I spent 36 hours in a foggy Chicago in June 2001. My friend David K praised the city as his favourite in the US, alongside San Francisco, and recommended a particular record shop. What was it called, now? [After a quick google:] Was it Jazz Record Mart? I think it probably was.
Against the high expectations I'd been given, I was disappointed by what I found there. But it was my last day before flying back to the UK (to vote, and, along with David, to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse open their European tour with what turned out be a triumphal performance in Sheffield), I knew I could squeeze an extra CD or two into my luggage, and maybe I had a few dollars that it wasn't worth converting back to pounds. I knew of Harry Partch by reputation — his reinvention of music, with a new scale and new instruments — and I wasn't sure if his stuff was readily available in the UK. Amazon-marketplace-globalisation was still a work in progress then. Hence The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2.
I guess I wasn't expecting to give it a lot of spins, and I haven't. My untutored is less wed to established musical palettes than a musician's, and I hear more connections to other works than ruptures from them. Moondog is probably a superficial comparison because both men were celebrated eccentrics outside the American musical establishment — and both are now most frequently pictured when they were grey- or white-haired, bearded and slightly wild-eyed. Still, I think their music overlaps as well. The quasi-narrative of The Wayward reminds me of John Cage's City Wears a Slouch Hat, while the train theme connects to both Woody Guthrie's romanticising of hobo life and Steve Reich's more middle-class American journeys in Different Trains. More than that, the way that the train destinations are called out repetitively makes me think Reich must have had this piece in mind when composing his own, which uses the same device with a similar rhythm — though both claim a root in the patterns of everyday American speech, so maybe that's the common denominator.
From what little I've heard of the rest of Partch's work, I think I struck lucky with this collection. All in all, an interesting listen, and one that deserves more attention than I've given it. This quality it shares with about 40% of my CDs and LPs, allowing for the 50% that is either slightly or extremely naff, and 10% that I know quite well.
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