Power Tools - 1987 - Strange Meeting

Power Tools

1987

Strange Meeting

01. Strange Meeting 5:06

02. Wolf In Sheep's Clothing 3:31

03. Wadmalaw Island 5:01

04. Unscientific Americans 2:55

05. Howard Beach Memoirs 5:32

06. When We Go 4:55

07. The President's Nap 3:49

08. A Song Is Not Enough 3:31

09. Blame & Shame 5:45

10. Unchained Melody 5:19

Drums – Ronald Shannon Jackson

Electric Bass – Melvin Gibbs

Electric Guitar – Bill Frisell

Recorded January 8, 9, 10, 1987 in New York City.

In the mid-1980s downtown New York jazz scene, where free improvisation collided with funk, noise, and whatever else was floating through the lofts and clubs, three musicians who had little business sharing a stage somehow ended up in a recording studio together. The result was Strange Meeting, the sole album by the short-lived trio Power Tools, released in 1987 on Antilles New Directions. The name itself feels like a wry joke: these were not power tools in the heavy-metal sense, nor a straightforward power trio, but a meeting so improbable it still sounds a little strange decades later. Guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson formed a one-off unit that never quite became a working band, yet left behind a record that captures a particular moment of American experimental music with unusual clarity and charm.

Bill Frisell had by then already begun carving out his distinctive path. Born in Baltimore in 1951 and raised in Denver, he started on clarinet before switching to guitar, absorbing everything from Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall to Jimi Hendrix, country, and the blues. After time at Berklee and early associations with the ECM label and Paul Motian, Frisell was developing the gauzy, delayed, almost cinematic guitar voice that would later define his Americana explorations. Ronald Shannon Jackson, older and more battle-hardened, brought the fire. A veteran of Albert Ayler’s groups, Cecil Taylor’s units, and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic experiments, Jackson was deep into his own Decoding Society projects and the ferocious free-metal noise of Last Exit by the time of this session. Melvin Gibbs, the youngest of the three, had been the steady, inventive electric bassist in Jackson’s Decoding Society and was equally at home in the avant-funk and no-wave circles that included Arto Lindsay. Their combined influences formed a Venn diagram of free jazz, harmolodics, electric funk, rock energy, and Frisell’s emerging pastoral sensibility. Producer David Breskin, who had already worked with both Jackson and Frisell (and had engineered earlier collisions like the Frisell-Vernon Reid duo Smash & Scatteration), deliberately brought them together, sensing that Jackson’s propulsive chaos might rough up Frisell’s lyricism while Gibbs acted as the perfect fulcrum. The session was no accident or last-minute substitution; it was planned, rehearsed, and shaped with the conscious goal of making a proper album rather than a loose jam document.

Released on Antilles New Directions, a short-lived experimental jazz imprint under Island Records that had already housed adventurous work by artists like Ornette Coleman and Air, Strange Meeting was recorded digitally and live over three days in January 1987 at Radio City Recording Studio in New York. There was no remixing, no editing, and no overdubbing. The purity of the approach shows. Engineer Don Hunerberg captured a sound that is detailed yet atmospheric, with Frisell’s effects-drenched guitar floating over Gibbs’s thick electric bass and Jackson’s close-miked, arena-ready drums. The ten tracks run just under forty-six minutes and are carefully paced: three compositions by Frisell, three by Gibbs, two by Jackson, one collective improvisation, and a closing cover. It feels like an album rather than a collection of performances.

Musically the record occupies a fertile middle ground between song form and free playing. Frisell’s title track and “When We Go” (both previously recorded in different settings on his 1985 album Rambler) lean toward the lyrical and slightly melancholic, his guitar often submerged in reverb and delay that give the music a dreamy, almost underwater quality. Gibbs’s pieces, particularly the lovely “Wadmalaw Island” and the more urgent “Howard Beach Memoirs,” provide the strongest structural anchors; the former drifts with a Latin-tinged vamp and gradually darkens as Frisell adds distortion, while the latter carries a steely narrative line that seems to glance at social tension without spelling anything out. Jackson’s contributions, “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” and “Blame & Shame,” inject Ornette-ish heads and tumbling free-funk energy. The collective “The President’s Nap” is pure atmospheric menace, beginning with one of Jackson’s characteristic martial marches before dissolving into swirling, sci-fi abstraction. The album closes with a reimagined “Unchained Melody,” a song Frisell has long loved; here it becomes romantic and slightly wired, ending with the guitar alone in delay, a perfect asymmetrical fade.

What makes the music work is the constant negotiation. Frisell’s inherent softness and space sometimes blunt Jackson’s more aggressive impulses, yet the friction itself is interesting; when the pieces stay closer to song form the balance is especially rewarding. Gibbs never overplays, supplying both harmonic glue and rhythmic punch. The production, with its clean digital clarity and 1980s guitar effects, gives the whole thing a period flavor that some might call dated but which now feels like a distinctive sonic signature—part Miami Vice humidity, part downtown loft, part open American landscape.

That landscape is literally present on the cover. The artwork features a photograph by Joel Sternfeld from his landmark American Prospects series: “Roadside Rest Area, White Sands, New Mexico, September 1980.” An old missile body lies beside a corrugated fence marked “WOMEN,” with the vast White Sands Missile Range stretching beyond. Designer Patrick Roques placed the image with quiet irony; the desolate, slightly absurd American vista mirrors the music’s mixture of beauty, unease, and wry humor. The title Strange Meeting feels almost too perfect against that backdrop of leftover Cold War hardware and empty desert.

Critical and public reception at the time was respectful but not ecstatic. Robert Christgau awarded it a solid B+, praising the way Jackson and Gibbs obligingly cede space to Frisell while still keeping everything funky and atmospheric. AllMusic later noted that the freer passages do not always gel perfectly, Frisell’s gauze sometimes muting Jackson’s force, yet the more structured pieces succeed handsomely and the closing “Unchained Melody” is genuinely moving. Live appearances in 1988, including a Bottom Line set reviewed by the New York Times, confirmed that the trio could generate real tension and interplay onstage. Among listeners the album has quietly become a cult favorite, especially with Frisell devotees who discovered it after his more famous work of the 1990s. Fans still call it a desert-island disc, an underrated fusion classic that somehow never quite entered the standard jazz-fusion canon.

Its legacy is that of a singular document rather than a foundational statement. Power Tools never recorded again; the European tour was brief and the chemistry remained a one-time event. Yet Strange Meeting stands as a vivid snapshot of mid-1980s New York experimentalism at its most open-minded and least dogmatic. It refuses to choose between free improvisation and song, between noise and melody, between the pastoral and the urban. In an era when many jazz records were either aggressively avant-garde or commercially smoothed, this one managed to be both strange and strangely welcoming. Nearly forty years later it still sounds like three very different musicians who, for a few days in a studio, found a way to speak the same odd language.