Culturedarm’s from the Vault 2023

The vault might seem to connote a sense of authority, visions of round doors, time locks and bank currency or rows of booklets and stacks of boxes whose contents have been carefully packed away. Yet musically the prising open of a vault can prove a cacophonous and contentious affair. What should be scrapped or saved for posterity, who gets to decide and how do works of art cohere shorn of their immediate contexts? Here from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad to the New York Public Library, and from Mahasarakham province to the underground scene in early-nineties Ukraine we find newly discovered live recordings, compilation albums and remastered cult classics featuring loft jazz and Downtown luminaries, a couple of Ethiopian beauties, the ‘god of khene’ and the great John Coltrane. This selection ‘from the vault’ serves as complement to Culturedarm’s long lists of the best records and songs of 2023.

Arthur Russell – Picture of Bunny Rabbit

At the confluence of the Downtown scene inaugurated in the loft of a Chambers Street apartment by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young, which from its roots in sustained tones and minimalist repetition came to encompass everything from the shifting phrases of Steve Reich and Philip Glass to the performance art of Laurie Anderson and no wave abrasions of Glenn Branca and Lydia Lunch, the Iowan composer Arthur Russell landed in New York City and gained a degree of notoriety for his cello distortions, a brief spell as the musical director of the avant-garde venue The Kitchen, and his early embrace of disco which together led to fruitful collaborations with a diverse cast of characters including Allen Ginsberg, David Byrne, Peter Zummo, Julius Eastman and the DJ and born-again remixer Walter Gibbons. The perception of Russell as a solo artist turned upon the 1986 release of his second studio album World of Echo, which merged bristling cello improvisations and liminal dub rhythms with wispy chamber melodies, shrouds of reverb and his folksy tenor and proved a resounding commercial failure, before the passage of time hailed it as a poignant and inscrutable masterpiece.

When Arthur Russell died in 1992 at the age of forty, he left behind a vast archive of mostly unfinished recordings which together comprised more than 1,000 tapes. With his partner Tom Lee serving as the executor of his estate, since the early 2000s it has fallen to Steve Knutson of Audika Records to wade through all of this material, expanding the scope of his musical interests and the depth of his songwriting talent with reissues of World of Echo and his 1983 orchestral album Tower of Meaning joined by the woolly synth-pop and whirring drum machines of Calling Out of Context, the proto-house beats and heavy metal rumbles of Springfield, and the folk yearnings of Love Is Overtaking Me and Iowa Dream. The latest compilation Picture of Bunny Rabbit cleaves more closely to the shape and spirit of World of Echo, featuring nine previously unreleased performances from the same period, capped by an open-ended solo rendition of ‘In The Light of a Miracle’ whose oscillating strobes are punctuated by sun-flicked backs, rainbow rides and milky ways. Knutson says that after twenty years of digging and dusting, this ‘might be the last major project’ on Audika Records, adding ‘This is the one I’m most proud of though’.

Aselefech Ashine & Getenesh Kebret – ሸ​ገ​ኔ​ዎ​ች (Beauties)

Slipping in at the tail end of a golden age of Ethiopian music before the Derg regime began to crack down on all manner of artistic expression, the voices of Aselefech Ashine and Getenesh Kebret entwine in close harmony over the minor-key piano runs, interlocking percussion and rock-steady basslines of the Army Band while the sonorous flute of the arranger Teshome Sisay ties together ten rollicking and variegated Ethio-jazz compositions. Ashine and Kebret met at the legendary Hager Fikir Theatre in Addis Ababa and their duo album Beauties was a local hit upon its release in 1976, now remastered and reissued with translated lyrics and an interview with Ashine by Mississippi Records and Domino Sound who have a track record when it comes to filling in our collective blanks, reviving marginalised voices and long-forgotten scenes in close collaboration with their selected artists.

Ellen Zweig – Fiction of the Physical

Nowadays exploring the Western gaze, cultural minutiae, and the cultivation of imaginary identities as they relate to her lifelong fascination with China, back in seventies the poet and media artist Ellen Zweig was part of the pioneering Downtown scene in New York City, where she introduced and perfected a technique called the ‘human loop’ through which multiple performers repeated a single phrase, creating a sonic collage of syllabic waves which washed in and out of synchronisation. Collecting for the first time her key works from the period, which blend speculative spoken word with fourth world ambient minimalism, on ‘If Archimedes’ the poet amplifies the technique, telling with apocalyptic humour and ceaseless foreboding the story of Edith Warner, who lived near the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the development of the first atomic bomb.

