Georgia Songwriter Bill Mallonee; Avant-Cellist Maya Beiser; Accessing the Lost NY Loft Jazz Scene

New York" SIZE=5> It's a fine line: A musician's responsibility to the audience requires an uncomfortable degree of honesty. And honesty is what makes for the best music, the ballsy stuff that works its way into your gut. But those who are up to the task run the risk of baring their souls to an uncomprehending audience and an unsympathetic industry. Just ask Aimee Mann.

Perhaps no working musician in America knows this risk better than Athens, GA-based songwriter and Vigilantes of Love frontman Bill Mallonee. Playing a rootsy blend of bluegrass, rock and folk, Mallonee's robust, direct lyrics, a blend of world-weary melancholy and transcendent hope, have attracted a critical following and a small but rabid fan base. But despite studio collaborations with producers like Peter Buck, Jim Scott and John Keane, record labels and radio stations have had no idea what to do with the Vigilantes. So for the years that mainstream success has eluded him, Mallonee earned his bread and butter the old-fashioned way: hardcore touring.

The history of their latest album, Audible Sigh, illustrates the band's travails. Slated for release a year ago, the original label, Pioneer, folded at the last minute. Mallonee secured the rights to his own album and sold a limited run. When those copies disappeared, a second version was pressed with new cuts (Mallonee writes dozens of songs a year; he can't record them fast enough). The version in stores now, from Compass, is the third incarnation, and features yet another track list plus a second disc, the EP Room Despair, which includes four demos and an Audible Sigh outtake. Fans are hopeful that this release is the one to bring Mallonee and the Vigilantes into the mainstream: it's as powerful as any of the band's other major releases, and is also one of their slickest-sounding and most radio-friendly. Produced by Buddy Miller, Audible Sigh features Julie Miller and Emmylou Harris on backing vocals.

Heretofore VOL has been the best folk-rock act nobody's ever heard of. It's no surprise that the intelligence and intensity of Mallonee's writing has elicited comparisons to Dylan from his loyal underground admirers. Given the consistency and quality of Mallonee's work over eight albums, he is arguably the first writer since John Prine to make the comparison plausible. Mallonee has an unfussy sound, entirely his own yet recalling years of tradition, and is living proof that three chords can still take you places you've never been. The style and content of his songs evoke further comparisons to fellow Georgian Flannery O'Connor, who also wrote the same story over and over but made it fresh every time. Only so many wells of inspiration make that kind of creativity possible; Mallonee taps from the same source of peculiarly Southern gothic Christianity that O'Connor did; his peculiar addition to the mix is a brutal confessionalism.

Mallonee doesn't just plumb the depths of his own dark heart, he rips it out and drops it bloody and pumping in your lap. This is his blessing and curse, and explains both the fervor of his admirers and the confusion of the music industry suits. On the haunting "Resplendent" he laments, "I can make you promises/if you don't expect too much." With the rollicking love song "She Walks on Roses," he declares almost gleefully that "they say that pride is the chief of sins/well I know all of his deputies?I'm well acquainted with them."

Listeners see themselves in these four-minute autobiographies. "Everybody's got a secret," he sings, and smacks us with the force of epiphany. We already know this secret. We were just afraid to confront it.

But confront it we must, for Audible Sigh is about weighty matters: sin and redemption, despair and hope, resignation and faith, violence and grace, all just a hair's-breadth apart. On the brooding "Black Cloud O'er Me," Mallonee says that "some will shake off the sloth of faithlessness/while others simply languish in their sleep/me... I just fight to stay awake." The lyrics remind us that we're all in this state of limbo, suspended between heaven and hell.

Bill Mallonee and the Vigilantes of Love play Friday, June 30, at the All Angels Church Coffeehouse, 251 W. 80th St. (betw. B'way & W. End Ave.), 362-9300.

Jeff Hanson

Kinship Maya Beiser (Koch International Classics)

Not only insanely talented, but also curiously innovative, Maya Beiser is pushing the limits of what cello playing can be. Not since Charlotte Moorman's deconstructions of the instrument back in the 1960s has anyone dared to mess with the cello, certainly the most revered piece of the Western orchestra. On her new album, Kinship, she places the cello in unfamiliar musical settings that would make Pablo Casal's skin crawl. But she doesn't achieve it through typical avant-abrasion. Instead, she's unabashedly musical about it. Her playing and musical tastes are easy to love and easy to get excited about; there's always a hook to bring you in, no matter how treacherous the territory.

Then there's her well-considered image. In a recent live performance, she showed off her great stage presence, which more recalls the world of rock than the world of classical music. She was dressed in a hot-pink tie-dyed ruffled outfit, and kept tapping her foot (clad in red mile-high platform shoes) to the beat. Best of all, her long hennaed hair got caught in the tuning pegs of the cello each time she would ecstatically throw her head back in time to the music. This iconoclastic exuberance is thankfully felt throughout her new CD.

