March 2002

From the Inside Out
Archive <& /articles/ftio_archive.tmp &>

By Chris M. Slawecki

Among the many rewarding, delightful things that music and romance have in common is the fact that, in both cases, you almost never see the most magical moments coming. It’s as if great music and great romance obey an unwritten rule to appear when you’re not even looking for them, in places where you’d least expect to find them, from the last person you’d expect.

It’s those unexpected moments of inexplicable joy that often seem the most joyous of all occasions. This month, FTIO experiences the joy of new music that’s really old music, courtesy of two twenty-something club DJs from Washington D.C., and an octogenarian bassist who’s currently renown as one of the world’s most accomplished violinists.

Thievery Corporation: Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi (Verve)

Since 1996, Eric Hilton and Rob Garza, collectively known as Thievery Corporation, have explored warm, subtle electronic dance music with DJ sets in their own Washington D.C. nightclub and on their 18th Street Lounge Music label (named after their club). Their production expertise creates music that softly falls in shades like floating leaves somewhere between trip-hop and acid jazz. On their most recent project, Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi (a wordplay on the duo’s acclaimed debut, Songs from the Thievery Hi-Fi), the duo compile their favorite songs from the Verve archives, upon the label’s request.

“The Verve catalog was an incredible influence, as it crossed many musical boundaries and served as a guide to the music we were trying to create,” Garza wrote in the liner notes. “We wanted to create music with samplers, drum machines, and sequencers, while still attempting to capture the warmness of those old records. Those records have a timelessness and subtlety that we could only dream of recreating in our own music. When Verve approached us about compiling our favorite songs, we felt honored.”

Hilton wrote: “I own hundreds of Verve records and I’m often surprised at the vision and eclecticism that the label has displayed. As I’m especially partial to jazz hybrids such as bossa nova, Latin jazz, jazz-funk, indo-jazz, et al, Verve continued to impress me by consistently bringing forth the most exquisite works from these unique genres. The early works on Antonio Carlos Jobim, the Latin-inspired work of Cal Tjader, the airy vocals of Astrud Gilberto, and the funky boogaloo sound of Willie Bobo were all perfectly at home on Verve. And straight-ahead jazzmen like Chico Hamilton and Wes Montgomery are always big on my home hi-fi.”

Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi floats the listener down the river of hip mainstream jazz as well as its more exotic tributaries in the label’s catalog, particularly sounds from Brazilian and Latin streams. “Chove Chuva” is a classic ‘60s Brazilian pop glide from Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66, with cascading waterfall guitars and vocals lush as any jungle garden (Garza: “The vocals are so cool, like cinnamon and cloves.”). This balmy Brazilian interpretation of “Light My Fire” by Astrud Gilberto (the voice of “The Girl From Ipanema”) is similarly soft and pastel in hue, while Richie Havens’ sitar meditation “Something Else Again” reaches back into the incense and peppermint days of the more psychedelic ‘60s.

Oh, the Thievery Corporation do set that beat box to rockin’. They bust out two Cal Tjader Latin grooves, the crunchy straight-up Funk of “Cuchy Frito Man” and the Middle Eastern evocation “The Fakir” with Lalo Schifrin. Jimmy Smith teams up with Wes Montgomery for a spin through the tight, sleek sound of classic blues n’ bop in “ODG (Road Song).” “For Mods Only” from Chico Hamilton’s album The Dealer is sparkling jazz with just the right blend of ultra-cool style and boogie-woogie Funk, thanks to composer Archie Shepp’s barrelhouse turn on piano (“For Mods Only” was also the Corporation’s first working title for Songs…). With his majestic mid-song solo, a spirited and uncommon blend of Rock, Jazz and Blues, “Mods” presents the recording debut of guitarist Larry Coryell; several years later, guitarist Mick Taylor would lift several bars from this Coryell solo nearly note-for-note, fittingly enough for Taylor’s own coming out party as the new guitarist for the Rolling Stones, the song “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’” for their album Sticky Fingers.

