Say what you will about the 1960s, the era spawned a lot of good ideas before things went wrong. Musically, the communal band Insect Trust was one of the best, and one of the least recognized.
Equal parts beat and hip, they had strong ties to Memphis but came together in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a roster featuring bluesologist/guitarist Bill Barth, fiery folk-rock singer Nancy Jeffries, Gil Evans sideman Trevor Koehler on saxes and flute, Luke Faust on harmonica/guitar/banjo, and future music critic Robert Palmer on recorder, alto and clarinet. (Notice the lack of bass and drums; they used hired guns there.)
Insect Trust’s seamless roots-and-branches blend of blues, old-timey, Dixieland, brass band, folk, pop and free jazz put most other such experiments to shame. It still sounds exuberantly vibrant today on this, their second and last album.
A band has to be awfully tight to be able to sound this loose. Whether it’s Jeffries spitting daggers on the proto-feminist “Trip On Me”, making whoopee on the title song, or dreaming out loud on “The Eyes Of A New York Woman” (lyrics adapted from Thomas Pynchon); guest drummer (and Coltrane mainstay) Elvin Jones gently but firmly guiding the band through “Our Sister The Sun” like he’d just materialized in the studio from an Astral Weeks session; the “Glade Song” horns going both dissonant and harmonious on each other; or everybody JB’ing funky through the instrumental “Ducks”, this is American music in the most all-inclusive, and most iconoclastic, sense of the term.
