Take Five: 36 strings (or maybe 42)
Marc Ribot's memoir took me through a winding path of guitarists this week, from Derek Bailey to Shane Parish to Robert Quine to Chris Forsyth to Rez Abassi... and a guest appearance by William Tyler
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
1. Marc Ribot — Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist
This week found me reading about and listening to guitars, and it mainly stems from reading the memoir of guitarist Marc Ribot, Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist. Ribot will be in Iowa City on Oct. 19, performing his score for Yakov Protazanov’s pioneering sci-fi film "Aelita: Queen of Mars" as part of the Refocus Film Festival, and then reading from and discussing Unstrung as part of the Iowa City Book Festival. As you may recall, I have been slowly working my way through Tom Waits' discography in part because I wanted to hear Ribot's contributions to the meat of his catalog. I was somewhat familiar with Ribot's solo work and his albums with his trio, Ceramic Dog, over the last several years. But what has grabbed me thus far is Unstrung. I likely wouldn't have ever picked it up were it not for the festival connection, but I have found it to be a fascinatingly disjointed look at Ribot's varied career. The quote above, which opens the book, sets the tone. It not only accurately describes what Ribot brings to most of his projects — a guitar that doesn't always sound like a guitar — but that notion of struggle. Nothing comes easy, or certainly nothing worth much.
2. Derek Bailey — Ballads
Included in the book are Ribot's liner notes for Derek Bailey's 2002 album Ballads. Before this week, I was more familiar with Bailey's reputation than his music, usually only encountering him in performance with others like Evan Parker, so I was happy to dip a toe in his work through this relatively accessible starting point. The 2002 album finds Bailey interpreting standards like "Stella by Starlight" and "Body and Soul" by introducing familiar tunes and then subverting them, amassing angular phrases on top out of which those strands of melody occasionally writhe back into earshot. Bailey is not known for doing things one would expect with a guitar. You could say he struggles against it, works to subvert what a listener might expect. The result, for those willing to spend time with the work, is the revelation of something new, something that reveals a new facet, a new tone. As Ribot writes, “Of course, even in free improvisation, what emerges from imagination is largely what went into memory, or some synthesis of its elements.” That makes Ballads all the more interesting, because Bailey teases the ear with a familiar phrase, a pleasing arrangement of notes, and then pulls the rug, forcing the listener to meet him in the middle. It's not for everyone, but anyone could benefit. Even thinking about why you don't like this can make you better appreciate what you do like.
3. Shane Parish — Repertoire
Guitarist Wendy Eisenberg1 cites Bailey's Ballads in the liner notes to Shane Parish's newish album, Repertoire, which finds the young guitarist offering his own reinterpretations of a disparate slate of songs. Eisenberg and Parish both play in Bill Orcutt's Guitar Quartet, so they know from deconstruction. Parish writes of his own project, "For this record, I adhered to two principles: Andres Segovia’s famous statement that the guitar is an “orchestra in miniature” and Thelonious Monk’s observation: “they came for the melody." That means songs by Ornette Coleman, Aphex Twin and Fred Rogers sit comfortably alongside one another, all featuring melody-forward acoustic guitar arrangements. This is almost the antithesis of Bailey's album in that it takes things that could be seen as challenging to the casual listener and renders them in approachable fashion. There is little that is jarring here — unless you think of the juxtapositions in the tracklist — but rather the results are almost prosaic. You may listen for the novelty of hearing a familiar song rendered in an unfamiliar way, but you will come back because Parish has created a cohesive album of intricately arranged acoustic music that stands on its own regardless of the source material.
4. Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet — Intents & Purpose
Making a Spotify playlist of the original songs covered on Repertoire reminded me of a similar exercise I did a few years ago inspired by Intents & Purpose, an album of acoustic covers of 70s "Jazz-rock classics" by the Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet. These two albums may have a similar conceit, but they are very different. Source material is the biggest difference. That Spotify playlist for Intents & Purpose finds the original versions to be a cohesive listen, with songs by Weather Report, Tony Williams Lifetime and Mahavishnu Orchestra flowing well from one to the next. The playlist of Repertoire originals, on the other hand, is a bit of aural whiplash, the originals by Charles Mingus, Mr. Rogers, and John Cage sounding like a spin across the radio dial in a Lynchian fever dream. The, well, intents are different as well (and they both differ from that of Bailey). Parish is mining for elements to bring to the fore — "I often ignore the chords that are written in charts or played on recordings, and I try to determine the harmony that the melody is implying," he writes of his take on Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch" (listen above) — while Abbasi is more faithful to his source material. His goal seems to be to take away some of the elements that make jazz fusion a bit too much to take for some and leave the melodies and instrumental interplay intact. There is nowhere to hide in these acoustic arrangements, a sort of de-evolution of jazz back to basic elements.
5. Robert Quine/Fred Maher — Basic; BASIC — This is Basic
Circling back to Ribot's book, he also writes affectionately about guitarist Robert Quine, best known for his work in Richard Hell and the Voidoids and his short stint backing Lou Reed (listen to Blue Mask if you haven’t, or again if you have). I had already been meaning to pull out a left field entry in Quine's slim catalog, his album Basic with drummer Fred Maher, and Ribot's book was the additional nudge I needed. The album has been on my mind because one of my favorite guitarists, Chris Forsyth, joined recently with fellow guitarist Nick Millevoi and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Mikel Patrick Avery to form BASIC, a group inspired by the Quine/Maher outing. That original 1984 album found the guitarist and drummer creating what are essentially "basic" tracks, beds for what would usually be augmented by vocals or solos. Instead of adding those elements, however, they offer the songs as is, instrumental music stripped to base elements. Though Quine does solo here and there— something one usually comes to a Quine record to hear — it is infrequent, sometimes frustratingly so. Forsyth and Co. mine similar territory, and show the same restraint. Forsyth is one of the foremost shredders in whatever one calls non-commercial rock these days, and there is a decided lack of ripping solos here. As with the Quine album, one must reckon with that, meeting the album on its own terms. I'll always prefer Quine and Forsyth in full show-off mode, but these two albums, like the others here, offer the chance to think about guitar music in a different way, which is a reward in and of itself.
BONUS!
Last weekend I took advantage of an empty house to listen to some records. First up was The RSD reissue on MERGE of William Tyler’s Deseret Canyon, his first foray in to solo acoustic guitar. I was reading and thus not paying close attention, but it did seem as if the songs were longer than expected. I chalked it up to being distracted. I looked the album up on Discogs to see if there were any differences between this version and the original, which was initially released by a smaller label under the band name Paper Hats2. Reading this comment on the listing, I quickly realized what was going on: "My wife mistakenly played it at 33 1/3 and it sounded great that way, too!" Sure enough, this 45 rpm pressing was spinning at 33 1/3, that 13 minute opening track song taking a more leisurely 17. I can concur — it sounded great that way, too, a perfectly languorous soundtrack for a Saturday morning. I flipped the switch and listened again. Still good, but different. Speaking of allowing one to think about guitar music — in this case very specific guitar music — in a different way, I can attest that the music of William Tyler is a great listen at any speed.
Speaking of William Tyler, I saw him earlier this year in another guitar-saturated week:
Thankful for Eisenberg’s presence here, because yes, I realize this is otherwise a big ol’ post full of nothing but dudes. It’s a timely reminder to move her just-released new album, Viewfinder, to the top of my virtual listening pile. At a Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet show I saw this summer, each of the three guitarists who are not Bill Orcutt (Eisenberg, Parish and Ava Mendoza) did a short solo performance before the quartet began. Based on her set, I’m eager to hear Eisenberg’s album.
Bringing things even fuller circle, Forced Exposure described that original 2009 issue thusly (all typos intact): “The Apalachian meets Raga meets Vienna classic meets Hawaiian slack. The Fahey thing, the Loren Mazzacane Conners thing, the Ribot thing, the Jansch thing, the O'Rourke ding, the Datashock dthing.”
Ah yes, that Ribot thing, always lurking this week.