I was impressed with her earlier outing on Koch, where she ripped through the forbidding turf of the Russian modernists Sofia Gubaidulina and Galina Ustvolskaya. In other hands, this work can get terribly academic; in Beiser's, it sang. This time around, Beiser explores the musical traditions of the world with her cello, but like Des Esseintes in Huysmans' A Rebours, she never leaves her own living room. Instead, masters around the world compose for and collaborate with her. Using a blend of blinding virtuosity and studio techniques, Beiser in her playing ranges from quiet medieval-sounding solo pieces to full-on gamelans.

The best cut on the disc, "Kebyar Maya," was penned for Beiser by fellow Bang on a Can member Evan Ziporyn. It's a transcription of an orchestral gamelan work for solo cello. The challenge was to make a solo instrument sound like a complete gamelan orchestra. Rising to that challenge, Beiser virtually turns the damn instrument inside out. She whacks the cello's body, plunks the strings, detunes the strings and strikes the instrument with an assortment of objects. She took recordings of these actions into the studio and stitched them together into a seamless composition. In the end, she hits the mark; you'd be hard-pressed to tell that it wasn't the real thing. But maybe it's better: Beiser pumps up the beats and, in doing so, articulates the strong rhythmical ties between gamelan and rock 'n' roll.

There are a couple of incredible duets with Simon Shaheen, a modern master of the Arabic string instrument, the oud. Again, Beiser twists her Western instrument, this time to become Middle Eastern. The form of the Arabic compositions is classical, with proper beginnings, middles and endings; they start out quietly, slowly building in the middle until all hell breaks loose at the end. In the tradition of Om Kalthoum, Beiser and Shaheen swing. As Beiser explains it, she was brought up in Israel on a kibbutz, near a Palestinian village. Each day, at sunrise and sunset, the sounds of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer would drift over to the kibbutz. From an early age, she was fascinated and hooked on Arabic music.

The other pieces on the disc each have their own remarkable qualities. On a Nana Vasconcelos piece, "Trayra Boia," Beiser uses feedback-drenched overtones. Instead of classical, she sounds like the Velvet Underground's John Cale on "Sister Ray" or Angus MacLise on his recent acid-soaked, transcendent disc The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. She takes on orthodox Greek music on "Tsmindao Ghmerto." It's quiet stuff, and reminds me of the cyclical intensity of Thomas Tallis' hypnotic "Spem in Alium." Long, broad strokes across the strings of the cello intertwine with Beiser's simple vocals so that it's often hard to tell what's vocal and what's instrumental.

The only dull patch is a piece penned by the composer Chinary Ung. Its somber mood (it's an elegy to those killed during the Pol Pot regime) just doesn't fit in with the high spirits on the rest of the disc. While it's by no means a poor piece, perhaps it might stand out better in a quieter, more contemplative set.

Kenneth Goldsmith

Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions Various Artists (Knitting Factory)

Duo Exchange Frank Lowe/Rashied Ali (Knitting Factory)

The New York loft jazz scene was short-lived but fruitful, kind of like bebop. And like bebop, it was partly a reaction to the music-business establishment. While during the 60s there had been a brief period when the major labels were releasing what amounted to "free jazz"?Impulse, perhaps the second-greatest free-jazz label of all time, behind only ESP, was owned by ABC, after all?by the mid-70s the record business, bound by inflation, was about to enact drastic cutbacks. Anything "experimental" was going to have to take a dive.

So, ignored and scorned by the industry for their idiosyncrasies, and taking advantage of the cheap rents engendered by the recession, a small group of mostly black musicians began buying up deserted warehouse space and holding all-night jam sessions in it. The primary catalyst of this movement was Sam Rivers, the tenor saxophonist whose own albums for Impulse and Blue Note had sometimes been brilliant, sometimes flawed, but never predictable. Already 52 when he began sponsoring the Wildflower sessions, it was only natural that Rivers would seize the reins just as Mingus and Ornette had with their own workshops before him.

Recorded over a period of two weekends in May of 1976, before the loft had really steamed up with full-blown summer heat, the original Wildflowers sessions were released as five LPs by Alan Douglas on his eponymous label.

Knitting Factory has taken great care to restore all five of these legendary but long- out-of-print albums, releasing them on three CDs. The gesture is way overdue, since the albums have grown in notoriety as the years go by, and many of the musicians who were unknowns in those days have emerged as some of the most active principals on the jazz scene today: David Murray, David S. Ware, Henry Threadgill, etc. However, as proven by the cuts here, the Wildflowers sessions represented a healthy cross-pollination of old and young, with jazz veterans like Rivers and Randy Weston sitting in with mavericks like Oliver Lake and Ahmed Abdullah. A lot of the vets from the first free-jazz era were still around, and they're here, too?guys like Sunny Murray and Andrew Cyrille and Marion Brown. In ways, this may be the greatest consolidation of jazz talent in one place since the days of bebop, which is why it's great to have it around again.

It's worth the price of admission alone just to have Roscoe Mitchell's "Chant," a circular track that could definitely be considered one of the most distinctive avant-garde pieces of its day, and possibly one of the most irritating as well. (Irritatingly repetitious, that is, almost like Ornette's "Theme From a Symphony.") Then there's Ahmed Abdullah's "Blue Phase," an amazing piece of improv that mixes electric and acoustic with the kind of rolling finesse Don Cherry showed on the album he made for Horizon at roughly the same time. Who knew these guys were this good? Wildflowers presents evidence of a lot of latent talent?dudes who shouldn't be forgotten just because they didn't have the impact of the true giants. They were infinitely better than what was passing itself off as mainstream jazz in those days, and has ever since: mainly, the kind of airy, noxious swill that pays homage to Doc Severinsen and Lawrence Welk instead of Coltrane and Dolphy.

