be Devil Man / And I’m scared to be divine… I’m afraid of loving women / And I’m scared of loving men…” The so-called monster that he chases through the forest ultimately turns out to be “curled up on the floor / just like a baby boy,” as he confronts the dark reality that the things he fears most are helpless and small and deep inside. The bombast of the song makes it feel like a Bob Ezrin production, but it’s actually Will Gregory’s string arrangement sawing away behind the rest of the musicians and propelling things forward. The song ends with the image of the monster curled up on the floor, with a heartbeat of a synth line fading away.

The strings continue into the intro of “Growing Up,” though that cello line appears to have been programmed rather than played. The main part of the song builds on a shuffling drum beat and whooshing synths, but Gabriel’s lyrics take us on a journey from the womb through birth and life as “my ghost likes to travel / so far in the unknown,” ultimately moving through the final transition: “the breathing stops … in a transition once again / such a struggle getting through these changes.” The ghost ultimately confides its disconnection with life: “It all seems so absurd / To be flying like a bird / When I do not feel I’ve really landed here.” The track builds off a massive groove, but the meditative lyrics don’t seem at home above the beats (though perhaps that’s the point).

The third track, “Sky Blue,” floats in on Daniel Lanois’ steel guitar, feeling as though it comes from the same emotional center as “Blood of Eden” or “Don’t Give Up.” The narrator becries his alienation: “Train pulled out said my goodbyes, sky blue / Back on the road alone with the sky, sky blue … So tired of all this traveling / So many miles away from home.” But the narrator paradoxically finds beauty in the distance and motion: “Warm wind flowing over the Earth / I sing through the land, the land sings through me … There’s a presence here no one denies, sky blue … I keep moving to be stable.” The slow 6/8 groove builds up to a wordless hymn as the Blind Boys of Alabama join to sing the cry at the end, accompanied by David Sancious’s Hammond organ. The track had been around since the Us sessions, but the addition of the Blind Boys take it over the top, finding the emotional center of the song in the narrator’s wordless cry to creation.

“No Way Out” comes closer to more traditional Gabriel territory, but is still immersed in the fear, despair and difficulty of facing death. The track builds up from a tight Danny Thompson acoustic bass line, with shuffling drums (both programmed and live) joined by Hossam Ramzy’s tabla under an insistent David Rhodes guitar line and a spare piano line. Here the narrator confronts the death of a loved one: “Someone runs to make a phone call / And the man kneels on the ground / There’s a tightening in my chest / I know that I’m drawn in / Oh God, let it not be you.” The chorus is more direct: “Don’t leave us / Don’t leave like this / Don’t leave me here again / I’m not quitting on you / There’s no one else.” The song is epic in emotional scope but only captures a brief flickering moment of despair; the band’s coda, in its crashing cymbals and circling bassline, leaves us in anger and despair.

That ultimately yields to the dark, spare opening of “I Grieve.” Originally written for the soundtrack of City of Angels, the American remake of Wings of Desire,2 it finds us in a moment after the fighting is done and the narrator is left only with the grief and anger of figuring out how to move forward: “It was only one hour ago … Looks like it always did / This flesh and bone / It’s just the way you were tied in / Now there’s no one home.” But the narrator moves past the feeling of abandonment: “Let it out and move on / Missing what’s gone / They say life carries on … Life carries on in the people I meet / In everyone in the street / In all the flies and rats / The rot and the rust / The ashes and the dust…” Ultimately the soul lives, he thinks, and the body is “just the car that we ride in / The home we reside in.” The narrator ends having made this transcendental argument but still acknowledging the emptiness left behind: “Now I can find relief / I grieve.”

What follows is a rarity in Gabriel’s catalog, a funky soul-inspired track that works as a mean groove while completely falling flat lyrically. “The Barry Williams Show” has a fantastic deep Tony Levin bass line, some great New Orleans style shuffle drums, and a killer horn line. Unfortunately it also comes with a fairly uninteresting vocal and lyrics that skewer reality television hosts like Jerry Springer, which firmly dates the song. It’s also not clear whether it is punching up at the host or down at his guests, which is not the sort of ambivalence you want in a song like this.

From sneers to the quiet echoes of a disturbed mind, “My Head Sounds Like That” takes us back into Gabriel’s survey of human experience, with a song that shows us how it feels to perceive the world through depression, where everything scrapes along jagged exposed nerve endings, both paradoxically dull and unbearably bright. It’s a painful song for anyone who’s had to live the experience of a visitation of the Black Dog, but it’s also quietly beautiful with the sounds of the Black Dyke Band behind the pain.

With an opening guitar riff that feels like a deliberate return to pop forms but which is actually Peter playing a Telecaster sample through a keyboard, “More Than This” finds the narrator contemplating the liminal, unseen things just beyond perception as he decides that there must be something more to the world, decides that the sense that is made when people are put together is like the sense constructed from words one after another. “So much more than this, there is something else there / When all that you had has all gone / And more than this, I’m alone, feeling so connected / And I’m all there, right next to you.” The song aches up against the edge of resolving the minor key chords that comprise it; Gabriel’s self-harmonies climb up the scale, landing on the minor tonic in a way that suggests that they’re really hanging on the edge of resolving to something brighter.

We don’t get that brighter in “Signal to Noise,” though the song (which I discussed in my post about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Night Song, does tie into the central message of finding that connection between people as the narrator begs to “turn up the signal, wipe out the noise.” How much of his catalog boils down to the resolution of this song: “Receive and transmit”! There are echoes of songs from “Secret World” all the way back to “On the Air” in those words, and ultimately a central thesis that we’re all better off when we actually open up the channels of communication one to the other. The incredible Nusrat vocal that anchors the song, extracted from the inaugural performance of “Signal to Noise” on Peter’s 1995 VH1 special, explains why the song holds such a strong place in PG fans’ hearts, as much as the centrality of his message. The choice to underpin this version with strings rather than a bombastic rock sound adds immensely to the rising tension at the end that is ultimately unresolved.

The album ends with “The Drop,” Peter playing piano and singing a melody that he couldn’t make fit OVO but which here anchors the album with the visual of paratroops jumping off into the unknown: “One by one, they’re going out / You watch them dim / One by one, you watch them fall / And wonder where they’re falling to.” A koan, and the only song shorter than three minutes on an album where the rest are more than twice as long, the tune echoes bits of “Downside Up” but ends, unresolved, on an open fifth, leaving us to decide the destination.

