Yoko Ono

For reasons unknown (at least to me), Secretly Canadian has decided to re-release Yoko One's 1981 album, Season of Glass, today.

Yoko has long been my favorite Beatle.  My personal opinion is that The Beatles' music became much more interesting after her relationship with John Lennon began in 1966. The conventional story (that is, told by conventional people to defend their conventional, bourgeoise tastes) is that she ruined the band and caused them to break up, but The Beatles would have eventually broken up anyway or else become boring and predictable like so many other bands. Impermanence is swift, man, and nothing lasts forever. But if you want to subject yourself to scorn and abuse, try saying something positive bout Yoko to the Beatles gatekeepers on Reddit or Facebook. For the boomer Beatles fans, she's the very definition of "unlistenable" and is to be despised and derided at all times.   

It's also been said that meeting John Lennon was the worst thing that could have happened to the artist, Yoko. She was a conceptual artist, part of the Fluxus movement (George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, John Cage, etc), with gallery shows and conceptual-art performances,  and Lennon attended a preopening viewing in London of one of her gallery shows, titled Unfinished Paintings. One of her pieces was called Painting To Hammer A Nail In, with a hammer attached to a block inviting people to drive nails into a blank canvas. Lennon asked if he could hammer in a nail before the public opening, and Yoko told him, sure, but for five shillings. When Lennon replied, "Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in," that was it - the perfect conceptual response to conceptual art and they fell in love and were together for the rest of Lennon's life. 

I was in my early teens at the time and didn't understand the attraction at all. She wasn't conventionally pretty like I imagined a Beatles' wife to be and when I saw the cover photo of John and Yoko's Two Virgins album with the two of the them stark naked - full-frontal nudity - I thought they had both lost their minds. And when I heard her manic, screaming vocals, I thought it was the worst possible sound in the world rather than understanding it as the appropriate Fluxus/conceptual response to popular music.

But after they met, the Beatles went on to release albums that redefined rock music, landmark records like Sgt. Peppers, The White Album, and Abbey Road. To be sure, their trajectory toward experimentalism and new forms of expression had already begun, but it took off like a rocket after John drove in that nail.

By 1970, though, my taste in music was changing and The Beatles started to sound passe and cliched to me, especially after the release of the ballad-heavy Let It Be. By that time, I had heard Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, and there was no going back to McCartney's Mom-friendly pop songs. But Lennon, especially his solo stuff and the Plastic One Band, still had an edge. 

To be honest, I initially weaponized some of her music, playing Yoko records to freak out friends or to clear out a party if I got tired of hosting guests in the house. But with time, I became fond of my weapons ("This one will really get them") and the more I listened, the more I understood Yoko's vocal stylings. Eventually, I even came to like them. 

That may have laid the groundwork for my later appreciation of free jazz, but I can't quite connect those dots. However, I apparently wasn't the only one to associate Yoko's in-your-face, atonal vocals to the skronk of free jazz.

Season of Glass was the first album by Yoko after Lennon's death, and is a surprisingly conventional affair. Where one might think the artist's reaction to the murder of her husband would be 90 minutes of unbridled, primal screaming, accompanied by frenzied guitar feedback, instead she used a bunch of accomplished studio musicians, including Tony Levin (pre-King Crimson) and jazz musicians Michael Brecker, Ronnie Cuber, and Howard Johnson, to express herself and her grief. Most of the songs if thrown into a playlist today probably wouldn't raise a single eyebrow. 

She's not a great vocalist and has a limited range, but she's no worse than, say, Nico of the Velvet Underground, and if you can accept flat, deadpan vocals from a German blonde fashion model but not a Japanese conceptual artist, you might want to take a self-examination for racism.

Walking on Thin Ice is probably the most outre song on the album and wasn't even included in the 1981 release but later added to the 1997 CD reissue. People who reflexively hate Yoko will find something to object to at about the 2:30 mark and her repeating cries of "ice" (which certainly hits differently now in the age of ICE).

 

Spontaneous Music Live

The L.A.-based band SML have finally released an album that captures them doing what they do best, spontaneous music live, which not coincidentally is the title of their new album and also reveals what "SML" actually stands for. Recorded at the club Zebulon in Los Angeles on December 3, 2025, they perform in the round, like they did at Big Ears last March.

While their previous albums have featured either short studio performances or brief excerpts from live shows, Spontaneous Music Live contains two extended live tracks, The Drums and Roundabouts, so one can hear how ideas develop, grow, and change in the course of performance. It's SML finally as the way they should be heard, and how I hope they'll record in the future.

