The Great Denny Zeitlin Sings!
From the Age of Aquarius to the Age of Isolation, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ composer and jazztronica wizard drops 1969 demo album, ‘The Name of This Terrain,’ in 2022
“I’m just really excited to actually have this new, very old album finally out.”
Veteran pianist/composer Denny Zeitlin never wanted the demo you’re hearing to get out.
That only made The Name of This Terrain even more of a forbidden fruit to the jazz fans, collectors, and independent record label producers out there.
The 1969 demo of multi-genre, multi-style music and lyrics simply wasn’t finished. It was made for a singer, not a trio of avowed instrumentalists discovering a whole new way of jazztronic expression…a sign of their times as young lions.
“Back in 1969, I was immersed in an electro-acoustic integration of jazz, rock, avant-garde classical, funk, and free-form music,” Zeitlin explained. “My long-time close friend [and concert promoter, the late] Bill Young, suggested we co-produce a project where I would write new music and lyrics, and my trio, with [drummer] George Marsh and [the late bassist] Mel Graves, would perform and sing the lyrics as a demo. Bill would try to interest a label in completing the album with professional singers, and supporting a tour [as Zeitgeist, German for ‘spirit of the times’].”
Unfortunately, the trio was ahead of its time, even in the late ‘60s, where anything goes. Young, with experience in a top commercial music production facility, couldn’t find any interest in the demo or idea.
“It turned out, there were no takers,” Zeitlin said in a recent YouTube interview with the Jazz Video Guy (“The Story Behind Denny Zeitlin’s The Name of This Terrain”). “The album was so far out and had so many genres in it — even though I felt it was powerfully integrated — record labels said, ‘We don’t have an established conduit for this. We like the music, but how are we gonna sell it?’ They didn’t feel there was any marketability at that time for it, so the album went on the shelf.”
After Young passed away of cancer in 2003, the demo got out anyway. Someone packed up the concert promoter’s stuff in his office and donated everything, including stacks of these demo LPs, to a Chicago Salvation Army. Soon, a “very low-grade international buzz” kicked off surrounding this demo album.
Zeitlin began receiving calls from fans, collectors, and record labels almost begging him to release the album in its entirety, which he steadfastly refused to do, because — hello? — it was a working demo, not meant for the public.
“I was taken aback at the prospect. Although I felt the music and lyrics were strong, none of us trio members had ever done any singing, and this demo album was never intended for release,” he continued. “I destroyed my copies, and for years successfully fended off inquiries…a dozen or so calls a year, and eventually getting emails about it. One guy in the Netherlands wrote me saying, ‘I’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a copy of this album.’ I couldn’t believe it, man!”
One guy in particular kept at it: Eothen Alapatt of Now-Again Records.
“He would circle back, enthusiastically proclaiming the album’s musical importance and the passion and emotional immediacy of the trio’s untrained vocal cords…. I would try to staunchly and politely tell him why I didn’t want this album released…. He would tell me, ‘I respect that, but I think this album is actually one of the important albums of the 20th century. I think the fact that you guys don’t have trained vocal chords is irrelevant compared to the immediacy emotionally of what you’re doing. I don’t know that professional singers would’ve sounded as good as you guys with the freshness of what you brought to the thing.’ I said, I appreciate that Eothen, but please, it’s not for release.”
In 2020, Zeitlin again turned Alapatt down, but then had a change of heart. At least in giving the demo a listen.
“I did the same dialogue with him, hung up the phone, but this time, turned to my wife Josephine and said, ‘Honey, we haven’t listened to this album in 50 years, maybe we oughta just put it on again.’”
Zeitlin was struck by the demo’s freshness, adventurous spirit, and enormous “passion of performance… I heard the mistakes in the singing. I heard that I didn’t hit every pitch, okay. That seemed, on this re-listening, far less important to me than the totality of this experience. This thing is worth hearing, this is worth getting this album out.”
He began to hear what the fans, collectors, and record label producers did, and found himself delighting in the new music, his signature integration of “rock and jazz and free-form music and electronics” — with lyrics that bubbled up from his unconscious…easygoing, audacious, wonderfully, cheekily derivative, sometimes naughty, indicative of the finger-snapping, groovy beatnik times. Yet, timeless too.
A brilliant, organic coming together of the celebratorily divergent.
