Arnold Young has dedicated much of the past fifty years to giving the straight-laced component of Kansas City’s jazz community the hot foot. In a deliciously ironic development, the trickster has created a leading contender for the strongest locally released album of 2022.
Fear Is the Mind Killer, the drummer’s powerhouse recording with his band the RoughTet, is suffused with the rebellious spirit of Kansas City icon Charlie Parker and his fellow bebop revolutionaries Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach. It’s an ecstatic jazz riot.
In spite of its fealty to the venerated sounds of the 1940s, Fear Is the Mind Killer sounds subversive in present-day Kansas City. Young and his collaborators apply a raucous devil-may-care approach to improvised music. And they embrace anarchic noise on tracks including the aptly titled “For Anthony Braxton.”
Young began providing a prominent alternative to Kansas City’s jazz establishment with his band Advertisement for a Dream in the early 1970s. His status as a perennial outsider has intensified Young’s artistic commitment but may also be partly responsible for his indifference to marketing.
Young can’t be bothered with prosaic matters such as websites, press releases and distribution. Fear Is the Mind Killer may or may not feature Jacob Schwartzberg, Quin Wallace and John Nichols.* Whoever they are, his co-conspirators abet Young’s lifelong commitment to getting into the right kind of trouble.
*Young has since confirmed that the saxophonist, trumpeter and bassist are featured on the album. Saxophonist Jack "Blackie" Blackett plays on one track.