9. Holy Thursday – David Axelrod
Not to be confused with David Axelrod, the famous political consultant who may be instrumental in providing the USA with its first black president. Fingers crossed: Barack Obama might be that country’s last best hope.

The David Axelrod with whom we concern ourselves here is the record producer / arranger / bandleader and jazz innovator.

Axelrod is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, he’s interesting from the point of view of jazz. Here is a guy who produced some of the coolest of the West Coast ‘Cool’ jazz of the 1950s.

But from there, he progressed. He went on to produce proto-jazz/funk by Cannonball Adderley and was responsible for the great Lou Rawls track ‘You’ve Made Me So Very Happy’.

As the 60s and 70s came along, Axelrod started diversifying and working with psychedelic garage band The Electric Prunes.

Perhaps most interesting to me was Axelrod’s interest in the recording technique itself. I’ve long maintained that the most influential and important records are those that ask the question “no, really – just how far can we push this equipment?”.

Examples include Sgt. Peppers, Pet Sounds, OK Computer, Endtroducing… and Axelrod goes along way down the same path as these groundbreakers.

He also helped pioneer — or at least develop — the concept album, and 1969’s Songs of Innocence was a weird kind of pop / jazz / soul / r&b / cabaret / rock-opera work in tribute to William Blake, as was its successor: Songs of Experience.

Now, I have to stop for a moment here and tell you a little story. That’s part of the deal with this blog: you get the music, but you have to put up with the little indulgences.

I became interested in William Blake through Andrew Rockell — a friend and ex-band mate of mine in Auckland who wrote his thesis on Blake, and who for a short while seemed to become the most sought-after Blake scholar on the planet. He was also fairly important in my conversion to jazz too, come to think of it.

Anyhow, as I recall, the University of Toronto, long the spiritual home of Blake studies had a chronically ill and dying literature academic on their hands and wanted to entice my friend to their department to hold in reserve as the next world-beating Blake brain. He declined, repeatedly, and they kept sweetening the pot until they grew tired of that game and eventually went away.

Anyway, it was through Rockell’s enthusings that I started reading Blake — and reading about Blake. And you can’t read about Blake without encountering Northrop Frye who wrote three of the most important books that shaped the way I think about the world: Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism and The Educated Imagination.

Frye was, as it happens, the University of Toronto’s resident Blake scholar around the time Marshall McLuhan was there — and it’s fair to say that McLuhan’s writings have pretty much provided the frame through which I’ve viewed the universe for the past 6 or 7 years.

He’s not taken anywhere near seriously enough these days — but go and read anything and everything he wrote.

Actually, come to think of it, I like Robertson Davies‘s books too — and he was at Toronto University around the same time.

All three of them at U. Toronto at the same time. All three wrote books I really love. All three were heavily into William Blake and Carl Jung. All three had a deeply religious connection (Frye was a Dean at the Theological College, McLuhan was a devout Catholic, and Davies looked like Santa Claus). A coincidence?

Anyway — I digress. Man, do I digress. Back to Axelrod. He dropped out for a bit during the 80s. Apparently he became something of a recluse. Probably fair to say he wouldn’t have been appreciated properly during that decade.

But some of his music became popular sample fodder for more astute and ‘searching’ members of the hip hop fraternity during the 1990s (Kid Koala, DJ Shadow, DJ Cam…) — and he returned the compliment by later providing his own remix of an U.N.K.L.E. track, ‘Rabbit in the Headlights’.

Axelrod’s 12th and self-titled album came about when the Mo’ Wax label dug up some thirty year-old rhythm tracks he’d laid down for an album that explored Goethe’s Faust. The album, in its finished form, draws in every musical style that Axelrod ever had a passing acquaintance with, and it’s quite a dazzling accomplishment that spans three decades, and never sounds disjointed.

That might be one to pop down on your list as one to investigate. And read those Frye books while you’re at it.

Originally, today’s track was on the Songs of Innocence album, but it was collected as part of the Blue Note series that highlighted older and often forgotten tracks that have featured as samples in hip hop in recent years. The Blue Break Beats compilations are uniformly excellent, but this fourth one has to be my favourite… particularly because it was where I first really encountered David Axelrod.

My thanks to DJ Cro who has been enthusing to me about Axelrod for at least the past year. He’s right. This shit’s important and amazing.

Buy Blue Break Beats Vol. 4 or check out Axelrod’s 2001 self-titled album.