Scott Johnson : John Somebody, part 1

"You know who's in New York?  Remember that guy... J- John somebody?"  Ahhh, a sentence that is, quite literally thanks to Scott Johnson, music to my ears.  I first ran across this record in the hallowed halls of WRUW-FM Cleveland where I did an electro-acoustic and experimental radio show for seven years or so.  John Somebody, on Nonesuch Records I think, was a staple of that show.  I actually own the LP.

The entire piece is based around speech samples.  Scott takes a tiny bit of speech, or maybe a laugh or an "uh", and loops and splices it.  Then he builds a piece from the natural rhythms and tonal qualities occurring in the speech, and plays counterpoint against it, primarily with electric guitar, but there's some horns on the record as well.

It's an impressive piece of work, really well done.  But the other thing to remember was that this was created in 1982, well before the introduction of the sampler into the common musical vernacular.  That means this entire piece was done with tape.  Yeah, that means he sat there in the recording studio with a razor blade, a reel-to-reel and bits of scotch tape and built this entire thing by repeatedly bouncing the samples from tape to tape, cutting and splicing at exactly the right place, and overdubbing like a madman.

Today, we'd use a sampler, and it'd still be an awesome piece.  But to pull this off back then was beyond astounding, into the realm of the unthinkable.  The sheer amount of dedication and work to bring it about is just unfathomable.

The greatest thing about it is, the average person can enjoy to it.  It's not some extreme, wacked out, cold, classical-based electro-acoustic piece.  It's very jazzy, a little funky, almost poppy, and extraordinarily listenable.  If he had thrown some drums under it and managed to put a video together for MTV, I bet he would have had a top 40 hit, it's that accessible.  Well, I listen to some fucked up things, so maybe I'm not a great barometer for what's accessible, but I'm telling you, you could play this for your mom and she'd probably dig it.

The full piece, which is really more a suite of studies than one continuous piece, is nearly 30 minutes long.  I'm only giving you 'Part 1', which is how it's tracked on the CD.  The original John Somebody LP was released in 1982, but in 2004, Tzadik released a new remastered version on CD which includes two other pieces that are just as great.  Enjoy!

[You can listen to Scott Johnson's "John Somebody, pt. 1" by navigating to the post "Song064" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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