Rabshakeh

He's gone quiet over at his new home on substack, recently.

Not at all. But this is an area on which academic consensus is so clear that it is hardly worth debating. Those who claim that the first rock and roll record was actually 'Wig Wam Bam' by The Sweet are deluded in my view.

Rolls and honey and nothing else trumps honey and a honey dipper. Neither a work of beauty.

The first Rock and Roll record was 'We're Not Going to Take It', by Los Angeles-based band Twisted Sister. It is the first song to combine the core rock and roll genre characteristics of pouting, guitars and a music video where the dad gets beaten up. All other minds of music that preceded it are just pastoral shepherd flute music or Chinese opera.

Surely one of the worst album covers of all time.

Listening now. Really excellent

Thanks!

Which is that? The link doesn't work for me for some reason.

Was it good? I was weighing it up and plumped for the Vortex trip mainly because I so rarely go there now. You tipped me off to Arbenz I think, a year or so ago. Thank you for that. Half to hear that Sakata was good!

I guess a lot does depend on what you mean by rock and roll. Maybe it if you don't mean Bill Haley or Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry but instead mean the Rolling Stones. The Jim Dawson and Steve Propes book sounds really interesting. And a far more sensible approach to dealing with the question than any other that I could think of.

Maybe. That is closer to what my ears say. Although there's some complex musical DNA back there.

Bill Marx Trio - My Son The Folk Swinger

I never quite understood why Rocket 88 is considered early rock and roll. To my ears it sounds fairly squarely R&B. I guess the lyrics are about driving around getting teenage kicks.

I saw Palmer last year at Ronnie's and he was really good. Off to the Vortex this evening in Dalston to watch Florian Albenz featuring Greg Osby.

These are excellent points. I agree that Sun Ra is not properly speaking "spiritual jazz" at all, but I think that as used on social media and indeed by record labels these days, "spiritual jazz" means must about anything. What interests me is that, when those reissues did start in the 1990s, it was the 1960s records that got reissued first (or at least that attracted attention): Magic City, Atlantis, Heliocentric Worlds, etc.. Not Languidity or Disco 3000. Then I remember the surge of interest in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the 1950s records were re-released and people were confronted with a Sun Ra that was so much more accessible. But it still took a few years for those late 1970s records to come out.

John Edwards / Luis Vicente / Vasco Trilla – Choreography Of Fractures

What is the blog about? The Spanish jazz scene? Interesting stuff.

Armando Sciascia – Impressions In Rhythm & Sound The rare really really good Italian library record. (As opposed to merely good or tepid in a "why the hell are you all obsessing over this you clout-chasing freaks?!" way.)

Yeah. It was this stuff that struck a passing correspondence in head. Having reminded myself of what KP actually sounds like, that is really where the correspondence ends.

Similar gimmick actually but he's a weird lounge guy from the dawn of the 1950s. That record sounds like a travelogue record played through a music box, very much in the bad way.

Sun Ra – Concert For The Comet Kohoutek Korla Pandit – Latin Holiday

El'Zabar is putting serious time in for East London, it seems. He plays three or four times a year.

AMM – Before Driving To The Chapel We Took Coffee With Rick And Jennifer Reed I had a listen to this after it was mentioned a few days ago. Tatum is brilliant on this but I struggled a bit with Stewart: that sawing thing he has going sort of kills the rhythm.

I think that what has happened is that Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Sun Ra how now become very mainstream as "Spiritual Jazz", along with a few other names that younger listeners regard as similar, like Dorothy Ashby. I know lots of younger people for whom those artists represent their main experience of jazz. It is quite specific periods for each artist, mostly corresponding to their time on Impulse! or in the case of Sun Ra, his move towards less obviously extreme music, and particularly the Languidity, Disco 3000 and Nuclear War records. So no ESP or BYG stuff. I get the sense that these records have an aura of "conscious" afro-centric spirituality with good visuals that appeal to the Instagram and tiktok creators, but they also have a transgressive edge from the fact that they are associated with the avant-garde, without actually being difficult to listen to. I don't get the sense that the wider avantgarde jazz is really growing at all. I don't think these people enjoying Alice Coltrane's meditation records are checking out Frank Wright or Lester Bowie, let alone more recent figures like Gustafsson etc. The three exemplary figures of the avantgarde back when I got into the music: John Coltrane, Don Cherry, and for other listeners, John Zorn, seem to be much less famous with younger people than they were before. I am always a bit shocked at the collapse in name recognition for Cherry in particular. More shockingly, I have come across really quite a number of people in both real life and on the internet who profess to like avantgarde jazz, who turn up their nose up at Coltrane. I think it is because the name Coltrane is too widely known and they, in their ignorance, mistakenly regard Coltrane as music for normies. The famous cover of "My Favorite Things" seems to get mentioned as an example of creative compromise or selling out, which is obviously completely bizarre. Ascension, which for anyone learned about this music retrospectively in the text based media era was the obvious example of an avantgarde jazz record, seems to be MIA in modern discourse. I think a lot of the reason for this is that the interest in these records is spurred by social media. I.e. the growth of interest in these artists is coming in large part from short form videos where an attractive young person shows you his or her "Five essential spiritual jazz records that just hit different" and then pulls out records whilst nodding. It is generally the same records on Impulse!. That is partly because the algorithm incentivises picking the same records (the more people that mention a specific record the more likely the video is to trend) but also partly because Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra records look otherworldly and cosmic. A lot of the people making these videos appear to just be recycling the same themes, so there isn't much way to break their narratives. That may explain why the previously talismanic records are retreating: John Coltrane records just have photographs of him looking serious, Don Cherry records look a bit messy and John Zorn is not handsome and his records are all on CD. As a separate phenomenon, I have also come across increasing recognition of Evan Parker, Peter Brotzmann and Anthony Braxton, although typically not connected to actually listening to their music. I think that these three get held up online as "really extreme" or "really experimental", which adds up to name recognition and some curiousity. I went to see e.g. Parker or Brotzmann (RIP) recently and the gigs were full of curious younger people who hadn't actually listened to the records but we're excited, often having travelled quite far, listening in rapt attention. Again, I think that this reflects the fact that these people's records are showing up on Instagram and Tiktok as examples of the most avant-garde or experimental jazz. I don't think that any of this is really a sign of wider interest though, any more than the resurgence of interest in Gil Scott-Heron a few years ago heralded a growth of interest in 1970s soul and funk. It is just an intersection of politics, youth culture, nice looking covers and short form video. Finally, I should add that these "young" people are in their 30s. In generational terms the popularity of these records is strictly a millennial thing. I have seen no sign whatsoever that listeners under 25 are getting into this music.

It really interests me how Sun Ra has been defanged in the popular culture. Some sort of pivot happened around 2010. Where he went from being perceived as an exemplar of the avant-garde that Sonic Youth was going to tell you about, to being someone whose work you could use to sell tote bags. The focus has also shifted quite radically away from his New York era records that used to define him in wider culture.