There's no question about the intentions of Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe on Duo Exchange, another reissue in the Knitting Factory's excellent Knitclassics series. These are musicians on the margins, not even remotely involved in whatever's going on in the mainstream. Lowe was one of the great post-Coltrane tenor men, and his Black Beings album on ESP was a masterpiece of soulful shriek. Rashied Ali was one of the premiere free-jazz drum-men, and the work he's most renowned for?for example, his collaboration with Coltrane, Interstellar Space, a duet of rhythmic fury and sonic intensity?can be seen as leading up to this record. Duo Exchange, recorded in 1972, could almost be considered Interstellar Space II. Lowe absolutely blows his ass off, and Ali never ceases to be amazing. The result is an insane musical dialogue that pushes the language of jazz to brave new heights. Absolutely essential sounds from a phase of jazz most people don't even know existed. Rejoice?one can now bear witness to its unhinged alchemy.

Joe S. Harrington

It's a Brand New Day Tom Cora (Knitting Factory)

Tom Cora died of melanoma in April 1998. He was 44. A lot of fans hadn't known he was sick. After his death, there was a big tribute concert at the Knitting Factory, and Tzadik put out a two-CD tribute compilation, featuring recordings of Cora and others playing his compositions.

Now comes another disc, a collection of live dates from 1989 to 1996, recorded at the Knitting Factory by Downtown Music Gallery's Bruce Gallanter on a Sony D5. For me this album was something of a revelation. I had heard Cora on a variety of recordings over the years; it was hard not to: he truly was a "mainstay of the new music scene," as his Times obit read. I'd heard him with Curlew, and Third Person and the Ex, and I liked what I heard?that instantly recognizable and wonderfully tense, skittering sound. But Curlew was always a little too stiff for my taste, and Third Person, Cora's project with Samm Bennett and, as the name would imply, a rotating guest musician, was too uneven. I loved the albums with the Ex though, And the Weathermen Shrug their Shoulders and Scrabbling at the Lock. It was amazing how well Cora's sensibility fit in with a Dutch group that had played together for over a decade.

It's a Brand New Day features Cora's collaborations with his wife, Catherine Jauniaux, Fred Frith, Dave Douglas and most of the rest of Curlew. It highlights two sides of Cora's musical personality: one, a fascination with the sheer variety of sounds he could coax from his instrument, what Derek Bailey called "the instrumental impulse"; the other side to Cora was a stubborn attachment to tunefulness and compelling rhythms?a fascination with structure?which is why his compositions live on after him and why he was such a good match with the Ex.

Most of the pieces on the album reflect both of these strands, but some fall into one camp or the other. I found the more experimental, improv/stream-of-consciousness stuff less compelling, including an 18-minute duet with Fred Frith. Listening to this disc, I heard for the first time a resemblance between Cora's compositions and those of Ives?especially on "Saint Dog," where Dave Douglas' trumpet emerges from the murk like the Civil War tunes in "Three Places in New England." I especially liked the tracks that feature Jauniaux's vocals, "Passing" and "Ce Grand Neant." The former is tense and insistently swinging at the same time, both pretty and moody, reminiscent of soundtrack music. In the second, Jauniaux sings a circling vocal line parallel to Cora's cello, spitting out what sounds like a twisted nursery rhyme.

The recordings sound good, although sometimes the applause after each track runs annoyingly long. Gallanter writes in the liner notes about how underrecorded Cora was, with which I agree, and how difficult it is to find many of his releases. I don't know about that?I've seen many of them in used record stores (but, come to think of it, that was on the West Coast, where I guess they don't know which records are supposed to be rare). The Knitting Factory is certainly doing us a service by releasing these tracks, even though they get the date of Cora's death wrong. Clearly, Gallanter wrote the notes long before the CD came out, but for an artist so closely associated with the club and the (erstwhile) scene, this smacks of carelessness. Once you put the disc in the player, however, such annoyances will fade away. You'll find yourself appreciating anew, or for the first time, what was lost with Cora's death.

Eva Neuberg

Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant Belle and Sebastian (Matador)

Even the name of this album shows these elitist pricks have pretensions. When I asked Ben Goldberg of Matador for a copy of this new record, he said, "Oh, lookit the wussy boy!" Truth is, I'd never heard Belle and Sebastian, despite their ultrahipness, until last summer, and the belated release of their first Brit disc, Tigermilk: I was sitting on someone's back deck in the midst of the heat wave last summer, drinking tequila, and from the window came wafting the wistful sounds of B&S. "Yeah, this is okay," I remember thinking, and that was probably the last cognizant thought of that hazy, pleasant evening. It's also the last time I thought about Belle and Sebastian until the release of this new masterpiece (which is in the same vein as Tigermilk as far as I can remember). As for the wuss-girl quotient, let's put it this way: one reason I've resisted Belle and Sebastian for so long is that the hype had them pegged in that whole "retro" vein of prefabricated kitsch that, in their case, meant the fey 60s would-be crooners like Scott Walker, Lee Hazelwood, Neil Diamond and, believe it or not, Tom Jones. Add a few years to the equation and you might as well toss in Elton John.

