New Release!
SANDY BULL : RE-INVENTIONS
The Best Of The Vanguard Years
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1. Blend --21:55-- From'Fantasias'~Recorded 1962
2. Manha de Carnival --13:00-- From'Inventions'~Recorded 1964
3. Carmina Burana Fantasy --4:32-- From'Fantasias'~Recorded 1962
4. Gospel Tune --9:58-- From'Fantasias'~Recorded 1962
5. Little Maggie --4:07-- From'Fantasias'~Recorded 1962
6. Memphis, Tennessee --9:46-- From'Inventions'~Recorded 1964
7. Triple Ballade --3:13-- From'Inventions'~Recorded 1964
8. Carnival Jump --9:01-- From'Demolition Derby'~Recorded 1971
Featuring these two giants of Be-bop /Avant-garde percussion:
Billy Higgins on "Blend" & "Memphis,Tennessee" Denis Charles on "Carnival Jump"
San Francisco-1967
Arts All Around
townonline.com March 16, 1999
Eastern Massachusetts'Arts and Entertainment Resource
Sandy Bull: "Re-inventions" (Vanguard)
By Ed Symkus
It's not that Sandy Bull is the best string player there ever was ... no, the word eclectic comes quicker to mind. This is a sampling of his recordings from 1963, 1965 and 1972, and it's a fabulous selection of works from an ever-growing artist. The opener, "Blend," with Bull on acoustic guitar and drummer Billy Higgins, builds feverishly for 22 minutes.The familiar "Manha de Carnival," featuring Bull as a triple threat on acoustic guitar, oud and electric bass, is simply beautiful. His banjo playing might take some getting used to, but when he plugs in his Stratocaster, the results manage to be shimmering, smooth and harsh. This is an outstanding hour of instrumental music. (Grade: A)
RE-INVENTIONS : LINER NOTES
By Sam Graham
Sandy Bull. Mention the name and you're liable to hear one of two responses, neither of them exactly what you'd call centrist.
"Sandy Bull?" say the already indoctrinated. "A visionary. A true original. Spellbinding. In a category by himself."
And then there's the second response, which tends to go something like this: "Sandy Bull? Never heard of him."
It's hard to predict just how far this re-release of some of Bull's earliest recordings will go towards bringing the latter camp into the former. But one thing is beyond dispute: the music on this compact disc, culled from three of the four albums Bull recorded for the Vanguard label, is the work of a musician for whom terms like "eclectic," "fusion," and "world music" were a stock in trade years, even decades, before they became part of the everyday musical vocabulary.
The titles alone provide ample clues. Bull manages to bring together Chuck Berry ("Memphis, Tennessee"), Brazilian bossa nova master Luiz Bonfa ("Manha de Carnival"), German classical composer Carl Orff ("Carmina Burana Fantasy"), 14th Century French ars nova composer Guillaume de Machaut ("Triple Ballade"), Pop Staples (the Staple Singers-inspired "Gospel Tune"), and more. Add to that the fact that he's performing this diverse material on acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass, banjo, and oud (a Middle Eastern member of the lute family), and the scope of both Bull's ambition and his accomplishments comes still more clearly into focus.
And all of that's before actually listening to the music. Slap this disc in the nearest player and you'll soon realize that Bull long ago created a style that the eminent critic Nat Hentoff has described as "beyond eclecticism... into what could be called inner musical space where diversely rooted forms and textures flow into and out of each other, creating in the process new ways of connecting, new spirals of cross influences, leading into unexpectedly disclosed vaults of the senses where there were further doors to be opened..." In other words, this isn't a question of mixing apples, oranges and kumquats for its own sake. On the contrary, in Sandy Bull's hands this music all fits together naturally, if unexpectedly. Put simply, it works.
Not that Bull specifically planned it that way, of course. Ask him how he came to develop his unique style, and he shrugs, "It's just what I do, I guess. I've always tried to be sensitive to the different musical cultures that strike a chord inside me. I just took what I liked from a variety of different sources."
