James ‘Blood’ Ulmer – Are You Glad To Be In America? (1980) (Rough Trade – ROUGH 16)

Well, greetings for the “new” year of 2025. That’s all I will say about that. This is the second record from guitarist James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, who had once been in Ornette Coleman’s band. While his debut featured Ornette and was produced by him, this one shows how comfortable he was doing his own thing, while being produced by Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola fame.

It’s firey, squonky, jittery, and hard-hitting. It’s often intentionally repetitive. If Blood’s guitar occasionally sounds like a chicken that just ate a whole bottle of Adderall it found spilled on the ground, and then followed that by railing a line of PCP, there’s also some tunefulness here. The horn melodies that skip lightly over the taut rhythms of the opening track, “Layout”, are very Coleman-esque. In fact, I would swear he lifted them directly from a Coleman composition, although I’ll be damned if I could tell you which one. It’s both catchy and forgettable, here one moment and gone the next. That ephemeral quality is one of the aspects many listeners often find challenging about Coleman’s music, if not outright annoying. Whether one sees is as a kind of musical zen or compositional dementia probably depends on your temperament.

One characteristic Ulmer didn’t share with his mentor was Ornette’s seeming aversion to any palpable nods to blues and swing. Nothing here may be exactly toe-tapping. Blood’s early music was funky, but fast. The blues is in there, but it’s staccato and frenetic, never laid back. His group would have sounded more at home on a bill with Fishbone than with The Gap Band. Blood also made an album called “No Wave” with one of his other projects, Music Revelation Ensemble, and although there isn’t any direct relationship to the NYC art/music movement that I know about, they were probably kindred spirits to some of the music coming out of that whole bag, at least the ones that leaned towards weirdly-danceable atonality.

But Blood’s groups could also pull out catchy head-bobbing jams with vocals like “Jazz Is The Teacher (Funk Is The Preacher)” and the title track “Are You Glad To Be In America?,” which may be some sort of “Are You Experienced?” for the Reagan era. Like that song, it’s structured mostly around a drone generated by a single chord, but there are also melodic flourishes that recall Sly & The Family Stone’s “There’s A Riot Going On”. Good heady stuff and it has the lyric, “And Superman, he lives next door”, so how can you not like it?

All of which is to say that I think James Blood Ulmer could have been making more commercially appealing blues / soul / jazz-funk if only that damned chicken wasn’t always eating up all his Adderall

1 Layout 5:02
2 Pressure 3:49
3 Interview 3:06
4 Jazz Is The Teacher (Funk Is The Preacher) 4:20
5 See-Through 3:51
6 Time Out 5:20
7 T.V. Blues 4:32
8 Light Eyed 3:57
9 Revelation March 3:19
10 Are You Glad To Be In America? 4:38

Alto Saxophone – Oliver Lake (tracks: 1, 4 to 8)
Cornet – Olu Dara (tracks: 4, 5, 7)
Drums – G. Calvin Weston* (tracks: 1, 2, 4 to 8, 10), Ronald Shannon Jackson (tracks: 1 to 3, 5 to 10)
Electric Bass – Amin Ali
Guitar – James Blood Ulmer
Producer [Assistant For Original Release] – Mayo Thompson, Roger Trilling
Producer [Original Release] – James Blood Ulmer
Rhythm Guitar – William Patterson (tracks: 4)
Tenor Saxophone – David Murray
Vocals – James Blood Ulmer (tracks: 4, 10)

A1 - Layout

A2 - Pressure

A3 - Interview

A4 - Jazz Is The Teacher (Funk Is The Preacher)

B4 - Revelation March

B5 - Are You Glad To Be In America

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LINEAGE: vinyl 1980 Rough Trade ROUGH 16; Pro-Ject RM-5SE with Audio Tecnica Signet TK7E cartridge; Accubox battery power supply; Pro-Ject Tube Box S2 preamp; Audioquest Black Mamba and Pangea Premier interconnect cables; RME Babyface Pro interface ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 192khz; Click Repair; further clicks and pops removed manually with Adobe Audition 3.0; dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced. Converted to FLAC in either Trader’s Little Helper or dBPoweramp. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename, Replay Gain tags added in Foobar2000.

THIS RECORD HAS BEEN RELEASED WITH A DIZZYING ARRAY OF ALTERNATE COVER ARTWORK: