Bill Orcutt Vinyl, CD & Tape 4 Items

"Charlie Parker's first album with a string section landed in 1950, ten years after his debut recordings. Although the overtly lush arrangements of Charlie Parker with Strings were Parker's idea, the record must've been something of a relief to producer Norman Granz, especially when the sides went on to become Bird's best-seller, by a long shot. The record (and its follow-up) sparked something of a jazz-strings virus, infecting Nina Simone, Paul Desmond, Clifford Brown, and (later) Miles and Trane. And while the latter entries in that list were clearly bending their arrangements into space-age forms (and the arrangers—Gil Evans, Eric Dolphy—were becoming much hipper), these ubiquitous strings albums established a jazz cliché of sorts. They were a shot for the charts at worst, an attempted reinvigoration of tired easy-listening ear candy at best. How to Rescue Things, landing 15 years into Bill Orcutt's 'rediscovery' years, marks a somewhat tardy entry into the string- sweetening sweepstakes. In a post-chart, post-irony world, no one is going to mistake this as a bid for mainstream ears—nor are too many pop-gobblers going to paste this into their 'Chillax' playlist. With loops of dulcet, birdsong choruses, syrupy strings, and plucked harps clipped from an RCA easy-listening disc, the zombie strings conjure not red leather couches, cotton slankets, and yuzu martinis, but rather a clockwork mortuary, an undead Who-ville and a cigarette butt drowned in bottom-shelf scotch. In contrast to Orcutt's previous reanimation of yesterday's hit parade, How to Rescue Things instead takes as its foundation the oily underbelly of the American songbook, the relentless gears that churn melody into newly consumable and marketable forms—simultaneously ersatz, soothing, and funereal. It's easy to use saccharine, easy-listening settings to deconstruct the romanticism of the past. Yet How to Rescue Things is not an ironic record. True to its title, the transparently corny strings serve not as a meditation on cultural vacuity, but as an attempt to rehabilitate the clichés of the past, 'rescuing' them as improvisational grist for new melodic content. They serve as a harmonic substrate for some of Orcutt's most complex playing, and free him to explore the solo-as-such without the need to imply an underlying tune (unlike Orcutt's previous acoustic explorations of nostalgic song). Orcutt's razor-sharp Fender slices through the satiny settings in angular and unexpected ways, particularly in the final tracks 'Requiem in Dust' and 'The Wild Psalms,' where his double picking swerves into almost Sharrock-ian territory. But ultimately, true to the Parker records that started this whole trope in the first place, Orcutt sticks to a complex yet tonal path throughout, imbuing tracks like 'Not Reconciled' (with its crooned 'Oh my god' and a cheeky 'amen' tacked to the end) with wide-eyed romantic optimism that goes down strange in a deathbed ballad. But ultimately, it's not strange at all. Rather, this palliative track celebrates a necessary, death-defying joy in the face of darkness—whether genuine or performative is unimportant. And what's more genuinely American than whistling past the graveyard? Just ask Judy Garland."—Tom Carter

In a trajectory full of about-faces, Music for Four Guitars splices the formal innovations of Bill Orcutt's software-based music into the lobe-frying, blown-out Fender hyperdrive of his most frenetic workouts with Corsano or Hoyos. And while the guitar tone here is resolutely treble-kicked—or, as Orcutt puts it, 'a bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record'—it still wades the same melodic streams as his previous LPs (yet, as Heraclitus taught us, that stream is utterly different the second time around). Although it's a true left-field listen, Music for Four Guitars is bizarrely meditative, a Bill Orcutt Buddha Machine, a glimpse of the world of icy beauty haunting the latitudes high above the Delta (down where the climate suits your clothes)..."—Tom Carter

After two LPs and over half a decade spent toiling in the margins of the American Songbook, Bill Orcutt returns to original composition and the blues with his latest LP, Odds Against Tomorrow. Taking its title from Robert Wise 's 1959 film noir, Odds Against Tomorrow retrofits familiar folk/blues forms to the unique sound of Orcutt's guitar and the result crackles with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver. Odds Against Tomorrow is more than an expansion of the territory charted by Bill Orcutt, his eponymous 2017 studio electric debut, although it's certainly that. With its nods to existing musics, half-step fluctuations, and near-songwriter-ly manipulations of tension/release, Odds Against Tomorrow is a rock record—almost. Clearly and simply recorded through a clattering Fender Twin in Orcutt's living room and lovingly mixed by Bay Area neighbor and pedal-steel savant Chuck Johnson, no one would mistake it for any era's radio fodder, yet the precision of its technique and the swaying Child-ballad logic of its gentler improvisations comfortably seats it between John Mayall and Richard Thompson in your Ikea Kallax... Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction."—Tom Carter

"It's been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One, a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar—and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of 'a certain age' will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt's rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt's electric records, which chart a course from Quine's choppiness to Thompson-ian/ Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten-year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey. But what's maybe more surprising is that Jump On It , with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt's earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On It treads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as 'The Life of Jesus' and 'In a Column of Air' that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt's trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brickwall short). While you won't mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not if taken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener. Strangely, some of the melted lockstep grooves found in Jump On It evoke nothing other than Music for Four Guitars. While many of the linear runs are clearly improvised, and the phrasing distinctly slurred, intuitive and non-mechanical, the strummed chords hint at a cellular construction similar to Jump On It 's electric predecessor. (Orcutt states that he prefers to keep his strategies obscure—but that implies there is in fact a strategy). Whatever the case, I also hear Satie in Music for Four Guitars, and I hear him here too, hidden within Jump On It 's lilting repetition, which I easily imagine stretching to an infinitely-distant horizon. Like each of Satie's three Gymnopedies, each facet of Jump On It is a tiny miniature bound in a slim volume, an earworm you might savor again and again upon awakening or before drifting off. Each track is a key to a memory, a building block in a shining anamnesis leading to the recollection that hey, we're all humans in a shared cosmos, and music is one way we might make that universe go down easy. And who wouldn't jump on that?"—Tom Carter. Recorded Spring/Summer 2022 at the Living Room, San Francisco. Mixed and mastered by Chuck Johnson.