perfidy

Sometimes an album comes along that catches you totally by surprise. I mean, I'm ready for anything: Balinese gamelan music, recordings of shortwave static, German industrial music, Ace of Base, but I wasn't ready for Bobby Previte's Coalition of the Willing.

I don't know much about Bobby Previte. I know he's from Buffalo. I know he's a drummer and that he's big on the downtown Manhattan jazz scene. I know he's got a reputation for being a great player, a pioneering composer, and a freaky cat. He has interesting hair. But beyond that, the music of Bobby Previte is terra incognita to me.

I'm up for third stream, new wave, nu metal, Japanese dance, Greek art music, art house, acid house, acid jazz, jazz flute, Malinese song-flute, Hawaiian nose-flute, power pop, hard bop, Billy Joel and Iggy Pop, rockabilly, punkabilly, Carter Family, Manson Family, the Family Stone, the Stone Temple Pilots, Temple of the Dog, and antisocial synthesizer belches from two-person bands from northern Vermont.

But I never expected surf music.

Surf music! And psychedelic garage rock! And Miles Davis-style chugging electric glowering! And, and spy music! Like James Bond! And remember Lalo Schifrin, the guy who wrote the "Mission Impossible" theme, whose personal style mixed Continental snazzery with Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass and a dash of neatly tailored rock and roll? Him, too!

When Bobby Previte's new album crossed my decks, my first thought was, verbatim, "... The hell is this?"

Mainly, this was brought on by the cover art and album title. Previte's current band is called the Coalition of the Willing, which on its own is kind of funny, a gloss on a phrase that's been around since the 1980s, but which George W. Bush catapulted to fame (or infamy) when he applied it to the nations that backed the libervasion of Iraq in 2003. Fans of Robert Anton Wilson will remember the running joke toward the end of the Illuminatus! trilogy with all the bands named after real-world things, like "The American Medical Association." Other, less nerdy people might be familiar with Dave Barry's running joke that things like The Coalition of the Willing "would make a great band name." Either way, "Coalition of the Willing" is a great name for a band.

However.

Over the last five years or so my patience for all things Orwellian has run thin. This goes both for actual pieces of Orwelliana like the fatuously named "Department of Homeland Security" as well as pretend pieces of Orwelliana, like albums that take half their song titles from the pages of 1984. Indeed, The Coalition of the Willing features the titles, "The Ministry of Truth," "The Ministry of Love," "Memory Hole," and "Oceania," as well as an album cover in the classic Che/Castro/Anarchist hues of red, white and black and festooned with raised fists. Ugh. Whatever they were going for with the cover art, what they came up with makes my eyes roll, my gorge rise, and awakens an urge in my heart to grab a truncheon and stand guard on the nearest barricade on behalf of The Man, The System, and capitalist pigs anywhere. Filthy lucre forever!!

Oh, right. The music. What's the music like?

It turns out that The Coalition of the Willing features one of the largest differentials between cover art quality and the quality of the music inside since Guns & Roses scrapped the original "robot rape" cover to Appetite For Destruction for the less awful version we all know and love.

That is to say, The Coalition Of The Willing is a damn good record, eight long instrumental slices of jazz-inflected rock spiked with liberal dashes of surf and spy music, fusion a la electric Miles Davis, and even house and reggae. There's not a slack bit, there are no twiddly precious solos, and all the genre-hopping manages to add spice, rather than just confuse matters.

Previte is a sensitive drummer with a great sense of groove, and the players he assembled for this project are uniformly top-notch. Notably, guitar wizard Charlie Hunter plays on every track, even choosing to lay aside his trademark eight-string guitar for a standard six-string model. And although he is by far the best-known musician to grace these tracks, he doesn't overshadow the other contributors, who include Steve Bernstein (of the unfortunately-named New York group Sex Mob) on trumpet, Jamie Saft on the Hammond organ, Stew Cutler on occasional harmonica, the one-named Skerik, a tenor saxophonist who plays with Les Claypool of Primus, and Stanton Moore, drummer for the jammy New Orleans funk outfit Galactic.

