Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [18]
The musicians include some of the new jazz's most eloquent and innovative voices: Don Cherry, Mike Mantler, Roswell Rudd, and Gato Barbieri, who plays the most searingly pure tenor saxophone that I have heard in some time, as pregnant with consuming love and painfully articulate suffering as Charles Mingus's best work. But all involved comport themselves with single-minded discipline and that impassioned restraint whose subtlety and control makes a musical soul-baring that much more convincing. Like Pharoah Sanders’ Karma, this record suggests a new maturity in the camps of the jazz avant-garde, a weathered internalization of all reckless experiments which allows the artists to submit the revelations encountered out on all those limbs to clearly defined and relatively directed musical purposes. Thus, the relatively familiar and unadventurous framework of brooding flamenco, rather than being a hackneyed musical strait-jacket stifling woolly ramblers, proves a firm foundation for exalted, heart-swelling statements by turns lyrical and dissonant. Haden's bass work is especially superb, throbbing and droning with a restless yet understated intensity expressing perfectly the pulsebeat of lives like those in the Spanish Resistance, lived in eternal fear and the fiercely nurtured strength of brave dreams. The arrangements by Carla Bley are miracles of dynamics, rising and falling in volume and velocity and the awe-inspiring balance of collective ensembles improvising freely through swellings and contractions of individual voices entering and leaving the mysterious swirling circle of simultaneous songs as diverse as the number of performers yet never lacking the kind of transporting telepathic unity that makes this multiplicity of musical lines such a far cry from the chaos of the charlatans in other sections of the avant-garde hiding under the mantle of these geniuses.
Rolling Stone, February 21, 1970
Canned Heat:
The New Age
Hey kids and bluesbusterbrowns of all ages, guess who's back? No, not the Plaster Casters Blues Band—it's Canned Heat! The riginators of Boogie in the flesh! And it sure is refreshing to see ‘em too, what with all these jive-ass MOR pseud-dudes like John Lee Hooker ripping off their great primal riffs and milking ‘em dry.
How did we love Canned Heat? Let's count the ways. We loved ‘em because they scooped out a whole new wrinkle in the monotone mazurka; it wasn’t their fault that a whole generation of ten zillion bands took and ran it into the ground sans finesse after Canned Heat had run it into the ground so damned good themselves. We loved ‘em because they’ve always held the record for Longest Single Boogie Preserved on Wax: “Refried Boogie” from Livin’ the Blues was forty-plus minutes of real raunch froth perfect for parties or car stereos, especially if they got ripped off—and a lot of it was even actually listenable. We loved ‘em because Henry Vestine was an incredible, scorching motherfucker of a guitarist, knocking you through the wall. And we loved ‘em because Bobby Bear was so damned weird you could abide his every excess.
But Canned Heat disappeared from the sets for a while there, just sorta flapped up and boogied into the zone and what was really sad was that nobody missed ‘em. Even though they were always real fine journeymen, they never made a wholly and entirely good album, of course, but they’ve consistently had their moments. And The New Age, which of course is no new age at all, has just as many of ‘em as any of the others. There's “Keep It Clean,” a happy highho funk churn like unto their cover of Wilbert Harrison's “Let's Work Together,” which means it could very well be hitbound. There's “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music,” Bear Hite's obligatortilla in deference to the traditions, his utter lack of imagination, and all that. He's been listening to some old New Orleans r&b this time, so it's OK even if he does still sing like a scalped guppy.
“Framed” is just a reprise in new drag of their classic about being busted in Denver that was on Boogie with Canned Heat, and that was just a new