Sound Grammar: Francis Davis and the Best Jazz of 2025, So Far
Image: Jeffrey St. Clair.
I bought my first ‘jazz’ LP in 1974 at a headshop called Karma on the southside of Indianapolis, thinking it was a rock record: Birds of Fire by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This genre-melding recording did rock, but in ways I hadn’t heard before. John McLaughlin’s guitar screamed louder than Jimmy Page’s, Billy Cobham’s drums thundered furiously, Jerry Goodman’s runs on his electrified violin spiraled up into the aural exosphere and braided their way back to earth in tandem with Jan Hammer’s trippy chords on the mini-Moog and the basslines of the Irishman Rick Laird held it all together in funky, hypnotic grooves. This was heavy, often blistering, electronic music played in strange (to me, at least) new sonic registers and time signatures, as if the band members were engaged in some ecstatic, ever-branching conversation with each other. Other fusion records followed: Return to Forever’s Where Have I Known You Before, Tony Williams’ Lifetime!, Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, and Red Clay by Indy’s own Freddie Hubbard. I liked my music loud then. Still do, partly because I’m nearly deaf, partly because the music made me so.
Technically, I was deep into jazz, though I didn’t really know anything about the art form and didn’t start to learn much until the late 70s when I was assigned a dorm room on the American University campus with a guy named Kevin, whom everybody called “Ratbone.” I never knew why. Ratbone didn’t give a damn about jazz. Never listened to it. He was a metalhead. He only bathed once a month on the theory that showers dulled the Sontag-like lightning bolt he’d dyed in his otherwise shoe-polish black mop of hair. He smoked dope out of a purple bong the size of the Chrysler Building all of the day (and, as the Kinks sang, all of the night) and often guzzled the bong water to boost his high.
Ratbone was from Philly and........
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