10 Saturday, February 23, 2013 www.thenational.ae The National thereview The National thereview Saturday, February 23, 2013 www.thenational.ae 11 this week’s essential reading ’Warrior Petraeus’ by Interesting essay on the former US army general David Petraeus’s career from Vietnam Thomas Powers, The to Afghanistan. The ideas that shaped him, and how he shaped Washington’s strategy music { New York Review of Books } playlist Four significant jazz fusion albums by Miles Freaky & fried-out Davis, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea Weather Report The Columbia Albums 1971-1975 (2012) An album by the Stark Reality, recorded for a children’s show This recent box set gathers six albums on American public television, is one of the most memorable by a group featuring members of Miles examples of jazz fusion from the 1970s, writes Andy Battaglia Davis’s fitful fusion bands (Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinful “Wouldn’t you like to be a whale wrote a clutch of charming, cheery Again Records, which grew out looseness, the Stark Reality were an and sail serenely by – an 80-foot of the popular Los Angeles label improbably tight band that locked among them). See the whale, from your tip to your tail, Stones Throw. into grooves and spacey excursions title of one for a taste: I and a tiny, briny eye?” It’s a good The set comes decorated with fortified enough to maintain their Sing the Body Elect. question, and one likely to lead to psychedelic cover art and photo- striking shapes as they travel for- an answer in the affirmative. graphs of a band full of hippie jazz- ward through time. It’s that qual- It is not, however, a question bos in zoned-out states, entranced ity of fusion that makes the genre a Herbie Hancock on any prospective lists of likely by the music they’re playing and treasure trove for sample-hunters subject matter for jazz songs. But maybe certain other tools of art at and aficionados of mind-bending Sextant (1973) there it is in “The Whale”, a pecu- work in their systems (smokable beats in the present day. liar bit of brilliance by a supremely tools, it seems safe to infer from But all sorts of other fusion as- In 1973, this classic in- odd jazz fusion band known as the the liner notes). All of that signals pects are as otherworldly in their troduced fusion to great Stark Reality. that the realm of children’s music effects. For a wealth of those, atten- spacey sounds from the Formed in the late 1960s in the has been left far, far behind. tion is well-rewarded by a new archi- pioneering Arp 2600 United States, in Boston, the Stark But the Stark Reality were val set featuring jazz legend Miles synthesizer (played by Reality made just a few records Hoagy Carmichael’s Music strange even in the realm of jazz Davis in the quintet with which he Patrick Gleeson) and before being cast off and forgot- Shop fusion, which made strangeness first launched forth into fusion in sweeping ideas of a kind ten in the annals of music history. The Stark Reality and experimentalism a high prior- earnest. With three CDs and a DVD that seemed to rush out There they remained, forgotten Now Again Records ity. Few genres have been as exces- of performance footage, Live in Eu- with changes in tone while trying for decades, until some of their Dh33 sive in their zeal for both as fusion rope 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 things out on new tunes (like Miles of Herbie Hancock’s stirring sounds found new life in was in its late-1960s and 1970s captures a fleeting time of transi- Runs the Voodoo Down, released in head. samples for modern-day hip-hop heyday, when jazz reached out to tion, after Davis’s adventurous but recorded form the next year on the beats and many-textured backing tunes for children gathered on an incorporate the electrified sounds still recognisably “jazz”-minded epochal Bitches Brew) and old fa- tracks. album titled Hoagy Carmichael’s of funk and rock. run in the mid-’60s and right before vourites (among them Milestones, It’s a common story, visited upon Havin’ a Party. The Stark Reality were proficient the release of his radical electric- dating back to an album in 1958, Miles Davis thousands of strange records col- It was endearing but a little hok- with all the disparate sounds at storm of an album Bitches Brew. and ’Round Midnight, from a little lecting dust in consignment stores ey, with an innocent sort of gee- their disposal, as exemplified by an The sounds are electrified but not earlier). On the Corner (1972) and speciality shops all across the whiz 1950s air about it, but the early song of their