 

A Few Thoughts

Did I just discover the greatest song ever?

Milwaukee DJ and poet Bob Reitman, from his 1972 album, The Eleventh House. I suspect Wilhelm Reich would have approved of this song.

New Music Friday

This was actually released a week ago, but I'm just learning about it now.

Chris Forsyth's BASIC, a trio including Douglas McCombs (bass) and Mikel Patrick Avery  (percussion and electronics), play guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll with an improvisational, experimental edge. They performed at last March's Big Ears festival and although they made my short list of acts to see, I didn't get the chance (I was at a "secret show" duet of jazz guitarists Julian Lage and Nils Cline at the time of their set). 

I don't really have any words here to add to the music. You either get it and dig it or you don't. I do, and am glad that this music exists in my world. 

 

R.I.P., Abdullah Ibrahim

The revered South African jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim, born as Dollar Brand, died last weekend. Impermanence is swift.

Ibrahim wasn't as well known or famous as, say, the recently departed Sonny Rollins, but the outpouring of sympathy and tributes I've seen on line is a testament to his humanity, to the way his music touched so many listeners. It seems like everyone who ever heard him has some personal experience of the way his music touched them that they want to express, and the outpouring of respect for a relatively obscure jazz musician is impressive.

The hypnotic rhythm of his Ishmael was a personal favorite of mine. I first heard it on late-night radio (WBUR) in Boston back in the 70s and I remember the feeling of elation I felt every time I heard the opening bass lines (Cecil McBee) and the wash of cymbals (Roy Brooks) on air, knowing the voyage it was about to take me on. I had a copy of his 1976 LP, Banyana – Children of Africa, on which the track appears. I still return to the album often and consider it nothing short of a masterpiece.

I never saw him perform live. But I do have a bootleg recording of a performance (March 7, 1976) from the period of Ishmael and Banyana that a friend had taped at Boston's Emmanuel Church and sent to me literally decades later. 

Speaking of digital files, fun fact: Ibrahim's Calypso Minor, from his soundtrack to the 1990 Claire Denis film, No Fear, No Die, was the very first track I ever owned on MP3. Back in the mid '90s, I had read something in the old print-media newspaper about some new digital-music format, and an online search (keyword: MP3) led me to a file for the track on an AOL bulletin board, which I immediately downloaded. Every other digital-music file I've ever downloaded or somehow came to own in my life was subsequent to Calypso Minor.    

Horse Lords

Yesterday's New Music Friday included the release of the new album, Demand to Be Taken Alive!, by the Baltimore band, Horse Lords. If their music sounds somehow "different" to you, congratulations, you've got a good musical ear. They employ the just intonation tuning system championed by La Monte Young and Harry Partch, among others. 

I'm not a musician and have only the weakest of grasps of music theory so I'll probably get this wrong, but as I understand it, just intonation is a tuning system that allows chords and intervals to ring perfectly clear and doesn't produce "beating," those faint, restless "waves" heard during sustained notes. Thus, the tuning has a characteristically lush and resonant sound. 

The "just" in "just intonation" doesn't mean "only" or "merely," but instead means conforming to a standard of correctness, as in "just behavior" or "just reward." Notes in just intonation are tuned using whole-number frequency ratios that align with the natural overtone series. However, the downside is that an instrument tuned to a certain key in just intonation will sound beautiful in that key, but will sound out of tune in a different key unless the instrument is re-tuned specific to that other key. 

Nearly all Western music uses equal temperament to avoid this limitation. Equal temperament divides the octave into 12 equal semitones. Because of mathematical compromises, nearly every interval is slightly "out of tune" by a tiny fraction and chords can sound slightly less pure and can produce the "beats" that just intonation lacks. However, it allows instruments with fixed pitches (like pianos and guitars) to play in all 12 musical keys with equal ease. You can say that every guitar and every piano is ever so slightly out of tune, but nearly all Western Music uses equal temperament, in part because that's how western instruments are designed and built.

Horse Lords gets around this problem by using hand-modified guitars with repositioned frets, re-tuned and customized by the band's guitarist, Owen Gardner. The other band members are Andrew Bernstein (saxophone), Max Eilbacher (bass),  and Sam Haberman (drums). Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! also features vocalists Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor, the first Horse Lords album to include vocalists (but no lyrics); toward the end of the track, note the use of the hocketing technique employed in the Ramayana Monkey Chant and elsewhere. The album also features bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone and trombonist Weston Olencki. 

Demand to Be Taken Alive! is streaming everywhere and can by purchased on Bandcamp. The band will perform at Atlanta's Drunken Unicorn on October 13.