Gabriel toured behind Up (the “Growing Up” tour) and then seemed to drop back into the shadows. He released a few loose singles in the late 2000s, but much of what he recorded seemed like stock-taking projects: a long-in-progress collaborative album from the Real World recording weeks called Big Blue Ball; his Scratch My Back project featuring covers of other singers’ work; his orchestral album New Blood (and companion live album Live Blood), featuring arrangements of his own works; and several compilations and live albums. It seemed at the time like the end. But the lesson of Gabriel’s discography is to never count him out. In 2023, twenty-one years after Up, he released the album i/o, taking advantage of Bandcamp’s subscription features to push out a track a month to subscribers, which may have helped the famously distractible Gabriel stay focused on the project. He’s repeating the process right now with the album’s sequel, o/i. But though we’ll end our survey of his studio albums here, we’re not quite done with Peter, or this series, yet, as you’ll hear over the next two weeks.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I didn’t own Up on vinyl when I started this series, so I ended up using a few tracks written for the album as bonus tracks, including “Signal To Noise.” But there are a few other gems connected to these sessions out there, including this one from The Long Walk Home which uses the Blind Boys of Alabama part from “Sky Blue” as a standalone soundtrack cut:

BONUS BONUS: Peter has done a lot of live performances in Real World Studios for video and album releases. Here’s one recorded during the run-up to the “Growing Up Live” tour in 2002:

Footnotes

  1. Not only did R.E.M. release their own Up in 1998, but Ani DiFranco had her own Up Up Up Up Up Up in 1999. ↩︎
  2. A completely unnecessary film given the brilliance of Wim Wenders’ original. ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, OVO

An unlikely source for the great musician’s most personal song, in a cast album for a musical that had 999 performances in the Millennium Dome.

Album of the Week, October 10, 2026

Even in the moment, in the mid-1990s following the release of Us, it seemed like Peter Gabriel was all over the place while simultaneously being invisible. Interactive computer entertainment via the then-new medium of the CD-ROM? He was there, with XPlora 1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World (reviews now differ: was it a computer game or an extended advertising campaign? Having played it back in the day, I can say with confidence: it was slow) and Eve. There were talks about a theme park. But new music under his name was slow to appear, until in 2000 an odd album appeared. A soundtrack, but for a live show rather than a movie; a concept album with an impossible-to-describe concept; and a Peter Gabriel album with almost everyone except Peter Gabriel on lead vocals. What, exactly, was OVO?

First of all, it was the soundtrack to the Millennium Dome Show, intended as a massive multimedia event but remembered today mostly as an expensive flop. The show, built inside a massive dome on London’s Greenwich Peninsula near Canary Wharf that now houses the O2 Arena, was meant to commemorate the Millennium and, not coincidentally, to announce to the world that Tony Blair’s New Labour was creating fabulous things in Great Britain. Ultimately the show, which ran for a year, did not draw the crowds the organizers anticipated; though the 6.5 million visitors who saw one of the 999 shows were reportedly happy with the experience, organizers had planned for more than 10 million.

Second, it was a concept album, but a meandering one. The Skypeople live in the trees, while the Earth People were originally agrarian but develop iron technology, creating alienating cities in towers, such as the Tower That Ate People. Sofia of the Earth People nevertheless falls in love with Skyboy of the Skypeople. Sofia’s brother, who built the tower, grows paranoid about the Skypeople and jealous of Skyboy, and imprisons him in the tower. The desperate Skypeople attack the tower and free Skyboy; Sofia’s brother, understanding at last his folly, dies atop the tower, and the Skypeople bring it down, killing Sofia’s mother in the rubble. Sofia, bereft, finally finds Skyboy again and goes with him above the clouds, ultimately bearing his child, a boy named OVO (the caps are in the score); at his birth a tree springs from his grandmother’s grave, rapidly growing into a giant oak. When catastrophic rains come and endanger earth and Skypeople alike, Sofia has a dream that the world is upside down and that one can sail away to safety into the sky. Inspired by the dream, she places OVO in a nest and sends him sailing into the sky to find hope and a safer place. While the story has deeper emotional resonance than Mozo’s radio-born revolution, it’s plenty bonkers.

But last, OVO contains some of Peter’s most personal writing, with some melodies dating back to So, and some truly gorgeous sonic landscapes, even if he doesn’t sing most of it. It’s all delivered in something that’s more musical theater than rock album, complete with recurring themes, big set numbers, and a broad cast of characters.

“The Story of OVO” opens with a grimy groove which immediately subverts the listener’s expectation: yes, that’s rap, and yes, that’s Neneh Cherry, alongside American rapper Rasco. Gabriel apparently chose this approach because he wanted to interest a broader range of listeners in the material, and he knew “kids listened to rap.” Hamilton it ain’t, but the track does what it needs to do, which is to move the plot along atop the deepest beats on the album.

We subvert expectations once again with “Low Light,” which immediately turns aside from the groove into an ambient soundscape that wouldn’t have been out of place on Passion but is even deeper and more enveloping. The stunning Irish voice on the latter half of the track belongs to Iarla Ó Lionáird, a sean–nós singer who had released his first solo album on Real World in 1997 and was also a member of the beat-driven Irish and West African crossover ensemble, the Afro Celt Sound System. There are undercurrents throughout the work of musical themes that will appear later in the album, including the “Downside-Up” theme.

“The Time of the Turning” is something else again, an acoustic ballad with vocals by electronica singer Alison Goldfrapp, a few years away from her star turns on the album Black Cherry and the hit single “Ooh La La.” Alongside Goldfrapp is none other than singer-songwriter Richie Havens, voicing the perspective of Sofia’s father and his traditional agrarian ways. But Goldfrapp warns us, “It’s the time of the turning/And we’d better learn to say our goodbyes.”

“The Man Who Loved the Earth/The Hand That Sold Shadows” revisits the groove from the opening track as an instrumental, so you can hear the play of the buzzing didgeridoo against the bass line and thundering drums. The only problem with the arrangement is the odd interjections from the villagers as they build their constructions of iron, which sounds like something in between the didgeridoo and scratching. In the last minute and 30 seconds there’s a hard cut to a more ominous percussive rhythm, driven forward by a hooky, whistling synth and David Rhodes’ monster guitar.

“The Time of the Turning (Reprise)/The Weaver’s Reel” brings Goldfrapp back for one more chorus, accompanied by a brass band, before we abruptly transition into a frantic Celtic dance, anchored by the redoubtable Richard Evans but also by the Dhol Foundation (a South Asian drumming ensemble based in London), Johnny Kalsi and James McNally (members of the Afro Celt Sound System), and a host of Celtic musicians. The net effect is a thesis statement that will be familiar to listeners of Sheila Chandra: that there is a through-line among the music of the Irish, the South Asians, and West African cultures. It’s the adrenaline climax of the album, and it pointed the way to where the Afro Celts and others were heading in blending these musics into something you’d want to dance to.

“Father, Son” is a rare introspective moment, and a rare instance of Gabriel’s vocals on the record. As the industrialist Ion mourns the death of his father, he reflects on their relationship in a piano-driven ballad. It stands completely apart from the rest of the material, and was written earlier. The lyrics, as the two men have an emotional breakthrough while doing yoga together, are both concrete (“spine against spine”) and incredibly moving. Emotionally it feels of a piece with other introspective Gabriel songs like “I Grieve,” which had appeared on the soundtrack to the movie City of Angels some years prior, and it continued in Gabriel’s set lists for years after; I remember being struck by its impact at Gabriel’s 2001 WOMAD performance in Redmond, Washington.

“The Tower That Ate People” introduces a new theme driven by snarling guitars courtesy of David Rhodes and tight drums from Manu Katché. Gabriel’s vocals here are treated and, in his own words, influenced by Dr. John as he snarls out his paranoia in the role of Ion. The music would fit well alongside earlier songs like “Steam” and some of Gabriel’s forthcoming projects, which we’ll hear more of later.

“Revenge,” as the Skypeople attack the Tower, is a massive drum number with the Dhol Foundation playing alongside programmed drums and a thrumming keyboard line. It’s brief and leads into the grief-filled “White Ashes,” anchored by vocals from Omi Hall as the villagers sort through the rubble of the Tower.

“Downside-Up” opens the third act with one of the most thoroughly realized and dramatic tracks on the album, a duet between the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan. Fraser doesn’t get the opportunity to do much of her trademark vocal acrobatics here, but Skyboy’s part was written for Buchanan’s haunted baritone and he sounds fantastic here. It’s a full-blown PG song, with his full band joined by former Super Étoile de Dakar members Assane Thiam and Babacar Faye—in fact it’s really two PG songs in one, with the gentle “Downside-Up” theme grafted to the more rhythmic “Ovo” theme in the second half as they celebrate the infant’s arrival.

“The Nest That Sailed the Sky” gives us one last instrumental, with the brass band joined by Shankar and a string and synth-driven soundscape for another track that wouldn’t have been out of place on Passion. It leads into the cast finale, “Make Tomorrow,” as we hear from Buchanan, Fraser, Richie Havens and Gabriel in their grief and hope as they send OVO into the sky, and snippets of the “Downside-Up” and “Ovo” themes blend into moments of percussion that recall the more conflict-driven moments of the album. When the percussion and growling didgeridoo re-emerge to underpin the “Make Tomorrow” theme, we get a sort of synthesis moment that gives us hope that all the forces can actually work together, which one suspects was the narrative point.

Gabriel’s grand musical may not have ultimately congealed into a fully coherent statement, but it still stands as a unique point in his repertoire as the only musical theatre in his solo repertoire and his first major concept album since Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Gabriel would make more soundtrack albums following this, including The Long Walk Home (soundtrack to The Rabbit-Proof Fence), but he would also finally release more original songs. In fact, simultaneously with OVO he was working on another album, a proper sequel to Us, which would finally be released two years after the ambitious concept. We’ll hear that one next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Peter performed some of the music live with the musicians on the project on the promotional circuit. Here he is with Fraser and Buchanan on the Jools Holland show a few weeks before the album was released:

BONUS BONUS: Peter took the material from OVO into live performances through the 2000s, and in his 2010 orchestral project New Blood. Here’s a performance from his “Growing Up” tour, and from the New Blood concert film Taking the Pulse:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: This wouldn’t be Peter’s last collaboration with the Afro Celt Sound System. It was with delighted disbelief that I heard his voice on their song “When You’re Falling” on the air in 2003. Here’s a live version of the song from an unspecified television program:

Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels

In which a performance artist leans into the musical side of her art and finds emotional resonance.

Album of the Week, July 11, 2026

Laurie Anderson might have started the 1980s as the definitive performance artist who also happened to sing, but her last album of the decade posited her as a singer who also happened to be a performance artist. Like Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, released just a week before Strange Angels, the album centered Laurie the person in an emotional space that she had never really occupied, showing her with fewer electronic tricks and more heartfelt songwriting in an album adorned by a stunningly intimate cover portrait.

That cover was taken by famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who near the beginning of his career had captured the great Patti Smith for her first album Horses. In the earlier photo he portrayed someone both confrontational and delicate in a way that played with gender conventions. Here, near the end of his life (Mapplethorpe died several months before the album’s release, of AIDS), he imbued Anderson, previously careful to present herself through a sort of hip androgyny, with a sort of uncanny beauty, presenting her in a way that was still undeniably artistic and avant-garde but somehow unavoidably feminine.

The cover photo was a good metaphor for the music contained inside, as an artist who had previously relied on an electronic pitch-shifter to give her “The Voice of Authority” now leveraged a new voice, an unexpectedly clear and beautiful soprano. She has told a story about realizing that a song needed to be actually sung instead of talked, going to take voice lessons, and discovering that voice had been waiting for her the whole time. And while there are certainly familiar collaborators, including producer Roma Baran and percussionist David Van Tieghem, most of the musicians on the record are most familiar for having collaborated with someone else: the Golden Palominos’ Anton Fier; trumpeter Earl Gardner, trombonist Steve Turre, drum programmer Leon Pendarvis (Janice’s husband) and accordionist Tom “T-Bone” Wolk from the Saturday Night Live band; session drummer Steve Gadd (“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”); Tony Levin; guitarist Ray Phiri and bassist Bakithi Kumalo (Graceland); minimalist tape loop composer Scott Johnson; bassist Mark Dresser (Anthony Braxton); drummer Joey Baron and percussionist Cyro Baptista (John Zorn); and a host of well-known voices lending backing vocals including Meat Loaf, Bobby McFerrin, outsider artists The Roches, and Lisa Fischer (Rolling Stones, Luther Vandross).

