Scenes from the Year in Old

Surveying the archive discoveries and reissues from a banner year....

Dec 13, 2024

No big themes here! Promise! Really, there’s no point imposing trend-story-type order on the random delights that rose out of the deep-freeze archives over the past year. These included: Comforting consonances from earnest ‘70s songwriters vying with quite possibly the most thrilling live jazz club throwdown ever, toussling with electronic music at torture-device frequencies from Peru in the 1960s (the above, my favorite cover art of the year). That’s a soundtrack for our moment: Crossed wires across scrambled timelines, inane stuff some underutilized AI bot made to imitate ‘60s lounge music sitting alongside lost masterworks and blurry demos made on cassette.

Of course this was also the year Ween’s sly (and still underrated) masterpiece Chocolate and Cheese got the deluxe-anniversary treatment, which can only mean….Truly everything old is new again. (OK, maybe not the cheese….).

Lijadu Sisters: Horizon Unlimited (Numero Group)

For a while there, it was looking like the sun-beckoning soul-rousing music of the Lijadu Sisters was never going to make it to the digital realm. Twins from Nigeria whose blend could be reverent or strident, the Lijadus were second cousins of the great Fela Kuti, and shared his rebellious streak. That brought them fame as trailblazers but also, in the male-dominated Nigerian music business of the 1970s, all-too-common problems – which, according to Yeye Taiwo Lijadu (who survives her sister, the late Kehinde Lijadu), included non-payment of royalties, sexism, piracy, etc. There weren’t even official versions of the band’s music on streaming services.

That changed earlier this year, when the revered reissue label The Numero Group began a comprehensive plan to restore the band’s catalog. This effort started with the last work from the siblings’ ‘70s output, the tremendous Horizon Unlimited from 1979. A few facile detours into disco notwithstanding, this record shows just how radically exuberant — and original — the Lijadu Sisters were. Its grooves gather elements of Afrobeat, funk, rock and religious/ceremonial music, and its melodies are galvanic in the most lighthearted, disarmingly graceful way.

In addition to restoring the Lijadu catalog and making it available in multiple formats, Numero is curating a boxed set of the siblings’ material that is expected to include promotional singles (and B-sides), studio demos and tracks distributed to radio that were never available to the public. No word on a release date.

Those looking for more inspiration from Nigeria might check the recently issued compilation Nigeria Special Volume 3: Electronic Innovation Meets Culture And Tradition 1978-93, from Soundway Records. The title says it all: This collection tracks the moment when then-ubiquitous trappings of Western pop — drum machines and synths — were embraced by musicians who were masters of the intricate interlocking grooves of highlife and juju. Turns out, the building blocks don’t make much difference: This is what we talk about when we talk about groove.

Leave a comment

Share your most cherished discovery of 2024 with us! No wrong answers! Leave a comment!

Best line from a documentary-film interview: Tom Scott in Yacht Rock. The film is a curious entertainment that celebrates the creators of a ‘90s web series who alternately lampooned and championed the soft-rock explosion of the 1970s. These creators happily take credit for sleuthing out connections between Steely Dan and Christopher Cross and others, but their genre tag is squishy and porous and oddly inconsistent, applying to Boz Scaggs but not the Eagles of the “Peaceful Easy Feeling” era. (Whatever!) Leave it to veteran Los Angeles reedman Tom Scott to pop the bubble of this decades-late attempt at trendspotting: He dismisses the term “Yacht Rock” – and, by extension, the documentary itself – as an act of “forensic labelling.”

Joni Mitchell: Archives Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980). Joni Mitchell had been thinking about instrumental textures as a part of her songwriting since before her commercial breakthrough with Court And Spark in 1974. By 1976 and the sketeches that became Hejira, that approach evolved into a full collaborative dance. This is one reason, among many, to explore the fourth installment of her carefully assembled Archives series, discussed in a previous EL post here: To study how Mitchell’s crystalline ideas — already complete in terms of melody and narrative — grow more impactful as musicians like the late bassist Jaco Pastorius contribute rhapsodic, musically expansive counterlines. Every songwriter should hear this.

Paul McCartney and Wings: One Hand Clapping. Here’s an instance where the Special Edition is absolutely worth seeking, because it includes the six songs McCartney performed solo, in the backyard of Abbey Road Studios, on what sounds like a cheerful whim. It was the last day his band Wings was filming the live-in-the-studio One Hand Clapping, and Band On the Run was atop the British charts, and McCartney was having fun tripping back through “Peggy Sue” and other gems. The film was shelved, but some of the loose, steady-rolling performances have turned up on assorted anthologies; in its entirety, the set gently argues that Wings is perhaps overdue for reconsideration.

If you’re hunkered down in the doomsday bunker and have already run out of late Leonard Cohen music to keep spirits bright, remember his immortal words: You want it darker. For moments when what’s called for is something calm-ish in the key of disconsolate, reach for the timely expansion of one of the instrumental masterworks of the last half-century, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition). Sometimes these “expansions” with newly discovered stuff end up detracting from a beloved original work. Not the case here: the appended material catches the tonal veneers and emotional frameworks of the initial release, while showing off different aspects of Richard D. James’ gift for coaxing menacing disquiet from inanimate machines. The last track, “Rhubarb Orc. 19.51 Rev,” unfolds as a slow-motion single-camera panning shot across a barren landscape. As it evolves, it somehow echoes, and establishes kinship with, Samuel Barber’s orchestral classic “Adagio for Strings.”

