cocktails for two/Marshall Allen
cocktails for two/Marshall Allen
I have to make a confession here, if only because I'm about to retract it: I've always had trouble appreciating Marshall Allen's contribution to the Arkestral tapestry. But this week curiosity drew me to the version of "Cocktails for two" on -live at Praxis II-, and making certain seemingly incongruent connections really changed the way I hear him.
I wrote part of this for another listserv, hence the background that really isn't necessary for most in this forum. Feel free to offer corrections/arguments/observations/etc...
Allen has a real grating chaotic squall of a tone, developed in part when Ra recommended to him that he "play like you're beating up on your saxophone", which is usually how he sounds; to see this in person, he sorta looks like he's strangling a big brass straw that's gotten all tangled, and is furiously trying to get to whatever drink is on the other side of that straw; when he occasionally holds a note and relaxes, but even through that relative calm you can hear the strain of his struggle, and the calm obviously drives him crazy: too used to the struggle, his long tones, already a little sour, inevitably get beaten up again like a doomed and bitter Buster Keaton stopping to take a wheezing night of shut-eye but being stirred awake by the unending array of cops, all in the speeded-up disjointed rhythm of a hand-cranked camera.
So I've always thought him funny enough, though a little tedious after a while. But it figures that the humor would be what really helped me get a handle on his sound: a real clarifying revelation I had on Ra's music was when I heard Arkestra precussionist/reedman James Jacson introduce a Ra film program at LC last year. Lamby find what I wrote then...
Jacson helped introduce the films and answer questions, and he brought up something that I had always experienced at Ra shows but never really thought of as essential to his work: the comedy. Ra wanted all his musicians to be discplined in their craft, but also to have a sense of humor; while the theatricality may seem distracting to some, (and often results in critics not taking Ra's musicianship seriously), the laughter is a -release- for the musicians. Jacson notes one occasion when he was given a misleadingly simple two-note pattern to play that he just couldn't get in rehearsal. The intervals just didn't make sense to him, try as he might; finally in concert, Ra made one of his typi cal outlandish pratdances, cracking the band and the audience up in the process, and Jacson finally -got- it. He noted that whoever could make the rest of the band bust out laughing during a particular show would get the rest of the band into the groove.
Getting to the point then: "Cocktails for two" is a logical showcase for Allen's jarring array of sound, like a one-man City Slickers with slide whistles and shotgun blasts and car horns all rolled up into that alto crazy straw of his. But unlike Spike, there's still a significant trace of romance left in the tune, in the sour soulful strains Allen will fall back to between squalls, in the lyrical runs Ra will run between dense chord clusters.
Similar rhythmic and emotional hurdling takes place on other Arkestrized standards; but where on their versions of "Prelude to a kiss" it can get trivialized (albeit with a lot of fun and inventiveness) with campy vocals, on "Cocktails for two" pulls meaning out of trivia, taking you deeper into the song than the standard changes might, teaching, at least me, something new through kitsch.
To bring more substantial discussion to this list, I was hoping my esteemed colleagues might could recommend/analyze sepcific recordings to help me and others get a handle on other Arkestral voices - Abdullah, Thompson, Omoe, Patrick - whoever. My ears have really only managed to distinguish a few of the more obvious personalities - Gilmore, Ray, Allen - and since the body of work is so vast, I'd like to ask for expert, even quasi-structured guidance before attempting this on my lonesome.
Thanks again to the many fellow SATURN-ites who have helped me put together a broad collection from which to choose as I undertake this research. Etc.
Pat