That's kind of what Belle and Sebastian are: the Elton of their day, or maybe Simon and Garfunkel of the "Scarborough Fair"/"Hazy Shade of Winter" variety. Only B&S isn't actually a duo, a fact I didn't realize till recently. I thought it was two four-eyed geeks but actually they're a six-piece collective with a girl singer who delivers in one of those marvelous icicle-incisor monotones. She adds a real shiver to the already spine-tingling "Beyond the Sunrise," a plaintive ballad featuring some of the most wonderfully morose vocalizing I've ever heard, along with some downright Holy Modal Rounder-style fingerpicking and a smoldering riff that slowly unfurls like a cloud of smoke. This is what I imagine vintage Gordon Lightfoot sounded like, in the days when he was palling around with the Velvet Underground.

"Don't Leave the Light On, Baby" brings out the Hammond organ for those 70s effects, reminding me of Vicky Lawrence's "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia." It's a lot more interesting than anything that putz Beck ever did. With a Beck tune you get the organ and all you get is the organ. With Belle and Sebastian, who are consummate songwriters, the organ is merely an embellishment to an already-great song. "The Wrong Girl" plays on the whole Tom Jones mythology again: there are wafting strings and a blaze of fluttering trumpets. Best song is "Family Tree," the ultimate Burt Bacharach homage with the singer acting as a reasonable facsimile of Dionne Warwick. But would Dionne ever sing anything like "They threw me out of school/'Cause I swore at all the teachers/Because they never teach us/A thing I want to know/We do chemistry, biology and maths/I want poetry and music and some laughs"? Then again, would the Loud Family? Their smarty-pop is even more incisive than Belle and Sebastian's, which only proves what we've known all along: Americans do it better every time.

Joe S. Harrington

In Name and Blood The Murder City Devils (Sub Pop)

When Spencer Moody sings, "Too many drinks and too much John Wayne," it's easy to see why the Murder City Devils exist?to play rock 'n' roll. And while their shows certainly up the count of rock 'n' roll believers, the lyrics are what differentiate them from other twentysomething punk outfits. The Devils' third album, In Name and Blood, surpasses 1998's appropriately titled Empty Bottles, Broken Hearts debut on Sub Pop, epitomizing all that's great in 60s and 70s rock: riffs, women and booze. In crooning vocals, Moody reminisces about the road, drinking too much and dealing with lost love?themes prevalent since the band's inception in '96. On "Somebody Else's Baby," an ode to an absent lover, Moody sings, "I heard or read/the only love is/lost love... I woke up/in someone else's arms/but I was dreaming/I was dreaming of you." "Idle Hands," probably the most heartfelt song on the album, relays a memorable encounter during a drunken stupor in Texas: "these idle hands/they do the devil's work...betcha got a boy/back in Austin, baby/but I'm not asking." The Devils cover Neil Diamond's "I'll Come Running" for all the sensitive rockers. In Name and Blood is so tough it'll make you feel okay drinking a few shots alone, but it also can get you reflecting on past relationships.

With the new album comes an added full-time keyboard player, Leslie Hardy. Bassist Derek Fudesco can now concentrate on his own instrument instead of fluctuating between bass and keys, strengthening the Devils' energized brand of punk rock. The downside is songs more organ-drenched than guitar-oriented?which is somewhat antithetical to their live performances?but they're still the Murder City Devils. As they sing in "Lemuria Rising": "I would of slit my wrists if it wasn't for rock 'n' roll."

The Murder City Devils are playing Thursday, July 28th at Maxwell's and Friday, July 29th at CBGB.

Lisa LeeKing

Binaural Pearl Jam (Epic)

When Pearl Jam's latest found its way to me I immediately turned and asked if anyone in the office wanted to hear it. Much to my surprise, quite a few Gen-Yers did, forcing me to me accept that even though we were less than five years apart in age, my colleagues and I were miles apart in taste.

For me cut-downs have always been, until recently, a funny, fickle business. I've now discovered that the best are short, one-dimensional and to the point, like last week when I stopped a guy from accidentally putting his cigarette out in my drink at a party.

"See, you're the kind of guy who would put ash in a full beer. That's the main difference between you and me," I told him. "You're a dork and I'm not." Devoid of wit yet possessing an undeniably sophomoric appeal, the remark was met with a solid, "Oooooo!" from the crowd gathered, followed by the odd, lingering, "Damn!" The same thing happened the other day in the office over Pearl Jam.

"Oh yeah," I said sarcastically. "I forgot you guys are from a different generation. The generation that didn't get told Pearl Jam sucks." And with that, I finally found it?a surefire method of shutting up even the most precocious of New York Hangover employees. But all in all, my cut-down formula worked at the party because it was a graduation bash for poetry majors, and at the office because Pearl Jam really does suck.

