SHED YOUR CLOTHES, SHED YOUR INTOLERANCE, AND GET NAKED WITH JONATHAN FREILICH
Naked On The Floor, as opposed to his nearly 20-piece Naked Orchestra, is Ninth Ward guitarist Jonathan Freilich’s (a member—past and present—of bands as disparate as 007, Los Vecinos and the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars) small jazz ensemble, consisting of himself, tenor saxophonist Tim Green, trombonist Rick Trolsen, bassist James Singleton and drummer Mark DiFlorio.
On Naked City, elegantly, invisibly produced by Benjamin Lyons at Mark Bingham’s Piety Street Recording Studio on July 10 of this year, Freilich offers seven instrumental compositions, the briefest of which (“Cultural Confusion”) is a bit over four-and-a-half minutes long and the longest, eleven-and-a-half minutes (the tongue-twistingly-titled “Possible Reflections On Your Most Humorous Fears After Leaving The Haunted House”). In a city where composition usually means a slight variation on the Meters’ “Look-Ka Py Py,” Freilich is our most adventurous, outrageous creator of unexpected music. It’s “jazz,” but don’t let that scare you away.
Freilich puts it like this: “To play naked is to try and expose what lies beneath style.” And furthermore: “The name of the band came from a discussion with fellow Frenchmen Street desperado, Kenny Claiborne. Café Brasil used to have the lesser draws play early on the hard, cold floor away from the stage. You’d have to play to a big room while the main act dragged all the gear in while you were playing. No one watching, you had to really be trying to get your thing out there. Through the window you looked naked. Naked On The Floor. The music was naked too. Still is.”
Naked means democratic, as well. If the listener didn’t know better, he would assume this was a Tim Green solo album. Green plays with intensity equal to John Coltrane and is at the forefront of every song. There are no giant arena-bashing guitar solos from Freilich but rather, a constant barrage of witticisms, references, hooks, ladders and shotgun houses on fire. You can also hear Freilich, amidst several of Green’s more explosive runs, tossing gasoline on the pyre with semi-verbal exhortations.
Trombonist Trolsen is equally incendiary and the rhythm section of Singleton and DiFlorio sears the wallpaper. The music sounds like—well, in my notes I scribbled “Circus elephants doing a waltz around all three rings as they avoid wet noodles.” Every time it gets on the verge of being too ethnic, too klezmer-y, too Armenian/Slovenian/Basque/Balian/Botswanaian/Belorussian/Burgundy Streetian, Tim Green steps up and we’re back in Soulville with Junior Walker passing the washtub-fried turkey necks to Junior Parker. And then when Green flies his rocket out past the Dog Star, Freilich sashays in with a riff and a whiff of normalcy.
This is strange, weird music from a time and place when strange and weird are commonplace, where Buddhist tattoos, scrotal piercings, vegetarian pizza, cross-dressing lesbian libertarians, wheatgrass juice cocktails, St. Augustine green-dyed dreadlocks and vintage Vespa Primaveras are on every corner. It’s a raucous time of, as goes Freilich’s title, “Cultural Confusion.”
In his extensive liner notes, which commence with quotes from philosopher Bertrand Russell, Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan and composer Duke Ellington, Freilich writes: “Cultural confusion—putting one note in front of the other. Just to see what you really hear. Slowly, without learned manipulations. Where do these threads come from? All experiences leading up to the moment when the note is written; what your teachers taught, the radio played, your mother sang, the rhythm of blows from young schoolmates, what your grandmother sang to you, the tailspin of a recent incident that moved the mind into its current vibration. Then you look without automatically editing. Observe cultural confusions and tolerate the alternatively organized cultural stew.”
Confused? Shed your clothes, shed your intolerance, and get naked with Jonathan Freilich’s sounds of five mighty musical brains at work. You’ll be floored.
