ugEXPLODE Influences #3: The Pop Group "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?"

Left: The original Pop Group lineup: Gareth Sager, Mark Stewart, Bruce Smith, John Waddington, Simon Underwood

The Pop Group sprung frothing with iconoclasm from dreary Bristol, England in 1978. Typifying the embryonic "post punk" ethos, the band extended the range of DIY outrage past the narrow limitations of rock and roll through Situationist-inspired chaos as well as heavy jazz, funk and dub influences. Comprised of five idealistic, reputedly arrogant teenaged boys, the group quickly made a splash in the UK press, landing high-profile tours with Patti Smith and Pere Ubu.

Despite the fact that their band name would eventually ring totally ironic, the early sound of The Pop Group was indeed still related to pop music forms - a briskly executed blend of melodic, jangling rock over a busy, syncopated rhythm section topped by singer Mark Stewart's delirious howl. The subject matter during their early period tended towards vague, philosophical matters of individualism and injustice in society - i.e. a concerns of intelligent adolescents looking for something greater than what their own surroundings might readily offer. They laid down their first John Peel session in July 1978. The recording engineer at the session, Bill Aitken recalls:

"The Pop Group were the most obnoxious bunch of prats I ever had the misfortune to record. Their instruments sounded bad, they couldn’t play in tune or in time, their act (I refuse to use the word songs) was crap, and like many acts of the punk / new wave era, they were arrogant beyond belief. I remember working hard to get the backing tracks to sound respectable – and when the band came in for a playback the reaction was to inform me by means of a high volume harangue that “You make a shit sound!” The drummer then went on to insist that I make him sound “like David Bowie’s drummer”. I didn’t even bother debating the issue with them. Because they were so bad, they overran the double session. We only just got the backing tracks down by the early hours of the morning, and had to arrange another session for remix. I was pleased, because I was dreading the mix, and hoped that they would not have the time to turn up for the second session. On the remix session, just as I was about to lay down the first track on 1/4″, the band turned up. They asked if they could hear the track before I laid it. The reaction was predictable (“the sound is a load of shit!…. etc). Anyway, as I played the track through again, trying to decode from the bullshit around me anything valid that might help get the recording more to their liking, the vocalist leaned over, pulled up the “lead vocal” fader to levels that were technically overloaded and artistically crass and said – “I want more vocal”.
For a joke, I grabbed the fader and said “oh … you mean like this!” – and I proceeded to wank the fader up and down furiously in time with the music. I fully expected to savour the satisfaction of insulting them all, but to my amazement, the reaction was “hey …. that’s great!!!!” Stung into action, I compounded the lunacy of the situation, and so I started doing the same alternately with the bass and drums and – not content with screwing around with the levels – I started to put the most ridiculous eq on everything, and to feed-back the delay lines and reverbs to each other – almost to the point of oscillation. Looking back, I suppose the band had a point. If I hadn’t done something ridiculous to distract the listener, the Great British public would have been that much more aware that what they were witnessing really was a load of crap. Anyway, to add insult to injury, the following week the Melody Maker referred to the “amazing John Peel tapes” in reviewing the Pop Group – and I was told that on the strength of my tapes, the band had managed to get themselves on the Patti Smith tour. This was the only time I remember a BBC session getting a positive review in a music mag! What a travesty! It was about this time that I started thinking about making a move to earn a living outside studios. The whole punk thing was a joke for me, and I became very disillusioned with some of my colleagues at Radio 1, who seemed to be succumbing to the “king’s new suit of clothes” syndrome. I think the passing of time has sorted out the wheat from the chaff. Who remembers the Pop Group? For that matter who remembers Patti Smith?"

Who remembers Patti Smith or The Pop Group? Well, who remembers Bill Aitken? Who remembers ANYTHING at this point? Recently the Pitchfork-friendly alt-pop act St. Vincent a.k.a. singer Annie Clark has been performing a faithful cover of The Pop Group's first single "She Is Beyond Good and Evil" live, having even played the song on a recent broadcast of the Jimmy Fallon Show. In a Youtube video from a Texas gig, Clark asks the audience "Who has heard of The Pop Group?" Two or three people cheer (sounding like sycophants, ready to salute anything coming of Clark's mouth) and the rest of the crowd is dead silent. After the song is finished, the audience, as predicted, applauds ecstatically for it, no differently than the songs preceding and following it. Is it a surprise that a large audience of pop-culture addicted sheep haven't dug back very deep into the history of music? No. Of course not. Clark herself was only born two years after the group disbanded, and a fuck of a lot has happened since. It is perfectly evident that a minor, defunct band like The Pop Group might be quickly relinquished to the annals of music trivia. It is conceivable that Annie Clark herself only heard of the group after one of their recent reunion performances at various All Tommorow's Party festival functions. Will the people leaving the St. Vincent show wake up the next day and go listen to a Pop Group record? Who fucking cares! The history of great art is not the history of mass popularity and it was clear that the ultimate destiny of The Pop Group was one of extreme artistic non-compromise.

