 |
No More Bull: Sandy Bull and the Deep Song of the Sixties
By Bill Wadsworth
Pull my daisy
Tip my cup
All my eggs are broken.
Cut my thoughts for coconuts
All my doors are open.
—from "Pull My Daisy," by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady, 1959
Before there was "world music" or "fusion," there was Sandy Bull.
In 1959, at the height of the folk-music revival, Bull was eighteen and already well on his way as a serious musician. Like many others at the time, his interest in music had been inspired by the Weavers, and he was fortunate enough to have learned guitar and banjo directly from Weavers' Mike Seeger and Erik Darling. But it was the less intimate influence of Pete Seeger that proved formative. The elder Weaver's internationalism cleared a path for Bull out of the backwoods and cotton fields of Americanist music into a different realm, a wider expanse of space, time, and musical modes.
That year Bull took off for a brief stint as a street musician in Paris: "We played under the bridges along the Seine, and people would shower francs on us. We went to a café, Ali's, in the Algerian section, and that was the first time I heard people playing oudlike instruments and style."
Open sesame.
In 1959, Ornette Coleman's historic ten-week stint at the Five Spot opened the door to a new freedom from musical convention in jazz, to the outrage of some and the exhilaration of others. It was a moment of crossover, of not looking back, of transition from subculture to counterculture. When the Coleman quartet returned for a second engagement in the spring of 1960, John Coltrane was there every night. It was a breakthrough of influence, a catalyst to Coltrane's genius that made possible the transcendent purity of "A Love Supreme" and "Meditations" a few years later.
Sandy Bull, back in the States after listening to Algerian music in Paris, was also in the Coleman's audience. But what he was drawn to most was not Coleman's saxophone or Don Cherry's trumpet, it was the drumming of Billy Higgins. At that moment an affinity was forged, and a lifelong friendship, that fused the two musicians' folk and jazz sensibilities. Together Bull and Higgins would, as Ezra Pound said, Make It New.
Open sesame.
Bull recorded his first album, Fantasias for Banjo and Guitar, for Vanguard in 1962, at the age of twenty-one. The centerpiece of the album is a twenty-two-minute improvisation entitled "Blend," featuring Bull on guitar and Higgins on drums. Since delving into African music and free jazz, Bull had been listening to Ali Akbar Khan's renditions of classical Indian ragas. The result is "Blend"—and it is on "Blend" that Bull's reputation as a musician's musician's musician is permanently secured. No one had ever heard anything like it before on guitar; it is the Ur-source for the psychedelic raga rock of the mid- and late sixties, as well as arguably the proliferation of all kinds of nontraditional open-tuned guitar work that drove sixties music.
Bull was immediately established as the ultimate eclecticist, whose albums combined a wild assortment of genres and traditions, from Chuck Berry to Bach, from fourteenth-century ballades to salsa and samba to Indian, African, and Middle Eastern music. His instruments eventually included oud, sarod, six-string bass, pedal steel, and drums as well as guitar and banjo. But the core of Bull's genius wasn't versatility, virtuosity, or even his eclecticism; it was his rage to synthesize. Bach on banjo, bossa nova on oud, and especially raga on guitar: It was imaginative transgressions such as these, with their intermixing in works like "Blend," that made him a true original and a seminal influence on far more famous musicians who followed, among them Jimi Hendrix, Steve Winwood, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. His style was a precursor to those of Leo Kottke, John Fahey, and Ralph Towner; his groundbreaking use of open tunings foreshadowed Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, and the power chords of Keith Richards.
According to legend, it was Sandy Bull, during a stay in Woodstock in the summer of 1964, who persuaded Dylan to commit his own act of transgression by picking up an electric guitar. A year later, at Newport, when Dylan performed with the Band to a chorus of boos, the folk revival was eclipsed for good by rock.
Open sesame.
