Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (6 page)

Banality is bourgeois style.

Kurt Schwitters, “Chinese Banalities”

First, an inventory: Drum machine. Bassline. “Yeah.” Synth. Cornet. Drum roll. “Nice.” Panned, high synth on the right channel. Cornet. Drum roll and syndrum snare stab. “Mine.” “Tonight.” “Jazz.” “Yeah.” Delayed cornet. Panned synth returns. “Jazz.” “Jazz.” The palette thickens, grows more crowded and insistent. Fade at 2:38.

Chalking the sidewalk outline around the corpses of jazz and funk with heavy quotation marks, TG offer not jazz but “jazz,” not funk but “funk.” Instead of giving us chops and feel and sex appeal and feverish commitment,
20 Jazz Funk Greats
offers a deliberate perversion of funk and jazz, a mutant clone, somehow simultaneously flaccid and mechanical—a soft machine. The song seems to model these genres for the listener as received ideas, exhausted forms stalled en
route to their liberatory payoffs. In his
ABC of Reading
, Ezra Pound proclaimed that “music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance,” and the languid tempo of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, more slurred than slinky, offers us such atrophy in (in)action, a wither report from behind the enemy lines of popular music (Pound, 14). It is unclear whether jazz and funk are being set up as senile modes in need of recuperation, or simply as dead weight overripe for satire. In either case—so far, so postmodern.

Such a reading takes us a few inches into this song, but let’s consider something a little more debatable: that TG’s music could be seriously regarded as a mutation of certain possibilities inherent in the templates of these genres. From jazz, TG take the idea of group improvisation from an agreed starting point and create something flexible enough to accommodate dissonance and the immanent to the moment acceptance of music-as-sound. From funk, TG take the idea of a rhythmic, repetitive music that attempts to evoke a physical response, with an implicit sexual and abject referent (“funk” as bad smell, as aroma of overproductive physicality; funk as what is, above all else,
nasty)
. Neither reference point quite survives as a living presence within the commodified forms that lurch zombielike through the cocktail lounge scenario of this song, but within the practice defined by the album as a whole, you could do far worse than isolate jazz and funk as the Ur-genres from which this piece of music derives its license and cops its moves.

Cosey:
I think what we wanted to do was to bear in mind the theme of it and the cover, so that the first track
would
give you a kind of jazz funk.

Chris:
A false sense of security.

Drew:
Whose voice is it?

Cosey:
It’s Sleazy’s voice, and that’s nice too, because of course that’s what he likes to do most. So it works from that, and then starts to get a bit weird, you think, “What’s that noise there?” and it starts to build to a crescendo.

Drew:
On that vocal take on the song “20 Jazz Funk Greats,” are you speaking “in character”? Is there anyone who you’re trying to sound a little bit like?

Sleazy:
No, I did vocals so rarely that anything I did was “in character” in that I wasn’t used to it. It wasn’t particularly modeled on anyone.

Drew:
It’s not your Barry White moment?

Sleazy:
[laughs] Well, I suppose it was relevant to that genre of things.

Drew:
Simon Ford mentions that you were a DJ while you were in Buffalo.

Sleazy:
I did some DJing when I was in Buffalo in ’73 or ’74, like late-night college radio DJing. At that time, I vaguely have a recollection of segueing Harry Lymon and the Teenagers and Bowie and weird things, eclectic things. I suppose, things that are probably quite common now.

Drew:
If you get a little bit loose about what constitutes jazz, a lot of live TG seems like a form of ultranoisy jazz, in that there are a few motifs to hang onto and then everyone is freaking out and improvising on top.

Sleazy:
True, but we were always, I in particular was always, quite quick to jump in and say that the improvisation that we did was quite different from that. Jazz improvisation is very intellectual and is based on a quite complicated and sophisticated musical language and preconceptions and talent;
whereas what we were doing was a more direct, intellect-free connection of the subconscious to the sound. To me, it was more like a stream-of-consciousness, and there was not a kind of on-the-fly thought process involved. For me, it was very important that people didn’t think that we were being clever or trying to be anything really. The sound was just a kind of spontaneous expression of emotion and the way that we were feeling in that second.

