“Peace and Love” as my friend Ara says… (hit play)

This is a pretty killer recording of Jaco Pastorious sitting in with Herbie Hancock quintet in 1977 at the Ivanhoe Theatre in New York. At first I thought I’d just play a couple of my favorite songs but I thought that wouldn’t be fair for the folks who haven’t heard it before, as this is rare but not “that” rare… Instead I staggered the order as Track 2 and particularly track 3 – It Remains to Be Seen, are some of my favorites. In typical fashion this track came on my ipod on the way home tonight from the shop and it just cranks, so here I am playing it — no rhyme or reason I suppose (smile).

Also — and this is important — now, here I was, thinking I was something special with some of these rare tracks. But as I was looking online for both the playlist and some art for this bootleg (or “import” as they were once called), out of the wood work I found some blogs way older than this one, including **holy gold mine** – very cool, make sure you click that link. In this single post there are 44 great bootlegs — many of which I don’t even own. And look at the lineup, Roy Ayers (trust me – there is some Roy Ayers coming) and a gazillion others… It’s so good that I added his blog to the blog roll on the right and it will take be days to get through it all, and to even get a good beginning…

Here is some art from this blog & this post. There is something about the covers of early 70s recordings, again just keepin it real…

A lot of the music that happens in my life comes from down at our amateur mechanic shop at the Recycling Center in Heber City, Utah. This is where we spend a lot of our time working on old Toyota Land Cruisers and other misc vehicles. We do all sorts of interesting work: major modifications, engine swaps, modernization of old vehicles, and other crazy fabrication. We’re down there for hours and hours upon a time and usually the music is very loud and the music is sort of our essence and the soul of our time and essence down there. We have a pretty sick old stereo, interestingly the same old stereo I’ve had all the way since high school and some parts (the receiver) since middle school. It is an old school 400 watt JVC from the early days of compact disks, back when their players were called “DADs” or “digital audio devices.” I bought it from my friend Sam Spiegel for $25 in I think 8th or 9th grade, who is now a famous DJ and music producer in L.A. I’m sure he’d be psyched to know I still have it and am using it and the direct role this receiver has had in my life. Through out the night we basically just turn it up and last night we found ourselves listening to the album you hopefully just hit play on (above) – “Secrets” – the famous old album by Herbie Hancock from about 1974, so I thought I would post it for your enjoyment in its entirety…

This is the album that followed the Head Hunters’ famous self titled album with “Chameleon.” My best interpretation of it is Herbie Hancock and his group really progressed heavily from the Head Hunters album. Herbie also had a lot of new, neat interesting toys that were coming out at the time and was getting really good at using them. For example he started using a machine/synthesizer called an “Arp Odyssey” and a few others. Yes the name is an accurate representation of it’s sound.

“Secrets,” to me, is a way-more advanced read than “Head Hunters.” Simple and tuned down, a little more poppy and generally catchy-er. But it also wasn’t “new” and “out there” like Head Hunters so this is why Head Hunters was always their best selling album, whereas I remember the first time I bought “Secrets” (its been purchased several times, LOL) I remember it in the discount bin for $8 in Tower Records at the bottom of Central Park in New York. Here is the album cover…

Herbie Hancock Secrets

I think this picture says a lot about Herbie and sort of the era there. If you look at photos of Herbie these days you’ll see he is pretty sharp and clean cut. And that really about-describes Herbie and the mantra of this site spells out, the old school jazz and bebop movement was largely dead with the rising shortly-lived popularity of avant-garde jazz music and the increasing popularity of increasingly complicated rock music, such as the progressive rock band Yes, and even the Beatles. For many Americans, it wasn’t too odd by then, I figure (though I wouldn’t have been born until 6 years later) to see Yes and the My Favorite Things album occupying the same milk crate.

So the interesting thing is that this is probably when it really mattered to Herbie, he had a good past that he could ride out, but so did his competition like Miles Davis Guitar Player John Mclaughlin who beat him to the punch with this killer album (earlier post on this site). Herbie really had no idea what the outcome would be and what his future would be, he had no idea he would go on to basically always have and audience and put out God-knows how many Grammy-winning albums.

Down at the shop I was going to say that our environment is sort of “young” and I realized that I’ve been really clinging onto my “twenties” possibly as a method that I believe I “still appeal to young people,” college kids etc. I was right about to write that “we’re all a bunch of 20-somethings” but I realized that as of last November I turned 30 and in fact none of us are 20-something now.

