Scotty Hard

10-18-06

By Ian Patterson

One of the strengths of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was the employment of silence. Yet if any piece of music could successfully accompany the image of Frank being “severed” from the space-pod by HAL, then the spacey, sinister intro of Scotty Hard’s Radical Reconstructive Surgery could be it.

This is an album full of halucinatory noises and unearthly voices, swirling Moog and Wurlitzer atmospherics, and stabbing piano, all carried along on a deep funk beat. “Operation Chance” sounds like rats trapped inside a piano which is being tuned while the workmen are in laying down floorboards. “St. Clare’s Hospital” is for the most part, more earth-bound, with Nasheet Waits’ drums and William Parker’s bass plotting a funky course through swathes of keyboard sounds; a catchy Mathew Shipp piano riff warms up, but just when you want or expect it to go somewhere, it disappears. This music could never be accused of being predictable.

It works best when Waits and Parker get into a groove, as on “The General,” where Parker’s deep bass and a slow Billy Cobbham-esque beat swing the tune along, or on “Eclipse,” where John Medeski breaks out of the shackles. The pure armospherics of “Joint Disease” could perhaps have been left on the cutting floor.

It all comes together beautifully, however, on the final track, “Round 2,” which begins slowly, but with Shipp’s piano providing great tension, it builds cosmically until it fades away when it should perhaps have died like an exploding star.

Scotty Hard has worked with a great group of musicians here and has orchestrated adventurous, challenging soundscapes from their work. His Radical Reconstructive Surgery will no doubt infuriate as many listeners as it delights.


- All About Jazz

10-04-06

By Troy Collins

Celebrated hip-hop producer Scotty Hard realizes a longstanding ambition on Radical Reconstructive Surgery: the pairing of keyboardists John Medeski and Matthew Shipp. This album documents the first-ever recorded encounter of the two players, both former students of the New England Conservatory of Music. Half the pieces consist of written collaborations between Medeski, Shipp and Hard; the remainder of the tunes were written by Hard.

Medeski and Shipp are joined by stalwart bassist William Parker and rising drummer Nasheet Waits. Effortlessly flowing from one funky gambit to the next, Parker and Waits lay a solid, rhythmic foundation with in-the-pocket grooves. Mauricio Takara intermittently adds percussion, while DJ Olive introduces subtle atmospheric textures into the mix. Hard's understated contributions provide the sort of focused sonic cohesion that supergroup meetings such as this often lack.

Hard's role as matchmaker pays ample dividends; Medeski and Shipp make an analogously funky pair. Medeski generates idiosyncratic variations on an assortment of old analog keyboards while Shipp expels pensive, angular melodies, primarily on piano. Parker's monolithic bass tone and Waits' adept drumming are further amplified by Hard's beat-heavy post-production skills. DJ Olive's swirling textures float freely throughout, while Hard cuts the original organic recording session into skittering fragments and jittery blasts of sound.

The soloing here is brief and thematically concise. Medeski and Shipp are more concerned with texture and ambience than endless virtuoso noodling. Anchored by the rhythm section's heavy bottom end, the keyboardists chime in to accentuate the mood, dabbling in brief discourses. Mostly it's an amalgamation of Medeski and Shipp's personal styles. Only ”Anatomy of Melancholy” sounds anything like a typical MMW groove, with its ebullient shuffle rhythm, cascading piano riff and punchy bass line. “Cocktail” conjures the swinging futurism of Sun Ra in just under two minutes. The majority of the session is dominated by cybernetic funk and moody sci-fi ambience, awash in old school retro-futurism.

Another successful collaboration from Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, Radical Reconstructive Surgery is truth in advertising about Scotty Hard's augmentation of a studio recording between two like-minded masters. Funky, adventurous and succinct, it delivers all the best traits the series has to offer. - All About Jazz

Once they went to school together. Back then, did they already go around with weird ideas as to how they will later realize their odd projects? John Medeski, known to many as the keyboard player of the trio Medeski, Martin & Wood, and Matthew Shipp, sit across from each other for the first time in this production, led by Scotty Hard (Wu Tang Clan), and slam each other with their keyboard-produced ideas. Between these two exalted musicians , any rhythm section will have to make an effort to be heard. But, what at first can sound like a chaotic brew of hallucinatory sounds, unreal voices, twisted Moog-sounds, and strange Wurlitzer piano riffs, the drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist William Parker are capable of asserting themselves. For sure, the late James Brown would turn in his grave at the sound of these frayed grooves. However, we are certain that, would the funk dictator Brown have let his rhythm servants have run on a longer leash every now and then, they would have come up with similar results. And when Waits and Parker let themselves be recruited to an irresistibly lackadaisical groove, as in “The General,” then they even win the upper hand in the competition for the most crooked sound. That they are also skilled in razor sharp swing can be observed in “Apothecary’s Cabinet.” A short while later, however, one finds oneself on board of the S.S. Discovery in Stanley Kubriks “2001: A Space Odyssey.”


