PLEASURE CONTROL
James Blood Ulmer
Free Lancing
When my Dad moved out of the “family home” a couple of years ago (it was only ever me and him who lived there), he hired a car and ferried all manner of junk down to my place – including, at my insistence as his next of kin, his record collection. I was hence assigned the task of storing, cleaning, and gradually mini-disking his most prized LPs. (Mini-discs is about as far into the digital realm my Dad has got: the world of mp3’s is beyond him. MD may carry the same ones and zeroes in roughly the same order, but they are neatly manifest in pocket-sized physical form, and hence not too far removed from the familiar analogous formats of old.)
Despite looking to his record collection throughout my childhood and adolescence as, probably, my primary source of musical influence, there remained (and remain) certain records which I wilfully overlooked. These usually resided towards the back of the stack, and comprised those that looked like Dad’s old hippy shit, avant-garde jazz, and those with sleeves so impenetrably obscure that I’d decided they were far too weird – as well as those records that looked as if they’d been enjoyed at so many parties that they would render useless any stylus that might be unfortunate enough to come into contact with them.
One of these forgotten artefacts is James Blood Ulmer’s Free Lancing, forgotten not only by my Dad but also to Columbia Records (it has never been re-issued on CD) and, apparently, the avant/jazz fraternity, as it is rarely discussed in free jazz circles, websites, and the like. As a curious teenager hungry for rhythm, it was easily flicked past in my trawls through the vinyl, its image of a sweaty, bearded black guy in African garb holding a guitar and grimacing in typical axe-wielder pose doing little to divert my attention, as I searched for the next Dillinger or Scientist in the rack. It was only years later that it came to my attention, during one of my Dad’s reminiscences in which he raved about Blood’s “Jazz is the Teacher, Funk is the Preacher” (recorded with the same band for his Are You Glad to be in America? LP), and I was ordered to mini-disc everything by Ulmer on the shelf.
When I finally played it (after giving it a damn good clean) I cursed myself for never having played it before. Much like …America, it is a rush of brittle energy, faster than punk and as funky as Ulmer’s namesake Brown. David Murray’s horn lines provide a melodic counterpoint to Blood’s contorted guitar dissonance, while the whole lot is underpinned by a rhythm section buzzing off their own frazzled energy. And what a rhythm section! What rhythms! Like a jogger tripping on his laces, they are carried through the album on their own relentless momentum, faster, faster, just about keeping on their feet.
This is not just a great free jazz record. It’s a classic post-punk album, a sweaty funk cut, an avant-garde gem. And it is post-punk, and everything that phrase suggests. The slinky lounge jazz of “High Time” recalls “Twice Removed” by the (belatedly) celebrated punk-funker James Chance’s Contortions, while the upbeat numbers are funkier than anything on the Contorions’ Buy, and at least as intense. If the jazzers and the kids weren’t going to the same clubs or buying the same records at the end of the 70s, there must have been something very distinctive in the New York water.
(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang
“Music industry to tax downloaders – £30 ‘licence fee’ set to revolutionise illegal file-sharing” (Independent)
The news that the record industry had obtained the support of the Government in securing a “memorandum of understanding” from the six biggest internet service providers, should not have been entirely unexpected. This industry has a long and prosperous history of fierce protectionism, jealously guarding its humble innovations with a cobweb of patents, aggressive marketing tactics and exploitation.* Its latest wheeze, to get ISPs to whack an arbitrary flat fee on anyone downloading music, smacks of the doomed last gasp of a bloated beast, desperately flailing in its new inhospitable environment. Because this is about the survival of the record industry. The BPI has instigated this because it is the BPI’s members that are in trouble.
The official line is that this is all in aid of the musicians – particularly those long-suffering “smaller” artists, for whom it could be the difference between working full-time as a musician or going back to the day job. But where will the money raised from the proposed levy end up? “The money raised would be channelled back to the rights-holders, with artists responsible for the most popular songs receiving a bigger slice” – for “rights-holders” read songwriters and record companies; while the “bigger slice” would presumably go to the likes of Coldplay. The Beatles’ estates and other needy hopefuls. (I say “presumably”, as there is, as far as I know, no reliable indicator of which artists are most downloaded.) So, that’s business as usual then, as those who have always profited most from the industry’s redistribution schemes will continue to keep their coffers flush.
There is no question that illegal peer-to-peer downloading is harming the wallets of the record industry and its biggest artists, whose profits come almost entirely from royalties cheques and CD sales; but to claim, as the industry’s defenders such as this guy have, that it is the small-time musicians who are being hurt the most is disingenuous to say the least. When a band or musician is at the semi-professional level, their prime concern is exposure. In the year since I had the internet installed and began downloading mp3s – and streaming internet radio (which also pays no royalties to collection societies) – I have heard more unfamiliar music than in probably any of the previous fifteen.
The CD: the industry's petard by which it has now been hoist
The ease and cheapness of distribution means anyone with an internet connection can get an mp3 or ogg of their recordings to a potentially vast audience, without worrying about how many copies to produce, where to store them all or how to pay the distributors. They won’t make any money, but they might get more people to come and see them play live. And contrary to the conventional belief that tours are loss-making promotional gambits, the last decade’s resurgence in live music means that the money is there for a band that can draw a crowd. A “small” band will now not bother going on tour unless there’s a good chance they’ll at least break even.
True, the amounts I’m referring to are not life-changing; a future music industry would perhaps consist of a multitude of middleweight bands with modest audiences, run more like efficient small businesses, with the narrow day-to-day profit margins that implies, rather than the star-creation and huge outlay of current major label-led entertainment. Unglamorous, perhaps; but any businessman worth his salt (even in the music business) would recognise that an industry must adapt to its environment, not vice versa. And it was the industry’s innovations that helped to create the current environment – with the establishment of CDs.
The record industry wants to have its cake and eat it. It enthusiastically funded the development of the CD, and hence precipitated the ensuing digitisation of all recorded music. Albums from the back catalogue were hastily re-issued in the new format – often with shoddy re-mastering by engineers unfamiliar with the properties of digital audio – which, combined with the steady deletion of vinyl editions from the same roster, contributed to the take-up of the new discs and the players to play them. The record companies were more than happy with the arrival of digital technology, allowing them as it did to sell punters records they had already bought. If it wasn’t for this ruthless exploitation, music in an easily-copied digital form would not be as universal as it is today, and the problem of music “piracy” on the internet (by curiously benevolent pirates, sharing their CD collection as they do for free) would not be so widespread.
What’s really funny about this is that vinyl sales are on the increase!** (A revival which, needless to say, originated in the independent sector.) Further anecdotal evidence of that old home-tapers plea: that music fans, on being convinced of a band (either by friend’s mix-tape or download) will go out and purchase the record – because our consumerist society loves a good product.
*The early chapters of Louis Barfe’s Where Have the Good Times Gone? gives an exhaustive history of the tiffs and spats between the inventors of various “talking machines”, in the days before any kind of standard format was reached.
**In a slightly confused article from Elisa Bray of the Independent