From her home on the banks of the Rio Grande at the Otowi Bridge crossing, Warner opened a tea room where she sold Coca-Colas and her legendary chocolate cake to a steady stream of patrons including the laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer, who loved physics and the red desolation of the desert and found in Los Alamos a place where he could reconcile those two loves. Clanging alongside David Dunn on the junk percussion of the atomic artist Tony Price with vocal contributions from Nathanial Tarn and Joan La Barbara, tossing in a reversal of the immortal nectar of the Bhagavad Gita, Zweig juxtaposes the fates of Warner, Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project with the life and work of the Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes, who designed catapults and burning lenses to defend his city of Syracuse from the Romans only to be slain by an errant soldier, commenting obliquely on a barren future from the swirling confines of his bathtub.

Evan Parker – NYC 1978

In the seventies the loft jazz scene which sprung up almost overnight in New York City served as a spiritual continuation of the free jazz ethos which had been nourished by the likes of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. Outsiders, avant-garde musicians and enthusiasts with a loose connection to the mainstream set up performance spaces in lofts and apartments, downtown storefronts and galleries, community centres and abandoned warehouses, which bore witness to burgeoning sounds from the five boroughs and places like Chicago, California and St. Louis plus a flurry of artists from farther afield. Some of the most famous loft jazz venues included Studio Rivbea by the saxophonist Sam Rivers and his wife Bea, Ali’s Alley by the former Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali, and Environ which had been set up by Dave Brubeck’s sons Chris and Danny and was managed by the pianist and trailblazing computer artist John Fischer. In the fall of 1978 the British saxophonist Evan Parker – who had collaborated with Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann and Alexander von Schlippenbach and was already counted among the European free jazz pioneers – had just released his acclaimed solo soprano album Monoceros and embarked upon his first ever trip to the Big Apple. His performance at Environ in front of a small audience one October evening lands on the New York improvisational stalwart Relative Pitch.

John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy – Evenings at the Village Gate

By the summer of 1961, the indomitable saxophonist John Coltrane had established his first quartet and opened new harmonic expanses for jazz through his sheets of sound. As a leader for Atlantic, the cascades of ‘Countdown’ and ‘Giant Steps’ with its loping bassline and spirited cycle of chromatic thirds helmed his first iconic album and introduced what would become known as the Coltrane changes, while turning to the soprano saxophone, he scored a surprise hit with his rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune ‘My Favorite Things’, which would remain one of his most cherished pieces of work. Now buttressing the playing of the drummer Elvin Jones, the pianist McCoy Tyner and the bassist Reggie Workman with an extra bass in the form of Art Davis, Donald Garrett or Jimmy Garrison and the incendiary Eric Dolphy on second horn, the expanded ensemble were preparing for a four-night residency at the Village Vanguard, although it was not all plain sailing for Coltrane during this period, as his group would soon be described as ‘a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend’ by the DownBeat critic John Tynan, while the previous year his muscular solos had alienated the Parisian crowd on his final tour with Miles Davis.

Shedding new light on this seminal moment of artistic development, tapes recently discovered by a Bob Dylan archivist at the New York Public Library capture Coltrane and Dolphy just a couple of months before their famed Village Vanguard residency, on a special night at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village in August of 1961. With the original quartet of Jones, Tyner and Workman bolstered by Dolphy on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, Coltrane’s engagement at the Village Gate was part of a busy month of summer jazz for the burgeoning nightclub. He was billed alongside groups by the drummer Art Blakey and the pianists Ray Bryant and Horace Silver, plus a nineteen-year old singer by the name of Aretha Franklin, who was performing for the very first time in New York City, having released her debut solo album Aretha backed by the Ray Bryant Combo on Columbia Records at the start of the year.

The Village Gate had a state-of-the-art sound system which had been installed by an ambitious young engineer called Richard Alderson, who would later work extensively for ESP-Disk and record live albums for Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte and Nina Simone. Seizing the moment that night in August, he recorded the Coltrane quartet as a way to test out his new system, using a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a single suspended RCA ribbon microphone. The results were shelved and found their way into a collection at the New York Public Library, with their discovery prompting eighty minutes of new material now packaged up as a double album on Impulse. Boasting a full title of John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate, the set includes a fresh take on ‘My Favorite Things’, a breathtaking feature for Dolphy on bass clarinet on the Benny Carter and Spencer Williams standard ‘When Lights Are Low’, and the only known non-studio recording of the Coltrane composition ‘Africa’, plus liner essays by Workman, Alderson, the Grammy-winning jazz historian Ashley Kahn, and the saxophonists Branford Marsalis and Lakecia Benjamin.

