By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World Jacob Fred Jazz Trio "Live at Your Mama's House" (Plum-E Records) The Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey started out several years ago with the jazzy name but an overly funky sound. The improv thing was there in spots, but sometimes the boys seemed more concerned with being MCs than emissaries. After the first couple of years and the first thousand Medeski, Martin and Wood bootlegs, Jacob Fred evolved into a true jazz odyssey — and never have its members so deeply explored the innocently psychedelic spirit of improvisation than in this side project, a trio of keyboardist Brian Haas, bassist Reed Mathis and drummer Matt Edwards. The Jacob Fred Trio has been playing weekly at the Bowery for six months, and this single disc captures a handful of the band's best moments there, including Haas' invigorating "Good Energy Perpetuates Good Energy," a meandering Thelonious Monk medley that morphs into an original tribute to former Tulsa bassist Al Ray ("The Man Who Adjusted Tonalities") and a rhapsodic opener, "Pacific," by Odyssey trombone player Matt Leland's father, Max. All of it moves in the same impressionistic space, not leaving you with any lasting tunes but leaving your ears a little looser. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Negativland is a band of self-described "culture jammers" whose musical collage art has landed them in hot water during the last decade. The band's music is a process of cutting up, splicing together and warping various sounds and recordings, netting the flotsam and jetsam of our media culture and fusing it back together in striking, poignant and sometimes grotesque new shapes — and often, new statements. It's just like those art-school collages, only in aural, not visual, art. It's a less-traveled road which has made all the difference for Negativland. Two decades and countless lawsuits into its career, Negativland is touring for the first time in seven years. The True/False Tour brings the band's culture blending into a live and ultimately more bracing setting. The multi-media show incorporates musical instruments and countless sound devices, as well as eight film projectors and three slide projectors. "It took us two years to develop this show because we wanted to be able to do it right and to create something that very few people have experienced before," said Mark Hosler, a charter Negativland member. "About 85 percent of the show, too, is all original material that nobody has heard before. We actually even collage our own material from our own records." Indeed, by 1986 — when a group showed up named Pop Will Eat Itself — Negativland already had established the recipe for that meal. Raiding the sonic junkyards of suburban culture — television, telephones, other people's records -- and juicing up the sounds with occasional keyboards and percussion, Negativland began in 1980 making records that were disjointed aural sculptures. The core members of Negativland met at an after-school job: conducting telephone surveys about people's favorite TV shows. Discovering a shared fascination for tinkering with noises, they followed a friend's advice and assembled their first collages into a self-titled album. "The covers were all hand-made, not because that's what we wanted to do but because we didn't know how you got things printed, how you turned a piece of artwork into printed pieces of cardboard," Hosler said. "So I spent my senior semester of art class making the covers by hand, using old wallpaper books and such. The covers, basically, were collages, too." In the visual arts, this appropriation rarely raises any concerns, but in music — particularly since the advent of hip-hop and sampling — the word "appropriation" attracts lawyers like blood attracts sharks. Negativland has received more than its share of mail with "Attorneys at Law" in the return address, starting with 1989's "Helter Stupid" album, the cover of which featured a photo of convicted Minnesota mass murderer David Broom. The album was a disturbing masterpiece on media manipulation. The most famous run-in with the law, though, occurred a couple of years later when Negativland picked on someone much bigger. The band released a single called "U2," which made fun of Bono's band by picking out the melody of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" on kazoos and included tapes of a profanity-laced studio tantrum by swell-guy radio star Casey Kasem. The resulting legal battle with U2 galvanized the band as crusaders for redefining the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. The battle and the band's resulting theories are chronicled in a