From the article "The Ageless Poetry of Ed Askew" by David Shirley, www.brooklynrail.org
Askew first honed his songwriting and performing skills in New Haven while earning an art degree at Yale in the mid-1960’s, including a brief interlude as a singer (though not an instrumentalist) for the rock and roll band Gandalf and the Motorpickle. “I couldn’t play my tiple with them because it just wouldn’t work with a rock and roll band,” Askew explained to me recently. His first solo performance was at the Exit Coffeehouse in the basement of a local Methodist church (where another local favorite, Michael Bolton, first showed his stuff). “I didn’t know the words to any of my songs. I still don’t. So I laid the words in front of me and played. And when I stopped, all these people literally ran to the stage. Literally ran.”
Encouraged by the local enthusiasm for his psychedelic tiple music—and armed with an upgraded tiple, newly purchased from his earnings from teaching art at a New England prep school—Askew landed a multi-record deal with ESP, the offbeat New York label that had recently expanded its free jazz roster (Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders) to include outside folk and rock artists like the Fugs, the Holy Modal Rounders, Pearls Before Swine, and the Godz. ESP founder Bernard Stollman was notoriously austere and anarchistic in his approach to recording, with nonstop forty-five-minute sessions, minimal production, and a strict no-retakes policy. Along with the rest of the ESP catalogue, Ask the Unicorn captures the raw excitement of something new taking shape right before your ears.
Released in 1968, Ask the Unicorn received little if any promotion from the label, which was already beset by the financial difficulties that would eventually drive Stollman to bankruptcy in 1974, and quickly disappeared from circulation. Unable to persuade Stollman to release him from his contract, Askew recorded a second album for ESP. Whether it was because of the label’s increasing debt or Stollman’s distaste for Askew’s newfound interest in the piano, Little Eyes was never released by ESP, or anyone else, until the appearance of De Stijl’s limited-edition, vinyl-only “reissue” in 2003 [and released on CD in 2007].
In the mid-1980’s, Askew moved to New York City, where a small inheritance enabled him to restart his musical career. “Someone left me five thousand dollars, and I bought an electronic piano, a tape recorder, and a couple of mics. I started recording again shortly after that."
Askew’s most obvious musical parallel is British post-prog composer Robert Wyatt, with whom he shares a frail but remarkably expressive tenor voice and an incremental, chord-based approach to composition and arrangement, layering swelling triads, looped arpeggios and the occasional whimsically Monkish flight to build simple keyboard progressions into rich, emotionally compelling soundscapes. Lyrically, Askew bears a striking resemblance to Paul Goodman, the mid-twentieth-century New York City poet, novelist, gestalt psychologist, and anarchist social theorist. Like Goodman’s poetry, Askew’s lyrics shift effortlessly from contemplative abstraction to political tirades, from naturalist landscapes to graphic descriptions of urban street life, from childhood vignettes to tales of gay romance—conveyed in language that’s at once elegant and conversational. Also like Goodman, Askew displays (in both his lyrics and his music) a stubborn indifference to contemporary fashion. If that’s what makes Askew’s music such a hard sell for current labels and commercial audiences, it’s also the source of its timelessness. Whether you choose to listen to it now or wait for the next round of “reissues” forty years from now, this is music that will endure.
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of ABERNETHY:
JOSEPH ABERNETHY’s COLLEGE GROVE was released by Spinning Gold Records in 2007.
ABERNETHY / THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE WINDOW will be released July 14, 2009.
IF YOU ARE TRYING TO VIEW ANY OF MY OWN VIDEOS ; I AM SORRY TO REPORT THAT YOUTUBE HAS TAKEN DOWN ALL OF THEM TO PUNISH ME FOR POSTING ONE THAT SOMEONE HAS OBJECTED TO. what they call "a violation of terms of service" Ed Askew
Hey, thanks for the add, the vacuum-sealed currant scones from Cambridge, the box of blood oranges from Valencia, the case of '82 Mouton Rothchild...what can I say? Friends like these are hard to find.
