ABNER JAY
Diskografi (på Subliminal Sounds):

One Man Band (SUBCD-7)

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"Det ultimata enmansbandet! Abner Jay var den mest ovanliga musikaliska talangen som världen någonsin skådat. Han beskrev sig själv som "den sista stora svarta minstreal showen från södern". Abner Jay var en kringresande enmansbandsmusiker och en andlig folkmusiksjäl som framförde egenartat dystra versioner av originell blues och traditionella Amerikanska andliga sånger tillsammans med sitt eget material, framfört med en baritonröst som låg flera nivåer djupare en Johnny Cash stämma. Genom att bromsa ned sitt källmaterial till ett söligt, tafatt skumpande räddade Jay det från decennium av uppsvärtad virtuosiskt efterapande och fick tillbaka fokus till musikens sluskiga infattning, emotionella djup och komplexa mänsklighet. Jay blev en medlem i Silas Green Minstrels 1932 med sin stora repertoar av banjo- och ålderdomliga sånger som han lärt av sin farfar, som hade varit slav i Washington County i Georgia. Han kom att leda WMAZ Minstrels på Macons radiostation under åren 1946 till 1956 innan han fortsatte som soloartist och började turnera landet runt i sin "portabla timmerkoja", komplett med ett eget PA system, varifrån han uppträdde och sålde sina kassetter och LP skivor. Han hade också stadiga engagemang på Tom Flynn's Plantat Restaurang i Stone Mountain, Georgia. Jay dog 1993 och efter dess har hans LP skivor blivit praktiskt taget omöjliga att få tag på. Anthony Braxton beskriver Jay som en "Amerikansk mästare" och hans banjo, gitarr och munspels trakterande är på alla sätt så idiosynkratiskt och opåverkat av de tyranniska kraven om "korrekt teknik" som Braxtons egna och de tungor som Jay's inspelningar ger en röst kommer djupt inifrån seklens mörker."

Lyssna på ljudklipp från detta album:
Woke up this morning
I'm so depressed
Cocaine Blues

Recensioner:

Dagens Nyheter/Sweden:
I bortåt femtio år turnerade Abner Jay som enmansband - gitarr/banjo, trummor, munspel - och kallade sig USA:s siste minstrelsångare. Han gav ut sina skivor själv och hade lagret i bakluckan på sin bil. MER UNDERGROUND kan det knappast bli. Men när det lilla Stockholmsbolaget Subliminal Sounds nu ger ut ett urval Abner Jay-inspelningar formar de bilden av en oväntat komplex artist, som utan problem hoppar från blåsvart blues och protestsånger om Vietnamkriget till att hojta vitsar som "Vad ger man en elefant med diarré? Gott om plats!" Han är en sångare med imponerande register: kraftfull, burlesk, ohämmat känslosam. Samtidigt är han en stram och stabil enmansorkester, rakt igenom alla olika stilar. En kuf, visst, men verkligen ingen amatör. Rimligen börjar kulten växa här och nu. /Nils Hanson/Dagens NyheterLa Musik/Sweden:
Det är helt osannolikt hur många blueskufar det verkar ha funnits (och finns) på den amerikanska södern. Extra underlgt blir det när man tänker på deras talang och den uppmärksamhet de borde ha fått. Som Abner Jay från Fitzgerlad, Georgia. Hela sitt liv turnerade han pålandsbygden i de södra delarna av USA. Han bankade utsin musik på en sexsträngad banjo, bastrumma och munspel. Denna lilla enmansorkester byggde uppstämningen för hans ilskna, energiska och lite nervösa röst. Och som han sjunger! Och som han berättar. Elakt, provokativt och klurigt. Detär så tufft, så känslosamt och så amerikanskt att man baxnar. Abner Jay var gangsarappare femtio år innan den termen uppfanns. Han sjunger om kokainets jävelskap (och lockelsekraft) i "Cocaine Blues" och "Cocain", han sjunegr om ensamhet i "I'm So Depressed". Den är förövrigt det mest sorgliga jag hört på länge. Herregud, vad ledsen han är. Och herregud, vad synd det är om honom. Jag älskar musikalisk självömkan och när Abner jay drar på är hanså nära att man svimmar av. Helt klart är att jag hade kunnat mörda, eller åtminstone knuffas lite, för att få ha sett Abner Jay på någon skabbig bar. Han var nog en fantastisk underhållare!/M. Röshammar/La MusikSonic/Sweden:
Svart geni och excentricitet får ett ansikte, igen.ALBUM OF THE MONTH i VICE issue Vol 10 # 11 / USADusted Magazine/USA
Abner Jay's extensive bread-crumb trail of albums, disseminated via his own Brandie Records imprint, represents one of the most individual takeson traditional song form to have risen from the 20th century. Jay spent several decades (the 1930s through the 1950s) working in touring minstrel shows, resurrecting the spirit of his late grandfather through songs passed down through generations. But it was when Abner Jay started traveling and performing solo in a portable home fleshed out with a public address system that his work really started to elevate. Jay's take on traditional American musics - blues and spirituals - was accurately captured by writer and musician David Keenan in a recent issue of The Wire as "slowing (them) ... down to a laggard, awkward lollop". Jay plucked his banjo with an insistent gait while maintaining a ponderous rhythm on a bass drum and hi-hat combination powered by his feet. But it's the combination of Jay's harmonica playing, which shivers between the gaps offered up by his slowly unfurling blues phrases, and his deep and rich vocals, that gives One Man Band its affecting qualities. Jay's work continually encircles similar themes: sex and relationships, the everyday and the social, drugs and depression. Abner Jay's stories frame his songs in such a way that the heart-breaking melancholy of his singing can slip by. But it's in that see-sawing sense of emotional tension that Jay's music is at its most powerful. This is best exemplified by Jay's delivery near the end of "I'm So Depressed", where he unspools an aching vocal performance and then destabilizes the song's very title by offering a generous handful of rough laughter slipped between key phrases. The beautiful uncertainty in that performance can be found throughout One Man Band, humanizing the 13 songs collected here and exposing the generosity at the heart of Jay's music. His music seems to be saying, with its very fibre, the simplest and most universally relevant things: each experience has its opposite, and it is this dialectical relationship that energizes music which holds sympathy for humanity as its strongest suit./Jon Dale/Dusted MagazineTime Out/UK:
Billiant! A compilation of impossibly rare stuff from Americas's best ever long-necked, six-string electric banjo/swamp guitar/hambone/harmonica/bass-drum and cymbal-playing traveling minstrel. Emerging from south Georgia some time back in the 1920s, shifty-eyed Jay proceeded to purvey a variously dirty and tender vaudevillian one-man band show right through to the '60s (which was when he was mostly recorded). One of the last minstrel musicians, he is assumed long dead, though no one seems to know for sure. Actually, not too much of anything is known about him. Original liner notes from a late ´50s album stated that "Abner is now enjoying his seventh wife, and he claims she is just about wore out too". Notes from the later "Swaunee Water And Cocaine Blues" elucidate a little more. "He was raised laying on his belly, drinkin' water from the old Swaunee River. Jay claims the secret for his good health and being the father of 16 young 'uns, and gonna git some more, is layin on his belly drinkin' water from that ol Swaunee River." And there's a picture of him on the sleeve doing just that. This is truly wonderful stuff. Even if some of the lewd spoken-humour has worn kinda thin in the intervening years, what can't be denied is the exaggerated sense of life and spark and fun and sheer holy drollery. A real loss and a find. /Ross Forune/Time OutExberliner/Germany
An itinerant musician who worked out of his car, signing banjo driven Stephen Foster songs interspersed with filthy jokes, he called himself the Last of the Minstrels - is that a triumphant sobriquet or a resigned one? At least he didn't have to paint his face, although that might have extended the early Seventies allegory. Could you imagine stopping for gas along some Florida interstate in 1972 and have this guy drive up to you, open up the trunk of his car, pull out a banjo and a few autographed record albums, and then start singing "I'm So Depressed"? I mean, if Bongo Joe was considered louche back
in the Sixties, imagine this guy. Jay also somehow became a hero to Anthony Braxton of all people, which underlines that life is not so much about those who can and those who try, as those who win and those who lose. To the victors the spoils, to the rest of us spoiled meat. -- D. Strauss/Exberliner
The Brainwashed Brain/USA

