#bj cole

[jt1674]

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[coeurdeverre82]

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salman rushdie at tt the bear's place cambridge mass july 18 1995

with the soldier string quartet & bj cole

[kosmik-signals]

Trapeze ~ Coast to Coast.flv

guests BJ Cole - steel guitar, Rod Argent - electric piano

[rainingmusic]

The Alan Parsons Project - Breakdown

[myrecordcollections]

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Strange, often haunting, outsider-sounding (I think it's the vocals) prog/psych/folk rock from pedal steel master B.J. Cole, featuring members of King Crimson, Pentangle, and more. One of many albums that I've been waiting to post until I feel that I can do them justice with a proper writeup, but as the years roll by, I realize that it's just not gonna happen so I might as well just post 'em. Just read about it at Aquarium Drunkard.

[nofatclips]

Silver Moon by David Sylvian from the album Gone to Earth - Director: Nicholas Brandt

[dustedmagazine]

Michael Chapman — True North (Paradise of Bachelors)

Michael Chapman cites an unexpected influence for his latest recording, naming the Jimmy Giuffre 3 performance of “The Train and the River” from the 1960 film Jazz on a Summer’s Day as one of his touchstones. The clip, taken from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, captures Giuffre on clarinet, along with Bob Brookmeyer on trombone and Jim Hall on guitar, playing in a blues-based but free-ranging synchronicity. Giuffre is widely credited as a precursor to free jazz, since, though traditionally grounded, he encouraged an unusual amount of improvisation among his players. Here Chapman, also a traditionalist, finds the same sort of free-form but deeply rooted grooves among a seasoned band of collaborators.

It makes sense to start with Chapman himself, a very good Takoma-style finger-picker, well-versed in the language and music of pre-war blues, but also untethered by it. Like Jack Rose, whom he toured with about a year before Rose’s death, he has a way of being faithful to the idiom while turning it inside out. On this album, the two instrumentals, “Eleuthera” and “Caddo Lake,” his playing is beautiful, lucid, lyrical and precise, but it also taps into a transcendental vibe. The darker shadows are more ominous, the luminous breaks are more psychedelic than real life. Chapman’s vocals, too, are both steeped in folk tradition and eerily outside of it. He has a primal rasp, deep and ravaged, untroubled by the chaos and suffering in his songs. “Because we were kept apart by a cruel twist of fate/I never knew I wanted you until it was too late,” he growls in the opener, “It’s Too Late,” which sounds a good bit like “The Right Time of Night.” He might be observing the weather, nasty but out of his control.

As for 50, Chapman taps Steve Gunn as producer and multi-instrumental collaborator, and Bridget St. John again contributes soft, weathered, beautifully soulful vocals. The band is different, however, both in what it has and what it lacks. There’s no consistent rhythm section in True North, though both Chapman and Gunn play occasional bass and drums. That gives the songs an aura of wide-lens, edgeless reverie; there are fewer sharp corners and hard pull-ups, more introspection and less bang.

On the additive side, though, Chapman gains pedal steel player BJ Cole, once of Cochise, now session mainstay for dozens of artists including John Cale and Brian Eno (fun fact: Cole played the pedal steel part in Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”). His eerie atmospheric textures go a long way towards defining the album. True North also adds a cello player in Sarah Smout, and that, too, contributes to its moody, ruminative tone.

One of the joys of True North is hearing all these players together, in loose conjunction rather than unity. They work out their own thoughts in the shadows of others, making adjustments to one another without seeking any kind of flattening alignment. There are often three guitars going at once — acoustics, electrics, slide — a slash of cello, a wispy thread of background vocals. And yet in songs like “Trucks,” with all hands on deck, there remains a thoughtful, mournful space at the center. Michael Chapman’s songs are gorgeous, dark-tone places, full of the work of musical collaboration, but also haunted and spare. Lovely stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

[thesunlounge]

BJ Cole - Pavane pour une infante défunte (from Transparent Music, Hannibal Records 1989)