May 2, 2019
The Album: James Blood
Ulmer: Odyssey (1984)
“Electric guitar” and “free jazz” may not be terms that folks
normally pair together but when James Blood Ulmer first began
collaborating with jazz giant Ornette Coleman in the mid 1970s,
Ulmer found an instant kinship is the heady, improvisational style
of Coleman’s harmolodics theory. The influence would shape the
beginnings of Ulmer’s solo career later in the decade, culminating,
for many, in Odyssey, recorded in 1983 with just
Ulmer, drummer Warren Benbow and violinist Charles Burnham. Since
then, the album is considered one of Ulmer’s greatest achievements,
what longtime New York music critic, Robert Christgau lauded as a
“ur-American synthesis that takes in jazz, rock, Delta blues and
even country music…you’d be hard-pressed to pin just one style on
any of this painfully beautiful stuff.”
Odyssey came to us via music historian and author RJ
Smith. He's already written books on everything from
the Los
Angeles post-war jazz scene to photographer Robert
Frank to an R&B artist named James
Brown. He's currently working on a new biography, this one
about Chuck Berry. For RJ, Ulmer's masterpiece represented a
distillation of musical movements all colliding together in early
1980s New York City and where Odyssey's opening song
felt like an invitation to prayer and mediation.
More on RJ Smith
More on Odyssey
Show Tracklisting (all songs from Odyssey unless indicated otherwise):
Here is the Spotify playlist of as many songs as we can find there.
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