The John Benson Brooks Trio: Avant Slant (one PLUS 1=II?)

This Decca relic is a collaboration between Milt Gabler, a songwriter and Decca A&R guy, and John Benson Brooks, a pianist and bandleader. Brooks was 50 and Gabler was 56 when they collaborated on this music/text/sound effects collage, possibly the granddaddy of all mix tapes, during the height of hippie consciousness. The seed of the record is a 20-minute concert by the JBB Trio performed at the International Jazz Festival, Howard University, Washington, DC on 6/2/1962. It contained four songs in hardcore 12-tone free jazz style (“The King Must Go”, “Cherries Are Ripe”, “Ornette”, and “Satan Takes”). It was the Trio’s only live performance. The recording sat on the shelf until a few years later when Brooks and Gabler were both run over by the 1967 bus (maybe they didn’t drop out, but these two mid-career industry insiders certainly tuned in and turned on). For fun Brooks had created his own tape edit of mixed audio media that he called “D.J.-ology”, and together he and Gabler appropriated the form of Brooks’ collage as a means of digesting and regurgitating the JBB Trio’s 1962 jazz freakout as a standalone album.

The LP contains four tracks, each one built around one of the live tracks, with each 5- to 6-minute song blown up to 10+ minutes thanks to frequent cutaways to found materials and studio-produced materials, almost all of it collaged in a strict DIY aesthetic of straight cuts without any cross-fades. Besides the live trio, there are sound effects records, clips from the news, fragments of existing records, a team of four actors reciting lines of text, and new songs produced just for the record. The texts are from poems by the likes of Seymour Krim, LeRoi Jones, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Carl Sandburg, plus what are probably a few uncredited lifts from Lord Buckley. There are samples from records by current folk & blues acts like The Tarriers, The Rites, Lighting Hopkins, and Corinne: some of them Decca acts, some not. Most interesting are the five new songs written for vocalist Judy Scott to sing with full orchestral accompaniment, all of them short and intense (“The Gods on High”, “What’s a Square”, “Love Is Psychedelic”, etc.), deploying their thematic content and getting out quick. Scott has a strong, precise voice and can really belt out the tunes; I wish I could point you to one of her albums but Discogs lists only four singles she cut between 1957 and 1964.

With the front and back of the LP sleeve slathered in text fragments that comprise a virtual tag cloud for the year 1967 (“hippies cool love peace corps scene happening way out”) it’s tempting to see this record as an artifact that didn’t outlast its own time, and a lot of it is a weak melange of rush-of-blood-to-the-head free-association in service of a grand tribute to something never articulated. But some of these individual fragments still work like gangbusters, and after I digitized the record and determined it contained about 105 discrete chunks connected by straight splics, I cut the MP3 version of the album the same way: MP3 album tracks 1-28 are track A1 from the vinyl, track A2 makes up MP3 tracks 29-54, MP3 tracks 55-81 are vinyl track B1, and vinyl track B2 is MP3 tracks 82-105. You can now, if you like, do exactly as the liner notes suggest and compile just the JBB Trio song segments to hear the original live show just as it was performed; or you can listen to the five-track album resulting from isolating the Judy Scott songs (it fills seven minutes, and it’s deeply odd and very satisfying).

Album audio & artwork
DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.