1. Concerning the Dearth of Communist Utopias
At the age of eighty George Bernard Shaw recalled William Morris on the fortieth anniversary of his death. "Morris, when he had to define himself politically, called himself a Communist," Shaw began. "It was the only word he was comfortable with (ix)." Though twenty-two years apart in age and often at odds on even fundamental political questions, the two men's association in the 1880s and '90s ripened into a lasting friendship. Of the entire British socialist movement, wrote Shaw, Morris alone was able to articulate his "vision of the life to come on a happy earth, and his values that went so much deeper into eternity than the surplus value of Marx."
This vision only he himself could propagate; and so he had to go to the street corner even though he was thoroughly miserable there, and to think out and write out for delivery in public halls lectures which were far too pregnant and profound to be extemporized... His painfully written lectures survive as the best books in the Bible of Socialism.
Morris's socialist essays and lectures, unlike his early verse, Shaw added,
did not come easily and happily: he would never have written Sigurd if it had cost him half the hard brain work Socialism extorted from him. But that was how the idle singer of an empty day became a prophet and a saint (xxxviii-xxxix).
The aesthetic philosophy of his early years became Morris's bridge to Marxism. He developed the radical critique of modern art implicit in the Pre-Raphaelite movement of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and he extended the judgment of nineteenth-century England he had distilled from the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin. In his pamphlet "How I Became a Socialist," Morris wrote,
Apart from my desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life is hatred of modern civilization... Was it all to end in a counting house, on the top of a cinder heap, with Podsnap's drawing-room in the offing, and a Whig committee, dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions, as would make all men contented together, though the pleasure of the eyes have ever gone from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken by Huxley? (Complete Works 23, 279-80)
His hatred of modern civilization was thoroughgoing and specific. Morris hated the downright ugliness of the nineteenth century, the age of the hot room and the stinking railway carriage, the soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys, the sound of riveting and hammering, its plague of bookmaking and its "beastly ugly" coins. He hated the "sickening vulgarity" of his times, the "cockney villas of the well-to-do" along the Thames about Hampton Court.
Most of all, Morris hated the deep-going hypocrisy of bourgeois life, its "parliamentary commercial sham-kings," its artificial necessities, its poorhouses and prisons, its jingoism and imperialism; he reserved his most pungent invective for "the respectable commercial marriage-bed" and the deformed creatures who occupied it, with their "blue-devils" and "Mulleygrubs, " the nineteenth-century disease of idleness. Behind the so-called "splendid works of imagination and intellect" Victorian literature boasted itself, Morris discovered the modern intellectual's "sour distaste for the changing drama of the year," his fashionable attitude of "life as a thing to be borne, rather than enjoyed." Vainglorious Britain, to Morris, was truly a land where the sun never set. His summary judgment of his era was that its "great achievement... was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience, and which were used for the production of measureless quantities of worthless make-shifts" (CW 16, 96).
Apart from my desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life is hatred of modern civilization... Was it all to end in a counting house, on the top of a cinder heap, with Podsnap's drawing-room in the offing, and a Whig committee, dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions, as would make all men contented together, though the pleasure of the eyes have ever gone from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken by Huxley? (Complete Works 23, 279-80)
His hatred of modern civilization was thoroughgoing and specific. Morris hated the downright ugliness of the nineteenth century, the age of the hot room and the stinking railway carriage, the soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys, the sound of riveting and hammering, its plague of bookmaking and its "beastly ugly" coins. He hated the "sickening vulgarity" of his times, the "cockney villas of the well-to-do" along the Thames about Hampton Court.