Obviously the band was ready to overturn the musical establishment and the above sort of heated reaction to their fiery modus operandi was proof positive. The three songs from the July '78 Peel Session ("We Are Time", "Words Disobey Me" and "Kiss The Book") are tightly played and highly musical, especially for such young musicians. The mixing style of the session is indeed a few shades more extreme than the sort of slick, straight-ahead balance a typical BBC session might consist of, but the group would soon push the concept of recording-studio-as-instrument much, much further. Signed to American Warner Brothers subsidiary Radar Records, the first official releases by the band appeared during Spring 1979 including the full-length album "Y" and a single featuring "She Is Beyond Good and Evil" backed with the John Cage inspired noise/dub track "3:38". Produced by renowned Reggae icon Dennis Bovell, "Y" strikes a very tentative chord. In a recent interview with Pop Group multi-instrumentalist Gareth Sager, he intimates that Bovell took the job just to make money and that neither he or the band really knew where the other party was coming from. The end result is definitely a bit of a reverb-drenched, muddy mess, albeit an endearing one. Bovell's experimental, dub-tempered production style adds an alien, disembodied air to the band's more straight-ahead numbers and pushes their experimental soundscapes like "Blood Money" and "Savage Sea" straight into outer space. There's something a bit soft and sentimental both sonically and lyrically about the music on "Y" - perhaps the lads were still feeling a bit positive about their world and its potential? 

By November 1979,  any residual sweetness or reticence left was extinguished by the excoriating "We Are All Prositutes" single, released on burgeoning independent UK label Rough Trade. Bassist Simon Underwood - who would go on to found the more mainstream white-funk unit Pigbag - had been replaced by the more agitprop-minded Dan Catsis, who also played in the punk/funk/experimental band Glaxo Babies. "We Are All Prostitutes" begins in a jumble of vocal muttering from guest artist Tristan Honsinger, before the band slices into a caustic, angular funk groove wound tightly around thin guitar cacophony, synthesized hand claps and Stewart's irate, distortion-clad vocal sloganeering. Chaotic outbursts of saxophone, organ and cello appear at random moments and fight the other instruments for space in the dense mix. The Pop Group are now truly playing as if their lives depend on it and this sound is exhilarating. The b-side "Amnesty International Report on British Army Torture of Irish Prisoners" is a fascinating instrumental track beginning with a colorful, Beefheartian tattoo from drummer Bruce Smith and ending in a free improvised threnody over which Stewart morbidly intones a brief, atrocious vignette of political dehumanization. The piece is absolutely dense with detail and dread. This is the sound of a band ready to burn everything to the ground.

The Pop Group's second album "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" appeared in March 1980 on Rough Trade. For some reason this insane, iconoclastic dervish seems consistently overshadowed by the (barely) more "accessible" debut. The first album is tentative, lazy and unfocused, whereas the second is a sharply edged shank of desperation, lashing out wildly in a uniform frenzy of rabid idealism. A gauntlet is immediately thrown down by the haunting black and white cover art featuring two naked children sharing an innocent kiss in the scorched earth of the Third World. Perhaps this is the greatest, most romantic metaphor for the mission of The Pop Group: young and doomed children trapped in a world they didn't make, trying to find a single glimmer of hope in the darkest situation possible. Contained in the original issue of the LP was a series of large newsprint posters chalked full of more bleak agitprop collage, emblazoned with the irate lyrics of the songs contained. Mark Stewart's focus on "For How Much Longer" encompasses nightmarish images of anguished Cambodia, human rights violations, stealing from the rich, police brutality, pop culture as an accessory to genocide and social indoctrination. The Pop Group were clearly no longer about "fun". They were willing to make polarized, simplistic manifestos about the human condition and that is exactly what makes this music so utterly powerful. It is morose, astringent and relentless on every level, drunken with anger and impulsive incoherence. "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" is the sound of a band that didn't care if their message "dated", but sought to live each day as its last on the brink of possible nuclear armageddon.