own called The yet completely, signalling a change It’s fusion in the truest sense, in world. They’re numerous enough – songs changed shape considerably New Generation. It starts out slow, still in the early real-time stages of that you can hear the fusing actu- For a sense of where and rediscovered so constantly and when the Stark Reality gave them with bleary notes from an electri- being conceived. In Directions, the ally going on. Much that came to Davis would go when consistently – to make one wonder another pass. The band did so in fied vibraphone, before bolting up- first song in a fierce live set from follow in the wide-reaching name he delved most fully if in the archives of time lurk hid- 1970 for a public television series right with a funky walking bass line Antibes, a resort town in south-east of “fusion” suggests a wonky pag- into funk, this 1972 den depths that may never, ever, be to educate kids in America, at the and rhythmic sounds from horns. France, the band launches into a eant of excess guided by noble manifesto carries a fully understood. behest of Carmichael’s son. When They carry on in a familiar sort of sort of free-form jam that leans but often ultimately misbegotten resonant message Not unlike the oceans called they got their re-recorded versions jazz-funk vamp before layered mul- forward into the future without ideas. Indeed, short of prog-rock in more than 40 years on. home by the whale, a curious crea- to Carmichael himself, the com- ti-part vocals wander in, with signs foregoing its ties to the past. Saxo- the 1970s (that graveyard of bloated ture that comes under observation poser, then 70 years old, wrote, of the times in tow. “We’re the new phonist Wayne Shorter remains double-albums and “rock-operas” by the Stark Reality in phantasma- “Out came the damnedest music world generation, full of war, strife, from Davis’s famous mid-60s quin- about space), it’s hard to think of a gorical musical mode. [I] ever heard. This is children’s and hate,” the band sings. “The sta- tet, but other than the bandleader, musical movement more maligned. The song The Whale is winningly music!? I say, ‘Stark mad’.” tus quo has got to go – we hope it’s he is the only player not new to the But fusion offers the true thrill of weird in its own right, but it also He went on to describe the effect not too late.” enterprise. searching out to find moments of Return to Forever happens to reside on an album of bandleader Monty Stark’s sing- A similar tone plays out on The Drummer Jack DeJohnette sounds magic in music that is by no means with an even weirder distinction: ing voice as “somewhere between Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy like he has a lot to prove, pounding magic all the time. Those moments The Anthology (2008) its singular status as a freaky, the filings on the edge of a pie pan Carmichael’s Music Shop, which out flurries of rhythm with momen- are there, though, and the best of fried-out remake of a children’s and the singing voice of a guru marries elements of the original tous energy and force. Bassist Dave them are wowing enough to make a This tidy two-CD set com- record by the early 20th-century during one of his most exalted mo- children’s tunes with surprise di- Holland lays out fat, round, robust whale wonder what exactly is going piles highlights from Chick pop whiz Hoagy Carmichael. ments”. gressions like a call-out to notori- lines that bob and float around, on with all those weird humans up Corea’s wildly kinetic fu- Carmichael wrote the music for He wasn’t far off in his evalua- ous cult leader and convicted mass subtly but significantly. On electric The Stark Reality, left to right: Phil Morrison, John Abercrombie, Vinnie above. sion band from the 70s, a store of classic pop songs that tions, but all of that conspires to murderer Charles Manson. What piano, Chick Corea sounds curious Johnson and Monty Stark. Courtesy of Score Press with an endearing excess became standards of the form, make The Stark Reality Discovers might have been meant by such a about the new instrument beneath Andy Battaglia is a New York-based of energy in action on including Stardust, Georgia on My Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop disorienting invocation is hard to his fingers, excited by its potential writer whose work appears in The every track. Mind, Heart and Soul, and many a very good album indeed. That divine, but fusion was nothing if but maybe not yet fully convinced whose presence is felt even when and mystique while handling a so much tradition and history be- Wall Street Journal, The Wire, Spin more.