An avant-garde composer. A disco hitmaker. A hip-hop label honcho.
No, we're not talking about John Cage, Giorgio Moroder and Russell Simmons. We're talking about one man: Arthur Russell, a New York musician who wore so many hats during his brief musical career that he often struggled to find an audience.
"Calling Out of Context," a rich and endearing collection of Russell's '80s tunes, has been winning him a new generation of fans since its release last February. The compilation captures a tender musician flourishing before losing a fight with AIDS in 1992 at the age of 40.
But getting a handle on the woozy pop meditations that make up "Context" might require some . . . well . . . context.
As teenagers and/or classically trained cellists are wont to do, Russell got the heck out of his native Iowa in the early '70s. After making a pit stop in San Francisco (where he studied Hindustani music and became friends with Allen Ginsberg), Russell dropped anchor in New York City in 1973. Before long, he was rubbing elbows in the downtown scene, collaborating with Philip Glass, Rhys Chatham and David Byrne, among others.
Then along came disco.
While most Manhattan devotees were swept up in the sheer decadence of the scene, Russell heard a human tenderness in disco music and eventually penned dance-floor hits like "Is It All Over My Face?" with the group Loose Joints. (This and much of his disco-era output appears on Soul Jazz Records' recent retrospective "The World of Arthur Russell.")
Nurturing his ear for rhythm in the early '80s, Russell co-founded Sleeping Bag Records, the influential hip-hop imprint that popularized the stark electro sound embodied by such artists as Mantronix and Todd Terry.
Certainly, you can hear all this history in Russell's craft, but the songs on "Calling Out of Context" don't catch him grappling in a stylistic tug-of-war. Instead, he confidently floats in the froth between art-pop and disco.
His fluid compositions go hand in hand with the watery imagery of his lyrics. "I hear the sound of the whitecaps," he sings over the loopy buzz of "The Platform on the Ocean." The song bubbles along for eight minutes without a care.
Nearly all of Russell's songs coast over drum machine beats, and they often come wrapped in a hazy blur of cello, keyboard and gentle singing. One exception is "You Can Make Me Feel Bad," a rare moment of shoulder-shrugging melancholy in which only Russell's voice aches alongside the distorted scrapes of his cello.
And what a peculiar and enchanting singer he was. Wrapping his vocals in coats of reverb, Russell's voice isn't unlike Kermit the Frog's, but his delivery is as sensitive and graceful as Sade's. There's an irresistible charm to his carefree crooning on such songs as "Get Around to It" and "I Like You!"
The album's liner notes describe Russell as a tireless laborer who left behind a generous archive of unreleased tapes. It's hard not to wonder if and when more of this wonderful music might see the light of day.
