Saturday Night Quick Hits
Spent last Saturday night like the good old days, with a bottle of Bushmill's and random snatches of my record collection turned up LOUD on my headphones. Here are a few dominant impressions.
Fela Kuti, Shuffering and Shmiling/No Agreement, MCA.
Which of the dozens of Fela discs should a neophyte reach for? Damned if I know. They all galvanize in pretty much the same way. It's all reliable hypnosis, African voodoo for sturdy souls. Tracks are between 10 and 30 minutes long, begin with a riff that takes a few bars to kick into a canter, then lopes strong and effortless like a horse in a field working out the kinks on its own. It keeps going--trance-inducing like Steve Reich or Terry Riley but Afro-warped into serious funk--adding bits of sweat-foam texture, until the horns cross-cut, big and abrupt, like the public address speaker in a high school, and continue to break in on the canter, so you've got polyrhythms and fanfares, an irresistibly danceable tapesty of sound. Sometimes Fela grabs the mike and tells the rich to fuck off in plenty more than so many words, but that's optional to the overall pleasure of the thing. "Shuffering," a rerelease of a pair of discs from the late 70s, follows that template, and is otherwise of interest due to the presence of late Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester Bowie, a majestic clown-shaman who died a few years back, shortly after I'd caught a marvelous gig with him leading another ensemble at St. Catharine's, of all places, in St. Paul. Anyway, Lester is said to have been influential on Fela after their collaboration. Could be, and makes sense. But both didn't need the other to be hot shits worthy of your time. And if you want to tumble into the beguiling, beautiful world of Fela Kuti, originator of "Afrobeat," this is as good a portal as any.
Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, A Night In Tunisia, Bluebird.
Raw hard bop. When you hear this disc, all three of those words fight for italics. Bluebird shrewdly spins the marketing in the direction of collectors: "The only album ever recorded by the legendary drummer's first sextet..." But you should buy it (easy for me to say, on the music-promo gravy train, my mailman a Santa most every day) because this is jazz that's in your face, utterly of the moment 46 years ago, shortly after Bird and Dizzy had forced the bebop revolution on jazz and cats like Blakey were already coursing whitecaps on that new river, using the energy of swing jazz on bop changes, pushing relentlessly enough to create a subgenre inevitably called hard bop. The lineup here is notable for the saxophone tandem of Johnny Griffin and Jackie McLean (who was credited as "Ferris Benda" because he was under contract to Prestige), and each pulls colored strings of handkerchiefs out of their ass when they solo, but it's still Blakey who dominates. You want this album because of the two takes, both over twelve minutes, of "A Night In Tunisia." Dizzy's Latin-bebop gem had not yet become a jazz standard, but Blakey was clearly in love with the tune--he recorded six versions between 1954 and 1960--and these two takes are balls-to-the-wall bashing that documents what can happen when a drumming dynamo in his prime--Blakey was 38 in 1957--decides to stow inhibitions in his watch-pocket and simply call upon the lightning gods to help him wail the tar out of his Gretsch kit. Other band members initially join in on various percussion, adding to the beat deluge, but they're just tinsel to Blakey's angel at the top of the tree. Multiple "mistakes" are made, here and on other tracks, but perfection was obviously of no concern. These versions of "A Night In Tunisia" are break an egg into your beer and chug it after a shot of whiskey style of bebop. And from time to time, even the most sober among us can use a little of that.
Missy Elliott, Under Construction, Elektra.
God Bless Missy Elliott. It took me a long time to warm to her. As much as I dug her first three discs, it felt like Timbaland was doing all the work, an impression strengthened by a series of lackluster records on acts where Missy provided the A&R or production. Timbaland and The Neptunes have learned to save their best beats for Missy--and they are the hottest producers in the R&B/hip hop game right now--but "Under Construction" is Missy maturing into her own skin, and consequently becoming enough of a force in her own right to justify headline status over the killer beats. But that all sounds like crit-speak. What I mean to say is that Missy ratifies her heart this time out, credibly imploring folks not to let career-enhancing beef devolve into senseless murder as it did with Tupac and Biggie, and slinging attitude both on "Pussycat" and on the intro to the next track that explains why "Pussycat" is a feminist joint in gender-servile drag. "Work It" was appropriately the song of 2002--I urge the uninitiated to dance to it and see if it doesn't coax you into saucy-suave fantasy land--as much for Missy's command and triumphantly pelvic flow as for the beats, which deserve to bring the word "phat" out of anachronism. Put simply, I didn't buy Missy's goodtime mama schtick before and I do now. Whether that's growth from me or Missy is debatable. That "Under Construction" prods the booty and the brain at the same time is not.
In closing, kudos to writer Michaelangelo Matos, a huge Fela Kuti fan who probably could tell you which three CDs to start with on the catalog, and who also big-upped Missy's new CD in City Pages, prompting me to pull it out of the pile again on Saturday night.
5:52:08 PM 
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