A Totally Unassailable and Correct Listing of the Ten Best Fall Albums

On this I will brook no dissent. Well, maybe a little.

1. Hex Enduction Hour
2. Live at the Witch Trials
3. This Nation's Saving Grace
4. The Wonderful and Frightening World of . . .
5. Perverted by Language
6. Dragnet
7. Grotesque (After the Gramme)
8. Room to Live
9. The Unutterable
10. I am Curious Oranj

And here is a Fall mix, just for you:

You are my Everlovin' - Henry Flynt (1981)

The mixing of "high" and "low" art . . . no, the erasure of the idea of "high" and "low" art, the erasure of ART altogether . . . Henry Flynt sawing away on his fiddle along with a taped tambura, referencing blues, raga, modal jazz, free jazz, hillbilly music . . . totally outside any of those references, just playing a life lived and heard . . . there is no art, there is no concept, there is only sound. 

RIP Mark E. Smith (3/5/1957 - 1/24/2018)

Best Rock Side Ever: Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys, Side One

"Who Knows" and "Machine Gun" live at the Fillmore, side one of Band of Gypsys

Somewhere - I think it was in It Might Get Loud - Jack White was expounding on the glory of cheap guitars, and how they made you a better guitar player, which . . . first of all, fuck you Jack White, 'cause most of the time I see you kicking it on a live video, you're doing it with a Gretsch White Falcon, which is more than half a year's rent for a two bedroom in my neighborhood . . . and second, speaking as a fellow primitive technique guitarist, after years of broke-ass guitars with shitty action, when I finally found my beloved transparent green 98 deluxe Telecaster, I immediately became a better player. . . .

BUT, our friend Jack does have a point, or a couple, actually. There is something rewarding about digging out the soul of idiosyncratic guitars, guitars that make you play on their terms, not your own. And also, that glib sort of pentatonic shredding crap is the worst.

Which brings us to Jimi Hendrix, who (of course!) easily transcended the whole shredder mystique . . . at once the ultimate shredder, and beyond shredding itself. Jimi could play guitar as easily and automatically as the normal person speaks, and with a massive vocabulary besides. However, after 45+ years of mining 4 years worth of recording, you find that Jimi's fluency on guitar could be a curse as well as a blessing. Sometimes, per Jack White, guitar came too easy to Hendrix. As a result, there's a whole lot of posthumous Hendrix with a lot of flash, but no substance. The average guitarist, or even a good-to-great guitarist, has to focus on his instrument to be even moderately coherent; but there is Jimi, just chatting away with his guitar. Problem was, he quite often was just talking shit.

There is a story (possibly apocryphal) that Bill Graham, famous Fillmore impresario, was approached by Hendrix after a (literally!) incendiary set during his holiday 69/70 run, and asked for his opinion. Graham told him, in effect, that he was clowning for the audience at the expense of his music. Angered, Hendrix went out and locked in on the next set without the pyrotechnics, at least until the encore, when he went absolutely apeshit as a big "fuck you" to Graham. The version of "Machine Gun" from Band of Gypsys is from that very set.

Hendrix's most popular music was created with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. Billy Cox and Buddy Miles handled the bass and drums respectively for the Band of Gypsys. As brilliant as Mitchell was on drums, Cox and Miles gave Hendrix an open groove and plenty of room to run. At their best, the Band of Gypsys was the next level of rock music, and side one of Band of Gypsys is the band at their best. It is open and funky, an exploration after the soul of Coltrane, as nimble as Dolphy*, as passionate as Ayler or Etta James or Koko Taylor (see Taylor with Willie Dixon on "Insane Asylum"). It is Hendrix focused and at his absolute best.

In light of the revival of the vinyl LP, I think we can not only discuss the greatest rock album, but the greatest rock side. Side two of Band of Gypsys is not a dog by any stretch of the imagination, but it does not stand up to side one. Side one of Band of Gypsys is the best rock side ever . . . and that, friends, is indisputable scientific fact.

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*  Hendrix is frequently compared to jazz saxophonists, especially Coltrane, but I believe the most accurate comparison to be Eric Dolphy. Dolphy and Hendrix share an athleticism and aggression that sets them apart.

Jerry "The Logo" West and "Pistol" Pete Maravich

Dragon Lady - The Geraldine Fibbers (1995)

Carla
& guitar tone 

Bloodroot - Kelly Moran (2017)

Highly Recommended

Bloodroot isn't a prepared piano record per se - the prepared piano sounds are sampled and loaded into MIDI controllers so Moran has access to them through her synthesizer - but unlike, say, Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote player piano rolls to execute piano compositions that humans couldn't play, Moran uses the samples to have her prepared piano vocabulary at her fingertips, and to extend that vocabulary (but always within the context of the composition!) by mixing the prepared piano sounds with straight piano sounds. It also allows her to do things that would require a second set of hands, like using an ebow whilst playing prepared/straight piano on some of the same notes.*

tl:dr; All of this is a way of saying that this is a prepared piano record, even if not technically a prepared piano record. As such, it is most obviously compared to John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano . . . and while that may seem too easy, it also happens to be fair & useful. Given the stature of Sonatas and Interludes, it is a tribute to Moran that she is produce an album that stands up to Cage's masterwork.

Circa 2017, prepared piano is not the novelty it was when Cage first started toying with it in the late 1930s, even if it is not exactly commonplace. The thing that makes Sonatas and Interludes transcendent is that, once you get past the technical innovation, it is composition itself that really makes it immortal. In the same way, above and beyond Moran's technical vision, the composition is what carries Bloodroot. 

The thing that really makes Sonatas and Interludes shine is the way that pianist Maro Ajemian (to whom Cage dedicates the work) finds the Satie at the core of Cage's compositions**: the archness, the asceticism, the playfulness, the obstinance, the longing . . . the soul, if you will indulge the cliché. In Moran's work to you can hear echoes of Satie - I also hear Messiaen, Cowell, and Ligeti, just off the top of my head - but manages to create a work that is informed by her predecessors, not dependent upon them. And while the simple fact that it is a prepared piano work links it closely to Sonatas and Interludes, that too informs it, but does not define it. The compositions are, after the first blush of sound wears off, beautiful, varied, and unique. While Bloodroot will perhaps never fully escape the orbit of Sonatas and Interludes, it will stand up as part of the canon.

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*  Something has been made of the hybrid nature of the technology, linking it to electronic music as well as prepared piano. I think this is misleading: while electronics do show up on the treatments of some sounds, the effect is subtle and not at all like what we understand as electronic music in the avant garde classical sense.  

** I've heard other versions; Ajemian's debut of the work on Dial Records is the best version of the work by far.

Midget Submarine - Swell Maps (1979)

S/T - Mazozma's Fatufairfe (2016)

It's the whole damn e.p., 'cause I couldn't figure out which song I like the best, and there's only four. You really should have this one on yr phone.

Happy New Year - Eugene Chadbourne (1984)