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This year, on a sweaty March evening at the Grace Emily Hotel, I went to see Kristin Hersh. She was touring her 2023 solo album Clear Pond Road and reading excerpts from her Vic Chesnutt memoir ‘Don’t Suck, Don’t Die’ as well as her contribution to the FUTURES series ‘The Future of Songwriting’. By happy coincidence, this was the day before the release of the latest Throwing Muses record ‘Moonlight Concessions’, and she had brought some ‘very illegal’ advanced copies of the vinyl along with her (mine was already in the mail). It wasn’t an especially prolific moment for an artist with near thirty albums and five books… if you’re able to catch one of her shows you’re as likely as I was to find yourself in a nexus of releases.

Hersh might be best known as the primary songwriter and creative force behind Throwing Muses, the band which, among many things, brought the weird and eerie to the 4AD sound. I’m convinced that they are one strategically placed song in Fight Club away from selling out theatres, they’re that important in the trajectory of ’80s college rock.

Alternately she might be known under her own name, where she has released twelve solo albums spanning dark acoustic chamber folk, alternative rock, Appalachian songs and more. While certainly not an artist who can be pigeon-holed, her song ‘Your Ghost’ featuring Michael Stipe was an underground hit, and on the four occasions I’ve managed to see her perform solo she has ended her set with that number.

It’s less likely that she would be known for 50 Foot Wave, the hard rock power trio. The Fire Records website describes them as ‘Kristin Hersh’s other band’ and their music as ‘grunge melancholy and dronecore menace’. I think that’s fair, particularly in reference to their 2022 record Black Pearl.

Golden Ocean catches the band in an earlier mode. There’s a lot of grunge, but not much in the way of melancholy. There’s brutal riffing. There’s an abundance of time signature changes. There’s honestly some of the best and least clichéd hard rock drumming this side of Jimmy Chamberlain.

Zooming out, you can hear this record coming when you listen to the self-titled Throwing Muses record from 2003. The sudden time signature and groove changes, Hersh’s developing vocal snarl, a grunge-inflected power and barre chord approach on guitars. Earlier Muses music often involved interlocking picked and arpeggiated guitar lines from Hersh and Donelly, reminiscent of the jangle of 80s indie music. On the 2003 record we start to hear an angularity to the guitar parts and boldness to the arrangements. Earlier (and more recent) Hersh music could be meditative and textural but in 2003 things were becoming more jagged.

Vocally, Hersh is a powerhouse on Golden Ocean. In her early career her voice had an agility but also when required a captivating frailty. This makes way for what can only be described as a roar, part Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey, part Black Francis or Kurt Cobain. Check out Pneuma from 2:30 mins onwards… I’ve probably irritated my throat more than once trying to sing along.

While I want to give credit to long-time Muses and 50 Foot Wave bassist Bernard Georges, always solid with a great tone, the other major force on this record is drummer Rob Ahlers. I believe, though I can’t find the reference, that Ahlers came at the recommendation of Muses drummer Dave Narcizo after he was unable to be involved in the project. Narcizo is a strong contributor in his own right, navigating and supporting Hersh’s twisty compositions in an accessible way, and with his own distinctive style. (His prominent use of China cymbal in an indie/alternate setting is notable, particularly when otherwise he is quite sparing with crash cymbals).

Ahlers is a monster on this album. The pure velocity and belting tone of Jimmy Chamberlain with the inventiveness and pocket of someone like Rob Ellis (another PJ Harvey reference… there’s more to come). Where Narcizo would write a drum part to give the audience as much of a solid foothold around Hersh’s songwriting wrinkles as possible, Ahlers highlights them and doubles down on them. The result is, at times, something akin to math-rock, where the expected groove is always being subverted. But unlike those bands, there’s also a maturity to the drum parts. The multitudinous fills all serve a purpose. It draws out playfulness and bombast in Hersh’s writing… you get the sense she was enjoying being handed the keys to this particular high-performance vehicle.

This early incarnation of 50 Foot Wave feels like Hersh is taking her cue from PJ Harvey’s first two records, Dry and Rid of Me. On the surface there’s a small lyrical reference… ‘gonna wash that man right out of my hair’ from Bone China recalls the same repeated line from Harvey’s Sheela-Na-Gig.

