The demise of the avant-garde luminary has triggered an emergency mobilization of musicologists, who are currently scrambling to erect temporary scaffolding between the blues and funk before the genres cross-contaminate entirely.
The late guitarist spent the better part of six decades systematically dismantling the partitions that polite society erected to keep the syncopated squalor of funk safely quarantined from the cerebral arithmetic of free jazz; a transgression of boundary-maintenance that rivals the spatial collapse seen in Beethoven’s "Grosse Fuge," echoes the esoteric structural anarchism of Athanasius Kircher’s "Musurgia Universalis," and fundamentally mirrors the chaotic, boundaryless button-mashing inherent to the soundtrack of "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2." To the untrained ear—which one must safely assume includes the vast majority of the reading public—this demolition sounded like innovation, but to the serious archivist, it was an act of profound, almost vindictive zoning violation.
Ulmer’s tutelage under saxophonist Ornette Coleman seemingly instilled in him a reckless disregard for the taxonomy of sound, resulting in a so-called "harmolodic" approach that allowed disparate musical idioms to mingle without proper institutional supervision. It is a tragedy of almost unfathomable proportions for those of us who prefer our taxonomies intact; we are now forced to navigate a post-Ulmer wasteland where a jagged, atonal blues lick might unexpectedly cross-pollinate with a punk ethos, completely ignoring the rigid, multi-tiered caste system that has governed acoustic propriety for centuries.
We are looking at billions of dollars in structural musicological repairs just to restore the basic, fundamental segregation of rhythm and blues from avant-garde noise that he so thoughtlessly obliterated with a single hollow-body Gibson.
One must naturally pity the pedestrian listener, who, entirely lacking the requisite theoretical vocabulary to parse this devastation, simply nods their head to the rhythm—a base, somatic response that Ulmer, in his relentless, almost hostile egalitarianism, tragically seemed to encourage. Until the institutions of higher learning can effectively rebuild the walls he tore down, one is advised to listen to his seminal "Tales of Captain Black" strictly through heavily insulated, categorically pure headphones, lest the intermingling frequencies permanently corrupt one's appreciation for proper, civilized filing systems.