After maybe six hours of nonstop writing yesterday, I unwound with the day’s newspaper and the Tomas Doncker Band’s Howlin’ Wolf Tribute album Moanin’ After Midnight. Doing what I do, listening to music, more often than not music I don’t like, my every waking moment, what I listen to when I am relaxing is the definition of what I truly love. And what I truly love is just about every single thing Doncker puts his hand to.
Luckily Tomas puts his hand to a lot of stuff, with a stable of musicians signed to his True Groove Record label, including the spoken word pop wonderwoman Marla Mase, and the hottest band in the world the TDB, especially harp player David Barnes. Doncker is always in the studio (try and set up a lunch with him), or playing, and year after year, he spends going his own way, doing what he will. Meanwhile, the Black Rock establishment embare him as one of their own as one of their own, the way poet Yusef Komunyakaa and avant-garde music master Bill Laswell have done and do time after time.
I, myself knew of Doncker without knowing of him, from his sterling no wave guitar playing with the likes of James Chance And The Contortions and Defunkt back in the 80s. But I became closely aware of him, after watching a performance of “The Power Of The Trinity” musical at Summerstage in 2012. Since then he has had me looking backwards and forwards simultaneously, trying to catch up and keep up with an oeuvre that should be considered in the same breath as Kanye West in the 2010s. Simply: he is the best. Resolutely color blind, Doncker is a musical chameleon, a superb electric blues guitarists, with a gravelly baritone that improves with age, at home in any genre you throw at him. He is always working, always writing, always playing around town and always always always creating.
Here is my top ten songs associated with Doncker in one way or the other… for today, any way. His catalog is so wide, and he is always releasing new stuff, who knows what tomorrow brings?
10 — Kong – The Highbridge Lowballers – Written for a still in production musical, this is where Johnny Weissmuller meets Chuck D, a rhythmic giant Amazonian minimalistic roar of a track with Tomas bellowing “You can’t own a man, get out of my face, you can’t own a man”.
9 – Lucky Day – Tomas Doncker – When Tomas pulled this out of his treasure chest at a midnight concert at the Blue Note a coupla years ago, he resurrected one of his most perfect songs, an anthem for all of us, and a beautiful mid-tempo work of art. Unfortunately, the recording on Small World, a fine below the radar singer songwriter album, could do with an update. If he extended it and gave it a little more backbone, it could well emerge as one of his greatest achievements.
8 – Spoonful – Tomas Doncker Band – It was Doncker’s idea to use Howlin’ Wolf songs on the soundtrack to Alfred Preisser production of “Diablo Love”. Before performing in the musical, Tomas recorded an EP of Wolf covers, and afterwards he recorded the entire Moanin’ After Midnight. “Spoonful”, well known through Cream’s 1966 cover, was the first song on the EP. Tomas’s version is so electrified, he goes head to head with Clapton on the guitar and beats him on the vocals.
7 – Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick – True Groove Allstars – Marla Mase takes on Ian Dury’s masterpiece and finds worlds of sexuality and desire Ian didn’t pull out of it. Ian, rightly, saw it as a musical onomatopoeia (I know, but it is the closest I can get) whereas Marla sees it as sexually domination (“Hit me damn it, do I have to teach you everything?”). Manny Pacquiao recently dubbed it one of the songs he is working out to for the big fight. Yes, that sort of aggressiveness.
6 – Peace Is Not Fiction (featuring Bill Laswell And Selam Woldemariam) – Tomas Doncker – This is a breakthrough track, though it didn’t seem like it at the time, and not for Tomas as such but for the Doncker Band itself. With the great Ethiopian musician Woldemariam’s gorgeous guitar front and center, the band gets into lockstep, giving him room to move.
5 – We’re A Winner – True Groove Allstars – Doncker and his family of musicians take on Curtis Mayfield, to close up the sublime (and a little subliminal, given the atmosphere it was recorded in) Fully-Recovered. The band band together and the family share verses, singing in unison “let us all say amen…” Why? “Because we’re a winner”. A superb ending but also a superb cover.
4- Can’t Say No – Tomas Doncker Band – This is the most Stonesy song the Stones have never sung, on any given day it could well be my favorite of Doncker’s songs and of any songs, a groovy let it rocking on blues street call to the South. Beyond great, worthy, important, it is his best rock star moment… I mean really, this would fit into Exile, I swear it.
3 – Abet Gurage – Tomas Doncker – Doncker might not want to hear this, but we deserved another album of Ethiopian soul, as this song reminds us. When one of the great unknown in the US pop singer’s Mahmoud Ahmed takes it over at the midway point and sings his heart out, as though he can face a Yank audience and teach them all a thing or too, all of Doncker’s thoughts on World Soul becomes real. Amazing, it seems to be soul via East Africa via every soul singer you’ve ever heard in a horn raging rocked out conclusion. Magnificent.
2 – Drown In Blue – Marla Mase – In Marla’s masterpiece we get the anthropomorphism of an emotional state, a wonder of psychological damage and a transmogrification of thought to content. It also never stops moving because, I figure, it is on the move.
1 – The New Day – Tomas Doncker Band – I claimed earlier in this story that Tomas was musically color blind and the proof is here: when I asked him about the music on this song, Tomas referenced The Band -the Canadian birthers of Americana. What Doncker did here, is take Yusef Komunyakaa lyric, words that harkens back to both Yusef and Doncker himself, about the migration from South to North East, when Black Americans brought their god with them to the storefronts of Brooklyn, and hand it over to all Americans via the music. It is a story that reverberates at the heart of the American dream and by turning into a folk song, it is an entry into the myth of America. That I am still telling people they should listen to this possible greatest song of the 21st Century is beyond me.
Don’t come whining about the state of modern popular music if you don’t listen to True Groove Records, because you simply won’t know what you’re talking about.
