What I'm Listening To 6-16-06

Gary Bartz and NTU Troop, I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies (OJC)
I'm guessing Gary Bartz is best known for playing sax in the Miles Davis band that included Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette and recorded Live Evil and The Cellar Door Sessions. The title song from I've Known Rivers was one of the "conscious" jazzy songs I often heard on underground Arizona radio (along with "Compared to What" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"), and this album strikes a balance between Coltrane-ish modal jazz and electic-piano-based funk. It's not all exciting, but it's warm and grooving when it's not. Would mix in well with some Al Green for a Sunday morning set.

Lee "Scratch" Perry, Divine Madness, Definitely and Produced and Directed by the Upsetter (Pressure Sounds) Adrian Sherwood did the world a good turn by making pretty good records with Lee Perry after Lee went off the deep end and burned down the Black Ark Studio. (Now there's a building that's gone down in studio history with Gold Star in Hollywood and Sun in Memphis.) He's doing the world an even better one by continuing to track down definitive examples of Lee Perry mind-fuck dub from the Black Ark years. The first collection in the series, Voodooism, was fantastic. (I'd put it up there with Open the Gate and Build the Ark, two now-rare anthologies of songs-plus-dubs on Trojan Records.) These last two are much in the same vein. No one could create an aural haunted house hosting a block-rocking party like Scratch, and these albums feature some of his spookiest. (Given a cursory listening, I find the tunes on Produced and Directed more consistently amazing.)

Nels Cline and Gregg Bendian, Interstellar Space Revisited Nels has been my noise guitar inspiration for the past couple of years, and this homage to John Coltrane and Rashied Ali's original goes about it the right way: by blowing the roof off the place using slashes of violent rhythm. And they can turn it down and get downright celestial when they want to.