About Inventions

"1995 issue of this all-time class 1964 Vanguard LP...
a folk/improv space monster, one of the definitive
recordings of the 60s decade...with Ornette sideman
Billy Higgins (on drums), the track 'Blend II'
reproduces 24 minutes of the highest level of
melodic/rhythmic spiritual conversation/combat
this side of Coltrane/Rashied Ali, one of the
best examples of cosmic-interplay I've
been fortunate enough to unravel in
the privacy of my own home...Unreal."
--FORCED EXPOSURE

Click Here For Music Fragments

1. Gavotte II--J.S.Bach (Acoustic Guitar)
2. Manha de Carnival--Luiz Bonfa (Oud, Acoustic Guitar & Bass)
3. Triple Ballade--Guillaume de Machaut (Oud, Banjo & Acoustic Guitar)
4. Memphis, Tennessee--Chuck Berry (Electric Guitars, Bass & Billy Higgins on Drums)
5. Blend II--Sandy Bull (Acoustic Guitar & Billy Higgins on Drums)
6. Gavotte II--J.S.Bach (Electric Guitar)      

1964 Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

Sandy Bull, a 24-year old, unusually resourceful musician--and listener--does not have any one "bag" (the jazz term for a firmly delimited style). As his first album (Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo, Vanguard Records-1963), indicated, his interests and expressive needs encompass a broad and continually deepening range of world music. What makes him unique in his explorations beyond customary boundaries is that the resultant music, while unabashedly heterogeneous at its roots, becomes cohesively ordered through the inventive thrust of Bull's musical personality.

In response to Sandy Bull's first album, Martin Williams wrote in the Saturday Review of Bull's "succinct understanding" of the wide variety of musical idioms he had chosen; and Williams also underlined the young player's "immediately apparent innate musical sensibility."  In Down Beat, Pete Welding concluded a probing review with: "It will be interesting to see where Bull goes from here."

Two Years after that first record, Inventions is where Mr. Bull is now at. As before, the materials are greatly diversified-- as are the influences which have been involved in the further shaping of Sandy Bull's protean musical curiosity. And this time, he feels--and I agree--that there is deeper cohesion in the fusion of those materials.

The recording begins with Gavotte No.2 from Bach's Cello Suite No.5 . The performance is not based on improvisation but is an interpretation of the work as written except for the fact that Bull made changes to the bass line that had been appended to this melody some time around the turn of this century. Bach has been a major force in Bull's musical development and he intends to study--and later record--more complex works by him. "In one sense," says Bull, "it's kind of a cop-out not to devote your whole musical life to Bach if you want to play his work." But in another sense, of course, Bull's predilection for so many different kinds of music makes this degree of immersion impossible for him.

On Manha de Carnival by Luis Bonfa, there is multi-tracking. Bull plays rhythm on acoustic guitar (he learned the chords from Bruce Langhorne), adds his own bass line on a Gibson electric bass, and interprets the melody on the oud.Bull distills and sustains the airy and yet introspectively lyrical mood of the piece with ease and grace. The oud, which he studied by watching (and listening to) Hamza el Din (Songs of Nubia, Vanguard VSD-79164), is especially apt, as he notes, for the composition. "It has the kind of peacefulness required," says Bull. "The oud is a kind of inward instrument. It has to be played softly, and because there are no frets, the fingers have to be exactly in the right place. With five pairs of strings, and friction pegs, it's tricky to keep in tune, but it's such a wonderful instrument to improvise on melodically."

The Triple Ballade by the 14th century Guillaume de Machaut is transmuted by Bull into an absorbing play of sonorities as well as lines. By multi-tracking, he plays the parts on oud, banjo and guitar. The piece is a canon on the unison in that each part comes in on the same note. "Written long before the rules of modern counterpoint had been set down," Bull points out, "the harmonies have that haunting sound of the Gothic age, plus what actually amounts to tone clusters in certain places." For me, the performance is a further illustration of the freshness with which Bull is able to conceptualize music. Because of the "innate musical sensibility" to which Martin Williams has referred, Bull can utilize in this context such seemingly disparate instruments as the oud, banjo and guitar and make them sound entirely in place without distorting or otherwise marring the force or spirit of the composition.

Billy Higgins joins in on Chuck Berry's Memphis, Tennessee on which, by multi-tracking, Bull plays rhythm guitar, Gibson bass guitar and Fender Stratocaster lead guitar.To Bull, Chuck Berry "may well be the folk poet of America today. Listen, for example, to his rhyme schemes and the way he uses contemporary place names in his "traveling" songs. He's part of that bridge in American popular music that appeals to all races and backgrounds." In this performance, Bull and Higgins achieve a kind of kaleidoscopic microcosm of Rhythm and Blues with hints of Country and Western. Much of it   is a sustained rhythmic reworking of elements indigenous to the idiom. Heightened emotional intensity accumulates from   the skillful use of reverberation in the lead guitar, the pulsating momentum of Billy Higgins and Bull's use of Indian-style drone in two choruses. Memphis is simultaneously a fusion of impressions, a tribute to Chuck Berry and a search for personal meaning in this acutely contemporary language.

