Numero Group's Eccentric Soul Revue Plays Columbus

Although the curatorial reissue label Numero Group is based in Chicago, its roots are in Columbus, Ohio. Its first release, in early 2004, and the inaugural title in the acclaimed Eccentric Soul series, was devoted to Capsoul Records, an obscure, suitably eccentric Columbus record label of the late 1960s/early 1970s.

"We launched our label with Capsoul, and we've done four albums from Columbus, more than any city," announced Ken Shipley, one of the archival label's founders, at the start of Numero's Eccentric Soul Revue roadshow stand in Columbus on Nov. 9.

So not only was the city an appropriate stop for this short U.S. tour, but so was the venue - the Egyptian Revival-style Lincoln Theater, which had opened as a vaudeville/jazz house in the city's historic African-American King-Lincoln District back in 1928 and, legend has it, was where a young Sammy Davis Jr. started his career. It had been vacant for decades until this year, when the city spearheaded a $13.5 million renovation to restore it to its old glories, with updated sound and lighting as well as a glisteningly colorful interior

The show was presented in Columbus by the innovative Wexner Center for the Arts, which meant it attracted arts/pop culture devotees as well as middle-aged and older blacks who remembered when Capsoul was a big deal in Ohio's capitol city.

Primarily, the Eccentric Soul Revue was meant to showcase Numero Group's recent reissue of material from Chicago's late-1960s Twinight label, Twinight's Lunar Rotation. Twinight is best known as home to the prescient soul-blues-funk-protest singles of Syl Johnson ("Different Strokes," "Is It Because I'm Black," "Concrete Reservation"). To fans of Windy City soul, he occupies a position something like Otis Rush's Cobra blues releases of the 1950s - great songs somewhat overlooked today because the label just didn't last for long. Next year, Numero is releasing a definitive box set of Johnson's recordings.

The house/backing band was JC Brooks & the six-member Uptown Sound, with the young, talented Brooks doing yeoman's work of singing warm-up between featured acts, emceeing and providing harmony support when needed. His songs, such as "I Used to Hold You, Now I Hold You Back" had punch and grit and were unexpected pleasures.

For Columbus, the revue added one of Capsoul's finest vocal groups, the Four Mints. Wearing bright-red and black outfits straight out of the 1970s, with a lead singer struggling to stay in tune, their two-song set featured their danceable, sweet 1971 local hit "Row My Boat." Afterward, the writer of the song - Dean Francis - took the stage to express his gratitude.

The show's sole disappointment was that Capsoul artist Marion Black - who recorded the sublime "Go On Fool," a complaint about his wife's lack of appreciation for his hard work - didn't sing as billed. He stood from the audience when announced, acknowledging applause, but that was it.

There were three Twinight acts on the bill - Renaldo Domino, the Notations and Johnson himself, still trim, quick-witted and hard-working at 73. Domino, his voice Smokey-like with its high vulnerable falsetto, was just a kid in 1969 when he recorded the memorable ballad "Not Too Cool to Cry," and in Columbus he sang it with its lovely, dreamy sweetness intact.

The Notations, a quartet decked out in stylish white sport coats and light-green slacks, owe plenty to Chicago soul's most important figure, the late Curtis Mayfield. He was a mentor to its lead vocalist, Cliff Curry, whose onstage kindness and sense of gratitude was reminiscent of Mayfield's own personality.

It was fitting the Notations did an a cappella version of the Impressions' "It's Alright," and high tenor Michael Thurman opened the set with Mayfield's mid-1970s nugget, "Super People." But the group also sang its own regional hit, "I'm Still Here," with impressive authority.

Johnson, whether performing blues or soul material, has always been too idiosyncratic to allow himself to become slick and stylized - one reason he's a hero to the Ponderosa Stomp crowd rather than an oldies-circuit lounge act.

As a singer, there's still nothing formulaic about his approach - he was tough and impassioned and brought a commanding sense of relevance to his material. For instance, on his old hit "Is It Because I'm Black," a melancholy, anti-racist drifting-blues number that has the same kind of chillingly ethereal feel as B.B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone," Johnson ended with a defiant shout-out: "But they can't hold me back anymore because I am President!"

For the Numero revue, he didn't play his guitar but did pull out the harmonica on a few songs, even dropping to his knees to draw more volume on set-closer "Take Me to the River." (As Johnson pointed out, he was the first person to recognize that song's potential, releasing the obscure Al Green album track as a single when he and Green were both Hi Records label mates in the 1970s.)

Johnson's Twinight singles held up amazingly well live - his 1967 hit "Come on Sock It To Me" has a James Brown-like polyrhythmic funk that is more rock-steady than what Brown, himself, was doing at the time. On stage, Johnson shook his hips to it with aplomb, a veritable dancing machine.

The show ended with Brooks calling all the performers on stage for a rousing, extended and unexpected version of the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Actually, for devotees of classic soul, you absolutely could get what you want at the Eccentric Soul Revue in Columbus.

