Only rarely has the true randomness of my crates come to the surface on these Records at Random Fridays. But today’s featured record, Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society’s 1981 sophomore release Nasty is is one of those really random pieces of wax from my collection that I don’t think I’ve ever even sat down and listened to before.
The disc was recently rediscovered amongst a couple of armfuls of exceptionally random records entrusted to me when a local library discarded their vinyl a few years back, which I’m only now picking through deciding what to keep and what to give away myself due to space constraints in my apartment. I was intrigued by the cover, and the fact that I wasn’t sure what kind of music it was, so I set it aside, and it found it’s way into the stack of joints sitting next to my desk for blog consideration.
As it turns out, the kind of music Jackson — who played drums for Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Betty Carter, McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman, Stanley Turrentine and Albert Ayler during the 60’s and 70’s — and his band — which included a young Vernon Reid (of Living Colour and Black Rock Coalition fame) on guitar and Melvin Gibbs (another original member of the Black Rock Coalition and a member of Henry Rollins‘ Rollins Band) on bass — made was called “Free Funk,” a concoction that blended the rhythms of Funk with those of avant-garde or “Free” Jazz. So, Nasty can at times sound like a swirl of rhythmic & melodic counterpoints, a wild display of instrumental virtuosity, or an arrhythmic cacophony of dissonant noise.
Though there are “funky” elements present in the songs on Nasty, like gurgling basslines and plucky guitar, the word Funk to me implies “groove,” and since getting “free” by definition means breaking constraints, the Decoding Society only rarely “grooves” in any conventional sense. Jackson’s drumming style, which is almost all fill and roll, totally breakbeat-free and virtually backbeat-free, is a big part of this. But so is the fact that a lot of the songs feel like two or three songs playing at the same time.
Take “Black Widow,” with a bumpin’ Funk bassline here, another bass playing a silky Jazz lick there, a Blues guitar underneath, Big Band horns over the top, tinkling vibes in the middle, marching-band cadence snares all over the place, descending into “out there” skronk and crash as it goes on and on, for example. The clash of styles, sounds, disciplines and instruments — which can sound like somebody put Primus in a blender with Weather Report — even in the same song is pretty ill. Which, depending on your ear, could be a good thing or a bad thing.
The band gets especially free and funky on the 11-plus minute album-closer “When We Return” though. The tune opens with a spaceman-welcoming horn solo before switching up into the sort of fractured, rolling drum and bass “groove” that El-P’s productions for Cannibal Ox were made of. Then the second bass comes in, quickly joined by guitar and the return of the horns, and a few minutes after that the joint just breaks into a more manic pace with wicked Rock guitar soloing and psychedelic fuzz which builds for the entire length of the song into a raging crescendo. Eventually, the opening “groove,” now sounding like some sort of Free-Jazz answer to James Brown, comes back before the ultimate fade out.
Casual music listeners or kids searching for breaks probably aren’t going to be feeling this. But the talent of the musicians involved, and the ambitious nature of their work here should be appealing to those with an open mind and discriminating ear.