(Albion/Inertia)

Two more compilations of the eccentric

According to Edgar Allan Poe there’s no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. Strange Jazz and Strange Soul are devoted to pushing the boundary of how much strangeness you can get in there before you lose that exquisite beauty. A lot of Strange Jazz’s strangeness comes from the fusion era when they were first realising that you could make actual music with those electric keyboard things, and a variety of spacey, funky, sci-fi jazz was the result. Afro-funk fusionistas and electronic instrument pioneers The Headhunters provide a perfect example with If You’ve Got It, You’ll Get It and Weldon Irvine’s endlessly quirky Pogo Stick (sample lyric: “What did the chicken say to the duck? / You ain’t good lookin’ but you sure can ... dance.”) is another good example. Some tracks fall into the improv trap of endless noodling, vamping and plain fucking around, scribbled examples of perfect freedom resulting in perfect boredom, but that’s the risk you take with jazz. Strange Soul does some good work rescuing songs that would otherwise only be remembered as sources for plundering DJs to sample like Chocolate Milk’s Actions Speak Louder Than Words and Irvine’s Music Is The Key. Several of the songs sound quite normal for an album with the word strange in its name, even more so when you get to the really weird stuff. The best examples of that are Bernard Wright’s Smurf-voiced Haboglabotribin and The Friends Of Distinction making sounds like aliens landing on top of a piano. Like the Strange Hip Hop compilation put out by the same label, I can’t help but feel they would have done better by concentrating on the really out-there shit, which makes for the highlights of both CDs.

Strange Jazz ***

Strange Soul ***    

JODY MACGREGOR
 

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