Poster insert from "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?", 1980.

"For How Much Longer . . ." opens with a slice of audio verite of what sounds like Indonesian monkey-chant, or kecak, which starts slow in iteration and builds into a frenzied constellation of voices from which the volcanic rhythm section of Catsis and Smith explode into "Forces Of Oppression". During the blistering funk assault of "Forces", Sager manically switches between abrasive guitar and wah-wah-injected reeds, interjecting skronk and squeal at odd, disruptive intervals. Taped snatches of a TV news report play at one point. There is an amphetamine-fueled thinness to the production here, which contrasts greatly to the soothing lushness of "Y" - it's fair to assume The Pop Group lorded over producer Dave Anderson in order to achieve this strained, unique sonic result. One of the most defining features of the sound is Bruce Smith's piercing, penetrating drumset tone, particularly the acid slashing of his high-hat accents.

"Feed the Hungry" follows at a slower tempo, bolstered by persistent tom-tom rumble, envelope filtered wah-bass and jags of reverbed feedback and guitar noise. Subtle layers of piano arpeggios bubble behind the track. The band is operating from a premise of RHYTHM AND NOISE: the symmetry of their flinty, forceful grooves are constantly rendered lopsided by the various aural violations from Sager and tandem guitarist John Waddington. Over the top, Stewart continues to essay on the vast discrepancies between classes. "One Out Of Many" is an experimental track largely built upon noisy free improvisation laid over the stunning 1972 proto-rap recording "E Pluribus Unum" by The Last Poets. The band is so disinterested in the limitations of their format that they have gone so far as to feature someone else's recording as their own! Obviously this is out of total reverence, as The Last Poets' wrathful decree mirrors the same kind of outspoken radicalism The Pop Group aspired to. "Blind Faith" continues the sort of speedy hate-funk as the opening track, featuring cacophonous organ clusters, more lashings of intense guitar skronk and a thrilling tempo change in the middle section before suddenly crossfading into a chiming, seemingly unrelated coda of guitar harmonics.

The title track is a sinister funk workout which wouldn't seem out of place on a '73-'75 era Miles Davis record if it weren't for Mark Stewart's impassioned bellowing, rising and falling in unruly shifts of volume over the top. The piece is more spacious than any of the previous ones on the record, all of the instruments taking turns dropping out to reveal haunting spaces of electronic ambience before horrific plagues of noisemaking blast the listener once again.  At the end of the track a burbling synthesizer strolls through the stereo field as Stewart succumbs into a defeated whisper, trailing off into a tomb of final silence. "Justice" follows in a relatively bouncy mode as Stewart demands, "Who guards the guards? Who polices the police?" He demands political justice for the use of excessive force by the men who control the Western world on a local and international level and posits that someday they might come knocking on our doors if we don't act out. Mark Stewart, then in his teens, was obviously trying the best he could to utilize the music as a platform for social consciousness, as confused and pretentious as it can seem. This extreme idealism could only come from a youth and it is potent and unguarded in its effect.

"There Are No Spectators" is a downtempo, reggae-like construct, washed in delay and reverb, with scraping violin touches and some pained falsetto from Stewart. Bruce Smith leads the track with the kind of ticky-tacky African-influenced percussion colors he would also use when doing double-duty in the ranks of the seminal punk-cum-world band The Slits. Ultimately, Smith was the musical linchpin around which the Pop Group's music revolved. His endless theme-and-variation approach to rhythmic pulse is hyperactively ingenious, making everything he recorded early on into a sort of garrulous drum concerto. His manic fills and offbeat accents are a constant source of surprise on the Pop Group recordings and helped transform what might have been rote post-punk into something truly special. Stewart proclaims "Escapism is not Freedom!" He's right. Whereas the band may have begun as a trojan horse, trying to infect the pop scene with their revolutionary virus, eventually they became so radical on every level it pushed them out of the mainstream straight into the fringes. People use entertainment as a salve, but at this point The Pop Group are preaching to the converted, a gaping sore on the face of complacency.