Anyway, about the music. Given that Bobby Previte and Charlie Hunter are pretty well known for playing hip, cerebral and challenging New York jazz, the last thing I expected when I popped this album in the player was to be met at the door by a groove that is about 50% "Incense and Peppermints" and 50% theme music to some lurid imaginary Roger Corman film with a title like "Surf Nazis Run Wild!!!" or "Bikini Girl Go-Go Shootout!!!"

And yet, the very first track overcomes its Orwellian title ("The Ministry of Truth") with just such a sound, a snazzy, tacky vibe driven by the jet-setting Hammond organ of Jamie Saft and a foursquare beat from Previte that would be equally at home on a Lalo Shifrin album or some lost track from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. Over this, Charlie Hunter spits edgy chromatic James Bond-theme-style melodic fragments until he is mugged by a scratchy harmonica solo from Stew Cutler. The whole thing brings to mind a dizzying array of great pop culture moments, from the original Batman TV series to Ren & Stimpy, and that's just in the first five minutes of the record.

Throughout, Previte and his band switch gears without even trying. "Oceania" jams a 12-string guitar riff that sounds like a broken-down Midnight Oil song right next to more spy music right next to reggae without even blinking. Impressively, this all sounds perfectly natural. None of the transitions anywhere on the record sound forced or awkward, no matter how unrelated the two sections might be. Whether it is Hunter's metal riffage on "The Ministry of Love," the atmospheric house-inflected groove of "Anthem for Andrea" or Skerik's ruminatory make-out sax on "Memory Hole," there's not a moment where the album sounds flat or self-indulgent. For an instrumental album made by a bunch of serious jazzheads, that's flat out impressive.

The final test, of course, is to try this album out on someone unsuspecting. Someone whose relationship to music is less fanatic than mine. Someone who doesn't dig on modern art-music that sounds like you've stuck your head in an air duct. Someone who doesn't get the melody lines from archival Frank Zappa live performances stuck in their head for days on end.

What I'm trying to say is, my wife dug this album too.

The Coalition Of The Willing features players of fearsome talent playing stylish, sinister, beautiful, fractured, epic music with a sense of fun that dumps any consternation caused by the strange song-title and cover art choices right down the memory hole.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org.

The original polka dot has been carefully preserved in a textile museum near Brussels.

Today is my last day of work. Until next Tuesday, anyway. What with wrapping up projects at my soon to be ex-place of employment, I am rather busy. But here are a few spacely tidbits to occupy your mind:

• Zoe Brain has an in-depth and critical look at NASA's Apollo retread, I mean CEV program. I would offer detailed comments, but that would be gilding the lilly, as I agree with everything she says.
• Alan Stern, the big brain responsible for the New Horizons Pluto Mission, has an exceedingly clever idea for supplying our future moon colonists with water. To save money, effort and time, he insists, we need not bother with cumbersome and outmoded concepts like actually decelerating our water when it reaches the moon. Water ice can simply be crashed into the moon like a comet, where it will accomodatingly enough bury itself a few feet under the Lunar regolith, there safe from evaporation but still easy to get to. Apparently, only about 15% of the water will be lost on impact, and as an added bonus, we get to do comet research by studying the impact craters.
• Also from space.com, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is expected to cross the outermost limits of the solar system, the termination shock. Which sounds suspiciously like what happened to me one Friday about two years ago this week. In this case, however, Voyager will hopefully provide some info on why the heliosphere is all funny shaped.
• Rand Simberg on SDLVness, EELVness, and other expensive and ill-thought NASA acronyms.

Murdoc, whose omnipresence and coverage of matters martial forces my corporeal energies to choose between crying with joy or popping a boner, brings this story on a protest at a recruiting office. As Murdoc points out, the argument seems to go: protest-->no recruits-->no recruiters-->no soldiers-->no one to fight war-->end of war-->world peace. Which might be nice, if so many people weren't trying so desperately to kill us. Except that they ARE trying desperately to kill us, so this sort of activity is basically stupid.

