Annette Peacock
I'm The One

Avant-garde.
According to Wikipedia: a term attributed to the most extreme, daring, innovative artistic and literary phenomena, ahead of tastes and knowledge.
In my vocabulary: snobbery.

Freedom.
According to Wikipedia: the condition where an individual can decide to think, express, and act without constraints, using the will to design and carry out an action, through a free choice of ends and the means they deem useful to achieve it.
In my vocabulary: when it comes to music, it is synonymous with Trout Mask Replica.

For heaven's sake; nothing against the avant-garde. But nowadays when I hear the term avant-garde, it often comes from the pristine lips of some notable jerk (forgive my prejudice). Moreover, to stay confined to the musical field, as Wyatt said (I quote from memory): "it's easier to experiment from our affluent living rooms. Even if we don't end up on the charts, we certainly won't end up broke." And that's precisely what I call snobbery.
Now, leaving aside the fact that Wyatt is the living contradiction of what he claims, it is also often true that not always in the so-called avant-garde does one breathe the sense of unfettered freedom that roars from the Captain's grooves; who may have been more out-of-his-mind than a true "experimenter," but is also one of the few who makes me want to be uncompromisingly free enough to lose sleep.

All this preamble just to say that when an album is presented to me as "avant-garde," it takes a millisecond before I've already marked it down to avoid. Unfortunately, my first approach to Annette Peacock was marred by this definition so adverse to me: but when a cover like that catches your eye, you give it a thought.

I'm the One, Annette seems to say as she looks at us with that cocky look from this masterpiece of psychedelic portrait. And who else.
And indeed, Annette arrives at this debut under her own name already quite experienced and certainly isn't afraid to look a rookie like me straight in the eyes. Perfect: it's this attitude that makes me fall in love with a woman.

A musician since birth, she accompanies herself while still very young with jazz bassist Gary Peacock, who opens the doors to New York lofts where they dabble with free jazz. It may be a coincidence, but in the early sixties, Annette is on tour (pianist-keyboardist) with the least frivolous of all: Albert Ayler, who shares the same madness with my beloved Captain. In the meantime, she changes partners and pairs with pianist (still free jazz) Paul Bley. In Bley's albums, she plays, sings, and composes. She is gifted by Robert Moog with one of the first prototypes of the instrument bearing his name, and it is said that she was the first to process voice through this synthesizer.

We thus arrive at this fateful 1971 in which, now sure of her means, she releases I'm the One.
Incredibly anchored to the song format, this album disassembles traditional blues, funk, and folk to recombine them into a cubist portrait that redraws you the moment you look at it. To get an idea, I hear a similar treatment of standards in albums like Nothing Can Stop Us by Wyatt or in singles by the Flying Lizards (the famous cover of Money (That's What I Want), for example).

From the initial and eclectic I'm the One to the final and more minimalist Gesture Without A Plot, it is Annette's singing that brands all the songs. She manages to be technical without losing a shred of passion, experimental yet engaging at the same time. A kind of more exuberant Joni Mitchell, a Janis Joplin orbiting Mars, a slightly more accommodating Nico, a Mick Jagger lent to jazz: you decide. Her "shouts" filtered through the Moog at the end of I'm the One are something I have rarely heard.

In short: an album with charisma, talent, technique, and experiments that smells of tradition and reinvents it. More freedom than avant-garde, this I'm the One!

A must-listen!