Bridges

I am assured by the gurus of social media that blogging at an irregular pace will cause me to lose all of my readers. That seems to contain some truth, but I dislike the notion that my readers will lose their erections if not repeatedly stroked at regular intervals. I'll blog whenever I damn well feel like. That said, please don't leave me. I'm all alone here.

I spent the last few weeks catching up with the developments in music of all sorts and trying to put my life back together. So: in that vein: Gogol Bordello. After the guy out on the street who shouted after a taxi cab 'What are you, fucking retahded?' they were probably the best thing that happened to me in Boston. I only wish I'd been down in the mosh pit instead of slowly developing a neckache from headbanging while turning my head to the right to try and follow Eugene Hutz's ridiculous stage antics. They are an an explosive band that has made their brand of gypsy punk-polka into a great party and an even greater philosophical triumph. Ask me again sometime how that happens - I'll figure it out eventually. I think that dancing like a fool is only enjoyable with the subtle realisation that it could be necessary for the health of the soul. Otherwise it's pointless and embarrassing. Or maybe I just don't know how to party. Anyway, Gogol Bordello tickled me well and good and at the end of the night I had a neckache, which is always a good indicator of fun being had. Those crazy immigrants.

On a different beat, I hit up Sonny Rollins and two albums from opposite sides of the Williamsburg Bridge - 'Saxophone Colossus' and the expertly named 'The Bridge'. Sometime in the middle of his career he stopped performing altogether and was often seen practicing alone on the Williamsburg bridge, the crazy hairy man. One expects strange things to have happened to his music after that hiatus - so it was confounding to most critics when 'The Bridge' came out and it seemed to sound pretty much like what he'd been doing all along, which is just gravy as far as I'm concerned because he's Sonny Rollins.

But anyway, what happened? He did swap out his pianist for guitarist Jim Hall, who as an accompanist is far stranger than anybody save Monk could have been - listen to the A sections of the title-track rhythm changes. The electric guitar changes up the soundscape, too. The pounding, effervescent swing of his earlier records is still there, but no more the grounding presence of a piano. Guitars play less notes at once, and with less range in terms of pitch, and Jim Hall as a particular guitarist is also very fond of counterpoint rather than continuo-style block chords. The result is an emptier, freer sounding record where the interplay between Hall's deadpan counterpoint and Rollin's bubbling energy often becomes delightful. I was a little depressed with the ballads, to be honest, where they both seem to become trapped in idioms that signify more than they deliver in terms of musical interest. I rarely like jazz ballads anyway, unless Coltrane's playing them. But those uptempo numbers! I couldn't tell you what he found up there on the Williamsburg bridge, but it must have been some kind of awesome.

In contrast to that album is the earlier Saxophone Colossus - a fairly universally well-regarded one. The piano's there, so the swing is a little more focused and hard-rocking. Which is not to say normal, Sonny's anything but, but he's a genius in a slightly more (to our accustomed ears) expected way. The calypso opener St. Thomas, now a well-deserved standard, set the precedent for his later calypso albums, in which he all but plays the same tune with a series of different titles (Don't Stop the Carnival, for example, with who I think is Bobby Broom on guitar). Me, I don't care. The careless happiness of the calypso underneath the colorful urgency of the saxophone is a winning move. And, as if to point out that they haven't gone completely native, he turns up the swing for a second solo.

For an interesting comparison, you might look up his later recordings of St. Thomas with Jim Hall, or Jim Hall's solo versions of that tune.