Most of all, Morris hated the deep-going hypocrisy of bourgeois life, its "parliamentary commercial sham-kings," its artificial necessities, its poorhouses and prisons, its jingoism and imperialism; he reserved his most pungent invective for "the respectable commercial marriage-bed" and the deformed creatures who occupied it, with their "blue-devils" and "Mulleygrubs, " the nineteenth-century disease of idleness. Behind the so-called "splendid works of imagination and intellect" Victorian literature boasted itself, Morris discovered the modern intellectual's "sour distaste for the changing drama of the year," his fashionable attitude of "life as a thing to be borne, rather than enjoyed." Vainglorious Britain, to Morris, was truly a land where the sun never set. His summary judgment of his era was that its "great achievement... was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience, and which were used for the production of measureless quantities of worthless make-shifts" (CW 16, 96).
William Morris published News from Nowhere, in both serial and book form, in 1890. Then and now, it stands alone as a comprehensive, visceral description of a communist paradise. Based upon its author's love of the beautiful, as well as his hatred of modern civilization, Nowhere is much more than a trenchant and important critique of capitalism; it is virtually the only imaginary voyage into "the realm of freedom" of any consequence or degree of specificity the Marxist movement has ever attempted. The avoidance of such speculation by the major architects of Marxism is understandable, and in the final analysis probably wise, for the revolutionary movement of our times is necessarily bound to the politics and turmoil of today; it must define itself more in terms of what it is against-- the slide of humanity into barbarism or extinction-- than by a utopian vision of what it is for. Indeed, it may be useful to distinguish Marxism, as the science of revolution, from communism, as a mode of human existence which can be defined only by a transformed, post-revolutionary humanity
Morris stood on the best Marxist authority available when his imagined voyage into the distant future came to mirror the dearest features of the distant past. His Nowhere is precisely the negation of the nineteenth century he hated so passionately, and what he foresaw is best expressed in the novel's subtitle, "An Epoch of Rest." A series of parallel images from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, Morris's vision of communist man is even more radically different from those of his twentieth century successors than it was from that of his Fabian contemporaries.
2. Concerning Morris's and Other Utopias
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a Fabian-styled tract from America, presented a view of humanity's future almost the direct antithesis of Morris's. With its labor armies, omnipresent "telephone" (radio), and array of mechanical marvels, Bellamy's utopian novel served as the immediate pretext for News from Nowhere. Regarding the shiny, Buck Rogers world forecast by Bellamy, Morris wrote that he "wouldn't want to live in such a Cockney paradise," and to his daughter May he growled that "if they brigaded him into a regiment of workers he would just lie on his back and kick" (May Morris, xxviii).
The general drift of Nowhere, in fact, amounts to an outline of the end of the machine age; man's vaunted mastery of mechanical force, if present in Nowhere, is almost entirely hidden and barely regarded at all by its inhabitants. On "the Morrow of the Revolution," the blight of Manchester no longer exists, and Reading has been cleared and rebuilt. The twenty-first century bows to Bellamy in only a very few instances, entirely inessential to Morris's vision, such as the mysterious "force-barges" his protagonist encounters on the Thames. Other questions of moment are similarly left vague; while it is clear that modern European languages have survived more or less intact, the geography of the world is hardly touched upon. Of the fate of the United States, it is observed only that "for nearly a hundred years the people of the northern parts of America have been engaged in gradually making a dwelling-place out of a stinking dust-heap" (CW 16, 98). Reference is also made to "unsocial countries" and "unhappy people" in some unspecified parts of the world, though nation no longer oppresses nation and imperialism has ended. Though the city of London remains as an intellectual center to an England of towns and villages, it is a London of pleasant orchards and gardens, of clean and colorful open-air markets.
In order to tell how all this comes about, Morris created from his reading and from his own experiences one of the most vivid and arresting of modern narratives of the strikes and street barricades of masses in motion. His passages devoted to an imaginary 1952 English revolution cogently evoke the actual problems and experience of the twentieth-century movement. They contain a rigorous treatment of the current of reformism ("state socialism") then gaining a foothold in the British labor movement, along with an analysis of craft-unionism and corrupt labor officialdom. Morris accurately forecasts the economic crises of the twentieth century's vicious repressions unleashed by the British ruling class nearly a half century after he died. His recreation of the great Trafalgar Square demonstrations of 1887, in its proposal of a working class united under a "Committee of Public Safety," not only draws upon the struggle of the Paris Communards, but anticipates in a manner unique in the literature of nineteenth-century socialism the soviets and dual power configurations typical of modern revolution. Even the counter-revolutionary development of fascist organizations ("Friends of Order") finds a place in the great revolution Morris dreamed.