“Strange Angels” begins as a classic Laurie Anderson lyric: “They say that heaven is like TV,/A perfect little world/That doesn’t really need you.” But it’s sung, not wryly spoken, and the combination of instruments that joins as she intones “here they come” – guitar, accordion, bass, crisp percussion – tells us we are in for a different sort of experience. I always loved the lyric that leads off the second verse: “Well it was one of those days / Larger than life / When your friends came to dinner /And they stayed they night/ And then they cleaned out the refrigerator / They ate everything in sight / And then they stayed up in the living room / And they cried all night.” Possibly I feel this way because the first time I heard the album was in the living room of a Mount Holyoke choir member, where I was crashing overnight on the floor while we were on tour. I don’t make friends easily but that night we stayed up until two, and would have cleaned out the refrigerator had there been one. (Some of these reviews are not impartial.) Perhaps, though, I like the tune so much because, as the chords swing from major to minor, the band creates an undercurrent of melancholy underneath the main story, and we understand that we’re looking backwards at a visitation from the angels that can never occur again.

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a different thing, a fable about not messing with Mother Nature in the form of a song. The setup—Laurie going to a retail establishment and requesting modifications—is not particularly novel, but the salesman pushing back on her warning of the unintended consequences is: “Please. There’s no guarantee. Cause nature’s got rules, and nature’s got laws, and if you cross her look out — it’s the monkey’s paw.” The musical track is light, thanks to Ray Phiri and Bakithi Kumalo, and the gorgeous falsetto vocalise of Bobby McFerrin.

“Coolsville” is a song built over an effect, a delayed reverb circuit providing a sort of call and response effect behind Laurie’s vocals. That’s the gimmick, and on the initial listen when she intones “Coolsville” into this thing it can be overwhelming. But the song itself, with its longing for perfection that doesn’t exist, is somehow deeply moving nevertheless.

That brings us to “Ramon,” which for me is the emotional center of the album. Opening with a deceptive drum pattern that always makes me think the beat is dislocated by half a measure, Laurie is back to clouds of angels: “Last night I saw a host of angels, and they were all singing different songs/And they sounded like a lot of lawnmowers/Mowing down my lawn/And up above kerjillions of stars spangled all over the sky…” But the visitation of angels leaves us and there’s a man fallen on his back in the snow. Laurie’s verse centers this man in the broader cosmos: “some people walk on water/some people walk on broken glass/some just walk round and round in their dreams/some just keep falling down.” There’s something deeply human, almost a humanist form of Christian ethics, in these lyrics: regardless of which kind of person you’re dealing with, when you see a man who’s broken, pick him up and carry him! To put this into context, this was coming at the end of an eight year period where the culture had encouraged a kind of spiritual self-centeredness, amid the rise of televangelism and the rapid removal of societal support for the homeless, as well as at the end of a period where the Reagan administration’s refusal to do anything about the AIDS crisis had meant the loss of tens of thousands of people, with the population of artists in New York with whom Anderson collaborated (including Mapplethorpe) hit especially hard. So for me, hearing these lyrics against this context, it came as a sort of moral call to arms. For Anderson, this isn’t an explicitly Christian moment, more a humanist one, since we are all in this together: “We don’t know where we come from/We don’t know what we are.”

The first side closes out with “Babydoll,” which is for me one of the songs on the album that would have done better as spoken word. The concept, about a brain that stops functioning on behalf of its owner because it wants to have fun, is pretty good, and the music is rich, but they somehow don’t seem to reinforce each other. Still the song is worth it for its extremely 1989 moment, in which the brain says, “Take me to your leader/And I say: do you mean … George?”

“Beautiful Red Dress” flips the tropes of women’s roles (shrill, decorative, emotionally unstable, dependence) on their heads, starting from the first chorus: “I’ve got a beautiful red dress/And you’d look really good/Standing beside it…” Lenny Pickett gets to play some spectacular 1980s saxophone all over the track, and there’s a great moment in which Laurie quiets the track down with the observation, “You know, for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago, that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make — a buck.”

“The Day the Devil” flips the script on blaming external forces for your problems, with the devil being blamed for knowing you inside out before sneering, “Don’t come banging your Bibles/Cause you’ve been laughing all the way to the bank.” It’s not, to my hearing, entirely coherent, but the gospel chorus covers a multitude of sins in this song for me: “Give me back my innocence… ‘Cause when I get on up to heaven Lord/You can have it all back.”

The other emotional center for me comes next. “The Dream Before” is an unvarnished story of dashed hopes and unhappy outcomes. Hansel says, “I’ve wasted my life on our stupid legend/When my one and only love was the wicked witch.” The second half of the brief functions as sort of an ultimate Zen koan, with Anderson and Bobby McFerrin laying down some high-grade philosophy: “History is an angel being blown backwards into the future… and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken, but there is a storm blowing from Paradise … and this storm, this storm, is called Progress.” Really listening to this as an about-to-graduate college student did something to the wiring of my brain. (I centered this song on a mix tape in 1993.)

“My Eyes” is somehow the perfect blend of Laurie’s tart observations and her new musical fluency, all the more so because there’s no pat moral or punchline. She confronts the enormous night, the kerjillions of stars, the “ocean, so deep, so old,” and simply exists in it: “Everything’s shaking in strange delight.” The track is underpinned by that spectacular one-two combo of Bakithi Khumalo’s fretless bass and Ray Phiri’s guitar.

The album ends with a valediction for the departed in “Hiawatha,” as Laurie invokes the spirits of Elvis, JFK, and Marilyn Monroe to welcome newly departed souls: “Well, starlight, starbright, we’re going to hang some new stars in the sky tonight.” The combination of Scott Johnson’s guitar and the understated backing vocals of the Roches turns the overall effect into a simultaneous groove and valediction.

