Tony Williams Lifetime - EMERGENCY

[felser]

9 hours ago, Bill Nelson said:

When Tony Williams broke from MIles to launch Lifetime, his first mistake was hiring Miles' late-40's buddy Monte Kay as manager.

At this time, Monte had been managing Flip Wilson and would be producer of The Flip Wilson Show on NBC-TV in 1970.

In Melody Maker (January 15, 1972), John McLaughlin had this to say about Lifetime's state of affairs:

"Everything except the music was incredibly bad; management, economics, administration, organization... incredibly bad."

And his second mistake was "singing".

[JSngry]

I have come to actually enjoy the vocals. It's a flavor.

I mean, if we can tolerate Bob Dylan.... 

[jazzbo]

Personally I consider Bob Dylan a master vocalist. Tony Williams. . . um no.

[JSngry]

Vocalist and singer are two different things. 

[jazzbo]

Well I consider Dylan a master singer. WIlliams. . . sang on occasion.  Not nearly as well imo.

Edited April 4, 2023 by jazzbo

[JSngry]

I see! 

[jazzbo]

Unlike you I never warmed to the singing. And this is where I begin to take him off the pedestal as one of my favorite drummers. Just me and my tastes.

[JSngry]

He wasn't playing the yellow drums yet. He was still swirling with a furious abandon, as was the entire trio. Whatever one thinks about the vocals, they hardly dominate the record. I don't think anything could dominate the playing on the record. 

[jazzbo]

Dominate or not, I'd play the disc more often were they not there. This was the start of the sort of drumming that he moved to that I wish he hadn't, swirling abandon is so different to the mastery and invention he had going on a year before. As a former drummer this may mean more to me than to someone else.

Edited April 4, 2023 by jazzbo

[JSngry]

Oh, but this IS the Tony that we hear on Filles, and the Tony that we might have heard on In A Silent Way if he had been turned loose. Mastery & invention abound. Abundantly so. And you get plenty of it all the way through to his playing on Captain Marvel. And then...he changed his mind about things, or that's what it seems like to me.

I'm not a former drummer, but I have played a fair amount with some pretty damn good ones, so I think I know drummers and drumming reasonably well. and I can say with certainty that this Tony and the Tony of a few years later on VSOP and such are two different players...or styles, it's still the same player.

Problem, officer?

[jazzbo]

Well I disagree. Here, at this time is the beginning of the divergance. And my lack of appreciation begins at this time forward.

[JSngry]

I think this is still a period of growth. There was still plenty of "old Tony". I think it was all old Tony, expanded. The actual divergence came a few years later. 

Hindsight is 20/20.

[jazzbo]

I disagree. Important, to me, parts of former Tony were jettisoned never to return. And I am not a fan of what was replacing them. 

C'est la vie.

[ep1str0phy]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

I think this is still a period of growth. There was still plenty of "old Tony". I think it was all old Tony, expanded. The actual divergence came a few years later. 

Hindsight is 20/20.

Jim - something I've always admired about your contributions to this forum is that you're very dialed into context. When I first joined this forum, I was getting a lot of my education from editorialized histories. The practical history of this music is so convoluted that I found myself heavily scrutinizing everything that wasn't a primary (or participatory secondary) source. Like, it's easy to cotton to a series of sensible truths, but seemingly every day of my working life has been filled with - "Welp. I was wrong about that one."

A canon informed by documentation is intrinsically unreliable, mainly because western modes of information digestion train us to see patterns where they may not exist. Like, "Fusion" isn't really a thing so much as a series of compatible actions and ideas that happened to manifest in the same timeframe. 

My occam's razor-informed understanding of Lifetime is that Tony just wanted a rock band. Lifetime is a reverse-engineered Cream, in much the same way that a band like Sonic Youth or Rollins Band gets at free jazz from the opposite direction. The deal is that Lifetime is a syncretic construction - it's simultaneously an organ trio and rock band, and the components don't necessarily mesh into their intended shape.