Morris stood on the best Marxist authority available when his imagined voyage into the distant future came to mirror the dearest features of the distant past. His Nowhere is precisely the negation of the nineteenth century he hated so passionately, and what he foresaw is best expressed in the novel's subtitle, "An Epoch of Rest." A series of parallel images from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, Morris's vision of communist man is even more radically different from those of his twentieth century successors than it was from that of his Fabian contemporaries.
2. Concerning Morris's and Other Utopias
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a Fabian-styled tract from America, presented a view of humanity's future almost the direct antithesis of Morris's. With its labor armies, omnipresent "telephone" (radio), and array of mechanical marvels, Bellamy's utopian novel served as the immediate pretext for News from Nowhere. Regarding the shiny, Buck Rogers world forecast by Bellamy, Morris wrote that he "wouldn't want to live in such a Cockney paradise," and to his daughter May he growled that "if they brigaded him into a regiment of workers he would just lie on his back and kick" (May Morris, xxviii).
The general drift of Nowhere, in fact, amounts to an outline of the end of the machine age; man's vaunted mastery of mechanical force, if present in Nowhere, is almost entirely hidden and barely regarded at all by its inhabitants. On "the Morrow of the Revolution," the blight of Manchester no longer exists, and Reading has been cleared and rebuilt. The twenty-first century bows to Bellamy in only a very few instances, entirely inessential to Morris's vision, such as the mysterious "force-barges" his protagonist encounters on the Thames. Other questions of moment are similarly left vague; while it is clear that modern European languages have survived more or less intact, the geography of the world is hardly touched upon. Of the fate of the United States, it is observed only that "for nearly a hundred years the people of the northern parts of America have been engaged in gradually making a dwelling-place out of a stinking dust-heap" (CW 16, 98). Reference is also made to "unsocial countries" and "unhappy people" in some unspecified parts of the world, though nation no longer oppresses nation and imperialism has ended. Though the city of London remains as an intellectual center to an England of towns and villages, it is a London of pleasant orchards and gardens, of clean and colorful open-air markets.
In order to tell how all this comes about, Morris created from his reading and from his own experiences one of the most vivid and arresting of modern narratives of the strikes and street barricades of masses in motion. His passages devoted to an imaginary 1952 English revolution cogently evoke the actual problems and experience of the twentieth-century movement. They contain a rigorous treatment of the current of reformism ("state socialism") then gaining a foothold in the British labor movement, along with an analysis of craft-unionism and corrupt labor officialdom. Morris accurately forecasts the economic crises of the twentieth century's vicious repressions unleashed by the British ruling class nearly a half century after he died. His recreation of the great Trafalgar Square demonstrations of 1887, in its proposal of a working class united under a "Committee of Public Safety," not only draws upon the struggle of the Paris Communards, but anticipates in a manner unique in the literature of nineteenth-century socialism the soviets and dual power configurations typical of modern revolution. Even the counter-revolutionary development of fascist organizations ("Friends of Order") finds a place in the great revolution Morris dreamed.