He certainly had a lot of sources to choose from. Born in 1941 into a broken home in New York City, he lived first with his father in Florida, where he picked up his first guitar (his first tune: "Red River Valley") and was exposed to everything from Hank Williams to the African drums heard on the soundtracks to "safari movies" like "King Solomon's Mines." He later returned to New York to live with his mother, herself a harpist with a cabaret act called "From Bach to Boogie Woogie."
"My mother's musical taste ran the gamut," Bull recalls. "Her repertoire included everything from Scarlatti to Jerome Kern-she had all the great 78s and LPs: Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Hank Snow. In high school chorus I loved old choral music, the stuff that gave you chills, like Bach and Palestrina. I also loved gospel music, Ray Charles, the Staple Singers; there was a time when I wouldn't listen to anything but gospel radio. At one point I even learned to play a couple of tunes on the bagpipes."There was" he adds, "a big palette to choose from. So I just took the things I liked, and left the rest behind."
Of course, all artists-be they poets or painters, musicians or dancers, sculptors or actors-have influences. Yet very few consciously try to incorporate their specific inspirations in their own work; they're just there, part of his or her life experience and artistic makeup, and inevitably they'll be apparent in some form or other once the artist forges a personal style. In that respect, Sandy Bull was no different. But what was unusual was that despite the fact that in the early-to-mid '60s he was regularly in the company of people like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Roger (then Jim) McGuinn, blues-folkies Koerner, Ray & Glover, San Francisco's psychedelic rockers and many other luminaries, he doesn't count them among his influences.
"I never really imitated my peers too much," Bull admits. "It's not that I didn't appreciate or admire them. But I tried to go places where other people weren't going, just because I wanted to build something of my own. I've always been drawn to heartfelt, spirited music, and I try to see the similarities rather than the differences. There's good and bad music from all cultures, and I like to think that I was attracted to the good things."
Having learned to play guitar at age 8 and banjo at 13, Bull began gigging while still in high school. He spent some time at Boston University, studying composition, string bass, and voice, but dropped out in order to return to New York (in 1961) and pursue a musical career in earnest. After playing from Cambridge to Yale's Indian Neck Folk Festival (where he caught the attention of Robert Shelton of the New York Times), to Greenwich Village, appearing in legendary venues like Club 47, Folk City, Gaslight Cafe, the Bitter End and many more, Bull signed with Vanguard, for whom he began recording in 1962. The first fruit of that association was Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo, represented here by "Blend," "Carmina Burana Fantasy," "Gospel Tune," and "Little Maggie."
"Blend," which occupied the entire first side of the original LP, was the quintessential Sandy Bull performance. Basically one long, spontaneous improvisation by Bull and drummer Billy Higgins (whom Sandy had met while Higgins was playing in New York with saxophonist Ornette Coleman's seminal avant-garde group), it was issued as it was recorded: a single take without edits or overdubs.
"It has kind of a crazy spirit," Bull says of "Blend." "Even though Billy and I talked a little about what we were going to do, I hadn't really thought too much about what I was going to play. But I was pretty certain I had something that was new and interesting and fresh."
If the prospect of a nearly 22-minute guitar improvisation inspires nightmarish visions of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"-like excesses, rest easy. "Blend," variously described as a "new guitar raga" (by Bull) and "psychedelic folk" (by critics), is no high-volume riff orgy. While certainly not lacking in technique, the guitarist relies less on virtuosity than on more subtle qualities like dynamics and the empathic interplay achieved by two musicians who are actually listening to each other.
Inspired by Bull's interest in bagpipes and Indian/Arabic music, the piece is driven by "the drone"; there are no chord changes, no verses and choruses. The first few minutes are languid, moody, gradually building until, at about the five minute mark, Higgins moves from tom-toms to snare and opens up on his cymbals, playing in double time while Bull matches with the fervency of his own attack. Three or so minutes later it's back to a slightly more intense version of the original mood. And so it goes, alternately peaking and subsiding, ebbing and flowing, until by the end it's not hard to understand why "Blend," among all of Sandy Bull's recordings, was the one that college students, coffee house habitues, and other forward thinking types most often got stoned to. "Psychedelic folk" indeed. Like all of Bull's work, "Blend" also serves as an example of his use of "embellishments," or what he calls "the most important part of good music. It's the little things-the trills, the appoggiaturas, maybe pulling off a note to give it a little sob— things that require some technique, but don't go on and on. It's the stuff that feels right-not how many notes you play, but when you play them."