Laurie’s experiment with leaning more fully into the musical side of her art was well received by the critics, with Robert Christgau giving the album an A. After the album it took a while for her to find her next voice, but find it she did after about five years, and we’ll hear that sound another time. Next week, though, we’ll swerve back over into what was being called “world music” to hear the next album from one of Peter Gabriel’s other collaborators.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s Laurie performing “Strange Angels” live in San Remo in 2001, during an award ceremony in which she was awarded the Premio Tenco for songwriting:

BONUS BONUS: “Strange Angels” soundtracks a moving moment in the William Hurt/Elizabeth Perkins 1991 film The Doctor, in which the characters, playing cancer patients, embrace a moment of grace:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Laurie originally didn’t pursue the traditional music video route to promote the album, instead opting to produce a series of short videos, called “Personal Service Announcements,” in which she did her version of stand-up comedy. A few of these have surfaced over the years, including these:

Yusef Lateef, Autophysiopsychic

Album of the Week, September 9, 2023

And so we come to the end of our Summer of CTI. We’ve traced, through the admittedly very selective lens of my record collection, the history of Creed Taylor’s label, from its beginnings as a subsidiary of Verve, to its critical heights in the works of Freddie Hubbard, to the peaks of its crossover successes with Deodato and Hubert Laws, and into the long jazz-funk coda with last week’s George Benson outing.

Today’s album takes us even further down that long and winding road, to a place where much of the jazz has been wrung out of the funk, the most famous arrangers and contributors have moved on, and you kind of want to ask yourself why that record is in your collection. But it comes from the hand of one of the all time great reed players, so maybe it’s a good time to shut down our preconceptions and listen.

Yusef Lateef had been playing since the 1950s, recording his first solo session in 1957 and following with a string of dates on the New Jazz, Prestige and Riverside labels, including what’s probably his best known work, Eastern Sounds (about which more will be said another time). But he never held still, musically, and he had begun to incorporate elements of soul and the blues alongside his Eastern musical influences by the mid-1960s. By the time he recorded Autophysiopsychic in 1977, these had blossomed into something like full-on funk music.

The opening track, “Robot Man,” is probably the boldest of these statements. No horns are heard for the first two minutes, just a funk backing track with Lateef singing. You might be tempted to turn it off! But after the opening two minutes comes Lateef’s soprano sax, and suddenly we’re in a very different sound space. Lateef was a careful listener and a brilliant improviser, and combined those into an absolutely rock solid jazz-funk conception. The rest of the track is pedestrian, but Lateef’s solo is incandescent, escaping into other tonalities while still staying absolutely funky.

“Look on the Right Side” fixes the backing track problem by tipping all the way over into George Clinton territory. Indeed, it is hard to tell that this track wasn’t a b-side from Chocolate City or Mothership Connection. The electric bass is squelched out, the keys and guitar keep the groove going, and Lateef’s voice has more than a little hint of Glenn Goins about it. His sax playing likewise seems to take inspiration from Maceo Parker and the rest of Clinton’s Parliament. This track also features the great Art Farmer, another player with a history stretching back to the late 1940s and the dawn of bebop. By now he had relocated to Europe and was doing pretty much whatever he wanted to, including playing a lugubriously rhythmic solo on this track. Only the relative mediocrity of Lateef’s lyrics keeps the track from being a stone classic.

Inside of the gatefold jacket for the album, featuring (mediocre) lyrics and liner notes

“YL” (pronounced Yeel) occupies breezier territory, vibrating on the same harmonic wavelength as George Benson’s “Theme from Good King Bad” (and also written by David Matthews). The two horns open the track playing in harmony, then Lateef switches to flute for the solo. He’s a more angular player than Hubert Laws in similar territory, at one point hitting a thrilling octave plus leap in the middle of a run, but the overall impression is of a tune happily gliding along on the pillow of its own major-key chord progressions.

“Communication” finds us back in Parliament territory, with Lateef’s “stay in contact with your mind” anchoring the track to Clinton’s cosmology. But rather than scaling the lunatic heights of “Bop Gun,” Lateef keeps the track moving along at a simmer, helped by an absolutely dirty tenor sax solo. Farmer’s flugelhorn brings a key change and a different energy to the track, as though soaring above the relentless funk below. It’s a highlight of the album

“Sister Mamie” is the only track on the album to feature Lateef’s fascination with non-Western wind instruments, opening with a fanfare of sorts on the shehnai before shifting into another funk groove. Again, what could be a relatively pedestrian backing track is redeemed by a fiery solo from Lateef alongside some funky trumpet work from Farmer.

So Lateef showed another way to enliven jazz-funk, bringing intelligent and cerebral improvisation of the highest order alongside earthy Parliament-inspired funk grooves. Alas, in 1977 CTI’s time was about to run out. The label had partnered with Motown for distribution, but that deal collapsed in 1977 and led to CTI’s eventual bankruptcy in 1978. Taylor kept the label going following a restructuring, but the momentum had gone and it ceased operations in 1984, returning with new recordings once every five or six years afterwards until Taylor’s death in 2022. Jazz-funk didn’t disappear, but classical-jazz crossovers would be less common following the label’s winding down.

We’re going to change gears a little for the next few weeks and explore some of the influences that popped up on Autophysiopsychic. Do not attempt to adjust your set…

You can listen to today’s album here:

George Benson, Good King Bad

Album of the Week, September 2, 2023

When I was growing up in the bucolic suburbs of Newport News, Virginia, listening to my parents’ music on the kitchen radio and in our car, the radio was generally on one of two stations. One, WGH, was the local independent classical radio station (which later moved its programming to WHRO). The other, WFOG, was the “easy listening” one. I didn’t mind it at first, but in time I grew to mock it, hearing the uncomplicated, dumbed-down orchestral arrangements of pop standards everywhere—dentist’s offices, malls, grocery stores. When I first heard “smooth jazz,” courtesy of Kenny G, I knew exactly where it had come from.

And when I started listening to CTI Records, I thought that was what I’d be getting, thanks to the label’s reputation for heavy string arrangements and jazz-funk hybridization. (I’ve had record collectors proudly tell me they avoid the label entirely for this reason.) As this series has hopefully shown, I was almost completely wrong.

