JACK JOHNSON
A chum from gamelan gave me the news; Jack Johnson. Not the chum, the record; Jack Johnson. He plays cello, mainly. The chum, not Jack Johnson. A schoolteacher. The chum, not Jack Johnson. Jack Johnson was a boxer. Plays “out” cello. Weird strings. The chum, not Jack Johnson. Stockhausen. Cage. Shoenberg. Plus his own dense and haunting compositions, and also in a local free jazz combo, along with another gamelan friend (a drummer). Anyway, he e-mailed me to tell me about Jack Johnson. I was crestfallen. Jack Johnson! The chum and I, we have a little thing going based on ping-pong and Miles Davis’ electric fusion period. He loaned me Big Fun and On the Corner and Get Up With It. I loaned him the deluxe complete sessions of In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. And we played a fierce ping-pong tournament over the spring. He won, but it was tight.
Jack Johnson. Or rather, The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. Five CDs of recordings made from February to June by Miles Davis as he dug further down in the scathing rock sounds that he’d started mining in Bitches Brew. More rock than fusion. The sessions produced A Tribute To Jack Johnson, a single LP soundtrack to a not-very-popular documentary about the boxer. It was mad, bad and beautiful. I never owned it, but I borrowed it from a fellow I worked with once and had it in my car for weeks. Wonderful.
But Jack Johnson. Expensive! I went online to suss out the goods. Went to something called Blogcritics. Not because I’m a great blog believer or anything, it was just the first thing on Google that looked alright. There, some guy named Mr. Tom Johnson (presumably no relation) had this to say:
“If you’re not familiar with Miles’ 70s output, pick up a used copy of A Tribute To Jack Johnson - there will doubtless be plenty as copies of that disc are traded in to help alleviate the cost of this box.”
And this:
“I decided I needed to sacrifice a few dud-discs to get this one, and so traded enough to at least cut the price in half. Worth the loss off a few “once a year+ listen discs”? You bet!”
And okay, so I was inspired and I similarly scraped the cruft off the bottom of my cd collection and took it and traded it in, and so I won’t be saying too much this week, as I will be listening to this big fat pig of a record instead, and you can blame Miles and Tom Johnson and my cello-playin’ chum. See ya.
