Ten Years of Punk Archaeology

This is a very special Friday! It’s the 10th anniversary of punk archaeology.

If you’re not sure what punk archaeology (and let’s face it, it’s not an especially straight forward concept), you can download the book here, read this short and perhaps unhelpful essay here, or see my reflections after the event here. If you find the concept compelling, you can even peruse about my various musings over the last decade here.

Or simply enjoy punk archaeology’s contribution to the 2020 shit fireplace here.

Three Things Thursday: Survey, Oil, and Mild Anarchism

Every now and then, life happens in threes and that makes me wonder whether I’m blogging about my life or I’m simply living out a series of blog posts. In some ways, I suppose, it doesn’t matter, but it sure makes three things Thursday a bit easier.

My next few days will be focused (such as I can at all these days) on these three things:

Thing the First

My old survey buddy David Pettegrew has put together an article that offers a preliminary analysis of the Medieval material from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This is a pretty exciting piece for two reasons. First, at some point in the distant past, it was originally intended to be a chapter of his soon to be completed book on the material from EKAS. When it dropped out of that volume, it wandered a bit in the wilderness before he found a home for it. 

Because these are hectic times for all of us, and writing about archaeology in the best of situations often takes a village, I offered to help get this article into final shape. One of the things that I’m working on is adding hyperlinks to the EKAS data in Open Context. This will allow the reader to drill down into the data from the article text, validate David’s arguments, and ask new questions from the raw material. This could mean looking at the data spatially in new ways, aggregating new assemblages based on material fro the same survey unit, or even connecting this data to other publicly available data sets. 

With David’s permission, I’ll share some of the linked assemblages new week.

Thing the Second

Last year, I wrote a short piece on the archaeology of petroleum production. My buddy Kostis Kourelis is pretty sure that the archaeology of oil will be next big thing. Oil is not only the quintessential modern hyper object, but also represents a type fossil for supermodernity. My article mostly just scratched the surface of the potential of an archaeology of oil as a key component of archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the kind of critical archaeology that offers new ways of understanding the modern age.

Part of the reason for this is because the article is destined for some kind of handbook of the archaeology of plastics. In fact, the editors and reviewers patiently pointed out, my article needed to connect oil and petroleum production to plastic more explicitly throughout. This was a fair point and I’ve been nibbling away at their helpful comments. 

In many ways, their urging that I connect petroleum production to plastics was more than just appropriate for the volume, but also useful for reconsidering oil and petroleum production as the definitive phenomenon of the supermodern world. The ubiquity of plastics in our everyday life is just one example of oil’s central place in our contemporary society. That said, plastic manufacturing and petroleum production rely on shared spatial footprints. The profoundly toxic sites of petroleum refineries attract similarly toxic petrochemical manufacturing plants that churn out the stock from which most new plastics are made. These plastic pellets then find their way into the world through some of the same infrastructure as our gasoline, heating oil, and other forms of petroleum that we use as fuel. In other words, plastic and oil share more than chemical DNA, but also leverage the same infrastructure that allows both to be always at hand in the contemporary world. Stay tuned for a plasticized draft.

Thing the Third

The third thing that I’m working on with a mid-February deadline is the revision of an article on a class that I taught as the centerpiece of the Wesley College Documentation Project. The article celebrated (I admit) the prospects of a “mildly anarchist” pedagogy that undermined the increasingly bureaucratized nature of both the modern university and archaeology as an industry. It attempted to embrace many aspects of slow, punk, and anarchist archaeology. Unfortunately, it also appears to have captured some of the more traditional elements of writing about archaeology as well. Namely the congratulatory nature of so many fieldwork publications that elevates the archaeologist from the deeply collaborative space of archaeological knowledge making to the august heights of heroic truth teller. 

This, of course, was the opposite of what my paper was intending to accomplish. I was hoping to celebrate the remarkable creativity that occurred over the course of a spontaneous, place-based, research program freed from much of the administrative oversight that can stifle the simply joy of wandering an abandoned place, thinking about the past, and working together to make sense of a building and its history.

That all said, the reviewers were probably doing me a favor by telling me to temper my congratulatory tone and do what I can to ground my excitement for the project in the dusty and incomplete world of reality. The last thing I want to do is to alienate a reader or conform to some kind of stereotype of ego-driven, tenured, middle aged, truth teller. Stay tuned for an updated and tempered draft. 