The idea of an alienated bohemian take on jazz or funk is, of course, not exclusive to Throbbing Gristle. Consider the following remarks of Brian Eno from 1978, the year before TG set their fangs into the funk:

In 1974 or ’75 I absolutely despised funky music. I just thought that it was everything I didn’t want in music. And suddenly, I found myself taking quite the contrary position. I suddenly found that, because of what [David Bowie] was doing and one or two other things—mostly Parliament and Bootsy and those people—I suddenly realized that if you took this a little bit further it became something very extreme and interesting. (Tamm, p. 35)

The crucial difference is in perspective. Eno, at least as he presents himself in this interview, seems to be surveying the entire map of available musical genres from above; his “view from nowhere” models a kind of detached objectivity about funk’s position within the total demesne of formal territory. By contrast, Throbbing Gristle seem to be looking up at funk and jazz from a cruder, subaltern position, from somewhere aesthetically
below
the minimum musical skill requirements necessary to play properly in a funk or jazz
idiom. In some senses they share this with a large number of self-taught and DIY musicians in the wake of punk rock who are looking elsewhere for inspiration, energy, release. But if the post-punk and punk-funk crossovers of A Certain Ratio and Pigbag (among many others) represent a way of getting punk’s dour grind to lighten up and its 1-2-3-4 stomp to “tighten up” into something far funkier, the industrial take on jazz funk offered up by Throbbing Gristle is a horse of a different color, paradoxically more square and more loose at the same time. By replacing the swing and feel of live instruments with the rigidity of sequencers, TG ensured that their stab at funk would feel mechanical, deliberately inhuman, lacking in interplay. By replacing tight riffs and thoughtful, carefully sculpted solos with murky cornet groans and detuned modular synth squiggles, TG ensured that their take on jazz would feel alien, impoverished, the musical equivalent of milk that’s gone slightly but noticeably “off.” The song feels like a setup and induces a kind of creeping self-consciousness on the part of the listener it is ostensibly designed to relax and seduce.

Drew:
What was your relationship to funk and jazz as genres? Because I could see people saying that live you were—a bit—related to jazz ideas about form, and that there were elements of funk in your approach to both programming rhythms, and to the meaning of “funk” as something nasty.

Cosey:
But “being funky” at that time had turned into
Shaft
kind of stuff, that kitschy funky stuff going
wah wah wah
. [imitates chickenscratch guitar riff]

Drew:
But listen to that bassline on “Tanith.” I mean, that
is
wah bass.

Chris:
With the whole “20 Jazz Funk Greats” song, me and Sleazy had a lot of influence on how that track came about. With the synth that sounds like a guitar, that’s Sleazy and I both playing parts on that thing.

Drew:
Are you both on the same synth and adjusting different parameters?

Chris:
No, actually it’s two different synths and he’s doing one and I’m doing another.

Drew:
The same one that is playing the bassline on “20 Jazz Funk Greats”?

Chris:
Yeah, the modular system.

Drew:
How do you do the fast little fill, the “dooda-dooda-dooda-dooda” part?

Chris:
Adjusting the speed of the sequencer; you could also adjust the step, shortening or lengthening the step by feeding the CV out back into the CV in. It had two channels running down, and you could use one for pitch and one for gate time.

Drew:
Cosey, you’re playing cornet; what is Gen up to?

Chris:
That’s just the three of us on that one.

Drew:
You don’t see any link between jazz and your playing there? Or are you deliberately trying to be somewhat “jazzy”?

Chris:
Sleazy and I both . . . don’t mind jazz. There’s some jazz I quite like, but Cosey hates all jazz.

Cosey:
No, I hate free-form jazz; all it is is a battle for one person to be the star. But I like jazz that’s melodic, where you’re playing together, not against one another, getting a cool thing, getting a mood.

Drew:
What’s your history with the cornet?

Cosey:
Nothing. My history is Sleazy not being able to
blow it and get a note. Him saying, “Would you do it? All I get is a fart. I dare not blow into it because I’ll look silly.” So I said I’ll try and I got a note straight away. I quite liked it. I still love playing it now; I love it.

Chris:
You got really good over the years.

