Ran Blake: The Blue Potato and Other Outrages... (Milestone)
Purchased used at Phat Bear in Estes Park, CO
Because I'm an adult homeowner, I don't trumpet my casual traveling over social media. I don't Insta-out my trip pics, or Facebook Live my current tourist destination. What, I want to tell the world that my house is sitting largely unattended?
I'm back a few days from an eleven day trip to Colorado. Never been there before, might not ever return. Not to sound like I'm blaming her, but my wife signed us up for a tour excursion of CO. So yes, we were bona fide tourists. I certainly wasn't the youngest person in the group at 61, but on average I was on the younger end of the scale. I kept thinking to myself, what a bunch of grups (Star Trek episode eight, "Miri"). But then I'm not exactly young myself.
On the bus, the tour guide had song playlists lined up, in addition to taking a suggested song from everyone on the tour. From her lists, I haven't heard so much John Denver since seeing him on The Muppet Show in 1979. And as for the tourists' song suggestions, well..."Don't Stop Believing", "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Alleluia", "Stairway to Heaven" (weirdly, the tour guide played a version by Led ZepAgain, a note-for-note recreation of the original), Louis Armstrong's version of "What a Wonderful World", and, you know, other songs I never need to hear again. I had to really consider what I'd ask for. I didn't want to bother anyone with Thelonious Monk or Charles Mingus, let alone something even more daring. I settled on The Beatles' "I Feel Fine", a song I like despite its adolescent lyrics. Someone else chose "In My Life", a frankly better John Lennon song. Mid-tour, I told my wife what I should have chosen was Parliament's "Flashlight" if I had thought of it. That would have gotten the tour bus rockin. Late in the trip, she said that I'm probably looking forward to listening to something harder and less mainstream when we got home. And here we are.
We went many places, I can't even remember how many towns in ten days altogether. As I always will, if there's a record store (or at least a store that has vinyl) I'm looking. Cursory impression of Colorado for record hunting? Outrageously expensive. One example: I was in an antique mall in Durango. A couple of the booths had records, nothing unusual. There was a pair of young people, both dressed to the Ts in hippy uniforms, looking over a crate. They gleefully pulled out four "classic rock" titles, including The Byrds' country album and Jethro Tull's Stormwatch. I heard the dealer say, "Well, that's $125 dollars, I'll sell them to you for $100."
What?
From what I saw, these were not great titles. $10 records at best, and the covers showing wear. I thought, I could pack up a van with copies of Love Beach, Whipped Cream and Other Delights, any Iron Butterfly LP other than the famous one, etc etc etc, charge twice in Colorado what I paid for them in Pittsburgh. Probably still wouldn't be worth the gas money though.
So what of this album? Estes Park, CO. One of the first lunch stops on our tour. Cute touristy town, with one significant landmark: the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King's The Shining. (And possible outdoor location for the film? I was unclear on that point.)
We found this shop, Phat Bear, next to the restaurant where we ate. Sign by the back door advertising records for sale, so yeah I want to go in. Mostly it's tourist things, tshirts, fridge magnets, dream catchers, and such. There's a wall of new vinyl reissues, $40 sealed Led Zeppelin records, that sort of thing. There were several racks of used records, and nothing looked promising. "Hm, there's that same Michael Franks record I see everywhere...Peter, Paul, and Mary, no thanks...oh, another copy of the first Chicago album...Supertramp, meh, pass."
Then, of all things, this Ran Blake LP turns up. I don't remember seeing it before this time, an early solo session of his. The price, $13, doesn't make me jump but I considered it. "I think you can afford it" my wife joked. It wasn't even the price so much as the inconvenience of dragging it around Colorado for another nine days, but needless to say I snatched it up.
It's why we look, right? It's a far cry from my potential Holy Grail crate digging find, Clarence (Sawdust) Kelley's Twin Singing Saws of the Stardust Trail, an all-solo saw album without out a hint of irony or avant garde intentions.
So finally, what of this? Ran was the head of the Third Stream division at New England Conservatory for years, now referred to as Modern Improvisation or such. Third Stream is a bit of a loaded term, jazz and improvisation that draws on modernist classical (for lack of a better term) techniques. Webern, Cowell, and Monk are cited in the liner notes, the latter two being the more obvious predecessors or influences. Ran sometimes goes into full-blown tone cluster territory on occasion here (most notably on his takes on "Chicago" and "Never On Sunday"), but he's a bit more subdued here than I remember him being on later sessions. His takes on other people's tunes tends to abstract them, in the strictest sense: he quotes, simplifies, extends familiar melodies rather than playing them straight-forward. At the same time, his take on "God Bless the Child" demonstrates his bona fide jazz chops, as it were.
Ran's politics are close to the surface too, choosing to cover Max Roach's "Garvey's Ghost" and Charles Mingus' "Fables of Faubus", as well as dedicating pieces to Che Guevara and Malcolm X. Oh, and "the Blue Potato", slang I hadn't heard before for a police officer.
Listening to this on vinyl without paying much attention to when the banding indicates track starts and finishes, it all sort of floats along in an impressionistic sort of way. To be clear, it doesn't sound like "impressionist" music per se. The tracks are largely short, twelve in total with only two longer than four minutes. Compositions seem more like sign posts on the path rather than distinctive start and stop points. In a way I think I like it better without necessarily knowing where things begin and end. There's a snippet of walking bass, then some cluster pounding, followed by quasi-tonal balladry, and so forth. the album was recorded over two days (seems like a luxury to me) so clearly it's edited and not played like a performance start to finish.
The template is similar to most of his solo piano albums: a mix of original compositions and more standard-type tunes, nothing played directly like a straight forward tune. It seems like a perfect format for this approach, moving directions as he sees fit, wherever the improvisations lead him.
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