book, "Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2," and the group's web site is now a clearinghouse for discussion of the limits of sampling and collage uses of other musicians' work — the difference between piracy and "the transformative re-use of material from multiple sources to create new, original works . . . Collage is not theft." "In the visual arts, collage is making one-of-a-kind pieces, and it's under the label of fine art. Music, though, is mass produced. It's pop culture. The monied interests are more involved and they make it into a whole new ball game," Hosler said. "Nobody cared when we were doing this back in the '80s. Only with hip-hop becoming a bigger part of music did things change. "The mentality has changed. We saw it happen with the `U2' single, and now it's happening with computers and the Internet. Napster is a front-page story on USA Today, and it's all about the issues we started dealing with in '90 and '91. Once it becomes digital, the concept of theft and property is turned on its head. The original and the copy are the same. And the way the music industry makes money is by having tight control over the distribution, so once that becomes endangered, they freak out. These threats against Napster are the terrified screams of a dying industry that wants to stop the future from happening." Hosler, in fact, sees virtually all art as collage art. In other words, every new idea is simply the recombination of other, old ideas into a new form. "That's the natural creative impulse — it's transformational more than purely creative, as in starting from nothing," he said. "We take chunks of actual things and recombine them. It's not outright counterfeit when you create something new. But now these businesses want to stop that, stop people from being creative. Time-Warner and all that — they want total control of everything and they want us to sit back and be passive consumers. If you follow that logic all the way through, it's the death of culture. It's mean-spirited, and it's just dumb." Negativland When: 8 p.m. Thursday Where: Other Side, 6906 S. Lewis Ave. Tickets: $15 at the door BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World The Isley Brothers did OK with "Twist and Shout," but the Beatles made it a monster hit. Same story throughout the '60s with "Respectable" (the Yardbirds, the Outsiders), "Nobody But Me" (the Human Beinz) and "Shout" (Lulu). These other groups copied the Isleys' blueprint pretty closely and somehow scored bigger hits with the same songs. The Isleys eventually got their due — with R&B hits such as the shimmering "This Old Heart of Mine," "It's Your Thing" and "Who's That Lady?" — and they look back on those early days not as struggles but as a time when their influence helped direct the flow of modern music. "The Isley Brothers have always been there as some sort of reference point," said Ernie Isley in an interview this week. "We're in the fine print, in the details of rock 'n' roll. Our name may not be called out first, but you always see us in connection with many of the greats. People talk about Hendrix blah blah blah — and the Isleys are there. People talk about the Beatles blah blah blah — and the Isleys are there ... Now with rap and hip-hop, we're the most sampled of anybody. We're still in the mix." Indeed, the Isley Brothers have been there from the beginning, when the first trio of Isley siblings — Ronald, Rudolph and O'Kelly — traveled from Cincinnati to New York City to record a string of doo-wop singles in the '50s. These first songs didn't take the group far at all, but during a 1959 performance in Washington, D.C., they added a line to their spirited cover of "Lonely Teardrops." The ad lib: "You know you make me want to shout." The audience went wild. An RCA executive saw the show, and when he signed the Isleys soon after, he told them to build their first RCA single around that catch phrase. The song "Shout" was born, and though the Isleys' debut of it never cracked the Top 40, "Shout" would become an oft-covered classic, becoming a hit all over again with Lloyd Williams' version in the 1978 movie "Animal House." "We show up in movies all the time," Ernie said. "That movie 'Out of Sight' with George Clooney uses (Public Enemy's Isley-sampling hit) 'Fight the Power' and 'It's Your Thing' running throughout. I didn't know that when I went to see the movie. I felt proud and humbled at the same time. I thought, 'Lord, have mercy. Did we do this music that keeps pushing these buttons?' " Ernie Isley joined his older brothers in the family business just as the group was hitting it big. His first job was playing bass on the Isleys' No. 2 1969 hit, "It's Your Thing." He backed up his brothers