“We rehearsed before we went into the studio, because the music is actually quite complex. There’s a lot of written-out sections, unusual time signatures that morph into others, and then there’s sections for free improvisation. So, the road map was something that we were clear on, but then, when we got onto the road, how we drive, how fast, all those things are what’s the heart of, excitement of creation at the moment in the studio… It flowed organically.”
The Name of This Terrain — out on CD and LP — features the technical wizardry and novel invention of three well-established, well-integrated musician friends feeling out the new material, letting go of personal constraints, self-consciousness, and the jazz artist’s natural inclination for perfection — and getting downright jiggy with it.
Zeitlin performs on acoustic piano, Farfisa organ, melodica, African thumb piano, Hohner clavinet, tambourine, and custom sound generating and altering devices. His compatriots, Marsh and Graves, do their thing on their respective instruments, as well as backup vocals.
The top six tracks percolate on a free jazz and rock electronica rhythm that is very familiar terrain indeed to the kids growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, heavy on the lighthearted jabs at taboo subjects and stream-of-consciousness equivocation indicative of the Baby Boomer generation.
Torn between caring too much and checking out.
“Are you hip to the name
Of this terrain
That stretches for miles inside of you?…Hey — you plant the trees here
You make the breeze here
Gotta dig up the bones of your mind…”
The title track instantly puts the Zeitlin trio in the vocal spotlight, and they wear their new roles well, with a casual, offhanded confidence meant for the business of putting down the road map for a vocalist who knows what he or she’s doing.
Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find any existing, established vocalist from the ‘60s to present who could as ably fill the role as these three jazz instrumentalists can.
Somehow, they fuse the quirky aptitude of their musical origins, jazz roots, and rock interest into both the music and lyrics. The words given life by the vocals seem a natural part of the music; the fourth instrument, if you will.
The moments of free jazz, gyrating Woodstock rock frenzy, and concentrated vocal outbursts Zeitlin talked about are all here, vibrating to a nuanced, strangely compelling frequency anyone can sync up to.
Every loosely interconnected note counts, from Zeitlin channeling a twisted Zappa-influenced Gregorian chant in the echo chamber of an outstretched Marsh drum solo, conjuring indigenous ayahuasca rituals, to the tweaking of a thumb-beat of an African rainforest gone amok and Graves coming in on his nostalgic 1960s bass-a-go-go intro/outro.
“You’re takin’ two steps forward, baby
Then you take one step back
You’re gettin’ near the doorway, baby
Open it up a crack
I’m out here saying
Give us a try — say yes, not why…”
“2 Steps Forward; 1 Step Back” is so totally ‘60s-retro in every way, the psychedelic synth power plays tripping over wavering sync meters, the hepcat Monkees starter club vocalization, the deceptively throwaway lyrics catching you singing along, as you go about vacuuming your life away.
Zeitlin pounces on his keys, as if he’s about to go down a different, more rockabye rabbit hole, when — seamlessly, mind you — on the same wavelength, his vocals come in, dragging the vague, Tiger-Beat-pop ditty down into very grown-up terrain, G to PG in a hurry…hovering between a mindless dance jerk to the real deal.
If you know what I mean.
The best part of this six-minute-plus tune is Zeitlin zooming and honing in on his synth-board-keys with increasing intensity and frequency, throwing in some gnarly mixes, rushes, and tonal imbalances, before reverting to ‘60s type, easing the gas on this roller coaster time machine.
“Goin’ to a place far, far away
Farther than the eye can see
It’s gonna take some doin’
But the admission is free
The admission is free…”
“Gonna Take You Away” immediately picks up on a little James Brown do-wop turnaround, a little B-52s walkie-talkie, and a little bee-buzzing, wah-wah fandango.
Like a diesel engine revving up for a cross-country trip with Dr. Who.
Or, doing The Swim and Watusi on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” variety show right alongside peekaboo Goldie Hawn.
It’s a Beach-Boys-surf back in time, jumbled up on sticks and stones, and Zeitlin’s frothy promise to go to a place far, far away, where the escapist admission is free, and fine.
Off-pitch? Hardly.
“Pleistocene flyboys — a fright on the cliffs
Scanning horizons for interpersonal tiffs
Serve reflections for supper to moribund stiffs
What’s in it for you?”