By Steven Rosen
Blurt (www. blurt-online.com)
Nov. 16, 2009

These Days It Takes a Full Sentence to Name a Band

Band names are supposed to make a statement: Strawberry Alarm Clock was the essence of the psychedelic 1960s. But today’s rockers are taking it to the extreme.

Increasingly, especially in the world of indie rock, their names contain verbs and form complete sentences: I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness. I Wrestled a Bear Once. These Arms Are Snakes. This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb. Wake the President. We Were Promised Jetpacks. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.

What’s behind it? Anna Barie, of the Brooklyn/Chicago trio These Are Powers, thinks one motivating factor is that language in general is undergoing change. “There are different ways that people are communicating now – online and texting and ‘tweeting.’ So the language is getting played with more, and that gets reflected in band names,” she says.

Pop-culturists peg as the first significant modern-era “verb band” They Might Be Giants, formed in 1982 by John Flansburgh and John Linnell as a quirky alternative-rock duo. They released the first album in 1986 and are still active, having won their second Grammy this year for Best Musical Album for Children.

“Of course a musician has to name a band before you really are a band, so the act is a huge artistic gesture made in a total vacuum,” Flansburgh says, via an (excerpted) E-mail message. “We wanted very much to be fully original, but late 1982 was a time when it seemed all the easy, cool name possibilities seemed played out. We finally gave ourselves a full sentence name: They Might Be Giants seemed fully unknowable and slightly paranoid. Perfect. In fact, ‘They Might Be Giants’ is the name of a film from the early 1970s.”

Why have some other verb bands chosen their names, and what has been the response? Here are excerpts from E-mail replies:

(*) Dan Geller, of I Am the World Trade Center:
“I actually chose the name before September 11, 2001. I was living in New York City and looking for a name for my new project. I was discussing how I like bands with location-based names. I said ‘the World Trade Center’ (and) went on to say, ‘Yeah, then I can get on stage and say I Am the World Trade Center.’”

(*) Jason Reece, of …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead:
“The name was so ridiculous that we just couldn't stop laughing at how evil it sounded as it came out of our juvenile mouths. The ellipse came later because we wanted to make the name even longer and more like a descriptive moment in a novel.”

(*) Jonathan Lee of Cut Off Your Hands:
“In 2006 we started the band under the name Shaky Hands and titled our debut EP ‘Cut Off Your Hands.’ We were forced to lose the name when a band from the USA using the same name sent us a cease-and-desist letter via our band’s MySpace page. Because we had started to gain a following in our home country (New Zealand), Cut Off Your Hands became our bands' name and ‘Shaky Hands’ the title of the first EP.”

(*) Paul Lacques, from I See Hawks in L.A.:
“We'd all been seeing lots of hawks in the skies over Los Angeles,and we decided to form a country-rock band called I See Hawks In L.A.We find that there are two reactions and two groups of people: Those who see hawks in L.A. all the time, and those who don't believe there areany.”

(*) John Lambremont, of We Landed On The Moon!:
“Our singer Melissa might have (heard) the best response so far. Last month she had a surgery where the surgeon asked her the name of her band right as she was being given the anesthesia. The last thing she heard before she was knocked out was, ‘We Landed on the Moon? Well, that's a weird name.’”

By Steven Rosen
From GRAMMY magazine, Fall 2009

For Musician David Sylvian, Life Is a Series of Obstacles. That Isn't Necessarily a Problem.

One can draw parallels between David Sylvian's career and that of Scott Walker.

Sylvian, who at age 51 is 15 years younger than Walker, also experienced early success as a handsome British pop idol - his New Romantic/New Wave band Japan enjoyed a series of Top Ten hits in the early 1980s, one of which, "Ghosts," was remarkable for its ambient soundscape. Like Walker, Sylvian has a gorgeously smooth, sensuous voice - in his case, a tenor (that seems to have deepened into baritone) with a yearningly intimate vibrato.

And after Japan, from the 1980s onward, Sylvian, like Walker, has moved steadily toward the avant-garde side of pop music with his lyrical and instrumental concerns, alone and with international collaborators.

And both men have adopted new homelands - while Walker left his native U.S. for Britain back in the 1960s, Sylvian in the 1990s left Britain for the U.S. to pursue sadhana, enlightenment through the aid of a spiritual guru, first in Northern California and then New Hampshire. Divorced, he now spends time between New York City and New Hampshire, where his children live.

"For people who leave their native country, you begin to feel you can't put roots down anywhere else and yet you can't go home because the place you left no longer exists as it once was," Sylvian says, in a telephone interview about the release of his new album Manafon. "In a sense, the world becomes your home because one place doesn't feel like home any more than any other. Yet there's a freedom in that opening. Something is lost but something is gained."

