The jazz musicians Iggy Pop loves most of all: “He has a real nice flow”

Like any genre, punk can be traced back indefinitely beyond garage rock, finding spiritual predecessors in the hippy movement, 1950s rock ‘n roll, or the blue-collar blues that soundtracked America’s Black townships at the dawn of popular music. If one artist had to be crowned ‘Godfather of Punk’ and credited with forging the very archetype of punk several years before its insurrectionary bolt struck New York and London, dues would have to be paid to Iggy Pop.

Taking cues from Jim Morrison and Lou Reed, Pop took feral onstage mania to frenzied heights few have seen since, fronting Detroit’s The Stooges and embedding himself in countercultural lore with performances involving abuse of peanut butter and self-mutilation. By the time of 1973’s Raw Power, Pop and his band had set a sonic and aesthetic template for a generation of kids partial to glam’s smeared glitter but still wanting a hell of a lot more from rock’s mid-1970s stultifying charts.

Gifted with a natural permanence and creative nose for music’s diverse tapestry, Pop would follow his gut from the ‘comeback’ success of 1977’s The Idiot, trying his hand at synth-soaked post-punk, French jazz, and riding the wave of 1990s alternative rock with American Caesar. Such an authentic embrace of music’s disparate hues and flavours makes Pop the perfect host for a show with BBC Radio 6 Music, overseeing his Iggy Confidential segment playing all manner of cuts from yesteryear’s fringes to the contemporary underground.

With Pop’s curatorial authority and dependable music taste, a chance to peek at his private record collection is a tantalising one. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2005, Pop revealed his “must-have CDs” for every respectable household, reeling off LPs including The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and his old comrade David Bowie. While curiously lacking any punk selections, Pop plumped for a healthy presence of two jazz heavyweights representing two of the genre’s essential formative periods.

Reaching into Jazz’s infancy, Pop pulls out Legacy Recordings’ 2003 compilation The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 1, a 4-disc archive of Louis Armstrong’s early cuts in Chicago while still wedded to the old blues approach to performance and arrangements.

Saturated in pleasing tape-hiss that further colours its sense of historic gravitas, the Armstrong compendium documents an essential era before his later public profile where he was effortlessly shaping the artform’s foundations. ”Eerie, scary, and sometimes ironic,” Pop declared. “Really cool playing”.

Jumping to thirty-odd years later Pop dusted off another wieldy jazz compilation with 1995’s The Heavyweight Champion: The Complete Atlantic Recordings, a thorough collation of John Coltrane‘s works between 1959 and 1961 with the famous label. Pushing jazz to more fluid, freeform and even spiritual dimensions, Coltrane’s output during this period set the stage for his future wanders into avant-garde territory as starkly realised in 1965’s hailed A Love Supreme.

While a figure surrounded by high praise from musicologists and scholars alike, Pop’s fandom stays grounded in a much humbler appreciation: ”You can put it on in a car, before dinner, if you’re lonesome — he always flows real nice. Probably more than any other single artist, I listen to him”.

from https://faroutmagazine.co.uk