Manafonistas

1 – Am Ende eines Gespräches

 

„In my next radio night I will play a long track from Robert Ashley‘s masterpiece „Private Parts“. A special voice tells a story full of apparently marginal things (but nevertheless a meditation on life), accompanied by interesting „background music“. Recommended for your ears, Kurt, also,  because of the way you are working with  language on Showtunes.“

“The  name rings a bell, Michael. Special background music – that was the  case, too, when Bob Dylan read his speech for the Nobel Prize, just being accompanied by a piano.“

“A propos piano. In a review of Showtunes, I put your album alongside some other albums from different genres that, for me, have a similar kind of nakedness, intensity and intimacy. And one of them was a piano solo album by Paul Bley: „Open, to love“.  Go for that, Kurt, it‘s awesome midnight music.

„I will, Michael. I love ECM“.

 

(transcribed from memory, from yesterday‘s Zoom-interview with Kurt Wagner (Lambchop) in Nashville, Tennessee)

 

 

 

 

2 – Einige dieser Sommerabende

 

Der Sommer, der morgen beginnt, und obwohl er schon ein paar Tage offenkundig war, rasch wieder von einer Regenfront und kühlen Winden verprellt wird, hatte genug warme Wiesen parat, um sich darauf zu räkeln, in die neuen Kurzgeschichten von Haruki Murakami abzutauchen,  oder sich vom feinsinnigen Humor der Essays von John Green entführen zu lassen – und obendrein gab es die angenehm kühlen Abende mit verlangsamten Blicken zu den Restlichtern dieser Tage (Laternen, Abendrot, Grillkohle), sowie Alben, die, wie in alten Zeiten, zur Nacht hin, abwechselnd den Plattenteller blockierten: immer wieder „Showtunes“ von Lambchop, „Promises“ von Floating Points, und das Album mit mehr als einem Hauch einer alten Stadt der Mayas. „Every repetition is a form of change“ (Oblique Strategies, oder Heraklit, ganz wie man will).

 

 

3 – In bester Gesellschaft von „Showtunes“

 

Mark Hollis’ solo album, Joe Lovano’s „Trio Tapestry“, Nico‘s „The Marble Index“,  Paul Bley‘s „Open, to Love“, Brian Eno‘s  „Another Day On Earth“, Prefab Sprout‘s „I Trawl The Megahertz“, John Cale‘s „Music For A New Society“, and the last album of Jacques Brel, the one with a pale blue sky and pale white clouds

 

 

4 – Nachspiel

 

Trio Tapestry‘s sense of melody, space and  letting-go  is immaculate. I will always remember their first record, one of the jazz miracles of 2019. For me, it was the best album Joe Lovano ever made, with Manfred Eicher’s perfect sequencing of the tracks. Listen to the vinyl: suspense, sound and silence in perfect union. It is quite natural that this follow-up lives up to the high standard of the first meeting in New York. Now with a deeper touch of Provence pastel and colours at dusk. You can think of every jazz writing cliche of praise, from „filigree“ to „elemental“, and be sure that Lovano, Crispell and Castaldi are breathing new life into it. After the first three pieces of pure baladry (written by soul, not by the book), the appearances of sound take more and more adventurous side steps, from moments of pianistic unrest and upheaval, to an exploration of metal and sound in Castaldi‘s drum figures. A zen-like purity‘s bold pairing with an adventurous spirit. „Garden of Expression“ delivers everything with grace, selflessness and the most nuanced sense of  tempo, time standing still and a flow of undercurrents. If this sounds slightly over the top, let the music take over, dim the lights and follow the tapestries!

 

 
 

When I had a first glance on Kurt Wagner’s telling essay on the making of FLOTUS, the word „Mancini“ popped up, and I immediately thought of Henry Mancini, the composer of unforgettable soundtracks. After having channelled Frankie „Boy“ Sinatra into ghost town territory, after having composed a new soundtrack for a German silent movie from the 20’s, after some Curtis Mayfield falsetto highs on NIXON – why should the man who, similar to Robert Wyatt, has always been able to give well-known sources a personal touch, not get away with some Henry Mancini mood? I was wrong, Mary Mancini is the name of his wife. A politician. Democratic party. And she plays her part in the album, that’s for sure.

To be honest, I would very much prefer to get lost in a Scottish whiskey bar instead of following the ups and downs of a long-time marriage by reading canonical middle class novels by Updike or Ford (to make a long list short) that were quite obsessed with midlife-crisis-drama and long-term relationship-matters.

But there are exceptions. BLOOD ON THE TRACKS (to name a prize-winning writer), or one of the long Neil Young-songs on PSYCHEDELIC PILL – or Lambchop’s FLOTUS: though there are a few songs here (you could ad hoc call love songs), a lot of the tracks carry you away from any kind of conceptual exloration of the modus vivendi of people who know one another for half a lifetime. And the love songs, by the way, are brilliant.

FLOTUS Is a multi-layered beast, on par with Lambchop masterpieces like IS A WOMAN or DAMAGED (you, dear reader, might have other ones in mind). But here he is, Mr. Kurt Wagner, playing with „auto-tune“, doing „the two-step-hustle“, spending some time in Spain, just a few days before the release of one of the great song albums of 2016. Album of the month in MOJO, album of the month in UNCUT (December issues). So, take your time, and do yourself a favour, read – and listen!

 
 

Michael Engelbrecht: Where are you just now, Kurt, any hip-hop to be heard in the neighborhood?

 

Kurt Wagner: I’m in Castelion, Spain, on my off day which happens to be a bank holiday in Spain. Last night was Halloween. Not much hip-hop in this town this morning but it has yet to wake up.

