Episode notes

The Album: James Blood Ulmer: Odyssey (1984)

“Electric guitar” and “free jazz” may not be terms that folks normally pair together but when James Blood Ulmer first began collaborating with jazz giant Ornette Coleman in the mid 1970s, Ulmer found an instant kinship is the heady, improvisational style of Coleman’s harmolodics theory. The influence would shape the beginnings of Ulmer’s solo career later in the decade, culminating, for many, in Odyssey, recorded in 1983 with just Ulmer, drummer Warren Benbow and violinist Charles Burnham. Since then, the album is considered one of Ulmer’s greatest achievements, what longtime New York music critic, Robert Christgau lauded as a “ur-American synthesis that takes in jazz, rock, Delta blues and even country music…you’d be hard-pressed to pin just one style on any of this painfully beautiful stuff.”

Odyssey came to us via music historian and author RJ Smith. He’s already written books on everything from the Los Angeles post-war jazz scene to photographer Robert Frank to an R&B artist named James Brown. He’s currently working on a new biography, this one about Chuck Berry. For RJ, Ulmer’s masterpiece represented a distillation of musical movements all colliding together in early 1980s New York City and where Odyssey‘s opening song felt like an invitation to prayer and mediation.

More on RJ Smith

More on Odyssey

Robert Christgau’s review of Odyssey (and other Ulmer albums of the era)

1998 interview between Ulmer and Jason Gross (Furious.com)

Show Tracklisting (all songs from Odyssey unless indicated otherwise):

Love Dance

Church

Smothered Soul

Ornette Coleman Quartet: Live in Roma

Swing and Things

Wynton Marsalis: When It’s Sleepytime Down South

Swing and Things

Church

Please Tell Her

Little Red House

Are You Glad To Be In America

Here is the Spotify playlist of as many songs as we can find there.

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