5 Songs Friday Dec. 27, 2024

It's the last 5 Songs of the year but these songs look further back than our current annum

Fela Ransome-Kuti – “Awo” 1960s single available on Highlife Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969). Early Fela is kind of revelatory. Of course, I love the epic funk excursions of the 70s, but there is an innocence and a sense of discovery in the earlier material that deserves to be heard, too. This features his early Nigerian band, Koola Lobitos, and it also has him on trumpet, not the saxophone he would play later. “Awo” is an infectious little dance number, almost a rhumba, and featuring a steady clave 1-2-1-2-3 played on woodblock. This is the sort of thing his band would play for dancers in those days before Nigerian politics turned oppressive. I never heard this stuff until I read Joe Boyd’s wonderful And the Roots of Rhythm Remain book on world music, my fave music book of 2024.

Jack DeJohnette – “The Rock Thing” 1974 from Sorcery. The 1970s were a wild time in the jazz world, as virtually everybody wound up doing something weird at one time or another. This is from probably the great drummer Dejohnette’s weirdest record. This particular track is strange in multiple ways. First, it’s built on a funky rock rhythm way straighter than what was happening in fusion at the time, with none other than Dave Holland playing electric bass. Then the guitars, played by John Abercrombie and Mick Goodrick, sound like they’re being squeezed through an old-fashioned washing machine or something, an effect I kinda dig. So, we’re going along for a while, moving to the funk and hearing notes and chords flying this way and that when Bennie Maupin starts wailing on bass clarinet, and there’s some strange loud high pitched sound that might have come from an old-school synthesizer but there’s not one credited on the record so it’s probably a guitar shrink. About the three-minute mark, everybody starts breaking down in different directions, not exactly playing off each other so much as searching for a way out of a locked room. It’s weird, but it’s wonderful, too.

Jimbo Mathus – “Butcher Bird” 2014 from Dark Night of the Soul. I’d almost forgotten how cool this ex-Squirrel Nut Zipper can be. This track is kind of a psychedelic folk song, with Mathus encouraging the titular butcher bird – and don’t ask me what that is – to fly away to home, to the universe, to the end of the earth. It’s got a neat electric piano underpinning, with what sounds like an electric mandolin doubling up on the riff as Mathus puts all his aching yearning into singing the melody, which is basically the same as the riff. Then there’s a horn of some sort, and an echo-laden vocal chorus in the background. The sound gets bigger and bigger, the groove more and more intense, as everything pretty much stays with the same few notes. It’s never boring.

Teddy Thompson – “Where To Go From Here” 2008 from A Piece of What You Need. Teddy Thompson can’t escape the shadow of his much more famous parents, Richard & Linda Thompson. I mean, he doesn’t try very hard – he’s appeared on and produced albums by Linda, and Richard has appeared on his records, and he’s toured with each at different times. I think he’s a pretty good songwriter in his own right. I once saw him play a last-minute gig where only one other person knew who he was, so I feel a special closeness to his music. This song is one of those melancholy “I just don’t know what to do with myself” kind of songs. It’s got a lovely melody, delivered in Teddy’s trademark lyrical vocal fashion. I love the arrangement with gentle acoustic guitar strumming, steady bass throb, brushed drums, and something that sounds somewhere between a vibraphone and steel drums in the background, alongside quietly strumming horns here and there. It’s a beautiful song, and I’ve been there myself with that feeling of “The safe lie of the in between / I never lose but I never win.”

Neil Young – “Natural Beauty” 1992 from Harvest Moon. The basic track with Neil Young playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, and singing the lead vocal, was recorded live in front of an audience, but then he went into the studio and overdubbed vibraphone, pump organ, and other instruments. I’m not sure if the backing vocals were added or were there on the tour, though I don’t think he ever toured with female vocalists on stage. At any rate, this is such a wandering but beautiful song – ten minutes flies by, as I’m entranced by the mood set by the guitar, by the lovely melody sung in Young’s earnest vocal style, by the desire to hold on to what can’t be saved that is the theme of the song. What’s left out of Young’s desire to preserve natural beauty like a monument to nature is the passing of time. Nothing stays the same. That doesn’t mean a different kind of preservation couldn’t be done in the Amazon – he brings the ravaging of that rainforest up in the second verse – but all the rest of the beauty he admires comes and goes. That subtext makes the song deeper than it might seem at first.