Cosey:
I get a bit pissed off because when we go onstage Gen’s got his lipstick on and I can’t wear it because it’ll get smeared all over from the cornet. I end up with stinging numb lips.

Chris:
Gen’s got this habit, as soon as he sees you pick up your cornet he goes to the microphone.

Both anachronistic and forward-looking, the numbed, askew jazz funk Throbbing Gristle delivered to their fans in 1979 was untimely in several senses. Jazz funk as a commercially credible genre had arguably peaked financially and artistically six years earlier with Herbie Hancock’s 1973
Head Hunters
LP, the withering ARP Odyssey synthesizer solos of which were oft imitated in the wake of the album’s astonishing status as the greatest selling jazz LP of all time. But by the close of the seventies, Hancock’s potent combination of extended solos, synth freakouts, funk rhythms and pop hooks had ossified into a new cliché as this mutant strain of crossbred genres was decisively watered down and smoothed out by an army of studio hack clones. With the quasi-academic fussiness of jazz fusion degenerating into an arms race mentality of chops-heavy technical playing, and Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” waiting in the wings to provide a suitably Jacuzzi-ready soundtrack to usher out the Me Decade, jazz funk was still ringing the cash register, but wasn’t actually such a funky proposition anymore. As funk scholar Ricky Vincent puts it,
“By 1977 the jazz-funk field had thinned out, as a new flavor of over-the-top pop jazz was going strong, led by the likes of George Benson and Chuck Mangione” (Vincent, p. 146). What began with the anarchistic and interstellar explorations of the “new thing” and the psychedelic excesses of jazz funk blowouts like “Vein Melter” was doomed to end in the drivetime narcotic of the Quiet Storm radio format.

The song “20 Jazz Funk Greats” responds to this historical slide into decadence by deliberately exaggerating the process of deracination already underway in the surrounding culture. Performing a kind of stereotyped gesture of musical “whiteness” by stiffening the slink of funky music into a sequenced grid, the lawnsprinkler hissing of the hi hats and the tricksy drum machine kicks and rolls in the song accent the control freak aspect of electronic funk, advancing a kind of machine-music aesthetic that would ultimately blossom into techno. And yet Chris Carter’s use of CV (controlled voltage) “feedback” within modular systems and his hand-cranked tempo changes on the drum machine fills add an undeniably “funky” quality of looseness and unpredictability to the sequenced material. Just as it slides in and out of alignment with the liquid ideal of “real” funk music, TG’s track toggles both forward and backward in its temporal positioning in music history; the modular synth sweeps and squeals that Chris and Sleazy take turns laying down could conceivably be regarded as “futuristic” signifiers, but they also pay homage to the fluorescent ugliness of the solos from the original jazz funk class of ’73. In particular, one could compare the tones TG generate with the detuned, slightly sour synth motif in Roy Ayers’s fuzak chestnut “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” a song with a curiously tenacious hold
on the English musical imagination; strands of its musical DNA can be found in acid jazz (the piano riff), downtempo (the drums and vibes) and drum-n-bass (the keening, constant string tone sawing away on the horizon), among others. If this feeling of curdled tonality binds together the synthesizer lines with Cosey’s comet, it also comically undercuts the seductive energies of Sleazy’s vocal—there’s nothing “nice” about the sounds the synth is making.

There is an “untimely” quality to TG’s choice of brass instrument as well. The cornet is, as Sibyl Marcuse’s
Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments
informs us, a “valved brass instrument of medium conical bore, played with a cup mouthpiece, usually built in trumpet form, formerly also in helicon form”; an instrument with old roots in English folk forms and in hunting tradition, the cornet is based upon the coiled “post horn” or rustic horn used from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries (Marcuse, p. 127). Its rustic, clamorous connotations led the Spanish golden age playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca to denounce the “vile cornet” as unfit for courtly ears, but in fact its tone is considered quieter and mellower than its more popular cousin, the trumpet. The cornet was a staple component of New Orleans jazz bands and was played by Joe “King” Oliver, Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong (before he made the switch to trumpet). Ironically, in using a cornet rather than a trumpet, Throbbing Gristle wound up returning anachronistically to a specific instrumental tone found at the very beginning of jazz.