Robert Wyatt: Cuckooland
Hannibal 1468
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 Cuckooland
is Robert Wyatt's first complete CD of new material since 1997 -- which probably means
that if you're not already a fan, you've never heard of the man. In popular music, six
years is the equivalent of a geologic epoch -- even the landscape changes in that amount
of time.
If you don't know Wyatt's remarkable body of work, Cuckooland
is as good a place to make his acquaintance as any. It's not precisely typical of his
music -- but that's because Wyatt never repeats himself, not because it's not up to his
standards.
Wyatt first came to prominence as the drummer of the
British jazz-rock ensemble the Soft Machine in the late 1960s. The Soft Machine's first
four albums weren’t fusion -- certainly not in the way the term came to be understood
in the mid-'70s, when it melded the excesses of both genres into a passionless pudding.
The band was a post-psychedelic hybrid of rock, extended improvisation, experimental
noise, and rhythmic experimentation that owed more to Pink Floyd's canny combination of
craft and strangeness than the self-conscious excesses of some of the arty British bands
that followed in their wake.
Wyatt left the band at the height of its popularity and
creativity, and released a solo album, End of an Ear. Shortly after it came out, he
fell from an open window at a party, breaking his back and losing the use of his legs.
Wyatt made art from personal tragedy. In 1974's Rock
Bottom, he crafted a singular sonic landscape out of languid, wistful songs about his
personal twist of fate, his love for his wife (artist-poet Alfreda Benge), and of living
by the sea. Rock Bottom set a standard that few albums classified as
"rock" have ever met. It was fiercely intelligent, profoundly moving, and it
forged new sonic ground -- its dreamy, open spaces were filled with an inner luminescence.
In the ensuing years, Wyatt has only refined his abilities
as a singer and songwriter. His output hasn't been vast, but it has been choice. And now
there's Cuckooland, a record that deepens and expands Wyatt's jazz-rock
crossbreeding from his earliest Soft Machine days. He’s even taken up the trumpet.
What Wyatt has not abandoned is his sharp political
conscience. The man who recorded Don Cherry's "Song for Che" -- and the finest
interpretation on record of "Shipbuilding," Clive Langer and Elvis
Costello’s song protesting the UK’s invasion of the Falklands -- weighs in on
the effects of the Gulf Wars on its least-culpable victims, the children, in "Lullaby
for Hamza." One suspects there's a barb in the title of "Old Europe" as
well.
Cuckooland's strength doesn’t lie in any
didactic viewpoint, but rather in its quiet swing and charm. Wyatt duets with Karen
Mantler on Jobim's "Insensatez," and coaxes the gutsiest blues-drenched guitar
riffs out of David Gilmour that anyone has managed in the last two decades. He blows the
dickens out of the trumpet on "Old Europe." And throughout, he plays keyboards
with an economy and emotional directness that recall -- while in no way imitating --
Thelonious Monk.
But it's Wyatt's voice that's his most compelling
instrument. He himself claims that "it has been reduced to a wino's mutter," but
it remains supple and honest -- as one critic has noted, "like a direct conduit to
his intellect."
I'd put that conduit about a foot lower -- leading straight
to his heart, which remains as big and open as any I've encountered.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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