Yusef Lateef is one of my dad's favourite recording artists and his "Russell and Elliot" (a weeping, plaintive blues) is one of the first songs I can remember hearing.
From Lateef's excellent Live At Pep's recording comes "Sister Mamie," a jazz, blue and far-eastern.
The drums are off to the side, pushing the song from left to right, not supporting it or pushing forward. The piano is an insistent low-down shake of the head. The bass slides. Lateef is on senai, a quadruple-reed woodwind. He wails and cries. His playing frames the other more traditional solos in the context of an anguish inexpressible by the twelve-tone blues.
Play it for your babies. They will end up like me.
***
Is it OK to write lyrics like these:
''Histories of ages past
Unenlightened shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity
'Tis then when the hurdy gurdy man
Comes singing songs of love''?
Certainly not.
However, colossal distorted electric guitars (and sitars, of course), constant drum fills and a twee voice affected with tremolo join his special brand of pre-prog fantasy lyrics to make "Hurdy Gurdy Man" a strange and beautiful classic of psychedelic folk/rock.
For further listening consider Jim O'Rourke's perverse hurdy gurdy drone album, Happy Days.
Just one today (and a half) . But it's a doozy.
***
The comments on Friday's post, as I'm sure many of you have noticed, are not working. Here is a summary of what was written:
1. Everybody loves Wolf Parade.
2. Some people love The Decemberists.
3. Some people just are not sure about the Decemberists.
4. Some people who have seen me in person mentioned my nearly super-human agility and good-looks.
5. Some people pointed out that the comments are not working.
***
Blind Willie Johnson - "John The Revelator"
From deep down in the centre of something, from inside a desert on fire, comes this sweaty brooding dirge.
"Who's that a-writing?"
"It's John the Revelator."
Is "John the Revelator" Saint John the Baptist emerging out of the desert with clothes "of camel's hair, and a leather girdle about his loins?" That would be fitting.
"What's John a-writing?"
"Ask the Revelator."
Johnson's voice is a thing of the earth, busting out of the ground like thick crude. The back-up singer stays with him, is not afraid.
Blind Willie Johnson died destitute, sleeping on wet newspaper in the place where his house had been before it burnt down. He sings as if aware of that biographical fact, which of course, he could not have been.
Is he a man? An alligator? A time past?
***
Richard Buckner - "Lovin Her Was Easier"
I compulsively buy Kris Kristofferson albums at garage sales, and yet have never enjoyed one of his songs.
Then Buckner tries his hand at one and gets it exactly right. It seems unjust.
As Dan points out, his voice flutters between notes entirely without effort.
"I have seen the morning burning golden on the mountains in the skies."
This song is drenched in an entirely different kind of sunlight than drenches the songs of The Beach Boys and Love.