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Hoagy, Stark Reality, and Now
BY FRANKLIN BRUNO
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No album can be all things to all people, but Stark Reality’s Now, a collection of out-of-print and unreleased tracks recorded by vibraphonist Monty Stark’s Boston-based electric jazz group between 1968 and 1970, comes close. The underground hip-hop crowd will take note of the disc’s analog-era funk grooves, as well as its release on Stone’s Throw, the reissue-heavy imprint curated by turntablist Peanut Butter Wolf. The Guitar Player crowd will welcome long-unavailable (and just plain long) excursions by Berklee-student/muso-hero John Abercrombie. And "Great American Songbook" archivists — a constituency not known for its overlap with those previously mentioned — will value it as a repository of several little-known songs by the late Hoagy Carmichael. Now that’s fusion. Between the current release’s thorough liner notes (compiled by one "Egon") and Richard Sudhalter’s recent Carmichael biography, Stardust Melody, it’s possible to trace this strange amalgam’s origin. Like many songwriters of his era unlucky enough to live to see the rise of rock, Carmichael was in little demand by the late ’50s — though Ray Charles’s 1960 recording of "Georgia on My Mind," which Hoagy wrote in 1929, kept the royalties flowing. One of his last attempts to keep his hand in was a collection of songs for children that was published in sheet-music form in 1957. A decade later, his son Hoagy Bix Carmichael (so named for hot-jazz legend Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke, the elder Carmichael’s musical mentor) was a producer at Boston’s WGBH, at the height of the station’s inventiveness. Casting about for a way to bring his unhappily retired father into the picture, Hoagy Bix hit on Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop, in which the songwriter presented his children’s material in the guise of a kindly music-store proprietor. According to Sudhalter, the show first aired in 1970-’71 and was in reruns for several years thereafter. Hoagy Bix also signed up the Stark Reality (the reissue drops the article), who had previously recorded theme music for other station productions, to supply with-it updates of the host’s songs. These were used in the show as end-credit underscoring, and the full-length versions appeared on a 1970 LP, which comprises the bulk of Now. If anything, the tunes sound farther out today than they must have in the year of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Drummer Vinnie Johnson and bassist Phil Morrison are impossibly fluid, and the youthful Abercrombie crams every wah-drenched idea he’s got into the allotted solo space. But the real revelation is leader Stark’s approach to the vibes. Harmonically venturesome and often heavily distorted, his playing has a sonic weight rarely associated with the instrument, closer to Sun Ra’s electric keyboard experiments than to the fleet elegance of Lionel Hampton or Milt Jackson. The earlier recordings that round out Now are less successful. Of Stark’s originals, "Sunday’s Song" shares the Carmichael LP’s free-blowing spirit, but the bluesy "Roller Coaster Ride" and the ballad "Too Much Tenderness" are dragged earthward by awkward vocals and early member Carl Atkins’s R&B-indebted saxophone. The Mingus-meets-JB’s theme to WGBH’s Say Brother is more intriguing, as the mixed-race band chant black-power slogans over Morrison’s aggressive upright bowing. (Public television was rather different in those days, it would seem.) Something about Carmichael’s simple but unpatronizing source material seems to have brought out Stark and company’s best. Some tracks ("Junkman’s Song," "Shooting Stars") use the songs as mere springboards, with several minutes of polyphonic improv introducing a brief nugget of vocal melody. Others involve more elaborate negotiations. The ambitious "All You Need To Make Music" moves through several distinct sections that explain sharps, flats, and other basics of musical notation. Six minutes in, Stark feeds Johnson rhythmic instructions — "A dot makes it half again as long . . . half-rest, repeat" — while the drummer responds in kind. You can practically hear Peanut Butter Wolf’s jaw hitting the floor at the track’s breakbeat potential. Two cuts short-circuit the songs’ pedagogical ends entirely. I presume Carmichael had a scouting expedition in mind when he wrote "Comrades," but given Stark’s affectless delivery, lines like "Jack with his compass/And me with my knife" evoke some less innocent form of friendship. And the band’s angular take on Carmichael’s setting of "Thirty Days Has September," which tries to squeeze "quite contrary February" into the scheme by means of a few extra lines, makes the calendar seem even more irrational than it is. As a mnemonic advice, it’s about as useful as Charlie Brown’s spelling-rules nightmare in Snoopy Come Home. Most children’s music presents society’s rules and conventions as not just convenient but natural; the Stark Reality’s schoolhouse acid-rock vibe revels in their essential arbitrariness.
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