Don Cherry, "I Walk"
Common, "Voices Inside My Head"
Indian Ocean, "Tree House/School Bell (Part 1)"
Steve Miller Band, "Macho City"
This is our last installment for Disco not Disco Volume 1, and it might be the best example of leftfield disco yet. There should be some recognizable names above, which might be the main message behind this compilation. Disco was not a closed genre as so many seemed to think. It was open to all sorts of different people, even people who had no idea that their music had been adopted by DJs and clubgoers.
No better example of this than the last song above, "Macho City." To answer your first question, yes, that is the Steve Miller Band that every suburban kid and classic rock radio fan has grown up on. That's right, Steve Miller, a.k.a. the space cowboy, the gangster of love, Maurice, was a disco icon. Okay, icon might be stretching it, but this song did become a staple of Larry Levan's sets at the Paradise Garage. This song came out in 1981, filling the entire B-side of Miller's album Circle of Light with 16+ minutes of funky weirdness (the last like minute or so is a rain storm!). It's really good, in no hurry at all. Dude always has some good shit, remember "Abracadabra" came out around this time too. Don't front on Steve Miller, bol was a picker, grinner, lover, sinner, joker, smoker and midnight toker for chrissakes!
That Common track is actually a discofied version of The Police's "Voices Inside My Head," done for one of Began Cekic's labels. Things really get rolling Don Cherry is a legend, a pivotal figure in free jazz who opened himself up to new sounds as that movement began to stagnate. Love the vocals on this one, it's like Don came late and just started ad-libbing random shit off the top of his head. It's interesting to hear Cherry's trumpet work perfectly with this driving, dance-y song. One of the greats. Finally, Indian Ocean is another Arthur Russell alias, "Tree House/School Bell (Part 1)" is a crazy, shuffling song with Russell scatting on top of a percussive base. One of the weirder cuts on the album, way out of leftfield, possibly my favorite song of the bunch. We'll get into Russell more later, as he is such a pivotal figure in that late 70s/early 80s downtown music scene, a bridge between all sorts of different scenes.
Volume 2 next!
1 comment:
That Steve Miller is crazy. Good find.
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