In 1963, Bull befriended Hamza El Din, the Nubian oud master, whom he met on the Via Veneto in Rome, and with whom he later shared apartments in New York and San Francisco. El Din's first album, released by Vanguard in the mid-sixties, was one of the first "world music" recordings to receive widespread recognition in the West. In 1964, Bull recorded his second album, Inventions, which features "Blend 2." "Blend 2" is more complicated and adventurous than "Blend," and this time the presiding spirit is more Hamza El Din than Ali Akbar Khan. The description of "Blend 2" by Nat Hentoff in the liner notes is worth quoting:
The rhythmically ad-lib opening mood is surfacely tranquil but restless beneath. The first recognizable tune is a sketch of "Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman. After fragments of an Ali Akbar Khan melody, there is a brief paraphrase of "Pretty Polly," followed by a change of key to the dominant. (It is here the tempo doubles, and in this dominant section can be found influences of Lebanese music, plus several choruses of a North African popular song.) Billy Higgins emerges in a fascinatingly constructed drum solo of both continuity and sensitivity. "Blend 2" keeps rising with a Cairo theme, actually an identifying motif from the Egyptian singer Om Koulsom's recording, "Ya Zalemni."
Without a break or a sense of gratuitous superimposition, Bull moves to "Wabash Cannonball"; a tune from Pakistan (heard on a jukebox at a Pakistani restaurant in New York); a simplified Afghanistan-style tune; a paraphrase of "The Young Man Who Couldn't Hoe Corn" . . . and finally, in swiftly accelerating tempo, an exploration of the tonalities of what has gone before as well as a stretching out of rhythmic possibilities. (This turbulent conclusion is based on a practice heard at the end of some Indian ragas, though not on any one particular raga.) |
After 1964, Bull was taken down by a heroin habit. He didn't return to the style and tuning of "Blend" and "Blend 2" for twenty years, and by that time he was all but forgotten as a musician. His performances became notorious nonperformances, incoherent, stumbling, and solipsistic. Patti Smith wrote, "It was the strangest thing I ever saw. His sense of space and time was slightly science fiction. A leftover junk space." In 1968, an outraged Grover Sales wrote a devastating piece entitled "Goodbye Sandy Bull" and soon rumors began to circulate that Bull had died. Patti Smith again: "Some said he was dead, car crash. 3 notches under James Dean. Some say his end was more decadent. More Paris in the twenties. Slain in some alley. A fizzled goofball brain." Ben Fong-Torres wrote a piece on Bull in Rolling Stone in 1970 entitled "Hey, I Thought You Were Dead."
Sandy Bull was not dead. He kicked his habit in 1974 and made a comeback of sorts playing oud in Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. But after recording his last album for Vanguard, aptly called Demolition Derby, in 1972, he didn't release another recording for sixteen years. He remained a restless and innovative outsider on the music scene, eventually moving closer to his Americanist roots and settling outside Nashville in the early nineties. But his early recordings went out of print and his later ones were largely ignored. The impact of those first two albums, which he recorded between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, would never be repeated, and scarcely remembered.
In certain pieces of music—Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" or Sandy Bull's "Blend"—one hears a common open-endedness, a timelessness, a bottomless quality that seems to me to strike the radical chord of a time when for a historical moment "all the doors were open." Technically, on the guitar, this may be explained by the phenomenon of open tuning and the use of drone notes. Through open tuning, Bull was able to reach forward to a new openness in musical consciousness and simultaneously to reach back to musics and modes of consciousness far more ancient than ours. García Lorca, tracing the same quality in Gypsy music back to similar roots in India, called it cante jondo—"deep song." What he said of deep song may be the best description I know of the supreme instrumental meditations of Coltrane and Bull:
| Notice, gentlemen, the transcendence of deep song, and how rightly our people call it "deep." It is truly deep, deeper than all the wells and seas that surround the world, much deeper than the present heart that creates it or the voice that sings it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from remote races and crosses the graveyard of the years and the fronds of parched winds. It comes from the first sob and the first kiss. |
Open sesame.
I called Sandy Bull to interview him for this piece, only to learn from his wife, Candy Bull, that he had died four months earlier, on April 11, 2001, at the age of sixty. He left two sons, Jesse and Jackson, and a daughter, K.C., who in recent years had been performing with him. I learned he had a brother named Digger St. John and that his sister was Daisy Paradis, the well- known American sitar player. His stepfather was Geoffrey Hellman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and his first mentor, it turned out, was his mother, who was an accomplished classical harpist. It sounded like a good life, and his career had lately been reviving, thanks in part to the long-delayed rerelease in the late nineties of his early Vanguard recordings.
Billy Higgins died three weeks after Sandy Bull.
Close sesame.
to top
|
|