The drums are loud, in part, because they were mixed poorly. The albums are filled with vocals because Tony wanted to play songs. Neither of these identified problems confound Tony's intentions, because - like Raw Power - the music makes more sense when it goes into the red.

I can guarantee you that if a young organ trio recorded something that sounded exactly like Emergency in 2023 - with worse mixing and ill-conceived compression - it would find an enthusiastic and un-perplexed audience. This is in part because "acceptable sound quality" has become a generationally subjective phenomenon, and in part because whoever recorded this hypothetical new album would not have played in the Miles Davis Quintet.

Understandably, I think that we want badly for things to exist in forms that they do not. The Platonic ideal of Lifetime is not Lifetime. That Trio Beyond record is rad, but it's also not it. The fact that both of the classic Lifetime albums are flawed constructions is exactly the point - it's impossible to both experiment and land every decision. 

 

Edited April 4, 2023 by ep1str0phy

[JSngry]

3 minutes ago, ep1str0phy said:

My occam's razor-informed understanding of Lifetime is that Tony just wanted a rock band. Lifetime is a reverse-engineered Cream... 

And what I love about Emergency is that nobody on that record had yet to try to (or figure out how to) dumb down who they were and what they knew in the pursuit of that goal. 

[ep1str0phy]

15 minutes ago, JSngry said:

And what I love about Emergency is that nobody on that record had yet to try to (or figure out how to) dumb down who they were and what they knew in the pursuit of that goal. 

Exactly. The music conforms to the performers and not the other way around. Emergency sounds to me like an expansion of existing vocabulary. The Tony on this record existed implicitly on Nefertiti. 

[mikeweil]

There is a link between the two styles of Tony - you can hear it on The Old Bum's Rush. On that album he almost plays like he did in the new Lifteime and the Stanley Clarke album on Nemperor, and later in his Quintet. After the Rush LP he switched drum brands, as he needed a bigger sound for that style that Gretsch drums couldn't project. 

I also sense Tony's personal image of the sound of black power on drums in the direction he took.

[JSngry]

20 minutes ago, ep1str0phy said:

The Tony on this record existed implicitly on Nefertiti. 

And more than implicitly here:

 

[BFrank]

Has anyone heard the 2011 Esoteric Recordings remaster of this? One reason I've always had trouble with it is the poor quality of the recording. Is it significantly better?

Here's their description:

+++

The Tony Williams Lifetime: Emergency! CD

RE-PRESS: CD ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 2011

REMASTERED UK CD EDITION OF THE CLASSIC DEBUT ALBUM BY TONY WILLIAMS’ LIFETIME – FEATURING JOHN McLAUGHLIN and LARRY YOUNG
BOOKLET WITH FULLY RESTORED ARTWORK & NEW ESSAY

Esoteric Recordings are pleased to release the first album by the legendary jazz / rock / fusion outfit Tony Williams’ Lifetime.

The group was founded by former Miles Davis drummer Tony Williams in 1969 out of his desire to fuse the influences of modern jazz and rock music. Recruiting legendary British guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young, Williams recorded the album “Emergency!”. It was a stunning and seminal work that divided critics in both jazz and rock but is now rightly regarded as being a groundbreaking work.

This Esoteric Recordings edition is remastered and features the original album artwork and an informative essay.

[bertrand]

Ego is my favorite Lifetime record. No McLaughlin, but Ted Dunbar is great.

More subdued due to the different guitarist, but the compositions are really good.

There is a recording of Lifetime where Larry had to lay out due to a problem with the venue's organ. There is a bassist but it is most likely Dave Holland, not Jack Bruce. I cannot share this and it will never come out. I should not even be talking about it.

[felser]

As far as Emergency, my longstanding understanding is that the recording was botched, no remastering is going to make it sound good.  Yet it remains essential listening despite the sonic flaws (and Tony's "singing").

[bertrand]

There's a review of that gig sans Larry in the Washington Post 3/2/70. Dave Holland is named. I saw in some chronology that Jack Bruce was in Calfornia.