Ulmer shared with Jimi Hendrix a way of intrepid hazard in his guitar solos, together with the expressive timbral and textural units that usually name the phrase “psychedelic” to thoughts.
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Paul Hawthorne/Getty Photos North America
James Blood Ulmer, whose jabbering electrical guitar and enthralling vocal warble made him a singular pressure in free-funk and avant-garde jazz, died on June 3 on the Higher Eastside Rehabilitation and Nursing Heart in New York Metropolis. He was 86.
His dying was confirmed in a press release from his household, which famous that “his music was fearless, and so was his spirit.”
Fearlessness was elementary in Ulmer’s music, which got here firmly rooted within the blues however might typically sound heat-warped, hallucinatory and feral. These qualities, together with an openness to risk, endeared him to the free-jazz forefather Ornette Coleman, with whom he began collaborating within the early Seventies. Ulmer turned essentially the most devoted acolyte of Coleman’s idea of Harmolodics, which frees musicians from strict adherence to a key. The system, which perplexed many musicians and critics, made instinctual sense to Ulmer, who tuned every of his six strings to the identical notice.
He developed a method that blended drones with dissonance, composure with abandon, and located musicians who might vary as far and freely as he did — vanguardists just like the tenor saxophonist David Murray and drummers Ronald Shannon Jackson and G. Calvin Weston. Masking a present by this cohort in 1979, the New York Occasions critic Robert Palmer praised “the freshest and most visceral new music this reviewer has heard these days.” Two years later, marking the discharge of Ulmer’s album Free Lancing, Palmer declared him “essentially the most authentic electrical guitarist to emerge because the late Jimi Hendrix.”
Ulmer shared with Hendrix a way of intrepid hazard in his guitar solos, together with the expressive timbral and textural units that usually name the phrase “psychedelic” to thoughts; his vocal fashion might evoke Hendrix’s, too. However he was altogether extra daring with tonality, and in efficiency he was a wildcard: he might dig right into a syncopated funk pocket in a single second and succumb to a fever dream within the subsequent.
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Born Willie James Ulmer in St. Matthews, South Carolina on Feb. 8, 1940, he was the eldest of eight youngsters, and acquired his first guitar from his father, the Baptist preacher James David Ulmer, at age 4. He sang alongside his father within the Southern Sons Quartette, however left the ministry after rising enamored of rock ‘n’ roll and the blues.
After highschool, Ulmer moved to Pittsburgh, backing R&B teams just like the Savoys and the Del Vikings on guitar. He subsequently lived and labored in Columbus, Ohio, and Detroit, Mich., earlier than shifting to New York in 1971. He held a gentle gig in the home band at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem for the higher a part of a 12 months, and fashioned bonds with avant-gardists like drummer Rashied Ali and saxophonist Arthur Blythe.
By way of Blythe, who had achieved a measure of prominence working with the Gil Evans Orchestra and drummer Jack DeJohnette (amongst others), Ulmer discovered his method onto a significant label. He performed on Blythe’s Columbia albums Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illusions, and was quickly provided his personal report deal. He launched three albums for Columbia or CBS in as a few years: Free Lancing (1981), Black Rock (1982), and Odyssey (1983).
The final of these launched a working band by the identical identify, with Charles Burnham on violin and Walter Benbow on drums. Amongst its standout tracks was a track that Ulmer had initially recorded in 1980 for the British label Tough Commerce: “Are You Glad to Be in America?”
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Throughout this stretch within the ’80s, Ulmer was so breathlessly lauded within the music press that it inevitably introduced pushback. The critic Greg Tate was amongst those that pushed, respectfully. “Blood does not play sensuous, explosive space-blues strains like Hendrix,” he wrote in The Village Voice in 1981. “What he does play is shrill, disjointed fragments, nervous bits and rickety items tied collectively by a staggered however wryly swinging thematic sensibility.” This piece, “Knee Deep in Blood Ulmer,” would later be the very first in Tate’s lauded assortment Flyboy within the Buttermilk: Essays on Up to date America. It landed on an admiring evaluation, pinging off two transmitters of American musical originality: “Think about Andrew Hill refiltered by way of Mississippi Fred McDowell and you have got a deal with on how Blood’s eccentric guitar suits in with the various ridims.”
Ulmer’s profession stretched nicely previous this most seen interval, and into different musical byways. He launched greater than two dozen albums after his years on Columbia’s label, often delivering a landmark like Harmolodic Guitar with Strings in 1993. In the course of the early aughts, he made a sequence of well-regarded blues albums produced by fellow guitar slinger Vernon Reid; amongst them are Memphis Blood: The Solar Periods (2001) and No Escape from the Blues: The Electrical Woman Periods (2003).
He performed his closing live performance on the 2024 Detroit Jazz Pageant, retiring quickly after resulting from deteriorating well being. The earlier 12 months, throughout a two-night residency at Photo voltaic Fable in Philadelphia, he performed a solo guitar-and-vocals live performance that distilled all the deep, darkish mystique in his sound, together with soul cries of ruefulness and redemption.
