This latest opus from San Francisco avant-guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a charming and improbable outlier in his strange and wonderful discography, as it feels like a remarkably sincere homage to easy listening, the golden age of Hollywood, and schmaltz in general. As Tom Carter observes in the album’s description, the pervasive orchestral sweetening of the mid-20th century is far from beloved to most contemporary ears (particularly among jazz fans), but the title’s provocative Ornette Coleman-style statement of intent is largely an irony-free one, as Orcutt gamely improvises along with a shifting fantasia of angelic choirs, rippling harps, and swooning string swells. While all of the usual hallmarks of Orcutt’s distinctive playing (scrabbling flurries of notes, cathartic bends, viscerally abused strings) are present and remain as delightful as ever, most of the melodic heavy lifting is done by the looped samples. Freed from the burden of carrying the central melody with his guitar, Orcutt’s playing feels uniquely loose, tender, and spacious, resulting in an unexpectedly heartwarming and endearingly soulful major key blues album that is every bit as strong as the more explosive and idiosyncratic work that he is usually known for.
It is tempting to view this album as Orcutt’s inversion of the softening and sweetening “jazz-strings virus,” as Carter’s analysis focuses primarily on that element (though he does also mention “the oily underbelly of the American songbook”). The reality of How To Rescue Things is a bit more complex, however, as the first third of the album sounds a hell of a lot more like Orcutt is jamming along to a pre-irony (and pre-bebop) Christmas movie from the 1930s or 1940s and none of the appropriated loops are particularly recognizable from the The Great American Songbook (though I am hardly an expert on that subject). There is definitely an inversion happening, of course, but it feels like a sincere and tender one: Orcutt is essentially taking toothlessly sentimental melodic motifs and “fixing” them with a healthy injection of soul, slicing intensity, and vibrant spontaneity. In fact, this album amusingly reminds me of Prince’s performances on Muppets Tonight: an iconic and innovative artist improbably dropped into a family-friendly and ostensibly ridiculous situation and somehow emerging looking as cool as ever. In this case, however, the Muppets are swapped out for choirs of angels and harp-wielding cherubs, but Orcutt proves to be equally game at embracing his environment in good faith and making the crazy collision of aesthetics work beautifully. Moreover, he manages to make it feel both easy and natural, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight: if you are not jaded to an absolutely joyless degree, there is plenty of legitimate heartstring-tugging beauty and magic to be gleaned from a beatific celestial chorus if you know how to do it right.
While I would not have predicted that the guy from Harry Pussy would be the first one to make such a leap, Orcutt has always been an artist who tirelessly searches for new ways to escape familiar patterns and he has long been one with a fondness for inventively revisiting well-worn, sentimental melodies as well. As such, it is not a huge leap to go from covering "When You Wish Upon A Star" or "Over The Rainbow" to How To Rescue Things. That said, Orcutt's approach is definitely quite different this time around, as I would not have predicted how sympathetically he would treat his source material. While I am certain that a noise-guitar firestorm or a thorny freeform excursion into the outer limits of improv would have been a perfectly fine (and more expected) enhancement of these loops, Orcutt instead seamlessly embraces the tone of his appropriated melodies and simply embellishes the central themes with some more vibrant melodic tendrils of his own.
Given that, How To Rescue Things is not exactly an album of fresh Bill Orcutt pieces so much as it is a snapshot of a great guitarist endearingly indulging himself in fond memories and breathing new life into them with his improvised accompaniments. As such, my enjoyment of any particular piece is largely determined by how much I enjoy the central loop, as Orcutt’s playing is invariably loose, organic, and intuitive in a way that few other guitarists can match. There is no point at all in which it feels like he is cycling through familiar scales or trotting out pre-meditated riffs: he is simply living in the moment, nimbly riding waves of old-timey sentimentality with casual effortlessness and transforming them into something newly relevant and emotionally resonant.
I do have some favorites, however, as I connected most deeply with the bittersweetly lovely “Old Hamlet” and the closing “The Wild Psalms,” which has the feel of an absolutely rapturous Hollywood ending. I cannot say that I felt particularly optimistic about the state of the world at the end of 2024, but that piece in particular made me feel like everything was absolutely wonderful and would presumably stay that way forever (for five glorious minutes, at least). I can safely say that no other album in recent memory has made me feel that way, so How To Rescue Things is a legitimately great detour in my book.