- Stereo magazine - Germany

This eclectic disc boasts a line-up of jazz heavyweights as performers, including John Medeski, Matthew Shipp, DJ Olive as well as Scotty Hard himself. The album takes in a variety of different schools of performance, all hinging on the interplay between a plethora of keyboard instruments – including pianos, Wurlitzers and Moogs – and the mighty rhythm section supplied by William Parker and Nasheet Waits. It could be argued that the most structured work here (such as the tight grooving ‘Eclipse’) yields the most satisfying results. At the other end of the spectrum, ghostly clavinet tinkering and eerie scratching sounds evoke a more open, freed up sensibility on ‘Primary Humor’, which is a thoroughly successful venture into abstraction. The closing epic ‘Round’ goes some way towards consolidating these different strains of jazz, with the electronic shenanigans of DJ Olive (credited here not only as turntablist but “audio janitor” too) weaving in and out of the tangled instrumental chaos. - Hefty, UK

Scott Harding is a renowned figure among the hip-hop circle. Although he did not sells platinum, nor did he involved in numerous shooting incidents, he nonetheless was responsible for engineering works for the Wu-tang Clan (Forever), Prince Paul (Psychoanalysis and Gravediaagz albums) and countless other hip-hop/rap acts. Despite his day job as a sound engineer, Harding, under the guises of Scotty Hard, metamorphoses into a serious underground hip-hop headz. Scott Harding was the mastermind behind New Kingdom, a short-lived metagroup with rhymes provided by Sebastian Laws and Jason Furlong and cameos by John Medeski. With only one (now out of print) release, "Paradise Don't Come Cheap", New Kingdom captured the freshness that many jaded hip-hop headz could not ignored: big, slamming beats with full and rounded bass, coupled with the nasal but muscle vocal delivery of Laws and Furlong. "Unicorn were Horses" slammed the listeners with the massive organ clouds (provided by John Medeski) and a slippery beat. New Kingdom sits well in the avant-rap territory that many underground acts occupied.

After a many guest appearances (many Bill Laswell's dub/hip-hop and rap compilations), Scotty Hard strikes again on the legendary underground abstract hip-hop label Wordsound Recordings. "The Return of Kill Dog" years does not blow the listeners away like a desert hurricane (much alike "Paradise"), but grounded into the classic Wordsound tones: down-tempoed subterranean groove with big, fat dubby bass. However subdued it was, the big-ass sound of Scotty Hard could not be suppressed. Hard introduced a darker, noir-ish quality to the tracks. The opening track "Modus Operandi: 456" sedated the listeners with random electronic bullocks before the beats and bass hitting full-force. Like a cross-breed of B-Real and Justin Warfield, Laws' (known as Sebstop) rhymes with fury, cutting the track with savagery images as easy as if he was toking on a spliff. The intensity of this track is classic Scott Harding.

Ex-Jungle Brother Sensation dropped in a cut with his usual out-there mentality, although Scotty Hard managed to squeeze certain amount of concentration from Sensational. Other Wordsound roster popped up in the recording, however, it was the instrumental tracks (put together by Scotty Hard) played surprisingly well. The hard and spiraling basslines sometime echoes Corporal Blossom and the big fat beats treading the thin line of phat hip-hop and wicked Big Beats. Perhaps Hard cut his tracks much slower than any other hip-hop tracks, the music had a much intense edge to it, while not relegating to retarded trip-hop territory. "Raw Nerves" played like a soundtrack to a car-chase in Dick Tracy. "Luring in the Shadows" displayed the sinister creepiness of the mood.

For a dark-noir concept album, "The Return of Kill Dog E" might not be an excellent effort, but for a 45 minutes of alternative dark, brooding beats, Scotty Hard might just delivered his goods.

