After a hiatus spanning more than two decades,
guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer’s Odyssey trio has
returned with a new album, a 55-minute tour de force that neatly
encapsulates the myriad musical directions that its iconoclastic
leader has pursued over the past half-century. Don’t let the
CD’s title fool you: An amalgam of free jazz, country-blues,
psychedelic rock, slippery soul, and sanctified funk, Back in Time is no
step backward, even though it does mark the first time that Ulmer
has recorded with violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren
Benbow since 1983, when the three men recorded the widely praised
but commercially disappointing Odyssey LP for the Columbia label. Integrating basically
every offshoot of the African-American musical vernacular and
creating a kind of universal language from the various dialects, Back in Time is
ultimately as remarkable as its creator, who, if you ask me,
deserves his own section in the record store, if not his own
franchise. But that’s just wishful thinking, of course. He
might be the most important outside-jazz guitarist in history, the
natural heir of Jimi Hendrix, a technical innovator and a sui generis genius,
but, chances are, your run-of-the-mill Trey Anastasio fan has never
heard of Ulmer and therefore has no idea what distinguishes a
prodigious noodler from an actual prodigy. Given Ulmer’s undeserved obscurity, a
bit of background history is in order. He grew up in segregated
South Carolina, the gospel-steeped product of a strict Baptist
upbringing in which all forms of secular music were considered the
work of the devil. After migrating north, as did so many black
musicians of his era, he spent most of the ’60s playing in
funk bands. In the early ’70s, he moved to New York City and
began his career as a jazz musician, performing with the likes of
Art Blakey and Rashied Ali. By 1973, he’d begun playing with
free-jazz icon Ornette Coleman, whose “harmolodic” theory
of improvisation, in which harmony, melody, and rhythm receive equal
compositional weight, was a lasting influence on the young guitarist.
After winning over experimental-rock fans in the ’80s with an
album for Rough Trade and sharing bills with underground darlings such
as Public Image and Captain Beefheart, Ulmer embraced more
conventionally structured idioms. He’s spent much of the new
decade immersing himself in the blues, recording a handful of singular
vocal-oriented albums, including his first solo venture, Birthright (Hyena), which was chosen by DownBeat readers as
2005’s Blues Album of the Year. Back in Time is
both a reminder of Ulmer’s avant-garde heyday and a
recapitulation of his more recent Delta-blues-inspired output. From
the spiritualized jazz of “Last One” to the echoing
fugue of “Channel One” and the salacious straight-ahead
blues of “Let’s Get Married,” the 12 tracks draw
on seemingly disparate sources to reveal unexpected tonal
commonalities. Odyssey also revisits compositions from
Ulmer’s back catalog — including his brilliant
signature song, “Little Red House” (from Are You Glad to Be in America? ), and the propulsive “Woman Coming” (from
his Coleman-produced debut, Tales of
Captain Black ) — and transforms
them, sometimes to startling effect. Burnham’s violin careers
from lyrical to lacerating, its sound rendered nearly
unrecognizable in places by a wah-wah pedal; Ulmer’s
trademark staccato attacks morph into searing hard-rock leads and
languid rhythmic textures; Benbow’s funky undercurrents
percolate for awhile before erupting in bright cymbal crashes.
Music this far-reaching and abstruse could easily devolve into
chaos, but the trio always manages to retain its visceral force, to
ground itself in familiar forms while gesturing toward the
stratosphere.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2006.