But then there’s George Benson and Good King Bad. A technically brilliant player with a great melodic imagination, on this record he surrounded himself with a small army of studio musicians and smothered much of the material in major key, uncomplicated string arrangements. (I don’t know how to describe the unique tonality of so much of the smooth jazz adjacent recordings that I’ve heard except to observe that they are almost always in major keys and almost never use modes or complex modulations. But I always imagine some of the blissful jazz announcers I heard in Washington DC, who never seemed to let a cloud cross their minds and who seemed to always be speaking through a permanent smile, when I hear it.) The good news is that alongside the smooth jazz there is a fair amount of jazz-funk as well, in a way that lives up to Benson’s considerable prowess with the guitar.

About that small army: the musicians here are no slouches. There’s David Sanborn, Michael and Randy Brecker, and James Brown stalwart Fred Wesley, for starters, as well as Joe Farrell, Roland Hanna, Ronnie Foster, Eric Gale, and Steve Gadd, along with a bunch of other horn and string players. But there’s not a “band” to speak of as each of the tracks features a different line-up.

“Theme from Good King Bad” is not a soundtrack, just the opening number. Written by arranger David Matthews (no relation), the uncomplicated pop number has not an ounce of swing in the chart, just straight ahead seventies jazz rock with horns and Eric Gale’s insistent chukka chukka on the rhythm guitar.. The funk in the performance is brought by Benson, whose guitar redeems the track with his usual precise yet soulful melody sense, as well as a sense of rhythm that swings all over the precise backing beats of the chart. Listening to the track, recorded in 1975, is a reminder that disco was already here, just not evenly distributed yet.

Matthews also authored “One Rock Don’t Make No Boulder,” which plays with the smooth formula by bringing in some crunchy minor chord progressions. Benson’s solo finds some grime and soul in the chart, which swings a bit more than in the first track, and the clarinet solo by Don Grolnick is a notable contribution to the overall mood. It’s a more complex sound that hearkens back to jazz-funk works like Farrell’s Penny Arcade.

“Em” continues in this vein. A slightly blues-inflected jazz-funk track written by Philip Namanworth, it edges even closer to the disco line. Benson’s guitar work is unremarkable here.

Vince Guaraldi’s classic “Cast Your Fate To The Wind” is a different story. Here remade in a technicolor arrangement that brings strings around the edges of the tune, Benson is otherwise left largely to his own devices over the backing group, and he both renders the wistful side of Guaraldi’s melody as well as bringing out a hint of the bravado lurking beneath. Joe Farrell’s flute is a lovely complement to the track, and taking the second solo he brings a celebratory cadence to the music. The only misstep in the arrangement is an unnecessary key change in the bridge, but that is quickly rectified. The two soloists play in dialogue to close out the track.

Matthews’ “Siberian Workout” again seeks to shed the major-key stereotype, centering its composition in a minor mode instead. The same chicken-scratch guitar, horns and flute apply here; it’s probably the least distinguished track on the disk. “Shell Of A Man,” on the other hand, is a standout. Written by Eugene McDaniels, it’s an uptempo ballad enlivened by Dave Friedman’s vibes and Ronnie Foster’s keyboards. A tinge of blues in the chorus keeps things moving along. The coda, which swings into a fade-out, sees Benson take flight, exploring some of the changes of the set. It’s a seriously interesting track.

I wanted to dislike this album on the strength of the smooth jazz overtones, especially in the first track, but there are enough nuggets of gold in it to earn a recommendation from me. The more commercial sound was no mistake, however; it marked a period where Creed Taylor’s label was consciously seeking more and more pop-oriented sounds in the vain hopes of recapturing the chart successes they had earlier in the 1970s. We have one more record in the CTI series for this column, and it goes even further afield, with some players we haven’t heard from yet … but who may surprise you. That’s coming up next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Jim Hall, Concierto

Album of the Day, August 26, 2023

We’ve met guitarist Jim Hall before, several times—once with Bill Evans in arguably his most famous recording, once with the Kronos Quartet years later revisiting that material—but never as a leader. He recorded a lot of sessions on small labels in the years leading up to today’s 1975 session, but almost always in duos or as a sideman; his first proper solo album, after a 1957 record on Pacific Jazz, came in 1969 on tiny label MPS (which we’ll hear another day), and another followed in 1972 on Milestone. But his best work came with collaborators, and for Concierto, his only solo headlining session on CTI Records, Creed Taylor surrounded him with some of the best: alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, trumpeter Chet Baker, pianist Roland Hanna, drummer Steve Gadd, and the redoubtable bassist Ron Carter. Don Sebesky is here as arranger, but the record is straight-ahead jazz untouched by orchestra, and that’s just fine.

Hall’s touch on the guitar is always lyrical and melodic even when he’s navigating challenging chord changes, and that’s in evidence on the opening track, “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” Hall opens the tune with Gadd, Hanna and Carter accompanying, then spins into a solo that exercises all the rhythmic flexibility and complexity in the tune before handing over to Paul Desmond. Desmond’s trademark romanticism and restraint are both on display for his short solo, which takes a second verse with Chet Baker’s accompaniment underneath. Baker then takes a proper straight-ahead solo, handing off to Roland Hanna, who takes his own run at the tune while playing with its rhythm and articulation. Carter has his own moment to stretch out, accompanied only by Hall, who picks up his pattern and enters into a duo seemingly simultaneously as Gadd enters on cymbals. At over seven minutes, the track isn’t exactly short, but it feels like it flies by.

“Two’s Blues” is what it says on the tin, a straight ahead blues that features Hall trading lines with Chet Baker. We haven’t come across Baker before in these posts, but his legend precedes him: coming up at the same time as Miles and with (initially) a similar trumpet sound, he cut many “cool jazz” classics as both a trumpeter and a vocalist, but wasn’t able to overcome his addiction to heroin. Here he’s in fine form, providing a melodic solo, but Hall’s solo is blistering, laying down a run of chords that take the song through multiple key changes, then switching it up to a pure melody again.

“The Answer is Yes” is played here as a straight ballad with a solo introduction by Hall, and then an opening in-tempo statement of the melody by Baker. Hall plays the bridge accompanied by Gadd and Carter, and keeps going into a solo that hands off to Hanna, who elegantly improvises around the melody. Baker’s solo relaxes into the tune with Hall playing counterpoint underneath; Hall picks up the solo from there as in the opening, and the whole band plays out. At the ending, Baker plays the melody with Hall answering in a call-and-response form.

