That Sound, That Soil

ONCE UPON A TIME
BUTTERMILK BOTTOM
Marion Brown
Geechee Recollections
Impulse : 1973

MB, alto and soprano sax, clarinet; Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet; James Jefferson, bass, cello; Steve McCall, drums; William Malone, autoharp, thumb piano; A. Kobena Adzenyah, African drums.

C: Marion Brown is an underground jazz legend. But it’s always been mysterious why he isn’t esteemed on the same plane as, say, Archie Shepp or Pharoah Sanders. His music from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s is every bit as ambitious and high-quality. Maybe more so.

D: The obvious problem is that many of his best albums are out of print. Most of them have never even been released on CD. Check out his discography. Maybe some key reissues would get people to take another look.

C: Maybe. Although it seems to me that musicians’ reputations get revised more quickly in rock and blues circles. It only takes a few articles and a nice archival release and suddenly everyone is righteously hip to the amazing qualities of, say, Dock Boggs, Shuggie Otis, or Arthur Russell. In jazz, that process doesn’t happen very often.

D: Alice Coltrane’s rep sure has turned around in the last few years. But I know what you’re saying.

C: I guess another problem is that Brown seemed to disappear in the 1980s. He was a key player throughout the 1970s, creating this incredibly diverse body of work for various major labels. I mean, Impulse even released Geechee Recollections on eight track!

D: Those were different times.

C: But after that, he released relatively little. Or maybe I missed it.

D: He’s been in academia. And I know he’s been plagued by serious health problems – see this fairly recent Jazz Times interview for more details. I don’t know if it’s related, but his later music also seems to have become more conservative and less interesting. What I’ve heard is a far cry from something like Geechee Recollections.

C: Amazingly, Geechee isn’t necessarily his best work, just the one that best fit our mood. There’s a terrific end-of-summer vibe to the album, a sense of trying to stretch out the last few lazy and hazy days of the season while looking backwards with just the slightest tinge of nostalgia.

D: Both “Once Upon a Time” and “Buttermilk Bottom” have a nice laid-back and bluesy feel to them. “Buttermilk” is the more funky track. It’s all churned up, you might say. (Sorry.) I really like how both tunes are underpinned by an unusual array of percolating and shambling percussion. It somehow feels both African and Southern.

C: Yeah, there’s a real palpable sense of place to the album. It’s hard to pinpoint, but listening I feel like I’m scuffing my shoes along the same dirt roads that Faulkner describes at the beginning of Light in August. Definitely rural and Southern.

D: And maybe a pinch of 52nd Street on the “Buttermilk” theme. I love albums where the geography has settled into the grooves. In name-dropping mode, R.E.M.’s Murmur, The Feelies’ The Good Earth, and Pere Ubu’s Dub Housing are a few that jump to mind. Geechee was part of Brown’s Georgia trilogy, right?– between Afternoon of a Georgia Faun and Sweet Earth Flying.

C: Both very different but equally worthwhile projects that we’ll get to soon enough. As well as Brown’s incredible In Sommerhausen — a hideously rare live album that’s one of the most compelling, theatrical, and bizarro documents of free jazz. (A few more for the Iverson files?) But for now, here are a few passages from Geechee, which manage to be pastorale without devolving into the merely pretty.

\ \ \ \ \ \ \

On a sadder note, the great saxophonist Dewey Redman passed away over the weekend, on Saturday. DJA, as usual, does a yeoman’s job of rounding up the encomiums. As a starting place, Ben Ratliff wrote a fine obit for the New York Times. For the more committed: Do the Math computes the subtraction. Columbia University’s great station, WKCR, ran a day-long memorial Redman marathon on Monday. Not sure if it will be stream-able after the fact. We plan a Redman post for later in the week. Like Brown, Redman was a player who didn’t find it necessary to completely jettison the past in order to find a way to make it new. He will be missed.