It’s also funny for me to think of myself as the youngest guy in the shop as well. The good news is we’re all at least pretty “mentally” young. Bill is a pretty hardcore adventurer. His facebook profile picture is a bumper sticker that reads “My vacation is your worst nightmare.” Right on Bill!

Scotty and I, I feel like, are tremendously close these days mostly revolving around life at the shop. He has this absolutely bitchen’ old 4WD ’77 Dodge Van that he bought for $500 that he is sooping up to be a sweet lean mean shaggin’ machine in true 70′s style (and bare min it has a bar and tons of shag carpeting to be installed), he even has a plexi-glass mirror for the ceiling. He’s been doing tons of bondo and fiberglass (and minimal rust work as its just too far gone) to make it a fun-ass vehicle to drive till its death, put a month of work into, and get a good 5-10 years of ever-rotting enjoyment until it finally dies. His goals this year are bare min, the Desert Rocks Music Festival (in Moab Utah in just over a month away – gulp!) and Burning Man. How sick is that.

Scotty Ray's Mean, Bitchen '77 4WD Dodge Van

The story of the shop is pretty neat. I was fresh out of college in about 2002 and took on my first attempt at doing something “crazy!” with a vehicle: restoring an old ’71 Toyota Land Cruiser from the ground up. Previously I’d never attempted anything remotely similar. I was doing it in the basement garage of a hour I was sharing with a bunch of guys and I managed to kill the furnace from all of the airborne dust that came from removing literally pounds and pounds of bondo-dust from the 30-year-old vehicle. So after that of course, I needed to move operations…

Shortly after my neighbor revealed had an extra bay in a shop he owned down in neighboring Heber City, so I ended up down there. A couple years later I became good friends with a new transplant to here in Park City Utah from Kentucky named Damon Leake and maybe a year later we ended up sharing the shop. One year after that I was recycling one day and I met Dirk Spangenberg, the owner of Curb It Recycling, and we ended up moving into his larger shop on the rear side of his facility. One after that our friends Scott Ray (also from Kentucky originally, one of Damon’s good friends from home who is just awesome) and our friend Bill Hartlieb who I met through the world of biodiesel have also moved in.

We have a pretty good environment where its a lot of fun and we do a hell of a job pooling tools and resources and really with I think all of ours only complaint being a lack of cleanliness and too much clutter unfortunately..

We’ve done some pretty neat things. At least two full diesel engine conversions, some WVO conversions, several major rust removal projects, a full motorcycle restoration, countless suspensions installed, fabrication of potato guns and bicycles, and absolutely huge amounts of fabrication in general – definitely a fun place to be… I’m liking it so much these days that perhaps sometime in the future will be to create a site for the shop for the 4 of us where we constantly update all the fun stuff we’re doing…

This all leads me to last night where Scotty, who’s really into the Jam Band scene and all the bands from there (and I’m sort of into a lot of those guys too), are listening to the album you’re listening to right now. Except it was really really loud and on our amazing sound system. This era of Herbie Hancock was probably cranked in thousands and pot-smoke-filled vans, just like the one he was working on, through the 70s and everyone knows who Herbie Hancock is but I find not a lot of people have listened to his tunes… I think we were both likening it to a lot of the music we’re going to see down in a month and a half at Desert Rocks, but I described it to him as “real early – 1973. You have to imaging a room full of the darkest soul brothas just getting down and funky. Listen to the congas!” I did point out that there was a white guy with an afro in the band though. Mike something-aruther, who was the drummer… Cool, funky stuff… Scotty was down….

If you’re done with the tunes and want to get a visual of it all. I believe I’ve posted this earlier on this blog but here is a good 17 minute (you can skip through it of course) video of Herbie playing “Chameleon” from his famous Head Hunters album which was the one that lead to this album. I hope you enjoyed this…

Cheers,
Andre

Herbie Hancock – Chameleon Live 1974 from Andre Shoumatoff on Vimeo.

The Spook Who Sat By the Door was a Blaxploitation era movie that Herbie Hancock did the soundtrack for. The theme song eventually became the song “Actual Proof” on Thrust. Look for more posts about this album and ‘the spook’ soundtrack coming up some time…

I’m not one for most metal (except I like some artists, and dug “grunge” in the early 90′s) but I definitely 100% respect Black Sabbath and like quite a few songs off their 1970 quadruple-platinum album Paranoid. I also figure a lot of 20 year olds probably have no idea who “Ozzie” is other than that MTV show when they were 14 called The Osborns with some crazy dude who can’t talk. Ozzie was the lead singer of Black Sabbath before he got sacked from the band for heavy drug use, which is why he’s so physically messed up today.

