The trouble with "jazz-rock" is that, too often, its whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Listen to the MC5 motor through hypercharged rawk riffology - that's exciting. Listen to the Five blow their wad on a rama-lama rendition of Sun Ra's "Starship"...that's more like embarrassing. And have you ever actually listened to what a jazz musician likes to think of as "rock?"
Poetry's relationship with popular music has been similarly fraught. Think Allen Ginsberg's flirtations with "music." Think a straight-faced Jim Morrison bellowing about "the Lizard King." Sure, there are exceptions to every rule: prime Captain Beefheart, for example, was a living monument to that obscure crossroads where rock, jazz and spoken word successfully meet. But for the most part, from the Soft Machine to Blinking with Fists to the Bozo Dionysus himself, mixing the loose spontaneity of jazz and poetry with the terse, orgasmic grit of rock'n'roll is a risky proposition at best.
So we've at least established that Unknown Instructors, a loose-limbed post-punk supergroup with a mission to merge poetry, rock and jazz, have balls. "Jazz-rock," much less jazz-rock with quasi-Beat poetry for vocals, hasn't been in fashion since, oh, 1975. To release a record like The Way Things Work in a year when "indie" music is best summarized by the soundtrack to The O.C. is to effectively surrender all hope of actually selling any records. But forget about mainstream accessibility (who needs it?). The most intriguing thing about this utterly strange, beyond anachronistic record is that it actually works. Neither a jazz album nor a rock album, The Way Things Work manages to stand just fine on its own.
Helmed by poet/vocalist/saxophonist Dan McGuire, with back-up from guitarist Joe Baiza (formerly of SST jazz-punks Saccharine Trust) and Minutemen/fIREHOSE rhythm section Geoge Hurley and Mike Watt, Unknown Instructors don't deal in songs so much as formless, freewheeling jams. However, unlike the festival-friendly collectives one usually associates with the word "jam," these boys aren't about spreading good vibes. Give a listen to the drunken, foreboding vamp that perpetually forms and dissembles beneath McGuire's surreal Jim Thompsonesque nightmare "Starving Artists": this is dissonant stuff, mood music only if you're in the mood for dread. The opening bassline and guitar noodling of "Punch Out * The Layoff * Gratuity" suggests James Chance at his most aggravating; elsewhere, the cacophony of dueling atonalities in "Punk (is Whatever We Made It to Be)" frequently threatens to drown out McGuire's verse.
Article comments
1 - John
When you wrote: "McGuire threatening to succumb to boho self-parody as he hollers sloganistic clunkers like, "let's say I've got a number/that number is 50,000/that's 10% of 500,000" and "the working classes are manipulated!" I'm all for stretching the boundaries of poetic expression, but isn't blurring the lines between art and socialist pamphlet just a bridge too far?"
-- you missed that McGuire was reciting d.Boon/Watt lyrics from one side of Double Nickels on the Dime. One of the things that made the minutemen great was the political nature of the lyrics, but the 500,000 line sounded better when d. Boon hollered it.