Exotic Percussion

Chronique

Endure, if you will, an entire army squadron marching into the cool music den the moment the needle hits the vinyl. Let them stomp up and down on the freshly reupholstered furniture with their muddy boots. Let the contingent of military snare drummers sharpen their sticks, like the wooden stakes of vampire hunters, and let them drive these stakes deep into the heart of the turntable. Let an additional army come in to clean up anything left over; after all, this is Phase Four stereo. Such an ordeal would be nothing compared to what faithful laboratory assistant Igor has gone through trying to complete his collection of easy listening albums from the '50s and '60s involving percussion. "All Americans of a certain generation have these records somewhere in their houses," he is fond of saying. "It is just a matter of waiting for them to die, then finding the records." Not always patient about the wait, Igor's situation brings to mind the cartoon of the vultures with the caption "Patience my ass, let's kill something." Hopefully nothing indiscreet was involved in the acquisition of this side by the famous British conductor Stanley Black, the percussion trail having led from Ping Pong Percussion to the kinder and gentler Persuasive Percussion to a steaming approach described by the album title of Exotic Percussion. In terms of exotica, the picture of the girl on the front cover is the high point, and so it should be. Otherwise everything related to Phase Four stereo gets more play than anything to do with the music on the lavish, slick gatefold cover. The number "4" is printed much larger than anything else, including the girl, which doesn't seem right. The dozen tracks crafted by Black are not mentioned until the back side. No musicians are credited at all, although names of instruments are mentioned in the track-by-track description. The entire gatefold is given over to the wonder of the Phase Four system. The main comment that should be made about Phase Four is that it could be the only such development in music playback systems in which the best thing about it seems to be the graphic depiction of how the system works, black-and-white artwork that takes up the bottom third of one gatefold sleeve and is worth the price of admission, provided this was scored on the used record pile for a tariff a bit less than a cappuccino.
Black comes on like gangbusters during the opening "Temptation" -- the temptation was to pile on everything, leading to the delirious description of an invading army in the preceding paragraph. Perhaps the reason for avoiding credits for the musicians is that it would have had to have taken room away from the Phase Four hype. After all, there must be a million musicians involved, plus a chorus or six. Something always seems to be in the process of being added into the mix as Black tries to impress on the first side. This of course includes percussion, which to be audible above all the mess requires a sound force equivalent to an anvil being dropped onto a xylophone from the roof of a tall building. How pleasant, in fact, that the strains of "By the Waters of Minnetonka" brought to mind a somewhat similar memory, of actor Joe Don Baker dropping a bag of concrete onto the skull of a big, bad thug in a film entitled Framed. Black and Phase Four will not enjoy credit for pleasures they did not intend, of course. How nice it would be if music such as this actually left a burned-out village or a smashed skull in its wake; what it really was all about was ennui, about nothing happening but perhaps a cocktail being stirred. Why so-called "normal" people felt a need to stuff such an overblown production into the background may seem like an overwhelming mystery to subsequent generations, who need to be reminded that back in 1962 there was no such thing as new age music yet. As if he had waited for the teacher to leave the room, in this case the teacher standing for an uncredited producer or similar executive, Black gets into more attractive, subtle musical touches in the second half of the program. "Baia" is particularly nice, sporting tradeoffs between an electric guitarist who plays as if pins were sticking out of the fretboard and a swinging English horn. Reaching wide in his sources, Black pulls off one of the few underdone treatments of "Caravan," but his approach to a Rimsky-Korsakoff theme represented in 1962 a dangerous potential insult to the Soviet Union -- only potential, fortunately, because since the Communists banned Phase Four stereo nobody behind the Iron Curtain ever heard this track. Except for Igor from Transylvania, and he doesn't seem to care.

© Eugene Chadbourne /TiVo