Free Funk

[ep1str0phy]

Wow--I see that album around and I had no idea that Ron Wilson was with the Tapscott people. A quick glance at "The Dark Tree" doesn't seem to yield his name. (Though by "quick glance" I think I mean just looking at the index.)

I think some of the UGMAA's music can fit into this category. The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra's music is consistently harmonically complex, polyphonic, and stratified, but it's often underpinned by very regular--I guess you could say funky--rhythms. One of the really attractive things about many of Tapscott's compositions are their reliance on low-register ostinati, which makes them cyclical in an Afro-American way rather than just an African or pan-African way. That's the other "dark" part of the Dark Tree, I guess--those heavy, churning rhythms...

"The Giant Is Awakened" is funky in a really pulsing, penetrating way, for example--just really heavy, danceable--edgy--rhythms. The point is made in "The Dark Tree" that Tapscott is similar in respects to Fela Kuti, and I can totally understand this--musically, and not just politically; both Fela and Horace made music that simultaneously conveyed unfettered energy and encouraged unfettered asses. (Free your mind and your ass will follow...)

And if anyone has the Isoardi ("The Dark Tree") book, some of the recordings on the accompanying CD are as good as anything that got wide® release. There's this excerpt from an Eternal Egypt Suite that superimposes pretty high-energy free solos over (I haven't listened to this in a bit, so I may be thinking of something else) a dirty 6/8 vamp. This is heavy shit--like Black Beings Frank Lowe heavy, or slightly less-burnished 70's quartet Charles Tolliver heavy--and weirdly danceable.

[Niko]

Wow--I see that album around and I had no idea that Ron Wilson was with the Tapscott people. A quick glance at "The Dark Tree" doesn't seem to yield his name. (Though by "quick glance" I think I mean just looking at the index.)

And if anyone has the Isoardi ("The Dark Tree") book, some of the recordings on the accompanying CD are as good as anything that got wide® release. There's this excerpt from an Eternal Egypt Suite that superimposes pretty high-energy free solos over (I haven't listened to this in a bit, so I may be thinking of something else) a dirty 6/8 vamp. This is heavy shit--like Black Beings Frank Lowe heavy, or slightly less-burnished 70's quartet Charles Tolliver heavy--and weirdly danceable.

wilson is on one tape in the tapscott collection at UCLA in a quartet with Tapscott sideman Ray Straughter (playing one composition which is also on the open sky unit album) [and this is all my assertion was based on]

http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt1870...2&brand=oac

Malcom X Week at Riverside City College . 05/22/1971

Future Present Tense UGMAA

Personnel: Ron Wilson, piano; Paul Wright, bass; John Blue, drums; Ray S, tenor sax

Compositions: E.P., Mankind Is One, Hot Rotten Collard Greens, Paul Chant, Passion and Compassion

___________________

Eternal Egypt Suite is definitely an excellent piece of music (and my favorite on that cd)... had heard the composer/soloist of that piece fuasi abdu khaliq in berlin years ago and was surprised to see his name again when reading about tapscott...

[ep1str0phy]

Whoa--solid research. I'm still holding out hope that some of the PAPA stuff that is in the UCLA vaults will see release; the recordings don't have open access, although (if I recall correctly) it's possible to get in and see the scores.

The reputable side of Stanley Crouch has it that no one was playing like the UGMAA out on the East Coast. As it is, a lot of the UGMAA guys who did get out to NY wound up either conforming to already-going trends there. Barring Butch Morris, I think most of those guys made it more as instrumentalists than conceptualists--Arthur Blythe, for example, who was and is a total terror, but not so often a card-carrying radical (though I think his work with tuba or cello and some of his funkier sides, like Lenox Avenue Breakdown, are unprecedented in their own way(s)). Azar Lawrence was a total badass from a young age and has done some original things with the Coltrane concept, but hasn't really produced out of that mold since--not necessarily a bad thing, but it is what it is.

On the other hand, I think a lot of the UGMAA folks that stayed in LA produced really interesting work--and not because LA is in a vacuum per-se, but maybe just on the strength of ideas. Horace was a stone LA man to the end and there is still nothing out there that sounds quite like him. I think the same could be said of, say, Jesse Sharps, who developed an approach to circular breathing that sounds nothing like Roscoe Mitchell or Rahsaan Roland Kirk--more a direct line from Coltrane. And, though they weren't UGMAA, similar could be said for Bobby Bradford and John Carter.

[ep1str0phy]

By the way, this fits with the topic:

http://www.myspace.com/freeformfunkyfreqs

It's a trio of Vernon Reid, Calvin Weston, and Jamaaladeen Tacuma. Sometimes the "free form" is hard to detect, but I guess it really is more of a formal thing (versus a technical or melodic or harmonic thing). I think this sits a few steps above funky "jam" music; this is some of the best Tacuma I've heard in a while--maybe because it's a cooperative and the concept is so specific (thus minimal chance of commercial BS).

[Afric Pepperbird]

I would think Harry Whitakers's Black Renaissance would fit the bill

[kh1958]

The various editions of Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, as recorded on Nasty, Street Priest, Barbeque Dog, When Colours Play, Texas, What Spirit Say, Shannon's House, Raven Roc, Decode Yourself, etc.

Ned Rothenberg's Double Band, with Thomas Chapin--on Overlays, Parting, and Real and Imagined Time.

[randyhersom]

Mario Pavone with Thomas Chapin's trio and Abdul Wadud with Julius Hemphill both give up the funk. Sky Piece and Dogon A. D. are good places to start, respectively.