 

Michael: To open this album with IN CARE OF 856309, is a courageous decision. A slow burner, the vocals quite deep in the mix (sometimes the deep range of your voice placed close to the bass). Words become sounds, and the listener is not forced to do semantics in the first place. An „ambient song“, kind of.

 

Kurt: Making this the first track on FLOTUS seemed to be the only logical place for this track to go. For this particular record I think it introduces the vocal distortions in a confident way, almost relentlessly. The flow of the words and the almost ultra wordy prose makes the case for a certain amount of drift by the listener much in the same way great dense hip hop words work. But also Dylan.

 

Michael: Additionally, you cannot always distinguish exactly between the real voice and the manipulated one.

 

Kurt: It is true that the vocal processing does balance between the more natural voice and the processed. My hope is by the end of the experience you have either accepted the notion, or turned the track off. It gives you the space to decide.

 

Michael: Speaking of „Auto-Tune“. What is it that attracts you here, from besides of paying attention to your hip-hopping neigbourhood, and the distorted sound of their ghettoblasters? 

 

Kurt: In my case, this machine enables me to to go beyond my limitations as an artist. It can suggest and infer possibilities, it can open up ideas by virtue of its design. And it happens in real time as the source is presented, it’s like a performance enhance for but the mind and the mouth.

 

Michael: I have big fun when reading the lyrics of JFK (“ … We must build a culture of understanding / just shy of the radio: I’m a pharmacist … „) – and simultaneously listening to the song. What has been the inspiration to a song that may have some sad undercurrents. But then, yep, the dancing groove of the second part, me oh my …

 

Kurt: When I was helping my parents move a few years back I was cleaning out their basement and I came across a drawing I made when I must have been 6 or so. It was a picture of JFK at a desk in the oval office with the presidential flag behind him. (the same flag that’s on the FLOTUS record cover). It now sits in my office and I see it everyday and i move it from place to place not knowing really what to do with it. I even made a crude wooden frame for it back then and signed it on the back. I must have been quite proud of it I suppose. I do remember that when I was very young we went to see the eternal flame at JFKs grave in Washington DC and that I am told I broke away from my parents and slipped under the rope that protected the area and made a break for the grave and flame. A U.S. Marine guard had to run me down and return me to my parents. The song was written while looking at and contemplating the drawing.

 

Michael: You often used your small orchestra as a kind of paintbox carefully chosing musical colours, so that it resulted in a kind of chamber folk, maybe with the exception of NIXON. Now starting these songs alone with some new electronic devices allowed you to build up songs from scratch, with no prefigurations by favoured or well-trusted guitar lines. But it still sounds intimate and colourful. Even when a „club feel“ enters. And the long last, most „groovy“, most electronic track of the album sounds so much more contemplative than switching on fireworks-mode.

 

Kurt: With the help of technology I’ve been freed up to realize a song idea in a fuller more complete and complex way. But that said it still needs the human touch to be a Lambchop record or performance. It is that intimacy that Lambchop has with the listener that is one of the cool things about this record. I feel it’s still there in the sound and the songs.

 

Michael: I know that many of your songs start with everyday observations. So, looking at a song like OLD MASTERS, what (the hell) has inspired it? A good example that you don’t need to have the faintest idea of anything to love a song.

 

Kurt: Stay hungry, my friend.

 

Michael: I have been listening to the whole album just about six, seven times now, and I’m very sure that this whole thing is a damned tricky beast. You are never trapped in a formula, e v e r y song has a different and distinct atmosphere. I think you like downplaying this sophisticated element by presenting yourself as a man of certain age looking at the younger generation for doing a bit of trial-and-error stuff.

 

Kurt: I’ve indeed been convinced that in order to move forward through a creative life one has to look to younger generations to see where things are heading. Most but not all people my age tend to settle into a place that is more about the past than the future. Partly because the future for my generation is pretty fucked in a broad sense. So let the children play so to speak and interact with their sounds and ideas. I am in no way a complete idea but rather one that is in need of learning and refining the ideas that are out there and the ones yet to be thought of.

 

Michael: Some lyrics seem to refer to dream activities, at least daydream activities (the scene in the laundry, the special imagery of HARBOR COUNTRY.

 

Kurt: Sorry, no dreams in Harbor Country.

 

Michael: THE WRITER is witty, funny, thoughtful, dark, everything. Shades of a self portrait? Or some musings on polarities?

 

Kurt: It’s a bit of both really, I was playing with the folk form of style and verse and placing it in an electro setting with horns.

 

Michael: Your favourite TV-series of the last years?

 

Kurt: „Last Week With John Oliver“, the best comedy show on current events in the USA right now. No one else comes close.

 

„The result is his most freely-flowing album since the sparse and beats-light Is A Woman, although this is a very different sonic world to that one he created 19 years ago. If the title of Showtunes could be at first read as ironic, there are actual hints of George Gershwin’s or Hoagy Carmichael’s melodic sweep in these songs, as Wagner sails his voice over ambient jazz washes and subtle electronics. More often, though, it sounds like The Blue Nile recording for ECM.“

(Tom Doyle) 

 

„This is all I know / It’s nothing but the courage of a fool“, singt Wagner im letzten Song von „Showtunes“ (diesem unheimlich intimen Album), „The Last Benedict“, fasst damit alles Vorhergehende zusammen – und offenbart genau, was für den Zusammenbau einer so brillant gewagten Platte nötig ist. Drei Jahrzehnte später wäre es so einfach gewesen, auf Nummer sicher zu gehen; der experimentelle Triumph von „Showtunes“ macht deutlich, dass Lambchop zum Glück nicht wissen, wie. Und wenn sie es wissen, vergessen sie es nur allzu gern. Es lebe „der Geist des Anfängers“. Dieses Album hat auch einen Hauch von Zen. Deep listening recommended!

(Sam B., Michael E.)