In funky jazz music there were plenty of early pioneers just as there probably are with metal. But if there were one band I’d say is the “Black Sabbath” of jazz music, I’d say it’s Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Click play to start listening:

The first two are my favorites off Inner Mounting Flame.

The rest of the songs are the actual Black Sabbath songs of Paranoid, you might as well listen to them too as they rock also… This is the complete album, in order…

Mahavishnu was the first major group out of the “Miles Davis alumni” who went on to become the jazz & funk pioneers that are so heavily covered on this blog. The 1971 Inner Mounting Flame (the songs you’re listening to) was one of the first jazz funk albums that became “popular” without Miles’ name on it, and was more “listenable” than the avante-garde (downfall of) bebop & jazz music of the late 60′s, including Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, the first major jazz-funk album.

I forget when or where it was, but at some point I heard a recording of Herbie Hancock saying ‘there is something about Mahavishnu” that led to his involvement that is the source of the existence of this blog, for example, and how a guy like me who wasn’t even born until 1978 is still fascinated with this stuff that happened 35 years ago…

Mahavishu was a little a-traditional in their lineup as well. They had an electric violin player of all instruments, a French guy named Jean-Luc Ponty, as a leader in their small group. Some people like this, some don’t. To some the violin is a smooth, romantic song, and to some it’s piecing. Mahavishnu also extensively used the Fender Rhodes as well.

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So I thought I’d give some ode to the “Black Sabbath” of Jazz-funk, and a little Black Sabbath too while we’re at it… Enjoy the tunes…

Good reads/relevant:
http://www.liraproductions.com/jazzrock/htdocs/histhome.htm
And all the wikipedia links in this post…

The analog is rooted in the old school. An old gauge that sweeps and might not be 100% right but is probably pretty close. A mechanical device, of or pertaining to a mechanism that represents data by measurement of a continuous physical variable, as voltage or pressure.

The famous analog keyboards that make up a crux of the tunes on this site:

Hammond Organ – B3 & variants – “The Hammond” or anything mentioning “B3″
The Wurlitzer Electric Jazz Piano (what Ray Charles played) – “The Wurlitzer”
The Fender Rhodes Electric Jazz Piano (what Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea played) – “The Rhodes”
The Hohnet Clavinet – “The Clav” or “The Clavinet” – Funky!

and a few others but these take the cake though…

A good honorable mention is the Moog, the first electric synthesizer which was also analog…

Now, some samples (click play to listen):

- Bill Withers, Use Me Up. Exclusively using the clav…

- The Disco Track 9 is a song off the Boogie Nights soundtrack affectionately known as “track 9.” The main instrument is the clavinet once it gets into the breakdown. Sorry, this is a long, very repetitive song but good stuff… The echo-ey “Riders on the Storm” sounding instrument is the Rhodes piano as well.

- Soulive, Uncle Junior. This is a good Hammond Organ-heavy song… There are only three guys playing; the organ player is also playing the bass.

- Chick Corea, Fickle Funk. A good Fender Rhodes-heavy song by Chick Corea…

- Beastie Boys, Namaste – Good example of the Wurlitzer in action…

– Hugo Montenegro and His Orchestra – Moog Power.mp3

- And finally, a song that ties them all together… Chameleon by Herbie Hancock & The Headhunters. It was common practice to have some or all of them and play them all. Sometimes 2 at a time, one hand on each such as Herbie Hancock does. If you listen carefully, you can catch them all in there. Anything really really “scratchy” or echo-ie like the sound of a rubber band is the Moog. The solo at about 8 minutes in is him on the Rhodes. It is really hard to pick them all out, so fear not…

* * *

Now some video:

Here’s a Wurlitzer demo some dude made off youtube:
( You’ll notice some similarities between it and the Rhodes as well… )

And here is a youtube video of a Rhodes in action. He’s just showing off a pedal there but it doesn’t change much (an effect he’s messing with called “vibrato”).

And finally, here is a live version of Herbie Hancock playing Chamelon Live in 1974. I found a bunch of copies on YouTube but never found a full length one. I uploaded this full length version that used to be on YouTube (so I was wondering where it went) but they shot it down because it’s too long (about 14 mintues) so I uploaded it to Vimeo.

When I first saw this, it blew my mind… Enjoy…

Herbie Hancock – Chameleon Live 1974 from Andre Shoumatoff on Vimeo.