Substack: A new identity in Electronic India

Growing up as a chubby and shy brown boy in 80’s/90’s Brighton, I yearned for more role models who looked like me. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciated the dedication of grafters like my parents who went from cut-short careers in radiography and accountancy to monotonous seven-day weeks in newsagencies. But when you’re a kid, safe can be boring and routine mind-numbing. There must be something else.

Where were the artists? The rebels and risktakers. The mavericks and mould-breakers we could follow. Someone to stoke our defiance, slap the need for approval out of us and say, go on, express yourselves. Bust out of that straightjacket of an acceptable profession, be it medicine, banking or law.

Is this a reflection of my sheltered childhood or my narrow window to the world at the time? As a graduate of a bohemian seaside town who was immersed in popular culture and wondering where he fit in, I doubt it. But let me think…

We had Handsworth-born ragamuffin Apache Indian storming up the UK charts in 1993 with ‘Boom Shack-A-Lak’, which found its way into the comedy Dumb and Dumber. Cornershop, fronted by Tjinder Singh, reaching number one in 1998 courtesy of a Fatboy Slim remix. Who else?

Goodness Gracious Me causing a stir on British TV by royally taking the piss. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia raising eyebrows with Karim’s horny escapades as a bisexual adolescent who’s raging against his mixed race in 70’s Britain. The Asian Underground movement (an umbrella term used to cover the likes of Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Asian Dub Foundation and State of Bengal) carving their own lane in the UK music industry.

How we claimed swaggering, somersaulting Prince Naseem Hamed as one of our own, particularly the Muslim South Asians, even though he’s of Yemeni heritage. At a stretch, let’s add “that bass player from No Doubt” playing in the background, as Aziz Ansari quipped on stage. (His name is Tony Ashwin Kanal, by the way. And respect is due.)  

So you can imagine my shock and excitement when I discovered that Ahmedabad, in my family’s homeland of Gujarat, was a hotbed of electronic music experimentation. And not a decade ago or whatever. Way back in the 1960s!

Read the full story on my Substack, Bluejeans & Moonbeams.

Also in this issue: The Holdovers rekindles my love of cinema, the best of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Michael Jackson back in the spotlight, Carl Weathers RIP and the late Neil Kulkarni destroys Oasis.

Bearing witness to the fire

When I was starting out in music journalism and stepping sheepishly into the world of jazz, Straight No Chaser editor Paul Bradshaw insisted I read As Serious As Your Life. A book about a period of intrepid and daring detours in perhaps the greatest and most misunderstood art form in the history of America. A black art form. Some called it free jazz, The New Music or The New Thing, an unshackling in composition catalysed by Ornette Coleman's early 60's excursions. At first, it was belittled as frivolous, somehow amateurish and illegitimate. Vilified, even.

Yorkshire-born photographer and writer Val Wilmer set out to help change that with the publication of this book in 1977. She was inspired/riled by seeing another one about New Music that only featured white avant-garde luminaries such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. 

Wilmer has had a remarkable career, someone who not only photographed emerging pop phenomenons such as The Kinks and Bob Dylan, but also ventured from West Africa to the Deep South getting to the root of it all. She has spent time with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Muddy Waters, Anthony Braxton to Albert Ayler, Sun Ra to Cecil Taylor, Sunny Murray to Milford Graves.

Compassionate and curious, Wilmer’s 70’s encounters opened up the music to many. How, where and with whom it came to be. And that includes the underappreciated contributions of wives and partners. Her empathy for the struggle of black musicians – trying to earn a living in a prejudiced society – and reverence for each artist's will to express themselves with no compromises is evident from the first page of her introduction. There, she recalls sitting in a clapboard house beside a North Carolina tobacco field, witnessing Guitar Shorty playing/singing/reinventing the blues with "a cavalier attitude to form".

Wilmer picks up the story… "On the way back to New York that night I started thinking about freedom in music and how it is just that refusal to conform to any preconceived (ie European) patterns or rules that is one of the chief virtues of Black or African-American music. No matter who the performer – a housemaid bearing witness in church on a Sunday or a guitarist playing the Saturday night blues in some downhome bar – the music is never predictable.

"Polished or basic – Duke Ellington whipping his sidemen through the majestic surge of sound that was uniquely his (and their) creation, Eddie Kendricks singing in his exquisite falsetto high above The Temptations, Albert Ayler wrenching meanings from 'Summertime' that Gershwin never dreamed of – the sound of surprise is what counts."

As I delved deeper into history to learn about some of the most influential artists in this nascent scene, I encountered one Wilmer portrait after another. There was a spectral Ayler (below), looking over his shoulder, case in hand, in New York in 1966. The Ornette Coleman Quartet camped out in a Prince St loft in 1971. Bea and Sam Rivers embracing at their Studio Rivbea in 1972. And a 1971 picture of Lee and Helen Morgan at home in their Bronx apartment, before that fateful night at Slug’s.