The first three tracks, as gorgeous as they are, are really only a warmup for the main event, Hall’s take on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, which occupies the entirety of Side B. The work was already famous thanks to Miles and Gil Evans’ adaptation of it for trumpet and jazz orchestra in Sketches of Spain, but Rodrigo originally wrote it for the guitar, and Hall’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” is a master lesson in blurring the lines between classical and jazz. The opening features Hall playing the melody on electric guitar and accompanying himself with an overdubbed Spanish guitar while Carter provides a sort of bass continuo. Baker and Desmond alternate measures in the initial statement of the melody, and Hall picks it up with Desmond playing counterpoint. And then comes the Sebesky pivot, as Carter lays down a bass line and the whole arrangement shifts into a samba-flavored adaptation of the melody. Here it works; there are no strings, no electric piano, just the core band backing up Hall’s improvisations. Gadd is more active on this track, pushing the beat forward insistently beneath a sensitive solo by Desmond. Baker plays a melancholy solo that combines the lyricism of early 1960s Miles with some of the forthright assertiveness of Freddie Hubbard. Hanna’s solo again plays with rhythm, making more of the samba influence in the arrangement and then shifting into a syncopation that Hall picks up in his next solo. The full band comes back in for a moment, then Hall (again on electric and Spanish guitar), Carter, and Gadd wrap up the track, lingering on the melancholy final notes.

The session for Concierto recorded an additional five(!) bonus tracks that are available on the CD and digital reissues of the album, but the four tracks on the original LP stand as classics of the straight-ahead side of CTI as well as standouts in Hall’s recorded output. Always a gifted collaborator, he rarely performed the long-form arrangements typical of CTI, preferring more straightforward and intimate renditions. We’ll hear one of his early records as leader another time; next week we’ll hear from another guitarist and a completely different flavor of the CTI sound.

You can listen to the album here:

Hubert Laws, In the Beginning

Album of the Week, August 12, 2023

Hubert Laws was having a good few years. The last of his albums we reviewed, Morning Star, was nominated for a Grammy in 1973 for Best Jazz Performance by a Soloist. He had built up a track record as a sideman across a whole slew of CTI recordings—to say nothing of his appearance on Gil Scott-Heron’s major label debut, Pieces of a Man. (That’s Laws playing the killer flute obbligato on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”) And CTI was having a pretty good run as a label, thanks to hits from Deodato and others. So Creed Taylor doubled down, literally, on Laws, and this double album was the result.

In the Beginning has a complicated discographical history. Originally issued in the form I’m reviewing today, a few years later the two disks were unbundled and released separately as Then There Was Light Vol. 1 and 2. We do know that the original record was recorded in four days between February 6 and 11, 1974 at the Van Gelder studio, and released sometime later in 1974. And it was a substantial cast, as always with Laws’ CTI recordings. His brother Ronnie Laws played tenor sax; Bob James, acoustic and electric piano; Richard Tee, organ; Clare Fischer, electric piano; Gene Bertoncini, guitar; Steve Gadd, drums; Airto, percussion; Dave Friedmann, vibes; the omnipresent Ron Carter, bass; and a string quartet. Fischer, James, and Laws all contributed arrangements.

Incidentally, we haven’t come across Clare Fischer’s work in this column before, but you’ve almost certainly heard it, thanks to a long career as an arranger. He was the pianist and arranger for the Hi-Los in the 1950s before swerving into Latin jazz, but had a parallel and far more successful career as an arranger, working on (among many others) Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin, Paul McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt, Chanticleer’s Lost in the Stars, the Buckshot LeFonque project of Branford Marsalis, Michael Jackson’s This Is It, Usher’s Here I Stand, and Prince’s Parade, Sign ‘☮’ the Times, Graffiti Bridge, [Love Symbol], “Pink Cashmere,” The Vault, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic and 3121. (!!!)

It’s a Fischer composition and arrangement that leads off the album. The title track is almost a capsule of jazz development from Ellingtonian chords to Trane-influenced minor key modality to a chunk of avant-garde, which fades into a slow rich blues. The richness of the arrangement falls back to an eight-bar solo for Carter, which then yields to a group blues with Laws taking a high solo. The final turn of the arrangement is into classic CTI jazz-funk, and then it circles back to the abstract theme of the beginning. A nifty little piece, and a great foretaste of what’s ahead.

“Restoration” is a slow waltz, supported by Bob James’s acoustic piano and a thoughtful Carter bass line. Here Laws’ flute recalls his performance with Chick Corea on “Windows,” from his early album Laws’ Clause, later collected with other Chick performances on Inner Space. Some fine Bertoncini guitar work hands off to a reflective Laws solo, and back to a Dave Friedman vibes passage, before the final chorus brings the performance to a meditative close.

That meditative feeling continues with Bob James’ arrangement of “Gymnopédie No. 1” for guitar, flute, piano, bass, vibes and string quartet. One of these years I’ll have to put together a collection of performances of this Erik Satie composition. For emotional reserve and measured tempo, this might be one of the best of the “covers” of the tune. Laws’ solo is by turns elegiac and birdlike, and the arrangement keeps the instruments from crowding each other; in most of the moments you hear only a few voices at a time. It comes too quickly to an end.

“Come Ye Disconsolate” is a gospel staple that received a contemporary pop boost from Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway in 1972, and the performance here is appropriately pop-gospel flavored; improvisatory in the middle verses, with a down-home altar call feel in the final verse. It’s comfortable and easy on the ears.

“Airegin” immediately challenges that relaxation moment, ending Side 2 with a cover of the Sonny Rollins standard with just Laws and Steve Gadd. Gadd here is especially delightful under Laws’ increasingly complex improvisation; he starts with just a steady kick drum pattern, then adds cymbals, snare and tom until it’s as much a proclamation of drum ingenuity as it is a statement of flute virtuosity. It can be easy to forget, with the excellence of the arrangements that usually drape Laws’ CTI work, just how amazing a soloist he was; this track corrects that nicely.

