John Benson Brooks Trio - Avant Slant (One Plus 1 = II)

Assisted by inhabitants of the world at large, and assorted vibrations still in orbit.
Catalyzed by Milt Gabler from two ideas by John Benson Brooks. Special material by Milt Gabler
An Original Music Corporation Production
Contains excerpts from the following readings
"No Man Is An lsland" by John Donne.
"Autobiography" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
"The People, Yes" by Carl Sandburg.
"The Magical Underwear Panty (with Detachable garters)" by Seymour Krim.
"Give Me Your Tired" by Emma Lazarus.
"Mend Them Fences" by Robert Graves.
"America, The Beautiful" by Catherine Lee Bates.
"The Tree Of Liberty" by Thomas jefferson.

"On Location" Sounds recorded by Robert and Joan Franklin

A Special thank you to Sammy Davis Jr. for his permission to use part of his "Town Hall Concert", also

"On Location" Sounds recorded by Robert and Joan Franklin. A Special thank you to Sammy Davis Jr. for his permission to use part of his "Town Hall Concert", also to Jack Shaindlin for his piano solo portions from "50 Years of Movie Music"

From the back cover

AVANT SLANT is a collage-in-sound, in which fragments of poetry, pop tunes, radio broadcasts, and Feiffer-like babble intermingle to form an aural history of "Right Now." It is also a twelve-tone: jazz concert, an electronic poem composed in several media, and the first example of what may be a radically new art form. It resulted from a unique collaboration between a creative artist and a technical wizard. The artist is John Benson Brooks, composer, arranger, pianist, and philosopher-a distinctly original man, who manages to enlarge everyone who comes in contact with him. The wizard and catalyst is Milt Gabler, without whom the library of recorded music in America would be woefully, even irreparably smaller, as his biography makes all too clear.

The record had its beginning a few years ago when Brooks played two tapes for Gabler. The first was a performance by the John Benson Brooks Trio, recorded on June 2, 1962, at the International Jazz Festival held at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Since 1959, Brooks had been working with Don Heckman and Howard Hart on the problems of improvising jazz in the twelve-tone serial and chance idioms, and this tape constituted the Trio's public debut, and (as it turned out) its final performance as well. The second tape was a curious melange of air-shots, record-excerpts, sound-effects, and oneliners that Brooks had put together, more or less experimentally, under the generic title, D. J.-ology.

On first listening, the two tapes seemed to have little relation to one another, but it soon became evident to Gabler that a connection did exist. The same sensibility had shaped them both, and each described, from a different angle, a similar vision of the world. Gabler suggested that they might be intermixed to form a large, many-levelled work, and after months of collaboration in studio and workshop this record has emerged.

`AVANT SLANT is not a mere documentary in sound, a sort of "Sounds: Of Our Times" narrative, but a full-fledged creation of its own, in which music reverberates against words, and words reverberate against music, with a single, controlling intelligence as the point where they converge. The four self-contained jazz improvisations of the Trio are here as originally recorded, except that they have been broken up to form the context in which the other material is arranged, providing a comment on it, an elucidation, and an overall artistic structure. All by themselves, The Twelves (as Brooks calls these works) are intensely fascinating, and twelve-tone aficionados will want to tape them in sequence off this record so that they can hear the original twenty-minute concert as it was presented in Washingon. For others, AVANT SLANT offers a compact anthology of John Benson Brooks and Milt Gabler songs-mordant, insinuative, wryly humorous lieder of our time that take on new relevance, and new poignance, now that they are placed in the context of the contemporary, non-musical sounds out of which popular music has always come. One of them, by the way, has lyrics by world-famed poet Robert Graves, whose collaboration on an American pop-song is an event by anybody's standards.

For everyone, this record will be a new kind of listening experience, one that gets richer each time around, as its themes surface and fade and re-surface via the ironic juxtapositions and violent wrenches of context that Gabler's interpolations and creative editing have made possible. Here are the ghost-voices of such contemporary oracles as LBJ, ex-Governor Wallace; and perhaps Dean Martin, and Everett Dirksen-not to mention a host of other, more tentative voices that might very well be yours or mine. Here are echoes of the identity crises, war, space-fantasies, racism and anxiety that haunt all our lives today. And here, as well, is that black humor which is so often our last defense against the confusion and sheer noise of a technological civilization that seems increasingly to measure its nerves in decibels. And woven through it all, the surge and eddy of this challenging music provides that coherence which art alone can shape out of the chaos of modern experience-a kind of non-verbal Chorus that is particularly eloquent in a word-buffeted time.