Bill Laswell, the legendary bassist and producer, is in rough shape these days. He’s had a lot of health issues since before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and since he’s been effectively unable to work, he’s been in danger of losing both his home and his New Jersey studio, Orange Music, which he’s been running for over 20 years since leaving his former longtime spot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There’s a GoFundMe to help him stay afloat, but another way people can support Laswell is by subscribing to his Bandcamp page, which I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. For $22 a month, you get access to a tremendous amount of music from his vast archives, much of it previously unreleased.
There are recordings by all sorts of projects, but the most exciting things for me have been a half dozen live concerts by the group I’m going to focus on in this essay: the free jazz/punk/metal/improv quartet Last Exit.
Bill Laswell courtesy of Orange Studios
Laswell formed Last Exit at the beginning of 1986 with saxophonist Peter Broetzmann, guitarist Sonny Sharrock, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. He had history with each man. He’d met Broetzmann in Downtown and European improvised music contexts; the guitarist had been a member of his band/collective, Material, since the early ’80s; and he’d produced an album for Jackson’s band, the Decoding Society. But they’d never worked together collectively, and there was no rehearsal prior to their first live performance in Vienna, Austria in February 1986. As Jackson put it in an interview with The Wire, “I met [Sharrock] on the plane and I met [Broetzmann] on stage.”
After that initial string of live performances, which included shows in Paris, Frankfurt, and Koeln, they reunited again at the Moers festival in May 1986, and before the end of their first year together they had also played in Sweden, Finland, and Japan.
Last Exit’s music was a shock to many in 1986, and nearly 40 years later, it’s still like getting a pitcher of ice water thrown in your face without warning. Their self-titled debut album, recorded at the aforementioned Paris gig, is a thunderous blend of Broetzmann’s squalling saxophone, Sharrock’s unhinged free-jazz guitar, Laswell’s massive postpunk bass, and Jackson’s rolling and tumbling, Texas-blues-as-avalanche drumming. But it’s not a mere barrage of noise; they frequently slow down to a doom-blues crawl, or let one instrument take the spotlight for a long, tense (because you’re waiting for everyone else to come crashing back in) solo interlude. Their music has groove, but it also has the harmolodic spirit — Jackson was an early member of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time — wherein anyone can become the leader at any time. When it was the drummer’s turn, he might set up a foot-stomping beat and begin breathlessly chanting the lyrics to an old blues song, or quote poet Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”
The Japanese shows, documented on the second Last Exit CD, The Noise Of Trouble: Live In Tokyo, demonstrated the flexibility of their concept. They swung; they played the blues; they got ferociously heavy; and they invited guests to the party. Japanese free jazz saxophonist Akira Sakata dueled with Broetzmann on a stormy eruption based on Sharrock’s composition “Blind Willie,” and Herbie Hancock(!) joined the fray, adding a Latin piano groove to a piece called “Help Me Mo, I’m Blind.”
1987 was another great year for Last Exit and its members. In January, Laswell made a duo album with Broetzmann, Low Life, on which bass saxophone, electric bass, and dubby electronics created a nerve-jangling experience, all low farts and sudden shrieks. In March, the saxophonist joined Sharrock, second guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, and bassist Jan Kazda in a short-lived group led by drummer Ginger Baker; they were dubbed No Material in a nod to Laswell and to their free-improv methodology. The music had more lilt, and more of an African groove, than Last Exit, but Broetzmann and Sharrock were able to drag it into the gutter and turn it into something genuinely frightening at times.
When I interviewed Broetzmann in 2019, shortly after Baker’s death, he told me, “When we had the first meeting, kind of rehearsal, Ginger looked at me like, What is this guy doing? He couldn’t believe it. And it was in the beginning not such a really friendly feeling. But then we were sitting down at a table and killed a couple of bottles of scotch…and after that, it was working very well. Eventually we came to quite a good understanding.”
In the spring and summer of that year, Last Exit reunited for more tour dates in the US and Europe, some of which were excerpted on Cassette Recordings ‘87. Their music had, if possible, gotten even heavier; that album’s 20-minute opening track, “Line Of Fire,” begins with a hoarse horn-guitar fanfare over a drum roll from Jackson, and quickly becomes a thundering funk-metal assault, halfway between Black Sabbath and Miles Davis’ Agharta. But on the same album, you can hear Jackson sing Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” and his own tribute to legendary blueswoman “Ma Rainey.” As he told The Wire in 1986, “If you don’t have no history or no tradition then the source you’re drawing from is blank. It’s more than just ‘improvising,’ it’s connecting up to the richness of a whole reservoir of information that’s already been fed in. We’re four people, but in terms of what’s happening we are like four multiplied by 90.”
“This is the most special thing that’s happened in this area of music in a long time,” Laswell told The Wire. “People may disagree…fuck ’em.”
In 1988, the unthinkable happened: This wildass improv project, that had spent two years barnstorming through the US and Europe terrifying jazz festival audiences with pure audio napalm, went into the recording studio and emerged with an album of complex, riff-oriented art-metal. Iron Path, which was somehow released on Virgin Records (Laswell has always been good at securing financing for his projects), was produced with real care; the group members’ playing was as energetic as ever, but it was now placed in the service of real compositions that also featured temple bells, drones, shouted vocals, and abstract percussion interludes that gave it all the feel of a dark ritual. It represented a whole other side of the band, and is startlingly beautiful at times.
Last Exit continued to pop up here and there in 1989; a European tour was documented on the CD Headfirst Into The Flames, though it wasn’t released until 1993. The last gig I know of was in February 1990 at the Knitting Factory in New York. Afterward, the various members all went their separate ways. Sharrock died 30 years ago next week, on May 26, 1994; Jackson died in October 2013; and Broetzmann died last June. So there’s never gonna be a Last Exit reunion of any kind. But like I mentioned above, Bill Laswell has been digging into his archives and putting things up on Bandcamp, and to date he’s released six live recordings by the group, all of which are strictly for subscribers, since they’re likely to be the kind of diehards for whom this stuff is absolute catnip.
The most recent release is Frankfurt, documenting their third-ever gig, on Valentine’s Day 1986 (the Paris show was their fourth, and the album Koeln captures their second). He’s also released Moers, a performance from May 1986 where they’re joined onstage by violinist Billy Bang and vocalist Diamanda Galás, and that’s as balls-out and terrifying as you can imagine; Stockholm, a comparatively restrained — but still explosive — gig from two nights later; Tampere, a Finnish show from November 1986; Allentown, an 80-minute 1987 performance, a brief excerpt of which previously appeared on Cassette Recordings ‘87, and Somerville, a Massachusetts show from February 1990, the night before the Knitting Factory gig I mentioned (which has not been released in full…yet). When you listen to all this stuff — about eight and a half hours of live material, plus one studio album — in order, you can really hear four highly volatile elements blending together, gradually creating one of the most potent musical blends I’ve ever come across. There’s no genre tag that fits Last Exit’s music. They played a lot of jazz festivals and clubs (like the Knitting Factory, or Fasching in Stockholm) that typically booked jazz acts, but they were loud, fast, furious and heavy enough that they could easily have taken the stage at CBGB and held even hardcore bands at bay.
I leave you with this video of Last Exit at the Deutsches Jazzfestival in 1986 (the gig just released to subscribers on Laswell’s Bandcamp), and bear in mind, once again, that this was their third performance ever. They’d been a band for less than a week. There was nothing like them at the time, and even the bands that have come up in their wake haven’t picked up the gauntlet they laid down, because they were four once-in-a-century figures who Voltron-ed together to become something genuinely terrifying.
