Review
Genre and Mood
Kalabrese called in Khan for Desperate Man, and the result sits where house, jazz and the blues overlap. Resident Advisor heard low-slung jazz house; Groove called it calm. The feelings here, relaxed, soulful and hypnotic, are this page’s reading of a track that takes ten and a half minutes and never seems to hurry.
Song Summary
Desperate Man is the sixth of thirteen tracks on Independent Dancer, the album Sacha Winkler, alias Kalabrese, released on his Zurich label Rumpelmusig on 26 April 2013. The label’s own notes call it his “epic blues solo” and point to two things: Khan, the guest singer from Berlin, and the groove bassline of Marton di Katz from Kalabrese’s live band, the Rumpelorchester. A version of it was older than the album: MusicBrainz lists Desperate Man in Nicolas Jaar’s Resident Advisor podcast RA.211 of June 2010.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through the track part by part, so this breakdown says only what the sources name and points at what to listen for.
Intro
Listen for what arrives first, and how long the track takes to settle into its groove.
Main Section
The bassline is the label’s own highlight here. Khan’s voice joins it; the sources do not describe his delivery or the lyric.
Outro
Listen for how a ten-minute track lets go: whether it fades, thins out or simply stops.
Concepts in Focus
The <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/blues/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“blues” title=“The African-American music born in the Deep South around the start of the 20th century, built on call and response, bent “blue” notes and short repeating forms such as the twelve-bar blues. Almost every later popular style, from rock and soul to house, carries some of its scales and phrasing.“>blues enters through the label’s description of an “epic blues solo” and through its notes on the whole album, inspired by blues, funk and “tragic heroes of the night”. A blues solo can take its time, circling a phrase until a feeling has been worked through, and a ten-minute house track can do the same.
The bassline is the part that carries it. In a slow track the bass often decides whether the body moves at all, and here the label named its player.
In July 2014 Rumpelmusig released a remix EP. Resident Advisor wrote that Matthew Herbert contorted the original into “a breathless oompah stomp”; both Resident Advisor and Groove heard Canson’s remix stay close to the original.
Artistic Context
Independent Dancer came six years after Kalabrese’s debut Rumpelzirkus of 2007, which he toured with the Rumpelorchester at festivals such as Sónar, Mutek and Transmediale. The credits name Can Oral among the writers: Can “Khan” Oral was born in Frankfurt to Turkish-Finnish parents, lived in New York from 1992 to 2002, where he ran the record shop Temple Records, and has worked in Berlin since.
Impact and Reception
BlackPlastic found the album uneven, with fantastic moments in a difficult package; the track’s own reception is the Jaar podcast and the remix EP, on which Acid Pauli, heard in Bonaparte, Acid Pauli – Not Today, reworked Wanzka. Give it the ten minutes it asks for.