The years of the late twentieth century, as Morris foresaw them immediately on the heels of the revolution, would be "brisk, hot-headed times," a time for the venting of hatred upon commercial civilization in all its aspects. The earliest act of the socialized English proceeds in 1955, with its "great clearing of houses" in London, the erasure of the slums, grime, and ugliness bequeathed by the nineteenth century. Even now in the twenty-first century, a main point of contention among the people of Nowhere is the ongoing debate over what from the past is worth preserving. The historical process is largely a question of "clearing," of erasing the undesirable vestiges of the past. Of the dozen-odd buildings permitted to remain that are mentioned, most-- the British Museum and the Bodleian Library among them-- are preserved expressly as conservatories of the past, the domain of a dying breed of scholars and historians. Windsor Castle is now a museum, and at Wallingford another museum of manufactured articles allows the protagonist to trace the resurgence of handicraft and home industry from the ruins of the factory system. As for the rest, Londoners are still undecided about the fate of Westminster Abbey, from which not even two hundred years have successfully effaced the accumulated dirt. In a touch reminscent of Sir Thomas More's golden manacles and chamberpots, the Houses of Parliament are now transformed into a dung market.
With the burden of industrial civilization removed, the people of Nowhere revert to the life-patterns of traditional human society, as they existed before the great blight of commercialism set in during the Renaissance. The examples of architecture and interior decoration we see are reminders of fourteenth-century Gothic and Byzantine models, and there is nothing "modern" in Nowhere's manner of dress, decoration, or everyday implements. The arts, insofar as we are permitted to learn of them (from the frieze, for example, which graces the dining hall of the Bloomsbury Market, or the Welsh folk singers mentioned as entertainment), have reverted to traditional forms as well. The settling of society back into time-worn tradition precludes such a civilization of Eloi and Morlocks as H. G. Wells envisioned, for Nowhere presents a humanity completely integrated and without alienation, a society whose members address each other as "neighbors" and whose basic social units range from monogamous families to such collective "phalansteries" as Fourier dreamed of. Throughout England, one is almost never out of a sight of a human dwelling, and the norm seems to be the small, planned community of quadrangles surrounded by pleasant rural scenery, even on the outskirts of London. "We discourage centralisation all we can" (68), explains one character; "We like everything trim and clean" (73) says another. Communist society, it is shown, is "very well off as to politics-- because we have none" (85). Political life, a sort of participatory democracy organized by discussion and decision in village "motes," has indeed become a matter of "the administration of things," in the sense meant by Engels.
IN MY ROTATION:
Generally speaking, Beefheart's music recorded from live setting should be considered footnotes to his studio output. The legal status of this pair in particular isn't clear; copyright law in Europe and in the USA are not the same. Be that as it may, the recordings here are delightful.
As their titles make clear, both of these albums are compilations taken from various live performances and several different editions of Beefheart's Magic Bands over approximately one decade, the first from shows in the USA and the other from the UK. In both instances, the recording quality varies from show to show, but it is generally good.
Most enthusiasts will welcome renditions of tunes that are unavailable elsewhere. "Black Snake Moan," a pure Delta blues, is present on both collections. "One Nest Rolls After Another" is an oddity in itself. And on this latter-day version of "Big Eyed Beans from Venus," it's up to Mr. Gary "Midnight Hat" Snyder and Mr. Jeff Morris Tepper to hit "that long, lunar note" on their guitars.
From the USA collection, one-third of the program-- six selections-- were cherry-picked from the 1981 California concert, which is available in its entirety on the familiar bootleg, Best Batch Yet. From the UK set, six tracks were similarly selected from a 1980 show in Liverpool.
One can hear two harmonicas on the renditions of "Grow Fins" from the Bottom Line show in New York, 1977.
With the burden of industrial civilization removed, the people of Nowhere revert to the life-patterns of traditional human society, as they existed before the great blight of commercialism set in during the Renaissance. The examples of architecture and interior decoration we see are reminders of fourteenth-century Gothic and Byzantine models, and there is nothing "modern" in Nowhere's manner of dress, decoration, or everyday implements. The arts, insofar as we are permitted to learn of them (from the frieze, for example, which graces the dining hall of the Bloomsbury Market, or the Welsh folk singers mentioned as entertainment), have reverted to traditional forms as well. The settling of society back into time-worn tradition precludes such a civilization of Eloi and Morlocks as H. G. Wells envisioned, for Nowhere presents a humanity completely integrated and without alienation, a society whose members address each other as "neighbors" and whose basic social units range from monogamous families to such collective "phalansteries" as Fourier dreamed of. Throughout England, one is almost never out of a sight of a human dwelling, and the norm seems to be the small, planned community of quadrangles surrounded by pleasant rural scenery, even on the outskirts of London. "We discourage centralisation all we can" (68), explains one character; "We like everything trim and clean" (73) says another. Communist society, it is shown, is "very well off as to politics-- because we have none" (85). Political life, a sort of participatory democracy organized by discussion and decision in village "motes," has indeed become a matter of "the administration of things," in the sense meant by Engels.
