Stewart Birch : Can't Live Without Me - single review

If you saw the recent BBC 4 documentary on the origins of Jazz Funk then this will be familar ground for you. Newcastle DJ Stewart Birch is very much the spiritual heir of those late 70s early 80s acts. Despite the fact that his influences are more the US House and Garage scenes.

  

I'm a sucker for a good bass line and ' Can't Live Without Me' has a fine one. On first listen the House Mix is the funkier version, driven along on an insistent Conga beat, and discreet Rhodes and strings to add to the Jazz Funk feel. The slightly more relaxed 110 BPM orginal version takes a bit more time to worm its way into your brain. Guitar is more visible than on the Houe mix, and the groove is that bit more relaxed. In the end the original is the version that's going on the Ben More bar playlist, alongside Quantic Soul Orchestra, Wilbert Longmire and recent new favs Men I Trust.

Having found Stewart on Bandcamp I tried his earlier releases. 'Heaven' has Car Wash handclaps and a bassline straight out of Giorgio Moroder. 'Sweat' very cleverly pitches the two different electric piano sounds of the Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer EP200, think Supertramp and Joe Zawinul for the latter's unique sound, and if you don't know what a Rhodes sounds like we should talk. Stewart's other release available on Bandcamp is another Jazzy house piece called 'Dreams Don't Work'. " Dream's don't work unless you do. See your future, build your future. Touch the Sky!"

The whole lot will only cost you a fiver, although you can give him a bit more. While they are available lots of places remember that he earns more from Bandcamp.

New news! Stewart seems to be putting out a track a week at the moment. Upgrade is the latest and keeps up the standrd of his previous songs. Still like 'Sweat' best though. Try that first and then get the rest.

 

Still under the radar - Reviews roundup

When you have been reviewing for a bit, you inevitably end up on the mailing lists of some of the P.R. companies. Talking to our editor at Americana UK the other evening he believed at least some PRs get it badly wrong when blanket mailing their music out for review. Thrash Metal and R&B are never going to be AUK's bag so why send it. Information filed away for acting on in my own Marketing 4 Music venture, where I do try hard to match up the recipient with something they may actually be interested in. 

One company that gets it spot on is Dutch promoter Continental Record Services. I reviewed their fab new album from Robert Jon and The Wreck over at AUK recently.  This led me onto their mailing list and to hearing some more of their artists. They focus on the singer songwriter, Americana and roots corner of the forest, and the quality of their releases is remarkably high.

Emma Swift’s ‘Blonde on The Tracks’ is a case in point. An album of Dylan covers is hardly a new idea, but Swift’s Australian background possibly separates her from some of the reverence for Dylan that always seems present when Americans cover his songs. She just sings them. ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ drips Dylan and Emmylou Harris in about equal measure.

Swift says; “The idea for the album came about during a long depressive phase... the kind where it’s hard to get out of bed and get dressed and present to the world as a high-functioning human. I was lost on all fronts no doubt, but especially creatively.” Her Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” reflects this, closer to Hope Sandoval than Dylan, and for me one of the best songs of the year so far. These are just two highlights in an album full of not quite obvious song choices. The videos that go with some of the songs are also worth a watch. Highly recommended.

Southern Rock from the Netherlands, who would have thought it? Copperhead County did and their album due out about now ‘Brothers’ is proof it can be done. Opener ‘Be Different’ shows why they named themselves as they did, more than a touch of Steve Earle about it. The guitars are quite Rolling Stones in places, but the influences don’t overwhelm the songs. The Neil Young flavoured title song is especially good. Other songs live in roughly Tom Petty territory. Another fine album.

I’ve never really dug into Cajun or Zydeco music but Cary Morin’s ‘Dockside Saints’ may be changing that. I’ve been playing this for a few days now and it continues to grow on me. Bits of rock, jazz, and blues mix with the Southern influences. Some of it reminiscent of Willy DeVille’s later work – which is a good thing. Best song by a country (swampy) mile is single ‘Come the Rain’.

Over the last few months, I have been featuring more and more independent music here and that is because that is where the action is. Find Continental Record Services roster at Bandcamp and support some cracking good music, from a company that is promoting artists who we wouldn’t otherwise get to hear.  

