Description
More a field study in cross-cultural communication than a traditional band, Taxicab Verses started to take shape when Athens, Georgia-based musician Jim Wilson first traveled to West Africa in 2008. On his initial trip to Accra, Ghana he became enamored with the environment and the music, and quickly began collaborating with local musicians. In Ghana, Wilson worked with a group of area players called Kofi Atentenben and the Warriors, with Atentenben conducting his band to create foundations of driving percussion while he himself laid down improvised alto flute solos. Wilson did several recording sessions on location in Ghana, and at the same time he wandered around collecting field recordings and jotting down seemingly random slogans he saw written in English on the backs of taxis. These phrases — motivational messages like “Be Wise” or random exclamations like “Jesus Saves My Cheeba” — became the lyrical building blocks for Wilson’s new songs. Once back in the states, he enlisted a huge crew of Athens musicians (including members of the Drive-By Truckers, contributors to the Elephant 6 collective, and more than a dozen others) to flesh out the rhythmic skeletons with bass, electric guitar, and backing vocals. The resultant album, Is What You Make It, is a playful, high-energy, and slightly surrealistic patchwork of international sounds and concepts. Upbeat and melodic tunes like “Be Wise, Think Twice” recall the same Americanization of African sounds that the Talking Heads wove into their danceable pop songs on Remain in Light. Different elements take on a central role in the album’s various songs, with “Boyz Boyz” using a pushy pulse as the backdrop for eerie interplay between strings and a heavy bass groove, “Dunia” focusing on meditative polyrhythms and group interplay, and “Tug of War” serving up explosive Afrobeat with moments of both distorted guitar soloing and untethered sax playing. Wilson’s carnival barker vocals add another layer of weirdness to Is What You Make It, with his shouted proclamations giving some songs an almost Beefheart-ian feel. The project lingered in limbo for over a decade, originally trading hands between friends in a small edition of 200 CDs before reaching the Strolling Bones label, which released the album on a much wider platform, taking it from obscurity to the public realm. The years between its creation and the chance most listeners will have to hear Taxicab Verses don’t really matter much. Is What You Make It concocts a strange, friendly atmosphere not tied to time or geography, but inseparable from the curiosity and sense of discovery the project was born from in the first place. ~ Fred Thomas