3. Concerning Pastoral in Nowhere
Morris used the term "utopian romance" to describe News from Nowhere, but as Middlebro' points out (11), it is better to characterize it as an arcadian romance. The traditions of the pastoral find their fullest exploration in Nowhere, expressed with a conviction not present elsewhere in the literature of the Victorian age. Once transported to the future, the narrator's consciousness begins outdoors with "a delicious relief caused by the fresh air and pleasant breeze," a sensation of "measureless wonder: a beautiful bright morning seemingly of early June" (5). The pretty houses on the banks of the Thames at Hammersmith appear comfortable, and as if, so to say, "alive and sympathetic with the life of the dwellers in them." he notices gardens growing down to the water's edge, "in which the flowers were now blooming luxuriantly, and sending delicious waves of summer scent over the eddying stream" and the vistas of forests beyond (9).
The London of the future is painted in sensuous colors, with "wide sunny meadows and garden-like tillage," pleasant lanes, teeming gardens, and enchanting cottages" (23). Kensington Gardens is now a romantic, wooded wild spot in the midst of the city, and Trafalgar Square is the site of carefully tended orchards. The hideous iron suspension bridges of Morris's day have been replaced by structures "of stone arches, splendidly solid, and as graceful as they were strong" (8). The sensuousness extends to the smallest detail of life, to the delicious varieties of bread, the table settings, the roses "like the produce of an old country garden" (15).
The pastoral tradition is worked into the novel's characters as well; one offhanded remark by Clara on Nowhere's beautifully embroidered humanity, for example, could have been penned by Spenser, if not by Theocritus himself: "you see we are not going to make the bright day and the flowers feel ashamed of themselves." Truly, she seems "born out of the summer day itself" (142). The acme of ambition in Nowhere, moreover, is to show one's prowess at mowing down hay, and Morris inserts a pastoral bragging contest between carvers and hay mowers. Humanity's principal source of grief is not death, but "love-madness," with its centuries of bucolic tradition trailing along behind. Communist society triumphs over the tragedies of love by eliminating capitalism's "artificial perversions of the sexual passions," and "family tyranny" (81).
The English pastoral adaptations Morris knew from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lend a decidedly Georgic cast to his imaginative vision. His chief theme of alienation-- the joy of living contrasted with the "outside" observer of life-- is directly descended from Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." Also prominent are the conventions of the English topographical poem with its allegorical "circuit walk," for the heart of News from Nowhere is its author's symbolic journey through his own past. The novel is filled with eighteenth-century genre scenes, of characters around the hearth singing for each other and telling stories, rather like "The Cotter's Saturday Night." There is even a glimpse of tent people camping in the Oxfordshire countryside, evoking the scholar gypsy of English folklore.
But Nowhere, like the Idylls and Eclogues of yore, goes nowhere. It presents a static design, very much on the order of the floral patterns in Morris's decorative fabrics and wallpapers, a world beyond time. With the end of the epoch of contradiction between man and nature, Nowhere signals as well the end of history's forward momentum. Morris's linear narrative device, i.e. the intrusion of the nineteenth-century Guest into this perfect equilibrium, is the sole extrusion of the Romanticism of the author's own time, and significantly Guest remains an unassimilable element, unable to achieve the necessary metamorphosis of decades and centuries into a man of the future.