Prog or not - Beatles or not

Writing about the word "progessive" recently I did mention the Prog Magazine's Facebook had banned the "is it prog?" question. Not entirely successfully, although Is uspect they left a recent on which asked the question of The Carpenters' version of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" without seemingly any ironic intent whatsoever. As any fule kno the original was by Klaatu, best known for being misidentified as "The Beatles reformed" but actually a quite respectable group in their own right. You can read more about them here. They may well be "prog", maybe even progressive by the definition I set last time, but The Carpenters? Sorry no. Even if I do have a soft spot for their really rather good pop version of the song. Compare and contrast here.

Lets reclaim "progressive"...

I bought a large collection of Jazz CDs recently. You'll hear more about them shortly, but one of the popular artists with the original owner was Stan Kenton. Kenton was a big band leader and pianist. To be honest I don't like his music much, but he was very popular at a certain point in the late 40s. In 1947 he formed a new, larger band than his previous on to present "Concerts in Progressive Jazz". The album that resulted from this was called 'A Presentation of Progressive Jazz'. Reviews included "jerry-built jumble of effects and counter-effects" and "this album presents very little that can justifiably be called either jazz or progressive. "Billboard said it was "as mumbo-jumbo a collection of cacophony as has ever been loosed on an unsuspecting public.”

Now in fairness Kenton’s music can best be described as bombastic at best. And this got me thinking, again, about the use of the word “progressive” in music. Google “what is progressive rock” and you get; “a style of rock music popular especially in the 1970s and characterised by classical influences, the use of keyboard instruments, and lengthy compositions.”

Google “progressive music” and you land on a Wikipedia entry that talks about “progressive music which  “usually synthesizes influences from various cultural domains, such as European art music, Celtic folk, West Indian, or African. It is rooted in the idea of a cultural alternative and may also be associated with auteur-stars and concept albums, considered traditional structures of the music industry.” Ok so once you’ve picked your way through that lot you may be fairly confused, I certainly am, and be no closer to a definition of what progressive means. When it comes to Jazz the article decides that Progressive Jazz “originated in the 1940s with arrangers who drew from modernist composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. Its "progressive" features were replete with dissonance, atonality, and brash effects. “ By now you may be starting to get tired of the rather pompous style of the Wikipedia author, I certainly am, and be thinking that Progressive Jazz probably should be more about Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra – who all came along rather later and whose innovations belong to the late 50s and 60s. 

Now I started avoiding Prog magazine’s mostly quite interesting Facebook group because of the interminable question, is XXXX prog? Looking now I find that the site rules now include “Please do not post "Is XXXX prog?" questions, lets focus on interesting discussions.” Great I can follow it again. Prog Magazine itself does include a good bit of music that follows the definition of ”progressive music” we saw above. Now of course they include the old guard, ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd, they want to sell magazines to old folks. But they go far enough off piste to include music that stretches genre boundaries pretty close to breaking point. Which is great. If you assume (as I do) that the first proper progressive rock album was ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ and then step off in to Van Der Graaf Generator and thence into outer space then very little of what is called “Prog” is actually progressive, any more than Stan Kenton was ”progressive” when it came to Jazz.

In the citations for the Wikipedia entry mentioned earlier there is a note that quotes  - Willis 2014, p. 219, “'Progressive' music can be seen as an experimentation with alternative routes"; Moore 2004, p. 22, "What was so revolutionary about this post-hippie music that came to be called 'progressive' ... was that ... the umbilical link between idiolect and style had been broken."; Macan 1997, p. 246, "the progressive rock of the 1970s had been 'progressive' only as long as it pushed the stylistic and conceptual boundaries of rock outwards" As all the references circle back to the article they are quoted in I can’t tell you anything about the books the quotes come from. But I think we can start to get a definition of what the word “progressive” means to those who ask the “is it Prog?” question on Facebook. It doesn’t in fact mean progressive at all, and we should probably use “prog” to distinguish the music that derives from 70s artists like ELP, Yes, and lesser mortals, and we can lump Mr Kenton in with the as Prog Jazz, with the distinguishing feature that the music is loud, grandiose, and bombastic. We can then reserve the “progressive” for music that stretches boundaries, Coltrane, Miles or Cecil Taylor in Jazz, and King Crimson, Tool, Frank Zappa, and maybe even The Velvet Underground in rock. Thoughts on properly progressive rock acts happily received.