Poor Nick Hornby. The British author of High Fidelity fame and erstwhile music critic is at it again, this time in a recent New York Times op-ed piece bemoaning the fact that rock music has become too experimental and “self-conscious,” and that no one — with the apparent exception of Philadelphia’s Marah — remembers how to rock any more. A few years back, the man who “novelized” his list-making fetish into a mediocre best seller was bellyaching in the New Yorker, railing against Radiohead’s Kid A and how his beloved band had failed him by not re-making The Bends forever and ever.
“Kid A demands the patience of the devoted; both patience and devotion become scarcer commodities once you start picking up a paycheck,” Hornby wrote in an ugly spasm of Baby Boomer nostalgia. (You can tell how homesick he is by the number of times ol’ Nick swears he isn’t.)
Putting aside the sinister assertion that art is just another commodity, there are countless logical fallacies at work in Hornby’s soapbox sermons. For starters, one listener’s taxed patience is often another’s glorious abandon; nor have the rock-starved masses swarmed Marah’s shows (which are quite good, mind you).
And if by “self-conscious” Hornby is referring to musicians who are aware of their musical ancestors and seek to expand upon their work or add their own twist — well, has there ever been a group more conscious of themselves and their place in history than the Beatles? Experimentation seems to have suited their legacy rather well. (One senses Hornby is more of a Rolling Stones fan — not that there’s anything wrong with that).
More importantly to this discussion, where is it written that you can’t enjoy, say, both Marah and Radiohead? Both the Stones and the Beatles? Who says you can’t get a musical thrill from the past and the present, while eagerly anticipating what the future will bring? Where is that damn Rock & Roll rulebook, anyway?
Hornby is by no means alone — the hue and cry over the alleged “Death of Rock” appears cyclically (often accompanying cicada plagues), and we’re in a decidedly inflationary cycle when it comes to the gnashing of teeth and hand wringing. You could argue that we live in very conservative times, when a good portion of the country views change as near heresy.
For instance, the new record from Wilco, A Ghost Is Born, is already receiving the “it’s too difficult” treatment from some critics and those fans still longing for Summerteeth II or Being There, Again.
No doubt our man Nick will be ready to lead the charge — or retreat, to be more accurate in this instance. Of Wilco’s last record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Hornby writes in his recent op-ed piece:
“The squeaks and bleeps scattered all over the lovely songs on the last Wilco album sound less like experimentation, and more like a despairing audio suicide note.”
How far is Hornby willing to go to prove he doesn’t like change? You could argue he’s got one thing right — the “squeaks and bleeps” themselves are nothing new; bandleader Jeff Tweedy has clearly programmed a little post rock into the ol’ iPod, making Yankee … a subconscious homage, perhaps, to those who’d come before. (Coincidentally, Hornby lauds Marah for the same type of behavior, albeit in a different rock milieu — “you can often hear their love for the rock cannon”).
What is vitally new, however, and apparently beyond Hornby’s grasp, is that Tweedy — by almost universal consensus a musician with a pretty singular vision — was behind the wheel of these experiments. The results are songs wholly unique and never-before heard — with the “squeaks and bleeps” an integral component, if not the most important, of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
As for the pre-emptive strikes against Wilco’s new one, look for a lot of “A Ghost Is Born reassessed” reviews down the road. This record reveals more with every listen — a common occurrence with most remotely challenging or new music. Which is exactly the way Tweedy prefers it:
“(Listeners) get what they put into it, out of it,” he says by phone from Chicago. “In my listening experiences, I like to be able to have room to kind of get in there and explore and feel like my perception is changing — I love that experience.”
What does all this have to do with the matter at hand, the excellent new free jazz recording, Nonfiction, from New York City/Charlotte-based The Eastern Seaboard (which performs at The Room Saturday)? Plenty. The same obsessions with the past that permeate the rock world are just as rampant in jazz-land (see Wynton Marsalis’ hard-core hard-bop nostalgia, or the fundamentally flawed Jazz documentary by Ken Burns, for starters).
In fact, as the orbits of free jazz and free rock converge again (Kid A, with its Charles Mingus’ Town Hall Concert homage, being perhaps the most notorious lightning rod), the two camps find themselves pilfering both sounds and concepts from one another. Unlike the one-way Fusion era, however, when jazz did most of the borrowing, this time the exchange is more equitable — and a lot less cheesy.
An expansive listen, Nonfiction pulses with an air of sinister mystery, traditional melodies subverted by free-form explosions. It’s a record with roots chock-full of inspirational mulch: Sonic Youth, Lester Young, Chicago post-rock, Boards of Canada electronica, 60s free jazz, Joe Strummer, Midwest tornadoes and the novels of Jim Thompson, to name just a few.