Publishing and the Undercommons

If you’re around campus tomorrow afternoon at 4:30ish, I’m going to be hanging out with Political Science Professor Brian Urlacher and English Professor Patrick Henry at the World Famous Chester Fritz Library to participate in the Inaugural Randy Rasmussen lecture. This event will feature a reading from Brian’s novel The Library of Chester Fritz (which you can download for free here!) and a conversation between me and Patrick about the future of academic and literary publishing at the University of North Dakota. It should be a good time!

I am not really sure what Patrick and I will end up talking about and my hope is that it is a bit of a conversation between us. One of the concepts, though, that has regained my somewhat fractured attention lately is that of the undercommons. The main source for this idea is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, which you can download here. The book is too complicated and poetic to try to summarize here. Instead, I’ve been thinking about the notion that universities serve not only to educate students and to promote certain kind of research but also to reproduce themselves (institutionally, intellectually, socially, economically, politically). The institutional effort, policies, and habits to do these things tends to create a more or less permanent underclass of individuals who are not fully part of the institution, but upon whom the institution relies for its success. This includes part-time students, contingent faculty, night and part-time staff and the other folks around a university campus who do not fit neatly in to the institutions main focus. The individuals in these groups constitute what Moten and Harney call an undercommons. They are drawn to campus by the excess energy that such large institutions produce and which they find ways to use for their own benefit and agendas (which may or may not represent goals of the institution).

A great example of this is the library. The library contains both physical resources (books, computers, and increasingly things like scanners, 3D printers, and the like) as well as intellectual resources (ideas!) that leaven the life of the undercommons (as well as the university community). Universities also include campus spaces — student unions, lobbies, unused classrooms, conference rooms — that can function as places where people can gather informally to exchange views, scheme, and work. Of course, recent efforts across the country to restrict what institutions teach formally mean that the undercommons might not only see an influx of individuals disaffected by state mandates, but also make the excess energy produced by institutions all the more important in creating alternative spaces and communities. 

This also got me thinking about my work with North Dakota Quarterly and The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. I’ve done all I can to keep these two projects as separate from the university as possible while still availing themselves to university resources. To bring this around to conversations about publishing, I like to imagine that universities could serve as platforms of underground, unorthodox, and radical publishing. The technologies are certainly available and the undercommons has abundant expertise and creative energies. 

NDQ and The Digital Press might not qualify as subversive or even particularly radical (no good radical magazine can last for over a century and retains any of its subversive credentials!), but I do want these institutions which can dance along the fine line between the institution and the undercommons to provide opportunities to develop skills useful to amplifying the voices of the commons and the undercommons.   

The Bakken Buzz: Settler Colonialism, Uncertainty, and Dominion

Last week, I mentioned a growing buzz about the Bakken in academic works. Perhaps this is the lag between the Bakken boom and scholarly output. 

This weekend, I read Nestor L. Silva’s very recent Stanford dissertation, “Bakken Ecology: The Culture and Space of Fracked Farmland in North Dakota” (2022). It’s good and thought provoking as any dissertation should be.

He argues that settler colonialism created and relies upon the belief that the uncertainty of living in the Bakken (or western North Dakota more broadly) is manageable by controlling human and material variables. Thus Silva located “dominion” associated with settler conquests as the by-product of efforts to manage the uncertain landscape by controlling independent population, adapting to new ecologies, and ultimately balancing between local knowledge (and control) and non-local sources of authority and power. Silva’s dissertation draws on interviews and his personal experiences in Bakken and offers deep perspectives on how companies, local residents, and visiting researchers encountered the boom-time landscape.

There are five things that caught my attention.  

1. Soil. One of the most interesting chapters of the dissertation deals with the Pedersen family whose farm near Tioga was the site of one of the largest terrestrial oil spills in US history when a Tesoro pipeline dumped millions of gallons of oil on the land. Tesoro funded a massive clean up that involved literally cleaning the topsoil of the farm and redepositing it. The Pedersen family recognized that it would be difficult to discern the outcome of this process until long after the cleanup was complete. That said, they have confidence that the productivity of their fields would be restored either through technology or through some kind of financial settlement.

Silva does a great job of locating dominion not in some kind of abstract conceptual space of territories or law, but in the actual soil itself.  