with bass, guitar and vocals until he and two other family members — brother Marvin and brother-in-law Chris Jasper — joined the older three on 1973's "3 + 3" album, featuring the next huge Isleys hit, "Who's That Lady?" "That was my official coming-out party," Ernie said. The inclusion of Ernie added a new dimension to the Isleys' lite funk. Trained originally as a drummer, Ernie found his way to guitar, largely inspired by Jose Feliciano's cover of the Doors' "Light My Fire." Not that he didn't have one of the greatest living guitarists living in his house. During the Isleys' 1964 tour, they recruited a young guitarist from Seattle named Jimmy James. He played on "Testify," the Isleys' first single for their independent record label, T-Neck. A couple of years later, at the Monterrey Pop Festival, the world was introduced to this guitarist under a modified name: Jimi Hendrix. "I was 12 years old when Jimmy came around," Ernie recalled. "All I saw was a very talented musician. I couldn't understand why he practiced all the time, because he was already so good. But the thing I saw was more real than the thing everybody else saw. I saw the unsimonized, unhyped, real, living, breathing person living in my house. My brothers bought him his first Stratocaster. "People used to have conversations where they'd ask, 'Who's the better guitarist: Clapton or Hendrix?' I was never popular, because I'd say Jose Feliciano. I mean, he took this song by the Doors and showed how melodious it is -- and he was playing acoustic, and he was blind. I thought Hendrix was great, too, but not because of 'Purple Haze' or 'Foxey Lady' but because of what I heard him play without an amp. Nobody wanted to hear that, though." The Isley Brothers and Jimi Hendrix both were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. During the ceremony, Ernie joined the all-star band to sing "Purple Haze," even playing the guitar behind his back. The Isleys have found new life in the era of hip-hop, too. As Ernie mentioned, more rappers sample Isley Brothers songs than even James Brown. "It started with Public Enemy doing 'Fight the Power.' That was one of the first samples. That was before there were any ground rules as to how the songwriters and publishers were going to deal with this. After that, it seemed we started getting about a dozen requests for different songs out of our catalogs on a daily basis. We still do." The current Isley Brothers lineup includes Ronald, Ernie and Marvin, the same trio that recorded the group's latest album in 1996, "Mission to Please." That record was the group's first gold album since 1983's "Between the Sheets." "We're working on another CD," Ernie said. "We gotta keep going. This Isley Brothers banner has been flying for more than 40 years, and I get the feeling there are some people who are just now starting to pay attention. I mean, what these guys do seems to dictate which way the wind is going to blow against the flag. You know, people know what Britney Spears is doing and what the Backstreet Boys are doing. But what are the Isleys doing?" The Isley Brothers When: 8 p.m. Thursday Where: Brady Theater, 105 W. Brady Tickets: $40.50 on the floor, $36.50 in the balcony, available at the Brady box office and all Dillard's outlets BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Hanson "This Time Around" (Island Def Jam) Anyone here heard Mitch Ryder? OK, let me rephrase: has anyone under 40 heard Mitch Ryder? He and his quintet, the Detroit Wheels, did for soul music in the '60s what Elvis did for rock 'n' roll in the '50s: introduced it to a white audience. Ryder, the Spencer Davis Group, the Animals — these groups comprised the bridge from the underlying groove of Temptations and Four Tops hits to the soul influences that showed up at the turn of the '70s in groups ranging from Joe Cocker, Traffic (featuring Steve Winwood, the engine in the Spencer Davis Group), all the way to Springsteen. Ryder, in particular, was an indispensable shaman. With his frayed, dizzying wail, Ryder led the Wheels' piston-pumping backbeat through a string of tightly wound hits in '66 and '67 — "Jenny Take a Ride," "Sock It to Me, Baby," "Devil With the Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly" -- all of which evoked the pioneers of soul before him while laying down his own tread on the music. Without Ryder's shot of energy, it's questionable whether fellow Detroit rockers like Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, the MC5 and even the Stooges would have had enough gunpowder to explode out of Motor City. The Hanson brothers know a lot about Ryder. They covered a few of his hits in concert and on the resulting live album largely because they were