Sounds From the Margins

Suren ran a cult favourite hardcore record label (Burrito Records), owned a brick-and-mortar punk-focused record store (Sound Idea Records in Brandon, Florida), and he’s helmed several underground hardcore bands that can boast a loyal fanbase to this day (Failure Face and Murder-Suicide Pact, among others).

But over the past several years, Suren has turned to writing as his primary means of expression—something that makes considerable sense given his talent for it and his degree in journalism from the University of Florida (something often overlooked in online biographies).

Bob Suren’s first book, 2015’s Crate Digger, was an exciting memoir of a life lived in the DIY hardcore scene, told by collecting all the underground punk records that influenced the character, values, and direction of his life.

Now comes Bob’s newest work, but on a much different topic.

Weird Music That Goes On Forever: A Punk’s Guide to Loving Jazz is an entertaining and humorous guide for those looking to discover new musical frontiers that lie beyond the sometimes musically redundant world of three-chord punk.

The book is a breath of fresh air. It melds together two musical worlds often thought of as impossibly disparate. Suren does this in an erudite and fun style.

“Jazz and punk have a lot in common,” Suren writes. “Both started in the underground, largely performed by marginalised people. Jazz musicians were abusing drugs before Sid Vicious was even born. And while artists of each genre have been accused of ‘selling out’, both styles are still very unpopular in their purest form.” Or at least very underground.

For punks navigating the often complicated world of jazz, Weird Music provides a wealth of helpful reference points: “Record labels like Blue Note, Columbia, and Prestige were the Dischord, SST, and Alternative Tentacles of jazz,” he notes. “Their logos are symbols of quality.”

Likewise, jazz magazine DownBeat, founded in 1934 and still going strong, is “the Maximum RocknRoll of jazz”, Suren says. Similar touchstones are mentioned throughout the book, and these comparisons help get non-jazz folks their bearings in this new musical terrain.

For a more direct link between jazz and punk, one only has to think of, for example, Lora Logic and her famous saxophone playing in X-Ray Spex. Lora Logic’s post-X-Ray Spex band, Essential Logic, is a perfect example.

Or how bands like The Cravats and The Very Things, affiliated with Crass Records (and its Corpus Christi offshoot), had an oddly jazzy side. Or how many of New York’s No Wave bands incorporated aspects of free jazz into their sound, epitomised by the late James Chance.

In fact, the more one analyses punk, the more apparent the jazz influences become.

In a 1985 review of Black Flag’s jazz-influenced The Process of Weeding Out EP, Robert Palmer wrote in The New York Times that “now it is the punk rockers, rather than the jazz rockers, who most successfully create atmosphere and convey feelings and ideas in their improvisations”.

While punks still debate the merits of Black Flag’s late-career turn to free jazz—something Suren discusses both in his book and in our interview—the fact remains that the leap from punk into jazz isn’t as great as one might assume.

Oliver Sheppard: What made you want to write this book?

Bob Suren: Jazz isn’t supposed to be exclusive. Punk rock wasn’t exclusive, either. In the beginning, at least, it wasn’t. Jazz was outsider music. Almost all the artists were Black, and they fought against racial discrimination their entire careers, playing strange music that most of the world couldn’t get into.

On a more surface level, you could talk about the influence of jazz on, say, the Black Flag album The Process of Weeding Out. Or you could hear jazz in a band from West Virginia, Th’ Inbred.

There are many jazzy bits in punk rock, and you might not even be aware that it’s jazz because you haven’t listened to jazz enough to say, “Oh, that sounds like a Max Roach piece.”

After I wrote Weird Music, the publicist at my publisher, Microcosm, said, “In the book, you named the Minutemen and Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop. Would you mind if we sent those people some copies to see how they reacted to it? Mike Watt is a huge jazz fan, Thurston Moore is a huge jazz fan, and so is Iggy Pop.” I said, “Of course!”

Oliver Sheppard: You mention jazz’s origins as street-level music, as the music of the dispossessed. Which punk was supposed to be, too. But jazz got institutionalised in a way that punk hasn’t. You won’t find a “Chair of Punk” at the Lincoln Center.

Bob Suren: Jazz had an 80-year head start on punk rock. It might catch up yet. For example, Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye created a permanent punk rock exhibit for the Smithsonian. And there’s that punk rock museum in Las Vegas.

Oliver Sheppard: How would you define jazz?

Bob Suren: Early in the book, I discuss the word’s etymology. There’s a funny bit about a theory that “jazz” is related to sex; the word “orgasm” is shortened to ‘jasm.

Jazz is improvisational music influenced by traditional African music mixing with what was considered European popular music at the time.

Oliver Sheppard: Europe seemed to take jazz to heart much quicker than America. Why do you think that happened?

Bob Suren: Just about every African American artist I write about seemed to conclude, “I’m busting my ass in the United States. I’m getting beat up by cops. I can’t walk through the front door of a club. And I have to use the back door and different bathrooms just because I’m Black.”

And then they’ll go to Europe and be treated like serious artists. They get paid well and treated with equality. This underscored how racist America was. Miles Davis goes to Paris, and it’s a massive deal there.

Oliver Sheppard: It was.

Bob Suren: But it was American imports that became popular there, not so much their own artists. There are some, but the Americans struck gold there.

In the book, I mention Chet Baker staying on tour in Europe for years. Some of that was because he was avoiding the IRS, but most of it was because the Europeans appreciated him and jazz more. And because he liked European drugs.

But Europe was always much more friendly to jazz than America originally was. Many jazz artists who went there eventually had some desire to come back to America to either change things here or make their mark and have a career here in some way.

Oliver Sheppard: Ornette Coleman was a change agent. In the book, you call Ornette Coleman “the Butthole Surfer of jazz”.

Bob Suren: Yes. Ornette Coleman was a pioneer of free jazz, and when he broke out in the late 1950s, a lot of people in jazz were like, “Okay, jazz is wild and freaky, but it’s not this freaky.”

Coleman and the free jazz guys crossed the line in jazz at that time, starting in the late 1950s, which is kind of what the Butthole Surfers did in punk.

When they (first) heard the Butthole Surfers in the early 1980s, some punks were on board. Others said, “Nope, I’m out of here,” because they sounded weird.

In jazz, it was the same with Ornette Coleman. He was just too much for some people.

Oliver Sheppard: You talk about a legendary altercation between jazz drummer Max Roach and Ornette Coleman. Was Coleman’s free jazz experimentation upsetting?

Bob Suren: Yes, Max Roach had to punch Ornette Coleman in the face because he didn’t know what else to do.

Ornette Coleman’s big album, 1959’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, had just come out. The Max Roach incident happened shortly after that.

Roach had been playing more straight-style jazz with Miles Davis. When he went to see Coleman play, he punched him in the face.

It illustrates, on the one hand, the humourless, gatekeeper-type thing that can exist in jazz, but also how revolutionary Coleman was, even within jazz.

In effect, he said, “You can’t play music like that.”