The accidental, Beatles-“Yellow Submarine”-inspired beatnik poetry that falls from “What’s In It For You?,” with pinpoint accuracy and offbeat slam-dunks, could’ve easily been jimmied open by a Frank Zappa, an oft-copied, indie-alt-artist of the endlessly forgiving Boomer era, the first truly successful one, majorly influenced by the rebellious ‘60s and his own outré-blasé style.
Point of fact, in the hallow of all that Hendrix freak show shit and wallow-wallow-marshmallow, key-sync navel-gazing, Zeitlin kinda sounds a lot like Zappa (and the Blues Brothers), glibly observing — with every slap of Marsh’s skin on skin — our sick and twisted state of affairs, while dropping sage bombs in between the straight-faced lines.
The Zappa narration alternates with the dull-toned chorus of Zeitlin and his makeshift singers. Duly, coolly noted.
“…Because, uh, your mother and I would, uh, like to, uh, be able to, uh —
Can, can we go on behind the shed and try it? —
Excuse me —
No, Ruth! —
Excuse me —
You can’t go back to your work now!
Excuse me —
Your life has been miraculously spared —
Peruse me, abuse me! —
There are great days ahead!”
Talk about Zappa, with his flitting, fleeting twists and turns, carnal performance art, and many interwoven thoughts voiced aloud, haphazardly. “Free Piece” goes there, opening on a hide-and-seek bass-piano-drum intro. Growling, flirting, Monty Python-ing through courtship confines, avant-gospel blasphemies, and ye olde psychosexual frustration.
Calling Dr. Freud: Zeitlin hilariously plays the theme to “Sesame Street” while talking about cannibalism.
Deliciously amorphous, manic-reptilian (yes, I see you, Jim Morrison and your drawling Riders of the Storm), and peckishly, tortuously prurient, riffing/faux-scatting/pixelating on a spit-balling high. The kind of song the late Gotham king of brutal (un-PC) comedy, Lenny Bruce, would absolutely get a kick out of.
“There ain’t gonna be no war no more.”
“Rubber Biscuit,” “Sesame Street Theme,” and every other opening theme to every 1960s crime drama ever produced… a quick cheat sheet, glancing blows through our Baby Boomer pop culture…curling up around a seductive, winding synth Hail Mary, sputtering with “Rice crops!” and a fart sound.
Yeah, that.
The sacred and the absurd.
Welcome to the 20th century, folks.
“Poison! It’s poison!
Gotta get the antidote
Where is the antidote?
Give us the antidote, please
Wizard of many names and faces
Savior of other earths and places
We’ve never been…”
Zeitlin’s trio gives the wah-wah and the ever-darkening, but insistently floral Liberace key flourishes a workout in the folkie-talkie samba-like musical, “The Wizard,” with a “Gandalf!! Gandalf!! (crowd exultation)” rounding the quarter mark.
This is probably what Zeitlin referred to regarding his earnest but off-key, breathy singing on the upturn. No biggie, really. For the entire tune is a fun, jam-packed frolic, expressing his favorite nods to signatures, styles, and piano-scatting tempos — in a mostly intimate, “We’re among friends, here” dialogue.
“Gandalf — where are ya goin’?
Is there no way to make you stay this day?”
“Gandalf!! Gandalf!! (crowd exultation)” rounds out the demo-LP-turned-album, as if dropped in from a half-forgotten musical about a fantasy-fiction wizard on display, sitting on the shelf…waiting to be real.
Sounds of a raucous late-1960s rock concert on a Broadway “Hair” bender ensue — encased in Zeitlin’s acoustic piano memory — before being overtaken and eased into an electrified taffy lullaby, blowing up the oozing, swing-sway lava lamp of a mizithra pilgrim sneaking in extra slices of grandma’s Black Forest Cake or fill-in-the-blanks, beneath the covers of his tented bed-fort in the dying light of patchwork-quilt summers.
“Thinking back on that recording session over 50 years ago, I remember how much fun it was,” Zeitlin mused. “The rapport with George and Mel was terrific, and there was plenty room for improvisation amidst complex tunes and arrangements. There are totally free sections, including an utterly wacky ‘Free Piece,’ where we first recorded a free improvisation leaving a lot of space, and then, each getting a head phone feed of the music, free-associated to phrases from a dozen books opened to random pages.”
Artist quotes from Jazz Video Guy’s YouTube interviews and a press release.