2. Pipelines. Silva’s discussion of the role of soil as the location for settler dominion in the Bakken extends beyond spill sites. He was particularly sensitive to the role that pipelines play in creating networks of dominion through the Bakken. He notes the tension between the claims that oil companies make the use of pipelines is a “greener” alternative to using trucks and even rail to transport Bakken crude. Silva didn’t overstate and lovely irony of this claim, nor did he overstate the role that pipelines play in making the vagaries of rail traffic more certain for oil producers.

He does note that the construction of pipelines requires the careful removal and replacement of soil. In the semi-arid climate of western North Dakota where soil chemistry is a fragile and inexact science. Even the removal and return of the same soil can cause dramatic decreases in productivity for these areas. This uncertainty requires constant attention on the part of the pipeline builders and farmers. It is not, however, seen as a liability of pipeline building, but as a technical problem that can be solved to ensure that movement of oil and the continued productivity of the soil. 

3. Management and Safety. The third chapter of Silva’s dissertation dealt with the way in which companies operating in the Bakken sought to manage the risk and uncertainty present on job sites. He examines his own experiences with OSHA training and his visit to an “active” (although paused for their visit) fracking site with students and faculty from UND.

He examines how OSHA training transferred the responsibility for on-site safety from OSHA or even the company, to the individual who was responsible for not only keeping themself safe but also making sure that the work site remained in compliance with safety standards. Silva might have even gone a step further in understanding that unlike earlier forms of extractive industries, such as mining, where organized labor sought to manage uncertainty for workers (and potentially companies alike), oil companies shunned unions and instead managed the uncertainty associated with potential litigation or even legal penalties associated with accidents by creating an almost impossibly obscure network of subcontractors which isolated the oil companies themselves from the workplace.

At the same time, Silva notes that by making the individual responsible for their own safety, they recognize that individuals introduce unmanageable levels of uncertainty into the system. The response of oil companies to this uncertainty is to isolate responsibility within the worker and then insulating the worker within complex layers of bureaucratized authority.   

4. Uncertainty and Bakktimism. When Bret Weber and I were talking to folks in the Bakken, we coined a phrase called Bakktimism which represents the unwavering optimism that we encountered across the Bakken even when the boom itself started to falter. We never, as far as I remember, connected this to settler colonialism. Silva’s dissertation proposed that a belief in the ability of settler society to manage uncertainty was at the heart of this Bakktimism. In other words, Bakktimism isn’t the confidence that things would improve, but rather that economic, demographic, and social paroxysm that characterized a boom-time environment would somehow be normalized.

If we ever get to thinking more about Bakktimism, it would be great to look at our interviews through the lens that Silva established. My feeling is that we’ll find plenty of material to support Silva’s view of settler dominion.    

5. Ecologies, Environments, and Ontologies. As an archaeologist, I tend to get preoccupied with the so-called “ontological turn” and efforts to obviate the historical boundaries between human and the material, the social and the natural, and the environmental and political (among many others). Silva’s dissertation dispensed with this academic parlor game by simply assuming that humans, the soil, territory, oil, and institutions exist within the same space. More than that, settler colonialism relied and relies on the continuous negotiation and hybridization of these blurry concepts in the name of managing uncertainty.

 

One last thing about this dissertation, it has a CC-By-NC license which hopefully means that it finds its ways into the hands of scholars and communities who appreciate it critique with as little friction as possible!

Music Monday: More Good Vibes

Last week, I wrote about the fantastic vibe player, Bobby Hutcherson, and it only seems right to mention his younger contemporary and equally marvelous vibe player Walt Dickerson. 

If Hutcherson was notable for his ability to stay relevant even as jazz artists embraced hard bob, modal, fusion, and funkified flavors of music, Walt Dickerson charted his own course and embrace both modal and then a more distinctly avant-garde sound throughout his career. 

I have four albums that by Walt Dickerson that make me very happy especially on cold, but sunny Sunday afternoons where the low sun and dusty air creates just the right glow in my comfy sitting room.

First, there’s To My Queen, from 1962 with Andrew Hill on piano, George Tucker on bass, and a young Andrew Cyrille on drums. This is quiet music and asks soft questions and rewards patient listening. Tucker’s basslines are worthy of particular attention and the gentle interplay between him, Hill, and Dickerson reminds of me three people describing a winter sunset. Cyrille’s playing is just right. 

The next two albums are a pair separated by over a dozen years and both feature Sun Ra. The first is apparently a reinterpretation of the score from the Sidney Poitier film A Patch of Blue called Impressions of “A Patch of Blue”. You can read more about the backstory in Rodger Coleman’s study of this album in Sun Ra Sundays and listen to it here (“Bacon and Eggs” is just great). While Sun Ra’s playing has the capacity to take over any recording (as does Andrew Hill’s!), on this album he and Dickerson have a great rapport and Coleman’s observation that this gives the album “a loose, late night feel” that apparently reflected the intense conversations that Ra and Dickerson had concerning matters of race and music.

These conversations continued 13-years later after Dickerson reemerged from a self-imposed musical exile. Dickerson and Sun Ra recorded Visions which has a more Sun Ra vibe to it. The interplay between Sun Ra’s piano which alternates between probing and elegant flourishes and Dickerson’s vibes which sound positively unworldly gives the space-age sound of Sun Ra’s music a kind of warm familiarity of a lazy Martian afternoon. This is evening music, by the fire place, with a couple of dogs to keep you grounded and a glass of pleasant tequila to help you drift.

Last week, I mentioned Bobby Hutcherson’s 1975 album Montara which some critic called the most 1975 album ever. Dickerson released an album that year with Wilbur Ware and Andrew Cyrille that offers a deeply engaged reminder that there was a lot of stuff going on in 1975 that did not make much of an impact in commercial jazz circles. While the Ware on bass and Cyrille on drums might not be an intuitive pairing, the percussive Ware complements the understated Cyrille and impactful Dickerson in delightful ways. There is so much space on this album, it begs you to be quiet. This is not commercial music, but it is compelling and wonderful.

It’s only two tracks:

Finally (and this is a bonus album), I have a soft spot for solo jazz recordings especially when they’re on instruments that don’t usually get solo treatments. Solo vibes. It’s a tonic for whatever overheated encounters punctuate your existence.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s finally Friday after a long (albeit short) week. That means a chance to catch my breath a bit, take care of some odds and ends, and get some momentum into the next week.

This weekend will be a delightful combination of getting some work done after an exceedingly hectic week and football. The Eagles play division rivals the New York Football Giants tomorrow night and the games on Sunday look to be particularly entertaining (even if I don’t necessarily have a dog in that fight). This will distract me from the remarkable play of the Sixers on their current West coast swing!

In the meantime, here is a little list of quick hits and varia:

• Photogrammetry and GIS in Human-Occupied Digital Landscapes.
• The Horse in Ancient Athens.
• Nothing Even Matters.
• Theory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity.
• Deep Time: A Literary History.
• U.S. Archaeologists Find Ancient Isthmian Stadium Near Corinth (1959).
• Vintage Parking in Athens.
• Sun Ra Cover Art.
• Remainders.
• Cozy Catastrophes.
• Lorca Model 1.
• What I’m reading: Nestor L. Silva, “Bakken Ecology: The Culture and Space of Fracked Farmland in North Dakota.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University 2022.
• What I’m listening to: Lee Morgan, Sonic Boom. (1967 [1979]).

Three Things Thursday: Punk is Next, Buzz about the Bakken, and Hanging Out!

There’s a lot of stuff going on these days and I suppose it is better than getting bored, but it sometimes results in me feeling a bit scattered. Today’s “Three Things Thursday” is a reflection of my scattered feeling. I’m know some of this stuff means something to me and hopefully you’ll find it at least vaguely interesting.

Thing the First

Aaron Barth posted something on social media about distributing posters for our conferences on punk archaeology in January 2013. I figured this was a memory of a memory or something, but sure enough, punk archaeology is ten years old this year.  

For those of you who don’t know or don’t remember. Punk archaeology was this alternative conference, event, concert, gathering in Fargo, North Dakota. It produced a book and for a brief moment on one very cold and still night, an intense feeling of community. 

I’m not sure that it produced anything else. Maybe that’s all it was meant to do. Or maybe it could have produced something more tangible and substantial. It seems like ten years out is a good time to reflect on it.

Thing the Second

Resource booms are, by definition, abrupt and short lived. They strike communities that are unprepared and often dissipate before they’re completely understood. In fact, part of what makes booms so damaging and confusing is their unpredictability. Unfortunately, scholars often struggle to research unpredictable, abrupt, and short-lived events. Academic research agendas are like big ships or trains which take a long time to gain momentum, stop, or turn.

There’s been a bit of lag between the peak of the Bakken oil boom and scholarship designed to interrogate, unpack, and even understand it. I’m very much looking forward to Kyle Conway’s forthcoming book on Bakken hospitality. I’m also eager to read Mary E. Thomas’s and Bruce Braun’s edited collection Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil which should appear in coming weeks (paperback apparently in April)!   

