The Free Spirits - "Out of Sight and Sound" 1967, Vinyl (ABC Records)

I purchased this used album due to the front cover's groovy aspect and even more so to its title, "Out of Sight and Sound." The Free Spirits are basically a jazz band. Two guitars, electric bass, drums, vocals, and Saxophone/flute. To me, the album yells out mid-60s Manhattan, and I see The Free Spirits fitting in into the world of The Fugs and The Velvet Underground. Over anything else, I'm intrigued when jazz-heads do rock. The known musicians on this album are the guitarist Larry Coryell and sax player Jim Pepper, who, by the way, is excellent on this record. 

"Out of Sight and Sound" was produced by Bob Thiele and engineered by the great Rudy Van Gelder at his tremendous and legendary studio in Englewoods Cliffs in New Jersey. The Free Spirits do twelve songs, I presume, in the hopes of getting a hit of some sort. Live, they stretch out like a jazz band, so the tension between the jazz mentality and pop is at its contrasting postures. 

The album is not by any means a masterpiece but a great work of curiosity. For those who love The Lovin' Spoonful, The Velvets, and The Fugs, I think this record needs to be placed in that post-hippie but right before the music world became totally dull. Coryell, the music director of this band, became a significant jazz guitarist in the jazz world. Here he put his talents to the rock n' roll medium and tried to stretch it to something new at the time. I love 1967. 

November 2, 2014

November 2, 2014

The ordinary world is so dull.  Day-in-day-out.  One has to re-imagine themselves just to brush off the offensive personalities that are of “that” landscape.  One needs to take a space and make it special.  I have often admired the work of Rudy van Gelder, due that he took a room, made it to his specification for the perfect sound to capture music genius’s sounds.  Throughout my life I tried to find the perfect location to do my writing, but alas, I seem to fail.  I first began working in my personal library, but I found myself enclosed in a world of my making, in other words, the books I have read and worshiped.  The books have a tendency to reflect the personality that I desperately want or desire, and once I approach the empty piece of paper … it stays empty.

I try to re-imagine myself in a world that is artificial, and therefore I’m drawn to films made by Luchino Visconti - because the setting appears to be much larger than the characters. I’m thinking specifically of “Death inVenice” and “The Damned.” Both locations are inflicted with decay, and the death of a culture can be an inspirational torch to get one to be creative.  On the other hand, for me who I find contemporary culture to be unexciting, lifeless… It’s a stretch of my imagination to convey a better world out of that miserable existence that I call the 21st century.

On the other hand, I need a landscape that seems real to me.  I was very much raised in the world of comic books, and one illustrator that has always captured my attention is Steve Ditko, who seemed to have an almost feminine approach to his super-heroes.   Doctor Strange is very psychedelic - almost too much for my sensibilities. His adventures take place on another dimension, that is hard for me to understand or grasp.  I can’t identify myself in such a world.  Perhaps because it is just so fantastic.  I need a landscape that is clearly decaying.  The 21st century is for sure in that mode, but it is so dreary it is hard for me to get my imagination around it.

The way I see it, I don’t want to shoot contemporary culture with an elephant gun, so I wished it would just shuffle along.  Yet, it stays like a bad odor in a public bathroom.   Boredom is worn proudly on their jacket lapel. With that in mind, I always remember the quote from Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly:  “Hatred needs scorn.  Scorn is hatred’s nectar.” I have a print-out of that quote and I attach it to my notebook, as an inspiration or motivation to finish a project.  My feeling of disgust is the hunger within that makes me want to write, to create - a better world?