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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Matchups between long-dead singers and groovy DJs can feel contrived, but King Britt's remix with the great Sister Gertrude is a revelation.
Nov 30, 2005 | 
Not so very long ago, a record pairing a modern, forward-thinking DJ and producer with a little-known gospel singer who happens to have been dead for a quarter-century would have seemed pretty unusual. But the September release of "King Britt Presents Sister Gertrude Morgan" has to be evaluated as an example of what is basically a genre, encompassing work by Moby, the three "Verve Remixed" records and the Motown and Atlantic Records remix projects (all issued in the past three years), and even violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain and DJ Scientifics' forthcoming "A Civil Rights Reader for Strings, Laptop & DJ." Some of the more absurd virtual collaborations (the recent double-deceased duet of Biggie Smalls and Bob Marley, for instance) are proving that mere novelty is not enough, and there's a not-so-fine line between rediscovery and repurposing.
Sister Gertrude Morgan made one record in New Orleans in the late 1960s or thereabouts, and died in 1980. She is better known for her paintings, which fall in the folk or vernacular or naive (your pick) tradition: That is, she had no formal training, and most of her work was ignored for most of her life, but eventually it was "discovered" and celebrated. You always get the vague sense, looking at "outsider" art exhibits, that what you're really supposed to admire is not just the talent of the artist, but the taste -- the talent -- of the curator. Which can be irritating. Still, the idea of taste as a talent has its uses. In music it's often associated with the postmodern power of the DJ, but it's also what makes, for instance, Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue," or K. McKarty's album of Daniel Johnston covers, "Dead Dog's Eyeball," so much better than Rod Stewart's multiphase assault on the Great American Songbook. Cover projects, like remixes, work out better when song selection really is guided by taste and a passion for the material, as opposed to making a score with the grocery store background-music industry.
In this case, the story goes that Ropeadope Records founder Andy Hurwitz came upon a copy of Morgan's obscure release, "Let's Make a Record," in a New Orleans record store, and presented it to Philadelphia DJ King Britt as the possible basis for a project. In the original recordings, recently remastered and reissued by Ropeadope, Morgan sings gospel numbers that occasionally tip into full-on sermons, accompanied only by her own tambourine playing. It's a striking and raw performance, partly because her conviction is total and her vocal presence so vivid.
The next thing to consider, then, is the way the source material is treated. It's hard, for example, not to think of Moby's 1999 album, "Play," which included several meetings of modern recording wizardry and folk expression, and was a sensation. He basically treated his archival sources like anonymous found objects. "Natural Blues," the album's credits note, "features samples from the Vera Hall recording 'Trouble So Hard.'" The notes include several essays in which Moby shares his views on vegan dining and prisoners' rights, but nothing about who this Vera Hall person might be, or how her voice happened to arrive in his digital toolbox. Listen to Hall's a cappella performance, recorded by Alan Lomax in her Tuscaloosa, Ala., kitchen in 1959, then to Moby's song. There's no question Moby has excellent taste, and made something wonderful and new. But is Vera Hall's contribution merely a "sample"? Or is this a collaboration? A remix? A cover? (Commercial dimensions to this question later arose in connection with another sample-driven song from "Play" that ended up in an American Express ad.)
One of the more underrated remix albums of the past few years took an interesting approach to this issue: "Alan Lomax's Southern Journey Remixed," by New Orleans' Tangle Eye (2004), brilliantly combined samples with electronic beats and burbles and live playing by various New Orleans jazz musicians -- and explained where each sample came from. Of course, building everything around Lomax gave a bit more credit to him as a kind of ur-DJ for, say, locating the prison ax gang singing "Rosie" in the late 1940s than to C.B. "88" Cook for being the lead vocalist of that performance and thus of Tangle Eye's "Work Song."
