a note on Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes

Tom Petty has had problems with his image from the start. A thoroughly enjoyable and likable mainstream rock and roller in my book, Petty and the Heartbreakers first emerged on the scene with the sudden glut of arty New York New Wave bands like Television, Talking Heads and The Ramones, and was mistakenly categorized as being a punk outfit. After some exposure to his first record made it obvious that the Heartbreakers had little to do with the aesthetics of American punk posey (American new wave, like it or not, is loaded with semi-tough intellectuals who compromise a new generation of native "art-rockers," a dread thought to many who think being dumb somehow places you in a state of grace and frees you from good manners, healthy diets,and other conventions of everyday life: the classical artists' conceit), one too many critics made note of the similarity between Petty's nasal, braying voice and that of old Byrds helmsman Roger McGuinn, and concluded that the Heartbreakers were a band stuck in emulating the pop-rock shtick of the 60s. Petty, thankfully, is a feisty counter-puncher with enough good sense to ignore what others, aware, want him to be. Damn The Torpedoes, his new record, clears the ground, and should at once establish that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are their own men who play their own kind of rock and roll in a way that's all too rare: straight ahead, with conviction and feeling, without affectation or chest-thumping baloney. At the risk of sounding as though I'm over-reaching for a comparison, I consider Petty to be the closest thing to a Graham Parker that America has. Like Parker, Petty's lyrical persona is of someone who's overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of everyday life who, through a visage of someone scratching his head in a state of anger, confusion, and frustration, achieves a kind of calculated artlessness in his expression. There is little in Petty's words one would consider the equal of some of rock's better wordsmiths: nothing on the par with the Zen-like ambiguities of Steely Dan, the colloquized surrealism of the late Lowell George, the compounded paradoxes of Elvis Costello, or the sublimely etched ironies of Randy Newman. Rather, Petty's main lyrical strength is his directness. Like Parker, Bob Seger (when he's not being morose) or Garland Jefferies, Petty demonstrates that he can cut to the cause of disagreement, emotional snafus where equal combinations of anger and self-loathing make an ugly tattoo on a young man’s thin skin.

A TAKE ON JETHRO TULL , IN GENERAL

Jethro Tull was a band of superb musicians who played music that was decidedly more work than pleasure to bear with. There's no denying that leader and chief composer Ian Anderson could cook up artful and impressive ensemble pyrotechnics for this or any number of the other versions of Jethro Tull to blaze through. The leader's ideas were limited, however, and one-note throughout the band's peak and into their decline. English folk traditions wedded with baroque fussiness, wheezy flute solos over craggy hard rock interludes, much of it seasoned with the admittedly agreeable sweet and sour fills and riffing from longtime guitarist Martin Barre. Skill and discipline aside, though, the plentiful progressive/art rock elements of JT's music were directionless. This flaw worsened as soon as Anderson responded to the grandiosity of Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer by going for the long format of single-song projects such as Thick as a Brick and Passion Play. Bits and pieces create sparks and actually ignite on both discs, but soon enough you're in a maze of a tricky time-signatures and agitated changes that are less inspiring and moving thematically. It was at this point in their career that Tull became a cure for insomnia. I'm the first to admit that Jethro Tull had "pretty parts", but I would reserve that classification for those musical moments where a shining bit of ensemble work actually clicked and highlighted a fine band raging happily along with some problematic time signatures. In that vein,

I rather like the Martin Barre—composed introduction to "Minstrel in the Gallery", a masterpiece of quirky transitions and sculpted dissonance that rises to actual art. Compression and brevity are the keys to those instances when JT catches my attention, but as often as not Anderson refuses to move from his signature amalgam of styles he likes and provides them is needed, or even effective, in the then-mistaken belief that length of composition and promiscuously convolutions of theme equals serious art. I was always one who preferred their progressive rock not to drag along the road. Lyrically, principle songwriter Ian Anderson is not so stunning; he had an effective light touch with imagery in the early work like "Living in the Past" or the particularly riveting tune "Nothing to Say"; 'though perhaps guised in a fictional persona, Anderson, all the same, connects with a convincing humanity as matters of being alive without certainty are sussed through impressionistically and, yes, concisely, closer to true poetry. The man had a knack, in the day, of getting to the point and getting you to think about things other than material gain. That wordsmithing, I think, has been far less in evidence since their career took off, from 'Aqualung" onward.

 Their   body of work exhibits more than enough eclectic ingenuity to confirm that Ian Anderson is a man of solid musicianship. And kudos to him for maintaining one of the tightest and best disciplined group of musicians I've come across in a musically busy rock band. That said, Anderson wanted some extended suite  glories that were the sweet spot for  Zappa, Yes and Genesis (quality varies according to taste, of course) so he wrote this, a two-sided song meant as a serious piece of concert/theater music. What draws this down fatally is the sheer cement thickness of the lyrics, which seem to be going about something grave and scandalous but which are rendered in language so oblique that a reader/listener feels neither gravity nor is scandalized and likely couldn't care less. In     between all the verbiage are the instrumental parts, some of them fine, very fine, some even brilliant in the playing, drawing on old English and Celtic influences, the classics and certainly some hard rock intrusions; much of it , however, is musically unconnected, much of the      instrumental passages devolve into longish riffy filler , and then Anderson appears again , braying more and more about this matter he can't be clear about. I listened to it once when it was released and was impressed but the sheer effort, the workman like professionalism. Maybe I thought it was good. A second and third try to get through TAAB merely   told me that this was one of the dullest albums of the decade.

