New York Noise

BABY TALK
BIG TREE
Music Revelation Ensemble
No Wave
Moers : 1980

James “Blood” Ulmer, guitar; David Murray, tenor sax, bass clarinet; Amin Ali, bass; Ronald Shannon Jackson, drums.

“James Blood Band was the first black band to be playing that music in those clubs like Hurrah and Danceteria…I didn’t hear no motherfuckers playing shit like we were playing.”
–James “Blood” Ulmer

No Wave. Part of the Downtown New York music scene curdled as it watched punk become coopted into slick and marketable New Wave. So they created something more sonically extreme than punk, stripping the music down to a stark framework of pure feedback and only the most guttural gestures. Raw and primal — a flayed minimalism. A movement proud to be unpalatable.

No Wave. Where unusually diverse and weird crews briefly co-mingled — painters, noise rockers, free jazzers, performance artists, queer poets, disco savants, transgressive filmmakers, graffiti dilettantes, and dim stars. A hotbed of cross-pollination. An affinity of attitudes and low rents. A moment where anything seemed possible.

No Wave. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. James Chance and the Contortions. D.N.A. Mars. UT. 8-Eyed Spy. Rosa Yemen. Dark Day. The Swans. The Music Revelation Ensemble.

The Music Revelation Ensemble. A five-star, fire-breathing free funk band with an emphasis on the free. Blood Ulmer shredding harmolodically, David Murray teaching James Chance a few tricks with his sheets of skronk.

“Baby Talk” starts as something akin to a wedding band supplying the world’s most harmolodic conga line accompaniment. A little farther along, the joint phrases from Ulmer and Murray would leave most revelers shaking out of their shoes. Ulmer’s solo, over Shannon Jackson’s steady skittering and Ali’s bent bass, is a well-constructed romp that, in true No Wave fashion, owes little to his jazz guitar forebears. Murray, fresh from the Are You Glad to Be in America? sessions, and a solo turn in Switzerland, turns in a concise (for him) and tightly wrought turn over Ulmer’s “comping.” (The following month Murray and his octet complete Ming.) After an Ali solo, it’s back to the carnival.

“Big Tree” is more subdued;a low, blue, almost folky rumble, with Murray’s bass clarinet melding particularly well with Ulmer’s strings. Less a song in the traditional sense than a moody, chugging study in sound, it’s nevertheless an engrossing showcase for Ulmer.

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ALSO: Jason Gross talked to Ulmer for Perfect Sounds Forever almost ten years ago; it’s a good interview.