As for Eddie Vedder...well let's start with the name. People, please, by all means if you want your child to spend his life telling the neighbor her hair looks lovely while simultaneously planning to smuggle Beaver across the state line or deflowering underage One Day at a Time cast members, name him Eddie. You might as well give the child a kitten, point him in the direction of the nearest microwave and leave your car keys lying out on the kitchen table. Of course the upside of hanging out with people named Eddie is that they are usually good for a few laughs, just like this CD. And another thing, Vedder: You, sir, are no Neil Young. Although you are, much like the sister who allegedly dressed Nietzsche up in baby's clothes when he was too vulnerable and confused to help himself, responsible for Neil's mid-90s flirtation with stocking caps and baggy jeans. And for that I can never forgive you.

As for the album, I made it halfway through track number four and then put on Petty's greatest hits. Given the choice, I think Vedder would have done the same. I think he'd like to be doing something as timeless and unique as the Petty archives, as in on songs like "Refugee," yet knows deep inside he's falling far short?fading away. In all fairness, there are a lot of people my age who love Pearl Jam, like my friend Mia from Northern California. She helped put on a few of Pearl Jam's shows out there back when they were just getting started, and was one of their biggest, earliest fans. Sweet girl, Mia. Shit taste in music.

Tanya Richardson

Tangerine Dexter Gordon (Milestone)

In Japan Joe Henderson (Milestone)

Two albums, two horn players, both among the all-time top-30 sax players of the past century. Both LPs happening at approximately the same juncture in each musician's career and, as fate would have it, almost the same calendar year and on the same label. Both artists have blown their share of cheese, and Joe Henderson's still blowing, and if Dexter Gordon were still alive he'd no doubt be leading some suckbag proceedings himself right now. But it's okay because, like I said, both are candidates for the all-time top-30 (the portion not occupied by, you know, Coltrane, Frank Lowe, David S. Ware...)

Gordon's one of the people who defined the tenor sax as an instrument, with classic bebop sides like "Settin' the Pace (Sides 1 & 2)" as well as swank LPs in the makeout vein like Dexter Blows Hot & Cool. By the time of Tangerine he'd already gone round the bend a few times and the tone here is fairly laid-back. That's not to say it's not good?in 1972, when this album came out, there weren't many pure wailing-tenor blowouts just for the sake of it, but that's what Tangerine constitutes for the most part: a melodic, gently rocking affair that lets the tenor sax lead the way. Old pros like Thad Jones, Hank Jones and Louis Hayes know what to do, because they've played with the best of them and if the mood demands a general laid-back atmosphere, these clock-punchers ain't gonna complain. One exception is bassist Stanley Clarke. At the time he was a totally hip, happening post-Bitches Brew fusion cat, but here it's mostly follow-the-leader. Soupy sails away on "August Blues," but it's a series of lame solos (including one by Clarke). Gordon's blowing okay on "The Group," where he's helped out by Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton and Billy Higgins. This track features one of his trademark elliptical solos, and it once and for all shows why he gets the nod over Henderson in the theoretical honor roll of tenor greats. But it's also kinda lame?lame piano and a truly cheesy riff that beckons Vegas.

About a year or so before Dexter Gordon waxed Tangerine, Joe Henderson played a series of successful dates in Japan, and the results were captured on another Milestone release, being reissued here for the first time. To fully complete the concept of a genuine cultural exchange, Henderson chose as his sidemen a bunch of homegrown Jap cats. But there's one problem: Japs cannot play jazz, or at least at that time couldn't, and it shows. Sad thing is, Hendu blows some of his best stuff ever. I've always considered him somewhat of a puffer, somewhere below even a Wayne Shorter or Hank Mobley on the all-time list, but here he seems to be catching up with the post-Coltrane free-jazz explosion. He tries to riff like a hipster on the first track, a version of Monk's "Round Midnight," but there's a lotta Jap Mitsubishi-building precision holding him back. The boogoid solo by Hideo Ichikawa is strictly hackwork.

The second track, Hendu's own "Out N In," out-hard-bops Gordon, which isn't surprising since Henderson was recording for Blue Note, perhaps the preeminent hard-bop label, at roughly the same time. But the stuff he blows on a version of Kenny Dorham's "Blue Bossa"?which, judging by the audiences response, was considered somewhat of a standard in the Land of the Rising Sun?ain't nothing special. He gets down in the post-Coltrane mode for "Junk Blues," but he's held back by a truly laughable keyboard solo, courtesy of Ichikawa, which shows the influence of one too many listenings of Bitches Brew. As for the Japs: dunno if they ever learned to play jazz, but at least they're learning baseball.

Joe S. Harrington

Trouble Over Bridgwater Half Man Half Biscuit (Probe Plus)

Half Man Half Biscuit are as English as jellied eels, John Peel and Loaded. Whether or not you consider this A Good Thing depends on both your palate and sense of the absurd. The Biscuit first rose to a certain infamy in the mid-80s for their mix of English square dances, contemporary rhythms and ability to poke fun at the pompous and assuage the social conscience of a whole generation of students through use of a few carefully placed puns. By doing so, they inspired both the cringeworthy Carter USM and soap-dodging Levellers and any number of soccer fanzine writers. (Indeed, you could almost say that Loaded?and hence the whole culture of the lad?was directly Half Man Half Biscuit's fault, but it isn't quite true. The Fall, Serious Drinking and Viz Comics had plenty to do with that, as well. Also, the Biscuit had a certain feminine sensitivity to their beer-laden anthems.) Their moment of glory came when they turned down a date on a tv teen-pop show because it clashed with a game by their soccer team. Shortly after that?in October 1986?they split, and the nation breathed a collective sigh of relief.