The key element Morris emphasizes is the gradual transformation of man to rejoin himself to eternal nature, quite the reverse of Virgil's "prophetic" Eclogue of the transformation of nature conforming to fixed human desire, suggested by Leon Trotsky's remarks addressed to the revival of Russian pastoralism in his own time:
The poetry of the earth is not eternal, but changeable, and man began to sing articulate songs only after he had placed between himself and the earth implements and instruments which were the first simple machines. Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans... Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain. And man will do it so well that the tiger won't even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times (252).
4. Concerning the Nature of Work and the Work of Nature
It was the common assumption, wrote Morris of an age where, "the one aim of all people... was to avoid work," that "while the ordinary daily work of the world would be done entirely by automatic machinery, the energies of the more intelligent part of mankind would be set free to follow the higher forms of the arts, as well as science and the study of history" (178). If Nowhere "had cast away riches and attained to wealth," it was not without surmounting the great challenge of the earliest post-revolutionary society. "A kind of disappointment seemed coming over us," says old Hammond, "and the prophecies of some of the reactionists of past times seemed as if they would come true, and a dull level of utilitarian comfort be the end for a while of our aspirations and success... [H]ow if it should make men dull by giving them too much time for thought or idle musing?" Nowhere's remedy became "the production of what used to be called art, but which has no name amongst us now, because it has become a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces" (133).
The post-revolutionary "exodus of the people from the town to the country" resulted in a gradual recovery of "those arts of life which they had lost" (177) during the commercial epoch and a return to the crafts of carpentering, smithing, etc. Thus began a rebirth of hand industry, learned first by watching the operation of machinery, then by refining relearned technique into art, through decades of trial and error, much in the manner of Morris himself looking backward to tradition for the precise shade of dye for his fabrics. The ultimate incentive to labor was then revealed to be, as in Fourier and the manuscripts of the young Marx, "the reward of creation." "All work is now pleasurable," says Hammond, "either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done... or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit; and lastly... because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists" (92). The modern gulf between physical and intellectual labor is bridged, mostly to the detriment of the sort of scholarship that our age has elevated into a fetish, brooding over the still sad music of humanity. It is suggested, even with some misgivings, that the study of history may very well cease along with the historical process itself and with interest in pure science, of which, suggests one character, "though it is no longer the only innocent occupation which is thought worth an intelligent man spending his time upon, as it once was, yet there are, and I suppose will be, many people who are excited by its conquest of difficulties, and care for it more than for anything else." To these vain pursuits, Morris counterposes "easy-hard" labor, such as entire communities might perform during a hay harvest, or in a road-mending scene straight out of Ruskin's days at Oxford: "It's down good sport trying to see how much pick-work one can get into an hour" (47). The nineteenth century's obsession with books, "reactionary novels" and abstract mathematics has been replaced by a passion for open-air work shared by the human community and by the "work-pleasure" accrued by individuals in support of what was in Morris's day called the "lesser arts." The notion of fine art and belle lettres still survives in Nowhere, but it is frankly acknowledged a relic from the age of alienated labor. As Lionel Trilling observed, "There are no geniuses in News from Nowhere."
In times of slavery, Morris wrote, it was considered "natural" to think that men "should try to make nature their slave, since they thought "nature" was something outside them" (179). What makes Nowhere unique in modern literature is its depiction of a world that has thought beneath the origins of history to exorcise this demon of modernity, the impulse toward domination. Of his last glimpse of Nowhere, Morris's nineteenth-century Guest brings back the vision of long-sought peace between man and nature, the image of a church festival, bedecked and festooned with flowers, of which "the best ornament was the crowd of handsome, happy-looking men and women... like a bed of tulips in the sun" (208).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Calhoun, Blue. The Pastoral Vision of William Morris: The Earthly Paradise. Athens GA: U of
Georgia P, 1975.
