Search - Junk Genius :: Ghost of Electricity

Buckle up . . .

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 02/02/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

". . . something huge is going on here. Something at once readily apparent yet somehow obscured, hiding in plain view, as it were, something quite approachable but edgy and out there, something radically new and creakily old. I've always been strangely drawn to this disc, but only recently have I hit upon the proper hermeneutic to encounter and retrieve its weirdly veiled accessibility, what I call Downtown Americana.



The key to this music is obviously John Schott, that Bay Area guitar madman, sometime Zorn collaborator, and former T. J. Kirk member. If you go to his website and read about him, you'll find his roots go deep into the kind of ur-American vibe so magically conjured and brilliantly on display here. In fact, there's an interesting story about how this music came about. It seems these guys got together for weeks at a time and endlessly played old timey American song forms, from both black and white sources, until they found a way to present them in a new context, all the while retaining (if sometimes radically reconfiguring) not only their spirit but also their rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic content. That is, they messed around with them until they knew them inside out, totally absorbing their sensibility, but also allowing them to take on a new shape and character, not exactly the same as the originals (indeed, sometimes pretty radically different), but definitely organically connected to them. This approach produces an interesting effect on the listener--the feeling that one has heard this music before. And not only heard it, but felt it all one's life. A weird and somewhat unsettling kind of déjà vu thing.



Seldom has a group gotten so far inside musical forms as to authentically represent them while at the same time nearly completely transforming them. But that's what's going on here. While listening to this disc, I often get the strange feeling that I'm encountering the absolute heart of the American spirit, somehow captured and rendered musically but in a new way never heard before. Kinda like what Jim Pepper did with American Indian music. Other discs, especially Free Country by Joel Harrison (with whom Schott recorded on the Nine Winds label), Drift by Michael Blake, Redemption by Slow Poke (on which drummer Kenny Wollesen appears, and bassist Tony Scherr channels Haden/Dunn), and about half of Bill Frisell's output, cover similar ground, but none with such consummate authority, sensibility, and distinction. Downtown Americana (lovingly, non-ironically) filtered through Saint Francis (patron saint of San Francisco, whence Goldberg and Schott hail)--that's what we've got here.



The lodestar for this disc is Bob Dylan, another artist who had the capability of reworking old folk musics into something hauntingly familiar yet genuinely new. And I must say, if there is one single analog, one disc that most closely resembles the approach taken here, it's Michael Moore's instrumental Dylan tribute, Jewels and Binoculars (most highly recommended, by the way). It would be fascinating to hear Junk Genius do an album of Dylan songs. In the meantime, as soon as I have the funds I'm getting the entire John Schott oeuvre (including all his appearances with Ben Goldberg), which includes In These Great Times, Shuffle Play, What Comes Before, Almost Never, Xu Feng, and Joel Harrison's 3 + 3 = 7.



In short, this is music of the highest accomplishment, right up there with Catechism by Dennis Gonzalez, The Dark Tree vols. I and II by Horace Tapscott, Pictures of Soul and Mulatos by Omar Sosa, Lullablueby and Quickening by Frank Kimbrough, Alight by Safa, Entomological Reflections by Mephista, Songbird Suite and Folklorico by Susie Ibarra, I, Claudia by the Claudia Quintet, Nascer and The Invisible by Peter Epstein, South by David Binney, and Buzz by Ben Allison. If you know anything about my taste in music, you know grouping this disc with those is praise of the absolute highest order.



Absolutely not to be missed."