That was that.

Except it wasn't. The professional Northerners?bored, or perhaps having pissed all their royalties up against a wall?reformed just four years later. The newest, Trouble Over Bridgwater, is their eighth album and is just as incomprehensible and full of laconic in-jokes as their first. There are songs that make fun of music fascists ("Irk the Purists," which mentions Hüsker Dü and ELO in the same verse), songs about irritating beardy UK tv presenters ("Visitor for Mr. Edmonds"), the odd number on the "turbulent demise of Climie Fisher," who ended up working for the education department in the BBC. Yeah, I know. Be still, splitting sides. The music, meanwhile, is the usual hotpotch of square dances, terrace anthems, Mark E. Smith-esque vocalizing and off-pitch harmonies. One for all you Yanks who still think of the English as "cute."

Everett True

Science Fiction Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)

The Complete Science Fiction Sessions Ornette Coleman (Columbia/Legacy)

Dancing in Your Head Ornette Coleman (Verve)

Ornette Coleman is a complex artist who's had his share of ups and downs in the music business (mostly downs, he'd tell you). In 1971, after productive stints with Blue Note and ABC/Impulse, he began a relationship with Columbia that yielded two albums, Skies of America and Science Fiction. Science Fiction was the inaugural Columbia project and it promised great things, reuniting Coleman with perennial consorts Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell for predictably kinetic results. He also occasionally adds tenor man Dewey Redman and Bobby Bradford to the proceedings. Together all of them generate the kind of passionate interchange that comes rarely in recorded music. It never sounds like merely a collective of musicians following a lead sheet; there's passion in not only each individual player's voice, but in their unity as well. It's a unity that can only come from having played together for years and sharing a similar vision for the music itself, as opposed to simply playing follow-the- leader.

In many ways, Science Fiction was the culmination of the r&b and free-jazz fusion that Ornette had been working on since the 50s. As his next two LPs would prove, his subsequent direction would be far less organic. In the meantime, the performances on Science Fiction highlight the kind of small-band jump-blues-from-outer-space that always made this band's work a challenge to the ear as well as a riveting and joyous experience. The only cuts that don't work are ones like the opener, "What Reason Could I Give," which adds vocalist Asha Puthli for some gospelized histrionics, or "Science Fiction" itself, which presents the kind of "protest"/montage experiment Ornette was purveying on his 1969 LP, Crisis. Like similar experiments from around the same time (Archie Shepp's Attica Blues for instance) these cuts have aged badly. But most of this stuff is right on. "Law Years," for instance, on which Cherry is replaced by Bobby Bradford and Redman guests on tenor, is classic Ornette. The whole performance rests on Higgins' funky gutbucket delivery, and Ornette wails the blues tirelessly. On "The Jungle Is a Skyscraper," Ornette pumps great swooping strides of fury from his sax and Bradford does a good imitation of Cherry, with the same kind of muted notes. "School Work" marks the first appearance of the figure that would crop up again on Skies of America as "The Good Life" and reach full fruition on Dancing in Your Head as "Theme from a Symphony." It was obviously the perennial riff he was working during these years and because these three reissues pretty much trace its evolution, in a strange way they can be seen as some kind of trilogy. Here, the riff is already fully formed, but unlike the kind of rhythmic workout it gets on Dancing in Your Head, at this point it's still firmly in the jazz/gospel vein.

Disc Two features the remainder of the original Science Fiction LP as well as what would've been Ornette's third LP for Columbia, Broken Shadows, if they'd chosen to release it. These sessions are notable for showcasing Ornette's brief flirtation with vocal jazz in the form of "Good Girl Blues," a weird jump blues featuring vocalist Webster Armstrong that recalls similar experiments by Sun Ra, and "Is It Forever," which expands the lineup to include Jim Hall on guitar, Cedar Walton on piano and a host of other musicians on flute, oboe, French horn and other eclectic accompaniment.

Between Science Fiction and Broken Shadows, Ornette recorded what was perhaps his most ambitious project of the period, Skies of America, which featured him sitting in with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It's interesting to hear Ornette actually playing against the orchestra on "The Artist in America," but despite this seeming contradiction, the whole thing rumbles with surprising coherence. On "The Good Life," we hear the now-unmistakable motif pop up again. A further extrapolation of the basic melody would lead to his next experiment, Dancing in Your Head, which featured the first recorded appearance of Prime Time, the group who led the way toward Ornette's exploration of amplified instruments, much like Miles Davis a few years before. However, whereas Miles plumbed the electro-boogie turf of fusion, Ornette's electrified experiments fell somewhere between the crazy rhythms of Captain Beefheart and the funky workouts of James "Blood" Ulmer.

