Galt MacDermot
Up
from the Basement:
Unreleased Tracks Vol. 1
(Kilmarnock)
[Shuggie Otis was reviewed in this same piece.]
... As a teenage music student, Otis was assigned to write imaginary soundtracks; meanwhile, composer Galt MacDermot was writing real ones, scoring HAIR in '67 for Joe Papp's Public Theater before the musical blew up on Broadway. MacDermot's gritty, piano-driven instrumentals enlisted boom-bap experts like drummer Bernard Purdie and have been recently reanimated via Busta Rhymes and Prince Paul. Up from the Basement culls unreleased material spanning '68 to '73, including funk-outs written for a Shakespearean festival long before The Bombity of Errors. Straight from acetate, some of these oldies ("Woe Is Me") hiss and crackle at their first sunshine in decades. "Ripped Open by Metal Explosions" has a somber piano and guitar that'll tingle the shrapnel in your hip socket. The malevolent strings of "Rhinoceros Main Theme" ebb into a gorgeous trumpet solo by Jon Faddis, uncle of West Coast indie hip-hop neo-freak Quasimoto, who cribbed MacDermot on his sample-bent LP The Unseen. But MacDermot and Otis deserve our love because they made great music, not because they've been sampled to life or because the hipster in the Fred Kirby cowpoke shirt is suddenly on Rare Groove's dick. Get with 'em. They'll love you back.
Dave Tompkins
from SPIN