Over the past 20 years, I hadn’t seen any sizeable exhibitions of Wilmer's work, until I stepped into Worldly, Wicked & Wise Gallery in London. It's a compact space but one that frames the significance of this era-spanning archive with due reverence. The walls are lined with magnificent portrait after portrait in black and white. It turns out that this is the prelude to a new Cafe Royal booklet publication called Deep Blues 1960-1988.

Here are a few favourites from Blue Moments, Black Sounds – A Retrospective. If these artists are unfamiliar, fear not. There's room for well-known giants including Jimi Hendrix (who Wilmer gave a lift to once) and Aretha Franklin.

Guitar Shorty near Elm City, North Carolina, 1972

Albert Ayler in Harlem, 1966

Sonny Rollins at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, 1965

Johnny Griffin at Trafalgar Square, London, 1963

Blues Dance (Jacob Stuckey) in Bentonia, Mississippi, 1973

Louis Maholo in London, c1969

Rashied Ali at Cooper Square, New York, 1972

Archie Shepp at 27 Cooper Square, New York, 1971

Working Print: Muddy Waters and Friends at Fairfield Hall, Croydon, 1964

SE Rogers (Rogie) in Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1964

Unfortunately, the exhibition is now closed but you can see some Wilmer-related work in Re/Sisters at the Barbican and Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain. Related because they feature images from Format, the first all-women's photography agency co-founded with Maggie Murray. 

I would also recommend The Wire conversation with Wilmer at Cafe Oto from 2017, a BBC Radio 3 documentary and her chat with Paul Bradshaw on Worldwide FM. There is an autobiography too, Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This.

Sisters were doin' it

Have you watched Lisa Rovner’s documentary Sisters with Transistors? It’s every bit the revelation you would expect from this trailer. Witness the great leaps that a league of extraordinary women took in experimental music as far back as the 1950s.

As narrator Laurie Anderson says, these artists didn't just aim to make new compositions, they set out to change the way we listen, regardless of acclaim or exclusion. Largely lone explorers though kindred spirits, they used sound waves and frequencies as their malleable orchestra, transmitting new ideas and possibilities. In turn, their pieces became our transporters.

I sat there stunned, unable to fathom how this music was being made or what it was doing to me, regardless of any explanations offered. Every track, whether it was by Daphne Oram, Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel (pictured above), Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron (with husband Louis), Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros or Clara Rockmore still feels like drifting giddily into a strange new world. 

You may know some of these names through little flecks of recognition they have been granted. Derbyshire created the original Dr Who theme. Oram was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Seeing her demonstrate Oramics, where notations on 35mm film were converted into synthesised music, was magic. Show that to kids in school.

Barron co-created the score for Forbidden Planet though it was brushed off as "sonic tonalities" in the credits. Ciani was the first woman to score a Hollywood film (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) and a go-to composer in the commercials world, making a sonic signature for the Coca-Cola bottle. We see her giving Letterman a demo on his show. Spiegel worked at Bell Labs in the early 70s and went on to develop Music Mouse, which turned the Mac into a musical instrument.

Carlos was instrumental in conjuring the foreboding mood at the beginning of Kubrick's The Shining and A Clockwork Orange – you can read her memories of working with the fastidious director here – as well as Tron's virtual wonder. While her 1968 album Switched-On Bach defied the parameters of classical music and brought the Moog to the masses. 

I discovered Pauline Oliveros through her writings on sonic meditations (instructions for listening as a fully embodied experience, as deep contemplation, as healing). And yet, ask me about early electronic music before watching Sisters with Transistors, and the first names to pop out would be John Cage, Brian Eno or Raymond Scott, maybe Sun Ra. On the evidence of this documentary, that's not right.

Important to note the collaged, almost hallucinatory style of visual presentation. Archive footage of the changing times coming in and out of our field of vision as each sister has their moment. (The bit when Maryanne Archer has Thurston Moore cowering with hands on ears as she blasts him with sound is just brilliant.) This treatment certainly made me more willing to forgo expectations and hop on different wavelengths, riding its gentle pulse. You're in the hands of a director who not only knows their material. They really feel it. Bravo, Lisa.

Final thought: I would devour a series with long episodes devoted to each of these remarkable individuals. 

WATCH

Also, here’s a Curzon playlist of songs by the artists featured in the documentary.

While you’re at it, listen to Marta Solagni on the role of the sound designer in a film that’s already blessed with a galaxy of wondrous music.

And check out the Sounds Good video on Wendy Carlos. Well researched and presented.