The original impetus for the LP was a trip Ornette took to Morocco to record with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in early 1973 (during which time "Midnight Sunrise" was recorded). A lot of English-speaking musicians at the time (Robert Palmer, Ornette, Brian Jones etc.) wanted to jam with the Masters, and for good reason: their untempered tuning was, spiritually, not only a premonition of the more skewered tenets of avant-garde electronic composition in the late 70s, but also the single factor that put "world music" on the map. But Columbia wasn't buying and Ornette had to wait till 1977, when A&M finally released Dancing. Fortunately, at that time, with disco, punk and avant-garde all at their respective peaks, the album, with its melodic soloing and weird harmonics, sounded right up to date.

Joe S. Harrington

The Marshall Mathers LP Eminem (Interscope)

How many times have you heard someone try to defend what people consider harmful or dangerous art by explaining it away? An artist puts his rawest stuff out there, it disturbs someone, maybe many someones, and immediately the managers, p.r. people and critics start working overtime to convince us that it's all "just" fantasy, "just" the creative imagination at work, a persona, an alter ego?nothing to worry about, folks, move along, move along?this isn't real.

If the artist is interested in maintaining his commercial viability and making what the Kinks called some real money?the kind of money you make after you're number one?then he knows he's gotta spin too. The Slim Shady LP was a calculated bitch-slap across the face of popular culture. It was also one of the greatest albums of the last 10 years. Of course, you're saying, Eminem's just about entertainment, not art. Slim Shady is a character, he's not real. This is like saying that Olivier playing Archie Rice in The Entertainer was art, but what Archie did onstage was entertainment. And that Archie wasn't real. But if he's not real, why bother? What was so compelling about Eminem when he first blew up was his mix of recognizably authentic fucked-upness and razor-sharp commercial smarts (okay, the smarts were just as much Dre's and Paul Rosenberg's and Jimmy Iovine's). Not to mention the way he played with what was real and what was not.

"Realness" is the commodity in rap these days but it's in short supply. Don't the biggest bullshitters you know talk a lot about keeping it real? Eminem had a strike against him when it came to being accepted as real by certain segments of the record-buying, review-writing public. That's why it was so important to get the fatherless, trailer-trash backstory into heavy rotation, to counter all the people who either don't or can't listen and so thought (still think) of Eminem as just another whiteboy rapper. And remember, Dre?arbiter of real niggahood?was behind him, which led a lot of people to give him a chance. That's why it's funny when Em takes them on, imitating them in one of his wonderful whiny, funny voices: "Dr. Dre said?nothing, you idiots/Dr. Dre's dead/he's locked in my basement." That independent spirit doesn't prevent Em from including "Bitch Please II" with Dre and Snoop on The Marshall Mathers LP.

Just to prove he doesn't give a fuck, on "I'm Back" he also disses Puffy and raps about fucking Jennifer Lopez. Not to mention talking about how he "became a commodity/because I'm W-H-I-T-E 'cause MTV was so friend-ly to me." He even bites the Public Enemy lyric "once again, back is the incredible/the rhyme animal." Then there's Snoop on Eminem's own album, calling him the great white American hope.

It's this kind of self-aware, real/fake interplay that fuels the best parts of Marshall Mathers. Eminem's at his funniest when he pretends to be one of his critics: "Oh, now he's raping his own mother, abusing a whore, snorting coke and we gave him the Rolling Stone cover." Or the skit with Steve Berman: "Do you know why Dre's record was so successful? He's rapping about big screen tv's, blunts, 40s and bitches. You're rapping about homosexuals and Vicodin." "Kim" is a delirious, over-the-top look inside Eminem's head that might get those critics antsy again. At least on "97 Bonnie and Clyde" she was already dead. On this album we get to hear a loud, uncontrolled domestic "interlude" with Marshall dragging her into the car while he screams out, "You think I'm ugly, don't you?" and "I hate you, I hate you... I love you." What other "entertainer" around puts out anything like this?

For me, the best song on the album is "Stan." But it's a song that Eminem came close to ruining?or more precisely, did ruin. "Stan" starts out with the sound of falling rain and a woman singing a catchy, melancholy melody with lyrics about how celebrity worship can bring you up when you're down. Then Eminem takes on the persona of one of his own fans, an unhappy guy who identifies with him so strongly that he gets enraged when Em won't respond to his letters or sign autographs. He ends up killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend. "Stan" is a complete mindfuck. It's incredibly real at the same time you know it's "just" Em imagining himself into the life of one of his fans.

Again, what other popular rapper has those kind of imaginative powers? The song should end with the splash of the car as Stan drives into the water. Instead Eminem comes back in?as "himself"?and proceeds to rap about how he's sorry he's so late writing back and "you got some issues Stan/I think you need some counseling." Weak! Even weaker is what Eminem said to the L.A. Times about the song: "[Stan]'s crazy for real and he thinks I'm crazy, but I try to help him at the end of the song. It kinda shows the real side of me." That's the spin. Unfortunately, the spin made it into the song.

Eminem got a lot of fans because he was crazy for real. Crazy enough, anyway. Remember how Slim Shady was full of references to dying and coming back? He'd been there and he knew. There's a little of that spirit on the new record, like on "I'm Back," where Em raps that "you'd better get rid of that 9/it ain't gonna help/what good's it gonna do against a man that strangles himself." Then you hear choking f/x. Slim Shady was all about how crazy beats hard. That was why some people didn't like it?they wanted to hear about hard guys dealing drugs, not wimpy guys overdosing on them. What a pussy way to go out anyhow?a real man shoots himself, preferably after shooting someone else.

