Post Description

Fortunately for us, Alexis Korner has never needed that sedan chair because he's been very busy making music. As a result, his influence on pop music can be traced from 1961 with the Rolling Stones, to Cream, to Led Zeppelin, right up to 1975 with Bad Company, and believe me I've only named a few.

 

No way is Alexis Korner going to stop now. Alexis is a high energy, almost manic guy, bouncing around with an inner excitement for life and music. His mind is always sparking off a thousand ideas, always an originator. Alexis is simply one of those rare people whom Yeats called the antennae of our race: the artist, the men and women who feel the pain of existence and describe it for us in poetry, in the novel, on film or on canvas, or in music.

 

After three years, I thought I knew Alexis pretty well. Then I got this album and put it on the turntable. Everything you thought you know about the guy explodes, and one essential characteristic becomes clarified: Alexis stands as the single consistent contributor to the music of our times, from the late 50's to this very moment in space/time. That's what all the shouting about his being the "Father of Us All" comes down to - Alexis is the intangible soul deep inside that very physical body that is pop music.

 

You can feel it on this album. If there is any such thing as a musical consciousness binding us all, then Alexis is tapping its pulse beat, crystallizing it for us. His roots - so overused a word - have absorbed nourishment from jazz (way back to Louis Armstrong and on to Parker and Mingus), from the "pure" Delta blues, from rhythm and blues, and from all of the music of the 60's.

 

For me, personally, Alexis is like Stephen Crane, who etched the grim reality of war in The Red Badge Of Courage and forced every serious writer thereafter to face up to the grim reality of life with honesty. Alexis has been doing that all of his life in music, and now this album, which I think is going to be one of those rare signposts, an album so rich in ideas that other musicians are going to be taking off from it for years. I don't mean a trendy album, something faddish. I think this is one of those few albums that point a fork in the road. The Stones, who picked up so much from Alexis in the beginning, did it with their raunch-blues that made us all go back and listen to the black blues that is the core of rock. Dylan did it with his songs, breaking open the three-minute vise of pop music and enriching the language of that music.

 

Alexis is enriching it further, by recreating and fusing all the feeder roots of pop, from jazz to Muddy Waters to Motown, until something incredible happens: you can feel, as your feet start moving and your mind starts racing back through all the music you've ever heard - you can actually feel all those subdivisions of pop music blending into one and then flying out again. Like a kaleidoscope. There's so much happening in here, so much that's joyous, and painful, and so incredibly humorous.

 

The album is a total experience! It's theatre, fully visual and incredibly alive. You can see it and hear it, most especially on Get Off Of My Cloud - Alexis as leading man, directing his band and his chorus as he transforms the youthful arrogance of the Stones' original into a dramatic vignette of today's urban experience: cool, laid-back paranoia that comes to life because Alexis makes you see and feel all those people out there trying to muck up his mind and rip off his soul. The whole album is like that - a universality of feeling that touches the widest possible range of your emotions.

 

Alexis once said he's not a good singer: "It's a joke even to refer to me as a singer." He's absolutely wrong. His voice on these songs is the thread that knits it all together, a musical instrument weaving a tapestry, not just another piece of vinyl with ten cuts. Any good tailor will tell you that you must never let the thread show. Alexis is a superb tailor. His thread doesn't show until you go searching for it, trying to figure out why this album works so well.

 

"I came up as a sort of blues-cum-jazz player," Alexis once said, "and I always worked with jazz players because they have a particular feel for things which I don't want to get away from."

 

And that's the undercurrent through this album, that feeling that jazz once had of a spontaneous communication between musicians. Alexis is a blues man, and he's also a jazz man. And feeling quite schizoid about it: "What happened to me is this schizophrenia I've carried around quite happily for many years now, between the blues - where the folk ideal is that the song is more important than the singer and the great singer becomes the song - and the jazzmen - who were more interested in using the blues form to express themselves: 'This is me, Louis Armstrong,' or 'This is me, Joe Oliver,' the improvisation which presents him as him and nothing else is more important than the song he's playing.

 

"I just had to fly along between those two lines, like flying high and low at the same