www.list.co.uk/music Mudhoney
PREVIEW GRUNGE/INDIE MUDHONEY AND THE VASELINES HMV Picture House, Edinburgh, Fri 9 Oct Back in early 90s, the music world turned its eyes on Seattle. And Mudhoney were there right at the start: the first band to have success on the seminal Sub Pop record label with their 1988 EP Superfuzz Bigmuff, featuring the classic ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’, and popularising the heavy distortion that came to influence the whole grunge movement. ‘Alice in Chains really made it in the States, Soundgarden were plugging away, Nirvana had a huge breakthrough then Pearl Jam had their huge breakthrough, and not just the music press but magazines that usually had politicians on the cover were covering the Seattle music scene,’ explains Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm. ‘I could never say we’ve been influential, but we’ve been influenced,’ he adds. The ever-modest Arm, alongside guitarist Steve Turner, drummer Dan Peters and bassist Matt Lukin, formed the core of Mudhoney, after various attempts to start ‘a band’ (most notably Green River which also featured Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard who went on to form Mother Love Bone and later, Pearl Jam). However their distinctive fuzz guitar sound actually
came about via a chance encounter: ‘This guy from a Vancouver punk band gave Steve a superfuzz [distortion pedal], thinking that in the early 80s “this is outdated, this isn’t a sound anyone will go for.” Everyone was into Siouxsie & the Banshees and The Cure and this clean guitar sound. Then we found the bigmuff [effects pedal] and that was our holy grail. The superfuzz sounded like Blue Cheer and the bigmuff sounded like the first Stooges’ record.’
Mudhoney had a sense of humour that made them stand out from their peers, especially on the raucous Piece of Cake (1992). ‘People might say it’s what kept us from being super, super successful,’ laughs Arm. ‘But I think you have to have a sense of humour. Perhaps we went too goofy, but it was a reaction to the moroseness of some of our counterparts.’ They play Edinburgh with Scotland’s own perennial
underachievers, the freshly reformed Vaselines, a band who also unintentionally helped shaped grunge, given the colossal influence their music had on a young Kurt Cobain.
Mudhoney, meanwhile, are promising ‘at least one song from every record’; this should be the perfect introduction or nostalgia trip for grunge fans of every generation or a blinding introduction for the uninitiated. (Henry Northmore)
Music
PREVIEW JAZZ BURT-MACDONALD GROUP WITH MARILYN CRISPELL City Halls (Recital Room), Glasgow, Tue 13 Oct
The ever imaginative Burt-MacDonald Group, co-led by guitarist George Burt and saxophonist Raymond MacDonald, follow up earlier collaborations with pianist Keith Tippett and Satoko Fujii with this mouth-watering meeting with the great Marilyn Crispell. It will be her first visit to Scotland in some time, and Raymond MacDonald reckons it should suit them down to the ground.
‘We felt that Marilyn’s approach – very open and improvisatory while also retaining a strong focus on melody – fitted very much with our own, and was in keeping with the approach of our previous collaborators. Of course, the fact that she is one of the most important piano players on the contemporary improvisation scene is an added bonus!’
The group will have just a day of rehearsal to work out an approach to the concert, a process that will begin with composed material and develop from that kernel.
‘I imagine we will play through some structured melodic material that George and myself have written and see how that works. There will be free improvisations for the whole group as well, and we will probably also try some duo and trio features.’
The gig will coincide with the release of the new Burt-MacDonald CD, Think About It (Textile), featuring Michael Zerang and Fred Longberg Holm from the Peter Brotzmann Tentet alongside Bill Wells and Daniel Padden. (Kenny Mathieson)
PREVIEW AFRO-JAZZ HYPNOTIC BRASS ENSEMBLE Oran Mor, Glasgow, Mon 19 Oct
‘When my mother was pregnant with me, she went to concerts,’ says Gabriel ‘Hudah’ Hubert, trumpet player in Chicago’s Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. ‘Apparently your ears are one of the first things that develop on you, so that was my way of life, who I am, being decided then.’ He wasn’t the only one. Hudah is one of eight male siblings who make up the Ensemble, all of them horn players and all sons of the trumpeter Phil Cohran, who is best-known as a member of Sun Ra’s trailblazing cosmic jazz ensemble The Arkestra in the late 50s and early 60s. ‘We wanted to keep the rich legacy of our father alive,’ says Hudah, ‘by creating
cosmic music, but also what we call ‘now’ music.’ They have a good grounding, given that the parental influences which every young musician begins with involved the torrent of music from across the globe that their father listened to. ‘He sat us down and taught us to be cultured,’ says Hudah. ‘Music from Asia, Africa, the Aborigines, our father’s peers like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, but we’d also sneak out and listen to the music of our own time: some rap and R&B.’ With their eponymous debut album properly released this year, the band’s
sound takes in a range of influences, cultivating jazz roots through Afrobeat, ska and on into a kind of populist party style. It comes as little surprise, in fact, that no less an advocate of music sans frontieres as Damon Albarn has performed with the group before, and invited them to support Blur on their Hyde Park comeback stage earlier this summer. (David Pollock)
8–22 Oct 2009 THE LIST 63