I’d go out on a limb and say that the late 70’s was not a particularly high point of American pop. As fusion eroded into a synthesized quagmire and Herbie Hancock’s pioneering early 70’s work degenerated into radio-ready cheese, pop also embraced similar “revolutions” in sound, opening up an entirely new realm of disposable songwriting.
But Arthur Russell, who made several seminal contributions to the then-nascent disco scene (including Sire’s first dancefloor single “Kiss Me Again”), apparently saw quite a lot of potential in emergent radio sounds—though he was too optimistic in seeing his “Instrumentals Volume 2” as predictive of future radio; we have not come as far as Russell might have liked. First Thought Best Thought’s two discs, newly reissued by Audika, form a classically oriented and harmonically complex picture to sit alongside the sheen of Russell’s ventures in pop and disco.
The work collected in the unfinished “Instrumentals” series was supposed to, in Russell’s words, “be revised logically through time”; the pieces reflect both pop radio and avant-garde leanings. Improvisatory by design, this is not the minimalism of Reich or Glass, but a sound that pays homage to a much wider base of influence, especially the rhythmic pulse and fusion sensibility of Headhunters and In a Silent Way; the reduced yet driving percussion of “Instrumentals D” calls to mind Tony Williams’ work on the latter record and adds a similarly memorable presence.
At the same time, both “Instrumentals” volumes are much more deliberately structured that any jazz or fusion counterpart, and owe a great deal to Moondog’s outsider compositions a decade earlier. Languid woodwinds, airy keyboard, and Russell’s electric cello interact with the precision of both carefully crafted pop and modern classical. Any one characterization ends in hilarious contradiction— fiercely experimental muzak? A thinking man’s smooth jazz? Easy-listening psych-drone?—and such labels don’t come near capturing the wealth of ideas at work in these pieces.
Laid to tape in 1981, the Glassian “Tower of Meaning” is much closer to the Ginsberg-accompanying compositions for which Russell became known in the early 70’s, and can perhaps be seen as a gentler cousin of Schoenberg or Ives at their most stripped down. But this music rarely harbors such theoretical pretenses; consistently lyrical, poetically evocative statements, these pieces stretch out over deep expanses—think of Eno’s plaintive “2/2,” which closes Music for Airports. Simultaneously enigmatic and cohesive, the sections end without warning; it is as if the pieces long to continue ad infinitum, unbounded by recording constrictions.
Russell never stagnated within a single sound, and as such First Thought Best Thought’s display of Russell’s protean genre-synthesis is possibly its finest accomplishment. Rarely have both quotidian and experimental sounds been comprehended so thoroughly by the same imagination; such was the depth of Russell’s achievement. Amazingly, all the music on this double-cd set has been out of print for the better part of two decades, only now being remixed and re-mastered by Audika’s Steve Knudson, who has already been rightfully lauded for these musicological labors of love. This release marks the next valuable reemergence of Russell’s work, a catalogue so vast that the handful of reissues in recent years only begins to scratch the surface.
