17. “Vashkar,” The Tony Williams Lifetime, from Emergency! (1969)

In February 1969, Tony Williams played with Miles Davis for the last time, propelling the roughly three-hour session that would yield In a Silent Way. Though Bitches Brew (1970) would have a much larger impact—and sell millions of copies​—most critics regard In a Silent Way as the first true fusion album, and with Davis's inclusion of organist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, it effectively marks the end of the second great quintet.
 
In the studio, Davis asked Williams to play simple, repetitive figures with no fills—a two-handed sixteenth-note hi-hat pattern on “Shhh/Peaceful;” a clacking hard eight on the hi-hat and snare rim for “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time,” with a brief explosive rock-and-soul foray on the ride and snare during the middle section.
 
It’s odd that Davis assigned these minimal timekeeping duties to Williams given the defining features of the drummer's playing: high-decibel attack with thick marching band drumsticks; unpredictable all-over-the-kit fills; and the ability to squeeze and stretch tempos like silly putty. All of this made him more suited for high-wire act improvisation, preferably with musicians using large, overdriven amplifiers.
 
“I like to play loud,” Williams once said in an interview. “I believe the drums should be hit hard.” Or as he put it on another occasion: “I’m interested in the drums and I want to beat the shit out of them all the time.”
 
Three months after In a Silent Way, Williams was back in the studio with a new group of his own: The Tony Williams Lifetime, a trio committed to playing loud, hitting hard, and beating the shit out of everything. With fellow In a Silent Way player John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young (credited here as Khalid Yasin), the group recorded a furious, risky, and at times uneven debut.
 
Why uneven? On three tracks, Williams sings—or, more accurately, sing-speaks—in a gentle, high-pitched, decidedly un-rock voice, offering improvised-sounding lyrics about love and personal growth. “I told you everything is said in the bed,” he coos in “Beyond Games.” “And it shouldn’t change just ‘cause you’re wed.”
 
Though Williams wanted to bring the fury on his drum kit, he was apparently looking to more tender models for his vocal stylings: “The way that I’d like to sing would be more like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett,” he admitted in an interview. “I like the way they sing.”
 
Williams’s tepid vocals may date the record, but instrumental tracks like “Vashkar” sound like they came from another universe entirely. Written by composer Carla Bley, the song as first recorded in 1963 by her husband, pianist Paul Bley, feels airy, abstract, almost tentative; Lifetime transforms the tune into rollicking, barely-controlled chaos. Building from the initial sound of low murmuring hammer-ons from McLaughlin, this version explodes with Williams playing frantic, ever-shifting patterns—propulsive, not quite fills, but not exactly grooves—which recede to make space first for McLaughlin’s angular fretboard workouts, then for Young’s pulsing washes of unnerving atonal chords.
 
Emergency! was a pioneering album—arriving in record stores a year earlier than Bitches Brew—but Williams saw poor sales during his time with Polydor, in part because Lifetime bore little resemblance to the wave of popular 1970s fusion groups that followed. "Tony plays jazz-rock, not fusion," drummer Lenny White explains. "The connotation is different...Tony played grooves and beats with a jazz sensibility. He’s got Papa Jo Jones up top with his back beat stuff on the bottom with bass drum and snare, playing in-between like a great jazz drummer would.”
 
Aside from the music itself, the album’s production made it unpalatable to many audiences: Dark, distorted, and occasionally tinny, Emergency! sounds like a creature from the basement. Some critics have claimed that the album’s blown-up aesthetic is the result of carelessness; in the 1991 CD reissue liner notes, session engineer Phil Schaap blames McLaughlin’s tricky effects pedals, a broken studio organ, and an out-of-spec tape machine—and laments the session’s fatally compromised bass drum track. Yet subsequent generations of noise-loving musicians have declared the album’s distortion a feature, not a bug, and now consciously seek their own urgent, lo-fi, in-the-red sounds.