As for the other tracks from the Fantasias album: "Carmina Burana," which Bull had sung in his high school chorus and whose original Latin text had made a profound impression on him, is performed here on banjo; an unusual idea, and unusually effective, but as Bull points out, Pete Seeger was playing Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" on banjo long before Bull ever picked up the instrument himself. "Little Maggie," another banjo tune, invokes the style of Earl Scruggs, the bluegrass virtuoso whose three-finger style revolutionized banjo playing in the '40s. "Gospel Tune" has its roots as well, specifically in the down-and-dirty, vibrato-laden guitar style of Roebuck "Pop" Staples, patriarch of the great gospel family. All of which reinforces Bull's modest assessment of his own considerable impact on stringed instrumental music: "I wasn't the first, by any means. I just did a few things a little differently."
By 1964 Bull was experimenting with two-track overdubbing, and Inventions (1965), was self-engineered in his own living room. Thus "Manha de Carnival," the sensuous Bonfa melody, is played on oud, while Bull accompanies himself on guitar and electric bass. "Memphis Tennessee," meanwhile, finds Bull playing electric rhythm and lead guitars and bass; it also reunites him with Billy Higgins. The result is a performance of the Chuck Berry standard that combines R&B, Country and Eastern modal influences with a jazzy, swinging rhythmic approach topped by Bull's deeply funky Stratocaster leads. The third track taken from Inventions is Guillaume de Machaut's canon-like Triple Ballade. Nat Hentoff writes in his original liner notes: "For me, the performance is a further illustration of the freshness with which Bull is able to conceptualize music... (he) can utilize in this context such seemingly disparate instruments as oud, banjo and guitar and make them sound entirely in place without distorting or otherwise marring the force or spirit of the composition."
Two more Vanguard albums followed: E Pluribus Unum (1970), which has already been re-released on CD; and Demolition Derby (1972), which included this package's "Carnival Jump," a lively duet for oud and hand drums (played by the St. Croix-born jazz drummer, Dennis Charles). The latter album, described by one critic as "a scary mix of Latin juking and country warbling," marked the end of Bull's Vanguard career and the beginning of a long hiatus from the commercial music scene as whole. Contributing to that was a progressively crippling heroin/cocaine addiction, which Bull partly attributes to being "caught up in the whole artistic syndrome of never wanting to repeat yourself, always wanting to do something new, being afraid of being accused of not growing musically. I kept trying to do different sounding records, and I'm sure I left a lot of fans behind as a result."
Bull kicked his drug habit in '74. But finding another commercial outlet for his music proved to be a more protracted process. Although he made plenty of music during the '70s and '80s (he also started a family and put together a studio that he moved from New York to Miami, to Los Angeles and to Nashville), it wasn't until 1988, when Keith Holzman's ROM Records released Jukebox School of Music (again featuring Billy Higgins), that he returned to active duty, so to speak. There have been two albums since then, Vehicles in 1991 and a vocal album, Steel Tears in 1996.
And now? Well, you might say Sandy Bull has come full circle; he's recording solo instrumental pieces again, which makes the timing of this re-release all the more appropriate. He's gigging regularly as well, sometimes even accompanied by his daughter, K.C.
"Sometimes," he laughs, "you have to go through all kinds of crazy stuff before you realize you really were doing okay in the first place. The people who like my stuff just want me to do the things I started out doing. They like the improvisation, that kind of minimal approach. They're even calling me a minimalist now, whatever that means, and an 'Americanist,' which is a bit strange considering all the world musics I've been though. But that's fine. They can call me whatever they want, as long as they listen to the music."