Frye, Northrop. "Past and Future in Morris," Studies in Romanticism 21 (Fall 1982): 303-318.
Middlebro', Tom. "Brief Thoughts on News from Nowhere." Journal of the William Morris
Society 2, no, 4 (summer 1970): 8-12.
"Morris and Trafalgar Square," Journal of the William Morris Society 1, no. 1 (winter 1961): 28-31.
Morris, William. The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris. Volume 16: News from
Nowhere, 1-211. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966.
Shaw, George Bernard. "Morris As I Knew Him," foreword to May Morris, William Morris: Artist
Writer, Socialist: Volume 2, Morris As a Socialist. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966.
Trilling, Lionel. "Aggression and Utopia: "A Note on William Morris's News from Nowhere,"
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 42, no. 2 (April 1973): 214-225.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1968.
IN MY ROTATION:
- Captain Beefheart and His Magic Bands, Railroadism: Live in the USA, 1972-1981 (Amazon download)
Generally speaking, Beefheart's music recorded from live setting should be considered footnotes to his studio output. The legal status of this pair in particular isn't clear; copyright law in Europe and in the USA are not the same. Be that as it may, the recordings here are delightful.
As their titles make clear, both of these albums are compilations taken from various live performances and several different editions of Beefheart's Magic Bands over approximately one decade, the first from shows in the USA and the other from the UK. In both instances, the recording quality varies from show to show, but it is generally good.
Most enthusiasts will welcome renditions of tunes that are unavailable elsewhere. "Black Snake Moan," a pure Delta blues, is present on both collections. "One Nest Rolls After Another" is an oddity in itself. And on this latter-day version of "Big Eyed Beans from Venus," it's up to Mr. Gary "Midnight Hat" Snyder and Mr. Jeff Morris Tepper to hit "that long, lunar note" on their guitars.
From the USA collection, one-third of the program-- six selections-- were cherry-picked from the 1981 California concert, which is available in its entirety on the familiar bootleg, Best Batch Yet. From the UK set, six tracks were similarly selected from a 1980 show in Liverpool.
One can hear two harmonicas on the renditions of "Grow Fins" from the Bottom Line show in New York, 1977.
- Dizzy Gillespie, A Portrait of Duke Ellington (Essential Jazz Classics/ original label Verve? 1960)
- Wardell Gray, Way Out Wardell (Modern/ Boplicity, 1947)
- The Complete Sonny Rollins on Verve 195?-1956)
This set gives me the opportunity to supplant several CDR rips I've kept for years, and also a good reason to revisit these masterpiece albums. In addition to the usual caveats regarding the Enlightenment sets, I see that a few essential tracks have been omitted: Where is "Friday the Thirteenth" from Rollins's early collaboration with Thelonious Monk? And from the final album in this collection, Tour de Force, what happened to "B. Quick" and "B. Swift"?
A very old friend. Just a homemade needle-drop; sounds great to me. Only the original six tracks, of course. I have to seriously consider this for the Elantra Collection.
- Wes Montgomery, Full House (Riverside, 1962)
A very old friend. Just a homemade needle-drop; sounds great to me. Only the original six tracks, of course. I have to seriously consider this for the Elantra Collection.
Sathima Bea Benjamin with Abdullah Ibrahim, 1979
OUR CAR CLUB:
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The versions of "Prelude to a Kiss" and "In a Sentimental Mood" contained herein were surely the first I ever heard of these tunes.
- Duke Ellington, Piano Reflections (Capitol, 1953)
I first heard this album while still in my teens, and it had a lot to do with my becoming a devotee of Duke and of jazz in general. The CD reissue contains 15 tracks, mostly trio performances by the pianist with Wendell Marshall on bass and either Butch Ballard or Dave Black on drums. One exception is "Melancholia," performed by Ellington accompanied by string bass only. (Some years ago, I acquired the sheet music and attempted to play this tune: too damn hard).
NEXT: John Milton, The English Revolution, And The Execution Of Charles I
