f you do one thing well, and do it again and again, it’s possible that Fame will come knocking at your door. If you do many things well—and rarely repeat yourself—Fame will probably pass you by in favor of another contender. Pablo Picasso is perhaps an exception to these generalizations, but even here, in the case of an artist whose entire career was an affirmation of radical change, how many people are even slightly aware of Picasso’s poetry—that body of work unfairly dismissed by Gertrude Stein with the famous phrase, "Pablo, paint"?

Jake Berry is a graphic artist, a musician, a poet, a lyricist, a performer. He is dazzlingly talented in all these media, and he has accomplished much. When I played some of his music on my KPFA radio program, a listener phoned in and asked, "Who was that?" I explained that it was Jake Berry, he lived in Alabama, and… The man repeated, "Yes, but who was that?"

John Lennon remarked that rock n roll was the folk music of our time. Berry’s music taps into that notion but expands it: it’s rock n roll that moves into areas of jazz and "folk," keeping a base in the blues and extremely accepting of "dissonance." Strange Parlors—the title comes from one of the songs, the wittily-titled "Chimera Verité"—is not likely to win Berry any supporters from the I-love-it-just-give-me-more-of-the-same set. Berry himself carefully wrote to his friends to explain that the songs on this CD were the result of an "alternate tuning" of his guitar and so people might have some initial difficulty in understanding what he was doing. He needn’t have bothered. You can hear the alternate tuning on the very first track, "Beneath Wings," and the music is so haunting and so—strange—that one is likely to listen to it again and again, gaining more with each hearing.

The lyrics alone ought to make this CD a classic:

I used to work the night shift 
until the light merchants closed night down 
Now it’s daylight all the time 
even when you turn the daylight out 

Or

And the evening falls so close 
wraps itself like a shroud 
around the light going down 
Beneath the wings of the crow 
the amber light from evening houses 
looks like stars have fallen in the hills 

(Note that the bird in "Beneath Wings" is a crow, not a dove—something black, not white. These lyrics are the result of a genuine but "alternate" religious sensibility, in which Western religion is simultaneously a source of immense personal pain and, at times, a profound judgement upon others. The words "deep" and "dark" repeat.)

One could quote many other instances of highly imaginative, suggestive lyric writing here. But the main point is the music. Berry is capable of writing perfectly hummable tunes, melodies—just like Irving Berlin or Paul McCartney. One example in Strange Parlors is "Dark Water." But a song like "Beneath Wings" uses music in a different way: it is music as deep atmosphere. The music is like the score to a wonderful, surrealistic film noir: in a certain sense it is "background," pure atmosphere, bringing us not only into an alternate understanding of harmonic relationships but into, as Berry puts it in a lyric, "some other time." It is deeply mysterious, surprising, at times "wrong" in its rightness. (The great master of right "wrong" notes is of course Thelonious Monk, whom Berry has studied—but the explicit references in Strange Parlors are to Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman.)

Rock n roll was not only the "folk music" of our time, as Lennon remarked; it has also been for many a source of religious feeling when the religions into which people were born seemed dead or deadening. Lennon was of course aware of this fact: his notorious remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" was one way of putting it. His marvelous song, "Imagine," went even further: a popular song dealing with the death of God!

Jake Berry’s songs are an examination of what religion feels like as we enter the tumultuous, bloody, ill-run twenty-first century. If there are echoes of old bluesmen, or of Bob Dylan, or of Van Morrison in Berry’s work, it is also true that he constantly breaks free of these influences. His active imagination and his extraordinary willingness to experiment bring him into territory which is far "stranger" than either fiction or science fiction: "it all comes down," he writes in a song titled from Ecclesiastes, "to a single motion / that takes your breath away."

Strange Parlors is available at 9thstlab.blogspot.com/. Contact Jake Berry.