Ghost of Electricity

Notable players in the 1990s San Francisco Bay Area jazz scene, clarinetist Ben Goldberg and guitarist John Schott, backed by bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Kenny Wollesen, developed a set of original compositions inspired by Schott’s interest in Mississippi blues, and Goldberg’s high regard for avant-garde jazz elder Steve Lacy. The spacious performance, with wide dynamics and a deep soundstage, was recorded by audiophile engineer Cookie Marenco (Windham Hill, Blue Coast) in analog.
– Mark Werlin, NativeDSD & All About Jazz

Junk Genius’s first record consisted of fractured, go-for-broke treatments of difficult bebop compositions. Five years later they returned with a different focus: original songs that sound as if they’d come from old field recordings, recovered artifacts inspiring a new oral tradition. Through hymns, stomps, hollers, and anarchic strum-alongs,

Junk Genius trace the border regions between alternative jazz, improvisation, and the primal music of Dock Boggs, Son House, the Carter Family, the Georgia Sea Islands, work songs, and the Sacred Harp tradition. Ben Goldberg, John Schott, Trevor Dunn and Kenny Wollesen play together as one, and are beautifully recorded. But this is no exercise in nostalgia: while it moves the listener with the reverence of its melodies, the rhythmic feel is dynamic and unsettling and the overall tone of the record both liberating and tragic.

John Schott writes: Ghost of Electricity is in some measure a commentary on American folk music, a catch-all label for the many musical traditions that spring from rural Southern cultures. We set ourselves the challenge of writing music that could almost have been passed along through oral tradition. We wanted to preserve the messy, knotted and tangled pictures the music presented us, and not prettify it or put quotation marks around it. We didn’t want to simplify or needlessly complicate.

Our model for the personal transformation of folk song was Bob Dylan, whose song ‘Visions Of Johanna’ provides the title of our record. From the outset of his career Dylan had an uncanny feeling for the strange, off-balance world the old songs inhabit. He knew that the violence of the imagery, the Old Testament justice, and the naked expressions of desire present in the songs were all but underground in the conservative ’50s milieu from which he emerged. In our way we had attempted a similar re-claiming of the almost malevolent genius of bebop on our first record. Folk traditions have of course been used by jazz musicians before, memorably by Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. Moreover, jazz is itself a sort of folk music, mixing individual genius with an implicit history that is continually reworked.

Ben Goldberg, Clarinet
John Schott, Electric & National Steel Guitar
Trevor Dunn, Double Bass
Kenny Wollesen, Drums