Abner Jay was a classic ragtime song-and-dance man, learning his trade with Silas Green's Minstrels in the 1930's and WMAZ Minstrels in Macon during the 40's and 50's. Lap dissolve to the late 60's, and Abner Jay had transformed himself into a one-man-band and traveling nostalgia revue, issuing a series of private press LPs that now trade hands for ridiculously high prices. Sweden's Subliminal Sounds recently released this compilation, collecting material from three of Jay's best albums. Jay billed himself as America's Last Minstrel Show, and he played an energetic combo of finger-picked banjo and harmonica, working the bass drum with a foot pedal. He introduced each song with bad puns and raunchy jokes, his deep Southern drawl a deliberate caricature of old-time Uncle Tom minstrelsy. It would be tempting to dismiss Abner Jay as a politically-incorrect anachronism, were it not for the obvious talent and intelligence with which he approaches his racially-charged material. By fearlessly accentuating the house Negro stereotypes that defined and imprisoned black performers in the post-Civil War South, Abner Jay is able to transcend them, exorcising the pain of his ancestry. Nowhere is this more clear than in the heart-breaking song "I'm So Depressed," a track so beautiful and haunting that it floored me upon first listen. Beginning as a traditional-sounding blues lament, Jay's voice suddenly shifts into a high lonesome wail, choking back tears and belting out a series of deeply felt emotional cries that express an ancient sadness. "I was born during the hard depression days...My folks were sharecroppers/We had nothing, we had nothing, we had nothing/But grasshoppers/Looking back over my life/O lord, I'm so depressed." On "Swaunee," Jay talks at length about his beloved Southern river, it's legacy and importance. Jay's narration is layered over an atmospheric instrumental track punctuated by the chorus of the traditional song, treated to sound like an old 78. Because of my penchant for outsider music, I have heard hundreds of hyped reissues of vanity pressings and much-vaunted musical oddities. Rarely have I heard anything as impressive as Abner Jay's evocative, recollective race-folk. One Man Band is currently the only widely available edition of his music, making it absolutely essential. - Jonathan Dean/The Brainwashed Brain make it!