In Blend 2 (a sequel, in a sense, to Blend on his first album) Sandy is again accompanied by the instantly responsive, lithely imaginative jazz drummer, Billy Higgins, who has worked with Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Thelonious Monk and Jackie McLean, among other demanding improvisors. "While in Blend the music would rise to a peak. subside, then rise to a peak again," Bull observes, "in Blend 2 we wanted to keep building all the way to the end. Billy and I worked together more closely this time because I'm a bit more up to staying with him. No matter which way I go, Billy's right there. He really listens to all kinds of music."

One of the sources for parts of Blend 2--and a kind of spiritual advisor for the album as a whole--is Hamza el Din. The Nubian musician, now resident in America, is expert in Arabic and Turkish music as well as in Nubian lore, and Bull regards him both as a master musician and as an unusually wise man.The rhythmically ad-lib opening mood is surfacely tranquil but restless beneath. The first recognizable tune is a sketch of Lonely Woman by Ornette Coleman. After fragments of an Ali Akbar Khan melody, there is a brief paraphrase of Pretty Polly, followed by a change to the dominant.(It is here that the tempo doubles, and in this dominant section can be found influences of Lebanese music, plus several choruses of a North African popular song). Billy Higgins emerges in a fascinatingly constructed drum solo of both continuity and sensitivity. Blend 2 keeps rising with a Cairo theme, actually an identifying motif from the Egyptian singer Om Koulsom's recording, Ya Zalemni.

Without a break or sense of gratuitous superimposition, Bull moves to Wabash Cannonball; a tune from Pakistan (heard on a jukebox at a Pakistani restaurant in New York); a simplified Afghanistani tune; a paraphrase of The Young Man Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn (as played by Mike Seeger on Pete Seeger's Indian Summer LP) and finally, in swiftly accelerating tempo, an exploration of the tonalities of what has gone before as well as a stretching out of rhythmic possibilities. (This turbulent conclusion is based on a practice heard at the end of some Hindu ragas, though not on any one particular raga.)

The side ends with Bull on electric guitar in the Gavotte No.2 by Bach, the same piece played on acoustic guitar at the beginning of the record. Bull chose to try one version on the Fender in order, he explains,"to break through the usual conception of the role and nature of the electric guitar." The result--for this listener, whose mind has indeed been pre-set on the subject-- was totally unexpected. The sound, as Bull observes, is not unlike that of a baroque organ.

Inventions, in sum, is a further stage in the singular musical odyssey of Sandy Bull. Born in New York, with time out in Florida and later in Vermont and Boston, Bull began on guitar at eight, added banjo at fourteen after hearing Mike and Pete Seeger, studied at the Boston University College of Music, joined the Cambridge folk ferment, played folk festivals, Greenwich Village clubs and coffee houses, was drawn to the jazz scene as well, became immersed in Indian and Arabic music, recorded his first solo album for Vanguard (in addition to four previous recordings; The Samplers In Person-Kapp, The Folk Singers of Washington Square-Continental, Woman's Delight with Ed McCurdy-Prestige, The Bad Men-Columbia), worked in clubs in Berkeley, Hollywood, and Cambridge again, was heard at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and as of this writing, is traveling once more, listening all the while.

Sandy Bull is not at all defensive if he is "charged" with undue eclecticism. "There is," he points out, "so much around today to pick from. It's one thing if you come from a solid background of one kind of music. But if you're like I am-- a city boy who got into music late--it can be a natural course to build up something of your own from the music or sounds in music you most enjoy. Whatever cohesion results, transcends, in my case, from somewhere beyond my control. Eventually all music is going to come together. It has already started in this country, and will come together here even more so. For this to happen internationally will take a long time, but it will happen. As for me, I'm going to keep on seeing where all this leads me--I mean I'm going to keep on listening for the similarities in all the kinds of music that reach me, some of which I'm able to join together and others that I havn't been able to fuse yet."

What counts for the listener in Sandy Bull's unpredictable musical evolution is that each stage so far has been a stimulus for those who hear him--as well as Bull himself--to broaden their own way of thinking about and reacting to music. It is difficult to approach such a Bull performance as Blend 2 with narrow categories of pre-judgment concerning various musical "bags." Instead, if one really listens, it is the impact of the music which transcends compartmentalization. Later, an analysis of component parts can be fun, but at the moment of contact, we are hearing one musical temperament, and it is a remarkably unifying one.

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