James Blood Ulmer

Gone at age 86

There are many people who have probably never heard of James Blood Ulmer. But to anybody who came through New York in the late 70s and 80s he was a voice to be reckoned with.

Blood’s sound, most famously conveyed in his tenure with Ornette Coleman in one of the iterations of Primetime, was rough, edgy, and deeply rooted in Southern soil. He had the most bizarre technique, this wasn't a guy who learned to play by going to music school! Check out these videos and see how he works the strings with his enormous thumb, no effects, plugged straight into a solid state amp.

Something I'm fond of saying is that many guitar players all sound like each other these days. Sure there's plenty of variation, but it's incredibly rare that somebody stands out as completely their own. Somebody who when you hear them, you say, “Where on earth did this come from?” Blood was one of those people. He almost seemed to be created out of a vacuum, as if John Lee Hooker had re-inhabited the body of an outside jazz musician. He played all between the bar lines, he roamed freely through harmony abandoning any conventional Jazz language. He was funky as all get out.

It was rarely pretty. But it was always arresting.

When I went to Bard college, 1980, I hired Blood to play at the school. Oliver Lake was in the band, and it was a real melee. Bard had a sound system that didn't work. The sound man, some idiotic student who had apparently failed electronics class, ran around like a private stripped of his weapons, who had just been ordered to attack an incoming army. You couldn't hear Oliver Lake unless you sat right next to him. They inhabited the small dining hall like a quartet of mastodons, towering over the wide-eyed kids, blasting away at unbelievable volume. I think Amina Claudine Meyers was in the group. It’s a sense memory, it was like being picked up by a tornado, you were bruised and beat up after it. I'm not even sure I thought it was “good” ( a term as relative as it gets, depending on a thousand states of mind)— I knew it was amazing though.

You look at Blood playing with John Hicks in one of these videos, live at Birdland, and it looks like they never rehearsed, he just said let's play this tune and probably just started up with some vamp. In today’s of auto tune, pro tools, perfect technique, and music school grooming this seems absolutely primeval, and therefore wonderful. All of a sudden I miss the early 80s in a terrible way. Where’s all the trash on the street, the $700 lofts in Soho?

I last saw Blood perform at the Winter Jazzfest a few years ago over in Bushwick. God dammit it was a weird experience. He was playing with five strings, 82 years old, and in a way playing like he’d never picked up a guitar before in his life. It could've been 100 years ago, we all could've been standing at some juke joint as he roared out in a language nobody could understand. His own language, something you felt rather than understood. Eccentric, singular, eerie, and apparently unforgettable.

Check out these tracks by Blood. I have to thank my pal Bill Milkowski for providing these links in his excellent substack column, The Milkman.

The music:

This is an extraordinary piece of jazz music. Searing George Adams, one of the most underrated sax players of all time, one of the most underrated drummers of all time, Doug Hammond, the same. Cecil McBee swings like crazy, and Blood does this thing which truly is his thing.

The following track has the Meters drummer, Zigaboo, the great Amina Claudine Meyers on organ, and funk virtuoso Bernie Worrell on keys. I feel like if the Grateful Dead were funky, they might've sounded a little bit like this.

Look at how they seem to be throwing this together in the moment. It's just a vibe, a vamp and a groove. It's got this abstract, searching quality.

This is from a later, early 2000’s. Vernon Reid took blood into Electric Ladyland Studios and made a blues record. The tone is unbelievable, his singing is ragged and great. On the other hand, it's pretty referential to something that many many people did just as well. Still, it's attractive because it's him, and nobody sounded quite like Blood.