In his liner notes to the original 1959 release of Folk Songs For Far Out Folk, Fred Katz wrote the following: "If we accept Jazz as a modern culture, then we must accept all the obligations and soul-searching and experimentation that all the other arts are subject to." He then went on to say that this meant Jazz had an obligation to broaden its horizons and look beyond the borders of popular music for its inspiration. (He cited "Tin Pan Alley" specifically, which was a term given to designate the mass production of popular songs by writers ensconced in an area of New York City where the majority of popular music performed at that time was being written.)
He said that anywhere people made music, that those doing the performing shared the common denominator of an eternal soul that unites all human kind. It was his hope, at the time, that Folk Songs For Far Out Folk would be a first step in the direction needed to take Jazz down that path towards a place of unification. On the album Mr. Katz conducts three different bands in interpreting folk songs from three distinct traditions: American, Hebrew, and African.
As an attempt to underline his point Katz enlisted one of the Beat poets, Lawrence Lipton, to write a poem for each of the folk songs. Each of the poems is a manifestation of the same idea that Fred was trying to express with the music. Lipton's poems expresses either a theme that evokes the particular culture it is describing, or tells a story that provides insight into it.
Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit label who are committed to recovering the lost music and the stories connected to them, will be re-issuing the classic Fred Katz composition Folk Songs For Far Out Folk on July 10th. As part of the package they've included an extensive interview with Fred, who is currently 86 years old and a professor emeritus at the State University of California in Orange County, where he has been a teacher of cultural anthropology since 1970.
The interview, accompanying pictures, and biographical notes contained in the booklet go a long way towards helping those uninitiated into the intricacies of Jazz to appreciate the recording. Most Americans will probably be familiar with at least one of the American folk songs represented on the album but will also, most likely, have a difficult time recognizing it as the song they know. I assume the same conundrum of knowing a title but struggling with the songs identity otherwise, would apply to representatives of the two other cultures as well.
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