"Communicate" is a wild slice of harmolodic improvisation probably influenced directly by Ornette Coleman's 1976 recording "Dancing In Your Head" (Horizon Records). It has the same sort of tumbling melodic bass, repeated melodic fragments and quarter-note stomp factor as the original, but the obnoxious saxophone squealing, found tape inserts, synth

The Pop Group circa 1979: Waddington, Catsis, Sager, Stewart, Smith

accents and bizarre mix pushes the piece into new territory. The album closes with the deceptively jolly "Rob A Bank", featuring some perky trumpet by an unnamed guest. Extolling the strategy of good old Robin Hood, The Pop Group call for a redistribution of wealth. The song ends unexpectedly with a sudden tape edit.

The Pop Group did not gain a wider audience through "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" How could it have? It was completely uncompromising, brutal, dissonant and frenzied. This is rarely what the average person wants from their "entertainment". What they succeeded in was creating great art, unlike anything before or after it. The band went on to issue a split single with The Slits as well as an excellent compendium of live, demo and outtake recordings called "We Are Time" (Y Records, 1980). "Where There Is A Will There's A Way" (from the split) and "Amnesty Report" (from "We Are Time") both sound like they came from the same sessions as "For How Much Longer . . .", as a bookend to this particular saga.

During 1980, the group continued to tour Europe as well as playing a show in New York. The swansong of the band came in late October 1980 at a huge outdoor show protesting cruise missiles at Trafalgar Square in London with Killing Joke headlining. Stewart split off from the group to pursue his political interests for a while before re-emerging a few years later with his more electronic/production based group Mark Stewart and the Maffia. Sager and Smith focused more on the purely musical end with their long-running free-jazz tinged group Rip Rig and Panic (which later morphed into Float Up CP) which featured a rotating cast of characters including Neneh Cherry. Waddington and Catsis went on to form the mild punk/funk combo Maximum Joy.

The band (minus John Waddington) has played numerous gigs in the last few years and is threatening a new album one of these days. Of course the reincarnated Pop Group could never match the fully-adrenalized,  hormonal eruptions of their prime, but it should be interesting to see how relevant they can be in the midst of this modern milieu. Hopefully they have some new insight or outrage to add to these decrepit new end times. Youth is not everything. 

ugEXPLODE Influences #1: The Electric Eels

ugEXPLODE Influences #2: Top 10 Roxy Music Songs and why

Record Reviews #2: '70s Private Press Free Jazz Records

Jayne Cortez "There It Is" (Bola Press, 1982)

Jayne Cortez' 1982 album "There It Is" is a caustic, agitprop offering, mating her outraged, self-righteous wordplay with the churning music of an expanded ensemble (tagged "The Firespitters") featuring Cortez cohorts Denardo Coleman, Bern Nix, Bill Cole, Prime Time bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, saxophonist Charles Moffett Jr. (son of Ornette alumni and master percussionist Charles Moffett) and two percussionists. I have paid for this record twice: the first time, in 1989, I bought it new from the NYC mail order company NMDS (another post on this topic in the future), attracted by the personnel. At the time I had difficulty relating to it. Although the music had some appeal, the spoken word aspect was very off-putting - it's pretty easy to understand why a white, lower-middle-class teenager living in a bland Midwestern town might not be able to deal with Cortez' gritty urban minority outlook. Now that I have found another copy of this scarce record, I find the presentation no less unsettling, but have a somewhat wider worldview window to peer at it through.