- Music Forum - Hong Kong

Scotty Hard initially made his reputation in the rap world, but since 2000 or so he's been doing at least as many jazz gigs (if not more), contributing heavily to albums by Sex Mob and Medeski, Martin & Wood. Scotty Hard's Radical Reconstructive Surgery is Hard's first jazz release, put out as part of Thirsty Ear's illustrious Blue Series Continuum. The album is constructed from performances of an amazing all-star group: Matthew Shipp and John Medeski on keyboards, free jazz giant William Parker on bass, and Nasheet Waits on drums, with additional contributions from DJ Olive and percussionist Mauricio Takara. Then comes the radical reconstructive surgery. Hard takes those performances and transforms them, adding drum machines and samples and using dub techniques and studio production to rework the material into something that probably couldn't have been performed live, but retains the essence of the live performance. For a guy with a reputation as a free player, William Parker sure knows how to work a groove, and he and Waits set up some muscular beats. Shipp and Medeski are both virtuosos in their own right, and Hard contrasts them nicely by having them play different instruments on the songs, generally organ and piano. The playing is great all the way around, but this isn't an album about virtuosic solos; it's about groove and atmosphere and it succeeds in spades. Oddly enough, Hard's modus operandi is laid out in an exerpt from a medical journal written by "The Company of Barber Surgeons" (remember "Theodoric of York"?) concerning bodily humors and "foul vapours" in the curing of the sick. The answer?: "to experiment with new techniques; to undertake a radical reconstructive surgery." The rest of the quote fits in nicely with the concept as well. Is this traditional jazz? No way. Is it jazz? You bet. Thirsty Ear has been releasing some of the finest examples of this new modern jazz over the last several years, and Radical Reconstructive Surgery stands up nicely alongside releases by avant-jazzmen like Matthew Shipp and Craig Taborn and other entries in the Blue Series Continuum from non-jazzers like Good and Evil and Spring Heel Jack. This is decidedly adventurous jazz that invites listeners in and can make them move at the same time. Well done. - All Music Guide

New York City-via-Vancouver's Scotty Hard oversees a historic artistic
gathering and ends up with a stunning musical amalgam. With John
Medeski, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Nasheet Waits, DJ Olive and
Mauricio Takara on board, the hip-hop-schooled Hard has ostensibly
produced his first jazz record. The visionary adventurism of the
players, however, defies easy categorization, as they incorporate and
discard genre distinctions effortlessly. Waits' slamming funk drums
mesmerize the listener before Parker's nimble bass weaves between
Medeski and Shipp's Moog and Wurlitzer on "Chance Operation." "St.
Clare's Hospital" is a beautiful dose of old-school hip-hop, with
Parker and Waits locked in a tight groove and "The General" features
an ambient electronica/turntablism stew. The remarkable talent here
produces a heady, heavy dose of hip-hop-infused improvisations. VK
- The Eye - Toronto

Scott Harding (aka Scotty Hard, aka Radical Reconstructive Surgery) is a Canadian born producer who spent the 80s and 90s working with some of the biggest names in hip-hop, including Biz Markie, Cypress Hill and Wu-Tang Clan. Some of that influence percolates through into his latest release on the independent Thirsty Ear label.

He's gathered together a simmering collection of talent including keyboard maestros John Medeski and Matthew Shipp. The coming together of sequenced, often heavy beats with jazz virtuosity is beautifully balanced and goes way beyond any ideas you might have about 'jazz-rap' production from previous excursions into the genre. There's a real sense of flow to the album - the tracks have been sequenced carefully to give the impression of listening to a single, constantly evolving piece of music. Opener 'Primray Humor' and the following 'St. Clare's Hospital' layer big hip-hop beats over abstract electronic sounds and some amazing piano work courtesy of Shipp. As the album continues the pace gets less frantic, the beats die down in intensity, and the funky hammond of Medeski gets a chance to shine - first dirty, as on 'Eclipse', then bluesy and funky on 'Apothecary's Cabinet'. The arrangements are constantly challenging - the beats might be sequenced, but we're not talking four-to-the-floor here, intricate rhythmic patterns are augmented and lightened by live drums and bass.

Standout track on the album, though, is the closer, 'Round 2', which sounds as pugilistic as it's title would suggest. A mid-paced grinder, it sees John Medeski playing some seriously dirty hammond, which is then further processed into a staggering wall of sound that bombards and delights in equal measure. This record really does sound like nothing else out there at the moment. It's another example of jazz innovation that totally does away with any association with bop or it's many offshoots, free-jazz included. It's still high-quality, cleverly constructed improvised music, simply with a different set of influences than those that Bird had in the late 1940s. To paraphrase Miles, 'It's about time'. - The Daily Jazz