“Moment’s Notice,” a cover of the Coltrane classic, features a fuller big band treatment, with Ronnie Laws’ tenor sax taking an appropriately more prominent voice, then yielding to Laws’ flute util the two end up in (of course) a battle, underpinned by James on piano with some brisk walking bass from Carter and a non-stop barrage of ingenuity on the drum kit from Gadd. It’s a fun exploration of the tune, with some wonderfully pointed dissonance from James keeping it from being just another Trane cover.

Rodgers Grant’s “Reconciliation” provides a way for Laws to shift back to more meditative material, with Carter, Gadd and James closely following. The tune moves in and out of minor modes, with Carter’s high-octave tonic providing the transition. Indeed, while there’s a lot going on with this track, it’s worth just listening to the way Carter negotiates the twists of the melody, providing a steadying pulse under Laws’ flute as it explores increasingly abstract textures, then taking a solo that’s a master class in saying everything with a few notes. This isn’t relaxed reflection, exactly; there’s a touch of anxiety in the way the tune never settles into a single tonality, as if fighting against the eventual concord promised in the title.

As if acknowledging the complexity of the penultimate track, “Mean Lene” is a simpler pleasure, some straight-ahead jazz funk with a Latin tinge. But even here the tempo shifts from measure to measure in the head, not settling down until Friedman’s vibes take the first solo over the rhythm section in a happily sambified mood. But as the track continues to stretch out, some of the conventionality breaks down for something richer and stranger, until it’s no longer clear who’s soloing and who’s supporting. It’s not free jazz exactly, but it’s the track on the album that comes closest to the give and take of a free performance. Throw in a left-field drum solo and a shift back to Latin funk, alongside some overdubbed flute and another rich Clare Fischer arrangement, and we have ourselves a party.

Laws was nominated for another Grammy for this record, and for good reason. It’s one of the most satisfying of the CTI Records discography, and one that most ably shrugs off the potential limitations of the CTI formula to end up at an entirely new place.

You can listen to the album here:

Joe Farrell, Penny Arcade

Album of the Week, July 29, 2023

After the bombast of the last two weeks, one might see the cover of this week’s #albumoftheweek and think: phew. Small group straight ahead jazz. You’d be right about the group size—Joe Farrell brought a sextet into the studio this time, with Herbie Hancock returning on piano and adding Joe Beck on guitar, Herb Bushler on bass, Steve Gadd on drums, and Don Alias on congas. However, rather than straight-ahead sounds, this album continues the turn to jazz-funk that began on Farrell’s previous CTI date, Moon Germs.

In fact, since that record, Farrell had been playing a lot of jazz-funk, and so had his band. Penny Arcade was recorded in October 1973, a month after Herbie Hancock recorded the galactically funky Head Hunters. Steve Gadd had played sessions with Johnny Hammond and the earlier, funkier incarnation of Chuck Mangione’s band. Don Alias had, of course, played with Miles on Bitches Brew, and also played in the Tony Williams Lifetime. Herb Bushler had also played with the Lifetime and also with Melvin Van Peebles. And Joe Beck had played electric guitar on Miles’ “Circle in the Round,” the trumpeter’s first session with an electric guitar, and had performed with a number of jazz and funk combos, including a number of session tracks for James Brown. In fact, it’s likely that Farrell met Beck in Brown’s band, since both played on Get on the Good Foot.

And the album definitely shows its funk roots, though it takes a minute to get there. “Penny Arcade” starts out as a more conventional quintet number, but Joe Beck’s wah-wah laden solo quickly shifts things into the funk zone. Farrell’s solo is less adventurous than many on his early ’70s output as he sticks close to the melody, and the pocket.

That brings us to the mighty “Too High.” The opening is a faithful cover of the Stevie Wonders classic, thanks to some tasty keyboard work from Hancock, Farrell’s soprano sax, and the combined electric onslaught of Beck and Bushler. Herbie’s keyboard playing gets richer and stranger behind each iteration of the chorus, which repeats three times before Farrell takes a solo. Here he’s a little less tethered to the literal melody of the tune and it opens up into a modal exploration over top of a squelchy, funky rhythm section. Farrell’s solo continues, bridging between straight ahead melody, funky rhythm, and avant-garde voicings, before returning to the chorus. Hancock’s solo is full of the melodic flourishes that he brought to Head Hunters, but in a more limited palette; he confines himself to the Fender Rhodes, rather than the riot of synthesizers that appeared on his earlier album. Toward the end of the solo, he extends the tonality into a more explicitly minor key before returning to the melody. Bushler builds a solo around the bent notes of the hook, Beck supporting him with an increasingly spare rhythm until he drops out entirely. The final chorus narrows to a plaintive note from Farrell before returning for a coda. It’s the highlight of the album.

“Hurricane Jane,” by contrast, is a brighter uptempo number that opens with a more prominent Beck over the unified rhythm section, with Farrell sitting back further in the mix. The mood changes and clouds of Echoplexed Fender roll in for a few measures, and then it’s right back to the funk as Farrell takes a fierce Maceo-flavored solo.

“Cloud Cream” begins with Don Alias’s congas and a dual lead on the soprano sax and the Fender. It keeps its salsa flavor going through the first two minutes, then segues to a double-time section before relaxing back into the rhythm, led by Farrell on piccolo. The track is lovely and straightforward, and sets up the closer, “Geo Blue.” Pivoting between slower balladic moments and straight ahead groove, the track seems to sum up the funk, melodic feel, and approachability of the album. It is the most versatile set of sounds on the album, featuring a lovely and effects-free solo from Beck, an acoustic piano interlude from Hancock, and a recurring solo from Farrell on tenor sax that’s plaintive and winsome by turns.

Farrell thus managed a transition from avant-garde leaning straight ahead jazz to pure jazz funk and retained much of his credibility in the process. It’s a hard thing to do, and critics panned the follow-up efforts Upon This Rock and Canned Funk. Those albums were still loved by MCs, though, and were sampled by Kanye West and A Tribe Called Quest, among others. In 2008, 22 years after her father’s death, Farrell’s daughter sued West, Method Man, Redman and Common for sampling “Upon This Rock” without permission. She quietly settled the suit. So though Farrell may not have had a long career, his recordings lived on—and continued to earn money for the family. Next week we’ll hear from another CTI stalwart who is still recording today.

You can listen to the album here: