Rearview Mirror (1):
Really the Blues
by Tom Hull
The Best There Ever Was
1927-35, Yazoo
Blues Story
1920-54, Shout! Factory
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The U.S. Congress has rarely been so clueless as when it declared 2003
"the year of the blues." Sure, Congress probably just figured it to be
a sop to the music industry, which in turn figured they'd turn their
old blues comps into this year's Ken Burns Jazz. It's hardly
the only thing that didn't work out as planned in 2003, but Martin
Scorsese Presents the Blues just left most of us scratching our
heads. These two titles are the only general blues intros from the
year that I can recommend -- especially with The Blues: A
Smithsonian Collection of Classic Blues Singers out of print. (Who
says the private sector does things better?) Yazoo is the only
American label that has made a consistent effort to keep pre-WWII
blues in print, and the 20-song Best There Ever Was
cherry-picks its way through their rural blues catalog, avoiding
anything too obvious, yet keeping a smooth flow through such extremes
as the haggard Blind Willie Johnson and the mellifluous Mississippi
John Hurt. The two-disc Blues Story, on the other hand, aims to be
obvious: It starts with Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" (the first blues
record ever) and ends with Big Mama Thornton's Elvis-ready "Hound
Dog," taking in most of the obvious tourist attractions along the
way. I suppose one might complain that Robert Johnson isn't on either,
but he isn't really missed.
The Big Horn
1942-52, Proper
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British reissue label Proper's box sets are one of the few real
bargains available today: four CDs, five hours of smartly selected
50-plus-year-old music, useful booklet, about $20 if you shop
around. They've managed to fill out single-artist boxes for the likes
of Mildred Bailey, Slim Gaillard, and Ernest Tubb, and keep the
quality coming. Their various-artists boxes sometimes go out on a
limb: Swing Tanzen Verboten! -- four discs of, no kidding, Nazi
swing -- will only interest scholars and perverts, but Hillbilly
Boogie, 100 country songs with "Boogie" in their title, took a
minor fad and turned it into something thoroughly enjoyable. This one
works, too: 106 singles featuring "honkin' and screamin'" saxophones,
starting with Illinois Jacquet's 1942 "Flying Home." The beboppers,
who founded modern jazz by mostly playing for each other, hated this
shit, but it was the down and dirty R&B of the era, and anyone who
grew up on rock and roll will recognize it as the missing link from
small group swing.
Trojan Box Set: Nyahbinghi
1968-75, Sanctuary/Trojan
Cedric Im Brooks &
the Light of Saba
1974-76, Honest Jons
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Nyahbinghi is an ascetic sect of Rastafarianism, but for our purposes
we can skip the theology and just note that the music is based on
three hand drums, homemade instruments, and devotional chants. The
rhythms are primitivist, reaching back to an African heritage that
predated slavery; the chants have a churchly simplicity, which in the
case of Ras Michael -- the closest Nyahbinghi has ever come to a star
-- makes them sound like nursery rhymes. Trojan's budget-priced,
50-song Box Set is a rare and useful sampler, but one thing it
doesn't do is to break out of its formalism. Cedric Im Brooks also has
roots in Nyahbinghi -- he recorded the landmark Grounation with
Count Ossie, as the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, in 1973 -- but as
a saxophonist who cut his teeth on Sun Ra and Sonny Rollins, he sought
out more expansive musical contexts. His mid-'70s work, long out of
print but now collected on Cedric Im Brooks & the Light of
Saba, feels like the missing link to a synthesis that never
arrived: deep Rastafarian preaching, sinuous rhythms, exquisite horn
charts, covers of "Nobody's Business" and "Satta Massa Gana," and a
Latin take on Horace Silver's "Song for My Father."
When the Sun Goes Down, Vol. 6:
Poor Man's Heaven
1928-40, Bluebird
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As this traces an arc from Eddie Cantor's too-pained-to-be-funny "Tips
on the Stockmarket" to Reverend Gates' hard learned "President
Roosevelt Is Everybody's Friend," you can feel the Great Depression
opening up and sucking more and more people into its chasm of
despair. The early songs are show tunes like "Brother, Can You Spare a
Dime?" and the clever "It Must Be Swell" ("to be layin' out dead") is
likely a joke, but Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such
Times and Live?" is dead serious, and nothing that follows it lightens
the gloom. (Certainly not Woody Guthrie's "Dusty Old Dust" -- the only
other song here you're likely to have heard.) It's something to think
about, especially now that the current regime in Washington has
destroyed more jobs than any administration since Herbert Hoover's. So
is the fact that what Bob Miller has to say about health care in "The
Rich Man and the Poor Man" is, sad to say, just as true today.
Seattle Weekly, Jan. 28-Feb. 3, 2004
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