Brass Trax

If jazz needed a Patti Smith, a frank and alluring wordsmith with an abiding love of rock and roll, it found one in Annette Peacock. Throughout the sixties and seventies, Peacock fused free jazz with rock, electronic music and poetry, developing an idiosyncratic artistic language that has rarely garnered the attention it deserved. Two of her albums from the seventies, I’m the One (1972) and X-Dreams (1978), demonstrate Peacock’s artistic range.

I’m The One (1972)

I’m the One might have been the first major label recording Peacock released under her own name, but it was the culmination of nearly a decade of artistic development. Peacock, a Brooklyn native, spent the sixties in New York City’s burgeoning free jazz scene, even marrying Gary Peacock, Albert Ayler’s bassist. She found a close musical companion in pianist Paul Bley, whose performances skirted the edge between jazz and modern classical. Bley and Peacock traded compositions and instruments—they were both early adopters of electronic synthesizers—and even released an album together, The Bigger the Love, the Greater the Hate, a trippy whorl of synthesizer and creepy, smokily voiced singing, that presaged Peacock’s seventies work.

I’m the One opens with a blast of free jazz, covered with a shrieking vocal line that Peacock ran through a synthesizer. Unstable Moog effects rush over a shifting drum and a band lurching to the left and the right of tonality, until the rhythm section suddenly pulls itself together, defining a loose pocket. “I’m the One” goes from Steve Lacy to Steely Dan in the course of two minutes. By the time the song has run its course, it has also included girl group R&B, unsettling vocal samples, and Moog noodles until it resolves in at an anthemic pace, a massive Rube Goldberg machine of a song. Its multitude of working parts would become the hallmark of the whole album.

Whether it’s a playful synthesizer line colonizing an unknowing torch song (”Seven Days” or Airto Moreira pasting a detuned samba over an atonal keyboard line (”One Way”), there’s rarely anything straightforward about Peacock’s compositions. Thoughout the album, however, two things remain constant: the impeccable musicianship (the roster includes Airto, Bley, and Peacock along with guitarist Tom Cosgrove, bassist Stu Woods, and drummer Rick Morotta, along with a host of support staff) and Peacock’s tendency to resolve her avant garde gestures with a blast of pure R&B.

Nowhere on the album are these two tendencies more pronounced than on Peacock’s bizarre cover of the Elvis Presley standard “Love Me Tender.” The tune is practically unrecognizable at its outset—slowed to the point where it’s more blues than rhythm and sung by Peacock with a nihilistic wistfulness that is completely without charm. Add a few synthesizer blasts for good measure, and it sounds like Elvis as performed by methadone junkies from Mars. Stick around long enough, however, and you’ll be rewarded by a tasty guitar riff and a thick,sultry bassline. It’s free jazz’s revenge on the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

X-Dreams (1978)

The six years between I’m the One and X-Dreams seemed to have mellowed the chanteuse. Far more accessible than the earlier effort, X-Dreams ditches the synthesizer and the free jazz royalty in favor of a more conventional jazz-rock instrumentation and reliable, British studio musicians like guitarists Chris Spedding and Mick Ronson—who played with John Cale, Brian Eno, and David Bowie—and Yes drummer Bill Bruford. The results, as you might imagine, sound more like prog rock than loft jazz.

Like a whiskey that you’ve left alone for six years, Peacock’s voice mellowed between the two outings. Instead of affectations to hide its inadequacies—the synthesizer stabs and the shrieking—Peacock offers a buttery and smoky cordial that perfectly accompanies her frank lyrics and the band’s tight groove. X-Dreams, unlike its predecessor, isn’t an album to spend a lot of time thinking about, but it might be something you put on to set a particular mood.

That’s not to say that Peacock has completely abandoned her free jazz roots. The song structure of “Real & Defined Androgenes”—a litany of sexual politics—is just as cobbled-together as anything on I’m the One, and, at nearly 12 minutes, twice as long.

Like I’m the One, X-Dreams features an Elvis Presley cover, and the differences between the two albums can be summed up by comparing Peacock’s shrieking “Love Me Tender” to her smoothed down and slow grooving take on “Don’t Be Cruel.” The former pushes you away; the latter pulls you in. It’s two different sides to one iconoclastic artistic personality.

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