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.
