Take Five: Happy birthday! Happy anniversary! Welcome back!
The passage of time in increments of decades allows for the reappraisal of artists and their work, while the lack of time is part of the reason why I don't reread books.
“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 to check out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other time times.
1. Kenny Dorham at 100
The summer of 1990 was pivotal for my eventual love of jazz. A high school friend spent the summer in Iowa City to live in his older brother's apartment and work to make money for the school year. This is the same friend whose other brother's record collection was transferred to many a Maxell XLII during high school and led me to R.E.M. et al. This brother had many CDs, including three jazz albums that were my gateway: John Coltrane's Blue Train, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers' Live at the Cafe Bohemia, and Kenny Dorham's Una Mas. The title track of the last of these, a 15-minute bossa nova that endlessly loops through its groove while the members of the quintet -- Dorham is joined by Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Butch Warren and Tony Williams -- take turns soloing. The tune hits a peak about two minutes from the end when someone, I always assumed it was Dorham, yells, "Una Mas!" and they launch into the theme one more time. "Sao Paulo," the closing track (with a 15-minute opener, there are only three songs on the album), is just as good. A mere seven minutes long, it starts like an espionage movie soundtrack before settling into another Latin groove that gives way to solos, from Dorham's slow-burning trumpet to Henderson's questing tenor sax. Dorham is receiving the sort of attention that always seemed to elude him during his life as jazz fans and critics celebrate his centenary. You can learn more about Dorham's history and discography at the great JazzWax blog or a deeper appreciation of Dorham's performance of "It Could Happen to You" from Inta Something as shared by Mark Stryker on Ethan Iverson's Transitional Technology Substack.
2. Mark Lanegan - Bubblegum XX
In 2004, we knew Mark Lanegan as one of three things: the singer for the psych-grunge band Screaming Trees, the dour singer behind a string of acoustic-based solo albums, or the ringer increasingly finding his way onto hip albums. With that year's Bubblegum (and the EP, Here Comes That Weird Chill that preceded it), we started to hear the Lanegan that would dominate until his death in 2002, the one that no genre could hold. The dark, brooding intensity of his best work is there, but so are skittering beats and songs with a cinematic sweep. Duets with PJ Harvey would foreshadow a series of albums with Belle and Sebastian chanteuse Isobel Campbell, while much of the rest would set the stage for nearly two more decades of meandering but never dull explorations of what he could do with his incredibly expressive voice. This new expanded edition, Bubblegum XX, includes both Bubblegum and Weird Chill, as well as an album of demos and outtakes. "Methamphetamine Blues," a clanking, squiggly squall of a song about, like seemingly everything else here, the spiral and struggle of addiction1, is still a highlight. But these new songs, including album outtakes and "hotel sessions" that are more stripped down demos and covers, are welcome additions to a canon that isn't getting any bigger. And lest you wonder about that sunny title for an album of dark tales, this from "Bombed" shows how Lanegan could co-opt the most innocent image to convey despair:
When I'm bombed
I stretch like bubblegum
And look too long straight at the morning sun
3. Fennesz - Venice 20
I bought Lanegan's album as soon as it was released and have lived with it for 20 years. Fennesz's Venice is an album also celebrating its 20th anniversary with an expanded reissue, but it is something I came to much more recently. Life circumstances led me to seek out more ambient music about five or six years ago, and the resulting tangents quickly led me to Christian Fennesz's music. I won't pretend to have the vocabulary to parse slices of the broader electronic instrumental music culture, suffice to say I was draw to his blend of droning guitars and glitchy electronics. Because I was encountering a lengthy catalog all at once, it was difficult for individual albums to make a mark. I spent a lot of time with Endless Summer, his acknowledged breakthrough, but the other albums all blurred into one mass of soothing sound. Spending a bit more time with Venice in its expanded state, I better appreciate its unique textures and mood. I've also since had the chance to see Fennesz live, and it was one of the most assaultive, visceral shows I have experienced. His guitar, fed through various pedals and processors, created a wave of sound that I felt as it hit my body. It completely recontextualized his music. I realized that while this music at low volume in headphones can be soothing and peaceful, it also can —perhaps as intended — be a physical experience, the quiet moments not lulls, but the relenting of an insistent push. I still prefer this music at "3" rather than "11," but appreciated, as I listened to this remastered Venice, the way soft or loud presentations could drastically alter these songs, a light accent now rendered as a piercing jab, a warm swell now a disorienting wave.
4. ‘Against rereading’
People are always surprised to learn that I'm not a rereader. I'm always surprised when they assume I am. Reading a new piece by Australian writer Oscar Schwartz in The Paris Review, "Against Rereading," I recognized all of the arguments in favor of the practice. In fact, the piece comes across more as an argument for than against. After spending paragraph after paragraph recounting how avid rereaders promote their practice, making perfectly reasonable arguments in its favor, Schwartz simply states, "The most obvious argument against rereading is, of course, that there just isn’t enough time." He does get philosophical and suggest that to non-rereaders each book is a little life, and that once it has been read, it has been exhausted. That feels silly to me. My argument against it is more pragmatic: Every book one rereads is a new book not read. As much as I enjoy reliving rewarding experiences — eating a favorite meal, reminiscing with old friends about long ago exploits, or standing in front of a favorite painting to marvel once again at the brushstrokes — I like to experience new things even more. Yes, I have found it beneficial and enjoyable to occasionally reread something — though that is usually a poem or a short story rather than an entire novel — but I find it more enjoyable to dive into a new world in the pages of an unread book. I suppose if the resource of time was unlimited, there would be no reason to not occasionally revisit something. But even then, I believe I would reread only selectively. I'm sure there is more I could share about the arguments in favor of rereading, but that would necessitate going back to the piece and, well, you know.
5. The return of Oasis
I have wanted to write something about the Oasis reunion and the fact that, while I wouldn’t go anywhere near one of those concerts for reasons that are almost exclusively nonmusical, I do enjoy about an album’s worth of their work. I couldn’t figure out a way to talk about it that would add anything to the discourse (and still might not have done so), but I was intrigued by Damon Krukowski’s take in his wonderful Dada Drummer Almanach Substack. He used it as a jumping off point for a discussion of national identity, positing Oasis’s “Britpop” tag against the reductive “Krautrock” term thrown around and dissected in a new book, Neu Klang by Christopher Dallach. But it is Krukowski’s description of Oasis that caught my eye: “Oasis sound like ‘classic rock’ to me, meaning, anything that fits a radio station that plays, ‘Best of the 60s, 70s, 80s… and 90s!’” That, back in the mid-90s, was the entirety of their appeal. At a time when guitars were falling out of favor in pop radio, Oasis flew the six-string flag. Yes, the lyrics were awful, the songs a Beatlesque pastiche, but big, dumb rock was a vanishing presence. There was great music — much better music — being made in 1995, but there was nothing quite like this, and it scratched an itch. Call it what you will, complain that no one should pay $200 and more to see it, but I for one am glad it was there, and must admit a few spins of Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory over the past couple of weeks.
After writing this, I found a write-up of the reissue at Rolling Stone, which had this quote from Lanegan (by way of CMJ New Music Monthly) from 2004: “Every one of these goddamn songs is about [drugs], and when I’m talking about love, it’s not a human love. But that’s just me. And luckily, some people can connect to this shit, this music, that aren’t junkies. But I always figured that I was making this music for my own people.”