Both men, in short, have become deep-thinking aesthetes. Yet if there's been a major difference, Walker's music increasingly has tried to match the despair and darkness of his subject matter. Albums like Tilt and The Drift are tough conceptual art. Sylvian, on the other hand, especially in his highly lauded 1999 album Dead Bees on a Cake, had been trying to find breakthrough beauty that contains a spiritual dimension - not conventional prettiness or religiosity, by any means. He's become one of pop music's great seekers.

Manafon -- named for a Welsh village and released on his own Samadhisound label - continues his search for peak musical beauty, in many ways. But the darkness that is life is starting now to surround him.

Working with improvisational musicians over the course of several years at sessions in Vienna, Tokyo and London, he has created nine songs featuring hushed and muted soundscapes: breathy, restrained sax; careful guitar strumming; isolated cello shrieks; short, high-octave piano explorations; quietly commanding acoustic bass; occasional live electronic interventions or turntable scratches, and other sounds. Musicians include Evan Parker (sax), John Tilbury (piano), Werner Dafeldecker (acoustic bass) and Franz Hautzinger (trumpet). Sylvian relies on his voice, both soothing and foreboding, to provide the melody; the songs are all ballads, slowly and ruminatively sung with lots of space between words.

But those words. For a man who seemed on the verge of achieving bliss on Dead Bees' "Krishna Blue," these lyrics often feel ominous. From "Snow White in Appalachia":

"There is no Maker, just an exhaustible indifference/
And there's comfort in that so you feel unafraid."

"Random Acts of Senseless Violence," which may be about the all-too-temporal scourge of terrorism: "The safety in numbers is just a contrivance/For the future will contain random acts of senseless violence." A song called "The Rabbit Skinner," which ends with Sylvian concluding "Here lies a man without quality," has extra bite because the album comes with a portrait of a weathered Sylvian holding a dead rabbit.

Sylvian used a process known as "automatic writing" in coming up with the lyrics. He had done that earlier with 2003's Blemish, an at-times difficult album at least partly about his divorce. On Manafon, he was responding to the music that had (mostly) been previously recorded, sometimes a year ago or longer. It wasn't completely spontaneous; he listened to the music studiously to find words that he believed organically fit the instrumentation. And he occasionally used notebooks to help when he became blocked. But he also let his own words surprise him, not editing or rewriting them for poetic cleverness.

"I wanted to get to a certain subject matter that seemed unreachable, out of my grasp," Sylvian explains, in a voice both erudite and confessional. "I wanted to push myself to those areas and see what would surface. In automatic writing, there's not really a point where one reviews what one has written prior to recording it. [There's] a sense of possible revelation that can be quite exciting, because what's revealed publicly is also revealed to myself."

So what's being revealed? One comes up against a crisis in faith, a mourning for life as lived and its limits. It's especially striking in that previously quoted line from "Snow White in Appalachia" - a beautifully haunting song that seems like a wiser, more sorrowful cousin to The Stones' "Moonlight Mile" - about the absence of a "Maker."

"I'm not afraid of complete annihilation," Sylvian says. "I don't have a problem with this life being all there is, that things come to a full stop at the end of a lifetime. In fact, I find it quite comforting to think along those lines. I find it a beautiful thought that life can go on, but there's no knowledge of what that life will consist of. Does the suffering of this life also go on into the next, as well as the joys?

"Now my brother, who's an atheist, finds that quite troubling, so we're kind of at odds with each other. He would love to believe that life goes on. He loves life so much he wishes it were eternal."

In a way, perhaps, Sylvian is where Peggy Lee was at when she sang Leiber & Stoller's "Is That All There Is?" back in 1969, but maybe not as resigned to it as she. "This whole album, in one sense, deals with disillusionment," he says. "I think this is just where I find myself at this particular moment. It's very much a document of a moment in time.

"There are a lot of questions that show up in the course of writing the work, but there is no resolution because I had no answers at the time. Usually I write from the standpoint of having lived thru an experience and then I feel comfortable to write about it. I haven't been doing that so much. I feel more comfortable with the process of questioning and not knowing."

As Sylvian describes it, his long, devotional search for sadhana lately has been meeting with obstacles. That's not an unheard-of thing; sometimes an obstacle is meant to test someone and show a greater truth. But, he says, he can't get around this one.

"I came up against one of these obstacles and I found myself incapable of getting around the thing," he says. "So I started to look at what was being shown to me, but I couldn't grasp the nature of the lesson. That's where I find myself. At the same time, my means of trying to comprehend it are part of my development."

Asked what specifically that obstacle is, Sylvian demurs. "That's a kind of personal issue I don't feel comfortable talking about directly," he says, with a tone of apology.

On the flip side, Sylvian notes, there's a positive side to Manafon. "It's dealing with the poetic imagination, the creative mind, which is enormously powerful and in some way is connected with the core of our being. If a life is given shape by one's poetic acts, I think there's great beauty to that and great significance to that."

So Sylvian's struggle continues - as does his art.

By Steven Rosen
Blurt Magazine (www.blurt-online.com), Nov. 11, 2009