Local tenor saxophonist Brent Bagwell (also of Pyramid) — who along with Seth Nanaa (drums) and Jason Schranz (bass) make up the trio — sees their multi-faceted tastes and backgrounds as key to the group’s creative muse. With backgrounds split equally among rock groups (all three were “serious” bassists at one point, Bagwell says) and more traditional jazz ensembles, The Eastern Seaboard is practically incapable of playing it straight.
“We took all the things we liked about jazz and all the things we liked about rock and sort of just folded them together and made up stuff of our own,” Bagwell says of the record. “This is what it feels like to be around all the music that we’ve heard and what we see going on around us. I would almost have to consciously ignore those elements if I left them out, which seems less honest than it should be.”
Assimilation abounds on Nonfiction. From the opening attack of Bagwell’s tenor on the Nanaa-penned “Minerals” and his own “Cut and Run,” the songs sound like a jazz trio’s version of original material that would be right at home on a Kid A. Schranz’s bowed bass often emulates synth or keyboard sounds; Bagwell’s reeds (he also plays clarinet) glide effortlessly between guitar-like lines (“Anadarko” — the first of three tunes named after novelist Thompson’s hometown), Lester Young-flavored heads (“On the Take”), and free jazz squonk-and-squawk solos (“Cut and Run” and the third “Anadarko”).
The amalgamation, Bagwell says, is a response to the static nature of jazz, which has its own Hornby-like Nostalgianarian, Marsalis, waging war Quixote-like on those with the temerity to subvert the status quo.
“It used to be that jazz was the rock music of its day — you know be-bop was some seriously subversive music,” Bagwell says. “People have gotten away from that now…they’ve forgotten the pure chaotic nature of it, it’s more considered now.”
For The Eastern Seaboard, that sense of “been there, done that” extends even to the jazz capital of the world, New York, and its free jazz movement, once the vanguard of musical experimentation. Citing the ubiquity of world music rhythms, Bagwell and his bandmates found the NY free scene not all that free, frankly.
“The free music players have created a lexicon now of attitudes and of actual performance ideas that people do,” Bagwell says. “A lot of times I see people do it now so self-consciously. They’re only doing it because that’s what other free people have done.”
Which is why Nonfiction frequently steps beyond the bounds of jazz altogether. Two tunes, the snippet-like “Blanket Hill” and “Anadarko” (the second), even make use of processed sound (recorded at Pyramid’s Charlotte studio with help from that band’s Chris Walldorf), resulting in something much more like Tortoise than Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor.
At other times, it’s the group’s insistence on writing actual introductions and outros, as well as their refusal to abandon all traditions of time and melody, which keep them from being strict free jazz acolytes.
“As rock refugees,” Bagwell says, “we ended up wanting to have songs and for there to be structure. Obviously we try to feel like we can take it wherever we want, but we still like to start somewhere.”
It’s not a new idea — Chicago Underground Trio, Isotope 217, John Zorn, Marc Ribot and others have explored this link between free jazz and rock’s newer experimental elements for years — but this is their unique spin on it. In addition to the more obvious reference material they bring to it, add Bagwell’s training in Western classical and his partners’ fondness for American 80s punkers, The Minutemen.
“I would say that of the people who come to see us play,” Bagwell says, “if they were in the car beforehand listening to Radiohead or TransAm or something like that, they’re as prone to like us, and maybe more so, than people who would’ve come to the show listening to Charlie Parker.”
Which is precisely what nostalgists like Hornby and Marsalis can’t come to grips with — time marches on. Musical eras fade, re-emerge to inspire someone else, then fade again. None of it ever disappears, because it’s in virtually every song’s DNA.
But with major labels and radio conglomerates trying to limit what we hear in the first place, doctrinaire nostalgia is a dangerous game to play. True innovation is rare enough — whether one enjoys all of it, some of it, or none of it, is almost beside the point; experimentation should always be applauded as a vital part of artistic growth, for the musician and the music.
Nick Hornby may be particularly enamored of a certain era when he, I don’t know, had more hair, smoked his first joint or lost his virginity, but that doesn’t mean everything that’s come since has been somehow inferior. Music is a living, breathing entity; the only thing that can kill it is stagnation.
“To say, “oh, yeah, it’s the 60s, I’m doing this like they used to,’ wouldn’t be honest,” Bagwell says. “Unfortunately, it can’t be like that, and fortunately, in many respects, it isn’t.”
The Eastern Seaboard plays The Room Saturday, with The Sea of Cortez opening.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2004.
