John
Kruth
The Cherry Electric
Internal Combustion
What a fun CD! Originally released in
1995 on San Francisco's Weasel Disc, this hard-to-find little gem has been reissued by
Milwaukee's Internal
Combustion label, and is well worth tracking down.
Known mostly as a quirky folk/rock singer/songwriter (he's
recorded for independent folk labels Flying Fish and Gadfly), John Kruth is also a journalist, author,
and music historian whose oeuvre includes Bright Moments, a biography of idiosyncratic jazz saxophonist
Rahsaan Roland Kirk. On this, his first all-instrumental disc, Kruth serves up a tasty gumbo of folk,
experimental jazz, hip-hop, and world beat with a healthy dose of lunacy, prominently
featuring his cherry red 1957 Fender
Mandocaster (tuned to ADF#A, if you're keeping score). The fact that the disc is dedicated
to both avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and the Carnatic mandolin maestro U Srinivas should give you some idea
of what you're in for.
"Karmachanic," the leadoff number, follows a
fairly conventional AABB 16-bar folk structure, but a number of layered electric and
acoustic mandolin parts elevate it above the ordinary. "Wabash Cannibal" takes
the train-tune idiom for a wild ride, with defiantly out-of-tune Mandocaster licks and
some great sax from Jason Todd—whose playing, in
fact, is featured just as prominently as Kruth's on most of the tracks. There's a wicked
turntable scratch groove on "Bertha Cool," and the weirdest Rolling Stones cover
of the millennium has to be Kruth's free-jazz take on "Lady Jane," which he
subtitles the "Brian Jones ghost dance mix" in honor of Jagger & Co.'s late
guitarist.
"Midnight Hora," once again, is conventionally
structured, but uniquely voiced: you won't hear tablas and tin whistle backing up an
electric mandolin every day. There's more than a bit of New Orleans on
"Parisha," while "Crazy Maker" is sort of a Wes-Montgomery-meets-
John-Zorn-in-the-Twilight-Zone thing: Kruth plays an insistent Mandocaster theme in
double stops using an alternate tuning based on major sevenths and tritones (either that
or he multitracked it), while Todd and the rhythm section riff like a wrecking crew. As if
that weren't enough, "Weeping Statues" and "Mary Mandolin" are both
haunting waltzes that lend a bittersweet touch to the proceedings. Kruth has said this may
be his best CD, and who am I to disagree?
You can order a copy of The Cherry Electric
directly from Internal
Combustion. It's also available at Amazon
and CDNow.
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