The new record's not crazy enough. It's infused with a cautious spirit that says let's give 'em more of the same, which isn't the same the second time around. So we get almost identical PSAs and Paul Rosenberg skits. A lot of bragging raps about nothing in particular (please, leave that to Snoop and Dre, they're better at it). A lot of choruses like "you don't/wanna fuck with Shady/cause Shady/will fuckin' kill you." Heartfelt, I'm sure, but what was he thinking? On "Under the Influence" he says, "I was high when I wrote this/so suck/my dick." That might be funny, if the rest of the song were any better. "They say I can't rap about being broke no more" is a lyric near the beginning of the album. But Marshall Mathers is still being marketed with photos of Eminem taking out the garbage in a food-service apron. Just in case we forgot?

There are moments of good dumb fun on the disc, like "Amityville" (aka Detroit) with its dark scratchy sounds and the chorus, sung with Bizarre from D-12 and more intensity each time: "Mentally ill from Amityville/accidentally kill your family still/thinking he won't goddamn it he will." I like "Drug Ballad" with its true-to-life tales of rum and ecstasy and Eminem predicting a future for himself of drinking scotch on the porch and babysitting "while Hailie's out getting smashed." I also like the "Ken Kaniff" skit with its outrageous cock-slurping. Great little machine-gun-fire lyrical moments are scattered throughout the album. It's worth owning. But it doesn't measure up to Eminem's own standard.

Even the "Murder Murder" single on the Next Friday soundtrack was better than a lot of what's here. Given that the single was terrific, and the video is in heavy rotation, Eminem didn't need to do much to guarantee at least the initial sales. So he didn't do much. He's still Eminem, but the "Just Don't Give a Fuck" days are gone (they had to go, I guess, and don't tell me about how it was all just a posture?never real?to begin with). Marshall Mathers makes it hard to tell whether Eminem now cares too much, or not quite enough.

Eva Neuberg

Pastoral Composure Matthew Shipp Quartet (Thirsty Ear)

This album does for Matthew Shipp what Sunrise in the Tone World did for bassist William Parker: it establishes him as a bandleader of formidable repute. This complements his role as one of the great sidemen of the era, most prominently in the David S. Ware Quartet (to which Parker also belongs). Earlier efforts as a leader, including such collaborations with Parker as Zo and DNA, have been more scholarly exercises. Not that Shipp ever comes across as anything soulless or unfunky. It's just that collaborations between a pianist and stand-up bass player, and solely a pianist and stand-up bass player, are usually less than accessible by their very nature. An earlier trio effort, Prism, was a gem, however: an harmonic firestorm wrought through the filter of post-Cecil Taylor improvising.

But none of those records could have prepared one for Pastoral Composure, which is, in its own way, as brilliant as Surrendered, the new David S. Ware album on Columbia, which naturally features Shipp as well. Not that one could compare the two?Ware's is firmly entrenched in the constantly moving-outward tradition of Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, among others. The Ware group is totally on a mission to keep forging onward and upward. What Shipp is doing here is a lot more experimental and, I suppose, less organic. Whereas Ware's record succeeds as the great sky-blast free-jazz record of the season, Pastoral Composure succeeds on many different levels. It's a testament to Shipp's integral commitment to the "movement" that he can be involved in so many multifarious levels of musicmaking at once. One only has to consider the decrepit rock clowns who put out an album a year or less and bemoan their artistic suffrage to realize this is no mean feat.

Pastoral Composure is bound to draw comparisons to Miles Davis, if only because it features a trumpet player prominently. Roy Campbell is no stranger to the whole spectrum of experimental jazz, as his work here, as well as with the excellent collective Other Dimensions in Music (which also features Shipp and Parker), proves. His duet with Shipp on "Visions," featuring some primal pounding on Shipp's part plus some fast-fingered glissando motions, is a scintillating interchange of musical ideas and idioms that eventually works into one of Shipp's greatest solos ever, a boat-rocking ride somewhere between Monk and funky New Orleans. Campbell whips out a flugelhorn for the title cut, and the result can only be termed "psychedelic." There are a lot of atmospheric flourishes from drummer Gerald Cleaver, and a kind of rolling thunder courtesy of Parker.

Miles comparisons come courtesy of "Progression." One expects Wayne Shorter to start soloing any minute, but there are no actual saxes on this album. (Maybe Ware took up all their theoretical honking space?) "Gesture," with its thumping caravan-like rhythm and almost martial buildup, recalls Sketches of Spain for about one second, but Campbell's doing things on trumpet that Miles never even thought of. It has the "Bolero" feel of Coltrane's "Olé." They also do an all-out freakout version "Frere Jacques," which I have mixed feelings about since I've never been a big fan of the tune. Shipp solos on Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss" and his own "XTU" and proves why he's the logical heir to Cecil Taylor, as well as the most important jazz pianist since Ran Blake, or at least Andrew Hill.

Joe S. Harrington