On June 2nd in Philadelphia at Johnny Brenda’s, Denver’s Slim Cessna’s Auto Club explored a murky psychological terrain between belief and skepticism, playing to the audience’s queasiness toward whether they were, along with the band, lampooning Southern American religious fervor, or deep-down wishing they could in earnest be swept up a in soul-felt rush of old-timey salvation and holy deliverance from the agnostic nihilism that permeates our cultural landscape. “It’s only a short step from atheism to schizophrenia,” a character in one of Russian novelist Viktor Pelevin’s stories once said, “and in most cases it’s already been taken.” That is no idle observation, coming from an author who grew to manhood under a dictatorship where atheism was the state mandate.
SCAC’s six guys took the stage looking as though they were just back from a saunter through the sow and heifer shed at the county fair, but the evocation of humility intended by their get-ups was immediately betrayed by the casual sophistication of the veteran group’s performance.
Within the first three songs ex-Woven Hand bassist Shane Trost switched from trumpet, to keyboards, to upright acoustic bass and on to the electric bass, continuing to alternate between basses with each new number. SCAC, from song to song, shifted seamlessly from a stripped down three-piece combo backing up a three-front-man attack, to a quintet backing up a lone singer and various combinations in between.
Typically pegged as a country band, SCAC does not possess many characteristics akin to American country music or even to many of the dreaded alternative country campers, apart from a proclivity for the hoedown and the use of electric banjo feedback. They are more like the embodiment of the six sensibilities of Tom Waits with all of those sensibilities on performance enhancing drugs. SCAC also appeals to the same visceral instinct as do Flogging Molly or Black 47, but with a bit more finesse.
Singers Slim Cessna and Jay Munly took turns stepping to the front to coax on the faithful, often coming forward together with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders or around the other’s waist. Munly, as well as Cessna, who displayed a nearly autistic attachment to the phrase “for the good people,” implored the crowd, sometimes from their knees, to test their own will against the pull of spiritual surrender. They employed theatrical ploys lifted straight from the Evangelist’s Handbook, such as the palm of the hand raised in the air and face lunging toward the agog pilgrims. Before long though, their hands in the air brought to mind fists thrust skyward by guys in kilts at a Dropkick Murphys show.
Just the same, SCAC delivered a raucous, heel-stomping set of genre-eschewing, dark, blasphemous gospel. Driven by the steam engine rhythm section of Trost and drummer Ordy Garrison–who played a crackingly tuned, econo-sized Gretsch kit–the other Auto Clubbers were at liberty to take turns at center stage and switch freely from instrument to instrument, whipping their supplicants into a spiritualized frenzy.
But, as with any weeknight tent service, it remains to be seen who of the flock, about to be returned to a cynical world of existentialist temptations, will stray from the righteous path, once they are no longer within the sheltering fortress of an emotion-fueled revival.
Upcoming shows:
June 3 Pittsburgh, PA - Club Cafe
June 4 Pontiac, MI - The Crofoot
June 5 Indianapolis, IN - Melody Inn
June 6 Chicago, IL - Reggie’s Rock Club
June 7 Minneapolis, MN - shamROCK at The Cabooze
June 9 Denver, CO - Larimer Lounge
August 23 Denver, CO - Bluebird Theatre
photos: Jessica Kourkounis
Regional talent pockets are mystifying phenomena. For techno heads it must be quite vexing to contemplate that three of the genre’s pioneers, Derrick May, Kevin Sanderson and Juan Atkins, all hail from rural Michigan’s Belleville High School. Fans of free jazz are likely even more titillated by the list of the vanguard pantheistic fixtures who came through I. M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth, Texas–a school named in honor of the prominent African American Texas educator. It was originally a secondary school set aside for the town’s black students who had enough latitude to pursue that level of education in 1882 and is now an elementary school.
In the early ’50s the Terrell school graduated saxophonist and 2000 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee King Curtis. Curtis was a mainstay session player and producer of soul and R&B records for Aretha Franklin, The Coasters, Sam Moore, and many others throughout the ’50s and ’60s up until his very early demise in 1971.
Taking nothing away from Curtis’ impressive and prodigious list of accomplishments, especially considering he died at the tragically young age of 37, I. M. Terrell’s less congruent but more compelling alumni constitute a veritable Who’s Who of what became the avant-garde (and often controversial) genre of free jazz.
Between 1948 and 1958 Terrell saw pass through its halls–and more particularly through the musical instruction of band teacher G. A. Baxter–saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman (pictured below), and Julius Hemphill (pictured above), as well as drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson.
I would run down that list again, but you can just go back and read it yourselves.
Contemplating the expansive global influence of those four musicians as well as perusing a list of the people they played with is what you might call a real mind fuck.
Ornette Coleman, albeit on the immediate heels of John Coltrane’s stunning and irreversible inversion of bee bop, essentially invented or at least defined “free” jazz. There was not a post-punker worth their salt, from Thurston Moore, to Henry Rollins to the Laughing Hyenas’ guitarist Larissa Strickland, who didn’t cite Coleman as an influence.
