Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel Read Free Book Online Page A

like?
    Sleazy: No, I did vocals so rarely that anything I did was “in character” in that I wasn’t used to it. It wasn’t particularly modeled on anyone.
    Drew: It’s not your Barry White moment?
    Sleazy: [laughs] Well, I suppose it was relevant to that genre of things.
    Drew: Simon Ford mentions that you were a DJ while you were in Buffalo.
    Sleazy: I did some DJing when I was in Buffalo in ’73 or ’74, like late-night college radio DJing. At that time, I vaguely have a recollection of segueing Harry Lymon and the Teenagers and Bowie and weird things, eclectic things. I suppose, things that are probably quite common now.
    Drew: If you get a little bit loose about what constitutes jazz, a lot of live TG seems like a form of ultranoisy jazz, in that there are a few motifs to hang onto and then everyone is freaking out and improvising on top.
    Sleazy: True, but we were always, I in particular was always, quite quick to jump in and say that the improvisation that we did was quite different from that. Jazz improvisation is very intellectual and is based on a quite complicated and sophisticated musical language and preconceptions and talent;whereas what we were doing was a more direct, intellect-free connection of the subconscious to the sound. To me, it was more like a stream-of-consciousness, and there was not a kind of on-the-fly thought process involved. For me, it was very important that people didn’t think that we were being clever or trying to be anything really. The sound was just a kind of spontaneous expression of emotion and the way that we were feeling in that second.
    The idea of an alienated bohemian take on jazz or funk is, of course, not exclusive to Throbbing Gristle. Consider the following remarks of Brian Eno from 1978, the year before TG set their fangs into the funk:
    In 1974 or ’75 I absolutely despised funky music. I just thought that it was everything I didn’t want in music. And suddenly, I found myself taking quite the contrary position. I suddenly found that, because of what [David Bowie] was doing and one or two other things—mostly Parliament and Bootsy and those people—I suddenly realized that if you took this a little bit further it became something very extreme and interesting. (Tamm, p. 35)
    The crucial difference is in perspective. Eno, at least as he presents himself in this interview, seems to be surveying the entire map of available musical genres from above; his “view from nowhere” models a kind of detached objectivity about funk’s position within the total demesne of formal territory. By contrast, Throbbing Gristle seem to be looking up at funk and jazz from a cruder, subaltern position, from somewhere aesthetically
below
the minimum musical skill requirements necessary to play properly in a funk or jazzidiom. In some senses they share this with a large number of self-taught and DIY musicians in the wake of punk rock who are looking elsewhere for inspiration, energy, release. But if the post-punk and punk-funk crossovers of A Certain Ratio and Pigbag (among many others) represent a way of getting punk’s dour grind to lighten up and its 1-2-3-4 stomp to “tighten up” into something far funkier, the industrial take on jazz funk offered up by Throbbing Gristle is a horse of a different color, paradoxically more square and more loose at the same time. By replacing the swing and feel of live instruments with the rigidity of sequencers, TG ensured that their stab at funk would feel mechanical, deliberately inhuman, lacking in interplay. By replacing tight riffs and thoughtful, carefully sculpted solos with murky cornet groans and detuned modular synth squiggles, TG ensured that their take on jazz would feel alien, impoverished, the musical equivalent of milk that’s gone slightly but noticeably “off.” The song feels like a setup and induces a kind of creeping self-consciousness on the part of the listener it is ostensibly designed to relax and seduce.
    Drew: What