#4: Invitation To Openness

RIP Les McCann, CDs Outselling Vinyl and Stadium Ambient

Welcome to 2024. Here’s some death.

Sorry but the last couple years and all to come are going to be rife with fallen heroes, teachers, mystics and prophets. I don’t know if my psyche and fingers are up to the task of noting every notable musician that passes from here on out but personally monumental ones require a step outside of our short time.

Les McCann has passed away at the age of 88. Most obituaries you’ll read about him will focus on hip-hop albums that sampled him or his incendiary reading of Eugene McDaniels’ ‘Compared to What’ recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 1969. The song, lyrically as prescient as ever, was a certified hit and would also be my first intro to McCann via Swiss Movement (Atlantic), his 1969 LP with Eddie Harris that sold a shitload of copies.

But it was Invitation To Openness—McCann’s 1972 LP that, right now, sits alone and waiting in a shop near you—that has me me in mourning.

In the early winter of 1998 I got my first turntable set up and was loaned a stack of albums from my jazz-leaning uncle. Almost all from the 70s, the records looked and felt deep and important. The only names in the pile that I knew were Miles Davis (In A Silent Way, Columbia, 1969) and Frank Zappa (Waka Jawaka, Reprise, 1972). Albums by McCoy Tyner (Enlightenment, Milestone,1973) and Larry Coryell (Spaces, Vanguard, 1970) were unfamiliar but were quickly subsumed.

It was Invitation to Openness that felt (and still feels) the most personal and expansive. From its inviting cover image of a sun through trees to the gatefold with notes of love and dreams and unity, it made a profound impression before the stylus settled into the first groove.

Containing just three pieces, the album travels from the serene to the funky with a cast that included famed drummers Alphonse Mouzon and Bernard Purdie along with the legendary reedsman Yusef Lateef, guitarists David Spinozza and Cornell Dupree while McCann rests his voice and sings through acoustic and electric pianos and synthesizer.

Likely corralled by the producer or the record label, this large ensemble plays the material open hearted and without a smidge of ego. They journey as one and the architect’s presence is but a hue among those of the builders’. But Invitation is not formless, there are sweet melodic facts and rhythmic figures stated and dissolved by the musicians’ searching. A head-nodding groove can gently tumble into a percussive pool with electric birds circling and reeds rustling all around. It’s music that just seems impossible to plan and calculate. It feels like a window into another universe, an expression from the infinite.

How a handful of beings with expiration dates manage to channel such a godsound is a question I hope to never have answered.

For a while I held and perpetuated the notion that vinyl was better than the compact disc simply because of the format’s “warmth". I didn’t know what I was talking about then and only kind of know what I’m talking about now. And I don’t wish to kick a hornet’s nest. But the fact is records have become cool and pretty expensive. At the end of the day, I’m a music lover first and a collector a distant second. I pledge no allegiance to one format over another but as someone with limited means, the CD has started looking great again the last few years.

Apparently I’m not alone, as Darko relays a report that new CD sales were double the amount of new vinyl sales in the UK in 2023. But the thing is, this report is spun to continue to prop up the “vinyl revival”, probably due to major labels baking in insane markups for vinyl these days. See below from Stamper Discs:

Look, these numbers reflect mainstream pop tastes and that’s not what we do here but I do find it comforting that the UK still prefers the CD to other physical formats. It’s small, sounds great and is cheap to produce. I hope more independent artists and fans come around to perfect sound forever and reject buying poorly made and overly expensive vinyl. Most labels in our little corner of the universe are trying to keep their prices low and that’s truly wonderful and you should continue to support them. But don’t just stream the album if you can’t get the LP, buy a download or a CD. Try to divide your purchases between going direct with a band/label and with your local independent shop, the latter are getting squeezed hard by the majors’ price gouging. A healthy and thriving independent music ecosystem still depends on physical sales and vinyl is not the only game in town.

If the CD never went away for you or you’re just coming back to it, I’d love to hear what you’re using for a player or transport/DAC combo. Drop your setup in the comments.

---

My full, intentional introduction to pure electronic music was in a hotboxed nissan rattling Aphex Twin’s ...I Care Because You Do (Warp, 1995) sometime shortly after its release. I’d become friendly with some older dudes in high school who always had weed and interesting music and that Richard D James experience is the only one that smoky time hasn’t taken from my memory of them. I ended up going to The Wall looking for a CD copy and the person working there had no idea who I was asking for but ended up special ordering it for me.

Not long after that, our friend group got a line on some acid and when we were picking it up from the Long Island wookie distributor, he put the blotter inside the sleeve of the Orb’s Live 93 (Island, 1993) double CD and said “play this about 4 hours after you drop.” We did as the hippie told us to do and I think I was the only one who was sufficiently floated on little fluffy clouds. We played Love’s Da Capo (Elektra, 1966) later as I’d taken my dad’s copy along for my inaugural trip, remembering his tale that the second side is “the band freaking out on acid.” It was great, too, but the Orb seemed way more psychedelic to me at the time ( and it still does).

My third deep communing with electronic music was in college with a dubbed copy of the sole studio album by nearly-completely-forgotten group The NRG. To this day I don’t know what label released Stadium Ambient and I never had a clue when it came out as the tape copy I was given in 1998 had no info on it. I went to the school’s library to use the internet to search for information but never found anything. I’d meet other deep music heads around shows in the northeast, none having a clue what I was on about when bringing up The NRG. Upon moving to Brooklyn in the early 00s, I hit every record store I found, searching for more music from this group that I swear I didn’t make up. Again, drawing nothing but blank stares from every record store clerk I punished.

So it was a happy happy happy day when my long-running google alert sent a notice in December of 2022 that Stadium Ambient had been reissued and was available on Bandcamp. I was even happier to see some live releases and other sonic artifacts there.

Cut to more recently, and last week I see Tokyo’s Muzan Editions are doing a new version of Stadium Ambient, including new mixes and some lost tracks from the NRGs non-legendary Japanese tour in 1993.

This is the third coming of some of the finest, chillest, most sublime music one can experience, and neither a Nissan or a hit of blotter are needed.