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By Root 491 0

‘n’ Eno, these kraut kats only beatcha by about 55 years!). Also you’ll hear plenty purely Germanic trills bitten and uvular shim-sham, often corkscrewing through at the oddest moments conveying palpable deja views of secondary blear from the most vintage cartoons made in the same era and neck o’ the globe this music was. Which is another good thing about it, its completely unexpected diversity of appeal. Why, you could slap this on the box and sit some dopesmokin’ ponytailed Grateful Deadheads right knee-to-knee with the brittlest herringbone-cheeked SoHo artiste nouveau-punquelettes and they wouldn’t even claw blood and de-snaggletooth each other! Not one hincty snoot lanced for drill even. Comedian Harmonists promote Peace & Love wherever, whenever they play!

And if you want to know why I’ll tell you. Because of what I was talking about before: what you are holding in your hands ain’t no career. These guys didn’t record, say, “Creole Love Call” (my far-and-away absolute favorite cut; I think this truly sounds like it could have been recorded on some astral plane) because they’d heard Duke Ellington was hip and maybe moving some product in the States so they’d cover it quick cross the pond. They recorded it because they loved Duke Ellington so deeply and were so moved by the original that they just had to say thank you some way and this was fortunately for us the best way they knew how. I can’t speak or read German, and almost all music I’ve heard from that country since these sides were cut makes me nervous at best. But I’ve been listening to music and at least trying to keep my ears open for the real thing amid the tides of dross long enough that I think I can still tell when something is done up not only professionally and technically but with pure hearts collectively welling for a long-awaited outpouring of love for their mentors, their accompanists, each other, whatever audiences (and of whatever kind!) they may have had, and most of all, for their music. When was the last time you heard someone sing for joy? Unalloyed.

What I’m interested in is people with musical obsessions they’re driven to work out. In the cases of the Comedian Harmonists, I just kinda suspect they were a bunch of nice, unsuspecting German guys who some smartass slapped upside the head with their first blast of black American music one day, which musta been some kinda religious experience for them (I know it was for me, and I was born here), after which they were never quite the same again. Admittedly, it musta been more than a little schizo at times. Because there is, all delicate political questions aside, a certain kind of emotionalism in American music, a passion of a particular kind, and I am not even just talking about black music, that seems absolutely antithetical to everything German music is about structurally, conceptually, attitudinally But believe me, there is something deep in the, well, soul of that society, national identity or whatever, that shoots off a hotline emergency interrupt call straight down to the gut every time that big American beat starts up again, the Voice of Control, where it issues from sepulchrally intoning booty-defamations leaden with dread, fear, and God knows whatall else.

One of the things I like best about this album is the way it transcends the usual inevitably somewhat sickly trappings of “nostalgia”-oriented disks. I’m sorry, but I had one childhood, one adolescence, and (particularly re the pube phase) once was more than enough. Maybe it's my age, but I have absolutely no referents for this music. Yet it sounds somehow familiar. There's nothing creepy about it, don’t get paranoid you’re gonna look up all rosy-cheeked and blanch at Hitler leering in the wings. It has nothing to do with Cabaret-style decadence chopped ‘n’ channeled into mass-marketable kitsch, either (always hated that play). Like I said, this music is from outer space. That's just about the only way I can begin to convey the effect it has on me. Brian Eno once said the same thing about his exposure to American a cappella doo-wop groups