This line of his though made me snort: with no soldiers, "just think of all the extra people available to grow apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves".

You know, in the wake of 9-11, I thought, if nothing else, the America-hating hippie military-bashing filth would finally have to face that there are people on this Earth who want to kill us all- Christian, Jew, hippie, stud, etc- ALL of us, and that we can at least work together from that starting point. Whatever our fundamental differences politically and culturally, right, left, up, down, Federalist and Communist can move forward providing for the common defense. Within about a week I was disgusted by my own naivete.

Well, what military-haters don't comprehend is that recruiters are professionals. Anything that grabastic, screechy children do, say, or attempt matters pretty close to zero on their Important Shit-o-Meter. You don't matter to them in any meaningful way. I like that.

Nevertheless, I have felt that some gesture ought to be made to counter the drum-circle set. No, professionals don't need such gestures, but I do. One thing I've done is to buy lunch for the local recruiters. It's a little thing, I know, but it's just some way to show that not everyone in the community is against them. Nothing fancy; send over some good takeout or something.

Try it.

We can all see that there is a need, or at least an available niche, for those wishing to provide ideologically filtered news. In a broad sense, both CNN and Fox do exactly that. On the interweb, home of a billion schismatic communities, one would expect to find a website tailored to the mind of the conservative. So, of course, someone stepped up to the plate.

But did it have to be so... gauche?

Stolen from Whatever, a magical webthingy for making your very own, personal De-Motivators.

Here, I victimize my pets:

[wik] The Ministry of Future Perfidy in the far, far, unimaginable year of 2025 is shocked, shocked, to find that the link for the meme generator still works. Was meme even a word in the before-times of 2006?

From NDR at The Rhine River I discover that someone has gone to all the trouble of assembling a list of the twenty five best American novels of the last quarter century. Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the Times Review of Books, sent out a letter to writers, critics, and other literary muckety-mucks and asked them to name the best American Novel. The results are striking. First, I've read three of them, including number one. Second, I've read three times more of these novels than NDR. And third, to paraphrase JBS Haldane, "I'm not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of Phillip Roth."

A California-compliant civilian model of the M1 Abrams Tank is scheduled for regular production by 2008.

Well, maybe not to that deluxe apartment in the sky. But the Buckethead has secured new and more remunerative employment, and will be leaving the comfortable if unchallenging realm of the government contractor for the fast paced results-oriented world of the commercial sector. I will leave the humid and dank lowlands of the Justice department for the sunny uplands of a small consulting group. My early experience in a small start up several years ago was without question one of the most rewarding and fun times I've ever had at work, and I hope that this job will prove to be the same. And thanks to the extra money, my son won't have to get a summer job. Good for him, because the only jobs available for three year olds are either degrading or not well paid.

One key benefit for me in this new gig is that I will be able to work at home for a good portion of the working week. The reason this is key is that it will allow me to reasonably take on short term and part time gigs that were just not feasible when I had to be at the job site every day during business hours. You can't easily or indeed legally take a conference call for another gig when you're sitting in a government office cubical, and taking off time a couple times a week to tend to your side gigs quickly becomes suspicious. Now though, I can do that sort of thing without interfering with the main job.

While I have some feelers out for those part time and short term writing jobs, I would certainly appreciate any leads that you, my loyal readers, can give me. So you know, I have nearly a decade of experience as a technical writer in the software field, writing manuals, supporting documentation, help systems and web copy. Of course, I also have three years experience as a world class blogger. What I'm looking for is technical writing gigs, and journalism-type gigs in the software industry press. Any help will of course be greatly appreciated, and will certainly merit prominent mention in these pages.

[wik] Thanks to Nicholas for pointing out some word use issues. While you're thanking him for the quality of this post, go encourage him to post more than once a month, on average.