Milford Graves, Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover – Children of the Forest

Bringing to bear all of his experience as part of Afro-Cuban ensembles, the New York Art Quartet and briefly as an additional drummer under Albert Ayler, serving as the culmination of his years as a bandleader in the loft jazz scene which burnished fellow arch experimenters Sunny Murray and Rashied Ali, the live album Bäbi by the percussionist Milford Graves stands as a towering, caterwauling and incandescent free-jazz classic. Now the Black Editions Archive has unearthed a series of sessions which led up to that iconic release, the last of which was held at his studio-workshop in Queens just nine days before the Bäbi dates, on 11 March 1976 where Graves was accompanied by Arthur Doyle on tenor saxophone and fife, and Hugh Glover on the klaxon and vaccine, a rudimentary Haitian single-note trumpet.

The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972

Around the turn of the seventies, the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad was the place to be as a hub of industrial development meant to furnish the needs of a thriving independent state, a pioneering educational centre conceived along Bauhaus lines which emphasised learning by doing and drew figures like John Cage, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Louis Kahn and Charles Eames as visiting lecturers, and according to a new compilation released this year, the home of some deliriously off-kilter electronic dance music. The release of The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972 shines a spotlight on a hitherto overlooked corner of the world, more famous for its textile mills and the ashrams of Mahatma Gandhi, suggesting that while Indian forms suffused the Western world from the jangly pop of The Beatles and The Byrds to the raga swirls which influenced Don Cherry, Robbie Basho, La Monte Young and Terry Riley, the institute at Ahmedabad was plying away at the forefront of early developments in analogue synthesis.

Founded with support from the New York composer David Tudor, who set up a Moog modular system and tape machine in the autumn of 1969, the electronic studio at the National Institute of Design would remain in operation for three years as experiments in synthesis, tape collage, field recording and voice captured a moment of self-discovery where trends in Western drone and minimalism segued with the avant-garde offshoots of classical Indian music. Following years of research by the installation artist Paul Purgas which disclosed 27 reels of archival tape, the compilation presents pieces by the musician and poet Atul Desai, the teachers and technicians I.S. Mathur and S.C. Sharma, the pakhavaj percussionist Gita Sarabhai and the young architectural student Jinraj Joshipura, stretching from the pulsating hallucinogenic ‘Dance Music’ of Sharma’s tracks one-through-three to the cooing oscillations and metallic birdsong of his ‘Electronic Sounds Created on a Moog’, the percussive coils of Desai’s posited ‘Recordings for Osaka Expo 70’, and the industrial buzz of Mathur’s wryly biographical take on ‘Once I Played a Tanpura’.

Sombat Simla – Master of Bamboo Mouth Organ: Isan, Thailand

Black Truffle and the sound artist, ethnographer and independent filmmaker Yasuhiro Morinaga present the first album-length documentation of Sombat Simla, known throughout Thailand but especially in his home of Mahasarakham province as ‘the god of khene’. Captured over the course of one day, the pieces on Master of Bamboo Mouth Organ, which was originally released unedited back in 2018, range from molam folk songs played inside of a cattle shed alongside the percussionist Mali Moodsansee and the cymbalist Pattaradon Ekchatree to solo incantations whose long tones and chugging rhythms have been described by the Bangkok Post as like ‘the sound of a train journey, complete with traffic crossings and the call of barbecue chicken vendors’.

Svitlana Nianio – Transilvania Smile, 1994

As labels like Muscut and its archival imprint Shukai continue to draw attention to the Ukrainian independent scene, the avant-garde pioneer and soprano vocalist Svitlana Nianio harbours a second wind following her return to live performance in 2017, with the collaborative album Eye of the Sea alongside the multi-instrumentalist Tom James Scott released on Skire in July. Back in the nineties, the conservatory graduate was a member of the experimental Kyiv collective Cukor Bila Smert’, released her debut solo album Kytytsi on the cult Polish label Koka Records, partnered with the illustrator and instrument builder Oleksandr Yurchenko for an album recorded in an abandoned park which featured her Casio keyboard and soprano sublimations over the tender refrains of the hammered dulcimer, and toured extensively in Poland and Germany before the turn of the century saw her briefly fall off the face of the earth.

It was in Cologne in 1994 that Nianio collaborated with the dance group Pentamonia, on a project which would be dubbed with the evocative name Transilvania Smile. Directed by the choreographer Isabel Bartenstein while Nianio played, sang and improvised, the piece of dance theatre was performed at the former gallery space Urania in Cologne and again in Aachen, before the producer Michael Springer invited Nianio to record her compositions at his Phanton studio. Featuring her signature blend of folk motifs, beguiling melodies and vocals which stretch and strain towards the liturgical, here accompanied by the roving and sometimes elegiac strains of piano and harmonium which together conjure everything from the polyphonies of Pérotin to the austere night march of Connie Converse’s haunted reverie ‘One by One’, some of the songs which make up Transilvania Smile were released on cassette compilations during the nineties, now finally gathered by Shukai in their original form.