The opening title track is an uptempo mutant-blues supporting Cortez' biting socio-political commentary. Bern Nix's guitar is typically smooth and sour as it jangles away over the stomping Tacuma/Coleman rhythm section. Cortez is livid as she casts a wide net of anger towards the American establishment in a message of revolt before Moffett takes a traditional, albeit unintentionally out-of-tune tenor solo. This music could be a sort of African-American counterpart to the slashing polemic of the second Pop Group album, substituting blues for funk, and showing a black and female bias instead of hormonal white British teenagers? The assault continues with the punchline-based track "U.S./Nigerian Relations" as she simply repeats "THEY WANT THE OIL, BUT THEY DON'T WANT THE PEOPLE!" over a dense, fast pileup of chaotic free playing, including Bill Cole's pungent double reed whines. The third track "I See Chano Pozo" is no respite from the aggression. Although superficially it seems like a tribute to the Cuban percussionist Pozo, deeper listening reveals that Pozo led a turbulant, short life which Cortez equates with the potency of his music. The track is an obvious showcase for the percussion duo of Abraham Adzinyah and Farel Johnson Jr. and the rest of the players remain in the background as support. Side A ends with "Skin Diver", a short but bludgeoning track in the harmolodic tradition of Ornette Coleman's contemporary music. After a series of convoluted riffs, a middle section of wild, angular, rhythmic free playing convenes, with Moffett in the lead and Denardo Coleman's deranged, loose bashing subverting the flow in his signature manner. "Opening Act" opens the second side with a bout of intense chaos from the ensemble before settling into a slow, but pushing blues form, peppered by saxophone and bitter lashings of Cole's double-reeds over which Cortez essays on the struggles of performers trying to continue in the face of apathy. "If The Drum Is A Woman" features only voice and percussion, with Cortez creating an evocative allegory between the drum-as-man's possession and women's rights. It's not completely clear, but it's not meant to be: this song is an outpouring of hurt wrapped in impressionistic verbiage. "To A Gypsy Cab Man" is a swinging, tonal funk groove with text concerning the underground economy and social implications of independent cab drivers in the ghetto, driving where no other cab might dare. The LP ends with the ranting "Blood Suckers", an indictment of imperialist big industry corruption slithering through an agitated mock march. Overall, "There It Is" burns with anger. It is somewhat monochromatic emotionally, but resounds as a powerful document from a different era - one which is showing signs of returning as injustice thrives and the world economy takes a dive, the wealthy minority reclining smugly on their thrones of complacency built on the beaten backs of the teeming multitudes.


RECORD REVIEWS #1

Weasel Walter Hott Mixx Club #4: Punk Jazz

For one year between 2004 and 2005, I created a little mix-cd club. Here is edition number Four from the series. Thanks to Phil Plencner for re-posting it:

PUNK JAZZ:
This edition features raw, rare trax at the apex where jazz and punk meet in the middle, focused basically on the Ornette Coleman-spawned electric "harmolodic" music school and including some DIY screeching from the old days of NYC . . .
 
1. Miles Davis - "Rated X"
From the 1974 2LP "Get Up With It", this is a true roomclearer featuring skeletal voodoo/Noh sabre-rattling death-funk topped by screechingly atonal farfisa treble clusters. This is the dark shit - it's abrasive and unnerving, a perfect opener for the punk jazz mixxx. Pure pain!

2. James Blood Ulmer - "Revelation March"
From one of the many versions of the second LP "Are You Glad To Be In America". To my knowledge there are at least 3 separate mixes for this record! I guess they kept trying until it was right? This one was the best one in my opinion - it saw the light of day on Ornette's Artists House imprint in the early '80s (other versions appeared on Rough Trade under the "production" aegis of Red Krayolan Mayo Thompson). An all-star cast w/ dual drumming by Shannon Jackson and Grant Calvin Weston and horns by Oliver Lake, David Murray and Olu Dara, this little ditty moves full speed ahead with clattering frenzy.

3. Milford Graves - "Ba" (excerpt)
 From the ultra rare mid-'70s DIY LP "Babi", this eruption of energy still stuns like shrapnel. There's supposed to be an umlaut over the 'A', of course - truly metal. Features Graves at his wildest plus the far-away caterwauling of Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover on saxophones. Graves told the record biz to fuck off a long time ago and proceeded to document his legend on his own miniscule private pressings. He's also known for his many sideman appearances on various ESP-Disk titles as well as stints with Albert Ayler and Peter Brotzmann.

4. Ornette Coleman - "Voice Poetry"
Bo Diddley nightmare skronk from the "Body Meta" LP, recorded in late 1976. The early, definitive, teenaged(!) line-up of Ornette's "Prime Time" featuring Bern Nix (also future James White sideman) and Charlie Ellerbee on guitars, Jamaaladeen Tacuma on bass and adult member Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums. The band was busted broke in France at the end of a tour, so some weird Franco pop-star let them go nuts in the studio for a day. One of the most ridiculously flat drum sounds since "Trout Mask Replica"! The band is playing Ornette's concept of "harmolodic" music, which basically means that harmony, melody and rhythm are of equal importance to all of the instruments at all times, with no lead and no background roles implied.

5. Sam Rivers - "Scud"
From the out of print 1976 Impulse release "Sizzle". Sam Rivers is a well-respected elder statesman of post-bop and free jazz, having played with Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis and countless others. On this long, weird track he cycles through a bunch of rickety rhythm section riffs with abandon. There are moments of true chaos - particularly when both drummers kick in - while remaining steadfastly melodic and musical the entire time. I can't help but to think this composition was inspired by ornette's nascent electric music, but I don't know for sure. Featuring the stalwart duo of Dave Holland on bass guitar and Barry Altschul on drums.