To further tighten the knot between these jazz deities and the reach of their influences, Shannon Jackson, after doing several records with the pianist every jazz purist loved to hate, Cecil Taylor, as well as swatting the skins on at least three Albert Ayler records, formed a trio that could only be neatly categorized as fusion–and to try and define the extent of the elements they fused would be light years out of my league. Nevertheless, the other two players in this project, The Decoding Society, were a pre-Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid and a pre-Rollins Band bass player Melvin Gibbs.
Jackson played with so many avant-garders, including his old townie, Coleman, it would take another website worth of server space to cover them all. Jackson was not only a drummer but became an accomplished horn player and composed music for 23 albums of one or another of his projects, not to mention being the song starter for the legendary, and oft name-dropped influence on every conscious NYC post punk band, the totally improvisational Last Exit, with bassist Bill Laswell, sax man Peter Brötzmann and one of the most distinctive guitar stylists there ever was, Sonny Sharrock.
Julius Hemphill was, of course, the founding force behind the fabulous World Saxophone Quartet. And Dewey Redman, father of present-day jazz star Joshua, was considered among the most skilled sax players of his day and an important innovator of the free jazz form.
G. A. Baxter taught them all.
I interviewed Shannon Jackson for a personal video project a few years back and could not quite get him to agree that the Fort Worth free jazz phenomenon was anything but coincidence. The way he thought of it was comparable to one day when he ran into two friends from different countries and different walks of life at an airport ticket counter. Jackson did, however, admit that Mr. G. A. Baxter, who Jackson described only as a short man of “black German” heritage, was a steadfast disciplinarian but with a pragmatic lenience. According to Jackson, Baxter’s imperative was to every year win the statewide, black high school band competitions, held annually at Prairie View A & M University, a traditionally black institution of higher education in Prairie View, Texas. This is where Baxter’s disciplinarian traits were applied. On the other hand, Baxter would open the band room at Terrell High for Jackson and his fellow classical composition class and school band mates everyday during school lunch hours and allow them to play unsupervised.
When I asked Jackson to consider what I perceived to be his involvement in projects (i.e., Ayler, Coleman, Last Exit) that had great influence on rock musicians, and asked him if he liked rock music, or if he was ever going for a rock sound, he flatly replied, “no.” He ended up playing in electric bands like Decoding Society, Power Tools and Last Exit because it allowed him to express his physical approach to the drums unfettered by the restraint necessarily dictated by circumstances where acoustic pianos and horns were the feature instruments.
All the Fort Worth guys started in what was then a small town in a racially miserable setting in a state where open debate on race is so taboo that discussion of it is still stifled to a muffled murmur. They all played blues, R&B, even country in the case of Jackson. Jackson’s family home, where he lives today, was firebombed and nearly destroyed by rednecks when he was a youngster
Ornette Coleman once said, in an interview the late 1990s–this is paraphrased–that of all the places he has been, Texas is the one place he had no idea about. Fort Worth has hosted a jazz festival for several years, the administrators of which had trouble finally agreeing to terms acceptable enough to Jackson for him to play the festival even once.
Having lived in three different cities in Texas I noticed how aggressively the Texas community tries to erase its own history before it even becomes identifiable. They will have to go to great lengths to erase the legacy of G. A. Baxter and the kids out of I. M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth
Back in the mid-’90s, when it really felt like music mattered, there was a band who encompassed the ready-to-implode danger of Exile on Main Street-era Rolling Stones and the feral sensuality of Lou Reed’s shape-shifting masterpiece Transformer. That band was Jonathan Fire*Eater, and for a tumultuous hot minute they ruled their little pocket of college radio-approved alternative rock with their major label debut Wolf Songs for Lambs. With hard to decipher pseudo-intellectual musings and pithy euphemisms, Wolf Songs for Lambs chronicled sexual escapades and eloquently recounted drug-fueled hallucinations that helped to bolster the band’s Lower East Side rock n’ roll aesthetic. Unfortunately, like most promising bands of the ’90s Jonathan Fire*Eater broke up–due mainly to the outlandish antics and drug use of lead singer Stewart Lupton.
While three members went on to form the successful off-the-radar quintet the Walkmen, Lupton went back to school, cleaned up his act and eventually formed Dylan-esque outfit The Child Ballads along with co-vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Betsy Wright, drummer Hugh Mcintosh and guitarist Judah Bauer. On their debut EP Cheekbone Hollows (Pop. 1/2 Life), Lupton and company transport the listener to an almost high-minded fairytale town called Cheekbone Hollows where whimsical stories become grounded by earthy percussion, slide guitar, male-female vocal harmonies and tongue-twisting lyrics. Taking their name from a 19th century compilation of poems, this outfit is a far cry from Lupton’s debauched past with an easy-going sound that’s more akin to urban country than the sometimes inconsistent flying off-the-hinges rock. With solid tracks like “Old Man October,” which incorporates a shaky pop percussion with falsetto “ohhhs,” and the dreamy “Laughter From the Rafters” which employs Lupton’s signature growl and a romantic “Beast of Burden” sway, the Child Ballads show that musical maturity isn’t necessarily a bad thing.