I was very excited to be told about the completion of Nestor L. Silva’s Stanford dissertation, “Bakken Ecology: the Culture and Space of Fracked Farmland in North Dakota” (2022). Unfortunately, it is embargoed for two years, but I am dying (well, not literally) to get my hands on a copy of it.

If you have a contact at Stanford who can help me get a copy, I’d be very grateful!   

Thing the Third

Finally, I’m pretty excited for my friend Sheila Liming’s book to come out next week. The book is called Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time and she agreed to chat about it a bit over at the NDQ blog.

Check it out here.

Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience in 200 Words

Readers of this blog know only too well the multi-year odyssey to write a survey of the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. And many of you know that this was pretty bumpy.

It turns out the retraining myself as an Americanist was not a straightforward process and coming to understand the nuances of archaeology of the contemporary world in the context of American historical archaeology (as well as the myriad related and intersection disciplines that fortify this approach) was probably biting off more than I can chew.

That all said, this project has made some headway and as part of the pre-publication paperwork, I’ve been asked to put together a 150-200 word summary of the book. Here’s my current draft:

The Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience

This book is the first synthetic study of the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. This emerging field uses archaeological methods to describe, interpret, and critique the material culture and landscapes dating from mid-1970s until the present day. The Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience begins in the New Mexico desert with the excavation of Atari cartridges from the Alamgordo landfill. It situates this work in the tradition of Bill Rathje’s Garbage Project, more recent work on the archaeology of consumer culture, and media and digital archaeology of the 21st century. 

The second half of the book takes the reader to the Bakken oil patch in Western North Dakota. By comparing the Bakken to modern industrial spaces and the region’s workforce housing migrant camps, military bases, homelessness, modern cities, and college campuses, the book explores the intersection of contemporary productive landscapes and landscapes of control and resistance. The archaeology of contemporary consumption and production situates the American experience in a global context and emphasizes the planetary consequences of our everyday lives. 

~

Wish me luck as I bring this project in for a landing!

More on Rivers

This weekend, I read and enjoyed Donald Worster’s classic Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985). I read this as part of my effort to become a bit more familiar with American environmental history, but also get to understand the larger conversations surrounding “hydraulic society” in the American West. In many ways, Worster provides a key formative statement in how we understand the environmental manifestations of the United States’s quest for empire. By tracing the changing attitudes toward water and rivers in the American West from the 19th century to the mid-20th, we get to see the interplay between small farmers, wealth landowners, local communities, state governments, and the federal government in creating a new hydraulic society with both democratic potential and the capacity for exacerbating economic and social inequalities at a nationwide scale.

Some of this is also relevant for my growing interest in the flood mitigation efforts made along the Red River of the North. To be clear, Worster’s main focus was not only managing floods. In fact, flood management and navigation fell under the domain of the Army Corps of Engineers and Worster’s main focus was on the Bureau of Reclamation which sought to transform the rivers of the American west into a source of water for agricultural prosperity both in the region and nationally.

Worster’s understanding of American attitudes toward nature and to the flow of rivers, however, emphasized the desire of Americans to project their imperial yearnings not simply over the Indigenous people and territory of this vast region, but also of the rivers and natural resources. The earliest efforts were small scale and directed immediately toward the needs of communities struggling with the aridity of the region and the need to adapt their eastern crops and practices to irrigated farming.

By the early 20th-century, however, these limited and pragmatic approach quickly gave way to more expansive plans driven by competition and profit. At this stage the control of water and the ability to irrigate represented a pathway to wealth and wealthier landowners found ways to contravene efforts to preserve equality (or at very least fair) access to water in the West. As a result, control over water in the West soon took on the form of an ironic tragedy as the rhetoric used to champion increasingly bold and costly hydraulic interventions became increasingly detached from the outcomes of these intervention which rather than fortifying an idealized agricultural democracy, created more wealthy and powerful landowning class. The only commonality between rhetorical posturing of Bureau of Reclamation and the avarice of landowners was the desire to control the rivers of the West. 

How this all applies to my work here in the Red River of the North is bit unclear right now. Certainly there is reason to suspect that flood control along the Red River of the North is part of a larger effort to control western rivers in the name of stable settlement. The flooding of the river in the 19th century had revealed its destructive potential and floods in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s promoted increasingly monumental and ambitious interventions.

