by Rob Brookman

Outside of hip-hop, contemporary sightings of the cocksure musician are about as common as yeti captures.

Just run it down: Miles, Muddy and Mingus are dead, James Brown is an oldies act with a prison record, Mick Jagger's been emasculated by encroaching old age, and if the odious Noel Gallagher ever claims his band is bigger than Jesus, Christianity is in far worse shape than anyone suspects.

In fact, with very few exceptions, pop music artists these days studiously avoid signs of bravado - ambition, self-confidence or outright ego - feigning instead a kind of "shit happens" demeanor designed to shield them against both abject failure or runaway success. Even the present marketplace dominance of teen-pop reflects the trend - Britney, Christina and the Backstreet Boys are just too young and too milquetoast to convince an audience they're anything more than sexed-up school kids playing out harmless talent show fantasies on a grand scale.

All of which makes sax savant and sex symbol James Carter a long-awaited kick in the ass. Carter's not just the shit, he knows he's the shit. He's not just confident, he's got swagger. And he's not just a jazzman, he's Marvin Gaye with a horn in his pie hole - talent to burn, charismatic as hell, and coming to get your daughter.

Carter had the cojones to title his spectacular '95 CD The Real Quietstorm (take that, Smokey) and its follow-up - Conversin' With the Elders - found him going toe-to-toe with Lester Bowie, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Buddy Tate, simultaneously paying his respects to jazz's past and staking his claim to its present. '98's In Carterian Fashion proved yet another sonic skydive, mixing a honked up Hammond B3 into Carter's already-volatile bitches' brew.

Carter's the hot-shit kid down the street who takes every dare and wins every bet, the thrill-seeking stuntman who climbs tall peaks because they're there, and for five straight years he's played the part nearly to perfection. So what does he do for an encore? How about two simultaneous releases in 2000 - Chasin' the Gypsy and Layin' In the Cut - the first an homage to Django Reinhardt that gives hoary classics like "Nuages" a long-overdue goose, the second a guided tour of funk jazz, free jazz, harmolodics any other style accursed by the purists featuring a crack band that includes Marc Ribot on guitar, Ornette veteran Jamaaladeen Tacuma on bass and James Blood Ulmer stalwart G. Calvin Weston on drums.

To ears weaned on rock and roll, Chasin' the Gypsy is, by definition, the less attention grabbing of the two albums. But for anyone remotely familiar with Reinhardt, it might be the more audacious. Carter starts the album with "Nuages," which he reinvents with a startling bass sax line, dirtying up Django's prim tune into something that flirts with parody before pulling back into something that's simply exciting. Eight numbers later, he closes out the LP with - what else? - a tune by one James Carter called "Imari's Lullaby," a composition so faithful to the theme it probably has Reinhardt fans who don't bother with the songwriter credits scrambling to find the original amid their old Reinhardt vinyl.

In the end, Chasin' the Gypsy accomplishes what every tribute album should and what ever Carter album since JC On the Set has - it drags jazz's past squarely into the present, infusing it with the knowledge that Sonny Rollins happened, that Ornette Coleman happened, that the Art Ensemble of Chicago happened, that David Murray happened. It's no small feat, and it's only topped by Layin' In the Cut, seven tracks of funk so incendiary it might have some jazzbos wondering if Django Reinhardt ever happened.

The remarkable thing about Layin' In the Cut - especially with Chasin' the Gypsy throwing it into relief - is how inevitable it all sounds, how natural, how funky, like the elders Carter's been conversin' with aren't Lester and Harry but George Clinton and Prince. Not surprisingly, he makes the most of the conversations, honking, scatting and screeching over a groove so steady, so, well, rocking, it makes the Miles Davis band circa Bitches Brew seem positively unfocused. They prove they can slow it down, too; on "Requiem for Hartford Ave." the band settles into a bass-heavy slow burn that's part lament, part kiss-off, part excavation of some left-for-dead urban landscape.

If all this makes Carter sound like a dilettante, it shouldn't. He doesn't see jazz's different styles and subsets as branches on a tree, diverging highways extending endlessly toward different points on the compass. Mr. Armstrong, meet Mr. Coleman. Mr. Ellington, let me introduce Mr. Blood Ulmer. Jazz history is all part of the same wide river for Carter. And he's got guts enough to drink it all down.

* * * *

"Well, for starters, I invented this shit. Rock writing. I was first."

So claims Richard Meltzer in the first lines of the first essay of his hefty new collection, "A Whore Just Like the Rest," released along with a collection by buddy Nick Tosches and a new bio on buddy Lester Bangs (see Peter Gorman's recent essay on Bangs in our archives).

"Well, maybe not the literal first," Meltzer concedes, "just one of the first two-three-four, probably the first to take the ball and actually run with the fucker." And run with it he did - straight out of the ballpark.

De Capo Press bills "A Whore Just Like the Rest" as "30 years of music criticism by one of the first and greatest rockwriters." But in fact, Meltzer was only a rockwriter (he always makes it one word, how cute) as I'd define the term for four, maybe five years at the most. After that, he decided it was more entertaining to write about himself - how he was wronged by his peers, how he was manipulated by unscrupulous record label types, how he suffered through the decline and death of a musical form that let him down and broke his heart.

I actually found Meltzer's writing - that is, his style - entertaining and in some places even invigorating. I'd even agree with John Rockwell, in his jacket blurb, that Meltzer's prose "aspires to the spirit of [rock and roll] music." In the late sixties, I'm sure his madcap use of punctuation and capitalization, his Beat-like run-on sentences and his homemade slang might have even seemed pretty revolutionary.

But rock writing, as in the two-word kind? He may have invented it, but he abandoned it to the orphanage pretty quick.

Actually, most of the 575 pages in "A Whore..." are spent describing the people, institutions and music Meltzer doesn't like. And trust me, it's quite a catalog. All he does (or did) seem to enjoy was the wild, anything-goes rock and roll lifestyle, which petered out in early 70s at - what a coincidence - the exact same time as Meltzer's interest in the music.

From that time on (starting at about page 50 or so of the book), he pretty much slags everything and anyone who gets in his path - Patti Smith (became as star), rock concerts (he doesn't go to them but writes reviews anyway), Rolling Stone (apparently had the bad manners not to recognize his genius), Robert Christgau (apparently had the bad manner to try to edit said genius) and on and on and on and on. It's often lazy, and it's often bitchy, and it's only criticism if your strict definition of the word is "to pass unfavorable judgment; to censure; to disapprove."

Despite its faults, I'd recommend "A Whore..." to pop music fans interested in a twisted little slice of cultural history and in, okay, rockwriting that's adventurous even at its laziest and bitchiest.

But rock writing, as in the two-word kind? Let me put it this way: If Meltzer actually inspires you to buy an album, I'll be happy to pick up the tab.