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By Root 440 0

original songs in an outpouring of poetry that as far as I’m concerned would do Walt Whitman proud, and kicks ass on anything Allen Ginsberg's managed to come up with in upward of 20 years. Musical accompaniment is provided by the likes of drummer Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet, bassist Richard Davis, who played with Eric Dolphy and guitarist Jay Berline, whose only previous LP exposure to my knowledge was Charles Mingus's ultimate masterpiece, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, itself yet another unclassifiable work, featuring flamenco guitars, Duke Ellington horn charts, yearning waltzes, gutbucket NYC streetlife blare like a fusillade of lava: taxicabs honking, babies being born, people crying, dying, making love, tenderly comforting the wounded beloved one…. It's all life, is what it is, which is what I think all the best music is, or writing, for that matter, or anything. Mingus made a point on the front, back, and inner sleeves of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: where the usual logo read, “The New Wave”—that's what they called it!—“of Jazz Is on Impulse!” Mingus saw to it that all over that album the word “jazz” was deleted and “Ethnic Folk-Dance Music” emblazoned instead. A trifle clunky, maybe, but it gets at least part of the point across. And, babe, if you’ve ever heard that record, you sure do know you can dance to it. Across the crest of the sun.

As I may have said earlier, over the years I have noticed that the music that has meant the most to me, whether in terms of plain old garden variety association (you know, romance and all that stuff), the deeply personal identifications that occur when that magic confluence causes a certain piece of music to come along at a certain time, and— guess what?—it turns out to be better medicine for heart/soulache, balm for shredded nerves, them jetstream tropic mambo rumpus when spring breaks out in you lubricious unto delirium in any old time of the year—somehow, always, I end up with music, the soundtracks to whatever latest escapades (‘cause I am truly obnoxious, carry armloads of albums with me everywhere I go), refusing to fall into your generic categories which, by the way, have you noticed in the stores they getting ‘em ever-narrower defined till one day we’re gonna wake up and the only way to tell The Heartbreakers Live at Max's Kansas City Vol. VIIfrom Chuck Mangione Plays Rupert Holmes Gorillas for UNICEF will be by dat big old black-n-white PRICE CODE slapped right on the front of every album? Cover art? Who needs it? We gotta veritable New Hebrides among computer filing systems what don’t give diddley iffen you think y’all just gonna barge in here splitting who-cares hairs such as por exemplo Judy Holliday and Billie Holiday now wasn’t they sisters somewhere back there in the corncrib we’ll file ‘em together anyhoo they’re both dead after all.

And that's the present and future state of the art of the music business, which is why I am more than merely proud to be associated with this set. I’m honored because, friends, if you’ll just take my little words here on good faith, buy this sucker, take it home and slide it on that turntable, I guarantee you gonna have a listening experience like unto you never previously suspected existed in this galaxy at least. And they didn’t even have to fall back on no “Star Wars” synthesizer gimcracks. Nope. This music sounds like it was recorded in the ballrooms of Heaven, and that's right, I’m talking about that place where all those peculiar emanations plop theyselves on stray cloudlets and Hendrixify just a tad now and then on all them golden harps. Here, you have one too, easy to play, ain’t it?

But, I still hear you screaming, where in God's name did this stuff COME FROM? The answer is that I don’t know. Haven’t the foggiest. I do know that it was recorded in Germany pre-Hitler, mid-Twenties to early Thirties, that everybody in the band is white, that they’ve absorbed black soul, gospel, blues, ragtime, and SOMETHING ELSE AFRICAN that really sproings the chilly willies up your spine (eat your hearts out Byrne