6. Decoding Society - "Black Widow" (part 1)
From the rare 1981 Moers Music LP "Nasty". Typical of Ronald Shannon Jackson's writing, multiple layers of rhythm and melody clash and combine to create a rough but boyant tapestry of sound. This large group featured young luminaries Vernon Reid (pre-Living Colour!) on guitar and bassist Melvin Gibbs (pre-Rollins Band!) along with a shifting gaggle of solid but obscure horn players like Charles Brackeen and Byard Lancaster. The early Decoding Society records "Eye On You", "Nasty" and "Street Priest" featured the rawest music by the band before they became increasingly slick and glib, decending to the pits of, um, fusion.

7. Ornette Coleman - "Jump Street"
From the 1979 Antilles LP "Of Human Feelings" - one of the first all-digital commercial recordings ever! A totally disco-fied mess of dissonance from the Nix/Ellerbee/Tacuma/Coleman/Weston line-up of the group (when I say 'Coleman', I mean Ornette AND his enigmatic drumming son Denardo)

8. Decoding Society - "Black Widow" (part 2)



9. James Blood Ulmer - "Revealing"
From the macabre 1978 debut LP "Tales Of Captain Black", this track features the shockingly erratic percussion slaughtering of Denardo Coleman, the showstoppingly nimble Jamaaladeen Tacuma and a rare sideman appearance by Ornette. Blood developed his own harmolodic take on the guitar with uniquely sour open-string tunings coupled with his bitterly acrid, stinging tone. Denardo is clearly the star here - here, at tender age 21, his insanely jarring anti-pulse concept upstages everyone. He would have been great in the Shaggs!

10. Decoding Society - "Black Widow" (part 3)

11. Arthur Doyle - "November 7th or 8th . . ."
A teaser from the legendary "Alabama Feeling" LP released in the late '70s on Doyle's own label.
Doyle's ties to the no wave/noise scenes are well-documented, from his psycho-jamming with Rudolph Grey's Blue Humans to his current conglomerations featuring members of the Carbon and Siltbreeze mafias. This succinct outcry of ecstacy emerged right when everyone was proclaiming the death of jazz. Maybe it was the nail in the coffin!

12. Music Revelation Ensemble - "Baby Talk"
From the aptly titled 1980 Moers Music "No Wave" LP, featuring Blood Ulmer on guitar, Shannon Jackson on drums, David Murray on saxophone and Amin Ali on bass guitar. For the record, Jackson is particularly notable for having done time with Cecil Taylor, Ornette AND Ayler. That's quite a pedigree.

13. Human Arts Ensemble - "Beyond The New Horizon" (excerpt)
Frazzled free outbursting from the 1978 Black Saint LP "Junk Trap". These guys were a motley crew from late '70s NYC via St. Louis. The name of the album was quite fitting, considering the formidable drug abuse that certain members of the collective partook in! Influenced directly by the initial wave of free jazz, these slightly younger upstarts had extremely varied musical skills - from Joe Bowie (brother of Art Ensemble trumpeter Lester and future Defunkt leader) and Luther Thomas' (another James White henchman to be) fumbling but earnest incompetence to James Emery's shredding metal-muso speedpicking - but made up for it with sheer chutzpah. Drummer Charles Bobo Shaw held the whole mess together with his flashy drumming before winding up as a dope casuality in the '80s. The group issued a ton of flawed but truly unhinged LPs between 1972 and the early '80s (including one entitled "P'nk J'zz"!), most of which contain some wonderfully deranged moments worth the search.

14. Decoding Society - "Mandance"
A tasteful track from the 1983 Antilles LP of the same name, with Jackson, Reid, Gibbs, second bass player Bruce Johnson, trumpeter David Gordon and saxists Lee Rozie and Zane Massey.

15. Last Exit - "Discharge" From the landmark debut LP released on the German Enemy label in 1986. Full-boar assault by the supergroup featuring noise-guitar icon Sonny Sharrock, reedist Peter Brotzmann, Material bassist Bill Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Of all the band's legitimate releases, this one still holds up. The undoing of the combo was their increasing familiarity as documented at its nadir on the uninspired final release "Iron Path" (1990).

16. Ornette Coleman - "Theme From A Symphony"(excerpt)
From "Dancing in Your Head", recorded the same day, with the same line-up as "Body Meta"