The Test Tube and the Scale

  Some artists leave evidence of their restless musical imaginations strewn across their corpus like impassioned signatures of timely obsessions. The omnipresent whisper of keyboard on your favorite Prince song; John Lennon’s tendency to revert to fifties pop song structures; the growing warmth in Dylan’s vocal delivery beginning with Blonde on Blonde’s fourth side. Herbie Hancock, when he wasn’t striking those lyrical chords of brilliance that gave flight to the grounded blues of Miles Davis’ second great quintet, was often drawn in his solo career to the crowd pleasing sense of order and organization that pop musicians tend to make so memorable. His wasn’t so much a restless mind as it was tireless, the difference being the sense of mess you want to leave your aesthetic; for all his adventurousness, Hancock leaves extremely cleanly produced recordings. Chameleon, from his landmark early seventies record Head Hunters, is jazz-funk fusion that tests the formal elasticity of both ge...

  Mythologies endure only because the stories about them persist. A recent hour long Netflix documentary about Robert Johnson at the crossroads foregrounds details of the artist’s life that have since become thematic hallmarks of blues mythology: peripatetic and existential restlessness, martial infidelity, abandonment, musical proficiency, criminal jealousy, economic and racial injustice. The blues, the historical record tells us, is centered around the fatigue that accompanies the unending process of having to reclaim one’s personal identity amid the toil of relentless deprivation. Charlie Musselwhite was immersed in blues reality from a young age—his family moved from Mississippi to Memphis when he was only three and rock and roll was still in its infancy. From there, he later moved on to Chicago where he apprenticed with the electric American masters while making a name for himself as an emerging blues harp player. His debut record, Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s ...

  With a lyric written by Ian Curtis, Ceremony announces itself with a noticeably less declamatory flourish than Love Will Tear Us Apart’s revered opening, yet one just as exciting, with a bass-drums-guitar intro made singular in tone by the great Martin Hannett. What was most remarkable about this point in the rock and roll market—1980–was how interest in blues based rock had shifted from a working class demographic to an overall middle class one; a mass, global music audience had quietly become, almost at once, a surfeit of consumers clamoring for what the Clash described that year as “that special offer, a guaranteed personality”…a realization of market potential that finally saw real world fruition in the age of social media. Though New Order’s accomplishment was to combine the formal motorik dynamics of Krautrock with the commercially rhythmic vogue of disco, the band connected with an ever expanding audience by framing their distilled essence within an existing pop tradition....