Johnny Frigo Sextet: Collected Works (Luv n Haight)

Born in 1916 Chicago, Johnny Frigo played violin and tuba as a youth, and then switched from tuba to stringed bass as the bass steadily phased the tuba out of most jazz rhythm sections. As bass player, Frigo settled into the rhythm section of Jimmy Dorsey’s band in the mid-1940s, and was renown for decades as THE session bassist in and around Chicago. But he never lost his love for the violin. In 1988, Frigo released Live from Studio A in New York City, his first recording as a violinist in thirty years; several subsequent, highly acclaimed albums have elevated Frigo to his place among the recognized masters of this instrument. Johnny Frigo has been called “the premier jazz violinist in contemporary jazz” (The L.A. Times) and “the best violinist in the country” (The Chicago Tribune).

However, Johnny Frigo: Collected Works, a new anthology compiled by the Ubiquity label sub-print Luv n’ Haight, features absolutely none of Frigo’s violin playing. None. It is instead a collection of sides that Frigo the bassist cut with a sextet of friends for another friend, master jazz and modern dance choreographer Gus Giordano.

Collected Works is music made for dancing. Literally. In the late 1960s, Frigo’s wife was one of Giordano’s studio dancers. “At the time, there was no jazz dance technique, or jazz dance music going into the dancing schools,” Giordano recalls in the Collected Works liner notes. “The dancers didn’t have live percussionists in the schools. They were exposed to very percussive music, very accented music, very jazz music. But most schools in America, except the big ones, only had a record player.”

Displeased with the quality of recorded music available to his students, Giordano set up his own record label (Orion) and asked Frigo to record albums for his students to dance to. Giordano would specify particular songs to highlight rhythms and styles that corresponded to his dancers’ routines. “It was a crazy scene,” Giordano confesses. “I would bring these dancers down and we would dance while Frigo recorded. We were the ones that actually drove the musicians. The drummer was always the lead instrument. Always. And the drum and bass solos would follow whatever the dancer was doing at that point.”

Frigo recalls: “Gus said he wanted a group of records done for his dance class. This was in the mid-1960s. He’d already instructed his students to records he liked. So he hired me to get a group together to copy some of these records. I rearranged them, made up different melodies with the same amount of bars in the same style. It was a strange combination of rock, jazz, and a little Latin flavor on some of them. The whole idea was a lot of rhythm.”

Collected Works is not just the end of great story about recovering “new” music that few people originally heard and might have been forever lost. It’s also simply great music, full of the freewheeling musical spirit of the early ‘70s when “fusion” truly meant “no boundaries.” Frigo leads his sextet (including his son Rick on drums, guitarist Ron Steele, and percussionist Bobby Christian) through a program of tunes by Sly Stone, Isaac Hayes, Buddy Miles, and Lalo Schifrin. The emphasis, as you’d expect, is on the groove.

The collection starts off with several compact (under three minutes) pieces of tight mainstream small combo jazz, most notably “The Happening,” which wobbles and sways on the piano gospel of Les McCann as preached by keyboardist Dick Marx. However, the lid soon begins to boil off this cookin’ pot with “Appollo,” which boldly rocks atop that same funky Memphis rhythm that drives “Mustang Sally,” and with guitar and percussion solos that suggest Caribbean and Latin music. It’ll get your groove on, for sure.

Frigo funk-ifies this workout of “Thank You” with a simple two-note bass figure that’s nearly as super-bad as Larry Graham’s thumpin’ in the original (Sly Stone) version. Like many other songs on this set, “Thank You” features a mid-song bass/drum breakdown that cries out for dancing! In fact, “Do Whatever Sets You Free,” the first of two Buddy Miles tunes, BEGINS with its drum/percussion breakdown, creating a wide-open feel that sets the stage for the remainder of this freewheeling instrumental.

“Scorpio” is a seething cauldron of instrumental funk with a mid-song beatdown, a careening bass solo, and bubbles bursting with wah-wah guitars and keyboards, all of which would sound simply perfect behind the climactic chase scene of an imaginary ‘70s action film. And the whole blasted house comes tumblin’ down with this twelve-minute exercise of “Them Changes,” the other Miles’ song; an extended instrumental jazz workout of a milestone composition in the fusion of Rock and Funk, pulsing with boogaloo beats and breaks, is the perfect crowning glory to conclude this quicksilver compilation.

Collected Works is not just the end of great story. It may also represent a beginning: its abundance of bass/drum/percussion breakdowns and emphasis on tricky rhythms should place Johnny Frigo: Collected Works squarely in the sights of today’s trip-hoppers and acid-jazzers.