raised on that music. Living abroad and being home-schooled here in Tulsa throughout their youth (which ain't over yet), they enjoyed a unique isolation with those old rock and soul collections and fed on that same high energy — so much so that when they themselves finally emerged into the musical world, their own unique gifts transmitted the same power. On the trio's eagerly anticipated follow-up to its multi-platinum debut, they finally seize that opportunity, like Ryder, to divine the hidden glories of American soul music to a new generation — a new, white, affluent generation — as well as to define their own sights, synergies and sound. In summary, it RRRocks. "This Time Around" could have been a wreck. Early reports were not good — initial sessions with former Cars frontman and producer extraordinaire Ric Ocasek had been scrapped for murky reasons (translation: the record label didn't hear another "MMMBop"), and Hanson had been shoved back into the studio with Stephen Lironi, the producer of Hanson's smash debut, "Middle of Nowhere." The debut was certainly a good record, but had Hanson merely retreaded it for the follow-up, they'd be destroyed. Too many eyes were on them, too many ears — too many expectations for a great leap forward. What a leap they've made. Lironi's presence on "This Time Around" can be heard in the pitiful scratching sounds that dumb down otherwise solid tracks like "If Only," but the new record is clearly a committed assertion by three willful youngsters determined to avoid being written off amid the boy-band craze they helped to create. There's still not another "MMMBop" here. One wonders how much they had to fight the corporate money-changers to take the steps evident here — the unabashed soul, the high-octane rock 'n' roll — and whether the marketing department at Island Def Jam is stymied as to how they'll push the record. They certainly can't be worried about the record's potential. "This Time Around" could play on virtually any radio station — that is, within any confining format. Send "Dying to Be Alive" to a classic R&B station. Drop "Save Me" among the silly modern rock balladry of Kid Rock and Third Eye Blind, or at least send it to adult contemporary. Make sure to twist the arm of mainstream rock moguls so they play "This Time Around." Heck, they don't even have to back-announce it — run it up against a Black Crowes song and your average KMOD listener probably wouldn't even blink. The worry is whether or not those other radio stations will deign to give Hanson a chance this time around. After all, Hanson's a kiddie band, right? They're like the Backstreet Boys, they don't belong at the table with the adults. That attitude is pretty prevalent (especially among the audience this record could hit the hardest — people my age, on either side of 30), and "This Time Around" likely will be a slow burn compared to "Middle of Nowhere." There's plenty of fuel for the fire, though. The tunefulness and the hooks they mastered the first time around are still here, but the tunes are more complex, the hooks more skillfully cast. The title-track single tip-toes out of the gate with a soft piano introduction, but by the chorus it's chugging with a 300-horsepower riff and see-sawing between the contrary powers of Journey and Stevie Wonder. "Dying to Be Alive" draws heavily on the boys' soul influences and features a small gospel choir led by Rose Stone (of Sly and the Family Stone). On "In the City," Hanson dances on the edge of accessibility, bleeding off the sunshine from the arrangement and singing a pretty desperate plea to an adulterous partner. "You Never Know" opens the record as if the boys have gone to War, brightening a heavy groove and singing, perhaps portentously, "You never know, baby / You never know, baby / You judge the song by a lie that was told." Or he could be singing "soul." As with all great soul singers, it's hard to discern the words accurately. Taylor, the middle Hanson boy and its forthright lead vocalist, is certainly a great soul singer, possibly one day to be hailed among the best of Generation Y (though Macy Gray is going to give him one hell of a fight for that title). His voice is immensely powerful and dynamic — if that come-back line "Do you know why I died?" at the end of the title track doesn't stop your heart, double-check that you're still actually alive — and when, as he grows older, it becomes a partner to his passions, he might rewrite the story of Jericho. It's a SOULFUL voice, too, full of chewy inflections and gritty, guttural wails. It seems to come from an unspoken inner drive, a burgeoning catharsis, more than a heady desire to convey a literate message. Granted, soul music is virtually dead today — replaced by slick, machine-driven R&B, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the rhythm and blues that created the acronym in the first place — but Taylor's pipes and his brothers' developing rhythmic chops on this CD could be cracking open the coffin. (And to the credit of Isaac's and Zac's instrumental talents, this album's guest players like Jonny Lang and Blues Traveler's John Popper wholeheartedly fail to steal the show.) Ryder & Co. translated the music across lines of color; Hanson could transfer the music across lines of age and experience. Either way, "This Time Around" is one teeth-rattling, high-energy rock fest. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World In 1971, Willis Alan Ramsey cut his first record. The self-titled debut, released through Leon Russell's Tulsa-based Shelter Records, sold modestly, but it packed an influential wallop in Ramsey's adopted home state of Texas. That one record, it has been claimed, single-handedly spawned the alternative-Nashville stance that has made Austin, Texas, the so-called live music capital of the world. Just don't ask Ramsey when his next record will appear. "That's an area I really don't want to go to," he says, dodging the requisite inquiries about his work since that first — and, thus far, only — album ("Have you been writing all this time?" "Has anything been recorded?" "Will we ever see a second album?"). "Willis Alan Ramsey" remains the songwriter's one-hit wonder, and nearly 30 years later many musicians still invoke it as the fountainhead of their inspiration. A Ramsey show was the first concert a young Lyle Lovett ever attended, and he has reported that it inspired him to start writing songs. Lovett also has covered songs from that "Ramsey" album, as have such artists as Jimmy Buffett, America, Waylon Jennings, Sam Bush, Shawn Colvin, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kate Wolf, Jerry Jeff Walker and, of course, the Captain and Tenille, who made Ramsey's "Muskrat Love" a Top 5 hit in 1976. Indeed, never has one batch of 11 songs had such stamina, and rarely does one find a songwriter so humble -- almost insecure — about such influence. While remaining enigmatic about his affairs during the last 29 years, Ramsey frequently writes off his initial experience to the pure luck of youth and happenstance. "I was just a kid knocking around," he said, in a rare interview last week, in which Ramsey eked out a tale of time, Tulsa and tenacity. Seeking Shelter Born in Birmingham, Ala., and raised in Dallas by his Georgia-native parents, Ramsey graduated high school and "got away as quick as I could." He dropped south to Austin where he explored some of the guitar-picking he'd been tinkering with. Ray Wylie Hubbard's fledgling band took notice of his skills and asked Ramsey to open some of its shows in 1969. "I was playing the UT coffee house, and I heard that Leon (Russell) and Gregg Allman were in town playing a festival and staying at the same hotel. So I walked in, knocked on both their doors and told them I thought they should give me a listen," Ramsey said. "It was a pretty asinine thing to do back then, and I guess they thought I was so cocky they gave me the chance. I played my songs for Leon and his roadie, and then for Gregg and (Allman Brothers guitarist) Dickey Betts, right there in their rooms." Both musicians heard promise in Ramsey's material, and both offered him contracts on their record labels — Allman's Atlanta-based Capricorn Records and Russell's Shelter, based then in Los Angeles. Ramsey sought Shelter — with possibly purely personal motives. "I've never really thought about this," Ramsey chuckled, "but I guess since my whole family was from Georgia I liked the idea of going to L.A. better than being closer to Atlanta." Mad dogs and Southerners Ramsey headed to L.A. to cut his record in Russell's home studio, "probably the first professional home studio anyone had in the world," he said. He was largely left to his own devices, as Russell had decided to move back to Tulsa. "At that point, Leon decided he'd had enough of North Hollywood and wanted to move back to Tulsa," Ramsey said. "He and Denny (Cordell, Russell's and Ramsey's producer and manager) had good luck with Shelter, so they took it home. Leon bought that whole block with a church on it and put in a studio . . . He left me in his L.A. place, so I got to learn how to work in a studio — by myself. I learned how to write in the studio. That's something Leon taught me: how to use the studio as a writing tool." Most of Ramsey's record was completed in L.A., with Russell helping out and adding piano to one track, "Goodbye Old Missoula." It was that work directly with Russell that made Ramsey feel every bit the lucky kid just knocking around. "I was a kid musically, and I was stretched and stretched to the point where I was way past my musical abilities," he said. "Leon would put you in a studio with Jim Keltner on drums, Carl Radle on bass and Don Preston on electric guitar, and he'd sit at the piano. He'd say, `Well, this song needs an acoustic guitar solo. Willis, why don't you just play a solo here.' I was 20 and not in the space where I could just do that on the spot yet. I was definitely over my head." Ramsey's record came out in 1972 and sold moderately -- not well enough to give Ramsey the escape he needed. Ramsey -- like nearly all Shelter artists, from Russell to Phoebe Snow — fell out with Cordell, but without big profits he couldn't get out of his Shelter contract. "I didn't have enough sales to be able to just leave and tell my lawyers to clean it up. Tom Petty did, Phoebe Snow did, I couldn't afford to," he said. So he sat out his contract — all eight years of it. By the time it ran out, it was 1980, Ramsey was in the doldrums of a divorce and had been all but forgotten by non-musicians. He bought some synthesizers and "fooled around with those," but he quickly found that there was no place for a shy, sensitive songwriter in the "Urban Cowboy" '80s. "I just didn't want to play in a place with a mechanical bull in it," Ramsey said. I will survive Since then, Ramsey says, cryptically, he's been writing. He wants to record again, but he's not sure he'll ever get to do it on his terms — which is the only way it'll happen, he said. "My No. 1 goal right now is to have more kids. No. 2 is to make more records," he said. "But making records these days requires a record label, and label budgets are small these days. That record of mine cost $80,000 to make, which would be about $300,000 in today's dollars. It was a pretty expensive first-time record in 1972. I'm not the kind of guy who can make a $30,000 record. It takes me longer. There's too much I want to do." He still performs around the region — "some old songs, some new" — drawing a sizeable cult following. He's even appeared on a record recently, coming out of the woodwork to sing on two Lovett records in the '90s, "Joshua Judges Ruth" and "I Love Everybody." Last year, Koch Records reissued "Willis Alan Ramsey" on CD, and the record has begun to find a fresh audience. "It still gets around," Ramsey said. "It's been a real work-horse all this time." Ramsey on Oklahoma Willis Alan Ramsey recorded his one and only record for Shelter Records back in Leon Russell's heyday. That meant hanging out in Tulsa at Russell's many area studios, where "you'd go to pick up the phone, and it would be George Harrison or someone," Ramsey said. Here are a few of his recollections and praise of his Okie counterparts: "I was in the process of finishing up my record and got to work with people like Leon and Jamie Oldaker. J.J. Cale took me in the studio. I was hanging out with guys like Gary Gilmore and Jesse Davis, both of whom played with Taj Mahal. Chuck Blackwell, too. Some pretty serious musicians came out of Tulsa. I mean, Jimmy Lee Keltner — he and Oldecker . . . if Tulsa can produce two drummers like that, well, they're the best, in my opinion. Those Tulsa boys raised me in the studio." "When I was playing the Cellar Door Club in (Washington) D.C., this long-haired kid would come sit on the back steps, and I'd get him in for free. He was going to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. When he finally got up enough nerve to play the acoustic guitar for me, he turned out this amazing stuff. He said, 'What should I do with this?' and I said, 'I dunno, but you'd better do something.' It was Michael Hedges." "I still say this, and most people I know say it, too: Leon Russell is a musical genius. He still is. He's so incredibly talented, and he's a free thinker. Lots of Tulsans are . . . But I don't think he ever really scratched the surface of his ability." "It was in the '60s when I figured out I wanted to write and say some things. In New York, I found a book called Born to Win, a compilation of Woody Guthrie's songs, stories, poems, letters and drawings. It was this fabulous direct hit from his pen, with his own unique voice. Even when I think about that book today, it still really does motivate me. He was another free-thinking Okie. There was something about the way he could connect with the thought and deliver it to you totally unvarnished. So visceral, but so elegant . . . (My song) 'Boy From Oklahoma' is sort of a romanticized version of Woody." |
Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
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