You and Me and the Continuum

 

https://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/jgblostnovel.html

RIP Chris Hill

 Reposting this blog from earlier in the year about the British funk scene of the 1970s in which deejay Chris Hill was a prime instigator

Fascinating 1980 program presented by Danny Baker, who fiercely argued in the pages of the NME at that time for jazz-funk as the real-deal music c.f. the constipated faux-funk of  A Certain Ratio and Gang of Four, and here takes the battle to the television screen. 

In the program, he just uses the word "funk", though. 

Bunch of things that jumped out at me

1/ The self-conscious organization of the scene around tribes - a local squad or crew like Frontline from Brixton - who then at the dances amalgamate into a mega-tribe, which deejay Chris Hill here describes as the Family. The tribes have their own regalia - sometimes T-shirts with the tribe name, sometimes some other goofy identifying element - and they also often bring banners that they drape over the balcony at the venue. 

2/ You would tend to think of  U.K. working class scenes oriented around black-music to be very much about style and elegance. What surprised me about the Funk All-Dayers captured here is how amiably uncool the dancing and the general larking about is....  It's very much not in the tradition of Mod, it's not about a Face dancing alone in this moat of personal space....  the deejays exhort and entrain the crowd to all kinds of daft behaviour that is collective and synchronised.... they seem to be consciously trying to create the crowd-body consciousness, like in spectator sports with the Mexican wave...  Then there's individual kids who take off all their clothes.... a wonderfully silly mass sing-along 'n' dance to the Ovalteenies theme (you'll recognise that from Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore - "we're happy girls and boys").  And perhaps most bizarre of all - a fad for building human pyramids on the dancefloor (something I've only ever seen at Enter Shikari shows).

As Hill explains - again it's interesting just how self-conscious he is about how it all works as a subcultural machinery - the get-away Weekends at Caister and other seaside resorts are about escalating this sense of the scene as a world unto itself. A world where normal rules of behaviour get suspended and overturned in a carnivalesque fashion (not to put too Bakhtinian a spin on it though -it is also rather  Club 18-30). "Pride and dignity", the soul-boy ethos, doesn't come into it. But it's also very different from how people danced and behaved on the Northern Soul scene.

3/ The other thing that came across was that the fervour seems to be somewhat out of proportion to the music...  Now I love funk, indeed particularly at this time (early 80s) I loved it with a convert's fetishistic passion - but while I wouldn't describe myself as a connoisseur, I always felt that the jazz-funk, especially the UK offerings but most of the US imports then too, tended to be a bit bantamweight.  There are some great tunes but there's a lot of slick 'n'  tepid.  I put that down to the same dynamic on the Northern scene where there's a fetish for obscurity. Instead of rare soul singles that were barely released in 1965 or whenever, in the jazz funk scene it seems to be about a deep cut on an import album, something tucked away on side 2 of a Tom Browne or Grover Washington Jr LP.  

But perhaps the music is simply a pretext for identity, a trigger for fervour, an excuse to mobilize. 

Still, it's a little weird when Hill says that after going to a weekend away in Great Yarmouth, the kids become fully committed, like "they've been on a campaign. And the music is a crusade". 

Once interviewed Randy Crawford, wouldyabelieve?

jump to 4.10 of Fiorucci for the Ovalteenies scene

and 19.18 mins for the Ovalteenies dancealong - singalong in Funk

Danny Baker crusading for the funk cause in the pages of NME - with "intro" from Chris Hill

Hi-Tension bringing the funk to the punks on Revolver

Punk discofunkafied by the Black Arabs, a scene  from Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle 

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Edmund in Comments directs to another film, from slightly earlier, about the scene - British Hustle -  tons of footage of fervid dancers and Chris Hill emceeing through echo FX

And isn't Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels a recreation of these times - what the Black British kids were into, as opposed to punk... 

Give us a twirl

 

Those Horny "Horns"

If I was to make an inventory of My Favorite Sounds in Dance Music....  high up would be the horn sounds in UK garage. 

"Horns" - because they are nearly always done with synths.  The timbre is obviously ersatz and the "action", in terms of playing, is not quite right.  

But in this case, they are vastly preferable to the Real Thing. Imagine how awful it would be to have actual saxophonists or trumpeters playing on UK garage tracks! 

Oh I know there's the odd example of real soloing  and indeed the main one that springs to mind - the musky, languid sax on Groove Chronicles' "Stone Cold" -  is great. 

But generally the horns in UKG are completely synthetic and all the better for it.

It's one of the defining features of speed garage and 2step, right up there with the woody drum sounds and  those xylo-bass percusso-riffs.

I think what I like about the sound is precisely the sophistication-on-the-cheap quality. 

They also contribute to the sultry sexiness of the genre. 

But because they are played on a keyboard, they have a particular function:  parping vamps that propel the groove along, just like every other single musical element in the mix. 

But what is he talking about, you are saying? 

Well, here's a primo example: Chris Mack's "Get It", flipside of "Plenty More"

Another good one is the parp-riff that kicks in about 38 seconds into New Horizons' "Find The Path" - it's meant to be an alto sax, I think. 

