Friends, this year is going to be a doozy, one which will require mental fortitude on par with the strength of Hercules combined with the flexibility of Gumby. And yet there’s only much loin-girding a person can reasonably do, so instead I’m determined to keep a hyper-focus on the shit that keeps me sane: music, fiction, poetry, TV, and gassing on about them. I intend to support this endeavour with obsessive list-compiling and snacking, and being guided by realistic yet joyously pointless goals, one of which is to complete Omargeddon by the end of the year. In other words, it’s metaphorically Friday night, I have no date, a two-litre bottle of Shasta and my all-Mars Volta mixtape: Let’s rock.
New Year’s Day 2013 kicked off another prolific year for ORL, with the release of both Equinox, and Woman Gives Birth to Tomato! This album is credited to the Omar Rodríguez-López Group, with personnel consisting of Adrián Terrazas-González on various woodwinds, Mark Aanderud on piano and percussion, drumming from Marcel R-L, with Omar providing guitar, synthesisers/sequences and producing. Each track is named after a city he lived in (possibly in sequential order), starting with Bayamón, Puerto Rico and ending with Tokyo, Japan, although this is actually a half-minute of silence rather than an actual song.
Full ten out of ten marks for the excellent title…and then I got nothing. This is jazz – free jazz, to be precise, and I’ve never been further out of my depth. I would love to love this record or, at the very least, have an opinion and, by extension, something to say about it. But I have even less to say than I did about Doom Patrol, which was functionally nothing. For that record I was able to scribble some basic notes against each track, whereas here I managed exactly el zilcho.
And I hate that for me, because when I say, ‘I don’t get jazz’, I’m reminded of how my mother claims she ‘doesn’t like Indian food’. Both assertions are lazy and kind of icky: There are many types of jazz from all over the world, just as India is a massive country with several different culinary traditions. In some form of defence of us both, Ma is a boomer who grew up in a very homogeneous midwestern USA town with little exposure to international cuisine (and, it could be argued, food with flavour) and of all the various genres and sub-genres, free jazz does genuinely appear to be the most uncompromising, complicated and least accessible sort. If only a man would take time to properly explain it to me while I pranced around in a yellow frock.
What I hate even more is my baffling inconsistency, because when I outline the aspects of the music on this record that I don’t enjoy, I contradict myself. Thing 1: It’s just sort of background music with weird bits that claw my attention away from what I’m working on. Thing 2: The shrillness – please make it stop, it sounds like a sound effect created by garbled AI titled ‘robot Stevie Nicks snaps after hours of interrogation by journalists repeatedly asking the same question’. And yet, I fucking love The Bedlam In Goliath, a record that has moments where the very same Adrián Terrazas-González could be accused of attempted murder via flute, and my favourite background music will frequently force me to stop what I’m doing to focus on it instead.
With a catalogue as extensive as ORL’s, I was never going to love every single record, and this is where I have to say I gave it the old college try, but had to throw in the towel. But maybe in a few years time I’ll listen again, and be better able to appreciate the intricate sophistication and musicianship. In this world, I will also have read In Search of Lost Time, perfected a sourdough recipe and learned how to control the VOLUME OF MY VOICE. Not all my goals are realistic, but they are joyously pointless.
Track listing:
Bayamón, Puerto Rico
Puebla, México
El Paso, Texas
Long Beach, California
Amsterdam, Holland
Brooklyn, New York
Zapopan, México
Tokyo, Japan