How To Rescue Things

"Charlie Parker's first album with a string section landed in 1950, ten years after his debut recordings. Although the overtly lush arrangements of Charlie Parker with Strings were Parker's idea, the record must've been something of a relief to producer Norman Granz, especially when the sides went on to become Bird's best-seller, by a long shot. The record (and it's follow-up) sparked something of a jazz-strings virus, infecting Nina Simone, Paul Desmond, Clifford Brown, and (later) Miles and Trane. And while the latter entries in that list were clearly bending their arrangements into space-age forms (and the arrangers-Gil Evans, Eric Dolphy-were becoming much hipper), these ubiquitous strings albums established a jazz cliche´ of sorts. They were a shot for the charts at worst, an attempted reinvigoration of tired easy-listening ear candy at best. How to Rescue Things, landing 15 years into Bill Orcutt's 'rediscovery' years, marks a somewhat tardy entry into the string- sweetening sweepstakes. In a post-chart, post-irony world, no one is going to mistake this as a bid for mainstream ears-nor are too many pop-gobblers going to paste this into their 'Chillax' playlist. With loops of dulcet, birdsong choruses, syrupy strings, and plucked harps clipped from an RCA easy-listening disc, the zombie strings conjure not red leather couches, cotton slankets, and yuzu martinis, but rather a clockwork mortuary, an undead Who-ville and a cigarette butt drowned in bottom-shelf scotch. In contrast to Orcutt's previous reanimation of yesterday's hit parade, How to Rescue Things instead takes as it's foundation the oily underbelly of the American songbook, the relentless gears that churn melody into newly consumable and marketable forms-simultaneously ersatz, soothing, and funereal. It's easy to use saccharine, easy-listening settings to deconstruct the romanticism of the past. Yet How to Rescue Things is not an ironic record. True to it's title, the transparently corny strings serve not as a meditation on cultural vacuity, but as an attempt to rehabilitate the cliche´s of the past, 'rescuing' them as improvisational grist for new melodic content. They serve as a harmonic substrate for some of Orcutt's most complex playing, and free him to explore the solo-as-such without the need to imply an underlying tune (unlike Orcutt's previous acoustic explorations of nostalgic song).