Beyond this, Hersh also uses some of the polyrhytmic ideas Harvey was making the basis of a number of her early songs. Much like Ahlers, Rob Ellis wrote drum parts which sometimes juxtaposed Harvey’s songs, underpinning them often with variations of quarter-note triplets creating a seductive push and pull feel. While I can understand PJ eventually wanting a support band that just played the songs as expected, and she got that on To Bring You My Love, it’s those first two records that are really captivating for me in no small part due to Ellis’s contributions.

Elsewhere there are some fairly classic half-time/double-time punk rock moves, but it is done so effortlessly and naturally that these don’t feel at all like imported rock clichés. Ginger Park is a great example and a real showcase of Ahlers ability to grab a song by the scruff of the neck.

The production from Ethan Allen is fantastic. Fairly liberal with the compression, it nonetheless gives each instrument wiggle room whilst remaining near the red most of the way. The drums are close to my ideal recorded drum sound, in no small part because Ahlers’s tone is just so good. Some people just know how to hit a snare drum. The guitars are big and buttery. It’s just a great mix for a power trio. Interestingly, Allen had previously produced other Hersh works including the somewhat more relaxed affair Sky Motel.

50 Foot Wave would put out one more album in this style, the 2009 record Power + Light, before becoming a little cleaner and a little more ‘math-oriented’ on the With Love From The Men’s Room and Bath White EPs. After a 6 year gap they would return with Black Pearl in 2022 which indeed is awash with ‘dronecore menace’ as the blurb suggests, the twists and turns of their earlier work smoothed out and replaced with sinister atmosphere. Yet I feel that Golden Ocean holds up as 50 Foot Wave’s definitive statement and a forgotten gem of 2005. As Pitchfork said, when they used to be occasionally interesting, ‘… one of Hersh’s former labelmates posited that motherhood equaled mental freeze. No doubt said labelmate never envisioned Kristin Hersh, mother of four, entering her 21st year as a professional musician, leading a group that runs laps around most rock bands.’*

Kristin Hersh recently uploaded an Instagram post of what looks like a mixing console with a print of the photo at the top of this post. Exciting things could be on their way.

*wow, there was a time when popular writers could expect the audience to catch a reference

Something I’m intending to do with this blog is write a little about albums or tunes I’ve come to love over the years, with a particular focus on music which might have slipped through the cracks or fallen off the radar.

‘Tom Cat’ by Lee Morgan is one such album. The story regarding the sequencing of releases of Morgan’s albums has been told elsewhere, but I’ll summarise here. By the time this album was recorded in August 1964, Morgan had become a significant commodity as far as the Blue Note record label was concerned thanks to the success of his album The Sidewinder and the use of its title track in a Chrysler commercial in 1963. A fact that’s difficult to grapple with today is that the tune The Sidewinder cracked the Billboard Top 100, a tune which is undeniably catchy and joyous, but also features some pretty exploratory improvisation from Morgan and Joe Henderson especially, at least by the standards of ‘mainstream’ music charts.

The result of this success is that albums such as Tom Cat and the celebrated Search For The New Land were shelved. In the case of New Land the delay was only from 1964 until 1966, but in the case of Tom Cat the album remained unreleased until 1980, eight years after his death. For this reason alone I can understand why Tom Cat isn’t often regarded as an important marker in the progression of 1960s jazz, but these kinds of conversations about the historical importance of an album, whether the music within represents a progression for the artists or something novel… these things don’t matter so much for me.

Onto the actual music… the first thing to note is that the lineup is a kind of alternate reality Jazz Messengers with a front line of Morgan, Jackie McLean and Curtis Fuller, with McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw and Art Blakey in the rhythm section. This invites some comparisons to Blakey’s ’60s groups, in particular what I consider the two classic Jazz Messengers lineups: the Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, Jymie Merritt group who made albums such as The Freedom Rider and A Night in Tunisia, and the group featuring Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Shorter, Merritt or Reggie Workman and Cedar Walton on piano who made the classic Free For All among a number of classics. The group Morgan assembled for Tom Cat was a who’s who of Jazz Messengers alumni, including Jackie McLean who appears on a few mid-’50s Messengers albums. The one exception, and a major figure in the Tom Cat ensemble is pianist McCoy Tyner. Two things to note here: Firstly, Tyner and Messengers member Cedar Walton in the ’60s were not an universe away from each other in terms of style. I find their hard-bop inside/outside approaches quite similar at points. Secondly, Tyner did appear with Blakey on the latter’s A Jazz Message (not an official Messengers release), along with Sonny Stitt… a great record! I personally find Blakey, Tyner and Walton have deeply authoritative and assured time feels, and the dialogue they have at that level is always thrilling for me.

