By the time their song "This Is What We Do to Our Enemies" came out on The Miracle of Levitation, The Flying Luttenbachers had already gone through a few lineup changes with Drummer Weasel Walter as the only longstanding member. Walter founded the band in 1991 with free jazz legend Hal Russell (née Harold Luttenbacher) under whom he had been studying. With Chad Organ on tenor sax to complete the trio, The Flying Luttenbachers released their debut album Live at WNUR 2-6-92 in 1992 on Walter's own label ugEXPLODE.
"No time for messing around here," quips Hal Russell, earning a laugh from Walter, before the explosive start of his composition "3 Free." In that bit of banter lies the contradictions propping up this first iteration of the Luttenbachers. They embrace the comedy natural to free jazz but are self-aware enough to know that there is a serious idealism that motivates their stage aloofness. Walter performs with impetuous aggression, youthful anarchism and a true-believer's purity; Russell plays as if at the end of a long journey of self-discovery, an idealist's vision of self-expression hidden behind slurring self-deprecations. They click where the intellectual avant-garde meets the indigence of punk and Walter's maximalist drumming mirrors Russell's breathless riffs.
The live performance of their collaboration can occasionally be rough and sloppy, an indication of natural fits in a rush to create and express themselves, but the players are clever enough to channel half-baked thoughts into new directions. These directions are often comic in nature, a product of the players and their approach to free jazz. It's particularly apparent in the push-me-pull-you playing that comes near the end of songs: where Walter, through his drumming, tries to wrest control of the improvisation from the unwieldy horns by introducing the rhythms that should lead the song back to its original and concluding theme...only to have Russell or Organ take a leap elsewhere, leaving Walter to follow their lead and try again later. Even free improvisation needs structure and nothing is funnier in free jazz songs than hearing the untethered and often manic free expression of the players finally coming to a proper and ordered conclusion.
Where you begin is also where you end: so in jazz as in life. Here exemplified by the start of a young man's storied music career coinciding with the conclusion of a pioneer's legendary one. Each invigorate and inspire the other with an unexpected combustibility that could only burn for so long. Russell left his namesake band, over a disagreement, within the month of this recording and died a few months after that.
Here is the discography surrounding The Flying Luttenbachers's debut tape:
Live at WNUR 2-6-92
"Edge of Night" by The Flying Luttenbachers
"3 Free" by The Flying Luttenbachers
Pass the Headphones!!
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