11. Music Revelation EnsembleNo Wave

A lot of the music I love, like Ornette’s Body Meta record earlier, is music that really kind of baffles me, where I don’t really understand what’s going on. And sometimes, yeah, you’re sort of saying: Is this good? Is this actually good? Or is this bad? That young, naive thing where you’ve heard great players and, and then all of a sudden, there’s this guy playing guitar and it’s really jagged, and it’s like, what’s going on here?

This has James Blood Ulmer on guitar. He was a mysterious figure that appeared in the late 70s – he was doing stuff earlier but he was doing stuff on CBS in the late 70s. The music revelation ensemble was one of the first James Blood Ulmer records I heard, and it was also called No Wave. People were calling it punk jazz, and so it crossed over into a lot of the stuff that was happening in New York, in the No Wave scene too, although I think it’s pretty different. But it was a connection that led me on to that stuff.