Lee Morgan was, of course, part of Jazz Messengers lineups which featured composers with styles which pointed in quite different directions regarding the trajectory of jazz in the 1960s. Benny Golson and Bobby Timmons (who wrote Moanin’, perhaps the tune most identified with the Jazz Messengers), brought a distinctively gospel-infused sound to their writing, particularly on their most well known tunes. On the other hand Wayne Shorter, who Morgan played alongside in both the Jazz Messengers and on Shorter’s own albums (including his debut record as well as Night Dreamer, arguably Shorter’s best), was perhaps the composer who most defines the ‘mid-’60s sound’, with his blending of iconic melody writing and harmonic innovations. On Tom Cat, Morgan was at the helm of a Jazz Messengers-like ensemble and we get to hear his own compositional voice in this context.

The result is something probably closer to Timmons and Golson, but there is an undeniable influence of Shorter in the mix. The blues was never far from Morgan at any point of his career and it is certainly present in his writing here: the tune Tom Cat itself broadly follows a blues form, while Twice Around is essentially a contrafact of Nat Adderley’s ‘Work Song’.

Yet there are a few traces of the modal harmony that Morgan would have been exposed to playing Shorter’s compositions with Blakey’s band, in addition to his experience playing on John Coltrane’s ‘Blue Train’, the title track of which uses the same technique Morgan uses on Tom Cat: using the form and chord changes of the blues, but harmonising the horns in that distinctively modal way using scale tone triads.

These techniques, combined with what was becoming Morgan’s distinctive melodic sensibility, make pieces like Tom Cat and Rigormortis really memorable and effective.

Jackie McLean plays with notable clarity on this recording. One thing I admire about his playing is the completeness of his phrases; ideas emerge fully formed and structured yet without the dispassion that at times crept into someone like Sonny Rollins’ more motivic solos. There’s a certain way that McLean’s clarity of thought is a great support role for Morgan and his more exploratory moments, much like Herbie Hancock does on other Morgan records (Hancock the Sideman was a master in this period of building a solo from the smallest cell of an idea and carrying it through all its permutations and potentialities. See live recordings of the Miles Davis Second Great Quintet from 1965 to 1967… sometimes the music disintegrates before Hancock puts the pieces back together again).

McCoy Tyner at this period is more known for his work with John Coltrane’s Classic Quartet, where he was painting with huge brush stokes of quartal harmony and colour. On Tom Cat he seemingly returns to his style from a couple of years before, such as on albums like Reaching Fourth… the pentatonic runs and stomping left hand 5ths are there, but there are lots of blues and bebop-like passages also. Yet it’s worth noting that in the same year as Tom Cat, Tyner recorded his Duke Ellington tribute record and was appearing on Joe Henderson and Shorter albums. It’s important to remember that even though Tyner’s ’60s style, broadly defined, has been digested so thoroughly by subsequent piano players that a mention of his name calls up a specific system of chord voicings and scales, he was in fact a versatile player who could adapt to the setting he found himself in.

Art Blakey’s role is an interesting one on Tom Cat. I recall Richard Cook and Brian Morton writing in their Penguin Guide to Jazz that Blakey showed a unique ability to understand and accompany Thelonious Monk’s music. He plays a similar role here on Tom Cat, bringing all his iconic fills and press rolls, but always being ‘in’ the music, be it the feel and time changes of Twice Around or the double-time moments of Tyner’s Twilight Mist. It’s fun to hear Morgan and Blakey trading solos, with Blakey deploying many of his iconic lines, knowing Morgan has probably traded fours with these exact drum phrases before.

Considering it with all of the aformentioned context Tom Cat feels like a document of ‘high hard-bop’, one of the brightest moments of a jazz style which blended complex multi-part writing of the kind we hear on Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth, while retaining and emphasising memorable melodies and danceable rhythms. Within a few years the music was venturing into more ‘free’ terrain or going electric in the form of jazz fusion. For this reason it’s understandable that an album like this in 1980 would have seemed unremarkable. But as I’ve hopefully described, Tom Cat is a wonderful collection of great writing, tackled by some of the true greats of the music.