M-E-C - Music News » 2007

In this age of file-sharing, music blogs, and Nuggets inspired compilations of any/all sorts, it seems nary an unearthed gem remains hidden. The obscurity of decades past has become more and more of an antiquity; even the casual listener can now have at hand hundreds of artists and albums who, in the days before the information superhighway, might’ve likely remain undiscovered by all but the most dedicated of record collectors and tape traders. The release, then, of Lee Rockey Music, comes as a surprise. Here’s a guy who was making forward-looking, wholly out music in the 1960s, an early collaborator with Smegma, and his name and work remained virtually unknown until De Stijl’s reissue, of this, his first solo lp.

Rockey was an accomplished jazz drummer, playing in Portland, Oregon, and New York City, and appearing on some of Herbie Mann’s early albums. The sounds that make up Lee Rockey Music, however, are far from anything Rockey might have played in even his most adventurous jazz pairings. The lp, full of early synthesizer, strings, and percussion, is a platter of bracingly modern (for its time, at least) sound. On the album’s cover, Rockey is playing a violin, but the electronics are as much the album’s star, blurting and bleating in arrested squirts of analog emission. Rockey’s violin is often echoed, his playing in melodic fragments set atop a buzz or pulse calling insistently from the background. Rockey’s wholly non-linear improvisations contain some of that simplistic wonder in sound so often generated by the pioneers of electronic music, but his addition of strings and other voices into the fray tends to add a textural component that focuses on the qualities of the synthesized sound with respect to its surroundings, not simply its novel nature of the instrument’s output.

Lee Rockey died in 2002, and though there’s little information provided on what he was up to during the past two decades or so. De Stijl’s press for the album hints that there could be more of Rockey’s music on the way, and, from the sounds of what’s going on here, there’s likely more interesting music lurking somewhere with Rockey’s name attached. Ju Suk Reet Meate’s liner notes relay the story of a 1976 multimedia performance of Rockey’s that must have been pretty mind blowing, and one can only hope that De Stijl can dig deeper into the archives for more material from Mr. Rockey, who deserves renown that remains, as yet, unbestowed.

Posted on August 26th, 2007 by admin
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