All this was done against the backdrop of the Pick-Sloan plan along the Missouri River which sought to control and harness the flow of the Big Muddy to irrigate farms, mitigate floods, and provide recreational opportunities. The destructive ambition behind the Garrison Dam, which led to the flooding of thousands of acres of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation made clear that North Dakota was part of the larger mid-century hydraulic landscape of the American West punctuated by massive dams and large scale diversions. Even today, massive diversions of the Red River around Fargo-Moorhead and around Winnipeg reflect a persistent willingness to transform the region by controlling the flow of rivers. 

My interest in reading Worster’s book, then, is less to discern whether the particular conditions that shape the Red River of the North appear in his analysis. For most of the time that this book covers, the Red River is both too far east (climatically speaking) and relatively untapped for irrigation. At the same time, I suspect that areas on the margins of the American West found themselves particularly susceptible to the mentalities that developed in the wider region. If we see Worster’s book as much a commentary on shifting attitudes toward empire building in North America as it is a specific technocratic, bureaucratic, or even economic response to certain environmental conditions (and the claim that Worster’s work smacks of a healthy dose of environmental determinism have been greatly exaggerated), then the work to control the Red River of the North fits into wider pattern that by the middle years of the 20th century had largely become unhinged from any particular justification. This ensured that the broader Western mindset that guided the continued damming of western rivers to provide irrigation for crops that would not sell, electricity for towns that did not exist, and solutions to problems that did not exist, could be applied to marginal cases because there was no longer a tight connection between the problem, the solution, and the justification for the approach.

This is not to suggest that the flood mitigation efforts imposed on the Red River of the North weren’t adequate or technically appropriate. Instead, I’m hypothesizing that the approach by the Army Corps of Engineers to the Red River in Grand Forks reflects attitudes developed in very different circumstances elsewhere in the American West. 

Whether this proves to be the case will involve some deeper digging!

Music Monday: Vibing Out

I’m buried in work these days which is both unpleasant and compromises my ability to enjoy the full range of music in my collection. I dislike the idea of background music, but I also recognize that I work better with some music on even if that music can’t necessarily be the center of my attention.

Over the weekend, when I had a delightful blend of repetitive, tedious, and mundane work to get through, I found myself listening to the brilliant vibraphone player Bobby Hutcherson and engaging in an impromptu career retrospective starting with his hard bop and mildly avant-garde days and continuing through his fusion and soul jazz phases. 

Hutcherson’s album Stick-Up! from 1966 is a nice example of his late hard bop phase (which also includes Components from the same year). It is fun to contrast it with his work on the brilliant album Dialogue where he performs alongside Andrew Hill, Freddie Hubbard, Sam Rivers, Richard Davis, and Joe Chambers. You can listen to that album here.  

By the late 1960s, Hutcherson’s style had changed markedly. He had teamed up with saxophone player Harold Land in what would be a long-standing and immensely creative partnership. In 1969, they released the album Now! which opened with the remarkable track “Slow Change.” 

By 1971, Hutcherson demonstrated his willingness to explore the emerging sounds of jazz fusion on the album San Francisco with the addition of both the electric bass and electric piano. For the latter, he brings pianist Joe Sample on board whose playing brought an ample dose of soul to Hutcherson’s and Land’s collaboration. 

By the mid-1970s, Hutcherson’s willingness to explore fusion and soul jazz was in full flight with a series of thoroughly entertaining albums that celebrate the capacity of his distinctive style on the vibes and Land’s compelling tone to bring new life to popular and R&B songs.

Cirrus starts with the Woody Shaw penned, R&B tinged track “Rosewood” arranged by trumpet player Woody Shaw and the rest of the album proceeds from there. It finds a deeper and perhaps even more accessible groove in some ways compared to San Francisco and sets the stage for things to come the next year. 

1975 saw the release of two fantastic Hutcherson albums: Linger Lane and Montara. These albums marked the end of Hutcherson’s collaboration with Land and the embrace of a larger band and a larger more soul inflected sound. 

Linger Lane opens with a deeply funky version of The Stylistic’s “People Make the World Go Round”:

And the Theme from MASH which had started to emerge as a pop-jazz standard by the mid-1970s.

 Montara is an altogether tighter album that announces its intention with the first track, George Cables’ “Camel Rise”:

And brings it home with a mildly funkified version of Tito Puente’s “Oyo Como Va”:

If you’re still worried about your work at this point, I really don’t have a cure for what ails you.