There's also a two-note horn vamp in their "It's My House (The Bashment Mix)", from about 48 seconds in.

Another example: the Steve Gurley remix of Baffled Republic's "Things Are Never" - again, just a micro-riff, kicking in about 1.31, Really just a kind of thickening agent to the hyper-syncopated stew. 

In this immortally insane track by Stephen Emmanuel presents Colours, a single shrill note of horn -  more a beep than a parp - punctuates the madness repeatedly. Jump in at about 47 seconds. And it's particularly clear from 1.50 when the track strips down.

Talking of madness... in KMA Productions' "Kaotic Madness", the pseudo-sax  - it kicks in around 1.23  - has slightly more of a melodic trill going on but is still very much a sequenced pattern.

 

Here in Echo Ltd 9's "Happy Times", there's more of a developed melodic role - starting at about 2.14 -  but still mechanistic

Conversely, Dreem Teem's remix of Amira's "My Desire" is largely horn-free but then there's an odd little stunted solo at around 3.56

The Ramsey & Fen remix of Fabulous Baker Boys' "Oh Boy" has an almost-solo coming in at 3 minutes on the dot - and then 3.44, recurs with some slightly different vampige. 

Sort of makes me think of an animatronic jazz band... 

This Grant Nelson production starts a parpin' at 47 seconds...  the horn is basically doing the same sort of job as the "organ" pulse

A modern example, ominously titled "Sax", does indeed deliver at cheesy solo of sorts at 4.30

Can't tell if that's a real horn or still the keyboard approach...  A keyboard, I think.

Either way, yeuuch

See, what I like about this kind of thing is that it gestures at jazz but doesn't deliver it

"Jazz" in air quotes. 

"Jazzy" is good in Nuum... actual jazz, not so much. The methodologies don't gel.

In all these UKG tunes, the jazziness is subordinated entirely to the groove function. 

It's also almost always a chirpy, cheerful, extrovert sound. There's none of the blues aspect of saxophone, the sensual melancholy. It's a brisk, get-busy sort of feeling.

Another thing is the eerieness or just off-ness that occurs when an instrumental sound is played on a keyboard, rather than the sounding mechanism of whatever instrument it is meant to be: strings and horsehair with a violin, brass and fiddly little stops and fingertips with horns (not forgetting the embouchure of the blower). 

With the UKG horns, the attack and decay of the sound is wrong. ("Envelope", is that the term?)

But this wrongness then becomes its own kind of rightness.

A similar thing happens with the Mellotron and the Chamberlin (its precursor instrument). Brief swatches of instrumental timbre - brass or woodwind or strings or whatever - are on loops of tape that are triggered by a keyboard. So you have a trumpet or a cello sound but they are played pianistically. Very much proto-sampler, except it's like a Fairlight that only has the preset, built-in timbres, it doesn't have the ability for the user to make new samples.

The classic example of this natural-sound-made-denatured, as heard in all sorts of dance music is vocal samples arrayed on a keyboard and played in a clearly not-what-a-mouth-and-lungs-would-do way

But the estrangement effect works just as well as with instruments that aren't made of flesh and sinew, the external instruments as it were. 

See also that other hallmark of the nuum:  pizzicato "string" parts. 

Even more horny horn examples.

Actually this one, by Doolally, "Straight To The Heart", at 1.46, is different. It's much more like 2-Tone and the trombone sound in ska. With a bit of dubby reverb on it at points. 

Actually the Doolally track has the other kind of parping sax vamp in there too - the whole track is, along with everything else delicious about it, an intricate arrangement for horns

More in the classic UKG parptastic mode: Nu-Birth, "Anytime", from 2 minutes in.

Exact same plaintively parping riff pops up in Somore's "I Refuse (What You Want) (Industry Standard Club Mix)" at about 4 minutes in

Maybe it's sampled, not played? 

In the Somore, a voice seems to be saying "blow your horn" - sampled from some classic American garage track, maybe? 

See, I had been hoping that this was some unique UKG invention, but of course it turns out that the first to do the fake-sax are your American maestro progenitors, like Masters At Work

Okay, then, like always, the Americans start it. 

But, like almost always, the Brits take it further. 

That would apply to the vocal cut-ups, the hard-swung woodblock snares, too.

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And of course - American sourced, yet a UKG cornerstone, and saxy - there's this 

That, I'm almost certain, is real saxophone - there's a lightness of touch to it, and inflection, that's entirely absent from UKG hornery,

Which is usually sort of stubby, is the word I would use to describe those parped toots. 

It's real sax in "Gabriel" but I wonder if it is sampled or whether Roy Davis got someone in to play it. 

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Started pondering the mystery of the UKG horn and what it connotes while watching this objectively poorly executed doc that is just about worth sitting through for the snippets of old footage...

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Late breaking example suggested by Mark Kenosist in comments - at about 1.15 in this

More of a trill than a parp - a sort of amputated flourish. GIF-like.