ANDY EDWARDS DECLARES WAR ON JAZZ SNOBBERY

 Andy Edwards is a manic YouTuber , a retired fusion drummer, music educator who presents the public with a wild assortment of critiques about nearly all things music; the depth of his love , no , let us say passion for music is obvious, his jeremiads are full of distractions, meltdowns, excoriations and self-recrimination, but his knowledge of the genres he concentrates on is incontestable. His the kind of music buddy you want to have, a contrarian who can make a good argument for his against-the-grain views. I can't stand his opinions most of the time, and I can't get enough of him most of the time. He is a Brit, he is Brit centric and proud, and he's a hoot,

On this posting in 2024, he insists that jazz has become an elitist music, the ad-libs of snobs and the snot-nosed.  So jazz has been absorbed by the mainstream and is now considered High Culture. It's a tendency that is , in many cases, inevitable. If the form as any resilient character as it gains popularity, it will be canonized and presented to the world from that point as being among the best things that society is capable of, elegant, inventive, beautiful. This happened with Theater, a wholly disreputable art form intended for lowlifes, beggars, fish merchants, the rabble in general, dealing with popular themes of lust, betrayal, revenge, always revenge, and expressed in loud and exclamatory terms to an audience that was in large part illiterate. Shakespeare wrote his plays to enthrall, distract, beguile, amuse and overall entertain an audience with it in mind to make a living, not create art that defined Literature as we understand it. History seems to have an unpredictable irony, as the elevation of art forms originating in the lower and marginalized quarters of society being elevated, after generations of changing standards and fresher habits of analysis, to the become something associated with a more sophisticated class of humanity.

Being in- the -moment is what jazz is about, but not the only thing, since brilliant improvisors required a musical super structure on which to create their spontaneous counter-compositions. Interesting that a body of chord-heavy songs with fleet, rhythmic melodies became the initial properties jazz players based their explorations upon. So composition, IE, composing music for improvisors, is no less a part of making it possible for soloists to be brilliant. The composed piece, setting the mood, establishing harmonies, rhythm, gives the soloist a more diverse field of expression. The metaphysical beauty of "in the moment" hasn't been destroyed, but in fact exists when the improvisors first states the melody as written and then essentially recreates it in the solo space he's given.

What possessed jazz in the beginning has perhaps moved onto rap, I suppose, but as any art that survives the faddish conditions of their origins and remain somehow credible generations from their starting point, the nature of that art changes with the prevailing conditions of overall culture of the time and that art becomes institutionalized, i.e., classified, historicized, studied, defined, given a set of formalized aesthetics . It becomes the stuff of graduate programs, references used in political and philosophical discourse. This certainly happened to jazz as it ascended to High Art, it happened to the great vulgarian enterprise of rock and roll ( it went from being the expression of confused, angry, impatient and passionate youth to being a branch of literature), and one can see it happening with rap and hip hop: the spontaneity of each becomes mythology. So where is jazz now? As it happens, there is quite a lot of exciting work being created by established artists , and a good number of younger improvisors emerging from across the world who are keeping a jazz tradition alive by insisting on their native voices being wedded to the musical form. Jazz as we understand is becoming jazz as we don't understand , which I regard as signs that there remains much to be created, much to be heard, much to learn. Where is it now? Not standing still, that's a fact.

Paul Rodgers, Blues Singer

 Muddy Water Blues --Paul Rodgers and Friends

Paul Rodgers, vocalist formerly of the English blues rock band Free and the riff-happy and radio friendly Bad Company, is as good as blue-eyed blues/rock belting has ever gotten--he can rasp and croon, belt and banter with equal measures of savvy and snap when all cans are firing. Sadly, he sings better than he writes, as just about all his post-Free efforts show. On this album, he digs into the bullet-proof songs of Muddy Waters, and has a hoot doing them: refreshingly, this is not a purist effort. Instead, it’s a throw back to British blues rock, which was louder, faster, flashier. Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Brian Setzer and Trevor Rabin and Neal Schon all lend their fingers here, flash and feeling , and Rodgers applies the vocal cords for the best singing he'd done in easily ten years. "She Sends Me", "Born Under a Bad Sign", 'She's Alright" and "Rolling Stone" help me, for a moment, remember why I used to think he was the best singer on the planet. Stevie Ray is no more a wanker on the blues than are/were Albert King, Guitar Shorty, Buddy Guy or Vernon Reid, Blood Ulmer, Michael Hill or Sonny Sharrock, nor was he any less inspired by the pitched, aggravated dynamics the style demanded. He could keep a solo going, he could extend the sheer reams of bent notes, shadings, and feedback into reams of pure, sustained rapture, a pain that does not subside--he was easily continuing the work Hendrix started, by bringing the blues into something that was as emotionally relevant to the times he surveyed, and he kept his guitar heroics honest--one can listen to Gary Moore, for example, and be impressed and overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity and speed of his technique, yet not be moved by it, but with Vaughn, the heart of his feelings found their way to his fingertips and their calluses and managed a voice out of some dark night of the soul that exclaims, in high notes and low, rolling rumbles along the bass e string, that he has survived another midnight, another patch of bad luck, another bad fuck and worse drunk to see the sun of the following day again just to live the next twenty-four hours on the promise of more blues, the one thing that doesn't lie, the one set of notes in any scale and key you please that renews itself endlessly as long as there remains some capacity to feel deeply and longingly in that arena that is the province of being human alone, to find another reason to live another day. Stevie found his reason, a day at a time, with his guitar.

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2John McMeekan and Julie Hoye

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