While you’re contemplating: It was a good year for music for airports, both in the high-concept art division and at the spa-targeted low end. We apparently all need some time in the chill room. Brian Eno stars as his sonically omnivorous self in a new “generative” documentary film by Gary Hustwit that, if I understand correctly, has gazillions of narrative options: The scenes are shuffled at random so the film never tells the same story twice. Happily the soundtrack is more, ahem, traditional: 17 tracks covering a range of musical concepts, from icy sharp synth-based draperies to rumbling funk to explorations like the intense “Lighthouse #429” that split the difference — its beat is cobbled from scattered drum machine snares and bells, its textures derive from droning synths. Someday denizens of popular culture will look up from all the Tikking and Tokking and fall into a slow-motion gaze of near stillness set to steadying chords, and out of the shimmer an Eno-sized insight will emerge: Things were better when they were slower.

Unless, of course, they’re better faster. And wilder. And free like a chase scene on a test track. “In ‘N Out,” the opening track of the McCoy Tyner-Joe Henderson live discovery Forces of Nature, moves at a challengingly brisk tempo common in jazz for tunes of “normal” five-to-seven minute duration, where the soloists each take a few mannered choruses and everyone marvels at the dexterity. Within seconds, it’s clear that this 1965 live date from pianist McCoy Tyner, saxophonist Joe Henderson, bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Jack DeJohnette is not that. It’s blistering and lashing in a way improvisation isn’t always, and given the tempo it’s reasonable to expect it’ll dim in due time. Except it doesn’t. The tenor peaks, climbs, crests, peaks some more, leaps, finds the next gear, flips the pulse but keeps the time, surges further, goaded by DeJohnnette’s tireless ride cymbal toward a peak we can’t see. Don’t know what’s there but we are going, to where the air is thinner and the chords are thicker. This pursuit continues for 27 minutes — longer than a Seinfeld episode. The whole record is like that, a metaphor for pursuits heroic and otherwise.

Screaming Trees: Weird Things Happening. Alive with disarming – and uncharacteristically jubilant – singalong refrains, this set of 4-track cassette demos from the pre-history of Screaming Trees was among the goldmine finds of the recent Record Store Day. It was recorded in the stockroom of New World Video – the rental shop owned by the parents of guitarist Gary Lee Conner and bassist Van Conner – between 1986 and 1988. On a four-track cassette recorder, though veteran producer/engineer Jack Endino (whose credits include Trees’ Buzz Factory and Nirvana’s Bleach) was hired to work some magic for this RSD release. You know, to bring the sonics up to mid-90s basement-studio spec.

The clarity helps cover for some missing instruments (thanks to the Portastudio, Gary Lee Conner played most everything), and brings focus to the more earnest pop tunes (the Beatles-leaning “Now or Never”). There are tightly wound driving-at-midnight songs, and drifty, distantly psychedelic tunes like “What’s Never Been” that carry seeds of not only later Screaming Trees efforts but some of frontman Mark Lanegan’s mystical/metaphysical solo works. The sound might be rough but the songs are fully realized, and after a few, you begin to hear what Greg Ginn heard when he signed Screaming Trees to SST – a band with limitless potential, led by a post-everything bluesman/seer who wrote about his flaws, and human flaws generally, in a bracingly beautiful way.

Various Artists: Virtual Dreams Vol. 2: Ambient Explorations in the House and Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999. This one is all about technique, and techniques. Specifically those employed by producers, DJs and ambient-minded synthesists working in Japan during the period when house and techno music exploded there in the mid ‘90s. These artists understood club culture, and used its sonic signatures to create spacious, placid “listening techno” for chill rooms and other spaces beyond dancefloors. Their work amounts to a subversive recontextualizing of the squelchy acid-bass lines, furtive synth arpeggios, droning bell tones and dramatic filter-sweeping shifts of techno; it transforms those elements into music that simply envelops the listener, inviting contemplation. Special mention for this anthology as a triumph of expert curation: It offers diverse tour of semi-obscure astonishments that are united by a clearly defined concept.

Various Artists: Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996. Call me shallow, but I pressed play on this simply to hear what a song called “Oh Get Ready Cossack There Will Be a March” might sound like. The work of a group called Shapoval Sextet, it lived up to the grandeur — and the absurdism — and sparked curiosity about the artists from Ukraine featured here. Turns out they’re really only united by geography: After a spoken introduction and brusque fanfare opening, “Get Ready” chugs along as a brisk organ-spiced jazz waltz. Tucked amid several knotty rock experiments and improv-driven instrumentals are more compositional works: Valentina Goncharova’s “Silence,” a meditation for gentle bells and wispy flute, is worth the trip all by itself.

EchoLocator

Discussion about this post